Establishment by Howard Fast Page A

they make a circus out of it. To tell you the truth, Joe, I’m rather excited about the whole prospect. I feel somewhat the way I felt when I went to Germany in nineteen thirty-nine, a little afraid, yet terribly curious to see the devil in his den.”
    â€œDoes pop know about this?”
    â€œHe knows about Bernie, of course, but not about the subpoena. I don’t want anyone to know, and you’re the only one who does besides Harvey Baxter. I suppose that when I go to Washington it’ll be spread all over the papers, but until then I just don’t want to be bothered, and certainly daddy doesn’t need this now.”
    ***
    With ten years of intermittent warfare behind him, Bernie Cohen was neither a pilot nor a navigator nor a radio operator. He rode as a passenger in one of the big C-54s as the ten planes took off, one after another, from the desert airfield. They flew into the morning sun, just lifting above the horizon. Bernie’s plane was piloted by Jerry Fox, a small, red-headed, freckled young man who looked eighteen but was actually twenty-six, and who had been with the Tenth Air Force. The navigator, who also doubled as radio operator, was Al Shlemsky, a dark, morose man of thirty who had been born in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, who had gone to Palestine at the age of sixteen, and who, like Bernie, had enlisted in the British army. After the war, he had gone back to Palestine and joined the Irgun, the underground terrorist organization led by Menachem Begin. Captured by the British occupation forces, he had been held in the Jerusalem Central Prison for seven months. “I was there when they hanged Dov Gruner,” he told Bernie, his dark eyes turned inward. “They hanged four of us—Gruner, Drezner, Alkochi, and Kashani. We just didn’t believe it could happen. They were soldiers fighting for their homeland, and all our lives we had been fed that shit about the British being civilized. Then, when it happened, when they were taken out of their cells to be hanged, we heard them singing the Hatikvah. Someone yelled to us what was happening, and we began to sing, ninety of us singing the Hatikvah in that lousy jail. I remember that I was crying as I sang. A month later they released me, and I came back to the States to see my mother. She was dying. Funny, she was a nice, plain, little orthodox Jewish lady, and she could never understand what I was doing in Palestine. I could never explain it to her, either. Then I heard that the Haganah guys here were looking for pilots and navigators, and here I am.”
    Jerry Fox, the pilot, was something else. He was enjoying himself thoroughly. “I never flew one of these cookies before,” he told Bernie, “but they’re sweethearts. They handle a damn sight better than the 17-G, and there’s nobody shooting at me. I did forty-two missions with the 17-G. I tell you, Cohen, this beats West Covina all to hell. You ever been to West Covina?”
    Bernie shook his head.
    â€œYou are fortunate. Outside of L.A. My folks live there. Pop runs a hardware store. I get out of the service and I’m back in Pomona College, working weekends in the hardware store, getting laid now and then and going crazy. Absolutely going crazy. There is nothing I want to do except fly an airplane, but go find a job with ten thousand pilots scrambling for the few jobs there are. And then this comes along. I’d pay you to let me fly this crate. Funny thing is, I’m not all that Jewish. My father is, but my mother’s Irish and I was raised as a Catholic—parochial school, the whole shtick. And here I am on my way to Palestine. If that doesn’t beat the shit out of it, nothing does.”
    Sitting in the copilot’s chair, the Rocky Mountains beneath him, the other planes spread out to the left and to the right, it occurred to Bernie that if anyone had told him a week ago that he would be here, he would have