We saw the familiar footage of Mount Moriah cemetery, with the temple where Wuchnik’s body had been found. Lawlor’s cameraman added a close-up of several Jewish gravestones, with the six-pointed stars on them.
And who was right there in the middle of the cemetery, dancing around the dead man before his blood was cold? Why, Chame Salanter’s cute-as-a-button granddaughter. And who was with her? The daughter of Sophy Duran-goo, the offspring of the monkey in the zoo, who thinks she needs to go to Washington to represent the good and honest people of Illinois.
And dancing right along with them? Children of illegal aliens that Chame and his Malina Foundation have brazenly smuggled into the United States to take jobs away from good and decent Americans like you! It’s time we told Chame to go home, to take his terrorist pals with him, and to send Duran-goo back to the zoo!
And before you liberals start in with your smears and blood libels against me, remember, Duran-goo’s the one who brought monkeys into the debate. She thinks she’s descended from a monkey, not created in the image of God like you and me. If that’s racism, I totally give up on the United States of America as a place where free speech is allowed. It’s Heil Duran-goo, Heil Obama, Heil Salanter, as we march the United States over a cliff.
By the end of the rampage, I was biting my lip so hard I drew blood. Jake was furious. “That’s disgusting and obscene! How does he get away with it?”
“We let him get away with it!” I poured us both out a good dose of whisky; my hand was none too steady. “I think you’re right, that Salanter should sue Lawlor. Otherwise those lies will just fill up more and more of people’s heads.”
“You don’t think there could be some truth?” Jake suggested.
“No smoke without fire? You really think a child locked in the Vilna ghetto did some deal with the Nazis to murder his parents in exchange for his own freedom?” My face flooded with color.
“Don’t give me the eye of death, V.I.! Of course I don’t. But if he isn’t sitting on something ugly, why won’t he confront Lawlor?”
“Maybe he puts too much faith in reason, or believes Americans are too decent to be taken in. I don’t know.” I moved fretfully around the room. “The girls I saw last night—Salanter’s own granddaughter—they’re the age he was when he was living alone in a war zone. They’re halfway between children and women; they’re old enough to look after themselves but they don’t have good judgment. If Salanter—if any child that age—did something questionable to survive—”
I broke off, as I began to imagine horrific things that Salanter could have done—or his granddaughter, come to that. If she and her friends had stumbled on Miles Wuchnik and killed him, I wouldn’t believe their youth made murder acceptable. If Salanter had done something dreadful in the middle of occupied Lithuania, did the occupation excuse his acts?
“But how did Lawlor get the news that Salanter’s granddaughter was in the cemetery—not to mention the two immigrant girls?” I said. “When I saw Durango and Julia Salanter this afternoon—”
My phone rang mid-sentence. It didn’t surprise me to hear Julia Salanter on the other end of the line.
“Dr. Durango and I trusted you to keep—”
“Never begin a sentence with an accusation,” I cut her off. “I didn’t betray your confidence. I just watched Lawlor’s show—it’s sickening, and I don’t blame you for being upset, but I am not the person who leaked the news to him.”
“Then who did?” Salanter demanded.
“I don’t know, and, as I said this afternoon, I think it would be close to impossible to find out. Lawlor has people trolling blogs and Facebook and police blotters, looking for little grains of scandal to use to back up his big lies. I still think your dad should sue him for slander, and libel, but I can’t solve the leak problem for you.”
“Chaim won’t sue,” Julia said. “We don’t want more fingers poking through our history than happens already!”
“Then you have an insoluble problem,” I said dryly. “There are no brakes on what anyone can say online these days. I suppose you could start your own PR offensive, if you wanted to change the dialogue.”
“We don’t have anything to hide or prove. But we talked to our lawyer and to our publicist, and we’ve all agreed that the best thing we can do is to be open about what happened. Our publicist arranged for the girls to appear on television tomorrow—the Rachel Lyle show. We hate doing it, Chaim most of all: we’ve always tried to keep our lives emphatically private, but Rachel will run a sympathetic interview, and we owe it to Sophy to try to limit damage to her campaign.”