Leon Uris: A God In Ruins

“How is he?” she asked shakily.

“The gulag neither killed him nor broke his spirit, but he is a badly damaged man. He has been brutalized. It is a question of your being in Israel to meet him.”

“Meet me here tomorrow, same time,” she said, and moved away quickly.

Damnable Russian tragedy, the mournful music, the endless dull winters, the bleakness, the walls of cold stone, weeping women in babushkas, the drunk on the street, the listless eyes of a thousand men and women on the escalator coming out of the Metro underground.

Oh, David, what have I done to you? You are my love, greater than anyone. Yuri brought us together, and now he is taking us apart.

Yuri! I have been an unfaithful wife. I have betrayed you. When I had David’s child, I wanted to hear news of your death. What the hell, David and Alexander and Ben were nothing more than a dream. Russia is real. No matter what, she had to keep her rendezvous with Yuri in Israel. This great man could not be further broken with a scandal. Secrets had to be kept.

The safety of the child was a need greater than Marina and David’s agony. Alexander had to be put up for adoption, and she would return to Israel. But how? Through the Jewish agencies her name would surely be discovered.

Father Gallico was now Monsignor Gallico, a strong servant for Cardinal Watts. His relationship with David Horowitz remained.

“My dear friend, my dear, dear friend,” Gallico comforted him. “So, here we are. I will see how I can get it done.”

Alexander was a year old when Marina handed him over to Mario Gallico.

The child would disappear inside the Catholic bureaucracy.

From that moment on it seemed that death played a hand in silencing those people who had knowledge of the plot.

First to die was Marina Sokolov. She and Yuri knew a moment of peace.

They were given respite on a beautiful kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee.

But Yuri was a wreckage of a man, blind in one eye, one leg amputated, violent headaches from his beatings. Marina poured her life into him, but as she did, her own life ebbed from her. She continued to live the big lie, frightened every day that her secret would be discovered. Always wracking her, the terrible longing for Alexander and her beautiful lover, David.

Marina went silently, they said of congestive heart failure. It was a broken heart. Unable to go on without her, Yuri followed her to his grave a year later.

The little convent of St. Catherine held many secrets. One of their unspoken duties was to care for certain “nameless” orphans. Sometimes, these were children of priests and now and again a nun. Other children were sent there to protect them from the notoriety of revelation.

The less the mother superior knew, the safer for the child. “Baby Alex,” without a surname, became “Baby Patrick.” Parents, unknown. For the next two years Patrick was a centerpiece of the convent, a greatly gifted and adored infant.

During this time the priest Scan Logan had pleaded with Monsignor Gallico for a special child for his sister, Siobhan O’Connell, and her husband, Dan, to adopt.

David Horowitz, sucked of will to live after the loss of his lover and child, succumbed to pneumonia, brought on by neglect of himself.

At first Quinn didn’t want to hear the story, felt invaded, exposed in a manner that would bring the walls down on his head.

As Ben spoke, it changed. It turned into a moment he had dreamed of and played out ten thousand times. That moment! That exact moment!

“I was thirteen when our father died,” Ben continued. “We had become very close, although any mention of Marina and Alex was simply forbidden. Grief wore him out. Guilt finished him off. He knew nothing about where you were, who you were with, how you were faring. The last year of his life was pitiful. When I reached my bar mitzvah, he revealed to me the circumstances of your disappearance, and he told me that Marina Sokolov had died in Israel, bearing their secret.”

“Hell of a bar mitzvah,” Greer said.

“Our father told me that I was a man now, and had to assume a man’s burden. I only remembered my half brother in veiled tones, and somehow the name of Alexander stuck in my mind.”

The melting away of fear in Quinn changed to a flooding gladness as Ben stopped for a drink, noting that the altitude made him dry. He took a small photograph album from his overnight bag and opened it.

“This is our dad.”

Quinn felt Rita’s hand grip his shoulder as he stared, and said nothing.

Ben drew a deep breath, turned the page. “This is the only photo I have of your mother.”

Quinn spun out of his seat and turned his back to them, mumbling to himself in a jerky voice. Ben gulped another glass of water.

“I’m sorry, Ben, I’m being very selfish. Lord, what you must have gone through.”

“I knew I’d find you. The search became the hub of my life. I went into police work to specialize in missing persons. After I made detective lieutenant, I joined the faculty of John Jay College for Criminal Justice. For years only cold trails—here are my kids, two boys and two girls. Well, they’re not kids anymore. And these are the grandchildren.”

“I’m an uncle. God, that’s strange, Uncle Quinn. And I’m going to be a grandfather, and my daughter will have cousins and an aunt and an uncle .. .”

“Maybe I could have picked a more appropriate time, but Ms. Crowder convinced me it would be disastrous to hold on to this information ... so I came.”

Ben related the rest of his odyssey. All the principals were dead, and Alexander had disappeared as if into thin air. Ben had vague memories of Monsignor Gallico’s visits, but these stopped.

“When Dad died,” Ben said, “I was his main survivor. I was there with the family lawyer when we emptied the safe deposit box. There were a few things of value, some stocks, jewelry, certificates of ownership, insurance policies. What I did not know was that Dad had sent a sealed envelope to Monsignor Gallico and his successors. The front read: Not to Be Opened Until the Year of 2000 by Benjamin Horawitz or His Immediate Heirs. Here are the contents.”

Quinn looked at photos of Marina and David and a birth certificate for a “Baby” Horowitz.

“I tried to play the Catholic card but didn’t even get as far as the convent door. It’s a deep, dark, mystical world in there, with an understanding of God that is strange and different.”

“God sure has a weird sense of humor,” Mal grunted.

“It became a matter of numbers: matching footprints on the birth certificate. The FBI had hundreds of millions of prints, but computer clarification had not caught up to them. Footprints of a newborn infant can change, so I went by probable birth dates. Well, everyone gives up a print sooner or later. When yours popped up, it was a very close match to the one on the birth certificate.”

“My footprint? How the hell did anyone get my footprint?”

“I didn’t, but a certificate told me your name, the time you were born and where. Then I researched Catholic adoption records covering a five-year period. A single line said, “Baby Patrick, parents unknown.

Adopted by Daniel and Siobhan O’Connell, Troublesome, Colorado,

February 17, 1953.” The rest of it? Baby Patrick grew to be Governor Quinn Patrick O’Connell.”

“But how did you confirm your connection with Quinn?” Rita asked.

“Quinn has given innumerable pints of blood to the Red Cross to be used as a bank for a family emergency, and otherwise, he is a regular donor. I was able to get a hold of a pint and run a DNA on it, then one on myself. To make utterly certain, I had Father’s body exhumed and took enough to test him as well. The three of us are a match.”