May We Be Forgiven

Service, National Guard. We are going to use you as bait and bring the Israeli in.”
    “I am at your disposal,” I say.
    “You bet you are. E-mail George as per the address you got from Jason.”
    “You know about Jason?”
    “He’s a good boy,” Walter says.
    “Is he in on this?”
    “We’re using a range of assets.”
    “Have you been in my e-mail?”
    “First stop on the tour,” Walter says. “Tell George you’re driving up Friday night to get his signature on some paperwork.”
    “But I’ve got company on Friday—Ricardo will be here for the weekend,” I say.
    Walter Penny doesn’t even acknowledge what I’m saying. “Tell George you’re able to meet anytime after six on Friday through six on Saturday.”
    I do as I’m told; George replies he can do it anytime before sundown on Friday or after sundown on Saturday. I call Walter.
    “Crap,” Walter says, “this confirms my suspicion. Your brother is practicing Judaism. He and Lenny are observing the Sabbath; that’s what we’ve been seeing them doing on Friday nights. The feds couldn’t figure it out—said they were lighting some kind of ‘flares’ and then sitting dormant—as if waiting for something. The feds couldn’t crack it.”
    “A Jersey used-car dealer got George hooked on religion?”
    “Strange things happen when men are left to themselves.” In the background a phone rings. “That’s the big boys—do nothing further until you hear from me.”
    Meanwhile, another message from George appears in my inbox: “When you come, bring my silk boxers—upstairs dresser on the left. And some cookware—pots, pans, a spatula, and a ladle—and maybe Mom’s old candlesticks, not the silver ones—glass?”
    A little while later, the phone rings. “So what’s your special gift, something you can bring that he can’t get from Amazon?”
    “Aunt Lillian’s chocolate-chip cookies,” I say, not telling him that (a) I’m not in possession of her actual cookies and (b) I don’t have the recipe to attempt re-creation.
    “It’s like the frontier; your brother and this Lenny character are running a general store up there. The bad boys bring them a dead duck and get Hershey bars in return. They’ve used the Amazon boxes to build themselves some sort of fort in a fort, which at the moment our camera can’t penetrate—we’re thinking it’s made out of some kind of river mud.”
    “Dung,” I say. “Grass and dung.”
    “Shit?” Penny asks.
    “Yes.”

    A unt Lillian’s cookies. I make it my secret mission to replicate the cookies and the tin. I go to CVS, buy a tin of Danish Butter Cookies, come home, play kick-the-can with it while I walk Tessie, send it through the dishwasher, tumble it in the clothes dryer on hot with a bunch of towels, basically abuse the hell out of it, in a program to rapidly achieve the patina that would otherwise come with age. I buy the semi-sweet morsels, walnut halves, brown sugar, white sugar, vanilla, butter, flour, salt, baking soda, and remember the all-important tablespoon of warm water that Ashley told me about. Soon I am turning out Toll House hockey pucks that are equal in size, color, and lumpitude to Lillian’s famous. I leave them out to air-dry. Each day, fewer cookies remain—I say nothing to the suspected culprits at home, except that I am counting and know exactly what I’ve got, and I offer them a two-for-one special on the “defective” batch, which is actually far better.
    And then, when I’ve got all the details, I call Ricardo’s aunt and tell her that I’ve got to work late in the city and ask if she can come and keep an eye on the kids.
    “Of course,” she says.
    And then—the real craziness starts. Later, I will wonder if this part really happened or if I dreamed it.

    I am directed to a location several hours from home, and then, once I’m there, I’m led by an unmarked car to a deserted airstrip lit like a film set. Parked on the dirt runway are a small private plane and two military helicopters. By the time I arrive, the sky is sinking from twilight to the flat black of a starless night. On the grass nearby are several unmarked black cars, four guys in ATF nylon jackets, a dozen or more National Guard in full gear, Secret Service men trying to look low-key in polo shirts and khakis, a couple of unidentified men, assumedly FBI or CIA, and Walter Penny with a clipboard and a whistle on a lanyard around his neck, looking like a coach, preparing for the