The Believers Read Online Free PDF

muddy oils by a veteran of the Attica riots; a kilim depicting scenes from the Palestinian struggle--but there was not a single item of furniture here that could be said to represent a considered aesthetic choice. The love seat, upholstered in a nubby mustard tweed, had been given to them by Joel's mother. The giant cherrywood cabinet and the collection of miniature china shoes it housed were an inheritance from Joel's aunt Marion. A silver-plated andiron set, gamely arranged around the blocked-off fireplace, had come as barter payment from one of Joel's clients.
    Joel sat down now and, with practiced efficiency, began to fillet the papers for items relating to himself and today's trial. The New York Times and the Washington Post had two more or less straightforward accounts of the case that mentioned his name, but without comment. In the New York Post , he found an editorial that made two passing references to him as "a rent-a-radical with a long history of un-Americanism" and as "a man whose knee-jerk leftism is thankfully now all but extinct in today's political climate."
    He stared at the pile of newspapers for a moment and then took another pass, checking to see if he had missed anything. In a long career of defending pariahs, Joel had learned to expect and to treasure hostile public attention. It was the gauge by which he measured the importance and usefulness of his work. ("Joel never feels so alive," Audrey liked to say, "as when someone is wishing him dead.") Back in the 1980s when he had been defending al-Saddawi, the accused murderer of the Hasid leader Rabbi Kosse, protesters had organized rallies against him and put up posters around New York that read, "Litvinoff: Self-Hating Jew." They had even made death threats against the children. By these standards, the animosity generated by the Hassani case had been disappointingly tame: one bomb threat to his uptown law office (deemed "not credible" by the police), a couple of people shouting "traitor" in the street. And one lousy mention in the Post . He looked at the editorial again. Well, they'd called him un-American; that was something.
    He heard his wife coming down the stairs now. "Come look, sweetie," he called out. "The Post is gunning for me!"
    After a moment, Audrey appeared in the living room doorway--a thin woman of fifty-eight, with steel-colored hair and the dark, unblinking eyes of a woodland animal. She was wearing a denim skirt and a T-shirt printed with the slogan "One Nation Under Surveillance."
    Joel rustled his papers. "They say I'm a rent-a-radical."
    "Bully for you," Audrey said.
    "Did you know Lenny and Tanya were here?"
    "I saw them."
    "Somebody urinated on Tanya's bed last night. Can you believe it? Who are these people they hang around with?"
    Audrey frowned, noticing that another of the living room's floorboards had come loose. "Oh, do shut up, Joel," she murmured.
    Jadedness was Audrey's default pose with her husband. She used it partly in the English manner, as a way of alluding to affection by manifesting its opposite, and partly as a strategy for asserting her privileged spousal status. The wives of great men must always be jealously guarding their positions against the encroachments of acolytes, and Audrey had decided long ago that if everybody else was going to guffaw at Joel's jokes and roll over at his charm, her distinction--the mark of her unparalleled intimacy with the legend--would be a deadpan unimpressibility. "Oh, I forgot!" she often drawled when Joel was embarking on one of his exuberant anecdotes. "It's all about you, isn't it?"
    "What do you want for breakfast?" she asked now.
    "I'll have a bialy," Joel said.
    Audrey looked at him.
    "What?" he said, glancing up after a moment. "I have to have carbohydrates sometimes. You want me to go to court on a bowl of yogurt?"
    Audrey went into the kitchen.
    "I can't find the bialys," she called out after a moment. "Are you sure we have any?"
    Joel looked up from the papers. "Oh, come