The Gun Runner's Daughter

by Neil Gordon

  She struggled for a moment with her reply, and then blurted out: “Well, maybe we can have them stabbed in an airport bathroom too.”

  “Darling, I don’t know what in God’s name you’re talking about. Next time I call, try to be a little less hysterical.”

  And then the line went dead, leaving her, once again, enraged.

  Now, hugging herself against the chill wind on the ferry, sniffing, she thought: my father. My father. Like a singsong, the word went through her head. Their conversation, she thought, was a tiny blemish on her father’s day. Right now he was probably talking to three members of Knesset, entirely disregarding the fact that he was about to be convicted of federal charges. Her father would probably react to this conversation by telling Bob Stein to tell his secretary to send her some money, and in a few days another one of his checks for $4,345.16 would arrive in the mail.

  Anxiety was flooding her body again, as if the wind were chilling her blood. What had Nicky been looking for? What could he possibly have found that was important enough to have him killed? What was her father hiding? What was the role of Greg Eastbrook in this?

  And then Martha was back from the commissary, carrying two tall cans of Heineken, her voice, her warm, familiar voice, as if taking the chill from the remorseless, oracular wind.

  Midnight. The Corner Bistro. Allison, at the bar, drinking a second bourbon, the liquor dulling the dullness in her mind, the hourless memory of road passing under her wheels. She had parked at the hydrant in front of the house, rung her next-door neighbor Chris’s bell; he and his boyfriend had helped her unload her Canondale and Pauly’s Bianchi, the things from Ocean View. Chris had invited her in, she had declined, climbed again into the cab of the Cherokee and gone around the corner to the parking garage on Eighth. Then, her sandy sneakers incongruous against the concrete pavement, she’d gone to the bar to let bourbon dull the dullness that was in her mind.

  Perhaps it was a mistake. The small bar crowded, lousy with men, loud with the good jukebox. Both the men on either side of her had felt they had license to talk to her. One was okay, a calm, Jewish guy with a shock of white in his full head of hair. She knew him slightly from the neighborhood, he did not offer her a drink, and she was happy to talk, a little. The other did offer her a drink, was frankly hitting on her, and she had to keep him at bay by talking to the first. But then a woman came to meet the first man; they moved to a table, and she was forced, finally, to acknowledge the second with a direct look.

  “Listen. I’m sorry. I’m very tired, and I’d rather be left alone.” She kept her voice down, which the man seemed to appreciate. Still, his face showed bitterly wounded pride. And then she was alone, wondering how deep an injury it had been for that man, her unwillingness to be hit on. She thought, what a strange fragile kind of pride men carried. Everyone had to present a face to reality, she thought, but men had it hardest: they were allowed so few of the buffers that women used, and what was understandable reserve in a woman was touchiness and mood in a man. That they had, she thought, such a shallow well of rage, so immediate to erupt, made sense.

  And then Dee walked in, swinging the door open hard in a breeze of cold air, and against the lamplit night she saw his form develop like a photo in a tray of chemicals.

  His hands under her jacket, along the small of her back, her warm sweater against his palms. Before him the promise of her breasts, rounding against the jacket; the rise of her neck under her chin, her face, her wondering face framed by a fall of blond hair. He noticed her eyes, dark and large in the dimness of the bar. Her lips, open, the tip of her tongue visible between her teeth, her lips widening with wonder, into a smile. He stepped back, his face telling her without telling her that they must be circumspect. Smiling, she lifted her drink, and for the first time he felt the illicit nature of his attraction, the secrecy of their union, and it ran electric through his limbs, to his hands. And she, as if the eyes were indeed the window to the soul, seemed to absorb all that he was thinking, and moved away from him in the noise of the bar, turned to her drink and, in profile now, downed it in two careful sips, then replaced her shot glass and downed the chaser.

  He felt the distance between the bar and her apartment as a brief instant of chill, then climbed the stairs in something like a trance: far were the trial and his bosses, far were her father and his companies. Inside her apartment she turned at the door, slamming it behind him with a shove that made the windows shake in their housing, and he saw her bags and boxes and two bicycles on the small expanse of floor in front of a desk; he saw a bedroom on the left, a kitchen behind her. And then he saw that she was removing, one by one, her jacket, then her sweater, then her bra; her sneakers, then her pants, then her underwear. Perfectly aware, perfectly naked, and perfectly exposed; a naked being, a spirit, and then she was warm, warm and round, through the cold sheen of his clothes, holding him hard while everything in his body leant to her, trying to touch.

  CHAPTER 8

  September 1994.

  New York City.

  1.

  It was not an Indian summer, exactly. More an elaborately staged descent into fall, each remaining day of September like another wine in a series of increasingly rare vintages, each complecting, elaborating, the one that came before.

  That first night she told him what she had devised. He was to arrive at the Corner Bistro around nine. If she was not there, he was to leave. If she was, he was to wait until, after she left, Bobby—the bartender and Allison’s close friend—ushered him through the kitchen to the interior staircase, which led up to Allison’s third-floor apartment.

  Like that, they spent nearly every evening, and every night, of that slowly evolving autumn, in her apartment, together.

  That was good, because New York City had become a very isolated place for Allison.

  She hadn’t expected so many people to be interested in her father’s trial. Certainly she hadn’t expected so many to care. And the degree to which it mattered surprised her. At school, the rare occasions she went, people avoided her; professors looked uncomfortable when she seated herself for class.

  For herself, she hadn’t really minded. Martha’s job at the Observer was not one that required any particular moral rectitude, and they met often: afternoons at downtown bars, evenings when Dee was busy, weekends at Martha’s mother’s place in Amagansett.

  For Dee, however, that attention was the central experience of his autumn, and would probably continue to be for some time.

  When, after a few weeks, not only had no mention been made of Dymitryck’s death but the FBI had failed, day after day, to approach Dee on the subject of why he had been photographed by Dymitryck visiting the summer house of the man he had been prosecuting, Dee began to relax. Clearly, Dymitryck had either not photographed him, or the film was lost, or both.

  Of course this meant, it occurred to him, that he could have left the case after all. That was regrettable. And yet, Dee was honest enough to ask himself, how regrettable was that, really? He was prepared to give up the case in order to keep Allison, but what if he could, after all, keep Allison without giving up what was shaping up to be the opening to the greatest possibilities his chosen profession had to offer?

  Allison couldn’t really blame him. The attention he was receiving was immense. Already his lunches were booked weeks ahead: the Century Club, the Harvard Club, the Knickerbocker. It was instructive, Allison felt, to witness the way Dee rose, as he had been taught, to the challenge: he worked through dinner nearly every night, showing up at the Corner Bistro only at nine, and even at her apartment, after making love, he sometimes worked till dawn. Sleep or no, each day he left immaculately tailored and groomed: friendly, handsome, and on the surface, relaxed.

  Allison couldn’t really blame him. And had she, that blame would have been tempered by the evolution of Dee’s mood, as the autumn progressed.

  Because slowly, she came to see, he was turning into something further and further from the confident, easy, hand
some young man who went each day to be groomed at work, and lunch, and dinner.

  Slowly, as that September progressed toward the trial’s opening day, she saw him losing his certainty about the trial that everyone was sure he couldn’t lose.

  There was no smoking gun. There was no scandalous fact that suddenly cast everything in a different light.

  There was just a slow process of demoralization, of ever-growing doubt.

  That was not a good thing, for Dee to be losing confidence in a trial that he would be arguing on the front pages of every newspaper in the States. A trial that had every chance of going to the Supreme Court.

  It was, in fact, a very destructive thing.

  For that, Allison knew without quite admitting it to herself, she was responsible.

  Or rather, Nicky Dymitryck was.

  It started in the single discussion they had concerning Dee’s withdrawal from the trial.

  Nicky’s death, of course had rendered any such way out impossible. Recusal now would put them in every publication in the country, from the Wall Street Journal to People: young lovers in the liberal elite, no editor could refuse that. Early on she had understood that Nicky’s death had made Dee’s planned recusal impossible, and now it was too late.

  When, therefore, the first night they spent together in New York, Dee suggested leaving the trial whatever the cost, Alley listened, calmly, gravely, lying next to him in the dark. When he finished, she rose, naked, and left the room.

  He followed her to where she was sitting, knees to breasts, at the little Formica table in her kitchen. And when he sat, opposite her, she spoke immediately, her green eyes focused intently.

  “Now you listen to me, Dee. You recuse yourself over this now, you ruin your career, you ruin my life, and the one thing you make sure is that you and I will never, in our whole lives, be able to sit together in a restaurant. Meanwhile, your boss replaces you. Right quick, too. And they still convict my father.”

  “All right.” It was as if she were the fast-track lawyer and he were the student who wished, rather than studying the law, to be writing poetry. “And if I don’t recuse myself? Then what, Alley? First I put your father in jail. Then, that’s all done, we go celebrate at the Bowery Bar. I don’t think so.”

  But Alley had thought far beyond this. “First off, you’re not putting my dad in jail. You said yourself, the trial’s an exchange of assets. My dad isn’t ever coming back to the States.”

  He interrupted her. “They’ll take everything he owns in this country. They’ll take Ocean View.”

  Now her green eyes were full on him, her face grave. “Then we’ll just have to go to your aunt Mary’s house when we want to go to the island.”

  “Alley. How the fuck we going to do that?”

  “Like this. A week after the trial’s over, you and I are going to meet at 120 Wooster. I am going to be with Martha. You are going to walk up to the table and tell me how sorry you were to be instrumental in my father’s prosecution. I am going to tell you that I understand you were doing your job. You are going to sit down. And Martha is going to put it in the Observer : ‘Federal Prosecutor Woos Gun Runner’s Daughter.’ You with me?”

  Staring at her eyes, Dee nodded.

  “Three days later we are going to meet at a party and talk to each other at length. Then we are going to go to dinner. Then you are going to come here and take my virginity. And I will give you dimes to dollars that by next summer you can take me up to Aunt Mary’s and I’ll cook you a ham dinner after church. ’Cause by next summer, no one is going to give a fuck about my dad. You will have closed him down. You with me?”

  But Dee was more than with her. “No. I mean yes. But no. You know what’s better? Six weeks later I resign my position with the U.S. attorney. And why do I resign it? ’Cause I can’t possibly be associated with the office that once prosecuted the father of the woman I now love. It would be unethical. And we’re out of here before the ink’s dried on the papers.”

  She was smiling appreciatively. “Deal.”

  “And what if we fall out of love?”

  She shook her head resolutely. “Then it’s a handshake and a secret kept between people who remember loving each other as one of the finest moments of their lives. Or some such shit. I’m not going down that road, Dee. I’ve known you way too long not to trust you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. Then we’re all set if you win. Now tell me this. What if you lose?”

  That stopped him for a second. “Lose? Alley, I can’t lose.”

  “No?” There was something nearly cruel, she thought, having made him agree that he could not withdraw from the case, in now bringing up the possibility of losing. But it was a real possibility, after Nicky’s death. And it had to be faced. She explained it to him in icy precision.

  “Imagine this, Dee: what about when some smart reporter decides to look into what Dymitryck was doing before he was murdered?”

  “Alley, that’s why I stayed on the damn case.”

  “Right. But imagine that this particular reporter isn’t an idiot. In fact, imagine it’s someone pretty smart. Smart enough to see through this bullshit about Dymitryck’s death being connected with the Harlanstrasse bombing. Smart enough to wonder what it was Dymitryck found out on the island, about my father, that made him worth killing. And then they start wondering why the U.S. attorney’s office hasn’t done the same investigation, and asked the same question?”

  “No one in my office has even mentioned Dymitryck’s name in connection with your father.”

  “Isn’t that interesting.” She stood now and turned her back to him for an instant while she crossed to the sink, then leaned against it, her naked form unprotected, her green eyes alive. “Isn’t that interesting. What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No? I do. Dymitryck had no friends in Washington. As far as anyone’s concerned—anyone who counts—Dymitryck’s death is a godsend, and they don’t care who did it. That’s why they haven’t investigated.”

  “Yeah.” Dee was following her, she saw, but still, she drove the point home.

  “Maybe it’ll never happen, Dee. But it could, and if it did, it’d be very bad press. Very bad for a jury, too.”

  She watched him understanding that. Finally, he spoke. “Okay. What’s your point?”

  “That there’s no such thing as a lock, Deedee. Especially not with the kind of people you’re working for. Between their cheating, their idealism, and their incompetence, you say you can’t lose, you’re kidding yourself.”

  2.

  Even more destructive than undermining his confidence in his case, however, was the degree to which Dee’s intimacy with Alley had undermined his assumptions about the person he was prosecuting.

  Dee’s experience of his work had been so much from the inside that he had not yet had the time to learn who these people he prosecuted actually were. He had not been prepared to learn that the devilish Ronald Rosenthal was also a father, a husband, a person who existed for his daughter with the same ambiguity that he felt toward his own powerful, domineering, ambitious father. Now, as the weeks of that September went by, under Allison’s tutelage, he could not ignore that the same complex emotions through which he viewed his father were not so different from those she held toward hers.

  Night after night, in her kitchen on Jane Street, pacing between the stove and table, they talked. And as the days mounted closer and closer to the trial, the tenor of their discussions mounted too.

  Perhaps more important to the gradual dissolving of Dee’s confidence in his prosecution was the fact that Dee, like most people who have been raised in privilege, had been around Jews his whole life and yet had managed not to know very much about them.

  “That’s bullshit, Dee,” Allison was saying now. “The trial’s not about the Arms Export Control Act, for God’s sake. You go in there talking about that, they’ll crucify you. No one’s going to deny that my father’s
prosecutable, that’s a given. They’re going to make the case from the jump—and they’re going to make it not in court, but in the press—that this is a witch hunt. They’re going to call it ‘business terrorism.’ They’re going to say my father’s being prosecuted to keep a government program deniable. That’s going to make him sound human, and a lot of people are sympathetic to that kind of talk.”

  “Juries follow the law, Alley.”

  “Oh nonsense. White-collar prosecution is overwhelmingly selective, you know that. How the hell are you going to justify the government going after my father when the damned administration’s taking every arms export limitation they can off the books to facilitate foreign trade?”

  “I don’t need to justify it. I just need to show he broke the law. I show that, Stein loses their sympathy, no matter what heartrending stories he has to tell.”

  “Do you?” And now Alley stopped pacing, paused by the kitchen window and stood staring out. Then, crossing to the table and sitting in front of him, she began to talk, as if simply unable to stop herself.

  “I see him, Dee. His name’s Yossi Nehanyu. I see him so clearly. He’s got a factory outside Tel Aviv, makes bomb casings, the motherfucker. He led my father into Iran-contra like a cow with a ring in its nose. Made him believe it was patriotic, for God’s sake. You have no idea how innocent people can be when it comes to Israel. You come with me to Brooklyn, I’ll show you God-fearing, Orthodox Jews who’ve torched their own factories and broken unions to save a few dollars, but you mention Jerusalem and their eyes mist over. Nothing could have happened without Nehanyu, and I swear to you, Dee, nothing Nehanyu did could have happened without high-level, U.S. permission—nothing. Every one of his orders came straight out of the NSC staff during Iran-contra, and every one of them came out of the White House for Bosnia: one after the other after the other.”

  “So what?” Dee asked curiously, a real request for information.