The Gun Runner's Daughter

by Neil Gordon

The taxi stopped on Eighth Avenue, a few short steps from the bar’s entrance. Were the two men who had shot at Nicky watching the bar? She went in without looking up, as if ignoring them would protect her. Then she went through the little interior door to the staircase while Bobby went out to get Nicky’s things from the taxi. Upstairs, Nicky let her in and, crouching, led her by the hand to the couch, the single spot in the living room that could not be seen through a window.

  Still holding hands they regarded each other in silence. Was he angry? Fleetingly, she thought: it’s too early to see this man angry. And then, to her surprise, he smiled his strange, wide-mouthed, slightly sardonic smile.

  “I came here to blackmail you. Instead you have to save my life.”

  She returned the smile, suddenly and without intending to. There was, she thought, something slightly evil in his expression, something that made her think that, after all, there was hope. And if there was hope, then she had to think. Now, for the first time, she turned her mind toward a practical solution.

  They had to leave this apartment. They had to get rid of the two men outside. Nicky had to get back to Los Angeles, where he could hide, and finish the recuperation he had so jeopardized to see her. And before he went, she had to make a deal with him. Those were the problems, and when the solution came to her it was fluidly, without thought. It was, she thought, just like everything else she had done. The solution had always been there, always. She had just forgotten she had it.

  “Okay. Hang on.”

  Sitting on the floor in the darkened room, far from the window, she pulled the telephone to her and punched a number. As she waited for an answer, she walked on her knees to the window and peered out over the sill.

  There was no hesitation in what she did, and yet, when it had become so entirely clear to her what had to be done, she could not say.

  2.

  Sitting on the couch, watching her in amazement, Nicky heard her speak suddenly, unaccountably, in another language.

  “ Efshar ledaber im Peretz? ”

  Then, after a pause: “ Peretz. Tzippy. Ani meod tsricha autcha .”

  Hebrew. Nicky stopped listening. He lay down on the couch, closing his eyes as if to block out the present. He had to leave, he thought, and so did she. He tried to concentrate on a solution to that problem. But so completely had he come to perceive his role as a patient of Alley’s decisions, rather than an agent of his own, so strong was his sense of her as his guide in a new world, and so great was her empire over him in that role, that rather than attempting to plan his immediate future, he simply watched her at work.

  And as he did so, the warmth of her body still on his skin, he found himself strangely happy. Who was this strong and brave woman? What was she doing? Far above the many matters that weighed on his mind and stomach, he felt intensely curious about her, as curious as he had ever felt in his life. For Nicky, curiosity had always been a happy experience, an experience that made him feel alive.

  He heard her hang up the phone and opened his eyes, finding himself staring up into her face. More to make her respond than because he cared, he said: “We have to leave now.”

  “Forget it.” With a lithe movement, she lifted herself onto the couch.

  “I have to get to the airport. You have to get me out of here. You’d better come with me.”

  “I told you, forget it. Your friends are still outside.”

  He sat up, and she pushed him down again, half lying against him. “Don’t show yourself, idiot.”

  He acquiesced. “How many?”

  “One now. I think the second’s around the corner—he keeps looking that way.”

  “What are we going to do?” He asked this question not rhetorically, but with curiosity.

  “We’re going to wait.” She shifted, her body on his legs now, one hand flat on his chest, and they lay, staring at each other for some minutes. When he spoke, it was dryly.

  “And what are we waiting for?”

  “For my friend Peretz. He’ll come to get you in about half an hour. He’ll get us out of here.”

  “Yeah? And how will he do that?”

  “Peretz was an antiterrorist commando in the Israeli army.”

  “And he’ll risk his life for you?”

  She looked at him appraisingly. “Dymitryck, what’s that, a Russian name?”

  “Montenegrin. I think it’s a bastardization. My dad was fourteen when he came here, and they shortened it at immigration.”

  “Not Jewish though, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, Dymitryck, you are a long way from home, you know that? Half my first-grade class spent high school in the JDL—the Jewish Defense League—and about half of those then joined the Israeli army after graduation: elite units, every one. You know who paid their way to Israel? Same guy who poured millions into every Jewish organization from Kahane Chai to the World Jewish Congress. These guys worship my father.”

  He answered slowly. “Kahane Chai. Your father supports the followers of Meir Kahane? How’s that work?”

  “Oh, you liberal. Guys like my father, they have two politics, one for Israel, one for the world.”

  “I understand that. It’s all fucked up.”

  She smiled. “Oh. Well, that’s not on this test.”

  He watched her for a moment. Then: “So now what? Peretz gonna blast our way out of here all alone?”

  She laughed now. “I think he’ll be able to scare up some friends. Just be still now.”

  He was, for a minute, lying with her hand on his chest, looking through the window and at the sky. Then he faced her.

  “By the way, I told you before, I’m not a liberal.”

  “Yeah.” She put a hand on his face. “God, that seems like a long time ago.”

  Lying, half pinned by her weight, her face inches from his in the dark, Nicky saw them suddenly as children, hidden in the living room, playing a game of secrets. A police car passed in the street, throwing a diffuse arc of flashing light across the ceiling. He spoke again in a whisper.

  “So the Yiddish Rambo and his posse save me. Then what? I can kill Diamond’s prosecution, but there’s sure to be others. Stan can’t be the only person you scammed.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded, and watched him for a moment. “That’s okay. Let Diamond go ahead.”

  He stumbled over his response. “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to be saved.”

  “That means you want to be caught?”

  “If you want. All I need is for it not to happen for two weeks. I need some time.”

  “You can’t have it: the election’s in a couple weeks and Eastbrook’s ahead in the polls.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m going to help you. Remember what you want from me. Stay focused.”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “I don’t want that anymore.”

  She looked at him now, expressionless, and spoke slowly.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Nicky, you’re not listening. I don’t want you to save me. If you want to help me, do what I say. I need more than just two weeks’ delay. I need you to make sure Diamond proceeds in his prosecution.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Maybe. I’ve thought about all this before, Nicky, and I don’t need a test.”

  “Then don’t make me ask all these questions.”

  A silence. Then, as if relenting, Nicky spoke again.

  “There is no way I’m going to get Jay to wait till after the elections before Diamond goes ahead. That means Eastbrook will be senator-elect before Diamond even has you extradited to Massachusetts.”

  “I know. It’s worth the wait.”

  “You don’t know Jay.”

  “Stop saying that. Tell him you know how to prove Greg Eastbrook is impeachable for illegal arms sales to Iraq.”

  Nicky was silent now. Then he said, as if sadly: “You’ll testify about the meeting between Eastbrook and your dad?”<
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  She nodded her understanding. Then she shook her head. “No.”

  Nicky nodded, not surprised that she understood him.

  “Then you have the videotape?”

  “Yes.”

  “How good is it?”

  “As good as it gets. You get Eastbrook himself, acknowledging his role as U.S. government facilitator for Cardoen’s exports to Iraq. The real approval, not that bullshit Teledyne and Cardoen trotted out to Highsmith. This is classified Israeli material. Eastbrook says in it, on tape, that Cardoen is under his personal protection.”

  “Acknowledging to whom?”

  “My father.”

  Nicky thought. Then, shaking his head: “This’ll launch an investigation of a U.S. senator, Alley.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ll be front-page news from Washington to Madras.”

  “You too.”

  “And it’ll flush your father’s defense down the toilet.”

  “His problem.”

  “Let me see.”

  “No.”

  He looked at her without answering. Then: “And what do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing. Until I say so. Then I want you to have Diamond file suit.”

  She was utterly composed, perfectly calm, and without any humor at all.

  “This is as illegal a thing as has ever been proposed to me in my life.”

  “Yes.”

  “And as immoral.”

  “No.” Now she was not whispering, she was hissing. “It’s justice.”

  “Alley. I don’t have the heart for it.”

  Then the phone rang.

  She answered and spoke two more Hebrew words, first, “ Ken? ” Then, “ Beseder gamur .” She hung up and spoke to Nicky.

  “Come. My friends are here.”

  “How do we get out?”

  “Follow me.”

  They put on their coats and she led him down the stairs, moving quietly and without turning on the hallway lights. She took him down the staircase, pulling him behind her by his hand, and stopped at a small metal door, on which she pounded with an open palm. When it opened, she took him through the kitchen, behind the bar, and through a small door under the cash register. Copying Allison’s movements, he lowered himself backward into the door, feeling his way down a steep flight of stairs to a basement stockroom. Bobby was there, bent over under the low ceiling. He crossed the room and opened a padlock on a metal loading hatch.

  They were all moving very quickly now. Allison climbed halfway up, peeked out, and then motioned for Nicky to follow, which he did, emerging into the evening on the sidewalk under the bar’s big window on Eighth Avenue. Immediately, she pushed him toward the open door of a van, and he climbed in, a hand guiding him to a seat on the floor. Turning, he saw Allison looking into the van.

  “Nicky, Peretz. Peretz, Nicky.” The driver turned, and Nicky found himself looking into the bearded face of a man wearing a yarmulke. Then Allison was speaking.

  “Peretz, here’s the key to my zaideh’s place. Nicky, go with Peretz. I’ll meet you later.”

  “You come too.”

  “No. I’ve got to do something. Peretz’ll take you somewhere safe, and I’ll be there tonight. Go now.”

  She slid the door shut, and as the van drew away, Nicky was able to rise long enough to espy her watching them draw away, before a hand fell on his head and gently pushed him down again.

  3.

  Alone, Alley watched the van draw off with a sudden feeling of desolation. Slowly, she returned around the corner of the bar, and found herself face to face with the two men who’d been waiting outside her apartment. A jet of adrenaline tingled her scalp, but she had only the briefest glimpse of their faces as they passed her at a run, and as she turned after them, she saw them climbing into a small car and, engine roaring, taking off up Eighth Avenue after Peretz’s van.

  That didn’t scare her as much as fill her with extreme anxiety. And it wasn’t because she was afraid that Peretz and his practiced friends couldn’t handle her father’s hired assassins. It was because, she admitted to herself now, she had known what this evening was going to bring to those two men. She knew it, although she doubted that Nicky did. Yet. She wondered how long it would take him to figure it out.

  In her apartment again, she found herself unable to focus. Everything she had done since meeting Dee Labor Day weekend had been directed toward this night, and now that it had come, her confidence in what she was doing had abandoned her. For a long time she sat in the darkened apartment, staring at nothing, feeling a sensation she could not identify.

  Only when she arose did it occur to her, and she stood, unmoving, while a memory rushed through her head. The sensation was of a day on the island when she was six or seven. Her father had discovered, one morning, a litter of newborn dogs in the garage: a stray had found her way in during the night and died during the birth. All the pups were dead but one, and this one, a fat black beast no more than four inches big, they had spent the morning trying to feed with a dropper. Toward noon, her father had decided it was hopeless, the pup could not survive, and taken it out back to put it down. Unfortunately, he had decided to strangle it, which is a very bad way to kill even a baby dog, born with a thick sheath of muscle protecting its throat. It had taken a long time. Now Allison remembered, vividly, waiting on the porch, stomach clenched, wishing the evil thing, the necessary thing, to be over.

  4.

  Besides Peretz, driving, there were three other men in the car. From his seat on the floor, Nicky saw that they all four wore beards and yarmulkes, white shirts with the fringes of prayer shawls showing. Two wore leather coats, two wore sheepskin-lined jean jackets.

  The van was moving through traffic, weaving, throwing Nicky back and forth against the sidewall, and for a time they drove in silence. Then the driver spoke, not in Hebrew this time, but in a language Nicky realized must be Yiddish, and one of the men in the back seat climbed to the back of the van and looked out the window. For a time they continued, the man looking out the back reporting from time to time, the van driving straight for a bit, then swerving abruptly, then driving straight for a bit. Finally, the driver—Peretz—spoke to Nicky in a Brooklyn accent.

  “You might as well get comfortable. We’re not gonna lose them.”

  Nicky sat up to find the van high up in the air, surrounded by the black of a starlit night. They were, he realized, on a bridge, crossing a river. He looked behind at the headlamps of thick traffic, and the man next to him said: “It’s the blue Nova. Two men. That them?”

  He couldn’t see well enough to identify the men, but he had no real doubt. He answered: “I think so.”

  Peretz spoke now: “Well, they been following us since Alley’s. And I can’t lose them in this piece of Jap shit.” He didn’t sound worried.

  “What are we going to do?”

  Peretz turned and looked at him with a humorless smile. “ Ma she tagidlanu .” Nicky didn’t respond, and with some surprise, Peretz asked, “You’re not Jewish?”

  “No.”

  “Really? Well, that was a language called Hebrew. It means, what you tell us. Essie said it’s your party.”

  Nicky didn’t answer; Peretz didn’t seem inclined to expand. They crossed the bridge in silence, the old van rattling mercilessly, the four men now ignoring Nicky completely. The man in the passenger seat was talking softly into a small tape recorder, his eyes darting back and forth through the windows and out the rearview mirror, which was set, Nicky noticed, so that he could see behind from the passenger seat. Nicky could not hear, in the traffic, what he was saying. Then a bubble of unease popped in him.

  They clearly could not escape the Nova. But if they actually were caught, and Peretz spoke to the men in the Nova, it wouldn’t take ten seconds for them to discover they were all on the same side. Then what?

  Would Peretz hand him over? For a time, Nicky considered this. And he could not avoid concluding: probably.

 
Nicky dead, Peretz alienated, what would happen to Alley’s plan, whatever it was?

  And what would happen to whatever evidence she was planning to give him?

  For a time Nicky considered, anxiety and dread equally mounting in his belly. Finally, he asked Peretz:

  “Do you know who those men are?”

  “Mr. Rosenthal’s enemies.”

  Nicky literally bit his tongue to stop himself from talking. Then he said, suddenly: “They’ve tried to kill me. Twice.”

  This was greeted with a raised-eyebrows glance between Peretz and the man in the passenger seat, who then turned to Nicky, showing a face that looked as if it had once, long ago, been beaten to a pulp.

  “Give us the word, pal. We can’t be doing this all night long.”

  And now a cold jet went through Nicky, a cold jet that ran, in an instant, from his heart to his scalp and then clean through his blood.

  He said: “For all I know, these people are on a government payroll.”

  Peretz, pursing his lips as if speaking to a child: “Don’t be so scared of the government, pal. Just a bunch of thugs. Just like us.”

  That, to Nicky, was a convincing speech. He nodded, dry-mouthed: “All right.”

  Thinking, trying to think, of another way of keeping Rosenthal’s two sets of employees from meeting.

  The end of the bridge was at hand now, and Peretz, no longer driving fast, angled down an exit ramp, crossed a couple of populated blocks, then turned down a steep hill. He flipped on the radio to Chrissie Hynde’s voice: Come to me darling / With a message of love; the man with the tape recorder said something in an angry tone and snapped the radio off again. At the bottom of the hill, Nicky saw the river, the great arc of the bridge they had just crossed rising up on massive stone arches, and recognized it as the Brooklyn Bridge. Then they passed into a series of deserted streets, lined with warehouses.

  And here, in this dreamy urban landscape, as the van cruised bumpily from deserted street to deserted street, the atmosphere in the car changed. There was no more talk besides the voice of the man speaking into the tape recorder, in what Nicky could now hear to be Hebrew, in the silence of these deserted streets, and Nicky became slowly aware of the ammoniac smell of sweat. He spoke, as if awakening from a sleep.