The Gun Runner's Daughter

by Neil Gordon

  And now she was in front of W. H. Smith, under the covered sidewalk on the rue de Rivoli, thick holiday crowds moving around her like the slowly shifting roll of a wave, and she wasn’t sure how she had gotten there.

  2.

  W. H. Smith. The warmth, the dry warmth of a store full of English-language books on her face now. Hands still in her coat pockets, she shouldered her way through the lines at the cash registers and to the back of the store, the poetry section. Gazed blankly up at the shelf of paperbacks, her eyes resting on names and editions she knew: Clark, Coleman, Malanga, Reznikoff, Wakoski. She stopped at this last name and, after a hesitation, took the book, Emerald Ice , and moved back to the cash register. Outside again, clutching the book under an arm, she made her way to Angelina’s, took a table, and ordered a chocolat.

  Earlier that morning, Bob Stein had called her at the rue de Fleurus. Three in the morning, New York time; he must have woken especially for it. Her father was on his way to Paris. He did not yet understand what had happened. Bob thought that it might be some time before her father understood the full extent of what she had done. So far, he had refused to discuss it.

  As for her, the deal was almost cut: if she honored the Ocean View leases, all concerned were willing to drop charges. Except for Stan Diamond, who would settle only if he could have Ocean View farmhouse itself. That meant that Alley would lose the summer on the island—the first season of her life she’d miss there. He spoke as if she would be in the States for the season, as if she would have the luxury of deciding where she would summer. In the living room of the apartment, she had listened impassively, her eyes watching the rain drip, dropping down the outside of the big French doors looking out over all Paris; her eyes seeing soft snow drifting on the streets far below the window of Bob’s office in downtown New York.

  “So my view is, stay put till after New Year’s. Your dad’s thinking of Corsica. Go with him. Get a tan.”

  She didn’t answer, and as if, on the other end of the line, Bob had understood her, he went on. “You come back here early January, they’ll arrest you at the airport, I’ll have you out the next day, tops. We’ll cut a parole deal the next day.”

  “Parole for how long?”

  “Maybe a year, honey.”

  “Where? Massachusetts?”

  “No, you could stay in New York.”

  “No. I’m not coming. I’ll honor the leases, and Diamond can have his season. But I’m not serving a parole sentence, and I’m not coming back without an order of extradition.”

  “No, I don’t think there’s gonna be an extradition order. Justice has had about enough of you.”

  That, she thought, at least gave her the quarter million. She no longer considered Ocean View her father’s property—he had, in his willingness to lose it, sacrificed his ownership of that magical place. And then, she had a job—of sorts, one that promised to be very lucrative.

  3.

  Now, waiting for her hot chocolate at a table at Angelina’s, she thought ruefully how immediately Stein would have understood her new job.

  When she’d arrived in Paris and taken a room she could not pay for at La Louisiane on the rue du Seine, she’d immediately called Mr. Chevejon to find out where her money was. He was not in, but his answer arrived the next afternoon by messenger.

  Florence

  Dear Ms. Rosenthal,

  Your money is in an account with Crédit Suisse, numbered per the enclosed. It is immediately available by wire through their Paris office. I have withdrawn from it my expenses, per the enclosed receipts.

  More importantly, I would like to extend to you my offer of help, whether providing you a quiet place to stay or, forgive me, extending whatever financial help you may need, as I would guess that the sum you deposited in Switzerland may be subject to some pressure for return.

  The letter had shown two addresses, but one, on the rue St. Honoré in Paris, was crossed out, leaving one on the Piazza Santo Spirito in Florence.

  Then she had fallen very ill, and been hospitalized in Neuilly, and for some days had been unable to do anything. When she could write again, from her hospital bed, she had sent him a letter:

  Dear Mr. Chevejon,

  I wonder if I can draw on your goodness once again. It would be of great use to me to have a quiet place to stay for some time in the New Year, preferably in Paris. Would you know of an agent who can arrange such a thing? I can pay up to $3,000 U.S. per month.

  She had received a brief answer, Chevejon’s voice withdrawn again to formality, as if to mask the generosity of his offer:

  Dear Ms. Rosenthal,

  It happens that my business partner has at his disposal an empty apartment in the sixth. We’d both be delighted if you would make yourself at home in it. If you’d like to contact me when you are ready to leave the hospital, I’ll let the concierge know you’re coming. The address is 6, rue de Fleurus, sixth floor left.

  The rue de Fleurus, she knew, was near the Luxembourg Gardens. This seemed to her perfect, and in the end she had found herself arriving in a luxurious apartment, protected by massive Fichet locks and a computerized burglar alarm, with windows giving out over all Paris, the wintry lead roofs, the bare trees, and the always steely gray sky. There were sparse furnishings: a living room with empty shelves, an empty office. But the minimal furniture was enough: a couch in the living room, a bed with linens; the kitchen was equipped, and the entire place had clearly been very recently cleaned. This, evidently, had been overseen by Chevejon, whom she called that evening in Florence.

  “Mr. Chevejon. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Not at all, Ms. Rosenthal. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to greet you. Do you need anything?”

  “Thank you, no. Thank you very much, Mr. Chevejon.”

  “I see.” He answered somewhat obliquely, and then after a pause, continued.

  “Tell me, Ms. Rosenthal: what do you plan to do in Paris?”

  She was silent a moment. And then, suddenly: “Whatever I have to, Mr. Chevejon.”

  “I see.” A pause, and she imagined him smiling. “You have finished law school?”

  “No. Nearly so.”

  “I see.”

  She hesitated, but only for a moment. “Mr. Chevejon? I know how to paper a sale—any kind of sale—in any state of the U.S. and also in Israel. I know accounting practice and I know both a network of very savvy people in New York and some of the wealthiest people on the East Coast, as well as most of the major players in Israeli arms. I don’t have a law degree, granted. But I think I have a lot to offer.”

  His answer was unequivocal. “Precisely what I think, Ms. Rosenthal.” He paused. “You do understand that none of the work I have to offer is, strictly speaking, legal?”

  She considered, suddenly tense. “You mean, in the sense of drawing on my law school education?”

  He laughed. “No, Ms. Rosenthal. That is extremely useful to me. I mean in the sense of being sanctioned by law.”

  She relaxed. “Yes, Mr. Chevejon. I understand that.”

  “When might you like to come to Florence?”

  Her heart skipped, so unambiguous was his job offer. “My father is in Paris. He leaves in a day or two, so perhaps next week.”

  “Splendid, Ms. Rosenthal. And, Ms. Rosenthal? Why not stay put in the rue de Fleurus for the time being. Does that suit you?”

  At that she practically smiled.

  4.

  At her table at Angelina’s now, the crowds on the rue de Rivoli, where a thin snow had started to fall, passing outside the window, the warmth of the crowded restaurant slowly permeating her skin, the swirl of conversation around her slowly drawing her out of her thoughts. A voice beside her said “N’en fait pas, cheri, ça va aller.” Then again: “Eh, du calme, eh? Où en es-tu avec ton chocolat? J’en commande un autre, ou ben non?” She looked over, and saw a man with two children at the next table of the crowded salon, a girl in a chair and a baby in his lap. The girl, sitting wi
th her chin at the table and kicking her legs, was looking at her.

  She looked away. The oddest part was, now that it was over, she knew how big a role chance had played. The whole thing couldn’t have stood up to a spirited defense from Dee. What if Martha Ohlinger had been subpoenaed, would she have perjured herself for Alley? That was a hard question to answer: Martha was deeply loyal, but she was also sincere in the ethics that guided her politics. But then, Martha would not be so anxious to show that she had let her job, for which she had fought tooth and nail, be used in a criminal agenda. Martha, Alley thought, might be feeling just a little bit guilty herself right now.

  And Nicky? Again, the wound of his cold rejection throbbed in her. It was fed, she knew, by his disgust with himself, with his complicity in her crime. But in the end, the positive good of indicting Eastbrook had overridden his concern with himself, and he had said nothing. Still, she doubted that he would be going for the moral high ground again soon.

  And yet luck was involved. Nothing, after all, was perfect: luck was always involved. Really, she thought, not for the first time, she owed it to Dee, to Dee refusing to say a word, in public or in private, in his defense.

  Sometimes she wondered about that. But she knew that Dee could not think that she had planned this, had used a pretense with them to carry it out. She knew that he would understand that there had been no plan, there had just been an objective. The emotions that had lived between them were not pretenses, they had all been true. It was just that they had all had double meanings. But what doesn’t? What doesn’t mean two things; what doesn’t carry a fundamental ambivalence, tenderness and violence, hope and regret? All that divided her from Dee was her willingness to read, and to use the shadow meaning that always tails behind what we think of as the truth.

  Alley found herself staring at the little girl at the neighboring table, and made a last effort to focus on the book in front of her.

  And could not. A cup of hot chocolate, untasted, sat before her, next to the book of poetry, unopened. She knew nearly every piece in it by heart, anyway: it was more a talisman, a fetish. But it was also a bridge to another time, not a time of happiness but a time when she had suffered only a simple shame.

  Because now she knew guilt. Pure, unambiguous, convicted guilt. Crime. The kind her father knew. Now she knew justice, that implacable reality, where two wrongs clash and one outmuscles the other. Once she had known mourning, a pain that never ends but renews itself each day, a gift of endless resource, and she had thought it to be guilt. How foolish she had been. The guilt she knew now, she would live with it forever, no longer a child but a felon, and it would never be absolved, and never go away.

  She knew betrayal. With these two men, she had spent a moment of perfect trust and not once, but twice, she had betrayed each lover. The weight of that guilt lay now in her womb, and she knew that never, ever would it either pass from her body nor would it cease to struggle to be born.

  All those people her father had killed. Laos, Cambodia, Guatemala, Iran, Angola. Not just soldiers but citizens: retirees, journalists, masons, nuns, accountants, schoolchildren—the assorted victims of cluster bombs and land mines, of napalm and heat-seeking missiles. There was a randomness about the variety of people who died that in itself was frightening. Chileans, Colombians, Africans, Christians, Muslims. There were even some Jews.

  And did he feel guilt? Did he feel this black heart at the center of his being, this thing that ached? She felt now, for a long time, for the answer to this question, and perhaps she would have found it. But in the event, her attention suddenly went, totally out of her control, to someone who, she found, was standing next to her, bumping against her leg.

  It was the little girl from the next table, standing with one hand on Allison’s knee. She was perhaps three, dressed in jeans and a red sweater, and she stared up at Allison with a grave face, her big cheeks around a red rosebud mouth, her nut-brown hair, which had probably never been cut, swept back in a ponytail. One cheek held a perfectly placed beauty mark; her eyes were serious, unblinking, showing massive brown irises in the middle of long, very long lashes.

  “Je peux avoir un gout de votre chocolat?”

  Stock still, as if a wrong movement would break the spell, Allison answered. “Oui. Vas-y.”

  The girl stood on tiptoe to reach her mouth to the cup, tipped it with a pink hand on which, hyperaware, Allison noticed a small red birthmark and a gold bracelet, then stood back again, a mustache of thick chocolate on her upper lip.

  At a loss, Alley asked: “Il est bon?”

  “Oui, il est très bon.”

  Allison could not remember ever speaking to a child this age. For a moment the girl and she regarded each other, the girl gravely through her clear brown eyes, Allison curiously.

  Then, from the next table the father called: “Leila. Qu’est-ce que tu fais là?”

  The girl heard, and wended her circuitous way through the chairs over to the man, a man not much older than Nicky, with thinning hair and a black beard, a strange, harsh look halfway between a rabbi and a spy, who sat feeding a bottle to a very small boy in his lap. He was, Allison registered, Jewish. Ashkenazi, which wasn’t often the case in Paris. When the girl was close enough, the man spoke absently.

  “Eh, toi. Je fais bouffer à Jacob, puis que veux-tu qu’on fasse?”

  “Aller aux Tuileries.” She answered matter-of-factly, a hand on her brother’s stomach.

  “Bon, ça y est.”

  The girl agreed, then, with a hand on his shoulder, stood on tiptoes to speak in his ear. He listened, then started to laugh. Then he met Allison’s eyes and stopped.

  “Désolé, madame. Je vais vous en commander un autre.”

  She answered with a shake of her head, without really raising her voice. “Vous en faites pas. J’étais sur le point de m’en aller.”

  But she did not go, not yet. Now the girl was sitting up on her chair, her legs dangling above the floor, ending in pink galoshes. The man had returned his attention to her brother, who, his wet lip round on the nipple of the bottle, a fuzz of blond hair over the crown of his head, gazed up at his father with shining eyes. The two looked ridiculously alike. The father made a face and the boy’s lips stretched in open-faced delight.

  And the father, balding with his black beard and Jewish nose, smiled back. His eyes behind his glasses crinkling with another kind of delight, a delight tempered by the age of his face, yes, but more by the worry of love, the worry that was love. The girl climbed off her chair and moved to his side; he curled his arm around the baby’s neck to hold the bottle and with his other arm free, now, turned the girl’s face to his, wiped off her chocolate mustache, and bent down to kiss her.

  As for the lady with the hot chocolate, she had ceased to exist for them.

  But she sat, transfixed. Feeling pity, fear, regret.

  Pity for that balding man with his love corrupted by mortal fear.

  Fear for those children, stuck with a devotion they had never asked for and could never lose.

  And a searing regret that passed through and through her and left her, yet again, on the verge of tears.

  Rising, leaving money on the table, leaving.

  That girl with her father. What did they know about love?

  5.

  Four-fifteen, the Hotel Ritz. In the living room of her father’s suite. A uniformed waiter had opened the door for her, but for once, she seemed to be expected: she did not need to explain who she was, and her father, in shirtsleeves and suit pants, was at the window of the living room, watching out. For a moment he did not notice that she had arrived. Then, when she spoke, he turned and she was in his arms, smelling aftershave and cigarettes mixed with the wet-wool smell of her coat.

  Busily, he took her coat, put her into a chair, directed the waiter’s tea service in his lousy French, all the while talking to her. The government had returned his files to him, so much for Mike Levi, that damn liar. He’d be back stateside in a few weeks.
Le Monde was coming to interview him at five.

  She seemed to see him more than hear him as he spoke. Even the crime she had committed did not seem to breach the limits of his paternalism. She wished she could offer him the same lack of condition. But her affection no longer seemed adequate to her response to this man. Nor, however, like a curse on her, would it abandon him, and as she watched him talking, pouring tea, lighting a cigarette, talking, she ached with desire for him to kiss her as that man, this afternoon, had kissed his daughter.

  His monologue slowed at last, and a silence fell between them. Finishing his tea and lighting a cigarette, he rose and stood by the big windows that gave out onto the Place Vendôme. Turning in her armchair, she watched him in profile: a strong, rather squat man with the embonpoint of a life of wealth and power, a weathered face, a piercing green eye. At last, not looking at her, he spoke in a quiet voice she had not, she realized, heard for years.

  “Now, Essie, I’m not going to ask about what happened. I know neither Stein nor the papers got the truth. I don’t believe I need to have it either. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go ahead.”

  She was quiet for a moment. Then she answered.

  “I want you to give Ocean View to the Trustees of Reservations. I want a guaranteed stewardship for me and my heirs. If I have no children, then it reverts to reservation land. The rental houses I want demolished. At your expense.”

  Her father nodded, as if he had been expecting this. “Agreed.”

  “There’s more. I want you to stop sending me checks. I’m not going back to law school, and I no longer want to be supported.”

  That, at last, made him blanch, as if she had dealt him a physical injury. She softened her tone, but she went on, as if administering a just and implacable punishment. “And I want you to know that whatever I might one day inherit from you, I will not accept. The half that should have been Pauly’s, I want you to give to Yale. The half that should have been mine, I want given to nonpolitical charities.”