The Gun Runner's Daughter (10 page)

It had not surprised Allison that Martha should hide this information from her. Martha, who came from somewhere very similar to Borough Park, had protected Allison since the first day they met,
eleven years old, at St. Ann’s School. This was because Martha, like Allison, had been subject to a profound deculturation.

The very first day after school Martha had taken her—Allison’s first time on the subway—to Greenwich Village to equip herself with the rudimentary requirements: jeans,
oversized plaid shirts, a pea coat. Then, together, they’d taken care of Pauly.

Not moving her eyes from her friend, Allison answered.

“Who? Anyone. Anyone at all is going to tell.”

“Bullshit, Alley girl. Stay away from old Goodwoman Dennis and you’ll be fine. There wasn’t a soul there last night that knew Dee.”

Allison turned now. “What about your pal from Kennedy’s office?”

“Yeah, don’t worry about him. I know what he saw last night, and it wasn’t your lover.”

There was a wide, slightly crooked smile on Martha’s face. Allison savored it for a moment, its familiarity, its pure, brute beauty. But Martha, Allison thought, was babying her: she knew
how important this was.

“Martha?”

“Yeah, baby.”

“Stop fooling around. Why is Dee Dennis talking to me?”

Martha looked up now, curious. “ ’Cause you’re beautiful, baby.”

“Fuck you.”

“Okay then. ’Cause he wants to know whether you’re going to speak to the press about your childhood love affair. ’Cause if you do that, it’s going to make a lot of
people, like, very nervous.”

“Who?”

She hesitated. Then, less jocularly, “My father. Ed Dennis. At least. I don’t know for sure.”

Allison gazed at her friend, blankness on her face masking her thoughts. “Your dad’s cabinet. Dennis is White House staff. What do they have to do with it?”

“That’s just the point, Alley girl. Nothing legal. Drawing media attention to what will, at the very least, be a serious embarrassment to the prosecution, that’s going to make
them very, very nervous. You know what’d make them even more nervous? If you met him out on the beach at Wasque. You’re gonna fuck him, I presume?”

“Martha.”

“Aw, Alley, come on.
Someone’s
got to pay for
something
sometime. Tell you what: you fuck him, then I’ll publish an article in the
Observer.
That’ll
take care of Dee’s worries, ’cause he’ll be off the case. Okay?”

And when Allison didn’t answer, but rose to keep her appointment with Dee, Martha leaned up on one elbow and spoke, to Allison’s surprise, with a wide smile.

“Alley girl? You know, you can take out the clown. But it won’t stop the circus.”

Moving toward the door, Alley snapped at her friend.

“I know that, Martha. I’m not an idiot.”

5.

Dymitryck’s rented Jeep appeared behind Allison just before the airport road. That made her heart quicken. Still, she had already decided what she was going to do. She
slowed down and was able to see, in her rearview mirror, that he wore sunglasses and was smoking as he drove.

She cruised slowly toward Edgartown, then, at Whippoorwill Farm, picked up speed, passing one, two, three cars before the traffic slowed to town speed. Like this she entered Edgartown proper
with a number of cars between them. In town, she turned left, then right, pulled into the Chappy ferry, and by the time the short man was entering town, the ferry was already unmoored, leaving him
stranded at the dock. She sighed, relaxing, in the cab of the Cherokee. And that was when she saw, just in front of her, Dee, leaning lightly against his little Fiat, unprotected in the light
rain.

Their eyes met through Alley’s windshield. He looked away toward a man in a disheveled Barbour who was stepping out of his car, and Alley recognized Ronald Dworkin. At the Chappy-side dock
he climbed into his car without looking back, and watched her through the rearview as she followed him through the dirty roads of Chappaquiddick and past Dyke Bridge to the parking lot at Wasque
Point.

A strange lightness was in Dee’s stomach now, a strange inability to focus on the gravity of what was occurring. Dimly, he felt that the difficult part of his business with Alley had
already been completed: in their conversation the night before something had made him sure that this cool, quiet woman was not going to compromise him. This, he knew, could turn out to be more of a
hope than a valid intuition. Still, it was all he had, and he could not afford to let go.

At the Wasque parking lot two men in wet suits were loading sea kayaks onto the top of a Range Rover. Alley circled the lot, parked facing him, and while they waited for the men to finish they
watched each other through their windshields at a distance of some ten lightly fogged yards.

Or, Dee thought to himself, ten years.

When the sea kayakers left, Dee climbed out of his Fiat, crossed the small parking lot, and got into her Jeep.

Within the car, the gray light did not flatter him as had the soft lights of the Ritz. But it did bring out the pallor of his cleanly shaven cheek and light the light blue of
his eyes and so, to Alley’s eye, did something more than flatter. She watched him for a moment, smelling shaving cream and the warm, humid rain.

A Suburban drew into the parking lot, carrying two deep-sea fishing rigs on its roof. She shifted into first and went out onto the beach, fishtailing slightly on the low dune, gathering speed
along the water’s edge. As they breached the point, the fog cleared, a warm, wet sea wind carrying it north. She stopped and they opened their doors, then sat sheltered in the cab of the car,
steamy rain dripping on sand.

There was a long silence that she did not try to break. He watched out his door to the water, eyes at quarter profile to her, focused out to the enormity of the sky. When he turned, his face was
perfectly flat.

“This is a hard place to lose.”

That statement, she thought, contained two separate meanings.

One was undeniable: the fact that he, like Martha, like herself, had been formed in this landscape. It was a sentiment impossible to explain to city people, this lifelong rapport with a natural
place. It was a sentiment, she knew, that they shared.

She reacted, however, to the other meaning. “Oh? Are you losing it too? I thought you were taking it.”

Now he turned toward her, and she had the chance, once again, to appreciate the power this man had assumed. He spoke, as he had in the bar, entirely directly. “Very funny. Look. I
didn’t commit any crime. I didn’t do anything but play by the rules. You see me being invited back here a lot after my dad finds out about me and you?”

She kept expression out of her voice. “How’s he going to find out?”

“Shauna McCarthy’s going to tell him.”

“And she?”

He paused. “She what?”

“How’s she going to find out?”

“From me, of course, Alley. I’m telling her about it on Tuesday morning.”

The aggrieved tone in his voice was not lost on her. She just wasn’t sure she believed it. “You could have told her when she offered you the job.”

His answer came readily. “I didn’t know it was your father when I came on. And even when I knew who it was, I still didn’t connect him with you.”

Was that so? She squinted away out the window, as if truth existed at a distance in the warm rain. Yes, she thought, regretting the implied meaning of what he had just said—the little
importance her memory held to him—it was probably so. Then she looked back.

“I believe you. Now, what is it you want from me?”

He answered, she noticed, immediately.

“I want you to know I’m going to withdraw from the case.”

She shrugged.

“That’s up to you.”

For a long moment there was silence, each turned away watching the dripping vista of sea. Finally, as if on cue, she looked at him as he turned to her and spoke in a tone new
to their conversation.

“I was so sorry about Paul.”

She shrugged, and he watched her face softening. Encouraged, he went on.

“I remember him well.”

“Yeah.” A small smile from her.

He said, carefully: “I should have spoken to you there.”

“Oh . . . I don’t even remember the memorial.” Now she gathered herself into the car seat, pulling up her legs and wrapping them in her thin, strong, sunburnt arms. At least,
he thought, she wasn’t being actively hostile now. Although when she spoke again, not looking at him, she was still cold.

“Look. I was a child ten years ago. So were you. I understand your father’s . . . interest in this case. I understand your family dilemma. But let’s keep in mind, it
doesn’t really have any standing with me. There’s some other Beltway insider with a dot-gov address waiting to take your place in a minute flat.”

He answered, this time quickly. “Good. Then you’re all set.”

“I didn’t ask your father to get involved in a Justice Department prosecution.”

“And I didn’t ask your father to break the law.”

Alley turned at this. “But someone else did ask him. You know that for a fact. The Clinton administration wanted those arms sold. Exactly like Reagan wanted to arm the contras.”

“If he was directed, then he can prove it in court.”

“No, Dee. He can’t prove it in court. You know damn well that he can’t prove it in court. That’s what makes your trial such a charade.”

He shrugged. “Your father’s a businessman, Alley. If he can’t prove the legality of a transaction, he shouldn’t be involved.”

“Wrong. You know who authorized him, and you know it can’t be proved. A lot of people do what my father does. Most of them were once in the fucking Defense Department.”

Now Dee watched her seriously. So that’s what she thought, was it? That he was a pawn of an agenda? That was an impression that had to be corrected. He spoke coolly.

“That a lot of people do it is why it’s so important we try these cases. I just spent five years fighting constitutional issues. This is a case with as serious, long-term
consequences as the Walsh prosecutions. Oliver North was sanctioned by an administration. That doesn’t make what he did legal. An acquittal of Rosenthal declares open season on the Third
World: arms sales wherever any political interest wants them. I’m sorry about your father. But this is a case that has to be made.”

She watched him, wordless, for a moment. Then she nodded. “I hear you. But you know what I hear? Another turf battle over arms and money. You fight, my dad pays.”

“Democracy is a turf fight. And I don’t work for the president.”

She didn’t answer, and for a time, in the cab, the rain falling harder against the window, he watched her. He didn’t want to argue law with her. He didn’t want her like this.
He wanted her the way she was when he spoke about her brother. He said:

“I wanted you to know that I was leaving the case. That’s all. Now I’ll go if you want me to.”

6.

And suddenly, bitterly, she did not want him to go.

This witness from the time when Ocean View was the house next to the sea on the magic island, sheltered by scrub pine, always under the sun. In the intimate interior of the car under dripping
rain, she did not want him to go. She wanted him to stay.

She could smell him, the fresh of the rain and a clean, slightly scented soap. It scared her, how healing it felt to be with this man, this man with whom she had been naked when she was a child.
But it did not surprise her.

And he? Appraisingly, she watched him before his open door, ready to enter the rain. The papers were desperate for copy about the trial. Not a soul would resist the story of his withdrawal from
a Federal case due to a childhood romance with sexy Allison Rosenthal. The publicity could ruin his career. What would he do? What did lawyers like that do? Take up probate and divorce law? Not the
future as a brilliant jurist Ed Dennis had in mind for his son. Grudgingly, she admitted that he, too, was losing everything.

For a long fugue of moments she listened to the patter of the rain on the car top, watched the vista of sodden beach. Then she slammed her door and started the car. “Dee. Just sit
down.”

Now he hefted his weight back into the seat, and looked at her. She spoke immediately.

“Look, I’m sorry. I’m sorry this happened to you. Let’s go have a drink.”

“Where?” He did not sound surprised.

“My house.”

He thought for a moment. Then said, as if in conclusion: “Drop me off round the point. I’ll walk back to my car and take the next ferry after you.”

This slim, slight girl who had sat next to him in the car, with her hair loose around her face, her body hidden under a loose T-shirt and jeans. In the intimacy of the car, her
need had been palpable to him. She was losing everything.

Driving fifteen minutes behind Allison along the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road, Dee Dennis hung poised perfectly in understanding of her, as if she were an image in a mirror before him.

She was waiting for him at the top of Ocean View Road. Then he saw her Cherokee take off again as he approached, skidding in the sandy road. They passed no one on the chase
down, and at the small carport outside her house they parked side by side. By the time he had opened his door, she was running through the rain down a flagstone path into the house.