The Gun Runner's Daughter (11 page)

Inside, the rain was fat drops blowing across the burnt grass to slap against the windowpanes. Beyond her frame of vision, he saw from his tallness the lawn pulsing in the ominous darkening of
the day; the vista of cattails and hay field nodding in the gusts of wind. For a time, together, they watched. Then she spoke without turning. “Do you know that a year ago Clinton was
considering staying here?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Forget it.”

He found himself, suddenly, unwilling to look at her, afraid—from the tone of her voice, from the need in her voice—what he might see.

“May I have a drink?”

She answered by motioning with her head. He followed her gesture, and saw a small canvas, a still life hanging over a hutch containing bottles and flowers. With a slight shock, he recognized the
painting: this was Rosenthal’s famous Soutine. He stepped over to pour two scotches in small crystal glasses. Then he carried Alley’s to her and looked full at her.

The soft storm light on her skin. The corners of her mouth red at the edges, her expression alive with invitation. Her hand trembled slightly at the end of her bare arm as she took the drink.
Then, sipping thirstily, she looked up at him, her green eyes so alive as to make shimmer the light in them. And a decision was made for Dee. When she removed the glass he leaned down to kiss her,
tasted scotch and felt cold in the skin of her lips, a damp cold he had felt years before, years before. He straightened and directly, she turned away, hugging herself tightly.

7.

She hugged herself tighter, looking away over the land, at the cattails nodding in the ocean wind, at the hay field stretching pure gold under the long, threatening light. Then
she felt his hands on her shoulders, the warmth of his body, chest, stomach, and groin, against her back.

Could this be happening? she asked herself again, her back to him, her face to the storm, interrogating the wave of cattails, the rising ocean swell. Could this be happening? His hands came
farther down her arms, whose skin she felt hardening against the warmth of his fingers. Still hugging herself, she turned and lifted her face, decided on nothing.

But a longing so pure was through her. Through and through her, like an ache, from her ears to her eyes to the full surface of her skin: all the parts of her body that perceived, suddenly, felt;
and then all the parts that permitted to live too—her heart, her lungs—were pierced.

Against the roar of the surf. She pushed him away, watched him for a moment, then took him by the hand and led him through the living room. The shade of the falling light. The wooden stairway
into the heart of the empty house with all its old, familial smell. Gone was the silence, gone was the desertion, and she looked into Pauly’s room as if he were there, on his bed, lying with
his head between his Boston Acoustics and listening to David Byrne. When she turned to Dee, in her room, that look was on his face, the look of fathomless tenderness, and a flush went clean through
her. And then she was in the dry scent of his body, in the airiness of his clean hair, in the beat of his heart and the heat of his skin.

It was like coming home. It was like filling the aching emptiness she had felt from her earliest youth, for her mother, for her father, for her brother. She had tried before, plugging men into
the hollow heart of that longing. One or two had fit, for a while, if she worked hard enough at it. And now that hollow heart filled, not with family but in solitude, one person, this person, it
filled and in those moments Allison Rosenthal, Esther, felt herself whole.

September 4, 1994.
Ocean View Farm.

1.

There is an unspeakable pathos to a summer house, and it is hardest to avoid by dawn.

It lay across Ocean View Farm, when Allison awoke in her childhood bed, like a spell.

In the sodden light leaking into the little room where Pauly had played with his ancient set of wooden trains, still packed in their wicker basket in the closet.

In the still air of her father’s study, where a fine layer of dust lay on the surface of the Stickley desk.

Every window, holding a vista of horse pasture and wind-stunted field, filled with the drizzling dawn of receding storm.

A framed composition, saturated with meaning, illustrating loss.

Allison woke to the neurotic clucking of guinea fowl greeting the dawn. For a moment her body tried to find its way back into sleep. Then Dee shifted beside her, and sleep
fled. Like this she rested for a while, eyes wide. Then, gingerly, she climbed over him, naked, briefly straddling his big sleeping form, and picked up her nightdress as she left the room.

Downstairs, through the big picture windows, the rain had all but stopped and the high sky was filled with fleeing clouds beyond which showed, every now and again, a glimpse of high, anonymous
blue. A big, wet wind filled the air, rocking the trees, blowing the hammock on the porch, and for an eerie second, a flash, she saw Pauly lying there, swinging away a long dappled afternoon of
shade, beside their swimsuited mother.

For a long time she sat, arms around knees, in the living room, watching over the lawn, to the sky still swimming with the spectacular business of the storm’s lull.

Then, with a quickening heart, she heard Dee’s foot on the floor above.

He came down barefoot, in his jeans, his white shirttails hanging out. His blond hair was messy with sleep, and when he approached she smelled on him, faintly, the rain from the day before.
Wordless, she let him fold her against his chest, against the rough of his shirt. And for a moment, in the still morning, the pathos of the scene receded. Then she felt him tense, and reluctantly
she stepped back.

“Alley. I got to be home before my aunt wakes.”

“Okay.”

He stood, at a loss. And she said:

“I understand. Go now.”

“May I come back later?”

“I’ll be home after lunch.”

“I’ll be here after lunch.”

Then he was gone.

2.

Dee drove the wet, sandy road up to the highway carefully, afraid suddenly of getting stuck: this was not a place he wanted to have to call for a tow. In Vineyard Haven, only
the breakfast joints on Main Street were open, fishermen coming out in boots, smoking, heading for their cars: after the storm, the seas would be far too high to go out today. Billy Poole saw him
passing and waved, grinning in reference to the Sunday morning dawn run home. At home, he idled the car into the garage, then slipped in the screen door, careful not to let it bang.

But he needn’t have bothered. As he entered, the telephone began to ring, and when he answered it the familiar voice of Shauna’s secretary came to him, uncannily, as if from another
life. The prosecution team had been leaked, she told him, to Stephen Labaton at the
Times.
McCarthy had talked him into holding his scoop until the following afternoon, but that meant the
press conference had been moved up: ten o’clock, Monday morning. He had to be in for makeup—he would be announcing on-camera—at seven.

“She says you got to be here if you have to swim, Mr. Dennis.”

“I might have to.” No sooner had Dee hung up than his father called. Senator Kennedy’s office had secured him an emergency reservation on the first ferry after the seas calmed,
which would probably be that evening.

Dee hung up again, calculating.

An early-evening ferry would allow him to get to New York by midnight.

He’d call Shauna from the road and ask her if he could come to her house that night.

By the morning, he thought as his heart quickened, it would all be over.

At Ocean View, Allison Rosenthal, dressed now in her bicycle clothes and sitting with a cup of coffee at the big dining room table, had just dialed her father’s
lawyer’s home on Long Island. There was a pause, which she spent fingering the keys on her PowerBook.

“Bob? Alley Rosenthal here.”

Stein’s booming voice was so loud that it could be heard in the room. Bob was, Allison thought, trying to smooth over their fight, and her apology, with his loud friendliness.

“Alley girl! How are you, honey?”

“I’m fine, Bob. You?”

“Fine, doll. Margey was just talking about you. You in the city?”

“No, I’m on island still.”

“Well, when you get back down we want to see you. What’s up?”

“Bob, who’s Nicholson Dymitryck?”

His reaction was immediate.

“Dymitryck? What’s up with him?”

After the briefest of pauses, Alley answered: “Uh, Sally at Dole Realty told me he was poking around, asking questions. She handles—used to handle—the rentals.”

“He spoken to you?”

“No, not at all.”

“Tried?”

“No.”

“Okay.” But Stein still sounded nervous. “Look, honey, keep away from him. Okay?”

“Okay, but what’s he want?”

“Oh, God, who knows? Come on, doll, it’s hardly the first time a reporter’s been after you. I promise you, we’ll get rid of him.”

Grimacing, she spoke. “Please do, Bob. He scares me.”

She listened to Stein’s assurances and, the moment he was done talking, hung up.

Standing, stretching, she thought: that should do for Nicholson Dymitryck. Bob was probably speaking to her father already, and her father would have Falcon security kick Dymitryck off-island by
lunch.

She could not afford him seeing Dee.

She bent over the desk and wrote a quick note in case Martha came over. She stepped out of the house, locked the door, and put the key under a flagstone. Then she walked to her bicycle, donning
her helmet as she went. When was the earliest Dee could be back? Not, she thought, before eleven. She could go up to Menemsha for breakfast, then take the ferry, loop up through Gay Head, and be
back home by then. She taped the note to the shingled wall of the carport, and in moments was pumping up the road, in the still slightly dripping air, leaving Ocean View Farm in peace.

It’s no surprise, perhaps, that on this unusually fast-paced Sunday morning, it was not a peace that lasted long.

Nor should it be a surprise that the man who broke it, approaching the house over the dunes from the beach, in a gray raincoat, walking carefully, then stooping to reach the key out from under
the flagstone, opening the door and replacing the key, was Nicholson Dymitryck of the
North American Review.

3.

Inside the house, the temperature fell several degrees, but smells of occupation—a wood fire, perfume—lingered faintly in the chill air. Dymitryck entered and
crossed the room silently, seeming to put his weight on the balls of his feet, ear cocked to the cavernous silence under the high ceilings. To his left was the liquor cabinet, above which hung a
still life of flowers and wine on a white-clothed table. This he examined with some attention; particularly the lower right-hand corner of the small canvas, holding the signature. Soutine. The
painting that Rosenthal had bought for some astronomical sum at Christie’s right after Iran-contra, boasting to the press that he’d paid for it with a check drawn on the Bank of
Teheran. Satisfied with his identification, he turned, and slowly regarded the room in a long arc.

The kilim was, of course, authentic, its dyes rich and weave nearly saturnine with age. On such walls as this open room possessed, there were bookshelves, save the wall that held a white-brick
chimney and a massive open fireplace. The furniture was low, leather and chrome Eames and Saarinen, and the dining room table was clearly a Greene and Greene.

With a low whistle the man inspected the table, circling it entirely, bending slightly to look at the legs. He wore a gray Burberry raincoat with a checkered lining and, emerging from its
bottom, khakis and L. L. Bean rubber shoes. His hair was thick, brushed back dramatically across his head, and though he was only five-six, at close quarters a nearly graceful energy animated his
movements, one that made his smallness seem rather an asset.

It was with this grace that, now, he set to work.

Sitting at the table, he turned on the small computer. While it booted he leafed, quickly and with a light touch, through the papers before him. One, a ledger for Rosenthal
Equities, particularly attracted his attention: he opened it carefully, then withdrew an envelope of deposit slips and leafed through them. By the end of the small pile, his lips were pursed. For a
time, looking up, he calculated. Then, as if having reached a conclusion, he laid the last five deposit slips in a row and withdrew from his raincoat pocket a small automatic camera, in whose flash
he took three shots of the slips. He replaced them in the envelope and closed the register.