The Gun Runner's Daughter (17 page)

It was the twenty-seventh time she had taken part in this ceremony of loss.

Only this time, she watched with none of the assurance that the cold lurking in the depth of the wind was transient, that the benign season would come again.

And then she began, suddenly, to cry: alone on the cold metal of the ferry’s deck, just softly, just slightly, and just for a second. A child’s grief, at separation, at loss, at the
steady, slow, and remorseless way that the water was carrying her away.

Like Pauly had cried, a child, when, on the first day of their new school at St. Ann’s, Allison and he had been forced to separate into their separate crowd of sneakered
and T-shirted strangers, Pauly bewildered and scared in his long, untucked white shirt and
kipah,
Allison curious and ashamed in her long woolen skirt ending above black pumps. Then, too, it
had been an authority, implacable and undeniable, that was separating them. She cried only briefly, but in those two or three brief tears, everything was: Pauly, Ocean View, her mother, her
grandparents—dogs and cats and toys and vistas and afternoons long gone, things and times that had not been visitable for years. Rarely were these things present to her so vividly; rarely was
the great divide between her present and the time when Pauly was alive so vividly breached. But now, watching Vineyard Haven disappear into the blind of harbor light with all the broken promise of
summer, was such a time, and she let the cold wind snatch one, two, three hot tears from under her eyes before, inhaling a great sniff, turning away.

Late the night before, she had been woken by the telephone and, lifting it, heard the distant hum of long distance.

Dee? Dee should know not to call her here, she had thought. Nonetheless, her hopes soaring, Allison listened, and after a series of clicks a voice came through, not Dee’s, she perceived
slowly, but her father’s.

“Esther,
ma shlomech
? I’ve been calling you every day in New York. What are you doing on-island? Hasn’t school started?”

Heart sinking, she forced herself to answer. “Tomorrow, Daddy. I needed to clean up. How are you?”

“I’m okay, my darling. I’m okay. Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“The checks getting to you?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Good. This stupid charade of theirs. You taking heat, doll?”

“No. A couple reporters. Bill Dykeman asked me not to come in.”

“I’m not guilty of anything, my doll. Remember that.”

Listening, she stared into the fire. Then she spoke without thinking.

“Is that right? Then tell me something.”

“Of course, my doll. What’s up?”

She imagined him at Falcon’s Hamalekh Shaul office in Tel Aviv.

“What’s up with this Nicky Dymitryck?”

There was a long pause. Then he said, softly, “Who’s that, sweetheart.”

It was a statement, not a question, and its message was to be quiet on the telephone. For a moment she struggled, trying to find a way to communicate around the possibility of a phone tap. Then,
suddenly, she didn’t care.

“Daddy, damn it, don’t be coy with me.”

But the speed with which Rosenthal changed courses was typical.

“Oh, him? He’s that little shithead works for that anti-Semitic rag out West.”

“Daddy, the
North American Review
’s editor is a Jew.”

“Yeah, right.” Her father’s voice was careful now, filled with warning. “Doesn’t make him any less anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist, Essie.”

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.

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, handsome 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.