The Gun Runner's Daughter (18 page)

He followed her to where she was sitting, knees to breasts, at the little Formica table in her kitchen. And when he sat, opposite her, she spoke immediately, her green eyes focused intently.

“Now you listen to me, Dee. You recuse yourself over this now, you ruin your career, you ruin my life, and the one thing you make sure is that you and I will never, in our whole lives, be
able to sit together in a restaurant. Meanwhile, your boss replaces you. Right quick, too. And they still convict my father.”

“All right.” It was as if she were the fast-track lawyer and he were the student who wished, rather than studying the law, to be writing poetry. “And if I don’t recuse
myself? Then what, Alley? First I put your father in jail. Then, that’s all done, we go celebrate at the Bowery Bar. I don’t think so.”

But Alley had thought far beyond this. “First off, you’re not putting my dad in jail. You said yourself, the trial’s an exchange of assets. My dad isn’t ever coming back
to the States.”

He interrupted her. “They’ll take everything he owns in this country. They’ll take Ocean View.”

Now her green eyes were full on him, her face grave. “Then we’ll just have to go to your aunt Mary’s house when we want to go to the island.”

“Alley. How the fuck we going to do that?”

“Like this. A week after the trial’s over, you and I are going to meet at 120 Wooster. I am going to be with Martha. You are going to walk up to the table and tell me how sorry you
were to be instrumental in my father’s prosecution. I am going to tell you that I understand you were doing your job. You are going to sit down. And Martha is going to put it in the
Observer
: ‘Federal Prosecutor Woos Gun Runner’s Daughter.’ You with me?”

Staring at her eyes, Dee nodded.

“Three days later we are going to meet at a party and talk to each other at length. Then we are going to go to dinner. Then you are going to come here and take my virginity. And I will
give you dimes to dollars that by next summer you can take me up to Aunt Mary’s and I’ll cook you a ham dinner after church. ’Cause by next summer, no one is going to give a fuck
about my dad. You will have closed him down. You with me?”

But Dee was more than with her. “No. I mean yes. But no. You know what’s better? Six weeks later I resign my position with the U.S. attorney. And why do I resign it? ’Cause I
can’t possibly be associated with the office that once prosecuted the father of the woman I now love. It would be unethical. And we’re out of here before the ink’s dried on the
papers.”

She was smiling appreciatively. “Deal.”

“And what if we fall out of love?”

She shook her head resolutely. “Then it’s a handshake and a secret kept between people who remember loving each other as one of the finest moments of their lives. Or some such shit.
I’m not going down that road, Dee. I’ve known you way too long not to trust you.”

“Okay.”

“Good. Then we’re all set if you win. Now tell me this. What if you lose?”

That stopped him for a second. “Lose? Alley, I can’t lose.”

“No?” There was something nearly cruel, she thought, having made him agree that he could not withdraw from the case, in now bringing up the possibility of losing. But it was a real
possibility, after Nicky’s death. And it had to be faced. She explained it to him in icy precision.

“Imagine this, Dee: what about when some smart reporter decides to look into what Dymitryck was doing before he was murdered?”

“Alley, that’s why I stayed on the damn case.”

“Right. But imagine that this particular reporter isn’t an idiot. In fact, imagine it’s someone pretty smart. Smart enough to see through this bullshit about Dymitryck’s
death being connected with the Harlanstrasse bombing. Smart enough to wonder what it was Dymitryck found out on the island, about my father, that made him worth killing. And then they start
wondering why the U.S. attorney’s office hasn’t done the same investigation, and asked the same question?”

“No one in my office has even
mentioned
Dymitryck’s name in connection with your father.”

“Isn’t that interesting.” She stood now and turned her back to him for an instant while she crossed to the sink, then leaned against it, her naked form unprotected, her green
eyes alive. “Isn’t that interesting. What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know.”

“No? I do. Dymitryck had no friends in Washington. As far as anyone’s concerned—anyone who counts—Dymitryck’s death is a godsend, and they don’t care who did
it. That’s why they haven’t investigated.”

“Yeah.” Dee was following her, she saw, but still, she drove the point home.

“Maybe it’ll never happen, Dee. But it could, and if it did, it’d be very bad press. Very bad for a jury, too.”

She watched him understanding that. Finally, he spoke. “Okay. What’s your point?”

“That there’s no such thing as a lock, Deedee. Especially not with the kind of people you’re working for. Between their cheating, their idealism, and their incompetence, you
say you can’t lose, you’re kidding yourself.”

2.

Even more destructive than undermining his confidence in his case, however, was the degree to which Dee’s intimacy with Alley had undermined his assumptions about the
person he was prosecuting.

Dee’s experience of his work had been so much from the inside that he had not yet had the time to learn who these people he prosecuted actually were. He had not been prepared to learn that
the devilish Ronald Rosenthal was also a father, a husband, a person who existed for his daughter with the same ambiguity that he felt toward his own powerful, domineering, ambitious father. Now,
as the weeks of that September went by, under Allison’s tutelage, he could not ignore that the same complex emotions through which he viewed his father were not so different from those she
held toward hers.

Night after night, in her kitchen on Jane Street, pacing between the stove and table, they talked. And as the days mounted closer and closer to the trial, the tenor of their discussions mounted
too.

Perhaps more important to the gradual dissolving of Dee’s confidence in his prosecution was the fact that Dee, like most people who have been raised in privilege, had been around Jews his
whole life and yet had managed not to know very much about them.

“That’s bullshit, Dee,” Allison was saying now. “The trial’s not about the Arms Export Control Act, for God’s sake. You go in there talking about that,
they’ll crucify you. No one’s going to deny that my father’s prosecutable, that’s a given. They’re going to make the case from the jump—and they’re going
to make it not in court, but in the press—that this is a witch hunt. They’re going to call it ‘business terrorism.’ They’re going to say my father’s being
prosecuted to keep a government program deniable. That’s going to make him sound human, and a lot of people are sympathetic to that kind of talk.”

“Juries follow the law, Alley.”

“Oh nonsense. White-collar prosecution is overwhelmingly selective, you know that. How the hell are you going to justify the government going after my father when the damned
administration’s taking every arms export limitation they can off the books to facilitate foreign trade?”

“I don’t need to justify it. I just need to show he broke the law. I show that, Stein loses their sympathy, no matter what heartrending stories he has to tell.”

“Do you?” And now Alley stopped pacing, paused by the kitchen window and stood staring out. Then, crossing to the table and sitting in front of him, she began to talk, as if simply
unable to stop herself.

“I
see
him, Dee. His name’s Yossi Nehanyu. I see him so
clearly.
He’s got a factory outside Tel Aviv, makes bomb casings, the motherfucker. He led my father into
Iran-contra like a cow with a ring in its nose. Made him believe it was patriotic, for God’s sake. You have no idea how innocent people can be when it comes to Israel. You come with me to
Brooklyn, I’ll show you God-fearing, Orthodox Jews who’ve torched their own factories and broken unions to save a few dollars, but you mention Jerusalem and their eyes mist over.
Nothing could have happened without Nehanyu, and I swear to you, Dee, nothing Nehanyu did could have happened without high-level, U.S. permission—nothing. Every one of his orders came
straight out of the NSC staff during Iran-contra, and every one of them came out of the White House for Bosnia: one after the other after the other.”

“So what?” Dee asked curiously, a real request for information.

“So imagine Bob Stein telling a jury that. Imagine Bob Stein asking a jury what the fuck is the government of the United States doing now? It’s a vendetta. Your Walsh put one person
in minimum-security prison for a few months. But my father’s going to lose everything he owns. What for? You know, I know, that someone sanctioned Falcon. Fucking Greg Eastbrook sanctioned
cocaine traffic into this country to pay for contra arms. But in two months, dimes’ll get you dollars, he goes to the U.S. Senate. You say what you want, but the fact of the matter remains
that Greg Eastbrook’s spending the next six years of Sundays in an Episcopalian church while Ronald Aaron Rosenthal is exiled from the country.”

“Your father’s a criminal, Alley. This isn’t about being Jewish. It’s about a crime.”

“Oh yeah? You prepared to ask your father that?”

Dee’s answer to this was silence.

And in that silence was a reflection that, for Dee, was very hard to make: that Ronald Rosenthal, seen through Alley’s eyes, was not all that different from Dee’s
own father. Dee’s father, too, did harsh and duplicitous things in his job; Dee’s father, too, thought these things were in the service of something other than himself. The fundraising,
the virtual marketing of access to the president in return for soft, unregulated dollars: it was a necessary evil, given the pioneering work in this field the GOP had done with Reagan and Bush. The
cold, harsh calculations on health-care and welfare reform, Dee knew, the petty retreats on everything from Haiti to gay rights in the military, it all went against everything his father believed.
“You have to keep your eye on the prize, Deedee,” his father liked to say. “People like us, it’s our job to focus on the greater good.”

The greater good. Night after night in her bed, staring into the blackness above their faces, Alley made him understand that her father, too, thought that he worked for a greater good. His own
father, Alley’s grandfather, had spent five years in Dachau, from the age of thirteen to eighteen. Ronald Rosenthal had been born in a refugee camp in Italy, while his parents, the only two
survivors from a little town in Lithuania, had grown up under the shadow of the Holocaust in a neighborhood of Brooklyn that held legions of battered, scarred people, passing their lives without
any doubt as to what people were willing, and able, to do to one another. When, at thirteen or fourteen, Rosenthal had met his first Israeli, the experience was, to the street-smart, embattled
Brooklyn boy, revolutionary.

Whispering into the dark of her bedroom, naked beside him, Alley told Dee about it. “You have to understand. My grandfather, he didn’t set foot out of Borough Park for the first ten
years he was in the States. Then he ventured as far as downtown Brooklyn, because he opened a store on Jay Street.”

“But why?” Staring up, trying to imagine this world that he had never even dreamed existed, Dee whispered too. “He was safe here. Christ sake, Alley, it was U.S. soldiers that
rescued him.”

“I know. It’s not that. I mean, it’s not the people. It’s the government. God, Dee, you know that denazification was a farce. Those bastards were putting Nazis right back
in power from Bonn to Buenos Aires. They were rearming Germany! People like my granddad, they couldn’t believe it. But it was also other people. This country’s always had a vicious
strain of anti-Semitism. My dad got his first broken bone at ten: he and his friends were jumped by an Irish gang on their way out of yeshiva. By thirteen, he was in gang fights every
weekend.”

But Dee still didn’t see it. “Alley, my grandfather used to have lunch with Felix Warburg once a week. There were Jews in every firm on Wall Street, every bank in the country, and
every department of the government. I’ve had Jewish friends and girlfriends from Exeter to Cornell to Harvard, and colleagues as long as I’ve been working.”

“Right. In the schools. And at the jobs. But not in the clubs. Not at the Nisi Prius luncheons. You’ve been around Jews your whole life, right? Forgive me, but can you tell me when
Rosh Hashanah is? Not the month even: just the season. Can you? You see, there’s a difference between tolerated and accepted, Dee. Borough Park was a long way from Wall Street. You
don’t understand that, then you don’t know a thing about people.”

But Dee did know a thing about people. Dee knew more than a thing about what people were prepared to do to each other. During the war, his grandfather had worked for John J. McCloy on the
internment of Japanese-Americans, one hundred thousand of them, forced into primitive camps for the duration. And lying there, Alley’s quiet voice traveling from her lips to his ear, the air
around them not a separation but a conduit, skin to skin, he knew she was right.

3.

That he knew made him all the more ready to listen when she asked him, suddenly, the most important question that lay between them:

“Dee. Why are they after my father?”

For a time, there was silence. Then Dee:

“I don’t know. Do you?”

She shook her head against the pillow.

“No.”

He licked his lips before he spoke again. “I mean, it’s a valid process, Alley, setting the parameters of a law’s interpretation.”

Watching him. “Okay, it’s valid. It’s a shame they chose my dad. But that’s not it, is it?”

He admitted it. “No.”

Now she raised herself on her elbows to look him in the face. “Dee?”

He changed his focus to her now, as if unwillingly. “Yes?”

“Why don’t you know?”

Another silence. Then he spoke hesitantly. “Alley, you said it yourself. These guys don’t care that Dymitryck was killed.”