The Gun Runner's Daughter (2 page)

July 1, 1994.

New York City.

1.

Only the innocent wake unafraid.

Six months earlier, she had woken when the telephone rang, muted and frantic beyond the bedroom door, and fear expanded in her like a spill of cold water on ice.

A bitter wind on her face. A distant thunder outside.

In a fluid movement she was up, her body moving of its own volition, turning on the lamp. She was in her bedroom on Jane Street, in New York City. The cold was the air conditioner next to her
bed; the thunder fireworks booming through the Village streets. It was night, or rather morning, July the first, and she was leaving in a few hours for Martha’s Vineyard, where she was to
meet her father at their summer house for the holiday weekend.

Under a sleeveless T-shirt her breathing eased and from her face, tanned and lightly covered with freckles on fair skin, the fear lifted, leaving no trace. Her eyes were a muted green in the
dark, wide awake now, perfectly aware. Her hair, blond and heavy, untangling from the pillow, fell shoulder length.

And the telephone was ringing.

But only the innocent wake unafraid. Only the innocent close their eyes in movies, turn from danger, hesitate in fright. Allison Rosenthal went directly through the bedroom door into the living
room, stepping smoothly through the trapezoids of light cast by streetlamps through the windows, and without hesitation approached the source of her fear.

Bob Stein, her father’s lawyer.

“Allison. Now listen to me, doll. Your dad was arrested yesterday in Arizona. I’m on my way out. He said you could pick up a couple things for him at his place.”

“Arrested for what?”

Stein’s voice changed pitch. “A screwup, darling. We’ll have it straightened out by dinnertime. Can you pop up to your dad’s place and then down to my office? I’m
on my way in. Then I got to catch a plane, so you need to step on it, honey.”

His confidence was clearly forced. She hung up and returned to the bedroom. From her hips she slid the white gym shorts, from her torso the sleeveless T-shirt. Around her neck, falling to the
top of her breasts, hung a heavy golden Star of David, and it swung free of her skin as she turned to the clock. It was four
A
.
M
.

Her father, she knew, would need fresh clothes, toiletries, and money—a lot of money. He would need a passport, preferably an Israeli one. All of these could be found at his apartment at
454 Park. Shifting her attention, she put on jeans, a black cotton shirt, sandals. Comfortable clothes she had expected to wear that day on the drive up to Woods Hole. Instead, she wore them into
the liquid heat of the street and found a cab.

On the way she stopped at a Korean for the
Times,
where Ronald Rosenthal’s arrest was already front-page news.

2.

His business in Phoenix had concluded the morning before. His assistants were dispatched back to the New York office, his security returned to the embassy. That afternoon he was
to fly out: a Falcon Gulfstream was at the airport, and it would land him nonstop in Martha’s Vineyard. There was no hurry. His daughter would not be there until the following day.

He had a leisurely lunch in the restaurant of the Grand Hyatt. A squat, handsome man, filled with the ease of wealth, eating expensive food with huge, vital appetite. After lunch he packed and
stepped into the shower: Ronald Rosenthal spent a good portion of his life in planes and he knew that hot water immediately before and after a flight obviated most of its bad effects. It was while
he was wet that he heard noises in his room. For a time, perfectly still, he listened. Then understanding dawned and he opened the glass door.

There were seven federal agents in the bathroom, weapons drawn. They cuffed him and took him naked into the bedroom. In the hallway, a team was staged: they didn’t know he had returned his
bodyguards. There were a lot—a lot—of nerves in the room.

Dripping with water, he had a strange dignity as he tried to calm his frightened captors.

“Listen to me. I’m unarmed, I’m unguarded. For God’s sake, I’m naked.”

An agent placed him formally under arrest. The charge was arms export control violations. Rosenthal was profoundly surprised.

“Do you know who you’re talking to?”

When the agent answered in the affirmative, he shrugged and held out his wrists.

“Then undo these so that I can get dressed.”

In the summer dawn, Allison read the story in the taxi to her father’s apartment at 454 Park. So much for the weekend. So much for the Fourth of July weekend, her first chance to go to the
island all summer, the first chance to see her father in months. A bitter moment of resentment crossed her stomach. Then, as if in compensation, she suddenly saw what her father had seen when he
stepped out of his shower. Some of the federal agents arresting him were women, impassively watching a naked Jew.

3.

“Now Allison, you’re not to be scared. Ron’ll be out tonight. If he’s not, it’s utterly out of the question they won’t let us post bail on a
holiday weekend. So above all, don’t you worry.”

Once again, Bob Stein’s orotund voice carried no conviction. He wore a crisp shirt with colored collar, dark blue tie hanging carelessly open. His hair, silk-thin and white, lay groomed
across his pink scalp, his fingernails as he poured and drank a cup of coffee were buffed and trim at the end of his soft, long-fingered hands, one thin wrist adorned with a Mercier. His grooming,
somehow, reassured her. When, however, she raised her eyes to his face, in the gray of his smooth-shaved cheeks, she saw exhaustion, then anxiety, and for the first time she began to feel seriously
concerned. Bob was speaking.

“What do you know about this business, honey?”

“As little as possible.”

“Is that right?” Stein regarded her appraisingly: a blond woman of twenty-seven in jeans and a black shirt. No one had ever believed that her short, dark father had provided the
world with two such beautiful children: Pauly too had been blond, tall, and heartrendingly handsome. And no one had ever believed that either of them was Jewish, nor their regal blond mother, but
they were. Ronald Rosenthal might have a fluid definition of legality, but he was not about to marry a shiksa.

“How’s school?” Stein asked, as though the subject had not changed.

Disarmed by the non sequitur, she shrugged, and perhaps now he saw more a girl than a woman. “How’s law school ever?”

“You’re in first year?”

“Just finished second.”

“Yeah.” Stein’s voice, suddenly, shifted, and Allison saw that the non sequitur had been deliberate. “Well honey, a third-year law student at NYU. Cum laude from Yale, am
I right? Phi Beta Kappa? You know something about your dad’s affairs, I’m guessing.”

In a neutral voice, she answered with some respect: Bob knew how to be blunt.

“Daddy represents the Falcon Corporation in America. The Falcon Corporation is an Israeli defense manufacturer and dealer. The New York office brokers deals for the Israeli defense
technologies, works codevelopment deals with American companies, and handles fulfillment of U.S. sales, grants, and other transfers to Israel.”

And yet while she recited, she heard another account, Pauly’s account, as he had once delivered it, drunk, at a Yale party when someone had asked him what his father’s company did.
“Falcon Corporation? Why, Falcon sells Wide Area Penetration Tools for use in Soft-Target-Rich Environments, of course, as well as Very Large Potentially Disruptive Reentry Vehicles and
Violence Processing Equipment. All of it is in the interest of something called National Security, which is a term that seems to make the most sense to the people making large profits by
it.”

Bob brought her back to the present, speaking conversationally.

“Alley, honey, your dad’s charged with illegally selling military supplies to the Bosnian Muslims in contravention of the U.N. embargo.”

She listened, watching out the sun-flooded window, her green eyes, catching the morning light, nearly on fire. Even she, who tried not to know about such things, knew this was untrue. Clinton
was known to oppose the embargo, in fact, had recently sent Warren Christopher to try to overturn it.

“Bob. I don’t care what my father was arrested for, so I certainly don’t need to be lied to.”

“I’m not lying.” Stein spoke very slowly now, and carefully. “There’s either something we don’t understand, or the arrest was a mistake. Either way,
we’ll have him out tonight. It’s the Fourth of July weekend, for Christ sake.”

Standing again, she opened her bag and unpacked her father’s things under Bob’s suddenly attentive eye. “You do that, Bob. Now, there’s my dad’s stuff, okay? Can I
go now?”

“Go where?”

“To the island. I got a four o’clock ferry at Woods Hole.”

4.

She did not need to be lied to. She had always known about it. Once, for a month, the entire building staff of their apartment block in Borough Park had been replaced by Secret
Service agents; once the Hebrew day school on Forty-ninth Street where she was in fifth grade and Pauly in third had been ringed for a full week by the NYPD. Years later, Leslie Cockburn reported
that each occurrence had been to protect against a death threat, the first against her father by the Tupac Amaru when the Falcon Corporation had been selling helicopters to the Peruvian military at
Carter’s behest; the second against her and Pauly by a business competitor based in Lebanon.

In those days, she had a kind of respect for him. Her classmates’ fathers were chemists, shopkeepers, small businessmen. Hers was a romantic, elusive figure, in and out of the country day
to day. But that was long ago. When Reagan came, there was no longer any need for that kind of person; the industry in which her father had made his fortune came entirely above ground, and slowly
her respect for him waned.

That was the difference between Allison and her younger brother: she knew him before Reagan, he only after. To Pauly he was just a businessman who dealt in instruments of death. Once she had
tried to tell him, but he’d shrugged it off with the insolence of the young.

“Don’t give me that, Alley. Death dealing isn’t Zionism.”

“You don’t get it. Ben-Gurion built an arms industry when no one else in the world would arm them. The ’48 war, right after the Holocaust: Pauly, it was life or death, you know
that. And because they had to arm themselves once, they think they have to be able to do it again. No matter what it costs.”

“No matter what it costs other countries, you mean. It’s bullshit, Alley. It’s 1990, not 1948: Israel’s about as likely to be annihilated as New Jersey. They sold to the
Shah, to Mobuto, to South Africa. Now they can’t give arms exports up for the same reason Bush can’t: they need the fucking money.”

Pauly, after all, had been able to forget Borough Park, the neighborhood of her own childhood where Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian are spoken more than English and which harbors more camp
survivors per capita than anywhere else in the world—a population that included Ronald Rosenthal’s parents, survivors of Dachau. He had shed the past as quickly as he’d removed
his
kipah
and abandoned David—a king’s name—for Paul the first day of school in their new neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights, where Rosenthal had moved his children in 1980.
God, how she’d hated to see him do that, or rather, hated to see the ease with which he’d done it. Still, she too had introduced herself in the new neighborhood, and ever since, as
Allison rather than her given name, Esther. Pauly was too hard on his father. They’d both adapted to the new surroundings, and so had he.

He had had to. Those who could not change to Reagan’s way of doing business were replaced by people who could: people from the department of defense, or lawyers, or MBAs. Her
father’s Yale law degree was more important, now, than his army service: more lucrative, too. And under Clinton there was no longer any need for cloak-and-dagger because nothing, virtually,
was illegal anymore. In the interest of the balance of trade and keeping the vast Cold War arms industry healthy—a vital constituency for Democrats and Republicans alike—Clinton’s
State and Commerce departments were there to facilitate any little problems with end-user licensing and Arms Export Control Act limitations people like Ronald Rosenthal might encounter. That was
when her father completed his trajectory from Borough Park by moving to Park Avenue.

Riding home from Bob Stein’s office in a cab, she reflected that that would be what so surprised Bob about the arrest. Her father had made a fortune by his fine knowledge of what the
government could be induced to allow: his entire expertise was in identifying market niches in unacknowledged government operations. And Clinton’s tacit support of the Bosnian Muslims had
been a campaign promise, for God’s sake. He had accepted the embargo only to placate the allies in the NATO peacekeeping force, all the while tacitly approving the many pipelines supplying
the Bosnian Muslim militias, to the great profit of the many Turkish, Croatian, and former-Soviet dealers involved. The Israelis, she had no doubt—America’s traditional representatives
in such matters—resented being left out of that extremely lucrative proxy position. Her father, she had no doubt, had confidently expected to be cut in.