The Gun Runner's Daughter (20 page)

September 30, 1994.
Brooklyn.

1.

Cristo ama te.
So said the bumper sticker on a gypsy cab, fishtailing from the right lane of Court Street in Cobble Hill through blaring cars, then in front of her
skidding bicycle and left around the corner onto Union, radio blaring:
Cristo ama te.

Alley followed it in a tight turn and then for a time down the street as it bounced on its springs along Union, musing on the sentiment. On balance, she thought it unlikely. When the cab slowed
at the Gowanus drawbridge, she coasted easily past it to the gate, then circled slowly while she waited for a tug to pass on the filthy water.

Now, before her eyes, the vista dizzied: the opened bridge, the canal stretching into Brooklyn’s industrial graveyard, the pastel blue of the autumn sky, the street of low industrial
plants, then the sky again, a silver airplane in descent toward Kennedy glinting in the sun. And for the first time since leaving the island, for the briefest moment, perhaps a full revolution of
her wheels, she felt happy. Then she lowered her eyes in time to see the taxi driver leering at her, his mouth open, his red tongue lifted to touch his top teeth.

The drawbridge descended, and she wheeled across.

It was a trip no one else in the world would have thought of taking. No one else in the world, after all—not even Bob Stein—knew that Ron Rosenthal still kept his parents’
apartment on Forty-ninth Street and Thirteenth Avenue in Borough Park. No one else knew that he kept a set of filing cabinets there, as well as a safe.

Allison knew. She knew because her father had directed her there, years before when he was in some other trouble, to fetch an Israeli passport from one of the filing cabinets. That was the
single time she had entered her grandparents’ apartment since their deaths.

As for the combination to the safe, not even her father knew that she had that. Not even her father knew of an afternoon she had spent in her grandfather’s watch-repair and lock store on
what had once been the shopping district on Jay Street, thirteen years old, watching her grandfather while the old man, peering through magnifying glasses, set the combination as the letters of her
Hebrew nickname.

And because Allison knew all that, she knew that whatever Nicky was searching for when he broke into the Ocean View farmhouse, he had gone to the wrong place.

If he wanted to know about her father’s business, she knew, he should have come here.

2.

The Noor School, Arabic writing, one entrance labeled Boys; another, Girls. Fourth Avenue, Sunset Park, the Pentecostal Meetinghouse, the Iglesia Pentecostal de Jesu Cristo,
Inc. Greenwood Cemetery, its turning trees imparting a soft yellow light over the bordering avenue.

She turned left somewhere in the Forties, her breath coming fast and easy, took the long uphill out of Sunset Park in a measured acceleration. As she crested the hill, a commercially zoned
district appeared. She passed signs for Tallis and Tefillin Beitlach, then Bobov Meats, then Yitzchak’s Fish Store, two large Hasids in bloody aprons behind the window. Borough Park. Passing
the open door of a used-furniture store, she was assailed by the atmosphere of its interior: the precise smell of her grandparents’ apartment, when they were living.

She dismounted on Thirteenth Avenue and walked her bicycle on the sidewalk. Black-garbed men in wide hats and
payess
, wigged women staring with frank appraisal at her skin-tight bicycle
pants. Three girls in calf-length plaid skirts and black down jackets came out of the Sara Shenhler Teachers’ School, happy and confident. She had ridden nearly ten miles from her apartment
now without strain, but at this sudden vision of her onetime self she was, at last, breathless.

Her grandparents had lived here, had insisted on dying here in a tiny apartment on one of the long blocks off the avenue: her grandfather had spent his entire life traveling
between this neighborhood and downtown Brooklyn, where he had come to own a watch-repair store. Her father had offered them houses from Long Island to Florida; offered them rooms in his own later
homes. Nothing would do for her grandfather but this, the neighborhood they had come to after the war: the soldiers who’d liberated him from Dachau had been eighteen-year-old
Italian-Americans from Bay Ridge, and old Mr. Rosenthal had never again considered living anywhere but Brooklyn.

There were two of them, and they had been the old man’s only non-Jewish friends in his life, the annual Christmas Day visit to them the only day of his calendar not governed by Torah. She
had gone with him when she was young, with her father and Pauly: a long table laden with stuffed artichokes and manicotti, the massive family reclined around it, the children gazing in wonder at
the visitors from another world, the parents with bemused pride. These neighborhoods had provided the ground force of the D-Day invasion, and the older men had witnessed horrible atrocity, horrible
murder and privation in the European theater that had culminated in their utter stupefaction—eighteen-year-old Brooklyn boys, away for the first time in their lives—before the
just-deserted camps, the guards hastily decamped, the phantasmagoric inmates unearthly. Joe Grasso and Peter Corsi, childhood pals from Bay Ridge, had taken Allison’s grandfather—one of
the few prisoners who could muster the strength to walk—straight to the barbed-wire square where huddled a few miserable captured guards and offered him a gun. Allison’s grandfather had
held the gun in complete confusion, unable to understand what they wanted him to do. So they did it for him, hard boys, used to death, and from then on, they made it their business to take care of
the half-dead Jew.

To Allison, it made sense. The rescue of her grandfather had redeemed the war for the two boys, redeemed the atrocious experience to which they’d been subjected. They’d nursed him
back to health, coddling him with food, buying his immigration with cigarettes and favors. They’d gotten him into an Italian refugee camp, which was where he found his wife, one of the other
five survivors from the Lithuanian shtetl where he had briefly been a child. Almost immediately, she had become pregnant, and they’d been interned there long enough for her to deliver her
baby, Ronald, named after Corsi’s recently deceased father. Then the two Italian-Americans succeeded in sponsoring his entry into America. Together, the two had found the couple an apartment,
and later Grasso’s uncle had provided the down payment for the Jay Street storefront where old Mr. Rosenthal spent the rest of his working life.

Nothing at the Christmas Day dinner could be eaten by the visitors. When her grandfather had died, Allison had stopped seeing the Italian families. The Jay Street storefront was razed for the
Metrotech Building, and her father, who had inherited the property, had made a fortune from its sale to the monolithic corporate development.

Only much later, Allison had learned that her father had put both Grasso and Igneri’s sons through college at Haverford, paid for each year of tuition, each dorm bill, each book, and each
date with a Bryn Mawr girl, then law school in Michigan for one and medical school at Notre Dame for the other, the first professionals the two families from Bari had ever produced, as Rosenthal
himself was the first lawyer from his family of tradesmen and shopkeepers.

Near the apartment building, Allison locked her bike to a parking meter with two Kryptonite locks and entered a store on the avenue, the Menashem Bakery. She ordered a spinach
knish and a cup of coffee; while waiting for the microwave to heat the knish she read the Xeroxed signs on the wall offering, in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish, the guaranteed services of an
immigration lawyer, six-week yeshiva-sponsored English lessons, computer courses, and tours to Israel.

While she waited she listened to the Yiddish of two women standing in line for challah—this evening was Erev Shabbat, or Erov Shabbos to these women—discussing the World Trade Center
bomber.

“You know why it is? It’s because we let anybody into the country.”

“We should cut off his fingers! Do like they do!”

With her food and coffee, Alley wandered out onto the sidewalk to eat, but at the first bite her throat closed so effectively that she had to step to a curb garbage can, spit the mouthful out
into her napkin, and throw it, with the knish, into the garbage. On reflection, she threw out the watery coffee, too. Then she walked down Forty-ninth Street and entered her grandparents’
building.

3.

Everything was the same: the elevator’s wood paneling gleaming with lemon-scented polish, the worn red plush velvet with gilt edges along the door. Everything was the
same: the corridor with its dim Deco lighting, the muted sound of Chopin from behind a closed door. In the hallway she understood why she had not been able to eat: her throat seemed to have closed,
and for a moment she felt suffocation. Only then did she realize how frightened she was. She hurried down the hallway, opened the apartment door with a key, then, as her hand automatically lifted
first to her lips, then to the mezuzah, she experienced a moment of real fear.

But everything was different: the dark parquet floors empty, the green papered walls showing the unbleached places where pictures had once hung. Most of the furniture had been removed from this
room, and in its place were four walls of legal filing cabinets, the center of the room occupied only by the massive oak dining table that had once been this home’s heart.

In this room, she felt slightly calmer: it was too changed to be frightening. But to find the safe meant a full search of the house, and at the thought her heart began to thump. She paused there
in the dining room, trying to even her breath. After a time, using real physical strength, she was able to walk across to the sliding doors that closed off the living room, and hesitantly opened
one.

Here, muffled light from the shaded windows showed the furniture covered in white fabric, the tables with their lamps, the framed watercolors of long-gone villages and landscapes that her
grandmother had liked to buy from a store, owned by a Lithuanian survivor, that specialized in remembering these shtetls, rich and happy places from the time before the war. Oddly, it was a fall of
light through the shaded windows that most vividly struck her: the sensation of timelessness in the muffled light, the silent room. Her grandmother would sit just there, at the end of the couch,
her brunette wig above her half glasses, her short body curved to the couch’s angle. Alley felt her stomach clench at the memory, as if half expecting to see her there. But then the room came
back into focus, the covered chairs, the empty couch, and she stepped hesitantly into the sunny silence.

She turned to the sideboard, her eyes finding exactly the little painting of the Jaffa Gate, the framed
ketubah—
marriage license—witnessed by Joe Grasso and Peter Corsi,
hanging in the musty, foreign smell, as if suspended in time. She retreated into the dining room again and rested, as if from an exertion. Finally, slowly, she closed the sliding doors. Nothing,
she thought, could be worse than that. And as if liberated by the thought, she went down the hallway, the remembrance of the apartment returning to her with a reminiscence of queasiness in her
stomach. The bathroom with its light blue ceramic tile, a phantom smell of soap. The bedroom, a heavy oak bedstead, mattress covered in plastic. At the end, in shadow from the hallway light, was
the linen closet. When she opened the door, it let forth the faintest suspicion of her grandmother’s perfume, the lightest hint, but enough to bring a swoon through her. She crouched on the
floor, eyes shut tight, balancing herself with one hand on the doorknob. No. She was wrong. Nothing could be harder than this.

When she opened her eyes she found herself staring at the squat black safe. And without a pause, she put forth a hand to turn its combination.

Before her eyes now was the day, so long ago, she had learned it. She’d been visiting her grandfather at lunch hour from St. Ann’s in his downtown watch shop, and
he had made her memorize it against the possibility of his memory failing. It had been easy to retain: the old man had customized the lock and set it himself, the consonants of her Hebrew name,
Tziporah: he never had mastered English well, but he was fluent in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and Lithuanian. Later, when her father had started using the safe, her grandfather had been too far gone
to remember that she also had the combination, and then he died. She remembered him now, his capacious linguist’s mind, his dry hand, callused with age and work, caressing her face that day
as he watched her with swimming eyes, saying, as he always did, in the Hebrew or Yiddish in which he spoke to her: “Esther. Hadassah. The girl who saved the Jews.”

The last tumbler fell on the “hay” of Tziporah and, hesitantly, she swung the door open, then reached a hand inside. It was surprisingly full: a large amount of various currencies in
stacks tied by rubber bands. Next she felt something hard, and removed an object that, with a shock, she found to be a large nickel-plated handgun with two extra magazines held against it by a
rubber band. Now she leaned down to the floor to peek in, and saw that the remaining contents were manila files. These she removed and put on the hallway floor.