The Gun Runner's Daughter (29 page)

“I’m from Chevejon. Kiss me on the cheek, now, like we’re old friends.
Gut.
My name’s Natalie. I take it this bag has your thing for us?
Gut,
just sit now,
and put the bag on the floor.”

They sat, and as the woman talked she leaned down to transfer Allison’s envelope into her small leather attaché case on the floor.

“Very good now. It’s the big envelope, I take it.
Voilà.
I don’t think anyone’s watching, but why not be sure? Now, when we’re done, you’ll take
your bag and go, and I’ll stay here for a bit. Okay?”

Alley answered, trying to mirror the girl’s bright, not evidently forced, smile. “Aren’t you going to count it?”

She answered without looking up, buckling the case, which, Allison now noticed, was attached to her left wrist by a silver chain. “Chevejon said not to. He also asked me to tell you that
he can’t be bothered discounting a sum of this size. He will take his expenses, and hopes you will accept his service as that of a friend.”

Allison absorbed this, then asked: “Does that mean it’s too small, or too large?”

The woman looked up and smiled, a wide, pretty smile showing the pink tip of her tongue between even white teeth, and suddenly Allison found herself liking her. She wondered how someone like
that got into such work, and wished she could ask.

“Far too small. He says he’ll put it in a numbered account for you. Shall he choose a bank? Good. Mr. Chevejon assumes you’ll be coming to Europe before long?”

Allison nodded.

“Do you need any help with that?”

Confused, she shook her head. Then she added as an afterthought:

“Such as what?”

“Ach, I don’t know. A passport? Anything like that?”

“Oh. No, thanks. I’m set.”

“Set to jet, good to go. Fine. Just contact Chevejon when you arrive, and he’ll let you know the bank location and account number. Just one more thing, now.”

Sitting, looking up, Allison waited.

“Chevejon would like you to know that he’s at your service, now or any other time, for anything at all that you might need. He particularly wished me to tell you that . . .”
She hesitated, as if her English were failing her, and then went on: “That this is regardless of your father’s wishes. That is . . . that his help is not dependent on your father. I
don’t know what he meant. Do you understand?”

Allison nodded. The interview seemed to be over now, so she thanked the woman, who offered her right hand for a handshake, accompanied by a curious and, somehow, amused look directly at
Allison’s face. Then Allison stood and walked off with her empty bag.

As she left the Waldorf, a brief moment of nervousness overcame her. But no one stopped her, and nothing happened. She crossed the street and then, on sudden inspiration, stopped and leaned
against a doorfront to watch the entrance to the hotel. After ten minutes or so, the woman in the black pantsuit came out, the silver chain of her attaché case around her wrist hidden under
her sleeve, balancing on high heels with the easy confidence of a businesswoman leaving a meeting, but flanked by two large men in well-cut Italian suits.

The three of them climbed into a taxi, the taxi pulled out, but Allison kept standing there for a long time, lost in thought. This amused person, she thought, an out-and-out criminal, was the
most sympathetic presence she had been in for months. And when she came to herself again, she found herself humming a tune, the familiar tune of a song, except that in the fugue of thought her mind
had mistaken the words:

5.

On Wednesday morning, October 19th, the
New York Observer
ran a picture of Allison Rosenthal and Bob Stein leaving the Yale Club. Later Allison found out from Martha that
an acquaintance from college, now an editor at
Vogue,
had seen them lunching, called his girlfriend at the
Observer,
and the
Observer
had sent a photographer over. Martha had
delayed them for a week, then been powerless to stop them from running it. At first, she was very worried about that. Then she saw that the publicity suited her perfectly.

That made her realize something important.

It made her realize that events were in conspiracy with her. They had been since the beginning.

She thought about that, Thursday morning after Dee left, for a long time, sitting over coffee in her sunny kitchen. Then she shrugged the thought off. Probably, she thought, anyone with an
objective in mind found that pure chance sometimes helped, and sometimes hurt. When it hurt, they didn’t notice. When it helped, well then, it was like riding a bicycle downhill, drawing on
the well of potential energy, enjoying its effortless transformation into kinetic.

Until you have to start climbing uphill again.

Anyway, she had long known that most people never rely much on chance: they’re too frightened to be anything but safe, running scared for a safe spot in the status quo. Only those who try
their luck, she knew, ever find out how good it might be.

Luck, however, needed help, and she rose now to dress again in business clothes.

All the while knowing that to explain the processes occurring to her as luck was grossly to evade the question.

That day, she went down to Bob Stein’s offices, where a secretary had arranged the complete documentation of her father’s trial, including the prosecution’s
disclosure, in a little office off Bob’s. She thanked the secretary, accepted a cup of coffee, and started reading. She was there when Stein arrived in his office at eleven, there when he
left at seven. And on Saturday morning, dawn found Allison Rosenthal in her father’s lawyer’s office, watching through the sealed window down to the river, in a rumpled business suit,
drinking cold coffee from the afternoon before.

She couldn’t blame Bob for his pessimism, not altogether. He, after all, did not know what she knew: he did not know Dee, did not know of his steadily shrinking confidence in the
government’s case. From Stein’s point of view, she saw, whatever doubts Dee might harbor about the prosecution’s chances of success, there were very many reasons to expect it to
succeed. The reasons for this were less in the facts than in Stein’s handwritten marginal notes.

For where Dee saw a central moral weakness in his prosecution, Stein saw another, possibly more serious one, in his defense. What Stein saw was that no matter how skilled his defense, no matter
how careful his jury selection, no matter how thorough his P.R. and spin control, there was a fact that cut through all the complex legal issues of the case.

That fact stemmed from his inability to document the Clinton administration’s direction of Rosenthal’s Bosnian sale. And without that, when the day was done there was a rich Jew on
trial, a very rich Jew, and one who, unlike any of the defendants in the Walsh prosecutions, was absolutely out of the running for any executive pardon. What Stein saw, and was right to see, was
that even with the many and varied weaknesses in the U.S. attorney’s case, when the jury went out, they would convict a very rich Jew.

As for the weaknesses in the prosecution’s case, Alley, with her privileged view of her father’s files from Borough Park, found to the contrary that the government knew a very great
deal indeed about the Falcon Corporation. Not, of course, the truth, but a sufficiently plausible version of it to convict.

She considered this bleak prospect until, carrying his
Wall Street Journal
and stopping in his tracks with surprise, Bob Stein entered his office and found her there, precisely where he
had left her the evening before.

She crossed to the couch and sat, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hands while he lowered himself into his chair and regarded her curiously.

“You find what you need?”

She yawned, stretching her arms above her. “Umhmm. They have a good case.”

Bob nodded, waiting, while her gaze abstracted, marshaling thought, and then came to focus on him again. “This is what I need you to do. Try to establish a distance between what Michael
Levi knows and what the prosecution knows. Every chance you get.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“I mean, look for the limits. Is there a discrepancy? Do they only know what Levi told them as State’s witness, or are there corroborating sources? And what’s the source of
Levi’s evidence? Insist on the sources.”

Her authority, to judge from Stein’s response, had grown—backed up now by the gravity of her exhaustion. They paused while a secretary brought in coffee on a silver tray, and when
she had gone, Stein shrugged.

“Why?”

She looked at him for a moment, as if in warning, then continued. “Also, the prosecuting lawyer, he’ll have rehearsed Levi’s testimony, right?”

“Sure.”

“Then badger him. Make the jury think he’s leading the witness.”

“Alley. I attack their lawyer, the media’s going to be on my ass
tout de suite.
”

“I know. That’s good. Who’s their true prosecutor?”

“Some hotshot kid, Ed Dennis’s son. They’re giving him the exposure on it, seeing they figure he can’t lose.”

“He any good?”

“Don’t know. So far he’s just following orders.”

Allison nodded. “Well, make him look bad.” Now she rose to get her coffee from his desk, then leaned against the window while she drank it, looking out. “One last thing. I need
daily transcripts of the trial. Can you do that?”

“Yeah.” Bob nodded, as if having abdicated all responsibility for himself. “How do you want it?”

“You have a computer geek here? Good.” She crossed the room now to her backpack, and took out a computer disk. “Just tell him this is my PGP key and Net address. Tell him to go
via penet-fi, okay? That makes it anonymous. He can send it once a day.”

Stein nodded, holding the disk—clearly an unfamiliar object to him—by the edge. Then he rose and stepped around the desk, looking slightly embarrassed. “Is that all?”

Allison nodded, moving toward the door, as if to avoid a handshake, and Bob, uncharacteristically meek, asked:

“Anything else you can tell me?”

She shook her head, once, decidedly, and then she was gone.

Outside, leaving Bob’s office and walking uptown through the bright autumn sun rising in the cold morning air, Allison stopped on Broadway. Stopped and stood, in the
middle of the sidewalk, for a long, hesitant moment. As if unsure of where to go. As if unsure of what to do next. And for a moment, her confidence wavered.

True, she had come a long way. True, the pieces on this crazy chessboard had so arranged themselves magically.

Still, there was a lot that had to happen—a lot over which she had no control, and for a moment, everything that had seemed so clear, everything that had seemed so magnificently arranged
as an itinerary, felt instead a mad series of disconnected events.

Then she shook off the thought. In her heart she knew, surely and absolutely, that that which had to happen, would happen, and when it did, she would recognize it. She had taken the golden
scepter, and now, against the king’s highest law, she was going to speak.
And if I perish,
she thought suddenly, with a flush of determination,
I perish.

Recognizing the quote, she blushed, clear through the light skin under her blond hair.

October 24, 1994.
New York City.

1.

On Monday morning, October 24th—opening day of
U.S. v. Ronald Rosenthal—
Nicky Dymitryck arrived in New York and checked into the room at the Sherry-Netherland
Jay had reserved for him under the name of Neal Cassady.

Very funny, Nicky thought, after three days of traveling across the country, leaning weakly against the open doorway while the porter placed his bag on a stand. Dimly, against the skin of his
face, he felt a cold sweat, and his hand trembled as he gave the porter his tip. The door closed and he made it to the bathroom just in time to throw up, painfully, the paroxysms burning the length
of his belly’s dual scars: one the slim track of a scalpel from his splenectomy; one the jagged, evil flare of a knife. When he could, he staggered into the room, flipped on the television,
and tuned it to NY1, just in time to see the scene outside the federal courthouse where Ronald Rosenthal was about to go on trial.

Three TV uplink vans were there, and on the screen Nicky recognized the Israeli ambassador entering, a small group from the Coalition for a Code of Conduct, a number of government observers, and
reporters from every newspaper he knew.

Jesus, he thought to himself as he lay, willing his nausea down, weakness washing over him. Every fucking person in the world wants a piece of Ronald Rosenthal.

His trip had started out well. After a month in bed at his father’s house in Malibu, attended by a private nurse and discreetly visited by Stan’s doctor, his
health, always resilient, had seemed to have returned nearly completely. True, Dr. Bromberg had warned him against getting up: Nicky needed at least another month of recuperation, he said. In
another month, however, Colonel Eastbrook would be Senator Eastbrook, and Nicky had convinced Jay to make the arrangements for him to go east.