The Gun Runner's Daughter (34 page)

Recovering her breath, she spoke in a whisper.

“You know the funny thing.”

“What, Alley?” He whispered too.

“That when I met you at the Ritz, you know what made me talk to you?”

“What?”

“That you were prepared to hurt me. That you were prepared to do anything for what you thought was justice.”

“Um-hmm.” He put a hand to her hair. “Now you’re disappointed.”

“No. And you?”

“Me? I’m not disappointed, if that’s what you mean.” “No. I mean, what did you . . . recognize in me? At the Ritz.”

“Oh. God.” His hand on her forehead, as if taking her temperature, he looked away. Then: “You see, I’m like you in so many ways. My dad’s rich, I’ve had every
advantage possible. But I’ve always had this . . . taste for the gutter? I don’t mean sex or suchlike, I mean . . . the moral gutter. Do you know?”

“Yes. You like the ones with dirty hands.”

“No. I mean yes. I admire the high ground, you know? I just don’t like it. And I don’t admire the kind of people I deal with. But I like them.”

“Uh-huh. And when you met me, you thought . . .”

He interrupted. “When I met you, I thought that I had met a peer.”

A wide smile from her, a happy smile, of understanding, of sympathy. “The funny thing is, I don’t agree with you. I think justice is absolute. I think whatever you have to do to stop
Eastbrook is justified, no matter what it does to me.”

He paused, finding his mind unaccountably clear. Then, at her smile, he smiled too, suddenly. He said:

“Want to do me a favor?”

“Um-hmm. Anything.”

“Don’t make me talk politics with you anymore.”

“Okay, baby. Later.”

“No, not later. Never. My whole fucking life is politics. I can’t make love with you without it being political.”

She laughed now, her mouth open, and turned to the ceiling. “Well, politics are personal.”

That made him laugh, too, his chest and stomach moving against hers. This small, warm body. This drunken spirit. She felt desire, with a force that shocked her. Ignoring his injury, she pulled
his body full against her and said: “Nicky. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow, okay?”

And as if his assent had been a confession of love rather than a commitment to suspend trust, she buried her face in his neck.

3.

In the bar, Dee had waited exactly ten minutes, watching each one pass on the clock. While he waited, he drank four shots of vodka, one after the other after the other. Then he
put his briefcase on his stool and crossed to the phone. It was taken: another short guy, this one balding with a beard, and for an instant Dee considered lifting him bodily and throwing him into
the crowd. Disgusted, he pushed his way back to his seat, shouldering his neighbor away from his stool and, opening his briefcase, took out his cellular. He had been avoiding using it to call Alley
in case the service kept some kind of record, but now he didn’t care. In any event, her machine answered, and he hung up, turned in his seat to the window, deeply disappointed.

The bar was packed now. Above the noise of the conversation, he heard music playing from the jukebox, a song too distant to recognize but too insistent to ignore, and without properly being able
to understand it, Dee nonetheless absorbed the emotion of the manic falsetto that carried the melody. Even without the words the song’s plaintive emotion was clear, and suddenly it seemed to
Dee that that song and this night were the sound track of his destiny. There were tears of frustration in his eyes now, making swim the view of the street through the window. Even there was an
object lesson in exclusion: a homosexual couple, walking by, cast a look at him in his suit and tie, his lawyer’s briefcase balanced on the window seat; they commented something to each
other, and looked away.

Who was this fucking little geek? Why wasn’t he dead? And why the hell had he made everyone believe he was? Dee wanted to put his fist through the window of the bar; better, to pick up his
stool and smash the window with it. He turned now, to the man standing next to him, the one who had been pushing against Dee for the past half hour.

“Stop touching me.”

The man looked surprised. “Pardon me?”

“Stop touching me. With your arm. Or I’ll break it.”

A shocked expression, a shift away from him, and the man turned his back while remorse flooded Dee’s stomach. But there was no point in apologizing, and he turned back to the bar.

For the next hour, Dee called again every ten minutes, growing steadily drunker until finally she answered, quietly, “Hello?”

“Alley. Can you talk?”

“Yeah. He’s gone to bed.”

“What the fuck is up with this midget? They fake his death?”

“Yeah.” Surprise in her voice. “Sort of. He almost died. When he didn’t, they let it be known that he had, to avoid another attempt while they investigated.”

“Yeah. I should have seen that coming. Oh, Alley. I could have dropped the fucking case.”

“Dee, take it easy.”

Real complaint in his voice. “Couldn’t you unload him?”

“Dee, come on. This guy is dangerous. Besides, he’s so sick, he nearly passed out in the bar.”

“What you been doing?”

“Taking care of him. He shouldn’t be out of bed. I was afraid you’d call, so I turned the ringer off.”

A pause. Then Dee, as quietly as he could through the noise of the bar: “Shit, Alley, I need you.”

“I know.” Her voice so soft, his heart actually seemed to swell. “I do too.”

“Tomorrow night. He’ll be gone, I hope to hell.”

“I don’t know. I hope so. Dee. I can learn a lot from him. You can go for a directed conviction.”

“He make a pass at you?”

She laughed again. “You’re kidding, right? A pass, that’d be an infringement on my rights as a woman.”

Slightly mollified, Dee: “Some kind of sixties burnout, huh?”

“Worse. A seventies burnout.”

Despite himself, Dee almost smiled. Then: “I miss you.”

“And I you. Don’t worry about Dymitryck, I can handle him. Go home now, baby. Call me before you go to bed.”

“I’ll wake you.”

“I don’t care.”

Silence.

“I love you, Alley.”

“Me too, Dee.”

She answered, he noted gratefully, immediately.

Dee hung up, pocketed the phone, and turned back to the bar, finding the bartender, Alley’s friend Bobby, standing before him with crossed arms. He leaned forward and asked:
“What’s up?”

“What’s up is you can’t hold your liquor. It’s time for you to go, pal. I don’t care who you’re friends with. I’m tired of you pushing my customers
around.”

Oh, good: immediately, Dee felt this was a good thing. Nothing in the whole world could be better than a fight right now, and this man was big enough to make it fair. He looked to his right, and
saw that a small space had cleared around him, the man he had threatened edging away. That made him feel powerful. He’d start, he thought, by breaking that little shit’s nose.

And then, through the acceleration of his heart, he thought, he couldn’t afford to be shitcanned from this bar; he couldn’t afford to be in a brawl. With infinite regret, he took in
a vast breath, released it, and moving away, reached his wallet from his back pocket and put some money on the bar.

“Sorry, man.”

The bartender nodded, a respectful nod. “Good. We’ll see you again, man.”

And Dee, feeling as defeated as he’d ever felt in his life, went out into the wet street.

4.

Spent, Nicky had tried to shift his body off of hers. “No, stay,” she had whispered, and in a moment his entire body had lost tone, weighing on her like a living
blanket as he succumbed to exhaustion and dropped into sleep. For a long time, she lay under his breathing, absently running her hands down the long muscles of his back and over his buttocks,
feeling that profound, almost impossible peace again. Then she slept herself, very briefly, waking after less than an hour into a clean consciousness of what she had to do next, as if having, in
her sleep, written a to-do list.

When the phone rang with Dee’s call from home, she rolled Nicky gently onto his side, rose, and talked to Dee. Then she showered again. Wrapped in a towel, she sat now at her desk and
flipped on her computer. Its clock showed two
A.M.
With practiced movements, she logged on to her computer account, then downloaded the transcript of her father’s
first day in court and opened it on the screen. From the locking drawer, she took out her diary. For a time, she read the court transcript, wholly absorbed. Then she turned to her diary, and
although she looked up again occasionally for reference, for the next two hours she wrote steadily, in pencil, in a neat, quick script.

Four-fifteen, now. She locked up the computer with a password program and shut down, then locked the diary. Then she joined Nicky, where, in the bedroom, he slept heavily, on his stomach.

Nicky woke in what first appeared to be darkness. Raising the curtain, he found the sky lit, but the bedroom still in an urban, crepuscular shade. Seven o’clock. The bed
was empty.

He rose, picked up his jeans from the floor, and pulled them on, then came out of the bedroom. Alley, he found, was fully dressed in court clothes, at her desk, absorbed in the computer screen.
She noticed him, however, as he crossed to the smell of coffee in the kitchen, poured a cup, and then came back through the small arch into the living room. She looked up and spoke.

“You okay?”

He put his coffee on the edge of her desk, next to her lit computer screen. “I want . . . I want to say thank you. It sounds wrong though.”

“Not at all.” She spoke absently as she finished shutting down the computer and putting papers into a drawer. Then she rose, walked around the desk to him with energy and, her face
level with his, ran both hands into the back of his jeans. He shifted to feel her breasts move through her silk blouse against his chest. Then she stepped away, leaving his bare chest and stomach
feeling cold.

“I can’t do this now. Tonight. You stay here, in bed. Okay? You need to rest.”

“My things are at the Sherry-Netherland.”

“I’ll get them. Give me the key.”

He smiled, despite himself, as he handed them over. “You going to search my bags?”

She returned the smile. “When I get back here. We can do it together. Now I’ve got to go to the law library. I have to study mornings before the trial if I’m going to get
through this.”

“Wish it was televised. The papers got good coverage?”

“They got everything. Front page and two inside.” She smiled suddenly. “You mean, you don’t know what’s going on?”

“Nope.”

“Hold on to your hat, then. They are crucifying Mike Levi.”

“Oh yeah?” Nicky no longer sounded like he cared.

“I have to do something after court, then I’ll get your bags. I should be home by seven.” She stepped back. “Can you tell me one thing?”

He nodded, and she went on. “When’s Diamond going to go to the state attorney?”

“I told you. Forget Diamond. They can find some other way to play their politics.”

“Yeah, right. Jay Cohen’s gonna welcome you with open arms after you scuttle the suit.”

“Fuck Jay.”

She smiled. “That’s very sweet, Nicky.” Now she stopped smiling. “Promise me you won’t do anything about it today.”

“Why?”

Alley did not feel she could ignore the question. “For a lot of reasons. I’ll explain later, okay?”

Now he turned away, crossing the room to refill his coffee, drink, and put it down again, then showing the puzzle of muscles on his back as he ran his hands through his hair. “Sooner or
later, we’re going to have to trust each other a little.”

“Maybe so. Tonight. We’ll discuss it. Just one day.”

“All right. Now you tell me one thing.”

She nodded, and he went on. “What do you have about Eastbrook? And what do you want from me?”

But instead of answering, she crossed to him, putting her arms around his waist. She felt him tense beneath them.

“That’s two things.”

Her breath on his face. He watched her. And she said: “Nicky. Just wait until tonight.”

5.

Alone in the apartment, Nicky experienced a familiar sensation, the long forgotten feeling of being in the house of a woman just met, just seduced. The college-boy sense of
security in knowing you had just gotten laid, and that now a whole world of new intimacy was open to you. That there was no comparison possible between what he was experiencing now and any other
experience of his life did not diminish the fleeting familiarity. He wandered for a while, shirtless in his jeans, drinking coffee and smoking, exhaling big breaths of smoke into the light shafting
through the windows. He had not remembered, he thought, that morning sun could have this depth. Finally, gratefully, he returned to the still-warm bed and, in the thick autumn sunlight through the
window, fell deep into sleep.

At Bobst Library, a couple of hours before court opened for the day, Allison found a carrel high up in the stacks. By the window, she paused now, standing.

A feeling of comfort was through her, so profound, a relaxation of her every muscle. For a moment she let play through her mind the feel of this small, strong body that had slept beside her. She
saw the intensity of his eyes under their worried brow, the careful movements of his full lips as he talked. How close had she come, she wondered? How close had she come to him?

As close as he, to her?

At the thought, she turned from the window. It was not time to think, she knew. It was time to feel. And to act. What was happening to her, she knew, was now a matter for intuition, not
analysis.

If she thought about it, she knew, she would not be able to do it.

She sat, shrugged off her coat, and withdrew a pen from her bag. But rather than taking a law text out now, she took out her diary and her printed copy of Monday’s trial transcript and,
again, set carefully to work.

She worked for an hour before tiredness began to swirl her attention. By then she was finished with the entry in her diary, and as she flipped back to the beginning of the entry, it could be
seen that the date on which she was working was not October 25, 1994, but rather August 22. Without reading it over she closed the notebook and replaced it in her bag. Then she tore the transcript
into very small pieces of paper, which she gathered carefully and put in a side pocket of her leather backpack.