The Gun Runner's Daughter (4 page)

Alley shook her head emphatically. “Christ sake. Clinton’s too smart to establish plausible deniability through the Justice Department.”

“Oh? Who’s the smart guy ordered Paula Jones audited by Treasury?’ The voices of both women were rising in pitch now.

“I don’t know. A lackey probably. Not the damn president.”

“That’s right, Alley girl. A lackey. Like my father. Or like Ed Dennis.”

Deeply annoyed now, Allison stood suddenly. “Hey Marty? You have any word on who the U.S. Attorney hired to do the prosecution?”

Lips grim, Martha shook her head.

“Then stop telling me about it, okay? I know they’re scapegoating my father. I also know nothing’s going to stop them, and so does my dad. So let’s stop wasting our time
over what we can’t help.”

8.

Her father, his profession, it meant nothing to her: just another of the unsavory things adults did to one another at work. That she was in law school led people to think she
was more concerned with her father’s affairs—particularly reporters, one or two of whom she came to expect to find waiting in Washington Square as she came out of classes whenever her
father was in the news, hoping for a comment. But law school had nothing to do with what she wanted in life: she had never wanted to go. When her father had started pressuring her to study law
rather than go to graduate school, she’d obeyed only because she could not, or would not, fight back. That was less fear of him, she vaguely knew, than concern: her empire over her
father’s fragile emotions—his fear for her, his ambitions—since his divorce was so enormous that she didn’t have the heart. She hadn’t really needed to fight, anyway:
Pauly, as always, had done it for her.

“You want her in the family business, Dad? Another Rosenthal gonif?”

It was at the Shabbos dinner table, and her father had paused in incomprehension, then suspicion.

“What’s that supposed to mean, David?”

Her heart was pounding as she watched, but Pauly seemed as calm as usual when he answered.

“For God’s sake. I know what you do for a living. You think I’ve forgotten meeting Oliver North in this very house? Or Amiram Nir? Let’s go ask Amiram Nir. Oh, wait,
he’s dead, right? That’s what you want Alley to go to law school for? Or what, you going to introduce her to Greg Eastbrook in the NSC, and she’s going to carry on the family
business? ‘Rosenthal and Daughter.’ Sounds like the smoked-fish store on Houston Street. Except you don’t sell fish, do you, Dad?”

Her father had listened to Pauly’s speech, his jaw falling lower and lower with each name: not even his only son had ever talked to him like this before. Perhaps no one had. When his son
had finished, he’d been too surprised to respond for long seconds. Then he’d asked the maid to leave the room, and addressed Pauly with restrained fury.

“What do you know about my work, David?”

He was nearly shouting, his face flushed, his body tensed against the table edge.

“I can
read
, Dad. You’d have to be
blind
not to see your name in these damn books, the library catalog
indexes
, the footnote references. I’ve seen
enough
of you in the papers.”

Her father nodded, as if, despite his anger, Pauly was merely confirming what he had long suspected about his son.

“Calm down. I know you can read. Now tell me what you know about Greg Eastbrook.”

It clearly surprised Pauly that her father had picked that name out of others. He calmed somewhat with his answer.

“I don’t know what’s your particular business with that scumbag, Dad, but by your response I’d infer that it’s particularly insalubrious.”

Her father answered now, decisively, and in the language of his business. “Infer, would you? Who made you the jury? And didn’t the judge instruct you that if you see fit to
‘infer’ from ambiguous evidence, the law requires you to favor the exculpatory inference?”

For a few moments, silence reigned in the ornate, high-ceilinged dining room while her father considered his son. And then he turned to his daughter.

“Now you listen to me, Essie, not to this child, okay? You want to talk about my business, then you’d better be ready to be a big girl. First off, the law isn’t about truth,
it’s about appearances. David wants to judge me, fine, but let him learn what he’s talking about first. Then I’ll debate the issues, not the emotions. You go read Thomas
Jefferson, you go read Madison, then read
Curtiss-Wright
, and you’ll see that what I do is the same as WASP businessmen in Washington do every day, okay? I work every day with the
Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA. I change my name to Gladstone and no one’s going to pay any attention to me. Only, I’m Rosenthal, get it? You ever read about the mail Bill
Cohen and Arthur Liman got during Iran-contra? You see even the Hawaiian or Italians on the committees getting mail like that? And Cohen only sounds Jewish, he’s a WASP himself.”

He paused now, thinking so deeply that Alley was afraid to interrupt.

“Secondly, this isn’t about me, and it’s not about David. It’s about you. Men have a lot more latitude. You be whatever kind of lady poetess you want to be, but
you’re going to do it with a law degree, okay? You do what your daddy says now, Esther. You get a law degree. I don’t care if Farrakhan joins forces with the Michigan Militia,
you’re gonna be protected as sure as you got a gun. You follow me? This is
America.
The country’s
made
for the people who know how to use the law. Okay?”

There was no arguing with her father. No one could. Even trying to screw up the LSATs hadn’t helped, just committed her to going to NYU instead of back to New Haven. The best she’d
been able to do was convince him that a year of finishing in Paris was what every girl needed after graduation, and then she’d managed to extend that to two.

But at the end of the second year, while she had been relaxing into a hot Paris summer, her brother had called her home. And even after he died, the deal had stood. Without either of them
questioning it, she’d started law school at NYU in the fall after Pauly’s death.

And although her father had never mentioned his business to her again—never directly—he had, after Pauly’s death, come to treat her confidence as assumed, which was strange, as
if Pauly’s suicide had made her an accomplice.

Nothing, then, changed for Allison Rosenthal. As the dry August of 1994 swelled toward fall, by day she went to the offices of DG&B, a meditative, rote exercise in which
she had no stake; by night she sat in the Corner Bistro, alone or with Martha, where the bartenders protected her from all comers. Or read. Or padded around her little apartment in her underwear,
watching the saturated summer night reflecting from the surface of Eighth Avenue.

In mid-August, in a dinner during a Group of Seven trip to Europe, Clinton was reported to have referred to the Rosenthal trial as categorical proof of America’s commitment to uphold the
European Union’s embargo of the Bosnian Muslims. Allison stayed away from work that day, and so was at home midmorning to receive, by messenger, a letter from Bill Dykeman asking her, in
light of her father’s approaching prosecution, to take the rest of her internship off with full pay. When the smart of the affront had subsided, it occurred to her that now she could spend
the rest of the summer at Ocean View Farm, her childhood home, and for the first time since her father’s arrest the chill lifted.

But not for long. While she was packing that day, to go up to the island, Bob Stein called to tell her he had received a federal notice of seizure on her father’s property, including his
business, his Park Avenue home, and his summer estate, Ocean View Farm.

She listened to Bob with incredulity. Did they not know that Ocean View had been Pauly’s last home? Did they not know that everything else, for her, was gone? Briefly, it occurred to her
that one by one the doors of her life were closing, and with each closing door she lost one of the small rosary of people she loved: her grandparents at Borough Park; her mother in Brooklyn
Heights; and her brother, her dear, dead brother, from Ocean View. Now her father was exiled and they were taking Ocean View from her too. Then she interrupted.

“Wait a minute, Bob. You’re saying my dad’s going to be convicted.”

Silence. Then: “I’m saying the seizure’s going to take place in the fall. You knew they were using RICO, honey. We won’t be able to stop that.”

“Why?”

Stein let dead air sit on the phone.

“Cause he’s guilty, right?”

“Allison. Calm down.”

“Bob. Do something for me, okay?”

“Yes honey.”

“Don’t call me again. You hear?”

She must sound to Bob, she thought as she hung up, exactly like her father.

And it was only then that Allison Rosenthal’s quiet courage failed and, alone at the desk of her apartment, in sunlight mediated by the leaves on the London plane tree outside her window,
she let herself feel the horror of everything that had happened since July 1st, everything that had happened, just as Martha had worried, not to her father, but to her.

August 1, 1994.

Washington, D.C.

1.

The first hint, to the outside world, that Ronald Rosenthal’s arrest on Arms Export Control Act violations was not going to go away was extremely understated. So much so
that David Treat Dennis, Dee, might have missed it.

It was August 1, and page 15 of the
Washington Post
ran a short account that the State Department had suspended all open export licenses held by the Falcon Corporation pending the outcome
of the Rosenthal trial. A second article, from the UPI news wire, reported that the Israeli envoy had protested the move.

Each article was small, as if not even the writers understood the importance of what had just happened. That was because, perhaps, it was important to so few people. And that it was, to those
few, so vitally important did not matter yet.

Dee Dennis read the account in a taxi from Dupont Circle to Thirteenth and F, where he worked on the skeleton staff still assisting Independent Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh in cleaning up from the
Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters.
And as he read he felt regret.

Ronald Rosenthal. Dee had followed the account of his arrest, the month before, with something close to salivation. This, he had thought at the time, was the kind of criminal whose ass you can
lock up without fear of a government pardon and unfettered by the nasty
Kastigar
decision that had so complicated his life under Walsh. It was precisely in the hope of this kind of
prosecution that he had so far turned down all the offers of jobs as counsel or analyst that had come to him since Walsh finished, whether from powerful New York houses who had flown him up in
company jets to talk over lunch at the Harmony or Maidstone, from congressional offices or committees, or from NGOs—nongovernmental organizations—on Mass. Ave. and Beltway Bandits in
Arlington. That he had refused them all was because Dee Dennis wished to work on a criminal prosecution for the Justice Department. One like this.

The weekend of Rosenthal’s arrest, the month before, his father had mentioned the case as the two flew up to their family home in Martha’s Vineyard, where the rest of the Dennises
were already waiting to celebrate Independence Day. That he should be au courant with this affair was, to Dee, a surprise: Edward Treat Dennis, counsel to the Democratic National Committee during
the election, was now White House counsel. Rosenthal was properly the business of the Justice Department, and between the two there were meant to be fire walls.

“You see we indicted Ron Rosenthal?”

“Yeah. What’s it all about?”

His father had shown surprise.

“Deedee, that’s the son-of-a-bitch who took Ocean View Farm off of Gerry Saunders.”

Now Dee understood his father’s interest. It was Rosenthal, the big property owner on Martha’s Vineyard, where generations of Dennises had been born, and where Dee had summered his
whole life. Rosenthal had bought Ocean View Farm in foreclosure from one of the island’s oldest families during hard times in the sixties, and no sooner had he acquired it than he’d
started subdividing. So quickly, in fact, that the State Assembly had passed a three-acre wetlands zoning law to stop him. As for his father’s emotion, Rosenthal’s tenure on the island
was only a quarter century old. Many of the original families, environmentalists before there was any such movement, much resented this newcomer gaining control over large tracts of fragile
oceanfront.

Still, even if his father’s interest in the case was more personal than political, Dee knew that his influence was both. Watching his father turn his attention back to a report he was
reading, for a brief moment Dee considered asking a direct favor.

But caution—practiced caution, never taught but intuitively grasped—interceded.

If his father didn’t understand by himself, Dee Dennis knew, there was no point in asking.

It was a shame. But after his return from the Fourth of July weekend on the island, Dee Dennis doubted he had thought about Rosenthal even once.