The Gun Runner's Daughter (42 page)

So that, thought Nicky, watching Jay with open eyes, is justice.

And then he thought, with a sinking heart, how unfair it was that he should, right this minute, just after losing everything else, lose Jay too.

3.

In a conference room in the Manhattan County Minimum Security Detention Unit, Allison Rosenthal sat at a long table. Around her were a deputy U.S. attorney, his assistant, and
Bob Stein, who, at her father’s orders, was continuing to represent her. The U.S. attorney was deposing Alley gently in questions designed less to find out what she knew than how far she was
prepared to go, as if aware of the power that a pretty woman, especially one in tears, brings to a courtroom.

“Did you start renting Ocean View before, or after, you met Mr. Dennis?”

She had looked away out the window, hiding her expression—or rather, her lack of expression.

“After. My dad was in jail. I had tuition due on my last year of law school. I was broke.”

Bob listened without expression: her father’s many checks to Allison had been issued out of his office. The deputy U.S. attorney made some notes, then looked up again, silently inviting
her to go on.

“I thought . . . I thought that if I had enough money, I could get away from him. But . . .” She dropped her eyes now, and finished simply. “But I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

She answered simply. “He told me he could get Daddy off. If I cooperated. I believed him. I don’t know why, but I believed him. My brother died two years ago, it nearly destroyed my
father. And Iran-contra, they nearly crucified him. And then the arrest, and losing our house. I was panicking.”

“When did you start doubting him?”

“Oh, God. I guess in mid-September. The
Times
said that conviction was certain, and then he asked me to find out about Falcon’s role in the Iraq thing. I knew my dad had done
a lot to stop the arming of Iraq. And I suddenly realized he was looking to show that Falcon had acted against U.S. interests over Iraq, and I got suspicious. I mean, I’m in my third year of
law school. So I refused to tell him and . . .”

She stopped, her chin trembling, and with horror the deputy U.S. attorney realized that she was very convincingly on the verge of tears. He wondered, briefly, if a jury would be able to see the
contradiction between the trembling chin and the observant green eyes and decided, with regret, that they would not.

“Take your time, Alley.” Bob speaking now, directing a look of calm challenge at the deputy U.S. attorney, accentuating the threat of tears.

“Okay.” Wiping her nose. “Then he showed me the transcripts.”

“Did he say where he got them?”

“No. He wouldn’t say.”

“And?”

“And he threatened to release them to the press if I didn’t help him.”

“Where did you go for information about the Israeli attempt to stop the Iraq trade?”

“My father has his files hidden in my grandfather’s apartment out in Brooklyn. Dee knew that. I’ve known him since I was a kid.”

“You went to your grandfather?”

“My grandfather is dead. I went to his apartment.”

“Why didn’t you get help?”

“I was afraid. I’ve known Dee for years. He is an extremely violent man. Ask anyone: he got suspended from Exeter for fighting. He was on probation at Cornell twice for fag-bashing.
He just nearly got kicked out of the bar by my house for threatening a guy half his size.”

“And what made you keep the diary?”

At this, she had looked straight across the table at him, then slowly at each of the men at the table.

“I was hoping this day would come.”

There was a silence in the room. Then, clearing his throat, the attorney spoke dryly. “You seem to know the system well enough to know how to go about getting help from blackmail, Ms.
Rosenthal.”

She looked away. And then she looked back and spoke in an even, controlled voice. “We were having a sexual relationship, counselor. I first slept with Dee Dennis when I was fifteen years
old and he was eighteen, which I now understand is statutory rape. What agency should I have gone to for recourse for that?”

And Bob Stein watched with an emotion that, if it weren’t so completely bedazzled by the performance he was witnessing, might well have been called pride, as the other two men showed just
how appalled they were.

That was Saturday morning. Saturday afternoon, something even more astounding took place, something that would keep the story in the right-hand column of
The New York Times
and give it a
large-point headline too.

In the World Trade Center offices of the U.S. attorney.

When Dee Dennis announced his intention to enter a plea of nolo contendere to Allison Rosenthal’s charges.

4.

Edward Treat Dennis, White House counsel, slammed shut the door of the U.S. attorney’s office’s conference room with a force that sent two secretaries scurrying
after papers swept from the table by the draft. Present were the attorney who had deposed Allison Rosenthal, Daniel Edelson, Beth Callahan, and Shauna McCarthy, as well as Wayne Barlowe, the deputy
attorney general just arrived from Washington, several paralegals, numerous secretaries. And Dee himself.

Then Edward Treat Dennis paused, and seated himself somewhat more quietly, as if he had expected to enter a war zone and found instead an armistice council. What his father was experiencing,
noting the tension in the room, was evident to Dee, and for a brief, intense moment, it hurt his heart with a physical pain. The meeting had been going on already for fifteen minutes.

Shauna McCarthy spoke, from the head of the table. “Now, Ed, we all understand your concern. Let me start by assuring you that there is not a soul in this room who does not know these
allegations to be entirely without substance. And I have just informed the attorney general of my intention to defend David in court.”

“I’ll serve as associate counsel.”

Wayne Barlowe cleared his throat and spoke, somewhat apologetically. “Ed, the decision of whether or not to fight will be taken in Washington. You don’t need me to explain the dice
game there.”

Shauna: “Wayne, I myself will offer my resignation unless this case is fought.”

Silence. Then Edward Treat Dennis, as if flipping a switch on his anger, spoke in a placating voice that reminded his son that his father was a lobbyist.

“Wayne, Shauna. Maybe we’re ahead of ourselves here. Let’s start at the beginning, okay? Where are we at with this girl? What’s she want?”

Boy, Dee thought to himself with some admiration as he watched his father cover his bases. That was fast.

Shauna nodded to the attorney who had deposed Alley, and he spoke with evident hesitation. “Mr. Dennis, I have to tell you from the outset: we’ll need support in
Washington. This girl is very, very smart, and she has presented a very, very sophisticated challenge. There’s not a lawyer in the world wants her on a witness stand, either: she’s
beautiful, and she’s ready to cry on demand. That girl crying in front of a jury is a lock, and Stein knows it. That’s the bad news.

“The good news is that she’s lying. It’s an ugly case to defend—we’ll have to subpoena Sidney Ohlinger’s daughter—but it can be done. Let me start with
the allegations, and then we can look a little further into the extenuations and then at the burden of proof . . .”

Dee wondered, sitting with his back to the window, how his father had managed to make himself the focus of this meeting. He turned now, and let his gaze wander out over the harbor and to the sky
of November gray over Jersey. Perhaps the first time he had paused for thought in the past two days.

Or two nights.

For the first time his mind shifted, at long last, into synthesis rather than apprehension, as he listened vaguely to the lawyer outlining Alley’s claims. To Dee Dennis, each one was less
an allegation than an explanation. A piece of a puzzle.

Perhaps love, thought Dee, was always a puzzle, and perhaps there were always pieces missing.

This intimate puzzle, every piece was in place.

He saw it now, so clearly. Each step in their intimacy had been a step in Alley’s reasoning, each exposure of himself through trust another piece of evidence, and he, he had been
blind.

And yet, could he honestly say that he had been innocent? This love affair that also happened to save his career? Had his original intentions been innocent?

Only the losers in any game, Dee knew, can say for sure that they were not willing to cheat.

It was as if she had played his own subconscious like a hand of cards.

Blame?

Dee pronounced the word to himself.

It was like a foreign language.

All he felt was wonder.

Faster than Jay Cohen, certainly faster than Nicky, Dee Dennis had seen the entire complexity of Alley’s genius the moment he’d learned, from the
New York Times
reporter
who’d called him for comment, what she had done. One fact, and everything had fallen into place, everything. From the FedEx slip to her careful guidance of his prosecution, and across all the
moments of nakedness between them. Each detail of doubt he remembered immediately. How he had blinded himself to them.

And he understood more than the facts. He understood the motivation. He understood the calculation and he understood the need. He understood with his analytic capacity; he understood with his
sensual knowledge. This woman. He understood her, in her passion, in her skill, and in her courage.

And in that understanding, for Dee Dennis, in that understanding not only of her person but of her past, of her family, of the entire shared world of rarefied compromise and cynical ambivalence
in which they had together grown up, for the first time the wall of the past came down and a continuum stretched, unbroken, from the slim, small-breasted girl with the light on her skin on Hancock
Beach to the woman by whom he stood now accused.

He understood, in short, with the empathy of real love.

The attorney who had deposed Allison had finished and Dee’s father, still the de facto chair of the meeting, was speaking in his “Getting to Yes” voice
again.

“Okay. Ladies, gentlemen, let’s not bullshit each other, okay? Shauna, Wayne knows, and I know, you’re with us. We also know that you’re coming from the Beltway
Disneyland, and that you deal with Mickey Mouse there, not people. So let’s not bullshit each other. Who can we count on?”

Dee watched with attention as Wayne, then Shauna, each in turn, hedged. So, she didn’t want to name names. Dee understood that: if there wasn’t any support for this prosecution in
the White House, who wanted to be allied with his father on his defense? And as Shauna unwillingly put her cards on the table, Dee saw that the odds against him were very long indeed: as he had
suspected, this whole prosecution had lost its original support in the two years since, early in the Clinton administration, it was launched at his father’s urging. The odds were long: so
long that it would take real principle, and real courage, to oppose them. And suddenly Dee wondered what side his father would fall on.

That doubt, unlike his thoughts of Alley, gave him real pain.

Perhaps, he thought—his thoughts again taking leave of the meeting—that was because the choice before his father was a radical test, whereas nothing Alley had done contradicted her
profession of love. Perhaps, he thought, the love of another is always just a reflection of the love for self. But the stuff of self, Dee thought, the stuff of self is always the reflection of a
parent’s love, and when the parent’s love is dishonest the self is so crippled. Yes, he thought, with a strange detachment. We can leave a lover behind and survive, but these people,
these terrible people, are with us for all of our lives. And Alley knows that. Nothing else matters. Alley knows that.

He turned, and looked around the table of his superiors, trying to face facts. How silly. There was only one thing to do. He had been doomed from the very first day he had seen Alley on the
porch of the Up Island General Store. All her other allegations, all the mad fiction she had built out of him, it didn’t matter: his conviction was assured in the first moment. He had slept
with the enemy. He had slept with her that night on Hancock Beach, and he had left her bed hours before she was arrested on an interstate warrant.

And he had been caught.

How was Edward Treat Dennis’s son to react? Gazing around the table at these self-satisfied people, the kind of people who had surrounded him all his life, calmly analyzing the ins and
outs of Washington politics, he experienced the same excited feeling, suddenly, as he had felt when he’d dropped his first bombshell in court.

There was only one conclusion to the question. Sooner or later, they would get there. But if he spoke now, if he spoke now and said it for them, then he would not have to see which side his
father would take, and he would not have to live forever with whatever he saw.

“Just a moment.” His voice broke the conversation at the table in an instant.

“I think I can save us all some time.”

5.

NO CONTEST
. The words in the
New York Times
headline, the Sunday edition, emerging sideways from the fax, appeared to Nicky’s wide eyes
letter after letter. Then the next headline, a two-line head, came out: first
EASTBROOK
on top of the word
EXPECTED
, then
CALLS
over
TO
, then
PRESS
, over
ANNOUNCE
, then
CONFERENCE
over
RESIGNATION
. He removed the page and read it again, then again. First:
DAVID DENNIS ENTERS PLEA OF NO CONTEST
; then:
EASTBROOK CALLS PRESS
CONFERENCE
,
EXPECTED TO ANNOUNCE RESIGNATION
.