The Gun Runner's Daughter (43 page)

Holding the fax, Nicky Dymitryck sat heavily in his chair.

What was in Nicky Dymitryck’s mind as he sat? Something that defied description.

As if the one fact about Alley he did not know, the fact that she and Dee Dennis were in love—the one irreducible ambiguity in the story he had for so long followed—had at last cast
his mind out of the analytic and into the mystical.

For
mystical
is the closest word to describe Nicky Dymitryck’s experience, that Saturday night in his office: a synchronic state in which all the meanings of his present appeared in
perfect equivalence, the death, the loss, the depth of love he had felt, the enormity of betrayal, the completeness of his solitude, the thoroughness of the state change of his life, as if it had
turned from water into gas, and it were floating, floating away.

Really, even better than
mystical
, the word to describe what happened to Nicky that moment was
epistemological
, a change in his very definition of all he knew, of the truth, and of
himself.

A strange way, an abrupt and very tragic way, to have one’s heart broken.

6.

On Monday morning, November the 14th, Bob Stein successfully argued for Allison Rosenthal’s release on bond, relying heavily on the extenuating circumstances of her
position and David Dennis’s plea of no contest.

Bail was set at fifty thousand dollars, and Stein immediately dispatched an assistant for the bond. Allison waited in a holding room for the hour it took to get that. While she waited, a
subpoena was served on her to appear in state court, Boston, the following morning. At 11:45 she was released into the cold of a gray November day. She wore the clothes in which she had been
arrested: jeans, black leather loafers, a black jersey, and a long black cashmere overcoat.

Stein was waiting with a limousine, and helped her shoulder her way through the reporters and into the car. It drove off with difficulty. But it did not go far. On North Moore and Varick, clear
of the reporters, it stopped. Alley got out, spoke to Stein for a moment through the window, and hailed a cab. Inside, she asked for La Guardia Airport. As the cab pulled out, she noted through the
back window, a white Taurus driven by a single man pulled out after her.

She rode to La Guardia silently in the cab, followed by the white Taurus, her eyes out the window on the grim landscape between the airport and the city. A familiar landscape and one, she knew,
she would not soon see again. At La Guardia she made her way to the Delta Shuttle, noticing that the driver of the white Taurus had parked illegally and was walking after her. He wore a London Fog
raincoat. She purchased an open ticket to Boston, and then sat at a table in the little restaurant off the rotunda of the terminal, watching the man from the white Taurus take a seat at the
bar.

In time, three men entered the restaurant, all bearded and in business suits and hats. Two stood at the door while one, carrying an oddly feminine suitcase, crossed to her table, sat, and spoke
briefly with Allison in a foreign language. Then he looked over at the other two and motioned with a tip of his head. Following the direction of his movement, they crossed the restaurant and sat at
the bar, on either side of the man from the white Taurus. A brief discussion ensued, during which the man from the white Taurus withdrew and displayed to his companions an FBI badge. The discussion
seemed to grow heated, until one of the men settled whatever was at issue with a gesture under his suit jacket. Whatever he was concealing there seemed to convince the man from the Taurus, for he
paled, and then allowed the other two to escort him out of the restaurant.

Now, at her table, Allison accepted from her childhood friend Peretz the suitcase, the keys to a car, a passport, and a small bundle of currency. With a nod, she rose and walked out of the
restaurant and out of the terminal.

As for Peretz, he rose a moment later and followed her at a distance. He watched her cross the street to the parking lot, then open and board the rented Buick in which he, Menachem, and Ben
Gordon had arrived. He watched as she threw the bag in the back and drew out of the lot toward the airport exit, not acknowledging him as she passed.

Only then did he turn and, eyes thoughtfully to the ground, walk slowly back to the terminal.

That evening, at eleven o’clock, a woman in a rented Buick parked in the lot of a truck stop near LaFargeville, New York.

She entered and settled at a table. Then she rose again, and crossed the restaurant to a pay phone.

With a credit card, she placed a telephone call.

Her hands, it could be observed, were shaking as she dialed.

What was the expression on her face as she waited for an answer?

There was hope, a tremulous expression in the lift of her eyebrows, the tip of her tongue showing between her teeth.

There was dread, a heavy set of her lips, a stiffness of her cheeks.

And there was courage, a slow green burn in her eyes, as if she had come to this phone, in this restaurant, ready to face the truth.

The conversation with Nicky lasted perhaps one minute.

“It’s me.”

Silence while she listened. Then, a single word:

“Please.”

Another silence. And then, with a small smile.

“I told you you wouldn’t want to hear from me again.”

With that she hung up and stood by the phone, leaning against the wall, as if too weak to walk. And only after a long moment did she manage to cross back to her table, her face, now, devoid of
any expression whatsoever except the saddest of the three, which was courage.

Alone at a table, she drank coffee, then just sat, staring out the window, for three hours. For those three hours, she sat still, with the exception of a short period in which
she read, several times, the title page of a small, thin, blue booklet, the size of a passport. Then she returned her gaze out the window, her lips moving slightly, as if she were memorizing
something, or reciting a mantra.

At two in the morning she rose, paid, and left the restaurant. She started her car, drew out of the truck stop north on Highway 81. Forty-five minutes later, Tziporah Rosen showed a small, blue
Israeli passport with a valid Canadian visa to the customs inspector at the border, submitted to a brief search of her car, and then drove into Canada.

Had someone been following—no one was—they would have followed her from here to Montréal International Airport, where a ticket was held in her name for a direct flight, later
that morning, to Paris.

December 15, 1994.
Paris.

1.

December 15; rue de la Paix.

In front of the Hermès picture window, Allison stood, gazing at the Christmas display.

Or so it seemed. In fact, it was her reflection she watched: her face pale and lips red in the damp Paris winter, dark pools of fatigue under her eyes. Peering at her face, mercilessly, she
wondered if it would ever come back to itself.

But what was itself? She corrected herself: to what it had been. Her eyes met her eyes and an expression crossed her face, of annoyance, of disgust. Three o’clock. Her father had arrived
that morning in Paris, resuming his duties for the Falcon Corporation. She was due to meet him at his hotel at four.

She had been walking already for hours, and a bone-deep weariness was in her, the accumulated exhaustion of the month past, of the months past. As if all the nights she sat up at her desk on
Jane Street, falsifying her diary, working with the court transcripts and her father’s private papers, making love to Dee and talking to Nicky, as if all those nights had caught up with her
and were taking their toll now. She had been very sick when she’d arrived in Paris, first strep throat, and then pneumonia, for which she had been hospitalized in Neuilly for a week. She
should have accepted her father’s offer of a ticket, via Bob Stein, to Martinique. Instead, she moved into Chevejon’s apartment on the rue de Fleurus, and recuperated slowly in the
European winter.

Now, in front of the window at Hermès, thinking of all the sleep she had missed that fall, she pictured her desk in the apartment on Jane Street, the window next to it illuminated by the
streetlights at the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Jane.

Then she saw the beach at Ocean View, a slanting snow darting like commas into the wash of the waves.

Hypnagogic memory. Quick, involuntary hallucinations, precisely detailed, of past locales. She had experienced them a lot since she’d been sick: her fatigue, which weighed on her mind as
much as her body, seemed to encourage it.

She sighed now, watching her breath mist the window, then turned in the direction of Angelina’s on the rue de Rivoli, thinking joylessly of the thick hot chocolates she and Pauly had so
loved there, a little Jewish boy and girl, immaculately dressed, visiting Paris with their mother.

She could wait there for an hour with the paper, she thought, or a book from W. H. Smith, right down the street, then head up to the Ritz to meet her father.

The vision of Ocean View still fresh in her mind, she wondered how Dee had spent the month. He had written to her after Bob Stein had withdrawn her charges against him, a
short, factual letter in which he told her that he would be moving to San Francisco, and that he did not blame her for what she had done. It was, she suspected, something of a liberation for him.
Perhaps he realized the aspirations she had forced him to sacrifice were too factitious to have any real meaning. When she tried to feel anything deeper about him, however, she felt blankness. She
was sorry for what she had done to him, she supposed. But she could not help but feel that somehow, somewhere in this, Dee had been happy to let her go. Perhaps she knew, now, that ultimately, no
matter where Dee might venture, he would return to his conventionality. It was, she admitted now, not only for him but for nearly everyone she had ever known in that little trapezoidal world
between the Vineyard, Boston, New York, and Washington, too powerful a force.

And Martha. She had not heard from Martha even once since she’d gone, as if finally Martha had understood the difference between the worlds of their fathers. Martha’s encounter with
this willingness so blatantly to use illegality without government protection would have scared her. Faced with the possibility of moving entirely out of Beltway logic, entirely out of
conventionality, she knew, Martha too would never really take the step. Marty. She could not imagine life without her, and yet that was what faced her.

Nicky Dymitryck she could not think about. It was funny that the one person as fundamentally maverick as herself was the one who had so cleanly rejected her. Of all the things that had happened
to her, that hurt the most. It had hurt when it happened, and it hurt now, throbbing in her chest with the regularity of the thin Paris rain pissing down onto her. It would, she thought, throb like
that for a great while.

And now she was in front of W. H. Smith, under the covered sidewalk on the rue de Rivoli, thick holiday crowds moving around her like the slowly shifting roll of a wave, and she wasn’t
sure how she had gotten there.

2.

W. H. Smith. The warmth, the dry warmth of a store full of English-language books on her face now. Hands still in her coat pockets, she shouldered her way through the lines at
the cash registers and to the back of the store, the poetry section. Gazed blankly up at the shelf of paperbacks, her eyes resting on names and editions she knew: Clark, Coleman, Malanga,
Reznikoff, Wakoski. She stopped at this last name and, after a hesitation, took the book,
Emerald Ice
, and moved back to the cash register. Outside again, clutching the book under an arm,
she made her way to Angelina’s, took a table, and ordered a
chocolat.

Earlier that morning, Bob Stein had called her at the rue de Fleurus. Three in the morning, New York time; he must have woken especially for it. Her father was on his way to Paris. He did not
yet understand what had happened. Bob thought that it might be some time before her father understood the full extent of what she had done. So far, he had refused to discuss it.

As for her, the deal was almost cut: if she honored the Ocean View leases, all concerned were willing to drop charges. Except for Stan Diamond, who would settle only if he could have Ocean View
farmhouse itself. That meant that Alley would lose the summer on the island—the first season of her life she’d miss there. He spoke as if she would be in the States for the season, as
if she would have the luxury of deciding where she would summer. In the living room of the apartment, she had listened impassively, her eyes watching the rain drip, dropping down the outside of the
big French doors looking out over all Paris; her eyes seeing soft snow drifting on the streets far below the window of Bob’s office in downtown New York.

“So my view is, stay put till after New Year’s. Your dad’s thinking of Corsica. Go with him. Get a tan.”

She didn’t answer, and as if, on the other end of the line, Bob had understood her, he went on. “You come back here early January, they’ll arrest you at the airport, I’ll
have you out the next day, tops. We’ll cut a parole deal the next day.”