The Gun Runner's Daughter (6 page)

Later, he would remember it. But even at the time, as a realization, a memory, opened in him like a wound, still, in a far part of his mind, Dee observed that this was what it felt like when a
life, a whole life, was ruined.

Dee excused himself and went through the living room to the hallway bathroom. By the time he got there, he could feel his shirt damp with sweat. In the wood-framed mirror over a bouquet of dried
flowers, he watched himself, his pupils dilated, his sky blue eyes wide. Moments passed before he was again master of his expression. Then he turned out again abruptly and went back to the
table.

Edward Treat Dennis was sitting back over an empty plate now, observing his son appraisingly as he sat down. “You want my opinion, Deedee? You wanted to, you could think big. You could
think very big indeed.”

After such a day of facing the unprecedented, nothing any longer seemed too hard to say. And obscurely, he knew that there was only going to be one chance to say what he was about to. The next
time his mother left the room for the kitchen, he took a deep breath, and spoke.

“Dad. Am I qualified to do this case?”

His father switched to scrutiny in a second, and Dee regretted squandering his rare moment of approval. “What’s that mean?”

“I mean, with you and Rosenthal both owning property on the island. Isn’t that a conflict?”

His father answered with a short laugh. “Why, you do his daughter?”

It took Dee a moment to realize his father was joking, and it was a moment of real fright. By then Edward Dennis was talking again.

“Boy, if every lawyer recused himself on the grounds of real estate investments, there’d be no one to prosecute that shyster.”

Slowly Dee realized his father didn’t have any idea about him and Alley.

This meant, he realized, that his father did not know how much danger he was in.

And then, as quickly as the moment had come, it was, inevitably and irreparably, too late.

5.

Never in life would he have connected that sixteen-year-old girl with Ronald Rosenthal.

Dee flew that night after dinner to New York and took a cab to the Yale Club, where his father kept a room.

Never in his life would he have connected that sixteen-year-old girl with Ronald Rosenthal: he’d had no consciousness of who her father was when he knew her, no curiosity, no possible
interest.

In those days the world was a given: winters at school, summers on the island; in those days the three months a year on Hancock Beach, sailing in Vineyard Haven, riding at Sarah Wright’s
stables—they were far more immediate interests than the professions or social standing of his friends’ parents.

Dee dropped his bags in his room, then at the stand-up bar in the club ordered a scotch and a thin Dunhill Panatela. In Washington Dee would have recognized about everyone around him. Here he
was anonymous. Not, Dee thought, gazing around him with a kind of wonder, for long. With the thought, he felt his heart beat.

What was it his father had said?
You wanted to, you could think big. You could think very big indeed.
Well, he was doing that, wasn’t he? Turning to the bar Dee smiled to himself,
ruefully. He was thinking damn big, but the celebrity he was considering was rather different from that of his father’s aspiration. The celebrity he was considering was one that would start
if, the very next day, he announced to Shauna McCarthy that Ronald Rosenthal’s daughter had been for two adolescent summers his lover, his first lover, and that remaining on the case, the
best case any young lawyer could hope to have, could be considered as a serious enough breach of ethics to result in his removal from the bar.

Then, not for the first time, but stronger than ever before, a sense of disbelief swept over him, sudden amazement at the swift, absolute fatality of what had happened.

What was so astounding was the logic of the thing. Each step in its occurrence had, at the time, seemed so opportune, so immensely lucky. So used was Dee Dennis to opportunity,
to success, that he hadn’t thought for a moment to question it. Now he saw himself as not only blind, but also complacent. Now he saw that each step of the way had had a dual meaning, one in
appearance, one in truth, and never in life would it have been possible to know how radically the two would diverge.

The offer from the U.S. attorney? He had been taught the legal territory of arms export control and administration by Lawrence Walsh himself. For a nuts-and-bolts understanding of
Rosenthal’s crime by statute and paragraph, through years of congressional wrangling and presidential meddling in the relevant acts of Congress, few lawyers in the country were up to Dee. His
father’s involvement? Yes, he knew that neither his father nor Sid Ohlinger should be directing the Justice Department from the White House. He also knew that Watergate—with its many
political innovations—was twenty years old. Who could doubt that this was business as usual? Who on earth could doubt that this was the chance to think very, very big indeed?

And who could have foreseen that at the same time, these unimpeachably deserved, so long anticipated opportunities could carry the germ of their own utter explosion?

For no matter how well he might have known the law, no matter who was his father and how big he might think, that David Treat Dennis, deputy U.S. attorney, had once been the childhood lover of
Allison Rosenthal, daughter of the defendant in the federal trial he would argue in open court, was hard to reconcile with opportunity.

As was it hard, very hard, to reconcile that fact with the sudden anonymity that had cloaked him in its protection since he’d entered this bar.

To the contrary. Standing before the high wooden bar in the Yale Club, his back to the room and face toward a mirror, hidden behind rows of bottles, a vivid cascade of realization came across
Dee. To the contrary. Anonymity was the antithesis of the attention that would be paid him when this fact became known, attention not just by the New York tabloids, but by the national press, which
already had reporters permanently assigned to the trial.

It was an attention that would raise the interest of many, many people indeed. And, in the middle of this delicate prosecution, which was being directed, no matter how quietly,
illegally
by a presidential administration, it would not be a welcome interest—not at all. Dee Dennis knew exactly how unwelcome that attention would be.

The U.S. attorney would take perhaps ten minutes to replace Dee and remove his name from her Rolodex.

The White House, in its turn, would listen to the dim noise of these events in New York just long enough to order someone to order someone to make sure that the name of David Treat Dennis had
nowhere been written down, only whispered, and then softly close its doors.

And as for Edward Treat Dennis, on whom those White House doors—noiseless, well-oiled hinges on carpeted floors, with the cream of the U.S. military standing white-gloved, armed guard
outside—would also close, his interest would be long-lived indeed.

Dee Dennis endured another long, bitter moment. And only with real mental effort was he able to force it to pass.

When it did, he finished his drink and motioned for another. Immediately as it was put down before him he lifted it and upturned the glass. And while the peaty taste traveled down his throat,
his head toward the clouded glass of the light bowls, their dim emanations staining the smoky, swimming air, for the first time in years, he saw her.

Alley at fifteen, climbing from the silver ocean under a lowering moon, the light on her hair, the light on her skin. They had been alone together by the purest chance; the others had gone on a
beer run, leaving one person behind so Alley wouldn’t be swimming alone. He’d volunteered to stay, without understanding why; he’d settled on a blanket next to the fire and lit a
joint, happy to have a few moments alone.

And then she had come from the sea, the light on her skin, and dropped next to him on the blanket, her small chest heaving in her black Speedo, and in a gesture that had gone through to his
heart she had taken his wrist in her small cold hand and lifted the joint he held to her shivering lips. And he’d felt something he had only felt before in the abstract, in untutored and
clumsy fantasy, and then her hand was on his neck, and his hand was on her small, wet breast. And then he was feeling the sea on his skin as her skin was against his, her whole living, breathing
body against him.

And then it was now. Now, and he was prosecuting the sweetest case of illegal, and more importantly politically unpopular, arms dealing since Edwin Wilson. Now, and the prosecution had a
State’s witness testifying in exchange for immunity from prosecution. And the defendant, the defendant who hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of winning a motion from the most
lenient judge in the world, was Ronald Rosenthal.

He couldn’t lose. So his father had told him. And yet, in that moment when he should have been listening to his father, Dee’s mind had been elsewhere. Dee’s mind had been
absorbing a different rhetorical emphasis to that phrase. “You can’t lose,” and appropriately enough, that emphasis came from Alley herself.

Dee was visited again by one of those nights on Hancock Beach, removing the too-young girl’s clothes piece by piece on the darkening beach, her emerging body half lit by the little fire.
And the deep seriousness of her face. And the profound warmth of her lightly freckled skin. And he remembered that when he had finished and her body was still moving slowly against his she would
hold his face against her neck and speak a three-word phrase, “Please don’t stop”—inflectionless, ambiguous, and only slowly had the ambiguity come clear to him, making him
wonder whether the rhetorical comma went after “please” or after “don’t,” and she had laughed and pulled his mouth toward hers.

“You can’t lose.” The phrase had been playing through his mind all night, but never did he surmount the ambiguity of when he first heard it and it had sounded imperative rather
than constative; a threat rather than a statement of encouraging fact.

You can’t lose.

He was going to play a central role in a very public case. He was going to be in the papers, on TV, on view. If the case was well defended, and successfully appealed, it would probably go, and
its lawyer with it, to the Supreme Court.

And as far as anyone in his small world, his only world, was concerned, he couldn’t lose.

Watching himself in the bar mirror, standing alone in the room crowded with the kind of silver-haired, cologned men he had believed himself sure one day to be, David Treat Dennis, Dee, lifted a
third scotch to his lips and, as his arm rose, felt precise drips of sweat falling under his shirt.

6.

The first weekend of his new job Dee Dennis spent both days in the U.S. attorney’s office library, making his first acquaintance with the twelve-hundred-odd pieces of paper that, so far,
constituted the indictment of Ronald Rosenthal.

The second week, they had begun deposing Michael Levi, a fascinating and intricate process that knew, essentially, no limits of time: fourteen hours a day was fine; Levi was a federal detainee,
required to cooperate.

By the third week of August, therefore, he had worked a consecutive nineteen days, no less than ten hours each, and often more.

Under this pressure, it was easy to subsume the consciousness of his trouble in the formality of his job. Trial was scheduled for the fall; McCarthy was saving the announcement
of the prosecution’s team until after Labor Day, giving them the time to become sound-bite experts before a news conference. His position on the case still, therefore, was unannounced except
to Washington circles. The matter of a recusal, however, had not yet grown absolutely unavoidable.

Or so he told himself.

It would be no harder to do it just before the press conference than now. In some ways, in fact, it would be better to separate the recusal from his acceptance of the job, as if the matter had
only just come to him. In any case, his career would be over—in Washington terms, which were the only terms that meant anything. And as far as his father was concerned, he would be
finished.

This point Dee did not even need to articulate to himself, so deeply did he understand it. His father, he knew, was a narcissist and, like all narcissists, saw his children only as an extension
of himself. When Dee showed himself so stupid as to have compromised himself, ten years earlier, by having a secret childhood affair with Rosenthal’s daughter, his father’s interest in
him would evaporate instantaneously.

And if he did nothing? Well, if he did nothing, then his career would still be over, when the facts came out. Only this time it would be over very, very publicly. It would be over in a way that
jeopardized a White House directed prosecution. It would be over in a way that would cause some White House level damage.

But would the facts come out? That was what he could not quite decide, as the days before the press conference evaporated into the summer air. His affair with Alley over those two summers was
known, he was sure, to no one but themselves. With adolescent instinct they had kept it secret from the others, detaching themselves from the group of lifelong summer friends only late at night,
keeping to beaches and woods, anonymous locales, always outside, always in the dark. Only Alley knew. If he did nothing, then, if he went to work in the morning as if nothing had happened, those
ten years ago, would she tell?

There was no way to answer that. But, Dee knew, between the two alternatives facing him—immediate ruin and possible ruin—there was no real choice.

The Friday before Labor Day, Dee was interrupted in his office toward late evening by the U.S. attorney, who came in without knocking and, while he pulled his attention from a
videotape of Levi’s deposition, stood waiting by the window looking out over the lights of New York Harbor, eighty-five stories below. When Dee had sorted himself out, she directed him a few
questions, nodding as he answered.