The Gun Runner's Daughter

by Neil Gordon

  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.

  “Okay, Dee, nice work. We’re announcing the day after Labor Day. September six, eight A.M., we’ll brief for a press conference at ten. Okay?”

  Agreeing, Dee felt suddenly exhausted. Over the weekend he could call Shauna at home. The press conference would take place without him.

  This was his first weekend off. There was only one place to go. At the Yale Club he booked a ticket to the little airport on the Vineyard.

  In his room he packed slowly, thoughtfully. Then he lifted his bag and with sudden energy made his way out of the club.

  Perhaps he was an optimist. Somewhere, in the furthest frequencies of his mood’s spectrum, he felt that if he went up to the island, if he found and talked to Alley, something would change.

  It might be, he knew, an illusion. If so, it was a necessary one, because it was his only one, and therefore he simply could not afford to give it up.

  CHAPTER 3

  Labor Day Weekend, 1994.

  Martha’s Vineyard.

  1.

  Beyond the porch of the Up Island General Store, late-summer traffic crawled down-island, Volvos, Cherokees, Land Cruisers, Suburbans, orderly and slow, like a well-rehearsed coastal evacuation under the slow st
robe of clouds and sun. The Clintons were on-island this week and the summer traffic, always heavy, now had to negotiate a series of mobile security installations going up at all major intersections. Coming through the store’s screen door with her mail, Allison watched the line of traffic go into a cloud shadow, then looked automatically to the parking lot. The short man was there, again, sitting in his rented Jeep.

  This was certainly the most cunning of the journalists who’d tried to interview her in the two weeks she’d been on the island: Emily Harden from the New Yorker , Charles Sennott from the Boston Globe , Douglas Frantz from the Los Angeles Times— Stein had informed her each time a paper made a bid to talk to her. How he had known, Alley was not sure: it would not surprise her to learn that Falcon employees were keeping some kind of eye on her. As for the man, he had not yet approached her, but followed her wherever she was going in his little rented Jeep. At first it had amused her. Now it no longer seemed funny. He sat at the wheel of his Jeep in khakis, penny loafers, a white cotton shirt, well shaped, noticeably short. His hair was brown, not recently cut. She had not seen his face.

  Squinting as the sun came out again, she watched him while behind her passed the sweep of bare feet on wood, vacationers coming in and out of this social center of this tiny corner of a tiny universe. She heard a woman say that the dry spell was ending, a man drawl something in a Bucks County accent, and then, whispered, the words “Ron Rosenthal’s daughter.” As if on cue, now, the small man looked up and showed her an even-featured, rather delicate face. For a moment they watched each other. Then she impassively gave him the finger, turning her right hand up from waist level. He smiled suddenly, and she turned away.

  In three short steps she was lightly off the porch, swinging a leg over her bicycle seat, clipping a foot into a pedal. In the corner of her eye she saw the Jeep moving, but no car could catch a bike in this traffic. A push and she was coasting while she felt for the other pedal. When it clipped she looked up for a break in the traffic, poised to accelerate.

  That was when she saw the other man who had been watching her, across the road, from an open red sports car—nearly liquid red in the blaze of sun.

  Only a second passed as she held his eyes before she had passed onto the road.

  It felt, however, to Allison a much longer time, as if she were moving in slow motion, her progress checked by the weight of the August sun.

  And only after perhaps ten minutes, when she had braked, banked, and in a cloud of dust pumped off onto the dirt road to Ocean View Farm, past a sign announcing to the island a single word, “Private,” did she pronounce to herself her emotion, in a long, drawn-out obscenity.

  Having some damn journalist follow her around was one thing. But even with all that had happened to her this summer, that she should today, of all days, for the first time in ten years, see Dee Dennis, that was venturing into the realm of the unreal.

  2.

  How bizarre, how unheimlich —the word, from a long-ago class with Paul De Man, surfaced slowly in her memory—it had been, the sight of his face. At the memory of it a sense of comfort, of childhood, swept through her, sweet and familiar. When had she last even thought of him? It had been ten years, easy, since she’d seen him, and that was another life. She’d heard of him a few times: he’d won some prize at Harvard, and turned down a Connecticut clerkship to go work on those doomed prosecutions for Walsh. His family was a big presence on the island, even though only his aunt was actually in residence; the Dennises pronounced aunt with an English accent, and had once farmed much of Chilmark. It had been ten years, though, since she and he last spoke, easy.

  Alone in the living room of Ocean View, watching a single swan glide across the pond in the falling afternoon light—unnerved by the wind, darting its head sideways at imagined perils—Allison let that feeling of familiarity again pass through her belly.

  And in the middle of that feeling, like the cold wind from the ocean that chilled you only out of the sun’s heat, a sudden shadow: the knowledge that everything had changed.

  In her drying sweaty clothes she shivered, as if in a chill wind blown through the living room. The wind rattled a window and the house responded with a cavernous silence, echoing, in its very timbers, that sense of change.

  God, she had had a happy life. In this room, she felt that very intensely. Then Pauly had died. Briefly, she felt a cold, pitiless resentment against him, as if he were still her annoying, clinging little brother. Then, equally familiar, missing flooded her being.

  Heavily, Allison sat at the dining room table, drinking water from a bottle, wiping her mouth against the warm, salty surface of her arm after each sip. Then, with a sigh, she pulled the mail from her saddlebag, and turned her attention to the letters.

  Clearly this table had not been used for dining in some time. Central on it was a PowerBook computer; radiating around were neat piles of paper, documents, and correspondence. The books pertaining to Ocean View’s finances were here, as Allison had retrieved them from the real estate agent. And finally, visible on the table, the urgent business before her: the ongoing inventory of Ocean View’s contents.

  At first, when she’d arrived, she’d refused to consider what the end of the summer would bring. The house was as familiar as anything in her life. The familiarity, she found, could not be poisoned by the events that surrounded her presence here; it was too home, too dear. Nor did it frighten her to be alone here. She had always liked being alone at Ocean View.

  Bob Stein had followed up on her outburst with a terse, entirely formal letter repeating his legal advice that the house should be inventoried against its inevitable seizure in the fall. This she had thrown away.

  Nonetheless, in the days that followed, she quickly found she could not ignore the business of Ocean View. Mail arrived: notices from the government, a mimeographed sheet titled “Preparing Your House for Federal Escrow,” letters from tenants. In time, she’d found herself spending a couple of hours each morning working on it, and at last came to feel that Stein’s advice had been correct. Something could change: the house could be seized and, as a result of litigation, or a plea bargain, returned. No matter how unlikely that event, if it happened, she would want to hold the federal government liable for every missing piece of dust. After a few days’ thought she wrote a short letter of apology to Bob Stein, and began inventorying the house in an Excel spreadsheet on the PowerBook.

  Equally urgent, she had quickly found, was the paperwork generated by Ocean View Farm with its fifteen rentals: outstanding bills, repairs, fees, taxes. All of this work had fallen to her: the real estate agent who had handled Ronald Rosenthal’s work for the past twenty-five years had, this summer, declined to be any longer involved with it—but not until, Allison had noticed, the commissions on the current summer’s rentals were calculated.

  Most of the regular renters had understood without being told that they’d best look elsewhere for their next season’s summer rental. To her surprise, however, several tenants seemed not to have heard of her father’s arrest and upcoming trial, or if they had, had not realized that it might affect their regular summer rentals, and had sent in their checks for the following season as if nothing in the world were wrong.

  And Allison, contemplating those checks, had been surprised by the thought that had come to her.

  In today’s mail the Newmans, from Michigan, had sent in a deposit of $5,000 pending lease from their landlord. The check was made out to Rosenthal Equities. The Hugheses, with a Chicago address, had enclosed a check for the same amount. The Petersons had decided to pass this year; they would be taking a less expensive, if less spectacular, house in Edgartown, but the Mitchels from Los Angeles enclosed their fully executed lease with their first payment of $18,500, which, with their original deposit of $5,000, constituted half the payment on the full-season rental of one of the most splendid ocean-side properties for rent on the island.

  Nearly $30,000 in today’s mail alone. She placed the checks neatly i
n a pile next to the computer. So far, receivables on the 1995 rental season were at $180,000. Real estate, God. She shook her head, momentarily unaware of the absurdity of her emotion. So that was why her father had gotten into land speculation so quickly.

  She should, she knew, contact these people. Return their checks, explain that there were no longer any Ocean View rentals.

  She should. For if she did not, she would cause them, and the federal government, an enormous amount of trouble when, next summer, these renters demanded their properties.

  Which is why, today, she did what she had done for the past two weeks, each afternoon, with the rental checks that arrived in the mail.

  From a Chemical Bank envelope, she took out a pile of canceled checks and leafed through them. Then she chose one and placed it before her, facedown, showing her father’s endorsement on the back. Finished, she lined up all the rental checks, also facedown, and finally put a blank sheet of paper over them.

  When all was ready, staring at her father’s signature, on this blank sheet she copied his scrawled name, perhaps twenty times, with the thick Mont Blanc marker he habitually used. Then she raised her writing hand, removed the paper, and, working quickly and neatly, endorsed each check. This finished, she rested for a moment, studying her work. And finally, she filled out a deposit slip, not to Rosenthal Equities from the big business ledger, but to her own account in New York from her little checkbook. Then she tore off the deposit slip, and stuffed everything into an envelope for Chemical Bank.

  Let the federal accountants sort that one out when next summer rolled around. Her father would be, at the least, amused to have embezzlement added to the charges he did not intend to face. And by then, she was sure, she’d have found a way to tie up the money so tightly that it would take the government’s accountants months to sort it all out.