The Gun Runner's Daughter

by Neil Gordon

  She stood now and stretched, feeling—as after each of her forgeries—satisfied. That she had no real intention of keeping the money seemed to remove the risk. Five o’clock on the wall clock. Time enough to shower, dress, and drive down-island to the Oyster Bar. She crossed to the liquor cabinet, under a small, beautiful still life of wine bottles and flowers, poured a bourbon, and carried it onto the porch.

  The wind had come up, with a faint hint of cold, perhaps of an approaching storm. She lay on her stomach and, chin in hands, looked out at the surf. On a lone rock in the water cormorants gathered, oily black birds coming in to land for the winter; on shore a herd of huddled gulls watched them sleepily. When she was a child, she thought, the gull had been a beautiful bird of flight rather than the ill-mooded, cheeky beast that sidled up to picnickers on the beach and settled around garbage cans in town. Perhaps the cormorant would be as common and as little mysterious as the gull had it, too, learned to live on human waste rather than relying on the dwindling inshore fish population.

  And once again not exactly a memory, more a sensation, of Dee Dennis passed across her mind.

  As if her consciousness were a cormorant, floating on the surface of the sea before, unexpectedly, plunging underwater, out of sight, and emerging with a tiny, struggling, wriggling piece of hope.

  3.

  And while she thought that, Dee Dennis stood at the lead-glass window of the Wright House in Menemsha, staring across the manicured lawn that sloped to the harbor under lowering clouds: the dry spell, it appeared, was coming to its end. Far out, a ketch-rigged yacht, a reef in, heeled heavily in the blow, reaching for harbor. Seen through the window, a vast silence seemed to play over the scene, over the sloping lawn to the water and through the low-ceilinged rooms of Sarah Wright’s house in which ticked, tocked, a massive seagoing Breguet, a family heirloom.

  He lifted his eyes to the high sky of running clouds and saw Allison draw away again, her moving body flashing chiaroscuro under the absolute shadow of roadside trees. Then his eyes closed, and opened, and again he was watching the parched lawn sloping down to the harbor under lowering clouds.

  Alley girl. That was what Martha Ohlinger had always called her. He had never been friends with Martha either; they had just been thrown together within that loose group of kids that gathered on Hancock Beach every summer. Alley girl: wiry thin, tough, quiet. He had never thought even to question her presence, so long had he known her, since his earliest youth: he remembered her in sailing lessons at the harbor, riding lessons at Scrubby Neck, all the way back to day camp at Chilmark Center.

  He hadn’t really thought of her even as female. Until the day they found themselves alone on Hancock Beach at night and she came walking out of the dark, moving water with the light on her skin, a black Speedo over a golden tan, and she had held his hand to her shivering lips to pull on a joint and a surge had gone through his groin while his heart stopped, stopped, then launched into a tattoo.

  But someone was talking. With effort, his heart batting, Dee Dennis brought his attention to the room around him.

  The dry spell, it appeared, was coming to an end. Such, at least, was the general feeling in Sarah Wright’s living room, where Dee and his aunt Mary had come to dine.

  Returning to his seat on the couch, Dee rattled ice in his glass and concurred with this popular opinion as it was proffered by some niece of Sarah’s. The niece was wearing riding boots and smelled vaguely of horse, and as he politely directed his gaze at her, he tried desperately to keep himself remembering.

  But of course it was gone: beyond a vague lament, a trace of anxiety so deep as to seem permanent, there was nothing left but the voice of the horse-girl, low, accented, filling his ears.

  The horse-girl was Scottish, and wanted him to ride with her the next day. He was meant, he thought, to accept: that was why the Wrights had called to invite him as soon as they’d heard that he was on the island. With an effort, he focused his attention on her. She was perhaps twenty-five, he thought, and projected a vague impression of wanting to fuck.

  He answered noncommittally, and then everyone was rising for dinner, Aunt Mary waiting for him to help her up. The Wrights’ house had been rebuilt in the fifties, entirely with materials and labor donated to Sarah’s husband by the Fall River Carpenters’ Guild, which he had defended pro bono during a spectacular series of strikes in the late forties. And although the guild had long ago been busted to pieces by Reagan, the Wrights had changed nothing in the house since it was built: they dined on a Wakefield table off Fiesta ware and Bakelite cutlery in front of the sliding doors to the green lawn that sloped down to kiss Menemsha Bay.

  Talk was political, in a way Dee was long familiar with from his father’s dinner table: it was as if these were people who had emerged from a long hibernation, woken for the first time in many years by the new administration. Washington was alive for them again. Jack Wright, next to Dee at the top of the table, whispered conspiratorially about Dee’s coming trial. Farther down the table he heard talk of Haiti, national health care, and affirmative action.

  And Dee’s mind fighting away from there, fighting for the quiet to piece together what had happened that summer, long ago, and why it now seemed so to matter.

  4.

  The last summer they had been together had been after his freshman year at Cornell. And then, it was as if she had disappeared. Or rather, not disappeared—three years younger than he, she had gone nowhere. Except from his consciousness, completely. As if, after his sophomore year, he had shed his identity.

  It had been a willing metamorphosis, encouraged by fear. In fact, Dee Dennis had nearly failed to go to college at all. Edward Treat Dennis had assumed his son would go to Dartmouth, but Dartmouth had turned Edward Treat Dennis’s only son down flat, an affront to the powerful alumnus taken only after very serious debate and, to the admission committee’s relief, justified by the same response from every other college in the Ivy League. The problem was, Dee Dennis had not been a good high school student—in fact, he had been a very poor one, devoting his last couple of years at Exeter exclusively to dealing eightballs and ounces of pot, disturbing the peace while under the influence, and being arrested for same at regular intervals, causing his father to scramble in his Rolodex time after time to fish his son out of his legal entanglements. He had been such a poor student, in fact, that for a moment there it had seemed that Dee was not to go to college at all. But at the last minute Dee’s uncle, a generous contributor to Cornell and an intimate of its president, had stepped forward, and that institution had decided to accept David Treat Dennis, Dee, on an informal probation.

  A wise decision, on a number of levels. Edward Treat Dennis was a fine friend for a university to have, and that friendship would serve Cornell well for years to come. As for Dee, during his sophomore year—by which time he had started having fun—it became evident that the university’s faith in him was to bear real fruit.

  Four years at Cornell led to a summa cum laude degree and early acceptance to Harvard Law School.

  So far, so good.

  This shit, he had found over four years in Ithaca, was not as difficult as he might have thought.

  He was allowed, for instance, to drink: wine at Lion Hall with the Quill and Dagger; or whiskey at a tailgate party; or anything the hell he wanted, and as much of it, at Rulloff’s in College Town. He was allowed to do drugs—everyone else who could afford to did. He was allowed, during all of these activities, to drive the factory-new Fiat with which his father had presented him after his first semester’s grades came in, an unimaginable incentive and a very effective bribe indeed. Most of all he was allowed, even encouraged, to have a great deal and a great variety of sex.

  Cornell was a moveable feast of body parts, belonging to all kinds of women from all over the world, and all of them, Dee realized to his shock, wanted, these first years out of their parents’ houses and out on their own, to have sex. A lot of sex, often and with a minimal involvement o
f time from their busy and competitive lives. There were tough and accomplished girls from Spence and Brearley and Andover and Rosemary Hall; there were girls from Chicago and San Francisco and Oklahoma City and Galveston, Texas, of whom every one had been among the smartest in their classes, and many also the most beautiful; there were quiet, dark, curious girls from Beirut and Jerusalem, there were practiced and open-eyed girls from Paris and Berlin and Milan. There were graduate students. There were assistant professors.

  In the article of seduction, therefore, Dee Dennis found himself gaining valuable experience, far beyond his clumsy encounter with Alley Rosenthal on Hancock Beach, and quickly. It helped that some of the more physical skills he had learned on the streets of Exeter and Portsmouth turned out to have a surprisingly legitimate use on the rugby team, of which he was the captain for his junior and senior years; it helped that his editorial by-line was soon an institution on the campus newspaper; it helped that when Al Gore came to Cornell, or Warren Christopher, or Sidney Ohlinger, they always brought love from Edward Treat Dennis, founding partner of Dennis and McReady and counsel to the Democratic National Committee, and those regards were usually delivered over dinner at the president’s house.

  All of this visibility, in the article of seduction, helped David Treat Dennis, Dee, and in time this article became naturally ascendant over his more childish and less complicated ways of altering his sensorium which, in the mid eighties, were gradually falling out of vogue anyway.

  When he’d come back to the island the summer after sophomore year, he’d been with Dory Kerrigan, and he was never on the beach or at the Ritz, where everyone went at night, because the Kerrigans took him sailing up to North Haven, Maine. And the next summer, and the summer after—perhaps he’d seen Alley once or twice, once walking in town, once at Paul Rosenthal’s memorial, but she had no longer seemed quite real but a memory of youth, a mythical experience, and sometimes he wasn’t even sure what had happened those nights on the beach. And he assumed that for her, too, he had passed out of memory and into myth. No longer a part of the real present, but of a past, vague, like a memory of a fall of light, or a season.

  Until the day he was told that he was to prosecute Ronald Rosenthal for the federal government, a prosecution on which depended his whole future, a prosecution he couldn’t lose, and then those nights far in his youth had come back, come crashing back.

  And then Dee Dennis saw that what he always had feared was true: nothing was ever forgotten, and no one was ever allowed to change.

  He should have known. But Cornell had been offered, and he’d accepted. And that seemingly endless suite of willing women had been offered, and he’d accepted. And Harvard had been offered, and the Walsh prosecutions had been offered, and the U.S. attorney’s office had been offered, and in full knowledge that it was an apprenticeship for his own entry into Democratic politics, consulting to the same people he was going to prosecute, he’d accepted, he’d accepted.

  And not until he found himself looking at Alley Rosenthal on the porch of the Up Island General Store did Dee Dennis finally admit that it was too late to pretend that it would all go away.

  When he could, under the disapproving stare of his aunt, he thanked the Wrights and left their house. For a time he was in the dark of his car. Then he felt a moment of cold rain on his face. And then, at last, he was standing at the open door of the Ritz, disregarding the doorman’s request for a one-dollar cover, making out, over the crowd, the figure of Allison Rosenthal, alone at the bar, watching her face, as he had so recently been watching his face, through the shelves of bottles in the mirror.

  And what was the right thing to do now? Poised before a decision that could well be irreversible, David Treat Dennis asked himself, what would his father tell him to do? But then, his father wouldn’t be in this position, would he? Real frustration was in Dee’s stomach now, and beyond it, a big-winged, swooping, real fear.

  But what was fear? Everyone he knew, Dee reminded himself, everyone he knew in his little world, was afraid, from his aunt Mary to the Scottish horse-girl he had just left at the Wrights’.

  There was no choice, so why be afraid?

  That’s what Dee thought as he entered the Ritz.

  “Life,” Joseph Brodsky once said, “is a game with many rules but no referee.”

  Small wonder, he went on, that so many people cheat.

  CHAPTER 4

  Labor Day Weekend, 1994.

  Oak Bluffs.

  1.

  At the Oyster Bar, through the picture window, Allison was able to see Martha in black stretch pants and a sleeveless silk shirt, standing with a group of perhaps seven people. Seen in silence from the fogged street, her animation seemed a performance, and as such, Allison could see, it was entirely carrying her audience.

  Changing her focus, she checked her translucent reflection in the window of the restaurant. Her sleeveless Donna Karan T-shirt was nearly indistinguishable, in this light, from the tan skin of her neck and shoulders. Her hair was up, a serpentine frame; her lips red, her eyes green.

  This was the first evening she had been out in two weeks, and Martha had had to argue hard to get her to do it. But she did not know any of the people Martha was talking to, so she entered the dry warmth of the room, filled with people, loud with conversation, beyond which sounded Tony Bennett and k. d. lang through four large speakers.

  Martha introduced her as Alley, no more, no less. Someone gave her a champagne flute, a black guy in Ralph Lauren, who then asked her what she did. For a moment she was unable to answer, unused to the sensations of the restaurant after her solitary weeks. Then she answered that she was in law school at NYU. No need to lie, so far.

  The black guy worked for Kennedy, someone else for Knopf. Someone else wrote for Conan O’Brien, someone else was at Miramax. None were paying their own way on the island. Each was intent on establishing that the dry spell was over. Allison drank champagne, ate a plate of oysters, drank more champagne.

  The restaurant’s tables were filling now, a late-season crowd, homeowners on-island for the last week, cleaning up after renters, closing up summer houses. She kept her back to the room as it filled and Martha, consciously or not, helped shield her, often standing close enough that Allison could feel the heat of her darkly tanned skin on her own. Like that, it was over the curve of Martha’s bare shoulder that she saw the short man enter and cross to the bar. And for a moment—far too early, she thought with regret—her evening faltered.

  He wore, now, khakis, black shoes, an ironed white shirt, and a jean jacket; perfect island evening wear, Allison noticed—only tourists came out at night in either very casual or very good clothes. And indeed, this man seemed at his ease as he stepped in, a curious and friendly expression on his face. He spoke with the hostess, then followed her in a casual walk to a table for one. Disregarding the seat she proffered, which gave the largest view of the restaurant, he rounded the table and took a chair that allowed him directly to face Allison.

  And yet, he wasn’t really looking at her, now, but at Martha, who had followed her friend’s gaze, turning casually to look over at the man. Allison felt her stiffen as she turned away again, quickly. She stood very close as they regarded each other, Alley raising an eyebrow in question. Martha whispered.

  “You seen him before?”

  Alley nodded. “He’s been following me around.”

  “You speak to him?”

  “I gave him the finger.”

  Martha nodded, serious. Then without any hesitation she cocked her head toward the door.

  And, a dozen oysters and a salad having composed their dinners, the two slipped out onto the street without good-byes.

  A deep sea fog was in over the town, a thick, muffling blind through which dripped, dropped, a desultory rain. Circuit Avenue was ghostly, deserted. Only the Ritz was alive, a yellow light leaking into the fog, spilling loud music unabashed into the empty town. Hugging themselves against the moist chill, the two women kept
silent until they were away from the line forming at the Oyster Bar’s door. Only then did Alley say:

  “Okay, let’s have it.”

  Martha did not look at her. “Have what, baby?”

  “Who was it?”

  A pause. Then, with a deep breath, she replied: “It’s not good, Alley girl. That’s Nicholson Dymitryck.”

  “Yeah? Who’s that?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” When Alley didn’t answer, Martha glanced at her. Allison was looking down as she walked, shaking her head no. “Christ sakes, Alley. It was Dymitryck who broke the story on your dad for the North American Review. ”

  “Very impressive. A reporter. So what?”

  “Dymitryck’s not just a reporter, Alley girl. No one knows more about the arms trade except, maybe, the buyers and sellers. Dymitryck’s the guy who was at Harlanstrasse 14. You with me?”

  Alley’s stomach was plummeting now. She knew about Harlanstrasse 14, the address of a brutal bombing in Munich, where a Turkish arms dealer had been killed during an interview, along with a cameraman. Dymitryck, the interviewer, had been the only survivor, and one of the scoops he had brought from the interview—exactly what the bombers, reputed to be Israeli, were supposed to have been trying to prevent—was that Ronald Rosenthal had been doing business in Bosnia. The Turkish dealer had been one of Rosenthal’s sources. But Martha was still talking.

  “I got a whole file on this guy. I wrote it for the Financial Times , and then again for the Observer , but neither of them would publish it. Know why? They didn’t believe it. Dymitryck’s bankrolled by Stan Diamond—you know him? Organic Communications? Old SDS guy turned software magnate? Dymitryck’s the one who documented the pipelines to the Haitian attachés and to the mujahideen.”

  Diamond. For a second, the name was familiar. But she was too busy being scared, suddenly, to pursue it. “Okay, okay. So what’s it mean that he’s here?”