The Gun Runner's Daughter

by Neil Gordon

  “And she?”

  He paused. “She what?”

  “How’s she going to find out?”

  “From me, of course, Alley. I’m telling her about it on Tuesday morning.”

  The aggrieved tone in his voice was not lost on her. She just wasn’t sure she believed it. “You could have told her when she offered you the job.”

  His answer came readily. “I didn’t know it was your father when I came on. And even when I knew who it was, I still didn’t connect him with you.”

  Was that so? She squinted away out the window, as if truth existed at a distance in the warm rain. Yes, she thought, regretting the implied meaning of what he had just said—the little importance her memory held to him—it was probably so. Then she looked back.

  “I believe you. Now, what is it you want from me?”

  He answered, she noticed, immediately.

  “I want you to know I’m going to withdraw from the case.”

  She shrugged.

  “That’s up to you.”

  For a long moment there was silence, each turned away watching the dripping vista of sea. Finally, as if on cue, she looked at him as he turned to her and spoke in a tone new to their conversation.

  “I was so sorry about Paul.”

  She shrugged, and he watched her face softening. Encouraged, he went on.

  “I remember him well.”

  “Yeah.” A small smile from her.

  He said, carefully: “I should have spoken to you there.”

  “Oh . . . I don’t even remember the memorial.” Now she gathered herself into the car seat, pulling up her legs and wrapping them in her thin, strong, sunburnt arms. At least, he thought, she wasn’t being actively hostile now. Although when she spoke again, not looking at him, she was still cold.

  “Look. I was a child ten years ago. So were you. I understand your father’s . . . interest in this case. I understand your family dilemma. But let’s keep in mind, it doesn’t really have any standing with me. There’s some other Beltway insider with a dot-gov address waiting to take your place in a minute flat.”

  He answered, this time quickly. “Good. Then you’re all set.”

  “I didn’t ask your father to get involved in a Justice Department prosecution.”

  “And I didn’t ask your father to break the law.”

  Alley turned at this. “But someone else did ask him. You know that for a fact. The Clinton administration wanted those arms sold. Exactly like Reagan wanted to arm the contras.”

  “If he was directed, then he can prove it in court.”

  “No, Dee. He can’t prove it in court. You know damn well that he can’t prove it in court. That’s what makes your trial such a charade.”

  He shrugged. “Your father’s a businessman, Alley. If he can’t prove the legality of a transaction, he shouldn’t be involved.”

  “Wrong. You know who authorized him, and you know it can’t be proved. A lot of people do what my father does. Most of them were once in the fucking Defense Department.”

  Now Dee watched her seriously. So that’s what she thought, was it? That he was a pawn of an agenda? That was an impression that had to be corrected. He spoke coolly.

  “That a lot of people do it is why it’s so important we try these cases. I just spent five years fighting constitutional issues. This is a case with as serious, long-term consequences as the Walsh prosecutions. Oliver North was sanctioned by an administration. That doesn’t make what he did legal. An acquittal of Rosenthal declares open season on the Third World: arms sales wherever any political interest wants them. I’m sorry about your father. But this is a case that has to be made.”

  She watched him, wordless, for a moment. Then she nodded. “I hear you. But you know what I hear? Another turf battle over arms and money. You fight, my dad pays.”

  “Democracy is a turf fight. And I don’t work for the president.”

  She didn’t answer, and for a time, in the cab, the rain falling harder against the window, he watched her. He didn’t want to argue law with her. He didn’t want her like this. He wanted her the way she was when he spoke about her brother. He said:

  “I wanted you to know that I was leaving the case. That’s all. Now I’ll go if you want me to.”

  6.

  And suddenly, bitterly, she did not want him to go.

  This witness from the time when Ocean View was the house next to the sea on the magic island, sheltered by scrub pine, always under the sun. In the intimate interior of the car under dripping rain, she did not want him to go. She wanted him to stay.

  She could smell him, the fresh of the rain and a clean, slightly scented soap. It scared her, how healing it felt to be with this man, this man with whom she had been naked when she was a child. But it did not surprise her.

  And he? Appraisingly, she watched him before his open door, ready to enter the rain. The papers were desperate for copy about the trial. Not a soul would resist the story of his withdrawal from a Federal case due to a childhood romance with sexy Allison Rosenthal. The publicity could ruin his career. What would he do? What did lawyers like that do? Take up probate and divorce law? Not the future as a brilliant jurist Ed Dennis had in mind for his son. Grudgingly, she admitted that he, too, was losing everything.

  For a long fugue of moments she listened to the patter of the rain on the car top, watched the vista of sodden beach. Then she slammed her door and started the car. “Dee. Just sit down.”

  Now he hefted his weight back into the seat, and looked at her. She spoke immediately.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I’m sorry this happened to you. Let’s go have a drink.”

  “Where?” He did not sound surprised.

  “My house.”

  He thought for a moment. Then said, as if in conclusion: “Drop me off round the point. I’ll walk back to my car and take the next ferry after you.”

  This slim, slight girl who had sat next to him in the car, with her hair loose around her face, her body hidden under a loose T-shirt and jeans. In the intimacy of the car, her need had been palpable to him. She was losing everything.

  Driving fifteen minutes behind Allison along the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road, Dee Dennis hung poised perfectly in understanding of her, as if she were an image in a mirror before him.

  She was waiting for him at the top of Ocean View Road. Then he saw her Cherokee take off again as he approached, skidding in the sandy road. They passed no one on the chase down, and at the small carport outside her house they parked side by side. By the time he had opened his door, she was running through the rain down a flagstone path into the house.

  Inside, the rain was fat drops blowing across the burnt grass to slap against the windowpanes. Beyond her frame of vision, he saw from his tallness the lawn pulsing in the ominous darkening of the day; the vista of cattails and hay field nodding in the gusts of wind. For a time, together, they watched. Then she spoke without turning. “Do you know that a year ago Clinton was considering staying here?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it.”

  He found himself, suddenly, unwilling to look at her, afraid—from the tone of her voice, from the need in her voice—what he might see.

  “May I have a drink?”

  She answered by motioning with her head. He followed her gesture, and saw a small canvas, a still life hanging over a hutch containing bottles and flowers. With a slight shock, he recognized the painting: this was Rosenthal’s famous Soutine. He stepped over to pour two scotches in small crystal glasses. Then he carried Alley’s to her and looked full at her.

  The soft storm light on her skin. The corners of her mouth red at the edges, her expression alive with invitation. Her hand trembled slightly at the end of her bare arm as she took the drink. Then, sipping thirstily, she looked up at him, her green eyes so alive as to make shimmer the light in them. And a decision was made for Dee. When she removed the glass he leaned down to kiss her, tasted scotch and felt cold in the skin of her
lips, a damp cold he had felt years before, years before. He straightened and directly, she turned away, hugging herself tightly.

  7.

  She hugged herself tighter, looking away over the land, at the cattails nodding in the ocean wind, at the hay field stretching pure gold under the long, threatening light. Then she felt his hands on her shoulders, the warmth of his body, chest, stomach, and groin, against her back.

  Could this be happening? she asked herself again, her back to him, her face to the storm, interrogating the wave of cattails, the rising ocean swell. Could this be happening? His hands came farther down her arms, whose skin she felt hardening against the warmth of his fingers. Still hugging herself, she turned and lifted her face, decided on nothing.

  But a longing so pure was through her. Through and through her, like an ache, from her ears to her eyes to the full surface of her skin: all the parts of her body that perceived, suddenly, felt; and then all the parts that permitted to live too—her heart, her lungs—were pierced.

  Against the roar of the surf. She pushed him away, watched him for a moment, then took him by the hand and led him through the living room. The shade of the falling light. The wooden stairway into the heart of the empty house with all its old, familial smell. Gone was the silence, gone was the desertion, and she looked into Pauly’s room as if he were there, on his bed, lying with his head between his Boston Acoustics and listening to David Byrne. When she turned to Dee, in her room, that look was on his face, the look of fathomless tenderness, and a flush went clean through her. And then she was in the dry scent of his body, in the airiness of his clean hair, in the beat of his heart and the heat of his skin.

  It was like coming home. It was like filling the aching emptiness she had felt from her earliest youth, for her mother, for her father, for her brother. She had tried before, plugging men into the hollow heart of that longing. One or two had fit, for a while, if she worked hard enough at it. And now that hollow heart filled, not with family but in solitude, one person, this person, it filled and in those moments Allison Rosenthal, Esther, felt herself whole.

  CHAPTER 5

  September 4, 1994.

  Ocean View Farm.

  1.

  There is an unspeakable pathos to a summer house, and it is hardest to avoid by dawn.

  It lay across Ocean View Farm, when Allison awoke in her childhood bed, like a spell.

  In the sodden light leaking into the little room where Pauly had played with his ancient set of wooden trains, still packed in their wicker basket in the closet.

  In the still air of her father’s study, where a fine layer of dust lay on the surface of the Stickley desk.

  Every window, holding a vista of horse pasture and wind-stunted field, filled with the drizzling dawn of receding storm.

  A framed composition, saturated with meaning, illustrating loss.

  Allison woke to the neurotic clucking of guinea fowl greeting the dawn. For a moment her body tried to find its way back into sleep. Then Dee shifted beside her, and sleep fled. Like this she rested for a while, eyes wide. Then, gingerly, she climbed over him, naked, briefly straddling his big sleeping form, and picked up her nightdress as she left the room.

  Downstairs, through the big picture windows, the rain had all but stopped and the high sky was filled with fleeing clouds beyond which showed, every now and again, a glimpse of high, anonymous blue. A big, wet wind filled the air, rocking the trees, blowing the hammock on the porch, and for an eerie second, a flash, she saw Pauly lying there, swinging away a long dappled afternoon of shade, beside their swimsuited mother.

  For a long time she sat, arms around knees, in the living room, watching over the lawn, to the sky still swimming with the spectacular business of the storm’s lull.

  Then, with a quickening heart, she heard Dee’s foot on the floor above.

  He came down barefoot, in his jeans, his white shirttails hanging out. His blond hair was messy with sleep, and when he approached she smelled on him, faintly, the rain from the day before. Wordless, she let him fold her against his chest, against the rough of his shirt. And for a moment, in the still morning, the pathos of the scene receded. Then she felt him tense, and reluctantly she stepped back.

  “Alley. I got to be home before my aunt wakes.”

  “Okay.”

  He stood, at a loss. And she said:

  “I understand. Go now.”

  “May I come back later?”

  “I’ll be home after lunch.”

  “I’ll be here after lunch.”

  Then he was gone.

  2.

  Dee drove the wet, sandy road up to the highway carefully, afraid suddenly of getting stuck: this was not a place he wanted to have to call for a tow. In Vineyard Haven, only the breakfast joints on Main Street were open, fishermen coming out in boots, smoking, heading for their cars: after the storm, the seas would be far too high to go out today. Billy Poole saw him passing and waved, grinning in reference to the Sunday morning dawn run home. At home, he idled the car into the garage, then slipped in the screen door, careful not to let it bang.

  But he needn’t have bothered. As he entered, the telephone began to ring, and when he answered it the familiar voice of Shauna’s secretary came to him, uncannily, as if from another life. The prosecution team had been leaked, she told him, to Stephen Labaton at the Times. McCarthy had talked him into holding his scoop until the following afternoon, but that meant the press conference had been moved up: ten o’clock, Monday morning. He had to be in for makeup—he would be announcing on-camera—at seven.

  “She says you got to be here if you have to swim, Mr. Dennis.”

  “I might have to.” No sooner had Dee hung up than his father called. Senator Kennedy’s office had secured him an emergency reservation on the first ferry after the seas calmed, which would probably be that evening.

  Dee hung up again, calculating.

  An early-evening ferry would allow him to get to New York by midnight.

  He’d call Shauna from the road and ask her if he could come to her house that night.

  By the morning, he thought as his heart quickened, it would all be over.

  At Ocean View, Allison Rosenthal, dressed now in her bicycle clothes and sitting with a cup of coffee at the big dining room table, had just dialed her father’s lawyer’s home on Long Island. There was a pause, which she spent fingering the keys on her PowerBook.

  “Bob? Alley Rosenthal here.”

  Stein’s booming voice was so loud that it could be heard in the room. Bob was, Allison thought, trying to smooth over their fight, and her apology, with his loud friendliness.

  “Alley girl! How are you, honey?”

  “I’m fine, Bob. You?”

  “Fine, doll. Margey was just talking about you. You in the city?”

  “No, I’m on island still.”

  “Well, when you get back down we want to see you. What’s up?”

  “Bob, who’s Nicholson Dymitryck?”

  His reaction was immediate.

  “Dymitryck? What’s up with him?”

  After the briefest of pauses, Alley answered: “Uh, Sally at Dole Realty told me he was poking around, asking questions. She handles—used to handle—the rentals.”

  “He spoken to you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Tried?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” But Stein still sounded nervous. “Look, honey, keep away from him. Okay?”

  “Okay, but what’s he want?”

  “Oh, God, who knows? Come on, doll, it’s hardly the first time a reporter’s been after you. I promise you, we’ll get rid of him.”

  Grimacing, she spoke. “Please do, Bob. He scares me.”

  She listened to Stein’s assurances and, the moment he was done talking, hung up.

  Standing, stretching, she thought: that should do for Nicholson Dymitryck. Bob was probably speaking to her father already, and her father would have Falcon security kick Dymitryck of
f-island by lunch.

  She could not afford him seeing Dee.

  She bent over the desk and wrote a quick note in case Martha came over. She stepped out of the house, locked the door, and put the key under a flagstone. Then she walked to her bicycle, donning her helmet as she went. When was the earliest Dee could be back? Not, she thought, before eleven. She could go up to Menemsha for breakfast, then take the ferry, loop up through Gay Head, and be back home by then. She taped the note to the shingled wall of the carport, and in moments was pumping up the road, in the still slightly dripping air, leaving Ocean View Farm in peace.

  It’s no surprise, perhaps, that on this unusually fast-paced Sunday morning, it was not a peace that lasted long.

  Nor should it be a surprise that the man who broke it, approaching the house over the dunes from the beach, in a gray raincoat, walking carefully, then stooping to reach the key out from under the flagstone, opening the door and replacing the key, was Nicholson Dymitryck of the North American Review.

  3.

  Inside the house, the temperature fell several degrees, but smells of occupation—a wood fire, perfume—lingered faintly in the chill air. Dymitryck entered and crossed the room silently, seeming to put his weight on the balls of his feet, ear cocked to the cavernous silence under the high ceilings. To his left was the liquor cabinet, above which hung a still life of flowers and wine on a white-clothed table. This he examined with some attention; particularly the lower right-hand corner of the small canvas, holding the signature. Soutine. The painting that Rosenthal had bought for some astronomical sum at Christie’s right after Iran-contra, boasting to the press that he’d paid for it with a check drawn on the Bank of Teheran. Satisfied with his identification, he turned, and slowly regarded the room in a long arc.

  The kilim was, of course, authentic, its dyes rich and weave nearly saturnine with age. On such walls as this open room possessed, there were bookshelves, save the wall that held a white-brick chimney and a massive open fireplace. The furniture was low, leather and chrome Eames and Saarinen, and the dining room table was clearly a Greene and Greene.