The Gun Runner's Daughter

by Neil Gordon

  When her father returned, enraged, she told him never to allow that to happen again, and hushing her, aware of the attention they were getting, he’d agreed. But she’d suspected that all he’d done was ask the guards to change their clothes, and whenever her father or his work were in the news, she’d noticed that casually dressed Israeli-looking men in jeans and sports jackets happened to be discernible around her.

  A drunk getting taken out of a bar, that was one thing.

  But what kind of a threat did Nicky Dymitryck pose to be the victim of a murder?

  During the afternoon the clouds raced from the sky, replaced by a backdrop of pastel blue high above the gusty wind. A thin luminescence was over the sea, dappling the water with diamondine glints of light. The end of the season, Alley knew, and recognizing it, she turned from the window.

  Of course Dee had announced. Of course he had not recused himself. Dee would have heard the news of Nicky’s death by the time he arrived in New York. He would not have known what to do. He could not risk associating himself, and by extension her, with the media firestorm that was sure to erupt. With dread, she felt what he must have felt. Then he had announced. Of course. And now, if he were to try to leave the trial, it would draw enormous attention, enormous. And as she thought that, time—the summer, the strange feeling of early autumn—seemed to halt.

  When she could, she trained her mind again on the murder. Nicky had said he was not interested in her father’s arrest—not beyond knowing why he was lying down for it. What had he wanted? Something about Greg Eastbrook. Dimly, she brought her mind to the night before as best as she could. Then the memory came clean.

  He had actually tried to blackmail her. He had actually searched her house, found out about her deposit of the Ocean View rental checks, and tried to use that knowledge to make her tell him something about Greg Eastbrook.

  Now, pacing the living room, she thought with greater clarity than she had found all day. Colonel Eastbrook was running in the November midterm elections for a Senate seat in California. Like most people she knew, she had followed the campaign with interest. Eastbrook had been in the NSC during Iran-contra, and his campaign was modeled closely on North’s in Virginia.

  But what did Nicky think—what had Nicky thought—she could tell him about Eastbrook? Pauly, maybe: Pauly had been the political one, and he had known a lot about their father’s business. The thought stirred a memory in her, too vague to catch, and after a time she turned back to the computer screen and logged in to Bobcat, the NYU card catalog. The NAR was collected there, she saw: when she got back to New York she could go and look at it. Perhaps that would tell her something. Again, the memory, distant, tugged at her mind, and perhaps she might have found it had not the sound of a car skidding to a sandy halt in the carport caught the focus of her dizzied mind.

  It was Martha, come to spend the night. She’d closed her father’s house for the season and was delaying her return to New York to help Allison finish the Ocean View inventory and close the house. Then they’d go together down to the city, Martha to the Observer and Allison, a day late, for the beginning of her last year of law school. Theoretically.

  Watching Martha jump out of the car and hurry toward the house, her face a picture of worry, Allison doubted that would be happening.

  And it was only as she opened the door for Martha that she realized one last fact.

  Nicky had threatened her with prosecution for her embezzlement of the Ocean View rental money.

  God, what had she been thinking? So much had she enjoyed the pure bloody-mindedness of complicating life for the federal accountants, she had never even considered that someone might take it seriously as a crime.

  But of course they could. Nicky had seen it as a crime, and a prosecutable one.

  Did his death, now, save her from that?

  4.

  Coming inside like a burst of wind, dropping her bag on the couch, Martha was talking immediately, calmly but intensely, like a doctor during an emergency.

  “Alley girl, now, answer me a couple questions, then we’ll figure out what to do. Did you have any contact with Dymitryck?”

  “None.”

  Her friend peered at her through squinting eyes, but Alley, feeling her face grow as blank as an adolescent’s, held her ground. Relenting slightly then, but only slightly, Martha went on.

  “What happened with Dee?”

  Now a small shock pierced Allison as she realized that the revolutionary, cataclysmic events of the past few days were unknown to her friend. Quickly, before she could think, she answered:

  “Nothing, Marty.”

  This, however, Martha was unwilling, or unable, to swallow.

  “What? Didn’t you meet him after the Ritz?”

  “I saw him the next day. Out at Wasque. No one saw us.”

  “And?”

  Alley turned to the window, as if moved. “And I guess he had been drunk at the Ritz. He was sober enough not to say anything. Christ, Martha. What’s there to say?”

  “Well, how about your father’s name, doll? That’s enough to get him off the case, isn’t it?”

  Her back to her friend, she shrugged. “Marty, let’s be big girls, okay? My dad’s guilty.”

  “Yeah, right. Unlike about six dozen of his colleagues.” Deeply worried, biting her lip, Martha sat on the couch and Alley, turning, watched her friend as she thought.

  And in the pause, incongruously, she remembered how as children they’d sat for hours next to each other with their legs linked, swinging them in unison, thigh to thigh and calf to calf, utterly unconscious of their intimacy.

  Now there was a dark, full, complex woman before her, as beautiful as she could be in the intensity of her calculation. Her boyfriends, when she had them, were either casual or much older: few men of their age and circle interested her or, for that matter, could handle her. Allison thought of her sometimes as an olive: dark, foreign, too salty to keep eating but too irresistible to stop. Martha had been nearly estranged from her father since she’d told Clinton at a White House dinner that the only person in America fit to be president was Gore Vidal. Clinton, the way Martha told the story, had seemed rather to agree with her, but Ohlinger had turned beet-red—not a pretty sight—and later, in the privacy of their government car home, had more or less banished her from Washington, a family exile from which, she suspected, only a Republican victory in ’96 would rehabilitate her.

  But could she tell Martha about Dee? And could she tell her about Nicky?

  Before she could decide, Martha went on.

  “Everyone in Washington knows the FBI’s lying about the murder being a robbery. But this is the thing, Alley girl. Everyone thinks the killing was to stop him from testifying to House intelligence. They think it was probably the same people as set the bomb in Harlanstrasse. That means no one has connected him to you.”

  Alley nodded. “That’s good.”

  “Damn right it’s good, Alley. Otherwise you’d have six dozen reporters trampling what’s left of your damn lawn out there. Do you understand what’s at risk here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now look. They know he was on the island, big deal. His interest in your dad is public record. You didn’t have any contact with him. He was about to testify to the U.S. House of Representatives on the killing of an American citizen at Harlanstrasse 14. There’s the story. Fuck Martha’s Vineyard.”

  For a long moment, Alley thought. If Martha thought that’s why Nicky was killed, she was not going to argue.

  “If you say so.”

  Martha nodded. “I tell you what, though. I’m not leaving you for a second till this house of yours is closed and you’re back in the city. Something changes, you’ll need Governor Weld to get the national guard to protect you from the press out here. In New York, you can hide. Know who taught me that? Kathy Boudin. So let’s hop to it, doll. This fucking island’s starting to feel like Auschwitz to me, and we got arbeit that’ll macht us the fuck frei.
”

  5.

  Five o’clock. They had returned from Delmonico at three, the federal prosecution team tipsy, high with the success of their announcement conference. Back at the office, Shauna had given them the afternoon off, advising them to be at the breakfast conference the next morning sober, serious, and ready for the hardest work of their lives. Edelson and Callahan had taken off immediately, McCarthy a half hour later. But Dee had stayed in his office, standing by the window, smoking, staring out. It was time, Dee thought, to do some thinking.

  This he knew. Ronald Rosenthal had been arrested for papering a sale of post-Soviet weapons through Falcon subsidiaries in Europe. There were automatic machine guns, mines, grenades, and some small artillery. He’d transshipped through Turkey, joining the established Bosnian corridor there, shipped to Croatia, paid his percentage there, and trucked on to the Muslims.

  The sale was directly prosecutable in the United States. Justice had therefore caught up with him in Phoenix and kicked in the door of his hotel room to arrest and arraign him in federal court.

  So far so good.

  Now, Rosenthal had not been much intimidated by his arrest, to judge from Bob Stein’s attitude. He had grown up, Dee knew, in Brooklyn when Brooklyn was a scary place; put himself through Brooklyn College and then Yale Law on scholarships and his own work, and that was after running away at seventeen to join the Israeli army. To Rosenthal, his arrest was business as usual, and Dee’s experience tended to agree: white-collar prosecution was 99 percent selective, and the arms trade, after all, was the ultimate business of suits. Dee had seen it over and over again while he worked for Walsh: businessmen push the envelope, every now and again the Justice Department decides to set an example, lawyers make rain, assets are exchanged, and maybe, if the government’s feeling vindictive, the businessman serves a little minimum-security time in a salad-bar jail. That these particular businessmen brokered lethal armaments rather than, say, commodity futures or real estate did not alter the legal principle.

  So what was wrong? Murders had occurred in other investigations of this sort. Amiram Nir, John Tower, Robert Maxwell, Gerald Bull: suspicious accidental deaths and outright assassinations, Dee knew, were frequent backstories to this kind of investigation. That Israel was involved made it only more believable: “Nothing is implausible,” Dee remembered the CEO of an American military contractor saying to him, “for the Israelis.” Nor were only players killed: Danny Casolaro, Jonathan Moyle, Linda Frazier, all journalists, all dead. The murder itself was not the issue.

  The problem was that no one in government knew what Dee and Allison knew: that Dymitryck’s bruises did not come from his murder, but from his beating on the island by Rosenthal’s minions. And, therefore, no one knew that in fact his murder was much more likely to do with the Rosenthal affair than with Harlanstrasse 14.

  And that changed everything. It changed the issue not only of the murder, but of the entire Rosenthal prosecution.

  It put the whole thing into the arena of, say, the Inslaw affair, in which many respectable people claimed that Danny Casolaro, an investigative journalist, had been murdered while looking into the Justice Department’s role in the intelligence usage of the Promis computer databasing program. Israelis, Dee reminded himself, were involved in that, too.

  Shifting to the window again, Dee shook off the thought. Inslaw was that vast area of parapolitics, conspiracy theory, the Octopus: no one knew if—or rather, how much of—that stuff was true. What he had before him, however, were facts.

  First: Nicky Dymitryck had searched Rosenthal’s house, and had the shit kicked out of him for his efforts.

  Second: that had not stopped him from saving, as Dee had witnessed, both pictures and computer files taken from the house.

  What were they? There was no way to know. All he could know was, third, that in Ronald Rosenthal’s house, Dymitryck had found something that seriously upped the ante. Seriously enough to have him beaten up. Seriously enough, no matter what the papers reported or the Congress believed, to have him killed.

  For a long time, David Dennis’s mind skated over this terrain, unable to find purchase for the feeling of suspicion that animated it.

  Then, like a bolt shooting into its housing, he found what he was looking for.

  It was subtle, but it was true, and it could be expressed in two sentences.

  One: that in this trial being prosecuted in open courts, with full disclosure by the government to the press of their motives and evidence, Nicky Dymitryck had still seen fit to come snooping for material.

  Two: this short man from an obscure publication in Los Angeles, however, represented a threat worthy of Ronald Rosenthal’s having him killed.

  Conclusion? That there was something involved in this case that Dee Dennis was not being told.

  The waters of New York Harbor, far below, went out of focus in Dee Dennis’s eyes. And it was not until many minutes later that his eyes focused again.

  Alley had said she lived on Jane Street, above a bar called the Corner Bistro. With the first feeling of resolution he had felt since the night before, he decided that he must go there tomorrow night when—very late, he had no doubt—he got away from the office.

  6.

  Tuesday morning, in one marathon session, Allison and Martha finished the inventory: the living room furniture, the contents of the garage and carport. They packed Allison’s clothes and loaded the car, then went through the house one last time, Martha making sure never to leave Allison alone. Then, following Martha’s Land Cruiser, Alley piloted her father’s Cherokee for the last time up the road from Ocean View.

  Waiting for the ferry, they ate lobster at the Black Dog with two bottles of an ’82 Mouton Rothschild from Allison’s father’s cellar: even though she’d removed and buried next to the pond some of the finest brandies and ports, a fantastic cellar was being sacrificed to the federal government. Then they went, somewhat unsteadily, to load their cars.

  On the ferry Martha went off in search of beer while Allison, on deck, watched the houses of Vineyard Haven draw surely away into the nascent September light, heavy, saturated not only with color but with the annual pathos of leave-taking, of the end of the kind season.

  It was the twenty-seventh time she had taken part in this ceremony of loss.

  Only this time, she watched with none of the assurance that the cold lurking in the depth of the wind was transient, that the benign season would come again.

  And then she began, suddenly, to cry: alone on the cold metal of the ferry’s deck, just softly, just slightly, and just for a second. A child’s grief, at separation, at loss, at the steady, slow, and remorseless way that the water was carrying her away.

  Like Pauly had cried, a child, when, on the first day of their new school at St. Ann’s, Allison and he had been forced to separate into their separate crowd of sneakered and T-shirted strangers, Pauly bewildered and scared in his long, untucked white shirt and kipah, Allison curious and ashamed in her long woolen skirt ending above black pumps. Then, too, it had been an authority, implacable and undeniable, that was separating them. She cried only briefly, but in those two or three brief tears, everything was: Pauly, Ocean View, her mother, her grandparents—dogs and cats and toys and vistas and afternoons long gone, things and times that had not been visitable for years. Rarely were these things present to her so vividly; rarely was the great divide between her present and the time when Pauly was alive so vividly breached. But now, watching Vineyard Haven disappear into the blind of harbor light with all the broken promise of summer, was such a time, and she let the cold wind snatch one, two, three hot tears from under her eyes before, inhaling a great sniff, turning away.

  Late the night before, she had been woken by the telephone and, lifting it, heard the distant hum of long distance.

  Dee? Dee should know not to call her here, she had thought. Nonetheless, her hopes soaring, Allison listened, and after a series of clicks a voice came through, not Dee’s, she per
ceived slowly, but her father’s.

  “Esther, ma shlomech ? I’ve been calling you every day in New York. What are you doing on-island? Hasn’t school started?”

  Heart sinking, she forced herself to answer. “Tomorrow, Daddy. I needed to clean up. How are you?”

  “I’m okay, my darling. I’m okay. Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “The checks getting to you?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Good. This stupid charade of theirs. You taking heat, doll?”

  “No. A couple reporters. Bill Dykeman asked me not to come in.”

  “I’m not guilty of anything, my doll. Remember that.”

  Listening, she stared into the fire. Then she spoke without thinking.

  “Is that right? Then tell me something.”

  “Of course, my doll. What’s up?”

  She imagined him at Falcon’s Hamalekh Shaul office in Tel Aviv.

  “What’s up with this Nicky Dymitryck?”

  There was a long pause. Then he said, softly, “Who’s that, sweetheart.”

  It was a statement, not a question, and its message was to be quiet on the telephone. For a moment she struggled, trying to find a way to communicate around the possibility of a phone tap. Then, suddenly, she didn’t care.

  “Daddy, damn it, don’t be coy with me.”

  But the speed with which Rosenthal changed courses was typical.

  “Oh, him? He’s that little shithead works for that anti-Semitic rag out West.”

  “Daddy, the North American Review ’s editor is a Jew.”

  “Yeah, right.” Her father’s voice was careful now, filled with warning. “Doesn’t make him any less anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist, Essie.”