by Neil Gordon
“What should I ask Peleg?”
It worked. Without pause, the boy said: “Ask him to show you a video he made of Greg Eastbrook and Ronald Rosenthal in Brooklyn.”
“Okay. Will you call me again?”
A slight, humorless laugh. “I doubt it.”
And then the line went dead, but only for the second it took for Nicky to dial Air France.
4.
Dov Peleg met him at a restaurant on the Place Balard toward three on a Sunday morning. That was a good choice, Nicky thought, as he crossed the deserted intersection toward the restaurant: there was not another soul in this obscure southwestern corner of the city, and had there been, he or she would have been clearly visible. The restaurant was equally deserted: it was open only for the truckers who would soon arrive for the greenmarket on the square, but it was still too early for them. Nicky waited for a few moments over a drink. Then Peleg came in.
He was scared, bitter, and drunk. He stood a few inches taller than Nicky in old jeans and a wrinkled, ill-smelling polyester shirt. The hair over his nearly spherical head was thin and greasy in a way that bespoke not only a lack of cleanliness, but also ill health. But he was also clearly a practiced agent of some intelligence arm. He searched Nicky, quickly and cleanly, in the bathroom, then examined his tape recorder. Satisfied, he led him back to the bar and they began to talk.
Peleg was a former Israeli intelligence technician. He had been ousted in the fallout surrounding Iran-contra. He could not return to his country. He hated Paris. If he was to help Nicky, Nicky would have to pay, very handsomely, and help him leave the country. Nicky explained that his resources were very large. But he needed something very difficult. At last, Peleg turned his yellowing, bloodshot eyes to his interlocutor.
“What do you need, friend?”
“I’m told you worked for Israeli intelligence in the eighties.”
With no acknowledgment, the other waited.
“I’m told you videotaped a meeting between Rosenthal and Greg Eastbrook in Brooklyn.”
Again, no response.
“I want that videotape.”
Now the other nodded. He didn’t have the tape. But he could tell Nicky where to get it. His price was a ticket to Australia and ten thousand dollars. For a time they haggled, while the restaurant began to fill with the drivers of the trucks slowly filling the square, outside, in the dim morning light. In time they agreed that Peleg would tell him what was on the tape for the ticket and two thousand dollars. On the spot, Nicky paid him cash—a portion of the funds that had been wired from Diamond’s Organic Communications account to Paris that morning: he was not allowing the time for any assassinations. And then Peleg began to talk, leaning close, whispering.
“There was me, Bennie Friedman. Ron’s daughter, Esther, came in for a moment. She saw the whole thing. Ach, that girl. I used to think I’d marry her when she grew up. Beautiful, these eyes like nothing I’ve ever seen.” Peleg’s eyes unfocused, and he fell into silence.
“So I have to find Rosenthal’s daughter?”
“Hey?” For a moment, the other looked lost. Then: “Oh no. She won’t help you. She’s Daddy’s girl. No, what you want is to find the son.”
And now he leaned across the table, breathing his breath of sour wine into Nicky’s face, and lowered his voice. “Listen to this, okay? No one knows this but me. The son was there too.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Eastbrook’s security checked the doors, the street, and scanned for bugs. But they never checked for a fourteen-year-old boy coming in through the maid’s door from the kitchen. Why should they? The meeting was as dangerous for Ron as it was for their boss. They assumed he had secured the rest of the house. Remember, no one ever gave Greg Eastbrook high marks for competence, right? And in the middle of the fucking meeting, this kid in pajamas walks in, half asleep.”
“What’d they do?”
“Oh, well. They laughed. Ron took the boy out, and they went on. But I was watching, and I know that boy. He is sly, just like his father. He knew what he had seen.”
“Why should he tell me?”
A pause. “You’re not Jewish, are you?”
“No.”
“Then you won’t understand. Trust me. You find him, you play him, you can make him do anything you want, so long as it hurts his father.”
“Why does he want to hurt his father?”
“To avoid going to the army.”
“The army? People like the Rosenthals don’t go to the army, Mr. Peleg.”
“Not in America. I mean Israel.” At Nicky’s silence, he went on. “I told you you wouldn’t understand. Just find the boy. If he can’t get the tape, he can testify about what he saw. No one’ll believe an alcoholic Israeli spy. But they’ll believe him.”
“Where do I find him?”
“What month is this? June? Go to Martha’s Vineyard. Ocean View Farm. Go soon.”
At the door, Nicky asked suddenly:
“This kid, Rosenthal’s son. He has what color eyes?”
“Like his sister. Green as a field in spring.”
“Mr. Peleg. He was the one who sent me to you.”
“Was he?” The Israeli was clearly anxious to leave. Had he, Nicky wondered, recognized someone in the now crowded restaurant? “That doesn’t surprise me. The kid’s fighting for his life. His father has his way, he’ll spend three years on the Golan. He’s a lefty, he’s queer, and he hates his father. When you see him, tell him I did my best. But if he really wants to help, he’s going to have to do it himself.”
It turned out the Place Balard wasn’t as good a choice as one might have thought. Nicky returned to America safely. But Peleg, that same afternoon, died in a car accident on the way to Charles de Gaulle Airport to catch a plane to Australia.
And, it turned out, Nicky had not been fast enough. Two days later, in late June of 1992, Nicky Dymitryck arrived on the little island-hopper to Martha’s Vineyard only to read, in a copy of the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette that he found at the airport, the headline “Suicide at Gay Head” and the story that Paul Rosenthal, son of one of the island’s wealthiest residents, depressed at his recent diagnosis as HIV-positive, had shot himself in the chest and fallen from the cliffs at Gay Head to die, as Allison would later write in a poem, under some brilliant sky, in the sea moving like eels.
Summer 1992. Nicky left Martha’s Vineyard without trying to contact the Rosenthals. He knew there was no point. Back in Los Angeles, he locked the Peleg interview in the office safe, with another copy at his father’s Malibu house, where he’d lived since the dissolution of his engagement. Nothing in the interview could be substantiated, and without substantiation, it was only color. Besides, Eastbrook had just announced his bid for the Senate in a joint conference with Oliver North, and there was, for the NAR , serious work to do.
So it was not until two years later, in the summer of 1994, when Stan Diamond rented a summer house on South Beach in Martha’s Vineyard, that Nicky thought about Allison Rosenthal again.
5.
At first, the coincidence seemed too much. Stan had just come back from Martha’s Vineyard, where he’d rented, for the following summer, a magnificent property on the southern coast of the island, paying a $5,000 deposit on a total of $47,000 for a three-month rental. He’d received a lease, which was due back in mid August. Stan had signed the lease and written a check. And only after mailing them back had he connected his landlord with the man in the newspapers.
Sitting in Jay Cohen’s office, holding Stan Diamond’s lease and canceled deposit check, Nicky considered. The property was under notice of a federal seizure, to be executed in a matter of weeks. Renting the property was clearly illegal, but more than that, it was impossible: Ronald Rosenthal was known to have absconded to Israel. Clearly, the signature on the lease was a forgery. Clearly, the intention of completing the rental was embezzlement.
His first question to Stan had been whether he was willing to
execute the lease and send in, as required, the balance of one-half of the rental amount. It was a long shot, Nicky explained, but he might be providing a valuable lever against Ron Rosenthal, whom Nicky knew to be in possession of damning evidence about Greg Eastbrook. That he conveniently left out the fact that the only person the leverage could in fact be against was Rosenthal’s daughter, who was capable of testifying to Rosenthal’s interaction with Eastbrook—if not actually providing a video of it—was because he doubted Stan would have the stomach for that. In any case, Stan agreed. The signed lease and check were sent, overnight mail.
Nicky waited as long as he could, until just before Labor Day weekend. That allowed whoever had forged the signature on the lease two weeks to deposit the check. Then he left: he was under subpoena to testify in Washington about the Harlanstrasse bombing, which, two years after the fact, the House Intelligence Committee was finally looking into. That left him only a few days on the island.
More important, Eastbrook was, by that August, three points ahead in the polls, and the election was only two months away.
This was, Nicky knew, a pretty long shot. But it was more than likely his last shot, so he could not afford to let it go.
And he was right. On Martha’s Vineyard, his suspicions were confirmed, three times. First when he found proof of the forged endorsement of rental checks. Second when he was beaten up.
Things became more complex when he met Rosenthal’s daughter, a strange and impressive woman, graceful and courageous as the world around her came tumbling down. He liked her immediately—as much, he thought, as he had ever liked anyone. Adding to her misery was not an easy thing. But he reminded himself that at stake was an imperative: nothing was sacred if it might help keep Greg Eastbrook out of office, and he made his pitch.
The third proof was the most categorical: that at last, after all these years of work, he had gotten close enough to Eastbrook to scare him.
That was when, in a bathroom at Logan Airport, en route to Washington during Labor Day weekend, a thin, tall man slipped behind him at the urinal and spun him around by the hips, as if they were dancing. And as he turned he felt a sensation that could only be a blade cutting flesh, and then he was being pulled off his feet, his whole body weight on the blade moving cruelly upward through his abdomen, and his arms were around the man’s neck, and the smell of the man’s evil breath was in his nose, and then he was falling, falling, while the blood of his body drained onto the tiled floor, and his consciousness fled without even the chance to appreciate how right, how perfectly right he had been all along.
6.
That night, the night before Labor Day, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, at one in the morning, Harry Essex was putting on his coat.
It was the first time he had done so in over thirty hours: during the Labor Day weekend festivities he had performed emergency operations on no fewer that five gunshot victims. When a bleeder had been announced by EMS, he had just finished changing out of scrubs for the first time in two days, and was about to head back to his home in Newton. The bleeder, he told himself as he listened to the EMS radio, hadn’t a prayer anyway: his intern could call the code and look into organ donation.
Still, before leaving, he hesitated. It was a moment during which a choice was made as to whether Nicky would live or die: no one else in the hospital, this night, could have saved him. Perhaps Dr. Essex knew that. And perhaps it was why, when he emerged from his fugue of thought, he removed his jacket and called for scrubs again.
Before the bleeder arrived Dr. Essex was already in the operating room, having his gloves put on while the rest of the team assembled. As the nurse worked on his gloves, he began to speak in the calm and certain tone of a professor addressing a classroom.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are waiting on a thirty-five-year-old white male stabbing victim, one hundred and thirty pounds. He was stabbed in the lower left quadrant with an unknown blade. The EMS team reports a definite arterial bleed, and a very grave degree of blood loss. Dr. Armstrong, what will we be looking for?”
A young black woman spoke, gloved hands held up as her facial mask was tied. “Besides the bleed, sir, we’ll want to look straight to the spleen, the lungs, and the other hollow viscera, depending on the nature and shape of the wound.”
“Good. Dr. Thomas, what will we be preparing for?”
“We’ll be ready to crack the chest cavity and clamp the aorta, while transfusing aggressively. Additionally, we’ll scrub for an emergent splenectomy. Given the EMS report, sir, we’ve already notified organ donation of a likely candidate, and they are contacting his next of kin.”
“Okay.” Clearly, Dr. Essex’s control over his operating theater was entire, and clearly this control was very much one offered by his respectful staff, rather than demanded by his authority. But before he could go on, the door was opening as the patient was brought in, the EMS technician squatting on the gurney while still keeping his hand, deep within Nicky’s stomach, pinching off the arterial bleed.
As for Nicky, he appeared to be, rather than dead, in the grip of exhaustion—hopeless, painful—old far beyond his years, his eyes clenched in a frown, his face tightened as if in concentration. He was, of course, perfectly unconscious, probably already comatose. Still, when they transferred him to the operating table, it seemed as if the many machines and monitors connected to him were, rather than sustaining him, only remaining on-line by his massive effort, so massive that in his gray face the skin at the end of his lips, around his nose, and at his temples was strangely, entirely, bloodless.
Before Dr. Essex’s eyes, now, Nicky was moved to the operating table. Some of the team connected him to a variety of machines, drips, and transfusions; others, monitoring the machines, began to call out vital signs; and still others began cutting away his shirt, spongy with scarlet blood. For a long moment, the doctor stood, his gloved hands held fingers-up before him, apparently lost in thought. Then, from the table, a voice called:
“Sir, I think we should notify organ donor stat. This patient will not survive a chest crack.”
“By all means.” Nearly absently, Dr. Essex spoke as he approached the table. “By all means. Now, young man”—speaking to the EMS technician—”I want you to keep your fingers on that bleed. Very well done, very well. Dr. Armstrong, I agree with you. We cannot open the chest. But we can try something else. I want a lateral cut from the center of the wound. Be careful of this young man’s fingers. Dr. Thomas, I want you to prepare to clamp the mesenteric artery by feel above this young man’s hand. Then I’ll suture the bleed blind from the abdominal opening. It might work. We’ll move from there directly to a splenectomy, I have little doubt. Young man, was your hand sterile? No? Well, let’s give cefoxitin, two grams IV stat . . .”
The operation lasted four hours. And then, still not satisfied, Dr. Essex accompanied his bleeder to the recovery room, where he asked for some dinner, and then settled in for the rest of the night. Becoming, by the morning, the man who had saved Nicholson Jefferson Dymitryck’s life no fewer than four times.
He would do so again four times before, in early evening, East Coast time, Jay Cohen arrived at the hospital, having taken Stan Diamond’s Gulfstream from its berth at LAX.
7.
At five-thirty on the morning of September 9, Nicky awoke again in his hospital bed, hearing his voice, his dull, drugged voice saying things he never would have said to anybody, anybody. The room was dark, and for a long time he lay, saying unutterable things, as if emptying his soul in a vast paroxysm of all that had been secret, had been kept secret, all of his life. Then a nurse was there, inserting a syringe into the tube in his arm, and then she was gone, on a cresting wave of morphine, and once again, before the eyes of Nicky Dymitryck, all was black.
A night. And then a day.
This time, when he awoke, it was slowly.
Consciousness came before vision, a slow dream about darkness.
There were thoughts, but they were
preverbal: sensations of time, of memory. As if there were, floating before him, out of reach and entirely without words, an idea of identity that, although he felt it to be assured, would not, could not pronounce itself. For a long time he lay in this weightless space, free of all past, free of future, trying to reassemble his awareness, fractured by massive bodily injury and then by wave after wave of cruelly numbing drugs.
Finally, as if far above, the rouge light of his lids pierced through the channel of his optic nerve into his awareness, and with it a sensation of pain; and then, as if rising from the bottom of a deep canyon of water, his identity returned.
He was in a white room next to a black window, unlighted save for the red glow of a readout next to his head. For a long time he watched that glow. Then, moving only his eyes, he let his gaze wander over the ceiling, the window, the chair in the corner, and the mass of instruments around him. And only then did his eye fall on the person standing next to the open window, leaning out. It was Jay Cohen.
Slowly the room assembled itself: a space of low fluorescent lights, a monitor beeping, the smell of antiseptic in the air mixing with the smoke from the cigarette Jay was trying to keep out the window. For a long time, he gazed up at Jay, his familiar face with its Coke-bottle glasses under his ring of black hair around a bald scalp, and at the sight, a wave of peace seemed to pour down the IV into his arm. His throat hurt when he spoke:
“Since when you smoke?”
Jay started, flipped his cigarette out the window, and turned. “Since the late fifties.”
“Thought you quit.”
“Well, I started again, so shut the fuck up.”
A pause while Jay shut the window and came to sit next to the bed, and Nicky noticed now a massive peace through his body, a relaxation so thorough, so total, that it seemed all his pain, all his days of pain and fear, had been concentrated into the ache in his throat. He wondered if he had ever felt this way before. Perhaps, he thought, in the womb.
