by Neil Gordon
“Jay?”
“Yes, Nicky.”
“Tell me what happened.”
An immediate response, in a curious tone, as if asking for information. “Don’t you remember?”
Looking away to the black window, Nicky considered.
“I do remember. I was stabbed at the airport. I mean after that.”
Jay hesitated, then spoke in a neutral voice. “You had an arterial bleed and a ruptured spleen. A sharp goddamn EMS worker held the artery closed all the way to the hospital, and your doctor improvised a procedure to save you.”
Staring at his boss, Nicky asked: “How close was it?”
“You were coded eight times. I was here for the last one.”
“Jesus.”
“You said it.”
For a moment they regarded each other in wonder. Then Jay said:
“How you feel?”
“Like I been stabbed and coded eight times.”
“Good, boy. You just relax now.”
But Jay, Nicky saw, did not want anyone to relax—Jay wanted to talk. He rose, fetched a pint of scotch from his jacket, drank, and sat again. For a long time there was silence, the weight of Nicky’s near death between them. Finally, Jay:
“Does she know?”
“Who?”
“The Rosenthal girl.”
“About what?”
“What you’re up to.”
“To a degree. She knows I know about the embezzlement. She knows I want her to tell me about Greg Eastbrook.”
“What’s the story, you think?”
“She’s scamming money off her father’s properties. Did they find my things?”
“Uh-huh. The hospital had put them away, so I got them before the FBI. The film’s at a lab, and the computer disk’s in my pocket.”
“Yeah.” For a moment, Nicky struggled to remember, fighting against the somniferous effect of the pain killer. Then: “The film has images of endorsed checks from renters. The disk has an Excel spreadsheet tracking the income from rentals. Oh, yeah: the film also has a sheet of practice signatures, if they came out. I was right. The girl’s forging her father’s endorsement. When Stan’s cancelled check comes back, we can prove the forgery.”
Jay nodded. “We got her.”
“Uh-hmm.”
But Jay was racing ahead.
“Man, it’s gonna be fun telling Rosenthal that. Nicky, when you get out of this bed, I’m going to kick your ass, then fire you. You hear me? But until then, I got to admit, this was sweet work.”
Nicky paused at the praise, vaguely aware that once it would have meant a lot to him. Much of what he had done in his career, he knew, was designed to win praise from just this source. Now it seemed immaterial, an unnecessary delay in the conversation. “What’s the plan?”
“Threaten to inform the State Attorney in Massachusetts. Gillian Morreale’ll do it out of Stockyard, Dyson. Let Rosenthal know that we can put his daughter in jail. Then let him know what we’re looking for, and how he can make us go away.”
“Good. I’m doing it.”
Now Jay smiled. “Uh-uh. I haven’t told you the whole story. You’re dead.”
Nicky considered this for a moment, as if it might really be true. Then he spoke with the almost petulant defensiveness of the very ill.
“No I’m not.”
“Oh, but you are. Check it out. The FBI thinks this whole thing’s about the Harlanstrasse bombing, right? So I tell them, the only way to protect you is to announce to the media that you died under the knife. They say, no way, so I mention that the second you open your eyes we’re giving a press conference to say that they wouldn’t give you federal marshals although we warned them of the danger. So we announced that you’d died. Your obit was a few days ago. Made you sound kind of like an asshole, by the way.”
Staring up, Nicky nodded hesitantly, as if still unsure that it wasn’t true.
“You’re shitting me.”
“No, friend. I’m serious. You’re a dead man.”
“All right.” For a moment, he absorbed the news. Then: “Now what?”
“Now we get your ass into a bed out West, thanks to Stan’s Gulfstream sitting out at Logan, and then you sit tight while I go find Rosenthal and get this sorted out. You with me? You show your fine self anywhere and sure as the sun’s coming up tomorrow, you’re a dead man.”
“No.” Without any hesitation, Nicky emerged from the thought into which he’d descended while Jay spoke. “No way. What happens now is you get Stan to file suit. You need a month for that anyway. When you’re ready, I go east and find Allison.”
“Nicky . . .”
“Jay, don’t fuck with me. It’s that or nothing. I swear to you, I’ll check myself out of this fucking place the second I can walk and go straight to New York.”
“Okay. Okay.” Jay rose and crossed back to the open window to light a cigarette. “You want some of this?”
“Yes.”
So he crossed back and gave the lighted cigarette to Nicky, who drew hungrily. While his mind swirled with the nicotine, he asked:
“Think it’s gonna work?”
“What?”
“Pressuring Rosenthal.”
“I don’t know.” Jay allowed Nicky a last drag on the cigarette, then tossed it out the window. Nicky went on.
“I mean, he’s only a criminal to us, right? These guys, this isn’t crime to them, it’s a religion, right? It looks like illegal arms dealing to us, to them it’s Zionism.”
Jay considered that.
“I don’t believe that. Rosenthal’s a businessman, not an idealist. The survival-of-Israel argument hasn’t had any merit in years. It meant something once, but it still never covered half of what these guys have done. In fact, I’d go further: in terms of religion, they’re on very shaky ground. Judaism’s a religion based fundamentally on a story of liberation from slavery, of legitimate national aspiration. Now, Ron Rosenthal comes to me and says I got to help overturn democratically elected governments all over the globe, from Iran to Guatemala, to protect Israeli interests. That puts them in fundamental contradiction of the principles of their religion. Plenty of people in Israel know that. They’re the WASPs of their country—White Ashkenazi Sabras with Proteksia, with influence. Powerful, yeah. But they don’t define the national agenda alone. Right?”
Nicky nodded in response to Jay’s piercing look, and after a suspicious moment of thought, Jay went on.
“These guys, they’re just taking advantage of the fact that once upon a time, the country was built on the manufacture of armaments. David Ben-Gurion, you know what’d have happened if instead of concentrating on the Galil combat weapon he’d put his efforts into the internal combustion engine, or the computer chip? Israel’d be Japan, and the West Bank would be the Silicon Valley. Tel Aviv’d be employing Arabs from Jordan to Damascus, and Palestinians’d be beating down the door to get a job and a three-room ranch house with a swimming pool next to the mall in Hebron.”
Now Nicky spoke. “That’s not fair. Japan was disarmed and reconstructed by America. Israel had to arm itself. After the Holocaust.”
“Right, ain’t that a weird twist of history.” Jay was sounding like himself now, and Nicky knew the lecture was over. “I still don’t buy it. You know the numbers: there’s been forty million deaths, worldwide, by conventional arms since World War II. What, we don’t care about that because they weren’t six million Jews? I don’t buy it. I don’t care why they’re prosecuting Rosenthal, and I don’t care whether he’s guilty or not. I got no sympathy for him. Whatever you found in Martha’s Vineyard, we’re going to shove it right back up Rosenthal’s ass, and when we get up there, you know what I think we’re gonna find? I think we’re gonna find Greg Eastbrook.”
Nicky listened.
But all the while he was listening, Nicky was not thinking about Greg Eastbrook. Nor was he thinking about Israel, Zionism, or Ronald Rosenthal.
He was thinking, rather—and to
his surprise—about the woman with green eyes who had been the last person he spoke to before he was stabbed and whom he was going, as soon as he was better, to see.
CHAPTER 11
October 11, 1994.
New York City.
1.
Later, it would seem to her that she had planned it from the very beginning: from the last, high, dry days of summer on the island; when she had met Dee, and when she had met Nicky.
Later, it would seem to her that she had been planning it all along, and each event, each meeting, each thought that seemed so coincidental, so fortuitous, each had its place in an itinerary she had been directing, without ever acknowledging, from the very start.
She wondered if her trip to Borough Park had really been the first time she knew what she was going to do. She wondered if, rather, she hadn’t known long before.
Such as when Nicky was killed. Or when he came to Ocean View.
But then, Nicky meant nothing to her until he had discovered her fraudulent rental of the Ocean View properties.
When she began fraudulently renting out Ocean View, then.
But that was impossible—so impossible that the thought made her feel dizzy. Nor was it all. Nicky would have meant nothing to her had Dee not been hired to prosecute her father, and that had been well before.
And then she thought: but nothing would have been possible had she not fallen in love with Dee, ten years earlier on Hancock Beach. Had she not been present at Dov Peleg’s taping of her father. Had she not gone that night to see Patti Smith. Had she not met Martha at Saint Ann’s.
Then it was no longer clear to her when anything had started.
It was like, she thought, the way conspiracy theorists thought. Only, the conspirators were not operatives working for government agencies, but intentions hidden in covert agencies of her mind.
She remembered a Passover Seder she and Pauly had attended with her father, accompanying him on a trip to South Africa. It was at the home of a wealthy procurement officer on the South African-Israeli nuclear program, a palatial house surrounded by high walls and electronic gates in a suburb of Johannesburg. They had congregated around a heavily laden table for the annual rehearsal of the Jews’ escape from Egyptian slavery into nationhood, and then the black servants had brought in the knaidlach and gefilte fish. The host had escaped the Holocaust, traveled, penniless, across the sea to Africa, and here in one generation he had risen to the highest possible wealth and influence. The wine was poured, and without looking up the host held out Elijah’s glass to a servant, who carried it to the back door. Then he told a joke about the servant who returned to the Seder table with an empty glass, saying: “Master, Elijah here and he want more wine, Master.”
Later, in the guest house with its own staff, Pauly, lying in a deep armchair, had said: “Daddy. How do you take that guy seriously?”
“How do I take him seriously?” Standing by the window, gazing out at the sweep and roll of perfectly green lawn around a swimming pool, her father had answered thoughtfully. “I take a guy who’s made a billion dollars and brought nuclear capability to his country seriously very easily.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Dad, stop being dense.”
And her father had laughed.
“Boy, the shvartzim get together a P.R. machine like we got, then they can have their own servants.”
Watching, Alley had realized her father’s success was not a fantasy, not a pretense, but a reality, and the fact that there was another reality—that of a police state and a vast, impoverished, repressed populace underpinning the white power elite with whom he did business—never entered his mind.
Now, considering what she had learned about herself since her visit to Borough Park, she thought: plausible deniability was not really a new political doctrine. It was an old psychic one, first, and long, long before.
She thought these things very early on Tuesday morning, October 11, sitting at her desk by the window on Jane Street, staring out into the chill night. It was 2 A.M.
In front of her, in a brown envelope, were 250 thousand-dollar bills, the entire take from her rentals on Ocean View, which she had withdrawn the day before. She’d tried to take it out on Friday, but the bank had required a day’s notice. That had given her pause, but only briefly, for when she had gone to collect the money, in an armored room next to the bank’s vault, it had been given to her with no questions.
Next to the money were the transcripts, photographs, and video she had taken from her father’s safe in Borough Park.
Now, carefully, she wound each pile separately in Saran Wrap, turning them over and over in front of the box until thickly and tightly wrapped. She rose and carried them to the little, unused half bathroom off the kitchen, where she placed them on the tile floor directly in front of an ancient pedestal sink which had not been in use for years. With an effort of her legs she tilted the sink backward, exposing the hollow interior of the pedestal base, then with a toe gently shifted her jewelry box to the side and pushed the packages under. Next she lowered the sink again, inspected her work, turned off the light, and made her way quietly back to the bedroom.
Here, Dee slept, heavily, on his stomach, his arms wrapped around his head. Instead of joining him, however, she stepped to the closet and pulled off her nightdress. She dressed quickly in silk bicycling tights, a woolen sweater, and a down vest. Back at her desk, she took her wallet, the keys to her grandparents’ apartment. Then she crouched in front of her bicycle and oiled it with a can of WD-40: she’d have to ride fast if she wanted to avoid getting robbed, or raped, and she couldn’t afford a misshift in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. Briefly she stopped to wonder if she should drive. But she concluded, as she had concluded before, that it would be easy to follow her in a car, but virtually impossible on a bike. So she strapped on her helmet and then slipped quietly out of her apartment, carrying her bicycle and bicycle shoes, and into the night street.
The ride was nearly ten miles, and in the dark city, surreally lit and deserted, she sprinted nearly the whole way, high on her pedals over the Brooklyn Bridge, silently gliding through the streets, so fast that the few people she passed nearly didn’t notice. On Third Avenue a Camry filled with Puerto Rican kids followed her, but she ran a red light and then banked the wrong way down a side street, leaving them far behind. The dangerous part was the hill into Borough Park, necessarily a slow climb, and once, approaching a group of men on the sidewalk, she wheeled round, sped down the hill again, then took another street back up. That delayed her a bit, but even so she arrived on Thirteenth Avenue in about forty minutes.
This time, she did not go down the hallway to the safe, but turned on the light in the dining room and began to walk the perimeter of the room, head cocked to read the file cabinet labels. Toward the end of her revolution, she found what she wanted. She put her backpack and helmet on the floor, opened a drawer, and began to finger through the files.
She knew it was there, for that was the very reason for the existence of these files: “My self-insurance policy,” her father had called them, and he’d documented there, far from his legitimate business files, his private transactions. Such as his art purchases. And in particular, his purchases from a man she remembered him talking about.
Her father had bought a lot of art and antiquities, but only a few pieces came from this man, and not remembering the name, she had to search by the piece. Finally, in the paperwork for the purchase of some coins minted in Jerusalem in the second century before Christ, she found him: Peter Chevejon, with an address in Florence. Leafing through the paperwork, she read the development of the deal, then followed the cross-reference notes to ensuing deals: this, apparently, was an early one, as the coins had a legal provenance and her father had had them appraised, then paid fair market value. In later deals, she learned, as she found her way through the filing cabinets, Rosenthal would come to pay vastly inflated prices, from which Chevejon—in correspondence, her father addressed him by his last nam
e—would exact a hefty cut, then deposit the balance in a numbered account. Still later, it appeared that Chevejon had abandoned all pretense of commercial process, and come to use the same network by which he smuggled illegal antiquities into America to take large amounts of Rosenthal’s cash out, heavily discounting the exchange to European currency in return. Finally, there was a typed written report, in Hebrew and apparently the work of an intelligence operative, in which she read that Peter Chevejon was an alias of Peter Luria, an expatriate American living in Florence.
Now, in the shaded silence of her grandparents’ apartment, kneeling on the parquet floor, Allison Rosenthal noted the name and Florence address in a little notebook and closed the file cabinet.
Chevejon could help her in a small, but essential portion of what was ahead of her.
Very possibly, she had known as soon as she had received Nicky’s letter, she would be wanting to leave the country. And she would need money to keep her safe wherever she went.
As for leaving the country, that, she thought, she would work on. For the money, however, all she had in the world were her father’s checks, which she would not touch, and the stolen rental money.
She was fairly sure that Peter Chevejon would know what to do with that.
By four-thirty she was back in her apartment at Jane Street. She undressed again in the bedroom, replacing her clothes while Dee slept. She put on her nightdress, made coffee in the kitchen. What was next? She withdrew her diary from a drawer, and opened it to the last composed page: Wednesday, August 31. She drew a rule under the last entry, dated a new entry Thursday, September 1, and then began to write.
An alarm sounded from the bedroom, and hastily she hid the diary in a locking drawer of her desk. Then Dee emerged from the bedroom, naked, and crossed to the shower, stopping to kiss her on the way. Allison paused at her desk for a moment, then went to shower with him.
This, she did unwillingly: somehow, since her trip to Borough Park, their intimacy had become a bit suffocating to her.
