by Neil Gordon
But she could not let that stop her. There was just too much to do.
PART FOUR
Thus the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and slaughter, and destruction, and did what they would unto those that hated them.
And in Shushan the palace the Jews slew and destroyed five hundred men.
And Parshandatha, and Dalphon, and Aspatha. And Poratha, and Adalia, and Aridatha, and Parmashta, and Arisai, and Aridai, and Vajezatha. . . .
ESTHER 9:5-9
CHAPTER 15
October 26, 1994.
New York, Los Angeles.
1.
From the airplane, Nicky called Jay to pick him up at the airport, then spent ten minutes being interrogated for details of his trip.
“Jay, would you take a chill pill? I’m on a cellular connection from thirty thousand feet in the air. The intercept area probably covers the entire continent.”
“Goddamn it, Nicky. You be sure you’re sober and rested when you land, you hear?”
But, in fact, Nicky was not listening: he had just found a thick envelope in his briefcase, an envelope he had never seen before, and it held all his attention. Heart quickening, he thought that Alley must have put it in while he was away with Peretz: she had brought his luggage along to Borough Park. Silencing Jay by pushing the phone into its cradle in the back of the seat, he opened the envelope to find a small pile of photographs, a single page of typescript, and a note, a single line on a postcard, reading: “This is why.”
The loose photographs, which he laid out on his little plastic table, were all taken at Ocean View. Powerful images, flooded in thick summer sun, rich with the colors of the past. They showed Alley, as a baby, lying in her father’s arms in a lawn chair, her father young, his bare chest strong, his hair thick over his head. Alley and Pauly, children, lying in a hammock, their pretty blond mother in a summer dress swinging them. Paul as a teenager, doing a handstand on the beach, the house visible between his legs. Alley, perhaps sixteen, in a black Speedo, reading on a couch before the big windows that gave onto the sea.
The typescript was the poem he had stolen from Ocean View, together with the newspaper clipping about Paul Rosenthal’s suicide: she had taken them from the file in his briefcase where he’d held them and put them with the photographs. He opened it now, a single sheet of type on Corrasable bond, and read:
He, who once was my brother, is dead by his own hand
Even now, years later, I see his thin form lying on the sand
where the sheltered sea washes against those cliffs
he chose to die from. Mother took me back there every day for
over a year and asked me, in her whining way, why it had to happen
over and over again—until I wanted
never to hear of David anymore. How
could I tell her of his dream about the gull beating its wings
effortlessly together until they drew blood?
Would it explain anything, and how can I tell
Anyone here about the great form and its beating wings. How it
swoops down and covers me, and the dark tension leaves
me with blood on my mouth and thighs. But it was that dream,
you must know, that brought my tight, sullen little
brother to my room that night and pushed his whole taut body
right over mine until I yielded, and together we yielded to the dark tension.
Over a thousand passing years, I will never forget him, who was my brother, who is dead. Mother asked me why
every day for a year; and I told her justice. Justice is
reason enough for anything ugly. It balances the beauty in the world.
LAX. They landed at eight that morning, local time. Jay, waiting at the gate, hustled him through the airport and out to a waiting car: Stan’s driver, who sped up and out of the airport as if they were being followed. Only then did Jay allow himself to comment.
“What the hell is going on, Nicky?”
He thought before answering, finally: “I don’t know, Jay.”
“What is this girl trying to do?”
“To convict her father.”
“What?”
“To convict her father.”
An uncharacteristically slow response, for Jay; a strangely long pause for thought. “You’re crazy.”
“Maybe. But that’s what she’s trying to do.”
2.
New York. Outside the Federal Courthouse, walking next to his father after the day’s session, David Dennis passed Allison Rosenthal walking with Bob Stein. For a fraction of a second, their eyes met. Then the two pairs of people moved on and were swallowed up by the milling crowd.
Dee was not sure why his father had come up for the night. Normally he would not be that curious: Ed Dennis often had reasons to be in New York. This time, however, appeared to be different, or so Dee thought, to judge by his father’s degree of gravity, verging on the taciturn.
From the courthouse his father had led him, without explanation, past City Hall and, to his surprise, up the walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Only when they were up away from the street did his father stop. Then, reaching into an inside pocket, he withdrew two tiny blue pills.
“Take these, boy.”
His father was more nervous than Dee could ever remember seeing him. Reaching for the pills, he raised his eyebrows in question. His father answered expressionlessly.
“Beta blockers. Harmless. Just take them, okay?” With a shrug, Dee swallowed the two pills. Then, without talking the father and son mounted the long curve of the bridge into the chill of autumn air. A low sun was out on the water, the tide on the flood, a nearly stationary barge trying to fight its way into the harbor. Finally, in the middle of the bridge Dee, squinting through the light at his father, spoke.
“Dad? You know, we have conference every day after court.”
“Not today.” Ed Dennis spoke without missing a step, and as they went on, in silence, Dee felt more like a child being taken in to punishment than he could remember ever feeling in his life. On the Brooklyn side of the bridge his father led him down Pierrepont Street toward the Promenade, then into an apartment building. As the elevator mounted to the penthouse, he spoke to his now very confused son.
“Deedee, I’m taking you in to see someone. Whatever he asks you, you answer to the very best of your ability. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Dee found himself feeling—under the effects of the drug—a strangely impersonal fright, one that carried no physical effects.
“Even if your answer implicates you in a crime, you answer. You hear me? If there’s something you need to get off your chest, now’s the time. It’s as good as taking Five.”
“Okay.”
The penthouse apartment, impersonally furnished and carpeted in white, gave the impression of not really being anyone’s home: this was, Dee understood instinctively, what was meant by a “safe house.” The windows showed a panoramic view from the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building. The living room, in which they sat, was empty. Ed Dennis poured himself and his son a scotch from a liquor cabinet, and they sat in silence for perhaps five minutes until Dee heard the front door opening with a key and three men entered.
While his father watched, two of the men set up a machine next to Dee’s chair, and the third, pouring a drink, sat opposite him. When Dee saw what the machine was—a polygraph—he understood what the pills had been for: many people in public life, he knew, used beta blockers to decrease the peripheral effects of anxiety, precisely the effects a polygraph measured. That his father thought he needed them for the polygraph surprised him and, curious, Dee looked over at him. As much as his father ever showed any emotion, he was showing it now: something that looked like sheepishness. Or guilt.
When he was connected, the man seated opposite, without any preamble, began to speak. First he asked a series of innocuous questions, meant, Dee realized, to establish a baseline for t
he lie detector. And only when one of the technicians had signaled his approval, did a real question come.
“Mr. Dennis, what is the source of your information about Ronald Rosenthal’s business?”
Dee hesitated visibly. “I don’t understand.”
Now, for the first time, the man’s bland expression altered. “What don’t you understand? The question is simple.”
“Well, sir, I thought it was obvious. Mike Levi, the State’s witness under questioning, is my source.”
“Yes. But what led you to your line of questioning?”
He hesitated again. “Common sense.”
“No, Mr. Dennis. That won’t do. You diverged from your planned course of questioning from the first day of the trial. Why?”
Dee turned to his father, as if for help, but Ed Dennis was standing now at the window, back to his son. Dee let a long pause go by.
So that was what this was about. Somewhere in the labyrinthine reaches of the so-called Intelligence Establishment, someone had grown suspicious of Dee’s conduct of the Rosenthal prosecution. Dee could imagine what kind of person this was: the kind who needed neither White House approval nor a constitutional basis to set up an investigation. The kind whose efforts, under the umbrella justification of national security, were virtually free of legal constraints. In order to get him in a private place for a private questioning, this person had called on Edward Treat Dennis for help. And Edward Treat Dennis had said yes. For a last instant, Dee wondered why his father had thought he needed chemical help for this. To protect his son, or to protect himself?
As if deeply unwillingly, he answered.
“The NAR .”
“Pardon me?”
“The North American Review. The magazine. It gave me all my leads about Rosenthal. Everything I asked Levi was suggested there.”
In the periphery of his vision, Dee saw his father turn from the window. The interrogator, Dee noted with satisfaction, was actually silenced by the answer. “Asshole,” he said, but only to himself. What kind of idiot did they think he was?
“And why did you turn to the North American Review ?”
“Why?” Now Dee let loose into his voice the contempt he felt. “Because this journal’s investigative reporter, who was responsible for my defendant’s arrest, was murdered. That’s why. I don’t know whether you’re from the semicompetent three-letter organization or the notoriously incompetent one, but in my branch of the government we are able to recognize and investigate a suspicious circumstance when it slaps us in the face. The second I heard that Dymitryck had been killed I understood that someone was covering up the real reason, and I went for the NAR as quick as ever I could. And I’ll tell you this: if we had an intelligence operation that could do R and A as good as the NAR, we’d be in a damn sight different international landscape today.”
For a long while there was silence in the room. Then, as if in exact reverse of their entrance, the polygraph was removed from Dee’s fingers and chest, and the three men left the room without another word.
When they were gone Ed Dennis poured an enormous slug of scotch into his glass and downed it. Dee noticed his father’s hand trembling. They left the apartment. Still without speaking, his father led him out to the Promenade, where, in the early dusk, they stood side by side over the water. And then his father reached an arm around him, the first time Dee could remember being touched by him since childhood, and squeezed his shoulders, hard enough to hurt.
“What is it, Dad? What’s it about?”
When there was no answer, he went on.
“I just got spooked, right?”
No answer.
“It’s okay now?”
“Is it okay now?” his father at last answered. “Does a frog have a watertight asshole? Yes, it is okay now. It is so okay now that I can’t tell you without violating my security classification. Boy, the two of us just saved our careers.”
It was as much emotion as Dee had ever seen his father express. When they returned to the street a black Lincoln was waiting for Edward Treat Dennis, White House counsel. Dee noted now, vaguely, that the walk across the bridge to Brooklyn must have been to allow the tranquilizers time to take effect—his father had been very, very worried indeed.
But as they cruised up through the streets of the north Heights, a flashing light on the car clearing traffic away, Dee wondered again for whom his father had been so scared.
Whom he had been trying to protect.
And for whom he was, now, so entirely, joyfully, relieved.
3.
Sometimes it seemed like the moment for which she had been waiting all day. Sometimes it seemed to be the most precious moment of her life. As the November 8 elections drew closer, each night after Dee fell asleep, Allison went out to a pay phone on Hudson Street and called Nicky in California. Long, low conversations. One night she called at moonrise in New York, and they spoke until it rose in L.A. Like that, their call encompassed the movement of the planet.
And each night, his voice was the most intimate physical experience, carrying through a late-night satellite connection every nuance of his lips’ movement, centimeters from the receiver and a continent away.
He answered, each night, on the first ring, and she imagined him in bed in his father’s sprawling Malibu house.
“How are you?”
Only to him could she tell the truth of how she felt, not because it was secret, but because it was so complex. “Scared. Lonely. When you’re lonely, you know you’re alive.”
“And when you’re scared.”
“Yes.” It was like watching a tightrope walker: again and again, expecting him to fall, and finding, again and again, that he understood.
“I wish you’d let me help you.”
She said simply, gratefully: “You help every time you answer the phone.”
“No I don’t.” There was real frustration in his voice. “You won’t let me. You won’t tell me anything.”
“I can’t, Nicky. Not yet.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
“No one can.”
“No one? No one’s ever helped you?”
There was a long pause while she watched the lights of taxis running down Hudson Street. Then her voice came again. “I once thought someone had helped me.”
“And?”
A pause. “It was a childhood friend. We met again as adults, and for a few minutes, I thought I was in love.”
“What happened?”
Now there was a very long pause. Then she said, simply: “Then I met you.”
“Yes.” It was like acknowledging a legal fact, what had happened between them.
“Nicky.”
“Yes.”
“If I told you, you’d have to stop me.”
“No.” The word was like a confession. She laughed.
“Yes. You’re too good. You’re like a priest. You couldn’t allow it.”
He laughed too. “Alley. I’m a bolshie atheist. You’re the one with a moral tradition.”
“Yeah. Which tradition is that? The one where they bulldoze Arab family homes so Jews can return to their biblical birthright? Or the one where they arm dictators and train repressive regimes for profit?”
Her eyes clenched shut as she listened to him. “Stop being absolutist. Those are the fringes of your culture. Most Jews don’t even know about the arms trade, and most dislike fundamentalism whether it’s Jewish, Muslim, or Christian.”
“Thanks. You’re right. Sometimes I forget: my religion’s a warm, fuzzy, normative humanism implicating universal nationalist liberation promoting an inclusive liberalism. Right?”
He paused, suspiciously. “More or less.”
“Well, there you have the reason that it’s becoming a religion of radicals, boy: it’s hardly distinguishable from some kind of High Church Protestantism. Even I’m in love with a goy.”
That voice, across the line. Each night as the electrons approached, it gained new tones. Deep tones,
of affection, of fatalism, of irony: tones that he thought of as Jewish. Hard tones, the tones of her reasoning, her uncompromising cynicism. And another tone, one harder to name, that grew in pitch, he thought, as the nights progressed.
Lying on the floor, the phone pressed to his ear as if every ounce of pressure brought her closer, he absorbed the statement for a moment before he was able to answer. In the silence, he heard the far noises of a New York street in the early, early morning.
“That you and a goy are in love doesn’t make you less Jewish.”
“Maybe not. And my kids?”
Now his eyes were open. Carefully, he said: “I bet your goy would convert before you had kids.”
“Oh yeah? Great, then I’d have company in this ridiculous neurosis. I’m so sick of it, Nicky. I’m so sick of the whole damn thing.”
“You’re wrong. You’re lucky, and you don’t know it. The goy who—who loves you, he’d be delighted to have what you have.”
“Which is?”
“A tradition.”
“Maybe.”
“Why?”
He heard her licking her lips. “Tradition involves a certain amount of hypocrisy.”
“I suppose so. But . . .”
“Go on.”
Now he spoke gently. “It’s not an odious kind of hypocrisy.”
“All hypocrisy is odious.”
“Only to the guilty.”
She paused, surprised. “What’s that mean?”
“You see, only the guilty are so absolute about hypocrisy. You spend any time with criminals, you find that out.”
Instead of an answer, from across the line, he heard her humming.
“What’s that song?”
She sang, now, in a low voice. “It’s like I told you, only the guilty can play.”
“You mean the lonely.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Anyway, I don’t agree with you.”
“I know you don’t.”
4.
New York, five fifty-five in the morning. Alley, stretching in her nightdress, rose to look out the window. She had talked to Nicky until three, then worked at her desk until now. She could not remember when last she had slept a full night.
