The Gun Runner's Daughter

by Neil Gordon

  Shauna: “Wayne, I myself will offer my resignation unless this case is fought.”

  Silence. Then Edward Treat Dennis, as if flipping a switch on his anger, spoke in a placating voice that reminded his son that his father was a lobbyist.

  “Wayne, Shauna. Maybe we’re ahead of ourselves here. Let’s start at the beginning, okay? Where are we at with this girl? What’s she want?”

  Boy, Dee thought to himself with some admiration as he watched his father cover his bases. That was fast.

  Shauna nodded to the attorney who had deposed Alley, and he spoke with evident hesitation. “Mr. Dennis, I have to tell you from the outset: we’ll need support in Washington. This girl is very, very smart, and she has presented a very, very sophisticated challenge. There’s not a lawyer in the world wants her on a witness stand, either: she’s beautiful, and she’s ready to cry on demand. That girl crying in front of a jury is a lock, and Stein knows it. That’s the bad news.

  “The good news is that she’s lying. It’s an ugly case to defend—we’ll have to subpoena Sidney Ohlinger’s daughter—but it can be done. Let me start with the allegations, and then we can look a little further into the extenuations and then at the burden of proof . . .”

  Dee wondered, sitting with his back to the window, how his father had managed to make himself the focus of this meeting. He turned now, and let his gaze wander out over the harbor and to the sky of November gray over Jersey. Perhaps the first time he had paused for thought in the past two days.

  Or two nights.

  For the first time his mind shifted, at long last, into synthesis rather than apprehension, as he listened vaguely to the lawyer outlining Alley’s claims. To Dee Dennis, each one was less an allegation than an explanation. A piece of a puzzle.

  Perhaps love, thought Dee, was always a puzzle, and perhaps there were always pieces missing.

  This intimate puzzle, every piece was in place.

  He saw it now, so clearly. Each step in their intimacy had been a step in Alley’s reasoning, each exposure of himself through trust another piece of evidence, and he, he had been blind.

  And yet, could he honestly say that he had been innocent? This love affair that also happened to save his career? Had his original intentions been innocent?

  Only the losers in any game, Dee knew, can say for sure that they were not willing to cheat.

  It was as if she had played his own subconscious like a hand of cards.

  Blame?

  Dee pronounced the word to himself.

  It was like a foreign language.

  All he felt was wonder.

  Faster than Jay Cohen, certainly faster than Nicky, Dee Dennis had seen the entire complexity of Alley’s genius the moment he’d learned, from the New York Times reporter who’d called him for comment, what she had done. One fact, and everything had fallen into place, everything. From the FedEx slip to her careful guidance of his prosecution, and across all the moments of nakedness between them. Each detail of doubt he remembered immediately. How he had blinded himself to them.

  And he understood more than the facts. He understood the motivation. He understood the calculation and he understood the need. He understood with his analytic capacity; he understood with his sensual knowledge. This woman. He understood her, in her passion, in her skill, and in her courage.

  And in that understanding, for Dee Dennis, in that understanding not only of her person but of her past, of her family, of the entire shared world of rarefied compromise and cynical ambivalence in which they had together grown up, for the first time the wall of the past came down and a continuum stretched, unbroken, from the slim, small-breasted girl with the light on her skin on Hancock Beach to the woman by whom he stood now accused.

  He understood, in short, with the empathy of real love.

  The attorney who had deposed Allison had finished and Dee’s father, still the de facto chair of the meeting, was speaking in his “Getting to Yes” voice again.

  “Okay. Ladies, gentlemen, let’s not bullshit each other, okay? Shauna, Wayne knows, and I know, you’re with us. We also know that you’re coming from the Beltway Disneyland, and that you deal with Mickey Mouse there, not people. So let’s not bullshit each other. Who can we count on?”

  Dee watched with attention as Wayne, then Shauna, each in turn, hedged. So, she didn’t want to name names. Dee understood that: if there wasn’t any support for this prosecution in the White House, who wanted to be allied with his father on his defense? And as Shauna unwillingly put her cards on the table, Dee saw that the odds against him were very long indeed: as he had suspected, this whole prosecution had lost its original support in the two years since, early in the Clinton administration, it was launched at his father’s urging. The odds were long: so long that it would take real principle, and real courage, to oppose them. And suddenly Dee wondered what side his father would fall on.

  That doubt, unlike his thoughts of Alley, gave him real pain.

  Perhaps, he thought—his thoughts again taking leave of the meeting—that was because the choice before his father was a radical test, whereas nothing Alley had done contradicted her profession of love. Perhaps, he thought, the love of another is always just a reflection of the love for self. But the stuff of self, Dee thought, the stuff of self is always the reflection of a parent’s love, and when the parent’s love is dishonest the self is so crippled. Yes, he thought, with a strange detachment. We can leave a lover behind and survive, but these people, these terrible people, are with us for all of our lives. And Alley knows that. Nothing else matters. Alley knows that.

  He turned, and looked around the table of his superiors, trying to face facts. How silly. There was only one thing to do. He had been doomed from the very first day he had seen Alley on the porch of the Up Island General Store. All her other allegations, all the mad fiction she had built out of him, it didn’t matter: his conviction was assured in the first moment. He had slept with the enemy. He had slept with her that night on Hancock Beach, and he had left her bed hours before she was arrested on an interstate warrant.

  And he had been caught.

  How was Edward Treat Dennis’s son to react? Gazing around the table at these self-satisfied people, the kind of people who had surrounded him all his life, calmly analyzing the ins and outs of Washington politics, he experienced the same excited feeling, suddenly, as he had felt when he’d dropped his first bombshell in court.

  There was only one conclusion to the question. Sooner or later, they would get there. But if he spoke now, if he spoke now and said it for them, then he would not have to see which side his father would take, and he would not have to live forever with whatever he saw.

  “Just a moment.” His voice broke the conversation at the table in an instant.

  “I think I can save us all some time.”

  5.

  NO CONTEST. The words in the New York Times headline, the Sunday edition, emerging sideways from the fax, appeared to Nicky’s wide eyes letter after letter. Then the next headline, a two-line head, came out: first EASTBROOK on top of the word EXPECTED, then CALLS over TO, then PRESS, over ANNOUNCE, then CONFERENCE over RESIGNATION. He removed the page and read it again, then again. First: DAVID DENNIS ENTERS PLEA OF NO CONTEST; then: EASTBROOK CALLS PRESS CONFERENCE, EXPECTED TO ANNOUNCE RESIGNATION.

  Holding the fax, Nicky Dymitryck sat heavily in his chair.

  What was in Nicky Dymitryck’s mind as he sat? Something that defied description.

  As if the one fact about Alley he did not know, the fact that she and Dee Dennis were in love—the one irreducible ambiguity in the story he had for so long followed—had at last cast his mind out of the analytic and into the mystical.

  For mystical is the closest word to describe Nicky Dymitryck’s experience, that Saturday night in his office: a synchronic state in which all the meanings of his present appeared in perfect equivalence, the death, the loss, the depth of love he had felt, the enormity of betrayal, the completeness of his so
litude, the thoroughness of the state change of his life, as if it had turned from water into gas, and it were floating, floating away.

  Really, even better than mystical , the word to describe what happened to Nicky that moment was epistemological , a change in his very definition of all he knew, of the truth, and of himself.

  A strange way, an abrupt and very tragic way, to have one’s heart broken.

  6.

  On Monday morning, November the 14th, Bob Stein successfully argued for Allison Rosenthal’s release on bond, relying heavily on the extenuating circumstances of her position and David Dennis’s plea of no contest.

  Bail was set at fifty thousand dollars, and Stein immediately dispatched an assistant for the bond. Allison waited in a holding room for the hour it took to get that. While she waited, a subpoena was served on her to appear in state court, Boston, the following morning. At 11:45 she was released into the cold of a gray November day. She wore the clothes in which she had been arrested: jeans, black leather loafers, a black jersey, and a long black cashmere overcoat.

  Stein was waiting with a limousine, and helped her shoulder her way through the reporters and into the car. It drove off with difficulty. But it did not go far. On North Moore and Varick, clear of the reporters, it stopped. Alley got out, spoke to Stein for a moment through the window, and hailed a cab. Inside, she asked for La Guardia Airport. As the cab pulled out, she noted through the back window, a white Taurus driven by a single man pulled out after her.

  She rode to La Guardia silently in the cab, followed by the white Taurus, her eyes out the window on the grim landscape between the airport and the city. A familiar landscape and one, she knew, she would not soon see again. At La Guardia she made her way to the Delta Shuttle, noticing that the driver of the white Taurus had parked illegally and was walking after her. He wore a London Fog raincoat. She purchased an open ticket to Boston, and then sat at a table in the little restaurant off the rotunda of the terminal, watching the man from the white Taurus take a seat at the bar.

  In time, three men entered the restaurant, all bearded and in business suits and hats. Two stood at the door while one, carrying an oddly feminine suitcase, crossed to her table, sat, and spoke briefly with Allison in a foreign language. Then he looked over at the other two and motioned with a tip of his head. Following the direction of his movement, they crossed the restaurant and sat at the bar, on either side of the man from the white Taurus. A brief discussion ensued, during which the man from the white Taurus withdrew and displayed to his companions an FBI badge. The discussion seemed to grow heated, until one of the men settled whatever was at issue with a gesture under his suit jacket. Whatever he was concealing there seemed to convince the man from the Taurus, for he paled, and then allowed the other two to escort him out of the restaurant.

  Now, at her table, Allison accepted from her childhood friend Peretz the suitcase, the keys to a car, a passport, and a small bundle of currency. With a nod, she rose and walked out of the restaurant and out of the terminal.

  As for Peretz, he rose a moment later and followed her at a distance. He watched her cross the street to the parking lot, then open and board the rented Buick in which he, Menachem, and Ben Gordon had arrived. He watched as she threw the bag in the back and drew out of the lot toward the airport exit, not acknowledging him as she passed.

  Only then did he turn and, eyes thoughtfully to the ground, walk slowly back to the terminal.

  That evening, at eleven o’clock, a woman in a rented Buick parked in the lot of a truck stop near LaFargeville, New York.

  She entered and settled at a table. Then she rose again, and crossed the restaurant to a pay phone.

  With a credit card, she placed a telephone call.

  Her hands, it could be observed, were shaking as she dialed.

  What was the expression on her face as she waited for an answer?

  There was hope, a tremulous expression in the lift of her eyebrows, the tip of her tongue showing between her teeth.

  There was dread, a heavy set of her lips, a stiffness of her cheeks.

  And there was courage, a slow green burn in her eyes, as if she had come to this phone, in this restaurant, ready to face the truth.

  The conversation with Nicky lasted perhaps one minute.

  “It’s me.”

  Silence while she listened. Then, a single word:

  “Please.”

  Another silence. And then, with a small smile.

  “I told you you wouldn’t want to hear from me again.”

  With that she hung up and stood by the phone, leaning against the wall, as if too weak to walk. And only after a long moment did she manage to cross back to her table, her face, now, devoid of any expression whatsoever except the saddest of the three, which was courage.

  Alone at a table, she drank coffee, then just sat, staring out the window, for three hours. For those three hours, she sat still, with the exception of a short period in which she read, several times, the title page of a small, thin, blue booklet, the size of a passport. Then she returned her gaze out the window, her lips moving slightly, as if she were memorizing something, or reciting a mantra.

  At two in the morning she rose, paid, and left the restaurant. She started her car, drew out of the truck stop north on Highway 81. Forty-five minutes later, Tziporah Rosen showed a small, blue Israeli passport with a valid Canadian visa to the customs inspector at the border, submitted to a brief search of her car, and then drove into Canada.

  Had someone been following—no one was—they would have followed her from here to Montréal International Airport, where a ticket was held in her name for a direct flight, later that morning, to Paris.

  CHAPTER 17

  December 15, 1994.

  Paris.

  1.

  December 15; rue de la Paix.

  In front of the Hermès picture window, Allison stood, gazing at the Christmas display.

  Or so it seemed. In fact, it was her reflection she watched: her face pale and lips red in the damp Paris winter, dark pools of fatigue under her eyes. Peering at her face, mercilessly, she wondered if it would ever come back to itself.

  But what was itself? She corrected herself: to what it had been. Her eyes met her eyes and an expression crossed her face, of annoyance, of disgust. Three o’clock. Her father had arrived that morning in Paris, resuming his duties for the Falcon Corporation. She was due to meet him at his hotel at four.

  She had been walking already for hours, and a bone-deep weariness was in her, the accumulated exhaustion of the month past, of the months past. As if all the nights she sat up at her desk on Jane Street, falsifying her diary, working with the court transcripts and her father’s private papers, making love to Dee and talking to Nicky, as if all those nights had caught up with her and were taking their toll now. She had been very sick when she’d arrived in Paris, first strep throat, and then pneumonia, for which she had been hospitalized in Neuilly for a week. She should have accepted her father’s offer of a ticket, via Bob Stein, to Martinique. Instead, she moved into Chevejon’s apartment on the rue de Fleurus, and recuperated slowly in the European winter.

  Now, in front of the window at Hermès, thinking of all the sleep she had missed that fall, she pictured her desk in the apartment on Jane Street, the window next to it illuminated by the streetlights at the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Jane.

  Then she saw the beach at Ocean View, a slanting snow darting like commas into the wash of the waves.

  Hypnagogic memory. Quick, involuntary hallucinations, precisely detailed, of past locales. She had experienced them a lot since she’d been sick: her fatigue, which weighed on her mind as much as her body, seemed to encourage it.

  She sighed now, watching her breath mist the window, then turned in the direction of Angelina’s on the rue de Rivoli, thinking joylessly of the thick hot chocolates she and Pauly had so loved there, a little Jewish boy and girl, immaculately dressed, visiting Paris with their mother.

&n
bsp; She could wait there for an hour with the paper, she thought, or a book from W. H. Smith, right down the street, then head up to the Ritz to meet her father.

  The vision of Ocean View still fresh in her mind, she wondered how Dee had spent the month. He had written to her after Bob Stein had withdrawn her charges against him, a short, factual letter in which he told her that he would be moving to San Francisco, and that he did not blame her for what she had done. It was, she suspected, something of a liberation for him. Perhaps he realized the aspirations she had forced him to sacrifice were too factitious to have any real meaning. When she tried to feel anything deeper about him, however, she felt blankness. She was sorry for what she had done to him, she supposed. But she could not help but feel that somehow, somewhere in this, Dee had been happy to let her go. Perhaps she knew, now, that ultimately, no matter where Dee might venture, he would return to his conventionality. It was, she admitted now, not only for him but for nearly everyone she had ever known in that little trapezoidal world between the Vineyard, Boston, New York, and Washington, too powerful a force.

  And Martha. She had not heard from Martha even once since she’d gone, as if finally Martha had understood the difference between the worlds of their fathers. Martha’s encounter with this willingness so blatantly to use illegality without government protection would have scared her. Faced with the possibility of moving entirely out of Beltway logic, entirely out of conventionality, she knew, Martha too would never really take the step. Marty. She could not imagine life without her, and yet that was what faced her.

  Nicky Dymitryck she could not think about. It was funny that the one person as fundamentally maverick as herself was the one who had so cleanly rejected her. Of all the things that had happened to her, that hurt the most. It had hurt when it happened, and it hurt now, throbbing in her chest with the regularity of the thin Paris rain pissing down onto her. It would, she thought, throb like that for a great while.