by Neil Gordon
And Nicky, to what he realized was the satisfaction of the quiet man watching, felt shock.
6.
But the woman was talking again.
“Mr. Dymitryck, please do not make your decision now. Here are some documents that our employer has taken the liberty to prepare for you. You’ll find here a passport and some other identification. They’re under the name of Benjamin Black, and I assure you, they are impeccable. I have also a ticket to Rome leaving tomorrow night, and then Florence. You’ll note it’s round-trip.
Accept these and go to Florence, just to discuss this with our colleagues. They are formidable persons. You will be glad to have met them.”
There was a different tone in her voice at these last words, and Nicky looked at her absently, without curiosity. Then, without a word, he rose and turned to leave the room.
But the man was blocking him at the door.
“Mr. Dymitryck. Refuse what we ask, that is your choice. But please, just take the documentation with you. If you don’t use it, destroy it. Whether you do that, or even if you simply go to Florence to see Allison and then return, I give you my word. You’ll never hear from us again.”
Now Nicky paused, looking up into the man’s oddly spaced black eyes. With a nod he turned and took from the woman the package of documents, and the whisky bottle from the table.
“Thank you for your time.”
And Nicky left the room.
7.
For a time, after he returned to his car, he was all right. But only for a time. Then, without thinking, he opened the bottle, and, in an open car on the highway, took a drink.
He drank steadily all the way up Highway 1, disregarding the fact that he was in a convertible on an open road. Once at home, carrying the bottle into the house, he continued to drink by the living room window, overlooking the sea, in the silent house. The sun sank over the cliffs, the garden around the swimming pool stepped into shades of green, the sea blackened, and Nicky, standing, drank.
Until at last, mercifully, it was night.
When he woke it was light again. Outside the window children were squabbling in the yard next door, and Nicky was undressed in his bed, with no memory of getting there. Wincing, he stood and managed to get to the sink before vomiting.
For a time he rested on the linoleum of the bathroom floor. When he could, he negotiated the hallway to the kitchen. Clumsily, he put together a cup of coffee, then drank it with a shot of bourbon. That made him gag, but it also stopped the pounding in his head. Only then did he try to piece together the events of the previous day.
Panic flowering in him, he managed to rise and get to the bedroom. There, he saw that it all had really happened. The bottle of scotch, nearly empty, was on his bedside table, next to the neat little folder with the airline tickets. Nicky sank to sit on the floor against the bed.
For a long time he sat like that, listening to the children fighting next door. He rose once, to get more coffee, then he sat down again. After a time, he shifted, but just enough to reach his cigarettes from his jacket where it lay on the floor.
The dim sound of a dog barking far away.
The children fighting in the garden next door.
He continued to sit.
It was so bitter to him. She had allowed him to get rid of Eastbrook simply because it served her purposes: had it not, she would not have cared. And in what she did, so much damage had been done to so many important things: cruel and ugly damage, to people, to the law. Not for years would a government attempt a prosecution like this again; not for years would the outrage of selling death for profit be brought again into national debate, what he had struggled for his whole working life. Governments would continue to seek their own short-term interest, profits would always carry the day, and only the innocent, only the innocent would ever care about the dead.
And against that? Justice, she would say, was reason enough, even for something this ugly. Her father had been guilty, only not of what he had been charged with, and the justice of saving him was an absolute.
Justice is reason enough for anything ugly. It balances the beauty in the world. Those last lines of her poem had never long left his mind, and never for a moment had he felt he understood them. Now, suddenly, in the quiescence of his hangover, it occurred to him that perhaps he had never understood because beauty did not exist in a world devoid of guilt. And perhaps, therefore, it was not something that people like him, the righteous, could ever really see.
Rising slowly to protect his pounding head, he admitted to himself that helping Commandante Tierce was not the problem. What frightened him—and it frightened him badly—was that after all the terrible things he had witnessed, and all the terrible places he had been, it should in the end be a criminal—the gun runner’s daughter—who would finally show him something beautiful.
Pulling his much-used briefcase from the closet, packing for another night flight across continents, as always when traveling toward danger, Nicky Dymitryck felt something like hope.
October 1997, Nassau Street
NOTES ON SOURCES
Any faults, inaccuracies, and mistakes of this novel are my own. Whatever political acuity and documentary accuracy it contains, however, are predicated upon the sources below.
For interviews, I am grateful to Joost Hilterman and Stephen Goose of the Human Rights Watch Arms Project, David Isenberg of the Center for Defense Information, Lora Lumpe of the Federation of American Scientists, Caleb Rossiter of Demilitarization for Democracy, Mr. Adam Yarmolinsky, and Dr. Dov Zakheim of Systems Planning International. I am particularly grateful to Professor Daniel Nelson for his insights into military supply in Bosnia, and to the journalist and writer Frank Smyth.
Published sources from which I drew include Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (South End Press); Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration’s Secret War in Nicaragua (Atlantic Monthly Press); Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship (HarperCollins); David Corn, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades (Simon & Schuster); William D. Hartung, And Weapons for All (HarperCollins); Seymour M. Hersch, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (Random House); Herbert Krosney, Deadly Business: Legal Deals and Outlaw Weapons: The Arming of Iran and Iraq, 1975 to Present (Four Walls Eight Windows); Gary Sick, October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan (Random House); Warner Smith, Covert Warrior: Fighting the CIA’s Secret War in Southeast Asia and China, 1965-1967 (Presidio); M. Wesley Swearingen, FBI Secrets: An Agent’s Exposé (South End Press); Jack Terrell with Ron Marz, Disposable Patriot: Revelations of a Soldier in America’s Secret Wars (National Book Press).
Ronald Rosenthal is an entirely fictional character, with no real-life counterpart. His profession, however, is a real one, and in imagining Rosenthal’s professional activities I have been inspired by several real life events. I am particularly indebted to Ari Ben Menashe’s Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network (Sheridan Square), whose historical account of his years of work for Israel’s clandestine agencies led me to create several fictional scenes: Ronald Rosenthal’s videotaped argument with Greg Eastbrook, Ronald Rosenthal’s trip to Chile to negotiate with Carlos Cardoen, and the Israeli intelligence complicity in the murder of the supergun inventor Gerald Bull. I have also, in my research, drawn heavily on Theodore Draper’s A Very Thin Line (Hill and Wang) and Lawrence Walsh’s account of his work as special prosecutor for Iran-contra matters, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up (Norton). Finally, I am grateful to Kai Bird for his monumental work The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (Simon & Schuster).
Video sources include America’s Arms Monitor , produced by the Center for Defense Information, generously made available to me by Mark Sugg; School of Assassins , produced by Robert Richter/Maryknoll
World Productions; and Coverup , produced by the Empowerment Project. Internet sources include, in addition to those named earlier, the indispensable Nambase database published on www.blythe.org and www.pir.org, and the Octopus and Patriot archives, on www.tezcat.com.
Readers familiar with Diane Wakoski will recognize this novel’s constant dialogue with and homage to her essay “Creating a Personal Mythology.”
Throughout this book I have attempted to ground all reference to the arms trade, covert or governmentally licensed, in historical reality, with one notable exception: I know of no source, written or unacknowledged, that implicates any Israeli company, government organ, or private entity in the supply of the Bosnian Muslim Militias, an arms transaction wholly invented—to my knowledge—by me for the purposes of this novel.
Praise for The Gun Runner’s Daughter
‘Wonderfully suspenseful.’
Washington Post Book World
‘Neil Gordon has redesigned a classic genre for a new world order.’
Boston Globe
‘A complicated plot bursting with skulduggery and finishing off with a satisfying surprise.’
New York Times
‘A well-crafted story of intrigue, honor and love.’
Newsday
‘Chilling, richly intelligent . . . Gordon adroitly manages an intricate page-turning plot, three-dimensional characters, unflagging suspense, intrigue and ardent romance.’
Publishers Weekly
‘Far more engrossing than other books you’ll read this summer . . . Gordon asks tough moral questions.’
Library Journal
‘Gordon [is] the next link in the chain of Graham Greene, John le Carré, and Joan Didion . . . [An] ingenious and riveting drama.’
Booklist
THE GUN RUNNER’S DAUGHTER
Neil Gordon is the author of four novels: Sacrifice of Isaac , The Gun Runner’s Daughter , The Company You Keep , and You’re a Big Girl Now . He holds a Ph.D. in French Literature from Yale University and is a literary editor at the Boston Review as well as Professor of Writing at The New School and Professor of Comparative Literature and Dean of The American University of Paris.
Also by Neil Gordon
Sacrifice of Isaac
The Company You Keep
You’re a Big Girl Now
First published 1998 by Random House, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously by Random House, Inc., Canada
First published in paperback 2000 by Bantam Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York
First published in the United Kingdom 2012 by Picador
First published in paperback 2014 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2014 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-4472-2786-1
Copyright © Neil Gordon 1998
The right of Neil Gordon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Black Sparrow Press for permission to reprint “Some Brilliant Sky.” Copyright © 1988 by Diane Wakoski. Reprinted from Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962–1987 with the permission of Black Sparrow Press.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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