The Gun Runner's Daughter Read online

  “Go ahead.”

  “You’re doing what you’re doing because of your father.”

  That surprised him. “What do you know about my father?”

  “Oh, I don’t need to know anything about him. Either he’s on the right and you’re rebelling, or he’s on the left and you’re following. My point is that you’re a product of your environment just as much as I am.”

  He nodded, and perhaps his answer was all the more aggressive for how deeply she had hit him where it hurt. “I follow you. And it’s not just that you’re wrong. It’s that the way you’re wrong is so revealing.”

  She shrugged. “Prove it.”

  “Oh, I can prove it. But I’d have to tell you my life’s story. And I have a boat to catch.”

  “I see.” Allison was not too drunk to know that it was time to end the conversation, and that she had best be the one to do it. “Well, maybe another time, Mr. Dymitryck.”

  “Nicky. I hope so, Allison. Now my turn?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The guy I’m interested in, you know who that is?”

  “No. I don’t care, either.”

  “His name’s Greg Eastbrook. He’s the Republican candidate for the Senate in California this November. He’s also a guy who’s worked with your dad since they met in Vientiane in, like, the Summer of Love. I’ll bet you know him.”

  She did not respond, and for a moment they watched each other. Then he smiled and spoke with the intonation of a kindergarten teacher.

  “And that’s really what this is all about, Allison. It’s that you know a bunch about Greg Eastbrook. In fact, I believe that you know a very great deal about Eastbrook indeed. And that’s why I want to offer you a deal.”

  “No thanks.”

  But his face, hardening suddenly, showed he was not to be stopped.

  “No, please, it’s my pleasure. All you have to do is agree to talk to me about Greg Eastbrook. And if you do, I’ll consider not letting the Massachusetts state attorney’s office know that you just made nearly two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of fraudulent deposits from renting property soon to be under federal seizure to unsuspecting tenants. And I’ll also not tell my very strong suspicions that the endorsements on those deposits were forged by you.”

  Wordless, now, she watched him stand, shrug on his jacket, and then suddenly face her and smile, a wide smile that was as much in his eyes as in the wry pose of his lips.

  “See, Ms. Rosenthal. I told you I wasn’t like one of your little friends.”

  6.

  Ever after, those two late-summer days, September 4th and 5th, 1994, would be, in Allison’s memory, one long day.

  After Nicky had left, she stayed in the bar for a long time, until closing.

  She sat and drank, alone, as the boozy jukebox played through smoky air to an audience of five islanders, one asleep with his head on the bar. And as she drank, she marveled at how quickly, how efficiently, the world had closed around her. First her father. Then Dee. Now this.

  When the bar closed she drove, dead drunk, through the empty night to the terror of home.

  Unwilling even to process what she now faced.

  September 5th, she woke supine on the living room couch under a throw, unable to remember falling asleep. Against the windows, a windy rain pounded the glass; through the water running on its surface she saw a leaden sky leaking a slight, ominous light. After a moment she raised her wrist to her eyes and saw, dreamily, that the time was nearly twelve. Then, with a small shock, she realized that it was day. That meant it was not midnight but noon.

  Surprised, she sat up, and as she did so from her chest a plastic orange medicine bottle, open, rolled onto the floor. She lifted it, feeling her head pound, and made out on the label the word diazepam. That scared her, suddenly, and she rose.

  As she made coffee, her fright subsided. She had slept through the morning on Valium and booze, but she had survived, and strangely, it had been therapeutic. What had she been doing before? The memory of the night, dim, stayed at bay, and then her mind turned to remembering that she had missed the press conference that morning. By now, Dee had recused himself from her father’s prosecution. That should have been a relief. Only now, she knew without detailing them, she had a new set of problems to face.

  But she didn’t care. A deep relaxation was through her, a sense not that anything was all right, but that everything was so entirely wrong that she no longer really cared. And she was hungry: that was a good sign. In the cupboard was a can of soup, which she heated and ate, hungrily, watching the now quiescent ocean from the kitchen window. Finished, she went back to the living room and booted her computer. She launched Netscape, then logged in to the on-line New York Times. While the front page loaded she sipped coffee, watching the headline come clear: “U.S. Attorney Announces Rosenthal Prosecution Team.”

  There was no headline reference to Dee, she saw. Was that good? Impatient, she clicked through to the article and, heart sinking, saw a straight reporting of the press conference, conducted by Dee, announcing the prosecution’s team. There could be no confusion: Dee was quoted directly, and he referred to himself as the third member of a team of three.

  Finished, she hit the back button and returned to the front page. There was a short analytic piece about the trial by Labaton, but that was all. What could that mean?

  For a long time she stared at the screen, unable to understand. Then, as if a voice calling insistently from far away, another headline caught her eye. It read: “Reporter Victim of Stabbing.” She clicked through to this article, and read about a crime at Logan Airport the night before. Some guy had been beaten, then stabbed in a bathroom and left for dead. The airport was practically deserted—the victim was booked on the first flight the next morning to Washington—and even though he’d managed to crawl along the floor, and out onto the concourse, he had bled to death by the time he’d been found.

  Only then did Allison Rosenthal, all hint of relaxation fleeing every corner, every interstice of her body, her mind suddenly acute, again, to the world of pain that had been waiting while she slept, absorb why the murder warranted such a big headline.

  The dead man was the chief investigative reporter and associate editor of North American Review in Los Angeles.

  Nicholson Jefferson Dymitryck.

  PART TWO

  Then Esther bade them return Mordecai this answer, Go, gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, and fast ye for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day: I also and my maidens will fast likewise; and so will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish.

  ESTHER 4:15-16

  CHAPTER 7

  September 4, 1994.

  New York City.

  1.

  Woods Hole. Buzzards Bay. Fall River, Mystic, Groton, New London. The night before, still blissfully unaware of Dymitryck’s death, Dee had taken the I-91 connector through New Haven and accelerated down the Merritt to New York, speeding. The road humming under the light tires of the little car, engine revving at eighty, he took the unlighted Merritt in smooth sweeps of his arms on the wheel. His mind drained of any thought beyond the speed. Only the foolish, Dee knew, reflect at night.

  Perhaps he did not reflect. But some mental process was spinning itself on nonetheless, and north of Larchmont he pulled off the road and into a little restaurant parking lot, still wondering what he was about to do.

  Inside, he ate dinner, slowly, thinking. After perhaps an hour he rose hesitantly and, at a bank of telephones, punched Shauna’s home number from his pocket diary, then his credit card number. A man answered, obviously just woken. Without saying who it was, Dee asked for Ms. McCarthy. Waiting, Dee felt fear and courage, intermixed. The courage surprised him.

  Then, in an aural refocus, he became aware that a radio was playing the news. A man had been attacked and stabbed at Logan Airport. Police suspected an attempted robbery. But the case was complicated by th
e fact that the man was a reporter on his way to testify in Washington before the House Intelligence Committee. The newscast announced the reporter’s name just as Shauna’s sleepy voice came on the other end of the line.

  Without a word, acting purely from instinct, Dee hung up.

  In the city, at the Yale Club, he got the details on CNN. Dymitryck was on his way to Washington to testify to House Intelligence on the bombing at Harlanstrasse 14, which was under investigation by Bob Torricelli from New Jersey. Now, Dee heard the details of the familiar story. Nicky had been interviewing a Turkish arms dealer, Mehmet Hourani, who claimed to have proof of American involvement in a Chilean cluster bomb factory that was supplying Saddam Hussein up until the Gulf War.

  The interview had taken place in Hourani’s apartment on the outskirts of Munich, and about halfway through, a bomb had gone off, killing Sargonalian and Nicky’s cameraman. Dymitryck himself had been badly injured, but not too badly to come out, days later, with the original article detailing Rosenthal’s role in the Bosnian sales. Hourani had been killed before giving Dymitryck the Iraqi story he had come for. He had, however, given him the Rosenthal story.

  Nonetheless, CNN reported, the murder was being called a robbery gone awry by the Boston police, although on what evidence, Dee could not see.

  And now, step by step, Dee began to understand how correct had been his instinct in hanging up before Shauna came to the phone. Stomach sinking, he began, in minutes, to understand what his instinct had seen in a fraction of a second.

  For no matter what fantasy the Boston police were feeding the media about a murder gone awry, the FBI was certainly, right this minute, covering every step of Dymitryck’s movements prior to his death. The most cursory investigation, he knew immediately, would reveal that this man had just come from the island. And the most idiotic of investigators would be able to connect his presence on Martha’s Vineyard with his interest in Ronald Rosenthal.

  Then, suddenly, an image of the roll of film the man had dropped on the ground came to him and Dee felt sweat rolling down his sides.

  And that was it. Had he been photographed going into the Ocean View farmhouse? And was the FBI going to find those photographs in the effects of the dead reporter?

  If so, his explanation to his boss, that he had simply not connected his onetime sweetheart to his current defendant, would look very thin indeed. If Dee were connected—not in the past but in the present—both to his defendant’s daughter and, by extension, to a brutal assassination, then his recusal was practically irrelevant.

  And that Dee understood made it crucial that he do nothing.

  For if, by some chance, he had not been photographed, then the connection between Dymitryck’s death and Allison Rosenthal, no matter how big a media sensation it may be, would not affect him.

  And, if there were any chance at all that he had not been photographed, then the last thing in the world he wanted to do was, by his public withdrawal from the case, connect himself with Dymitryck’s murder during a trip to Martha’s Vineyard to investigate notorious gun runner Ronald Rosenthal, a story that would, Dee had no doubt, be on the front page of every newspaper in the country the next morning.

  The only thing that could eclipse such a story would be the revelation of his secret love affair with that notorious gun runner’s daughter.

  What Dee’s instinct had seen the moment he heard the news of Dymitryck’s death was that he could not do that to himself, and, even more important, he could not do it to Alley.

  At three o’clock CNN reported that the FBI had determined that Dymitryck was at Logan Airport en route to Washington from Martha’s Vineyard. Following this report, Dee went out to a pay phone and called Ocean View. But the telephone rang and rang until a machine answered with a curt command to leave a message, and he hung up.

  A process that he repeated, and with the same results, every hour until seven A.M.

  By seven, CNN had not reported anything new since three.

  A last call to Alley had produced nothing.

  With a glacial dread in his blood, Dee showered and dressed for the office.

  With no idea at all what he was going to do.

  2.

  At first, he thought that the murder would not be mentioned until he spoke to McCarthy. But when he did, she said nothing about it. As he let himself be carried through the preparations for the press conference, Dee Dennis realized that the connection had either not been made, or was for some reason not being discussed.

  After all, as Steve Post had said that morning on the radio during Dee’s taxi ride downtown, Nicholson Dymitryck, in his writing for the NAR, had moved from virulent denunciation of what the magazine called the “Reagan-Bush Junta” to a steady, bitter critique of the “Clinton Compromise” without missing a beat.

  And now, watching his fellows in the U.S. attorney’s office, Dee realized that no one in his little world had connected the murder with what they were doing. The realization made a sense of unreality pass clean through him.

  That was growing to be a familiar sensation, and it only heightened as time accelerated—so it seemed—to the conference. In truth, it was already impossible, but he did not want to admit that. An hour before the press conference the team watched CNN’s preconference coverage of the Rosenthal trial, only to find it following the story of Dymitryck’s murder. Now the FBI had concluded that the murder was definitely a robbery: Dymitryck’s wallet and briefcase were missing, and witnesses had identified the perpetrators as two young black men. The report pushed the sense of unreality to some sort of an apogee, for Dee. No one—least of all the FBI—could believe this nonsense. What did it mean? As if physically crippled, Dee watched the report helplessly, feeling the moments pass.

  A powerful dread was now in him. Only a schizophrenic, he thought with a feeling close to tears, could avoid feeling the impossible ambivalence, the pure duality of his position. Nothing meant what it seemed to mean, nothing.

  This thought, without warning, loosened the clutch of his dilemma, and in a practiced mental maneuver, Dee seized the chance to turn his mind to the challenge ahead.

  It was a challenge for which, he thought wryly, he had been bred.

  The David Treat Dennis who presented himself to the cameras was a composed, articulate, handsome young man, inspired by a sense of righteousness, of moral probity, and manifesting a winning level of nervousness. Behind him, as he spoke, a slide projector showed images culled from Bosnia, Rwanda, Nicaragua, Guatemala—all unattributed—showing the various effects of antipersonnel land mines, cluster bombs, and combat weapons, largely on young children. Showing these images had been Ed Dennis’s idea, and that they were entirely irrelevant to the prosecution of Ronald Rosenthal bothered no one, least of all Dee: this was not a courtroom. His voice, when the audience finally hushed and he began talking, was only helped by the raspiness of his night awake.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we talk about the arms trade, and the way we talk about it obscures the reality of what people like Ronald Rosenthal do for a living. Yes, they wear suits; yes, they work in offices; yes, they pay taxes. But the reality of their work is selling death and profiting from war, and our prosecution of Ronald Rosenthal sends one message, pure and simple: munitions sales are governed by the law of the land. They are a matter of foreign policy that only our executive branch can alter; a matter of legislation that only our Congress can rule on; and when they are illegally undertaken they become a matter that our courts cannot ignore.”

  Coming from this earnest, handsome, articulate young man, the speech got the benefit of the network cameramen’s kindest attention: this was prime-time material, straight into the can. Only one lone reporter, a young woman in the back of the room, sounded a note of discord when she asked in a precise, confident voice, “You don’t mean to say, Mr. Dennis, that there aren’t more arms being exported under the Clinton administration than any other previous government? And a follow-up: how is your prosecution being affected by t
he reports of a secret arms pipeline between the Falcon Corporation and the Bosnian Muslims being blessed by the White House?”

  With a showman’s instinct, Dee answered only the follow-up.

  “The Justice Department has, to my knowledge, found those reports groundless, Ms. . . .”

  “Laura Isenberg, Pacifica Network.”

  A name, clearly, the handsome young lawyer found easy to disregard, as he turned his attention to a man from ABC.

  The conference was aired live on C-SPAN, and when Dee arrived back in the office his father was waiting on hold.

  “Deedee. Tremendous. The way you handled that girl was word-perfect. Who briefed you on that?”

  Hollow with fear, Dee had hung up the phone, and after receiving the rest of his congratulations, made his way to his office.

  Shauna was taking the staff to a champagne lunch at Delmonico.

  Watching the harbor water glinting, steely, dispassionate, Dee lit a thin Dunhill Panatela, pulling the smoke deep toward the aching anxiety in his stomach.

  It was like a wound.

  3.

  Once, during her time in Paris between college and law school, Alley had surprised her father by picking him up at the airport on one of his business trips.

  Her father had emerged from customs in the escort of four black-suited men. Outside, two BMWs had been waiting: one for her father, one for the men, and they’d driven straight to the Israeli embassy, where, while her father conferred behind closed doors with the ambassador, the four men had drawn handguns—big, automatic nine-millimeters—to fit the holsters they wore under their suit jackets.

  What business required this security—unusual even for her father—Alley had known better than to ask, and she’d managed to forget that the four men were even there, most of the time. But one night at the Flore, while her father was in the bathroom, a very drunken man tried to pick her up while she sat alone, upstairs, at a small table. She ignored him, he got mad and lurched toward her, and before she could raise a hand to stop him he was lying on the ground with a knee on his chest while one of the bodyguards searched him with violent efficiency, then dragged him out of the café. She watched, horrified—he had been harmless. But she had been too surprised to intervene.