The Gun Runner's Daughter (38 page)
Read The Gun Runner's Daughter Online
Authors: Neil Gordon
“Peleg says he was. Off camera. He says your brother walked into the room through some maid’s door from the kitchen.”
This made her, literally, flinch as she absorbed it, like a blow to the body.
“Go on.”
“Peleg said your brother would help me. I asked why, but he said I wouldn’t understand, because I wasn’t Jewish. So they recorded the whole damn conversation, did
they?”
“Yes.”
“I see.” Nicky thought for a moment, his eyes abstracting. “I got Peleg killed, didn’t I?”
“Yes. What happened next?”
“I went to Martha’s Vineyard to find your brother. It was late June. And when I got there, I found out about his . . . suicide.”
Nicky stopped talking, and they watched each other’s eyes. And only after a long time of suspension did Alley say:
“Jesus, Nicky. You were on the island in 1992?”
“Yes.”
She leaned toward him now and let her head rest on his chest. “Oh, God, I wish I’d known you then.”
Time passed. When she sat up again, presenting him her face, she had been crying. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, and then spoke.
“Well. I have the tape. So you get what you want after all.”
“Except I don’t want it anymore.”
That made her, nearly, smile. “Isn’t that funny?”
“Let me see it.”
“No way.” She shook her head, once, sniffing. “Don’t even ask. Not until Diamond files suit.”
“And when does Diamond file suit?”
“When I tell you so.”
“Then you give me the tape?”
“Yes.”
“Original?”
“Yes.”
Nicky thought, watching her. “And how do I tell a judge I got it?”
She watched him now through the darkness. Then she licked her lips, and took a deep breath, talking as she exhaled.
“It’ll be mailed to you. FedEx. From Dee—David. Dennis. The prosecuting attorney.”
6.
Nicky’s mouth opened. “What, that guy? Why the fuck would he want to do that?”
She spoke automatically now, delivering the lie as she thought it. “He needs it leaked. It makes his case against my father.”
He said nothing for a moment. Then: “Your father’ll never set foot in this country again.”
“Focus, Nicky. You’ll force Eastbrook to resign before he’s even inaugurated. For Christ sake, I am giving you the resignation of a U.S. senator, a fanatic rightist.
What’d you call him? A ‘radical enemy of democracy’— right? This is the sweetest thing to happen to the American Left since Watergate. You’ll have fifty-year-olds in
ponytails popping champagne from Woodstock to Berkeley. You are looking at a piece of American history.”
“I don’t give a fuck about Eastbrook. I care about you.”
“Then do what I say.”
She watched him carefully as he spoke. And to her surprise, he spoke in a sad voice.
“This is really what you want to do?”
And she, too, answered in a different tone than she meant. “It really is.”
He looked up to the ceiling, and it occurred to her that throughout the conversation, his hand had stayed on her breast. She moved it now, lifting her shirt and placing it against her skin.
“And me? I go back to L.A.? And pretend I never met you?”
“We’ll talk every day. When it’s over . . . when it’s over, you can tell me the story of your life or something. If . . . if you still want to.”
“I don’t understand. You’re in jail, your father’s stuck with a bigger crime than ever.”
“But you get to off Eastbrook.”
“Yeah? What did I do to deserve to be the sole beneficiary of this whole mess?”
She shrugged. “Nicky. Come on. At the end of the line,
someone
has to get what they want. This time, it’s your turn.”
She let him wonder what she was referring to: Eastbrook or her bed. Then she leaned forward over his chest.
“Nicky. Please.”
“What are you up to, Alley?”
She answered quickly. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“What do you think I’m up to?”
He thought now, for a long time. Then he said: “I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“I can’t. I only know two things about it. Not enough.”
“What are they?”
“It’s illegal, and it’s immoral.”
“No. No.” Hissing at him in the darkness: “It’s something beautiful. It’s justice.”
Nicky paused, thinking. Then he spoke slowly. “And that’s reason enough for how ugly it is?”
She answered immediately, in a surprised tone. “Yes. Yes, of course it is.”
Not looking at her, he nodded, as if having just that moment decided. “Okay.”
“That’s not enough.”
“Okay, I’m going to do what you tell me.”
“And exactly what I tell you?”
“Yes.”
And now she lowered her head completely—onto his chest, onto the chest of this small man lying on her grandparents’ couch in their Borough Park apartment at two in the morning; she
lowered her head to his chest and hid her face, blushing, with a sudden access of gratitude.
Of amazement.
They slept. Briefly, for the darkness left of the night. They woke, together, at four, and left the apartment for the street, cold in the last hour before dawn.
The highways to the airport were nearly deserted; Alley drove silently, with one hand, her other lightly in Nicky’s palm.
At the airport, she saw him to his gate. They kissed, their eyes level, and she let her hands travel once up and down his back, under his leather jacket.
“Alley.” His voice against her ear as she held him.
“Yes, Nicky.”
“When I went to the Vineyard, in ’92? The papers said your brother had committed suicide. Why did you say he was murdered?”
She lied before she could think about it. “I didn’t mean that, Nicky. Not literally. My brother was a complicated person. He was very brilliant, and very beautiful. But he was gay.
He had HIV, and his boyfriend had full-blown AIDS. That’s why he killed himself. It had nothing to do with you.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I know, I know.”
“Alley, one more thing.”
“Yes.”
“What did Peleg mean, I wouldn’t understand your brother because I wasn’t Jewish?”
That made her laugh, humorlessly. “Did your father ever try to send you back to where he was from?”
“Montenegro? If I tried to go, he’d have disowned me. My middle name is Jefferson, for Christ sake. My father’s the most American Yugoslavian known to man.”
She laughed again. “Peleg was right. You wouldn’t understand. Now go get your plane.”
Then he was gone, and she was walking back through the terminal to her car, feeling more exhausted than she could remember ever feeling in her life.
But she could not let that stop her. There was just too much to do.
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
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.
