The Gun Runner's Daughter (44 page)

“Parole for how long?”

“Maybe a year, honey.”

“Where? Massachusetts?”

“No, you could stay in New York.”

“No. I’m not coming. I’ll honor the leases, and Diamond can have his season. But I’m not serving a parole sentence, and I’m not coming back without an order of
extradition.”

“No, I don’t think there’s gonna be an extradition order. Justice has had about enough of you.”

That, she thought, at least gave her the quarter million. She no longer considered Ocean View her father’s property—he had, in his willingness to lose it, sacrificed his ownership of
that magical place. And then, she had a job—of sorts, one that promised to be very lucrative.

3.

Now, waiting for her hot chocolate at a table at Angelina’s, she thought ruefully how immediately Stein would have understood her new job.

When she’d arrived in Paris and taken a room she could not pay for at La Louisiane on the rue du Seine, she’d immediately called Mr. Chevejon to find out where her money was. He was
not in, but his answer arrived the next afternoon by messenger.

The letter had shown two addresses, but one, on the rue St. Honoré in Paris, was crossed out, leaving one on the Piazza Santo Spirito in Florence.

Then she had fallen very ill, and been hospitalized in Neuilly, and for some days had been unable to do anything. When she could write again, from her hospital bed, she had sent him a
letter:

She had received a brief answer, Chevejon’s voice withdrawn again to formality, as if to mask the generosity of his offer:

The rue de Fleurus, she knew, was near the Luxembourg Gardens. This seemed to her perfect, and in the end she had found herself arriving in a luxurious apartment, protected by massive Fichet
locks and a computerized burglar alarm, with windows giving out over all Paris, the wintry lead roofs, the bare trees, and the always steely gray sky. There were sparse furnishings: a living room
with empty shelves, an empty office. But the minimal furniture was enough: a couch in the living room, a bed with linens; the kitchen was equipped, and the entire place had clearly been very
recently cleaned. This, evidently, had been overseen by Chevejon, whom she called that evening in Florence.

“Mr. Chevejon. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Not at all, Ms. Rosenthal. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to greet you. Do you need anything?”

“Thank you, no. Thank you very much, Mr. Chevejon.”

“I see.” He answered somewhat obliquely, and then after a pause, continued.

“Tell me, Ms. Rosenthal: what do you plan to do in Paris?”

She was silent a moment. And then, suddenly: “Whatever I have to, Mr. Chevejon.”

“I see.” A pause, and she imagined him smiling. “You have finished law school?”

“No. Nearly so.”

“I see.”

She hesitated, but only for a moment. “Mr. Chevejon? I know how to paper a sale—any kind of sale—in any state of the U.S. and also in Israel. I know accounting practice and I
know both a network of very savvy people in New York and some of the wealthiest people on the East Coast, as well as most of the major players in Israeli arms. I don’t have a law degree,
granted. But I think I have a lot to offer.”

His answer was unequivocal. “Precisely what I think, Ms. Rosenthal.” He paused. “You do understand that none of the work I have to offer is, strictly speaking,
legal?”

She considered, suddenly tense. “You mean, in the sense of drawing on my law school education?”

He laughed. “No, Ms. Rosenthal. That is extremely useful to me. I mean in the sense of being sanctioned by law.”

She relaxed. “Yes, Mr. Chevejon. I understand that.”

“When might you like to come to Florence?”

Her heart skipped, so unambiguous was his job offer. “My father is in Paris. He leaves in a day or two, so perhaps next week.”

“Splendid, Ms. Rosenthal. And, Ms. Rosenthal? Why not stay put in the rue de Fleurus for the time being. Does that suit you?”

At that she practically smiled.

4.

At her table at Angelina’s now, the crowds on the rue de Rivoli, where a thin snow had started to fall, passing outside the window, the warmth of the crowded restaurant
slowly permeating her skin, the swirl of conversation around her slowly drawing her out of her thoughts. A voice beside her said
“N’en fait pas, cheri, ça va aller.”
Then again:
“Eh, du calme, eh? Où en es-tu avec ton chocolat? J’en commande un autre, ou ben non?”
She looked over, and saw a man with two children at the next table
of the crowded salon, a girl in a chair and a baby in his lap. The girl, sitting with her chin at the table and kicking her legs, was looking at her.

She looked away. The oddest part was, now that it was over, she knew how big a role chance had played. The whole thing couldn’t have stood up to a spirited defense from Dee. What if Martha
Ohlinger had been subpoenaed, would she have perjured herself for Alley? That was a hard question to answer: Martha was deeply loyal, but she was also sincere in the ethics that guided her
politics. But then, Martha would not be so anxious to show that she had let her job, for which she had fought tooth and nail, be used in a criminal agenda. Martha, Alley thought, might be feeling
just a little bit guilty herself right now.

And Nicky? Again, the wound of his cold rejection throbbed in her. It was fed, she knew, by his disgust with himself, with his complicity in her crime. But in the end, the positive good of
indicting Eastbrook had overridden his concern with himself, and he had said nothing. Still, she doubted that he would be going for the moral high ground again soon.

And yet luck was involved. Nothing, after all, was perfect: luck was always involved. Really, she thought, not for the first time, she owed it to Dee, to Dee refusing to say a word, in public or
in private, in his defense.

Sometimes she wondered about that. But she knew that Dee could not think that she had planned this, had used a pretense with them to carry it out. She knew that he would understand that there
had been no plan, there had just been an objective. The emotions that had lived between them were not pretenses, they had all been true. It was just that they had all had double meanings. But what
doesn’t? What doesn’t mean two things; what doesn’t carry a fundamental ambivalence, tenderness and violence, hope and regret? All that divided her from Dee was her willingness to
read, and to use the shadow meaning that always tails behind what we think of as the truth.

Alley found herself staring at the little girl at the neighboring table, and made a last effort to focus on the book in front of her.

And could not. A cup of hot chocolate, untasted, sat before her, next to the book of poetry, unopened. She knew nearly every piece in it by heart, anyway: it was more a talisman, a fetish. But
it was also a bridge to another time, not a time of happiness but a time when she had suffered only a simple shame.

Because now she knew guilt. Pure, unambiguous, convicted guilt. Crime. The kind her father knew. Now she knew justice, that implacable reality, where two wrongs clash and one outmuscles the
other. Once she had known mourning, a pain that never ends but renews itself each day, a gift of endless resource, and she had thought it to be guilt. How foolish she had been. The guilt she knew
now, she would live with it forever, no longer a child but a felon, and it would never be absolved, and never go away.

She knew betrayal. With these two men, she had spent a moment of perfect trust and not once, but twice, she had betrayed each lover. The weight of that guilt lay now in her womb, and she knew
that never, ever would it either pass from her body nor would it cease to struggle to be born.

All those people her father had killed. Laos, Cambodia, Guatemala, Iran, Angola. Not just soldiers but citizens: retirees, journalists, masons, nuns, accountants, schoolchildren—the
assorted victims of cluster bombs and land mines, of napalm and heat-seeking missiles. There was a randomness about the variety of people who died that in itself was frightening. Chileans,
Colombians, Africans, Christians, Muslims. There were even some Jews.

And did he feel guilt? Did he feel this black heart at the center of his being, this thing that ached? She felt now, for a long time, for the answer to this question, and perhaps she would have
found it. But in the event, her attention suddenly went, totally out of her control, to someone who, she found, was standing next to her, bumping against her leg.

It was the little girl from the next table, standing with one hand on Allison’s knee. She was perhaps three, dressed in jeans and a red sweater, and she stared up at
Allison with a grave face, her big cheeks around a red rosebud mouth, her nut-brown hair, which had probably never been cut, swept back in a ponytail. One cheek held a perfectly placed beauty mark;
her eyes were serious, unblinking, showing massive brown irises in the middle of long, very long lashes.

“Je peux avoir un gout de votre chocolat?”

Stock still, as if a wrong movement would break the spell, Allison answered.
“Oui. Vas-y.”

The girl stood on tiptoe to reach her mouth to the cup, tipped it with a pink hand on which, hyperaware, Allison noticed a small red birthmark and a gold bracelet, then stood back again, a
mustache of thick chocolate on her upper lip.

At a loss, Alley asked:
“Il est bon?”

“Oui, il est très bon.”

Allison could not remember ever speaking to a child this age. For a moment the girl and she regarded each other, the girl gravely through her clear brown eyes, Allison curiously.

Then, from the next table the father called:
“Leila. Qu’est-ce que tu fais là?”

The girl heard, and wended her circuitous way through the chairs over to the man, a man not much older than Nicky, with thinning hair and a black beard, a strange, harsh look halfway between a
rabbi and a spy, who sat feeding a bottle to a very small boy in his lap. He was, Allison registered, Jewish. Ashkenazi, which wasn’t often the case in Paris. When the girl was close enough,
the man spoke absently.

“Eh, toi. Je fais bouffer à Jacob, puis que veux-tu qu’on fasse?”

“Aller aux Tuileries.”
She answered matter-of-factly, a hand on her brother’s stomach.

“Bon, ça y est.”

The girl agreed, then, with a hand on his shoulder, stood on tiptoes to speak in his ear. He listened, then started to laugh. Then he met Allison’s eyes and stopped.

“Désolé, madame. Je vais vous en commander un autre.”

She answered with a shake of her head, without really raising her voice.
“Vous en faites pas. J’étais sur le point de m’en aller.”

But she did not go, not yet. Now the girl was sitting up on her chair, her legs dangling above the floor, ending in pink galoshes. The man had returned his attention to her brother, who, his wet
lip round on the nipple of the bottle, a fuzz of blond hair over the crown of his head, gazed up at his father with shining eyes. The two looked ridiculously alike. The father made a face and the
boy’s lips stretched in open-faced delight.

And the father, balding with his black beard and Jewish nose, smiled back. His eyes behind his glasses crinkling with another kind of delight, a delight tempered by the age of his face, yes, but
more by the worry of love, the worry that was love. The girl climbed off her chair and moved to his side; he curled his arm around the baby’s neck to hold the bottle and with his other arm
free, now, turned the girl’s face to his, wiped off her chocolate mustache, and bent down to kiss her.

As for the lady with the hot chocolate, she had ceased to exist for them.

But she sat, transfixed. Feeling pity, fear, regret.

Pity for that balding man with his love corrupted by mortal fear.

Fear for those children, stuck with a devotion they had never asked for and could never lose.

And a searing regret that passed through and through her and left her, yet again, on the verge of tears.

Rising, leaving money on the table, leaving.

That girl with her father. What did they know about love?

5.

Four-fifteen, the Hotel Ritz. In the living room of her father’s suite. A uniformed waiter had opened the door for her, but for once, she seemed to be expected: she did
not need to explain who she was, and her father, in shirtsleeves and suit pants, was at the window of the living room, watching out. For a moment he did not notice that she had arrived. Then, when
she spoke, he turned and she was in his arms, smelling aftershave and cigarettes mixed with the wet-wool smell of her coat.

Busily, he took her coat, put her into a chair, directed the waiter’s tea service in his lousy French, all the while talking to her. The government had returned his files to him, so much
for Mike Levi, that damn liar. He’d be back stateside in a few weeks.
Le Monde
was coming to interview him at five.