The Gun Runner's Daughter (37 page)

Nicky didn’t answer; Peretz didn’t seem inclined to expand. They crossed the bridge in silence, the old van rattling mercilessly, the four men now ignoring Nicky
completely. The man in the passenger seat was talking softly into a small tape recorder, his eyes darting back and forth through the windows and out the rearview mirror, which was set, Nicky
noticed, so that he could see behind from the passenger seat. Nicky could not hear, in the traffic, what he was saying. Then a bubble of unease popped in him.

They clearly could not escape the Nova. But if they actually were caught, and Peretz spoke to the men in the Nova, it wouldn’t take ten seconds for them to discover they were all on the
same side. Then what?

Would Peretz hand him over? For a time, Nicky considered this. And he could not avoid concluding: probably.

Nicky dead, Peretz alienated, what would happen to Alley’s plan, whatever it was?

And what would happen to whatever evidence she was planning to give him?

For a time Nicky considered, anxiety and dread equally mounting in his belly. Finally, he asked Peretz:

“Do you know who those men are?”

“Mr. Rosenthal’s enemies.”

Nicky literally bit his tongue to stop himself from talking. Then he said, suddenly: “They’ve tried to kill me. Twice.”

This was greeted with a raised-eyebrows glance between Peretz and the man in the passenger seat, who then turned to Nicky, showing a face that looked as if it had once, long ago, been beaten to
a pulp.

“Give us the word, pal. We can’t be doing this all night long.”

And now a cold jet went through Nicky, a cold jet that ran, in an instant, from his heart to his scalp and then clean through his blood.

He said: “For all I know, these people are on a government payroll.”

Peretz, pursing his lips as if speaking to a child: “Don’t be so scared of the government, pal. Just a bunch of thugs. Just like us.”

That, to Nicky, was a convincing speech. He nodded, dry-mouthed: “All right.”

Thinking, trying to think, of another way of keeping Rosenthal’s two sets of employees from meeting.

The end of the bridge was at hand now, and Peretz, no longer driving fast, angled down an exit ramp, crossed a couple of populated blocks, then turned down a steep hill. He
flipped on the radio to Chrissie Hynde’s voice:
Come to me darling / With a message of love;
the man with the tape recorder said something in an angry tone and snapped the radio off
again. At the bottom of the hill, Nicky saw the river, the great arc of the bridge they had just crossed rising up on massive stone arches, and recognized it as the Brooklyn Bridge. Then they
passed into a series of deserted streets, lined with warehouses.

And here, in this dreamy urban landscape, as the van cruised bumpily from deserted street to deserted street, the atmosphere in the car changed. There was no more talk besides the voice of the
man speaking into the tape recorder, in what Nicky could now hear to be Hebrew, in the silence of these deserted streets, and Nicky became slowly aware of the ammoniac smell of sweat. He spoke, as
if awakening from a sleep.

“Peretz. Take me to the police.”

The man answered calmly, without turning. “Essie Rosenthal said to take you elsewhere.”

He leaned forward, raising his voice. “I do not want them murdered.”

Peretz kept driving, his eyes darting from one side of the street to the other, and answered in a conversational tone: “That so? Why not?”

“For every reason. You know why.”

Now Peretz turned in his seat, slowing somewhat, to look directly at Nicky. “No, I don’t.”

“Those are dangerous people.”

“Are they?” In quarter profile to Nicky, his face turning back to the windshield, the man smiled. “I think they’re stupid people.”

He looked at Nicky again, driving: “Be a big boy. I think you know we don’t have a hell of a lot of options. What do you say?”

And now Nicky was very scared, more scared than he could remember ever being before in his life. Or perhaps
fear
was not the word, but
dread.
Fear, after all, may have driven him
to do something. And yet he did not move, but sat feeling each second pass as a discrete moment of horror, slowly realizing that he was not even going to try to stop this thing, whatever it was.
That he did not want to stop it. And with that realization came a horror even stronger. And then he heard himself talking.

“Okay.”

5.

The decision made, the atmosphere in the van changed entirely. For a short time, however, they continued to drive, as if nothing were different. Finally, at the end of a long
street running next to warehouses, Peretz accelerated sharply, distancing himself from the Nova, then turned a corner and, just as sharply, braked. As the van slowed, the man in the passenger seat
turned back, opened the side door, and the two men in leather jackets slipped out of the moving car, pushing the door closed behind them. Nicky saw them entering the doorway of a warehouse, and
then the Nova turned the corner behind them, flooding the street with light. Still driving slowly, as if to give the Nova time to catch up, Peretz continued down the street for a time, next to the
warehouse, then turned through an open gate in a storm fence surrounding what appeared to be a factory parking lot.

Now, in front of the van, Nicky could see water and the lights of Manhattan across the harbor. As if rehearsed, the Nova drew in behind them, and the van stopped. For a moment, nothing happened;
then the doors of the Nova opened in unison.

Nicky tensed, wanting suddenly to crouch on the floor, but none of the men moved, nor did the two occupants of the Nova appear, and slowly Nicky realized that they were crouching behind the open
doors of their car. He knelt, straining his neck to look behind, while the windows of each open door rolled down, then two gunshots sounded and the back window of the van suddenly showed a ragged
design of cracks around a small hole. Nicky ducked.

But when he looked up again, he saw that perhaps Peretz had been right about these men.

Perhaps they were stupid.

Because behind the Nova the two men in leather jackets were approaching from a doorway in the warehouse, each cradling something in his arms like a small baby.

And before Nicky had time to think again, there were two short bursts of gunfire and, one by one, the two men from the Nova fell sideways onto the ground next to their car.

He watched them, lying on the tarmac in a strange fetal position, his heart huge. Behind, standing straight now, Peretz’s men were approaching the corpses, one each; and
each, in a movement impossible not to recognize, placed a coup de grâce in the corpses’ temples. Then, still moving calmly, they searched the Nova.

When they entered the van again, with the sliding door open, Peretz drove in a wide curve next to the water, and each of the leather-jacketed men tossed their guns, wood-stocked shotguns with
stumpy barrels, over the edge of the dock, then peeled off surgeon’s gloves and tossed those too. Then, still driving slowly, they left the parking lot, pausing briefly for one man to descend
and lock the gates behind them, and they drew off into the little streets.

Now the man in the passenger seat was talking again, into the little tape recorder, and as they pulled away from the factory parking lot, Nicky, his heart calming, could hear
that his accented speech was in fact English. “Entering the Navy Yard, two cars, ATP116 and Hoodie 75. Adams Street, light on, fourth floor, number 205. Park Street, red light. Tillary
Street, moving east from Court. Male black, six foot, green parka. Police at intersection, NY 12, Seventy-sixth Precinct. Jay Street, going south . . .”

Driving scrupulously, Peretz piloted the van south, then east, deep into, Nicky guessed, Brooklyn. Slowly, he realized that the one with the tape recorder was documenting possible witnesses. He
wondered what that would be good for if they were caught.

Still, the tension in the car melted away, and the four men began to talk softly, in Yiddish. Apparently he, Nicky, was the subject of the conversation, for in time one of the big men who had
performed the murders turned to him and said in a curious tone: “So you’re a friend of Mr. Rosenthal?”

Nicky hesitated, lighting a cigarette. “Of Allison’s.” Surprised at how normal his voice sounded.

“Oh? Where from?”

Nicky paused. Then he said, “College.”

“No kidding?” That seemed all the explanation the man needed, and disregarding Nicky, he made a comment in Yiddish, apparently a joke, because the others started laughing quietly.
When they stopped, Nicky addressed a question to the big one.

“Where do you all know Allison from?”

For a moment Nicky thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, briefly: “The shtetl, before she turned goyish.”

From the front seat, Peretz, still laughing, said: “Look who’s talking. Menachem here has a Ph.D. from Stanford.”

“That right?” Looking curiously at the man, Nicky asked, “In what?”

But Menachem apparently didn’t care to discuss it. Briefly, he said: “Philosophy of religion.” He turned away, lighting a cigarette himself, and then turned back with a
strangely friendly smile.

“But my postdoc work was more important.”

“Oh yeah? Where was that?”

“University of East Beirut. Shatila campus.”

Nicky said nothing while the others laughed.

In time, Peretz began stopping the van, letting off two of his men, one after the other, at different locations. When only the three of them—Peretz, Menachem, and
Nicky—were left, they stopped at last in front of an apartment block and went through the ornate and shabby lobby of the prewar building and into an apartment where, at a large dining room
table in a room bordered by file cabinets, they sat. Only now did Nicky think to check his watch, and found it to be midnight. After perhaps a quarter hour, Nicky heard the elevator doors opening
in the corridor, then footsteps, and then a key in the front-door lock. Calmly, Peretz withdrew a gun from his breast pocket and sat with it leveled at the door. It opened, and Allison came in.

There was a brief discussion among the three, a discussion that quickly grew heated. Alley left the two men talking to go down a hallway, then returned with a thick wad of
money in her hand. They argued for a moment more, then, as quickly as the argument had flared up, it died. Ignoring the pile of bills, now sitting in the middle of the table, the men rose, Peretz
heading immediately to the door, Menachem pausing to turn to Nicky and say, “
B’hatzlacha
, pal. Good luck. Whoever the fuck you are.”

Then they were gone. Alley, still standing, turned her face to Nicky, and he saw for the first time the deep lines of fatigue on her cheeks. They regarded each other while
outside, and far away, a siren passed. Then she moved to the light switch, turned off the lights, and, holding Nicky again by the hand, led him through a set of doors into another room.

Here, street lamps dimly illuminated what Nicky gradually saw to be a living room from another age: heavy furniture covered with sheets, an oak coffee table, bronze lamps with silk shades. Alley
pulled the sheet from a couch and they sat, watching each other again. After a moment, Alley shifted, pulling her legs up on the couch, and lowering her head onto his chest. At the same time, she
pulled the sheet up and around them both. He felt her shivering, and put his hands, gingerly, around her shoulders. For a long time, silence. When he spoke, he found himself whispering.

“Where are we?”

She answered, too, in a whisper. “My grandparents’ apartment.”

“What were you arguing about?”

“I wanted them to take some money and leave the country. They said they didn’t need to.”

“Who won?”

“They did.”

A pause. Then she said, tonelessly and still whispering: “I knew they were going to do it.”

Nicky answered immediately. “I know.”

“Did you see?”

“Yes.” He paused, and she shifted her head under his to look at his face. Now his palm was on her brow.

She nodded.

“Those guys thought they were helping your father.” She nodded again, and took his hand from her shoulder and held it, under the sheet, against her breast. “I know. Listen now.
There’s a plane to L.A. tomorrow morning at six. From Newark. I booked you.”

“So what do we do?”

“We wait here. I’ll take you to the airport in a few hours.”

“And then?”

“Then you go home and get better. And when I tell you to, you have Diamond file suit.”

It was as if they were an old married couple, returning to the frayed arena of an ever-repeating argument. With a sigh, he told her, “You’ll be arrested immediately.”

“I know that.”

“What good will that do?”

“Don’t think about that.” There was exhaustion in her voice. “Just promise me, Nicky.”

Instead of answering, he asked another question. “How did you know I was looking for the videotape?”

“Your interview in Paris with Peleg was taped. My father had a transcript in his safe.”

“Did you read it?”

“No. Just a glance. That told me all I needed to know. Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“How did you find Peleg?”

Nicky paused, a long moment, before answering. Then:

“The same way I found Hourani, Alley. Your brother told me.”

Eyes absolutely blank, she absorbed the news. “When?”

“First in the spring of ’92, first time. In New Haven. Then he called me again, in early June. I . . .” He fell silent now, and watched her, as if seeking a clue from her
expression for what he should say. When she gave him nothing, he went on. “Why didn’t you read the transcript?”

She nearly spat the answer. “I don’t care about that shit. I didn’t need to.”

“Well, Peleg told me he didn’t have a copy of the tape. He told me what happened in it, but he couldn’t be a witness. He was too disreputable, no one would believe him. He told
me that you had witnessed, but that you wouldn’t help. But he told me your brother might.”

“Pauly wasn’t there.” Again, there was no tone in her voice, and no expression in his eyes.