The Gun Runner's Daughter (3 page)

Allison remembered a winter’s night in their Brooklyn Heights townhouse at Grace Court, when she was in high school. She’d woken up thirsty and come down the back stairs to get a
bottle of seltzer. Through the swinging door in the kitchen, she had seen him sitting in front of a rocks glass and a bottle of Absolut vodka at the dining room table. He had, it was clear to her,
just come in, for his overcoat was still on, his tired face with its thinning hair emerging, used and lined, from the bulk of the black cashmere.

“Hello, my Essie. Congratulate me, doll.” He was too drunk to attempt to dissimulate his loneliness: with the move from Borough Park had come the departure of his wife, who had gone
one step further than her husband in their flight from their roots by moving to California and marrying a goyish art dealer.

“Hello, Daddy.” She sat down across the big oak table from him. “What for?”

“Becoming a billionaire.”

“Congratulations. Ready for bed now?”

“Yeah.” He drained his drink and stood, unsteadily, while Alley rounded the table and took his arm. She smelled Yves Saint Laurent on his cashmere coat, tobacco and booze on his
breath. Supporting him gently up the stairs, she breathed deep his smells.

“So are we really billionaires?”

And now her father laughed, happily. “With seven figures to spare, doll. It’ll be in tomorrow’s papers.”

But in his bedroom he stopped, staring out the window over Grace Court for such a long time that Allison began to grow alarmed.

“What’s the matter, Daddy?”

And in a soft voice, no longer drunk, he whispered: “Nothing. I just wish Abba’d lived to see it.”

Abba. His father. Later, upstairs in her attic room, her father safely asleep, she had allowed herself to feel what Pauly had both understood and misunderstood: the simplicity of her
father’s ambition, the extent to which money mattered.

The next day the
New York Times
reported the sale of twenty-four rebuilt Mirages to Honduras. The sale, since the Israeli rebuilds used a U.S.-manufactured engine, had been signed off by
Ronald Reagan, three weeks into his presidency. And the commission to Ronald Rosenthal, U.S. representative of the Falcon Corporation, was estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

5.

That afternoon, in Arizona, the grand jury indicted her father on three counts: one violation of Arms Export Control Act, two violations of Arms Export Administration Act. Her
father was arraigned, and bail hearings were held, at which Bob Stein presented the court’s bailiff with three million dollars of Falcon Corporation money in six suitcases. Thereupon her
father was charged and released. The national news reported it that night.

Allison watched it from her apartment on Jane Street—despite what she had told Bob Stein, she had no intention of facing the summer community on Martha’s Vineyard while her father
was in the national spotlight. She had a fairly good idea of what was next.

And indeed, the next morning the papers reported that Ronald Rosenthal had left Phoenix on a chartered helicopter, and that his whereabouts were now unknown. The helicopter, she thought, would
have taken him to the Texas coast, from where a private boat probably took him to Havana. From there he would travel to Europe, then to Tel Aviv, where he was not terrifically worried about
extradition: he was a citizen, he owned both influence and property, and there was a Labor Knesset seat available to him for the asking. The only mistake, she thought, was that he had already been
arraigned. That meant, if she remembered correctly, that he could be tried in absentia.

July 4th. The summer day liquid. The summer night alive with explosions. The phone ringing endlessly, unanswered. Outside the window a television camera set up, filmed her window, did a spot,
left. She waited out the day reading by the throbbing of the air conditioner as if it were nothing more than a dream from which she had been awoken by the phone, at night. When she’d finished
her assigned reading—Bill Dykeman at the law firm where she was interning believed in continuing education—bored, she booted her computer, logged into Dykeman’s Lexis account, and
read some Arms Export Control Act law. That confirmed her apathy. Her father would never come to trial: pleas would be bargained, assets exchanged. This was business as usual.

That she thought this was because she did not yet know how deeply her father was in trouble, and how dearly he was going to be made to pay.

Nor could she. The percolation of events that would, by Thanksgiving, erupt again on the front pages of every major newspaper in America was, for the moment, so removed, so secret, that even Bob
Stein had no inkling of it.

Which was, in many ways, fortunate.

For as the summer of 1994 crept across New York in a suite of indistinguishable days of ferocious heat, an epic dry spell that was breaking all previous drought records, days of high cerulean
skies at noon and brilliantly clear starlit nights, it was, for Allison Rosenthal, the end of a kind of innocence she wasn’t aware she possessed but which she would miss for a long time to
come.

6.

Michael Levi, her father’s second in command and lifelong friend, was arrested in mid-July. The press missed the importance of it and Levi’s problems were relegated
to section B, city news.

Allison didn’t get it either. She read the item in the morning over coffee and juice at Brigitte’s on Greenwich, the morning sun splashing through the high windows onto the
newsprint. She was tired of how long they were taking to settle her father’s messy, embarrassing problems. And for the first time the prospect of sitting in the offices of Dykeman, Goldfarb
& Barney struck her as attractive: it would stop her thinking about her father.

When, a week later, Levi turned State’s evidence in return for limited use immunity, the papers missed that too.

That evening—as every evening—Allison met Martha Ohlinger at a table in the Corner Bistro. At the
New York Observer,
Martha reported on Wall Street and Washington, and had
often told Allison things she didn’t want to know about her father. In doing so, of course, Martha was immeasurably helped by the fact that her own father was no less than the national
security adviser and a close confidant of Clinton, as he had once been of Carter. Pushing back to Allison through the crowded room in jeans, sandals, and a black silk blouse, Martha sat and threw a
copy of the
Observer
onto the table.

“You seen this, Alley girl?”

Allison watched her friend shaking her black curls free from under a baseball cap, letting them fall in a frame around her dark, complex, sharply delineated face. Her eyes, black and alive, were
showing excitement, and not for the first time Alley thought that what made Martha attractive was intellect more than any of her more obvious assets. Just now, she was very attractive indeed.

“Martha? If you’re going to tell me about my father, I don’t want to know.”

“You’re going to want to know this, Alley.”

The paper carried the story that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York had announced her intention to pursue a conviction of Ronald Rosenthal, in absentia, using Michael
Levi’s immunized State’s evidence.

And still, Allison Rosenthal did not understand.

“Big deal. My dad’s sitting in a million-dollar house in Jerusalem. They’ll never convict him, Marty. Peres’ll come over and whisper a word to your dad, Falcon’ll
pay a fine. It’s just making rain for Bob Stein.”

Martha shook her head emphatically. The two had known each other since Alley’s first day, eleven years old, at St. Ann’s, and since then they had shared not only every emotional
experience, but almost every intellectual one, arguing their way through to joint American studies B.A.s at Yale before their paths diverged, Alley to Paris, Martha to the London School of
Economics.

“I don’t think so, Alley, and unlike you I know what I’m talking about. The case has been given to Shauna McCarthy. U.S. Attorney, Southern District.”

“And McCarthy’ll make a deal. It’s not about foreign policy, Marty. It’s about an exchange of assets.”

“That’s just it. It
is
about foreign policy. And it
worries
me that you don’t understand.”

“Marty.” Alley lowered her voice, as if explaining something embarrassingly simple. “Foreign policy is conducted by the Executive. Criminal prosecutions are the business of the
Justice Department. Come off it.”

“That’s exactly my point.” Calm and methodical, like a doctor administering unwelcome medicine, Martha counted off on her fingers. “McCarthyism. The destruction of the
Black Panther Party. Watergate. The Iran-contra pardons. Paula Jones’s tax audit. I got an example for every decade since the war of an administration abrogating to itself the tools of the
Justice Department, Alley girl. Now, what exactly do you have to prove this administration’s different?”

For a moment, Alley thought. Then: “Have they appointed a prosecutor?”

Martha nodded. That, to someone trying to gauge the seriousness of the government’s intentions, was exactly the right question. “Not yet.”

“Then don’t worry about it. Okay?”

“Alley, I heard that Dee Dennis is under consideration.”

She didn’t answer that, but raised her eyebrows at her friend, who went on nearly unwillingly, her voice lowered.

“Christ sake, Alley girl. Ed Dennis is White House counsel. And his son is just looking for a job after five years on the Walsh prosecutions. Dee’s probably as well qualified as
anybody in the country to argue this. And he’s a damn sight better connected.”

For a moment, the two stared at each other, and the expression between them was one that had first been there over fifteen years before. Then Alley wiped her hands over her eyes.

“Let me alone, Marty, okay? I’m already like a goddamn pariah. You know what it’s gonna be like going to DG&B tomorrow? I can’t help what they’re doing to my
father.”

But Martha was not calmed. “I don’t give a fuck about your father, Alley. I’m worrying about what they’re going to do to you.”

7.

Still, she simply did not see. Nothing was happening to her: a couple reporters, so what. Nor could she see that her father risked much. A very great portion of his business
took place in Israel and Europe, and those things left in America had earned their keep long ago. All through the month since his arrest, his checks had continued to arrive from his secretaries at
his offices abroad, checks in bizarre amounts—$4,562.17; $12,603.50; $2,998.89—yielded by that day’s exchange from deutsche marks, shekels, pounds sterling, checks drawn on Bank
Leumi, Barclay’s, Crédit Lyonnais.

By day, she went to work at Dykeman, Goldfarb & Barney; by night she went out with Martha, or read, or slept. True, it surprised her how increasingly many people, at work, now avoided her as
the extent of the government’s determination to prosecute her father came clear. Surprised her, but did not otherwise affect her. She had always been solitary. And she knew that soon the
story would fade.

But as July passed into August, it became clearer and clearer that her father’s affairs were far from disappearing from the media. She could judge the story’s prominence by the
treatment she received at work. And Martha, over drinks each night at the Corner Bistro, continued to feed her the most important points, like medicine to an unwilling child.

Allison was grateful, in her way. Sidney Ohlinger had told Martha to stay away from Allison after her father’s arrest, and Martha had told him to take his regular chair in the Oval Office
and shove it. Watching her friend one such evening at the bistro, Allison smiled at the memory, with gratitude, with affection. When Martha had woken one morning a few years back to see a
front-page picture of Ronald Rosenthal testifying in front of the joint committee on Iran-contra, all she had said was: “You see? It’s like I always told you, we both got crooks for old
men.”

Then the smile faded. Martha was the dearest thing in the world to her, but even Martha didn’t really understand. Most American Jews didn’t quite get it. You had to think of her
father not as a boy from Brooklyn made good in a WASP world—like the perfectly American, perfectly liberal Ohlingers—but as an Israeli: he’d spent half of his life there since
running away to join Tsahal, the Israel Defense Forces, at seventeen. Understanding that, for Alley, was key.

Once, after a dinner, Pauly had said: “Daddy, for Christ sake. How can you deal with these people?”

It was an evening not at Grace Court but at 454 Park, so she must have been in college. Her father had just ushered important dinner guests out: Amiram Nir, Richard Secord, and a young man with
a South American accent who was somebody’s son.

“How?” He answered absently, jotting down figures at the living room escritoire while she watched. Then he turned directly to him and spoke in the dimmed lights of the room.
“Now you listen to me. Who do you want to have the profits? Portugal? Sweden? Germany? Or the country that has millions of Soviet Jews to absorb? David Ben-Gurion himself said that all
military embargoes are embargoes against Israel. You decide, boychik.”

That was the end of the conversation. The next day the man with the South American accent who was somebody’s son called to invite her out, and she found out his name. It was
Stroessner.

Thinking all this, watching Martha across the table at the Corner Bistro. But how could she tell her this? And Martha was speaking.

“I
know
what happened, Alley. Britain and France both got wind of your dad’s sales. They know he works with our government all the time, they know he wouldn’t do a thing
like this without a directive from our government. Only thing is, Britain and France don’t give a fuck about the Bosnian Muslims, and they don’t want them armed and shooting on their
peace-keeping forces, which our damn president forced them to send in the first place. So they filed diplomatic démarches.”

Eyes narrowed, Allison was listening now. “Go on.”

“So, what the fuck, Alley. If you’re the president, that’s why you
use
covert programs in the first place. He got his guns to Bosnia, now he has your dad prosecuted to
prove he was uninvolved. That’s called plausible deniability.”