The Gun Runner's Daughter (9 page)

And yet, he wasn’t really looking at her, now, but at Martha, who had followed her friend’s gaze, turning casually to look over at the man. Allison felt her stiffen as she turned
away again, quickly. She stood very close as they regarded each other, Alley raising an eyebrow in question. Martha whispered.

“You seen him before?”

Alley nodded. “He’s been following me around.”

“You speak to him?”

“I gave him the finger.”

Martha nodded, serious. Then without any hesitation she cocked her head toward the door.

And, a dozen oysters and a salad having composed their dinners, the two slipped out onto the street without good-byes.

A deep sea fog was in over the town, a thick, muffling blind through which dripped, dropped, a desultory rain. Circuit Avenue was ghostly, deserted. Only the Ritz was alive, a
yellow light leaking into the fog, spilling loud music unabashed into the empty town. Hugging themselves against the moist chill, the two women kept silent until they were away from the line
forming at the Oyster Bar’s door. Only then did Alley say:

“Okay, let’s have it.”

Martha did not look at her. “Have what, baby?”

“Who was it?”

A pause. Then, with a deep breath, she replied: “It’s not good, Alley girl. That’s Nicholson Dymitryck.”

“Yeah? Who’s that?”

“You’re kidding, right?” When Alley didn’t answer, Martha glanced at her. Allison was looking down as she walked, shaking her head no. “Christ sakes, Alley. It was
Dymitryck who broke the story on your dad for the
North American Review.
”

“Very impressive. A reporter. So what?”

“Dymitryck’s not just a reporter, Alley girl. No one knows more about the arms trade except, maybe, the buyers and sellers. Dymitryck’s the guy who was at Harlanstrasse 14. You
with me?”

Alley’s stomach was plummeting now. She knew about Harlanstrasse 14, the address of a brutal bombing in Munich, where a Turkish arms dealer had been killed during an interview, along with
a cameraman. Dymitryck, the interviewer, had been the only survivor, and one of the scoops he had brought from the interview—exactly what the bombers, reputed to be Israeli, were supposed to
have been trying to prevent—was that Ronald Rosenthal had been doing business in Bosnia. The Turkish dealer had been one of Rosenthal’s sources. But Martha was still talking.

“I got a whole file on this guy. I wrote it for the
Financial Times
, and then again for the
Observer
, but neither of them would publish it. Know why? They didn’t
believe it. Dymitryck’s bankrolled by Stan Diamond—you know him? Organic Communications? Old SDS guy turned software magnate? Dymitryck’s the one who documented the pipelines to
the Haitian attachés and to the mujahideen.”

Diamond. For a second, the name was familiar. But she was too busy being scared, suddenly, to pursue it. “Okay, okay. So what’s it mean that he’s here?”

“It means that he thinks there’s something to learn from you, Alley. That’s all it can mean.”

“Well then, he’s wasting his time, isn’t he?”

“I guess so.” Martha, to her friend’s dismay, sounded doubtful.

“What?”

“It’s just that this guy doesn’t waste a whole lot of his time.”

And Alley, thinking about this, forgot to tell her friend about Dee.

They were at the Ritz now. Just inside the door, Martha put her arm around the bouncer’s shoulders, and spoke in his ear. Allison knew what she was saying: there was a little bastard in a
jacket bothering her, would he keep the guy out? Smiling, the bouncer nodded and took a twenty-dollar bill from her. Then someone put his arms a round Martha, and, with a worried look to Alley, she
let herself be manhandled onto the dance floor.

Alone, Allison shouldered her way to the bar and ordered a beer. Here, Ronald Rosenthal, who had poured millions of dollars into the island’s economy via the construction industry, was
something of a popular hero. Someone made room at the bar—in fact, quite a few people, all men, made room at the bar—and beer in hand, she let herself concentrate on Dymitryck. Emily
Harden, with her precisely phrased
New Yorker
questions, she could handle. This guy, however, scared her, and it took effort to stop thinking about him as, sipping her beer, she watched the
band.

Which was why she did not see Dee until he had pushed his way through the crowd at the bar, shyly, smiling uneasily, and leaned next to her.

2.

She did not seem surprised to see him, Dee perceived in the high awareness of his fright. Perhaps she seemed slightly disturbed. What did that mean?

The answer came to him at once. It meant that she did not know he was the government’s attorney. It was so open a secret in Dee’s circles that it came as a shock to realize that to
Allison it might not yet be known.

Allison, however, was next to him, and there was no time to think of anything else. Leaning to draw the bartender toward him, Dee ordered drinks, for himself, for Alley. Then, the music too loud
to talk, he waited, looking down at Alley, smiling slightly to mask his anxiety. What was he going to say? He had no idea. But when the song ended, he found himself talking.

“Looks like the dry spell’s about over.”

Her eyes on him, she licked her lips with the point of her tongue. His gaze moved up, onto her tanned forehead, very lightly freckled, down her cheekbone, and then to her red, red lips. With
relief, he saw that they were smiling.

“So I’m told.”

He smiled too, now, broadly.

“How’s your summer been?”

“Good enough.”

The band was introducing a new song with a long, loud acoustic lead. Now, in tiny increments, his nerve was returning. He leaned down and nearly shouted toward her ear, above which her blond
hair was tightly pulled.

“So I hear you’re in law school down in New York.”

She answered, in turn, toward his ear, and he felt her breath as heat against his cheek.

“Uh-huh.”

“That means we live in the same city.”

“Does it?”

For a time the song, Chrissie Hynde’s “Revolution,” was too loud to talk. When it faded, the band took a break and he spoke again at something closer to a normal conversational
distance.

“What year you in?”

“Huh?”

“School.”

“Oh. Last.” That surprised him. She would be, what, twenty-seven? Dee had passed the bar at twenty-five. He started to calculate this, then stopped when she added: “I spent two
years abroad before starting law school.”

Ah. That made sense. “Really? Where?”

“Paris, mostly.”

“What’d you do?”

She shrugged. “Hung. Took classes. Tried to get out of going to law school.”

He nodded. This, the longest sentence she had spoken, sounded for the first time like the girl he had known. He wished he could get her to speak at length. He reminded himself that he had to go.
“Any plans?”

“Not to practice law.”

And now, without any warning, she asked the question he had not yet decided how he would answer.

“So where do you work?”

She was facing him directly now, her face composed, her attention full on him. On instinct he answered with equal directness.

“U.S. attorney’s office. Southern District.”

A pause, an observant moment on his part, watching with satisfaction the surprise on her face.

Good.

3.

For a moment she had been feeling okay. The very fact that he was speaking to her had assured her that he must have been passed over for the job on her father’s
prosecution. Now she suddenly felt betrayed. Before she could talk, he had leaned toward her and was, as much as the bar’s noise allowed it, speaking softly, his lips toward her ear.

“I was offered a job that interested me awfully. The constitutional issues were important. And it was clean: only an exchange of assets was at stake. The defendant had already departed the
country; his financial loss was irrelevant to him. And then, it was a pretty good deal for him because he’s guilty.”

She said nothing, and he went on, speaking carefully, and avoiding, she noticed, saying the one or two words that would put him outside the law. “I think, however, that personal
considerations are probably going to make me less than entirely appropriate as the line prosecutor. I was foolish not to realize that when I took the job.”

That was all. He fell silent, expectantly so. As if waiting for her to make a decision.

He was right, she thought, to put his cards on the table. Masked by the loud music, watching out the window as she fumbled for purchase in her understanding. In a way she was flattered by his
bluntness, by the assumption of her preference to hear the truth.

So Dee Dennis was prosecuting her father after all. She pronounced the words voicelessly, with wry wonder. So Dee Dennis was the line attorney on the federal prosecution of her father. Jesus
fucking
God
almighty, what was going to happen next?

Then, as her initial shock passed, she thought, why not? He was, what, three years older than she? He was qualified, she had no doubt: he had been in grooming for this job since the day he was
born.

Then what exactly did he want? It was extraordinarily dangerous for Dee to be talking to her. She had only to turn to him and say, “Falcon Corporation,” and he was compromised.
Already what he had done was probably unethical.

Her heart was beating hard now, very hard in the cage of her chest under her sleeveless T-shirt. She turned her face to him for the first time in minutes, but still she did not speak.

He was much heavier than the thin child she had known, and to all appearances the weight was muscle. His hair was blond, like Allison’s, but very light where hers was wheaten, straight,
shaved close at the sides and left full at the top. The greatest change, however, was in his face, which seemed to slip in and out of familiarity as she watched: now familiar, wry and inquisitive,
blue eyes shining, mouth curving sardonically at the corners; now a stranger, the settled expression of an adult, unafraid and, seemingly, in judgment of what it was watching. His hands, she was
surprised to see, were long, with knuckly fingers and surprisingly thin wrists, more than a little graceful.

He was a beautiful man, as beautiful, in his way, as Pauly, who had been the handsomest man she had known. She wondered, for a moment, if Pauly would have developed this sense of adulthood that
Dee showed, this ease of authority. They were, after all, both males, no matter how different in kind. But of course Dee was not Jewish, and Dee was not gay.

Finally, she answered, speaking calmly, as if making a neutral observation.

“It is unethical for you to speak to me.”

He nodded, but said nothing, and she went on.

“I think you’re being foolish.”

He smiled now, as if enjoying the danger of this meeting. “Maybe. I want to talk to you.”

She did not answer that but instead asked herself again, what did he want?

He was still looking down at her, still waiting for her answer, apparently unafraid. His light eyes smiling. His face so open, so cleanly shaven, the lines from his mouth to his chin so defined,
like a vision of hope. Perhaps she watched him a second too long: she felt a blush rising to her face, and his expression was shifting. And now he was precisely the person she remembered, little
Dee Dennis, reckless and charming, never doing what he should, always just on the outside, and now desire was rising in her. She spoke very carefully.

“Why?”

He answered immediately. “I can’t tell you here. Please. Meet me tomorrow.”

She turned away, feeling the heat spread through her face and over her chest, her thighs tighten and her legs, just the slightest bit, grow tired. She drank from her beer, composing herself.

But she could not focus her thoughts on Dee. She could only think: if only she were someone else! If only she could make it appear! Appear like her father wasn’t a crook who was about to
lose his house to federal seizure. Appear like he was not the man the whole nation had watched testify before the Iran-contra committee. If only she could make the truth inadmissible, not to
evidence
but to
reality.
To make love to Dee, right now, tonight, would eradicate everything: the empty house, the dying summer, everything, for the minutes it lasted; it would be
like being sixteen again in the days before her brother died and her father was arrested; it would be like being perfectly whole again, entirely at home. She looked at him now and on his face was
an unambiguously tender expression, too clear to pretend not to see, and she watched him openly.

“Where?” The music was growing louder, and the word sounded like a shout.

“Anywhere.”

Watching him still, watching him, her mind traversing a wordless fantasy in which she did not have to fake and nothing separated her from him.

And then, with an interior sense of factitiousness that was only too familiar, she leaned toward him and raised her voice through the mounting volume of the band, speaking with decision at which
she could not remember arriving; at which she could not remember ever not having arrived.

“I’ll pick you up at the parking lot at Wasque at noon tomorrow.”

When she stepped back again, it was in time to see relief visibly relax his frame, his eyes losing focus as a hint of tears filmed over the so blue irises, and he nodded, and left some money on
the bar, and without showing her his face again, pushed through the crowd and out into the street. And Allison, alone, stood in total disbelief at herself, staring at herself in the back-bar mirror
until, behind her, she felt the warmth of a soft body, and then arms around her neck, and then saw Martha’s face reflected beside hers, cheek to cheek, while Martha’s voice spoke in her
ear, filled with surprise: “Alley girl, Alley girl, what the fucking hell do you think you’re up to?”

4.

“Stop worrying. Who’s gonna tell?
I’m
not.”

Saturday morning, Martha lay on the living room floor in light moving from the rain on the windows, smiling ruefully as she talked: Allison had taken her to task, until far into the morning, for
omitting to tell her that Dee had after all been tapped for her father’s prosecution. Now that the fact was known, however, Martha saw not only practical but erotic possibility in it.