The Gun Runner's Daughter (22 page)

Or could have been. Slowly, still thinking, she rose. It could have been perfect, but only if Nicky had not died. As it was, Nicky’s death ruined everything.

And even if he had not died, would she have the courage? The . . . the courage, yes, but also the total unscrupulousness required to use these documents in that other context.

Did she? Grimly, looking at nothing, she asked herself. Once before she had done something terrible to save her father, something so unspeakable that even now she only approached its memory
barely, not even acknowledging it to herself. But then, she had only sacrificed herself to hide an unspeakable truth from him. For what she was envisaging now, she would have to sacrifice not only
herself, although that sacrifice would be enormous, but others too.

In return, however, she would save the most important thing in the world.

She shook her head, as if to free herself of the thought. Really, it didn’t matter. Nicky was dead, and without him, she could do nothing. And with that comforting realization, she slipped
her arms into the backpack, picked up her helmet, and, turning off the lights, went quickly out the door.

4.

In the street again, in the thick October light, she unlocked her bicycle with clumsy movements, still trembling, mounted, and kicked into motion onto the street in front of a
van, the outraged face of its driver, a Hasid, flashing out of his window. Allison didn’t notice. On the avenue she entered the line of traffic and accelerated, then banked tightly down
Fifty-fourth Street, gathering speed, standing straight-legged on the pedals, dropping her hands on the handlebars and lowering her helmeted head against the wind, the wind that grew with her
speed, and then, more suddenly, fell as she braked to a stop in front of a small storefront, which a faded sign advertised in Hebrew and Yiddish as housing “Klavan’s Religious
Articles.”

Jesus. In shock she stared at the storefront. She would not have believed that it could still exist, never mind be open for business. In disbelief, she hesitated. Then in doubt. Both were brief,
and she dismounted and walked her bike into the dusty interior of the store.

Again, the pervasive smell of old fabrics and cooked food. She paused as her eyes adjusted from the bright sunlight, then gradually the view of a man in shirtsleeves,
payess
, a yarmulke,
and a sparse, untrimmed beard came into focus. Somehow she had the impression that he had been watching her through the window. To his back, she spoke.

“What are you doing here, Drew?”

The man answered without turning. “The name is Peretz, and you fucking know it.” His accent, strangely nasal, was flat and clipped.

That made her stop. But what, she thought, had she expected? “I’m sorry. I forgot.”

“Remember it, okay?”

Silence. Then, relenting, he turned and stepped into the dim sunlight that the store’s dirty front permitted, revealing a thin face with a massive nose, complexly and unusually crooked.
His eyes were slightly squinted, as if their degree zero was somewhat searching.

“How are you, Esther?”

Esther. She could not remember when last she had heard her real name used but by her father. In wonder, she watched the man before her. “And you?”

“
Baruch ha shem
.” He shrugged, watching her carefully, his black eyes squinting over his nose, which, she now noticed, was badly scarred.

“Don’t tell me you’ve broken that nose of yours again.”

“No, but they had to operate for a deviated septum, from that prick cop at the Russian embassy.” Drew had, during his time in the now defunct Brooklyn Jewish Defense League, held
some kind of a record for breaking his nose in street fights. That was before he joined the JDL’s more religious, more militant, more right-wing successor, Kahane Chai, and changed his
name.

“Lemme see.” She stepped forward, reaching a hand up, familiarly and with affection.

“No. Don’t touch me. Come on, Esther. Show some fucking respect.”

She let her hand fall, unaccountably hurt. They had been children together, best friends before Rosenthal had moved her and Pauly to Brooklyn Heights. He had kissed her once.

Drew spoke again. “Sorry. I’m sorry, Essie.”

She nodded, not looking, still aching. But her answer did not show it. “So, what are you doing in Brooklyn? Aren’t there Arabs to shoot in Hebron? Or wait: you all do peacenik Jews
now too, don’t you?”

He ignored the comment and answered, instead, in the rising tone of frustration. “There’s no one to take care of this fucking store. Since Dad died, and my brother’s out in
L.A.”

“Sell it.”

“Yeah, right. You got anything for my mom to live on?” Quickly, he seemed to regret the question. “Don’t answer that. How’s your dad?”

For a moment she registered, curiously, how completely the expectation of shame disappeared here. Answering was a luxury. “Trial starts in a few days.”

“I heard when this is over he’s going to stand for Knesset.”

“Buy himself an election, sure.”

Drew paused, then spoke with a kind of hesitant argument. “Well, he’s not going to get any justice here.”

He was surprised by the response, as was she. “Oh, fuck him, Drew. Peretz. This isn’t about justice.”

She was looking down now, fingering an object on a display, and her cheeks were red. Perhaps in all the world, she thought, only Drew knew what she thought about her father.

He answered softly. Nearly beseechingly. “Don’t say that, Essie. It’s a crime and you know it. Anyone’s earned a Knesset seat, then why not him? You know what he’s
done over there? Shuls, yeshivot, hospital care. Myself, I’d have done six to ten in Dannemora without your dad, and believe me it’s hard to keep kosher while you’re being
shtupped by the Nation of Islam. Don’t let the goyim turn him into a criminal to his own daughter. It’s not true.”

But in Allison’s mind, she heard her father’s voice: “Truth? What the fuck is truth, okay?” Outside the window, a woman passed in a gold wig and a flowered dress. In her
mind’s eye was Drew, a long-haired high school boy in an oversized plaid shirt, dirty blue jeans, a tiny knit
kipah
bobby-pinned to his head, balancing a basketball in his lap while
they listened to Mott the Hoople at a diner jukebox. After she’d left Borough Park he’d been arrested for possession of a handgun; his father had called Rosenthal for help, and
Rosenthal had called D’Amato. Then Drew had had his nose broken by a cop during a protest in front of the Soviet embassy, and his father had called Rosenthal again, this time in panic because
the cop had been hospitalized from a blow to the ear with Drew’s heavy boot, repeated three times. Stein had avoided trial with a plea that put Drew at Wiltwick for nine months, a harsh and
punishing experience, immediately after which he’d joined the Israeli army.

Even after they’d left for the Heights, she’d still see Drew sometimes. She’d bike out and they’d sit at a diner; he’d meet her on the promenade. Then she’d
gone to college and he’d gone to jail, then Israel, ultimately putting his reform school experience to use in the Bekáa Valley, and she hadn’t spoken to him but twice since then.
Once he’d called, after Pauly died. Then again when her father was arrested. She turned, longing to touch that boy with the long hair in the oversized plaid shirt.

But how could she explain to him this other world? The world of her new life for which he had such contempt? The world of her father’s business: Switzerland, London, Marbella, Madrid;
would Drew even understand her indignation at her father’s activities? And how could she tell him of falling in love with Dee, and then meeting that idealistic man on the day of his murder?
She felt pressure against her lungs and she drew in a big breath, as if about to speak. Then she let it out again.

“Is there anything I can do? Tzippy?” Her heart warmed at the Hebrew nickname, but at the same time she knew that for all his pleasure at seeing her, she was the past and he wished
she hadn’t come. She shook her head.

“You could leave all this behind. You could come to Israel.”

She shook her head again, and forced a smile. “Yeah, right. Quite a catch I’d be. They’d marry me to the town fool.”

“You underestimate us. You underestimate yourself too.”

“Yeah, right.” She laughed briefly. “Allison Rosenthal. A jewel of Orthodox femininity.”

“Esther. Esther Rosenthal.” Drew was speaking very seriously now. “That’s not a name you can run away from. What did your zaideh call you? ‘The girl who saved the
Jews,’ right? You’re brilliant, perfectly educated, and soon you’ll be a lawyer. You could be a central, productive, important person for us.”

“Oh God, Drew, Peretz, don’t give me that old garbage. I’m the daughter of a criminal, living like a goy, not virgin. I have nothing to offer you or your damn
community.”

But Drew just shook his head, gravely, patiently. “It’s not old, and it’s not garbage. Essie, your father’s no criminal—not in Israel. Not to the Jews. You
don’t understand: the story is biblical: your father is Mordecai, Sid Ohlinger is Haman, Clinton’s the king, and you’re Esther. Don’t you see?”

“No. No, I don’t see.” Allison stepped closer now, smelling the stale sweat on her childhood friend’s white shirt, feeling like crying. “All that proves is that
politics are ageless and the one constant of history is how horrible people can be to each other.”

Drew was whispering now, urgently, across the small distance between them. “No. You’re not listening. You think this is a story about politics. It’s not even a
loyalty.”

Rather than answering, she watched him, and after a long moment, he stepped back and spoke sadly.

“Essie, you need me, all you have to do is pick up the phone. You understand? One call, whenever you want, and I’m there.”

She nodded.

“And one more thing. You tell your father the same thing. Any time he needs me, I’m ready, and so’s Menacham Abramowitz and Ben Gordon and Yankel Shapiro. You with me? Any
time, any place, anything. All you gotta do is tell me.”

Allison frowned, nodded again. Then she spoke in a normal voice.

“I’ll tell him. Hey, Drewski? I’ll see you later.”

And before he could stop her, she had darted over and planted a kiss on her old friend, her dear friend’s cheek, and then, steering her bicycle, was out the door.

5.

Prospect Park, at the head of Coney Island Avenue. Alley pedaled hard along the drive, pushing herself, her breath coming fast in the cold air, her body sweating steadily under
its tight clothes. At Grand Army Plaza she exited the park, shot out really, through the changing light and full into the stream of traffic around the monument, disregarding the blare of a
horn.

How odd it was that across the gulf—the abyss, really—between them, Drew’s loyalty remained intact. He could have done a lot for her, she thought. He could have added so much
to the field of possibilities. Thinking that, she became aware of the weight of her father’s documents she carried on her back. Then she shrugged off the thought. Nicky’s death ruined
everything.

Four o’clock. An hour or two of daylight left. Before the bridge she found herself somehow unwilling to return to Manhattan, and she detoured west into Brooklyn Heights, and against the
traffic down Pierrepont Street. Outside her high school, of its own volition her body paused the bicycle and her eye turned to the low wall next to the art room.

Two girls, tight T-shirts showing their small-breasted, slim-shouldered bodies, sat smoking, talking to the small group of boys gathered around. That was where she would have been, with Martha,
her own blond hair shoulder length and parted at the middle, Martha’s black and curly and tied back with a band so it exploded around the nape of her neck. Across the street, in the big
sycamore whose lower branches you could reach with a boost from a friend, Pauly would be climbing with Michael Numeroff and Richard Robbins, waiting for her to take him home. She looked to the
right, expecting to see other children climbing the tree. But the lower branches were now twelve or fourteen feet high, and no one was climbing the tree.

A car approached, so she pushed off and down the street, then turned left and coasted against traffic on Hicks Street to Grace Court. Midway on the small street was the ornate brownstone mansion
in which she had grown up, and here she paused again.

Not for the first time, she wondered why her father had moved here. Perhaps, she thought, when he had decided to withdraw his daughter and son from yeshiva and move the family out of Borough
Park, perhaps he’d been too scared to go out of Brooklyn, and settled on this enclave next to Grace Church as a compromise. A class of children from the church school passed behind her,
crayons and papers in hand, and settled to copy a street sign, and her eye traveled up the facade of the house to the windows of her third-floor bedroom. They rested briefly there, then dropped as
she mounted her bicycle and rode slowly off.

Still, she could not quite bring herself to leave, and paused at the end of the street, watching Manhattan rising in an aura of smog. Funny that she should feel so at home here now, she thought.
Moving had been the trauma of her life, the first trauma: eleven years old, an odd-shaped creature with long legs, showing up the first day of school dressed in the ankle-length skirt and starched
white shirt of her yeshiva. Only Martha, who had also been subject to a deculturation—although much earlier in life when Ohlinger had pulled himself out of the Bronx and headed, a brilliant
young yeshiva
bucher
, to Harvard Law—had befriended Allison. Then together, they’d taken care of Pauly.

Which was funny, because it had ultimately been Pauly who’d taught her everything she knew about living here. Those two years had made all the difference: his memories of yeshiva
disappeared the moment he took his
kipah
off, the first day in school when he realized no one else was wearing one. Now, watching the river just beyond her childhood house, Allison thought
that Pauly had always been more indigenous to the Heights than she.