The Gun Runner's Daughter Read Online Free Page B

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.”
    Alley shook her head emphatically. “Christ sake. Clinton’s too smart to establish plausible deniability through the Justice Department.”
    “Oh? Who’s the smart guy ordered Paula Jones audited by Treasury?’ The voices of both women were rising in pitch now.
    “I don’t know. A lackey probably. Not the damn president.”
    “That’s right, Alley girl. A lackey. Like my father. Or like Ed Dennis.”
    Deeply annoyed now, Allison stood suddenly. “Hey Marty? You have any word on who the U.S. Attorney hired to do the prosecution?”
    Lips grim, Martha shook her head.
    “Then stop telling me about it, okay? I know they’re scapegoating my father. I also know nothing’s going to stop them, and so does my dad. So let’s stop wasting our time
over what we can’t help.”
    8.
    Her father, his profession, it meant nothing to her: just another of the unsavory things adults did to one another at work. That she was in law school led people to think she
was more concerned with her father’s affairs—particularly reporters, one or two of whom she came to expect to find waiting in Washington Square as she came out of classes whenever her
father was in the news, hoping for a comment. But law school had nothing to do with what she wanted in life: she had never wanted to go. When her father had started pressuring her to study law
rather than go to graduate school, she’d obeyed only because she could not, or would not, fight back. That was less fear of him, she vaguely knew, than concern: her empire over her
father’s fragile emotions—his fear for her, his ambitions—since his divorce was so enormous that she