Greenwich (10 page)

“I understand. I'm not religious, and when we moved here to Greenwich, I joined Christ Church—the big one on the Post Road next to the Jewish temple—because that's where the people I knew belonged. I hate to say this and I don't mean it as any put-down of religion, but that's the way I am. I joined the Hill Crest Club because my friends belonged to it. It didn't matter to me that it was ah Episcopal church, I mean Christ Church. I give them five thousand a year and I turn up with Sally and my son at Christmastime and Easter.”

Donovan realized that there had to be a point to all this and he wondered where it was leading. He knew how unusual it was for a man in Castle's position to talk like this, and he decided that the easiest answer to his question was to ask. “You want help, Mr. Castle. That appears obvious, if I may say so. What Can I do for you?”

“Well, it's a matter of public record, so it's not a question of privileged information. During the Bush administration I was one of the Assistant Secretaries of State. My field was Central America.”

“I still don't fully understand. Are you referring to the dinner-table conversation?”

“Sort of. I mean the business in El Salvador.”

“Were you concerned in that?”

“That's just the trouble. I got you in here with the feeling that I could talk to you in a way that would be privileged. Then you tell me that's not the case. Now I don't know what to say.”

The man had his hand out, and Donovan did not know what to put in it. There were so many bits and pieces mixed up in their conversation that the monsignor could not think of any way to sort them out: religion, guilt, murder possibly, or perhaps something less than murder that he could not grasp. Donovan had in his pocket sixteen dollars and change that had to last to his next paycheck. He was a man who had lived for years attempting not to be judgmental, and he was being asked for help by a man so far apart from him on the economic scale that there was almost no possible meeting ground; yet he lived by the belief that there was always a meeting ground.

“I can't allow you to tell me things in the manner of a confession. Do you believe in God, Mr. Castle?”

“What?”

Why such surprise? Donovan wondered. After all, he had sought out a priest to talk to, or perhaps not sought him out, but he had grasped the opportunity to talk when his wife brought one here.

“I asked you whether you believed in God. That's not such an unusual question for a priest to ask, very personal perhaps, but you did indicate to me that this was a very personal conversation.”

Castle nodded but did not speak, and as the silence extended, the priest repeated the question, “Do you believe in God?”

Forced to enter himself and examine himself, Richard Castle spoke very slowly. “The truth is, I never much thought about it.” Pause again. “That's a hell of a thing to say, isn't it? Nobody ever asked me that before.”

“Never?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Don't you regard that as a bit strange?”

An introspective exchange was something rare in Castle's world. At this point he felt a sense of futility, but he was also unable to end the dialogue, partially because he did not want to surrender it. He wanted answers to questions he could not bring himself to ask.

“No, I don't think so, Monsignor. I grew up as a poor kid in the South. I suppose I took it for granted that a preacher talked about God, not anyone else. I lived with all sorts of people, and I lived different lives. I worked my way through college to a degree in business administration. I went to Washington and worked my way through law school. I'm sixty-three years old, and I got a lot of polish on the way up. But nobody ever asked me whether I believed in God. I mean on Wall Street”—he smiled slightly—“well, maybe some pray for the market to go up—but God … I'm trying to say something—I mean, you die. What happens then? I don't know whether this makes any sense at all to you, but the only thing I ever thought seriously about was being rich. Now I'm rich enough. But God? You don't ask that—nobody does.”

“I asked you.”

“You did. I'll have to think about it.”

“I'd also like to know what conclusion you come to, and when you come to it, whatever it is, I'd like to know. Perhaps we can talk again. You can find me at St. Matthew's. It's getting late now, and I'm afraid Sister Brody and I must go.”

“One more thing. I wouldn't say this to anyone else in the world, and maybe it's because I'm sixty-three, and every time my heart skips a beat, I think that this is it. I'm not much damn good. I think I love my wife, but tonight, when my friend Muffy was leaving, I tried to make a date to see her in New York—”

Donovan interrupted him: “No, Mr. Castle! I can't have you confessing to me.”

Castle's smile was unexpected. “You're right. You know what Groucho Marx said, ‘I wouldn't join a club that would have me as a member.'”

“I don't mean it that way,” the monsignor said softly.

“No, of course not. Do me one favor, let me write out a check for your church.”

Donovan looked at him searchingly. “Why?”

Castle shrugged. “I feel I'm in deep shit up to my neck. Something happened to me tonight. I never talked like this before. I dumped on you; I don't dump on people. On Wall Street, I'm one crafty, nasty son of a bitch. That's what I am and I'm no damn different now, but I'm tired. I'm just so fuckin' tired.”

“Will it help if you write me a check?”

“Yes.”

“All right. I'd like to help. Make it out to St. Matthew's Church.”

Castle went to his desk, took out a checkbook, and wrote the check. He handed it to the monsignor.

“This is for ten thousand dollars,” Donovan said.

“I won't miss it.”

“Thank you.”

“For Christ's sake, don't thank me.”

“I must, Castle. It will do a lot of good.”

“I've spent a lifetime hating do-gooders. I still do. I haven't changed.”

T
he monsignor and Sister Brody left. Sister Brody kissed Sally and said she would see her again. The monsignor thanked Castle for a good evening. When he and the nun were in the car, driving back to the neighborhood where their church was located, Sister Brody said, “I suppose you have no intention of telling me what went on between you and Castle?”

“That's an excellent supposition.”

“I have the right to be curious, considering what I've heard about the man.”

“Everyone has the right to be curious. We can thank God for that.” Then, after a moment, he added, “Castle gave me a check, made out to St. Matthew's, for ten thousand dollars.”

“What! I don't believe you.”

“Sister, Sister.”

“Ten thousand dollars—that's wonderful.”

“I argued against it. I didn't want to take it.”

“You argued against it? For heaven's sake, do you know how much we need that money, how much we can do with it, how many hungry mouths can be fed, how much food and medicine we can send to El Salvador and Guatemala—”

“Sister, please don't lecture me! I happen to know exactly what we can do with it.”

Thirteen

H
arold Sellig drove away from the dinner party to join his wife at the hospital. He was full of good food, two glasses of wine, the lingering taste of the Cuban cigar, and a heavy load of guilt. He felt that he should have been with his wife at the hospital, that she was facing perhaps the most serious crisis of her life and that he had allowed her to go and keep a vigil alone because he selfishly desired to make a clinical study of a very rich man and his trophy wife. He had gone with her urging and with Dr. Ferguson's assurance that the operation was a “lead-pipe cinch.” Harold said he had no idea of what a lead-pipe cinch was, and Dr. Ferguson had carefully explained that in ancient times—some fifty or sixty years ago—underground utility connections were sealed with hot lead. Harold had grown up with a father who never understood him, and when he married Ruth, Dr. Ferguson had adopted him as the son he never had.

On board the aircraft carrier, off the coast of Vietnam and amid the screeching, banging hellish noise of an aircraft carrier in action, Harold, as a naval historian, found solace in the antique game of pinochle, which he played with two sailors from the engine room, who taught him the game. He brought the game home with him, and some of the best hours of their marriage were spent with Dr. Ferguson, playing pinochle, a game that can only be played with grim seriousness and loving anger.

He and Ruth had frequently argued about and discussed “Jewish guilt.” She held that it was genetic, but Dr. Ferguson rejected that view and said there was a limit to how much you could blame on the genes. He put it to the series of misfortunes that spelled out Jewish history, but Ruth insisted that the whole idea of the victim carrying the burden of guilt was fallacious. Harold dutifully excised from his speech any mention of guilt; nevertheless on occasions such as this, he wallowed in it.

It was a half hour past ten when he reached the hospital, parked, and went to the waiting room, where he found Ruth, drawn and tired, talking to a young redheaded man, who was introduced to him as David Greene.

“You're Herb's son?”

David nodded.

“How's it going with Seth?” Harold asked Ruth.

“Not good,” she said bleakly.

Harold put his arms around her and kissed her. She tightened the embrace and clung to him. That spelled out her condition to her husband. She was not a clinging woman.

“What happened?”

“Dad's back in the operating room.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I don't know what happened. But they called the surgeon back and Dad's in the operating room again.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

Harold turned to look at David.

“I don't know much more than that, Mr. Sellig. I was with my girlfriend, Nellie Kadinsky, when Dr. Loring called her and told her to meet him here, at the hospital. She's his scrub nurse, and he said it was an emergency. I drove her here, and I'm waiting for her.” David hesitated, not knowing what else he should say. He felt he had no right to pass on Nellie's comments about the operation, and he knew it would only make things worse for Ruth Sellig.

“What kind of an emergency? Did she say?”

David shook his head. “I don't know.”

Harold drew Ruth over to a couch, and she huddled against him. He knew enough about bypass operations to realize that stopping the heart twice in a matter of hours was no small thing. What would Seth Ferguson's death do to Ruth? Her relationship with her father was, he felt, stronger than their own relationship. When she whispered, “Hal, what will I do if he dies?” and he assured her that Seth would not die, it was like the cold wind of death flowing over both of them. He hated hospitals. He had spent hours in the ship's hospital of the carrier. Terrible things happen on an aircraft carrier, things that the public is never informed of. Every landing of a plane was a passage with death, and Harold remembered a visit to the bomb hold, where there was enough explosive to blow away an entire country; and there the stink of death was not a smell but a vibration thick as molasses, and that was the way it felt in this waiting room now.

He simply could not ask Ruth whether she had read any of the manuscript or the changes he had made in it. That would be like asking her whether she had touched base with death.

“How long since the surgeon was here?” he asked. “Did you see him?”

“For a moment.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Just that there were complications and that he had to hurry off.”

There was nothing to say that Harold could think of, and Ruth was silent, her mind filled with memories of fishing in the Long Island Sound when she was a small girl, when she was eleven and twelve, the two years after her mother had died of cancer. They kept a small rowboat at Tod's Point, that strange finger of land that Greenwich was so proud of, and they would go bottom fishing with no poles, just string lines, and occasionally they would hook a flounder or blowfish, throw back the blowfish and take the flounders home. Those were wonderful days, and sometimes they would just sit and drift with the incoming tide, and she would read to Seth, while he smoked his pipe and allowed the delicious smell to drift past her.

Those are death thoughts
, she told herself with annoyance, and said to Harold, “He'll make it, won't he? Tell me that he'll make it.”

“Of course, he'll make it.”

It was more than an hour since Harold had come there, and as they spoke, Seth Ferguson was already dead, and Dr. Loring was firming up his resolve to go to the waiting room and inform Ruth that her father had passed away.

He entered the waiting room, still in his green gown, and stood looking at David and Harold and Ruth. Then he walked over to Ruth.

“I'm so sorry. We tried everything we could. His heart was too weak. I'm sorry.”

Fourteen

W
hile Harold and Ruth Sellig and David Greene were waiting to hear the results of Dr. Ferguson's second operation, Frank Manelli and Abel Hunt were in the emergency room, on the ground floor where Christina had been taken to have her arm x-rayed.

They were alone in the small waiting room. The emergency room at the hospital was not a very busy place at this hour, and they had a bit of time to talk without Christina's presence. Manelli was still pushing to go on out to the Castles' place, and Abel was still trying to cool him off.

“Like I said,” Abel told him, “you stay out of this. What are you after? Revenge? This is a part of a kid's growing up. She learned something about people. Lessons are painful but necessary.”

“I don't buy that.”