Greenwich (19 page)

Thirty-four

L
arry drove away from the Castle place with the comfortable feeling that no one had seen him come or go. He was still riding the high of the double killing, with only one worry—that perhaps there had been another copy of the letter. But even if a copy existed—and he did not believe that it did exist—it meant nothing. It was eight forty-five, and by ten o'clock, he would be in his room at the Waldorf. He had left a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.

He had intended to drive to Route 120A and then to 128 south, which would not only take him over the New Croton Reservoir, but would allow him to throw the gun and the ID cards into the water without getting out of the car. Drummond had been very rigid on the matter of getting rid of the gun and cards as soon as possible after the killing, but if he did that, there was the long chance that a cop might stop him for one reason or another. He was in a hurry. He wanted to get back to the Waldorf, and once he had been seen, to take the next shuttle back to Washington. The CIA identification would justify the gun, while with no identification at all, he might well end up in some local jail.

He made his decision and headed for the Round Hill entrance to the Merritt Parkway. He maintained his speed at precisely fifty-five miles per hour, and precisely fifty minutes after he left the Castle pool-house office, he came off the West Side highway, drove to the car-rental garage, wiped his fingerprints off the wheel, and walked to the Waldorf. He congratulated himself. Everything had gone as smooth as silk, and he was a man now with poise and power. He felt newly alive; he was different; he walked differently. He had not given his room key to the desk clerk, and even at this hour of the morning, the great lobby of the Waldorf was crowded. In his light suit, no one noticed him, a tall, well-built man with white hair, an athletic bag slung over his shoulder. There were tall, well-built men with white hair wherever one looked. He remembered that one of the first things he must do in his room was to cut the ID cards into small pieces and flush them down the toilet. He had decided to keep the gun and the ID until the last moment. He would get rid of the gun on his way to the plane.

Then he was at the door to his room. He opened it, and there was Drummond, sitting in the lounge chair, with a gun and silencer on his lap.

“Close the door, Larry,” he said.

After the first shock at seeing Drummond, Larry burst out, “How the hell did you get in here?”

“Doors are not an obstacle, Larry. You know that. I came to hear you say, Mission complete.”

“What's the gun for?”

“In case it was not you, Larry.”

“You can't kill someone in the Waldorf just because they walk into a room. Suppose it was the maid?”

“Why not? It's been done.”

“Are you nuts?”

Smiling, Drummond said, “Calm down, Larry. Did you take care of Castle?”

“He's dead.”

Raising the pistol—fitted with a silencer, as Larry noted—Drummond said, “So are you, Larry.”

“Come on, enough of that, Hugh. You're not going to kill me.”

“Why not?”

Larry was terrified. In all his life, he had never been so frightened. His heart was beating wildly, and thoughts were racing through his mind. Should he go for the gun in his jacket pocket? No way to get it out quickly enough. Should he dive at Drummond and take his chances? He was younger than Drummond. If the shot missed him, he could deal with Drummond with his bare hands. But Drummond would not miss. He had practiced pistol shooting at Drummond's place many times. Larry was a good shot, but Drummond was better.

“What sense does it make to kill me?”

“The same sense it made for you to kill Castle. Year two thousand, I'll be governor of my state. That puts you in a position where you can destroy me. I can't live with that hanging over me.”

“Why should I destroy you?” Larry asked desperately.

“For the same reason you're clinging to that bag. Castle offered money. You took the money and killed him.”

Larry had forgotten that the athletic bag was in his hand. He dropped it now.

“You're a fool, Larry. You'd kill your own mother for money. There's nothing you wouldn't do for money. But you're an asshole. You could have gotten twice what's in that bag if you had played it right. Castle has millions. He'd go on paying for the rest of his life.”

At that point, Larry decided to move. He flung himself, not at Drummond, but at an angle, as a football player tackles a man, ripping the gun out of his pocket as he slid across the floor. Drummond's shot tore through Larry's neck, severing the carotid artery, but Larry's shot struck Drummond between the eyes. Larry bled to death, staring at Drummond's dead body.

Thirty-five

D
riving from the Greenes' to Stamford, where they intended to inform Nellie's parents of their marital intentions, Nellie asked David, “Why didn't you ever tell me that you were Jewish?”

“Come on, you always knew I was Jewish.”

“I knew your father was born Jewish but was some kind of agnostic.”

“Lots of Jews are agnostic. It comes with circumcision,” David replied, adding, “I'm sorry. That's a smart-ass remark that I rescind.”

“OK,” Nellie agreed. “But I always heard that Jewish descent goes through the mother. And your mother is a pious Catholic; your sister, too. Your mother said that when you were eleven or twelve, you decided that you were Jewish.”

“That's right.”

“Does that make you Jewish?” Nellie wondered.

“Why shouldn't it? My mom is a remarkable woman. She never said a word against it. She said, David; if you want to be a Jew, fine. If you ever change your mind, that's all right, too.”

“But you were baptized.”

“And circumcised.”

“So are most of the Christian kids I know.”

“Why this sudden interest in religion? I'm as much of a Jew as you are a Catholic.”

“But my mother and father are Catholic,” Nellie protested.

“But you never go to mass, not even on Christmas. I go to mass on Christmas because the whole family goes. My father goes grudgingly, and he always takes a book with him to read. I think that's pushing it too far, but if my mom isn't annoyed, why should I be? That doesn't make me any more of a Catholic. You're the smartest, most compassionate and beautiful woman in Greenwich—”

“Oh, don't bullshit me like that, David, please!”

“All right, so you're too tall and bony and gawky. Whatever you like.”

“That's even more condescending! I ask you a simple question, and all you respond with are smart-ass answers. No, this is not a fight or an argument, and I still love you, and in a few minutes you'll meet my father and mother for the first time—”

“May I interrupt?”

“Sure. Interrupt. Why not?”

“We've been intimate—and I use the word advisedly—for two years now—and loving—”

“Closer to three years,” she said.

“Yes, and I adore you, and I'm not a kid, and so help me, God, I'll marry you or stay single all my life, and yet I've never met your parents.”

“I thought you understood that. I have my own problems with myself and who I am, Dave. Pull over here by the golf course. We have more to talk about than we can in the three minutes before we reach them.”

Obediently, David pulled the car off the road onto the grass swath alongside the fence of Stamford's public golf course.

“OK, here we are.”

“You know why you never met my parents. We've talked about it before. Believe it or not, I love you as much or more than you love me. I have since I met you. You were a kid then and you're still a kid, but I figure that in ten years it won't make any difference. There's no rule in this demented country that a wife can't be three years older than her husband, and if necessary you can lie about it and tell my father we're the same age.”

“I don't enjoy lying,” David said.

“Neither do I, but when it's necessary, I lie. But let me add to what I've said about my parents. My father is a decent, hardworking man, but he's Polish. He was born in 1944. He's a Republican. He hates Clinton and thinks he should be impeached. He hates welfare and thinks people on welfare are worthless bums. He's as reactionary as anyone can be without having a portrait of Hitler on the wall.”

“And he doesn't like Jews.”

“No, he hates them. Blames them for all the troubles in the world.”

“In other words, he's a practicing anti-Semite,” David said.

“He doesn't practice it, but he lives with it. I used to argue with him, but then I gave it up. They're pious Catholics. My mother goes to mass every day, and they took it for granted that I would marry into a good Catholic family. They worship the pope, and the one real explosion came about that. I can't bear the pope, with his anti-abortion and his all-male priests and his attitude toward women and all the rest of the garbage, and I said a thing or two that I shouldn't have said. That was when I moved out and went on my own. We've reconciled since then—I'm their only child—but it's a troubled peace.”

“And you never told them that my father was Jewish.”

Nellie sighed and shook her head. “I simply left it alone. You have red hair and blue eyes and you don't look Jewish.”

“Nobody looks Jewish!” David said angrily.

“David, David, don't make this into a fight. My mother dreams of a wedding in a Catholic church. So now, when you tell me that you're Jewish and I fear you'll tell them the same thing—my God, David, I love you. I don't want you in the middle of this disgraceful thing. I kept you away from them until now—not because we're poor and my father is a janitor who lives in a miserable basement apartment, but—well, now you know why.”

“About being married—well, I really don't give a damn where we're married, a church or a judge's office. It's being married to you that matters, not how.”

“I feel the same way. What should we do?”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then a police car pulled up behind them, and the cop got out of the car, walked over to the open driver's window, and asked, “Trouble?”

“Only emotional,” Nellie answered, smiling.

“You'll have to work it out somewhere else,” the cop said. “Try the mall. No parking here.”

He went back to his car, and they drove off. “That's a nice cop,” David acknowledged. “He didn't even ask for my license.”

David drove through Stamford and into the Ridgeway Mall lot. Looking for an open space, David muttered, “Hail, Mary, full of grace, help me find a parking place.”

“I'll be damned!” Nellie exclaimed.

“Credit my sister Claire. She says it always works.”

“Does it?”

“I'm afraid not. I have a story to tell you. Can you bear it?”

“I'll try,” Nellie said. “How long can we park here?”

“Five or ten minutes should do it. I have a friend up at Harvard, a senior like me. We took two semesters of biology together and got to be good friends. He's from Boston, very Waspy Boston, a very valid Lowell, back to the
Mayflower
and all that. He and his wife live off campus. I met his wife, a lovely black woman, and the next day, I managed to inquire how his folks took it. He asked me to guess, but I couldn't have guessed in a thousand years. You know what his mother said? His mother said, Thank God she's not Jewish.”

Nellie stared at him. “True? You're not inventing this?”

“True. Absolutely true. Half a century after the Holocaust.”

Nellie spread her hands. “I don't know what to say.”

“That manuscript you have in your bag—Harold Sellig's book,
The Assassin.
It's been lying around the house for days. I read an earlier draft of it. It's a book about the Holocaust and Vietnam and the collective guilt of a civilization that he defines by one word,
murder.
He writes that our civilization—not only America but the whole world—is a cult that worships murder. He doesn't admit to civilization; he calls it a sham, even as he calls Christianity a sham along with every other religion, including Judaism. He indicts mankind with the collective guilt of murder. It's one of the most terrifying books I have ever read. He goes into statistics of the twentieth century, the bloodiest century in history, numbers that are appalling. He holds that everyone on earth must share the blame of the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Vietnam. And I tell you, Nellie, that only a Jew could have written this book.”

After a time of silence, Nellie said, “Only a Jew? Your mother, your sister, and me? What a terrible indictment you're laying on us! And the Israelis?”

“I'm not an Israeli, I'm a Jew. His list includes Israel. Do you know what this Jewish guilt is? It's the guilt of an outsider who looks at the human race. At least some of us do, and that's the rock bottom of anti-Semitism. They don't want us to observe them, they want us to join, and that's something I'll never do.”

Silence again, and they sat in silence for at least ten minutes, a very long time for two people sitting in the front seat of a car in a shopping center; and to both of them, it seemed a good deal longer.

Finally, Nellie said, “I have a suggestion.”

“Thank goodness. I don't.”

“Let's drive back to Greenwich and out to Tod's Point and find a quiet place along the shore, and we'll sit close to each other and watch the waves and the gulls and hold hands.”

David nodded. “What about your father and mother?”

“We'll put that off until we solve it.”

“I like that.”

“And then,” Nellie said, “we can have lunch somewhere.”

“I'm broke.”

“My treat. And then, after lunch, we can go to my place and make love.”