by Howard Fast
Finally, past two in the morning, he fell asleep on the hard bench in the holding cell.
Twenty-two
Sister Patricia Brody, Harold Sellig, and Frank Manelli all had one thing in common: They all had bad dreams, which were sometimes unbearable nightmares. They all woke up in the morning, sweating and shivering.
The dreams of Manelli and Sellig were of Vietnam; the nightmares of Sister Brody were of El Salvador.
Some months ago Sister Brody had spoken about her dreams to Monsignor Donovan, who had a degree in psychology from Fordham University.
“They are nightmares of a sort, but without the distortions that usually come with nightmares. Oh, yes, some distortion, but very repetitive of what actually happened.
“It was in San Salvador, at a school. I was there with three lay workers and six Jesuit priests. You know what happened.”
“Yes, but from your point of view?”
“I was in the school, and the priest and I heard the shots. The lay workers hid in a closet. I remained in the doorway. I was frozen there. I saw one of the Jesuits lying on the ground. He was dead. A priest ran toward him, and there was a burst of fire from another soldier who had an assault weapon. It literally tore him in half. The soldier was no more than twenty feet from the priest. In my memory, things come into focus, one by one. Another Jesuit was on his knees, his palms pressed in prayer, his head bent. Another soldier, standing behind him, was laughing.”
“You remember that bit, laughing?” Donovan asked.
“I’ll never forget it. It appeared that everything was happening at once, total insanity. A Jesuit who was with a class came to the door, right beside me, shouting in Spanish, ‘Stop! Stop!’ Then the soldier who was laughing emptied his pistol into the priest’s head, the whole magazine, and blew the priest’s head off. Then they shot the Jesuit standing in the doorway, beside me. They killed six of them—six Jesuit priests, the whole staff of the school.”
“And still you didn’t try to run away?”
“I was frozen with fear.”
“And then?”
“And then they raped me. I don’t know how many of them—I fainted after it began—and when I regained consciousness, there was blood all over me and dead priests everywhere. I don’t know why they didn’t kill me, but I suppose that for some reason they wanted a witness to what happened. I spent a week in the hospital, and that was when the dreams began.”
It was three months ago that she told this story to the monsignor. By now, in June of 1998, the dreams came infrequently, yet each time she went to bed, it was with the prayer that the dream would not come. On this Friday night, after the dinner party at the Castles’, Sister Brody felt a melancholic sense of peace. She felt that she had helped Sally, and that somehow Sally would begin to find a way. She rarely asked for anything when she prayed, and tonight, as she kneeled beside her bed, her thoughts were quiet.
Frank Manelli awakened at four in the morning, the usual time, whimpering, his knees drawn up in a fetal position, and Connie put her arms around his huge bulk and whispered to him, “It’s all right, Frankie. I’ll never let anything hurt you. It’s all right, my baby. It’s all right, and God watches over us.”
“Sure, sure, honey.” He relaxed, and in a few minutes he was asleep again. But Connie found it difficult to go back to sleep. She lay beside the warm body of her husband, wondering, as she had a hundred times before, why God and the Mother of God, whom she loved so much, had allowed this to happen, had sent a generation of young men into hell, with a punishment that would never end.
Harold Sellig did not sleep that night. He dozed now and then, but for most of the night he was involved with his thoughts. He loved Seth Ferguson, and he tried to think of his life with Ruth without the old doctor. No more long discussions about the wonders of the human body, no more reflections on the nature of the universe, no more of the comfort of having a father, of the feeling that both he and his wife were children of the same father. Harold had never in his life asked anyone for money. After the navy, he reached a point when they were broke; they never said a word to Seth or even allowed him to suspect, but it was Christmastime, and on that morning they found a small box under their tree with five hundred-dollar bills in it. They argued about it, but Ruth convinced Harold that if they returned it, Seth would be hurt beyond measure.
And now, Seth was dead.
Like most people without church or religion, Harold Sellig spent a great deal of time speculating about God. Since Seth was no more a believer than he was, they felt a freedom to discuss God that most religious people lacked. God, like money, was something one never mentioned. One of Seth Ferguson’s hobbies had been the early Greeks and the golden age of Athens. The Greeks of that time also argued about the gods, but they solved the perversities of chance and nature by creating a set of myths that gave the gods of Greece all the inconsistencies of human beings, all the jealousies and rivalries that they knew as a part of mankind’s makeup.
Unfortunately, as Harold pointed out to Seth, monotheism put an end to that, although Seth countered with the fact that the small gold caduceus that his wife had given him when he graduated from medical school was the winged staff of the god Mercury—oddly enough the symbol of his profession.
They both stumbled over ethics, and tonight, half awake, Harold brooded over ethics. Why does a good man die so meaninglessly? Why are half a million people in Africa murdered by people so indistinguishable from themselves? The trouble was that, like so many disbelievers, he had come to the conclusion that there had to be a mind, a force, an intelligence—but what kind of an intelligence? Could Seth Ferguson’s death be as meaningless as the death of an ant he stepped on? Harold had written a book about the ethics of mankind and had woven a net of guilt around the citizens—mostly very ordinary citizens—of the town he lived in, Greenwich, Connecticut. It was a pretty town, a decent town, well-kept, reasonably well-managed, perhaps with more than its share of wealthy people, but with middle-class people and very poor people as well. Seth had liked the manuscript and agreed with the concept—but who else? His wife, Ruth, rejected it, lumping it together with the widely held Afro-American accusation that every white was a racist.
Seth had said to him, “If this idea of yours, Harry, ever gained real acceptance, it would shake the world.” But that was a sort of intellectual hubris. Nothing shook the world.
A week from now, no one but he or Ruth would even mention Dr. Ferguson.
People died, and if the dying was not close, nobody actually gave a damn. The newest theory was that there were too many people for a small planet. That was why so few of the rich in Greenwich cared about HIV. They gave much more money for other diseases in this Republican stronghold. HIV victims voted Democrat, anyway.
Then he threw that kind of thinking away. Ruth, lying beside him, had taken a sleeping pill, and now she was pressed up against him, her arm over his shoulder. The faintest light of dawn was in the sky.
He dozed off at last, and he dreamed. It was the day after the Tet offensive, and the black body bags were lined up as far as he could see, far into the distance, piled up over the broken buildings and the smashed tanks and guns.
Twenty-three
Larry, whose full given name was Latterbe in honor of a Civil War ancestor, Colonel Vernon Latterbe Johnson, was a meticulous man.
He was meticulous about everything. In his younger years and even in his childhood, he was neatly dressed, with a round face, blue eyes, and carefully combed corn-silk hair. People remarked that he had an innocent face. He grew into a tall, muscular six-footer, but he maintained the round face and the look of innocence. Thus, through his adolescence, he escaped blame for a number of things that he did. He also kept his weight down, and in college, he played football. He went to a small southern college. In a more prestigious school, he might well have graduated into a professional football player.
His father was a lawyer in the small southern town where Larry had been born. Larry
spent two years working in his dad’s office, and then, instead of going on to law school, Larry ran for sheriff. He was easily elected, and he served successive two-year terms. In the course of his first term, two men attempted to rob the local bank. Larry intercepted them as they came out of the bank, one of them holding an ancient hogleg six-shooter. Larry killed both of them with three shots. He had practiced with his .45-cal-iber automatic pistol for hours, and even though it was discovered the old six-shooter did not even have a firing pin, Larry was hailed as a hero and he received excellent coverage all over the state.
Larry felt a strange exultation in killing. It made him feel good, better than he had ever felt before: It made him feel like he had taken a snort of coke, something he had done occasionally, yet a practice he kept under strict control. He was much too meticulous to ever become an addict. During his second term, he was out in the woods hunting, when he came on a local black man fishing. Larry knew the man and did not like him, considering him one of those “uppity niggers.”
“What are you up to, Cal?” Larry called out to the black man.
He turned his head to see Larry, and replied, “Fishing. Can’t you see the rod in my hand?”
“Don’t get snotty with me. Stand up and turn around.”
Cal stood up and turned around.
“What’s that you got in your belt?” Larry demanded.
“That’s my fish knife.”
“Show it to me.”
“What for? Just an old fish knife.”
Larry took out his .45. “I said, show it to me.”
“OK, captain. You say, show it to me, I show it to you.” Cal took the fish knife out of his scabbard, and Larry shot him, a single shot to the heart.
The black community raised hell over this killing, but the fish knife was grasped in Cal’s hand, and Larry made sure that the hand was tightly clenched around it and ripped the front of his shirt to prove that Cal had come at him. The black community hired a lawyer from the capital city, but the case never went to trial, and Larry finished out his second term as sheriff.
It was this second killing that drew Hugh Drummond’s attention. He came down to the little town that Larry ruled as his fiefdom, and they had a long talk in the sheriff’s office. Drummond asked a series of questions about Larry’s past, starting right at his birth and going into every detail. He then went into the record of Larry’s father. When Drummond had telephoned to make the appointment, Larry asked some acquaintances in Washington about him, and he had good reason to respect Drummond and answer his queries.
Drummond liked him. His round, innocent face was good currency, and his southern accent was tempered by education. He smoked an occasional cigar and he confessed to his casual use of cocaine.
“No more,” Larry said. “I gave that up when they elected me sheriff.”
“Stick to that,” Drummond said.
“Oh, yes, sir. I intend to.”
“You drink?”
“Socially. A beer, not much more.”
“You’re not married. Are you gay? I want the truth.”
Larry grinned. “You don’t mince words, do you? I’m not gay. I’ll give you some names if you want them.”
“I’ll take your word for it. How would you like to be a congressman?”
“I thought about it. I’d like it fine.”
“I need a congressman. When I say I need a congressman, I mean exactly what I say. That little nigger you shot weighed one hundred and twenty pounds. You must be a hundred eighty.”
“A hundred ninety-five.”
“That incident defines where you stand on civil liberties, and today there’s a lot of shit about civil liberties. You’ll go into the state legislature next year. I want you to file immediately. Consider it a postgraduate course. Get your name around the district. Firm stand against busing and desegregation, but do it with regret and class. You’ll come up to Washington, and I’ll introduce you to a friend of mine, Curtis by name. As for the word nigger, that’s out of your vocabulary. ‘Negroes’ from here on, or ‘colored folk.’ Curtis will introduce you to some of the right people and give you a little training.”
“Where’s the money coming from? I can raise a few thousand dollars, but not much more. These things take a lot of money.”
“Don’t worry about the money. I’ll take care of that. I got a man in the state legislature, name of Ted James. He’ll be your top sergeant and he’ll teach you the ropes. Believe me, Larry, we don’t sign contracts on this kind of thing. Sam Goldwyn once said that a verbal contract is not worth the paper it’s written on. That was the movie business. This is another kind of business entirely, so if we shake hands, that’s it. You want to think about it?”
“I thought about it,” Larry answered, smiling. He had a cherubic smile. He thrust out his hand, and Drummond took it. Larry had a strong grip; Drummond’s was stronger.
Now, on this Saturday morning in June of 1998, Larry was awakened by the hotel operator at 5:45. It was a lovely morning, the sunrise streaked with thin lines of vapor glowing in reds and yellows and violets. Larry stared out of the window for a moment or two, thinking how odd it was to see Lexington Avenue almost empty of traffic. Like so many out-of-towners, he enjoyed the energy and excitement of New York.
He shaved carefully. He had a good head of hair, turning white now, and his round face still bespoke innocence. He put on a lightweight silk suit, a white shirt with thin blue stripes, and a bow tie. He looked once more at the driver’s license and the American Express card that belonged to a CIA man, whose name was Koles and who was fifty-five years old, wondering for a moment what name Koles was using on his mission to Latin America. His own wallet and identification, he sealed in a brown envelope. Then he examined the pistol and the silencer very carefully, even though he was quite familiar with the working of a .38 automatic. It had a full chamber. He dropped them into his jacket pocket.
Downstairs in the lobby, he smiled at the girl at the desk. “I’ll be drifting around town today. I love to get up early and walk in New York, and the less I have on me, the better I feel. So put this in the safe, and I’ll pick it up this afternoon.”
“So do I,” she agreed, “but I’m on the night shift, Mr. Johnson, and when I’m done, I don’t feel much like walking. But the streets are much safer since Giuliani took over.”
The breakfast room had just opened, and Larry always ate a good breakfast. After ham and eggs and fried potatoes, he felt ready for the day. He enjoyed the walk to the garage, and the car he had reserved was waiting for him. It was close to seven o’clock when he drove out of the garage.
Twenty-four
Monsignor Donovan was troubled when he awakened that Saturday morning, and since he was a man rarely troubled by either his beliefs or his actions, his state of mind was unusual. As was his daily habit, he awakened at six o’clock in his rather bare bedroom, adorned only with pictures of his mother and father and a carved crucifix given to him by a local bishop in South Africa. He shaved, showered, and dressed, and then he sat down on his bed and stared at the check Castle had given him—ten thousand dollars. The outreach of St. Matthew’s always grew faster than its funds, and the church was always in debt. “You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” had been said to him so often that he hated the phrase; yet Sister Brody was right. He couldn’t refuse the gift. But why had Castle given it? His wife? From what Sister Brody had told him, Richard Castle had little respect for the woman he had married, “a trophy wife,” as the nun had put it, and Castle himself had not indicated any religious desire during their talk. At best, he felt that a Catholic priest was a willing receptacle for confession. He knew nothing about religion, less than nothing, thought the monsignor, recalling part of the talk around Castle’s dinner table, when Castle asked him, “Just what exactly is a Jesuit? I know he’s a priest.” That followed the monsignor’s mention that he himself was a Jesuit.
Having no desire to go into a lecture at the dinner table, Donovan simply
replied that it was an order of priests devoted to education and to missionary work. Curiously, Castle had not followed up on the question when they spoke in the study. Something tugged at the priest’s memory though, and he decided he would look into it before he deposited the check—at least sit down later, with youthful help, at the computer in the rectory and see what he might learn about Richard Castle.
Twenty-five
Richard Castle slept poorly. His was a carefully constructed world that he had planned for years. He was a good salesman, who worked not with pressure but with enjoyable persuasion. He had thrived as an investment banker and had made money for himself and for his clients.
He was not the richest man in Greenwich, which was probably a wealthier community than even Beverly Hills, and he was still short of the billion dollars that had been his aim when he hit sixty. Real-estate men had told him that he could get four million for his home, but he had no desire to sell. He belonged to the Hill Crest Club, and he had a beautiful wife. He had achieved all of the American Way of Life, and he could buy anything he set his heart on. He could even afford that ultimate of the wealthy man’s desire, a private Learjet; but he disliked air travel and was content with commercial first-class seating.
Yet he had a son who bitterly disappointed him and who was without either common sense or direction. For this, he blamed the boy’s mother, his former wife, who had lost Dickie because of drugs and alcohol. Sally had passed the age of safe childbearing, nor was he sure that she could conceive.
As for Larry, well. he would take care of that in his own way. Larry loved money. Castle did not love money; he loved the power that money gave him. But Larry loved money the way a man loves a woman, or the way Drum-mond loved bulldogs. Castle was rarely introspective so he had created his self-image without ever realizing that he was creating it. He liked to think of himself as a country gentleman, and he had in his mind a picture of himself and Sally, two beautiful people riding horses together; but there was little room in Greenwich, particularly in his own patch of Greenwich, for horses, and he would live nowhere else. Once, the Back Country of Greehwich had consisted entirely of great estates, where there were broad pastures and plenty of room for horses as well as cattle, but that time was long gone. Anyway, he was not sure that he cared very much for horses as anything except a mental image; he preferred the fact of himself in a convertible BMW, of which he owned two, as well as a two-seater Mercedes and a Range Rover. He had decided that he would dock Dickie’s car for a month; he could think of no worse punishment.
