"You mean he's deranged?"
"Deranged. That would be a way of putting it. But only in that particular region of his brain. Otherwise he's fine, except for the fact that he probably isn't going to make it through the night."
"Is it cancer?"
"Cancer. Yes, you might say he's got a cancer on his soul. Medically speaking, he's fine. You know the old bit about how people died of a broken heart? That's what he's got."
"I see. That's awful. I-"
"You know, he supports fifty Catholic orphanages, and you should see them. Top of the line. I've stayed in hotel rooms that weren't half as nice as some of these kids have."
The priest felt awful, yet he also had the feeling this man, whose name he didn't even know, was putting the arm on him.
"You are going to forgive him, right?"
What an appalling question. "Mr.-"
"Felix."
"Mr. Felix-"
"No, that's a first name."
"Frankly that's an inappropriate question." Yet the man stared at him in such a way he found himself saying, "But… of course."
"Good. Come on, let's go see the old guy." The priest followed him up the front steps and into the house. A long marble corridor seemed to go on forever, past two flanking rows of battle helmets from the ancient world, from Sumeria, Egypt, Crete, Sparta and Rome, mounted and spot-lit on top of alabaster columns. The priest shuddered. The man said matter-of-factly, "Those are real."
At the end of the marble corridor they came to a door and went in.
The room was wainscoted in bleached pine, the walls covered in red morocco. The fire was going, even at this strange hour of the morning. The priest's eyes were drawn to a painting above the mantel of what appeared to be a bum in a top hat, with a raggedy blanket wrapped around his shoulders and a bottle of booze lying on the ground. On another wall he saw a rack of expensive-looking shotguns, blued barrels lambent with firelight, and something incongruous set into the wall behind glass: an old mailbox, a heavy piece of wood with a sheet of corrugated tin folded over like the canopy on a Conestoga wagon. American folk art? But now he turned toward the far side of the room and saw him, propped up on a cloudbank of pillows, gray, with the mummiferous gauntness of approaching death. Still, there was something faintly comical about the eyebrows, bushy and curled at the outer edge like a caricature of a nineteenth-century colonel. The old man's eyes were closed. The morbid accessory was there: an IV monitor with a red LED display indicating the dosage of the fluid running onto the thin arm. A woman was sitting on the opposite side holding his hand. The priest could not help notice her good figure and attractive face. She looked up at him and smiled through horn-rimmed glasses in a friendly way. Felix whispered, "Hi, Jeannie." She shook the priest's hand and left.
The man leaned over the bed like an archaeologist afraid of disturbing important dust. He said, "Charley?" The priest was surprised that a servant would call his employer by his first name but everything else was so strange. "I brought you your priest, Charley."
The papery eyelids trembled, opened slowly and the eyes fastened directly on the priest's. They were amazingly alive in contrast to the rest of him, like people standing on the deck of a sinking ship waving to be rescued. They blinked.
"Padre?"
"Yes, my son," said the priest automatically.
"Son?" The voice was a croak, a susurrus of air forced over dried-up vocal cords; but there was still authority to it. "How old are you?"
"Twenty-nine," the priest answered before he could protest the role reversal of penitent and absolutionist. Who's asking the questions here?
The eyebrows stirred like great birds in their nests. The old man looked up at Felix, who smiled and shrugged as if to say: In the middle of the night you were expecting an archbishop? He turned back to the priest. "You're ordained, right. You got papers?"
"Yes," said the priest.
The old man nodded. "Felix," he said, "get the padre something to drink."
"No, thank you."
The old man raised his hand with difficulty to shake the priest's. "I'm Charley Becker. Thank you for coming to see me on such short notice." He held on to the priest's hand. He grinned. "I have gold in my veins."
"Yes, my son."
The old man stared. "I do. If you put some of my blood on a slide, you'll see gold. It's true."
Gold in your veins. They all want to take it with them. The priest felt sorry for the man, even if he was an arms dealer. He opened his sin satchel and removed the accoutrements of his trade: the silver box-an ordination gift from his aunt-containing the cotton balls moistened with the holy oils, the narrow purple stole, which he hung around his neck. Felix patted the old man's arm and said he would wait outside.
"Stick around," said the old man. He said to the priest, "Felix knows it all." Then he grinned. "Don't you, Felix?"
"That's right," said Felix. He caught the priest's eye and winked. "I'll just be over there."
The priest made the sign of the cross. "Bless me, Father," said the old man. "It's been a while since my last confession. I killed a man."
"Yes, my son," said the priest with flawless compassion.
"A very fine man."
"Yes."
"I killed him with my own hand, this hand right here."
The priest had closed his eyes and was nodding the way he did inside the confessional, lubricating the release of words with drops of "Yes."
"He was like a son to me, you see."
"Yes."
"The others deserved to die, but not Felix."
Felix? Felix was twenty feet away. Of course, he doesn't know what he's saying. He asked, perhaps a bit too brightly, "What others, my son?"
"Oh, must have been forty, fifty by the time we were through. Never did count 'em all up."
"I see."
The old man looked up quizzically. "You do?"
"Yes." The priest nodded encouragingly.
"You're being awful understanding about this, Padre."
"Are you sorry for killing these other people?"
"I am not."
"I see." In the seminary he'd read a psychological study suggesting that in some extreme cases the priest should feign opprobrium in order to freight the absolution with the desired gravity. Nothing too heavy, mind. "That's very serious," he said, as if to suggest he might need to consult with a bishop.
"I killed them close up, with my own forty-five," said the old man. "Close enough to get wet. Wet work, that's what they call it. It's an actual term."
The priest nodded. "If you are not sorry, then do you have the intention of not committing these sins again?"
The old man regarded him strangely. "I think we're all right on that score, Padre."
The priest whispered the closing words of the ritual. He asked the Lord to lift him up and give him strength. When it was over, Charley said to the man with the melted face, "See the padre gets something for his trouble," then he closed his eyes, perhaps to start in on his three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers. These young priests, they gave such light penances.
I
1
"Mr. Robertson to see you," said Miss Farrell.
"Send him in," said Charley Becker. He had hired Robertson away from Northrop six months ago. He was a balding jock in his mid-forties who rose at 4 A.M. every day to strap on blood-pressure monitors and LED pedometers to run seven miles.
He strode in, beaming, hand extended, bursting. "CB!" he said.
Charley nodded. "I've been looking over the log to N forty-nine ninety."
"N forty-nine ninety… forty-nine ninety."
"Those are the tail numbers of the G-4 you've been living in the last six months."