Wet Work

Prologue

He had done only two deathbeds up to now, and both of them coma cases. Father Toomey reserved to himself the conscious; he got the brain-dead, the vegetal and the Do Not Resuscitate. "Dues," said Father Toomey one night, tossing back his third vodka martini. "It was the same when I was just out of seminary. They think because you're new you'll make a mistake and send them to Hell on a technicality."

There wasn't much challenge in ministering to people who just lay there with tubes going in and out. What drama he'd experienced had been decidedly unpleasant. He'd just finished with the anointing when the hairdresser showed up. The family had provided for a weekly shampoo, set and rinse. The hairdresser pointed to the smear of holy oil on the old lady's forehead and said, "Okay if that gets wet?" Six years of seminary to dicker over forehead rights with a hairstylist to the dying?

But now this. Now this had promise.

He was in an Italian sports car with a name like exotic pasta, being catapulted through the dark countryside by a man with a melted face who'd shown up on the rectory doorstep at three in the morning asking for Father Toomey. When he saw the face he'd gasped, but the man only smiled as if to say, That happens all the time. He was a friendly man, in a gangsterish sort of way, with two heavy gold rings. It was entirely possible, he mused, that he was on the way to the deathbed of a Mafia don. The elements were all there.

"Hope we don't hit a deer, huh?"

Strange conversational gambit, he thought. The man tapped a black box on the dash. "This thing here, it sends out like a kind of Morse code to deer-we can't hear it, but they can-that tells them there's this maniac doing eighty on a road posted forty-five and they should stick to the sidewalk. You like venison? I never had it till I came down here, now I eat it all the time."

"Can you tell me something about your employer?" the young priest ventured.

"Charles Becker."

The priest gathered the name was supposed to ring a bell. "Yes?"

The driver seemed amused. He downshifted and the car screamed up a hill, bare-trunked sugar maples flashing by like fence pickets. "He's a businessman."

"I see." There was a long silence. "What kind of businessman?"

"Good businessman." He nodded.

Mafia. The priest felt his heart rate increasing.

"Real estate, mining, agricultural fertilizers, aircraft, cod-you know Captain Pete's fish sticks?"

"Sure."

"Those are his fish sticks."

"Is that right? I ate a lot of those fish sticks, growing up."

"There you go. You made him rich. What else? Oil, gas, timber-he owns a good deal of Oregon, I believe it is, or Washington State. You remember when Mount St. Helens blew up, that volcano? Well, a lot of that ash landed on his land. He turned around and sold it for agricultural fertilizer. This is a smart man, Padre." Padre? "Livestock. Weather satellites. One of the movie companies, he owns a good of piece of that. Defense, his company used to do some defense work for the government."

The priest recoiled. Defense? What ironic grace had brought him to the deathbed of an arms dealer, he who'd been arrested for demonstrating outside the El Salvadoran embassy in Washington. He saw napalm lighting up the jungle, cluster bombs free-falling from the bellies of B-52s, tanks crushing human beings, ballistic missiles hurtling toward what the "defense" industry liked to call "population centers," saw the sky-the very heavens-polluted with laser weapons. He saw children starving, people dying of AIDS, the homeless shivering on steam grates, battered wives, crack babies abandoned in hospitals, he saw-they were going through a gate, a large gate that seemed to open without human agency. He turned and saw them, two men with-of course-holsters. Remember, he told himself through pursed lips, that Christ went to the home of Matthew, the tax collector. But a defense contractor?

"Halfway."

"What?" said the priest, sounding annoyed.

"That's the house up there, those lights."

The priest could barely make them out. They were-miles away anyway. Good lord, how many wars had it taken to acquire a front lawn this size?

"This is the golf course here. The buffalo tear the hell out of it. If it was me, I'd stick them somewheres else, but he likes looking at them from his window, so they just go on replacing the divots. You ever seen a buffalo divot? Tell you something else about buffalo," he said with a confidential air. "They're major defecators. We got someone on staff, that's all he does."

They drove over a stone bridge. The priest saw swans and Canada geese in the moonlight.

"When I was a kid growing up they called it 'Extreme Unction.' You remember that? I guess that was before your time."

The priest didn't like the allusion to his youth. He said a bit stiffly, "It's called the 'Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick' now."

"That's nicer. Takes the sting out, doesn't it? 'Extreme Unction' always sounded so severe, you know? Like 'Unction with Extreme Prejudice.'" He chuckled.

The young priest thought it was a little funny, but he wasn't in the mood to laugh. "Is Mr. Becker a practicing Catholic?"

"Sure."

Sure? "I mean-"

He pointed. "That's the chapel over there." The priest made out an ecclesiastical silhouette surrounded by poplars on top of a hillock. "That's where everyone's buried. Underneath, in the crypts." He pronounced it crips. "They've got this plumbing system, I guess you could call it that, to get rid of the methane. Apparently you can actually get explosions. You imagine, you're laying a wreath on Aunt Martha's crip and baboom!"

The car crunched to a stop in front of the large Georgian mansion covered in ivy, not a moment too soon as far as the priest was concerned. He reached for the door handle. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned toward the melted face.

"Before you go in, Padre, there's something I should tell you."

What now?

"He's a little doped up."

The priest nodded. "Thank God for the drugs."

"Yeah," the man chuckled, "thank God for the drugs. Look, Padre, he's likely to tell you this story. Don't take it too seriously, if you see what I'm saying."

"No," said the priest. "I don't." What a strange man.

"It's this story he's made up for himself, to get through a bad part of his life."

"Story?"

"So you know, okay? He lost his granddaughter couple of years ago. She was like a daughter. I mean, he raised her from when she was a kid. The buffalo were a birthday present to her when she was five, so you can appreciate how he felt about her, right? How many kids when they're five get a herd of buffalo? Anyway, she died, and it hit him real hard."

"I'm sorry. Was it… leukemia, or…?"

"It was an overdose of cocaine."

"Oh Lord. I'm sorry."

"Yeah. One of those things. Nice kid, good-looking. Extremely good-looking, in fact. She was going to be an actress. Actually, she was already an actress but she was just getting started. She had this part in a play. Then"-he shrugged-"end of career. It was an accident. But they're all accidents."

"That's terrible."

"Yeah."

"We need to do more than we're doing. While I was in the seminary I did some fieldwork in a hospital where-"

"She was all he had left, I mean"-he gestured toward the mansion-"aside from all this. He was an orphan. Worked his way up from zip. He had a son and he died, a wife and she died, so the granddaughter became, like, his life, and then she died, and when that happened, he went a little-he made up this fantasy for himself about how he… anyway, if he starts telling you this story about how he killed a bunch of dope dealers, don't believe it. You're not dealing with some major criminal here. He's a very sweet old guy. Just play along. You see what I'm saying?"

"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.