by Howard Fast
“The day before yesterday, I was in a village, baptizing three newborn babes, when word came that we were the target of a murder squad. Since there were only three rifles and one pistol in the village, the better part of valor made the men decide to hide in the bush. I went with them, and we took every boy who was over eight years old. We were about a mile from the village, crouched in the jungle growth, when we heard the sound of shooting. Some of the men wanted to rush back immediately; others counseled caution. Everyone was terribly disturbed, and when we felt it was safe to return, the village was silent except for the barking of the dogs. When we came into the village, we discovered that every living soul in the village was dead, old women, young women, boys and girls and the infants I had just baptized. They had been executed by the light rapid-fire carbines that we have flooded the military with. One infant I had baptized, eleven days old, had twelve bullet holes in her tiny body, the little corpse so ripped to pieces that it bore no resemblance to a human being.
“If my hand shakes and my writing is poor, consider what I have witnessed — done to these poor people by the will of some giant power, many miles away and even more distant in terms of their understanding. For a whole day, I gave the last rites and helped to dig graves and then I spent the night in prayer, trying to find God and know what one of His priests should do.
“Yours in Christ, Francis O’Healey.”
After finishing the letter, Ramos stared in silence at Freed-man. They were sitting in Freedman’s tiny office at the precinct house, both of them silent now and looking at each other the way two people at a funeral, both of them close to and beloved of the deceased, might look at each other.
Minutes went by, and then Freedman, burdened increasingly with a sense of this priest who had so strangely come into their lives, said to Ramos, “Why didn’t the bishop give the letter to the press?”
“Maybe he did.”
“Come on! You tell me no paper would publish this? That’s bullshit.”
“Then he didn’t give it to the press!” Ramos snapped. “What do you want from me?”
“Cool it, Ramos. I’m trying to understand something.”
“So am I.”
“You’re Catholic. I thought maybe you’d know something I don’t know.”
“What?”
“How the hell do I know!” Freedman exclaimed. “I don’t even know what the hell drove him down there.”
Ramos shook his head hopelessly. “Yesterday,” he said, “I saw a list of names in the paper of kids who went down to Nicaragua. They’re called witnesses for peace. Half the names were Jewish. I haven’t been in a church since I was married, and that’s more years back than I want to think about. I have bad dreams about O’Healey too, but a cop has bad dreams about a lot of things. I do my work, I draw my pay, and someday I’ll take my pension and put a gun in my mouth and blow my brains out, so don’t ask me to comment on the condition of society, because I only got one word for it — it stinks.”
Lieutenant Freedman found it hard to disagree with that.
Monty
ON THE TELEPHONE, Sheila said to Freedman, “Mel, I got a date tonight. I told you that. I got a dinner date with a buyer from Minneapolis—”
“A buyer!” Freedman exploded, loud enough for the men in the squad room to hear him and pretend not to hear him. “You always said you wouldn’t touch one of those bastards with a ten-foot pole.”
“Well, there you are,” Sheila said, “and now listen to me, Mel. I am not your wife, period. This is why I stopped being your wife. You made me crazy with your goddamn suspicions. Now I am not married to you. I could fuck the whole lousy shmata business, and it’s no skin off your back—”
“Can I get a word in?”
“No! Because I haven’t finished. It just happens that this buyer is Mr. Sam Ginzberg, and he’s seventy-three years old, and he runs the best store in Louisville, Kentucky, and he caters to all that crappy horse crowd, and he still does his own buying, and he does nothing but talk about his damn twelve grandchildren, and he always takes me to dinner so he can ask questions about the New York cops, and he bores the life out of me, but he’s sweet, and the boss says if I ever tell him I divorced a crud like you, I’m fired, and we go to dinner at a place called Ratner’s downtown, where they don’t serve any meat, because he’s very kosher, period. Furthermore, we dine — you should excuse the expression — at six-thirty and he’s back in his hotel at nine, because in New York he misses his afternoon nap.”
“Then you’re free at nine-thirty?” Freedman asked pleadingly.
“What!”
Lowering his voice, Freedman said, “What did I do wrong? Haven’t I behaved decently every time I saw you? We had fun. We could still take in a movie after dinner. Or just watch TV. Maybe only for an hour or two—”
“Come on, Mel,” she said. “You know what happens when we get together. We live in the age of AIDS. I haven’t been with another man since we broke up — oh, the hell with it. Better come by at ten. Mr. Ginzberg might be bursting with energy tonight.”
Freedman was a reasonably happy man as he left the cubicle he called his office and entered the squad room. George Jones looked up from a report he was writing, and said, “Lieutenant, can you tell us how come that tape Cullen made never hit the newspapers?”
“Or the box?” Leary put in.
“Did you ask the sergeant?”
“Ramos said to ask you.”
“He was right. You asked me.”
“Do we get an answer?” Jones said.
“No.” With that, Freedman left. He had to do things — take a shower, shave, change his clothes, eat something, read the papers, try to work out his continuing approach to Sheila, whom he had every intention of remarrying one day. When the time finally approached and he rang her doorbell, she was wearing a pale yellow robe and her black hair was tied at her neck. She had cleaned her face and removed all makeup. That was Sheila’s ploy. Her skin was perfect; she was one of those rare women who looked better without makeup, and being five feet and ten inches in height, she could kiss Freedman on his own level.
“Did you eat?” she asked him.
“Sort of.”
“Sort of. You know what kills cops — not bullets but the lousy junk food they live on. Come on in the kitchen.”
In the kitchen, she put together a salad of lettuce, cucumber, and tomatoes, toast, butter — the last thing on earth that Freedman desired at that moment. But he forced himself to eat without complaint or demur. Then they sat over coffee.
“You’re different,” Sheila admitted.
“How?”
“I don’t know. You’re just different.”
“About AIDS,” he said, “I want you to know something.”
“I don’t have to know anything.”
“I want you to know it. After we split, I never slept with another woman. I’m not lying. I wouldn’t lie about something like this.”
“I know you’re not lying.”
“If I seem a little crazy, it has nothing to do with you and me. It’s what I’m up against.”
“We talked about that,” Sheila said gently. “Give it up, Mel. Forget it.”
“You know, I walked into rooms where my feet sucked up blood, and four, sometimes five dead bodies, all cut up the way those demented dopers do it, and I could go home and go to bed. This thing sucks at me.”
“Why? What’s so different about it?”
“I’m Jewish,” he said.
“What else is new?”
“I don’t know this kind of shit. I don’t understand it. Just tell me something. You’re a Catholic. When I told your father that we wanted to get married, he damn near cut my head off. All right, I know I bored you with all this crap before, but try to help me. Here’s a priest. I don’t know that much about priests, but they live easy. All right, they give up on a wife and kids. A lot of people do. But they eat three square meals a day, they get respect, and nobody can fire them if they
do what they’re supposed to do. But here’s a priest who gives up everything to go down there to the asshole of creation to be with a lot of illiterate peons, no pay, beans when he can get them; otherwise he goes hungry — he gets shot at, nobody gives a damn about him, nobody thanks him, and he ends up being dumped out of a helicopter at eight hundred feet — and my government calls him a red and antes up for the guns that shoot the shit out of these peons of his, and not only that, but Washington supplies the helicopter, which has to cost maybe five, maybe ten million dollars, for him to be tossed out of.”
Sheila spread her arms hopelessly. “What do you want, Mel, a lecture about politics, which I don’t know a damn thing about?”
“No. I want to know about priests.”
“There are all kinds of priests. What do you want me to tell you? There was a priest had his hands up my drawers when I was thirteen years old.”
“No, you’re kidding. You never told me that before.”
“So I never told you. I don’t knock priests the way some people do. There are all kinds. You ever heard about Saint Francis?”
“Of course I heard about Francis of Assisi. I’m not ignorant, just stupid.”
“You know, it wouldn’t break your back to say something nice about yourself. You got a low self-opinion. That’s the trouble with you and you don’t know it.”
“Sheila, please knock that off.”
“OK. I’ll tell you about Saint Francis. He’s a kid who’s got everything, comes from a good home, father has money, wears fancy clothes, nothing to worry about — and then he dumps it all, changes his fancy clothes for rags, and dedicates his life to the poor.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Seven, eight hundred years.”
“This is 1987,” Freedman said. “I don’t think it fits — not with O’Healey. I mean, it’s all too different, Sheila. O’Healey’s a priest. I never heard of reds who couldn’t live without a priest. You know, you’re a cop, you begin to think that everything’s bullshit because most of it is, but there’s got to be a little left that isn’t.”
“So ask yourself how it feels to be married to a cop.”
“Oh, hell. I’m tired and I love you. That’s not bullshit. Maybe that’s the only thing in the world that makes any sense. Let’s go to bed.”
At half-past four in the morning, the telephone in Sheila’s bedroom rang. When it was his bedroom as well as Sheila’s, the telephone was on his side of the bed. After he left, Sheila moved it over to the other side, and now Freedman had to stumble around the bed in the dark, feel for the telephone, and then knock it off the night table. It fell with a resounding crash. Sheila awoke with a scream of fright, and he had to shout into the telephone “Hold on” while he put his arm around Sheila to reassure her that everything was all right. Then he picked up the telephone, and it was Ramos, saying, “What the hell’s going on?”
“Nothing. I dropped the telephone. It frightened Sheila.”
“You can say that again,” Sheila said, her voice shaking. “I’d almost forgotten the joy of being a cop’s wife and waking up in the middle of the night.”
“What’s up?” he asked Ramos.
“Cullen’s dead.”
“Oh, no!”
“They caught up to him and put four bullets into him.”
“Poor bastard,” Freedman said, his voice so mournful that Sheila, who had turned on the bedside light, asked, her voice full of fear, “What happened, Mel? What happened?”
“They killed Cullen.”
“Oh, Lord, no,” Sheila whimpered, like a little girl. It got to her. It got to everyone involved in the case.
“Where?” he asked Ramos.
“On the sidewalk right outside the church. I think they had the place staked out. They were hunting him, and I think they figured he’d go to the church. Where else could he go?”
“I’ll meet you there. Ten minutes,” Freedman said.
Freedman was naked, his tall, long-muscled body, with its pale white skin and orange hair, sort of funny, clownish, causing Sheila to smile as he struggled with his clothes, not a graceful man, not at all a graceful man.
“Can I make some coffee?” she asked him.
“No, I got to get over there.”
“A few minutes,” wondering what difference a few minutes might make. Cullen was dead. She had never seen Cullen, but she had grown up with an Irish father and an Italian mother, so she could visualize Cullen, or create him to her own specifications.
“No,” Freedman said, putting his arms around her. “Forgive me, baby.” He had always asked her forgiveness when the telephone awakened her in the middle of the night. He bolted out the door and Sheila stretched out in bed, wondering whether she could fall asleep or whether it made more sense to get up and shower and call it a night. It was almost five o’clock.
At the church, Ramos was waiting for him, and there was one of their own prowl cars still there and another from Manhattan South. Freedman had always protested the way prowl cars piled up at the scene of a crime when the crime was finished, and he sent his car away. Ramos had his collar turned up, and he was rubbing his hands and talking to Father White, who was in slippers with a robe wrapped around him.
“It’s all in hand,” Brady, from Manhattan South, told Freed-man. “Four shots, three in the body, and a finish shot in the head. Totally professional.”
“Where’s the body?” Freedman asked.
“The wagon wouldn’t wait. You know how those guys are. Why don’t you come over to the house and talk about it?”
“What’s to talk? The man’s dead.”
“Yeah. You know, Freedman, it seems to me that you know a hell of a lot more about Cullen than we do. We’re on the same side. Why don’t you be a nice guy and share the knowledge?”
“Talk to the zone commander. When he says, Freedman, go share the knowledge, I’ll share. Until then, I don’t know any more about Cullen than you do.”
“That’s sweet. That’s very sweet.”
“I’m a sweet guy,” Freedman said.
It was cold and it was beginning to rain. The Manhattan South cops took themselves off, and Father White said, “Lieutenant, why don’t you and Sergeant Ramos come inside to the kitchen? I’ll cook up some hot coffee and toast some bagels and we’ll all feel better than standing here in the rain.”
They sat in the kitchen of the old rectory beside the church, a kitchen hardly changed from the way it had been half a century ago, old iron-and-enamel stove, long wooden table, tin sinks, refrigerator crowned by its cooling mechanism, and beautiful Dutch tiles on the floor. The old housekeeper, cross at having been awakened at this hour, put up the coffee in a big enamel percolator and left Father White to do the rest. He toasted the bagels and brought out butter and cream cheese. Freedman, suddenly very hungry, found himself eating the bagels with gusto while Ramos drank black coffee.
“Father White,” Freedman said, “would you go down to Honduras or El Salvador or some such place to be a priest for the poor who lived there, even if they were in revolt against their own government?”
Ramos looked at Freedman strangely, and Father White, taken somewhat aback, stared a long moment at Freedman before he answered, “I didn’t think — well, I thought you’d ask me about poor Cullen. It did happen here, outside our door. I heard the shots and I got outside as quickly as I could—”
“Quickly? You ought to have more sense than that, Father. If you had gotten outside before they took off, you’d be in the same morgue as Joe Cullen.”
“They were in a car, you know,” the priest said. “I got outside just as the car was turning the corner. There was nothing else moving on the street.”
“He rushed out there, Lieutenant,” Ramos explained, “to give the man the last rites.”
Freedman brooded over that while White spread cream cheese on another bagel and handed it to the lieutenant. “About Honduras,” Freedman said, chewing, his mouth full of food.
&nbs
p; “Well, it’s an odd question,” Father White said, preferring to turn the conversation back to the crime. “Mr. Cullen—”
“Let’s drop Mr. Cullen for a moment, Father. There’s nothing we can do for him. About Honduras.”
“Well, that’s a difficult question. A priest can’t just walk out of his duty to fulfill some romantic dream. Have I thought about it? Well, I must admit that I have. After the Maryknoll nuns were raped and murdered by the death squads of El Salvador, I was properly horrified that our government could support the men who did it, and to be truthful, I did have romantic fantasies about going there — especially after the same group murdered the archbishop — and perhaps ministering to the guerrilla movement; but that must have been the fantasy of hundreds of priests, and you see, I am here in Chelsea. But how does this possibly connect with Cullen’s death?”
Ignoring the priest’s question, Freedman insisted, “Why? Why? Not revenge — you wouldn’t think that way as a priest?”
“Oh, no, surely not revenge. But my feeling was that these men and women had sanctified themselves in the service of Christ. Did He not say to go among the poor and lowly to preach His grace? To bring comfort to the dying? If the truth be told, I say a mass on a Sunday, and there are a dozen people in the church—”
Ramos, becoming increasingly uncomfortable at Freedman’s insistence, said, “Let’s go, Lieutenant.”
Outside, they got into Ramos’s car, and Freedman said, “What got you, Hosea?”
“You ask for something he can’t give.”
“What’s that?”
“Look, Lieutenant, my father came here from Puerto Rico in 1933. He wasn’t some ignorant kid. He finished high school, and he’d had two years of college in Puerto Rico. He majored in chemistry and biology, and even with the Depression, he got himself a job in a medical lab and he was making forty dollars a week, damn good money at that time. Then the Spanish Civil War broke out and he goes and joins the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight against Franco. And he wasn’t a commie. I ask him why; he can’t answer me. It’s something deep inside, and it was deep inside that priest, and maybe it’s why the good guys don’t disappear. Ah, Jesus, I don’t like to talk to priests. They make me nervous.”