The Confession of Joe Cullen (7 page)

“Look, Lieutenant,” Ramos said, “they got
Casablanca
playing down on Fourteenth Street. We can sit down and relax.”

“I saw it six times,” Freedman said.

“So what? It's got to be the best picture in the world. So you see it a seventh time.”

Freedman shook his head. “I'm going over there, and if she doesn't want to see me, she don't open the door. I'm not going to break it down.”

“Suppose she's got a guy there? It's legal. She's not your wife now.”

Outside, Ramos watched him walk away, a big, shambling man, stooped, depressed. Ramos never understood why anyone wanted to be a cop. He didn't understand why he was a cop.

It was a dozen blocks to the brownstone where Sheila lived in their old floor-through apartment, three flights up with no elevator. After the divorce Freedman had begged her to move to one of the new high-rises, with a doorman to see who goes in and who goes out, but she preferred her privacy and she wasn't afraid of anything, including Freedman, who had slapped her once and in return received an iron frying pan on his skull.

He opened the street door with his key, walked up the three flights, and then resisted the temptation to turn around and walk out of the place. If he pressed the buzzer and she didn't open the door, he'd be even more miserable than he was right now, and if he did not press it, at least he would avoid rejection.

He pressed the buzzer. Suppose she had a date. Suppose she wasn't home. There was no reason that she should sit at home. Whatever anyone said about Sheila, no one ever denied her beauty. She was a tall, black-haired, dark-eyed woman, half Irish, half Italian, and according to Freedman's mother, not the kind of girl a Jewish boy should marry.

“Who is it?” Sheila asked. “I ordered nothing and nothing's coming and you didn't ring downstairs, so if it's not the Pope, fuck off.”

“It's me,” Freedman said.

“Oh, God — you.”

“Me — just me,” Freedman said, feeling that even the three words could be interpreted as a softening of the initial harsh response. “Please, I need to see you, Sheila — please. I'm not drunk — one beer, I'm not looking for trouble — please—”

“Is that Puerto Rican bum you hang out with standing next to you?”

“Ramos? Why would I bring Ramos here?”

“Good question. Why did you bring him around every other day when we were together? Oh, shit—” She opened the door. “Come on in. I'm probably as miserable and lonely as you are.”

“Thank you,” reminding her of a large, awkward, redheaded dog wagging his tail. She had never been able to explain, even to herself, why she had married Freedman. Maybe it was her Italian grandmother, who told her to marry a Jewish boy who would never beat up on her, just because he was a Jewish boy, which was absolutely not true, as she learned. Maybe it was his curious gentleness most of the time, except when wild anger took over, and his love of poetry. She had never met anyone else who was content to sit facing her and read poetry. Had she fallen in love with Freedman or the sonnets of Shakespeare and Keats, or the bemusing wonder of the Rubáiyát, or the love songs of Carew and Herrick? And this coming from a policeman, who spoke the language of the streets of New York, had shattered her resistance.

“Why the hell can't you stay away?” she asked him. “Why can't you give me a break and not make me crazy? That's all I ever asked from you. I didn't ask for money. I never asked for anything.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You're always sorry. OK, come in. Sit down.”

He dropped into one of the armchairs. The big, square room was tastefully furnished, overstuffed pieces with wonderful fabrics, a colorful hand-woven Portuguese rug, long white curtains on the high windows — all of it making him wonder, as it always had, how a woman almost uneducated could have such good taste. She was a model at Cornich Dresses, in-house and photographed as well, and very decently paid — more so than any cop short of the commissioner.

Sheila dropped into a chair facing him and asked, “What can I give you, Mel? A drink, sandwich?”

“Nothing. I just ate.”

“Hard day? Don't answer. I don't want to listen to another cop's day.”

“This one was different.”

“They're all different. Mother of God, you wallow in dung all day — you can't wash it off.”

“Beautiful. I need that.”

“There we go again,” Sheila said. “No. I want to hear about today. Honestly, truly. It did something to you, something deep and a little scary. Forgive me. We won't fight tonight. Tell me about today — please.”

“A man walked into the house and told us he had murdered a priest.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah, just like that.” And then he went on and told her all of it, and when he had finished, Sheila stared at him without commenting, and he stared back and wondered what was going on in that lovely head of hers. She broke the silence.

“What got to you?” she wondered. “You've seen it all — all the blood and guts and garbage.”

“Something shattered,” Freedman said.

“What?”

“I don't know. I can't get the image out of my head, the priest flung out of the plane and falling and screaming.”

“I wish I understood you,” Sheila said. “I don't think we would have made it anyway, because someone like me could never make it with a cop, not in a thousand years, but I'd feel better if I knew how it goes inside of you.”

“Any more than I know what goes inside of you?” Freedman asked bleakly. “I'd quit the cops if I could have you back, but then what would I do? Who'd pay me? And for what? All I know is to rut in garbage.”

“Oh, shut up,” Sheila said. “Nobody goes back. Come on, Mel. Take off your clothes and take a shower and we'll crawl into bed and weep for each other.”

Francis Luke O'Healey

C
ULLEN REMEMBERED,
from his very young schooldays, the apple that sat on the teacher's desk. The custom is gone and forgotten, but in that long ago it was still observed. The apple was anonymous, a shining red object that stood there in full view of all the class, and all the class knew that whoever put it there would somehow make himself or herself known to the teacher. But then, in that long ago before a school was a battlefield, the class awaited the teacher's response — although it was always the same and although they knew it as well as the teacher. “Indeed!” the teacher would say, picking up the apple and turning it over, and then continuing, “I see we have an apple polisher in attendance. But they do say that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and I am sure we shall have no need of a doctor here.”

The memory brought a smile to Cullen's face. He had one of those broad, flat Irish faces, and its very flatness and impassiveness made his smile a total transformation. He had a wonderful smile — a good set of teeth and a smile that welcomed the world. Father O'Healey had said to him, “Joseph, you have a unique smile, and when I see it, I think of the moment God smiled. Perhaps you heard the story when you were a kid?”

Embarrassed, Cullen shook his head.

“An old legend. As God smiled, the smile turned into a thousand cherubim.”

Perhaps the nicest thing that had ever been said to Cullen, and he thought of it now as he entered the shed where Father O'Healey was kept prisoner. There were two guards now on duty. They knew Cullen and made no effort to stop him, and they were not without a thread of reverence for the priest, even though he had been designated as
el diablo, abogado del diablo
, not to mention
el comunista
. They were very poor and very ordinary
campesinos
, and though O'Healey was of the devil, he was still a priest. Standing in front of the shed in their ill-fitting, American-made uniforms, with their old Springfield rifles — the automatic weapons were reserved for the regular army — they struck Cullen as being more comic than dangerous; and as for guarding, they hardly expected a manacled priest to walk off into the jungle. They passed Cullen through without even asking to see the contents of the brown paper bag he carried.

Father O'Healey watched him spread the contents of the brown bag, and not without a certain amount of awe. Cullen arranged the stuff on a crate: two cans of Norwegian sardines, King Oscar brand — “The very best, for more reasons than one,” Cullen said — a package of imported Finn Crisp, ajar of Chivers dark marmalade, made of bitter Seville oranges, a Sara Lee cake with chocolate frosting, and a huge California orange.

“You are a man of miracles,” O'Healey whispered.

“If these are miracles, they come cheap, Father. Those local mothers live like kings. The bastards even got a freezer. That's where the cake comes from and by now it's defrosted. The sardines are important, being the whole fish. You got your calcium there and you got your vitamins from the orange and you got your roughage out of the Finn Crisp. You can't live on beans alone.”

“I have. But this? Cullen, where did you get all this nutrition stuff?”

“You mean the food? These mothers got a generator and they order anything they want from the States.”

“No, I don't mean the food, Cullen. I mean the nutritional talk.”

“Oh, that.”

“Right. Oh, I'm grateful. Thank you, Cullen, but one thing. If you call them mothers out of respect for me, don't.”

“Motherfuckers?”

“I heard the word before. I survived. May I have the orange first? Or does a menu come with it?”

“You're putting me on, Father.”

“A little. Tell me about nutrition.”

“I dated this army nutritionist in Nam. All she talked about was nutrition.”

“Wonderful. You pick up things, Cullen. You see things. You remember things. That's a gift.”

Cullen regarded O'Healey suspiciously, but the priest's attention was on the orange, which, although handcuffed, he was slowly and carefully peeling. “Cullen,” he said, choosing his words precisely, “doesn't it trouble you, flying the guns down here and taking the dope back?”

“I was afraid you'd ask me that. I was hoping you wouldn't.”

“Oh?”

“Damn it, it gets tangled when a priest asks you a question like that.”

“No priest. Same question. Oscar is asking.”

“That son of a bitch Kovach got me the job. Why would he ask me? Father, does it bug you when I swear? I do it without thinking.”

“I know all the words. It doesn't bug me.”

“All right. Kovach asks me, but he knows the answer. If I don't, someone else will do it.”

“Except that you've never committed a crime. This is criminal — if not the guns then surely the dope.”

“I don't know what's a crime,” Cullen replied uneasily. “I never said this to anyone else, Father, but the way we did it in Nam, putting a gunship down on a village and raking it, so that every man, woman, and child there was shot to pieces — wasn't that a crime?”

“Yes.”

“And a mortal sin?”

“I would say yes, a mortal sin.”

“Well, there you are.”

“In Nam,” the priest said, “you followed orders.”

“Does that make it different?”

“I don't think so, but it might make a difference in your own soul, at least the sense that you felt you were doing what's right.”

“I don't know what's right. I don't believe I have a soul. I watched our kids being shot to pieces. I watched the VC kids being shot to pieces. Did they have souls? Maybe we were doing good, sending all those souls up to heaven. Father, it's such bullshit. Tell me I'm crazy. Tell me it ain't bullshit.”

“I can't tell you that,” the priest said gently. “I can't even look at it that way. There's only one way I can deal with it.”

“What's that?”

“What I do. If I have a soul, I must find it. Do you want a piece of orange?”

Cullen took the offered orange segment and said, “Father, I met you only twenty-four hours ago, and you already got me more confused than I ever been.”

“It's time, isn't it?”

“Time for what?”

“Time to confuse you. Look at it, Joe. You kill, and you work it out. Everyone else is doing it, and if you don't do it, someone else will. You're following orders. You're serving your country. Clean and simple and direct. No confusion. You take a job to bring guns into this place of agony, and what the guns will do doesn't trouble you, because if you don't take the job of flying them down, another will, so what's the difference? And the same goes for the cocaine you take back, and that's all right because up in Texas at the other end are the fat cats who have always run things, and you know that's the way it's always been, and there's a touch of CIA and army, so you figure it's no skin off your back if these wealthy and powerful characters want to run dope into the United States, and that's simple too. So if I confuse you, I have to say it's high time someone did, and if you feel I put you down too much, you can take your ass out of here.”