Gospel (128 page)

I suppose, she sighed, I could march over to the Newlife Covenant Center or some such equivalent. Go home to my folks before my child started showing, do some song and dance about working on the Matthias scroll in Louisiana, have the kid, give it up, go back to my life and allow him or her to be brought up—

Her thought stopped there:
him
or
her.
It was the first time she had given the
it
in her body that much of an identity. No matter, she thought stoically, it will have to be given up. Don't even like kids that much, and my sister Cecilia's monsters drive me crazy, the bawling, the whining, the selfishness that has to be tamed with loving caution. But here they would make me write that letter. That letter the child could read at eighteen when Lucy would be … let's see, well into another unrecognizable, uncharted life at 46. Dear Daughter, or Dear Son. You're probably wondering why I gave you up …

No.

You must know that if things were different I would not have given you away …

No.

You will never understand, perhaps, why I felt it best to give you away but since you're eighteen maybe you can see how much having a child would change your life, or maybe you're the kind of woman who welcomes that, but, dear daughter—or son—whoever and however you are, with your Southern accent and your mother's bad Irish skin through adolescence, can you believe just one thing? That, trust me, I did you a big favor. And forever after this letter you must know that somewhere your one-time mother loves you, wanted the best for you, which was not me, but hopes you're very happy with the wonderful, mystifying life before you as it once was before me …

Better the silence than such a letter! My God!

*   *   *

O'Hanrahan awoke to dull pain. He blearily focused on the room and saw that it was dark outside the window and only one light in his room, a table lamp, was on at its lowest wattage.

The nighttable clock said it was nearly midnight.

It was, he surmised, a homey little room, probably the Bullins Center's best luxury suite. To his side was a bedstand with a variety of medical gadgets and between him and this table was his IV tree with three full bags of something-or-other filtering into him. He raised his left arm, which was straightened against a lightweight splint so he wouldn't bend his elbow and disrupt the IV drip. Imagine getting poked with all those needles and being so out of it you had no idea, he considered.

Also on his bedstand were three Dom Perignon cigars in individual humidors. Surely Lucy didn't leave those … or Bullins, maybe?

“Cigars, Mr. O'Hanrahan,” said a gravelly, assuring voice from across the room.

O'Hanrahan raised his head weakly. Sitting by the lamp was a gentleman in his sixties with full silver hair styled as for a politician, a sturdy but not heavy man dressed impeccably in a conservative dark suit. He was half-attentive to an article in a neatly folded
Wall Street Journal
on his lap. A bottle of some kind of whiskey was beside the stranger on the tabletop, shrouded in a brown paper bag.

“Dom Perignons, as you no doubt recognize,” said the man. It was a cigar-smoker's tenor voice given a false bass rasp.

“Thank you,” said O'Hanrahan, distressed at how feeble he sounded. “I take it then you're not a doctor.”

He set aside his
Wall Street Journal.
“No,” he said, volunteering no new information. “This bottle here is a Kentucky Bourbon I thought you'd enjoy. Special Reserve, Old Confederate—private stock, only a few barrels of the stuff ever made. They tell me you've got hepatitis and a number of complications, but when you get better I thought you'd appreciate it.”

“Maybe I won't get better.”

The gentleman examined his fine, manicured hands. He stood, picked up the bottle and walked closer to put it down on O'Hanrahan's bedside table. O'Hanrahan noticed the youth of the man's hands, like a teenager's, not a liver spot or a crease. The man stood at the bedside and they both looked at each other a moment. “Well, my friend, if indeed the end is near, it wouldn't hurt to drink it. Our vices, Mr. O'Hanrahan, support us in our old age; they are the guardrails we cling to, our constants in an impermanent world.” He paced back to the easy chair. “Vice is endangered in this country in this era.”

O'Hanrahan smiled faintly. “I agree.”

After a pause the man opened a cigar case and motioned, “Do you mind?”

“Not at all.” O'Hanrahan wondered if he would have to answer to the head nurse for the lingering cigar smoke in his room.

“You're sure?”

O'Hanrahan lifted his splinted arm and gestured a be-my-guest as well as he could.

“A man my age is defined by his vices. To the club for a dinner of high-cholesterol prime rib, port in the library, cigars with the fellows, a warmed brandy by the fire, a bit of gambling from time to time, cards. A visit to the mistress, much younger—you see what I mean.” He barely smiled, raising a hand gracefully. “They have become the sum of me.”

It occurred to O'Hanrahan, still struggling with the sensation of having seen the man before, who his visitor was. “You're Chester Merriwether, aren't you?”

The gentleman lit his cigar and availed himself of a paper cup as an ashtray. “I'm
Charles
Merriwether, Mr. O'Hanrahan. But you've got the right idea. Merriwether Industries, chairman of the board.”

O'Hanrahan felt fevered and weak, relieved his guest was up to doing the talking.

“Chester was my father. Or Chester the Second, I should say. My grandfather, founder of the original steel enterprise, was Chester the First.” He paused, puffing on his cigar.

“Chester the First was a man of God. Led the factory in collective prayer, each Sunday. Mind you, his workers would work for pennies until an industrial accident did them in, children and women too, inhuman hours, unspeakable conditions. Before my grandfather's eyes was a sea of laboring-class misery that he alone was responsible for, but in all those prayers, in all that piety, in all that talk of…” He said the name with distaste: “… of Jesus, he never could perceive a contradiction. With men of God like Chester the First, unions became inevitable—and our nation pays the price for this now. Chester the Second, my father, was a lover of fine things. Art, old masters, porcelain from China, suits of armor from the Middle Ages, and scrolls, collectibles, antiquities.”

“He once owned the
Gospel of Matthias,
” O'Hanrahan said.

“A prized possession. We had, in fact, a falling-out over my selling it to another collector. My father paid more attention to his hoarding and rapine than to our family's corporation, which funded his dilettantish pursuits. When I got power of attorney over my father, I began selling off the bric-a-brac. It was easy capital and rendered unnecessary our outrageous insurance payments to protect a bunch of old paintings and potsherds. My retired father became estranged. Never forgave me.”

O'Hanrahan stopped short of asking why he himself should be privileged to hear this recital of family history. Mr. Merriwether continued:

“There was a Chester the Third, my older brother.”

O'Hanrahan had heard of this brother dimly, an article once in
Look
magazine, a playboy, a jet-setter in the 1960s, convertibles and French actresses with lots of hair …

“Having no interest in the family business, he wasted lots of money and died drunk, from a failure to negotiate the road along the cliffs of Menton. A thorough waste of a life, my brother.”

“Seems to me he enjoyed his life,” O'Hanrahan offered. “A man of vice, like yourself.”

But at this Mr. Merriwether erupted: “
Not
like myself. There is a difference in the practice of vice and the practice of self-destruction, of ruination! Any fool,” Merriwether thundered, “can die at thirty, Mr. O'Hanrahan.” He relaxed his fist and examined his hands, smoothing them as if to calm them. More quietly he continued, “To ration the pleasures of life to old age is a sign of classical temperament, also something endangered in this country in this era. Chester…”

O'Hanrahan said nothing as his visitor trailed off, thinking of his older brother. But soon he began again: “My father hoped to pass the company to my brother but had to make do with me, I'm afraid.”

“You've done quite well,” said O'Hanrahan, scooting up on his pillows to better have a conversation, though a conversation was by no means Merriwether's evident program. “Your multinational is in the Fortune Top 30, is it not?”

Merriwether nodded. “I expanded a series of dying rust-belt steel production plants to a multinational corporation with assets in the tens of billions, Mr. O'Hanrahan. Which brings us to Chester the Fourth.” Merriwether sank back in the chair, morosely examining his right hand now, reaching absently for a small silver nail file from his inner suitcoat pocket.

“Your brother's son?”

“No. My son.” Without any emotion or change of tone, Merriwether rambled on easily, “You lost your son, did you not, Mr. O'Hanrahan?”

“Yes.”

“And your wife?”

“Yes.”

“Not to minimize your grief, my friend, but one can suffer these losses in ways other than death. My wife walked away from our marriage with millions—it would have been billions, but I paid my lawyers a fortune, a fortune I would as soon have put into the garbage than allow her to possess. And my son is lost to me. Chester.”

O'Hanrahan felt brave enough to venture, “Doesn't want to follow in your footsteps?”

Merriwether put down the nail file and leaned back in his easy chair, placing his hands on his stomach. “He's on the board. I have spent the last forty years pretending my only child is not an idiot, and I have prepared the way for him, I have hired the best advisers for him, I have sent him to the best schools and bribed the best colleges for degrees … but what's the use? He lost his first trust fund, the largest, in his first divorce. That castrating debutante was followed by a Brazilian dancer, I kid you not—she too made off with a bundle. His third wife was a drugged-out socialite, his children, my grandchildren, are in and out of psychiatric clinics. Two weeks ago his oldest boy tried to kill himself and made a botch of it—blew the side of his head off … More money changed hands to keep this tidbit about young Charles…”

Mr. Merriwether's own namesake, thought O'Hanrahan grimly.

“… from tabloid TV shows, the Neanderthal national media at large.”

A pause. There was nothing O'Hanrahan could think to say.

“The board will politely wait until I retire and then they'll force out this nincompoop son of mine and the once-proud Merriwether Industries will cease to have any Merriwethers.”

“You could decide not to retire,” said O'Hanrahan, his strength fading. “Like Paley and Getty, keep hanging on.”

“I deal in actualities, Mr. O'Hanrahan. If I don't step down upon my proposed retirement my board members will retire me themselves—I have no illusions about this. Although, I have sown the seeds of my renascence.”

O'Hanrahan rallied his strength to challenge his visitor. “It's hard to believe you deal only in actualities, Mr. Merriwether.”

Merriwether buffed a thumbnail. “Really. What would lead you to say that?”

“Because you're hooked up with a lunatic who is planning to broadcast live from the Rapture. And a rogue CIA agent who's trying to bring on Armageddon, and your cohort on the scene is a silly little man who quoted Masonic drivel to me in Khartoum. You don't strike me as the type for Masonic plots, Mr. Merriwether.”

Merriwether laughed gently. “Bullins isn't a lunatic, Mr. O'Hanrahan, he's a charlatan. Believes about one-half of the nonsense he spouts, and the other half of the time he's got his eyes on his profit margin. You don't build a personal fortune of $100 million tax-free dollars if you're a lunatic. That scroll of yours is worth a few million more. No matter what he tells you, don't think that fact has escaped him.

“The good reverend is connected in Louisiana as few people are. We had a business deal. I was to get him the
Gospel of Matthias,
this so-called False Prophecy, for his nonsensical end-of-the-world ministry and his nutcase CIA sidekicks. In return, he was to facilitate my purchase of nearly one-third of existing oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico.”

O'Hanrahan said presciently, “And since Iraq invaded Kuwait and gas has gone up to…”

“Gone up to $1.35 and climbing. $24 a barrel. Already some 80,000 Louisiana riggers have gone back to work. This little brouhaha in Kuwait is good for American business.”

“I imagine your investment has paid off royally, Mr. Merriwether. But if these men whose mischief you're underwriting ever really start a big war in an attempt to make a red-white-and-blue Armageddon, how will you feel then?”

Mr. Merriwether laughed. “Come now, Underwood and Colonel Westin can barely tie their shoes. I'm afraid any attempt to postulate a vast conspiracy theory in which I commence the trumps of Armageddon is doomed, sir.” The idea of Colonel Westin amused him. “Down in Langley they have shredded every document with Westin's name on it. They don't want to know.”

O'Hanrahan had taken the measure of his visitor, and said sourly, “And it doesn't matter to you that there might be thousands of deaths as Saddam's war machine sweeps through the Arabian Peninsula.”

“What did I tell you? I deal in actualities, Mr. O'Hanrahan.” Merriwether folded his hands again on his stomach. “War,” he said lightly, “is a constant in that part of the world. They fight wars, that's what they do. With or without our arms, with or without our involvement, war in the Middle East will happen; Arabs like killing other Arabs. Now we can choose to wring our hands like Jimmy Carter and say ooooh isn't it all so terrible, or we can choose to affect the outcome and, failing that, profit by it, derive some good from it.”