We gathered at Green-Wood Cemetery, a grand affair spread out on a hillside in a scrappy neighborhood of Brooklyn, with a view over the docks, the harbor, and the Statue of Liberty glowing copper green in the distance. It was a wet spring day, but the clouds parted as I got there and the sun emerged on the blossom trees and mausoleums on the slopes. Felix couldn’t have asked for more, I thought. Maybe he’d chosen it: I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I walked up the hill to the cemetery through a stone arch on which was a bas-relief of Jesus being laid to rest following the Crucifixion. Unlike Christ, or even Harry, Felix wasn’t coming back. He had drowned off Southampton and washed up on the long, broad beach among the seashells. He’d left a note for his wife and children, I’d been told, which was brief, remorseful, and blessedly vague.
To my left was a field with low gravestones set into it and a multitude of tiny Stars and Stripes fluttering in the breeze. A pair of Canada geese was waddling defiantly past, and when I bent down to scan a couple of stones, they turned out to be the graves of Civil War veterans. In death, Felix had transcended obscurity and was being sent to the afterlife accompanied by high technology and higher security. I passed a dozen or so huge trucks with satellite dishes on their roofs and burly technicians watching over a cardiovascular array of cords.
A couple of reporters leaned by them, take-out coffees in hand. One of them was my friend Bruce Bradley, who’d led me astray on Fox News about Harry. He was wearing either the same blazer or another like it and was laughing overheartily at his producer’s joke. Higher up the slope, near the arch, were five or six black Lincoln Navigators and Chevy Suburbans with another group of burly men clustered by them, these in suits rather than casual gear. They had translucent wires stuck into their ears, carrying Secret Service radio chatter. Someone important had turned up for Felix. Finally, there were three Suffolk County sheriff’s cars filled with uniformed officers trying not to be overawed by the Feds.
All in all, it was quite a show. Felix would have liked it, or found it entertaining. My feelings were still raw, but I’d found that despite everything he’d done, I’d come to miss him. Although he’d betrayed Harry, he’d been the nearest I’d found to a kindred spirit, at least until our last meeting. I didn’t count Anna-she came under miscellaneous.
A familiar vehicle was parked under a tree beyond the arch, which marked the border between the gawkers and the mourners-Nora’s stone gray Range Rover. I felt odd seeing it, and I peered into a window as I walked past to check if she or Anna was inside. It was empty, but I saw Nora as I looked up again. She was standing on a hill thirty yards away by a pink blossom tree, dressed in black with a small cap fixed to her hair. I watched her turn away from the scene to walk farther into the cemetery.
I’d entered a minefield of encounters by being there, but I hadn’t felt able to avoid it. I hadn’t done much for Felix, so I could at least attend his send-off. Walking after Nora, I came over the brow and looked into a bowl-shaped arena with a chapel at the bottom like a bonsai version of Christ Church in Oxford, in the same limestone with ornate carvings leading up to its dome. It was overlooked by rows of mausoleums and graves set along pathways.
As I got there, I saw an encounter unfold below me. Two vehicles were parked near the steps by the chapel. One was a heavy black limousine from which Tom Henderson had emerged and was shaking hands with two men I didn’t recognize. The other was a Suffolk County sheriff’s truck holding Harry. As Harry emerged, wearing a dark suit and handcuffs, they gazed at each other, but I couldn’t see their expressions from a hundred yards away. A Secret Service man stepped in front of Henderson, as if to protect him from a felon, and he sprang up the steps while Harry was held behind. Finally, Harry was allowed to proceed and he walked slowly through the wooden doors of the chapel.
By the time I arrived, most people were in place on the seven rows of benches in front of the altar, under a brass ring of blazing electric lights. It suited me, for it allowed me to slip into a backseat and scan the mourners. Nora was in the same row as Harry but a few seats down from him, as if jail protocol had to be observed, and Henderson was on the far side. Gabriel was on the same bench and gave me a nod. There was no organ, so we sat there in silence until the doors opened and a minister in white robes led a procession into the chapel: first the coffin and behind it Felix’s wife, black-haired with an ashen gray face, and their two children. The little boy had Felix’s molelike nose.
When the priest spoke, I realized he was reading from the Book of Common Prayer, as if we’d been taken back to an English church. It’s Episcopal, I thought-my brand. It was the first time I’d seen the religion in action, rather than treating patients in its name.
“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,” he intoned. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
I looked across at a stained-glass window that was backlit by the sun and attempted to ignore the sound of Felix’s wife weeping. It wasn’t easy; she had a low-pitched, agonized gulp that sounded as if she were dying herself, the body’s last effort to fill the lungs. I wanted to place my hands over my ears to block the sounds of pain, but it was impermissible. The first psalm was a relief-it was a cue for her to blow her nose and for the rest of us to cough and shuffle before the reading started. It was De Profundis, and I listened unthinkingly.
I look for the Lord; my soul doth wait for him;
in his word is my trust.
My soul fleeth unto the Lord before the morning watch
I say, before the morning watch.
We spilled out into the sunshine at the end of the service, and I drifted to one side so as not to intrude. The coffin was put back in the hearse and the priest led the mourners up a path to a lawn with a view over warehouses and docks. By the grave, I caught a glimpse of the little girl whose toys I must have seen in their apartment, holding her mother’s hand while the minister read the committal.
The priest hesitated fractionally on the last lines of the committal: “Suffer us not, at our last hour, through any pains of death, to fall from thee.” The widow started to weep again; the sound of her gulps mingled with those of clods of earth falling on the coffin.
I had gotten about fifty yards back down the path toward the arch, my duty to Felix done, when I heard footsteps behind and two Secret Service agents fell in beside me, making me jump with alarm.
“Dr. Cowper?” The agent who spoke had a shaved head and wore aviator sunglasses, making it impossible to see any impression of humanity in his eyes. “Secretary Henderson would like to speak with you.”
The pair led me back toward Felix’s grave, where a clump of mourners was still gathered, including Harry, who was talking to the priest and seemed to be making the most of his day out from jail. Halfway there, they deviated toward a concrete-and-glass building surrounded by water. The aviator led me across a bridge, while his companion hung back.
At first, I didn’t know what the building was. It was like a library, with rows of floor-to-ceiling stacks lining a corridor and chairs in the empty spaces. But instead of shelves, the stacks held rows of boxlike cubicles, each with a glass door. Then I realized-it was a columbarium. There were urns in each cubicle, with the remains of a dead person in each one. Some were brass and others were jade. Most of the names were Chinese or Asian, and I saw small portrait photographs propped by some of them, with artificial flowers on the other side.
Henderson stood by a padded bench next to one of these walls of ashes. Opposite the stack was a glass wall that overlooked the lawn where Felix had just been buried. I could see the mourners still lingering by the graveside, but I knew we were invisible to them.
“Hello again, Dr. Cowper. Look at all these names.” Henderson was tracing a finger over the glass face to the cubicles that lined the stack. “Pui Wah Choi. An Ying Qu. Chinese mainland or Taiwan, I wonder? A fascinating place, Green-Wood. My wife insisted on us taking a trolley-bus tour once. All the mausoleums for the well-to-do of the nineteenth century. Now it’s the Chinese from Sunset Park in vases.”
“It’s very striking,” I said, unsure of where all this was leading.
“And now one Englishman, too. Although Felix had become an American citizen, I think.” He sat on the bench and crossed his legs. One of his pants legs rode up and I saw a long sock, the touch of a gentleman. “I wrote a testimonial letter for him a couple of years back, when the Rosenthal name helped. Homeland Security would probably deport you now.”
He lapsed into silence, seemingly in no hurry to get to the point. Something had gone out of him-the menacing authority I’d witnessed in Washington. He looked deflated and unhappy.
“It’s a tragedy,” I prompted.
“A terrible one. I always liked Felix. We were together in London, you know, a long while back. Why did he … do this?”
I looked at him, trying to discern if there was an accusation there, but the question seemed guileless.
“Perhaps he felt remorse for betraying Harry,” I said.
I didn’t say what I meant, but Henderson nodded as if there were no need for us to pretend with each other.
“He’d told you about that, did he? He must have been unhappy. I want you to believe one thing. Whatever was done …” He grimaced, as if the habit of deflecting responsibility had become so deeply ingrained in him that he had to force himself out of it. “Whatever I did, was meant for the best.”
Who gave you the right to choose Harry’s fate? I thought. It angered me, his halfhearted regret. He’d played with people, and he’d believed he was allowed to do it because his bank ruled Wall Street.
“You told me how great Rosenthal was-what a fine institution-but you didn’t save Seligman, you used it,” I said. “Greene’s dead and now Felix is, too. Harry could be in jail for the rest of his life. You can’t justify that.”
He frowned and the lines in his forehead were deep and heavy-it was an old man’s face. “Not with two deaths, no. I’ve talked to the president. I’ve told him it’s time for me to step down. I hope that’s enough for you.”
It was an appeal for clemency. He knew what Felix had disclosed, and he didn’t want me to publish it. I hadn’t decided what to do with the document that had been bequeathed to me, but I wasn’t willing to let him rest easy.
“Not really,” I said.
“You think about that. I have to go now,” he said, offering me his hand to shake. “Be well, Dr. Cowper.”
He went out of a far entrance toward Felix’s grave, and I retraced my steps along the path to the cemetery entrance, pausing at a stone cross in memory of a Scottish woman who’d died in the 1800s. As I crested the brow of the hill, I looked down to see Nora standing by her car with Harry. The prison officer had let him approach her, and he was leaning down to meet her lips briefly with his. Then he was led away and she stood alone for a few seconds, dabbing her eyes, before she climbed into her car and drove away.
As she did, I saw a driver open the door of a limousine parked near the arch for a woman to get out. She was in her fifties, tall and imposing, with a gaunt face and thin, upturned nose, and she was bearing a bouquet of purple and white flowers, arrayed in matching colored paper tied with twine. It looked like the kind of casually expensive arrangement you found in Manhattan. She’d timed her entrance so that the Shapiros were no longer around, and she walked up the path into the cemetery. After she’d passed me by, I turned to follow, for I’d recognized her. She was the woman in the Senate video who’d placed her hand on Anna’s arm.
We walked in lockstep, me twenty yards behind her, toward Felix’s grave. The path was hard underfoot, and I heard the scrunch of her heels striking the ground as she walked. The place was emptying and a group of workmen was getting ready to start an excavator and tip the earth back into Felix’s grave. It felt too exposed to follow her all the way there, so I sat on a bench nearby and watched from a distance. As she approached, she squatted briefly to examine the flowers by the grave and then put her own bouquet by the others. She straightened up again and I examined her face. It was blank and unmoving, as if it had been an act of duty or she were an envoy. Then she started the trek back along the path. I hid my face from her by looking at my phone as she passed, letting her walk out of sight.
I sat for a while to make sure that no one else was coming. The workmen were standing talking near the grave, a couple of them smoking. In the distance, I heard cars starting up and the buzz of electronic chatter-either the Secret Service readying to leave or the television crews spreading the news. Then I walked across the grass. My heart was thudding and my mouth was dry, although no one seemed to be watching. I reached the border to the grave, where the grass had been pounded by feet into mud, and bent to look at the flowers she’d left. There was a mauve envelope pinned to the bouquet, and I slipped the card from inside.
“To Felix,” it read. “In memory. Margaret Greene.”
The temperature had risen in the previous few days, the heat of Washington moving north and bringing hints of a humid summer to come. The nights were warmer, and that evening I went to a window that led onto the fire escape that snaked down the side of my apartment building. Sitting on the sill, I thrust my legs over and rested them on the platform. I could hear sirens course through Union Square and the nighttime buzz of the city.
I had poured myself a glass of bourbon, and as I’d added ice, I’d thought of Felix on our last night. Faithful servants, had been his toast, but now I wondered if he’d been faithful to anyone at all. I’d trusted him, but so had everyone else: Harry, Nora, Henderson, the Greenes. Seeing Margaret Greene’s note had made me wonder if he’d told me the truth, even at the end. Felix had betrayed Harry because he’d believed in Henderson-or the bank he personified-but he’d tried to compensate. That’s what he’d told me.
They’d come to mark his passing. Margaret Greene had cared enough to be driven there and place her memento on his grave. Everyone was willing to forgive him, so why had he killed himself? His sin didn’t seem enough to warrant despair. The only absentee had been Anna. She’d left Nora to drive her car herself. On the subway ride back to Manhattan-Felix had thoughtfully chosen to get buried near the N line-I remembered the line in the psalm: “My soul fleeth unto the Lord before the morning watch.” That was the last sight I’d had of her, walking along the beach. Now I realized what she’d hidden from me.
I’d never bothered to find out about the Greenes before. All the stories I’d heard about them had made them seem impersonal, hostile forces rather than people. But I had rectified that when I’d returned home, reading the newspaper stories around the time of his death that I’d ignored before. Greene hadn’t been a nice man-almost no one I’d talked to had much good to say about him. He was single-handedly breaching the motto that you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. But outside of Wall Street he’d been human. He’d married a woman and had a family. They had brought up children together.
Holding my phone, I climbed out onto the fire escape platform and punched in Anna’s number, then placed it to my ear to hear the tone. It went on for six rings and then switched to voice mail. Her voice invited me to leave a message and I vacillated for what felt like several seconds but was only a fraction of one before pressing the icon to end the call. I couldn’t confront her on voice mail: it had to be done in the flesh.