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 Idid, 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.