Cathedral

by Nelson DeMille

  “Terri O’Neal.”

  “Right. I got this from a Boston Provo. He and some other lads were supposed to snatch this O’Neal woman last night if a man named Morgan couldn’t pick her up in a disco. I assume Morgan picked her up—it’s easy today, like going out for a pack of cigarettes. You know? Anyway, now these Boston lads think it was part of what happened today, and they’re not happy about what the Fenians did.”

  “Neither are we.”

  “Of course,” added Ferguson, “it could all be coincidence.”

  “Yeah.” Burke thought. Terri O’Neal. It was a familiar name, but he couldn’t place it. He was sure it wasn’t in the files, because women in the files were still rare enough to remember every one of them. “Terri O’Neal.”

  “That’s what the gentleman said. Now get me the hell out of here.”

  “Okay. Stay put. Don’t open the door to strangers.”

  “How long will it take to get a car here?”

  “I’m not sure. Hang on. You’re covered.”

  “That’s what Langley told Timmy O’Day last summer.”

  “Mistakes happen. Listen, we’ll have a drink next week … lunch—”

  “Fuck lunch—”

  Burke hung up. He stared at the telephone for several minutes. He had a bad taste in his mouth, and he stubbed out his cigarette, then sipped on the bourbon. The telephone rang, and he picked it up. “Operator, get me Midtown North Precinct.”

  After a short wait the phone rang, and a deep voice said, “Sergeant Gonzalez, Midtown North.”

  “This is Lieutenant Burke, Intelligence.” He gave his badge number. “Do you have clear radio commo with your cars?”

  The harried desk sergeant answered, “Yeah, the jamming isn’t affecting us here.”

  Burke heard the recorder go on and heard the beep at four-second intervals. “You check me out after you hang up. Okay?”

  “Right.”

  “Can you get a car over to 560 West Fifty-fifth Street? Apartment 5D. Pick up and place in protective custody—name of Jack Ferguson.”

  “What for?”

  “His life is in danger.”

  “So is every citizen’s life in this city. Comes with the territory. West Fifty-fifth? I’m surprised he’s not dead yet.”

  “He’s an informant. Real important.”

  “I don’t have many cars available. Things are a mess—”

  “Yeah, I heard. Listen, he’ll want to go to the Port Authority building, but keep him in the station house.”

  “Sounds fucked up.”

  “He’s involved with this Cathedral thing. Just do it, okay? I’ll take care of you. Erin go bragh, Gonzalez.”

  “Yeah, hasta la vista.”

  Burke hung up and left the apartment. He went out into the street and walked back toward the park, where a crowd had gathered outside the fence. As he walked he thought about Ferguson. He knew he owed Ferguson a better shot at staying alive. He knew he should pick him up in the helicopter. But the priorities were shifting again. Gordon Stillway was important. Brian Flynn was important, and Major Martin was important. Jack Ferguson was not so important any longer. Unless … Terri O’Neal. What in the name of God was that all about? Why was that name so familiar?

  CHAPTER 34

  John Hickey sat alone at the chancel organ. He raised his field glasses to the southeast triforium. Frank Gallagher sat precariously on the parapet, reading a Bible; his back was to a supporting column, his sniper rifle was across his knees, and he looked very serene. Hickey marveled at a man who could hold two opposing philosophies in his head at the same time. He shouted to Gallagher, “Look lively.”

  Hickey focused the glasses on George Sullivan in the long southwest triforium, who was also sitting on the parapet. He was playing a small mouth organ too softly to be heard, except by Abby Boland across the nave. Hickey focused on her as she leaned out across the parapet, looking at Sullivan like a moonstruck girl hanging from a balcony in some cheap melodrama.

  Hickey shifted the glasses to the choir loft. Megan was talking to Leary again, and Leary appeared to be actually listening this time. Hickey sensed that they were discovering a common inhumanity. He thought of two vampires on a castle wall in the moonlight, bloodless and lifeless, not able to consummate their meeting in a normal way but agreeing to hunt together.

  He raised the glasses and focused on Flynn, who was sitting alone in the choir benches that rose up toward the towering brass organ pipes. Beyond the pipes the great rose window sat above his head like an alien moon, suffused with the night-lights of the Avenue. The effect was dramatic, striking, thought Hickey, and unintentionally so, like most of the memorable tableaux he had seen in his life. Flynn seemed uninterested in Megan or Leary, or in the blueprints spread across his knees. He was staring out into space, and Hickey saw that he was toying with his ring.

  Hickey put down the glasses. He had the impression that the troops were getting bored, even claustrophobic, if that were possible in this space. Cabin fever— Cathedral fever, whatever; it was taking its toll, and the night was yet young. Why was it, he thought, that the old, with so little time left, had the most patience? Well, he smiled, age was not so important in here. Everyone had almost the same lifespan left … give or take a few heartbeats.

  Hickey looked at the hostages on the sanctuary. The four of them were speaking intently. No boredom there. Hickey cranked the field phone beside him. “Attic? Status report.”

  Jean Kearney’s voice came back with a breathy stutter. “Cold as hell up here.”

  Hickey smiled. “You and Arthur should do what we used to do when I was a lad to keep warm in winter.” He waited for a response, but there was none, so he said, “We used to chop wood.” He laughed, then cranked the phone again. “South tower. See anything interesting?”

  Rory Devane answered, “Snipers with flak jackets on every roof. The area as far south as Forty-eighth Street is cleared. Across the way there are hundreds of people at the windows.” He added, “I feel as though I’m in a goldfish bowl.”

  Hickey lit his pipe, and it bobbed in his mouth as he spoke. “Hold your head up, lad—they’re watching your face through their glasses.” He thought, And through their sniper scopes. “Stare back at them. You’re the reason they’re all there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hickey rang the bell tower. “Status report.”

  Donald Mullins answered, “Status unchanged … except that more soldiers are arriving.”

  Hickey drew on his pipe. “Did you get your corned beef, lad? Want more tea?”

  “Yes, more tea, please. I’m cold. It’s very cold here.”

  Hickey’s voice was low. “It was cold on Easter Monday, 1916, on the roof of the General Post Office. It was cold when the British soldiers marched us to Kilmainham Jail. It was cold in Stonebreaker’s Yard where they shot my father and Padraic Pearse and fifteen of our leaders. It’s cold in the grave.”

  Hickey picked up the Cathedral telephone and spoke to the police switchboard operator in the rectory. “Get me Schroeder.” He waited through a series of clicks, then said, “Did you find Gordon Stillway yet?”

  Schroeder’s voice sounded startled. “What?”

  “We cleaned out his office after quitting time—couldn’t do it before, you understand. That might have tipped someone as dense as even Langley or Burke. But we had trouble getting to Stillway in the crowd. Then the riot broke.”

  Schroeder’s voice faltered, then he said, “Why are you telling us this—?”

  “We should have killed him, but we didn’t. He’s either in a hospital or drunk somewhere, or your good friend Martin has murdered him. Stillway is the key man for a successful assault, of course. The blueprints by themselves are not enough. Did you find a copy in the rectory? Well, don’t tell me, then. Are you still there, Schroeder?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you nodded off.” Hickey saw Flynn moving toward the organ keyboard in the choir loft. “Listen, Sc
hroeder, we’re going to play some hymns on the bells later. I want a list of eight requests from the NYPD when I call again. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “Nothing tricky now. Just good solid Christian hymns that sound nice on the bells. Some Irish folk songs, too. Give the city a lift. Beannacht.” He hung up. After uncovering the keyboard and turning on the chancel organ, he put his thin hands over the keys and began playing a few random notes. He nodded with exaggerated graciousness toward the hostages who were watching and began singing as he played. “In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty …” His voice came out in a well-controlled bass, rich and full, very unlike his speaking voice. “ ’Twas where I first met my sweet Molly Malone …”

  Brian Flynn sat at the choir organ and turned the key to start it. He placed his hands over the long curved keyboard and played a chord. On the organ was a large convex mirror set at an angle that allowed Flynn to see most of the Cathedral below—used, he knew, by the organist to time the triumphal entry of a procession or to set the pace for an overly eager bride, or a reluctant one. He smiled as he joined with the smaller organ below and looked at Megan, who had just come from the south tower. “Give us the pleasure of your sweet voice, Megan. Come here and turn on this microphone.”

  Megan looked at him but made no move toward the microphone. Leary’s eyes darted between Flynn and Megan.

  Flynn said, “Ah, Megan, you’ve no idea how important song is to revolution.” He turned on the microphone. Hickey was going through the song again, and Flynn joined in with a soft tenor.

  “As she wheeled her wheelbarrow

  Through streets wide and narrow

  Crying cockles, and mussels,

  Alive, alive-o …”

  John Hickey smiled, and his eyes misted as the music carried him back across the spans of time and distance to the country he had not seen in over forty years.

  “She was a fishmonger,

  And sure ’twas no wonder,

  For her father and mother were

  Fishmongers, too,

  And they each wheel’d their barrow …”

  Hickey saw his father’s face again on the night before the soldiers took him out to be shot. He remembered being dragged out of their cell to what he thought was his own place of execution, but they had beaten him and dumped him on the road outside Kilmainham Jail. He remembered clearly the green sod laid carefully over his father’s grave the next day, his mother’s face at the graveside….

  “And she died of a fever

  And no one could save her,

  And that was the end of sweet

  Molly Malone,

  But her ghost wheels her barrow …”

  He had wanted to die then, and had tried to die a soldier’s death every day since, but it wasn’t in his stars. And when at last he thought death had come in that mean little tenement across the river, he found he was required to go on … to complete one last mission. But it would be over soon … and he would be home again.

  CHAPTER 35

  Bert Schroeder looked at the memo given him by the Hostage Unit’s psychologist, Dr. Korman, who had been monitoring each conversation from the adjoining office. Korman had written: Flynn is a megalomaniac and probably a paranoid schizophrenic. Hickey is paranoid also and has an unfulfilled death wish. Schroeder almost laughed. What the hell other kind of death wish could you have if you were still alive?

  How, wondered Schroeder, could a New York psychologist diagnose a man like Flynn, from a culture so different from his own? Or Hickey, from a different era? How could he diagnose anybody based on telephone conversations? Yet he did it at least fifty times a year for Schroeder. Sometimes his diagnoses turned out to be fairly accurate; other times they did not. He always wondered if Korman was diagnosing him as well.

  He looked up at Langley, who had taken off his jacket in the stuffy room. His exposed revolver lent, thought Schroeder, a nice menacing touch for the civilians. Schroeder said to him, “Do you have much faith in these things?”

  Langley looked up from his copy of the report. “I’m reminded of my horoscope— the language is such that it fits anybody … nobody’s playing with a full deck. You know?”

  Schroeder nodded and turned a page of the report and stared at it without reading. He hadn’t given Korman the psy-profiles on either man yet and might never give them to the psychologist. The more varying opinions he had, the more he would be able to cover himself if things went bad. He said to Langley, “Regarding Korman’s theory of Hickey’s unfulfilled death wish, how are we making out on that court order for exhumation?”

  Langley said, “A judge in Jersey City was located. We’ll be able to dig up Hickey … the grave, by midnight.”

  Schroeder nodded. Midnight—grave digging. He gave a small shudder and looked down at the psychologist’s report again. It went on for three typewritten pages, and as he read Schroeder had the feeling that Dr. Korman wasn’t all there either. As to the real state of mind of these two men, Schroeder believed only God knew that—not Korman or anyone in the room, and probably not the two men themselves.

  Schroeder looked at the three other people remaining in the room—Langley, Spiegel, and Bellini. He was aware that they were waiting for him to say something. He cleared his throat. “Well … I’ve dealt with crazier people…. In fact, all the people I’ve dealt with have been crazy. The funny thing is that the proximity to death seems to snap them out of it, temporarily. They act very rational when they realize what they’re up against—when they see the forces massed against them.”

  Langley said, “Only the two people in the towers have that visual stimulation, Bert. The rest are in a sort of cocoon. You know?”

  Schroeder shot Langley an annoyed look.

  Joe Bellini said suddenly, “Fuck this psycho-crap. Where is Stillway?” He looked at Langley.

  Langley shrugged.

  Bellini said, “If Flynn has him in there, we’ve got a real problem.”

  Langley blew a smoke ring. “We’re looking into it.”

  Schroeder said, “Hickey is a liar. He knows where Stillway is.”

  Spiegel shook her head. “I don’t think he does.”

  Langley added, “Hickey was very indiscreet to mention Major Martin over the phone like that. Flynn wouldn’t have wanted Martin’s name involved publicly. He doesn’t want to make trouble between Washington and London at this stage.”

  Schroeder nodded absently. He was certain the governments wouldn’t reach an accord anyway—or, if they did, it wouldn’t include releasing prisoners in Northern Ireland. He had nothing to offer the Fenians but their lives and a fair trial, and they didn’t seem much interested in either.

  Captain Bellini paced in front of the fireplace. “I won’t expose my men to a fight unless I know every column, pew, balcony, and altar in that place.”

  Langley looked down at the six large picture books on the coffee table. “Those should give you a fair idea of the layout. Some good interior shots. Passable floor plans. Have your men start studying them. Now.”

  Bellini looked at him. “Is that the best intelligence you can come up with?” He picked up the books in one of his big hands and walked toward the door. “Damn it, if there’s a secret way into that place, I’ve got to know.” He began pacing in tight circles. “They’ve had it all their way up to now … but I’ll get them.” He looked at the silent people in the room. “Just keep them talking, Schroeder. When they call on me to move, I’ll be ready. I’ll get those potato-eating Mick sons of bitches—I’ll bring Flynn’s balls to you in a teacup.” He walked out and slammed the door behind him.

  Roberta Spiegel looked at Schroeder. “Is he nuts?”

  Schroeder shrugged. “He goes through this act every time a situation goes down. He’s getting himself psyched. He gets crazier as the thing drags on.”

  Roberta Spiegel stood and reached into Langley’s shirt pocket and took a cigarette.

  Langley watched her as she lit the c
igarette. There was something masculine and at the same time sensuously feminine about all her movements. A woman who had an obvious power over the Mayor—although exactly what type of power no one knew for sure. And, thought Langley, she was much sharper than His Honor. When it came down to the final decision on which so many lives hung, she would be the one to make it. Roberta Spiegel, whose name was known to nobody outside of New York. Roberta Spiegel, who had no ambitions of elected office, no civil service career to worry about, no one to answer to.

  Spiegel sat on the edge of Schroeder’s desk and leaned toward him, then glanced back at Langley. She said, “Let me be frank while we three are alone—” She bit her lip thoughtfully, then continued. “The British are not going to give in, as you know. Bellini doesn’t have much of a chance of saving those people or this Cathedral. Washington is playing games, and the Governor is—well, between us, an asshole. His Honor is—how shall I put it?—not up to the task. And the Church is going to become a problem if we give them enough time.” She leaned very close to Schroeder. “So … it’s up to you, Captain. More than any time in your distinguished career it’s all up to you—and, if you don’t mind my saying so, Captain, you don’t seem to be handling this with your usual aplomb.”

  Schroeder’s face reddened. He cleared his throat. “If you … if the Mayor would like me to step aside—”

  She came down from the desk. “There comes a time when every man knows he’s met his match. I think we’ve all met our match here at this Cathedral. We can’t even seem to win a point. Why?”

  Schroeder again cleared his throat. “Well … it always seems that way in the beginning. They’re the aggressors, you understand, and they’ve had months to think everything out. In time the situation will begin to reverse—”