Canto for a Gypsy

  “Should we call the assistant commissioner now?” the commander suggested.

  “No,” Meyer rebuffed him. “We’re going in the church. Get me the cardinal.”

  Meanwhile, like a defective orrery, the city continued to stir.

  An IRT subway train broke down and stranded hundreds of the music lovers trying to leave the festival at the Columbus Circle station. Mounted police, unaware of the problem, tried to push the milling kids back in the station. Somebody knocked a cop off his horse with an accurately thrown bottle of apple wine, and quicker than one could say “The Grateful Dead” a small riot was brewing.

  Similar difficulties were developing in Harlem. A liquor store was held up at gunpoint, and as the thieves ran, the proprietor followed them with his own unlicensed pistol. He killed one; only the people standing around Lenox Avenue weren’t sure the white store owner had shot the right black man. Running inside, he locked all three locks on his door. The door and windows were permanently protected with wire mesh, so he felt reasonably secure until the window crashed in with a blast from a shotgun. Police cars were trying to converge on the scene, but neighborhood residents held them back with barricades of burning uncollected garbage. The people would have already burned out the store, but they were trying to figure out a way to get at the owner’s liquor, too.

  The detectives in Saks had barely put the phone down when it rang again. The assistant commissioner wanted to know where Lynch was and why Meyer was where he was. The Twenty-second Precinct requested more black plain-clothesmen for Lenox Avenue. Central Park Command wanted all available men at Columbus Circle. And what about Reggel? the Hungarians demanded.

  By the time Killane entered the office in Saks, Chief Meyer was on his way out.

  “I just wanted to tell you, Cardinal, we’re going into St. Patrick’s to take a man into custody. It’s a Hungarian security officer who has no business there, and it’s at the request of his mission.”

  Killane had taken the time to dress in his prince’s cape. He laid it carefully over the arms of his chair so that it wouldn’t bind when he sat. Meyer fretted at the door.

  “I’m going over now,” he emphasized.

  “On whose authority?” Killane asked.

  Monsignor Burns lit the cardinal’s cigarette, cleaned an ashtray, set it by Killane and informed Meyer the cardinal was addressed as “Your Eminence.”

  “Your Eminence, we’ve got a couple of riots tonight. I have to pull some of the men off surveillance here, so I have to take the Hungarian now. I haven’t got time to talk about it.”

  “What has the man done?”

  Meyer gave his wristwatch a labored gaze. The cardinal had taken thirty minutes to cross the street from his residence.

  “Cardinal, Your Eminence, I got a complaint. I’m picking the man up. I’m canning the detective who’s in there with him and then I’m going to go do my job like the city pays me for.”

  Killane was as unruffled as a spider on a web.

  “Show me the complaint, Chief Meyer.”

  Meyer was thrown off stride. The use of his name reminded him that he was a Jew dealing with a Catholic cardinal and Catholic detectives were listening.

  “See, this is a police watch in the church, Your Eminence. I don’t need a written complaint to deal with unauthorized persons on police business.”

  “He’s there on my authority.”

  “And the authority of the commissioner,” Meyer shot back.

  “Fine.” Killane settled back for a long stay. “Let’s wait for Commissioner Lynch.”

  Meyer was through for the moment and he knew it.

  “All right, Your Eminence, I won’t go in now because there are more important things to do. To do them I’m going to need every detective assigned to the church. With a little cooperation we could have worked something out. As it is, I’m very sorry.”

  Killane listened as Meyer ordered the detective at the desk to recall all the cars and surveillance teams.

  “We can’t reach Sergeant Isadore,” Meyer said. “He will maintain the watch.”

  The detectives followed their chief’s exit with their radio and rifle. The clergymen were alone.

  “Your Eminence was grand,” Burns applauded.

  “Yes, so grand that St. Patrick’s is now unprotected.”

  “What will you do?”

  Killane looked at Burns in mild surprise. For once, the monsignor thought his cardinal had an answer.

  21

  At 4 A.M. the streets around St. Patrick’s were as empty as the surveillance posts. The only vehicles parked were trucks owned by the industrial cleaners who would start working in the church early on Monday. Marked cars that regularly patrolled Fifth Avenue were on special duty at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. Commissioner Lynch was with them at last, and the mayor had cabled a message of concern from Chile.

  The doors of the middle truck opened and a man slipped out and crossed to the door set in the rusticated wall. He opened the door with a key of hard rubber so that it wouldn’t complete the circuit of an electrical alarm. Four more men left the truck. Odrich, white stubble growing over the front of his skull, closed up the truck. Even if the surveillance team had remained at its post above the restaurant, it was unlikely they would have seen him. The rear of the truck was at an angle from the restaurant and the line of trucks cut off any view of the boiler room door.

  Odrich took the lead inside the boiler room. All five wore black pullovers, black pants and tennis shoes and two carried nylon ropes fastened on their shoulders by epaulets. At the far corner of the room, the first point where it was actually beneath the church, Odrich unlocked the door to a spiral metal staircase.

  * * *

  Isadore looked at the radium dial of his watch. It was 4:10. Nine hours had passed since he entered the priest’s half of the confessional because Roman said it was the best place to watch the Holy Crown. Not that he could see the crown. But it had to be there, the detective thought, because there was no other place it could be, nowhere else as obvious and perfectly hidden. And it had to be there because Isadore was out of a job if it wasn’t.

  He glanced through the confessional grate at Roman. The Gypsy was asleep on the confessor’s bench. Typical, Isadore told himself. He turned his weary attention to the panel at his feet. Every entrance to St. Patrick’s was wired to it, and a red light would appear at as much as the insertion of a key in a lock. The panel was blank. Isadore rubbed his cramped legs.

  The confessional facing Isadore across the nave was half-open. There Reggel was at his post. Within the first hour he had slipped into the familiar hypnotism of the flickering candles. After eight hours the unsteady orange glow threw smiles on the faces of the marble statues staring back from their chapels, smiles of disinterested humor or the open mockery of those wearing their own crowns.

  The pupils of Reggel’s eyes blossomed in the darkness.

  Isadore heard a scratch on the grate. Roman was awake and pointing up. Isadore listened, heard nothing and raised his eyebrows. The Gypsy pointed up again. Isadore looked at the panel. There were still no lights.

  The detective shook his head. Besides pointing up again, Roman held up two fingers.

  Sweat and adrenaline began circulating in Isadore. The silence didn’t help. He opened his curtain far enough to see Reggel. The Hungarian was as still as a statue. Isadore opened his jacket, feeling for the revolver in his belt, then looked back through the grate.

  This time Roman pointed to the other side of the sanctuary. Isadore took a final look at the electric panel. It was still dark. Well, fuck the panel, he thought, and drew his gun.

  There was no mistaking Roman’s gestures anymore. Isadore drew the curtain back and looked straight at the gallery high along the south side of the sanctuary. At first he saw nothing but the gallery columns, and when something moved between
them it seemed faint enough to be his imagination. The movement came closer and he could make out a head.

  Odrich leaned confidently over the rail to survey the empty church.

  Roman was not disappointed. The face in the gallery was lean and strong-featured, the partly shaven skull accentuating the high forehead. There were no lines of doubt and the pale eyes were serene. It was the face of a man fully conscious that in middle age he was more dangerous physically and intellectually than ever before. A face etched in silver.

  Two younger faces joined Odrich’s at the rail. The other priests, Roman thought.

  One of them climbed the gallery rail. He balanced on it, then bent his knees and leaped out. Five feet into the open air he caught the chain of the chandelier. As the chain swung back to the gallery, the other of Odrich’s assistants grabbed it and held it still. In all, they made no more noise than if the wind had brushed a window.

  The man holding the chain pulled it closer to the wall. The one on the chain climbed it swiftly with the ease of a gymnast until he reached its base in the bay of the clerestory window a hundred feet above the floor. He rolled up the bottom of his sweater to uncover a wide belt equipped with rock-climbing straps.

  The Alpine Korps, Isadore remembered.

  From the gallery the chandelier chain was swung first one way and then the other so that the climber could fasten his straps to each side of the window’s lead molding. His hands let go of the chain and he dropped no more than a foot, suspended by the straps across the face of the window where its stained-glass panels came together in stone trefoils.

  On their own side of the sanctuary, Roman and Isadore heard the same soft landing of a body on a chandelier chain and the whisper as the chain was caught. The climber on the south window unbuttoned the coil of rope from his shoulder. Isadore looked across to Reggel’s confessional.

  Reggel had seen and heard nothing. Stone lips grinned at him secretively.

  Hanging ten stories above the floor on each side of the sanctuary, the climbers seemed to have the power of flight. Their heads grazed the join of the window bays, and nearly within arm’s reach were the great ribs of the ceiling meeting and radiating in three granite suns. They were far beyond where the police had searched, and Roman could understand why. Among the planes, medallions and ribs of the Gothic vision of heaven there was not one place in which to hide the Holy Crown.

  The rope flew across the ceiling and was caught. Roman watched the man on the south window make his end of the rope fast through the clips on the window and assumed that the same was happening on the north side.

  Odrich climbed the chandelier chain. If anything, he was faster and smoother than the younger man.

  He touched the window perch like a bird reluctant to land. In one motion, he turned toward the rope stretched across the sanctuary and dove out.

  A red light glowed on Isadore’s panel, but the detective was no longer paying attention to it.

  Odrich traveled hand over hand along the rope, his shadow swimming behind over the green ceiling.

  The Gypsy was right, Isadore knew for sure now.

  Odrich stopped in the middle of the rope, his feet dangling over the altar canopy. Above him in the last star of the ceiling was a dove. Hanging from the dove was a cardinal’s hat.

  There were four hats hanging from the ceiling, and they were all still, but during the storm there had been one stationary bloodred ring crossed by three swaying black rings. Roman had had a particularly good view of them while Reggel was pushing him off the gallery.

  Odrich brushed the tassels out of his face and reached through the wires attached to the wide brim. As he lifted the hat’s false cover a dull golden glow appeared in the dark.

  Odrich carefully removed the Holy Crown by its cross. Roman and Isadore pulled back the drapes of their booths. They saw no sign of Reggel.

  Odrich swung his legs around the rope and held the crown tight to his chest with one hand. He just started back when every light in the cathedral went on at once.

  Killane stood by the altar wing that controlled the lights. He had put on a chasuble.

  “I order you to stop in His Name.”

  Isadore was out of the confessional, waving the cardinal back with both hands. The man on the south window sighted on Isadore’s stomach with a .22 automatic. The gun had been selected for its compactness and relative quiet without a silencer, for short range rather than distance or power. Roman emerged from the confessional as the gun fired.

  The .22 made less noise than a door shutting, but Isadore went down in the aisle. Roman pushed him behind a pew.

  Isadore fought back. “Damn it, I’m not hit.”

  Light and sound had freed Reggel. He was in the south aisle, ignoring the men on the windows and galleries as he aimed straight up at Odrich. Reggel’s feet were spread wide and he held the gun in both hands.

  “Tell them to stop firing, Colonel, or I’ll kill you.”

  Odrich bobbed on the rope, grasping the crown. Two .22s trained on Reggel from the windows. Odrich estimated at least one would hit, but unless it took an eye or the heart the shock would be insufficient and Reggel would get his shot off.

  “Captain, think. If you shoot me, what will happen to the crown?” he shouted down.

  “It’s been broken before. Tell them to drop the guns.”

  While Odrich considered, the fat officer he thought dead got to his feet. Isadore aimed his revolver at Odrich.

  “No, Reggel. A trade. The Holy Crown for the cardinal. Don’t move,” Odrich warned as Isadore took a step forward. “Then we’ll all be shooting instead of talking. After all, we have four guns to your two and the cardinal is an old man.”

  Reggel planted his feet more firmly and held his breath.

  Odrich knew at the last moment what Reggel’s decision was. He twisted his head as far to the ceiling as he could.

  The sound of Reggel’s gun was an explosion compared to the .22. The rope parted. Odrich held on and swung upside down into the stained-glass window. He bounced off it, spinning on the rope and still holding the crown.

  There was no broken glass because the impact of Odrich’s fall had been borne by the man hanging on the south window. He was still on the window, but he was no longer hanging. His broken belt sagged out of reach along the side of the window. Even Reggel lowered his gun.

  The man was spread like the points of a compass against the trefoil decorations of the upper window. All that kept him from falling was the tension of his hands and heels pressed into the carved stone. From the floor, they could see his body bowing out over the sanctuary and, with the lights on, the whites of his eyes as he looked at his friend on the far ­window.

  The man on the gallery below him tried to swing the chandelier chain closer, but Odrich was in the way.

  “Jozsef!” Odrich yelled up from the rope. “The belt!”

  The head turned slowly, refusing to become dizzy. One foot slipped and his ankle dug into the stone. He stretched his left hand. The belt was four feet away between the window and a pilaster of ribs branching out onto the ceiling.

  “Jump!” Odrich ordered him.

  As his other foot slipped off, he jumped.

  The figure turned skillfully in the air. It landed a foot too low against the ribs curving into the center of the church and clung for a second. There was a pleading look at Odrich before the desperate grip was lost and an arm outstretched for help as he dropped, but Odrich held onto the rope with one hand and the crown with the other.

  The man called Jozsef landed behind the choir stall. The other climber watched, fascinated, as one of the dead man’s shoes rolled all the way over the sanctuary stones to the Communion rail. He tore his eyes away to look at Odrich in disbelief.

  The chain was swung to the climber’s hands. Winches holding the chains were thrown open and chandeliers and men beg
an descending to the floor.

  Roman and Isadore ran down one aisle to the front door while the three who had abandoned Odrich ran down the other. Roman heard the detective shouting for him to get out of the way, but the aisles were the equivalent of a fifty-yard dash. He noticed Isadore falling farther behind. By the time the five men converged in the vestibule, Isadore was gasping like a steam engine.

  First through the door was a tall blond sprinter whom Roman remembered from the convertible. Roman was next.

  Two of Odrich’s men came after. The second turned to aim his gun at Isadore, and the detective seized the opportunity to throw himself on the floor in what passed as a tackle. The man with the gun went down and so did his friend.

  Outside, Roman and the sprinter rolled down the stairs to the sidewalk. The sprinter was up first and reached for his gun. He straightened up quickly when he saw his gun in Roman’s hand.

  Odrich had ridden the chain only partway down, jumping with the crown into the gallery. Reggel likewise disregarded the men landing in the sanctuary and ran to the gallery steps.

  The gallery was empty when Reggel reached it. The door at the end was open. Reggel stopped where he was and fired a 7.65 slug that pierced both sides of the near air blower. Then he aimed at the far one.

  Odrich darted from the second blower, shooting. He was through the open door before Reggel could pick himself up from the floor.

  Where are all the detectives that are supposed to be here? the Hungarian wondered.

  Behind the door was an area Reggel had been in only once before, an unlit wooden walkway leading from south gallery to north gallery in the space between the Lady Chapel’s domed ceiling and its steep-pitched copper roof. There, like a worm in the skull, Odrich would wait for him to step into the light of the doorway.

  Reggel pressed himself against the wall beside the door. In the sanctuary below, Killane kneeled over a shoe and a sock that protruded from the choir stall.

  “He’s dead, Cardinal. Take my word for it.”