Brian Flynn lay in the narrow space, his eyes closed and his chest rising and falling very slowly. She said, “He’s not letting go so easily.” She watched him for a few seconds, then added, “He’s a good-looking man … must have had a great deal of charisma, too. Very few are born into this sorry world like that…. In another time and place, perhaps, he would have been … something else…. Incredible waste …”
Burke came around the counter and knelt beside Flynn. He pushed back his eyelids, then listened to his chest and felt for his pulse. Burke looked up. “Fluid in the chest … heart is going … but it may take a while.”
No one spoke. Then Spiegel said, “I can’t do this … I’ll get the stretcher-bearers….”
Flynn’s lips began to move, and Burke put his ear close to Flynn’s face. Burke said, “Yes, all right.” He turned to Spiegel. “Forget the stretcher … he wants to speak to her.”
* * *
Maureen Malone sat quietly in the bride’s room while four policewomen tried to make conversation with her.
Roberta Spiegel opened the door and regarded her for a second, then said abruptly, “Come with me.”
She seemed not to have heard and sat motionless.
Spiegel said, “He wants to see you.”
Maureen looked up and met the eyes of the other woman. She rose and followed Spiegel. They hurried down the side aisle and crossed in front of the vestibules. As they entered the bookstore Langley looked at Maureen appraisingly, and Burke nodded to her. Both men walked out of the room. Spiegel said, “There.” She pointed. “Take your time.” She turned and left.
Maureen moved around the counter and knelt beside Brian Flynn. She took his hands in hers but said nothing. She looked through the glass counter and realized there was no one else there, and she understood. She pressed Flynn’s hands, an overwhelming feeling of pity and sorrow coming over her such as she had never felt for him before. “Oh, Brian … so alone … always alone …”
Flynn opened his eyes.
She leaned forward so that their faces were close and said, “I’m here.”
His eyes showed recognition.
“Do you want a priest?”
He shook his head.
She felt a small pressure on her hands and returned it. “You’re dying, Brian. You know that, don’t you? And they’ve left you here to die. Why won’t you see a priest?”
He tried to speak, but no sound came out. Yet she thought she knew what he wanted to say and to ask her. She told him of the deaths of the Fenians, including Hickey and Megan, and with no hesitancy she told him of the death of Father Murphy, of the survival of the Cardinal, Harold Baxter, Rory Devane, and of the Cathedral itself, and about the bomb that didn’t explode. His face registered emotion as she spoke. She added, “Martin is dead, also. Lieutenant Burke, they say, pushed him from the choir loft, and they also say that Leary was Martin’s man…. Can you hear me?”
Flynn nodded.
She went on. “I know you don’t mind dying … but I mind … mind terribly…. I love you, still…. Won’t you, for me, let a priest see you? Brian?”
He opened his mouth, and she bent closer. He said, “… the priest …”
“Yes … I’ll call for one.”
He shook his head and clutched at her hands. She bent forward again. Flynn’s voice was almost inaudible. “The priest … Father Donnelly … here …”
“What … ?”
“Came here….” He held up his right hand. “Took back the ring….”
She stared at his hand and saw that the ring was gone. She looked at his face and noticed for the first time that it had a peaceful quality to it, with no trace of the things that had so marked him over the years.
He opened his eyes wide and looked intently at her. “You see … ?” He reached for her hands again and held them tightly.
She nodded. “Yes … no … no, I don’t see, but I never did, and you always seemed so sure, Brian—” She felt the pressure on her hand relax, and she looked at him and saw that he was dead. She closed his eyes and kissed him, then took a long breath and stood.
Burke, Langley, and Spiegel stood at the curb on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. The Sanitation Department had mobilized its huge squadrons, and the men in gray mingled with the men in blue. Great heaps of trash, mostly Kelly-green in color, grew at the curbsides. The police cordon that had enclosed two dozen square blocks pulled in tighter, and the early rush hour began building up in the surrounding streets.
None of the three spoke for some time. Spiegel turned and faced the sun coming over the tall buildings to the east. She studied the façade of the Cathedral, then said, “In class I used to teach that every holiday will one day have two connotations. I think of Yom Kippur, Tet. And after the Easter Monday Rising in 1916, that day was never the same again in Ireland. It became a different sort of holiday, with different connotations—different associations—like Saint Valentine’s Day in Chicago. I have the feeling that Saint Patrick’s Day in New York may never be the same again.”
Burke looked at Langley. “I don’t even like art—what the hell do I care if someone forges it?”
Langley smiled, then said, “You never asked me about the note in Hickey’s coffin.” Langley handed him the note, and Burke read: If you’re reading this note, you’ve found me out. I wanted to spend my last days alone and in peace, to lay down the sword and give up the fight. Then again, if something good comes along— In any case, don’t put me here. Bury me beneath the sod of Clonakily beside my mother and father.
There was a silence, and they looked around for something to occupy their attention. Langley saw a PBA canteen truck that had parked beside the wrecked mobile headquarters. He cleared his throat and said to Roberta Spiegel, “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
“Sure.” She smiled and put her arm through his. “Give me a cigarette.”
Burke watched them walk off, then stood by himself. He thought he might make the end of the Mass, but then decided to report to the new mobile headquarters across the street. He began walking but turned at the sound of an odd noise behind him.
A horse was snorting, thick plumes of fog coming from its nostrils. Betty Foster said, “Hi! Thought you’d be okay.”
Burke moved away from the spirited horse. “Did you?”
“Sure.” She reined the horse beside him. “Mayor make you nervous?”
Burke said, “That idiot…. Oh, the horse. Where do you get these names?”
She laughed. “Give you a lift?”
“No … I have to hang around….”
She leaned down from the saddle. “Why? It’s over. Over, Lieutenant. You don’t have to hang around.”
He looked at her. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy, but there was a determined sort of recklessness in them, brought on, he supposed, by the insanity of the long night, and he saw that she wasn’t going to be put off so easily. “Yeah, give me a lift.”
She took her foot from the stirrup, reached down, and helped him up behind her. “Where to?”
He put his arms around her waist. “Where do you usually go?”
She laughed again and reined the horse in a circle. “Come on, Lieutenant—give me an order.”
“Paris,” said Burke. “Let’s go to Paris.”
“You got it.” She kicked the horse’s flanks. “Gi-yap, Mayor!”
Maureen Malone rubbed her eyes in the sunlight as she came through the doors of the north vestibule flanked by FBI men, including Douglas Hogan. Hogan indicated a waiting Cadillac limousine on the corner.
Harold Baxter came out of the south vestibule surrounded by consulate security men. A silver-gray Bentley drew up to the curb.
Maureen moved down the steps toward the Cadillac and saw Baxter through the crowd. Reporters began converging first on Baxter and then around her, and her escort elbowed through the throng. She pulled away from Hogan and stood on her toes, looking for Baxter, but file Bentley drove off with a motorcycle escort.
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She slid into the back of the limousine and sat quietly as men piled in around her and the doors slammed shut. Hogan said, “We’re taking you to a private hospital.”
She didn’t answer, and the car drew away from the curb. She looked down at her hands, still covered with Flynn’s blood where he had held them.
The limousine edged into the middle of the crowded Avenue, and Maureen looked out the window at the Cathedral, certain she would never see it again.
A man suddenly ran up beside the slow-moving vehicle and held an identification to the window, and Hogan lowered the glass a few inches. The man spoke with a British accent. “Miss Malone …” He held a single wilted green carnation through the window. “Compliments of Sir Harold, miss.” She took the carnation, and the man saluted as the car moved off.
The limousine turned east on Fiftieth Street and passed beside the Cathedral, then headed north on Madison Avenue and passed the Cardinal’s residence, Lady Chapel, and rectory, picking up speed as it moved over the wet pavement. Ahead she saw the gray Bentley, then lost it in the heavy traffic. She said, “Lower the window.”
Someone lowered the window closest to her, and she heard the bells of distant churches, recognizing the distinctive bells of St. Patrick’s playing “Danny Boy,” and she sat back and listened to them. She thought briefly of the journey home, of Sheila and Brian, and she recalled a time in her life, not so long ago, when everyone she knew was alive—parents, girl friends and boyfriends, relatives and neighbors— but now her life was filled with the dead, the missing, and the wounded, and she thought that most likely she would join those ranks. She tried to imagine a future for herself and her country but couldn’t. Yet she wasn’t afraid and looked forward to working, in her own way, to accomplish the Fenian goal of emptying the jails of Ulster.
The bells died in the distance, and she looked down at the carnation in her lap. She picked it up and twirled the stem in her fingers, then put it in the lapel of her tweed jacket.
Nelson DeMille, Cathedral
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