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, Schroeder, 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 wheelbarrowThrough streets wide and narrowCrying 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 wereFishmongers, 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 feverAnd no one could save her,And that was the end of sweetMolly 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.