Flynn put his arms around their shoulders and moved with them toward the priest. “Make Father Murphy a happy man and let him save your souls from the fires of hell at least.” Flynn moved toward the door, then called back to Murphy. “Don’t undermine the troops’ morale, and no lengthy penances.”
Flynn reentered the tower and waited in the darkness of a large, opaque-windowed room. He looked at his watch. According to Schroeder there were twenty minutes left until the earliest time the attack might begin.
He sat down on the cold, dusty floor, suddenly filled with a sense of awe at what he had done. One of the largest civil disturbances in American history was about to end in the most massive police action ever seen on this continent—and a landmark was going to be deleted from the guidebooks. The name of Brian Flynn would enter history. Yet, he felt, all that was trivial compared to the fact that these men and women were willingly following him into death.
Abruptly he pivoted around, drew his pistol, and knocked out a pane of thick glass, then looked out at the night. A cold wind blew feathery clouds across a brilliant blue, moonlit sky. Up the Avenue dozens of flags hung from protruding staffs, swaying stiff and frozen in the wind. The sidewalks were covered with ice and broken glass, sparkling in the light. Spring, he thought. “Dear God, I’ll not see the spring.”
Father Murphy cleared his throat, and Flynn spun around. Their eyes met, and Flynn rose quickly. “That was fast.”
Flynn began the climb up the winding stairs that gave way to a series of ladders. Murphy followed cautiously. He’d never been this high in either tower, and despite the circumstances he was eager in a boyish sort of way to see the bells.
They climbed into the lowest bell room, where Donald Mullins crouched behind the stonework that separated two louvers. He wore a flak jacket, and his face and hands were blackened with soot from a burned cork whose odor still hung in the cold room.
Father Murphy looked at the ripped louvers with obvious displeasure and then stared up at the bells hanging from their cross-beams. Flynn said nothing but looked out into the Avenue. Everything appeared as before, but in some vague, undefined way it was not. He said to Mullins, “Can you tell?”
Mullins nodded. “When?”
“Soon.” Flynn gave him two sheets of paper. “They’ve got to blind the eyes that watch them before the rest of the attack can proceed. It’s all there in the order of battle.”
Mullins ran a flashlight over the neatly typed pages, only vaguely interested in how Flynn came to have them. “My name here is Towerman North. Sounds like a bloody English lord or something.” He laughed, then read, “If Towerman North cannot be put out with sniper fire, then high explosive and/or gas grenades will be fired into bell room with launchers. Helicopter machine gunners will be called in if Towerman North is still not neutralized….” He looked up. “Neutralized … God, how they’ve butchered the language here….”
Flynn saw that Mullins’s smile was strained. Flynn said, “Try to keep us informed on the field phone…. Keep the receiver off the cradle so we can hear what’s happening….”
Mullins pictured himself thrashing around on the floor, small animal noises coming from his mouth into the open receiver.
Flynn went on, “If you survive the snipers, you’ll survive the explosion and the fire.”
“That barely compensates me for freezing half to death.”
Flynn moved to the west opening and stared down at the green and gold harp flag, glazed with ice, and ran his hand over it. He looked out at Rockefeller Center. Hundreds of windows were still lit with bright fluorescent light, and figures passed back and forth. He took Mullins’s field glasses and watched. A man was eating a sandwich. A young woman laughed on the telephone. Two uniformed policemen drank from cups. Someone with field glasses waved to him. He handed the glasses back. “I never hated them before …”
Mullins nodded. “It’s so maddeningly commonplace … but I’ve gotten used to it.” Mullins turned to Father Murphy. “So, it’s that time, is it?”
“Apparently it is.”
Mullins came close to Murphy. “Priests, doctors, and undertakers give me worse chills than ever a north wind did.”
Father Murphy said nothing.
Mullins’s eyes stared off at some indeterminate place and time. He spoke in a barely audible voice. “You’re from the north, and you’ve heard the caoine—the funeral cry of the peasants. It’s meant to imitate the wail of a chorus of banshees. The priests know this but never seem to object.” He glanced at Murphy. “Irish priests are very tolerant of these things. Well, I’ve heard the actual banshees’ wail, Father, whistling through the louvers all night … even when the wind was still.”
“You’ve heard nothing of the sort.”
Mullins laughed. “But I have. I have. And I’ve seen the coach-a-bower. Immense it was and black-polished, riding over these rooftops, a red coffin mounted atop it, and a headless Dullahan madly whipping a team of headless horses … and the coach drew past this window, Father, and the coachman threw in my face a basin of cold blood.”
Murphy shook his head.
Mullins smiled. “Well … I fancy myself a poet, you see … and I’ve license to hear things….”
Murphy looked at him with some interest. “A poet …”
“Aye.” A faint smile played over his blue lips, but his voice was melancholy. “And some time ago I fell in love with Leanhaun Shee, the Gaelic muse who gives us inspiration. She lives on mortal life, as you may know, in return for her favor. That’s why Gaelic poets die young, Father. Do you believe that?”
Murphy said, “They die young because they eat badly, drink too much, and don’t dress well in winter. They die young because unlike most civilized poets they run off to fight in ill-conceived wars. Do you want to make your confession?”
Mullins knelt and took the priest’s hands.
Flynn climbed down to the room below. A strong gust of wind came through the shattered windows and picked up clouds of ancient dust that had been undisturbed for a century.
Father Murphy came down the ladder. “This”—he motioned toward the broken windows—“this was the only thing that bothered him…. I suppose I shouldn’t tell you that….”
Flynn almost laughed. “Well, one man’s prank may be another’s most tormenting sin, and vice versa.” He jumped onto the ladder and descended to the spiral stairs, Father Murphy following. They came out of the tower into the subdued lighting and warmer air of the choir loft.
As Father Murphy moved along the rail he felt that someone was watching him. He looked into the choir pews that rose upward from the keyboard, and let out a startled gasp.
A figure stood above them, motionless in the shadows, dressed in a hooded monk’s robe. A hideous, inhuman face peered out from the recesses of the cowl, and it was several seconds before Father Murphy recognized it as the face of a leopard. Leary’s voice came out of the immobile face. “Scare you, priest?”
Murphy regained his composure.
Flynn said, “A bit of greasepaint would have done, Mr. Leary.”
Leary laughed, an odd shrill laugh for a man with so deep a voice.
Megan rose from between the pews, dressed in a black cassock, her face covered with swirls of dull-colored camouflage paint, expertly applied, thought Flynn, by another hand.
She moved into the center aisle, and Flynn saw that it was an altar boy’s robe and that it revealed her bare forearms. He saw also that her legs and feet were bare. He studied Megan’s face and found that the paint did not make her features so impenetrable that he could not see the same signs he had seen in Jean Kearney. He said, “With death so near, Megan, I can hardly blame you.”