Sir Harold Baxter turned his head and looked at her. “Is this traditional?”
She could not control her voice sufficiently to speak, and she stared at him.
Baxter moved beside her. Their shoulders touched. Her reaction was to move away, but she didn’t. He turned his head slightly. “Will you stand next to me for the rest of this thing?”
She moved her eyes toward him. Camera shutters clicked around them. She spoke softly. “I believe there’s an assassin out there who intends to kill me today.”
He didn’t appear to react to this information. “Well, there are probably several out there who intend to kill me…. I promise I won’t throw myself in front of you if you promise the same.”
She let herself smile. “I think we can agree on that.”
Burke stood firm as the crowd pushed and shoved around him. He looked at his watch. The episode had taken just two minutes. For a moment he had thought this was it, but within fifteen seconds he knew these were not the Fenians.
The security police on the steps had acted quickly but not really decisively in front of the partisan crowd. If that bottle had been a bomb, there would have been more than green paint to mop up. Burke took a long drink from his flask. He knew the whole day was a security problem of such magnitude that it had ceased to be a problem.
Burke considered the little he knew of the Fenians. They were veterans, said Ferguson, survivors, not suicidal fanatics. Whatever their mission they most probably intended to get away afterward, and that, thought Burke, would make their mission more difficult and make his job just a little easier. He hoped.
Colonel Dennis Logan was calming Pat and Mike, who had been aroused by shouts from the crowd.
Logan straightened up and looked at the stanchion clock. One minute past noon. “Oh, shit!” He turned to his adjutant, Major Cole. “Start this fucking parade.”
“Yes, sir!” The adjutant turned to Barry Dugan, the police officer who for twenty-five years had blown the green whistle to begin the parade. “Officer Dugan! Do it!”
Dugan put the whistle to his lips, filled his lungs, and let out the longest, loudest whistle in all his quarter century of doing it.
Colonel Logan placed himself in front of the formation and raised his arm. Logan looked up the six blocks and saw the mass of newsmen and blue uniforms milling around a paddy wagon. They’d take their time if left to their own devices. He remembered his regiment’s motto: Clear the way! He lowered his arm and turned his head over his right shoulder. “Foo-waard—MARCH!” The regiment stepped off.
The army band struck up the “Garryowen,” and the two hundred and twenty-third St. Patrick’s Day Parade began.
CHAPTER 11
Patrick Burke walked across the Avenue to the curb in front of the Cathedral and stood by the barricades. The 69th Regiment came abreast of the Cathedral, and Colonel Logan called the regiment to a halt.
The barriers behind Burke were parted where the green carpet came into the street, and a group of men in morning dress left the parade line and approached the Cathedral.
Burke remembered that the Cardinal had mentioned, casually, to the newspapers the day before that his favorite song was “Danny Boy,” and the army bandleader apparently had taken this as a command and ordered the band to play the sweet, lilting air. Some of the people on the steps and many in the crowd around the Cathedral broke into spontaneous song. It was difficult for an Irishman, thought Burke, not to respond to that music, especially if he had had a few already. “O Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are callingFrom glen to glen, and down the mountain side,The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling,’Tis you, ’tis you, must go and I must bide.”
Burke watched the entourage of dignitaries as they mounted the steps: the marshals, Mayor Kline, Governor Doyle, senators, congressmen, all the secular power in the city and state, and many from the national level. They all passed through the space in those barriers, walked across the narrow carpet, and presented themselves to the Cardinal, then left quickly, as protocol demanded. The faithful knelt and kissed the green-jeweled ring; others bowed or shook hands. “But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow,For I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow,O Danny Boy, O Danny Boy, I love you so.”
Maureen felt the excitement, the heightening of perceptions that led to fear, to apprehension. Everyone was smiling and bowing, kissing the Cardinal’s ring, shaking her hand, the Monsignor’s hand, Baxter’s hand. Hands and wide smiles. The Americans had super teeth. Not a bad one in the lot.
She noticed a few steely-eyed men near her who wore the same expression of suppressed anxiety that she knew was on her face. Down by the space in the barriers she recognized Lieutenant Burke from the Waldorf. He was eyeing everyone who approached, as though they were all ax murderers instead of important citizens, and she felt a little comforted.
Around her the crowd was still singing, trying to remember the words and humming where they couldn’t, as the flutes and horns of the army band played.
“But when ye leave, and all the flowers are dying,
And I am dead, as dead I may well be,
Then will ye come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say an Ave there for me?”
Maureen shook her head. What a typically morbid Irish song. She tried to turn her thoughts to other things, but the intrusive words of the ballad reminded her of her own life—her own tragic love. Danny Boy was Brian, as Danny Boy was every Irish girl’s lover. She could not escape its message and meaning for her as an Irishwoman; she found her eyes had gone misty, and there was a lump in her throat. “And I shall hear tho soft ye tread above me,And tho my grave will warmer, sweeter be,And you shall bend and tell me that you love me,And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.”
Burke watched the 69th move out. When the last unit was clear of the Cathedral, he breathed easier. The potential targets were no longer clustered around the Cathedral, they were scattered again—on the steps, moving around the regiment in small groups, some riding now in limousines up Park Avenue to the reviewing stands, some on their way home or to the airports.
At the end of the 69th Regiment Burke saw the regimental veterans in civilian clothes marching in a unit. Behind them was the Police Emerald Society Pipes and Drums, kilts swirling and their bagpipes wailing as their drums beat out a warlike cadence. At the head of the unit their longtime commander, Finbar Devine, raised his huge mace and ordered the pipers to play “Danny Boy” as they passed the Cathedral. Burke smiled. One hundred and ninety-six marching bands would play “Danny Boy” for the Cardinal today, such was the combined power of the press and the Cardinal’s casual remark. Before the day was out His Eminence would wish he had never heard the song and pray to God that he would never hear it again as long as he lived.
Burke joined the last rank of the old veterans at the end of the 69th Regiment. The next likely point of trouble was the reviewing stands at Sixty-fourth Street, where the targets would again be bunched up like irresistibly plump fruit, and on St. Patrick’s Day the fastest way to get uptown was to be in the parade.
Central Park was covered with people on hillocks and stone outcroppings, and several people were sitting in trees.