From the street and the rooftops an exclamation rose from the reporters and civilians still in the area. A few people cheered, and a few applauded. There were a few jeers as well.
Mullins listened to the mixed reaction, then pulled his head back into the tower and wiped the cold sleet from his face. He wondered with a sense of awe how he came to be standing in the bell tower of St. Patrick’s Cathedral with a rifle. Then he remembered his older sister, Peg, widowed with three children, pacing the prison yard of Armagh. He remembered the night her husband, Barry Collins, was killed trying to take a prison van that was supposed to contain Maureen Malone’s sister, Sheila. He remembered his mother looking after Peg’s three children for days at a time while Peg went off with hard-looking men in dark coats. Mullins remembered the night he went into the streets of Belfast to find Brian Flynn and his Fenians, and how his mother wept and cursed after him. But most of all he remembered the bombs and gunfire that had rocked and split the Belfast nights ever since he was a child. Thinking back, he didn’t see how he could have traveled any road that didn’t lead here, or someplace like it.
Patrick Burke looked up. A green flag, emblazoned with the gold Irish harp, hung from the ripped louvers, and Burke could make out a man with a rifle standing in the opening. Burke turned and watched the police in the intersection wheeling away the smashed spotlight. The crowd was becoming more cooperative, concluding that anyone who could put out a spotlight at two hundred yards could put them out just as easily. Burke moved into the alcove of the tower door and spoke to the policeman he had posted there. “We’ll just stand here awhile. That guy up there is still manufacturing adrenaline.”
“I know the feeling.”
Burke looked out over the steps. The green carpet was white with sleet now, and green carnations, plastic leprechaun hats, and paper pompoms littered the steps, sidewalks, and street. In the intersection of Fiftieth Street a huge Lambeg drum left by the Orangemen lay on its side. Black bowlers and bright orange sashes moved slowly southward in the wind. From the buildings of Rockefeller Center news cameramen were cautiously getting it all on film. Burke pictured it as it would appear on television. Zoom-in shots of the debris, a bowler tumbling end over end across the icy street. The voice-over, deep, resonant—“Today the ancient war between the English and the Irish came to Fifth Avenue….” The Irish always gave you good theater.
Brian Flynn leaned out over the parapet rail of the choir loft and pointed to a small sacristy off the ambulatory as he said to Hickey, “Since we can’t see the outside door of the bishop’s sacristy or the elevator door, the police could theoretically beat the alarms and mines. Then we’d have policemen massed in that small sacristy.”
Leary, who seemed to be able to hear things at great distances, called out from the far end of the choir loft. “And if they stick their heads into the ambulatory, I’ll blow—”
Hickey shouted back, “Thank you, Mr. Leary. We know you will.” He said softly to Flynn, “God Almighty, where’d you get that monster? I’ll be afraid to scratch my ass down there.”
Flynn answered quietly, “Yes, he has good eyes and ears.”
“An American, isn’t he?”
“Irish-American. Marine sniper in Vietnam.”
“Does he know why he’s here? Does he even know where the hell he is?”
“He’s in a perch overlooking a free-fire zone. That’s all he knows and all he cares about. He’s being paid handsomely for his services. He’s the only one of us besides you and me who has no relatives in British jails. I don’t want a man up here with emotional ties to us. He’ll kill according to standing orders, he’ll kill any one of us I tell him to kill, and if we’re attacked and overcome, he’ll kill any of us who survives, if he’s still able. He’s the Angel of Death, the Grim Reaper, and the court of last resort.” “Does everyone know all of this?”
“No.”
Hickey smiled, a half-toothless grin. “I underestimated you, Brian.”
“Yes. You’ve been doing that. Let’s go on with this. The Archbishop’s sacristy— a problem, but only one of many—”
“I wish you’d brought more people.”
Flynn spoke impatiently. “I have a great deal of help on the outside, but how many people do you think I could find to come in here to die?”
A distant look came over the old man’s face. “There were plenty of good men and women in Dublin on Easter Monday, 1916. More than the besieged buildings could hold.” Hickey’s eyes took in the quiet Cathedral below. “No lack of volunteers then. And faith! What faith we all had. In the early days of the First War, sometime before the Easter Rising, my brother was in the British Army. Lot of Irish lads were then. Still are. You’ve heard of the Angels of Mons? No? Well, my brother Bob was with the British Expeditionary Force in France, and they were about to be annihilated by an overwhelming German force. Then, at a place called Mons, a host of heavenly angels appeared and stood between them and the Germans. Understandably the Germans fell back in confusion. It was in all the papers at the time. And people believed it, Brian. They believed the British Army was so blessed by God that He sent His angels to intervene on their behalf against their enemy.”
Flynn looked at him. “Sounds like a mass hallucination of desperate men. When we start seeing angels here, we’ll know we’ve had it, and—” He broke off abruptly and looked at Hickey closely in the dim light. For a brief second he imagined he was back in Whitehorn Abbey, listening to the stories of the old priest.
“What is it, lad?”
“Nothing. I suppose one shouldn’t doubt the intervention of the supernatural. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”
Hickey laughed. “If you can tell it tomorrow, I’ll believe it.”
Flynn forced a smile in return. “I may be telling it to you in another place.”
“Then I’ll surely believe it.”
Megan Fitzgerald came up behind George Sullivan setting the last of the mines on the south transept door. “Finished?”
Sullivan turned abruptly. “Jesus, don’t do that, Megan, when I’m working with explosives.”
She looked at Sullivan, dressed splendidly in the kilts of a bagpiper of the New York Police Emerald Society. “Grab your gear and follow me. Bring your bagpipes.” She led him to a small door at the corner of the transept, and they walked up a spiral stone staircase, coming out onto the long south triforium. A flagpole with a huge American flag hanging from it pointed across the nave toward the Papal flag on the opposite triforium. Megan looked to the left, at the choir loft below, and watched Flynn and Hickey poring over their blueprints like two generals on the eve of battle. She found it odd that such different men seemed to be getting on well. She hadn’t liked the idea of bringing John Hickey in at the last moment. But the others felt they needed the old hero to legitimize themselves, a bona fide link with 1916, as though Hickey’s presence could make them something other than the outcasts they all were.
She saw no need to draw on the past. The world had taken form for her in 1973 when she had seen her first bomb casualties in downtown Belfast on the way home from school, and had taken meaning and purpose when her older brother Tommy had been wounded and captured trying to free Sheila Malone. The distant past didn’t exist, any more than the near future did. Her own personal memories were all the history she was concerned with.
She watched Flynn pointing and gesturing. He seemed not much different from the old man beside him. Yet he had been different once. To Tommy Fitzgerald, Brian Flynn was everything a man should be, and she had grown up seeing Brian Flynn, the legend in the making, through her older brother’s eyes. Then came Brian’s arrest and his release, suspicious at best. Then the break with the IRA, the forming of the new Fenian Army, his recruiting of her and her younger brother Pedar, and, finally, her inevitable involvement with him. She had not been disappointed in him as a lover, but as a revolutionary he had flaws. He would hesitate before destroying the Cathedral, but she would see to it that this decision was out of his hands.