the rear door of the police mobile headquarters van. A television set was tuned to the WPIX news program that was covering the parade. Lights flashed on the consoles, and three radios, each tuned to a different command channel, crackled in the semidarkness. A few men occupied with paperwork or electronics sat on small stools.
Burke recognized Sergeant George Byrd from the Bureau of Special Services. “Big Byrd.”
Byrd looked up from a radio and smiled. “Patrick Burke, the scourge of Irish revolutionaries, defender of the faith.”
“Eat it, George.” He lit a cigarette.
“I read the report you filed this morning. Who are the Finnigans? What do they want?”
Burke sat on a small jump seat. “Fenians.”
“Fenians. Finnigans. Micks. Who are they?”
“The Fenians were a group of Irish warriors and poets. About 200 A.D. There was also an Irish anti-British guerrilla army in the nineteenth century who called themselves Fenians—”
Byrd laughed. “That’s kind of old intelligence, Burke. Must have been held up in Police Plaza.”
“Filed with your promotion papers, no doubt.”
Byrd grunted and leaned back against the wall. “And who’s Finn Mac— something?”
“Head of the original Fenians. Been dead seventeen hundred years now.”
“A code name?”
“I hope so. Wouldn’t want to meet the real one.”
Byrd listened to the radios. The command posts up and down the Avenue were reporting: The post at the Presbyterian church at Fifty-fourth Street reported all quiet. The post on the twentieth floor of the General Motors Building reported all quiet. The mobile headquarters at the Cathedral reported all quiet. Byrd picked up the radiophone and hesitated, then spoke softly. “Mobile at Sixty-fourth. All quiet at the reviewing stands. Out.” He replaced the phone and looked at Burke. “Too quiet?”
“Don’t start that shit.” Burke picked up a telephone and dialed. “Jack?”
Jack Ferguson glanced at the closed bedroom door where his wife slept fitfully, then spoke in a low voice. “Patrick”—he looked at a wall clock in the kitchen—“it’s twelve-thirty. You’re supposed to call me on the hour.”
“I was in the parade. What do you have?”
Ferguson looked at some notes scribbled on a pad near the telephone. “It’s hard to find anyone today.”
“I know, Jack. That’s why today is the day.”
“Exactly. But I did learn that the man called MacCumail has recruited some of the more wild-eyed members of the Boston Provisional IRA.”
“Interesting. Any line on weapons? Explosives?”
“No,” answered Ferguson, “but you can buy anything you want in this country, from pistols to tanks.”
“Anything else?”
“A partial description of the man called MacCumail—tall, lean, dark—”
“That could be my mother.”
“He wears a distinctive ring. Always has it.”
“Not very smart.”
“No. He may believe it’s a charm of some sort. The Irish are a superstitious lot. The ring is oversized, probably an antique or a family heirloom. Also, I did find out something interesting about this MacCumail. It’s only hearsay … but apparently he was captured once and possibly compromised by British Intelligence.”
“Hold on.” Burke tried to arrange his thoughts. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that there was more than one game in town today. Where there was an Irish conspiracy, there was sure to be an English conspiracy. After eight hundred years of almost continuous strife, it was as though the two adversaries were inseparably bonded in a bizarre embrace destined to last eternally. If the Irish war was coming to America, then the English would be here to fight it. It was Major Bartholomew Martin’s presence in New York, more than anything Ferguson said, that signaled an approaching battle. And Major Martin knew more than he was telling. Burke spoke into the mouthpiece. “Do you have anything else?”
“No … I’m going to have to do some legwork now. I’ll leave messages with Langley at Police Plaza if anything turns up. I’ll meet you at the zoo at four-thirty if nothing has happened by then.”
“Time is short, Jack,” Burke said.
“I’ll do what I can to avoid violence. But you must try to go easy on the lads if you find them. They’re brothers.”
“Yeah … brothers….” Burke hung up and turned to Byrd. “That was one of my informers. A funny little guy who’s caught between his own basic decency and his wild politics.”
Burke left the van and stood in the crowd at the corner of Sixty-fourth Street. He looked at the reviewing stands across Fifth Avenue, thick with people. If there was going to be trouble, it would probably happen at the reviewing stands. The other possible objectives that Major Martin suggested—the banks, the consulates, the airline offices, symbols of the London, Dublin, or Belfast governments—were small potatoes compared to the reviewing stands crowded with American, British, Irish, and other foreign VIPs.
The Cathedral, Burke understood, was also a big potato. But no Irish group would attack the Cathedral. Even Ferguson’s Official IRA—mostly nonviolent Marxists and atheists—wouldn’t consider it. The Provisionals were violent but mostly Catholic. Who but the Irish could have peaceful Reds and bomb-throwing Catholics?
Burke rubbed his tired eyes. Yes, if there was an action today, it had to be the reviewing stands.
Terri O’Neal was lying on the bed. The television set was tuned to the parade. Dan Morgan sat on the window seat and looked down Sixty-fourth Street. He noticed a tall man in civilian clothes step down from the police van, and he watched him as he lit a cigarette and stared into the street, scanning the buildings. Eventually the police, the FBI, maybe even the CIA and British Intelligence, would start to get onto them. That was expected. The Irish had a tradition called Inform and Betray. Without that weakness in the national character they would have been rid of the English centuries ago. But this time was going to be different. MacCumail was a man you didn’t want to betray. The Fenians were a group more closely knit than an ancient clan, bound by one great sorrow and one great hate.
The telephone rang. Morgan walked into the living room, closed the door behind him, then picked up the receiver. “Yes?” He listened to the voice of Finn MacCumail, then hung up and pushed open the door. He stared at Terri O’Neal. It wasn’t easy to kill a woman, yet MacCumail wasn’t asking him to do something he himself wouldn’t do. Maureen Malone and Terri O’Neal. They had nothing in common except their ancestry and the fact that both of them had only a fifty-fifty chance of seeing another dawn.
CHAPTER 12
Patrick Burke walked down Third Avenue, stopping at Irish pubs along the way. The sidewalks were crowded with revelers engaged in the traditional barhopping. Paper shamrocks and harps were plastered against the windows of most shops and restaurants. There was an old saying that St. Patrick’s Day was the day the Irish marched up Fifth Avenue and staggered down Third, and Burke noticed that ladies and gentlemen were be beginning to wobble a bit. There was a great deal of handshaking, a tradition of sorts, as though everyone were congratulating each other on being Irish or on being sober enough to find his hand.
Burke approached P. J. Clarke’s at Fifty-fifth Street, an old nineteenth-century brick relic, spared by the wrecker’s ball but left encapsulated in the towering hulk around it—the Marine Midland Bank Building, which resembled a black Sony calculator with too many buttons.
Burke walked in through the frosted glass doors, made his way to the crowded bar, and ordered a beer. He looked around for familiar faces, an informant, an old friend, someone who owed him, but there was no one. Too many familiar faces missing this afternoon.
He made his way back into the street and breathed the cold north wind until his head cleared. He continued to walk, stopping at a half-remembered bar, an Irish-owned shop, or wherever a group of people huddled and spoke on the sidewalk. His thoughts raced rapidly and, unconsciously, he picked up his pace to keep abreast of the moving streams of people.
This day had begun strangely, and every incident, every conversation, added to his sense of unreality. He
