Manhattan 62 (38 page)

CHAPTER TWO

October 28, '62

T
HE MASS SEEMED TO
go on for hours, the lulling rise and fall of Latin, familiar, reassuring, mysterious, and for me now, meaningless. The words I'd been forced to learn by heart every Saturday morning at Catechism class when I was nine.
Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipoténtem, Factorem caeli et terrae
.—I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth—I wasn't sure what I believed any more, I hadn't been in a church for a long time except for weddings and funerals. Something in me stirred, though, as the great organ played the first notes of “Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring,” a piece my grandmother loved to play on a battered old harmonium.

From where I was sitting, I could survey the whole congregation, but it was Homer Logan who had my attention. I could just see him, up at the front, rising, sitting, kneeling, but also glancing backward from time to time as if looking for somebody in the crowd.

As the priest concluded the offertory, I watched the trickle of people stepping from their pews turn to a river as they moved up the main aisle to take communion, including some guys from the Gambino crew. Logan was on his feet and then he was behind Gambino's men. Maybe it was this he had come for. Maybe he was after these men whose social club was around the corner on Sullivan Street. Logan was obsessed with the Mob.

I pushed forward. An old woman in black gave me a dirty look for pushing in, but I kept moving. I gave her a deeply pious look, and genuflected, making the sign of the cross. She had a sour expression when everybody else was expressing joy.

At the front of the communion line, a young redhead in a frilly pink, blue and white polka dot blouse smiled at me, and let me in front of her as if she thought I was desperate, and I needed the communion. Maybe I did.

The crisis was over. The world was safe. No bombs would fall. But if Ostalsky was right, and I believed him, by the end of the day there would be an event so terrible, it would all heat up again. There was no safe place.

Anxious, I kept my hand on the gun in my pocket, trying to look at faces in the crowd. Nobody here would make a worthwhile target for an assassin.

I waited until the priest came and took a host from the chalice and held it up. It was years since I'd done this. I barely looked at the host, as I took it in my mouth.

Adlai Stevenson was off the list. After I had called Uncle Jack from the corner, I phoned a cop I knew who worked for the United Nations. He said he had seen Ambassador Stevenson enter the building earlier. I told him to make sure Stevenson stayed inside, and I hung up; I didn't know if he would do it; I couldn't know.

“Corpus Christi,”
said the priest and I saw Homer Logan leave with his wife in the gray mink stole.

I said,
“Amen.”

A man I hadn't seen earlier appeared, a man in a dark gray coat, collar up, holding his hat near his face. As soon as he saw me looking, he hurried to the Mulberry Street exit. When I ran after him, into the narrow corridor, out of the door, there was nobody around. The street was empty.

In the church again, I heard the words:
Ite, missa est,
‘The mass is ended'. As people began to leave, the organ played familiar, haunting arpeggios and a little boy, not more than ten, got up and sang Gounod's “Ave Maria” in that kind of clear pure voice that, on any other day, would have put tears in my eyes. Instead, I was sweating. My hands were cold.

Ostalsky. It had to be Ostalsky. He was a Red. He was a survivor. He followed orders. There were people over there who wanted us dead, who wanted a war. Ostalsky been willing to kill me in the warehouse; he had been waiting for me; I had walked into a trap. He had taken Nancy away from me. He was a Communist who loved Fidel Castro and hated the young Cubans who fought against the bastard.

I would get Ostalsky. I would stop him. I would make up for the Cubans who had been murdered, for Susana Reyes and Rica Valdes, and Jorge Dias. I would make up for the sucker I had been. I would kill the bastard by myself. If there is a God, I said to myself, help me. God help me.

Trouble was, I didn't believe any more. Maybe I had never believed. Max Ostalsky had been right when he told me he wished he understood about God. He knew there was no God to help him; and I knew it.

The organ loft had been empty earlier, but an assassin could have climbed up during the mass. It was where I would have concealed myself. A sniper's rifle would do it, one you had stashed in the loft, up under the high vaulted ceiling. A trained sniper could pick off anybody in the church. Wasn't Ostalsky trained? Wasn't he a crack shot with a pistol? Why not a sniper rifle?

Between masses, I crept up to the loft, but I knew I only had a few minutes. It was a busy day, people were everywhere, two priests hearing confessions, a group of little children in their white suits and frilly dresses making their first communion. In my mind, I saw the massacre. I saw the killer with his rifle aiming at his target, not caring who he picked off; I saw the little kids with blood on their white dresses, and tiny suits, the white shoes and little veils.

Looking down, I could see the whole of the church, the length of it stretching from Mott Street to the backdoor that led onto Mulberry. A city block. Near the Mulberry Street door was some scaffolding and large canvas tarps.

From up here, a rifle would do it. Had somebody stashed the rifle beforehand? I crawled all over the organ loft. Nothing.

Who was the victim? Someone important. Someone whose murder would provoke trouble, even a war. My gut turned over. Something had begun to form in the darkest part of me; something impossible, unbearable, too terrible to put into words. The name, the victim, I couldn't bring myself to acknowledge. Paranoia washed over me.

“Detective, can I help?” It was one of the church ladies I knew from when I was a kid. She saw me come down from the loft. I made an excuse and hurried away.

All day, and into the evening, I sat through the services. What surprised me most was that at the 7 p.m. mass, a woman I recognized but could not place right away came in just before the service began and sat towards the back of the church. She seemed middle-aged and was nicely dressed in a green coat and a matching hat, the brim covering part of her face. She sat quietly, no beads in her gloved hands, no missal either. This is what struck me about her, and then, at some point, as if startled by a noise, she looked up and I saw her face.

It was Muriel Miller. Mrs Miller, Ostalsky's host, the woman who had taken him shopping to show him capitalism at its most delightful and played
Swan Lake
and invited his friends for dinner. She was Jewish. What the hell was Muriel Miller doing in a Catholic church? I remembered then what she had said to me in her kitchen. “I do love a nice mass, Pat. You know, I sometimes go to Old St Patrick's for the music.”

Mass over, I looked around the church one more time. Under the tarps near the Mulberry Street door, beneath the scaffolding I had seen from the organ loft, was some broken statuary. Nobody there. By then Muriel Miller had gone.

It was getting late, and October 28th—the day the assassination was to have taken place—was coming to an end.

CHAPTER THREE

October 28, '62

T
HE STEPS DOWN TO
the mortuary vaults were outside the front door of the church. I lifted the metal cover, and hurried down, pulling the cover back into place.

Inside it was cold with a musty smell of death, water somewhere dripping onto old stones. A single bulb burned. This part of the church had been here since 1809, stone from the original church before it burned down and was rebuilt sixty years later. All that history that had been jammed into our heads as kids, along with the religious stuff, I knew it by heart, but I had only been down here into the vaults a half dozen times, when somebody important, some priest or bishop the family knew, was interred.

I had a small flashlight and I flicked it around the walls, the light making shadows. Sounds seemed to come from inside the vaults, like the dead whimpering. The dead calling out for me to save them.

The place had always scared me. It was the silence, and the smell. It was as if I was three years old again, terrified of the dark, wanting somebody to hold my hand.

I took off my suit jacket, patted the pockets for a cigarette, and realized I couldn't smoke here. Somebody would smell it. Somebody would come running, a priest, one of the parishioners, or the killer.

I stopped in front of one of the massive vaults. Thomas Eckert's red-brick vault had heavy iron doors that were surprisingly easy to open. I went inside; it was like a small apartment with its elegant electric lamps and the desk and a chair, all as if Mr Eckert had intended to continue working in the afterlife. You could hide here. You could stay here. Plenty of air came through the cracks in the ancient walls.

After that I covered the rest of the underground, and found nothing at all except the dead. I went back upstairs.

A high wall that bordered Prince Street surrounded the cemetery. It was cold. I put on my jacket and felt in the pocket. I was half dead with fatigue and I found a couple of Benzedrine I had stolen from Nancy's medicine cabinet. There was a water fountain near the side of the cemetery.

In the early days of the nineteenth century, when the church was built, this had been a graveyard for bishops and for the nobs and social elite; later it was a burial ground for immigrant families. I tried to sit against a headstone, but it didn't provide much cover.

Panicky now, I began to wonder if I'd got it wrong. If Rush O'Neill had lied to Nancy, or Nancy to me. Maybe it was St Patrick's on Fifth Avenue that was the location for this assassination. Maybe it was another church. Or no church at all. I kept myself alert as best I could, jogging in place, at least until the drugs kicked in.

Who will believe us?
Max had been right. I couldn't name a victim. Even if I called my uncle and asked for help, and he called somebody he trusted, and while they heard my story—if they believed it at all—and discussed it with other officers, the assassin would get into the church and kill his target.

The drugs took hold. I was wired. My brain started doing overtime. It had been planned like this, planned for the day after the missile crisis had ended, and nobody was paying attention anymore. Already there were fewer cops on the street. Maybe the assassination had been scheduled for the 28th, maybe it had. But what was to keep them, whoever they were, from changing the date? October 28th was only some cockamamie date when Columbus apparently discovered Cuba, but these people, these Commies, or whoever they were, they were smart and they were good. Why not change it? Why not guess somebody might find out and change the date?Why not wait until nobody was paying attention at all? Maybe it was us. Maybe we had the date figured wrong, the wrong day. I had to hold on. I had to stick around another day, two more. It was all I knew.

What an imbecilic dope I had been. I went into the church and sat on a pew at the very back.

Maybe it was a decision fuelled by the drugs that had me wired, but suddenly I felt invincible. From where I sat I could see everything, except the organ loft, which was over my head. Still, I could see the stairs that led to it. There was no other way up.

I checked my gun. I had a knife too, but I was lousy with knives.

It was the longest night I had ever known. I tried to sleep. All the time, snapshots flipped through my head, and they were all of Nancy. I took the last pill I had and swallowed it dry.

CHAPTER FOUR

October 29, '62

D
ARK GRAY OVERCOAT HANGING
loose, the man who had left earlier through the Mulberry Street door reappeared. Medium height, dark hair, upright bearing. Something familiar. Who was he? He was in a pew near the altar, and then he rose and started in my direction.

I ducked into a confessional and held the door ajar. Through the narrow slit, I could just make out what he was wearing under his coat. I thought he saw me because he hurriedly buttoned it, maybe to hide the uniform.

When he started towards the stairs for the organ loft, I crept out of the confessional and stayed low to the ground. I saw his face clearly. Stanley Miller was moving through the church quietly, swiftly, one hand in his pocket, feeling for a gun, or a knife, I thought.

Muriel Miller had been in the church the day before. Had she been preparing for this? Did she know? My God, I remembered, I remembered. In Edward Forrester's photograph, he had been the fourth man, a young soldier posing with Forrester, Rush O'Neill and Homer Logan. All of them devoted to their commander, Curtis LeMay.

I had met Miller only once, that night at dinner at his apartment on 10th Street. I had not made the connection when I saw Forrester's snapshots.

Stan Miller, the meekest of them all: the advertising man who went to Yankees games and washed his white Olds on weekends was the killer.
The only time he feels good is after those get togethers with his military buddies.
Muriel had said it to me that night.

It was Miller who had invited a Soviet student to stay with him. Not any student. Max Ostalsky. Ostalsky, whose uncle was a general, disaffected, furious with the current leaders, wanting war, wanting confrontation. And Forrester, who ferried back and forth between the US and the Soviet Union, was the messenger. Was it possible? That this provocation had been put in place by both sides? Was this the thing Ostalsky had tried to tell me?

Suddenly, Miller seemed to change his mind. He did not climb to the organ loft. He turned sharply and went back towards the altar, slid into a pew and onto his knees.

Intent on his prayers, for a Jew Miller seemed to know exactly what he was doing in a church. Anyone coming in would take him for a local who had stopped by before work.

I waited. I needed proof. I had to know what he was planning. So I waited. I waited while Miller prayed and the sunlight coming in grew brighter, and at 7.30 a.m., I saw somebody prop open the front door to the church, Mott Street side.

Crab-like, unwilling to stand up and make myself a target, I got as close to it as I could manage. From outside came the sound of cars. Cars arriving. Voices. Again I moved closer. At the curb were two black limousines. Beside one of them was Father Sean. With him was the Monsignor.

Father Sean opened the back door. A handsome woman in a bright blue hat emerged. She was familiar, of course. The photographs I had seen flooded my brain. It was Mrs Kennedy. Rose Kennedy. The President's mother. And then, quickly, a grin on his face, her son Bobby popped out of the car and put his arm around her.

“Thank you,” he said to the bishop. “This is nice, having this time alone. My mother had planned it for so long, and it seems we were unable to keep the original date, which as you know was yesterday,” added Bobby in that particular familiar Boston accent. “You know I've always liked this church. Shall we go in?”