Step on a Crack (10 page)

THE NEAT MAN WINCED as he probed a gloved hand behind the pay phone in the kiosk on the northwest corner of 51st and Madison. The sour reek of stale urine rising from the phone’s pedestal teared his eyes as he groped around blindly.
Where the hell was the device
?

Of all the places to set up a rendezvous, he thought as his fingers finally, mercifully found the plastic-coated wire behind the steel box.

Yet another bullet point in their plan, he noted as he clipped a phone company dial set across the pair of hidden colored wires. Three weeks before, his boys had actually snaked a pair of phone lines through a street duct in the rectory basement, into the corner phone company manhole, and, from the manhole, up the pay phone duct here to the street. Anticipating that all cell phone and landline transmissions in and out of the church would be monitored, they had created their own undocumented line.

The Neat Man checked his watch as he lifted the dial set to his ear.

At exactly 6:00 p.m., there was a crackle as one of the hijackers inside St. Patrick’s attached a simple nine-volt battery to the opposite end of the line, powering it. Instead of going high tech, they had outwitted the dopes by going low tech. He had every angle covered, right through to the dramatic climax and escape, which, he had to admit, was a real doozy.

The Neat Man whistled softly-“O Come, All Ye Faithful,” a holiday favorite of his.

“You there, Jack?”

“Where else would I be? How’s it looking from your end?” Jack answered.

“When you sent out that first wave,” the Neat Man said with a smile, “they didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Ditto with Hopkins. They’re still shaking their heads in disbelief.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Jack said.

“How’d the interviews go with all our rich friends?”

“Real informative,” Jack said. “Question now is will law enforcement stay stunned and stumped for the amount of time we need to get this done?”

“From what I’ve seen so far,” the Neat Man said with a laugh, “they’ll be scratching their heads ’til
next
Christmas.”

“Pardon me for not chuckling along with you there, buddy,” Jack said coldly. “For some reason things don’t seem so funny on the side of the wall everyone’s pointing guns at.”

“We all have our part to play, Jack,” the Neat Man said. His partner in crime, Jack, was a born worrier. Not his most attractive quality.

“Yeah, well, if I was you, I’d make extra sure I didn’t screw up my lines,” Jack said with menace before disconnecting their private line.

THE NEXT TIME I glanced up from the notes I was making on the negotiation with Jack, the command center’s small window to the outside had somehow become dark. The time had flown. Paul Martelli was busy talking on the phone beside me. Ned Mason was on the phone, too. A dozen or more other cops were working laptops, including Steve Reno.

I stood up and palmed the low ceiling as I stretched pretty close to my full six two.

The demands had been sent to the FBI’s New York headquarters downtown, at 26 Federal Plaza. The Bureau’s White Collar Crime Squad was crunching the numbers. The grand total of the ransom was nearly eighty million dollars.

It was a massive sum for one person to pay, but if you broke it down to the two and a half million or so for each hostage, it wasn’t that outrageous.

In fact, it was incredible how
willing
to pay these people seemed to be.

Celebrity spouses and family members were giving me the numbers of their financial people almost before I had a chance to explain who I was. More than one Hollywood talent agency I spoke to didn’t hesitate to put up the firm’s money for their lucrative clients. Three investment banks were working overtime organizing all the wire transfers.

One Beverly Hills lawyer actually asked for the hijackers’ number-to see if he could negotiate directly.
Uh, Jack-Marv Begelman from California wants to talk with you
.

It irked me, but I had to agree with what Jack had said before giving the demands. The fat cats were more than willing to buy their way out of trouble.

As I stepped outside the bus for some much-needed air, the first thing that hit me was the buzz-saw chattering of diesel generators. A half dozen portable crime scene light carts had been set up, and they illuminated the cathedral as if this were Times Square. For a second, the scene reminded me of another annoying NYC phenomenon: location shoots for movies-idling trailers, blocked-off streets, bright lights anywhere you looked.

Time to hit the catering van, I thought. See if I could keep some food down.

As I walked east along 50th, I could see that the sides of the cathedral were lit up, too. There should have been families strolling hand in hand down this block around now. Rosy-cheeked visitors from across the country and the world, sipping hot cocoa and smiling as they caught the candle glow from the famous stained-glass windows.

On the northwest corner of the Saks Fifth Avenue roof, I spotted a motionless FBI sniper.

The whole thing was totally insane.

What was even crazier was that these maniacs thought they were going to get away with it.

How?
Every inch of the cathedral was being scoped out by snipers. Air traffic had been diverted, so even an unlikely helicopter escape couldn’t work. As Oakley, the HRT supervisor, had mentioned, the hundred-and-fifty-year-old church was built right on top of Manhattan bedrock. So there was no basement, no way to get out from underground.

I tried to convince myself that the hijackers hadn’t thought the grand finale through, that Jack had put their escape plan in the cross-that-bridge-when-we-come-to-it file.

But as I stood out on that cold, deserted street, all evidence pointed to the alternative. The boldness of their action, the confidence that we would do exactly as they said. It was looking more and more like the hijackers knew something about their exodus that we didn’t.

I was rubbing my hands for warmth when my cell phone rang.

I snatched the line to Jack, stiffening for the next ninety-mile-an-hour curveball that was more than likely heading straight for my forehead.

Then I realized it wasn’t the police cell ringing but my own personal one. I rolled my eyes when I saw that the number on my caller ID was my grandfather Seamus.

As if I didn’t have enough on my mind.

“SEAMUS, I’M BUSY. What is it?” I greeted my grandfather. Not the warmest of salutations, maybe, but I wasn’t filled with Christmas cheer right at that moment. Besides, conversation to my grandfather, even at seventy-four years old, is a form of combat. If you don’t put yourself on the offensive immediately, he will eat you alive.

“Well, a fine good evening to you as well, young Micheál,” Seamus said. I knew I was in for it when my Hibernian forebear reverted to the Gaelic form of my name. My grandfather didn’t just kiss the Blarney Stone, family legend had it. He bit off a chunk and swallowed it.
Daily
.

“And an especially fine way of conversing with the man currently taking care of your flock of goslings,” he finished.

Flock of goslings,
I thought, rolling my eyes. My grand-father could make Malachy or Frank McCourt eat his tweed cap. He was the biggest, most blustery stage Irishman alive. He’d come to this country in the forties at the age of twelve. Sixty-some years had passed since he’d set foot on the “old sod,” as he called it, but if you didn’t know him better, at any given moment you’d think he’d just put up the donkey after cutting turf from the bog.

He was constantly coming in to check on his great-grandkids, though. Underneath the mile-thick crust of blarney, thank God, actually lay a heart of pure gold.

“Where’s Mary Catherine?” I said.

“Is that her name, now? We weren’t formally introduced. Why didn’t you tell me you were adopting another child?”

I knew it. The lethal innuendo just beneath the surface. If you looked closely, you could see that Seamus’s tongue was really the blade of a slicing machine.

“That’s a good one, old man,” I said. “You must have been saving that one up all afternoon. Mary Catherine happens to be the au pair.”

“
Au pair
. Is that whatcher callin’m these days?” my grandfather said. “Be careful, young Micheál. Eileen, your grandmother, caught me talking to an
au pair
once on a street corner one Sunday in Dublin. She broke three of me ribs with a hurling stick.”

“ Dublin?” I said. “That’s funny. I thought Grandma Eileen was from Queens.”

As he began to stammer out an explanation, I explained to him the letter from Maeve’s mother and Mary Catherine’s mysterious arrival the night before.

“You’re the authority on all things Irish,” I said. “What do you make of it?”

“I don’t like it,” he said. “This young girl could be after something. Keep track of the silverware.”

“Gee, thanks for the heads-up, you suspicious old coot,” I finally said. “And speaking of the goslings, I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to get out of here, but you tell them to get their homework out of the way and to start their jobs. Their
duties
. They’ll know what you’re talking about.”

“Does it have to do with that chart on the icebox in the kitchen?” my grandfather asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It does indeed.”

“Whose idea was that? You or Maeve?” my grandfather said suspiciously.

“Maeve,” I said. “She thought it would be good to give them something positive to do. Get their minds off everything else. Besides, they’re actually helping out. It’s amazing what twenty pairs of hands, even little ones, can get done.”

“It’s not a good idea,” my grandfather finally said brightly. “It’s a great one. No wonder Maeve came up with it.”

“You done now?” I said, half laughing. He loved Maeve as much as any of us.

“Any last insults before I hang up?” I said, conceding him the last word to get the call over with.

“A few,” Seamus said. “But I’ll be seeing you later. I might as well save them up.”

THIS WAS THE KIND of outlandish nightmare scene during which you were continually thinking,
This can’t possibly be happening. I’ll wake up soon and it’ll be over
.

The “danger zone” was occupied by police only and was off-limits to the press. The next outer ring belonged to the media and was dominated by TV trucks with giant antennae extended. The scene in the “staging area” was all crisscrossing cables, reporters at their computers, dozens of TV monitors. Periodically, we would convene a press conference and feed the newsies.

The portable generators for the lights were still roaring in the cold when I started walking back toward the bus. I found Commander Will Matthews inside. All the hostage advocates had been contacted, he informed me, and the situation was now officially in a holding pattern.

“Now for the excruciating part,” Will Matthews said. “It’s time to sit and wait this thing out.”

“Hey, Mike,” Martelli said as he stood. Though he’d been at this siege situation from the beginning, he didn’t look it.

“Nothing personal, but you seem beat. Why don’t you get out of here for a little while? These jokers say they won’t call back for hours, and when they do, we-and more important, those hostages inside-are going to need you calm and collected.”

“He’s right. Grab a bite. We need you on ice,” said Commander Will Matthews. “That’s an order, Mike.”

All the talk, and the thoughts of Maeve on my stroll, made me want to see her. The New York Hospital Cancer Center was only twenty blocks uptown, I thought. It wouldn’t take very long to swing by there.

I’m going to head to a cancer center to blow off steam
, I realized.

I left my cell number with Martelli and stowed my badge before I stepped out from the checkpoints. Countless reporters, producers, correspondents, and technicians were camped out around both sides of blocked-off Fifth Avenue with the giddy camaraderie of Deadheads with tickets to Jerry Garcia’s back-from-the-grave concert.

I had to wake up a burly cameraman who was sleeping in a folding chair in front of my blue Imp. I jumped inside the car and hit the road.

I made two stops actually. The first was at a great, crazy place called Burger Joint in the lobby of the Le Méridien hotel on 57th. Minutes later, I left there with a greasy brown paper bag under my arm. The second stop was at Amy’s Bread on Ninth, where I left with another bag.

I put on my light and siren as I made a left onto Park Avenue. Poinsettias and white lights fringed the center median as far as the eye could see to the north. Massive wreaths were hung above the revolving doors of the gleaming glass office towers, as well as from the polished brass doors of the luxury apartment houses I passed farther uptown.

As I drove, I couldn’t help staring at the high, stately old buildings lit up through the billowing silver of the avenue steam stacks, the gleaming wood-paneled walls beneath the opulent awnings.

As I waited on the light at 61st, a top-hatted doorman escorted a pale, devastatingly beautiful brunette in an ankle-length white mink and a little girl in red plaid into the plush rear leather of a waiting Mercedes.

The holiday beauty I saw everywhere I looked made my chest literally ache with guilt. I’d been so shot to pieces lately, I hadn’t even gotten a tree.

No wonder so many people went and killed themselves around the holidays, I thought as I screeched around the CL55 and the corner. Christmas was geared to make you explode with contentment, to burn with the passing year’s tremendous love and good fortune.

To be anything short of excited seemed, well, impolite.

To be depressed at this time of year, I thought, gunning my car east down a cold, black side street, to be actually sick with sadness, felt like an unforgivable sin.

MY SWEET MAEVE had her eyes closed as I stepped through her open hospital room door.

But her nose was definitely still in working order because she smiled when I put the smuggled packages on her drab-colored tray.

“No,” she said in her cracked voice. “You didn’t?” I lifted her plastic water cup and made her drink some. Her eyes teared with pain as she sat up. So did mine.

“I smell cheeseburgers,” she said with a dead seriousness. “If this is a dream and you wake me up, I won’t be responsible, Mike.”

“You’re not dreaming, angel,” I said into her ear as I climbed in carefully beside her. “Do you want the double onion or the double onion?”

Though Maeve ate only half of the burger and only about a quarter of the blondie, her cheeks flushed with healthy color as she pushed back the waxed paper.

“Remember our midnight junk-a-thons?” she said.

I smiled. When we started going out, we both worked four-to-twelves. At first, we used to hit a bar, but that tired quickly, and soon we found ourselves visiting the local video store and an all-night supermarket, heading straight for the frozen-food aisle. Chicken wings, pizza, mozzarella sticks-
health food
. The rule was anything you wanted, as long as you could cook it in a microwave and eat it in front of an old movie.

God, they were great times, though. Sometimes we’d stay up after we ate, just talking, not wanting it to end, until birds started tweeting outside the bedroom window.

“Remember all the work I used to bring you?” I said.

Maeve had been in the trauma ward at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx just around the corner from the Four-Nine, my rookie precinct.

The whole time during my tour, I would practically kidnap people off the streets and bring them into the emergency room just to get a chance to see her.

“Remember when that huge, homeless, toothless man you brought in hugged you?” Maeve said with a hard laugh. “What did he say? ‘You ain’t like those other jive turkeys, man. You care.’ ”

“No,” I said, laughing with her now. “He said, ‘Man, you’re the nicest damn honky I ever met.’ ”

Her eyes closed, and then she stopped laughing. Just like that. She must have taken something before I came in, and now she was fading fast into sleep.

I squeezed Maeve’s hand gently. Then I rose from the bed as quietly as I could. I cleaned up our mess and tucked her sheet around her shoulders, and then I knelt beside her.

For more than ten minutes, I watched my wife’s chest rise and fall. It was strange because for the first time I didn’t feel angry at the world or at God. I just loved her and always would. I wiped my tears on my sleeves before I leaned in beside her.

“Remember when you changed me forever,” I whispered in Maeve’s ear.