Prince of Peace (63 page)

Michael was the first to leave his hiding place. He had been huddled since before the building closed in a rarely used and flimsily locked mop closet in the men's room off the main post office lobby. Now, following the thin beam of his flashlight, he crossed that lobby quickly, went into the stairwell and down to the basement snack bar. He rapped on a storage room door once. The lock was thrown and the door opened quickly. Father Pete Bryant raised a hand, then followed. They were both dressed clerically, blacks and collar, unusual for priests like them by then, but their clothing was the color of night, and if they were arrested they wanted to be taken from the start for what they were. They were also wearing surgical gloves, the clerical dress of burglars.

They went back up the stairs quietly and quickly. On the second floor were postal offices where clerks worked. Michael knocked once on the ladies' room door. Jerry Dunne and Joe Reilley had crouched for the hour before the building closed on the same toilet in a booth they'd marked with an out-of-order sign. Now they came out promptly, young men in their mid-twenties. Jerry was a draft counselor whom Michael knew well, and Joe was his roommate, a math teacher in a Catholic high school in Queens. Pete Bryant worked in a parish in Harlem, and he was the one who'd made the point that by hitting the draftboard in downtown Newark, it would be young blacks, mainly, whose files the government would lose. Why should white kids be the only ones spared a vicious death in Asia?

Another advantage Newark had—the main one—was that the federal building, like many in the centers of older cities, was not alarmed or guarded at night, and the locks were common ones. Both Bryant and Maguire had learned what they could about picking them and were in fact by then as proficient at it as the average petty burglar. The doors to the offices, also, were paneled in the old-fashioned style, with frosted glass. Jerry Dunne carried tools and suction cups to cut through it if they had to.

They didn't. In minutes they were on the fourth floor and seconds later, having picked a simple tumbler lock—there was a dead-bolt lock that might have stymied them, but the last clerk out had neglected to throw it—they were inside the sprawling, cabinet-lined mammoth room of the Newark Selective Service office. The two younger men had cased the place with visits and they knew what they were after. They led the way to the bank of files where the I-A forms were stored. Each of the four took a separate cabinet and began to empty its contents into one of the two laundry bags he'd brought; then on to the next cabinet and the next until, within minutes, each man had both his bags stuffed with the papers that identified the thousands of New Jersey boys who were even then in the process of being drafted. Hauling their bags on their shoulders, like Santa's helpers, they left the office. On the glass Michael scrawled with a grease pencil, "Stop the killing! Stop the war!"

The next morning Michael, still dressed as a priest, though now wearing street gloves, went to the
Newark Star-Ledger
and asked the receptionist to take the box he gave her to the city editor. It contained one undamaged Selective Service file from which the draftee's name had been excised, and a plastic bag full of ashes and a letter describing what they'd done. It ended, "If this was Vietnam instead of New Jersey these would be the remains of people instead of paper," and it was signed, "The Catholic Conspiracy to Save Lives."

In the next weeks they took advantage of the Christmas and New Year's lull, which slowed the bureaucracies' ability to respond. Michael, Pete Bryant, Joe Reilley and Jerry Dunne repeated the action in Camden, Albany, Wilmington and Harrisburg. In each case they were able to enter the Selective Service office—in Harrisburg it was only a floor above the FBI field office—seize the files and get out. Each morning after, Michael presented the ashes of the burned files to a local newspaper or radio or television station. The Catholic Conspiracy to Save Lives was suddenly notorious. In Portland, Oregon, during the night before Richard Nixon's inauguration, another group unknown to Michael raided the Selective Service office in the same way and signed itself, "The West Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives." By the end of January, draftboards in Joliet, Illinois, and San Diego were similarly hit by other groups.

In Washington several things happened. The Selective Service received a special appropriation to begin the immediate microfilm duplication of its records. The General Services Administration issued new guidelines for security in federal buildings and created an emergency fund for twenty-four-hour patrols of buildings housing Selective Service offices. J. Edgar Hoover made the arrest of the draftboard conspirators a top priority for the FBI.

Michael shouldn't have shown himself at the newspapers, perhaps. The FBI had a good description of him and, since his conflict with Spellman and his participation in various demonstrations had been well publicized, he was an obvious suspect. But while his purpose was not to get arrested, neither was it to avoid arrest at all cost or indefinitely. He knew what he was doing. And he knew that if their raids succeeded, the draftboard offices would quickly be made invulnerable anyway to amateurs like him and his friends, both the ones he knew and the ones he didn't.

The FBI, on the other hand, wanted more than Michael. Hoover wanted everyone. Agents were convinced that Michael Maguire was the leader of at least two dozen raiders, and that he had orchestrated the recent burglaries in the Midwest and on the West Coast too. In fact there had already been that many Catholics arrested and freed on bail, and by the end of 1969 forty or fifty more would be. Most of them were priests and nuns, some like Michael in bad standing and some formally defrocked. They participated in draftboard raids not out of subservience to any leader or as part of a centralized organization, but out of subservience to what they'd have described as a vocation to end the war. They were disparate groups, only in the loosest sense conspirators, but they embraced the word
conspiracy
nonetheless. Like true Romans, they loved its Latin etymology, for it means "breathe together." Like true Romans, they liked the draftboard raid for its liturgical simplicity and its moral purity. They were destroying paper to save children.

But governments everywhere fail to understand the spontaneously expressed moral urges of the people. Always governments are fingering agitators and uncovering master plans and tracking down ringleaders. There were a dozen priests like Michael; well known, articulate, charismatic, capable of inspiring boldness in the tame. But the FBI singled him out. Eventually they made him famous. They could simply have arrested him with the evidence they had, and however the trial came out that would almost certainly have ended his aggressive resistance. But, prodded by Hoover and supported fully by the new attorney general, they embarked upon a plan to break the back of what they regarded as the core of the kooky Catholic war resistance.

 

She came to his office at NYU in early February. Celia Zack, a startlingly pretty Jewish woman in her late twenties. She had lustrous dark hair and eyes dark enough and deep enough to draw anyone in. But her eyes' constant rapid blinking undercut their effect and belied her intelligence, her nerve, and made her seem slightly vacuous. She blinked like that because of her contact lenses.

Michael knew her slightly. She was a board member of RESIST, which had its offices in the same building as his. The antiwar crowd had moved into the religious centers of universities as the alienated kids had moved out. RESIST had sponsored the early draftcard burnings and had more recently focused its efforts on helping draft-dodgers get to Canada. Michael had obtained false papers for a dozen or more of his clients from Celia Zack.

She stood in the doorway of his office.

"Come in," he said.

She shook her head. "Let's go for a walk." She turned the fur collar up on her heavy afghan coat.

When he didn't respond, her eyes went meaningfully to the corners of his ceiling; the room might be bugged.

Michael nodded and got his coat. On their way out he whispered, "You movement heavies flatter yourselves."

It was a brittle day, midmorning, and the only people they passed were walking purposefully, tilted into the cold air.

Celia didn't speak until they'd cut into the park at Washington Square, which was empty even of winos. The fountain in front of the great arch was full of leaves, and on its plaque someone had sprayed, "Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! NLF Is Going To Win!" The trees scratched at the gray sky.

"I know that you're the mystery priest, Michael," Celia Zack said finally.

They kept walking. Michael decided to say nothing.

"Don't you want to know how I know?"

"What's the mystery priest, Celia?"

"Skip it, Michael. Come on. You know what I'm talking about. Newark, Albany, Wilmington, Harrisburg. I suspected you right away. When you weren't around the office I figured there'd be a raid within a few days and there always was."

"Smart. You should be with the FBI."

"I have a proposal to make."

Michael said nothing.

"Well, do you want to hear it or not?"

"Look, Celia, if you have something to say to me, say it." There was something about this woman Michael didn't like. Was it an assumption of superiority? Secular condescension?

"Okay. Let me lay it out for you. I have a friend who works as an office manager at the Selective Service Building on Canal Street. That's the central records depot for the local offices all over the city. It's the largest in the country. It's where the One-A forms are transposed onto IBM, the last step before induction notices are sent out. My friend has helped us a few times by lifting files of particular draft-eligibles and destroying them. It's the best way to beat the system. Without duplicates, it takes them a year to track a kid down again, and then the delay gives him the perfect basis for a complaint in court."

"Why does your friend do that for you?"

"I've been cultivating him for a couple of years."

"What's his name?"

She hesitated, but only for a moment. "Malcolm Dodd. I always thought of him as my trump card, but now he tells me they're going to start microfilming files next week."

"Good things don't last forever."

"And then when I put two and two together about you I realized I'd been thinking much too small. Why not take out all the One-A files for the whole city? We could bring the whole system here to a halt. They'd have to start from scratch."

It was a stunning thought. Michael answered carefully, "How would that work exactly?"

"My friend hands over plans and keys to the offices, codes for the alarm systems, keys and combinations to the cabinets, and the patrol schedule of the night guards. To do the job right would take a lot of people. There are a lot of files."

"And that's why you're talking to me? Because I'm the 'mystery priest'?"

"'The Catholic Conspiracy to Save Lives,' right?"

"But there are dozens of people in RESIST who'd do it. Why don't you organize them? Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery."

"I would, but there isn't time. The microfilming will be done in a couple of weeks. An action like this takes discipline obviously, and a group that's been weeded out and tested. A group like yours."

"What do you mean 'cultivating'?" he asked.

"What?"

"You've been 'cultivating' this office manager. How so?"

She shrugged. "I let him fuck me."

Michael looked across the park. No birds, no hippies, no derelicts. "So now we fuck him," he said.

"They probably can't finger him. There are three hundred clerks in that office, and maybe thirty of them could get the keys and plans."

"Filching a file now and then is small potatoes compared to this. Are you sure he'll do it?"

"He loves me."

Michael nodded. "It can make a man pathetic, can't it?"

She looked up sharply. "Yes." She conveyed for an instant only, but effectively, her hatred. And Michael realized what he didn't like about her. He stifled it and said, "I'll have to talk to my people. We'd move on it this weekend."

"How many?"

"Could it handle twenty-five?"

She smiled. Could it ever.

 

Saturday night, Sunday morning. Two o'clock, then three. Canal Street, a canyon of offices and warehouses and loft-factories, was deserted. A careful observer who knew what to look for could see the figures in the shadows. Michael watched the windows of the old stone building from across the street. In cars and vans up the block and down, people sprawled on seats and floors to be invisible. From a casket warehouse behind him people watched. He could feel their eyes.

He watched. He was waiting for the flashlight beam of the GSA guard to pass by the windows of the stairwell between the third floor and the fourth. It had passed already seven times at intervals of roughly twenty minutes, intervals prescribed in the schedule of rounds he'd memorized. Now when it passed, it was go.

There it was.

He turned his jacket collar up against the cold and stepped into the street. Then he was across and at the door. The key worked. Inside he applied another key to a metal panel and opened it. A maze of wires and toggles, it took a moment to make sense of it. He threw the numbered switches in sequence, then closed the panel. The alarm for floors one through five was deactivated.

Through three sets of locked doors, each key worked. He took the stairs two at a time. On the fifth-floor landing he opened another panel and threw a second set of switches. Now the alarm was off everywhere. He looked at his watch. Four minutes. The guard was in the basement.

On the seventh floor, he entered the main file room. He waited for a moment to let his eyes adjust to that less severe darkness. He had to work without a flashlight there because of the large uncurtained windows, but they admitted sufficient light from the street. Finally he saw the bank of cabinets that he wanted and approached it. He had the small key ready. It took him a second to find the hole, but then he inserted the key. It made a noise. And then he was ripping sheets of paper furiously. The noise of his destruction resounded through the room.