Prince of Peace (64 page)

"Freeze!" a man cried.

Lights blinked on.

In quick succession, two burly men hit him, one with his fist just at the kidneys, and another with a vicious chop between his shoulder and his neck. It dropped Michael to his knees, but immediately he was hauled up. His hands were cuffed behind him. And an agent hooked him under the chin and lifted him with the muzzle of a shotgun.

"Where the fuck are the others?" the agent demanded.

Michael said nothing.

Agents crashed into the room behind them. A dozen others already present were poised with their weapons behind desks and cabinets, ready to shoot. There were shotguns everywhere.

"Where the fuck are the others?" A note of hysteria in the man's voice surprised Michael. He himself felt remarkably calm. Everything was going as he expected, although the weapons surprised him. The shotguns. Was he Dillinger? Didn't they know they didn't need weapons?

The agent pressed the gun barrel into Michael's gullet, against his Roman collar. Michael said, "I'm alone."

The agent eased the pressure with the gun. "What?"

"I'm alone," Michael repeated.

A supervisor, one of those who'd been waiting in the casket warehouse, came in. Altogether he had forty-two men in the operation that night, and he didn't like what he saw. He'd pulled people off six squads for this raid, the biggest in New York since the Joe Columbo takedown, and he was going to have to show for it. "Where the fuck are the others?" he bellowed. It was the exact phrase Hoover would use—though without "fuck"—in the morning. "There were going to be twenty-five. Where the fuck are they?" He glared at the agents.

One said, "He was the only one who came in from the street." Another said, "No one came up the back stairs or the freight elevator. No one came in from the alley." The other agents began to holster their guns and to check their watches.

"He says he's alone," one offered.

The supervisor let his eyes fall to the papers that Michael had ripped and strewn. He saw at once that the pages were blank.

The agents had been cued to wait until the perpetrators had actually destroyed documents before arresting them. The charge would be destruction of government property. But what if the fucker had brought his own paper in? What in hell was going on here? If he hadn't actually destroyed draft files, the charge wouldn't even be B&E since he'd come in with keys. All this trouble for illegal entry? Since the federal government did not own the land on which the building sat, it wouldn't even be crime on a government reservation. It would be a local charge, tried in local courts, a step above trespassing! All this trouble for one fucking son of a bitch? For a month's probation? Heads would roll! His head would roll! If the newspapers got it, he'd be sent to Dubuque.

The supervisor yelled, "Out! Everyone out! Check the building again! Every corridor, closet and toilet! Find them if they're here! Goddamnit, find them!"

When the other agents had left, he said to the two who had Michael, "Uncuff him." They did so. "Wait outside." They left too.

Then Michael was alone with the supervisor in the brightly lit cavernous room. They stared at each other for a long time, then the FBI man bent and picked up one of the torn blank pages. At the top were printed the words "The Catholic Relief Service, 350 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y." The agent smiled. "Very clever, Father."

"I'm glad you appreciate it."

"I'm the only one who will." The agent gathered the papers, a third of a ream perhaps, and carefully stuffed them inside his coat. Then he fastidiously pulled on his leather gloves. He opened several file cabinet drawers, then withdrew a file folder from one of them. It was about two inches thick. He offered it to Michael. "I think you'll find this material more interesting, Father."

Michael did not answer him, nor did he take it.

The supervisor nodded. "That would have been too easy, wouldn't it? I understand your purposes, Father. Frankly, you're a little naive if you think anyone's going to believe your version of events here. Now I'll have to ask you to understand my purposes."

Suddenly his right fist shot into Michael's abdomen. Michael doubled over, clutching himself. Before he could stop him, the agent had opened Michael's hands and forced the folder between them. Pages fell to the floor. The FBI man brought both his fists down on Michael's neck. As Michael went down, he kicked him in the groin. Michael fell, hands open, on the scattered Selective Service forms. Fingerprints. Not many, but enough.

The supervisor picked up a sheaf of papers and carefully ripped them in two. His hands were perfectly steady. No hysteria or threat of it in this man. He dropped the pages, then retrieved another sheaf and ripped those. He let them fall like leaves. He knocked Michael aside, then picked up the pages on which his hands had rested. He ripped those and let them fall. Destruction of government property. Not much, but enough.

When Michael, gasping and still clutching himself, looked up, the FBI man said calmly, "Sorry, Father. It's all in the job."

 

The next morning the
New York Times
had the story on the front page of its late edition. "Priest Arrested by FBI in Draft Office," the headline read. And the subhead: "Priest Charges Entrapment."

The second paragraph of the story read, "A package delivered to the
New York Times
early this morning contained a letter describing the one-man draftboard raid and the reasons for it. The letter was signed, 'Father Michael Maguire,' although its source has not been verified. The package also contained a set of wax impressions of keys purported to fit doors and cabinets in the Canal Street Selective Service Building and which the letter claims were supplied to Father Maguire by an FBI agent provocateur. The package also contained a tape recording of a conversation between a woman identified as Celia Zack, an antiwar activist, and a man identified as Father Maguire. In the conversation, which was apparently recorded without the woman's knowledge, she does raise the subject of the raid on the draftboard that took place last night. She can be heard describing keys and building diagrams that she says were supplied by a Selective Service employee named Malcolm Dodd and that were apparently being handed over to Father Maguire. The woman also details the patrol schedule of the building guards. If the tape is authentic and if Miss Zack does in fact work for the FBI as the letter asserts, then there may be some basis for Father Maguire's claim. According to
New York Times's
legal sources entrapment occurs when a criminal act takes place that could not otherwise have taken place without the material assistance of government agents.
New York Times's
sources maintain that it is illegal for law enforcement officers to actively further the commission of a crime even for the purpose of gaining evidence against a suspect. The FBI had refused comment on Father Maguire's charges as of this writing, although the
New York Times
was able to learn that no one named Malcolm Dodd is employed at the Selective Service office on Canal Street. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney denied that Miss Zack works for the government and that there was entrapment in this case. The spokesman said, 'The accused can make his case, whatever it is, to the judge and jury.'"

The final paragraph of the news story was a quotation from what it doggedly called "the letter alleged to have been written by Father Maguire." Looking at it now, I find it moving, as I did then, although also somewhat ingenuous. When he wanted to the son of a bitch could croon the
Ave Maria,
warble and all.

"Though as a Catholic priest and the son of a New York City policeman who died in the line of duty I have an inbred respect, even reverence, for the law, I decided to allow myself to be entrapped in this way to expose the illegal and immoral methods used by a desperate government against its own people to keep them from protesting the infinitely more illegal and immoral war it continues to wage against the Vietnamese people. In their name and in God's name and in America's, we say, 'End this evil war before it destroys us all!'"

C
AROLYN
and I were sitting on a stone bench in the Biblical Garden, a small, tidy plot nestled against the Cathedral Choir and containing with floral fundamentalism only plants mentioned in the Bible: fig trees, mustard plants, lilies, papyrus and the star-of-Bethlehem. Trellised between the buttresses of the cathedral were ten cedars of Lebanon, evergreens that one never sees in the Holy Land now. They were overharvested eons ago, and I was thinking for the first time since leaving Israel of the war in Beirut, the overharvesting of blood.

Another tree caught my eye, a small redbud, the Judas tree. I touched Carolyn's sleeve. "They say that tree descends from the one on which Judas hanged himself. Its flowers are crimson because it blushes with shame."

Carolyn did not speak. I left my hand resting on her sleeve. I remembered sitting self-consciously in a garden like that with Michael at the Cloisters above Inwood. I remembered our laughing hysterically because Jesus cast demons into some poor bastard's swine.

I remembered our sitting on that hill overlooking the river and the bridge.

Carolyn and I had bought our house years later because it overlooked the other river, the other bridge. "Do you remember," I asked quietly, "how we used to have supper on our balcony overlooking the river and the city?"

She nodded. The bright sun and its heat swaddled us.

She took my hand.

"I used to think on those evenings that we would live forever."

"I thought Michael would," she said simply.

Four fruit trees grew in the center of the garden. I could not read the small sign in front of them. Apple trees? Apricot? But of course it was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. From one of those Adam plucked fruit and therefore death came into the world.

A large pigeon pecked at gravel near us. What a miserly life! I thought. A few desperate years, odd grains, bread crumbs, the discards of squirrels, then a solitary grotto under shrubs somewhere and a pigeon's heart attack. And is it different for us? The fucking outrage of it! It made me want to kick that bird, kick God.

Michael died of a heart attack. He was just fifty, as I was at that point. He'd been in perfect health, Molly told me, a jogger. He'd quit smoking as a wedding gift to Carolyn.

I knew nothing of the last years of his life, how he earned a living, how he was changed by federal prison, how he was as a father, whether he took up golf, whether he could fix the gutters himself or had, like me, to hire people.

"Where do you live?" I asked.

"In Brooklyn."

"Our house?"

"Yes."

"Good." Could I possibly have meant that? Michael had usurped me utterly. I must have known they were living there. Shouldn't I have been surprised? Had I been a ghost to him around that house? I hoped so suddenly. I hoped I had haunted him. I hoped when the wind blew doors shut in the middle of the night he had thought it was me coming after him. "Did the two of you have supper on the balcony?"

"Not alone, the way you and I did. It's different when the children are older."

"Molly looks wonderful, Carolyn. She fills me with pride."

Carolyn smiled, drew back from her grief.

"And I met your handsome son. You have a Vietnamese daughter. You've been busy." I covered her hand, cupped it between my two. "And you kept painting."

She nodded, but absently. She had no real capacity for talk about such things, as if her painting, her house, her children even, could have sustained her then. I saw that it would have been wrong for me to steer away from Michael. Memory alone assuages loss, and that was what I was there to help with. It shocked me to realize that I was the one person who could help her navigate that weather. I was there to put heart into that woman. Yet what heart had I? And if I could give her, finally, nothing, wouldn't it be because she had long since taken from me all I had?

We sat in the stillness of the garden. I saw the shadow of the great cathedral creeping toward us, the stillness and the shadow of death.

Finally she said, "Frank, thank you for coming."

"No, Carolyn. I'm the one to thank you. How could I ever have not been here?" I must have shown her more of my feelings than I intended, because all at once she took me in her arms and pressed my face to her breast.
She
consoled
me!

After a time I pulled away from her. "Carolyn," I said somewhat formally, stifling my emotion, "I want to help you, to be your friend."

"Oh, Frank, I need you! I went to pieces and sent Molly for you, as if you lived in Philadelphia. It was crazy." She shook her head. "What made me wild was when they said we couldn't bury him in sacred ground. It made me crazy when they used that word about him."

"Excommunicated?"

She nodded. "As if he were Hitler or someone. And I didn't know what to do. Someone suggested Saint John's and Dean Evans here has been wonderful..." She looked up at the soaring cathedral, the buttresses, the windows, the great bulk of stone. "...but it's not..." She didn't finish.

"Catholic."

"I didn't think it would bother me, but it does. I can't put his ashes in a wall, a safe-deposit box. I have to commit him to the earth! I have to bury him the way he buried people! This isn't where he belongs, Frank. It's a Protestant church. We can't leave Michael here."

"We could try to think about it in a new way, Caro. So much has changed. Catholics and Episcopalians are so much alike now..."

"Oh, but Frank..." Her eyes glistened. "...none of that matters. This isn't Michael's place."

I'd had the same reaction at first, but I'd put it aside. Now I felt the depth of her pain, her shock. "We're still Catholics, aren't we?" I said it smiling, hoping to bring out the irony—we'd thought ourselves so worldly, but we were just mackerel snappers after all—so we could savor it together.

But her eyes overflowed. I was not prepared for that show of desolation. She had displaced her great distress, loading it on that detail of obsolete ecclesiology. It didn't matter to the dead where they were buried, and did God care if it was Saint John's and not Saint Patrick's? But God was not sitting by me, shattered. What did God know of exile or excommunication or the loss of home?