Step On A Crack

Chapter 35

TEN MINUTES LATER, we were outside in the frosty air, staring up at the magnificent church. As we stepped around the side of one of the dump trucks, Oakley spoke into his hands-free radio and ordered his snipers to get an angle on the irreplaceable windows of the Lady Chapel.

The gray light cast shadows into the church’s second-story windows and its arched entryway. The front of the cathedral resembled a large face, I thought: wide, dark eyes and a very large mouth, gaping open as if in outrage and shock.

I stopped dead still and almost went for my Glock again when the bells started sounding. I thought it was another move by the hijackers-until I glanced at my watch and saw that it was twelve.

The bells, set on some timer no doubt, were sounding out the Angelus, reminding the bustling heathens of Midtown to pray for some specific devotion I couldn’t remember. If failing to induce a communal saying of the Rosary, the tolling of the bells at least silenced the crowd of cops and press and onlookers.

Each long peal rang out loudly and forebodingly off the surrounding skyscrapers’ stone and aluminum and glass.

I scanned the crowd as an idea occurred to me.

I spotted the caretaker, Nardy, talking to a young woman across the 50th Street barricade.

“Mr. Nardy, where are the bells located?” I said as I jogged up to him, interrupting his conversation with the woman.

He stared at me before answering. “In the north spire,” he said with a grimace.

I looked at the ornate thirty-story cone of stone. About a hundred feet up, I noticed green slats that seemed like faded copper shutters.

“Is there access to the bells from inside?” I asked Nardy.

The caretaker nodded. “There’s an old winding set of wooden maintenance stairs from a time when the bells were rung by hand.”

It seemed risky, but if we could get up there somehow-maybe we could quietly pry loose some of the copper slats and get in.

“Can the inside of the north spire be seen from down in the church?” I asked.

“Why?” asked the woman Nardy had been talking to. “Do you plan to blow it up, too? Detective…?”