The Guns of Heaven by Pete Hamill

Author:Pete Hamill [Hamill, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0843955953
Publisher: Dorchester Publishing Co.
Published: 2006-08-31T21:00:00+00:00

16

The Plaza is the dowager who won’t die. She was born in 1906 at a cost of twelve million dollars, on the site of the original Plaza Hotel, which cost three million when it was built on the site of an old skating rink. The architect was a man named Henry J. Hardenbaugh, who tried to make the new Plaza into a French Renaissance chateau, the first such chateau ever to climb eighteen stories into the New York sky. Moving through its marble halls, covering events in the ballrooms, climbing to upper floors in the old hydraulic lifts, investigating its wine cellars and what they used to call the wireless room, walking the mosaic floors in the lobby, or sipping whiskey in the Palm Court, I always felt like a character written by Edith Wharton or Henry James. But on this chilly March afternoon, looking for the southern white man who had carried Plaza stationery to a violent appointment at McDaid s bar in Queens, I felt more like a character out of Sean O’Casey, with some rewriting by Mario Puzo. The shadow of the gunman was upon the land.

I went into the bar off the Oak Room. It was crowded and noisy. Frank Geraghty was behind the stick and smiled when I came in. We grew up in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn and had seen each other in a lot of saloons in the years since we stopped being young. He had another bartender helping with the afternoon crowd.

“A beer, and some real peanuts, Frank,” I said.

He grinned. “Salty. Not dry roasted.”

“The real stuff.”

He turned his broad back to me, walked down the crowded bar, opened a Heineken, and came back with the beer and a silver bowl of real honest-to-Jesus salty peanuts. I told him I needed information.

“About a guest?” he said, bending in close.

“Yeah. A Southerner. I think he was staying here maybe as late as yesterday. Tall, wiry, bony face. He was driving a black Buick Regal. I don’t have anything else on him, except that he was outside McDaid s bar in Queens last night when it blew up.”

Frank’s face darkened. He looked at the crowd at the bar, then back at me.

“The hotel’s full, Sam. That’s more than two thousand people here. Some of them are sleeping in closets.”

“Do you have a list of events back there? Meetings, conventions, that kind of thing?”

He came back with a mimeographed sheet with a Plaza logo, and while he served other customers, I ran down the list. Society of Magazine Publishers. International Shoe Manufacturers’ Guild. Sansui Ltd. of Tokyo. The National Petroleum Suppliers. I took out a pen and circled one group. The Church of Christ the Leader. CCL. The initials doodled on that sheet of stationery.

“Try this group,” I said. “The house dick would know what floor they’re on. Maybe a maid—”

Frank whispered: “What’s this about, Sam?”

“Ireland,” I said.

“Really?”

He murmured something to the other bartender and went out a small back door. A man wearing

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