The Piranhas [antikvár]

THE FUNERAL It was pissing rain at eleven o'clock in the morning in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral. The police had blocked all traffic down Fifth Avenue from 54th Street to 49th Street except buses and they were only in a single line close to the sidewalk near Rockefeller Center across from the Cathedral. The street itself was crowded with blackened window stretchouts. The sidewalk and the steps leading up to the entrance of the Cathedral were jammed with television cameras, reporters and the morbid curious crowd that always managed to show up for death and destruction. Inside the Cathedral all the pews were filled with black-dressed mourners. Some very expensively dressed and others in threadbare black but each looked down toward the altar to the front of the ornate gold coffin with a simple wreath of flowers at the foot. There was an expectant air as they waited to hear the mass that would be given by Cardinal Fitzsimmons. They wanted to hear what he had to say, because he had always hated him. I was seated in the first seat off the aisle reserved only for relatives of the deceased. I looked over at the open coffin. My uncle looked fit and relaxed. Better, actually, than he usually did in life. Even as a child I realized that he was taut and always thinking. But most of all, I could always see the Angel of Death peering over his left shoulder, who would disappear the moment my uncle would talk to me. There were five other members of the family in the pew with me. My aunt, Rosa, the sister of my uncle and my father who had been his brother. Then there were Rosa's married daughters and their husbands. I had trouble remembering their names because over the many years we had rarely seen each other. I think their names were Cristina and her husband,