The kids being able to take care of themselves felt like Maeve had done her job. Like she had tied up all the loose ends and was now ready to go.

I wiped my tears on the sleeve of my robe as Chrissy hugged me hard and gave me a butterfly kiss by fluttering her eyelashes on my neck.

A deep breath helped me pull myself together. If Maeve saw me cry in front of them, she’d kick my ass.

And so, I felt a joyful smile invade my face when I looked at them again. My kids really were angels. They were completely unreal. I nodded at Julia and Brian. Had anyone, let alone a couple of kids, risen to a horrible occasion with such selflessness? I gritted my teeth to kill another wave of sorrow; then I cleared my throat.

“I know it’s not Sunday,” I yelled with enthusiasm, “but who needs a Sunday breakfast as much as me?”

The cries of “We do” and “Me” rang off the walls as I slapped two cast-iron frying pans up on the stove.

Seamus arrived in the kitchen as I was dispensing my bacon, egg, potato, and green onion hash to my guys.

“Ock. Faith and begora,” he said, glaring wide-eyed at the costumed kids. “Halloween already?”

“NO!” the kids cried, giggling at their grandfather.

Mary Catherine came in a minute later, a quizzical look on her face. I handed her a plate.

“I warned you we were nuts,” I said, smiling.

For a few glorious seconds, I just stood at the stove, staring out at my family, listening to them eat and laugh. My bliss lasted until I spotted my cell phone and keys on the counter next to the coffee machine.

Damn world, I thought. I wished it would just lay off already.

I thought of the hostages and how the clock was ticking against them. It was the hostage-takers themselves that finally got me to uproot myself and head for the shower. I smiled bitterly as I felt the heavy, black resentment in me shift away from myself and toward them like the cannon of a tank. Jack was the one responsible for taking me away from my loved ones, I realized.

You don’t know who you’re messing with, buddy, I mentally e-mailed him. You might think you do. But you have no idea.

THE BENNETTS STOPPED some NYC traffic again when we did our morning dash for the front doors of Holy Name half an hour later. A brunette model crawling out of a taxi in a sequined black dress, no doubt worn the night before, stopped at the curb, put her hand to her décolletage, and actually said, “Ohhhh!” at the cuteness of my family pageant. Even a passing metrosexual in a GQ camel-hair overcoat couldn’t help gaping open-mouthed at my crew as he exchanged his iPod earpiece for his ringing cell.

And far better than both of those reactions was the one I got from none other than Sister Sheilah.

“God bless you, Mr. Bennett,” she called with a smile, an actual smile, as she unhooked the door.

I was feeling pretty warm despite the cold when I got back into my van. I decided to sit for a minute. I lifted the Times I’d picked up from my doorstep to look at it for the first time.

The spark of holiday joy fizzled instantly in my chest when I looked at a picture of myself under the first lady caroline hopkins ’s funeral hijacked headline. “We Don’t Know Anything” was the cheerful caption under my picture. I looked at the byline of the hatchet job.

Cathy Calvin.

Who else?

I shook my head, and I felt my stomach filling with acid. She’d hamstrung me but good. Even the picture was bad. There was a pensive, searching expression to my face that could easily be misinterpreted as utter confusion. They must have snapped it when I was looking for the cathedral caretaker.

Thanks for my fifteen minutes of fame, Calvin, I thought. You really shouldn’t have. I couldn’t wait to see Commander Will Matthews. It was going to be such fun receiving the commendation for the top-notch PR job I had done with the Times.

And on that note-this case just kept getting better and better, didn’t it?-I violently hurled the paper over the seat and downshifted into drive.

Boy, oh, boy, was I glad to be in the white-hot center of this mess.

IT WAS PRECISELY eight twenty-nine when the Neat Man placed his coffee on the frosted ledge of the pay phone kiosk on the corner of 51st and Madison.

Though he’d gotten the cup from one of those Porta-Potty-like corner carts, he was heartened by its blistering temperature as he took a scalding sip.

Between the ash-colored buildings down 51st, the gray morning sky looked like a giant shard of dirty glass. The dull light did very little to illuminate the dark arched windows of St. Pat’s, kitty-corner across the barricaded street.

The Neat Man smiled for a moment, savoring the misery, the too hot, too horrible coffee, the biting cold on his face, the ear-drilling clatter of the police generators. As if on cue, a bum stirred from a rag-and-bag pile beneath a sidewalk shed halfway down the block and yawned before loudly air-blowing his nose, one nostril at a time, into the gutter.

Ah! Morning, New York-style, the Neat Man thought as he picked up the pay phone.

Learning all this raw, in-your-face grittiness was going to be a jolt, he thought. But maybe if he reached way down deep into his soon-to-be seven-figure bank account, he might have a shot of finding a way.

“What’s up?” a voice said.

“Same old, same old, Jack, my man,” the Neat Man said cheerily. “You see the new trailer out front? Hostage Rescue is in the house.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Jack said, pumped. “Everyone’s sticking right to the script.”

“How are the guests? Everyone have a pleasant night?”

“The rich really aren’t like you and me,” Jack said. “They’re a trillion times softer. The truth, a kindergarten class would be more trouble.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” the Neat Man said.

“That you did,” Jack said. “That you did. Keep your eyes open out there. Stick to the plan.”

The line went dead. The Neat Man hung up the phone and smiled as a couple of uniformed cops walked by. Despair, gray as the dawn, was in their bag-eyed faces.

When he closed his own eyes a vision of a huge, sun-washed bathroom appeared before him, acres of gleaming marble, steam rising off a bubbling Jacuzzi, a blinding white pyramid of meticulously folded towels beneath a window filled with a blue-green sea.

He lifted his lava-temperature coffee again as he turned toward the church. There were pigeons in the nickeled light, fluttering about the sharp spires. His stomach churned as he remembered the pigeons his father used to fly off the roof of their Brooklyn tenement.

If he never laid eyes on another flying rat, the Neat Man thought, or his low-class excuse for a father, for that matter, he would die a very happy man.

The Neat Man blinked away his rare lapse into memory and moved the coffee cup up and down and side to side over the church like a priest conferring a benediction.

“For the gifts which I am about to receive,” the Neat Man said, “may the Lord make me truly thankful.”