Having surrendered to so many temptations already, Rom yielded easily to the urge to return to the scene of the crime.  He left the bartender a five, walked out of O'Lunney's with a good buzz on and headed uptown on Sixth Avenue.
     Fifteen blocks later he approached the litter-strewn stage of his latest triumph, barely feeling the chill breeze.  It was not quite 6 p.m. but had already started to get dark, and the street lights were blinking on.  Columbus' statue had been cleaned of the demonstrators' crap. A few souls hastened, hands in pockets, heads down, across the asphalt patch.  Very few people would be entering the park now.
     Rom paused at the curb and surveyed the scene.  Today he had starred here in one of  the city's severe little one-act plays and come out no worse for the wear.  More dumb luck.  He'd had no idea Lopy would still be taping in that riot, but the footage he'd seen showed nothing to give him away.  Melody had been too petrified to make a connection.  And the getaway had been tense but clean.
     Two policemen now appeared at the subway entrance.  One cast a long glance at Rom. Turning his jacket collar up against the breeze, Rom walked past the cops and up Central Park West.  He stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets and laughed when he felt the mask.
     He walked along the waist-high stone wall that borders the park, taxis speeding along to his left, the homeless staking out benches to his right. He passed the Tavern on the Green, a swanky eatery somehow smuggled just inside the park at 66th Street.  Stretch limos nudged each other, like napping whales, in the vast expanse of the parking lot.  Rom took in the flash of high fashion, the wafting gifts of sharp perfume, the music of money.
     As he approached 72nd Street he noticed the subway entrance across Central Park West and decided to head back down to Penn Station and take a train home.  He'd done enough for one day, and perhaps if he got back to his rooms and started writing, it would help him think.
     He reached the corner and stopped short.  Diagonally across rose the Dakota, like a Gothic urban fortress.  Rom flashed back more than 10 years, to the TV lounge in the seminary.  He had been there a couple weeks — "the cardinal's jumper," some called him — and had been working odd jobs around the campus.  That night he'd sat with a handful of seminarians watching Monday Night Football, not quite ready for the sudden announcement by Howard Cosell that John Lennon had just been murdered.  News reports had showed crowds of mourners clustered around the Dakota.  Again and again came the images of the dark portico where a young man with a gun, a copy of  The Catcher in the Rye and a mental problem killed his idol.  The next day, the papers had been filled with the grim details, and always pictures of the Dakota.
     Now, across the busy traffic, Rom stood and gave the building a long look.  Traffic flew past it, pedestrians walked alongside, and few seemed to give it a glance.  Its grandness seemed inappropriate now, pointless.
     On impulse Rom turned and headed into the park, where he knew Strawberry Fields had been completed and opened five years before. He'd read that Yoko Ono had spearheaded the drive to clean up the little teardrop-shaped piece of Central Park just across from their home and had trees and shrubs from all over the world planted.  In a little plaza, now meekly lit by a few street lamps, a circular mosaic with the single word "Imagine" had been set into the ground.  Rom stood for a long moment looking at it.  Someone had left a few flowers on it, someone else a pink guitar pick.  He sat on a bench nearby and regarded the few travelers through this peaceful plot.  Smells of earth and alcohol and car exhaust came and went.  He heard playful yelling in the park, and not far away the clip-clop of a horse, probably a mounted policeman.
     The breeze picked up a bit, and Rom pulled his jacket collar up tighter and walked eastward through the park, passing a few joggers.  If you were going to run in Manhattan, the park was the place to do it, but not at night, he thought.  Wasn't that asking for it?
 Rom asked himself the same question when he reached the Mall and spied the collection of people still on the wide, bench-lined boulevard that stretched south.  There were some roller skaters, a few homeless and other harmless-looking people, but a dozen tough-looking kids were raising a racket and sparring among themselves.  Rom gave the youths wide berth and continued northward, down past Bethesda Fountain, taking an underpass that housed a score of homeless people, whose shopping carts sat parked against the dirty brick wall.  The place smelled like a toilet and Rom had to hold his breath.  The fountain itself, a collection of sculpted angels,was covered with pigeon shit.
     He strolled onward, through the occasional pool of light thrown by a streetlamp. He noticed the signs nailed to trees that warned ¡Peligro! Veneno de Raton — Danger! Rat poison.  He walked through the Ramble, a network of dimly lit, paved paths in a hilly part of the park, and fended off the hungry stares of the men he found cruising there.  More than once, he spotted two or more of them sporting behind a tree or bush.  How many would get AIDS here tonight, he wondered, for a moment feeling a strange, uncomfortable kinship with them.
     Then he reached Belvedere, a small, handsome castle in the middle of the park, built as a fire watchtower in the 1890s, now a weather station.  He climbed the smooth stone steps to its broad courtyard and looked out across the Great Lawn.  After awhile he descended and continued across the immense field, seeing no stars when he looked heavenward, only the darting lights of aircraft against the milky glow that is the sum of the lights of New York City.  He reached the giant Croton Reservoir and walked around it clockwise, against the flow of joggers, and finally sat on a bench by the handsome stone building that he guessed served as a pumphouse.  The giant Roman-numeral clock, which actually worked, read 7:30.
     Rom took off his Roman collar, stretched and gazed at the lights reflected on the gently rippling waters and listened to the sounds of the city, now fainter, distant, tolerable: sirens, car horns, jets, helicopters, shouts.  He noted the soft, regular footfalls of the spandexed runners as they sped past him on the running track around the reservoir.  How fresh the air smelled here in the park.  Just a few hundred yards away, on the fashionable Upper East Side, garbage cans spilled over, dogs shit in the street and doorways smelled of piss, but here, in this green rectangle in the middle of a concrete island, you could breathe.
     Rom put his hands into his jacket pockets, and he felt his mask in one, his collar in the other.  He knew he had decisions to make.  They were small decisions, for the biggest decision had already been made: He was going to die, sooner rather than later.  Would he die a priest?  In many ways he belonged to the Church.  Hadn't it fed him, educated him?  Hadn't it elevated him, made him a vicar of Christ Himself?   Hadn't he been pulled from the dark waters by one of the Sacred College of Cardinals?   Surely it meant something.  But did it mean everything?
     The chime of a church bell, softened by the dark trees, shimmered over the reservoir.  Saturday night, Rom thought.  Must be Confession.
     The Sacrament of Reconciliation, as the church had been valiantly trying to recast Confession, had been the part of his job that Rom had first loved, then hated, the most.  The first confessions he'd heard had carried the dark thrill of shared secrets, of embarrassed confidence. But after a few years Rom had come to dread Tuesday and Saturday evenings, for they meant three hours of Confession duty in his church.  He was still moved by the sincere repentance of many of the voices that came through the screen — few parishioners had opted for the modern face-to-face version of Confession — but more and more, Rom had come to see that people committed sins like they were using an American Express card.  It mattered little what you bought, as long as you righted the account by the end of the billing cycle.  Sin now, pay later.
     Rom considered his own New Wave of sin.  He'd started doing drugs again.  He'd taken the law into his own hands.  Just today he'd bought condoms, in case the urge struck to get a hooker!  And then there was Cassandra.  His thoughts of her were indisputably unpure, and complicated.  How he wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her neck and her face and her breasts, to make love to her and stay with her forever.  But forever loomed as a short, painful road, one he would never lead her down.
     Rom sighed, stood up and stretched, noting the little pains from the afternoon's riot.  A bump on the head, a pain in his hand where he'd punched the punk in the leather jacket.  Absently he fingered the bruise on his chin again and flexed his knee.  He'd been pretty well manhandled in the last few days.  But he was lucky, he decided, to be alive.  And probably crazy.  No one who's normal dresses up as Zorro and goes after the bad guys.  Weren't the asylums filled with people who thought they were Zorro or Jesus or Napoleon or Superman?  Sure, he was still on the streets, but where would he be taken if he were detained by a policeman?  Probably Bellevue Hospital, if not the city jail on Rikers Island.  Wouldn't that be great?
     Why was he doing this?  Why was he risking his life — what was left of it — for strangers?  Inviting trouble?  Daring everybody to find him, unmask him?  He was no hero.  He was — what?  A gypsy, an Italian.  An orphan.  A lover of peace, of food and good wine. Martini fan, citizen.  Priest.  Casualty.  Perhaps he had more in common with the men in the Ramble than he realized.  Perhaps he was just hastening his own death.  Was his bravery just recklessness?  Was he doing this to help others or was he using the whole world as a sword to fall upon?  And how long could it last?
     Rom stepped over to the fence and gazed across the reservoir, drinking in the sounds and smells of the night.  Everything in the world was there for a purpose; this he sensed from a feeling beyond knowledge, beyond Catholicism, beyond himself.  He put his hands in his pockets again and felt the mask in one, the collar in the other.
     Then he heard the scream.