The man was masked as ever but I knew when I saw him that it was he who had been the Union officer who had sung that amazing duet with the prima donna at the opera house and brought the audience to tears. The voice was the same, but this was the first time I had ever heard it.

'Where is Pierre?' he asked.

'He is in the coach still,' she replied. 'I asked him to give us a few moments. He will come shortly.'

My heart leapt. If the boy was in the coach there was a good chance that Darius, hunting somewhere in the park, would not find him.

'What do you want of me?' she asked the Phantom.

'All my life I have been rejected and rebuffed, treated with cruelty and mockery. Why ... you know too well. Just once, all those years ago, I thought for one fleeting hour that I might have found love. Something bigger and warmer than the endless bitterness of existence ...'

'Stop, Erik. It could not be, it cannot be. Once I thought you were a real ghost, my invisible Angel of Music. Later I learned the truth, that you were a man in every sense. Then I came to fear you, your power, your sometimes savage anger, your genius. But even with the fear was a compulsive fascination like a rabbit before the cobra.

'That last evening, in the darkness by the lake far beneath the Opera I was so afraid I thought I would die of fear. I was half-swooning when what happened ... happened. When you spared me and Raoul and vanished again into the shadows, I believed I would never see you again. Then I understood better all you had been through and felt only compa.s.sion and tenderness for my fearsome outcast.

'But love, true love, anything to match that pa.s.sion you felt for me ... this I could not feel. Better you should have hated me.'

'Never hate, Christine. Only love. I loved you then and ever since and always will. But now I accept. The wound is cauterized at last. There is another love. My son. Our son. What will you tell him of me?'

'That he has a friend, a true and dear friend, here in America. In six years I will tell him the truth. That you are his real father. And he will choose. If he can accept this, that Raoul has been everything for him that a father can be, and done everything for him that a father can do, and yet is not his real parent - then he will come to you and with my blessing.'

I found myself rooted behind the hedge, stunned by what I had heard. Suddenly everything that had drifted by me un.o.bserved and not understood became too clear. The letter from Paris that had told this strange hermit of a man that he had a son alive, the secret plan to bring mother and child to New York, the tryst to see them both, and most terrible of all the crazed hatred of Darius against the boy who would now displace him as the heir of the multimillionaire.

Darius ... I suddenly recalled that he too was somewhere among the shadows and was about to throw myself forward with the too-long-delayed warning. Then I heard the approaching feet of the others to my right. At this point the sun rose, flooding the glade with a pink light, turning to rose the dusting of snow that had fallen in the night. Then three figures came into view.

From separate paths to my right the vicomte and the priest appeared. Both stopped in their tracks when they saw the man in the sweeping cape, the wide-brimmed hat and the mask that always covered his face, talking to Mme de Chagny. I heard the vicomte whisper: 'Le Phantome.' To my left the boy Pierre came running. Even as he did so, there was a low click close to me. I turned.

Between two large bushes, not ten yards away, almost invisible among the remaining deep shadows, was the crouching figure of a man. He was all in black but I caught a glimpse of a bone-white face and of something in his right hand with a long barrel. I drew in air and opened my mouth to shout a warning but it was too late. What happened next was so fast that I have to slow the action down to describe it to you.

The boy Pierre called to his mother, 'Mama, can we go home now?' She turned towards him with her brilliant smile, opened her arms and said, 'Oui, cheri.' He began to run. The figure in the bushes rose, extended his arm and followed the running boy with what turned out to be a Navy Colt. That was when I shouted, but my cry was drowned by a much louder noise.

The boy reached his mother and pa.s.sed into her embrace. But to avoid being knocked off her feet by his weight, she swept him into her arms and turned, as a parent will do. My shout of warning and the crash of the Colt came together. I saw the lovely young woman shudder as if she had been punched in the back, which in fact she had for, in turning, she had stopped the bullet intended for her son.

The man in the mask whirled towards the gunshot, saw the figure amid the bushes, pulled something from beneath his cloak, extended his arm and fired. I heard the crack of the tiny Derringer with its single bullet, but one was enough. Ten yards from me the a.s.sa.s.sin threw both hands to his face. When he fell he crashed out of the bushes onto the snow and lay face upwards in the frosty dawn, a single hole showing black in the centre of his forehead.

I was rooted to my spot behind the hedge. I could not move. I thank Providence there was nothing I could do anyway. What I could have done earlier, I was too late to do now, for I had seen and heard so much and understood so little.

At the second gunshot the boy, still uncomprehending, released his mother who sank to her knees. There was a red stain already spreading on her back. The soft leaden slug had not penetrated her to hit the son in her arms, but had remained inside her. The vicomte gave a cry of 'Christine' and ran forward to take her in his arms. She leaned back in his embrace, looked up at him and smiled.

Father Kilfoyle was on his knees in the snow beside her. He ripped off the broad sash around his waist, kissed both ends of it and draped it around his neck. He was praying rapidly and urgently, tears streaming down his rugged Irish face. The man in the mask dropped his small pistol in the snow and stood like a statue, head bowed. His shoulders heaved silently as he wept.

The boy Pierre alone seemed at first unable to take in what had happened. One second his mother was embracing him, the next she was dying in front of his eyes. The first time he called 'Mama' it was like a question. The second and third time, like a piteous cry. Then, as if seeking explanation, he turned to the vicomte. 'Papa?' he asked.

Christine de Chagny opened her eyes and her gaze found Pierre. She spoke for the last time, quite clearly, before that divine voice was silenced for ever. She said, 'Pierre, this is not really Papa. He has brought you up as his own, but your true father is there.' She nodded towards the bowed figure in the mask. 'I am sorry, my darling.'

Then she died. I will not make a big production out of it. She just died. Her eyes closed, the last breath rattled out of her and her head tilted sideways onto the chest of her husband. There was complete silence for several seconds, which seemed like an age. The boy looked from one man to the other. Then he asked of the vicomte once more, 'Papa?'

Now, over the past few days I had come to think of the French aristocrat as a kind and decent man but somewhat ineffectual, compared, say, to the dynamic priest. But now something seemed to come into him.

The body of his dead wife lay cradled in the crook of his left arm. With his right hand he sought one of hers and slowly removed from it a golden ring. I recalled the closing scene at the opera, when the soldier with the shattered face had given her back that very ring as a sign that he accepted their love could never be. The French vicomte took the ring from her finger and pressed it into the palm of his devastated stepson.

A yard away Father Kilfoyle remained on his knees. He had given the diva final absolution before death and, his duty done, he prayed for her immortal soul.

Vicomte de Chagny scooped his dead wife up in his arms and rose to his feet. Then the man who had brought up another's son as his own spoke in his halting English.

'It is true, Pierre. Mama was right. I have done everything for you that I could, but I was never your natural father. The ring belongs to him, who is your father in G.o.d's eyes. Give it back to him. He loved her too, and in a way I never could.

'I am going to take the only woman I ever loved back to Paris, to lie in the soil of France. Today, here, this hour, you have ceased to be a boy and become a man. Now you must make your own choice.'

He stood there, his wife in his arms, waiting for an answer. Pierre turned and stared long at the figure of the man identified as his blood father.

The man I had come to call simply the Phantom of Manhattan stood alone with his head bowed, the very distance that separated him from the others seeming to represent the distance to which the human race had pushed him. The hermit, the eternal outsider who had once thought that he had some chance of acceptance into human joys and had been rebuffed. Now every line of his body told me he had once lost everything he ever cared for and was going to lose it all again.

There was silence for several seconds as the boy stared across the clearing. In front of me was what the French call a tableau vivant. tableau vivant. Six figures, two of them dead and four in pain. Six figures, two of them dead and four in pain.

The French vicomte was on one knee cradling the torso of his dead wife. He had laid his cheek on the top of her head which lolled against his chest, stroking the dark hair as if to comfort her.

The Phantom stood motionless, head still bowed, utterly defeated. Darius lay a few feet from me, open-eyed, staring up at a winter sky he could no longer see. The boy stood next to his stepfather, everything he had ever believed in and held to be the immutable order now torn to pieces in violence and bewilderment.

The priest was still on his knees, face turned upwards, eyes closed, but I noticed the big hard hands clutching his metal cross and the lips moving in silent prayer. Later, still consumed by my own inability to explain what happened next, I visited him at his home in the slums of the Lower East Side. What he told me I still do not really understand, but I relate it to you.

He said that in that noiseless clearing he could hear silent screams. He could hear the keening grief of the quiet Frenchman a few feet away. He could hear the bewildered pain of the boy whom he had tutored for six years. But over all this, he said, he could hear something else. There was in that clearing a lost soul, crying in agony like Coleridge's wandering albatross, planing alone through a sky of pain above an ocean of despair. He was praying that this lost soul might find safe haven in the love of G.o.d again. He was praying for a miracle which could not possibly happen. Look, I was a brash Jewish kid from the Bronx. What did I know of lost souls, redemption and miracles? I can only tell you what I saw.

Pierre slowly walked across the clearing towards him. He lifted a hand and removed the wide-brimmed hat. I thought the man in the mask uttered a low whimper. For the skull was bald, save for a few tufts of spa.r.s.e hair, and the skin was blotched with livid scars and ribbed like molten wax. Without a word the boy eased the mask away from the face.

Now I have seen the bodies on the slabs at the Bellevue, some of them many days in the Hudson river; I have seen men killed on the fields of Europe. But I have never seen a face like the one exposed behind the mask. Only a part of the lower jaw on one side, and the eyes from which tears flowed down the ravaged cheeks seemed human in a visage otherwise so disfigured as to remain hardly human. I could at last understand why he wore his mask, and hid himself from mankind and all our society. Yet here he stood, exposed and humiliated in front of us all, and at the hand of a boy who was his own son.

Pierre stared up at the terrible face without visible shock or revulsion for a long time. Then he dropped the mask from his right hand. He took the left hand of his father and placed the golden ring upon the third finger.

Then he reached up with both hands, embraced the weeping man and said quite clearly, 'I want to stay here with you, Father.'

That's about it, young people. Within hours the story of the a.s.sa.s.sination of the diva broke over New York. It was put down to a crazed fanatic, himself shot down at the scene of his infamy. It was a version that suited the Mayor and the city authorities. As for me, well, it was the one story in my whole career I never wrote up even though I would have been fired if that were known. Too late to write it now.

EPILOGUE.

THE BODY OF CHRISTINE DE CHAGNY WAS LAID TO rest beside that of her father in the churchyard of a small village in Brittany from which they both came.

The vicomte, that good and kindly man, retired to his Normandy estates. He never married again and kept a picture of his much-loved wife beside him at all times. He died of natural causes in the spring of 1940 and never lived to see the invasion of his native land.

Father Joe Kilfoyle stayed on and settled in New York where he founded a refuge and school for the dest.i.tute, abused and unwanted children of the Lower East Side. He refused all preferment in the Church, and remained simply Father Joe to generations of underprivileged kids. Throughout, his homes and schools remained remarkably well endowed but he never revealed where the funds came from. He died, full of years, in the mid-1950s. For his last three years he was confined to a home for old priests in a small town on the coast of Long Island where the nuns who looked after him reported that he would sit on the open deck, wrapped in a blanket, staring eastwards across the sea and dreaming of a farm near Mullingar.

Oscar Hammerstein later lost control of the Manhattan Opera to the Met, which drove it out of business. His grandson, Oscar II, collaborated with Richard Rodgers to write musicals in the 1940s and 1950s.

Pierre de Chagny completed his schooling in New York, graduated from an Ivy League university and joined his father at the head of the enormous family corporation. During the First World War both men changed the family name from Muhlheim to another, still widely known and respected in America to this day.

The corporation became famous for its philanthropy across a wide range of social issues, founded a major inst.i.tution for the correction of disfigurement and created many charitable foundations.

The father retired in the early Twenties to a secluded property in Connecticut where he lived out his days with books, paintings and his beloved music. He was attended by two veterans, each cruelly disfigured while fighting in the trenches, and after that day in Battery Park never wore his mask again.

The son, Pierre, married once and died of old age in the year the first American landed on the moon. His four children live on.

THE END.