“Please, dear Lord, not while I’m on duty”

“Please, dear Lord, not while I’m on duty” is the old policeman’s prayer attached to the plainclothes officers guarding the cathedral during the manhunt for The Jackal. In a scene crowded with concealed weapons, covert surveillance, and anxious checks, the words turn the routine act of praying into a compact expression of the danger of being on duty.

The Prayer and Its Setting

The prayer appears during the cathedral portion of the security operation. The Cardinal Archbishop of Paris officiates, flanked by prelates and clergy, while police have watched the religious staff as they robe. Two riflemen are concealed in the organ loft, where even the Archbishop does not know they are present. Plainclothes officers are dispersed among the worshippers, maintaining their watch instead of kneeling or closing their eyes.

The officers nevertheless pray as fervently as those around them. The narrator identifies their invocation as the old policeman’s prayer and gives its words directly: “Please, dear Lord, not while I'm on duty.” The sentence is both a plea for protection and a dry acknowledgment that danger has arrived at the very moment they are responsible for preventing it.

A Manhunt Compressed into a Gesture

The line gains its force from the contrast between the cathedral’s religious ceremony and the police operation concealed inside it. The officers share the worshippers’ outward setting but cannot surrender their attention to the service: their work requires them to keep watch. Their prayer makes that tension personal without displacing the practical details of the guard.

Those details extend beyond the cathedral. Bystanders who reach inside their jackets are hustled away, even when they are two hundred metres from the entrance; one has only been scratching an armpit, another reaching for a cigarette case. Across the operation, the danger is serious enough to warrant such immediate intervention, but ambiguous gestures can also produce false alarms. The prayer gives voice to the strain of that vigilance from within the officers’ own ranks.

Narrative Function

The invocation is wry rather than triumphant: the officers ask not for a heroic confrontation but that nothing happen while they are on duty. That modest wish sharpens the scene’s suspense, because the elaborate precautions have not made the threat disappear. At the cathedral, as at the ceremony earlier in the day, the expected attack never comes. The prayer therefore belongs to a moment of suspended danger, where the officers’ readiness is real even though the feared violence does not materialize.