Kitabı oku: «The City of Strangers»
MICHAEL RUSSELL
The City of Strangers
For
Anya, Seren, Finn, Coinneach and Marta
And the Silver Meteor
To the Pennsylvania Station
Send but a song oversea for us,
Heart of their hearts who are free,
Heart of their singer to be for us
More than our singing can be.
‘To Walt Whitman in America’
Algernon Charles Swinburne
RPACN FEBSA HOGYH VTNOY IKSAO RYHOI VAUAR OAOIR OKWGQ MWAYA IERIL IETTM NNSTN ATAUA OIETH ARGTR YLHRA NASRI FOOAA AIALL TINYN LMENV NOOYG EEHOS OAOET GECTN: List of spies noted. Am forwarding it to Intelligence Director for his information. Are you able to carry out annihilation of all spies?
From Decoding the IRA
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Uptown
1. Pallas Strand
2. Fulton Market
3. Kilranelagh
4. Corbawn Lane
5. Inns Quay
6. West Thirty-Sixth Street
7. The Yankee Clipper
8. Fifty-Second Street
9. Centre Street
10. Pennsylvania Six-Five-Thousand
11. Fifth Avenue
12. The Hampshire House
Part Two: Upstate
13. Locust Valley
14. Central Park
15. Flushing Meadows
16. A Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street
17. The Waldorf-Astoria
18. Route Eleven
19. Mexico Bay
20. The Empire State
21. A Hundred and Sixteenth Street
22. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral
Part Three: Upstroke
23. Dún Laoghaire
24. Béarra
25. The Four Courts
26. Henrietta Street
27. Reilig Chill Rannaireach
28. Royal Oak
War and the Rumour of War
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Michael Russell
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
Uptown
Mrs Leticia Harris, aged 53, who resided at 14 Herbert Place, Dublin, disappeared some time after 6 a.m. on Sunday, 8 th March. The following morning her car was discovered at premises in Corbawn Lane, leading from Shankill to the sea. There were numerous bloodstains inside the car, and the police later in the day found a bloodstained hatchet in a shed adjoining her house, and also bloodstains on the flower borders in the garden. The police theory is that Mrs Harris was murdered in her own home and the body taken away in her car. Mrs Harris is the wife of Dr Cecil Wingfield Harris, 81 Pembroke Road, Dublin.
The Irish Times
1. Pallas Strand
West Cork, November 1922
The storm did not come suddenly. All day the wind from the Atlantic had blown hard and cold and fast against Pallas Strand. The grey sky sped past overhead, heavy, thick, turbulent. The noise was unceasing, humming and roaring, loud and soft, and loud and soft again, but always there, along with the beat of the sea crashing endlessly against the white curve of sand. The farm lay back from the strand, behind a scattering of tufted dunes and a row of wasted trees, bent and twisted from long years of bowing and creaking before the wind, yet somehow always strong enough to stand. Indoors and out the blast of the wind battering the farmyard and the buildings had been constant, but still the rain hadn’t come.
The boy was in the yard, leaning into the wind to stand, scattering leftovers from a bucket to the ruffled and bad-tempered hens. He was seven; it had been his birthday only a week ago. He shouted and laughed as the puppy that had been his birthday present danced around him, darting and leaping, behind, in front, through his legs, trying to snatch the bacon rinds before the hens could get them. His father was in the barn, milking the three black cows. His mother was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. He didn’t hear the two vehicles driving along the track from the main road. The wind was blowing the sound away from him. It was only as the dog turned sharply from the scraps and started to bark that he saw them.
He knew them well enough. The long, sleek Crossley Tourer came first, with its top open even in the wind, and its battered leather seats. He loved the Tourer and its white-walled tyres, despite the men inside it. The other one was different; a Rolls Royce armoured car with its squat turret on the back and its .303 Vickers machine gun sticking out through the letter-box sights. As the dog zigzagged angrily round the wheels of the Crossley, snapping and snarling, it stopped; three uniformed men got out. The boy knew them too. It wasn’t the first time they had driven into the farmyard at Pallas Strand.
There was a young lieutenant and two great-coated Free State soldiers. The lieutenant smiled; the boy didn’t smile back. No one got out of the armoured car; its turret moved in a slow, grating arc as the machine gun scanned the yard. The puppy kept up a furious yapping, now round the feet of the intruders, but a kick sent him flying across the muddy yard. The boy turned to find his father standing behind him. There was another man too, his uncle. Where his father was calm and steady, he could see the fear in the other man’s eyes. And his mother was there now, in the doorway of the house, wiping her hands dry with her apron. The lieutenant stepped towards the boy’s father.
‘You’ve heard what happened on the Kenmare road?’
‘I heard something.’
‘So where were you yesterday?’
‘I was here. Where else would I be?’
‘You were seen in Kenmare the day before, with Ted Sullivan.’
‘Who says?’
‘I do.’
The boy’s father shrugged.
‘There’s a Garda sergeant dead at Derrylough. A mine,’ said the officer.
The boy’s father shrugged again.
‘Someone said something about it.’
‘There was no mine on Tuesday. The road was clear.’
‘I wouldn’t know, Lieutenant. That’ll be your business.’
‘But Ted Sullivan would know, I’d say.’
‘That’ll be his business then. You’d need to ask him so.’
‘Maybe you’d know where he is then?’
‘Well, he wouldn’t always be easy to find.’
‘Unless you were an IRA man.’
‘There’d be a lot of IRA men in West Cork. You’d know yourself. And it’s not so long ago you fellers would have called yourselves IRA men.’
The boy’s father smiled. It was a mixture of amusement and contempt. It was a familiar conversation, empty, circular, quietly insolent; all the lieutenant’s questions would go unanswered. But he knew that. He turned to one of the soldiers and nodded. The man walked forward and slammed the butt of his rifle into the farmer’s stomach. As he collapsed to the ground the boy stepped between his father and the soldier, saying nothing, but glaring hatred and defiance. The soldier laughed. The boy’s mother ran forward across the yard, but her husband was already struggling to his feet. He looked at her sharply and shook his head. She stopped immediately. The boy turned to his father. The noise of the wind rose and blasted. The man smiled, despite his pain, and put his hand on his son’s head, ruffling his hair. The lieutenant put a cigarette in his mouth. He hunched over his hands for several seconds, trying to get his lighter to catch it. After a moment he straightened up, drawing on the smoke.
‘Let’s see what you’ve got to say at the barracks.’
The soldier who had knocked the boy’s father down took his arm and dragged him towards the Crossley Tourer. The other soldier covered him with his rifle. The turret of the armoured car creaked slowly as the machine gun swept round the farmyard once more. The boy watched as his father was pushed into the back seat of the car. Neither his mother nor his uncle moved. They had seen it before; it was always the same; the same questions and no answers. He would come back, beaten and bruised, but he would come back. The soldiers got into the car. Then the Crossley Tourer and the armoured car swept round in a circle in the farmyard, through the mud and the dung, and drove up the track towards the road to Castleberehaven, the dog chasing behind, still barking and snapping.
The woman walked forward. She took her son’s hand and smiled reassuringly. It would be all right. These were the things they lived with, that they had always lived with. Even at seven years old he was meant to understand that. The soldiers who had taken his father away were traitors; men who had sold the fight for Irish freedom for a half-arsed treaty with England that was barely freedom at all. Traitors were to be treated with contempt, not fear. Then his mother turned to his uncle, his face white, his fists clenched tight at his side. The fear was gone; now his face was full of anger.
The boy had once asked his mother why his father seemed to have no fear and his uncle, sometimes, had to hide his shaking hands. ‘A man can only give what he has,’ she told him. ‘If he gives it all, no one can ask more than that.’ She was very calm now. None of it was new to them. Three years ago it had been the English Black and Tans; now the men in uniform were Irish, but the same sort of shite. Rage was to be nurtured, as it had been for centuries. There would always be a time to use it.
‘You take the bike and go up to Horan’s. They’ll get a message to Brigadier Sullivan. He’d better know. And we’ll finish milking the cows.’
The boy’s uncle nodded and walked quickly away. The woman and the boy went into the barn. For a moment, as his mother put her arm round him and squeezed, the boy smiled again. He did know it would be all right.
They waited all that evening, wife and brother and son. The rain had finally come just before dark, beating in from the sea, and the wind began to drop. As night fell a more welcome car pulled into the farmyard. The IRA brigadier said the man was where they expected him to be, in the police barracks in Castleberehaven, on the other side of the peninsula. The Crossley Tourer had been seen driving in through the gates around four o’clock. The IRA had someone inside the barracks; when the man was released they’d have the information immediately. He would be collected and brought home. The Free Staters had pulled in a number of volunteers that afternoon; it was the usual game; most of the men were already home. They only had to wait.
When the boy went up to bed there was no sense of anxiety in the house. The rain was falling outside, but the storm was quiet. Lying in his bedroom under the eaves, listening to the rain rattling comfortably on the roof, he drifted off to sleep thinking of the days when he would hold a rifle in his hand and fight the fight his family fought now. But when he woke abruptly in the early hours of the morning, he knew something was wrong. The rain still fell, but the house wasn’t at its ease any more. He could hear voices downstairs; his mother’s, his uncle’s, and others, a woman, several men. He could make out no words, but the voices no longer echoed the assured tones of the brigadier. There was anxiety; he knew what that was. The voices grew louder and then someone said something to quieten them; but the quiet wasn’t really quiet; it was a series of harsh, adult whispers that only intensified the anxiety.
He got out of bed and crept across the room. He knew where each floorboard creaked; he stepped slowly and carefully. At the door he turned the knob and opened it just a crack. The lamps were still burning downstairs. He didn’t know the time, but he knew these were the early hours of the morning. The voices were still unclear. The broken words and overlapping phrases that came up the stairs wouldn’t fit together. ‘Five fucking hours ago – they drove him out, he was in the car – it was ten o’clock – no, the ones at Ardgroom were from Kenmare – Gerry Curran didn’t even pick up a gun – they pulled him out of bed – they already knew where the explosives was buried – so where is he?’
The voices stopped. People were moving downstairs. The door into the farmyard opened. The boy tiptoed to the window. He pulled back the curtain and looked down. Two men were walking across the farmyard. They carried rifles. His uncle followed, a few steps behind; he stopped and turned back to the house. His mother was there now, standing in the rain. His uncle stepped back. He put his arm round her and pulled her to him. It was the same gesture of reassurance the boy had received from his mother as they walked to the barn to milk the cows, but everything about the way his mother stood now, unmoving, unaware of the rain falling on her, said that she wasn’t reassured.
His uncle picked up the bicycle that lay on the ground by the door. He got on it and rode away. Ahead of him the two other men were on bicycles too, their rifles slung over their backs, their hats pulled down on their heads. The three of them rode out of the farmyard and within seconds the rain and the darkness had swallowed them. The light from the open door shone on his mother as she watched them go. The boy looked down from the bedroom window. It seemed a long time before she turned away from the darkness, back into the house. The door shut. She did not come upstairs.
He let the curtain fall back across the window. He stood in the dark room. He could hear no sound from the kitchen below, but somehow he knew that his mother was standing, just as he was, and that she was crying, just as he was. He could feel the tears now. He understood nothing, except that there were reasons for tears, and reasons to be afraid. He walked to his bed and knelt. He crossed himself and clasped his hands together, closing his eyes tightly. ‘Holy Mary, be a mother to me. May the Blessed Virgin Mary, St Joseph, and all the saints in heaven pray for us to the Lord, that we may be preserved this night from sin and evil. Good Angel, that God has appointed my guardian, watch over my Daddy and protect him from harm.’
The rain stopped very suddenly, just before dawn. The sun had been up for over an hour when the boy woke. He wasn’t in his bed. He was sprawled across it where he had finally fallen asleep in the middle of the prayers he had repeated over and over again. He got up and walked to the window to pull back the curtains.
The sun was low in the sky but the morning was clear and bright already. Outside he could hear the familiar sounds of the cows in the barn, waiting to be fed and milked. The cockerel called across the farmyard, loud and urgent. But the only other noise was the shrill sound of gulls, flocking overhead. It was a moment before the anxiety of the previous night pushed the morning aside, and he remembered.
He ran to the door and downstairs. There was no one in the kitchen. The door to the farmyard was open. The door to the sitting room was open too, but there was no one there. He ran back upstairs and burst into his mother and father’s bedroom. It was empty; the bed had not been slept in. He knocked on the door to his uncle’s room across the landing, then opened it; it was empty too and the bed was unused. He raced down the stairs again. He put his raincoat on over his pyjamas and pulled on his boots.
The farmyard was empty. He stood outside and looked around him. It was as if everyone he loved had simply disappeared; for a moment it was bewildering rather than frightening. But he knew the emptiness around him meant that the darkness of the night had not been swept away by the dawn. He looked at the sky. The noise of the gulls was very loud now. A great crowd of them rose and fell on currents of air over the sea beyond the dunes, tightly bunched, angry somehow.
He ran towards the sound, through the farmyard, past the haystacks, on to the track through the dune field, up on to the tussocky dunes. He stopped, looking out at Pallas Strand and the sea, and the crowd of people, away at the far end of the beach, where the gulls were flocking and diving and screeching overhead.
He ran towards the crowd; twenty-five, thirty people in a loose group. Some stood silently, looking towards the sea, away from something. Some stood with their heads bowed in prayer. Some were simply staring down at the sand. No one seemed to see him coming. As he reached the crowd and pushed through the onlookers, still none of them seemed to notice him.
His father’s head and shoulders rose out of the sand of Pallas Strand.
He had been buried up to his chest; his hands were by his side, somewhere beneath the sand. His head was facing out towards the sea. And where his eyes had been there were two pits of black and red pus.
The boy stared, not able to understand what he was looking at. It wasn’t real; it wasn’t a real thing at all. The first thing that came into his head was the face of the vampire he had seen at the cinema in Castleberehaven, when he had crept in at the back with Danny Mullins during Nosferatu a month ago; they had watched in open-mouthed awe, for all of five minutes, before they were yanked out by the ears. But he knew what he was looking at, of course he knew. And then it was gone. His uncle’s coat dropped over the head and covered it, and suddenly, as if a still photograph had sprung to life, everyone saw him.
His mother turned and came towards him. He didn’t see her; he was still staring down at the sand and the coat that covered his father’s head. She pulled him to her, standing between him and his father’s body, folding him in her arms before she pulled him away. He didn’t resist as she led him back towards the farm.
He didn’t even try to look back.
No one would let him look at his father’s face again. On the day of the removal, when the coffin rested all day in the farm’s best room and friends and neighbours walked from all around to drink tea and shake his hand, his mother’s hand, his uncle’s hand, the coffin would be shut. But in reality he would always see it; the black tears of blood on the wet cheeks. And as he walked silently along the strand with his mother now, the gulls were still screaming and baying for the feast they had been driven away from.
His father had died a hero. But life had to continue; there was a farm. Yet down the years of growing up in the farm behind Pallas Strand, he saw his father’s face whenever he heard the sound of hungry gulls. And though he had been told a thousand times that his father was already dead when the Free State soldiers buried him there, as a reprisal for the dead Free State sergeant at Derrylough, and as a brutal warning, he would still wake at night in terror, from dreams in which he couldn’t move his body, his legs, his arms, and he felt himself gazing helplessly at the waves moving towards him across Pallas Strand, where no one could hear his screams over the wind roaring in the darkness.
Grief would be softened as the years went by, but not rage. It was a secret strength. Rage had to be nurtured; there was a time to use it.
2. Fulton Market
New York, March 1939
In the Fulton Fish Market, below the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side of the East River, an Irishman was sitting at a coffee stall. He was a little over forty; tall, fair, with a little bit more weight than was entirely good for him. It was eleven o’clock in the evening and the place was gearing up for the night, as it did every night, its busiest time. It was as cold inside as it was outside. Lights shone fiercely over the stalls stretched out in every direction, but wind from the East River blew in through the open doors, and the crushed ice that was everywhere made it even colder. Fish was still arriving, in boxes and baskets, carried by porters and piled high on the forklift trucks that raced along the market aisles, blasting horns.
The air reeked of blood and the sea; the floor swam with melting ice and fish guts; the occasional live eel squirmed between the stalls, struggling for the doors and the smell of the East River beyond. The price of fish was shouted out with competing, overlapping cries that echoed endlessly round the building. The prices were called in English, but the profanities that accompanied them were in all the languages of New York: English, German, Yiddish, Italian, Greek, Chinese, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Armenian; like the varieties of fish, no one could count them all.
Captain John Cavendish, of the Irish army, Óglaigh na hÉireann, had been in New York for the last two months as an advisor on security during the construction of the Irish Pavilion at the World’s Fair, across the river in Long Island’s Flushing Meadows. He had also spent some of his time talking to the American army about weapons and training and munitions, and was compiling a report on all this to take back to Ireland. As far as both the ambassador in Washington and the consul general in New York were concerned, his previous role as an officer in Military Intelligence, G2, had nothing whatsoever to do with his presence in America. The fact that he was in New York at all, where the current IRA bombing campaign against Britain, now in full if ineffective swing, had been largely planned and financed, was no more than a coincidence.
It was a coincidence too that he was in New York while the IRA’s chief of staff was in America, selling not only the new war against the old enemy, but the idea that the bigger war that had to come, sooner or later, between Britain and Germany, would bring the IRA back to a position of power in Ireland itself. It would be a war that would chase England out of the corner of Ireland it still held on to; it would put an end to the toadying Free State that had found the temerity, under the leadership of the Republican turncoat Éamon de Valera, to almost call itself a ‘republic’; and it would reunite the island of Ireland.
Captain Cavendish perched on a stool at the coffee stall counter. He wore a dark grey lounge suit, a blue shirt, a silver tie, a navy blue overcoat and a pale grey fedora. He should have looked out of place among the porters and stallholders in Fulton Market, but nobody took any notice. The man he was chatting amiably to at the counter ought to have looked equally out of place, in a black cashmere overcoat and a black homburg, a half-smoked cigar clamped between his teeth. But men in overcoats and hats were no strangers to the market in the middle of the night; it was run by the Mob, after all, and the men in overcoats took a cut on every box of fish that came in and went out.
The man John Cavendish was talking to carried a .38 under his jacket, and he was important enough that the man in the brown homburg who had come into the market with him, and was now helping himself to boiled shrimps from the next stall, carried a .45 to make sure his boss had no need to use his .38. The man in the black homburg raised his hat to the captain and walked away, followed by his protection. He had a word for every stallholder he passed; the replies all contained the word ‘mister’.
John Cavendish looked at his watch; the man he was meeting was late. He had a good idea why and he didn’t much like it. But he had no choice but to wait. The army officer held out his empty coffee cup for a refill. And he liked the market. It was an old building that offered relief from the streets of towers and skyscrapers that stretched through Manhattan. It was a manageable place. It reminded him of the South City Markets in Dublin; it had the same red brick, the same arched windows, the same broken gabled lights in the roof, the same vaulting interior and battered, shabby, workaday appearance. Living in the future, as he had been told he was many times since arriving in New York, he liked to touch the past.
The man he was waiting for had docked at Pier 17 on the Hudson River two hours earlier. There were piers by Fulton Market too, but there were no grand Atlantic liners there, only the fishing boats from Long Island and New England, and the ferries to Brooklyn. Donal Redmond’s ship was the French Line’s SS Normandie; he was a steward. He would have picked up the message he was delivering, as he always did, when the boat stopped at Cobh on its way from Le Havre to New York. And before the delivery was made at the other end he would give it to John Cavendish to copy.
‘You’re late.’
‘I’m here, what else do you want?’
‘You’d be better off out of the White Horse every time you dock.’
‘If I didn’t have a few in there, they’d think something was up.’
‘You’ve had more than a few.’
‘I’ve been on that boat six fucking days. What do you care?’
‘I don’t,’ said Cavendish, getting up off the stool. ‘Have you got it?’
Donal Redmond nodded. He followed the army officer through the maze of stalls, out to the back of the market, where the boxes of fish were loading and unloading. Trucks and cars, horses and carts, barrows and forklifts were everywhere. Money was changing hands outside as it was in, and arguments were still going on about prices that had started at the stalls and carried on out to the street; hands were spat on and shaken; illegible dockets and receipts were scrawled out and dropped into the slush of ice and blood and litter.
John Cavendish sat with the steward in the front of his red and white Crossley. In all the noise and the constant movement of vehicles a man scribbling something down in the front of a car looked like any other wholesaler or restaurateur totting up his bill.
The two letters, on thin copy-paper flimsies, had been rolled up tightly into straws and buried in a tin of Jacob’s shortbread biscuits. On each of the two pages were several paragraphs of typed capital letters; the letters grouped in neat columns, each five letters wide, with a space between each group. Cavendish copied both pages, laying the letters out exactly as in the typed originals. He rolled up the pages as tightly as they had emerged from the tin, then twisted the top and bottom of each one. The other man pushed them back under the biscuits, pressed the lid down tightly, and turned to stuff the tin into the duffel bag that was now on the back seat of the captain’s car.
‘Do you want a lift over to Queens?’
‘OK. Suits me.’
John Cavendish took five ten dollar bills from his wallet and handed them over. The steward put them in his pocket and grinned. It was done.
‘Merci, mon brave. Quelque chose à boire?’
Cavendish reached under the dashboard and pulled out a silver and leather hip flask. As he started the engine he handed it to Donal Redmond. He drove from Front Street on to Fulton Street, past City Hall and up on to the Brooklyn Bridge, over the East River to Long Island. He drove through Brooklyn into Queens. Redmond said nothing now; their business was over. Two blocks from the call house in Woodside, at the corner of 58th Street and 37th Avenue, where the ciphers would be delivered, the army officer stopped the car. The steward got out, hauled his duffel bag from the back seat and walked away.
As he disappeared from sight Cavendish reached for the hip flask and drank the remaining whiskey; as he put his hands back on the steering wheel he realised they were shaking. He pulled out into the road. A horn blasted angrily. The Irishman smiled to himself and tutted, ‘Cavendish, Cavendish!’ He drove on. He’d said he’d meet her an hour ago. He was heading for La Guardia now, for the Triborough Bridge, and then Harlem.
It was one o’clock in the morning in Small’s Paradise on 7th Avenue and 135th. It was hot, however cold it was outside. The downtown whites with the appetite for it had left the restaurants and bars of Lower Manhattan to join the black crowds in Harlem now, where the music was always louder but more importantly always better, much better, and you could dance with a woman in ways that would have got you thrown out of the Rainbow Room for even thinking about. The mix of black and white customers was a natural thing in Small’s; it was natural enough that nobody thought very much about it; Ed Small was black after all. There were white-owned, Jim Crow Harlem clubs, like the Cotton Club, where only the waiters and the musicians were black. But there were black clubs and black clubs of course; Small’s Paradise was just about as black as Manhattan’s more adventurous white downtowners and midtowners could comfortably cope with.
John Cavendish was happy enough to be there for the music, which he had grown to love during his months in New York. He’d heard a lot of it now and he never tired of hearing more. It was like nothing he’d known, and whatever he’d heard before, on records or the radio, was only the palest reflection of what it felt like to be in a room with it. He was easy there; he would have been happy just to listen.
The Irish woman he was with, Kate O’Donnell, was maybe thirty, tall, with blue eyes that had the habit of always looking slightly puzzled. Her hair was cut just above her shoulders, blonde enough not to need bleaching, and with enough curl not to need perming; sometimes she even brushed it, but not so often that it looked brushed. She was dressed well, but if you’d asked her what she had on, she would have had to check. She wasn’t easy sitting there. There was an edge of anxiety about her. She needed one of the trumpeters in the band with her when she talked to John Cavendish tonight.
If the captain was going to help her, she wanted him to help her now. She had started to feel he was putting it on the long finger. They needed to talk harder again; the captain, her, the trumpeter; they needed to move.
But talking to the trumpeter wasn’t the only reason they were there at Small’s Paradise. It was safe, safer than anywhere else. Harlem was the right side of Central Park, that’s to say the wrong side; it was nobody’s territory, at least nobody she knew, nobody who mattered.
The black trumpeter was playing now, standing up for a short, final solo as the band came to the end of ‘Caravan’. Cavendish knew it; he’d been at Small’s once before when Duke Ellington was playing. He liked swing; it was the sound he heard everywhere in New York. But the man at the piano, with the immaculately slicked hair and the faintest pencil-line moustache, went further than swing. What he played wasn’t just music, it was the city itself; it was as delicate and ephemeral as it was hard and sharp and solid. The piano was the night air in Central Park one moment and a subway train the next. As the trumpeter sat down to a scattering of applause, the piano and the brushed cymbals took over. Cavendish took an envelope from his pocket and pushed it across the table to Kate. The music was louder again now as the band played the last, almost harmonious chord, and the whole club focused on Ellington and his musicians, clapping and shouting.
‘That’s the passport I promised,’ said Cavendish. ‘Two. If she needs to travel under another name, there’s not much point you travelling under yours. It’s unlikely she’ll want it going into Canada, but with what’s going on at the moment you don’t need a problem.’
Kate picked up her handbag and put the envelope in it.
‘My problem right now is she’s still there, locked up in that place.’
The set had finished now, and the fading applause followed Ellington and his band off the stage. Another musician made his way to the piano and started to play, more quietly. Dancers drifted off the floor; the volume of conversation grew; trays of food and drink were coming at greater speed.
Jimmy Palmer, the trumpeter, pushed his way through the milling customers and waiters and cigarette girls, and sat down at the table with Kate O’Donnell and John Cavendish without saying a word. He lit a cigarette.
‘So where are we, Kate?’ he asked.
‘John’s at the Canadian border. I haven’t got her off Long Island.’
She smiled as she said it, but it wasn’t a joke.
‘You really think he’s going to come after her?’ said Cavendish.
‘We’ve been having this conversation for a month, John.’ Kate was tired repeating herself. ‘You’ve talked about helping us, and then you’ve talked about helping us, then you’ve talked about it a bit more. He won’t let her just go. How many times do I have to say it? She wouldn’t be there in the first place if he was happy to let her go. If you’re not going to do it –’
Jimmy Palmer just drew on his cigarette and watched.
‘I need to be sure how careful we need to be, once we get her out of New York,’ the army officer continued. ‘The answer’s still very. So you get her away from Locust Valley and I’ll make sure you cross into Canada. I’m not trying to find a way out of it.’ He took out a cigarette himself now; he caught the eye of a waiter and gestured for another round of drinks. ‘I’ve said I’ll use my car. There’s not going to be anybody around to make a connection between you and an Irishman taking a little trip upstate –’
‘I can get a car.’ It was Jimmy who spoke now. ‘I can do the trip.’
Kate smiled, reaching out her hand fondly to take his. He spoke with determination. It mattered to him in the same way it mattered to her. It was different for Cavendish; of course it was. He was there for what he could get. But he was the one they needed. He had the false passports.
‘I know, Jimmy. But there’s too many connections already. He knows you too. Anybody he sends after Niamh is going to know you. And people are going to notice a black man driving two white women around upstate.’
‘Poor old Jim Crow, eh?’
He gave a wry smile. It didn’t make the truth any easier. Harlem was his place; he was somebody here. Outside Harlem he wasn’t anybody at all.
‘I guess I know you’re right.’
He shrugged; you couldn’t argue much with how things were.
Kate turned back to Cavendish.
‘I have talked to her. I’ve told her what she has to do. It’s not easy. Once she’s out of there it’ll be different. Once she can breathe. Half the time she’s so doped up she doesn’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know who’s listening either. I am sure she can do it. It’s just getting her to walk out –’
‘That bit’s down to you,’ said the Irishman quietly. ‘When we’re out of New York it should be fine.’ He picked up his drink. ‘But I still need what I need from her. I need her in a state where she can think clearly.’
She nodded. He held her gaze for a moment. Maybe there was a part of him that was doing this because he had started to care now, about Kate and about her sister. But that wasn’t why he was there. And Kate knew it.
‘Niamh does know that. She has got the information.’
There was silence. Kate picked up her drink. She was tense again. Jimmy Palmer looked at them both. Whatever they were talking about didn’t include him.
‘Does know what?’ he said, his eyes on Kate. ‘What’s this about?’
‘It doesn’t matter, Jimmy.’
She was awkward rather than dismissive, but it came across as dismissive anyway. Cavendish wouldn’t want her to talk about any of that.
‘It matters to me. And it sounds like it’s going to matter to Niamh.’
The trumpeter turned to Captain Cavendish again. He didn’t know him. He didn’t know why he was involved, why he was giving out passports and booking liner tickets. He didn’t like the fact that he was taking things over, in ways that weren’t explained, ways that seemed to be about something a lot more than helping Kate O’Donnell and her sister because he was a nice guy. He had only met the captain three times; he didn’t always feel like a nice guy. He watched people too much. ‘So this’ll be some li’l thing the nigger don’t need concern hisself with, that right Massa John?’
‘Come on, Jimmy. It’s nothing of the kind,’ said Cavendish.
‘Maybe this nigger should know about it, Kate,’ snapped Jimmy.
‘He’s not helping us for love,’ said Kate, shaking her head. ‘You must have worked that out. He wants something out of it. You know what Niamh was doing on the boats. You know she wasn’t just any old courier either. Why should the captain do anything for nothing? Why should anybody? He’s a soldier, an Irish soldier. You know what I’m talking about too.’
John Cavendish wasn’t comfortable with what Kate was saying, but he didn’t stop her saying it. He looked across at Jimmy Palmer and nodded.
Jimmy didn’t like it but he could work it out, enough anyway.
‘We can’t do this on our own,’ said Kate. It was all she could offer.
The trumpeter stubbed out his cigarette. The waiter arrived with the fresh drinks and passed them round. Palmer downed his bourbon in one.
‘If there’s a deal, then you do your part, Mr Cavendish. She can’t stay there. And days, not weeks. Kate’s seen her. She can’t take much more.’
‘I’m ready to go.’ John Cavendish looked from Jimmy to Kate.
Jimmy was looking at Kate now too.
She nodded.
Ellington’s band was straggling back on stage.
‘I got the taxi,’ said the horn player, getting up. ‘Just give me the day.’
Kate nodded again. She picked up her drink.
Cavendish raised his and smiled.
Jimmy reached out his hand. John Cavendish shook it.
Kate smiled at them both. It wasn’t much of a smile. She looked tired.
The trumpeter walked back to the stage.
‘Do you want a lift, Kate?’ She shook her head.
‘No, I’ll get a cab.’
‘Sure?’
‘It’s better we’re not seen together outside work.’
She was right.
Suddenly Duke Ellington’s hands hit the piano hard. The drummer crashed the cymbal and top hat. Jimmy Palmer’s horn was loud and liquid.
Outside it was cold. Kate O’Donnell slipped away, with no more than a last smile, a stronger smile now, and hailed a cab. John Cavendish watched her go for a moment, conscious that he had been delaying things. He didn’t know what the consequences would be, that was all. There was no obvious connection to make between a woman escaping from a sanatorium on Long Island, where she was virtually a prisoner, and the IRA’s courier system and its ciphered messages to and from America. But if the IRA was as careful as it ought to be, someone could decide changes were in order anyway, and that might mean his interceptions drying up. He pushed away all that and walked towards 7th Avenue to get his car. It was time to act; a file full of ciphers nobody could read was no use to anybody. He needed Niamh Carroll now.
The night was bright and noisy all around him; car horns, laughter, singing, angry voices, somewhere a saxophone, the rattle of the trains from the el. It was still Ellington’s music, all of it.
At the corner with 7th Avenue there were a few people standing in front of a small black man, not old but with strikingly white hair, who stood on a box speaking. In front of him there was a placard: The Ethiopian Pacific Movement – the Struggle between the New Order and the Old. People drifted by. Some paused, then walked on quickly. The night swept round the white-haired man. John Cavendish did stop, listening to his words. He had seen the man before.
‘You think there’s going to be change while those sonovabitch Jews run things? Even the white man’s starting to listen now. Even the white man’s got someone telling him what’s righteous. You heard of Adolf Hitler? Now, he’s a man got those sonovabitch Jews on the run. When he’s kicked their butts, well, the white man can have Europe, that’s all Hitler wants. He wants us to have our place and whitey to have his. Black place, white place. That’s the world we want. So Herr Hitler is fighting our battle for us. He’s fighting against white democracy, because white democracy is the biggest shit lie the Devil ever put on the earth. And you know what Herr Hitler’s going to do? He’s going to take Africa from the British and give it to the black man. That’s coming brothers, believe me! And we got other friends too, not just Mr Hitler. We got the Japanese now. They want to kick the white man’s ass out of the Pacific, like Hitler will in Africa. They’ll kick it so hard you won’t see a white man or a fucking sonovabitch Jew for dust!’
The words puzzled Cavendish now as they had puzzled him before, but the light of truth shone in the black man’s eyes. He was looking at Cavendish, with a slight smile, only now registering his only listener. The captain smiled back amiably, pulled his hat on tighter, and walked off.
*
When Donal Redmond left John Cavendish’s car in Queens he had walked two blocks to Lennon’s Bar, the call house where the messages he brought from Ireland were dropped. He walked in through the bar, nodding to the barman and the two or three customers who were there, and headed straight for the back room. He knew the place; he knew the routine. And there’d be a couple of drinks afterwards. He opened the door into Paddy Lennon’s office.
The old man was sitting at his desk, a green shade over his eyes, totting up figures. The room was tiny, lined with ledgers and files, the desk piled with skewered bills and receipts. Paddy raised his eyes and pushed up the shade.
‘You’re late.’
‘Why the fuck’s everyone always telling me I’m late?’
‘Maybe it’s got something to do with the time.’
‘Is there a clock on this?’
Paddy Lennon simply smiled, but it was an odd sort of smile.
The steward put down his duffel bag and got out the Jacob’s tin.
The bar owner took it and put it in a drawer in the desk.
‘You should stay off the booze till a job’s done, Donal.’
‘I don’t take orders from you. I deliver and you collect. That’s it. I get my orders in Dublin. The job is done and that’s that. The way it always is.’
‘The way it always is,’ said Paddy, pulling down his eye shade.
As Donal Redmond walked back to the bar there were two men standing in his way. One of them was a uniformed NYPD officer. The other man wore a grey raincoat and still had his hat on. He was a policeman too, a detective. He didn’t need a uniform for the ship’s steward to know it.
‘Mr Redmond?’ It was the detective who spoke.
‘That’s right.’
‘I’d like a look at your passport and your papers.’
‘What for?’
‘Some sort of mix up, that’s all.’
‘What sort of mix up? I’m straight off my ship.’
The detective ought to have sounded apologetic; he didn’t.
‘We can give you a lift down to the precinct house. The sergeant just wants to look over the details. You can be on your way then. Will we go?’
There was something odd about the way they were looking at him. It wasn’t unpleasant. It wasn’t anything. But it was the same way Paddy Lennon had been looking at him in the back room. Donal Redmond knew he didn’t want to go with them. The detective opened his coat to pull out a packet of cigarettes. As he did Redmond saw the shoulder holster and the gun that sat in it. The detective didn’t take a cigarette from the packet. He was making a point. And the point was made.
As the three men left the bar, conversation among the customers resumed, as if they had never been there.
*
It was two days later that John Cavendish, sitting in the coffee bar across from the Irish Pavilion at the World’s Fair, reading The New York Times, saw an item at the bottom of page seven. A man’s body had been pulled out of the Hudson River. He had been identified from papers in his pocket as Donal Redmond, an Irishman who had only just arrived in New York; he had worked on the French Line boat, the Normandie, as a steward. It was believed that he had fallen into the Hudson from the ship, docked at Pier 17, when drunk.
It seemed that the captain’s source had dried up now anyway. There would be no more IRA ciphers. He had to hope that they had enough to find out what was going on, and he had to hope that Kate O’Donnell’s sister Niamh could give him what he needed most of all, the key to break the code, because no one was getting anywhere with deciphering the stuff in Dublin. He had hoped to get a bit more out of Donal Redmond though. He was disappointed; but probably not as disappointed as Donal had been himself.
3. Kilranelagh
West Wicklow
Garda Sergeant Stefan Gillespie was walking slowly down the stairs in the stone farmhouse below Kilranelagh. He was tired. The first ewes were lambing; he had been out in the haggard field behind the hay barn with his father till five in the morning, and now it was only eight. The smell of new life and morning frost was still in his nostrils; the clothes he’d lain down in were spattered with blood and urine, stiff with the grease from the ewes’ fleeces. Four twins, two singles, and only one born dead, strangled by its umbilical cord before he could get his hand in to turn it. There was a frail, dark triplet the ewe would have no milk for, to be reared for a time by the kitchen stove.
He had only been half asleep as the telephone started to ring. If his father was in bed and his mother was in the kitchen, it might ring till he answered it. It sat on a shelf by the front door, still looking very new, its black Bakelite shining; it had been there for almost a year now and it was polished more than it was used. It rang rarely enough that when it did Helena Gillespie would emerge from the kitchen and look at it for a few seconds, with an air of mild trepidation that she had not yet quite shaken off, before picking it up and speaking into it, slowly, carefully and loudly. She was coming out of the kitchen now, drying her hands on a tea towel. She smiled as Stefan arrived at the phone at the same time she did, and turned to go back to the breakfast she was cooking.
Tom Gillespie, Stefan’s nine-year-old son had got up from the breakfast table and was peering out. ‘Who is it, Oma?’ His grandmother shrugged. ‘It’ll be for your father. It always is.’ And it was. Superintendent Riordan was calling from the Garda barracks in Baltinglass.
‘You’re to go up to Dublin, Sergeant. They want you at headquarters as soon as you can get there. There’s no point coming in here. You’ll need to shift if you’re going to catch the train.’ Riordan was oddly formal. He would normally have called his station sergeant by his name, but since the message he had just received came from the Commissioner, this was a standing-up sort of phone call. There was also a hint of irritation in his voice; he didn’t like passing on a message from the Garda Commissioner to one of his officers when no one had had the courtesy to explain anything at all to him.
‘What’s all this about?’ asked Stefan.
‘If you don’t know, I’m sure I don’t.’
‘Well, I haven’t got the faintest idea, sir.’ Stefan smiled; he heard the irritation now; the ‘sir’ might help. He looked down at the clothes he was in. No one expected him in at the station today. ‘I’d better put a clean shirt on.’
‘The Commissioner wants you at eleven, so don’t piss about.’
The phone went down at the other end before Sergeant Gillespie could ask any more questions. Stefan walked into the kitchen, puzzled. Tom was eating his bacon and egg slowly, peering across the plate at the book he was reading, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Once he had grasped that the call was what most calls were at Kilranelagh, for his father, just another message, summons, query, instruction from the Garda station, he had lost interest. Helena was about to put another plate of bacon and egg on the table. Stefan reached out and picked up some bacon with his fingers and popped it in his mouth. That would have to do for breakfast.
Her lips tightened as she looked at his clothes.
‘Jesus, could you not have taken those off when you came in?’
He winked at Tom; Tom laughed.
‘Do you like making work for me, Stefan?’
‘You know I do, Ma!’
She turned back to the stove with a puff of irritation and a smile.
He leant across her and took another piece of bacon.
‘Have we got no plates now?’
‘Sorry, I haven’t got time.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve to be in Dublin. I’ll only just get the train.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. They want to see me at Garda HQ. They didn’t tell Gerry Riordan what it was about. I could see the expression on his face coming down the phone line at me!’ He laughed again, grabbing an apple from the bowl on the sideboard. He looked down at the lamb, sleeping in a cardboard box by the stove. ‘And don’t forget her, will you Tom?’
‘I won’t,’ his son nodded, still reading, not looking up.
He ran upstairs a lot faster than he’d come down. He wasn’t tired now. In a place where not much happened, anything happening was an event.
In the farmyard David Gillespie was driving a cow and a calf into the loose box next to the barn. Stefan took the bicycle that was leaning against the wall by the front door and cycled out round his father and the cow and calf; the cow stopped, bellowing darkly, and nudging her wobbling calf away.
‘I don’t know what time I’ll be back, Pa. I’ve to go to Dublin.’
His father nodded and tapped the cow’s backside.
‘Your Ma said.’
‘Ned Broy wants to see me. And pronto, apparently!’
‘What have you done?’ said David with a wry smile.
‘He’ll be worried about the sheep stealing again, I’d say, Pa.’ He rode out of the farmyard, down to the road.
His father watched him for a while, remembering the years that had passed since his son was last called to Garda Headquarters. At the end of all that Stefan had left his job as a detective in Dublin, and had come back to Baltinglass to work as a uniformed sergeant in the small West Wicklow town. It had been his own choice, driven as much as anything else by the responsibility he felt to his own son. Tom was only five then, living with his grandparents on the farm, seeing his father once a week, sometimes less. The four years that had passed since then had been happy ones for the most part, but in a family where emotions were sometimes as deeply hidden as they were deeply felt, David Gillespie knew that what his son gave to that happiness came at a price.
It wasn’t a price Stefan begrudged, but it was still a price. His life had been on hold. There were things that weren’t easy; there were corners where the comfortable contentment the Garda sergeant showed his Wicklow neighbours was less than comfortable. He lived in a place he loved, with the people he loved. It was what he had felt he had to do; it was not all he was.
For Stefan’s mother it was simple enough; all that was missing was a woman, not to take the place of her son’s now six-years-dead wife, Maeve, but to fill the empty places.
David Gillespie knew it went further than that. A long time ago he had put his own life on hold, for very different reasons, and he had come back to the farm above Baltinglass to give himself the space to breathe. He had breathed the air that came down from the mountains very deeply, and like his son he loved it, but it was a narrower life than he had wanted, with all its gifts. David had found a way to calm what was restless and dissatisfied in himself; perhaps he had nowhere else to go. But he recognised the same restlessness in his son; he recognised that it went deeper too.
He looked round the farmyard for a moment, then up at the hills that surrounded it, Keadeen, Kilranelagh, Baltinglass Hill. It was a great deal, but it would not be enough, not the way it had been for him, even if Stefan had persuaded himself it could be. David Gillespie shrugged, and turned back to the suspicious cow and her calf, driving them into the loose box.
Inevitably some of the same thoughts came into Stefan’s head as he cycled through Baltinglass’s Main Street and along Mill Street to the station, but it was easier to think about the present than the past. As he sat on the train following the River Slaney north towards Naas and Dublin, he looked out of the window and thought how little what he’d been doing in recent weeks could interest the brass in the Phoenix Park. He smiled. Sheep stealing really was about as serious as it got.
There was the new Dance Hall Act, of course, which required all dances to be licensed in light of the moral dangers the Church felt were inherent in dancing. A spate of unpopular raids was taking Stefan into the courthouse in Baltinglass on a weekly basis now. Yesterday he’d been giving evidence against the Secretary of the Dunlavin Bicycling Association and the Rathvilly Association Football Club. Admittedly the Dance Hall Act was causing considerable anger among the unmarried guards in Baltinglass who, when they weren’t raiding the dances, were dancing at them.
Then there was the pen of in-lamb ewes he was pursuing, that had disappeared from Paddy Kelly’s farm on Spynans Hill in February. Christy Hannity had bought them from Paddy at a farm sale and swore blind the old man had put them back on to the mountain while he was in the pub. It wasn’t the first time Paddy Kelly had played this trick and got away with it. All he had to say now was that mountain sheep had their own ways and Christy was too drunk to remember what he’d done with them.
And there were two days wasted on James MacDonald who had assaulted the Water Bailiff, Cathal Patterson, after refusing to give up a salmon found in his possession by the Slaney. He claimed the salmon was a trout, which he had since eaten. As for the Water Bailiff’s nose, didn’t he break it himself, tripping over a dead cat as he was walking out of Sheridan’s Bar?
It was hard to push the past out of the way altogether as Stefan walked from Kingsbridge Station through the Phoenix Park to the long, low stone building that was part eighteenth-century army barracks and part Irish country house. Nothing very much had happened in the last four years; most of what had, had happened to his son. He had no problem with that; it was why he had left CID, why he had left Dublin, why he went home. But the thought of how easily and how completely he had left behind the job he had always wanted, since the day he joined the Gardaí, had never struck him as starkly before as it did in the few moments he spent waiting outside Ned Broy’s office.
It hadn’t only been about Tom of course. He had also left because it suited everybody, the Garda Commissioner included. He had been involved in investigating two murders that in the end nobody wanted investigated too publicly. There had been justice of a kind, finally, but it had been a rough justice that the Irish state didn’t want to know about.
For a time it had been easiest for Detective Sergeant Gillespie to become plain Sergeant Gillespie in a country police station. No one had really meant him to stay there so long. He hadn’t intended that himself. It just happened, because that was what was best for Tom. Now, as Stefan sat in Ned Broy’s office again, he could feel an awkwardness in the Garda Commissioner. Sergeant Gillespie’s submerging in a backwater had not been what he had intended either.
Whatever was urgent, the Commissioner’s opening words weren’t.
‘So, how’s West Wicklow?’
‘Quiet enough, sir.’
‘You’re keeping Gerry Riordan in check, I hope.’
‘Well, mostly he does what he’s told.’
The Commissioner smiled. There was a moment’s silence.
‘You’ve been there a long time.’
‘Four years doesn’t seem so long. Time goes fast enough.’
‘Bollocks, you’re not old enough to say that yet.’
Stefan laughed. They were only words, but the Commissioner was looking at him quizzically now, remembering what had happened before.
‘Your father’s well? And your lad?’
The Commissioner had a good memory at least.
‘We’re all grand.’
‘And you’re happy down the country?’
‘Happy enough, sir.’ Stefan was aware that the polite remarks, whatever was about to follow, meant nothing to Broy, but it was the first time anyone had asked him such a direct question about his job, and by extension his life. The answer he gave was the answer any Irishman would give to such a question; an answer that could mean anything from despair to exultation, and everything in between. He was aware that he was avoiding a direct answer, not for the Garda Commissioner’s sake, but for his own.
‘A woman is missing.’
Broy suddenly stood up and moved slowly towards the window that looked out on to the Phoenix Park. The trees were still bare. Spring wasn’t far away now, but it still felt like winter.
‘There is every reason to believe she’s dead, and that she was killed.’ He turned back from the window. ‘The fact that she’s missing is the only thing that’s been in the newspapers so far. We can keep it like that for a little longer. And it’s helpful that we do, for various reasons. She is a Mrs Leticia Harris, with a house in Herbert Place.’
‘I think I did read something about it, sir.’
‘The evidence from the house, along with Mrs Harris’s car,’ continued the Commissioner, ‘indicates that she was the object of a very brutal attack in her home. Her car, however, was found in the grounds of a house close to Shankill, by the sea in Corbawn Lane. It’s clear she had been in the car, or her body had. At the moment we believe she was killed at the house in Herbert Place, or at least that she was dead by the time she reached Corbawn Lane, where the body was probably taken from the car and thrown into the sea. What the tides have done with her is anybody’s guess at this point.’
It was odd, but Stefan could feel his heart racing slightly. It was an unfamiliar feeling. It was excitement. It was four years since he had worked as a detective, but the instincts that had made him good at his job were still there. He felt as if a light had just been switched on inside his head.
‘Mrs Harris has a son. Owen. He’s twenty-one years old. I don’t think we know enough about him to understand what kind of man he is, but we know his relationship with his mother was very difficult, in all sorts of ways. Some of those ways had to do with money. Mrs Harris has lived apart from her husband for a considerable time, over ten years in fact. He’s a doctor, of some note, with a practice in Pembroke Road. From what Doctor Harris has told detectives, I think you’d describe the relationship between mother and son as highly strung, which is a polite way of saying they were a bloody peculiar pair. Superintendent Gregory at Dublin Castle is in charge, but it’s a big operation, involving detectives from several stations, as well as Special Branch. The short version is that we believe Owen Harris murdered his mother and dumped her in the sea.’
‘And where is he now?’ asked Stefan. The Commissioner’s tone of voice told him that wherever he was he certainly wasn’t in Garda custody.
‘New York.’
‘That was quick work.’
‘He left from Cobh two days after his mother disappeared.’
‘So is he in custody? In New York?’
‘No, but we know where he is.’
The Commissioner sat back down again, his lips pursed. It was more to do with irritation than anything else. Stefan could already sense this case was about more than a suspected murderer. Broy opened a file on his desk.
‘Mr Harris is at the Markwell Hotel, which is somewhere near Times Square – 220 West 49th Street to be exact. It’s felt there’s no need for his arrest or extradition.’
Stefan was aware this was a slightly odd way of putting it, as if it wasn’t entirely the Commissioner’s decision.
‘He’s agreed to come back to Ireland voluntarily to be interviewed, as soon as possible, as soon as practical. That’s why you’re here, Sergeant.’
This may have been the most interesting conversation Stefan Gillespie had had in a police station since he went to Baltinglass as station sergeant, but so far its purpose was as clear as mud. He looked at Broy blankly.
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