The small boat bobbed gently about on the lake. Every few minutes Stefan Gillespie pulled on the oars two or three times to keep it where it was. The Canadian boat would be looking for the jetty at Loch Eske; they had to stay as close to it as possible. The mist was heavier now, and in the white silence that surrounded them they would lose any sense of where they were if they drifted out further into Lake Ontario. Kate was in the bow, gazing out at nothing, holding the lamp in front of her. Niamh seemed to be looking out too, but as so often she had retreated inside herself. They said nothing; their voices would carry back to the shore across the water. The minutes passed slowly, until almost half an hour had gone; it seemed much longer.
Then there was a sound.
At first Stefan and Kate could barely distinguish it from the sounds inside their heads; it was so quiet they seemed to hear the beating of their hearts. But the noise was real and it was growing louder. There was light moving through the mist. Kate stood up and held the lantern. They were all shouting, Niamh as well. And then the light was coming towards them, cutting through the haze. They could see a white hull and the shape of a wooden wheelhouse. The engine cut quite suddenly and the boat swung round in front of them. A searchlight beam picked them out, momentarily blinding them. And a man shouted: ‘Bonsoir, mes amis, ça va?’
The Elco Cruisette was somebody’s pride and joy; inside it was all polished mahogany and brass. If the Temeraire had ever carried liquor across the lake during Prohibition, it lived a quieter life now. The two crewmen said little, and when they did say anything there was no reference to what was happening; they might have all been on a tourists’ midnight cruise. The men’s accents mixed Canada and France; when they spoke to each other they spoke in French. They took Stefan, Kate and Niamh down to the saloon and left them there with a bottle of rum. But the closed-in cabin wasn’t where any of them wanted to be and most of the time they sat on deck with the open night around them.
It was another long journey. It took almost five hours, north across the lake past the small islands that marked the end of America, over the invisible border, skirting round Wolfe Island, into an empty corner of the harbour at Kingston.
It had been light for a while, but they saw nothing of the city. A black Hudson waited for them at the dockside and they were soon on the road that followed the St Lawrence River, and the American border, through Ontario and Quebec, to Montreal.
By midday Stefan, Kate and Niamh were in a room in the Ford Hotel on Dorchester Boulevard. It was where the Hudson had brought them. They were asked no questions and they were not asked to register. Whoever Longie Zwillman’s friends were, everything had been paid for and there would be no record of their stay at the Ford. They would not be there long anyway. Kate and Niamh went out to buy the suitcases and clothes they needed for the trip home; not only because they needed something to wear but to make sure they looked like the ordinary passengers they were meant to be.
By the time the ravages of the last few days had been brushed off, at least off the surface, there was only an hour to go until the cab came to take the two women to the boat. There would be no dockside goodbyes though. Kate and Niamh felt safe, finally, but it was important that when they got to the boat the faster they moved up the gangway, unnoticed and anonymous in the crowd, the better. So Stefan would not go to see them off. And when he took Kate for a drink in the bar, and left Niamh to finish packing, it wasn’t about farewells either; it was to tell her that Jimmy Palmer was dead and to leave her with the task of telling her sister.
Kate understood why he had said nothing before, but she was very quiet. She knew what it would mean to Niamh. The news seemed to cut away anything that Stefan and Kate might have had to say to one another too, and in the end they said very little. What had happened between them at Lough Eske had taken them by surprise; neither of them knew whether it was anything or nothing. It was jammed about with other things, bigger things. It had been a moment of need. Did it have to be more?
Stefan had no explanation to give Kate about Dominic Carroll’s presence at the lake. It was better that she and Niamh knew nothing about what was going on. He said it was all to do with Clan na Gael; she didn’t want to know more. She had no interest in anything Dominic Carroll did now. He was something to be thrown away, as quickly as possible.
And then Kate O’Donnell and Niamh Carroll were gone; several hours before Stefan Gillespie went to the Gare Windsor for the overnight train to New York they were moving down the St Lawrence towards Quebec and the sea on the Empress of Canada, bound for Belfast.
For Stefan, there was no space to wonder about Kate. And for the time being he didn’t much want to. He didn’t know what it had meant to him; or perhaps he didn’t want to think about it because he didn’t know what it had meant to her. If there was going to be a time to ask, it would come later.
Now the words he had heard in the cellar at Loch Eske were in his head; he felt the ghost of John Cavendish was still at his shoulder. He phoned the number in New York that Longie Zwillman had given him to use in an emergency. Ten minutes later Zwillman phoned back. What Stefan said was oblique, but the urgency of it was clear.
‘When you get back to New York,’ said Longie, ‘the first thing you need is some fish.’
In the sleeper on the Montreal Limited, Stefan knew he wouldn’t get much sleep. He was tired enough, but Dominic Carroll’s words had stuck, and the words of Paul Eisterholz, the German-American Bund leader, and the unspoken words that weren’t even for an assortment of pro-German and anti-British zealots at the lakeside meeting.
He had had no great interest in George VI’s tour of Canada and America, but it was news that had been in the air for weeks, even in Ireland. Now the American newspapers he had bought at Windsor Station were full of it. King George and Queen Elizabeth had crossed the border at Niagara Falls; he was the first reigning British monarch ever to visit America. He had been met by President Roosevelt and he would be moving on to Washington soon, but he would be stopping off in New York first to visit the World’s Fair.
The king’s itinerary was in The New York Times, minute by minute. That was how these things worked. The minutes for the motorcade, the minutes for photographs, the minutes for inspecting the troops, the minutes for admiring the exhibits in the British Pavilion, the minutes for a speech and some more anodyne pleasantries, the minutes for shaking some hands and smiling at children. These things had to run like clockwork.
As he sat in the diner Stefan reflected on the big reception in Washington that would take place several days later; the reception there wouldn’t be much point anybody turning up for. If Dominic Carroll’s throwaway words meant what they could mean, there might be clockwork, real clockwork, somewhere in the king’s New York itinerary.
The Delaware and Hudson train had left Montreal at half past ten; an hour later it crossed the border into New York State at Rouses Point. Stefan would see almost nothing except the night for much of the journey as the train moved south, following the Adirondack Mountains and the Hudson River to New York.
In the sleeper he took out John Cavendish’s notebook pages and the copy of The Scarlet Letter. He looked at the last entry, the most recent of the IRA dispatches. He followed Niamh Carroll’s instructions and got a page number and line from the date at the top of the message. It was page 239; the seventh line. It read: ‘There is good to be done! Exchange this false life.’ He wrote the first twelve letters at the top of a sheet of paper, then started to write the apparently arbitrary letters of one of the last ciphers Cavendish had obtained in columns underneath them. After an hour of writing and rewriting and transposing he began to see the first few words emerging. It was a short enough message, but it was three o’clock in the morning by the time he had enough of it on paper to make any sense of it.
AGREED. NO MORE DISPATCHES RI IN US. ARMY COUNCIL PLANS ABANDONED. CEARNOGA HAVE IT. ENSURE EVERYTHING DONE TO GET MR HART WATCHED AND ARRESTED TO PROVIDE SIDESHOW. HAPPY HUNTING TO OUR FRIENDS. SO BLACKBIRD RI ABU. JESUS.
Together with the conversation at Carroll’s lakeside house that wasn’t even for the most approving IRA and pro-German ears, the message had to confirm what Stefan was beginning to believe. There was no indication of when the message had been sent, but from its place in Cavendish’s notes it was recent. It was a message from Ireland; it was a reply to instructions from America, maybe from Seán Russell or Dominic Carroll.
He stared out at the darkness and listened to the rattle of the train. This was John Cavendish’s ‘something big’; the assassination of the King of England in New York. That was what it was. It was hard to think of anything bigger. He took a clean sheet of paper and put it in front of him. He looked at the night again, conscious he was only seeing himself reflected back from the glass. He began to copy out the letters of the next cipher.
When he looked out again two more hours had passed. It was morning and the train was running along the west bank of the Hudson River. On the opposite shore a long, low line of hills followed the river, falling steeply to the water’s edge.
It was a wall of trees, deciduous and pine; not all in leaf, but the hardwoods were starting to colour with coming spring. Stefan sat back from the table and looked out. They were not far from New York now but the trees of the Hudson Valley stretched on endlessly it seemed. He knew the oaks and beeches well enough, and the birches and ashes, the red maples too; there were others he couldn’t quite name; sugar maples and hickories and wild fruits, and all sorts of pines that didn’t grow at home. But it was what it all made in the morning light that held him; little colour yet, but still a tapestry of soft, intense light, mile after mile after mile.
It was enough to push what he had been doing to the back of his head for a time at least. It was enough, however different it was, to take him home to mornings at Kilranelagh and the scruffy ashes and hazels in the valley below the farm. Enough to make him wish he was there with Tom, with his mother feeding the hens, his father bringing in the cattle from the fields and the air still cold enough to mist their breath.
It surprised him how close the Hudson Valley forests took him to Manhattan, but then, very suddenly, there were buildings and factories. The trees were gone; the river was gone. And the train plunged underground into the darkness, to tunnel its way beneath New York’s streets.
*
In the office above the Fulton Street Market Stefan Gillespie sat at the table with Longie Zwillman and a small, fat, balding man who wore a pin-striped suit that was too tight for him. He had taken a cab straight to the fish market from Grand Central Station. Zwillman was waiting for him. The gangster introduced the other man, unexpectedly, as a Federal Special Agent. He gave him no name and offered no explanation. The FBI man blinked at Stefan through milk-bottle-thick glasses and offered a handshake limper than the dead fish being loaded in the market hall below. Now he was gazing at the two deciphered IRA dispatches. He had been looking for several minutes.
‘You understand “ri”, Mr Gillespie? And “ceorn—”, what’s that?’
‘I think so,’ replied Stefan. ‘The word “rí” is the Irish word for king. So there was an IRA plan that had something to do with a king, and it’s all off. No more dispatches about it. Nothing more said about it. Whether that’s an instruction from here to Ireland or from Ireland to here, I don’t know, but it’s “abandoned”, that’s for sure. As for who the king is, it says the king in the United States. There’s only one king who’s going to interest the IRA very much, the English king, who’s just crossed the border from Canada.’
‘So we take king literally?’ asked the FBI man.
‘He’s here, isn’t he?’ shrugged Stefan.
‘Right here, in New York, tomorrow,’ replied the Special Agent.
‘But the plan is only abandoned as far as the IRA is concerned. Somebody else has it. “Cearnoga” is Irish again. It just means squares. But maybe the word you’d be looking for here would be more like squareheads.’
‘Germans,’ smiled Longie Zwillman.
‘And you think the plan is a bomb, Mr Gillespie?’
‘I can’t say that. It would have to be my guess. One way or another it seems to involve George VI not being around. Not being around for a reception in Washington anyway. That’s what Carroll was joking about.’
‘You would think so.’ The man in the glasses still didn’t raise his eyes. ‘So what is the blackbird rí? Does that tell us anything else? Presumably words aren’t wasted given the amount of time it takes to encode these messages.’ He pushed the message back across the table to Stefan.
‘I won’t sing for you, but it goes like this: “In England my blackbird and I were together, Where he was still noble and generous of heart. Oh, woe to the time that first we went thither – Alas, he was forced soon from thence to depart.” Is that enough?’ said Stefan with a grin.
The expressions on the faces of Longie Zwillman and the FBI agent told him it wasn’t.
‘It’s an old Jacobite song. The blackbird was the King over the Water, the king who would return when whoever was on the throne of England was defeated, mostly some Hanoverian with the name George as often as not. I’m not suggesting anyone’s interested in that now, but I guess the English do have a King over the Water again, in the shape of the abdicated Edward. And from what I’ve read in the papers, he’s very pally with Adolf Hitler.’
The Special Agent nodded; there was very nearly a smile.
‘Yes, I think I’ve got hold of that. And “abu”, Irish again?’
‘Forever. The Blackbird Rí Forever! Followed understandably enough by “Jesus”, which would probably be short for something like, “Jesus Christ what the fuck are we doing blowing up one English king on behalf of another one!” It might take a bit of explaining in the IRA and Clan na Gael.’
‘You’re a useful man to have around, Sergeant Gillespie. Deciphering these things only seems to be half the battle, unless you’ve got some Irish.’
The Special Agent looked at the second cipher Stefan had decoded.
‘There are two people who feature in these messages. Mr Brown and Mr Hart. From what we know about who’s calling the shots I’d guess Mr Brown is Dominic Carroll and Mr Hart is Russell. Do you agree?’
He pushed the paper with Stefan’s workings on it across the table.
MR BROWN MR HART AUTHORISED NEGOTIATE WITH BUND FRIENDS. NO ONE ELSE. NOT ALL MR BROWNS GERMAN PALS ON BOARD. NEW CONCERNS ABOUT COURIER INTEGRITY. IF INFORMATION LEAKS DISPOSE OF ALL LOOSE ENDS.
‘Seán Russell’s the one you arrested in Detroit. That’s what the message says was meant to happen. That’s why he went there with Carroll. To get arrested.’
‘On the basis that if we thought anybody was going to try anything it would be him. And if we’ve dealt with him there’s no more to worry about?’
‘A sideshow’s what they wanted. I don’t know about Bund friends versus German pals.’ Stefan looked from the FBI man to Zwillman. ‘Some people can be trusted and some people can’t. All that’s more your area.’
Longie Zwillman shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me.’
‘I don’t know what German Intelligence would make of this,’ said the Special Agent. ‘It doesn’t smell like anything official. I mean if you wanted to start a war tomorrow morning, and maybe undo all the work you’ve put in persuading most Americans to stay out of it – this would be no bad way to go about it. I should think the German government’s as likely to be in on this one as the Irish government, which is not to say it wouldn’t suit them of course.’
‘And the loose ends?’ continued the Special Agent.
‘John Cavendish would be one,’ said Longie Zwillman quietly.
The FBI man stood up.
‘Thank you, gentlemen. I don’t know what we’ll get from the rest of these ciphers, but your people are probably looking for different things, Mr Gillespie. We’re not in a hurry, except for the matter of a bomb, of course. There are a number of possibilities but the most public one is the World’s Fair. As for the rest of it, just now we’re more interested in watching what the IRA and the Nazis are up to in America than catching them. Safe home.’
He took his briefcase, put on a hat that was too big for him, and left.
Longie Zwillman stood up, thoughtfully; he took out a cigar and lit it.
‘You keep unexpected company, Mr Zwillman,’ said Stefan.
‘Given my line of work?’
‘I wouldn’t think you often sit down with the FBI.’
‘The wolves are coming out of the forest, Stefan. It’s a good time for friends and neighbours to leave off strangling each other. We can go back to that when they’ve gone. In the meantime there’s things people like me can do that fine upstanding people can’t. I didn’t think I’d be in the business of saving an English king’s life though. You neither, I reckon?’
‘It wouldn’t have been high on my list of things to do in New York.’
‘A Jew and an Irishman! The Empire’s fallen on hard times.’
‘It looks like it,’ smiled Stefan.
‘Not too hard for now, I hope. They’re all bastards as far as I’m concerned. I might have men in the docks now, finding out what the IRA and the German-American Bund are planning to do to sabotage arms shipments to Britain, but when I’m not doing that I’m smuggling guns out for Jews to use against the British in Palestine. It pisses me we’ve got the same enemies, you know that? I think it pissed John Cavendish too. He didn’t have much doubt what was coming though. And it is coming. We’re going to be a big neutral and you’re going to be a small one, but sometime we’ll all have to decide what side we’re neutral on.’ He smiled and sucked in cigar smoke. ‘If you’re Jewish it’s not a hard decision.’
The two men said nothing for a moment.
‘You know how I met John?’ continued Zwillman. ‘It was a meeting above a German bookshop on 3rd Avenue, the usual crew, America First, the German-American Bund, Silver Shirts, Coughlin’s Christian Front. There’s always some IRA men too, to add a bit of anti-British to the anti-Jewish, anti-Negro, anti-Communist, anti-Democracy, anti-fucking-anything-you-can-think-of stuff they like. That’s what he was interested in, what the IRA was up to in all that. But what does he do? He takes fucking notes! So they think he’s a reporter. And what they do with reporters is send them away with enough cracked ribs to make sure they don’t come back. He was lucky. I had some boys come over from New Jersey to break up the meeting. The Bund had to leave him out the back. They hadn’t really got started on him.’
Stefan began to gather up Cavendish’s notes and the ciphers.
‘But somebody got started on him eventually,’ he said. ‘They got finished too. I doubt I’ll ever know any more than that, not now. It’s about the beginning and the end of what I’ll be taking back to the Garda Commissioner. He was a loose end somebody needed to dispose of. Someone’ll have to think of something else to tell his wife and his kids.’
*
‘I can’t say New York was everything I expected,’ said Owen Harris, ‘but I haven’t been able to get out as much as I’d hoped. I’m not complaining. I’ve met some fascinating people. Frightening, but with their own New World charm. I do admit that I’m rather glad to be going home though, Sergeant.’
Stefan Gillespie sat across the bare table in the bare room at Police Headquarters as he had the day Harris had been arrested in the bar on 52nd Street. He knew what to expect from him, and he wasn’t in the mood for it.
‘I’ll pick you up in the morning, Mr Harris.’
‘I suppose I’d better pack. I didn’t bring a lot with me.’
‘I have your things. They’ve been sent over from the hotel.’
‘The dear Thesps! How are they? Mr Mac Liammóir was kind enough to come to see me, for what it was worth. He didn’t have very much to say.’
‘The plane takes just over –’
‘You know Yeats rejected it?’
‘We’ll be at Foynes –’
‘The play, John Bull’s Other Island,’ continued Harris, ‘it was commissioned for the Abbey originally. Too controversial, too long, he said. Now it’s not controversial at all, but it’s still too long. I always think Shaw had a problem with his comedies. The trouble is they’re not remotely funny.’
‘Tomorrow then,’ said Stefan.
‘I’ve found myself relating to Synge in here. I should have said that to Micheál. I’d never thought much of him before, Synge I mean.’ He sat back, frowning and giggling at the same time. ‘All that English that’s meant to sound like Irish and doesn’t sound like anything on earth. But I’ve become quite a celebrity in here, just like in The Playboy of the Western World, a kind of Christy Mahon of Broadway. “Is it killed your mother?” “With the help of God I did surely?” It should go down even better in Ireland!’
Owen Harris looked up smugly, as if he was waiting for applause.
Stefan stood up.
‘You don’t think it will then, Sergeant?’
‘No, Mr Harris, I don’t think joking about your mother’s death will endear you to anybody. You’ll help yourself more by shutting your mouth.’
‘My God, you’re right, the story of my life, Medea versus Moloch. Only two parents to choose from and I couldn’t even murder the right one!’
Stefan turned and walked out, leaving Owen Harris chuckling.
When he came into the Headquarters Detective Division room it was almost empty. Two detectives hurried out as he walked in. Michael Phelan was at his desk, strapping on his shoulder holster, with the boyish look of gung-ho enthusiasm that had accompanied him into the 52nd Street club with Stefan.
‘Can’t stop, Stefan, we’re heading for the World’s Fair.’
‘I heard something,’ said Stefan.
‘Something’s a bomb, that’s the word, at the British Pavilion.’
‘They’ve found it?’
‘I’m not sure.’ He grinned. ‘The thing is, what’s going to happen when we do? Are we going to get rid of it or set the thing off? It’s asking a lot of an Irish cop not to see a bit of England blown up. Maybe those lions!’
‘Come on Mikey!’ Aaron Phelan appeared in the doorway in uniform. ‘If you want a lift over to Flushing Meadows, I’m going now!’
‘Keep your hair on, Captain!’ Michael Phelan turned back to Stefan. ‘I say that because he’s lost a chunk. Right about there.’ He pointed to the back of his own head, more or less where Stefan Gillespie’s revolver had hit his brother. ‘And he’s got a bump the size of a duck egg. If I didn’t know better I’d say he’d been out on the piss. That’s usually my job in the family.’
‘I said move!’ Phelan laughed. ‘You want to come, Stefan?’
‘No, I need to get everything sorted out before I go.’
‘We’ll be glad to get your prisoner out of our cells,’ said Captain Phelan cheerfully. ‘He’s taken to singing in the middle of the night. Much more and you’d be taking him home in a box. And it’d be a cop who strangled him! We’ve got to go. There’ll be a car to get you to La Guardia tomorrow. Can you do it, Mikey?’
‘Fine with me,’ said Michael. ‘I’ll see you then, Stefan.’
The two brothers were gone. The room was empty. Stefan smiled a quiet smile which was all relief. He had had no choice but to go into Police Headquarters; that’s where Owen Harris was. But bumping into Aaron Phelan was something else. It was something he had hoped wouldn’t happen. There was no reason why the NYPD captain should connect him with Kate and Niamh. He had thought it through a dozen times. Nothing had happened to let him make that connection.
The captain couldn’t have seen him, even in that last moment by the jetty as Stefan had smashed the gun barrel down the back of his head. But the revolver was nagging at him. Somewhere he’d lost it. It could have been by the boathouse at Mexico Bay; it could have been in the rowing boat, or on the Temeraire; it could have been in the big Hudson, or in the Montreal hotel.
So far no one had asked for it back at Centre Street. He didn’t want to say he’d lost it; the thing had been given to him so casually he was simply hoping the question wouldn’t arise. But there was nothing odd about Captain Phelan’s behaviour, and by tomorrow Stefan would be gone.
*
Richard Langham, who was responsible for such things, hadn’t thought it mattered much when the big bald-headed black cleaner they called Cab (he didn’t know his surname, but it was written down somewhere) hadn’t turned up for work at the British Pavilion at the World’s Fair one night in early February. A small white-haired Negro who said he was Cab’s cousin turned up instead (Mr Langham didn’t remember his name at all, but it must have been written down somewhere).
The Fair would be opening in a matter of weeks and the cleaners needed to be in place; one black cleaner was the same as another black cleaner. They weren’t a part of the Fair anyway; they were an invisible army that would only appear when the Fair closed. Buses brought them from Harlem every evening and took them back in the early hours of the morning, about the same time the garbage trucks left. Who they were didn’t matter. And as it happened someone whose job it was to notice such things mentioned that the new cleaner was a damned sight better than the old one, whatever his name had been, whatever the name of the new man was.
The cleaner’s name was actually Louis Marshall. Two men from the German-American Bund had taught him how to put the bomb together and how to set it. The meetings his Ethiopian Pacific Movement had had with the pro-Hitler groups had been few and far between, but he had tried to establish contact, because he knew they had things in common under the skin; and something remarkable had come of those efforts. They wanted to work with him; they wanted him to work with them.
He had brought the bomb parts into the British Pavilion one at a time, in pieces small enough to fit under the sandwiches in his lunch box; he had hidden them in sealed packets in the toilet cisterns and in empty tins of polish in the cupboard where he kept his trolley, mops, brushes, buckets. The false bottom in the cleaning trolley was more difficult than the bomb. That had to be good; so good it was solid. It had to stand up to the search that would happen before the English king got to the World’s Fair. Marshall had had to carry the metal plate in and out of the Fair three days running before the Bund men got it to fit right.
He was to assemble the parts of the bomb two nights before George VI’s visit; they told him the time to set it; the tiny clock, almost silent, could run for forty-eight hours. The Bund men were as biggity and astorperious as every other white-ass Louis Marshall had met; he certainly wasn’t dumb to the fact that they despised him all the time they were patting him on the back. But they were no better than rednecks anyway; whatever they called themselves they weren’t real Germans; real Hitler Germans didn’t come from Queens and New Jersey. But they were paying him well, and what he was doing was bigger than them. It was as big as Louis Marshall’s dreams.
It was the British Empire that had stolen Africa from Aunt Hagar’s children, and once the British were out of Africa it would be a home for every black man on earth. He didn’t know much about the English and their kings. He knew about the man who’d stopped being king because they wouldn’t let him marry some American woman, though he had no idea why anybody gave a damn. But when the king they had now was dead, the old one would come back. And this one didn’t even want Africa. He was a friend of Adolf Hitler’s; he was Hitler’s man all the way. And when he’d kicked out all the Jews who controlled the British Empire, it would be the way Hitler said it would be. The whites would have their place. The brothers-in-black would have theirs, and it would be Africa, without a white ass on the continent, from Cairo to Cape Town. The way God intended it.
So when Louis Marshall aired out back to Harlem after setting the bomb, he knew that what he had done was as righteous as rage itself. He had stood on a box at the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue for four years. He had borne witness to the days of wrath that would change the world, and now he was a part of it, now he was driving it.
The world Hitler wanted was the world he had seen too, when every dusty-butt, jar-head nigger in Harlem couldn’t see further than jooking and jelly and juice. Oh, Little Sister, Babylon would fall, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication! Everybody said big things were coming; the great battles and the great storms would sweep Babylon away.
When the Bund men came to pay him that night Louis had got in some bottles of Budweiser. He didn’t drink a lot, but he wouldn’t see them again, and whatever he thought about the Germans they were the only people he could celebrate with. He knew he couldn’t tell anyone else, not yet; one day, one day his brothers would know what he had done. But as it happened there was little likelihood of him telling anyone, either now or at any point in the future. While one of the German Americans held him down, the other one stuck him in the chest with a knife, and then cut his throat.
He wasn’t the only one the bomb killed.
The next day, when the FBI and the NYPD poured into the British Pavilion at the World’s Fair, it took a while to find the bomb, but it was discovered eventually, in the almost invisible trolley of the completely invisible black cleaner.
Two detectives from the NYPD’s Bomb Squad took it to a stretch of waste ground at the back of the Fair to defuse it. When it went off it killed them instantly. The two men had worked together at Police Headquarters on Centre Street for a long time. When they were drunk in McSorley’s they had a party piece; they sang ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’. Joe Lynch would sing in English; Freddy Socha was the only NYPD officer who knew it in Polish.
When the bomb exploded most Fair visitors assumed some of the evening fireworks had gone off by mistake.
*
In the Statler Bar at the Hotel Pennsylvania Stefan Gillespie sat in a booth with Micheál Mac Liammóir and another actor, Charlie Mawson.
Mawson was tall, with a thin, angular face and dark hair. He smoked continually and had very little to say except that if Owen Harris had killed his mother he would have known. They had shared a cabin together on the boat from Cobh to New York; he would have known. The fact that he didn’t even know that his ex-lover’s mother was missing at all until they arrived in New York and that there was no question that Harris had, at the very least, dragged his dead mother’s body out to her car, driven it through Dublin to the sea, and there disposed of it, didn’t seem to alter Mawson’s certainty about his innocence.
He said several times that Owen Harris was a ‘troubled young man but not that troubled, never that troubled’. He said he had asked him directly, at the Markwell, what had happened. Harris’s answer had been that he didn’t know, but that his mother had been threatening suicide again. Mrs Harris apparently went through phases of threatening suicide and she had even told Mawson himself, several times, that she intended to kill herself, because her son hated her and her husband despised her.
Charlie Mawson also said that although he had felt some sympathy for the lonely, self-pitying figure of Mrs Harris when he had first met her, he had come to the conclusion, very quickly in fact, that she was cruel, manipulative, vindictive and incapable of telling the truth about anything, particularly about her son and her estranged husband.
Then he stopped saying the same thing over and over again, and gave a dry smile; he knew what Stefan Gillespie was thinking anyway.
‘I’m not helping, am I, Sergeant?’
‘I appreciate your concern for your friend –’
‘But I’ve got bugger all to say.’
‘I’m not in a position to take statements, Mr Mawson.’
‘Naturally I’d speak for him in court.’
Stefan nodded. Mawson’s declaration that his friend had not only lied to him all the way across the Atlantic, but had spent most of his time drinking and playing pranks on the other actors, while showing no sign at all of grief or remorse about the mother he had thrown off a cliff, even if he hadn’t stabbed her to death, was definitely unhelpful to anyone except the prosecutor. His description of Leticia Harris as manipulative, spiteful and violent sounded more like a list of motives for her son to kill her than an explanation of dry he didn’t. The only mitigating factor in there perhaps, somewhere, was that mother and son were probably as mad as each other.
‘I wrote this down after I, saw him at Centre Street.’
It was Mac Liammóir who spoke now.
‘It’s the same mix of confused and sometimes unfeeling remarks, the same leaps back to his childhood, or to things he seems to consider complete strangers ought to know, that the actors who sat with him at the Markwell have talked to me about, but it’s what he said. I don’t know whether there’s anything in there that means anything at all, but somewhere in that conversation I felt that when he said he didn’t kill his mother, he meant it. I’ve thought about it a great deal since. I keep telling myself that probably the boy is mad enough to mean he didn’t do it and mad enough to have done it all at once. But I wanted to say –’
He laughed.
‘The truth is I don’t know what I wanted to say, except that someone should listen to him. Either there is some truth in there, or he really is as mad as a hatter, and if he’s that, then it needs to be said too. People won’t like him, Mr Gillespie. Jurors won’t like him. I don’t like him myself.’
Micheál Mac Liammóir shrugged.
‘He could hang himself, just because of the man he is. He has no sense of how people respond to him. I’d like to think that you won’t let him do that. That if there are questions to be asked, they will at least be asked.’
He glanced at Charlie Mawson. They both stood up.
‘You won’t make it to the play, Mr Gillespie?’
‘I go back tomorrow.’
‘Ah, you read the reviews!’
‘I haven’t seen anything about it.’
‘You’re too polite for a policeman. I’ve always thought that.’
‘Not great?’
‘It was the wrong play. That was the problem.’
Stefan nodded, as if he agreed.
‘And a reviewer who arrived in a cravat.’
Stefan looked puzzled.
‘It’s a questionable choice at the best of times, Sergeant, but in Manhattan it shows all the imagination you might find inside a gnat’s arse!’
The three men shook hands. They were standing in front of one of the mirrored pillars in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania. There were a lot of people, but for a moment Stefan Gillespie’s eye was caught by a brown suit in the mirror. As the director and the actor walked away he turned. The suit had gone, but he was sure he had recognised it, along with the man in it. It was Katzmann, the German intelligence officer he last saw in Central Park.
In the Statler Bar Stefan had almost forgotten about what had been happening around him. He was almost back on the Yankee Clipper. It was what waited for him at home that was at the front of his mind; the man he was taking back to Dublin to hand over to Superintendent Gregory. But maybe it hadn’t been Katzmann at all.
It was a suit and a man who was slightly too big for it. He couldn’t see him anyway, and he had something to do that pushed even Owen Harris away. He had the top of the Empire State Building to go to. He had promised Tom he would do it. He wanted to himself. He wanted to look out at New York at night. He wanted to clear his mind of everything that had happened and to let the city give him something he could share with his son. And something that would also be his own.
He walked out on to 7th Avenue and stepped to the kerb to hail a cab. It was all busy, noisy, bright; he wanted that too. He smiled as the cab pulled up, remembering the moment with Kate O’Donnell outside the Hampshire House, when he couldn’t get her a cab, before the Hampshire House became a very different memory. It was only a couple of blocks to 5th Avenue, but it would be his last New York taxi. He would walk back. As it pulled away he was thinking about Kate. It wasn’t everything he wanted to clear his head of when he stood at the top of the Empire State.
He was unaware of the dark saloon that inched out behind him, following the cab into 34th Street. But it hadn’t gone entirely unnoticed.
Rudolf Katzmann stood just down from the Hotel Pennsylvania, in the brown suit Stefan Gillespie had recognised, lighting a cigarette. He had watched Stefan come out. He had watched him get into the yellow cab. He had watched the dark car pull out behind. Now he walked quickly back into the lobby of the Pennsylvania. He went to the Bell Captain’s desk. He put a dollar bill down and picked up the telephone.