Last night in New York. The picture on the front is right where I am, nearly at the top of the Empire State Building. You told me I had to come up here, so up here is where I am. Looking out at the city at night is like nothing else on earth. You have to see it for yourself. One day you will. I know you will. I’ll post this tomorrow. Then we can both wait for it to arrive. Love to everyone at home, love to you Tom.
He felt those last words very deeply tonight. They weren’t words he was used to writing as simply and as straightforwardly as that, but he needed to say them. He wanted to be home again. There was nothing he wanted to see now, surrounded by so much he had wanted to see. There were things he wanted to remember, and things he wanted to forget. As the elevator carried him down to the street he wondered about Kate O’Donnell again. He wondered what she would want to remember. He hoped he was on that list.
He came out on to 5th Avenue and walked towards the kerb, simply looking up and down before turning to walk back to the hotel. There was a car straight in front of him. Standing by it was Captain Aaron Phelan, no longer in uniform, watching him. He smiled as if he had been waiting. Stefan knew that he had been. Phelan dropped a cigarette on to the sidewalk.
‘I thought you might want a lift, Stefan?’
He stepped forward and pulled open the back door of the saloon. There was nothing threatening about it, but it was still threatening; it was the rear door, not the front. Stefan’s surprise had already given way to something else. Phelan couldn’t have guessed he would be here. And why would he want to anyway? He hadn’t bumped into him by chance because he happened to be standing by a car outside the Empire State Building, smoking a cigarette. Stefan Gillespie knew he had been followed. Aaron Phelan’s behaviour at Police Headquarters had been an act. However unlikely the connections to Kate and Niamh were, he had made them now.
‘I’d like to walk. It’s my last night in New York, Captain.’
Immediately he was aware that there were two men on either side of him. One took his arm, pulling him into the car after him; the second grabbed his other arm and pushed. It was done so quickly that before he could even start to resist he was on the back seat of the dark saloon.
The second man was already in behind him; he was wedged between the two of them. The first man had a gun in his hand now. The barrel was pressed hard against Stefan Gillespie’s temple. The second man grabbed his hands and pulled them up. He snapped a pair of handcuffs over his wrists. Aaron Phelan was in the driver’s seat. He started the engine. No one said a word.
The car pulled into the 5th Avenue evening traffic. It drove two blocks south and into East 32nd Street, then north on to Madison Avenue. No one spoke. There was nothing to say. There was only the radio, and as the car headed uptown the man on Stefan’s left leant back beside him, whistling tunelessly through his teeth with the Andrews Sisters. ‘Zing boom tararrel, ring out a song of good cheer. Now’s the time to roll the barrel, for the gang’s all here.’
He knew he was just north of Central Park now, somewhere off Lexington Avenue, towards the East River, but that was about it. The car had pulled up in an alleyway behind a row of flat-fronted tenements and shops. There had been no point struggling as he was bundled down steps into a dark corridor and then a dimly lit cellar room.
He was sitting on a chair, surrounded by string-bound piles of newspapers and boxes of what looked like books. The two men who had pushed him into the car sat across the cellar at a table. The one who had grabbed him from behind was rolling a cigarette; the other was half-reading a newspaper. Captain Phelan had left as he had been deposited in the chair, still handcuffed. Above he could hear voices. A man was talking. There was applause, cheering; a lot of people. There was a kind of echo. Above it had to be a big room; some kind of meeting was in progress.
It was the cellar of a bookshop. A lot of the books were in German; a few of the newspapers too. Stefan took in some of the titles as he looked round. They didn’t mean much, but they gave him a sense of where he was, and who the people sitting opposite him were. They certainly weren’t Irish.
To his left piles of the National American, with a headline, ‘Sterilization for All Refugees Entering America’; to his right the Christian Mobilizer, ‘Will Your Sons Die for England’s Empire?’; at his feet the American Vindicator, ‘Guard Your Womenfolk from the Pollution of Jews, Blacks, Browns and Bolsheviks’.
It came as no surprise when the two men started to speak quietly to each other in German. Stefan assumed it must be because they didn’t want him to know what they were saying; from their accents it was clear they were Americans. It wasn’t their first language. They had no reason to know that he spoke German, but their desire to keep the conversation from him was something, a straw. After all, no one minded what dead men heard. Besides, he could see that they were uncomfortable.
‘Come on, what the fuck is this?’ said the man smoking the roll-up.
‘Someone Phelan wants to teach a lesson to,’ answered the other one.
‘He’s Irish, isn’t he?’
‘That’s what Phelan said.’
‘So what’s it got to do with us?’
‘He said he needed a favour.’
‘Hasn’t he got enough cops and Micks to do him that sort of favour?’
‘The guy trod on his toes – he wants to give him a lesson.’
The man with the roll-up shook his head.
‘I would have thought we’d be better keeping out of each other’s way at the moment. If this is some IRA thing then it’s nothing to do with the Bund – if it’s some Irish shit who’s pissed him, what the fuck do we care?’
‘It’s no big deal.’
The man with the roll-up still didn’t like it.
‘You should have told him to fuck off. We’ve got enough shit to clean up without working for the Micks. You’re not telling me they haven’t got something to do with this fuck up in the first place. He shouldn’t be here.’
‘He said he needed to ask this guy some questions.’
‘He doesn’t give us orders.’ The man smoking the roll-up shook his head as he spoke. The conversation wasn’t making him any happier. He took out another paper and some tobacco. He was tense and uneasy. ‘He was thick with Paul before, but now Paul’s not – after what happened to Paul –’
For a moment neither of them spoke. The other man was tapping his fingers uneasily now too, no longer looking at the newspaper. As the man rolling the cigarette put it in his mouth and lit it, he wouldn’t let it go.
‘We don’t have to take Phelan’s orders. It’s over, isn’t it? It’s over and Paul’s paid the fucking price for going behind the Abwehr’s back. It doesn’t look so clever now any of it. And isn’t this guy some kind of cop?’
‘An Irish cop.’
‘There’s enough fucking Irishmen in New York to do him over then.’
The conversation stopped. In the quiet Stefan could hear the voice of the man addressing a meeting above more clearly. He was shouting now.
‘America will not fight a war in Europe, and it’s our job to see she doesn’t. America will remain neutral, even though the King of England is parading through our streets. He won’t be parading anywhere when Hitler’s tanks are in London! But things are going to change here too. There’s a revolution coming! And it’s going to start in the streets. We’ll clean up this goddamn democracy! This is New York not Jew York! We won’t let this city be run by a stinkweed like Guardia or leave our country in the hands of a Jew-bum like Roosevelt. Don’t put your trust in Democracy. Will America continue on the Low Road of Democracy, on to slavery and national suicide, or will we regain the High Road of true freedom? Will Democracy drag us back into the Dark Ages, or will Nazism lead us to the New Dawn? The same question lies before every man in every country in the world today. Is America on the road to the true Republic? Is Ireland on the road to the true Republic? Is any country on that road? Yes, one country is. Germany! Germany is already there. We want it too! Freedom! And if we have the courage, we will take it! Freedom!’
Applause had grown as the speech reached its crescendo, and it ended with roaring and shouting from the audience above Stefan Gillespie’s head. The floor shook as hundreds of feet stamped out the rhythm of the word that the audience kept repeating. ‘Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!’ And then suddenly it stopped. The shouting was replaced by the murmur of excited conversation, and several hundred feet shuffled in one direction, out of the hall above. It was silent.
The two men at the table seemed to take no notice of what was going on above them. Then a phone rang. They looked up. The man who wasn’t smoking got up and walked to a shelf. He picked up the phone.
‘Yeah, he went out. He’ll be back though.’ The man glanced round at Stefan. When he spoke again he spoke in German. ‘We picked up the guy outside the Empire State. Phelan said he needed the shit kicking out of him.’
The door opened and Aaron Phelan entered. The Bund man put down the phone. It wasn’t hurried or awkward, but the way he looked at the NYPD man was somehow different now. He walked back to the table and sat down.
‘Not giving you any trouble?’ said Aaron Phelan cheerfully.
‘He hasn’t said a word.’
Phelan took a step forward and stared at Stefan, half smiling. The NYPD captain took a .38 Colt Police Positive from his pocket and held it up.
‘Thanks for letting us have it back.’ He rubbed the side of his head.
He walked up and down slowly. He seemed unaware of the two men at the table. They watched like an audience not sure they’re at the right play.
‘I knew it was the gun we’d given you, so I knew you were the one with them, with Mrs Carroll and her sister, I couldn’t work it out. Why would you be helping them? How did you even know them? But you’d met the sister. I saw you with her on Patrick’s Day. It didn’t make sense, but there was something. Had to be. It nagged me all the way to New York.’
He looked at the gun again then put it back in his pocket.
‘I helped them, that’s all,’ said Stefan. There was no point denying that. ‘It was the sister who pulled me in, Kate. I guess it was pretty stupid.’
‘She’s a looker. You’re right about that,’ smiled the policeman.
‘She got me hooked,’ shrugged Stefan. ‘It got out of hand.’
‘Thinking with your cock, that’s an Irishman for you.’
Phelan looked round at the German Americans and laughed. They smiled uneasily. Stefan could see they had no idea what the captain was talking about. He turned his eyes back to Aaron Phelan. He didn’t know where this was going but he knew what the policeman was capable of. He knew Jimmy Palmer had died after a conversation with him, maybe a conversation like this. But surely the NYPD man only knew about Niamh and Kate. He couldn’t know what Stefan had heard in the cellar under Dominic Carroll’s house at Mexico Bay. He couldn’t know Niamh had provided the key to John Cavendish’s IRA dispatches. He couldn’t make that leap. Surely all he wanted to know was where Niamh Carroll was.
‘So where are they, Sergeant Gillespie?’
Stefan felt a sense of relief; the truth made for easy answers.
‘On their way home to Ireland.’
‘How?’
‘A boat, what do you think? Why can’t you leave it at that?’
‘And the sister sorted that out?’
‘That’s it. She just needed help getting out of New York. There was a plan. I don’t know what went wrong. She came to me with a sob story –’
There was no need for him to say he knew who Jimmy Palmer was. His part came with the journey to Mexico Bay. It was no more than that.
‘How did you get up to the lake? There was no car?’
‘We paid a couple of guys with a fish truck. From Fulton Market.’
It was an unlikely reply, but it sounded unlikely enough to be true. If Aaron Phelan wanted to take that any further Stefan wished him the best of luck in a market run by Longie Zwillman’s associates. Stefan was starting to breathe more easily. It was all about Niamh. Phelan knew nothing about the rest of it. He could know nothing about how Stefan had really got involved.
‘Is it such a bad thing? Whatever’s wrong with Mrs Carroll, her sister wanted her home. I shouldn’t have got involved, but maybe it’s for the best.’
The shrug that accompanied the words wasn’t reciprocated.
‘The sister couldn’t have got her out without you.’
‘I should have walked away. But does Mr Carroll really want his wife locked up for the rest of her life? So she disappears? So he’s shot of her.’
‘I think that’s Mr Carroll’s business, not some culchie gobshite’s. But how did you manage it so? You didn’t row the fucking boat across Ontario.’
‘Kate had plenty of money to pay her way,’ said Stefan. ‘I told you, I helped them get out of the city. She’d arranged for a boat to come over and pick us up. She phoned the guy before we set off. She’d been working it out for a long time, ever since she got to New York. I left them in Montreal. She said that was the end of it as far as I was concerned. The bitch dumped me.’
Stefan tried a man-of-the-world smile; it wasn’t reciprocated either.
‘What about the Free State soldier, John Cavendish?’
This was the conversation Stefan Gillespie didn’t want. He didn’t know whether the NYPD man had just been waiting to ask that question because he knew more all the time, or whether he was only fishing.
‘What’s he got to do with it?’
‘You knew him.’
‘I can hardly say I knew him. I met him at Mr Carroll’s party, on Patrick’s Day. We didn’t have very long to get acquainted, as you know.’
‘You didn’t know him better than that?’
‘No, but I know a lot more about him now. I’ve been sitting at Centre Street with your brother reading the reports on the investigation into his death, as requested by the consul general. Yes, I should’ve stuck to that.’
‘I think Kate O’Donnell was pretty friendly with Captain Cavendish,’ said Phelan slowly. ‘They were working together, over at the World’s Fair.’
‘I wasn’t very interested in who else she was friendly with, Captain,’ said Stefan. ‘I was interested in how friendly I could get her to be with me.’
‘You think that was all he did, Sergeant – Mr Cavendish?’
‘All he did what?’
‘Someone told me he was in Military Intelligence at one time.’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘A Free State soldier and a Free State detective would have a lot in common, the way things are in Ireland now, with de Valera cracking down on the real Republicans. If he was G2, maybe you’re in Special Branch.’
‘You know who I am. You know why I came to New York.’
‘You tell a good tale, Sergeant,’ replied Phelan. ‘And it seems to hang together. I know you’re not Special Branch. I know you really are a sergeant in Baltinglass. Mr Carroll wanted you checked out. But you still worry me. The IRA never really got anything on Cavendish, but there were things going on, there was information going out somewhere, and he was in it somewhere. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but that’s the impression I’ve got. Now, out of nowhere, there are things that have gone wrong, very wrong.’
‘So a woman gets out of a nut house and goes home to her family?’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’
‘Then you’ve lost me, Captain.’
Aaron Phelan looked at Stefan Gillespie for a long moment.
‘Mr Carroll is still pretty pissed about his wife.’
‘You’ve told me.’
‘That would be enough,’ continued the NYPD man. ‘It would be enough to teach someone a very serious lesson. Mr Carroll doesn’t get involved in that sort of thing. I deal with all that for him. I make my own decisions. He doesn’t like to know. Why should he? I could almost have decided to let it go, even though I’m pretty pissed too. You made me look like a real jerk, because he had to know some of it. He had to know she’d left the country. I don’t like being humiliated like that, Sergeant. But when I put being pissed together with, well, other things nagging me –’
He took the gun out of his pocket again.
Stefan tensed himself; he could do nothing. And it was unexpected. Whatever his fears outside the Empire State Building, he had felt them ease away as Aaron Phelan’s words had focused so much on Niamh Carroll. That was all the NYPD man really knew. What he hadn’t understood was what he had done to Aaron Phelan in the only eyes that mattered to him, Dominic Carroll’s.
The two German Americans stood up. They didn’t like this at all now.
‘Look, Mr Phelan, a bit of roughing up –’
‘Don’t worry, boys. I told you, we’re doing Mr Carroll a favour.’
‘All you said –’
‘All you need to do is clear up the mess!’ snapped Phelan.
Suddenly the door opened. Aaron Phelan spun round, surprised and irritated. But he knew the man who walked in. And so did Stefan Gillespie. It was the Abwehr man he had met in Central Park, Rudolf Katzmann. It was the man he thought he had glimpsed in a mirror at the Pennsylvania only two hours earlier, watching him. Now he knew he had been right.
‘It’s Captain Phelan, isn’t it? We have met before.’
‘I work for Mr Carroll.’
‘Of course,’ smiled the intelligence officer. ‘What is this?’
‘There’s a problem to attend to here, Mr Katzmann, that’s all. It’s not your problem though. If you’ve got some interest in it, then get on to Paul Eisterholz. I spoke to him about it on the phone yesterday and he cleared it. You know these things need doing sometimes. It’s not German business.’
‘I see,’ said Katzmann softly. ‘He’s an informer?’
‘It’s close enough.’
‘An IRA informer?’
‘It’s between me and Paul, Herr Katzmann. These are Paul’s men.’
Phelan was impatient now; he jerked his head at the two Bund men.
‘Paul is no longer here,’ said Rudolf Katzmann. ‘He has no men.’
‘I spoke to him yesterday.’ The captain looked at the two German Americans. ‘Tell this guy to fuck off. You don’t take orders from him.’
‘They do now,’ smiled the Abwehr man. ‘There has been, well, let’s say a change of management. Paul has disappeared. Unfortunately no one knows where he is, but he was dabbling in things that were really beyond his competence. Sometimes there is a price to pay for that. I don’t know enough about the IRA to know whether that’s true of you and Mr Carroll, but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. So, I really think you need to tell me why you’ve brought Mr Gillespie here, and what you intend to do with him.’
‘You know who he is?’
‘As a matter of fact I do.’
‘Well, he’s fucked off Mr Carroll, and maybe more –’
‘So you’re going to shoot him.’
‘I think you want to go a bit higher up before you start throwing your weight about. You need to talk to Mr Carroll and Seán Russell. You might want to remember that Mr Carroll was in Berlin two weeks ago. If you don’t want to watch, go outside. I can get rid of the body without anybody’s help.’
Aaron Phelan turned to Stefan, holding out the gun.
‘He’s a loose end. You’ll have to trust me, Mr Katzmann.’
‘All right, Captain,’ shrugged Katzmann. ‘It’s your decision –’
Stefan flung himself off the chair at Phelan. His hands were still cuffed. But it was all he could do. As he moved he heard the explosion that filled the room. His head hit Aaron Phelan. For a moment he didn’t know that it had actually hit Aaron Phelan’s dead body. The NYPD man was a bloodied sack of potatoes. Stefan was on the ground next to him. He felt nothing. Surely Phelan couldn’t have missed him at that range? He was staring into the policeman’s open eyes. But they were the eyes of a dead man. There was blood trickling from his mouth. He started to get up. Katzmann was standing over the body with a gun, looking down.
‘Unfortunately, you are the loose end, Captain Phelan. I wouldn’t necessarily feel obliged to act on that, but you don’t seem to know when to leave well enough alone.’ His eyes moved to Stefan as he put the gun back into his pocket. ‘Is that an Irish trait, Sergeant Gillespie? I rather think so.’
Stefan said nothing. The Abwehr man turned to the two American Bund men. He spoke to them in German, sharply. They stood to attention.
‘Get rid of the body. The river will do. The IRA need know nothing. But I don’t think he has to disappear as completely as Paul Eisterholz. I know the Irish like a good funeral. I wouldn’t want to deprive him of that.’
Without a word the two men walked across to Captain Aaron Phelan’s body. One of them reached into his pocket; he handed Katzmann a small key. Katzmann stepped over the dead man and undid Stefan’s handcuffs.
‘You’ll probably want to get back to your hotel and pack, Sergeant.’
Stefan sat beside Katzmann as the German’s crossed into 7th Avenue from the park. He glanced left at the tower of the Hampshire House along 59th Street.
‘It seems you took over from John Cavendish after all, Mr Gillespie.’
‘I don’t think I did, Herr Katzmann. It was about a woman who didn’t get on with her husband, and another woman I liked. That’s it. I don’t know what else Captain Phelan had in his head. All I know is I couldn’t get it out.’
‘We should probably leave it at that then, Sergeant. You won’t know anything about a bomb that was planted at the World’s Fair today, in the British Pavilion. In anticipation of King George’s imminent visit it seems.’
‘I heard about it when I was at Police Headquarters earlier today. And I heard they’d found it, on the radio. Two cops were killed, isn’t that right?’
‘No one knows who did it, of course,’ said the Abwehr man.
‘I guess between the FBI and the NYPD they’ll find out.’
‘I very much doubt it.’
‘You very much doubt it or you hope they won’t?’
‘It was certainly nothing to do with the Abwehr. My superiors would not be altogether enthusiastic about replacing the present English king with a man who is quite as captivated by our Fuehrer as the Duke of Windsor. There will be a war, as any fool knows. When it comes we fully intend to defeat Britain, and we will, as any fool knows too, even American fools, with the exception of the biggest fool of all, President Roosevelt. But defeating Britain and turning it into a Hitler-worshipping satellite of our Thousand Year Reich are two very different things. One day Germany may have to get rid of Hitler and the Nazis, and we may want the world to resume something more like normal service. When that day comes it will be useful if the rest of the world still exists. Not that any of those thoughts are mine. I am as loyal to the Fuehrer as any German alive.’
‘I hope more Germans are as loyal as you, Herr Katzmann.’
The Abwehr man laughed; he drove on for a moment saying nothing.
‘I don’t know whether Captain Cavendish knew about the bomb,’ continued Katzmann, ‘but he did know something was going to happen. And he knew it involved, well, shall we call them rogue elements. I don’t know whether rogue elements applies to the IRA, who seem to be under the impression that a king calling himself Edward VIII would hardly be on the throne five minutes before handing the island of Ireland over to them in its entirety. However, it certainly applies to anyone who thought killing the English king was in Germany’s interests. One way or another Captain Cavendish had decided I was probably worth talking to. Whatever he knew about bombs, he didn’t believe the Abwehr would have countenanced it.’
‘He was going to tell you something?’ said Stefan.
‘Tell me what? What you know nothing about, Sergeant?’
‘Something like that, Herr Katzmann.’
‘He spoke to me that night at the Hampshire House, St Patrick’s Day. I had suggested we talk before, but he had been, well, standoffish, let’s say. In our line of work you can be sure anyone in the same line who suggests a conversation is looking for more than he intends to give. As of course I was. He asked me to meet him that evening, on one of the empty floors. Naturally it wouldn’t have been good for either of us to be seen talking to each other.’
Stefan realised what the German was telling him. It wasn’t about a bomb or an IRA and American Bund assassination, it was about Cavendish.
‘You were there.’ It was all he said.
‘Yes.’
‘You know who killed him?’
‘I walked up the stairs. I was a little late. When I got there I could hear voices, angry voices, and sounds I recognised. I didn’t go much further, but I saw enough. It was a fight, well, not a fight. It was dark, but I could see John Cavendish was being held and he was being hit. There were four or five men, from the team that had been playing some game. The hurlers, isn’t that the word? I’d seen them at the party, drunk from the start.’
‘And you walked away?’
‘Any public contact of that sort would have embarrassed us both.’
‘Maybe John would have preferred being embarrassed to being dead.’
‘My job doesn’t offer much in the Good Samaritan line. Obviously I had no idea at all how it would end. If I had I would have found a way to mention it to somebody. There were enough policemen there. I’m sorry, that’s all I can say. In our profession it doesn’t do to get into awkward situations. How he got into a scrap with a bunch of drunken ball players –’
‘They followed him up there,’ said Stefan simply.
‘Do you know something about it?’
‘I know something. I can’t make any sense of it though. It seems –’
He shook his head. He remembered the party. He remembered the anger in the face of the hurler who had spoken to John Cavendish. He remembered the look on the captain’s face too. He had felt the darkness, even though he had no idea what it was about. And he still had no idea, though he now knew it had cost the G2 man his life.
He didn’t believe Rudolf Katzmann was the only person who knew something though. Someone in the NYPD did. He didn’t know how high it went; he didn’t know how many detectives knew. But the runaround he had been given was all about covering up what happened. There was no unpicking that now, at least not in New York. Katzmann would not be walking into Centre Street to make a statement. But it wasn’t over; he owed John Cavendish more than that. He was taking what he knew back to Ireland. The people who killed the intelligence officer didn’t have a police force to cover up for them there.
In the Statler Bar at the Pennsylvania Stefan Gillespie bought a bottle of whiskey. He took it up to his room. He put it down on the desk and walked into the bathroom to get a glass. He found himself shaking. He went to the sink and stared into the mirror. Suddenly he threw up. The telephone was ringing. He splashed his face with water and went back to the bedroom.
‘This is Roland Geoghegan, from the consulate.’
‘And how’s it going, Roland?’ he said, coughing.
‘The consul general wants to speak to you.’
‘I’m grand too, Roland.’
‘Mr McCauley would like to speak to you now. If you could –’
‘Are you sure?’ interrupted Stefan.
‘What do you mean, am I sure?’ said the third secretary shortly.
‘On the Owen Harris front I’m hoping to get him on a plane tomorrow without him getting killed in an NYPD cell or giving an interview on what’s funny about killing your mammy. As for the rest, tell Mr McCauley he’ll need to decide how much he wants to know, on a variety of subjects relating to dead intelligence officers, Clan na Gael presidents, bombs in World’s Fair pavilions, the IRA and German Intelligence, and what the NYPD never got round to telling anybody about the Cork hurling team. He won’t want to know everything. He might not want to know anything. But without your diplomatic training, Roland, I’m too fucked to guess what bits to leave out.’
‘Just get a cab to the consulate, Sergeant!’
‘Tell him to come here,’ said Stefan.
‘What?’
‘You heard me, you gobshite. I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Have you been drinking, Gillespie?’
‘No, Geoghegan, but by the time he gets here I’ll be well on!’
He slammed the phone down and picked up the bottle of Jameson.