Mike met Danny Doyle at dusk on North Avenue Beach, at the end of the breakwater. The Gold Coast stretched behind them. In the clouds to the south they could just make out the orange glow of the steel mills in Gary. The wind was, as usual, cruel.
Danny had come in civilian clothes; he wore an overcoat, a cloth cap, and gloves, his face and neck swaddled in a thick blue muffler.
Mike had been sitting on the last bench, looking at the Lake. He rose as Doyle approached, and noticed that Doyle had so correctly interpreted the invitation as to have come out of uniform.
“Yeah, fine,” Doyle said, “and let’s walk, or we’ll freeze to death.”
They began to walk down the breakwater and back toward the beach.
“You got,” Doyle said, “a romantic streak, which, being neither a Jew nor an Irishman, I got to say has to come from your nurse dropped you on your head out of the cradle.” Then, having run out of small talk, he stopped.
“I want to know about the IRA,” Mike said.
“Well, Jesus, Mary, yes, and Joseph,” Doyle said, “you don’t want a lot.”
They kept on walking.
“Lot of people were in France,” Doyle said. “You could ask some other one of them, other than me.”
“Tell me who to ask,” Mike said.
Doyle shook his head in disgust.
“My mother,” he said, “I was growing up? She told me two things: ‘Whatever you have to do? Never get a good girl in trouble.’” He turned his back to the wind and lit a cigarette. “And ‘Never trust a Protestant.’”
He turned to Mike.
“The best way I can help you,” he said, “and I will help you, and, I swear to you, this is a gift: we never had this conversation.”
Doyle walked away, down into the underpass to Lake Shore Drive.
Sir William Frederick, the secretary at the British consulate regretted, was in Chicago only for a short stay, and would be unavailable for interviews, “as his time was not his own.”
Mike hung up the phone. He walked down to the Newspaper Morgue and pulled the files on Sir William. Then, after what he felt was a shamefully short debate, he went home and affixed to his lapel the rosettes of the Croix de Guerre and the British Distinguished Flying Cross.
The desk clerk at the Palmer House knew Mike, and tipped him the room number. Mike knocked on the door. He was admitted into the first five feet of the suite’s anteroom by a bodyguard. A well-bred fellow at a desk looked up annoyed and said, “What is it?” in the poshest, most dismissive accent Mike had ever heard.
His eyes went to the medal rosettes on Mike’s chest, and he rose, coming, unconsciously, to a modified attention.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “May I help you?”
“My name is Captain Hodge,” Mike said. “I would like three minutes with Sir William.” He passed the man a card.
“Could you tell me the nature of your inquiries?” the man said.
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” Mike said.
The secretary excused himself into the next room. Mike and the bodyguard each looked at nothing. Half a minute later Mike was passed into the inner room.
The sitting room held a fireplace displaying neat birch logs, a white baby grand piano, and a large, ornate desk. The bodyguard stood against the wall, halfway between Mike and Sir William.
Sir William rose from the desk, still looking at the card. He put the card down and removed his spectacles. He wore a business suit, and, in its lapel, the single-wing emblem of the Royal Flying Corps.
“Captain Hodge,” he said.
“Once,” Mike said.
“No, you don’t actually keep the rank over here, do you?”
“Regular army, they might; though they usually don’t under colonel. On retirement. Mere captain’s nothing to brag about.”
“Well, no, but one does. You introduced yourself as ‘Captain,’” Sir William said. He indicated, with the most deniable of questioning looks, Mike’s rosettes.
“Yeah, I’m ashamed of myself,” Mike said.
“Because they’re false?” Sir William said.
“No. They’re mine,” Mike said, “but my exploiting them is an insult to the glorious dead who fell to ensure, for us all, the future.”
“Would you like a drink?” Sir William said.
The bodyguard poured the whiskey. Sir William and Mike settled into their seats before the fire, and Mike was pleased to see him utilize the apparent conclusion of his interrogation to ask the telling questions.
“What did you see of it, whom did you fly with, who pinned the medals on” were easy, beautifully thrown away, and answered as if casual small talk between two acquaintances. And Mike was growing pleased that, after what was, in effect, the grilling, the bodyguard left the room to request the vetting of Mike’s story. Nothing would be done until someone had vouched for him, so Mike spent the time chatting Sir William up.
“I think that you flew with the R.F.C.,” Mike ventured, in imitation of a man who had done no research.
“Oh, what? I suppose I did,” Sir William said, in his part of the charade, and they both laughed.
The phone rang. Sir William answered it. “Yes?” he said. He listened for a moment, then said, “Thank you,” and hung up.
“Captain Hodge,” he said. “Captain Hodge. Someone, it seems, has vouched for a Captain Hodge.”
“That would be me,” Mike said.
“Who was your squadron commander, in France?”
“Hubert Devere,” Mike said.
“Do you recall his wife’s name?”
“He didn’t care for women,” Mike said.
Sir William nodded, and refilled their glasses.
“How might I help you?” he said.
“I want to know about the IRA,” Mike said.
Sir William took Mike to lunch at the Drake Hotel. The restaurant looked out over East Lake Shore Drive.
“My real war was South Africa,” Sir William said. “It perhaps is rougher here.”
“At least the territories are defined,” Mike said. “I understand over there was a bunch of hide-and-seek.”
“No way to fight a war,” Sir William said, “save that it was their way, and they won.”
“Well, perhaps one could learn from them,” Mike said.
“One could,” Sir William said. “One has. The Irish have. Mow down a bunch of innocents, throw a bomb, ‘o’er the Border and awae, wi’ Jock O’Hazeldean.’”
“What can be done about it?” Mike said.
Sir William nodded. “The Irish? You can do this,” he said. “Have a drink, and thank the Lord it’s not your fight.”
“It’s your fight,” Mike said.
“Yes.”
“What will come of it?”
“In truth?”
“Yes.”
“In truth? It will bring the Empire down.” He shrugged.
“Now,” he said, “your wars here, your gang wars, mimic, interestingly, the border squabbles of Europe. Imported, whole, from Sicily, as I am told; and, as I know to be the case, from Ireland.”
“What can we do about it?” Mike said.
“Here,” Sir William said, “the clan fights within itself, for place and wealth; and, as a clan, against the Other, for territory.
“Each fights, additionally, against what the learned might call the host mechanism.”
“The dominant culture,” Mike suggested.
“Perhaps,” Sir William said, “save, what does it dominate? It is dominated, by those groups which can fight and disband. The borderers. Like our friend Piet in South Africa, the various gangs, here, can pick their fights. We have only the choice of accepting or rejecting each particular battle.”
“Napoléon said, ‘Who dictates the terms of the battle, dictates the terms of the peace,’” Mike said.
“Indeed he did,” Sir William said. “And, like the rest of mankind, he did not take his own advice; and his grand army died in the snows of Russia.”
“And here?” Mike said.
“Here, the snows are the riches of your merchant city. Which will tempt, and convince the immigrants that the easier way to power is that indigenous to the locale. In South Africa, our friend Piet hid behind rocks and potted us, just as he shot the gazelle.
“Your immigrants here steal and kill; they have the local franchise for sin, and they sell liquor and drugs and women, on license from City Hall. Reformers might call it kickbacks or bribes but it is, finally, merely a license.
“The politicians who oppose them, those who cannot be bribed, if such there be, are, currently, killed. In time, and one may, perhaps, see it already, the Irish, and the Italians, will ask: why not become the politicians? And they will.
“They, then, as one soldier to another, will have taught themselves the foremost lesson: study the ground. Then they will not only possess the sin franchise, but every other fungible good, service, and permission.”
“What will you do with the IRA?” Mike said.
“Currently, currently, all we can do is kill them. If and when we find them.”
“Can you prevent them?”
Sir William shook his head. “We can interdict their arms, now and then. They’ll go elsewhere, of course, but their arm of choice is, currently, yours . . .”
The waiter came by with the coffeepot.
“Yes, I think so,” Sir William said. “You?”
Mike said yes. The waiter poured the coffee and left.
“. . . the tommy gun . . . ,” Sir William said.
“And they buy them here?” Mike said.
“They can’t buy them here,” Sir William said, “as there is an arms embargo. They steal them here.”
“From whom?” Mike said.
“From your army.”
“I’m looking for an Irishman who may be in the IRA,” Mike said.
“Should you come across him, I’d hope you’ll tell me,” Sir William said.
“Can you help me?”
“I would if I could,” Sir William said. “Which isn’t quite true, and, as one soldier to another, I owe you the truth. And it pains me to refuse you. I perhaps could give you a lead, but it would be a violation of my oath of office. The IRA are involved in the theft, from your armories, of these guns. They are here. I would advise you to steer clear of them. They will not hesitate to kill you. They’ll kill anyone.”
Sir William patted his lips with the napkin and rose. “Well,” he said. “Now: here’s a tip, however, f’I can do you a good turn.”
The good turn concerned the missing automobiles. The coach-built North Shore touring cars lifted, Sir William said, and driven to East Chicago. They were loaded on freighters, and traveled up through the Sault Ste. Marie locks, the St. Lawrence, and trans-ocean to be sold in Europe, mainly in France.
A British contingent of “observers” was due to raid the next outgoing freighter, the first of the coming month. The actual raid and subsequent arrests being conducted by the Washington Bureau of Investigation.
The two men rose and walked across the restaurant.
“Why would you care who’s stealing some cars?” Mike said.
“Oh, no. We don’t,” Sir William said. “But it does get us onto the docks. Which, we have friends who tell us, are the same docks from which our Irish friends are shipping their guns.”