The City of Strangers (38 page)

He walked out on to 7
^th
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 5
^th
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 34
^th
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.

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 5
^th
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 5
^th
Avenue evening traffic. It drove two blocks south and into East 32
^nd
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.’