Obit (36 page)

Sandra smiled in spite of herself. “Why indeed?”

“Your father. This is the man who was shot at a family wedding, am I right?” Reg asked.

“He’s ‘a man’ who was shot at a family wedding. I’m sure it happens all the time.”

Not among our sort,
Reg refrained from saying. But his expression said it clearly.

Brennan plopped down heavily on the pale yellow chesterfield, causing the clipboard woman to jolt upwards, then fall over against his shoulder. She jerked away and clung to the arm of the couch. He gave her a loopy smile.

“Let us carry on, shall we?” Sandra said. “Excuse me for a moment while I pour the coffee.”

The clipboard woman consulted her notes. “I have our letter to the gallery in Florence. And I had a friend translate it into Italian; I thought that might be a nice touch, posing the request in the curator’s mother tongue. Now apparently the curator, Signor Falda, is reluctant to lend us the artist’s entire oeuvre from that period, but I think we should insist. That was our starting position, and I felt we had the agreement of the government person I spoke to.”

“Is this the Uffizi you’re talking about?” Brennan inquired.

She favoured him with a condescending smile. “The Uffizi is the most famous gallery in Florence but it’s not the only one. We are dealing with the National Museum.”

“Right. The Museo Nazionale in the old Bargello. You’re looking for sculpture, is it? Ceramics, that sort of thing? I don’t know the curator but you may want to call Luca Carracci.”

“Really.”

“Really.”

“His name again . . .”

“Give me your pen and I’ll write it out for you.” He leaned over, she drew back, but she shoved the pen and the clipboard into his hands.

He scribbled at the top of the page. “This is his name, this is where he works.” He peered at the letter. “What’s this now? No, no, you can’t say that. It means ‘what we want is.’ That would sound rude and pushy to an Italian. You need the conditional tense there. We’ll change it to
‘vorremmo avere,’
which is ‘we would like to have.’ And here, where you say you’re going to give the ministry an assurance of this or that. It would be less awkward if you changed the indirect pronoun
gli
to
glie
and combine it with the direct-object pronoun
lo
to get
glielo
. Then you should stick it on the end of the verb, so you have
darglielo.
That’s better. And, oh no, here’s something that’s not spelled right . . .”

He went through the entire letter, rewriting it from top to bottom. Was the man drunk at all? Reg stared at him, baffled. Unseen by Brennan, Sandra peered in from the dining room. Reg caught her eye and, with a terse nod, she gave him the news: whatever the sozzled Paddy writes will be correct. She then called out that the coffee was ready. “I hope you’ll be having some, Brennan.”

“No, don’t trouble yourself, Mavourneen. Young Collins here hasn’t yet enjoyed a pint over at P.J. Clarke’s; we’ll be headin’ in that direction now.”

Sandra saw us to the door. She took Brennan’s left hand in her right; he didn’t move. “Be sure to look me up next time you’re in the city, Brennan.”

“I will.”

Each gave the other a long, long look before he turned and walked away.

He lit up a smoke when we got out to the street. “Well, there’s an end to a pathetic twenty-five year delusion on my part.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll be putting her out of my mind for good. And she’ll be happy to be rid of a drunken Irish priest. No loss for her there.”

She knew damn well he wasn’t as drunk as he appeared to be; she’d seen him with the letter. So I persisted: “She said she wants to see you
next time you’re in New York.”

“She was lying.”

“Well, you told her you’d look her up.”

“I was lying.”

“But . . .”

He gave me a pitying look. “You have a lot to learn about the world, my lad.”

Chapter 11

Confiteor Deo omnipotenti . . . et tibi Pater,
quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, et opere,
mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

I confess to Almighty God . . . and to you, Father,
that I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed,
through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.

— Confiteor, the Mass

April 2, 1991

I got a call the next afternoon from a rough-voiced man who said he was Lieutenant O’Brien and he was in McQuaid’s bar on Eleventh Avenue if I wanted to meet him for a drink. I left the hotel and walked west and down. A wind had come up and it blew sheets of rain into my face. I was soaked by the time I got there. McQuaid’s Public House was a small corner brick building with an awning over the door and shamrocks painted on the outside wall.

Seamus “Shammy” O’Brien was in his late sixties, long retired. He was several inches over six feet and must have weighed in at two-fifty. He sported an iron-grey crewcut, and had the face of a fighter who had taken a good many hits in the ring. Delivered a good many too, I suspected. There wasn’t a drop of rain on him; he’d been here awhile.

“Lieutenant O’Brien, thanks for seeing me. I thought you lived in Brooklyn.”

“Spent all my working life over there, but I grew up here in Hell’s
Kitchen. Place like this, it calls you back.” He gave a snort of laughter, then signalled for the bartender. “What are you drinking?”

“A Guinness would be good.”

“Two pints, Denny. So, what can I do for you?”

“I’m interested in some of the gun-running that was going on in the 1950s. Over on the other side of the river.”

“Oh yeah? What got you interested in that?”

The hapless Desmonds were my cover story. I had no intention of linking Declan’s name with the waterfront heist. “I’m a friend of the Desmond family. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“A lot of Desmonds around.”

“These people are trying to find out what happened to their father. Big boozer. Drifted off and the family lost touch. The daughter told me something happened on the waterfront when he was a port watchman.”

“A lot of stuff happened on the waterfront.”

“I hear you. This was in 1952, an incident on Pier One, when some guns were stolen. Desmond was supposed to have been on duty at the time.”

“He wasn’t. The watchman on duty was an Italian guy. I don’t remember his name.”

“Rinaldi. I saw it in the news clippings. Which is where I got your name. So Rinaldi was on duty, and he’s the one who got clobbered. Was there any mention of a Desmond?”

“Not that I can recall.”

“That’s good news, I guess, but I was hoping to get more information about this Desmond. The watchman position was the last work the family knew he had.”

So the Desmonds were in luck, even if they didn’t know it: the police did not associate his name with the crime. But since all this was just my cover for contacting O’Brien, I had better move on.

“Your beat was the waterfront, was it, Lieutenant?”

“That was a good part of my career, yeah.”

“You must have come across some real characters.”

“Yeah, you could say that. Organized crime makes for some interesting characters. The Cosa Nostra kept me busy in those days. Never a dull moment.”

“How about the Irish Mob? How well-organized would they have been? I’m thinking about code books, or —”

“Organized?
They’re Irish!” He raised his pint and wiggled it; a gold Claddagh ring glimmered on his right hand. “Organized would not be the word. Code books? I doubt it!” He shook his head.

“The Desmond woman mentioned a name, but I couldn’t find out anything about him. Cathal Murphy. Ever hear of him?” O’Brien shook his head. “He also went by the name Fagan, she thought.”

“Fagan, you say?” I had his attention now.

“Yes. I don’t know why he had two names.”

“I do, if it’s Charlie Fagan you’re talking about. He was running stolen guns out of here for years. Or so we suspected. I never knew him as Murphy. He stayed in a little rathole in Williamsburg. Lived like a monk. The Irish Republican movement was part of his religion. He was good, I’ll say that for him. Quite the operative. We could never catch him meeting with anybody in the gun racket. We figured he was using a go-between, a courier, to take the money to the suppliers. But we never saw it happening. We never saw him socializing. He worked in a manufacturing plant, came off shift and went home. We kept an eye on the plant for a while but, as far as we could make out, he didn’t have any Mick contacts there. He spent the occasional evening in a pub but all he ever drank was soda, and he didn’t have any regular pals.”

“How did you know he was moving stolen guns if you never caught him at it?”

“Well, I shouldn’ta said ‘never.’ We nailed him once. We were following an Irishman who we knew had flown over from the old country specifically to set up an arms network. This guy met with Fagan. But even then we could only get him for illegal possession of firearms. We couldn’t pin anything on the guy from Ireland. Fagan copped a plea, did his time like a man, didn’t give anybody up. He wasn’t inside very long.”

“When was that?”

“Early fifties. Fagan must have become a lot more sophisticated after his experience in the clink. We believed he was still at it for a long time after that, but we never had enough evidence to charge him.”

“When you say he lived like a monk, how do you mean?”

“Lived alone in this one-room dive near the waterfront.”

“Alone?”

“Yeah, he wasn’t married. I had a warrant to search his place one time. A little cot of a bed and a hot plate to cook on. Didn’t bother to hide his inclinations: the only reading material was Irish history, Irish saints and church stuff. Missals, holy cards, that kind of thing. The guy went to Mass every day of his life, far as I know. We had guys tail him into Saint Bridey’s a few times but he was just praying and attending Mass; he wasn’t hiding or slipping out the back door.”

So Cathal had kept two apartments, one of his own and one for Nessie. Maybe he couldn’t afford to drink!

“What kind of job did Fagan have? Manufacturing, you said?”

“Yeah. He spent his workday in the warehouse, shipping and receiving. The outfit made aviation parts or something. Desailes Inc.”

Picturing the arms smuggler in Mass every day reminded me of a detail Patrick had dug up about Cathal Murphy’s funeral. “Did you attend his funeral?”

“What?”

“Fagan’s funeral. You weren’t among the mourners, were you?”

“Not fucking likely. I didn’t know he croaked.”

So O’Brien wasn’t the lone man at the back of the church.

“One other thing, Lieutenant. What about women?”

“We never saw him squiring any dames around town. He paid a lot of visits to this crippled girl. Relative of some kind. But, like I say, a real monkish type.”

“So. Not the type to follow women around.”

“Where did that come from?”

“Just something that came up,” I said, unconvincingly.

“I don’t know what you’re driving at. But if you’re talking about Fagan following somebody and he was spotted, it’s because he wanted to be seen. Otherwise, nobody would ever have known he was there.”

†

It was time to scoot up to Patrick Burke’s office. It was in a red-brick Victorian row house on the Upper West Side, with a bow window and a flower box. Patrick arrived at the same time I did, and we entered his waiting room.

“Is my sister here yet?” he asked his secretary.

“Not yet. There are a few telephone messages for you.” She handed him a stack of pink slips. “And here’s another one: ‘Tell Doctor Burke he’s a fraud and a quack and I have no intention of putting myself in his hands. T.’ Can’t win ’em all I guess, Doctor.”

“That would be my brother Terry. Long years of training and experience lead me to the conclusion that he will not be participating in our session today.”

Shit.
“That’s too bad,” I said.

“Think about it, Monty. Would you really like to see an airline pilot go into a hypnotic trance in response to monotonous sights and sounds? Would you ever fly again?”

“You’ve got a point there.”

“We’ll get what we can out of —”

“Hi, Paddy! Put me under, put me out, put me down, I don’t care. I’ve had the most aggravating day. Oh, hi, Monty! I’d give you a big hello kiss but not under the watchful eyes of Doctor Freud here. He probably took note of whether your pupils dilated at the sight of me. Did they?” she demanded of her brother.

“No, I didn’t see anything get bigger.”

She dropped a heavy handbag on the floor and collapsed in a chair.

“How are you, Bridey?” I asked her.

“Don’t ask. How many kids have you got?”

“Two.”

“Don’t have any more.”

“Not much chance of that.”

“All right, sweetheart,” her brother said, “I explained to you on the phone what we’re going to do here. Would you like anything before we start? Tea? A glass of water?” She shook her head. “Just make yourself comfortable and I’m going to help you relax.”

She closed her eyes. Patrick began to talk to her in a soothing voice. A couple of times her eyes opened, and she looked over at me. Her brother caught on and turned towards me. I was a distraction.

“I’ll wait outside, Pat,” I said and left the office. Sooner than I would have expected, his secretary came out and beckoned me inside. Patrick motioned for me to sit behind Bridey’s chair, and he got her started on her recollections of the man who had followed her mother decades before.

“Me and Terry have money to go to Zuckerman’s for a treat. We’re s’posed to bring something back for everybody.”

“How old are you now, Bridey?” Pat asked her.

“I’m seven! There’s that man again! He’s on our street. Now he’s moving away. We’re following him to the bus stop. He can’t see us hiding behind the tree. Me and Terry are getting on the bus. Everybody thinks this lady with the shopping bags is our mother. When we get home we’re going to tell all about this man and where he lives. Mam will give us chocolate milk. Fran will be jealous. The man’s not even looking at us. Boo! No, we don’t want him to know. He’s staring out the window. We’re going a long ways from home. Terry’s pointing out everything he sees. I tell him to shut up. We’re secret agents! Oh, the man is getting off here. Us, too. He’s crossing the street. Red light! We can’t go. But we keep watching. Now we go. Long walk. The gardens! Bren and Molly took us here before. Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Terry says, reading the sign. Shut up, Terry. We sneak in behind some people with a bunch of cameras around their necks. We should have brought Paddy’s camera. It’s beautiful in the garden, with all the trees and flowers. Good places to hide! There he goes. Now he’s sitting on a bench, reading the paper.