The City of Strangers (17 page)

‘Well, you’ve certainly seen some of New York now.’

‘Ah, yes, there won’t be many tourists who can say they’ve woken up in the drunk tank, Sergeant. I mean any fool can take the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building and have his picture taken. But all this!’ He gestured round the drab room, laughing. ‘If my mother could see me now!’

He stopped abruptly. Stefan could see that he had simply forgotten that she was dead. He knew you could do that. He knew how even when the death of someone you loved filled your head and left room for nothing else, no other thought, no other feeling, you could still, for a moment, just forget.

‘Poor old Medea,’ said the would-be actor quietly.

Stefan looked at him. He knew enough about Greek mythology to know that Medea was the wife of Jason, a priestess, an enchantress, maybe a witch, but he didn’t know that she inhabited Owen Harris’s own mythology.

‘Medea and Moloch, Mater and Pater, Ma and Pa, Daidí agus Mamaí. The beloved Ps. You know the sort of thing.’ Harris stopped and shrugged, shaking his head. ‘Familial terms of endearment, old chap. Well, after a fashion. “Sophey pephukas kai kakoan polloan idris.” Thou art a clever woman, skilled in great evil, grieving for the loss of thy husband’s bed. And Moloch, a different kettle of fish altogether! Thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Moloch! Oh, just an ordinary family, after all.’

There was no extravagant performance in the words Harris quoted. They were familiar words, to him at least, old words, worked and reworked, and usually thrown out to make someone smile, or to make the ordinariness of his parents’ ordinarily unhappy marriage and the mess of their ordinarily uninteresting lives, sound somehow extraordinary. But odd as the words were, they sounded tender. Harris looked at Stefan, a half smile on his lips.

‘I didn’t kill her. It’s a simple fact. I hope you’ll believe me.’

‘I think you should keep what you have to say until you’re in Ireland.’

‘Why?’ It was a simple question.

‘For a start we need to know what happened. It can take a long time to do all that. It’s a step by step thing, and it’s very important to make sure it’s right. And there are questions to be asked. I don’t know what they all are.’

‘Surely one of them has to be, “Did you slit your mother’s throat, Mr Harris?” I’m just telling you that I didn’t, Sergeant. It seems to be pertinent. In fact I’d say it’s crucial under the circumstances, isn’t it? For goodness’ sake, man, I should have thought the sooner you know all that the better.’

It was a flash of petulance and irritation in the current calm.

It was also exactly the situation Stefan Gillespie had anticipated. The first police officer to talk to Owen Harris was bound to hear things that might not be said again, that might be said differently, that reflection might change and re-order and re-interpret, that a solicitor might want to sit on, or reconstruct, or suggest his client forget about altogether. He already had the sense that the man in front of him was used to giving a performance and that you might not always be sure which Owen Harris you were talking to. He had seen one extreme at the Dizzy Club, frantic, desperate, hysterical; this one was brooding at times, but it was a more reasonable and more circumspect one; he couldn’t really know whether it was any less of a performance though.

Micheál Mac Liammóir’s observation stuck in his head: a fragile grip on reality.

There were a lot of words coming out of Harris but it was hard to know what was behind them, and he couldn’t believe it would get any easier when Superintendent Gregory sat down with him at Dublin Castle. Besides, he had learned a long time ago that if you wanted to get the truth out of a suspect, the time to do it was when the suspect wanted to talk to you, not when you told him to talk to you.

If there was a real Owen Harris to find in there, finding him would come out of some kind of trust, or it would come when he was off-guard, or at least when he wasn’t on a stage. A Dublin Castle interview room and a row of Garda detectives would probably be another stage and another audience. But Stefan Gillespie had been told what to do. He had been told to keep his mouth shut.

Tom, this is the Empire State Building. I’ve seen it now. Wow! It’s as big as you think and then bigger! But I haven’t been to the top. I hope I’ll get there tomorrow. I want to go at night. I think it should be something to see, the lights of all the other skyscrapers. Tomorrow is St Patrick’s Day. I’ll be standing on Fifth Avenue and watching – that should be something to see too – maybe just a bit bigger than Baltinglass. The biggest Paddy’s day parade there is! I’ve got some police friends who’ll be marching it. Enjoy your parade as well!

Stefan Gillespie sat at the desk in his room at the Hotel Pennsylvania, writing a postcard to his son. The desk was in front of the window, on the corner of 7
^th
and 33
^rd
, looking out over the Pennsylvania Station and across the lights of a thousand Manhattan buildings, high and low, towards the Hudson River. He poured the last of a bottle of Eichler beer, happy to do nothing except sit in the chair and gaze out over the city.

The radio was playing quietly in the background, the last blue notes of Glenn Miller’s ‘Moonlight Serenade’. He didn’t particularly notice the sombre organ music that followed a bouncy advertisement for Pepsi Cola. ‘Pepsi Cola hits the spot. Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot. Twice as much for a nickel too.’ He didn’t register the sombre voice that spoke over it. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we present at this time the regular weekly broadcast of Father Charles Coughlin, pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower, in Detroit, Michigan.’ But the voice that came next pulled his attention away from the window. It was slow, even laboured, but the words were enunciated with a weight and precision that seemed to insist that every consonant, every vowel mattered.

‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I ask your indulgence as I return once more to the gruesome subject of war, but it is my duty to disclose to you information which does not level itself down to ordinary people. We Americans have been victimised by invisible forces which are determined to embroil us in war. Is this democracy? When ninety-five per cent of our population abhors the very word “war”, is this democracy?’ Stefan was looking away from the window, at the radio. It was a curious voice, and curious words; they weren’t the words he expected to hear in New York.

‘When ninety-five per cent of our fellow citizens have their minds tortured, their passions agitated, by the five per cent of internationalistic warmongers, whose sole, insidious aim is the destruction of the so-called totalitarian states, is this democracy? Are we not used like putty in the hands of those responsible for the half-truths, the warmongering which appears daily in our press? When the catchphrase “unjust aggressors” was used to stir up your wrath against Germany and Italy, were you conscious of the real truth of unjust aggression, of Britain’s seizure of the African continent in the last years of the last century, conducted more ruthlessly than any seizures accredited to Italy and Germany in the past two years? Who were responsible for the silence but the scheming internationalists, descendants of the Father of Lies? Did they tell of the crimes of France, that other great democracy? No! See the hidden hand of the internationalists who dominate governments and nations and control the world. Who wants to drive America to play a part in the impending European clash? Ask the leaders of the League for Peace and Democracy! Ask the internationalists who shuttle gold back and forth across the Atlantic! Ask the munitions makers! Ask the Jews who refuse to oppose Godless communism as they oppose Nazism!’

There was a knock on the door. Stefan got up and walked across the room. The voice had mesmerised him for several minutes. He knew little about what was happening in America, its politics and its preoccupations; but hardly noticing it he had left Europe and its dark quarrels behind him. Now that over-precise, rhythmic voice, a voice that had enough of Ireland in it to make him even more uncomfortable, had taken him back to the politics and preoccupations on the other side of the Atlantic. They were all here, of course they were all here; but to listen to such a shrill expression of them was a shock to him. It was as much the tone, cold and dark, as the words themselves. He felt it ought not to belong in this city of towers and lights. But there it all was, in the very air, crackling down out of the night sky.

As he opened the door he was pleased to see that John Cavendish had indeed found him. Cavendish walked in, pulling off his overcoat and dropping it down on the bed. He looked at Stefan for a moment, smiling.

‘You haven’t changed, Stefan.’

‘It’s four years, not so long I suppose.’

‘No, I mean you haven’t changed. The first time I met you, you’d been beaten black and blue. Your face looked like it does now. A bad habit.’

Stefan glanced at the mirror behind him and laughed; he had forgotten the altercation in the club on 52
^nd
Street. The first time he had met the army officer it had been the night after a run in with two Special Branch detectives who had a point to make. His face had probably looked much worse then.

‘Your prisoner wasn’t in the mood to go home then?’

‘It wasn’t him. But he’d made some friends in New York. They were reluctant to break up the party. They thought they’d break up some cops.’

Cavendish bent over his coat and took out a half bottle of Bushmills.

‘Have you got any glasses?’

He slumped down into an armchair.

Stefan went into the bathroom and came back with two tumblers. Cavendish was looking at the radio. The slow words were still coming out.

‘Now that democracy seemingly has failed in America, because it was irreverently wedded to international capitalism, the schemers plan to destroy our form of government and replace it with an absolute dictatorship, by pleading with you ill-informed people to save democracy! Democracy?’

‘The Radio Priest! I wouldn’t have thought he was up your street.’

Stefan took the bottle of whiskey. He walked across to the desk and turned off the radio; he was glad that the piercing voice had stopped now.

‘It just came on after Glenn Miller. Who the hell is he?’

He opened the whiskey bottle and poured out two glasses.

‘Father Charles Coughlin,’ said the army officer, settling back into the chair and yawning. ‘The Shrine of the Little Flower. The best-known priest in the country. Anti-war, anti-communist, anti-Roosevelt, anti-capitalist, anti-British, anti-Semitic, and now anti-democracy apparently. He’s got an audience of millions. There are a lot of people who’d like to shut him up, including most of the Catholic hierarchy. He frightens the life out of them. That was him on a quiet day. There’s even a song about him. “Yonder comes Father Coughlin, wearing the silver chain – Gas on his stomach and Hitler on his brain.” And isn’t he a credit to us all?’ Cavendish took the glass Stefan held out and grinned broadly. ‘You wouldn’t be long working out the old bastard’s mammy and daddy came from the oul sod itself, would you?’

‘You wouldn’t so. It’s in his voice.’

Stefan sat back down at the desk.

‘I was talking to Leo McCauley at the consulate this morning,’ said Cavendish. ‘He told me there was a guard coming to take your man Harris back. I didn’t dream it was you. A bit of a cock up, eh? The NYPD wouldn’t have been too happy.’

‘Not very, but it’s un-cocked up now. It’s nothing to do with me anyway. I’m only here because Mr Mac Liammóir thought I’d frighten Mr Harris a bit less than someone from Special Branch. Nobody wanted a mammy-killer raining on the World’s Fair parade. I just sit on the plane and make sure he gets back. So what’s all this World’s Fair about with you?’

‘Security and all that. It doesn’t amount to much really. The army found me a few other jobs to do here. I was in Washington for a while.’

‘No more intelligence then?’

‘Well, old habits,’ laughed Cavendish. ‘I might send G2 a postcard now and again. I keep an eye open so. You meet all sorts in New York.’

He looked down for a moment. Stefan could see he was preoccupied. He took a slow sip of whiskey, and then carried on making easy conversation.

‘You’re really still down in Baltinglass?’

‘When I’m not in New York.’

‘You should come out to the World’s Fair. It is worth seeing.’

‘Isn’t it all?’ Stefan looked back towards the window.

‘You should still do it. It’s like nothing else.’

‘I’ve only got two days before the plane leaves.’

‘I’ll drive you out there. Just spend an hour, you won’t forget it.’

John Cavendish stood up and walked towards the desk. Stefan was still sipping his whiskey, but the army officer had already finished his. He poured another one and drank half of it immediately, looking out through the window. There was only the sound of traffic, a muffled music through the glass. Stefan wouldn’t have put him down as a drinker when they had met before, but he had already reached out for the bottle again. You couldn’t judge those things. And there was something about the conversation that was, well, odd; it seemed easy enough but there was tension in it. It didn’t feel like the acquaintances-in-a-strange-town visit that was advertised.

‘I want you to do me a favour, Stefan.’

He looked up at Cavendish. The captain was more serious now. He went back to the armchair. As he sat down Stefan could see he was tired. It wasn’t just tired; it was a kind of weariness; the tension was a part of that too, wherever it was coming from. There was more than the Irish Pavilion’s security in his head, and more than a drink and a chat about old times.

‘I need to get something to Dublin, as quickly, as safely as I can.’

Stefan said nothing; clearly old habits did die hard after all.

‘Nothing’s going to be any faster than the way you’re going, on the flying boat, and I doubt it could be any safer. Even sending something in the diplomatic bag from Washington – it takes forever and even using the damn thing draws attention to whatever you put in it. I’ve got some material, papers, that need to go to Commandant de Paor. You’ll remember him.’