The City of Strangers (18 page)

‘He was your boss in G2. And maybe still is?’

The captain shrugged.

‘I take it this is all material no one knows I’ve got.’

‘You’ve got no connection to anybody at the embassy in Washington, or the consulate here. You don’t know a soul, and the reason you’re here is simple. You’ve got your witness or prisoner, or whatever you’re telling him he is.’ Cavendish smiled; he was well informed. ‘You’ve got no particular connection to me. Better not to tell the consul general we’re old friends.’

Stefan looked surprised.

‘I’m not doubting Leo McCauley, not for a minute, but we’re all still living in an Irish village sometimes, even in the middle of New York. Everyone knows everyone’s business. I try to keep away from all that. As far as my business is concerned, well, some of it – it’s better if no one knows.’

Stefan nodded, simply accepting it.

‘The trouble is I don’t know who does know my business now.’

He stopped, absorbed by his own thoughts. His glass was empty.

Stefan topped up his own tumbler and walked over to fill Cavendish’s.

‘I’ll tell you what I think you need to know, Stefan.’ The intelligence officer had decided more was required. ‘So if anything happens to me –’

Stefan looked at him harder.

Cavendish laughed.

‘I don’t mean that the way it came out.’

It sounded like he meant it exactly the way it came out.

‘I can’t talk directly to Gerry de Paor, and I don’t want to write it down at the moment. All I’m asking you to do is get on the plane with an envelope in your bag. But I guess you have to know enough to keep your wits about you, that’s all.’

He hesitated, reassuring himself that what he was doing was right once more. He hadn’t made this decision lightly.

‘I’ve been intercepting IRA ciphers here for three months now. Messages they’re couriering back and forward from Ireland. Some of the material’s already back there, with G2, but it still hasn’t been deciphered. They’re getting nowhere with it, but the more there is to work with the better the chances of cracking it. Though I hope I’ll be able to do something about that myself. If I do then I’ll risk a phone call to get that information through. But it’ll be very important then that they’ve got everything.’ He smiled. ‘Still, that’s all something I’ve yet to make happen. Anyway, you just take an envelope –’

‘More of the same?’ said Stefan.

‘More of the same and probably the last of it. My source has dried up. That’s the polite way we put it in this game. He dried up in the Hudson.’

‘So the IRA knew he was giving you information?’

‘They may not know who he was giving it to, but I have to assume, yes, they may know it was me. And if they hadn’t clocked me as G2, they probably have now. But the couriers have no idea about contents. They’re messengers, that’s it. I’d say the IRA would be confident about the ciphers. They’ve every right to be. We’ve had people working on them for months.’

‘Doesn’t that put you at risk?’

‘I don’t think it would, not normally.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Well, the IRA is a lot more popular here than it is at home, but knocking off Irish government employees isn’t going to endear them to anybody. There’s a kind of unwritten rule as far as the government and the IRA are concerned. Don’t embarrass us and you can get on with it. You can send money and explosives across the Atlantic, but don’t blow anyone up in America. It’s the old Irish village thing again too, just like home. You know yourself. The IRA could put the finger on every Special Branch man and Army Intelligence officer in Dublin, and the world and his wife knows who’s on the IRA Army Council. We don’t go around shooting each other though,’ Captain Cavendish smiled, ‘well, not most of the time anyway.’

‘But this is different?’

Stefan was still thinking about the word ‘normally’.

‘I don’t know. There are other people involved.’

‘Like who?’

‘Like German Intelligence.’

There was a tight smile on Cavendish’s face. Not everyone would have understood how that changed the game. Stefan Gillespie did. He might have forgotten that he did, but four years really wasn’t such a long time ago.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know specifically. I mean there’s all the usual stuff they have in common. Number one is keeping America out of the war, that’s what brings German Americans and Irish Americans together politically. President Roosevelt is trying to amend the Neutrality Act in ways that would help Britain buy arms here. Congress is probably going to stop him and it’s Irish-American senators and congressmen who are making more noise about it than anybody else. And they’re winning. Why wouldn’t the IRA and the Abwehr be sniffing around all that? But that’s merely the stuff of everyday politics. You just heard some of it on the radio. Dear old Father Coughlin on every week to tell his flock the president’s dragging the country into a war and democracy’s the way to perdition. But there’s a lot more going on too. There’s the IRA bombing campaign in Britain. Among other things that is meant to show the Germans they can deliver the goods in the sabotage department if there’s a war. That’s not going well from what I’ve read.’

‘It’s a farce so far,’ said Stefan. ‘The last thing they blew up was a bit of Hammersmith Bridge and a public convenience in Birmingham. I’ve only been to Birmingham once, and from what I remember of the toilets that one’s maybe no bad thing. But sooner or later they’ll hit something bigger.’

‘The truth is they need to do better, a lot better,’ replied Cavendish, ‘if the Germans are going to take them seriously. That’s one of the reasons Seán Russell is here at the moment. It’s about money mostly, and it’s about persuading people the bombing campaign he cooked up with Dominic Carroll isn’t the mess it is. But it’s also about planning what’s going to happen next, in the event of a war. And there’s something else on. I don’t know what it is, but something here, that’s the word. Against all the unwritten rules, they’re planning something here.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘It’s from the German end. I don’t know if it’s the IRA and German Intelligence, or the IRA and some bunch of German Americans, or pro-Nazis. There are all sorts of German-American organisations out there. The Irish have got Clan na Gael and the Irish clubs – the Germans have got the German-American Bunds, complete with brown shirts, brass bands, flags and fuehrers. Sometimes they just drink a lot of beer and eat bratwurst, sometimes they go out and beat up a few Jews. But there’s more to it now.’

‘Presumably that didn’t come from an IRA cipher you can’t read?’

‘It comes from a lot of things,’ said the captain. ‘It’s in the air too.’

Stefan Gillespie was being drawn into it. He could feel it. It was that sensation again; his heart beating faster. He wanted to know more. But he could see that John Cavendish had gone as far as he intended to go.

‘Where does Dominic Carroll come into this?’ asked Stefan.

‘I told you, the bombs in Britain, the IRA declaration of war and all that bollocks, that’s what he and Seán Russell put together. He’s got a lot riding on that, and since it looks like all it’s going to achieve is to get a lot of IRA men locked up in Britain and Ireland, piss everybody off at home, and demonstrate very convincingly how fucking incompetent the IRA is –’

‘I’ve met Carroll.’

It was Cavendish’s turn to show surprise.

‘Where?’

‘On the flying boat. He was coming back from Ireland.’

‘Back from Berlin actually, Stefan. He was there last week.’

‘He didn’t mention that.’

Stefan turned and poured some more whiskey. As he stood up to take the bottle across to John Cavendish the army officer’s head had dropped. He was on the edge of falling asleep. His head snapped up and he grinned.

‘I’m banjaxed. I need to get home and get some sleep.’

He stood up, pulling on his coat. He picked up his glass and drained it.

‘I’ll catch up with you, Stefan. I’ll take you out to World’s Fair.’

‘I’ll leave it to you,’ Stefan replied.

John Cavendish nodded. He turned away and walked out.

Stefan stood still as the door closed. It was a strange meeting, and it took him to other places than New York. Dublin four years ago, when he was still a detective; the Austrian abortionist from Merrion Square, who had collected information for German Intelligence, beaten to death in an empty house in Danzig; the bodies of a man and a woman buried in the Dublin Mountains because they had loved the wrong people, and because they were in the way of bigger things; the priest who believed Adolf Hitler was the Church’s salvation and the sister who thought her brother was; the only woman he had felt he could love since Maeve’s death. He had not seen Hannah since.

It had all seemed further away than it really was, all that, despite the constant talk of war. It was close again now, some of it anyway. He wasn’t entirely sure what John Cavendish was trusting him with yet. There was something to deliver; but it wasn’t only that. The intelligence officer had told him much more than he needed to. Stefan understood that too; he thought he did. It was partly the man’s isolation, the fact that there was no one he could talk to about what he was doing. He had decided to trust Stefan with something, then he had decided to trust him with more. It was also the fact that he didn’t know where he stood; he didn’t know whether he was in real danger or not. Stefan wasn’t convinced John Cavendish really believed in that Irish village, where everyone knew everyone anyway and, sure, no one ever had to get shot.

Stefan walked back to the desk and sat down. He poured the rest of the Bushmills into his glass and sipped the whiskey. He looked out at the lights of New York, like a thousand stars, rising up, filling the sky and stretching into the distance to merge with the real stars above. The sight was as exciting, as vibrant, as full of life as it was when he had first sat at the window, but something had changed. The city was darker. It was no longer as magical as it had been. And it was a darkness that felt tired and familiar. There were not enough lights, even in New York, to push the darkness away.

It’s a great day for the Irish, with New York’s finest leading the St Patrick’s Parade! Forty thousand men, women and children, are marching to pipes and bands, heavenly music right from the oul sod. The parade is reviewed by many notables: there’s Mayor La Guardia, and Jimmy Walker, just like the old days, and Dominic Carroll, how many of these has he marched in as Grand Marshal? At St Patrick’s Cathedral New York’s new archbishop, Cardinal Spellman, gives his blessing to New York’s Irish. And while half a million Gothamites, all green flags and flowers today, watch the tremendous spectacle from packed curbstones and vantage points in high buildings, the Old 69
^th
, the Fighting Irish of World War fame, are in the vanguard, as the marchers swing along 5
^th
Avenue. Sure, what a celebration tonight!

When Stefan Gillespie woke up the next day the words of the previous night felt out of place in the New York morning, but as he sat reading
The
New York Times
over breakfast in the Hotel Pennsylvania, there wasn’t really very much to keep the conversation of the night before at bay.

At the World’s Fair, across the East River on Long Island, the exhibits that had already become its symbols, the soaring, needle-like spire of the Trylon, and the great white globe next to it, the Perisphere, had been attracting more than six thousand visitors a day since President Roosevelt had opened the Fair a week earlier. Inside the Perisphere was a diorama of the City of Tomorrow; elegant, peaceful, full of light and space, with jobs and homes for everyone, said
The
New York Times
. It was called ‘Democracity’, and visitors were carried around the inside of the globe on the world’s longest escalators, watching twenty-four hours of the city’s well-mannered, utopian day. But that was about all there was of ‘Democracity’ on the paper’s front page.

Elsewhere Adolf Hitler had declared Slovakia a German Protectorate; it was all that was left of a Czechoslovakia he had just dismembered and filled with German soldiers, with not much more than a sour shrug from the world’s democracies. The temporary withdrawal of various ambassadors was still threatened of course. Hungary had annexed what had been Ruthenia to finish off the remnants of the Czechoslovak army and mop up the last pieces of the country. Prague was under German martial law, but although the persecution of its Jews was proceeding as expected, the
Times
did say it was in a methodical and orderly fashion, which was something.

Congress was split between condemning Hitler’s annexations and minding America’s own business. In Brooklyn, meanwhile, kindergarten and high school children of the Jugendschaft des Amerikanischdeutchischen Volksbundes, in storm troop and Hitler youth uniforms, had marched through Brooklyn Heights with mechanical precision, under heavy police guard, to the delight of their parents and friends.

However, stocks were rallying in London and Paris as the immediate threat of war had, familiarly, been postponed once more, and in baseball the New York Yankees had got their revenge on the Tampa Reds, in St Petersburg, Florida, for a recent defeat. But whatever was happening anywhere else, in New York this day was going to be green.

As Stefan finished his breakfast, Detective Michael Phelan arrived. He was in uniform, and it was full NYPD dress uniform, with buttons and cap badge gleaming for the day that was in it. He sat down at the table, his face still showing the bruises from their visit to the Dizzy Club. The waiter brought a cup and poured him a coffee without any need for communication.

‘I take it you’ll be marching.’

‘I will,’ said Michael Phelan, full of himself once more.

‘I’ll maybe see you then. I’ll walk up to 5
^th
Avenue and have a look.’

The sergeant pulled a crumpled NYPD cap from his pocket and pushed it across the table. Stefan folded up his newspaper and picked it up.

‘I thought your boy might like it.’