The City of Strangers (19 page)

‘He will too. That’s quite something, Michael. Thank you.’

‘In the meantime you’ll be wearing it yourself,’ grinned the detective.

‘I’ll keep it for Tom.’ Stefan shrugged, reading nothing into it.

‘You will not! You’re going to be marching so.’

‘Should I look out for the Wicklow Association?’ laughed Stefan.

‘You can forget the County Wicklow, you’ll be marching with us.’

Two hours later Sergeant Stefan Gillespie found himself in West 44
^th
Street, off 5
^th
Avenue, standing with Sergeant Phelan and maybe a hundred other police officers, beside the NYPD Mounted Unit. Further up were the soldiers and veterans of the Fighting 69
^th
, then the Police Department Marching Band and the NYPD Holy Name Society. Behind, stretching back down 44
^th
Street, as far as he could see, were the uniforms of firemen, marines, sailors, boy scouts and a dozen high school marching bands. Hovering to one side, at the corner of 5
^th
and 44
^th
, were the dark suits and the dark hats of the Irish-American Legislators Association, the city and state and federal politicians who were important enough to march at the front of the parade. They were moving through the ranks of soldiers and police officers, pumping the hands of people they didn’t know, with smiles that, if a steady eye had anything to do with it, were every bit as sincere as their firm handshakes.

Above the rumble of conversation and laughter, and the shouted orders of the marshals, there was the strangled wail of bagpipes tuning up; there was the snort of horses and the clatter of their shoes on tarmac. Unusually there was no noise of traffic. Cars, trucks, cabs, buses were a long way from 5
^th
Avenue today.

On the other side of 5
^th
Avenue, on East 44
^th
Street, and along the route at the intersections at 45
^th
, 46
^th
, 47
^th
, East and West, all the rest of Irish New York was assembling, in a city that ranked, after Dublin and Belfast, as the biggest Irish city in the world. There were the sashes of 32 county associations, from Antrim down through the alphabet to Wicklow; there were Ancient Order of Hibernians boards from Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Long Island, New Jersey and the Hudson Valley, and from Pennsylvania, Connecticut and beyond; school children and church congregations and Gaelic Athletic clubs were ready to step out, along with Clan na Gael chapters and Brian Boru clubs and the Friends of Irish Freedom; there were more uniforms, too, from fire departments, from the Port Authority, from sheriffs’ departments, from correction facilities, from the Coast Guard; there were ever more drums and ever more pipes.

Stefan really would much rather have watched than participated, but he had no choice in the matter. When he had reached 44
^th
Street he was introduced to thirty or forty police officers whose names he wouldn’t ever remember, and to a few he would, including Michael Phelan’s elder brother, Aaron, and his father, Ernest. The Phelans were an important family in a police force where family, especially Irish family, mattered. Ernie Phelan, wearing the eagle insignia of an inspector on his cap badge, would lead out the Police Department guard of honour on to 5
^th
Avenue; Aaron, a captain at Police Headquarters, would be close behind.

And then suddenly it was time; after two hours of standing around, all the waiting was over. The last cigarettes and the last cigars were stubbed out along 44
^th
Street. The horses rode out on to the Avenue. Pipes and drums played. The parade had begun.

Moving uptown from 44
^th
Street, the 5
^th
Avenue of Lower Manhattan, stretching down into the garment district below the Empire State Building at 34
^th
, had already been left behind. The parade was a midtown-uptown affair, and a few streets on from 44
^th
Street St Patrick’s Cathedral was firmly located where New York’s bluebloods still held sway; they weren’t much in evidence today though. Cardinal Spellman stood on the steps of the cathedral, blessing the marchers, and almost to a man, woman and child they crossed themselves as they passed him. There were few enough beside Stefan Gillespie who didn’t. He was conscious of it.

There had been times in his life, when he was younger, surrounded by people doing what most Irish people did without thinking, that he had simply done it too, not to stand out. It wasn’t that anyone particularly noticed whether you did or didn’t; it was simply the consciousness that not being a Catholic brought, and had seemed to bring more and more in Ireland since his childhood; not quite fitting.

As the parade moved past St Patrick’s, on towards the Grand Army Plaza and the start of Central Park, this wasn’t the territory of most of the people who were marching, nor of most of those who lined the Avenue in their hundreds of thousands to watch, from 44
^th
Street to halfway along the length of Central Park and 86
^th
Street.

If New York’s social register had retreated steadily north and east into Park Avenue over the years, and was now heading beyond the city itself to Long Island, there were still old mansions in the streets off 5
^th
Avenue; there were air-conditioned apartments and penthouses in the skyscrapers; there were grand hotels like the Waldorf-Astoria, the Savoy-Plaza, the St Regis; exclusive clubs where you wouldn’t want to be too Jewish or even too Irish to qualify for membership, and where, if you weren’t white, you might just get in to collect the garbage; there were museums and art galleries that still preferred their patrons to be on the social register and expected them to leave bequests in their wills; there were the shops and stores and restaurants and cafés and night-clubs that required money, real money, if you wanted to indulge: Tiffany’s, Cartier, Saks, Bergdorf Goodman, the Rainbow Room, the Stork Club.

But none of that mattered much on St Patrick’s Day. And the feeling that New York belonged to everyone who filled 5
^th
Avenue, marchers and spectators alike, was hard to resist.

Stefan Gillespie was enjoying his Irishness more self-consciously than he ever did in Ireland, sharing it with everyone else. And wasn’t New York one hell of a place to feel you had as much stake in as anyone else, even for a day? Looking at the people around him, in the march and on the street, more than at the buildings, he remembered the words he had read in
The New York Times
that morning, about the opening of the World’s Fair, words the city’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia had spoken a week earlier: ‘The greatest display of all, at this great World’s Fair, will be New York City itself, with its 7,454,995 inhabitants.’

For a few hours the Atlantic seemed much wider again to Stefan; the shrill rumour of war out of Europe slipped away. Maybe there was more to ‘Democracity’ in New York than just a cardboard cut-out after all. Just now it was hard not to believe it.

The parade ended for Stefan Gillespie where 86
^th
Street met 5
^th
Avenue and crossed into Central Park. Behind him thousands of marchers were still funnelling through the cheering midtown crowds; they would do so for two more hours. The NYPD vanguard broke up quickly, as officers met up with their families, headed for the subways and the els to the Bronx and Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens, or drifted off to various Irish bars. Stefan walked east along 86
^th
Street with Michael Phelan and a dozen other Headquarters’ detectives to the Lexington Avenue Line Subway.

They jammed their way into the subway car, down to the Lower East Side, and then jammed into McSorley’s on East 7
^th
Street, where people were spilling out on to the street. Michael Phelan had promised Stefan he’d feel at home in McSorley’s, and he did. The dark wood, the dim light, the smell of stale beer, the cloud of tobacco smoke, not to mention the complete absence of women, was familiar enough, even for a man who spent more time raiding pubs to break up out-of-hours sessions than he did drinking in them.

Home wasn’t really where he wanted to be when he had barely two days in New York; he quite fancied being in New York as it happened. But the warm, foaming beer was good, and there seemed little point doing anything other than drink it, talk about where he came from, which seemed to interest McSorley’s customers far more than their own city, and to admit that, yes, you could be in a pub slap bang in the middle of Dublin.

The sneers about Free Staters, and the Free State Polis, were delivered with good-humour, as it was St Patrick’s Day, and it was answer enough for him to shrug and smile. But when Michael Phelan suggested they went back uptown, to crash a party on Central Park that wouldn’t feel at all like the middle of Dublin, Stefan was more than happy to squeeze out of McSorley’s again and take the subway back to 59
^th
Street and the park.

The parade had been over for hours. The sun was setting; it would soon be dark. New York was coming alight.

Hampshire House was a 37-storey building on West 59
^th
Street, overlooking Central Park, almost exactly halfway between 6
^th
and 7
^th
Avenues. It was a new building by New York standards, and builders were still working on the upper floors, but apartments lower down, with their views the length of the park, south to north, were already filling up. The most distinctive features of the building were the stepped terraces of the top storeys and the steep pitch of the great pyramid-like copper roof that crowned it. The roof bore some resemblance to the roof of a French chateau, hanging in the sky, and it had little to do with the tower below, where a bit of Spanish baroque blended with austere Art Deco and some English Regency here and there. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. Like the rest of New York it threw together all sorts of things from other places and other times to produce something that could only belong, uniquely and spectacularly, to one place and one time: New York, now.

It was in Dominic Carroll’s sprawling apartment on the twenty-ninth floor of the Hampshire House that a St Patrick’s Day party was in full swing, as Michael Phelan and Stefan Gillespie arrived. There had probably been someone checking invitations at some point, but by now anybody with any claim to be Irish could walk in, let alone anyone in an NYPD uniform, which was, in any case, its own claim to being Irish. It wasn’t until he was in the elevator going up to Carroll’s apartment that Stefan realised whose party it was. He wasn’t sure how welcome he would be, but he had had enough to drink not to be concerned. It did have its funny side too. No one could deny he had a connection; it wouldn’t be everyone whose luggage had been personally searched by Dominic Carroll.

‘It doesn’t get much better.’

Stefan Gillespie was standing at a window looking out over Central Park. There wasn’t much to see of the park now, except for the strings of lights that were roads, and the occasional clustering of a building’s lights in the great darkness that was the green space at the heart of Manhattan. But on each side, cut sharply out of the night on the park’s west side and east side were the buildings that gave it its rectangular, ordered shape, blazing with light. It was everything he had been looking at since he had arrived, but there were things you didn’t tire of looking at. The voice behind him, rising quietly above the voices filling the room, was Dominic Carroll’s.

‘I’d say not,’ replied Stefan, turning round.

‘I spent every cent I had on this building. I may never see it all back.’

He heard the pride in those words, yet there was nothing boastful in it.

‘It’s your building then?’

‘Just about. Mine and a couple of banks’. I’m a builder.’

Stefan looked back through the apartment and through the party-goers. There were easily a hundred, probably more, chattering, laughing, arguing, eating, drinking. A series of wide rooms interconnected through folded doors. Everything was black and white, clean and new, but the furniture that filled the rooms was elaborate and fussy; the pictures on the wall were landscapes and still lifes. Like the building itself it ought not to have worked, but it did. In one room there was a bar and a buffet full of food. A black pianist played quiet, soothing jazz. Waiters walked around with silver trays full of drinks and canapés.

There were green, glittering shamrocks and green balloons and green bunting. But the flag that hung in each room was not the tricolour of Ireland; it was the green flag with the golden harp that had been the flag of Ireland before the tricolour. There was a point to be made for those who knew, though for most people there the flags were just a bit of old Ireland. But as far as Dominic Carroll was concerned the tricolour wouldn’t fly until there was a republic in Ireland that was a real republic, and Éamon de Valera’s statelet was not that republic.

‘It was derelict for years,’ Carroll continued. ‘They started on it in 1931, but by the time the shell was up and the floors were in, the Depression caught up with it. It was boarded up for five years. It just sat. I bought it for where it was. To be honest I didn’t care what it looked like.’

‘Well, it’s not a bad-looker either,’ Stefan answered.

‘Love’s never about looks,’ said the American. ‘When I finally got it, I didn’t have the money to finish it. I let it sit here for another two years until I did. We’re still fitting out the top storeys, but it’s almost there. I didn’t just want to live here. I wanted to make something of it. This is what I made.’

‘So what happens now?

‘Now, I need to sell it, Stefan!’ Dominic Carroll chuckled. ‘If I don’t, it’ll break me. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been broken, but I’m getting long in the tooth for clawing my way back. Still, I should get there. Anyway, I’m glad you got here. From what I’ve just heard, you seem to be fitting in.’

‘I guess it’s hard not to on St Patrick’s day, Mr Carroll.’

‘I meant with the NYPD.’

‘Still keeping an eye on me?’