The City of Strangers (36 page)

In the sleeper he took out John Cavendish’s notebook pages and the copy of
The Scarlet Letter
. He looked at the last entry, the most recent of the IRA dispatches. He followed Niamh Carroll’s instructions and got a page number and line from the date at the top of the message. It was page 239; the seventh line. It read: ‘There is good to be done! Exchange this false life.’ He wrote the first twelve letters at the top of a sheet of paper, then started to write the apparently arbitrary letters of one of the last ciphers Cavendish had obtained in columns underneath them. After an hour of writing and rewriting and transposing he began to see the first few words emerging. It was a short enough message, but it was three o’clock in the morning by the time he had enough of it on paper to make any sense of it.

AGREED.   NO   MORE   DISPATCHES   RI   IN   US.   ARMY   COUNCIL   PLANS   ABANDONED.   CEARNOGA   HAVE   IT.   ENSURE   EVERYTHING   DONE   TO   GET   MR   HART   WATCHED   AND   ARRESTED   TO   PROVIDE   SIDESHOW.   HAPPY   HUNTING TO   OUR   FRIENDS.   SO   BLACKBIRD   RI   ABU.   JESUS.

Together with the conversation at Carroll’s lakeside house that wasn’t even for the most approving IRA and pro-German ears, the message had to confirm what Stefan was beginning to believe. There was no indication of when the message had been sent, but from its place in Cavendish’s notes it was recent. It was a message from Ireland; it was a reply to instructions from America, maybe from Seán Russell or Dominic Carroll.

He stared out at the darkness and listened to the rattle of the train. This was John Cavendish’s ‘something big’; the assassination of the King of England in New York. That was what it was. It was hard to think of anything bigger. He took a clean sheet of paper and put it in front of him. He looked at the night again, conscious he was only seeing himself reflected back from the glass. He began to copy out the letters of the next cipher.

When he looked out again two more hours had passed. It was morning and the train was running along the west bank of the Hudson River. On the opposite shore a long, low line of hills followed the river, falling steeply to the water’s edge.

It was a wall of trees, deciduous and pine; not all in leaf, but the hardwoods were starting to colour with coming spring. Stefan sat back from the table and looked out. They were not far from New York now but the trees of the Hudson Valley stretched on endlessly it seemed. He knew the oaks and beeches well enough, and the birches and ashes, the red maples too; there were others he couldn’t quite name; sugar maples and hickories and wild fruits, and all sorts of pines that didn’t grow at home. But it was what it all made in the morning light that held him; little colour yet, but still a tapestry of soft, intense light, mile after mile after mile.

It was enough to push what he had been doing to the back of his head for a time at least. It was enough, however different it was, to take him home to mornings at Kilranelagh and the scruffy ashes and hazels in the valley below the farm. Enough to make him wish he was there with Tom, with his mother feeding the hens, his father bringing in the cattle from the fields and the air still cold enough to mist their breath.

It surprised him how close the Hudson Valley forests took him to Manhattan, but then, very suddenly, there were buildings and factories. The trees were gone; the river was gone. And the train plunged underground into the darkness, to tunnel its way beneath New York’s streets.

*

In the office above the Fulton Street Market Stefan Gillespie sat at the table with Longie Zwillman and a small, fat, balding man who wore a pin-striped suit that was too tight for him. He had taken a cab straight to the fish market from Grand Central Station. Zwillman was waiting for him. The gangster introduced the other man, unexpectedly, as a Federal Special Agent. He gave him no name and offered no explanation. The FBI man blinked at Stefan through milk-bottle-thick glasses and offered a handshake limper than the dead fish being loaded in the market hall below. Now he was gazing at the two deciphered IRA dispatches. He had been looking for several minutes.

‘You understand “ri”, Mr Gillespie? And “ceorn—”, what’s that?’

‘I think so,’ replied Stefan. ‘The word “rí” is the Irish word for king. So there was an IRA plan that had something to do with a king, and it’s all off. No more dispatches about it. Nothing more said about it. Whether that’s an instruction from here to Ireland or from Ireland to here, I don’t know, but it’s “abandoned”, that’s for sure. As for who the king is, it says the king in the United States. There’s only one king who’s going to interest the IRA very much, the English king, who’s just crossed the border from Canada.’

‘So we take king literally?’ asked the FBI man.

‘He’s here, isn’t he?’ shrugged Stefan.

‘Right here, in New York, tomorrow,’ replied the Special Agent.

‘But the plan is only abandoned as far as the IRA is concerned. Somebody else has it. “Cearnoga” is Irish again. It just means squares. But maybe the word you’d be looking for here would be more like squareheads.’

‘Germans,’ smiled Longie Zwillman.

‘And you think the plan is a bomb, Mr Gillespie?’

‘I can’t say that. It would have to be my guess. One way or another it seems to involve George VI not being around. Not being around for a reception in Washington anyway. That’s what Carroll was joking about.’

‘You would think so.’ The man in the glasses still didn’t raise his eyes. ‘So what is the blackbird rí? Does that tell us anything else? Presumably words aren’t wasted given the amount of time it takes to encode these messages.’ He pushed the message back across the table to Stefan.

‘I won’t sing for you, but it goes like this: “In England my blackbird and I were together, Where he was still noble and generous of heart. Oh, woe to the time that first we went thither – Alas, he was forced soon from thence to depart.” Is that enough?’ said Stefan with a grin.

The expressions on the faces of Longie Zwillman and the FBI agent told him it wasn’t.

‘It’s an old Jacobite song. The blackbird was the King over the Water, the king who would return when whoever was on the throne of England was defeated, mostly some Hanoverian with the name George as often as not. I’m not suggesting anyone’s interested in that now, but I guess the English do have a King over the Water again, in the shape of the abdicated Edward. And from what I’ve read in the papers, he’s very pally with Adolf Hitler.’

The Special Agent nodded; there was very nearly a smile.

‘Yes, I think I’ve got hold of that. And “abu”, Irish again?’

‘Forever. The Blackbird Rí Forever! Followed understandably enough by “Jesus”, which would probably be short for something like, “Jesus Christ what the fuck are we doing blowing up one English king on behalf of another one!” It might take a bit of explaining in the IRA and Clan na Gael.’

‘You’re a useful man to have around, Sergeant Gillespie. Deciphering these things only seems to be half the battle, unless you’ve got some Irish.’

The Special Agent looked at the second cipher Stefan had decoded.

‘There are two people who feature in these messages. Mr Brown and Mr Hart. From what we know about who’s calling the shots I’d guess Mr Brown is Dominic Carroll and Mr Hart is Russell. Do you agree?’

He pushed the paper with Stefan’s workings on it across the table.

MR   BROWN   MR   HART   AUTHORISED   NEGOTIATE   WITH   BUND   FRIENDS.   NO   ONE   ELSE.   NOT   ALL   MR   BROWNS   GERMAN   PALS   ON   BOARD.   NEW   CONCERNS   ABOUT   COURIER   INTEGRITY.   IF   INFORMATION   LEAKS   DISPOSE   OF   ALL   LOOSE   ENDS.

‘Seán Russell’s the one you arrested in Detroit. That’s what the message says was meant to happen. That’s why he went there with Carroll. To get arrested.’

‘On the basis that if we thought anybody was going to try anything it would be him. And if we’ve dealt with him there’s no more to worry about?’

‘A sideshow’s what they wanted. I don’t know about Bund friends versus German pals.’ Stefan looked from the FBI man to Zwillman. ‘Some people can be trusted and some people can’t. All that’s more your area.’

Longie Zwillman shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me.’

‘I don’t know what German Intelligence would make of this,’ said the Special Agent. ‘It doesn’t smell like anything official. I mean if you wanted to start a war tomorrow morning, and maybe undo all the work you’ve put in persuading most Americans to stay out of it – this would be no bad way to go about it. I should think the German government’s as likely to be in on this one as the Irish government, which is not to say it wouldn’t suit them of course.’

‘And the loose ends?’ continued the Special Agent.

‘John Cavendish would be one,’ said Longie Zwillman quietly.

The FBI man stood up.

‘Thank you, gentlemen. I don’t know what we’ll get from the rest of these ciphers, but your people are probably looking for different things, Mr Gillespie. We’re not in a hurry, except for the matter of a bomb, of course. There are a number of possibilities but the most public one is the World’s Fair. As for the rest of it, just now we’re more interested in watching what the IRA and the Nazis are up to in America than catching them. Safe home.’

He took his briefcase, put on a hat that was too big for him, and left.

Longie Zwillman stood up, thoughtfully; he took out a cigar and lit it.

‘You keep unexpected company, Mr Zwillman,’ said Stefan.

‘Given my line of work?’

‘I wouldn’t think you often sit down with the FBI.’

‘The wolves are coming out of the forest, Stefan. It’s a good time for friends and neighbours to leave off strangling each other. We can go back to that when they’ve gone. In the meantime there’s things people like me can do that fine upstanding people can’t. I didn’t think I’d be in the business of saving an English king’s life though. You neither, I reckon?’

‘It wouldn’t have been high on my list of things to do in New York.’

‘A Jew and an Irishman! The Empire’s fallen on hard times.’

‘It looks like it,’ smiled Stefan.

‘Not too hard for now, I hope. They’re all bastards as far as I’m concerned. I might have men in the docks now, finding out what the IRA and the German-American Bund are planning to do to sabotage arms shipments to Britain, but when I’m not doing that I’m smuggling guns out for Jews to use against the British in Palestine. It pisses me we’ve got the same enemies, you know that? I think it pissed John Cavendish too. He didn’t have much doubt what was coming though. And it is coming. We’re going to be a big neutral and you’re going to be a small one, but sometime we’ll all have to decide what side we’re neutral on.’ He smiled and sucked in cigar smoke. ‘If you’re Jewish it’s not a hard decision.’

The two men said nothing for a moment.

‘You know how I met John?’ continued Zwillman. ‘It was a meeting above a German bookshop on 3
^rd
Avenue, the usual crew, America First, the German-American Bund, Silver Shirts, Coughlin’s Christian Front. There’s always some IRA men too, to add a bit of anti-British to the anti-Jewish, anti-Negro, anti-Communist, anti-Democracy, anti-fucking-anything-you-can-think-of stuff they like. That’s what he was interested in, what the IRA was up to in all that. But what does he do? He takes fucking notes! So they think he’s a reporter. And what they do with reporters is send them away with enough cracked ribs to make sure they don’t come back. He was lucky. I had some boys come over from New Jersey to break up the meeting. The Bund had to leave him out the back. They hadn’t really got started on him.’

Stefan began to gather up Cavendish’s notes and the ciphers.

‘But somebody got started on him eventually,’ he said. ‘They got finished too. I doubt I’ll ever know any more than that, not now. It’s about the beginning and the end of what I’ll be taking back to the Garda Commissioner. He was a loose end somebody needed to dispose of. Someone’ll have to think of something else to tell his wife and his kids.’

*

‘I can’t say New York was everything I expected,’ said Owen Harris, ‘but I haven’t been able to get out as much as I’d hoped. I’m not complaining. I’ve met some fascinating people. Frightening, but with their own New World charm. I do admit that I’m rather glad to be going home though, Sergeant.’

Stefan Gillespie sat across the bare table in the bare room at Police Headquarters as he had the day Harris had been arrested in the bar on 52
^nd
Street. He knew what to expect from him, and he wasn’t in the mood for it.

‘I’ll pick you up in the morning, Mr Harris.’

‘I suppose I’d better pack. I didn’t bring a lot with me.’

‘I have your things. They’ve been sent over from the hotel.’

‘The dear Thesps! How are they? Mr Mac Liammóir was kind enough to come to see me, for what it was worth. He didn’t have very much to say.’

‘The plane takes just over –’

‘You know Yeats rejected it?’

‘We’ll be at Foynes –’

‘The play,
John Bull’s Other Island
,’ continued Harris, ‘it was commissioned for the Abbey originally. Too controversial, too long, he said. Now it’s not controversial at all, but it’s still too long. I always think Shaw had a problem with his comedies. The trouble is they’re not remotely funny.’

‘Tomorrow then,’ said Stefan.

‘I’ve found myself relating to Synge in here. I should have said that to Micheál. I’d never thought much of him before, Synge I mean.’ He sat back, frowning and giggling at the same time. ‘All that English that’s meant to sound like Irish and doesn’t sound like anything on earth. But I’ve become quite a celebrity in here, just like in
The Playboy of the Western World
, a kind of Christy Mahon of Broadway. “Is it killed your mother?” “With the help of God I did surely?” It should go down even better in Ireland!’

Owen Harris looked up smugly, as if he was waiting for applause.

Stefan stood up.

‘You don’t think it will then, Sergeant?’

‘No, Mr Harris, I don’t think joking about your mother’s death will endear you to anybody. You’ll help yourself more by shutting your mouth.’

‘My God, you’re right, the story of my life, Medea versus Moloch. Only two parents to choose from and I couldn’t even murder the right one!’