The City of Strangers (37 page)

Stefan turned and walked out, leaving Owen Harris chuckling.

When he came into the Headquarters Detective Division room it was almost empty. Two detectives hurried out as he walked in. Michael Phelan was at his desk, strapping on his shoulder holster, with the boyish look of gung-ho enthusiasm that had accompanied him into the 52
^nd
Street club with Stefan.

‘Can’t stop, Stefan, we’re heading for the World’s Fair.’

‘I heard something,’ said Stefan.

‘Something’s a bomb, that’s the word, at the British Pavilion.’

‘They’ve found it?’

‘I’m not sure.’ He grinned. ‘The thing is, what’s going to happen when we do? Are we going to get rid of it or set the thing off? It’s asking a lot of an Irish cop not to see a bit of England blown up. Maybe those lions!’

‘Come on Mikey!’ Aaron Phelan appeared in the doorway in uniform. ‘If you want a lift over to Flushing Meadows, I’m going now!’

‘Keep your hair on, Captain!’ Michael Phelan turned back to Stefan. ‘I say that because he’s lost a chunk. Right about there.’ He pointed to the back of his own head, more or less where Stefan Gillespie’s revolver had hit his brother. ‘And he’s got a bump the size of a duck egg. If I didn’t know better I’d say he’d been out on the piss. That’s usually my job in the family.’

‘I said move!’ Phelan laughed. ‘You want to come, Stefan?’

‘No, I need to get everything sorted out before I go.’

‘We’ll be glad to get your prisoner out of our cells,’ said Captain Phelan cheerfully. ‘He’s taken to singing in the middle of the night. Much more and you’d be taking him home in a box. And it’d be a cop who strangled him! We’ve got to go. There’ll be a car to get you to La Guardia tomorrow. Can you do it, Mikey?’

‘Fine with me,’ said Michael. ‘I’ll see you then, Stefan.’

The two brothers were gone. The room was empty. Stefan smiled a quiet smile which was all relief. He had had no choice but to go into Police Headquarters; that’s where Owen Harris was. But bumping into Aaron Phelan was something else. It was something he had hoped wouldn’t happen. There was no reason why the NYPD captain should connect him with Kate and Niamh. He had thought it through a dozen times. Nothing had happened to let him make that connection.

The captain couldn’t have seen him, even in that last moment by the jetty as Stefan had smashed the gun barrel down the back of his head. But the revolver was nagging at him. Somewhere he’d lost it. It could have been by the boathouse at Mexico Bay; it could have been in the rowing boat, or on the
Temeraire
; it could have been in the big Hudson, or in the Montreal hotel.

So far no one had asked for it back at Centre Street. He didn’t want to say he’d lost it; the thing had been given to him so casually he was simply hoping the question wouldn’t arise. But there was nothing odd about Captain Phelan’s behaviour, and by tomorrow Stefan would be gone.

*

Richard Langham, who was responsible for such things, hadn’t thought it mattered much when the big bald-headed black cleaner they called Cab (he didn’t know his surname, but it was written down somewhere) hadn’t turned up for work at the British Pavilion at the World’s Fair one night in early February. A small white-haired Negro who said he was Cab’s cousin turned up instead (Mr Langham didn’t remember his name at all, but it must have been written down somewhere).

The Fair would be opening in a matter of weeks and the cleaners needed to be in place; one black cleaner was the same as another black cleaner. They weren’t a part of the Fair anyway; they were an invisible army that would only appear when the Fair closed. Buses brought them from Harlem every evening and took them back in the early hours of the morning, about the same time the garbage trucks left. Who they were didn’t matter. And as it happened someone whose job it was to notice such things mentioned that the new cleaner was a damned sight better than the old one, whatever his name had been, whatever the name of the new man was.

The cleaner’s name was actually Louis Marshall. Two men from the German-American Bund had taught him how to put the bomb together and how to set it. The meetings his Ethiopian Pacific Movement had had with the pro-Hitler groups had been few and far between, but he had tried to establish contact, because he knew they had things in common under the skin; and something remarkable had come of those efforts. They wanted to work with him; they wanted him to work with them.

He had brought the bomb parts into the British Pavilion one at a time, in pieces small enough to fit under the sandwiches in his lunch box; he had hidden them in sealed packets in the toilet cisterns and in empty tins of polish in the cupboard where he kept his trolley, mops, brushes, buckets. The false bottom in the cleaning trolley was more difficult than the bomb. That had to be good; so good it was solid. It had to stand up to the search that would happen before the English king got to the World’s Fair. Marshall had had to carry the metal plate in and out of the Fair three days running before the Bund men got it to fit right.

He was to assemble the parts of the bomb two nights before George VI’s visit; they told him the time to set it; the tiny clock, almost silent, could run for forty-eight hours. The Bund men were as biggity and astorperious as every other white-ass Louis Marshall had met; he certainly wasn’t dumb to the fact that they despised him all the time they were patting him on the back. But they were no better than rednecks anyway; whatever they called themselves they weren’t real Germans; real Hitler Germans didn’t come from Queens and New Jersey. But they were paying him well, and what he was doing was bigger than them. It was as big as Louis Marshall’s dreams.

It was the British Empire that had stolen Africa from Aunt Hagar’s children, and once the British were out of Africa it would be a home for every black man on earth. He didn’t know much about the English and their kings. He knew about the man who’d stopped being king because they wouldn’t let him marry some American woman, though he had no idea why anybody gave a damn. But when the king they had now was dead, the old one would come back. And this one didn’t even want Africa. He was a friend of Adolf Hitler’s; he was Hitler’s man all the way. And when he’d kicked out all the Jews who controlled the British Empire, it would be the way Hitler said it would be. The whites would have their place. The brothers-in-black would have theirs, and it would be Africa, without a white ass on the continent, from Cairo to Cape Town. The way God intended it.

So when Louis Marshall aired out back to Harlem after setting the bomb, he knew that what he had done was as righteous as rage itself. He had stood on a box at the corner of 125
^th
Street and Lenox Avenue for four years. He had borne witness to the days of wrath that would change the world, and now he was a part of it, now he was driving it.

The world Hitler wanted was the world he had seen too, when every dusty-butt, jar-head nigger in Harlem couldn’t see further than jooking and jelly and juice. Oh, Little Sister, Babylon would fall, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication! Everybody said big things were coming; the great battles and the great storms would sweep Babylon away.

When the Bund men came to pay him that night Louis had got in some bottles of Budweiser. He didn’t drink a lot, but he wouldn’t see them again, and whatever he thought about the Germans they were the only people he could celebrate with. He knew he couldn’t tell anyone else, not yet; one day, one day his brothers would know what he had done. But as it happened there was little likelihood of him telling anyone, either now or at any point in the future. While one of the German Americans held him down, the other one stuck him in the chest with a knife, and then cut his throat.

He wasn’t the only one the bomb killed.

The next day, when the FBI and the NYPD poured into the British Pavilion at the World’s Fair, it took a while to find the bomb, but it was discovered eventually, in the almost invisible trolley of the completely invisible black cleaner.

Two detectives from the NYPD’s Bomb Squad took it to a stretch of waste ground at the back of the Fair to defuse it. When it went off it killed them instantly. The two men had worked together at Police Headquarters on Centre Street for a long time. When they were drunk in McSorley’s they had a party piece; they sang ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’. Joe Lynch would sing in English; Freddy Socha was the only NYPD officer who knew it in Polish.

When the bomb exploded most Fair visitors assumed some of the evening fireworks had gone off by mistake.

*

In the Statler Bar at the Hotel Pennsylvania Stefan Gillespie sat in a booth with Micheál Mac Liammóir and another actor, Charlie Mawson.

Mawson was tall, with a thin, angular face and dark hair. He smoked continually and had very little to say except that if Owen Harris had killed his mother he would have known. They had shared a cabin together on the boat from Cobh to New York; he would have known. The fact that he didn’t even know that his ex-lover’s mother was missing at all until they arrived in New York and that there was no question that Harris had, at the very least, dragged his dead mother’s body out to her car, driven it through Dublin to the sea, and there disposed of it, didn’t seem to alter Mawson’s certainty about his innocence.

He said several times that Owen Harris was a ‘troubled young man but not that troubled, never that troubled’. He said he had asked him directly, at the Markwell, what had happened. Harris’s answer had been that he didn’t know, but that his mother had been threatening suicide again. Mrs Harris apparently went through phases of threatening suicide and she had even told Mawson himself, several times, that she intended to kill herself, because her son hated her and her husband despised her.

Charlie Mawson also said that although he had felt some sympathy for the lonely, self-pitying figure of Mrs Harris when he had first met her, he had come to the conclusion, very quickly in fact, that she was cruel, manipulative, vindictive and incapable of telling the truth about anything, particularly about her son and her estranged husband.

Then he stopped saying the same thing over and over again, and gave a dry smile; he knew what Stefan Gillespie was thinking anyway.

‘I’m not helping, am I, Sergeant?’

‘I appreciate your concern for your friend –’

‘But I’ve got bugger all to say.’

‘I’m not in a position to take statements, Mr Mawson.’

‘Naturally I’d speak for him in court.’

Stefan nodded. Mawson’s declaration that his friend had not only lied to him all the way across the Atlantic, but had spent most of his time drinking and playing pranks on the other actors, while showing no sign at all of grief or remorse about the mother he had thrown off a cliff, even if he hadn’t stabbed her to death, was definitely unhelpful to anyone except the prosecutor. His description of Leticia Harris as manipulative, spiteful and violent sounded more like a list of motives for her son to kill her than an explanation of dry he didn’t. The only mitigating factor in there perhaps, somewhere, was that mother and son were probably as mad as each other.

‘I wrote this down after I, saw him at Centre Street.’

It was Mac Liammóir who spoke now.

‘It’s the same mix of confused and sometimes unfeeling remarks, the same leaps back to his childhood, or to things he seems to consider complete strangers ought to know, that the actors who sat with him at the Markwell have talked to me about, but it’s what he said. I don’t know whether there’s anything in there that means anything at all, but somewhere in that conversation I felt that when he said he didn’t kill his mother, he meant it. I’ve thought about it a great deal since. I keep telling myself that probably the boy is mad enough to mean he didn’t do it and mad enough to have done it all at once. But I wanted to say –’

He laughed.

‘The truth is I don’t know what I wanted to say, except that someone should listen to him. Either there is some truth in there, or he really is as mad as a hatter, and if he’s that, then it needs to be said too. People won’t like him, Mr Gillespie. Jurors won’t like him. I don’t like him myself.’

Micheál Mac Liammóir shrugged.

‘He could hang himself, just because of the man he is. He has no sense of how people respond to him. I’d like to think that you won’t let him do that. That if there are questions to be asked, they will at least be asked.’

He glanced at Charlie Mawson. They both stood up.

‘You won’t make it to the play, Mr Gillespie?’

‘I go back tomorrow.’

‘Ah, you read the reviews!’

‘I haven’t seen anything about it.’

‘You’re too polite for a policeman. I’ve always thought that.’

‘Not great?’

‘It was the wrong play. That was the problem.’

Stefan nodded, as if he agreed.

‘And a reviewer who arrived in a cravat.’

Stefan looked puzzled.

‘It’s a questionable choice at the best of times, Sergeant, but in Manhattan it shows all the imagination you might find inside a gnat’s arse!’

The three men shook hands. They were standing in front of one of the mirrored pillars in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania. There were a lot of people, but for a moment Stefan Gillespie’s eye was caught by a brown suit in the mirror. As the director and the actor walked away he turned. The suit had gone, but he was sure he had recognised it, along with the man in it. It was Katzmann, the German intelligence officer he last saw in Central Park.

In the Statler Bar Stefan had almost forgotten about what had been happening around him. He was almost back on the Yankee Clipper. It was what waited for him at home that was at the front of his mind; the man he was taking back to Dublin to hand over to Superintendent Gregory. But maybe it hadn’t been Katzmann at all.

It was a suit and a man who was slightly too big for it. He couldn’t see him anyway, and he had something to do that pushed even Owen Harris away. He had the top of the Empire State Building to go to. He had promised Tom he would do it. He wanted to himself. He wanted to look out at New York at night. He wanted to clear his mind of everything that had happened and to let the city give him something he could share with his son. And something that would also be his own.