The City of Strangers (12 page)

‘I know what a guard is, Mr Gillespie. I’m not a stranger to Ireland.’

He spoke easily, wiping out any traces of the feelings that he hadn’t been able to hide seconds earlier. But he was no longer as relaxed as he had been, and as the conversation continued Stefan couldn’t help feeling he was being watched and weighed up. It was hard to work out what was going on. It wasn’t much now, and if he hadn’t registered those first, unfathomable reactions from the American, he probably wouldn’t have noticed at all. Carroll was suspicious; for some reason he was uneasy that Stefan was a guard.

However, time passed and bit by bit the suspicion seemed to fade. Dominic Carroll was a good talker, and like a lot of good talkers he was used to being listened to. Once it was clear that Stefan Gillespie had nothing to say about his business, other than he was doing a job for the Gardaí and would be meeting some NYPD officers, he left the subject alone, except to announce that he knew almost every senior police officer in New York. As Stefan hadn’t got the faintest idea who he’d be talking to, or what would be happening once he arrived in Manhattan, the string of names, all of them Irish, had little effect. The NYPD was soon forgotten but New York was not.

The man who had been born in Carrickfergus was proud of the city he now lived in. He had no doubt whatsoever that it was the greatest city on the face of the earth and that if there was anywhere that represented the future, the future of everything, it was New York, his city. It was no accident that the greatest World’s Fair the world had ever seen had just opened its gates in New York’s Flushing Meadows. Dominic Carroll had played some part in putting that together. The World’s Fair was the world of tomorrow in a box, tied up with red-white-and-blue, star-spangled ribbon and more magical than the stars in the heavens at night.

‘When you fly west, Mr Gillespie, you’re flying into the future. But it’s not just America’s future. One day we’ll bring that future back to Ireland!’

It was hard not to share his enthusiasm. He seemed to have a lot of business interests, so many that it was a struggle to follow them as he fired out details of his early career, his failures and successes, his various bankruptcies and disasters, in building and finance and property speculation. At one point it seemed he had been responsible for building most of the skyscrapers of New York over the past thirty years personally. He caught the amusement in Stefan Gillespie’s eyes, and laughed himself, enjoying his own pomposity and yet happy enough to puncture it.

‘It’s my city. It belongs to me. Every New Yorker feels like that.’

Over dinner the talk turned to families. Here Dominic Carroll seemed more reticent. He had sons, grown-up sons, but no grandchildren yet. He didn’t say much about his sons, for a man of such far-ranging enthusiasms, but it was enough to tell Stefan that the American wasn’t as close to them as he wished. Somewhere in there was a failure he didn’t want to talk about.

He let Stefan talk more now, and clearly he could listen too when he wanted to, or when the topic of conversation wasn’t so easy. Details of Stefan’s life on the farm at Kilranelagh absorbed him and amused him, but it was when he told him about Maeve that something changed. Stefan retold the story of his wife’s death, six years ago, in the matter-of-fact way he always did. It was simply part of who he was. The American listened intently, then reached out his hands and clasped Stefan’s across the table. By now Stefan had had a bit to drink himself; his acquaintance was ahead of him. Carroll shook his head sadly, knowingly. He had found a bond between them. He was a sentimental man; sometimes sentiments shared were a kind of friendship for him.

‘My wife died when my eldest was thirteen. It wasn’t so unexpected. She’d been ill a long time, and however much money you’ve got, when they can’t do anything, it’s no use to you. You keep thinking you’ll find a doctor who knows the cure, if only you look enough and pay enough. But you can’t pay your way out of God’s decisions. You can’t pray your way out either.’

As he said the last words he crossed himself.

They walked back to their seats from the dining room with glasses of brandy, quieter than they’d come. Stefan had no desire to continue talking about the past; it was enough to say it. But the American wouldn’t let it go.

‘You’ve never remarried?’ he asked as they sat down.

‘No.’

‘You’re still a young man.’

‘I’m not avoiding it. It’s just something that hasn’t happened.’

‘You should count your blessings,’ said the American. It was an abrupt change of tone. Where his words had shown sympathy, consideration, shared understanding, there was a surprising edge now, something almost bitter. He looked away, staring at the window. It was dark outside now; all he was staring at was the black hole that was the night sky. ‘You should be careful. It was the biggest mistake of my life. If you want sex, you can buy it. You can buy as much as you want. But if you think you can replace the one love you ever had, if you think you can even come close, forget it.’

Stefan didn’t reply. The new tone of voice had unsettled him. It contained an appeal to an intimacy he didn’t want and didn’t feel he liked very much. Whatever the man was talking about it was his and his alone.

For a moment the American said nothing either. He seemed to realise that he had taken a direction he shouldn’t have done and had revealed more of himself than he was comfortable with. He looked up and smiled again. ‘That’s the trouble with a journey like this. Nothing to do but drink and they chuck it at you like there’s no tomorrow.’

Stefan nodded. ‘I’ve had enough. I wouldn’t mind some more coffee.’

Carroll called to the galley for two coffees. He turned back to Stefan.

‘You don’t make much sense to me. You mind me saying it?’

‘It depends what you mean,’ laughed Stefan.

‘I’ve got your boy, and why you’re where you are, looking after him, and I’ve got what happened to your wife. I’ve got the farm and your mam and your dad. But I haven’t got you. I haven’t got you at all, you know that? What are you doing sitting on your arse in a country police station, running in drunks and, what was it, raiding the village hall to see if there’s any illegal dancing going on! Jesus!’ He grinned, entertained by the idea. ‘That’s not you, Sergeant Gillespie, not you! I didn’t have to talk long to see that.’

‘Someone’s got to do it,’ shrugged Stefan, and attempted a smile.

The look of suspicion was back in Dominic Carroll’s eyes. It struck Stefan forcibly that although the stranger was smiling at him, he somehow didn’t believe he was who he said he was. They’d talked about all sorts of things. Yet there was a sense now, as he watched the older man watching him, that the American had been probing, trying to find out something when there was nothing to find out. Stefan needed a break from the conversation. He leant across to the newspapers Carroll had been reading and picked one up.

‘Do you mind if I have a look at one of these?’

‘Help yourself. I’m going to turn in. We’ll be landing at Botwood in the early hours. It’s best to get some sleep in. You can’t sleep through it.’

On each side of the compartment the seats had been made up into beds while they were at dinner, with curtains across them to create small bedrooms. Dominic Carroll got up and took an attaché case from a rack above. He pulled out a washbag and walked through the plane to the bathroom. Other people were starting to appear in pyjamas, dressing gowns.

Stefan felt relieved to be alone for a moment; if nothing else it was a rest from talking. He opened the newspaper. The first thing he saw was a report about an IRA bomb that had gone off in London the day before.

There had been dozens of bombs across Britain since the beginning of the year. On 12 January the IRA Army Council had sent a letter to the British government, declaring war and claiming it was now the sole representative of the people of Ireland, since the treacherous and toadying government the people of Ireland had voted for several times since 1922 did not have the legitimacy the IRA had inherited, by a process similar to Apostolic succession, from the seven signatories of the Declaration of Independence in 1916.

The quantity of bombs that had followed this declaration of war had been impressive, even if the results had been indifferent. The damage had been minimal; reaction in Britain, despite indignant speeches in Parliament, seemed more like puzzlement than either anger or fear. The targets were sometimes railway or underground stations, mainly in London, and bridges over canals elsewhere; sometimes electricity pylons and gas mains were attacked; sometimes incendiaries were planted, more randomly, in stores like Marks and Spencer, Burton’s, Woolworths; one bomb had gone off at the offices of the
News Chronicle
in Fleet Street.

Remarkably, no one had yet been killed, in line with the declared intention of the IRA’s chief of staff, Seán Russell. In this most recent attack two bombs had exploded by the Thames, on Hammersmith Bridge. Stefan had heard about it in Dublin.

Two explosions which occurred at Hammersmith Bridge, just after 1 a.m. yesterday morning, are being investigated by Scotland Yard officers. The force of the explosion dislodged two girders in the suspension work of the bridge, and one was thrown across the roadway. Lamp standards were demolished and the middle of the bridge was left in darkness. While investigations at the bridge were in progress, Divisional Detective Inspector Clarke left to interview two men at Putney police station. It was later decided to arrest the two men. They were Edward John Connell, 22, a salesman, of Elibank Gardens, Barnes, and William Brown, 22, of Grafton Place, Euston.

He looked up to see Dominic Carroll opening the curtains into his sleeping compartment, and looking down at him with a wry smile as he did so.

‘Another bomb.’

‘Another bomb,’ replied Stefan; it was familiar news after all.

‘They don’t seem to be able to do much to stop it.’

‘Well, they will if they keep arresting people at the rate they have been. I don’t know what it is now, fifteen, sixteen, and two more yesterday.’

‘You’re assuming the IRA’s short of volunteers then?’

‘There are only so many people who’d know how to plant a bomb.’

‘Well,’ shrugged Carroll, ‘the British must be shaken up by it now.’

‘I would be,’ Stefan nodded. ‘I’d be pretty pissed off if I lived in Barnes and I had to go all the way down to Putney to find a bridge. I wouldn’t put it much stronger than that. Unless London County Council’s very short on lamp standards, I wouldn’t say it’ll keep anybody awake.’

As this conversation had started there had been a look of amused satisfaction on the American’s face. Stefan believed he could read it easily enough. He had sat in pubs with enough American-Irish singers of Republican songs to know that though ‘Up the IRA’ was a cry that was hardly on many lips in Ireland, the enthusiasm in New York and Boston and Chicago was unaffected by the fact that the IRA wasn’t only at war with Britain, it was still ideologically at war with the government of Ireland itself. It wasn’t an argument he intended to start. Carroll could have his opinions.

‘You’re one of Ned Broy’s men all right, Mr Gillespie. Goodnight.’

The words were said with something like a grin, almost with a wink, but there was something colder in the words than anything that had gone before. They were words that no guard could fail to understand, and they came from somewhere that was about more than singing rebel songs.

To be one of Ned Broy’s men was to be more than just a lackey of the illegitimate entity that Republicans still referred to contemptuously as the Free State; it was to be an informer, a traitor, a killer. Wasn’t the Commissioner a turncoat, like de Valera and all his crew, an IRA man himself who had brought ex-IRA men into the Gardaí to hunt down their old comrades, to imprison them, to torture them, sometimes to kill them? And it was true enough. The men Ned Broy had brought into the Garda Special Branch had done all that. Their reasons didn’t make the bare facts any more palatable.

That none of this had anything to do with Stefan Gillespie didn’t mean he couldn’t feel the contempt behind Dominic Carroll’s parting wink, or that he didn’t sense now that the man was no idle wearing-of-the-green, up-the-rebels American-Irish tourist. He was a political Republican, and as a wealthy and influential man in New York he probably mattered in Republican politics, whether it was in America or Ireland, and it was likely both.

Stefan remembered that Carroll had expected him to know who he was. If he really was someone, it was unlikely he hadn’t had a Special Branch tail on him while he was in Ireland, or that he wouldn’t have been aware of it. The suspicion he had shown, on finding a Garda officer sitting opposite him on a plane to New York, with apparently no very good reason to be there, finally made sense.

It was 5.30 in the morning when the Yankee Clipper bumped down into the waters of Botwood, Newfoundland, and was tied up at the end of the long pier at the western end of the small harbour. Stefan Gillespie had not been able to sleep. For a while there had been the rattle of conversation and laughter and the clink of glasses from further down the cabin, where a group of passengers was playing canasta, but it had been silent for several hours now. The soft buzz of the engines, and the occasional grunt and snore from behind the curtains across the aisle, were the only sounds.

It was an odd feeling, cocooned up here, sailing through the night sky. He felt apart, not just from the world below in general, but from his own life in particular. He wasn’t in the habit of stepping back from himself, and he wasn’t entirely sure he liked doing it, but here, hanging in the darkness, it was hard not to do it. There was a lot in his head. Ned Broy and Owen Harris and Dessie MacMahon and Terry Gregory; Valerie Lessingham and Tom and his parents; the wide-ranging conversation with Dominic Carroll, about Ireland and New York and the prospect of war and Hammersmith Bridge and loss and grief and the sheep on the mountainside at Kilranelagh. And he kept coming back to the question a stranger had asked that he hadn’t asked himself in a very long time: what are you doing, sitting on your arse in a country police station, running in drunks?