The City of Strangers (14 page)

The smile was back; he preferred her smiling.

‘I’ll give you the legs,’ he said, ‘but I’m not sure the smile’s so cute.’

Finally she laughed.

The door from the consul general’s office opened. A tall, fair-haired man in his early forties came out. The woman looked round and stood up. She didn’t smile. It felt as if she had been waiting for the man because she needed to. Her face was, if anything, slightly anxious now. There was more behind her impatience than boredom. Stefan Gillespie stood up too as he looked from the woman to the man. He recognised him immediately, though he hadn’t seen him for four years. The man smiled at the woman; he didn’t notice Stefan straightaway. The woman looked at her watch once more.

‘I’ve got to be back at the Fair. I’ve got some painters coming in.’

‘It’s all right, I’m going back. I’ll drive you.’

‘Is everything ready?’ She lowered her voice instinctively.

‘Of course,’ said the man lightly. He touched her arm, moving towards the door. ‘We can chat in the car.’ He smiled at Stefan now, but without recognising him.

Stefan walked forward, stretching out his hand. ‘John Cavendish. I won’t say this isn’t a surprise. How are you?’

The man laughed, recognising him now.

‘Stefan Gillespie! How are you, Sergeant? It is still sergeant?’

‘It still is. Is it still lieutenant?’

‘Captain for what it’s worth. If you hang around long enough –’

‘So, how’s it going? How’s the army?’ said Stefan.

‘Not so bad. I’m over here working at the World’s Fair, at the Irish Pavilion, in charge of security. I lock up every night and put the bins out.’

The woman was watching them both. Whatever her business with Captain Cavendish was, she didn’t much like it being interrupted like this.

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘I’ve got a man to take back to Dublin.’

Cavendish nodded. Stefan could see that he knew something about it.

‘You flew then.’

‘Someone thought it was important enough.’

‘How long are you here?’

‘Two days that’s all.’

‘Where are you?’

‘The Pennsylvania.’

‘We’ll have a drink.’

For a moment he looked at Stefan quite hard, as if he was thinking about something that had nothing at all to do with a drink with an old friend. He held out his hand and shook Stefan’s again, quite unnecessarily, and with a purpose that reflected, somehow, whatever it was he had been thinking.

‘Good,’ he said quietly.

The door from the consul general’s office opened again. The consul general looked out and saw the man he assumed must be Stefan Gillespie.

‘Sorry to keep you, Sergeant, come in!’

‘Thank you, sir.’

As he stepped back inside Stefan followed.

‘I’ll look you up!’ called John Cavendish.

Leo McCauley was still young, like many of the young Irish state’s diplomats, though a balding head made him look older than his forty-five years. He had a shrewd face that rarely showed irritation. He showed it now.

‘I’ve had several telephone conversations with the Commissioner of Police here that have been extremely polite, but not over-friendly. Obviously he can’t give me the bollocking he’d like to, but I imagine he’ll depute someone at Police Headquarters to give you one. The line you take, apart from the fact that you’re only here, as a junior officer, to remove the problem of Mr Harris from their city, is that he is simply a witness. Whatever rumours they’ve got hold of, you ignore. The NYPD won’t believe he’s only a witness, and they know we don’t believe it either, but it’s the best we can come up with as an explanation for our silence regarding the said Mr Harris and why we chose not to have him arrested or go through the usual deportation channels. It has the virtue of containing about enough truth to make it possible to keep saying it. So just keep saying it, Sergeant.’

‘Have they got any idea where he’s gone?’

‘There was a sighting of a man who could be Harris. If it was him I’d have some faith they’ll find him fairly quickly. Of course we’re all at the rosaries hoping that murdering his mother hasn’t given him a taste for it.’ He smiled. ‘Quickly and quietly doesn’t seem such a very good idea, does it?’

‘And what do I do now?’ asked Stefan.

‘You’d better go down to Police Headquarters and introduce yourself. The Headquarters Detective Division is dealing with it, and the Missing Persons Bureau is there too, so, as I say, I think we can hope for rapid results. The man to speak to is Inspector Twomey. As you can tell from the name he’ll be Irish enough for the bollocking to be loud but not too painful.’

The bollocking was much as the consul general had expected. Another cab took Stefan Gillespie through the streets of New York, now on his own; this time south towards Lower Manhattan and the unlikely baroque building on Centre Street, part palace and part French town hall, that was the NYPD’s headquarters. Inspector Joseph Twomey, despite having been born in the Bronx, had an accent that was unmistakably Irish, and the bollocking he gave Sergeant Gillespie reflected his origins.

What the fuck did they think they were doing keeping the presence of an Irish fucking axe-murderer to themselves and trying to fucking spirit him back to Dublin with a bunch of fucking queers and actors to make sure he stayed where he fucking was? It gave a whole new meaning to a fucking unarmed police force. And before anyone else started telling him the fucking man was only a fucking witness, he already knew better than that, and so did every fucking detective in Dublin. And after making the fucking hames of it they had, the fucking Gardaí couldn’t even send over an officer senior enough to give a decent fucking bollocking to!

The inspector stopped, almost in mid-bollocking, and asked Stefan where he came from. He then reeled off a list of a dozen officers whose families Stefan might know in Ireland. He didn’t know any of them, though the names of Dunlavin and Blessington and Carlow were being thrown at him, and it seemed like a good idea to say he thought some of the names rang a bell. When Stefan asked the inspector what he wanted him to do Twomey shrugged. There wasn’t much he could do, but with a bit of luck there’d be time for a drink with some of the lads before he put the fucking axe-murderer on the plane. And that was it. He handed Stefan over to one of the detectives who was looking for Owen Harris and disappeared back into his office.

Sergeant Michael Phelan was a few years younger than Stefan. He was about the same height, with the same dark hair, but cut very short unlike the untidy mess that was Stefan’s. He was another New York Irishman, but with none of Inspector Twomey’s obvious Irishness. His accent was entirely American and to anyone who knew, identified him unquestionably as a New Yorker. He seemed more amused by Owen Harris than irritated. It was just another job as far as he was concerned. But Stefan could see that the amusement was part of his style; he took it all much more seriously than the grin and the shrug suggested. He didn’t think the Garda sergeant would be sitting around in New York for very long however. He expected Owen Harris to be found fast.

It was Stefan Gillespie’s turn to smile, though he said nothing. It was clear the young policeman wanted to show him what a real police force was about. They hadn’t been talking for many minutes before Sergeant Phelan mentioned that the NYPD was the best police force in the world. It was said with a wry, self-deprecating smile; but he meant every word of it. And he said it again, twice, before they’d finished talking.

‘You’ve spoken to the people at the Markwell Hotel?’ asked Stefan as the conversation faltered and Sergeant Phelan had temporarily run out of ways to impress him. ‘I mean Mr Mac Liammóir and the other actors.’

‘I was there myself. Not that they knew anything. The guy climbed down the fire escape. I don’t think anybody knew he’d gone for an hour.’

‘I’d like to go over there anyway.’

‘That’s up to you. You think we missed something?’ Phelan smiled.

‘I’d say that’s unlikely.’

‘Too right it’s unlikely.’

‘Is there anything I can do though?’ asked Stefan.

‘Not unless you know New York backwards. I take it you don’t?’

‘What do you think? You’ll let me know when you get something?’

‘You’ll know soon enough, Steve. Like I say, it won’t take us long.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

The NYPD sergeant looked at him for a moment, then grinned.

‘You want in on it then?’

Stefan looked; he hoped Phelan meant what he thought he meant.

‘I mean he could just be picked up on the street somewhere, but if there’s anything more interesting going on. I mean it’s your call, OK?’

‘I’ve got nothing else to do. And I wouldn’t mind him in one piece.’

He looked at the gun in the American detective’s shoulder holster.

Sergeant Phelan laughed.

‘We’ll try so. And if there’s anything worthwhile, you’re in on it.’

Stefan walked out of his hotel and turned north on to 7
^th
Avenue. If he kept going he would come to Times Square and 47
^th
Street. It wasn’t a long walk, and it was a good way to get to know where he was. The gridiron wasn’t meant to be difficult to follow; that was what it was there for, but the profusion of numbers and the way they combined felt, for the moment anyway, more complicated than just looking for a name. Still, the place itself wasn’t entirely new to him, not so new anyway. There were names already in his head, the names everyone knew from the movies and from songs and the fact that New York somehow existed in the air people breathed, even in Wicklow and the streets of Dublin. It was, after all, as much an Irish city as an American city, at least in Ireland.

In front of the hotel, right across 7
^th
Avenue, was the Pennsylvania Station; a great row of simple Doric columns like something from the Forum in Rome that Rome could not ever have built on that scale. Beyond the columns was one of the largest indoor spaces in the world. It was no accident that it looked like a temple; its grubby granite was no longer the palest pink it had been once, but its scale, and even more the scale of the glass and iron inside, was meant to impress. It reminded Stefan of the Brandenburg gate in Berlin, rebuilt on the scale of St Peter’s Basilica; he had walked through the Brandenburg Gate into Unter den Linden as a child, visiting his cousins in Germany, and since it had never been out of the newsreels and newspapers since 1933, the connection was easy to make; it was a connection the architect had intended.

As he walked away from the station, he looked up, as Dominic Carroll had told him he should. The shapes that ascended, sheer and straight out of the noise and hustle of the city streets, were calm and still, carving out the skyline all around him; it was that skyline, unlike anything else anywhere, that made this place New York.

He could pick out one skyscraper, ahead of him, to his right, the Empire State building, towering over everything else, and a shape he already knew. He had promised Tom he would go to the top if he could; if he did nothing else, that’s what he would do. There were other buildings he thought he might know, that his mind had some pictures of at least: the Chrysler Building, brighter and more delicate; the heavy, solid sprawl of the Rockefeller Center. There were dozens of others, but that was about it as far as recognition went. They were all round him, in numbers he hadn’t quite been prepared for; if he got to the top of the Empire State he would be able to say he had seen them anyway.

He glanced down at the map he was holding, then put it in his pocket, and walked on. It didn’t really matter what the buildings were called. It was enough to look up and see them.

It wasn’t until he came into Times Square, where 7
^th
Avenue met Broadway, that his eyes really looked back down at the streets around him. There was nothing calm or graceful here. There was all the noise and colour he had taken in from the taxi rides, only more. There were restaurants, diners, lunch counters, bars, theatres, cinemas, ticket booths, nightclubs, burlesque shows, parking lots, newspaper stands, juice stands, souvenir stores, carts selling soda and hot dogs, pretzels and ice cream.

The lights that brought the place to life at night, advertising Planter’s Peanuts and Coca Cola, Chevrolet and Four Roses Bourbon, could only twinkle now, unable to turn the chaos into magic. Now there was just the already familiar traffic and the endless stream of people going somewhere in a hurry or nowhere in particular, and the stinking trucks still picking up filth from the night before. Yet Stefan Gillespie thought it was magical enough as he stopped to buy a pretzel and found himself looking down 42
^nd
Street, where the theatres and restaurants spilled out of Times Square; almost immediately the hotels looked shabbier.

It was the last film he’d seen with Maeve, on a rare night out, seven years ago now. Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell. ‘Come on and meet those dancing feet. On the Avenue I’m taking you to. Forty-Second Street.’

Five streets on he turned into 47
^th
Street, past the Mansfield Theatre, which advertised Dublin’s Gate Theatre, opening with George Bernard Shaw’s
John Bull’s Other Island
. The Hotel Markwell was two streets up 8
^th
Avenue on 49
^th
.

‘Mr Gillespie, we’ll have some coffee. The Markwell cockroaches are some of the largest I’ve seen, but the coffee is better than the Rainbow Room’s.’

Stefan sat opposite the director of the Gate Theatre, Micheál Mac Liammóir. They were in two armchairs in the hotel foyer, next to a window that looked out on to 49
^th
Street. Most of the stuffing had long disappeared from the chairs, and there were pieces of peeling tape all over the cracked and stained leather that had been stuck on over the years in vain to hold back the tide.

The Markwell was not one of New York’s grand hotels either, but it was a very long way down the list from the Pennsylvania. However, the actor sat back in his chair, smoking a cigarette, as if he was in the lobby of the Plaza or the Waldorf Astoria. As he spoke he never seemed to lose his focus on Stefan’s face, even though his eyes constantly flitted to the street beyond the grubby plate glass and the ever-absorbing flow of people and vehicles outside.