The City of Strangers (16 page)

He stopped abruptly, then laughed himself, and gave a low, sweeping bow. The audience applauded and cheered; it was weird, but it was funny. Behind them Stefan Gillespie had recognised Louis MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’ immediately; Michael Phelan hadn’t; there was a lot more to do in the evenings in New York than there was in West Wicklow.

Owen Harris straightened up and drained his glass. It had been a tumbler almost full of straight bourbon. He held the glass out expectantly, grinning the way a performing seal might have grinned, if performing seals grinned. One of the men reached for a bottle on the bar and filled the tumbler.

‘My good man!’ exclaimed Harris.

Stefan was still standing in the shadows with the New York detective. Phelan grinned. ‘Wow, he’s some specimen. I guess that will be him.’ Stefan nodded. He had never seen Owen Harris, or even a photograph of him, but he didn’t need to. The man might not be much of an actor, but he was definitely a performer. Out of habit rather than necessity Michael Phelan reached his hand inside his coat and undid the clip of his shoulder holster.

‘Mr Harris?’

It was the NYPD detective who spoke, stepping out finally into the circle of light around the bar. Until then neither the performer nor his audience had been aware of the two men watching them in the darkness. Sergeant Stefan Gillespie stood just behind Sergeant Michael Phelan.

‘And what have you come as, dear?’ pouted Harris.

Phelan held up his badge.

‘Oh, G Men!’ the Irishman proclaimed, raising his eyebrows.

The onlookers laughed, though less enthusiastically.

‘I’m Sergeant Phelan, NYPD. I’d like to talk you, sir.’

‘My goodness, what good-looking policemen you do have here!’

There was another ripple of laughter. Owen Harris was good value.

‘If you’d come down to Headquarters with us, Mr Harris.’

‘Down to Headquarters! Just like a movie. But a lot more polite. I like that. It’s definitely an improvement. Who does write your dialogue?’

Whatever about the dialogue, this wasn’t the script Michael Phelan had in mind, at least not in front of Garda Sergeant Gillespie, who was there to see what real policing was. But for the moment Stefan was enjoying it.

‘If you just come along. You’ll know what it’s about, sure enough.’

Owen Harris grinned broadly; his accent was suddenly stage Irish.

‘Sure enough! Sure enough, says he! Bejasus and begorrah, Sergeant Phelan, was your mother ever Irish? God save all here, go away with you!’

The laughter from the onlookers was louder now. It seemed that the entertaining Irishman had the measure of the young detective. They resumed their drinking and topped up glasses. Stefan was aware that like Owen Harris himself they had all been drinking a lot. Who they were, how Harris had met them, whether they were, some of them, all of them, as Michael Phelan assumed, of the faggot fraternity, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the atmosphere had changed.

As the men grinned and sniggered, the geniality that had been there when he had walked into the club with Phelan wasn’t there any more. Owen Harris wasn’t aware of it; he wasn’t really aware of anything except that he was the focus of attention, his glass was being filled, and he was making people laugh. But there was a tension behind that laughter now. Stefan had been on the end of enough pub brawls to know how suddenly things could happen.

Michael Phelan’s voice was no longer lazy; he felt it too. The American detective had had no reason to expect trouble in the Dizzy Club at this time of day, but in his eagerness to show the visiting Garda sergeant how things were done, he had been less cautious than he should have been. Now he thought Stefan’s presence might defuse the situation. He only needed Owen Harris to agree to go with them.

‘This is Sergeant Gillespie. He’s here from Ireland.’

Harris looked at Stefan, a slightly puzzled expression on his face for a moment. It was New York, and for a moment it didn’t quite make sense.

‘A guard?’

‘I think you were expecting me, Mr Harris,’ said Stefan calmly.

‘You’re here to take me back!’

There was no suggestion left now of the repertoire of archness, the grins, leers, pouts, sneers, simpers and eyebrow-raising, that had so amused Harris’s audience. Now the man in the green feather boa looked frightened.

‘No! If you think I’m going with a fucking peeler and the fucking Irish Mafia here, you can fuck yourself. I know what you’ll do with me when you get me back there. You don’t want to talk to me. You want to fucking hang me! I’ve done nothing, nothing at all!’ He stepped back slightly, into his audience, looking at them with fearful, desperate eyes.

‘You just have to tell us what you know,’ said Stefan. ‘I’m sure you’d want to do anything to help. Didn’t you say so to Mr Mac Liammóir?’

‘Don’t let them take me. Please, don’t let them take me!’

He grasped the arm of a thickset, burly man. There was silence now. The group of men, seven of them, were looking at the two policemen hard.

‘What’s he supposed to have done?’ one of the men asked.

‘It’s not your business,’ snapped Phelan. ‘Just keep out of it.’

Another man put his arm round Owen Harris’s shoulder.

‘He looks harmless enough to me.’

‘You want to come downtown too?’ Phelan held the man’s gaze.

They were the wrong words. Another man stepped in front of the NYPD detective. He held up the glass he had just drained the drink from.

‘You know what you need to do, Sergeant? You need to walk back up those stairs to 52
^nd
Street and come back with some cops who are big enough and old enough to make those kinds of threats. You got that?’

The man was very close to Michael Phelan, breathing into his face; his stale breath smelt of too much bourbon and of too many cigarettes.

‘Back off,’ said the detective.

‘Why don’t you make me?’

Stefan saw two of the onlookers pick up empty bottles.

Sergeant Phelan shrugged. It was an attempt at a kind of weary indifference, but he was well aware the situation was dangerous now. He shook his head, and then reached into his coat and pulled out his gun. His movements didn’t look fast, but the gun appeared with considerable speed. But with even more speed, one of the men who had picked up a bottle moved out of the shadows and smashed it down across Michael Phelan’s outstretched arm. The gun clattered to the floor and spun off under a table.

Stefan Gillespie moved closer to Phelan, but even as he did there was a man in front of him, blocking his path. The man grinned and then swung his fist into Stefan’s face. He collapsed to the ground, knocking over a table.

Two men grabbed Michael Phelan by the arms; the man who had spoken to him stood in front of him, shaking his head. He tightened his fist and threw a heavy punch into the NYPD man’s stomach. Owen Harris was laughing now, a high-pitched laugh that was almost a scream, an uncomfortable mix of fear and hysterical amusement.

As Stefan tried to get up his assailant was standing over him; he kicked him back down again. ‘Stay down there, you bastard!’

The big man punched Phelan in the stomach again. ‘Next time bring some real cops, asshole!’

The other men were clapping and laughing now, as if all the geniality that had been there before the policemen had arrived had returned. And there was a new floorshow. The man who had hit Stefan was chuckling too, reaching for his drink. Everybody had forgotten about the gun. But Stefan could see it, close to the table he had knocked over as he fell. He rolled forward suddenly and grabbed it. As the man who had knocked him down caught the movement, he turned round and came for him again. Stefan sat up, pointing the gun straight at him. The man stopped. Then Stefan Gillespie fired the pistol into the air, deafening them, and stood up.

‘Do you want to let Sergeant Phelan go now, fellers?’

The men who were holding the NYPD detective let him drop to the ground. He struggled painfully to his feet, but as he did so the smile he wore so confidently was returning to his face, just a little more wry than usual. From outside, drifting along the passageway to the steps, the sound of a siren could be heard over the rumble of traffic. The woman they had spoken to when they entered Dizzy’s was standing behind Stefan, smoking a cheroot.

‘Someone must have phoned the cops again. They’re here.’

Lois DeFee turned back to the office and slammed the door shut.

There was complete silence in the club. Owen Harris’s shrill voice had stopped and no one else could find much to laugh about now. No one moved, but then Harris let go of the arm he was clutching so desperately and walked to the bar, as if he was unaware that anything at all had happened. He picked up a bottle of bourbon that was on the counter and filled his tall glass brimful to overflowing. He picked it up with great care and drained it. Still no one else moved, but everyone was watching him. He filled the glass again and drained that, and then turned round with a sigh, to face the room.

‘It’s been a pleasure, gentlemen,’ he said. He took a step forward and grimaced. He cleared his throat and started to sing. ‘If you ever go across the sea to Ireland.’ He took two more steps forward; they were shakier than the first. ‘Then maybe at the closing of the day.’ He frowned, as if searching for the words; he swayed a little. ‘You will sit and watch the moon –’

Then he passed out.

As he did there was the noise of running feet in the passageway from 52
^nd
Street now, and four billy-club-wielding NYPD officers appeared. They were definitely big enough and old enough. And when Owen Harris was carried up the steps from the club, on his way to the drunk tank, Stefan Gillespie could hear them proving it.

Later that evening the sounds drifting out on to 52
^nd
Street would be jazz, and very good jazz it would be. But there was nothing cool about the noises from the cellar now. No one was going to bother to take the customers from the Dizzy Club downtown and book them. That was too much like hard work. But beating the shite out of a bunch of faggots was altogether different; that really wasn’t any work at all.

*

Garda Sergeant Gillespie sat in a bare office on the ground floor of Police Headquarters. It was dark. The lights of New York were outside the window, but the blind had been pulled down. The room was lit by a lamp. There was the rumble of traffic. Through the door came the rattle of a typewriter, the occasional shout or curse, the sound of laughter.

Owen Harris sat opposite him, drawing deeply on a cigarette. It was ten o’clock in the evening now. The would-be actor and suspected matricide was a great deal quieter than he had been in the club on 52
^nd
Street. He had spent the last three hours in the drunk tank and was now on his way to a cell. But if he was quieter, he was also surprisingly resilient. Under his eyes the skin was almost black and the effects of a fierce, throbbing hangover still had him in their grip. As Stefan explained that he would be kept locked up for the next two days, until the Yankee Clipper left for Ireland, he accepted the situation with a calmness that seemed to have no relation to the terror he had shown earlier. The idea of the hangman had disappeared, as if it had never been there. Perhaps it had only been there for the audience.

Stefan put the change down to the fact that Harris had been blind drunk and probably couldn’t remember anything that had happened anyway, yet it didn’t feel like that. It felt as if he was speaking to someone else now, a man who was rational, helpful, perceptive, and alert.

‘I understand perfectly, Sergeant.’ Harris blew out a ring of smoke. ‘Obviously I can’t expect you to leave me wandering round New York, not after I’ve put everyone to such a lot of trouble to stop me doing exactly that.’

‘You’ll be in a cell on your own,’ said Stefan.

‘Well, that’s more than I was at the Markwell. And the food’s better here too. You’d really think that with a theatre company that has the kind of reputation the Gate has, the dear chums, Micheál and Hilton, could put us up somewhere a little more upmarket. I can cope with the occasional cockroach with the best of them, but it’s a question of style. We really do look like the poor relations. And the theatre’s not much better, according to Charlie Mawson anyway. The thing is, if you’re going to be on Broadway, you need to be on Broadway. Appearance does matter. In the theatre it’s everything.’

He spoke clearly, brightly, as if he expected the Garda sergeant across the desk to have an opinion. His accent could have been mistaken for an English one, of the public school variety, but he had abandoned the over-precise, over-shrill voice of his upper-class English impersonation at the Dizzy Club. Stefan assumed this was his own voice; the Irish tones that softened the brittle consonants and sharp nasal vowels were unmistakable.

‘You understand that you’ll be taken to the plane with a police escort.’ Stefan didn’t feel it was necessary for him to comment on the Gate Theatre’s choice of hotels. ‘Once we’re on it you won’t be getting off again until we get to Foynes. It does stop to refuel, in Botwood in Newfoundland, and most people do get off. However, I won’t be able to let you do that, I’m afraid.’

‘Botwood, well, there’s a place I’d never thought of going.’

‘I don’t imagine many people have.’

‘Not much there in the way of nightclubs anyway?’

‘Not much at all.’

‘That’s no great loss then. Will I be in shackles, Sergeant?’

‘Not if I can avoid it. That’s really up to you.’

‘Ah, so you do have shackles.’

‘Handcuffs,’ replied Stefan.

‘I did intend to come back to the Markwell, Mr Gillespie. It wasn’t so much an escape from returning to Ireland, more an escape from the tedium.’

‘I’m not sure that’s something I can take for granted, Mr Harris.’

‘I was so bored in that grim hotel, you see. There wasn’t even a view. Just a fire escape and somebody’s washing. And I wanted to see something of New York. I’d been shut up in the sodding place since I arrived. I mean to come all this way and not walk down Broadway. It was a frightful waste.’