The City of Strangers (22 page)

‘The NYPD called him straightaway. Just get a cab, Mr Gillespie!’

‘You want me to go somewhere, I’ve got it. So how about where?’

‘I’ve already told you where!’

‘Then tell me again, Roland!’

‘The Hampshire House.’

‘The Hampshire House?’

‘It’s on 59
^th
Street, right in front of Central –’

‘All right, I’ve got it. I was there this – never mind. Why does Mr –’

‘I’m not phoning for a fucking chat, Sergeant. Just get off your arse!’

The cab couldn’t stop at the front of the Hampshire House. There were vehicles all along the kerb. They included three police cars and an ambulance. There were policemen everywhere. Stefan got out of the taxi and walked to the kerb.

A uniformed police officer stepped in front of him.

‘Move along, buddy, this is a crime scene.’

‘I’m looking for the Irish consul general, Mr McCauley.’

‘You must be Gillespie?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Over there, down the side of the building.’

He gestured over to the left. Stefan walked along the front of the Hampshire House. Where the building stopped there was a black gap and some shining, aluminium gates, now open. There were more policemen. He saw the consul general in conversation with a senior officer. He recognised him as Inspector Ernie Phelan. He had last seen the inspector singing ‘Wherever Green Is Worn’ round the piano with Dominic Carroll, just before he left the party.

Leo McCauley looked relieved to see Stefan. Ernie Phelan nodded a curt, business-like greeting, then turned away to shout at a group of uniformed officers. ‘Someone get me a fucking coffee here!’

The consul walked across to Stefan. ‘You know what’s happened?’

‘No. I was just told to get here fast.’

‘You were here with John Cavendish last night?’

‘I was talking to him, at the party –’

McCauley said no more. He walked to the dark alleyway between the Hampshire House and the next building. A group of NYPD officers stepped aside to let them through the silver gates. A little way down the black valley between the high-walled buildings was a blaze of light. Dark figures and their shadows moved in it.

Stefan walked beside the consul; McCauley spoke quietly and calmly; he gave no explanations, no instructions.

‘The party broke up around midnight, but apparently he’d left some time before that, quite some time. But you were there yourself, isn’t that right?’

‘I left around eleven. He’d already gone, maybe an hour before.’

‘I need to know what’s going on, Sergeant. I need to know what’s happened. The best thing is for you to liaise directly with the police. You seem to have got on the right side of them, which is helpful. I’ve spoken to the ambassador in Washington and he’s agreed you delay your flight. I don’t know how long this will take, but Mr Harris can stay where he is. There may be staff from the consulate who need interviewing, as well as the World’s Fair pavilion. We have to be as helpful as possible.’ He was silent for some seconds. ‘Captain Cavendish spoke to me about you. A short conversation but he trusted you. If he trusted you you’re the right man to keep an eye on all this. It may be no more than a terrible accident. Let’s hope it’s just that.’

They had reached the floodlight that illuminated the end of the alleyway, where it turned a corner to the back of the Hampshire House. A police photographer was taking pictures of a body that lay where it had fallen from a terrace some thirty storeys up. Detectives and uniformed officers looked on. Flash bulbs lit the scene more brightly than the floodlight for a fraction of a second, then again, then again.

Stefan already knew whose body he would find as he passed through the group of detectives. Captain John Cavendish lay on his back on a mound of builder’s rubble, brick and broken concrete, in the dark blue dress uniform with its red stripes, its white braid, its white belt. He was staring up at the night, his dead eyes wide open.

Seán Russell, stated to be an Irish Republican Army leader, has been detained in Detroit. Federal agents arrested Russell as he was about to enter a taxi-cab in front of Michigan Central Station. According to a Detroit newspaper, Russell’s companion, who was not arrested, is Mr Dominic Carroll, of New York, said to be known as IRA leader in the United States. Detroit, where Russell was arrested, is just across the river from Windsor, Ontario, where the King and Queen are today. Dominic, adds the newspaper, described himself as an ‘old friend’ of Russell. He said that Mr Russell was in America to visit relatives in the Bronx, New York, and they had gone to Detroit to see friends. He denied that their visit had any significance.

The Irish Times

Every Saturday since arriving in New York, Kate O’Donnell had taken the Long Island Rail Road from Woodside in Queens to Locust Valley in Nassau County on the island’s North Shore, changing trains at Jamaica for the Oyster Bay Branch. She knew the journey now; it should have been enjoyable, but in the months she had been working at the World’s Fair she had grown to loathe it.

As the train moved east and north from Jamaica, the city of New York was left quite suddenly and abruptly behind. There were bright clapboard houses, and close-cut lawns; there were neat farms with tidy bar-fenced fields; there were thin, scattered woods and narrow two-lane roads edged with trees; then eventually, beyond the trees, there were the long, empty beaches on Long Island Sound that they called the Gold Coast. The Oyster Bay Branch Line stopped at the small towns that nestled comfortably between the low hills and the coast and described themselves as villages and hamlets; Albertson, Roslyn, Greenvale, Glen Head, Sea Cliff, and Locust Valley, the last stop before the end of the line at Oyster Bay.

There was quiet order in the timber-fronted stores that lined the Wonderful-Life Main Streets; and in the countryside beyond, ever closer to the sound of the sea, there were the homes of the wealthiest New Yorkers. There was old money here, which was always preferable to new money on the North Shore. There was so much money in fact, and it had been here so long, that the wealthiest people of all spoke a language of their own, just to show that their money, like their families, really had been around since time immemorial. It was called Locust Valley Lockjaw, a slow, tight-lipped, consonant-dropping drawl, consciously or unconsciously the exact opposite of the accents of New York City itself, that were only ever fast, furious, urgent, shrill, loud. Those other accents were beginning to find their way up the Long Island Rail Road, but money could always absorb more money, even money that spoke with Irish, Jewish, Italian accents, as long as there was enough of it. The privacy all that money gave was a precious commodity only miles from one of the biggest cities on earth; there was more than one reason to want it.

For the last month Kate O’Donnell had changed her routine. Instead of coming in the afternoon she came in the evening and stayed late. With the imminent opening of the World’s Fair, she said she was working every Saturday, along with everyone else at the Irish Pavilion. Sometimes, when the Woodside train got to the Jamaica interchange, she walked down the steps to Beaver Road and got a taxi all the way to Locust Valley, and had it wait to bring her back. It was expensive, but it meant people got used to her arriving in an out-of-town taxi and to the sight of a black driver in a Queens cab. And they did get used to it, though the nurses still thought Kate had some serious moxie to sit in a car with a Negro all that way, and at night too.

It was a big house that lay at the end of Kate O’Donnell’s journey, surrounded by lawns and trees like all the other big houses. It was past eight o’clock when she arrived now, and it was already dark. This time the Jamaica taxi had been waiting for her in Beaver Street. The driver was the trumpeter, Jimmy Palmer; the cab belonged to the friend of a friend who didn’t ask why Jimmy wanted it. They said very little as the car drove out of Queens into the countryside. It had all been said. Now it had to be done.

In Locust Valley, coming out of the town that called itself a hamlet, past the drugstore and the bank and the filling station, on to Birch Hill and Horse Hollow Road, they passed the driveways to half a dozen big houses and signs to the country clubs that serviced them, the Nassau and the Piping Rock, before the cab turned into a driveway that seemed like all the others; high hedges, dark shrubs, pine trees. It didn’t particularly stand out. All the estates were shut away from prying eyes. But behind the hedges here, among the trees and the rhododendrons, the high wire fencing that was invisible from the road made a more serious statement about being shut away.

A hundred yards along the gravel road there were heavy iron gates, with none of the frills and flourishes of the other wrought-iron showpieces off Horse Hollow Road. They were opened by an elderly man in a dark green, guard-like uniform. He tipped his cap to Kate who was sitting in the back of the cab. He knew her well enough. As the taxi drove on he closed and locked the gates. There was a small sign at the lodge: Bayville Convalescent Home.

The house was as big as a Locust Valley house should be. It was wide and high, with white-rendered walls and grey stone-mullioned windows, lit now by two spotlights where the driveway turned towards the stone columns of the porch. The grey shingles of the high-pitched roof matched the stone. Once the house had hosted Astors and Vanderbilts, Guggenheims and Rockefellers, Roosevelts and Du Ponts, but its owners hadn’t had quite enough old money to fend off the Depression, and it had quietly and discreetly become a convalescent home for the wealthy. Yet it still hosted members of the New York aristocracy occasionally. There were several of them in the secure wing at the back of the house, where the windows had bars and there was a locked security door to the country-hotel-like reception area. It had been hosting some of them for a considerable time.

The Bayville Convalescent Home dealt with the kind of convalescence that nobody talked about. The term most heard in the consulting rooms was ‘nerves’, and the Bayville’s patients suffered from nerves of various kinds. Alcohol-induced nerves were probably at the top of the list, although the nerves created by Benzedrine and cocaine and heroin featured prominently too. People dried out and cleaned themselves up here, sometimes because they wanted to, sometimes because they were locked in until they did. Either way a lot of the patients were very regular visitors; they came and went, willingly and unwillingly.

There were other problems the Bayville Convalescent Home handled just as discreetly, although no one needed to put you in a barred room because you had gonorrhoea or syphilis. Sometimes, of course, like sexually transmitted diseases, nerves weren’t so easy to get rid of, even when the drugs and alcohol had been flushed out. Insanity wasn’t a word much used at the Bayville, but no one wanted a wife, a sister, a brother, a child, to join the thousands of cuckoos in the fortress hell that was the ‘Psych Center’ at Long Island’s Kings Park. You didn’t want to commit them to being plunged in and out of baths of near-freezing and near-boiling water for the rest of their lives, or put them on the wrong end of the other varieties of curative care; electro-convulsion, insulin-induced seizures, ice-pick lobotomies. No one would choose that for a loved one, let alone in public. But at Bayville nerves of that kind could be kept in check, and kept out of sight. And the nervous could vegetate happily enough in a room that didn’t remotely resemble a cell, while the patient was pumped full of drugs very like the ones that their fellow patients were having pumped out of them.

‘So, we’re going to do it. Today, Niamh. It has to be now.’

In the pink-washed room at the back of the Bayville venetian blinds hid the iron bars on the windows. There was a bed, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers painted pale blue, a desk with a radio and a vase of fresh flowers on it; there were two armchairs on either side of a coffee table piled high with magazines; a door opened into a bathroom. The door to the corridor had a small pane of wire-meshed glass in it. There was a painting of trees in the fall, somewhere in New England. The radio was on, playing music quietly, a Beethoven piano sonata; it was always on, even through the night, though Niamh Carroll was never really conscious of listening to it.

She was thirty-six, almost eight years older than Kate. The sisters had been close for a very short time, when Kate was young, but age had pushed them apart; Niamh had left home when Kate was only nine, and she had only rarely come back. She had lived her life away from Ireland, and the life she had lived had been her own, separate life. It had taken her away from her family in ways that had nothing to do with distance, for no special or extraordinary reasons; just because it’s a lot easier to get lost than it is to find your way back home.

‘I don’t know if I can do it. You didn’t say it would be today.’

‘It has to be one day.’ Kate took her sister’s hand. ‘And it’s today.’

Niamh shook her head uncertainly. She was confused, already tearful.

‘Jimmy’s outside, Niamh.’

The words were met with a frown of disbelief.

‘I told you he would be.’

‘He’s here? He can’t be here.’

‘Niamh, we’ve talked it through a dozen times. It will work, I know it will. You have to be strong, that’s all. All you have to do is walk. No one’s going to want to talk to you, no one ever does. There’s one locked door to go through, then there’s the reception desk and the front door. You walk through it, straight to the taxi. Jimmy’s there. You can do it.’

The idea of strength was not something Niamh Carroll found it easy to think about. Thinking at all was something she had got out of the habit of doing. She had been in this room for nearly eighteen months, though she had little real sense of how long herself. The days were always the same, the music was always the same, the magazines were always the same, the nurses were always the same; it was a dull haze, much of which she spent asleep. But she didn’t sleep so much now. She had stopped crying for reasons she didn’t understand; she had stopped screaming in the night when she woke up; she had stopped eating her food with her fingers and then pushing the same fingers into her throat to make herself sick.