The City of Strangers (26 page)

He took a wallet from his jacket pocket and handed over a card: Mr Rudolf Katzmann, German Tourist Office; with an address on Broadway.

‘I had intended to talk to him that evening. Just a chat, you know, to catch up. So many people there! And I didn’t! And suddenly, he’s not here.’

‘You knew him at the World’s Fair then, Herr Katzmann?’ Stefan decided it was his turn to ask questions. The conversation was oddly stilted; yet it had to have a purpose.

‘No, we were barely acquainted, strangers in a strange city, you know how it is. Germany has no exhibition at the World’s Fair. Our Fuehrer feels that if anyone wants to see the future of mankind they don’t need fiction. There is the whole Reich to look at. Germany is the real World’s Fair.’

Katzmann said it with an unctuous smile that could have been wry, knowing, condescending, even contemptuous; but whether his contempt was for what he had just said or for Stefan Gillespie because he wasn’t a part of mankind’s real future, it was impossible to tell.

‘I’m sorry we didn’t have that conversation now,’ Katzmann continued. He looked harder at Stefan, as if he was waiting for something. ‘I assume someone will have to take over from him. I thought perhaps you –’

‘I have no connection with the Fair, none at all.’

The Abwehr man nodded, as if he expected a lie and had got one.

‘Well, we are fellow strangers in New York, my condolences again. If you feel there is something to say, when you have thought about it more, you know how to find me. At the moment you must be shocked by what has happened. Understandable, of course. But the world goes on, Mr Gillespie.’

He raised his hat and walked towards the gate and 59
^th
Street. Stefan waited a moment, until he had gone. It had been a conversation about nothing, except some of the things two strangers might have said about a man neither of them was much acquainted with, who had died in a city neither of them was much acquainted with either. But the German had wanted more. Stefan had felt the gentle push in his words. When he had asked if Stefan was working with John Cavendish, it wasn’t about the burglar alarm system at the World’s Fair. It was an invitation to reveal something more; a question hardly there and yet insistent.

Rudolf Katzmann not only knew who Captain John Cavendish was, he knew they were both in the same business. And since the G2 man’s business had been to find out what was going on between German Intelligence and the IRA in America, it was difficult to see what the two men had to chat about at the Hampshire House on St Patrick’s night. Now the Abwehr man had not only been asking about the enquiries into Cavendish’s death, he had been asking about Stefan too. He had followed him but he had been unperturbed that Stefan would be able to work that out. He had assumed Stefan was working with John Cavendish and had somehow wanted to talk about it. Of course the German’s assumptions weren’t all wrong. There was a sense in which he was taking over from John Cavendish; he had instructions to find the documents for G2 in Dublin, documents that he was sure must contain information about Germany and the IRA.

But how many people knew that?

Stefan Gillespie turned away from the West Drive and walked back the way he had come, across the park to the 5
^th
Avenue subway. It seemed like a good idea to go to Cavendish’s apartment now; he would phone Leo McCauley later to make arrangements to get into the office at the World’s Fair. But he wouldn’t go straight to Brooklyn. He would not be so easily followed through New York again.

*

Two hours later a cab carrying Stefan Gillespie crossed over the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. It was dusk. His circuitous journey had involved cabs, subways and els, a walk through Bergdorf Goodman and half an hour in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking less at the exhibits in the Egyptian collection than to see if any faces kept recurring from his journey. He had picked up a street map along the way and in Brooklyn the cab dropped him outside the Brooklyn Public Library in Grand Army Plaza. He went into the library through one door and left through another, then walked along Underhill Avenue to Prospect Place. It was a street of flat-fronted brownstone houses and stunted sidewalk trees. He walked up the stoop of number 292.

One of the keys on John Cavendish’s key ring opened the front door. It was dark inside the hallway; there was a steep flight of stairs in front of him; to the left was a heavy door with the number 1 on it.

On the street floor, below where Stefan Gillespie was standing, an elderly man was listening to his footsteps. He had been at the window, pulling on his coat, when he saw Stefan outside, looking up at the house, checking the address on a piece of paper. He didn’t know the man but he heard him enter with a key. He knew the door the stranger was standing in front of in the parlour floor hallway; it was the Irishman’s apartment again. He heard that door open too. Then he walked to his own door to the street and took the stick he used. He came out on to Prospect Place and turned left towards Vanderbilt Avenue and the drugstore telephone. He had more to say now. Maybe he’d get more. But ten dollars was still good money for a phone call.

Stefan had pushed open the door and slipped inside, closing it behind him almost noiselessly; at least that’s what he thought. He was standing in a sitting room; heavy armchairs, a table, a dresser. The curtains were open, but there was little light now; it was almost dark outside.

He could hear something. There was movement. He saw a door on his right, half open. Someone was in there. There was a noise that could have been a drawer opening. Then something heavy fell. Silence. Then a light went on. It wasn’t bright, probably a lamp. Stefan walked quietly to the door. He could see quite clearly now. He stood looking through the open door into the bedroom.

He knew the slight figure crouching down, pulling out the bottom drawer of a chest. She wasn’t easily forgotten. He pushed open the door and walked in.

‘You know every policeman in New York’s looking for you.’

Kate O’Donnell spun round and got up. The shock lasted only seconds. She shrugged, as if she did this kind of thing every day of her life.

‘You didn’t bring them with you then?’

‘I didn’t think. I wasn’t expecting to find you here.’

She looked at him as quizzically as he was looking at her.

‘Ditto, Mr Gillespie. Obviously New York’s smaller than we thought.’

‘I don’t know how we’re going to do this, Miss O’Donnell, but maybe if you tell me what you’re looking for, I could help you find it. That’s if it’s something you should be looking for in the first place. What do you say?’

‘Are you going to tell me what you’re looking for, Sergeant?’

‘Who says I’m looking for anything?’

‘You mean you’re just here to make sure nobody else is?’

‘It’s not my business why you’ve got a key to his apartment.’

‘There could only be one reason for that, couldn’t there, Sergeant? I was running short of underwear and I always keep a great drawer full here.’

‘Like I said, it’s not my business.’

‘The caretaker let me in as a matter of fact. He already knew what had happened. I’m afraid I told him I was John’s sister. It sounded more convincing than lover. That’s such a dopey word I’ve always thought, even when it’s not true. I think sister got more sympathy, which was the point.’

Stefan could see that the words weren’t a reflection of what she felt. Behind the smile and all the couldn’t-care-less answers, she was afraid.

‘I don’t mind what the point is,’ he said gently.

‘I don’t know how this happened. I needed him. We needed him. He wasn’t here. The night we – he was meant to be here. He was to drive us –’

Stefan walked across to her. There were tears in her eyes.

‘He said he trusted you,’ she said suddenly, looking at him.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He just said it, at the party, when I asked him who you were.’

‘I don’t know what you’re doing, but I was at Police Headquarters earlier. They’re looking for you, and your sister, and a feller, a black feller who helped you get her out of some hospital. Is that it? Is that right?’

She nodded. The tears that had started had stopped.

‘And I mean looking for you,’ he continued. ‘Everything else is on hold. What did your sister do, kill someone? That’s what it sounded like. They’re going to find you, you know that? It can’t take long. And here you are, wandering around Brooklyn, going through John Cavendish’s flat!’

‘We shouldn’t be here. We should be on our way to Albany.’

She looked helpless now; she had no words to throw back.

‘He said he trusted you.’ She said it again, looking at him, as if it would make something happen. He knew she was asking him for help.

‘What is it you’re looking for?’

‘The tickets for the boat. John had to do that, to match the passports he got us. We were meant to come here, to drive to Albany for the train. It’s all we need, the tickets. Jimmy’s found a way to get us out of the city now.’

‘Jesus, it better be a good one. I tell you the way the police –’

She smiled. He hadn’t said a word about helping; she knew he would.

‘I have to find the tickets, Mr Gillespie.’

He hesitated another moment, but he knew he would help her too.

‘I’ll search the room. Why don’t you tell me what this is about?’

Whatever it was, it wasn’t just Kate O’Donnell and her sister and a black trumpet player. It was John Cavendish too. Stefan wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know any of it, but it seemed less and less likely he didn’t need to.

He started to work his way through the apartment, starting in the bedroom, working quickly, tidily, thoroughly. He needed to find every envelope and every piece of paper anyway. As he worked Kate talked.

It didn’t all come out at once. She spoke a few words, then stopped, watching him. Some of the words were for him; some of them were just her own. She stopped and started again, walking round the flat, following him.

‘You have to understand that there’s nothing wrong with my sister. Niamh’s been locked up in a glorified asylum for over a year, for nothing, not because she’s crazy, but because she married a man she should never have married, because she got herself in a mess, in her head. I don’t know why she married Dominic. He was so much older. I think it was a way out of something, or she thought it was. She’d got involved in things when she was working on the boats. She was a waitress first, then she started working as a singer with some of the bands. I don’t know everything she did, but she was smuggling, drugs sometimes. She started taking them too. And then she met Dominic, and he was a way out for her. Only he wasn’t. I know she did have a breakdown. Then she started drinking and taking drugs again. He didn’t help. He put her in that place, locked her away. She did nothing, nothing!’

Stefan had searched the bedroom first. He was moving out into the sitting room. He closed the curtains, switched on the lights, started again. He looked behind cupboards and reached down the backs of chairs. He pulled drawers out and looked inside them. He opened every book in the bookcase.

‘I had a plan that when I finished working in New York I’d get Niamh out and take her back to Ireland.’ Kate began again. ‘I tried to talk to Dominic, to get him to let her come home. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t really believe she was in there to get help. He said it all the time, but it was where he wanted her. So the plan got crazier. It got Jimmy involved and then it got John Cavendish involved. I don’t know how. But he could do things. He could get false passports and use them for tickets. He had a way to get us into Canada and away while they were looking in New York –’

‘Can I ask a question?’

‘Of course you can.’

‘Why did John Cavendish decide to do all that?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘About the only reason I can think of, the one that wouldn’t be my business, doesn’t seem to come into it. So why else would he do it? You tell a good story, and I get the little catches in your throat as you tell it, but I’m damned sure that wasn’t enough. He was taking serious risks, wasn’t he?’

‘Maybe he just wasn’t the little gobshite you are, Sergeant.’

She said it with a smile, but there were no tearful catches now.

‘I believe what you’ve told me, but that’s not all of it.’

She looked at him hard now, her eyes narrowing, trying to get behind what that word ‘trust’ from John Cavendish had really meant when it came to this man she didn’t know. Then she realised he had stopped searching.

‘There’s nothing here, is there?’ she said.

‘Not in the way of transatlantic tickets, no.’

‘Or in the way of what you’re looking for,’ she replied.

It was his turn to look at her harder now. She had more to say; there was more she knew too. Whatever he was walking into, somewhere, somehow, at the moment she knew a lot more than he did. She might not know the same things, but she was unquestionably ahead of him. And somewhere, somehow, there had been something important in this for John Cavendish, in her, in this bizarre plan to get the crazy sister out of America.

‘So what am I looking for, Miss O’Donnell?’

She smiled at him more confidently now; he already knew she knew.

‘I was always good at charades. Is the answer IRA ciphers?’

Stefan Gillespie and Kate O’Donnell walked down the stoop to the sidewalk. Whether it was a good idea or a bad idea they were going to go to John Cavendish’s office at the World’s Fair together. He wasn’t going to leave her to search it on her own. He had some sort of explanation for what she was doing, but it didn’t really tell him why the G2 man had been helping her to do it, or how she knew what he was looking for. Did that mean she was someone the captain trusted or someone he had to watch? She was going to go anyway; Stefan couldn’t stop her. And she had a key to the Irish Pavilion.

‘We’ll walk up and get a cab,’ said Stefan briskly, but as they turned away from the house the door of a black Pontiac Eight, parked almost directly in front of them opened. A young man in a grey overcoat and a light brown hat stood in front of them, fresh-faced and smiling. He raised his hat.