The City of Strangers (28 page)

The depth of the detail surprised Kate, even after everything that had happened. She said nothing for a moment. It made no sense to her; it was evident Zwillman wasn’t about to provide any. Stefan, still looking through the desk drawers as he took this in, understood more than he had done. He had some part of what had been missing from the story Kate had told him.

‘OK, boss.’ The driver stood up. The safe door was open.

‘Let’s see,’ said Zwillman.

As he crouched down by the safe, Sam walked out with an air of professional detachment. Longie pulled several files and papers out of the safe. He put them on the desk. Stefan stopped what he was doing. Kate got off the desk and turned to face it. The gangster leafed through several documents quickly. He pushed them across to Stefan.

‘They don’t seem to mean much. Take a look though.’

As Stefan scanned the pages he could see only figures and accounts.

Zwillman opened a small envelope. He smiled.

‘The
Empress of Canada
. There you are, Miss O’Donnell.’

He continued to smile as he put the tickets in his inside pocket.

‘What are you going to do with those?’

‘I hope I’ll be able to give them to you later.’

He turned back to the papers on the desk. He opened a sealed manila envelope. Inside were the torn pages from a notebook, stapled together. He looked through the pages and then he handed them across the desk to Stefan.

‘From your IRA pals. This is what the ciphers look like.’

Stefan peered down at the pages. Rows of capital letters, in Cavendish’s tiny, meticulous hand; groups of five letters in columns. Some took up only a few lines of a page; others carried on over several pages.

‘So, that’s what you’re after, right, Mr Gillespie?’

There was no point saying it wasn’t. Whatever the reasons, Longie Zwillman had been trusted by John Cavendish, enough to know all this.

‘That’s what he wanted to get back to Ireland. But I want to know what’s in them too. I’ll take a copy of them.’

He held his hand out. Stefan gave him the pages. If Cavendish had trusted him, he had to do the same. And it wasn’t as if he had any choice.

‘All we need now, is the key, right?’

Zwillman wasn’t looking at Stefan now; he was looking at Kate.

‘Like I say, the deal still stands, Miss O’Donnell.’

‘The deal was with John Cavendish. It’s got nothing to do with you.’

‘You’ll have to take my word that it has.’

‘We’ve found a way to get out of New York. We don’t need help.’

‘That’ll be Jimmy Palmer’s friends, the band that’s playing a dance in Buffalo. You go in the truck with the musicians. They drop you at Albany?’

She stared at him, no longer surprised, but still disbelieving.

‘I got that from a couple of detectives in Harlem, and they got it from somebody at Headquarters Detective Division. I don’t think they know where you’re holed up yet, but they know you’re in Harlem. You’re not going to get out of New York, sweetheart. I doubt you’ll get out of Harlem.’

She sank down on to the edge of the desk again. The bit of fire she had started to find again had just had a bucket of water thrown over it.

‘So maybe you need some help after all.’

She didn’t answer; it was answer enough.

‘I can get you out. I can maybe get you into Canada. But forget about trains from Albany. If they know you’re going in a truck with a bunch of Harlem jazzers, they’ll know where those boys were going to kick you off.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Kate, reaching for another cigarette.

‘So the deal’s still there. You get the key to these fucking codes out of your sister, for Mr Gillespie and me, and I get you to the boat. I don’t know how long you think you’ve got, but if your sister isn’t out of Harlem pretty damn quick, she’ll be back in the psych ward, and your friend Mr Carroll will be making sure it’s one with bigger doors and bigger bars, and I don’t think you’ll be doing any visiting there. That’s if she makes it back to the psych ward in the first place. Headquarters Detective Division isn’t looking for you because it’s their call. They’re in Dominic Carroll’s pocket, and let me assure you, Miss O’Donnell, I know whereof I speak, when it comes to having cops in your pocket. I have to pay. Mr Carroll just has to be Irish.’

Kate O’Donnell looked at Longie Zwillman and simply nodded.

‘You go and get her now, and you bring her where I tell you.’

She nodded again.

‘You better go with her, Gillespie,’ said the American.

Stefan caught Kate’s eyes as she looked at him. She had no words now; she was out of her depth and she knew it. But she wanted him with her. And he nodded too.

He wasn’t exactly sure when he had moved from trying to find the envelope John Cavendish had asked him to take back to Military Intelligence in Dublin to helping a gangster smuggle a wanted woman out of the United States, but he was struggling to find the point at which he’d had any choice in the matter. Cavendish’s death hadn’t given him any choice. Kate O’Donnell didn’t really offer him much choice either now. As for Longie Zwillman, he didn’t look like a man who ever gave anybody any choice, at least not the kind of choice that would leave you with any choice.

As they walked out of the pavilion Stefan spoke quietly to Zwillman.

‘There’s a German intelligence man here, pretends he’s a tourism –’

‘Katzmann,’ replied the gangster. ‘I know.’

‘He knows something about this.’

‘Not as much as me, so don’t shvitz, my friend!’

‘So nisht kefelecht?’

Longie Zwillman roared with laughter.

‘Nisht kefelecht!’ he said, slapping Stefan on the back.

He was still laughing as he got into the car.

‘Keep it clean, boys, we’ve got an Irish cop who speaks Yiddish.’

‘Not much, that was about it.’

Sam looked round, amused.

‘He’s all right then, boss?’

‘So far,’ said Zwillman quietly. He looked at Stefan. ‘You in this?’

‘It looks like it.’

‘Then I guess you’ll do then, Sergeant.’

As the car pulled away from the Irish Pavilion, Stefan Gillespie looked out at the three Irish tricolours, drooping now after the breeze had dropped. The Soviet Pavilion towered above, massive and triumphant. Germany wasn’t represented at the Fair, but it would have produced something strangely similar. There was a lot that towered above Ireland of course, all around, in all sorts of ways, everywhere. He looked out as the Pontiac passed the Czechoslovak flag; all that was left of a small, broken country. It was likely there would be a lot more broken countries, and the broken bodies to go with them. Whatever this was about it met all that, somewhere, out in the darkness.

Stefan didn’t want any of it, but then nobody did. He had to trust what John Cavendish had left him with that night at the Hotel Pennsylvania: this mattered to his small country. He could still walk away from Kate O’Donnell even though he didn’t want to. He could probably walk away from Longie Zwillman too; there was nothing he knew that the Jewish gangster didn’t know already, and know more about. It was still the dead soldier who ultimately left him with no choice. Maybe the Abwehr man had been right after all. With no intention of doing so, Garda Sergeant Stefan Gillespie had taken over from Captain John Cavendish.

The Pontiac exited the deserted avenues of the World’s Fair on to the Grand Central Parkway; the signs proclaimed its message everywhere: The World of Tomorrow. Kate put her arm through Stefan’s. She leant closer to him. She had needed him there; now it felt as if she wanted him there too.

Negro Harlem started at 125
^th
Street. If New York was the biggest Jewish city on earth and the third largest Irish city, Harlem was the world’s greatest black city, in fact its only great black city. And like any other great city it teemed with the rich and not-so-rich and the poor, the idle and the ambitious, the builders and the breakers. Like any other city, it had its high-maintenance boulevards and its back-street tenements, and it threw them together, dancing cheek to cheek, like everywhere else in Manhattan. Nothing distinguished Harlem from any other low-rise part of New York in the appearance of its houses, apartment blocks, shops, theatres, churches, libraries, schools, gas stations, restaurants, diners. The dance halls and clubs weren’t any different to look at; there were just more of them, though pouring out of them, apparently with about as much ease as it took to smoke a cigarette or drink a beer, was some of the most vital, new, original music the world had ever heard. It was only really the colour of people’s faces that changed.

Riding uptown on 7
^th
Avenue, for twenty-five solid blocks north of 125
^th
, almost everybody on the streets was black. There was nowhere else like it; it had a faster heartbeat than anywhere else in the world’s fastest city. Harlem wasn’t a creation of concrete and steel; it was re-made every day by the people who walked its streets. It had none of the skyscrapers of lower and midtown Manhattan, but it also defined what New York City truly was.

At fourteen storeys the highest building in Harlem was the Hotel Theresa, on the corner of 125
^th
and 7
^th
. People called it the Black Waldorf-Astoria. There wasn’t too much Waldorf-Astoria about the unimposing white building with too many small windows; the gables and columns that sat on top, that the architect might have called Renaissance if he’d been pushed, were facades that looked like they’d been lifted up from another building, maybe a rail terminus, that should have been twelve storeys lower. The Theresa was more big hotel than grand hotel, but it did something no other big hotel south of 125
^th
Street did, all the way through Manhattan down to Battery Park; it was a big hotel a black man could walk into and get a room to sleep in. When you hit the Hotel Theresa, you were in Harlem.

Longie Zwillman’s driver pulled left off 7
^th
Avenue into 124
^th
Street and stopped the car just past a row of garbage bins and some high wooden gates. Stefan and Kate sat in the back. She knew where they were, at the back of the Hotel Theresa; he had no idea. Sam had said little and explained nothing. He was doing what his boss had told him; his passengers would do the same. Zwillman and the gunman they now knew as Rick had been dropped off over the Brooklyn Bridge before the Pontiac headed north to Harlem. Longie’s last remark had been curt; it had been an instruction, not a suggestion. Stefan could feel Kate’s anger, though Zwillman spoke to him.

‘Dump the Negro. He’s a fucking neon sign. Tell him to get out of the city for a bit. He’s not important, but the cops won’t give him an easy time.’

Stefan and Kate got out of the car and followed Sam back on to 7
^th
Avenue, into the lobby of the Theresa. It was busy and noisy. People spilled out of the bar into the foyer; most of them were black. Sam walked to the reception desk. A young black man recognised Kate and smiled. As he eyed Sam he looked more serious and more wary. He had no idea who the man in the overcoat and the homburg was, but he knew what he was without a word being spoken. Sam spoke quietly and quickly; this was his boss’s business.

‘You had any cops sniffing round in here tonight?’

‘No, sir, I haven’t seen any.’

‘You will. They’ll be looking for Miss –’ He glanced round at Kate, then back at the receptionist. ‘Her and the woman with her, whatever they’re calling themselves. The cops’ll have another name. They’ll be after the horn player too, Jimmy Palmer, whatever he’s calling himself. Are they upstairs?’

‘I don’t think they’ve been out of the room. I can ring –’

‘We’re going up anyway. They need to get out. You’ve got gates on 124
^th
Street. How do we get out that way? I don’t want to go through here.’

‘If you find the service stairs, at the end of the hall, here –’

The receptionist produced a plan of the upper floors of the hotel. He spoke as if he was telling them how to get to the nearest subway station. Stefan and Kate simply looked on; whatever was happening was outside their control; they were in a world of rules everyone but them understood.

‘The room’s here. All the floors are the same. You go right, right again. There’s a door at the end of the hallway. You go all the way down and it’ll bring you to the kitchens. You go straight in. I’ll tell them you’re coming, and someone’ll show you the way. You come out into the yard –’

‘I’ve got you.’

Sam took a roll of dollar bills from his pocket and peeled several off.

‘OK. That checks them out,’ he said, ‘and there’s a bit left over for you on top. I don’t know how long before the cops get here, but you tell them the dames left a couple of hours ago. They won’t believe you, but you might as well waste some of their time. They’ve got plenty of it, all right?’

‘You need to get dressed and out of here. If the cops don’t know you’re here there’s going to be somebody who’s going to tell them. They know plenty already. I don’t know if we’ve got minutes or hours, so let’s say minutes.’

Niamh Carroll and Jimmy Palmer stood by the bed they had just climbed out of, a few hastily grabbed clothes draped round them, surprised and disoriented; only a moment before they had been asleep. Jimmy was suspicious, puzzled; like the Theresa receptionist he only had to look at the man in the homburg to know what he was. The other man hadn’t spoken; he didn’t go with the gangster though. Niamh was holding Jimmy’s hand. She looked afraid. There were two men she didn’t know; one giving them orders.

‘I don’t understand, Kate, who are –’

‘This is Stefan,’ said her sister. ‘He’s a friend of John Cavendish –’

‘And I’m Sam,’ said Zwillman’s lieutenant, ‘and I’m here to get you out before the paddy wagon arrives. So now we all know each other, and we all know what’s happening, just get your fucking clothes on, sweetheart.’

‘Don’t talk to the lady like that,’ growled the trumpeter.

Sam shook his head wearily, and turned to Kate.

‘You tell these people why they got to fucking shift, in three words.’