The City of Strangers (29 page)

‘The police know we’re in Harlem. They know about the band getting us out. They know where we’re going, Niamh. They know Jimmy’s with us. We’ve got to find another way. Stefan and someone else Captain Cavendish knew, Mr Zwillman – I’ve got the boat tickets, if we can get to Montreal. I can’t explain now, Niamh. But we have to leave. We don’t have a choice.’

Now Niamh looked cornered and frightened. She looked at Jimmy.

‘Longie Zwillman?’ asked the trumpeter in disbelief, staring at Sam.

‘Mr Zwillman is making alternative arrangements,’ nodded the driver.

‘For fuck’s sake! What is this?’

‘Minutes, I said. You’re not playing a solo now, brother.’

‘Don’t call me brother, Jewboy.’

‘We’re all brothers under the skin, Jimmy,’ grinned the gangster.

Palmer wanted to lay one on him; instead he reached for his clothes.

‘Niamh, please, you have to trust me,’ said Kate.

‘Your sister’s right, Mrs Carroll,’ Stefan spoke quietly. ‘We’re here to help you get back to Ireland. The plans have changed. They have to. There really isn’t any time.’

His voice surprised Niamh, because it was an Irish voice when she didn’t expect one. And it was an Irish voice talking about going home. She felt calmer.

Stefan looked at Jimmy. ‘If the police come –’

The trumpeter nodded. It wasn’t an easy nod, but reality was a wall in front of him now. Talking wouldn’t take him over it. He smiled at Niamh.

‘Harlem’s a crazy place, I told you. We do what the man says.’

That smile hadn’t been an easy smile either.

Kate bent down to pick her sister’s clothes off the floor.

‘You go in the bathroom.’ She pushed the clothes into Niamh’s hands. ‘I’ll put a few things in a bag, as much as I can. Just be quick, sis, please.’

She took Niamh’s arm and pushed her into the bathroom, then she picked up a leather bag and started to take clothes from a suitcase and stuffed them into it. Palmer was almost dressed now, buttoning his shirt.

‘Mr Zwillman recommends you take a trip out of town, Jimmy.’

Again the horn player produced a nod he didn’t want to give.

‘I guess I can work it out. Even one nigger’s a nigger too many.’

Sam shrugged; that was about it.

The telephone by the bed rang. Sam walked across and picked it up.

‘OK. Keep them talking and then send them to another floor.’

He put the phone down and grinned at Stefan. He liked his job.

‘They’re here now. So what do you think of New York, Sergeant?’

For a moment Niamh Carroll and Jimmy Palmer stood at the open door of the hotel room. There was no time to speak. Maybe that was best. She stepped forward and held him for another precious second. There was no time for tears either. They could wait. ‘We’ll find each other. I’ll write when I’m in Ireland.’ He nodded.

He knew she believed they’d find each other. He would have liked to believe it too. He knew that wasn’t the way the world worked. He smiled to tell her it was true. And then she was gone. They were all gone. He shut the door. He walked to the bed and pulled on his jacket. He looked at the bed. He reached out his hand and touched the sheet where she had lain. The telephone rang again. He picked it up. It was the receptionist.

‘Yeah, I know, I guess it wasn’t going to take the assholes long.’

He put the phone down. He took a cigarette from the packet by the bed and lit it. He took in a long draw of smoke then walked to the door. He looked back into the room once more, and smiled. He turned out the light.

*

Longie Zwillman’s driver led them through the Hotel Theresa’s kitchens. Amidst all the noise and smoke and steam, the shouting and cursing and laughing, the crash of pans and crockery, no one took any notice at all of four people who very obviously had no place there, but each time they came to a door, or a turn, or a passageway, someone would look up from chopping vegetables or grilling steaks or washing dishes or wheeling a trolley, to point the way and send them on in the right direction. It wasn’t long before they were walking past the garbage bins at the back of the hotel, out on to 124
^th
Street. And minutes later the Pontiac was heading south down 7
^th
Avenue.

*

As Jimmy Palmer sauntered towards the elevators, he was in a good mood. He wasn’t looking forward to what was going to happen downtown, but he’d been beaten up by detectives before. Years ago in the Prohibition days, when a speakeasy was raided, the cops always let the white customers leave and then beat up the black barmen and busboys and musicians, so that nobody could say they weren’t doing their jobs properly. And every punch that was going to be thrown at him now was going to be more time they weren’t out there looking for Niamh. There wasn’t a bigger thing he’d done in his life than this.

For a long time he’d thought he’d never see her again. He’d found out where she was; he’d found out they had her locked away, because of the heroin or because she was crazy, but he knew that wasn’t it. Yet there was nothing he could do, except remember, and hope that she remembered.

Then he’d met her sister; she’d been looking for him. She’d known who he was and she’d known what he was to Niamh. And somehow the plan they’d talked about one long night in Small’s Paradise hadn’t seemed so wild, even when the sun came up. Kate had found someone who could help too; a man who could get passports, real ones. He didn’t understand what was going on between the Irishman and Kate; he didn’t know what the Irishman really wanted. But he knew what Niamh had been doing when they met on the boats, when he was playing in a band back and forth across the Atlantic, and she was singing. They’d both brought some drugs across now and again; everybody did. But she’d been doing something else.

She was carrying messages for the IRA. It didn’t mean a lot to him. Nobody was going to lock you up for it as far as he could tell; definitely not in New York. What he knew about the IRA he’d read in the papers. It was a big thing where the Irish lived in New York, but what it was about, and what kind of army they had, he never really got a handle on. He’d played a few Irish dances and he knew they sang a lot of songs about it when they were pissed; that was about as far as his interest extended.

There were plenty of people in Harlem, if you wanted to listen, who hadn’t got much time for the British. They’d stolen most of Africa after all, and black people weren’t going to take that forever, any more than they were going to take white shit in America forever. Ireland was another place the British had stolen and if the Irish wanted to kick their arses out, there was nothing wrong with that. The same thing was going to happen in Africa; it was already starting to happen. It was how Niamh had met Dominic Carroll though, all that IRA stuff. He was a big man. He did what big men do. He took what he wanted and pissed on everyone else. There was nothing surprising about that. That was how it was everywhere; it didn’t matter whether you were black or white, except that if you were black there were more people out there to piss on you.

Sometimes Niamh could seem hard, but she never was, not inside; he knew that. And when Dominic Carroll found out she wasn’t what he wanted after all, he broke her, in every way a man could break a woman. But Jimmy had found her again. He’d found her and now he’d brought her away from it. She would find a way to put the pieces together.

That night in the Hotel Theresa, holding her again, he knew there was something that hadn’t been broken. There was what she felt for him. He knew there would be a place, one day, where she could put the pieces together. Even if he never saw her again, he’d made that happen.

He was smiling as the elevator doors opened. A white policeman came out. He was wearing an overcoat over his uniform. The white shirt told Jimmy the man was a senior officer. It was Captain Aaron Phelan. On another day it might have occurred to him that he was more senior than anybody might expect on a job like this. But all that surprised him was that it was quicker than he’d thought. Not many minutes earlier there would have been nothing to smile about. A black, uniformed officer and a white plain-clothes man stood beside the captain. It was the black officer who spoke.

‘Jimmy Palmer, right?’

‘You looking for Jimmy Palmer?’

The game was on.

‘Where are they?’ asked Aaron Phelan quietly.

‘Where’s who, Captain?’

They looked round as two more officers appeared, coming up the stairs next to the elevator; another black officer and another detective.

Phelan looked at Palmer for a moment. The expression on the trumpeter’s face told him that the room would be empty. He walked back along the corridor. The detectives followed him with one of the black officers; the other black officer stayed with Jimmy. When they reached the room Phelan nodded. One of the detectives kicked open the door. They all went in; and seconds later they all came out, heading back to the elevator.

‘Check the rest of this floor. Get downstairs and check the service stairs and the service elevator. Get some men in the kitchens. Get outside back and front. We don’t know whether they’re still here or they’ve already gone. And when you’ve got a spare minute take the fucking receptionist out back and lose him some teeth. Somebody made a call, is that right Jimmy?’

As the captain turned back to Jimmy Palmer the two black officers were running down the stairs; one of the detectives was walking back down the corridor, heading for the service elevator. There was a door behind the trumpeter; a brass panel said ‘Housekeeper’. The captain walked forward, opened the door, switched on the light and waited. The detective took Palmer’s arm and pushed him through it. Inside the room there were shelves filled with perfectly folded and ironed bedlinen, from floor to ceiling; towers of white towels were piled on a table and on the floor. Aaron Phelan followed Jimmy and the detective into the small, windowless room. As the door swung shut the detective stepped back and the captain stepped forward.

‘How long since they left?’

‘Who left, Captain?’

‘Shall we make it short, Jimmy? Niamh Carroll, Kate O’Donnell. You drove the cab that took them from the Bayville Convalescent Home. You brought them here. You’ve been staying here with them. That’s about it.’

‘You’re right, they’ve gone. It was a couple of hours ago, I’d say.’

‘It’s not hours,’ said Phelan. ‘Where are they going?’

‘I don’t know, I just drove the cab. They didn’t tell me.’

‘You know how I got here?’

‘A squad car?’

‘I see,’ smiled the captain. ‘I got here because one of your friends, one of your trusted brothers, who was going to help you get the women out of New York, and upstate to catch a train to Canada, wasn’t much of a brother.’

Jimmy Palmer took the blow. It wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world. It’s how things were; there was always somebody to piss on you.

‘Is it worth what’s coming, Jimmy?’

The horn player said nothing. He didn’t need a diagram.

‘You think that white whore gives a fuck about you?’

It wasn’t the right thing to say, because as it happened, Jimmy Palmer knew that that white whore did give a fuck about him. He knew she loved him. Maybe because of that there was really no right thing for Aaron Phelan to say. The trumpeter was never going to tell him anything. Well, he was going to tell him quite a lot; it’s just that none of it would be true. He had already got a series of stories in his head. Some of them would even be convincing; some of them he would keep till they were beaten out of him.

‘All I need to know is where they are, and where they’re going?’

‘I drove the cab. I got paid for it. I brought them here to hole up. I don’t know where they’re going now. There was a train in it somewhere. I don’t know about Albany. Maybe the Chieftain, maybe it was Chicago.’

‘That’s crap, isn’t it Jimmy?’ Phelan shook his head.

‘They wanted my help, Captain. They didn’t trust me though.’

‘That’s funny, because I don’t trust you either.’

The trumpeter shrugged. He wasn’t smiling, but there was a smile in there. And Aaron Phelan could see it. He wasn’t such a bad judge of men.

‘You’re not going to tell me anything, are you? It won’t matter what happens downtown. It won’t matter how much shite we kick out of you.’

Jimmy said nothing. He wouldn’t be able to waste as much police time as he’d hoped. But at least when the beating came it would be shorter.

‘There’s not a lot of point in this,’ said Phelan. ‘You know what they do with a nigger who fucks a white woman in the South, don’t you Jimmy?’

‘I don’t spend a lot of time in the South, Captain.’

‘Don’t worry, you’re in New York. We’ll leave you your balls.’

Aaron Phelan turned abruptly and walked out. The door swung shut again. It was Jimmy and the detective now. The captain obviously didn’t do his own beating. But if it was here, if they weren’t taking him downtown, it wouldn’t last that long, thought the horn player. It didn’t. The hand the detective drew from his coat was holding a gun. He fired three times. Jimmy Palmer collapsed on to the towels neatly piled beside the shelves, scattering them across the floor. Red blood spread out across the white.

*

They were back under the Brooklyn Bridge now, driving beside the East River. Longie Zwillman’s driver pulled into Fulton Street and wove his way through the fish trucks and forklifts, blasting his horn and responding enthusiastically to the curses that blasted back in return. Sam stopped the Pontiac in Front Street, behind the market. He pushed in through the open doors with Stefan, Kate and Niamh. The cold ice-and-blood air hit them along with the roar that was the noise of the market.

It was dark now and the market was gearing up for the night. Sam turned up a stone staircase just inside the doors. They walked up two flights of stairs and into a dimly lit office. The windows had been whitewashed over in places; cracks in the glass were papered over. There was a desk full of skewered bills and invoices; a table with unwashed coffee mugs and overfull ashtrays. One side of the room was piled with wooden fish crates. The smell was the smell of the market below, along with half a century of cigarette and cigar smoke and sweat, and it was as cold as it was downstairs.