The City of Strangers (30 page)

A telephone started ringing. Longie Zwillman, walking up and down and rubbing his hands, ignored it.

‘Mrs Carroll,’ he stepped forward and stretched out his hand.

Niamh shook it, cautiously, nervously. She had no idea who he was, but fear had given way to a kind of bland, unquestioning acceptance now.

‘Longie Zwillman. Call me Longie.’

‘This is all very confusing, Mr Zwillman.’

‘Let’s hope we can make it less so.’

He smiled, and it seemed to be a smile that genuinely recognised Niamh Carroll’s fragility. She was less nervous. She still didn’t know who he was; she didn’t know what he wanted; she didn’t know whether he was going to help her or what he was going to do. But her life had been in other people’s hands for a long time now; she was used to doing nothing herself.

The gangster looked hard at Stefan.

‘You wouldn’t want to have been any later out of there, Sergeant.’

‘You’ve heard something already?’

‘I got some of it back, yeah.’

He said no more, but Stefan realised there was more to say. He turned back to Niamh, still standing there as an onlooker to what was all about her.

‘We have some business to conclude, Mrs Carroll.’

Niamh looked at him blankly.

‘We need the deal, that’s how business is done.’

She still didn’t understand.

‘Things are different, you know that of course.’ The half smile was still the half smile no one could ever quite read, but the voice was kind. ‘It’s not in Captain Cavendish’s hands any more, I’m sorry to say. It’s in mine and Mr Gillespie’s. But it’s your part of the deal first. You know what your sister discussed with the captain. And you know what he wanted from you.’

Niamh was no longer puzzled. She remembered; she wasn’t easy.

‘Is there a problem with that, Mrs Carroll?’

Zwillman’s expression didn’t change; the voice was harder though.

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure what’s right –’

‘Niamh, we have talked about this,’ said Kate softly.

The look of deep confusion was back on her sister’s face.

‘Look, Mrs Carroll, let’s say in the absence of the captain, Sergeant Gillespie is representing the Irish government, and I’m the shipping agent. I can get you out of New York and I can get you into Canada. No borders involved. But you deliver first. People are taking considerable risks for you.’

‘I know,’ Niamh answered. ‘I’m just not sure – it was a long – it was three years ago, more. Things change. Everything I knew then could be –’

‘Buyer beware, no such thing as a sure bet. I’ve got you.’

Kate knew that if the deal had ever been an option it wasn’t now.

‘Niamh, it’s what we all agreed.’

Niamh nodded, but she was still struggling with something.

‘If it was just about Dominic, it wouldn’t matter –’

Stefan knew what was happening; the idea of betrayal went deep in Ireland, very deep. It was that idea that Niamh Carroll was confronting. Longie Zwillman had some sense of it too, but he didn’t have any time for it.

‘Do me a favour, Mrs Carroll, one day, when the world seems bright and gay, maybe we’ll get together and you can sing me “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and I’ll sing you “My Yiddishe Momme”. In the meantime you want to make sure a room in the psych ward’s all your husband and his friends have got in mind. John Cavendish never struck me as the sort of man who’d take a walk off a thirty-storey building. So we’ll cut the crap.’

Kate reached out and took her sister’s hand.

Niamh looked at her for a moment. As she turned back to Longie Zwillman and Stefan she spoke more clearly, as if her mind was stronger.

‘Can you let me see one of the ciphers?’

Stefan took an envelope from his pocket. He handed her a piece of paper. A short message; a date; two lines of capital letters grouped in fives.

Niamh gazed at it for some seconds, seeing another time.

‘It looks the same. That doesn’t guarantee –’

She stopped. When she spoke again her voice was clearer. These were facts. She had pushed away the emotions they carried with them. There was something in the back of her mind that was engaging. They were only facts.

‘There’s a date on each message,’ she said slowly, but as she spoke her words became more confident. ‘It won’t have anything to do with the real date or even the real year. That’s partly to confuse, but it’s also because the date tells you how to use the key. You take the date. Then it’s the month. You multiply the month by ten and add the date.’ She looked back at one of the ciphers Cavendish had copied. ‘This one is the 14
^th
of August. The number you get is 94. The keys are in the Everyman edition of
The Scarlet Letter
. So you go to page 94.’

She stopped for a few seconds, running it all through her head. It was there.

‘You add the last two numbers of the year. This is 1935, so that’s 8. The first twelve letters of the eighth line, that’s the key. You write out the message, with no gaps between the words, a letter at a time, under those twelve letters. You start a new line with every thirteenth letter. The message ends up as long columns of letters under the key. You switch the columns round by putting the key into alphabetical order, then you type out the letters in the columns. They’re always in groups of five but that doesn’t mean anything. If you’re deciphering, once you’ve got the key you work backwards and you end up with the message. It can take a while.’

‘Really? You’re kidding me, Mrs Carroll,’ laughed Zwillman.

Niamh smiled. It was easier than she had thought. And it was done.

‘Sam, go and get a couple of copies of the book,’ said Longie.

‘What book?’

‘Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The Scarlet Letter
. It’s the Everyman edition. It’s got to be that edition or it won’t work. Is that how it is, Mrs Carroll?’

She nodded.

Sam frowned.

‘Where am I going to find a bookstore open at this time of night?’

‘Wake someone up, use your head, I don’t know!’

‘I’d have to go back to Jersey for anyone paying protection, boss.’

‘You think we shake down bookshops now? You need to talk to your rabbi a bit more. What are we, Italians? You just buy the fucking things!’

Sam, looking a little put out, shrugged his shoulders and left.

‘So, did you get all that cipher baloney, Sergeant?’

Stefan Gillespie laughed.

‘I think you need to explain it again, with pictures, Mrs Carroll.’

‘It’s not so hard, Mr Gillespie. It’s just tedious. I’ll write it down.’

Niamh sat at the desk and took some paper and a pencil. She wanted to do it now. Perhaps she just wanted something to do. She needed to stop thinking about what was happening. She needed to stop her mind racing. She needed to stop thinking about Jimmy, finding him and losing him. She looked up at Kate for a moment. Kate gave her a reassuring smile. It didn’t reassure her, but it did matter. They were together; that mattered more. Niamh turned back to the desk and started to write down the instructions for using the cipher key.

Kate looked at Stefan and then turned to Zwillman. ‘The deal’s done. So where do we go from here, Mr Zwillman?’

‘Well, the horn player didn’t have such a bad idea. I mean a truck going somewhere. There’s thousands driving in and out of New York, day and night. That’s why I got you here. There’s fish deliveries leaving Fulton Market all the time. You won’t smell too sweet at the end of it, but a bar of soap should sort that out. Forget the train. And forget the border crossing.’

‘That gets us out of New York,’ replied Kate, ‘not into Canada.’

‘Ten years ago I was bringing a lot of liquor in from Canada, by boat, across Lake Ontario. It was Prohibition. I made a few trips over myself, it’s no big deal. I still have some Canadian business associates who owe me a favour. It’ll take a day or so to sort out maybe. I mean there’s nothing organised now. No one’s set up to do it. But I can find someone to bring a boat across the lake at night. The only question is where. You need to get some place you’re holed up, out of sight, somewhere a boat can get to, so maybe some kind of jetty, right? That’s harder but we’ll get there.’ He looked at Stefan. ‘What do you think? They disappear. No one knows how.’

Stefan saw that Zwillman’s insistence on asking him annoyed Kate.

‘I guess it’s up to Kate and Niamh.’

‘I’m not offering options here. You’re the one going with them.’

‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

It didn’t entirely come as a surprise to Stefan that he was going to take Kate and her sister across the border, but he hadn’t quite got it into his head that he had replaced John Cavendish so completely.

‘As you’re not offering options, Mr Zwillman,’ said Kate, ‘a fish truck sounds just perfect. I wouldn’t want to put Sergeant Gillespie out though.’

Longie Zwillman grinned.

‘I’m already put out,’ smiled Stefan, ‘unless you want rid of me?’

‘It’s entirely up to you, Sergeant.’

She didn’t smile, but he still knew she was glad he was going.

‘Dominic has a house on Lake Ontario.’

It was Niamh who spoke. She had stopped writing now and had been listening to them. Her mind really was calmer now; she was thinking hard.

‘We used to go there when we were first married. It’s not far from Syracuse. It’s a place called Mexico Bay, an old wooden house, right on its own. There’s a boathouse on the lake. I couldn’t tell you exactly where it is, but I could find the house if we got close to it. I don’t know if anyone even goes up there any more, but it was always shut up till the spring anyway.’

‘That sounds like something, Mrs Carroll,’ nodded Zwillman. ‘If you get across that end of the lake, you’re close to Kingston. I know people in Kingston. You take a train to Montreal from there and the boat’s waiting. Or we can just get a car to take you. You got almost three days till the boat sails. I don’t think that should be a problem though. Maybe the tighter the better.’

As if he had only now remembered that he had them in his pocket, the gangster took out the envelope containing the boat tickets. He handed them to Kate O’Donnell. The deal had been done; it would be honoured. He turned to a bookshelf that was lined with telephone directories and box files. He ran his fingers along the shelf and pulled out several battered and stained road maps. He looked through them, then opened one up and spread it out.

‘Can you show me where this place is, Mrs Carroll? Or near it?’

Niamh got up from the desk and joined him.

‘It’s not big, Mr Zwillman. I don’t know about a boat finding it –’

‘Don’t worry, they’ll be guys who know the lake backwards.’

As Longie Zwillman and Niamh Carroll pored over the map, Stefan moved closer to Kate. Nobody was speaking. The noise of the fish market below filtered up through the floor. Stefan watched Kate for a moment. She was watching her sister. It was a strange place to be, in strange company, but there was more animation in Niamh’s face than she had seen in a very long time. She turned, aware of Stefan looking at her. She looked up at him.

‘I’m glad you’ll be with us.’

‘I’m glad I’ll be with you too.’

In what was not said in the moment that followed those words was something that neither of them had expected, but both of them understood.

Two hours later Stefan, Kate and Niamh were in the back of a fish truck, heading out of Manhattan to New Jersey. The ice that had been packed round the boxes of fish still made the truck bitterly cold. They huddled together against the wall between them and the cab, where they could feel a little heat from the engine through the panelling. The two sisters wore men’s coats and boots, hats and gloves, collected up from porters at the market. It would be a long journey, six or seven hours, to Upstate New York.

Sam was in the cab driving, after returning to Fulton Market with two very expensive copies of
The Scarlet Letter
; he had Rick, the gunman, to keep him company; the truck, like the clothing, was borrowed.

For the time being no one spoke in the back of the fish truck. Too much had happened; there had been too much talking. All three of them needed the silence of the journey, for a time at least. Stefan’s thoughts, as the truck pulled away from Fulton Market, were ones he didn’t want to share, not yet anyway. He had been right that Longie Zwillman had more to say about the Hotel Theresa.

Zwillman had walked down to the Fulton Market coffee stall with him and had told him then. Jimmy Palmer was dead. It seemed a bad idea to let Kate know right now, let alone Niamh; he left it to Stefan to decide when was a good time and what story to tell. When Stefan asked Longie Zwillman why he was doing all this, Zwillman shrugged, as if he wasn’t really doing anything at all, then he said it was because John Cavendish had given his word. Someone had to honour that.

‘So I’m honouring it, Sergeant. Aren’t you doing the same?’

‘Why do you care about IRA ciphers? That’s what you wanted too –’

‘We all pick up shit on our shoes. It’s spread pretty even these days. The captain and me just found out what was on our shoes was the same shit.’

*

The Harlem police weren’t pleased that detectives from downtown had shot a Negro on their patch. Not that anyone was very bothered about a dead black man. It had no significance; but if there was a Negro to be shot above 125
^th
Street the Harlem cops preferred it if a black officer did the shooting; it didn’t cause so much resentment that way. Longie Zwillman had got it straight from a detective in the 26
^th
Precinct; Jimmy Palmer was shot while resisting arrest, though everyone knew he’d been shot for fucking Dominic Carroll’s wife. He had been shot by a Headquarters detective of course, but everyone knew that the man who gave the order was Captain Aaron Phelan.

Micheál Mac Liammóir took a long time getting himself ready that morning. He lay in the bath for almost an hour. He shaved meticulously and precisely. He oiled his hair with Murray’s Pomade and dabbed himself with the bergamot-scented cologne that should have soothed his temper but only gave it a sharper, citrus edge. He paused only once in the five minutes he spent staring into the mirror, brushing his teeth; it was to stretch out his foot to crush a cockroach that had been unwise enough to scuttle out from under the bath. He laid out a pale blue soft-collared shirt and a crimson tie, the pair of lemon silk socks Hilton Edwards, his partner and co-producer, had bought him at Bergdorf Goodman for luck (unsuccessfully as it turned out); also the pale grey suit that he liked because it was slightly too big and made him look thinner than he really was. He dressed with the intensity he gave to the delivery of words on stage; he retied the tie three times. Then he picked up the black Malacca cane that offered both elegance and assistance with his sciatica, and went out. He was furious. Hilton Edwards, ever patient, but aware that today patience would not be rewarded, had already gone, leaving his lover in the bath, deciding that a morning at the Museum of Modern Art would be good for his soul. The other actors had gone too, because someone would have to take the blame, and their director wouldn’t care who it was.