The City of Strangers (31 page)

Emerging from the Markwell on to 49
^th
Street Mac Liammóir didn’t walk west, to the diner that had become the company’s green room. He might be hung for a ham here, but not for being cheap. He turned towards 8
^th
Avenue, then walked the bottom end of Central Park to the Waldorf-Astoria. He ordered eggs Benedict and a bottle of champagne. When the waiter offered him a copy of
The
New York Times
he shook his head curtly. Yesterday had been the first night of
John Bull’s Other Island
. He had sat with the cast in Sardi’s till midnight, waiting for the first editions to arrive. He would not be reading that mealy-mouthed bollocks of a review again.

Mac Liammóir had often felt that disaster was preferable to faint praise; anything was. He abhorred the whimper of ordinariness and that was what lurked between the bland platitudes of the gobshite from
The New York Times
. He should have seen it coming. A man who wore a cravat in Manhattan could hardly be trusted. Probably
John Bull’s Other Island
had been a mistake. Shaw thought his plays were about ideas, but they were about words; words that needed to be juggled like knives in some kind of frenetic circus act. And if the knives weren’t as sharp as hell, then it didn’t work. The
Times
review stuck in his craw; he couldn’t get the damned thing out of his head. ‘Although the Dublin Gate Theatre company is amiable, it is not brilliant enough to make so much talk continuously incandescent.’

He looked round at the wealthy breakfasters. What could you say about a city whose claim to fame was its height? It swam in a sea of dollar bills, proclaiming its endless vulgarity as the future of the world. At least Ireland wasn’t vulgar; nobody had the money for it. He drained the glass of champagne then laughed, because he loved this city and everything it was. When petulance and spite were about to consume him it was his ability to laugh at himself that brought him to earth. It was then that he thought of Owen Harris in a police cell at the end of Manhattan. He needed something to do. He called the waiter and held up the two-thirds-full bottle of Moët.

‘Could you put this in a bag?’

‘A bag, sir?’ The waiter looked at him, puzzled.

‘You do that very well,’ said Mac Liammóir. ‘Do you act?’

The waiter looked more puzzled.

‘I want to take it with me. Isn’t a brown bag the usual thing?’

‘I don’t think we have brown bags, sir.’

‘You surprise me. I’m sure the Markwell has brown bags.’

He smiled. The waiter smiled too, and went to find a brown bag.

Clutching the champagne in the brown paper bag, Micheál Mac Liammóir strolled through the morning crowds on 7
^th
Avenue to the Hotel Pennsylvania. Stefan Gillespie wasn’t there. Mac Liammóir thought nothing of this, but having set his mind on doing something he carried on down to Centre Street and Police Headquarters. It was a long walk, but he was enjoying it. He had a new sense of the size and shape of the city. He liked the way it dwarfed him and absorbed him at the same time. Its scale shouldn’t have been human and yet it was, entirely and utterly human. When he arrived at Police Headquarters he was surprised to find himself in a foyer that was a smaller version of the Waldorf-Astoria. Whatever lay behind the dark front desk, the NYPD at least possessed a halfway decent chandelier.

Mac Liammóir had been important for as long as he could remember. Even as a child, before anybody else realised he was important, he had commanded his family’s attention effortlessly, with the same authority that he commanded a stage. His explanation of who he was didn’t amount to much, but he mentioned the Irish consul general and Sergeant Gillespie. It was enough to establish that he had some official role. His own expectation that he would see Owen Harris was enough to convince Inspector Twomey; in fact the inspector didn’t even pause to be convinced. Wasn’t it enough that your man was Irish, and so self-evidently a man of some importance?

It was the same bare room that Stefan Gillespie had sat in with Owen Harris. Now Micheál Mac Liammóir sat across the table from the fresh-faced matricide. They drank from white cups, stained brown with coffee. Harris had not asked why the director of the Gate had arrived with champagne. He smiled vacantly. Mac Liammóir couldn’t remember why he’d come. It had been a moment of responsibility perhaps; the man did work for him. Or maybe it was just curiosity. Charlie Mawson did keep talking about it. That was the problem. And Mawson really didn’t believe Owen Harris had killed his mother. As Mawson was one of the better actors he had in New York, the Gate director had found himself listening to the conversation more than he wanted; it had lodged in his brain. Mawson was a fool when it came to pretty boys, and Harris was pretty, but he was no bad judge of character.

‘You’re all right then, Harris?’

‘The bed’s rather uncomfortable. That is getting on my nerves.’

‘Well, it won’t be for long. Do you know when you’re going back?’

‘I’m not quite sure. Sergeant Gillespie –’

‘I gather you’re flying?’

Mac Liammóir felt the inanity of the question. Harris ignored it.

‘How did the first night go, sir?’

‘Oh, well, it went.’

The Gate director’s lips were tight; the conclusion was obvious. It hadn’t gone as well as it should have done. But Owen Harris was not someone who could read what other people were thinking, however obvious.

‘How was the grasshopper?’

Mac Liammóir didn’t know what he meant.

‘I was the grasshopper understudy. I did think Helen did it rather too quietly. It’s got to have some feeling. Not just a noise. I felt you could have got rather more out of it, if you don’t mind me saying, Mr Mac Liammóir.’

Harris put down his champagne and coughed, clearing his throat.

He made a shrill clucking, sucking sound with his lips.

‘Then he says, “Ah, it’s no use, me poor little friend. If you could jump as far as a kangaroo you couldn’t jump away from your own heart an’ its punishment. You can only look at Heaven from here: you can’t reach it!”’

He made the noise again, louder this time, his face red with effort.

‘Do you see?’

Micheál Mac Liammóir nodded, now wishing he hadn’t come. He shifted in his chair and grimaced, as a pain suddenly shot through his leg.

‘Are you all right, sir?’

‘A bit of sciatica. It comes and goes, like an old friend.’

‘You must see my father then. He’s quite the expert on the sciatica front. I can take you to Pembroke Road myself. He’d be delighted. Moloch’s not keen on the theatre, but anybody who’s somebody is always welcome!’

Harris chuckled, as if sharing a joke.

Mac Liammóir picked up the bottle of champagne and poured the last dregs into the cups. He had always found that anything that smacked of taking responsibility for anything, let alone anybody, was usually a mistake.

‘Sciatica is an indefinite term applied to conditions associated with pain in the region of the sciatic nerve. The public think that sciatica is a disease of itself, of course, and if you tell a patient you wish to examine his pelvis, hip joint, or his bowel, he will invariably inform you that he cannot understand the importance of being examined for other more serious diseases, of which his trouble and pain is, in reality, only a symptom.’

Owen Harris’s words came in a voice quite different from the one Micheál Mac Liammóir had been listening to; it was deeper, more resonant, richer. Harris was not a good actor, by any standards, but the Gate director had no doubt that this was the voice of Doctor Cecil Harris, his father, and probably a very good imitation. When Harris stopped it was with a slightly sheepish grin, like a child waiting to be congratulated for a party trick.

‘I can do the whole lecture, you know!’

Mac Liammóir quickly asked Harris if there was anything he needed. He wasn’t sure how long Doctor Harris’s lecture on sciatica lasted, but from the pride he could hear in the son’s voice he suspected it might be a considerable time. But the question got no answer. As Harris drained the last, flat champagne from the porcelain cup, he wasn’t even listening.

‘It’s the fuss Moloch won’t be able to abide. Name in the papers and all that. I think they’ll be respectful though, given who he is. “First Moloch, horrid King besmear’d with blood!”’ He laughed. ‘I’m sure you know all that. “Of human sacrifice, and parent’s tears.” Medea and I used to shout it at the moon, dancing in the garden, whenever there’d been another great, fat, screaming, Moloch row! A kind of “Hubble, bubble”, and we were the two witches, sending him into the fires of hell! I always had too many parts to play though. “Death take you all, you and your father!” That was me too!’

Again a shared joke, almost a shared past, as if Mac Liammóir was on the inside of it all. The actor was distinctly uncomfortable now: ‘besmear’d with blood’, ‘human sacrifice’, ‘death take you all’. Harris spoke as if he was remembering a fond and funny family picnic. And it was barely a week ago that his mother had been hacked to death, in almost everyone’s view by him. The smile stayed on his lips briefly, then he looked at Mac Liammóir.

‘I didn’t do it. I hope you know that, Mr Mac Liammóir.’

‘I know that Charlie Mawson is very sure –’

‘It is a mess though, isn’t it? A really frightful mess.’

Harris spoke over Mac Liammóir; he didn’t want a conversation.

‘And of course I do keep wondering about the Lost Boys.’

The Gate director said nothing. He didn’t know why the man was talking about
Peter Pan
. By now he knew who Medea and Moloch were, and he had some sense of the world Owen Harris inhabited, somewhere in the hatred and mutual dependency his parents fed off. He had been the glue that held them together; the stick they never stopped beating each other with. He still looked like a boy, but not a boy who had never grown up, thought Mac Liammóir; a boy who had grown up a very, very long time ago and had spent his childhood pretending that he hadn’t. He was still pretending now.

‘I’m sure they’ll be all right. Spring’s here,’ continued Harris, as if Mac Liammóir knew what he was talking about. ‘I always left out anything we had – wood, a bit of turf. They’re sharp you know, especially Slightly. When I think of some of the idiots who surrounded me at Shrewsbury! Well, that was a mistake from the start. Medea always thought so. I’m sure Moloch did eventually, though he could hardly say so. An English public school was the worst of all worlds. The only thing it taught me was that I didn’t belong in England and I was just English enough not to fit in Ireland. Money well spent! Slightly is the bright one. Tootles is very Tootles. I’ve always felt he’ll miss out on anything that comes his way. Not that anything’s likely to come his way, or Slightly’s. But if you’re warm, at least if you’re warm –’

Micheál Mac Liammóir took a cab back uptown, but as he passed the Hotel Pennsylvania he got out. He left a ticket for the play at reception for Stefan Gillespie, not because he wanted him to see it, but because he wanted to see the Garda sergeant. With the exception of Charlie Mawson there was nobody who knew about the murder of Leticia Harris who didn’t believe her son had killed her. The consul general had said as much. It was probably true. The boy was clearly disturbed, and that disturbance had its roots in his relationship with his mother and father; it took only minutes of listening to him to see that. But it troubled the actor that no one seemed to have any doubts. He sensed that nobody in Ireland was asking any questions.

It wasn’t that he knew what questions needed to be asked; he had no idea. But he was a man who was often full of doubts; easy certainties troubled him. He felt that Owen Harris believed in his own innocence if nobody else did. He could put it no more strongly. Maybe it was because the poor boy was mad enough not to know what he had done. Maybe it was true; he hadn’t killed her. If it was true it troubled Mac Liammóir how easy it would be to ignore that, because of who he was, because of what he was. When he stood in an Irish court no one would like what he was; it already made him guilty of something. More than anything it troubled Micheál Mac Liammóir what a small step it might be from that unspoken guilt to a noose.

Through most of the previous night the fish truck from Fulton Market had carried Stefan Gillespie, Kate O’Donnell and Niamh Carroll into Upstate New York. It took the Holland Tunnel out of New York City, under the Hudson River, into Jersey City and Newark. It drove west along state roads to the Delaware River and into Pennsylvania where it picked up Interstate 11 at Scranton and finally turned north towards Lake Ontario. South of Binghamton it crossed the line back into New York State, and rattled on through Cortland to Syracuse. East, in the darkness, were the Appalachians and New England; west, the Great Lakes and the Plains and all of America.

In the back of the truck Stefan, Kate and Niamh had little idea where they were going. They tried to sleep and sometimes they managed, for minutes rather than hours. The cold and the rattle and sway of the truck would always wake them, even on the Interstate.

It was completely black; there was nowhere for any light to come in. Only the flame from a lighter or a match and then the dim glow of cigarettes occasionally lit the boxes that were piled up all round them. The fish that had been emptied out had been fresh enough. The smell of the sea it left behind wasn’t so unpleasant, but there was a deeper, rancid stench behind it that every so often filled the air and sent a wave of nausea through them. That was when they all, as one, reached for another cigarette. They would be long hours travelling north.

Three times Longie Zwillman’s men, Sam and Rick, stopped at a gas station and brought them hot coffee, always driving on and turning off the road to find a dirt track and some trees before they opened up the back and let them out. For ten minutes they could walk a little bit of warmth back into their legs. No gas station pump man or passing driver could remotely know who they were, but it was better that no one saw them. They were a strange cargo for a truck still dripping out melting ice and rank with the smell of fish. It was only after they turned off the Interstate beyond Syracuse, heading for Oswego County, that Niamh went up front to direct Sam to the Lake Ontario shore, through fields and woods and the sleeping towns of Mexico and Texas. Stefan and Kate stayed where they were in back.