The City of Strangers (48 page)

She walked slowly across the room to Dominic Carroll. When she reached the chair she lifted his cuffed hand and put the gun barrel against one palm. For the first time there was doubt, even fear in him. She didn’t hesitate. There was no threat, no word. She fired straight through his hand. The gun deafened them, but Carroll’s screams rose above the blast.

‘Have you got anything to stop the bleeding?’ she said. She turned round and handed the gun back to Stefan. ‘If there are no bandages –’

‘There should be some first aid stuff in the car boot,’ said Dessie.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Kate quietly, and walked out.

‘Jesus Christ!’ screamed Carroll. ‘Jesus Christ! She’s as mad as her sister! Look at what the bitch has done to me. The fucking whore! Christ!’

Dessie stubbed out his cigarette.

‘I’ll tell you where we are, Mr Carroll,’ said Stefan. ‘You’ll remember the man I was bringing back from New York. The trial has just finished. You might have seen something about it in the papers? The man who killed his mother, or didn’t kill his mother. Guilty but insane, that was the verdict.’

‘What are you talking about? I’m bleeding here! Do something!’

‘This is where he brought the body, Owen Harris,’ continued Stefan, taking no notice. ‘He dumped her into the sea, at the end of the garden. He chose a good place. Mrs Harris’s body was never found. That’s why we’re here. In case we end up with a body. So, you give me a phone number and a message with all the right words in it, and we’ll arrange for someone who’s involved in your IRA kangaroo court to release Mrs Carroll. Then we’ll release you too. If you can’t do that we’ll go out for a smoke and leave you with Miss O’Donnell. You’ve another hand, not to mention two feet, two kneecaps, a groin.’

Kate came back in.

She knelt down beside Dominic Carroll and started to clean the wound that was now bleeding profusely. He winced as she dabbed it with iodine and then started to wind a bandage round it. She was doing it in a way that almost seemed tender, but as she looked up at him he was in no doubt about the hatred he could read in her eyes. He believed she would kill him.

It wasn’t long afterwards that Stefan stood in the AA box at the top of Corbawn Lane. He asked for the number Dominic Carroll had given him and read the message the American had written. It was an instruction to release the prisoner, Niamh Carroll, and to abandon the court martial. A man answered. Stefan read the message. It obviously contained words or phrases that verified its authenticity. He waited in silence for another five minutes; another man came to the phone. He asked for the message to be read again. He said nothing for almost a minute, then asked Stefan to identify himself.

‘You don’t need to know that. I’m sure if you do what you’re told Mr Carroll will fill you in afterwards. If you don’t, he won’t be in a position to.’

‘Are you Special Branch?’ asked the man.

‘After a fashion.’

‘What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means Mr Carroll has made a mistake, and I’m just here to put that right. His wife didn’t give information to anybody about the IRA. The only thing she did wrong was to sleep with a man who wasn’t Dominic Carroll. If that’s treachery, I don’t think it’s the sort that would normally involve an IRA court martial. If you’re going on Dominic Carroll’s word, you might want to ask him some more questions. Like why he had Mrs Carroll locked up in a psych ward for a year, and why she had to be smuggled out of America to stop him putting her back there for good. It’s just a suggestion. Maybe it’s one Seán Russell would want you to follow up. I mean you’re soldiers of Ireland, aren’t you? Unless you’re in the business of helping men get rid of wives they don’t want by blowing their brains out. She’s a sick woman. She’s under a psychiatrist. You’ve got her, fucking look at her!’

An hour later Stefan Gillespie sat with Dominic Carroll outside the entrance to the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy of St Vincent de Paul. Dessie was in the driver’s seat. Stefan still had the gun in his pocket. The handcuffs had been taken off the Clan na Gael man and he clutched his bandaged, smashed hand.

The convent advertised itself as a free hostel for respectable women; it offered shelter when there was nowhere else to go. Kate O’Donnell was inside, waiting for Niamh. Stefan had already spoken to the Sister Superior. It was a place of safety; in Ireland no one would challenge that. There would be a bed for the night and there would be no questions. That was as far as anybody could go. The nun understood Stefan’s shorthand enough to know that questions would give unwanted answers. She knew he was a policeman; she had a sense of who the people he talked about might be; it came with being Irish. It wasn’t the first time the convent had been neutral territory.

Stefan was looking across Henrietta Street at the long dilapidated row of high Georgian houses. They were more tenements, just like the one the two boys he only knew as Slightly and Tootles had lived in. He thought of Owen Harris again and hoped that if nothing else, whatever money had taken the boys and their family away from Ireland, for whatever reason, had done something worth doing. Dominic Carroll was watching him, not understanding what was in his head, but knowing well enough what he was looking at.

‘Dev’s Ireland. You can get the smell of it, can’t you, Sergeant?’

Stefan looked round.

‘The same slums as England’s Ireland,’ continued Carroll.

‘And you’ve the answer, Mr Carroll. A machine gun in every tenement.’

‘England’s still choking the life out of us. Everyone knows it.’

‘I’d say we’re big enough to choke ourselves,’ said Stefan. ‘We don’t need England any more, except to blame.’

‘That wouldn’t be a very popular opinion.’

‘Here or in New York?’

‘Do you ever wonder if you belong, Stefan?’

‘I belong enough to say what I think about my country.’

‘Is that the same thing?’

Stefan looked hard at the American and shook his head, smiling.

‘My son should be asleep now. My mother and father too. There’s three mountains that look down on the house, Keadeen, Kilranelagh, Baltinglass Hill. If they’re not our mountains, then they’re nobody’s.’

As he said the last words he looked back out of the car window.

Dominic Carroll didn’t reply. For a moment in the darkness, just a moment, he felt more American than he was used to feeling when he was in Ireland.

Stefan looked at his watch; they would soon be there.

‘If I were you I’d get to a hospital with that hand,’ he said.

‘She’ll need to go a long way from Ireland before this is done, you know that?’ replied Dominic Carroll. ‘Do you think it really stops here?’

‘I think your friends might have something to say about that. They might want to know a bit more about why you want your wife killed before they do this again. Whatever you’ve told them, she didn’t know anything about bombs in New York. She hasn’t betrayed anyone. If that’s what you’ve told them it’s not true and you know it.’

It was true of course, but he didn’t believe the Clan na Gael man knew any of that, whatever story he’d made up to get someone else to exorcise the humiliation he had felt as a result of what his wife had done. This was personal revenge, nothing more than that.

‘You know she hasn’t been an IRA courier for years. You had her locked up for half that time. I know your comrades get excited about traitors. Just point the finger hard enough and almost anyone will do. There’s a gun out before there’s a question asked.’ He was thinking about a night in Castleberehaven seventeen years ago. ‘I know a little bit about that.’

It was the first time Dominic Carroll had really believed that Stefan Gillespie could be anything other than the man he met on the Yankee Clipper; a guard who went to New York to escort a prisoner and got caught up in an affair with his sister-in-law. A man who should have got a kicking, and one hell of a kicking, but a man Kate O’Donnell had used. Whatever was going on tonight, however it had turned around and put him where he was now, Carroll knew that Stefan had the authority here. With that knowledge came the belief that there had to be more; he had been tricked in some deeper way that had to do with more than getting Niamh out of America. He had taken the guard at his word about John Cavendish. But did he really not know the intelligence officer at all? Surely he must have done.

‘And do you know a little bit about bombs in New York too, Sergeant?’

‘Not very much. Let’s say I knew a man who did –’

‘Captain Cavendish.’

Stefan didn’t need to say anything.

‘You had me fooled. I really thought you were nobody.’

‘That’s because I am nobody.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ continued the American. ‘Nobody can be a nobody in this war, Stefan. And nobody can stay neutral, whatever Dev thinks. People here need to know that. I’ve been in Berlin. I’ve seen what Germany is. Britain isn’t going to stand in the way of Adolf Hitler. And as for bombs in New York, well, maybe I’m not so sorry the stuttering idiot’s still in Buckingham Palace after all. I’d rather see England broken into a million pieces and wiped from the face of the earth than see it coming to terms with Hitler. No real Irishman would feel any different.’

Carroll was in his stride. This was his testament; this was what he believed.

‘However you look at it England, Britain, the Empire, it’s all finished. Germany is the future. You’ve seen New York. You know what it is. That’s one part of the future. The other’s Berlin. Put them together. Imagine if you put them together! And it’s going to happen. And when it does we’re going to make sure Ireland’s at the heart of it too, on the right side, on the side of what’s unstoppable. An earthquake won’t go away because you don’t like it, whether you’re Éamon de Valera or some other nobody-to-be. The future has already been written.’

‘I don’t think New York and Berlin are going to fit together quite as neatly as you think, Mr Carroll. But I guess we’ll all find out, won’t we?’

Dominic Carroll’s response was a shrug. It wasn’t easy swallowing what had just happened, but he could see that he needed to. He had mended his fences with German Intelligence after the mess at the World’s Fair. No one had told him that Aaron Phelan’s life was part of the price of that mess; perhaps he chose not to think about it. In Berlin Hermann Goering had been polite and enthusiastic about the IRA’s contribution to a war with Britain, but in the offices of the Abwehr it had been made clear that Carroll was there to take back a message: Seán Russell and the IRA were to do what they were told. Their day would come; but it would come when and where and how Germany decided.

The American didn’t find it easy to admit his mistakes, but Stefan Gillespie had just turned his attempt to take revenge on the wife who had humiliated him into a mistake. Without the Garda sergeant no one in the IRA in Dublin would have cared what happened to Niamh Carroll; his word was enough to have her shot, and that should have been it. But Seán Russell would not like this; there was never any room for the personal where he was concerned. And it had been made clear in Berlin that some things had changed. However much Dominic Carroll meant in New York, the only leader the Abwehr was interested in now was Seán Russell.

A grey Austin pulled into Henrietta Street from Henrietta Place, past the black Humber. It turned round in front of the gates into the King’s Inns. The driver got out and opened a rear door. Niamh Carroll stepped out, slightly shaky, clearly dazed and confused. She walked forward a few steps. The IRA man took her arm, holding her back. He was waiting. Inside the Humber, Stefan Gillespie leant across Dominic Carroll and opened the door.

‘Do you know Longie Zwillman, Mr Carroll?’

‘What?’

‘You probably know who he is.’

The American frowned. He didn’t know where this came from.

‘I know who he is. So?’

‘It’s odd, I think it’s odd, but he was a friend of John Cavendish’s.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘He’d still like to know who murdered him.’

‘Zwillman’s a fucking gangster!’ laughed Carroll.

‘I did meet Mr Zwillman briefly. He asked me to tell him who killed John Cavendish, if ever I found out. As it happens I have found out now.’

‘Really? And who was it?’

‘Captain Aaron Phelan, NYPD.’

‘Aaron Phelan’s dead.’

‘He was your man. You gave the order.’

‘You’re not as good as I thought,’ smiled Carroll. ‘That’s shite.’

‘Maybe it is. I’m not entirely sure. But I don’t need to be sure. Longie Zwillman told me to stay in touch. You know New York a lot better than me, but I’d say if Mr Zwillman got it into his head that you were responsible for killing a friend of his, you’d need a lot more than Clan na Gael to stop him doing something about it. I’d say a better option would be to leave your wife alone, right alone, and forget about all this. Just go home, Mr Carroll.’

The Clan na Gael president frowned. None of that made sense. But the fact that it didn’t make sense was disturbing rather than reassuring. Longie Zwillman’s wasn’t a name Stefan Gillespie could have plucked out of the air. It had to mean something. What Dominic Carroll did didn’t bring him into contact with the Mob, but he knew there were people in the Mob who were no friends of Germany and no friends of the IRA because of that. He shook his head, smiling slightly, but the smile was by no means convincing.

‘It’s still shite.’

‘Well, I’d take a long look before you step in it, a chomrádaí.’

Dominic Carroll got out of the car and walked towards the Austin.

The IRA man let go of Niamh Carroll.

She stood for a moment, not sure what to do; then she walked towards the convent. Between the two cars her path crossed that of the man she was married to. He looked at her with the disgust he had always felt for her. She didn’t bother to look at him. She walked to the convent entrance. She stared for a moment, still disoriented, trying to find the bell. She found it and pulled it. The door opened immediately. A nun appeared. Then the door closed.

The Clan na Gael leader was now in the Austin. The headlights blazed and the car pulled out into Henrietta Street. It was gone.