The City of Strangers. Michael Russell
back on stage.
‘I got the taxi,’ said the horn player, getting up. ‘Just give me the day.’
Kate nodded again. She picked up her drink.
Cavendish raised his and smiled.
Jimmy reached out his hand. John Cavendish shook it.
Kate smiled at them both. It wasn’t much of a smile. She looked tired.
The trumpeter walked back to the stage.
‘Do you want a lift, Kate?’ She shook her head.
‘No, I’ll get a cab.’
‘Sure?’
‘It’s better we’re not seen together outside work.’
She was right.
Suddenly Duke Ellington’s hands hit the piano hard. The drummer crashed the cymbal and top hat. Jimmy Palmer’s horn was loud and liquid.
Outside it was cold. Kate O’Donnell slipped away, with no more than a last smile, a stronger smile now, and hailed a cab. John Cavendish watched her go for a moment, conscious that he had been delaying things. He didn’t know what the consequences would be, that was all. There was no obvious connection to make between a woman escaping from a sanatorium on Long Island, where she was virtually a prisoner, and the IRA’s courier system and its ciphered messages to and from America. But if the IRA was as careful as it ought to be, someone could decide changes were in order anyway, and that might mean his interceptions drying up. He pushed away all that and walked towards 7th Avenue to get his car. It was time to act; a file full of ciphers nobody could read was no use to anybody. He needed Niamh Carroll now.
The night was bright and noisy all around him; car horns, laughter, singing, angry voices, somewhere a saxophone, the rattle of the trains from the el. It was still Ellington’s music, all of it.
At the corner with 7th Avenue there were a few people standing in front of a small black man, not old but with strikingly white hair, who stood on a box speaking. In front of him there was a placard: The Ethiopian Pacific Movement – the Struggle between the New Order and the Old. People drifted by. Some paused, then walked on quickly. The night swept round the white-haired man. John Cavendish did stop, listening to his words. He had seen the man before.
‘You think there’s going to be change while those sonovabitch Jews run things? Even the white man’s starting to listen now. Even the white man’s got someone telling him what’s righteous. You heard of Adolf Hitler? Now, he’s a man got those sonovabitch Jews on the run. When he’s kicked their butts, well, the white man can have Europe, that’s all Hitler wants. He wants us to have our place and whitey to have his. Black place, white place. That’s the world we want. So Herr Hitler is fighting our battle for us. He’s fighting against white democracy, because white democracy is the biggest shit lie the Devil ever put on the earth. And you know what Herr Hitler’s going to do? He’s going to take Africa from the British and give it to the black man. That’s coming brothers, believe me! And we got other friends too, not just Mr Hitler. We got the Japanese now. They want to kick the white man’s ass out of the Pacific, like Hitler will in Africa. They’ll kick it so hard you won’t see a white man or a fucking sonovabitch Jew for dust!’
The words puzzled Cavendish now as they had puzzled him before, but the light of truth shone in the black man’s eyes. He was looking at Cavendish, with a slight smile, only now registering his only listener. The captain smiled back amiably, pulled his hat on tighter, and walked off.
*
When Donal Redmond left John Cavendish’s car in Queens he had walked two blocks to Lennon’s Bar, the call house where the messages he brought from Ireland were dropped. He walked in through the bar, nodding to the barman and the two or three customers who were there, and headed straight for the back room. He knew the place; he knew the routine. And there’d be a couple of drinks afterwards. He opened the door into Paddy Lennon’s office.
The old man was sitting at his desk, a green shade over his eyes, totting up figures. The room was tiny, lined with ledgers and files, the desk piled with skewered bills and receipts. Paddy raised his eyes and pushed up the shade.
‘You’re late.’
‘Why the fuck’s everyone always telling me I’m late?’
‘Maybe it’s got something to do with the time.’
‘Is there a clock on this?’
Paddy Lennon simply smiled, but it was an odd sort of smile.
The steward put down his duffel bag and got out the Jacob’s tin.
The bar owner took it and put it in a drawer in the desk.
‘You should stay off the booze till a job’s done, Donal.’
‘I don’t take orders from you. I deliver and you collect. That’s it. I get my orders in Dublin. The job is done and that’s that. The way it always is.’
‘The way it always is,’ said Paddy, pulling down his eye shade.
As Donal Redmond walked back to the bar there were two men standing in his way. One of them was a uniformed NYPD officer. The other man wore a grey raincoat and still had his hat on. He was a policeman too, a detective. He didn’t need a uniform for the ship’s steward to know it.
‘Mr Redmond?’ It was the detective who spoke.
‘That’s right.’
‘I’d like a look at your passport and your papers.’
‘What for?’
‘Some sort of mix up, that’s all.’
‘What sort of mix up? I’m straight off my ship.’
The detective ought to have sounded apologetic; he didn’t.
‘We can give you a lift down to the precinct house. The sergeant just wants to look over the details. You can be on your way then. Will we go?’
There was something odd about the way they were looking at him. It wasn’t unpleasant. It wasn’t anything. But it was the same way Paddy Lennon had been looking at him in the back room. Donal Redmond knew he didn’t want to go with them. The detective opened his coat to pull out a packet of cigarettes. As he did Redmond saw the shoulder holster and the gun that sat in it. The detective didn’t take a cigarette from the packet. He was making a point. And the point was made.
As the three men left the bar, conversation among the customers resumed, as if they had never been there.
*
It was two days later that John Cavendish, sitting in the coffee bar across from the Irish Pavilion at the World’s Fair, reading The New York Times, saw an item at the bottom of page seven. A man’s body had been pulled out of the Hudson River. He had been identified from papers in his pocket as Donal Redmond, an Irishman who had only just arrived in New York; he had worked on the French Line boat, the Normandie, as a steward. It was believed that he had fallen into the Hudson from the ship, docked at Pier 17, when drunk.
It seemed that the captain’s source had dried up now anyway. There would be no more IRA ciphers. He had to hope that they had enough to find out what was going on, and he had to hope that Kate O’Donnell’s sister Niamh could give him what he needed most of all, the key to break the code, because no one was getting anywhere with deciphering the stuff in Dublin. He had hoped to get a bit more out of Donal Redmond though. He was disappointed; but probably not as disappointed as Donal had been himself.
West Wicklow
Garda Sergeant Stefan Gillespie was walking slowly down the stairs in the stone farmhouse below Kilranelagh. He