“Your boss can’t stop them?”
“He’s not my boss,” Cronin said, “and he’s focused on other matters, isn’t he?” Cronin almost said distracted. He had even thought about gone mad.
“It’s somewhere safe.”
Cronin fixed him with a stare. “Safe,” he said. A preposterous word. “You know what? Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“Too tempting?” Francis said.
“You haven’t caught on yet, have you? To how any of this works? If I wanted the money, I’d’ve put a gun to your brother’s head and sent you to fetch it. And if you’d dragged your feet, maybe I’d’ve broken a few of his fingers, or his whole hand, just to quicken your step.”
Francis ran a hand through his hair. He had fallen into a film—Scarface, The Public Enemy—and they expected him to play along. “Look, Mr. Cronin,” he said. “I know what the old man wants of me, and I know what he said he’ll do if I don’t follow through. But I’m not a killer.”
“That’s no matter,” Cronin said. “The old man is, and that’s what matters. Now, we came back here so you could get yourself cleaned up. So get yourself cleaned up.”
IN THE BATHROOM, Francis contemplated his face in the mirror. It was surrounded by lightbulbs, just like the mirrors in actors’ dressing rooms he’d seen in the movies. Maybe that would make this whole business easier: to think of it as a play. That’s all it was. He was playing the part of the assassin; some other fellow was playing the part of the king. Anisette—the shocked witness, the ingenue betrayed—would be played by an actress best known for her star turns last season as Ophelia, as Desdemona: innocents destroyed by deceit. Another actress—a real hoot, once you got to know her—would play Félicité, the sneering Cassandra who knew it all along. The other members of the repertory would divvy up the remaining parts: the widowed queen, the society matron, the dumbstruck guard.
This was the lie, Francis decided, that he would tell himself until even he believed it. It is only a play, I am only an actor, the gun is but a prop. And what a laugh the cast would have when the set was struck and the theater went dark and they all met around the corner for a drink.
CRONIN HAD BRISTLED at being Gavigan’s errand boy, but now, fuming, he realized he was something worse. He had been tasked with finding Francis Dempsey and he had done that. He had been sent to nick him off the street in broad daylight, and he had done that. And now a new assignment—a lead role in this madman’s plan cooked up by Gavigan: to keep watch over Dempsey and prepare him to kill.
How could he do that when he was crowded on all sides by ghosts? Being around Francis made him edgy enough, and now the older Dempsey brother had appeared. When Martin had called out to them, a shock ran the length of Cronin’s spine, and he had to wonder if Martin felt the same. Was there some nugget buried deep in Martin’s memory, alert to contact with those from his past? A man who knew his parents. Who had been in the family home. Who had blown the family to bits. Cronin had told himself for years that it was Frank who was the betrayer, Frank who had broken with his comrades and supported a bad treaty. Only later did he realize, did he admit, that he didn’t plant the bomb because Frank had chosen the other side. The purpose of the bomb was to undo the man Cronin had become—the man he’d let Frank make him into. One last spilling of blood, and then no more: that was his plan. He was young enough and stupid enough to believe that Frank’s death would bring him some measure of peace. When the bomb went off and it was Bernadette who died, Cronin knew he would never be able to wash off the blood. Bernadette was their saint, anyone would tell you that, and if she was their Joan of Arc, then Cronin was the man who’d lit the match and tossed it on the pyre. He was a pariah. An untouchable. Within days of the blast he was packed off on a merchant ship bound for the States, traveling under papers that blotted out his name but couldn’t hide what he’d done. The only man willing to offer him refuge was Gavigan. Every other door was closed to him.
Cronin had come to understand that service to Gavigan had no end. He thought of the moment at the farm when Gavigan saw his desire to strike the old man dead. If it hadn’t been for Jamie, there at the end of the lane with the long gun laid across his lap, he would have done it. Alice would have accepted it. He had told her enough. But then he thought of the boy. What would it have done to him to see “my Tom,” as he called Cronin, take the life of another man? Even a bad man like Gavigan? There would be a time for teaching the boy that the world was a dangerous place full of bad men—men like Gavigan, men like Cronin himself—but that time was not now.
Gavigan had packed Cronin and Dempsey into one of the taxis earlier that evening. He had a list of instructions for Cronin, none of which Cronin was keen to perform. He needed to round up formal attire for the boy—Francis couldn’t meet the king dressed for a day in the park—and a new suit for himself. “In that country getup at the Plaza,” Gavigan had said to Cronin, “you’re going to stick out like a nun in a whorehouse.” Gavigan wanted Dempsey back at the hotel in case his wealthy friends needed to contact him about the royal visit, and if Cronin needed any pocket money, he was free to tap into the cache Dempsey had spirited out of Ireland. It had been meant to finance a major operation, and what operation, in the whole history of the IRA, was bigger than this?
And then there was this last item on the list: to instruct Dempsey in the use of the weapon he would carry for the job. Gavigan owned an old carbarn below the meatpacking district, a place where trolleys had once been serviced and stowed. The cavernous space sat beneath the elevated tracks, swathed in a constant din that made it an ideal shooting range. That was where Dempsey would practice the quick draw, the arm extension, and the spasm of finger on trigger that could send history careening in unforeseen directions.
Gavigan’s plan was pure madness, and Cronin suspected that even Gavigan knew that he was way beyond the pale. Why else did he need Cronin? Why else wouldn’t he keep Dempsey at Gramercy Park himself until he was ready to unleash him? He didn’t want his own fingerprints on this bomb he was preparing to toss.
This was what Cronin now realized: that Gavigan had kept his own name out of the boy’s ears, but had freely thrown around Cronin’s. If Dempsey carried out his task, he would not know the name of the man who had put him up to it, but he would know Cronin’s. That was a name the police could wring from him, if he survived. So now it was in Cronin’s interest to make sure that Francis did what he was told and then see that he didn’t leave the fairgrounds alive. Of course Gavigan saw that, and of course Gavigan knew that Cronin saw it, too.
THE BOWERY