Lilly’s hand went to the scarf knotted at her neck as she caught sight of the shop where she’d purchased it—could it really have been only a few days since her failed interview at the Foundation? She thought again of the view from the top of the tower, looking west: the foreground with buildings, spires, and water tanks; then the rows of ocean liners jutting into the river; then the river itself set ablaze by the afternoon sun; then the high ridge of the Palisades, and beyond it nothing, she imagined, but open country.
Lilly was yanked from her reverie by her guest, who took her by the arm and pointed excitedly at the bronze-hooped globe and its burly Atlas. Across the avenue sprouted a cathedral in the Gothic style, but of a much more recent vintage. The soot of the city was only just beginning to dim the glow of its crystalline towers, but given a few centuries of smoke and pigeon shit, it could rival the dingy beauties of Europe.
He urged her forward, an impatient guide eager to show her the sights: another church fronted by sad-faced saints, a lobby entrance guarded by snake-tongued Harpies and golden-robed goddesses. None of this impressed Lilly, who steadied the boxy Rolleiflex to keep it from thumping against her chest. She typically moved at a more sedate, unobtrusive pace that allowed her to see the compositions unfolding around her. Up ahead, a thickly built woman draped in a dusky frock, her silver hair pinned against her scalp, was peering into a shop window. The display was a mock boudoir, with frothy lingerie scattered across Louis XIV chairs and spilling from the drawers of a chiffonier. If she’d been alone, Lilly would have framed a shot that captured the woman’s face: Were her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed in distaste? Or did her expression suggest a long-simmering memory of some frenzied night in the previous century?
Before she could get closer, the boy jogged her arm and—Just a little farther!—beckoned her onward. They crossed another street, a wave of pedestrians surging around them, and then another and another. In this city there was such freedom to move, there was an excess of it, and the people flaunted their ability to walk where they wanted, when they wanted. Prague had been like that when she left it: Lilly could stroll forever, and if she ever felt boxed in by Prague, there was always Paris, just as earlier there had been Berlin and Barcelona. Why would she give up the simple thrill of walking—walking!—to return to a city where everyone would be assigned a place, and where rules, and walls, and worse would keep them from moving?
They crossed another street and now the edge of the park rose before them: a picket of trees and beyond it—or so the guidebook claimed—an urban oasis of paths, meadows, and ponds. He came to a stop in front of the grand hotel on the corner and with a flourish of his hand, as if unveiling a portrait, he directed Lilly’s attention to the door. As she looked up at the white fa?ade, its rows of windows, its steeply pitched roof, she remembered the fairy-tale castle, and of course the park was its enchanted forest. The smile on his face and his eager wish to draw her inside seemed proof that this was his home, and that her little pauper was in fact princely.
GANSEVOORT STREET
YEARS EARLIER, GAVIGAN HAD secured a deal with a city commissioner that paid him to provide storage for a fleet of trolleys, and though the streetcars had long ago been decommissioned and replaced by buses, the deal still held, buried in a single line in a back page of the city budget. The carbarn itself was a vast space, and though it was surrounded by slaughterhouses, it had been built at a time when grandeur was bestowed on even the most functional of structures. The high arches that once admitted the trolleys were flanked by Grecian pilasters. Undulant terra-cotta corbels bracketed windows that ran, frieze-like, across the barn. A pair of cupolas bookended the roofline, and in the center sat a squat dome punctured on four sides with porthole windows. This crowning touch gave the place the appearance of a failed soufflé. The building’s claim to aesthetic harmony was further challenged by the construction, ten years earlier, of the elevated freight line that now ran over the back end of the barn. Inside, the barn was stripped of architectural ornament. The floor was inlaid with a web of iron rails and spattered all over with the droppings of birds and bats. The dust-fogged windows admitted only a pale glow, and the banks of Holophane pendant lights were furred with dust and bridged by spiderwebs.
It was here that Cronin brought Francis for his tutorial on assassination. Cronin knew where to find the fuse box and had been able to get a pair of the overhead lights switched on. He leaned an old wooden door against one of the interior columns and with a stub of charcoal—snatched from the remains of a hobo campsite—he chalked a man-size outline on the door: head, heart, belly, legs.
“Have you fired a gun before?” he said.
“Now when would I have done that?” Francis said.
Cronin carried a brown paper bag, and from it he withdrew a stout revolver, a short-barreled .38 caliber. It was a policeman’s weapon, a Detective Special. He casually handed it to Francis—“Hold this,” he said—and continued to rummage through the bag.
Francis took hold of the gun, uncertain at first what to make of it. It was lighter than he’d imagined it would be, and its blue-black frame was lustrous. Cronin’s back was to him, and with a shock of adrenaline—Seize the day, Francis!—he extended his arm.
Cronin cast a look over his shoulder and returned to the bag. “It’s not loaded,” he said.
Francis lowered his arm. He was trembling.
Cronin stepped forward and swiped the gun from his hand. “Did you not even check it?” he said. “Do you even know how to do that?”
“Like I said last night,” Francis said, wounded and glum, “I’m not a killer.”
Half of Cronin wanted to smack Dempsey in the face for being so smug, so blissfully unaware of the practice of violence. But the other half of him envied Dempsey for growing up in a time and a place where he didn’t need to know how to set an ambush, how to lob a grenade, how to look a man in the eye and then end his life. Hadn’t Cronin, by his actions during the war, bought that peace and stupid tranquillity for Francis and a whole generation like him? And hadn’t Frank also played his part in creating for his sons a world where they didn’t have to be killers? Cronin believed Francis when he said that whatever happened in Ireland had been an accident. Francis wouldn’t know the first thing about organizing a raid, taking out three men—IRA men, at that—and walking off with enough loot to incite a transatlantic manhunt. But none of that mattered now. Francis was to be initiated, and it was Cronin’s job to do it. Just as Francis’s father had once instructed him.