Before arriving at the carbarn, they had secured formalwear that matched Francis’s alleged station in life; along with a host of other Highland accessories, they had procured an elaborate seal-fur-and-silver sporran, the belted pouch favored by kilted Scots, which Cronin figured for the best place to stow the revolver. The rest of the fancy kit was zipped into a garment bag in Cronin’s Packard, but now, from the paper bag, he withdrew a box of cartridges and the pouch, which resembled a small mammal on a leash. He loaded the cylinder and stood ten feet from the door where he had outlined the king.
“When the time comes,” he said, setting his feet, “your heart is going to be racing, but you must remain calm. Do you hear? Keep your hand steady, but be quick about it. You need to squeeze off as many shots as you can, but you can’t rush.”
“Festina lente,” Francis said, almost under his breath.
“What was that?” Cronin said.
“It’s Latin. ‘Make haste slowly.’”
“I know what it means.” Cronin’s voice was a growl. It was one of Black Frank’s sayings. He’d heard it a hundred times, at least. “The other thing you have to know: It’s going to be loud. Especially if you’re indoors, each shot is going to be very loud. You have to expect it.”
“Let me write that down,” Francis said. “Guns are loud.”
“I’m telling you this so you don’t flinch,” Cronin said, adding silently, you smug prick. “It’s going to be loud and the gun is going to jump in your hand. You can’t flinch, or you’ll miss, or you’ll drop the gun, and that will be it. For you—and for the others.”
They stood facing each other. The room was full of shadows.
“Would he do it?” Francis said. “Kill my brothers, if I don’t go along?”
“He doesn’t make empty threats.”
“And would you be the one to do it?”
“He’s got plenty of men who can pull a trigger. It’s not hard to find them in a city like this.”
“But what if you’re the man he asks?”
“He doesn’t ask.”
A train thundered overhead, car after car hung with swaying slabs of beef. Francis waited for the worst of the noise to pass.
“Would my father have wanted me to do this?”
Cronin said nothing. Above, the train slowed, its wheels ticking against the rails.
“I know that you knew him. In Cork. Your boss said—”
“Stop calling him my boss!”
“The old man, whoever he is, said something to you about unfinished business with the Dempseys. Martin saw it, too. There’s something familiar about you. You knew him.”
“What did your father tell you?”
“My father never said a word about anything that mattered. He gave us plenty of Virgil and Ovid, and our fill of Homer and Sophocles. As for himself? He liked his eggs poached and his tea strong. End of list.”
“Nothing about the war?”
“Loads about the Peloponnesian War. The Trojan War, too. We heard dispatches from the front practically every night. But if you’re asking about a war in the last twenty centuries, the answer there is no.”
Cronin set his mouth in a flat line. In the rafters of the barn, a Holophane light glowed in its cage. He and Francis stood spotlighted, like two boxers in the ring, crowded on all sides by darkness and roaring silence. Would there come a day when a man like himself stood before little Henry, grown old enough to ask questions about the past? And would that man, through malice or simple carelessness, pull down the wall Cronin had erected, silence stacked on silence, dividing what he once had been from what he endeavored to be? Let the boy think me a brute, he had prayed, let him think me a dullard or a fool. But don’t let him know the wickedness I have done in this world. It was a prayer Cronin offered every Sunday on his knees in the gray stone church where he and Alice and the boy—and now the baby—drove each week for Mass. He often felt himself to be a hypocrite for asking, and in some superstitious corner of his heart he feared that the request alone—Lord, deliver him not from his ignorance—would bring on its opposite.
Cronin shook his head. “I’ll respect your father’s silence,” he said.
“All we got from my father was silence! We heard barely a word from him, and all of us stuck living in the ass-end of the world.”
“He left Cork to keep you safe. Whatever else he was, he was a good father—your life over his.”
“What does that mean, whatever else he was?”
“I’ve said too much already.”
“Too much?” Francis said. “You’ve not said anything.”
“The old man said if you became too much trouble, I was to dump you back at the garage. Let you stew in that little room until it was time for you to be useful. Is that what you want?”
“But did you know my—”
Cronin leveled the revolver at the door and fired six shots, one after another. All six to the chest, none more than a few inches from the heart.
At the first shot, Francis leaped back, his hands going to his ears. “Jesus Christ! You could have warned me!”
Cronin lowered the gun and pointed to the sporran. “Put that thing on,” he said. “And then get over here. You’ve a lot to learn.”
Cronin insisted that Francis rehearse until the motion became like a reflex. He would reach into the sporran, withdraw the gun, and fire until the cylinder was empty. If Cronin saw the slightest hitch or stumble, he would stop Francis and make him start from the beginning. They tried it from five feet away, from ten, from fifteen, from twenty.
“Keep your eyes on the king,” Cronin told him. “And for God’s sake, don’t hit the queen.”
IT WAS EVENING when they returned to the Plaza. Francis’s right hand was numb, his arm still tingled from the jolt of the revolver, and a low whine pestered his ears from all those shots echoing off the brick walls, the derelict trolleys, the vaulted ceiling. The air in the carbarn had been clammy and damp, but now he was soaked to the skin. He couldn’t remember a day so warm in all his years in Ireland. His first thought had been of the bar cart in the suite—yes, he would have the front desk send up a bucket of ice as soon as he got to the room to cool his body and calm his mind—but then he remembered: Michael adrift in the city, and Martin the only one searching for him.
Cronin, with the garment bag over his shoulder, waited by the bank of elevators while Francis went to retrieve the key. But as Francis crossed the lobby, intent on the front desk, he came face to face with Félicité Bingham.
“What a treat,” she said in her bored drawl. “A private audience with near royalty.”
He almost answered in his Francis voice but caught himself in time to rough up the burr in his throat. “Fancy meeting you, Miss Bingham. But where did—”
“Enough of the ‘Miss Bingham’ talk. It’s Lici”—and then she added as a joke, an afterthought—“Your Lordship.”
“Please, it’s Angus.”
“I don’t know what to call you. My mother and my sister might be taken in, but I don’t buy it.”
“But Lici,” he said. “I’m not selling anything.”
“Father says everyone is either buying or selling. Or dead.”
“And where does your father stand? Is he sold on me, or is he not buying it either?”
“You’re clever,” she said. “I like that. But I don’t trust you.”
“Oh, but I’m very trustworthy. All Scotsmen are.”
“And what if you’re not really a Scotsman?”
“Would you like to see my kilt?” He pointed toward Cronin, standing awkwardly by the elevators. “It’s right there, in that bag. Would that convince you?”
“Now you’re making fun of me.”