What had become of those mementos since his father’s death? Were they lost like the memories his father had locked away? Francis had to wonder, if his father had lived another five or ten to twenty years, whether he would have revealed more of his past to his sons. He had played some part in the war, and done enough to earn the ire of the old man who now determined Francis’s fate. He left Cork to keep you safe. Or so Cronin had said. But safe from what? Or from whom? Had the old man been stalking the Dempseys all this time? Cronin knew the answers, but he kept himself locked up just as tight as their father ever had. And really, what was the point now? The knowledge would do him no good, Michael couldn’t be told, and Martin didn’t seem to care.
Francis hefted the gun, feeling its weight in his palm. He checked the cylinder, confirmed that the safety was on, and placed it grip-up in the pouch. With this, he would fire the shot and the Binghams would scream, Sir Angus! What have you done? With barely contained glee, Félicité would direct the police to the Plaza—Cassandra vindicated at last!—and half the peelers in New York would be kicking down the door, guns drawn, only to find Michael in placid communion with a vase of flowers. To keep Michael out of harm’s way—something he had done a piss-poor job of, to be sure—he would need to get him out of the hotel. Peggy’s wedding made the most sense, but there was no time for that now. He should have argued for it last night, but he had been so intent on getting lost in the mountains of food, the river of champagne, and the hi-de-hi-de-hos that he had forgotten all the wrong things. And then Rosemary had gotten it into her head that Miss Bloch must—absolutely must—stay in the hotel, which had only served to upgrade Miss Bloch from witness to accomplice, which would do no favors for a woman who already had about her the look of an anarchist, or a kohl-eyed spy in some film about the Great War.
He had tried last night to stay away from the eye of her camera, but she was crafty. Often he heard the shutter without any sense of whom she had caught in the frame. Now all of last night’s photos would become evidence in a case file linking the notorious Francis Dempsey to this whole carousing crew. See how they toasted their plot the night before its bloody conclusion! A lavish dinner, cocktails by the gallon, and New York’s hottest floor show! Cold-blooded killers, every one of them!
His world was reorganizing itself into a few broad categories. Everything he had touched since arriving in New York would be viewed as evidence, while everyone he had met would be considered a witness, an accomplice, or a co-conspirator.
The only way he could help now was to buy them all time and distance. He wondered how long it would take for the name Angus MacFarquhar to be peeled back to reveal the name beneath it. Would he himself be the one to give that up? Not if his final bullet found its intended target. Would Martin step forward and claim him? Not unless he wanted a stain on his name that could never be wiped away. And would the Irish state, the newly christened republic, claim him as its own: a convict who’d escaped Mountjoy, only to resurface in New York, hell-bent on dragging the whole country into war with the old empire? Not bloody likely. He would be eagerly, willfully forgotten, unless the old man was so determined to put an Irishman’s finger on the trigger that he splashed the Dempsey name in the press. Striking a blow for Ireland! For the abandoned brothers of Ulster! For a history that never stopped bleeding.
If the Dempsey name did become public, then what would become of Martin? Alive, yes, but what sort of life might he have? He wondered if the sap who’d shot Franz Ferdinand had a brother, and if so, how he’d fared in the years when Europe was sending its young men first to the trenches, and then to their graves.
It was too much to figure out with only an hour before he was due to meet the Binghams. Already he was late for his appointment with Mr. Cronin, who was expecting him to turn over the bankroll that had fueled the FC Plan. That plan had come to an end and there was nothing to do but settle the tab. In his Highland regalia, Francis went to the front desk to retrieve the personal item he had placed in the safe: a small leather satchel of the type carried by doctors on house calls. Its brass clasp was all that protected the fortune in stacked currencies. As lavishly as Francis had spent in the past weeks, there was still close to four thousand dollars inside. He stuffed a thick slab of bills into the sporran, gave a fiver to the man at the front desk, and in an envelope left twenty for Collier. To a True Gentleman, he wrote on the outside, then added A. MacF. before sealing the flap.
Cronin waited in an armchair beneath a potted palm, pretending to read the morning’s Times. He stood as Francis approached. If Francis had been expecting a smile from Cronin about his attire, none was forthcoming.
“You’re set, then,” Cronin said. It wasn’t meant as a question, but a statement of fact.
No, Francis wanted to say. But I’m going to do it anyway. He shook the bag at his side. “Should I hand it over now?”
“Just don’t make a show of it,” Cronin said.
“So is this what they mean in the gangster films, when there’s a yoke called a bagman? I guess that’s you, isn’t it?”
Cronin snatched the bag from him. “You should watch your mouth,” he said.
“It’s not going to matter much longer, is it?”
Cronin turned without so much as opening the satchel.
“Aren’t you going to count it?” Francis said.
“I don’t care what’s in it.” He gave Francis a curt nod—why was the boy drawing this out? There was a look in his eyes that Cronin couldn’t place, but he was eager to get away from the hotel, from Francis, from this whole godforsaken city. “We’re done, so,” he said, putting an end to it.
“Wait.”
“What?” The word came through gritted teeth.
“Did my father ever kill anyone?”
Cronin snapped around again. “Why are you asking me that?”
“You, the old man—you all know more about my own family than I do. I need to know.”
Cronin glared at him. There was that look in Francis’s eyes again: Was it fear? Was Dempsey losing his nerve? “He never pulled a trigger, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“And my mother,” Francis said. “She wasn’t killed in a crash—an accident—was she?”
Cronin’s lips went white. There was so much not to say. “If that’s what your father told you—”
“It’s what he said, but it’s not the truth, is it?”
Cronin had found a spot beyond Francis’s shoulder and his gaze was locked on that.
“You said he left Cork to keep us safe. But it’s not as if every car in Cork was coming for us, so it must have been something else. Or someone else.”
At no point had Cronin imagined confessing what had happened to Bernadette—what he had done to Bernadette. He had never told anyone, not even Alice. For years, he hadn’t needed to tell it; everyone in Cork knew, and that knowledge followed him to New York. Everyone could smell the bad fortune that clung to him like a pox.
“Your mother was never a target,” Cronin said. “But that was no protection. Not for her. Not for a lot of others.”
“Did you know the men who did it?”
Cronin met the boy’s eyes—he owed him that—and slowly nodded. “Your parents wanted a better world for you and your brothers and they knew that took work. Work that others couldn’t do.”
“Does that make it easier?” Francis said. “When you believe in why you’re doing it?”