All down the avenue from Midtown to Gavigan’s place, the lampposts and the awnings were festooned with flags: Union Jacks on every corner, and the royals wouldn’t even see them. The parade was to be up the West Side Highway and the papers said there would be hundreds of thousands lining the route. If it had been twenty years earlier, and the king’s father had been fool enough to visit Ireland, and Frank Dempsey had given him the word? And if Bernadette had told him it would advance the cause, that it would put England on the back foot? Of course Cronin would have done it, and with no more animus than when he shot a police inspector. But it wasn’t twenty years ago, it wasn’t Ireland, and Gavigan’s reasons were a poor substitute for the Dempseys’. The Americans had had their war with another King George—hadn’t they called him a tyrant, too?—but that was history and now they waved flags and roses for the king. Some histories you washed off quickly. Others you wallowed in like a sty.
Cronin found a place for the car on the far side of Gramercy Park, where the low iron gate separated him from a riot of rhododendron and azalea, flocks of bearded iris. He caught the wet smell of the earth, of mulched bark: a reminder that a better world existed somewhere. He should have used the back entrance to the brownstone, but Gavigan had gone out of his way to expose Cronin, so why shouldn’t he return the favor? The small, petty defiance of a man who has been beaten and knows it. With the bag at his side, Cronin rang the bell and Helen, the Jane-of-all-trades, opened the door.
“Well, if it isn’t our bad penny,” she said. “You keep turning up.”
“This’ll be the last time,” he said. “I need to see him and then I’m off.”
She beckoned for Cronin to follow her down the carpeted hall. She was a stout woman, built like a coffeepot. “The two of them have been in the study all morning listening to the radio.” She stopped when she came to the door. “You don’t suppose they’re waiting for the opera, do you?”
Gavigan was behind the desk. Jamie leaned, arms folded, against the bookcase, like he had all the time in the world.
“Come to join our party, Tommy?” Gavigan said. “I’ve got a nice bottle set aside for a toast, but not until we have a reason to celebrate. It could be a few hours still, and I know how you get thirsty. Think you can wait?”
Cronin ignored the question and set the bag on the desk. “Here’s your money, or what’s left of it. Dempsey wasn’t exactly pinching pennies.”
“A small price to pay,” Gavigan said. “They’ll be writing songs about him soon.”
“Well, then,” Cronin said. “I’ll be on my way.”
“What? So soon? We couldn’t have done this without you, Tommy. For all his charm, I don’t think Jamie would have had the patience to see Dempsey through all this. He was all for dumping him off a bridge days ago.”
“I’m not the babysitting type,” Jamie said. “But I’m glad that someone is.”
Gavigan barked a laugh that tripped into a manky, wet cough. He was practically giddy. His plan was coming together, bigger than any heist or hit in the old days. By nightfall, the world would be in an uproar. He would make clear to the Army Council just who had masterminded this operation—and wouldn’t that give them a shock! Of course they wouldn’t breathe a word of it. It was too easy to connect the dots and link Gavigan back to them, and who would believe that Gavigan alone had freelanced this entire operation, without the knowledge or consent of the IRA? No, they would be gobsmacked. Maybe now he would get the respect he deserved.
“That’s right,” Gavigan said. “Tommy wants to get back to his farmer’s wife and his baby. You be sure to give them a kiss from their old uncle John.”
Cronin had heard enough. He turned for the door.
“I’ll tell you what, Tommy.” Gavigan reached for the satchel and came out with a wedge of banknotes. He peeled off bills like he was skinning a potato. “Here’s a little something extra for your troubles. Why don’t you buy that woman of yours something nice?” His laugh was croupy, malicious. He was the king of all jokes today. “Maybe a wedding ring? Make an honest woman of her, why don’tcha?”
Cronin stopped, his hand on the doorknob. On the desk, Gavigan had laid out five hundred dollars in tens and twenties.
“Oh, don’t be so sour. I’m just having a bit of fun.” He stacked the bills into a neat pile and then proffered it to Cronin. “Take it,” he said. “If you don’t want any gifts, then you can consider it a down payment for the next time.”
Cronin’s left hand balled into a fist, the way it had in front of the farmhouse. “This is the end of it,” he said, as much to himself as to Gavigan.
“It’s the end for now,” Gavigan said. “I know where to find you when I need you.”
CRONIN WHEELED ON Gavigan with the revolver and fired, catching the old man in the neck. The wound was messy and Gavigan lingered only long enough to know that it was Cronin who had done it.
Even as he was squeezing the trigger, Cronin knew that he should have shot Jamie first. That would have been the smart thing to do: take out the muscle. But he had let his temper get the better of him—Frank Dempsey would have had stern words for a lapse like that—and some small part of him must have thought that Jamie wanted to be free of Gavigan too.
The bullet that struck Cronin’s shoulder announced that Jamie did not want to be free of all this. And the fact that the shot hit him in the shoulder rather than the head or the gut told him that Jamie, for all his vigilance, had been caught off guard. Before Jamie could fire a second time, Cronin pivoted and fired, practically point-blank, and sent him spinning face-first to the carpet. The Webley was a battlefield weapon. It rarely required a second shot.
The pain came in hot, electric pulses down Cronin’s arm and into his chest, as if he were wrapped in burning barbed wire. In two strides he reached Jamie and kicked free his gun and then, with the same foot, he rolled him onto his back. The blood was already spreading across Jamie’s shirt, around a shredded spot in the fabric where the bullet had torn into his chest. Cronin knew that something similar was happening to him. He could feel the ooze of it on his arm.
“You stupid goddamn langer,” Cronin said to Jamie. “He’s dead. You could’ve walked away.”
Jamie’s eyes were rolling in his head. Whatever Cronin was feeling, Jamie was feeling it worse. He spoke in short breaths, between gritted teeth: “Fucking hell. If I’d’a wanted him dead, I coulda done it any time.”
Cronin tried to lift his left hand, but the pain wouldn’t allow it. He sat on the arm of the wingback, and with the Webley still in his hand, he poked at the lapel of his jacket with the gun barrel to peek at the damage.
Jamie’s eyes were canted to the side and fixed on Cronin. His breathing came fast and shallow. “You gonna finish the job?”
“I’m done,” he said. “I wasn’t planning on shooting you—you made that happen. It’s not up to me whether you live or die.”
JAMIE CLOSED HIS eyes. The crisp white shirt that Helen had starched and ironed for him was soaked and sticky with his own blood. He had taken more time than usual that morning to decide on a necktie; ridiculous as it seemed to him now, he had actually pondered whether to wear the green one to recognize Gavigan’s grand scheme for Ireland, or just go with the blue, because it favored his eyes. Only an hour ago, the decision had seemed to matter.