How had he let Cronin get a shot off? He had seen the man boiling in the moments before the gun flashed out from under his jacket but Jamie felt like he was watching it happen in a movie. All week long, Cronin had taken whatever abuse Gavigan had heaped on him, and like Gavigan, Jamie came to believe that Cronin was a broken man, easily bullied. Well, cheers to Cronin, then. He had proven them both wrong.
Jamie wanted to get off the floor but nothing in his body responded to the thought. Helen must be somewhere in the house, but if she had any brains she was hiding until the ruckus came to an end. Perhaps she would call the police. There were still a few men on the force sympathetic to Gavigan and the largesse he could dispense. And perhaps there would be an ambulance, though it was sure to arrive too late to matter. It wouldn’t be long now.
THE CORPSE THAT had recently been Gavigan was slumped in the big chair behind the desk. The portrait of his mother glared out into the room, as if she could not bear the sight of her dead son. She must have loved her boy as he loved her: fiercely and despite the opinions of the world.
The fire that Cronin had felt when the bullet hit was already starting to ebb, replaced now with a different sort of ache. It felt like someone had taken a rusty saw to his left arm and detached the limb, then hastily stuck it back in place. His fingers still moved and that was a good sign, but the blood had reached down to his shirt cuff and that seemed to bode ill. Cronin had been in plenty of scrapes that had left him bruised and in need of stitches, but this was the first time he’d been shot. Surprising, really, considering the ways he’d spent the past twenty years. It was almost funny now that it had finally happened, but he knew that if he started laughing about it—if he really did find it funny—it was a sure sign that he was losing too much blood, or perhaps just losing his mind. Jamie lay on the floor, clearly not long for this world. His staccato breathing had become an occasional hiccup and his face was going slack. It struck Cronin that their places could have easily been reversed: Jamie only winged, while Cronin breathed his last. Jamie would have cleaned it all up, and if Alice ever received any word of his fate, it would only have been to brand him a murderer, and to lay bare every misdeed of his past. A great sob heaved out of Cronin’s chest, followed by another and another. His legs shook and for a moment he thought that he might fall from the arm of the chair to his knees. But he had not come this far—on this godforsaken errand or in this life—to die alone and be counted among these men.
Cronin hauled himself to his feet. The pile of money was still on the desk, the top bill spattered with Gavigan’s blood. Cronin peeled it from the stack, left the lone bill on the desk, and put the rest of the money, along with the Webley, back in the satchel. He might have his principles, but he also had his responsibilities.
He looked again at Jamie. If Cronin had never stepped off that train, then Jamie would not have taken his place at Gavigan’s side. He could tell himself that Jamie’s life might not have turned out any differently—that the years might, in fact, have treated him far worse—but he could not erase the fact that it was he who had put an end to it all, both for Jamie and for Gavigan. He was not a new man, not a different man since he’d found Alice and the boy at the farm. But a different sort of man could not have walked out of this room alive. Cronin knew who he was, and he knew that he could not be saved, but there were others who were not yet lost, and they were the ones he would serve.
He reached for the fat black telephone and turned it so the dial faced him. The phone number was still in his jacket pocket, and with great effort his fished it out. The paper was now half soaked in his blood. He stabbed his fingers one by one into the dial, which buzzed with each rotation like a nest of bees. It rang twice, and then the oldest Dempsey’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Listen to me,” Cronin said. “Your brother is about to do something terrible, and you have to stop him.”
Martin started to ask, “Who is—” but Cronin cut him off.
“You know my voice and you know my face,” Cronin said. “And you know your brother is mixed up in something.”
“Just what are you and Francis up to? And don’t give me the runaround this—”
“Your brother is going to kill the king today.” Cronin growled through gritted teeth. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself. “I knew your parents in Cork, and on their graves I swear it’s true.”
“Look, I’m on the way out the door to a wedding.” He said it as if it mattered, as if it could put a stop to anything Cronin had said.
“Your father and mother had a home on O’Donovan Rossa Street, close to the university. There was a piano in the parlor and a marble fireplace. There was a clock on the mantel—shiny, brass or bronze—with a man on one side of the clock’s face, and a lady on the other.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I was there. I served with your father in the war.”
“My father was a professor.”
“And I was a gardener. But that didn’t stop me from pulling the trigger when the professor told me to shoot.”
Martin’s breathing came through the receiver like bursts of static.
“Francis has a gun,” Cronin said, “and he’s been told that if he doesn’t do it, then you and your brother and your wife are all dead.”
“Hold on now, what? My”—his voice dropped to a whisper—“my wife?”
“You need to stop him.”
“You just said if he doesn’t do it, then we’re all—”
“I took care of that,” Cronin said. “You’re not in danger anymore. But if your brother pulls that trigger, God only knows what hell he’ll unleash.”
“There must be a million people at the fair today.”
“Find the king and you’ll find your brother. Tell him it’s off. Tell him the old man is dead. Tell him that.”
“What old man?”
“Tell him,” Cronin said.
Cronin’s left arm hung limp and blood pooled in the palm of his hand. He could feel himself slipping into that pool. Going under. But if he thought about it hard enough, he could get his fingers to move. Every small motion sent a jolt up his arm. The jolts were enough to keep him from sliding under, but not for long. The Dempsey boy’s voice was coming through the receiver but it wasn’t making any sense. Cronin wadded up the paper he had torn from the phone book, all the M. Dempseys in New York, and put it in his mouth. He chewed it slowly, the pulpy mass spiked with the salt iron of his blood.
“One more thing,” Cronin said into the receiver, every word a stone he could barely lift. “After you stop your brother, you find Alice, and you tell her I tried to do right.”
“Alice?” said a voice from far away. “Who’s Alice?”
Who’s Alice? There was no way to answer that question. Alice was Alice. “On the farm,” he said. “With Henry and Gracie.”
“Hello?” said the voice, but the voice was so far away. The receiver lay on the desk, and Cronin found himself on the floor, and though the voice continued to say, “Hello? Hello?” Cronin thought only of Alice, and the boy, and the baby, and the farm.
FORDHAM HEIGHTS