PARKED DOWN THE BLOCK from the house he’d visited the night before, Cronin had to admit that he’d gotten rusty. Worse, he’d been careless—careless, impatient, stupid—to go knocking on the door so late, but he had spent the day tracking down every M. Dempsey in the phone book and by ten at night he was tired and angry and that was the wrong way to go about this sort of business. When the old woman came to the door, he was sure he’d turned down another blind alley, but then she opened her craw and said Mr. Dempsey wasn’t at home because he was a musician and kept odd hours. At the mention of music, Cronin knew he had his man. Now he could only hope he hadn’t spooked Martin and sent Francis into hiding.
He wouldn’t have been so careless in the old days, but now even his hunches were failing him. Of the almost one hundred and fifty Dempseys in the phone books of the five boroughs, there were no Martins and only three M. Dempseys: one in Brooklyn, one in the Bronx, and one on Staten Island. It should have been easy enough. He started early Friday morning in Brooklyn, but four hours in front of a brownstone on Prospect Avenue revealed the mystery M. to be Mae Dempsey, a member in good standing of the ladies’ auxiliary at Holy Family Roman Catholic Church. Cronin’s next roll of the dice took him to Staten Island and, really, he should have known better. What kind of a musician lived on Staten Island? A ferry ride and a long walk put him on a leafy street in front of a two-story wood-frame occupied by the middle-aged Malachy Dempsey and his unruly brood of towheaded sons. Cronin heard them whooping it up from halfway down the street. It had been a long way to go for a quick answer to his question.
He should have started with the Bronx—the borough was lousy with Irish—but for Cronin, the Bronx was a landscape of pits and snares. It was the terrain of his past. Back in Prohibition days, Gavigan had knocked heads with bootleggers big and small trying to chisel off little pieces of business, nowhere more so than on the west side of Manhattan and up and down the Bronx. Whenever there were heads to be knocked, it was Cronin’s job to do the knocking, and now the thought of running into men with scores to settle had spooked Cronin into staying clear of his old stomping ground. He knew, deep down, that the M. Dempsey he was looking for was the one in the Bronx, but he had been foolish enough to believe—worse, to hope—that this job could be easy, that it wouldn’t force him to go straight into the maw of the bad old days.
Cronin had been jumpy since he stepped off the train at Grand Central. The press of bodies on the platform, the steam and the darkness and the shrill whistles of the conductors, and the jostling of the porters and the garbled voices on the loudspeakers calling out departures—it had nearly sent him into a panic. For five years, he had been softened by the sound of wind ruffling the birch trees. He was buffeted only by the flanks of the cows, and snugged close at night in the bed with Alice. On the platform, feeling every eye on him, he couldn’t help jerking his head this way and that, though he knew it was likely to get him noticed: it’s the nervous man, the one who most wants to be invisible, who is spotlighted in the crowd. He settled himself as he moved up the staircase and into the vaulted concourse, where he navigated the thinning crowd and pushed through the door onto Forty-Second Street. Amid the splashes of neon and the million-bulbed marquees, he walked west through Times Square, then crossed Eighth Avenue, moving like a man who would brook no nonsense from pickpockets or stickup men. He gripped tight the handle of the valise and struck toward the river, walking past storefronts locked up against the night’s rougher traffic. Yellow light spilled onto the street from an all-night hash-and-eggs joint full of cops and cabbies. He passed a bar that seemed darker on the inside than the street itself, and then another, and another. In any one of those bars could be a man who had spent years rehearsing to himself what he would do if he ever came across Tom Cronin, unarmed, on a dark street. The bars could be full of such men.
He did not wander aimlessly; this was no nostalgic tour of his old haunts. He knew well the spot where Gavigan had said he could retrieve an automobile: a warehouse in the West Forties that at midnight still echoed with the sounds of cars and men—slamming, cursing, rattling, laughing. The syrupy tang of motor oil, the whiskey of petrol, the haze of exhaust: gouts of it billowed from the open bay of the garage. Half of the building was a taxicab company. Cronin’s car would be in the other half, the one whose entrance faced away from the street and smelled of fresh paint and larceny. Inside he found a man in striped blue coveralls peering into the open mouth of a Buick. Cronin waited for the man to slam shut its hood.
“I’m here about a car.” Cronin’s voice sounded small in the sudden quiet, but it had the intended effect: the other man—a kid, really—startled.
He was a beanpole, all straight lines and angles. His knobby wrists poked from his sleeves like a scarecrow’s. He tried to play off his flinch as something else, shooting his cuffs, straightening the collar of his coveralls, like a man going out on the town. He gave Cronin the once-over. “Oh yeah, and who are you?”
“That’s no matter,” Cronin said. “I’m here to pick up a car.”
The kid smirked. “And I’m just gonna hand over the keys?” His eyes swept the top of a battered tool bench that ran the length of the Buick. A wrench. A tire iron. A ball-peen hammer. Cronin took it all in.
“Gavigan sent me,” Cronin said. “So, yeah, that’s what you’re gonna do.”
“Gavigan, huh?” The kid picked up a rag and scoured his blackened hands. “Wait here.”
The name was like gravel in Cronin’s mouth, but it was proof, if he needed it, that Gavigan could still open a few doors. It was a name he had hoped never to speak again, but there were worse places to find out if the currency of Gavigan’s name had kept its value. If some hard-luck case with a score to settle thought twice about potshotting Cronin because he feared what Gavigan would do, then the name was doing its job.
Stretch reemerged from a small room at the back of the garage with a clipboard in his hand. He muttered under his breath—Gavigangavigangavigangavigan—while he flipped through yellow pages lined in blue. Without looking up, he said, “Are you… Cronin?”
Gut-punched. That’s how it felt to hear his name spoken so freely. Had Gavigan really been so reckless?