The kid seemed unfazed. To him, Cronin’s name was a word on a sheet of paper, nothing more. He held out a pair of keys ringed to a leather tab. “Back there,” he said, cocking his head to the right. “Packard. A black one.”
Cronin took the keys. The kid was barely in his twenties—too young for Cronin to have crossed paths with him. And he would have remembered someone so lanky and skittish. He was like a character out of a children’s book: the marionette who cuts his strings and gets a job fixing cars.
“Can I see?” Cronin had already reached out and had a tight grip on the clipboard, his fingers marking the page. He wanted the puppet to know that he would not win a tug-of-war against flesh and blood, and that with the keys in his hand, Cronin no longer needed him for anything.
“Sure, buddy,” he said, relinquishing the clipboard. “Knock yourself out.”
It was all spelled out in a hasty scrawl: Thurs./Fri. Cronin, pickup for G. The G was circled, apparently the kid’s effort at a coded message. Cronin tore off the page and stuffed it into his pocket. He thought for a moment about threatening the kid, promising some terrible punishment involving the tire iron and a pair of pliers if he breathed a word about his visit, but it would only make him more likely to talk, to test the weight of Cronin’s name.
As Cronin turned the key and the car came to life, he wondered again what Gavigan could have been thinking to bandy about his name so carelessly. Or maybe it hadn’t been him at all. When did Gavigan take care of such details? It must have been that Jamie, the one behind the wheel of the car, where Cronin had once sat. Because this was the kind of thing Cronin himself would have done: Send a message in letters twenty feet tall to some reluctant stooge about just how precarious his position was. That was a message to keep a man focused, to make him work with a sense of purpose.
NOW IT WAS Saturday and Cronin was back in the Bronx, parked on a street of narrow lots, each house leaning into its neighbor. The days away from the farm were already piling one on top of another. He had arrived late on Thursday, spent Friday morning in Brooklyn, then wasted the afternoon on a fool’s errand to Staten Island. He should have called it quits and started fresh on Saturday—he had barely slept on Thursday night, tossing and turning in a dollar-a-day flop on a bed that sagged like a sailor’s hammock—but there was one Dempsey left and Cronin was eager to bring a close to this mad business. He was working on the assumption that Francis had made contact with his older brother, that he might even be in cahoots with Martin, and that the dead men in Ireland and the quick turn toward America might all be part of a Dempsey family revenge scheme—a scheme that would lead them to Cronin and the farm. So he had rushed it, and if last night’s foray had tipped off the Dempseys, then Cronin just might have banjaxed the whole operation.
Slumped behind the wheel of the Packard, his shirt plastered to his back and his collar chafing him like a yoke, Cronin thought again of Gavigan. Of how he’d appeared at the farm, acting as if finding Frank Dempsey’s wayward son were Cronin’s responsibility. But what did Gavigan know? He had never even met Frank Dempsey. He knew him only by his legend—first as a hero of the cause, then as a sticky problem that had to be solved. Cronin knew them all, though it had been a long, long time since he’d set eyes on Frank or Bernadette or their boys.
It was Gavigan’s mention of music—of the oldest boy being a musician—that had first sent a shock through Cronin’s veins, a shock he hadn’t quite shaken in the days since. Of course his mind went straight to Bernadette—to Mrs. Dempsey. God, what a beauty, and God, what a voice! All through the war, she had offered music lessons from the family home, just down the street from the university where Mr. Dempsey taught, and where Cronin worked for the groundskeeper. When the Dempseys took notice of him, he was flattered by the attention. Even then, he saw the couple through a golden haze: These were educated folks who organized marches and published articles in the nationalist newspapers, and now they wanted Tom Cronin, with his turfy fingernails and his three years of schooling, to join them. They invited him to meetings where the talk was all about the struggle against the English, about the need for Ireland to be free. There were men at those meetings who had survived the Easter Rising and they spoke of how they had struck the match and watched the fuse burn for years and now it was time for the powder keg to blow.
Cronin had never cared for politics, but these meetings fit his own life into a bigger story: Hadn’t his own brother died in the Great War, fighting for the same empire that oppressed them all? The Dempseys were the first to make him feel like he had an important part to play in building this new Ireland, like he was the man to put the muscle behind these speeches and grand plans. If he was a little bit in love with Bernadette Dempsey, what was the harm in it? Everyone loved her. When she spoke, she could outpatriot any of the men. And when she sang one of the old songs, all of their eyes shone with tears and their hearts filled with rebel blood.
Cronin had a memory from those early years of young Martin plinking out a tune on the piano. The boy couldn’t have been more than nine or ten at the time, but it was brilliant to watch his little fingers running up and down the keys. His mother stood behind him and beamed, her lips moving silently as she counted out the tune. Her hair, coppery red and lively as silk, was pinned up and away from her face, with a single strand dancing against her swan’s neck.