He had hoped to make his mark with this Ireland business, bankrolling the operation for going on forty years: the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, the anti-Treaty side of the civil war. He was convinced that none of it would have happened without the money and the guns and the yet-more-money he had dispatched to the Old Sod. His mother had raised him on stories of the Famine, the shame of the workhouse, uncles led in chains to Australia, a hunger so raw no lifetime could ever satiate it. But it wasn’t the old stories alone that had raised the banner in his heart. Just before the turn of the century, as he began to get a little money in his pockets, he had taken his mother to the Odeon in the old Five Points neighborhood to see one of the great Irish tenors. The performance turned out to be some kind of Fenian fund-raiser and while the singer caught his breath, another man took the stage and gave such a fiery recounting of the sins against the Irish people that Gavigan pledged himself right then and there to the cause of a free Ireland. It wasn’t long before he was meeting at white-tablecloth steak houses with the up-and-coming class of Irish-Catholic merchants and lawyers—the strivers of New York with their fine suits and Jesuit manners, men who would have otherwise looked down on a gutter rat like John Gavigan. Only now they were drooling to get their hands on the money he could give to free Mother Ireland from British rule. When it was guns they needed, Gavigan knew how to get them, and when they needed men on the docks who could label rifles as machine parts—well, Gavigan took care of that, too. But what did they need from Gavigan now? Did they come to him for his general’s eye for strategy, his banker’s eye for business, his soldier’s eye for knowing when to pull the trigger?
No, Lord, they want none of that. Only my money, Lord, to spend on schemes that don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell—forgive me, Lord, but I sometimes lose my temper, just as You did when the moneychangers took over the temple. And I know how that is, Lord, when you’re trying to stay true to the cause but all around you is incompetence and idiocy. I know a thing or two about staking out turf and keeping it yours, but does that get me listened to? It sure as shit does not. And forgive me again, Lord, for my rough language but You know that I am an uncouth soul, and You seem to love me for it anyhow. So thanks there, too, Lord.
This was the part that burned a hole in his gut—because what had their years of ignoring Gavigan’s best ideas gotten the Irish? Only a piece of the island, with a big bite taken out of the top. He for one wasn’t going to say that was good enough and call it a day. The south had purchased its independence—And goddamn it, they hadn’t even gotten that, not all the way—and the price was the blood of every northern republican trapped in servitude to an English king and subject now to constant persecution by the murderous Ulster unionists, who were more determined than ever to keep themselves in the fold of the empire. Having been deserted by their cowardly, self-satisfied brothers in the south, the Catholics in the north were both poor and powerless. He thought his money had built a generation of revolutionaries, but they were content to be a nation of civil servants. They had sold their own kin for a comfortable pension.
And even the IRA, the ones who were supposed to finish the job come hell or high water, had fallen into weakness and disarray. He had urged and argued for something big, something that would kick the English square in the balls. Kill the whole cabinet in one swipe! Instead, they had launched this pitiful Sabotage Campaign, with its bombs in mailboxes, bombs in trash cans. It was an annoyance, nothing more. Gavigan called for an all-out assault on the north, a coordinated strike that would be the signal for a larger uprising. Just what they’d intended in ’16, only better organized, with enough guns and men to force Parliament to throw up its hands and say, Enough is enough! These Irish will never be quelled! But no. The Army Council knew best. Gavigan told them they were mad and worse, that they had no stomach for a real fight. But still he opened his wallet because without him there would be no action at all.
And will you look at what’s happened now, Lord? This little nobody walks in and robs them blind and then lights out for America, his pockets full of my money. So now it’s up to me, once again, to clean up the mess they’ve made. Stupid fucking micks. Pardon my language, Lord, but it’s true what they say: Every Irishman worth a damn has either emigrated or been executed. The simpletons who stayed behind need constant supervision.
Gavigan still dreamed of one last score. Something so big that it would sweep away the small-timers. And if it wasn’t going to come from Ireland, then the American-born Irish would show them how it was done. There had been chatter around New York a few years back about flying a plane across the Atlantic, Lindbergh-style, to bomb the House of Commons. The plan had been to fly from the edge of Long Island, rain fire on the Parliament, and ditch the plane in sympathetic France. Gavigan lined up just such a plane. He found men willing to carry out the plan. But when he laid it all out for his supposed comrades, they balked. It was just talk, they said. Eyes full of stars, heads full of whiskey. Gavigan knew the truth, that they were scared of their own ambition.
But You know me, Lord. I’m not scared of nothing. Show me a sign, Lord, and I will not let You down. You have given me some good times on this earth, more than a man deserves, but if You give me one last score before we meet face to face then I will die a happy man. I’ve never asked for anything it wasn’t in Your power to give, and to be honest, I have tried my best to take care of myself and go easy on the asking. So if You can see Your way to helping me go out a winner, then we can call it even. Amen.
FORDHAM HEIGHTS
MARTIN AND ROSEMARY’S OLDER daughter, Kate, had been perched at the front window awaiting the arrival of these strange new creatures, her uncles, and when she saw the taxi at the curb, she sent up the alarm: “I see nuncles! The nuncles! The nuncles!”
Martin tromped down the stairs to meet them, and moments later, Michael and Francis, their arms brimming with presents, pushed through the front door. Before Mrs. Fichetti could interrupt the reunion, they swept upstairs for a round of introductions: brothers to their sister-in-law, uncles to nieces, and nieces to uncles. Francis gave a broad smile as he sized up Rosemary: Dark hair and a pretty face, though she looked a bit too serious. Still, she had a nice bosom and a slim figure, even after the two babies. Good fun to be had there, he thought. Well done, Martin. He had never known Martin’s type of girl. There were so few options among the country lasses in Ballyrath, and anyway Martin had always seemed more interested in music than girls. He wasn’t going to tie himself down while his sights were set on America.
Michael was tottering under the weight of a giant bottle of champagne—“It’s bigger than Evie!” Martin said—and as Michael was relieved of the bottle, Francis began dispensing presents. For Rosemary there was a brooch from Henri Bendel, which she said was too extravagant, all the while pinning it smartly to her blouse. For Kate, a Madame Alexander doll. “My baby!” she cried with rapturous glee when the box was opened. And for the littlest Dempsey, a silver teething ring in a powder-blue Tiffany box. Evie took hold of it in one fat fist and began madly drooling. Francis patted his pockets in a show of forgetfulness—“Now, what have I got for Daddy?” he said, winking at Kate—before producing another Tiffany box, this one containing a tie clip made up of thin lines of silver dotted with quarter notes. Francis beamed throughout this Santa Claus in June ceremony while Michael stood by his side with his alert, happy-but-not-idiotic smile, a look he had been practicing in the mirror that morning.