But this morning it wasn’t the soft knock that he heard first, it was Jamie’s voice raised and then another, buffeting it: Tommy Cronin’s. If Tommy was downstairs, there could be only one reason. And coming so early in the day was proof positive that Tommy was eager to get back to that farm of his, with his wide-hipped country wife and that plump baby he’d put in her. Gavigan had had a good laugh about that: Tommy Cronin, a man of the earth, on that tumbledown homestead out in the boonies. Gavigan couldn’t think of two nights in a row in his whole life that he’d spent outside the city. He was Manhattan to the bone: born and battle-bred in Five Points, he’d made his name in Hell’s Kitchen and come to roost at this spot in Gramercy Park.
Half the reason he’d moved here was that people like John Gavigan weren’t supposed to live in Gramercy Park. It was reserved for the posh set: fancy-pantses and silver-spooners, book readers and theatergoers. Dutch Protestants, English Protestants, people so rich they had no need for God. That crowd had put up a statue in the park of an actor whose own brother had shot Lincoln. (That was a notion Gavigan could get behind: To hell with Lincoln, who’d made the Irish fight to free the colored. What had Lincoln ever done for New York, anyway?) Living on the edge of the park entitled Gavigan to a key that unlocked the wrought-iron gate—this was no public park—but he hadn’t once set foot inside it. What did he care about flowers? All that mattered to him was that he could. Back in the old days, Tommy had been the one who slipped in and out of the park. He thought he was sly about it, but Gavigan knew. Thinking back on it, he should have seen it as a sign of things to come. It disappointed Gavigan that the man could have settled for so little; that he had abandoned his post to grub in the dirt with a woman who spooked when a stranger appeared at her door.
The commotion downstairs grew louder. Gavigan hooked a finger into the dressing gown that hung from his bedpost and struggled his arms into it. At the top of the stairs, his hand resting on the banister, he cleared his throat of the dreck that was already creeping into his lungs. A single hacking cough was enough to call a truce to whatever Tommy and Jamie were battling over.
“Jamie,” he said. “Is that Tommy Cronin down there?”
“It is, Mr. Gavigan.” Never a yes or a no from an Irishman—It is; it isn’t. No word for “yes” in the mother tongue; no word for “no,” either.
“Has he found Dempsey?”
“He claims that he has.”
“Did he bring him here?”
“He did not, sir.”
Gavigan coughed, the sound of something thick and wet being torn in half. “Show him to the study. I’ll be down in a minute.”
THE STUDY LOOKED the same as it had in Cronin’s days with Gavigan, the same as it had looked for decades before Cronin set foot in America. It was an odd name for the room; study suggested a bookish nook where a man went to ponder questions of science or philosophy. Meaning-of-life-type questions, angels on the head of a pin. But the only studying that went on in this room was of a more personal nature. Gavigan would sit at his big oak desk staring into the face of the man opposite him, a man in a wingback chair who had come seeking something. Gavigan would study this man’s face for signs of weakness, for the soft spots that would allow him to push this man in the direction that Gavigan needed him to go. A man might have come seeking a favor, money, or a promise, but Gavigan was always looking into the future, toward the favor returned, the payback, the other side of the bargain, and Gavigan always got back more than he gave. Most men knew this, and whatever relief they felt for having their wish granted was weighed against the leaden certainty that a day of reckoning would arrive. On the rare occasion that a man left that room thinking he’d gotten the better end of the deal, that was a sure sign of his own stupidity, and a guarantee that Gavigan would be rewarded ten times over.
The desk, a stout plateau of dark wood, enforced a distance between Gavigan and whoever sat on the other side. It was the same reason medieval lords had cleared the land around their castles: to emphasize the prominence of those high walls and to give those inside plenty of time to respond to any barbarous incursions. The room itself was festooned with trophies and keepsakes from Gavigan’s eighty years. Along the mantel stretched a rust-furred cutlass of Civil War vintage, Gavigan’s weapon of choice when he’d been a young brawler battling his way up the ranks of the Five Points gangs. A shelf held a replica of the death mask of Robert Emmet, presented to him as a gift by the New York chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians for “diligent support of the cause of the betterment of the Irish people, at home and abroad.” Near it hung an original pressing of the Easter Proclamation, slightly singed along one edge. On another wall was a framed and faded handbill advertising a music-hall performance by a Miss Daphne LaVerne (née Dorothea Gianopolis), the only, and unrequited, love of a much younger Gavigan. Behind the vast desk, daubed in muddy hues of brown, sage, and ocher, peered out a portrait of Gavigan’s mother. She had refused to sit for the artist—Who am I to put on such airs?—and so the rendering was based on a single meeting between the painter and Meem Gavigan, dead now these twenty years. If the portrait didn’t look much like her, it managed nevertheless to capture her defiant heart, her scorching humility.
Cronin had never liked this room. If the house was a tomb, this was the chamber that held the corpse. The light that filtered in was pallid, apologetic. In the old days, Cronin would position himself in a chair in the far corner, off the shoulder of the supplicant. It comforted Gavigan to know that Cronin was there in case one of his visitors ever got too full a head of steam. Not that force was ever necessary. Cronin’s presence alone guaranteed that the conversation never went above a simmer.
Alone in the room, Cronin wasn’t going to take his old post in the corner but neither was he going to sit in the wingback. He stood, one hand on the chair, as if posing for a portrait—the kind where the chair is occupied by the loving and loyal wife, a baby balanced on her knee. Cronin had never had such a picture taken with Alice and the children, but when he returned home he would insist on it. Let Alice laugh. He wanted a family portrait.
Gavigan, on stiff legs, was preceded into the room by a heavy-bosomed woman with hair the color of iron. She carried a tea tray that chattered with each step. When she set it down on the desk, the steam from the teapot sent a pang through Cronin. His first cup of tea, prepared by Alice each morning after he came in from the cowshed, was one of his great daily pleasures. He missed it, just as he missed everything, everyone, at the farm.
The woman looked casually at Cronin—another of Gavigan’s boys—before the snap of recognition showed.
“If it isn’t the ghost of Tommy Cronin!” Helen, that was her name. She had worked for Gavigan even before Cronin came to the house. A nurse in the Great War, she had more than once stitched up Cronin after a night had gotten rough. “I thought you got away clean,” she said, “but here you are again.”
“I won’t be long,” Cronin said.
“So you say,” Helen said, and closed the door behind her.
Gavigan dropped himself into the chair behind the desk. He nodded toward the setup of cups, saucers, sugar bowl, creamer. “Help yourself, Tommy.”
“I’ll just be on my way,” Cronin said. “I’d’ve left already but your man was in a tizzy, wanting to make certain that the job was done.”