“And is it?”
“You asked me to find Francis Dempsey and I’ve found him. I’ve all the details right here.” He withdrew an envelope from his pocket and skidded it across the desk. Gavigan ignored it.
“It’s interesting to me that you think of it as asking. As if you’ve done me a favor.”
“Call it what you will. It’s done.”
Without a knock, Jamie burst through the door, a newspaper in his hand. “Mr. Gavigan,” he said. “There’s news you should see.”
“What is it?” Gavigan said.
Jamie shot a look at Cronin—he wanted Cronin out of here almost as much as Cronin himself did—and handed Gavigan the morning newspaper, spatchcocked around a two-column story on page 8.
As Gavigan read, his jaw began working over some problem, grinding away at the inside of his cheek, his dentures, his own manky tongue. “This happened yesterday?”
Jamie gave a curt nod.
“And I wasn’t told? I have to read about it in the newspaper?” The dream again. The double cross. If it wasn’t someone trying to get the upper hand, then it was some joker trying to cut him out entirely.
“I see you have business,” Cronin said. “So I’ll be off.”
Gavigan hauled himself to his feet. “You’re not going anywhere!” He tossed the newspaper at the desk, where it clattered against the tea tray’s stock of silver and porcelain. “Just look at that!”
Cronin waited a beat before picking up the paper. Russell, McGarrity, Detroit, King George. Were these men, and Gavigan with them, still fighting the old battles?
“Do you see what I mean?” Gavigan said.
Cronin answered with a blank stare.
“What were they doing in Detroit?” Gavigan said. “With the goddamn king and queen just across the border?”
Jamie eyed Cronin, leaned in toward Gavigan. “Russell and McGarrity have been out raising money,” he said. “We knew about that—”
“You think this was a coincidence? They just happen to be in Detroit, in spitting distance of the king and queen? They’ve got a plan in the works. I can feel it. And I can tell you this, too. It’s another of their half-assed schemes. They jab and they jab but they never throw the knockout punch. They’re flyweights in a heavyweights’ game.”
“Look here,” Cronin said. “This has nothing to do with me. I did what you wanted, now—”
“No!” Gavigan pounded his fist on the desk. His face was a livid, angry red. “You’ve been a part of this for twenty years! You do not get to walk away again!” A chain of racking coughs tore through Gavigan, threatening to shred him from the inside. He took one of the teacups and hawked a fat gob of phlegm into it. The coughing had exhausted him, and when he spoke again it was close to a whisper: “There’s too much we don’t know. We’ve got Francis Dempsey, the son of a traitor. He busts out of jail and makes a beeline for one of our garrisons. Which he destroys. Which kills three of our men. And from which he loots thousands of dollars—thousands of my dollars—meant for Russell’s godforsaken Sabotage Campaign.”
Another fit of coughing ripped at Gavigan’s lungs, forcing him to sit heavily in the chair. Once he had regained his breath, he continued connecting the dots: “Then this Dempsey—this nobody—gives the slip to every IRA man in Ireland and sets sail for America. Where at the same time Russell and McGarrity are on tour, thumbing their noses at the king and queen of England. And I’m supposed to believe that this is all a coincidence? That it’s nothing but dumb luck?” Gavigan hauled himself to his feet and paced unsteadily behind his desk. “It stinks to high heaven,” he said. “We don’t know if Dempsey is working for Russell or some other faction. Holy hell, he could be working for de Valera or the Brits, for all we know.” He put his hand on the desk, steadying himself.
“This isn’t my fight,” Cronin said.
“You’ve got a short memory,” Gavigan said. “If nothing else, you owe it to those still in the field finishing what you started.”
A short memory. Gavigan could be in the funny papers with a line like that.
Gavigan lowered himself into the chair. Beneath his old man’s wattles, his jaw tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed. “Tommy,” he said, “bring in the Dempsey boy, but stash him somewhere out of the way.”
Jamie spoke up. “I can take it from here. If the information checks out, it’ll be easy work.”
“Your man’s right,” Cronin said. “I’m done here.”
“You’re done when I say you’re done.” Gavigan spat the words. “And if I have to send Jamie and half a dozen men like him back to that country shithole to find you again, it’s not going to be a social call like the last time.”
Cronin thought of the revolver, which Alice had stashed at the bottom of his valise. It was a Webley, taken from an officer of the Black and Tans ambushed by Cronin early in the war. Cronin had used it to grim effect in Cork and later, in Gavigan’s employ. Even if Alice had kept it, how could he expect her to use a thing with such a dark history?
“Until I know what’s what, you don’t leave this city,” Gavigan said. “Now go and get Dempsey. Let’s see what he has to say for himself.”
THE FARM
OF COURSE HE HAD his secrets. Alice knew that. Despite all that he had told her about his past, about his life in Ireland and then in New York, and about the things he had done that still forced him bolt upright in their bed in the middle of the night, she knew there was more that had been left unsaid. And what he had told her hadn’t come easily. Tom wasn’t a big talker. He was the strong, silent type and that was just fine with her. But in the early days, when they were getting to know each other, when she realized only after the fact that she was falling for him, they told each other things that they would have kept quiet if they’d had any idea that life would bring them where it did: a man and a woman with a little boy and a baby and a farm to run. If you wanted to catch the eye of a fellow, you didn’t flaunt your fears and your past mistakes, just like a fellow never told you the worst in him if he had any thoughts of winning you over. But she had played by those rules once before, with her husband. She had been full of coy looks and giggles, he had played the devil-may-care Romeo, and look what it had gotten her.