And then there was this Jamie. He was hard to figure, but Cronin could see he was no fool. There had to be some flaw in the design that had marked him for service to Gavigan instead of one of the bigger players in the city’s winner-take-all sweepstakes. Hadn’t Gavigan always surrounded himself with misfits, castoffs, men with nowhere else to go? Cronin knew all about that.
Two blocks from the garage, Cronin slotted the coins into a pay phone and put his fat finger in the dial. He still carried the page from the phone book, each Dempsey checked off but one. The telephone rang twice. There was a pause, followed by a faint click—the sound of a woman removing an earring.
When the woman answered, Cronin asked to speak to her husband.
“He’s not available,” she said. “May I take a message for him?”
Cronin had half a mind to hang up. This was madness, to be calling the Dempseys. “Could you tell him to look in on his youngest brother?” he said finally.
“Is something wrong? Is Michael all right?”
“Just tell your husband that he needs minding.”
“Who is this?” she said. “And where’s Francis?” The woman seemed to think this was a conversation.
“Ma’am.” His voice was like a door slamming. “Tell him this: Michael is at the Plaza Hotel under the name MacFarquhar.”
“Pardon me,” she said, “but how is that spelled?”
“It’s spelled like it sounds,” he said. “MacFarquhar. Room seven-twelve. Have you got that? Seven, one, two.”
Cronin placed the receiver back in its cradle. He had been grinding his teeth since the moment he’d dialed the first number, and his jaw ached like he’d been socked. Was he ever going to be rid of the Dempseys? Could he ever cut himself free of Gavigan? One led to the other and then it all doubled back to the beginning—Dempsey to Gavigan to Dempsey to Gavigan—until the words melted into one string of nonsense that would echo in his ears as long as he lived.
He wondered if the youngest Dempsey had found his way back to the hotel. How difficult could it be? All he had to do was walk down Fifth Avenue and he couldn’t miss it. But he thought again of Francis’s panic at leaving his brother on his own. There was something wrong with the boy—Cronin had seen it. He had left the boy exposed and alone once before, back in Cork, and now he had done it again. He wanted to believe that none of this mattered to him, not a whit, but of course it did.
He should call Alice. He had coins enough in his pocket and he had not spoken to her since their hasty farewell at the depot. Her voice would shore him up. Or else it would completely undo him. Right there was the reason he could not call, and there was this, too: Alice would hear in his voice a change. She would hear that Cronin had become a man she did not know. Not that he had changed into something new, but that he was changing back into what he once had been. The man it had taken him years on the farm to un-become.
THE BOWERY
WHEN LILLY EMERGED FROM under the hood at the back of the camera, the boy was crumpled at the base of the chair like a broken doll. For a moment she feared that the flash had been fatal, that the camera had fired some bolt of energy, Tesla-like, into his heart. She looked down at this stranger—his white shirt and torn pants, his limbs splayed and his mouth gaping, his thick shock of black hair tousled across his face—and she gasped: He was the image of Josef. Is that what she was seeing? A vision of Josef’s fate? “Josef!” she cried out. “Josef, get up!”
There was a catch in his throat, and his chest rose. Lilly’s eyes filled with tears as she knelt beside him. Her sobs shook her to the floor. Yes, she had always been superstitious—a harmless foible, something she and Josef laughed about—but for weeks she had been so desperate for a hopeful sign that her nerves had been rubbed raw. The fate of the world—her world, at least—depended on how many pigeons roosted on her windowsill, and which would be the first to take flight.
Now here was this changeling boy and with one flash of light, the spark of life had almost gone out of him. But what was she to do? She knew no one and had no telephone, and she was certain that if she tried to carry the boy down the stairs it would result in his death or hers. He stirred, his eyes twitching and his lips trembling as if on the verge of speech, but he seemed unable to come to consciousness. Had he fainted? Did he suffer from fits? He needed bed rest, she decided, because really, what other option did she have? As she dragged him to the daybed in the corner of the loft, she imagined what Josef would say about all of this: the absurdity of this boy she had waylaid, the sight of her hauling a stranger into her bed, and even how little of the studio she had reserved for sleeping, dressing, eating. Ninety-five percent work, five percent personal, he might have said. That seems about right—for you.
Satisfied that her guest was sleeping and not comatose, she went back to work, cataloging the negatives and the rolls of film she had not had the time to develop. She tapped out dates, locations, and brief notes on a typewriter she had purchased cheap at a street market. The Shift key was broken, so all of her letters were lowercase. As each page rose above the platen, she razored it into strips, which she glued to the lids of small cardboard boxes. The boxes were then carefully sorted and stacked inside a trunk, along with the cases custom-made to hold the Rolleiflex, the Leica, the Agfa-Ansco. The trunk was due to the shipping agent by noon Saturday. Her clothes could fit into a single valise.
This labeling allowed her to participate in Mr. Crabtree’s notion about life in Prague. She would return to her studio, which would be just as she left it more than three months ago. Nothing would have changed, within the studio or without. Certainly the name of the nation had been effaced, but that was an issue for the cartographers, the typesetters, the sign painters. Lilly would need only to add these newly labeled boxes to the others—from Paris, Spain, Prague, and points in between—and everything would be neat and orderly, all in its proper place.