At the farm he found Alice, heavy with child, and Alice’s father—an old man bent by a lifetime of work and then broken by a stroke. There was no sign of a husband and no mention of one either. Alice asked Cronin a few questions and when he hesitated she was blunt: Just tell me the truth, she said. If there were questions he did not want to answer, he was to say so. But every word from him had to be the truth. It seemed unwise—no, more than that, it was madness—for Alice to take him on, but there was work to be done and Cronin set about doing it. He tried in the years after Alice came into his life to atone for all that had transpired before. The priests had always said that you could never dig yourself in so deep that Jesus couldn’t pull you out, but what if all you ever did was dig, even when you’d sworn your digging days were done?
And now, because of the Dempseys, he was back at it, digging himself deeper! Francis Dempsey—that was a name that came roaring out of his past, and yet was as close as last night’s fitful sleep. Black Frank, they had called him. He was the one who’d set Cronin on the path that had poisoned every night for these past twenty years. He had turned a gardener into a killer, fashioning Cronin into a tool useful to the cause, urging him on whenever he felt Cronin’s will faltering, chiding him when he came up short, cheering him when he did the job right. Frank Dempsey had governed Cronin’s every step and even now what Cronin saw when he slept was born of Dempsey’s guiding hand.
Enough! Cronin had been through all of this, over and over. Frank Dempsey wasn’t the devil, no more than Gavigan was. They were all men, and when Cronin’s time came, he knew his sins would not be assigned to Dempsey’s account. He alone would be damned for what he had done. Alice had urged him to throw himself on God’s boundless mercy, to beg forgiveness for the lives he had taken and the people he had hurt. But Cronin knew that there could be no mercy without contrition; he must, in the words of the prayer, be heartily sorry for all that he had done. And while he longed to avoid the fires of hell, he knew that it was terror alone that would push him into the confessional. As Frank Dempsey had often told him and as Cronin still believed—in a part of his heart that remained off-limits even to Alice—those things had needed to be done. Even at the cost of nightmares. Even at the cost of hell.
Cronin also believed that the life he had now—with Alice and the boy and the baby, with their cows and their fields and their orchard—this was his heaven, and it was the only heaven he would ever know. If finding Black Frank’s son was the price he had to pay to keep his family safe and to live out his days with them in this earthly paradise, then so be it. He could only hope that there was no God and no final accounting for his actions on this earth—or else put his faith in God being an Irishman who would understand why he did what he did.
MIDTOWN
THE ROCKEFELLERS’ MIDTOWN KINGDOM soared above its earthbound neighbors. While their battered faces were smeared with soot and pigeon shit, the RCA Building burst from the pages of a comic book: its faultless lines were inked with shimmering quicksilver; its ascending pin-striped setbacks formed a giant’s staircase from street to sky. Here the promise of the modern world had been fixed in place by tons of granite and Indiana limestone. Murals hatched in fever dreams stretched across the lobby walls and everywhere were muscle-bound statues with jagged beards and roaring mouths and thunderbolts leaping from their hands. It was as if the gods of the past had been put to work building a brighter tomorrow. Waiting to ascend to the observation deck, the crowds of the curious could be excused for thinking they were boarding a rocket ship bound for a shiny future—leaving behind a world of torpor and disappointment and dull, grim streets lined with ruined buildings.
As she watched her reflection in the elevator’s polished bronze doors, Lilly Bloch let herself get swept along in this tide of optimism. It was Friday morning and she was scheduled to meet with Mr. Musgrove, her benefactor at the Foundation, which had brought her from Prague to America on an artist’s fellowship. During her three months in New York, she had often visited Mr. Musgrove’s office. He was fond of hosting freewheeling soirées with the other artists the Foundation had sponsored—a motley collection of aging Dadaists, surly constructivists, renegade expressionists, and a lonely surrealist who always asked for his cocktail to be served in a man’s hat. I’m beginning to wonder, she had written to her beloved Josef, if I’m the only one who has not pledged allegiance to an ism. Can you suggest the right one for me?
Two weeks earlier, after Lilly had shared with Mr. Musgrove the latest dire news from home, he had promised to use the Foundation’s considerable clout to keep her in New York and—what’s more—to spirit Josef out of Prague, where life had become precarious since the Reich had invaded and taken up residence in Prague Castle. In their letters to each other, Josef would ask, How is life in the Tower? and Lilly would respond with a blow-by-blow of the most recent dustup from one of Mr. Musgrove’s parties. She would always sign off by inquiring, with growing anxiety, What is the news from the Castle?—as if it were something from a fairy tale, unconnected to reality. The Tower and the Castle: it sounded like a game, but as the expiration date on her visa drew nearer and the reports from Josef became grimmer, the stakes had become impossibly high.
But today Mr. Musgrove’s promises would become reality; today the Tower would outfox the Castle. She had an appointment at ten o’clock, where she expected Mr. Musgrove would first present her with a fresh bouquet of compliments—he was fond of calling her a Major Talent, a Daring Visionary, and even, once, a Genius. Then he would sit back in his chair—a work of art in itself—with nothing but the clouds and the blue sky behind him and he would present her with a new visa and inform her that a similar document would soon be in Josef’s hands. She could already see the smile wrinkling the corners of his mouth, could almost hear him say, Didn’t I tell you I’d take care of everything? But Lilly didn’t need him to take care of everything. If he could make good on his biggest promise, to find some way to get Josef out of Prague, that would be more than enough.
As the elevator doors opened for her on the fifty-first floor, Lilly Bloch believed this dream of escape and reunion was still possible. She did not yet know that all of Mr. Musgrove’s promises had already come undone, and that the careless joy of two people in love had conspired against her.