The sound of cars, of engines turning over and chassis squealing on their springs, infiltrated the room. Car horns honked in short taps and long, angry bleats. The air was hot and close, thick with the smell of petrol, scalded rubber, and grease. Men shouted not in anger but to be heard over the din of the cars and the hoods slamming and the heavy overhead doors rolling up and rolling down. A tailpipe backfired and the voices fell silent for a moment, followed by laughter, more shouting, men giving each other a hard time. Someone must have flinched, he thought, and now his mates were taking the piss out of him. The voices ebbed, overcome by the grind of gearboxes, revving engines, the clear ping of a wrench dropped on the concrete, the clatter of hubcaps spilling from a precarious stack.
From his ladder-back chair, Francis faced the cell’s one brick wall, course over worn and flaky course. He followed the mortar, its network of right angles turning and climbing. The cell in Mountjoy had been built of sterner stuff: quarried stone blocks irregular in size and stacked impenetrably. He had spent hours, days, weeks staring at those walls, wondering how long it would be before he saw the outside again. His sentence was three years but he had known men to have months or years tacked on for misbehaviors intentional or otherwise. From the bottom left corner of his Mountjoy cell, the lowest course had run short block, short block, long block, then long, short, long, long, short. The course above that one went long, short, long, short, short, short, long, long, short. A random assortment, he knew, but over time he started to wonder if maybe there wasn’t a pattern—a message, even—in the masonry. Shorts and longs. Wasn’t that how Morse code worked? He still carried the sequence in his head.
Steady now. These were the moments when he saw how easy it was to slip into madness. A code in the masonry? The old-timers who walked in circles around the prison yard mumbling to themselves—no doubt they were working out the codes embedded in their cell walls. Anything to occupy the mind, to rescue you from the second-guessing and the desperate loneliness and the endless interrogation of what you shouldn’t have done, or what you should have done with greater aplomb to avoid getting caught. Those thoughts could eat you up, turn you inward with never a way out.
But now this place. One brick after another. The pattern was brick, brick, brick, brick. The message was brick, brick, brick, brick. It would be neither an escape nor a diversion. There was only what you had done wrong, whom you had left behind, and who stood to get hurt.
He had known he was being pursued. Of course he had. Hadn’t he been running since Ballyrath—and running even faster after the cock-up at the safe house? But he had allowed the immediate and robust success of the FC Plan to lull him into a state of calm. He thought again of the explosion, the disintegration of the farmhouse, the plume of smoke, and the stones and pieces of timber littering the site. And the bodies: three of the men from inside the house. Corpses, really. And then Michael. As soon after the blast as Francis was capable of yoking thought to action, he piled Michael’s battered body into the automobile and threw the strongbox into the boot. Before he could crank the engine, a voice called his name—a raspy, death-soaked holler, proof that someone else had survived the disaster. He thought, for a split second, of giving aid, but the crack of gunfire erased that notion. Each volley of his name—“Dempsey!”—was punctuated by the report of a pistol. So he had left Ballyrath pursued by the church and the state, and he arrived in Cork with the IRA joining the chase. Was there anyone who wasn’t hot to run him to ground?
And now Martin and his family were exposed to this danger. The man with the gun had named him. He knew where Martin lived. How could Francis warn him? And how could he protect Michael?
Ach! He had to shake himself out of this stupor! He had not given up when he was brought in chains to his father’s funeral. He had not given up when the bombs laid waste the farmhouse and nearly killed Michael. He couldn’t fold now. Hadn’t he survived worse? Hadn’t he, in fact, prospered?
A bolt was thrown and with a squeal the frame released its grip on the door. It was the big fellow from the museum, only now he had company: a smaller black-haired man with a face like a hatchet blade, all angles and planes, and standing behind them a truly old one dressed as if for a funeral in a gray suit, a coal-dark waistcoat, a flat spade of a necktie, and a plump gray fedora.
They brought Francis into a cluttered office furnished with a battered wooden desk, dusty stacks of carbons, cardboard boxes for auto parts, hand tools, greasy rags, and a map of the city pockmarked with pins. To the right of the desk was a pin-up calendar: April 1938, an apple-cheeked brunette carrying an umbrella and wearing nothing but a pair of bright yellow galoshes—just the sort of item Francis might have procured for a client in Dublin.
The old man lowered himself, with some effort, into the chair behind the desk and glared at Francis. “Do you know who I am?”
“As far as I can tell,” Francis said, “you’re some geezer who sends his thugs to snatch an innocent man off the streets. I’ve half a mind to set the police on you.”
The old man’s lip curled, almost a grin. “You do that, Mr. Dempsey. And then you can explain to the police how you escaped from prison, killed three men, stole their money, and entered the country on false papers.”
“That’s quite a story,” Francis said. “You could take that to Hollywood.”
The smaller man cuffed him across the mouth. Francis lunged at him, but the big fellow stepped between the two and pressed Francis flat against the wall. The old man’s laugh was syrupy with phlegm. “You think you can fight your way out of here? My friend there made a name for himself in Spain, and Mr. Cronin, who you met yesterday, well—let’s just say that his hands have been dirty since you were in short pants. Now sit down. You might have gotten the best of those mopes in Ireland, but I assure you we are a different breed in New York.”
As if to prove that he had the situation in hand, the old man told the other two to give him a moment alone with Mr. Dempsey. The two stood outside the windowed door, the little one keeping an eye on Francis and Cronin with his arms folded across his chest.
“So now what?” Francis said. “You’re packing me off to Ireland? Sending me back to prison?”
“Who said anything about prison? You belong in front of a firing squad, but the difficulty of transporting you back to Ireland makes that impractical.” He let that sink in—let Francis believe that he was getting a reprieve—then continued: “So instead I’m going to have one of our friends there cut your throat and dump you in the river.”
Francis looked at the two men standing outside. The big one was thickset like a storm cloud ready to burst, while the smaller one looked like a whip about to crack. He had a feeling it would be the little one.
“You and I both know it’s only the matter of the money that’s keeping you alive. But I am not a patient man. I’d sooner see justice done than wait to recover what you have stolen.”
“I didn’t steal—”
“You stole! And you murdered men fighting on your behalf!” He hacked loudly into a handkerchief. “How I wish your father could be here to see this. His own son, a thief and a traitor. It would serve him right.”