“They have nothing to do with this!”
“They have the misfortune of being related to you.”
Francis ran a hand over his scalp. He was soaked on the outside, empty on the inside. “Shoot me,” he said. “I’ll get your money and you can shoot me dead.”
“You are marked for bigger things now,” Gavigan said.
“You don’t just kill a king!”
“He’s just a man. He’ll bleed, same as you would. Same as the men you killed in Ireland. The only difficulty is getting to him, and that’s a problem you’ve solved.”
“I didn’t—” Francis faltered. Did the words exist that could get him out of this bind? “It was your people. They did this. They blew us all up.” He licked his cracked lips with a dry tongue. “It wasn’t my fault.”
Gavigan’s eyes glowed. He had been imagining the plan brought to life, but this last word from Francis snapped him back to this room, its heat, the smell of gasoline, the clatter and echo of the cars. “We’re beyond fault now, little Dempsey. There is only one question left open: Who else is to die for your sins?”
THE BOWERY
DURING THESE PAST FRANTIC days, it seemed to Michael that he never awoke in the same place twice. On one side of the great hole in his memory there were only two beds: the mattress piled high with beardy wool blankets where he slept in Ballyrath and the stiff, narrow cot at the seminary. On this side of the gap were the cabin aboard the ship, the posh hotel, and Martin’s couch. If he really stretched his memory, ransacked the scraps of images that brought him to the earliest moments after Whatever Happened, he saw flashes of another room and another bed: a ropy pattern on a chenille coverlet, a window with the drapes drawn, a single line of sunlight on the far wall like a white-hot exclamation mark. He had lain there, in and out of consciousness, pummeled by the Noise and unable to move his head. Things weren’t as bad as that now, but here he was in some other bed, and when he thought about how he had gotten here, it was the same old story. The day had ended suddenly, with a crash, and now time had elapsed and he was in a new place.
He used to read before bed. During the years when it was he and his father in the house—Martin long gone to America, Francis seeking his fortune in Dublin—they ended most days sitting before a turf fire, a lamp burning on the table as night sounds settled over the cottage: the wind buffeting the thatch, the hiss of the fire, the delicate tick of the mantel clock. The clock was one of the few relics of their life in Cork. The only items in the cottage that could trace their provenance to the Cork house were small and easily carried, as if they had been snatched from the house as it burned: the clock, some books, a few blankets, a single framed photograph of the family taken with Michael draped in his christening gown. (They were hoping for a daughter, Francis had often told him.)
Michael didn’t think of himself as particularly happy during those long nights, but seen from this distance those were sweet and peaceful times. Da would be scanning some book of poetry while Michael made his way through the Aeneid, or when Da loosened the reins of his nothing-after-the-sixth-century policy, perhaps Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or, for laughs, some Walter Scott. Was Da at that table now, alone in the lamplight, placing the bookmark among the pages and wondering where in the world his boys were? He and Martin had quarreled so mightily that when Martin finally made good on his promise to go to America, it brought a calm to the cottage. In time Francis grew restless too and rather than fight about it, he simply left. But could Da have ever expected them to stay? There had been some talk of Francis going to university but he showed little interest in formalizing his haphazard education. One day, despite their father’s hostility to cities—Cork, especially—Francis announced that he was bound for Dublin and that was that. Michael and Da had an easier rhythm to their time together. Maybe it was because Michael remembered nothing of life in Cork, of how things had been before the accident that took his mother and, Martin always claimed, changed their father in some irreparable way. Ballyrath was the only home Michael had ever known and his father was always the only way that Michael had ever known him.
Would he ever set foot in Ballyrath again? And when he did, would his father still be there, at the table, his book open before him, asking Michael to bank up the fire against the chill of the night?
He had let his mind wander. When he could read before bed, sleep came to him slowly. There was time to reflect on the day that was ending and to think about the day to come. But since Whatever Happened, sleep—the loss of consciousness, really—came quickly and without warning. He didn’t even know if he could call it sleep. It was a collapse, a demolition from within. He just hoped that he would continue to come out the other side, bleary-eyed but halfway sane, fortunate to be among the living.
LILLY BUSIED HERSELF with the coffeepot. She didn’t have much in the way of creature comforts in the studio: no icebox or stove, and the water pressure in the tap that fed the sink was flaccid and full of stammers and half-starts. But she had to have coffee, and in a hardware store on Delancey she had purchased an electric hot plate and a pot for brewing caffè ristretto. When she’d first arrived, she could keep milk on the windowsill, but the heat of the past month had made that impossible. She brewed a sludgy concoction and loaded it with sugar. It wasn’t exactly the Café des Artistes, but it was better than the endless cups of dishwater that Americans called coffee. She caught herself making more noise than usual, dropping spoons and clattering her cup into the saucer, but she could have blown the whole building down and the sound of it wouldn’t have roused her guest. The boy was clearly exhausted—he had slept for more than twelve hours—and she had to admit the same about herself. The New York List had kept her on the run, and even when she wasn’t in motion, the gears inside her head never stopped turning. But this morning she had awoken refreshed, if not exactly restored. Curled up against her catatonic guest, even in this relentless heat, she’d had her best night of sleep in weeks. Maybe in months.