Читать книгу The City of Strangers - Michael Russell - Страница 14

It’s the sheer size of it I couldn’t believe. It’s higher than a house. It’s like a liner, sitting in the water, but it’s the wings and the engines that are so big when you climb up under them to get in. One minute you’re on the water, bumping a bit – bumping quite a lot in fact, and then you’re in the air. We were only over Ireland a few minutes, hardly at all, and then we were over the Atlantic. You look down and the sea just goes on and on forever.

The postcard Stefan Gillespie was writing to Tom was growing in length, and his writing was getting smaller and smaller to fit. He had bought the picture of the Boeing 314 Yankee Clipper at the terminal, but Tom wanted it to be written on the plane and sent from America with an American stamp. The card wouldn’t reach Baltinglass till he was back there himself, but it was crucial that it came in the post as far as his son was concerned; that had an authenticity that the picture alone couldn’t have.

Finishing the card Stefan gazed down at the Atlantic again, as he had been gazing on and off for an hour. At 20,000 feet the sky was clear; there was nothing below except the sea, grey and choppy and unchanging, mile after mile after mile, and the long journey was only beginning. But as Stefan gazed down, that unchanging swell had its own fascination. The flying boat felt smaller now, far smaller than it had tied up beside the pontoon on the Shannon.

The cabin of the Yankee Clipper was divided up into small seating areas, with bulkheads closing them off from one another. The seats were leather, still with the smell of newness about them. The floors were thickly carpeted. Halfway along the length of the main cabin there was a small dining room; two stewards, naval-officer navy now exchanged for gleaming white jackets, were setting the tables for the first sitting of dinner, with crisp linen and silverware. Another steward, passing Stefan’s seat with a bottle of champagne, stopped and topped up the glass at his elbow.

The journey that was all about bringing a man home to hang perhaps had become no less strange in all the self-conscious elegance of the Yankee Clipper. But it was still hard not to smile grimly at the prospect of the return, a pair of handcuffs linking him and his prisoner across the plush leather, and both of them with a glass of champagne in each free hand. Whatever crap Superintendent Gregory had given him the night before at the Four Courts Hotel, he had taken one piece of advice; on the way to Kingsbridge Station he had walked round to the Bridewell Garda station, behind the Four Courts, to get a pair of handcuffs.

The flying boat was by no means full. Most of the passengers were already on the plane when it touched down from Southampton, English and American; only three others had got on with him at Foynes. The service had been in operation for barely a month and many of the passengers were wealthy people flying for the experience rather than because they needed to get to America fast.

The smell of money filled the cabin of the flying boat as distinctively as the smell of new leather and the steaks sizzling in the galley at the back of the fuselage. Several passengers had eyed him curiously as they smiled and said hello, not because they knew who he was, but because they didn’t. There was an atmosphere on board the plane, amidst all the tasteful elegance; if you were on the flight you ought to be important enough to be recognisable; you did have some obligation to be somebody.

Across the aisle from Stefan, in the compartment just in front of the galley, a man in his late fifties or early sixties had been immersed in a pile of newspapers, English and Irish, between scribbling notes in a notebook. He had said hello to Stefan, and remarked on the weather, which was pretty good for the crossing to Newfoundland it seemed, and then he’d got on with what he was doing.

He was a thin man, with a thick sweep of grey, almost silver hair; he had the kind of intense, thoughtful face that always has a frown between the eyebrows, even when it’s smiling. From time to time he whistled tunelessly to himself, not loudly, but loudly enough for it to slightly grate on Stefan. The Yankee Clipper was surprisingly quiet, despite the insistent buzz of the four great engines hanging from the wings above them, endlessly turning the propellers. Then all of a sudden the man folded his pile of newspapers together and reached over to put them on the empty seat opposite him. He closed his notebook, put away his pen, and picked up his champagne. He turned towards Stefan Gillespie with a smile.

‘Sláinte!’

‘Sláinte mhaith,’ replied Stefan.

‘First time?’ asked the man.

‘The very first.’

‘Quite something,’ the man continued, glancing out at the sky.

Stefan nodded.

The man got up and walked across the aisle, stretching out his hand.

‘Dominic Carroll.’

They shook hands.

‘Stefan Gillespie.’

The stranger sat down in the seat opposite him. There was nothing particularly unusual about the way he delivered his name, but Stefan got the impression that he expected it to mean something. As he continued to smile at Stefan it was as if he was waiting for recognition of some kind to dawn. It didn’t, and Dominic Carroll’s smile became a grin for a moment, as if he was aware of his own ego, and could find the room to laugh at it sometimes.

‘Where are you from, Mr Gillespie?’

‘West Wicklow, Baltinglass.’

‘I don’t know it. I could place it probably. I’m just about from County Tyrone, Carrickfergus. We emigrated when I was four, so you see it is just about. I’m a New Yorker, heading home. And where you headed yourself?’

‘New York too.’

‘Business?’

‘Of a sort.’

‘And what sort of business are you in?’

Stefan hesitated. He had had no instructions to keep what he was doing a secret, at least as far as it simply concerned who he was. The details were a different matter. But the fact that he was a policeman didn’t tell anybody anything significant; in fact it provided good reasons, without his appearing rude, for him to keep his business to himself.

‘I’m a guard, a policeman.’

The effect of this on Dominic Carroll was unexpected. He looked puzzled, and if not quite angry, irritated. He didn’t like it at all. Then his expression changed and he smiled, pushing away whatever had been there.

‘I know what a guard is, Mr Gillespie. I’m not a stranger to Ireland.’

He spoke easily, wiping out any traces of the feelings that he hadn’t been able to hide seconds earlier. But he was no longer as relaxed as he had been, and as the conversation continued Stefan couldn’t help feeling he was being watched and weighed up. It was hard to work out what was going on. It wasn’t much now, and if he hadn’t registered those first, unfathomable reactions from the American, he probably wouldn’t have noticed at all. Carroll was suspicious; for some reason he was uneasy that Stefan was a guard.

However, time passed and bit by bit the suspicion seemed to fade. Dominic Carroll was a good talker, and like a lot of good talkers he was used to being listened to. Once it was clear that Stefan Gillespie had nothing to say about his business, other than he was doing a job for the Gardaí and would be meeting some NYPD officers, he left the subject alone, except to announce that he knew almost every senior police officer in New York. As Stefan hadn’t got the faintest idea who he’d be talking to, or what would be happening once he arrived in Manhattan, the string of names, all of them Irish, had little effect. The NYPD was soon forgotten but New York was not.

The man who had been born in Carrickfergus was proud of the city he now lived in. He had no doubt whatsoever that it was the greatest city on the face of the earth and that if there was anywhere that represented the future, the future of everything, it was New York, his city. It was no accident that the greatest World’s Fair the world had ever seen had just opened its gates in New York’s Flushing Meadows. Dominic Carroll had played some part in putting that together. The World’s Fair was the world of tomorrow in a box, tied up with red-white-and-blue, star-spangled ribbon and more magical than the stars in the heavens at night.

‘When you fly west, Mr Gillespie, you’re flying into the future. But it’s not just America’s future. One day we’ll bring that future back to Ireland!’

It was hard not to share his enthusiasm. He seemed to have a lot of business interests, so many that it was a struggle to follow them as he fired out details of his early career, his failures and successes, his various bankruptcies and disasters, in building and finance and property speculation. At one point it seemed he had been responsible for building most of the skyscrapers of New York over the past thirty years personally. He caught the amusement in Stefan Gillespie’s eyes, and laughed himself, enjoying his own pomposity and yet happy enough to puncture it.

‘It’s my city. It belongs to me. Every New Yorker feels like that.’

Over dinner the talk turned to families. Here Dominic Carroll seemed more reticent. He had sons, grown-up sons, but no grandchildren yet. He didn’t say much about his sons, for a man of such far-ranging enthusiasms, but it was enough to tell Stefan that the American wasn’t as close to them as he wished. Somewhere in there was a failure he didn’t want to talk about.

He let Stefan talk more now, and clearly he could listen too when he wanted to, or when the topic of conversation wasn’t so easy. Details of Stefan’s life on the farm at Kilranelagh absorbed him and amused him, but it was when he told him about Maeve that something changed. Stefan retold the story of his wife’s death, six years ago, in the matter-of-fact way he always did. It was simply part of who he was. The American listened intently, then reached out his hands and clasped Stefan’s across the table. By now Stefan had had a bit to drink himself; his acquaintance was ahead of him. Carroll shook his head sadly, knowingly. He had found a bond between them. He was a sentimental man; sometimes sentiments shared were a kind of friendship for him.

‘My wife died when my eldest was thirteen. It wasn’t so unexpected. She’d been ill a long time, and however much money you’ve got, when they can’t do anything, it’s no use to you. You keep thinking you’ll find a doctor who knows the cure, if only you look enough and pay enough. But you can’t pay your way out of God’s decisions. You can’t pray your way out either.’

As he said the last words he crossed himself.

They walked back to their seats from the dining room with glasses of brandy, quieter than they’d come. Stefan had no desire to continue talking about the past; it was enough to say it. But the American wouldn’t let it go.

‘You’ve never remarried?’ he asked as they sat down.

‘No.’

‘You’re still a young man.’

‘I’m not avoiding it. It’s just something that hasn’t happened.’

‘You should count your blessings,’ said the American. It was an abrupt change of tone. Where his words had shown sympathy, consideration, shared understanding, there was a surprising edge now, something almost bitter. He looked away, staring at the window. It was dark outside now; all he was staring at was the black hole that was the night sky. ‘You should be careful. It was the biggest mistake of my life. If you want sex, you can buy it. You can buy as much as you want. But if you think you can replace the one love you ever had, if you think you can even come close, forget it.’

Stefan didn’t reply. The new tone of voice had unsettled him. It contained an appeal to an intimacy he didn’t want and didn’t feel he liked very much. Whatever the man was talking about it was his and his alone.

For a moment the American said nothing either. He seemed to realise that he had taken a direction he shouldn’t have done and had revealed more of himself than he was comfortable with. He looked up and smiled again. ‘That’s the trouble with a journey like this. Nothing to do but drink and they chuck it at you like there’s no tomorrow.’

Stefan nodded. ‘I’ve had enough. I wouldn’t mind some more coffee.’

Carroll called to the galley for two coffees. He turned back to Stefan.

‘You don’t make much sense to me. You mind me saying it?’

‘It depends what you mean,’ laughed Stefan.

‘I’ve got your boy, and why you’re where you are, looking after him, and I’ve got what happened to your wife. I’ve got the farm and your mam and your dad. But I haven’t got you. I haven’t got you at all, you know that? What are you doing sitting on your arse in a country police station, running in drunks and, what was it, raiding the village hall to see if there’s any illegal dancing going on! Jesus!’ He grinned, entertained by the idea. ‘That’s not you, Sergeant Gillespie, not you! I didn’t have to talk long to see that.’

‘Someone’s got to do it,’ shrugged Stefan, and attempted a smile.

The look of suspicion was back in Dominic Carroll’s eyes. It struck Stefan forcibly that although the stranger was smiling at him, he somehow didn’t believe he was who he said he was. They’d talked about all sorts of things. Yet there was a sense now, as he watched the older man watching him, that the American had been probing, trying to find out something when there was nothing to find out. Stefan needed a break from the conversation. He leant across to the newspapers Carroll had been reading and picked one up.

‘Do you mind if I have a look at one of these?’

‘Help yourself. I’m going to turn in. We’ll be landing at Botwood in the early hours. It’s best to get some sleep in. You can’t sleep through it.’

On each side of the compartment the seats had been made up into beds while they were at dinner, with curtains across them to create small bedrooms. Dominic Carroll got up and took an attaché case from a rack above. He pulled out a washbag and walked through the plane to the bathroom. Other people were starting to appear in pyjamas, dressing gowns.

Stefan felt relieved to be alone for a moment; if nothing else it was a rest from talking. He opened the newspaper. The first thing he saw was a report about an IRA bomb that had gone off in London the day before.

There had been dozens of bombs across Britain since the beginning of the year. On 12 January the IRA Army Council had sent a letter to the British government, declaring war and claiming it was now the sole representative of the people of Ireland, since the treacherous and toadying government the people of Ireland had voted for several times since 1922 did not have the legitimacy the IRA had inherited, by a process similar to Apostolic succession, from the seven signatories of the Declaration of Independence in 1916.

The quantity of bombs that had followed this declaration of war had been impressive, even if the results had been indifferent. The damage had been minimal; reaction in Britain, despite indignant speeches in Parliament, seemed more like puzzlement than either anger or fear. The targets were sometimes railway or underground stations, mainly in London, and bridges over canals elsewhere; sometimes electricity pylons and gas mains were attacked; sometimes incendiaries were planted, more randomly, in stores like Marks and Spencer, Burton’s, Woolworths; one bomb had gone off at the offices of the News Chronicle in Fleet Street.

Remarkably, no one had yet been killed, in line with the declared intention of the IRA’s chief of staff, Seán Russell. In this most recent attack two bombs had exploded by the Thames, on Hammersmith Bridge. Stefan had heard about it in Dublin.

Two explosions which occurred at Hammersmith Bridge, just after 1 a.m. yesterday morning, are being investigated by Scotland Yard officers. The force of the explosion dislodged two girders in the suspension work of the bridge, and one was thrown across the roadway. Lamp standards were demolished and the middle of the bridge was left in darkness. While investigations at the bridge were in progress, Divisional Detective Inspector Clarke left to interview two men at Putney police station. It was later decided to arrest the two men. They were Edward John Connell, 22, a salesman, of Elibank Gardens, Barnes, and William Brown, 22, of Grafton Place, Euston.

He looked up to see Dominic Carroll opening the curtains into his sleeping compartment, and looking down at him with a wry smile as he did so.

‘Another bomb.’

‘Another bomb,’ replied Stefan; it was familiar news after all.

‘They don’t seem to be able to do much to stop it.’

‘Well, they will if they keep arresting people at the rate they have been. I don’t know what it is now, fifteen, sixteen, and two more yesterday.’

‘You’re assuming the IRA’s short of volunteers then?’

‘There are only so many people who’d know how to plant a bomb.’

‘Well,’ shrugged Carroll, ‘the British must be shaken up by it now.’

‘I would be,’ Stefan nodded. ‘I’d be pretty pissed off if I lived in Barnes and I had to go all the way down to Putney to find a bridge. I wouldn’t put it much stronger than that. Unless London County Council’s very short on lamp standards, I wouldn’t say it’ll keep anybody awake.’

As this conversation had started there had been a look of amused satisfaction on the American’s face. Stefan believed he could read it easily enough. He had sat in pubs with enough American-Irish singers of Republican songs to know that though ‘Up the IRA’ was a cry that was hardly on many lips in Ireland, the enthusiasm in New York and Boston and Chicago was unaffected by the fact that the IRA wasn’t only at war with Britain, it was still ideologically at war with the government of Ireland itself. It wasn’t an argument he intended to start. Carroll could have his opinions.

‘You’re one of Ned Broy’s men all right, Mr Gillespie. Goodnight.’

The words were said with something like a grin, almost with a wink, but there was something colder in the words than anything that had gone before. They were words that no guard could fail to understand, and they came from somewhere that was about more than singing rebel songs.

To be one of Ned Broy’s men was to be more than just a lackey of the illegitimate entity that Republicans still referred to contemptuously as the Free State; it was to be an informer, a traitor, a killer. Wasn’t the Commissioner a turncoat, like de Valera and all his crew, an IRA man himself who had brought ex-IRA men into the Gardaí to hunt down their old comrades, to imprison them, to torture them, sometimes to kill them? And it was true enough. The men Ned Broy had brought into the Garda Special Branch had done all that. Their reasons didn’t make the bare facts any more palatable.

That none of this had anything to do with Stefan Gillespie didn’t mean he couldn’t feel the contempt behind Dominic Carroll’s parting wink, or that he didn’t sense now that the man was no idle wearing-of-the-green, up-the-rebels American-Irish tourist. He was a political Republican, and as a wealthy and influential man in New York he probably mattered in Republican politics, whether it was in America or Ireland, and it was likely both.

Stefan remembered that Carroll had expected him to know who he was. If he really was someone, it was unlikely he hadn’t had a Special Branch tail on him while he was in Ireland, or that he wouldn’t have been aware of it. The suspicion he had shown, on finding a Garda officer sitting opposite him on a plane to New York, with apparently no very good reason to be there, finally made sense.

It was 5.30 in the morning when the Yankee Clipper bumped down into the waters of Botwood, Newfoundland, and was tied up at the end of the long pier at the western end of the small harbour. Stefan Gillespie had not been able to sleep. For a while there had been the rattle of conversation and laughter and the clink of glasses from further down the cabin, where a group of passengers was playing canasta, but it had been silent for several hours now. The soft buzz of the engines, and the occasional grunt and snore from behind the curtains across the aisle, were the only sounds.

It was an odd feeling, cocooned up here, sailing through the night sky. He felt apart, not just from the world below in general, but from his own life in particular. He wasn’t in the habit of stepping back from himself, and he wasn’t entirely sure he liked doing it, but here, hanging in the darkness, it was hard not to do it. There was a lot in his head. Ned Broy and Owen Harris and Dessie MacMahon and Terry Gregory; Valerie Lessingham and Tom and his parents; the wide-ranging conversation with Dominic Carroll, about Ireland and New York and the prospect of war and Hammersmith Bridge and loss and grief and the sheep on the mountainside at Kilranelagh. And he kept coming back to the question a stranger had asked that he hadn’t asked himself in a very long time: what are you doing, sitting on your arse in a country police station, running in drunks?

When the flying boat was down he joined most of the other passengers, pulled on his overcoat, and left the cabin. Dominic Carroll didn’t stir, and he left him snoring quietly. He needed air and he wanted to walk. The air was cold enough. It was still dark. The Yankee Clipper was at one end of Botwood’s small harbour. Across the water he could see the lights of fishing boats coming into dock; there was only the chug of their engines and the sound of the wind, not strong but beating the rigging slowly, like a pulse.

Botwood was a village in the north of Newfoundland, almost as far east in North America as you could go. The whole of Canada lay to the west, but to the north the nearest piece of earth was Greenland, and to the east it was the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. The town sat in a sheltered bay, shaped by bare, treeless mountains, pretty much on the edge of nowhere; not very different from a thousand villages scattered along the western coast of Ireland on the other side of the Atlantic. Its buildings were of wood and corrugated iron sheets; most of its roads were dirt; an empty place in the great empty island of Newfoundland, which hadn’t even got round to calling itself part of Canada yet.

But Botwood had suddenly become important. By the time the flying boats of Pan American and Imperial Airways got there they were at the end of their range; they had to refuel. And the great and the good of Europe and America, the bankers and film stars, the heirs and heiresses and politicians, the makers and shakers, at least in their own eyes, now trailed regularly along the pier in the early hours of the morning, to drink coffee, eat a breakfast they didn’t need and talk about themselves.

Stefan drank the coffee too and spent some time talking idly with his fellow passengers. The conversation of the group, now all sitting together, had taken the turn every conversation did sooner or later, even at the edge of the world: war and the rumour of war. It wasn’t a conversation he wanted. He walked back to the sea along the dirt road from the pier and watched the fishermen unloading their catch. The lights of their boats marked one end of the harbour; the lights of the Yankee Clipper marked the other; the Atlantic water was very still in the darkness, full of the lights playing on its surface.