by R.J. Ellory
‘So you see,’ Forrester said, ‘there was some sense of justice in the end, was there not? Johnnie Redbird’s son found Harry Rose’s child, and though he searched he found no money. But sometimes the knowledge that the scales have been balanced is worth more than all the gold of El Dorado.’ Forrester raised his hand, again with that small theatrical flourish. He had concluded something.
Annie sat quietly for a moment. Her mind felt empty.
‘And now you want to know about your father,’ Forrester said.
Annie nodded. She tried to say something, but already there was an indescribable tension in her throat.
Forrester smiled. ‘Perhaps you would be so kind,’ he said, and lifted his coffee cup.
Annie took his cup and walked out back to the kitchen. She went through the motions automatically, saw her hands preparing the coffee, but her mind and her heart were back there in the store waiting for what Forrester would tell her. Everything went in to slow-motion. Everything was quiet. At last she held the refilled cup in her hand and was walking back the way she’d come. The distance between the kitchen and the store had never seemed so long. She set the cup down on the table and took her seat once more.
‘Your father,’ Forrester said, ‘was a brilliant man in his own way. There were many people who did not easily understand him, why he was the way he was, but a lot of his idiosyncrasies were down to his background, the things that had happened to him early in his life.’
‘Things?’ Annie asked. ‘What things?’
Forrester shook his head, waved his hand dismissively. ‘He was a man of passion perhaps, strong-willed, not afraid to fight for what he believed in. A man of principle …’
Forrester paused. He lifted the coffee cup and took a sip. He set the cup down, withdrew his hand, and then he reached for it once more and turned the handle towards himself.
Annie felt the tension rising, a band of steel in her chest.
‘And he was an engineer, as I said before, but no ordinary kind of engineer.’
Annie frowned.
‘He engineered life Miss O’Neill, made things happen. He had ideas, and then he brought them to life.’
Annie shook her head. She was beginning to understand something, something she knew she didn’t want to understand.
Forrester was quiet for a time. He reached up and buttoned his shirt, tightened his tie, and then he leaned forward with his fingers steepled together. ‘There was a dark side to your father, and when you believed you understood what he might do he would do exactly the opposite. He was possessed by different moods at different times, but there was always something behind everything he did that was known only to himself. Your father had a remarkable ability to hide inside himself, to let no-one inside, and that – perhaps that alone – was the reason he finally lost.’
Annie frowned, ill-at-ease. The conversation was once again taking a turn that she neither understood nor felt comfortable with. ‘Lost?’
‘Lost,’ Forrester stated matter-of-factly.
‘Lost what?’
‘His wife, your mother … and you.’
The tension in Annie now was suffocating. It seemed difficult to breathe, as though the air had become suddenly thicker, fluid almost.
‘But he died,’ Annie said. ‘He died back in 1979 … why do you say he lost us? We were the ones who lost him.’
Forrester reached inside his jacket pocket. From it he produced an envelope. He held it in his hand as if to let it go would be the end of him.
‘I have a picture here,’ he said. ‘A picture that perhaps may interest you.’
‘A picture?’
Forrester nodded. ‘A picture of Harry Rose.’
Annie shook her head. She was confused. She needed to know about her father, and yet even as Forrester was speaking she knew what was coming, she knew it in her heart of hearts, and she was fighting it all the way.
Forrester opened the envelope, and took out a small grainy monochrome snapshot. He held it for a moment, as if weighing it, and then he slid it across the table towards Annie.
Annie stared down at the photograph, a photograph that showed a fair-haired man standing proudly with a small child in his arms.
‘This is Harry Rose?’ Annie asked.
Forrester nodded, smiled benignly, as if he were granting a Papal indulgence to the moment. A special moment.
‘Yes,’ he said quietly, and his voice was like a whisper.
He leaned backwards, and when Annie looked up there was an expression on his face she hadn’t seen before. An expression of completeness.
‘And this child?’ she asked.
‘Is Harry’s daughter,’ Forrester said.
‘His daughter?’ Annie asked, her voice registering confusion and dismay.
Forrester smiled again. ‘Yes, that is his daughter.’
‘And he’s on Rikers Island?’
‘He is, yes … and all these years he was housed in a cell in the west wing of the penitentiary, a wing owned and run by the Italian families.’ Forrester smiled as if sharing something special and unique. ‘So much so that it was often referred to as the Cicero Hotel.’
Annie stared at Forrester, and somewhere inside her a feeling grew, a feeling of being twisted up from within by some unseen hand.
‘And the girl … the little girl?’ she said, and tears were welling in her eyes, and the sense of breathlessness in her chest was enough to suffocate her right where she sat.
Forrester paused. He breathed in and out slowly, as if letting something go. ‘The little girl,’ he said.
‘The little girl is all grown up now,’ Annie said, tears rolling down her face, her vision blurred, her hands shaking uncontrollably.
‘She is.’
‘And her name?’ Annie asked, her voice trembling, tears filling her eyes.
‘Her name?’ Forrester echoed. ‘Her name Miss O’Neill … is Annie.’
Forrester smiled. He bowed his head.
Annie O’Neill, a wave of indescribable anguish overwhelming her for a second, dropped the photograph, sensed it as if in slow-motion as it made its way to the floor, and then tried to rise from her chair.
She could not stand, she had neither the will nor the strength.
Forrester reached out his hand, and closing it around her forearm he pulled her down into a seated position once more.
‘Sit,’ he said quietly, his voice almost a whisper. His hand tightened on her wrist. She could feel the blood-flow constricting.
Annie looked at him, this Robert Forrester, this man she had trusted, a man who had walked into her life promising some sense of understanding, some sense of equilibrium, and even now had torn everything out from beneath her.
‘Your father took my life away,’ Forrester whispered. ‘He cheated me, he betrayed me time and time again … and whoever you may have imagined him to be he was something else entirely. He was a thief and a murderer and a traitor. He was a man who professed to have principles and honor, but he was a common criminal.’
Annie opened her mouth to speak. She could barely breathe. The tears that filled her eyes now rolled in fat lazy streaks down her face.
‘You know as much about him as I do,’ Forrester said, ‘and though I wrote these things for my own son, I also wrote them for you, so you would know, so you would understand what kind of person Frank O’Neill really was.’
No, Annie was mouthing, the word audible inside her head, but from her lips nothing.
No … no … no … no …
‘Yes Miss O’Neill, and yes again and again and again. Frank O’Neill was an evil man. And now you know, now you feel what I felt when he turned his back on me to let me die a little more each day on Rikers Island.’
She started to mouth the word But …
Forrester shook his head. ‘But nothing Miss O’Neill. You are the daughter of a truly worthless man. And my son –’
Forrester paused, smiled to himself. ‘My son understands who your father is al
so, and he hates you for what you are.’
Annie’s eyes widened. She did not want to understand what was happening.
Forrester shook his head, and once again tightened the grip on her wrist. ‘He came to get his legacy, the money that was rightfully his, and though you worked on him, though you started to turn him against me, the truth is that you meant nothing to him, will never mean anything to him.’
Annie was shaking her head, and even as her mind was reeling she was looking towards the door, back towards Forrester, trying to think if there was any way she might get herself free of Forrester’s grip and make it out and through the kitchen. Was the door deadbolted out there? Was there any way in the world she could make it?
And then another thought, a thought she could barely contain. Is this it? Is this the point I will die? Is this man now going to kill me as he has killed before?
In her mind she was screaming, but not a single word left her lips.
‘David,’ Forrester echoed. ‘David who took you to Boston, David who left you in a hotel while he came back here to help me search your apartment for any indication of where your father’s money was, David who answered the telephone when you called me that night. The same David who investigated every inch of your life, your bank accounts, your connections, the people you know. The same David who finally convinced me that Harry Rose took all my money and left me without a dime. I told him who your father was, what he had done to me, what your father had done to him, an innocent boy, and who determined to break your heart into pieces just to redress the balance. You almost took him Annie O’Neill … for a little while you almost took him from me, but I made him see sense, I made him understand the kind of person you must be. Once again he understands that any child of Harry Rose’s is an enemy of ours, an enemy to be despised and hated. And though we have no money to show for this, we also know you have nothing too. You have less than nothing, because whatever you may have believed would happen with my son, you have lost that as well. Your father was so worthless he managed to destroy whatever happiness you might have found without even being here.’
Annie started up again, but once more her legs gave beneath her. Whatever intention she might have had to free herself, Forrester’s grip was like a vice. She could feel herself pulling away with all she possessed, and yet she could barely move a muscle.
She collapsed into the chair, couldn’t see for the tears that filled her eyes, and as she wiped those tears away she looked at Forrester.
Forrester smiled, and as he did so he rose, and as he rose he released the grip from her arm. He gathered his topcoat, and while he was putting it on, stepping back, making his way from the table, Annie stared back at him with hollow eyes.
‘Whatever you may have believed David was, he was not. However you may have thought you reached him, I reached him deeper. You did reach him, I know you did, but in no time at all I turned him back towards the truth and made him see you for what you really are.’
Forrester took another half a dozen steps backward. He was ten, perhaps twelve feet from the door.
‘However you might have imagined your father, that he was good and kind and generous and compassionate, he was none of those things.’
Forrester moved again, and this time Annie did manage to get to her feet.
‘The life you might have had if your father had stayed with you would have been a life of running and hiding, of stealing and killing and breaking trust.’
Forrester reached the door. His fingers were on the handle, but as he started to turn it Annie was walking towards him, snatching a book from a stack as she passed.
‘Your father, Miss O’Neill, was a worthless excuse for a human being, and for his sins he will burn in hell.’
Annie screamed then, screamed and hurled the book at him. Forrester ducked, swung the door wide, and Annie ran after him, grabbed another book from near the counter and threw it towards the man as he hurried from the store. She could hear him laughing, a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard, a sound like rusted wire dragged through a grate, and as she felt the rush of cool wind reach her she knew that there was not enough left inside her to fight any longer.
By the time she reached the sidewalk Robert Franklin Forrester was across the street. He reached the opposite sidewalk, and for a moment he stood immobile under a streetlight.
Annie took one step forward and stopped dead in her tracks. Forrester was joined by another man, and together they stood side by side, looking back at her.
Robert Forrester and his son looked back at her. They did not move for some time, and whatever Annie O’Neill might have felt in that moment it was swallowed soundlessly when David tilted his head to the left and turned to the side.
Just like in the window across the street a thousand years before.
Just like then.
He had been watching her all the time, watching her as she went about her daily life, watching her while she thought she was falling in love.
And then he moved. David stepped back and turned the corner.
Forrester hesitated for a moment more, and then he turned and vanished also.
And with him – like a shadow, like a ghost – went Johnnie Redbird.
An hour later, the lights in the store still burning, it was John Damianka who found Annie O’Neill slumped in the chair with her head in her hands. He’d been walking home after an evening out with Elizabeth Farbolin. He’d seen the lights on, and the sheer incongruousness had drawn him to the window. The outer door was closed and he beat on it with his fists until she raised her head and looked back at him.
Eventually she rose and walked towards the door, unlocked it and let him in. He called a cab with his cellphone, and almost carrying her as deadweight he got her into the cab and took her home.
Sullivan was there when they arrived, and took her in. He closed his arms around Annie O’Neill and brought her to his apartment. He lay her down on his bed and he turned out the light. He sat with her until he was sure she slept.
There would be no talking that night. Not a word.
Seemed to Annie O’Neill that there was nothing left to say.
THIRTY-EIGHT
It took a week.
A week of tears and hysterics, of Jack Sullivan lying with her night after night until she slept. And often she would wake in the early hours of the morning, and she would start to cry again, and Jack would hold her, pull her tight against him, and say whatever he felt might help. It didn’t. There was no way it could.
She knew the truth.
And the truth hurt.
All these years her father had been out there, alive on Rikers Island, and Annie had never known. And her mother carried the knowledge, carried the secret close to her heart for all those years until she herself had died. And never said a word.
And they talked, Annie O’Neill and Jack Sullivan, talked perhaps more than they needed, and they read through the manuscript once more, and Annie faced the harshness of reality, and that reality came with teeth and claws and blood in its mouth.
And sometimes Annie would just ramble, monologuing her thoughts out into nowhere, and the fact that Sullivan was there to hear her made no difference. He could have been anyone at all, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. She had been caught up in something that was older than herself, and this man – this Redbird, Forrester, whoever the hell he was – had come for something that she didn’t have. He had even brought his son, a son who had used her name to take an apartment in her city … And then she talked of Boston, the way David had disappeared for those hours, and how – upon her return – she had found little things had moved, changed, found themselves out of place, and realized that they had been here, invaded her home, invaded her heart and everything about her …
And then disappeared.
They had wanted to deliver the truth, and deliver it they had. And the truth was what it was, however she chose to look at it: her father had been a killer; her father would die a killer; he would di
e in a small stone room measuring no more than eight by eight, and he knew – had always known – that not only was his own daughter out there, but that one day she might find him.
And so it took a week.
Sullivan had made the call. He gave them Annie’s name, as much detail as he could, and he requested a visitation order. Rikers Island told him when they could come, that the order could be collected on the day of arrival, and Sullivan started preparing Annie O’Neill to meet her father.
Tuesday morning, 23 September.
It was a bitter day, and from the East River through Hell Gate the wind came like a tornado of razor blades and cut into Annie’s face as she stood on the deck of the ferry, her heart like a dead fist in her chest, her nerves ragged, her mouth dry.
She looked back several times, over Jack Sullivan’s shoulder as he held her close, back there at the mainland, the lights of Port Morris and Mott Haven. And to her right was Long Island and Astoria where her father had lived all those years before, from where he himself had set out towards the same destination to see Johnnie Redbird. The North and South Brothers were there, and Lawrence Point, the Conrail Freight Yard, the stench from Bowery Bay that seemed to penetrate her very being through the pores of her skin. It was all there, just as it had been written, just as she had read.
Her face was numb with the cold, but better that way – a reason to keep silent. It seemed the tears – whatever tears may have been left – were now frozen in her eyes, and in blinking she could feel them, back there somewhere playing hard to get. Sullivan watched her, watched her intently, her every move, her every gesture, and when the ferry came in towards the docking station – already the sounds and smells of a strange world so far from their own around them – he held her arm tight as she made her way down the steps to the boardwalk that ran the length of the jetty.
