“Not Red Indians?”
“Indian Indians. And you should know that they’re fond of violence, at least in theory. If you find you need to know more, then you’ll just have to get in touch with me.”
Palóu took that in his stride. “An Englishman watching Indians—I think I can guess most of the rest. We Spanish are experts when it comes to losing empires,” he added. He seemed faintly amused by it all, a trait McColl had always considered a sure sign of sanity.
“One other thing,” McColl said. “Can you recommend somewhere to buy a gun?”
“There’s a gun store on Mason, between O’Farrell and Ellis.”
“Thanks.”
He drove Palóu back to his office and went in search of the gun store. Being able to walk into a shop and buy a firearm seemed odd to McColl, but the proprietor obviously didn’t find it so. He laid out a selection of small pistols and revolvers on the counter and listed the sterling qualities of each. McColl wavered between the Mauser Broomhandle, which he knew from the South African War, and the Browning M1900, which looked easier to conceal on his person. Opting for the latter, he was provided with a cardboard box containing enough ammunition to mount a small war of his own.
After a late lunch in a department store on Market, he walked on to the hotel where von Schön had said he would be staying. The desk clerk failed to recognize the name, and his search through the register proved unavailing. Nor was there any record of an advance booking. McColl decided he must have misheard—or perhaps the German had changed his mind. He asked the desk clerk for a list of San Francisco’s better hotels and phoned them one by one from the booth in the lobby. Von Schön was not staying at any of them.
Which was annoying. Had the German run across friends and gone to stay with them? Or had a message arrived calling him home to Germany? McColl hoped that nothing had happened to the man’s wife or daughter back home.
He worked his way through the second tier of hotels the following morning, driven as much by curiosity as by any real hope that von Schön could help him with his task. But there was no trace of the German. Stymied, he spent the afternoon at the showroom, where the owner was loudly regretting waiving a flat fee in favor of a percentage. His pretty blonde secretary was much friendlier, having persuaded Jed to take her out dancing that evening. She had already found a partner for Mac and offered, somewhat doubtfully, to seek one out for the ancient McColl. He let her off the hook, claiming he had paperwork to do.
Once they’d called it a day, he ate alone at an Italian restaurant, then read the evening edition in an almost empty bar on Geary. Stepping out into the night several beers later, he decided on impulse to visit the Shamrock and eavesdrop on plots against the empire. He hailed a cab and opened a window to sober himself up. It had rained on and off all day, and the lights of the city were reflected in myriad puddles as his taciturn driver motored south.
The Shamrock was much busier than on his previous visit, but the clientele was still overwhelmingly male. One table in the corner was empty, and he made a beeline for the stool at the bar that lay closest to it. An hour and two beers later, he was rewarded for his foresight—a group of men in suits threading their way through the tables with many a raised hand, rather in the manner of rulers acknowledging their subjects. McColl recognized Larry de Lacey from the photographs that Fairholme had given him. San Francisco’s republican boss looked barely out of school, wiry, dark-haired and -eyed, with an almost impish face. As one of the barmen hurried over to take their order, de Lacey sat packing tobacco into his pipe, occasionally smiling at what seemed a private joke.
McColl ordered another drink and spent the next hour trying to disentangle that table’s conversation from the others swirling noisily around him. Watching the speakers in the mirror behind the bar was some help and made him wish he’d added lipreading to his list of accomplishments.
They were talking, predictably enough, about the Dublin workers’ lockout, which had been dominating the Irish situation since the previous summer, when McColl was still in England. Caitlin, of course, supported Jim Larkin and his followers—it was a scandal, she said, that workers should be denied the right to unionize in this day and age. But the last news she’d heard had been of families starving, and now it seemed that the lockout was over. The workers had been defeated.
The men at de Lacey’s table were divided over this outcome. Some thought the lockout had been a dangerous distraction from the real business of Ireland’s liberation and plainly distrusted what they considered Larkin’s communistic leanings. Others were clearly in awe of the man and insisted that it was all part of the same battle. As one man put it, “The English don’t just rule our country—they own it. An independent Ireland that leaves them still running our business … well, that would be worse than useless.”
De Lacey smiled at that but offered little support for either side. The different points of view were obviously held seriously enough, but there was a lot of good-natured banter and laughter, and no one grew visibly angry. All in all, McColl thought, it was a thoroughly reasonable discussion and possible only because everyone involved agreed on one basic premise: that Ireland should cast itself free of its English overlord. As he listened to the conversation, McColl had to remind himself that the latest surveys showed that 90 percent of the Irish back home were happy with the Home Rule now on the table.
In the mirror he noticed another large group entering the saloon, this one half composed of women. Caitlin had told him she was going out to dinner with friends, but what if they turned up here afterward? The prospect both thrilled and worried him. How would he explain his presence here, not to mention his broad Scottish accent?
“I noticed you listening to our talk,” a voice said at his shoulder. It was de Lacey himself, at the bar for a new box of matches. “So what does a Scotsman make of these things?” de Lacey asked as the barman dealt with his request.
“The lockout?” McColl asked, noting, as the American doubtless intended, that his identity had already been probed. “My father always told me that you shouldn’t fight battles you couldn’t win.”
“And your father would be …?”
“A union man.”
“And you?”
“I wanted to see the world.”
“A fine ambition,” de Lacey agreed, taking the matches from the barman. “As to the other business, if you only fight battles you can win, you’ll probably die in your bed, but your children won’t hear you remembered in song.” He smiled briefly, then went back to his table.
It was time to leave, McColl decided—he was deep behind enemy lines and had already drunk more than was sensible for someone in that position.
Outside, it was raining again, and the world seemed devoid of cabs. He eventually caught a tram down Mission and then walked the rest of the way, cursing his lack of a hat.
There was a message waiting at reception, his name in her writing on a cream envelope. She wanted picking up outside the main post office at one o’clock on Saturday, in an automobile if that was at all possible. They had a lunch appointment with unnamed friends, but she was hoping that the two of them could go for an afternoon drive if the weather was fine.
She smiled as he pulled up in the Model T, arranged herself in the passenger seat, and gave him a big kiss. The friends, she told him, were Agnes and Ernest Brundin, and they were meeting at a Mexican restaurant that overlooked the bay. Agnes had said to follow Powell as far as it went, then turn left along the waterfront. The restaurant was called El Gran.
She had met Agnes a couple of years earlier—Agnes Smedley as she was then—and they had written to each other at fairly regular intervals ever since. “They’re both socialists,” she warned McColl, “but I think you’ll like them anyway.”
The Brundins were already there when McColl and Caitlin arrived, heads hunched over menus in a sparsely populated room. Agnes jumped up when she saw them and hugged Caitlin warmly. She was also tall for a woman, with hair that seemed
barely under control and large, soulful eyes that gazed into McColl’s as they were introduced. Her young husband was quiet, almost solemn, and clearly besotted with her.
After ordering, Agnes demanded to know about China and listened wide-eyed to Caitlin’s impressions of her time there. Once she discovered that McColl was the “friend” in Caitlin’s article, she included him more in the conversation, but he soon realized that any hint of cynicism was unwelcome and settled, like Ernest, for listening. Through the meal and after, the two women moved from the stalled Chinese Revolution to the growing ferment in India, then ventured back home for the latest news in birth control and the struggle over suffrage. Their enthusiasm was hard to resist, but as he listened, McColl had a growing sense of a whole other world, one not closed off only to men but to most of the rest of humanity. And yet people like Caitlin and Agnes, who created and lived in that closed-off world, were convinced they were serving the wider one. Wasn’t that a fatal contradiction, or was he just being cynical? He told himself that these were intelligent, well-intentioned people, something the world badly needed.
It was raining again when they left, and once they’d dropped Agnes and Ernest off at the cable car terminus on Hyde, he and Caitlin abandoned the idea of a country ride in favor of his hotel bed. “What did you think of Agnes?” she asked after they’d made love for the first time.
“A force of nature,” he said. “Like you.”
She took that as a compliment. “And Ernest?”
“He’s liable to get blown away.”
She thought about that. “Perhaps,” she conceded. “But you won’t,” she added with a smile.
No, he thought, he probably wouldn’t. But was that a good thing?
“Let’s get out of the city tomorrow,” she said. “Even if it’s raining. I want to see the giant sequoias in Muir Woods.”
“Where’s that?”
“Across the bay to the north. We can meet at the Sausalito ferry.”
“Aren’t you staying here tonight?”
“No, I won’t. I …”
“Word might get back to your father,” he guessed.
“I wouldn’t care about that. But my aunt … She’s old-fashioned in some ways, and I don’t want to hurt her.”
“Understood.”
“But we’ve got hours yet.”
When it was time, he insisted on driving her back. Her father’s friends lived in a big house on Twentieth Street, about half a mile from the Shamrock Saloon, and McColl saw a curtain twitch as he pulled up outside. She probably did, too, because he got only the briefest of good-night kisses.
Back at his hotel, another envelope was waiting. This one had come courtesy of a consulate courier and was full of twenty-dollar bills.
Sunday started gray and wet, but by the time they reached Muir Woods, a pale yellow sun was filtering down through the magnificent trees. McColl knew that it was a cliché, but the place really did feel like a cathedral. Like most gods, these sequoias were bound to make humans feel small.
For most of the hour their driver had given them, he and Caitlin walked the well-laid paths in companionable silence, listening to the birds and the steady dripping of the night’s rain from the branches above. And on the long buggy ride back to Sausalito, they gripped each other’s hands with more than the usual intensity, as if they’d just shared some sort of spiritual experience.
One of the quayside restaurants was open for lunch, and it was warm enough to sit outside, with a gorgeous view of the bay and its surrounding hills and cities. “We have to get back soon,” she announced once they’d eaten. “I have a meeting at five.”
“Who with?” he asked, disappointed.
“No, it’s a public meeting in a church hall. A friend of my father’s friend is giving a talk.”
“About what?”
She grimaced. “Oh, the usual stuff. Ireland’s situation and what to do about it. I know it’s important, but …”
“Hmm. Can I come?”
“You won’t like what you hear.” She grinned suddenly. “But why not? It might be good for your soul.”
“Perhaps. I’ve already sampled the local Irish hospitality. Do you know the Shamrock Saloon?”
She gave him a surprised look. “What took you there?”
He shrugged. “I was out walking, wondering when my girl would deign to see me again. It’s a nice enough bar.”
“I suppose so. The church hall is just around the corner, and people tend to go there after a talk.”
“Well, if that happens tonight, don’t be surprised by my accent. In establishments like that, I like them to know I’m Scottish.”
She was amused. “That says it all about the English in Ireland.”
Not quite, he thought, but he let it go. At least she wouldn’t get a shock if he had to exaggerate his accent.
A rain squall caught up with them as they crossed the bay, and their subsequent cab inched down a half-flooded Market Street at a swishing crawl, its windshield wipers utterly unequal to the scale of the downpour. The entrance to the church hall was full of people furling umbrellas and removing dripping coats, the hall itself almost packed. Caitlin led the way down the aisle and introduced McColl to her father’s friend, a cadaverous man in his fifties with thick gray hair and black-rimmed glasses. “Liam, this is Jack McColl, the Scot I met in China. Jack, this is Liam Keane, an old friend of my family’s. And this,” she added, turning to the balding priest beside him, “is Father Meagher. A fellow guest at the Keanes’. And a fellow New Yorker.”
Both men accepted the offer of a handshake, Meagher with a pursing of lips, Keane with what felt like a hostile smile. “I’m afraid we only saved the one seat,” the latter said almost smugly, and McColl could feel Caitlin tensing beside him. “I’ll see you afterward,” he told her, and walked away before she had a chance to protest.
He found a seat nearer the back and had been in it just a few moments when Larry de Lacey walked past with two of the men who’d shared his table the day before. They had seats reserved at the front.
Several announcements were made before the scheduled address, one about a lost cat, another concerning the arrival of a new piano teacher, a third detailing someone’s funeral arrangements. The collection cap doing the rounds was in aid of sending the local boys’ club on a trip into the mountains, and McColl wondered whether Caitlin would contribute or slip in a note on behalf of overlooked girls.
The speaker, somewhat unsurprisingly, turned out to be a priest. His subject was what he—and his audience—considered England’s long oppression of Ireland and how it should be brought to a speedy end. He began with a rambling account of the Gunpowder Plot, one of several events the English had used to justify anti-Catholic legislation. McColl had no way of knowing whether this was true and doubted whether anyone else in the audience had. The priest’s next generalization, that every subsequent improvement in the lot of British Catholics came not from English benevolence but from English fear, seemed similarly suspect as historical truth but rang all the right political bells. Making the English fear them was what mattered, the priest said, and the Church should set an example “in the deeds of patriotism.” Or to put it another way, as McColl did to himself, should do anything and everything in its power to support the struggle for independence. As the priest noted in another ringing phrase, “Faith and fatherland are one and indivisible.” No wonder de Lacey could count on men of the cloth to serve as his couriers.
The audience members clapped in all the right places and were willing to fill another collection cap for the struggle, but there was no great passion in the response—they had heard it all before, and Ireland was a long way away. What most struck McColl was the absence of Christian spirit in a Christian place of worship, the lack of even a token attempt to see the situation from more than one perspective. But it didn’t really surprise him. He knew from Caitlin that most priests in Dublin had sided with the employers during the lockout, even once their flocks began to
starve. Those priests knew which side their bread was buttered on, and so did the man on this platform. Both seemed happy to let their positions dictate their politics, and their politics determine how they interpreted their faith.
He couldn’t see Caitlin’s face from where he sat, but he thought he knew which expression it would be wearing—one of dutiful boredom. These were her people, and she wouldn’t fight them openly, but he knew that her view of humanity was more generous than this.
He waited for her outside and was pleased to see that she took his arm despite the presence of Liam Keane and Father Meagher. “We are going to the Shamrock,” she said. “Are you coming?”
The walk was just long enough for McColl to express his general agreement with the speaker’s point of view and to suggest that once Home Rule was a reality, any lingering English presence would soon disappear.
“And what of Ulster?” Keane asked.
“Oh, I expect there’ll be some sort of compromise,” McColl suggested airily, and received a contemptuous snort in reply.
“You did that deliberately,” Caitlin said once they had their drinks and a table to themselves.
Keane and Father Meagher, McColl noticed, were talking to one of de Lacey’s friends. And when de Lacey himself joined the group, he gave Keane an affectionate slap on the shoulder. What, McColl wondered, was Cumming’s man in New York going to turn up on Caitlin’s father? “I don’t suppose you can come back to the hotel?” he asked her.
“No, I can’t. I wish I could.” She looked around the bar and wryly shook her head. “This is just a boys’ club.”
“But not the one they’re sending up the mountain.”
She laughed. “If only.”
McColl was at Juan Palóu’s office first thing the next morning. He wasn’t expecting instant proof of an Irish-Indian conspiracy, and he wasn’t disappointed. It had taken the private detective twenty-four hours to set up the surveillance operation, and visitors to the ashram over the weekend had been few and far between. All had been photographed, but many of the pictures lacked clarity on account of the dreadful weather.
Jack of Spies Page 12
