The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  “HAVE THEY ALWAYS been like this?” Yeats said.

  “So I’ve heard. I was only seven when Martin left for America.”

  Yeats shook his head as if in disbelief that this was what the afterlife offered: a seminary dropout and his two bickering brothers. It wasn’t the first time Michael had seen that look. The more he told Yeats of what he could remember of his own personal history—his mother had died when he was an infant, his schoolmaster father had raised him and his brothers in the country, he had suffered some unknown misfortune—the more dour and distracted Yeats became, as if perpetually asking himself, Is this really it? This is what comes next?

  Yeats removed his spectacles and buffed the lenses with his handkerchief. He did a thorough job of it, giving more time to the effort than seemed necessary.

  “Can I ask a question?” Michael said.

  Yeats glanced up from his task and squinted at Michael. His face had the naked, mole-like look common to people who have removed their eyeglasses.

  “Seeing as how you’re dead, sir, and composed, I would assume, of some sort of spirit matter, do you really need those glasses?”

  Yeats turned the frames over in his hands, studying the arms, the hinges, the lenses. He placed them with some ceremonial grandeur—slowly, meticulously—on the bridge of his nose and secured them behind his ears.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do need them.”

  “To see?”

  “I need them. Can we leave it at that?”

  “But are they necessary?” Michael said. “Or is your attachment to them merely sentimental?”

  “Why do you assume that sentimentality and necessity are incompatible?”

  “How’s that again?”

  “There are times,” Yeats said, “when sentimentality is necessary.”

  MARTIN AND FRANCIS had called a truce. Martin was too tired and Francis had announced that his bladder was full to bursting—though he had offered to continue their conversation so long as Martin didn’t mind him unbuttoning his trousers and having a slash right there on the carpet. Martin put his head back on the sofa and pressed his palms to his eyelids. The hangover was gaining steam, and arguing with his brother wasn’t any help. This was not the way he had pictured their reunion, although if he had been honest with himself, he would have admitted that, yes, this was exactly how things were likely to go.

  As Francis pissed loudly into the toilet, he tried to tally how many cups of coffee he had bolted down before striking out for Martin’s apartment—three? Four? He didn’t even like coffee; he was hoping only for a stronger jolt than the thin-boned American tea could provide. They had been in America for two days and the quality of the tea had been one of the few disappointments. He could have gone straightaway to find Martin, but he figured it best to give himself a couple of days to get settled and for Michael to continue on the path to better health. The sea air had been good for him and city life had been even better. When they had set out from Cobh, Michael was a shell of himself. He could hardly walk ten feet without help from Francis. But two days of room service and plush beds—cheers to the FC Plan, once again—put some flesh on his bones and even a bit of the old sparkle in his eyes.

  As for Martin, he was an odd duck when it came to questions of family loyalty, and Francis had been unsure how he would respond to the train of illegality that Francis was dragging behind him. So far Martin had taken it all in stride, or as much in stride as Francis could have hoped for. But how would Martin have responded if Francis had told him the truth? That when Francis had been ordered to move the car, he had not only had words with one of the bomb makers, but had scuffled with him? And that when the first man had tried to settle the fight with a punch to Francis’s midsection, Francis had sent the man reeling inside, and slammed that iron-ribbed door, and somehow the whole works blew up? Francis had already spent the intervening weeks asking himself if things could have gone differently if only he had been more careful. He didn’t need Martin asking the same questions and coming up with his own answers. And whether or not he told Martin all there was to know about the event, the essential truth remained the same: Ireland had dealt the Dempsey family one more kick in the balls, but this time—through Francis’s quick thinking and selfless devotion to his brother—he had made it the occasion of their triumphal flight from their cruel, capricious homeland.

  If it all sounded like something out of a true-crime novel—another staple of the prison library—then there you had it: life imitating art. Or maybe this was what life did best, drop you in the middle of a story that you’d have a hard time believing if you saw it between the covers of a book. Even Francis himself had trouble keeping it all straight: mystery men from his father’s past, hand-drawn maps, stolen cars, an IRA bomb factory, a trunk full of banknotes, American heiresses, fancy ocean liners.

  But now that Francis had finally brought all the Dempsey brothers together again, he was ready to enjoy himself. There was a barbershop off the lobby, and that would be the place for a shave. Hot towels and lather, the straight razor against his neck. He hadn’t had a chance to treat himself since they arrived. Sure, last night’s dinner had been steak and a bottle of Bordeaux, but it had been room service, a pale shadow of what he imagined the full restaurant experience would be. He wanted waiters, busboys, a maître d’ to consult about the merits of the Pomerol versus the Haut-Médoc. He had a necktie he’d been saving for the right occasion, one he’d picked up on the ship during the Atlantic crossing—who knew there would be a tailor on board, exclusively for the first-class passengers?—and this first Saturday in New York was just the time for it. The Dempsey brothers were reunited and that was cause for celebration. They would start with a fine dinner, where they would fill themselves with porterhouse steaks and martinis, and then Martin could take them to a real nightclub. He was a musician and must know a thing or two about how to have a good time—or at least where a fellow could go to have one. Francis wanted to hear jazz music and he wanted to drink a Manhattan with a cherry as big as his fist. He wanted to see girls dancing in nothing but feathers and glitter, their eyes rimmed in black. He wanted bright lights and brighter music, gin and cigarettes, lipstick and smiles. He wanted a night that bled into the next day, a party that never stopped.

  There was a depression on, here as back home, but not for a man with money in his pockets. In the Ireland he knew, the sense of squalor, of dinginess, of glamourlessness, was omnipresent. There were greater and lesser degrees of it—he had run with a posh crowd in Dublin before his arrest—though you could never entirely escape its damp touch. But here? It had taken Francis only a day in the States to see that when so many were poor, his money and his title gave him a special glow and granted him access to a world that others could only dream of. A depression didn’t mean the extinction of comfort and luxury. They still existed in abundance, but it was a bounty available to a select few. He thought of that Walter fellow on board the Britannic, going on about how the crash had acted like a sieve, culling the ranks of the truly rich. Francis had nodded in sage agreement, even backed it up with a sly wink, but underneath, other ideas roiled: You fat filthy bastard, he had thought. Give me half a chance—I’ll show you how to thin the herd.

  Now here he was. The seventh floor of the Plaza Hotel. His face was framed by a gilt-edged mirror, like a portrait of some distant, wealthy relative. Charming bloke, my great-uncle. Fought with Wellington at Waterloo. Quite, quite. Francis withdrew a diamond pin from his jacket pocket and slid it into his lapel. He had lifted it from Walter the night after their dinner, when he found him legless-drunk on the casino deck. Walter got off easy, Francis told himself. Could have pitched him overboard. He smiled at the memory of it and pointed his finger gunlike at his reflection. Your money or your life. Your money and your wife.

  He readied himself for more questions, but on reemerging from the bathroom he found Martin fast asleep, his chin on his chest and his legs forming a bridge to the marble-topped coffee table. His breathing came
slow and regular, bracketed by a ragged snore on the inhale. Michael had returned to the sofa; he was perched on one arm, examining his brother’s profile. He looked better than he had in ages. Like his old self again.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Francis said.

  Michael didn’t answer—not that Francis had expected he would. His younger brother stared intently at Martin, a look that Francis took to be happiness. He had brought Michael here and now he had given him this gift of his oldest brother. If Michael could speak, Francis was certain he would say something like Thank you, Francis, for bringing us back together. It almost made Francis mist up just thinking about it.

  He boxed Michael on the shoulder to break whatever spell Martin had over him. “Come along, brother,” Francis said. “Let’s take Manhattan.”

  FORDHAM HEIGHTS

  PARKED DOWN THE BLOCK from the house he’d visited the night before, Cronin had to admit that he’d gotten rusty. Worse, he’d been careless—careless, impatient, stupid—to go knocking on the door so late, but he had spent the day tracking down every M. Dempsey in the phone book and by ten at night he was tired and angry and that was the wrong way to go about this sort of business. When the old woman came to the door, he was sure he’d turned down another blind alley, but then she opened her craw and said Mr. Dempsey wasn’t at home because he was a musician and kept odd hours. At the mention of music, Cronin knew he had his man. Now he could only hope he hadn’t spooked Martin and sent Francis into hiding.

  He wouldn’t have been so careless in the old days, but now even his hunches were failing him. Of the almost one hundred and fifty Dempseys in the phone books of the five boroughs, there were no Martins and only three M. Dempseys: one in Brooklyn, one in the Bronx, and one on Staten Island. It should have been easy enough. He started early Friday morning in Brooklyn, but four hours in front of a brownstone on Prospect Avenue revealed the mystery M. to be Mae Dempsey, a member in good standing of the ladies’ auxiliary at Holy Family Roman Catholic Church. Cronin’s next roll of the dice took him to Staten Island and, really, he should have known better. What kind of a musician lived on Staten Island? A ferry ride and a long walk put him on a leafy street in front of a two-story wood-frame occupied by the middle-aged Malachy Dempsey and his unruly brood of towheaded sons. Cronin heard them whooping it up from halfway down the street. It had been a long way to go for a quick answer to his question.

  He should have started with the Bronx—the borough was lousy with Irish—but for Cronin, the Bronx was a landscape of pits and snares. It was the terrain of his past. Back in Prohibition days, Gavigan had knocked heads with bootleggers big and small trying to chisel off little pieces of business, nowhere more so than on the west side of Manhattan and up and down the Bronx. Whenever there were heads to be knocked, it was Cronin’s job to do the knocking, and now the thought of running into men with scores to settle had spooked Cronin into staying clear of his old stomping ground. He knew, deep down, that the M. Dempsey he was looking for was the one in the Bronx, but he had been foolish enough to believe—worse, to hope—that this job could be easy, that it wouldn’t force him to go straight into the maw of the bad old days.

  Cronin had been jumpy since he stepped off the train at Grand Central. The press of bodies on the platform, the steam and the darkness and the shrill whistles of the conductors, and the jostling of the porters and the garbled voices on the loudspeakers calling out departures—it had nearly sent him into a panic. For five years, he had been softened by the sound of wind ruffling the birch trees. He was buffeted only by the flanks of the cows, and snugged close at night in the bed with Alice. On the platform, feeling every eye on him, he couldn’t help jerking his head this way and that, though he knew it was likely to get him noticed: it’s the nervous man, the one who most wants to be invisible, who is spotlighted in the crowd. He settled himself as he moved up the staircase and into the vaulted concourse, where he navigated the thinning crowd and pushed through the door onto Forty-Second Street. Amid the splashes of neon and the million-bulbed marquees, he walked west through Times Square, then crossed Eighth Avenue, moving like a man who would brook no nonsense from pickpockets or stickup men. He gripped tight the handle of the valise and struck toward the river, walking past storefronts locked up against the night’s rougher traffic. Yellow light spilled onto the street from an all-night hash-and-eggs joint full of cops and cabbies. He passed a bar that seemed darker on the inside than the street itself, and then another, and another. In any one of those bars could be a man who had spent years rehearsing to himself what he would do if he ever came across Tom Cronin, unarmed, on a dark street. The bars could be full of such men.

  He did not wander aimlessly; this was no nostalgic tour of his old haunts. He knew well the spot where Gavigan had said he could retrieve an automobile: a warehouse in the West Forties that at midnight still echoed with the sounds of cars and men—slamming, cursing, rattling, laughing. The syrupy tang of motor oil, the whiskey of petrol, the haze of exhaust: gouts of it billowed from the open bay of the garage. Half of the building was a taxicab company. Cronin’s car would be in the other half, the one whose entrance faced away from the street and smelled of fresh paint and larceny. Inside he found a man in striped blue coveralls peering into the open mouth of a Buick. Cronin waited for the man to slam shut its hood.

  “I’m here about a car.” Cronin’s voice sounded small in the sudden quiet, but it had the intended effect: the other man—a kid, really—startled.

  He was a beanpole, all straight lines and angles. His knobby wrists poked from his sleeves like a scarecrow’s. He tried to play off his flinch as something else, shooting his cuffs, straightening the collar of his coveralls, like a man going out on the town. He gave Cronin the once-over. “Oh yeah, and who are you?”

  “That’s no matter,” Cronin said. “I’m here to pick up a car.”

  The kid smirked. “And I’m just gonna hand over the keys?” His eyes swept the top of a battered tool bench that ran the length of the Buick. A wrench. A tire iron. A ball-peen hammer. Cronin took it all in.

  “Gavigan sent me,” Cronin said. “So, yeah, that’s what you’re gonna do.”

  “Gavigan, huh?” The kid picked up a rag and scoured his blackened hands. “Wait here.”

  The name was like gravel in Cronin’s mouth, but it was proof, if he needed it, that Gavigan could still open a few doors. It was a name he had hoped never to speak again, but there were worse places to find out if the currency of Gavigan’s name had kept its value. If some hard-luck case with a score to settle thought twice about potshotting Cronin because he feared what Gavigan would do, then the name was doing its job.

  Stretch reemerged from a small room at the back of the garage with a clipboard in his hand. He muttered under his breath—Gavigangavigangavigangavigan—while he flipped through yellow pages lined in blue. Without looking up, he said, “Are you… Cronin?”

  Gut-punched. That’s how it felt to hear his name spoken so freely. Had Gavigan really been so reckless?

  The kid seemed unfazed. To him, Cronin’s name was a word on a sheet of paper, nothing more. He held out a pair of keys ringed to a leather tab. “Back there,” he said, cocking his head to the right. “Packard. A black one.”

  Cronin took the keys. The kid was barely in his twenties—too young for Cronin to have crossed paths with him. And he would have remembered someone so lanky and skittish. He was like a character out of a children’s book: the marionette who cuts his strings and gets a job fixing cars.

  “Can I see?” Cronin had already reached out and had a tight grip on the clipboard, his fingers marking the page. He wanted the puppet to know that he would not win a tug-of-war against flesh and blood, and that with the keys in his hand, Cronin no longer needed him for anything.

  “Sure, buddy,” he said, relinquishing the clipboard. “Knock yourself out.”

  It was all spelled out in a hasty scrawl: Thurs./Fri. Cronin, pickup for G. The G was circled, apparently the kid�
�s effort at a coded message. Cronin tore off the page and stuffed it into his pocket. He thought for a moment about threatening the kid, promising some terrible punishment involving the tire iron and a pair of pliers if he breathed a word about his visit, but it would only make him more likely to talk, to test the weight of Cronin’s name.

  As Cronin turned the key and the car came to life, he wondered again what Gavigan could have been thinking to bandy about his name so carelessly. Or maybe it hadn’t been him at all. When did Gavigan take care of such details? It must have been that Jamie, the one behind the wheel of the car, where Cronin had once sat. Because this was the kind of thing Cronin himself would have done: Send a message in letters twenty feet tall to some reluctant stooge about just how precarious his position was. That was a message to keep a man focused, to make him work with a sense of purpose.

  NOW IT WAS Saturday and Cronin was back in the Bronx, parked on a street of narrow lots, each house leaning into its neighbor. The days away from the farm were already piling one on top of another. He had arrived late on Thursday, spent Friday morning in Brooklyn, then wasted the afternoon on a fool’s errand to Staten Island. He should have called it quits and started fresh on Saturday—he had barely slept on Thursday night, tossing and turning in a dollar-a-day flop on a bed that sagged like a sailor’s hammock—but there was one Dempsey left and Cronin was eager to bring a close to this mad business. He was working on the assumption that Francis had made contact with his older brother, that he might even be in cahoots with Martin, and that the dead men in Ireland and the quick turn toward America might all be part of a Dempsey family revenge scheme—a scheme that would lead them to Cronin and the farm. So he had rushed it, and if last night’s foray had tipped off the Dempseys, then Cronin just might have banjaxed the whole operation.