The bed against the far wall was small but neatly made. Michael took a deep breath, let out a long sigh.
He was an odd boy, that was for certain. One minute he was animated and elastic, all smiles and raised eyebrows taking the place of words. She would even have called him quick-witted. He seemed to notice things that others ignored or looked straight through. Hadn’t he been delighted, even consumed, by those boys and their game? His eyes had tracked that white ball up into the air, and his face—his mouth an O in wonder—had almost broken her heart. But when they entered the studio he became grave and distracted. His mind seemed to be fixed on a spot on the wall, or one of the columns, or her bed. She steered him to the space where the camera, a large box on a tripod, faced a single chair. With a hand on his shoulder she asked him to sit and it was as if she had snapped him out of a sound sleep. He looked at her and then the chair and then the camera and some knowledge of the situation registered and he bobbed his head: Yes, yes, yes, of course. He blushed, and she saw Josef in his features. Dark hair, dark eyes, the angled cheekbones, the high forehead. She brushed a hand over his temples, smoothed his hair. She posed his shoulders, squaring him to the lens, and retreated a few steps to consider the light, his posture, the way to approach this shoot with a subject who wouldn’t be able to hear the direction she had given to the others who sat in this spot: I want you to think of a question you have always wanted answered. For a moment, his eyes roamed over her face, her body, before becoming fixed again.
“You were wrong, Mr. Yeats.”
Yeats stood beside the camera. There was no trace of the apple. “It was a fair guess, given the facts at hand.”
“Did you really think she was a harlot?”
“I did,” Yeats said. “But I’ve been wrong about women in the past.”
She looked at Michael through the viewer, checked his position in the frame. Her subjects often had dreamy looks on their faces as they pondered the question, wondering either what they would ask or what their answer would be. She wanted to catch him in one of those moments when his eyes danced, absorbing the world around him, but this stare seemed as much a part of who he was as that other side. And she knew she couldn’t force it. She never told her subjects to smile, or not to smile, or to do anything but think about the question. It was a way of distracting them from the business of having their picture taken. But this boy was already distracted. She activated the shutter, cued the flash.
Light erupted where Yeats’s head had been only a moment before. Michael felt himself swallowed by it. His arms and legs, then his body and his head, all fell away from him. For a moment everything went white, and then all was blackness.
HELL’S KITCHEN
I’M GOING TO STRETCH my legs. That’s what Cronin had told the string bean with the ginger hair, the one who’d been so careless with his name that first night in the city.
“And what am I supposed to tell Mr. Gavigan when he gets here?”
“You tell him I’m stretching my legs,” Cronin said.
It was a sign that Gavigan had slipped in the past few years: the quality of the men he kept around him. When Cronin had first fallen into his orbit, Gavigan controlled a thriving bootleg-liquor business on the city’s west side. He had men on the docks, he worked in cars, had a piece of construction, too. Wherever the money was. He wasn’t a kingpin on the order of the bigger Italian outfits, but he had his own domain and he kept a close eye on its comings and goings. Even in the days before Cronin stepped off the train on the way to Albany, though, Gavigan’s sphere was shrinking. Repeal had been a blow, sure, and Gavigan had been too old, too slow, too old-fashioned, to make a move into prostitution, narcotics, hijacking. Cronin watched one man after another defect. Indignities were visited upon Gavigan that a year or two earlier would have been Cronin’s to punish. Each loss of the empire only made the old man more desperate to keep what remained. Not one to ease himself into the grave, he was sure to go out cursing and thrashing.
In the old days, the kid at the garage would have learned to shut his trap or someone would have dumped him into the river. Where’s Red, one of the fellas would ask. Oh, he’s walking to New Jersey. The others on the Gavigan payroll would have had a good laugh at that one.
And then there was this Jamie. He was hard to figure, but Cronin could see he was no fool. There had to be some flaw in the design that had marked him for service to Gavigan instead of one of the bigger players in the city’s winner-take-all sweepstakes. Hadn’t Gavigan always surrounded himself with misfits, castoffs, men with nowhere else to go? Cronin knew all about that.
Two blocks from the garage, Cronin slotted the coins into a pay phone and put his fat finger in the dial. He still carried the page from the phone book, each Dempsey checked off but one. The telephone rang twice. There was a pause, followed by a faint click—the sound of a woman removing an earring.
When the woman answered, Cronin asked to speak to her husband.
“He’s not available,” she said. “May I take a message for him?”
Cronin had half a mind to hang up. This was madness, to be calling the Dempseys. “Could you tell him to look in on his youngest brother?” he said finally.
“Is something wrong? Is Michael all right?”
“Just tell your husband that he needs minding.”
“Who is this?” she said. “And where’s Francis?” The woman seemed to think this was a conversation.
“Ma’am.” His voice was like a door slamming. “Tell him this: Michael is at the Plaza Hotel under the name MacFarquhar.”
“Pardon me,” she said, “but how is that spelled?”
“It’s spelled like it sounds,” he said. “MacFarquhar. Room seven-twelve. Have you got that? Seven, one, two.”
Cronin placed the receiver back in its cradle. He had been grinding his teeth since the moment he’d dialed the first number, and his jaw ached like he’d been socked. Was he ever going to be rid of the Dempseys? Could he ever cut himself free of Gavigan? One led to the other and then it all doubled back to the beginning—Dempsey to Gavigan to Dempsey to Gavigan—until the words melted into one string of nonsense that would echo in his ears as long as he lived.
He wondered if the youngest Dempsey had found his way back to the hotel. How difficult could it be? All he had to do was walk down Fifth Avenue and he couldn’t miss it. But he thought again of Francis’s panic at leaving his brother on his own. There was something wrong with the boy—Cronin had seen it. He had left the boy exposed and alone once before, back in Cork, and now he had done it again. He wanted to believe that none of this mattered to him, not a whit, but of course it did.
He should call Alice. He had coins enough in his pocket and he had not spoken to her since their hasty farewell at the depot. Her voice would shore him up. Or else it would completely undo him. Right there was the reason he could not call, and there was this, too: Alice would hear in his voice a change. She would hear that Cronin had become a man she did not know. Not that he had changed into something new, but that he was changing back into what he once had been. The man it had taken him years on the farm to un-become.
THE BOWERY
WHEN LILLY EMERGED FROM under the hood at the back of the camera, the boy was crumpled at the base of the chair like a broken doll. For a moment she feared that the flash had been fatal, that the camera had fired some bolt of energy, Tesla-like, into his heart. She looked down at this stranger—his white shirt and torn pants, his limbs splayed and his mouth gaping, his thick shock of black hair tousled across his face—and she gasped: He was the image of Josef. Is that what she was seeing? A vision of Josef’s fate? “Josef!” she cried out. “Josef, get up!”
There was a catch in his throat, and his chest rose. Lilly’s eyes filled with tears as she knelt beside him. Her sobs shook her to the floor. Yes, she had always been superstitious—a harmless foible, something she and Josef laughed about—but for weeks she had been so desperate for a hopeful sign that her nerves had been rubbed
raw. The fate of the world—her world, at least—depended on how many pigeons roosted on her windowsill, and which would be the first to take flight.
Now here was this changeling boy and with one flash of light, the spark of life had almost gone out of him. But what was she to do? She knew no one and had no telephone, and she was certain that if she tried to carry the boy down the stairs it would result in his death or hers. He stirred, his eyes twitching and his lips trembling as if on the verge of speech, but he seemed unable to come to consciousness. Had he fainted? Did he suffer from fits? He needed bed rest, she decided, because really, what other option did she have? As she dragged him to the daybed in the corner of the loft, she imagined what Josef would say about all of this: the absurdity of this boy she had waylaid, the sight of her hauling a stranger into her bed, and even how little of the studio she had reserved for sleeping, dressing, eating. Ninety-five percent work, five percent personal, he might have said. That seems about right—for you.
Satisfied that her guest was sleeping and not comatose, she went back to work, cataloging the negatives and the rolls of film she had not had the time to develop. She tapped out dates, locations, and brief notes on a typewriter she had purchased cheap at a street market. The Shift key was broken, so all of her letters were lowercase. As each page rose above the platen, she razored it into strips, which she glued to the lids of small cardboard boxes. The boxes were then carefully sorted and stacked inside a trunk, along with the cases custom-made to hold the Rolleiflex, the Leica, the Agfa-Ansco. The trunk was due to the shipping agent by noon Saturday. Her clothes could fit into a single valise.
This labeling allowed her to participate in Mr. Crabtree’s notion about life in Prague. She would return to her studio, which would be just as she left it more than three months ago. Nothing would have changed, within the studio or without. Certainly the name of the nation had been effaced, but that was an issue for the cartographers, the typesetters, the sign painters. Lilly would need only to add these newly labeled boxes to the others—from Paris, Spain, Prague, and points in between—and everything would be neat and orderly, all in its proper place.
Sometimes Lilly thought she should board the ship with no luggage at all, nothing more than the clothes she wore. Let her months in America disappear like a dream, so that when she finally awoke in Prague she would have nothing to show for her time away. Perhaps that would make it possible to believe she had never left, but had only slept. With no mementos, no photographic proof of New York’s existence, she would have only a head full of dreams so real she took them for true but that, like all dreams, would fade with time.
Or she could abandon the studio and go west—the traitorous thought that had gnawed at her since she gazed out over the city. Disappear into America with nothing but the Rolleiflex and a few rolls of film. Would anyone look for her? She could go as far as California—Hollywood, even, where her knowledge of light and shadow could be useful. She would take a new name and sit in the constant sunshine. She would pluck oranges from trees and wear dark sunglasses and rely on the heat and the salt water to purge her memories of Prague. She would be a new person, tied only by her accent to the dark continent where, every generation, old hatreds fueled new wars. Prague? she would say while sitting by some crystal-blue swimming pool. A lovely city. Pity, though. It can’t seem to stay out of the way of history.
There was another option, a halfway option: Paris. While many of her friends insisted that Germany had already lit the match and that one day Paris, too, would burn, others scoffed. Germany might gobble up the little nations, they said, might even take a bite out of Poland, but it wouldn’t look west. Meanwhile, the French had learned their lesson in the Great War. They would never take the field in defense of Czechoslovakia or any of the other newly hatched nations, these cartographic daydreams. Perhaps an uncomfortable feeling of stalemate would hang over the Continent and its many flavors of fascism, but Paris would still be Paris. The French bureaucracy, of course, wasn’t leaving the fate of the city, or the country, to chance. No visas were being issued at the consulate, and certainly not to residents of former nations now under Nazi occupation. The French were going to sit out this tussle behind the safety of the Maginot Line, and they weren’t going to do it with millions of refugees crowding their view of the battlefield.
Weary of typing and cutting, Lilly poured herself a glass of the cheap Chianti from the Italian market. She checked again on her guest, fast asleep in his torn clothes, and then stripped him of his shirt and trousers. With a needle and thread she repaired the knee of the pants as best she could. Her mother would have pulled them from her hands and done the sewing herself, and better: Every woman must know how to make those minute alterations that make a dress fit her like no other. Lilly had not cared much. Most of what she’d worn when she was younger shocked her mother with its shapeless, mannish utility. You can try to dress like a man, her mother would say, but I don’t know many men with breasts like yours.
She switched off the lights and went to the window. The flat gray sky was obscured by the haze of the city. Across the street, lights burned in the tall windows of a garment factory during its third shift, and women hunched over their tables, each machine buzzing beside a pile of fabric, one side for the pieces and the other for the finished product. Lilly could feel the same activity in her own building. The floor of the loft hummed with the commotion of the machines. In her first week, the constant tremor had made her nervous—as if something was happening far off but moving closer, little by little. Now, however, she took comfort in that bass-note thrum, when she noticed it at all. It was the sound of women at work when the rest of the world was sleeping.
Sleep. Even Lilly needed to sleep. She crawled into the daybed next to the boy. She was surprised by how little of the bed he took up, and as she lay beside him, listening to the shallow sifting of his breath, she fell into a dreamless sleep.
THE PLAZA HOTEL
MARTIN SPENT THE AFTERNOON and into the evening working his way through the Midtown jazz clubs, dropping in on contacts who might know of a band in need of help: piano, clarinet, sax—he would even play kazoo if the price was right. Plenty of the guys wanted him to describe the look on Chester’s face when Martin walked out, but none of them had a lead on an open seat. This business of lining up a plan B that might have to transform quickly into a plan A was going to take time. He wouldn’t say a word to Rosemary until he had a concrete answer to the question of rent, food, shoes. And besides, he didn’t want her to think he was having doubts about the hush-hush, can’t-miss plan he’d been dangling in front of her since Saturday night.
He came home just before eight, expecting to get some credit for not staying out two nights in a row. Instead, Rosemary launched immediately into the phone call, reporting word for word what the mystery caller had said. She had already contacted the Plaza, she told Martin, and had the front desk ring the brothers’ room. No answer, but all that meant was that Francis was elsewhere.
“The man on the phone,” Martin said. “Was he Irish?”
“He had a brogue,” she said. “And he said minding—that I should tell you your brother needs minding. That’s Irish, not American.”
“And there’s been no word from Francis?” Martin said, but of course there hadn’t been. Hadn’t he warned Francis just last night that the IRA was sure to come looking for him and for its money?
“I think we should call the police,” Rosemary said.
“And tell them what? That a man just telephoned and told me to visit my brother, who’s staying at one of the finest hotels in the city?” He imagined the questions the police would ask, and the impossibility of answering them. The money, the aliases, Michael’s condition, Francis’s whereabouts—the list went on and on.
“Don’t you think there’s something fishy about this?” Rosemary said.
Of course he did, but he asked Rosemary to let him sort it out. It could all be a joke, a misunderstanding—some pal of Francis who ha
d botched the delivery of a simple message. Francis was probably sitting in the Oak Bar right this moment regaling a Texas millionaire with tales from the Scottish Highlands. Martin hoped to put Rosemary at ease, but as he reached for his hat by the door, his hand was shaking. He gave Rosemary a quick kiss on the cheek and told her not to wait up. “Let me see what I can see at the Plaza,” he said, as the door closed behind him.
IT WAS LATE by the time he arrived at the hotel. The front-desk clerk was unwilling to hand over a key to the room, and when he called up, there was again no answer. Martin tried to explain the circumstances—someone had called him to come for his brother, and a deaf-mute couldn’t very well answer the telephone, now could he?—but the clerk was unmoved. Considering the hour, he said, wasn’t it possible that his brother was sleeping? And wouldn’t it be best to wait for His Lordship’s return?
If Martin had to locate Francis before he could find Michael, then the hotel bar wasn’t the worst place to start. He found a seat, shook a cigarette from its pack, and asked the bartender for a whiskey on the rocks. As he sparked his lighter, he heard a familiar voice from a figure on his right, half slumped over the bar.
“Would you look at the riffraff they’re letting in these days,” Chester Kingsley said as he hauled himself upright.
Shite. Martin knew that sooner or later he would have to settle things with Chester, but he’d been hoping it could happen after he launched the new band and secured a regular spot in one of the city’s best nightclubs. A tall order, but that’s how he’d planned it.
“Martin, my boy. We need to talk—man to man.” Wednesday was Chester’s night off, and he’d apparently been drinking for hours. When drunk, he lost the vaguely British accent he employed on the bandstand to announce each selection—And now, for your dancing pleasure, a little something called “Moonlight in Vermont.” With one hand on the bar, he ambled unsteadily to the stool next to Martin. He leaned in close, his breath clotted with bourbon and grenadine. “So what’s next for the great Martin Dempsey?”
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