The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  “The next time you go… away,” Michael said, “could you deliver a message to him?”

  “It’s not how this works,” Yeats said. “There’s no grand ballroom where the souls of the departed mill about in conversation.” He pointed to their benefactor, who sat in the row in front of Michael. “I would, however, like to renew our efforts to communicate with our cordial host.”

  “Not another séance,” Michael said. “I’m done with that business.”

  “No, not another séance. A map, but so simple in its execution that even you could draw it, and which will lead her—”

  “The only people I want to communicate with are my brothers. And the only discovery that matters is that my father is dead.” Michael’s face was faintly mirrored on the train’s window. He looked just like himself, like he had always looked to himself. Why was there no one in this city who could recognize him?

  “Do you have any children, Mr. Yeats?”

  Yeats seemed taken aback. “I have a daughter, Anne. And a son, called Michael.”

  “Michael? And you haven’t thought to mention that?”

  “It didn’t seem relevant.”

  Relevant. Michael brooded over the word for a moment. With everything so topsy-turvy, who could say what was relevant? All of it was, or else none of it. “How old is he?” he said.

  “About your age, I imagine.”

  “And that’s not relevant, either?”

  Yeats only shrugged.

  “What sort of a fellow is your Michael?”

  “Oh, he’s a fine lad, I’d say. Very interested in history and politics. Last time I saw him must have been autumn. We went round and round about the Czech situation—Chamberlain and all that.”

  “Autumn?” Michael said. “And you passed away in winter, wasn’t it? So you didn’t see much of each other, then?”

  “He spent—spends—most of his time in Ireland, with his mother.”

  “So your wife is often away as well?”

  “I’m the one who’s away—who was, who is… however you want to phrase it. London mostly, the English countryside. I have—I had—rather a large circle of friends and patrons, as you can imagine, and a number of… relationships, which can be complicated affairs.” Yeats removed his glasses and set about polishing the lenses. “When the children were young, it wasn’t possible to work when they were about. Noisy and nosy, as children tend to be.” He replaced his glasses on the bridge of his nose and crossed his legs, right over left, and switched, left over right. “I’m not what you’d call a family man, if that’s what you’re getting at. George knew that when we married.”

  “I’m not getting at anything,” Michael said. “Except to say that I am what you’d call a family man—or I’d like to be. If I could find my brothers, that would be enough. There’s nothing for me in France, or London, or Ireland. My father is dead, my brothers are here—somewhere—and the girl I loved is married off to a toothless old man. The only thing I left in Ireland is my senses and I don’t think I’ll be able to recover those by going back. The only healing, psychical or otherwise, is going to come from a reunion with my family. So I will not draw your map, and I will not baffle this good woman with visions and voices from the great beyond. If that’s not to your liking, then sod off back to the spirit realm.”

  THEY—THAT is, Michael and Lilly—exited the train and stood together on the elevated platform. There was no sign of Yeats. Michael’s view out the west-facing windows had been blocked by the standing passengers, but as the train pulled away, he saw before him the recognizable landmarks of his first days in the city: the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, and, on a straight line in front of him, the narrow-shouldered, pin-striped tower that soared above the golden man. He seized Lilly’s sleeve and stretched out his arm like a man in a crow’s nest sighting land.

  The walk to the museum was four blocks the long way, avenue to avenue, but he stretched the distance by jogging one block south for each block west. Lilly would have tried to steer him but he moved with such purpose, and with such a sense of lightness, as if a great weight had been lifted. The tea and the potato knish had restored him somewhat, and now, having reached Fifth Avenue, with its jewelry shops, furriers, ateliers, and boutiques, he was positively rejuvenated.

  Lilly’s hand went to the scarf knotted at her neck as she caught sight of the shop where she’d purchased it—could it really have been only a few days since her failed interview at the Foundation? She thought again of the view from the top of the tower, looking west: the foreground with buildings, spires, and water tanks; then the rows of ocean liners jutting into the river; then the river itself set ablaze by the afternoon sun; then the high ridge of the Palisades, and beyond it nothing, she imagined, but open country.

  Lilly was yanked from her reverie by her guest, who took her by the arm and pointed excitedly at the bronze-hooped globe and its burly Atlas. Across the avenue sprouted a cathedral in the Gothic style, but of a much more recent vintage. The soot of the city was only just beginning to dim the glow of its crystalline towers, but given a few centuries of smoke and pigeon shit, it could rival the dingy beauties of Europe.

  He urged her forward, an impatient guide eager to show her the sights: another church fronted by sad-faced saints, a lobby entrance guarded by snake-tongued Harpies and golden-robed goddesses. None of this impressed Lilly, who steadied the boxy Rolleiflex to keep it from thumping against her chest. She typically moved at a more sedate, unobtrusive pace that allowed her to see the compositions unfolding around her. Up ahead, a thickly built woman draped in a dusky frock, her silver hair pinned against her scalp, was peering into a shop window. The display was a mock boudoir, with frothy lingerie scattered across Louis XIV chairs and spilling from the drawers of a chiffonier. If she’d been alone, Lilly would have framed a shot that captured the woman’s face: Were her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed in distaste? Or did her expression suggest a long-simmering memory of some frenzied night in the previous century?

  Before she could get closer, the boy jogged her arm and—Just a little farther!—beckoned her onward. They crossed another street, a wave of pedestrians surging around them, and then another and another. In this city there was such freedom to move, there was an excess of it, and the people flaunted their ability to walk where they wanted, when they wanted. Prague had been like that when she left it: Lilly could stroll forever, and if she ever felt boxed in by Prague, there was always Paris, just as earlier there had been Berlin and Barcelona. Why would she give up the simple thrill of walking—walking!—to return to a city where everyone would be assigned a place, and where rules, and walls, and worse would keep them from moving?

  They crossed another street and now the edge of the park rose before them: a picket of trees and beyond it—or so the guidebook claimed—an urban oasis of paths, meadows, and ponds. He came to a stop in front of the grand hotel on the corner and with a flourish of his hand, as if unveiling a portrait, he directed Lilly’s attention to the door. As she looked up at the white façade, its rows of windows, its steeply pitched roof, she remembered the fairy-tale castle, and of course the park was its enchanted forest. The smile on his face and his eager wish to draw her inside seemed proof that this was his home, and that her little pauper was in fact princely.

  GANSEVOORT STREET

  YEARS EARLIER, GAVIGAN HAD secured a deal with a city commissioner that paid him to provide storage for a fleet of trolleys, and though the streetcars had long ago been decommissioned and replaced by buses, the deal still held, buried in a single line in a back page of the city budget. The carbarn itself was a vast space, and though it was surrounded by slaughterhouses, it had been built at a time when grandeur was bestowed on even the most functional of structures. The high arches that once admitted the trolleys were flanked by Grecian pilasters. Undulant terra-cotta corbels bracketed windows that ran, frieze-like, across the barn. A pair of cupolas bookended the roofline, and in the center sat a squat dome punctured on four s
ides with porthole windows. This crowning touch gave the place the appearance of a failed soufflé. The building’s claim to aesthetic harmony was further challenged by the construction, ten years earlier, of the elevated freight line that now ran over the back end of the barn. Inside, the barn was stripped of architectural ornament. The floor was inlaid with a web of iron rails and spattered all over with the droppings of birds and bats. The dust-fogged windows admitted only a pale glow, and the banks of Holophane pendant lights were furred with dust and bridged by spiderwebs.

  It was here that Cronin brought Francis for his tutorial on assassination. Cronin knew where to find the fuse box and had been able to get a pair of the overhead lights switched on. He leaned an old wooden door against one of the interior columns and with a stub of charcoal—snatched from the remains of a hobo campsite—he chalked a man-size outline on the door: head, heart, belly, legs.

  “Have you fired a gun before?” he said.

  “Now when would I have done that?” Francis said.

  Cronin carried a brown paper bag, and from it he withdrew a stout revolver, a short-barreled .38 caliber. It was a policeman’s weapon, a Detective Special. He casually handed it to Francis—“Hold this,” he said—and continued to rummage through the bag.

  Francis took hold of the gun, uncertain at first what to make of it. It was lighter than he’d imagined it would be, and its blue-black frame was lustrous. Cronin’s back was to him, and with a shock of adrenaline—Seize the day, Francis!—he extended his arm.

  Cronin cast a look over his shoulder and returned to the bag. “It’s not loaded,” he said.

  Francis lowered his arm. He was trembling.

  Cronin stepped forward and swiped the gun from his hand. “Did you not even check it?” he said. “Do you even know how to do that?”

  “Like I said last night,” Francis said, wounded and glum, “I’m not a killer.”

  Half of Cronin wanted to smack Dempsey in the face for being so smug, so blissfully unaware of the practice of violence. But the other half of him envied Dempsey for growing up in a time and a place where he didn’t need to know how to set an ambush, how to lob a grenade, how to look a man in the eye and then end his life. Hadn’t Cronin, by his actions during the war, bought that peace and stupid tranquillity for Francis and a whole generation like him? And hadn’t Frank also played his part in creating for his sons a world where they didn’t have to be killers? Cronin believed Francis when he said that whatever happened in Ireland had been an accident. Francis wouldn’t know the first thing about organizing a raid, taking out three men—IRA men, at that—and walking off with enough loot to incite a transatlantic manhunt. But none of that mattered now. Francis was to be initiated, and it was Cronin’s job to do it. Just as Francis’s father had once instructed him.

  Before arriving at the carbarn, they had secured formalwear that matched Francis’s alleged station in life; along with a host of other Highland accessories, they had procured an elaborate seal-fur-and-silver sporran, the belted pouch favored by kilted Scots, which Cronin figured for the best place to stow the revolver. The rest of the fancy kit was zipped into a garment bag in Cronin’s Packard, but now, from the paper bag, he withdrew a box of cartridges and the pouch, which resembled a small mammal on a leash. He loaded the cylinder and stood ten feet from the door where he had outlined the king.

  “When the time comes,” he said, setting his feet, “your heart is going to be racing, but you must remain calm. Do you hear? Keep your hand steady, but be quick about it. You need to squeeze off as many shots as you can, but you can’t rush.”

  “Festina lente,” Francis said, almost under his breath.

  “What was that?” Cronin said.

  “It’s Latin. ‘Make haste slowly.’”

  “I know what it means.” Cronin’s voice was a growl. It was one of Black Frank’s sayings. He’d heard it a hundred times, at least. “The other thing you have to know: It’s going to be loud. Especially if you’re indoors, each shot is going to be very loud. You have to expect it.”

  “Let me write that down,” Francis said. “Guns are loud.”

  “I’m telling you this so you don’t flinch,” Cronin said, adding silently, you smug prick. “It’s going to be loud and the gun is going to jump in your hand. You can’t flinch, or you’ll miss, or you’ll drop the gun, and that will be it. For you—and for the others.”

  They stood facing each other. The room was full of shadows.

  “Would he do it?” Francis said. “Kill my brothers, if I don’t go along?”

  “He doesn’t make empty threats.”

  “And would you be the one to do it?”

  “He’s got plenty of men who can pull a trigger. It’s not hard to find them in a city like this.”

  “But what if you’re the man he asks?”

  “He doesn’t ask.”

  A train thundered overhead, car after car hung with swaying slabs of beef. Francis waited for the worst of the noise to pass.

  “Would my father have wanted me to do this?”

  Cronin said nothing. Above, the train slowed, its wheels ticking against the rails.

  “I know that you knew him. In Cork. Your boss said—”

  “Stop calling him my boss!”

  “The old man, whoever he is, said something to you about unfinished business with the Dempseys. Martin saw it, too. There’s something familiar about you. You knew him.”

  “What did your father tell you?”

  “My father never said a word about anything that mattered. He gave us plenty of Virgil and Ovid, and our fill of Homer and Sophocles. As for himself? He liked his eggs poached and his tea strong. End of list.”

  “Nothing about the war?”

  “Loads about the Peloponnesian War. The Trojan War, too. We heard dispatches from the front practically every night. But if you’re asking about a war in the last twenty centuries, the answer there is no.”

  Cronin set his mouth in a flat line. In the rafters of the barn, a Holophane light glowed in its cage. He and Francis stood spotlighted, like two boxers in the ring, crowded on all sides by darkness and roaring silence. Would there come a day when a man like himself stood before little Henry, grown old enough to ask questions about the past? And would that man, through malice or simple carelessness, pull down the wall Cronin had erected, silence stacked on silence, dividing what he once had been from what he endeavored to be? Let the boy think me a brute, he had prayed, let him think me a dullard or a fool. But don’t let him know the wickedness I have done in this world. It was a prayer Cronin offered every Sunday on his knees in the gray stone church where he and Alice and the boy—and now the baby—drove each week for Mass. He often felt himself to be a hypocrite for asking, and in some superstitious corner of his heart he feared that the request alone—Lord, deliver him not from his ignorance—would bring on its opposite.

  Cronin shook his head. “I’ll respect your father’s silence,” he said.

  “All we got from my father was silence! We heard barely a word from him, and all of us stuck living in the ass-end of the world.”

  “He left Cork to keep you safe. Whatever else he was, he was a good father—your life over his.”

  “What does that mean, whatever else he was?”

  “I’ve said too much already.”

  “Too much?” Francis said. “You’ve not said anything.”

  “The old man said if you became too much trouble, I was to dump you back at the garage. Let you stew in that little room until it was time for you to be useful. Is that what you want?”

  “But did you know my—”

  Cronin leveled the revolver at the door and fired six shots, one after another. All six to the chest, none more than a few inches from the heart.

  At the first shot, Francis leaped back, his hands going to his ears. “Jesus Christ! You could have warned me!”

  Cronin lowered the gun and pointed to the sporran. “Put that thing on,” he said. “And then get o
ver here. You’ve a lot to learn.”

  Cronin insisted that Francis rehearse until the motion became like a reflex. He would reach into the sporran, withdraw the gun, and fire until the cylinder was empty. If Cronin saw the slightest hitch or stumble, he would stop Francis and make him start from the beginning. They tried it from five feet away, from ten, from fifteen, from twenty.

  “Keep your eyes on the king,” Cronin told him. “And for God’s sake, don’t hit the queen.”

  IT WAS EVENING when they returned to the Plaza. Francis’s right hand was numb, his arm still tingled from the jolt of the revolver, and a low whine pestered his ears from all those shots echoing off the brick walls, the derelict trolleys, the vaulted ceiling. The air in the carbarn had been clammy and damp, but now he was soaked to the skin. He couldn’t remember a day so warm in all his years in Ireland. His first thought had been of the bar cart in the suite—yes, he would have the front desk send up a bucket of ice as soon as he got to the room to cool his body and calm his mind—but then he remembered: Michael adrift in the city, and Martin the only one searching for him.

  Cronin, with the garment bag over his shoulder, waited by the bank of elevators while Francis went to retrieve the key. But as Francis crossed the lobby, intent on the front desk, he came face to face with Félicité Bingham.

  “What a treat,” she said in her bored drawl. “A private audience with near royalty.”

  He almost answered in his Francis voice but caught himself in time to rough up the burr in his throat. “Fancy meeting you, Miss Bingham. But where did—”

  “Enough of the ‘Miss Bingham’ talk. It’s Lici”—and then she added as a joke, an afterthought—“Your Lordship.”

  “Please, it’s Angus.”

  “I don’t know what to call you. My mother and my sister might be taken in, but I don’t buy it.”