The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Martin gave a hearty “Hear, hear!” to the idea of dinner out, and the Dempseys insisted, en masse, that the Countess Eudoxia accompany them. Lilly protested that she had too much to do, but Rosemary wouldn’t accept it. “You can’t abandon me to these hooligans,” she said, and Lilly relented. Dining with ersatz aristocrats wasn’t on the New York List, but she would have to pencil it in at no. 21. So Collier made calls and a table for five was procured and when Lilly saw the number painted on the lantern in front of the restaurant—21, of course—she shook her head in wonder and resignation. Coincidences had become commonplace, and all of them pointed to the veracity of the psychic’s list. Shouldn’t she stop claiming she was ready to brave any trial in the name of love? Wouldn’t it be a relief to submit to the logic of that no, no, nein?

  After a dinner of steak and caviar and salads soaked in lemon and anchovies, Francis insisted that the night was still young. Tommy Dorsey was at the Pennsylvania and Louis Prima had just opened at the Famous Door, but Francis said he’d heard there was a hot band at the Kensington—Chipper Kingston or some such? Rosemary put a quick end to that; the word on the street was that they didn’t sound half as good since they’d lost their clarinet. As Francis paid the dinner tab, they settled at last on the Cotton Club on Broadway, only five blocks away. Martin knew what Hooper and the Minton’s regulars thought of the place: nothing but white money staring at black talent. But even though he had the right face to get in the door, he’d never had the money for the cover—until now. Francis was flush with cash and Bill Robinson and Cab Calloway were leading the revue, and that was a tough ticket to turn down. Calloway always went heavy on the horns, and the whole place would shake when he went into his hi-de-hi-de-hos. As for Bill Robinson, even if Michael couldn’t hear his feet, he could still be amazed by what Bojangles could do.

  “I saw him in The Hot Mikado last month,” Martin said.

  “Hey, buster,” Rosemary said, with an elbow to his ribs. “You were going to take me to that.”

  He had meant to take her, and he couldn’t remember what exactly had scuttled the plan, but it was easy enough to guess: another of his marathon nights in the city, with Rosemary home in the Bronx. Now he saw a chance to make good on a busted promise—and with Rosemary looking like she’d stepped out of the pages of Photoplay, and giving his knee a squeeze beneath the table, he had to assume that his past misdeeds were forgiven, if not forgotten.

  THEY COULD HAVE stayed out all night, and what a different day Saturday might have been. Each would have slept off the hours of beefsteaks and Dover sole, crab cakes and shrimp cocktail, all of it washed down with wine and whiskey and gin in all its guises: martini, fizz, lime rickey, and gimlet. They would have awoken to the bright midday sun, taken two aspirin and a tall glass of water, and rolled toward the mercy of another hour or two of sleep. But each of them had a duty and knew it could not be ignored. Rosemary had Peggy’s wedding, which included a squirming flower girl to dress and primp for a day of best behavior. Martin had the wedding, yes, but uppermost was the reception and his very special audience of one. For all of his knocked-out joy over Michael’s safe return and Rosemary’s loveliness in that dress, he wasn’t going to bollix up his big chance with John Hammond by lugging a hangover to the show. Lilly had the studio all but packed, but no idea where she was going. Watching Rosemary and Martin had thrummed a string that ran the length of her body. They were a more Hollywood-movie version of her and Josef, but it hadn’t been that long since she’d sat with him in the Café Slavia listening to a jazz combo, their feet casually mixing it up beneath the table, just as Martin and Rosemary had done tonight. Michael had begun to miss Mr. Yeats, if only for the chance to converse, but for now had sworn off striking out on his own. He would go where the others went. And then Francis. Francis had a man to kill and that required a steady hand. As the hour grew late, an acid-edged dread gouged the pit of his stomach. He had tried to smother it in rich food, drown it in a highball, but the ache and the emptiness wouldn’t quit. Cronin would be waiting for him in the morning, but what was there left for Cronin to do? Francis had his gun and his orders. He had memorized the parade route and the timetable of the visit, and he had pulled the trigger so many times that he no longer flinched at the sound of the shot.

  ROSEMARY, WHO HAD become fast friends with Lilly, wasn’t ready to say good-bye. As they stood outside the club, waiting for Martin to hail taxis for their merry band, she invited Lilly to the wedding. Lilly demurred. Even Josef at his most impish would not have put that on the list. Their interest in the excesses of the bourgeoisie extended only so far. As the first cab scudded toward the curb, Martin told Francis to give his regards to Good King George, and it struck Lilly that this was the George whom they’d mentioned in the hotel. Francis, Michael, George: Madame Eudoxia hadn’t wasted a single name. London still remained a mystery, but the no, no, nein was becoming clearer than ever. In fact, the king’s name had hit Lilly with such force that she stumbled; Rosemary caught her new friend by the arm. She saw that Lilly was shaken, and wouldn’t hear of her returning, at this hour, to the lonely, half-packed studio in the Bowery. Not when Lilly was tired and tipsy. Not when Rosemary knew about the choices that faced her in the days ahead. She announced that Lilly would spend the night at the Plaza. Francis and Michael could share one bed, or one of them could sleep on the sofa, but Lilly would have the other room to herself.

  Lilly was more exhausted than she wanted to admit, and she accepted the plan with only mild protest. Ever since she had met this boy—her guest, Sir Malcolm, Michael—she had let herself be swept along by a series of signs she could only half read. Josef, her sweet historical materialist, would tell her she was losing her mind, but tonight she had dined on oysters as big as her hand, she was masquerading as a countess, and she had applauded like mad for a man who was perhaps the greatest dancer in the world. Now she was about to spend the night at the Plaza Hotel. It was almost worth returning to Prague and facing whatever the city had become just to tell the story of this night.

  Before Francis ducked into the taxicab, Rosemary gave him a stern look: she had her suspicions about Sunday night with Peggy, and she didn’t want a repeat performance. She took both of Lilly’s hands in hers. Lilly leaned in, kissed her rapidly on each cheek.

  “Will you write to me when you get—to wherever you go?” Rosemary said, and pressed a hastily scribbled address into Lilly’s hand. “And will you promise me that you’ll keep safe?”

  Lilly slipped the address into her purse. “I promise I’ll write,” she said as she slid in next to Francis and Michael. Just before the cab pulled away from the corner, she leaned out the window, aimed the camera, and snapped a picture of Martin and Rosemary standing together, the lights of Broadway pulsing all around them.

  THE PLAZA HOTEL

  FRANCIS DRESSED, HIS HANDS steady. A starched white shirt with a black bow tie, the hose and garter flashes secured beneath the knee, the kilt, the trim black coatee. Only when he belted the sporran did he reach into the drawer for the revolver. As his fingers found the grip, he checked again on Michael, who slept against the edge of the bed, his head almost lost in the pillow.

  Francis had not slept well, his mind spinning in circles, but it had been some comfort to have his brother in the bed. For years, they’d shared a room in Ballyrath, the two of them wedged onto narrow cots with blankets pulled to their chins against the chill of the cottage walls. All through this last night the faint, steady sound of Michael’s breathing brought on memories of those days: Francis and the other boys out in the hills, imagining themselves knights, Vikings, cowboys, Indians; baby Michael parked on a jacket at the edge of a field where Francis proved to the fat-fisted culchies that a schoolmaster’s boy could hit twice as hard as they could; or Francis spying on his father early one morning when he thought the boys were still asleep. He watched as Da removed a small box from atop a wardrobe, then sifted through stiff-backed photographs, faded envelopes bound with string, a ri
ng too delicate for his fat fingers. He hummed a slow, sad tune to himself—this from a man who never sang—but, when he heard Mrs. Greavey approach, broke off and hastily replaced the box, returning to his usual spot at the table.

  What had become of those mementos since his father’s death? Were they lost like the memories his father had locked away? Francis had to wonder, if his father had lived another five or ten to twenty years, whether he would have revealed more of his past to his sons. He had played some part in the war, and done enough to earn the ire of the old man who now determined Francis’s fate. He left Cork to keep you safe. Or so Cronin had said. But safe from what? Or from whom? Had the old man been stalking the Dempseys all this time? Cronin knew the answers, but he kept himself locked up just as tight as their father ever had. And really, what was the point now? The knowledge would do him no good, Michael couldn’t be told, and Martin didn’t seem to care.

  Francis hefted the gun, feeling its weight in his palm. He checked the cylinder, confirmed that the safety was on, and placed it grip-up in the pouch. With this, he would fire the shot and the Binghams would scream, Sir Angus! What have you done? With barely contained glee, Félicité would direct the police to the Plaza—Cassandra vindicated at last!—and half the peelers in New York would be kicking down the door, guns drawn, only to find Michael in placid communion with a vase of flowers. To keep Michael out of harm’s way—something he had done a piss-poor job of, to be sure—he would need to get him out of the hotel. Peggy’s wedding made the most sense, but there was no time for that now. He should have argued for it last night, but he had been so intent on getting lost in the mountains of food, the river of champagne, and the hi-de-hi-de-hos that he had forgotten all the wrong things. And then Rosemary had gotten it into her head that Miss Bloch must—absolutely must—stay in the hotel, which had only served to upgrade Miss Bloch from witness to accomplice, which would do no favors for a woman who already had about her the look of an anarchist, or a kohl-eyed spy in some film about the Great War.

  He had tried last night to stay away from the eye of her camera, but she was crafty. Often he heard the shutter without any sense of whom she had caught in the frame. Now all of last night’s photos would become evidence in a case file linking the notorious Francis Dempsey to this whole carousing crew. See how they toasted their plot the night before its bloody conclusion! A lavish dinner, cocktails by the gallon, and New York’s hottest floor show! Cold-blooded killers, every one of them!

  His world was reorganizing itself into a few broad categories. Everything he had touched since arriving in New York would be viewed as evidence, while everyone he had met would be considered a witness, an accomplice, or a co-conspirator.

  The only way he could help now was to buy them all time and distance. He wondered how long it would take for the name Angus MacFarquhar to be peeled back to reveal the name beneath it. Would he himself be the one to give that up? Not if his final bullet found its intended target. Would Martin step forward and claim him? Not unless he wanted a stain on his name that could never be wiped away. And would the Irish state, the newly christened republic, claim him as its own: a convict who’d escaped Mountjoy, only to resurface in New York, hell-bent on dragging the whole country into war with the old empire? Not bloody likely. He would be eagerly, willfully forgotten, unless the old man was so determined to put an Irishman’s finger on the trigger that he splashed the Dempsey name in the press. Striking a blow for Ireland! For the abandoned brothers of Ulster! For a history that never stopped bleeding.

  If the Dempsey name did become public, then what would become of Martin? Alive, yes, but what sort of life might he have? He wondered if the sap who’d shot Franz Ferdinand had a brother, and if so, how he’d fared in the years when Europe was sending its young men first to the trenches, and then to their graves.

  It was too much to figure out with only an hour before he was due to meet the Binghams. Already he was late for his appointment with Mr. Cronin, who was expecting him to turn over the bankroll that had fueled the FC Plan. That plan had come to an end and there was nothing to do but settle the tab. In his Highland regalia, Francis went to the front desk to retrieve the personal item he had placed in the safe: a small leather satchel of the type carried by doctors on house calls. Its brass clasp was all that protected the fortune in stacked currencies. As lavishly as Francis had spent in the past weeks, there was still close to four thousand dollars inside. He stuffed a thick slab of bills into the sporran, gave a fiver to the man at the front desk, and in an envelope left twenty for Collier. To a True Gentleman, he wrote on the outside, then added A. MacF. before sealing the flap.

  Cronin waited in an armchair beneath a potted palm, pretending to read the morning’s Times. He stood as Francis approached. If Francis had been expecting a smile from Cronin about his attire, none was forthcoming.

  “You’re set, then,” Cronin said. It wasn’t meant as a question, but a statement of fact.

  No, Francis wanted to say. But I’m going to do it anyway. He shook the bag at his side. “Should I hand it over now?”

  “Just don’t make a show of it,” Cronin said.

  “So is this what they mean in the gangster films, when there’s a yoke called a bagman? I guess that’s you, isn’t it?”

  Cronin snatched the bag from him. “You should watch your mouth,” he said.

  “It’s not going to matter much longer, is it?”

  Cronin turned without so much as opening the satchel.

  “Aren’t you going to count it?” Francis said.

  “I don’t care what’s in it.” He gave Francis a curt nod—why was the boy drawing this out? There was a look in his eyes that Cronin couldn’t place, but he was eager to get away from the hotel, from Francis, from this whole godforsaken city. “We’re done, so,” he said, putting an end to it.

  “Wait.”

  “What?” The word came through gritted teeth.

  “Did my father ever kill anyone?”

  Cronin snapped around again. “Why are you asking me that?”

  “You, the old man—you all know more about my own family than I do. I need to know.”

  Cronin glared at him. There was that look in Francis’s eyes again: Was it fear? Was Dempsey losing his nerve? “He never pulled a trigger, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “And my mother,” Francis said. “She wasn’t killed in a crash—an accident—was she?”

  Cronin’s lips went white. There was so much not to say. “If that’s what your father told you—”

  “It’s what he said, but it’s not the truth, is it?”

  Cronin had found a spot beyond Francis’s shoulder and his gaze was locked on that.

  “You said he left Cork to keep us safe. But it’s not as if every car in Cork was coming for us, so it must have been something else. Or someone else.”

  At no point had Cronin imagined confessing what had happened to Bernadette—what he had done to Bernadette. He had never told anyone, not even Alice. For years, he hadn’t needed to tell it; everyone in Cork knew, and that knowledge followed him to New York. Everyone could smell the bad fortune that clung to him like a pox.

  “Your mother was never a target,” Cronin said. “But that was no protection. Not for her. Not for a lot of others.”

  “Did you know the men who did it?”

  Cronin met the boy’s eyes—he owed him that—and slowly nodded. “Your parents wanted a better world for you and your brothers and they knew that took work. Work that others couldn’t do.”

  “Does that make it easier?” Francis said. “When you believe in why you’re doing it?”

  “It’s never easy,” Cronin said. “And it’s not supposed to be. You do it because it’s necessary. If it ever becomes easy, then you’re too far gone.”

  “And what would my parents have thought of this?” He meant the kilt, the sporran, the gun.

  “They knew that you do what you have to, for the ones that matter.”

  “D
oes the old man matter to you? Is that why you’re doing this?”

  Cronin absorbed the punch of it: all that it accused him of, all that it called into question. “I walked into the same trap you did,” Cronin said. He wanted to leave it at that—wittingly or not, each had put himself in debt to Gavigan—but what had the boy ever done? Francis might have stumbled in his life, but any mistakes he had made were petty compared to the sins of a man like Cronin. And yet here Francis stood, with his father’s grim face and his mother’s brilliant shock of red hair, preparing to endure a punishment far more severe than any Cronin had ever known.

  Cronin’s eyes burned. He looked at the floor, took a breath, then met Dempsey’s eyes again. He needed to leave, to get far from here, but his feet were rooted. “The old man,” he heard himself saying, “his name is Gavigan. John Gavigan. Knowing that won’t do you any good, and if you say the name out loud it’s only going to bring you misery. But you need to know that a man did this to you. Not God or the devil or some force of nature. Just a man who’s willing to make others suffer to get what he wants. He is too far gone.”

  Francis knew more than he ever had about his parents and the past, but there were too many pieces to be connected and still so much to ask Martin that could turn their younger years from a mad, irrational jumble into a thing, however awful, that was at least driven by cause and effect. But there was no time. There was only time to act.

  “I should be going,” Francis said, turning for the elevator. “I don’t want to keep the king waiting.”

  The thing that had been eating at Cronin revealed itself. Francis had his father’s face, yes, but it was the look in his eyes, the cast of his features, that Cronin had not been able to place until now. He had seen the same expression in his own eyes, in the silvered mirror in his uncle’s flat, on the morning before his first operation with Frank Dempsey. Before he reached the path by the River Lee where the police informant took his Sunday stroll, before Frank whistled the tune that signaled the man’s approach, before the branches that hung down in a cavern of greenery—before all of it, there was the mirror and that look: steely, excited, hollow, and frightened. When he saw himself later that night in the same mirror, he saw that something in him had broken and grown back crooked, like a bone that hadn’t been set right.