It had taken them a single night to mole their way under the shallow foundation of the prison using spoons, tin cups, and a metal chamber pot. The gimcrack jail was a joke, built to hold no criminal more desperate than the town drunk. They found a skiff tied up on the river. They rowed across the St. Lawrence to a hero’s welcome in the United States.
Lying stretched out on his bed, arms folded across his breast, staring up at the ceiling, he feels a dull misery when he thinks of his years of exile in the States. Once there, McMicken insisted he stay. The prison escape he had engineered put him beyond suspicion. The membership card issued by the Fenian Brotherhood was a passport not to be wasted. It gave him a pass into Irish Republican Army circles. McMicken wanted his prized agent where he could be most useful, in America, where the Irish operated with impunity and without interference from the authorities. He wanted him in the thick of things.
So he had gone wherever McMicken demanded he go, insinuated himself wherever useful things could be rned, helpful information harvested. He had been bounced from Boston to Cincinnati to Detroit to Chicago and finally to New York. He had done everything asked of him. Enlisted in the Irish Republican Army, turned out faithfully for military drill, attended patriotic rallies and huzzahed the golden-tongued orators, shook collection boxes for the cause in poor Irish neighbourhoods, twisted the ears of the better class of Irishman to buy bonds issued by a still non-existent Irish government. He became a darling of the leadership. They bestowed on him the nickname “the Indefatigable Dunne.”
He was every bit as indefatigable in McMicken’s cause. His reports transmitted in numerical code were precise, detailed, and written with a fluency he could never achieve in English. His involvement in IRA military exercises allowed him to give estimates of quantities and kinds of weapons and the locations of arsenals. He could report backroom conversations – even hour-long speeches – nearly word for word. He carefully noted down bond sales and donations, allowing McMicken to take the political temperature of the American Irish, whether it was truly hot or cooling. Cheering a fiery speech cost nothing but, as McMicken was fond of saying, coughing up hard cash is a different thing entirely. The true measure of commitment is the number of nickels and dimes in the collection plate.
As the months passed, Dunne had begun to know what it meant to be bone-chillingly afraid. The kind of fear that tightened your nut-sack and puckered your arsehole every hour of the day. The Fenians talked openly of the terrible revenge they visited on their own. Any man discovered a traitor was meat for slaughter. They eradicated the powerful as nonchalantly as they did the humble foot soldier. D’Arcy McGee had got his bloody comeuppance, a bullet on Sparks Street in the nation’s capital, for recanting his old revolutionary views. People who didn’t hesitate to murder a member of the House of Commons wouldn’t give a second thought to snuffing out Michael Dunne’s candle. Even McMicken had grown wary after McGee’s assassination. The Fenians had let it be known that they had marked him down for death too. McMicken lived like a hunted man, trusted nobody but his sons to guard him. The McMicken boys went everywhere with their father, armed to the teeth. McMicken himself carried a brace of pistols under his frock coat.
Dunne reckoned that it was time he followed the Stipendiary Magistrate’s example. If McMicken relied on pistols then Michael Dunne would rely on pistols too. He began to haunt New York’s shooting galleries, working hard to improve his marksmanship. Soon he loved shooting as much as he loved the Polybius square. Both demanded perfect focus, paring the world away to a column of numbers or a target. After a month of steady application he could stitch a pattern on a bull’s eye the diameter of a teacup. In another two weeks he had shrunk it to the size of a silver dollar.
Those days he lived in the Bowery, a once fashionable area of New York that was now home to criminals, the poorest of the city’s labourers, the lowest bums and tramps. On every street there were German beer gardens, saloons, brothels, and theatres offering lewd and vulgar entertainments. None of this had any attraction for Dunne – he despised immorality – but the district offered anonymity. The Bowery was a wasteland populated by transients; people came and went; no one remarked sudden appearances or disappearances; questions about your business were likely to awaken suspicions that the questioner was a stool pigeon.
Dunne resided in a peeling ruin that had, in better days, been an imposing townhouse but which had decomposed into a warren of noisome rented rooms. Its tenants were a cut above many citizens of the area simply because they worked. The jobs they did – scrubbing laundry, digging ditches, shining shoes, swamping out saloons, mucking out stables – sent them out of their beds every morning at dawn and kept them toiling away until darkness fell. An empty, silent building was perfect for a man in Dunne’s line of work. He could compose his reports in peace. It provided a safe location to conduct IRA and Fenian business.
The only two people who didn’t evacuate the building during the day were Rose and her fourteen-year-old son, Billy, who lived on the same floor as Dunne. Neither caused him any concern. It was common knowledge in the building that Rose spent her nights flat on her back in a knocking-shop owned by a toothless madam known as Polly Gums. When Rose reeled home in the morning, smelling of gin, she immediately pitched the boy out of their quarters so he wouldn’t disturb her beauty sleep. From nine o’clock in the morning until dusk, when she sashayed out of her room twitching her broad behind, Dunne never laid eyes on her, and assumed she was dead to the world, well dosed with laudanum, the whores’ favourite cure-all. Rose was no more capable of noticing anything going on around her than was a corpse in a funeral parlour.
As for Billy, he posed no threat either because he was a softhead, a simpleton who mooned about the hallways, softly and tunelessly humming to himself, or crouched on the front stoop like a gargoyle, his cornsilk hair a tangle of cowlicks and rooster tails, his mouth hanging open slackly as if he were inviting houseflies to lay eggs on his tongue. Everywhere Billy went, he clutched a daguerreotype in his hand, a studio portrait of himself taken when he was about a year old. Constant handling had darkened it with a patina of grease and dirt so dense that the infant’s image seemed to be taking form in shadows, or emerging from a grim thunderhead.
Nobody got by Billy without being pestered to look at his portrait. He plucked at people’s sleeves, cried out to each and every passerby, “Look at Baby Billy! Look at me!” The tenants of the building ignored his pleas, bustled by him, thrust him aside, or if he latched on to them and refused to let go they handed him a slap to the head. Dunne was the only one who couldn’t escape him. Once accosted, he couldn’t move. The daguerreotype of the gloomy baby held him fascinated, the high-pitched, piping cries of “Look at Baby Billy! See! See!” rooted him to the spot as if his feet had been pierced with spikes. He would stare at the portrait until the boy snatched it out of his hands and ran down the corridor clutching it to his chest, shouting, “Mine! Mine! My picture!”
Each time this happened, Dunne felt a little more frightened, a little more hollow. He could not understand why a mother would memorialize one of nature’s mistakes in a daguerreotype. Had she been drunk when she took the baby to the photographer? Or could it be possible that she felt something for a mush-head that nobody had ever felt for Michael Dunne?
Then one day it came to him that Billy might provide the solution to something that someone had said to him and which had recently been scurrying around in his brain like a rat in a wall. For the next few weeks, he reviewed and put in place all the necessary steps. One Saturday afternoonDunne sought out Billy. He found him lurking in a stairwell. When the boy thrust the daguerreotype at him to be admired, Dunne asked him if he would like to have a “big boy picture” taken.
It took some time for Billy to untangle what was being said to him. When he finally comprehended, his willing eagerness was everything Dunne had hoped for. Immediately, he began an insistent whining. “Now, take Billy’s picture now. Right now. Now.” He continued to chirp
these words even as Dunne took him by the hand, led him out of the back of the dwelling through the privy yard and down a maze of garbage-strewn alleys that delivered them into busy Canal Street.
It was an overcast spring day; there was a smell of rain in the air, and a ceiling of dark cloud hung above the city. Dunne hailed a cab. The novelty of a ride in a hansom finally plugged Billy’s gob. To keep the gawking boy from toppling out the window and into the street, Dunne had to hold on to his belt all the way to the East River dockyards.
When they dismounted from the vehicle Billy found the stupendous din of the wharves terrifying. Tucking his picture securely into one armpit, he clamped his hands to his ears to hold out the shriek of tugboat whistles, pulleys, and winches, the hiss of donkey engines, the shouts of sailors and dock men. Dunne took him by the shoulders and manoeuvred his goggle-eyed charge past all the hazards, the cranes and chugging steam engines, the files of sweating longshoremen who came staggering down the gangplanks bent double under their loads and threatened to trample the frightened boy underfoot.
When he got him into the area of warehouses, clear of the worst of the noise and the frenzied activity, Billy calmed down. Dunne steered him to a building that had once housed a sailmaking concern but was now unoccupied and in a very bad state of repair, the majority of its windows boarded up, its roof shedding shingles, its walls sprinkling paint flakes around the footings. Dunne knew it well. Eight months before, he had negotiated with the widow of the former owner for its rental. Several firms had made the widow offers of purchase, but she had refused them all because she had delusions about the value of the property. While waiting for the right price, she was willing to let it to the athletic club that Dunne represented. These supposedly ardent boxers and gymnasts were all members of an Irish Republican Army cell. The warehouse provided them a place to bayonet sacks of oats and to hack away at one another with wooden swords, safe from prying eyes.
Dunne, having selflessly volunteered to open the building on cold winter mornings and fire up the stove to warm the place before the others arrived for training, had the key to the turnip-sized lock. He let Billy and himself in.
The interior was musty, damp, and dismal. The windows had been set high on the walls, just below the roof, to catch all the sunshine possible to light the sail-stitchers’ work. But stone-chucking vandals had broken many of the panes in the deserted building and they had had to be planked up to keep out snow and rain. It was a dim, shadowy place.
Billy asked, “Where is the picture taker at?”
“I’m the picture taker,” said Dunne, pointing to the thickest crop of shadows. “I set up my camera there.”
Billy blinked owlishly, then mace housedmove to investigate, but Dunne caught him by the collar of his shirt, swung him around, and marched him to a chair set before a sheet of sail canvas that had been tacked to the wall. The oddments that hadn’t been cleared from the building when the business had closed had supplied everything required for the picture taking: a spool of waxed cord, remnants of canvas, sailmaker’s needles. All he had needed to provide were six whiskey jugs filled with water and stopped with corks, which rested on the floor a few paces from the chair where he was busying himself posing Billy. He had delivered the jugs the day before.
When he got the boy squared away, Dunne checked the light. He had selected the spot because the casements above the chair still held glass and admitted daylight. Despite the grey day, he was satisfied they provided enough illumination.
He made a few more fussy adjustments to the boy’s position, lifted his chin with his finger, turned his shoulders a little more to the left. When he was satisfied with his composition he knelt down so the boy’s eyes were level with his own and said, “You must keep very still. If you move, you will spoil the picture. Do you understand?”
Apparently Billy did. He didn’t dare nod an answer to the question; he held himself rigid, motionless. Dunne left him there and strode towards the spot where he had told the boy the camera waited. Yesterday he had measured the distance to where the deepest darkness began – fifteen paces. He counted them off, turned to face the boy.
It seemed to Dunne that Billy’s pale features and white-blond hair were attracting every gleam of light that penetrated the sooty windows, were reflecting it back to him like a smooth and radiant moon. He cocked his ear to the racket coming from the docks. It was loud enough; it would serve. Beneath the squeaks and squeals, the steady pounding of steam engines, he could detect something else, a brisk pattering on the roof, a growl of thunder, then a full-throated roar of wind. The clouds that had threatened rain earlier were unleashing a downpour.
Billy, tense with anticipation, sat frozen in place. The windows above his head were instantly convulsed with streaming water. The precious light glowing on the boy’s face began to wane, he was fading from sight, darkening and receding, like the features in the little portrait he held on his knees. Billy was becoming indistinct, his countenance blurring and swimming as the rain snaked down the windows. Just as the boy hovered on the point of disappearing entirely, Dunne raised his arm, aimed, and snapped Billy’s picture with a muzzle flash.
To Dunne, the walk back to the body felt a great deal longer than fifteen paces. Most of the blood and grey brain matter had struck the canvas backdrop, just as he had calculated it would. Billy was still in the chair, but his body was grotesquely contorted, the head thrown back over the chair back. Dunne pulled the sheet of canvas down from the wall, spread it on the floor, lifted Billy and placed him on it. To weight the burial shroud, he laid five whiskey jugs alongside the body. Then he began to sew up the canvas with a long, rusty sailmaker’s needle. That task completed, he used the water in the one remaining jug to scrub away whatever blood had splashed to the floor. The spots couldn’t be completely eradicated, but forty years of spilled tea, melted wax, and tar drippings had stained the floor so much they would hardly be noticed.
There was nothng left to do but wait for full dark. He sat down beside the body, wrapped his arms around his knees, remembering what that man had said to him in the shooting gallery. Until he had started to practise there, the fellow had been acknowledged the best shot in the borough and he hadn’t liked having his reputation challenged by a newcomer. One afternoon, after having watched Dunne stitch a tight pattern on a target, the gentleman in question had said to him, “The eye in a bull’s eye is only paper. It’s a different matter when what you are aiming at can look back at you. I know that. I was in the war.”
He had pondered that remark for some time, regarded it up and down and from every side until he thought he understood what had been said to him. He had been told that a gun was only a tool. He used it well enough on paper, but that wasn’t what it was meant for. The question was: When the time comes that you need to use it to kill, will you be able to?
In Dunne’s opinion, most people did not look far enough into the future. The day might come when he would be discovered as a spy, and his life would depend on proving to himself that whether it was a bull’s eye or a human face before him, it made no difference to Michael Dunne, he would not hesitate to discharge his weapon into either.
He knew now he was capable.
When Dunne could no longer see his own hand held up before his face, he hoisted Billy over his shoulder and walked out into the night. There were fewer people about on the docks, mostly drunken merchant seamen returning from a spree on the town, and a few gangs of longshoremen unloading urgent cargo by lamp- and torchlight. They took no notice of a man toting a roll of sailcloth. At a spot on a deserted wharf shielded by a stack of timber, Dunne paused, looked about him, and tipped the bundle off his shoulders into the river. For a moment, it bobbed and floated, then the jugs did their work, slowly dragged it down into the depths.
Dunne turns on his side and, as he always does when he wants to be most lucid, speaks aloud in pure numbers, in the language of the Polybius square.
“22,11,55,55,14 12,11,33,52,45,45,42,52,23,42,12.”
Billy disappeared.
For a time when the voice had said to him that someone was following he had thought the voice might be referring to Billy. That instead of drawing back into the shadows of the picture, Billy was emerging from them. But now Dunne sees how absolutely wrong he had been. There is no doubt. Billy disappeared.
Today it became obvious to him that the someone who is following can be none other than Mrs. Tarr. She is coming to him. That voice he had once thought sounded as flat as the tapping of a telegraph key had been a fault in his hearing. He is sure that the next time it speaks to him it will be in Mrs. Tarr’s warm tones, will be coloured by her loving character. And that hazy form will assume a definite, happy shape, grow ever more recognizably her with every step it takes towards him. And that slow, cloudy billowing about the knees that might have been anything – Billy wading up out of the river, a man tramping through snowdrifts – will sharpen until it becomes that particular skirt, the one he so admirs on Mrs. Tarr. And those bright, hovering flecks about her head and shoulders will grow ever stronger and light her face ever more clearly. He is certain of it. It is only a matter of time.
A Good Man Page 21