‘Pleased to meet you,’ said McGarrity, ‘I’m sure.’ He shook hands with both of them. The grip was bony but firm enough. From the sounds of it McGarrity had been in the United States for some time but there was still a strong accent behind the flattened vowels of New World English.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ said Russell, waving Barry and Sheila Connelly to club chairs set across from the couch where McGarrity had been sitting. Russell crossed the room to an antique escritoire that was doing duty as an ornate bar, bottles and glasses gleaming, a filled sterling ice bucket and tongs set to one side. Murphy’s, Jameson and Bushmills, all Irish, and a single bottle of gin. Fleischmann’s, not Gilbey’s.
Russell doled himself out four fingers of Bushmills, neat, then dropped down onto the couch beside McGarrity. The thin man glanced at the glass gripped in Russell’s hand, his lip curling slightly, but he said nothing.
Russell caught the look. ‘You’re thinking that I drink too much, aren’t you then, Joseph?’
‘I was.’
‘There’s no such thing as drinking too much.’
‘This is serious business we’re about, Sean.’
‘Very serious indeed by the smell of it,’ Russell answered, tasting the air with his nose raised. ‘What is it we’re brewing up today?’
McGarrity gave Barry and Sheila Connelly a long look then turned back to Russell. ‘The lot. Nitrated sawdust and nitroglycerine mostly.’
‘Blasting gelatin,’ said Barry. Now he knew why there was such a mixture of odours in the house.
‘That’s right.’ McGarrity looked at him. ‘What do you know about it?’
‘Only what I learned in the army.’
‘And what army would that have been?’
‘Irish Grenadiers.’
McGarrity sneered openly. ‘The Royal Army then. The king’s man.’
‘My own man,’ Barry answered, working to hold his temper. ‘As good as an orphan bastard from Cork could do in those days.’
‘You could have joined us instead of the army.’
‘What would you have given me for pay, a bullet in the head?’ Barry asked. ‘You know as well as I do that there was no agreement between any of the factions then. You killed as many of yourselves as you did anyone else.’
‘So why are you with us now?’
‘Because now I can do the organisation some good.’
McGarrity looked as though he was going to argue further but Russell clambered to his feet and raised a glass before his companion could speak. ‘Whisht! Enough blather.’ He cleared his throat and spoke in Gaelic. ‘Go maire sib bhur saol nua. May you enjoy your new life in America, Thomas Sullivan. Long life, a wet mouth and death in Ireland!’ Russell took a long swallow of his whiskey, almost emptying the glass.
‘You’re the only one with a drink in his hand, Sean, and your mouth is never dry from what I’ve seen,’ McGarrity said.
‘Ah, you’re a hard man, Joseph.’ He finished off the last of the whiskey and let the glass drop onto the small table at the end of the couch. ‘Up now and show us your bombs!’
They went down to the main floor again, McGarrity in the lead. At the bottom of the stairs Russell’s colleague turned to the left. Barry saw that this part of the house had been given over to Dr Doyle’s medical practice. There were two small waiting rooms, an office, two treatment rooms, a kitchen and a laboratory. In the ten-by-sixteen lab three men were working at a large table, while a fourth man brought in a large porcelain bowl of ice cubes.
All four men were wearing shoulder rigs that carried flat automatic pistols. The men also had large handkerchiefs over the lower part of their faces but Barry could see that their eyes were red and swollen from the fumes. The stench was enough to make his own eyes water and he could feel a burning sensation at the back of his throat.
At the table one of the men began drawing off the nitroglycerine from one cooling beaker with an eyedropper, moving it to a second beaker filled with water. Barry watched as the oily nitroglycerine, heavier than the water, dropped to the bottom of the second container. When all the explosive had been transferred the man began adding bicarbonate of soda to absorb the excess acid in the beaker.
After watching for a few moments McGarrity turned on his heel and left the room without a word. He went through a narrow door. Following him, Russell and Sheila, Barry found himself standing in what was obviously a very ordinary kitchen, complete with a gas cooker and a refrigerator. At a table in the middle of the room another man with his face obscured was adding a number of household ingredients together to make a stiff, grey-brown paste. Barry saw a jug of Sledge Hammer ammonia, a large jar of Vaseline petroleum jelly and a box of Boraxo brand saltpeter. Like the others, this man was also armed.
‘He’s mixing together the stabiliser,’ McGarrity explained. ‘Like pie dough. You add in the gun cotton, some nitrated sawdust and then the nitroglycerine. You end up with a sticky sort of dynamite you can mould into any shape you want.’
Russell put a beefy hand on Barry’s shoulder. ‘A dangerous fellow, Joe is. Spoons the fecking stuff into tins of corned beef and sends them to England as gifts with a friend of ours who works as a cabin steward on the Queen Mary. A certain irony there, don’t you think, Mr Sullivan?’
‘I suppose you could say that,’ Barry answered, looking at the mixing bowl and its contents. Scientists at the Hendon Police Laboratory just outside of London had examined the remains of the last few bombs exploded in Birmingham and Manchester and had come to the conclusion that the explosive itself and some of the bombs’ component parts were definitely of American origin. Probably from an explosives factory just like this one.
‘You don’t seem terribly impressed by all of this, Mr Sullivan,’ said McGarrity.
‘I’m not here to be impressed, Mr McGarrity. I’m here to see that Chief of Staff Russell completes his work and then returns to Ireland safely.’ He paused, wondering how much he dared aggravate Russell’s mysterious colleague. ‘What I’d like to know is why Chief of Staff Russell is here.’
McGarrity glanced at the young man with the mixing bowl. ‘Are you done now, Archie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then leave us.’ Young Archie scraped the spoon on the edge of the bowl and carried it out of the room. McGarrity turned to Barry. ‘You know why Sean is here.’
‘According to him it’s to greet Their Majesties.’
‘According to him?’
‘I bought the latest Time magazine in Chicago,’ said Barry, which was true enough; he’d picked it up at the railway station. ‘There was a detailed itinerary of the royal visit. Nothing was mentioned about Detroit. They’re crossing the border at Niagara Falls.’
‘True enough,’ said Russell, ‘but they are coming to Windsor on the Canadian side of the river. We’ll just have to nip across the bridge to deliver our gift to the young couple, God rot their royal hearts.’
‘The Canadian police must have your photograph, not to mention the Americans. They’re sure to be looking for you.’
‘Half the Detroit Police Department is Irish, Mr Sullivan.’
‘And the other half isn’t, Mr McGarrity and it’s likely that most of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in attendance won’t be Irish either.’
‘Life is full of risks, Mr Sullivan.’
‘I don’t deny it. Some are more calculated than others, however.’ Barry shook his head. ‘Bad enough that the chief of staff is so well known but to carry a bomb across the border with so much security in place? Madness.’
‘It’s not for you to say what’s mad and what’s not,’ said Russell, ‘and it’s me that’ll be taking the risk, boyo.’
‘And me that’s supposed to keep you safe,’ said Barry.
‘We don’t need you to tell us how to do our jobs, Mr Sullivan, and we don’t need you to keep Sean safe.’ McGarrity offered up a thin-lipped smile. ‘Why don’t you go back to New York and save us all a great deal of trouble?’ He glanced at Sheila Connel
ly, his expression souring. ‘Take the striapach with you,’ he added, using the Gaelic word for whore. ‘And put her on the boat for home.’
* * *
The R, or research division, of Military Intelligence occupied two small rooms under the eaves of 55 Broadway Buildings. The closet-size outer office was for the typist, while the slightly larger inner office was occupied by the division’s only employee, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Holland.
His desk, as usual, was a mess, piled high with files and papers, with more of the same hanging from the shelves of his two high bookcases. Most of the files contained correspondence and references to irregular and guerrilla warfare tactics, past and present, which was Holland’s special interest and the focus of his work with Military Intelligence.
Holland sat with his back to the desk and his feet up on the windowsill. Since his summary return to England the month before Holland had sent half a dozen memoranda to his own superiors as well as Kendal at Special Branch and Douglas-Home at the P.M.’s. None of them had been very forthcoming and none had expressed any opinion at all on paper.
From what Holland had been able to dig up through his own contacts, the order to have him returned to England seemed to have come from somewhere within the Foreign Office, transmitted through Douglas-Home. Officially it had been put out that Holland was needed at home and that there had been a duplication of services regarding royal security that made his presence in the United States redundant.
The truth, of course, was a great deal simpler than that. Politically, Russell had become as dangerous as one of the pressure-detonated booby traps Holland liked to design in his spare time. Since the royals had left England the bombing incidents had almost ceased. To have Russell arrested without real cause during the royal visit to the U.S. would generate an enormous amount of negative publicity, and worse, would almost certainly cost Roosevelt at least part of the Irish vote in the following year’s election.
Holland ran one hand over his bald scalp and kept staring thoughtfully out the narrow window, barely aware of the spires of Westminster peeking over the roofs and chimney pots on the buildings across from his own eyrie under the eaves. Once upon a time it had all been a gentleman’s game but no longer.
He smiled to himself, turning slightly to grab his cigarettes from the desk. He lit one and went back to looking out the window. Was Russell’s zealotry for the cause of Irish Independence any more or less insane than leaping out of a trench at Ypres or Vimy for God and Country? Was it madness to attempt the assassination of a king and queen if you thought your cause was just?
There he found himself stuck in the mire, sucking mud holding him in place, oozing up over his bloody gumboots. He remembered Thomas Barry’s words at their first meeting at Downing Street. Cui bono? Who benefits? Russell was many things but he was no fool. He had to know the consequences of killing George and Elizabeth. An Irish assassin would be the end of Ireland.
The bald man sat forward in his chair, his feet hitting the floor. He pushed his glasses back up onto his nose and dropped ash all over his shirt front as the mosaic of his thinking suddenly became a single, seamless design. Perhaps not an Irish assassin at all. Perhaps, instead, an Irish martyr. Poor Sean Russell, in America to attract interest in his cause, vilified by the press in Los Angeles, turned into a scapegoat without rhyme or reason.
The Irish-American vote, presently split between Republican and revolutionary, would be welded together as one in a united front. Roosevelt would suffer, perhaps even lose the election as a result, and America would stay out of the war that much longer. Long enough at least to ensure England’s invasion by the Nazis, leaving Ireland a free state on the far side of the Irish Sea with a German satrapy as its closest neighbour, a thousand years of oppression expunged at long last. They’d build a fifty-foot statue of Russell in bronze and drop it down into the middle of St Stephen’s Green and toast his name with Guinness until the end of time.
‘May the enemies of Ireland never find a friend,’ Holland grumbled, remembering the old blessing he’d heard for the first time long ago. He stood up, jamming his hands into his pocket and went to the window. It sounded good enough but there was something not quite right about it all. It was an elaborate construct, a design as detailed as the blueprints for a building.
Perhaps a building that didn’t exist.
Holland closed his eyes for a moment, thinking hard, finally remembering what it was that Stephen Hayes had said in that lonely windblown cottage on Friar’s Hill, overlooking the steel-grey sea. He turned away from the window, went back to his chair and, coughing, lit another cigarette from the butt of the first. He pushed away the mountain of files in front of him, dragged the telephone forward and dialled for directory. They gave him the number he wanted, and ringing off, he dialed again.
‘Quaritch’s.’ It was the old man himself, his voice as thin as parchment but with all his wits about him.
‘I wonder if you have any books on fencing.’
‘We have books on everything, young man,’ Quaritch answered tartly, assuming that anyone he was speaking to would be younger. ‘What sort of fencing do you mean? Fencing as in encircling a property or fencing as in swordplay.’
‘Fencing as in swordplay.’
‘Several,’ said the old man.
‘Excellent,’ Holland answered.
* * *
Michael the young chauffeur took Sheila Connelly and Thomas Barry all the way to their hotel off Congress Street, dropped them at the front door and sped away in a cloud of dust. Connelly and Barry went up to their one small room with its sagging bed and small stained carpet.
‘The bastards!’ said Sheila Connelly, dropping down on the bed, her small fists pounding her knees. Barry sat down on a straight wooden chair that had been placed under the room’s narrow window.
‘Why do you call them that?’
‘Because that’s what they are,’ she said furiously. ‘You heard McGarrity. To him a woman is nothing but a whore. You can bet that Sean doesn’t keep an opinion that’s much higher.’
‘Then they’re fools,’ said Thomas quietly. He stood, took the few short steps necessary to bring him to the bed then knelt, putting his own hands over the woman’s. ‘Fools and blind fools to boot.’
‘Ach, you’re the fool,’ she answered. ‘And a romantic one at that.’ She shook her head. ‘There’s no place for romance with this lot, Thomas. Their only love is for bullets and bombs.’
‘We can have it, even if they can’t,’ he said.
‘What? Love?’
‘Yes.’
She squeezed his hands in hers and looked down at him. ‘We can have it for a moment, Thomas. No more than that.’
‘Then that’s what I’ll take.’
He stood, lifting her with him, taking her into his arms and holding her but the soft moment and the silence only lasted for an instant. As their mouths touched she began to tear at his clothes and at her own, muttering and crying to herself, eventually pulling him down onto the bed on top of her, her fingers working at the buttons of his fly, then bringing his already stiffening organ into her grip, moaning for him, her thighs parting as she lifted her hips and pulled her plain cotton underpants aside with her free hand, guiding him into her, then letting go of him, her fingers clawing at his back as she thrust upward, impaling herself on him, screaming out his name as the tears rolled down her cheeks, squeezed from her tightly closed eyes, repeating his name like a battle cry with each movement either of them made until there was no sound or movement left except their ragged breathing and the rising and falling of their chests.
Sheila Connelly must have slept because the next thing she remembered was Thomas coming back into the room, closing the door softly behind him. He had two paper cups of coffee with him and a brown bag so translucent with grease and sugar she could see the shape of the doughnuts inside.
‘Been shopping, have you?’
He set the coffee and the bag of doughnuts down on the bedside tab
le. She sat up, drawing the sheet around her breasts. He sat down on the bed beside her. ‘I made a telephone call as well.’
‘To our friends in New York?’
‘Yes.’
‘You look full of gloom and doom, Thomas Barry. What did they tell you?’
‘Russell called his Clan contact in New York just before we left Chicago last night. Foxworth’s man intercepted the call and vouched for you but there must have been some kind of countersign Foxworth’s man didn’t know and Russell rang off immediately. Which means he knew I wasn’t from the Clan.’
‘Yet he leads us straight to his bomb-making factory, tells us his plans. It makes no sense at all,’ said Sheila Connelly. ‘A bullet in the brain and then tipped into the boot of young Michael’s car would be more likely.’
‘Which means Russell showed us and told us exactly what he wanted,’ Barry answered.
‘I think we should get out of here before Russell or McGarrity change their minds.’ She threw back the sheet and swung her legs out over the edge of the bed. ‘It’s not safe to stay here.’
‘Foxworth wants us back in New York as quickly as possible,’ said Barry, standing. ‘I checked with the air terminal. There’s a flight in two hours.’ He wrapped his arms around his naked companion as she rose off the bed. ‘So we have a little time yet.’
By the time they were done, the coffee had gone cold. They ate the doughnuts on the aeroplane to New York.
* * *
Acting on what was later announced to be an anonymous tip, George Messersmith, one-time U.S. consul in Berlin and presently an interregnum official at the State Department in Washington, ordered the arrest of Sean Russell based on technicalities within the Immigration Act and certain passport inconsistencies.
At 7:10 p.m. on June 5, less than twenty-four hours before the arrival of the royal train in Windsor, Ontario, Russell and his associate, Joseph McGarrity, were picked up at the Michigan Central Railway Depot. They had been preparing to board a boxcar about to be shunted onto one of the transfer barges that would take the boxcar and its passengers over to the Canadian side of the Detroit River, depositing them at the Michigan Central yards on the outskirts of Windsor.
The Second Assassin Page 27