The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  Jamie wanted to get off the floor but nothing in his body responded to the thought. Helen must be somewhere in the house, but if she had any brains she was hiding until the ruckus came to an end. Perhaps she would call the police. There were still a few men on the force sympathetic to Gavigan and the largesse he could dispense. And perhaps there would be an ambulance, though it was sure to arrive too late to matter. It wouldn’t be long now.

  THE CORPSE THAT had recently been Gavigan was slumped in the big chair behind the desk. The portrait of his mother glared out into the room, as if she could not bear the sight of her dead son. She must have loved her boy as he loved her: fiercely and despite the opinions of the world.

  The fire that Cronin had felt when the bullet hit was already starting to ebb, replaced now with a different sort of ache. It felt like someone had taken a rusty saw to his left arm and detached the limb, then hastily stuck it back in place. His fingers still moved and that was a good sign, but the blood had reached down to his shirt cuff and that seemed to bode ill. Cronin had been in plenty of scrapes that had left him bruised and in need of stitches, but this was the first time he’d been shot. Surprising, really, considering the ways he’d spent the past twenty years. It was almost funny now that it had finally happened, but he knew that if he started laughing about it—if he really did find it funny—it was a sure sign that he was losing too much blood, or perhaps just losing his mind. Jamie lay on the floor, clearly not long for this world. His staccato breathing had become an occasional hiccup and his face was going slack. It struck Cronin that their places could have easily been reversed: Jamie only winged, while Cronin breathed his last. Jamie would have cleaned it all up, and if Alice ever received any word of his fate, it would only have been to brand him a murderer, and to lay bare every misdeed of his past. A great sob heaved out of Cronin’s chest, followed by another and another. His legs shook and for a moment he thought that he might fall from the arm of the chair to his knees. But he had not come this far—on this godforsaken errand or in this life—to die alone and be counted among these men.

  Cronin hauled himself to his feet. The pile of money was still on the desk, the top bill spattered with Gavigan’s blood. Cronin peeled it from the stack, left the lone bill on the desk, and put the rest of the money, along with the Webley, back in the satchel. He might have his principles, but he also had his responsibilities.

  He looked again at Jamie. If Cronin had never stepped off that train, then Jamie would not have taken his place at Gavigan’s side. He could tell himself that Jamie’s life might not have turned out any differently—that the years might, in fact, have treated him far worse—but he could not erase the fact that it was he who had put an end to it all, both for Jamie and for Gavigan. He was not a new man, not a different man since he’d found Alice and the boy at the farm. But a different sort of man could not have walked out of this room alive. Cronin knew who he was, and he knew that he could not be saved, but there were others who were not yet lost, and they were the ones he would serve.

  He reached for the fat black telephone and turned it so the dial faced him. The phone number was still in his jacket pocket, and with great effort his fished it out. The paper was now half soaked in his blood. He stabbed his fingers one by one into the dial, which buzzed with each rotation like a nest of bees. It rang twice, and then the oldest Dempsey’s voice said, “Hello?”

  “Listen to me,” Cronin said. “Your brother is about to do something terrible, and you have to stop him.”

  Martin started to ask, “Who is—” but Cronin cut him off.

  “You know my voice and you know my face,” Cronin said. “And you know your brother is mixed up in something.”

  “Just what are you and Francis up to? And don’t give me the runaround this—”

  “Your brother is going to kill the king today.” Cronin growled through gritted teeth. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself. “I knew your parents in Cork, and on their graves I swear it’s true.”

  “Look, I’m on the way out the door to a wedding.” He said it as if it mattered, as if it could put a stop to anything Cronin had said.

  “Your father and mother had a home on O’Donovan Rossa Street, close to the university. There was a piano in the parlor and a marble fireplace. There was a clock on the mantel—shiny, brass or bronze—with a man on one side of the clock’s face, and a lady on the other.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because I was there. I served with your father in the war.”

  “My father was a professor.”

  “And I was a gardener. But that didn’t stop me from pulling the trigger when the professor told me to shoot.”

  Martin’s breathing came through the receiver like bursts of static.

  “Francis has a gun,” Cronin said, “and he’s been told that if he doesn’t do it, then you and your brother and your wife are all dead.”

  “Hold on now, what? My”—his voice dropped to a whisper—“my wife?”

  “You need to stop him.”

  “You just said if he doesn’t do it, then we’re all—”

  “I took care of that,” Cronin said. “You’re not in danger anymore. But if your brother pulls that trigger, God only knows what hell he’ll unleash.”

  “There must be a million people at the fair today.”

  “Find the king and you’ll find your brother. Tell him it’s off. Tell him the old man is dead. Tell him that.”

  “What old man?”

  “Tell him,” Cronin said.

  Cronin’s left arm hung limp and blood pooled in the palm of his hand. He could feel himself slipping into that pool. Going under. But if he thought about it hard enough, he could get his fingers to move. Every small motion sent a jolt up his arm. The jolts were enough to keep him from sliding under, but not for long. The Dempsey boy’s voice was coming through the receiver but it wasn’t making any sense. Cronin wadded up the paper he had torn from the phone book, all the M. Dempseys in New York, and put it in his mouth. He chewed it slowly, the pulpy mass spiked with the salt iron of his blood.

  “One more thing,” Cronin said into the receiver, every word a stone he could barely lift. “After you stop your brother, you find Alice, and you tell her I tried to do right.”

  “Alice?” said a voice from far away. “Who’s Alice?”

  Who’s Alice? There was no way to answer that question. Alice was Alice. “On the farm,” he said. “With Henry and Gracie.”

  “Hello?” said the voice, but the voice was so far away. The receiver lay on the desk, and Cronin found himself on the floor, and though the voice continued to say, “Hello? Hello?” Cronin thought only of Alice, and the boy, and the baby, and the farm.

  FORDHAM HEIGHTS

  AS SOON AS MARTIN hung up the telephone, he called the Plaza. There was no answer in the suite, but what did that mean? Only that Francis had left for the fair as planned, that Michael couldn’t hear Big Ben, let alone a telephone, and that Miss Bloch must have gone about her day. Hadn’t Rosemary said she was bound for Prague, or was it Budapest?

  Still, there was no way around it. He had to go. He wanted to believe that the man on the phone was spouting nonsense, but he knew it was the truth, even before the man began to describe Martin’s boyhood home. He tried for the third time to knot his tie, but his hands were trembling so badly that he couldn’t make it work.

  Explaining it all to Rosemary would be another matter. Missing the rehearsal was one thing—a lark. It had been a wonderful night, one that they would never forget. But the wedding? He couldn’t miss the wedding. And what about the reception? His band? If he left on this mad errand to stop Francis and save the king and prevent the next Great War, then by the time he got to Woodlawn the bride and groom would already be on their honeymoon. Rosemary, Peggy, the Dwyers, and John Hammond himself—they would all agree that they had been let down by Martin. Get used to it, Mr. Dwyer would say to Hammond. This kid is a walking, talking disappointment. Onl
y Hammond wouldn’t stick around long enough to get used to it. The world was full of bandleaders, horn players, and lady singers who needed only one chance to impress. Hammond couldn’t waste time with time wasters.

  Everything he had done this week and the weeks that led up to it was predicated on his faith in the band he had assembled. Hoop would blow that horn, Exley and Gaines would keep the rhythm swinging, and Martin would sit down at the piano—right where he had always belonged!—and take the whole outfit for a drive. He had quit his job for this, quit it and set the bridge burning! He had wanted Rosemary to see this thing he’d built, which would justify all the faith she put in him, all the times she’d deflected, ignored, or outright argued with her parents when they made their nasty comments, their tinker talk and What a shame and their disappointment so thick you could put it in a pot and call it soup. All of her forbearance—and, truth be told, she had put up with a fair bit of malarkey from Martin—would be recognized and paid back when she heard what this band could do.

  But now. Christ, now.

  Rosemary was in the children’s room, preparing Kate to be a flower girl. The dress had been ironed one last time, and Rosemary was slowly unwinding the curlers from Kate’s hair. She looked like a miniature Shirley Temple, and when Martin entered the room, she twirled in a circle to show off how well her dress could spin. Martin told her she was lovely—just lovely—but inside he was reeling with the news that she could have been orphaned, or worse.

  He hadn’t known it, but there had been a black cloud hanging over his family, and if the man on the phone was to be believed, then that cloud had lifted. It was all because of Francis, and now Francis was going to unleash another kind of storm, one that would devastate the family in a whole different way. Kill the king? Martin was certain that it all went back to the farmhouse where Michael was nearly killed and Francis came away with the pile of money that had fueled their time in New York. What had Francis said? Fellas run off all the time? Only Francis had been found, and somehow the stupid bastard had wound up with a gun in his hand.

  Martin couldn’t unspool the entire story for Rosemary—Francis, the gun, the call, the man who knew his parents—so he stuck to the parts that would most directly affect her: There was a problem, a big one, and he needed to go. He said he was likely to miss the wedding, but he would be back in time for the reception. It was a complete lie, but easier, in that moment, than the truth. Rosemary pressed him for details—was it Michael again? Francis? What was happening?—but Martin would only say that he’d explain it all at the reception. That he wouldn’t be leaving her at this moment if it weren’t important. That, if nothing else, she knew how badly he wanted to play with his band.

  “And Rosemary,” he said. “About the reception. If”—he lied—“if I’m late, I need you to tell Hooper to start without me. To play bandleader till I get there.”

  “Hooper? The one you told me about from Minton’s?” she said. “But isn’t he—”

  “The best trumpet your father’s money could buy?” Martin avoided her eyes and checked his pockets: wallet, keys, cigarettes, lighter. He needed to get moving. “Just tell Hoop to keep things running. He knows the set list.”

  “Wait just a minute,” she said. “The wedding starts in an hour, and you’re telling me now that you’re not going, and oh, by the way, you’ve got a colored musician—”

  “Hoop doesn’t say colored.” Martin looped his tie around his neck and tried again with the knot. “I think he says Negro.”

  Rosemary slapped him—a full-handed, Bette Davis slap, just like in the pictures. Kate, who had been sashaying around the room, warbling a tune, stopped, wide-eyed, and stared at her parents.

  Martin put his hand to his jaw. He deserved at least that much, putting Rosemary through the wringer like this. But he was also wasting time, and needed to get moving.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Tears were coming up in Rosemary’s eyes but she shook her head to fight them back. “Why don’t you tell me anything—about quitting your job, or your secret plan for what’s next, or why you’re suddenly skipping the wedding, or how your band is going to throw my parents into an absolute—”

  “Because you would’ve worried!” he interjected. “And you would’ve tried to talk me out of it!”

  They stood facing each other, unsure of what to say next. He had spoken the truth, as he saw it, but he’d also admitted that he didn’t trust her. Not completely. He muttered something, the makings of an apology, and ducked out of the girls’ room. His jacket—where had he left his jacket?

  In the silence, Rosemary’s hand throbbed. She had never slapped anyone, not like that. She wondered if that was what her father felt, those times when he hit her mother, or had his hands gotten too callused to feel the buzz and the heat?

  Martin reappeared in the doorway. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to do this.” He had his jacket in his hands, the collar of it bunched in one fist. “And I should have left already. Jesus, the time.”

  “Just tell me what’s happening.”

  “I’ll explain it all at the reception.” He tried for a smile—composed, apologetic—but it came off as a grimace. “You can even slap me again, if it makes you feel any better.”

  THE FIRST CABBIE he saw spelled it out for him: because of the royal parade and the millions gawking along the route, half the roads leading to Flushing were closed and the other half were twice as crowded. “You can get in,” he said, “but the meter’s gonna run for hours. How about it, Mr. Rockefeller?” No, the train was the only way, and that meant two, maybe three transfers, and that meant an hour or more, on a good day. This was not a good day. He bought a paper at the newsstand and gutted it for the special supplement on the royal visit. Photos of the king and queen filled each page: walking among a crowd in Canada, their path picketed with soldiers; riding in an open-topped carriage at the coronation; posing on a Scottish hillside with their two girls when the littlest was no more than Kate’s age. An inside page listed the itinerary for the day, from the moment they arrived by boat at the Battery to the long trek up the West Side Highway and then on to Queens. A close-up of the fairgrounds marked points of interest with numbered dots: the Trylon and Perisphere, Perylon Hall, the Federal Building, the British Pavilion, the Lagoon of Nations. The royals would see it all in a motorized cart at a touring speed of three miles an hour—faster, Martin believed, than the subway train that was slowly, slowly approaching the tunnel that would take it from the Bronx, to Manhattan, to Queens, and, if the stars aligned, would deliver Martin to the fair before Francis could blow the Court of Peace to pieces.

  All that had been pent up during this mad week came at Martin in a rush: the funeral, the questions about their father, the men with their map to the bomb factory, and this hanger-on, this stormcock—what was his name?—who sent Martin on a cross-city chase and then ran off as the family gathered last night, only to call again with news that Francis, with his party of millionaires’ daughters and wives, was going to kill the king of England. Martin wouldn’t have believed a word of it if not for that voice; the man was right, Martin had known it before, in Cork, in the house where he was a boy. The man knew the house, the piano, the mantel, the clock. His mother had carried that clock home from a trip she and Da had taken to France, much to Da’s consternation. Ares on one side, Aphrodite on the other, both slouched against the mother-of-pearl face. Is that supposed to be me? Da had said, pointing to the bearded Ares leaning shirtless on his shield. Of course not, she said. That’s me. You’re the pretty one on the other side. Mam always got a laugh from that story. For his part, Da would play the peacock, pretending offense while he primped his necktie. After the flight from Cork, Martin never again saw that side of Da—playful, rising above his resentments. The clock was one of the few items Da took with them to Ballyrath, where it marked the minutes and hours of their shared confinement.

  As the train lurched and scraped its way beneath the city, Martin thought back on those
early, happier days. Tossing paper boats in the river near the university gates and racing to see which were first to reach the weir. Sitting with his mother in the opera house, her eyes full of tears, and learning from her how deeply music could cut, and that it was good to open yourself up to that ache. Walking with his father through the smoldering ruins the morning after the Brits had put the city to the torch. December, was it? He couldn’t have been more than ten. The air was wet and the smell of charred wood and the fog of crushed brick clung close to the ground. A man who had seen it burn said the clock on the city hall had chimed all the way until it collapsed into the rubble. Martin secretly hoped that the statue of Father Mathew might have burned—he’d always been afraid of the way the Apostle of Temperance glowered at the river—but the bronze priest had stood his ground. When Martin and his father returned home, their faces were streaked in soot and their clothes reeked of smoke. His father crouched in front of him, his thick hands on Martin’s shoulders. Who’s going to build it back, Martin? Da said, and then answered his own question, like a catechism. You are, that’s who.

  Martin remembered this, too: Walking the twisty uphill lanes to the candy factory near Shandon, Francis in tow and a few shillings in his pocket. Most of what they bought, they gobbled on the spot, but Martin had learned to save a few sweets to bribe the rough boys who controlled safe passage from the Butter Exchange to the river. In those days, he would watch the ships at the port and in a notebook sketch their flags and list their countries of origin. He walked the bridge over Patrick Street, marking the low tide that exposed the barnacled walls of the quays and the high tides that lapped the underside of the other bridges. He listened to the gulls careening for bits of bread and river trash, the echo of the newsmen on George’s Street, the clop of dray horses toting jugs of milk, each tolling its own bass timbre. All of this was music to him. He heard every note and stitched them into unwritten compositions. By the time he was ten, he spent more than an hour a day at the piano and when Francis pestered him to kick a ball or line up a column of lead soldiers, he would practice for twice as long. He also played the tin whistle, the clarinet, the French horn. In the months after their last Christmas party, he had begged to be taught the violin. His mother had just arranged for him to take lessons, and then Mam was gone.