The City of Strangers. Michael Russell

Is there any news about Mrs Harris’s body yet?’

      Superintendent Gregory shook his head.

      ‘Don’t try to fuck a fucker, son.’

      But the game was over.

      ‘Ned Broy had a telegram from Mr McCauley, New York. It seems our Mr Harris wasn’t as enthusiastic about an invitation to come home for a chat as everyone thought. Not as I’d want to tell Ned I told him so, but I did.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘He’s gone. Not the biggest surprise, and I’m glad to say one that I don’t have any fecking responsibility for at all. I can kick that one upstairs.’

      ‘What happened?’

      ‘He walked out of the hotel, that’s all. And why wouldn’t he if he’s worked out what might be waiting for him in Dublin? So now he’s gone, the consul’s had to tell the New York police that we parked an axe-murderer in a hotel room with a bunch of queers to keep an eye on him, and never even mentioned it. And they were all worried about what we’d look like if something got into the American papers! I suppose we should be running the rosary through our fingers and praying Owen doesn’t get hold of an axe.’

      He grinned. He was clearly taking some satisfaction in all this.

      ‘So does that mean I don’t go?’

      ‘Oh no, Stevie, the plane’s all booked.’

      ‘But I thought you –’

      ‘It’s not my mess. The Commissioner seems to think the NYPD will pick him up quick enough, so the job’s still the same. You might want to take a pair of handcuffs with you for the journey back though. Of course the NYPD will be pissed off. We’ve been playing the bollocks on their patch, however much we tell them it was all about Owen Harris doing us all a favour and helping us with our enquiries. They will know better by now.’

      ‘So what am I supposed to do?’ said Stefan.

      ‘Turn up and wait till they find him.’

      ‘And if they don’t?’

      ‘I’d say they will. No one seems to think he’s much in his head. But the lad might want to go easy over there. They’re as likely to shoot him as look at him, knowing what he’s done.’ Gregory laughed. ‘The place is full of Irish cops who love their mammies after all. They won’t take to him, I’d say. Not that anyone here would be too bothered if he came back in a coffin –’

      ‘I thought nobody really wanted me to go to New York –’

      ‘Now everybody wants you to go, me included.’

      ‘In case it’s a fuck up?’

      ‘Got it in one. You’re a bright lad, Stevie. But it’s already a fuck up. McCauley’s fuck up in New York, Ned Broy’s here. I don’t intend to make it mine. So the grand thing about you is you’re nobody. You don’t matter.’

      ‘What about the NYPD?’

      ‘What do they care? They’ll deliver you a prisoner, or if we’re lucky a box. And you’ve got the trip to look forward to, a hotel in New York. Jesus, you’ll be the toast of the sheep shaggers for miles around when you get back to Baltinglass. And it’s not all bad news, Sergeant. If you could maybe make it a box, you might even be up for promotion. It’d save on the trial and for my money, well, if I had to choose between being shot and being hanged –’

      Terry Gregory drained the whiskey in his glass and stood up.

      ‘It’s an ill wind, eh Sergeant?’

      He walked out to the lobby and into the street.

      In the room Valerie was sitting up, reading. She laughed as Stefan came in.

      ‘What was all that about?’

      ‘The man I’ve got to bring back from New York has disappeared.’

      ‘So aren’t you going?’

      ‘They’ll find him. Well, that’s what the superintendent said.’

      He shrugged. She said no more. As he sat down on the bed she stretched out her hand to touch his back. He sat there for a moment, not moving, feeling her fingers. He was aware how much he liked her. That was the thought in his head that made him smile. It wasn’t love between them, it never had been, but it wasn’t nothing, for either of them. He turned round and reached across the bed, stroking her hair. As he kissed her she pulled him slowly down on to her. Neither of them needed to speak now to know that this would be the last time they would make love.

       6. West Thirty-Sixth Street

       New York

      Longie Zwillman stood at the counter in the window of Lindy’s diner on Broadway, between 49^th and 50^th. He kept his hat on and his overcoat done up, though it was warm enough in Lindy’s. He was thirty-five; he didn’t look older but somehow people felt he was older. There was age behind his eyes, and behind the half smile that was almost always on his lips there was nothing that suggested he found very much to laugh at. He was drinking the cup of coffee and eating the cheesecake Clara Lindermann had brought him personally.

      It was busy in Lindy’s, but there was space at the window where Zwillman stood looking out, seemingly at nothing in particular. The two big men in homburgs who stood behind him would have made sure there was space, because Longie didn’t like people too close to him; even in a New York diner he expected the courtesy of space. But they didn’t have to make room for him. There was something about the way Longie held himself, and the way he looked at people when they came near him, that ensured he rarely had to ask for anything. He was a courteous man though; he seemed to inspire courtesy in others. Broadway wasn’t his territory; neither was Manhattan. He had come over from New Jersey. But he was respected here as he was respected everywhere. The work he had today crossed no lines. It wasn’t business. It was pest control, and he had an interest in that.

      Outside the window, across the sidewalk, a truck stopped. It was a fish truck, one of the hundreds that pulled in and out of Fulton Market every night. The driver looked through the window at the man in the overcoat, eating the last forkful of Lindy’s cheesecake. Zwillman nodded. The truck drove on.

      Longie finished his coffee and walked out on to Broadway, followed by the two big men. He sauntered down towards Times Square. He went almost unnoticed in the afternoon crowds bustling up and down around him, but not entirely. Several people recognised him and nodded respectfully. He nodded in return. Several times men walked up to him and spoke, in low tones of respect, asking after his health and the health of his family. They waited for him to stretch out his hand before they attempted to shake his. Two NYPD officers were among those who stopped and received an invitation to shake that hand.

      In all the unseeing and indifferent noise of Broadway, Longie Zwillman walked like a secret island of calm and courtesy, or so it seemed. He knew who every one of the people who greeted him was, even out of his own fiefdom; and they were grateful for it. To know him and to be known by him was something. To lose those small favours was something else; after all respect and fear weren’t very different.

      There was the beginning of darkness in the grey March sky over Times Square, and the lights all along Broadway were beginning to push the trash and the seedy corners out of sight. Crowds jammed around the 42^nd Street subway as the people heading home from work met the people coming out to the theatres and movies, restaurants and clubs, or to do what most people did on Broadway, to be there and to walk about.

      Pushing up from the subway, through the hundreds of New Yorkers streaming down, was a group of men, a dozen or so, all beered up for the evening in advance. They were rowdy already, laughing loudly and looking around with a kind of purpose and anticipation they seemed to find funny and