Jack of Spies (16 page)

“I noticed you listening to our talk,” a voice said at his shoulder. It was de Lacey himself, at the bar for a new box of matches. “So what does a Scotsman make of these things?” de Lacey asked as the barman dealt with his request.

“The lockout?” McColl asked, noting, as the American doubtless intended, that his identity had already been probed. “My father always told me that you shouldn’t fight battles you couldn’t win.”

“And your father would be …?”

“A union man.”

“And you?”

“I wanted to see the world.”

“A fine ambition,” de Lacey agreed, taking the matches from
the barman. “As to the other business, if you only fight battles you can win, you’ll probably die in your bed, but your children won’t hear you remembered in song.” He smiled briefly, then went back to his table.

It was time to leave, McColl decided—he was deep behind enemy lines and had already drunk more than was sensible for someone in that position.

Outside, it was raining again, and the world seemed devoid of cabs. He eventually caught a tram down Mission and then walked the rest of the way, cursing his lack of a hat.

There was a message waiting at reception, his name in her writing on a cream envelope. She wanted picking up outside the main post office at one o’clock on Saturday, in an automobile if that was at all possible. They had a lunch appointment with unnamed friends, but she was hoping that the two of them could go for an afternoon drive if the weather was fine.

She smiled as he pulled up in the Model T, arranged herself in the passenger seat, and gave him a big kiss. The friends, she told him, were Agnes and Ernest Brundin, and they were meeting at a Mexican restaurant that overlooked the bay. Agnes had said to follow Powell as far as it went, then turn left along the waterfront. The restaurant was called El Gran.

She had met Agnes a couple of years earlier—Agnes Smedley as she was then—and they had written to each other at fairly regular intervals ever since. “They’re both socialists,” she warned McColl, “but I think you’ll like them anyway.”

The Brundins were already there when McColl and Caitlin arrived, heads hunched over menus in a sparsely populated room. Agnes jumped up when she saw them and hugged Caitlin warmly. She was also tall for a woman, with hair that seemed barely under control and large, soulful eyes that gazed into McColl’s as they were introduced. Her young husband was quiet, almost solemn, and clearly besotted with her.

After ordering, Agnes demanded to know about China and listened wide-eyed to Caitlin’s impressions of her time there. Once she discovered that McColl was the “friend” in Caitlin’s article, she included him more in the conversation, but he soon realized that any hint of cynicism was unwelcome and settled, like Ernest, for listening. Through the meal and after, the two women moved from the stalled Chinese Revolution to the growing ferment in India, then ventured back home for the latest news in birth control and the struggle over suffrage. Their enthusiasm was hard to resist, but as he listened, McColl had a growing sense of a whole other world, one not closed off only to men but to most of the rest of humanity. And yet people like Caitlin and Agnes, who created and lived in that closed-off world, were convinced they were serving the wider one. Wasn’t that a fatal contradiction, or was he just being cynical? He told himself that these were intelligent, well-intentioned people, something the world badly needed.

It was raining again when they left, and once they’d dropped Agnes and Ernest off at the cable car terminus on Hyde, he and Caitlin abandoned the idea of a country ride in favor of his hotel bed. “What did you think of Agnes?” she asked after they’d made love for the first time.

“A force of nature,” he said. “Like you.”

She took that as a compliment. “And Ernest?”

“He’s liable to get blown away.”

She thought about that. “Perhaps,” she conceded. “But you won’t,” she added with a smile.

No, he thought, he probably wouldn’t. But was that a good thing?

“Let’s get out of the city tomorrow,” she said. “Even if it’s raining. I want to see the giant sequoias in Muir Woods.”

“Where’s that?”

“Across the bay to the north. We can meet at the Sausalito ferry.”

“Aren’t you staying here tonight?”

“No, I won’t. I …”

“Word might get back to your father,” he guessed.

“I wouldn’t care about that. But my aunt … She’s old-fashioned in some ways, and I don’t want to hurt her.”

“Understood.”

“But we’ve got hours yet.”

When it was time, he insisted on driving her back. Her father’s friends lived in a big house on Twentieth Street, about half a mile from the Shamrock Saloon, and McColl saw a curtain twitch as he pulled up outside. She probably did, too, because he got only the briefest of good-night kisses.

Back at his hotel, another envelope was waiting. This one had come courtesy of a consulate courier and was full of twenty-dollar bills.

Sunday started gray and wet, but by the time they reached Muir Woods, a pale yellow sun was filtering down through the magnificent trees. McColl knew that it was a cliché, but the place really did feel like a cathedral. Like most gods, these sequoias were bound to make humans feel small.

For most of the hour their driver had given them, he and Caitlin walked the well-laid paths in companionable silence, listening to the birds and the steady dripping of the night’s rain from the branches above. And on the long buggy ride back to Sausalito, they gripped each other’s hands with more than the usual intensity, as if they’d just shared some sort of spiritual experience.

One of the quayside restaurants was open for lunch, and it was warm enough to sit outside, with a gorgeous view of the bay and its surrounding hills and cities. “We have to get back soon,” she announced once they’d eaten. “I have a meeting at five.”

“Who with?” he asked, disappointed.

“No, it’s a public meeting in a church hall. A friend of my father’s friend is giving a talk.”

“About what?”

She grimaced. “Oh, the usual stuff. Ireland’s situation and what to do about it. I know it’s important, but …”

“Hmm. Can I come?”

“You won’t like what you hear.” She grinned suddenly. “But why not? It might be good for your soul.”

“Perhaps. I’ve already sampled the local Irish hospitality. Do you know the Shamrock Saloon?”

She gave him a surprised look. “What took you
there
?”

He shrugged. “I was out walking, wondering when my girl would deign to see me again. It’s a nice enough bar.”

“I suppose so. The church hall is just around the corner, and people tend to go there after a talk.”

“Well, if that happens tonight, don’t be surprised by my accent. In establishments like that, I like them to know I’m Scottish.”

She was amused. “That says it all about the English in Ireland.”

Not quite, he thought, but he let it go. At least she wouldn’t get a shock if he had to exaggerate his accent.

A rain squall caught up with them as they crossed the bay, and their subsequent cab inched down a half-flooded Market Street at a swishing crawl, its windshield wipers utterly unequal to the scale of the downpour. The entrance to the church hall was full of people furling umbrellas and removing dripping coats, the hall itself almost packed. Caitlin led the way down the aisle and introduced McColl to her father’s friend, a cadaverous man in his fifties with thick gray hair and black-rimmed glasses. “Liam, this is Jack McColl, the Scot I met in China. Jack, this is Liam Keane, an old friend of my family’s. And this,” she added, turning to the balding priest beside him, “is Father Meagher. A fellow guest at the Keanes’. And a fellow New Yorker.”

Both men accepted the offer of a handshake, Meagher with a pursing of lips, Keane with what felt like a hostile smile. “I’m afraid we only saved the one seat,” the latter said almost smugly, and McColl could feel Caitlin tensing beside him. “I’ll see you afterward,” he told her, and walked away before she had a chance to protest.

He found a seat nearer the back and had been in it just a few moments when Larry de Lacey walked past with two of the men who’d shared his table the day before. They had seats reserved at the front.

Several announcements were made before the scheduled address, one about a lost cat, another concerning the arrival of a new piano teacher, a third detailing someone’s funeral arrangements. The collection cap doing the rounds was in aid of sending the local boys’ club on a trip into the mountains, and McColl wondered whether Caitlin would contribute or slip in a note on behalf of overlooked girls.

The speaker, somewhat unsurprisingly, turned out to be a priest. His subject was what he—and his audience—considered England’s long oppression of Ireland and how it should be brought to a speedy end. He began with a rambling account of the Gunpowder Plot, one of several events the English had used to justify anti-Catholic legislation. McColl had no way of knowing whether this was true and doubted whether anyone else in the audience had. The priest’s next generalization, that every subsequent improvement in the lot of British Catholics came not from English benevolence but from English fear, seemed similarly suspect as historical truth but rang all the right political bells. Making the English fear them was what mattered, the priest said, and the Church should set an example “in the deeds of patriotism.” Or to put it another way, as McColl did to himself, should do anything and everything in its power to support the struggle for independence. As the priest noted in another ringing phrase, “Faith and fatherland are one and indivisible.” No wonder de Lacey could count on men of the cloth to serve as his couriers.

The audience members clapped in all the right places and were willing to fill another collection cap for the struggle, but there was no great passion in the response—they had heard it all before, and Ireland was a long way away. What most struck McColl was the absence of Christian spirit in a Christian place of worship, the lack
of even a token attempt to see the situation from more than one perspective. But it didn’t really surprise him. He knew from Caitlin that most priests in Dublin had sided with the employers during the lockout, even once their flocks began to starve. Those priests knew which side their bread was buttered on, and so did the man on this platform. Both seemed happy to let their positions dictate their politics, and their politics determine how they interpreted their faith.

He couldn’t see Caitlin’s face from where he sat, but he thought he knew which expression it would be wearing—one of dutiful boredom. These were her people, and she wouldn’t fight them openly, but he knew that her view of humanity was more generous than this.

He waited for her outside and was pleased to see that she took his arm despite the presence of Liam Keane and Father Meagher. “We are going to the Shamrock,” she said. “Are you coming?”

The walk was just long enough for McColl to express his general agreement with the speaker’s point of view and to suggest that once Home Rule was a reality, any lingering English presence would soon disappear.

“And what of Ulster?” Keane asked.

“Oh, I expect there’ll be some sort of compromise,” McColl suggested airily, and received a contemptuous snort in reply.

“You did that deliberately,” Caitlin said once they had their drinks and a table to themselves.

Keane and Father Meagher, McColl noticed, were talking to one of de Lacey’s friends. And when de Lacey himself joined the group, he gave Keane an affectionate slap on the shoulder. What, McColl wondered, was Cumming’s man in New York going to turn up on Caitlin’s father? “I don’t suppose you can come back to the hotel?” he asked her.

“No, I can’t. I wish I could.” She looked around the bar and wryly shook her head. “This is just a boys’ club.”

“But not the one they’re sending up the mountain.”

She laughed. “If only.”

McColl was at Juan Palóu’s office first thing the next morning. He wasn’t expecting instant proof of an Irish-Indian conspiracy, and he wasn’t disappointed. It had taken the private detective twenty-four hours to set up the surveillance operation, and visitors to the ashram over the weekend had been few and far between. All had been photographed, but many of the pictures lacked clarity on account of the dreadful weather.

McColl looked through them. With one exception the male visitors were Indians, but none resembled Har Dayal or Khankhoje. The odd man out was wearing what looked like a Catholic priest’s robe, but his face was blurred by rain. If only the weather had been kinder …

The one woman pictured was also white, and heavily pregnant. Palóu couldn’t be certain that she’d visited the ashram office, but his son Alfredo had seen what looked like waving arms in the window at the same time as he heard shouting, and when the woman emerged, she looked angry and tearful. His second son, Paco, had followed the woman to an apartment on Sanchez Street, and identified her as Alice Burrows. She was unmarried, with two young children.

It wasn’t a bad start, McColl thought, and today the sun was shining. He paid Palóu for the last three days and told the detective to persist for another three. There was at least enough money for that.