Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

‘And what, pray…’

‘Ask an Irishman.’

‘Until the next time,’ said the man from Cork in the grocer’s store a block up from Wolff’s apartment. The next time was only three days later. By then he’d kept his promise and caught the train to Brooklyn to see Casement’s sister. She was restless, the house too small to contain her anxiety and a litany of woe. ‘He’s in hospital, Mr de Witt,’ she confided. ‘It’s too much for him, he’s so sensitive. He has these black moods, you see — he was the same as a boy.’

They walked to the park and she told him of a new ‘unpleasantness’. The Clan had caught Christensen frittering away the funds they’d entrusted to him on a wife he’d kept a secret from everyone. ‘He came to see me. I could tell he was no good,’ she said in a strained and unhappy voice. ‘I’m like that, you know. I look at people and I know at once. I see who they really are.’ She wiped away a tear and gave Wolff a shaky smile. ‘Dear Roddy’s done so much for that young man. He’s going to be dreadfully hurt.’ Yes, he would be, thought Wolff, and he regretted it deeply. ‘Does he need to know?’ he asked. ‘Of course,’ she replied emphatically and with the conviction of the biblical stone-thrower for whom truth is always pure and simply an end in itself.

The summons from the Germans was delivered to him the following day. The author had stolen an idea from a dime-store novel and signed it ‘The Dark Invader’:

Take the ferry to Hoboken, then a tram to the park across the street from the Norddeutscher Lloyd Line piers. Be there at 1900 on the 29th — tell no one.

Wolff telephoned Mr Ponting with the news.

‘Sure it’s Rintelen?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Dark Invader? It’s too ludicrously vainglorious to be anyone else.’

‘My people followed him to a trade-union office on the New Jersey side yesterday. Stirring up the Irish on the docks to strike, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Another of his “enterprises”.’

‘Best go armed,’ he advised.

But Wolff was glad he’d left the revolver nailed beneath the floorboards; it was too cumbersome for a light coat on a warm autumn evening, pressed between the worsted shoulders of longshoremen on the tram from the ferry, a sharp smell of stale sweat and beer. Everyone was going the same way, rumbling and cussin’ like a crowd before a football game, with Billy the barrack-room lawyer from Belfast — a true son of the city — threatening to kick anyone ‘up the arse’ who didn’t join the strike, and a fella from ‘ Jerzee ’ who was booed and thumped for complaining that it wasn’t his war and who was going to feed his family if he joined a walk-out? ‘Who the hell are you?’ someone asked Wolff as they approached the Norddeutscher terminal. ‘NYPD?’

‘Dressed too smart for the police,’ growled Billy. ‘Look at that suit there; from Paris, I wouldn’t wonder.’

‘Berlin,’ he replied, and it didn’t seem to be necessary to explain more.

In their tackety boots they clattered from the tram in front of the terminal, and hurried across the street into the park. Beyond the first belt of trees, a crowd of several hundred longshoremen was gathered about a small dais; on the sidewalk close by, a dozen bored-looking police officers. No sign of a ‘Dark Invader’. Turning his back on the park, Wolff walked towards the long, low red-brick terminal building where many thousands of passengers had set foot in the New World for the first time, eerily empty now the Atlantic was closed to German shipping lines. Beyond the terminal, the topmasts of the steamers laid up at the piers for the rest of what was going to be a long war. A small car appeared at the angle of the building and accelerated across the parade towards Wolff, but the driver swung left through the gate without giving him a second glance. From the park, a murmur of recognition and applause as the speakers stepped on to the platform. Facing the crowd alone on the sidewalk, Wolff felt like a hooker touting for business. The attention wasn’t healthy. He walked across the street and through the trees, drifting at the edge of the gathering until he could see the booming Irishman who’d just begun to address it.

‘…you have the power to strike a blow for freedom,’ he told them, his ‘freedom’ echoing effortlessly across the park. John Devoy was standing at his back.

‘You know me. Big Jim Larkin cares no more for kaisers than for British kings. But Germany’s cause is now our cause — this is for Ireland.’

More cheering. ‘You men are the ones who load British guns and shells, the horses, the food they need for their war… and you are the ones who can say, “No, enough, we’ll not serve your bloody purpose any more. Leave our country.”’

Some men near Wolff began to chant, ‘Strike, strike, strike.’

‘That’s right,’ Larkin pointed in their direction. ‘Those men there have it — strike for auld Ireland, here in New Jersey.’

The cry was taken up: ‘Strike, strike, strike,’ and Wolff was clapping with the rest, or trying to, only someone was tugging at his sleeve. Half turning to look, he discovered Laura smiling up at him.

‘What on earth…’

She shrugged and put her hands over her ears, then she shouted something but it was lost in the noise of the crowd.

‘To meet an associate,’ he said — or did she know already?

She shook her head blankly. The man beside her was bellowing inarticulately, like a punter cheering home the favourite: Big Jim was heady stuff. They were all drunk with excitement at the prospect of breaking strike laws in the service of auld Ireland.

‘Strike, strike, strike.’

Wolff touched her elbow and with a tilt of the head suggested they move away. She smiled weakly and nodded.

‘Those who come out can draw from a strike fund for their families,’ Larkin told them. ‘Mr John Devoy from Clan na Gael is here to tell you how…’

They walked just far enough for conversation to be possible.

‘Is it like this at your suffragette rallies?’

She laughed lightly. ‘Noisier.’

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

She shook her head.

‘You don’t seem surprised to see me,’ he observed, tapping a cigarette on the back of his case.

She looked away, the colour rising to her neck and face. ‘Mr Devoy thought you might be here.’

‘I wonder how he knew.’

‘From his German friends, I expect.’ Her gaze led him discreetly to where three, perhaps four men were standing beneath the canopy of a weeping cherry. They were twenty yards away, their faces hidden by the tree, but Wolff recognised one of them at once. Shifting awkwardly as large men do, his back turned towards them and his right arm raised to a branch above his head — the master of the Neckar . He was listening to someone in his shadow, nodding vigorously. Then he turned towards the meeting and Wolff caught a glimpse of the Dark Invader behind him.

‘Your Mr Gaché?’ she asked.

‘And some of his business associates, yes.’

‘I thought so.’ She bit the corner of her bottom lip, something she did when she was uneasy. ‘It’s a good turnout; quite a few men here,’ she said, catching his eye.

‘But only one woman.’

She laughed and looked down, self-consciously sweeping a loose strand of hair behind her ear. ‘I’m perfectly safe. Sir Roger says the only true gentlemen are Irishmen; they are gentlemen by instinct, not by an accident of birth.’

‘Then there’s no hope for me.’

‘There might be exceptions,’ she said with another light laugh, the tinkle of fine crystal. ‘After all, you are Roger’s friend.’

‘An honorary Irishman, then.’

‘That must be right.’