You might suppose that my fit of temper had done me no good with the Morrissey clan, but in point of fact I’d learned two things of value, perhaps three, although whether I could put them to use was another matter entirely. First of all, I now had a better idea of what Young Tim was up to, although at first blush it seemed daft enough. He’d set his cap for Rose. Whether he hoped for a love match as well as a dynastic marriage was of no importance. And he’d picked me for the simplest of reasons. It made his approach appear to be the offer of a gangland truce.
The second thing I’d discovered was at odds with the first. Rose Morrissey was animated by a different passion altogether.
I met Johnny Darling for a drink at a bar near the edge of Chinatown. It was close enough to the financial district, where he worked, but far enough off the beaten path for him not to be noticed. It would do him no credit to be seen with me, although Johnny would have brushed that aside like the gent he was. We’d done each other a service or two in what you might call another lifetime, but in the normal course of things our paths no longer crossed. Johnny wasn’t in the rackets, which is why I’d sought him out. He was the only person I could trust. Nothing we said would find its way to somebody’s long ears on the West Side.
I asked about his wife, of course, but he knew it wasn’t a simple social occasion, and I got down to cases, telling him what I knew about Des Morrissey’s active political sympathies, and trying to explain Tim Hannah’s curious overture, both in method and what I took to be his object. Johnny heard me out, putting one or two pertinent questions, but by and large letting me shape the narrative.
He nodded, when I was done, and ordered us another round of drinks. “Sláinte,” he said, smiling, raising his glass.
We clicked rims. Nobody in my family had spoken Gaelic for three generations.
“I don’t doubt your instincts, Mickey, but it seems kind of a reach,” he said. “Montagues and Capulets.”
“You haven’t seen her,” I said.
“Rose Morrissey.” He turned his glass on the bar, thinking it over. “Your guess is, she and Tim Hannah have already met.”
“That’s my suspicion.”
“When would they have had such an opportunity?”
“Thursday night Bingo at St. Xavier’s, for all I know,” I said. “I haven’t worked out the details. I’m telling you what I felt in that room. Rose Morrissey has good reason to see this through. Her father has no idea.”
“Well, fathers so often don’t,” he remarked.
This wasn’t a line of talk I wished to pursue. Johnny’s own father was a dangerous man whose enmity I’d managed to richly earn. “I mean that her father sees her through his own eyes,” I said. “Perhaps a victim of circumstance, who knows? I do know he doesn’t see her as a sexual creature.”
Johnny sat back. “A sexual creature?” He grinned. “You surprise me, Mickey. I thought the Irish imagined all women to be virgins or whores, with nothing in between, but you’re saying Morrissey’s daughter has honest desires?”
“Ach, take a flying leap at the moon, you barstid,” I said. “You’re all the same, bleeding Episcopalians, winking at sin.”
“Sodom and Begorrah,” Johnny said, lifting his whiskey.
We clicked glasses again.
“There’s something else about Rose,” he suggested.
I’d told him she was lame. Johnny himself had a piece of Jap shrapnel in his left leg which left him with a limp. I’d been using him as a sounding board, to put my thoughts in order, but now I was venturing into deeper waters. “Tim Hannah’s mob and the IRA,” I said.
“Montagues and Capulets?”
“A marriage of convenience, certainly,” I told him, “even if Des Morrissey can’t see it, or abide it. He’s got a hard boy for muscle, name of Dermot, but our lad Dermot looks to be less in Morrissey’s employ or under his discipline than he appears to be the eyes and ears of the Emerald Isle.”
“The military wing of Sinn Fein.”
I nodded. Johnny was quick.
“So, what you’re suggesting is that Morrissey would resist the match, for personal reasons, and for reasons of principle, but the men Dermot represents would see an advantage in it.” He sat forward. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“I’ve no one else to tell,” I said. It was the truth.
He circled back, as I expected he would. “What is it about Rose Morrissey, then?”
“I can’t penetrate her motives.”
“Easy enough to fathom, I’d imagine,” he remarked, smiling. “A girl who wears the shamrock on her sleeve.”
“I was thinking more Red, than Green,” I said.
I’d thrown him a curve, and it took him a moment to recover his aplomb. “You’re not serious,” he said.
“Do you know any Communists personally?” I asked him.
He stared at me in pure astonishment. I should explain that Johnny came from money; his family was in railroads, and an abiding power on Wall St. He shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “A few Parlor Pinks. People who voted for Henry Wallace. Hell, my dad still thinks Roosevelt was a tool of Stalin.”
“No, the real thing,” I said.
He waved it away. “You know there’s a Red Scare,” he said. “There’s always a Red Scare, in my circles.”
“Not just in yours,” I said.
He saw I was in earnest. “What are you saying?” he asked.
“Rose spoke of common cause, of the villainy of capital, of a corrupted polity. She’s got the heat of the committed.”
“You think she’s a Bolshie.” A statement, not a question.
“I didn’t say she was in the pay of the Kremlin.”
“No, but you’d say she had a thirst for social justice, and her father’s trapped in the past, with no eye for the future.”
“A thirst for social justice is no bad thing,” I said.
Johnny smiled. “I’m in no position to argue,” he said. He was one to wear his privilege lightly.
“As for her dad,” I said, “I’d agree he’s fighting a battle that’s already been decided.”
“Did he win or lose?”
“Ach,” I said, “that’s the argument. If it were up to Des, he’d rewrite history.”
“That’s a fair description of a Stalinist,” Johnny said.
I didn’t take his meaning.
“Des Morrissey’s a rigid man,” Johnny said. “His daughter appears to have inherited that, from what you say, if not his politics in the strictest sense. Beware orthodoxy, Mickey.” He grinned. “It’s all snake oil, to keep the rich in power.”
“The rich keep the rich in power,” I said.
“Our secret’s out, then,” Johnny said, cheerfully.
The third matter of business, the one I said I wasn’t so sure of, was our friend Dermot’s place in the scheme of things. I’d offered it to Johnny as a certainty, but I think that was mostly to make a weak tale more convincing.
Be that as it may, I reported back to Tim Hannah.
He was keyed up and eager, but once he learned that Des Morrissey had agreed in principle to the meeting, protocols yet to be determined, he seemed overtaken by lassitude, as if his former nervous energy were only a function of his anxiety that I’d fail in my errand, and when I proved successful, all the wind went out of his sails. I volunteered the intelligence that it was Rose Morrissey, not her father, who’d closed the deal.
His reaction was studied and over-careless. “Ah,” he said, “she’s something of a beauty, I’m told.”
“She has a sharp mind, and a sharp tongue,” I remarked.
“Well, we don’t all look for a pliant woman, Mickey,” Young Tim says, sort of sly-like.
‘Pliant’ was far from the word I’d use to describe Rose. I wondered, as Johnny had, how they’d met. I was sure they had.
He nodded to himself, as if confirming something he’d known already. “I don’
t doubt she’s got a mind of her own,” he said.
“I’d say she was the brains of the outfit.”
“Would you? And why’s that?”
“Des knows tactics. He’s a street fighter, by preference, and a politician only by default. Rose has an eye for the grand scheme. She understands strategy, not just stratagems.”
Tim gave me a chilly stare. “Perhaps she’s need of both,” he remarked. He’d said nothing about her withered legs. I took it the subject wasn’t to be discussed, or not directly.
“Des has a hard boy from Belfast keeping an eye on things,” I said. “A minder for the Provisionals.”
“Keeping an eye on Des, you mean,” Young Tim said. He knew where the land lay.
“He might be Rose’s creature, to some degree,” I told him.
A sudden fury suffused Tim Hannah’s face, but it was just as quickly suppressed. I should have realized he’d find a rival in Dermot. “To what degree?” he asked me, acidly.
I beat a retreat. “They have little enough in common,” I remarked. “But it’s my impression Rose wears the pants. Des is a front. This lad takes his instructions from the girl, not her father.”
Young Tim seemed to subside. “Find out what you can about their relationship,” he said. “Better to begin a negotiation in full knowledge than with the cup half empty.”
Which was all the encouragement I needed.