‘Why did you fake your suicide?’
The needle dropped on to the cylinder and the cylinder began to turn.
‘You’ll call me captain,’ Spalding’s voice commanded, ‘or you’ll call me sir. I will not suffer insubordination, sport. You will learn this to your cost.’
‘Why, sir, did you fake your suicide?’
There was a long silence. I could hear the sludgy moan of the needle on the wax. What I was hearing defied the laws of physics. But Harry Spalding had engineered his own bleak path through the rational world. He had harnessed magic to do it.
‘My parents followed a faith frowned upon by the land of the brave and the home of the free. Our faith was persecuted, outlawed. A Federal Bureau man called Grey oversaw the destruction of our place of worship. My parents prayed for revenge.’
To whom, I wondered. But I knew the answer.
‘Grey had a daughter. She had aspirations to be a dancer. I courted her. I wooed her, Martin, old chum. I took her to Europe cherishing dreams of the stage and ovations and garlands. And I butchered her with a boning knife and dropped her corpse in weighted pieces in the harbour at Rimini.’
‘And her father found out.’
‘Her father was dead by then. But he had buddied up for years with a loyal and dogged partner in the Bureau by the name of Gianfranco Genelli. Genelli’s entire family were Sicilian hoods. He was the white sheep of the flock. But he kept on good terms with people on both sides of the law. Things became a little hot for old Harry Spalding in the years after Rimini. Harry moved around, but Genelli’s people were only ever a step behind. It rather cramped my style. Eventually and somewhat flamboyantly, Harry was obliged to say adieu.’
Which was not a hard thing to accomplish, I supposed, in the New York of 1929. Not for a man as stupendously wealthy as Spalding had been. Not after the Crash, when it must have seemed as though the Great Depression would just go on deepening for ever.
‘So you got away with it.’
‘With what?’
‘With her murder.’
‘I get away with everything.’
‘Where are you now, Spalding?’
‘You’ll find out soon enough, sport. And you will call me captain or you will call me sir. I sparred with Hemingway, you know. And I bested Hem. I drank Scott Fitzgerald under the table.’
‘And you offered Bricktop a hundred grand to sleep with you and she turned you down, you fucking creep.’
There was a groaning, smudgy silence. Then, ‘I’ll see you soon, shipmate. I’m looking forward to it.’
My bravado was exactly that. I retreated to the dim, troubled refuge of my cabin and my ailing dad. Nothing will happen aboard the boat. Nothing will happen until we reach land. We are in no real danger until then. When we reach land, we will be in the proximity of Harry Spalding, who has never died. He will come aboard and take command. We will embark upon our real voyage. The
Eleven
I am to meet him after all. The Rimmers are holding a garden party and I accepted my invitation ages ago, and this morning I discovered that the man everyone refers to as Jane’s obnoxious American is also on the list of invited guests. Tommy Rimmer, who was very apologetic on the telephone this morning about it all, does not think that he will attend. He has, apparently, a reputation for not turning up to things. It’s something he probably cultivates, a kind of unpredictability designed to make him appear interesting rather than merely uncouth. But I think he will turn up. I have thought a meeting with him inevitable ever since his battered racing schooner limped into Liverpool Harbour and my father’s yard. He does not know about me. It was a ghastly coincidence, the fact that his boat fetched up for repair where it did. My father has had no reason, I’m sure, to mention me to him and I have every reason for never mentioning him to my father.
I will have to go to the Rimmers. It would be rude, now, not to go. And I will not have my life dictated to me by any man. This one in particular I will not allow to force me to act out of fear. Do I fear him? I suppose I do. Even after eight years of added experience and maturity and the resilience those elements bring to a person’s character, I still do fear Harry Spalding. But it would be absurd for me to miss the Rimmers’ party on his account.
Perhaps he will not remember me. I will not remind him if my face and name have slipped from his memory. I have always confronted my terrors, but this one is different. Where he is concerned, if he has forgotten me, I will be pragmatic. In the words of a saying expressing a sentiment I would ordinarily loathe, I will, just this once, let discretion be the better part of valour.
But he won’t have forgotten me. What would be the point of us meeting if he had? I’ve already said I believe this confrontation has the inevitability of fate about it. Of course he will remember me. I just hope he has matured enough to feel the shame and remorse that seemed to elude him in the aftermath back then.
Harry Spalding tried to rape me. He forced the door of my room at the Shelbourne Hotel and attempted to take me by force. I fought back, but he was enormously strong for so slightly built a man. He seemed inconceivably strong. Perhaps it was the strength of a madman. I was changing for dinner when he burst in. He tore my dress off and flung me across the bed and pinned my arms. I bit him hard enough to draw blood. But he seemed encouraged by that. I must have been screaming. Boland came into the room with a pistol. He put the point of the pistol under Spalding’s chin and told him very calmly that he would blow his head off if he did not release me. I swear the grin never left Spalding’s face. It was a rictus, death’s head grin that stretched his features grotesquely. He moved back from the bed, but Boland kept the gun on him. He did not look safe. As I have said already, he did not look sane.
Mick Collins came in. He must have heard the commotion. He took off his coat and put it over me and asked me was I alright. He asked Boland to take me to his room and to book me another. You can’t stay in this one, he said. I heard the first blows land as Boland closed the door on the room. Mick Collins was a powerful figure in the peak of condition then and every ounce of his reputation as a fighting man had been earned. I thought he would beat Spalding to a pulp. I hoped he would. But he did not. After I had been brought brandy in Mick’s room by Boland, Mick himself came in. He went into the bathroom and ran the tap until the water could only have been scalding and I heard him wash scrupulously. When he emerged, his hands were bruised, the knuckles visibly swelling. And one of his eyes was marked.
I caught a glimpse of Spalding later, leaving the hotel between two of Mick’s men. And his lip was cut and his face was swollen and carried contusions. But they were healing already. A half-smile played under the congealing gash on his upper lip.
I’d easier have beaten Lucifer himself, Mick said, helping himself to a brandy from the bottle Boland had fetched. Maybe I should just have him shot, he said.
You’ll shoot no one on my account, I said.
Cause a stink with the rest of the Yanks, Boland said.
The rest of them are decent men, Mick said.
You will shoot no one on my account, I repeated.
Then we’ll have that scum on the first boat out of Dublin. Boland here will make the call. Mick put down his glass and came over to me. I still wore his coat, the smell of him on the collar a comfort as I tried to stop trembling. He smiled and stroked my cheek. The touch of his sore hand was infinitely tender.
And that was the end of it. And I did not really think about Harry Spalding again. I did not think about him until his boat struggled listing up the Mersey and I read the story of the storm in the newspapers.
The Rimmers host their party tonight. Their house is one of the grandest on Westbourne Road. It overlooks the golf links, which is where Tommy and my obnoxious American met. I am slightly surprised that the party is going ahead as planned. But this is nothing to do with Spalding. A chambermaid has vanished from the Palace Hotel. The same girl worked for the Rimmers for a while, helping Nora Rimmer look after their youngest daughter
