In the Fulton Fish Market, below the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side of the East River, an Irishman was sitting at a coffee stall. He was a little over forty; tall, fair, with a little bit more weight than was entirely good for him. It was eleven o’clock in the evening and the place was gearing up for the night, as it did every night, its busiest time. It was as cold inside as it was outside. Lights shone fiercely over the stalls stretched out in every direction, but wind from the East River blew in through the open doors, and the crushed ice that was everywhere made it even colder. Fish was still arriving, in boxes and baskets, carried by porters and piled high on the forklift trucks that raced along the market aisles, blasting horns.

The air reeked of blood and the sea; the floor swam with melting ice and fish guts; the occasional live eel squirmed between the stalls, struggling for the doors and the smell of the East River beyond. The price of fish was shouted out with competing, overlapping cries that echoed endlessly round the building. The prices were called in English, but the profanities that accompanied them were in all the languages of New York: English, German, Yiddish, Italian, Greek, Chinese, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Armenian; like the varieties of fish, no one could count them all.

Captain John Cavendish, of the Irish army, Óglaigh na hÉireann, had been in New York for the last two months as an advisor on security during the construction of the Irish Pavilion at the World’s Fair, across the river in Long Island’s Flushing Meadows. He had also spent some of his time talking to the American army about weapons and training and munitions, and was compiling a report on all this to take back to Ireland. As far as both the ambassador in Washington and the consul general in New York were concerned, his previous role as an officer in Military Intelligence, G2, had nothing whatsoever to do with his presence in America. The fact that he was in New York at all, where the current IRA bombing campaign against Britain, now in full if ineffective swing, had been largely planned and financed, was no more than a coincidence.

It was a coincidence too that he was in New York while the IRA’s chief of staff was in America, selling not only the new war against the old enemy, but the idea that the bigger war that had to come, sooner or later, between Britain and Germany, would bring the IRA back to a position of power in Ireland itself. It would be a war that would chase England out of the corner of Ireland it still held on to; it would put an end to the toadying Free State that had found the temerity, under the leadership of the Republican turncoat Éamon de Valera, to almost call itself a ‘republic’; and it would reunite the island of Ireland.

Captain Cavendish perched on a stool at the coffee stall counter. He wore a dark grey lounge suit, a blue shirt, a silver tie, a navy blue overcoat and a pale grey fedora. He should have looked out of place among the porters and stallholders in Fulton Market, but nobody took any notice. The man he was chatting amiably to at the counter ought to have looked equally out of place, in a black cashmere overcoat and a black homburg, a half-smoked cigar clamped between his teeth. But men in overcoats and hats were no strangers to the market in the middle of the night; it was run by the Mob, after all, and the men in overcoats took a cut on every box of fish that came in and went out.

The man John Cavendish was talking to carried a .38 under his jacket, and he was important enough that the man in the brown homburg who had come into the market with him, and was now helping himself to boiled shrimps from the next stall, carried a .45 to make sure his boss had no need to use his .38. The man in the black homburg raised his hat to the captain and walked away, followed by his protection. He had a word for every stallholder he passed; the replies all contained the word ‘mister’.

John Cavendish looked at his watch; the man he was meeting was late. He had a good idea why and he didn’t much like it. But he had no choice but to wait. The army officer held out his empty coffee cup for a refill. And he liked the market. It was an old building that offered relief from the streets of towers and skyscrapers that stretched through Manhattan. It was a manageable place. It reminded him of the South City Markets in Dublin; it had the same red brick, the same arched windows, the same broken gabled lights in the roof, the same vaulting interior and battered, shabby, workaday appearance. Living in the future, as he had been told he was many times since arriving in New York, he liked to touch the past.

The man he was waiting for had docked at Pier 17 on the Hudson River two hours earlier. There were piers by Fulton Market too, but there were no grand Atlantic liners there, only the fishing boats from Long Island and New England, and the ferries to Brooklyn. Donal Redmond’s ship was the French Line’s SS Normandie; he was a steward. He would have picked up the message he was delivering, as he always did, when the boat stopped at Cobh on its way from Le Havre to New York. And before the delivery was made at the other end he would give it to John Cavendish to copy.

‘You’re late.’

‘I’m here, what else do you want?’

‘You’d be better off out of the White Horse every time you dock.’

‘If I didn’t have a few in there, they’d think something was up.’

‘You’ve had more than a few.’

‘I’ve been on that boat six fucking days. What do you care?’

‘I don’t,’ said Cavendish, getting up off the stool. ‘Have you got it?’

Donal Redmond nodded. He followed the army officer through the maze of stalls, out to the back of the market, where the boxes of fish were loading and unloading. Trucks and cars, horses and carts, barrows and forklifts were everywhere. Money was changing hands outside as it was in, and arguments were still going on about prices that had started at the stalls and carried on out to the street; hands were spat on and shaken; illegible dockets and receipts were scrawled out and dropped into the slush of ice and blood and litter.

John Cavendish sat with the steward in the front of his red and white Crossley. In all the noise and the constant movement of vehicles a man scribbling something down in the front of a car looked like any other wholesaler or restaurateur totting up his bill.

The two letters, on thin copy-paper flimsies, had been rolled up tightly into straws and buried in a tin of Jacob’s shortbread biscuits. On each of the two pages were several paragraphs of typed capital letters; the letters grouped in neat columns, each five letters wide, with a space between each group. Cavendish copied both pages, laying the letters out exactly as in the typed originals. He rolled up the pages as tightly as they had emerged from the tin, then twisted the top and bottom of each one. The other man pushed them back under the biscuits, pressed the lid down tightly, and turned to stuff the tin into the duffel bag that was now on the back seat of the captain’s car.

‘Do you want a lift over to Queens?’

‘OK. Suits me.’

John Cavendish took five ten dollar bills from his wallet and handed them over. The steward put them in his pocket and grinned. It was done.

‘Merci, mon brave. Quelque chose à boire?’

Cavendish reached under the dashboard and pulled out a silver and leather hip flask. As he started the engine he handed it to Donal Redmond. He drove from Front Street on to Fulton Street, past City Hall and up on to the Brooklyn Bridge, over the East River to Long Island. He drove through Brooklyn into Queens. Redmond said nothing now; their business was over. Two blocks from the call house in Woodside, at the corner of 58^th Street and 37^th Avenue, where the ciphers would be delivered, the army officer stopped the car. The steward got out, hauled his duffel bag from the back seat and walked away.

As he disappeared from sight Cavendish reached for the hip flask and drank the remaining whiskey; as he put his hands back on the steering wheel he realised they were shaking. He pulled out into the road. A horn blasted angrily. The Irishman smiled to himself and tutted, ‘Cavendish, Cavendish!’ He drove on. He’d said he’d meet her an hour ago. He was heading for La Guardia now, for the Triborough Bridge, and then Harlem.

It was one o’clock in the morning in Small’s Paradise on 7^th Avenue and 135^th. It was hot, however cold it was outside. The downtown whites with the appetite for it had left the restaurants and bars of Lower Manhattan to join the black crowds in Harlem now, where the music was always louder but more importantly always better, much better, and you could dance with a woman in ways that would have got you thrown out of the Rainbow Room for even thinking about. The mix of black and white customers was a natural thing in Small’s; it was natural enough that nobody thought very much about it; Ed Small was black after all. There were white-owned, Jim Crow Harlem clubs, like the Cotton Club, where only the waiters and the musicians were black. But there were black clubs and black clubs of course; Small’s Paradise was just about as black as Manhattan’s more adventurous white downtowners and midtowners could comfortably cope with.

John Cavendish was happy enough to be there for the music, which he had grown to love during his months in New York. He’d heard a lot of it now and he never tired of hearing more. It was like nothing he’d known, and whatever he’d heard before, on records or the radio, was only the palest reflection of what it felt like to be in a room with it. He was easy there; he would have been happy just to listen.

The Irish woman he was with, Kate O’Donnell, was maybe thirty, tall, with blue eyes that had the habit of always looking slightly puzzled. Her hair was cut just above her shoulders, blonde enough not to need bleaching, and with enough curl not to need perming; sometimes she even brushed it, but not so often that it looked brushed. She was dressed well, but if you’d asked her what she had on, she would have had to check. She wasn’t easy sitting there. There was an edge of anxiety about her. She needed one of the trumpeters in the band with her when she talked to John Cavendish tonight.

If the captain was going to help her, she wanted him to help her now. She had started to feel he was putting it on the long finger. They needed to talk harder again; the captain, her, the trumpeter; they needed to move.

But talking to the trumpeter wasn’t the only reason they were there at Small’s Paradise. It was safe, safer than anywhere else. Harlem was the right side of Central Park, that’s to say the wrong side; it was nobody’s territory, at least nobody she knew, nobody who mattered.

The black trumpeter was playing now, standing up for a short, final solo as the band came to the end of ‘Caravan’. Cavendish knew it; he’d been at Small’s once before when Duke Ellington was playing. He liked swing; it was the sound he heard everywhere in New York. But the man at the piano, with the immaculately slicked hair and the faintest pencil-line moustache, went further than swing. What he played wasn’t just music, it was the city itself; it was as delicate and ephemeral as it was hard and sharp and solid. The piano was the night air in Central Park one moment and a subway train the next. As the trumpeter sat down to a scattering of applause, the piano and the brushed cymbals took over. Cavendish took an envelope from his pocket and pushed it across the table to Kate. The music was louder again now as the band played the last, almost harmonious chord, and the whole club focused on Ellington and his musicians, clapping and shouting.

‘That’s the passport I promised,’ said Cavendish. ‘Two. If she needs to travel under another name, there’s not much point you travelling under yours. It’s unlikely she’ll want it going into Canada, but with what’s going on at the moment you don’t need a problem.’

Kate picked up her handbag and put the envelope in it.

‘My problem right now is she’s still there, locked up in that place.’

The set had finished now, and the fading applause followed Ellington and his band off the stage. Another musician made his way to the piano and started to play, more quietly. Dancers drifted off the floor; the volume of conversation grew; trays of food and drink were coming at greater speed.

Jimmy Palmer, the trumpeter, pushed his way through the milling customers and waiters and cigarette girls, and sat down at the table with Kate O’Donnell and John Cavendish without saying a word. He lit a cigarette.

‘So where are we, Kate?’ he asked.

‘John’s at the Canadian border. I haven’t got her off Long Island.’

She smiled as she said it, but it wasn’t a joke.

‘You really think he’s going to come after her?’ said Cavendish.

‘We’ve been having this conversation for a month, John.’ Kate was tired repeating herself. ‘You’ve talked about helping us, and then you’ve talked about helping us, then you’ve talked about it a bit more. He won’t let her just go. How many times do I have to say it? She wouldn’t be there in the first place if he was happy to let her go. If you’re not going to do it –’

Jimmy Palmer just drew on his cigarette and watched.

‘I need to be sure how careful we need to be, once we get her out of New York,’ the army officer continued. ‘The answer’s still very. So you get her away from Locust Valley and I’ll make sure you cross into Canada. I’m not trying to find a way out of it.’ He took out a cigarette himself now; he caught the eye of a waiter and gestured for another round of drinks. ‘I’ve said I’ll use my car. There’s not going to be anybody around to make a connection between you and an Irishman taking a little trip upstate –’

‘I can get a car.’ It was Jimmy who spoke now. ‘I can do the trip.’

Kate smiled, reaching out her hand fondly to take his. He spoke with determination. It mattered to him in the same way it mattered to her. It was different for Cavendish; of course it was. He was there for what he could get. But he was the one they needed. He had the false passports.

‘I know, Jimmy. But there’s too many connections already. He knows you too. Anybody he sends after Niamh is going to know you. And people are going to notice a black man driving two white women around upstate.’

‘Poor old Jim Crow, eh?’

He gave a wry smile. It didn’t make the truth any easier. Harlem was his place; he was somebody here. Outside Harlem he wasn’t anybody at all.

‘I guess I know you’re right.’

He shrugged; you couldn’t argue much with how things were.

Kate turned back to Cavendish.

‘I have talked to her. I’ve told her what she has to do. It’s not easy. Once she’s out of there it’ll be different. Once she can breathe. Half the time she’s so doped up she doesn’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know who’s listening either. I am sure she can do it. It’s just getting her to walk out –’

‘That bit’s down to you,’ said the Irishman quietly. ‘When we’re out of New York it should be fine.’ He picked up his drink. ‘But I still need what I need from her. I need her in a state where she can think clearly.’

She nodded. He held her gaze for a moment. Maybe there was a part of him that was doing this because he had started to care now, about Kate and about her sister. But that wasn’t why he was there. And Kate knew it.

‘Niamh does know that. She has got the information.’

There was silence. Kate picked up her drink. She was tense again. Jimmy Palmer looked at them both. Whatever they were talking about didn’t include him.

‘Does know what?’ he said, his eyes on Kate. ‘What’s this about?’

‘It doesn’t matter, Jimmy.’

She was awkward rather than dismissive, but it came across as dismissive anyway. Cavendish wouldn’t want her to talk about any of that.

‘It matters to me. And it sounds like it’s going to matter to Niamh.’

The trumpeter turned to Captain Cavendish again. He didn’t know him. He didn’t know why he was involved, why he was giving out passports and booking liner tickets. He didn’t like the fact that he was taking things over, in ways that weren’t explained, ways that seemed to be about something a lot more than helping Kate O’Donnell and her sister because he was a nice guy. He had only met the captain three times; he didn’t always feel like a nice guy. He watched people too much. ‘So this’ll be some li’l thing the nigger don’t need concern hisself with, that right Massa John?’

‘Come on, Jimmy. It’s nothing of the kind,’ said Cavendish.

‘Maybe this nigger should know about it, Kate,’ snapped Jimmy.

‘He’s not helping us for love,’ said Kate, shaking her head. ‘You must have worked that out. He wants something out of it. You know what Niamh was doing on the boats. You know she wasn’t just any old courier either. Why should the captain do anything for nothing? Why should anybody? He’s a soldier, an Irish soldier. You know what I’m talking about too.’

John Cavendish wasn’t comfortable with what Kate was saying, but he didn’t stop her saying it. He looked across at Jimmy Palmer and nodded.

Jimmy didn’t like it but he could work it out, enough anyway.

‘We can’t do this on our own,’ said Kate. It was all she could offer.

The trumpeter stubbed out his cigarette. The waiter arrived with the fresh drinks and passed them round. Palmer downed his bourbon in one.

‘If there’s a deal, then you do your part, Mr Cavendish. She can’t stay there. And days, not weeks. Kate’s seen her. She can’t take much more.’

‘I’m ready to go.’ John Cavendish looked from Jimmy to Kate.

Jimmy was looking at Kate now too.

She nodded.

Ellington’s band was straggling back on stage.

‘I got the taxi,’ said the horn player, getting up. ‘Just give me the day.’

Kate nodded again. She picked up her drink.

Cavendish raised his and smiled.

Jimmy reached out his hand. John Cavendish shook it.

Kate smiled at them both. It wasn’t much of a smile. She looked tired.

The trumpeter walked back to the stage.

‘Do you want a lift, Kate?’ She shook her head.

‘No, I’ll get a cab.’

‘Sure?’

‘It’s better we’re not seen together outside work.’

She was right.

Suddenly Duke Ellington’s hands hit the piano hard. The drummer crashed the cymbal and top hat. Jimmy Palmer’s horn was loud and liquid.

Outside it was cold. Kate O’Donnell slipped away, with no more than a last smile, a stronger smile now, and hailed a cab. John Cavendish watched her go for a moment, conscious that he had been delaying things. He didn’t know what the consequences would be, that was all. There was no obvious connection to make between a woman escaping from a sanatorium on Long Island, where she was virtually a prisoner, and the IRA’s courier system and its ciphered messages to and from America. But if the IRA was as careful as it ought to be, someone could decide changes were in order anyway, and that might mean his interceptions drying up. He pushed away all that and walked towards 7^th Avenue to get his car. It was time to act; a file full of ciphers nobody could read was no use to anybody. He needed Niamh Carroll now.

The night was bright and noisy all around him; car horns, laughter, singing, angry voices, somewhere a saxophone, the rattle of the trains from the el. It was still Ellington’s music, all of it.

At the corner with 7^th Avenue there were a few people standing in front of a small black man, not old but with strikingly white hair, who stood on a box speaking. In front of him there was a placard: The Ethiopian Pacific Movement – the Struggle between the New Order and the Old. People drifted by. Some paused, then walked on quickly. The night swept round the white-haired man. John Cavendish did stop, listening to his words. He had seen the man before.

‘You think there’s going to be change while those sonovabitch Jews run things? Even the white man’s starting to listen now. Even the white man’s got someone telling him what’s righteous. You heard of Adolf Hitler? Now, he’s a man got those sonovabitch Jews on the run. When he’s kicked their butts, well, the white man can have Europe, that’s all Hitler wants. He wants us to have our place and whitey to have his. Black place, white place. That’s the world we want. So Herr Hitler is fighting our battle for us. He’s fighting against white democracy, because white democracy is the biggest shit lie the Devil ever put on the earth. And you know what Herr Hitler’s going to do? He’s going to take Africa from the British and give it to the black man. That’s coming brothers, believe me! And we got other friends too, not just Mr Hitler. We got the Japanese now. They want to kick the white man’s ass out of the Pacific, like Hitler will in Africa. They’ll kick it so hard you won’t see a white man or a fucking sonovabitch Jew for dust!’

The words puzzled Cavendish now as they had puzzled him before, but the light of truth shone in the black man’s eyes. He was looking at Cavendish, with a slight smile, only now registering his only listener. The captain smiled back amiably, pulled his hat on tighter, and walked off.

When Donal Redmond left John Cavendish’s car in Queens he had walked two blocks to Lennon’s Bar, the call house where the messages he brought from Ireland were dropped. He walked in through the bar, nodding to the barman and the two or three customers who were there, and headed straight for the back room. He knew the place; he knew the routine. And there’d be a couple of drinks afterwards. He opened the door into Paddy Lennon’s office.

The old man was sitting at his desk, a green shade over his eyes, totting up figures. The room was tiny, lined with ledgers and files, the desk piled with skewered bills and receipts. Paddy raised his eyes and pushed up the shade.

‘You’re late.’

‘Why the fuck’s everyone always telling me I’m late?’

‘Maybe it’s got something to do with the time.’

‘Is there a clock on this?’

Paddy Lennon simply smiled, but it was an odd sort of smile.

The steward put down his duffel bag and got out the Jacob’s tin.

The bar owner took it and put it in a drawer in the desk.

‘You should stay off the booze till a job’s done, Donal.’

‘I don’t take orders from you. I deliver and you collect. That’s it. I get my orders in Dublin. The job is done and that’s that. The way it always is.’

‘The way it always is,’ said Paddy, pulling down his eye shade.

As Donal Redmond walked back to the bar there were two men standing in his way. One of them was a uniformed NYPD officer. The other man wore a grey raincoat and still had his hat on. He was a policeman too, a detective. He didn’t need a uniform for the ship’s steward to know it.

‘Mr Redmond?’ It was the detective who spoke.

‘That’s right.’

‘I’d like a look at your passport and your papers.’

‘What for?’

‘Some sort of mix up, that’s all.’

‘What sort of mix up? I’m straight off my ship.’

The detective ought to have sounded apologetic; he didn’t.

‘We can give you a lift down to the precinct house. The sergeant just wants to look over the details. You can be on your way then. Will we go?’

There was something odd about the way they were looking at him. It wasn’t unpleasant. It wasn’t anything. But it was the same way Paddy Lennon had been looking at him in the back room. Donal Redmond knew he didn’t want to go with them. The detective opened his coat to pull out a packet of cigarettes. As he did Redmond saw the shoulder holster and the gun that sat in it. The detective didn’t take a cigarette from the packet. He was making a point. And the point was made.

As the three men left the bar, conversation among the customers resumed, as if they had never been there.

It was two days later that John Cavendish, sitting in the coffee bar across from the Irish Pavilion at the World’s Fair, reading The New York Times, saw an item at the bottom of page seven. A man’s body had been pulled out of the Hudson River. He had been identified from papers in his pocket as Donal Redmond, an Irishman who had only just arrived in New York; he had worked on the French Line boat, the Normandie, as a steward. It was believed that he had fallen into the Hudson from the ship, docked at Pier 17, when drunk.

It seemed that the captain’s source had dried up now anyway. There would be no more IRA ciphers. He had to hope that they had enough to find out what was going on, and he had to hope that Kate O’Donnell’s sister Niamh could give him what he needed most of all, the key to break the code, because no one was getting anywhere with deciphering the stuff in Dublin. He had hoped to get a bit more out of Donal Redmond though. He was disappointed; but probably not as disappointed as Donal had been himself.