The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [94]
He glanced around carefully. Everything was exactly the way it had been except for the missing pane in the window. He stepped onto the sill, tied the rope around his waist, closed the window, and shimmied back up to the roof. Keeping low, he ran lightly back to his starting point and within seconds was back on the ground. He walked to the generating plant, flicked on the switch, and saw the outside lights flash back on.
He was back at the car within minutes and on his way to Düsseldorf. The whole operation had taken him less than two hours.
He left the hotel at seven-thirty the next morning dressed in jeans, anorak, and cap and walked to a nearby workman’s café for a breakfast of bratwurst, eggs, doughy poppyseed bread, and three steaming cups of coffee. It tasted like the food of the gods. He drove the Mercedes back to the rental lot and walked across to the airport. There he went into the barber’s shop, had a shave, and changed his clothes. Once more the smart young Russian diplomat in a conservative London suit, he boarded the flight for Washington.
New York, 1919
O’Hara threw open the saloon doors, letting the cold morning air in and the fog of smoke and booze out. He stood for a few minutes, his hands behind his back, the first cigar of the day at the corner of his mouth, inspecting his domain. He had lived on Delancey Street for twenty years and was one of its oldest residents, and sometimes he felt like he owned it. He knew everybody, the men were his customers, in work or out, for he always allowed them to run a tab until work came along. He knew their wives and knew how some were struggling to help their men while others were resentful, feeling life had cheated them. He knew their kids and their grandparents and aunts and uncles and lovers and the ins and outs of their lives because everybody’s problems were hashed out over his mahogany counter, helped down with a few beers. And there had been many a quiet handout of a few dollars to the desperate, no repayment asked or expected. He liked Delancey. It was good-humored, there was no violence—only the occasional man cuffing his wife around or noisy family fight. He would be sorry to leave it.
He walked back inside and began to clean his pumps, restocking his shelves with whiskey and gin, tobacco, cigarette papers, and cheap cigars. In a few weeks all this would be gone, banned by the Prohibition Act; he would be out of business and out of Delancey Street. But he had got it beat. He had made his plans a long time ago.
When he first came to America he had been a raw lad of eighteen, fresh from Ireland’s shores, big, brawny, and ready for what a new world had to offer. His brief schooling had ended at ten, but he could read and write and do arithmetic, and he had worked as a laborer in the fields. He wanted no more of the old country; he wanted “Life with a Capital L,” and he knew he wasn’t going to find it in the poor shebeen his ailing father had run in the bleak, windswept countryside overlooking Liscannor Bay. His father, Mick O’Hara, had been a weasly little man with a cough that dragged itself up from his oversized boots. He was rarely to be seen without a thin, ragged hand-rolled cigarette between his lips; it was there when he drew ale from the keg, it stayed there when he talked and even when he coughed. The only time Shamus had ever seen it removed was when his father ate, but that was over in a matter of minutes and it was back to rolling the next one. And to the next tot of whiskey, “to keep out the cold.”
Mary Kathleen O’Hara knew her husband was killing himself but there was nothing she could do about it. She had long ago accepted the fact that one day he would drop dead and she would be left to fend for herself, and she had made her plans accordingly. But time went on and the tough old weasel still defeated death, coughing his way through yet another night. Mary Kathleen was a big, strapping woman herself, with the red hair Shamus had inherited, a high color to her cheeks, and flashing green eyes. She had been considered a looker