Chapter2 - 7

“I feel like I’m drugged,”

Nora said. “He walks into the room, and it goes through my veins like smoke. Even though he’s a murderer.”

“Men commit murder for many reasons.”

Grace’s scarlet-polished fingernails tapped her glass. “Did he at least have a good one?”

“Someone hurt me. But that excuses nothing. What he did, taking the law into his own hands, that hurts me too.”

“You’re a great believer in law.”

Nora thought of the Bill of Rights, which she saw in its case every day. “The law is not perfect, but it is perfectible. Scorn that and we’re spitting on our foundations.”

“Don’t be pompous, Tipperary. You’re far too young.”

“All right, maybe that sounds pompous. But it’s still what I believe. Because if we don’t have the law, then all we have is might makes right. And then women always get hurt, instead of just often ,”

she finished bitterly.

“So—your gangster is sometimes a violent man. But is he a bad one? A weak one?”

“No,”

Nora stated. “If he was, I could walk away without a backward glance.”

The way she had from George. Who was now dead, and she couldn’t manage to be sorry. Only about how it had happened. She squeezed her eyes shut before they spilled over. “You don’t have to pretend you aren’t disgusted with me,”

she managed to say. “I’m disgusted with myself.”

“I’d be more inclined to disgust if you were head over heels for a weak man,”

Grace said. “Men of violence, well, they have their uses. Nations tend to begin with violent men.”

“They do not—”

“Yes, they do,”

Grace retorted. “Foundations of law like the ones you prize; who are they laid by? Men who aren’t afraid to bloody their knuckles or hurl tea in harbors. Now, this nation of ours decided to lay aside a violent beginning—in some ways, at least—and try to ground our future in something more rational... But that doesn’t mean violent men didn’t kick off the American experiment to begin with.”

Nora admitted she might have a point there. “Are you a history professor now?”

“Merely a woman who’s given a lot of thought to her origins. Both my own, and my nation’s, and violent men played a part in both. And I can tell you—”

Grace ran a finger around her glass’s rim. “Violent men who are also smart and strong are not completely lost causes. They can learn different ways, if they choose. It’s the weak ones who cause the most damage. Nothing wreaks havoc like a weak man—because they never learn, so they just go blithely on, leaving pain and wreckage behind them.”

“My brother is like that.”

“Interesting.”

Grace tilted her head, a handful of curls slipping down one shoulder. “You told me you were in love with a gangster before you told me you even had a brother.”

“Because I despise him,”

Nora said quietly. “My brother and most of my family.”

“Why?”

She hadn’t told Xavier this part. Hadn’t dared. She didn’t know why she was telling Grace now. Maybe it was the gin in her sun tea, which was starting to build a glow in her stomach... but the words were coming out, halting, rusty. George Harding; the affair at eighteen. The caveman wooing tactics that landed her in the hospital ward. “There was worse waiting when I got home,”

Nora said in a monotone. “My mother waiting for me, Timmy next to her. She wanted to know if George had knocked me up. I didn’t think so—I was stupid, getting involved with him, but not stupid enough to let him in without using, you know.”

She wasn’t much of a good Irish girl anymore, but she still didn’t know how to get any of the words for condom out. Rubbers, raincoats, sheaths.

“Good for you,”

said Grace.

“I told Mam I’d been careful, but she didn’t believe me. And she didn’t want to wait to see if I missed my monthly, because then morals came into it.”

The knee-jerk recoil; mortal sin. “So her loophole was that we’d make sure now, before anything was certain—make sure I wasn’t pregnant, that I wouldn’t disgrace the family. And she parked a mug of some disgusting tea in front of me, and when I wouldn’t drink it, Timmy started shouting. Telling me our father was rolling in his grave, telling me I was a whore and a disgrace. I asked which was the bigger disgrace, being a whore or being a crooked cop who goes to whores behind his wife’s back, and when Mam started flying to his defense and saying I had no morals, I said at least I wasn’t preaching the sacredness of life while shoving miscarriage tea down my daughter’s throat. And that’s when Mam said if I didn’t drink that mug down she’d put me out of the house that night, and Timmy backed her up.”

Grace was silent. Nora concentrated on breathing. In, out. In, out.

“I had nowhere to go,”

she said softly. “No money, no friends who would side with me over my family. So I drank it. I wasn’t pregnant, I knew I wasn’t, so it just made me horribly ill for a week. I spent that whole week planning how soon I could move out. Mam didn’t understand when I came down with my suitcase a few months later, when I’d scraped up just enough from my National Archives salary to pay a month’s advance rent on this room. She kept asking why I was making a fuss—hadn’t she and Tim stood by me? I said I never wanted to speak to her again, but she still phones and lays on the guilt. And every month or so, Tim comes round and helps himself to my rent money when his wallet’s light. That’s fine in his eyes, and it’s fine in Mam’s, too, because ‘girls help their brothers, deirfiúr bheag .’”

In, out. In, out.

“You know the funny thing?”

Nora bolted the rest of her tea. “I could tell Xavier this, and he’d take care of it. He’d get my family out of my life in a heartbeat. He’d beat Tim to a pulp and threaten to send him to jail for corruption if he or Mam ever contacted me again.”

She finally let herself meet Grace’s calm golden-brown gaze. “And Mother of God, but sometimes I’ve been tempted.”

“You were betrayed by a weak man on the right side of the law, so you ran to a strong man on the wrong side of it.”

Grace tilted her head. “Why not let him take care of your brother for you? At least scare him off.”

“Because a belief in the law shouldn’t only be maintained when it’s convenient.”

Nora leaned back, trailing a fingertip along the painted wall vine. “And because Xavier is like an atomic bomb—once he’s set off, I have no idea what the damage might be. I need a scalpel here, not a bomb. I need to take out my own dirty laundry.”

“Your dirty laundry is currently stealing your rent money,”

Grace pointed out.

And my lover might be going to the electric chair , Nora thought.

As if reading her mind, Grace said, “He might be acquitted. Get off scot-free.”

Nora looked at the huge diamond on her finger. “But he’s guilty , Grace.”

“You still don’t want him dead.”

“No, I don’t want him dead. But I don’t know what else to want. I’m such a roil inside.”

Nora looked at Grace, sitting there so calm. “I wish I was more like you,”

she heard herself saying. “All self-contained and self-sufficient.”

“It took a good long while to get myself this way, Tipperary. I’ve done my share of roiling.”

Grace drew up a knee, resting her elbow on it. “What will you do if he gets off?”

The question echoed inside Nora’s skull. “I don’t know.”

“When does he go on trial?”

“The end of March.”

“Well,”

Grace said, rising. “You’re hardly a ditherer, Nora Walsh. I strongly suggest you have a decision by the time the jury comes out with theirs.”

Nora set her empty glass aside, unable to help wondering aloud, “Why doesn’t any of this shock you, Grace? Does nothing shock you?”

“Very little.”

Grace smiled over her shoulder, a tilted smile. “In the days when I wasn’t quite so self-contained and self-sufficient, I, too, mixed with my share of weak men—and violent ones.”

Nora felt sorry for the Rosenbergs, truly she did. Even if they were guilty, no one could see their pinched, frightened faces in the newspapers and not feel a certain swell of pity. But at the same time, she was grateful the trial consumed every paper in the District, day after day. Because on the day the jury returned a verdict of guilty against the Rosenbergs, eight men and four women were filing into a different courtroom to hear the charges against Xavier Warring Byrne... And no one, thank god, was paying attention.

I won’t go to the trial , Nora had promised herself, and that held the first seven days. It wasn’t page one news; that was all saved for speculation about what sentence the judge would levy on the Rosenbergs, but back pages of the Evening Star and the Washington Post held enough updates to get a picture of the trial’s progress. “Jury Told Shot Killed Harding at Point Blank.”

And “‘I had to do it,’ Byrne says; Threat Made by Harding Told by Waitress.”

And finally “Byrne Murder Trial Expected to Continue Through Next Week.”

I won’t go , Nora chanted—but the morning after she read “Byrne to Testify in His Own Defense,”

she found herself claiming gastric flu at the National Archives, looking pale and sick enough that even Mrs.Halliwell didn’t look skeptical, and making her way to the courthouse.

She was glad it was packed—it meant she could slip into the very back, in the shadow of a woman in an enormous hat. Around the brim she saw a phalanx of dark-suited men at the front, some familiar faces from the Amber Club... As for the two stone-faced men at the front, she had no trouble identifying Xavier’s uncles.

The judge, bald, fierce as a bantam; the jury, twelve faceless sketches in their box—everything was a blur until Xavier took the stand. And Nora had to lower her face swiftly and gulp down the visceral tug in her gut that the sight of him still yanked out of her.

He was taking the oath; he was swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help him God. You liar , she thought. He looked leaner, inscrutable, no hint of a smile in the corner of his mouth. He took his seat in his blue suit, leaning back, at ease.

“The jury has already heard that George Harding followed you upstairs to the second floor at one fifty in the morning of the day in question,”

Xavier’s lawyer began at last, looking avuncular. “Can you tell us why you went upstairs?”

“I’d seen George Harding walk into the club, and I’d heard he was looking to kill me.”

Xavier spoke with perfect ease, laying it all out one question at a time.

No mention of the robbery on Macomb Street; all that had been swept under the rug. Just a man acting in self-defense, pulling a gun when an ex-employee with a grudge drew on him first.