Chapter2 - 8

“How many times did you pull the trigger?”

the lawyer asked.

“Three.”

“Why three?”

“In the Marine Corps, we’re taught to aim for the center and shoot till the target’s down.”

Xavier sounded like he was asking for a bacon and tomato sandwich at the Crispy Biscuit. Calm as ice water. No one on that jury would ever believe a man like this could throw a tennis ball endlessly for his dog, or read the morning paper with his girlfriend’s head in his lap, absently playing with a lock of her hair...

There was a break before cross-examination, and the matron next to Nora looked indignant. “They’d better not come after him too hard. Mr.Byrne is somebody down in Foggy Bottom, you know! Wouldn’t be the same without him and that dog around, keeping an eye.”

“Isn’t he—”

Nora nodded toward the block of Warring men at the front. “You know.”

“Maybe, but he’s done more for the neighborhood than any of those prosecutors and judges.”

The woman sniffed. “I’m not saying it’s right, breaking the law, but some of those that do are better men than those frauds in double-breasted suits who don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t gamble, but wouldn’t give you a dime out of their pocket or a minute of their time. Just because a man ain’t lawful don’t mean he can’t be good. And vice versa.”

Nora thought fleetingly of Timmy in his police blues, rummaging wrist-deep in her pocketbook.

Cross-examination. The questions fired like bullets. Wasn’t it true Mr.Byrne had carried a pistol long before the night in question? “Yes. But I never had any intention of shooting George Harding.”

“Yet you did shoot him, didn’t you?”

the prosecutor barked.

“Yes.”

There was the smile, the knife edge of it at the corner of his mouth, there and gone so fast you’d have to know him very well to see it. Nora saw it. “I did.”

And the next day—the day when all the headlines blared “Rosenbergs Sentenced to Death; Julius Convicts on Secondary Charge.”

Nora’s Colcannon

6 russet potatoes, cut into 1-inch pieces 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more for serving 1 cup heavy cream 1 / 3 to 1 / 2 cup cooked and chopped thick-cut bacon (optional)

Salt and freshly ground black pepper 3 cups chopped cooked kale 3 green onions, minced

Place the potato pieces into a large mixing bowl, cover them with water, and let them sit for at least 1hour to remove starch. This will enhance the texture.

Fill a large cooking pot (at least 8quarts) with water and bring to a boil. Add the potatoes and boil for about 15minutes. Once the pieces can be easily pierced with a fork, remove the pot from the heat. Let sit for 2minutes, then drain. Return the potatoes to the pot.

Add 3 to 4 tablespoons of the butter and a splash of cream. Mash potatoes with a masher or mixer, slowly adding the remaining butter and cream until the desired consistency is reached. Add bacon, if using, reserving some for garnish, then season with salt and pepper to taste.

Add the kale and half of the green onions. Whip hard with a wooden spoon, incorporating as much air as possible into the mixture.

Transfer the mixture to a serving dish and make an indentation in the center. Top with 1to 2knobs of butter, the remaining green onions, and the reserved bacon, if using.

Enjoy alone on a bad day, with nips of Jameson, while listening to “If” by Perry Como.

St.Patrick’s Day was the biggest holiday in the Walsh family. This year it was celebrated late: chicken pox had swept from Tim’s children through all the cousins, so the huge family lunch, the keg of green beer, the party streamers and shamrocks were postponed until everyone stopped scabbing and scratching. Two days after Xavier was sentenced to a year in prison for carrying a deadly weapon, Nora set off for her family home with a big pot of colcannon.

She’d pondered wearing Xavier’s chinchilla wrap and the reddest lipstick she could find—look like a moll, since her family had undoubtedly Heard Things.

In the end she shrugged into her old green-sprigged dress and saddle shoes, looking like her mother’s daughter—like Timmy’s deirfiúr bheag .

“Nora!”

Tim’s wife, Siobhan, greeted her at the door. “I haven’t seen you in an age. Take the baby, won’t you?”

“Sorry,”

Nora said, juggling the pot. “Hands full!”

She slipped through the mix of aunts and uncles, cousins and cousins and more cousins, back to the table already groaning with food. Except for the sheer number of police badges, it looked very much like a Warring family lunch.

Nora got herself a glass of the green beer her brother had brought in from Dailey’s and found a corner to sit, legs crossed. Normally a Walsh daughter would be expected to make the rounds on St. Patrick’s Day: pay tribute to all the relations and let them ask her why she wasn’t married yet; play with any babies anyone thrust her way; ferry whatever dirty dishes any male Walsh handed her to the kitchen. Nora sat back in her corner this time like Xavier, sipping her beer, returning the various curious gazes with his cool, slow-lidded blink, watching the eyes flit away. Like Xavier, she was waiting for her target to come to her.

“Nora, darlin’, you’re finally back!”

Tim came at her with open arms, a whiskey flush already on his cheeks. He looked so delighted to see her. He always did. Nora wondered if he really didn’t remember the names he’d called her. Slut, whore, tramp. If she brought it up, he’d probably look wounded and say something like Water under the bridge, right?

Tim gave her the family gossip, and she nodded and smiled, waiting until he started dropping hints about when she’d move home, give Siobhan a hand with the kids—only until Nora married, of course. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a proper lad to bring round to Sunday lunch, do you?”

Tim asked finally. “Because we’ve heard things...”

“Nothing to hear, Tim,”

Nora said. She’d said the same thing yesterday to Mr.Harris, telling him there was nothing and no one in her acquaintanceship that would bring embarrassment to the National Archives. Said it with a hint of frost so he flushed. So he’d think twice about poking in a subordinate’s personal affairs again.

“Look, Nora—”

Tim looked down into his green beer. “Since you’re here...”

Nora looked up at the stairs, twined with green crepe paper and cutout shamrocks. “Kids did a grand job decorating this year.”

“They did, didn’t they? Look, spot me a bit till my next payday? They passed the hat at the precinct for a pal laid up with a broken leg; can’t stint at times like that—”

“Or when it comes time to lay five-to-one on a horse still running backward somewhere at Pimlico?”

Nora set down her beer.

Tim grinned that charming lopsided grin. “Never could fool you, deirfiúr bheag . Come on with you, just a few dollars, a fiver if you’ve got it...”

Nora waited until he reached into the handbag she’d left open on her lap. Then she snapped the metal clasp shut on his fingertips, hard.

“Ouch—”

He yanked back with a surprised huff . “Come on, Nora—”

“Shut up. You’re going to listen for once, Timmy. I’m never giving you another dime, hear me? You will never show up outside the National Archives again, or Briarwood House. If you do, I won’t hesitate to make a fuss.”

There were worse things, Nora had learned, than a public fuss. “You will never steal from me again. Or sweet Jesus help me, you will rue the fucking day .”

Her language clearly shocked him more than anything else. “What’s gotten into you?”

Nora smiled Xavier’s smile, like the gleam off a knife’s edge in winter. “Say it. Say you’ll leave me alone. Or—”

“Or what? That mobster in your pocket will—”

“I don’t have a mobster in my pocket, Tim. Be afraid of me . Because I can get you kicked off the force all on my own. All the things you’ve done, the payoffs and the kickbacks? You try to stick your hand in my pocket again, I’ll hang your dirty laundry out for the world to see.”

Threats like this wouldn’t have worked on George Harding, who would have promptly backhanded Nora across the room, and they wouldn’t have worked on a great many of the other Walsh men, either—the ones who didn’t mind taking a hand to their wives and a belt to their kids.

But threats would work on Tim. Because he was weak, and Nora had learned something about weak men—weak men, and how to be terrifying.

“Jesus, Nora.”

He looked so hurt, his eyes full of how could you? “I’m family. Doesn’t that—”

“Mean anything?”

Nora rose, feeling a little lightheaded. “It means absolutely nothing, Timmy. You made sure of that.”

She slid her handbag over one arm and headed for the door without a backward glance. She could feel him staring after her.

“Going so soon, Nora?”

Mam cornered her by the groaning kitchen table, looking flushed and reproachful. “I was counting on you to help me get the roast out, and then sit down with your cousin Deirdre’s new baby. Speaking of babies, Timmy Junior is bursting out of his clothes again, and your brother could use just a little bit extra for—”

Nora smiled Xavier’s smile at her mother, watched it hit, and lowered her voice. “Mam, get off my back. Stop telephoning, stop nagging, stop all of it. And if you or Timmy ever try to help yourself to my rent money again, I will report him to the Washington Post for being on the Warring family payroll.”

She stepped past the table, but not so fast she didn’t see her mother’s face drain. “You don’t have any proof,”

Mam hissed, hand shooting out to catch Nora’s elbow. Not shocked that Tim took payoffs; everyone did that . Just shocked it might come out. “You don’t have anything!”

Nora looked her in the eye. She couldn’t lie to Xavier, any more than he could to her, but she had no problem lying to her flesh and blood. And Tim might forget what she’d said today, but Mam never forgot anything. “I do have proof, Mam. And I don’t care if he goes to jail. So keep out of my life.”

Nora took her seat at the visiting-room table, folding her hands precisely before her. She’d jumped through all the hoops, heard all the rules from the guards outside. Xavier’s eyes drank her in from French twist to French slingbacks, lingering on the diamond on her finger. He smiled, then pointed silently at the ceiling. She nodded. Foolish to assume no one would be listening. “I assume one of your uncles set up the private visit,”

she said. “The one who drove me here?”

Xavier nodded. He looked just as relaxed in prison garb as he had in one of his expensive three-piece suits. “What did you think of him?”

Short, lean, brisk, hard as granite, asking her no questions on the brief drive. The uncle Xavier described as the brains of the family, the one who ran everything. “I think he’s a tolerable preview of you in a few years.”

Low-voiced, considerate, loyal. At least one prison term behind him. No softness at all. The man who ran the District, or at least the shadowed parts. “He told me you’ll serve your whole sentence here,”

Nora said, managing to clear her throat. “A year seems like a lot just for carrying a deadly weapon.”

“Judge made sure I got the maximum.”

Her lover didn’t sound angry or resentful. He’s the kind that can really do time , Xavier’s uncle had said on the drive, approvingly. It won’t make a dent in him. Nora didn’t imagine it would.

“The Rosenbergs will get the electric chair,”

she said. “I’m... glad you’re not.”

“You came to hear me testify.”

“You saw me?”

“Always.”

Xavier hesitated. “I’m sorry you had to hear it.”

“Hear you lie?”

“I don’t lie. Not to you.”

His face was impassive. “I said I had no intention of shooting George Harding, and I didn’t.”

You just put out the word he was a dead man so he’d make a run at you , Nora thought, looking her lover right in the eye. You didn’t have to intend anything. Just arrange things so you could shoot him in self-defense.

That’s right , Xavier’s eyes said back. But he changed the subject. “I’ll be home in a year. Maybe less, with good behavior. I arranged for Duke to stay with my sister, but she’s not so fond of dogs. I’d rather leave him with you.”

“Mrs.Nilsson doesn’t allow pets.”

“She will if I send her a wad of cash. But he’s a lot of dog for that little room of yours.”

Xavier paused. “You could stay in my house on Macomb Street. The bills are paid, Louise would keep house for you. My family, they’ll check in—”

“Xavier—”

“—and in a year I’d be back.”

He reached across the table, touched her ring finger. The lightest touch. “Then we’d make it official.”

“And you’d go back to the Amber Club.”

“It’s where I work. I’m a businessman.”

Nora tilted her head. “And if— this —comes up again, something like this? Would you do it again?”

No answer.

“You’re not just a businessman, Xavier.”

She took the big round diamond off her finger, laid it down on the table. “I love you. But I wouldn’t ever lie on the stand for you. I don’t have it in me. And can you tell me it would never come up, while you’re in this business?”

He was silent.

“I appreciate your honesty.”

She slipped the ring into her pocket to give to his uncle, rose, headed toward the door.

“Nora.”

She turned back. Dark eyes in battered sockets, still making her spine prickle. Still the hook in her gut. She didn’t think it would go away, ever. She still felt him filling her veins like a drug.

“I’m out in a year,”

he said. “Let me try to change your mind then.”

“Our first night, you said you’d go the moment I told you to go. And you said you had a thing for lost causes.”

Nora opened the door, spoke over her shoulder. She had to gulp the words, but they came out steady. “I’m no one’s lost cause. And I’m telling you to go.”

“Mrs.Muller,”

Nora said when she got back to Briarwood House, nearly bumping into the old woman in the hall. “Will we be seeing you at Grace’s on Thursday? Maybe you’ll add a flower to the wall vine—”

“No,”

Reka Muller said, speaking English for the first time in Nora’s recollection. “No, absolutely not, never.”

“Well. All right,”

Nora said, startled, and headed up, planning a solitary dinner of leftover buttery mashed potatoes and green ribbons of kale eaten straight out of the pot. Solitary, but not lonely. She was Miss Walsh of the National Archives, possibly the future chief of Building and Grounds, first woman ever promoted to such a position. She was going to watch someday soon as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were brought into the Rotunda: six pages of parchment encased in helium-filled glass cases, escorted from the Library of Congress by the Army Band, the Air Force Drum and Bugle Corps, an armored Marine Corps personnel carrier, down Pennsylvania and Constitution. She’d end up exchanging a look of complicit, dizzy delight with a young Negro servicewoman in proud dress uniform who’d been part of the escort cordon on the library steps; she’d listen to President Truman speak as the documents were enshrined; she’d wait until the Rotunda was empty and she could look at the glass cases by herself, gazing at her foundations. Everyone else’s foundations, too, but also just hers. Stroll out of the Rotunda, nailing a smile over that tug in her gut, the beguiling smoke in her veins.

MissWalsh. Heartsick—but her own woman.