A Good Man (28 page)

McMicken had congratulated him on his good work, slathered on the flattery, told him no one was so clever as he, that no one could have infiltrated the nest of conspirators as quickly as he had done. The first test of his Fenian loyalty had come when the Orangemen of Toronto announced they would burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes, a provocation to all freedom-loving Irishmen. The Hibernians had been called out to parade their opposition, and he had assembled with them, a pike on his shoulder. With military precision they had marched along College, several hundred strong, ready to put the run on King Billy’s boys wherever they encountered them. That fifth of November night, as their boots thundered in the midnight streets, he had made sure that Michael Murphy, Esq., took notice of Michael Dunne. He was in the forefront of every charge against the jeering Proddy corner boys, and dealt out a ferocious, bloody beating to any Orangeman whose coat collar he could snatch, earning Michael Murphy’s praise as an Irish patriot of the first water, an example to all. His reward was to be selected for Murphy’s own personal guard, which was charged with protecting the leader in street actions.

Michael Murphy’s favour and confidence put him in the very middle of things, like a spider crouched at the centre of a web. Any movement, on any strand of the Fenian web, sent tremors to the centre. His first success was tipping McMicken that an employee of the Toronto Savings Bank by name of Cullen would soon receive a coded telegram, a telegram that would be assumed to be a confidential financial communication because it would be addressed to a fine, upstanding commercial concern. But its real recipient would be Michael Murphy, already busy preparing to assist a Fenian invasion led by B.D. Killian.

McMicken had seen to it that the telegram was intercepted at the telegraph office and a copy made of it before it was delivered. Dunne had seen the original itself because Michael Murphy had triumphantly waved it under his nose. A decade later he still had it by memory.

Trg gjragl fvatyr zra ernql sbe beqref ol ghrfqnl pubbfr qevyyrq naq grzcrenapr zra vs lbh pna cnpx rdhvczragf naq nzzhavgvba ernql sbe rkcerffvat jurer qverpgrq zra bg sbyybj.

          X

Get twenty single men ready for orders by Tuesday choose drilled and temperance men if you can pack equipments and ammunition ready for expressing where directed men to follow.

           K

An alphabetical code so simple it could be busted easy as a poached egg, and Murphy so puffed up at how he was pulling the wool over John Bull’s eyes that he swelled with pride.

When the news came that Killian intended to cross over in New Brunswick, Murphy had decided that it was only fitting that he sumed tere to welcome the invaders to British North American soil. “Dunne,” he had said, “I want you at my side. Hand-pick four other good men to accompany us.” Off they had raced by train for Campobello Island. When he had informed McMicken of where they were headed and why, he had been surprised to learn that the Stipendiary Magistrate had no intention of stopping them. McMicken explained he was going to let Murphy tie his own noose, hang it around his own neck. A little more evidence of treason and it would be possible to convict him of a capital crime. Of course, McMicken was duty-bound to let the government know what was in the wind. He did, and the politicians hoisted his shirt-tail and buggered him good. Attorney General Cartier saw the threatened Fenian attack as the perfect opportunity to cast himself in a heroic light. He sped from Montreal to Cornwall, called out the local militia, blocked the tracks, pulled Murphy and his companions off the train, and put them under arrest.

So he, Michael Dunne, true and faithful servant of the Crown, found himself languishing in the cracker box that Cornwall called a jail, waiting for McMicken to show up and finagle his release. But when the old fox did arrive, he made it clear that his agent could not simply be discharged; the dimmest Irishman would deduce that he was an informant. No, the only option was for Michael Dunne to make his escape from custody and take Murphy and his whole bloody crew with him. Prime Minister Macdonald’s attorney general’s rash exploit had put paid to the whole scheme. Simply put, now there wasn’t sufficient evidence to convict these wretches of anything, let alone see them hanged. If they were brought to trial, the courts would have to set them free. The fat would be in the fire when Murphy and his men complained publicly of being hounded and persecuted because of their race. They were unwavering in their claim to be innocent vacationers, bound to Campobello to take the sea air. Macdonald’s government would look like bunglers, the opposition would flay it in Parliament; the newspapers would raise a hue and cry from every quarter. Under the circumstances, a jailbreak was the preferred solution to the problem. Let the Fenians scamper for the States. Flight was as good as an admission of guilt. The Cornwall prison was under local control; no blame could be laid on Ottawa’s doorstep. As to the guards – McMicken would have a word with them, see to it that they did not investigate any excavating. He would see to everything for the good of the country. “Start digging,” he had said. “Make the dirt fly like badgers.”

It had taken them a single night to mole their way under the shallow foundation of the prison using spoons, tin cups, and a metal chamber pot. The gimcrack jail was a joke, built to hold no criminal more desperate than the town drunk. They found a skiff tied up on the river. They rowed across the St. Lawrence to a hero’s welcome in the United States.

Lying stretched out on his bed, arms folded across his breast, staring up at the ceiling, he feels a dull misery when he thinks of his years of exile in the States. Once there, McMicken insisted he stay. The prison escape he had engineered put him beyond suspicion. The membership card issued by the Fenian Brotherhood was a passport not to be wasted. It gave him a pass into Irish Republican Army circles. McMicken wanted his prized agent where he could be most useful, in America, where the Irish operated with impunity and without interference from the authorities. He wanted him in the thick of things.

So he had gone wherever McMicken demanded he go, insinuated himself wherever useful things could be rned, helpful information harvested. He had been bounced from Boston to Cincinnati to Detroit to Chicago and finally to New York. He had done everything asked of him. Enlisted in the Irish Republican Army, turned out faithfully for military drill, attended patriotic rallies and huzzahed the golden-tongued orators, shook collection boxes for the cause in poor Irish neighbourhoods, twisted the ears of the better class of Irishman to buy bonds issued by a still non-existent Irish government. He became a darling of the leadership. They bestowed on him the nickname “the Indefatigable Dunne.”

He was every bit as indefatigable in McMicken’s cause. His reports transmitted in numerical code were precise, detailed, and written with a fluency he could never achieve in English. His involvement in
IRA
military exercises allowed him to give estimates of quantities and kinds of weapons and the locations of arsenals. He could report backroom conversations – even hour-long speeches – nearly word for word. He carefully noted down bond sales and donations, allowing McMicken to take the political temperature of the American Irish, whether it was truly hot or cooling. Cheering a fiery speech cost nothing but, as McMicken was fond of saying, coughing up hard cash is a different thing entirely. The true measure of commitment is the number of nickels and dimes in the collection plate.

As the months passed, Dunne had begun to know what it meant to be bone-chillingly afraid. The kind of fear that tightened your nut-sack and puckered your arsehole every hour of the day. The Fenians talked openly of the terrible revenge they visited on their own. Any man discovered a traitor was meat for slaughter. They eradicated the powerful as nonchalantly as they did the humble foot soldier. D’Arcy McGee had got his bloody comeuppance, a bullet on Sparks Street in the nation’s capital, for recanting his old revolutionary views. People who didn’t hesitate to murder a member of the House of Commons wouldn’t give a second thought to snuffing out Michael Dunne’s candle. Even McMicken had grown wary after McGee’s assassination. The Fenians had let it be known that they had marked him down for death too. McMicken lived like a hunted man, trusted nobody but his sons to guard him. The McMicken boys went everywhere with their father, armed to the teeth. McMicken himself carried a brace of pistols under his frock coat.

Dunne reckoned that it was time he followed the Stipendiary Magistrate’s example. If McMicken relied on pistols then Michael Dunne would rely on pistols too. He began to haunt New York’s shooting galleries, working hard to improve his marksmanship. Soon he loved shooting as much as he loved the Polybius square. Both demanded perfect focus, paring the world away to a column of numbers or a target. After a month of steady application he could stitch a pattern on a bull’s eye the diameter of a teacup. In another two weeks he had shrunk it to the size of a silver dollar.

Those days he lived in the Bowery, a once fashionable area of New York that was now home to criminals, the poorest of the city’s labourers, the lowest bums and tramps. On every street there were German beer gardens, saloons, brothels, and theatres offering lewd and vulgar entertainments. None of this had any attraction for Dunne – he despised immorality – but the district offered anonymity. The Bowery was a wasteland populated by transients; people came and went; no one remarked sudden appearances or disappearances; questions about your business were likely to awaken suspicions that the questioner was a stool pigeon.

Dunne resided in a peeling ruin that had, in better days, been an imposing townhouse but which had decomposed into a warren of noisome rented rooms. Its tenants were a cut above many citizens of the area simply because they worked. The jobs they did – scrubbing laundry, digging ditches, shining shoes, swamping out saloons, mucking out stables – sent them out of their beds every morning at dawn and kept them toiling away until darkness fell. An empty, silent building was perfect for a man in Dunne’s line of work. He could compose his reports in peace. It provided a safe location to conduct
IRA
and Fenian business.

The only two people who didn’t evacuate the building during the day were Rose and her fourteen-year-old son, Billy, who lived on the same floor as Dunne. Neither caused him any concern. It was common knowledge in the building that Rose spent her nights flat on her back in a knocking-shop owned by a toothless madam known as Polly Gums. When Rose reeled home in the morning, smelling of gin, she immediately pitched the boy out of their quarters so he wouldn’t disturb her beauty sleep. From nine o’clock in the morning until dusk, when she sashayed out of her room twitching her broad behind, Dunne never laid eyes on her, and assumed she was dead to the world, well dosed with laudanum, the whores’ favourite cure-all. Rose was no more capable of noticing anything going on around her than was a corpse in a funeral parlour.

As for Billy, he posed no threat either because he was a softhead, a simpleton who mooned about the hallways, softly and tunelessly humming to himself, or crouched on the front stoop like a gargoyle, his cornsilk hair a tangle of cowlicks and rooster tails, his mouth hanging open slackly as if he were inviting houseflies to lay eggs on his tongue. Everywhere Billy went, he clutched a daguerreotype in his hand, a studio portrait of himself taken when he was about a year old. Constant handling had darkened it with a patina of grease and dirt so dense that the infant’s image seemed to be taking form in shadows, or emerging from a grim thunderhead.

Nobody got by Billy without being pestered to look at his portrait. He plucked at people’s sleeves, cried out to each and every passerby, “Look at Baby Billy! Look at me!” The tenants of the building ignored his pleas, bustled by him, thrust him aside, or if he latched on to them and refused to let go they handed him a slap to the head. Dunne was the only one who couldn’t escape him. Once accosted, he couldn’t move. The daguerreotype of the gloomy baby held him fascinated, the high-pitched, piping cries of “Look at Baby Billy! See! See!” rooted him to the spot as if his feet had been pierced with spikes. He would stare at the portrait until the boy snatched it out of his hands and ran down the corridor clutching it to his chest, shouting, “Mine! Mine! My picture!”

Each time this happened, Dunne felt a little more frightened, a little more hollow. He could not understand why a mother would memorialize one of nature’s mistakes in a daguerreotype. Had she been drunk when she took the baby to the photographer? Or could it be possible that she felt something for a mush-head that nobody had ever felt for Michael Dunne?

Then one day it came to him that Billy might provide the solution to something that someone had said to him and which had recently been scurrying around in his brain like a rat in a wall. For the next few weeks, he reviewed and put in place all the necessary steps. One Saturday afternoonDunne sought out Billy. He found him lurking in a stairwell. When the boy thrust the daguerreotype at him to be admired, Dunne asked him if he would like to have a “big boy picture” taken.

It took some time for Billy to untangle what was being said to him. When he finally comprehended, his willing eagerness was everything Dunne had hoped for. Immediately, he began an insistent whining. “Now, take Billy’s picture now. Right now. Now.” He continued to chirp these words even as Dunne took him by the hand, led him out of the back of the dwelling through the privy yard and down a maze of garbage-strewn alleys that delivered them into busy Canal Street.

It was an overcast spring day; there was a smell of rain in the air, and a ceiling of dark cloud hung above the city. Dunne hailed a cab. The novelty of a ride in a hansom finally plugged Billy’s gob. To keep the gawking boy from toppling out the window and into the street, Dunne had to hold on to his belt all the way to the East River dockyards.