It Was Only Ever You (24 page)

In the meantime, she had to find something to do to keep herself busy – starting with this afternoon. The apartment was spick and span, and she was darned if she would go to the trouble of preparing a meal for Patrick. If he was not back in time to take her out for her spaghetti dinner, he could starve!

Ava wandered into her bedroom and looked at the clothes she had been trying on the night before, scattered across the wardrobe door and chair. Most of them didn’t fit her, but even though Ava knew she would lose the weight after the baby was born, part of her just wanted to throw them all away. These were the clothes she had bought and worn before she had met Patrick. She was a different woman now, in a new life. The pedal pushers and sweaters she had worn dancing, all those dresses her mother had made her buy that she had never liked, the very sight of them irritated her. Perhaps it was time to let them go, and with them, her past. Remembering her work with her mother, and the clothes parcels they sent through the church across to Ireland, she decided to parcel them up and find a way of approaching her mother with them.

Opening her packed closet, Ava took a deep breath and began to plough through her clothes. She sifted out the items that no longer fitted her and put them into a pile on her bed. Holding up each one, she noted sadly that most of them had been bought in preparation for being the lawyer’s wife, during her courtship with Dermot. The smart navy cotton dress and jacket suit she had worn to meet his parents for the first time. The silk, pussy-bow blouse she wore on their third date. She only wore it once, regretting the high neck one evening as she had tried to unbutton herself to lure him into a more passionate kiss. The red shift dress she had worn to her engagement party and finally, her Sybil Connolly rose suit.

Ava stood in front of her dressing table mirror and held it up in front of her. It seemed like it belonged to another woman.

She thought about how much her life had changed in just a few months, how much her body had changed. She looked across at herself and almost jolted at the look of fear in her eyes. It was the prospect of how much more change she knew there was to come with this baby.

In that moment, despite being married to a man she loved, despite carrying the baby that she very much wanted, Ava felt overwhelmed by her own life.

I
GGY
COULD
not get Sheila Klein out of his head.

As soon as she left the building he went out to the bar and gave Gerry a roasting. Gerry was convinced he was about to be fired. But in the end the only instructions Iggy gave him were to give the kid a regular slot with the house band three days a week and, ‘Get him a decent stage suit, for Christsake!’

As his manager was sheepishly heading out the door, Iggy barked, ‘What’s his name?’

Gerry looked confused.

‘The kid! The kid! What’s his name?’

‘Er – Patrick Murphy,’ Gerry said. His boss’s behaviour, and sudden patronage of Patrick on the strength of that frankly accidental performance, was puzzling. Iggy was a difficult boss in that he was exacting. But he was pretty easy to read.

Gerry could see he was off form, but he had no idea by how much.

During the next hour Iggy tried to go through the books, but the whole time he felt restless, as if something was missing.

He decided to go back out into the club to see if that Jewish chick had hung around. He was sure that she hadn’t, but still, he thought he’d go out and check anyway. He wandered around, even going back to the place by the door where she had first approached him. Of course, she wasn’t there. She had stormed out.

He went back to his office and opened the books again. Ingoings and outgoings, deliveries and overheads. Bar takings were up on last month, door takings were down on the last six-month period... Oh! To hell with it! He threw the books aside – who cared about them anyway? That chick had got the last word on him. And some cheek she had coming in here, to his club, pretending to be some kind of a bigshot manager when he knew everyone in town. She was a nobody, but she had knocked him back. Iggy didn’t get knocked back by anyone. Not for a long time. Not by anyone who knew who he was.

He had asked her out to supper and she had said ‘no’. The hell with her...

Iggy picked up the phone and rang old Hymie Baldwin across town. Hymie owned the Spotlight Ballroom in the East Village, where Iggy had cut his teeth behind the bar as a fifteen-year-old roughneck straight off the boat from Ireland.

‘Work for a Jew if you can,’ a man on the boat across had advised him. ‘Work hard and they’ll pay you properly. Only work for your own when you don’t need something.’ Iggy had learned everything he knew in business working for Jewish bosses. It was, he knew, what made him such a success. He wasn’t afraid of upsetting his own. He wasn’t beholden to anyone, or afraid of anyone. Wherever he was, Iggy remained an outsider and he liked it like that.

Now he asked his old friend straight out, ‘Do you know a broad called Sheila Klein? Calls herself a music manager.’

‘Ouch,’ Hymie said. ‘She worked for Dan McAndrew at the Twilight. Did more than work for him, too. His wife, Angela, is one of the Balduccis. I heard they were pretty mad. I was kind of hoping she might turn up here, looking for a job. She was one hell of a manager, by all accounts. More than that lazy, womanizing shyster deserved, anyway. But with those Italian gorillas after her, I’m guessing she skipped town. Why the interest? You looking for staff?’

‘I’m always looking for staff, old man.’

They exchanged a few more words before Iggy put the phone down.

He was disappointed. Dan McAndrew was exactly the sort of lazy, louche character he despised. Ignatius Morrow was certainly not interested in his leftovers. Even if he were, he reasoned, women were enough trouble on their own, without the Mafia after them. Plus, Miss Klein had skipped town. So, that was that.

Except that Iggy had an itch now and he couldn’t let go until it was scratched.

The next day he went to Boston to check on his establishment there. He rang round. Nobody had heard of Sheila Klein. From there he went to Chicago, and made a few more calls. Again – nobody had heard of her. Cincinnati, Fort Worth, St Louis – no one in any of the clubs in any of the cities where he operated had known of a dark-haired Jewish broad in her thirties come in looking for work. Furthermore, word was spreading that Iggy Morrow was losing it. Ringing around competitors, chinwagging and asking questions? Every stop, Iggy told himself he was being a fool. What the hell was he doing looking for this woman? He didn’t even know her. Somehow, she had got right under his skin.

As the weeks passed and his enquiries led to nothing, Iggy began to worry that something had happened to her. In a whiskey snooze on his regular long-haul flight to London, Iggy had a nightmare the Balducci brothers had found her. They were following her through the streets of Willesden in north-west London, and he was chasing after them, but, no matter how fast he ran, he couldn’t catch up to their slow, menacing swagger. He woke up calling out her name. The air hostess, Linda, brought him over a blanket and coffee.

‘Who’s Sheila?’ she said, teasing him.

He decided enough was enough. He visited Manchester, Liverpool and Cork on that trip. Returning to New York from Dublin he made a conscious decision to stop looking. He would not ring Hymie or other club owners to see if Sheila had turned back up on home soil. Enough was enough. She was just some woman, and if she was in trouble it was nothing to do with him.

There was one sure way to scratch the itch she had given him, but Iggy didn’t call any of his girlfriends on that trip. He just didn’t have the will for his usual enjoyable but ultimately pointless encounters. Next time around, next trip, he told himself. Or perhaps, he thought, I am just getting too old. Too old for all the travel and the cheap sex. Maybe, he worried, I am losing my mind altogether, chasing around after some woman I don’t even know.

His flight came in early and Iggy decided to head straight to Yonkers for breakfast in Katie’s, his favourite diner, before going across to the Emerald. It was closer to Riverdale than Yonkers, but he could use the walk. When he was done there he would head across to the club, get all his paperwork done before noon, then go back to his hotel, sleep and be ready for his flight to Boston the next morning.

The diner was busy, but that was no great surprise. It was a great place, popular with the Irish crowd. There were proper Irish rashers and sausages shipped in from home, and brown bread like ‘your mother used to make’.

Not that Iggy had grown up eating rashers and sausages, or indeed had a mother to make brown bread for him. Home was a Christian Brothers orphanage, whose brutality ended when he ran away at thirteen to work in Dublin and save for the boat ticket to his American dream. Iggy reinvented the truth by re-creating the vision of Ireland for the Irish abroad, and the Irish at home too. And in doing so he was able to invent a pretty fiction for himself with the finest rashers and sausages and strong tea, never coffee, in a Yonkers diner.

‘The usual, Katie,’ he said to the woman at the counter. She gave him a mug and he sat down in his favourite booth with a copy of the
New York Times
. A waitress came over with the coffee jug as he put his hand over the mug – she splashed it with boiling coffee.

‘Ouch!’ he said and looked up at her angrily.

A somewhat defiant pair of dark eyes looked straight into his, and a broad mouth twisted in very slight but nonetheless unmistakably amused recognition.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She didn’t look sorry. And she wasn’t.

Sheila had hoped never to see the creep Morrow again, although she had also known that in taking a job in an Irish diner, on a die-hard Irishman’s patch, was not exactly the best way of avoiding him.

She had needed the money and this gig was a last resort. It was near home and she had nowhere else to go. The knock-back from Iggy that night had thrown her, and she had decided to sit tight and try and save enough money to get herself to another city to start a new life. In truth, though, she didn’t feel like running anywhere.

So she took this job, but Sheila hated waiting tables and frankly, she was lousy at it. People might forgive a young waitress for spilling coffee, but they expected a kind of homespun charm from older servers, and Sheila was pretty short on that. The dim and dusty world of New York nightlife was what she knew. Over and over she told herself that if she could have that ten minutes in front of Iggy Morrow back again, she would offer her services. Hell, pulling pints or selling cigarettes in an Irish dance hall was better than this.

So, here he was.

Still, they had parted on bad terms and Sheila didn’t do apologies – empty or otherwise.

‘It’s you,’ he said.

‘You want some ice for that hand?’ she asked, without making a move to help him.

‘No it’s fine,’ he said. Then, remembering himself, said, ‘It’s Miss...?’

‘Klein. Sheila Klein.’

Iggy felt pleased with himself. As if he had somehow clawed back some of the self-respect he lost while chasing around after her. At least she had no idea he had been looking.

Sheila shuffled from foot to foot.

‘Hey, lady! Where’s my coffee?’ a fat regular called from across the room.

She arched her eyebrows at Iggy in an embarrassed apology and went off to serve the other customer.

Iggy watched her as she worked. Her skinny black pants with a matching black sweater made her body look even narrower than he remembered. Her hair was slung casually into a ponytail at the nape of her neck and her back was so straight as she walked across the room, it looked like she might snap in half. She seemed full of more energy than her thin body could contain.

Although she said little, and moved carefully, Iggy could sense something glittering beneath the surface of her reserve. An anger. A hunger. As his gaze carefully followed her he alarmed himself with the thought that she might walk out the door of this establishment at any moment and he might never see her again.

Katie brought over his breakfast herself.

‘New girl,’ he said.

‘Worst waitress I ever had. Charmless. I’m doing a favour for her family.’

‘She’s local?’

‘Nice old Jewish couple, the Kleins, German. She grew up with them. Her family died in the war.’

So this is where she was from. She hadn’t moved far out of town, but, as he knew himself, the Bronx was a million miles away from Manhattan if you were looking for somebody. Iggy looked across at her again, refilling the coffee pot behind the counter. He felt a silly disappointment that she had not stuck around in the area for him.

He went up to the counter to pay. Katie had left Sheila to deal with him.

She came over with his check. He wasn’t interested in her. She’d blown it. Guys like him didn’t go around giving people second chances, even when they didn’t know that they wanted one.

So she was absolutely astonished when the great Iggy Morrow handed over two dollars and said, ‘You want a job?’

She wanted to lean over and hug him. But hugging wasn’t her style and so, instead, she found herself saying, ‘A job doing what?’

Her lower lip was trembling. Iggy could sense the tension in her voice and see her eyes lose some of their determined hardness. She was desperate. She needed work, the Mafia were after her, she’d be a lucky woman if he offered her a job, even selling cigarettes or working in the cloakroom. Would she go out to dinner with him now? he wondered. He knew she would, but he didn’t know if she would want to. And he wanted her to want him.

In that moment he knew that, while she was keeping up the tough façade, she would take anything on offer.

In that moment Iggy knew that he had complete control over Sheila Klein.

‘I would like you to come and manage Patrick Murphy for me. You were right. The kid’s got talent, but I don’t have time to bring him on.’

Inside, Sheila was screaming. Was this happening? Was this guy for real? She kept her face as impassive as she could and narrowed her eyes. Persuading herself they looked as hard as concrete, she said, ‘Fifty-fifty – straight down the line.’