It takes him a second to recognise the fellow. It is the thick, brown beard that has thrown O’Keefe, but there is no mistaking the voice, the gruff, jocular Dublin accent softened by the snowy steppes of his earliest childhood. ‘Solly …’
‘I heard you were back, Seáneen, and haunting the taverns. How’re you keeping?’
‘Better than some,’ O’Keefe says, nodding at the coalman kneeling in the street and offering his hand to his old friend. ‘Did you see it?’
‘Heard it and ducked for cover like the coward I am. Chap over there said it was a car full of trenchcoats pulled up and started popping away at a lad on the opposite side of the road there. He claims it was the ever elusive Felim O’Hanley they were gunning for. The green pimpernel.’
‘And the poor horse got it in the crossfire, along with Slattery’s window and mirror. I nearly had a bullet with my pint.’
‘Free State musketry leaves much to be desired, so I’m told.’
O’Keefe smiles. Harold ‘Solly’ Solomon had been eight years old when his father landed the Solomon clan in Dublin, renting the house two doors up from the O’Keefe’s with another Ukrainian Jewish family fleeing the pogroms of central Europe for the poverty of Dublin. The poverty had not bothered the Solomons much, and they now own the house they had once rented. The three Solomon brothers are professional men, their sisters married well to upstanding Dublin Jews.
‘Will you come inside for a glass or three, Solly?’ O’Keefe asks.
Solly tugs a pocket watch from inside his coat. ‘Seeing as I’m late already, sure, a quick one would be no harm.’
When they are settled at the bar with their pints of stout, Solly says, ‘How is the father anyway, Seán? I’ve not been in since your mother called for me, what, two weeks ago now? I must stop in to him.’
O’Keefe is puzzled. He has been to see his mother only once since his return to Dublin. Five months of wilful negligence, though his digs are hardly a mile from his home. This pub, a fifteen-minute walk to his front door. He feels heat rise to his face.
‘I … I didn’t know he wasn’t well.’
Solly takes a sup and nods. ‘I know things weren’t good between you and the Da, Seán. After Peter … God rest him. Jesus, don’t I know what fathers are like, having one of them myself?’
‘Your auldfella’s a sound man, Solly. Not like mine at all.’
‘Different but the same. We go weeks without talking.’
‘Not seven years, but …’
‘No, not seven years. Jews have a harder time with begrudging silence than the likes of ye. If only for the chance of further recrimination, my auldfella can’t hold his tongue for long—you’re right there.’ Solly laughs. ‘He’s always asking after you, Seán, Daddy is. You should call in. The pot of borscht is still always on the go. The mother as well would love to see you. She’d want to feed you up, you know that.’ He breaks into an imitation of his mother’s rudimentary English. ‘Irish boy, only beer, need food for fat. No beer, soup! Soup! You’re a fourth son to them, sure.’
‘I’m too thick to be a Solomon.’
‘Every house needs a heavy.’
O’Keefe laughs softly. ‘Will you go another jar, Solly?’
Solly claps him on the shoulder. ‘No, I’ve a patient to see in Rathgar. I’ll be hoofing it now that the tram’s off. But we will, Seán, soon, yes? Call in to me and we’ll go for a gallon.’
O’Keefe realises what he must ask his old friend, and feels the shame of asking. ‘Solly? What’s … wrong with the auldfella? He’s all right, isn’t he?’
Solly’s eyes darken under his homburg. ‘You should go see him, Seán. Go see him and then call in to me and we’ll sit down for a chat. But you’d do well to see him, right?’ He squeezes O’Keefe’s shoulder, and O’Keefe shudders under the grip.
‘All right, I will.’
‘Good man, Seán.’
‘Right so, Solly.’
O’Keefe walks his friend out of the pub, and watches him weave his way through the thinning crowd. On the street a DMP constable has finally arrived on the scene, and has enlisted some men standing on the path to help him shift the dead horse and the coal wagon off the tram tracks. O’Keefe turns momentarily north, instinct directing his heart homewards, but shame trumps instinct and he swivels about face—a parade ground pivot from his days of drill in the Peelers and the army—and heads back into Slattery’s to the safety of the bar’s daylight shadows.
For three days, O’Keefe drinks. He does not eat and does not play the horses and only vaguely remembers stumbling out of wherever he had finished the first night. There was whiskey involved and the heady miasma of perfume and sweat. The laughter of women and a crackling gramophone.
Noon or sometime after, O’Keefe rises and finds the bottle of Jameson on the desk beside his table. It is a bottle he has no recollection of buying but is glad he did. He pours stagnant water from a pitcher into a glass and adds whiskey, and in half an hour he starts again in Slattery’s, and keeps at it until he falls down outside of Kehoe’s on South Anne Street. He is lifted to his feet by a man he has met in the pub, and guided to a hack and driven back to his digs, stopping twice to be sick, once at the top of Stephen’s Green and again at Harcourt Street. Shortly after this, a quarter mile from his family home, he tells the hackney man to stop. The driver waits in silence, his horse’s breath a lazy billow in the night air. ‘Fuck it, drive on,’ O’Keefe says, before passing out.
He awakes early and is sick again, but blessedly back in his digs in the faded darkness of night on the cusp of morning. A darkness that will not grant sleep. He eyes the whiskey bottle, a quarter full, takes up the pitcher of water in shaking hands and pours it into his one glass and adds whiskey. And starts again. To help him sleep. Today, he thinks, he will see his father, his mother. But sleep first.
Again to Slattery’s, where Davey asks him has he not had enough, at half twelve in the afternoon, and from there in his memory he has only a dim, flickering reel of pubs and flashing blasts of conversation until a kindly constable and again a hack, and this time he gives the driver the address to his home instead of his digs.
His father answers his sloppy knocking and O’Keefe is dimly aware of the surprise on his father’s face, and then a strange blankness as if he does not recognise his son, but it is gone in an instant, replaced by a smile and then his mother is there. And then he is aware of nothing until he awakes in the bed he had slept in as a boy, in the bed he had shared with his brother.
2
So you’re saying Detective Officer Kenny was dead before you got him to Jervis Street Infirmary in the taxi …?’
‘Yes, he was,’ the woman from the front desk of Burton’s Hotel says.
Her interrogator looks up from the file he is reading. His gaze is unnerving because one of his eyes is made of glass, replacing the one that had been gouged out by Auxiliaries who’d captured and questioned him more than a year ago in a different and far simpler conflict. This man, she thinks, knows more than any man should about interrogation. As if reading her thoughts, he dons a pair of round spectacles under which the glass eye is less noticeable.
The woman, Nora Flynn, shakes her head and gazes out the second-floor window at the offices across the busy Westland Row thoroughfare. She can see men in shirtsleeves and ties, women at typewriters. The bustling business of a life assurance company, clacking and scribbling away in search of profit as if there was no way on earth men could be killing each other just a street or two away. Bustling, she thinks, liking the word, the innocent industry it implies.
These offices too are busy. There are men in shirtsleeves and women at typewriters, but over the shirtsleeves the men wear leather shoulder-holsters stuffed with pistols and in the typists’ desk drawers, Nora knows, there are loaded Colt revolvers and files bearing the names of dead men and men marked for death. Bustling
is not a word one would use, she decides, bringing her eyes back to the man with the file.
Nervous under the weight of her interrogator’s silence, she continues. ‘Sure, didn’t they have a car? The Ford they were using. Why didn’t they use it to take him to the hospital?’
Nora remembers running down Abbey Street, trailing a member of the surveillance squad whose name she does not know, an agent who moments earlier had burst through the hotel doors bellowing for Nora to help, that they had a man down injured. In her mind she sees the man pile through the open door of the Ford Tourer and the car leaving, roaring off in the direction of the Custom House, no instructions given to her other than to get the fallen man to a hospital. And she remembers the quiet that descended as the car’s motor faded in the distance. She can almost feel the heft of Kenny’s head in her lap and the warm blood on her hand as she pressed it to the wound, the knife handle still there, lodged between his ribs.
Her interrogator stares at her for a long moment, and Nora wonders if it would have been better to remain silent. She has worked with this man, and men like him, for the better part of two years, indirectly at first, but directly for the past nine months. This is, she thinks, her second war, and yet she feels little different, at times, than when she was a summer typist in her father’s accountancy office.
‘And all this happened at what time?’
She makes an effort to remember. ‘It couldn’t have been more than ten past midnight. You have my operations report. The boy passed by me and exited the hotel at … what did I write? Eleven fifty-six? Forty-six? And Detective Officer Kenny followed him.’ She is growing angry, a flush of blood in her cheeks, her palms still sweating, but there is steel in her voice as she speaks. She has done her job. In no way is she to blame for the death of a man who should have known better.
Kenny, the man with the newspaper. An unlikely detective, she thinks, with his pinched, wan face, his thin body and quick-bitten fingernails. A man who, in reality, had looked every inch the Active Service Unit gunman he had been in the fight against the Crown. But they have called each other ‘detective officers’—it is their rank and they are paid as such—ever since transforming from Michael Collins’ handpicked squad of shooters to the Criminal Investigation Department in Oriel House. Detecting was not what men like Kenny had joined up for, Nora knows, though some of the newer members of CID, and some who had come to the unit from the Irish Republican Police or from IRA units in distant counties, are under the illusion that they are, in fact, detectives.
‘And you’ve no idea who stabbed Kenny?’ her interrogator asks, lighting a cigarette.
‘No, no idea. You’ll have to ask them when … when they come in,’ she says, filling the silence as much as answering the question. Behind her low-burn anger, fear continues to smoulder. ‘It’s all in my report,’ she adds. ‘Did Dillon or O’Shea file theirs?’
Her interrogator watches her for a long moment. Then he closes the manila file on his desk and leans forward, holding out his packet of Sweet Aftons.
Finally: ‘No. They’ve not come in yet, and when I rang Wellington barracks I was told they hadn’t checked in there yet either.’
‘So that leaves us where?’ she asks, not sure if she should.
‘It leaves us wanting to speak to them and catch whoever stabbed Detective Kenny. Finding O’Hanley seems secondary now, in a way, though we mustn’t stop searching for him, or laying bait.’
Felim O’Hanley is the target of the hotel operation. Slippery as Collins—God rest him—had been to the British, and now running the Dublin Brigade for the anti-Treaty Irregulars. After another long silence, Nora meets her interrogator’s eyes.
He says, ‘There was nothing you could have done, Nora. You’ve been doing good work and you did what you were called on to do.’
She leans across the desk and takes a cigarette. Detective Superintendent Terence Carty, like Detective Officer Kenny, was a member of the Big Fella’s special squad, one of his twelve apostles during the Tan War, but smarter, more nuanced than most of them. From fearing Carty to remembering now how he’d always respected the work she had done for the cause during that war; how he had personally recruited her into the Free State Army Intelligence Department and then into CID. He treated her as an agent, rather than just a mocked-up typist, like many of the others did. It was he who had suggested she man the desk at Burton’s for this operation and had made sure she was included in the briefings pertaining to it.
It’s as if Carty sees beyond the notion that women were suited only to the paperwork of war. Sophisticated, Nora thinks, but frightening in his own way. In his eyeglasses and shirtsleeves he might have appeared more at home in the assurance offices across the road, auditing claims for fire and theft. But Carty, Nora knows, had taken many lives as a gunman for Collins. He goes nowhere unarmed, wearing even now at his desk a Mauser C96 in a shoulder-holster instead of the standard issue Colt .45 revolver most of the men in the department carry. She wonders had he shot any of the men she had fingered during her time in the Castle with that same gun. How many men had he killed? More men than she herself had marked for death with a pen and carbon file copy? She pushes the line of thought from her mind. Silly questions. War possesses a mathematics all of its own.
‘What do we do now?’ she asks. Two minutes earlier she would not have dared.
Carty exhales a stream of smoke, stubs out his cigarette and removes his glasses to wipe them on his necktie. Maybe not so sophisticated, Nora thinks.
‘We have to wait for Charlie and the rest of the boys to come in. Find out from them what happened. Find out if we’ll be able to proceed with things or if the whole operation is scuppered. Charlie has his own way of doing things. He’ll be back when he’s ready.’
Carty speaks of Captain Charles Dillon as if of an eccentric uncle rather than a veteran gunman.
Nora is confused. ‘But surely … I mean, Mr Murphy is blown. He can’t be used. Not when the messengers failed to return to O’Hanley. At least we know from Murphy that it was O’Hanley who sent the boys.’
‘If they failed to return,’ Carty says.
‘Something happened in that laneway, something involving the messenger boys. They weren’t two minutes out the door when your man burst back into the hotel shouting they’d a man down stabbed. For all we know, Dillon could have the two messenger boys in custody at Wellington barracks, if not O’Hanley himself.’
Nora knows she is treading dangerously, making accusations she cannot substantiate, but she feels aggrieved. So what if Charlie Dillon has his own way of doing things? A man was dead, and an operation of many weeks’ planning likely damaged beyond repair.
‘If they’d plugged or pulled O’Hanley, we’d have heard about it by now,’ Carty says, a vague smile at his lips.
‘But what about Murphy? Is he not blown?’
‘No, I think we’ll keep him in his rooms for the time being. Until we see what happens. You’ll continue to work the front desk, in shifts along with Detective Officers Malloy and Ring?’
‘Of course.’
‘And if our Mr Murphy is, in fact, blown,’ Carty says, the smile blossoming now to a real one, ‘our pals in the Crown can always lend us another one.’
‘Their generosity knows no bounds.’
‘You mean our pals in British Army intelligence aren’t helping us for the good of an independent Ireland?’
Nora smiles for the first time in what feels like days. ‘I rather doubt it, don’t you?’
3
‘How’s the head, then?’
His father’s voice. O’Keefe opens his eyes, convinced he is waking from one dream and slipping into another. A voice he has not heard in almost seven years. No. Dreaming. He closes his eyes again.
‘There’s tea for you. If you can keep it down.’
This time his eyes snap open. His father looms, sitting in a
chair beside the bed, and a jolt of panic flashes through O’Keefe as he scans the room, realising now that it is his own room and, at once, not his at all. His gaze returns to his father—white hair in the years since he had seen him, the moustache that he has worn as long as O’Keefe has been alive and aware, now also white.
‘What …?’ O’Keefe says. ‘What am I doing here?’
His father smiles, and the smile is a comfort to O’Keefe in his haze of waking. It has been so long since he has seen it, though his father smiled often when he and brother Peter and elder sister Sally had been children. O’Keefe’s father had been a happy man once. A respected DMP detective, he had been a man proud of his work and his home and his ability to keep the O’Keefe family safe and secure; well-fed and schooled. Loved. And then Peter was killed in Turkey and his father had stopped smiling.
O’Keefe sits up, and as he does his vision blurs and sharp pain seizes his head and neck, nausea rising in his throat. Gingerly he lies back. ‘Jaysus, my head. What happened to me?’ He squeezes his eyes shut against the pain and senses, as much as hears, his father laugh. Smiling and now laughing.
O’Keefe wonders suddenly is Peter really dead or had he dreamed it all: the war and the water; the blood and the beach and the scattering death of a million Turkish rounds ripping through the men of the Dublin and Munster Fusiliers? And the wounds and the black winds of sadness that blew in when he let drop his guard? The hospital in Cork? His return to the police and the war in West Cork? His last parade in the Phoenix Park depot on his demob day five months before? All of it a dream, because he is in the bedroom of his childhood, in the bed he shared with his brother and his father is smiling, laughing.
‘You really don’t know, do yeh, son?’
O’Keefe says nothing but opens one eye. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ve a feeling it’s a good thing I don’t.’
Again his father smiles. ‘Well, Misters Guinness and Jameson thank you anyway.’
Irregulars Page 2