Smoke rises lazily from the tin chimney of the hut, and the men loitering in front of it go silent at their approach. O’Keefe gets the smell of boiled cabbage and bacon coming from the open door of the dwelling, and his stomach, independent of his fear, growls with hunger.
‘Lads,’ he says, unable to think of a more apt greeting. Something tells him that commenting on the weather will not be taken kindly by these men. They are tough-looking, variously sized, but lean and angry, skin roughened brown by wind and sun. They are much like the men O’Keefe remembers from his time in the army, lacking only the kit and uniform, but there is a silent rage that he can sense among them, smouldering just beneath their silence. None of them responds to his greeting.
‘We’re looking to speak with Séamus Brennan, if we could,’ he tries, as their menace thickens in the humid sea air. The sound of waves and Albert’s jingling coins. O’Keefe turns back to the doorman and stares until he ceases bothering the copper in his pockets. When he brings his gaze back to the men, Just Albert resumes it again, a smirk on his face that O’Keefe can feel but not see.
O’Keefe controls the bite of ire he feels towards Ginny’s man, and this anger is replaced by a dawning fear. He wonders suddenly if he has arrested any of these men in the past. Shot at them? Had he, God forbid, killed one of their brothers or friends? It is not beyond the possible.
He swallows, his mouth dry. ‘We’re not police or Free State intelligence or any of the other things you’re probably thinking. I’ve met Mr Brennan before and helped him once and I’m hoping he can help me now with a matter that’s nothing to do with your being in here or with the war outside.’
‘Everything has to do with the war going on outside if you’ve come to see a man who’s inside,’ one of the men says. He is in his twenties, with light green eyes and blond hair worn oiled and combed back off his forehead. He wears woollen army uniform trousers and braces over a cotton undershirt.
O’Keefe considers the man’s words before speaking. Then: ‘Fair enough. Maybe it does have to do with the war. It probably does. But I’ve no truck with your enemies, if that’s a better way of putting it. If you could point me to Séamus Brennan’s hut, I can explain it to him.’
‘Why don’t you explain it to us first,’ the same man says.
‘Because he just fuckin’ told yis he’d rather explain it to the man himself is why,’ Just Albert says from behind O’Keefe.
The words are spoken without rancour, but O’Keefe cringes inwardly. What had started as oblique negotiation, Ginny Dolan’s man has given a shove towards confrontation. A confrontation they will not win.
‘Look,’ O’Keefe says, ‘can one of you give him a message that Seán O’Keefe, out of Ballycarleton once, is here to see him? And then let him make up his own mind to see me or not. If he says to take the road out, we’ll take it. That’s all I’m asking.’
One of the group steps forward, big, his shirt sleeves rolled over thick forearms. ‘I’ll show ye the fucking road, I will,’ he says.
The green-eyed man intervenes. ‘Leave off. I’ll take them to Brennan and see what he says. Follow me,’ he says to O’Keefe and Albert, stepping past them. O’Keefe turns to follow, and after a long moment staring at the men, so does Just Albert. As they trail their guide between the maze of huts, deeper into the camp, O’Keefe wonders how close they had just come to a serious beating or worse.
After a few minutes they come to a hut in what O’Keefe takes to be the centre of the camp. It appears to be the farthest away from any of the guard towers and has purpose-built steps of scrap wood leading up to its doorway. Green-eyes disappears inside, leaving O’Keefe and Albert waiting in stilted silence and subject to wary, menacing interest from prisoners loitering in front of a neighbouring hut.
‘Sergeant O’Keefe,’ Séamus Brennan says, looking down from the doorway, and O’Keefe thanks a God he has ceased to believe in that it is the man he had hoped for.
Séamus Brennan had been the OIC of Brigade Intelligence of the West Cork Thirds, IRA, during the Tan War. O’Keefe had heard, or read in a file sometime before his demobilisation from the RIC, that Brennan had been promoted to OIC of Intelligence for the Southern Division, IRA, and had held that post until he’d sided with de Valera and the anti-Treaty Irregulars. O’Keefe had met him while investigating the murder of a young woman whose body had been left on a hillside outside of Drumdoolin in West Cork. He had found Brennan to be a ruthless, though personable, professional officer who had seemed to respect O’Keefe’s detective work and had tried to recruit O’Keefe into the ranks of the IRA. O’Keefe had declined his offer, his loyalty having always been to his comrades in the RIC, but he had respected Brennan in return.
‘Just plain Seán, now, Mr Brennan. General Brennan? It’s been some time since I’ve held rank in any service at all.’
Brennan smiles. ‘Haven’t joined the Civic Guard then? I understand they’re looking for men like yerself, boy. Men with policing experience.’
‘I’ve done enough policing to last a man a lifetime, General. I’m doing a favour for … for a friend, is all. Could I speak with you privately, sir?’
There is a quiet, cunning charisma about Brennan that had impressed O’Keefe the first time they met, and it is still there now, though it is dimmed somewhat—by age, O’Keefe imagines, and by disillusionment. By captivity. Older than the average IRA man even then, Brennan has aged harshly in the three years since O’Keefe had seen him last. The intelligence man’s hair has gone white and his face is drawn—sharp, haggard lines grid his eyes and mouth, and his hand appears clenched in a painful, awkward way. Brennan notices O’Keefe’s attention to his hand and holds it up.
‘Courtesy of our friends in the Auxiliaries, who kindly held it down and stamped on it until it became useless altogether. My claw of war.’ Brennan laughs quietly. ‘I’ve fresher wounds, sure, courtesy of former friends now working for the Free State. Some of them I trained in myself, boy. Imagine.’
‘Nothing’s too difficult to imagine these days, sir,’ O’Keefe says.
‘Sure, you said it before, the time I met you. War makes strange bedfellows. Strange enemies too.’ There is a sadness in Brennnan’s voice, but little of the rage O’Keefe senses in the younger men in the camp. ‘Come inside, so, and I’ll see if I can help ye. And then I’ll try again to convince you to join us in our struggle.’
O’Keefe returns his smile. ‘Thanks again for the offer, sir, but I’ve done my share of fighting. I don’t think I’ll take it up again.’
They follow him inside, where Brennan sits down at a table of sanded boards. He indicates two stools across from him at the table, and pours out tea from a pot heating on an army field stove. ‘I was just having some myself lads, I hope you’ll join me. I’d offer you a cigarette but we’ve not had a package in a week. The boys are convinced the guards are smoking their fags and spreading their mothers’ jams on their Free State toast back in barracks, though it’s likely our own boys have cut the rail lines or burned out a post office here and there, delaying deliveries.’
O’Keefe’s face flushes with embarrassment. He should have brought an offering of some sort to the camp. When, he thinks, did a man ever visit a prison without bringing something in as a gift for the prisoner? Albert seems to read his thoughts—not for the first time, O’Keefe realises—and reaches into his pocket, coming out with a packet of the thin cigars he smokes. He hands them across to Brennan who takes them, laughing with surprise.
‘That’s kind of you, sir,’ he says to Albert, who nods and lights one of his own. ‘Now, boys, what can I help you with?’
O’Keefe explains it to him while Brennan relishes his cigar and sips tea, nodding occasionally.
When O’Keefe has finished, Brennan pinches out his quarter-smoked cigar and sets it on the table. ‘The Mahons. Well, boy, it’d want to be a fairly close friend you’re doing this favou
r for, to meet up with that mob for your troubles.’
‘It is,’ Just Albert says, and Brennan looks at him and then back to O’Keefe.
‘I’ve heard stories about them,’ O’Keefe says.
Brennan claps O’Keefe on the shoulder with his good hand. ‘Wait til ye meet them, then. Sure, the stories haven’t a patch on the real thing …’
To O’Keefe’s surprise, Just Albert has managed to ply their green-eyed escort with one of his cigars while O’Keefe had been saying his goodbyes to Brennan, and now they chat as they walk, the three men. They learn that his name is Eamonn Dunne, a Kerryman who had been captured after his column had been ambushed by Free State troops while sleeping in what they had thought to be a safe house. Dunne’s brother, he tells them, had been shot down in his stockinged feet in the raid and is in Mountjoy Jail now, having only just survived his wounds. Dunne tells them that he is more concerned about getting a transfer to Mountjoy himself so that he might tend to his brother than he is in escaping and continuing the fight for the freedom of Ireland.
‘Sure, fuck, lads,’ he says, as they follow him between the huts towards the eastern, beach side of the camp, ‘this whole lark’ll be done with soon enough, and between yourselves and meself and the four walls—the wire, anyway,’ he smiles, ‘there’s no way we’ll win it. The Free State bastards know every hidey hole, every safe house in the country and every fucking trick in the book, I tell you. There’s only so many ways you can fight a war like ours, and sure didn’t the Free State fellas help write the bloody book.’
‘The sooner it’s done the better, I say,’ Albert says. ‘Too many fellas thinking they’re top dogs, just because they’re carrying a pistol and wearing a funny hat.’
‘I’m telling you, it’ll be over before you know it,’ Dunne says, ‘but not before it gets a whole shagging lot bloodier. There’s boys in here so angry they’d rip the throat from your neck for talking like I’m talking now, and the Free Staters have got fierce savage since Mick Collins was shot. Before, sure, it could be like they were windy about shooting fellas they’d fought the Tans with, but not any more; not after they put the Big Fella in the ground. No, this war won’t be won by us … or by them, really, when you think about it. But that never stopped lads from keeping on shooting each other just for spite.’
O’Keefe finds himself agreeing. He had fought in just such a futile, needless war. He had lost his own brother in it. For what? For fuck all. He tells this to Dunne, and also tells him that he is better off locked up and out of it.
‘If I can get the brother back to his health, please God, then I’ll be better off altogether and damn the rest. I’m sick of the whole thing, I am.’
‘You and the rest of the bleedin’ country,’ Just Albert says.
‘The rest of the country don’t matter a shite to most of the boys in this camp once they’ve a chance to plug some fucker who’s called them traitors.’ They come to a stop in front of a relatively isolated hut. ‘Here you are, and I’ll leave you to it. And thanks for the cigar, friend. Sure, I knew I’d come upon a kind-hearted Jackeen one day, I did.’ He smiles at the men and leaves them.
The hut is in the farthest, northeast corner of the camp, close to the inner perimeter fence. Through the two sets of wire and just beyond the tracks of the Dublin–Belfast railway line, O’Keefe can view the sea. The beach before it is long with low tide, the wet sand reflecting sunlight as if it had been varnished. Nature has been rough with the dwelling and sea wind has sandblasted the outer walls, scouring paint from the door.
Two men sit on a sea trunk that serves as a bench to the left of the pallet steps. One of them is smoking a needle-thin cigarette rolled in newsprint. They are smaller, thinner than most of the men they have seen in the camp. Dublin men, O’Keefe thinks, remembering the whippet-like lads he had served with in the army, many of them tenement-reared, and weighing little more than the kit and rifle they were made to carry, but carried nonetheless.
The IRA had been for many years the preserve of middle-class men and rural farm labourers; of intellectuals and the sons of generations of dispossessed and evicted subsistence farmers. But the civil war had widened the pool of fighting men on both sides of the Treaty and this, inevitably, included men like the ones seated on the sea trunk.
O’Keefe does not bother with formalities. ‘Is the bossman in?’
The man on the left—in his twenties, his flat cap pulled low over his eyes, black razor-shadow on his angled features—takes a pull on his roll-up.
‘Who wants to know?’
Before O’Keefe can answer, Just Albert steps in front of O’Keefe and leans down until he is at eye level with the man. He says something in a low voice that O’Keefe cannot hear and then stands back, allowing the man to stand and enter the hut. The second man watches but says nothing, avoiding Just Albert’s eyes.
The man in the cap returns to the doorway. ‘He’s inside.’
Just Albert indicates for O’Keefe to lead the way, and O’Keefe nods his thanks for having their passage smoothed. He is growing weary of the jousting this day has required. He had forgotten how difficult investigating anything in Ireland could be; forgotten just how guarded and suspicious of intent eight hundred years of foreign rule could make a people. And the recent years of war had made things worse. When he had been in uniform, there had been people in any town who would discreetly aid an investigation, if it were thought to be morally right. There were also those who were happy to put the finger on another man so long as their names were left out of any testimony, thus, at very least, providing the intelligence that any investigating police require. But there were few who would willingly volunteer anything to a common man in a suit. Ireland had never had great success with plain-clothes police detectives since they were thought to be little more than informants or spies when out of uniform. So O’Keefe expects little from the Mahons. A common man in a common suit is what I am now and nothing more, O’Keefe thinks, and he feels a great distance between his life now and his past life as an RIC man.
He enters the hut, Just Albert behind him, and slowly his eyes adjust to the dim interior light. Three men are seated at a table in the centre of the room, and through an open doorway behind them O’Keefe can see a room housing bunks, all of them neatly made with turned-down sheets that would not have been out of place in a police or army barracks. Or a prison, he thinks, noticing how everything in the room in which he stands is tidied or hung away on hooks or displayed on purpose-built shelves. The military discipline of the men in the other huts could hardly be more rigorous than the penal tidiness these men had embraced during various spells in Dublin’s jails.
‘Gentlemen,’ O’Keefe says. ‘I was hoping to speak with Dominic Mahon if I could.’ As he speaks, he realises there are two other men in the room besides those at the table. They are young and big and one of them has a flat, smashed nose like a boxer’s. They move now and take up a place on either side of the entry door behind O’Keefe and Just Albert.
‘If you could, who would you be?’ one of the men at the table says. O’Keefe judges the speaker to be Mahon himself because the other two look at him when he speaks, as if to take their lead.
‘My name is Seán O’Keefe. I’ve been hired by …’
‘What’d you call yourself?’ a second man asks. He has oiled, black hair, a pencil-thin moustache and a pile of newsprint roll-ups on the table in front of him.
‘Seán O’Keefe …’
The third man speaks to his mates at the table. He is stocky and fit, shoulders and biceps straining his shirt fabric. Built like Just Albert, O’Keefe briefly thinks, only from slinging crates off ships rather than dumbbells. ‘It looks the same, it does.’
It? O’Keefe frowns.
‘Couldn’t be …’ The black-haired man squints with concentration, focusing on O’Keefe’s face.
‘He’s the cut of him, I’m fuckin’ t
ellin’ yeh,’ the stocky man says now. ‘Why don’t yeh ask him?’
‘Ask him what?’ Just Albert says, and O’Keefe can hear the smirk in his voice.
‘You’re no relation to Daniel O’Keefe are you? Big, strapping G-Division copper?’ the first man says, the one O’Keefe assumes to be Dominic Mahon.
‘I … well, I am.’
‘Holy jaysus, the chances of it …’ the stocky man says, smiling in a way O’Keefe does not like.
O’Keefe sees Dominic Mahon nod. Sensing movement behind him, he turns, into the arms of one of the men behind him, who links his hands together in front of O’Keefe, squeezing him tightly in a bear hug and lifting him off his feet.
‘What in the name of Jesus…?’ O’Keefe says, before his breath is viced from his lungs. He writhes against the man’s grip and sees Just Albert move now, skipping for the doorway, towards the big man still stationed there. For a moment, O’Keefe thinks Albert is fleeing the hut, and the man at the door thinks the same, taking two steps forward as if to cut off his escape.
‘Albert!’ O’Keefe manages, but Just Albert ignores him, his hand going inside his suit coat and coming out with a stunted club the length of his forearm, stepping inside the big man’s lunge and using his wrist to swing the club in a short arc. Lightning quick, the sound of the club on skull is like cracking wood, and the man’s stunned momentum takes him forward past the grappling O’Keefe and face down onto the table where the three men sit, its legs collapsing, the three men shoving back and standing to enter the fray.
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