The black tide of despondency laps at his consciousness and he forces it back for the second time in as many days, knowing he is riding his luck, aware that when the tide chooses to rise and wash in, it will come, and there will be nothing he can do about it, even if he cared to try.
He sits up and checks his watch—half past seven—and rubs sleep from his eyes.The knocking resumes and then stops. O’Keefe can hear the whispered conversation from behind the door, and relaxes as he rises from his bed, pulling on a pair of corduroy trousers and a cotton vest.
‘His bike is under the front steps, so he has to be in.’
‘His bike was here last week and he wasn’t feckin’ in.’
‘You said “feck”, I’m tellin Ma.’
‘Yeh rat. Informer! You wake the Ma and you’ll get a clatter, you will, yeh thick shite.’
O’Keefe can hear the sound of a slap and another given in return. ‘Lads,’ he says, opening the door. ‘It’s fierce early for visits, isn’t it?’
The younger Cunningham boy, Henry, his school uniform shirt misbuttoned so that one end of it hangs low over his short trousers and the other rides up over his pale belly, says, ‘I know. Ma would reef us out of it if she knew. Come here, look …’ Henry nudges his brother, who takes out a deck of cards. ‘We learned how to play Twenty-five off Granny.’
‘Did you now?’
‘We did.’
‘And?’
The elder brother, Thomas, takes over. ‘And …’ the boy has large, brown eyes and hair that will not stay combed if it were glued down and varnished, ‘… will you give us a game? We can’t play each other ’cause Henry’s always cheatin’.’
‘You’re always feckin’ cheatin’.’
‘Lads …’
‘You are!’
O’Keefe smiles, helpless. He wonders was he and his own brother like this pair, the best of friends and never not fighting. ‘All right, lads, one game and then I’m off for work. Let me make tea and some beans.’
‘Can we have some?’ Henry says.
‘See, I told yeh he was awake,’ Thomas says.
O’Keefe loses four hands of Twenty-five to the boys. He is, he thinks, the world’s worst card player. Or perhaps Henry had been cheating. He smiles a little as he dresses and shaves.
As he mounts the Trusty, patting his trenchcoat pocket for the photo of Nicholas Dolan, he hears his name called. He turns, startled, to see the woman from the reception desk at Burton’s Hotel coming towards him on the footpath. He summons her name. Nora Flynn.
‘Mr O’Keefe,’ she says, stopping on the path in front of him. ‘What a coincidence. Do you live here? I’m only up Leinster Road myself. Up at the top in digs.’
‘Yes, the basement rooms here. Room, really,’ O’Keefe says. Unconsciously he removes his leather helmet and smooths his hair with his fingers. Lost for words, he repeats hers. ‘What a coincidence. I was just on my way to get the photograph copied. I was going to call in at the hotel with copies on the way to collect my friend.’
The woman smiles, and something wells in O’Keefe’s chest. She is wearing a long, blue linen skirt and white blouse under a navy jacket, and carries a worn leather satchel bag. The simplicity of the outfit highlights her beauty, O’Keefe thinks, his eyes fixed on the woman’s voluminous red hair, which is gathered into a neat French roll. There is a smattering of freckles on her nose and O’Keefe restrains his gaze from lingering on her shapely figure. He concentrates on her eyes—sea-green he notes, framed by thick, dark red lashes. She is tall, but she carries her height with grace and confidence.
There is a momentary but not unpleasant silence between them, as if both are thinking that whatever either one of them says next will be of some significance. Nora looks thoughtful, as if deliberating the wisdom of befriending this stranger. Then she smiles and nods at the Trusty.
‘Is it yours?’
‘It is. I bought her in Cork. After the war …’ O’Keefe stops, suddenly feeling he has said too much. As if he has admitted something shameful. Nora looks at him and appears to sense this, her eyes settling briefly on the scar on his face.
‘It’s lovely. You must give us a spin some time. I’ve never been on a motorbike before. My brothers are mad about them.’
O’Keefe smiles. ‘I am as well. She’s my one true love, she is.’ He stops. How ridiculous he must sound—how pathetic—to a woman as poised and lovely as this Nora Flynn. Another rootless, jobless war veteran on the make.
But Nora laughs and her cheeks bloom with colour. ‘Surely that can’t be true, Mr O’Keefe.’
‘Sad but true, Miss Flynn,’ he says, trying to make light of his awkwardness. Somehow, he has lost his easy way with women. The war, he thinks. He knows.
Again there is silence but this time neither of them glances away.
‘Would you …’ O’Keefe feels he should stop himself before he goes on but finds he is unable, ‘… Would you like a lift into work? I’ve only to stop at the printer’s … there’s one on Camden Street, and then I could drop you. Only if you’d like. If …’
‘I’d like that very much, Mr O’Keefe. Thank you.’
They smile at each other and Nora mounts the bike side-saddle, taking a tentative hold of O’Keefe’s waist.
‘Here,’ he says, handing her the goggles. ‘Wear these. Just in case.’
‘Just in case of what, Mr O’Keefe?’ she asks, but smiles, and there is something lovely and wicked in the smile that O’Keefe is meant to see and does. ‘Am I in danger?’
He shakes his head as he kick-starts the bike.
‘Not too fast!’ she shouts.
O’Keefe laughs. ‘Not too fast, so.’
Nora Flynn watches the smiling Seán O’Keefe roar away from the hotel, swinging left onto O’Connell Street. Her own smile in return is genuine. She has enjoyed the jaunt on the motorbike despite herself, but her smile fades when she remembers the duty to which she has been assigned. A job of work, girl, and no summer holiday.
Her ‘chance’ meeting with Seán O’Keefe; the small, safe-house room she had been moved into in the middle of the night in the home of a family with a son in the Free State army—all of it possible, necessary, because she had rung her colleagues waiting in the Flowing Tide. What she had not imagined when she rang them was that O’Keefe would become her work. Her target.
It had come to Carty that O’Keefe, in his hunt for the boy, might lead them to O’Hanley, and was thus worth marking. And she would be the marker. She catches herself using the language of football in her mind, and recalls how she has only started doing this since joining CID. In sport, men employ the terms of war; in war, the words of sport. And in a war, women fall into the same habits, talking, thinking like men. Yet still treated as women, sure as God.
But female detectives have their uses, Nora knows well. Much of her work in CID involves the tracking of women aiding and abetting the Irregulars. Active ones, carrying messages or even weapons to the gunmen. Passive ones she searches on the streets or minds on silent raids, when she and her CID or Army Intelligence colleagues take over the houses of known Irregulars and wait—schtum—with their families as hostage, in the hope of snaring a returning gunman come home for a mother’s feed. In these raids, Nora is mostly tasked with tending to the women and children, and many of these women call her a Free State whore, traitor bitch. Others are resigned and silent, and their silence digs at her conscience more than the harsh words. Why their dignified acquiescence bothers her is a mystery. Her conscience is clean. She has done her work and no more, no less.
And this Seán O’Keefe will not be a burden or threat to her conscience. He will be easy. The way he looks at her—even she can see it. A dandy-doddle, this job of work that is Seán O’Keefe, she thinks, the unexpected thrill of the motorbike ride giving way to something harder, darker inside her.
At the hotel switchboard, she rings and reports her morning’s progress to a fellow detective officer at Oriel House, knowing Carty will be pleased when he hears of it.
26
O’Keefe and Just Albert make little progress.
After dropping the photograph of Nicholas Dolan at the Fine Print shop on Camden Street and delivering Nora to the hotel, he’d collected Albert at Ginny Dolan’s house. The woman herself had been out, and O’Keefe had been glad not to have to report their lack of headway in person, though no doubt Just Albert had already done so.
They pass the rest of the morning and afternoon questioning newsboys who sell or hand out republican news sheets, learning only that it had been some months since Nicholas had done anything on the papers—selling or postering for the anti-Treaty side was punishable by imprisonment—and that rumour has it he had moved up to working for O’Hanley himself, since the wily brigade commandant had returned to Dublin. Nothing in it they don’t know already.
O’Keefe remarks to Just Albert just how much it would mean for a boy of Nicholas’s age to serve under a hero like O’Hanley.
Albert spits on the cobbles. ‘And I give a ha’penny fuck about the fella? This O’Hanley puts Nicky in harm’s way and he’ll be a hero floating face down in the Liffey.’
They move on down Talbot Street and receive hard looks from some men on the corner of Marlborough Street as they question another newsboy. One of the men approaches them, as the boy shakes his head and moves on, and demands to know what their business is. Just Albert tells him, and asks the man does he know anything about the missing boy, seeing as he is so alight with knowledge of what transpires on Talbot Street from his perch on the corner. The man huffs, offended, and asks the staring Just Albert who he thinks he is to be asking questions of people. He glances back at his friends, who avoid his eyes, and then says he knows nothing before skulking away. O’Keefe wonders does the bold cornerboy realise how lucky he is to depart a confrontation with Just Albert with only his pride wounded.
Albert stews in silence for the rest of the afternoon. O’Keefe can sense the raging thrum of tension in the man’s posture, in his movements. Nothing will satisfy him except finding the boy, but he will settle for a ruck.
Just Albert says, ‘Two fuckin’ streets away from Monto we are, standing here with our pricks in our hands and not a drop of piss to show for it. You’re the copper, Mr O’Keefe. What should we be doing next?’ He looks up at O’Keefe, squinting, head cocked.
In his face, O’Keefe now sees something more than just anger or frustration. He sees worry. Fear.
‘Former copper, Albert,’ he says evenly. ‘And even if I was still a copper, I’m not sure there’s anything the whole of the DMP or Civic Guard—or whatever they’re calling it now—could do to find the lad if he doesn’t want to be found. He’s in deep, obviously, if he’s running with O’Hanley. Sure, the whole Free State army and every one of its spooks is looking for the commandant and can’t find him. What does that say about our chances?’
The doorman lights a short cigar. ‘I don’t care a shite what it says. We need find Nicky.’
O’Keefe recalls the urgency, the worry, he had felt for the boy the previous evening when they had met the gun dealer, but he does not feel it now. He lights a Navy Cut, strange happiness simmering in his heart. It is the rare light of the October sun, perhaps, but more likely it is the prospect of meeting Nora Flynn again. A glowing anticipation as warm as the sun on his back, like he hasn’t felt in years. Dropping her at the hotel that morning, they had agreed that he’d call in that evening to deliver the copies of the photograph, and she’d hinted that she might like to go for another spin. Maybe, she had said, but she’d smiled when she said it.
Just Albert squints up at him as if trying to read his thoughts. ‘Did you hear me?’
‘Of course I heard you, Albert. I’m only thinking that maybe Mrs Dolan needn’t be so worried. There’s no one would harm a youngfella if they can help it, war be damned.’
But as he says this he knows it’s not true, and guilt snags on the lie—guilt that his own heart is lighter today than it has been in months while Albert’s and Ginny Dolan’s are heavy with concern. But such is the way of things. Around every corner, in every tenement and cottage, every hospital and battlefield, someone, somewhere is dying, some tragedy is being wrought, and yet the world goes on. Men and women meet. Babies are born and pints sunk and horses run; books read and children fed and socks darned. Men are killed and he himself has killed his share of them. His brother cut to ribbons. Boys are lost and boys are found. But the world carries on, O’Keefe thinks, and sometimes the sun shines and a woman smiles at you. Enjoy when you can, endure when you must. Where had he read that?
He takes a long pull on his Player’s. ‘You know I want to find him, and maybe we will. But we might have to accept as well … Mrs Dolan might have to accept … that the boy made a choice to go off with the Irregulars and that he’ll come back in his own time. When the fighting is finished or he’s pulled by the Free Staters.’
‘Or shot,’ Just Albert says, tossing down his cigar. ‘They’re shooting lads they find carrying weapons. Doing it on the sly at the moment but there’s talk of making it law. Nicky was carrying guns for them boys.’
‘He was carrying a gun because he’s a boy, Albert. That’s why. Because they’ll not shoot a youngfella for carrying. The people won’t stand for the likes of it.’
Just Albert lowers his head and stares at his boots. ‘You’ve been around Monto as long as I have, you learn there’s not a lot that people won’t stand for, once it doesn’t happen to them.’
Evening lowers, and before it closes O’Keefe and Just Albert collect the two hundred printed posters of the boy’s photograph. O’Keefe pays for them out of his own pocket, insistent that Ginny Dolan get every penny of her expense roll returned to her because, more than likely, he feels he will have little or nothing to show for it. The posters are of good quality, and O’Keefe’s address, as well as Ginny Dolan’s, is printed at the bottom of the page. A reward is offered for any information leading to the boy’s whereabouts. O’Keefe had debated the wisdom of doing this, knowing that the prospect of payment brings out the loonies, increasing the possibility of chasing ghost boys conjured by the crooked or greedy or mad. But Albert approves, thinking it better than nothing and telling O’Keefe that Ginny Dolan will pay more than he might imagine for Nicky’s return. They make their way on the Trusty back to Talbot Street and employ a dozen newsboys to poster the city.
Job done, Just Albert looks at the sky, then at O’Keefe. ‘We should be doing something else. Talking to people.’
‘We are doing something, Albert. Posting the photograph around town is a good thing. If anyone knows anything, the reward might tempt them to tell us.’
‘Fishing for touts.’
‘You could say that. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can drum up a contact in the Irregulars who might be able to get a message to the boy at least.’
‘Good luck with that. They’ll be eager to speak with a copper.’ There is bitterness in his voice.
‘Former copper, Albert. I was only thinking aloud.’ O’Keefe is silent for a moment before speaking again. ‘We could go to the DMP. They might …’
‘No police. Mrs Dolan was clear on that. We find him, not them.’
‘They might be better able …’
‘And then Nicky eats a bullet for a rat? Imagine they did find him and found other rebel lads along with him. He’d be shot by his mates in the Irregulars or live his life with the shame of fellas thinking him an informer. No police.’ Just Albert squints up at O’Keefe, his face set in a way that says there will be no more discussion of the matter.
27
The reception hall of the Achill Guest House and Baths is all exposed brickwork, holy statues and cold, parquet tile floor. A sagging line of half-drunk and hu
ngry men extends out of the front door and Jeremiah Byrne is amongst them, waiting until the man behind the wire cage of the cashier’s desk is occupied by one of the sots in the queue.
‘You,’ the man in the cage says. ‘You know I’ll extend you no favours, McPhail. No favours at all unless you’ve the scratch to warrant them, and since you haven’t had a ship since the war, I know you’ve nothing and may shove off with yourself.’
‘What, here’s me only arriving in and already you’re slandering me? You fuckin’ goat’s poxed cunt of a bastard son of a tinker bitch.’ The drunk, McPhail, raises his arms, grabbing the wire mesh of the cage with hands like claws, as if to wrench the cage from its frame. He continues his rant, as Jeremiah had hoped he would, raising himself to his full height, a large man in a tattered black overcoat and sailor’s cap, the coat open now like bat’s wings, blocking the cashier’s view of the foyer.
Jeremiah ducks low and darts across the reception hall as the drunken man calls the cashier every common slur and curse, including some that Jerry has never heard before. Sailors are like that, he thinks, hearing the drunk call the cashier a ‘whore’s rusted seed pipe’ as he turns into the main hallway of the doss-house. Others in the queue may have seen him, but fuck them. Few of them had never pinched a free doss somewhere, and they would rather sleep with both eyes shut than spend the night waiting for a youngfella like himself to creep up on them in the dark and slit their throats for a touting, Turk informer. Jeremiah isn’t half worth wasting their own sad, few coppers of kip on.
He can still be unlucky, he knows, if he bumps into another of the house’s workers who gives enough of a toss to ask to see his rooming chit—the small paper ticket that changes colours each night of the week, indicating payment of doss fees. But there are ways around them if it happens, and most of the staff—kitchen women, mop men or coal boys—are known to care about as much as Jeremiah himself does, who has paid for what, once a fella doesn’t make more work for a body.
Irregulars Page 20