Nora laughs at this. ‘A Pinkerton man who helps you stay lost!’
But O’Keefe is not listening. His eyes are tracking a group of men as they enter the bar and take several tables against the back wall, facing the entrance. One of them eyes O’Keefe, staring at him for a long moment before O’Keefe looks away, not wanting a challenge from the man to spoil his time with Nora.
‘You look like you’re miles away.’
He smiles. ‘Only as far as the back of the bar.’
‘Who are those men?’ she asks, taking a cigarette from her bag and allowing O’Keefe to light it. It is the third time he has done so, and he feels now an easy familiarity in the act.
‘They’re protection of some sort. For the nobs from the Dáil staying here, I imagine. Protective Corps from Oriel House, maybe. Keeping an eye out for anyone who might not wish the best for the men in the Free State government.’
‘Who could that be?’ she says, a cynical edge under the music of her voice.
O’Keefe shrugs. ‘I’ve never much liked politicians myself.’
‘But you hardly support the Irregulars, do you?’
O’Keefe drinks. ‘No, of course not. I’d support the Quakers and pacifists if they were in the running, I suppose, though I hardly imagine any of them would be much better if they were to get a taste of power.’
Nora sighs. ‘Even in the hotel bar of the Shelbourne, imagine. It feels sometimes as if there’s no place you can go where the war isn’t.’
‘This table here,’ he says.
‘How do you mean?’
‘We’ll declare this table to be a ceasefire zone. We’ll officially banish belligerence of any kind from here. You did leave your weapon at the door?’
Nora smiles and thinks of the Webley in her bag. ‘Did you?’
‘I’ve come unarmed this evening, madam. I’m at your mercy.’
‘You’re mad, Mr O’Keefe,’ she says.
O’Keefe agrees and sips more whiskey, smiling again at Nora, unable to help himself, and she smiles back.
‘What?’ she says.
‘What do you mean, “what?”’
‘You’re smiling at me.’
And O’Keefe wonders how long it has been since he has smiled as much or as easily.
‘I like the look of you. But I’ll stop if you like.’
‘It’s better you smiling than frowning at me.’
‘Much better, altogether.’
And O’Keefe keeps smiling at her as she sips her drink, and for the moment, he feels, their table in the Shelbourne is the one place in Ireland where the war is not.
‘This is it,’ Nora says, stepping off the Trusty and smoothing her skirt. Her hair has come loose on the short ride from Stephen’s Green to Rathmines and she gathers it back and holds it to her head before giving up, letting it fall free.
‘So it is,’ O’Keefe replies. A two-story redbrick house at the top of Leinster Road. Hardly three hundred yards from his own. Blessed coincidence? Fate? He smiles. Jesus, listen to yourself, Seán.
‘I’ve had a lovely evening. You’re a gent to stand for the drinks. The Shelbourne is the dearest place in the city.’
‘My pleasure,’ he says, unsure of whether to dismount or stay on the bike. Nora stands close by on the footpath, close enough to reach out and touch. He lowers his goggles and lets them hang around his neck.
‘I’d ask you in for a cup of tea but …’ Nora looks away, brushes red curls from her face and then looks back at O’Keefe.
‘I know,’ O’Keefe says, hearing how daft he sounds, the nervous longing in his own voice. ‘Sure, it’s late.’
‘And my landlord, he’s terribly old-fashioned about … visitors. Even a cup of tea would set his mind turning over.’ She smiles, and in the light from the street lamps, O’Keefe imagines she is blushing.
‘Some people are like that. Always thinking the worst.’
Nora laughs lightly, and it is a beautiful sound to O’Keefe. She says, ‘“Nothing good ever happens after midnight.” One of my father’s favourite sayings.’
‘And do you believe him?’ he asks. ‘Your father?’
‘I don’t know, Mr O’Keefe. Should I?’
‘I’m not sure, Miss Flynn. Should you?’
Nora takes a step closer to him. Standing above him on the footpath, a head taller than he is on the Trusty.
‘Well …’ she says.
‘Well.’
‘I should be getting in. I’ve work tomorrow.’
‘I have as well.’
‘Well then.’
‘Well …’
She leans into him and presses her lips against his. O’Keefe is as surprised as he is happy, feeling Nora’s heart beating fast under the soft press of her breasts against his chest. They kiss for a long minute, O’Keefe breathing in the lavender smell of her clothes, her hair, the sweet tartness of lime and gin on her lips.
30
Minutes later, O’Keefe rounds the corner, anticipating sleep, the heat of Nora’s body is still with him after seeing her into her digs, the scent of her hair still rich in his senses. He slows his bike and sees Just Albert, leaning against the bonnet of a Bentley motor car parked in front of the Cunningham house.
Shutting down the Trusty, O’Keefe says, ‘Jesus, Albert. Has me watch stopped or didn’t we say nine tomorrow morning?’
Ginny Dolan’s man indicates the car. All thought of Nora evaporates into the cool night air, the taste of her gone, suddenly, from O’Keefe’s lips.
‘Get in the car. Now. Mrs Dolan is waiting for us.’
‘Waiting? Where?’
‘The morgue. They think they found Nicholas.’
‘What do you mean? Who’s found him?’
‘Some farmer. The bodies of two youngfellas, in a field out in Clondalkin.’
‘It might not be him,’ O’Keefe says, unable to believe that the boy is dead. There is something so unreconciled about this that it seems untrue.
‘A Murder Man came by the shop. He described him to Mrs Dolan. He’d seen the posters.’
‘It might not be him.’
‘His name is on the collar of his jacket.’
Like a schoolboy, O’Keefe thinks.
‘Still …’
‘Get in the car.’
Oh, Jesus, what are you at, girl?
Leaving the light off, Nora crosses her small room to the thick, musty drapes and parts them an inch. Surely, they hadn’t been followed. Had they? Carty hadn’t said anything about a tail. She was the tail. They’d hardly spare more men to shadow someone like O’Keefe. A bit player. Nor would they put eyes on his basement flat. On her room. No, of course not. Why would they be watching her room? CID is overstretched as it is, men dispatched throughout the country, hunting proper Irregulars. Fighting men. Carty thinks it’s important to know what O’Keefe knows about the Dolan boy and if the boy’s connected to O’Hanley like they think, but there are far bigger fish to fry than a jobless, war-weary ex-Peeler. O’Hanley himself had been spotted and fired on, supposedly, crossing Leeson Street bridge only yesterday. They can’t be sparing men to spy on the likes of me ...—Nora corrects herself—… to spy on the likes of O’Keefe. No.
But what if she is wrong? What if one of them has seen her kissing O’Keefe? What if one of the stuffed turkeys living in this house has seen them? A safe house in the Tan War—so Spartan and cold it makes her long for her lonely rooms in Ballsbridge—and now used by Free State forces; located conveniently close to O’Keefe’s flat. The owner, a prig of a schoolmaster with a son in the Free State army, would tell his contact in CID, whomever it is, what he had seen through his front window—the embrace, the kiss. Jesus. A phrase from her childhood rises unbidden in her mind. Eating the face off him. She groans audibly. Nora, you foolish, stupid woman.
It had been part of her cover only. Yes. Part of the job. Like with the Englishman before …. She stops herself from remembering. No. Yes. It is what she will tell them. He had wanted to kiss her and she’d let him. But she had leaned into him, hadn’t she? That is the truth of it. He had wanted to kiss her and she had wanted to kiss him back.
She lets the drapes fall closed over the night-quiet street, saying a small prayer that she has not been seen with O’Keefe. She turns on the electric light and the shabby room is cast in harsh glare. A sunken single bed and fraying counterpane. An ashtray with a stubbed-out cigarette standing up like a finger raised to hospitality. A faded hunting print askew on the smoke-yellow wall. A safe house room.
There is a full-length mirror on the back of the door, and Nora avoids looking at it as she undresses. Then, in her undergarments, she cannot help herself and looks. Too tall, too Irish-looking somehow, with her round hips and full breasts and unruly red hair. More country girl than spy, she thinks. A female agent should be cigarillo-thin, black-haired, dark-eyed. Every country had used them during the war in Europe, she had learned in her training. Worldly, well-travelled and world-weary women, she imagines. Nora feels only weary. Mata Hari. Jesus, girl, you’re no Mata Hari. Nora angrily opens the overnight bag she has brought, pulls her nightdress from it and throws it over her head, taking off her bra and panties underneath it, unable to face her own nakedness in the mirror.
Disgust wells up in her belly and she crawls into bed, the sour smell of some other guest’s sweat in the sheets as she peels them back. She reaches down into her purse by the bed, takes out a cigarette and lights it. The owner of the house has told her expressly not to smoke in bed. This is why she does it, thinking, It’s not only the look of you, Nora, that’s putting the dark clouds over your head.
No. You’re taken with this O’Keefe. It’s wrong, but there it is, and Nora can still feel the heat of his lips from when she had kissed him. Let him kiss her. There is something about him, she thinks, blowing smoke at the jaundiced paint on the wall. A sadness, a kindness, that masks something rougher, darker. Even the smell of him. Cigarettes, whiskey and shaving soap and oil from the Triumph. She realises that she has learned nothing of note to report to Carty about O’Keefe’s investigation into the boy’s whereabouts.
31
Just Albert turns the Bentley off Amiens Street and into Foley Street. O’Keefe checks his wristwatch. Twenty past one in the morning. The busiest time of day in Monto.
Foot traffic slows their progress, weaving gentlemen in half-mast neckties and open jackets, university students and labouring men in flat caps. A uniformed DMP constable, idly swinging his baton from a leather thong on his wrist. Doors to most of the houses on the street are open, light pouring out onto the paving stones from within. Lamps in front windows are draped with red kerchiefs or scarves. Working girls stand on the steps of the houses and shout at groups of passing men. Some of the groups stop and banter back at the girls before continuing on their way while others follow the girls into the houses. A fire burning in an oil drum on the corner of Foley Street. A queue stretching five people long from the door of Mossy Morrison’s shop to buy his famous pigs’ trotters and mushy peas. Horse-drawn hacks and the odd motor car, idling, girls climbing in and out of the cars, men stepping gingerly down from the hackneys. Children running barefoot in the night street, in and out of the gas light, carrying cigarettes and messages from house to house. Monto babies, keeping the same hours as their guardians. Children of the night. Like Just Albert had been but Nicholas had not. O’Keefe recalls the photograph in his pocket and the one on the wall in Ginny Dolan’s parlour of a fresh-faced school boy, well-rested, well-fed. Loved.
From the open car window, O’Keefe hears raised voices, gramophone music, shrieks of laughter. The echolalia of Monto. What kind of desperation brings men here? Men like his father? No, he can’t conceive of it. The debt to Ginny Dolan must be something different altogether. A debt, O’Keefe thinks, that will remain unpaid if the boy on the mortuary slab is her son.
‘Wait here,’ Just Albert says, pulling up in front of Ginny Dolan’s brothel.
O’Keefe assents in silence. Hers is the only house on the street with its door closed to the night, no light in its windows, no music or laughter in this house. Nor will there be, he imagines, for a long while to come, and feels a stab of pity for the madam.
Moments pass and the brothel door opens. Just Albert holds Ginny Dolan’s arm at the crook of her elbow, gently, tenderly as any loving son, escorting her limping figure down the steps to the car. O’Keefe is moved at the sight of them, feeling as if he is intruding upon an intimacy he was never meant to witness. He wonders then at his presence here. Why has Albert insisted he accompany them for the identification of the body? A grim awareness rises within O’Keefe as he gets out of the car and opens the rear door for the woman. His work for Ginny Dolan is far from finished.
‘Mrs Dolan,’ he says.
The woman eases herself into the car and stares at him without speaking and there is something so terrible in her face, in her eyes, that O’Keefe shudders. It appears that she has been weeping but has made a conscious effort to disguise it, her eyes lined with kohl and mascara, her face powdered. And under the grief O’Keefe senses rage as yet held in check. Her only natural son. And O’Keefe has failed to find him, has failed this woman, and now people will pay for his failure. There is something so savage beneath her sorrow that O’Keefe is frightened by the power of it. He closes the door and turns away. Just Albert shakes his head and sits behind the wheel while O’Keefe hand cranks the Bentley’s starter.
The Dublin Coroner’s Court and City Morgue is a redbrick building on Store Street with a green painted wooden gate at its side large enough for ambulance or horse and cart to pass through. The public entrance is located to the right of the gate and here O’Keefe, Just Albert and Ginny Dolan are met by a priest and a tall, gaunt man in a wool suit and dark tie. The man, in his late thirties, is a detective, O’Keefe decides, the Murder Man Albert had spoken of.
‘Mrs Dolan,’ the priest says. ‘This may be difficult, but with the love of Our Holy Father in heaven …’
Ginny Dolan shrugs free from Albert’s supporting hand and draws herself up to her full height. She is not tall but presents a formidable figure. Noble, O’Keefe cannot help but thinking. Fierce.
‘We will not be needing you tonight, Father. Or any other night, for that matter. Your lot had no time for my Nicky when he was alive, you’ll not roost over him or me now.’
The priest takes a breath as if to counter or reassure, but stops and retreats a step behind the other man. There is a flash of fear in the priest’s eyes. Instinctive, primal. O’Keefe pities him a little.
The detective says, ‘Mrs Dolan, I know how you must feel, but there’s no harm having …’
‘You’ve no idea how I must be feeling, Detective. Now take me to my son.’
‘This way, please,’ the detective says, leading Ginny Dolan down the hallway. O’Keefe and Just Albert follow and the detective stops. ‘These gentlemen, Mrs Dolan …’
‘These gentlemen work for me, Detective. They will accompany me through.’
The detective gives each of them a long, assessing look, pausing longest to lock eyes with Albert. It is a look O’Keefe recognises. He had used it himself as a copper—used it to gauge and weigh and intimidate, all at the same time. The detective shakes his head almost imperceptibly and turns, continuing on through a set of swinging doors.
Through a second set of doors to a third, these marked simply ‘Morgue.’ A wooden crucifix hangs above the door and O’Keefe wonders if it has always been there or is it a recent Free State addition.
The detective comes to a halt and clears his throat, looking more at the wall above her head than at Ginny Dolan herself. ‘This will be difficult, Mrs Dolan. I will have to ask you if the body I’m to show you
is your son. It requires that you say “yes” or “no” aloud. Do you think …’—the detective looks at O’Keefe, appearing to study the scar on his face, as if only aware of it now—‘… will you be able for that, Mrs Dolan?’
There is an intense light in Ginny Dolan’s eyes and steel in her voice. ‘I am able, Detective. Let me in.’
Nodding once, the detective opens the door, stepping through and holding it open from inside. Just Albert guides Ginny Dolan, a hand on the small of her back, and O’Keefe follows behind, uneasy amidst the scents of mould and bleach, the faint tang of decay. I should not be here, he thinks. I should not see this.
One body lies covered with a sheet on a dissection table in the middle of the room and a second is sheeted on a gurney against the wall. Ginny Dolan stumps across the tiled floor, her breath billowing in the unnaturally cool air. She stops at the head of the nearest corpse. Just Albert stands beside her, his hand on her shoulder.
‘Is it this one?’ she asks, her voice neutral.
‘It is, ma’m.’ The speaker is an older man in a white coat. He rises from a desk in the near corner of the room, taking up a manila file and opening it in front of him. He removes a pen from behind his ear and dips it into the ink-well set into the desk, readying himself in a discreet, practised manner. The detective lets the doors swing shut behind him and approaches Ginny Dolan and Just Albert.
‘Lift the sheet, Albert,’ she says, and O’Keefe watches her swallow, her jaw flex and clench.
The detective reaches over Just Albert. ‘It’s all right, Mrs Dolan. I can …’
‘Lift the sheet, Albert. And do it now, when I tell you.’
Just Albert looks at the detective, and though O’Keefe cannot see his eyes he knows what is in them because the detective stops and backs away two steps from the table. Albert looks to his mistress and she nods. He lifts back the sheet down to the corpse’s shoulders.
Ginny Dolan leans over the boy’s body and stares at the face for a long, silent moment. She then leans down and kisses the corpse’s cheek. O’Keefe watches the detective nod to the man in the white coat, who scratches something into the file and then closes it.
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