by R J Bailey
I sensed he wasn’t finished.
‘When I was a teenager my uncle brought me up here to this very place. An old cherry processing plant. The same uncle who used to take me fishing for velvet swimming crabs on the coast.’ He winked at me. ‘He explained to me what my life was going to be from then on. That I was of an age to carry on the family heritage. To join the struggle. Son of Eneca, the fiery one. I was to become a freedom fighter for ETA.’
Freedom fighter, patriot, murderer, terrorist, psychopath . . . take your pick.
‘I was meant to follow in my mother’s hallowed footsteps. But I wasn’t having any of it. I didn’t want to be killing innocent people. So I wrote to my mother’s family in Ireland, asking if I could come over there and live there. And I did.’
Mrs Irwin hawked up a great gob of spit and deposited it noisily on the stone floor. ‘And became a tout,’ she said, and smiled as sweetly as a woman with her bruised face could. ‘Sorry. Go on.’
‘I did. Become a tout, as she puts it. I prefer the word spy. Not immediately. But that family, it was as steeped in violence as my Basque one. They used to have a picture of Bobby Sands above the dining table. Can you imagine him staring down at you while you ate your roast lamb? When I had been there a year or so, I was approached by a member of the security services. A man who knew all about me and my “terrorist” family links, as he put it. I was on a watch list somewhere, apparently. Anyway, he told me he knew how my mother and father died. And it wasn’t as a hero of ETA or the IRA.’
‘That’s news to me,’ said Mrs Irwin.
‘Then shut your gobshite mouth and listen.’
She closed her eyes and said, ‘I’m all ears, Anjel,’ as if he were about to tell a bedtime story.
‘But there was a price for this information,’ he continued. ‘Those fellas, there’s always a price. They make Faust look like a market trader. In payment for the truth, I had to use my celebrity as Eneca’s son to dig the dirt on the FIL. The Freedom for Ireland League, a fundraising group in the United States. You see, the Brits kept intercepting shipments of weapons bought by FIL. From anonymous tip-offs. What they couldn’t understand was that the weapons were all shit. I mean, the kind of crap a kid soldier in the Congo might turn his nose up at. So it transpires that at least three people in the FIL, Sean Logan, Ronnie Corrigan and Marie Ronan, had a plan. It was the dog days of the struggle anyway, peace was coming. They were going to cash out before everyone turned into Martin McGuinness. So the FIL claimed the Ulster Constabulary – as they were then – and MI5 had intercepted a million dollars’ worth of guns. Damn, what a shame. Except these were worth maybe ten grand as scrap.’
‘Why didn’t the police expose this?’
‘Because taking a haul of weapons that were intended to kill had far more political clout than taking weapons that couldn’t kill a rabbit. So the press releases would say that a major arms shipment worth a million or two had been intercepted. They’d show some weapons, but who was to say those nice shiny AKs were the ones they actually found?’
‘And the rest of the money from the deal? The skim off the top?’ I looked at Mrs Irwin, who still had her eyes closed. ‘Let me guess. Luxembourg. An NOP account. Funding a new life in the USA.’
Myles gasped, as well he might.
‘As a rich widow,’ Anjel confirmed. ‘With canny investments. Which, to be fair, she had made. But the seed money, that was blood money.’
‘So it was a simple scam?’ I asked Anjel. ‘This FIL business?’
‘Simple, yes. But also dangerous. In the end the security boys decided that, despite the evidence I had given them, it would imperil the peace process to prosecute them. Political expediency. But the TRU decided on a different approach. They let it be known to the IRA Army Council what was going on. That they were being used as a milch cow to feather someone’s nests.’ I let the mixed metaphor pass. ‘The Brits reckoned the Squad would take out the embezzlers, saving them the trouble.’
Mrs Irwin turned her glare up to eleven once more, but kept quiet.
‘The Squad?’ I asked.
‘The Internal Security Unit of the Provos. Also known, probably more accurately, as the Nutting Squad. They vetted new members, hunted out informers and carried out any punishments decreed by courts martial. Everything from kneecapping to killing. If you stole from the IRA, you had a week of being tortured with oxyacetylene or acid or worse. Castration if you were a man, and if you were a woman . . . well, you didn’t want to be a woman. The Brits thought the Squad would know how to deal with thieves.’
‘And did they?’
‘Aye, but there was a complication. One of the embezzlers was Ronnie Corrigan, a key figure in the Squad. A legend, just like my mother. The very man meant to punish such crimes had been culpable himself. Who polices the policemen? In the end, they let the FIL thieves live.’
‘Unusual,’ I said.
‘Aye. But you remember the Northern Ireland bank raid?’
‘Vaguely,’ I admitted.
‘Twenty-odd million it netted. Part organised by Sean Logan. Poor Sean. Anyway, a good chunk of that haul went to pay back the embezzled money. Once they had done that, the thieves were told to fuck off and never set foot in the old country again. Except in a wooden box.’
‘And you?’ I asked. ‘What did you do?’
‘Me? It made me realise that behind every great political cause, there is a group of venal men and women who are only in it for the excitement, the power and the prestige, and, when that goes, the money. In the end, I didn’t give a fuck about what happened to them. Not really. I was done. I went to make a new life, to forget ETA and the IRA and all that shite.’
Mrs Irwin made an unpleasant noise in her throat. ‘Anjel has neglected to mention that, in order to protect his cover, he let Ronnie Corrigan and Sean Logan torture and shoot an innocent man. Stood outside a cottage in County Tyrone with me while they shot Jamie Brogan in the face, to make sure there couldn’t be an open coffin.’
‘Innocent?’ Anjel asked. ‘Who among us can say that? He was what he was. A soldier caught in the crossfire. Probably shouldn’t have signed up.’
‘You are a bastard,’ she spat.
‘You helped make me one.’ Anjel turned his attention back to me. ‘I was given a new identity. Michael Shannon. I’d met a girl, and a beautiful girl, too. Andrea. From Cork. In a pub in England, when the TRU was training me in covert operations. She didn’t know that of course. Thought I was on a sales course. But we got on like . . . we got on. But what was left of the FIL tracked me down through some arsehole of a tout and tried to blow me up. But there was a flat battery . . . and just once, just that fuckin’ once, Andrea, my wife, forgot what I had drummed into her over and over.’
Looking under the car, he meant, a daily routine that would have saved her life. You only had to forget once. As his wife discovered, bad luck would make sure that was the very day there was a mercury tilt mechanism or an electronic activation circuit attached to a bomb beneath your vehicle. No wonder Konrad had been so assiduous in his own inspections of that Peugeot.
‘And Siobhan? Why is she here?’ I made a guess. ‘Sister? She’s Andrea’s sister?’
Anjel nodded. ‘Aye. Andrea’s younger sister, yes. My partner in . . .’
‘Revenge,’ Siobhan said as she entered carrying two mugs of coffee. Looked like I was being snubbed. ‘We got her brother. And Corrigan. She’s the third. The last of them. Then it’s over.’
It’s never really over. I knew that. Except for the dead. But for the living, closure is astonishingly hard to find. ‘It won’t help,’ I said. ‘All this. It won’t help stop the voices in your head. Or the reliving of that moment when the bomb that killed your wife went off. Nothing stops that. Except time, maybe. You won’t find peace by murdering more people. It never works.’
I didn’t want to spell it out in front of Myles. About what they intended to do to their prisoner, and maybe us. But Siobhan knew what I meant. �
�I’d like to find out for myself, if youse don’t mind.’
Anjel stared at her for a minute, his face set in stone. Eventually he looked at me. ‘I’m going to show you something that might explain this.’ I said nothing. At least his talking kept us all alive for a while longer. From his pocket he took a clear plastic wallet. From it, he took out several sheets of newsprint, clippings that had grown smudged with time. He carefully unfolded them and laid them on the table. ‘That one first,’ he said, as he pushed them across to me. It was from the Cork Evening Echo. About a ‘local woman’ killed by a car bomb, that old IRA favourite. Andrea Shannon. The police claimed there was no proven paramilitary connection.
‘But of course there was a paramilitary connection,’ Anjel said. Just not an official one. This was FIL’s farewell to Ireland before they buggered off for good.’ He pointed at another cutting. ‘Now that one. The Belfast paper.’
This one was about a plane crash in Northern Ireland in which a certain Sean Logan died.
‘Now Sean was easy to find. He placated the IRA by volunteering to do time in the Maze in place of someone above his pay grade and keeping his mouth shut. He was rewarded with a job and his life. So he got to stay in Ireland. Liked flying his wee plane, he did. Until it blew up.’
‘I always knew it wasn’t an accident,’ said Mrs Irwin. ‘Knew someone had murdered Sean.’ That explained her being scared of flying. She thought they might explode under her. ‘I thought it was belated revenge for the money we took. Not you.’
‘Sorry to disappoint,’ said Anjel. ‘But it was me and Siobhan here. So, then, that last one.’
I picked it up. I knew what the gist of it would be before I read the words. A father by the name of Ronnie Corrigan shot dead in the street. That was the name of the uncle Myles had mentioned to me. Just nipping out for a pint. Back in time to cut the daughter’s birthday cake.
‘So there we are,’ said Anjel with a sigh, as if he had just done a good day’s work. ‘There were one or two others along the way, but they never made the papers. Anyway, I’ve saved young Marie for last.’
‘You killed these people?’ I asked, flicking the cuttings. ‘Logan and . . .’ I looked at the name again. ‘Corrigan. These murders were all down to you?’ I just wanted to hear him confirm it.
‘Aye,’ he said.
‘Down to us,’ said Siobhan, not wanting to be robbed of her credit.
‘And you set up this whole scheme, just to get her over here to finish the job?’
‘It was important,’ said Anjel, ‘that she was last. And that she knew why she was the last.’
I didn’t have to ask. I knew he would tell us.
‘Look at that first clipping again. The car bomb. Meant for me. It was little sweet Marie here, you see, who made the bomb that killed my wife.’ He paused, as if struggling to say the next words. ‘And my child.’
THIRTY-THREE
Cork, Ireland – 2000
Michael Shannon is shaving in the bathroom, looking through the tiny window over the rooftops, the slates freshly slicked with rain, a low, zinc sky keeping a lid on the city. He is thinking about Spain, and sunshine, and good food. Of velvet swimming crab soup, deep-fried elvers; of pâtés of marmatiko – bonito cooked with potatoes, garlic and red pepper – and glasses of light, lively txakoli in summer and deep draughts of cloudy cider on a winter’s afternoon. Of the excavated cathedral high above Vittoria, the surfing beach at Donostia, the slippery, silvery form of the Guggenheim at Bilbao. There was a lot to show her. Lots to explain.
‘I promised I’d pick Andrea up.’
He thinks, as he does most days, of his mother and father. Desperate to stop any further atrocities, bending to defuse the bomb cynically placed in a tourist café.
‘I’ll take yours, then.’
And the explosion, detonated by remote control by an ETA comando unit, that atomised them into motes of dust dancing in the sunlight.
‘I’ll see you later.’
Like one of those cheap hypnotism shows Andrea loves, Michael is now back in the bathroom, staring at a half-shaved face in the mirror. What did she say? What did Andrea just say?
‘You’ll do what?’ he shouts.
His mind replays the conversation with her over the past five minutes, an exchange muted to muffled exchanges by his being in the square, watching those people die again.
Michael, are you taking your car?
No. Joe’s giving me a lift.
You don’t need it?
No, why?
My battery is fuckety-fucked again. I’ll take yours then. I’ve got the keys. See you later.
NO!
He shouts it out, but he has no sense of how much time has passed since they first spoke. A few seconds? A few minutes?
Andrea! Wait.
He is out of the bathroom and running – almost falling – down the stairs when the house rocks as if a giant tidal wave has crashed over the city and broken against the outside wall. The staircase becomes fluid beneath his feet. A roaring fills his ears. For the second time that morning, a bomb, a cowardly bomb, has shattered lives as well as bodies.
Plural.
Although it is only after the postmortem that he discovers Andrea had been pregnant.
THIRTY-FOUR
Basque Country, Spain
There was a stunned silence once Anjel had finished his explanation. Myles looked at his mother with an expression like curdled milk on his face. I pulled the blanket tighter around myself, a sudden shudder taking me by surprise.
‘The woman you know as Mrs Irwin, and I used to know as Marie Ronan, was bomb-maker to the active service units of the Provisional IRA. And very good she was, too.’
Mrs Irwin shook her head at her son, but it wasn’t clear what she was trying to convey. She certainly wasn’t denying the charge.
‘Can we just get on with this?’ asked Siobhan. ‘All this gassin’ is givin’ me a headache.’
‘Ach, hold your peace,’ said Anjel. ‘It’s been almost twenty years. I think we can savour the moment. You might think I’d have more sympathy, wouldn’t you? Given my mother’s story. But it turns out my mother was trying to defuse a bomb, not plant it, as the legend has it. My father stood by, covering her. ETA detonated it deliberately, to make two new martyrs.’
Eventually, after she had processed this, Mrs Irwin spoke. ‘That’s what they told you? The fuckin’ Brits? That she was trying to save lives? And you believed it?’
‘They had decided to support the peace initiative. The Zuba, the ETA high command, could not let them defect. They set them up.’
‘You’d take the word of a TRU man? Even now, when we know they are lying scum?’
I didn’t know much about the TRU, but I was convinced the security services were economical with the truth. But perhaps it is always easier to believe your mother was a force for good, rather than evil, even if she was a late convert to the cause of righteousness.
‘Well, whatever the truth, at least you can’t blame that one on me.’
‘Not you personally. Just your kind.’
‘What kind is that?’ she asked.
‘The hurting kind,’ Anjel said.
‘Me?’ She sounded genuinely shocked. ‘I’m the hurting kind? Sweet Jesus . . . who’s got the guns here?’
‘Can we just get on with it?’ Siobhan repeated, even more impatiently. ’We’ll be here all night at this rate.’
‘Get on with what?’ asked Myles. ‘This is fuckin’ insane.’
‘Funny thing is, I’d grown up hating the violence that those people perpetrated. All of them, Basque and Irish. I thought I wasn’t like them. And now, here I am. Ah well, maybe blood will out. Maybe it always will.’
He reached for the shotgun.
‘You can’t do it here. Not now.’ Mrs Irwin’s voice sounded stronger and there was a tinge of defiance in it. ‘You’ll never live with yourself.’
‘We’ll manage,’ said Siobhan flatly.
‘N
ot you. Him.’ She pointed at Anjel. ‘He’ll never live with what he is about to do.’
‘Why the fuck not?’ asked Siobhan.
‘That baby in your wife’s belly? It wouldn’t have been your firstborn, Anjel. You already had a child. And what sort of man kills the mother of his own son in front of the lad?’
It took a while for me to compute. It was like playing a game of Unhappy Families in my skull. The first one to move and speak was Siobhan, who strode over towards Mrs Irwin, gun raised to strike.
Mrs Irwin’s voice was very small in that echoing space. ‘You already had a child, Anjel, before the bomb.’
‘You lying bitch!’ Siobhan yelled.
‘Stop!’
Anjel banged the table. I have never seen a man overcome by weariness in such a short space of time. His skin was sickly and wan, his shoulders slumped. Anjel Garzia sagged like a broken reed. He waved Siobhan away with the shotgun.
‘Well, it’s not fuckin’ true, is it? Anjel? Is it?’ Siobhan screeched.
He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. ‘Well, now, it could be, Siobhan. It could well be.’
‘No way,’ said Myles. It was his turn to glare at his mother. ‘You cannot be serious. You . . . you told me . . .’
Myles, I recalled, believed his father had died when he was a kid. And now there he apparently was, sitting at a table with a shotgun within his reach, which he intended to use on the boy’s mother.
‘I told you whatever needed to be said at the time,’ she snapped. ‘The truth is something different.’
‘The truth, I find, is somewhat slippery to say the least,’ said Anjel. ‘We only have your word for this revelation. In the absence of a DNA test kit . . .’
‘You have the same eyes,’ I offered.
‘Fuck,’ said Myles, squirming. ‘Fuckin’ mindfuck.’
I didn’t think they had the same eyes at all. I couldn’t see any resemblance. But if it kept us alive, I’d swear they were dead ringers, peas in a pod, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.