‘I’ll just come in very briefly,’ I said as a man suddenly appeared, his dark hair sprinkled with snow.
‘Could you just let us have the keys to your car for a moment, Uncle Marty?’
‘My car?’
‘Just for a wee minute, if that’s all right with you. We need to move it for you.’
The man who had come in was looking at me from enlarged orbs, as if I were a species that up to now he had only heard of. I handed him my keys.
‘We’d better go up,’ Ted said. ‘They’ll be wondering what happened to me.’
The heat was excessive and I unbuttoned my coat as we stepped into the lift. As we ascended, the building seemed to hum all around us. A life-size statue of the Virgin Mary with a halo made of tiny electric lights appeared on the third floor when the lift doors opened and was bizarrely comforting. Was there anything in my car—anything at all—that could give them what I now knew they were looking for? The empty wards were still jarringly cheerful with their streamers and Santa Clauses. Ted Junior held open the door to a room beside a fire escape.
‘After you, Uncle Marty.’
Death, as it approaches, sends out an almost tangible atmosphere, not quite a vapour, not quite a smell, more like a soupy kinetic field of inevitability. I had experienced it in Kenya, when I had escaped it, and, as a child, in the Gent’s abattoir, where terrified sheep and pigs awaited their fate.
A waxen infant lay in bed beside a machine with a greenly winking panel. Jennifer, Iggy’s wife, sat, holding the child’s hand. Patrick, Ted Junior’s twin brother, was standing beside the door to a bathroom and stared at me as I came in. Jennifer was brushing the child’s hair.
‘I’m sorry it has to be like this,’ I whispered to her.
‘We all must live our lives, however short they may be,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry Iggy can’t be here.’
She looked at me with mild curiosity, then smiled sadly.
‘Uncle Marty?’ Ted Junior swivelled his head towards the bathroom. ‘A word in private?’
At such moments, my life compresses into tiny fractions of time. I wondered if I should try to take one of them with me, and what exactly Sugar was doing then, or if the hunt at Main had moved off. I’m a big man, but as I stepped in to the bathroom, I was shoved violently from behind and pitched forward onto the tiled floor.
‘What…?’
Ted Junior was standing over me, pointing a pistol in my face.
‘Take all your fuckin’ clothes off, Uncle Marty. Take them off now!’
‘What?’
‘Take your fuckin’ clothes off!’ His gun hand was steady. ‘Every stitch.’
Trembling, I got up and began to undress. ‘You’re making a big mistake.’
‘Then explain the day of the ordination, Marty.’ Patrick was standing behind me. ‘Explain how you knew. You can’t, can you? Because then you’d have to tell us who you really are.’
He’d backed away and was minutely examining each article of clothing as I removed it, turning out my pockets. With a carpet cutter, he began to reef the collar and lining of my jacket, shredding the garment and spilling out its wadding.
‘The ordination, Marty.’ Ted Junior poked the cold barrel into my ear. ‘Tell us real quick about the day of the ordination!’
‘I … I saw a helicopter,’ I said as I stepped from my underpants, ‘and suddenly realised what was going to happen.’
‘Kneel in the shower and face the wall.’
‘Iggy and I had an old code from when we were children.’
Ted Junior clubbed me across the neck with the handle of the gun.
‘Kneel down in the shower and face the fuckin’ wall!’
As my knees hit cold tiles, I thought of the one person I had so loved but who had also died violently. A knife blade clicked and I braced. From the corner of my eye, I could see Patrick slicing my overcoat to pieces.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘You know what I’m fuckin’ looking for and you know if we find it here or in your car, you’re a dead man,’ Patrick said.
I made myself laugh. ‘You think I’m working for the Brits? That I’ve come here with some sort of a transmitting device? You’re out of your minds. You’ve completely misjudged the situation.’
‘Just shoot the cunt,’ Patrick said. ‘Put him out of his misery.’
‘You won’t find anything in my clothes because there isn’t anything to find, and there isn’t because I’m not who you think I am.’
‘Stand up! Hands on the wall! Spread your legs! Now!’
I stood in an outstretched position, and then gasped as I felt the crude, blunt force of a finger in a rubber glove ram upwards into my rectum.
‘Christ!’
‘Now you know what it feels like.’ I heard Patrick snap the glove off. ‘We’ll give you one last chance. Tell us who you’re working for, who you report to, what you know about Iggy, what plans the Brits have for Iggy, and we won’t kill you.’
My shivering was beyond my control. ‘You know exactly who I am and for whom I work. I speak with an English accent because that is how my parents spoke and because I was sent to school in England.’
He pressed the gun into the back of my neck and my legs went from under me.
‘Last chance, Marty.’
From where I curled, I said, ‘Of course we exchange information with the Brits. Of course we use them to try to keep abreast of what’s going on up here.’ He clicked off the safety and I peed warmly down my thighs. ‘So, yes, I did hear, but not in any way that I could confirm, that there might be some trouble following the ordination mass—which is why I went to Armagh in the first place. To warn Iggy. Which I did. Do you know how close he and I are? We’re like brothers. All I would ever want to do is protect him. I love Iggy Kane and up to five minutes ago I thought that he loved me.’
Someone knocked on the bathroom door and I could hear the sound of keys. Ted Junior’s gun was inserted into my ear again. ‘You’re full of shit Marty! You could just as easily have made a call. Or told Bobby Gillece so that he could have warned us.’
‘Bobby? A man who hasn’t been sober for twenty-five years? Or send a message by telephone? I don’t know much, but this much I do know: there’s a war going on and, in a war, you trust no one but those close to you.’
‘That’s the world we operate in,’ Ted Junior said. ‘Twenty-four-hour surveillance, eyes in the sky, tracking devices put into our cars. So we trust no one, not even those close to us. But because you’re close to us, we’re giving you this one last chance.’
‘I can’t tell you what I don’t know.’
‘Do you not know why you were screwing that fat bitch?’ Patrick shouted in my ear. ‘Mrs Alison Chase? You’re one of them, Marty! Admit it now!’ I began to weep, but not for myself. ‘Do it!’ Patrick said urgently. ‘Do it quick!’
There was silence. I grasped myself and waited for the blankness. Just like turning out a light.
My underclothes landed on the floor outside the shower.
‘You can get up, Uncle Marty,’ Ted Junior said. ‘I’m sorry. We had to be sure.’
I made it to my feet, but then my knees gave way again and the two lads caught me.
12
NEWRY, COUNTY ARMAGH
Saint Stephen’s Day 1976
Except for the voice of the bald-headed receptionist, on the telephone in his back office, all was quiet in the hospital lobby. Upstairs they’d replaced my clothes with a kind of boiler suit and given me a woollen jacket. After I had puked at length, they had turned on the shower and made sure that I was clean before I dressed.
Patrick Kane suddenly appeared in the lobby, walking briskly. He went outside, ran to a black Austin Cambridge parked there, started it up and drove to the hospital doors. Engine exhaust rose in a thick white tail, whiter than the day. I heard the lift again and then Jennifer appeared, carrying her infant well wrapped up in both arms. On one side of her walke
d a priest, on the other a nurse wearing an outer coat over her white uniform. Patrick was holding open the door to the hospital. In less than a minute they had driven away. Then, as I watched, the blue Ford van pulled out and drove from the car park at a leisurely pace. The receptionist had not even bothered to come out and observe the departure of his hospital’s solitary patient.
‘Uncle Marty?’ Ted Junior must have been standing behind me all along. ‘You all right?’
‘I’m fine, thank you, yes,’ I said. ‘But I think I’ll go home now. D’ you have my keys?’
‘They’re upstairs. Come up with me and we’ll get them.’
Unhurriedly, we went to the lift. On the third floor, as the doors opened to the halo of lights, he broke into a run. ‘Come on!’
By the time I had caught up and reached the bedroom he had already scooped up the baby. ‘The fire escape! Go!’ Two bars stood out from the doors at waist height.
‘Kick them!’
I expected an alarm, but the whistle of wind was the only sound as I zigzagged down to the foot of the metal structure where my car was parked.
‘Uncle Marty.’ He lobbed the keys at me. ‘You’re driving.’
The infant’s chest rose in laboured gasps. I followed his instruction into a maze of stark housing and ten minutes later began to recognise some of the landmarks—a school, a burned-out car. We were driving in circles.
‘It’s having to do what we’re doing at this minute that turns ordinary men into soldiers. One day they’re going to remember the name of little Jenny Kane, aren’t they Jenny? Aye? That’s a great girl.’
With the heater turned to high, we left the town as daylight began to ebb. Trees stood out bleakly. The baby shuddered. Little frozen hills gave way to glens swaddled in evening mist. It was really quite beautiful. I pulled in, as Ted told me to, under a tree canopy and switched off the engine. He wound down his window and listened. I could hear nothing, except for the baby as she battled to breathe.
‘And, of course, if you are one of them, Uncle Marty, they’ll hardly take us out, now, will they?’ Ted Junior chuckled as we drove on again. ‘Not if you’re one of their own.’
I was now certain that Vance’s plan, whatever that was, had been outsmarted. My ordeal in the bathroom had left me drained to a point where I could wonder what was going to happen next with a detachment bordering on indifference. I wondered where Iggy would be waiting. I would mean nothing to him in this context: just a man with a clean car. I was irrelevant to Iggy, and that marked the difference between us: he was not to me.
The road followed the crests of little rises, then plunged into valleys of dead ferns etched in white fronds as precise as filigree. We turned down an unpaved road with sunken wheel ruts and the underside of my car scraped earth. The infant panted and gasped. Ahead towered the deep black wall of a coniferous forest.
‘Pull up and turn off the engine.’
Within thirty seconds the cold had begun to seep in. Lights flashed. A Toyota jeep drew across our track and two men jumped from it, both in standard army camouflage and woollen head masks. One stood at the front of the car, pointing an AKM assault rifle at me; the other went to Ted Junior’s side.
‘You weren’t followed?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘How’s the wee bairn?’
Ted Junior bent to the baby’s head and kissed her.
‘What about him?’
‘He’s clean,’ Ted Junior said. ‘Patrick and me checked him. And the car.’
The man came around to my window. ‘Is the boot locked?’
‘I don’t believe so.’
As the boot was opened and I heard him rummaging, the gunman never lowered his aim. His companion now went to the jeep and took out a long metal pole that ended in a dish-like mirror. He began to inspect the car’s underbody.
‘Ted!’
One of the gunmen was listening intently. Through the trees, as if through a giant lung, came the soughing wind. We were all straining, but the quality of silence beyond the wind was gapingly empty. The man with the inspection mirror came to my window.
‘Follow us. Stay glued. Don’t even think of turning your lights on.’
The jeep swung around and I drove into the forest within five yards of its tow-hitch. Daylight died.
‘She’s never going to come out of here,’ Ted Junior said. ‘The only blessing is she knows nothing.’
A dull fatalism had taken me over, in which all fear was absent and my concerns for my own safety evaporated. I no longer cared. My career had amounted in the end to nothing more than this dark, dead place. All at once the jeep stopped.
‘Come on, love.’ Ted Junior opened the door.
Maybe a hundred years before, when the lee side of this mountain had been a bare, treeless place, a man had built his cottage here. All that remained were two walls, including the curved granite lintel of the front door, gracefully intact. Ted Junior gathered the infant close, although the cold within this forest was less piercing. Iggy walked out from the ruined house.
‘Hello, Iggy.’
He strafed me with a look, then he went to his child.
‘You’d best sit her in the car,’ Ted Junior was saying as Iggy took his daughter and kissed her. Even in the dim light I could see that his hair was grey.
‘You can’t take these nails out, Marty. These ones are driven right through my heart.’
‘Iggy!’
A man from the jeep had begun to shout.
‘Oh, Jesus, no!’ Ted Junior cried.
And then our little group was pinned in blinding light as noise made further communication impossible. Ted Junior put his arm around his half-brother’s slight shoulders, but Iggy’s jaw was set as he clutched his child. The gunmen were firing at the sky as the trees seemed to bend inwards. Dropping from the car, I rolled into cold, crisp ferns. Any minute I expected the impact. I hit a tree, flung myself around it and kept rolling. My back hurt. I think I heard automatic weapons discharging but I could not be sure since the racket was so intense. After more than a minute I got up and ran. Every few hundred yards, I stopped and listened. It didn’t take long for the natural silence to be restored.
When I left the forest, the night was clear and bright and the skinned land stood out starkly. Downhill, through tiny fields, by a stone wall, I removed Ted Junior’s jacket and put my lighter to it. I felt the glow as the cheap fabric caught the flame. A few minutes later I ground the ashes with my heel and covered what remained with stones.
I used the evening star as my waypoint. The same star hung over our mountain on a good night and had never let me down. The cold didn’t bother me and my step lightened, despite an insistent ache in my back. Most of my life was still ahead of me and I had much to be thankful for.
Part IV
GUELPH LINE, CAMPBELLVILLE, ONTARIO
The Recent Past
Sometimes she sees them as figures in a canvas, as if there has been a mistake and they have somehow entered another dimension. At such moments, she becomes convinced that the present is provisional and that time is simply being marked here while a more suitable space is being prepared, into which they will shortly move, a fresh plane where the past will be regained quite naturally.
Maria Fernanda’s Saturdays come around so quickly now that it is impossible to believe another week has gone by since the intercom last signalled her arrival. When they sit down with her for tea—an initiative that he was not at first disposed towards—and Maria Fernanda tells them of the señor’s recent health setbacks, in the days that follow she finds herself hoping that a man she has never met will pass away, in the shameful belief that they will then have more of Maria Fernanda to themselves.
She has not seen Emmet in many years. He too changed his name and, from what she can gather, lives somewhere in Europe. He is married to a French woman and they have grown-up children whom she will never meet. It seems like only a few weeks ago that she had wrapped him up against the snow on the
day of the point-to-point. She never blamed him for wanting to begin again, on his own. Despite everything, against all the odds, she believes in hope and in the mercy of Providence.
1
PARIS
1979
Ireland steadily expanded her embassies during the 1970s, providing openings for rank-and-filers like me who wanted to see a bit of the world. In the second half of 1977 I was posted with the position of secretary to Greece, and in 1979 to Paris, where one morning, sitting outside Fouquet’s with a grand crème, and reading the Daily Telegraph, I sat back with a shock as the photograph of a man jumped out at me from the obituaries page. His career in the Foreign Office had been distinguished, the paper said, and he had contributed to a number of important intergovernmental protocols, particularly involving the United Kingdom and Ireland. His death followed a short illness, it said. He was survived by his wife and two sons. I read and re-read the obituary. He had never made it to the South of France, but what surprised me most, I think, was that his first name was Reginald.
2
DUBLIN AIRPORT
May 1977
Tired-looking airline crews stood around the hotel reception waiting to be allocated rooms. By the lifts, ugly rubber plants spilled from ceramic pots. Five floors up, I knocked on a door. He was sniffling and still wore his raincoat. The bed in the poky room had not been slept in. Outside, midday sun spanked from the windscreens of airport traffic.
‘I’m glad you haven’t caught this, chum, although now you probably will. But perhaps not. You upper-class types have a far superior immune system to us commoners. It’s true! You’re tough old buggers.’
He poured boiling water into two glasses, added honey from tiny plastic containers, took out a naggin of John Jameson’s from the pocket of his raincoat and decanted it generously.
‘Cheers, old boy. How is Sugar? The children? And of course, how are you?’
‘We’re all very well, thanks.’
‘That’s the main thing, isn’t it? Your health. I mean, money is important, but health is everything.’
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