by R.J. Ellory
Doyle paused to drink his tea, and Travis—realizing that he had completely forgotten his own—drank also.
“This is all so much history now,” Doyle said, “but finally a partition was drawn between the six counties in the northeast and the twenty-six in the south. I was in the north when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and immediately understood that the south of Ireland would be of great interest to Hitler. There it was, right on the doorstep of the only country that presented an immediate threat to his domination of Europe, and the population could perhaps be seduced by propaganda, made to believe that allegiance to Nazi Germany would give them the freedom they had sought for so long.”
Doyle stood and crossed the narrow confine of the caravan to bring the teapot to the table. He refilled Travis’s cup, then his own. Before he started speaking again, he lit a cigarette.
“And it was into that cauldron that I was hurled in the early part of 1940, Agent Travis. Finally, we get to the point! I know we Irish have a reputation for talking too much, but sometimes I even surprise myself!”
“Go on,” Travis said. “I am honestly fascinated.”
“You remember the deal, though?” Doyle said, smiling. “A story for a story was the agreement, was it not?”
“Of course, yes,” Travis said. “Please… continue.”
“My job, though to call it a job was stretching the term considerably, was to keep the British informed of pro-Nazi allegiances and sympathies in the south. My family came from the west, a town called Kilfenora in County Clare. We descended from a famous line of drunkards and troublemakers, you see? Everyone knew the Kilfenora Doyles, and that was part of the reason the British sent me back.” Doyle shook his head and sighed. “People died for reasons; people died for no reason at all. It was a dreadful period of history, and had it not been for you fellows, then it might all have come to nothing.”
“I had no idea,” Travis said.
“About the war?”
“About you, Mr. Doyle.”
“Well, why would you have any idea? I have told you very little about myself, my family…” Doyle paused and smiled wryly. “Case in point, you know nothing at all about my errant and troublesome stepbrother, and that, believe me, is a saga all its own.”
“I suppose it’s preconceptions,” Travis said. “You think you know people. You think you have some idea of who they are, what kind of life they have led, and you learn some small truth and it changes your preconceptions completely.”
“Oh, we were busy enough through the whole war,” Doyle said. “I investigated the relationship between Francis Stuart and a German intelligence operative called Helmut Clissmann. Clissmann’s cover was the German Academic Exchange Commission, arranging cultural exchanges between Irish and German teachers and students, but in reality he was establishing intelligence lines into Ireland, the IRA itself, and Stuart helped him. Stuart even toured Germany, lecturing and teaching, used that position to carry messages to the Abwehr from the IRA’s chief of staff, Stephen Hayes.”
Doyle smiled, lit another cigarette.
“And so it went on, the lies, the deceptions, the espionage, the aborted planning for an Irish invasion by the Nazis… and I stayed right in the middle of all of it until the war was over. I was sent into France in mid-1943 as well,” Doyle added, “but that was for something entirely different.”
He paused for a moment, his mind seemingly elsewhere, and his fingers touched the small enamel flower on the collar of his vest. “And that was where I met Valeria. At the time she was all of twenty-seven years old, fierce and passionate and breathtakingly beautiful. She was working with the French-Canadian Resistance team organized and led by Renaud Larouche and Gaston Lepage. They were legendary men, both of them, and I had the great honor of working with them later. However, at that time, I was in France for just a few weeks, but Valeria and I had already begun a relationship before I left. I didn’t then see her for another two and a half years. We were actually reunited in England in January of 1946, and that—of all things—was the strangest coincidence you could ever imagine. There had been no communication between us during that time, and I had no idea whether she was even still alive. I felt she was. That’s all I can tell you. I felt she was still alive, and she believed I was still alive, and there was such a strong connection between us that we knew we would keep on looking for as long as it took.”
“So if you were only in France for a few weeks, where did you go then? What did you do for the last two years of the war?”
“Numerous and varied things, and I worked again with Larouche and Lepage, as I said.”
“Doing what, exactly?”
Doyle smiled. “Enough questions, Agent Travis.”
“At least tell me how was it that you managed to meet Valeria again in London?”
“She can tell that story so much better than I,” Doyle replied, “and I feel I have said more than enough to fulfill my end of the bargain.”
“Okay, Mr. Doyle. Perhaps one other smaller question… not about your past, but just to satisfy a little curiosity I have.”
“Which is?”
“The badge on your lapel,” Travis said. “What is that for?”
“That has a significance only I would understand, Agent Travis.”
“It’s a forget-me-not, isn’t it?”
“It is, yes.”
“And it has some sentimental value? I don’t think I have ever seen you without it.”
“You are observant. Let us just say this. Let us say that it is my shield against all ills. It is the thing that makes me invincible.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Like your dead man, perhaps. He carried a badge as well, did he not? Perhaps a little more permanent, but a badge all the same.”
“You mean the tattoo? So you wear the badge because you are a member of something?”
“Really, that is it for questions, Agent Travis. I am humoring you out of courtesy, not duty or legal obligation. It is now time for a little part of your life to be shared with the world, don’t you think?”
“I promise that there is nothing from my life that could even compare to what you’ve told me.”
“I know that that’s not true,” Doyle said. “You are a man of shadows, are you not?”
“You said that before. Miss Valeria said that as well. What does that even mean?”
“You know what it means, Agent Travis. We see right through you. You are as transparent as a pane of glass. Everyone has a life, and its significance and importance cannot be compared to that of another. They are not connected, and they are not related. The force with which one person is affected by an event is not comparable to the force with which someone else would experience the same event. Does that make sense?”
“Of course it does, yes. We are even discussing such things in our work at the Bureau.”
“I would imagine that you are,” Doyle said. “Everyone is unique. Everyone responds differently to stimuli. The mental and emotional effect experienced by two people from the same source is entirely different, is it not?”
“Yes, I would agree.”
“So, there we have it. Just because you consider it slight or unimportant does not change the fact that I might consider it earth-shattering in its significance.”
“Agreed.”
“So, tell me something that is of no consequence, Agent Travis, and we will see whether it is actually of no consequence.”
“What do you want to know, Mr. Doyle?”
“Whatever you wish me to know, Agent Travis. Sometimes the first thing that comes to mind is the most important, you know? Sometimes you just have to be willing to say what’s on your mind…”
19
“The dreams have come back.”
Those were the words that left Michael Travis’s lips, and even as he heard them, he did not un
derstand why.
“I had them as a teenager,” he went on. “Just before I joined the army. I had them then, and then they stopped for a while, but I have always been afraid that they would come back.”
Travis paused and looked at Edgar Doyle.
“But they have, and it worries me.”
“Because?” Doyle asked.
“Because I do not understand them.”
“Do they need to be understood, Agent Travis?”
Travis smiled, waved his hand in a dismissive fashion. “Of course they need to be understood, Mr. Doyle. Everything in life needs to be understood.”
“And what of those things that can never be understood?”
“Such as?”
“Déjà vu,” Doyle said. “Have you ever experienced déjà vu to such a degree that it is almost religious in its intensity?”
“Yes, I have, as a matter of fact. I don’t know that I would use the word religious, but I understand what you mean.”
“Religion just means a belief, Agent Travis. It doesn’t mean church or God or praying or anything else. It just means a belief. When I say religious in its intensity, I just mean that it’s almost impossible to believe that you have not been to this place before, that you cannot understand where such a feeling could come from. You know what I’m talking about, right?”
“I do, yes.”
“So where does that come from? Why would a human being feel such a thing in a place they had never seen before?”
“I do not know, Mr. Doyle.”
“And yet even the term itself—déjà vu—means already seen. What causes that, Agent Travis? What causes a human being to feel such a thing?”
Travis shook his head. “As I said, I do not know.”
Doyle smiled. “Valeria says it is our previous lives reminding us that we are immortal.”
Travis laughed, but Doyle did not laugh with him.
“Go on, Agent Travis. Tell me about the dreams.”
Travis cleared his throat. “I am in a field,” he said. “It is cracked and arid, dried out. There are fissures in the ground. I can see a shadow. At first I thought it was someone else, but now I am starting to think that it might be my own shadow. And I can hear a bird, perhaps a crow. The sound it makes is like someone laughing. And that is all. It comes to me periodically, always vivid, always so very clear in my mind when I wake, and I have no explanation for it at all.”
“And it started when you were a teenager?” Doyle asked.
“Yes,” Travis replied. “I was thinking of it as you were speaking of your own experiences in the war. You said you went to France in the middle of 1943.”
“That’s right, yes.”
“In November of that year, my mother was sentenced to death for killing my father. That’s what I remember most about 1943, Mr. Doyle… that my mother was sentenced to death for murdering my father.”
Travis expected some reaction from Doyle—an expression of shock, surprise, a few words of sympathy, condolence perhaps. Something. Anything.
Doyle returned his gaze unerringly, almost without any flicker of recognition in his eyes, almost as if Travis had made some innocuous comment about the weather.
“In August of 1942, when I was fifteen years old,” Travis went on, “my mother stabbed my father through the eye with a table knife, Mr. Doyle. She killed him instantly, and then she sent me to fetch the sheriff. She confessed to it as a premeditated act of murder, and so she was tried and sentenced to death. She was executed in August of 1947 in Nebraska State Penitentiary. I saw her the night before she died, and for all but a brief moment, she didn’t even know who I was. She killed my father, Mr. Doyle. She killed my father and then she lost her mind completely.”
Travis caught himself as his fists clenched and his knuckles whitened. He did not feel good. He experienced a sudden sensation of disorientation and instability. The tension within him was like a hot coal in his chest. He was losing control of his emotions, and he did not like it at all. And then—for just a split second—it was as if he were looking down on himself and Edgar Doyle, as if he were right there against the ceiling of that tiny caravan, a caravan that now seemed inordinately vast, and he was looking down at himself talking to the man who sat facing him.
Then the strangest thing happened, for Doyle looked up at him, directed his eyes to the ceiling, and said, “Tell me what happened after your father died, Michael,” and even though Travis knew that he was seated on the bench, even though he could feel the bench beneath him, it felt as if he were in both places simultaneously.
And with that question, the simple fact that Doyle used his first name, Travis was suddenly facing the man again.
There was a sensation in his ears, similar to that experienced when taking off or descending in an aircraft. The pressure was there, and then it was gone.
Travis took a sudden deep breath and held it.
Doyle, again implacable, merely watched him for a while and then said, “Whenever you’re ready, Agent Travis.”
“There are headaches,” Travis said. “When I have the dream, I get headaches. Sometimes before, sometimes after.” He laughed nervously. “I don’t even know why I am telling you this.”
Travis hesitated. He felt like a child—somehow fragile, vulnerable. It was not a feeling with which he was familiar, nor a feeling that he liked.
“A long time ago… 1943 again, September, I went back to the house of my childhood, where my father was murdered, and I saw him there. He’d been dead for more than a year, but I saw him sitting right there at the table where he’d died. He spoke to me, Mr. Doyle.”
You done fucked the quiff, eh, boy? I seen her a coupla times. Cain’t ’member when, but I seen her and figured she’d be good for a party. But you beat me to it, you old dog, and you only sixteen years old.
“What did he tell you?” Doyle asked.
God darn it, boy, you sure as hell is your father’s son.
“Agent Travis?”
You know your problem, kiddo. You always thunk too darn much.
Doyle reached out and touched Travis’s arm.
Travis snapped to, as if from a reverie. “He told me that I spent too much time thinking,” he replied, for some reason completely unable to express the first memory that had come to mind. “He told me what he thought of my mother. He told me that he was inside my head and that I would never be able to get rid of him.”
“And did you believe him?”
“Believe him?” he said. “How could I believe him or not believe him? He was a figment of my imagination, Mr. Doyle.”
“Imagination is sometimes more powerful than reality, Agent Travis,” Doyle said. And then, with a crooked smile, he added, “Or so I have been told.”
“You’re not the first person to tell me that I lack imagination, Mr. Doyle,” Travis said.
“Who said that, then? One of your superiors at the Bureau?”
“Mr. Hoover himself.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, it was Mr. Hoover.”
“And there’s a man with an imagination, if ever there was one,” Doyle replied.
“Why do you say that?”
“To create something, you have to imagine it first, do you not?” Doyle replied. “Your Mr. Hoover has been very busy. He has imagined himself to be the conscience of the nation, perhaps the world. He has imagined that he can discover everyone’s secrets and hold them secure in his vaults and archives. He has files, Agent Travis. That’s what Mr. Hoover has. He has files about you and me and Valeria and Sheriff Rourke and the townspeople of Seneca Falls. Anyone who interests him earns a file, do they not?”
“He believes that the law cannot be enforced without a real appreciation of each individual, and that appreciation comes about as a result of accurate information.”
“He is a p
aranoiac, Agent Travis. Little more than a spy. He has allowed his personal curiosity to become a psychotic obsession.”
“I am not able to comment, Mr. Doyle, and I won’t.”
“Now, if you report my comments to Mr. Hoover, then I might earn myself some more pages in a file, yes? I might even be tempted to have you do that. It sounds exciting. It appeals to me, being a subversive, perhaps even a Communist.”
“Now you are the one with the imagination, Mr. Doyle.”
“Perhaps it will be contagious, Agent Travis, and perhaps a little contagion of imagination might help you solve this case that is so troubling you.”
“Why do you say that? Do I give the impression that it troubles me?”
Doyle laughed suddenly, brazenly. “You wear it like a heavy coat, my friend,” he said. “What is the relevance of this case? Why is it so important to find out who this dead man is?”
“If you knew him… if he were a friend of yours, even a relative, wouldn’t you want to know what happened to him?”
“Perhaps, yes.”
“Perhaps?”
“Bodies are frail, Agent Travis. They break very easily. Who knows what happened to him, or why. We die when we die, and usually we die because we deserve it. Either that, or we feel that we have reached the end of our game and we want a new one to play.”
“That is a strange viewpoint, Mr. Doyle.”
“Strange? I would think that your viewpoint is far stranger, Agent Travis.”
“Mine?”
“That a man is just his body. That a man is nothing more than a collection of fat and muscle and bone and chemicals with a street value of about two dollars. That his intelligence, his creativity, his imagination, his vision, his dreams, his ideas come from a few pounds of hamburger inside his skull. That seems to me to be the most far-fetched and ludicrous idea of all, wouldn’t you say?”