by Joe Joyce
‘How did you get yourself arrested?’ Sullivan asked.
‘Good question,’ Duggan said.
They usually worked on separate operations, but they shared an office, so each inevitably picked up details of what the other was up to. And Sullivan was in charge of G2’s interrogation of Hermann Goertz, so he knew that Duggan had been carrying a message to the Abwehr that was supposed to have come from the German spy. He knew nothing about Duggan’s attempts to check up on Frank Aiken’s doings in Lisbon.
‘The boss was very worried about you,’ Sullivan said, giving him a sardonic grin. It was a regular complaint of his that their immediate superior, Commandant McClure, favoured Duggan over him, giving him the more interesting jobs and treating him more as an equal. ‘Afraid they’d hurt you.’
Duggan ignored the jibe. ‘You got the transmitter?’
‘And the fags and the coffee.’ Sullivan sped down the road into Blackrock village, giving a wide berth to a wobbly cyclist who looked like he was on his way home from a hard night’s drinking. ‘I didn’t know you were doing a little smuggling on the side.’
‘And the message for Goertz?’
Sullivan nodded. ‘Hasn’t been decoded yet. Dr Hayes wasn’t
available yesterday.’ Richard Hayes, the head of the National Library, was their unofficial cryptographer, and the man who had broken the code used by Goertz.
‘How is Hermann?’
‘Can’t shut the fucker up,’ Sullivan sighed. He’d been delighted at first to be given the task of interrogating Goertz after his capture at the end of a long pursuit, but his interest was beginning to fade.
‘Anything interesting?’
‘Just repeating the same old stuff at this stage. I’m Ireland’s best friend. Working night and day to protect your neutrality. Germany loves Ireland,’ Sullivan mimicked. ‘And moaning about the shower of unreliable fuckers in the IRA.’
‘All good news,’ Duggan laughed.
Sullivan nodded. ‘And there’s another love letter for you.’
‘You got it?’
‘In the office.’
‘How did you get this American penfriend anyway?’
‘Can’t tell you,’ Duggan said. They had already had this sparring conversation several times. Sullivan knew nothing of his relationship with Gerda Meier, or even that she was his correspondent.
‘Which reminds me. Your smart-arse Special Branch friend was looking for you.’
‘For what?’
‘Talking his usual shite. Worried about your morals. Wanted to make sure you weren’t eating meat on Fridays. Going to confession every week.’
‘You didn’t tell him where I was?’
‘Told him I didn’t know where you were. And cared less.’
A milkman was pouring milk into a jug for a uniformed maid outside a large house on Merrion Road, and there were more signs of life as they neared the city centre. Sullivan slowed as the traffic light at the corner of Merrion Square and Clare Street turned red, and glanced to either side to make sure there was nothing coming. He continued without stopping.
There was no pointsman on duty at O’Connell Bridge yet and Sullivan turned on to Bachelors Walk and drove down by the Liffey. The sunshine followed them westwards, mellowing the faded red brickwork of the buildings, which was broken only by the rebuilt facade of the Four Courts. They turned into Collins Barracks and one sentry saluted while another raised the barrier and Sullivan drove under the archway into the parade ground and parked on the right in front of the mess.
Sullivan stayed in the car as Duggan got out. ‘You not going back to bed?’ Duggan leaned down to ask through the open door.
‘No point,’ Sullivan said. ‘I’ll go into the office. Get an early start on the daily report.’
Duggan went upstairs to his room, opened the door with his key, and tossed his kitbag on the floor at the end of the iron bed. It was spartan but the window was open an inch, so it didn’t have the air of a room that hadn’t been occupied for six weeks. Somebody has been using it, he thought, but that wasn’t unusual: visiting officers were accommodated in any available rooms.
He sat on the side of the bed, unlaced his shoes, pushed each one off with the other foot and lay down. He fell asleep while still thinking he should get undressed.
Commandant McClure was sitting behind his desk in the Red House, the headquarters of G2, the inevitable cigarette in his ashtray producing a thin column of smoke, which divided into a victory sign as it climbed towards the ceiling. ‘Well,’ he said, sitting back with a smile as Duggan entered after a casual knock. ‘You got more than you bargained for.’
‘A little,’ Duggan agreed.
‘Tell me all,’ McClure said, pointing at the chair opposite him.
Duggan told him everything that had happened, in chronological order, knowing that he’d want to hear how things had developed. McClure listened with few interruptions and jotted an occasional note on a pad. ‘So Mr Aiken wasn’t being very diplomatic,’ he said, circling a couple of words on the pad when Duggan had finished. ‘But then he never is. Our friend in External Affairs has been up in a heap about the whole American trip. It’s turned into something of a disaster.’
‘They won’t give us any arms.’
‘Worse than that,’ said McClure, shaking his head. ‘They’ve made it fairly clear that they’ll support the British if Churchill decides he has to seize our ports.’
‘Jesus,’ Duggan said.
The pressure over the ports seemed to be ratcheting up inexorably. Churchill had a bee in his bonnet about them, was determined to get them back and was being restrained by his military advisers, who didn’t think that seizing and securing them would be worth the effort. And by fears of how a British invasion of Ireland would be perceived in America, where the isolationists were still very strong, probably in a majority in spite of President Roosevelt’s determined anti-Nazi stance. If the British knew the Yanks wouldn’t object . . .
‘I don’t know why Mr de Valera sent him in the first place,’ McClure was saying. ‘It never looked like a good idea.’
‘Maybe he thought the Americans needed to hear some straight talking.’ Duggan thought of his uncle, Timmy Monaghan, a government backbencher and a supporter of Aiken. Like him, Timmy was convinced that Britain was Ireland’s main enemy, and that Churchill was spoiling for a rerun of the War of Independence, in which Timmy had fought alongside Duggan’s father.
‘Time and place for everything,’ McClure muttered as he tapped another line in his notes with his pen. ‘You believe this fellow Hopkins?’
‘About Fritz Wiedermeyer?’
McClure nodded. ‘MI5 knew I’d met some German and had me taken off the ship in Pembroke. Somebody tipped them off, or one of their people saw me. If the German’s as senior as Hopkins says, that’d make sense. They’re probably watching each other’s men over there.’
‘But why was a senior Abwehr agent interested in a low-level IRA man?’ McClure asked, something in his tone making the question rhetorical as he reached for a file on top of a pile on the right-hand side of his desk. ‘And the answer is here.’ McClure waved the folder, put it on his desk and opened it. ‘The message he gave you for Goertz. Dr Hayes has started decoding it, and it may explain his interest. Nothing to do with the IRA as such.’
Duggan could see the rows of letters in blocks of four as McClure shuffled a couple of pages of shiny photocopies and came to a foolscap worksheet with a jumble of notes on it. He sat back, ignoring the file.
‘An American Flying Fortress crashed in Mayo a month or so ago,’ he said. ‘It had no markings on it. No armaments on board. All the crew in civvies. So, technically, it was a civilian aircraft and, anyway, not even from a belligerent country. Seems it ran out of fuel on its way to England.’ McClure paused to light a cigarette and tossed one to Duggan. ‘The co-pilot was killed, pilot and navigator injured but not seriously. Walking wounded. They were taken to a hospital in Castlebar and the Americ
an legation took over looking after them and so on. Asked that they be allowed to continue their journey to England with the co-pilot’s body. And asked that the wreckage be
salvaged and taken to the North. Which is what happened.’
McClure stretched out a finger to tap the file in front of him. ‘Wiedermeyer’s message to Goertz is about this plane.’
Duggan gave a low whistle. ‘Was the crash in the papers?’
McClure shook his head. ‘No. It was censored. And it gets more interesting. His message says that the plane was carrying a secret new American bombsight.’
‘Was it?’
‘First we’ve heard of it.’
‘So how did the Germans know about it?’ Duggan asked.
McClure stared back at him, letting the question hang in the air.
‘They’ve got another spy here? Apart from Goertz?’
‘Don’t think so,’ McClure said, stirring himself and standing up. ‘If they had, and if that person could have told them about the bombsight, they wouldn’t need to enlist Goertz’s help to try and find it.’
‘Find it?’ Duggan repeated. ‘It’s missing?’
McClure nodded.
‘How could they know that? That it was on board and that it’s missing.’
‘The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,’ McClure said, beginning to pace back and forth from his desk to the window, leaving a trail of smoke that doubled back on itself as he moved. The afternoon sky was a bright blue outside but this side of the building was in the shade. ‘We don’t even know if it’s true. If there was anything like that on board.’
‘Can’t we ask the Americans?’ Even as he said it, Duggan knew that that wasn’t a good idea: they’d want to know immediately how G2 had heard about the bombsight.
‘We already asked them what was on board and they assured us there was nothing of significance. No armaments and so on.’
‘Is a bombsight an armament?’
‘Clearly not if you don’t want it to be.’
Duggan stood up as well, trying to tease out his jumbled thoughts. ‘Couldn’t we ask the Americans if anything is missing?’
McClure gave a short laugh. ‘Lots of things were missing. It was carrying supplies for their London legation. Food. Drink. Cigarettes. Paper. Typewriter ribbons. Office stuff. Things in short supply in England.’
Duggan nodded his understanding. ‘How long did it take to secure the site?’
‘Long enough for most of the supplies to have disappeared. Some of the paper was left.’
McClure stopped behind his desk to stub out his cigarette. ‘We need to look back over everything to do with that plane. See what might have happened to what was on board and figure out how the Germans know about it.’
‘Use the transmitter to ask them for more information,’ Duggan suggested.
‘Perhaps. We need to set it up first. But I’d like to know a lot more about this before we ask the Germans or the Americans anything. Especially in the current state of our relations with the Americans. We’re floundering around in the dark at the moment.’
Duggan sat down at his desk and looked at the pile of files and documents. On top was a report about the crash of the Flying Fortress, which he put to one side. He sifted quickly through the rest, realising how most things resolved themselves unaided if they were left alone long enough. There were four letters: three from his mother and one from Gerda. His mother’s gave his full rank and army headquarters as the address; Gerda’s had no rank and said ‘The Red House, Infirmary Road, Dublin’. He smiled again at the thought of some American post office sorter thinking what a quaint Irish address it was; the red house as distinct from the green house or the blue house. And what if there were two red houses on the road,? Would one be the first red house?
‘How is she?’ Sullivan interrupted his reverie from his spot at the other end of the table which served as their desk.
‘My mother? I’ll tell you as soon as I open them.’
‘Your girlfriend.’
‘Why do you assume it’s from a woman?’ Duggan turned over the envelope, where the sender’s address said ‘G. Matthews’. ‘“G” is for Gearoid.’
‘Bollocks,’ Sullivan laughed. ‘That’s a woman’s writing.’
‘You a handwriting expert now?’
‘I know a woman’s writing when I see it.’
‘I’ll tell him he’d better change it.’ Duggan put the letters aside. ‘People are getting the wrong idea about him.’
‘We’ve set the date,’ Sullivan said.
‘For the wedding?’ Duggan asked in surprise. Sullivan had been engaged to be married to Carmel since the beginning of the year but had never seemed in a hurry to get to the altar.
‘September sixth.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘Her father’s not well. She wants to do it sooner rather than later, in case.’
‘Is he in hospital?’
Sullivan shook his head and shrugged. ‘Give me one of those cigarettes I gave you.’
Duggan tossed the packet of Player’s down the table and skated his lighter after it.
‘What are you going to do with them?’ Sullivan sent the packet skimming back along the table.
‘The cigarettes? Forgot to ask the boss what we should do with them. Where are they anyway?’
Sullivan pointed over Duggan’s shoulder to where the coat stand was. Duggan turned and saw the suitcase Wiedermeyer had given him in the corner. He picked it up, put it on the table and snapped open the catches. The radio equipment was gone but the cartons of cigarettes and bags of coffee were still there.
‘A guy from Signals took the radio,’ Sullivan said. ‘They’re setting it up in a house in Greystones. Waiting for you to come back before sending a first message.’
‘Why Greystones?’
‘Because it’s full of West Brits.’ Sullivan gave him a crooked smile. ‘It’ll confuse the real Brits if they locate it and think some of their supporters are talking to the Jerries.’
Duggan counted the cartons of cigarettes but had no idea how many more had gone missing. One sleeve of Player’s was already missing most of its packs. He shrugged to himself and put a packet in his pocket.
He cleared a space on the table in front of him for the big Royal typewriter. He put two sheets of carbon paper between three pages of blank foolscap, rolled them into the typewriter’s platen and loosened its lock to straighten them. It took him more than two hours to write his report on his visit to Lisbon, his meetings with the Germans, his detention at Pembroke and his conversations with the MI5 man who called himself Tom Hopkins. He did not try to interpret or speculate, just described each conversation and event. As McClure had instructed him, he made no mention of his efforts to find out what Frank Aiken had told people there.
When he had finished, he tipped the typewriter up on its end, read through the document and initialled each of the copies. Sullivan had disappeared, and he stood by the window for a bit, stretching himself. It was a lovely long summer’s evening out there, the sky bright blue, but shadows were beginning to lengthen and stretch out from the Red House.
He opened Gerda’s envelope and caught a faint trace of perfume as he took out the flimsy air-mail paper. He took his time reading it, leaning against the wall by the window and hearing her voice behind the words as she described the daily tedium of her job in an insurance company’s typing pool, the friendships she’d made with two other girls, and their progress, or lack of it, in getting an apartment to share. She signed off with ‘missing you’ followed by a neat drawing of a heart with an arrow through it and a ‘G’.
He read it again, trying to visualise her life there, but his only real images of New York came from films and were usually black and white and involved gangsters and crime. He smiled at the thought of her surprise when she got his postcard from Lisbon and checked the date on the letter again. She wouldn’t have received it when she wrote but she should have got it by now.
/> He read through his mother’s letters, the usual catalogue of local news, more deaths than births or marriages. His father had put the car up on blocks, refusing his brother-in-law Timmy’s offer of a few cans of petrol from Timmy’s private store, and they were now using the pony and trap to get to town. One of his school friends was trying to get a travel permit to go to England after running away from the construction corps because of the bad conditions on the bogs, where they lived and worked cutting turf.
Good luck to him with that, Duggan thought, aware of rumours that Sean Lemass, the minister in charge of supplies, was thinking of banning emigration by all able-bodied men, and cutting their dole to force them to work at whatever he wanted done. He went back to his desk, put down the typewriter and wrote to his mother, apologising for the long silence. He’d been on manoeuvres, he told her: his parents didn’t know he’d been out of the country.
When he’d finished, he opened the file on the Flying Fortress crash. The first report was from LOP 55, the lookout post at Renvyle point which had first sighted the unmarked plane crossing the coast a few days after he had left for Lisbon. It was followed by a Garda report describing the crash site, interviews with the pilot in hospital and a final report on the operation to remove the wreckage, which had taken a couple of days.
The plane had left from Washington and had had to divert northwards around a thunderstorm in its intended flight path. That, and a possible slow leak in a fuel line, had left it running out of fuel as it approached the Irish coast. The pilot had tried to land it on what looked like a flat area just north of a lake, and it had come down on a bog, skidded on its belly for nearly half a mile and crashed into a small wood. Wreckage had been found all along the landing area – bits of wings and engines – and the main part of the fuselage was in the wood.
The report listed the names of the crew and their injuries but without any ranks, except for the pilot. He was referred to as ‘Captain’, but whether that was a military rank or his position in charge of the aircraft wasn’t clear.
The final document was an internal G2 report on the removal of the wreckage, signed with the initials ‘L.A.’ Liam Anderson. Shit, Duggan thought, of all the people who might have gone down there. Anderson was a captain on the British desk with whom Duggan had had several run-ins in the past, when there had been an overlap between the German and British desks. But there was nothing for it but to talk to him.