All Our Yesterdays

by Robert B. Parker

  That afternoon Conn said to the soldier, “Lend me sixpence for the tram.”

  “I can give you five shillings,” the soldier said.

  “No, sixpence will do. I’m tired of this place.”

  The soldier laughed and handed him the silver.

  “If it only cost sixpence all of us would go,” he said.

  The soldier would leave the Old Gunner’s door open—the padlock closed but not locked, so that it looked secure. The Old Gunner could reach through the peephole and unlock it. Conn’s door had no padlock, but the lock could be opened from the outside by pressing against the jamb with the handle of a spoon.

  An hour after lights out, the Old Gunner walked in stocking feet past the soldiers sleeping near him and came to Conn’s cell. His boots were slung by the laces around his neck. He struggled silently to pop the bolt on Conn’s cell door. In the silence Conn could hear the soldiers in the nearby cell. One of them muttered in his sleep. Several of them snored. He was listening so intensely in the darkness that Conn could hear the sound of the running water that never fully shut itself off in the toilet down the hall.

  The bolt clicked back. They edged the door open, slowly, so that it wouldn’t squeak. Conn too had his boots around his neck. He gave the cutters to the Old Gunner, and held the .38 in his hand. They moved silently down the corridor past the guardroom, up the iron stairs. The iron door at the top was not locked. They went through it to the exercise yard. The ground was damp and the exterior walls were clammy in the night. The gravel was thunderous as they crunched across it in stocking feet. And the moon glared down like a spotlight.

  At the gate the Old Gunner worked with the cutters while Conn stood pressed into as dark a corner as possible with his .38 drawn. He heard the Old Gunner laugh.

  “Like butter,” the Old Gunner said.

  They pushed half the gate open slowly. It groaned as they did so. Then they were out in the bright night. They pushed the gate slowly closed behind them. In the darkness to their left they heard movement and Conn saw the outline of a soldier’s peaked cap. Conn put his left hand out to stop the Old Gunner, and crouched a little and brought the .38 up. Had they been tipped? Were they waiting? A shot would wake up the garrison. Another figure stirred beside the soldier and Conn realized it was a woman. He could smell her perfume in the soft, damp Dublin night. Conn edged closer. The soldier and the woman were locked in an embrace. The soldier was fumbling beneath her blouse. Conn smiled. It might be a trap, but it wasn’t a trap for him. He edged back to the Old Gunner.

  “Love,” Conn said.

  A different figure appeared, wearing a tweed scally cap.

  “Liam Sullivan,” the figure whispered. “Fourth Brigade. Catch the tram on the South Circular Road. Well keep the soldiers busy.”

  “Are the girls yours?” the Old Gunner said.

  “Hired for the event,” Sullivan said.

  “Fucking for Free Ireland,” Conn said. “How sweet.”

  “Actually it’s your freedom they’re fucking for,” Sullivan said. “But it’s still a good cause.”

  As they moved silently along the outside of the jail wall they passed other soldiers and women, in various degrees of intimacy, and then they were away from the jail. Sullivan vanished into the darkness. They boarded a tram on South Circular Road and mingled with other people. Around them Dublin spread out as if it had no limit. The dun brick looked bright, there were people with colored scarfs and laundered clothes. The signs on stores and taverns seemed sprightly and amusing, and the air seemed to breathe very easily. They listened to the talk around them, and laughter. With senses sharpened by deprivation, they smelled food, and the pleasant yeastiness of the Guinness Brewery, and the fertile wet scent of the river.

  Conn

  “You were born to be shot, Conn,” Michael Collins said. “They’ll never hang you.”

  “I’m through with it, Mick,” Conn said. “I’ve no heart for it anymore.”

  “You swore an oath, Conn. Just like I did. We’d not rest until Ireland was free.”

  Conn shrugged.

  “I’m not the same man,” he said.

  Collins looked at him thoughtfully. His round, smooth face showed nothing.

  “It wasn’t the jail,” Collins said after a moment.

  Conn shrugged.

  “It’s the woman,” Collins said.

  “You know about her?”

  “It’s my profession.”

  “Doesn’t matter what it is, Mick. I’m through. I have no more heart for causes.”

  Collins nodded.

  “Amazing,” Collins said. “You are one of the hardest men I ever knew. In a fight. Facing death.”

  Facing death. Conn smiled to himself. Collins’s rhetorical flourishes would have seemed laboriously stilted in most men. In Collins it was so much a part of who he was that it seemed normal speech.

  “You’d go up against anyone,” Collins went on. “One man or ten. But one woman”—Collins shook his head—“she broke you.”

  “She betrayed me.”

  They were silent.

  “Thanks for getting me out,” Conn said.

  “I like you, Conn. Or I used to. But we got you out because it was good for Ireland that you escape. The only person arrested for Bloody Sunday. In their strongest jail. It weakens them, Conn. That’s the point.”

  “There’ll be reprisal,” Conn said. “Somebody’ll hang for my freedom.”

  “And we’ll have another martyr. It’s not an adventure, Conn. It’s a war.”

  “Well, it’s neither one for me, Mick. I’m out of it.”

  “Then go away, Conn. Go far. South Africa, Australia, America. It won’t help us if they catch you. It’ll help us if you disappear.”

  “I don’t want to stay here,” Conn said.

  “Good. A lot of our boys don’t like quitters much.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Conn said.

  “Nothing matters, does it?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll arrange it,” Collins said. “Where do you want to go?”

  Conn had never thought of where to go. He’d only thought of leaving.

  “The United States,” Conn said. “I’ll go to Boston.”

  Collins grinned suddenly.

  “Fancy that,” Collins said.

  1994

  Voice-Over

  “You walk along the River Liffey,” I said, “which cuts right through the middle of the city, and there’s a bunch of barrel-arched bridges. And the arches reflect in the water and make a circle. You walk along the river, past Guinness Brewery, and veer up past Heuston Station and go up a hill and there’s Kilmainham Jail, this—Christ, I don’t know—Stonehengean pile of granite block, right in the middle of a bunch of neat small houses with neat small yards. So I went in. You can’t go except on a tour, so I tagged along. And, Jesus … abandon all hope ye who enter here.”

  Grace waited, her gaze resting on me, calm and guarded so that it felt heavy. Though it seemed a little less guarded to me than it had. Always when she listened, she gave you her full attention and you felt as if you were saying things of absolute grace and significance.

  “It felt like you’d think a prison would feel: ponderous, unyielding, and hopeless. There was a light rain the day I was there. Actually there’s a light rain most days in Dublin, I think. And the rain didn’t make it more cheerful, but even in the present day, you know, now, when I was walking around in there, and now it’s just a museum, I felt”—I looked for the right word—“like despair. I felt buried underneath this atrocious heap. It wasn’t a cold day, maybe fifty-five, sixty, but inside the walls it was freezing. You knew what it must have been like to be caught in the gears of the British Empire. They were entirely indifferent, and they must have ground exceeding fucking fine.”

  “And yet he escaped,” Grace said.

  “He was an indomitable bastard,” I said.

  The thick snow had begun to pile up along the bottom of the w
indow, its whiteness making the night storm blacker.

  “Except that it sounds like he didn’t care about anything.”

  “There’s freedom in that.”

  “There’s freedom and there’s freedom,” Grace said.

  “True.”

  She looked at me again for a time.

  “There’s indomitable and indomitable too,” she said.

  “What the hell does that mean?” I said.

  Grace shrugged.

  “We’ll see.”

  I waited but she didn’t say anything else. Lightning startled outside the window, and thunder rolled in after it. The space between the light and the sound had narrowed as the heart of the storm moved toward us.

  “A little after Conn left Ireland, they had stopped fighting England and started fighting each other. Michael Collins was killed by some other Irishmen, on the other side of the treaty issue.

  “But Conn cared no more about that. He was over here. He arrived late in 1921 and joined the cops. The police strike was only two years before, and the force was pretty much starting over, and so was Conn. It was a match made in heaven. He was a charmer. I’ve seen pictures of him. Tall, strong looking, black curly hair, bright eyes, with a kind of go-to-hell look in them, you know? Like Errol Flynn. In fact much like myself.”

  Grace smiled.

  “And one of his missions in life was to score every woman in Boston. Sort of a fuck-you to Hadley, I suppose.”

  “I thought Irishmen were sexually inhibited,” Grace said. “Hung up on their mother and the Blessed Virgin, whom they quite often confused with each other.”

  “You shouldn’t generalize,” I said. “Anyway, he started out walking a beat in the West End with a guy named Knocko Kiernan. I’ve actually met Knocko. I was a little kid, and he was a fat old guy drinking beer in his undershirt, when my father took me to see him once. But he still had funny eyes—like Robert Benchley, you know? Eyes that know life’s secret, and it’s funny? Lot of Irishmen like him, about half of them, the other half thinks life’s secret is tragic. I’m not sure yet which kind I am.”

  “Maybe a complete one,” Grace said. “Maybe you’re both.”

  “So he’s walking a beat in the West End, which isn’t even there anymore. Nice high rise condos—if you lived here you’d be home now. And they bust some bootleggers, and roust some loan sharks, and one day they caught a guy trying to murder an old lady. It wasn’t great sleuthing, they just came across him in the act. But they saved the old lady and collared the guy and it made the papers. Martin Lomasney wrote a letter to the Post about it, and the mayor, James Michael Curley, had his picture taken with them, and in a while they were both detectives. And in another while they were both, still partners, working homicide out of Headquarters. Is this a great country? Or what.”

  “Land of opportunity,” Grace said.

  1931

  Conn

  They went to Boylan’s, next to City Hall, which meant that Knocko Kiernan’s wife, Faith, who had arranged the blind date, considered it important. Conn had a pint of whiskey with him in his coat pocket and he and Knocko were already aglow with it when they met Faith and Mellen Murphy in the restaurant.

  “Mellen’s a very pretty name,” Conn said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It’s Mary Ellen, actually. I think my father invented the contraction when he was mad at me and couldn’t get ‘Mary Ellen’ out without sputtering.”

  Her hair was the color of honey, and her eyes were very large and blue. She was slim, and wore a green dress with a lace collar. Her only makeup appeared to be lipstick, and she wore a small crucifix on a gold chain round her neck. Conn smiled to himself when he saw the crucifix.

  We’ll see about that.

  “Hard to imagine getting mad at you,” Conn said.

  The waiter came with menus.

  “We’ll have some glasses and ice,” Knocko said. “And a siphon of seltzer.”

  “It is not permitted to drink here,” the waiter said. He was a small dark man. “It’s the law. Prohibition.”

  Knocko was bald, and jowly. He looked like the caricatured Irish policeman who appeared occasionally in The Evening Transcript. His face reddened.

  “Maybe you’d like to have the place shut fucking down for a couple weeks,” Knocko said.

  “Francis,” his wife said. “Your language.”

  “I’m sorry sir,” the waiter said. “Management—”

  “Fuck management,” Knocko said.

  “Francis!”

  Conn stood up. He rested a hand on Knocko’s shoulder, for a moment, as if calming a restive horse. Then he said, “Excuse me,” to the table, put an arm over the waiter’s shoulder, and, smiling, steered him a few steps away. With his back turned so that only the waiter could see it, he took out his badge and showed it to him. He smiled broadly.

  “Just bring us the setups, guinea-wop. And shut the fuck up,” Conn said in a pleasant voice. He nodded his head encouragingly. “You unnerstand?”

  It wasn’t the badge, as much as it was what the waiter saw in Conn’s eyes.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Sorry.”

  Conn gave him a little pat on the back. And came back to the table.

  “See that, Francis?” Faith said. “That’s how a gentleman handles things. No need for rampaging round like a great sow.”

  Knocko winked at Mary Ellen.

  “A sow is a female pig, Faith, if you’ll be insulting me, for Crissake, at least get it right.”

  The waiter returned with glasses and ice and seltzer. Conn took the bottle from his inside pocket and mixed them all a drink.

  “Make mine very weak,” Mary Ellen said. “I really don’t know how to drink very much.”

  “Plenty of time to learn,” Conn said. They drank and looked at the menus. Mary Ellen drank in very small sips, and Conn could see that she didn’t like the taste. He looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar. He was wearing a blue suit and vest and a red-and-blue tie with a collar pin. His white shirt fresh laundered by the Chinaman. His face had a healthy, wind-burned look and the blue suit set off his eyes and made them look even more piercing than they were.

  “What did you say,” Mary Ellen asked, “to make the waiter change his mind?”

  “Sweet reason,” Conn said. “I explained to him that while Prohibition was the law of the land, Knocko and I were the law of the city.”

  Mary Ellen smiled and took another tiny sip of her drink and tried to keep from wrinkling her nose at the taste.

  “It’s lovely, the way you speak, you’re born in Ireland.”

  “In Dublin,” Conn said. “Left ten years ago.”

  “Was it the troubles?”

  Conn smiled at her.

  “I was hoping to meet you,” he said.

  “You’re very gallant,” Mary Ellen said.

  “Just ask the waiter,” Knocko said. He had drunk two whiskies since the waiter brought the glasses, and his face was bright.

  “Oh, Francis,” Faith said.

  “You live at home?” Conn said.

  “Yes, and I work for Judge Canavan.”

  “Secretary?”

  “Yes. He’s a friend of my father’s.”

  “Judge Murphy?”

  Mary Ellen nodded.

  “You know my father?”

  “Just by reputation,” Conn said. “He’s a defendant’s judge.”

  “My father is very softhearted,” Mary Ellen said.

  Knocko mixed up another whiskey and soda. His tie was loosened, his collar open, and his vest gapped above his belt. He gestured the waiter to them.

  “We’ll have oysters,” he said.

  “For four, sir?”

  “Yeah, bring them for the table.”

  “Would you care to order anything else, sir?”

  “Just bring the freakin’ oysters,” Knocko said. “We’ll let you know what we want next.”

  Faith leaned forward across the table toward her husband. She
spoke softly with her lips barely moving.

  “Francis, you straighten out.”

  Knocko smiled and drank his drink. But he seemed uneasy. Pussy whipped, Conn thought. He swallowed some whiskey, felt it cold at first, then warm. He smiled to himself. Aren’t they all?

  The oysters came, on a silver platter served on a bed of ice. Mary Ellen eyed them uncertainly.

  “Was a brave man, first ate an oyster,” Conn said. He put one on Mary Ellen’s plate, and a tiny dab of horseradish, then he offered her the meat on the small fork provided. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth and Conn popped it in. She swallowed without chewing.

  “Like communion,” Conn said.

  Mary Ellen drank some from her whiskey and soda to wash it down.

  “Wasn’t so bad, was it?” Conn said.

  Mary Ellen smiled. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t.”

  “Next time you might chew it,” Conn said. “In time you might like it.”

  “I’m learning,” Mary Ellen said.

  “You certainly are,” Conn said.

  “You’re a good teacher,” she said.

  “Yes,” Conn said. “I am, in fact.”

  Conn

  Conn sat quietly beside Mellen at Mass on a warm June morning. He enjoyed the scent of her: the soap she’d used in her morning bath, the floral shampoo with which she’d washed her hair, the perfume she’d sprayed lightly in the hollow of her throat. He liked the seriousness in her face as the Latin Mass rolled sonorously on. He liked the clear polish that made nails gleam as she fingered her rosary, and, when she knelt, Conn remained seated and studied the contour of her buttocks under the white summer dress. Kneeling enhances a woman’s ass.

  The parish was Irish. The sermon was about the Blessed Virgin and her Beloved Son. He could hear the reverential capital letters in the priest’s smug voice. Mother love and virginity. Echoes of his childhood. He could have been in Dublin. It’s not whiskey, Conn thought, keeps the Irish from ruling the world. The smell of incense, and the ringing of the bells, the impenetrable rhythmic Latin, the cassocks, and organ music, the dreadful martyrdom, the resurrection and the life, prayer, confession, contrition, the collection baskets passed by men in ill-fitting black suits that smelled of camphor, the flat wafer on the tongue, ohmygodIamheartilysorry. Conn smiled to himself. Foolish bastards.