“Open the window,” the fat one suggested.
Kev shook his head and returned to his seat. They heard footsteps in the hall. The door opened and the tall gunman entered. He looked first at Moira, then at the two guards. “All clear,” he said. “Take a break. I’ll mind them.”
Kev and the fat one at once stood up and left the room. The tall youth pulled a chair toward them, straddling it, then hitching it closer so that he sat directly in front of Moira and Dillon.
“That was a stupid trick you just played,” he said to Moira. He turned to Dillon. “If the pair of you don’t cooperate with us tonight, you’re goin’ to be sorry. If not now, then later on—a week from now, a month from now. We won’t forget you. If anybody asks you any questions about tonight, you know nothin’. Is that clear?”
Dillon did not answer.
“Because this isn’t over, this operation, it’s just beginning. I hear your wife was shootin’ her mouth off, earlier on. I don’t think she realizes. Do you know what I mean?”
“Realizes what?” Moira said suddenly.
He ignored this. He turned to Dillon.
“It’s up to you to keep her in check, do you hear? For her own good.” He sniffed. “Do you smoke?”
Dillon shook his head.
“Either of you?”
Again, Dillon shook his head. The tall youth at once stood up, went to the door, opened it, and called softly, “Volunteer?” After a moment, the fat guard appeared in the doorway.
“You were smokin’ in here?”
“Just the one cigarette. Sorry, now.”
“Both of yous?”
Kev now loomed up in the doorway. “You too?” the tall youth asked.
Kev nodded. “Sorry, now.”
“Shit!” the tall youth said. “What do you mean, sorry? Did you lift your mask?”
“They didn’t see us,” the fat guard said. “We were turned away. It was just a wee puff, just for a minute.”
The tall youth looked at them, then shut the door on them, leaving them outside. He came back and sat down again, facing Moira and Dillon. “You people are Catholics, is that right?” he asked.
“None of your business,” Moira said.
“I mean, if you saw anything you shouldn’t I don’t think either of you would say anythin’, would you? Would you? I’m not threatenin’, mind. I know you probably don’t have any more time for the Brits than the rest of us.”
“Do you, indeed?” Moira said. She turned and stared at him. At once Dillon took hold of her hand, squeezing it in warning. But she pulled free and turned again to the gunman. “Who the hell do you think you are, telling us what to do? Do you know what I’ve been sitting here thinking? Whose fault is it that you’re in my house tonight? It’s my fault. I don’t know how we let you get this far. If there was a vote tomorrow among the Catholics in Northern Ireland you wouldn’t get five per cent of it. You’re just a bunch of crooks, IRA or UDA, Protestants or Catholics, you’re all in the same business. Racketeers, the bunch of you. There isn’t a building site in this city or a pub that you or the UDA don’t hold up for protection money. Protection money! Military operation, my foot! You’ve made this place into a bloody shambles and if it was handed over to your crowd tomorrow, lock, stock and barrel, you wouldn’t have the first notion of what to do with it.”
“Shut your mouth,” the tall youth said. “Do you hear me? Shut your mouth, or I’ll shut it for you.”
“Go on, hit me, hit me,” Moira said.
“What’s the use? You’re just a woman, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No? I’ll tell you one thing I do know. You’re not fighting for anybody’s freedom. Not mine, not the people of Northern Ireland’s, not anybody’s. The only thing you’re doing is making people hate each other worse than ever. Maybe that’s what you want, isn’t it? Because if the Catholics here stopped hating the Prods, where would the IRA be? And the worst of it is, I’m wasting my breath talking to you because you’re too stupid to know the harm you’ve done.”
The faceless eyes in the woolen mask stared at her, unblinking. “Have you finished?”
“Would you like more?” Moira said.
He stood up, went to the door, and opened it. “Get in here, the both of you,” he said. Kev and the fat guard appeared from the hallway. “And I want quiet. Dead quiet. No talkin’.”
He went out into the hall, shutting the door behind him. Kev and the fat one took their former seats. Kev looked at Dillon. “Did you say we were smokin’?”
Dillon did not answer.
“The pair of you, you’re goin’ to be sorry you ever met me,” Kev said.
“Shsh.” The fat guard jerked his thumb at the door. Kev nodded, then stared at Moira, that hungry stare, lascivious, mixed with hatred. Dillon also looked at her. She sat there, angry, frightened, but brave as he was not. She was the one who had tried to escape, she was the one who stood up to them. She was the one they feared. He was the one they hoped to reason with. He thought back to what the tall one had said before her outburst. This isn’t over. This operation is just beginning. Perhaps they were not just going to use the car? Perhaps they had something else in mind?
And then it came to him. They might be planning to blow up the hotel. Bombing hotels to frighten off tourists was one of their tactics. They would need his car to get the bomb past the security gates. With him driving it? And maybe Moira in the car as well?
At that moment the door opened and the tall youth came in, his radio crackling faintly. “Put the light out,” he whispered. At once Kev jumped for the switch. The room went black. “No torches, nothin’,” the tall one’s voice said. “Mind them two. Dead quiet, dead quiet, do you hear?”
In the darkness the heavy coldness of a revolver pushed under Dillon’s ear. Beside him, Moira gave a small gasp as though the same thing was happening to her. In the dark he could hear his captors’ breathing. The radio static started up again. A girl’s voice spoke. “Unit two, unit two?”
“Unit two, come in,” the tall youth said.
“Police on foot comin’ from the Antrim Road.”
“How many?”
“Four. They have radio. Radio silence, over.”
“Over.” The radio static ceased. The tall youth said, “I’m goin’ out the back.”
Dillon heard him go down the hall into the kitchen. The revolver barrel below his ear shifted slightly and the fat guard whispered, “Mind yourself, now, mind yourself. Quiet.”
Then Kev, whispering to Moira, “Quiet, you, or I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off.”
The shallow excited breathing of his captors, the touch of steel below his ear, the knowledge that policemen, armed, and, most likely, in radio contact with an armored police car, were turning in from the Antrim Road and coming up the avenue toward the house, perhaps alerted by some neighbor who had heard Moira scream and seen the goings-on in the back garden, these thoughts, these sensations, filled Dillon with a confusion of fear and hope.
Somewhere out there the police are coming toward this house, watched by the man and the girl in the white Ford, and perhaps by other IRA, armed, ready to open fire. What if the police ring our doorbell? Will that start the shooting?
Suddenly, he was at one with his captors, trapped, waiting for violence to start, praying that the police would pass by. How often had he read of innocent bystanders, even children, being killed in these battles.
If Moira and I are killed now it will be for nothing. We will die and be part of that endless mindless chain of killings. The police will not save us. Let them go past. Let them go past.
In the silence he heard the door open behind him. Involuntarily, he turned, but the revolver barrel dug into his neck, forcing him to keep still. Someone had come into the room and was moving past him. Facing the window, as he was, he saw this someone pull the blind slightly askew, giving a partial view of the street. A voice whispered, “Comin’ up now. Four of them.”
T
hey heard it then, coming up the avenue, the slow tentative sound of a police armored car. At once, the tension in the room became acute. The sound was louder now and, suddenly, in the chink of window, lit by the streetlamp outside, Dillon saw four armed policemen walking on the far side of the avenue, moving warily, looking right and left, covering each other. They moved on out of sight and then the vehicle rumbled past, gray, menacing, blind, the snout of its machine gun circling like some strange proboscis. It moved on.
Seconds later, it stopped. A voice in the street called something. A second voice answered.
They’re coming back, Dillon thought.
Then, the person at the window whispered, “It’s OK. They’re pickin’ them up.”
The armored car started up again. They listened as the sound grew faint, then was no longer heard. The IRA man at the window let the blind drop back. “Shsh,” he said. “Nobody move till we get the word.”
The fat guard, holding Dillon, relaxed his grip. Kev’s high-pitched voice whispered, “What are they lookin’ for?”
No one answered him. Then, in a clear, conversational voice, Moira said, “You’re scared out of your skins, aren’t you?”
Beside him on the sofa Dillon felt Kev struggle with her, heard her gasp as Kev stopped her speech. The fat guard jammed his gun into Dillon’s ear. “Don’t fuckin’ move.”
A third voice, the voice of the man at the window, said, “It’s OK now.” A flashlight shone on Moira. Kev had his hand over her mouth and his other hand on her throat as if to choke her.
“Let her go,” the other IRA man said. The room light came on. The IRA man who had said, “Let her go,” was the one Dillon had glimpsed briefly earlier, in the garden. Kev took his hand off Moira’s mouth and allowed her to sit up. She coughed and massaged her neck. The other IRA man went to the door and opened it. “Wait for the radio,” he said. “It’s not all clear yet.”
He went out, closing the door. Moira, still coughing, turned to Dillon as though they were alone in the room. “Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it?” she said.
“Shut up, you!” Kev said. Suddenly, unable to contain himself, he slapped her, the force of the blow snapping her head back. At once as though he knew Dillon was going to hit him he turned and punched Dillon in the face with his closed fist. “The pair of you, shut up.”
Dillon, his eyes stinging from the pain of the blow, moved across the sofa to comfort Moira. She sat bolt upright, her slapped face reddened along the right cheek. When he touched her, she shook him off, moving to the far end of the sofa. “I want a Kleenex,” she said. “There are some in that drawer over there.”
The fat guard stood up, went to the place she had indicated, and brought back a paper box of tissues. As he put it on the sofa beside her, he said, as if to no one in particular, “There’s no need for all this fightin’. There’s no need for it.”
In the silence that followed Dillon thought of the hotel, of the night staff going home at eight, replaced by the morning shift of waiters, cleaners, the desk clerks moving into reception, the guests buying morning papers in the lobby, the line of people going into the dining room for breakfast. In the past when the IRA planted bombs in hotels they always gave a warning. They had phoned in when they put a bomb in the Clarence kitchens last year. And in all the bombings of the Europa Hotel nobody had been hurt, had they? They were bombing property, not people. Calm down, he told himself. If they’re going to bomb the hotel, it will be all right. It’s only property. It will be all right.
But even as he told himself this he realized he did not know what they were going to do. It might not be the hotel at all. It might be something else.
Beside him, Moira blew her nose on a tissue. “What time it is?” she asked him.
“I told you to shut up,” Kev said. “Do you hear me? Shut up!”
“It’s half six,” the fat guard said.
THREE
Light, faint at first, had ripened into the bold yellow tone of a summer’s morning. It shone below the window blind, competing with the lamplight in the room. Shortly after seven, Kev switched off the lamp and raised the blind six inches from the bottom, allowing them a view of the avenue. Morning traffic could be heard on the nearby Antrim Road and, as they watched, a milk van came up the avenue, delivering bottles and collecting empties. As it did, the radio crackled in the hall outside and the tall youth came in, asking urgently, “Did you order milk?”
Dillon looked at Moira who sat, her hands folded on her lap, staring down at her shoes, ignoring the question. He looked up at the masked face. “We usually take a pint.” When he said that, the youth stepped to the window and pulled the blind down again. They waited in silence, hearing the footsteps of the milkman crossing the avenue, coming in their direction. There was the sound of their front gate opening, the chink of bottles, and the gate shut again. The van moved on.
The tall youth had eased the blind up to its former position, allowing a partial view of the avenue. “Ten minutes,” he said cryptically to the others. He went out, closing the door.
Across the avenue, directly opposite their house, Mr. Harbinson, a retired bank manager, came out of his front door, slipping a lead on his old Airedale dog. Dillon watched Mr. Harbinson walk down the path to his front gate, open it, and stand on the pavement, raising his hand, palm open as though he had felt a spit of rain. Mr. Harbinson looked up at the sky, unaware that he was being watched by armed men in woolen balaclava helmets. He shut his front gate and started off up the avenue, passing the white Ford, stopping as his dog lifted its leg to urinate on the low garden wall of a house two doors up from his own.
Mr. Harbinson, like themselves, had probably never seen an IRA man in the flesh. There had never been demonstrations or Sinn Fein parades in this part of the city. Mr. Harbinson was, by the sound of him, almost certainly a Protestant, but, equally likely, he was no more a religious Protestant than Dillon was a religious Catholic. Mr. Harbinson would never fight a civil war to prevent Ulster from becoming a part of the Irish Republic, or take up arms to affirm his status as a citizen of the United Kingdom. Mr. Harbinson, like ninety percent of the people of Ulster, Catholic and Protestant, just wanted to get on with his life without any interference from men in woolen masks.
And now, watching him go off for his morning walk with his dog, Dillon felt anger rise within him, anger at the lies which had made this, his and Mr. Harbinson’s birthplace, sick with a terminal illness of bigotry and injustice, lies told over the years to poor Protestant working people about the Catholics, lies told to poor Catholic working people about the Protestants, lies from parliaments and pulpits, lies at rallies and funeral orations, and, above all, the lies of silence from those in Westminster who did not want to face the injustices of Ulster’s status quo. Angry, he stared across the room at the most dangerous victims of these lies, his youthful, ignorant, murderous captors. What are they planning to do today, what new atrocity will they work at to keep us mired in hate?
Somewhere in the house a door banged. Kev stood up, flexing his arms and legs as though stiff from sitting. He walked over to the sofa and, positioning himself directly in front of Moira, began to do knee bends. Moira turned sideways on the sofa, pulling down her skirt as though she thought he was trying to look up her legs. Kev inched himself closer, did half a dozen more knee bends, then rested on his hunkers, looking at her. She did not look at him. He stood, went to the table to get his revolver, stuck it in his belt, and said to the fat one, “Ten minutes is up, wouldn’t you say?”
The fat one nodded. Kev went to the window and again hunkered down, peering at the avenue outside through the opening of the blind. As he did, there was a tramp of feet in the hall as though many more people had come into the house. At once Kev jumped up, exchanging a look with the fat one. The door opened. The tall youth came in, followed by a masked IRA man not seen before. The tall youth pointed at Dillon. “All right. Step outside.”
As Dillon rose to obey, Moira jumped up with him an
d caught hold of his arm. “Michael, Michael, listen.”
“Don’t worry,” he said to her. “It will be all right.”
“It won’t be all right,” she said. She pulled him to her, as if to stop him leaving.
“Come on, now, we have to get goin’,” the tall youth said to him. Then, to Moira, “Let go of him, will you?”
But she did not let go. “They’re going to kill you,” she said hysterically. “They are, I know they are.”
“Nobody’s goin’ to kill him if he does what he’s told,” the tall youth said, and nodded to Kev who at once caught hold of Moira from behind, jerking her backward, breaking her embrace. At the same time the new IRA man caught Dillon’s arm, twisting it up into the small of his back, causing him to bend over in pain.
“Michael?” Moira called out in a panicky voice, but at once Kev put his hand over her mouth, struggling with her, silencing her. The tall youth and the other IRA man pushed Dillon out into the hall, shutting the door behind them. Further down the hall Dillon saw two masked figures sitting at the kitchen table. The IRA man let go of his arm and the tall youth, pointing his revolver at him, said, “You and me’s goin’ upstairs. No funny stuff, do you hear?”
As Dillon started up the stairs, the tall one followed him step by step. “You’re goin’ to change, now. Where are your clothes?”
“In the bedroom.”
“OK. Come on.”
They entered the bedroom. Moira’s discarded nightgown lay spread out like a dressmaker’s pattern on the rumpled bed. On the dressing table her many toilet articles were jumbled in untidy profusion. The room smelled of her scent and the open wardrobe revealed a long line of her dresses and racks of her shoes.
“Where are your clothes?”
He went to the far end of the wardrobe where his few suits were.
“Put on the clothes you’d be wearin’ to work this mornin’. A suit and a tie, right?”
Lies of Silence Page 5