The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising

by Dermot McEvoy

  “Yes, Commandant-General.”

  “Keep ya gob shut and follow your orders!” The two of them got up. We shook hands all around, and they left.

  Mick sat down at his desk. “I like your Uncle Charlie. He’s an honourable man. A straight shooter.”

  “My Mammy loved Uncle Charlie,” I said. “She named my kid brother after him.”

  “As for Frank, he’s a difficult child.”

  “He’s a pain-in-the-arse,” I replied.

  “Ah,” Mick exclaimed, “brotherly love!”

  “Shite,” says I. “Can you get him out of the Customs House job? He’s not ready. He’ll get killed.”

  “I can’t do that, Eoin. Things have changed. I’m not running this thing. Dev and Brugha are. I have to be a good soldier. I have to do my part.”

  “And what part will that be?” I asked.

  Collins gave a feeble smile. “I’m still trying to figure that out. They insist on using the Squad, and I don’t want them compromised. It’s insanity. Everyone in the Squad knows the inner workings of Crow Street. It’s insanity to let any member of the Squad be exposed to or captured by the British. It would be a death knell to our whole intelligence operation.”

  “Well,” says I, “why don’t you put your foot down and say ‘no’?”

  “I can’t. If I don’t play along with this insanity, they will think I’m bucking them and the Dáil. I’m still figuring out what to do.”

  “A rock and a hard place,” says I. “And you have only a week to figure it out.”

  “I don’t know how to play this. I’m lost.”

  I was frightened. If Michael Collins was lost, so was Ireland.

  138

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 1921

  Michael Collins had personally sent out orders forbidding any member of the intelligence staff from participating in the Customs House operation. This put Eoin in an awkward position, because he was the only member of Crow Street who also worked with the Squad, albeit on a freelance basis. He took his case to Paddy Daly, the Squad’s leader.

  Eoin knew the Squad would be assembling at the Dump, so he went over to have a chat with Daly. “What are you doing here?” was the first thing out of Daly’s mouth when Eoin came in the door.

  “I thought I was part of the operation,” Eoin replied, as innocently as he could.

  “You know the orders,” snapped Paddy.

  “What orders?”

  “Mick Collins’s orders, backed up by Liam Tobin’s orders—no one from Crow Street is to be part of this caper.”

  “Can I come along?”

  “Eoin,” said Daly, “you’re a great soldier, but do you know what Collins and Tobin would do to me if you were captured? I’d be shot!”

  “Oh,” replied Eoin, “I don’t t’ink it would be that bad.”

  Daly was forced to smile. “Against my better judgment, you can tag along, but stick close to me. And, for God’s sake, don’t tell Mick!”

  Well, at least Frank was safe enough, thought Eoin. He had kept after Collins, and the Big Fellow had had a chat with Oscar Traynor about Frank. It was decided that Frank would join the contingent that was to guard the Tara Street Fire Brigade, making sure they did not leave their side of the Liffey and put out the fires in the Customs House. It was a simple holding operation, and much less dangerous than what would be going on just across the river.

  The Squad left the Dump in twos and threes, covering each other as they made their way down Lower Abbey Street to the Customs House. They were to strike at exactly 12:45 p.m.

  The Squad was to be nothing more than glorified concierges, covering the doors of the Customs House while members of the Second Battalion did the burning. They were to round up all personnel and visitors and keep them at bay. They would allow people into the building occasionally, so that no one would know what was going on until the place was actually on fire. Once the fires were started, they would shoo everyone in the building out and make their own escape.

  It was a simple plan—and much too good to be true.

  Eoin, Vinny, and Paddy Daly took the door on Beresford Place, opposite the bombed-out Liberty Hall, and, at once, Vinny was commandeered to go upstairs and help torch the place. Already things were going awry. Eoin was waving his Webley around to get people’s attention and, happily, no one wanted to be a hero. Volunteers came in with cans of paraffin and rolls of cotton to start the blazes. Eoin stood by and detained individuals as they came through the door on their business. Eoin eyed his hostages warily and kept sniffing the air for smoke. “For Jaysus’ sake, Vincie, hurry the fook up!” he muttered under his breath.

  “Oh shite,” Daly suddenly swore. Outside, a lorry full of Black and Tans stopped on Beresford Place. “Eoin,” Daly shouted. “Come on. Get out!” He hated to leave Vinny, but, in this case, discretion was indeed the better part of valor. They put their guns away and casually walked out, looking as innocent as possible. The Tans were now standing in the lorry and getting ready to hit the pavement.

  “Fuck this,” said Daly, and he walked directly to the truck. He put his hand in his pocket, withdrew a hand grenade, pulled the pin, and dropped it into the back of the lorry. Then he took off at full speed, Eoin right behind him, and, as they approached Abbey Street, there was a terrific explosion that shot Tans into the air like acrobats.

  Crowds were forming at the end of Lower Abbey Street, and Eoin and Daly blended into them, quickly making their way as far west as the Abbey Theatre. Then they made their way down Marlborough Street to the Pro-Cathedral and started moving back, advancing up Talbot Street towards Amiens Street Station. At Gardner Street, they turned right and came back down to the Customs House. Like the crowd in St. Peter’s Square during a Papal Conclave, they looked eagerly for the white smoke, but were disappointed. “No Habemus Papam!” said Eoin, and even the dour Daly was forced to smile.

  Inside the Customs House, on the second floor, Vinny Byrne was piling ledger books in the middle of the floor and pouring paraffin over them. He was supposed to wait for a whistle to start the fire. None was forthcoming, so Vinny reached into his pocket and withdrew a box of matches. A quick strike, and the place was an instant inferno. He scampered down the stairs and made his way to the Beresford Place exit. He was barely out the door when he was pulled aside by one of the Tans.

  “What’s your fucking business?”

  “I’m a carpenter. I’m installing bookshelves here,” Vinny replied.

  The Tan slugged Vinny to the ground, and as he lay there, searched him for a gun, which Vinny had wisely left behind upstairs. “Get up,” he commanded. “Stand over here.”

  “Yes, sir!” said Vinny, trying to sound contrite.

  He was set in a line with other men. Tans, with hammers pulled back on their Webleys, looked for an excuse to murder someone. Soon an officer came to question each individually.

  “What’s your business here?”

  “I’m a carpenter,” Vinny repeated. “I was hired to build bookshelves.”

  “Prove it!” Vinny put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper with wood measurements on it. He also had a tape measure in his pocket. Vinny never left home without the two; it was part of his cover in case he got stopped. The Tan officer looked at Vinny’s pink cherubic face, his ever-present Pioneer pin, and finally said, “Get going.” Vinny started walking north towards Gardner Street and soon caught sight of Daly and Eoin.

  “Jaysus, am I glad to see you lads!”

  “You lucky sonofabitch,” said Daly, and the three of them gave a huge laugh of relief. They looked at the smoke beginning to creep out of the second-floor windows and chimneys. There was no sign of the Tara Street Fire Brigade, and Eoin felt a certain amount of pride in his brother Frank. “Let’s get the fuck out of here while the going’s good,” said Paddy Daly, and no one dissented.

  139

  “What a fucking fiasco!”

  Three days later, the Customs House was still smoldering, but the
smoke had cleared as far as Michael Collins was concerned. “Look at this,” he said, waving a sheet of paper at Eoin and Liam Tobin, “eighty percent of the IRA taken! Six dead! More still in hospital. Well, Dev got his big battle, and I hope to fuck it didn’t lose the war for us.” They were sitting in the office at 3 Andrew Street, and the mood of the Director of Intelligence was most foul.

  “What are you going to do about the Squad?” asked Tobin.

  “Brugha wants to dismantle it,” Collins snapped, “and consolidate the surviving members into a brand-new active service unit.” Eoin didn’t like the part about the “surviving members,” so he decided, for the moment, to keep his gob shut, in case his part in the operation should leak out.

  “What about Crow Street?” asked Tobin.

  “You will continue as before,” said Collins. “Eoin will brief me each evening. And continue to concentrate on our men of special interest.”

  The men of “special interest” were the contingent of British Secret Service agents that had inundated the country since Bloody Sunday. A lot had changed since that November day. Broy, finally compromised, was now on the run, and Boynton had, at Collins’s suggestion, left the G-Division and joined the British Secret Service in hopes of gaining information. Bloody Sunday had been successful—the neutralization of the G-Division was complete—and now the big fish were in the Secret Service. A second Bloody Sunday was on Michael Collins’s mind.

  “Just how serious are you about these men?” asked Tobin.

  “Very serious,” replied Collins.

  “There’s a lot of them,” interjected Eoin. “Maybe over sixty prime suspects.”

  Collins shook his head. “That’s a lot. We lost a hundred soldiers in the Customs House.” He stood and slammed his hand on the desk. “We’re fooked. Fooked good.” The frustrated Collins headed for the door and then turned swiftly and barked at Eoin, “How’s Frank?”

  “He did his job,” said Eoin, with a little smile of satisfaction on his face.

  “So he followed his orders for once?”

  “Yes, he did,” said Eoin proudly.

  Collins stared hard at his young protégé. “Unlike some others I’ve heard about.”

  And with that, the omniscient Director of Intelligence was out the door, leaving Eoin Kavanagh with his gob dragging like an eejit in heat.

  140

  SATURDAY, JULY 9, 1921

  Eoin was working at the Bachelors Walk office when he was interrupted by a terrific banging on the door. On instinct, he stood and drew his revolver.

  “Open up!” demanded the female voice. “Eoin, Eoin, open the door!” Eoin pulled the door open, expecting the worst, and there stood Róisín, waving that evening’s newspaper. “Look!” she said. The headline said it all.

  TRUCE.

  Eoin pulled the paper out of her hand and read the article. “It’s official,” she said. “By July eleventh. Two fookin’ days. Imagine that!”

  “I wonder what this will mean for Ireland?” said Eoin. “I wonder what this will mean for Mick?”

  “Fook Mick. Fook Ireland,” said Róisín, as she undid the top button on her nurse’s uniform. She had other things on her mind.

  The King had had it.

  Negotiations had been going nowhere. Lloyd George was demanding impossible pre-conditions to truce talks—such as the disarming of the IRA—deliberate non-starters on the Prime Minister’s part. He grew more stubborn with the burning of the Customs House, thinking that maybe the advice he was getting from the military about the diminishing capacity of the IRA was, perhaps, fallacious. De Valera’s military fiasco had been misinterpreted in Downing Street. Weakness had become power. The status quo in Ireland would continue for the remainder of the summer, if not the rest of 1921. Things were hopelessly stalemated.

  King George V was scheduled to open the new Northern Ireland parliament in Belfast on June tweny-second. He was tired of the black eye the Black and Tans had been giving Britain in the world press. He had told his prime minister he was not happy with the endless war in Ireland, and that something had to be done. In desperation, the King secretly collaborated with his friend, General Jan Smuts of South Africa, and the Prime Minister on some proposals. Lloyd George presented them anonymously to his cabinet, which reluctantly approved them.

  With that endorsement, George V, in his Belfast speech, called on “All Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and to forget, and to join in making for the land they love a new era of peace, contentment, and good will.” Two days later, Lloyd George approached de Valera—who had been, in one of the great screw-ups of Anglo-Irish history, bizarrely arrested and then released—as “the chosen leader of the great majority in Southern Ireland,” and a truce was soon in place.

  “I never thought,” Collins said, “that the Irish would have to depend on the fookin’ King of England to get this truce business moving.” He also added that he wasn’t so sure about the “forgiving and forgetting part.”

  Eoin looked out the window, the summer sun still high in the sky even at eight p.m. From the quay below and nearby O’Connell Bridge, a buzz was rising around the city. A Guinness barge on the Liffey gave a joyful toot of its whistle in celebration of the coming truce. Across the river, he could hear the historic bells of his parents’ church, Saints Michael and John’s, chiming in jubilation.

  “Poor Traynor, Maher, and Foley,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Traynor, Maher, and Foley,” repeated Eoin. “The last three lads hanged in Mountjoy for nothing. Nothing can bring them back.”

  “You’re right,” said Róisín. “Nothing can bring them back.” She turned and closed the door, slamming the bolt hard.

  At the bang of the bolt, Eoin turned around to see Róisín throwing her nurse’s uniform onto Eoin’s desk chair. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m celebrating,” she said, as she dropped her brassiere and slid her bloomers over her hips and onto the floor. “Take that fucker off,” she said, and the Webley and its holster landed on the floor by the window. She undid his belt, and his trousers also dropped to the floor. She yanked his drawers to his knees and pushed him onto the couch. All Eoin was wearing was his shoes, socks, shirt, tie, and waistcoat—and an enormous erection. Róisín leapt on top of him and took him inside her. “My God,” she said, throwing her arms around his shoulders and back and squeezing hard.

  “A truce!” proclaimed Eoin.

  “Yes,” repeated Róisín, “a fookin’ truce.” She kissed him hard on the lips as she continued to ride him. It was joyous, uninhibited sex. “Fook the lot of them,” repeated Róisín. “And their fookin’ truce, save two—us!”

  It had been a long time coming, and for this selfish moment in time, nothing else in Ireland existed except Róisín O’Mahony, Eoin Kavanagh, and their passionate love for each other.

  141

  “That wily old sonofabitch,” said Johnny, laughing.

  “What?” asked Diane.

  “He’s on his way to New York!”

  “Of course he is. What’s the big deal?”

  “He’s on his way to New York in 1921—not 1922—on a top-secret mission for Collins.” Johnny was arranging Eoin’s diaries in front of him on the dining room table. They held a big secret—one that Eoin would reveal only after death—but also some disturbing news about the relationship between Róisín and Eoin. “Róisín is going with him.”

  “Of course, she is,” seconded Diane.

  “Di, my love, this is 1921, not 2006,” said Johnny. “Single women—spinsters as they were called then—and bachelors did not travel together.”

  “Spinsters,” huffed Diane indignantly. “Did it stop Róisín?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Ah, the lovely scandal!”

  “Listen to this,” said Johnny. “From Eoin’s diary, dated July 29, 1921:”

  Collins called me to the Mansion House, where there were meetings g
oing on. He was brusque and seemed agitated. “You’re going to America,” he told me straight on. I asked him why. He said he wanted me to audit the books for the National Loan in New York. We had found discrepancies, and, as Minister for Finance, he wanted answers. I asked him why he didn’t go to New York himself. “And leave Ireland at this junction of history? Are you daft?”

  He told me that John Devoy would be my contact, and I immediately smelt a rat. Devoy hates de Valera, so I knew what was going on. “So I’m to get the goods on Dev?” I said. Mick grunted and said it shouldn’t take me more than a month or so. I said, “What about Róisín?”

  “What about Róisín?” he repeated.

  “She wants to go on a long holiday. I guess America would fit that bill.” Mick frowned at me. “Alright, she can go—but keep this to yourself.” I asked who’s paying, and Mick said, “The Minister for Finance.”

  “This sounds like quite an adventure for such a young Irish couple,” said Diane.

  “It was an adventure,” admitted Johnny. “Imagine coming out of a little town like Dublin and going to the noise and excitement of the Big Apple.” Johnny moved a few pages around before saying, “There are some terrific vignettes of New York City in 1921. Here’s the arrival:”

  We’re roastin’! We arrived at the Cunard Line’s Pier 54 at the foot of 14th Street in the Greenwich Village section of the city. It was 97 degrees and I was wearing long johns! I’ve never felt heat like this before, and I don’t know how’ll we’re survive it. “It’s the fookin’ tropics,” was all Róisín could muster. Aside from the heat, it felt like home, as all the dock workers are Irish and have the map of Eire on their faces. We disembarked from the Aquitania and were met by Devoy, who is terribly old. “I am delighted,” said Mister Devoy, “to meet someone who works for Ireland’s fighting Chief.” Róisín looked at me and nodded. Mr. Devoy can’t resist getting a dig in at the president at the first opportunity. In fact, he won’t even refer to Dev by name; he just calls him “The Visitor,” like some at home refer to the British as “The Stranger.”