On that particular day I had been to two camps in the south and arrived back at the Normandy with a splitting headache. Nothing would induce me to involve myself with the crowd at the bar, no matter how amusing they might be; all I wanted was a shower and an early night, so I went straight to my room - and Negib was sitting on my bed, pointing a revolver at me.
"Come in Harry, and don't make a sound."
There was no escape. I had as good as closed the door and anyway he was only a couple of yards away. "It's been a long time," I said, once I had recovered from the shock. I was nervous and I turned my back on him to pour a drink, the coward's way of facing a gun. "I looked for you, you know."
"I heard. I looked for you too - for a while," he said. I turned round and indicated the bottle. But he shook his head, half smiling, the gun still pointing at my chest. "It's against my religion," he said.
That surprised me. "You used to be a Christian. You changed?"
"A lot's changed, Harry - an awful lot. But as you say, it's been a long time."
I thought that he sounded tired, more tired than angry, despite the gun. I sat in the only chair and swallowed some whiskey, trying to think of something to say. "I've been to the camps today."
"I know. I saw you."
Another surprise. "You saw me? But you're not on the register. I looked, I always look."
He laughed. It was a dry rattle of a sound, quite without humour. "No, I'm not a resident. But that's the trouble, isn't it? I'm not a resident anywhere since the Jews stole my country." His eyes flashed with a warning of temper. Right at that moment I think it could have gone either way. Something told me that he hadn't come to kill me, but a careless word might spark off feelings beyond his control. I finished my drink and sat looking at him, wondering what he was going to do.
He sneered. "So you've seen the camps today. What now?"
"I'll write about them and the paper will run it or spike it - according to how they feel."
"And you're satisfied with that?"
"You're not - I can see that." I turned my back on him to replenish my drink. I was screwing up courage to ask the question which burned in my mind above all else, and not too proud to take courage from the bottle if it helped, not with a gun pointing at me. "Negib," I faced him, phrasing the question a dozen different ways in my mind before blurting out, "Haleem? Do you know where she is?"
For a split second I was sure he would kill me. His mouth tightened and his dark eyes blazed in his face. All the time the gun stayed steady in his hand and I wondered what the hell he wanted from me? Remorse, guilt, fear? Then I saw the pain creep into his expression and I knew that Haleem was dead, even before he told me.
"It was years ago," he began quietly. "In the Catastrophe. My uncle was taking her to Bet Hakerem, I think. I was in the hills with some of the others - we were making our way there separately. But it went badly for us and we got held up - we never made it - not in time anyway. My uncle and Haleem were also delayed and they stayed overnight with relations. At Deir Yassin!" His voice flared with sudden temper. "And everyone in Palestine knows what happened there, don't they? The whole rotten world should know. Why don't you write that in your filthy capitalist press Harry? Or would they spike that too?"
I was too shaken to answer, but enough of what I felt must have shown on my face. If he had come to inflict pain then he had succeeded. He knew it too I think, because a moment later he slipped the revolver into his pocket and just sat there, finishing the story.
"We were in the hills for months. Raiding the Jewish convoys on the roads and trying to stop the flood of refugees. But it was hopeless. After a while we fell back to Lydda on the Syrian border, hoping we'd meet Arab troops on the way, but there was nothing, no troops anyway, just thousands of refugees. The UN had got some kind of ceasefire going which helped while it lasted, but on July 9th the truce ended and an hour afterwards the Jews stormed the town. Loudspeaker vans toured the streets, ordering all Arabs to leave within half an hour. Leave? Go where, we asked? Anyway Lydda was in the Arab sector according to the UN. We were supposed to be there. The town was full of thousands of our people, sheltering in doorways, alleys, on the steps of mosques - women and children - thousands and thousands of people, but no bloody UN. Just Jews armed to the teeth with grenades and rifles and machine guns. Some of our men started to fight, but by then we'd nothing left to fight with - and the Jews quickly rounded them up and drove them away in trucks. We never saw them again. After that it was just one mad panic. Fleeing across open country in the burning heat to the nearest Arab village across the border. Ten miles it was - ten miles of running - harassed by mortar fire as we ran - weaving and ducking, scrambling for whatever cover we could find amidst the bare rocks - women screaming, children petrified, the elderly dropping like flies."
He accepted a cigarette without even looking at me. At that moment he was so gripped by his memories I might not have existed. "Thirty thousand were driven out of Lydda that day - and it was the same all along the Syrian border. The Catastrophe doesn't begin to describe it - doesn't begin..." His voice trailed off and his face twisted in pain. For a moment he seemed close to tears, but then he pulled himself together so that only bitterness sounded in his voice. "That's where I found Haleem - running from the guns at Lydda. You wouldn't have recognised her - even I didn't to begin with. She was dressed in rags, her face was dirty and she hobbled along on a badly-sprained ankle. The worst part was she wouldn't tell me what had happened to her. No matter how often I asked. She would never talk about it. Not even when we reached Damascus and I knew she was with child."
I swore aloud. I felt ashamed. Before I had been frightened and horrified, but at that moment I just felt sick with shame.
"Haleem had the baby in October." He stubbed the cigarette out as if he'd lost the taste for it. "It was a difficult birth, she was six weeks premature. The doctor may not have been the best either, I don't know. I was seventeen then and not very knowledgeable. Afterwards he said she just hadn't been strong enough - and he thought she'd been raped. I don't know. I never knew. When Haleem died I was almost alone. The Jews had killed my father and brother, and finally they had taken my sister. I swore then that I would avenge their deaths - all their deaths!" His face suddenly paled and his eyes blazed with fury. "And I have - ten times over!"
I was stunned for a minute, then I said, "You said you were almost alone?"
"I met a cousin. Older than me, a qualified dentist like like my father. His wife had lost a little girl - blown to pieces by a bomb a couple of months earlier. Idris, my cousin, offered to take care of the baby - to preserve his wife's sanity I think as much as anything. Still it worked out. It was like watching her come alive again when we gave her Haleem's baby."
"And the baby?"
"Was a girl. Idris and Farida called her Suzette."
"Suzette. That's not an Arab name?"
His look was half amused and half contemptuous. "You wouldn't understand. Those were the early days of the Catastrophe. We feared that we might be chased beyond Syria. Where was it going to end? We had nowhere to hide. Farida had friends in France. She wanted to live there if they could get out of Syria. At the time it seemed safer to give the baby a European name."
0950 Thursday
Big Reilly drank sweet tea from a chipped enamel mug and pretended not to notice the woman's hostility. She sat on the other side of the kitchen table, her thin yellow hair bound in pink curlers and her plump white body encased in a grubby blue housecoat. He remembered her once as pretty, as lively a colleen as could be found in the whole of Cork, with flashing eyes and swinging hips that had jerked the heads like balls on a string. But that was twenty years ago. Before her father drank himself to death, before she had nursed her mother through the long black months of a terminal illness, and before Mick's accident had left him half the man he used to be. Now everything in the cramped little kitchen mocked the wreckage of her life, everything from the unwashed pots and pans to the flyblow
n face of the cheap alarm clock which looked down from the dresser. Clothes lay airing in the hearth beneath a mantelpiece cluttered with the bric-a-brac of a lifetime, and on the wall a framed sampler next to a plaster cast of the Virgin Mary asked God Bless This House in faded yellow silks.
"And how's that boy of yours?" Big Reilly asked. "Michael, isn't it? He must have grown a yard taller since I last saw him."
He tried his smile on her and felt a pang of remorse as he remembered Liam. Liam's smile would have got through to her. Liam would have charmed her, had her laughing and joking about the old days, when they were all young. And as for her son Michael, hadn't Reilly seen him himself not more than an hour ago? Hadn't he waited at the bottom of the street, watching the bleak row of houses until the boy left for school?
"Michael's all right," she said ungraciously. A wisp of hair escaped from a curler and she brushed it away from her eyes. Reilly noticed her hand, red and swollen, bloated like a body recovered from the sea. Liam's body, he thought bitterly, if ever they found it.
The woman looked at the clock. "It's as good as ten now. Mick might not get back. Some days he's too busy to get away." Hope swelled in her breast and the words rushed out. "I'll tell him you called - perhaps another time - if you'll let us know when you're coming."
Reilly shook his head and watched the hope die in her eyes. "Sure now, he'll be along in a minute or two." "I'll wait. It's a long way I've come and—"
"And it's always the devil you bring with you! Mick's not a well man Big Reilly and it's you should be knowing that better than any man living."
Reilly thought back eight years. They had been moving gelignite across the border, Mick and him, driving an old Austin van stolen two days earlier from a builder's yard in Dublin. They knew the sticks were sweating, but they had wrapped them in old blankets and hoped for the best. Sure hadn't they done it a dozen times over? But their luck ran out that night. Two miles from the border the gelly had blown, ripping the back of the van open and sending it arse over tip down a gulley. The explosion had been heard in Ballyconnell and within an hour police were thicker on the ground than fag-ends in Patrick's Bar. Reilly had been lucky, two fingers of his left hand severed to the bone and a few other cuts from flying glass. But Mick's back had been blown in and the side of his jacket drenched with blood. Sweet Mother of Christ, it wasn't the first time Reilly had seen blood, but he'd never seen a man lose so much and live through it. They got clear of the wreckage somehow, Reilly carrying the other man for a mile and a half before Liam found them.
"Mick's finished with all that," Molly stretched her determination to its limit. "How many times do you need telling? Leave it for the younger ones. If they care enough they'll do their share of the fighting. These days Mick is—"
"Mick's a soldier," he interrupted roughly. "Once a soldier always a soldier. You know the rules."
"Oh no!" she banged the table angrily. "Not that all over again. Hasn't he done enough? Enough for Ireland, enough for the Movement, enough even for the high and mighty Big Reilly himself?"
He took the money from his jacket pocket and laid it on the table. "There's five hundred pounds there Molly. Think of all you could do with that. Think of the boy - think of Mick of—"
"And who else would I be thinking of? Them and the price you'll be wanting for your money!" She fought to steady her voice. "Can't you get it into your thick head Big Reilly, we don't want your money - we don't want the worry of it - we don't want you!"
"Molly!" Mick Malone rebuked from the back door, his arrival unnoticed by either of them. "Is that any way to talk to an old friend?" His gaze shifted slowly to the pile of notes. "And you'll have won the sweepstake itself Big Reilly to be carrying that much money about with you."
Reilly turned to greet the man he had grown up with, and tried hard to stop the shock from showing in his eyes. Mick Malone was less than half the man he used to be. Even in the six months since last they met he had shrivelled. His body, once as tall and broad as Reilly's own, had stooped and bent itself, so that now he stood a foot shorter and weighed half as much. And his face was the colour of putty with lines enough for a man of seventy - and a sick man at that.
It had been Big Reilly's decision that night eight years ago. Liam had wanted to leave Mick for the police to find. "It's the only thing to do," Liam had pleaded. "That way he'll get doctors, a hospital, an operation, whatever's needed." But Big Reilly had roared back, "That way he'll get twenty years in jail and you damn well know it." So they had stolen a car and raced to Dublin, arriving at the safe house at four in the morning, only to wait another twenty-eight hours for that quack of a doctor to get there. And ever since Mick's damaged kidneys had been slowly killing him, forcing him off the hard stuff and on to a diet fit only for mewling infants.
Mick's eyes sparkled as he wrung the other man's hand. "It's good to see you. Have you been here long?" He shuffled to the dresser before Reilly had time to answer and rummaged in a drawer. "Ah! And wasn't I saving this for a day like today?"
"Mick no!" Molly was out of her chair and around the table, one hand grasping for the green bottle as Mick swung it beyond her reach.
He caught her with his other arm and squeezed her. "Just a spot in my tea Molly, that's all. Big Reilly can drink his neat, the way it should be taken."
Molly brewed a fresh pot and watched the men settle in front of the fire, trying the while to keep her eyes from the money on the table. Taking his tea Mick added a finger of whiskey and handed the bottle to Reilly, telling him to finish it. Then he said, "Isn't it your sister you're seeing this morning Molly?"
She could have argued. These days she was almost as strong as he was. But it wasn't her way. Not in front of people, even people like Big Reilly. God and she knew there was little enough left of Mick for her to shame in front of his friends. So she climbed the narrow staircase to her bedroom, brushed her hair and put on a clean dress, picked up the coat new twelve years ago and went to her sister's place in O'Connell Street.
In the kitchen the men finished talking about the old days as soon as the door banged behind her. Reilly raised the reason for his visit. "It's Steve Cassidy, Mick. He was taken this morning. Did you know that?"
Mick finished his tea. "I heard. He's in the Holy Cross Jail." His grey face darkened to near black. "God knows what the murdering bastards will do to him."
"Will he talk?"
Mick smiled sadly. "If they hold him long enough. If they give him the full treatment. There's not a man born who can swallow his tongue, however hard he tries. You know that. But he'll make the bastards work for it."
Reilly sighed. Mick always gave it to him straight. Whether he liked it or not. Mick was like that. Once, a couple of years ago, when Mick's condition was obviously worsening, Reilly had asked him outright. "Mick do you blame me? Liam wanted to leave you, leave you for the police. Reckoned they'd get you to a hospital. Maybe if—" But Mick had interrupted him, "They'd have killed me on the spot, like as not. Don't fool yourself they'd have wasted fancy surgeons on the likes of me, Big Reilly. I'd have done as you did, so would any soldier. Liam's well enough but the lad's a poet and we've known that a long time."
A dead poet, thought Reilly bitterly. Aloud he said, "Steve Cassidy was going to do a job for us, Mick. Saturday. If he's not out by then we're in trouble, bad trouble."
Mick's eyes narrowed. He jerked his head at the table. "Is that what all the money's about?"
Reilly gambled. "No, that's for old times' sake."
Mick chuckled until his breath rasped and his chest heaved in a spasm of coughing. When he recovered he said, "So now the Movement's got funds enough to pay pensions to the likes of me? That's good news for a change." He sat looking into the fire, his breath still wheezing. "What's the job, then?"
"Steve was due to take a load over to Cologne this week. Isn't that right?"
"A load from our factory you mean?" Mick's eyes widened. "What the devil's that to do with you?"
Reilly s
miled. Our factory belonged to the English, a company called Exide Ltd with a fancy head office in London and other factories at Birmingham and Manchester. Mick had worked for them for years - one way or another. He had been a driver with them until his "accident." Then he had not worked for anyone for three long years. Three years for his back to mend itself as best it could. Three years without a wage coming into the house. Three years living on the handouts and help from his friends, debts building into a mountain of despair until finally, when he could get about on sticks, the factory had given him another job. Now he sat in a shed in the yard and was called a transport supervisor. Every morning he left home at six to get the lorries away by ten, when he slipped back again for his breakfast.
"It's a fair bit we know about your factory, Mick," Reilly was still smiling. "like for instance most of the export loads going by containers these days. Isn't that right now? But this time you've a lorry going all the way - all the way to Cologne."
A feint flush added a touch of colour to Mick's face. "And how the devil did you know that?"
Reilly tapped his nose. "Isn't it enough that we know?"
Mick stared, trying to work it out. "I only knew myself a week ago. There's some stuff to come back to us. That's why we're sending a forty-footer. It's cheaper."
Ian St James Compendium - Volume 1 Page 10