“Lawrence don’t,” she heard Casey say in a sharp tone. There was a thump and then the soldiers pulled Casey out through the door.
Time shifted, its focus narrowed, the aperture she always sought in these adrenalized moments outlining the morning with a sharp finger. The camera was loaded with fresh film, ready to go, ready to aim and shoot, ready for its defining moment—this moment—even if she wasn’t.
In the narrow street dawn was beginning its soft-shoe crawl, mellowing the cracked pavement, the shabby row houses, and the tiny patched gardens with their fading blooms. A muddy-colored lorry straddled the width of the lane, chuffing like an out-of-breath hippopotamus, a giant child’s toy set down in a space too confined and dangerous for its girth.
Automatically, as it had begun to do in these situations, her brain separated itself, like taking a box out of a box, leaving the original in its place and moving the latter over parallel to the original, though slightly askew. Photographer versus wife, picture taker versus the woman who wanted to scream in the street, who wanted to take the rifles these olive boys wore slung so casually over shoulders and narrow hips and turn them on their owners. And so the entire scene, (five minutes in real time, eternity on celluloid) laid itself out for her in freeze frame. Click, Casey cuffed now to the side of the lorry, morning light washing him over rose and silver and gold, half-naked and barefoot in the street; an Irish man in an Irish street in the twentieth century, hard to countenance and yet there for the clicking, there for the taking. Take the shot, take the picture, leave the pain, it interferes with the work, work now, bleed on the weekends, in the nights, in the quiet, that’s what Lucas had taught her.
Click, British boy in uniform, scared stiff, because you can’t trust the Irish, bastards have always been so goddamn unpredictable, they’ll kill you as soon as look at you, feed you tea in one hand and poison in the other. He scares her, this one, fear makes him nervy and he keeps glaring at Casey who looks back with one of those impenetrable black looks she knows only too well. It was like running into a brick wall, full tilt, one of those looks—a point of no return ‘this might be your game now but someday we’ll be in no man’s land and then the field is wide open’ kind of a look.
Click. Another soldier, tramping through the garden of some horticulturally avid old-age-pensioner, crushing forget-me-nots underfoot, snapping hollyhocks with the stem of his gun, just another jungle boy in the jungle. A hard northern face, a Geordie from up near the line, couldn’t predict these ones, sometimes they were nearly as disenchanted and disenfranchised as the Northern Irishman and sometimes they knew how to hate just like the Irishman, so they were much more dangerous than their southern cousins.
“Get the fuck back in the house,” he said to her, voice low but carrying like a poison-tipped arrow in the morning. Hard man, hard voice. He’d chosen the right occupation.
Click. Another man being dragged into the stillness, half-asleep, confused, yelling and thrashing, getting a hard kick for his pains and subsiding retching on his knees as the soldiers cuffed him to the lorry.
“Mornin’ Liam,” Casey said as calmly as if they were merely passing in the street. And yet there was a steely undercurrent, a tone that made the man, cuffs biting hard into his wrists, stand up slowly, take control of his breathing and face his captors calmly.
Click. Liam’s wife, Mary, standing in the street, clutching a threadbare housecoat about her soft frame, nine months gone with their fourth child, her mouth a round ‘O’ of silent tears.
Don’t ever project your own emotion into the frame, Lucas had told her, don’t become a part of it. When you take a shot with your emotions entangled, you cloud the clarity of your subject, you see them from a limited perspective. Our job is to get the story, he’d said, not become a part of it. Otherwise what we see is a mirror reflection, not the subject as they really are.
Click. Casey’s face, unsheltered for a moment, a look meant only for her, a private communication here in the street, with tense uneasy soldiers standing all round. She lowered the camera and walked towards him with neither haste nor deliberation.
“I’d say goodbye to ye,” he said low as she approached, “I don’t know when—”
She shook her head slowly. “I know.”
How many of these personal communications had passed between them before? A hundred? A thousand? A turn of the hand, a slant of the head, the flicker of an eyelash, a torrent of words in an instant, all without sound.
She stretched up on her toes, her cheek meeting his just as a blistering orange sun hissed above the horizon. She could feel his heat, even in the chill of morning, the dull burn of his unshaven cheek against her own. Then she drew back slightly, put her mouth to his, biting down on his lower lip.
“Open yer mouth,” he said in a low voice, and she did as bid, as if it were the most natural intimacy in the world to kiss one’s husband open-mouthed in the street while he stood cuffed to an army vehicle, with soldiers pointing guns in their direction.
“Hey there, break it apart,” said a gruff voice to her side.
She pressed her face harder against Casey’s in response, feeling the bone beneath the skin, and the blood that flew on its well-ordered way between the two. Then pulled back to meet his eyes. They were dark, fathoms deep, and soft. And for a moment, only a flash, she could feel him against her as he had felt that first time they’d made love, a private universe of two, blood to bone, two restless objects made of the stuff of stars. Then the long cold oiled barrel of a rifle inserted itself between them and Casey’s face changed imperceptibly, and without a flicker of muscle or betrayal of skin he was once again the hard man in the street. And she the abandoned wife.
Then, all at once, they loaded them into the truck, Casey, Liam, and four dazed looking young men who appeared half asleep. Stunned by the shouting, the guns in their backs while the warmth of their beds still evaporated from their skins. She stood with Lawrence, arm wrapped securely around his shoulders, as much to detain him as to comfort him.
Casey looked back only once, the morning sun gilding him with liquid fire, a stray breeze ruffling the ends of his hair. His eyes met hers across air and light, and it seemed as if the whole world moved in slow motion as his head tilted to the side and he blinked once, a small smile lifting the left-hand corner of his mouth. And then he was gone.
“Where are you taking them?” she asked through gritted teeth, aware of the soldier beside her, the Geordie with the hard jungle face.
He smiled, revealing pointy teeth in a sharp face. “To hell.”
Then he walked off whistling a jaunty tune, swung himself up onto the tail end of the lorry, slapped its side sharply, and yelled to the driver.
The vehicle rumbled in a higher pitch, as if protesting this early morning duty, and then with a grinding of gears and a lurch, they were gone.
She swallowed hard over a throat thick with fear, and felt the small flat plastic-wrapped packet bite hard into the roof of her mouth, where Casey had pushed it during their kiss, the taste of his tongue still on it. She knew before she spit it out into her waiting hand what she would find.
Under the plastic wrap, a sheet of thin paper, folded again and again until it was no more than an inch square. And upon it, etched in Casey’s bold, decisive hand was the address of where it was intended to go, one letter, two strokes. A falling curve, and an up tilted slash.
A simple, black-inked ‘J’.
Chapter Thirty-four
And Justice For None
THIRTY-ONE HOURS AFTER he’d left on a mission of futility, Jamie returned home. He was red-eyed, exhausted, and gripped in the claw of a fury unlike anything he’d before experienced. Internment had been expected, the streets rife with rumor for weeks, but as with many of life’s uglier events, the reality had turned out to be a bit of a shock. He’d run into so many metaphorical brick walls in the last twenty-four hours that he felt physically bruised.
Three hundred and forty-two men lifted out of a list of four hundred
and fifty. Three hundred forty-two, and Catholic to a man. That had been a tactical blunder, he supposed, made in the smug arrogance of the Orange inner circle. Somewhere in that number the two Riordan men had been swallowed up. And, at present, he’d no bloody idea where they might be spit out. He’d managed to trace Pat as far as Girdwood Barracks, but had met with an unnerving silence on any information beyond that. Casey, on the other hand, seemed to have disappeared into the ether, so insubstantial was any intelligence he’d managed to gather concerning the older of the Riordan brothers.
He climbed the stairs wearily, legs the consistency of gelled lead. He needed sleep desperately but knew that even a few hours of rest were a luxury he could not afford.
He stripped down in the bath off his bedroom, turned the taps up until the ancient pipes shrieked in protest, and then stepped into the scalding hot water. He scrubbed down quickly, wishing he could rinse his mind clean along with his body.
He leaned against the tiled wall for a moment, closing his eyes. Behind the lids he could see the streets, burned into his retina by fire and rage. His ears still rang with the cries of children suddenly fatherless, the screams and curses of women whose men had been yanked, without mercy, from their arms. And underlying the howls of human misery, the flat, metallic keen of the dustbin lids, banging the cobblestones as they had done so many times before in his demon-haunted city.
After his shower, he toweled down, chose a simple blue shirt and charcoal dress pants and dressed quickly, mind running over the myriad phone calls he would have to make, the bereft and terrified families he’d promised to look in on today and the promises he’d no idea how he was going to keep.
In the kitchen, where a pot of hot coffee was brewing and the scent of fresh rolls fragranced the air, he looked out over the city. Thick, black coils of smoke rose against a brittle blue sky, the imperial domes of the city smudged in the haze.
Standing there, the sound of coffee drizzling in the background, he was suddenly overcome by a stab of despair so sharp he couldn’t breathe around it. It came to him bluntly, the way such epiphanies often did, that he was, after all, only one man. One man, with all the frailties that the human condition came carelessly packaged with.
His hand sought a chair blindly and he found himself guided and pushed gently downwards by a pair of hands that, though not often felt, were recognized instantly.
“Sit down before you pass out,” she said tartly.
He sat, the wave of weakness abating slightly, and looked up.
“You look worse than I feel,” he said shortly, “and that’s saying something.”
“Compliments so early in the morning, Jamie?” she retorted, and then sat down heavily across from him, as though her bones had suddenly telescoped down into her knees.
“What happened to your face?”
“Belfast confetti,” she said with a weak smile, flinching as he touched her left cheek, which was turning a vivid and Stygian black.
“Rock or bottle?” he asked, rising to get the coffee, legs still slightly wobbly.
“Paving stone,” she said ruefully, “fortunately it just glanced off.”
Jamie looked at the blackness that bloomed around the sharp edges of her scar, the one she’d sustained in yet another battle that hadn’t been hers to fight, and thought he’d define fortunate in different terms than she’d become accustomed to.
“Where’s Lawrence?”
“Outside with Finbar. He’s like a little powder keg right now, thinks he can somehow avenge Casey and set him free all in one go. If we knew where he was, that is.”
Jamie set coffee down in front of her and a roll still warm from the oven.
“You have to eat,” he said, as she pushed the plate away from her and shook her head.
“Can’t,” she said wearily.
“Can,” he said and shoved the plate back. “You won’t do him any favors if you get sick. He needs you whole and well.”
Her head came up swiftly, eyes lit with hope. “You know where he is?” she asked with a sharp intake of breath.
He shook his head regretfully. “No, not yet. Pat’s in Girdwood Barracks. Have you seen Sylvie?”
She shook her head mutely, eyes dropping to stare at the tabletop as she bit her bottom lip in disappointment.
“Have you even cried yet?” he asked, tone softer.
“No,” she whispered, and he could hear the control beginning to slip in her voice. “He asked me not to. Told me not to give the bastards the pleasure of my tears. So I didn’t. I stood in the street, Jamie,” her head came up and he saw her eyes were glittery with unshed tears, “and took pictures like I was composing some storybook; I took pictures while they chained my husband like a savage to a truck. My husband,” she gasped, as if only now the enormity of the last twenty-four hours had caught up with her, “barefoot, half-naked and chained and I—I took pictures. Oh God, I’m sorry Jamie, but I think I’m going to be sick.”
“No you’re not,” he said briskly, wondering whose very sensible voice was speaking through him, “just stick your head down between your knees and breathe slowly, the shock has finally caught you up is all.”
“Better?” he asked a moment later as her head re-emerged above the table, strands of hair glued by tears into the battered mess on the left-hand side of her face.
She nodded weakly.
“Right then, do you think you could manage some tea? Maybe a bit of bread?”
He didn’t wait for her acquiescence, but put the kettle on to boil and set the bread to toast. Coffee was a good eye opener, but it was useless in a crisis. There were times, as any Irishman worth his salt knew, when only tea would do.
He watched her carefully while she ate, more to humor him than anything else, he suspected, and drank down the entire cup of tea.
“We’re going to have to have your face looked at,” he said as she gingerly wiped her face with a napkin, “your cheekbone could be fractured. Is it hurting you a great deal?”
She shook her head, “No, it’ll be fine, I don’t need a doctor.”
“We’ll see,” he said sternly and then added, “you need to go upstairs and get some rest.”
“No.” Her brow was set in a stubborn line he’d become well acquainted with over time. “I have to find out where Casey is being held, I have to locate Pat.”
“There’s no way to get near Pat right now.”
“If Pat’s there, then it’s likely Casey—”
He shook his head, hating himself even as he did so, but he couldn’t provide her with false hope.
“He’s not.”
She shook her head in denial. “You can’t be certain of that.”
“He’s not. I don’t know where he is Pamela, but I do know for certain it’s not there.”
“No, you don’t know for certain, you can’t—some were taken to Crumlin Road and—and...”
He shook his head again, feeling as if he were kicking a defenseless creature.
“He wasn’t. Liam Connelly is in Girdwood, so is Thomas O’Faolin and Jimmy McGurty and the other men who were put in that truck yesterday morning. But Casey isn’t with them.”
“You’re not God, Jamie Kirkpatrick, you can’t know everything,” she said pushing back her chair and lurching to her feet, the smell of fear beginning to pulse off her in rapid beats. “I have to go,” she dragged the back of a sweater sleeve across her eyes.
“And where will you go?” he asked gently.
“I—I don’t know, but I have to find him, Jamie.”
“What did he tell you, what did he ask you to do?” he asked, tone still gentle, but now insistent, pushing her memory.
She shook her head and dug in the front left-hand pocket of her jeans. “He left this for you, told me to go to you.” Her face twisted slightly, tears still standing in trembling pools above her bruised cheeks. “Did the two of you plan this in advance? Did you know? Did he know?” she asked, voice rising in agitation.
“Every
one knew this was coming, it’s hardly a surprise,” he said calmly and saw the answering spark of frustration in her stance. He sighed, rubbing the vertical crease between his eyebrows. As practiced as he was at the art of lying, he didn’t quite feel up to the challenge of it this morning.
“Yes, he came to me some weeks ago, asked me to see that you were safe. We both knew there was a possibility that no house was going to be a safe house. He knew someone was betraying him to Joe Doherty, now he’s got a better notion of who that is.”
“What?” she asked in a hoarse whisper, disbelief stark against her pale skin and under it something uncertain, a flicker of doubt, a hesitation that told him more about the state of her marriage than he was comfortable knowing. “Are you saying this was all a game, a ruse to smoke some rat out of hiding?”
“No, not at all. He really was worried they’d come for him at home. I don’t think he wanted that sort of trouble to touch your house.”
“Well it’s touched us now,” she said angrily.
“Pamela, he never wanted this to happen.”
She slumped down in the chair again, tears slipping the dam of anger and sliding down her bruised skin.
“I know,” she whispered. “I just feel so—so angry and helpless.”
“So do I,” he said.
The clatter of a boy and dog sounded just then in the hall. Pamela hastily wiped her tears away.
Maggie entered the kitchen, followed by Lawrence and Finbar, both rather disheveled from the events of the last twelve hours.
“Found this one behind the byre, smoking.”
Lawrence had the grace to look slightly shamefaced, as Pamela raised a brow at him.
“We need to find the lad a bed,” Jamie said, rising to his feet, every muscle feeling like it had been beaten with a large stick.
“He’s to be fed first,” Maggie said firmly, already filling a pot with water and measuring out steel-cut oats into a bowl. She nodded over her shoulder at Jamie, “Ye’d best find yer own bed, before ye drop on the spot.”
“I’ll get to it soon enough,” Jamie said, knowing he wasn’t fooling Maggie for a second.
Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2) Page 41