Northern Spy

by Flynn Berry

  Marian is waiting for me outside the bar, in a wool fisherman’s jumper. She says, “I’m sorry, Tessa.”

  Last night, I should have packed a bag, closed up the house, and driven with Finn across the border to Dublin airport. The two of us should be on a plane at the moment, about to land in Australia. We should be halfway across the world from these people, from this nest of damp streets. I should be having a cup of airplane coffee, squinting through the porthole window at the sunshine.

  “It’s all right,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  She leads me to a back room where Seamus, Damian, and Niall are waiting. The ceiling is even lower here than in the bar, with yellow wallpaper stained by years of smoke. I step forward to join them at the table, which is interesting, since I’m not in my body anymore. I’m not here at all, not really.

  “What are you having, Tessa?” asks Damian.

  “Oh, a red wine, please.”

  “I’ll take another white wine,” says Marian.

  I’d told Marian that I was surprised Seamus allowed his unit to drink, and she shrugged. “That’s nothing. Some units are off their tits on ketamine half the time,” she said, which I’d rather not have known.

  Once Damian returns with our drinks, Seamus says, “What did you study at Trinity, Tessa?”

  “History and politics.”

  “Did you enjoy it?” he asks.

  “Yes, very much.”

  “Which part? The course work? The social life?” His tone hasn’t changed, but my throat tenses.

  “Both.”

  “And you met Francesca Babb there. Are you still in touch?”

  Hearing my friend’s name from him is like being shoved. “Yes.”

  He lifts his glass and whiskey slides into his mouth. To the others, he says, “Her father owns Fortnum and Mason.”

  “Not entirely,” I say. “He’s an investor.”

  “Where does Francesca live?”

  “In Dublin.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Merrion Street.”

  Seamus might want to kidnap her. The IRA has ransomed wealthy locals often enough that some of them apparently offer payments in advance, so they won’t be taken.

  “How much do you know about Francesca’s father?” I ask, and Seamus tilts his head. “He’s not a nice man. They’re not close. He’d consider it a personal challenge to get her back without paying anything.”

  “Any grandchildren?”

  From the corner of my eye, I notice Marian lift a hand to her earring. She’s warning me that Seamus already knows the answer. He’s testing me. “Not yet,” I say, my voice light. “Francesca’s pregnant.”

  “Well,” he says. “We’ll keep that in mind.”

  Marian is sitting beside me, near enough for me to feel the bristles in her wool jumper, and I think to her, You need to get me out of this if it falls apart.

  Seamus clears his throat. “Marian says you’re interested in helping the movement. Why?”

  “For peace.”

  “What makes you think we’re going to win?” he asks.

  “Colonialism never wins. Not in the end.”

  “You work for the colonialists, though. You’ve spent these seven years at the BBC.”

  “It has half a million listeners a week. Do you not think people like us should have a say in what it broadcasts?”

  Sometimes Seamus looks from me to Marian, like he’s comparing us. I know that Marian seems softer than me, gentler, especially in her fisherman’s jumper. I have on my work clothes, a long-sleeved tartan dress, stockings, and ankle boots. But we’re also similar, in our expressions, our mannerisms. What luck for him, to find someone so like Marian. He’d prefer a clone of her, probably. He knows that I’m not Marian, but, then, she’s one in a million.

  “Why have you not volunteered before?” he asks.

  “I was scared of going to prison. I still am, to be honest. I’m not like Marian. But I had a baby a year ago, and one day he’s going to ask me what I did to stop this.”

  “And you want to tell him you were a terrorist?” asks Seamus.

  “The state uses political violence every day, they only call it terrorism when the poor use it.”

  We keep talking, and something settles in me, like silt falling to the bottom of a river. I feel more calm than I have in weeks. This isn’t so difficult. I’m a woman, after all, so I’ve had a lifetime of practice guessing what a man wants me to say, or be. Seamus wants me to be brisk and capable, and he wants me to be angry, which I am, only not in the direction he thinks.

  Seamus asks me questions, and as I answer them, directly and mostly honestly, I think, I’m going to destroy you.

  “We need a scout,” says Damian. “Are you likely to be stopped by the police?”

  “No.”

  “But you were interviewed at Musgrave after Marian’s robbery.”

  “If the police were worried about me, I wouldn’t be allowed into work, not with the sort of politicians who come into Broadcasting House.”

  “Have you ever been arrested?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been stopped and searched by the Crown forces?”

  “I’ve had my car searched at roadblocks.” But, then, so has everyone.

  “Have you attended any republican marches, events, or funerals?”

  “No.”

  “Do you drink in republican pubs?”

  “I’ve been to the Rock a fair amount with our mother’s family.”

  “You need to not go back there,” says Damian, and that’s when I know that I’m in.

  28

  Finn raises his arm and makes a sound. “What is it?” I ask, and he repeats the sound with more urgency. I open the door to his room, and he pads over to his blanket, tugs it between the bars of his crib, and walks past me through the doorway, with the blanket trailing over his shoulder down his back.

  “That’s new,” I say aloud.

  The baby’s needs fill the rooms like water. He needs to be fed, changed, brought a cup of water, a particular ball. Because it’s early in the morning, each of these needs is fresh, and I can’t imagine finding them wearying, I can’t fathom ever not being limitlessly patient. He toddles over to me and I hoist him in my arms so he can watch me make coffee. Each action is rushed, done at speed, but taken together their effect is placid.

  The kettle whistles, and from my hip Finn watches me pour the hot water over the coffee grounds. We’re alone in the house, with autumn sun blazing on the window frames. From here, it seems possible that the day could continue like this, absorbing everything into itself while remaining whole. It doesn’t need to fracture, the way all my days recently have done, into separate pieces, with no relation to one another.

  It’s not exactly, or not entirely, that I want to stay at home with Finn all day. It’s more that I want to feel, with him, as acute and competent as I do at work, and at work, as receptive and absorbed as I do with him. I want things to start to blend together. I want to feel like being myself and being his mother are the same thing.

  Maybe they already are. But then we lock the door, leaving the house, with a drift of muslin blankets and toys, a filter of wet coffee grounds, a tube of calendula lotion on the table, and as always, I’m surprised to be leaving, that the morning has ended, with all its busyness and warmth. We won’t be back for hours, and with that realization, the day does start to fracture.

  By the time I’m in Belfast, I don’t have a single item on my person related to caring for a baby, except for one small sock at the bottom of my bag. My hands are free. I’m oddly sleek and unfettered, and the air in Belfast seems thinner, like I’ve changed elevation.

  No one in the news meeting will see any sign of how the day began for me, even though my mornings with the baby are monumental, and de
nse. Some of them have children, but I don’t try to imagine their own mornings at home, not wanting to intrude, even hypothetically. Though I do love when anything about their families slips out, when Nicholas groaned that his son had scraped the car, when Esther said cheerfully that her daughters used to fight “like dogs in the street.”

  The editors start pitching their stories, and I listen, not looking as if I’ve left anything behind.

  * * *

  —

  After our meeting, I’m researching an interview when reception calls up to say a package has arrived for me by courier. I open the padded envelope in a toilet stall. Inside is a burner phone.

  At home, I unwrap the charger, plug the phone into an outlet, and watch as the screen floods with blue pixels. For the rest of the week, nothing happens. I move the phone between different bags, sleep with it next to my bed, place it by the sink while showering.

  I’ve tested its volume so many times that when the ringtone finally sounds on Sunday, it takes me a moment to understand that someone is on the other end. I stiffen, holding one of Finn’s shirts in my hands, and he takes the chance to scoot away. He chunters happily to himself, half dressed, as I lift the phone. “Hello, Tessa, it’s Seamus. We’re going to need you today.”

  * * *

  —

  Seamus has asked me to watch the police station in Saintfield. I’m to write a note of each car that drives in or out. Once the unit has my list, they will watch for these cars on the road. Seamus is constantly searching for police officers to kill. It’s not easy to find their names anymore, or where they live. When another unit murdered a detective inspector in Coleraine, Seamus went to the funeral, hoping to find his next target. And he went back to the grave the next day, in case any of the other detectives had signed their names on their cards or wreaths.

  “Psychopath,” I said, and Marian said, “That’s not even the worst of it.”

  A woman in the IRA became a primary school teacher. “What does your mammy do?” she asked the children. “What does your daddy do?” If one of the children said, “He’s a police officer,” the teacher would tell her brigade so they could kill him.

  My fury hearing that felt like panic. I can’t go back in time and gather all those children together and lead them out of her classroom, so instead I’m here, sitting in a café across from a police station.

  Eamonn warned the chief constable about the surveillance operation. Some of the cars will be painted or given new registration numbers, and others will be left out on the roads as bait. One of their drivers might have been murdered otherwise, without my interference. I’ve thrown a spanner in Seamus’s plan.

  My phone rings from my handbag. “Did you pack baby wipes?” asks Tom.

  “They’re in his bag.”

  “I don’t see them.”

  “Check the bottom.”

  “Found them,” he says after a minute, which is the sort of interaction that makes being a single mother not seem so bad.

  My concentration has broken, like Finn has suddenly toddled into the café, and takes a few minutes to settle again. I look out at the station across the road. The shift is changing over. Five cars have already driven into the station, and I’ve taken down their registrations on the newspaper crossword. Seamus told me to bring a paper, not a local one. “You read The Guardian? Yes? That’s fine.”

  He believes in the details. That’s how he hasn’t been lifted or killed yet. He told me to order food. He didn’t specify what, so I order a fry-up. Two fried eggs, baked beans, grilled tomato, potato bread, and tea with milk. Not the full Ulster, though, not with black pudding and sausages. Marian once mentioned that Seamus shouldn’t have meat anymore, since his heart attack.

  “When did he have a heart attack?” I asked. “Isn’t he young for one?”

  “Forty,” she said. “It’s common for IRA members, with the stress.”

  The officer commanding for Belfast gave Seamus the option to retire honorably. “But he’ll never quit,” said Marian. Or stop eating steak, for that matter, or rashers, black pudding, sausages. Which is maddening. I don’t want a heart attack to kill him. I want him in a court, not being given a paramilitary funeral, not retired.

  “They get pensions now,” Marian said. “And the real players are given villas in Bulgaria.”

  “How does the IRA have money for a pension program?”

  She looked confused by the question. “They have an empire.”

  They have extortion, security rackets, and wire transfers from idiotic Irish Americans sympathetic to the cause. They own hotels, pubs, nightclubs, taxi firms, party rental companies.

  “Party rentals?” I asked.

  “You know, bouncy castles,” she said. “For children’s birthday parties.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  I work through my fry-up and note the cars arriving at the station. Their drivers must be brave. Police officers know they’re being hunted now, all the time. The detective inspector in Coleraine, whose funeral Seamus attended, was in his driveway when a man said, “Alex?”

  “Yes?” he said, and the man shot him in the face.

  The gunmen always say the victim’s name first. They don’t want to accidentally kill the wrong person. They’re fine with killing the right person, though, even if, in this case, the man’s daughter was asleep in the backseat of the car. She’d fallen asleep on the drive home from a school concert, he’d been about to carry her up to bed.

  The gunmen were told by their officer commanding not to watch the news for a few days, so they wouldn’t see the family’s grief. They shouldn’t have to suffer through that, apparently.

  A waitress stops at my table. “Everything okay for you here?”

  “Grand, thanks.”

  Seamus has plans for me. Marian said, “He couldn’t have designed you any better. If Seamus met you at nineteen, he might have asked you to go to Trinity, to get a job at the BBC. He could have spent years working to get someone into your exact position. He said it’s like finding a sleeper agent.”

  He thinks I’ll be able to blend in at certain establishments. “Do you ride horses?” he asked me at Gallagher’s on Monday.

  “No.”

  “You could learn, though.” He wants me to visit a pony club, after hearing some senior army staff bring their girls to it. “Do any of your friends have daughters?”

  “No.” I’m not using Poppy, or any other girls, as a cover.

  “None?” he asked. “What are the odds?”

  “None who are old enough. You don’t teach a toddler horse riding.”

  You might, actually. I’ve no idea when they start. Neither did Seamus. Pony club wasn’t exactly part of his upbringing either.

  “What about golf?” he asked.

  There’s an expensive golf club in Bangor, with judges and government ministers among its members. Marian said he has been trying to get someone in there for years, and I might pass.

  A silver Citroën arrives at the police station. I wait until it disappears behind the steel cordon, then write down its registration number. I have some potato bread, some tea. This is how Seamus started Marian, with these small errands or favors, and I hate to say it, but I understand now why it worked. It does make you feel special.

  At work last week, our interview guest asked me to bring him a coffee, instead of our runner. A group of teenagers tried to essentially walk through me on the pavement. The bus ran late. Finn refused to eat any of the food I’d carefully prepared for him, and I had to scrape it off the floor, the wall, and myself. My point is, I don’t often feel powerful of a day. Most people don’t.

  Except now I do. I’m in a café eating a fry-up, at a melamine table with a sticky surface and bottles of red and brown sauce. But I’m also operating on a different plane, one that includes every battle fought in this war. The siege of
Derry, Burntollet Bridge, the Grand Hotel. And now here I am, in this café, and we might be almost at the end. Of course I feel special.

  * * *

  —

  By the time Tom returns home with the baby, I’m on the sofa with the culture pages from the Sunday paper. The house is clean, the dishwasher running, the laundry folded.

  “How was your day?” he asks.

  “Good,” I say, lifting Finn onto my lap.

  “What did you do?”

  “Oh,” I say. “You know, this and that.”

  29

  If he wakes up, there’s a bottle in the fridge,” I tell Olivia.

  “How long will you be gone?” she asks, sounding alarmed.

  “It shouldn’t be too late. I just need to run back to the office.”

  Olivia nods. She knows, vaguely, that my job has to do with the news, which could involve being called in on a Sunday night.

  Seamus sent a message telling me to meet them at Gallagher’s. I don’t want to go. From here, Belfast seems like the far side of the moon. Before leaving, I tuck a blanket around Finn. He brushes his face on the mattress, then rolls onto his stomach and scoots his arms under himself.

  I have to force myself away, out the door and into the car. When I arrive, the four of them are already in the back room. They seem to have been here for hours. When Marian leans over the table to kiss me hello, her hair smells like smoke.

  I hand Seamus the list of cars from the police station this morning. “Thanks,” he says. “If it’s not a bother, we’ll have you back there next week.”

  They begin to discuss how to advance the operation. The plan is to trail one of these cars, until the police officer can be cornered and shot. Damian argues for casting a wide net, placing spotters around the area to capture more of the cars’ movements. Niall wants to choose one car from the list and focus only on it.