by Nina Dreyer
Marion took out a loaf of fluffy white bread, weighing it in her hand. Long war years had taught her the measure of good bread, expensive bread. Bread to die for. Bread to kill for. Pure wheat flour, no plaster dust. Out of old habit, she bent down and smelled it, breathing deeply.
Eilis sat down on a rickety chair by the raw-scrubbed table. Her jaws were clenched, her posture razor-sharp. She kept glancing at the broken kitchen door.
Marion perched herself on a stool.
Eilis began tearing the bread. Flour dusted her fingers. Then she sliced the cheese, haphazardly spreading the grease paper. This was a picnic to her, Marion thought. A picnic below-stairs. She was letting crumbs and crusts fall everywhere. She had never starved. If she had, she’d know to carefully roll up the paper to lick late at night, when the stomach cramps came.
‘So,’ Eilis licked her finger, glancing again at the kitchen door, ‘tell me about these seances of yours. Any of your new British friends sitting in…?’
‘Eilis, I may have made some… misjudgements. But you must believe me.’ Marion tried not to raise her voice, tried not to sound shaky. ‘I’m not on their side. I hate the English.’ She thought of Hettie and felt a twinge of unease. ‘The men. Their soldiers. They are the cancer in this world. Many say it is the Bolsheviks or the Jews who are the cancer, but they’re wrong.’ Her heart began to pound, and she dug her nails into the edge of the table. ‘They’re very wrong. It’s ridiculous. Do the Jews have vast armies, laying waste to the world? Do they have an empire of slavery that spans the globe like eternal night? No. They don’t. They’ve never bothered anyone, it’s the English.’ Marion stabbed the table with her finger. ‘The English and their armies are the cause of all evil.’
‘Jesus,’ Eilis frowned at her and swallowed, ‘eternal night? Jews? What the hell are you on about? Christ, Marion, you do have hidden depths, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ Eilis snorted, ‘you only hate them because you’re a Hun. That’s only to be expected. You lost a war to them, after all. You don’t have any real skin in this game anymore, you’ve already been defeated.’ She lit another cigarette and sucked on it thoughtfully. ‘Me, on the other hand, I’m fighting to make them feck off out of my country.’
‘They killed my husband.’
The knife slipped from Eilis’ fingers, clattering to the floor. ‘What?’
Marion opened and closed her mouth, swallowing. Her throat felt like sandpaper.
‘Well? Cat got your tongue?’ Eilis drew two puffs on her cigarette, then extinguished it in a rind of cheese. Never been hungry, Marion thought, and she’d also never been short of tobacco.
‘I was married,’ she said, staring at the scratched surface of the table. ‘Erich was his name. From Vienna. He was killed in the war. Passchendaele. Third of July, 1917.’
Eilis said nothing for a long moment. ‘Why have you never told me that,’ she asked at last.
Marion lowered her head. ‘I wanted to start over. To forget. Hahn is my maiden name. I left it all behind. I… did something very terrible to him.’
‘What? Cheated on him, did you?’
‘No.’ Marion shut her eyes and tried to push the memory back down, the hot lights of the stage, the thundering howls of applause, boots stomping on sawdust floors, beer steins clinking. ‘I abused his death.’
‘I’m not even going to guess what that’s supposed to mean.’
‘The English, they were starving us, strangling us, we were dying of hunger, and then they killed Erich, and I was trying to…’
Eilis groaned, resting her elbows on the table and cradling her face in her hands. ‘Then why, why in the name of all things holy are you partying with the British now, Marion, dining with them, swanning around Clery’s arm in arm with them?’
‘I’ve made a terrible mistake, I didn’t realise… It happened very suddenly… Eilis, I need your help with this, after what happened…’
‘What?’ Eilis narrowed her eyes. ‘What do you mean, after what happened? If you’re talking about how you preyed on my Liam’s death, you can-’
‘No. Not that. We had another seance. John and I. And,’ Marion swallowed hard. ‘And a British colonel.’
‘Marion.’ Eilis’ voice was brittle now. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘They wanted to solve a murder. A soldier who had been shot, but Eilis, I didn’t realise that until it was too late-’
Eilis turned the colour of a winter beach and dug her nails into her collarbone. ‘What are you telling me,’ she whispered. Her eyes gleamed feverishly.
‘Listen, something terrible came through,’ Marion whispered, ‘something very dark, something very angry, a Poltergeist.’
Eilis’ cigarette dropped from her stiff hand and rolled, still smoking, on the flagstone floor. She didn’t bother to pick it up. She rose and swept her trembling hands over her silk negligee, over and over again. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I was right. The cards were right. I didn’t want to believe it. You’ve been helping them. You’ve been helping them catch our lads.’
Marion shook her head, her heart contorting in her throat.
Eilis covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes widening. ‘Marion,’ she whispered, ‘what have you done?’
‘I swear to you…’
Eilis’ mouth was quivering. Marion thought she was going to hurl the table across the room.
‘You are such a hypocrite,’ Eilis gasped, ‘oh, you hate ze English soldiers so much, so very much, but you’ve been helping them, sleeping around with one for weeks now for all I know!’
Marion stood up too suddenly, knocking over the chair. ‘That’s not true. Brock and I-’
‘Brock?’ Eilis’ face contorted. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? Oh.’ She let out an angry little wheeze. ‘Oh, I see. Brock to you now, is he? Little nicknames between you already. You mean Colonel Cecil Brockhurst of the Staffordshires, of course. So he was at your seance, he’s the one you’ve been helping.’ She glanced at the kitchen door again, her mouth hardening to a thin line.
‘No, he’s no friend to me, I don’t-’
‘Don’t play thick with me,’ Eilis pounded the table, ‘I’m not talking about your fucking Colonel Brockhurst, I’m talking about John!’
‘What?’
Eilis stared at her in stunned disbelief. Then she suddenly burst out laughing, a hard cackle, raw as a sob. ‘You really don’t know, do you? Jesus but you are a bloody eejit, aren’t you? Blind as a beast!’
Marion shook her head, fighting the impulse to press her hands over Eilis’ mouth to stop her talking.
‘John served in the British army all throughout the fucking war, Marion.’ Eilis raised her voice. ‘He volunteered first chance he got, South Irish Horse, very grand, strutted around everywhere in his uniform! He was a fucking captain by the time he came back!’
‘No.’ Marion shook her head. ‘No.’ She thought of his bearing, his posture, the way he spoke to other men. ‘No.’
‘Oh, really? Why do you think he won’t ever let anyone do a reading for him? Eh? Why do you think that is?’
Marion looked down at her hands. They were shaking, bone-white. She thought of the vision of No Man’s Land, of the spectre with John’s face, ragged greatcoat in billowing gas.
‘Do you want to know why, Marion,’ Eilis shouted, ‘it’s because nobody knows what he did in the war, other than it was something horrible, something sickening, and the only reason nobody ever talks about that is because Sid bloody well banned us all from ever breathing one word of it, well,’ she pounded the table, ‘I’ve got no more reason to be loyal to fucking Sid, so there you have it, you’ve been in bed with ze enemy all along.’
‘That’s not…’
‘What do you think your fine Austrian soldier husband would say to this? Eh? What do you think he’d say to you-’
‘Shut up!’ Marion pressed her hands to her ears. ‘I didn’t know, I
didn’t realise what was happening until…’ She thought of the seance room, Brock’s fleshy face contorting in the glow of the Ouija boards, spelling out messages of hate and murder. ‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ Marion said. ‘The gunmen. The IRA. I am very afraid of them.’
‘You should be.’ Eilis snatched up her cigarette. It crackled as she drew hard on it. Her hands were shaking. ‘They’re dangerous people, Marion.’ She dropped her voice to a hoarse whisper. ‘Some of them, God forgive me, but they’re not right in the head. They’ve no real lives, they’ve no families or jobs or homes of their own. Some of them are just mad for blood. I hear them barking at night, baying, snapping. I don’t have dealings with them. Not usually.’ She jerked, as if to shake cobwebs from her hair. ‘I’m sorry you lost your husband,’ she said quietly, ‘and I’m sorry you’ve dug your own lonely grave like this. I really am.’
It sounded like a goodbye.
‘Please help me,’ Marion whispered, ‘I’ve told you everything, I could have stayed away, I could have-’
Eilis gazed at Marion down the bridge of her nose, sniffling back a tear. ‘Help you? I’d say it’s rather too late for that. After what you’ve done.’ She spun around and tore open broken kitchen door. ‘You can come in now,’ she called into the icy wind, ‘she’s here.’
Marion clawed at her collar, it felt too tight, she couldn’t breathe right.
Two men came in, rainwater glinting on woollen caps pulled low over their eyes.
One raised a pistol.
Marion faltered back, knocking her hip against the edge of the table. She flung her arms over her head and ducked, but one man grabbed her arm and the other pulled a coarse sack over her head, tightening it in a hard fist.
Dirty darkness. Marion struggled to breathe, digging in her heels in, kicking and flailing for something to cling to, but she was dragged out, banging her head against the splintered door frame.
‘I’m sorry, Marion,’ she heard Eilis wail in a shaking voice on the edge of a sob, ‘you know I loved you once, you’ve only got yourself to blame.’
Marion crouched in the back of a speeding motorcar, her heart racing too fast, too shallowly, like a mouse in owl claws. Her woollen skirt felt rough against her chin. In the thin slit of light under the dirty sack, she saw a man’s feet in scuffed shoes. The car lurched and bumped as it roared down the streets. She tried to raise her head towards the fading twilight, to get some sense of direction, but she couldn’t.
The car ground to a rough halt, the door was torn open and Marion was dragged out by the scruff of her neck, struggling to find her footing on wet gravel. She felt herself being pushed through a door.
A cavernous, hollow room.
Rain pattered on corrugated iron sheets high above. Somewhere in the darkness, a pocket watch ticked.
Marion was thrust forward and pushed down onto a hard chair. She gulped for air, smelling soil and cold rust, willing this to be some sort of hallucination. She heard the two men position themselves behind her. Like soldiers, she thought. Soldiers without uniforms.
‘We don’t shoot women,’ said a man’s low voice, ‘normally.’
The darkness deepened. Marion tossed her head, trying to loosen the rough sack cloth. ‘Take the blindfold off me,’ she croaked.
‘You’re Marion Hahn,’ came the voice, ‘latterly of Crow Street.’
All around her, she felt the darkness shifting and moving, creeping nearer, trailing smells of blood and fear and a low thrum of panic. ‘Take it off me now,’ she wailed, her voice echoing.
Someone ripped it from her face. She gasped, wincing in the gloom.
The hall was poorly lit from high panes of dirty glass. The floor was stamped earth. Rusting chains hung suspended from the ceiling. A suggestion of meat hooks.
Marion looked up.
In front of her, a plain desk.
Behind the desk sat a man. By his left hand, a stack of photographs and papers. By his right, a revolver.
In the gathering darkness behind him, the air stirred with the breath of his dead.
Marion blinked and stared at him. He was deathly pale, with a face as pallid and featureless as a blank canvas. Even the colour of his eyes was vague and undefinable. He could be anybody. She doubted that she’d ever be able to clearly recall his face. She darted a glance over him with a growing sense of unreality. He was wearing an expensive three-piece suit, well-tailored. His shirt collar was expertly pressed. But his fingernails were bitten down to the quick.
The pale man leaned back and tapped the desk with a pencil stub. ‘You are Marion Hahn. Latterly of Crow Street,’ he said again.
Marion glanced over his shoulder. Far behind him, a door stood ajar. Perhaps with a trench behind it, newly-dug, gaping for her corpse. She began to shake uncontrollably.
‘We’ve had you followed for some time,’ said the man. ‘We know what you’re involved in.’
Marion stared at his hands. A prickling heat washed over her face and neck.
‘You aided in the execution of Liam Hurlihy. We’ve reason to believe that you supplied the British occupation force with information about his whereabouts and his activities, leading to the arrest of him and his men. And you are a known associate of officers of British military intelligence and their informers.’
Marion blinked at the desk. Scratches covered it, as if someone had been clawing at it with broken fingernails.
‘You’ve a chance to redeem yourself. Only one. If you do not cooperate, you will be taken from here to a secluded spot and shot.’ There was no anger in the pale man’s voice. He might as well have told her that she’d been denied for a loan application.
Behind him, a figure emerged.
Marion’s stomach contorted.
Fr. McSorley inched forward from the shadows, leaned by the pale man’s side and whispered something earnestly in his ear, rubbing his hands together as if he was washing them.
The pale man said nothing in reply. He merely gazed at Marion impassively, with not a flicker of emotion in his face, as if he was watching an uneventful newsreel.
‘Fr. McSorley,’ Marion whispered hoarsely, ‘please tell them-’
‘Don’t bother looking to him,’ said the pale man. ‘The padre is here in case you need to make your last confession. We’re not savages. Unlike some, we make sure the condemned receive the solace of the Last Rites before they die.’
McSorley wouldn’t meet her eye. He turned, knuckling his colourless lips and frowning at the dusty floor.
The pale man pushed a photograph towards her. ‘This man. He’s a known British sympathiser, and it’s believed that he’s now collaborating with British army intelligence to hunt down and kill our men. But you already know that.’
Marion looked at the photograph. ‘No.’ She ran a hand over her forehead. ‘No.’ She stared at it.
It was John.
Dressed in a British uniform.
‘He guards himself well. Never sleeps the same place twice in a row. Never takes the same routes. Fortifies himself inside his offices. Our men have made several attempts to gain access to the premises in Merrion Square. And we will continue to try. We want his routines, his patterns of movement, his closest associates, we want to know where he sleeps. You have forty-eight hours. If you fail in this, you will lure him to a place of execution. A time and place will be supplied to you. And then you will be next.’
Marion felt very cold, as though her gut were full of wet coals.
‘There’s a drinking club he’s been known to frequent. The Red Right Hand. Clanbrassil Street Lower. It’s only open to current and former British military men. You’re a woman, so you can pass more or less unnoticed. Go there, and find out how often he’s there. When he’s there. If there’s a pattern. What road he takes coming there. Who he drinks with. What road he takes leaving. When he leaves.’
‘I can give you someone else,’ said Marion in a shaking voice, ‘someone better.’
‘We don’t want anyone
else from you. We want him.’ The pale man stabbed the photograph with his pencil stub.
Marion closed her eyes and tried to breathe. ‘A young man was killed in the streets, not many weeks ago. One of your, your men. He was a cousin, a cousin of Liz. Shot in the face.’ She brushed the left side of her head and shivered at the memory. ‘I know who killed him.’
‘And how,’ said the pale man, ‘do you know this? Were you present?’
Marion snapped her eyes open. ‘I saw him after his death.’
The man to her right smacked the back of her head as if she was a misbehaving dog. ‘Do that again,’ Marion gasped, turning slowly, ‘and you will be sorry, every dark night for the rest of your living years.’
The pale man raised a hand at his comrades, then turned to Marion. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘His name is Fornwood,’ she gasped, tripping over her words, her voice breaking, ‘Thomas Fornwood, he drinks at the Imperial, light brown hair, average height, he has, he has something to do with the Government, something secret…’
The pale man folded his hands on the desk and narrowed his eyes.
Marion opened her mouth to tell him about Colonel Brockhurst. Where he lived. Where he drank. But her gut lurched with shame as she imagined Hettie wailing over her husband’s bloodied corpse.
‘Tell me why I should believe you,’ said the pale man slowly. ‘Tell me why I should believe that this man you mention is guilty, and not just some lover who spurned you.’