The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  But meanwhile here Francis was, out of jail and in his own clothes, back in Ballyrath, his father dead, and Michael dressed in the gown of a priest. He couldn’t sort out what was real from what was a dream. His only guide was the raw, hollow ache in his chest. The pain would tell him what to believe.

  Michael had been driven to the funeral by Brother Zozimus, whose principal task was to read the mail of the seminarians in pursuit of any impure thoughts, words, or deeds. He took up a place at the back of the church, kneeling on the stone floor throughout the Mass, while the Mountjoy warder lingered just inside the church’s arched double doors, smoking his way through a pack of Silk Cuts. The brothers sat side by side in the first pew.

  At the end of the Mass, the pastor trod down the aisle and the mourners followed in his incensed wake. On the front steps, a crowd gathered, many of them locals who had attended the funeral out of obligation to the man who had educated their children. Others had come out of simple peckishness for any break with the routine of a Tuesday in May. Among the mourners were a fair number of strangers, hard-looking men who had sat apart from each other, scattered around the church as if magnetized against contact. The warder watched the sluggish procession and grew gradually more agitated as neither of the Dempseys passed through the low-slung arch. One of the strangers, a man with red-blasted cheeks beneath a flat black cap, told him the boys were lighting a candle in their father’s memory before an image of the Sacred Heart. Another said the priest had asked Michael to retrieve another censer from a cabinet in the sacristy. The crowd milling about the doors seemed in no hurry to transport the coffin to its final resting place. The minutes ticked by, punctuated by the tolling of the bell overhead. The only two who seemed impatient for the reappearance of the Dempseys were the warder and a young woman dressed all in black. Both craned their necks to see over the heads of the throng and into the shadowy vault of the church.

  Inside, a group of the hard-looking strangers drifted to the front of the church and formed a knot around the Dempsey brothers. The condolences were brusque—“I’m sorry for your loss,” each said in turn—but the men stared at the boys with an intensity that was hard to ignore, scanning the brothers as if seeking to square the cast of their eyes or the shape of their noses with memories of their father’s own face.

  One of the men leaned in to Francis and in a raspy stage whisper said, “Sure you’re not going back to that jail, are you?”

  Francis thought the man was trying to lighten the mood with a joke. “Have you got a better offer?”

  The other men laughed grimly, but no sooner had Francis spoken than a plan began to take shape.

  “Say good-bye to your brother and go,” the man said. “We’ll slow down that screw.”

  “Go how?” Francis said.

  “The Brother’s keys are in his car,” Michael said. “But you’re not going without me.”

  “Good man!” one of the strangers spat.

  “Your father’s sons!” another said.

  The first man pushed a folded paper into Francis’s hands. “I drew this up during that frightful eulogy. It’ll take you to a safe house where you can sort out your next move.”

  “Where are you sending him?”

  “Not the place in Ardagh? It’s been donkey’s years since anyone—”

  “No, no—”

  “Not Westmeath? That was a shithole twenty years ago. Can’t imagine what it’s like—”

  “Will you cut it?” the first man said. He stabbed the paper with a stubby finger. “Follow the map.” A network of pencil lines, boxes, arrows. “That’s Limerick, that’s Glenagoul, and that line’s the road to Cork. Take the turn for Castletownroche, and when you’re halfway there, look for the broken arch, the white barn, the red door.”

  “A red door? He’ll never—”

  “Take it and go!” He pushed the map against Francis’s chest, then burrowed in his pocket for a handful of coins and a few banknotes. “Come on, lads,” he said. “For the orphans’ fund.”

  The eyes of the men were aglow. They were on a mission—an escape, a rescue operation, call it what you will. It was a return to younger days when they had all been soldiers and believed that a better, brighter world was one well-placed shot away.

  “WHO WERE THESE men?” Martin said. He was hunched forward on the sofa, following every word.

  “That’s just it,” Francis said. “Had to be friends of Da from the Cork days.”

  “Da was never the having-friends type.”

  “Well, there were a lot of them—tough-looking yokes, too.”

  “They must have been from the university. Old professors, come to bury one of their own.”

  “They didn’t look like teachers.” Francis spun the Scotch in his glass, contemplating its movement. “I have to ask, did you ever wonder if Da was involved in any IRA business?”

  “Da hated politics. And politicians even more.”

  “I’m not talking about politics. I mean fighting. Things got awfully hot in Cork.”

  “Mam was mad about speeches and rallies, but Da? He was no soldier.”

  “You’re sure of that? You’d remember best.”

  “Not a chance,” Martin said.

  “Wait till you hear the rest.”

  FRANCIS AND MICHAEL were bent double, picking their way through the headstones behind the church and making for the line of cars along the road. Both saw the mound of fresh dirt, the newly cut sides of the hole where the coffin would soon be lowered. “I’m not dropping you off at the seminary, so you know.”

  “I’m done with all that,” Michael said. “Didn’t you get my letters?”

  They found the seminary’s automobile, a black Vauxhall Cadet polished every weekend as part of the students’ regular contribution to the upkeep of St. Columbanus. Francis ducked into the driver’s seat and quietly pulled the door shut. Michael lingered outside, peering over the roof at the throng outside the church doors.

  “Come on,” Francis said. “Now or never, Michael.”

  Michael spotted Eileen on the fringe of the crowd, and as soon as he saw her, she turned and looked him full in the face, as if she’d heard him calling her name from someplace deep within. It had always been that way—from the time they were tykes right up until the moment she told him that there was no hope for them, that it was settled, that she would marry that old codger Doonan. But now his eyes were on hers, just like in the days before, and her mouth formed a single word: Go! For his sake and for hers. Go!

  Francis echoed the same word—Let’s go!—and then Michael was in the car and the car was moving and they were off.

  In the commotion that followed it was discovered that Francis or Michael or some co-conspirator had nicked the keys from the warder’s automobile as well. He tried to commandeer one of the other cars to begin pursuit, but none of the locals had driven to the church—Ballyrath was no bigger than a postage stamp, and few people owned cars—and after the out-of-town mourners hustled to their cars and fidgeted with their coats and trousers, they reported that their keys, too, had been stolen. After an hour’s delay, the warder finally waylaid a truck used for the delivery of peat and set off in pursuit. The head start alone was sizable enough but the Dempsey brothers also had the advantage of having grown up among the lanes and hedgerows around Ballyrath, and they drove like madmen drunk on the prospect of the freedom that lay ahead.

  “I believe we’re both outlaws now,” Michael said.

  On the run in the Vauxhall, they were no longer Francis and Michael Dempsey, they were Frank and Jesse James. And they weren’t bumping over a rutted backcountry road in the middle of Ireland, they were racing across the high plains outside of Carson City or Dodge or Tombstone—some frontier town whose name Francis had dredged up from the cowboy novels that formed the bulk of the prison library.

  “Da’d murder you for reading that tripe,” Michael said.

  “I heard Yeats himself loved cowboy stories, so what’s the harm?”
/>   “Yeats is dead.”

  “Well,” Francis said, “so is Da.”

  Though they wanted to imagine that some lean-boned sheriff with a drooping mustache was gathering a posse to hunt them, they knew that they had only the massed forces of the Roman Catholic Church and the newly christened Republic of Ireland at their backs. For the first time in their lives, the brothers gave thanks that Ballyrath was so far off the map of twentieth-century progress that there wasn’t a telephone within miles, but they knew that eventually word would reach the outside world that an escaped convict and a seminarian–cum–car thief were on the loose. Until then, they had to achieve some distance from the scene of their escape—a difficult proposition on roads unbroken by alternate routes and hemmed in by bristling hedges, where they could be stopped cold by a single donkey cart turned sideways in their path.

  Once the flush of excitement started to wane, they were confronted with the reality of being on the run and mostly penniless on an island that required money and legal papers to depart. In search of a less conspicuous mode of transport, they stopped east of Athenry to trade the Vauxhall to a pair of traveler folk for a dilapidated Morris Minor. “Smells like priests,” one of the men said, and Francis had to agree with him. The Vauxhall had the stink of hair tonic and candlewax on it. Though they were fleeced in the deal, the brothers fired up the engine and, lured by the comforts of the words safe house, followed the map south.

  IT DIDN’T LOOK like much upon their arrival, but maybe that was the point. It was an out-of-the-way house down a long lane off a back road—the kind of place that no one would simply stumble across. Had they known where they were going, or had their map been more than an old man’s half-remembered cartography rendered with a nubby pencil on a pension-check envelope, they could have made the drive from Ballyrath to the house in six hours. But the map, the swap with the travelers, the detours when they feared driving too close to towns or police barracks—all of it added up, and by the time they steered the Morris Minor, a desperate machine with a fly-pocked windscreen, up the dirt track that led to the house, it was long past midnight. The only light came from the half-moon and the car’s headlamps, which Francis aimed at the front door and left on as they exited the car.

  Sure enough, this was it, red door and all. A long stone cottage topped by a mangy thatched roof. The door itself was stout, ribbed with iron bands, and absolutely immovable.

  “Would’ve been nice of him to mention that,” Francis said. “Maybe take a moment from his lousy mapmaking to jot down a note about where to find the key?”

  The windows seemed equally impregnable. Thick shutters latched from the inside betrayed no hint of light in the cottage. All of this contributed to the sense of this safe house being extremely safe, snug, and secure—provided you could ever get in. Michael suggested a search of the Morris Minor for a jack or a pry bar, anything they could use to jimmy one of the shutters or, if necessary, smash a window. Francis had to admit that his lock-picking abilities weren’t up to this door. It was a skill he had tried to acquire at Mountjoy, but given that anyone caught practicing on the cell doors faced a week in solitary confinement, his education had been more theoretical than applied.

  Taken together, the Dempsey brothers were an unlikely pair of housebreakers. Francis wore the suit he had been sentenced in—a suit that had sat, poorly folded, in the jail’s storehouse since the first day of his incarceration. Gangster-inspired, with broad lapels, chalk stripes, and a double breast, it was not a suit made to convey the innocence of its wearer. Francis thought the outfit made him look dashing; the judge thought it made him look guilty. Francis’s companion in this halfhearted assault on the locked door, meanwhile, was dressed in a narrow, inky-black cassock studded with buttons from toe to notched collar.

  Francis’s clumsy efforts with the door were interrupted by a voice from the darkness: “What do you want here?”

  Both brothers’ shadows, outlined by the car’s headlamps, jumped like puppets in a children’s theater. “Who’s there?” Francis said. “Show yourself.”

  “Move on,” the man’s voice said. “You’ve no business here.”

  “We were sent,” Michael said. “Broken arch, red door. We have a map.”

  “Don’t show him that,” Francis said. “He’s not supposed to be here, either.”

  “Give the map to me.” The man emerged from the darkness behind the house, his hand extended.

  “We’re to stay,” Michael said. “Collect our bearings.”

  “No one’s staying here.”

  “But you are.”

  “Well, I’m the only one.”

  With a scrape of wood against the stone threshold, the massive front door opened wide enough for a man’s head to poke through the gap. “Who’s out there?” he said, squinting into the headlamps.

  “And that one,” Michael said. “That’s two of you.”

  “It’s my place,” the first man said.

  “Why should we believe you?” Michael said. “You lied about being alone.”

  There were in fact four men at the house, each thrown into a state of great agitation by the arrival of strangers. Three of the men had spent a month ensconced at the Factory, as the IRA called its clandestine bomb-making facility, developing munitions for the Sabotage Campaign, the IRA’s latest plan to bring Britain to its knees. Until today, they had received only a single visitor, a quartermaster from the Army Council who had relayed instructions to guide their work and a timetable for completing their assignment. Although he would not admit it, the quartermaster had also come to see whether or not the three had blown themselves to bits. But now, in the past twenty-four hours, the Factory had become a hive of activity. Early in the morning a car had arrived, disgorging two rough-looking fellows and a man called Finnegan who ran this entire section of the country for the IRA. One of the bruisers stayed behind, keeping close watch on a stoutly made strongbox, while Finnegan and the other drove to Cork for meetings with other higher-ups.

  Francis and Michael knew none of this. As they stood outside in the spring night, chilled and tired, they knew only that their safe house—this hastily packaged gift from the men at their father’s funeral—would not be a place where they could quietly sort out their next move.

  “SO THE FIRST one,” Francis said to Martin, “starts going on about us bringing the gardai right to their doorstep, how we’re going to get them all hanged—like I’m some kind of eejit who doesn’t know how to hide my tracks. Meanwhile, they’ve got the house packed with gelignite and paxo and all manner of nasties. They’re raising a ruckus about me and Michael and telling me to get the goddamn car away from the house and so I get back in to move it and right in the middle of all this commotion one of the bombs goes off.”

  “That’s what happened to Michael?”

  “Not just to Michael. All that was left was a pile of stones—and Michael in the middle of the wreckage.”

  “You brought our brother to a bomb factory?”

  “We didn’t know it was a bomb factory. It was supposed to be a safe house.”

  Martin put his hands over his face. He was exhausted, but there were questions he needed to ask. “And the IRA men? What happened to them?”

  “I tried to see if there was anything to be done, but—” Francis shrugged. “And it was all I could do to find Michael. Limp as a rag, he was. I swear I thought he was dead. But I lifted him up and he was breathing, barely. And then next to him I see a strongbox lying on its side in the stones and the burning thatch. The lid was smashed to pieces and it was packed full of cash—British pounds, American dollars, even some German notes. I figured either I take the money or let the first man on the scene help himself to it.”

  “So the bomb just—exploded,” Martin said. “And you had nothing to do with that?”

  “I had words with them, but nothing more. And if they were such lousy bomb makers that a few choice words could set off the whole works, I don’t think I can be blamed for that.”


  “I’m just trying to get this straight. You left a houseful of men dead, and you made off with their money?”

  “I didn’t kill them, Martin. Their own bomb did that. And would it have been better if I let the police find the money?” Francis rubbed his chin. He needed a shave. “To hell with them—they almost killed Michael. I’m looking at the money as compensation. And if the money was for this cock-and-bull bombing scheme, the real question should be how many lives I’ve saved by depriving them of their funds.”

  “Jesus, Francis, they’re going to come after you. Every one of them. The police, the IRA, the FBI. Take your pick. An escaped convict whose bankroll oh-by-the-way is courtesy of the IRA? God only knows how you even got into the country.”

  “Money opens a lot of doors,” Francis said. “And to keep them open, I’ve been telling folks I’m some kind of aristocrat. Earl of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor. It’s brilliant.”

  “Earl of—why didn’t you just tell them that you were the king of England?”

  “Too easy to figure that one out. His picture is everywhere.”

  Martin stared at his brother, dumbfounded.

  “Come on, Martin. Glamis? Cawdor? I cadged it all from Macbeth. It’s not real.”

  “Those are real places, you idiot. Macbeth is practically a history play.”

  “How can it be real when it has a ghost in it?” Francis stood, uncertain at first where to go in this vast room. Of course: the bar cart. He dribbled another measure of the Plaza’s Scotch into his glass. “I may be an eejit, as you say, but even I know that there’s a world of difference between a history and a tragedy. Tragedies are make-believe, and all the interesting ones die in the end. In a history play, the clever ones survive.”

  Martin was ready to go another round with Francis—what was his plan in America? What were they going to do about Michael?—but then he noticed Michael had drifted toward a far corner of the room and was staring intently at an armchair in front of one of the windows. As Michael moved closer to it, he cocked his head from side to side and moved his lips, as if whispering to himself. “Hold on,” Martin said. “What’s he doing?”