The City in Darkness

by Michael Russell

  ‘I don’t want to hand him over to Field Police,’ said Ryan.

  ‘So instead of being the Good Samaritan yourself, you want me to be the Good Samaritan. The Good Samaritan didn’t get much thanks for it.’

  ‘If someone can get him out of the town, towards his own lines . . .’

  ‘Bullets and bombs from both sides have killed my people, women and children. Why should we give a damn if those bullets kill him, or you?’

  ‘There’s no reason why you should, Father.’

  The priest shook his head. It was a statement that he had no choice.

  ‘I’ll do what I can to get him out of here. The best thing you can do to help is leave, now. Just drive away and they’ll forget he was ever here.’

  He turned without another word, back into the church.

  The two officers walked towards the Renault. It was very quiet. Frank Ryan was aware he had dumped his problem on a man he didn’t know. But he wanted to get the trusting face of the Bandera private out of his head. Perhaps he had known Mikey Hagan’s father. He prided himself on his memory for old comrades but he had forgotten too many.

  The stillness was broken as two motorcycles and a truck pulled into the square; the Comisaría Política’s propaganda unit. When the truck stopped the men who jumped down from the truck were communist Field Police, Brigade Commissar Hermann Klein’s familiars. Klein himself stepped from the cab, short, wiry, bullet-headed, always neat in a uniform that no one else could make look anything but shapeless. He was surprised to find Frank Ryan in Belchite’s plaza. He didn’t much like surprises.

  ‘Go into the church and get him away, Allen,’ said Ryan quietly.

  Lieutenant Armstrong walked back towards the church.

  ‘Hardly your beat, Brigadier,’ said the German commissar.

  ‘Wrong turn. My lieutenant thought he could avoid the traffic. When I’d finished bollocking him, I thought we’d have a drink. Brigade can’t give me troops tomorrow, but they did fill us up with booze. We can die happy.’

  He held the brandy bottle towards Klein.

  ‘You can leave me a bottle. I’m working now.’

  Klein nodded to the Field Police. Two of them turned to the church.

  ‘You do know how close to the river you are, Brigadier?’

  ‘We’ll find our way home, don’t worry.’

  ‘You’re almost at the front. Intelligence says there are snipers.’

  ‘I’ll keep my eyes peeled then, Hermann.’

  Lieutenant Armstrong strolled back out to the steps of the church, passing Klein’s men on their way in. He walked down to the square.

  ‘A beautiful evening, Commissar. Good to stop and look sometimes.’

  ‘I didn’t have you down as a church-goer, Lieutenant.’

  ‘I was going to light candles for my dead comrades, Commissar, but there weren’t enough. I’ll need to find a bigger church, with more candles.’

  Klein turned to Ryan. ‘You know this is a fascist town?’

  ‘Is it so? And I thought they had a pretty good spread of the dead when we drove in. Ours, theirs, and a few locals to even things out.’

  Frank Ryan had no difficulty irritating Hermann Klein; taking his lieutenant’s lead, it seemed a good idea to keep his attention away from what might be happening at the back of the church. But Commissar Klein had his own reason to be in Belchite. That reason was walking towards him now; the priest, with his arms held by the Field Policemen.

  ‘Julio Costales?’ said the commissar in Spanish.

  ‘Yes, I’m Father Costales.’

  ‘I’m glad to find you here.’

  ‘This is my church. Where else would I be?’

  ‘Information has come to the attention of Military Intelligence. You have provided medical assistance and comfort to renegades and fascists.’

  ‘Soldiers have died here on both sides.’

  ‘There is only one side,’ said the commissar. ‘When the Nationalists took the town, you gave the wounded water and the dying the last rites.’

  ‘Isn’t any man entitled to die in his faith?’

  ‘It’s not only that, Julio Costales, it’s what’s in your heart.’

  Hermann Klein took out his pistol.

  ‘This is mad,’ shouted Ryan, ‘can’t a priest give the last rites?’

  The commissar’s pistol was pointing at Father Costales.

  ‘Evidence proves you are a fascist sympathizer, a fascist spy.’

  ‘What evidence is that?’

  ‘The evidence is what you are. That’s more than enough.’

  Father Costales knew what was coming now; if he had not expected it he had, in the space of only a few seconds, accepted it.

  ‘You won’t do this,’ said Frank Ryan.

  ‘Get back to your battalion, Brigadier. You have no authority here.’

  The Irishman pulled his own revolver out and pointed it at Klein.

  ‘Frank, you can’t!’ said Allen Armstrong.

  Hermann Klein looked round at the communist militia men standing behind him. Three rifles were already trained on Ryan and Armstrong.

  ‘You don’t need to do this, Brigadier Ryan.’ The voice was the priest’s. ‘If there was a point I might encourage you. One more death will do for today.’

  Suddenly the sergeant of the Regulares walked forward, smashing the butt of his rifle against Frank Ryan’s wrist. The revolver fell to the ground. The sergeant picked it up, giving the Irishman an apologetic shrug.

  Hermann Klein turned back to the priest and fired three rapid shots.

  On Suicide Hill, Brigadier Ryan and Lieutenant Armstrong looked into the darkness of the Jarama Valley and drank a second bottle of brandy. Ryan was burying his anger in what the next day would bring. With the dawn his men would fight and die for Spain and freedom again. Hermann Klein didn’t change that. He had seen enough innocent men die in Ireland to know the smell; nothing would ever quite get it out of his nostrils. He couldn’t even say the commissar wasn’t right, that Father Costales hadn’t spied, hadn’t collaborated. He was a believer too, but there were few priests, in Spain or Ireland, who wouldn’t tell him he was fighting for the Antichrist and that Franco and his fascists were the saviours of civilization and faith. There was no room for the emotion he had shown. No one who had fought and killed as he had could be unaware that war was ugly and arbitrary, however just the cause. By the time the brandy was drunk he had put away his anger.

  It was Lieutenant Armstrong whose doubts were not so easily buried, doubts about what had just happened, about what happened everywhere the Communist Party tightened its grip on any hint of heresy. But by afternoon Allen Armstrong’s doubts would be laid to rest too, along with the little that Frank Ryan could find of his friend, after a fascist mortar landed on the stretcher party he was leading back into the olive groves of Suicide Hill.

  Later that day, standing over a shallow grave, Frank Ryan reached into his pocket for tobacco. His fingers touched metal. It was the Irish harp from Mikey Hagan’s Bandera uniform. It was likely the young Irishman was dead now too. He looked at the harp almost fondly, then dropped it into the earth of the Jarama Valley as it was shovelled over Allen Armstrong.

  3

  Crane Lane

  Dublin, December 1939

  Four days before Christmas, Dame Street was busy and aglow in the seven o’clock evening; the shops were still open even by Dublin Castle. The lights were bigger and brighter at the Trinity College end, where the shops were bigger and brighter too, bustling into Grafton Street and over the bridge to O’Connell Street; but just past the Palace Street entrance to the Castle the tree by the pillared portico of the City Hall blazed with 200 bulbs. Detective Inspector Stefan Gillespie glanced at it, as he did most nights, walking into Palace Street from the side gate to Dublin Castle.

  He crossed Dame Street to the Olympia Theatre, where a line of people queued for the evening performance of Cinderella. The theatre too was full of light, with coloured
bulbs strung along its flat front. There were always a lot of lights in Dublin at Christmas, but as he walked out of the Castle night after night he had felt there were more than usual. There was a kind of gaudy determination about all that brightness. It wasn’t far across the Irish Sea, across the whole of Britain, and on across Europe itself, that there were no Christmas lights at all, because darkness was safer, because a city of lights, any city, could only be a shining target for the bombers. The lights of Dublin didn’t lend much in the way of Christmas spirit to Stefan Gillespie now; not that he was indifferent to it, but all that brightness had the effect of reminding him of what he was doing rather than helping him forget it. In a city where people were uncomfortable talking publicly about the war Ireland wasn’t a part of, there were aspects of that war that were his daily preoccupation. He was far from easy with what that meant.

  He turned off Dame Street into Crane Lane; the noise and colour of Christmas stopped immediately. The narrow alley down to Essex Street and the river was ill-lit because there was little to light. He walked on to the black, boarded windows of Farrelly’s Bar at the end of the lane and went in.

  The pub was packed with shop workers and Dublin Castle civil servants and, as always, a group of Special Branch detectives from the Castle’s Police Yard. Farrelly’s made few concessions to Christmas; two strings of ancient paper chains above the altar of gleaming spirit bottles behind the bar. The lights were low; the bar and what there was of furniture were dark; the floorboards were bare and black; the ceiling might have been white once, but in living memory it had only been a marbled tobacco-brown; there was a haze of smoke. Stefan nodded to his Special Branch colleagues. They grinned, not expecting him to sit down for a drink.

  Stefan had joined the Special Branch as a detective three months earlier, after two years back in uniform at home in Baltinglass, not because he wanted to, but because Detective Superintendent Terry Gregory, head of the Branch, decided he needed him. He still felt an outsider, partly because he made it his business to be; he didn’t like where he was and made no secret of it. At the same time the Special Branch officers in the Police Yard were a close-knit bunch, suspicious of anyone who didn’t share their background and their history. There was no real hostility towards him, but if he didn’t really know why he was there, they didn’t either. They weren’t easy with that, and if nobody particularly disliked him nobody much liked him either.

  He pushed his way to the bar and ordered a bottle of Guinness. He took out a cigarette and lit it with a taper from the gas flame on the bar, for the reason he always took out a cigarette; something to do. He fixed his eyes on the middle distance, between the gas flame and the glinting shelves of spirits. For ten minutes the noise of the bar was only a rumbling irritant to the anger that was too close to the front of his mind to be pushed out. Then he saw Gregory; the round, always flushed face with the wry smile that never changed, whatever his mood. It was a soft face that still spoke of a lazy mind to Stefan, even though he knew the truth was very different.

  ‘We’ll talk in the snug, Inspector.’

  Farrelly’s snug was no more than the end of the bar partitioned off by a wooden wall. A few feet of the bar took up one corner; there was space for a table, a bench and a couple of chairs. As well as the door from the bar there was another into the backyard and Essex Street. The snug was the property of Special Branch, open to Superintendent Gregory and his men day or night. Everyone who used the pub knew it; no one else went in there. It was access to the bustle of Temple Bar and the Quays, without going through the pub, that made it a place to meet those who didn’t want to be seen with Special Branch officers. It was a conduit between the streets of the city and the Police Yard at Dublin Castle, and had been since the Special Branch men were British. Informers were still paid or blackmailed here, according to the particular circumstances, as they always had been.

  Terry Gregory sat on the bench. Stefan pulled up a chair. Dermot Farrelly appeared and set down a bottle of Powers and two glasses. Gregory poured two whiskies; he pushed one towards Stefan, then drained his own.

  ‘You’re a pain the arse, Gillespie, you know that?’

  ‘I have been working on it, sir.’

  ‘You think if you tell me to fuck myself, and walk out of my office one more time, I’ll kick you out? Not much of a plan for a clever feller.’

  ‘I thought of trying something subtler. I wasn’t sure you’d notice.’

  ‘You work for me. That’s all you’re there for, all any of you are there for. You don’t stop working for me till I decide I don’t need you anymore.’

  ‘What do you need me for at all?’ Stefan’s question was real.

  ‘A clever feller like you? Why wouldn’t I need you, Inspector?’

  ‘I’m the best German speaker you have. I know a lot about what’s going on in Germany and how they read Ireland. The men you’ve got watching the German community, the embassy, people who might be in touch with German agents, who might be German agents – they don’t speak German, and most of them think the Nazis aren’t such bad lads anyway—’

  ‘We’re a neutral country,’ laughed Gregory, ‘there are no bad lads.’

  Stefan hadn’t touched the whiskey; he drank it down now.

  ‘You’d like to do all that then, would you, Gillespie?’

  ‘Look, everyone knows men are leaving the country to join the British forces, thousands of them, and there’ll be thousands more. What’s the point listing them? Why worry if some feller says he’s taken the boat for a job in England and joins the army? What’s anybody going to do? I’m scrabbling about questioning friends, families, wives, girlfriends – why?’

  ‘Because you’re right, it’s getting out of hand. A lot of people would call these men traitors. Is joining the British Army something any decent Irishman should be doing at any time, let alone when we could be facing a British invasion? That’s not impossible. You know what’s at stake for the English. If they’ve got their backs to the wall, which looks likely enough . . .’

  Terry Gregory’s voice had become more serious, but the smile didn’t shift. Stefan felt the words were merely repeating other people’s words, official words. The superintendent stopped, maybe unimpressed himself.

  ‘Presumably you can recognize the seriousness of it when soldiers leave our own army, Guards leave the Gardaí. The word there is desertion.’

  ‘If it’s impossible for them to resign—’

  ‘Bollocks! You know the expression – there’s a fucking war on, isn’t there? The fact that we’re not fighting it doesn’t mean we won’t be. I don’t know if anyone’s coming after us. If they do it could be the English or the Germans. Say it’s the Germans. Who’s going to stop them if our army’s gone AWOL to help out across the water – and all that’s left is the IRA?’

  ‘If the English can’t stop them, I don’t think we will, sir.’

  Terry Gregory grinned. He refilled the glasses.

  ‘I will take some shite in your reports, Gillespie, but don’t push it.’

  ‘Don’t push what?’

  ‘I don’t blame Dessie MacMahon. I took him on as your sergeant because I thought he’d tell me what you were doing. A rare error of judgement. It doesn’t matter. But I do have details of three Guards you didn’t pass on information about, one now in the Lancashire Fusiliers, one in the Royal Artillery and one a gunner on HMS Achilles. Three Guards you worked with. Three deserters you didn’t add to your last report.’

  Stefan shrugged. ‘If I’m not up to the job—’

  ‘That’s not a plan either, so don’t bother. I’ll take so much, but if it gets out of hand you won’t be transferred, you’ll be out on your arse.’

  ‘It’s not what I want, sir . . .’ Stefan left a ‘but’ hovering.

  ‘I don’t know what you are yet, Inspector, but if you’re not a Guard, I’m not sure you know what you are yourself. You won’t be walking out.’

  For just a moment the smile on the superintende
nt’s lips disappeared. So far Stefan felt, as he always did, that words were being batted back and forward that didn’t really say what Gregory meant, what he knew, what he wanted. With the last words there was, briefly, none of the deceptive softness in his face. He was saying something Stefan had never consciously thought, but something that somewhere he knew was true, or almost true.

  ‘I can live with some selectiveness in what you give me, Gillespie. We all hold things back in this job, for all sorts of reasons. Usually it’s self-preservation, but if you’ve got reasons you think are noble, what do I care? You’re good at what you’re doing. None of the other arseholes could give me half what you put together. Why? Because you know these people. You sympathize with them. I have no shortage of men who sympathize with the IRA. That’s why they follow Republicans and you don’t. You couldn’t do it as well. They don’t need a guide book, just their noses. Horses for courses.’

  ‘And a test into the bargain,’ said Stefan, watching his boss.

  ‘What does that mean?

  ‘The dirtier we get our hands, the more you can rely on us.’

  ‘You’ll make a Special Branch officer yet, Inspector. But horses for courses doesn’t mean I’m a one-trick pony. The less anyone knows about what goes on in my mind, the better I do my job. And that’s what dear old Ireland needs from you, son, a job, not beliefs, not principles. You’ll do what you’re told. You’re here for as long as all this shite lasts. Like me.’

  The superintendent’s voice was hard and flat. Stefan could almost believe these words expressed something that mattered. But he wouldn’t have been surprised by a wink after ‘Like me’. Gregory pushed the bottle across the table and stood up. He walked to the door, then he turned back.

  ‘If you’re wondering about the lists . . .’

  Stefan had forgotten where the conversation had started.

  ‘Our brave Irish boys in the British forces.’

  Stefan nodded and looked at his boss.

  ‘One day they’ll be coming back. And God help them then.’