“You’re telling me,” I said.
“We can sort it all out later, Hock,” Ruby said, laying the folded Guardian across my chest. “Right now, I’d better fix you something to eat, you haven’t had a bite in almost twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, here’s some heavy reading.”
Ruby kissed me. Then she and Sister left the hut. I picked up the newspaper and might have fallen down if I was not already flat on my back.
Unaccustomed as he was to being featured on page one, there was Oliver Gunston’s big score, right where it should be. In fact, there was no other story to the front page of the Irish Guardian but Oliver’s, which was emblazoned simply THE “NEVERMORE PLAN”—MURDER & MADNESS!
From the looks of it, Gunston had his editors by the short hairs. If they refused to run the ugly thing, they would only become another wrinkle to the story Gunston could publish anywhere else in a heartbeat. From Slattery, I know about a reporter’s last resort for getting a controversial story into print: tell the boss you will gladly quit and take your story to the competition, along with the additional story about why you quit.
It embarrassed me to see the main photograph on page one—a blowup of the picture Professor Brennan had brought to our lunch, showing my father and Chancellor Cavanaugh, and a slightly bewildered William Butler Yeats. But I was glad for Gunston’s success. He had broken the most important story in Ireland since independence, no less. And one more of the many untold tales of World War II.
Additionally, there were photographs of some of the lesser players in the horrible drama. Arty Finn’s mug shot was a memento of some long-ago felony in County Kildare. Father Tim’s ordination photograph had come by way of the intrepid Slattery, no doubt. Also the rooftop shot of Constable Dennis Farrelly’s body at the bottom of a Hell’s Kitchen air shaft. Chief Eamonn Keegan’s last likeness was photographed by the Dublin Garda, his bulky body slumped across his desk, mouth spewing blood. I noticed the part of his desk where the Cuban cigars would have been if I had not swiped them.
Peadar Cavanaugh’s final portrait was clearly the most lurid. Gunston and a photographer from the Guardian had clearly got to the scene ahead of the cops. Cavanaugh’s head lay sideways on his desk, in a thick pool of brains and blood.
Under the subheadline MANIFESTO OF A DISTINGUISHED MADMAN was the full text of Chancellor Cavanaugh’s incredible letter, the revelation of The Nevermore Plan, and his confession to the unsolved 1937 murder of my grandfather. Next to this text was a photographic reproduction of Cavanaugh’s original letter, handwritten in his own blood.
There was even Gunston’s thumbnail picture, minus the eye-shade, wedged into the body type of his main report:
As deadly historical backdrop for a shocking series of murders and suicides here in Dublin and New York comes the exposure of a wartime terrorist conspiracy that well may exist to this day, for the purpose of supporting a permanent state of guerrilla war between militant Irish republican forces in both Ulster and the Republic and British authorities.
“The Nevermore Plan,” as the terror group is called, was revealed yesterday afternoon to this reporter by one of its principal founders—Peadar Cavanaugh, the chancellor of Trinity College, who shortly thereafter took his own tortured life by shooting himself in the head with a small-caliber pistol commonly issued to officers of the German Army during the time of the Third Reich.
The purpose of the Nevermore Plan, which appropriated the more fervent patriotic writings of Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats as both its intellectual inspiration and call to violent action, is said to be ongoing vigilance against presumed British designs to forcefully reimpose London’s rule over all Ireland. The organisation’s roots are apparently set in the Irish fascist movement of the 1930s, which supported Nazi Germany during the Battle of Britain.
The other principal founder of Nevermore is believed to be Aidan Hockaday, a 1934 graduate, summa cum laude, of Trinity College and briefly a local writer, who emigrated to America, joined the United States Army and disappeared during the war. Mr. Hockaday, pictured on this page with his academic mentor Peadar Cavanaugh and the poet Mr. Yeats, was the son-in-law of the barrister Lord Gavan Fitzgerald—whom Mr. Cavanaugh claims to have murdered in 1937.
Lord Fitzgerald’s disemboweled body was found hanged by its heels in the alley behind his fashionable Bloor Street home in mid-October of’37. That very day, his daughter Mairead and her affianced, Aidan Hockaday, set sail for New York.
Mr. Cavanaugh’s confession to murdering the father-in-law of his protégé was included in his “manifesto”, a letter written in his own blood (see accompanying document, this page). Lord Fitzgerald was killed as he slept, his chest hacked open and his heart removed, his blood used to letter a sign hanged’round his neck meant as a terrorist warning to British sympathizers during wartime.
Linked by as yet officially undetermined ways to Mr. Cavanaugh’s death are the following, in order of their event:
•The suicide last Sunday in New York of a retired Irish-American priest of that city’s Catholic Church of the Holy Cross, Father Timothy Kelly. Father Kelly shot himself in the head while making confession at the church. Like Mr. Cavanaugh, Father Kelly used a Mauser WTP .25 automatic vest-pocket pistol.
•The death of Irish national Arty Finn, also in New York City, one day later. Mr. Finn, according to Lieut. Ray Ellis of the New York Police Department, was widely known in Irish emigrant communities of the city to be a fund-raiser for the Irish Republican Army. Mr. Finn, himself an illegal immigrant in the United States and wanted by authorities in County Kildare, died in an explosion at the New York home of Police Captain Davy Mogaill. Mr. Mogaill’s late wife, Brenda, was the sister of Arty Finn. She herself died twelve years ago in a Dublin bomb factory, said to be operated by the IRA.
•The death that same day of Francie Boylan in a hail of gunfire in O’Connell Street. Mr. Boylan, a chauffeur by trade and an IRA sympathizer, was driving two American visitors—New York Police Detective Neil Hockaday, son of Aidan Hockaday, and Ruby Flagg, the American actress and companion of Detective Hockaday.
•Constable Dennis Farrelly of the Dublin Garda, who died in a New York City slum after a suspicious fall from a tenement rooftop. Mr. Farrelly had been cashiered by the late Chief Eamonn Keegan on grounds of his association with the banned wartime-era “Hearts of Steel” political club, a right-wing tendency nonetheless classified by the government as a financial conduit for the left-wing IRA.
•Garda Chief Eamonn Keegan, who was stabbed to death in his Dublin office two days ago. His earlier dismissal of Constable Farrelly was accompanied by a controversial statement: “Let my action be clear warning to all others of the Dublin Garda that so long as I’m alive I shall not tolerate any manner of association with the IRA.”
•Moira Catherine Bernadette Booley, a cook in the suburban Dún Laoghaire home of Liam Hockaday, retired banker and businessman—and brother of Aidan Hockaday. Miss Booley, according to the local Civic Guard, was found hanged in the cellar way of her employer’s home in Ladbroke Street. Miss Booley’s political sympathies are unknown.
That was essentially all there was to Gunston’s story, save for a few paragraphs quoting Professor Dermot Brennan. Brennan’s view, of course, served to buttress the major thrust of Gunston’s story—that the Nevermore Plan was not merely some paranoid fantasy, that it warranted the immediate and critical attention of the police and the government.
Fat chance of that, I thought. Gunston might agree with that sentiment, and that might well be why he held back so much of what he knew. Gunston was obviously the type who prefers to leave a few questions begging, and thus his customers wanting more. Smart young man; that way, he always has a job.
I read over the text of Cavanaugh’s letter once more. Sure enough, there it was again, the little matter that caught my eye on first reading:
… I am an old dog of war, dear Oliver … my commander has issued a final call, which shall mean my death, one way or a
nother. I choose my own way out of this vale …
And the other questions floated back into mind as I let the newspaper slip out of my hands, as I shut my eyes.
Bullets meant for me?
Liam summoned me?
They were questions Oliver Gunston could not answer for me. Nor the ghost of my father, try as I might to summon him in sleep.
I tried moving my wounded leg, and quickly thought the better of that. The pain that shot up my back clear to the shoulders felt like somebody was peeling skin off me. My head still felt spongy from the concussion. Thinking about the things that Gunston had left out of his story—and why—was not helping that much.
I tried thinking of other things, faraway New York things. Opening day at Yankee Stadium, throwing a Frisbee to Ruby in Central Park, Szechuan takeout. I would hold these images in mind for a second, hoping for relief, but one by one they were crowded out by my Irish troubles.
There was no use in thinking of home. I could no more stop wondering about missing connections than I could stop breathing. I needed all the answers to the mystery of my makings, or I would never leave Ireland alive.
This realized, it finally hit me. There was a key that I had overlooked my entire life.
Ruby and Sister Sullivan returned. I soon had a fine plate of stew in front of me, with warm black bread and cider.
“Sister,” I said, after I had filled myself, “tomorrow I’ll need to get to a telephone. Today, I’ll need you to tell me about my mother.”
Chapter 39
“I bloody well know where they’re headed, don’t try stopping me!”
“You’ll not get away with this.”
“Nae! I have, and I will. Stay back off me now, fair warning!”
“Not this time you won’t. You and your crowd, you’re nothing but toothless old dogs.”
“Who’d be the toothless ones? You don’t read the newspapers, man? It’s still just as he said, the cause will live into the next generation, and the next and the next—’til forever. Nevermore!”
“Crow while you can. The time for your side’s running short as a leprechaun’s legs. You don’t think that reporter chap’s telling all he knows, do you?”
“I said, stay back!”
“That peashooter don’t frighten me. The wee pathetic thing’s only been good for impotent rotters scared of getting it as they rightly deserve. Why don’t you do as your fellow cowards done, turn it on yourself and be off to Satan?”
“Such fine advice coming from you.”
“Here’s more: you’ve got the boy to contend with, and he’s a smarter one than what he appears.”
“That may be—”
“And if he’s not smart enough by his own, there’s Ruby with him.”
“They’ll not stop me neither.”
“Moira nearly did.”
“The potty old cow, she’ll talk now to Gawd.”
“You’d best not mock the Holy Father since you’re so close to His final judgment now.”
“Nae, you’re the one close. All it take’s a twitch of my finger.”
“How’d you do it to her?”
“She done it herself.”
“That’s what your bought coppers might say, it don’t make it true. And there’s coppers even your gang can’t buy, you know.”
“Never did I meet the variety.”
“The boy’s one.”
“He’s the exception what only proves the rule. That makes him a fool.”
“A fool like his own mother?”
“Mairead! Nobody needs die poor in America.”
“Who’s talking like the great fool he is now?”
“I had enough of this yap. Stand out of my way.”
“Think hard what you must do to back that up.”
“I’ll do it, I swear. I told you fair.”
“So much easier is it, the second time around?”
“You’d not be the second I killed, mate. Nor even the third nor fourth. You know better than most the blackness of my soul. But you don’t know bloody all …”
“What’s this? How—? You coming at me now…?”
“For the close range needed, aye.”
One man died of a bullet to his stomach, fired by a Mauser vest-pocket pistol. The other man left the house on Ladbroke Street.
Chapter 40
“Your mother Mairead was a rare sweet angel, what can I say?”
“It’s not the way I knew her.”
“The shame’s on you then, ain’t it, boy?”
“Yes, it is,” I admitted.
Sister Sullivan was right. I hated myself for saying that.
“I don’t mean she was hard on me as a boy,” I said. “It wasn’t exactly like that …”
“Nae, it was the bad times she had is all. Haven’t you the charity to see it? Her being a woman alone in a strange new country, with a child to raise up and a war come along and a husband gone left to fight? Cut the woman some slack, boy. She wasn’t no better off than us tinkers.”
Sister might as well have been a bona fide nun. She shamed me now, and I felt the poison of my own ingratitude deep in my bones.
I said, “I know, Sister, I know …”
“Mama, l want you to look like this.”
“That’s only a magazine lady, Neil.” Mama picked up the magazine and looked longingly at the woman in the swirling satin dress.
“No, no—I’ve seen the women like this …”
The women with their hair done in shops, not in a tenement house kitchen reeking of Toni home permanent solution. The women wearing dresses bought by their husbands from Saks and Bergdorf Goodman, not dresses dispensed to widows from the dead table at Holy Cross Church. The happy women, not the tired ones.
“Not in this neighborhood you haven’t.”
“But close by, Mama. So close. Outside the theaters I’ve seen them. And where you work, too.”
Mama cried. She always cried when he showed her a magazine lady.
“Well,” she said, pulling herself straight again, laughing, running fingers through her brittling hair, “we’ve got better things to do with the few little dollars in this house than tarting up your old mama now, haven’t we?”
“There was nothing to her fine upbringing to prepare Mairead for life as she found it. She was a rich girl once, only daughter of the high and mighty Lord Gavan Fitzgerald.” Sister turned her head and spat on the floor. “That’s in memory of Lord Fitz, making no apology of my ill regard for the bastard. I guess you heard about him?”
“I know of him.”
“Your grandfather was a swine. Him and his daughter, they was like night to day. It wasn’t any rebellion on her part. Mairead was just one of them rich folks that come’round as often as January sun. She knew, she did.”
“Knew—?”
“That the problem with being poor is poverty, and the problem with being rich is uselessness. Mairead would not tolerate herself being useless as all them rich girls she come up with, see. To her mind, this was a form of stupidity. She made no particular quarrel about it, but no effort neither to submit to the will of her tribe. Naturally, all her rich relations feared and hated her. That lace curtain bunch, they’re every bit as intolerant of intellectual freedom as the bogsiders—doubly so when it comes to an Irish woman wanting to think for herself.”
Sister poured herself more coffee, and lit a cigarette. Ruby took my plate and cup away. I caught her arm, and stroked it.
I said to Ruby, “We’ve got some hard things to talk about.”
She said, know, baby.”
Then Sister was laughing, blowing blue smoke in crazy circles. “You know what she used to say about money, your mother? Oh, it was the most delicious, subversive thing.”
“What?”
“Mairead was always generous with her money, never spending on herself unless she bought the same for two or three more. I asked her once, I says, ‘Mairead, dear, why do you get rid of your money so quick? Are you afraid your h
ands will get dirty?’ And your mother, she says, ‘When the purse is empty, the heart is full.’ Now I ask you, ain’t that beautiful?”
“To a fault,” I said.
“I called her an angel, not a saint,” Sister said. “All great ladies will have their faults.”
“How did you come to know her so well?”
“It’s her that troubled to know us is the way it was. She made it her business to learn how her father and the rest of the powerful poops was doing their best to dish us tinkers extra portions of the horror and misery during the Depression time.”
“What happened to you then?”
“The mighty councils of privilege, sitting in their banks and their bailee courts and their brokerage shops, they put it out to the regular folk taught to respect them how it was us tinkers bringing down the whole house of cards. Imagine—us, who wasn’t allowed into the house anyhow! The times, they were ripe for the big lie—and scapegoats.”
“So I’ve read.”
“I’ll give you two short examples of a tall problem. First, there’s the man in Cork who loses his carpentry job for the reason of his customers’ life savings gone to the bank crash. The carpenter’s got the need to strike out, I don’t deny him that. Who’s it easier for him to hit, I ask you? The nameless ones in their bowlers and suits, or the tinkers in the camp down the road—who are undercutting his price on what little carpentry jobs of work are left about?”
“I see what you mean.”
“Now then, that same carpenter needs some money to feed himself and his family. So he goes down to the local bank that’s been glad to hold his money for him during the good times, only to learn that since his times now ain’t particularly good, there’s no loan available to him. The poor sod, he won’t do right and steal from them who’ve got too much anyhow. This is because he’s been taught all his life by the priests and the coppers and the rich how it’s a mortal sin to steal. So because of this lie about property being sacred, he goes instead and borrows off the gombeen man, which I regret to say is too often a tinker.”
Drown All the Dogs Page 30