He didn’t bother to go back to Pearse Street. They could have Susan Field and Vincent Walsh. They could have Hugo Keller and Jimmy Lynch. It didn’t matter. The only thing left from that was Hannah Rosen. He wondered where she was. But there was no point needing a woman he would never even see again. He walked on faster. Kingsbridge was just beyond the park gates. He reached Albert Quay and crossed the Liffey to the station. Fifteen minutes later the train was taking him back home to West Wicklow.
*
The upstairs room looked out over Main Street in Baltinglass. The solicitor’s office was untidy, cluttered with papers and files and books. But it was a bright room. The big windows let in the pale midwinter light and the dust that hung in the air showed how rarely the place was cleaned. A man in his sixties stood at the window looking out. He leant on a walking stick. In Dublin, thirteen years earlier, during the War of Independence, the Black and Tans had thrown him from the first floor of a solicitor’s practice in Leeson Street. His legs had been broken in too many places to ever mend properly. Ever since, he had been more comfortable standing up than sitting down. Through the window came the noise of cattle being driven through the town to the market place. Emmet Brady had listened to Stefan without interruption. Now he paced slowly in front of the window, while Stefan sat on a chair in front of the desk the solicitor only used to pile papers on.
‘There is a simple solution of course, Stefan. You could convert.’
‘Is that all there is?’
‘It would certainly be the end of it.’
He watched Brady limping slowly up and down. The old man was thinking hard, but what he was thinking wasn’t what Stefan wanted to hear.
‘Are you telling me they can do this, Mr Brady?’
‘No, of course I’m not.’
‘But –’
‘But it doesn’t mean I’m telling you they can’t.’
‘It’s one or the other surely?’
‘You know the law better than that. A wife would be another option.’
‘What?’ Despite everything Stefan laughed.
Brady stopped, grimacing as pain shot down his leg, then paced again.
‘You’re not unattractive. Admittedly your employment prospects are slightly uncertain right now, but then you’ve a bit of land coming to you up at Kilranelagh one day. A good Catholic girl would do the job nicely. Maybe it’s time you put off the black armband, metaphorically speaking.’
‘I hope the fact that you think it’s funny is a good sign, Mr Brady.’
‘I don’t think it’s funny at all. But why not convert?’
‘I can’t convert to something I don’t believe in.’
‘You mean you’d rather not lie.’
‘I shouldn’t have to lie.’ Stefan turned in the chair, angry again.
‘You shouldn’t, I agree, but what if Father Carey and the bishop take this all the way to the Four Courts? What if the Church drags you into a courtroom and persuades a judge that the interests of your son would be best served if he lived with his uncle and aunt. I’m not saying they can or will.’
‘But it’s possible,’ said Stefan quietly.
‘Stick with the question. Wouldn’t a lie be better?’
‘I suppose it ought to be.’ He said the words with a frown. It wasn’t easy to know why he felt he couldn’t even contemplate that. Why should it matter so much, if one simple lie could take the vindictive curate off his back? Emmet Brady had stopped again, rubbing his leg as he watched him.
‘You did promise the boy would be brought up as a Catholic.’
‘And he is.’
‘And you’re a fit man to do that?’
‘I’m his father.’
‘How many of us have ever really been fit for that?’ The solicitor smiled, setting off again, pacing up and down in front of the window.
Stefan shifted uneasily in the chair, following Brady’s movements as he walked back and forward. The constant motion was irritating him.
‘Let’s look at you, Stefan. You’re a guard who’s on suspension for assaulting a priest. That’s quite some place to start, wouldn’t you say?’
‘What’s being a guard’s worth? I’d probably be better out of it.’
‘No, that won’t do.’ The old man halted abruptly, shaking his head. ‘You have to stick with the job, at all costs. You’ll be back in what –’
‘Six months. That’s what the Commissioner said.’
‘A man with a job is better than a man without one. A Garda sergeant with a blot on his record is better than a man who looks like he was kicked out. Hitting Father Carey is the biggest thing they have against you. The rest adds up, but on its own it wouldn’t amount to much. No one’s going to take you to the High Court brandishing a copy of The Communist Manifesto and a King James Bible! Walking into a synagogue with Tom for a couple of minutes might be high on Father Carey’s list of abominations, but it wouldn’t normally cut much ice elsewhere. Although taking the woman you had to talk to so urgently on Garda matters to your bed, is something else.’
Stefan’s lips tightened. It wasn’t Brady’s business or anyone else’s.
‘Is the curate right about that?’ insisted the old man.
‘If that’s how you want to put it.’ Stefan shrugged.
‘It’s not about how I want to put it, it’s how a barrister in the Four Courts would put it, when he describes you taking your four-year-old son into the synagogue, so that you could make arrangements for a sex session with your Jewish mistress. That’s what he might say. How does it sound?’
Stefan knew the courts; he could hear the words.
‘I see, and it’s even worse if she’s Jewish, is it?’
‘You need have no doubt that there are judges who would think exactly that. It’s a side of our Free State no one would want to admit to, but this isn’t about what’s right, Stefan. It’s about what you might have to deal with.’
The implications were sinking in. The man he had come to for help was making it sound worse than the Commissioner or the Garda Chaplain.
‘How does Carey know?’ The solicitor started to pace again.
‘He doesn’t. A good guess, that’s all.’
‘Come on, you said he’d written to the Garda Chaplain about you, even before this. He told him to feck off, but it doesn’t mean our curate hasn’t been busy elsewhere. Who else has he talked to? Who else knew?’
‘One other guard. Dessie wouldn’t –’
‘For God’s sake, man, I hope you’re a better detective than that! You’ve lived in a Garda barracks before. Do you really think there’s a single guard at Pearse Street who didn’t know what you were up to?’
Stefan couldn’t help laughing. Who had he been kidding?
‘So who would Father Carey have talked to?’
‘Maybe my inspector. Inspector Donaldson. He’s a real Holy Joe. You know, Mass every day, novenas, the Knights of St Columbanus, the lot.’
‘Well, aren’t you the lucky one? So are there any more?’
‘Any more what?’
‘Any more women you’ve been fucking. Any affairs? Have you got a string of mistresses? Do you spend your evenings in a whorehouse? They need to find all the reasons they can to prove you’re not a decent man to bring up a Catholic child. If they go for it they won’t hold anything back.’
‘There’s been no one else, not since Maeve died.’
‘All right, next question. Do you believe in God, Mr Gillespie?’
‘What?’
‘If I was their barrister, I’d ask. You can always lie.’
‘This is crazy.’
‘You bet it is! Come on! Do you believe in God, Mr Gillespie?’
‘I was brought up to believe. I believe in what Christianity –’
‘Do you believe in God? Yes or no.’
‘I don’t, but I –’
‘There are no buts in the witness box. If I were you, I’d say yes. If you don’t, the next question will be how can this
court believe a word you say? Didn’t you just swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God? Why did you do that if you don’t believe in God?’
Stefan couldn’t sit there any more. He stood up, angry, confused.
‘So are you saying they can take Tom away, or not?’
‘No.’ Emmet Brady stopped again. He smiled. ‘I’m not saying that.’
‘So what do I do?’
‘How far are you accommodating Father Carey now?’
‘Well, Tom starts at Kilranelagh Cross National School next week.’ Stefan found he was walking up and down beside the old man. ‘That’s what Carey wanted before. We’ll make sure he never misses Mass on Sunday. I’ll teach him his catechism and his rosary. My mother and father will never say a word about God or religion in the house. We’ll all keep our mouths shut.’
‘It’s personal with Carey. He’s made it very obvious, Stefan.’
‘I know that.’
The solicitor stood by the window. He turned briefly, looking out. Stefan stood behind him, saying nothing. It was quiet outside now. The noise of the cattle in the street below had gone. A car drove past.
‘So would you be happy taking on the Church, Mr Brady?’
Emmet Brady turned back towards him with a combative grin.
‘Why not, it’s my fucking Church, isn’t it?’
*
A week later Stefan drove his father’s John Deere tractor the mile or so along the road into the mountains, to the low stone building next to the chapel at Kilranelagh Cross. It was Tom’s first day at school. He sat on the trailer behind Stefan, by the pile of turf they were taking to the school, to keep the fires burning in the two classrooms. The crossroads below the big, long mountain called Keadeen was a bleak place on a January morning. There was nothing much there; the chapel and the school, a farm and a holy well, and further on along the road a shop with a bar in the back room. But Scoil Naomh Téagáin, St Tegan’s School, was noisy with children starting back after Christmas now, and Tom’s nervousness was quickly swept away as he ran off into the classroom with his friend Harry Lawlor. He knew nothing about what was happening around him, only that he was suddenly going to school. Stefan and David and Helena all believed, in different ways, that the threat to Tom would pass; because to believe anything else was still impossible.
By the time Stefan had unloaded his turf into the shed at the back of the school, classes had begun. Driving back to the road he could see the desks in Tom’s classroom through the window. He saw Tom looking out, hearing the familiar noise, and waving. Then he saw Anthony Carey, stepping over the stone wall that divided the school from the chapel. The curate raised his hand in greeting; Stefan did the same. But Father Carey’s smile wasn’t a smile of reconciliation. It was a statement: don’t let yourself think this is the end. He had no intention of losing face. It wasn’t over.
Stefan didn’t go straight back to the farm. He took the road to Baltinglass, to collect cattle feed for his father. On the way he stopped at the post office to post the letter he had written to Hannah Rosen. He didn’t know where she was, but he addressed it to her father’s house as she’d asked him to. It would find her eventually. She wouldn’t like what he had to tell her. She had trusted him. He wanted to believe it was more than trust. But there was nothing he could do now. The investigation into the deaths of Susan Field and Vincent Walsh was over. The files were sitting in a Special Branch office somewhere in Dublin Castle, and he had no reason to believe they would ever be opened again. It was beyond his control, but he still couldn’t help feeling he had let her down. He knew how much it would matter to her. He wondered if it mattered as much to her as it did to him that they would never see each other again. He couldn’t know. And even if it did, it didn’t change anything. The case was finished. It was no use pretending otherwise.
PART TWO
Free City
Mr Seán Lester, the League of Nations High Commissioner of Danzig, was publicly insulted yesterday by Herr Greiser, President of the Senate, who threatened that Mr Lester might be forced to leave the city. Mud was thrown at the Commissioner’s car by a crowd of people as he drove through the city. Feeling in Danzig is running very high. The Diet was dissolved at the beginning of February, and new elections have been fixed for April 7th. At the last elections in May, 1933, the Nazis gained 38 seats out of 72, and thus had a small majority. They now aim at eliminating the Opposition altogether. Mr Lester, who has the task of holding the balance between the rivals, has apparently been suspected of partiality.
The Irish Times
13. Oliva Cathedral
Danzig, April 1935
Hannah Rosen arrived in Trieste on the train from Milan. After Venice it followed the Adriatic south, running beside the sea all through a long afternoon as it finally approached the port. It was April and it was already hot. She knew people here. In the Via del Monte, where the city started to wind up the hillside overlooking the Gulf of Trieste, was the headquarters of the Jewish Agency. It was there for the thousands of men, women and children who came every year to take the boats to Jaffa and Haifa to start a new life. Less than twenty years ago, Trieste had been the main port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it was still the funnel into the Mediterranean for most of Central Europe. Few of the Jews who travelled to Trieste had much in common with the young socialists and communists who staffed the Jewish Agency office; they were simply people who believed that keeping your head down wasn’t going to be enough. They were running from what was to come, and they were no more than a drop in Europe’s Jewish ocean.
Hannah’s job was over. In Leeds, in London, in Manchester, in Bournemouth, in Lyons, Paris, Amsterdam, Milan – she had done what she had been sent to do. They weren’t large sums of money. No one ever said that now it was for guns, not tractors, but people had stepped back. Not everyone was so sure about guns. Yet the money still had to be moved, in cheques, money orders, bonds; it still had to reach its destination in ways the British government and the Palestine Mandate Police could not trace.
Leaving the Stazione Centrale, she didn’t head for the centre of Trieste and the Via del Monte. She turned left and walked the few hundred yards to the harbour. At the offices of the Adriatica Line she rebooked her next day’s passage to Haifa on the SS Marco Polo for a fortnight’s time. Then she turned her back on the Adriatic Sea and returned to the railway station. Just before seven that evening she was sitting in a compartment on the sleeper to Vienna, heading for the Free City of Danzig, at the other end of Europe, via Vienna, Prague and Warsaw, a route that would avoid her going through Germany. It was the only precaution she felt she needed to take.
From Trieste she shared her sleeper with a woman who spoke a little English. Hannah’s German wasn’t good, and it was coloured in ways she had been unaware of by the Yiddish her grandparents had spoken. She was surprised how easily it identified her. The woman was from Vienna, middle-aged, well-dressed and Jewish, and perceptive enough to know immediately that Hannah was Jewish too, despite the name she was travelling under, Anna Harvey. The conversation slipped from English into German and back again, but once the woman was in full flight she just kept talking; all Hannah had to do was listen to her, or at least pretend to. The woman didn’t make any real distinctions between England and Ireland, and if there were any she wasn’t interested in them. From Vienna it looked like the same place. She did think the English should keep out of European politics though. They had the rest of the world to make trouble in. As for the Nazis, she told Hannah everyone made too much of a commotion about them. The Germans had always beaten up Jews; in Vienna anti-Semitism was a fact of political life. It came and went, loud and soft, and in between people got on with their lives. Adolf Hitler was an Austrian, that’s all you needed to know. It was second nature to him to use anti-Semitism to get to power, but now that the reality of government had dawned, things would calm down; people would have to get on with their lives. It would be business as usual
. It always was. As for the Jews who made too much fuss about all that, they didn’t help anybody – socialists, communists, liberals, Zionists, they should shut up. Now it was all very loud; soon it would be quieter again. If you shut up it always was.
The next day, on the train from Vienna to Warsaw, she sat in the dining car some of the way with an elderly couple from Czechoslovakia, though as Germans born in the Sudetenland they didn’t consider their country to be a country at all; they belonged in Germany. They didn’t like politics; politics was what was wrong with Europe. They certainly didn’t like everything Adolf Hitler did. He was too vulgar by half. He had saved Germany from socialism, that was undeniable, but the old man wasn’t sure he was good for business. They were delighted to discover Hannah was Irish. They had visited Ireland thirty years ago when the man had gone to England on business. As they talked about Dublin before Hannah was born it was like listening to her father and mother. They made her smile, a sweet couple, still very much in love in their seventies. At one point, the old man took his wife’s hand, telling the story of how they’d met, and he held it tenderly for half an hour. They were good company at first, and that part of the journey went quickly. Then in Katowice, in Poland, a Jewish man in the dark clothes of orthodoxy asked if he could borrow the old man’s Austrian newspaper. It was passed across with a polite smile, and the conversation about Ireland continued. The Jew returned the newspaper when he got off at Cze˛stochowa. The old man shook his head sadly. The Jews had a lot to answer for. Politics was what was wrong with Europe and the Jews were the ones who controlled politics, the way they controlled everything. Hadn’t they started the war that destroyed Austria and brought Germany to its knees? Hadn’t they turned Russia into an atheistic wasteland? They were everywhere. You couldn’t move for them in Poland. She was lucky to live in Ireland, in a country without Jews. No, they didn’t like everything Adolf Hitler did, but he was right about the Jews. As they left the train at Warsaw, the old lady kissed Hannah and told her how much she reminded her of her daughter.
The City of Shadows Page 20