Passport to Peril

by Lawrence Block

  “I’ll probably be traveling by bus,” she said. “I’ll just go from one town to the next and see what develops. What singers and songs I can unearth. I want to fill as many tapes as I possibly can.”

  “It’s a fine country for it.”

  “So I understand.”

  “The ballad is a rich Irish tradition. To this day we have traveling balladeers, you know, men who go to the horse shows and the hurling matches and travel the whole course of the country making up songs about current events. They don’t fulfill the function they once did, back in the days when ballads were the newspapers and radios of the common man, but they still exist.”

  “I know. And are there still Gypsies? I’ve read about them…”

  “Gypsies? Oh, you mean the Irish Gypsies? The traveling people?”

  “Yes.”

  “You still find them in the south and west, though not as many as there were in the past. They’re not true Romany Gypsies, you know. They’re Irish families who took to the roads when Cromwell’s men evicted them from the land in the seventeenth century. You’ll see them, with their pretty cylindrical wagons and their horses. Tinkers, we call them. Good at mending pots and pans, and good at emptying a jar of poteen. If you can meet them, you’ll learn songs that have never found their way into songbooks.”

  “And do you think I could meet them?”

  “It’s a friendly country. You can meet anyone you’ve a mind to meet, Ellen.”

  They were still talking when the plane completed its passage over the Irish Sea and broke through the clouds for the descent to Dublin Airport. She looked out the window at the country spread out below and almost gasped at the vivid green of it. The ground was cut up by little fences into brilliant patches of green that were almost unreal in the intensity of their coloration.

  “Now I understand,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I knew it was green. I knew that was why they called it the Emerald Isle. All of that. But I never realized it looked like this.”

  He was craning his neck for a peek at his homeland. “Ireland,” he said softly. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  The plane landed smoothly and taxied to a stop. The stewardess made another speech, this time welcoming them to Ireland, and repeated herself in Gaelic. Father Farrell helped Ellen get her tape recorder from the overhead luggage rack, then followed her off the plane. The sun shone brightly from between the clouds overhead, and at the same time a gentle rain, scarcely more than a mist, was falling.

  “Now I know that I’m home,” he said. “It takes an Irish rain to make me certain of it. It always rains in Ireland, you know. Not even the sun can stop it. In Tanzania it was either hot and dry, or else the heavens opened up in a cloudburst. Here it always rains but never pours. You never drown and you’re never dry.”

  In the airport, they queued up to wait for their luggage. Her suitcase turned up quickly, but when the last of the carts of luggage was brought in she still could not find her guitar.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t left in London.”

  “I’m sure they’ll find it.”

  “Oh, I suppose I could buy another if I have to, but I don’t—oh, I hope…”

  The priest laid a hand on her shoulder. “Now isn’t this a fine way to welcome you to Ireland?” He took her arm. “Just let me make it a bit easier for you, my child. Let me have your passport and luggage checks, will you? And then you take yourself over to the counter there for a cup of hot tea, and by the time you’ve finished it I’ll have your guitar for you. Just you relax and let me take care of everything for you.”

  She handed over her passport and luggage checks, then let him lead her to a lunch counter. She ordered two cups of tea, set one aside for Father Farrell, and added milk and sugar to her own. The tea was strong and rich, and she sat sipping it and wondering what could have happened to her guitar. What would she do if they couldn’t find it? She had had the same guitar for almost four years, had paid almost a hundred dollars for it in a Third Avenue pawn shop, and had felt lucky to get it for that price. How could she replace it? And how could she possibly perform at Berlin with an inferior, unfamiliar instrument?

  She had just about managed to get herself profoundly worked up over the matter, when the priest appeared, his own suitcase in one hand, her guitar in the other. She let out a great sigh of relief, then found herself laughing at her own discomfiture.

  “You see?” he told her. “No problem at all. They were afraid it might be damaged in the regular luggage compartment, so they had it riding right up with us in the passenger area. It was probably no more than a few feet from us throughout the trip. Open the case, why don’t you, and make sure that it’s in good condition.”

  She unsnapped the case and took out the guitar. The fingers of her left hand automatically positioned themselves on the strings, and she strummed a few chords. “Out of tune,” she said, “but that’s nothing new. Close enough for folk music, anyway. That’s a joke among folk singers.”

  “Not as private a joke as you might imagine. When the organ is a shade out of tune, we say it’s close enough for the six o’clock mass.”

  “Really? I never heard that.”

  “And I never heard your version, but perhaps one private world is much like another. Here’s your passport, you won’t want to forget that. Oh, you ordered a cup of tea for me. That’s kind of you. You can go straight through customs now, if you wish. Or if you care to wait, I’ll make sure you get to your hotel.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I can get there without any trouble. I’ll just take a taxi.”

  “Would you like me to come with you? If there’s any trouble over your reservation, I might be able to help.”

  “I’m sure there won’t be any trouble. And I wouldn’t want to take you out of your way.”

  “I’ve plenty of time.”

  She got to her feet. “No, it’s quite all right.” She slung the guitar case over her shoulder, then picked up the tape recorder and the suitcase. “I do want to thank you,” she said earnestly. “Not just for getting my guitar for me, but for being…oh, for being so very nice. I enjoyed our conversation very much.”

  “No more than I did, I assure you.”

  “Thank you. And I…I’m sure I’ll love Ireland.”

  “I hope you do,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll see each other again. It’s a small country, you know. A tiny little island. I’ll be at home in County Clare, and I may get down to Kerry for a bit. I’ve friends and family there. We may encounter each other again before you leave.”

  “Oh, I hope so.”

  “And if not” —he smiled— “I do hope you enjoy your stay here. And I wish you all the luck in the world in Berlin.”

  Three

  As she had expected, there was no trouble about her room. The woman at The White House, slender, with a heart-shaped face and a soft Dublin brogue, led her up a flight of stairs to a spacious room with a window facing out on Amiens Street. The price was a pound a day, with breakfast included. Ellen said that the room was fine and signed the guest register in the hall downstairs. She glanced over the other entries in the old ledger. Most of the guests were English, with a few Canadians and some Irish from cities like Cork and Galway. She was the first American to stay at The White House in almost three months.

  She went to her room, unpacked, and took her guitar from its case. She struck a few chords, then went through the laborious process of tuning the instrument by ear. In the course of this her high E-string broke, and she had to replace it. Fortunately she had half a dozen spares for each of the six strings of the guitar. She had heard enough horror stories of performers stranded in out-of-the-way spots with a broken guitar string, and she was not likely to forget to carry a spare. A blues singer had told her of one such time, a nightclub date in East St. Louis. His G-string broke, and he replaced it, and the replacement snapped while he was tuning up. “And every store in to
wn closed, and I didn’t know another guitar player within fifty miles.” He had wound up playing the entire evening with five strings on the guitar.

  “Ellen,” he had told her, “I was about as good without that G-string as a stripper would have been. Everybody in the place got too drunk to know whether I was good or not, but I was stone sober, and I heard everything I played, and you better believe it was bad.” So she had brought plenty of spares. She might make her raincoat double in brass as a bathrobe, and she might make do with only two purses and two dresses and three skirt-and-sweater combinations, but her guitar was going to stay in good shape.

  She replaced the broken string, tuned it, kicked off her shoes, sat on the very soft bed, and began to play. She closed her eyes and let her fingers work on the strings without consciously selecting a tune. She had been playing the guitar for almost ten years, and for almost half that time the instrument had functioned as an extension of her own self. She had heard all the jokes about folk musicians who took their instruments to bed with them, about musicians who felt literally naked when they left their guitars or banjos at home, and she knew now that the jokes had a very real truth to them. She did feel incomplete without the guitar. It was a part of her, one of her private voices, and the thought of losing it at the airport, of being forcibly parted from it, had held an almost surgical terror for her.

  Her fingers picked out chords and melodies. She did not select songs consciously but sat with her eyes closed and let the guitar speak for her. She was in Dublin, and she thought about the songs that had come out of Dublin, songs of the Easter Rising of 1916, songs of an earlier rising in Dublin, when a Dublin boy named Robert Emmet tried to start an insurrection in 1803, just five years after the glorious rebellion of ’98. Spies and informers infiltrated his movement, and the British let it gather just enough momentum so that they could have an excuse to crush it once and for all, and hang Emmet in the bargain.

  She remembered his speech from the dock. “I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world; it is the charity of silence. Let no man write my epitaph, for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice nor ignorance disperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times and other men do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not until then, let my epitaph be written. I have done!”

  And her fingers found the right notes, and she sang.

  The battle is over, the boys are defeated

  Old Ireland’s surrounded with sadness and gloom

  We were defeated and shamefully treated

  And I, Robert Emmet, awaiting my doom

  Hanged, drawn, and quartered, sure that was my sentence

  But soon I will show them no coward am I

  My crime was the love of the land I was born in

  A hero I lived—and a hero I’ll die…

  Later she changed her shoes and went downstairs for a walk and a bite of lunch. The woman with the heart-shaped face was dusting the tables in the parlor. “I heard you singing ‘Robert Emmet,’” she said shyly. “I did not know that they knew our old songs in America.”

  “I know a few of them. I hope I didn’t disturb you…”

  “Surely you did not. And how would a song so sweetly sung disturb a person? He was a Dublin boy, Robert Emmet was. It was in Thomas Street that he rallied his men and in Thomas Street that they hanged him, and you could walk from here to there in half an hour. My father used to sing that very song, him and my uncles. And ‘Kevin Barry,’ but of course you know that one, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And doesn’t everyone know ‘Kevin Barry’? There was a time you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing it, unless it was the BBC you were listening to. Not likely you’d hear it there!” She laughed. “And the song for Sean Treacy? Him it was who fired the first shots of the Troubles, him and Dan Breen, and then rescued his friend Sean Hogan at the railroad station of Knocklong. Sean Hogan was taken by the Auxiliaries, and Sean Treacy took him right from the train, out from under their eyes. Tipperary boys they were, all of them, but Sean Treacy was shot down in the streets of Dublin, shot dead by the Tans, and not far from this very house, either. Do you know the song?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, if I had half a voice I would sing it for you.”

  “I’d love to learn it.”

  “Oh, but I’m no singer. I’ve an agreement with the Clancy Brothers, don’t you know. They don’t rent out rooms and I don’t sing songs, and it’s a sight better for everyone that way.”

  “Could you teach me the song?”

  “You’ll be laughing at my voice.”

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t. Let me get my tape recorder so that I don’t miss any of it. Please?”

  “You wouldn’t be sending me up, would you?”

  “No, I mean it.”

  “Well…”

  Ellen hurried to her room, got her tape recorder, and threaded a roll of tape onto the spool. She brought it downstairs and sat in the parlor, and the woman put down her dust cloth and perched on the edge of a massive armchair with a timid smile on her lips. She led into the old ballad gradually, talking of Sean Treacy and just where he had been killed and by whom. When she finally worked into the song itself she sang it beautifully. Her voice was thin, and she missed occasional high notes, but the tune carried sweet and clear, and the words were delivered with an air of conviction that brought the spirit of the Black and Tan days sharply into focus. The woman sang as she spoke, in a soft and gentle Dublin accent that was as far removed from the tones of the rest of Ireland as it was from the stage-Irish brogue of a Barry Fitzgerald movie.

  Ellen sat very still, absorbed in the song, caught up in the dying lament of Sean Treacy for “Tipperary so far away.” This was an extraordinary country, she thought, where a woman could sing for the pure joy of singing, where patriotism came from the heart rather than being summoned up perfunctorily at American Legion clambakes and Fourth of July picnics.

  “That was beautiful,” she said when the song had ended. “That was truly beautiful.”

  “Oh, now.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Ah, you must have been to Blarney Castle on your way to Dublin. And listen to me singing with a whole house to clean! But if it’s songs you want, you’ll find them in Ireland. Though there’s few who’ll sing them as sweetly as you.”

  Back in her room, Ellen put the tape recorder away, then took up the guitar for a moment and picked out the melody line of “Sean Treacy.” She would learn the words later, from the tape. It wasn’t a song she expected to sing often. It was more a man’s song and less the sort of thing she could put over effectively, and she did not expect to record it. But she might sing it now and then in concert, and she would certainly enjoy learning it and singing it herself.

  Reluctantly, she returned the guitar to the case and walked down the stairs and out of the house. It was still raining, but not heavily enough to make her want her raincoat. She walked on Amiens Street as far as Talbot Street, then turned right and walked half a block to a small café. She had fish and chips and a pot of strong tea. The fish was whiting, very fresh and fried to a turn. She finished it all and drank two cups of tea, and when she left the café the sun was shining and the rain had halted.

  She spent the afternoon walking until her feet ached. She began on O’Connell Street, the main artery of Dublin, and stood for a moment in front of the General Post Office where Padraig Pearse proclaimed the Irish Republic on Easter Monday in 1916. She walked on, past old hotels and new office buildings, airline ticket offices and travel bureaus, shops and cinemas and restaurants. She paused in the middle of the O’Connell Street Bridge—the bridge was wider than it was long—and watched the gulls sweeping over the Liffey. She walked on the quays along the southern bank of the Liffey, looked in the windows of antique shops, passed workmen’s pubs
where laborers sat with their pints of stout. She found Christ Church Cathedral, thinking at first that it was where Jonathan Swift had presided for so many years, then remembering that he had been Dean of St. Patrick’s instead. But she entered the cathedral anyway and stood at the tomb of Strongbow, the Norman earl who had led the first English invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century.

  The cathedral was empty. She stood quite alone by Strongbow’s tomb and looked from it to the altar and back again. Not even in London, at the Tower or at the Abbey, had she felt herself so forcibly gripped by the presence of History. The bones of great men, she thought.

  She walked for hours. Now and again it would begin raining. Then the rain would cease, only to resume again before long. She walked on through it, oblivious to it. She had bought a small tourist’s map of Dublin, and from time to time she would dig it out of her purse and try to figure out where she was and what landmark she could search out next. But each time she quickly let herself get lost, wandering down whatever old street appealed to her, trying to immerse herself entirely in the city. It was as though she were trying to swallow the city whole, to gulp it all down at once and digest it at her leisure.

  She passed St. Stephen’s Green and the fine shops on Dawson and Molesworth Streets. She walked through the gates and onto the campus of Trinity College. She passed a few minutes in the Long Room of the library, saw the busts of a hundred great men, glanced hurriedly at The Book of Kells and other ancient illuminated manuscripts, magnificently detailed volumes dating from the eighth and ninth centuries. Christianity had come to Ireland long before it took root in the rest of the British Isles, and with its coming the Irish had grown as a nation of saints and scholars, missionaries to the whole of Europe. She thought of St. Patrick and St. Columba and of the song that boasted the Irish claim to a civilization older than England’s.