Passport to Peril

by Lawrence Block

  “Are you all right now?”

  She looked up into the face of the man who had been gazing across the bar at her earlier in the evening. He held her wrists gently, and his eyes met hers. “How do you feel? Not sick, are you?”

  “Noooo, I’m not sick.” She peered owlishly at him. “I think,” she said very seriously, “that I think I drank I think too much. Stout. Too much stout.”

  She heard an odd sound, like the tinkling of many bells, and then realized with a start that it was her own laughter she heard. Oh, this is so silly! she thought, and she said, “Oh, this is so silllllly!” and exploded into laughter again.

  “I’d better get you out into the fresh air,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Some air will be good for you.”

  “Okay.”

  He straightened up and helped her to her feet. She maintained her balance for a moment, then sagged helplessly against him. “This is so silly,” she said. “Oh, wait a minute, we forgot the guitar.”

  “Sean took it.”

  “Who’s Sean?”

  “The boy who brought the guitar.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I think I remember now. I learned a song today about Sean Treacy, except I didn’t learn it yet. It’s on the tape recorder. On tape. Scotch tape. Irish tape. It’s on my Irish tape recorder. When Irish tape recorders are smiling. I don’t know you, sir.”

  “I’m David Clare.”

  “That’s where the priest came from. Clare, I mean. County Clare. Imagine if he came from County David. You were looking at me before. I saw you.”

  “Oh, was I?”

  “Uh-huh. Oh, goodness, I’m sure there weren’t so many steps on the way up. You won’t let me fall, will you?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. County David Clare will protect me from falling. Good evening, Mr. Clare, I’m Ellen Cameron. I’m Miss Cameron and I have the voice of an angel nightingale. I didn’t even like that stout when I first tried it, but with you looking at me I couldn’t just sit there, I had to do something. Imagine if I liked it. Oh, it’s raining again. It always rains. It’s the most wonderful city in the world but it always rains.”

  He was laughing. “I think we’d best walk a bit, and then get you something to eat.”

  “I didn’t have dinner.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. There wasn’t time.” She walked at his side, breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the fresh, moist air. Her head was clearer now. “I went to the Abbey, and I was going to have dinner afterward but I came here instead.”

  “You must be starving.”

  She hadn’t been until he mentioned it, but now she was. “No wonder the stout made such an impression on you. You were drinking on an empty stomach. Have you had stout before?”

  “No.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “Not at first.”

  “It grows on you, doesn’t it? There’s a café on the next block that should still be open. We’ll get you a couple of lamb chops and some potatoes.”

  “And no stout,” she said.

  They were alone in the café except for the sleepy-eyed waitress and an old man who sat reading the Irish Press and nursing a cup of tepid tea. She had two lamb chops and two rashers of bacon and a plateful of chips and a cup of fairly good coffee. The food helped. When they left she was still lightheaded, but her stomach had settled down and the world no longer dipped and swayed before her eyes. She felt grand but very tired, and he read her mind to say, “I’d better get you home. Where are you staying?”

  “The White House. It’s on Amiens Street—in Amiens Street, I mean. That’s how you say it here, isn’t it? Are you from County Clare, sir? Or are you a Dublin lad? Am I a Dublin girl?” She held his arm and peered up at him. “I think,” she said, “that the stout hasn’t entirely worn off.”

  “I suspect you’re right.”

  “But you didn’t tell me. Are you from Dublin?”

  He hailed a taxi, helped her into it, and took a seat beside her. He gave the driver her address and lit two cigarettes, passing one of them to her. “Sure, and can’t you tell me birthplace by me brogue? And isn’t it in the pure tones of the west that you hear me speaking to ye?”

  “What part of the west?”

  “County Galway it is,” he said, “and the little town of Ballyglunnin that’s me birthplace, and doesn’t me sainted mother live there to this day. And doesn’t she every day wrap her shawleen about her and go to the ould bog to cut turf for the fire, for to take the damp from her poor ould bones.”

  He went on, and she thought that his brogue had not been nearly so strong before, or perhaps she hadn’t noticed it, but now it was hard to understand him, and some of the words he spoke were not ones that she knew. And then, as the taxi turned on Amiens Street just a block from her hotel, she looked at him and caught the light in his eyes and the way his lip was struggling to keep from curling in a grin.

  “You,” she said carefully, “are putting me on.”

  “Sure, and ye’ve found me out.”

  “You’re not from County Galway at all.”

  “Sure, and where’s the harm to a body if a lad has a bit of innocent sport with a pretty—”

  “You’re not even Irish.”

  He grinned at her. “Well, that’s not entirely true,” he said, speaking all at once in an accent straight from the Eastern Seaboard. “My father’s Philadelphia Irish. Blood will tell, you know.”

  “You fooled me.”

  “I can put on a fair brogue. I’ve been here long enough.”

  “If I were entirely sober,” she said, “you wouldn’t have fooled me.”

  The taxi drew up in front of The White House. “This,” David Clare said, “is where you get off. And this is where I pick you up tomorrow morning. How’s ten o’clock?”

  “But…I don’t—”

  “And hurry inside and get to bed. It’s raining, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “But who are you? I don’t understand. I—”

  “Ten o’clock,” he said. “Wear comfortable shoes. I will come prepared to Tell All. Good night, Ellen Cameron.”

  He spoke to the driver, and the taxi moved away from the curb. She stood for a moment watching it until it turned a corner and disappeared from view.

  Five

  He was as good as his word. At ten o’clock, as she sat in her room studying her map of the city, basking in the afterglow of a deep sleep and a lavish breakfast, there was a knock on her door.

  “A gentleman to see you, Miss Cameron. He’s waiting in the parlor for you.”

  She had not truly expected him to come. She went downstairs, and he got to his feet and crossed the room to meet her. He held a cloth cap in both hands and stood before her with his head lowered like a servant.

  “Your personal guide ready to show you all of Dublin, mum,” he said. “But sad to say me limousine’s broke down, and it’s on foot that we’ll be after walkin’.”

  They walked all over the city, and by noon she was certain she would need to buy a new pair of shoes before she left Dublin. He took her to some of the places she had seen the day before, but he showed them to her in a new light. They walked through Trinity College together, where he was pursuing a master’s degree in history.

  “Pursuing it at a leisurely pace,” he added. “I’ve been here two years already, and it’ll be another year before I finish my thesis.”

  “Does it usually take that long?”

  “No,” he admitted. “But I’m in no hurry to get the degree itself. It’s just a piece of paper, when you come right down to it, and I’m more interested in learning the things I want to learn than in getting my studies finished. I’m on a teaching fellowship, and living’s cheap over here, so money’s not a problem.”

  He took her once again through the Long Room of the library. Before, the old manuscripts had been breathtaking; now, with his knowledge and enthusiasm bringing them to life for her, they
took on far greater fascination. Together they bent over a gleaming glass case to examine a page of The Book of Armagh, written by the monk Ferdomnach in the early ninth century. “The man spent a lifetime copying this manuscript,” he told her. “It’s hard to imagine such an investment of time in an age when we run off a million copies of a book in a matter of days. But how many of us manage to spend our lives creating anything as important as this?”

  Later, as they left the college and walked past the building that had housed Ireland’s first parliament, he talked more about himself. He had just finished his summer courses, he explained, and would not be attending classes again until January. His advisor had approved a leave of absence until then, and he planned to spend the time learning the Irish language.

  “Do you have to know it for your research?”

  “Well, it certainly won’t hurt,” he said, “but I’m sure I could get along well enough without it. If my particular area of study were the old Celtic times, then a knowledge of Irish might be necessary. But most of the records of the Rebellion of Ninety-eight are in English, or else available in English translation.”

  “Is that your subject?”

  He nodded. “It’s a funny thing about Irish history. It’s nothing but a record of unsuccessful rebellions from the Norman invasion clear up to the present century. The British kept planting the country with fresh settlers, and within a generation the new arrivals became Irish and rose up against England. The Rebellion of 1798 was the rising that struck the most responsive chord with me, and so I decided to go into it in more detail. You probably know some of the songs that came out of it.”

  “A few. Not as many as I’d like to know.”

  “I could teach you some, if only I could sing decently.”

  “Oh, will you?”

  “You know what my voice is like.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Don’t you be silly. I can’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  They walked on, and he talked about his plans to learn the language. “They have classes in Irish. They’ve been trying to encourage study of the old language since the turn of the century, but not too many of the young people have much enthusiasm for it. But I won’t be going to classes.”

  Instead, he explained, he would be spending the next few months far in the west of Ireland, in the Connemara region of County Galway. This was one of the areas that comprised the Gaeltacht, the general name for regions where the original Gaelic tongue was still spoken by the inhabitants as the language of everyday life. By living among the people, by meeting with them in the markets and at the pubs, he hoped to learn Irish as a spoken, living language, not as one would learn Latin or classical Greek.

  “But will you be able to retain the language when you go back to America?”

  “I’m not sure that I will go back.”

  “You mean you’d stay here?”

  “Why not?” He spread his arms wide, a gesture that took in the whole of Dublin and the surrounding country as well. “Why would anyone want to leave this place? Yesterday you saw it in the rain, and now you’re seeing it in the sunshine. Either way it’s the sweetest spot in the world. The people know how to live here. No one’s in a hurry, no one bustles about in a mad rush to join the Coronary Club by his fortieth birthday. Life is lived at its own pace.”

  “But could you really feel at home here?”

  “I already do,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “Look,” he said. “I’m an historian. In America an historian is someone who spends his life on a college campus teaching dull little freshmen what happened in eighteen fifteen. And publishing deadly articles in professional journals that nobody reads. And making a rotten living in the bargain. If I stay here I can spend my time doing nothing but research and writing. The cost of living is so much lower here that a man can make a comfortable living by writing an occasional book for the American market. And I’d be close to my sources here. Remember, Ellen, Irish history is my field. It’s one thing to study Michael Dwyer in the domed library of the University of Eastern Idaho or some such place. It’s another thing entirely to pack a knapsack and take a walk in the Wicklow hills where Dwyer and his men made their camp. It makes the whole thing come to life.”

  This, she thought, was certainly something she could understand. Just as the actual feel of a place transformed old books and documents into living history for him, the physical presence of Ireland made the old songs into much more than words and music in her own eyes.

  Did she herself feel at home in Ireland? She had told him that she was not sure, and now she asked herself the question again. She did not feel like a native, certainly, but neither did she feel like a stranger. And she thought of those hours spent at O’Donoghue’s the night before, perched on a stool with a borrowed guitar in her hands and a pint of stout on the bar before her and the world’s most truly appreciative audience hanging on every note she sang…

  That night he took her to the Irish Cabaret at Jury’s, an old hotel in the heart of the city. They sat at a table down front and ate Irish stew and shared a bottle of French wine.

  “The show’s strictly for tourists, of course,” he told her. “Most of the songs you’ll hear aren’t true Irish songs at all. They’re what Dubliners call Oirish. Sentimental numbers like ‘Galway Bay’ and ‘Mother Machree’ and all. They became popular with homesick Irishmen in America, and of course, the American tourists expect to hear them when they come back to the ould sod. But they do a good job here, and I think you’ll enjoy it. There’s a chorus of young girls who sing beautifully.”

  She sat entranced throughout the show. Even the ventriloquist with his stage-Irish dummy delighted her, and the little girls, all of them around ten or eleven years old, were an unadulterated joy with their songs and dances. They were all quite beautiful with their long black hair and pink cheeks and bright blue eyes, and it was worth the price of the evening just to look at them.

  They walked home from Jury’s. The rain had still held off. “Think of it,” he said, “a whole day without a drop of rain. Hard to believe we’re really in Dublin.” The night was glorious, cool but not chilly, the air clear and gloriously fresh and sweet in her lungs.

  “I’ll call for you tomorrow,” he said at her door. “Is ten a good time for you?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to—”

  “But I want to.”

  “I hate to take up your time. I know you have other things you have to do, and—”

  “I’m all finished with classes for the summer—remember? And my time’s my own until I get on the bus for Connemara. Until then I’m a gentleman of leisure, and I can’t think of a way I’d rather spend my leisure than with such a lovely young lady.”

  “Oh, get off with your blarney and don’t be after turning a poor girl’s head!”

  “Why, you’re learning the language, Ellen!” He smiled. “Ten o’clock?”

  “Will you sing some of those songs for me? And let me tape them?”

  “You drive a hard bargain, but I accept.”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  His hands found her shoulders, and she closed her eyes and waited for his kiss, but he did not kiss her. She went upstairs to her room and lay in bed thinking of him. Don’t be a fool, she told herself. He’s good company and an excellent guide, and after all this time he’s probably lonesome for an American girl. But he’s not in love with you, or you with him.

  She told herself this and made herself believe it, or thought she did. But all night long she tossed and turned in her sleep, and when she awoke in the morning she knew she had dreamed the night through, and that the dreams had been of David Clare.

  She had three more days in Dublin, and she passed almost all her time with David. They spent a morning in the parlor of her hotel while he sang songs into her tape recorder. His voice was as poor as he had alleged it to be, but he came close enough
to the melody so that she wound up with a fair idea of how the songs were supposed to sound. And, more important, he knew the full background of each of the songs he sang, the battles they commemorated, the lives of the heroes, the roles each had played in Ireland’s fight for freedom.

  He told her of Father John Murphy, the rebel priest of Boulavogue who rallied Wexford around him, only to be executed by the British after the final defeat at Vinegar Hill. And he sang four ballads about Murphy.

  God grant you glory, brave Father Murphy

  And open heaven to all your men

  The cause that called you may call tomorrow

  In another charge for the Green again

  In the afternoons he took her out to show her more of the city. The botanical gardens and the President’s Mansion. The Four Courts, where the 1916 insurgents held out against British guns and where, just a few years later, Michael Collins turned the new Free State’s guns upon the anti-Treaty forces of the Irish Republican Army. “No one likes to talk about the Civil War,” he told her. “It’s the country’s shame. So many successful uprisings end that way, with the Revolution devouring her own children. Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith accepted the Treaty and the Free State. De Valera and Cathal Brugha and others rejected it. And so old comrades fought each other. Cathal Brugha died right here; he took seventeen British bullets in nineteen sixteen and lived through it, and Michael Collins’s men shot him down here in nineteen twenty-two. And Collins was gunned down a few months later in an IRA ambush. The country’s not all jokes and songs and poetry. There’s a strain of sheer tragedy underneath it all.”

  One night he took her to the Abbey Tavern in Howth, a coastal suburb to the north of Dublin. He hired a car, and they drove there in the twilight. This time she brought her guitar, and although she spent most of her time listening to other singers, she did sing a few songs of her own and was as well received as the first night in O’Donoghue’s. She drank enough Guinness to get just the slightest bit high, and on the way back she sat with her head on David’s shoulder. When he drew to a stop at last in the still darkness of Amiens Street he took her in his arms and kissed her.