Passport to Peril

by Lawrence Block

  The whole memory of the mugging in London came back at her, sending shivers through her body. She held her hands in front of her and saw that her fingers were trembling.

  Ridiculous, she told herself. Of course, it was not the same man at all, and if she got a good look at him in the light, she would probably discover that this man looked nothing like the London criminal who had choked her and stolen her purse. But her reaction was at least indicative of the impression that incident had left upon her mind. She was badly shaken.

  It was ridiculous, she knew. It was not uncommon for total strangers to resemble persons whom one knew. This happened to her frequently in New York—a girl glimpsed on the street would look exactly like her college roommate, and when she ran to overtake the girl she would discover that the two looked not at all alike. And just a day ago, in Cork, she had seen a man in peasant’s clothing who had for a moment seemed the spitting image of the priest she had met on the plane to Dublin. The resemblance had so startled her that she had been on the point of hailing him, until she realized he could not possibly be Father Farrell. A priest did not suddenly put on an old tweed jacket and a battered cloth cap, any more than a London hoodlum turned up in the south of Ireland.

  She guessed that it was all a symptom of loneliness. When one was among strangers, one looked for familiar faces and invented them when they did not exist.

  She slept badly, haunted upon awakening by a formless but notably unpleasant dream. David had been in it, she knew, and Father Farrell, and her agent in New York, and the narrow-faced man from London, but just what they had all been doing in her dream was beyond recollection. She bathed and dressed and went down for breakfast, then packed her suitcase and checked out of the hotel. It was time to leave Cork, she had decided. She had to get to Tralee soon, and she did not want to spend any more time in a city that was beginning to give her unpleasant evidence of her loneliness.

  Her bus carried her to Bantry and Glengarrif, then north to Kenmare in County Kerry. She had bought a ticket straight through to Killarney, but in Kenmare she left the bus and found a room. She spent two days making side trips through the wild hills of Kerry, where the scenery had a raw and rugged splendor that made the beauties of the rest of Ireland almost pallid in comparison. The deep green of the hillsides, the stark majesty of mountains rising boldly behind deep blue lakes, the touching simplicity of tiny white cottages with thatched roofs, all made her understand why everyone throughout the whole of Ireland had assured her how much she would like Kerry.

  It was a poor county, and the years had been cruel to its people. The potato famine in the middle of the nineteenth century had devastated the countryside, reducing the population to literal starvation. Thousands had gone to their graves. Thousands more had boarded ship for America. And in the years that followed, the wars had placed new hardships upon Kerry. Some of the fiercest fighting of the Troubles and the Civil War had been waged in this county at the southwest corner of Ireland. It had always been a stronghold of Republicanism, and it boasted a record of massacres and reprisals, of homes and towns burned to the ground, of midnight ambushes and midnight arrests, of brutalities and outrages on both sides.

  All that ferocious fighting, all that record of misery, seemed out of place against the backdrop of sheer physical beauty. But at the same time she could sense bitterness and old violence lurking in the magnificence of the hills and the sweet green of the valleys.

  She sang some songs in the small towns of Kerry, and she learned more songs and put many of them on tape. She was moving close to a part of the Gaeltacht now, though it was far removed from Connemara, where David would go to learn Irish.

  The people she met spoke in a thick brogue, and she had worlds of trouble making out what some of them were saying. But gradually she learned to follow their speech. She met many persons who spoke Gaelic as often as they spoke English, and some of them sang songs for her in that tongue. She had to budget her tape very carefully to make sure she would have enough left for Tralee and Dingle.

  At last it was time, time for the festival in Tralee. She was barely looking forward to it by the time she had boarded the bus for that city. The trip so far, wholly unplanned, had been a joy. Now she was back on schedule again, with her activities quite strictly laid out and her timetable admitting little flexibility. She would be a few days in Kerry, then a few more days in Dingle, then a quick bus ride to Shannon Airport, then a plane all the way to Berlin. She hardly felt up to that last stage. Already she had bitten off more than she could chew, had swallowed more new experience than she could readily digest. The idea of taking in a whole new country was almost frightening.

  She sat on the bus, guitar and suitcase and tape recorder stowed in the overhead rack, as the bus rolled on toward Tralee.

  Seven

  Tralee was half a delight and half a nightmare and all quite different from what she had expected. Folk festivals in the main were relatively tame affairs, with the attention focused on a few hours of singing and dancing. But the Festival of Kerry turned out to be a good deal more than this. It was built around a three-day race meeting, and the men and women who had come to watch the horses would have crowded the town by themselves. Besides this there was an outdoor circus, sheep-dog trials, terrier and donkey derbies, swimming and athletic competitions, street dances, marching bands parading through the little city, and a general mood of hilarity that summoned up images of New Orleans at Mardi Gras time. The folk singing was just a small portion of the total pageantry that filled Tralee to overflowing.

  Rooms were not to be found. She had arrived without a reservation, and after she had wasted some time making the rounds of the hotels and rooming houses, a student from Edinburgh suggested she try the Festival Accommodations Committee. She went to their office, and a kindly woman arranged accommodations for her in a private home not far from the center of town. She was to pay five pounds for her room for the whole of the festival and would take breakfast with the family.

  The price was reasonable enough, but later she thought that she might almost have done without a room altogether, for all the time she spent in it. The city bustled endlessly. The streets were thronged with tens of thousands of visitors, and the town park had the air of a three-ring circus, with several events going on at a time from morning until late at night. Students from all parts of the British Isles had turned out in full force, many of them with knapsacks on their backs. They had reached Tralee by hitchhiking, and now they slept in the park or in fields on the edge of town, cutting their expenses to the bone and hurling themselves into the festival activity with a vengeance.

  Ellen was on the go for three days. Each night she crept back to her room in the small hours of the morning, careful not to wake the family with whom she was staying, and each day she left the house just after breakfast for another furious round of festival activity. The guitar, always close at hand, kept making new acquaintances for her. It stamped her as a singer, and other singers sought her out, and she spent hours in feverish conversation, swapping songs, exchanging gossip of the world of professional folk music, and making the sort of easy friendships that emerge from such hectic meetings.

  She filled all the rolls of tape she had bought in Cork, and mailed them all back to herself in New York. She sang songs around campfires on the edge of town, at a party in a house that three boys from London had leased for the season, and at the base of the 1798 monument in Denny Street near the Mall. She sang and listened and ate and drank and smoked and talked and kept going as long as the festival itself kept going, waiting with throngs in the park while the Rose of Tralee was chosen and crowned, running through the streets with the mob, caught up in a frenzy of unmotivated enthusiasm, and returning, at last, the festival over for another year, to her little room in Edward Street.

  She missed breakfast the next morning. She was exhausted and could barely drag herself out of bed. It was time to go to Dingle, she thought, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to go. Maybe she had had e
nough of folk music and festivals for the time being. Maybe she could go directly to Shannon and spend a few days in one of the lush American-style hotels near the international airport. She could well afford it, she knew; the trip so far had cost her far less than she had anticipated, and she could easily afford the luxury of a few days of lolling in an air-conditioned room and taking long baths and sleeping the day away.

  “There won’t be many of us going on to Dingle,” a Dublin singer named Rory had told her the day before. “They don’t get a tenth the crowd that Tralee does. It’s a tiny town, you know, and couldn’t take a crowd if it got one. They’ll have some singing and dancing, but I’ve had my fill of that for the time being.”

  She, too, had had her fill of it. Most of the singing in Dingle, she had heard, would be in Gaelic, which made it unlikely that she would be able to learn any new material. She would have been delighted to tape some Gaelic songs, but that seemed impossible now, since her tape was all gone and there did not seem to be any for sale in Tralee.

  No, she decided, she wouldn’t go. She was already exhausted, and the festival in Berlin would certainly be taxing. Between now and then she could use all the rest she could get. Dingle had sounded like fun when she had first planned it, but after all, it was only another little Irish town, and she had already been to a great many Irish towns, small and large, and…

  “Will you be going on to Dingle?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Sheehy,” she told her landlady. “I was thinking I might go straight to Shannon and—”

  “Ah, and I wish I had the time to go myself this year! We went last year, Dan and I.” The woman smiled at the memory. “The first night’s the most beautiful. All of us gathered at the harbor, the whole town and all of us who’d come down for the celebration. And the Rose of Tralee, she sailed up Dingle Harbor on a barge, and they touched off fireworks to greet her. Big pretty things that lighted up the whole sky. Ah, it was a beautiful thing, I tell you, and something you’ll never see elsewhere. I wish it was me that was going again.”

  Ellen walked to the bus station, carrying guitar and suitcase and the now useless tape recorder. Fireworks and a brass band, she thought; nothing that you couldn’t find in Keokuk, Iowa, on the Fourth of July. But she couldn’t brush aside the enthusiasm in Mrs. Sheehy’s voice. It gave a special glow to the description of the little town.

  Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. You don’t have to go. There’s no point to it.

  But she knew it was a lost cause. And at the little Tralee bus station she gave up the fight in good grace and bought a ticket to Dingle. If nothing else, she thought, a little seaside village might be restful. She could take her ease there as well as she could in Shannon, and no doubt at much less expense.

  And there was no getting around it—she was too responsive a traveler to force herself to take it easy. She grinned gamely as the tall, red-haired bus driver helped her up the steps of the bus and placed her luggage in the rack overhead. Already, she admitted, she was looking forward to Dingle. Already the thought of doing nothing for a few days had lost its charm. The luxury hotels of Shannon would be wasted on her, so she prepared to enjoy whatever was in store for her.

  The thirty-mile trip from Tralee to Dingle led through some of the most beautiful scenery in Ireland. The bus moved at a deliberate pace, stopping three times along the way at the little towns of Blennerville, Camp, and Aunascaul. On the first leg of the journey she had her choice between two equally splendid views. To her left were the Slieve Mish Mountains, their rough peaks shimmering in the sunlight. On the right Tralee Bay lay before her, soft and gloriously blue, with the “lonely Banna Strand,” celebrated in so many songs, stretching out beyond the scope of her vision. Sir Roger Casement had been captured there in April 1916, taken prisoner after an attempt to persuade the Germans to provide guns and troops for an Irish rising, then spirited off to England, tried, and hanged as a traitor to the Crown.

  The bus swung to the south at Camp, and before long she could see the waters of Dingle Bay on the left. The roads were circuitous now, steep and winding, with other cars appearing magically as they came around turns, and with an astonishing quantity of all sorts of animals turning up in the middle of the road. Sheep, pigs, even a pair of tethered goats, their presence giving the lie to the theory that goats would not cooperate long enough to clear a fence together. The bus moved onward, slowly but surely, somehow avoiding an accident with any of the odd creatures that cropped up in its path.

  The roads were thronged, too, by another breed entirely, pilgrims bound for Dingle town. She looked out the window to see college students with packs on their backs, some walking with determination, others standing at the side of the road, their thumbs out in the universal gesture of the hitchhiker. Even if only a small percentage of the crowd from Tralee found its way to Dingle, the little village would be hard put to house the crowd. It was still early in the day, and every time the bus passed hikers and hitchhikers she had the selfish thought that she would at least beat these people in the search for a room.

  “Dingle town,” called the driver. She looked out the front window and saw nothing resembling a town. Then the bus curved around yet another turn in the road, and she saw the little village laid out before her at the base of the hill.

  Her worries about finding a room turned out to be groundless. The first bed-and-breakfast house she tried was full, but the gentle-voiced proprietress recommended the house two doors further down on Strand Street, the main commercial street of Dingle. There Ellen found several rooms available and took a large one on the second floor just down the hall from the bathroom. She signed the register, then went to her room to unpack. On her way out of the house an older woman smiled to her and asked her if she was a folk singer.

  “Why, yes, I am,” she said, surprised. “How did you know?”

  “Not much in the way of detective work, I’m afraid.” The woman spoke in an accent Ellen had trouble placing—not Irish, certainly, but quite unlike the English and Scottish speech she had heard. “I’m staying here myself, and I was upstairs when you checked in. Saw you had a guitar, and it seemed an odd thing to carry for decoration, so I had to assume you played it. Will you be engaging in the competition?”

  “No, I haven’t registered.”

  “The actual competition’s all in Irish, I understand, though I trust there will be some songs in English. I certainly hope there will. I don’t understand Irish, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Though the sound of it is not unfamiliar. They still speak Cornish in my part of the world, and it’s another of the old Celtic tongues. I wonder if the Irish speakers can understand Cornish. Probably not, I suppose; the way these languages form dialects of their own over the centuries, you know. Oh, I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself yet, have I? I’m Sara Trevelyan, from Cornwall. The usual British schoolteacher on vacation, I’m afraid. Retired and husbandless and unutterably dull. And don’t rush to tell me that I can’t possibly be dull.”

  “I’m Ellen Cameron.”

  “Yes, I know.” Sara Trevelyan smiled. “And from New York, aren’t you? Again, no great shakes as a detective. I looked in the guest register. There’s a countryman of yours who signed in just after you, incidentally. Has a German name, if I remember correctly. Now what was it?” She wrinkled her brow in thought. “Koenig,” she said. “Doctor Robert Koenig, I think it was, and he’s from Philadelphia, which makes you almost neighbors, doesn’t it? Has a wife and two children with him. Not the most adorable children in the world, I wouldn’t say, but then perhaps I’m biased against children. Taught too many of them over the years and had none of my own, and that can rather set one against children. Not that I don’t admit the necessity of children, of course. You can’t produce people without having children as the first stage of the game.”

  Ellen laughed.

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Just as you need caterpillars in order to have butterflies. Sometimes I think the
parallel is a very close one at that. Horrid crawling things those caterpillars are, and look at the lovely, fragile creatures they become. And when I think of some of the dreary lads and lasses I taught over the years, and of their metamorphosis into rather worthwhile gentlemen and ladies, it’s hard to believe they’re all of the same species.” The Cornish woman sighed. “But I do run off at the mouth, don’t I? Perhaps I’m a little grateful to have someone to talk with. Are you anxious to get free of me? Or would you take lunch with an old woman if she promises not to talk too much?”

  “I’d be delighted.”

  “I’ve been here since last night. Came straight from Killarney. I suppose you were in Tralee?”

  “Yes.”

  “Crowded, was it?”

  “Very much so. And very active.”

  “Then I’m just as glad I missed it. I’m not that strong for crowds and fast-paced holidays. I’ll be glad for a chance to hear the singing, but I can hear it as well without all that hullabaloo going on. That’s what you call it in America, isn’t it? Hullabaloo?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you’re smiling, so I suppose I misused the colloquialism slightly, as one is apt to do. Hmmm. I was here last night, as I said. There’s a restaurant just a block from here, not fancy but rather pleasant. They do grilled meats well enough. Would you like to go there? And then I’ll promise to leave you alone for the rest of the afternoon.”

  “But I’m enjoying this very much!”