by Declan Burke
‘How much are we talking?’
‘Half a million sterling.’
‘In 1940?’
He nodded. ‘Adjusted for inflation, you’re talking about ten million’s worth now.’
I gave a low whistle. ‘So what happened?’ I said.
‘What we know for sure is the sub was sunk,’ Franco said.
‘Attacked?’
‘Probably not. What’s more likely is that it ran into rough weather, or surfaced into a storm and took a freak wave broadside. Or, what I think happened, it was deliberately wrecked.’
‘Scuttled, you mean.’
‘I mean the captain was given coordinates designed to send it aground or on to rocks.’
‘Let me get this straight. The contact here, presumably an IRA guy, double-crossed the Nazis.’
‘That’s the theory.’
It was, I supposed, possible. Or at least plausible. Other than it sounded completely ludicrous, a hoard of Nazi gold sitting on the floor of Lough Swilly, a lot of what Franco was saying backed up Gerard Smyth’s story. It also went some way to explaining Richter’s murderous rage. The guy had been on the hook for a serious chunk of gold, maybe personally responsible for its recovery, its safe passage back to Germany, once Rheingold’s cover was blown in Derry.
‘You think,’ I said, ‘Shay’s chasing this gold.’
‘What we think,’ he said, sighing so heavily I gagged on the stink of stale smoke he wafted across the table, ‘is someone else is doing the chasing, and using Shay for cover.’
Then he reached for his cup of tea. As he did so, Emily sat forward, handing me the phone. I thought she was fed up with the Arabian Nights, and looking for a new story, or some music, but she was showing me a text message on the screen. It was from Martin.
I’m in Rathmullan. Where you?
He must have left as soon as we’d spoken and burned it up, no traffic on the roads that early on a Sunday morning. I texted back:
Belle’s Kitchen cafe. Wait outside. Be there in five.
I gave the phone back to Emily. ‘Problem?’ Franco said.
‘No problem. So who’s using Shay? Carol Devereaux?’
He glanced down at the phone again, gave it a half-beat, then decided to let it go. ‘Break it down,’ he said. ‘Why’s Shay on Delphi right now?’
‘He wants to invest, develop this gold mine he’s talking up.’
‘Right. So where’s the seam?’
‘They’re not sure.’ I was starting to see it. ‘But they think, yeah, it could be on the sea floor, running northwest.’
‘Correct. And say they strike it lucky, start pulling up raw chunks of gold. What are they going to need on site?’
‘A smelter.’
‘There you go.’
A neat trick, if true. Shay throws up a smokescreen about investing in a gold mine and then goes after the sunken sub, pulls up the bricks and melts them down, presents the results as raw ore.
‘Sounds like a plan,’ I said, ‘except for one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I’ve met Shay, we’ve talked. He doesn’t sound mentally defective to me.’
‘Why would he need to be defective?’
‘Because he’d never get away with it. There’s no way you could hide that kind of activity. A con like that, someone would be bound to spot something’s off.’
‘Would they?’
‘Bound to.’
‘One of the islanders, you mean.’
‘Sure.’
‘Not necessarily. I mean, a gold mine is a pretty dangerous place for anyone who isn’t supposed to be there. So they’ll make sure it’s only accessible to designated personnel and so forth.’
‘OK, but people talk.’
‘Some people like to talk, sure.’
‘So it’d get out.’
‘Would it?’
‘It always does.’
‘Not necessarily. I mean, not everyone would know. Just the people who need to. And Delphi isn’t a very big island, Tom. There isn’t a huge population over there, a couple of hundred at most. It might be easier than you think to keep a secret. Especially if whatever was coming up was, as they say, being reinvested in the local economy.’
I laughed, but there wasn’t so much as a flicker in those grey eyes.
‘You’re serious,’ I said.
‘Shay’s on Delphi right now,’ he said. ‘He’s already gone public with the news about prospecting in Lough Swilly. And I know, because he’s told me, that he’s trying to track down a guy who was on that submarine. So yeah, I’m serious. Because someone needs to be.’
‘So you’ve talked to Shay about all this.’
‘There’s no talking to him, Tom. His mind’s made up. He doesn’t seem to realize that if this gets out, just a whisper, then people are going to start asking questions. As in, why was he involved in the massacre? What did he get out of it? How come Shay arrived in the States with no arse in his trousers, like he says himself, and suddenly he’s a millionaire? Next thing you know accounts are being frozen, assets seized.’
I took that all in while I sipped my coffee. If I read him right, Franco was suggesting that Shay Govern had bolted for the States with a stash of Nazi gold, a little start-up capital. Which was why, maybe, he was looking to clear his conscience with the book he’d commissioned, Sebastian Devereaux’s story with a little segue into a sordid tale about kids burning to death in a church.
‘Has he paid you yet?’ Franco said. ‘For this book you’re writing.’
‘An advance, yeah.’
‘But probably not in cash.’
‘A cheque.’ A post-dated cheque at that.
‘Right.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, we’ll honour it, Tom. Can’t say we’ll stump up for everything he’s promised you, but if he signed a cheque then we’ll see you right for that.’
‘This is presuming Shay doesn’t come through himself.’
‘And also presuming that you come through for us.’
‘How so?’
‘He’s talking to you, Tom. Telling you about the massacre. So all you have to do is keep listening.’
‘And then report back to you.’
‘Tom, no one will be happier than me if we’re wrong. You can trust me on that. But if we’re right about the submarine, and why Shay’s planning a gold mine on Delphi, then Shay needs protecting from himself.’
It sounded to me like a win-win scenario. If Franco was wrong, I’d be working on a hell of a book and getting paid handsomely to do it. If he was right, and the family pulled the plug on Shay’s crazy scheme to smelt down Nazi gold, then I was getting paid to listen to Shay’s ramblings. And by then I’d have signed the contract, which I figured the family would be happier to honour rather than have its breach contested in court, the details leak out.
A grubby way to make a living, maybe, but my living well involved spending as much time as I could with Emily, and I had a custody hearing coming up fast, and a position of financial responsibility to establish.
Emily took out one of her buds and tugged at my sleeve. ‘Daddy? I’m bored.’
‘I know, hon. Two more minutes and then we’re done.’
I waited until she was plugged in again, then said, ‘OK.’
Franco nodded. ‘Delighted to hear it,’ he said.
There was just one thing I needed to know. ‘Gerard Smyth,’ I said.
The grey eyes watched mine. He didn’t so much as blink. ‘Who’s Gerard Smyth?’
‘You said Shay’s trying to track down a guy who was on the submarine. He hired a man I know, and he’s found him. Gerard Smyth.’
‘And this Smyth found the guy.’
‘It’s the other way round. Smyth is the guy from the sub.’
‘He doesn’t sound very German to me.’
‘That’s his name now. He’s naturalized here in Ireland since way back.’
‘Right. So who found him?’
‘Jack Byrne. He used to be
a cop but he works private security now, surveillance gigs. Sometimes he does investigative work.’
‘You know him?’
‘We’ve worked together a couple of times.’
‘Would you trust him?’
‘Jack? Christ, no.’
‘So he could be feeding Shay any old shit.’
‘He hasn’t told Shay anything.’
‘I don’t get it, Tom.’
‘Jack came to me. Heard I was writing a book with Shay. He reckoned he had some dirt on Shay that might be worth a squeeze, wanted me to play along.’
‘Fuck.’ He winced then, glanced across at Emily and lowered his voice. ‘So what did you tell him?’
‘I told him he’d need to get his skates on, because Shay’s telling the story himself, in this book.’
‘What’d he say to that?’
‘Not much. I haven’t heard from him since yesterday morning.’
‘Shit-shit-shit. So now he’s gone to ground and we don’t know what this guy Smyth is saying.’
‘Yeah, well, there’s good and bad news there.’
‘What?’
‘The good news is, he brought me to see Smyth, so I could hear his story.’
‘And?’
‘This is an eye-witness account, OK?’ He nodded. ‘Well, Smyth says nothing about any gold on the submarine. I mean, he seems to know everything else, the spies, the massacre, the works. But no gold.’
‘That’s not necessarily bad news, Tom.’
‘Except that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that Smyth drowned in a canal on Friday night, and—’
‘He’s dead?’
‘He is, yeah, and the cops believe it was deliberate. Or that there’s a strong chance it was …’
‘The cops are involved?’
‘They certainly are. And because I was talking with Smyth on Friday evening, I’m what they’re calling a person of interest.’
‘You’re a suspect?’
‘I’m helping them with their enquiries. Or supposed to be.’
‘Fuck.’ This time he didn’t wince or glance at Emily. He said, slowly, ‘On the basis that you’re probably not the guy who put this Smyth in the canal, who did?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘This Jack Byrne guy?’
‘No reason why he would. Smyth was Jack’s way of squeezing Shay. But listen, Franco – Smyth gave me his testimony, a typed manuscript, which was lifted from my apartment some time yesterday morning by people good enough to leave no trace of themselves. No signs of a break-in, nothing.’
‘Christ, it’s a nightmare.’
‘It’s worse. According to Smyth, he’d been on to the British and German embassies about this alleged massacre in 1940. A couple of months back, he got a visit from some guys telling him to keep his voice down, an official investigation was pending. The way Smyth tells it, they were spooks.’
Franco leaned in low across the table. ‘Spooks?’
‘That’s what he believed.’
I was expecting some spectacular collision of profanity and blasphemy but Franco, for once, was left speechless. Eventually he said, ‘So this manuscript, Smyth’s testimony – who’s seen it?’
‘Me and Gerard Smyth for sure, and whoever stole it from my apartment. And then …’
‘Who?’
I’d been about to mention Martin, but there didn’t seem to be any point in dragging him any further into the mess than he’d already volunteered for.
‘I don’t know how much Smyth said about the massacre when he contacted those embassies,’ I said. ‘For all I know he could have posted them copies of his script.’
‘You think he might have?’
‘I really couldn’t say.’
He sat back and ran a hand across his buzz-cut skull. ‘How much does Shay know?’
‘Last I talked with him was yesterday morning, to let him know Jack Byrne had found Smyth, was planning to squeeze him about the massacre. It was later on that the manuscript was stolen, and then I heard Smyth had drowned.’
‘So Shay knows nothing about all this.’
‘He hasn’t heard it from me.’
He thought it over, the tips of his fingers drumming a soft tattoo on the edge of the table. He said, ‘Do the cops know Shay hired this Jack Byrne?’
‘They do.’
‘OK. So sooner or later they’ll connect Shay to this Smyth getting drowned.’
‘I’d plan for sooner.’ I’d pretty much joined the dots for Kee there. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m trying to figure out, Tom, if it’d look better that the cops catch up with Shay on Delphi, where he can play the innocent, or they stop him at the airport and arrest him as a flight risk.’
‘Either way, he’s in it up to his neck.’
‘Sure. But if we play it right, Shay comes out the victim. He’s been a bad boy but that was a long time ago and now he’s being blackmailed by Smyth and Jack Byrne.’
‘Says who?’
‘Says you, Tom. Meanwhile, Shay’s on Delphi trying to make this gold mine work for the locals. He’s a good guy, a philanthropist like you said. Not the kind of guy, you’d imagine, who would run around tossing old submarine sailors into canals. Right?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so, no.’ Which was to say, I hadn’t considered it until then. But Shay Govern had been in Dublin on Friday night, when Gerard Smyth drowned.
‘I need to talk to some people,’ Franco said, pushing his tea cup away into the centre of the table. ‘We’re going to get Shay out, get him home, then deal with this shit from there.’ Lawyer up, he meant, pull out the injunctions and gagging orders, resist all attempts at extradition in the likely event of Shay becoming a person of interest in a foreign jurisdiction. ‘In the meantime, Shay’s expecting to see you on Delphi to talk about this book. Sounds like he trusts you, you’ve already come across about Jack Byrne’s scheme. So maybe you could break it to him gently, how he’s in the middle of a shit storm.’
Maybe I could. Once he’d signed the contract.
‘Of course,’ Franco said, reaching across to ruffle Emily’s hair, ‘that leaves us with the problem of this little lady. You’ll hardly want to drag her into a crapfest like that.’
Emily glared up at him, then very deliberately took each bud from her ears. ‘Please don’t touch me,’ she said. ‘You are not my daddy.’
SIXTEEN
Franco paid for breakfast on the basis that he was the one who’d extended the invite but I dawdled on the way out, zipping up Emily’s jacket and tucking in her scarf, so that he was right behind me when we left and caught the terse nod I gave Martin, who was parked diagonally across from Belle’s Kitchen.
No harm in Franco thinking I wasn’t alone. And if I had one guy backing me up, he couldn’t be sure there weren’t others.
Then I gave the street a scan up and down, looking for any non-Donegal registration plates that would let me know someone had trailed Martin to Rathmullan. Mainly, though, I was scoping for Jack Byrne, the ex-cop working more angles than a pool-hall shark.
Apart from Martin’s Saab, every car I could see had Donegal registrations or the yellow plates that told me they were from over the border.
Franco took his time glancing away from Martin’s car, letting me know he’d clocked him, then gave me a Belle’s Kitchen card with his phone number scribbled on the back. Then we shook hands.
‘I’ll keep you posted,’ he said.
I watched him walk away, then nodded to Martin again, directing him towards the pier.
Once Emily had given Martin a good hugging and then sprinted off to the swings, we sat on a yellow metal bench just inside the playground fence, huddled against the feisty breeze whisking in off the water beyond the pier. I was expecting the third degree and a short, sharp lecture about dragging Emily into a dangerous situation, but Martin, being an accountant, was battle-hardened when it came to damage limitation.
‘I appreciate this,’ I
told him. ‘I owe you a big one.’
‘Put me in a book,’ he said. ‘Only make me taller.’
‘No problem.’
‘Who was the guy?’ he said, inclining his head in the direction of Belle’s Kitchen.
I brought him up to speed on Franco Govern. When I mentioned the Nazi gold he laughed, thinking I was winding him up. When I didn’t laugh along his eyebrows flapped like he was sending out semaphore. ‘You believe him?’
‘You’ve read Smyth’s account. It says nothing about any gold on the submarine. Shay Govern hasn’t mentioned it either.’
‘So where’d he get it from?’
‘He didn’t say. But it makes sense. I mean, as a motive for the massacre. And if Franco’s right, it doesn’t matter if the gold is there or not so long as Shay believes it’s there.’
‘So someone on Delphi, maybe Carol Devereaux, is telling Shay porkie pies to get him involved in this project.’
‘Could well be.’
‘You want my advice?’
‘Always.’
‘Take off now. Disappear. When it all shakes out the big guys’ll survive, they always do. It’s the little guy who’ll get squeezed in the middle.’
‘Sure, yeah. Except there’s two things.’
‘Is one of them Emily?’
‘The first is that he’s offered to honour the cheque Shay’s given me. If I get a contract signed with Shay, they’ll have to honour that too. They won’t want anyone squawking.’
Martin the accountant was only slightly mollified by my pragmatic approach to financial liquidity. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But I sincerely hope that your second reason doesn’t have anything to do with Gerard Smyth.’
‘I should just forget about him?’
‘Be serious, Tom.’
‘Do I look like I’m having fun?’
By now Emily had moved to the climbing frame, was heaving herself up hand over hand. Not exactly a reassuring sight, especially as it was still early enough for the last of the dew to be gleaming slick on the bars. Not for the first time, and very probably not the last, I found myself consciously willing myself to stay put, crossing my feet at the ankles and tucking them away under the bench. Kids fall from climbing frames every day, earn their bumps and bruises and cuts like tiny badges of honour, and unless you want to go insane or drive them in the same direction, you have to let them take their own risks, conquer their own fears, allow them to grow on their own terms.