Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “You’re telling us they killed her,” the Langley woman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “For what reason?” Gillespie asked in his precise manner.

  “They didn’t have to have a reason.” I hesitated again, wondering how to explain the inexplicable. “Were you ever in the army?” I asked Gillespie.

  “The Marine Corps.”

  “Well I’m told that sometimes the army or the Marines will give a recruit a live rabbit and tell him it’s dinner, but if the recruit doesn’t have the guts to kill the rabbit then he goes hungry. I think that’s how they treated the girls at Hasbaiya.”

  Gillespie and the woman stared at me for a few seconds. “Girls?” It was the dark-haired woman who asked.

  “It was mainly the Western girls who were killed. Not always, but usually.”

  Carole Adamson intervened. “Was this a religious prejudice?”

  “It was more to do with the fact that the Western girls argued.”

  “Argued?” Gillespie at last sounded shocked.

  “Look,” I tried to explain, “the Palestinians come from a culture that says a woman’s role is to be subservient to the authority of men. Then these middle-class American girls arrived, full of revolutionary fervour learned from some Marxist professor at Stanford or Harvard, and there was bound to be friction. The girls were all feminists, all argumentative, and all deeply into inter-cultural bonding, and they found it quite difficult to understand that their ordained place in the revolution was to be bonded between a lice-ridden mattress and an unwashed Palestinian.” I had sounded callous, but beneath the table my hands had been shaking. The dark-haired woman had gone silent and just watched me.

  “So they were shot?” Gillespie asked. “For arguing?”

  “Not always shot. Kimberley Sissons was strangled with copper wire.”

  “Just for arguing? For standing up for her rights?” Carole Adamson sounded horrified.

  “I told you,” I said, “it was a demonstration.”

  “So who was the demonstrator?” Gillespie asked.

  “Another trainee was ordered to kill her, and if he’d hesitated or disobeyed, then he’d have been the next to die. It was their way of making the trainees rethink their attitude to death.” I paused, knowing I had not given the real flavour of Hasbaiya; the febrile excitement that infected the place, the enthusiasm for killing and the triumph of mastering its dangers. “Maybe they were trying to destroy conscience?” I suggested.

  “Did you kill anyone at Hasbaiya?” Gillespie asked.

  “I told you, I wasn’t a trainee. I just escorted people there.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question,” Carole Adamson said with an unaccustomed asperity.

  “I did kill a man, yes,” I admitted.

  “Why? Were you ordered to?”

  I shook my head. “It was a fight.”

  “Who was he?”

  “A guy called Axel,” I said, “just Axel. I didn’t know his other name. He picked the fight, not me.”

  “When was that?” Gillespie asked.

  “On my last visit.”

  “In ’86?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’d simply escorted someone there?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he picked a fight? Why?”

  I shrugged. “God knows.”

  “How did you kill him?”

  “With a spade,” I said, “like an axe-blow.” I had told the truth, but only a tiny shred of the truth, but the rest of the tale was my nightmare and not to be shared with Gillespie’s notebooks or Carole Adamson’s diagnosis or the dark woman’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the Palestinians and Libyans.

  Gillespie was consulting the early pages of his notebook where he had written down the framework of my story, the chronology. “Eighty-six,” he said. “Was that when the IRA stopped trusting you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was that anything to do with Hasbaiya?”

  I hesitated again. Outside the window the snow was dazzling, glinting with a billion specks of light. “Yes,” I admitted, knowing that in the end I would have to tell a part of the story. “I took an American girl to Hasbaiya,” I said, “and she accused me of being a CIA agent.”

  “The girl’s name?” Gillespie was writing in his book.

  “Roisin Donovan,” I said as casually as I could. “I think she spelt her first name R-O-I-S-I-N.”

  “American, you say?” He frowned at me.

  “Like me,” I said, “tribal Irish. But she came from Baltimore.”

  “So tell me about her.”

  I feigned ignorance. “To be honest I didn’t know too much about her, except that she’d moved to Northern Ireland and was very active in the Women’s Section of the Provisional IRA.” I could feel my heart thumping and I was sure Carole Adamson must be registering my discomfort. I myself was horribly aware of everything in the room; the crackle of the poor fire, the creak of my chair, the scrape of Gillespie’s pencil on the pages of his notebook, the sceptical gaze of the dark-haired woman.

  “Why did she accuse you?” Gillespie asked. “Describe the circumstances.”

  I took a breath. “I took her to Hasbaiya. We reached the camp and I took her to Malouk’s quarters. Malouk was the commandant. She went inside, spoke with him, and ten minutes later he asked me to stay on in the camp. Which I didn’t want to do because I had a boat-delivery job lined up for the following week, but Malouk wasn’t a man you argued with, so I said sure, and that night he arrested me.”

  “Because Roisin Donovan had accused you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What had she told him?”

  “She told him,” I said, “that the CIA was trying to infiltrate European terrorist groups, and that to preserve their agents’ secrecy they were not using field controllers or letter drops or any other communication systems. She called them stealth spies because they were undetectable. They wouldn’t report back to Washington until their whole mission was finished.” I paused, staring out of the window. A deer stood at the edge of the far dark woods. It sniffed the air, dipped its head, then was gone with a flash of its white tail. “Then she said I was one of those stealth agents,” I finished bitterly.

  “Are you telling us she knew all about van Stryker’s programme?” Gillespie asked.

  “She knew about his idea of not using any form of communication in the field.”

  “Did she mention van Stryker?”

  “No.”

  “Any other names?”

  “No.”

  “So it sounds like a wild accusation.” Gillespie was scornful.

  I shrugged as if to suggest he must be right, though the truth was less pretty. Roisin and I had often talked about the possibility of the CIA infiltrating the IRA with an American agent. Their motives, we agreed, would be to do their British allies a favour as well as to eavesdrop on the rumours that were whispered through the European terrorist grapevines. We had embriodered the idea, suggesting how it might be done and how such an agent might avoid detection. It had not been Roisin who had dubbed such agents as ‘stealth spies’, but me. I had offered her that thought as if it had been mere idle speculation, but in reality I had been playing with fire; just like a cheating husband might get a stupid thrill from mentioning his mistress’s name to his wife, so I had not been able to resist describing van Stryker’s notion as a fantasy of my own. I could imagine just what psychological hay Gillespie and Adamson would make from such an admission, so I wisely said nothing.

  Gillespie turned a page in his notebook. “And the Hasbaiya authorities believed her accusation?”

  “They didn’t know whether to believe her or not, but they were worried to hell by her,” I said.

  “So what did they do?”

  “They sent a message to Ireland to discover whether anyone there suspected me, and that message saved me. It seemed that Seamus Geoghegan had taken refuge in Roisin’s apartment, and on the very day she’d left for the Leban
on he’d been arrested by the Brits. They claimed to have been given information by an informer, and it could only have been Roisin. So it seemed that she was the traitor, not me, and that by accusing me she was merely trying to spread the guilt to confuse everyone.” I made a rueful face. “But even so she’d tarred me with suspicion, and that suspicion was enough to make them cut me out of the game.”

  “What happened to Miss Donovan?” Gillespie asked.

  “She was shot,” I said bleakly.

  There was silence. Carole Adamson had scribbled a note which she now leaned forward to slide down the table. Gillespie unfolded the scrap of paper. In the fire a log collapsed in a shiver of cascading sparks. Gillespie screwed the note into a ball and tossed it at the flames. The ball missed the hearth, bouncing off the mantel and rolling on to the coir rug. “How much time did you spend in her company? I mean, on the way to Hasbaiya?”

  “Three days. We met in Athens, flew to Damascus, then drove to the Lebanon.”

  “So you must have talked with her?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you become lovers in those three days?” Gillespie asked.

  “No!” I tried to make my answer scornful.

  “What did you talk about on your journey?”

  “Nothing much,” I said. “She wasn’t very sociable.”

  “You must have discussed something!”

  “The scenery, Irish beer, the heat. We chatted, that’s all.”

  “Did you like her personally?” Gillespie pressed me.

  “Like her? I don’t know.” I was feeling excruciatingly uncomfortable. “Hell! She isn’t important.”

  There was silence again. The light was fading outside. It was deep winter and the days were short. The dark-haired woman looked at her watch. “I should be going, Peter.” She spoke to Gillespie. “I kind of hate driving in the dark.”

  “Of course.” The spell was broken. I felt myself relax. People round the table moved, stretched, made small talk. The woman thanked me for my time, said I had been helpful, then followed Carole Adamson into the hall to find her coat. Gillespie said he needed to visit the bathroom.

  They left me alone in the library. I was thinking of Hasbaiya, of Roisin. Seamus had once told me that conscience could be diluted in alcohol. “I’ll drink to that,” I had said, and now I helped myself to a bottle of rye whiskey kept in the drinks cabinet and carried it back to the deep library window. There I watched the snow, drank, and watched the snow again. Then I remembered the ball of paper lying on the coir rug, the one on which Carole Adamson had scribbled her note to Gillespie, so I turned and picked it up, uncrinkled the paper, and read her urgent words. “He’s telling lies! Telling lies!” And no wonder, by Christ, no wonder.

  Roisin had been lucky in one thing only; she had died swiftly.

  I later heard that Brendan Flynn had himself requested the act of mercy. He claimed that Roisin had been given neither the time nor the opportunity to betray the Palestinians, only the Irish, and that the Irish should therefore set the manner of her death and he wanted that death to be quick. I had always wondered if Brendan asked the favour because he too had been one of her lovers. Whatever, Roisin was taken to a dry gully beyond the camp and there shot. She took one bullet in the head and her blood had sprayed against the white heat of the sky and splashed on to the yellow, sulphurous rocks. I remembered her look of outrage and defiance as she had died. Her skin had been very red, burned by the fierce sun. She had very fair skin and burned easily.

  I was ordered to bury her on the hillside where she had died. A German called Axel Springer offered to stay with me, though he did precious little to help as I hacked a shallow scrape with the long-helved spade. He talked instead, telling me he was a theology student at Heidelberg, but that his real religion was the Red Army Faction. I wondered why he had volunteered to help me, and only began to understand when he stopped me from rolling Roisin’s thin corpse into the stony grave. “I want to look at her,” Axel said in his heavily accented English, “she was very pretty.”

  “She was beautiful,” I corrected him. Roisin had never been pretty, she had been too fierce and too committed and too scornful of weakness to be called pretty.

  “It is a sexual thing, you see,” Axel said.

  “What is?”

  “Why girls like this become involved in terrorism.”

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  “I have never joked,” he said in all seriousness. “Work has been done by American feminists on the correlations between sexuality and terrorism, and they maintain a direct linkage between sexual desire and terrorist activity. It has to do with the relaxation of inhibitions, both in society and in bed. I can offer you the reading list, if you would like?” He smiled and held out a pack of cigarettes. In those days I had smoked so I took a cigarette, stooped to his light, and gratefully sucked in the comforting smoke. “Of course,” Axel went on, “the camp authorities recognise the sexual linkage. That is why they encourage girls like this one to attend. These girls are hardly good pupils, but they have their uses.”

  “Their uses?”

  “It is obvious!” Axel blew a plume of smoke that whirled away down the valley. “The Arabs want the white girls. It is their revenge for colonialism. But they would not have enjoyed this one.” He jerked his head at Roisin.

  “Why not?”

  “Too thin! Look at her!” He leaned down and ripped Roisin’s flimsy shirt open. “See? Just pimples!” He gestured at her breasts, which were very white and very small. “Pimples!” Axel said again, but he could not keep his eyes away from them, and it was then that I understood exactly why he had stayed behind to help me bury her.

  “Cover her up,” I said. “It isn’t right to bury her half naked.”

  Axel had squinted up at me. “What is your name?”

  “Paul.”

  “Paul. I think you have American bourgeois inhibitions. You should deal with that. It isn’t healthy.”

  “I said cover her up!” I snapped.

  “OK! OK!” But instead of pulling the torn shirt over her body he caressed her small white breasts with his right hand, and it was at that moment I had hit him with the edge of the spade. I hit him so hard that the steel blade sank three inches into his skull, but even so the blow did not kill him straightaway. He was still making an odd noise, half pain and half protest, as I pulled him off Roisin’s body and he remained alive all the time that I took to bury her and to cover her shallow grave with a heap of stones to keep the beasts and birds away from her flesh. Axel could not speak, but his eyes watched me and he made the strange noises as I told him he was going to hell and that for the rest of eternity he would suffer an unimaginable agony. In the end he died, but I did not bury him. Instead I left him to the wild-winged creatures that screamed in the night, then I carried my bloodied spade back to the camp where I confessed my deed, but no one cared that Axel had been killed, for in Hasbaiya death was a creed.

  Outside the window the snow fell with the coming night.

  The air war in the Gulf blazed on, yet still no reprisals seared America. No planes tumbled from the sky, no bombs slashed at city centres. Indeed it seemed that my story of Saddam Hussein taking a terrorist revenge on America was just that, a story, a fantasy. Gillespie still questioned me about the Cubans in Miami, and the million and a half dollars, but I sensed he no longer believed a word of my tale.

  The days passed in a blanket of snow. I turned the pages of photograph albums and dredged up memories of meetings years before. The days began to have a dull rhythm. I watched the breakfast television news every morning, always expecting to hear that the allied ground troops had attacked the Iraqi army, but the air war went on and on. One morning I saw Congressman O’Shaughnessy expressing his concern that a ground campaign would cost thousands of American lives. It would be better, Tommy the Turd said, if the bombing campaign was given several more months to do its work. I was about to switch the set off when a news bulletin told of a bo
mb attack in London. The Provisional IRA had parked a roofless van in Whitehall, and the van had concealed a battery of mortars that had launched their bombs against Downing Street. The new Prime Minister and his cabinet had narrowly escaped injury. The news footage showed the burnt-out van standing abandoned in a sleety rain. Later that morning, just as I had anticipated, Gillespie asked me about the attack, but I could only offer him my strong suspicion that the spectacular operation had been planned as a strike against Margaret Thatcher, whom the IRA detested, but that the plan’s execution had been delayed to become a part of Iraq’s world-wide terrorist revenge. That delay might have cost the Provisional IRA their chance of killing Margaret Thatcher, but it had doubtless pleased Colonel Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein.

  Two more terror bombs struck London, both random attacks at train stations. One commuter was killed. The bombs had been left in rubbish bins and had exploded in the rush hour. They were primitive attacks, far removed from the sophistication of the Downing Street bombs, and I suggested to Gillespie that the Provisionals had been driven to such crudities by their eagerness to convince Saddam Hussein that they were truly co-operating. None of the London attacks had brought a united Ireland one day closer, but they had undoubtedly preserved the IRA’s standing with their most generous sponsor, Libya.

  In the days following the IRA attacks, and probably in response to questions coming from London, Gillespie pressed hard about my knowledge of IRA active-service units, but I knew nothing that could help him. The only top IRA men I knew were Brendan Flynn and Seamus Geoghegan. The rest were already dead, or else I had never met them. Gillespie thought I was hiding them, but he was wrong. I was hiding gold coins, not men.

  I knew the debriefing was coming to an end when Gillespie asked about my future, offering to give me the benefits of the Federal Witness Protection Programme. “We’ll give you a new name, a new social security number, a new job, and a settlement grant somewhere far away from your old haunts. No one could possibly trace you.”

  “You’ll make me a school janitor in North Dakota? Thank you, but no. I’m going back to the Cape.”