Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Not because of me, no, but I introduced her.”

  “Did she kill anyone?” It was a hostile question.

  “Not directly, at least I never heard that she did.” I walked in silence for a few paces. “I tried to stop her getting involved, but it was no good. And after I left Belfast she stayed on by herself. I know she never shot anyone, but that was because she couldn’t use a gun. She used to shut her eyes before she pulled the trigger, and it made her a lousy shot. But she did what she could. She told me about going into a bar once, looking for a man, and she pretended to be an American journalist, and when she found the guy she went back and told the gunmen exactly where they could locate him. That way they were able to walk straight to his table and not risk drawing attention to themselves by asking questions. But she was frustrated too. They didn’t really trust her, not like their own people. They used outsiders like us when we could be useful, but they never really trusted us in Belfast. I think that’s why Roisin wanted to be trained at Hasbaiya, so she could equip herself for a campaign in London. An American doesn’t stand out in London the way they do in Belfast or Derry.”

  Kathleen still walked with her head down. We crossed the sand track that led to the summer shacks at the far end of the beach, then climbed the last line of dunes before the sea. “Did you betray her?”

  “Me?”

  “You said you were CIA. So you must have informed on her along with everyone else.” Her voice was hostile, her accusations wild.

  “It didn’t work like that.” I knew I dared not describe van Stryker’s Stringless Programme. “I didn’t inform on her. I loved her.”

  “Did you want her to live in Belgium with you?”

  “More than I wanted anything else.” I walked past a dead gull’s feathered bones and I spoke of a love’s ending. “Roisin thought my job in Belgium would be dull. It was too far from the armed struggle, you see. I was still doing a job for the IRA, but it wasn’t a job she could help with, and she desperately wanted to be involved at the heart of things and I was going to be at the edge, and so she refused to come with me. We used to meet whenever we could, or whenever I could persuade her. Sometimes I’d fly to Dublin, and sometimes she’d come to Belgium. She once helped me deliver a yacht from Spain to Sweden, and I thought she was so happy during that voyage.” I stopped, remembering Roisin’s real happiness, the sound of her laughter, the gentleness that was surprising in her when she could be eased away from her hatreds. Except it had been her hatreds that made her feel alive. She had enjoyed the voyage, but felt guilty for being away from the fight. “I wanted to marry her,” I told Kathleen, “but she wasn’t interested.”

  I stopped at the crest of the dunes to see a ragged sea breaking and foaming and spewing a winter’s spray along the endless sand.

  “Was there another man?” Kathleen asked with a cruel acuity.

  “Yes.” The great breakers crashed unending on to the cold deserted beach.

  “Who?” Kathleen asked, and waited my silence out, so eventually I went on, even though I did not want to.

  “The first I knew of was before I left Belfast. He was called John Macroon. He was younger than Roisin, a hothead, a wild boy. God, he was wild. He would dare anything. And he was also a good Irish Catholic boy, scared witless of women, but I knew Roisin had broken his fears. I just knew from the way she talked and from the way he looked at me, but I never dared ask her, just in case she told me the truth. Once she came to me with a bruised face and I knew he’d hit her, but she wouldn’t tell me what the bruise was. And I didn’t want to believe she was being unfaithful, so I pretended everything was good between us. Then Macroon died, shot by a soldier in an ambush. He was on his way to plant a bomb at a country police station and the soldiers knew he was coming and they just shot him. No warning, no questions, just bang. And that night she was weeping fit to flood all Ireland with tears, and she told me about him.”

  I crouched at the foot of the dunes on the beach’s edge. The sea was empty of boats. There were tears in my eyes and I blamed the wind that smelled of salt and shell. “Macroon was very rough with her, but she said that she did not want him to die without knowing a woman. Christ!” I blasphemed aloud, and Christ, but how I hated to remember, yet I remembered only too well. I remembered my pain, and my need to hear every last damned detail of what I saw as a betrayal and Roisin claimed was a gesture of comfort to a hero. I remembered her defiance, her anger at me, her hatred for my tenderness, though later, in the night’s tears, she had wanted my comfort.

  “You say Macroon was the first?” Kathleen asked.

  “There were others,” I said, then was silent for a long time, or for as long as it took for a dozen great waves to break and shatter along the empty shore. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you any of this in Belgium. I guess I should have written to your family when she died, but somehow Roisin wasn’t the kind of person you thought of as having family.”

  Kathleen had found some tiny scraps of shell that she was lobbing idly on to the beach. “I think we all knew she was dead. You can sense it, can’t you? She’d usually remember to send a Christmas card, or a card for Mom’s birthday, but when we didn’t hear for so long…” She shrugged. “But we wanted to know, you understand? We wanted to be certain one way or the other. Mom doesn’t have too long, and Dad’s kind of frail too, so I promised I’d find out for them.” A gull screamed overhead and Kathleen pushed a strand of dark red hair out of her eyes.

  “What will you tell your parents?”

  She was silent for a long time, then shrugged again. “I guess I’ll lie to them. I’ll say she died in a car accident and that she was given the last rites and a proper Christian burial. I don’t think Mom and Dad want the truth. They don’t approve of terrorism. Nor do I.” She said the last three words very forcefully, then lobbed another scrap of shell that skittered along the sand. “I’ve had to think about terrorism,” Kathleen went on, “because of Roisin. Even before she went to Ireland she believed in violence. She collected money for the cause and she used to collect newspaper clippings about dead British soldiers and dead Irish policemen. Mom hated it. She thought Roisin was sick, but Dad said it was just the Irish sickness and a good reason to live in America.”

  “But what if you can’t live in America?” I asked. “What if you’re a Catholic living in Protestant Ulster?”

  “That’s not an excuse for murder,” Kathleen said firmly. “And if the IRA can’t wear a uniform and show themselves in battle, then they’re not real men, they’re just arrogant people who think they know better than the rest of Ireland, but the truth is they’ll burn in the same dreadful hell as whoever put that bomb on the Pan Am plane, or the men who shot the nuns in El Salvador, or the terrorists who killed our Marines in the Lebanon.” She turned and looked defiantly at me. “I suppose you must think I’m very naive? Or very stupid?”

  I stared at the sea. “The British did terrible things to the Irish.”

  “And we did terrible things to the native Americans, so you think that the Cherokee or the Sioux should be able to bomb shopping malls or ambush American servicemen?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think that.”

  “So what do you think?” she challenged me.

  I knew that only an answer of the most rigorous honesty would serve my purpose here, and my purpose was not to feed a proud tribalism, nor to be defiant, but to match Kathleen’s truthfulness with a genuine response. “I think,” I spoke slowly, “that terrorism is wrong, but I also think it’s seductive because there’s a glamour in the men and women who fight a secret war, but at the very heart of it, and God I hate to admit it, but at the very heart of it we all know that the British would do almost anything to be free of Ireland. Yet everyone agrees there’d be a bloodbath if the Brits left, that the Catholics would set on the Protestants, or the Protestants on the Catholics, and that threat of violence is the only justification the British troops have for staying in Ireland, and so every bomb and every bul
let the IRA uses only makes their justification stronger. So the IRA and the INLA and the UVF and the UDA are the only people keeping the British there, because the British sure as hell don’t want to be there. They hate the place! They quite like the Free State, but they dislike Ulster, and they detest Ulster’s Protestants! But who in the whole wide world does like the Northern Irish Protestants? Do you think Dublin wants to swallow those one million God-drunken stiff-necked bastards? And if the British won’t protect them, who will?” I paused, gazing at the grey horizon. “I don’t think any of it makes a blind scrap of sense, because I don’t think a single bomb has brought a free Ireland one day closer, but even so I still can’t see how any self-respecting lad growing up in Ballymurphy or Turf Lodge or the Bogside has any choice but to go on making the bombs. I think it’s a tragic, miserable, gut-wrenching mess. That’s what I think.”

  “And the CIA wants to be involved in that mess?” she asked me, showing her incredulity at my claim to have worked for the American government.

  “I don’t know.” I was feeling cold. “I was never a proper agent. I mean I didn’t take an oath or anything like that. They didn’t even pay me, but they asked me to find things out, and I did. But not about the IRA. They just used that as a kind of introduction.” It sounded lame, but it was the best I could do. “For me it was a kind of game, but not for Roisin. For her it was a cause. That was why she wanted to go to Hasbaiya. She wanted to learn how to kill without flinching. She wanted to win Ireland all by herself, and I just wanted to have a good time.” Which is why I had killed Liam and Gerry, because they stood between me and the gold. They had not died for Ireland or for America or for anything. Just for me. It made me feel shallow, but I did not know how to make myself profound. I remembered Liam’s eyes glazed with the green light and shuddered.

  Kathleen stared at me for a long time. “Roisin really hurt you, didn’t she?”

  How pale the sea was, I thought, and how cold. “More than I ever thought possible,” I admitted, “more than I ever thought possible.”

  “I’ll take that coffee now,” she said in a small forced voice, “if it’s still on offer.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it is.”

  We walked away from the sea, our shadows long and dark against the white winter sand.

  We did not talk much as we walked back around the head of the bay. I was nervous of Kathleen’s disapproval, while she had too much to think about. We made small talk; how good it was to live near the sea, that it was cold, but that the winter had nevertheless been mild. As we neared the house I asked where she lived, and she told me in Maryland not far from her parents. She said she had trained as a dental hygienist. “But I’m out of work right now.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought teeth were affected by the recession?”

  “They are, but that isn’t why I’m jobless. I was stupid enough to marry the dentist, you see, and now we’re divorced. It’s kind of messy.” She sounded resigned to the mess. “At least we didn’t have kids.”

  “Ah,” I said, which was inadequate, but about as much as I could manage. I was nervous, because I so wanted Kathleen to like me. Indeed, I suddenly felt as though my whole future happiness depended on Kathleen’s approval of me. I saw in her a quieter, gentler Roisin.

  “David ran off with one of his patients,” Kathleen went on, then shook her head. “I sometimes wonder why we all make each other so unhappy. It wasn’t meant to be that way, was it?”

  I thought of my dreams of bringing up Roisin’s children beside the water. “No, it wasn’t meant to be that way.” And I thought of Johnny Riordan and knew that there was at least one happy person among my friends, then I remembered I had to telephone Johnny, though not from the telephone in my house, and I wondered if Kathleen would give me a lift up the road to the public phone booth in the small shopping complex. But first I had to make coffee. “I’ve only got caffeinated,” I said as we walked about the side of the house, “and it isn’t even my coffee. It belongs to someone who was squatting in the house.”

  “Maybe I won’t have any then.” She stopped at the corner of the house and gave me a very nervous smile. “Maybe I’d just better be going.”

  “That’s fine by me.” I hid my disappointment. “But can you give me a ride up to the main road?”

  She nodded. “Sure.”

  “I’ll just get some small change for the phone,” I told her, and I pushed open the kitchen door which I had left unlocked because Sarah Sing Tennyson had not thought to leave me a new key when she changed the locks, and there she was. Sarah Sing Tennyson was standing in my kitchen with a squeegee bottle in her right hand.

  I began to twist away. I had the Colt .45 hidden in my oilskin pocket, but she was much faster than me. She squeezed, and my hands flew to my burning face and I half heard Kathleen scream with fear, then a figure ran out of the kitchen, past Sarah Tennyson, and told Kathleen not to worry, that I wasn’t being hurt, then something hit me viciously hard across the skull. My knees began to give way, a man’s voice grunted as he hit me again, then all went dark.

  PART THREE

  I recovered consciousness in a moving vehicle. That it was moving was about all I could tell for my head had been shrouded in a sack or bag and I had been thrust down into a foetal position on the carpeted floor of the van or car. My eyes were in terrible pain, my face was smarting and my nostrils filled with the stink of ammonia. I tried to stretch out, but discovered that I had been trussed into immobility. For some reason, though, I had not been gagged. “Who the hell – ”

  I had begun the question before I screamed. A terrible pain stabbed up from my kidneys. The pain was fearful; a sobbing, aching, dreadful lance of horror that seared through my abdomen. It seemed to take minutes for the pain to subside. I gasped for breath, half gagging on the bilelike taste of vomit in my mouth. I kept my eyes screwed shut for to open them was to invite a visitation of the stinging pain left by the ammonia. Then I remembered Kathleen and had a sudden terror that she would be hurt just because she had been visiting my house when these bastards ambushed me. “Please…” I spoke with a deliberate humility, but no sooner had I opened my mouth than the pain sliced into my back again and my screams sounded like the terror of a wounded animal.

  The car, if it was a car, swerved round a corner, throwing me sideways against a pair of legs. Once the subsiding pain allowed me to think half clearly I decided I had to be in the back of a car, rather than in a van, and hard down on the car’s floor where I was wedged between the front and back seats. The sound of the transmission told me the car was an automatic. I knew one person was on the seat to my right, so now I edged to my left to discover whether a second person hedged me in, but as soon as I moved a hand slapped me hard round the head. They wanted me to be still and they wanted me to be quiet, and the pain already inflicted me on persuaded me that their wishes were best respected. I stayed very still and very quiet.

  I was also very scared, if that word could do justice to the bowel-loosening terror that trembled in me. Whoever these people were, they were experts. They had taken me with a skill and efficiency that spoke of long practice. I had suspected nothing, but had simply walked into their ambush like a child. They had immobilised me in seconds and now they were carrying me away and I was helpless. If I moved, I was hurt. If I made a noise, I was hurt. They were training me like a dog, making me subject to their control, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Not one thing. And if these people decided to kill me, then I would die like a dog, because these people were good.

  The car pulled off the road. I felt the vehicle sway as it crossed a kerb-cut, then I heard the tyres scrunch on gravel. I had no idea how long we had been driving. I had no idea if we were even on the Cape still.

  The car seemed to drive into an enclosed space. I could hear its exhaust echoing loud, then the engine was switched off and I heard the doors open. Four doors.

  A hand reached down, grabbed one of the ropes that pinioned me, and yanked me
with extraordinary force out of the car and on to a cold hard floor.

  I sensed someone kneeling beside me. Something cold touched my ankle, a knife blade I imagined, and I whimpered with fear, but the blade merely cut the bonds that trussed my legs.

  A hand yanked me upright. I swayed, but managed to stand. My wrists were still bound and the thick sack was still over my head, but otherwise I had been freed of the ropes.

  A hand pushed me forward. I stumbled, hardly able to walk. My feet were bare on the concrete floor. I had been wearing boots and socks when I had been ambushed, but they, like my oilskin jacket, had been stripped off me and, as far as I could tell, I was dressed only in jeans, underwear, a shirt and a sweater. My gun was gone, everything but those few items of clothing was gone. I was pushed again and I dutifully tried to hurry, but succeeded only in stubbing my bare toe against a stone step. I cried out, fell, then scrambled up before they could hit me again. I seemed to have entered a thickly carpeted passageway. It was warm suddenly.

  A hand checked me. I heard a door open. The hand turned me to the right, pushed me slowly forward, very slowly, and I sensed I must use caution, and sure enough I found my foot stepping into thin air, and I gasped, thinking I was going to pitch forward into a terrible void, but a hand steadied me, and I realised they had simply steered me on to a flight of wooden steps.

  I went down the steps into what had to be a cellar. The footsteps of my captors were loud on the wooden stairs, then echoed from the bare concrete floor. At the foot of the steps I was pushed a few paces forward, then checked again. They wanted me to stand still.