Though the Heavens Fall

by Anne Emery

  No one took up his line of reasoning, so he continued, “There may have been somebody inside. In the pub. Saw Ronan and went out and made a phone call.”

  Cathal and the executive were shaking their heads. “Highly unlikely,” the executive said. “Anybody like that would have stuck out like Ian Paisley at, well, the Banned Flag! The lads would have noticed, and we’d have heard about it.”

  “You never know. Could be a tout in there. Long-time drinker, familiar face, taking the Queen’s shilling and passing information to Loyalist scum.”

  “Not likely,” the executive repeated, “but we’ll look into it.” To Brennan he said, “How long were you in the bar before the smoke bomb was thrown inside?”

  “About two hours, maybe a bit less.”

  “Did you notice anybody getting up and leaving, maybe without finishing his pint?”

  “I’m sorry. As I remember it, people were coming and going. I paid no attention.”

  “Sure, you wouldn’t have had any reason to watch them.”

  “A young couple from Derry came in, and we offered them seats at our table. But they didn’t seem to know who Ronan was, and they never got up from the table until the place filled with smoke.”

  “What did they sound like, the pair who came in?”

  Brennan thought about it. “They sounded like Martin McGuinness.”

  The men laughed, and Cathal said, “Really from Derry then.”

  A few seconds passed without any conversation, until the executive said, “Peelers questioned you.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “They did.”

  “You told them pretty much what you told us?”

  “I told them much less. They didn’t ask as many questions. Not as skilled at interrogation as you fellas, I guess.”

  That brought a brief smile to the executive’s face. “Not as interested in the outcome as we are.”

  “All right, now, Father,” said Cathal, “we’ll give you a spin over to Ronan’s place. Unless . . . would you care for another drop before you go?”

  “I’ve a thirst on me, now that you mention it.” His whiskey was long gone, and the beer nearly depleted as well.

  The boxer rose and replenished everyone’s drink. The executive said then, “Father Burke and I had a wee chat about Mass, and Father Sweeney’s name came up.”

  “You’ve met Father Sweeney?” Cathal asked Brennan.

  “No, I haven’t. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Well, if you ever do, be sure to get him going on Ian Paisley.” The others in the room chuckled knowingly. “He does a wicked impression of Paisley, so he does.”

  “Go on, do it,” the boxer urged Cathal. “You have to see Cathal doing Sweeney doing Paisley.”

  “No, you have to see Sweeney himself. He’d be doing Paisley in that over-the-top Ballymena accent, giving out about all us papists and our Saint Gobnait and her holy gob hanging open waiting for Saint Brigid and her lake of beer, and on and on like that, and Sweeney would twitch and look over his shoulder with fear and say, ‘Is he out there?’ Paisley, he meant, and he’d have us all wetting ourselves laughing. Whenever you see Father Sweeney, get him going on it.”

  “I’ll be sure to.”

  After that, he asked them to take him home to Andersonstown. When they had driven away from what Brennan thought of as the “safe house,” the boxer said, “Do you notice anything about our streets tonight, Father?”

  Brennan peered out the window but everything looked the same to him: the shops and bars, the side streets with their rows of brick houses, the cars and black taxis, the occasional police cruiser. “Nothing stands out for me,” he said.

  “No Brits,” the boxer replied. “No more soldiers patrolling our streets, as of last night. They pulled them out of other parts of the city a few weeks back. There are still some patrols in the rural areas but, well, now it’s our turn to celebrate their departure. It’s all to do with the ceasefire and the peace talks.”

  “That’s encouraging news.” Not only for the locals, Brennan said to himself, but for the poor devils sent over here to do the job. Some of the army men were thugs, as he well knew, but many were just young foot soldiers going where they were ordered to go, sent into an extremely dangerous theatre of operations.

  “Of course only a few hundred of them have left,” the boxer explained. “There’s something like seventeen thousand of them still here. So it’s not Brits out yet! It’s only the routine patrols they’re not doing now, helping out the peelers. Not needed these days, is the idea. But they’ll be back in a flash of gunfire if something happens to piss them off.”

  Brennan nodded. No doubt about that.

  The men left him off with wishes for his cousin’s full recovery. If these men were who Brennan assumed they were, members of the IRA trying to get to the bottom of the shooting, Brennan could not be faulted for his efforts to help them. He had told them everything he knew. If they were not Provos, if they were some other faction in the bewildering world of allegiances and enmities swirling around Belfast, he had not given away any damaging information about any person. He simply did not have any information that could identify a suspect. But he was ninety-nine percent certain they were genuine IRA.

  * * *

  When he was back at the house, Brennan made a phone call, under the pretext of letting Monty know how Ronan was progressing. Well, he shouldn’t say pretext; Monty would want to know how Ronan was doing. But Brennan had another reason for the call, and he would try to be cagey about it. He got to it after delivering the preliminary news.

  “Yes, the family are encouraged about his recovery. But they expressed some concern about me,” he lied, “about me being recognized by somebody.” Of course Brennan knew the same could be said of every other person at the bar the night of the shooting, but he’d started this so he kept it going. “I assured the family that there aren’t likely any photographs of my face floating around. There weren’t any pictures of me in the papers or on the news broadcasts, I hope.” Brennan felt like an eejit, like the sort of person who despite his protestations was really longing for newspaper or television fame.

  Monty laughed, as well he might. “There weren’t any, Brennan, in any of the coverage I saw. After all, does anyone here have a picture of you? But even if your stoical features had been featured in the tabloids, you can rest easy. Nobody would have recognized you as Duane Ballard. I’m pleased to say there was no resemblance between that southern hick and the Reverend Doctor Brennan Xavier Burke, latterly of Nova Scotia and soon to be of Rome.”

  Good, thought Brennan. Let Monty think that foolish escapade in the Iron Will bar was Brennan’s only perilous adventure. He did not want to think about the lawyer’s reaction if he learned of his role in the ill-fated gun incident.

  Chapter XXIII

  Monty

  Monty had two remaining cases that had been put in jeopardy by Emmet Crowley’s failure to secure representation for their trials before he fled the jurisdiction. Both clients were members of the Loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Defence Association. In one of the two cases, the Crown mysteriously withdrew the charges just before the case was to go to trial. Monty was not clear on the reasons why, but the matter had been resolved, and he put it out of his mind. The last case was that of a young UDA man, Sammy Dean Moffitt, who was charged with planting explosives at a Catholic taxi stand. One driver was killed in the explosion and a passenger severely injured. Two other devices at the stand failed to detonate. Because of the way things had turned out, Monty had not required the services of a local solicitor. He had briefed a barrister, but her services would not be needed for long. Because, at the eleventh hour, Monty had made a deal with the prosecution that his client would grass — inform — on his three accomplices, in return for a promise of immunity from prosecution himself. The Moffitt deal was still under wraps. Moffitt’s co-defend
ants had no idea yet of the trap their comrade was about to spring. He was scheduled to testify at the trial in three weeks’ time. Then he would walk out of the Crumlin Road Courthouse a free man. This took some skilful negotiation on Monty’s part, not to mention some distaste, and he liked to imagine that his client was grateful. The gratitude was subsumed by a somewhat surly manner during Monty’s visits to Moffitt at the Crumlin jail, but Monty would take what he could get. Because there was something specific he wanted to get from Moffitt the tout. And he wanted it now, before Moffitt testified and then blew town to avoid retribution for ratting out his accomplices.

  Muriel Whiteside’s investigator had come through with the name and address of the auto repair shop where the “hit and run” car had been patched up after the November 1992 incident. The man who had done the repairs was George Ayles, and the shop was in east Belfast. Now Monty was determined to get what he needed most of all, the name of the driver of the car.

  So, when Monty was seated with his client in the basement of the jail on Saturday morning and when he had satisfied himself that their conversation was private, Monty put his offer on the table. He began by telling Moffitt what his legal fees would be for all the work he had done to secure the immunity deal. He was gratified to see a look of horror on his client’s face. This was going exactly as planned.

  “But there’s a way out of that for you, Sam. I will consider the debt cancelled if I am provided with certain information that I want. And I know you can provide it.”

  Moffitt was instantly wary. “What kind of information?”

  “There was an incident a couple of years ago. There was a car involved. I know the owner of the car was a UDA man.”

  “What makes you think —”

  “I know, all right? I know everything I have to know about it,” Monty bluffed, “except the name of the guy who owned the car. That’s what I want: the name.”

  “I don’t know about any incident.”

  “You will when I describe it to you.”

  His client exercised the right he would have had, in other jurisdictions, to remain silent.

  Monty continued his pitch. “Back in November 1992, late at night, a car was driving along the Ammon Road around the same time a shooting occurred out there. The vehicle was a Ford Orion, not new but not ancient. And somebody fired shots at the car. The owner is reported as saying he didn’t know who opened fire. What I want is the name of the registered owner of that car.”

  “I wouldn’t know the owner of some car that —”

  Monty ignored him and wrapped up his spiel. “The owner was UDA. An Ulster Defence Association man being fired upon around the time of a well-publicized murder will certainly ring bells with the UDA. Tell me who I should talk to, or work your own contacts in this place. As I say, I suspect that a lot of what went on that night is well known in your organization. And many of its members are here in this institution. However you do it, get me the name.” Monty could almost see the wheels turning in Moffitt’s brain as he tried to weasel out of his assignment. “And make sure the information you bring me is accurate. If it isn’t, I’ll know within two days that you screwed me around. And you’ll be in the shithouse then; all deals will be off.

  “And just so you know, Sam, I am leaving details of this in my desk at work. If anything happens to me, my fellow solicitors will find it. And the whole thing will come down on your head. You’ll never get out of this cell or this country. If I return safely to my office after receiving the name, I will be suitably grateful for your assistance and will destroy all references to yourself. And you’ll be able to sail off into the sunset with no worries from my end. And your legal fees will be paid, and you won’t owe a penny.”

  The financial arrangement seemed to have a bigger impact than the promise that his name would not be associated with Monty’s investigation into the incident of November 14, 1992.

  Monty would write off his own fees and pay the firm’s portion out of his own pocket. It would be well worth it, if this would enable him to make things right for Katie and Timmy Flanagan and their mother, sister, and brothers. Their fate now rested in the hands of a UDA killer who would not have thought twice about blowing the Flanagan family to smithereens if they had been at the taxi stand that day. Monty’s scheming of course went way beyond the bounds of solicitor-client propriety, Monty virtually extorting information from a client. He avoided thinking what the reaction would be at Ellison Whiteside, or Stratton Sommers, if either of his firms got a whiff of what he was doing. But Monty had no respect for this client, a killer who was turning on his partners in crime in order to save his own skin. This was a client without scruples, so Monty would dispense with his own scruples in the desperate hope that he could do something for the Flanagans in his short time in Belfast. In reality, though, Monty would not do anything to scuttle the trial or the immunity arrangement, no matter what Moffitt did. But Moffitt didn’t know that. Let him think his lawyer was as unethical as he was himself.

  Brennan

  Brennan went to the Clonard Monastery on Sunday to say a special Mass for Ronan, the warrior turned peacemaker, who was still lying in hospital recovering from abdominal surgery. There was a little gathering in a side room before the Mass was to begin. The monastery, as Brennan well knew, was playing a role in the peace process, and here was the man most closely associated with those efforts, Father Alec Reid. He remembered Brennan and embraced him, assuring him of his continued prayers for Ronan.

  The Methodist minister, Clark Rayburn, was there, and he too embraced Brennan. “Thank God,” he said, “that Ronan survived that dreadful attack. My congregation has been praying for him.”

  “Thank you, Clark, very much.”

  Clark introduced him to the handful of other ministers who, like Ronan, were playing a role in the peace process and who had come to show their support. Clark identified the Presbyterian and other churches with which they were connected. They all offered their sympathy for Brennan’s stricken cousin, expressed their admiration for his new role as a man of peace, and wished him an early recovery. One of the churchmen said, “If, the Lord forbid, it turns out that someone from our community, the Unionist community, is responsible for this heinous act, Father Burke, you can be sure we will want to see him prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

  The speaker then directed a glance to another man in the room, whose expression did not suggest that he had been saying any prayers for the Burke family. Brennan had seen the intense-looking, wild-haired fellow somewhere, he knew. Then he had it. John the Baptist, a familiar figure from the news pages. The preacher stood apart, glowering at the others in the room. Brennan noted that his more famous colleague, Old Saint Nick, was not present. All this popery must have been just too rich for his blood. As for the Baptist, he looked as if he was suffering from a severe case of indigestion. A steady diet of wild locusts will do that. He finally made his contribution to the exchange. “We don’t condone terrorism no matter where it’s directed.”

  Brennan felt that was probably the case for many or most of these rare visitors to the Falls, but he wasn’t all that confident when it came to John the Baptist. That same man walked over to Brennan, leaned towards him, and said, “Maybe you should be looking on the Falls Road, in Ardoyne, Andytown, the Short Strand.”

  “Looking for . . . ?”

  “Come on now, Reverend Burke. There are elements in the Republican movement who are none too happy about the peace process, right? Where will that leave them? Sitting on their rear ends with nothing to do, no one to shoot at, nothing to blow up. Well, you’ve heard them yourself. They say all this peace talk is a sell-out, the end of the dream of a united Ireland. I would suggest you look to some of those fellows before you try to pin it on the Loyalists.”

  The same thought had crossed Brennan’s mind, inevitably, but he was not about to say so. Not in the present company. He had always pushed the thou
ght away. Ronan knew everybody on the Republican side, no matter where they stood with respect to the current peace process. He would know, surely, if someone from his own side was out to get him. Brennan didn’t like to dwell on the steps his cousin might have taken to neutralize a threat from within. He brought his mind back to the present.

  “We are here for a Mass of peace, Mr. . . .” Brennan could not for the life of him remember the preacher’s real name.

  “My name is Geddes. And I only wish we were all on the same page when it comes to a genuine desire for peace in Ulster. Anyway, let’s get in there for the service. Gentlemen?”

  It was indeed time to head in, time for Brennan to vest himself for Mass, so he excused himself and went into the sacristy to get ready. When he entered the church as part of the procession, he marvelled as always at its beauty. The church was ablaze with light, from the intricately patterned floor to the great vaulted ceiling and the shining golden mosaic above the high altar. Today, the place was packed. And, in a city where mourners had been murdered during a burial at the cemetery, security was tight. Father Reid had come to know Ronan Burke over the past few years, so Brennan had asked him to deliver the homily, which he graciously agreed to do. The sermon was a ringing tribute to Ronan and a cry to heaven for peace. It was a lovely ceremony; especially gratifying for Brennan was the sound of the choir that had been assembled for the occasion. They sang the beautiful Mass for Four Voices by William Byrd. The piece was notable for Byrd’s poignant setting of the dona nobis pacem line, the line that implores the Lamb of God to grant us peace. Then the choir did a selection from the great oratorio that had its premiere performance in Ireland just over two hundred and fifty years before. Handel’s Messiah.

  He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him.