The Mountains Wild

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  St. Stephen’s Green is exactly as I remember it, flowering trees and hedges lining the walking paths, the pond placid and full of ducks. The park is only moderately full; I find a bench in the sun and I have it all to myself once a young woman with a stroller moves along, the toddler in the stroller shouting about the ducks as they go.

  Every man who walks by could be Conor, but I get tired of the disappointment and I close my eyes and let the sun warm my face. I’m still jet-lagged and sleep deprived and for the first time since I arrived, I let myself relax a little, let go of the tension.

  I must doze off for a minute but when I start awake, the voice is still clear in my mind. I was at the hotel in Glenmalure. Talking to the woman behind the bar. The Guards were in a few months ago asking about a German girl. I think they found her, though. They didn’t ask about your cousin.

  A German girl.

  Griz answers on the first ring, like she was waiting for a call.

  “It’s Maggie D’arcy,” I say. “Roly told me he’d be in Wicklow all day but I thought I’d better tell someone. I just remembered something. There was a German girl. Back in 1993. The first time I went down there, the woman at the hotel mentioned that someone had been asking about her. She said they found her, but maybe she knows something. Maybe there was a mistake.” I don’t say anything about my archive search.

  But Griz already knows about her. I can tell by the way she hesitates. “Thank you, Detective D’arcy. I’ll make sure we follow up. I’ll ring you if we need to ask you any more about it.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Thank you.”

  There’s a shout in the background. She’s not indoors. “I’ve to go,” she says. I recognize something about the quality of the noise behind her. She’s got a lot of people, a lot of cars around her.

  “Has something happened?”

  She hesitates. I can feel her wrestling with herself, trying to decide. I’ve been there. In the end, I’m a fellow cop.

  “You’ll see it later on the telly,” she says, “if the number of cameras here is any indication. We found something.” She hesitates again. “We found something of Niamh’s.”

  16

  1993

  After Bernie found the scrap of paper with the bus times at the bed-and-breakfast, Roly told me to sit tight and wait for word. “We’re following all the leads,” he said, distracted, “just making a courtesy call before heading off to Galway to check bus station security tapes. Don’t worry if you don’t hear anything. It may be a couple of days.”

  But I was still thinking about the bartender at the Raven. I went for a run in a little park further down Ringsend Road and then, wearing one of Erin’s cotton fisherman sweaters against the cold afternoon, I walked into Temple Bar. The streets were busier now at the end of the working day, buses pulling up along St. Stephen’s Green and commuters hurrying along to their homes, their faces cast down at the sidewalk. The air smelled deliciously of smoke and, though it wasn’t raining, the gray, metallic tang of rain.

  At five fifteen, the pub was about twenty times as full as it had been before. I pushed my way up to the bar and looked for the redheaded barman. He wasn’t on duty—the older man with the moustache was holding court instead—and I was just about to go when I saw the redhead sitting at the end of the bar, a pint of Guinness in front of him. He was chatting with a very pretty blond woman who looked interested in whatever he was whispering in her ear, and he didn’t look like he wanted to be interrupted. I ordered a pint and took it down to his end of the bar anyway.

  “Hi,” I said, leaning in and addressing him over the woman’s head. She looked up and smiled. My bartender friend didn’t smile. “I don’t know if you remember. But I was in yesterday and I thought that maybe you thought you recognized me. The thing is, it may have been my cousin. Or you may have thought I was my cousin, I mean. We look a lot alike. And I don’t know if you heard, but she’s missing. The Guards are looking for her and I came over from the States to help find her. If she came here a lot, you might have seen something or heard something that could help us find her.”

  He stared at me for a minute and then muttered, “Jaysus.”

  The woman was staring at me, too, and she put a hand to her chest. “Not the American girl who went missing down in Wicklow? It was on RTÉ this morning. You’re very like her, aren’t you? Sean, do you know her?”

  “No, I don’t know her,” he said, in a resigned way. “Not really. But she used to stop in quite a bit and your man Andy fancied her, so sometimes I’d ring him up if she came in. It gave me a turn when I saw you. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, she’s come back. That’s grand, so.’ But then I realized you weren’t her. You’re very like her, but you’re … not her.”

  “No,” I said. “Did she ever talk to you? Did you ever see her with anyone in here?”

  He hesitated and then he said, “We just chitchatted a bit, if you know what I mean. At the bar, like, with Andy.” He pointed to a skinny, acne-plagued teenager behind the bar. “I knew she was American and all that. God, you look like her. I could have sworn it was her. Ah, yeah, we chatted sometimes, but not a lot.”

  “Was she ever in here with anyone? A man?”

  “No, she always came by herself. She mentioned getting off work a couple times, like, that it had been a long day or whatever at the café. She’d usually have one pint and look at a newspaper or just have a chat with whoever was around.”

  “Did she ever meet anyone in here? Did guys bother her?”

  He hesitated. “They always bothered her, but she didn’t let them bother her, if you know what I mean. She knew how to smile and chat for a minute and then move on if she wasn’t interested. Working as a barman, you see a lot of different sorts o’ brush-offs. She was a pro, she was.”

  “So, no one ever made it past the brush-off?”

  He hesitated again and I felt a little prickle at the base of my neck. This was it. Whatever he was going to tell me next was important. It was why he said “Jaysus” when I came over. He was afraid of something.

  “What? Who was it?”

  He thought about lying, then thought better of it.

  “All right, look. I don’t know if this is important at all. But back in, oh, I guess maybe August, end of the summer, she was in and these four fellas were talking to her and I noticed she didn’t just brush them off. They were talking real intensely, like she was interested in whatever they were telling her. I heard one of them say he was staying at the Westbury and they were going to be there later and she should join them. I was listening because like I told you, your man Andy really fancied her and I was wondering would she go or stay, so I could tell Andy, like. He was gearing up to ask her out for a bite to eat. He had it all planned out, the sad bastard.”

  “Did she go?”

  “I don’t know. It got busy and when I looked up again, they were all gone.”

  “So … what? That’s it?”

  “Well.” He hesitated again. “Two of ’em were Americans and the other two were Irish. One from the north. The Americans were older fellas, but the Irish two were a bit younger, like maybe thirties. That seemed weird, for one thing.”

  A group of guys at the back of the room were laughing loudly and shouting. I had to lean in to hear the barman’s words.

  “They were asking her where she was from,” he said. “I heard them asking if she knew someone named Pete O’Connell and she said she did but I think she was just slagging ’em off, like, ‘Yeah, do you know how big America is, you eejits?’ and they were all laughing. Then, like I said, it got really busy and when I looked up again they were gone. She was, too.”

  “Is there any way to figure out who they are? They didn’t pay with a credit card or anything, did they?”

  “For pints? No. Maybe the Westbury would know.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I told him. “What about the other two?”

  He hesitated again. “Like I said, one of them was from the north. One was from here. I hea
rd him saying he was from Arklow, something about coming up to Dublin to get parts, like maybe he ran a garage.” He took a deep breath. “I’m not a hundred percent, but I heard the other lad call him Niall.”

  “Where’s Arklow?”

  “Down in Wicklow.”

  I could feel my heart speed up a little.

  “When you say the north, you mean north like Northern Ireland?”

  “Yeah.” There was more. I could tell.

  He looked at the woman as though he was hoping for guidance. “The other fellas, the Americans. Like I said, they were a bit older. The Irish fellas didn’t know them. Didn’t know them already, like. They were meeting for the first time. The Irish two came in first and then the Americans came in and one of them kind of looked around and then he held up his newspaper—it was some kind of sign—and then they went over and shook hands and they started talking to each other. They seemed to have a lot to say.”

  I looked from him to the woman and back again. “So?” I was missing something.

  “So they had a look about them. The Irish guys. If you want to know the truth, they looked like fucking Provos. Especially the guy from the north.”

  I must have look confused, because the woman explained, “Provos. Provisional IRA.”

  “Really? And Erin—my cousin—she was talking to them? To all four of them?”

  “That’s it,” he said. “And it’s right after that that she stopped coming in.”

  I waited, and finally he said, “There was something about them. I’ve been a barman a long time. You see all kinds, you know, you really do. Something about those fellas made me wonder what she was mixed up in and hope she was all right.”

  17

  1993

  It was nine, still not quite raining but almost, the moisture hanging there in the air as though it was just waiting to be pushed over the edge.

  He had said, “Stop by the café.” Had he meant it? Was he just being polite?

  I turned down Eustace Street and wandered around Temple Bar. People poured out of the pubs and I had to dodge a kid vomiting against a brick wall on Temple Lane and a couple making out next to the youth hostel entrance on Fowne Street.

  Conor was locking the door as I approached the café and I called his name so he wouldn’t be surprised to find me standing there.

  He looked surprised anyway. “You’re not looking for salad, are you? Trust me, it’s shite by this time of night.”

  “No. I was walking by so I thought I’d see if you were here.”

  He looked down at me. He was wearing a brown leather motorcycle jacket, boots. He put the keys in his pocket and then held his hands out at his sides. “I’m here,” he said. “At least I think I am. I just had a load of seventeen-year-olds come in completely langered. One of them was sick in the bathroom. Another one had to run out to be sick.”

  “I think I saw him,” I said. “I had to move fast to save myself.”

  He grinned, then caught himself and asked, “Is there, uh, news?”

  There were still a lot of people on the street and it didn’t seem like the right place to ask him about Erin. “Not exactly. Look, do you want to get a drink? I could use a pint, and it sounds like you could, too. There’s something I want to ask you. About Erin.”

  He looked away and I thought he was going to give me an excuse, but then he forced a smile and said, “All right, then. It’s going to be pissing rain in a few minutes.”

  We started walking and he said, more to himself than to me, “Where will we go? Ah, the Palace is all right,” and we walked along Fleet Street for a couple of minutes before he held the door for me at the Palace Bar. It was small and crowded and old-fashioned inside, but we got our pints and found two stools at the back, up against a bar along the wall.

  The stools were close together and when I slid mine in, my thigh came to rest alongside his. I could feel the heat from his body. He shrugged off his leather jacket and I caught a whiff of his deodorant, spicy, sharp, not something I recognized. He took a long sip of his Guinness. “Well, what is it you want to know?”

  “The cops, the Guards, wanted to know if Erin had any boyfriends. They probably asked you, too.” He nodded. I said, “I was just at the Raven and the barman said that Erin was in there talking to some older American guys. They were with an Irish guy and a guy from the north and he said he thought they were Provos.” The word felt odd in my mouth.

  He stared at me, shocked. “Provos? Fuckin’ hell. He said that?”

  “Yeah. Does that … Did she ever say anything to you about that?”

  He still looked shocked. “That’s … He can’t be thinking…” But then something occurred to him. He met my eyes and looked away.

  “What?”

  “It’s not … I just remembered it now. She left one night after her shift and came back a bit later. She said she thought someone was following her. I was finished my shift anyway, so I saw her home. She said maybe she’d imagined it, but she was a bit wobbly. Something scared her right enough.”

  “But she didn’t say anything about any Americans or these … Provos? I don’t even really know what he was saying.”

  Conor took a deep breath and leaned back against the wall. “That’s … I’d say his implication was that the Americans were over as part of some kind of arms-smuggling arrangement. Or maybe just arranging financing.”

  I stared at him. “And Erin was somehow connected with these guys?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he thought they were trying to recruit her.”

  “What? To the IRA?”

  “One of the splinter groups, like. I know it sounds mental, but it’s happened. Not recently, though. It feels like a bit of a relic of the seventies and eighties, if you know what I mean. But a clean passport, an American who can travel freely. I’ve heard stories, but it’s probably pretty uncommon.”

  I say, “Erin, she … I never heard her talk about any of that stuff. I don’t think she even, like, understood the Troubles. I tried to explain the demographics of Northern Ireland to her once when some guys got into an argument at the bar, and she didn’t understand it. I mean, beyond singing ‘The Foggy Dew’ on Saint Patrick’s Day, I never heard her talk about politics. I don’t think she could have told you what ‘home rule’ meant.” He was watching me, a little smile on his face. “What?”

  “Nothing. I don’t want to offend you.”

  “You were about to say that not understanding Northern Ireland has never stopped Americans getting involved before?”

  He grinned. “Yeah, but.” We stared at each other for a long moment.

  A couple of guys at the front started playing traditional tunes, not a proper session, just the two guys, a guitar and a fiddle between them.

  Now he was watching me. “You’re a bit of an Irish history buff, are you?”

  “I went to Notre Dame for English and focused on Irish Studies. I got a prize and everything.”

  “Really?” I liked the way he said really. He found vowels in it I didn’t even know it had. “Erin never said. Are you in grad school?”

  “No, I was planning on it. I was about to do my junior year here but then my mother got really sick. And then she died. And after all that was over … I don’t know. It was all I could do to finish my undergrad degree.” He didn’t say anything for a minute, so I went on, babbling out of nervousness. “Maybe I’ll still go. I really like it here, even with … I don’t know what I’m doing, to be honest with you. I’ve been working at my uncle’s bar. I think I sort of just felt like, what was the point, you know? Did I really want to spend the rest of my life reading and rereading one particular passage of Joyce and, like, writing about chickens in his work or something? I mean…”

  He had an amused look on his face and I realized with horror what I’d done. “Oh God,” I said, but I couldn’t help laughing. “I just totally offended you, didn’t I? Oh my God, you’re studying chickens in twentieth-century Irish history, aren’t you? What are you study
ing?” I covered my face with my hands. But I was laughing so hard I couldn’t stop.

  He was laughing, too. “Well, yes, it’s true, I’ve devoted my entire academic career to … the role of chickens in late-twentieth-century Irish political history, but you know, you’re right. It’s totally pointless, so if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll just go and off myself in the toilet.” He pretended to get up, but I grabbed his arm and pulled him back onto his stool. He fell against me and I felt a charge of energy when he grabbed my arm to steady himself.

  There was a raucous shout of laughter from the other end of the bar. The guys were playing a jig now and a drunk tourist was trying to dance.

  “I’m so sorry. What are you really studying? I bet it’s hugely important to the survival of the planet.”

  He put on a mock formal voice and said, “Irish neutrality during the Emergency and the development of European identity.”

  “Hmmm. Interesting.” “The Emergency” was the term used to describe the World War II years in Ireland. “What are you writing about?”

  “Right now I’m writing about the secret negotiations between Ireland and the US to buy arms during the war.”

  “Did we sell them to you?”

  “No. You rejected us.”

  “I’m so sorry. I thought we had this special relationship, America and Ireland. I took a whole class about it.”

  “Ah, but you see, there was FDR, who was very pro-British. You also have a special relationship with Britain, a very, very special relationship. And see, that’s always been the tough thing about our relationship.”

  I swallowed, ventured. “Is that right? That’s the tough thing about our relationship?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know what the tough thing is about our relationship, mind you…” He grinned at me and I felt my heart shift. “But the tough thing about the Emergency was that Roosevelt wasn’t going to do anything to go against Downing Street, even though there was the Irish and American relationship, fed and watered by Irish Americans in Boston and New York and—”