Echobeat

by Joe Joyce

  ‘He must know about Goertz if his wife is ferrying him around the place,’ Duggan was thinking out loud.

  ‘That’s a non sequitur. These Germans have a way with women. Like dear old Hansi.’ Gifford paused. ‘I feel sorry for him, separated from the lovely Eliza in their lonely prison cells. In Athlone, as if internment wasn’t bad enough.’

  ‘They’re lucky they weren’t hanged as spies,’ Duggan said.

  Gifford gave a short whistle. ‘Heartless bastards, you lot.’ He nodded across the road. ‘That’s the house over there.’

  The house was a substantial three-storey with a well-tended garden and a Wolseley and a Jaguar parked in front. There was smoke rising straight up in the calm air from two chimneys. ‘Coal,’ Gifford sniffed the air. ‘A proper fire. None of that sodden culchie bog stuff for them.’

  ‘There must be somebody in,’ Duggan offered. ‘Probably a maid.’

  ‘Or two. Do you want to go over?’

  ‘What, knock on the door? Ask for Herr Goertz?’

  Gifford sighed like he was dealing with a slow student. ‘Shout “Heil Hitler” through the letterbox. And listen.’

  ‘For what?’ They stopped as they came to a bus stop.

  ‘For his heels to click as he jumps to attention and shouts “Heil Hitler” in return. And, if you’re lucky, he might overturn a table or smash some crockery as his arm shoots up automatically.’

  ‘And then what?’ Duggan gave a short laugh and got out a cigarette.

  ‘Then he realises he’s been tricked and runs out the back door and I nab him.’

  ‘So you get the glory.’

  ‘I’ll share it with you.’ Gifford bowed twice like he was in front of an audience and addressing it. ‘Thank you, thank you, but let me say first that this remarkable achievement would not have been possible without the support and help of my slow-witted assistant from what is jokingly known as military intelligence.’

  Duggan bent down, scooped up a handful of snow and threw it at him. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘we mightn’t get any credit for arresting him. Maybe the opposite.’

  ‘Oh,’ Gifford cocked his head to one side. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘I’m supposed to find him. Then await further instructions.’

  ‘Interesting. We can’t just shoot him on sight.’

  ‘That’s why we’re in intelligence, not the Special Branch.’

  ‘Cheeky,’ Gifford nodded to himself as if Duggan had confirmed something. ‘Make a culchie a captain and that’s what happens.’

  ‘That’s for your ears only,’ Duggan said. ‘That we’re just trying to find him, not take any action.’

  Gifford made the sign of the cross over his heart. ‘So he has the ear of the men as well as the eye of the women?’

  ‘I don’t know that for a fact,’ Duggan shrugged. ‘But I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s more than a simple spy.’

  ‘There’s such a thing as a simple spy?’ Gifford inquired.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  They began to saunter back down the road again, watching the house and the twin columns of grey smoke rising into the brighter grey of the sky.

  ‘By the way,’ Gifford said, ‘you put the heart crossways in Sinead yesterday.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Pushing notes through the letterbox.’

  ‘She was there?’ Duggan remembered the sound he thought he had heard in Gifford’s flat when he had left him the note about Mrs O’Shea the previous morning. ‘I didn’t knock because I thought you’d still be in bed.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Gifford laughed. ‘She was terrified you’d look in and see her.’

  Duggan flicked his cigarette butt down the path ahead of them, realising what Gifford was telling him. ‘She’s living with you?’

  ‘Only for the weekend. Her flatmates think she’s gone down to culchie land. “Back home” as you lot call it.’

  Duggan squashed the butt into the snow with his toe as they walked over it.

  ‘She’s afraid you’d think less of her if you knew.’

  ‘Why should I?’ Duggan said, trying to come to terms with the information. He didn’t know of anyone who’d spent a night with their girlfriend, never mind a weekend.

  ‘See her as a fallen woman,’ Gifford shrugged. ‘She’s terrified that anyone will find out.’

  ‘So why are you telling me?’

  ‘So I can reassure her that you won’t think less of her. She still has a soft spot for you. A soft spot in the head, if you ask me.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Duggan said. ‘Maybe we could all go out for a drink later?’ And invite Gerda, he thought.

  ‘Not during the weekend,’ Gifford said. ‘She won’t go out at all during the weekend in case anyone sees her.’ He gave a dirty wink. ‘Which is fine with me.’

  They were passing the church and Duggan stopped and said, ‘I’m going to have a look inside.’

  ‘Okay,’ Gifford looked at him sideways. ‘I’ll keep an eye out in case any Germans try to sneak away early.’

  Duggan handed him the car keys.

  ‘You’ve got to live while you can these days,’ Gifford said, taking them. ‘You never know when …’ He made a whistling sound and sketched a falling bomb with his thumb and forefinger and added, ‘Boom.’

  Duggan crossed to the church and tried to inch his way into the porch through the group of men packed into it. Two of them had one foot on the step outside, cigarettes cupped in their hands away from the building. He managed to slide through the door and the porch and sidled to one side to a narrow space amongst those standing against the back wall.

  The church was packed and an almost continuous series of coughs and snuffles sounded like an accompaniment to the mumble of Latin coming from the altar. He recognised from the well-known ritual that it was coming up to the communion and moments later the first pews began to empty into a line in the aisle. Some of those around him shuffled out the door and he knew the porch would empty in a moment as most of the men there left for the pubs that would be open illegally behind closed doors.

  He watched the line of communicants returning from the altar, wondering what was the best way to follow up the O’Shea lead. The obvious thing was to try and follow Mrs O’Shea and hope she’d lead them to Goertz. But that could take a lot of time and effort. And upset some powerful people if she realised what was happening. A better option was to approach Mrs O’Shea directly, he thought. We know for a fact that she knows Goertz, whether her husband does or not. Even better if he doesn’t know. Something to use as a lever. Get her to pass a message to Goertz. Ask him what was going on, why the Luftwaffe were bombing Dublin and other Irish targets. Then he’d know they were after him, but he knew that anyway. And it would be interesting if he didn’t know the answer to the question. He wouldn’t be what they thought he might be, just a low-level operative.

  He tired of watching the slow-moving line of communicants and joined the stealthy movement of men out the door.

  Gifford was leaning against the driver’s door of the Prefect, his arms folded. He raised an inquisitive eyebrow as Duggan approached. Duggan shrugged and shook his head and joined him, leaning against the car. They watched in silence as men left the church in dribs and drabs until the Mass ended and crowds began to pour from the main door and side doors.

  ‘There they are,’ Gifford muttered as the O’Sheas emerged from the door on their side of the church.

  They watched Mr O’Shea move slowly through the throng outside, his wife and children hidden until they came out to the footpath and turned towards their home.

  ‘What do we do now, general?’ Gifford demanded, handing him back the car keys. ‘Come between them and the Sunday roast? Or escort them safely home?’

  ‘I don’t—’ Duggan cut short what he was about to say as the O’Sheas stopped to talk to a woman in a fur coat with two teenage daughters. ‘Fuck me,’ he breathed.

  Gifford followed his gaze. ‘What?’

&nb
sp; ‘That’s my aunt,’ Duggan said, watching his aunt Mona smile at something Mrs O’Shea said to her.

  ‘Timmy Monaghan’s wife?’ Gifford sounded aghast. ‘And your cousins?’

  Duggan nodded, his mind going into overdrive. Mona knew the O’Sheas? Which meant that Timmy knew them, too. So, did he know Goertz as well? Was he part of a group who were protecting the German? Wouldn’t surprise him at all.

  ‘Ah Jaysus,’ Gifford sighed, turning his back on them. ‘I’m out of here. I’m not getting involved in another Timmy Monaghan fuck-up conspiracy.’

  O’Shea raised his hat to Mona as the two families separated and the Monaghans crossed the road towards Frankfort Avenue. Duggan turned away from them, bent his head to open the driver’s door and sat in. The Monaghans disappeared into the avenue and he breathed a sigh of relief, sure they hadn’t seen him.

  Gifford sat in and asked, ‘Was one of them the lovely Nuala?’ She was Timmy’s eldest daughter and the cause of a lot of previous trouble.

  ‘No,’ Duggan replied. ‘She’s working in London.’

  ‘Jaysus,’ Gifford repeated. ‘The English are in more trouble than I thought.’

  Gerda’s landlady opened the hall door and told Duggan to come into the parlour. ‘She’s titivating herself again,’ she added in a conspiratorial tone.

  ‘I better not,’ he said. ‘I left the car engine running.’

  ‘Aren’t you the lucky man that doesn’t have to worry about wasting petrol these days,’ she said, masking her disappointment in disapproval.

  ‘I’ll wait for her in the car,’ Duggan said, happy that his ploy had worked. He had avoided another interrogation.

  ‘I’ll hurry her up,’ the landlady said in a curt tone.

  Duggan sat back into the car and left the engine ticking over. Gerda came out a few minutes later, smiling, and kissed him lightly on the lips when she sat in. ‘She said you were in an awful hurry. What did you say to her?’

  Duggan told her and she laughed as he drove off.

  ‘The girls are all jealous,’ she said. ‘That I have a boyfriend who’s an officer and has a car.’

  ‘Which part of that is the more important?’

  ‘The car, of course.’ She punched him in the shoulder, her Cork accent turning more pronounced.

  ‘But they know it’s not mine.’

  ‘They think you must be very important to have a car at your disposal. And not just one car. Cars.’

  ‘But they don’t know what I do?’ he asked, a note of caution entering his voice.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘And they don’t care either. Just that my boyfriend must be important.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ he smiled, stopping at the junction with Drumcondra Road and checking the traffic.

  ‘My pretend boyfriend,’ she looked at him. ‘Are we still pretending?’

  ‘No,’ he turned his attention to her. ‘Are we?’

  She shook her head and leaned towards him and they kissed lightly.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked, as he turned towards the city centre.

  ‘For a walk on the beach,’ he said,

  ‘Are you mad? In this weather?’

  ‘It’ll be lovely. Blow the cobwebs away.’

  ‘I don’t have any cobwebs.’

  ‘You don’t want to do that?’ He turned left into Clonliffe Road, driving gingerly on the packed-down tracks of previous vehicles.

  ‘I don’t mind. Whatever you want to do.’

  They drove in silence for a while. The road was deserted, people huddled inside in a Sunday afternoon slump. The only sign of life was the smoke coming from chimneys.

  ‘There’s something I have to ask you,’ he said. ‘For work.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she mumbled, as if her thoughts were miles away.

  ‘I need to know everything you can tell me about Roddy Glenn.’

  ‘That letter was important?’ She sounded surprised, brought back to the present.

  He nodded to her, taking his eyes off the road for a moment.

  ‘Really important?’

  ‘Could be,’ he nodded to himself. Especially if it’s real, he thought. And even if it isn’t real. He had come to realise that everything could matter, that a lie was as important as the truth in this business. The difficulty was in telling them apart and then interpreting them correctly. ‘Yes,’ he corrected himself. ‘It is. Really important.’

  He felt rather than saw her inquiring look but ignored it; he couldn’t tell her anything about the letter.

  ‘It’s hard to imagine,’ she said after a moment. ‘That he really knows anything important.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He seems … harmless really,’ she said, thinking. ‘He’s young. Nervous. Unsure of himself. Not like a spy.’

  ‘He is an agent of some kind.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ she shook her head in disbelief.

  ‘Yes. Do you have any idea where he lives? Where he’s staying?’

  ‘No. Mrs Lynch might know. He might have told her when he was trying to sell his paintings.’

  That’s a possibility, he thought, nodding in agreement. ‘Did he ever mention anything?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Anything that would give us a hint about where he lives?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘No.’

  ‘Ever have anybody with him? A girlfriend? Other artists?’

  ‘No,’ she repeated, still thinking. ‘He was always alone when I saw him. He seems a little lost. A lonely person. Uncomfortable.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he encouraged her, turning left at Fairview and heading out the coast road to Clontarf, following the map he had memorised before leaving the office.

  ‘A loner. In a strange place. Strange to him, I mean.’ She paused and then added, ‘Not like a man carrying out a mission.’

  But he is a man carrying out a mission, he thought. The question was on whose behalf. ‘We have to find him again,’ he said. ‘And he can’t go back to the café since Mrs Lynch barred him.’

  ‘It’s important that you find him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the information he wanted to give to the Nazis? That was important too?’

  He nodded.

  ‘What will you do with it?’

  ‘That depends,’ he said. ‘That’s why we have to find him. Find out who he’s working for.’

  She turned sideways in the seat and her tone sharpened. ‘You might give this information to the Nazis?’

  ‘No, no,’ he glanced at the sudden anger in her face. ‘It’s important for us. For Ireland. For our neutrality.’

  ‘And it would help the Nazis?’

  ‘It could.’ He slowed in the centre of the road to turn onto the Bull Wall. ‘But we won’t give it to them.’

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said with more confidence than he had any reason to feel. They won’t, he told himself. They can’t. It’d be a huge breach of neutrality.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Why do you need to find this man then?’

  ‘To see who he’s working for. Find out if his information is accurate.’

  ‘What does it matter if it is accurate if you’re not going to tell the Nazis?’

  ‘Because it has implications for us too.’ He let the car glide to a halt, pulled up the handbrake, switched off the engine, and turned to her in the silence. ‘And as long as he’s free he could always tell the Germans again. Find another way of getting the information to them.’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve told you everything I know about him.’

  ‘Would you describe him to me again?’ he turned the question into a request, thinking of Anderson’s suggestion that they bring Gerda in for a debriefing. An interrogation.

  She described him again: about twenty, one metre seventy-five, light brown hair, sandy really. Usually wore a tweed jacket and cavalry twill trousers, open-necked check shirts, polite, well-mannered, English accent.

&nb
sp; ‘What kind of English accent?’ he prompted.

  She gave him a look that said you’re asking the wrong person. ‘I don’t know. It’s not hard.’

  ‘By the way,’ he said. ‘We’re very grateful for all you’ve done. It’s really appreciated.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything much,’ she shrugged.

  ‘Yes, you have.’ He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her deep eyes. ‘Let’s go for a walk. Blow all those cobwebs away.’

  She held his gaze for a moment, then gave a barely perceptible nod.

  The wind was stronger than they had expected and they had to catch their breaths against the cold as they got out of the car. They turned up their coat collars and he took her hand and put it with his into his deep coat pocket and they walked into the wind, heads bowed, close together.

  The beach was deserted apart from a distant figure with a dog which chased back and forth after a stick or ball they couldn’t see. Loose sand skimmed along its surface towards them and the incoming tide broke in nonchalant waves, following their own rules. Beyond it, the flashing light from the Poolbeg lighthouse at the mouth of the port was beginning to become visible, an advance warning that the winter daylight was beginning to wane.

  They walked in silence, slowed by the wind and their closeness, deep in their own thoughts. She leaned her head against his shoulder and they slowed to a stop and she turned to him, her hair blowing forward to narrow her face. He kissed her frozen forehead and the tip of her icy nose and found her warm mouth. She slipped her hands between the buttons of his overcoat and under his jacket and around his back.

  After a long moment they turned and were hurried by the wind back towards the car.

  ‘What’s a metre in feet and inches?’ Duggan asked Sullivan, stopping in the middle of typing Gerda’s description of Roddy Glenn.

  ‘A bit more than a yard,’ Sullivan yawned.

  ‘How much more?’ Duggan scratched his head.

  ‘Three foot and something inches.’

  ‘Yeah, but how many inches?’

  Sullivan shrugged. ‘What do you want to know for?’

  ‘That’s classified information,’ Duggan turned back to the typewriter. He didn’t want to write Gerda’s estimate of Glenn’s height in metres as that would make it clear that his informant was from the Continent. She had said before that Glenn was a couple of inches shorter than himself. Estimated height, five feet nine to ten inches, he wrote and tried to decide how to describe Glenn’s English accent. Not hard, Gerda had said. What did that mean? She was no expert on English accents. But neither was he. Soft English accent? Was there such a thing? Undetermined English accent, he wrote.