The Death of an Irish Politician

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Dev. didn’t go to London to the treaty proceedings,” said McGarr. “When those other men came back with it, he wanted to repudiate the thing.”

  O’Shaughnessy, who was a confirmed Fianna Fail supporter, added, “For a long time he wouldn’t take the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown, wouldn’t take his seat in the Dail. In fact, he really never did take the oath.”

  “Fook the oath! He eventually took the seat, suppressed the Army”—Martin meant the IRA—“and brought us nearly forty years of lip service to values which he refused to pursue. He allowed the gentry to retrench itself, big foreign money to buy up the country, the bunch of bastards in the North to make the Six Counties a police state more repressive than Outer Mongolia. All that will change and soon! This place”—he swept his hand—“will become the Irish Republic in more than name only! And the sort of social and economic system that obtained before the Norman invasion will again hold sway.”

  “Communism, you mean?” O’Shaughnessy asked.

  “Not communism. Who the hell knows what that term means anymore? Economic integration is what we’ll call it. We’ll put an end to private property.”

  “How?” asked McGarr. “Britain will never allow it. We’re a poor country of three million and they have over fifty. We’re tied to them commercially, geographically. We couldn’t hope to defend ourselves against an aggressor without their active aid and support. We speak their language.”

  “Don’t remind me,” said Martin.

  McGarr added, “In order to achieve the goals of the original revolution, the ones that the dreamers in the Army envisioned as their Ireland, or now, what you’re talking about, we’d need the sort of regime that Castro set up in Cuba. I wouldn’t want to see that happen here.”

  “Nonsense—this is Ireland, not some sultry banana republic in the Caribbean. Our people have been politically astute for centuries. If you haven’t noticed, the lion is now on its uppers more completely than it was during the Depression.” The old man shook his head. “Wake up, boy. This time we’re building broad support among third- and fourth-generation Irishmen in the States, some firm ties with other revolutionary groups around the world, and a good deal of money and arms. The political bosses over in Britain don’t realize how little stomach their people will have for the type of campaign a Dublin government that does more than blind an eye to the activities of a rejuvenated and well-financed army can launch. I, for one, am sick of what’s happening in the North. How about you, boys?”

  Both McGarr and O’Shaughnessy, like most Irishmen, were sick of what had been happening there for the past three hundred years.

  “The rest of the world is too, and nobody more than the average man in any English street. And the day of an invasion threat is over. Our friends in America, the same ones whom the British are depending on to bail out their economy, wouldn’t stand for it.” Martin drank up, stood, and pulled their glasses from them. He walked toward the bar.

  When the old man returned with fresh drinks, McGarr asked, “So, how has it come to be that a man like Mairtín O’Brugha, the idealist and conscience of the IRA, has attempted to commit murder in his old age?”

  “Attempted?” he asked.

  “Ovens isn’t dead. I only said that.”

  “But I called the hospital, notified a Protestant mortuary so at least the poor soul might be buried properly.”

  O’Shaughnessy snorted into his raised tumbler. “Smoke and shadow. We’re pretty good at that as well, old man.”

  O’Brugha was stunned. “So—I botched the job thoroughly.”

  “Why didn’t you use a gun?” asked McGarr. “Why did you choose to hit him while he was on his boat, and why did you use the winch handle?”

  O’Brugha shrugged. “We were belowdecks at the time. I figured I’d sail the boat out a few miles that night and scuttle her. That way we wouldn’t have a corpse to lug around and a boat to dispose of. Nobody would miss him or Virelay—suddenly both would be gone and that would be that.”

  “Who called us in the first place?” O’Shaughnessy asked.

  “Don’t know. Certainly not us, I mean, Leona, Horace, or I. The bloody whistle went off on the hill and we panicked. I figured the cripple was watching us through the glasses, so we’d better look like we were saving Ovens. I belted the bugger in the cabin, but he wouldn’t go down and blundered up on deck. Did he say anything to you?”

  McGarr shook his head.

  “He’s a good lad, but unpredictable. An American, you know. We need soldiers, like the ones in the twenties, the ones that humped fifteen years of solitary.”

  But McGarr was not convinced by this confession. O’Brugha himself was one of the stalwarts who had, in fact, humped fifteen years of solitary. He was well acquainted with the police, courts, and prisons. All McGarr had on him was the fingerprints on the winch handle, for which he had a plausible explanation. After all, he was the dock boy at the club and Moran had witnessed him saving Ovens. “Tell me about Leona.”

  The old man took a long drink from the glass of black porter. The buff-colored foam scudded his upper lip. He wiped it off with the back of his hand. “My grossest human failure. Ah—I had others, her mother, my father, my brother Mick, Willy O’Connell whom I left bleeding behind the waterworks in Derry after we walked into an ambush. We all have regrets about how we’ve treated people, I suppose.

  “Leona was born when I was on active service in 1931. A month later I was lifted and then transferred North. No extradition, they just handed me over to the RUC. ‘Cold storage,’ they called it. I broke out, got to the border, had a few months of freedom, and got lifted again. And so it went for twenty years, in and out. Leona couldn’t have had less of a father if I had been dead.” He paused to turn his seat so that he could look at the gas fire in the grate as he spoke. “About her, Butler Yeats, who was a friend I seldom got to see, said, ‘Maud Gonne was a beautiful woman in the tradition of Leona O‘Brugha,’ for you see”—the old man turned his head to McGarr, his eyes were now filling—“he saw how Leona’s beauty was greater and would be more a curse than that other woman’s had been to her.

  “Up until she became a beautiful woman, Leona was carefree, a happy child. And then it was as though the mental Leona viewed every beautiful change in the physical Leona as perfidy. She became ashamed of the beauty that caused women and men alike to single her out, and she hated my wife and me as the authors of her malaise. She took to dressing in loose clothes, became a recluse down in Cobh, where my wife chose to live among her own people while I was incarcerated. And we were told by the friends with whom she lived while she went to university in Dublin that, although besieged by men, she dated few and remained terribly shy. That reticence, of course, only added to her charm.

  “My God, I myself then saw how right Leona was. Her beauty was truly like an affliction or handicap. Once, while I was on the run, we went out walking together around the Botanical Gardens. Jasus, I felt like I was on the stage. Some son-of-a-bitch with a Mercedes automobile sent his chauffeur in to tell us his car was at our disposal, and I nearly shot the poor servant, his being dressed in high-cut boots and a dark uniform like a Garda and all.

  “Horrigan, whom she married, not because of any great passion but because he was then innocuous and kind, told me she buried herself in housewifery, her kids, his career. But you see, the unfortunate woman was also cursed with a brilliant mind. Horrigan couldn’t have made all that money by himself. He’s shrewd, but after the initial pot out on the Bantry, she took over. Have you thoroughly investigated Cobh Condominia Limited?”

  McGarr shook his head. Slattery was probably doing that now.

  “It also owns three acres of Oxford Street over in London. And that’s just one of the companies she set up. Last year, as dock boy at the Killiney Bay Yacht Club, I made over a hundred thousand pounds. For tax purposes she spreads the money out among her relatives and friends. There’s nothing mean about that woman. I’ve always had a passion for cigars.�
� The old man opened his tattered raincoat and pulled a brace of cigars from the pocket of his khaki shirt. “So now I indulge myself. It’s my one concession to wealth.” He handed a cigar to O’Shaughnessy, then one to McGarr—hand-rolled Havana-Havanas with claro wrappers and reeking of cedar. “Where was I?”

  “Leona,” said McGarr.

  “Ah—yes, Leona.” He bit the nib off the end of the cigar. “As long as the cat’s out of the bag I may as well smoke in public.” O’Shaughnessy struck a match and held it to the end of the cigar. The smoke was blue and followed the heat from the gas fire through the fishing nets that decorated the ceiling. “What more can I tell you? She dabbled successfully in finance, unsuccessfully in men. It was as though she had seized on them as her special penance, a way of expiating the sin of having been born Leona O’Brugha, Ireland’s most recent Queen Etain. And the more reprehensible or weird the man, the better she liked him.”

  “How did you, her father, feel about all this—philandering?” O’Shaughnessy asked. The Garda superintendent was very conservative in matters of morals and religion.

  “For shame, my Galway friend. I recognize your accent. Keep ever mindful of the fact that strict monogamy was an imposition of two alien cultures—one Christian, the other what is now known as British—on our ancient civilization, in which one’s sexual activity and preferences were mostly one’s own business.”

  “But Ovens?” McGarr asked. “Did she consent—”

  “That was a political decision which I made. The cargo he brought in last trip disturbed him. He didn’t completely understand the situation here and told us he was through. Leona paid for the repair of his vessel, which, mind you, he had damaged in our service. Inexplicably, that set him off. If he couldn’t take care of the boat himself, it didn’t seem to be any good to him anymore. He told me it just pointed out to him what the Virelay and he had done. He read every Dublin paper looking for deaths, maimings, and injuries caused by the bombs or rockets in the North and agonized over every one of them. He felt that he and that boat were the authors of every little tragedy in the Six Counties.

  “And he just loafed around the yacht club come-day-go-day, debating, it seemed to me—I mean, could there be any other explanation for those eternal fits of despondency?—whether or not he’d blow the whistle on us. Even if, as you now tell me, he’d probably never have done that, his being there with that battered boat, the gun oil in his crankcase, would cause somebody, like you two, to ask questions. I have spent far too many years in prison to have to end my days there or in exile. That’s what this peripatetic tippling is for me, you see—the actuation of the idea, which is sometimes hard for me to believe, that Mairtin O’Brugha is free, not some semihuman slug ensconced in a lightless cell with only a blanket, no clothes for cover, and the guards wearing rubber-soled shoes so as not to disturb the solitude of my reflections. During the day they even took away the blanket.” He finished his drink. “Does that settle your questions?” He stood. “Shall we go?”

  “One more,” said McGarr. “Does Ovens know who you are?”

  “Of course, which is the reason he didn’t talk, although it could be he was too drunk to remember the accident at all. I made sure he was stinko. My cause is not cruelty.”

  As they made for the door, O’Shaughnessy asked, “Can Ovens speak?”

  “Yes.”

  “But does he?”

  “Leona once told me he chooses not to speak, since, unlike other men, he realizes there is nothing to say. This makes him very wise in her opinion. Now, how he could have communicated his wisdom to her is a mystery to me.”

  “He has a certain look about him,” said O’Shaughnessy.

  “‘That certain carriage of the body which masks the deficiencies of the brain,’ said the Irishman when speaking of gravity.” O’Brugha fitted on his cloth cap.

  McGarr stopped at the door and asked him, “Aren’t you going to pick up your change?”

  “What for? I’ll be back. He’ll credit my account.”

  O’Shaughnessy corrected the old man. “Better to think of it this way—where you’re going you won’t be needing the cash.”

  CHAPTER 7

  AND ALL THE way back to Dublin, some twelve miles, McGarr wrestled with the dilemma of whether Mairtín O’Brugha would indeed keep the freedom that allowed him his diurnal round of peripatetic tippling, or whether McGarr would put him back in prison, an action that was almost sure to put McGarr himself out of the chief inspectorship of the Dublin Castle Garda and perhaps into prison with the ancient revolutionary.

  McGarr had always prided himself on being a model policeman. He did not act strictly by the rule book, but he did scrupulously avoid confusing his own self-interest with the job. And here, the situation was clear-cut. He must either quash the case, which he could do by asking Ovens if O’Brugha had clubbed him and, when the silent Yank refused to answer, McGarr could say they lacked proof to prosecute; or he must send the evidence they had (including the old man’s confession, verbal though it was) to the courts and, same day no doubt, find himself charged with the theft of that report.

  One thing was certain, however. Noreen had been right about McGarr’s feelings for his new job. He had spent far too long as an exile in other people’s countries, enforcing other people’s laws, and waiting for the right vacancy back home. It was still a thrill for him to wake up in the morning and realize he was not in Lisbon or Haifa or Leghorn but Rathmines, County Dublin. McGarr was not young, and because he had been honest, he was not rich. He had no children. But could he even think he had a career if he truckled to Horrigan?

  McGarr’s thoughts ceased with finality when the Rover bounced over the gate jamb and swung into the cobblestone courtyard of the Castle.

  There, surrounding his Cooper, was a group of policemen, most of them from Internal Security. Will Hare had opened the Cooper’s small trunk. Glumly he looked at McGarr and shook his head.

  McGarr and O’Shaughnessy got out of the car and walked through the crowd. The policemen pushed back to let them pass through their cordon of blue chests.

  McGarr said, “Don’t tell me: something stinks here.” He had just remembered the whiting he had gotten from the gardener in Killiney on Saturday morning. He added, “An anonymous phone call to boot.”

  “In Irish,” said Hare.

  McGarr turned and looked into the Rover at O’Brugha, who winked.

  The trunk also contained the Bombing Report.

  “Man’s voice or woman’s?” McGarr asked. O’Brugha hadn’t had a chance to call Hare.

  “Woman’s.”

  Neila Monahan, McGarr thought. Twice he had wondered why Horrigan, who must be a very busy man, would have chosen such an old secretary, a woman who was past seventy, whose family had been so closely associated with elements that the present government eschewed. “Old, quavering?”

  “A voice,” Hare shrugged. He plainly disliked the position the trunkload of documents put him in—having to pass judgment on the country’s premier detective and his good friend, whom he would have to interrogate, about whom he would have to submit a report, perhaps even asking for charges to be pressed. “But, now that you mention it, the voice was old. This looks bad, Peter. The paper came from Castle supplies. We’ve checked on it.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “We’re going over that now.”

  “I’ll be in my office.”

  Walking toward the stairs, McGarr asked O’Brugha, “How many times have you been here?”

  “I don’t know. Dozens. I can’t remember. Are you going to go through with it?”

  “I am,” said McGarr.

  O’Shaughnessy reached over and clapped McGarr on the back.

  “Then I suspect it’ll be my last. If I were the sentimental sort, I’d take a final look around as though the place meant something to me.”

  McGarr liked this old man. Here, as both of them were walking into unpleasant situations from which neither of them might ev
er extract himself, the old boy was joking. He had gone this road before.

  After O’Shaughnessy had handed O’Brugha over to Dick Delaney for processing, he said to McGarr, “Don’t worry about this, Peter. The boys”—he tilted his head toward the staff in the office—“and me will eventually prove Horrigan himself stole that report. It’s only a matter of time. He’s got to have slipped up somewhere.”

  “Well, maybe he has already. Let’s talk, Liam.” McGarr walked through the office and gestured to Bernie McKeon and Hughie Ward. They joined them in McGarr’s cubicle.

  McGarr took off his hat and coat and lit up a Woodbine. Down on the quay, a red setter was coursing along the tree belt, chasing the squirrels that had been browsing the litter on the sidewalk. On his desk was O’Brugha’s official dossier. He opened it and scanned several pages. The other men respected his silence. Finally, he said, “Fact: Ovens sustained injuries to his head that could in no way be self-inflicted and most probably were not accidental. Fact: O’Brugha was one of three persons close to Ovens when the injuries occurred. Fact: O’Brugha’s fingerprints are on the winch handle. Fact: he has confessed.”

  “Bingo!” said Bernie McKeon. “Crime solved, chief inspector sacked.”

  Said McGarr, “That’s what bothers me”—he smiled slightly—“apart from the chief inspector getting sacked and all—why the quick confession? If Special Branch couldn’t get anything out of O’Brugha in fifteen years, why was he so willing to confess to us? Otherwise, we only have his fingerprints and our supposition that he was the only person near enough to bash Ovens’ sconce. Then why would O’Brugha, who has had vast experience in assassinations and executions, have chosen that occasion to conk Ovens and that weapon, the winch handle? He has given us a plausible explanation, but I remain unconvinced. Surely he would have used his gun. And what bothers me most is why David Horrigan would risk his whole political career to cover up the final crime of an aged recidivist.”