Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  ‘Good morning to you, Gabrielle.’

  He did not have to look at his watch or allow an eyebrow to flicker. So obvious that he’d already achieved half a day’s work: why did he have to lord it over the rest of them? She hadn’t slept well: she’d gone to bed late and hungry because she’d been sorting out accommodation and liaison. Bentinick’s light had still been on when she’d gone along the corridor with its dimmed lights: she’d remembered reading in a biography of Mussolini that the Duce had ensured bulbs burned late in the government offices at Piazza Veneto so the gullible public would believe in the sincerity of Fascist endeavours.

  ‘We’ll fly out on the last scheduled one, the Joe and me, Czech Air. I’ve booked BA for you and the hired hand. Right?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘When do I have the pleasure of meeting him?

  ‘A bit later – not sure.’

  ‘Where is he? In the building with his head in a file? Not much he needs to know, other than to do what he’s told. Sorry, when do I get him up to speed?’

  ‘Soon.’

  The dispenser had finished the last of its dribble. The coffee was a disgrace.

  ‘Well, is he here?’

  ‘Putting himself in the picture nearby. The mocha is tolerable.’

  He turned away. The corridor was quiet.

  She said, ‘It’ll be a good one, Matthew.’

  ‘Of course it will. A big catch and a team led by a top player going for his throat.’

  There was that brief smile again. He was one of those men who had iron tips on his shoes, and his footsteps echoed.

  ‘You can learn to love me, Mr Exton, or you can hate me. Your choice.’

  The clothes he needed were laid out on the bed, with a plain envelope that contained the airline ticket. Ralph Exton always packed carefully.

  ‘You see, Mr Exton, because of what you’ve done – and the company you’re keeping – I can either be friendly or I metaphorically break every bone in your body.’

  He was less likely, these days, to find his shirts ironed and folded in the airing cupboard. More likely he would return home and they’d be on wire hangers over a radiator. Four should be enough. Money was the problem – or lack of it. The world of successful deals seemed to have slipped past him. He was down to cigarettes. Few commodities were lower in the food chain. Didn’t everybody do it? Perhaps, but not everybody did it by the lorryload from the south of Spain to the Galician coast, and not everybody transhipped to a trawler at dead of night. He’d been down in Puerto Banús on the coast, and at the time he dealt in Transit-van loads. He’d had a drink with his local contact who dealt with the money and the transport, in an Irish bar, when the contact had introduced him to two Irishmen, decent enough fellows.

  ‘I don’t want any misunderstandings. You work for us, Mr Exton, or you rot in gaol. You can do yourself a favour or get to know the intricacies of prison life.’

  Enough socks for a week, a pair of stout shoes, and some handkerchiefs . . . She was at a coffee party where plastic kitchen boxes, underwear or time shares were being flogged . . . It had gone rather well for a year. He had begun to believe that the sun shone on him, and there was a bit more money in his wallet, and Fliss’s purse, and a bit more of the debt was paid off. Then he’d been summoned to a police station: he didn’t recall going through a red light and was usually careful about speed limits. He hadn’t connected it with the monthly runs of cigarettes to the south of Ireland, and hadn’t been told to bring a solicitor. He had gone with a child’s innocence to the enquiries desk and given his name.

  ‘Ignorance, Mr Exton, is no defence in a court of law. You would find that both the judiciary and the public would have minimal sympathy for a cheap little crook who lines his pockets with a percentage of the profits used to subsidise terrorism. That is having blood on your hands.’

  He had been left to cool his heels in a reception area, among vandals and wife-beaters, and was there long enough to become apprehensive. Then his name had been called. He’d been led through doors, most of them locked and needing punch codes, to an interview room. It stank – disinfectant, urine, vomit – and the windows were clouded glass in concrete fittings. The table was Formica-covered, and the light was protected with a grille. He had sat on a hard chair facing the table and another chair in front of him was empty. He was watched from the door. Eventually he’d heard the approach of steel-shod shoes. A mobile had rung. A crisp answer: Yes, it’s Matthew. Speak, please. A half-minute later, the footsteps had reached the door and the constable watching him had stood aside.

  The man who came in wore a suit, with a gold watch chain draped across the waistcoat. A young woman had followed him. When the man, Matthew, had realised they were short of a chair he had flicked his fingers in annoyance and the constable had reacted. They’d sat and faced him. The girl had rooted in a bag and produced the file with the pictures – guys he used to meet in Puerto Banús, others he did business with in London, in a pub north of the Emirates stadium, and some he hooked up with in a bar off Galway’s Flood Street. She laid the police mug shots on top of the covert pictures, then a sheet detailing allegiances and criminal convictions. Matthew had let her outline their membership of Real IRA, and the time they’d done. Ralph Exton could remember to this day how the shabby little interview room had seemed cold and dark. Nothing to say, and there hadn’t seemed much point in denying what was on the table.

  ‘They pay you a percentage. With the rest they keep their murderous campaign from collapse. What’s it to be, Mr Exton? Are you on board or jumping ship?’

  His washbag went into the case. His pyjamas followed.

  He had numbly nodded agreement. She had produced a sheet of paper with two lines committing him to co-operation: he had signed and dated it on 1 April 2009. He was the ‘fool’. He’d said to Fliss he’d be in Reading for a meeting then might do some shopping – he needed a couple of shirts. She’d known he’d be out all afternoon. Next morning, when she’d gone early to the supermarket, he had been at home, still shaken from the previous afternoon’s experience and twitching with tension. He had made their bed and a condom wrapper had fallen to the carpet. She often seemed to forget to take her pill and kept a supply of condoms in the drawer on her side, but they hadn’t done it for a fortnight, or three weeks. It hadn’t seemed important at the time. He hadn’t seen Matthew again, but the woman had been Gaby and they’d met at least once a month for the past five years. He reckoned he could run rings round her, if he had to.

  ‘Don’t think to play fast and loose with me, Mr Exton, or you’ll find I have a short temper and am not pleasant when crossed.’

  He threw in a couple of ties because that was Timofey Simonov’s image of an Englishman. Who terrorised him most? Gaby, or the people up the hill when there had been deep fog and no back-up? He zipped the case and heard the drill whine. Hard bastards: they’d have used the drill, might have enjoyed it.

  He’d done the fire. In most houses the woman did it, but Malachy Riordan had made the fire for his mother, and when he’d married Bridie he had continued to lay and light it. The house then would be quiet around him, and he’d listen as the boy, Oisin, struggled for breath. He was relied upon. Brennie Murphy, Bridie’s uncle, talked of strategies but had no idea how a mercury tilt switch should be handled and didn’t understand the way a bullet travelled across four hundred metres of open moorland and how the wind affected its trajectory. He would think and plan. He would try to imagine where the surveillance would be, where there was weakness, and how to use what he had.

  The fire burned well and the peat smelt sickly sweet and raw.

  There were two boys, Kevin and Pearse, aged twenty and eighteen. Kevin’s father had been a volunteer in the eighties, had done time, then gone to England and was last heard of on building sites in Glasgow. He sent no money to his family. Pearse had a child’s face and a child’s body, and seemed so anxious to demonstrate commitment. There were others who lived in Coalisland, and
in the villages north of Castlecaulfield, and men in Stewartstown and Cookstown, but the pressure on the Organisation was fierce. Most men that he could call out spent half of every day looking over their shoulders for police tails. He liked the boys, accepted their youth and inexperience. There was a pipe bomb in the barn, a target and an opportunity. Could he give it to them? Could they do it if he wasn’t there? There was an opportunity to hit the O’Kane house on the Pomeroy road on Wednesday, because it was the mother’s birthday and her Catholic policeman son, Eamonn, would be down from Belfast. His car could be hit. Were Kevin and Pearse capable? Should the opportunity be let go?

  She brought him tea. He smelt cooking. He heard her go up the stairs to wake and dress the boy. Oisin would never be a fighter, as his father was, as his grandfather had been. Oisin would not match him at that age. Neither were those boys equal to how he had been. Was either Kevin or Pearse able enough? They were the future, not the old bastards who stayed in the bar, talking of great days – and had capitulated.

  He would not be there. He would be on foreign territory with people he didn’t know. The knot was back in his shoulders. He stood, stretched, and went to fetch more peat blocks. The dogs greeted him.

  Sebastian said, in Danny Curnow’s ear, ‘He’s the most capable they have in East Tyrone and Mid-Ulster. Each of the active areas requires a strong leadership personality. That matters more than the ideology. When the full weight of the Provisionals had mobilised in their day they had an internal structure of discipline, which was rarely challenged.’

  He allowed the man to talk. Patronising, but well meant.

  ‘What counts now is charisma. I’m told he has it. Of course, we’ve contacts among men who killed and bombed before the ceasefire, and who’ve taken another path. Now we throw money at them to keep them on it, but they all speak well of him. There are men in the former Special Branch who knew and respected him before his twenty-first birthday.’

  He wasn’t a big man, but he had the strong shoulders Danny would have expected of a young man growing up on a farm; his mother had been widowed when he was a child so he’d have heaved bales, sacks, buckets and jerry cans. Mousy hair, inclining to fair, a tanned face.

  ‘I’ve studied him, he’s in my sector, but I’ve never been in a position to linger on him. I’ve seen camera work, from the last gear we put in – that tree-trunk in the hedge by the lane gate. It ran for three days and we saw him a couple of times. The last day there was a view of him striding towards it with a chain-saw – God knows how he knew. He cut down the tree at the ground. You were at Gough so you’ll remember the wall round it. He parked on the pavement, close to the security cameras, near the gatehouse sentry bunker, and lobbed the camera over the wall, as if he was giving it back to us. We had that on camera too. Some in the county detest the agreement and the way the old IRA has gone into government, but they say they’re not ready to resume armed struggle. He’s trying to locate those in the community who don’t buy into that. He has to find the ones who’ll put life and liberty on the line. Nobody wants to come out of the shadows and hook up with a loser, but if there are new rifles, armour-piercing stuff, explosives and detonators, the recruits will show. Just so you understand where we are, Danny, it’s not like the old days here. I can’t sign up a hairy-arsed lunatic, with a big mouth, and put a rifle in his hand. We’d be charged with conspiracy to murder. It just doesn’t happen . . . We have five hundred people from Five living here and we’re on the back foot. We regard him as a prime enemy.’

  The dogs would have worshipped him, were close at his heel and came to his knee if he flicked a finger. He gazed around him. Danny understood. It was the man’s home, as the house in Caen was his. He wouldn’t have travelled. He had read the file on the flight between Northolt and Aldergrove and there was no mention of trips abroad. It was clear to Danny why the man must go to Prague: they’d put an RPG launcher in his hand – capable of destroying an armoured police vehicle – a sniper rifle, a box of military detonators, with Semtex or American equivalents, and he would test-fire and test-explode, then give the gear a clean bill of health. He sensed the unease in the walk to the open gate where the farm track met the lane.

  ‘The first file reference to him has him aged nearly four. He kicked a detective on the kneecap and fractured it. They’d come to take his father. The detective had to take three months’ sick leave – that’s why it’s entered. About a year later they came again for his father and he threw a plate at a woman officer, breaking her glasses and splitting her forehead. That’s in the file too. It’s said he was traumatised by the death of his father – I don’t wish to pry, Mr Curnow, but I assume you played a part in that. Teachers suggested he needed counselling because he was so introverted. Everything changed when he was thirteen. A man was bludgeoned to death a couple of miles from here, and local word was that he’d informed on the mission Padraig Riordan had gone out on. The file’s interesting here. There’s a big red star at the side of that entry and someone has written ‘Is that really so – dear oh dear?’ and initialled it MB. Anyway, the boy changed. Fair at school but a potential star in Gaelic football, and school staff were saying he’d turned a corner. Too much to hope for.’

  The child came out. Danny saw the love. The boy jumped awkwardly but the man caught him easily and swung him high. A little shriek of excitement reached Danny. Those years before it had been hatred. He reflected: most intelligence people were never privy to anything personal in the targets’ lives. They saw them, fleetingly, in balaclavas and combats, with an AK assault job, or brought from a prison wagon to a courthouse, heads ducked, or in a car park when information came one way and banknotes went the other. Or they saw them dead in a ditch with their shoes off, burns on their skin, and a plastic bag bulging over their heads with bone and brain. Few saw them as Danny did now, and that was what he had run away from.

  ‘That part of the mountain never bought into the peace. Another man articulated what they felt: “Did we have all those men killed and all those men locked away in the gaols, their youth lost, so that a few could parade in government and boast that they’d achieved power sharing?” Malachy Riordan had come under the influence of an activist, Brendan Murphy, a sort of surrogate father. He packed in the sport. He became a part-time haulage contractor, mostly trans-border smuggling, and a part-time guerrilla fighter. Forgive me, Danny, but I don’t make the judgements that require me to call them terrorists because we’ll likely end up negotiating with them one day, as we did fifteen years ago with the Provos. It’s as if this lot believe they alone carry the sacred flame, nationalism, and the former crowd are turncoats and traitors. He’s blown up a courthouse, he’s knocked the back off a local-government office, he’s wounded a detective with a Dragunov. We’ve been waiting for a mistake, but it hasn’t come yet. He’s good at what he does, and behind him is Bridie, his wife.’

  The father put his son down, held his hand, then let go.

  Sebastian murmured, ‘Apologies for not bringing a flask . . . Maybe going off the mountain, off Altmore, is his mistake, being somewhere his reputation hasn’t reached, among people he won’t easily impress.’

  Had he been preparing to address a seminar of recruits that afternoon, Matthew Bentinick might have observed that ‘The controller should always be aware that personalities, characters, individuals, never heard of before in relation to the mission, will spring to prominence. The presence in the scenario of some will be mildly welcome and others will be intrusive and a damn nuisance, may even put the show in jeopardy. Be aware. You may consider your planning has been faultless and dedicated, but things happen, events that cannot be foreseen. People will aid, obstruct and surprise. Ignore their interventions and you will fail.’ He did not, however, do recruits’ seminars, was sparing with advice to anyone, and among the remotest men in the building. He believed that ‘Strangers will always slip into the spotlight, usually as a damn nuisance.’

  No knock. She came in and kicked the door shut with h
er heel. ‘Is the big picture in focus?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Who has it?’

  ‘I do and you – the whole picture. Vagabond has most of it. The young woman will have the small-screen picture, which is adequate for her. The boss on the top floor, not a lot. He can’t worry about what he doesn’t know.’

  ‘There’ll be a local boy.’

  ‘Comes with a good pedigree. He’ll know it all. You were right. Vagabond came without a bleat.’

  ‘I usually am.’

  And she was gone. His eyes beaded on the file.

  His employer, Timofey Simonov, was up the hill behind the villa walking the dogs. He thought Simonov, who had been a captain, with little prospect of promotion – and was now a multi-millionaire – cared more for his dogs than for him. The former brigadier, who had seemed to be fast-tracked towards full general, was now a manservant ranked below the Weimaraners. He couldn’t kick them because they would betray him. He ran a vacuum cleaner over the rugs in the first-floor salon. It was a fine morning.

  Why the sour mood?

  He had sat in the church through the concert. At the end, Simonov had networked with others prominent in the town’s Russian community and from the embassy: the brigadier was not an equal and had been sent to the car to wait. He could remember hearing of the collapse of the regime and the dismissal of scores of intelligence-gathering officers, and realising that a world had ended. He had knelt in his office on his Afghan prayer mat and wept. It was of the finest workmanship, from the bazaar in Herat, prize booty from his service there. He had sobbed: he was no different from a conscript kid in a forward fire position with the savages closing in. He had survived that war and had gone as a star to Milovice, senior on the Central Command staff, but had been a casualty of the peace. He had felt hands on him and heard a soothing voice. His head had been against a uniformed chest, that of the junior captain, Timofey Simonov. He’d nowhere else to turn. Now he could have left him, had the resources, but the villa in Karlovy Vary was his true home. His wife lived in an apartment close to the embassy in Prague and they had two children at the school there, but his home was with his employer.