One Man's Flag

by David Downing

“One last thing,” her brother said as he got to his feet.

  “What?”

  “Remember me.”

  “How could I not?”

  A last wave, and the far door clanged shut behind him. She sat there sobbing for what seemed a long time, until an officer cajoled her onto her feet. The walk back to the gate was a gallery of unsympathetic faces.

  Once out on Jebb Avenue, she just stood there for a while, not knowing what to do. The thought of sharing a crowded tram was unbearable, and eventually she just started walking westward, in the general direction of her lodgings.

  How was she going to spend the next fourteen hours? What did one do with oneself in such a situation? Drink the hours away? Hide in the noisy darkness of a nickelodeon?

  How could she wish away her brother’s last hours on earth?

  There’d been so many months of waiting, of pestering embassy officials and lawyers, of mourning a life that wasn’t yet over. And at the beginning, through August and September, when no one else seemed interested in anything but the movement of armies, she’d been utterly alone with her anguish. Her father had refused to cross the Atlantic; her other brother was unwilling to leave his pregnant wife. Aunt Orla had announced she would come, and it had taken all Caitlin’s strength to discourage her—the thought of losing her surrogate mother to a German U-boat was more than she could bear.

  And then Michael Killen had appeared at the door of her room in Clapham, a tall, red-haired Dubliner with sad green eyes. He told her he was there on behalf of the Irish Citizen Army, the workers’ defense force created by union leader Jim Larkin during the 1913 lockout. The ICA was now the military wing of Irish socialism. Colm’s operation had not been sanctioned by the ICA leadership, but most of those involved had been members, and Killen was here to see that those who’d been caught and imprisoned did not feel abandoned. He couldn’t visit Colm himself, but he wanted Caitlin to tell her brother that in Dublin his name was revered.

  She’d been grateful for that, and for the talks they shared in the days that followed, which eventually ended in bed.

  But then he’d gone back to Dublin, leaving her alone once more. With Colm to visit and his fate occluding all else, she’d been forced to relinquish the New York newspaper job that had so excited her six months before. Marooned in London, she had filled her days with long, exploratory walks and spent the evenings nursing drinks in her local pub, where the male regulars quickly learned to let her be. On one particular occasion, finding herself in Limehouse, she had remembered reading that Sylvia Pankhurst, after breaking with her famous suffragette mother and sister over their support for the war, had set up home in nearby Poplar.

  Caitlin had found her at home and been welcomed like a long-lost sister. When, halfway through their first conversation, she had suddenly burst into tears, Sylvia had proved a sympathetic listener. Other visits had followed, in which her new friend advised Caitlin not to let her brother’s fate determine her own. She had eventually responded by penning an admiring piece on Sylvia’s work among East End women, which her former editor in New York was only too happy to print.

  Michael Killen had also returned on those two occasions when Colm’s comrades were about to be executed, carrying messages from their families that a sympathetic priest delivered to the condemned cells. Colm would be the last to die—the British, as far as Caitlin could judge, had been reluctant to execute an American, for fear of upsetting a potential ally. If her brother had agreed to a public show of remorse, one lawyer had told her, he would have been on a boat back home.

  But he hadn’t, and for Colm’s sake she had swallowed her anger and resigned herself to the worst. Michael had arrived in London a few days earlier, for what would be the last time. He would probably try to see her that evening, might even be waiting at her lodging house now, but she knew she wanted to spend this night alone. And he wouldn’t try to dissuade her. They weren’t that close, and both of them knew they never would be. She wasn’t at all sure why she was still sleeping with him—neither of them seemed to derive much joy from the process—and her original hope, that sleeping with someone new would help her forget Jack McColl, had so far proved in vain.

  She thought about Colm’s revelation, that Jack had actually offered to let him escape. So at least he had tried; he hadn’t been deaf to her plea. She must have meant something to the man. Not enough to tell her who he worked for, or that he was spying on her family, but something.

  As she carried on up Crescent Lane, waves of sadness rolled over her, each one coursing forth tears. And she wasn’t sure who they were for anymore. For Colm, of course, for her and Jack perhaps, not to mention a world in which thousands were dying each day for nothing more real than a flag. And where that was concerned, she had to admit, her brother was just the same. His flag might be a rebel flag, his death less a matter of chance, but this mad attachment to nations and land was what united them all.

  She crossed the road to the common and walked toward her lodging house on the northern side. Two women in black were sitting on a bench, watching their almost identical toddlers kicking around a bright red ball. Sons who would never play with their fathers again.

  As she had half expected, Michael was waiting at her lodgings, sharing a mug of tea with her Irish landlady. Up in Caitlin’s room, he confirmed that all hope of reprieve had passed and went through the motions of offering to stay the night. When she told him no, he said he would meet her outside the Tower entrance at eight o’clock next morning. On past occasions a notice that an execution had been carried out had always been posted on the gatehouse wall.

  He was a kind man, she thought as he disappeared down the stairs. Just not one who touched her heart. She would need his help in fulfilling Colm’s request.

  She didn’t feel hungry but knew she ought to eat, and she managed to consume a plate of pie and mash at the café a few doors down. The pub on the corner provided a bottle of scotch, which she carried home.

  Her room looked out across street and common, and once an attempt to divert herself with work had failed, she took chair and glass to the window and sat watching the world go by. There were still a lot of automobiles on the street, but rather fewer horses. An occasional brightly lit tram slid past, striking sparks on the overhead wires as it took the curve toward Kennington. Every now and then, she detected motion in the darkened park beyond—lovers, perhaps, but more likely people walking their dogs.

  Picturing Colm in his Tower cell, it all seemed too ridiculous. Her brother, like one of Richard III’s princes, or Thomas More, or poor Anne Boleyn, or any of those famous people who, deliberately or not, had dared to cross the British Crown. Well, there was no doubting Colm’s deliberation—as he’d said himself, the choice had been his.

  How he had come to make it—that was something else again. Why had her younger brother been so ready to follow a rebel like Seán Tiernan to the gates of death and beyond? The absence of a loving mother, the presence of an unloving father? His own character, which she herself had often feared was weak?

  What did it matter now?

  She tore herself away from the window and lay down on the bed, certain that sleep wouldn’t come. But the scotch must have done its work, because the sun was streaming between the undrawn curtains when she woke with a start.

  It was gone seven.

  The authorities had refused to reveal the time of execution, and she searched her heart for Colm’s—was he still alive? Surely she would know if he wasn’t?

  Nothing felt different. She hurriedly changed into clean clothes and went out. She didn’t have long to wait for a 30 tram, and the journey to Waterloo seemed quicker than usual. After walking across the bridge, she took the District Line train to Mark Lane. Emerging from the station, she realized what a beautiful day it was, the sun shining in another clear blue sky, the faintest of breezes ruffling the Union Jack that floated above the Tower. She had im
agined chill mists rising up from the river, foghorns singing their melancholy song, not this brutal light.

  “A good day to die,” she murmured to herself, remembering the Sioux chief’s famous line. What rubbish, she thought. For someone in terrible pain, perhaps. For anyone else there was no such thing.

  As she walked down toward the gate, her ears were alert for the sound of gunfire beyond the wall to her left. Colm had been so pleased to learn that he would be shot rather than hanged. “A soldier’s death,” he had called it.

  Michael was already there, and his expression told her all she needed to know. She buried her face in his shoulder and sobbed.

  “I spoke to the man in the gatehouse,” he told her eventually. “His personal effects are there for you.”

  She dried her eyes, took a deep breath, and went to collect the burlap sack that contained his books—Irish history, every one—his clothes, watch, pen, and journal. The thought of reading the latter was almost more than she could bear.

  She signed her name, gave the official a contemptuous look, and went back to Michael.

  “What do you want to do now?” he asked.

  Just cry and cry, she thought. “A cup of tea,” she said. It seemed as appropriate as anything else.

  In the café on Eastcheap, she told Michael what Colm had wanted her to do and asked if he could help her find the other families. He looked doubtful for a minute but said he would see what he could do. It occurred to Caitlin that the Citizen Army might have its own reasons for keeping an American journalist at bay. It had already occurred to her, with a sharp pang of guilt, that the story Colm wanted told might not prove as glorious as he imagined it to be. “When are you going back?” she asked Michael.

  “On the evening train. I’ll give you my address in Dublin. Have you a pen?”

  She loaned him Colm’s, which seemed fitting.

  “And I’ll write to you once I’ve fixed something up, all right?”

  “All right. And thanks for being here, Michael.”

  He smiled wryly. “I know you wish he’d never laid eyes on a green flag, but he was one of ours in the end, and we care for our own.”

  She kissed him lightly on the cheek and wished him a safe journey home.

  In her room that afternoon, between the bouts of helpless crying, she went through the press clippings relating to Colm and his operation that she’d collected over the months. The official story seemed full of contradictions and omissions, but for all she knew, the plotters’ account might prove equally flawed. She would find out. For Colm, for herself. And she would try to discover whether what they had done had made any difference. She wanted to know, no matter how painful the answer might be, if his sacrifice had been worth it.

  But Colm’s wasn’t the only story she wanted to tell. As night fell, she felt a sudden guilty realization that his death had freed her once more. He was gone, and she would honor his request, for her own sake as well as his. But not to the exclusion of everything else. Until that terrible night the previous August, when the police had come to tell her that Colm had been arrested, she’d spent five long years learning to be a journalist. All those days fighting off drunken editors and feeling the odd woman out in a boisterous male newsroom, all those raised eyebrows when she produced her press card, all those hours outblaséing the other crime reporters over city morgue cadavers, when all she wanted to do was throw up, preferably on her so-called colleagues. She wasn’t about to waste all that, and Colm wouldn’t want her to.

  She’d gotten good at her job in those five years, good at encapsulating people and places, at writing snappy prose, at keeping her rage sufficiently under control so as not to antagonize those she sought to convince. And in the end she’d won the post she dreamed of. Well, that was gone, but there’d be another, and God only knew there were stories to spare. The eight-month-old war was crossing the world like a tornado, throwing them out in every direction. Soldiers’ stories, workers’ stories, women’s stories. Before the war, people had complained that things were changing too fast, but now they were changing even faster.

  She ought to be in her element, she thought. And by God she intended to be.

  .

  Bhattacharyya

  The steam ferry worked its way down the crowded Hooghly in the wake of a jute ship bound for the Bay of Bengal. The ghats on either bank were crowded with bathers and washerwomen, the wharves and docks a hive of activity. Away to the left, the squat, rectangular blocks of the local Fort William dominated the eastern skyline.

  It was a pleasant half-hour journey to the botanical gardens, where McColl had arranged a meeting with an informer named Narayan Gangapadhyay. The choice of location had, as ever, been difficult—the number of places in Calcutta where a European and an Indian could share a lengthy conversation without arousing curiosity or suspicion was limited. Caitlin would surely have claimed that this said all there was to be said about British rule in India, and while McColl would not have gone that far, he was willing to allow that it did say a lot.

  He’d been told by several people that the botanical gardens were well worth a visit in their own right, if only to see the famous banyan, reputedly the largest tree on earth. And he was enjoying the trip downriver, the ferry chuffing its way through the heavy traffic in the early-morning sunshine. They were passing the main commercial docks now, as the river slowly curved to the right, past the once-fashionable suburb of Garden Reach.

  After the captain had eased his boat alongside the jetty, McColl stepped ashore and studied the painted map of the gardens that adorned the ticket booth’s wall. The Orchid House was not far away; the banyan, which looked some distance beyond it, would have to wait. Business before pleasure, he told himself as he walked up an avenue lined with soaring palms. To his left, beautifully kept lawns and flower beds stretched away toward a small lake. Most of the plants were native to the tropics, but the English signature was unmistakable.

  The first sign that something had gone awry was the Indian constable standing sentry at the door to the Orchid House. He raised a warning hand and carefully checked McColl’s police accreditation before letting him in. “Inspector Forsythe is senior rank,” he added helpfully.

  It wasn’t much hotter inside, but moisture misted the air. Forsythe, a red-faced Englishman in tropical suit and topee, was crouched over the body, which was lying amid a bed of crushed yellow orchids. Two Indian subordinates and what looked like a gardens official hovered above him.

  There was no mystery about the cause of death. A homemade dagger—just a sharpened length of steel—had been plunged with such force into the back of Gangapadhyay’s neck that the point stuck out through his throat. A torrent of blood had been released, enriching the soil for those orchids not crushed.

  McColl introduced himself to Forsythe and explained the situation.

  “So the enemy got to him first,” was the inspector’s summation. “I was wondering why he still had money in his pocket.”

  “Did you find anything else?”

  “Nothing.”

  McColl looked down at the young Bengali. He couldn’t have been more than twenty. “I need to search his room before anyone else does,” he told Forsythe. “You don’t need me here, do you?”

  “No. But I’ll need a statement at some point.”

  “Fine, I’ll be in touch.”

  McColl hurried back down the avenue of palms to the jetty, where the steam ferry was about to leave. The only two other passengers were Europeans, and neither was splattered in blood. Remembering the cross-river ferry that linked this jetty with Garden Reach, McColl asked the captain if it had recently departed.

  “About fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Did you notice any of the men who took it?”

  “No.”

  McColl took a seat near the bow and willed the boat on against the current. Garden Reach was a long way from Gang
apadhyay’s room in Black Town, but there was no knowing what form of transport the killer would be using. Jugantar had rich backers, and an automobile wasn’t out of the question.

  The heat was rising, and he could feel the sun grilling the top of his head through the thin felt hat. He had always thought he looked ridiculous wearing a topee, and the other popular option—wearing two felt hats, one inside the other—wasn’t much of a sartorial improvement. But the only other option was not going out. It was barely April, and his single hat was clearly inadequate.

  It took forty minutes to reach the Chandpal Ghat and the best part of another to convince the tonga wallah that he was serious about visiting Black Town. Once destination, route, and fare had been agreed upon, the Indian set the pony in motion. They trotted up Strand Road, crossed the busy approach to the Howrah Bridge, and, after rounding the mint, turned in to the maze of narrow streets that made up the largest native quarter. McColl had never been to Gangapadhyay’s home but had learned the address when posting him money for services rendered, along with the fictional letter suggesting it came from a generous uncle. And if there was anything there to find, he wanted to be the one who found it.

  Their journey through Black Town elicited many stares, but only a few seemed hostile. Gangapadhyay’s rooming house was accessible only via a narrow alley and, along with its courtyard, seemed completely hemmed in by other buildings. McColl told the tonga-wallah to wait and walked down the alley, scattering giggling children. The front doors were open, but the chairs in the hallway were unoccupied, the table with its ledger untended. He was looking for Number 8, but none of the doors seemed to bear a number.

  Hearing movement behind one, he rapped on it with his knuckles.

  The door inched open to reveal a couple of big brown eyes and a riot of raven hair.

  “Gangapadhyay?” he asked.

  A finger emerged, pointed upward, and withdrew itself. The door closed.

  McColl started up the wooden staircase, which creaked violently and showed alarming signs of rotting away. At the top of the second flight, he stopped to check the Webley in his pocket.