As he crossed Terenure Road, another car pulled between them, driven by an elderly lady, forcing the driver of the black car to brake. It edged to the centre of the road, allowing the man at the wheel to keep Ryan in sight.
It stayed there, maintaining its distance, until Ryan reached Harold’s Cross, where he pulled to the curb. He watched in the mirror as the black car slowed then turned off towards the cemetery.
Ryan might have worried about who followed him, which thin finger of the government crept after him, but he had other things on his mind as he pulled away.
He had a suit to collect.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CÉLESTIN LAINÉ DOWNED another shot of whiskey, let it bite his throat. Barely seven o’clock, and Paddy Murtagh was already drunk. Before long, he would start to sing. Rebel songs, he called them. The Bold Fenian Men, The Wearing of the Green, Johnson’s Motor Car. He would raise his voice, hoarse and tuneless, and would not fall silent until he passed out.
At least Lainé would not have to endure it alone this evening. Elouan Groix, a fellow Breton patriot, also sat at the table in the small cottage. Murtagh’s father had given Lainé the use of the two-room dwelling in a remote corner of his farmland, thus the young Murtagh was made welcome out of a sense of obligation.
Lainé and other members of Bezen Perrot, the small but dedicated band that he had led in the fight against the Allies, had fled to Ireland in the aftermath of the war. They had held on longer than many of the Germans they had battled alongside, but in the end, there remained no other choice but to run.
As a young man, Lainé had read La vie de Patrice Pearse by Louis le Roux. He had been left with a sense of awe, and of duty to those who had been martyred for Ireland in 1916. Like many autonomists, he had felt in his heart that those Irish lives had been sacrificed not just for Ireland, but also for men like him. The struggle to throw the French yoke off Breton shoulders needed the same spirit as had been shown by the Irish if it were to succeed, that shared Celtic fire in the warriors’ bellies.
The coming of the Reich had seemed like a kiss from God. A gift, a means to achieve what Bretons lacked the might to do for themselves. So as France fell, Lainé organised and recruited, armed his men with weapons supplied by the Germans, and fought.
Soon, Lainé discovered a talent he had never suspected he possessed. He had trained and worked as a chemical engineer, a useful vocation when manufacturing explosive devices, but a newly unearthed ability shocked everyone, including himself: he found he had an innate expertise in dragging information from prisoners.
On a hot night early in the occupation, Lainé and three comrades captured a Resistance fighter in fields north of Nantes. Two others had gotten away. Lainé began by asking for the names of the escaped men. The prisoner refused, giving only his own name, Sylvain Depaul. He was not from the area. Lainé would have known him otherwise.
They blindfolded Depaul and brought him to a barn on a sloping hillside. Cattle slept all around, oblivious to the men who crossed their fields. Lainé bound the résistant to a pillar. His wrists were slippery with sweat as they were fixed in place, tied tight to the wood. Depaul’s own belt was wrapped around his neck and buckled at the rear of the pillar, leaving him pinned and choking.
“Who were the others?” Lainé asked again.
“I’ve already told you,” Depaul said, the words coughed out from his restricted throat. “I was alone. I was just out walking.”
“With a Browning pistol?” Lainé stroked Depaul’s cheek with the weapon’s muzzle.
“For rabbits. I was going to make a fire and cook one.”
Lainé stabbed at Depaul’s lips with the muzzle, mashing the flesh against his teeth. Depaul turned his head away as far as the belt would allow, blood spilling from his torn skin.
“I have no patience for this,” Lainé said. “This is not a game. If you cooperate, you might live. I can’t guarantee that, but it remains a possibility. On the other hand, if you lie, if you hold back information, then it is a certainty that you will suffer and die.”
In Lainé’s mind, they were only words. He had been interrogated by police officers years ago, after the bombing of the Monument to the Unity of Brittany and France in Rennes. They screamed question after question at him, slapped his face, pulled his hair. Harsh, but hardly torture. He had never experienced such a thing. Thus, he was as surprised as anyone when he set the pistol aside, took an ivory-handled penknife from his pocket, heated the blade in the flame of the oil lamp until its tip glowed, then pressed it against Depaul’s cheek.
As the résistant howled, and the other men coughed at the smell of scorched meat, Lainé felt a surge of something he did not recognise in his chest. Power? Pride? As Depaul cried, Lainé smiled.
“I’ll ask you again,” he said. “Who were the others who fled when we captured you?”
Depaul growled, spat blood on his own shirt, swallowed his pain. “There was no one. I was alone.”
Lainé had not expected to be pleased at Depaul’s refusal to speak. Nevertheless, there it was: the pleasure of anticipating the next cruel act. He returned the blade to the oil lamp’s flame, watched as traces of Depaul’s blood and skin bubbled and burned away.
“I was on my own,” Depaul said, his voice liquid, no longer hard and defiant. “I swear. God help me, I’d tell you if there was anyone else, but there wasn’t, I promise.”
Lainé reached behind the pillar, seized the thumb of DePaul’s right hand.
“Once more, who were your companions?”
“Please, I was alone. There was—”
Lainé pushed the tip of the blade beneath Depaul’s thumbnail. Depaul screamed. The three Bretons stepped back. One of them ran outside, covering his mouth, vomit dribbling between his fingers.
Keeping the blade in place, Lainé asked, “Who were your companions?”
Depaul shook his head from side to side, his voice stretching thin as his lungs emptied.
Lainé explored the tenderness beneath the nail. The blade’s tip burrowed in, worked the keratin loose from the flesh until it peeled away.
Depaul talked.
He told them the names of his two companions, local men, and the location to which they had been heading. The British were to drop a crate by parachute into a field not even a mile away. When Lainé and his men reached it, they found it contained rifles, ammunition and radio equipment. Within twenty four hours, Depaul’s friends had been rounded up and executed alongside him.
As Lainé developed his newfound talent, his reputation travelled. Soon it only took the mention of the Breton’s name to convince a résistant to talk. It would have been a lie to deny the pleasure of such notoriety. Power in its purest form. The power of fear. Lainé grew accustomed to it quickly and never suspected he would lose that power.
Now in Ireland, in his mid-fifties, he had nothing. He had lacked the foresight to rob and rape as the Reich crumbled, leaving him to run with empty pockets. Had it not been for the contacts he had made with the IRA, heroes in his mind, he might never have escaped the wrath of the Allies and found his way to Ireland.
Lainé still remembered the crushing disappointment of finally meeting the Irish revolutionaries he had so idolised. In his imagination, they were the noble defenders of the working Celtic man. They were Patrick Pearse, they were James Connolly, they were Michael Collins.
In truth, they were a disjointed network of farmers, socialists and fascists, bigots and blowhards, an army whose war had come and gone decades before. They had sided with the Nazis during the war, even formulating plans to assist the Germans in an invasion of Northern Ireland to oust the British presence there, but they proved themselves incapable of such ambitious schemes.
Fleeing in defeat had been like swallowing thorns for Célestin Lainé. But now, years later, he knew it was better than the hopeless purgatory the fanatics of the IRA wallowed in. They had not quite won their struggle for independence; the northern part of their island remained under
the thumb of the British and their Protestant caretakers, while the rest of the nation was ruled by a self-serving government that had turned on the brave warriors whose sacrifice had made its very existence possible.
And now the best the IRA had to offer was ill educated louts like Paddy Murtagh and his belligerent father Caoimhín, full of songs about the virtuous struggle of revolution and precious little else.
As Lainé feared, young Murtagh placed his glass back on the table, inhaled a breath that rattled wet and thick at the back of his throat, and sang.
“Come all you warriors and renowned nobles, who once commanded brave warlike bands,” he slurred.
Elouan Groix gave Lainé a weary look. Lainé shrugged, raised a hand to say, what can I do?
Murtagh drew breath and let more of the dirge spill from his mouth. “Throw down your plumes and your golden trophies, give up your arms with a trembling hand.”
As Murtagh inhaled at the end of the couplet, Lainé heard the dog outside in the yard. It jerked on its chain and let loose a torrent of yelps and barks.
He had found the animal at the side of a road two years ago, no more than a pup, its pelt clinging to its ribs, a waist so thin Lainé could encircle it with one hand. A month of nurture, and he had a healthy and devoted companion he called Hervé, a masculine name, even though the dog was a female. And one could not have wished for a more loyal and fearsome guardian.
Murtagh’s voice rose to the next couplet.
Lainé lifted a hand and said, “Quiet.”
Murtagh let his voice fall to a bubbling exhalation, stared at Lainé with confusion and mild hurt on his face.
“Listen,” Lainé said.
Hervé’s cries rose in ferocity. Her chain jangled as she lunged out there in the weakening light.
“What?” Murtagh asked.
Groix placed a hand on the Irishman’s wrist, squeezed, silenced him.
The dog’s barks melded into a furious stream of noise, the chain jerking and snapping.
Lainé turned his head, peered out the window over the sink. He saw the post to which Hervé was tethered. The chain stretched beyond his vision, somewhere to the side of the cottage. The post leaned under the strain.
“We have a visitor,” Lainé said.
He watched the chain tauten and drop, tauten and drop, threatening to uproot the post. Hervé’s voice seemed to crack under the strain of her panic, reaching up and up until Lainé was sure it could climb no higher.
Then the dog fell silent, and the chain sagged to the ground.
CHAPTER NINE
A FULL LENGTH MIRROR fronted the wardrobe in Ryan’s hotel room. He stood before it, his shoulders back, chest forward, stomach in. The grey cloth of the suit clung to his body, accentuated the masculine, flattered his frame. Even, dare he think it, made him appear handsome. Ryan smoothed the tie. The silk whispered on his fingertips. The cufflinks sparked like flints on his wrists.
He did not look like a shopkeeper’s son.
“You’ll do,” he said.
THE GRAND HOTEL overlooked Malahide Estuary, north of Dublin, a broad wedding cake of a building, four storeys high, that had stood for more than a century. A receptionist directed Ryan to the function room. As he approached its doors, he heard a small swing band perform “How High the Moon.”
Waiters cleared away the remains of the meal that had recently been eaten by the guests. Some government affair, Ryan surmised, diplomats, judges, politicians. Men of power enjoying the spoils. They clustered in groups, girls and their suitors, elder men and their greying wives.
Couples danced, most of them stiff-backed, their bodies apart. A few showed less restraint.
For a moment, Ryan felt an imposter, an interloper. He didn’t belong here, amongst these people with their money and their good taste. His hand went to the silk of his tie. Its texture against his fingertips offered a sliver of reassurance.
“Are you lost?” a velvet voice asked.
Ryan turned, saw her. He opened his mouth, but words betrayed him, his tongue a tripwire. She stood with a young woman Ryan recognised as Charles Haughey’s secretary.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’re all charlatans here. Come on. I’ll let you get me a drink.”
She hooked her hand around his elbow, her forearm slender and bare, the skin of her wrist pale and freckled. In her heels, she stood only a few inches shorter than him, the length of her startling, the sleek line of her body drawing his eyes downwards. Deep red hair pinned up, eyes smoky green.
She gave her friend a smile and a wink as she guided Ryan away.
“Who are you with?” she asked.
Ryan gained control of his tongue. “I have to meet someone.”
“Who?”
“The minister.”
She led him deeper into the room’s currents. “Which minister? We have several.”
“The Minister for Justice.”
She smiled. “Charlie? I believe he’s holding court at the bar. Which is handy, seeing as you’re going to get me that drink.”
They walked together from the dimness of one room to the light of another. The music dulled, laughter and chatter swelled.
There was Haughey, perched on a high stool, surrounded by younger men, his face reddened with drink. He fixed Ryan with his hawk’s stare, winked, and continued his story.
“You should’ve seen the fucker,” he said, spittle arcing from his thin lips. “Galloping like his life depended on it. And it did, I’d have shot the bastard myself if he’d lost. Anyway, he’s coming charging up the straight, and wee Turley the jockey, he’s barely hanging on, he looks like he’s shitting himself. That other fucker, I forget his name, he’s looking back over his shoulder, sees my boy coming at him, I swear to God, he near fell off when he seen him.”
The young men laughed the laughter of the beholden.
Ryan felt warm air brush his ear, smelled lipstick. He shivered.
“I’ll have a G and T,” she said. “Lime. Never lemon.”
Ryan reached for his wallet.
Haughey called, “Hey, hey, hey, get your hand out of your pocket, big fella. It’s all taken care of.”
Ryan nodded his thanks and caught the barman’s attention. “Gin and tonic with lime and a half of Guinness.”
She let her fingers drop from his elbow to join with his, pulled his hand close to her, his knuckles brushing her hip. “Come on, a real drink.”
Heat bloomed on Ryan’s cheeks. He coughed. “Make that a brandy and ginger.”
“That’s more like it,” she said. Her fingers tightened on his before releasing them. She turned, leaned her back and elbows on the bar, the silken fabric of her dress telling tales.
The heat on Ryan’s cheeks spread to his neck.
She tilted her head, showing him the smooth place beneath her ear. “You haven’t asked my name.”
Ryan wondered for a moment if he should apologise. Instead, he put his hands in his pockets and feigned confidence. “All right. What’s your name?”
“Celia,” she said, letting the sibilant drip like honey, the vowels thick between her lips. “What’s yours?”
He told her as his assuredness flaked away like weathered paint.
“Well, Mr. Ryan, what business do you have with Charles J. Haughey?”
“Private business,” he said, his voice harder than he intended.
She arched a sculpted eyebrow. “I see.”
The sharp click of glass on marble, the shimmer of ice. Ryan handed Celia the gin and tonic. She held his stare as she sipped. Her tongue sought the glistening droplets on her lips.
Ryan swallowed the brandy’s burn, couldn’t meet her challenge. He might have seen the corner of her mouth curl in amusement as he looked away.
Haughey broke from his pack, the young men staring after him. He let his gaze crawl the length of Ryan’s form, shoe to collar. “McClelland take care of you all right?”
“Yes, Minister.” Ryan measured carefully the bo
w of his head, balancing deference and pride, the politician and the woman.
“Good.” Haughey nodded. “You’ll do all right. Won’t he, Miss Hume?”
Celia’s lips parted in a conspirator’s smile. “Yes he will,” she said.
Ryan couldn’t be sure whose conspiracy she sided with, only that he desired it to be his own.
“Come on,” Haughey said. “The colonel’s waiting.”
As the minister turned away, Celia’s finger snagged Ryan’s.
“Be careful,” she said, her smile lost.
Ryan followed Haughey to a darkened stairwell. The minister lit a cigarette as he walked, didn’t offer one to Ryan.
Mounting the steps, Haughey said, “Watch yourself with Skorzeny. He’s smart as a whip. Don’t be clever with him. Try it, and he’ll rip the shite out of you.”
“Yes, Minister.”
They exited the stairwell onto a carpeted corridor, numbered doors along the hallway. Haughey approached one set apart from the others. He knocked.
The door opened, swallowed Haughey, leaving Ryan alone in the corridor.
He leaned his back against the wall, not thinking of what waited inside the room. Instead, Ryan pictured the woman, remembered her scent, warm and sweet. Time passed, forgotten.
Haughey opened the door, stepped aside to allow two suited men to leave. They eyed Ryan as they passed. Once they had gone, the minister said, “Come on.”
CHAPTER TEN
AS RYAN ENTERED the suite, Skorzeny stood up from the leather-upholstered armchair, seeming to fill the room, the breadth and the height of him, the line of his shoulders stretching his pale suit like an oak beam. The scar traced a route from his eyebrow to the corner of his mouth, and onward to his chin, his moustache neat, his gaze bright. His thick greying hair swept back from his forehead.
Ratlines Page 5
