The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising

by Dermot McEvoy

  “What did I do now?” demanded Johnny.

  “You knew about Grandpa.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That he was a murderer.”

  Johnny turned angry. “Grandpa was not a murderer,” he said. “My grandfather was a soldier and a patriot, who helped established the Irish nation. What he did was entirely within the rules of war.”

  “But you knew,” Diane insisted.

  “I didn’t know for sure,” said Johnny. “Grandpa was always circumspect about the whole thing. Not even in America, where it might have gotten him votes, did he reveal he was in Collins’s Squad. He didn’t even give a witness statement to the Irish government when they were soliciting histories back in the 1940s and ’50s. It was his secret, and although I was suspicious, I respected his privacy.” Diane gave him a kiss to make up. “Come on,” said Johnny, “we’re going to town. I want you to know how it felt to walk in Grandpa’s shoes.”

  After arriving at the Westland Row DART station, Johnny walked Diane to St. Stephen’s Green, shot down Montague Street from Harcourt Street, and began his little tour.

  “It’s a remarkably unremarkable building,” said Diane.

  “Would you believe it’s eighteenth-century Georgian architecture?” Diane shook her head. “It’s been made a ‘protected structure’ by the Dublin Corporation—basically, a historic building. They can’t tear it down. I’m sure my great-grandfather would be impressed!” said Johnny, laughing. “It’s been remade over many, many times, of course.” The bricks were covered by a cream-colored, stucco-like surface. Johnny figured the fragile house remained standing only because of the strength of its latest coat of paint. “When it was built, both King George III and George Washington were alive. Think of that! I get a lump in my throat when I look at it,” Johnny said, and Diane squeezed his hand hard, “because that’s where my great-grandfather was murdered, and that’s where, I know now, my own grandfather avenged his death.”

  “This little city has our family in its grip, doesn’t it?” asked Diane. “Even after almost a hundred years.”

  “It does, indeed,” said Johnny. “Come on—let’s go for a walk.” They held hands as they walked down Aungier Street. At the Carmelite Church, they made a left and walked down to Golden Lane. “This is where the Piles Buildings were. As you can see, nothing exists of them anymore. Everything was torn down around 1980. It must have been a horrible eyesore by then.”

  Then Johnny laughed. “What’s so funny?” asked Diane.

  “I was thinking of the Duke of Clarence.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Queen Victoria’s grandson.”

  “Oh,” said Diane, now laughing herself, “this has to be good.”

  “Well,” said Johnny, “the young Duke and his father, the Prince of Wales—who would later become King Edward VII—were visiting this very site in 1885. It was one of those annoying visits where royalty meets and greets the great unwashed. Anyway, they were shaking hands when some ould wan tossed the contents of a chamber pot on top of the Duke’s pristine head. The Dublin poor had spoken!”

  Diane laughed out loud. “Oh, that’s wonderful!”

  “The Duke was quite a guy,” added Johnny. “Do you know he was suspected of being Jack the Ripper?”

  “No!”

  “Yep,” replied Johnny, with some satisfaction. “Died of syphilis. Always looked a little light in the boots to me, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh,” said Diane, “you’re so bold! And you get such satisfaction from such information.”

  “The only duke I ever liked,” said Johnny, sincerely, “was Duke Ellington.”

  Johnny led her up Stephens Street, and they emerged on South Great Georges Street. At Dame Street they crossed and turned left. Before they came to the City Hall, they turned down Cow Lane. At the bottom, they found what remained of Saints Michael and John’s RC Church.

  “This is where it all began,” said Johnny. “My whole family is linked to this dead church.”

  “It’s closed?”

  “For a long time,” replied Johnny. “It’s a shame. It’s the oldest Catholic Church in the city, and it was the first Catholic Church to ring its bells after Catholic emancipation. Now it’s waiting to become a theatre or something.”

  “You really hate change, you do!” laughed Diane. “You’re nothing but a historical stick-in-the-mud!”

  “Go ahead, mock me,” sighed Johnny, “but our family history was made in this church. And,” he added, “this is where Grandpa visited on the morning of Blood’s assassination—and maybe the reason he had such mixed feelings about the church.”

  “Did he? I thought Grandpa liked the clergy,” protested Diane. “He once told me that he always kissed the Cardinal’s ring on St. Patrick’s Day because it was worth a thousand votes!”

  “Yeah,” said Johnny, “I can just see him now, kissing Francis Cardinal Spellman’s ring on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They hated each other. The Cardinal thought Grandpa was too liberal, and Grandpa thought Spellman was an old queen, which he was. They were both right!”

  “I love it when you talk dirty, filthy sex,” teased Diane.

  “They didn’t call Spellman ‘Aunt Franny’ for nothing,” replied Johnny, with relish. They walked around the old church, hoping that a ghost from the family’s past might want to reach out, but it was quiet. “That assassination of Blood had a traumatic effect on Grandpa,” said Johnny. “I think he was probably in shock when he came here that morning. It must have been awfully disturbing for a man like Grandpa, a straight-shooter if there ever was one.”

  “No pun intended,” interjected Diane.

  “That must have been a Freudian pun, don’t you think?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time old Sigmund came between us!”

  “You know,” said Johnny, turning serious again, “he never took the sacraments ever again. Not even matrimony.”

  “You mean your grandparents never married?” said Diane, looking shocked.

  “I hate to disappoint you,” Johnny said, laughing, “but my father was not a bastard.”

  “That’s a relief—considering the stuff I’ve heard about him!”

  Diane realized she had been too flippant about the subject of Johnny’s father. It seemed that no one in the family wanted to discuss Eoin Jr. The old man and Róisín never talked about him, because they never got over the loss of their only son. And Diane thought Johnny didn’t want to discuss him because he felt his father had abandoned him. “My father,” said Johnny, unconsciously dropping his voice a full octave lower, “was the unfortunate offspring of two exceptional people. He had a hard time living up to the standard his parents had set. Sometimes people find this world such a terrible place that they can’t handle it.” Johnny paused and then smiled gently at his wife. “My father may have been a bastard, but he was no bastard! My grandparents were married in a civil ceremony by the State of New York at the Municipal Building, down by City Hall. I’m sure it was a mutual decision. Róisín wasn’t crazy about the church, either.”

  “I don’t get this whole thing with the church,” said Diane. “He’s always going into churches, but he wants nothing to do with the church.”

  “Remember Grandpa chasing away that priest the day he died? He was going to give him Extreme Unction. What euphemism do they use today? The Sacrament of the Sick? Grandpa didn’t want any part of it. Tough old bird to the end.”

  “See! That’s what I don’t understand,” said Diane. “But he insisted on having a funeral mass at the Pro-Cathedral.”

  “I think Róisín had a lot to do with it,” said Johnny. “I think she was abused as a child by the nuns and wanted nothing to do with them. And, of course, she had great influence over Grandpa. She was in the movement, the Cumann na mBan, before 1916. Remember, Grandpa was an accidental revolutionary! He was also a suspicious old cod anyway. There was a lot of politics going on back then. Some bishops were excommunicating Volu
nteers. Excommunication became certain bishops’ choice of ecclesiastical terror. Apparently, it was alright for the British to murder Irishmen but not okay for Irishmen to defend themselves. Many, including Collins and Grandpa, resented it. Collins actually thought that some of the bishops were collaborating with the British against their own people. They never fully trusted Holy Mother Church again.”

  “It’s so, so complicated,” confessed Diane.

  “I think the shooting of Blood—and others—had a lot to do with it,” said Johnny. “In his own way, I think Grandpa didn’t feel he was worthy enough to receive the sacraments. When you think of it, he was purposely starving himself of God’s love, a love I think he deeply craved.”

  “What a remarkable way to put it,” said Diane, clearly moved by the thought. “In effect, he was penalizing himself.”

  “We Kavanaghs are a remarkably bad lot of Catholics,” confessed Johnny. “But we were all born Catholics, and we will all die Catholics.” He looked intently at his Protestant wife. “Why, even Róisín had a Catholic burial.”

  “Bloody Papists!” said Diane, laughing before turning serious. “You think there are more killings to come?”

  “The Squad was very busy in 1920.”

  Diane shook her head. “It’s so frightening,” she said. “It’s like learning your favorite Grandpa was in Murder Incorporated.”

  “You’re close,” laughed Johnny easily, as he took her hand and walked her through the winding back streets of Temple Bar, circling back to Dame Street. “Here it is,” said Johnny. “It’s still here, but it’s gone.”

  “What?”

  “The entrance to 26 Temple Lane. That was Rosanna’s home, where Aunt Nellie ended up living. The building’s the same, but the façade’s been altered. Come on, I’ve got something to show you.” They walked to the corner and made a left at Nico’s Italian Restaurant and walked a block towards Trinity College. Johnny turned left into Crow Street and stood with Diane in front of number three. “This is it,” said Johnny. “The IRA’s CIA office in 1920. Second floor. Irish Products Company was the cover. That’s where Collins’s intelligence office was,” he continued, “although he almost never visited it.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “Too dangerous,” said Johnny. “Collins didn’t visit in case he was being watched by the British. This office was too important to give away. That’s why Grandpa was always running his daily intelligence brief to him around the city. The British never discovered this office. The building’s been altered, but, as you can see, it’s just three blocks from Dublin Castle. Oh, how the Brits would have loved to know about this place!”

  Diane shuddered. “It’s spooky, even eighty-six years later.”

  “Yeah,” said Johnny. “I’m scared stiff.” Johnny pulled Diane to him and gave her a serious, sensuous kiss.

  “That’s good,” she said softly. Johnny ground against Diane, and she could feel his arousal. “Revolution has an uplifting effect on you, I see,” she teased.

  “Reminds me of my yute!”

  “Yeah,” laughed Diane. “Erection-on-demand!”

  Johnny adjusted his trousers and walked Diane to the edge of Dame Street. “See that alley over there?” Diane looked across Dame Street and could see a narrow alley almost directly opposite from them. “Let’s go!” Johnny pulled Diane by the hand, and they jumped into Dame Street, dodging traffic in both directions. In New York, jaywalking was sport; in Dublin, it could be suicide. They came to a halt in front of the alley. Johnny pointed at the ground.

  “The Stag’s Head,” Diane read from the tile in the sidewalk.

  “It’s time for a drink,” said Johnny. They walked through the alley, emerging in Dame Court. Johnny pointed up the street. “See that doorway just to the left of the Dunne’s Store? Well, that’s 10 Exchequer Street, Collins’s and Grandpa’s first office. They did a lot of their conferencing right here,” Johnny said, turning to his left, where the Stag’s Head front door was. “I love this fucking place,” he said, as he secured a snug for himself and his wife at the end of the bar. They sat down and ordered a couple of pints of stout. “This was Collins’s favorite snug,” Johnny revealed. “Grandpa said he liked it because he could scoot out the back door in a second.”

  The bar was quiet this time of the day, so different from what it was at night. “If these walls could talk!” said Diane.

  “I don’t think you’d want to know!” responded Johnny. “Collins drank here so much in the early years that they had a keg known as ‘Mick’s Barrel.’ Must have been a hell of a whiskey.”

  “I never think of Collins as a drinker,” said Diane.

  “He liked a sup, but as time went on, he didn’t drink or even smoke. He needed all his strength for the revolution.”

  “What are you expecting out of Grandpa’s papers next?”

  Johnny took a sip of his Guinness and sighed. “Vicious brutality.”

  “You’re being redundant.”

  Johnny smiled weakly. “You’re right. But it will take ‘vicious brutality’ to finally make the British redundant.”

  Diane gave an involuntary shiver, as she remembered that she was sitting in Michael Collins’s favorite snug. Then, suddenly, she knew what was eating at her—the horror of 1920 had finally penetrated her bones during her visit to Dublin’s Dardanelles.

  75

  All the participants rose as Prime Minister David Lloyd George entered the conference room at 10 Downing Street. “Please be seated, gentlemen,” he said, as he took his place in the middle of the table. “Our agenda today is the tragedy that Dublin has become.” He paused, brushing aside his shoulder-length white locks. “Winston, the floor is yours.”

  Winston Spencer Churchill, Secretary of State for War, stood to speak. “Gentlemen, you are all aware of the outrages that occurred recently on the streets of South Dublin, where military convoys were destroyed and a detective sergeant of the Royal Irish Constabulary was brutally murdered.” He paused for effect. “The time for dillydallying with the Shiners is over!”

  The Churchill of 1920 was light-years away from the iconic Churchill of 1940. Although now occupying another cabinet position in Lloyd George’s government, he was still fresh from a string of Great War failures, which had branded him as a politician of mostly unrelenting failure. From the sinking of the Lusitania under his watch as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, to his disastrous Gallipoli adventure in 1915–16, Churchill had shown he had the Midas touch—only in reverse.

  Around the table were Johnny French, Field Marshal Henry Wilson, General Sir Nevil Macready, and Derek Gough-Coxe. “It is time,” said Churchill, “for a shake-up in Dublin. General Macready will become the new Commander-in-Chief for Ireland. Lord French will remain as Viceroy, and we will be sending help for the embattled RIC.”

  “About time,” Wilson proclaimed. “The rebels have had the run of us.”

  “We are undermanned,” said French, “as General Macready will soon find out.”

  “There will be no more excuses,” the Prime Minister reassured them.

  “We have begun to recruit—on the recommendation of Field Marshal Wilson—some temporary constables to supplement the RIC,” Churchill continued. “And I am proposing a Special Emergency Gendarmerie, also to supplement the RIC as auxiliary cadets. The quicker we can get these brigades organized and shipped to Ireland, the better.”

  “What is your estimated time of arrival?” asked the Prime Minister.

  “The temporary constables should be in Ireland by March,” replied Churchill. “The auxiliaries, a little later in the year.”

  “It’s going to be a hot summer in Ireland,” laughed Wilson.

  “But not hot enough for you, Henry, I surmise,” snapped Churchill. Churchill was anti-nationalist, but Wilson was an outright bigot in his disdain for the mostly Catholic rebels.

  “Perhaps this time, Winston,” replied Wilson, his martinet piqued by Churchill’s comment, “you will not be befud
dled by these Dublin Dardanelles, as you were by the Turkish Dardanelles.”

  Churchill ignored the jibe and responded evenly: “We have shot the rebels. We have imprisoned them. We have deported them. We have harassed them. What would you want us to do?”

  “More,” replied the succinct Wilson.

  Gough-Coxe laughed. “Field Marshal, you sound just like Sebastian Blood!”

  “Who the blazes is Sebastian Blood?” demanded Wilson.

  “Our detective/martyr from Aungier Street,” replied Gough-Coxe, “whom Mr. Churchill was just discussing.” Wilson looked ambushed by Gough-Coxe’s remarks, and Churchill suppressed a smile.

  “Besides the military,” said Lloyd George, interrupting the high-level pissing match, “what can be done at the local level in Dublin?”

  “The intelligence unit of the Dublin Metropolitan Police—that’s the G-Division—will be reorganized,” said Churchill, pointing to Gough-Coxe. “Our new Deputy Commissioner of Police Derek Gough-Coxe has had a remarkable career, recently in the Middle East during the Great War. Without his help in the region, we might have lost the Suez Canal. A great part of his success was due to him ‘going native’ to inspire and captivate the local Arab chieftains. We worked closely together, and I expect he will be able to supply equal expertise to our problems in Dublin City. I expect him to become our Fenian savant.”

  “And what exactly, Deputy Commissioner, do you see as our problems in Dublin City?” asked the Prime Minister.

  Gough-Coxe stood and surveyed the men around him. He felt confident that the trouble in Ireland would be over by this time next year. He felt secure that, with the backing of Churchill—whose father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was the first to play the “Orange Card” and originated the phrase, “Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right!”—and the likes of the Catholic-hating Wilson, who had the ear of the Prime Minister and the MPs from the North of Ireland, that the problems in Ireland could be soon overcome.

  “The problems in Dublin come down to two words,” said Gough-Coxe, pausing for effect. “Michael Collins.”