‘Ireland doesn’t even know our names. Our identities. So what do they think they’ll accomplish by sending some asshole over here? What’s he going to do? Huh? We’ve always operated in secrecy, Harry. Is this messenger boy going to unmask us?’
‘I can’t answer your questions, Jock. I don’t have the answers. But my best guess is that they’re not going to send any messenger boy. They’ll send a man who knows his business. And whoever he is, he’s going to be goddam determined to find out what happened to the entire operating budget of the Irish Republican Army for one whole year.’
Nicholas Linney closed his buff-coloured folder. He blinked his narrow eyes. ‘Let me get this straight. Are we meant to understand that this guy represents a threat to our personal safety? Is he going to come here armed?’
There was an unmistakable relish in Linney’s voice. He sounded like a man who had been confined too long to the drudgery of paperwork and whose blood quickened at the possibility of physical menace. For a moment Cairney wondered if Linney had played a role in the murderous hijacking, but he dismissed the speculation as fruitless. Linney, Mulhaney, Dawson – any one of this trio might have had his own reasons for arranging the piracy. Cairney, who disliked the track of his own suspicions, pushed the thought out of his mind.
He said, ‘I can only assume this man would carry a weapon, Nick. But if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.’
Linney smiled. It was a humourless little movement of his mouth. ‘Believe me, Senator, I’m not remotely worried. I can take care of myself.’
‘I’m sure you can,’ Cairney said. ‘What really concerns me is the fact that we can’t predict how this person will behave. We don’t know how he operates, if he’s rational, if he’s given to violence. We’re in the dark as much as he is. And since that’s the case, it would be wise for each of us to take whatever precautions we think necessary. At least until the situation is resolved.’
Kevin Dawson smiled uncertainly. ‘You don’t really imagine we’re in danger, do you?’
Cairney shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Ireland sends a man who doesn’t know our names, doesn’t know if one of us is responsible for this terrible situation, a man whose only mission is the recovery of the money by whatever means. Put yourself in his shoes. How would you act if you had been entrusted with a task like this one? How would you behave?’
Cairney listened to the silence that followed his questions. He thought now of the faceless figure who would come from Ireland. He imagined somebody stalking the Fund-raisers, a shadowy man driven by his sense of justice, of setting right a terrible wrong. He tried to envisage such a man, and even as he did so he experienced an unsettling chill. People who betrayed the Cause always paid an awful price because it was the one crime that was neither forgiven nor forgotten – and if somebody in this room had played a part in the seizure of the Connie’s cargo, then Cairney could almost feel sorry for the culprit. Almost.
As he turned away from the window and the cold sight of the frozen trees around the lake, he wondered how this Irishman was going to proceed with his efforts. What if he did find out the identities of the Fund-raisers? What then? Was he going to come and knock on the front door and ask polite questions? Cairney severely doubted that approach. The Irishman would have other ways, quite possibly unpleasant ones, of getting to the truth. Cairney shivered slightly. He was too old to face the prospect of physical threats, even violence. But he understood one thing – that whoever came from Ireland was sure to be a man who was determined to get results, no matter what lengths he might have to go to achieve them.
‘The whole thing’s academic anyway,’ Mulhaney said, blowing smoke rings. ‘The guy has absolutely no way of finding us.’
‘I wish I could be as certain as you, Jock,’ Cairney said unhappily, staring down into the polished wood surface of the oval table where the reflected faces of the Fundraisers, like men drowning in clear water, looked back at him.
4
Dublin
The girl told Patrick Cairney he had the eyes of a devil, which he found amusing. She was called Rhiannon Canavan and she was a tall red-haired girl with wide hips and small sculpted breasts, and she lay in Cairney’s bed in his tiny flat near the Fitzgibbon Street Garda Station, which was close to the main road between Swords and Dublin and not the quietest place in which to live. Cairney stretched out alongside her, feeling himself slip into that dreamy place at the end of intense lovemaking. He placed the flat of his hand against her belly, and she purred as a cat might, rolling her long body towards him and circling his legs with her own.
‘The eyes of a devil,’ she said again, and she bit Cairney lightly on the side of his neck.
‘And you’re a vampire,’ he answered.
‘A hussy is what I am. Or it’s what you’ve made me anyhow. For the love of God, what am I doing here? Did you put something in my drink, Patrick Cairney?’
‘I didn’t think you noticed.’
‘I remember seeing this funny little envelope in your hand.’
‘Himalayan Fucking Powder,’ he said. ‘Ancient Tibetan secret recipe. Guaranteed.’
‘You say wicked things.’ She sat upright, straddling him. Her breasts swung slightly in the half light of the room. In the distance, the sound of a police car could be heard whining in the night.
‘I don’t think I’d personally like to live with the police on my doorstep,’ she said.
‘Why? What have you got to hide?’
‘Obviously nothing,’ and she arched her back, tilting her face away from him. She was, so she had told him in the pub, a nurse in the Richmond Hospital, and he wasn’t to think that just because nurses had poor reputations she was going to hop into the sack with him straight off the bloody bat, even if he did have the eyes of the devil and his charming American manners into the bargain.
‘Nurse Canavan,’ he said in a fraudulent Irish accent. ‘I am having this Jaysus of a pain between my legs. Can you do anything about it, out of daycent Christian kindness?’
‘I think I have the prescription for you,’ and she swung her body around, lowering her face to his groin and taking him softly into her mouth. And then she moved away from him, rolling on her back, and he entered her even as he continued to hear the sirens of police cars outside in the night. There were depths here, Cairney thought, and he was afraid of them. In the half light of the room Rhiannon Canavan had her eyes closed and her mouth open, and she was holding on to Cairney as if he were a carnival ride that scared her. Spent, Cairney fell away from her, but she still held on to him.
‘Are all Americans that loud?’ she asked.
‘I’m an average screamer,’ he told her.
Nurse Canavan reached for a cigarette and lit it, and her face was briefly illuminated by the flare of her Bic. She had a wonderfully straight Irish jaw, a fine generous mouth, and high cheekbones which gave her face a certain delicate strength.
‘So tell me,’ she said. ‘You’re at Trinity, did you say?’
‘Trinity,’ Cairney answered.
‘And you’re one of them wealthy Americans that comes over here to study at Daddy’s expense, is that it?’
Cairney shook his head. ‘Daddy’s money can’t buy happiness. Besides, he doesn’t support me. I have a small income from teaching undergraduate classes at Trinity. He’s never really approved of my studies. He doesn’t see the point to them.’
‘I must say he has a case, Patrick Cairney. It seems to me a young man like yourself shouldn’t be poking around so much in the past.’
‘And where should I be poking?’
‘You know something? You’re disgusting.’ She laughed again. She had one of those rich sincere laughs that change the temperature of rooms, like fine resonant music.
‘Seriously now,’ she said. ‘Is archaeology a field for a young man?’
‘We study the past to understand the future,’ Cairney intoned solemnly.
‘You,’ and she nudged him with an elbow
. ‘Are you never serious?’
‘I have my moments.’
Rhiannon crushed out her cigarette and lay back. ‘Does it really matter how much a loaf of bread cost in ancient Egypt?’
‘I like to think it helps us understand inflation.’
Cairney peered at the cinder of light that lay against the window, thrown on the glass by a faraway streetlamp. He felt both comfortable and secure with this lovely girl at his side. She offset something of the lonely edge he frequently experienced – a stranger in a strange country. And yet it wasn’t alien at all because there was a sense in which he’d been familiar with it all his life, courtesy of his father, who had instilled in him the wonders of Irish culture and history. Harry Cairney, who for most of the year had been an absentee father in Washington, returned each summer to Roscommon to indoctrinate his son in the melancholic songs and stories that were part of the Irish tradition, tales of defeats and victories, old loves, poems about the Old Lammas Fair in Ballycastle and the headlands of Kerry and the braes of Strasala. When other kids were out in hot sandlots tossing baseballs at their fathers, Patrick Cairney would sit with a fishing pole on the bank of a river and listen to his father recite the last words of the patriot Robert Emmet on the eve of his execution. Even now the young man could remember Emmet’s speech. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done. Harry Cairney had been less a father than a kind of history instructor whose view of the past was coloured by the romanticism of the Irish exile. All through his childhood the boy had wished for a father like the one other kids had, those young vigorous men who’d throw a baseball at you or take you one-on-one on a basketball court or get down with you in a scrimmage. But Harry, who was fifty years older than his son, had seemed remote even then, removed from Patrick both by years and memories of a faraway island. As if he felt guilty about his absences, Harry forced himself on his son during the summer, but never quite in the way Patrick Cairney wanted. He was too old and too dignified, too detached, to get down in a sandlot and dirty his hands. He was too sophisticated to go inside a sporting-goods store and discuss the merits of this or that baseball bat. Consequently, when Patrick thought of his father now he felt a curious combination of admiration and pity, the former because Harry had occupied an exalted position in politics and was highly regarded by everyone – and the latter because the world Cairney had tried to foist on his son was an old man’s dead reality and therefore pathetic.
Patrick Cairney got out of bed and went into the small kitchen, where he filled a glass with water. He carried it back to the bedroom and slipped under the sheets beside the girl. Once more through the night came the quick whine of a Garda car.
‘You’ve gone very quiet all of a sudden,’ Rhiannon said.
‘I am Ireland: I am older than the Old Woman of Beare,’ he recited. ‘Great my glory: I that bore Cuchulain the valiant.’
‘Great my shame,’ the girl replied. ‘My own children that sold their mother.’ She paused a second. ‘Patrick Pearse. Sure, I’ve known that since I was no higher than a blade of grass. Where did you learn it?’
‘From my father,’ Cairney answered. ‘Didn’t I mention he was born right here in Dublin? Above a shop at number 29 Patrick Street, to be exact.’
‘And overseas he went to make his fortune,’ Rhiannon said.
Cairney nodded. ‘I don’t think he ever really left this country.’
The girl pressed her face into Cairney’s shoulder, her damp lips against his skin. Something had changed in the room in the space of a few minutes. Somebody had left the door open, and that old Celtic wraith Melancholy had gate-crashed.
‘The funny thing, as Irish as he still is, he’s never been back here to visit,’ Cairney said. And he envisaged Harry Cairney as he’d last seen him two years ago, some months before the old man had unexpectedly married Celestine Cunningham of Boston in a private ceremony. Cairney had never met the woman but apparently the old man was overjoyed with the match. He’d written a couple of times to say so. When his letters weren’t extolling the virtues of Celestine, they were urging Cairney to visit this place or that, as if the son might vicariously undertake a pilgrimage that the father had always meant to make for himself. Take a walk through St. Anne’s Park near the Dollymount Strand and smell the roses or Don’t forget to have a jar in the Stag’s Head at Dame Court. In these letters Cairney could still hear the strident voice of the man who had turned all his short boyhood summers, which should have been treasured times, into diatribes against the sheer perfidy of the English and the atrocities they had committed in Ireland.
Cairney said, ‘He wants to keep a memory of Ireland the way it was, not the way it is now. He romanticises things that were never romantic to begin with.’
‘And I see nothing wrong in such a thing,’ Rhiannon said. ‘Why shouldn’t old men have their illusions?’
Cairney nodded. Why not indeed? he wondered. Memories preserved in amber were inured to change. Harry Cairney’s Ireland was the Dear Green Place, the Sean-Bhean Bhoch, the Old Woman of Sorrow. His was an Ireland of martyrs, a place of ghosts. It was the doomed Easter Rising of 1916, when Harry Cairney’s heroes – Patrick Pearse and Eamon de Valera and James Connolly – had seized the General Post Office on O’Connell Street and Boland’s Mills in the south of Dublin and the English had crushed the insurgency with field guns and a gunboat on the River Liffey, consequently creating a new generation of martyrs.
It was an Ireland where Harry Cairney’s heroes were executed by the English. John McBride, Pearse himself, James Connolly (wounded, carried by stretcher to the firing squad), Thomas MacDonagh, names that had echoed like bells through Patrick Cairney’s formative years. And all the others – the glamorous Countess Markievicz who had stalked the streets of Dublin with a great plumed hat and a revolver, the beautiful Maude Gonne, who had captivated the heart of Yeats, running firearms into Ireland in defiance of the English, bold Rory O’Connor and his men who had dramatically seized the Four Courts Building in Dublin.
An old man’s illusions …
What did they all come down to now, these clichés of glories lost and won? Patrick Cairney wondered. In what did all this romance and glamour and bravery distil itself?
The answer was simple. Squalor in Ulster, where courage had yielded to indiscriminate acts of terrorism and where, behind the walls of Her Majesty’s Maze Prison – formerly Long Kesh Prison or, in convict terminology, The Lazy K – so-called political prisoners, members of the militant Provisional IRA, smeared their excrement on the walls of their cells and women did the same with their menstrual blood.
Patrick Cairney wondered if his father ever thought 60 about that, the way courage had become eroded by sheer human indignity. He doubted the older man ever did: memories preserved in amber…
He propped himself up on one elbow. He stroked the side of the girl’s face.
‘For a student, Patrick Cairney, you’ve got a pretty fine physique,’ Rhiannon said. ‘What is it you do? Lift weights? Pump iron, as they say? Or is it just those old books you plough through are so heavy they build your muscles up?’
‘I dig,’ he answered.
‘Dig? With a shovel?’
He nodded. ‘I dig holes in the ground.’
‘Like a navvy.’
‘That’s all I am, Nurse. A navvy with a purpose. When a labourer digs, he isn’t looking for anything. But when I dig, I’m searching.’
‘And what have you ever found?’
‘I once found a Coca-Cola bottle circa 1930.’
‘What treasure.’ Traysure was how she pronounced the word.
‘You don’t expect to find such a thing buried in the Egyptian desert,’ he said. It was best this way, he thought, best to keep everything at a level of flippancy he could handle. He stared at the darkened window. The silence of the night beyond the window was dense, impenetrable, as if it were the quiet left behind by all the lost causes of the w
orld. He moved his body closer to the girl, holding her. For some reason the last stanza of Patrick Pearse’s Renunciation went through his mind.
I have turned my face
To this road before me
To the deed that I see
And the death I shall die.
Cheerful little ditty, he thought.
When he heard the sound of the telephone ringing from the kitchen, he wanted to freeze it out of his brain.
‘It could be important,’ the girl said. ‘Why don’t you answer it?’
Cairney said nothing. The telephone went on ringing.
‘Good news. You never can tell.’
‘At midnight on a Saturday?’ he asked.
After ten, twelve rings, the sound stopped.
Cairney’s relief lasted only a moment, because the telephone started up again, and this time it seemed louder than before.
‘Maybe it’s a girl friend,’ Rhiannon said.
‘I don’t have one.’
‘And you expect me to believe that, do you?’
Cairney tossed the bedsheets aside. The room was cold around him. He went inside the kitchen and picked up the telephone and stood there shivering as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line. When he hung up he returned to the bedroom. He sat down on the mattress.
‘Well?’ the girl asked.
‘You should never answer a telephone that rings after twelve o’clock.’
Rhiannon crushed out her cigarette. ‘That bad?’
Cairney sighed. He looked slightly flustered. ‘A sickness in the family.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Cairney reached out for the girl’s hand, touching it softly. ‘My father,’ he said. ‘A mild heart attack.’
5
Dun Laoghaire, Republic of Ireland
It was an old whitewashed house on the outskirts of the resort town of Dun Laoghaire on the south shore of Dublin Bay and in the grey dawn it appeared translucent. The house was surrounded by walls and thick trees. The only means of entrance was through a set of large iron gates, behind which a small gatehouse stood. Usually the gatehouse was occupied by a man who kept a nine-millimetre Brazilian Taurus semi-automatic pistol in his waistband and an FN assault rifle propped against the wall. On this morning, however, the gatehouse was empty and the iron gates were unlocked.
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