Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

  “Oh, yeah?” said one of the Americans, a hulking bruiser with a face Littlejohn had encountered a thousand times in Belfast. “If I’da known that, I wouldna paid my dough. My name’s McCafferty.”

  “My name’s Maloney,” said another man, taller and more mild-mannered. “It doesn’t bother me at all. You’ve got a lovely home here, Captain. Thanks for telling us so much about it, ma’am.”

  “You’re quite welcome,” said Amanda Littlejohn, the eighteenth Lady Moorfield.

  The Americans trooped toward their bus, McCafferty arguing violently with Maloney.

  In the timbered entrance hall, beneath the portraits of a dozen notable ancestors, his mother took Littlejohn’s hand. “Shall we make a visit?” she said. “I’d very much like to thank Him for your safe return.”

  They walked through the sixty-foot-long dining room, with its mahogany table at which a dozen kings had supped, to the chapel beyond it. The small stone room, the oldest structure in Hazelewood, displayed the bare, powerful architecture of the crusader chapel in Jerusalem. Mass had been said here almost daily since 1239. They knelt together, as they had knelt since Arthur Littlejohn was a boy. But were they praying together? For the first time in his life, Littlejohn doubted it.

  His mother was thanking God for her son’s return from a land of murder and mayhem. He was thanking God for keeping the IRA’s best car bomber, Jimmy O’Hara, that extra five minutes in the house with red-haired Peggy O’Dowd, who they had paid £500 to betray him. Captain Littlejohn was thanking God for giving him a steady hand and a cold heart when at the last minute Peggy had changed her mind and screamed a warning. That gave him a license to kill her too. It was much neater that way. He might have killed her even if she had not screamed. But God was good enough to provoke a scream and solve a nice question of conscience.

  The captain did not thank God for protecting him from the fusillade Jimmy O’Hara fired at him with his AK-47. Whether Arthur Littlejohn lived or died was entirely up to God and a matter of utter indifference to him. That was part of the bargain he had made with God. It was a good bargain. It had enabled him to become the most effective special-intelligence officer in the British army.

  An hour later, bathed and unpacked, Littlejohn sat with his mother in the Nook, the small study off the great hall. On the wall above the fireplace was one of the most popular paintings of Victorian England, When Did You Last See Your Father? It portrayed a young boy being interrogated by frowning Puritans during the English Civil War of the 1640s. The boy might have been a Littlejohn. After the battle of Marston Moor, which was fought only a few miles from Hazelewood Hall, the Littlejohns had been on the run, living in the woods and in peasant cottages.

  Now, with the sort of irony that history seems to favor, Captain Littlejohn was playing the interrogator, asking similar questions of eight-year-olds in Ireland. But their answers were not the polite evasions of the frightened boy in the painting.

  We wants the army out. We’ll stone ’em out and burn ’em out and murder ’em and tar and feather ’em. They’re gestapo. They’re pigs. There’s no bacon in England because all the pigs is here. We’ll give the bastards cheap haircuts. We’ll melt ’em down into rubber bullets. We’ll gelignite ’em. Do you ’ear me? We’ll gelignite the limey bastards.

  That was the answer Littlejohn had got from Jimmy O’Hara’s eight-year-old son when he was asked if he had heard from his father lately.

  “I’ve invited Alice to dinner.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “I really do think it’s time you married, Arthur.”

  “I’m afraid it’s out of the question as long as I’m on these special assignments.”

  “Alice is not going to wait forever. She’s close to thirty, Arthur.”

  For a moment Littlejohn almost told her the Secret. His vow of celibacy. But he could not quite manage it. She wanted grandchildren so badly.

  He had intended to be a priest since he was thirteen. He had confided his ambition to Father Kinsella, the rector of Stonyhurst, the Jesuit preparatory school. With no warning, the day before he returned to Stonyhurst for his senior year, his father informed Littlejohn that he was going in the army. There had been a Littlejohn in the Yorkshire Rifles since 1745. Arthur had told his father he wanted to be a priest. His father had dismissed his vocation, with a wave of his hand. He had never been very religious. “The army’s not that much different from the Jesuits,” he said.

  Arthur had been filled with cold anger. He had walked to the family chapel and taken his vow of celibacy before the tabernacle. He knew it was a promise that any confessor would dismiss, virtually on request. It was a gesture of retaliation, almost of disobedience, against a father who was now dead. But he could not let go of it. In Ireland the vow had acquired a meaning that went deeper than his understanding of it. Somehow it had become part of his personality, part of the inner gyroscope that steadied him in moments of danger or stress.

  Alice arrived. She had come up from London on the train the previous night. She was working for the BBC. She was his mother’s opposite, small, dark, compact, her hair in a pageboy on her forehead. His mother left them alone in the Nook while she caught up on her correspondence with the Tourist Board.

  “You look peaked,” Alice said.

  “I am a bit. You don’t get much sleep in intelligence.”

  “That must make it difficult.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To be intelligent. I presume that’s why you’re in it.”

  “The old brain does creak a bit.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Creak? Oh. My conscience, sometimes. For not writing.”

  “I’m not talking about that. You never have written. The year you spent in Hong Kong, I got exactly one letter. I mean about the things you’re doing in Ireland.”

  “I can’t talk about that.”

  “I don’t mean your work. I mean the whole operation. Shooting women and children.”

  “The troops get out of hand now and then. But that’s not policy. We only fire when fired on.”

  A lie. But an official lie was not the same as a personal lie. The Jesuits had taught him that. His father had been right about one thing. The army and the Jesuits did have a lot in common.

  “We’ve been working on a documentary at the BBC. I’ve seen footage. It’s so beastly.”

  “You mean the IRA bombs. I should say.”

  “I mean the whole thing. I think we should withdraw and let them fight it out. I found a wonderful quotation from Shaw.”

  “Oh?”

  “‘After all, what business is it of the British if we Irish want to slaughter each other? They were glad to have us slaughter their enemies when they needed us.’”

  “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

  “I think it makes marvelous sense.”

  “Makes me glad I didn’t go to Cambridge. They didn’t teach Shaw at Sandhurst.”

  “Perhaps they should.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I’m going with someone. A producer from the BBC named Dolan. He wants me to marry him. Should I say yes?”

  “I didn’t know they had Irish at the BBC.”

  “His family’s been in England for fifty years.”

  “Well … I won’t let any understanding we have—”

  “Father’s upset. He sent me an army motto: ‘Money lost—little lost; honor lost—much lost; heart lost—all lost.’”

  Her smile was forced. Alice’s father was the former colonel of the Yorkshire Rifles. He had been even more instrumental than Amanda Littlejohn in fostering the engagement to Alice. Littlejohn sensed that all he had to do was take Alice’s hand and this BBC Irishman would evaporate. But he could not make the gesture. He sat there, frozen, his mind slipping out of Hazelewood Hall, across the Irish Sea to bomb-ravaged Belfast.

  His mother beamed in the doorway. “I hope you’ve had time to lay some deep-dyed plans,” she said. “Dinner’s ready.”r />
  The meal was a struggle. Littlejohn’s mind had shifted into doublethink, the intelligence mode. He was talking on one level to his mother and Alice about the royal family’s latest scandal, the future of the Liberal Party, while the other half was analyzing data. Was the Irishman at the BBC part of the apparatus? Were they trying to harass him by taking his fiancée away from him?

  He realized now that Alice was important to him. She was a reward that awaited him after a long upward struggle, as at the Irish shrine at Knock, where the pilgrims ascended the mountain on their knees. He was a pilgrim struggling toward some sort of illumination that would include Alice’s generous arms. Now they had taken her away. The stage was bare, leaving him in bitter soliloquy.

  It made him almost regret the information that was sending him to America. It had begun with a rumor picked up in a pub by an informer, confirmed by a second informer, who was supposedly in deepest cover. But it would never have become solid enough to send him to America if Littlejohn had not confirmed it personally in one of his reconnaissances.

  Littlejohn fondled that word in his mind. No one knew about his reconnaissances. Sometimes he thought God did not know about his reconnaissances. The things he did on reconnaissance were not done by Captain Arthur Littlejohn. They were the acts of another person, an ur-soul brewed out of terror and Irish mist. His reconnaissances took him into the deepest, deadliest parts of Belfast and Londonderry, into Bogside whorehouses and pubs where a British officer would be killed in the slowest, most painful way the IRA’s diseased minds could devise.

  There he had confirmed the information from their own beery, unsuspecting tongues. And reconfirmed it with his favorite prostitute, blond, bitter Maeve Flanagan. The IRA was about to buy a million dollars’ worth of sophisticated weapons in America. They were sending two of their best men to handle the operation. Aside from the desperate need for the weapons, they wanted to prove their boast of new American cooperation. It would have its usual magical impact on the waverers and quitters in the Belfast ranks.

  “Arthur.” His mother blinked back tears. “Alice tells me you’ve decided to break your engagement.”

  Even now, he saw that all he had to do was feign surprise, laugh, and protest that Alice had misunderstood him—and they could set a wedding day. But again, he could not speak. He wanted to see if she was part of the murderous game he was playing.

  “It seemed the best thing to do under the circumstances.”

  America was going to be very interesting.

  A THOUSAND WELCOMES, ALMOST

  “Well, well, well, well,” Hughie McGinty said, showing his crooked, yellow canines. “Old times, old times indeed, Dick.”

  “Old indeed,” said Richard O’Gorman, raising his glass.

  “Slainte,” said Desmond McBride, making the word sound like a TV ad for a mouthwash. He had already mangled beyond repair the Gaelic for a thousand welcomes. McBride was the mayor of Paradise Beach, the dismal shore town to which they would soon be transported. He was a smiling vacuum, one of those American lightweights who thought they knew all about Ireland because they had visited it two or three times for a total of six weeks and had an Irish grandmother who mispronounced a half dozen Gaelic phrases.

  McGinty was a colleague from the early days in Belfast. He had lacked the stomach for the bombing and had decided to walk. They had let him go without prejudice, believing he could be useful in America. But he was neither a likable nor a trustworthy fellow. A whiner from start to finish.

  There should have been a third welcomer—even a fourth—whose absence set O’Gorman’s teeth on edge. McBride’s son was the link between the IRA’s leadership and the rest of the scheme. He worked for a congressman from New Jersey who was close to Senator Teddy Kennedy.

  All things considered, the congressman should have been present too. Maybe even his spherical friend, Senator Ted. After all, O’Gorman was a man who had sat down to couscous in Yasir Arafat’s tent and talked world historical balderdash with Che Guevara. Certain former members of the Irgun, the Israeli terrorist group, also spoke of him with respect.

  Yet in America, the handful of Irish politicians who supported the IRA did so behind closed doors, through third and fourth parties, as if they were dealing with moral lepers who could infect them with that most fearsome of American political diseases—the loss of a voting bloc. Gone were the days when Irish-Americans rose in the Senate of the United States and roared, “Britannia delenda est.” In the first place, there weren’t five people in the country who could get the reference, thanks to America’s abysmal school system. In the second place, once it was translated, the British propaganda machine would serve the speaker up, macerated and broiled on TV for breakfast the following morning.

  All of which meant that if Black Dick had to forgo the pleasures of celebrity, he was determined to console himself with another pleasure, which was unquestionably available in Babylon on the Hudson. The great metropolis blinked its millions of inviting eyes at them through the bar’s twilit front window. But they might as well already be incarcerated in Paradise Beach, as far as responding to these enchanting signals was concerned. There had to be a way to lose these two millstones and give him and Billy at least a single night of pleasure.

  “I think it’s time we discussed our plans,” McBride said. “McGinty and his fine friends have kept me more or less in the dark. He said the final orders had to come from you.”

  “Oh, it’s very simple,” O’Gorman said. “The Cubans are bringing a million and half dollars’ worth of cocaine with them. We’re going to sell the dope to your brother-in-law O’Toole’s Italian friends and run the money out to the Cubans and get the weapons. It’ll all be said and done in twenty-four hours.”

  “Cocaine?” McBride said. “I’ve never heard a word about cocaine before. If something went wrong—if the Coast Guard—we could all go to jail for twenty years.”

  “It’s a goodly stretch you’ll get if they find you with the weapons,” O’Gorman said. “You agreed to bring them ashore. The cocaine is just a detail.”

  “I thought you were bringing the money,” McBride said. “Didn’t you say that?” he asked McGinty.

  “I said I hoped he would,” McGinty said.

  “We don’t have a tenth that much cash in the whole command. This is a big shipment of weapons. The biggest yet.”

  “Does Bill O’Toole know about the cocaine?” McBride asked.

  “I should say he does,” McGinty said. “He handled the whole thing with the Italians. He’s lined up one of their high rollers from Atlantic City. The fellow owns half the boardwalk, Bill says.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more about the cocaine,” McBride said. “You can use my boat, but I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  In Ireland, McBride had promised them his boat and himself as captain and navigator. Was the deal about to fall apart? McGinty let O’Gorman take charge.

  “Well and good, well and good,” O’Gorman said. “We can understand how you feel, Des. We’re still grateful and then some, right, Billy?”

  “Yah,” Billy said, his nose in his drink. Even his pea brain could see it was too early to put pressure on this papier-mache hero.

  “How’s Nora?” O’Gorman asked McGinty.

  “Just fine. We’ve got two lovely kids.”

  “Good news.”

  Sweet little Nora, the rose of Kilwickie. In 1975, she owned the softest rump, the juiciest knockers, in the Six Counties. O’Gorman had passed her on to McGinty somewhat the worse for wear. That was part of the reason for the anguish in Hughie’s voice.

  O’Gorman liked the whine of supplication that only he could hear. It meant McGinty knew that if things went awry, Dick O’Gorman could arrange to have a killing machine like Billy Kilroy on a plane to America in twenty-four hours. That was always implied in their original arrangement to let McGinty walk in good health, unkneecapped, with both eyes still in his head.

  You wouldn’t kill a man
with two lovely kids, would you, Dick? That was what McGinty was saying. He knew it was a waste of breath, but he said it anyway. Irish.

  “If we get going, we can be in Paradise Beach for dinner,” McBride said. “It’s only two hours from New York. We get quite a lot of New Yorkers in the summer.”

  In the winter, O’Gorman thought, you get penguins and seals, neither of which will be inclined to cooperate with what Kilroy and I need to ease our distress.

  “I was thinking of staying the night,” O’Gorman said. “There’s some people in the Irish Mission at the UN that are looking for a word from me.”

  “Them fookers can wait,” Billy said. “The weapons is more important.”

  “The weapons won’t be seen for weeks perhaps,” O’Gorman said. “The Cubans have very little use for schedules.”

  “I don’t like doing business with communists,” McBride said to McGinty. “I thought you said the guns were coming on a Japanese freighter.”

  “So I did, so I did,” McGinty said. “It would have been a better dodge, wouldn’t it. But the Japanese wanted tons of money. The Cubans are providin’ the ship free of charge. In this business you sometimes have to make bargains with the devil.”

  He glared at O’Gorman. “Thank God for Ireland’s faith. With it for protection we can dance with the devil without a bit of fear, right, Dick?”

  “Right.”

  O’Gorman did not know who infuriated him more, McGinty with his drooling religiosity or Kilroy with his sudden assumption of command. Between them they were going to let Ellen O’Flaherty, redhaired and worshipful, pine by the telephone at the Irish Mission. She had begged him to call her after the recruiting weekend they had spent together in Mayo. He was only two years behind schedule.

  “Shall I get the car?” McBride said.

  “By all means. The Irish Mission can wait. First things first,” O’Gorman said.

  The moment McBride left the room, McGinty all but sprang at O’Gorman’s throat. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Don’t you know better than to talk about the motherless Cubans in front of a Yank? They’re still the communist enemy, for Christ’s sake.”