by Bill Granger
“Ya know all about me—”
“Who are you?”
“O’Neill, I tole ya last night—”
“Who are you?”
“Don’t keep askin’ me the same bloody question—”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a commercial traveler. Out of Belfast—”
“What are you to Hastings?”
The pain, the dull voice, frightened O’Neill. It was maddening, it was like hell. O’Neill felt sick again at the smell of his own vomit on the rug. He wanted to get up, to flee, but he knew his legs would not work. The Yank sat still on the chair with bare feet and bare chest and stared at him. Without pity or a sign of humanity in him.
“I knew… Hastings… fer years and years—”
He looked at Devereaux’s face.
“Y’see, I dealt with him when he was workin’ fer the English, y’see.”
O’Neill blushed. Sweat beaded on his forehead again.
“Y’might say I trade in a little information from time to time.”
Devereaux waited.
“Well, y’see, after he retired, I just kept on tradin’ with him. Nothing very serious atall. I’m a commercial traveler.”
O’Neill could not gauge the other man’s face anymore: A winter face with no mercy.
He suddenly dashed into truth the way a swimmer runs into a cold mountain lake: “I had something for Hastings. It was better than anything I had before. And he was goin’ to give it to the Yanks and he was goin’ ta get me ten thousand dollars fer it.”
Devereaux got up and opened the drawer of the dresser. He took out a dark blue shirt and put it on. Slowly, he buttoned the front as he waited for O’Neill to go on.
“I went to the Crescent and Lion last night to find that English whore. I figures you and him made a deal without O’Neill, is what I thought—”
“How did you know about the meet—”
“He tole me, didn’t he? How the hell d’ya think I knew about it, man?”
“And you knew it was me.”
“And weren’t you the only bloody Yank in the place? My God, O’Neill is not a bloody fool.”
“And why did I kill Hastings?”
O’Neill shivered. “How the hell should I know that?”
“Why did I kill Hastings?”
O’Neill considered it. “Ya didn’t need him and ya didn’t need t’ pay him the money—”
“Did he know everything you knew?”
“Of course he—”
“So I didn’t need you—”
O’Neill fell silent.
“Or need you now.”
O’Neill moaned like a lost soul. “I don’t want the money—”
“I would not need you now, now that I know—”
“Oh, Mother of God—”
Devereaux buttoned his cuffs while he watched O’Neill. He felt angry, with himself and with the Irishman. First, he had been foolish enough not to set the deadlock last night. And before that, he had permitted an idiot like O’Neill to follow him. He had been drunk and careless and he deserved O’Neill this morning. And O’Neill deserved his fear now because he had wanted to kill Devereaux and might have.
“Get some towels out of the bathroom and clean this mess up,” he said.
“What?”
“Clean this mess up. We’ve got a lot to talk about this morning. I’m going to order tea.”
O’Neill looked at him. “Tea? Now what would you be after meanin’?”
Devereaux went to the telephone on the nightstand. “You came here for your ten thousand dollars this morning.”
O’Neill nodded.
“Perhaps you’ll get it. After we talk. And I find out the worth of what you have and what you were willing to tell Hastings. Find out what was good enough to get Hastings killed.”
O’Neill felt reprieved. “Well, now,” he said. His face was flushed and streaked with dried blood. He felt pain over the mask of his features. None of that mattered. He tried out a jaunty voice, the voice of a man of the world: “Well, you’re a man to talk with, I can see, sur.”
The talk proved considerably more painful than O’Neill expected.
Devereaux probed like a dentist without a care for pain. He drilled around O’Neill’s information and then went deep into the past until he struck the nerve. What had been his relationship with Hastings? (R Section had scant knowledge of Hastings’ informal network of contacts.) Why had O’Neill agreed to run for British Intelligence in the first place; was it when Hastings was still with them? Why had he stayed with Hastings after his retirement? Was O’Neill still feeding the Brits?
O’Neill sat like a schoolboy in a chair by the misty window and looked down at the railway lines streaming out of Edinburgh. He wished for home.
O’Neill was a traveling salesman for a major British shoe manufacturer that had extensive factories and offices in Northern Ireland and in the Republic to the south. Because he was Catholic, his upward progress in the English-owned firm had been slow—especially in the Belfast offices—and he could reasonably aspire to no greater job than he now held and had held for the past fifteen years.
Which had fed a spark of bitterness in him against the Prods and the English who ruled Northern Ireland. And which, for O’Neill as others, had found outlet finally in the civil rights demonstrations begun in 1969 with Bernadette Devlin.
O’Neill had merely been a spectator at first in the civil rights movement (as it was then called). He attended a few of the peaceful rallies but did not take part in the protest marches in Londonderry and Belfast which so excited the Protestant minority. The tactics used by the civil rights people were borrowed from the black civil rights movement of the 1960s in America. Like that black movement, it finally fell victim to despair. Doubting the efficacy of peaceful protest to win rights, it turned to violence.
Then—as the provisional Irish Republican Army gradually replaced the civil-rightists as the rallying point for the unrest in the Catholic majority in the North—O’Neill felt himself stirred to something like patriotism. Or as much patriotism as a man with a family of nine children could afford.
O’Neill’s uncles from Mayo had fought in the “troubles” against the English in the teens and twenties. That fact dwelt heavily inside the little salesman.
That was the most difficult part to explain to the American who sat across from him and did not speak. “Love of one’s country—” O’Neill had begun at one point, but the gray eyes that stared at him did not seem to comprehend the words, let alone the motive.
“You don’t know what it is to be an Irishman and a Catholic in the North,” O’Neill had said finally.
“Nor what it is to be black in America or a Jew in Russia or a stateless Palestinian,” Devereaux had added. And O’Neill had shrugged because there were some things beyond explaining.
O’Neill had volunteered his services to the IRA shortly after the British moved to illegally intern thousands of suspected IRA sympathizers in August, 1971. O’Neill himself had been arrested and held briefly and then released without apology. The incident had angered and humiliated him.
None of this greatly interested Devereaux, but he probed carefully at the edges of the life story with the methodical interrogation rhythm he had used debriefing Russian defectors.
The IRA had decided to use O’Neill as a courier because of the large territory he covered for the shoe firm in both the Republic to the south and to western Scotland. He was trusted and considered an ideal man to move sums of money from the South to the North (much American money was being laundered through southern Irish banks) and to move certain “packages” from the Belfast “factory” to Scottish postal addresses where they would be sent to targets in England.
All of which had led to O’Neill’s “problem”—as he put it.
One bright August morning in 1972, two CID men from Scotland Yard seized O’Neill as he debarked from the British Rail ferry at Stranraer in Scotland. He was carrying f
ourteen letter bombs in his luggage, all addressed to various London banking officials and all to be mailed from a box in Glasgow central station.
O’Neill hesitated as he told this part of the story. But the probing never let up; gently, insistently, Devereaux pried it out of him.
First they took him to Manchester, and then moved him to a jail in Birmingham for reasons he never fathomed. And they beat him. With rubber truncheons. All afternoon. All night. He was forced to stand for hours. They took all his clothing and made him stand naked. They beat his kidneys until burning urine dribbled down his naked leg. They would leave him for a time and then they would return and beat him again.
In the morning—the second morning—they told him he would probably spend the rest of his life in Her Majesty’s prisons.
In the afternoon, he received his first visit from Hastings. They had kept O’Neill—naked and shivering—in a cell without windows. He had wrapped his stinking body in a rough blanket. That is the way Hastings first saw him. The light from the corridor beyond the cell blinded O’Neill. He did not know if it was day or night.
Hastings was civilized and O’Neill wept when the man offered him tea and biscuits.
They sat in O’Neill’s cell and talked for a long time. About Northern Ireland and the IRA and the problems of being the Catholic majority in the North ruled by a Protestant minority.
Hastings was so sympathetic.
Said he was a Catholic as well and that his family had been persecuted in the days of the first Elizabeth when it was a capital crime to hear Mass or hide a priest. Yes, Hastings sympathized entirely.
Although, this business with letter bombs. Well, old darling, this was really shameful. Didn’t he think so?
Hastings went away that afternoon and, as promised, O’Neill was given his clothing back and transferred to a cell with a window that allowed O’Neill to tell it was night.
They didn’t beat him anymore.
On the third morning, Hastings returned and they had breakfast together. At that point, O’Neill had turned to the Englishman almost as a friend and asked him to get word to his wife at least about his situation. Hastings said he would.
And again, Hastings expressed sympathy for O’Neill’s plight. But added that O’Neill had gotten his quite commendable sense of Irish patriotism all mixed up with service to these criminals now operating under the disgraced banner of the IRA. “I mean, the ‘troubles’ of the twenties were one thing, but this. Come on, ducks, it isn’t patriotic to go blowing off the hands of mail clerks, is it?”
Another day passed. No sounds from beyond the cell. O’Neill sat alone. Hastings’ words worked on him. O’Neill prayed to God and promised to atone for his sins.
The next morning, they got down to business. It was quite simple, really. Hastings explained it gently: O’Neill would now work for British Intelligence.
“Now, now, old luv, don’t become agitated. There’s really nothing for it. On the one hand, we have these letter bombs and a certain sentence of at least thirty years in Wormwood Scrubs or some other perfectly awful hole and hardly a chance of ever seeing kith and kin again—and that means those nine lovely children, darling—or, really a quite safe and painless service for Her Majesty’s government which would put a couple of extra quid in the old pay packet—certainly could use that, I’ll be bound, ducks—and a chance to save poor, dear Belfast from the ravages of both the IRA and all those soldiers. I mean, it’s hardly a contest, is it?”
Devereaux rose and went to the window to stare at the castle in the fog while O’Neill told his story of becoming an informer for the English. Devereaux could hear something like a sob in the Irishman’s voice. He did not look at O’Neill again until he was through.
In the end, commercial traveler O’Neill resumed his journeys and turned up at home quite recovered from the rubber-truncheon beatings—except for the pain of urinating—and no one was the wiser. And just as routinely, the Daily Mirror told a splashy story about a mail clerk in Glasgow who discovered a cache of letter bombs in a London-bound bag and heroically flung the lot of them in the Clyde river.
“So, you see, sur, they had me and turned me into an informer,” O’Neill said at last. “I’m not proud of it. I will wear it to me grave. But what was I to do, sur?”
Devereaux had cleaned the vomit from the rug himself, compulsively smoothed the bedclothes, and examined the bullet hole in the plaster ceiling, while he listened. But he did not know what to say to the sad little Irishman with nine kids caught up in a game he could not play well.
He prodded O’Neill with another question, and O’Neill—almost gladly—went on: Hastings had fiddled O’Neill’s papers in British Intelligence before he retired and O’Neill the informer had become an unperson in London. But not to Hastings, who still held those papers over O’Neill. Hastings and O’Neill transferred their total allegiance to the new masters in Washington and O’Neill still felt the chains around him.
“So you looked in his room—”
“After you. After you—after he died. I saw his body—”
“After?”
“I couldn’t kill a man—”
“Only by letter. Only by bomb,” said Devereaux.
O’Neill turned his eyes down. “I’m a coward then as well as a traitor.”
“Yes,” said Devereaux. His voice was too hard, too without pity.
“O my God,” O’Neill began, and stopped.
“You looked around the room, didn’t you?” said Devereaux gently.
“Yes,” whispered O’Neill.
“For the papers about you,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Stepped around the body?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t find them.”
O’Neill looked up. “You have them—”
Devereaux shook his head. “No one has them, I’ll bet. I doubt very much that dossier still exists.”
“Do you now, sur?”
“It seems unlikely Hastings would keep it around, and it would be doubly dangerous—for him—if it were discovered. No, I think our departed brother undoubtedly destroyed the fact of O’Neill’s existence when he retired from Intelligence.”
“Do you now, sur?” Skepticism mixed with something like hope in his voice. A gentleness began to spread over the flat, broken Irish face.
Devereaux went to the window and looked out at the sun trying to burn through the fog. “Which brings us now to our business, O’Neill.”
But O’Neill saw himself free now. “If it’s the same to you, and I appreciate your kindness, sur, I’d as soon be quit of the business if you think old Hastings has really gotten rid of that dossier—”
“No,” said Devereaux. “You’re quit of it when I release you. Sit down.”
O’Neill hesitated and then sat down again. The gloom replaced whatever hope had infected his features a moment before.
Devereaux thought the moment was right. He opened the brown envelope and took out ten one-thousand-dollar bills. He placed them on the sill of the window by O’Neill’s chair.
“Mother of God,” said O’Neill reverently.
“Indeed,” said Devereaux.
O’Neill simply stared and calculated. The money represented three years’ pay.
Finally: “Well, sur. That’s impressive, sur, it certainly is.” Somehow, the chains seemed lighter. “Impressive but not as impressive as what I have to tell you, lad. Not half as much.” How lightly they could be worn. “Me, the O’Neill himself, has more than enough information—and you’ve not heard the like of it—”
Devereaux watched him. He was not prepared to be surprised—he had heard the like of many things. He was surprised at his own feeling of fascinated revulsion at the look in O’Neill’s blue eyes as the Irishman watched the money laying on the sill.
“Well,” he began. “The Byes.” Byes meaning boys, and the Boys meaning the provisional IRA. “The Byes are puttin’ together a plan. Didja never hear of Lord
Slough?”
Devereaux nodded. He had heard.
O’Neill ignored the nod: “The cousin of the Queen, he is. And the richest man in England.”
Devereaux tensed.
“Y’heard of him, all right,” said O’Neill. “The bloody world drinks his beer or drives his motorcars or reads his bloody papers or—” O’Neill’s eloquence left him; it was too unfair that this one Englishman should own the whole world when O’Neill had scarcely a piece of it.
“And—” said Devereaux. But he knew what O’Neill would say.
“Well, sur, the ‘and’ is that the Byes are gonna get him. Get the bloody great English Lord Slough, the cousin of the Queen of England—”
“Kidnap—” said Devereaux.
O’Neill’s eyes glittered with greed and mirth: “Oh, no, sur, not at all. Not at all. They’re gonna make him dance. They’re gonna get him fer good. They’ll make him dance with their guns, and when they’re through, Lord Slough will dance no more.” His voice carried an edge of patriotic glee—“Dance him, sur; they’re gonna kill the bloody man.”
Devereaux still stared, but O’Neill did not see him. His voice continued to rise:
“How’s that for ten thousand bloody dollars’ worth of information? How’s that, me lad? How’s that bloody suit you, that the Byes are going inter England itself and kill the richest man in the land and a member of the royal bloody family!”
Devereaux did not arrive at Blake House until shortly after eight P.M., when the hum and bustle of west London’s traffic had finally settled down for the November night.
There had been matters to settle in Edinburgh and questions to puzzle out.
First, there was the matter of O’Neill’s information, which never went far beyond the bare outlines.
O’Neill had explained that he was not an insider. The talk of the coming assassination had been garnered in bits and pieces from a half-dozen sources. No one, he said, knew the exact membership of the gang who would effect the assassination, though a “Cap’n Donovan” was supposed to be involved.
Lord Slough would be killed sometime before Boxing Day, the day after Christmas. That was for certain. Devereaux had probed at this date but O’Neill was adamant. That was the word in every quarter but nothing more specific.
