Games of The Hangman f-1

by VICTOR O'REILLY

  "It's as well I know you're a natural blonde," he said. "Or rather, how I know it. Otherwise I'd feel distanced by that getup." He gestured at the laden table on the glassed-in veranda. "Breakfast is ready."

  He had bathed and shaved but then concentrated on preparing the meal. He was wearing only a white terry-cloth bathrobe. The name of its original — and presumably still legal — owner, faded from numerous washings, could just be discerned on the breast pocket.

  In the distance, muted by the thick glass, there was the sound of a late-waking city, of traffic grinding through the expensive Dublin residential area of Ballsbridge.

  "A little distance is necessary at times," she said with a smile. "I've got a professional image to maintain. I don't want to climax on camera." He raised an eyebrow. She kissed him and sat down across the table. She could see scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, and there were bubbles in the orange juice.

  They had met some three years earlier when Radio Telefis Eireann, Ireland's state-owned national broadcasting organization, had sent a camera crew over to do a magazine piece on Fitzduane exhibition of war photographs in the Shelbourne Hotel. Fitzduane had disliked being on the receiving end of a camera and had been clipped and enigmatic during the interview. Afterward he had been annoyed with himself for making the interview more difficult and less interesting than it might have been. He went over to apologize and was mildly surprised when Etan had responded by inviting him out to dinner.

  They were lovers who had become friends. It might have become more, perhaps had become more — neither admitted it — but their careers kept them apart. Program deadlines kept Etan confined to the studios in Dublin for much of the time, and Fitzduane was out of Ireland so much. Though Etan was very fond of Fitzduane and had a growing sense that this might be more than an affair, she found it hard to understand how a man of such apparent gentleness and sensitivity engaged in such a dangerous and macabre occupation.

  He had once tried to explain it. He had a beautiful, rich voice with scarcely a trace of an Irish accent — a characteristic of his class and background. It was his voice above all, she thought, that had attracted her initially. She had rejected his rationale with some vigor, but she remembered his exact words.

  "War is about extremes," he had said, "extremes of violence and horror, but also extremes of heroism, of compassion, and of comradeship. It's the ultimate paradox. It's feeling utterly, totally alive in every molecule of your body because of — not in spite of — the presence and the threat of death. Often I hate it, and often I'm afraid, yet after it's over and I'm away from it, I want to go back. I miss that sense of being on the edge."

  He had turned to her and stroked her cheek. "Besides," he had added with a grin, "it's what I know."

  He decided he would take a raincheck on pointing out to her that virtually every day, she presented, from a warm, safe studio, the sort of violent news stories she criticized him for covering. But then again, maybe she wasn't being so inconsistent. Eating meat didn't automatically make you want to work in a slaughterhouse.

  She remembered her temper flaring and her sense of frustration. "It's like hearing a drug addict trying to rationalize his heroin," she had said. "To me it doesn't make sense to make your living out of photographing people killing each other. It's even crazier when that puts you at risk as well. You're not immune just because you carry a press card and a camera, you know that bloody well. I miss you horribly when you go. Like a damn fool, instead of putting you out of my mind, I worry myself sick that you may be killed or maimed or just disappear."

  He had kissed her gently on the lips, and despite herself she had responded. "The older I get, the less chance I have of being killed," he had said. "It's mostly the young who die in war; that's the way the system works. You mightn't be considered old enough to vote, but they'll make a paratrooper out of you."

  "Bullshit," she had retorted, and then she had made love to him with tenderness and anger, sobbing when she had climaxed. Afterward she had held him in her arms, her cheeks wet, while he slept. It didn't change anything.

  * * * * *

  Etan finished her coffee and looked at her watch. She would have to leave for the studios in a few minutes. Even though RTE in Donnybrook was not far away, she would be driving in traffic.

  Fitzduane had scarcely touched his breakfast. He smiled at her absentmindedly when she got up, and then he went back to staring into the middle distance. She stood behind his chair and put her arms around his neck. She pressed her cheek to his. Beneath the banter and the tenderness he was troubled.

  "You're doing your thousand-yard stare," she said.

  "It's the hanging."

  "I know," she said.

  "We cut him down, cut him open, put him in a box, and sent him airmail back to Bern; nineteen years of age, and all we seem to want to do is get rid of the scandal. Nobody cares why."

  She held him tightly. "It's not that people don't care," she said. "It's just that they don't know what to do. And what's the point now? It's too late. He's dead."

  "But why," he persisted.

  "Does it make a difference?"

  He moved his head so he could look at her and suddenly smiled. He took her hand in his and moved her palm against his lips; it was a long kiss. She felt a rush of love, of caring.

  "Maybe it's male menopause," he said, "but I think it does."

  "What are you going to do about it?"

  "Lay the ghost," he answered. "I'm going to find out why."

  "But how?" she said, suddenly afraid. "What will you do?"

  "I'll follow the advice of the King to Alice in Wonderland."

  She laughed despite herself. "What was that?"

  "‘Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’"

  * * * * *

  Etan had been sleeping with Fitzduane for nearly a year before she discovered he had once been married. He had never mentioned it. She had assumed that his way of life was the primary reason he hadn't settled down, but what she learned was more complicated. It helped explain his reluctance to make a further commitment. It also cast some light on her lover's growing obsession with this latest tragedy. Perhaps, once again, in his mind he had been too late.

  The name in the yellowed press clipping was Anne-Marie Thormann Fitzduane. Etan had been putting together a documentary on Ireland's involvements with the various United Nations peacekeeping forces when a researcher dropped a series of thick files on the Congo operation on her desk.

  The Belgian Congo — now known as Zaire — had been granted independence at the beginning of the sixties but had been ill prepared by its former masters for its new role. Trained administrators were virtually nonexistent. A handful of doctors was incapable of dealing with a population of more than thirteen million. Central government authority collapsed. Civil war broke out. Massacres and pillaging and wholesale wanton destruction became the order of the day.

  A United Nations force was sent in to restore order and keep the peace. Before long, to many UN troopers the peacekeeping mission seemed more like a war. Elite combat units like the Indian Gurkhas were seconded to the UN. Fitzduane was a young lieutenant in Ireland's contribution, an Airborne Rangers battalion under the leadership of Colonel Shane Kilmara.

  Etan was able to piece much of the story together from the clippings files. She learned that Anne-Marie had been a nurse with the Red Cross and had met Fitzduane at a mission in the bush when he was out on long-range patrol. They had been married within weeks. There was a photo of the wedding, which had taken place in the provincial capital. The honor guard consisted or Irish troops, and the bridesmaids were Red Cross nurses. The accompanying story told of the whirlwind romance. The couple looked very young and carefree and happy. The troops in the honor guard were smiling. Only their combat uniforms and sidearms gave a hint of the bloodbath to come.

  The Congo was a vast land, and the UN forces were sorely stretched. Fitzduane's unit moved on to another trouble spot, leaving the
provincial capital lightly guarded and under the care of central government troops. The troops revolted and were joined by an invading column of rebels — Simbas, they were called. Hostages were taken.

  Etan heard the rest of the story from Fitzduane. Holding hands, they had walked slowly from his castle to the lake nearby. They sat on a log and looked out across the lake and the intervening strip of land toward the sea and the spectacular sunset. The log had been covered with moss and damp, and the air had a chill to it. She could still vividly recall the texture of the mossy bark.

  Fitzduane had looked into the setting sun, his face aglow, and had murmured, "A world of cold fire." He had been silent for some moments before continuing.

  "The UN Secretary-General had been killed in a plane crash a few weeks earlier. Everything was confused. Nobody could decide what to do about the hostages. We were ordered to hold fast and do nothing. The Simbas were threatening to kill the hostages, and we knew firsthand they weren't bluffing. Kilmara decided on his own initiative to go in and asked for volunteers. Just about the whole unit stepped forward, which was no surprise. Under Kilmara we thought we could walk on water.

  "Anyway, we went in — the place was called Konina — by land, water, and air. Some of us sneaked in ahead at night and set up a position in a row of houses overlooking the square where the hostages were. There were about seven hundred of them — blacks, whites, Indians, men, women, and children. The town was packed with Simbas. There were masses of them; estimates ran as high as four thousand. Most of them were looting the town, but there was a guard of several hundred around the hostages in the square.

  "The Simbas had threatened to kill all the hostages if attacked, and God knows, they had had enough practice at massacres. They were often compared with the siafus, the soldier ants of Africa, destroying everything in their path. The Simbas believed they couldn't be killed. They were mainly primitive tribesmen stiffened by Force Publique deserters and led by witch doctors. Each recruit was put through a ritual that was supposed to give him dawa — medicine. If he then chanted, ‘mai, mai’ — water, water — as he went into battle, enemy bullets would turn to water."

  "What happened to this belief when some of them got killed?" Etan had asked.

  "The witch doctors had an answer for that." Fitzduane smiled wryly. "They said that the slain had lost face and broken one of the taboos. You had to follow the witch doctors exactly to keep your dawa."

  He continued. "The job of my command was to lie low until the attack came and then prevent the Simbas from killing the hostages until the main force could punch its way through. There were only twelve of us, so it was vital we didn't make a move until the attack started. We knew we couldn't hope to hold out for more than a matter of minutes unless reinforcements were right on hand. There were just too many Simbas, and though quite a few still had only spears and bows and arrows, most had FALs and other automatic weaponry captured from the ANC, the Congolese Army. So our orders were crystal clear: No matter what the provocation, unless actually detected — and we weren't — do nothing until the main force opens fire.

  "For eight hours we watched the scene below. Most of the hostages were left alive under guard, just sitting or trying to sleep on the ground, but a steady trickle was taken for the amusement of the Simbas and tortured to death. The torturing took place in a small garden at one end of the square. There was a statue there commemorating some explorer, and they used the plinth to tie their victims to.

  "We lay concealed no more than fifty meters away on the second floor of the house, and we could see it all clearly by the light of huge bonfires. With field glasses, it seemed close enough to touch. We couldn't do a damn thing. We had to wait; we just had to. They screamed and screamed and screamed; all goddamn night they screamed. Men, women, and children were raped. It made no difference. They were killed in as many disgusting ways as the Simbas could devise.

  "They put one little child — she couldn't have been more than four or five — between two jeeps, tied ropes to her arms and legs, and pulled her apart like a rag doll. One guy, with a beard and longish hair, they crucified. They shouted at him: ‘Jésus, Jésus, le roi des juifs.’ He was still alive after four hours, so they castrated him. After they raped them, they made some nuns drink gasoline. Then they cut their stomachs open and set fire to their intestines. That was a big favorite. We could smell them burning from where we lay. And we could do nothing, absolutely nothing to help. We lay there with our GPMGs and FNs and rocket launchers and grenades and knives and piano wire, and we didn't even move when little babies died.

  "Oh, we were a well-trained outfit, the best the Irish Army had to offer. We had discipline, absolute discipline. We had our orders, and they were sensible orders. Premature action would have been military suicide.

  "And then the Simbas pulled one young nurse out of the crowd. She was tall and red-haired and beautiful. She still wore her white uniform. It happened so quickly. One of the young Simbas — some were only thirteen or fourteen and among the cruelest — picked up a panga and almost casually hacked her head off. It took only a few blows. It was quite a quick death. The nurse was Anne-Marie. We'd been married just seven weeks."

  Etan had not known what to say or do. What she was hearing was so truly terrible and so much beyond her experience that she just sat there motionless. Then she put both her arms around her lover and drew him to her. After he'd finished speaking, Fitzduane had remained silent. The sun was now a dull semicircle vanishing into the sea. It had grown much colder. She could see the lights of the castle keep.

  Fitzduane had kissed the top of her head and squeezed her tight. "This is a damp bloody climate, isn't it?" he had said. To warm themselves up, they played ducks and drakes with flat stones on the lake in the twilight. Night had fallen by the time they made it back to Duncleeve, debating furiously as to who had won the game. The last few throws had taken place in near darkness.

  4

  The new Jury's Hotel in Dublin looked like nothing so much as the presidential palace of a newly emerging nation. The original Jury's had vanished except for the marble, mahogany, and brass Victorian bar that had been shipped in its entirety to Zurich by concerned Swiss bankers as a memorial to James Joyce.

  Fitzduane wended his way through a visiting Japanese electronics delegation, headed toward the new bar, and ordered a Jameson. He was watching the ice melt and thinking about postmortems and life and the pursuit of happiness when Günther arrived. He still looked baby-faced, so you tended not to notice at first quite how big he was. Close up you could see lines that hadn't been there before, but he still looked fit and tough.

  A wedding party slid in through the glass doors. The bride was heavily swaddled in layers of white man-made fiber. She was accompanied by either the headwaiter or the bridegroom, it was hard to tell which. The bride's train swished into the pound and began to sink. Fitzduane thought it was an unusual time of year for an Irish wedding, but then maybe not when you looked at her waistline.

  The bride's escort retrieved her train and wrung it out expertly into the fountain. He did it neatly and efficiently, as if it were a routine chore or he were used to killing chickens. The train now looked like a wet diaper as it followed the bride into family life. Fitzduane ignored the symbolism and finished his Jameson.

  "You're losing your puppy fat, Günther," he said. "You're either working too hard or playing too hard."

  "It's the climate here, and I'm getting older. I think I'm rusting." The accent was German and pronounced, but with more than a hint of Irishness to it. He'd been in Ireland for some considerable time. The government had once borrowed him from Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG-9), the West German antiterrorist force, and somehow he'd stayed.

  "Doesn't it rain in Germany?"

  "Only when required," replied Günther. "We're a very orderly nation."

  "The colonel coming?" asked Fitzduane. He patted the airline bag slung from Günther's shoulder and then hefted it, trying to work out the weapon inside.
Something Heckler & Koch at a guess. Germans liked using German products, and Heckler & Koch was state of the art. The weapon had a folding stock, and if he knew Kilmara, it was unlikely to be a nine millimeter. Kilmara had a combat-originated bias against the caliber, which he thought lacked stopping power. "The model thirty-three assault rifle?"

  Günther grinned and nodded. "You keep up-to-date," he said. "Very good. But the colonel is upstairs. You're dining in a private room; these days it's wiser." He led the way out of the bar and along the glass-walled corridor to the elevator. They got out on the top floor. Günther nodded at two plainclothes security guards and opened the door with a key. Three were two more men inside, automatic weapons at the ready. Günther ushered Fitzduane into the adjoining room.

  Colonel Shane Kilmara, security adviser to the Taoiseach — the Irish prime minister — and commander of the Rangers, the special Irish antiterrorist force, rose to meet him. A buffet lunch was spread out on a table to one side.

  "I didn't realize smoked salmon needed so much protection," said Fitzduane.

  "It's the company it keeps," answered Kilmara.

  * * * * *

  Whenever Ireland's idiosyncratic climate and the Celtic mentality of many of its natives began to get him down, Kilmara had only to reflect on how he had ended up in his present position to induce a frisson of well-being.

  Kilmara had been successful militarily in the Congo, and the saving of most of the hostages at Konina had been hailed as a classic surgical strike by the world press; but the bottom line had a political flavor, and back in cold, damp Ireland Kilmara was court-martialed — and found guilty. He did not dispute the finding. He had initiated the Konina strike against orders, and eighteen of his men had been killed.