“Right,” Brian said, and moved dutifully to his left. Monaghan went right, the beam of his flashlight flickering across the undergrowth of fern and gorse.
Brian’s hope was to find nothing—no blood, no track, no sign of the animal he had hit. Ignorance is bliss, he would tell Delia. If we don’t know what happened to the deer, we can assume it survived. Still, he played the flashlight as deeply as he could into the wilderness of Monaghan’s immense backyard. The light discovered nothing, and after walking a couple of hundred feet along the fencing he grew increasingly optimistic.
But then he heard a gunshot—or something very much as he imagined a gunshot would sound—and the noise arrested him in his tracks. For a moment the world was echo, and then came a second shot. This time he was certain of what he had heard, and he began trotting alongside the fence toward it.
He called as he ran: “Monaghan! Mr. Monaghan!”
“Over here,” came Monaghan’s voice.
Their flashlight beams met. Monaghan stood at the edge of the brush, his pistol—square and black, enormous to Brian’s eye—in his right hand. He swung the light of his torch into the wild green vegetation and Brian saw the deer, now dead.
“I smelled her before I saw her,” Monaghan said. “Blood. The reek of it. You can see for yourself: the bone at its break pokes clean through the flesh. It’s wondrous amazing she was able to clear my fence after your motorcar struck her.”
“You killed it,” Brian said. His tone was matter-of-fact, but was there truly an odor, and was it of blood—a humid sweetness heavy on the night air around them? The vegetation under the animal’s shattered leg glistened magenta in the light. Two nearly bloodless bullet holes showed the way to its heart.
“Took her out of her misery. She was trying to stand, her breathing hoarse as death itself.” Monaghan holstered the pistol. “There was nothing else for it.”
“Delia will be devastated.”
“She’ll need to be reminded the death of an animal is not like some human death. They’re ignorant, soulless creatures—poor things. They’ve neither premonition nor salvation.”
* * *
IN THE END, Delia was allowed a glass of brandy.
“One good thing,” Monaghan said. “It was indeed a doe—as I’d guessed from the way you two described it—but she wasn’t pregnant.” He shook his head and sighed. “If she’d been carrying a life, that would have been a dilemma. You know the glorious small poem, the one by your American poet, Stafford? It considers such a circumstance, and weighs the greater good.”
“‘Traveling Through the Dark,’” Delia said. “I make my students read it.”
“Just so.” Monaghan leaned toward his decanter. “Another touch of the brandy?”
“No, thank you.”
“And nothing more for me,” Brian said.
Monaghan sat back and folded his hands across his lap. “It’s been quite the night,” he said. “It’s exceedingly rare for me to have visitors in this house. Indeed, you two are the first.”
“Do you like living alone?” Delia asked. “Don’t you start talking to yourself?”
“And what better company?” Monaghan said. Then, serious: “It’s not entirely choice, but I’ve got accustomed to the sometime boredom of it. I have my reading, and I do have e-mail for contact with the outside universe. I play chess by computer besides, against various adversaries around the globe. Some matches occupy months.”
“Chess is one of our rainy-day pastimes,” Brian said.
“Is that a fact?”
“Brian has a pocket chess set,” Delia said. “With little magnetic pieces.”
“Then oughtn’t we to have a game?” Monaghan cocked his head, one eyebrow raised. “I’d welcome a flesh and blood opponent. Which of you shall it be?”
“Brian,” Delia said.
“I’m not very good,” Brian said.
“We’ll see about that.” Monaghan put down his glass and stood up. “Let me first arrange for disposing of our poor dead animal.”
* * *
FROM THE FRONT HALL THEY HEARD the flutter of a rotary-dial telephone. Monaghan moved as he talked, the movements changing the quality of light and shadow in the doorway.
“Mrs. Daly,” they heard him say, “is your Micheal at home?”
Apparently Micheal was not, for Monaghan went on almost at once. “Well that’s as should be,” he said. “Would you pass a message on to him? Would you say that a fine red doe has had the misfortune to be struck by a motorcar nearby and badly crippled. Tell him I’ve just now put her out of her misery and she lies dead not fifty feet from my back door. I’ve no way to dress the creature myself, but Micheal is welcome to her if he’ll come and haul her away. At the least he’ll have a fine head for mounting. Will you tell him that?”
“It’s nothing but a trophy to him,” Delia said grimly.
“Hush,” Brian said. “He’ll hear.”
“Let him.”
“I thank you, Mrs. Daly. I’ll look forward to at last meeting your Micheal face-to-face.”
The phone dropped into its cradle and the hall light went out. Monaghan came back into the room.
“Now,” he said, rubbing his hands together, “shall we have our match?”
He went to the game table and carried it forward, setting it in the space between Brian and himself. He began rearranging the chess pieces.
“This was but one contest of several I’m presently engaged in, with Micheal and others,” Monaghan said. “It’s kept in my head— though should the head fail, it’s safely on the computer drive.”
“Now I know I’m out of my depth,” Brian said.
“What a gorgeous chess table,” Delia said.
“Mahogany,” Monaghan told her. “Inlaid with squares of ebony wood and ivory. I’m told it once belonged to Alekhine, and when that master died it was appropriated by a mourner who displayed a fierce good taste.”
“Quite a history,” Brian said.
“The little I know of it. The balance of its provenance is shrouded in the mists. It came to me by way of an Ulster bureaucrat, now deceased.”
Monaghan took up two pawns and for a moment dropped his hands below table level. He held both fists out to Brian. “Choose.”
Brian touched the back of Monaghan’s right hand. “They must be very close friends of yours,” he said, “the Dalys—if you can phone them at one o’clock in the morning.”
Monaghan unclenched his hand to show the white pawn. “You could put it that way,” he said.
Brian pushed his king’s pawn. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help overhearing,” he said.
“Oh, no mind,” Monaghan said. “My acquaintance with Micheal and Clare Daly is what you might call fortuitous. They own the pub just where this road of ours meets the highway.”
“We know it well,” Brian said. In his mind’s eye he could see the Dalys, the wife tall and full-bosomed, her large hands suggesting an impressive strength. She was in her forties, Brian had guessed, stiff black hair shot through with slivers of white. The husband— Micheal—was about the same age, but slighter, subdued. While his wife drew the ales and bantered with patrons, Micheal stayed in the shadows between counter and kitchen, alert and ready to be useful but not putting himself forward. He had a wariness about him, his eyes bright and their movement restless. “And we know the Dalys— though not by name until now.”
“We call the place ‘our local,’” Delia said.
“Well then—I came to this house nearly two years ago,” Monaghan said. “Micheal bought the pub barely a month later, so in a manner of speaking we were strangers here together, both down from the North, both feeling our way amongst the natives, seeking respite from the madness left behind. What’s odd is that we’ve never truly met one another. We play chess, as you saw. We communicate by phone or e-mail. Tomorrow will be our first encounter.”
“You’re actually a priest,” Brian said. Intended as a question, the words came out like a state
ment, and for a moment Monaghan seemed taken aback.
“Ah,” he said. “The photograph on the mantel.” He leaned over the chess board. “It was the day of my ordination. I’ve too much sentiment in me not to commemorate it, the picture being one of the few reminders of what I was.”
“You left the Church?” Delia said.
“Left the priesthood,” Monaghan corrected. “It’s now thirty years. It was at a time when the voice of God seemed less persuasive than the voices I was hearing in the confessional.” He paused, moved a piece forward. “And in the streets as well,” he said. “It was for me a change of life as great as the first, but a different faith—a crusade, you might say. I’m retired from that as well.”
“Regrets?” Brian asked.
“I rarely ask myself such questions. If thirty years ago you had told me that at the age of seventy-one I should still be carrying a loaded pistol, I’d have chided you for too little faith. It only proves, I suppose, that the politics we marry, and the violence we condone, finally change nothing.”
Monaghan studied Brian’s game, his expression skeptical. “This is a curious deployment of your forces,” he said. “Curious and obscure.”
“I count on my ignorance,” Brian said. “I figure that if I don’t know what I’m doing, neither will the opponent.”
“I had comrades who similarly followed instinct. Most are dead.” He smiled and winked at Delia. “Gamesmanship,” he told her.
“Do you and Micheal talk about the future? Of the North, I mean—of a united Ireland someday?”
Monaghan shook his head. “We shy away, we two, from such speculation. It was not easy for me to be open with Micheal, nor he with me, and even now we confine our messages to matters of a mundane sort. Micheal appears to be a master of many trades, and so our association has concerned itself with the everydays of landscape and mechanics. It was Micheal who persuaded me to paint my gate its gaudy orange, though it was no favorite color of mine. He won me over with the argument of economy: he called one day to tell me he’d got a grand paint bargain from a shop in Tralee; what a waste, he argued, not to take advantage. A demon of persuasion, Micheal is.”
“It catches the eye,” Delia said.
“And do you have connections to Ireland yourself?” Monaghan asked.
“So I’m told,” Brian said. “My father’s grandfather is supposed to have come from Kinsale. That must have been in the mid-nineteenth century.”
“Then you’re here to look him up.”
“I haven’t yet,” Brian said. “We went through Kinsale on a Sunday.”
“We might go back there,” Delia said. “But time’s getting short.”
“That’s my part of the world, as happens,” Monaghan said. “Born in Youghal. Sent up to seminary in Dublin when I came of age. And then continued my vocation northward.”
“There was a news report this noon about a shooting near Belfast,” Brian said. “Somebody gunned down by a man on a motorbike.”
“True,” Monaghan said. He placed a pawn. “Red Hand. Protestants with a proven taste for murder.”
“So insane,” Delia said. “So pointless.”
Monaghan smiled. “My mother had a saying: ‘If God had meant us to be English, he’d not have thought up the Irish Sea.’ Thus do mothers marry geography and politics.”
“You push your differences so far back in time,” Delia said. “You Irish.”
“Well we have memories, don’t you see, and the roots reach far and deep down—past Cromwell himself. The Irish have elephant brains, I think.”
He studied Brian’s moves all the time he talked, countering, watching, countering. His game was not mechanical, but swifter and surer. He talked, but his eyes and his focus never left the board. Now he rubbed his chin and slid a rook forward. “Mate,” he said.
Brian’s shoulders slumped. He toppled his king on its side and pushed his chair away from the board. “I guess my famous ignorance has failed me.”
“We’ll see,” Monaghan said. “Shall we have another?”
“It’s terribly late,” Delia said.
Brian looked at her.
“We have plans for tomorrow,” she said. “We’re driving to Ennis.”
“It’s a journey easy and short enough,” Monaghan said. “Why not tomorrow then? No matter how late.”
“We’ll try,” Brian said. “I can’t promise.”
“Done.” Monaghan stood, right hand extended to them. Brian shook the hand; Delia appeared not to notice it.
“You’ve been kind,” she said. “But I’m sorry for the reason we met.”
“Ah, the unfortunate animal.” Monaghan moved the chess table back to its original place at the end of the room; in a matter of moments he reset it to the game he had wiped out earlier. “There’s something to be said for necessity,” he said. “Never mind whither our hearts may bend, often it’s circumstance rules us.”
* * *
DRIVING BACK FROM ENNIS the next evening, they quarreled over Monaghan. The weather was changeable; they drove in and out of rain showers, great dark clouds boiling up out of the west to drench them, then giving way to amiable high blue sky. The car radio was playing; on the outskirts of Limerick a news broadcast commenced. It was all about the North: a cache of arms uncovered in Donegal; an inquiry into the use of force by the R.U.C.; the Red Hand claiming responsibility for yesterday’s murder.
“You see?” Delia said. “He knew.”
“An educated guess,” Brian said.
“A certain knowledge.”
And that was how the quarrel began. There was something, she said; politics or not, there was something sinister about the man. Reclusive, said Brian, is not necessarily sinister. But what about the gun, the electric fence, the security business? And was that his real name? Hadn’t Brian noticed that Kerry and Monaghan were both names of Irish counties? Had he really been a priest?
“I don’t trust him,” she said. “Tell me the honest truth: Did you see it?”
“See what?”
“The deer. Did you actually see it?”
“Of course I saw it.”
“Did you see it before he put it down?”
“No,” Brian admitted. “It was already dead when I got to the spot.”
“I think Monaghan’s the kind of man who likes killing,” Delia said. “Never mind all that malarkey about poetry and beauty and something not so strong for the lady.”
“Delia—The deer was in agony. You could literally smell the blood. Monaghan did it a favor.”
“I don’t think of death as a ‘favor,’” she said. “And I can’t believe we’re going back tonight for more chess. Monaghan demolished you in that game.”
“But that was expected, wasn’t it? I’m no chess whiz. I can’t compete against a man who keeps multiple games in his head.”
“Then we should drive straight to the cottage,” Delia said. “Forget about another stupid game.”
“I promised him,” Brian said.
She closed her eyes, rested her head against the window. “Sometimes I don’t understand you at all.”
Brian concentrated on his driving—holding his arms uncomfortably rigid, as if he had not been driving on the left for weeks.
“How about a stop at our local?” he said. “A stiff nightcap for the lady.”
Delia relented. “That’s your first smart idea of the day.”
But when they arrived at the pub it was closed, the parking lot empty of cars. Brian got out and tried the door, but it was locked; when he peered inside he saw no lights, no sign of life.
“Too bad,” Delia said. “I’ve gotten to like this place.”
“Never mind. Monaghan will break out the drinks.”
“Watch my kibitzing,” Delia said. “I plan to get drunk as a skunk.”
* * *
FROM THE CREST OF THE LONG SLOPE where they had struck the deer the night before, they saw a single car parked at Monaghan’s driveway. It was unusual for hik
ers to be out on the trails so late, and as they came nearer they saw that it was a police car—a white Gardai sedan. An officer wearing a lime-yellow vest was leaning against a fender.
“What’s this?” Brian said.
He stopped alongside the Gardai car and rolled down his window. The officer, uniformed under his vest, a shiny-billed garrison cap pulled low on his forehead, leaned toward him.
“What’s happening?” Brian asked.
“Nothing for yourselves to be concerned with, sir,” the policeman said. “Official investigation.”
“Investigating what? What’s going on?”
Delia nudged him. Up by the orange gate a black Land Rover was parked. In its driver’s seat was a man, apparently a soldier, and at the gate itself stood two more soldiers—all three in camouflage uniforms, black berets, black boots and belts. The two at the gate carried machine guns; one man had his weapon at the ready, the other held his loosely over one arm, the muzzle pointed toward the ground. The gate itself was shut; an enormous X, done in two broad black strokes, was painted across it.
The policeman had come closer, bending to look in at them. “You’re American?”
“Yes.”
“Might I see your passports, please?”
“Mine’s at our cottage,” Brian said. “I could get it; it’s just down the road.”
“I have mine,” Delia said. She rummaged in her handbag, offered the passport to the officer, who examined it and returned it.
“We were invited to stop in for a game of chess,” Brian said.
“I’m afraid there’ll to be no matches tonight,” the officer said.
“Are those soldiers?”
The policeman stepped away. “We’re the police,” he said, “not the army. Move along now. Death’s happened here and we’ve work to do.” He dismissed them with the back of his hand.
“Let’s go,” Delia murmured.
Brian put the car in gear and drove on. “What the hell,” he said.
For the next few days, their last in Ireland, they of course made guesses about what had happened to the man who called himself Kerry Monaghan. Surely it had to do with the strife in the North, but what? There was nothing in the Irish Times, nothing in the Examiner, nothing on the RTE evening news programs to enlighten them.
Who Will Hear Your Secrets? Page 2
