Gunner Kelly dda-13

by Anthony Price

  And you with your great machines that can count the nine billion names of God Himself? He’s nobody, that’s who he is ... He’s John Doe, and William Rowe . . . and William Smith and Wilhelm Schmidt, who never did any harm to anyone—that was all his own harm, and not the harm others gave him to do.” The Irishman spread his glance between them. “He was a British soldier, for his dummy1

  sins—his father’s sins—” the glance fixed momentarily on Benedikt “—and probably killed a few Germans in his time, that he never set eyes on at all.”

  “We know that.”

  “You do? And he was a Bradford taxi-driver after that— you’ll know that, too? And no one looked twice at him, because no one ever looks twice at a taxi-driver, providing he’s there on time and doesn’t over-charge—eh?”

  “We know that, too.”

  “So you do ... Michael Kelly—John Doe, William Rowe, William Smith, Wilhelm Smith, Wilhelm Kelly, William Kelly, Aloysius Kelly—”

  “Aloysius Kelly?”

  “A common name. Two common names— Aloysius and Kelly . . .

  Though maybe Aloysius is not so common hereabouts. But—”

  “Aloysius Kelly.” Audley repeated the name quickly, as though he’d only just heard it the second before. “But he’s dead—” He looked at the American.

  “Dead—so he is!” agreed the Irishman. “Dead and gone these six years—seven years?”

  “Four years,” the American corrected him.

  “Four years, is it?” The Irishman accepted the correction. “But you’re right—it was seven years they were after him, but it’s only four years since they caught up with him—you have the right of it as always, Howard. But dead and gone—four years, or seven years, or seventy years, it’s all the same: dead and gone with all dummy1

  that was locked up in his head. And there are those that sleep a lot sounder for that, by God!”

  Benedikt looked at Audley. “Aloysius . . . Kelly?”

  “Yes.” Audley didn’t return the look. “What is Michael Kelly’s connection with him?”

  “Ah . . . now that machine of yours is good, but not good enough—

  eh?” The black-brown eyes dismissed the Kommissar as well as the British computer’s memory-bank. “The best connection of all, he had—the one that’s thicker than water, through the sister-son, which is one that counted strong from the old days.”

  “Hell!” The swarthy American shared his surprise with Audley.

  “He had no next-of-kin, damn it—”

  “There now!” Pure satisfaction peeled off the veneer of the Englishness in the man’s voice. “You have to go back . . . and you have to have the connections to get the sense of it, which your man prying wouldn’t take from it in a month of Sundays! For there was an age-gap you wouldn’t credit, between the one of them marrying young, and the other marrying late—and the scandal of the first one, that had to marry, that they always like to forget so they had the chance to ... And it was a Kelly marrying a Kelly, that was no relation at all—and a difference of opinion between the families as well...”

  Benedikt gave up trying to disentangle that convoluted relationship. Michael Kelly’s father had served with the British Army, and that might have made for enmity. But he wasn’t sure which generation the man was talking about.

  dummy1

  “What has Michael Kelly go to do with Aloysius Kelly?” The edge of anger in Audley’s voice indicated that he had the same problem, and was cutting through it.

  “They grew up together—I’m trying to tell you, Dr Audley. The same church and the same school, and houses in adjoining streets.

  And they kissed the same girls down by the river, and put their hands where they shouldn’t under the same skirts . . . Or, perhaps Michael didn’t, because he was the good one, that did as he was told—and enlisted in the British Army, like his father before him . . . Not like Aloysius—he was the clever one—and the bad one, to your way of thinking, Dr Audley.”

  “The bad one?” Benedikt was tired of the nuances of their fools’

  quarrels, which evidently encompassed Ireland’s own enmities as well as those he more or less understood.

  “His father was a Republican. They say he was one of those that lay in wait for Michael Collins.” The Irishman’s mouth twitched.

  “Michael’s was a Free Stater. And he wasn’t ashamed of wearing his medal ribbons—the DCM among them—the old man wasn’t.

  Out of their frame beside the fireplace, for all to see.”

  Mil Eliot zu Ruhm und Sieg, thought Benedikt: like the Elector of Hanover, the King of England had scattered his battle honours far and wide in the days of empire.

  “But . . . the two families—it was like there was an armed truce between them, the generation of the Troubles, and the Partition, and the Civil War, because there was blood between them as well as common to them . . . But the boys would have none of that—

  they were like brothers in the mischief they got up to between dummy1

  them . . . There’s this auntie, blind as a bat and sharp as the razor the barber shaves himself with—she remembers them both . . .

  until Aloysius went off to the seminary and Michael went to fight for the English—which was maybe just a little better than being a butcher’s boy, which was all the work he could get when they wouldn’t have him at the garage ... It was always cars he was into, the auntie said: it was a driver he wanted to be for the English, but his father said it was a gunner he must be, because it was only the presence of the guns on the battlefield that turned mere fisticuffs into proper warfare—” The Irishman looked around him quizzically “—which is all these things are, I suppose, if you think about it—just bloody great guns on wheels, with an engine bolted to them . . . Anyway, that’s when the two boys split up—” He slapped his hand on the Tiger “—and went their own ways—and very different ways, by God!”

  It was time, decided Benedikt, to cut his own losses ruthlessly: both the Englishman and the American clearly knew what the Irishman was talking about, but he did not.

  “Who is Aloysius Kelly?” He could have asked the question of any of them, but Audley was the most likely to give a straight answer.

  “David?”

  “Hah!” It was the Irishman who reacted first. “Now that’s a question that’s been asked a time or two!”

  Benedikt waited. The big Englishman wasn’t looking at him, he was staring past him, past the Tiger, at nothing, as though he hadn’t heard. “David?”

  dummy1

  Finally Audley drew a breath. “Who was Aloysius Kelly ...”

  “Of course.” They had all said as much: the Englishman and the American had argued over the length of time since that event, and the Irishman had agreed that it was four years since they caught up with him. “Who was he?”

  Audley looked at him. Then he looked at the American. “It was in Spain he was first spotted, wasn’t it?” He frowned. “With General O’Duffy’s Blue Shirts on Franco’s side?”

  “That’s probably just a story. He would have been absurdly young to have been with them on the Jarama.” The American frowned back at him. “Too young.”

  “They say he lied about his age.” The Irishman turned to Benedikt.

  “They say he first went into action alongside your General von Thoma’s tanks—they say the General wanted O’Duffy’s men with him because he reckoned they wouldn’t run away.”

  “But I don’t go for it.” The American shook his head. “I don’t reckon he was there so early.”

  “But he did go straight from the seminary,” countered the Irishman. “And he lied about his age, they say.”

  “Maybe. But if he was there he changed sides damn quick, that’s for sure.”

  “Ah . . . well, isn’t that the Irish for you!” Mr Smith smiled.

  “Going over from the winners to the losers.”

  “He went over—”

  “And nothing out of character.” The Irishman stuck to h
is guns.

  “He went there as a True Believer, straight from the seminary. And dummy1

  he went across like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, when he found another faith he liked better, having seen both sides—”

  “No!” The American shook his head again. “ ‘38—late ’38—is the first year I’ll buy. With Frank Ryan in the International Brigade—

  and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, not the British one, because it was long after the Cordoba trouble.”

  “Ah . . . Frank Ryan! Now he was a lovely man in his way, you know.” The Irishman half-closed his eyes. “A great gentleman, they say . . .”

  “And IRA since 1918.” The American looked at Audley.

  “And in contact with the Nazis, along with Sean Russell, in ‘41—

  they had a radio link going,” said Audley.

  “Which was a great waste of time for them both, to be sure,”

  murmured the Irishman.

  “But not for lack of trying,” said Audley.

  “That’s not what I mean, Dr Audley,” replied the Irishman mildly.

  “What I mean is that Aloysius Kelly was there beside him—and wasn’t he feeding it all back to Moscow, on his account, eh?”

  Audley sniffed abruptly, and turned to Benedikt. “Yes. So there you have it in a nutshell, Captain Schneider. Aloysius Kelly went to Spain and teamed up with Ryan, who was a long-time IRA man

  —”

  “Who’d fought alongside his father, in the Troubles and the Civil War,” supplemented Mr Smith.

  “But before that he’d been talent-scouted by one of their Political dummy1

  Commissars,” said the American laconically. “He was ordered to attach himself to Frank Ryan, who was an Irishman first and last—

  whoever was England’s enemy was his friend, it didn’t matter who

  —”

  “Which made him politically unreliable—Frank, I mean—”

  “Jim! For God’s sake!”

  “I was only explaining—”

  Audley cut them both off with a gesture. “What they both mean, Benedikt, is that the IRA originated as the military wing of a nationalist movement—a nationalist sectarian movement. The fashionable idea now is that all twentieth-century guerrilla organizations tick because Marx and Lenin wound them up— that it’s all Marxist-Leninist magic that makes them work. But the truth is that most of them owe damn all to Marx, and even less to Lenin

  —the halfways successful ones, anyway . . . from Pancho Villa to Fidel Castro, by way of the Jews and the Algerians and the Cypriots . . . and even the Chinese and Vietnamese too. You could say they owe a lot more to any classical guerrilla leader in history—

  to Francis Marion, say—” he pointed at the American “—his

  ‘Swamp Fox’ in the Carolinas, fighting Cornwallis and Tarleton in the American War of Independence—Marx and Lenin didn’t teach him anything . . . And the IRA has always derived a hundred times more from the United States than from Soviet Russia and Colonel Gaddafi . . . But to do that, it was the end of British colonialism—

  not the beginning of the socialist revolution—that they campaigned for. The shift to the left in the IRA didn’t start until the ‘6os.”

  “Aha!” Mr Smith gave Audley a shrewd look. “And you not an dummy1

  expert on Ireland, eh?” Then he nodded. “Ah—but it was you who said what I had was not worth a ha’penny, wasn’t it! So I can’t say you didn’t tell me.”

  “I’m not an expert on Ireland, damn it!” snapped Audley irritably.

  “We’re not talking about Ireland—we’re talking about Aloysius Kelly.”

  “And the Debreczen meetings.” Almost imperceptibly the American had shifted his position from alongside the Irishman, until now he was nearly facing him. And there was a note in his voice which matched his change of position: the mention of

  ‘Aloysius Kelly’ had ranged him alongside Audley as an ally, he was no longer a neutral ‘friend’.

  “Oh no! Debreczen is something else—” Mr Smith held up his hand, fingers widely spread, as though to ward both men off “—

  there’s nothing at all I know about that! It’s none of my business . . . what it was, or when it was. And I’m not having any part of it, either.” He looked around him, and Benedikt couldn’t help following his action. But now there was no one at all in sight: the great hall of tanks was inhabited only by fighting machines.

  “Fair enough.” Audley’s flash of irritability was gone. “No one could blame you for that. So ... we’ll just forget Debreczen—it’s something else that never existed. Right? And Aloysius Kelly too!”

  Debreczen?

  The Debreczen meetings? Benedikt frowned as the meetings fixed Debreczen for him. But what would an Irish veteran of the Spanish Civil War be doing in a nowhere-town in eastern Hungary, which—

  dummy1

  so far as he could recall—lay somewhere just on the better side of the Carpathians, almost equidistant from the borders of Slovakia and Rumania and the Ukraine?

  The Irishman looked at Audley wordlessly, and Benedikt could see that Audley friendly frightened him more than Audley hostile. But then, perhaps that was what Audley intended.

  “It’s Michael Kelly—our very own Gunner Kelly—who interests us, Mr Smith, you see?” Audley smiled, first at the Irishman, and then transferred the smile to Benedikt for confirmation. “Correct, Captain?”

  Benedikt nodded. “That is correct.” If anything, he thought, a smiling Audley was more disturbing.

  “And we left him taking the King’s shilling . . . forty years ago? No

  —forty-five, it must be . . .” Audley carried the nod back to Mr Smith. “Which is a long time ago, when you think about it.”

  A long time, indeed! Benedikt tried, and failed, to conjure up pictures of the Ireland of their time—the two Irish youths, one a butcher’s boy, the other a young seminarian . . . one to become a British soldier, the other to travel a very different road, serving under a newer flag and exchanging the true God for a false one.

  But both of them had grown old since then, over those long years . . . and yet now one was mysteriously dead, and the other plotted murderous vengeance, when they both ought to have been drowsing in front of the television sets by their firesides among grandchildren.

  “So when did they meet again, Michael and Aloysius?” Audley dummy1

  prodded the Irishman gently. “Because they did meet again, didn’t they?”

  As a guess, it was nothing extraordinary, really: it was the only computation of the possibilities which made any sense of what was happening now.

  “They met.” The hand resting on the tank clenched.

  “Four years ago?”

  “Ten years ago.”

  “So long as that?” Audley frowned, and fell silent for a moment.

  “Well now . . . ten years . . . and not by chance?”

  The Irishman didn’t reply.

  “Not by chance, let’s assume. And it was Aloysius who sought out Michael—right?” Audley nodded, but more to himself than to Mr Smith, and then turned to the American. “It was about ten years ago that they put the word out on him, wasn’t it?”

  The American stared into space for a couple of seconds. “No. Not so long—more like seven . . . ‘75—not earlier than that, David.”

  “Hmm . . . But then he could have seen the writing on the wall before they did. So he could have been setting up his bolt-holes in advance . . . That’s what I’d have done in his place.”

  ‘They’ . . . ? Both because Audley was who he was and because Aloysius Kelly had been who he had been, they were not the IRA, estimated Benedikt coldly. The long hunt for him— which now seemed to have extended to a pursuit of Gunner Kelly—sounded much more like the KGB’s Special Bureau No 1 on both accounts.

  dummy1

  “So how did Aloysius trace Michael?” Audley came round to Mr Smith again, and beamed suddenly at him. “Ah! He’d go about it just
like you did, wouldn’t he!” He nodded at Benedikt. “There now

  —that’s a lesson for both of us: the computer gives back only what it’s already been given, and if it lacks that one special bit of knowledge ...” He switched back quickly to the Irishman. “And that’s what’s bothering you at the moment, isn’t it?”

  The man’s source—of course! Because once Audley had that, the man himself was superfluous.

  “The old auntie.” This time Audley didn’t bother to smile, because he no longer needed to do so.

  “No—”

  “Yes. You slipped, and now you’re kicking yourself for it—

  although it’s easily done, and we all do it when we’re scared . . .

  And I could be charitable, and assume that you don’t want the old lady bothered by great gallumphing Britishers with Irish accents . . . Or I could be uncharitable, and suspect that you’re more worried about someone remembering that you’d been to see her just recently, and putting one and one together to make two—

  eh?”

  The Irishman had composed his features, but the knuckles on his fist betrayed him to Benedikt. “No. I was just thinking . . . word of an Irishman—that’s all.”

  “And quite properly.” Audley looked down his nose. “She’s your contact. But you don’t exist, so she doesn’t exist either.” He shrugged. “Simple.”

  dummy1

  “Your word on it?” Apart from the knuckles Mr Smith was steady now.

  “No. You already have my word, I can’t give it to you twice. Over here ... a gentleman only has one word-—would you have insulted Michael Collins or Frank Ryan like that?”

  The Irishman rolled a glance at the American. “Insufferable! And you wonder why we’re as we are, by God!” Then he relaxed slowly, with a light in his eye not present before. “And yet . . . you have no Irish blood in you by any far remote mischance, Dr Audley?”

  “Not a drop. No Irish raiders ever reached Sussex—fortunately for them. Good Anglo-Saxon, Mr Smith, I’m afraid. King Alfred’s men . . . the ones who beat the Danes in the end—remember?”

  “But not the Romans. Or the Normans?”