The City in Darkness

by Michael Russell

Gregory had made his point; he wasn’t going to give Stefan any space to believe that his hands would be anything other than dirty, dirtier than he had told himself they were already. He sat for a moment feeling more a part of Special Branch than he had since arriving at Dublin Castle. He had a sense that the dirtier his hands got the more he would belong. He poured himself a glass of whiskey; he knew he would finish the bottle.

  At the top of Crane Lane, in the now quiet night, Stefan stopped. It was gone midnight and Dublin was not a city that went late to bed. Whiskey was always a mistake. He needed something to clear the sourness out of his head, the sourness of the drink and what Terry Gregory had left behind. He needed to talk to Kate. She wouldn’t be long home from the Gate Theatre now, at her parents’ in Dún Laoghaire. Her parents didn’t like him phoning late at night, but there wasn’t much they liked about him anyway. The O’Donnells accepted he and their daughter were lovers in the way they accepted the war; they called it by another name and assumed that if they kept quiet it would go away. He had made considerable efforts to get on with Kate’s mother and father, but they had not got past stiff politeness. Not waking the house up with a phone call at half-past midnight, after Kate got home, was normally an element in the protocol of strained coexistence, but the best part of a bottle of Powers wasn’t much of a recipe for politeness.

  The Special Branch offices were across the street along with a telephone. Kate would know he was the worse for drink. It would piss her off; it changed his personality in a way he didn’t like himself. But he needed to hear her voice. He needed some of her light back in his head.

  He crossed Dame Street and walked into the Castle through the Palace Street Gate. A stifled yawn hailed him as he passed the sentry box.

  ‘Something on, Inspector?’

  Garda Aidan Fogarty clasped a mug of tea.

  ‘Not when I left Farrelly’s, Aidan.’

  ‘You should’ve brought me over one, sir!’

  Stefan walked down the dark, cobbled street to the arch into the Police Yard. There was a light in the yard but as he headed to the Special Branch offices he was surprised to see a light inside. It didn’t matter; at least not until he passed the doors of the garage and saw the black bonnet of a big Humber. It was Superintendent Gregory’s car. That was what Fogarty meant. The last thing he wanted was another conversation with his boss. He was about to turn back when the light in the office went off. The door opened. He slipped into the shadows of another doorway, feeling foolish and knowing he would feel more foolish if Gregory saw him hiding.

  He heard Terry Gregory’s voice as the superintendent moved across the yard to his car; there was another man with him. Stefan didn’t know the voice. The two spoke quietly, but their words were clear enough in the enclosed space.

  ‘Three to four hours. Don’t bank on any more,’ said Gregory.

  ‘It’ll be plenty,’ replied the other man.

  ‘My men’ll be half strength, less, and it’ll be the same in every Garda station in the city. The culchees are already heading down the country for Christmas, and you can split what’s left between the ones who’ll be at home putting up the lights and the poor buggers on duty who’ll be on the piss.’

  The other man laughed.

  ‘Four hours includes getting away, Cathal,’ Gregory continued.

  ‘We can shift a lot of ammunition in that time.’

  Stefan was sober. Standing in the shadows seemed less foolish.

  There was silence; feet on the cobbles, the car door opening. The engine started. Headlights blazed as Gregory drove the car out into the yard. Stefan saw the other man in the lights. He recognized him immediately, though he had never met him; his photograph was in the detectives’ room. He was a man who had no place inside the Special Branch building, except for interrogation. He had no place having a whispered heart to heart with Detective Superintendent Gregory in the Police Yard. Cathal McCallister was a senior IRA man; the organization’s Quartermaster, responsible for arms, ammunition, explosives, everything the IRA used in its struggle against Britain, in the North and across the water, and against the government of Ireland too.

  The black Humber stopped. Gregory got out and opened one of the rear doors. Cathal McCallister walked to the car.

  ‘Don’t push your luck,’ said Gregory, ‘just get out with what you can. Whatever else, I don’t want any shooting. I don’t want anyone killed.’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ said the IRA Quartermaster, laughing.

  He got into the car and stretched across the back seat. Gregory threw a coat over him and shut the door. He got back in himself and lit a cigarette. Stefan could see his face before the interior light went out. There was no smile.

  Stefan Gillespie waited until he could no longer hear the Humber’s engine. He wanted Terry Gregory gone. Kate O’Donnell was not in his mind now. He had forgotten why he was there. He wanted to forget what he had heard too. He didn’t know what it meant. It was dangerous information; it was dangerous he had it and more dangerous if anyone knew. If the head of Special Branch was working with the IRA who was there to trust? The price for knowing too much was a high one where the IRA was concerned. He came out of the shadows. At the Palace Street Gate Aidan Fogarty shouted something he didn’t hear; he didn’t even see him. Dublin was very still as he walked down Parliament Street to the bridge, along Wellington Quay to his rooms over Paddy Geary’s tobacconist’s. He should have left Terry Gregory’s bottle of Powers alone. Whiskey was always a mistake.

  4

  Roly Poly

  The next day was almost like every other day. Stefan Gillespie and Dessie MacMahon took a list of names from two government departments; men who had left civil service jobs and were suspected of joining the British Army. They also picked up a list of missing soldiers from the Military Police at Collins Barracks; these were deserters and as much information as possible was required. For the most part there was no doubt where the men were; they had told friends and families. Sometimes the tale was that the men had gone to look for work in England. But if facts weren’t forthcoming from tight-lipped relatives, rumour and begrudgery often offered more. So did the Post Office Censorship Office where letters to and from Britain were opened and read. Stefan and Dessie spent two hours there. They drew a clear line under two men; letters from the War Office in London told the next of kin that they had been killed in action. It wasn’t possible to chase up every man who had disappeared across the water and might or might not be in uniform, there were far too many, but civil servants mattered; they were employees of the state. And military personnel mattered above all; the Irish Army was haemorrhaging soldiers at the rate of hundreds every month.

  By six o’clock the two detectives were putting together their work. Stefan had said little that wasn’t about the job in hand; there were none of the gripes and complaints that got them through the day. Dessie knew there had been a set-to with the boss the night before, but the two men had known each other a long time. If something needed saying, it would be said.

  ‘Get in here, Gillespie!’

  Terry Gregory bellowed across the detectives’ room.

  Stefan got up and walked to the glass-partitioned office. He had no reason to think Gregory knew anything, but somehow he half-expected it.

  ‘Tell me about this play.’

  Stefan had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘At the Gate, Roly Poly, is that it?’

  ‘Er, yes, sir.’

  ‘Your other half’s working there?’

  ‘She’s got a part-time job in the design—’

  ‘You’ve seen it?’

  ‘I was at the opening night, sir.’

  ‘Very nice too. Enjoy it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Herr Hempel, the German ambassador, didn’t.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I’ve read the papers.’

  ‘So what’s this play about?’

  ‘Well, it’s based on a French story—’

  ‘Just tell me what
happens.’

  ‘There’s a war on. Some civilians from one side are trying to get through enemy lines to safety. They’re stopped by an army officer who won’t let them go, because of a woman he wants to sleep with. That’s it.’

  ‘Not Cinderella at the Olympia, but still a fucking pantomime.’

  Stefan didn’t know why they were discussing this.

  ‘Is there a whore in it?’

  ‘The woman is a prostitute.’

  ‘The guardians of our morality are troubled by that, in Leinster House, the Ministry of Justice, even, I am informed, our beloved Prime Minister Mr de Valera. Dev is unconvinced what Mac Liammóir and Edwards are up to at the end of O’Connell Street is suitable for a nation that gets overheated dancing at the crossroads. So the lads need to take it off.’

  ‘It’s only been on three days!’

  ‘You’ll be at the Gate tonight. The last night. I want to know who’s there, who says what. And if Mac Liammóir does what he’s supposed to.’

  It was the last thing Stefan wanted to do.

  ‘I know people there, starting with Mr Mac Liammóir. With Kate—’

  ‘Horses for courses. You’ll remember that. Anyway, you scrub up better than the rest, and what would be the point me sending some gobshite detective who couldn’t even be identified as a Special Branch man so?’

  ‘But what does it matter, if it’s coming off anyway?’

  ‘Details always matter. There’s never anything you don’t need to know. That’s all the job is. There are things it’s not helpful to know, things it’s not even wise to know, but you can’t tell in advance. Instinct tells you what to jettison, what to forget. I think you’re a man with good instincts.’

  The last words were delivered with Superintendent Gregory’s smile at its wryest. Stefan didn’t know what that told him. He didn’t know if it was a coda on the conversation in Farrelly’s, whether it was amusement at sending him to do something else he didn’t want to do, or whether Terry Gregory did know something about his presence in the Lower Castle Yard. They could have been idle words to wind him up, or maybe a warning.

  For the second time in four days Stefan watched the army officer walk into the hotel foyer and regard the group of travellers with disdain. The officer was prepared to treat enemy civilians with courtesy, but the idea that they were innocent bystanders was an indulgence. He knew these travellers for what they were: rats. Yet he had made a mistake. He should have let the party go on its way. Instead he saw the woman. She was not a rat. He assumed he could have her, given the profession she clearly pursued. But she refused. He might have ignored it but as he realized why, he couldn’t. Where the other travellers eyed him timidly, apologetically, she looked him in the face and told him he could force her, if that was the man he was, but she would not dishonour her country by sleeping with him. They all knew; his own men knew. He had lost face. It was as if his country had lost face, too, to a whore. The travellers had applauded her patriotism, but they were still rats. Once they realized the officer would only let them leave if the woman came to his bed, the applause would stop. He sensed their mood changing. Roly Poly was turning from heroine to whore again. What she refused for her country’s sake her compatriots would soon insist she did for theirs. The officer need do nothing; the rats would do it all.

  It was at this point, minutes before the end of the first act, that three men, a few rows back from the stage, stood up and pushed past other theatregoers, forcing them to stand too. The soldier stopped in mid-speech; other actors looked out to the auditorium. There was tutting and grunting. One of the men walking out looked at the audience around him and said, ‘This is a disgrace.’ His voice was accented; to make his point more forcefully he repeated himself in German, ‘Das ist eine Schande.’ In the lapel of his suit, better cut than any Irish suit there that evening, he wore a small circular buttonhole, red and black; the swastika of the Nazi Party.

  The words ‘disgrace’ and ‘shame’ were thrown back at the departing figures, one of them the stiff-faced German ambassador to Ireland, Eduard Hempel. By now the soldier on stage had resumed intimidating the travellers as Roly Poly herself came on. She stopped, looking at the fellow countrymen who had so recently approved her patriotic virtue but were now watching her with the beginning of something like indignation. They turned away, all of them. Then there was loud applause. And the lights went up.

  Stefan stood against the wall to one side of the bar. It was a small, crowded space, like everywhere at the Gate, stage and backstage, theatre and front of house. Faded wallpaper and muddy paint gave the feel of a Victorian drawing room that had seen better days, but the intimacy that lent the theatre its uniqueness had no appeal to him. When the interval came he wanted to go out to Cavendish Row for a cigarette, but he had a job to do, pointless as it was; watch and report. He was the only Special Branch officer known at the Gate. Even the barman who poured his Guinness knew him. The report of what happened, who said what, who did what, was incidental. He was intimidation, to remind the Gate’s director, Micheál Mac Liammóir, that the play had to come off; if the theatre did not do what was unofficially demanded, there would be some very official consequences.

  Stefan knew he would be challenged soon enough. The best he could hope for was getting out of the Gate before he encountered Kate O’Donnell.

  The conversation in the bar wasn’t about the play, but about Herr Hempel and his entourage, and everything that went with it, including the displeasure of Éamon de Valera and the Irish government. In the war now overtaking Europe, Ireland’s neutrality was above all about appearances, both for the ever-watchful, ever-threatening belligerents and the people of Ireland. The Gate wasn’t keeping up appearances by putting on a play about war, let alone a war in which people didn’t behave well. It wasn’t what the German ambassador expected from Ireland, or what Berlin expected either.

  ‘Ah, dear boy, what a surprise! Good to see you again so soon!’

  Inevitably it was Micheál Mac Liammóir Stefan saw walking towards him, smiling more than he usually smiled. It was a smile cold enough to tell him the director’s surprise was feigned. When Mac Liammóir was angry his voice became softer and quieter; his carefully enunciated words became ever more precise; the charm that was his stock-in-trade only increased with the contempt it could, when required, so effortlessly express. Stefan Gillespie did not know Mac Liammóir well, but he had seen that contempt directed at others; he was well aware it was now directed at him.

  ‘So impressed by the first night that you had to come again. First as a guest, now as a secret policeman, a spy? I’m not sure of the word, but given the times that are in it, what more could we ask for? With all the excitement I feel the action has spilled out into the audience, even into the bar at the interval. I dare anyone to say we’re not thoroughly experimental!’

  ‘It’s not my choice to be here, sir.’

  It sounded as feeble to Stefan as he knew it did to the director.

  ‘So are you here to shut us up, Inspector, or shut us down?’

  Mac Liammóir’s voice was louder; people were looking, listening. But that shift from private to public anger was a relief. It gave Stefan room to exchange awkwardness and embarrassment for something like irritation.

  ‘As I understand it, shutting up will suffice,’ he said quietly.

  The artificial smile on Micheál Mac Liammóir’s lips didn’t relax but there was, for a moment, a glint in his eye, and Stefan knew that if he hadn’t started to gather an audience, he might just have laughed.

  ‘They were right to send you, Stefan. You play your role well. The reluctant secret policeman. Tragical-comical verging on tragical-farcical, but I’m afraid the comic performance of the evening has to go to dear Herr Hempel. None of that means I’m not pissed off in the extreme, but not so pissed off I want to see the Gate closed down. Of course, I will have to make some show of it. The play’s the thing. I’m sure you won’t mind.’

  Stefan didn’t know
what the last words meant, but Mac Liammóir’s anger had subsided. It had been easier than he had expected. He had forgotten that a few harsh words from the Gate’s director were the least of his problems. But as the interval bell sounded and Mac Liammóir turned away with a shrug of acceptance, his next words brought reality home.

  ‘Kate darling, you didn’t say your feller was so wild about the play!’

  He didn’t know how long she had been there, but there was no smile on her face, feigned or otherwise. By now everyone at the Gate must know he was there to supervise the demise of Roly Poly. No one else would give the wry absolution of Mac Liammóir’s near laugh, including Kate.

  ‘Why you?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask Superintendent Gregory.’

  ‘Do you think it’s funny, Stefan?’

  They looked at each other for a long moment. The bar was empty now, except for the barman, watching them as he slowly collected glasses.

  ‘I’ve got friends here now. And I hoped I’d keep this job.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to take it out on you, Kate.’

  ‘You think the conversations won’t stop every time I walk in . . .’

  He looked past her. The auditorium doors were closing.

  ‘I have to go back in . . .’

  ‘What happened to telling Gregory to stick his job?’

  ‘It’s not that easy . . .’

  ‘You’ll probably need a few more drinks first. I don’t know why you keep telling me you don’t fit in as an informer. You seem to fit perfectly!’

  The play concluded with thunderous and sustained applause. The news that this was the last time the curtain would fall on Roly Poly, after only four performances, had spread. Detective Inspector Gillespie stood and applauded with everyone else. The applause only died down as Micheál Mac Liammóir came on stage, in front of the cast, waiting for silence.

  ‘Tomorrow you will hear that Hilton and I have reluctantly taken off our play for the sake of Ireland’s soul. It seems the character we call Roly Poly is a danger to it, by virtue of her unvirtuous profession. I am not sure which of her sins is most damning, the fact that she is a prostitute or that a prostitute is the play’s only virtuous character. Of course, none of this matters, because the reason the play is coming off has nothing to do with morality, as the presence of a guest from Garda Special Branch testifies.’