‘I’ll take it as a compliment, Frank.’
Ryan grinned. He walked to a shrine where a row of candles burnt. He took one from below the rack and lit it. He bent his head and then peered up at the statue of a young man painted in green and gold. The neck seemed just too long for his body, and there was a blood-red line round it. Triebel was walking quickly back towards them.
‘Do you know this feller at all, Sebastian?’
‘It’s his church, he’s Saint Acisclus.’
‘He’s a new one on me, and what did he do?’
‘He was a martyr, in Cordoba, when Diocletian was trying to wipe out Christianity in the Roman Empire. They cut off his head for his trouble. Naturally it was stuck back on – when he reached his reward in heaven.’
Leaving the dark church Frank Ryan stopped to light a cigarette.
‘At least you get your head put back, that’s the main thing. But times don’t change, do they? There’s always some fucker wanting to cut it off!’
Ryan made a point of walking slowly on the way back. He said nothing to Stefan for some minutes, drawing on one cigarette then another. When he spoke it was in Irish. Triebel, as he slowed at intervals to let them catch up, knew they weren’t speaking English, but he decided to ignore it.
‘I hope you don’t take me for a fool, Stevie.’
‘Why would I do that, Frank?’
‘I can play the fool, and the Irish eejit if required.’
‘Is that what you’re doing?’
‘I know they didn’t pull me out of gaol for love. I haven’t thought much about it. Why should I? It’s my way home. Didn’t you think you could be at home, sitting in that church? Whatever happens, it’s still my way back to Ireland, if I keep my head down. But my old comrade Herr Klein-Melsbach doesn’t leave me the luxury of looking the other way. He hated my guts in the Fifteenth Brigade. He won’t hate me any less now. I can keep my mouth shut about what I think as far as the others go. But he knows who I am.’
‘So what does happen, Frank?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve been fighting the fascists a long time. I’ve sent too many men to die fighting them. A lot of them were English. They wouldn’t have died without Hitler’s guns and bombs. That doesn’t change what England is to Ireland, yet it changes something. I doubt the English ever decided to fight fascism, but now they’re fighting the war I fought here.’
‘I don’t think that’s the line the Abwehr’s looking for.’
‘I can give them as much shite as they want. They think the IRA is important and I’m important to the IRA. Sooner or later they’ll come to the conclusion I’m not what they think, and it’s all bollocks anyway. If I’m just another Irish gobshite spinning a line they might as well let me go home.’
Stefan nodded.
‘You don’t think much of it, as a plan, Stevie!’
‘Well, you’re out of gaol.’
‘I know you’re not here by chance, whatever Leo thinks. You will be reporting back. I am no traitor to Ireland, even if I don’t much like what Dev’s made it. But I had to get out of Burgos. Just tell them that, will you? Tell someone. This isn’t my side.’
They were walking along the track that would bring them to the back gate into the Casa Azul’s garden. It was the end. Stefan knew he would be leaving soon.
‘Have you heard them talk about Richard I and Richard II?’
‘What?’ asked Ryan; the words meant nothing.
‘Any of the Germans? Have you heard those names?’
Frank Ryan shrugged and then spoke briefly in English.
‘You mean, “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”?’
‘You’re Richard II, that’s your code. Richard I is someone else.’
‘So who the fuck is Richard I then?’
‘I don’t know, but your friend Melsbach is collecting him off a boat that docks at Santander today. And when he gets here, that’s when you leave. I don’t know if it helps but you might as well know. You’re waiting for someone. Do you know anything about that?’
‘No, nothing at all. How do you know this?’
‘I speak some German.’
‘I see, so we’re neither of us the eejits they think we are.’
‘They killed a British agent in Lisbon last week. It didn’t make a lot of sense at the time, but if there’s always been more to hide, more to hide than you’ve said. . .’
‘Getting topped wouldn’t be a bad reason for me not to tell you?’
Two hours later Stefan Gillespie stood on the platform at Pendueles station, along the road from the Casa de los Sacerdotes Irlandeses, waiting for the train to Santander. Major Eckhart was with him to confirm his departure personally to Oberst Melsbach, who would now be on his way back from Santander by car. Nothing more had been said that gave any hint what Melsbach was doing; there had been no mention of his being in Santander. On the platform Eckhart talked about the Asturian coast and his breaks at the Blue House. It didn’t sound as if he was as enthusiastic about getting to the real war as he kept saying. When the train came he shook Stefan’s hand as warmly as only a man who is glad to see the back of someone can.
He waited until Stefan was on the train. He returned along the platform to the steps down to the road. He stopped and watched a moment longer.
The train was almost empty. There were three people in the carriage Stefan got into. He walked on and opened the door into the next. He could see the head of only one passenger, at the far end. He pushed down the window of the carriage door on the opposite side to the platform, then he reached out to turn the handle. As the door opened he jumped down. The train was starting to move. He slammed the door and ran across the track. He dived into the bushes in case Eckhart was still watching the platform.
He waited long after the station was empty and silent. There would be no more passengers for some time. The next train to Santander would not be there for three hours; the next one to Llanes and Oviedo would not arrive for two. He stepped out on to the track. The Casa Azul was a five-minute walk; the railway line ran past it, just across the road, looking down on the house and the garden. On either side of the track there was a scrubby growth of trees and low bushes. He could hide easily enough almost directly opposite the gates. He would have a clear view down the embankment, across the road to the house itself. Melsbach had left for Santander two hours before he and Frank Ryan had set off for Mass. Six hours had passed. If he kept to the times Stefan had overheard he would be back in an hour, as it was getting dark.
He scrambled on to the embankment from the track. He was invisible from the road and from the line now. He could see the Casa Azul. He sat on his suitcase and watched. He saw no one outside, though figures passed across the windows. The Citroën in which he had arrived from Burgos was at the front door. At one point Pelka and Triebel came out to pack suitcases and bags into the boot. An hour had gone. Whoever the Abwehr colonel was bringing back from Santander it was someone who mattered. Stefan assumed that something in all that would matter in Ireland too. He wasn’t sure why he was so determined to do the job this way. He had done what the ambassador asked. It mattered, that was all he could tell himself. Frank Ryan mattered too. Ryan was in trouble, perhaps more trouble than he realized. It might help no one in Ireland to know that, yet he still felt someone should.
An hour and a half had passed when Melsbach’s car returned. Stefan saw the lights before he heard the engine. The driver stopped at the gates and blasted the horn. Pelka and Triebel ran from the house. The car swept in. Melsbach got out. With him was a taller man in a trilby and a dark overcoat. Stefan could see no more than that. Konrad Eckhart shook the stranger’s hand and they went inside. He had to get closer. Darkness would make it easier. He watched the lights go on in the house. No blinds were drawn, no shutters closed. He could see a lot of movement. After ten minutes Pelka came out with Melsbach’s driver and more bags were packed into the Citroën. Stefan recalled that they were splitting up; the colo
nel to Salamanca and Abwehr HQ at the Irish College; Major Eckhart to Italy with Richard I and II.
He walked further along the railway embankment, feeling his way in the growing dark. Across the road he saw the track that led to the rear of the Casa Azul and to the back gate they had used going to Mass. He clambered down and crossed the road. He followed the track past farms and houses. As it turned towards the sea there was a path to the left. He was soon at the back wall of the Blue House. When he reached the gate it was unlocked; no one felt vulnerable now, whatever the secret. He stepped inside and slid along the wall behind a woodshed built hard up against it. He was close to the back of the house now. He looked up at the blue paintwork of the big first-floor conservatory. The lights were very bright. He could see Ryan with Eckhart and Melsbach. The tall man was there, his back to the window.
The two Abwehr officer were talking with great animation. Ryan and the other man, Richard II and Richard I, were very still. Melsbach moved forward and slapped Frank Ryan heartily on the back, laughing. Then the colonel walked away; Eckhart followed.
The two men who remained didn’t move at all. It didn’t seem as if they were talking, though they were looking at one another. Frank Ryan walked forward, closer to the window, and spoke. Stefan felt he knew what he was saying as he looked out. Ireland, Waterford; a straight line, north, north-west. The other man turned to the window. He stood next to Frank Ryan, looking the same way, to the sea. Then Stefan knew exactly who he was looking at.
It was a man he would have recognized from photographs in Special Branch but he knew him better than that. He had met him barely six months ago in New York.
It was Seán Russell, the IRA’s exiled Chief of Staff.
Russell had gone to the USA to raise money for the bombing campaign in England and had, disastrously, got mixed up in an attempt on the life of the English king, who was visiting America then. He had been on the run in the States ever since, though no one believed the FBI, let alone the Irish-American police forces of a dozen great cities, were trying very hard to find him. His absence had plunged the IRA at home into infighting and incompetence. Now German Intelligence had brought Seán Russell back to Europe.
Stefan was still gazing up as the back door opened. He ducked behind two rubbish bins. He heard the voices of the lieutenants, Pelka and Triebel.
‘You wouldn’t say they looked pleased to see each other.’
‘Fuck it, as long as the colonel’s pleased, I’m pleased.’
‘He’s never pleased, not for long.’
‘All that matters to me is that in two days we’ll be in Berlin.’
They tipped buckets of rubbish into the bins only feet from Stefan, then went back in.
When Stefan looked up again the light in the conservatory was out. He moved along the wall to the gate. As he stepped through it he heard a car start. The last light in the Casa de los Sacerdotes Irlandeses was switched off. The engine of the second car turned over. He walked out and followed the lane. He would cut back to the railway station later. There was no shortage of darkness to hide in now, till the train to Santander. By that time the Germans would be long gone from Pendueles. Frank Ryan and Seán Russell would be over Spain, heading for Italy. But it was only a stop. Whatever Frank Ryan was hoping for, wherever he really believed he was going, in two days he would be in Berlin.
22
El Río Tormes
Below the city of Salamanca, the Río Tormes spreads itself lazily through a patchwork of mudflats and reed beds that shrink and grow as the river rises and falls with the seasons. At times the dark waters are almost lost from sight when the trees are at their thickest and the reeds at their highest. Where the river bed is widest the vegetation pushes out from the banks on either side and almost meets. It is here the Romans built a bridge across the Tormes to the gates of the city they called Salamantica. The twenty-six arches of the long, low bridge approach the city from the south. Once a cluster of temples rose up ahead, including the shrine of the virgin goddess Diana. Rising up 2,000 years later, dominating everything else, were the Old and the New cathedrals, each dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It was among the reeds below the Roman Bridge that the body of María Fernández Duarte was found. A bullet to her forehead killed her but the shots through each of her eyes ensured that everyone knew why she died.
In one respect, María’s parents were lucky; they had a body to bury. The habit of disappearance was hard to break in Spain and the bodies of those still taken in the early hours of the morning were rarely found. The death squads of Franco’s Falange, led frequently by the Civil Guards who might also pretend to investigate the disappearances later, were still busy, ferreting out people who needed killing for the sake of good order in the New Order. But there was a point to the discovery of María’s body; it was nicely made.
Señor and Señora Duarte lived in a small terraced house hard up against the old city wall, below the cathedrals, directly opposite the Roman bridge. The windows of the house in the Calle de Ribera del Puente gave on to the bridge and the river; coming out of the door they were the first things to be seen. They were the things María had seen every day of her childhood. They would still be the things her parents saw every day, and for the rest of their lives they would also see their daughter’s body in the reeds below the bridge.
When Stefan Gillespie arrived in Santander from Pendueles he stayed the night at a hotel in the station square and travelled on to Madrid the next day to see Leopold Kerney. He saw little of Madrid apart from the Norte station and the big white house in the Calle Zurbano, which was the Irish Legation. But the short drive from the Estación del Norte told its own story. The station had been cleared of debris but the rubble from the years of siege was still piled up round it, and there was barely a pane of glass in its vast cast-iron roof. In the streets beyond there were roofless buildings, collapsed walls, apartments with their fronts blown off. There were bomb craters still to be skirted round; heaps of stone and brick were being cleared by gangs of workers. The fact that the work parties were watched over by armed Civil Guards left little doubt who was doing the clearing. It reminded Stefan of what Otto Melsbach had said about the war in Spain; it had been good practice.
The account Stefan gave Kerney of the journey from Burgos to Pendueles ended with Frank Ryan finally leaving Spain for Italy on a German plane. It did not include the walk along the railway line to the Casa de los Sacerdotes Irlandeses, nor an account of the man he had seen there; he did not mention Richard I. What the ambassador wanted to know was that Ryan had left the country and he had. It was up to others to decide if he needed to know more. The ambassador was satisfied Frank Ryan was safe; he had no interest in speculating about where he might end up. If he had an opinion, he kept it to himself. And after a quiet evening at the Legation, and a dinner with Mr and Mrs Kerney at which they all left the world outside well alone and talked mostly of home, Stefan took the train back to Salamanca.
He had one thing more to do for Frank Ryan, which was to give María Fernández Duarte her Irish passport. He discovered, as soon as he arrived at the Irish College and saw Michael Hagan, that the passport was surplus to requirements. The young Irishman was distressed for himself, and more distressed for Frank Ryan, but he also seemed to accept María’s death with a kind of resignation that was a part of what it was to live in Spain. The murderous brutality that went with the Civil War had achieved a kind of normality, and the fact that it hadn’t stopped surprised no one. For Stefan, though he hardly knew María, it was harder to find anything like resignation to set beside sorrow and anger. He felt a responsibility he knew he didn’t have but could not shake off. Whatever danger he might have faced in Pendueles, there was a sense in which it was still a game, a game they had all played. It was no game for the dead woman. Her death would be no game to Frank Ryan.
However, there was another thing to do, which was the real reason Stefan was in Salamanca now; to face Hagan again with the question of Billy Byrne and Jim Collins. He w
as still unsure how to handle it but he was convinced Hagan knew where Collins was. But it was easier than he had expected; something had changed in the young Irishman. Perhaps what Stefan had said in the college chapel had left its mark; perhaps his role in Frank Ryan’s release had combined with a sense of conscience and obligation to force his Mikey’s hand; or perhaps María Duarte’s death had hit him harder than it seemed. In the end the door was open now. Michael Hagan had spoken to Jim Collins and Collins had agreed to see Stefan.
Stefan Gillespie sat in a café in the square of a small, nondescript town upriver from Salamanca. The bus there had taken an hour, following the river through flat yellow fields and grey olive groves. Alba de Tormes had a particular distinction; Saint Teresa of Avila had died in a convent there. Seeing the statues and pictures in the shops of the town’s Plaza Mayor, Stefan was unaware she was the patron saint of those in need of grace. It may be that Jim Collins wasn’t.
Stefan had been there for almost an hour and was now wondering if Collins would appear after all. But finally a thin, dark man approached him. Stefan had registered the man several times already, as he had registered others, but none showed any sign of being anything but ordinary Spanish men about their business.
‘You’re Mr Gillespie.’
‘You’re Mr Collins.’
‘Mikey said I should come. I didn’t want to. He said it was right.’
Stefan could hear the accent of Wicklow clearly enough in the man’s voice but it was coloured now by the years he had spent speaking Spanish.
Collins sat down. ‘Billy’s dead then?’
‘That’s what we assume. The body hasn’t been found, at least it hadn’t when I left Ireland. No one holds out much hope it will be now.’
There was a faint smile on Collins’s lips.
‘Maybe he was just dragged straight down to hell.’
‘That’s not an uncommon response, I’d have to say,’ replied Stefan.
‘I was never any friend of his, you should know that.’
The City in Darkness Page 25
