The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Certainly before Sunshine soap appeared on the scene.”

  Noreen and the waitress nodded; Maddie was wide-eyed.

  “Having said all that—would you want to eat your enemy without washing him first?”

  Noreen laughed; Maddie smiled but plainly had not understood; Bresnahan rose to leave.

  Said the waitress, “The specials is roast leg of lamb with mint sauce, entrecote of beef grilled to order, and Dover sole.”

  “Where’re you going? Aren’t you going to stay for dinner?”

  “I just want to peek at the harbor. I’ll have the steak, rare. The ‘Intruder’ cut.” It was while passing through the lobby that the VHF radio in her purse beeped, then issued the garbled squawk of an electronically scrambled voice. Of an actual intruder.

  Bresnahan stopped, even though she knew she would not be able to understand what was said. But no more was.

  After unscrambling the transmission, Paul O’Malley heard:

  “Dugald?”

  “Hier.”

  “Ons ’n poging waag.”

  “Alle voorspoed!”

  O’Malley activated the telephone and spoke the number of the translator in Dublin.

  Bernie McKeon in the turret of the lighthouse had heard the brief bark of the scrambled transmission, and he was waiting for more, when he thought he saw a figure moving up the boreen toward the Gottschalk house.

  Ever since the beginning of the storm, his surveillance sector had been thrown into such chaos that he did not know which figure among the dozens to follow. They were rushing this way and that, trying to get themselves and their gear out of the blast. Also, day was giving over to night, and the strange low clouds that had enveloped the turret that morning, seemed to be returning. Wisps kept bolting past the window, obscuring his view for whole seconds at a time.

  The question was, should he switch on the infrared enhancement in the night-seeing binoculars? Or should he assume that the raiders, if they were out there, would possess the capability of knowing they were being observed?

  With the figure now in the yard between the Gottschalks’ buildings, he had no choice, but it took his eyes a few moments to adjust to the pale green and yellow shapes that now appeared, and by then she was at the door of the house. A tall, square, young woman dressed in something like a field uniform.

  As she was knocking, McKeon remembered where he had seen her before: with the man whom Noreen and Maddie had spoken to earlier in the evening; and in the dive boat below the cliffs during the afternoon. There was no mistaking the sculptured shape of the backside that she now turned to him, as she waited for the door to open.

  What about the boat? McKeon swung the glasses but had to wait until another patch of cloud whisked by. There it was, anchored off the cliff but now hobby-horsing on its rode in the stiff storm chop. How had she gotten up here without climbing through the cut near the Ford cottage where both McGarr and he would surely have seen her?

  It was then that another voice came on the VHF. “Chief, Bernie—it’s me,” said Bresnahan. “I’m breaking in because I thought you should know: I just got off the phone with Hughie, who says Clem Ford is or was actually a person named Klimt Dorfmann, son of a Borkum island merchant sailor and a Harwich woman. He was at Magdalene College, Cambridge, with Angus Helmut Rehm, a Scot whose father was a German national, like Ford’s or Dorfmann’s.

  “Rehm, however, was an avowed Nazi sympathizer, and there seemed to be some antipathy between the two. After graduating from Cambridge in 1935, Rehm returned there with three other men and attacked Dorfmann. The court transcript says Dorfmann was a huge man, who put three of them in hospital but ended up there himself. He then returned to Harwich to recuperate.

  “At the trial, however, he refused to identify his attackers, even at the insistence of the magistrate, saying it was dark and he couldn’t remember who they were, and the charges were dropped. Rehm then left the country shortly afterward, never to return according to British records.

  “But—and here is the big one—Rehm was named at Nuremberg as a war criminal, and is still on the active list of the Wiesenthal organization.” That pursued Nazi war criminals, McKeon knew.

  Now the door was open, and Mirna Gottschalk—after saying something into the house, evidently to her son—pulled on an anorak and accompanied the young woman out into the drive. They moved off down the boreen toward the tent that she had put up earlier with the old man and had been one of the few that had survived the onslaught of wind. Another cloud bolted by.

  “Rehm is described by Wiesenthal as five feet nine inches tall with a stocky build, blond hair, and blue eyes.”

  A genetic Nazi, thought McKeon.

  “As a Waffen SS colonel during the war, he was captured by the Russians and interrogated by the NKVD. He was tortured and lost all the fingers on his right hand, before he is said to have killed his captors and escaped.”

  Turnabout being only fair play, butcher to butcher. McKeon kept his eyes on the house.

  “He would now be in his early eighties, so all that might have changed.”

  Not a great deal, thought McKeon, who had watched him erect the tent and pound down the stakes, in spite of the missing fingers.

  “The capper is the fact that Customs and Immigration have no Ernst Schweibert legally in the country. Hughie, through a contact at Trinity, got Schweibert’s home phone number in Switzerland. It seems that the Dr. Ernst Schweibert who participated in the recent Clare Island study disappeared three months ago while on a dig in Umbria. He just never returned to his hotel one night. The Italian police say he was last seen in the company of a much younger woman, but with no corpse and no report of violence, they’re treating it as a missing-person case.”

  Very missing, McKeon concluded—like for eternity.

  “Also, we can find no entry documentation for Brendan or ‘Brando’ O’Malley, who purported to be an Australian national. He’s about thirty-five, close to six feet, powerfully built, shaved head, and had what appeared to Noreen to be hiking or camping gear in a kit. He also had tattoos on both biceps and his neck and a large bruise on his upper chest, as though he’d recently been in a mix-up or an accident.”

  Now at the tent, the younger woman pulled down the zipper and held the flap open. Mirna Gottschalk bent and stepped in. The girl followed her.

  “And finally, there is no known person by the name of Moira O’Malley at the address she gave in Howth, and we don’t have a record of having interviewed any Helenes, which is the name ‘Schweibert’s’ assistant gave Noreen when she spoke to her this afternoon.”

  They then heard an electronic ringing in the background. “Wait, it’s my phone.”

  “Peter,” McKeon interrupted, while keeping his eyes on the tent. “The assistant is the girl from the boat, it’s still below the cliffs here, and Schweibert is Rehm, I’m sure of it. Build, age, the one gloved hand, the works.”

  Now the tent flap opened again. “Worse still, they’re both now with Mirna Gottschalk. She’s got his arm on one side, the girl on the other, like they’re helping him walk, and they’re moving toward the house.”

  “Can you get down there?”

  “Before they get back inside? Not a chance.” It would take McKeon all of twenty-five on-the-trot minutes to even approach the house.

  “I can’t see a thing here,” said McGarr. “The blow has pushed the clouds right down over me.”

  “That was Paul O’Malley,” Bresnahan interrupted. “He says the last transmission was the older male voice telling the younger male to begin the operation. Also, it could be that they know they’re being watched by infrared.”

  Sitting with his back wedged into a crevice of stone that shielded him from most of the wind and rain, McGarr had a decision to make—to rush the house, now that they knew who Rehm and the woman were. Or to wait until they were out in the open again.

  The problem with either scenario was the safety of the Gottschalks, which would damn him either wa
y if they came to harm. But, of course, Rehm wanted something from them, which might buy time. The even greater problem was the probability that their voices were now being monitored. Which could not be helped.

  “Bernie, you stay put and report anything and everything. Ruth—you get Rice and the others to close off the compound. Make sure everybody…extraneous is out of the area.” McGarr pushed himself out from the protective nook into the stiff breeze that was thick with wet, gauzy cloud. “Understood?”

  “Understood,” McKeon and Bresnahan said together.

  CHAPTER 25

  AS HAD ANGUS Rehm. He was clutching the VHF scanner/decoder to his chest like a heart monitor, which Heather had told the Gottschalk woman it was. “My father, please—he’s having problems with his heart. I’m afraid he’ll die if I don’t get him out of that tent.” The wire, however, led to a plug in Rehm’s right ear.

  And what had he understood? That he had underestimated the police. Now there was little time to get what they came for and leave. As the two women helped him through the front door, he punched down the transmitter and said one word in Afrikaans, “Nou!”

  Earlier in the day before the storm had struck, Dugald had climbed down the cliffs about fifty feet, where he could be seen only from the sea. He then traversed the cliff face about a half mile horizontally, until he was even with the Gottschalk house and came upon the rappelling ropes that Heather had strung to facilitate the evacuation from the island. Using those, he had quickly gained the top of the cliff, which coincided, neatly, with the onset of the storm. For the last nearly two hours, he had waited in a shed near the back door of the cottage.

  Now at the door itself, Dugald raised a climbing shoe and dashed its hard-rubber sole into the wrought-iron latch. It broke cleanly, as he knew it would. The thin cubby door sailed off, smacking into a tier of shelving boards and dumping whole rows of potted plants onto the concrete floor with good dramatic effect.

  There was no way anybody in the house could have missed that sound, Dugald thought, as he stepped across the cubby, pivoted, and raised his foot again. Just as in Lesotho in the early 1980s when he was a young recruit with the South African Defense Force and was rousting ANC criminals from the shantytowns around Maseru, he kept the barrel of his Steyr AUG assault rifle pointed at the door, so he could kick it open, fire and fall away. The police might soon arrive; time was critical.

  But all he heard was his father’s voice somewhere deep in the house, saying, “Is that your son? He’s about to meet mine.”

  Moving quickly into the well-appointed kitchen, Dugald squeezed himself between a fridge and a freezer, again pointing the barrel at the only possible place that a threat might appear. And did.

  A tall, dark young man with a square bony frame walked quickly into the kitchen toward the broken frame of the now open door. When he stepped by the fridge, Dugald reached out, grabbed a wrist, and pulled the man down and toward him, while his left knee snapped up into the groin. As the head descended, Dugald popped the neck once with the thick butt of the AUG’s bullpup stock that had been designed just for that purpose. The man dropped limp, out before he even hit the deck. And hard. His forehead bounced on the terrazzo tiles.

  Quickly, professionally, Dugald patted him down. No weapon. Without war to keep people hard and vigilant, they grew soft. The man—Karl Gottschalk, Dugald believed his name was—had to have known they’d be coming, his mother or the police having told him. And yet there he lay, helpless, probably not even having seen who or what hit him. Dugald had half a mind to whack the back of his useless head. But they might need him for the mother.

  Still, Dugald pressed a climbing shoe against the small of the back where the hands could not reach. This time there would be no screwups. Unlike his brother Malcolm, Dugald would not die for his father’s ego or his sister’s vanity.

  Rehm called to him now. “Would yeh bring the boy in now, please, Dugald? There’s little time.”

  Standartenführer Rehm, thought Dugald, giving orders. He’d had enough of that in his life. Snatching up the limp form by the belt and rushing him into the long hall, he skidded the son, like a curling stone, across the slick tiles toward the three people who were still standing just inside the front door. Heather hopped out of the way and the body, tumbling and turning, slammed into the door.

  The mother dropped to her knees and raised the bloodied face. Like a peach, the skin of the forehead had popped, and blood was tracking into his eyes and across the pale discs of his sclerae. “My God, you’ve killed him.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ll not ask ye’ again,” said Rehm. “Give us whatever Clem Ford brought ye’. It was not his and never was.”

  “Nor yours either, as I understand it.” She rose from the floor and began moving down the hall, as though she would walk away.

  Heather stepped in front of her. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To get a plaster for my son’s forehead. To stop the bleeding.”

  “Better bring the box, he might soon be bleeding elsewhere.” There was color in Heather’s cheeks, her eyes were bright; she was enjoying herself, Dugald could tell.

  “Please get out of my way.”

  “So,” said Rehm, “Clem did bring it here?”

  “Fuck!” Dugald roared. “We’re getting fucking nowhere! We’re wasting fucking time!” His hand shot out, grabbed the woman by the face, and pulled her toward him. “Is it under the fucking hearth?” he bawled into her face.

  Mirna could not speak; she was frozen with fear. Enormously strong, his fingers felt like steel springs pressing into her flesh, bruising her bones. In a wild arc, her eyes took in the shaved head, the rings in the ear, the look in his eyes that proclaimed to Mirna louder than he could shout that he had killed and would willingly again. “Yes,” she managed.

  Releasing her, Dugald turned to Heather. “Get it.”

  “What? You bastard, you get it your—”

  The backhand slap, sweeping up from Dugald’s belt, snapped his sister’s head back and sent her on a stagger into the sitting room. “And bring it all here.”

  Rehm moved forward to help, but Dugald shoved him back against the door. “I hear a peep out of ye’, ye’ won’t have the chance to savor yehr muckle sweet revenge,” Dugald taunted in a broad Scots burr. “Malcolm would want ye’ at least to glam the geld.”

  Dugald’s hatred of him and the sister, who had kissed the old man’s arse from the time she could talk, was not recent. While he was alive Malcolm, who had been loved by all, had acted as mediator among them, but now that he was gone…“Give it here”—Dugald swung the barrel of the AUG at Heather, as she rose from a choke of ash dust with the metal box. He’d pop her without thinking twice.

  And he could tell she wanted to say something, to assert her new primacy with their father, who shook his head. Warning her against any such foolishness, warning her against her own brother, his son. The middle child, Dugald had really never felt a part of them, and he knew what they thought—it should have been him and not Malcolm.

  So be it. Snatching the metal box out of her hands, he stepped to the table in the hall and dumped the contents under a light. They had created the division, they had wanted it. How much could there be to share?

  He scanned the page with the two names and addresses and also his father’s name at the bottom of the page, all written like the correspondence they had found in the cottage. He then surveyed the map with “Cave” marked plainly on it at what appeared to be a three-hundred-foot level.

  Clipped to the map were some Polaroid snapshots showing what looked like ammunition cases brimming with jewelry and gemstones, and not one or two but at least six that Dugald could count. “Come here,” Dugald said to the woman.

  She took a timid step forward, turning her head back to her son on the floor who was beginning to come to.

  “What’s this?”

  “Clem’s map of the cave.”

  “Where is it?”
r />   “On the Great Cliff of Croaghmore. It can’t be seen, you have to climb there.”

  “How big is it?”

  “Big. Several large galleries and maybe a chimney.”

  “You mean, there might be a second entrance?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. My light wasn’t strong enough.”

  “And these? Is this what’s in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you take these pictures?”

  Mirna nodded.

  “When?”

  “Two nights ago.”

  “Why?”

  “To show to my son.”

  Rehm now dared to approach Dugald. “Ach—would ye’ look a’ tha’. Diamonds, rubies and gold. Did I na’ tell ye’, son? Was I na’ right? All the kiaugh we’ve gone to has paid off.”

  Dugald ignored him. “What’s this?” He picked up the thick sheaf of yellowing composition paper with the red wax seal that was broken. Opening it up he discovered more of Ford’s eccentric script. It was dated 1947.

  “It’s Clem’s memoir about how he came by all of that.”

  “He came by it? Woman—I personally put it all together with no help from him. He stole it from me in the last days of the war.”

  “That’s in there too.”

  Flicking through the pages, Dugald saw that she was not lying. He handed it to his father, saying, “You should burn that.”

  “What—are ye’ crazy, mahn?” Rehm fanned the pages. “It’s confirmation of all that I ever told ye’ about what happened there in Bergen. It’s his bloody confession.”

  But also the link between you, a war criminal, and my fortune, you old fool. And it cannot continue to exist. Snatching it back, he tossed it to Heather. “Burn it.”

  He could see she wanted to challenge him, to say, Burn it yourself. But she knew what would happen, and they needed him more than he did them. She moved toward the hearth.

  “What’s this name mean?” Dugald pointed to the names Monck & Neary. “I’ll ask you but once.”

  Mirna did not hesitate. She was terrified of the man; she could still feel where his fingers had dug into her face. “They’re solicitors in Dublin, the firm Clem told me I should see.”