Passport to Peril

by Lawrence Block

“Are you? I know that I am. I find children charmless, but I do enjoy young people. I hope you like the restaurant.”

  She did like the restaurant, a narrow café where a pert and pretty young waitress brought them small filet steaks and chips. And she did enjoy the company of the older woman. Cornwall, that little peninsula at the southwest corner of England, was another of the places she had long wanted to visit. She tried to remember if anyone had ever recorded an album of Cornish songs. She couldn’t think of any, although it was certain that the Cornishmen would have folk music of their own, just as every little pocket of culture throughout the world did. Later, perhaps, she might ask Miss Trevelyan if she knew any of the old songs. A shame she was out of tape, but perhaps she could learn a song or two.

  After lunch they parted company. The retired schoolteacher planned a hike along the beach in search of shells and a taste of salt air. She walked back to the B-and-B with Ellen and got her walking stick from her room. It was a knobby blackthorn stick, and she showed it to Ellen.

  “Quite the thing, isn’t it? Do you think it goes well with the tweed suit? And does it make me look properly Irish?”

  “Oh, very Irish.”

  “I suspect it stamps me as a tourist, actually. In a week I haven’t seen a single Irishman carrying one of these silly things. A great knobby stick, isn’t it? I’m sure they’d never make them at all but to sell them to the English and Americans, and fools we are to buy them. Would you believe I paid four pounds for this one? And it’s only a silly piece of wood.”

  “It’s attractive, though.”

  “Perhaps. I do know it’s a great help in walking. Well, thank you again for lunching with me. I hope we’ll see each other again. You’ll be in Dingle a few days?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll see you at the breakfast table, and perhaps around the town as well.”

  She spent the afternoon wandering around the town but not making as strenuous a project of it as the elderly Cornish lady. She windowshopped at the little stores on Strand Street, wandered through the side streets among the little rows of neat well-scrubbed cottages. She stopped in a Catholic church, covering her head with a handkerchief and walking slowly through the aisles, studying the stained-glass windows and sitting for a moment before the altar. A person could find a special sort of contentment in any house of worship, a nonverbal sense of the presence of some greater force. Sitting there, in a small church in a small town deep in the southwest corner of Ireland, she thought for a moment that she would like to pray, to give thanks for the pure delight of the trip. But she had never found prayer natural, and after a few moments she got to her feet and left.

  In the corridor outside her own room, she saw a round-faced, balding man shepherding a woman and two children into another room, then turning and heading for the staircase. The doctor from Philadelphia, she thought at once, and there was something strikingly familiar about him, though she could not say what it was.

  “Dr. Koenig?”

  He spun around, genuinely startled, when she spoke his name.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just…we haven’t met, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve seen you before.”

  “It is possible,” he said stiffly. His voice had a slight trace of a German accent.

  “Were you in Tralee?”

  “No. No, we came direct from Dublin.”

  “Perhaps I saw you there.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “Although this is a common phenomenon, you know. The recognition of strangers. In my business, I am a psychiatrist, we have observed—”

  “I hope you don’t mean that I’m unbalanced?”

  “Not at all.” She had meant to make light of it, but the psychiatrist seemed to be a totally humorless man. “And it is possible that we have seen each other after all. I am from Philadelphia. Is that by any chance your own hometown?”

  “No, but I have been there. I’m from New York.”

  “And I have often been to New York. Perhaps we have met on the underground. The subway, that is. One sees so many people. It is possible.”

  “Yes, but I just—”

  “You must excuse me,” he said. “My wife has found an errand for me. I hope you enjoy Dingle, Miss Cameron.”

  It never occurred to her to wonder how he had known her name.

  Shortly before dinner, the rains came. It was an on-again, off-again sort of rain, a drizzling mist that let up intermittently, only to resume again before very long. It was, in short, a typically Irish sort of rain, and she knew better than to resent it. The Tralee festival had been mercifully short of rain, with the skies surprisingly clear for long stretches at a time. Now Dingle was due for a downpour, and she could hardly object to it.

  “Horrid weather,” Sara Trevelyan said. They sat together in the parlor downstairs, waiting for the rain to let up so that they could go around the corner for dinner. “It’s a pity, really. If they could only do something about the cursed rain this area would be a veritable paradise. The summers never get too hot and the winters rarely get very cold. But it rains all the time.”

  “Did you get caught in it this afternoon?”

  “I just got back in time.”

  “Did you have much luck finding shells?”

  “I got a bag of them, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you what they are. I’m not one of these passionate shellers who go into spasms over a one-eyed limpet or a double-breasted cowrie, I’m afraid. Never can tell one shell from the next. I just pick the pretty ones and set them out around my house. Very much the amateur, I fear.”

  “You probably have more fun that way.”

  “Perhaps.”

  She went to the door. “It seems to have let up a little,” she said. “Shall we risk it?”

  “I think not, for my part. I catch colds rather easily, and my doctor is convinced that I’ll catch one and die of it if I’m not careful. I offered to bet that he’d die before me, but he pointed out it would be a difficult wager to collect, no matter who won it. An unanswerable argument. You go ahead and have your dinner, Ellen. I’ll lie down for a few minutes.”

  “Shall I bring you back something?”

  “Oh, don’t bother. I’m not that hungry, actually. I’ll go out later.”

  It was still raining after dinner, coming down a bit harder than before. She hurried from the café to the doorway of her rooming house and huddled there, out of the rain, while the town of Dingle prepared for the opening ceremonies of the festival. It was quietly comic, with everyone evidently determined not to let the rain spoil things, and with the rain equally determined to come down as hard and fast as it possibly could.

  A little band, formed of young boys and old men, their overcoats wrapped about them and their cloth caps pulled down over their foreheads, made several spirited passes up and down Strand Street. The band was not musically balanced, running to bugles and tin whistles and drums, but the old men and the youngsters made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in musical ability. They marched to and fro, playing with spirit and coming close to the desired tunes, and then the rain would pour down more furiously than before and would scatter their ranks, with the band’s members scurrying or hobbling, depending upon their age, to take cover in doorways and pubs.

  “And isn’t it a horrid thing, to have rain on a night like this?” a woman demanded. “Eight o’clock it is, and in thirty minutes’ time the Rose herself will sail across the harbor, and we should all of us be there to welcome her. But who’ll be turning out on a night like this? And it’s sad it’ll be for Dingle if there’s a bad showing at the pier.”

  The populace had no intention of making a bad showing. Rain or no rain, Ellen saw, the local people were determined to give the Rose of Tralee a fine and proper welcome. By eight-thirty men and women and children were filtering down to the foot of Strand Street to stand exposed to the elements in the little harbor. In spite of herself she was drawn along in their wake. She bundled up warmly—the
rain was chilling, and there was a strong wind behind it—and followed the crowd. Her feet were cold and wet, and drops of rain lashed at her face and trickled down over her wet skin. It seemed a great deal to endure for the dubious thrill of a fireworks display and a glimpse of the Rose of Tralee. She had seen the girl—a beautiful girl, admittedly; a Belfast colleen whose father had gone north from Kenmare some years before she was born—had seen her crowned in Tralee to the joyous shouts of the assembled multitude. A beautiful girl, to be sure, but surely one glimpse of the Rose of Tralee was enough, wasn’t it?

  She was lovely and fair as the roses of summer

  Yet ’twas not her beauty alone that won me

  Ah now ’twas the truth in her eyes gently dawning

  That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee

  They had played the song incessantly at Tralee, with every band piping it interminably through the streets of the town. And now the Dingle band, tuneless but inspired, was giving the familiar melody yet another run-through. She winced at the missed notes and tortured rhythm.

  To her left, a freckled little girl was talking earnestly with her mother. “Now we’d better be getting home,” the woman said. “The rain coming down so hard, and you just over a cold.”

  “But mother,” the child said, “I want to see the Rose.”

  “It’s only a pretty lady, Bridie.”

  “Oh, no,” the girl insisted. “It’s a rose, a beautiful rose—”

  A buzz went through the crowd. Someone had sighted the royal barge on the horizon. The welcoming committee was in place upon the wooden dock, and the first of the skyrockets was ignited and launched heavenward. It burst in a splash of fiery red, and a great cheer went up from the viewers.

  “It’s bad weather, but we’ll give her a good welcome!”

  “And why not? This is a day the lass will remember all her life, and the town of Dingle, too.”

  “If there’d only be an end to the bloody rain…”

  Another skyrocket was touched off, and again the crowd burst into applause. Now, for the first time, Ellen could see the barge that bore the Rose of Tralee. She wondered how the girl must feel, sailing so slowly across Dingle Bay and into the harbor. The runners-up would be present, too—Miss Boston and Miss New York and Miss Dublin and Miss Liverpool, Irish beauties from throughout the world.

  “Sure, and if it isn’t Ellen Cameron, turned out in the rain to welcome the Rose!”

  She spun at the thick brogue, at the mention of her name. And stood, open-mouthed, to stare into a familiar face.

  It was David Clare.

  Eight

  “It’s you!”

  “I’ll not deny it.”

  “You’re here—”

  “In the flesh.”

  ‘‘I…”

  She stood openmouthed while he shook his head solemnly. “I’ve had unusual welcomes before,” he said, “but this seems sure to be the strangest. It’s me, and I’m here, as you’ve observed. It’s both of us, actually, and we’re both here. Thee and me. We’re both cold and wet, too, as far as that goes. At least I am, and you certainly look cold and wet. And lovely, incidentally. Hello, Ellen.”

  “But…” She caught her breath and swallowed. “What are you doing here?”

  “Getting colder and wetter. By the minute. And waiting to see the Rose of Tralee dazzle us all with her beauty. See that one? A double-barreled skyrocket. I love fireworks, don’t you?”

  “I—”

  “A friend of mine lost the tip of his third finger to a cannon cracker once. We didn’t have a very safe-and-sane Fourth of July that year. But I still love fireworks. I’m incorrigible.” He studied her. “You somehow seem less than delighted to see me.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Oh?”

  “You just startled me,” she said. She managed a smile. It was one thing to keep running across faces that looked familiar. It was another thing entirely to meet someone when you were not expecting to. “You took me by surprise,” she said at length. “I never dreamed you would turn up in Dingle.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “When did you get here?”

  “Less than an hour ago. I got off the bus and found a room—no mean feat, by the way—and decided to find you. And I thought to myself, now where would Ellen Cameron be on a rainy night? Out in the rain, I decided instantly. It seems I was right.”

  “Why did you come to Dingle?”

  “I could say that the thought of the folk festival exerted a powerful magnetism that would not be denied. Or that it occurred to me that a visit to this particular part of the Gaeltacht might be in order before I head for Connemara.” He lowered his eyes. “I could say either of those things, but neither one had much to do with my coming. I decided that I wanted to see you again, Ellen. I don’t know whether I would have climbed the highest mountain or swum the deepest river—I’m not the world’s greatest swimmer, as a matter of fact—but I was at least up to a bumpy bus ride from Dublin to Dingle.” He looked down into her eyes. “You’re cold and wet and more beautiful than ever,” he said. “I’m glad I came, Ellen.”

  His hand found hers. They stood together in the rain, hand in hand, as the Rose of Tralee’s barge drew ever closer to the pier. The fireworks committee gave vent to an absolute orgy of skyrockets, anxious lest the Rose arrive before the last incendiary device had been properly exploded. Members of the crowd commented in delight upon the various rockets, groaning aloud when an occasional one proved to be a dud, shrieking with joy when an especially effective specimen burst into a riot of color overhead.

  “They’ll have to end with the American flag,” David mused. “They always did back home.”

  “Silly. Do you think they make fireworks that explode into an Irish flag?”

  “Probably not a great demand for that sort of thing. Say, look at that one! Sparks just missed the barge. Be a shame if the Rose got her eyebrows singed, wouldn’t it?”

  “You’re a madman.”

  “No doubt of it. See those old fellows over there? They’re jumping up and down every time a good one goes off. I’ll bet they tossed a few real bombs in their youth. Shall we go, or do you really want to see the Rose?”

  “I saw her in Tralee, but I’m not moving. This is too much fun.”

  “Rain and all?”

  “Rain and all.”

  The barge docked, and the Rose accepted a bouquet of flowers—roses, of course—from one of the town dignitaries. Flashbulbs popped, and cheers came up from the crowd in waves. The band blared forth with “The Rose of Tralee.” Ellen felt suddenly giddy, almost as she had felt the night at O’Donoghue’s. But that time she had drunk oceans of stout, and tonight she had had nothing at all to drink. She was drunk on the cold salt air, on the rain, on the joy of the evening, on the presence, unexpected and deliciously welcome, of David.

  The Rose entered one of the waiting cars, and each of the runners-up took a seat in another vehicle. Slowly the procession of cars moved out from the harbor and headed up Strand Street. A wave of people followed in its wake.

  “You’ve seen the Rose,” David said.

  “I know. Wasn’t she pretty?”

  “Lovely. It’s a pity you didn’t have an ancestor from County Kerry. You’d walk away with it.”

  She flushed. “Oh, stop it!”

  “You would. Ellen Cameron, the Rose of Tralee.”

  “Sure, and get off with your blarney!”

  “Ah, and it’s a good Irish tongue they’ve tucked in your pretty head! Did you learn to talk that way on your trip? Come on, let’s find someplace where we can sit down and get out of the rain. There’s a pub just up the street that looks decent.”

  “You’ve been here less than an hour and already you’ve picked out a pub?”

  “We Clares don’t waste time. First things first—that’s what it says on the family crest. But in Latin, needless to say.”

  “Needless to say.”

  They shared a ta
ble in the snug, the little back room of the pub. The barman brought them pints of stout, and they sipped the dark brew slowly and talked without pause. She told him everything about her trip through the Irish countryside. This, she thought, was what she had been missing. All along she had been storing up impressions and reactions and had had no one to share them with. Now she let everything pour out, and he listened to every word, fascinated.

  “It sounds as though you had a grand time, Ellen.”

  “I did. Oh, I did!”

  “And got a lot out of it.”

  “I used up all my tapes and bought more and used them up too. I’m fresh out now. And I’ve learned, oh, I don’t know how many songs. I won’t be able to use all of them, but—”

  “I don’t just mean music. I mean—oh, the perspective a person gets on a trip like yours. The sense of the country. Even a sense of self.”

  She nodded. “Yes. I know what you mean.”

  “That could turn out to be even more valuable than the songs.”

  “I think it will.”

  He took her hand in his, and their eyes met. She held his glance for a moment, then lowered her eyes. She thought of the way she had told herself over and over again that she would never seen him again, that she had been no more to him than a pleasant companion for a few days and evenings in Dublin, a break from a dull September. But now she knew that she had meant more to him than that. He had come all the way from Dublin just to see her. She thought back to that morning, remembering how she had very nearly gone directly to Shannon, bypassing Dingle completely. Her landlady’s words had changed her mind for her, and if she hadn’t listened to the woman, if she hadn’t come to Dingle according to plan, she might never have seen David again.

  She shivered at the thought. What a horrid joke that would have been! She might have spent the rest of her life remembering him, wondering what ever had happened to him, never knowing that he had cared for her as much as she cared for him. The road not taken, she thought.

  “Penny,” he said.

  She looked at him, puzzled.

  “For your thoughts. Or are they worth a great deal more than that? If so, name a price. You certainly seemed lost there for a minute.”