Passport to Peril

by Lawrence Block

  A man—the thin-faced man, the mugger from London—rose screaming and ran into the night, his clothes in flames. O’Sullivan fingered the Sten gun’s trigger and sent a stream of bullets climbing the man’s back from his belt to his head. The scream died in a throaty gasp and a thin man sprawled dead on the ground, his clothing still flaming.

  From all corners of the field the shooting went on, a furious barrage of destruction. Farrell’s men were firing back but did not know where to shoot or what to shoot at. One was on his feet, his hands high over his head, shrieking that he surrendered. A Mills bomb arced through the air and landed at his feet. He looked at it, hypnotized, still screaming, then tried to back away. The bomb blew off both his legs.

  “Surrender,” O’Sullivan said scornfully. “They’ll be prisoners of war, will they? The fires of hell they will.”

  There would be no surrenders, no prisoners. Ellen watched, transfixed, as the merciless destruction continued. She saw a heavyset man break into a run, watched as gunmen on all sides picked him up as a target. It was Koenig. Bullets tore at his legs, his body. They ripped into him from all directions, and he seemed to be dancing like a puppet on strings, miraculously staying on his feet.

  “And why are they wasting bullets?” O’Sullivan demanded. “It’s only the gunfire that’s keeping him on his feet. He’s been long dead, he has.” As he spoke the words, Koenig toppled and fell.

  A high-pitched scream. Another figure broke cover and ran toward the road. Again the guns spoke, and as they found their mark Ellen saw that it was a woman. Koenig’s woman.

  “That there should be a woman in such business,” O’Sullivan said. “Who would have thought I’d see the day that I’d be shooting women? Or that I’d see the day that women came into the fields with guns.”

  Gradually the staccato of gunfire died down. Flashlights played carefully over the terrain. Men in long jackets and caps came into view, moving through the battlefield, making certain that none of the spy gang were still alive. Ellen heard soft moaning off to the left and saw a young Irish boy walk over to the source of the moaning. His flashlight revealed a man on his back, blood pouring from a wound in his side, his head cradled in his arms. The boy put his pistol to the back of the wounded man’s head and blew his brains out.

  And Mick O’Sullivan said, “You’ll come out and meet the boys now. And have a look at these ‘professionals,’ such as they were. Eight of us, and did you ask if eight would be enough! Two of us could have done the job and done it right. Professionals!”

  David held her arm. They walked back and forth over the fields, studying the wrecked bodies of the men who had planned to kill them. They found Koenig and his woman and the long thin man, but they did not find Farrell. His body did not turn up.

  “He never escaped,” O’Sullivan insisted. “No man escaped. But one of the bombs could have taken him, and there’d be too little left in one piece to know it was him. There’s none of them escaped, and ye may count on it.”

  Ellen swayed. It was over, they were going to live, they were all right now…

  “Ye’ll meet the boys. Ellen Cameron and David Clare they are, and here are Seamus Finn who slashed their tires, and Fergal O’Hara. And here’s my own son Sean, and a good boy he is. And Jimmy Davis”—he pointed to the boy who had blown out the brains of the wounded man—“and just seventeen he is, and never fired a pistol at a man before tonight, and how well he did I’ll not soon forget.” Jimmy Davis glowed with pride. “And Tom Behan and Sean Cassidy and Peader Killeen. And now we’ll go round to Fergal’s house. You’ll be hungry, not eating the whole day and night, and you look to be needing a touch of poteen. And the boys will have a taste from the jar, I know.”

  There was laughter from the men.

  “We’ll be after having a hooley,” O’Sullivan said. “Fergal’s mother has the food cooking for ye already, and the jars out on the table. It’s a victory celebration, do ye know.”

  She couldn’t help it. She had held it back too long, and now there was no need to fight it any longer, no need at all. Her legs sagged and her shoulders heaved and she collapsed against David, fell into his arms, crying and crying, crying like a baby. It was all over and there was nothing to worry about and she couldn’t stop crying to save her soul.

  The men turned away, embarrassed. And David held her, firmly but gently, held her tight in his arms until the crying stopped.

  Twenty

  Fergal O’Hara and his widowed mother lived in a tiny cottage with a thatched roof upon which an anachronistic television antenna was perched. The main room of the cottage was crowded now with the eight “boys” and Ellen and David. Mrs. O’Hara, a thin little woman with snow-white hair and cool blue eyes, kept bringing food from the kitchen. Lamb chops, sausages, bacon, plates of fried potatoes. They ate ravenously; no food had ever tasted so good.

  And there was plenty of drink. Some of the men uncapped bottles of stout and drank deeply in long swallows. Seamus Finn drained one bottle without taking it from his lips, then set it down empty with one hand and snatched up a full bottle with another. “Sure,” he said, “and I’m going to hell in me Guinness.” And he uncapped the second bottle and poured it down his throat.

  Little Mick O’Sullivan, looking more like a leprechaun than ever, came over to them with a jug of colorless liquid. “Poteen,” he announced. “Made not three miles from this very house, and none the worse for not having the tax paid on it.”

  David took a long drink, coughed, shivered, and passed her the jug. She tried a sip. It was very smooth but extremely strong, and it burned its way down her throat and into her stomach. She shook her head when O’Sullivan offered her another drink.

  “It puts color in your cheeks, lass.”

  “Maybe later.”

  David took another drink, a longer one this time, and returned the jug to O’Sullivan without coughing. The little man beamed appreciatively. “It’s a good lad you are,” he said. “Ye’ll have to teach the lass to drink. Though it can be bad if a woman develops too much of a taste for the jar. She’ll turn her back on your housework and not be paying enough mind to the children.”

  She looked at David. His eyes met hers and she felt herself blushing. There were no more tears now, she thought: Only the elation of having survived and the joy of good fellowship. Warmth permeated the cottage, and only a portion of it emanated from the turf fire on the hearth. The greater part came from the men themselves.

  “Oh, I feel like singing,” she cried.

  O’Sullivan had already told the others that Ellen was a singer. Now one of them came to her, a banjo in hand. She was not very good with the banjo, had only experimented with that instrument from time to time, but she sensed that the professionalism of her performance would not matter. She took the banjo, and they gathered around, jugs of poteen and bottles of stout in hand.

  “What shall I sing?”

  Suggestions came from every quarter, but Fergal O’Hara’s voice overrode the others. “Give us a song for today,” he said. “A song to commemorate the fighting by the caves.”

  “You mean make one up?”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t know if I can…”

  “Then can ye play for me? And do you know the tune to ‘The Men of the West’?”

  She did; it was the same tune that was also used for “Acres of Clams” and “The Eighteenth Day of November” and several other ballads. She plucked tentatively at the banjo, letting her fingers accustom themselves to the unfamiliar tuning, then began to play the chords and, bit by bit, pick out the melody.

  He let her go through two choruses to get used to the banjo. Then, in a sweet tenor voice as clear as a church-bell, he began to sing.

  In the county of old Tipperary

  One night in the fall of the year

  The spawn of the devil came riding

  To gun down a lad and his dear

  But they never took into accounting

  The boys of the West T
ip Brigade

  Who shot them with rifles and pistols

  And blew them to hell with grenades

  “Didn’t use a solitary grenade,” someone said. “Canister bombs and bottles of petrol, but not a grenade did we have.” Someone else told him to hold his hour and have another, and passed him a jar of poteen.

  Oh, they lay in the darkness in waiting

  Outside of the Mitchelstown Cave

  To fight for their master, bold Satan

  And murder our Ellen and Dave

  But Jamie was there with his pistol

  And Fergal, and Mick, and both Seans

  And Seamus and Peader and Tommy

  To shoot ’em all dead before dawn

  “Shoot ’em all dead in ten minutes,” someone said.

  So here’s to the West Tipperary boys

  So valiant and bold and serene

  And here’s to the Irish Republic—

  Now pass me that jar of poteen!

  They applauded wildly and made him sing it four more times, and each time he added another verse. And then they called for some of the other Republican songs—“Take It Down from the Mast” and “The Patriot Game” and “Barry’s Column” and more, and she played them all and they sang them all, and the room rocked with their singing.

  Hardly anyone noticed when the friar came in. There was knocking at the door, and Mrs. O’Hara scurried off to answer it. A robed form passed through from the doorway to the kitchen, and moments later Mrs. O’Hara returned to the room.

  But Fergal said, “Who was it, Mother?”

  “Oh, and only a friar, a poor Dominican, and him so chilled and wet and saying he hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning. I’ve got him in the kitchen with a plate of food before him.”

  “And him wandering the countryside at this hour?”

  “He was lost, he’d lost his way and saw our light on. The poor man, how cold and wet he was.”

  “Then he’ll need more than food in him, Mother. Bring him in and pass him a jar.”

  “And if he doesn’t drink?”

  “And Mother, when did you know a Dominican who didn’t?”

  Mrs. O’Hara returned to the kitchen. She reappeared moments later with the friar at her side. He wore a great brown cloak with a hood covering his head, and he moved into the room smiling shyly, and Ellen glanced at him and looked at the banjo and then looked at him again, and her eyes rolled and she shrieked.

  It was Farrell.

  No one moved. Everyone stared at her, puzzled. She was the only one who recognized him, the only one who had ever seen him. And now, as her cry hung in the air, she watched as he reached into a fold in his cloak and drew out a small black automatic pistol—

  Someone shouldered her aside, pushing through the crowd. David. The gun drew up and pointed at her, and David threw himself on Farrell. The gun went off. A bullet streaked upward and buried itself in the thatched roof. The two men thrashed on the floor, locked in furious combat. The gun discharged a second time, and a bullet flew across the crowded room, and a man cried out in sudden pain.

  She watched, wide-eyed, breathless, her heart pounding furiously. Watched as David wrested the gun free and tossed it aside. Watched as his hands—his gentle hands, but gentle no longer—flailed at the false friar, beating him to the ground.

  Watched as David got up, slowly, blood trickling from his nose, a bruise on one cheek. And watched as Farrell lay motionless upon the cottage floor.

  There was a furious debate over what to do with Farrell. Peader Killeen suggested that they put a pistol bullet in his head and be done with it. Seamus Finn, who had taken one of Farrell’s bullets in his right thigh, argued persuasively for beating his brains out with a pike. Jimmy Davis thought they ought to hang him.

  “He’s more use alive,” David insisted.

  “He’s no use, alive or dead.”

  “Some people will have a lot of questions to ask him,” David explained. “Questions he’ll have to answer. And when they’re done with him, he’ll get what’s coming to him. He killed a woman in Dingle and probably murdered a motorist on the road. And may have killed many more. What happens to murderers in Ireland?”

  “They’re sentenced to life in prison. It used to be the gallows for them, but now it’s only prison.”

  “Then that’s where he’s going.”

  They felt cheated out of the chance for an execution but went along with it. They tied up the unconscious Farrell, lashed his wrists and ankles together, and locked him in a closet. Then they brought out more jars of poteen and more bottles of Guinness and another tray of food, and went on with the party.

  Ellen picked her banjo and everyone sang. Twice more Fergal O’Hara had to go through “The Boys of the West Tip Brigade,” and on the second run-through he added a verse to include the night’s latest development.

  But the worst of the villains deceived us

  And lived to escape from the fray

  And garbed in the robes of a friar

  He came to O’Hara’s that day

  But our own darling Ellen she spied him

  And David he wrestled him clean

  And the government’s going to jail him—

  Now where in the hell’s the poteen?

  Twenty-one

  Farrell cracked wide-open the moment the police began their interrogation. Defeat, his first defeat, had been too much for him. Mentally unstable from the beginning, he was completely unhinged by defeat; he raved like a lunatic. Along with the raving he came out with the facts.

  One fact, at least, fit with what he had originally told Ellen. He had spent several years in Africa, but not as a missionary. He was a free-lance spy and agent provocateur working to undermine various governments in independent Africa. In the course of his espionage he had come up with something big—a master list of all U.S. and British agents and sympathizers in one of the new African republics.

  This information had been recorded upon the scrap of microfilm that he concealed in Ellen’s passport. He planned to offer it for sale in Berlin and would have solicited bids from four governments—those of the United States, Britain; the Soviet Union, and Mainland China. Anyone attempting to overthrow the pro-Western government would have found the list invaluable; anyone wanting to maintain the government would pay well to keep it out of enemy hands.

  A member of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency received the microfilm from an agent of the Irish Government and took it back to Washington. Farrell—his real name, it turned out, was Henri Curtin, and he was a Belgian—was locked in a cell to await a trial that would send him to prison for life. The loose ends were tied up. The innocent victims—Sara Trevelyan, the man who had given Farrell a ride toward Dingle, another man shot by Koenig for an indeterminable reason—went to their separate graves. A garda named Patrick Daly had his motorcycle returned to him in acceptable condition. A man named Denis Mahoney received a C.I.A. check for one hundred pounds as compensation for seven full-grown sheep at seven pounds, ten shillings apiece, plus the balance for inconvenience and indignities suffered in the interest of the United States Government.

  And Ellen Cameron missed the Berlin Folk Music Festival.

  And now they were in Dublin again, where they had met and where the final stages of the interrogation had taken place. They had gone to O’Donohue’s for the singing, but left before closing and found another quieter pub several blocks away. They sat alone in the small snug and sipped pints of stout.

  He said, “Well, they’ll clear up the problem of your passport in a day or two, I suppose. Issue you a new one. It would be nice if they let you keep the other for a souvenir, but I don’t suppose they will.”

  “I guess not.”

  “You’ll be glad to get the new passport, won’t you?”

  “I suppose I will.”

  “And I’m sure you’ll be anxious to get back to New York. You must have had enough of Ireland to last you for the rest of your life.”

  “Why do y
ou say that?”

  “Everything you went through…”

  “How can you say that?” She was actually angry. “I met the nicest people in the world. The most wonderful people on earth. I had a grand trip. Dublin, and then the small towns on the way to Dingle, and Dingle itself. And the men in Tipperary, God, what wonderful men they were! And the singing, and the food and drink, and the warmth of everyone, and the scenery, and the air, so fresh and clean…”

  “Don’t forget the rain.”

  “I didn’t mind the rain. I didn’t melt, did I?”

  “Not noticeably.”

  “And how could you think I could help being utterly in love with this country? Why? Because of a couple of horrible days? Because there are evil men in the world? Because I came a little close to getting killed? It wasn’t Ireland’s fault.”

  “You sound as though you like it here.”

  “I love it here!”

  “And your eyes are funny. You’re not going to cry, are you?”

  “No, I’m not. I am not. Damn you, don’t look at me, I can’t help it, dammit. Oh, David…”

  A little later she said, “I’m going to be forward, I can’t help it. You know what brash things American girls are. And the first night in Dublin the cab driver said that all Americans are a little bit daft, so I’m sure you’ll pardon my brashness—”

  “Sure, and it’s the way of you American colleens.”

  “—because I want to go to Connemara with you.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  She nodded. “If you’ll take me. If I wouldn’t be in the way.”

  “You could never be in the way, Ellen.” He took a deep swallow of the black stout. “Ellen? You must be a little homesick for New York. Anxious to see your friends and your agent and everyone. After all, it’s your home, isn’t it?”

  “My home was a town called Belvedere, New Hampshire. The last time I went back was for my mother’s funeral. I never went back again. I never will.” She hesitated. “New York isn’t home,” she said. She thought of the crowds, the polluted air, the endless rushing around, the slums, the violence, the summer heat, the winter cold. The subways at rush hour, the harsh rudeness of strangers to strangers, the endless sensation of being trapped in a world of steel and glass and cement.