by Declan Burke
‘I’ll try. Oh, and Martin?’
‘What?’
‘One last favour …’
It was after seven by then, the sunrise-pink tendrils creeping in across the eastern end of the lough. I went back inside and upstairs. Emily didn’t appear to have so much as moved while I was gone. I showered and changed and got the kettle on and then checked my email.
Martin had been busy. He’d scanned Gerard Smyth’s testimony and sent it on as an attachment, as I’d asked, but he’d also scanned and attached the atrocity chapter from Rendezvous at Thira.
‘Might be worth cross-referencing,’ was his short note.
He was nothing if not thorough, Martin Banks. There and then I swore I’d never again query his nit-picking on my tax return.
I made a mug of instant coffee and wedged myself into the armchair, clicked on the first document. I’d already skimmed the story on Friday evening and given it a closer read later that night, but if Seanie the Clown’s ringmaster was planning to give me inside dope on Shay Govern and the gold mine, some of it might touch on the part Govern played in the massacre. I wanted to have the facts clear in my head, be able to contradict him if it looked like he was sending me astray.
I flicked down through the first few pages, the David Copperfield stuff and the voyage of the mysterious U-43 to Lough Swilly, Smyth taking a header into the lough, picking up his story near the bottom of the seventh page.
I remember very little of my first days on Delphi, most of which were spent asleep. If I dreamt, I have no memory of the dreams. I have recollections of being woken, and hauled into a sitting position, and when they moved me I thought it was torture and cried out that I knew nothing. My voice was hoarse. My muscles were cramped knots, the joints seized solid. When I felt strong hands on my legs and shoulders, pressing and kneading, and realized they only meant to massage me, I wept.
They fed me like a child, bowl and spoon. Porridge and mutton broth, and a new stranger’s face each time. I grew stronger, or less weak. Eventually I was able to walk about the narrow room, a stable loft swept bare, head down and shoulders hunched so as not to knock my head against the steeply pitched rafters. My bed was a mattress of straw ticks bound under a tarpaulin in the corner, the blankets soft wool. From the high window in the far wall I could see a small rough pasture, and beyond that a track that wound down the slope to the village below, the tiny harbour with its breakwater of massive stones.
They had washed and returned my clothes, the sleeveless shirt and woollen jumper, the oilskin trousers and sou’wester I’d been wearing when I went overboard. There was a comfort in their familiarity, although I was fully aware that a combatant discovered in enemy territory wearing civilian clothing could be shot for a spy. I knew that Ireland, the Free State part of the island, was a neutral country, but at the time, uncertain of the geography, I could not be sure where I had been pulled ashore. Either way, my war was over for the time being. It was my belief that the islanders would send me off to a prison or a POW camp as soon as I was fit to travel, and the prospect was not a terrible one. If I was to be treated half as well in a camp as I had been treated by the islanders, my stay – temporary, I was sure, given how quickly Europe was falling to blitzkrieg – would be endured without too much hardship.
But those were long and lonely hours. I wondered how my disappearance had been reported, if my wife believed me dead. How my children had taken the news. I had only one mission then, to get a message to my wife that I was alive and being treated well, but the islanders did not make it easy for me. They came in rotation, and I wondered if they did so to suit their own needs and work, or to spread the blame thinly should they be punished for taking me in. I spoke very little English, and when they spoke among themselves – they always came in pairs – they spoke in a language I had never heard before. Gaelic, of course. They were helpful but they were cautious. The woman who treated the wound on the back of my skull had kindly eyes but never smiled. The man with the limp who draped my arm across his shoulders and walked me the length of the loft for the first time remained stiff and awkward throughout. The schoolteacher, heavily pregnant, who told me her name and tried to speak a few words of German, had piercing blue eyes devoid of compassion. I gave her my name and tried to explain what had happened, but I had less English than she had German, and the conversation quickly died. The only islander to come more than once, a thickly bearded man who had to duck to get through the door, seemed to be the man they all deferred to, but he stood back against the wall beside the door, observing, and never spoke.
On the fifth day, in the early afternoon, the bearded man returned, bringing with him another man. He was dressed like the islanders, in a heavy woollen pullover and a collarless striped shirt, and his unshaven face was wind-burnt brown, but the flat cap rested on a thatch of coarse blond hair and when he spoke in Gaelic to the bearded man I heard an accent different to the rest.
Then he turned to me. Between us we possessed enough English and German to hold a stiff conversation.
‘Are you well?’ he said.
‘Well enough. Please thank your friend for me.’
‘I will. Who are you and why are you here?’
I gave him my name and explained that I had been washed overboard from a submarine on the night before I had been found by the fishing boat.
‘Where?’ he said.
‘I cannot tell you.’
‘Why was the U-boat in the lough?’
‘I cannot tell you.’
‘What can you tell me?’
‘I am a sailor. I have no important information.’
‘You learned nothing on the journey here?’
‘You understand that I can tell you nothing. Yes?’
He patted my shoulder. ‘I understand that you are a brave man,’ he said. Then he broke away to speak with the bearded man at the back wall, shaking his head while speaking. Their voices were low, the bearded man’s a rumble, but I heard and recognized, as I was no doubt meant to, one phrase the blond man used: agent provocateur.
He strode back down the room, his head angled to one side. ‘These people mean you no harm,’ he said. ‘But they mean no harm to come to them. If you are found to be a spy, it may go badly for them.’
‘I am no spy.’
‘But there was an agent on the U-boat. Yes?’
‘I can tell you nothing.’
‘I think you can tell me something.’
The blond man explained that the islanders’ mayor – the bearded man – was conflicted. That there was division between the locals. Some wanted to sail me across to the mainland, put me ashore and leave me to my own devices, so that I could take my chances with the Irish authorities. I would, he explained, be arrested as an illegal alien and interned indefinitely, or at least until my identify could be confirmed.
There were others among the islanders, however, who had bitter stories of how they and their people had been treated by the English, memories of beatings and burnings and murder and starvation. They wanted to help me, their enemy’s enemy, to escape and return to Germany.
And there were others still who suggested that I should be allowed to stay on the island for as long as I chose. Two others, the blond man said with a wink and a quick smile, and both were young women.
I told him that I would prefer to go home to my wife and children.
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘If you help us, we will help you. But first you must help us.’
What I understood was that the blond man was not an islander, but that he had taken on the appearance of one. His presence on the island and his knowledge of German, as sparse as it was, and his interrogation of me, as gentle as it was, all pointed to the fact that the man was a British agent.
Up to that point I had been treated far better than I’d had any right to expect, and I further expected that my refusal to answer the blond man’s questions meant that it was likely I would be treated more harshly. I was a sailor, not trained to resist inter
rogation, but I was no traitor, and nor would I easily volunteer information that might result in the capture of my comrades.
‘I cannot help you,’ I said.
The blond man nodded, as if he had expected nothing less. ‘Then let me help you,’ he said. ‘A man called Klaus Rheingold was arrested in Derry last night. The city of Derry, yes? When he was arrested he was carrying papers identifying him as Sam Davidson, a citizen of South Africa. Have you heard those names before?’
‘No.’
‘I think you have. When is the U-boat returning?’
‘I do not know.’
‘I think you do. Please consider my questions again.’
He broke away to speak with the bearded man again. When he returned his tone was sympathetic as he explained that I was in a precarious position. No one knew I was on the island. If what I said about being swept overboard was true, then it was likely I had already been posted as missing, presumed lost.
I understood the threat. All I could do was repeat that I was a sailor and that I had no knowledge of any secret mission. I also said that if I had been captured by enemy forces, I was entitled to be treated as a prisoner of war.
The blond man patted me on the shoulder again but this time he took a handful of my pullover. He explained that I had by my own admission sailed into the waters of a neutral country on a covert military mission and had been wearing civilian clothing when captured. Those actions meant that I was not entitled, the blond man said, to be considered a normal prisoner of war.
I pointed to his own clothes, and reminded him that he wore no uniform.
‘No,’ he said, ‘but I am not at war.’
It was a curious remark, given our circumstance, but then the blond man asked about my family, my children. I said yes, I had a boy and a baby girl.
‘Then think of them. Your boy and girl. This war is not being fought between you and I, but against them.’
He told me he would return in two hours. He asked me to search my memory and think very seriously about his questions. If I did not tell him when the U-boat was due to return, I would be taken out and shot.
It was at this point Smyth went wandering a little off topic, talking about how it felt to be threatened with death for not telling what he did not know. It struck him as being in some way an existential dilemma, although whether the notion occurred to him then or when he sat down to write his testimony was hard to say. At the time he was simultaneously ‘terrified and enraged’ as he paced the loft, trying to decide if the blond man was bluffing. Eventually, helpless and hopeless, he crawled on to the mattress.
As the idea of never seeing his children again crept in on him Smyth began to cry, at first quietly, ashamed at his weakness, then convulsing in racking sobs. He imagined himself being dragged out of the loft to his death, hands bound, and rather than blink it away he tried to fix the image, to see it and himself clearly, so that he would remember how a man should behave in his final moments. And it was this hopelessness, the understanding that he was so totally at the mercy of the blond man, that allowed, gradually, for a final hope to emerge. He imagined himself being dragged to the very brink, forced to his knees with a gun to his head, the hammer cocked. It was in these last few seconds, he believed, that his only hope lay – that the blond man would accept that Smyth was telling the truth, or more precisely that he had no truth to tell, no knowledge of Klaus Rheingold or the U-boat’s movements, and spare him.
It was all moot. Hours passed – each minute a new torture – but the blond man did not return.
I got up from the armchair and checked on Emily, who was now drooling on to the pillow, strands of hair stuck to the slime. I got her turned on to her other side and slipped a fresh pillow underneath her head, knowing that as soon as I stepped away from the bed she would turn back on to her favoured side.
I made a fresh coffee and went back to the armchair. As I picked up Smyth’s testimony again I recalled the picture on Kee’s phone, those puffy eyes and the greeny-blue pallor, and it occurred to me how bizarre it was to be reading it now – that the first time I’d read Smyth’s account, flicking through the pages for the juicy details, Gerard Smyth had been alive. Now that he was dead, and very probably because he had written down those words, I felt as if I should be ignoring his stiff phrasing and awkward syntax and focusing only on his story, the importance of what he had to say. But I was just too exhausted right then, too stressed about needing to watch over Emily and feeling guilty at putting her in the firing line, to be capable of the finer emotions. Instead it all felt pathetic and pointless.
I would be taken out and shot …
But he wasn’t. Gerard Smyth hadn’t died on Delphi Island in 1940, executed in the mistaken belief that he possessed a truth worth knowing. He’d gone on to live to a grand old age and drown in a Dublin canal. His words hadn’t mattered a damn to a single soul while he was alive. Now that he was dead, they were the only thing about him worth knowing. And while I hated the idea of owing him anything, he had quite literally put his story into my hands, and at my request. The very least I could do was read it in the spirit it was written.
The first I knew of German commandoes on the island was when one of them kicked in the door of the stable loft and pointed a sub-machine gun at my head. The man was masked, wearing a hood that hid all but his eyes, and for a split second all I saw was the gun barrel. In that moment I believed I was to be shot by the islanders as a brutal but simple solution to the problem of what to do with me.
Then I heard ‘Raus!’ and ‘Schnell!’, a muffled bawling from behind the mask. My next thought was that the man was a raider in a rescue party, dispatched from the submarine to take me off the island. Then I wondered why he didn’t recognize me.
And then I realized why my first instinct was that I was to be shot by the locals. The sub-machine gun was a Schmeisser, but he was dressed like a local. The black mask and the gun aside, he looked like a fisherman. One thing was certain: this man had not come from the U-43.
Still lying on the mattress, my hands above my head, I gave him my name and rank. The man seemed to stiffen, then beckoned me to my feet, extending a hand to help; but as I was getting up, he stepped in, reversed the Schmeisser and smashed the butt into the side of my head. I collapsed to the floor, then felt myself being dragged up again, shoved towards the door and down the wooden steps. The blow had left me dizzy and reeling, my left eye swelling closed. The man kicked and pushed me down through the rough pasture and into the village, then along a dark alleyway until we emerged into a small square fronting the harbour. A kind of bowl, or amphitheatre, dominated by a massive slab of outcropped rock, at the foot of which was tucked a tiny whitewashed church. I had the bizarre sense of intruding upon a pilgrimage, given the number of people who had gathered in silence near the foot of the steps that led up to the church, but the man in the mask was not one for piety. He marched me straight across the square and past the people to the bottom of the steps, then struck me again with the butt of his gun, this time between the shoulder blades. I went down hard.
I lay there twisted and winded and watched as the masked man went up the steps and touched another man on the shoulder. The second man, also masked, was dressed like the first apart from the knee-length black boots into which he had tucked his woollen pants. Behind them, huddled in the doorway of the church, was a group of six distraught children who were faced by two men with Schmeissers, the barrels pointed at the ground. The whitewashed church seemed to glow in the moonlight, although the square itself was shrouded in gloom. It was only then, as I glanced around, that I realized the crowd assembled in the square were all adults – the parents or older relatives, I presumed, of the children. A pitiful gathering, some supporting one another with arms around shoulders, others staring defiantly, eyes bright and jaws hard. A mother called out in a broken voice to a weeping girl who could not have been more than four years old, and was immediately shushed, although there was little comfort offered in the shushin
g. Beyond them, at the head of the alleyways that fed into the square, with another holding a position at the head of the pier, were more men, all armed with sub-machine guns. All were masked, and none wore any uniform nor any identifying marks I could see.
Now the second man, the one wearing the black boots, came down the steps. He stood over me and held out a hand. I grasped it and was pulled to my feet.
He gave his name as Richter but otherwise offered no rank or any other detail. As a Dane I often had trouble in differentiating between regional dialects but he sounded thickly Berliner. He was tall, an inch or two more than six feet. The eyes, which were all I could see of his face, were wide-set and seemed dark blue in the strange light.
I gave my name and rank again. ‘A sailor?’ he said, and I quickly explained how I came to be on the island. Richter nodded and without any discernible change of expression in his eyes told me that it all sounded like a deserter’s excuse.
I asked if it was likely, if I was a deserter, that I would still be wearing the clothes I wore while on duty. He considered that, then said, ‘Perhaps not.’ Then he asked if I knew when the U-43 would return. I told him that lower ranks weren’t given that kind of information. He asked then what I knew about the movements of Klaus Rheingold.
I told him that I had been interrogated by a blond man I believed to be an Englishman and a British agent, who had told me of Rheingold’s arrest in the city of Derry the night before.
‘Morrigan?’ Richter said.
The name meant nothing to me.
‘And this blond man – is he in the square now?’
I looked again at the group of adults. ‘No,’ I said.
‘But he was here today?’
‘This afternoon, yes.’
‘Gut.’ Richter ordered me to stay close, to stand by to identify the Englishman when he was discovered. He had no weapon to spare with which to arm me, even if his orders allowed for it, but I would be evacuated when they left and my account of how I had come to be on Delphi would be investigated by the appropriate authorities.
