Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “What happened to your father’s killers?” Gillespie had been entirely unmoved by my protest.

  “Beats me,” I shrugged, “the bastards were never found.”

  “I thought two of the suspected killers were found in the Charles River? Strangled?”

  “Were they now?” I asked innocently.

  “And a third man was found with his head thrust down a toilet in a Roxbury bar. He had drowned. The police believe that you and your brother were in that same bar on that night, but could find no witnesses to verify that belief.”

  “I thought you said I was in prison?”

  “The parole board had released you on compassionate grounds before the funeral. And your brother was on leave from the Marine Corps.”

  I shrugged and spread my hands as though I knew nothing.

  Gillespie turned a page in his notebook. “Your brother died in Vietnam?”

  “Hue. And no, his death didn’t make me angry at America.”

  Gillespie ignored the irrelevance. “So how did you earn a living after your father’s death?”

  “I took over his businesses.”

  “Including the brothels?”

  “I told you, they pulled those down. No, all I kept was the marina at Weymouth and the Green Harp Bar in Charlestown. I sold everything else.” I had been twenty-one, rich as a dream and cock of the Boston walk, but the money had slipped away like ice on a summer sidewalk. I let cronies use the marina slips for free, I ran a slate for friends in the Green Harp and I flew to Ireland to play the rich Irish-American to the admiring natives. I also made the bookmakers happy. On one day alone I dropped a hundred thousand dollars at Fairyhouse, a fair bit of it on a horse called Sally-So-Fair which started at a hundred to one and finished as dogmeat. I had sworn the horse could not lose, mainly on the grounds that I had spent the previous night with two whores, both called Sally and both fair-haired, but they were each a better goer than the horse.

  I had to sell the marina and a half-share in the bar to pay my debts. I promised my mother I would be good, but the promise was easier to make than the keeping of it. My half-share in the Green Harp made money, but the money trickled away on girls and booze and horses. My mother wanted me to marry some good Catholic virgin, but I had smelt the milk-and-diaper stench of respectability and knew it was not for me. I needed the spice of danger, and Joey Grogan brought it me.

  Joey was a passionate man, drunk with Irish myths and obsessed with liberating his ancestral home. I had first met him when he arrived at the Green Harp Bar to empty the Friends of Free Ireland collecting box that we kept alongside the Parish Fund box and the Multiple Sclerosis box and the Send the Kids to Camp box and the United Way box and any other charity box so long as it was not a Protestant box, but Joey scornfully swept all the other boxes aside and told me that there was only one cause worth supporting, and that was the cause of a united Ireland. I watched, amused, as he broke the other boxes open and poured their miserable harvest of dimes and pennies into his own pile. Later he recruited me to help him assemble an arms shipment for Ulster. The shipment was small stuff, mostly old handguns that we bought on the street corners of Boston, but still good enough, Joey said, to kill Brits. We sent them in a container load of panty-hose bound for Cork.

  “Panty-hose?” Gillespie asked in disbelief.

  Five years later, I said, Joey and I were sending big stuff; Armalites, Ingrams and even a pair of M6o machine-guns that had been liberated from a Massachusetts National Guard Armory, but by then the Middle East had already overtaken America as the source of the Provisional IRA’s weapons. We had become minor league, and Libya was the heavy hitter. “What year was that?” Gillespie asked.

  “It was ’76 when we sent the M6os. As a kind of reminder to the Brits of another ’76.”

  “That was the year your mother died?”

  “God rest her. She had cancer.”

  There was brief silence. A log spat angrily in the fire, arcing a spark that smouldered for a fierce and smoky second on the sacrificial coir rug that protected the library’s parquet floor from just such embers. “Was it the death of your mother,” Gillespie asked mildly, “that gave you the freedom to enter the drug trade?”

  “I was never in the drug trade,” I snapped. The debriefing had turned hostile because I resented this harrowing of my past. It seemed irrelevant to me. I had always been uncomfortable in the confessional because I hated to reflect on my actions. I was impetuous, generous and foolish, but not reflective. The truth was that I had smuggled drugs to make a quick buck, and a big buck, just as I had killed Liam and Gerry to make an even bigger and faster buck, but doing it did not mean I had to dwell on it, and I had small patience for my countrymen’s love of self-analysis and self-absorption. My dad had taught me to live life at full throttle and not to worry about the rear-view mirrors, but these sessions with Gillespie promised to be long, uncomfortable bouts of mirror-gazing and I did not like it.

  Gillespie turned a page in his folder. “In 1977 you were arrested in a boat called the Fighting Irish off the Boca Inlet in Florida, and the boat was carrying half a ton of marijuana. The Coastguard had tracked you from the Turks and Caicos Islands.”

  “I was charged?” I challenged him.

  “Of course not.” Because instead of going for trial I had gone underground, saved by a codfish aristocrat called Simon van Stryker and his Stringless Programme. I had become legitimate.

  Simon van Stryker was a WASP superstar; a man born to inestimable privilege, with immaculate manners and a gentle demeanour which nevertheless suggested that he could be as ruthless as a hungry rattlesnake. He was tall, elegant, beautifully spoken, and had pale green eyes as cold as the water off Nova Scotia. The moment I first saw him I knew his type, just as he knew mine. I was two-toilet Irish and he was the codfish aristocracy. The codfish aristocracy had never liked my kind for we were the incontinent, fecund, ill-spoken Papist immigrants who had fouled up their perfect Protestant America in the nineteenth century, but van Stryker still became my recruiter, my master, my friend. Van Stryker had saved me from God knows how many years in a federal prison in the depths of the Everglades surrounded by alligators, rattlers, coral snakes and Aids-riddled rapists waiting in the showers.

  Instead he had taken me to a house in Georgia, not unlike the house where Gillespie now took my secrets apart. There, surrounded by camellias and azaleas, van Stryker and his team had probed me and analysed me and prepared me.

  “Are you a patriot?” they had wanted to know, but they had hardly needed to ask for I had only to hear ‘America the Beautiful’ for the tears to start. We Shanahans had always been emotional. We were Irish after all, the cry babies of the Western world, and of course I was a patriot because America was my country. My love for it was laid down like the sediments of the seabed, dark and immovable, and however hard the wind blew or high the seas broke, still that ocean floor was as calm and still and unchanging as the farthest cold cinders of the universe. To me patriotism was bred in the bone, a part of the blood, etched till death. Show me Old Glory and I cry, play me ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and I weep.

  So what did I feel about Ireland?

  That was easy. Ireland was forty shades of green and smiling eyes and shamrocks and shillelaghs and the road ever rising to meet you and the St Patrick’s Day parade when all South Boston went gloriously drunk. Ireland was dancing the jig and good talk and warm hearts and fellowship.

  And England? they asked.

  England was where the cold-hearted bores came from; the bank managers and the Republicans, the golfers and the Episcopalians.

  And killing such cold fish was forgivable?

  “I never killed one of the bastards in my life!” I protested.

  But what about the work I did for the Friends of Free Ireland in Boston. Did I not collect money for the cause?

  Sure I did, but so what if the money went to buy guns and bombs? It was for expelling the English from Ireland and hadn’t the Engl
ish been slaughtering the Irish for centuries?

  Had I ever seen a child eviscerated by a bomb? Simon van Stryker asked me.

  I had shrugged the question away, but Simon van Stryker had photographs of the child. She had been three years old, waiting with her mother at a bus stop in Belfast. The mother had died too, her legs torn off by the bomb blast. The bomb had been the work of the IRA. For a new Ireland.

  And here were pictures of a woman tarred and feathered. Her hair had been cut off before the leprechauns jeered at her and smeared her with hot tar and chicken feathers, and all because her husband, who had made three widows and eleven orphans, was in jail for life and she had assuaged her loneliness by sleeping with another man. The woman was nineteen. Her lover had been a Catholic, and him they had beaten into a wheelchair. They were the IRA.

  And here was a man whose kneecaps had been shot away. A boy of sixteen had pulled the trigger and the victim would never walk again. The man was a Catholic and had been accused of giving information to the Ulster Defence Association which was one of the Protestant para-military groups, but in truth the victim had never talked to them. It had all been a mistake and the Provisional IRA had apologised for it. They made a lot of apologies because it helped convince Boston and New York that they were honourable men.

  And here was another man, also a Catholic, whose kneecaps had been shot through. He had owned a hardware store, selling penny nails and epoxy glue, but he had refused to pay the IRA their protection money so one night they had come for him with a loaded gun and taken him into his backyard and shot him through the kneecaps while his wife screamed in the kitchen. Then they shot his dog to stop it barking and threatened to shoot the wife down if she did not stop her noise. They burned his shop down too.

  Look at the photographs, Simon van Stryker had ordered me. Look at them. Look at them. I remember how the paths between the magnolias were drifted with fallen petals, thick as snowdrifts, the petals turning brown and curling at the edges.

  Terrorism, Simon van Stryker told me back inside the Georgia house, is a means, not a cause. You can love the sinner, but you must hate the sin. Terrorism, by its very nature, is random. It must strike the innocent. Terrorism must kill the child if it is to shock the adult. Terrorism must hurt the helpless if it is to gain the world’s attention. Terrorism, he told me again and again, is evil. It did not matter how noble was the cause that the terrorist served, the methods were evil. You could wrap terrorism in a flag of the most delicate green, but that did not make it right.

  “They have no choice!” I tried to argue with him.

  “They chose evil,” he said. A terrorist chooses to use the bullet and the bomb because he knows that if he relinquishes those weapons then he is reduced to the level of ordinary politicians who had to struggle with the mundane problems of education, health, and unemployment. Terrorists, having no answer to those matters, talked in transcendent terms. They claimed their bullets would bring in the millennium and their bombs would make a perfect world. But in the end, van Stryker told me, it was still just terror, and if I wanted one creed to cling to over the years then I should remember that no matter how good the cause, it was wrong if it used terror as a means of achievement.

  “What years?” I had asked.

  “The years,” he said, “that you would otherwise have spent in prison for running drugs. I saved you from those years, so now you will give them to me. And to America.”

  He explained that the CIA’s Division of Counter-Terrorism used the usual weapons of espionage against the various terrorist and insurgent groups which threatened American interests, but those usual weapons were rarely useful. Terrorists were too cautious to confide their plans to telephones that could be wiretapped, and they were too experienced to share their information with a circle of people who could be suborned into treachery. Terrorist cells were wonderfully designed to resist intelligence operations. It was possible to smash one cell, but to do no damage to any others. Terrorism’s secrets were protected by a wall of rumour and a moat of disinformation. Some terrorists did not even claim responsibility for atrocities they performed, preferring that the West should never learn who had inflicted the hurt.

  “And the West is the target,” van Stryker told me. “We Westerners are the possessors, so we must be attacked and hurt and mauled and bombed and humiliated. But we in the West have one terrorist organisation that is all our own, and which is trusted by the others, and if we can insert one good man into that organisation then it’s possible, just possible, that he can travel far and deep into its darkness and one day, in his own good time, bring back news from that journey.”

  “You mean me.”

  “I mean you.”

  “You want me to betray the Irish?”

  “Which Irish?” He had rounded on me scornfully. “The IRA claims to detest the Free State’s Dublin government as strongly as they hate London. The Irish electorate doesn’t vote for the IRA and most of the Irish people want nothing more than to see the IRA disappear! Besides, my enemy is not just the IRA. My enemies are the friends of the IRA; the Libyans and the Palestinians.”

  “So how do I reach them?”

  “Let the IRA work that out. We’ll merely equip you with the skills that will suggest to them that you might make a perfect courier. IRA activists can’t move in Europe without the police of a dozen nations watching, but the Garda and the British Special Branch won’t take any interest in an American yacht-delivery skipper.”

  We were walking along a damp path between the glistening leaves of the magnolias. “Supposing the IRA don’t do what you think they’ll do?” I asked van Stryker.

  “Then I’ll have wasted your time, and a lot of government money.”

  “And what do I make from it?” I had asked truculently.

  “You’re free, Paul. You’re not in a Florida jail. You’ll be taught a trade, given the capital to start your own business, and a ticket to Ireland.”

  “And when will you be finished with me?”

  “When does a fisherman come home?”

  “When his fish-hold is full.”

  “So bring me back a rich catch in your own good time.”

  We had stopped at the edge of the garden above a deep valley where a freight train wound its way northward. “Why me?” I asked him.

  Van Stryker had laughed. “Because you’re a scoundrel, Paul, a bad lot, a rogue, a rascal. I can hire any number of MBAs, straight-arrows, Rhodes scholars every one, but how often do I find a scoundrel who runs guns to Ireland and who murdered his father’s killers? No, don’t deny it.” Van Stryker had offered me a quirky, almost affectionate smile. “When you sup with the devil, Paul, it is prudent to use a very long spoon and you’re my spoon.”

  “And suppose I never come back?”

  Van Stryker shrugged. “I didn’t say there was no risk. Maybe you’ll leave here and do nothing? Maybe you’ll betray this programme? Maybe, probably perhaps, I’ll never hear from you again. All I can do is offer you a new life and what you make of it is up to you. You aren’t the only one I’m sending into the darkness, and if just one of you comes home it might be worth it.”

  And now I had come home to tell my secrets.

  All but one.

  Gillespie spent the first few days constructing a framework of my years abroad. He wanted names, places, facts, dates. Then, when he had the chronology straight and a rough idea of just what secrets I could tell, he brought in the experts who came to the mansion by helicopter to pick my brains. They were the agency’s specialists on the Middle Eastern terrorist groups.

  Gillespie imported no one to listen to my Irish tales, but instead took me through those years himself. I told him how I had gone to live in Dublin and then, at Brendan Flynn’s request, to Belfast where I had started a yacht-surveying and -delivery service that acted as a marvellous cover for the smuggling of weapons, explosives and gunmen across the Irish Sea. I described how I had planted two bombs in Belfast, not because the IRA had needed
another bomber, but because they wanted to see if I could be trusted.

  “Did anyone die in the explosions?” Carole Adamson asked.

  “No,” I said. “We phoned in warnings.”

  “We?” Gillespie asked.

  “A guy called Seamus Geoghegan led the unit. They brought him in from Derry.”

  “We know of Mr Geoghegan,” Gillespie said. He told me Seamus was now in Boston, fighting off a British attempt to extradite him. Seamus’s defence was that he was a political refugee entitled to the protection of the American Constitution, while the British argued that he was a common murderer; the American Anglophiles claimed he was an illegal immigrant and the Anglophobes said he was a hero. It was a tangle out of which only the lawyers would emerge enriched. Gillespie asked me about Seamus, but I could add nothing to the public record.

  “How did you feel about the two bombings?” Gillespie asked. Outside it was snowing gently, covering the already snow-heaped bushes with a new layer of glittering white.

  “I was doing what van Stryker wanted me to do. I was infiltrating the IRA.” I said it defiantly.

  “But did you enjoy it?” Gillespie probed.

  “I got drunk after it. Both times.”

  “Did you enjoy it?” He insisted on the question.

  “It was exciting,” I allowed. “You take risks when you plant a bomb and you don’t want the excitement to end, so when the job’s done you go to a bar and drink. You boast. You listen to other men boasting.” That was true, but I could just as easily have said that we got drunk because we did not want to think about what we had just done. Because we knew that nothing had been achieved by the bomb and nothing ever would be achieved. The only believers in terrorism were the fanatics who led the movement and their very youngest and most stupid recruits. Everyone else was trapped in their roles. I remembered Seamus Geoghegan shaking like a leaf, not out of fear, but out of a kind of hopelessness. “It’s a terrible thing,” he had told me that day, “but if you and I had been born in Liverpool, Paulie, we’d be fighting for the focking Brits, wouldn’t we?” There was nothing ideological in the fight, nothing constructive, it was just a tribal rite, a scream, a habit, a protest. But it was also exciting, full of comradeship, full of jest and whiskey and daring. The cause gave our violence its licence and it salved our consciences with its specious justifications.