Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “This is a focking mess, Paulie.” Seamus made an enormous effort to reach up with his right hand and pull off the black woollen balaclava helmet. It left his black hair rumpled. “Focker got me in the belly.”

  “You were after me.”

  “I thought that focker was you.” He jerked his chin towards the fallen Gillespie. From the outside, in the sudden light and with his back turned and wearing the yellow slicker he had found in my hallway, Gillespie must have looked very much like me. “Who the fock are they?” Seamus asked.

  “The law. They came to question me.” I crouched in front of Seamus and tried to assess his injury. I was no expert, but it looked bad. The bullet, as best I could see, had struck Seamus low on his left hip, then must have ricocheted off the pelvic bone to splinter and mangle his guts. He was bleeding horribly. If I had used Gillespie’s cellular telephone to call an ambulance Seamus might have lived, but he understood why I did no such thing. Those who live by the sword must die by it.

  I crossed to Callaghan, but without turning my back on Seamus. Callaghan lay on his back, his mouth brimming with glistening blood above which his teeth were bared in a feral snarl. “That was a good shot, Seamus.”

  “I was always a good shot. I remember in Strabane once, waiting in a burned-out house, and a Brit soldier almost got me. Surprised me, he did. He came through the back door, see, and I was watching out the front, but I hit him the same way. Fired from the hip.” His speech was slow. Occasionally his breath would catch, interrupted by pain, but he was making sense. “I got away then.”

  “You were only ever caught once,” I said.

  “That was so focking ridiculous,” he said. “It was all a focking accident, Paulie, just bad focking luck. I’d left the flat not five minutes, and this wee girl jumped a red light, so she did, on the corner of Ormeau Avenue. You know, where the television place is? And I hit her smack on, and there was a bloody police Land-Rover right there and the fockers recognised me.” He had been heading south, making for Dublin with a stolen driving licence in his pocket. The Army Council had reckoned he would have been safer in Dublin than in the north, even though he was wanted in both parts of Ireland. “The focking Brits said they were acting on information,” Seamus said bitterly, “but it was all an accident, nothing more. And that’s why she died, eh? Just because the focking Brits lied.”

  “That’s why she died,” I agreed, but I did not want to talk about Roisin’s death. “Who ordered me killed?” I asked instead.

  “Michael Herlihy, of course. He said you’d nicked the money, and you had to be punished.” Seamus drew in a terrible, shuddering breath. “I wouldn’t do it till I got confirmation, but it came, right enough.”

  “From Brendan Flynn?” I guessed sourly.

  “Aye.” Seamus tried to grin, but failed. “I’m sorry it had to be me, Paulie.”

  “You’re not given much of a choice in these things.” I squatted in front of him. “Is it hurting, Seamus?”

  “It’s sort of dull now, Paulie. Not so bad, really.” He sat in silence, his head against the wall. “Focking shame it had to be you. I always liked you.”

  “I liked you, Seamus.” Already we were using the past tense.

  “I remember Brendan Flynn telling me you were a dangerous one, but I reckoned you were all right.”

  “I thought Brendan trusted me?”

  “He wouldn’t trust the Pope, that one.” He sighed. “Why did you steal the money?”

  “I didn’t. I wanted to, but I didn’t.”

  “They say you did, but I suppose they’re nicking it for themselves. Just like they always do.” Blood was puddling under his buttocks. He was weakening so much that he could hardly lift his right hand. “There’s some ciggies in my shirt pocket,” he said. “Would you mind?”

  I held the automatic close to his face as I groped under his sweater. I found the cigarettes and a lighter, put a cigarette between his lips and clicked a flame.

  “You used to smoke, didn’t you?” Seamus asked.

  “I gave it up.”

  “Don’t you miss it, Paulie?”

  “Smoking? Sure I do.” I eased away from him. “The day I get to heaven, Seamus, St Peter’s going to be waiting at the Pearly Gate with a packet of twenty and a book of matches.”

  “You think you’ll get to heaven?” The cigarette twitched in his lips as he spoke.

  “We’ll all meet there, Seamus. You, me, all the boys. No Brits, though. And the hills will be green as emerald and the streams full of salmon and the sun ever shining.”

  “Like Dunnamanagh, eh?” That was a dream that would never come true; the wee house in the fold of the good green hills of County Derry. Seamus blinked rapidly, maybe because the smoke was in his eyes. “There was even a girl in Lifford.”

  “You? A girl?”

  “I always wanted one. I was sweet on her. Her da said I could ask her out, so he did.”

  “But you never did ask her?”

  “Never had time, Paulie. I wasn’t like you. I wasn’t one for the girls.” He seemed to be aware that something had been amiss in his life, but he could never have articulated it, nor known how to correct it, and I wondered what demons, born of a mother’s fears and priestly spite, had chased him through the long dark corridors of his lonely nights. “You remember that fellow we shot in Dunmurry?” he asked.

  “Of course I do.”

  Seamus laughed. “So focking scared. So focking scared. You remember where he hid?”

  “In the roof tank, you told me.”

  “Like a drowning focking rat.” The boy had been accused of rape. He was twenty-one or -two, and there was no evidence that would have stood up in court, but the community had no doubts of his guilt and so the Provos had stepped in. Seamus had been staying with me and had been asked if he wanted to do the honours, and I had driven him up to the housing estate. It was a Sunday evening in November and there had been a hint of snow in the darkness. The boy’s mother knew why we were there and she begged us to go away, but the father growled at her to hold her peace. The other kids were crying. The boy ran up the stairs. “Watch the focking windows,” Seamus told me, then he had followed the boy into the attic. The panicked kid had taken refuge in the header tank where Seamus shot him. Seamus laughed again. “There must have been blood coming out of their focking taps for days!” He was silent for a few seconds. “Head shot, it was.”

  “Do you remember them all?”

  “Every one, Paulie. Like they was on films in my head.” He frowned, I thought with pain, then he chuckled again. “Did I ever tell you about Danny Noonan’s big bomb?”

  “No.”

  “So focking silly.” He was laughing, and I think the laughter was hurting him, but the tale was in his head now and he had to get it out. “It must have been the first or second bomb I ever saw set. In a big focking cardboard box, it was. Danny Noonan built the bomb. He’d just been made the explosives officer in the South Derry brigade and he wanted to make himself known. Wanted everyone in the world to know a new man was on the job like, so he put every scrap of focking explosive he could find into that damned box. I tell you, Paulie, that bomb would have blown the ceiling clean off Africa, it was so big. But Danny wanted it big, see? He wanted something that would make the papers, you know?” He paused to suppress a moan.

  “Take your time,” I said stupidly. Time was the one thing that was fast running out for Seamus.

  “So Danny decides we’ll take out the BBC transmitter. You know the one? That focking great mast outside Derry? Must be a thousand feet tall if it’s an inch! That would make the papers, Danny said, so we all get in the car and off we go, Big John MacAnally was our driver. Daft as a clock, he was, but he could drive right enough. So off we go and we get in the compound easy enough and there are all these engineers just pissing themselves with fright. There’s Danny, Big John and me, all masked up, two of us with guns, and Big John holding the focking bomb in a focking great cardboard box. So Danny tell
s Big John to put the bomb by the mast, right underneath it like, but Big John gets all worried. He asks your top engineer man how long it will take them to repair the damage if he sets the focking bomb off under the mast, and your man says it’ll be all of six months. And Big John says, ‘You mean if the bomb goes off I can’t see Kojak this Saturday night?’, and the fella says, ‘Ye’ll not be seeing Kojak for six months of Saturday nights!’ ” Seamus stopped, and his breath came in horrid rasping gasps for a few seconds. The cigarette fell from his lips, bounced off his thigh, and hissed to extinction in the blood puddling beside him. I thought he was not going to be able to finish the story, but he made a huge effort to take in a breath.

  “So Danny’s going berserk, he is. Put the bomb down, he orders, but Big John won’t. He wants to know where he can put it so he can still see Kojak on Saturday night, so the engineer tells him to knock off the sub-station in the laneway. Danny’s screaming at Big John, but Big John tells Danny to shut the fock up because he wants to watch Kojak. In the end we put the focking bomb by the substation, down on the laneway like the man said, just to cut off the electricity like, and just so Big John could see his Kojak on Saturday night. Christ, but you should have seen that bang! Jasus, but we scared rooks out of the trees three counties away! There was smoke rising to the moon, so there was. We flattened a hundred yards of hedgerow, but it never made the newspapers. And that was Danny Noonan’s big bomb, just to knock out one focking sub-station in a focking hedge.” He tried to laugh, but was in too much pain. “And Big John got to see his Kojak, so he did.”

  “It’s a good tale, Seamus.” That was why he had told it. He came from a race that still told tales and still took pride in the telling.

  “So many good tales, Paulie.” He blinked a few times, then looked beseechingly at me. “I’m cold, Paulie.”

  I wanted to tell him it would not be long now, but I said nothing. Out beyond the barrier beach the waves seethed and growled like the world’s heartbeat.

  “They said they’d give me a medal,” Seamus said after a long silence. “They said there’s a Massachusetts medal of freedom. They said they’ve given it to other IRA men. They said they’d pin it on my chest on the State House steps.”

  “Michael Herlihy told you that?”

  “Aye, but I had to kill you first. He said you’d betrayed the movement and that he’d give me money if I killed you, but I told him I didn’t want any money. Then he said they’d give me the medal like, and all the newspapers would show it. My mam would have been pleased, Paulie, to see me with a medal. She was always nagging at me to do something in life, know what I mean? And she’d have liked a medal. And the Brits would have been pissed off.” He was quiet for a bit. He had gone very pale. His hands scrabbled and I thought for a second he had come to his moment of dying, then I realised he was trying to reach for his cigarettes. He abandoned the effort. “Give me another ciggie, Paulie.”

  I lit one for him, resisting the sudden strong temptation to drag down a lungful of smoke. “There.” I put it between his lips.

  He sucked on the smoke, then nodded at Gillespie’s corpse. “I thought that fellow was you.” The mistake clearly worried Seamus. It was a blot on his record. “It was the yellow coat that fooled me.”

  “How long were you waiting for me?” I asked.

  “Since teatime. Herlihy had Marty Doyle drive me out here.”

  “Where’s Marty now?”

  “Waiting up by the shops.” Seamus grinned weakly. “He’s driving a focking flower van. Can you believe it? It’s like the time we tried to take a focking hearse to put a bomb outside the Guildhall. Full of flowers, it was, and Malachy O’Brien had the focking hay fever. Can you believe it? He was sneezing so much he couldn’t drive! We had to abandon the focking bomb, so we did!” He laughed weakly. “Those were the days, Paulie.”

  “Weren’t they just?”

  Seamus drew deep on the cigarette. “You remember the big flats on Rossville Street. And William Street. I’ll never see them again, will I? And what was that pub on the Lecky Road?” He was asking about landmarks in Derry, a city I did not know. “And then we used to drink in that big bar off the Creggan Road. It was so focking cold in there in winter. That landlord was a mean bugger. Short arms and deep pockets, he had, so one night Big John MacAnally said he’d warm the place up and he lit a fire on the floor with focking newspapers. He was a focking mad bugger. They shot him, so they did.’

  “The Brits shot him?”

  He shook his head. “Our own fellows. Big John was a risk. Mad as a priest without a woman or a whiskey, so he was. Did you ever know Father Brady?”

  “No.”

  “He told me it would be a bad end.” He breathed hard. “Can you not get me a priest now, Paulie?”

  “No, Seamus, I can’t.” Because what had happened this night had to be hidden, buried as Roisin was buried, which meant there could be no priests and no rescue squad and no local police. That was the rule of the secret world and Seamus knew it.

  He nodded acceptance of my refusal. “Whose side are you on, Paulie?”

  “Yours, Seamus.”

  “You’re not a focking Brit, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Roisin always thought you grassed on Wild John Macroon.”

  “I wish I had.” Macroon had been the boy she had slept with before we parted. “But I didn’t. I didn’t need to, he was always going to get himself killed.”

  “That’s true enough.” Seamus pulled on the cigarette. “She was a fearful strong girl, so she was.”

  “I know.”

  “What was that record she was always playing? About Sandy Row and throwing pennies?”

  “Van Morrison,” I said. When I had lived in Belfast it had sometimes seemed that Van Morrison’s album Astral Weeks was the city’s theme music. It was played everywhere, seeping subliminally through the city’s brickwork; sad anthems for wounded tribes.

  “She got mad at me,” Seamus said sadly.

  “Because you wouldn’t go to bed with her?”

  “Aye.” He looked at me with astonishment, amazed that I had known such a thing. “I should have done, shouldn’t I?”

  “Probably.”

  “But it wasn’t her that betrayed me,” he said, “the Brits just said that to get us all worked up.” The British ploy had clearly rankled in him. He went quiet again. A half-inch of ash dropped down his sweater’s front. “So she was shot?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, knowing I could not avoid the subject.

  “In that Arab place?”

  “Yes.”

  Seamus’s pale knowing eyes looked at me. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Me, Seamus?” A thousand acts of contrition had not let me deliver those two words with any conviction. “Me, Seamus?”

  “It was you,” he said, “that shot her.”

  I hesitated, not sure whether I even trusted a man on the lip of eternity, but then I nodded. “Yes. But she didn’t know it was me. I was wearing a head-dress, see, and they just gave me the gun.”

  “And then you shot her?”

  “Once through the head. Quick.” I wondered how Seamus had known, then guessed it was written on my soul for all the damned to read, and I wondered how I could ever have hoped for happiness with Kathleen after what I had done to her sister on that yellow hillside in the Lebanon.

  “You poor focker, Paulie,” Seamus said, then he suddenly tensed and his whole back arched with the onslaught of a terrible pain. “Oh, Jasus,” he wailed.

  “Is it hurting?”

  “Like the fock, it is.” He was crying now. “Oh, Jasus,” he said again, and the second cigarette rolled out of his mouth and I heard him muttering, and at first I thought he was saying a Hail Mary, but before I could decipher the prayer his voice had dribbled away into incoherence. I rescued the fallen cigarette from a fold of his sleeve and stubbed it on the floor. I thought he had died, but suddenly he opened his eyes and spoke with an awful clar
ity. “It’s hard to kill someone you know.”

  “It is, yes.”

  “But you don’t have much choice, do you?”

  “No.” If I had not shot Roisin, then I would have been shot. But did that make it right?

  Seamus had gone quiet. I rocked away from him, but he twitched a hand towards me as though he needed my proximity. “Just tell me it’s going to be all right, Paulie.”

  “It is,” I said.

  “Tell me.” His hand twitched towards me again.

  I held his hand to give him the solace of human touch. He had known so little love, while his talent for rage had been used by lesser men.

  “Tell me,” he demanded again.

  “Ireland will be one,” I told him, “united under God, ruled from Dublin, and there’ll be no division left, and no more tears, and no more dying.”

  “Oh, God, yes,” he breathed, then tried to speak again, and his tongue seemed to rattle in the back of his mouth, but his willpower overcame the spasm of death to let him quote a line of verse.“‘Life springs from death,’ ” he said, but he could go no further, and I waited and waited, and still he said nothing more, and so I edged even closer to him and put my face down by his face and there was no breath in him at all, nothing, and so I touched his eyes shut with my right hand and finished the words for him. “‘And from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations.’ ”

  Seamus Geoghegan, the bright boy of Derry, was dead.

  My house was a disaster. It held the corpses of two CIA men and an IRA gunman, and if the newspapers ever got hold of that poisonous stew then the fuss would never stop. What I needed now was a piece of efficient housekeeping.

  I took Callaghan’s automatic, the money and the passport from the hiding place in the beam, then left through the kitchen door. I climbed into the pick-up. The engine started first time. I rammed it into gear, slewed the steering wheel round, and accelerated up the track. I flicked the headlights on, scaring a rabbit out of my path.

  I turned left on to the main road. I could see the white-painted panel van in the parking lot of the abandoned shopping precinct. The main shop was a seasonal outlet for cheap beach accessories like inflatable dolphins, plastic buckets and parasols. Next door was a shed that used to sell good ice-cream but now advertised frozen yoghurt. I pulled up in front of the yoghurt shop where my pick-up’s headlights illuminated the legend on the van’s body: ‘Shamrock Flower Shoppe. Blooms for all Family Occasions. Weddings our Specialty’; then I killed the lights, left the engine running and ran across to the white van.