The Second Assassin

by Paul Christopher

  Three minutes later they reached the island and Jane stepped out onto the narrow, vacant dock.

  ‘Last ride at six,’ said the ferryman. ‘No exceptions.’

  ‘I’ll be here.’

  ‘If not, you stay the night,’ the ferryman warned.

  ‘I’ll be here,’ she said again.

  The ferryman nodded and backed the boat away from the dock. Jane watched him go, watched the sun beginning to go down behind the city for a moment, then turned and followed the gravel path up to the main building with its octagonal, fortress-like tower and two massive wings, stretched out at an angle on either side with smaller towers of their own, like curled fists at the end of monstrous, enfolding arms.

  The narrow, barred windows were blank plates of brass reflecting the dying sun. Jane tried to swallow the small terror that always accompanied her here, the suffocating fear that she would enter the building and become lost and never find her way out again. Feeling her heart begin to pound, Jane reached the main entrance and dragged open one of the heavy wooden doors. She stepped into the octagon tower and paused, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom.

  Things had changed little since Charles Dickens visited the asylum during the final stages of its construction almost a hundred years before – dark-stained wainscoting with cold brick and stone above, dim yellow light leaking out from sconces bolted to the walls and booming granite floors that echoed with every step. Hateful then by Dickens’s description and hateful still.

  The core of the tower was taken up by an elegant spiraling staircase that wound upward to serve the multiple floors and open galleries above, while at its base stood a broad, high counter like that of a hotel. There were two people behind the counter. One, a woman, was dressed as a nurse, while the other, a huge man with ham hands and the flattened face of a prizefighter, was wearing an orderly’s white cap and uniform.

  Jane showed her pass to the nurse and she nodded but the orderly’s eyes followed her suspiciously. Or was he leering? Ignoring the look, Jane continued on and turned up the stairs. With each step she climbed the noises from above grew louder; moans and cries and wailing screams that echoed and re-echoed, the gibbering of idiots, the cataclysmic dreams and aspirations of tortured souls. Stepping out onto the third floor she was suddenly among them.

  They were everywhere in the corridors, like traffic on a busy street, moving in all directions. Men and women, all of them gaunt, some in pyjamas or long, old-fashioned nightshirts. Some shuffling in slippers making mad whispers as they moved, others barefoot on the cold stone, hair wild, eyes listless, hands twitching or gesticulating, fingers pointing in accusation or picking at ears and arms and chests. Teeth munching on lips.

  A marching soldier back from a war, chest out, proud of his medals, except there were no medals on his naked sunken chest, only the flapping breasts of an old man. A woman sitting on the floor, filthy with her own evacuations, laughing frightfully at an endlessly funny joke only she could hear. A mad conductor with an invisible baton and an orchestra of the insane.

  None of them with names.

  Once, early on, before she’d gone to California and deserted her sister for all those years, she’d come down the wrong stairs and found herself in the basement of the asylum and seen the most frightful sight of all – thousands upon thousands of dusty boxes, suitcases, carpetbags and valises in piled aisles and rows, a hundred years’ worth, ten thousand patients’ worth, the last evidence of lives lived outside the walls of this place, the last remnant of who each man and woman had been before they’d been consigned to their awful, anonymous exile here. Sometimes she still dreamed of it.

  Jane shook off the thought and moved with the ebb and flow of the lunatic tide, threading her way along the corridor until she came to the large ward of beds where her sister was. She showed her pass to another nurse on duty at the ward desk and like the first nurse she passed Jane through with no more than a nod.

  Here in the dark ward, windows shuttered, there were only the sounds of sleep and dreams, soft muttering and whisperings and small moans. Creaking bedsprings and small coughs, the steady rattle and tick of a ventilating fan. The smell of carbolic soap and urine and the yeasty pall of hard-laundered sheets. Rows of iron beds, the bodies within them already shrouded, like a muttering, whispering waiting room for death.

  Jane found her as she always found her, motionless, on her side, curved like a bent old woman, her lank hair against the striped pillow ticking, her face turned so that only one blind, roving eye was showing, shifting endlessly, moving back and forth and rolling side to side, seeing nothing in all these years, knowing nothing. If the eyes were windows to the soul, then her sister’s spirit had vanished long ago.

  ‘Hello, Annie,’ she said softly and sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘How you doing, sis?’ There was no response. There never was but she sometimes told herself that she knew the sound of her voice, knew she was visiting, knew she hadn’t forgotten her. She reached out and touched the soft skin of her hand, surprised as always at its warmth, its life. She took the hand in her own and held it and talked to her, leaning forward a little so she wouldn’t have to raise her voice.

  She spent an hour with her, telling her about Howard Raines and Cuba and Doris at Pan American and her lost bet with Billy Tinker. Told her about Joseph Shalleck the Mob lawyer, Dan Hennessy’s clear worries about burying the case and about her own sense that this was only the beginning of something much bigger than a small-time shyster’s murder.

  Ominous was the word for it. Ominous as the trembling of leaves before a storm, the flat dead calm of a hurricane’s approach. Ominous as the seemingly steady sweep to war again – that is, if you believed what you read and saw in the pages of Life magazine.

  The time passed and then it was fully dark outside. Jane looked at her watch and saw that it was almost six. The ferryman would be making his last trip soon. Jane squeezed her sister’s hand. ‘Better for you to be here, better you don’t know what’s going on in the world.’ She released her hand and stood, preparing to leave. The wide, polished planks of the old floor creaked beneath her feet. In the gloom someone angrily recited the Twenty-third Psalm like a curse.

  Jane stood and looked down at the blind, lost shell of her sister and shook her head in the gathering night. She shivered and looked up towards the ceiling high above, almost expecting to see the huge black wings of some creature that would give substance to the dark sense of foreboding that had suddenly come upon her, a nightmare of her own, harvested from the dreadful anguish of the sleeping souls around her. ‘Terrible things are coming, Annie,’ she whispered, shivering again. ‘Terrible things.’

  Chapter Seven

  Monday, April 17, 1939

  Dublin, Republic of Ireland

  As arranged over coffee the previous evening, Barry met Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Holland at the Irish Sea Airlines offices on Lower Belgrave Street at nine a.m. the morning after his so-called Fear-of-God meeting at 10 Downing Street. Holland was wearing a light worsted suit and Barry had dressed in his inevitable tweeds. From Belgrave Street the two men took the airport coach out to Croydon in time to catch the flight to Bristol.

  Their aircraft was an elegant, eight-passenger DeHavilland Rapide, a twin-engined biplane, freshly painted in the Aer Lingus green-and-white livery. It was a lovely spring day with clear skies and they took off exactly on time, flying due west towards the sea. The sound of the engines made conversation virtually impossible but Barry was more than content to stare out the window at the unfolding landscape a few thousand feet below.

  It was the policeman’s first flight and he enjoyed it immensely, ignoring the occasional shudder and swoop as well as the moanings of a female passenger in the seat directly behind him. Beside him, Holland slept for the entire hour, waking only as they started to land at Whitechurch Aerodrome, a few miles south of Bristol.

  The aircraft refuelled, Barry and Holland each had a fried-egg sandwich and coffee in the aerodrome cafe and
then the flight resumed. For the first hour of the ongoing journey Barry kept watch at the window as they flew north-west across the Severn, then on above the Welsh hills of Monmouth, Brecknock and Cardigan, leaving the land entirely at Aberystwyth, heading out over Cardigan Bay and finally the Irish Sea.

  The engines droned on monotonously, sending a light, continuous vibration through the aeroplane. The sun glinted brightly on the ruffled sea far below and eventually Barry turned away from the window, put his head back and closed his eyes. When he opened them again it was to discover that the weather had deteriorated to a dullish overcast and they were preparing to land at Dublin’s brand-new Collinstown Airport. As they touched down on the runway Barry glanced at his wristwatch. Not quite one in the afternoon. An arduous, exhausting journey that would have taken at least twenty hours via train and ferry had just been accomplished by air in less than four. Barry commented on it as they climbed down out of the aircraft and walked across the tarmac to the broad curve of the snow-white, multistoried terminal building.

  ‘Yes, wonderful.’ Holland nodded as they went through the swinging doors and into the Arrivals hall. ‘And all things being well we’ll be back in London by midnight.’

  Since they carried no luggage Customs was merely a formality. They showed their passports to a uniformed official and Barry was given a second look when the man saw first his place of birth and then his occupation.

  ‘Come home to join the Garda then?’ asked the official. ‘Or is it to take a job with Special Branch?’

  ‘Neither,’ Barry answered, ignoring the man’s tone. ‘Just over for a pint of Guinness and a stroll across St Stephen’s Green.’

  ‘Mile failte’ – a thousand welcomes – said the official without meaning a word of it, handing Barry back his passport.

  ‘Go raibh mile maith agat’ – And may as much good fortune be yours – Barry answered without hesitation. At first the official looked surprised, then confused. He finally scowled, waving him onward. There were no thousand welcomes for Holland, ill-meant or otherwise.

  Once out of the Customs hall they crossed the echoing concourse and stepped outside onto the pavement. The sky had darkened even more since they had landed, making the white concrete arc of the terminal building even brighter and the grass of the roundabout in front of them a startling green.

  There was a small, blunt-nosed Leyland coach in Aer Lingus colours parked beside the curb as well as half a dozen taxicabs of varying vintages and states of repair. ‘Which shall it be?’ Holland asked. ‘Coach or cab?’

  Barry shrugged. The officer inside the terminal had almost certainly begun to spread the news of their arrival, either by telephone or into the ear of a mate, and the coach driver and cabbies were either IRA themselves or had friends who were. One way or another their presence in Dublin would be common knowledge before the day was done. It was an odd feeling but there was no doubt in Barry’s mind that in most ways this deceptively familiar place was actually enemy territory and potentially dangerous.

  ‘I don’t suppose it really matters,’ Barry said finally.

  ‘I don’t really fancy the coach,’ said Holland, watching as it began to fill up. ‘Let’s splurge and take a cab.’ They went to the end of the queue, waited their turn, then climbed into a fragile-looking Swift at least a decade old with a bit of rag stuffed into the radiator plug and skinny tyres completely barren of tread. The driver was old and fat with thin white hair over a scalp that was frighteningly red. He was reading The Irish Press and puffing on the smoking stub of a wet-ended cigarette.

  ‘Where to?’ he asked, barely shifting to turn in his seat as Barry and Holland climbed into the back.

  ‘Two Foster Place,’ said Holland. ‘You know where it is?’

  ‘’Course,’ said the cabby. ‘Three punt.’

  ‘Two,’ Holland answered.

  ‘Done,’ said the driver. ‘Since you’re not having luggage wit’ ya.’ He flipped the cigarette end out the window, turned the key and pressed the starter. The engine caught and the motor car chattered away from the curb. They made their way around the traffic circle then followed the newly paved access drive to Swords Road, where they turned right and headed south towards Santry and the city beyond.

  The driver plucked another short end of a cigarette from a rusty Players tin on the seat beside him and lit it with a Vesta, blowing clouds of smoke at the windscreen. ‘A fine soft day it is,’ he said, turning his head slightly towards his passengers, smiling around the cigarette fixed to his lower lip.

  ‘It is that,’ Barry answered, accenting the words.

  The driver looked back in his mirror. ‘In from London, are you?’

  ‘We are,’ Barry said.

  ‘But not from there,’ said the driver. ‘Not you, at least.’

  Barry smiled. ‘No, that’s true, that’s true. Born in Cork I was. You’ve got me there,’ he answered, laying the accent on with a trowel, turning the o in Cork into a broad, flat a.

  ‘Ah,’ said the driver. ‘A culchie.’ The word was untranslatable, combining backbiting, gossiping, cheating and conniving with a general sense of uncultured rural stupidity. It was a word that Dubliners had applied to Corkmen for as long as anyone could remember.

  ‘Being culchie is a state of mind,’ Barry answered. ‘I’ve seen it as often on the banks of the Liffey as I have on the banks of the Lee. And at least the Lee has swans, culchie though they may be.’

  ‘Well, that’s true enough.’ The driver grinned. He paused and puffed on his cigarette. ‘On the other hand, I’ve heard that Corkmen have been known to hunt the poor bloody birds down and eat them on occasion. A very culchie thing to do, that.’

  ‘It’s true,’ muttered Holland. ‘Put two Irishmen in a room and you’ll have an argument.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re all mad.’

  ‘Driven to it without a doubt by a thousand years of British oppression and occupation,’ the driver responded pleasantly. ‘We fight among ourselves to keep in training to deal with the likes of you.’

  As they continued on in silence, open land gave way to built-up estates and small factories and by the time they crossed the narrow trench of the Santry River there was little greenery to see at all. They kept on Swords Road through Whitehall and Drumcorda, a brownish haze gathering around them the farther south they drove. By the time they crossed the Royal Canal in sight of the brooding stone pile of Mountjoy Prison, the air was thick with the yeast and sawdust smell of hops and barley spreading up and out in a dense pall from the massive Guinness Brewery at St James Gate, still more than two miles away on the other side of the Liffey.

  ‘My God,’ said Holland, wrinkling his forehead and pushing his spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose. ‘I’d forgotten the stench.’

  ‘If beer could shit, that’s what it would smell like,’ Barry answered.

  ‘Meat and drink to me,’ the cabby said, without being asked for his opinion. ‘Even a beggar won’t starve in Dublin if he has a nose. Food of the gods is Guinness.’

  ‘Sounds like an advert,’ Holland said with a laugh.

  The driver finally found his way down to the broad reach of O’Connell Street and they drove its length, going past the elegant façade of the Gresham Hotel, the black finger of Nelson’s Column, the General Post Office – still bullet pocked from the 1916 Rising – and finally the statue of O’Connell himself, peering balefully at the clattering dark green trolleys crossing the wide bridge over the Liffey that was named for him.

  A No 17 bus turned in front of them with a large Gold Flake tobacco advertisement on its side and out of the corner of his eye Barry caught a glimpse of the huge Players Please illuminated sign attached to the roofline of the Hopkins Store on the corner. On the opposite side of the wide street there was another sign, this one vertical, advertising Craven A. The might of the British Empire had failed to conquer Ireland’s heart and soul but British commerce had certainly conquered her lungs.

  The taxi veered slightly to the
right up Westmorland Street and soon reached College Green, the sooty Georgian expanse of the Bank of Ireland on their right, the walled white confines of Trinity College on their left. They sputtered around the columned arc of the bank, once Ireland’s Parliament and House of Lords, then took the first right turn down a narrow, tree-lined cul-de-sac.

  ‘Foster Place,’ said the driver, pulling to a stop. In front of them at the end of the street was a looming blank wall of cut stone and to their right was a side entrance to the Bank of Ireland. To the left was a short row of tall, mid-Victorian buildings, the last with a strong neoclassical porch supported on cast-iron columns. ‘It’ll be the Royal Bank you’re going to then?’ asked the driver.

  ‘Quite right,’ said Holland. He climbed out of the Swift with Barry close behind and paid the driver. He stood on the curb for a moment, waiting for the cabby to make his turn in the narrow street, but instead the white-haired man simply lit another cigarette end and picked up his newspaper. He glanced up at Holland and Barry. ‘Changed your mind, have you?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ Holland smiled.

  The driver shook his newspaper, folding back a page. ‘Thought I might be of assistance when your business is concluded.’

  ‘Very thoughtful of you,’ Holland answered. ‘We shan’t be long.’ He turned away from the taxi and went up the low steps to the porch of the bank.

  ‘Keeping an eye on us,’ said Barry.

  ‘Of course,’ Holland said. ‘Only to be expected, really.’ He pulled open one of the doors and stood aside to let Barry enter before him.

  The central banking hall was enormous, a beautiful barrel-vaulted-and-coffered ceiling in cream and brown supported by cast-iron Corinthian columns, the roof artfully lit by hidden clerestories that flooded the upper part of the room with light. The floor was marble, a long foyer bound on the left by a waist-high, dark oak counter and on the right by several arched niches set with comfortable-looking leather chairs for waiting patrons. At the far end of the entranceway the counter was fitted with an opening, allowing access to the rows of desks in the main portion of the hall.