Echobeat (18 page)

‘Bill Sullivan?’

‘He’s not friendly,’ she said.

‘Why? What’d he say?’

‘Last time he asked me was I the latest.’

‘The latest what?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘That’s just a bit of banter between us.’

‘You make love to all your agents?’ she asked with an impish grin.

Duggan began to laugh, thinking of Timmy and Gifford and all the other people he came across. ‘You should see them,’ he chortled.

‘I love your laugh,’ she said, serious. ‘We don’t laugh enough.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But we will. When we’ve put all this behind us.’

They got dressed and she watched him pick up the revolver and put the holster over his shoulders. ‘Is that loaded?’ she asked.

‘No point carrying an empty gun,’ he said.

‘You’re going to follow behind me?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s too dangerous. We don’t know who might be with him, watching his back. And if they saw me, they’d know you were a plant.’

‘A plant?’ she repeated, confused by the word.

‘A spy. Working for somebody. Not who Glenn thinks you are.’

She nodded, the possible danger of the situation now beginning to sink in for the first time. ‘A plant,’ she repeated, trying out the word, a new description for herself.

He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Remember,’ he said. ‘You are Gertie Maher, a part-time waitress. You’re not interested in the British or the Germans or what’s going on in the war. You couldn’t care less really. Nothing to do with us, we’re neutral. It’s just a’ – he searched for the right word – ‘an inconvenience.’

She nodded, searching his eyes, very serious now. A wave of tenderness overwhelmed him and he kissed her softly.

‘I’ll be watching from here,’ he inclined his head towards the binoculars on the floor. ‘Afterwards, you come back to the bus stop and get on your bus when it comes. Get off the third time it stops. Not at the third stop, but the third time it actually stops. Walk about fifty yards up the road and then turn around and come back to the stop, like you changed your mind. Wait at the stop again and I’ll pick you up in the car. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said.

‘Don’t agree to go anywhere with him. Under any circumstances. Not even into the Savoy café. Nowhere.’

She nodded.

‘If he asks you make some excuse. Someone’s waiting for you.’ He looked at his watch: ten minutes to go. She put on her overcoat and tied her scarf under her chin. ‘Go down the road and cross at the Pillar,’ he said. ‘And come back the same way. And don’t tell him where you work or live. Except in a general way. If it arises naturally.’

‘Don’t worry.’ She put a finger on his lips. ‘I will be very careful.’

He helped her fold up the rug and she checked that everything was as it should be in Montague’s office. The fire had died down and the room was beginning to cool. He followed her out to her own office and she put away the rug behind her desk and picked up her handbag. ‘Good luck,’ he said at the top of the stairs. She kissed him on the cheek and he watched her go down the stairs and out the street door. She didn’t look back.

Duggan smoked at the top of the stairs, hearing the street door still bang in his mind. He topped the half-finished cigarette onto the floor, rubbed out the burning coal with his shoe, went back into Gerda’s office and took up a position a step back from her window. He scanned the other side of O’Connell Street with the binoculars, moving slowly down the street, pausing at a few people standing in doorways and those at bus queues. The street wasn’t busy but there was a steady stream of couples and singles passing up and down.

He picked up Gerda as she came into view and held the picture steady as she passed through it, watching everyone who came after her, trying to pick out their features. That was impossible, he realised. Everyone was swathed in coats and hats and scarves and the dim streetlight was made more dense by the binoculars’ magnification. He caught up with Gerda again as she reached the Savoy and then the statue of Father Mathew in the centre of the street blocked his view. He cursed and willed her to go further and breathed with relief when she reappeared and stopped at the cinema, her back against the wall. Another woman waited near her and a man was standing at the other end of the building.

Duggan studied him for a moment, a dark hat over a brownish scarf and a black overcoat. He couldn’t make out any of his features
under the shadow of the hat, made impenetrable by the light from the cinema entrance behind him. He scanned back down the street again, pausing at any of the men who were alone and whose posture suggested they were not old. He swung back up the street to the Savoy and his pulse quickened. There was a man talking to Gerda, his back to the street.

He was wearing a tweed cap and a tweed coat down below his knees. Duggan could see hair under his cap but couldn’t tell if it was black or brown. He was taller than Gerda, thin, and stood straight but moved from foot to foot as if he was cold or impatient. Where had he come from? He hadn’t seen him approach.

Duggan watched them for a few moments, catching glimpses of Gerda’s face over Glenn’s shoulder as they shifted their positions. She was listening to whatever he was saying, then said something short, a couple of words. The man put his right hand into his pocket, took something out and gave it to her. At least Duggan assumed he gave it to her. His arms were beginning to ache from trying to hold the binoculars steady and he forced himself to breathe slowly to minimise the movement.

He scanned back down the street, trying to spot anyone who might be watching the meeting. A man in a doorway was facing the other way. There were two men separated by a middle-aged woman with a shopping bag in the middle of a bus queue, all facing up the street towards the oncoming traffic and the cinema. A bus pulled in and Duggan waited impatiently for it to take on the passengers, scanning back to the cinema to make sure Glenn and Gerda were still there.

The bus pulled away at last and there were a few people left at the stop, including one of the young men and the middle-aged woman. Duggan tried to make out his features but could see little other than an impression of his profile underneath a dark cap: he had his hands
in the pockets of a dark overcoat and was rocking back and forth on his heels. A sign of nerves? Or just impatience?

Duggan swung back to the Savoy and Gerda was just walking away. Glenn turned to look after her and then looked up and down the street a couple of times. He’s alone, Duggan thought: he wouldn’t be looking around if he knew he was being backed up. The brim of his cap and the cinema’s lights shadowed his face but Duggan caught a hint of a sharp chin. Glenn walked up the street, hurrying in the opposite direction, and Duggan cursed as he went outside his vision.

He scanned the street again once or twice but nobody caught his interest and he put the binoculars back in their case and put on his overcoat, ready to leave. He waited until he saw Gerda come up the street underneath the window to her bus stop. He locked the door behind him, went down the steps, and then locked the street door behind him. He sauntered down the street, not looking towards Gerda but trying to check out anyone coming towards him. He stopped under the canopy of the Pillar Picture House and looked at a poster of Bing Crosby and Gloria Jean without taking in the details, crossed Henry Street and stopped under the portico of the GPO and lit a cigarette, waiting for her bus to come up the street.

As soon as it passed him, he walked around the corner into Henry Street to where he had parked the Prefect and edged slowly into O’Connell Street. The bus was pulling away from the kerb and he followed it, keeping his distance, as it went up Parnell Square and North Frederick Street. He stopped every time it stopped, watching the traffic in front of him and behind. There were few cars on the streets and some cyclists. None of them seemed to be trying to match the bus’s progress.

The third time it stopped was near Phibsborough. A couple got off, followed by Gerda. They crossed the road behind the bus and came back down the road towards Duggan. He watched them go into
a house almost opposite him and waited until they had opened the door and closed it behind them. There was no sign of anyone taking an interest in the bus, Gerda or himself.

She had walked away from the bus stop, as instructed, turned and was now approaching it again. He waited until she got there, pulled out onto the road and drove up to her. She sat in, let out a deep breath and untied her scarf and shook out her hair.

‘Okay?’ he asked.

‘Whew,’ she nodded. ‘Is it all right?’

‘Nobody followed you.’

She poked him in the side with her finger. ‘See?’ she said. ‘I told you he was harmless. You had me all worried someone would follow me home. Kill me in my bed.’

‘Just being careful.’

‘Are you always so careful?’

‘I don’t want anything to happen to you,’ he said truthfully, but wondering if she’d forgotten that he was working.

‘Then you better get me some food before I starve to death.’ She was in a giddy mood, the release of tension giving way to a mild euphoria.

‘Me too,’ he said. ‘There’s a chipper back down there.’

‘Ugh,’ she laughed.

‘You don’t like fish and chips?’

‘It’s disgusting. But I’ll eat anything now.’

‘He is harmless,’ she said as he did a three-point turn and drove back past the Mater hospital to Dorset Street. ‘I answered all his questions. Did you give the letter to the Germans? I did, to an officer. What did he say? Did he open it? No. Who was he? I don’t know, just one of the Germans. Have you seen him again? No, I only work there some of the time. Will you give them another message?’

‘Ah ha,’ Duggan sighed with satisfaction.

‘Tell him I’d like to meet him?’ she continued her staccato report. ‘I don’t know when I’ll see him again. But tell him when you see him. All right, I said. Then he asked me to send a postcard to a woman in England.’

‘What?’ Duggan glanced at her.

‘He asked me to send a postcard to a woman in England,’ she repeated, opening her handbag. ‘Gave me the postcard and what to write on it.’

Duggan coasted to a stop just before the chipper on Dorset Street and turned off the engine. Gerda handed him a postcard, a black and white photograph of O’Connell Street on one side, the back blank. Then she handed him a folded sheet of paper from a young child’s copybook. It had a name on it, Mrs Agnes Smith, an address in Chelsea, London, and a message written crossways over the red and blue guidelines: ‘Dear Aunt Agnes, I’m having such a nice time here I’m staying another week! Hope all the family are well. Love …’

Duggan read it again. ‘Love, who?’

‘He said to sign it with any name I liked. A woman’s name. My own if I wanted. But any woman’s name.’

‘Why doesn’t he write it himself?’

‘I asked him that. But he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. Said it’d be better if someone else did it. And would I please. Then he said he had to go. And I tried to give him back the card and note and he pleaded with me. So I kept it.’ She paused. ‘You told me not to argue with him.’

Duggan nodded absently, wondering what this meant. It didn’t make any sense at all. Why would Glenn want her to send a postcard for him? With an apparently harmless message? Which was almost certainly a prearranged code for something. But why want a woman to send it? Just so it had a woman’s writing on it?

‘What about the other message? You said he wanted you to give the German airmen another message?’

‘He said he’d ring me in a day or two when it was ready.’

‘When it was ready? Did he say what that meant?’

‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘You told me to be a silly girl and not ask questions. I could’ve asked him a whole lot of things but you told me not to.’

‘You did a great job. Following orders.’

‘Yes, captain, sir,’ she gave him a mock salute. ‘Am I a good soldier?’

‘You’re a real trooper.’ He bent forward to kiss her.

‘Do I get my dinner now?’ she demanded when they broke apart.

Duggan put the postcard and note into his inside pocket and went into the chipper. He stood by the window and lit a cigarette while the deep fat fryer burst into life when the heavy man behind the counter threw a few handfuls of chipped potatoes and two battered fish into it. The shop was steamy with the heat, its window fogged with condensation. He rubbed a clear circle but it fogged over again almost immediately.

An ad on the corner of a folded
Evening Herald
caught his eye with its black silhouette of a bomber. ‘Last week you had a vivid reminder,’ the copy said, ‘so store food now: perhaps you will not get another chance.’ He turned over the paper and scanned the headlines: the Dáil was being summoned back next week to discuss shortages and the government had slashed the petrol ration. A two-gallon coupon was now worth only half a gallon, the story said, effectively putting an end to private motoring. A black box carried a Press Association report quoting Berlin radio saying that a Swedish newspaper reported that Britain would invade Eire in a few weeks.

Dúirt bean liom go ndúirt bean léi
… he thought of the dismissive saying about secondhand gossip, shaking his head involuntarily. So the British were implementing their plan, turning the screw on supplies to bring home to Ireland its refusal to help the Atlantic convoys with port facilities. The first part of the plan that ended with invasion.
But they’d hardly move that quickly. Surely they’d give the shortages more than a few weeks to work before …

‘Vinegar and salt?’ the counter man interrupted his thoughts, pointing to the bottle and large salt shaker as he wrapped the fish and chips in two sheets of old newspaper.

‘Hold on a moment,’ Duggan said and went out to the car to see what Gerda wanted.

‘Only salt,’ she grimaced.

He bought two bottles of red lemonade as well and they ate in the car, wolfing down the food with their fingers.

‘Maybe it’s not too disgusting,’ Gerda conceded, wrapping the newspaper around her remaining chips.

‘Even better after a few pints,’ he said.

‘Or a little spying,’ she giggled.

‘Are you not finishing those chips?’

She unwrapped them again and held them out for him to finish.

‘Do you want me to write the postcard?’ she asked.

‘We need to think about it first.’

‘Or will you get some of your other women to do it?’

‘That’s a possibility too,’ he smiled at her. ‘Maybe I’ll run a competition to see who has the nicest womanly writing.’

She took a small handkerchief from her handbag and tried to wipe her fingers, making little progress. He took her hand and licked her fingers. ‘Now you’re eating my fingers,’ she said. ‘Are you still hungry?’

‘I can’t resist the taste of vinegar and salt.’ He took her other hand and sucked each finger.

‘I’ll keep some salt and vinegar in the office from now on,’ she laughed.

‘Oh, no,’ he rolled up the used newspapers and tossed them onto the floor in the back of the car. ‘Mr Montague’d know there was something fishy going on if his office smelt like a bag of chips.’

She rested her head on his shoulder as he drove towards her digs and parked short of the house, in a dark area. They held each other for a while, contorted in the cramped space.

‘I had an idea,’ she said slowly. ‘How I could get all the information. I could tell him I am German. Then I can—’

‘No, no,’ Duggan recoiled. ‘No.’

‘He would tell me everything he wants to tell the Germans. I could ask all the questions.’

‘No.’ Duggan was still shaking his head. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘But you said he’s all alone.’

‘He seems to be. But he’s got very important information. Stuff that could affect the whole course of the war. Not just the British and the Germans. The Americans too.’

‘
Him
?’ she looked sceptical.

‘Yes. Him. I know it sounds unlikely. But you’ve got to believe me. His information is very important.’

‘To Ireland?’

‘Yes, to Ireland. But to everyone else as well. It’s about getting America into the war. And it could stop that happening if it got into the Germans’ hands.’

She stared at him as if he was indeed mad. ‘This man? Roddy Glenn?’

‘Yes,’ he nodded his head with emphasis, repeating his usual refrain. ‘We don’t know what his game is. Who he’s working for. But he’s playing for really high stakes. That’s if he knows what he’s doing. We don’t even know that, if he really does know what he’s doing.’

He held her startled gaze until she blinked and lowered her head onto his shoulder. ‘So,’ he continued in a calmer voice, ‘we’ve got to take it slowly. Not rush him. Or frighten him off. Until we can find out what he’s up to and who’s behind all this. He can’t have come across this information by himself. Somebody must have given it to him. And he’s not harmless. He can’t be, with that kind of information.’

She thought about that for a while and then raised her head. ‘What will I tell him when he phones? About a meeting?’

‘Tell him you haven’t seen the German officer yet. Until we decide what to do.’

Commandant McClure peered at the front and back of the postcard with a magnifying glass. He shrugged when he was finished and replaced the magnifying glass in the drawer of his desk. ‘Nothing obvious,’ he said. ‘We’ll see if there’s something written on it. Invisible ink.’