Irregulars (18 page)

‘Of course,’ he says, taking the proffered pen and jotting his name and address on to a page of hotel stationery.

‘Grand so, Mr O’Keefe.’

O’Keefe leaves the lobby smiling.

On the footpath outside the hotel, Just Albert lights one of his cigars. The Indian summer’s warmth is fleeing the concrete at their feet, chill descending from above.

Just Albert says, ‘You think now’s a good time for mottin’, Mr O’Keefe?’

O’Keefe frowns. ‘What are you blathering about, Albert?’

‘Your one. The foxy-haired girleen at the desk. I’ve eyes, Mr O’Keefe, and you’ve a job to do. You worry about the bints when the job’s done.’

Rage ignites in O’Keefe, like a smashed paraffin lamp on bedding hay, scorching the small joy he’d felt on meeting the woman. He takes a step towards Albert. ‘You mind what you say to me, Albert, I’m telling you.’

‘Or what?’ Just Albert gives him the same dismissive smile he gives to all men.

‘Or … Fuck it, Albert. You’d try the patience of a saint.’ O’Keefe turns away, exhaustion claiming his anger, an oily slick of despondency settling over him.

Albert appears to sense this and shuts down his smirk. ‘Nicholas is only a boy, Mr O’Keefe. We need find him before he comes to harm.’

‘I know that, Albert, and I’m trying to help you and Mrs Dolan find Nicky. I
want
to find him, by God I do. But you have to let me do it the way I know how.’

Just Albert’s face darkens. ‘Them cunts inside know something.’

‘They might, but we’ll never hear it now after you going for your man in there.’

‘He shouldn’t have run his mouth about Mrs Dolan.’

O’Keefe sighs. It was like talking to a child, sometimes, explaining things to Just Albert.

‘I know he shouldn’t have, Albert. But he was sending up a balloon … a test. Like was done in the war. He was trying to see how far he could push us. Probably because he was bored, fecked off with listening to rubbish all day. Who knows? And didn’t you give him the response he wanted? Brightened up his bleedin’ day and got us nothing. Look … sometimes, when you’re working a case, interviewing a fella, you have to eat things you normally wouldn’t. It’s the way the world works, Albert.’

Just Albert ponders this for a moment. ‘Not my world.’

‘We’re not
in
your world at the moment. Neither is Nicholas, and we’re not going to find him if we don’t ask the right questions in the right way. That girl in there might be a grand help to us if one of the other staff at the hotel has seen Nicholas. That’s how investigations work … how they break open. The offhand comment. The odd sighting. The last person you expect to know something, knows something.’

Ginny Dolan’s man drops his cigar to the ground and crushes it under his boot. ‘I’ll get what we need to know out of them fuckers in there.’

‘You’ll get killed, Albert, and Mrs Dolan doesn’t need that, does she?’

‘Them? Kill me?’

‘Yes, Albert. Those two are more than just docker muscle or drunken punters. They know how to hurt people and have done it before.’

Just Albert shakes his head and smiles his smile, squinting up at O’Keefe under his hat brim. ‘And here I thought you were getting to know me better, Mr O’Keefe.’

‘You’re a hard man to know, Albert.’

‘Hard men are good to know in this town, Mr O’Keefe.’

‘You’re right about that, and that’s what’s wrong with the place.’

‘You’re hurting me feelings.’

‘Jesus, give us peace,’ O’Keefe says, smiling again despite himself. He needs food, cigarettes. A drink, sleep. ‘Don’t go near them again until I think over what to do. Nine tomorrow I’ll call for you.’

‘Don’t be late, Mr O’Keefe.’

‘God forbid.’

‘It’s not God you need worry about.’

O’Keefe smiles wearily. For the love of all that’s holy. Dublin. You could lose sleep trying to get the last word in.

Nora Flynn watches the two men on the footpath in front of the hotel from behind a curtained window in the lobby. The shorter man is smiling and shaking his head, and the taller man, Mr O’Keefe, removes his hat and rubs the back of his head as if he is exasperated or tired.

An urge to go out to this Seán O’Keefe comes to her, rising up in her chest on a swell of something like guilt; redeem her lies by confessing to him that she
has
seen the boy, Nicholas Dolan. The man is working for the boy’s mother.
Stop, now, Nora. It does no soldier any good at all, thinking on the mothers who have been left at home.
The urge to confess passes and the cruel, handsome face of Charlie Dillon comes into her mind. She pushes it away.
Do your work, Nora. The boy’s a soldier. A runner for O’Hanley.
Old enough to know better
, she thinks, but she is not convinced.

She watches as O’Keefe turns and mounts a motorbike. Without waiting for him to ride off or stopping to think of the consequences, she moves quickly to the hotel switchboard and rings the men on duty in the Flowing Tide pub, different ones this time but assigned the same duties.

As she sets the receiver back in its cradle, she hopes that these duties will extend only as far as shadowing this Mr Seán O’Keefe. There is something about him that interests her—a warmth in his tired eyes. A certain strength tempered by kindness.
Don’t be daft, Nora, you’ve hardly spoken hardly two words to him.
But she had seen, watching from the doorway to the dining-room, how he had handled the scene with Mr Murphy and his men. He had not been afraid of them or what they represent. Perhaps in this he is a fool.
You should be afraid, Mr O’Keefe, if you’ve any sense at all.

Nora says a small prayer for the man’s safety and that he will find the boy he seeks—and blesses herself before she returns to the reception desk, hoping no one has seen her in the act.

Silly superstition
, she thinks, knowing in her heart that such prayers are rarely answered by a God who seems to have stopped listening.

24

N
o more than two miles from Burton’s Hotel, just off the North Circular Road, Jack Finch pulls up—the Chevrolet’s engine spluttering, radiator steaming—in front of a house with a plaque reading ‘Doctor’s Surgery’ beside its front door. Holding his side, his trouser leg and trenchcoat tail saturated, he slides off the blood-slick bench seat and out of the car.

He stumbles on the footpath, vision blurring, and lunges a hand out for the support of an iron fence that fronts the redbrick surgery. It takes more than a minute to right himself before he is able to mount the steps to the doctor’s door, fragments of thought coupling, shattering in his head as he shuffles, his boot leaving a snail’s wake of blood on the flagstones. One thought only snags his consciousness:
If the doctor’s out, ol’ chum, you’re for the common grave ….

He thumps on the door, oblivious to its brass knocker, and his fist leaves a bloody imprint. After a short wait, a young woman answers the door.

‘Yes? Oh, Jesus, sir …’

‘I’m shot, Miss. Is the doctor in?’ Finch manages before he collapses on the doctor’s doorstep.

Dr Stephen Hyland examines his insentient patient and cleans and staunches the wound as best he can before sitting back and examining his conscience.

There is a simple way to avoid bother, he knows. Simple as undressing the wound and letting the man bleed out and die and say nothing more about it. The man was dead on arrival at his surgery, he could easily enough say, and there had been nothing he could do to save him. Anyone would understand that surely. Neither Irregular nor Free Stater could blame him for the man’s death. If he
were
to save him and ring the army or police, however, there is no telling who would come looking for an explanation; the same if he simply brought the man to the hospital. This man had come to his humble and unsuitable surgery because a hospital is off limits to him. Hyland has no illusions about this. The wounded man is not a patient of his, nor has the doctor ever seen his face before. Sheer dumb luck has brought him, and he owes this man nothing. But at the same time the doctor knows there is nothing to be gained, in the days that are in it, from making enemies on either side of the conflict. Keeping the head down is the only way, and Hyland has been good at it thus far. Simpler, for all concerned, if this man should die here now.

But is it in him to will a man to die when he can, at very least, attempt to save him? A bullet wound does not speak well for a man’s character, but there are innocent men shot, and can he live with letting a man who might be innocent die?

The doctor thinks of the lethal weight in the pocket of the man’s bloodied trenchcoat and decides that innocence is less than likely, whomever he is fighting for.

Dr Hyland lights his pipe and watches the patient’s slow, laboured breathing. He then sets down his pipe and rifles the wounded man’s trouser and suit jacket pockets, his billfold.

Bloodstained but legible, behind a solid sheaf of pound notes in the billfold, the doctor finds a scrap of paper and on the paper is an address and a name.
Seán O’Keefe, 24 Fumbally Lane, Blackpitts, Dublin.

Realising he will not have to let this man bleed out in his surgery, Dr Hyland smiles, relieved to think that the man can now bleed out somewhere else.

‘Janey,’ he calls out of the surgery door to the young nurse receptionist who had answered the door. ‘Ring for a motor cab, will you? Our patient is in need of transport.’

25

O
’Keefe awakes to steady hammering on the rear, garden access door of his flat. A bar of October morning sun cuts through a gap in the curtains and carves light across his blanket.

The black tide of despondency laps at his consciousness and he forces it back for the second time in as many days, knowing he is riding his luck, aware that when the tide chooses to rise and wash in, it will come, and there will be nothing he can do about it, even if he cared to try.

He sits up and checks his watch—half past seven—and rubs sleep from his eyes.The knocking resumes and then stops. O’Keefe can hear the whispered conversation from behind the door, and relaxes as he rises from his bed, pulling on a pair of corduroy trousers and a cotton vest.

‘His bike is under the front steps, so he has to be in.’

‘His bike was here last week and he wasn’t feckin’ in.’

‘You said “feck”, I’m tellin Ma.’

‘Yeh rat.
Informer!
You wake the Ma and
you’ll
get a clatter, you will, yeh thick shite.’

O’Keefe can hear the sound of a slap and another given in return. ‘Lads,’ he says, opening the door. ‘It’s fierce early for visits, isn’t it?’

The younger Cunningham boy, Henry, his school uniform shirt misbuttoned so that one end of it hangs low over his short trousers and the other rides up over his pale belly, says, ‘I know. Ma would reef us out of it if she knew. Come here, look …’ Henry nudges his brother, who takes out a deck of cards. ‘We learned how to play Twenty-five off Granny.’

‘Did you now?’

‘We did.’

‘And?’

The elder brother, Thomas, takes over. ‘And …’ the boy has large, brown eyes and hair that will not stay combed if it were glued down and varnished, ‘… will you give us a game? We can’t play each other ’cause Henry’s always cheatin’.’

‘
You’re
always feckin’ cheatin’.’

‘Lads …’

‘You are!’

O’Keefe smiles, helpless. He wonders was he and his own brother like this pair, the best of friends and never not fighting. ‘All right, lads, one game and then I’m off for work. Let me make tea and some beans.’

‘Can we have some?’ Henry says.

‘See, I told yeh he was awake,’ Thomas says.

O’Keefe loses four hands of Twenty-five to the boys. He is, he thinks, the world’s worst card player. Or perhaps Henry had been cheating. He smiles a little as he dresses and shaves.

As he mounts the Trusty, patting his trenchcoat pocket for the photo of Nicholas Dolan, he hears his name called. He turns, startled, to see the woman from the reception desk at Burton’s Hotel coming towards him on the footpath. He summons her name. Nora Flynn.

‘Mr O’Keefe,’ she says, stopping on the path in front of him. ‘What a coincidence. Do you live here? I’m only up Leinster Road myself. Up at the top in digs.’

‘Yes, the basement rooms here.
Room
, really,’ O’Keefe says. Unconsciously he removes his leather helmet and smooths his hair with his fingers. Lost for words, he repeats hers. ‘What a coincidence. I was just on my way to get the photograph copied. I was going to call in at the hotel with copies on the way to collect my friend.’

The woman smiles, and something wells in O’Keefe’s chest. She is wearing a long, blue linen skirt and white blouse under a navy jacket, and carries a worn leather satchel bag. The simplicity of the outfit highlights her beauty, O’Keefe thinks, his eyes fixed on the woman’s voluminous red hair, which is gathered into a neat French roll. There is a smattering of freckles on her nose and O’Keefe restrains his gaze from lingering on her shapely figure. He concentrates on her eyes—sea-green he notes, framed by thick, dark red lashes. She is tall, but she carries her height with grace and confidence.

There is a momentary but not unpleasant silence between them, as if both are thinking that whatever either one of them says next will be of some significance. Nora looks thoughtful, as if deliberating the wisdom of befriending this stranger. Then she smiles and nods at the Trusty.

‘Is it yours?’

‘It is. I bought her in Cork. After the war …’ O’Keefe stops, suddenly feeling he has said too much. As if he has admitted something shameful. Nora looks at him and appears to sense this, her eyes settling briefly on the scar on his face.

‘It’s lovely. You must give us a spin some time. I’ve never been on a motorbike before. My brothers are mad about them.’

O’Keefe smiles. ‘I am as well. She’s my one true love, she is.’ He stops. How ridiculous he must sound—how pathetic—to a woman as poised and lovely as this Nora Flynn. Another rootless, jobless war veteran on the make.

But Nora laughs and her cheeks bloom with colour. ‘Surely that can’t be true, Mr O’Keefe.’

‘Sad but true, Miss Flynn,’ he says, trying to make light of his awkwardness. Somehow, he has lost his easy way with women. The war, he thinks. He knows.

Again there is silence but this time neither of them glances away.

‘Would you …’ O’Keefe feels he should stop himself before he goes on but finds he is unable, ‘… Would you like a lift into work? I’ve only to stop at the printer’s … there’s one on Camden Street, and then I could drop you. Only if you’d like. If …’

‘I’d like that very much, Mr O’Keefe. Thank you.’

They smile at each other and Nora mounts the bike side-saddle, taking a tentative hold of O’Keefe’s waist.

‘Here,’ he says, handing her the goggles. ‘Wear these. Just in case.’

‘Just in case of what, Mr O’Keefe?’ she asks, but smiles, and there is something lovely and wicked in the smile that O’Keefe is meant to see and does. ‘Am I in danger?’

He shakes his head as he kick-starts the bike.

‘Not too fast!’ she shouts.

O’Keefe laughs. ‘Not too fast, so.’

Nora Flynn watches the smiling Seán O’Keefe roar away from the hotel, swinging left onto O’Connell Street. Her own smile in return is genuine. She has enjoyed the jaunt on the motorbike despite herself, but her smile fades when she remembers the duty to which she has been assigned.
A job of work, girl, and no summer holiday.

Her ‘chance’ meeting with Seán O’Keefe; the small, safe-house room she had been moved into in the middle of the night in the home of a family with a son in the Free State army—all of it possible, necessary, because she had rung her colleagues waiting in the Flowing Tide. What she had not imagined when she rang them was that O’Keefe would become her work.
Her
target.

It had come to Carty that O’Keefe, in his hunt for the boy, might lead them to O’Hanley, and was thus worth marking. And she would be the marker. She catches herself using the language of football in her mind, and recalls how she has only started doing this since joining CID. In sport, men employ the terms of war; in war, the words of sport. And in a war, women fall into the same habits, talking, thinking like men.
Yet still treated as women
,
sure as God
.

But female detectives have their uses, Nora knows well. Much of her work in CID involves the tracking of women aiding and abetting the Irregulars. Active ones, carrying messages or even weapons to the gunmen. Passive ones she searches on the streets or minds on silent raids, when she and her CID or Army Intelligence colleagues take over the houses of known Irregulars and wait—
schtum
—with their families as hostage, in the hope of snaring a returning gunman come home for a mother’s feed. In these raids, Nora is mostly tasked with tending to the women and children, and many of these women call her a Free State whore, traitor bitch. Others are resigned and silent, and their silence digs at her conscience more than the harsh words. Why their dignified acquiescence bothers her is a mystery. Her conscience is clean. She has done her work and no more, no less.

And this Seán O’Keefe will not be a burden or threat to her conscience. He will be easy. The way he looks at her—even she can see it.
A dandy-doddle, this job of work that is Seán O’Keefe
, she thinks, the unexpected thrill of the motorbike ride giving way to something harder, darker inside her.

At the hotel switchboard, she rings and reports her morning’s progress to a fellow detective officer at Oriel House, knowing Carty will be pleased when he hears of it.