Irregulars (20 page)

28

T
he house below his attic bolthole is quiet—the Dempsey women gone visiting, he assumes, his young soldiers in bed or yet to return from their duties with Gilhooley—and O’Hanley scratches in his journal by candlelight. The silence here at the top of the Haddington Road house is unnerving. It is as if he is alone in the city of Dublin—like Christ might have felt, midway through his forty days in the desert, he thinks—and he would welcome the company of one of the young men. Just to sit beside him on the bed while he writes here at his desk, exuding the musky smell of tennis sweat and stolen cigarettes. He has banned the boys from smoking as well as swearing, but he knows they do it anyway.

His mind conjures a memory of his favourite soldier; a time when the lad had ascended to the attic to report some trivial matter and O’Hanley had asked him to stay. The memory is rich and vivid, with the soft sussing of the boy’s breath, strong on it the scent of tobacco; the boy’s arms thrown back and hands clasped behind the head in repose, pale skin under his arms .…

O’Hanley closes his eyes and forces the image away, shame welling in his belly.

He envies men who smoke, he thinks, as he gnaws at the skin around his thumb nail, a ruby pearl of blood rising up from the cuticle. Many of the priests in Maynooth had smoked when he was there, so surely it is a venal sin at most. There must be comfort in the searing balm of tobacco. A comfort he needs now. And he should let the boys smoke. They are doing the work of men for the country. He has often envied men who drink as well; envies them the easy laughter, the warm brotherhood and loosening of cares, though he knows an eight by ten foot attic room is no place for spirits or beer. Certainly he will court-martial any boy he finds drinking. Drink is the bane of revolution. Ireland locked in fetters for centuries, soaked in whiskey and the cause betrayed, time and time again, by men in their cups. No, he is blessed that he does not know even the taste of it. He inks his pen and returns to his journal.

… that our Lord works in ways we cannot fathom. Even in writing this I recall the verse from my days in the seminary though it gives me little comfort. “What man can know the intentions of God? And who can comprehend the will of the Lord? For the reasoning of mortals is inadequate, our attitudes of mind unstable, for a perishable body presses down on the soul, and this tent of clay weighs down the mind with its many cares.”

And don’t I have many cares? Thus, while I never waver, while my faith in Christ’s workings on behalf of a true and sovereign Irish republic can never be in doubt, it is in times such as this that I succumb to the temptation to question His means. This is not doubt. I have utter faith that He sees the rightness of our cause and that He has blessed me with the will and mettle of His holy spirit so that I, like my martyred brother Pádraig Pearse, may he rest in the arms of our Lord, might wage a war of purification and liberation for my country. But to my shame, I do doubt the ways in which He works. How am I supposed to wage this war from the confines of this safe house attic room where I have been ordered to stay? How am I to battle Mulcahy and O’Higgins and their Free State treachery when men of my own army are unwilling to fight for the cause because they are loathe to raise a hand in anger against their former comrades as was, apparently, the case in Limerick? I should be in Limerick now, presiding over a holy and liberated city, the first city of the new, blessed Republic of Ireland when instead Limerick is in filthy Free State hands and I am sentenced to what seems an eternity of waiting in this room. Unable to contact but a handful of my comrades, most having fled this city in shameful capitulation, I await news from Newbridge like the planner of any common robbery. His means are a mystery to me and I can only beg forgiveness for the means I am forced to employ.

Could I ever have imagined, seven years ago, teaching each day alongside Master Pearse, may he rest in God’s mercy, that I would be party to such deeds? That the young men I have chosen might shed precious blood robbing payrolls so that the sword of liberation might be purchased from the very hands of the oppressor? I …

Again, the knock on the closet door that disguises the room. O’Hanley takes up the revolver from beside his journal. But the knock is correct, and he holds the pistol by his leg as he unbolts the two doors leading into his room.

Smiling, Stephen Gilhooley enters and drops a leather travel bag at O’Hanley’s feet before slumping down onto the bed.

O’Hanley crouches and loosens the leather straps binding the bag. ‘You came by foot I take it? The butcher’s lorry is hardly parked in front of the house at this hour?’ His voice is flat and dry.

‘I’m no fool, for fuck sake.’

‘Your language, Stephen …’

Gilhooley ignores him. He is still riding the heist’s adrenaline and is giddy with his survival and success. ‘I hopped a tram and then hoofed it. I was even stopped by a clatter of Free State troops and blagged my way out of bother. Staying with me
auntie, I told them. Kicked out the gaff by the auldfella, says I. They never even searched me or the bag, the shower of bogtrotting bastards. They’d be leaking out on the Baggot Street footpath if they had.’

O’Hanley silently forgives the young man his uncouth ways and opens the bag. Inside, bound in butcher’s string and packed under a selection of shirts and smalls are twenty odd wedges of sterling banknotes. The smell of it hits O’Hanley and he blesses himself. He feels a momentary flash of shame at his earlier doubts. This, he thinks, is how the Lord works. A surge of confidence rises in his chest.

‘How much is it?’

‘More than enough for Murphy’s gear. Fourteen thousand and a bit.’

Gilhooley does not tell O’Hanley of the four thousand he has given his father from the take to pay off loans to suppliers to his shop and for a new refrigeration unit. His father has done his bit for the cause, and can use the few quid for the times that are in it. His brothers, too, have taken a taste but not so much as you’d know. Sure, Dinnie has a baby to feed and Ray needs his cut to pay the mothers of his now dead Free State army mates who tipped them to the job in the first place. Robbery costs, though no hope of Commandant O’Hanley understanding the notion.

‘And the boys?’

Gilhooley leans forward on the bed now, his smile fading. ‘Dinnie and Rayo, the brothers, they’re grand. They made it back grand. The two lads I took from here …’

‘Yes?’ O’Hanley’s eyes cloud with concern.

‘One’s all right. He’s staying with the McKinneys in Inchicore for tonight. He’ll be fed and bedded down and make his own way back to the rendezvous point late tomorrow where I’ll collect him.’ The boys are taken to and from the Dempsey house in the back of the butcher’s van, so that if they are captured they cannot locate the house for Free State intelligence.

‘Who didn’t make it?’ O’Hanley asks. All his boys are precious to him, but he has lost two already this week. Robert and Nicholas and now another. He does not want to hear it but as ranking officer he must.

‘Little Alan Fenlon. He ate a bullet keeping sketch in front of the bank. We’d some bother on the job.’

‘Free Staters?’

And here, Gilhooley laughs, little Alan Fenlon forgotten for the moment. ‘You’d not believe it if I told yeh.’

O’Hanley closes the bag and sits back in his chair at the desk. He inks his pen again and scratches the date onto the top left corner of a separate journal entitled
Operations
. ‘Tell me,’ he says.

‘Seems like we weren’t the only fellas looking to knock off that bank. Bunch of English boys with rifles and shotguns were at it first.’

‘And?’

‘And we plugged the lot of ’em, but Alan caught one in all the shooting. We got their Winchesters and two Colt automatics, you’ll be happy to know. One of them might have made it out but I hit him, sure as God. He won’t make it far.’

O’Hanley says a silent prayer for the repose of the soul of little Alan Fenlon. Sixteen years old, the boy was. No matter, O’Hanley thinks, blessing himself again. The young soldier died in the service of his country and will take his place at the right hand of the holy Father in heaven.

‘I am happy, Stephen. Tomorrow, then, you’ll take the money to Murphy. Once we can arm them, our army will rise from their torpor and stagnation and …’

Stephen Gilhooley listens for a minute to O’Hanley’s speech. He has heard it any number of times before. It is the one about the corruption that takes its seat in the hearts of Irishmen. Of demon drink and cowardly merchants dipping fingers in the smooth rubbed tills of petty shops but never finding a ha’pence for the cause of Irish independence.

O’Hanley is a quare one, no mistake. Gilhooley has thought this since he watched the older man fight in the GPO and spotted targets for him during his days in the Tan War. O’Hanley is a killer, a patriot, a leader of men. But he is a strange bird. All the same, he keeps things lively, Gilhooley thinks, and he’s no man for half-measures; for surrendering half the country under the terms of a Treaty that any proper republican wouldn’t bother wiping his arse on. Gilhooley is no man for half-measures himself, and this is what he likes about O’Hanley, strange bird and all that he is.

29

N
ora Flynn says yes. She tells O’Keefe she’d only be delighted to share a drink with him and isn’t she dying with the thirst and gumming for a nail? She appears to regret saying this, and O’Keefe catches her sudden shyness and tells her that he is of the same mind himself.

They decide on the Shelbourne Hotel bar, O’Keefe sipping Jameson and Nora Bombay gin and tonic water with a slice of lime. It is a nice touch, the lime, O’Keefe thinks, and is glad they have come here. The Shelbourne has been all but taken over by members of the new Free State government—Dáil representatives from country constituencies holed up in Dublin as much for their own safety, O’Keefe imagines, as for any legislative purpose—but the hotel retains its grandeur. O’Keefe wonders will it continue to be Mecca for the Protestant Ascendancy in this newly independent Ireland—hosting its débutante balls, hunt club dinners and wedding parties for the former ruling class of the country—as it has been for the past hundred years. He wonders will there even be an ascendancy any longer. He has heard of Protestants burnt out of their homes, some murdered. Many, he has heard, are selling up—or are trying to—and heading home to England. O’Keefe catches himself.
Home
. Many of these families had been in Ireland for centuries and are no more English than he is. Yes, many may have kept flats in London and married into families across the water. But not all of them, and not all Irish Protestants are wealthy landowners. He remembers the small farmers he would meet in West Cork when he served there in the RIC, poor as any of their Catholic neighbours. And how many regular coppers who had served alongside him had been Protestant? Many, and many fine men. He hopes the new Free State government will remember this, despite the treatment being meted out to Catholics in Belfast and the newly partitioned northern counties.

Nora returns to her seat across from O’Keefe. ‘Marble!’ she says. ‘The whole of it, from the stairs to the sinks is all marble.’ She smiles as she speaks. ‘I can’t believe I’ve never been in here before.’

They have already spoken of Nicholas, and O’Keefe’s difficulty in finding the boy, O’Keefe omitting details of his employer and her business, and Nora agrees with him—
though what would I know?
—that the boy will most likely turn up when he tires of the hard bread, the strange beds and damp ditches of the guerrilla fighter. Or when he misses his mother enough. She asks him if he has discovered anything about where he might be and he tells her no. He lowers his voice when he says it, and tells her that the boy is reputed to be working for Felim O’Hanley. The very man himself. Her eyes widen, and he is pleased with himself for sharing this vaguely scandalous nugget with her. Taking her into his confidence.

‘He’ll turn up,’ she tells him again, ‘please God, none for the worse, when he’s good and ready.’ They raise their glasses to it.

O’Keefe smiles back at her. ‘I’ve only been in here myself once before, for a friend’s wedding.’

‘A happy union?’ Nora says, taking a sip of her drink.

O’Keefe turns away. ‘He … died. He was killed at the Somme. God knows why he went at all. Why anyone did.’

‘At least he had the happiness of a fine wedding here. And a fine wife, I’m sure.’

O’Keefe senses the effort she makes to be cheerful and smiles. ‘He did. He had that.’

They speak now of other hotels, of weddings they have attended. Of meals served and speeches made by drunken fathers and best men. Of the dresses and the cost of things. They smile and laugh as they speak.

She tells O’Keefe when he asks her that she has worked in Burton’s Hotel for the past year and a bit, and before that as a typist in Dublin Castle. Nothing interesting about it but it’s paying work, she tells him, and O’Keefe tells her about his life in the RIC and how he is unsure of what to do now. He had taken the job of finding Nicholas, he tells her, as much for something to do as anything. He does not speak of his father’s illness. Instead, he tells her he has plenty of savings, because it feels important to him that she knows this. More than enough to tide him over until he finds proper work, whatever that will be, when he finishes this job for Mrs Dolan. ‘And I could always hire myself out,’ he says, ‘to people who don’t want somebody found.’

Nora laughs at this. ‘A Pinkerton man who helps you stay lost!’

But O’Keefe is not listening. His eyes are tracking a group of men as they enter the bar and take several tables against the back wall, facing the entrance. One of them eyes O’Keefe, staring at him for a long moment before O’Keefe looks away, not wanting a challenge from the man to spoil his time with Nora.

‘You look like you’re miles away.’

He smiles. ‘Only as far as the back of the bar.’

‘Who are those men?’ she asks, taking a cigarette from her bag and allowing O’Keefe to light it. It is the third time he has done so, and he feels now an easy familiarity in the act.

‘They’re protection of some sort. For the nobs from the Dáil staying here, I imagine. Protective Corps from Oriel House, maybe. Keeping an eye out for anyone who might not wish the best for the men in the Free State government.’

‘Who could that be?’ she says, a cynical edge under the music of her voice.

O’Keefe shrugs. ‘I’ve never much liked politicians myself.’

‘But you hardly support the Irregulars, do you?’

O’Keefe drinks. ‘No, of course not. I’d support the Quakers and pacifists if they were in the running, I suppose, though I hardly imagine any of them would be much better if they were to get a taste of power.’

Nora sighs. ‘Even in the hotel bar of the Shelbourne, imagine. It feels sometimes as if there’s no place you can go where the war isn’t.’

‘This table here,’ he says.

‘How do you mean?’

‘We’ll declare this table to be a ceasefire zone. We’ll officially banish belligerence of any kind from here. You did leave your weapon at the door?’

Nora smiles and thinks of the Webley in her bag. ‘Did you?’

‘I’ve come unarmed this evening, madam. I’m at your mercy.’

‘You’re mad, Mr O’Keefe,’ she says.

O’Keefe agrees and sips more whiskey, smiling again at Nora, unable to help himself, and she smiles back.

‘What?’ she says.

‘What do you mean, “what?”’

‘You’re smiling at me.’

And O’Keefe wonders how long it has been since he has smiled as much or as easily.

‘I like the look of you. But I’ll stop if you like.’

‘It’s better you smiling than frowning at me.’

‘Much better, altogether.’

And O’Keefe keeps smiling at her as she sips her drink, and for the moment, he feels, their table in the Shelbourne is the one place in Ireland where the war is not.

‘This is it,’ Nora says, stepping off the Trusty and smoothing her skirt. Her hair has come loose on the short ride from Stephen’s Green to Rathmines and she gathers it back and holds it to her head before giving up, letting it fall free.

‘So it is,’ O’Keefe replies. A two-story redbrick house at the top of Leinster Road. Hardly three hundred yards from his own. Blessed coincidence? Fate? He smiles.
Jesus, listen to yourself, Seán.

‘I’ve had a lovely evening. You’re a gent to stand for the drinks. The Shelbourne is the dearest place in the city.’

‘My pleasure,’ he says, unsure of whether to dismount or stay on the bike. Nora stands close by on the footpath, close enough to reach out and touch. He lowers his goggles and lets them hang around his neck.

‘I’d ask you in for a cup of tea but …’ Nora looks away, brushes red curls from her face and then looks back at O’Keefe.

‘I know,’ O’Keefe says, hearing how daft he sounds, the nervous longing in his own voice. ‘Sure, it’s late.’

‘And my landlord, he’s terribly old-fashioned about … visitors. Even a cup of tea would set his mind turning over.’ She smiles, and in the light from the street lamps, O’Keefe imagines she is blushing.

‘Some people are like that. Always thinking the worst.’

Nora laughs lightly, and it is a beautiful sound to O’Keefe. She says, ‘“Nothing good ever happens after midnight.” One of my father’s favourite sayings.’

‘And do you believe him?’ he asks. ‘Your father?’

‘I don’t know, Mr O’Keefe. Should I?’

‘I’m not sure, Miss Flynn. Should you?’

Nora takes a step closer to him. Standing above him on the footpath, a head taller than he is on the Trusty.

‘Well …’ she says.

‘Well.’

‘I should be getting in. I’ve work tomorrow.’

‘I have as well.’

‘Well then.’

‘Well …’

She leans into him and presses her lips against his. O’Keefe is as surprised as he is happy, feeling Nora’s heart beating fast under the soft press of her breasts against his chest. They kiss for a long minute, O’Keefe breathing in the lavender smell of her clothes, her hair, the sweet tartness of lime and gin on her lips.