Irregulars (7 page)

11

‘S
myth, you’ll take the van to the house. Shouldn’t need more than the one to manage the wife and kids,’ Captain Hanson says, looking up from his plate of smoked salmon and brown bread. Only the best for Captain Hanson. ‘And Tally. You’ll drive the others and our friend the bank manager in the Ford, and I don’t need to tell you, Tally, you don’t so much as inch that motor forward until they come out and load up.’

Tally looks up blankly from his beans and rashers. The dining-room of the Athlone Arms hotel is empty, and the single waiter has disappeared into the kitchen. The gang has checked in to the hotel as a group of English journalists covering the civil conflict in Ireland, Bennett even showing the desk man the Box Brownie camera he’d purchased in Cork with his cut of the take from their first job. Finch had carried a notebook around for the first hour or two of their stay and then abandoned it, realising the hotel owner and staff do not mind what their business is, just so long as they are business for the hotel. A civil war is a hard time to run a hostelry, and there has been fighting in Athlone in recent weeks. The town is controlled by the Free State side at the moment, but no one knows when this might change and when the people of Ireland might once again begin staying in hotels.

‘I’ll be there. I was there last time and every time before, wasn’t I?’ Tally says.

Hanson stops chewing and swallows, his fork and knife held poised over his plate. Finch, Smyth, Bennett and Raney stop eating and look from Tally to Hanson. The silence seems to last a long minute.

‘You weren’t where I fucking told you to be,’ Hanson says, his voice a rough, upper-class Scottish burr that is sometimes difficult to understand when he is speaking but utterly clear when he roars.

Tally blinks but says, ‘I moved round the corner to get off the tram tracks. Wouldn’t have been much of a getaway with the motor carved in two under the wheels of a bloody tram.’

Hanson again lets the silence hang heavy over the table and stares at Tally until Tally looks away. The Captain has that effect on men. There is something in his eyes—green, running to hazel, deep-set and thick-lidded like a reptile’s. His waxed moustache like fangs on a viper. Finch wonders what it is about the Captain that makes him the leader of their little mob and not one of the others. Hard men all, veterans, and not easily led. Why not himself, for example, Jack Raymond Finch? A stout-hearted man, if he do say so himself, who has no love of taking orders from anyone.

Yes, Hanson had been an officer in the big war in Europe. Rising to captain and demobbing as one. But then so had Tally and Raney. Point of fact, Raney had been a captain as well and a major in the Auxiliaries whereas Hanson had remained a captain. Finch and Bennett and Smyth had been enlisted men and served as Black and Tan constables in the RIC, but all three had as much combat experience in the war and in the ditches and fields of Ireland as the others.

So it is not rank that makes Hanson the chief, nor is it physical size or toughness. Hanson is roughly the same size as Finch—five nine, eleven stone—and Finch imagines that they don’t teach a man to scrap like a Shoreditch boy in the la-di-da schools and clubs, the likes of which Hanson had attended.

The same clubs—hunt clubs, golf clubs and débutante balls, that still thrive in Ireland despite the civil war—where Hanson dines and drinks, and meets people like the bank manager from Kildare town who has told him about the army payroll, which will be held for the Free State in his very own bank in Newbridge.

Or maybe, Finch reckons, tucking back into his roast chicken, it is merely because the whole lark, the strong-arm gang they had become, had been Hanson’s idea in the first place. The idea being that, despite the truce and the Treaty and the disbandment of the RIC and Auxiliaries, there was still fun to be had in Ireland; that, having no coppers in the country, especially when you had recently served as one or something like one, could be a rare opportunity for a mob of men of certain experience and temperament.

And fair dues to the man, Finch thinks—dabbing at his lips with his linen serviette because this is what he has seen Hanson and Raney do. Sometimes it took a man with a bit of class, a touch of the book learning, to spot the main chance. Three pubs, two post offices, a bank and a creamery since they had started in May. Hitting them hard and then riding the pig’s back until the money ran out and it was time to hit another one.

Bennett once told Finch that Captain Hanson had deposited his cut of their takings in various branches of the Ulster Bank throughout Ireland, intending to repatriate it to Scotland when he returned there. Finch and the others had spent theirs on the finest hotels, whores and whiskey.

‘You just be where you’re told to be, Tally,’ Captain Hanson says, setting his knife and fork down on the side of his plate.

And Finch has no doubt that Tally, if he has any sense in the world, will be exactly where Hanson expects him to be when the job goes off.

Bennett raises his head. Good old Bennett. Finch’s china plate from the muddy trenches of Flanders, they had also served as Black and Tans together in County Cork. Another East End boy, and the reason Finch is with the gang.

‘And will we just release the woman and child there, when we’ve done? Or will we bring them back to town?’ Bennett asks.

Hanson sighs deeply. He likes Bennett, Finch thinks, but even Finch knows what is coming.

‘Why don’t you drop the bank manager himself back at the house when we’ve done, Bennett, aye. That’ll be just velvet. Have a chat with the Free State soldiers waiting for him while you’re at it.’

Bennett smiles. He rarely takes offence at things, unless he’s been drinking. ‘And what then? I mean, right, what if the ’usband don’t co-operate, go along with things? What if he won’t leave his missus and kid with Smyth? I’d not like to leave my missus with ’im …’

‘Fuck off, chum. She’d like it,’ Smyth says.

‘What would you do, Smyth, cough on her, mate?’ Smyth’s lungs had been damaged by mustard gas in the war.

‘If he decides against travelling with us, Bennett, you’re to put a bullet in the wife’s knee. Then one in the kid’s knee, and he’ll get sense once he sees that.’ Bennett nods and stays silent. He searches the dregs of his coffee cup and balls his napkin, then opens it up and folds it and sets it onto the tablecloth as Hanson has done. The others at the table watch Bennett, who waits until Hanson has risen from the table and made his way into the hotel lounge for his brandy and cigar. When the Captain has gone, Bennett turns to Finch.

‘He’s not serious, is he, Jack? About shooting the lady … and the kid?’

Finch sniggers. ‘Don’t be a mug all your life, Bennett, what do you think?’

But Bennett does not laugh or smile in return. ‘That’s the thing, Finchy. I don’t know what to think. I’m not shooting no kid nor no bloody bint. I didn’t even do that in the war. Or down in Cork, though God knows I would have liked to at times.’

Finch claps Bennett on the shoulder. ‘You won’t have to shoot a bint, Benny, or a kid. He’s winding you up, mate.’

‘I ’ope so, chum. I fucking ’ope he is …’

12

T
hey make their way up Sackville Street—called O’Connell Street by Dubliners for many years—Just Albert worrying the multitude of coins in his pockets as he walks, O’Keefe taking in the shattered and burnt-out buildings that line what had once been one of the finer, more fashionable streets in the Empire.

This is not the first time O’Keefe has been on the street since the civil war started with the shelling of the Four Courts on the quays in late June and the fighting that spilled over onto O’Connell Street, but each time he walks it he experiences a sense of sadness and wonder. This is a street he’d walked since he was a boy, first with his hand tucked into his mother’s or father’s hand, strolling, window-shopping and watching Irish regiments of the British Army parade for the public on their return from foreign wars, eating fried bread with sugar, and Italian ices. Later, he had walked it on his way to school with his friends.

And now, along with the GPO, which is shrouded with scaffolding and only partially rebuilt, a number of hotels and grand stores on the street are charred shells—though Clerys, he notices, has reopened its ground floor. The street still functions in a makeshift, commercial way, but it is roughly patched and annexed, as if no owner wants to chance rebuilding until he is certain it won’t be destroyed again.

He is surprised to find himself thinking of how his own city has become like the villages he had seen in Turkey. His Dublin, a town bludgeoned, scorched by war. O’Keefe still can’t help but feeling that war is something that is supposed to happen elsewhere. He remembers again the returned Irish regiments parading when he was a boy in their splendid blue, red and green rigs. All of them back, he supposes now, from razing someone else’s city, village, home. Even having fought in the Tan War—or at least having policed it—here in Ireland, in Cork albeit, he has difficulty believing the devastation that has visited his native city. Cork itself had been almost burned to the ground by raging Black and Tans and Auxiliaries and, unforgivable though that had been, O’Keefe had understood it. Cork was just another distant place to the men who had burned it. Another Ypres, Mons or Marne. Most of the damage here, on the streets of Dublin, had been done by Irishmen to their own capital city. He shakes his head sadly.

As if reading his thoughts, Albert says, ‘Not even finished sweeping up the mess from the Rising and they go and try and blow the rest of it to smithereens.’

‘They made a fair job of it,’ O’Keefe says.

‘Or a shite one.’

‘How do you mean?’

Albert relights his cigar and hands a few coppers to a young girl in rags who has approached them from a side street. He smiles absently at her gratitude. ‘Shite job because they were only trying to clear a few of the anti-Treaty lads out of them buildings. Same as in 1916.
Those
men of genius we once answered to—the Crown-bleedin’-forces—floated a battleship down the Liffey to chuck shells on a few loonies holed up in a poxy post office. I did be thinking the whole time they’d land one of them big shells on Mrs Dolan’s gaff and we’d all be for it. ’Course, Mrs Dolan’s a cool one. She said at the time that there was no chance sailors would ever shell a knocking shop, not even by accident.’

‘True enough.’

Encouraged, Ginny Dolan’s man continues. ‘I mean, you’re a man of the world, Mr O’Keefe, you tell me. How hard can it be to run a few buckos out of a building without blowing the jaysus thing up?’

O’Keefe looks at Just Albert in an effort to see if he is being sarcastic, and realises that he can’t tell. He has a flashing memory of the village of Sedd El-Bahr, overlooking the beach on which he had landed in Gallipoli. There had been no artillery then, for the men who’d made it off the beach and through the Turkish guns and wire, up into the village. No. They had been forced to roust every sniper, from every house, with grenades, rifles and bayonets. He shudders at the memory and says, ‘Hard is what it can be. Bloody hard and just plain bloody.’

Albert jingles the apparently endless supply of coins in his pockets. ‘I don’t know, Mr O’Keefe. When I tell fellas to shift, they fuckin’ well shift.’

O’Keefe can smell the char from the destroyed buildings, and his wonder at the destruction of his city is overshadowed by the wonder he feels at having been landed with Mrs Dolan’s doorman. He decides not to argue with the man. Decides it just isn’t worth the breath. ‘Well, that’s just you, Just Albert. That’s you all over.’

The doorman puffs his cigar and nods, as if O’Keefe has agreed with his line of argument. ‘Right you are, Mr O’Keefe. Right you are.’

Turning right off O’Connell Street onto Parnell Street, they take a left onto North Great George’s Street and arrive in front of Francis Xavier College where Nicholas Dolan had studied until he had been dismissed. The redbrick school runs a quarter length of the street, and O’Keefe sees now that some of its lower windows are boarded up. O’Keefe had imagined that the school would have been far enough away from O’Connell Street and the fighting to avoid damage, but perhaps not. Or perhaps the boarded windows were just a precaution against any further combat in the area.

In a way, the facts of the boy’s expulsion, as relayed by Ginny Dolan, puzzle O’Keefe. He had attended this school, and he feels a wave of nostalgia wash over him just standing at its doors once again after so many years. He is surprised because he had thought that the Jesuits who run the school would be more understanding—more forgiving. Of course the Jesuits had always catered to the sons of the wealthy Catholics of the country—O’Keefe’s own father had stretched his Sergeant’s salary to pay the fees for himself and his brother—but they had always stressed to their charges a duty to the poor that the good fortune of their birth made obligatory. The men who had taught O’Keefe, not counting the odd lunatic, had been largely a forgiving and worldly cohort.

Nor were they snobs when it came to the backgrounds of the boys they taught. Scholarships were offered to bright boys from all walks of life. O’Keefe himself had never felt a lesser light than the barristers’ or bankers’ sons, or a brighter light than the scholarship boys, because he was the son of a policeman. But maybe things had changed.

He turns to Albert. ‘Look, I think it might be better …’

‘No, it wouldn’t,’ the doorman says, dropping his cigar butt to the footpath and grinding it out with a shiny leather brogue.

‘Wouldn’t what? You don’t even know what I was going to say.’

‘I do, and it wouldn’t. I’m to go with you, give you a hand when it’s called for, mind I don’t interfere, but stay with you all the same. You might think it’s better I don’t come in with you round all the holy fathers, but Mrs Dolan does think different.’

Anger again flares in O’Keefe. It has been a long time since he has been so freely contradicted by a sober or unarmed man. Since before he became a police constable, perhaps, and he realises that there is a great deal he will have to learn about life as a civilian. Still, Ginny Dolan’s man is pushing him hard.

‘Well, Mrs Dolan’s not here and I’m telling you you’re not helping me by running under my feet like some butcher’s dog.’

‘Well, I’m sorry to say, Mr O’Keefe, that I don’t give a fuck what you’re after telling me.’

O’Keefe takes a step forward now, jutting his chin, looming over Ginny Dolan’s man.

Just Albert stands his ground, cocks his head to the side and squints through one eye. He is smiling. ‘You’d want to mind yourself now. You’d be no good to Nicky or Mrs Dolan if I was to break you up here on the street, Mr O’Keefe.’

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, who in the name of fuck do you think …?’

‘Saying our prayers, are we?’

Albert steps back and touches the brim of his bowler. ‘Hello, Father.’

O’Keefe spins around, feeling for a sudden moment like a schoolboy again.

‘Father O’Dea? I …’ The priest has aged, certainly, but has the same shock of rough, white hair and kindly, ruddy, farmer’s face that O’Keefe remembers from his time in the school.

‘Seán O’Keefe.’ The priest smiles at O’Keefe’s amazement.

‘Yes, Father, how did you …?’

‘You haven’t changed really. I saw you from a short distance and remembered. Took me a wee second and then I had it.’ He reaches out a hand and O’Keefe takes it. ‘Hardly changed a bit but for the brush under your nose and the ding on your face there. I’d heard you’d gone off to fight. Heard about the brother as well, God rest him. I was sorry to hear it, Seán, so I was. He was a good lad, your brother.’

O’Keefe nods, his shock at having been recognised by the priest after more than twelve years turning to respect. Father O’Dea was a man who had kept tabs on the students he had taught for years after they had left his charge because he was a man who cared about what became of them. This had always been his way, and O’Keefe remembers again why he had liked the man so much when he had been a student.

‘You’re still teaching, Father?’

‘No such luck, young Seán. They’ve gone and made me headmaster for my sins. And your friend?’

O’Keefe snaps out of his reverie. ‘I’m sorry, Father. My …’ he hesitates to say it and then does, ‘… my colleague Albert. Albert, Father O’Dea. The Father taught me Latin and Composition when I went to school here. For all the good it did me.’ He smiles and the priest smiles back.

‘It did you a world of good if you understand anything of the world, Seán. Pleased to meet you, Albert.’ The Jesuit extends his hand and Albert takes it, though grudgingly it appears to O’Keefe. ‘Albert …?’ The priest attempts, as if a surname would place the man better. Father O’Dea had always possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of Dublin’s northside, O’Keefe remembers, and taken delight in making connections between people if he didn’t know them outright.

‘Just Albert’s grand, Father. No disrespect.’

‘None taken. And you’re from the area, Albert?’

‘From the Kips, Father, again, no disrespect.’

But O’Keefe hears something in Just Albert’s voice that runs against his words.

‘I’ve many friends there,’ the priest says, leaving Albert waiting for the judgement he had been expecting. ‘Perhaps in the future I can count you another?’

Anxious to avoid a confrontation, O’Keefe says, ‘Father, if it’s no trouble to you, could we speak with you inside? I’ve been employed by a Mrs Ginny Dolan …’ he waits for the priest to acknowledge that he knows of the woman ‘… to find her
son Nicholas. The boy has gone missing and Albert and myself have …’

‘… Albert and
I
,’ the priest says, smiling.

O’Keefe smiles despite himself. ‘
We
were hoping to ask you a few questions, Father. I don’t even know why, really, only that it seemed a good place to start. His school … former school.’

‘Certainly, please come in.’

Father O’Dea’s office is all oak panelling, a large mahogany desk under a crucifix braced by paintings of St Francis Xavier and
St Ignatius Loyola; the mingled scents of floor wax, pipe
tobacco and incense. O’Keefe and Albert take chairs in front of the headmaster’s desk, feeling like truants on the brink of chastisement.

‘Tea, gentlemen? Or a drop of something stronger?’

Something stronger. O’Keefe would gladly die for a sup of the priest’s whiskey. He decides to abstain, and is about to tell the priest that they would take tea if it was going when Just Albert intervenes. ‘Nothing for us, Father. We need get down to business so we can find Nicholas.’

The man is now answering for the two of us
, O’Keefe thinks, holding on to his anger in front of Father O’Dea. He will have it out with his ‘colleague’ when they leave. Until then he will direct the questioning, if they are to get anything useful to go on.

‘Father,’ he says, before the doorman can begin, ‘if you don’t mind my asking, do you remember Nicholas Dolan? He was expelled some time before the summer.’

‘I do remember him, of course.’

‘And can you tell me why Nicholas was actually asked to leave the college? By all accounts—well, by his mother’s account—he was a bright boy and a fine student.’

‘Oh, he was,’ the priest says. ‘He was a kind and clever lad. Always sticking up for the younger boys or the victims of bullies. He was a good boy who fell in with … with certain men both inside the school and out. Idealists, Seán. The kind of ideas that appeal to boys of a passionate nature.’

Just Albert shifts in his chair, and O’Keefe senses he has taken offence; that perhaps he feels the priest is implying that the boy was not supervised properly and, by implication, that streets of Monto were no place for a lad to be reared.

‘So he was expelled before the summer holidays then,’ O’Keefe prompts before Albert can give voice to any objections.

The headmaster takes time packing his pipe and lighting it. ‘Late June, yes. I can check the date. But surely the lad hasn’t been missing since then?’

‘No, he’s only been missing for the past month or so. And his mother knows of his involvement with the men you describe. The anti-Treatyites, the Irregulars. What I’m trying to get at is whether his dismissal might have led to his joining them. I mean …’ O’Keefe wonders where to go next. He thinks it may have been a worthless venture coming here. What can the priest tell him, really, about the boy’s whereabouts?

‘It was quite the reverse, Seán.’

O’Keefe frowns. ‘Pardon me, Father?’

‘His dismissal. His dismissal was a result of his
being
a member of the anti-Treaty faction, a follower of Mellowes and O’Connor, that lot. A week, two weeks before the shooting started at the Four Courts, Nicholas was dismissed for bringing a pistol to school.’

‘A what?’ Just Albert says, leaning forward. ‘I thought he was given the boot for … for how Missus Dolan makes a crust.’

Father O’Dea smiles and shakes his head. ‘Is that what he told you?’

Just Albert nods, averting his eyes, as if embarrassed.

‘I’m disappointed in the boy, but I can understand it,’ the priest says. ‘And is this the impression you were given as well, Seán?’

O’Keefe nods.