The Last Storyteller (17 page)

The last pile of possessions on the table lay under a brocade tablecloth of blue and gold. Miss Fay hesitated for a moment, slipped a hand under the cloth, and pulled forth a card much like the one I’d found with the money. James had written, “Ben’s true legacy.”

As tenderly as nurses, we removed the tablecloth—and exposed neat piles of black notebooks. I counted them: eighty-two; I opened one—and learned that every notebook had been numbered, and that these contained everything private that James had taken down in his life of collecting folklore, and that each of these unofficial notebooks covered approximately six months at a time.

I said to Miss Fay, “This is—” and got no further. Tears took over.

“He admired you so much, Ben.”

She left the room. While she was gone, I turned to the notebooks, and at great speed, I found the summer of 1932. That was when I had introduced him to Venetia.

Easy to find: James had written, “Ben’s young lady, Venetia, is tender and lovely. She is so kind to him. He is mature in her company, and gentle.”

Miss Fay returned, lugging a suitcase. In silence she laid it on the
floor: more notebooks, different in size and texture—James’s official notebooks, his own daily journals.

“They’ll have to go to the Commission archives,” she said, “but you should trawl through them first. I’ll hold them for a year.”

We had almost finished. Miss Fay pointed to the suits. I shook my head—but I picked up the long black coat. First I draped it over my shoulders. Then I put my arms in the sleeves. Finally, I wore it.

The mood snapped. Miss Fay stared. Then she turned away and with the vigor of a woman half her age began to hammer on the wall. And howl.

I reached for her, but she rejected my hand. Thinking of last straws and the backs of camels, I began to take off the coat.

“No, no, no, no, no!” she screamed. “Leave it on. Go away. Go!”

Where could I go after all that emotion? How could I come down from those heights? I waited in the hallway. Miss Fay wept for long minutes. In due course she allowed me to lead her to another room and an armchair. Brandy? She nodded; I took none. By now we had come close to midnight, and she looked exhausted.

The weeping stopped. She asked me, “Can you stay?”

“Of course.”

I said that I felt uneasy about the private notebooks.

“Shouldn’t they go to you?”

She said, “No!”

“Why so vehement?”

“He said they’d be a fuel source for you.”

“Do you know what he meant?”

“Open one.”

I went to the other room, took a notebook at random, brought it back, and handed it to Miss Fay.

She thumbed and mused: “At the end of each notebook James kept some spare pages for what he called short jottings. He used to read them to me. Look.”

I read, “Irish legends state that a king will always be a king. Not even a wizard can bring him down.”

“Few characters in mythology gain as much respect as the hero or champion, i.e., the man who shows determination no matter what challenges he faces.”

“The beauty of women in mythology doesn’t always denote beauty of spirit.”

“In legends, the hero always knows his destiny, even if he refuses to face it.”

Miss Fay, detached as a clerk, said, “That was his favorite quotation. That’s what James lived by. See what I mean?”

The next day, I should have climbed into my safe car and gone back to the countryside. Why didn’t I? Pusillanimity again. It even trumped my passion for fields, lakes, and stories told by the fire.

Unease nagged, too. The joust with Man One and Man Two had disturbed me. On two counts: they might set out after me, and I hadn’t freed myself from the guns nonsense. In broad daylight I couldn’t believe that I had come so close to such events. Or that they’d happened.

On impulse, as I walked past a police station near the Commission offices, I went in. Might I find a superior officer? Someone with a broader view? No thugs to manhandle me?

Naturally, my mind was asking,
What would James say? Meet it head-on
. Or would he again say,
Never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you?

I waited. For two hours. First, the desk sergeant asked if I had a complaint to make.
No, no complaint
. He asked the nature of my business.
Important. And confidential
. About what, like?
This is serious
. He asked how serious was serious.
Gun serious. IRA serious
. He asked my employer’s name, and when I said,
A government department
, he grabbed a notepad and pencil and disappeared. When he came back, many minutes later, he took me to a small room and locked the door behind me. And there I waited. For two more hours.

A superior officer did indeed appear—accompanied by Man Two.
Not good
, said my mind.
This is not the result I wanted
.

Man Two said, “Heh, Little Boy, I thought it was you.” I presumed that the sergeant at the desk had made a phone call.

James, where are you? In legends, the hero always knows his destiny, even if he refuses to face it. But what the hell is my destiny in this stuff? Another mistake, eh, Ben?

The senior man, not quite as old as my father, and with a cyst on his forehead, held out a handshake.

“I knew James Clare. I hear ’twas a great funeral.”
James, you’re still here, thank you
.

I said, “He was very well known.”

“Now, was James your boss?”

“He was indeed.”

“Well, you must be all right.” He smiled. “What’s the trouble?” He offered a cigarette—to me but not to Man Two, who stood behind him and glowered. “Larry here tells me that you’ve met some undesirables.”

I said, “It’s complicated.”

“Ah, sure nothing is simple,” said the Man with the Cyst. “How complicated?”

“Very.”

“Now, are you frightened or something? People who volunteer to see us are usually lunatics or frightened, and I don’t think you’re a lunatic.”

Oh, Christ! I haven’t thought this through. I don’t know where it could go
.

“Now, what do you want to tell me, Ben?” I said,

“I don’t know.”

“Well, in my department we always say, We can’t torture you for facts, but we can hang you for them.”

He chuckled, and Man Two snorted.

I said, “Suppose I did meet some ‘undesirables,’ as you call them, and suppose they were running guns, and suppose one of them told me in
detail about an attempted murder or about a military-style operation outside of this—” I hesitated.

“Jurisdiction?” he asked.

“Jurisdiction, yes.” I reached for some steam. “And suppose, say, just for the sake of argument, suppose I had ferried weapons here and there, and suppose I’d even handled a gun—even if I hadn’t taken part in anything?”

Behind the other man’s back, Man Two mimed a hanging. Hands around his neck, he rolled his eyes. Made silent, gagging faces. Tongue far out.

His superior remained kindly. “The burden of proof is always on us, Ben. But now there are ways of handling everything.”

Why does he say “now” so often?

“Such as?”

Oh, great
, rampaged my mind,
terrific. At one leap you wind up in something so deep and dangerous that you get yourself caught every which way
.

The Man with the Cyst took his time, looking at the floor and dragging on his cigarette.

“Hmm. Now—the best way, and in fact the only way—” He paused, contemplating every word. “In fact, yes, the only way—if what you’re describing—for the sake of argument—if it had, say, already happened.” He looked up at me quickly. “The only way you could cope with that would be, well, you’d have, so to speak, to become one of us.”

“But—how would that work?”

Yes, yes, yes. Caught. Comprehensively snagged and snared. Breathing in and breathing out. Would Jimmy B. put a bullet in my head? You bet he would. What did Randall call him? That little narcissist. Didn’t somebody—my father—call Al Capone a narcissist? Or was that Pretty Boy Floyd? My father and his books and magazines about gangsters. No use to me now
.

“You’d work with Larry here. Tell him where you were going. Who you’d be with.”

“At all times?”

“Well, if there was something undesirable going on. Or about to go on. That’s how it would work.”

I looked at Man Two—“Larry,” as I now knew. He winked at me. Not a nice wink, not a friendly wink, not a decent wink, but a wink that
said, “I’ll cut off your private parts”—which he would, one day, actually say to me. “And feed them to my greyhounds, only they’d probably choke.”

Violence everywhere. Everywhere. Oh, God, how I needed Venetia. Or James. Or any kind of kindness
.

“So—I need to get this clear. If I knew of anything that was ‘undesirable’ as you say—”

The Man with the Cyst interrupted me. “We’re not talking about a fellow who hasn’t put up the tax disc on his car or anything like that. Or hasn’t paid his income tax. Do you get that, Ben?”

I looked at the floor. And took a pause. Which they didn’t interrupt.

“Is this,” I asked, “what they call ‘turning’ somebody?”

The Man with the Cyst smiled. “You must have read a lot of spy books.”

I said, with a touch of rue, “My father.”

“And your next question will be,” said the Man with the Cyst, “what would happen to you if those you turned against found out?”

“I’m not with anyone,” I said, “so you can’t say I’m against anyone.”

“Well, you bloody well should be,” said Larry (who, by the way, went on to become a leading figure in Irish security matters). “Enemies of the state.”

“Larry, you sound like a Communist,” chuckled the Man with the Cyst. “Now, Ben.” He sat on the edge of the banged-up table, his cigarette almost down to the butt. “Do we have some kind of understanding here?”

I said, “I’ll have to think about it.”

To my surprise, he shook his head. “Too late for that, I’m afraid.”

“But I didn’t say a thing.”

He smiled—sympathy, compassion, regret. “My job is to address any implications that these recent activities north of the border have for us.” He became official. “The government has made it clear that it will seek the death penalty for any such killings committed down here. Killers and associates. If and when convicted. And it will extradite to Britain anyone wanted there.”

I said, “Hold on, hold on. I’ve said nothing about anything.”

The Man with the Cyst said, “I could have you in jail within
minutes—and for years.” He snapped his fingers at me. “Fix it. Stay on the right side.”

I backed away. “But either way—”

Larry drew his hand across his throat. “Either way a man could have his neck damaged,” Larry said.

The Man with the Cyst headed for the door. “My advice would be: do the right thing.”

He went. And Larry said, “If I don’t hear from you, Little Boy—I’ll come looking.” He winked again.

Thanks to that delay button in my emotional metabolism, I don’t respond fast to dramatic moments. Whether through paralysis, fear, or a wish to postpone delight, I store them until I can control them. How else could I have not shrunk into drink after such a meeting?

And what, children, happened next that day of the Man with the Cyst? I met Jimmy Bermingham again—the man upon whom I was supposed to inform. At the funeral party he had asked me to come and meet his “heart’s delight.”

“If she’s that important to you, Jimmy, why do you keep calling her ‘Dirty’ Marian?”

“Ah, you’ll see, Ben, you’ll see.”

“I bet she doesn’t like being called that.”

“What she likes, Ben, is a tongue sandwich.” He came close to embarrassing me with his roughness. “D’you know what, Ben? I’m always wanting to feel her.”

His cackle defined the word “lewd.”

We met inside the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, the iconic locus of the 1916 rebellion. He wore a brand-new coat, identical to the one wrecked by Elma Sloane’s father, including the brown velvet collar tabs. Hopped up with excitement, he said to me, “Any minute
now, Ben. Any shaggin’ minute.” He waxed dramatic. “She’s going to walk through that door, and she’ll have a basket on her arm, and it’ll be full of letters.”

“What’s her name?”

“She’s a Killeen, Ben, from Mayo. ‘Mayo, God help us’—isn’t that the old saying?”

We stood there, looking all around for a girl with a basket. We saw girls with handbags. We saw girls with parcels. We saw girls with dogs on leashes. My guess is that we stood there for at least an hour.

“Maybe,” I suggested, “she’s coming on another day. Or maybe she’s gone to a different post office.”

My patience drifted—and then Jimmy jerked his head.

“Hey, Ben, look.”

A tall girl, with, indeed, a basket of letters, walked to a window and spoke to the person behind the brass grille. “Dirty” Marian? No. Not in any way. Nothing low-grade or lewd here. Graciousness, yes, and reserve. A swan’s neck. An aloof head. A walk so poised that she might have trained as a dancer.

“Go over and say hello.”

Jimmy said, “No, no, we mustn’t do that, Ben, that’s the last thing we must do.” He saw me puzzle at this. “Give it a minute, Ben; we’ll see what she does.” He began to babble. “I don’t want to interrupt her, like, when she’s in the middle of her tasks. She’s very efficient, and she doesn’t appreciate it if you don’t let her do things the way she wants to.”

I watched her transact her basket of mail. Handed a form to sign, she took off her right glove and reached into her purse for a green fountain pen. When she had signed, she restored the glove.

“Listen.” I grabbed Jimmy Bermingham’s arm and gripped. “You have to tell me now, Jimmy, this instant. Why do you call her ‘Dirty’ Marian?”

“Kind of a joke, Ben.”

“But it misrepresents her completely.”

“Isn’t that the joke?”

I asked, “And she’s in on this joke?”

“Jesus, no. She’d kill me if she knew.”

“Then stop using that name to describe her.”

Marian Killeen. Actually, Marian Bernadette Killeen. How important
she would become to me. We watched her at the window. She unloaded her basket, piece by steady piece. When I changed positions to view the clerk behind the brass grille, I saw the deference in his face.