The Matchmaker of Kenmare (31 page)

Using her very slow and simple up-and-down method, Miss Begley scanned the map of Ireland, from Donegal down to the tip of west Kerry, from the coast of north Antrim down to the Saltee Islands off the Wexford coast in the southeast. Along those lines and at no point in between did the pendulum once halt or quiver.

“She’s not in this country,” she murmured, so softly that I had to ask what she’d said.

Now she turned to Europe. She began with Scandinavia; no surprises; I hadn’t expected any.

“Avoid the war,” I suggested, and we covered Spain and Portugal. The fruitlessness, the deadness of the needle, began to bore into my brain.

“Europe is the least likely,” I said. “There’s nowhere she’d have felt safe. What about America?”

I’d been told that Sarah Kelly, my mother-in-law, had boarded a liner for the United States not long after Venetia’s disappearance. My own mother had mentioned America—not exactly a pinpoint; and some other gossip had long ago said Florida. Did I dare suggest Florida? No. I lay back, then stood and walked around.

“Do I want to go on with this?” I asked myself, and didn’t realize that I’d spoken aloud.

Miss Begley said, “A pain endured is an inch grown.”

I spun around to look at her—because she hadn’t spoken claptrap for such a long time.

She climbed from the bed and walked to me. I, stretching, had my hands on my head, and she wrapped her arms around my body so tight that I could think of nothing.

I said, “We’ll drop it.”

“Whatever you like, Ben.” She gave me an extra squeeze and turned to putting all her maps away.

We ate supper. For long intervals we said nothing. She played with her hair a great deal, and every time we caught each other’s eye she smiled at me as though I were the most important man in the world.

Next morning, I joined forces with her in earnest. Together we set out a list of information that we needed, and its possible sources. I rode my bicycle down into Kenmare and returned with every newspaper that I could buy. At the library I searched for any and every book about war that she hadn’t already taken out.

Were we crazy? I thought so—but what was the alternative? Faced with her drive, I had to either help or go away. I tried to think my position through—I was assisting in the search for somebody whom I believed dead, and I had a strong belief that all the inquiries Miss Begley was making, or was about to make, would either confirm that fact or lead her down long roads to nowhere.

A thought ran through my mind like one of those songs that you can’t shake off:
Who could be better qualified for such a task? Haven’t I spent a dozen years searching?

We approached it in a disciplined way. At my suggestion, we entered in a large notebook various snippets of information about the fighting in France. I, the eater of newspapers, tracked every paragraph on the Allied advance.

Four sessions of three hours, fifteen-minute breaks—we worked from eight o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night. In the last effort of every day we compared notes, and then tried to assess whether we’d advanced our knowledge of the war to any purpose.

But we were amateurs, butterflies alighting on this vast burning tree. I joined in her assumptions—that Captain Miller had worked forward from Fauville in the Allied push. We agreed that he could have gone anywhere; up northwest to the Belgian border or due east to wait for the American troops slamming up from the south of France. If fit enough, he might even, in disguise, have reached Berlin by now, to run some kind of deadly work there. Who knew?

Actually—one man might. And I suggested his name.

Miss Begley “eyebrowed” me, that “lawyer’s look,” as I called it, and I said, in something of a hurry, “Why don’t I go and talk to him?”

“I’ll do it,” she said.

“Let me.”

She frowned. “Why do you think I shouldn’t?”

“He might be afraid of Charles.”

She said, “But Charles is a sweetheart.”

“I still think,” I said, “that it might be better if you let me do it.”

“Ben, it’s my husband we’re looking for.”

“But suppose you learn something about the kind of work Charles does in the army?” I was training myself to remain in the present tense.

“You mean that he’s an assassin? Oh, he told me that ages ago.”

“Will you tell Mr. Seefeld that you’re married?”

And she said, airy as a sprite, “I’ll tell him I’ve found a wife for Charles.”

“Then he’ll want to marry you,” I said.

She replied, “I can handle Mr. Seefeld.”

As you did before
, I thought, and surprised myself at the bitterness of my jealousy.

By mid-October, the Allies had liberated much of France—but the German armies had shocked the world with the ferocity of their retreat. Initially, as the
maquisards
had done in the south, the Germans used the terrain to their advantage. The rich farms along the coast of northern France had been fenced for centuries by tall, tough hedgerows, and the Allied troops found these medieval bocages unfamiliar and impenetrable.

When the fighting moved inland, the Germans, directed from Berlin, and led by some of the best soldiers the world had ever seen, defended as though attacking. The Allies experienced many, many days in which they took two steps forward and one step back. And often one and a half steps back. And sometimes two. And days came when they took three steps back, thrown into reverse by massive German infantry and air bombardments. That’s what we’d run into in the little town near Dieppe.

Viewed from neutral Ireland all of this might as well have been a drama of the silver screen. The newsreels in the cities, though, didn’t make it to the country towns for weeks. In Killarney they showed the Normandy landings two months after the event. Those who watched the newsreels felt pleasantly knowledgeable, as though they were viewing the confirmation of what they had already ascertained from their reading. The Irish newspapers, generally up-to-date, also seemed to tell the war from the German point of view, too. Neutrality might yet be our guide.

Mr. Seefeld beamed at us like the moon. Miss Begley pretended to be checking on his health and general well-being; I behaved as though collecting his lore. I’d written him a postcard, giving dates. On the second of those, we called on him—a Sunday, at Miss Begley’s suggestion: “He has no religion.”

“Kate, will you find me a wife on Lamb’s Head?”

She laughed and said, “There’s only my grandmother and myself.”

He said, “It is not a grandmother that I wish to marry.”

By now he had recovered so much that he almost had a twinkle. She laughed again—but kept him charmed, and on a leash.

After sipping the elderberry wine that he’d made, and admiring the four cats, and marveling at the weather, I chose to dive in.

“If you were looking for an officer in the middle of this war, where would you look?”

He laughed. “Ben, my friend, what tricks are you doing now?”

My mind called up the picture of how frail he’d looked walking up the jetty that morning, or standing beside me on the trawler’s deck. How had he recovered so well? Not only had he been through the trauma of kidnapping that we’d inflicted on him, he’d been grieving for his wife—and God knows I was familiar with that feeling.

“No tricks,” I said. “There’s somebody we need to find.”

He asked, still smiling, “Your side or mine?”

I said, “It’s somebody you know.”

He knew whom I meant, and said, his face growing cold, “Don’t look for him. Let the war take him.”

I saw Miss Begley wince—but only I, who knew her so well, could have caught it. She braved the moment.

“It’s kind of urgent,” she said. “A girl, a local girl—she’s very worried about him.”

“What do you know,” I asked, “about the term
Special Operations
? That’s what he does.”

Mr. Seefeld looked at us. “It means that he’s a bad man.”

Miss Begley was about to challenge that; my glance stopped her, and I asked, “What’s the equivalent in your army?”

He said, “Our problem was that we didn’t have enough of them. Where we did—it worked perfectly.”

“Explain,” I said, and he settled to the task.

“In many places all over Europe, especially at the beginning of the war, when we feared great local opposition, we sent in officers dressed as businessmen or clergy or whatever might be acceptable. They went into a local community and organized support for us.”

Miss Begley asked, “How efficiently did that work?”

“We fomented attacks against the police in France. We assassinated local leaders who might have led resistance to us.”

I said, “Is that what Captain Miller does?”

Mr. Seefeld reflected. “I’d say—no. If I were to guess, I’d say he’s deep behind our lines, German lines, that is.”

“As far as Berlin?” I asked.

“No, not that far.” And all the while my brain is saying to me,
He’s in a war cemetery in France, not far from the city of Rouen, that’s the fact
. Followed by the thought:
But we’re not dealing with real facts, are we? We’re handling blind faith
.

Miss Begley said, “How much do you know about the kind of work Captain Miller is doing?”

“We used to call our fellows ‘the wolves,’ ” said Mr. Seefeld. “But Miller doesn’t belong in a pack.”

I said, my mind in a shudder, “Why wolves?”

“The fear. Everybody fears wolves. They’re silent. They kill.”

I was about to say, “That isn’t always true,” but Mr. Seefeld continued. “I asked Miller about his work. Do you know what he said? Nothing. He said nothing. When I asked him what his work was, he just laughed and did this.” Mr. Seefeld clutched his hand to his throat and made strangling noises.

Miss Begley pressed. “Where would you search for him?”

“In Hell,” said Mr. Seefeld.

I, laughing to reduce the sting, said, “No—where would one look seriously?”

He left the room and came back with a map of Europe; it bore all kinds of marks; he’d been following the war as closely as we had.

“Look here,” he said, and drew with his finger a line that ran northeast, from Paris to Berlin. He circled Liège, in Belgium.

“That’s where the worst fighting will be,” he said, “my country’s last stand.” He shuddered. “I don’t know why any of this happened. I don’t know. I don’t know anything,” and he began to cry, a man still in shock.

Miss Begley jumped from her chair. “Hans!”

Now he flooded, boo-hooing like a boy. I had no idea what to do.

“Come on,” she said. “You and me’ll go for a little walk,” and she eyebrowed me behind his back.

I sat and talked to the cats. And looked at his map. And retraced his line. And that part of me in which I’d been holding on to some doubts or hopes filled up with the deadweight of premonition, because I knew what was going to happen—we would soon be traveling.

That night, she took out her pendulum—as I’d expected she would do. She concentrated on Liège. It took some time, and after a faint tremor the needle began to swing over an area southeast of Liège, close to the German border. It didn’t pinpoint any one place to her satisfaction, and she said that she’d try again.

We spent another week at Lamb’s Head. From my next visit to the library I returned with travel guides to northern Germany and Belgium. On their walk together, Miss Begley had elicited advice from Mr. Seefeld.

He told her, “Mirror what he’s doing. Go behind the lines of my armies. The people you will meet are friendly to the Irish. He will be among them, or they will know or suspect something. He will be meeting German resistance, they are under very deep cover, or he will be trying to connect with the German forces by pretending to be a sympathizer.”

“With his accent?” she queried

Mr. Seefeld replied, “He will have said that he lived in America for some years. His false papers will show that.”

When she told me this, I said, “But if we’re captured?”

She said, “He told me to ask the Americans for protection.”

“But we’re not going in with the Allies?” I said, my mind’s voice a shriek.

This was just getting worse and worse. I prayed for the
KILLED IN ACTION
telegram to arrive, and then felt guilty. She sensed my anguish and appeased it by agreeing to go back to the American embassy.
That’s where the truth will catch up with her
, I thought. Followed by the realization,
But will she show any regard for it?

In the second week of November, we waved good-bye to Mrs. Holst—who approved every step her granddaughter was taking. Her only disaffection showed when she saw or listened to me. We didn’t have a confrontation; no matter how she goaded me, I played for peace; I had enough friction going on in my head.

When Mrs. Holst had come back from Cork, she’d announced a curious development in her life—a proposal of marriage. It seemed preposterous to me; she was, after all, in her seventies, therefore ancient to someone my age.

Miss Begley danced at the news. “The matchmaker matched,” she cried, and danced again. And I thought,
Poor bastard doesn’t know what’s going to hit him
.

He, the swain, was the brother of Mrs. Holst’s Cork friend, and he’d also returned from the States, but quite recently. She’d never met him until a few weeks earlier; and, by all her accounts, love had swept in at first sight.
You can always sell to a salesman
, was my thought.

She said that she’d be leaving Lamb’s Head “at some stage in the not-too-distant future.” Mrs. Holst spoke like a strict official.

“Good news all around,” sang Miss Begley. “Imagine? Two brides out of this house in one year!”

And one already a widow
, I thought.

Our plan had been worked out elaborately. First Dublin, and the embassy
once more. Then London, a visit to Claudia at the Ritz. And then—and this staggered me—the small port of Hull in the east of England where, through a contact of Mr. Seefeld, we could get to south Denmark or Kiel in northern Germany.

That was the day I discovered that Miss Begley kept a detailed journal. We had spent hours working out a schedule, and I said to her, “I’m going to bring a notebook and try to keep some kind of record.”