The Matchmaker of Kenmare (45 page)

“Was that his tunic? With the blood?”

“Some people like taking souvenirs. But I already told you that.”

I tried again. “Did Miller come after you and fail? And did Volunder then go after Miller and succeed?”

He showed no emotion. The war had aged him—he looked like a man in his late forties, not thirty-one years of age.

“You would have to ask Volunder that.”

I realized that Peiper might have feared another war crime charge, so I changed tack.

“Please. His widow—his wife, my friend—she thinks Miller is still alive. Give me something to tell her. The war’s over.”

Peiper looked a little uncomfortable. He took his time about answering.

“He was a tough man,” he said. “Very tough. If he’d been one of mine, I’d have given him great responsibility.”

When I first met Sebastian Volunder, my skin had shrunk a little. With Peiper I felt none of that. I argued with myself as to why;
I’ve bathed and shaved
, I told myself.
I’ve even got new clothes. I’m human again, first time in almost two years. That’s why
.

And whatever his coldness, and however dreadfully he’d infringed the rules of war, Peiper felt like a soldier, and I began to make excuses for him along those lines. And then I said to myself,
How tired I am from this swinging, this side-to-side movement of my allegiances; on this side for a time, then on that side; supporters of “our” armies for a time, then at least understanding “their” armies because I met “their” soldiers, and “their” ordinary, countryside people. Neutrality, or is it indecision, and worse, cowardice? I’m tired of it
.

Once in a while, though not very often, and never for long, I see myself clearly, and in that particular glimpse at Dachau, I had a flash of reason and objectivity. For a second or two, I knew where I stood on everything—the war, my own loss, the woman back in New York, and her dreadful pain.

Now I have to tell you a horrible fact about myself. I acknowledge it as such; I will accept any epithet you launch at me, even though I am your father. If I have a defense—and perhaps I shouldn’t be allowed one—I will say that the war brutalized me.

Meeting Volunder, who was more thug than soldier, interviewing Peiper, who was more soldier than thug, associating with Killer Miller—all of that reduced my decent sensibilities, and I learned that, if given the opportunity, I could be as bad as they were. That’s all I will say in my defense.

If you want to be kind to me, add in the years of stolen and lost youth, of tender love and innocence destroyed, the savage and cynical
plundering of two young people, and a vile and violent separation motivated by greed and punishment.

All of these may provide understanding of what I did when I returned from Dachau—but they do not excuse action. Yet, as I learned in war, action too often overstates motive. I know; I killed a man in the deep snow. Yes, please allow me to defend myself by saying that I was morally reduced by the war. I knew that I could cross boundaries of an unspeakable nature.

And so—have you guessed what I’m about to tell you? Have you guessed that I went back to Templebeg, to find the house with the blue door? And found Cody? Raymond Cody, the rat. The milk-faced, snotty-nosed, hand-washing rat, the accountant planted on an unknowing Venetia by her appalling grandfather, the rat who set up—or so I suspected—the plot that took Venetia away from me and, if she weren’t still alive, led to her death.

If ever you behave brutally—and I hope you never do—the emotional consequences will appall you. Observe how your ego will change as you do so. You will believe that everything around you is conspiring against you, and that therefore you have to act. In my case, I left Germany in a bate of rage—unsatisfied, unfulfilled, unsteady. Neither of the two essential loose ends in my life had been tied, and I must have needed to take it out on someone.

When I saw that Cody’s brother had painted the blue door of his house a dull white, I believed that he had done it to fool me, to make me think that the house in Templebeg had never existed or that it now belonged to others.

It worked in part. I didn’t go to the door, I didn’t knock—I observed. I watched to see whether the slobbering brother and his fool-faced wife still lived there. Parking the car several hundred yards away, I went back to my previous vantage point among the trees. I had to wait several hours—and then I struck gold. Or lead. Or sewage. Or whatever I want to call him.

You understand, don’t you, that I had no evidence to implicate Cody in Venetia’s disappearance. I had nothing to go on beyond the fact that he had disappeared at the same time and that he had been the one to tell the members of Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show the troupe was disbanded. That’s what they told me when I went to the trouble of finding
each and every one of them. As the years went by, I became persuaded and then convinced of Cody’s guilt. Now at least one knot could be sealed.

Around eleven o’clock, with the sun choked by overcast, a light rain began to fall. The dull white door opened and somebody peered out. Not the brother, not the unmade bed of a wife—a different person. Moments later, clutching the collar of his raincoat to his chin, Raymond Cody emerged. Even at that distance I could tell the hooked nose, the pasty flour-and-water face. I watched—and judged that he intended to walk to the crossroads bus stop.

The rain thickened. I went to the car, turned around, drove in Cody’s footsteps, caught up with him, halted, and opened the passenger door. Remember—I know every lane in the Irish countryside. I turned my face away from the passenger side and said, “Hop in.”

“Oh thanks, thanks very much”—still the same nasal whine.

When he closed the door and again said, “Thanks very much,” I accelerated and turned my face full on to him.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Let me out, I can walk.”

I said, “You’re walking nowhere.”

Now and again on the road over the years, I’ve found myself far from a decent house at nightfall. It never felt ideal, and I knew that my own depression was causing me to damage myself in that way. It did, however, teach me where the old barns were all across the country, and ruined houses that still had portions of roof, or even old castles that could offer more than a smidgen of shelter.

In the wooded hills above Templebeg stood a derelict mansion that had once known delusions of grandeur. The roof had long fallen in, except on one tower, and I had found a way into that turret room by a staircase hidden in the ivy at the rear. Rain or no rain, I drove up the ruined old avenue, under low-hanging branches that swiped the
windshield, and parked on the old terrace that had fronted the main door.

Twice en route, Cody had attempted to open the car door. The first time I reached across him and slammed it shut again. And the second time I did nothing, but said, “If you do attempt to get out, I will kill you. I will knock you unconscious and drive the car over your head multiple times.”

I took my pens, and my toolbox, which had pliers, screwdrivers, wrenches, a ball of string, and a bradawl. I pushed him up the staircase ahead of me. Nobody would ever find him in this bleak place, not for months, maybe years. Forensic science hadn’t yet advanced to a sophisticated level; even if they used dental records I’d have taken a bet that Cody had never seen a dentist in his life. He had teeth like a yellow rat, and even the front ones needed fillings.

This plan of mine had been laid over many years, and with the greatest possible care. And why not? He had conspired to destroy all that I held dear—he might even have been Venetia’s killer.

We had almost no light in that damp, ruined room. Old furniture stood there—a broken armchair, a table propped against the wall because it lacked a leg. I twisted it around, so that it leaned against the wall propped on its two good legs.

Cody was small. With my big hands I was easily able to pinch his windpipe between finger and thumb, the means by which I pushed him back against the table. When I had him there, I held him by the throat as I tied him to the slanting wood and I didn’t care if the cords cut him. He cared, though, squealing like a puppy.

“What are you doing?”

“You mean you don’t know?” I asked. “Be patient, Ray, be patient.”

Am I that cruel? I must be, mustn’t I? Or was it simply that thirteen years of pain and loss and worry came flowing out of me like molten fire? Either way, I can’t be proud of it—and I’m not. I hope you find some comfort in that.

When I had him tied, I ripped open his shirt. I’d allowed him to keep on his coat for no particular reason; I didn’t care, provided I could get to some expanse of bare flesh, and now I had his chest exposed to me.

On the floor, I spread my tools—pliers, bradawl, wrench. He started to weep.

“Ben, don’t. Ben, don’t hurt me, Jesus’ sake, Ben, don’t. Ben, please.”

Pliers in hand, I stood in front of him and inspected his chest—so scrawny that finding loose flesh might prove difficult. I found a patch, above his left nipple, took it between the jaws of the pliers, and twisted. He almost lifted the table off the ground, so hard did he squirm. And he almost blew my left eardrum, so loud did he shriek. I twisted the flesh above the right nipple much harder. Then I stopped and stood back.

“I will now do the same to every loose piece of flesh, tissue, or muscle in your body,” I said.

“Why, why?” He could scarcely get the words out.

“If you ask me why again, I’ll start on your eyes earlier than I intended.”

“I didn’t touch her, I didn’t touch her.”

“So you do know why you’re here?”

“Two fellas came in a truck. We all had to hurry, people nearly saw us.”

I said, “How did you do it?”

“They had a shotgun. Old Kelly’s shotgun.”

I said, “King Kelly’s gun?”—meaning Venetia’s grandfather.

“Yes, I had to take it back to him.”

“Where did you bury her?”

“What? What d’you mean?”

This time I caught the flesh where it wrinkled next to his armpit and I twisted very hard and very fast.

“Don’t ask stupid questions.”

“She was never buried.”

So I moved to the other armpit; he shrieked again. By now he was losing control of his body—and I had scarcely begun.

“She never died, Ben. We didn’t harm her. We didn’t, we didn’t.”

I stopped. It hit me like a blow. For all my hopes, I had believed her dead. In all the searching, and the digging in forests, and the endless questions, and the resisted mournings, and the volatile hopes—I had lived in the belief that they’d killed her, even though I fought it and fought it.

“What happened?”

“We took her to Galway. There was a ship.”

When I heard this, why didn’t my steady, controlled rage that I had been building so carefully to get me through this exercise, why didn’t it begin to subside? I didn’t feel it slipping one jot; I had no difficulty keeping it going. If anything, it mounted.

“A ship to where?” I reached for my bradawl and began to polish it on my sleeve.

“Ben. To America. She’s in America, Ben.”

“Where in America?”

“She’s in Florida, Ben, Jesus, Ben, my skin, Ben, it’s burning me.”

“Big place, Florida. Where in Florida?” I could hear my own voice as though it came from a distant metallic source.

“A beach, Ben, an Atlantic beach.”

“Florida is lined with Atlantic beaches.”

He twisted and turned. I saw that his face was turning blue—with shock, I supposed, and a pool of urine had gathered at his feet.

“Tell me how to find her,” I said.

So now you know. How many men of your acquaintance—indeed of your own blood—have killed and gone on to torture?

I made Cody write it down. Freeing him from the cords, I gave him a pen and made him write the name and the address in my notebook. He talked as he did so, and told me how, at the orders of King Kelly, Cody had paid certain people to tell me stories that would lead me to believe Venetia had died—or was still living. King Kelly knew that I was traveling the country, asking everywhere, and he chose a number of people who would plant false and conflicting information on me. When Cody told me, I saw the pattern, and recalled how many had done so—here, there, and everywhere.

My head began to hurt. I’d always been more right than wrong; I’d often had the suspicion that I was being manipulated. Now Cody was giving me the proof.

I asked him a series of questions: Venetia’s health; her mother; how she lived. And I stopped, disgusted that I was receiving such intimate news from the man who had taken her away from me.

Suddenly the air in that old room smelled foul. I wrestled back the ancient shutters and let the breeze blow through the broken windowpanes.

Fool! He was gone—gone like a bat out of hell. I hadn’t finished with him, so I took off after him. He vanished. I heard him clatter down the old staircase and then silence, as though his feet had hit the long grasses outside.

Racing down the stairs, I tried to see a path in the grass, but found no trace. Had he turned and run into the old ruin itself? Where he could hide for years and nobody would find him?

I could sit him out—which would stop him getting away from me and going to the police. But if I sat him out, would I kill him? And then hide his body? Probably drop it into one of the deep ice-pits below the mansion kitchen floors? He might never be found—or be a skeleton if a rambler or a hunter or a nosy child eventually found him?

How fortunate that I’d had such experience of war, where decisions of massive emotional import were forced on me minute by minute. There I stood, wrestling with, on one hand, a decision whether to kill somebody—whom I’d just been torturing; and on the other hand to go and reclaim my lost and deeply beloved wife who was alive and well.

Note, by the way, that I didn’t ask Cody how Venetia’s pregnancy had borne fruit. Some things are just too much to bear.

At that moment, something good occurred—my inner voice began to return. It had been absent through most of Europe and the war. I’d scarcely heard it when we were shelled in France; hardly a cheep did it make in the forests of Belgium. Now it came back, in full voice and sharp as ever, my conscience, my sardonic adviser, my only means of control over myself. Its first words?
Well now, Venetia found, eh? Don’t you know the old saying? Be careful what you wish for
.