Irregulars (26 page)

The motor rumbles to life, and Jimmy’s hands are shaking and he grips the wheel so tightly to steady them that his knuckles blanch white. Dillon slams the door.

‘Move, it. We were never here.’ He turns in his seat to Nora. ‘We were never here until I find out who them boys you shot up are. No doubt they’re bent rebel boys, so no need to worry.’

He is smiling as he says all this. ‘There was nothing you could do,’ he says, turning to Jimmy, clapping him on the arm. ‘Was there, Jim? A lad moves on you with a knife … isn’t that right, Nora? How it happened? I didn’t need to be there to see how it went. Clear as day, a clever man shoots first, asks questions later, wha?’

They are rounding Stephen’s Green when Nora shakes Jimmy’s shoulder. ‘Stop the car,’ she manages, before flinging open the door in time to vomit onto the footpath.

36

I
t is the same dream O’Keefe has had since he was in the army hospital in Cork, septicaemia souring his blood. He is on the deck of the HMS
River Clyde
, the cargo ship converted to troop carrier and run aground at V Beach, the Turkish rifles and machine-guns grinding to life, like some infernal engine, a mechanical clanking rather than the stop-start stutter of the guns of reality. He is there with Peter as always, but in this version his father is with them in the navy blue uniform of the Dublin Metropolitan Police and holding a photograph of Nicholas Dolan to his chest. Each of them urges the other on, to march down the pontoon bridge to shore, as the men in front of them fall, machine-gun rounds harrying the air like bluebottles over a sheep’s carcass. And now in the dream, the Cunningham boys stand beside O’Keefe and his father and brother, urging them on towards the beach, the water bloody red and bodies floating in the soft wash of waves.

He is awake with a start before the knocking starts. It is the front door this time, but the same voices as in his dream.

‘He’d hardly be sleeping now, sure, we’ve already had our tea and all.’

‘What’d yis have for tea?’ This voice is unfamiliar to O’Keefe, and his bones and muscles ache as he rises from where he had been sleeping on the floor beside his own bed. He remembers why he has slept on the floor and bends down to Finch, who is still unconscious in the bed, feeling his forehead. It is clammy but not hot. Perhaps his fever has passed in the night—in the
day
, he realises. They have slept since morning and O’Keefe checks his wristwatch and finds that it is seven fifteen. From the quality of the light edging through the side gaps in the blinds, he judges it to be evening.

‘Eggs and Bachelor’s,’ O’Keefe hears the youngest of the Cunningham boys say.

The new voice now, older than the two boys’ says, ‘Wha’s “Bachelors”?’

‘What you mean, “what’s Bachelor’s”? Sure, they’re beans, aren’t they?’

‘Are yis mockin me, are yis?’ There is aggression in this new voice, and O’Keefe crosses to the front door of his flat and opens it. Standing with the two Cunningham boys at the bottom of the steps is another boy, of roughly the same size as the older of the brothers but much thinner and, by his face and voice, older. His clothes are thick with street grime and grease and one leg of his trousers is cut shorter than the other over filthy, road-hardened feet. His cap is the cap of a grown man and it swallows his head down to his ears, the back of it resting on a frayed and hole-riddled knit jumper. His pallor is sickly pale and his cheek-bones jab out under dark-ringed eyes that have seen too much. For a moment, he cannot place the boy.

‘Lads, what is it you want?’ His voice is thick with fatigue, and his words come out harsher than he had intended. The Cunningham boys look up at him, and for the first time since he has known them he sees uncertainty in their faces. They look young and wary.

‘This fella …’ Henry says, his eyes going to the new boy and then back to O’Keefe, ‘… he says he’s a message to give you but I said you were sleeping.’

Young Thomas says, ‘He doesn’t know what Bachelor’s beans are, he doesn’t.’

‘I’ll fuckin’ batter you,’ the capped boy growls, and O’Keefe realises where he has seen him.

‘Now, now, lads, none of that. Sure, there’s loads of people who’ve never eaten Bachelor’s beans and so why
would
they know about them?’

‘I’ve eaten beans before, by fuck!’

‘Of course you have,’ O’Keefe says, hunger flaring in his own stomach. ‘And you’ve a message for me, have you?’

‘Yis said yis’d gi’s a pound if we laid eyes on Jerry Byrne, yis did. Last night in the lane …’

‘We did, did you find him?’

The boy’s hand comes out now. The lines of his palm are creased deep with dirt.

‘Does Just … does my friend, Mr Albert, know ye’ve found him?’

‘Me scratch first,’ the boy says, jabbing his open palm at O’Keefe in the doorway.

‘Give us a minute while I fetch my wallet.’

‘Who’s in yer bed, Mr O’Keefe?’ Thomas Cunningham says, poking his head inside the room.

‘A friend is all. And he’s very sick at the moment so don’t be knocking him up, right?’ O’Keefe returns to the doorway, cursing himself for his carelessness. Mrs Cunningham is as kind a landlady as a man could ask for, but she would hardly stand for a man sweating out his fever from a bullet wound in her rented bed.

‘Here,’ O’Keefe says to the boy. He places a pound note on the boy’s outstretched palm and the fingers snap closed around it like a mousetrap.

‘Now then. Does my friend know you’ve found the lad?’

‘How should I fuckin’ know? I’m only here and not everywhere, amn’t I? And maybe there’s more than ye lookin’ him.’

Remembering the dead boys in the morgue, a bead of fear runs down O’Keefe’s spine. ‘And who would that be?’

‘Who’m I, Madam Zoraster, the fortune tellin’ gypo?’

‘So you don’t know, then, if there’s others still looking for the Byrne lad.’

The boy shrugs, the shadow of a feral smile tugging at his lips.

O’Keefe considers this. There may be others looking for Jeremiah Byrne and there may not be. Regardless, if he can get to the boy before Just Albert, he can save the lad some considerable suffering. ‘Where is he then?’

The boy shoves the pound note into his pocket and extends the palm once again.

‘I just paid you, youngfella. Where’s the Byrne lad?’

‘Yeh paid me to tell if yer friend knew ’bout where he is. I told yeh tha’.’

‘You told me you didn’t know.’

‘Yeh pay for an answer, yeh get an answer, even if it’s not the one yeh want. Another quid for where Jerry’s does be laying low, before he’s gone from there and yis’re none the wiser.’

O’Keefe smiles at the boy. As sharp in his own way as any boy from the best school in Dublin. Two pounds would feed him and his mates for a week or more, but O’Keefe knows it won’t go on food. The boys will drink whiskey and cider and gin instead of meth spirits and smoke Sweet Aftons tonight, and tomorrow they will still be hungry and working the backs of pubs and public toilets, dipping bags on Grafton Street under the clouting fists of policemen and hackney drivers. He places another pound note in the boy’s hand.

‘He’s at the Achill. The doss-house back the Smithfield markets, on the lane off Bow Street. One of our lads bunked in to tap the punters in the showers and there the cunt was before him.’

‘Thanks for that,’ O’Keefe says, and to his surprise, the boy touches the brim of his oversized cap and turns for the stairs up to the footpath.

O’Keefe says, ‘Wait a tick, youngfella.’ He dips back inside and returns to the boy, handing him a tin of Bachelor’s beans.

The boy holds the tin in his hand and stares at the label. ‘Beans?’ he says. ‘Why’re yeh givin me beans?’

‘They’re Bachelor’s. You said you’d never tried them.’

After studying the tin for another long moment, the boy touches his cap brim again and says, ‘Thanks, Mister.’ He then mounts the steps to the footpath and is gone.

‘You know that lad, Mr O’Keefe?’ Henry Cunningham says.

‘I’ve met him once. He was to bring me a message is all.’

‘He’s a fierce one for the cursing, so he is,’ Thomas says, with more than a little awe in his voice.

‘Right, shove off now, fellas. And don’t be bothering my sick friend, right?’

‘We fuckin’ won’t, will we not, Tommy?’

‘Fuckin’ won’t, bejaysus.’

‘Lads, don’t be cursing.’

‘Sorry, Mr O’Keefe.’

The boys are halfway up the stairs before the first of them says ‘cunt’, and they erupt in laughter.

37

… that this sham state be considered the independent Ireland we fought and died for is inconceivable to me and my comrades in the true Republican Army of Ireland. That traitors, hand in glove with their former Crown masters, should so seek to suppress our striving for a true republic, causes me unspeakable grief and fills me and my men—good and true and virtuous young men—with a righteous rage that will triumph. As God is our witness we will take any measures to ensure the birth of the republic that is divinely ordained as ours by right. We will do anything in our power to resist this rotten compromise of a Treaty brought to the nation by men so seduced by power and prestige that they have abandoned the future of Ireland as entrusted to us by our Father in heaven …

It is after eight when the familiar—but this time unexpected—knock sounds on the closet door to O’Hanley’s hidden room, and he puts down his pen and lifts the Webley from the table beside his journal.

‘Stephen,’ O’Hanley says, letting the young soldier in, Gilhooley’s face as ashen white as the clean sheets on his bed.

Words rush from the young man in a cascade. ‘They followed us, from the hotel. Murphy’s in with them, I’m tellin’ you. He placed a call, down to the front desk while I was there. He was telling someone, I swear to fuck. And the girl, on the desk, she’s one of them. She came with some heavies to the shop. My father …’ His voice chokes with rage and tears well up in his eyes, surprising O’Hanley.

‘Stephen, slow down, please. What happened? In with whom?’

‘With CID or Free State intelligence. Murphy. I swear to fuck, I was there, leaving the money, like you said when he makes me wait and rings the desk lookin’ for drinks. Half ten in the morning, lookin’ brandy and lemonade or some shite. And as I’m hoofin’ it back downstairs to the lorry, who do I see? Only the girl at the front desk, on her way up. And not twenty minutes later does she and two other fellas, Charlie Dillon and another lad with a tommy-gun, show up at Da’s shop and …’ Again, the words lodge in his throat.

‘And?’

‘And they shot me da and the brothers. All three of them shot down dead!’ His voice cracks with emotion and he pivots and raises his fist as if he will drive it into the wall.

O’Hanley places a hand on his shoulder. ‘Are you sure it was the same girl? From the front desk?’

The young gunman lowers his fist and nods. ‘It was.’

The commandant is silent for a long moment. He rubs his face and his hair, rage stirring his own blood now.

‘You left the money, you did?’

‘I did. I didn’t know at the time it was a set-up.’

‘And you weren’t followed here? After …’

‘Of course I bleedin’ wasn’t followed. The two of us legged it and gave them the slip and then waited til dark to make it back. Jesus fuckin’ wept, me?
Followed?
’

O’Hanley winces at the obscenity but ignores Gilhooley’s wounded pride. ‘Two of ye? Who else was with you?’

‘Nicky Dolan.’

‘Nicky is alive?’ O’Hanley’s eyes widen with surprise, and a smile comes unbidden to his lips. His favourite has survived. And as he thinks this, he realises that it had been after sending Nicholas and young Robert O’Donnell to the hotel, to deliver the second of the messages, that the two went missing. Murphy, the traitor. The snake. The smile shunts off his lips under this new weight of knowledge: there will be no shipment. No guns, no gelignite and no detonators. None of the promised field guns for the promised future, and without these things he and his fellow republicans will not take back Dublin; and without Dublin, there is nothing for it but to head to the mountains and wage war like tinkers, taking potshots at armoured cars, robbing banks and post offices. Like common criminals, sleeping in ditches and praying for clear nights while Mulcahy and his Free State henchmen bed down for the long marriage of convenience with the King.

‘We need to get the money back,’ he says. He is breathing hard from his nose. That bag of money being the future of the republic they are fighting for. Fourteen thousand odd pounds.

Stephen nods. ‘I’ll get it back meself if I’ve to hunt Murphy and his two goons to Blighty and fuckin’ back. The three of them are walking dead already.’

This time O’Hanley lets the cursing wash over him. He wishes he was the kind of man to take comfort in swearing, in blasphemy and hard talk. But he is not. He is a man of action who is left to rot in this room directing others to do what is right and just and proper for the republic that is rightfully, by God himself ordained, theirs.

‘Do what you have to, Stephen. Just get the money back.’

Stephen turns to leave.

‘And Stephen? Send Nicky up, will you?’

38

O
’Keefe shuts down the Trusty and wheels it into the light from the front doors of the Achill Guest House on Bow Street. He has misgivings about leaving the bike unchained in this part of town at a time when fighters from both sides of the conflict are requisitioning transport of any kind. He has heard that a good deal of commandeering is unofficial; that there are Free State soldiers as well as Irregulars taking their mothers to mass in requisitioned Rolls–Royces. He gives the Trusty a long look, says a small, reflexive prayer that it will still be there when he comes out, and mounts the steps of the Achill.

The lobby walls are tiled, the floor a scuffed black and white parquet studded with crushed dogends smoked down to nothing. Along the wall to the right there is a short queue of men waiting before a reception booth surrounded by wire mesh. A small window is cut into the mesh through which the cashier transacts his business. Some in the queue are day labourers and one or two appear to O’Keefe to be dockers or small farmers’ sons up from the country. Some of them may only need a bed for one night before returning to wherever they have come from, but most, O’Keefe reckons, know only places such as this as home, where the lobby smells of stale sweat and alcohol
and failure. This is a place where men stay when they have no place else.

A man in a torn tweed jacket and oversized trousers rolled up at the bottom stands in front of the caged reception with his cap clutched to his chest, trying to slide two coins through the dinner-plate-sized window to the cashier.

The cashier—a tidy, balding man with a thin moustache, a blue-grey necktie and braces over a white shirt—berates the man in a west of Ireland accent.

‘You stink of the road. And you expect us take you in just because you’ve begged the shrapnel for one night’s bed? You stink like a beast of the fields. The whole house’ll stink of you. How am I to know you won’t shite the bunk you’re given for that shilling?’

The dosser’s words strain the tiled walls in a high-pitched pleading that is abject and shameful to hear. The men in the queue look down at their feet or away at the walls, knowing it might soon be them begging for a bed. ‘But sure,’ the man in torn tweed says, ‘doesn’t everybody reek of the terrible hard times that are in it? I’ve come for a wash as well as a bed.’

‘You’ve only enough money for a bed and no wash. You may let the rain wash you and not be reeking up the whole of this house with your stench. Now shove off with you, before I have in the police.’

‘But I have the money. You told me last night not to come back til I had coin for a bed, and now I have it.’

Anger catches in O’Keefe’s throat as he watches. The cashier’s threat of the police galls him further. A small man with small power, abusing it on the down-and-outs. As if the police were the muscled arm of his pettiness. He approaches the cage and says to the pleading man, ‘How much for a bed for the night?’

The man in tweed turns to O’Keefe, fear dilating dark pupils, his cap clutched in front of his heart like a shield. ‘I … two bob.’ He turns back to the cashier. ‘Jesus in heaven, sir, why’d you call the guards in, you needn’t have done that! I’ve money and all and …’

‘I’m not a guard,’ O’Keefe says, using the common term for policemen in Dublin. ‘And even if I was, I wouldn’t be running like a lackey for this jumped-up fucker.’ He turns to the man in the cage.

The cashier is standing now, and pointing his finger behind the wire mesh. ‘Who do you think you are? Calling me that? I’ll have the police in on
you
, I will, for vicious slander.’

O’Keefe senses the men in the queue take a collective step back and, holding the cashier’s eyes, he flashes his hand through the cage’s window and grabs the man’s necktie, jerking him forward so that his face bangs the wire mesh. He pulls at the tie and wraps it in his fist, trapping the cashier’s face against the cage. With his other hand, he dips into his jacket pocket and takes out Ginny Dolan’s roll of banknotes. He hands it to the man in tweed, turning his head to count the men in the queue.

The man in tweed stares at the roll of notes and back to O’Keefe. ‘What?’ His mouth sags open in wonder.

‘Take two pound notes off that roll and put them through the window here,’ O’Keefe says, tugging harder at the cashier’s necktie so that the man’s cheek extrudes through the mesh in small, fleshy diamonds. The man is grunting, unable to open his mouth to call out.

‘Then put the roll back in my pocket.’

Tweed looks to his fellow dossers in the queue, and O’Keefe can see one or two of them nodding and cracking small smiles. The man takes two notes and slides them through the window, carefully avoiding touching O’Keefe’s fist wrapped in the cashier’s tie.

‘There’s rent for two nights’ bed, bath and feed for these men,’ O’Keefe says to the cashier. ‘You’re to give them the tickets they’ll need, and if one of them, so help me God, is abused by you, and I hear about it, I’ll come back and pull you through this window and batter three shades of shite out you, d’you hear me?’

The cashier gives a small, painful nod and O’Keefe releases him.

‘Now, where are the showers in this place?’ he asks the cashier, who slumps back into his chair, the imprint of the wire mesh an angry red grid on his face.

‘Through there, sir,’ the man in tweed says, stepping behind O’Keefe, eager to help and pointing to the door leading into the main hallway of the doss-house. ‘And down to your right, down the end of the hallway. Then downstairs and past the canteen. And bless you, sir. God bless you and yours.’

‘Good man,’ O’Keefe says, patting the man on the arm. ‘Sleep well.’

Men loiter in the main hallway of this former hospital under the gas jets, and O’Keefe stops at one group and asks have they seen any lads of Jerry Byrne’s description in the Achill. The men shake their heads and will not meet O’Keefe’s eyes. He had not expected more from them and does not attempt to buy the information. Gone is the terror of informing from the days of the Tan War, but very few men would accept payment for information in front of other men for the age-old shame of it.

He follows a yellowing, handwritten sign down cellar stairs to the canteen and scans the few remaining diners there, seated at long benches with arms shielding steaming tin plates piled high with cabbage and potatoes and small, fatty morsels of greying bacon. No boys are among them. He thinks to ask one of the serving women—older, thick-bodied women whose faces are carved into permanent frowns—but decides against it. Boys under eighteen years are not permitted to stay in the Achill, and a kitchen woman would hardly admit to serving one for fear of losing her job and ending up in the female version of this place. He leaves the canteen and makes his way down the long hallway to the swinging doors marked ‘Showers’.