Echobeat (10 page)

‘Yes. I had to bring her up to the bedroom to collect his things. While she looked down her nose at everything.’

‘What did she say?’

‘About the house? Oh, nothing. But she didn’t make any secret of what she thought of it.’ She raised her head in another unconscious sniff. ‘All beneath her.’

‘What did she say about Herr Goertz?’

‘Just that he sent his thanks. That’s all. No mention of all we had done for him. Given him Christmas dinner and everything.’ She paused. ‘Just “thanks”. That was all. Offhand. Like I was one of her servants.’

‘You know her?’

‘I know of her. And her type.’ She stood up and got a packet of Sweet Aftons from a counter. She offered him one and he lit both. ‘All airs and graces. You should hear her accent. She was only a nurse when she married Surgeon O’Shea. But you should hear her now. All hoity-toity.’

‘Surgeon O’Shea?’ he said, like he was trying to place him.

‘You know him?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You’d know if you knew him,’ she nodded to herself. ‘If you know what I mean. He hobnobs with all the powers that be these days. Knows all the so-called right people. From the old days.’ She looked him in the eye, squinting through a plume of smoke. ‘The glorious years.’

He nodded. The War of Independence years, she meant. Before it all ended in civil war.

‘He was a young doctor then. Treated more than a few lads who couldn’t go to hospital with their wounds. Then went with de Valera.’

Duggan put the politics of it together without even thinking. O’Shea had been close to the IRA, opposed the treaty, but followed de Valera when he founded Fianna Fáil and came into the Dáil and then into government. Like Timmy, he thought. And the Special Branch sergeant was probably right: Mrs Quinn was one of the irreconcilable opponents of the treaty and of those who had given up the fight. Not so innocent, he thought. Like her husband.

‘And where are they living now?’ he asked, as if he used to know where they lived.

‘Rathgar,’ she said, an unspoken ‘where else?’ attached to it. ‘A big house on Rathgar Road.’

‘And your husband had a word with her too,’ he prompted.

‘Aw,’ she gave a humourless laugh. ‘He was afraid of her. Kept out of the way. Let me bring her upstairs and collect the things.’ She took another drag and picked a loose piece of tobacco off her lip as she exhaled. ‘He’s an innocent when it comes to politics, you know. He got a job on the Shannon scheme when he left the tech. Siemens brought him to Germany to train some of them on the electricity-generating equipment. He’s been back and forth a few times and every time he goes he loves it even more. I think he wishes he was born a German.’

‘He told me he had interesting political discussions with Herr Goertz.’

She dismissed that with a shrug, not interested in German politics. ‘He knows nothing about politics,’ she repeated, meaning local politics. ‘He’s really only interested in engineering and machines. Germany is just a fairyland to him.’

Duggan put out his cigarette in the ashtray and stood up. ‘Thank you very much for your time,’ he said.

He went ahead of her to the hall door and turned on the doorstep. ‘Sorry about your windows,’ he looked up at the plywood nailed over the bedroom window above.

‘Thugs,’ she said and added quickly, ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’ He shook his head. ‘Just thick, ignorant thugs.’

Duggan started pedalling with one foot and threw his other leg over the saddle and cycled away slowly, keeping to the tracks where the light shower of snow had been turned to slush by car wheels. He almost felt a twinge of sympathy for Quinn, who was trying to ignore the political tensions under his nose by moving his interests into a political fantasy land. And there was Gerda, too, trying to shake off
the world she’d been born into, but with greater reason. And the O’Sheas, now among the powers that be. And maybe harbouring Hermann Goertz.

The morning was brisk, the sun bright and the air still sharp. Ranelagh was busy with Saturday shoppers, the footpaths more crowded than the roads. He sped by, weaving behind two women pushing prams across the street and headed back towards the city. He was about to cross the humpback bridge at Charlemont Street when he thought he should let Gifford know that he’d found out who the woman was and turned onto Canal Road. The canal was still, reflecting back the sky’s blue and hiding its usual murkiness. The snow lay pristine on its far bank.

Gifford’s flat wasn’t far away, in Heytesbury Street, and he crossed at the next bridge and freewheeled down to Harrington Street and turned right at the church. He propped his bicycle beside the railings outside the house and realised it was too early to knock on the door: Gifford would still be asleep after his night shift. He tore the back off an envelope and wrote a message and pushed it through the letterbox of the basement door. A noise inside stopped him as he was about to turn away and he waited for a moment, undecided. There was no further sign of life, so he left.

Captain Sullivan raised his head from his arms resting on top of a typewriter and gave Duggan a bleary look as he came into the office.

‘Been up all night again?’ Duggan asked, tossing his overcoat onto a spare chair.

Sullivan straightened up. ‘Got a few hours’ sleep but I’d be better off if I hadn’t got any.’

‘Any more news from Terenure?’

‘German bombs again,’ Sullivan shrugged.

‘But nobody dead this time.’

‘They were lucky. Especially one family, who used to live on the South Circular. In one of the houses that was bombed the other night.’

‘You’re joking me,’ Duggan looked at him in astonishment.

Sullivan shook his head and gave a mirthless laugh. ‘It’s true. I wouldn’t want to live near them wherever they move to next. It looks like Adolf has personally targeted them.’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Duggan shook his head. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Would you like to live beside them?’

‘I mean the Luftwaffe can’t be targeting a single family.’

‘I wouldn’t want to take any chances. Would you?’ Sullivan paused. ‘You know the other house hit belonged to Jews.’

‘Jesus,’ Duggan said, thinking of Gerda and how she would take that news. ‘They can’t be targeting them. A needle in a haystack.’

‘Maybe someone’s pinpointing them.’

‘Even so,’ Duggan said. ‘How could they hit specific houses?’

‘Maybe they have a secret weapon of some kind. Like the British with their radio detection thing.’

‘And why would they have hit that house in Carlow if they had? Killing people in the middle of nowhere.’

Sullivan was about to answer but his gaze shifted and Duggan felt a slap on his back. ‘You got something for me?’ Captain Anderson from the British section said as he turned.

‘Not yet,’ Duggan said. ‘My source is down the country.’

‘Doesn’t he have a phone?’

‘He doesn’t like talking on the phone.’

Anderson gave a short laugh. ‘Wise man. When’s he back?’

‘Monday, probably.’

‘You’ll talk to him then,’ Anderson’s Belfast accent made it sound even more like an order. ‘Impress on him the importance of linking us up with his source. In the national interest.’

Duggan nodded, curbing his instinctive reaction that Timmy didn’t need to be told by Anderson what was in the national interest. ‘By the way,’ he said instead, ‘do you know anything about an Englishman called Roderick or Roddy Glenn?’

‘Doesn’t ring any bells.’ Anderson propped himself against the desk.

‘He’s an artist.’

‘One of the conscientious objectors? The group of English artists who’ve come here to avoid the war. Say they’re pacifists or conscientious objectors. Maybe just dodging conscription.’

‘I don’t know,’ Duggan said. ‘He’s hanging round a café used by the German internees. Keeps trying to talk to them. ‘

‘Ah,’ Anderson nodded in satisfaction. ‘An agent provocateur.’

‘Says he has information for them. But they won’t talk to him.’

‘Yeah,’ Anderson nodded again. ‘They’re right. Brits love that sort of stuff. Psychological operations, they call them.’

‘So he’s a British agent,’ Sullivan intervened. ‘You should be keeping an eye on him.’

Anderson gave him a scathing glance over his shoulder and said to Duggan, ‘We’re up to our necks at the moment. Fishermen flooding in.’

‘Fishermen?’

‘Retired English colonels pretending to be here for the start of the salmon season. Going around the west trying to catch German submarines refuelling in quiet bays.’

‘I thought they’d given up on that,’ Duggan said.

‘They’d still love to catch us out. Really put the cat among the pigeons.’

‘But it’s not true,’ Duggan protested. ‘There are no U-boats coming ashore.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Anderson shrugged. ‘We have to keep an eye on them anyway. See where they’re going. Who they’re talking to. Some
fuckers down there’ll tell them anything for a few pints. Or just for the hell of it.’ He paused. ‘You’re from down there, aren’t you?’

‘Sort of,’ Duggan admitted. ‘Nowhere near the coast though.’

‘So you know what I mean,’ Anderson straightened himself up. ‘What’s his name again? That English artist?’

‘Roddy Glenn.’

‘You have someone covering that café, don’t you?’ Anderson waited for Duggan to nod in agreement. ‘Keep an eye on him. And let me know if anything transpires.’

‘We’ve got our hands full with the Germans,’ Sullivan interrupted. ‘You might have heard they’re bombing us every night.’

Anderson gave him a sardonic wink, clapped Duggan on the shoulder and left.

‘Fucking northerners,’ Sullivan grunted. ‘Think they can come down here and order everyone around.’

‘You better get used to it,’ Duggan laughed. ‘Partition’s not going to last forever.’

Sullivan snorted and asked him for a cigarette. Duggan lit one for himself and slid his case and lighter down the table. ‘Where’s the commandant?’ he asked through the smoke.

Sullivan lit his cigarette before replying. ‘At another meeting with civil servants. Trying to decide whether to sound air raid sirens or not the next time a plane approaches Dublin.’ He slid the cigarette case and lighter back to Duggan.

‘What’re they going to do?’

‘Who knows. The boss thinks they shouldn’t unless a fleet of bombers approaches. Anyway, who’s going to sleep in their beds tonight if they’ve got a shelter? And if they haven’t …’ Sullivan shrugged the thought away. ‘By the way, he wants everyone on standby for another raid. So no more of your sudden disappearances.’

Duggan grunted. ‘Are you finished using that typewriter as a pillow?’

‘It’s all yours.’

Duggan carried it back to his place and put in two sheets of paper with a carbon between them and typed the details of his conversation with Mrs Quinn. The next move was obviously to put surveillance on Mrs O’Shea, let her lead them to Goertz. Or maybe talk to her about his whereabouts. Her husband’s connections made either option sensitive, but they needed to talk to Goertz, as the commandant had said, see if he could explain what the bombing was all about. Which didn’t mean they had to talk to him in person. Indeed, it might be better if they didn’t, keep him at arms length in case the British found out about it. If they talked to him through an intermediary. Like Mrs O’Shea.

He finished typing his note about Mrs Quinn’s information, stubbed out his cigarette and leaned back and closed his eyes and thought of Gerda and her head on his shoulder and his arms around her.

Duggan chained his bicycle to a lamp standard across the road from the Ha’penny Bridge and walked along Liffey Street, taking his time. People hurried by him in the gloom, trying to pick their steps carefully on the slush and snow, well wrapped against the cold. The lights were going out in shops and the crash of shutters coming down broke the sound of hurrying feet. At the corner of Abbey Street he bought an
Evening Herald
from a newsboy and crossed, timing his way between cyclists and stepping over two lumps of horse shit, still steaming as a dray clomped westwards.

The lights were on in Mrs Lynch’s café and he glanced in as he went by. An elderly couple were at a table, eating a fry, and a young man sat alone reading a newspaper, his cigarette lying in an ashtray. He reached a slow hand for it without looking as Duggan passed. A waitress was sweeping the floor around tables whose chairs had been upended on their tops. There was no sign of Gerda. Maybe she had left already, he thought, as he crossed the road and continued on to the corner of Henry Street.

He stopped and opened the paper and glanced at the headlines and then folded it and put it in his overcoat pocket. He lit a cigarette and stomped his feet against the cold, a man without patience waiting for someone. This was probably a bad idea, he told himself again.
He shouldn’t be seen anywhere near the café. You’d never know who else could be watching it, who might recognise you. He could put Gerda at risk. He exhaled a cloud of smoke made bigger by the cold air and dismissed the thought. He was just a pretend boyfriend waiting for a pretend girlfriend.

A young man came out of a jeweller’s across the road, carrying a metal screen which he fixed to one side of the shop window. He went back in and came out with another one. The Angelus bell sounded from a nearby church, the pauses filled in by another one like an echo from a more distant church. An older man came out of the jeweller’s and shot home some bolts and locked them. He grabbed the screen with both hands, shook it to make sure it was secure and cast a suspicious eye across at Duggan before going back inside.

The elderly couple emerged from Mrs Lynch’s café and were followed a moment later by the young man. Could that be Roddy Glenn? he wondered. The couple came towards him and he watched them, having learned that people weren’t always what they seemed to be, but they appeared to be what they were, a couple going home after an afternoon’s shopping, the woman carrying a large shopping bag. The young man went the other way and the lights in the café dimmed.

He flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter and its glow died with an instant fizz and when he looked back at the café three women were emerging. Two of them came towards him and he recognised Gerda. She was wearing her gabardine coat and a scarf covered her hair and she carried a handbag. He caught her eye as she approached and she stopped and said hello when she reached him, as if she had expected him to be there.

‘See you next week,’ she said to her companion.

‘Cheerio,’ the other girl smiled, glancing from Gerda to Duggan and back again.

‘Something has happened,’ Gerda said when she had gone, somewhere between a question and a statement.

‘No,’ Duggan said, suddenly at a loss for words.

She gave him a quizzical look. ‘You are on duty?’

He nodded twice, an expression of regret.

‘So we pretend,’ she said to herself and slipped her arm under his and they began to walk up Henry Street. ‘You can come and visit me in the café any time now.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Yvonne will tell everyone you’re my boyfriend.’

He gave a light laugh. ‘Still not a good idea for us to be seen together there. In case someone adds two and two and gets the right answer.’

‘And how would they do that?’

‘Because I look like a soldier,’ he said, remembering how Gifford’s girlfriend, Sinead, had immediately identified him the first moment she set eyes on him.

‘So?’ Gerda shrugged. ‘The whole world is full of soldiers now.’

‘I don’t want to put you in any danger.’

‘How am I in danger?’

‘If it was realised you were helping us. There are people—’

‘The Nazis are that powerful here?’ she let go of his arm and stopped and stared at him.

‘No,’ he said, taking her hand and starting to walk again past the GPO arcade. ‘But there are people playing their own games. Like the IRA.’

‘You really think it’s dangerous?’

‘No, not really.’

‘So,’ she said, squeezing his hand, ‘you just don’t want to lose your spy. And then have to find another one.’

‘That’s true,’ he smiled at her and stopped outside a bar near the
Pillar. Snowflakes began to fall, spaced out and hesitant. ‘Would you like a drink?’

She looked at his left eye, then his right. ‘You’re on duty.’

‘I have to go back. But not yet. We’re on standby for tonight.’

‘More bombs?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You know something?’

‘No. It’s just in case.’

‘Okay,’ she said.

The bar was jammed and the small lounge was also full, a group of men from the radio station across the road in the GPO spread around three tables covered in pints of Guinness and glasses of whiskey. The air was heavy with the smell of pipe smoke and the sudden heat was oppressive. They found a spot against the panelled wall at the side and Duggan shrugged off his overcoat as he asked her what she would like.

She untied her scarf and let it fall around her neck and asked what he was having.

‘A hot whiskey,’ he said, prompted by the Bunsen burner hissing behind the bar beneath a glass jug of bubbling water. ‘Very medicinal.’

‘I’ll try that.’ She shook her hair and ran a hand through it.

Duggan waited impatiently while the barman topped up a line of pints of porter and a man beside him took three at a time and carried them over to the crowded tables with the care and solemnity of a religious ritual. Duggan gave an apologetic glance back at Gerda. She was leaning against the wall, holding their coats, her dark eyes unseeing, deep in her own thoughts.

‘Yes,’ she made a face after the first sip of the hot whiskey. ‘Like medicine.’

‘Yeah, you’ll never get drunk on it.’

‘Can you hold it for a moment?’ she asked, passing him her glass.
She opened her handbag and took out a folded brown envelope and gave it to him as she took back her glass. He unfolded the envelope, the size of a normal sheet of typing paper. It was sealed and had nothing written on it.

‘What’s in it?’ he raised the envelope, feeling its weight. Whatever was in it was not very bulky, but substantial enough.

‘You don’t know?’

‘No. How would I know?’

‘I thought it was why you were waiting for me.’

‘No,’ he shook his head, perplexed. ‘I just wanted to see you.’

She gave him a fleeting smile and touched the back of his hand and then was serious again. ‘That English painter gave it to me,’ she dropped her voice. ‘Roddy Glenn. He asked me to give it to a German officer.’

‘What is it?’ Duggan dropped his voice too and they moved closer, facing each other, their shoulders against the wooden wall.

‘He would only say it was important, very important for peace. He said that a number of times. It’s very important for peace that the Germans get it.’

‘Why didn’t he give it to them himself?’

‘That’s what I said too. He said they wouldn’t take anything from him. Or talk to him.’ She took a sip of her hot whiskey. ‘I know that’s true. I’ve seen them telling him to go away. To fuck off. They think he’s an English spy.’

‘Was that him in the café before it closed?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He was there this morning, before I arrived. Yvonne told me he had tried to talk to one of the Nazis but the Nazi spat on his shoe. Mrs Lynch was afraid there was going to be a fight and she told the Englishman to leave and not to come back.’

She took another sip of her whiskey. ‘He was waiting for me when I arrived,’ she continued, recounting the story in a quiet, matter-of-fact
voice. ‘Stopped me on the street before I got to the café and gave me the envelope. He said, “Give it to an officer or just leave it on their table, for an officer.” I said, “I can’t.” And he said, “Please, it’s very important for peace.” And I said, “What is it?” And he said, “I can’t tell you but it’s very important for peace. For ending the war.”’

‘For ending the war?’ Duggan repeated with a sceptical tone.

‘That’s what he said. And then he pushed it into my hand and as soon as I took it he walked away in a hurry. Nearly running.’

Duggan looked at the envelope. It was farcical to think that something in it could end the war. Anderson was probably right: Glenn was some kind of low-level British agent, trying to feed disinformation to the Germans.

‘He seemed nervous,’ Gerda added. ‘Like he had to go away quickly.’

‘Like someone was after him?’

She nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Did you notice anybody else hanging around?’

‘No. I called after him to wait but he kept going.’

Duggan tried to juggle his overcoat and his drink and get a cigarette and Gerda took his glass to help him. ‘Thanks,’ he said, lighting the cigarette and taking back the glass. ‘Do you think he knows you’re a’– he stopped himself just in time from saying German – ‘who you really are?’

‘No,’ she dragged out the word in an unconscious exaggeration of her Cork accent.

‘Why would he give it to you?’

‘Because I’m the only one there who was friendly,’ she shrugged. ‘No one else gives him the time of day.’

‘So he can’t go back there. But I still don’t see why he’s trying so hard to pass information to the German internees. Why not go to the German legation?’

‘Maybe he’s afraid it’s watched.’

‘Could be,’ Duggan said, knowing that it was. And that any new caller to the German legation would interest the watchers and someone would want to know who he was and what his business there had been. Mrs Lynch’s café and its German clientele was a less conspicuous way of passing information. Unless he used the IRA and its links to the Germans and their spies. But the IRA would be very suspicious of any Englishman offering information.

‘They are collecting information there,’ Gerda said, as though she was thinking along the same lines.

‘In the café?’

‘There are some silly girls who come in and talk and drink coffee and go to the pictures with them. One of them was saying today that her brother is working in England and her mother’s very worried about him even though he didn’t work in a bomb factory. They kept asking her questions, pretending they were worried too. And she told them he works for Electrolux and there is also a factory in the area making tanks and another one making some parts of planes for their air force. So he’s afraid the area will be bombed and she and her mother are praying every night that he’ll be safe. And they kept her talking and said, “We’ll tell our comrades to leave that area alone. Where is it?” And the stupid girl said,’ Gerda paused and shut her eyes to remember the unfamiliar name, ‘“Luton”.’ She paused. ‘Where’s that?’

‘Somewhere near London, I think.’

‘And then one of them said to their flight captain’ – she leaned in close to whisper – ‘“
Das ist eine für Henning nächste Woche
.”’ That’s one for Henning next week. She move back and searched his face to see that he understood.

‘That’s the name he used? Henning?’ It had to be Henning Thomsen, the counsellor in the legation. He visited the Curragh camp every week.

She nodded.

‘Do you know if this Henning ever turns up in Mrs Lynch’s?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t heard anyone use that name there.’ She sipped her drink. ‘I wanted to slap her in the face and tell her to shut her stupid mouth.’

‘People don’t think,’ Duggan said. ‘It all seems so far away. Hard to imagine.’

‘What’s hard to imagine?’ she shot back in anger. ‘They bombed some more Jews here last night.’

A burst of loud laughter came from the group of Radio Eireann men as one finished a joke. Gerda glanced across at them and Duggan swallowed the last of his whiskey, picked a clove from his lips and dropped it in the empty glass.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘People can be stupid sometimes. Unthinking. Just concerned with their own problems.’

‘Like this country. So concerned with the bad English and their little border.’

‘There’s a lot of good reasons for that,’ he said. ‘Centuries of reasons if you—’

She put her finger on his lips to stop him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated in a whisper. ‘You didn’t want to see me to hear my anger.’ She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth and drew back. ‘Was that why you wanted to see me?’

‘Yes,’ he drew her head to him for another slow kiss.

She put her hand flat on his chest and pushed him back. ‘Are you trying to ruin my reputation?’ she smiled. ‘Kissing and drinking in a pub.’

‘Don’t they do that in Cork?’

‘Oh God, no. Pubs are serious places in Cork. For talk about hurling. Do you play hurling?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Are you any good?’

‘Not bad.’

‘A back or a forward?’

‘A forward. Sharpshooter.’ He tilted his head to one side in a quizzical look. ‘What are you, an expert?’

‘I can talk hurling all night. How are your shins?’

‘Would you like to see them?’

She gave him a coy smile and sipped her drink.

‘Would you like another?’ he pointed at the glass.

‘Are you trying to get me drunk?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I think you are.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe I will only get more angry when I get drunk?’

‘I’ll take that chance.’

She looked around the pub. ‘It would be lovely to stay here and forget everything,’ she sighed. ‘You shouldn’t be drunk going back to work.’

‘Hot whiskey won’t make me drunk.’

‘It’s medicine.’

‘For the cold.’

She kissed him quickly. ‘You should have a clear head for your work.’

Outside, the snowflakes were coming down faster and thicker and beginning to cover the tyre tracks and pedestrian paths, muffling the fading sounds of the teatime city. They muffled up too: she pulled her scarf over her head and knotted it under her chin and he pulled up the collar of his coat. They held hands and turned up O’Connell Street towards her bus stop.