Gunner Kelly (24 page)

“That’s probably just a story. He would have been absurdly young to have been with them on the Jarama.” The American frowned back at him. “Too young.”

“They say he lied about his age.” The Irishman turned to Benedikt. “They say he first went into action alongside your General von Thoma’s tanks—they say the General wanted O’Duffy’s men with him because he reckoned they wouldn’t run away.”

“But I don’t go for it.” The American shook his head. “I don’t reckon he was there so early.”

“But he did go straight from the seminary,” countered the Irishman. “And he lied about his age, they say.”

“Maybe. But if he was there he changed sides damn quick, that’s for sure.”

“Ah … well, isn’t that the Irish for you!” Mr Smith smiled. “Going over from the winners to the losers.”

“He went over—”

“And nothing out of character.” The Irishman stuck to his guns. “He went there as a True Believer, straight from the seminary. And he went across like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, when he found another faith he liked better, having seen both sides—”

“No!” The American shook his head again. “ ‘38—late ’38—is the first year I’ll buy. With Frank Ryan in the International Brigade—and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, not the British one, because it was long after the Cordoba trouble.”

“Ah … Frank Ryan! Now he was a lovely man in his way, you know.” The Irishman half-closed his eyes. “A great gentleman, they say …”

“And IRA since 1918.” The American looked at Audley.

“And in contact with the Nazis, along with Sean Russell, in ‘41—they had a radio link going,” said Audley.

“Which was a great waste of time for them both, to be sure,” murmured the Irishman.

“But not for lack of trying,” said Audley.

“That’s not what I mean, Dr Audley,” replied the Irishman mildly. “What I mean is that Aloysius Kelly was there beside him—and wasn’t he feeding it all back to Moscow, on his account, eh?”

Audley sniffed abruptly, and turned to Benedikt. “Yes. So there you have it in a nutshell, Captain Schneider. Aloysius Kelly went to Spain and teamed up with Ryan, who was a long-time IRA man—”

“Who’d fought alongside his father, in the Troubles and the Civil War,” supplemented Mr Smith.

“But before that he’d been talent-scouted by one of their Political Commissars,” said the American laconically. “He was ordered to attach himself to Frank Ryan, who was an Irishman first and last—whoever was England’s enemy was his friend, it didn’t matter who—”

“Which made him politically unreliable—Frank, I mean—”

“Jim! For God’s sake!”

“I was only explaining—”

Audley cut them both off with a gesture. “What they both mean, Benedikt, is that the IRA originated as the military wing of a nationalist movement—a nationalist sectarian movement. The fashionable idea now is that all twentieth-century guerrilla organizations tick because Marx and Lenin wound them up— that it’s all Marxist-Leninist magic that makes them work. But the truth is that most of them owe damn all to Marx, and even less to Lenin—the halfways successful ones, anyway … from Pancho Villa to Fidel Castro, by way of the Jews and the Algerians and the Cypriots … and even the Chinese and Vietnamese too. You could say they owe a lot more to any classical guerrilla leader in history—to Francis Marion, say—” he pointed at the American “—his ‘Swamp Fox’ in the Carolinas, fighting Cornwallis and Tarleton in the American War of Independence—Marx and Lenin didn’t teach
him
anything … And the IRA has always derived a hundred times more from the United States than from Soviet Russia and Colonel Gaddafi … But to do that, it was the end of British colonialism—not the beginning of the socialist revolution—that they campaigned for. The shift to the left in the IRA didn’t start until the ‘6os.”

“Aha!” Mr Smith gave Audley a shrewd look. “And you not an expert on Ireland, eh?” Then he nodded. “Ah—but it was you who said what I had was not worth a ha’penny, wasn’t it! So I can’t say you didn’t tell me.”

“I’m not an expert on Ireland, damn it!” snapped Audley irritably. “We’re not talking about Ireland—we’re talking about Aloysius Kelly.”

“And the Debreczen meetings.” Almost imperceptibly the American had shifted his position from alongside the Irishman, until now he was nearly facing him. And there was a note in his voice which matched his change of position: the mention of ‘Aloysius Kelly’ had ranged him alongside Audley as an ally, he was no longer a neutral ‘friend’.

“Oh no!
Debreczen
is something else—” Mr Smith held up his hand, fingers widely spread, as though to ward both men off “—there’s nothing at all I know about that! It’s none of my business … what it was, or when it was. And I’m not having any part of it, either.” He looked around him, and Benedikt couldn’t help following his action. But now there was no one at all in sight: the great hall of tanks was inhabited only by fighting machines.

“Fair enough.” Audley’s flash of irritability was gone. “No one could blame you for that. So … we’ll just forget Debreczen—it’s something else that never existed. Right? And Aloysius Kelly too!”

Debreczen?

The Debreczen
meetings
? Benedikt frowned as the
meetings
fixed Debreczen for him. But what would an Irish veteran of the Spanish Civil War be doing in a nowhere-town in eastern Hungary, which—so far as he could recall—lay somewhere just on the better side of the Carpathians, almost equidistant from the borders of Slovakia and Rumania and the Ukraine?

The Irishman looked at Audley wordlessly, and Benedikt could see that Audley friendly frightened him more than Audley hostile. But then, perhaps that was what Audley intended.

“It’s Michael Kelly—our very own Gunner Kelly—who interests us, Mr Smith, you see?” Audley smiled, first at the Irishman, and then transferred the smile to Benedikt for confirmation. “Correct, Captain?”

Benedikt nodded. “That is correct.” If anything, he thought, a smiling Audley was
more
disturbing.

“And we left him taking the King’s shilling … forty years ago? No—forty-five, it must be …” Audley carried the nod back to Mr Smith. “Which is a long time ago, when you think about it.”

A long time, indeed! Benedikt tried, and failed, to conjure up pictures of the Ireland of their time—the two Irish youths, one a butcher’s boy, the other a young seminarian … one to become a British soldier, the other to travel a very different road, serving under a newer flag and exchanging the true God for a false one. But both of them had grown old since then, over those long years … and yet now one was mysteriously dead, and the other plotted murderous vengeance, when they both ought to have been drowsing in front of the television sets by their firesides among grandchildren.

“So when did they meet again, Michael and Aloysius?” Audley prodded the Irishman gently. “Because they did meet again, didn’t they?”

As a guess, it was nothing extraordinary, really: it was the only computation of the possibilities which made any sense of what was happening now.

“They met.” The hand resting on the tank clenched.

“Four years ago?”

“Ten years ago.”

“So long as that?” Audley frowned, and fell silent for a moment. “Well now … ten years … and not by chance?”

The Irishman didn’t reply.

“Not by chance, let’s assume. And it was Aloysius who sought out Michael—right?” Audley nodded, but more to himself than to Mr Smith, and then turned to the American. “It was about ten years ago that they put the word out on him, wasn’t it?”

The American stared into space for a couple of seconds. “No. Not so long—more like seven … ‘75—not earlier than that, David.”

“Hmm … But then he could have seen the writing on the wall before they did. So he could have been setting up his bolt-holes in advance … That’s what I’d have done in his place.”

‘They’ … ? Both because Audley was who he was and because Aloysius Kelly had been who he had been,
they
were not the IRA, estimated Benedikt coldly. The long hunt for him— which now seemed to have extended to a pursuit of Gunner Kelly—sounded much more like the KGB’s Special Bureau No 1 on both accounts.

“So how did Aloysius trace Michael?” Audley came round to Mr Smith again, and beamed suddenly at him. “Ah! He’d go about it just like you did, wouldn’t he!” He nodded at Benedikt. “There now—that’s a lesson for both of us: the computer gives back only what it’s already been given, and if it lacks that one special bit of knowledge …” He switched back quickly to the Irishman. “And
that’s
what’s bothering you at the moment, isn’t it?”

The man’s source—of course! Because once Audley had that, the man himself was superfluous.

“The old auntie.” This time Audley didn’t bother to smile, because he no longer needed to do so.

“No—”

“Yes. You slipped, and now you’re kicking yourself for it—although it’s easily done, and we all do it when we’re scared … And I could be charitable, and assume that you don’t want the old lady bothered by great gallumphing Britishers with Irish accents … Or I could be uncharitable, and suspect that you’re more worried about someone remembering that you’d been to see her just recently, and putting one and one together to make two—eh?”

The Irishman had composed his features, but the knuckles on his fist betrayed him to Benedikt. “No. I was just thinking … word of an Irishman—that’s all.”

“And quite properly.” Audley looked down his nose. “She’s your contact. But you don’t exist, so she doesn’t exist either.” He shrugged. “Simple.”

“Your word on it?” Apart from the knuckles Mr Smith was steady now.

“No. You already have my word, I can’t give it to you twice. Over here … a gentleman only has one word—would you have insulted Michael Collins or Frank Ryan like that?”

The Irishman rolled a glance at the American. “Insufferable! And you wonder why we’re as we are, by God!” Then he relaxed slowly, with a light in his eye not present before. “And yet … you have no Irish blood in you by any far remote mischance, Dr Audley?”

“Not a drop. No Irish raiders ever reached Sussex—fortunately for them. Good Anglo-Saxon, Mr Smith, I’m afraid. King Alfred’s men … the ones who beat the Danes in the end—remember?”

“But not the Romans. Or the Normans?”

“The Romans were before our time. The Normans were no more than a useful tincture, to tone us up. We assimilated them—as you have assimilated your English aristocracy, Mr Smith … We’ve done the same with anyone prepared to stay the course—French Huguenots and German Jews—and the Poles and GI’s left quite a few souvenirs behind them more recently.”

“And now the Pakistanis and the West Indians?”

“Nothing wrong with them. They may not play rugger, but they play damn good cricket. In a hundred years’ time they’ll have improved us—” Audley grinned at the CIA man “— they’ll be as English as Howard is American … It’s you Irish who make a tragedy of your history—you have this boring obsession with re-living it, as though it mattered what Cromwell did in Drogheda and Wexford any more than what Vespasian did to Maiden Castle with his legion just down the road from here, outside Dorchester …. It doesn’t worry
me
that we were once a Roman colony—it lends a touch of class to what would otherwise be rather dim tribal history … and it makes the archaeology much more interesting.” He waved a hand. “It’s all a joke, so long as we don’t have to live through it, and we can laugh at our ancestors slipping on the historical banana skins, don’t you see?”

He was challenging the Irishman to disagree with him in a way that no Irishman could disagree, thought Benedikt.

“So what did Auntie tell Aloysius Kelly ten years ago?” Audley came on frontally, like any good tank commander who reckoned he could break through the centre now, with no more messing around on the flanks to draw the Irishman’s reserves away.

“Aargh … it wasn’t Aloysius she’d kept in touch with—it was Michael who was her boy … it was always him that she’d been close to—her man had been with Michael Collins, not one of the Republicans—a Free Stater, when it came to the Treaty—and he’d been alongside the English in the trenches too, before that, so it was Michael that was always closer to her. And it was Michael that kept in touch with her over the years.”

“But then Aloysius turned up—?”

“Out of the blue. Asking after Michael.” The Irishman had lost his wary look. “He said there was this debt he had, that had been on his conscience for more years than he cared to remember. But now he’d come into a bit of money—and he showed her a wad of notes to prove it …. It was before the darkness had come on her, while she could still see what was close up …”

“What did she make of him?”

“She didn’t like the sound of it—of him … There were too many notes—and it was English money—and she’d not a lot of time for the English, but she’d no time at all for Aloysius—it was Michael who’d written to her over the years, with never a word from Aloysius until he came through her door as bold as brass, with his handful of money …. No, she didn’t like it at all. But just at that time Michael had been having some bad luck: a bit of bother with his insurance, he said, after he’d had this knock in his taxi … but she reckoned it was more likely it was a knock in the betting shop he’d taken, the way he fancied the horses as every good man should … So in the end, balancing that against the other, she let him have Michael’s address. And that was the last she saw of him—” he stopped suddenly.

“Yes?” Audley was right: there was more.

“It was some time later … It was the next year her sight went, and she’s a bit vague about time after that. A year or two, maybe … there were these two fellas came looking for Aloysius—had he been to see her? Did she know where he might be? ‘Old friends’, they were, and for old times’ sake, having lost touch with him, they wanted to meet up again.” Mr Smith paused. “It was just her in the house, with her great-grand-niece for company—and these two fellas.”

An old blind woman, and a child, thought Benedikt. And … would that be two ‘old friends’ from Special Bureau No 1, come to ask questions only the very brave or the very foolish refused to answer?