Irregulars (2 page)

He awakes early and is sick again, but blessedly back in his digs in the faded darkness of night on the cusp of morning. A darkness that will not grant sleep. He eyes the whiskey bottle, a quarter full, takes up the pitcher of water in shaking hands and pours it into his one glass and adds whiskey. And starts again. To help him sleep. Today, he thinks, he will see his father, his mother. But sleep first.

Again to Slattery’s, where Davey asks him has he not had enough, at half twelve in the afternoon, and from there in his memory he has only a dim, flickering reel of pubs and flashing blasts of conversation until a kindly constable and again a hack, and this time he gives the driver the address to his home instead of his digs.

His father answers his sloppy knocking and O’Keefe is dimly aware of the surprise on his father’s face, and then a strange blankness as if he does not recognise his son, but it is gone in an instant, replaced by a smile and then his mother is there. And then he is aware of nothing until he awakes in the bed he had slept in as a boy, in the bed he had shared with his brother.

2

S
o you’re saying Detective Officer Kenny was dead before you got him to Jervis Street Infirmary in the taxi …?’

‘Yes, he was,’ the woman from the front desk of Burton’s Hotel says.

Her interrogator looks up from the file he is reading. His gaze is unnerving because one of his eyes is made of glass, replacing the one that had been gouged out by Auxiliaries who’d captured and questioned him more than a year ago in a different and far simpler conflict. This man, she thinks, knows more than any man should about interrogation. As if reading her thoughts, he dons a pair of round spectacles under which the glass eye is less noticeable.

The woman, Nora Flynn, shakes her head and gazes out the second-floor window at the offices across the busy Westland Row thoroughfare. She can see men in shirtsleeves and ties, women at typewriters. The bustling business of a life assurance company, clacking and scribbling away in search of profit as if there was no way on earth men could be killing each other just a street or two away.
Bustling
, she thinks, liking the word, the innocent industry it implies.

These offices too are busy. There are men in shirtsleeves and women at typewriters, but over the shirtsleeves the men wear leather shoulder-holsters stuffed with pistols and in the typists’ desk drawers, Nora knows, there are loaded Colt revolvers and files bearing the names of dead men and men marked for death. Bustling is not a word one would use, she decides, bringing her eyes back to the man with the file.

Nervous under the weight of her interrogator’s silence, she continues. ‘Sure, didn’t they have a car? The Ford they were using. Why didn’t they use it to take him to the hospital?’

Nora remembers running down Abbey Street, trailing a member of the surveillance squad whose name she does not know, an agent who moments earlier had burst through the hotel doors bellowing for Nora to help, that they had a man down injured. In her mind she sees the man pile through the open door of the Ford Tourer and the car leaving, roaring off in the direction of the Custom House, no instructions given to her other than to get the fallen man to a hospital. And she remembers the quiet that descended as the car’s motor faded in the distance. She can almost feel the heft of Kenny’s head in her lap and the warm blood on her hand as she pressed it to the wound, the knife handle still there, lodged between his ribs.

Her interrogator stares at her for a long moment, and Nora wonders if it would have been better to remain silent. She has worked with this man, and men like him, for the better part of two years, indirectly at first, but directly for the past nine months. This is, she thinks, her second war, and yet she feels little different, at times, than when she was a summer typist in her father’s accountancy office.

‘And all this happened at what time?’

She makes an effort to remember. ‘It couldn’t have been more than ten past midnight. You have my operations report. The boy passed by me and exited the hotel at … what did I write? Eleven fifty-six? Forty-six? And Detective Officer Kenny followed him.’ She is growing angry, a flush of blood in her cheeks, her palms still sweating, but there is steel in her voice as she speaks. She has done her job. In no way is she to blame for the death of a man who should have known better.

Kenny, the man with the newspaper. An unlikely detective, she thinks, with his pinched, wan face, his thin body and quick-bitten fingernails. A man who, in reality, had looked every inch the Active Service Unit gunman he had been in the fight against the Crown. But they have called each other ‘detective officers’—it is their rank and they are paid as such—ever since transforming from Michael Collins’ handpicked squad of shooters to the Criminal Investigation Department in Oriel House. Detecting was not what men like Kenny had joined up for, Nora knows, though some of the newer members of CID, and some who had come to the unit from the Irish Republican Police or from IRA units in distant counties, are under the illusion that they are, in fact, detectives.

‘And you’ve no idea who stabbed Kenny?’ her interrogator asks, lighting a cigarette.

‘No, no idea. You’ll have to ask them when … when they come in,’ she says, filling the silence as much as answering the question. Behind her low-burn anger, fear continues to smoulder. ‘It’s all in my report,’ she adds. ‘Did Dillon or O’Shea file theirs?’

Her interrogator watches her for a long moment. Then he closes the manila file on his desk and leans forward, holding out his packet of Sweet Aftons.

Finally: ‘No. They’ve not come in yet, and when I rang Wellington barracks I was told they hadn’t checked in there yet either.’

‘So that leaves us where?’ she asks, not sure if she should.

‘It leaves us wanting to speak to them and catch whoever stabbed Detective Kenny. Finding O’Hanley seems secondary now, in a way, though we mustn’t stop searching for him, or laying bait.’

Felim O’Hanley is the target of the hotel operation. Slippery as Collins—God rest him—had been to the British, and now running the Dublin Brigade for the anti-Treaty Irregulars. After another long silence, Nora meets her interrogator’s eyes.

He says, ‘There was nothing you could have done, Nora. You’ve been doing good work and you did what you were called on to do.’

She leans across the desk and takes a cigarette. Detective Superintendent Terence Carty, like Detective Officer Kenny, was a member of the Big Fella’s special squad, one of his twelve apostles during the Tan War, but smarter, more nuanced than most of them. From fearing Carty to remembering now how he’d always respected the work she had done for the cause during that war; how he had personally recruited her into the Free State Army Intelligence Department and then into CID. He treated her as an agent, rather than just a mocked-up typist, like many of the others did. It was he who had suggested she man the desk at Burton’s for this operation and had made sure she was included in the briefings pertaining to it.

It’s as if Carty sees beyond the notion that women were suited only to the paperwork of war. Sophisticated, Nora thinks, but frightening in his own way. In his eyeglasses and shirtsleeves he might have appeared more at home in the assurance offices across the road, auditing claims for fire and theft. But Carty, Nora knows, had taken many lives as a gunman for Collins. He goes nowhere unarmed, wearing even now at his desk a Mauser C96 in a shoulder-holster instead of the standard issue Colt .45 revolver most of the men in the department carry. She wonders had he shot any of the men she had fingered during her time in the Castle with that same gun. How many men had he killed? More men than she herself had marked for death with a pen and carbon file copy? She pushes the line of thought from her mind. Silly questions. War possesses a mathematics all of its own.

‘What do we do now?’ she asks. Two minutes earlier she would not have dared.

Carty exhales a stream of smoke, stubs out his cigarette and removes his glasses to wipe them on his necktie.
Maybe not so sophisticated
, Nora thinks.

‘We have to wait for Charlie and the rest of the boys to come in. Find out from them what happened. Find out if we’ll be able to proceed with things or if the whole operation is scuppered. Charlie has his own way of doing things. He’ll be back when he’s ready.’

Carty speaks of Captain Charles Dillon as if of an eccentric uncle rather than a veteran gunman.

Nora is confused. ‘But surely … I mean, Mr Murphy is blown. He can’t be used. Not when the messengers failed to return to O’Hanley. At least we know from Murphy that it was O’Hanley who sent the boys.’

‘
If
they failed to return,’ Carty says.

‘Something happened in that laneway, something involving the messenger boys. They weren’t two minutes out the door when your man burst back into the hotel shouting they’d a man down stabbed. For all we know, Dillon could have the two messenger boys in custody at Wellington barracks, if not O’Hanley himself.’

Nora knows she is treading dangerously, making accusations she cannot substantiate, but she feels aggrieved. So what if Charlie Dillon has his own way of doing things? A man was dead, and an operation of many weeks’ planning likely damaged beyond repair.

‘If they’d plugged or pulled O’Hanley, we’d have heard about it by now,’ Carty says, a vague smile at his lips.

‘But what about Murphy? Is he not blown?’

‘No, I think we’ll keep him in his rooms for the time being. Until we see what happens. You’ll continue to work the front desk, in shifts along with Detective Officers Malloy and Ring?’

‘Of course.’

‘And if our Mr Murphy
is
, in fact, blown,’ Carty says, the smile blossoming now to a real one, ‘our pals in the Crown can always lend us another one.’

‘Their generosity knows no bounds.’

‘You mean our pals in British Army intelligence aren’t helping us for the good of an independent Ireland?’

Nora smiles for the first time in what feels like days. ‘I rather doubt it, don’t you?’

3

‘H
ow’s the head, then?’

His father’s voice. O’Keefe opens his eyes, convinced he is waking from one dream and slipping into another. A voice he has not heard in almost seven years. No. Dreaming. He closes his eyes again.

‘There’s tea for you. If you can keep it down.’

This time his eyes snap open. His father looms, sitting in a chair beside the bed, and a jolt of panic flashes through O’Keefe as he scans the room, realising now that it is his own room and, at once, not his at all. His gaze returns to his father—white hair in the years since he had seen him, the moustache that he has worn as long as O’Keefe has been alive and aware, now also white.

‘What …?’ O’Keefe says. ‘What am I doing here?’

His father smiles, and the smile is a comfort to O’Keefe in his haze of waking. It has been so long since he has seen it, though his father smiled often when he and brother Peter and elder sister Sally had been children. O’Keefe’s father had been a happy man once. A respected DMP detective, he had been a man proud of his work and his home and his ability to keep the O’Keefe family safe and secure; well-fed and schooled. Loved. And then Peter was killed in Turkey and his father had stopped smiling.

O’Keefe sits up, and as he does his vision blurs and sharp pain seizes his head and neck, nausea rising in his throat. Gingerly he lies back. ‘Jaysus, my head. What happened to me?’ He squeezes his eyes shut against the pain and senses, as much as hears, his father laugh. Smiling and now laughing.

O’Keefe wonders suddenly is Peter really dead or had he dreamed it all: the war and the water; the blood and the beach and the scattering death of a million Turkish rounds ripping through the men of the Dublin and Munster Fusiliers? And the wounds and the black winds of sadness that blew in when he let drop his guard? The hospital in Cork? His return to the police and the war in West Cork? His last parade in the Phoenix Park depot on his demob day five months before? All of it a dream, because he is in the bedroom of his childhood, in the bed he shared with his brother and his father is smiling, laughing.

‘You really don’t know, do yeh, son?’

O’Keefe says nothing but opens one eye. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ve a feeling it’s a good thing I don’t.’

Again his father smiles. ‘Well, Misters Guinness and Jameson thank you anyway.’

Closing his eyes again, O’Keefe dredges up a coherence of events as best he can.

A pub. A darkened laneway. A woman’s laughter. Windmilling punches thrown and the smashing of glass. O’Keefe opens his eyes, checks his knuckles and breathes a sigh of relief to find them undamaged.

‘What day is it?’ he asks, and feels a dart of shame in the asking.

His father is reading
The
Irish Times
, and he looks up over his reading glasses.

‘Monday,’ his father says, and in saying it, his face goes blank, in the same way it had when he’d opened the door to O’Keefe. He then holds the newspaper out at arm’s length, as if it wondering at its purpose. There is a long moment of confounded silence before O’Keefe’s father folds the paper with a flourish and scans the front page. ‘Monday, yes. You’ve been here since yesterday early. Your mother nearly fainted when she saw the state of you.’ He smiles again as if this amuses him. ‘We’d the doctor in—the young Jewish lad from up the road; a fine lad and knowledgeable about medicine from the Continent. He told us to watch over you, but that you’d live if you didn’t die.’

‘Solly, you mean, Da?’ O’Keefe says, puzzled by his father’s forgetfulness, but aware that his own thoughts are sluggish and slow in the aftermath of his spree.

His father’s face returns the puzzlement. ‘Solly?’

‘Harold Solomon, Daddy. Solly …’

His father’s brow buckles in sudden fury, and terror washes through O’Keefe.
What did I say?
And as quickly, his father’s rage is gone and there is fear in his expression and then something else. Embarrassment, O’Keefe decides, closing his eyes against it, wishing his father would smile again.

After some moments of silence, O’Keefe asks, ‘Where’s Mam?’

‘Your mother’s sleeping now. She’s the knees nearly worn off her with the praying.’

O’Keefe attempts a weak smile at the thought of his mother, on her knees in prayer, rosary beads hurtling through her fingers like the links of an anchor chain through a cat’s eye. An image from his childhood as common as any other he has of her, his mother hard at the rosary. ‘They seemed to have worked. The prayers …’ O’Keefe says, and something in the corner of his mind darkens—a shadow passing through his memory—and he is no longer smiling.

‘They do betimes,’ his father replies, looking away to the window as if recalling all the times when prayers had gone unanswered.

In his reverie, his father’s face goes slack and then brightens suddenly. ‘Peter’s due back from college soon, of course. And Sally, as well, with that friend of hers,’ he says, smiling and nodding.

‘But Peter is …’ O’Keefe stops himself for a reason he does not understand. He studies his father’s face and is unable to read it. It is as if a stranger is wearing a mask of gormless, glad perplexity that resembles his father but is not like his father at all. He decides he has misunderstood his father’s words—that he is dreaming after all—and closes his eyes again to the mercy of sleep.

Some time later that night, O’Keefe awakens and it is dark in his room and his father is no longer there but he can hear his voice, deep and grave somewhere below in the house. And the voice of another man, something menacingly familiar in the tone of it, speaking with his father, his father’s voice now raised in sudden anger. A door closing and then his father and the man speaking again, outside the house, and O’Keefe wonders if he is dreaming—hopes that he is—but knows that he is not and that his father has always taken guests outside when he wanted to speak of private matters. Of matters he did not want his wife to hear. But before long it is his mother’s voice O’Keefe hears as well, outside with the men. He closes his eyes and prays that his father and the man are not speaking about him. He thinks of the blankness in his father’s face, and remembers that he has come home to ask after his health. A dark shard of fear wedges itself beneath O’Keefe’s ribs, and for the first time in as long as he can remember he prays, and does not feel a fool doing it.

The shadow of fear is still there, but it is mostly at bay because it is his mother who comes to him in the morning, bringing sweetened tea and scrambled eggs, bread and butter and a bowl of custard. He thinks of his father’s words from the day before. He is certain now that he had heard him correctly.
And Peter’s due back from college soon. And Sally.
The fear returns.

O’Keefe listens to his mother chatting, recounting street gossip—marriages, births, deaths, minor scandal—and he finds that if he closes his eyes and concentrates on her voice, he can fall under the comforting weight of the dream that has him still a boy; sick and off from school, his mother sitting beside him as she does now, Peter and Sally due home but not for a while yet; his father at the barracks and O’Keefe alone with his mother. Blessedly sick. A dream of times past so rare and precious and full of flat lemonade and scrambled eggs; bread and jam and Seville oranges and the sweet musk of his mother as she leans over to fluff his pillows, her hand on his forehead in search of fever.

His mother is oblivious to the fantasy, however, often mentioning the civil war that has ravaged Ireland these past months, flaring up in incidents of savagery almost unheard of in the fight for independence against the Crown that preceded it. His mother speaks of so-and-so’s boy—
were you at school with him or was it Peter?—
gunned down in broad daylight.
Can you imagine?
Reading from the newspaper now. Another bank robbed. Limerick shelled by Free State troops. And other stories—
sotto voce
over garden walls or in the bakery or butcher’s—that the newspapers were forbidden by the Free State government to tell. Tales of the bloody, vicious things Irishmen were doing to each other in the fight for a country to call their own. A Free State? A Republic? O’Keefe thinks, when he is lucid and in the present, that no notional nation state is worth the damage being done to the country and its people by the men who have claimed to be its liberators.

But now, as she speaks of these things, O’Keefe burrows deeper into the blankets and pretends that Peter and Sally will be home soon from school. Daddy home soon from the barracks for his tea. Mammy will be reading him
Oliver Twist
or
Great Irish Legends
and not newspaper stories about skirmishes and casualties and bloody-minded murder. Blessed illness.

Shame drives him up from the dream, and he rises to sitting in the bed. ‘I’m sorry I took so long to come back here, Mam. And the state I came in …’

‘Hush, Seán, don’t mind. We’re only happy to have you here, your father and I.’

O’Keefe is silent, and the guilt and relief he feels well up in him and his eyes brim with tears. ‘Thanks, Mam.’

‘Go ’way out of that, pet. Where can you come to when you need it but your home? Did you think we’d not have you?’

For a moment, O’Keefe does not answer. ‘I thought Daddy might … I don’t know.’

‘Your father’s different now, Seán,’ his mother says, and even in his condition, he can sense that she wants to say more.

‘I met Solly, in Rathmines last …’ he cannot recall the day, and shame stabs at his ribs, ‘… last week. He asked after Da and said he’d been in to see him.’

‘He was. Good auld Solly. And in to see you as well, saying how you were suffering from the most common of Irish illnesses and not to worry for you.’

O’Keefe smiles weakly, thinking of his father’s reaction when he had mentioned Solly’s name. The rage his father’s face had shown at the mention of the old family friend. A rage directed at himself.

His mother continues, ‘What a fine man he’s become. And such a doctor. All the best of the Jews and Protestants attend his surgery, you know, Seán.’

O’Keefe laughs a little at his mother’s casual snobbery. Only a doctor good enough for the wealthier of Dublin’s Jews and Protestants would do her and her own. She is aware of this snobbery, of its general but necessary absurdity, and winks at her son.

‘Is Da all right, Mam?’ O’Keefe asks.

His mother is silent for a long moment and her eyes are suddenly sad and tired. Like his father, she has aged. It is he who should be looking after her and, again, shame and guilt course through his blood.

‘You’re father’s not well, Seán, but not in his body. He’s fit as a fiddle, his heart would do an ox proud.’

‘What is it then?’ But O’Keefe recalls the blankness that had visited his father’s face, his need to consult the date on the newspaper’s front page; his talk of Peter and Sally coming home from college, and he knows. ‘He’s not well in the head, Mam? Is that it?’

His mother nods. ‘He forgets things. Simple things. And he gets frightened, at night …’ She looks to the open doorway as if his father might enter at any moment. ‘And gets so angry when he can’t remember something, Seán.’

‘What did Solly say?’

‘He sent us to a surgeon, one of the masters in the Mater. He has your father on cannabis tincture and other pills.’

‘And are they working?’

‘They were.’

‘Jesus, Mam.’

His mother smiles, and it is the saddest smile O’Keefe can remember her ever giving. ‘He’ll only get worse, the master says, until he’ll have to be committed, for his own safety.’

O’Keefe says nothing, contemplating his father in an asylum. He had been to such places as a constable, and decides that he will not have his father in such a place. No place for any man, let alone his father. He wonders for a bitter second how his mother can even contemplate doing such a thing, but then decides that she wouldn’t if she knew what they were like.

‘And is he aware of it, Mam? Of how ill he is?’

‘He is and he isn’t, and half the time he forgets. Sometimes he goes out and I worry he’ll be lost and never come back.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘He goes out with Maurice O’Toole most mornings. They go to train Mossy’s greyhounds. I’d be lost without Maurice, I would. He’s a saint, the man.’

Maurice ‘Mossy’ O’Toole, a retired G-Division detective, the same as his father.

‘Jesus, Mam,’ O’Keefe says. ‘Look, I’ll move back in and help you, let me do that at least. I’ve money, saved from my police wages. I’ll help you here.’

‘No,’ his mother says, standing. ‘Not that. You’ll not be a nursemaid. I’ve Mrs Devereaux and she’s a great help all these years. Especially now. She’s better with him than I am, still calling him “Sergeant”. And when he gets in his rages, they just seem to run off her back like rain.’

Mrs Devereaux had been with the O’Keefe family since she was a young woman and O’Keefe a boy. She had married many years ago, but had continued to do washing and ironing, cooking the odd time and cleaning the fire grates for the O’Keefe family, coming each day, though there was hardly enough for her to do. O’Keefe had always been fond of her, never more so than now.

‘Is she enough help for you, Mam?’

‘She is of course. The most capable girl … listen to me,
girl
, when the woman must be forty-five years old with grown children of her own. The most capable woman in Ireland and she’s a true blessing with your father. And your sister comes some days and that’s enough but sure, doesn’t she have the babby now?’

His sister and her baby he’s not yet seen. Guilt again beds down with the sadness in his heart. ‘What can I do for you and Da then? I want to be of some help. However I can …’

Again his mother is silent, as if deciding something. ‘There is something you can do for me … for your father. When you’re better …’

‘What is it?’

‘Not now. When you’ve your strength back, I’ll tell you. You sleep, now, love,’ his mother says, placing her warm hand on his brow. ‘It’s so good to have you home, Seán. Even if it was an ill wind that brought you.’