Irregulars (29 page)

‘Luck’s …’

‘Luck’s got nothing to do with it, I know, Albert, but there’s heavy men who’ll be wanting that money back and won’t stop til they get it.’

They reach the stairwell and begin to descend, jogging down the steps so that O’Keefe does not hear Just Albert say, ‘That’s exactly what I’m hoping for, that is …’

O’Hanley sits on his chair and tells Nicholas Dolan, who closes and locks the outer and secret door to the room, to sit on the bed.

‘Nicholas,’ O’Hanley says. ‘I thought we’d lost you.’

The boy smiles brightly, young pride and mischief in his eyes. ‘Sure, it was ropey enough, it was. Meself and Robert got jumped by two gougers outside the hotel after I gave the message to Murphy. And then didn’t ourselves and the gougers get hit up by a great shower of Free State spooks in fine hats and trenchcoats. Only for one of the lane boys stabbed one of the Free Staters did I get away.’

‘And what about Robert?’

‘What about him, so?’

‘Did he get away with you?’

Nicholas’ smile fades now. ‘I … I don’t know. I … I thought he did. He’s not here?’

‘No,’ O’Hanley says, but he is smiling still, as if not overly concerned.

‘Fuck it if I never asked the boys downstairs … I should have asked after him, but I thought he’d be back.’

‘Don’t curse, Nicholas, it’s vulgar. You are an educated young man. A soldier of the republic. It does not suit.’

‘Sorry.’

O’Hanley breathes heavily and lets silence descend. He holds the boy’s gaze until the boy looks away. O’Hanley reaches across the space between them and pats Nicholas on the thigh, squeezing the taut muscle beneath the tattered woollen trousers.

‘Don’t worry, Nicholas. You’re a fine boy. And a fine soldier.’

Nicholas smiles, and casually shifts his leg from under O’Hanley’s grip. ‘Here,’ he says, holding out a sheaf of papers in his hand. ‘I got up to some good while I was wandering the streets. I stripped these from wherever I saw one.’

He hands the papers to O’Hanley, who recognises his own face on them. They are ‘Wanted’ posters announcing his name and age, stating his crime as murder of Free State forces, offering a reward for information and warning the public against attempting to apprehend him. That he is armed and dangerous. It is, he realises, the same photograph that the British Army and the RIC had used in their ‘Wanted’ posters during the Tan War. More evidence of collaboration between the Free State and Crown spies.

He smiles ruefully, unable to be truly angry with anything brought to him by this boy. ‘I had heard about these. I must send the lads out tomorrow to pull as many down as they can.’

‘And here, look at this one.’ He hands O’Hanley another poster, and at first O’Hanley does not recognise the face in the photograph.

‘You and me, on every lamppost in Dublin!’ Nicholas says, laughing like the fourteen-year-old boy he is.

The photograph is of Nicholas, the poster offering a reward for information of his whereabouts.

‘But don’t worry. It’s only me mother who’s had them posted. She’s worried is all, but I never went near her, like you said.’

O’Hanley looks up. ‘You’re a grand boy, Nicky.’ Again he pats the boy on the thigh, and leaves his hand there.

The boy looks away. ‘I should be getting down. Mrs Dempsey is going to mend my trousers and run me a bath.’

‘Not at all, Nicholas. Stay with me here, for a time.’ O’Hanley is breathing heavily now, his pupils dilated in the candlelight, the musky smell of river and sweat and youth rich in the small room.

‘All right,’ Nicholas says, and sits back down on the bed. ‘Can I help you with anything? I don’t know … drafting plans or records or something? Shall I write up a report of my stunt in the laneway?’

‘Nicky, please.
Stunt
? We’re not common jump-over men. We are republicans,’ O’Hanley says, but he smiles as he says it. ‘But yes, of course,’ he continues, ‘a record of your operation. Here, sit at my desk.’

The boy smiles and seats himself, and O’Hanley opens his Ops Log to a fresh page. ‘Here, write it here.’ O’Hanley leans over Nicholas’s shoulder and points at the fresh, white page.

The boy dips the pen in the ink pot and begins to scratch out the date and time of the entry, his commanding officer standing over him, resting a hand on his shoulder. He begins his account of the action, writing several sentences before O’Hanley tells him to stop.

‘Nicholas, oh Nicky … How did you ever manage to stay in Francis Xavier’s with penmanship like that.’ For the moment, O’Hanley is back in the classroom, the place he thinks he was most happy. ‘Here, let me show you something.’ Leaning over Nicholas, his face entering the glow of the low-burning candle, O’Hanley takes the boy’s hand in his own and begins to guide it in the shape of the letter S. He does this several times, the musky scent of the boy’s hair like an intoxicant, inches away from his face.

Laughing, Nicholas looks over his shoulder at O’Hanley. ‘Jesus, Commandant, I know how to write my letters.’

The sound of the boy’s laughter is lilting, sweet to O’Hanley’s ears, and with his hand still on the hand holding the pen, the commandant leans in and kisses Nicholas on the cheek. His free hand goes to the boy’s back and slides under his shirt to the ribbed heat of his chest.

The boy pulls away and stands, knocking the chair over behind him. ‘No, sir, no … Jesus, I’m not …’ The boy backs into the corner of the small room, his eyes alight with fear, confusion.

‘I’m sorry, Nicky, I don’t know what …’ O’Hanley rights the fallen chair and steps over to the boy. He crosses to the inside door and throws it open, only to hear the frantic rapping at the outer false door.

‘Sir! Sir!’ the voice from outside the room is shouting. ‘Open the door, please. I’ve Stephen Gilhooley here and he’s hurt badly, sir. Sir?’

‘Let him in, Nicholas.’ O’Hanley busies himself removing the medical kit from under his bed.

‘And Nicholas …’ the commandant says, something bitter about the turn of his lips now, ‘… not a word of this to anyone, boy. I’d fear for your safety, if ever you were to speak of what you’ve done here.’

41

T
he Triumph Trusty is where O’Keefe had left it in the alley beside the Achill, and soon the Dublin streets unwind beneath him, cobblestone and hard macadam, past Trinity College onto College Green, down Dame Street, passing a loose platoon of patrolling Free State soldiers, swinging left onto South George’s Street.

The evening assails him in memory. The lifeless, machine-gunned bodies of Murphy and his men. The tortured, sheeted corpses of the boys on the surgeon’s gurneys. The smashed and battered skull of the CID man in the doss-house baths, Just Albert’s bloody club rising and falling down like a blacksmith’s hammer. Bloodsoaked regret and the humid storm cloud of depression he has known since the war, gathering in the dark corners of his mind.

He should never have let Just Albert take the money. No good will come of it. A black assemblage of word and thought clatter in his mind, the Trusty’s pistoning four-stroke distant and muffled under this oppression, his eyes scanning the racing shadows and darkened windows of Camden Street as he rides. The flashing nightscape set-dressing his growing despair. Midnight urchins huddling a hackney stand’s barrel fire. A late-opening Italian shop, newsprint chip-and-ray wrappings flowered open on the footpath in the margins of its window light. Aging street whores in the maw of an alley, pimp keeping sketch for coppers. O’Keefe’s mind keeping grim pace with the bike.

Never should have taken this job in the first place. Nicholas Dolan more than likely up in the Wicklow hills under canvas playing bivo’ed soldiers, and here I am, as if born to it, up to my elbows in blood. And no way to know if the deaths of the boys in the morgue or the men in the hotel are linked to Nicholas’s whereabouts. And all to pay a debt incurred by the auldfella. A debt he may have already forgotten.

He curses his father, and regrets it, and then does not.

A light burns behind the curtains in his flat and O’Keefe shuts down the Trusty, leaving it for the moment on the footpath in front of the Cunningham house. He pauses at the top of the steps down to his rooms—a fresh surge of readiness flooding his nerves, heightening his senses—wishing suddenly he had thought to bring the dead man’s Colt with him. Then he remembers Finch, sweating out his wounds in his bed. His heart slows as he descends the steps and keys open his door. Instead of Finch, it is Mrs Cunningham sitting in his desk chair before a low coal fire in the grate, a book splayed open on her lap, the weak light over her shoulder from a paraffin lamp on his desk. She starts awake at the sound of his key.

‘Mrs Cunningham.’ His face flushes with the heat of embarrassment, and he looks to his bed, and beneath a thick welt of blankets is Finch, steadily breathing, lightly snoring. The source of his shame, he is relieved to learn, is still alive. ‘I should have told you about my friend. He’s …’

The woman smiles, rubs her eyes of sleep then closes the book on her lap. ‘It’s grand, Mr O’Keefe. His fever’s down in the past few hours. And I’ve changed his dressings. Healthy-looking wound, that is. A bullet if I were to guess.’ But there is no malice or suspicion in the words, and O’Keefe nods.

‘It is. I’m not sure how he came to get it, but he’s a friend I owe my life to. I should have told you. Asked you.’

‘Only so I could have tended him, Mr O’Keefe. He’s a man in need of medical attention, and medical attention I can provide. I’m happy for the chance to do it again, really. A holiday from the ironing and sewing, it makes me feel young again, and God knows I need to feel that way now and again.’ She laughs lightly, and seeing the question on O’Keefe’s face, she says, ‘I was a nurse, Mr O’Keefe. Before I married, before the war.’

‘You’re very kind, Mrs Cunningham. I’d like to pay you …’

‘Don’t be daft, I’m only happy to do it. Sure, somebody needs mind him so Henry and Thomas don’t take it upon themselves to do it. They’ll mithre the poor man to death if we’re not careful. He sent them to shops for whiskey, if you can believe it, and paid them in penny sweets. He wasn’t able for much of it.’

O’Keefe smiles back, wondering briefly how long it had taken after he had left for the two boys to sate their curiosity about the man in his bed.

‘Will he make it, do you think?’ he asks.

Mrs Cunningham stands, strands of her dark hair escaping from their knot at the back of her head and framing her face in the lamplight. A kind face, lines at her eyes that speak of a life spent smiling. Or weeping. Recent weeping, fresh lines carved by the grief of losing her husband, but still a woman more prone to happiness, bitterness not sitting naturally with her.

She is older than O’Keefe by half a decade, he thinks, and her body soft and round, a mother’s body under her skirts, her bust stretching tight the blanket she has wrapped round her shoulders for warmth and O’Keefe has a sudden urge to have her take him in her arms and hold him. Change the dressings in his heart, his head. Tend to him. His shame returns as he feels a tightening in his gut, a limning warmth in his balls. He flushes again, guilty and amazed in equal measure with how a body functions. Violence and shame and lust in the space of an hour. And his mind lurches now to Nora Flynn, her lips on his and body pressed against his body, the swell of her breasts against his chest, the heat rising from her skin beneath her shirt collar; Nora Flynn not half a mile away in her digs and his cock twitches, as unashamed and madly sovereign as any inmate in Bedlam. Mrs Cunningham smiles at him as if sensing his need, and though not recoiling from it, guiding it deftly, gently away.

‘There’s less discharge in his dressings this last time I changed them. I think he’ll be grand but tomorrow will tell. If the fever’s not worse, then let’s hope he’s dodged a proper dose of infection. When was he shot?’

O’Keefe squeezes his eyes shut on his yearning. Forcing his mind to speech, rational thought. ‘Two days ago. Three maybe. The doctor saw him …’ He must pause to think, and with it his desire is stilled, leaving a vague, reassuringly normal wraith of guilt. ‘… Yesterday, or two nights ago … the days are blending together for me at the moment, I’m afraid. The work I’m doing …’

She closes her book and turns down the lamp to a low gutter. ‘I should get back up to the children. What your friend needs is sleep. Nature’s nursemaid.’

‘
King Lear
,’ he says, smiling, surprising himself that he has remembered.

‘Who? Oh, I don’t know only that the sister who trained me in swore by it. Sleep the healer. And you should sleep, Mr O’Keefe. And don’t work so hard,’ she says, patting his forearm as she passes him for the door. ‘I can’t be tending two men at the same time.’

She leaves O’Keefe standing in the centre of his room, his eyes on the slow rise and fall of Finch’s breathing under the thick counterpane.
Get well, me auld mate
, he thinks, willing it but unable to pray.

The lamp flickers and dims, running low of oil. Hunger grips his stomach, and O’Keefe tries to remember when he last ate and cannot. Fatigue wrestles with his hunger and wins. Sleep now, he thinks, and takes Finch’s bloodstained trenchcoat from the hook by the door. He intends to use it for a blanket, but stops when he feels the unmistakeable shape and heft of a bottle in Finch’s coat. He shoves a hand in and comes out with Dewar’s finest Scotch whisky, Finch still preferring the Scotch to the Irish, still loyal to the old trench rumour of Scotch whisky’s purity over the rebel distilleries of Ireland. O’Keefe had tried many times, in the year and a half they served together in the RIC, to convince him of the superiority of Irish whiskey, but had never succeeded. But O’Keefe is not picky now, sleep and hunger lost for the moment to thirst. He uncorks the bottle and drinks.

He lowers himself to the floor, covers himself with the overcoat; lights a cigarette and pulls at the Dewar’s. When his cigarette is finished, he corks the bottle and blows out the lamp. Tossing restlessly on the draft-rife floor, his mind races and sleep retreats despite the whisky. He thinks of rising and drinking more, but an image of Nora Flynn again rears in his mind.
Don’t be a fool, O’Keefe
, he thinks.
Don’t be a bloody fool.

A rushed bath in tepid water, and five minutes later he is for the door.