Ossian's Ride (14 page)

“The parallel is one in which a few men are able to impress their will on the rest. It may be that what is being done now is not the same in detail as it was in Germany a generation ago, but the principle is the same—a few at the top decide what shall be done, and the rest are forced into abject obedience.”

The canon’s wife kept staring at her husband, as if to stop so dangerous an outflow, but I had no intention of allowing this promising spring to dry up. For here was the first remark I had yet heard that seemed to bear some relevance to the real problem—the driving force behind I.C.E. Not to appear overanxious, I steered the conversation slightly away from the matter in hand.

“I can’t quite see why you go back thirty years for an example. Wouldn’t the Russians serve the same case?”

The pudding was brought in at this point. Apparently the canon was trying to lose weight, and with this course of the meal of little interest to him, he addressed the table freely.

“A most interesting point,” he observed with relish. “The Russian system is no less obnoxious, my dear fellow, but it is subtly different. In Russia, it is the creed itself that dominates; everyone must obey, high and low alike. But here in Ireland it is the high-ups themselves who decide the creed.”

“Well, I suppose I must admit that I’ve never given much thought to who I’d be working for. Are these people at the top of I.C.E. really like Hitler and his gang? I mean personally.”

“That I cannot answer, because I’ve never seen any of these people myself.”

“Then ...”

He interrupted with a wave of his right hand. “How do I know they exist—eh? Well, well, Mr. Sherwood, I’ve lived in the west of Ireland for almost twenty years. My work brings me into contact with many people, both inside and outside the Church. I saw the first small beginnings of I.C.E. and I’ve seen it grow step by step over the last ten years.”

Now he lifted a finger to emphasize his remark. “And throughout all this time I’ve never yet come across anyone employed by I.C.E. who really made the important decisions in his own job. They’re all slaves, Mr. Sherwood. And that’s exactly what I had in mind when I said that you ought to think very carefully before you decide to throw in your lot with these people.”

“Then everyone must be acting under instructions, except of course for those who give the instructions. But have you any idea how all this obedience is achieved, sir? It almost sounds like an army.”

“It is an army, precisely so. Quite literally, there is a considerable army at work behind the barrier. But I hear darker stories whispered, stories of drugs, even of the use of bacteria. Men are said not to be the same after they have passed through the hands of this I.C.E. medical service.”

“Now, John, that’s quite enough!” exclaimed his wife. “And at dinnertime too,” she added to cover her alarm.

The canon’s remarks had a considerable if not profound effect on me. The remark about drugs, although probably guesswork, did fit with Parsonage’s statement that I.C.E. somehow managed to take very few agents into its employment. It had always puzzled me how they could take on so many trustworthy scientists (from their point of view) and so few untrustworthy ones. Perhaps this was the explanation. At all events there seemed even less prospect of my being able to bluff myself into the inner councils of this incredible organization.

“But one must agree that the ordinary people of Ireland are much better off now than they used to be,” observed one of the teachers.

“One must admit that we are a good deal better off in some directions and a great deal worse off in others,” answered the canon.

“There was none of this police surveillance in the good old days,” he went on. “No road patrols making endless inquiries, no daytime curfews, no harrying of every stranger in sight.”

The teacher silenced, he turned back to me, at last changing the subject. “Paddy tells me that your car is broken down. Tomorrow I’ll be going into Limerick for a few hours. Is there anything I can get for you?”

I thanked him and said that it was a new voltage regulator I would be needing. Then after supper I went along to Mrs. O’Callaghan to ask if I could use the telephone. This done I rejoined the others in the small sitting room. Meanwhile the storm shrieked across the hillside at the back of the house.

We built up the turf fire in an entirely splendid fashion. Conversation never lagged, for the canon turned out to be a supreme raconteur, with a vast fund of spine-tingling stories. As the evening wore on, he progressed from ghosts seen at third-hand to ghosts seen at second-hand and at last to ghosts that he himself could vouch for upon affidavit. The ladies became decidedly jumpy, and truth to tell I was little better, for the re-emergence had been distinctly unnerving. Here was the darned fellow again, not a charred bag of bones as I had supposed, but as large as life, telling a sequence of most ingeniously contrived supernatural stories.

It grew so hot in the small room that we opened the door. Still the fire burned brightly, and the rain pelted fiercely on the window. But there came a quite sudden moment of silence, and in that moment I saw from the corner of my eye a streak leap out from the bright-red pile of turf in the grate. In a flash it seemed to cross the room and to be out by the open door. Simultaneously there were piercing screams from the women; the teachers leaped across the room, ending their flight by pinning me completely in the bottom of my chair.

The canon was white about the gills, for I suppose he achieved his skill as a storyteller by half-believing his gruesome yarns. “Now I wonder just what that could be?” he said with a commendable attempt at calm unconcern.

“I wish I could look around a bit,” I answered from the depths of my prison. With muttered apologies the schoolteachers removed themselves from the scrummage—their screams had amply compensated for their erstwhile silence.

“It may have been a cat,” suggested the canon.

“And how would a cat come to be in the middle of the fire?” countered his wife with implacable logic.

The upshot was that we—the canon and I—went off to consult with Paddy. He assured us that the household kept no cat. In a shaking voice he insisted that it was no cat we had seen but “himself,” a view that the canon, with his Protestant tradition, was not disposed to accept. The two of us tramped about the house but we could find nothing. We returned to the sitting room.

“Ah well, it is no matter,” remarked the canon with ill-concealed anxiety. “It only shows that we should have been away to bed long ago.”

He pulled out a watch and flicked it open. With horror I looked for the imprint of a crown, but there was none that I could see.

The mists of sleep were gathering around me when there was a soft thud on the bed and a subdued miaow. It
had
been a cat, after all.

The wind fell during the night and the rain died to a light drizzle. The canon was already at breakfast when I came down.

“It
was
a cat,” he exclaimed in triumph. “I saw the little beggar on the stairs. It must have been seeking shelter from the storm, got into the chimney somehow and skated down into the room like an Eastern firewalker. Used up half its nine lives at one go, I’m thinking.” He laughed uproariously, and one of the teachers smiled rather wanly.

“Doesn’t the cat have a very special significance in the practice of witchcraft?” I asked.

No one seemed to have the stomach to pursue this subject. The canon indeed made a sharp turnabout.

“I expect to be leaving for Limerick at about ten o’clock. Would you like to come with me, or can I pick up whatever it is you want?”

I said I would like to go along with him because I wasn’t sure of the precise specifications of the voltage regulator, but that I would recognize it when I saw it.

The problem of explaining to Mrs. O’Callaghan that although I would be returning for my car I might not be returning to her house proved a little tricky. Fortunately she still took me for a scatterbrain to be humored. So I managed to pay my due, and the canon and I were away by 10:50 A.M.

About six miles south of Limerick we were stopped at a barrier.

“There’s going to be a curfew,” remarked the canon with surprising complacency as he brought the car to a stop. A guard handed him a green slip of paper.

“Show this if you should want to go out again, sir. I expect you’ve got your papers with you?”

“Yes, of course,” answered the canon.

“And you, sir?” The question was addressed to me.

“Yes, of course,” I replied.

The car picked up speed, and I was now trapped in a city under a daytime curfew where all strangers were hunted on sight. Not for the first time I deplored my lack of Irish identification papers. I had not wished to carry such papers through the Dublin immigration—and Seamus Colquhoun had been a broken reed. My British passport would be a sadly inadequate document. The bad error had been to accompany the canon, but the lift to Limerick was nearly halfway to my destination, and after the long miserable tramps of the preceding days I had allowed myself to be seduced by his offer.

The canon dropped me in the city, saying that he would meet me at about four, outside the Hilton Hotel. I was sorry not to be able to say good-by, for I had no intention of being outside the Hilton Hotel at four.

Without delay I sought out the Pan American Airways office.

“I phoned yesterday, booking an evening flight to London,” I said to the clerk.

“What name, sir?”

“Sherwood, Thomas Sherwood.”

He looked through his list, and then nodded in confirmation. “Could I see your passport, please?”

The misgiving I felt in handing it over was tempered by the realization that if I couldn’t deceive an airline clerk my case would indeed be hopeless. He glanced at the photograph, ripped a counterfoil off my visa and handed the passport back. I suppose it must have seemed very natural that someone with a British passport should be booking a flight to London.

He filled out a ticket and handed me a green boarding card. I paid for the ticket and asked: “I noticed that you gave the fellow before me a yellow boarding card. Why was that?”

The clerk dropped his voice. “We’re instructed by the police to issue yellow cards to anyone who books a flight
after
a curfew is announced. You’ll be all right with your card, sir. If I may give you a bit of advice I’d take an early bus out to the airport.”

“Why?”

“Because the police like everyone with valid papers to get out of the city as soon as possible. That makes it easier for them to deal with the rest.”

I climbed into the bus, thanking my lucky stars that by some sixth sense I’d had the wit to make a booking by phone the previous night. Almost the worst that could now happen was that I should find myself back in London. I hadn’t really fulfilled my mission, but at least I’d have a tolerable story to tell. At all events I could make things a bit easier for anyone who should follow me.

It was probable that the police would notice that I was seriously offbeat, as far as my itinerary was concerned at any rate. It was possible that I’d be held for questioning, but I couldn’t see that any serious charge could be sustained against me. If they had grounds for really strong suspicion, then by good detective work there was little doubt that the whole course of my activities could be reconstructed, but there wasn’t the slightest reason why they should go to such lengths. The most likely thing was that I’d be kept under close watch until I boarded the plane—that I wouldn’t be allowed to slip away at Shannon Airport.

But I was saved by my companion in the bus. He was a little man, I should judge of maybe sixty-five, dressed in a blue wind jacket that boasted the insignia of the New Jersey Sno Club. He told me that he was a small manufacturer from the town of Elizabeth, on his first visit to Ireland. When the police boarded the bus and were looking through the papers of the people in front of us, he began deploring this undemocratic activity in a loud voice. The police kept glancing at us, and heads were constantly being turned. Then the little fellow announced, “And what’s more, I haven’t even been allowed to see anything of this I.C.E. business. From all I hear they’ve quite a few things that we could make use of back home in the States.”

When the police reached us, he scowled at them. “Always hustling innocent people about. I’ll have a few questions to ask when I get back to New Jersey.”

In their anxiety to get at the old fellow, the guards somewhat naturally were rather superficial in their examination of my things. My green card, passport and visa stamp were all they bothered with.

But they put the old chap’s effects through a fine-tooth comb, luggage and all. He never ceased to complain the whole while. He would write to his representative in Congress. He would get his wife to complain to the local woman’s club, a threat which two other male Americans assured the guards to be serious. The police retired at last, baffled men. I had the impression that I wasn’t the only person in the bus to sigh with relief.

I was not averse to visiting the airport. On the face of it the easiest way into I.C.E. territory would be to land at the airport and then to take a small boat down the Shannon, eventually landing somewhere on the south bank. Quite apart from espionage, it was certain that profitable smuggling of I.C.E. products must be taking place through the airport. I once read the precept that wherever an economically profitable racket exists, it is a certainty that such a racket will receive full exploitation. If so, there surely had to be a route through Shannon Airport into I.C.E. land.

Manifestly I should learn little from hanging about the main lounge, and it would be unwise to go roaming about the airfield until I knew the layout better. I had once worked for a month during the summer at a Strathpeffer Hotel, spending my earnings afterward in climbing the Northwestern Highlands, so I had some slight knowledge of kitchen and restaurant work. I knew that there are always cleaning jobs that no one likes to do, and I resolved to present myself as a new recruit for one of these jobs. I looked the part, something of a ruffian, and I knew that my credentials would not be overanxiously surveyed. I knew also that it was unlikely that I would be given any job that brought me into contact with the public. Such jobs are always sought after, because of the chance of tips. It was unlikely therefore that I would run any risk of recognition by my companions in the bus.