Ratlines (12 page)

“Albert,” she said.

Ryan stood. “Celia.”

They stood in silence save for the ticking of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece until Celia said, “Thank you, Mrs. Highland.”

The landlady looked at them each in turn, cleared her throat. “Well, I’ll leave you two to make your plans. Good evening, Mr. Ryan.”

He bowed his head. “Good evening.”

Mrs. Highland left them, closed the door behind her. Ryan heard her scold the girls on the stairs.

Celia’s green-eyed gaze caused Ryan’s mouth to dry and his lips to seal shut.

When he thought he could bear the silence no longer, she said, “Mrs. Highland does like to fuss over her girls.”

Ryan’s laugh burst from him like a greyhound from a trap. He blushed, and Celia smiled.

“Shall we go?” she asked.

T
HEY SAT IN
the flickering dark, still and silent. Other couples leaned close, touched, the silhouettes of their heads sometimes joining together. Everyone in the room
oohed
in soft unison as Ursula Andress emerged tanned and shining from the sea.

The girl next to Celia looked up for a moment before turning her lips back to the boy whose hand had slipped inside her blouse. Ryan watched the shapes of the boy’s fingers move beneath the fabric. When he raised his eyes, he saw Celia looking back at him, a sly smile, her eyes glistening in the dimness.

T
HEY WALKED SOUTH
along D’Olier Street towards the northerly buildings of Trinity College, Celia’s arm hooked in Ryan’s. A rain shower had slicked the pavement while they’d been in the cinema, street lights reflected in the sheen. The windows of the
Irish Times
building glowed across the way.

“He’s ever so handsome,” she said.

“Sean Connery?”

“Yes. I met him once, at a party in London. Well, I didn’t meet him exactly, he was in the room. It was last year, just before Dr. No came out in England. You could tell to look at him he’d be a star. He had a grace about him, like an animal, a tiger or a leopard, something dangerous and beautiful.”

She spoke the words as if they were the most savoury ingredients of an exotic recipe.

“I don’t suppose it’s really like that, is it? Being a secret agent.”

Ryan smiled. “I’m not a secret agent.”

“Well, you’re G2. It’s the nearest thing we have to a secret agent in our little country.”

“Maybe so, but it’s nothing like that film.”

“No?” She forced an exaggerated frown of disappointment. “No lithe beauties coming ashore and throwing themselves at you?”

They reached the end of the street, the elaborate facade of D’Olier Chambers rising above them. Celia indicated the pub tucked away on Fleet Street, opposite.

“Buy me a drink,” she said.

Inside, thick curtains of tobacco smoke hung in the air. Ryan went to the bar while Celia found a snug at the rear. The barman stared in confusion when he asked for lime in the gin and tonic, so lemon had to do.

Suited men, red faced with shirt collars unbuttoned, guffawed and shouted. Journalists, Ryan guessed, writers for the
Irish Times
, downing whiskeys and pints of stout, exchanging stories. They had watched Celia as she entered on Ryan’s arm, their eyes following the flow of her through the room. Ryan had felt no offence at their covetous stares. Instead he had felt pride, his vanity glowing like a filament in his chest.

Many would have thought it scandalous for a young woman to enter a pub like this, but that didn’t seem to bother Celia. But the lack of lime in her drink did.

“Rum and Coca Cola would be fine next time,” she said, her smile polite but scolding.

Ryan wondered if he should apologise. Instead, he sipped his half of Guinness. Celia’s gaze settled somewhere beneath his chin.

“Isn’t that the same tie you wore in Malahide?” she asked.

His fingers went to the silk before he could stop them. “Is it? I don’t know. I don’t pay much attention to fashion.”

“Really? It’s a very nice suit. What is it?”

She reached across the table, lifted his lapel and read the label on the inside pocket.

“Canali. Italian. You dress well for a man who doesn’t follow fashion. Better than most of the men in Dublin, anyway. Have you ever been to Paris?”

“I’ve passed through,” he said.

She told him about her time there, stationed in the Irish embassy, a Third Secretary. How she walked around Montmartre, and how once, entirely out of the blue, a man came right up to her and asked her to model for him.

“And did you agree to it?” Ryan asked.

“Almost,” she said. She leaned close, shielded her mouth with her hand, and whispered, “Until he said it was to be a nude.”

She said her father was a High Court judge, now retired, a fussy old man, stiff with snobbery, but she loved him all the more for it. He told her about his father and his little grocery store where he had toiled for year upon year, just like his father before him, with little to show for it.

Celia told him about the garden party for President Kennedy that was scheduled for the Aras, President de Valera’s official residence. She had been promised an invitation, and confessed that the idea of being in the company of, perhaps even meeting, Kennedy and his beautiful wife made her giddy as the schoolgirl she had been at Mount Anville, the private convent where she had received her education.

They talked about the places they had been, each in the line of their work, he as a soldier, she as Third Secretary to one diplomatic mission or another. Ryan talked about the cold Dutch fields and the warm Sicilian streets, the days dug into gritty ditches in Egypt, the stifling wet heat of the Korean summer followed by the hard bite of its winter. Celia spoke of days typing letters, fetching coffee, collecting dry cleaning, the tedium made worthwhile by parties in hotel suites with cocktail bars and gilded furniture. Months spent in one city or another, weekends on yachts, banquets in palaces.

At twenty six she had seen more of life than almost any man, and certainly any woman, Ryan had ever known. So different from the girls he had shared coy exchanges with as a boy and a young man, so confident in her words and her gestures. Her hands did not lie curled in her lap. Instead they moved with her speech, bold and free. She did not wait her turn to speak in deference to his masculinity. She laughed from her belly, out loud, didn’t titter politely as if she sat in a church pew. She knew the world.

But not the barren places, the dark corners, the bleeding crevices. He measured his words, allowed her a glimpse of the harsh terrains he knew, but no more. Men came back damaged from such places, their souls scooped out of them. He did not wish her to think he was one of them, even if he sometimes feared he was.

Ryan neared the bottom of his second glass of Guinness—a pint this time—while Celia stirred her second rum and Coca Cola.

“It’s good to meet a man who’s travelled,” she said. “This country is so self-absorbed, our tiny little island. It’s as if we’re surrounded by a wall or a fence, like that one they’ve put up in Berlin, except it’s been built all the way around the coast. The only reason anyone gets on an aeroplane or a boat is to emigrate, and then the only places they can think to go to are England or America.”

“It’s expensive to travel,” Ryan said. “Who can afford it, unless they do it for a living?”

Celia leaned forward, pointed a finger, her eyes wide with an idea. “Then everyone should be a soldier or a Third Secretary.”

Ryan raised his own finger. “Then who would stay at home to tend the fields? Or go to church? We can’t leave all those priests with no one to preach to. Whose confession would they take?”

Her brow creased. “Clearly, I haven’t thought this through.”

“Why did you talk to me?”

Her smile faltered. The question had preyed on him since the night they danced, but he hadn’t meant to ask it aloud.

“In Malahide, I mean. Why did you come over to me?”

“That is an improper question, Albert Ryan.”

She brought her glass to her lips.

“But I’d like to know,” Ryan said.

Celia returned the glass to the table, watched the bubbles scale its walls and cling to the melting ice.

“I saw you walk in,” she said. “I saw the way you carried yourself. I thought: this man is not like the others. All those little boys and old men, politicians, civil servants, chinless pencil pushers and clock watchers. You were clearly not one of them. You were clearly something … else.” She looked up from the glass. “And also a little bit sad.”

Ryan felt naked, as if her eyes picked over the skin beneath his shirt. He couldn’t have borne it a moment longer if she hadn’t tripped him with a sudden smile.

“And then you opened your mouth, and you were like a schoolboy at his first dance in the Parochial Hall. I could almost imagine your mother spitting on her hankie and wiping your face before she let you out the door.”

“It’s a long time since my mother cleaned my face,” Ryan said. “Almost a month, in fact.”

Her chiming laughter and a hand on his knee caused a fluttering in Ryan’s belly. He excused himself and went looking for the WC. He found it at the rear of the room, the door hidden in a darkened corner, the mixed smell of disinfectant and human waste meeting him as he entered.

Ryan went to the toilet stall rather than the trough that served as a urinal. He preferred the privacy of the enclosed space over the vulnerability of standing exposed. When he was done, he pulled the chain and heard the roar of the flush.

He stepped out of the cubicle and saw a man at the washbasin, running water over the teeth of a comb. In the mirror above the basin, the man watched the reflection of the wet comb as it smoothed his thick dark hair to his scalp.

Ryan knew this man was not local, his charcoal-coloured suit too well cut, his skin too tanned. The man stepped aside to allow Ryan to wash his hands, but he lingered, taking his time over his grooming, watching himself over Ryan’s shoulder.

The man asked, “Did you enjoy the picture?”

Ryan took his hands from the water. “Excuse me?”

“The picture,” the man said, putting his comb in his pocket. “Did you enjoy it?”

His accent was American, but seasoned by something else. It had that nasal twang, but a depth to the vowels that was more European. His facial expression might have passed for friendly if not for his eyes.

Ryan shut off the tap and lifted paper towels from the stack above the basin. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

The man smiled. He had good teeth. “No, you don’t. I saw you in the movie house.”

Ryan estimated the man’s age at forty to forty five. He had small scars on his hands, and what might have been an old burn on the skin of his neck, not quite concealed by his collar.

“It wasn’t bad,” Ryan said, dropping the paper towels into the bin. “A bit silly. But I enjoyed it.”

“Silly.” The man weighed the word. “Yes, that’s a good way to describe it. Entertaining, but hardly realistic, don’t you think?”

Ryan stepped away from the basin, towards the door. “I wouldn’t know. Good night.”

“She’s very pretty.”

Ryan stopped, his fingers on the handle. He turned to see the man incline his head towards the door, and the unseen room beyond.

“The girl. Your date. She’s very pretty.”

Ryan let his hands drop to his sides, found his balance. “Yes, she is.”

“You’re punching above your weight a little, though, aren’t you?”

Ryan did not answer.

“I mean, you’re getting a little out of your league.”

“Who are you?”

The man’s smile broadened. “You don’t want to be out of your league, do you? If you get in over your head, who knows what might happen?”

Ryan shifted his weight forward on the ball of his right foot. The man braced.

“Who sent you?” Ryan asked.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you—”

Ryan moved, one hand going in low, the other high, ready to seize the man, turn him, pin him against the tiled wall. Ryan was quick, but the man was quicker. A hard hand on his wrist, pulling, stealing his momentum, using it against him. The man turned and ducked within Ryan’s reach, nimble like a dancer, the sharp point of his elbow jutting into Ryan’s groin, robbing him of air.

The tiles slammed into Ryan’s cheek. He tried to push himself away from the wall, but the man kicked at the backs of his knees, taking his legs from under him. Ryan’s kneecaps cracked on the cold wet floor. He felt the other man’s knee press hard between his shoulder blades, pinning his chest to the wall. A hand gripped his hair, pulled his head back.

Ryan heard a metallic click, saw the tip of a blade close to his right eye, felt it brush his eyelashes, the chill of it against his cheek.

“Be still, my friend.”

Ryan put his palms on the tiles, fought the heaving in his chest.

“I only asked if you enjoyed the picture,” the man said, his voice calm and even. “That’s all. Nothing to get worked up about, is it? Just a friendly question, right?”

The man released Ryan’s hair, took the knee from his back, the knife from his vision, and stepped away.

“I’ll see you around, Lieutenant Ryan.”

The door creaked, the chatter of drinkers swelling for a moment then receding. Ryan looked over his shoulder. Alone, he rested his forehead on the coolness of the tiles for a few seconds before dragging himself to his feet.

He went to the mirror over the basin, checked for any mark from the blade, saw none. His knees carried damp stains from the moisture on the floor, and his tie hung crooked. He straightened it, wiped at his knees with paper towels. When his breathing steadied, he left the WC.

Celia looked up as he approached. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” Ryan said. “I promised Mrs. Highland I’d have you back by eleven. We’d better be going.”

Celia scoffed. “Oh, Mrs. Highland can wait up. That dried up old bag should step out herself now and then. It’d do her the world of good to blow the cobwebs from her knickers.”

She giggled, brought her fingertips to her mouth. “I’m sorry, that was quite coarse of me, wasn’t it? Perhaps I’ve had one drink too many. You’re right, we should go.”