Ratlines (7 page)

Ryan pulled into the driveway through the open gates. Rabbi Hempel stood waiting in the doorway. He was a middle-aged man with square-framed spectacles, casually dressed with a knitted vest over an open-collar shirt and a suede kippah on his crown. His beard almost reached the bottom of the V formed by his top button. He extended his hand as Ryan got out of the car and approached.

“Mr. Ryan?” he asked.

Ryan shook his hand. “Thank you for agreeing to speak with me.”

“Not at all. Come to my office.”

Stained glass windows refracted the morning light inside the synagogue, bathing the rows of seats in a warm peace. The rabbi led Ryan to a room to the rear of the building. It was a modestly appointed office, books lined upon shelves, a sparse desk.

“Please, sit down,” Rabbi Hempel said. Once they were seated, and Ryan had declined any refreshments, the rabbi asked, “Are you a policeman?”

“Not quite,” Ryan said. “I work for the Directorate of Intelligence.”

“But you want to talk to me about a crime?”

“Three crimes. Three murders, to be exact.”

The rabbi’s lips pursed with concern. “Oh, dear. I can promise you I know nothing of such crimes.”

Ryan smiled to reassure him. “I know. But if I explain the nature of the murders, you might understand why I’ve come to you.”

Rabbi Hempel sat back in his chair. “I’m listening.”

Ryan told him about Renders and Hambro, and Helmut Krauss, and the blood on the floor of the guest house in Salthill. He told the rabbi about the note addressed to Skorzeny.

Rabbi Hempel sat in silence for a few seconds, gazing at Ryan across the desk, before he said, “I am not sure what alarms me more: that these people are permitted to come and live in peace in Ireland, or that your first assumption is that only a Jew could do such a thing.”

“It is not my assumption,” Ryan said.

The rabbi leaned forward. “And yet here you are.”

“It’s a line of inquiry I was instructed to pursue by my superiors.”

“Orders.”

“Yes. Orders.”

Rabbi Hempel smiled. “So many men have simply followed orders. The men who shot my parents and my elder sister at the edge of a ditch they had just forced them to dig, they were following orders. Does that absolve them?”

“No,” Ryan said. “But nevertheless, you must see why I have been asked to follow this line.”

“I do indeed see the reason. It’s likely a different reason than you believe it to be, but please, go ahead.”

“Thank you. Are you aware of any groups within your community, perhaps younger men, who have strong feelings about the war?”

Ryan realised the stupidity of the question too late, felt heat spread on his face.

“I promise you, Mr. Ryan, all in my community have strong feelings about the war.”

“Of course,” Ryan said. “I apologise.”

The rabbi nodded his acceptance. “That aside, there are no organised groups that I’m aware of. There are less than two thousand Jewish people left on the whole island of Ireland now, possibly only fifteen hundred. I can barely gather enough for a congregation. Believe me, there are no groups of disaffected young men, hungry for blood.”

“To your knowledge,” Ryan said.

Rabbi Hempel shrugged. “Who would have the motive? We have suffered comparatively little persecution here. The ugly episode in Limerick at the start of the century, some call it a pogrom, but those who were driven out were in turn welcomed in Cork. The bureaucrats at the Department of Justice did their best to block Jewish refugees entering Ireland before and after the war, but the Department of External Affairs put pressure on de Valera to intervene. Ireland has not always been welcoming, but seldom has it been overtly hostile. These are not the conditions that put hate in young men’s hearts.”

Ryan almost laughed, but choked it back. “There’s no shortage of hatred in this country.”

“The Irish have long memories,” Rabbi Hempel said. “I have lived in Ireland for more than ten years, and this was my first understanding of its people. Were it not so, perhaps Britain might have had another ally against the Germans. Instead, Ireland sat on its hands and watched as Europe burned.”

Ryan thought about letting it go, almost did, but said, “Ireland had barely found its feet as a state. It had been through the First World War, the War of Independence and the Civil War, all in less than a decade. It couldn’t afford to go to war again. It didn’t have the strength. Even so, a hundred thousand of us fought.”

The rabbi raised his thick eyebrows. “You?”

“Yes.”

“And did your neighbours appreciate your fighting for the British?”

“No, not all of them.”

Rabbi Hempel nodded. “Like I said. Long memories.”

A
S
R
YAN EASED
out of the synagogue’s driveway, heading back towards town, he saw the black car parked further down the road. And its two occupants, both men, neither of them watching him.

In his rear view mirror, he saw the car pull out from the curb. It kept a distance of thirty yards or so. He glanced as he drove, trying to make out the men’s features. All he saw were shapes, shoulders and heads, the impressions of shirts and ties. One of them smoked a cigarette.

As he crossed Terenure Road, another car pulled between them, driven by an elderly lady, forcing the driver of the black car to brake. It edged to the centre of the road, allowing the man at the wheel to keep Ryan in sight.

It stayed there, maintaining its distance, until Ryan reached Harold’s Cross, where he pulled to the curb. He watched in the mirror as the black car slowed then turned off towards the cemetery.

Ryan might have worried about who followed him, which thin finger of the government crept after him, but he had other things on his mind as he pulled away.

He had a suit to collect.

CHAPTER EIGHT

C
ÉLESTIN
L
AINÉ DOWNED
another shot of whiskey, let it bite his throat. Barely seven o’clock, and Paddy Murtagh was already drunk. Before long, he would start to sing. Rebel songs, he called them. The Bold Fenian Men, The Wearing of the Green, Johnson’s Motor Car. He would raise his voice, hoarse and tuneless, and would not fall silent until he passed out.

At least Lainé would not have to endure it alone this evening. Elouan Groix, a fellow Breton patriot, also sat at the table in the small cottage. Murtagh’s father had given Lainé the use of the two-room dwelling in a remote corner of his farmland, thus the young Murtagh was made welcome out of a sense of obligation.

Lainé and other members of
Bezen Perrot
, the small but dedicated band that he had led in the fight against the Allies, had fled to Ireland in the aftermath of the war. They had held on longer than many of the Germans they had battled alongside, but in the end, there remained no other choice but to run.

As a young man, Lainé had read
La vie de Patrice Pearse
by Louis le Roux. He had been left with a sense of awe, and of duty to those who had been martyred for Ireland in 1916. Like many autonomists, he had felt in his heart that those Irish lives had been sacrificed not just for Ireland, but also for men like him. The struggle to throw the French yoke off Breton shoulders needed the same spirit as had been shown by the Irish if it were to succeed, that shared Celtic fire in the warriors’ bellies.

The coming of the Reich had seemed like a kiss from God. A gift, a means to achieve what Bretons lacked the might to do for themselves. So as France fell, Lainé organised and recruited, armed his men with weapons supplied by the Germans, and fought.

Soon, Lainé discovered a talent he had never suspected he possessed. He had trained and worked as a chemical engineer, a useful vocation when manufacturing explosive devices, but a newly unearthed ability shocked everyone, including himself: he found he had an innate expertise in dragging information from prisoners.

On a hot night early in the occupation, Lainé and three comrades captured a Resistance fighter in fields north of Nantes. Two others had gotten away. Lainé began by asking for the names of the escaped men. The prisoner refused, giving only his own name, Sylvain Depaul. He was not from the area. Lainé would have known him otherwise.

They blindfolded Depaul and brought him to a barn on a sloping hillside. Cattle slept all around, oblivious to the men who crossed their fields. Lainé bound the
résistant
to a pillar. His wrists were slippery with sweat as they were fixed in place, tied tight to the wood. Depaul’s own belt was wrapped around his neck and buckled at the rear of the pillar, leaving him pinned and choking.

“Who were the others?” Lainé asked again.

“I’ve already told you,” Depaul said, the words coughed out from his restricted throat. “I was alone. I was just out walking.”

“With a Browning pistol?” Lainé stroked Depaul’s cheek with the weapon’s muzzle.

“For rabbits. I was going to make a fire and cook one.”

Lainé stabbed at Depaul’s lips with the muzzle, mashing the flesh against his teeth. Depaul turned his head away as far as the belt would allow, blood spilling from his torn skin.

“I have no patience for this,” Lainé said. “This is not a game. If you cooperate, you might live. I can’t guarantee that, but it remains a possibility. On the other hand, if you lie, if you hold back information, then it is a certainty that you will suffer and die.”

In Lainé’s mind, they were only words. He had been interrogated by police officers years ago, after the bombing of the Monument to the Unity of Brittany and France in Rennes. They screamed question after question at him, slapped his face, pulled his hair. Harsh, but hardly torture. He had never experienced such a thing. Thus, he was as surprised as anyone when he set the pistol aside, took an ivory-handled penknife from his pocket, heated the blade in the flame of the oil lamp until its tip glowed, then pressed it against Depaul’s cheek.

As the
résistant
howled, and the other men coughed at the smell of scorched meat, Lainé felt a surge of something he did not recognise in his chest. Power? Pride? As Depaul cried, Lainé smiled.

“I’ll ask you again,” he said. “Who were the others who fled when we captured you?”

Depaul growled, spat blood on his own shirt, swallowed his pain. “There was no one. I was alone.”

Lainé had not expected to be pleased at Depaul’s refusal to speak. Nevertheless, there it was: the pleasure of anticipating the next cruel act. He returned the blade to the oil lamp’s flame, watched as traces of Depaul’s blood and skin bubbled and burned away.

“I was on my own,” Depaul said, his voice liquid, no longer hard and defiant. “I swear. God help me, I’d tell you if there was anyone else, but there wasn’t, I promise.”

Lainé reached behind the pillar, seized the thumb of DePaul’s right hand.

“Once more, who were your companions?”

“Please, I was alone. There was—”

Lainé pushed the tip of the blade beneath Depaul’s thumbnail. Depaul screamed. The three Bretons stepped back. One of them ran outside, covering his mouth, vomit dribbling between his fingers.

Keeping the blade in place, Lainé asked, “Who were your companions?”

Depaul shook his head from side to side, his voice stretching thin as his lungs emptied.

Lainé explored the tenderness beneath the nail. The blade’s tip burrowed in, worked the keratin loose from the flesh until it peeled away.

Depaul talked.

He told them the names of his two companions, local men, and the location to which they had been heading. The British were to drop a crate by parachute into a field not even a mile away. When Lainé and his men reached it, they found it contained rifles, ammunition and radio equipment. Within twenty four hours, Depaul’s friends had been rounded up and executed alongside him.

As Lainé developed his newfound talent, his reputation travelled. Soon it only took the mention of the Breton’s name to convince a
résistant
to talk. It would have been a lie to deny the pleasure of such notoriety. Power in its purest form. The power of fear. Lainé grew accustomed to it quickly and never suspected he would lose that power.

Now in Ireland, in his mid-fifties, he had nothing. He had lacked the foresight to rob and rape as the Reich crumbled, leaving him to run with empty pockets. Had it not been for the contacts he had made with the IRA, heroes in his mind, he might never have escaped the wrath of the Allies and found his way to Ireland.

Lainé still remembered the crushing disappointment of finally meeting the Irish revolutionaries he had so idolised. In his imagination, they were the noble defenders of the working Celtic man. They were Patrick Pearse, they were James Connolly, they were Michael Collins.

In truth, they were a disjointed network of farmers, socialists and fascists, bigots and blowhards, an army whose war had come and gone decades before. They had sided with the Nazis during the war, even formulating plans to assist the Germans in an invasion of Northern Ireland to oust the British presence there, but they proved themselves incapable of such ambitious schemes.

Fleeing in defeat had been like swallowing thorns for Célestin Lainé. But now, years later, he knew it was better than the hopeless purgatory the fanatics of the IRA wallowed in. They had not quite won their struggle for independence; the northern part of their island remained under the thumb of the British and their Protestant caretakers, while the rest of the nation was ruled by a self-serving government that had turned on the brave warriors whose sacrifice had made its very existence possible.

And now the best the IRA had to offer was ill educated louts like Paddy Murtagh and his belligerent father Caoimhín, full of songs about the virtuous struggle of revolution and precious little else.

As Lainé feared, young Murtagh placed his glass back on the table, inhaled a breath that rattled wet and thick at the back of his throat, and sang.

“Come all you warriors and renowned nobles, who once commanded brave warlike bands,” he slurred.