The Little Red Chairs (14 page)

The bus was hired for the occasion and the name McDonagh was splashed in gold lettering on both sides. The driver, who was Polish, was very affable.

‘I show you the beauty of Ben Bulben,’ he said to each one as they got in, mostly women in their Sunday best, flowered dresses and matching jackets, the younger ones in T-shirts and jeans, while the actress who had come specially from Dublin to recite was in a cream trouser suit and wore a green chunky necklace. She had been booked as a substitute to recite his poems, which she deemed ‘Mystical and Quasi-Philosophical’.

They sat in pairs. Vlad had taken the single seat behind the driver, bent over his sheaf of papers and making corrections. Fidelma kept hoping that he might turn around just once and
give her even the semblance of a smile. Since the morning of the graffiti she had heard nothing.

They were an animated group. Fifi and her help Maggs were reeling off the delights of the picnic in the green rush basket – sausage rolls, cheese canapés and egg-and-cress sandwiches, all wrapped in moist linen to keep fresh. Cora, the supervisor in the seaweed spa, had brought her mother along, the poor woman scattered and
distrait
as she looked around at the unfamiliar faces, and seeing Vlad, she pointed and said, ‘Is he the devil?’ The wide brim of her straw hat, held down with two metal curlers, gave her a somewhat childish, stroppy look. There were whispers at how awful sad it was that she a schoolteacher for almost forty years, was now asking people their names and then forgetting them and saying her husband, her dead husband that is, spent far too much time on the computer. Phyllida showed the more recent pictures of her foal Brio, who unfortunately was losing her nice biscuit colour and was more khaki now.

Minerals and sweets were passed around and the excitement was palpable. Those from different neighbourhoods sat in huddles, but as the day went on it was hoped that everyone would mingle. Two silent men sat together as they did on fine days on the town bench, rarely exchanging a word.

‘A sign say
No Climb
but I climb,’ the driver told them, boasting of his pride at having stood on the summit of Ben Bulben and searched for shells and coral, as souvenirs for his daughter. Yes, stood there and between the wide bays of the sea, had a view of another mountain, with the tomb of an ancient queen and from where it was forbidden to trespass or take stones.

They left the town and after a few miles came on the woods, beech trees, that met and mashed overhead, an oasis of green.
Further on ash trees grew in little clumps, and the sun slanted through the window creating different moments of light and shadow, the same sunlight that sent dimples of gold into the pools of rainwater that had lodged in the fields from a downpour the previous evening.

‘Aren’t we blessed with the day that’s in it,’ two elderly women kept repeating, tears in their eyes, grateful at being included in such select company.

They had a fine view as the road was high, having been built on mounds of earth to prevent flooding, but the ride was bumpy and Cora said what a pity that they did not have an important politician up in Dublin, that would ensure good roads for them. Her mother kept thinking she saw the sea, which she couldn’t have, as they were still passing fields, sheep cropping the young grass and clover, lambs suckling and running away and running back almost instantly, as if they feared abandonment.

‘Look, there’s the sea,’ her mother said and Cora kept apologising for her, and her mother’s harmless smile disappeared, just as if someone had wiped it off with a face flannel. Her expression was hostile, as if to say
I see what I see, I understand what I understand. You’ll all be old one day.
One of the silent men swapped places with Cora and began to show the mother pictures in his illustrated bird book and she imagined they saw these different birds in the air, soaring and circling.

As they came out onto a dual carriageway, cars were whizzing by at a reckless speed. It was a dangerous road, where the many small white crosses, wreathed in meadowsweet and set at a distance to one another, were reminders of those who had lost their lives. They had not yet reached the sea, but the air smelt salty and with a tang to it. Vlad had not engaged with them at all, never
once looking up from his papers and Fidelma wondered if, after his poetry reading, she would manage a word with him alone. She craved it. She knew that there was to be no further communication and she accepted it, but she hoped, if only for the child’s sake, he would be there, at the rim of her existence. She had not yet told Jack. How to tell him. What to tell him. When to tell him. These were the questions that assailed her hour after hour, as she faked good cheer at home and cooked the things he liked, flans, steamed pudding and crème brûlée, things he didn’t have to chew too much. But soon the gourd of her belly would show and there would be no hiding from him or from anyone.

‘Holy Jesus!’ Fifi was the first to cry out as the driver braked suddenly, the bus came to a stop and people were thrown onto one another, the open tin of sweets rolling along the aisle, toffees and chocolates spilling out.

A guard in uniform had put his hand up, signalling the bus to stop, then had a few words with the driver through the open window. Traffic was building up behind and the driver was asked to move the bus into a lay-by, which he did. Everyone assumed it was about his licence, or if he had been insured to drive a bus at all. Then two guards, who were not local, boarded the bus, both with revolvers attached to their holsters, and made a quick survey of the passengers on either side. They approached Vlad and asked for proof of his identity. He looked in his briefcase and after what seemed an interminable time, he took out his passport. Both guards studied it and nodded to one another in silence. Then one, who spoke with a country accent, said, ‘I’m afraid we have to ask you to come to the station with us.’

‘I’m afraid it’s impossible because we are heading for a poetry recital,’ he answered, quite nonchalant.

‘That will not be possible sir … we are arresting you,’ the second, more senior guard said.

‘My dear fellow, you must be mad … arresting me … you are chasing shadows,’ Vlad said, still in total command of himself.

‘You have been living under a false name,’ one said, and his colleague, who was not quite so bristling, said that they were just doing what they had been instructed to do, as he held up the arrest warrant for him to see.

‘But this is preposterous,’ Vlad said and turning to the others, he shrugged as if to say ‘I have fallen into the hands of highwaymen.’

The postmistress, alert to every little nuance in the parish, was flabbergasted. How could she have missed it, the build-up, the massive surveillance, liaising with big shots in Dublin and with not a single local guard consulted. She felt cheated of her importance in the community. Some had already begun to take pictures on their mobile phones and Cora reckoned that it was probably to do with his practising as a healer without the necessary qualifications. Fifi knew different. It was more sinister than that. One time, when she found the key to his safe and had opened it, she discovered guns, ammunition, money in different currencies and several passports, each photo of him so radically different, bearded, clean-shaven and once with an implausible red wig. Fidelma ran up far too excited, all her covert passion poured into her words, to vouch for him. Almost condescendingly he motioned her back and as he did, the second policeman snapped the handcuffs over his wrists and shut them tight.

The last image they had was of his tall figure, unbowed but humiliated, starting down the steps of the bus and just as the sun had soaked into the young ash leaves, it now rasped on the
bracelets of metal that bound his wrists.

It happened so quickly, so ‘low key’ as they said, that they were well nigh lost for words. The fact that he had co-operated and hadn’t tried to escape was surely a sign that it couldn’t be too serious. Yet the mood had changed, everyone felt uneasy and the driver was sweating and cursing his bad luck. A day wasted. Fidelma regretted that she had jumped up and was touched for the first time with a fatalistic terror.

The driver, no longer extolling the beauties of Ben Bulben, threw his hands up and said, ‘The longer I live in this insane country, the less I understand it.’

By a show of hands it was agreed that he would drive them back to the stop by the Folk Park where he had collected them.

*

People came out of their shops and out of their houses to repeat to one another what they already knew, talking in grave tones, enumerating the horror, the horrors that might have befallen their children. They came in cars and on scooters, older people with sticks or on walking frames came and even the ducks, disturbed by the hullabaloo, waddled out from the Folk Park into the main street.

A television camera had been set up and a reporter with a handheld microphone approached passers-by to be interviewed, but most were reluctant to speak. Children made faces at the camera.

TJ’s was crammed, people craning to have a closer look at their fake healer, who they were told had the sobriquet of ‘Beast of Bosnia’ and that there were millions on his head. They saw
images of him in his wartime swagger, and once with the Russian poet, both men shooting into the town of Sarajevo, as if it were a game, and accompanying it were lines of his poetry:

When the time comes for gun barrels to speak,

For heroic days, valorous nights,

When a foreign army floods your country,

And wreaks havoc and causes damage in it,

That condition must be righted:

Then you roam your homeland on foot,

And your boots fight side by side with you.

On the television one or two spoke of him as the warrior poet, who had always had a mystical conviction of his role in history. He had risen from being an obscure doctor to the global notoriety that he had always craved and was now on his way to the Tribunal in The Hague, to be indicted for crimes that included genocide, ethnic cleansing, massacres, tortures, detaining people in camps and displacing hundreds of thousands. His first request in the detention centre, where he awaited extradition, was for a barber, and so his white locks and his white beard were now, somewhere, on that barber’s floor.

What apes they were, taken in by his mesmerism, his tree hugging, his aura, his tripe. A strange youth rushed in and said just after capture he had broken free from detention and shot a guard and another person talked of his having taken his own life with prussic acid. A general delirium prevailed. There was shock, repugnance and disbelief. Plodder Pat sat unusually quiet, thinking what could he have done when not even the sergeant was briefed on the operation. The boys in Dublin wanted
all the glory for themselves. Fifi was crying aloud, asking John in God’s name why he had not sent her some sign, some guidance from beyond. She would throw the effing gusle into the river, except that the police had taken it, having ransacked the house and in the safe seen the skeleton of a snake, the revolver and the cartridges. They put her through two hours of interrogation. Why had she not gone to them after the very suggestive words scrawled on the pavement in the town –
Where Wolves Fuck.
Why hadn’t she? The truth was she was a little soft on him. She remembered once, bringing home a box of young lettuces to plant, when surprisingly he appeared to help, remarking on the clay, saying what good clay it was and little did she guess that in his own country were all these thousands of remains, with worms eating them. He’d fooled everyone. She would never trust a soft-spoken, courteous man again.

They saw the shells of burnt houses, a gutted landscape, marching frightened families, a boy on a pile of rags calling a name and behind the bars of a concentration camp, skeletal young men staring out in gaunt and hopeless despair.

‘If it’s true, it’s sad … It’s very sad,’ Hamish said.

‘It’s true … Very true and very sad,’ Fifi replied.

The capture was described in detail, the idyllic country setting, a bus hurtling along, a disingenuous party, mostly of women, heading for Ben Bulben, with its proud association to the great national poet, W. B. Yeats.

He had entered Ireland, so they learnt, by a circuitous route. Having been hidden in monasteries in his own country, he was spirited out, when it became apparent that the authorities were soon to close in on him. By Italy and Malta, through the bay of Biscay to Spain, he had travelled under several names, by boat and
then by trawler, before arriving at Clegger Harbour, an unmanned cove, off the coast of Wexford. It was well known to smugglers and paramilitaries, where, because of the rock formation, the tide was always low and small boats or currachs could get in.

‘He who walketh on shite,’ someone shouted and Father Eamonn, who had never set foot in that bar, came in, leaning on his stick and close to tears, as he was led to the good chair by the fire. He was as baffled as everyone else.

Mona was the most jittery of all, because of her accidental part in the day’s happenings. She could barely cope. With Dara not yet returned from the football match in England, she had to call on Dante to draw the pints and the half pints, while she herself did the shorts, her hand shaking uncontrollably, sloshing it. If she were alone she would have turned the blasted thing off. But it was the encounter in the early morning that kept dogging her. When she opened the shop at ten, three men, bruisers, were waiting to come in. They were uncouth, treated the place like a dosshouse, wanting a shower, changing their underpants in front of her and brusquely demanding coffee and toasted sandwiches. One had a crew cut, a second wore a plaid cap that he must have got at the airport and was trying it on in the several bar mirrors, the third wore a hat on the back of his head and had a ginger moustache. The other two referred to him as the Medico. They asked her what time the bus with Dr Vuk would be returning. She said she didn’t know, as Dr Vladimir had moved out of the area weeks ago. They knew that and they were the ones to tell her that since he left, he had lived in a caravan on a remote island off the coast of Galway.