Vagabond (42 page)

She would not have claimed to know Pearse’s mother. Kevin was her eldest. Pearse was the woman’s youngest. The rain had eased.

They approached each other on a collision course. Kevin’s mother had wanted to be flushed with aggression when she met the other woman. Might have been a mirror of herself she looked at. Hair tangled, eyes swollen and red. Both walked in the middle of a road that was not wide enough to have a line at its centre. There was a tractor behind Pearse’s mother and a delivery van behind herself. Neither mother made way. They met and held each other. The anger shrivelled and fell away.

‘I would have said, and argued it to my grave, that it was the fault of your Pearse for leading him.’

‘I came to yell at you that if your Kevin hadn’t led him they would both be lolling in their beds.’

‘At the O’Kane house, and he’s no bigot.’

‘A good Catholic man and his wife. Their boy did no harm to us.’

‘Who led your Pearse and my Kevin? Who filled their heads with the rubbish?’

‘Malachy Riordan led them, and Brennie Murphy stuffed their heads with the rubbish.’

‘Brennie Murphy is a joke, full of the shit of the past and all talk.’

‘Malachy Riordan would have turned their idiot heads.’

‘They’re dead, and what for? Why?’

‘Because Malachy Riordan sent them.’

The delivery driver in his van hooted at them. The farmer in the tractor cab revved.

‘They were just wee boys and knew nothing.’

‘It wouldn’t have happened in the old days when they used men – fine men – not kids.’

‘Why were my Pearse and your Kevin taken?’

‘For nothing.’

The anger was purged, and the two women stepped aside. The delivery van sped past and towards the Pomeroy road. The tractor went by slowly, as if the driver was mindful of the mud on his tyres and took care not to spray them.

His tongue? Better he had bitten it out.

Yes, I think I know a man, can fix it, who’ll sell you gear
. Better he’d never said it. He sat at the table in the back room of the villa in Karlovy Vary. The sun slanted in through the window and the warmth came over the hill, the woodlands, a back path and across the yard. Ralph Exton always agreed to a deal that would guarantee him a profit, and frequently opened his mouth when no profit margin was in sight. He won some and lost some, and right now in his life he was losing plenty. He might have to sell the semi-detached in the ‘royal’ village and the bullshitting would be over. He couldn’t have said what he was doing in Karlovy Vary. He was hung-over.

The brigadier cleared the plates and had battle scars. He had taken a pounding. Ralph felt no sympathy, but sensed Timofey Simonov’s irritation with his man’s appearance. A mugging, apparently, an assailant prowling at the back of the property. A thief who had stolen a watch and a wallet – dumped but cleaned out of cash. Not police or detectives doing surveillance, but an opportunist thief. Timofey claimed that no criminals dared set foot in Karlovy Vary, and was confused.

They had discussed the detail, himself and Timofey, and had a time, a general location for the test-firing and the start of the transfer process. He’d thought he’d asked the question casually enough but he had been ignored.

The plates had gone, and within half an hour he would leave and be shipped back to Prague. He made the pitch again. ‘I was wondering, Timofey . . .’

‘What, Ralph?’

‘I was wondering if you could advise me.’

‘If within my power.’ Wary. Not the warmth Ralph had shown those many years before in the Amsterdam bar.

He blurted, ‘Timofey, how do I disappear, out of sight – go under the radar?’

The man sniggered. ‘You want to leave the royal village and your meetings with the duchess? With your wife and daughter? Go where you have no contacts? How then do you trade, if you know nothing, nobody? Ridiculous, Ralph.’

‘I thought you could help me.’ He was deflated. He couldn’t say he needed to get away from the Irish, that he was an agent of the security service and needed to escape their clutches. He needed also to be beyond the retribution reach of the plump, unsightly Russian – he didn’t want mastic sealant up his rectum, his feet swilling in wet concrete, or a sniper stalking his garden.

‘Just that sometimes events seem a bit overwhelming.’

‘You talk nonsense, Ralph, and that is not you. I advise. You buy a dog. You have a dog. You cannot fuck the dog but you can talk to it. It will not complain to you or criticise you and will not contradict.’

‘Thank you.’

Timofey stood. It was as if his attention span for his guest was exhausted and he wished to walk his dogs. Ralph bored him now. The deal rested on a sneer offered by a British officer at a Berlin seminar a long time before, and Ralph had heard it, chapter and verse, three times the night before. He was no nearer an exit strategy. He had dexterity, was fast on his feet. Think again, dear boy. The brigadier was called.

Ralph was hugged, and left. He thought the claws held him, and that the road to freedom was harder to spot.

Suspicion cut into him. Malachy caught hold of her. She was beside him but he tugged her in front of him, held her hard and high. He saw the shock spread across her face, inches from his. He turned with the finesse of a clumsy kid at a school dance. Her knees banged into his.

His mouth over hers, he tasted toothpaste. He kissed her.

If Bridie had seen him, or known of it, she might have battered him with a pan or walked out on him. It was an age since he’d held her like he held the girl, a stranger, and kissed her lips. She moved her body against his and he felt her weight against him. The warmth came through her clothing and she was tight to his chest and stomach . . . and down lower. She was like a bitch on heat, and had almost closed her eyes. When he had turned her the full half-circle he could see them.

Gardeners swept, pruned and raked, and mothers with children in buggies were nearby. A man walked with a tablet open in one hand, his mobile in the other, the two linked by cable. He saw an old man dressed like a tinker from home, German tourists with loud voices – four of them – and a couple: hardly remembered and barely recognisable. Nothing about them had stayed prominent but they had been there. He kissed the girl and she kissed him back. He eased her hair to the side and saw past her. They were arguing.

Malachy couldn’t hear their voices.

He had seen them at the gate. Then, when he and Frankie had finished their coffee, they had been on the rampart walls of the fortress. He had gone with Frankie out of the cemetery, through the far exit from the old graves, and they had been twenty-five yards from him. He couldn’t have said whether the argument was starting or prolonged. He saw them through the girl’s hair, soft gold strands that fell through his fingers.

The woman prodded the man’s chest with her finger, did a drumbeat on it. Made her point, emphasised it. The man pushed her away, open hand on her shoulder. She came back, closer, fury blazing in her eyes. He looked for the flash of a ring on the woman’s finger. Nothing. The man broke away, turned his back and went towards the steps that led to the outer wall. Malachy thought he had seen enough. He kept the view of them through the hair that lay on his face and twisted in his fingers. The woman seemed to shake, as if tears were coming, and she went after the man, kicked at the back of his leg, missed and stumbled. He turned and held her. Event over.

Malachy pushed Frankie away from him and her eyes opened. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He said, ‘I reckon they’re clean.’

‘Who?’

She tried to take his hand but he put it behind his back. Then she must have read it in his face: indifference.

‘They’re clean.’

‘What were we doing?’

Malachy put a hand on her shoulder and turned her forcibly. He told her that a couple, a man and a woman of uncertain age, had had sight of them round the Vyšehrad gardens.

He said, ‘Thanks for that, making it all possible, you know.’

‘Thanks for nothing. Please yourself. Any time.’

‘Well, I had to, didn’t I?’

Malachy didn’t know if anything more should be said, except that there was time for a coffee before they went back into the city. He was satisfied, and had told her.

The fight was over. Danny Curnow had an arm protectively round her shoulders.

She grimaced. ‘Was that all right for you?’

‘You did well.’

‘Are you good at rowing?’

‘I try not to . . .’ He looked to the left towards the steps up to the wall’s parapet.

‘Because there isn’t anyone in your life to shout at?’

‘None of your business.’

‘No next-of-kin was listed in Archive.’

‘I’m my own man. I don’t like arguments.’

‘You were pretty convincing.’

Danny Curnow softened, perhaps for the first time – maybe the last too. ‘And you did well. We had the sort of argument others don’t want to be part of. I’m talking to you so I’m turned enough to see them. We’re off their eyeball. Don’t think it gets easy. It never does.’

‘As you know?’

‘Yes.’

‘If I could ask a question of Desperate or Vagabond or Danny, or whoever’s shirt you’re wearing today, did you prefer our performance or theirs?’

He said to her, ‘If we’d shown out it would have been a death sentence for our Joe – and nasty stuff before.’

They walked towards the round tower of the church and the arch. He used Gaby to do their eyeball and he was talking with Karol Pilar. When he’d cut his mobile he repeated to her that she’d done well. He found it hard to give praise – it wasn’t his style.

The death of the quartermaster’s wife was a painful memory. It seemed to cut deeper than others. Dusty had parked the minibus and stayed with it. The tourists liked to feel it was secure, that they could leave their bags and coats without worrying. It was a sharp day and a wind came briskly up the Channel. The evening they’d heard that they’d lost the woman had been a defining one. Maybe, for Desperate, it had been a tipping paint. It was always down to politics when the world screwed up for them. The decision had been taken at Lisburn. It would have crossed a brigadier’s desk, or a general’s, and the secretary of state would have been leaning on him. A general would never tell a government minister to go fuck himself. They’d always had a laugh with the quartermaster’s wife, and the guys had liked the pictures of the kids she’d brought with her. Her usefulness was shrinking, though – the locations of the caches were less relevant – but she’d be at the meetings, delve in her memory and come up with a new name each time.

The secretary of state had needed a coup with his counterparts in the South. It was a difficult time, strained relations, and the refrain was that the South did not do enough to seal the frontier and disrupt ‘terrorist’ operations; the response was that the intelligence rarely dictated where arms seizures could be made. A simple solution: photographs of the field in which a bunker was located, its interior and the weapons; aerial pictures and a map – 1:50,000 scale – with a cross. There would have been a meeting, and documentation passed from hand to hand.

Desperate had warned her, but she wouldn’t leave. She had touched his hand and said, ‘I’ll sort any of the boys out, no worry. Nothing to it.’ The internal-security unit would have gone purple at the knocking over of that cache, and that amount of gear, and would have worked hard to find the source of the leak. She’d known of it because the quartermaster had banjaxed his ankle, couldn’t drive, and she’d taken him there a few months before the Monaghan exposure.

She’d been found in a ditch near Cullyhanna. The day before, her kids had been dropped off at the presbytery of a church. A lieutenant from the light infantry had come over to Gough and had photographs. She would have gone through many degrees of hell before the bullet in the head had ended it. The lieutenant’s reason for driving that distance to Armagh City had been apparent from the pursed lips that barely held in the anger at an innocent’s manipulation. He’d have been on a four-month
roulement
in the Province, had barely scratched the surface of the war and might not have understood that winning was seldom pretty. The biggest mouth in the FRU mess that night had been Harris Gates’s, a sergeant, two years with them, who had gone berserk and called Desperate a ‘fucking murderer’. He had swung a punch before he was pulled back. A bitter moment, and Gates was gone by breakfast the next morning, never seen again. Not even Captain Bentinick had raked over it. The funeral had been on TV, and the kids had walked with an uncle. It was one of those days when the light went out and something of the unit’s soul had gone walkabout.