Echoland (4 page)

The sentry on the gate saluted Duggan as he walked out of the
barracks
and headed down to the Liffey, stretching the distance to the Red House to give himself a longer walk. It was another lovely
morning
, the air still and cool with a sharp tang of hops from the brewery across the river. He paused at the river wall to light a cigarette with his mother of pearl lighter, a commissioning present from his parents, and inhaled the first sweet smoke of the day. The sky was a soft blue, cloudless, and the river was full, the tide covering the stench of its bed. A barge, already loaded with wooden barrels, was getting up steam on the brewery’s quay and he could see a plume of smoke from a train pulling into Kingsbridge Station as he set off up river.

He took his time and tossed the butt away as he went up the hill to Infirmary Road and through the checkpoint into army
headquarters
. A group of dispatch riders were firing up their motorbike engines and Captain McClure came out the door of the Red House with two bulky envelopes, handed one each to two dispatch riders. He stepped back and pointed both index fingers at the gate and shouted ‘Go!’ over the clatter of their engines, as if he was starting a race. Duggan stepped out of their way as they took off at speed.

McClure caught sight of him and called him over with an
impatient
wave of his hand. ‘Can you drive a car?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Get the keys of one of those from the duty office.’ He pointed to two dark green saloons parked nearby. Ford V8s, just like Timmy’s new car.

Duggan followed him inside and realized at once that something had happened. The normally sedate corridors were filled with officers and orderlies, all looking grim, nobody talking, everybody busy. He got the car key and went up to his office. McClure was selecting files from various piles and handing an occasional one to an orderly who held open a large canvas sack with one hand. On the side of the sack was painted in capital letters in red the word ‘BURN’.

‘Okay,’ he said to the orderly when he saw Duggan arrive. ‘That’ll do for the moment. And remember, don’t do it yet, until you get a direct order. But be ready to destroy everything when you get the order.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the orderly saluted and went out.

Duggan felt his stomach turn and his breath caught in his throat for a moment. It’s happening, he thought as McClure turned to him and said, ‘Come on.’ Duggan followed him down the corridor and out to the car. He sat in and started the engine.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked finally.

‘Invasion,’ McClure said, sounding preoccupied. ‘We’re going to Dublin Castle. D’you know the way?’

‘Where?’

‘Dublin Castle.’

‘Sorry. I meant where’s the invasion.’

‘It’s imminent. Hasn’t happened yet, as far as I know.’

The sentry at the gate raised the barrier for the car and Duggan drove through and stopped. ‘Left,’ McClure said. ‘And left again.’

‘The British or the Germans?’

The question seemed to break through McClure’s preoccupation
and he looked sideways at Duggan. ‘Germans. Why’d you think it was the British?’

‘I didn’t,’ Duggan said, aware of Timmy’s warning to look towards the border. ‘Just thought it could be either.’

‘Or both,’ McClure said, almost to himself. ‘We’ll end up a
battleground
for both of them. Just a matter of who comes first.’

Duggan felt his stomach turn again and glanced at McClure. A phrase from the nights of family rosaries ran through his mind: pray for us now and at the hour of our death. They were driving past the Four Courts, the sun shining brightly, the sky still blue. The pavements were empty down here away from the city centre, few pedestrians about. It was hard to think they could be at war. Were already, for all he knew.

McClure rubbed his eyes and took his cigarette case from his tunic. He rolled down his window, lit a cigarette and breathed the smoke deeply. ‘What a night,’ he said. ‘Take the next right. Over the bridge.’

‘What happened?’ Duggan asked eventually, his need to find out what was happening overcoming his uncertainty about questioning a superior. ‘Last night?’

‘Special Branch raided a house out in Templeogue. Looking for a German parachutist who we think landed here a week or so ago. They fucked it up as usual. Should’ve waited till they were sure he was there. Only the owner’s mother was there.’

‘The German got away.’

‘He wasn’t there. And I don’t think he’ll be coming back. But they found a lot of interesting stuff in a locked room. Transmitter. Code books. Picked up the owner of the house when he eventually turned up in the early hours. Stephen Held, businessman, half-German.’

‘He’s working for them?’

‘We have to assume so,’ McClure sighed and indicated with his
hand that Duggan should turn left at the junction facing the city hall. ‘And, to make it worse, he’s friendly with our local lads.’

‘The IRA.’

‘The self-styled IRA,’ McClure corrected him. ‘Go right here.’

Duggan stopped opposite the Olympia Theatre and waited for a strung out line of cyclists to go past before pulling across the road into the narrow laneway that led to the lower yard of Dublin Castle. A uniformed guard stopped the car and Duggan could see two
plainclothes
men with submachine guns behind him. McClure waved an identity card at the guard, who insisted on reading it before letting them through. The men with the submachine guns watched them closely as they drove in.

‘Typical,’ McClure snorted as he stared back at them. ‘Locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.’

McClure directed him around the back and told him to park when they neared the Ship Street gate. Duggan stayed in the car as the captain got out and then turned back to him and said, ‘Come with me. You may as well see this, too.’

Duggan followed him down a laneway, both slowing as they passed the building which had been badly damaged by an early
morning
IRA bomb that had injured five detectives and a caretaker a month earlier. A retaliation for the deaths in jail of two IRA hunger strikers, it was said. Rubble had been pushed to the side of the passageway and thick timbers propped against the sides of the blackened holes and the sagging roof. They went on and entered another building where McClure asked for a superintendent whose name Duggan couldn’t catch. A detective brought them to another room where he knocked, spoke to someone inside, and ushered them in.

The Superintendent took off his reading glasses, stood up and came around his desk as they went in. ‘Morning, men,’ he said. He
was tall, in his fifties, balding and beginning to sag a little. ‘This is what you want to see.’

He brought them over to a table beside a window looking out on a lawn, the early summer grass almost luminous in the sunshine. One end of the table was covered with neat rows of American dollars of different depths, each bound with an elastic band. ‘Each pile’s a
thousand
dollars,’ the Superintendent said. ‘Twenty thousand altogether.’

‘Were they like that when you found them?’ McClure asked. ‘In thousand dollar packs?’

‘No. They were in a box. All mixed up. Ten dollar bills, twenties, so on. We had to count them.’

‘Twenty thousand exactly?’

The Superintendent nodded. ‘About five thousand pounds’ worth, I’m told.’

‘So he hadn’t got to spend any of it yet,’ McClure said.

At the other end of the table was a folded white silk parachute. It reminded Duggan for some reason of vestments. Between the money and the parachute were the wireless set, a pad of letters and numbers, several maps, crude drawings of what looked like ports and airports, and a small sheaf of papers clipped together with ‘Plan Kathleen’ typed on the cover. A Luftwaffe breast patch of blue-grey wool depicting an eagle with a swastika hanging from its claws, a German army officer’s cap, and some old military medals were also among the collection.

‘He wasn’t a pilot shot down anyway,’ the Superintendent said drily. ‘I’m sure the Germans don’t give all their pilots twenty
thousand
dollars to buy their way out of trouble.’

‘Or invasion plans for other countries.’ McClure pointed to the document that said Plan Kathleen. ‘Have you read it?’

The Superintendent nodded and gave a succinct summary. ‘Germans to drop by parachute in the west of the Six Counties. The
IRA to move across the border from Leitrim to Fermanagh. They combine and throw the British out.’

‘When?’ Duggan asked and was sorry when they both looked at him.

‘It doesn’t say,’ the Superintendent said.

‘Have you had copies made?’ McClure asked him.

‘Done. One was sent over to you. Probably crossed paths when you were on your way here.’

McClure bent over some of the hand-drawn maps and turned his head sideways to get their orientation right. He didn’t touch
anything
. Duggan looked at the wireless. It didn’t look that different from the one his father had built years ago to listen to 2RN, a
collection
of valves, tuning coils, knobs and a dial. Except for the Morse keypad connected to it by a rubber-covered wire. He went on to the Luftwaffe badge and bent down to peer more closely at the
inscriptions
on one of the medals. It was a bronze cross, all the arms equal in size and the same shape, with swords crossed behind it and the figures 1914 above 1918 in a wreath at its centre.

‘Hindenburg Cross,’ McClure tapped his finger on the table beside it and Duggan straightened up. ‘The swords mean he served in the front line. Bit old to be a fly boy now if he was in the trenches. Bit old to be jumping out of planes too.’

‘Maybe it was his father’s,’ Duggan suggested.

McClure rested his chin on his thumb and forefinger and looked at it again. ‘That’d make sense. Father’s or some other close relative’s. Something of sentimental value. Why else pack that in your rucksack with all this other stuff?’

He stared at the table for a moment, scanning one item after the other, and then turned to the Superintendent. ‘What’s Held saying?’

‘Usual cock and bull story. Doesn’t know your man from a hole in the road. He turned up at his house the other day, asking to rent a
room. Said his name was Heinrich Brandy. Held and his mother talked it over and agreed. Sheet metal business isn’t doing too well at the moment, he says. The war and everything. They could do with the bit of extra money.’

‘And he has no idea where Herr Brandy is now?’

‘Of course not. Last he saw of him was the evening before when they went for a walk and Brandy invited him into a local pub for a drink. Held declined because he had to be up early yesterday for a business meeting. And hasn’t seen him since.’

‘And what was Brandy’s reason for picking his house of all the houses in Dublin to look for digs?’

The Superintendent rolled his eyes. ‘He’s a bit evasive on that. Something about a friend of a friend in the German community recommending him. But he doesn’t know what friend. Or what friend of a friend.’

‘Okay.’ McClure said, glancing at Duggan. ‘I think we’re finished here.’

‘I’ll let you know if he says anything else of interest,’ the Superintendent walked to the door and opened it for them. ‘You’d think they might all leave us alone,’ he said in a tired voice, shaking his head. ‘We haven’t even had twenty years yet of being in control of our own destiny after all those centuries.’

McClure nodded and shook hands with him.

Back in the car McClure said, ‘Get on to Dr Hayes when we get back to the office and tell him about those codes. He should see them as soon as possible.’

‘Dr Hayes?’

‘In the National Library or the film censor’s office. Our
cryptographer
.’ He noticed Duggan’s surprised look. ‘He’s very good at it.
That code pad could be a gold mine.’

‘Okay.’

McClure took out his cigarette case and lit a Players. ‘I’m smoking so many of these things I’m beginning to hate them,’ he said.

The Castle’s gate was blocked by a car coming in, the guard
talking
to its driver. The plainclothes men with the submachine guns were watching it intently. One of them turned back and put out a hand, waving their car back. Duggan stopped about twenty yards short of the gate, held down the clutch and put it into first gear. He and McClure watched the tableau in front of them in silence. Eventually the guard stepped back from the car at the gate and it began to move slowly backwards, reversed into a side lane and turned and drove away. One of the plainclothes detectives went to talk to the guard and the other waved them through.

There were more people about now on Dame Street, tempted out for early lunches by the growing heat of the day. Duggan retraced the journey they had taken earlier. McClure sat in a pensive mode, staring out his side window at the passing wall of the river and beyond it at the undistinguished skyline on its southern bank, broken only by church spires and dowdy buildings seemingly heaped up behind each other.

‘Don’t be afraid to ask questions,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s the best way for you to learn. And it’s also a help to me.’

‘Okay.’ Duggan took a deep breath and plunged on with the only question in his mind. ‘Is the invasion really imminent?’

McClure sighed. ‘There are a lot of straws in the wind right now. All pointing in the same direction.’

‘So it’s not just this German, Brandy?’

‘No, it’s not just him. But he’s one of the stronger straws. Sent some people into a tizzy last night. Taking precautions.’ He rolled down the window and flicked out the cigarette, still a generous butt. ‘He obviously came on a serious mission. The transmitter. All that
money. The sketch maps. Possible landing sites and so on. All point to him being here to prepare the ground. It’s clear what he’s up to. Unlike Harbusch.’

‘And the plan, Plan Kathleen.’

‘I’m not sure about that,’ McClure said. ‘It doesn’t really fit with all the other stuff. If they already had a plan, why would he be
scouting
other locations? Why would he be carrying a copy? Too risky, if he got caught.’