A Star Called Henry (33 page)

The peelers stayed away.

We grabbed a few minutes for ourselves, away from the dancing and back-slapping.

I gave her a German pipe, a beautiful thing, my face carved into the black wood of the bowl. She held it carefully by the shank and gazed into the face.

—It’s exactly you, she said.

—Put it in the window when it’s safe for me to visit, I said.

—A husband visiting his wife, she said.—What sort of a world is it we’re marrying into?

—It’ll be a better one soon, I said.

And, the day that was in it, I believed what I’d said.

She gave me a pair of britches, and a snake belt to hold them up.

—Not that you’ll be needing it, she said as she watched me putting them on.

She took the two steps over to me and started unbuttoning them. She put a hand on my cheek.

—My child bride, she said.

—Fuck off, would yeh.

—Say that again.

—No.

—Do what you’re told, Henry Smart.

—Fuck off.

—Again, Henry.

—Fuck off.

—What would happen if they came in now?

—Who? The priest?

—Oh God.

We were in the scullery, in the dark behind the kitchen. Its coolness was welcome after the heat outside.

I grabbed her to me.

—The peelers?

—Oh—

It wasn’t the same as the room under the G.P.O. but it did us fine and we did it proud. We fucked without grazing our knees on the flags, without stopping for balance or breath, for the first time since that first time, after months of staring at each other, rubbing against each other, ignoring, torturing each other. We blew up together and held on to each other till our bodies calmed down and we could feel and hear the dancing from the kitchen outside and the end of it, and old Missis reciting
Dangerous Dan McGrew
. We knew that Ivan was leaning against the other side of the scullery door. Ivan had become a big man in the parish, a man who might have killed a peeler, a man who had it in his power to leave any man dead in a ditch with a piece of paper pinned to his lapel:
Killed as a spy by the I.R.A.
Power had gone to Ivan’s soul. He had cut the hair off girls who’d been seen giving soldiers the eye, tied them to gates and railings, their hair cut with shears and a singeing machine. And he always kept a lock of the hair, to post to the victim weeks later. He’d gone further than that. He’d punched two pig rings into a young one’s ears, because she was a peeler’s niece and her boyfriend had refused to stop seeing her. He’d hanged a donkey from a tree for delivering turf to Strokestown barracks. And he’d become a great man for the letter writing.
Unless you withdraw your services from the local peelers within three days of receiving this notice you will undergo the extreme penalty at the hands of the I.R.A. i.e. DEATH.
They had a style that was all his own.
Please yourself now, but failure to carry out the above order will be frowned upon. Yours faithfully. The Firing Party.
We never had many recruits and fewer real ones, devoted men, soldiers who were prepared to give up everything and do anything for the fight. Collins himself said that there were never more than three thousand fighting. So, savages like Ivan did the work of hundreds. We scoured the country looking for Ivans. He was on the other side of the door now, so the scullery was ours for as long as we wanted it.

—Your mother?

—Oh God—

I had a photograph of the day that I managed to hold on to until it was burnt in front of my eyes, in a warehouse in Chicago just before they shot me. We’re sitting on a bench in front of whitewash that must have been the side wall of old Missis’s house. You could tell from the wall that it was a hot, glaring day. I’m in the suit from Clery’s, before I changed into the britches, my shirt whiter than the wall, and a Thompson sub-machine-gun, a great-looking gun but overrated, draped across my lap. She’s in a dress she’d made herself from looking at the pictures in a book of legends of the Fianna, white linen broken with embroidered birds and monsters biting their own tails and a massive Tara brooch holding a cloak to her shoulders. Her hair is loosened; her bun has become a frame for her face: she was perfect that day. The butt of the Thompson is nudging her knee. Ivan is behind us in full uniform, one hand covering his holster, the other unseen. Ivan the Terrible, later to become Ivan Reynolds T.D. He was already getting fat on his future. He’s standing behind Miss O’Shea and looking away, keeping an eye on his men on the barn roof, a fringe he’d let grow over the summer curtaining the other eye; he’d met Collins in May and hadn’t cut the hair since. And the bridesmaid is beside Ivan, right behind me. She was a Reynolds, too, no great friend of Miss O’Shea’s, just a female cousin neither too old nor young to be her bridesmaid, and even in that old photograph, ruined by the sweat, rain and wear of the fugitive life, years of it by the time they’d caught up with me and I was standing against that wall in Chicago, and years since I’d last seen Miss O’Shea and longer still since I’d held her, even then as the photograph burned and curled in front of my face, I could see that the poor girl was blushing and I could see too where Ivan’s other hand was going as he looked at his men on the barn. Ivan was feeling his cousin. On the 12th of September, 1919. Dáil Éireann was finally declared illegal by the British Government. They had, said Arthur Griffith,
proclaimed the whole of the Irish nation as an illegal assembly
. Detective Constable Daniel Hoey, who’d been on every rebel’s wanted list since 1916, got what was coming to him right under the gates of Dublin Castle. And Henry Smart, gunman and water diviner, got married to Miss O’Shea, gun-woman in waiting. Another big day for Ireland.

I was gone the next day. I dumped the bike in a friendly shed outside Mullingar, a walk to the station and onto the train. Off at Kingsbridge. A ring of soldiers at every door.

I kept walking.

G-men sweating in their trenchcoats watched every face coming towards them as they leaned against pillars and pretended to read newspapers. I stared straight through them, a man in a hurry, and walked right up to the door.

—So who are you?

An English accent. There were no more Irish soldiers. A sergeant. Not unpleasant. Backed up by twitchy youngsters and two Crossley cars behind them on the street.

—Michael Collins, I said.

We laughed.

—Reggie Nash, I said.

—And what are you up to then, Mister Nash?

—I’m on my way home, Sergeant, I said.—The wife’s after having a baby.

—Congratulations. What’s in the briefcase, or am I being rude?

—I’m a traveller for Kapp and Petersen, I told him as I opened the case and showed him my display of pipes.

—Goodness, he said.

They were beautiful things, four lines of the most elegant pipes, gleaming and expensive, only one empty space, where my own face had been the day before. He was mesmerised. His arm moved slightly, and stopped. He wanted to touch them but was scared of their elegance. He shook slightly, and spoke again.

—Alright, he said.—Off you go, home to your missis. Boy or a girl? Hang on. Excuse me.

He lifted the tail of my trenchcoat and saw the leg sitting in its holster.

They all took small steps back and I heard the neat thump of a breech bolt being pulled. The crowd right behind me stopped shuffling.

—What’s this then, Mister Nash?

—A display item, I said.

—Come again?

—A display item, I said.—It’s a giant-sized match.

I hoped to Jesus that they were all fresh off the boat, that none of them knew that the pipes were made by Kapp and Petersen and the matches by Maguire and Patterson.

I showed him the strap.

—The idea being that it gets hung above the tobacconist’s door.

—It don’t look much like a match from here, sir.

He was relaxing now, curious.

—That’s probably why no one wanted it, I said.—I have to agree with you. But, like you, Sergeant, I have to obey orders. A boy.

—Come again?

—The baby, I said.—A boy.

—I’ve got girls myself, he said.—Sorry for delaying you, sir.

—Goodbye, Sergeant, I said.—I hope the rain stays away for you.

Out onto the street. More G-men leaning against the river wall. Away. Past them and gone. Across the bridge and away. Into the streets where the G-men weren’t welcome.

 

—I’m married now, Granny, I told her.

—Does she own both her legs? she asked.

She’d been reading the
Independent
. She put her finger under the last word and looked up at me. She looked at me properly for the first time since I was a child fighting on her daughter’s lap.

—She does, yeah, I said.

—Then you’ll be very happy, she said.

She was still looking at me.

—Are you not very young to be getting yourself wedded?

—I’m twenty-two, I told her.

She lifted her finger, brought it to the top of the page and dropped it under the date.

—So I’ve been reading news that’s four years old, she said.

—Tell me more about Gandon, I said.

—Gandon in 1919 or Gandon in 1923?

—1919.

—It’s hard to remember, she said.—It’s such a long, long time ago.

—I’m seventeen, I told her.

—Ah, she said.

She took her finger off the date.

—He’s a changed man, she said.

—How is he?

—Have you any books for me?

—No.

—My lips are sealed, so.

—What about a wedding present? I said.

—He’s a changed man, she said.—A Shinner and a Minister, no less. Talking about important things beyond in the Mansion House. Changing his name to O’Gandúin.

She turned the page of the paper and whacked it flat on the table.

—I know all that, I said.

—That wasn’t your present, she said.—It’s this: he isn’t changed at all.

—What d’you mean?

—When will you have books for me?

—Tomorrow, I said.—I’ll get them tonight.

—By females?

—Yeah.

—He’s still up to his old tricks, she said.—The things the wooden fella used to do for him. Except he has other eejits now to do his dirty work for him. He hasn’t changed a bit.

—You know Smith?

Collins was sitting on his desk.

—I do, I said.

—He’s yours, he said.

This was Collins’s latest office, a new one added to the five or six he used every day. The Ministry of Finance, hidden behind a name, Hegarty and Dunne, Insurance, a company that didn’t exist, in a room up two flights of stairs in Mary Street. Like all the others, it was clean and bare of virtually everything except paper. He brought his own filing system everywhere with him, nails in rows along all four walls and his papers pinned to them in an order that only he, the inventor, understood.

We were alone. We were almost always alone when we met now. Behind the desk he was Minister for Finance; where he was now, sitting on the desk, in front of me, he was President of the Supreme Council of the I.R.B. He’d give me a name and I’d deliver a dead man.

I was one of the Squad, one of the secret elite. An assassin. There were nine of us, then twelve, and we became the Twelve Apostles and the name stuck even when, with deaths, arrests and executions, there were less and more than twelve of us.

—Do you have any scruples about the taking of life?

Dick McKee had asked the question just before I’d been sworn into the Squad. They were looking for a strange mix of man - dissident and slave, a man who was quick with his brain and an eejit. They knew what they were doing when they chose me; I was quick and ruthless, outspoken and loyal - and such an eejit it took me years to realise what was going on. Collins and Dick Mulcahy, Chief of Staff of the I.R.A., stood behind McKee. I was sitting on a straight-backed chair in another bare room.

—Not usually, I said.

—At all? said McKee.

—Well, I’ll tell you, Dick, I said.—I wouldn’t want to kill animals or children. But if it’s rozzers we’re talking about, I’m your man.

I was their man alright.

I was with Collins now. He was sharing himself with me - I was one of the chosen - sharing his time, risking his security, in return for which I was going to kill Detective Sergeant Smith of the G Division.

—He’s been warned, said Collins.—He said Thanks and told the lads to feck off. Brave man.

—When?

—Tomorrow.

—Who’ll be with me?

We worked in pairs.

—You’ll find out when you meet him.

 

 

I rested my foot on the kerb, at a corner under a hanging tree on Terenure Road. The city was dead. Two minutes to the midnight curfew and I was far from home. My room on Cranby Row, the one I’d shared with Jack, was still there, but I couldn’t go near it; the homes of the wanted men were watched all the time. I was more than two minutes’ cycle away from anywhere with a suitcase full of stolen books, all by female authors, strapped to the back of a bike I’d borrowed from Collins. I had nowhere to go. There was the water beneath me but I didn’t want to abandon the bike or drench the books. I’d spent the night slithering into big houses around Kenilworth Square, spent hours reading the titles and authors on the spines, selecting the best and the fat-test, from off the shelves and the bedside tables of sleeping owners. I listened. Not a sinner out, except me, not a footstep or a bike chain complaining. I heard the Rathmines bells giving out the hour and then I heard the roar of a motor and saw a giant headlight coming from Highfield Road.

I was over a hedge with the bike and the books when the caged lorry raced past and braked about fifty yards past me and reversed, and braked again. I heard boots hit the ground and screams from a woman.