Blood-Dark Track (10 page)

Monsieur Salvator said that he and his wife were the last two Jews left in Mersin. The synagogue had disappeared, as had the seventy Jewish families who lived in the town when Salvator joined the Toros Hotel as an eighteen-year-old on 9 September 1935 – a time when Mersin was a marvel, Monsieur Salvator said, a cosmopolis where you’d hear three words of French, four words of Turkish and three words of Arabic, and when Joseph Dakak, a punctilious but fair boss, caroused until three or four in the morning and didn’t emerge from his rooms in the hotel loft until noon. There was a staff of five: a Christian, a Muslim woman, a Kurd, and two Jews. Monsieur Salvator, the bookkeeper, found the ethnically diverse atmosphere uncongenial.

In 1940, Monsieur Salvator recalled with a sigh, the Toros Hotel was the place to be. It had twenty rooms and a first-class restaurant with a chef who had cooked for Mustafa Kemal. On Sunday nights there was dancing to tunes played by musicians from Stamboul on the terrace overlooking the sea. The hotel buzzed with Mersin society, travellers and foreign so-called businessmen. Leaning forward with not a little excitement in his voice, Monsieur Salvator revealed that the Turkish authorities forced Monsieur Dakak to engage a man – Moharem, he was called – who was an agent of the Turkish
secret police and whose job it was to spy on the goings-on at the hotel; that an Austrian resident of Mersin called Gioskun Parker, mentioned in Herr Ülrich’s letter as a friend of Joseph, was an agent of the Germans and quite possibly a double agent of the Turks; that in 1940, Monsieur Salvator quit his job because the secret police wanted him to intercept letters and inform on the guests staying at the hotel. The most eminent of these guests was the German ambassador, Franz von Papen. He, Salvator Avigdor, a Jew, had personally accompanied His Excellency and Frau von Papen on a motoring trip down the coast in the direction of Silifke, stopping at the spectacular caverns known as Heaven and Hell.

I asked Salvator whether my grandfather ever expressed opinions about the war.

‘Never. It was out of the question. At the hotel, there would be a German here, an Englishman there, and an Italian in between. You couldn’t open your mouth. You never knew who was working for who.’

I said, ‘What about my grandfather? Do you think he worked for anyone?’

Monsieur Salvator said, ‘Well, he was Germanophile, that’s for sure. His German was fluent, and he’d speak to the German visitors at the hotel.’ He continued pleasantly, ‘I personally think that he probably did work for the Germans. You see, once you’ve given a little information, that’s it, you’ve crossed the line.’

Monsieur Salvator didn’t elaborate on his speculation. Instead he stood up and made an aerobatic motion with his hand. ‘Every day an Italian plane flew over the port, counting the ships. You must understand, Mersin was an important place. It was full of intrigue, like Lisbon. Mersin,’ Mr Salvator said, pointing upwards, ‘was like Casablanca.’

Walking back to the hotel from Monsieur Salvator’s, I reflected that pretty much everything I had heard about Joseph suggested that he saw himself as a man apart, and indeed that
seeing himself
must have been an essential procedure of his psyche. It wasn’t that, Narcissus-like, he fell in love with his own reflection; it was rather that, in order to generate and project an image for which there was
no local model, he would have needed to dream up an imagined version of himself by which he might gauge his style and conduct. To judge from his reputation as a self-cultivator, this relationship with his imaginary double must have been a powerful one; perhaps as powerful and enduring as any he knew. The question was: what was the character of this modular other? Who was he?

The notion of my grandfather as a fantasist made me think of certain other fantasists I encounter in my working life – the kind who wind up on the wrong end of allegations of fraud. What often marks the downfall of these men – almost invariably they are men – is not a cold ambition to enrich themselves at the expense of others but a fatal susceptibility to their own deceptions: a crazy, romantic belief that their get-rich-quick schemes, however flawed and tricky, will result in champagne for all. Could the same thing have happened to Joseph? Could some dreamlander’s misapprehension have led him astray – into espionage and subsequent imprisonment? I thought about what Monsieur Salvator had said about Casablanca. I was, of course, thinking about the movie, about a well-dressed man in a white tuxedo who tries to steer a neutral and profitable course through a sea of vultures, gamblers, desperadoes, lovers, black marketeers, drinkers, secret agents, beauties, idealists, rumour-mongers. Humphrey Bogart, as Rick, the owner of Rick’s Café Américain, had been almost exactly my grandfather’s age; and
Casablanca
was set in December 1941, precisely when my grandfather was running the Toros Hotel and, unless I was mistaken, only months before he was arrested.

I ran into my mother at the Toros Hotel reception. ‘Did you find the key to the depot?’ I asked. My mother reached into her hip pocket. ‘I have it here,’ she said.

With the key in my hand I ran up the hotel’s handsome granite stairs just as, twenty-one years before, I ran up the stairs clutching a telegram from Ireland that a waiter had handed me. I was in tears as I sprinted up to my grandmother’s apartment that day, because the telegram from my uncle said, ‘DAD DIED YESTERDAY STOP FUNERAL ON SATURDAY STOP BRENDAN’.

2

Now never marry a soldier,
a sailor or a marine,
But keep your eye on the Sinn Féin boy
with his yellow, white and green.

– Anonymous, ‘Salonika’

I
n summer, around Inishannon, the Bandon could be a jungle river. Rank, swollen trees – beech, oak, willow, ash, sycamore, horse chestnut, various evergreens – gather heavily over the banks, the trunks enveloped by vines and dangling plants, the forked branches supporting huge thunderheads of foliage. Everything is overgrown: river boulders and sandbars sprout bushes and weeds, the water surface is clogged with pale yellow blooms, and elongated strands of green vegetation run underwater. Further west and upriver, the Bandon slips along through meadows and copses and is only patchily visible from the main road. At Bandon, the old British garrison town of which it used to be said that even its pigs were Protestant, the river passes under Bandon Bridge. It is still remembered that in 1641 English troops tied 88 Irishmen of the town back to back and threw them off the bridge into the water, where all
were drowned. Upstream beyond Bandon town, the river meanders by such townlands as Coolfadda, Shinagh and Laragh on its northerly bank and Castlebernard and Killountain on its southerly. It is briefly reunited with the highway, at Baxter’s Bridge, before twisting off again on a path of its own. The road, meanwhile, has started to resemble the secretive river it shadows – narrow, sinuous, and hemmed in by thickets and dense, overarching trees that barely admit daylight. Black-feathered birds drift like ashes out of the way of cars. The surrounding hills are obscured and the highway is reduced to a succession of blind turns. It’s enough to lead you, kept in this leafy dark, to imagine a conspiracy to conceal the world through which you travel – West Cork.

Finally, a valley opens up ahead. A ruined mill appears on the right. You are coming to the village of Enniskean. If you take a left, towards the gentle uplands there, and follow certain hedged-in lanes, you will arrive upon the townland of Ardkitt, where my grandfather Jim O’Neill was born and the O’Neill farm, now occupied by my second cousin Pat O’Neill, may still be found. If you drive straight on, through Enniskean and the even smaller village of Ballineen, you will come to places where my grandfather, long after he had left the country to live in Cork city, returned on nights when neither the moon nor the floods were up, to steal salmon on the Bandon river.

Jim usually took with him a son or two; often, too, his regular poaching sidekick, Dan Cashman, whose ready compliance with my grandfather’s commands outweighed the fact that he could neither swim, nor drive, nor see beyond the palm of his hand. The fishing party pulled up in the twilight at Manch, where the Bandon twists close to the road and where the fishing rights and riparian lands were the property of the Conners of Manch House. (Manch was also where Tom Barry’s Flying Column, having marched in rain through Shanacashel, Coolnagow and Balteenbrack, crossed the river after the Kilmichael ambush.) Arrival at dusk, when a car with no lights shining would not attract attention, was vital; the car’s electrics were doctored so that the brake lights could be turned on and off by a special switch under the dashboard.

My grandfather, Dan Cashman and my uncle Brendan quickly
jumped out. They took two nets – darkened with a product actually called Nigger-Brown Dye – from the boot and skipped over the stile. They passed through the hedge and crossed the single track of the Cork, Bandon & South Coast Railway. There was the water, only a few dozen paces away through furze and long grass. Meanwhile another uncle of mine, Jim Junior, drove on and parked the car in a spot he hoped was both innocuous and discreet. Only fourteen, he would wait there anxiously until the others returned later that night.

Night fell. Nevertheless, it was possible to see clearly, since a night sky is navy, never black, and eyes grow quickly accustomed to the dark. Rain fell intermittently, which was good. The last thing the poachers wanted was the moon hanging there like a button on a blazer and lighting up the river.

My grandfather pegged one end of a net into the ground. Then he took the net’s weighted line and threw it over the water on to the opposite bank, which was thirty or so feet away; he did the same with the jackline of the other (unpegged) net. He and Brendan forded the river by stepping on a gravel isle and wading knee-deep across the remaining stretch. Once they’d crossed, Brendan unspooled and worked the first net so that it stretched across the water like a submerged tennis net. (The net could drop ten to eleven feet underwater in meshes of seven and a quarter inches.) Meanwhile my grandfather picked up the second, unpegged, net and signalled to Dan Cashman to do the same on his side of the water. Then Dan Cashman and my grandfather dragged that net through the water towards the tennis net.

Ever since the time he was carried away by the current, Dan Cashman would only enter the water in an emergency. Dan was lucky, that time, to wash up on a fluvial island. My grandfather had to wade into the freezing water and swim over to him. He tied a rope around Dan’s waist, swam back to the bank, and hauled Dan through the water like a calf.

In between the two nets was the Key Hole. If the salmon were anywhere, they would be there, slowly twisting where the river was ten to twelve feet deep. These were the trade secrets that my
grandfather knew from his childhood: the location of the pools where the salmon congregated – the Key Hole, the Forge Hole, the Rock Pool, the Flat of Kilcascan – and the fords and the dangerous currents. He learned from his father, who acquired the knowledge and the poaching knowhow from his own father.

The three poachers stealthily went about their work. The river was unquiet, haunted by sounds and movements that made everybody jumpy. The wind stirred a roar in the riverbank trees, somewhere waterhens chirped, downriver a startled heron flapped up; and, of course, the water itself, dark and restless shapes of trees reflected monstrously in its sheen, was always rustling. Rain snapped in the trees.

My grandfather was not out on the river at midnight, chilled and soaked and running the risk of catastrophe, for the fun of it. He was there because Jim and Brendan had their confirmations coming up and another son, Padraig, his communion, and the boys hadn’t a stitch to wear.

As the nets came together, salmon could be felt tugging in the meshes. Eventually the nets were dragged out. ‘Jesus, they’re heavy,’ my grandfather said. And they were, because they were crammed. A rogue shaft of moonlight shone on the netted fish. ‘Look at that,’ my grandfather said, ‘a rosary.’

On they went, to another pool further down the river, and then another. Each time the fishing was good. By the time the catch was totally landed, thirty-three salmon were tallied. It was a record-breaking haul.

My grandfather made a sack from his herringbone overcoat and filled it with fish. Afterwards, their smell would not leave his jacket. My grandmother would say that the cats of Cork followed him around for a month.

‘What happens if the bailiffs come?’ Brendan asked his father.

My grandfather pulled out a revolver. ‘’Twould be a poor night for any bailiff that walks here tonight.’

Although on this occasion two nets were being used, usually just the one sufficed: the poachers would suspend the net in the middle of the pool for about half an hour, waiting for the salmon to
entangle themselves on the principle that salmon are never still. (It was not unknown for a dog to be thrown into the river to frighten the fish towards the net.) Sometimes a guest poacher would accompany the O’Neills and the outing would take on a social dimension. Tomás MacCurtain Junior, the IRA man and son of the Lord Mayor of Cork shot dead by the British, went poaching with my grandfather, as did Brendan’s brother-in-law, Seán O’Callaghan, after his release from seven years’ imprisonment.

Poaching was not restricted to the Bandon. In August and September my grandfather fished for blackberries, as the late season fish were called, at Skibbereen. There, the river Ilen is tidal and the channel forty-five yards across, and two nets had to be tied end to end to cover it. The channel could not be forded: my grandfather had to swim naked with the jackline in his hand. Still naked, he would pull the nets over with the jackline and remain on the far bank for half an hour of fishing; then he’d swim back.

The thirty-three salmon were taken to the fishmongers, who would pay anything from £2 to £5 for each fish. That was a lot of money.

A fishmonger once tried to cross Jim O’Neill. Jim sent Brendan to Mortell’s (‘If It Swims, We Have It’) with three salmon. Mortell only paid for two, asserting that the third was a slat – a dud fish. My grandfather took issue with this and returned to Mortell’s on two or three occasions, claiming payment or the return of the salmon. ‘It’ll cost you a lot more than one salmon,’ he finally warned Mortell. Mortell shrugged and continued serving his customers. After all, what remedy did Jim, as a thief of the fish, have? But Mortell miscalculated. There and then, in a full shop, my grandfather toppled a skyscraper of egg-crates and the shop was flooded in a lake of yolk. ‘Now,’ my grandfather said, ‘you can keep your salmon.’