Habit of Fear (31 page)

“Did they have to kill him?” Julie said finally.

“They must have thought so. Even they don’t kill without reason. It is axiomatic among their community: if they can break a man, thereafter anyone can break him.”

“What you’re saying is, the information they got from him cost him his life.”

“To be more specific about it, the use to which they intended to put that information cost him his life. He was alive for fourteen hours, remember, after leaving the bar. I don’t think it took that long to persuade him. I think there was consultation among their top command about what could be done with the information.

“We’ve got to keep in mind that Donavan seems to have had nothing on his mind save his job until he got to Sligo. Even for a couple of hours after he got there, and he must have known from the moment he walked into that hotel the affiliations of some of the men who were on hand there. Yet he sat in the open drinking tea and nibbling biscuits. You, Mrs. Hayes, were his only concern. But something was happening among the hierarchy of revolutionaries that met in the back room of Greely’s Bookstore. We can be reasonably sure a majority of the represented groups voted to refuse the ONI participation in their council and, most particularly, representation at Casey’s funeral. They were an angry lot by then and, like a bunch of football touts on a rampage, they mussed up Irwin and took the tape of the Quinlan interview from him, and when they spotted Donavan, they got onto him and thereupon discovered something that gave them a new lease on life.”

“What?” Julie and Carr said the word simultaneously.

“You, Mrs. Hayes. You became the focus of that lot’s hope for survival.”

“Y
OU WERE MADE SECURE
—a room where you were bound to stay the night,” the Special Branch man want on. “That seems important to me. Then he went out and placed his New York call. It would be very useful to know if the contents of his report to Kevin Bourke differed from those he had made previously. Is it possible, Mrs. Hayes, for you to be in touch with your benefactor?”

“No!” Julie cried before he could go further. “I cannot and I will not.”

“I’m not sure about the
cannot
.” Costello said, “although if the circumstances had been slightly altered, that might well have been the case. I suspect that when the ONI broke him down that night, they discovered you the perfect kidnap subject. Let’s look at our ‘givens’: the ONI are desperate for funds, indeed desperate on all counts. You are a columnist for a well-known New York newspaper. The first thing you do, arriving in Sligo, is visit the relative of a famous American actor. More notoriety. You are under the security care of a man whom the ONI may have themselves hand-picked for the assignment. In any case they took his own log of the case from him. Some among them likely knew the power and the wealth, if not the name, of Sweets Romano. If he was willing to pay so well for your protection, would he not pay a king’s ransom for you?”

“I don’t know,” Julie said. “Maybe not. Inspector, let’s say you’re right on all counts. Why didn’t it come off? Why wasn’t I kidnapped?”

“That’s the question of the moment, certainly,” Costello said. “I would hazard a guess that they had to get in touch with their commandant. They may have been instructed to await a better place, a better time.”

“Or would they have found out my real mission in Ireland, looking for someone they knew as Aengus?”

“That’s a possibility, but I doubt it. Aengus was IRA. It’s true, this lot is a breakaway from the Provos, but they are young and hard, and they identify with international terrorism. The only dead heroes they honor are those they can avenge: I’ve heard that was said of them in the meeting before Roger Casey’s funeral.”

“Do you know who said it?”

“I do. Joseph Quinlan. Which has its own touch of irony; if you remember, he closed his oration with Padraic Pierce’s famous rally cry of 1915 at the grave of O’Donovan Rossa. How does it go? ‘… The fools, the fools—they have left us our Fenian dead …’”

Sergeant Carr said the rest with him: “‘… And while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.’”

The two men were looking at each other across the table. It was a fleeting instant, but in it Julie sensed the sorrow of men who identified with the cause and despised its most passionate advocates.

They were all silent and thoughtful until Sergeant Carr said, “In your scheme of things, Inspector, could Donavan have had in mind to warn or protect Mrs. Hayes? Might he have gone to her room for that purpose?”

“In that case his captors would have first had to release him. They had but two options if the kidnap plan was to go forward: they had to kill him or take him with them.”

“The plan didn’t go forward, and they killed him anyway,” Julie said.

“And tore into three parts a play by Seamus McNally to make sure it was known that they had been there.”

“My God!” Julie said. “Is the cave where Seamus and I—could they have taken it over? Could I have gone on my own to the very place they might have hidden me?”

“I have been waiting for you to make that suggestion, Mrs. Hayes,” the Special Branch man said. “It is a distinct possibility.”

“H
ERE I WAS THINKING
to be trussed up like a Christmas goose,” Seamus said, “and they’re not even feeding me from the bottle anymore. I feel like a fool. ‘Let me pass out in the backseat’: did I say that?”

Julie grinned and nodded.

“And all I’ve got is a hairline fracture in the vicinity of where I’d have a tail if they hadn’t cut it off some billion years ago. Did you go to the Gardai?”

“Yes, and then last night men from the Special Branch and the Murder Team came to me.”

It was getting on toward noon when she finished telling him everything there was to tell, this time holding back nothing, but touching very lightly on Costello’s theory of a kidnap plan.

What exercised McNally most was the presence in Ireland of Kincaid. “You could have told me you saw the bastard that night,” he said when she was done. “It would have saved me some frivolous thoughts about why you’d changed your mind about you and me.”

“Something very interesting, Seamus: the police last night didn’t ask me a single question about them after they learned Joseph Quinlan was their lawyer. I think they’re counting on him to take them out as quietly as he brought them in.”

He gave a grunt of pain as he tried to change positions. Then: “Doesn’t it make you feel you’ve been had in some way?”

“Yeah,” she snapped.

“Ah, love, I don’t mean that way: I was thinking of the tender care the justice system lavishes on monsters.”

“It’s better this way. I want them safe until their trial. I just don’t want to have to see them until then. When can you go home?”

“Tomorrow if I let them convey me in something called an ambulette.”

“They don’t trust me to drive you!” Julie cried.

“It’s the car they don’t trust. Will you take it in hand and follow the ambulette? What an obscene word. It sounds American.”

Julie laughed.

Then he said earnestly, “You didn’t take seriously the idea of their trying to kidnap you?”

“I think the danger of that is past—if it ever existed. There’s been plenty of opportunity, here in Donegal—in Ballymahon.”

“Does Special Branch actually think the cave was taken over by the ONI?”

“They’ll try to find out in the cave this morning.”

“Ach, that’ll be the last you or I ever hear of it,” Seamus said. “But then, it might have been the last ever heard of us, come to think of it. A bloody round-robin, isn’t it?”

“Seamus, could I borrow the Nissan this afternoon? I want to go to Rossnowlagh. Is that how you say it?” She had stumbled over the word.

“The friary?” He gave the name Rossnowlagh its Gaelic pronunciation. “It’s desolate in winter, rough winds now, but grand in summer. Lovely gardens, and a glorious view of the ocean and the strand.”

“I’ve had that,” Julie said. “It was a priest from there who went to Ballymahon and said Mass for my father when he disappeared.”

“You like saying the words
my father,
don’t you?”

Julie nodded.

“Take the car and come back safe. I’ll need the both of you.”

AS SEAMUS HAD FORETOLD
, she found the Franciscan friary high on a windswept plateau overlooking the Atlantic. The gnarled trees along the entrance drive bent away from the sea like old rheumatics.

A Brother Charles came to talk with her, both of them sitting in a back pew of the very modern, very chilly chapel. In his brown robe and with bare, sandaled feet, tonsured, he looked out of place—or time—but in manner he was at ease with her. A young face, yet deeply creased, weathered. His cheeks were very red. “It would be
Father
Daniel, if he said Mass, and if as you say he was tubercular, he’d likely have come from a city—Dublin or Derry or Belfast—where they still make room for the old diseases. I was in Derry last winter and I couldn’t hear my own voice at the altar for the hacking and coughing in the congregation. I could smell the sickness. It was called consumption in my mother’s time, and I grew up with the strains of it still running through the family.

“We’re chiefly a convalescent home here for overextended Franciscans,” he went on with a smile that creased his whole face. “We send an occasional parish substitute, if called upon. Even Ireland is running short of priests these days. Now I do remember Father Daniel O’Meara. I knew if I talked on, it would come to me. Very devious the ways of the mind: if you wait for a thought, it may never come, and if you run on without it, there’s a good chance it’ll catch up with you.

“Father Daniel was a fine man and a great teacher, but it was said of him by the higher-ups that he was more political than Holy Orders required of him. And when he developed the trouble in his chest, they were glad to pasture him in the clear air of Rossnowlagh. And if the truth be told, he wasn’t a day past recovery when the directors here cheerfully shipped him back to Dublin.”

“Adam and Eve?” Julie said.

“Saint Mary’s. Aye, that’s Adam and Eve.”

“That’s where my father went to school.”

“To Daniel O’Meara, I shouldn’t wonder. He’s getting on—if he’s still alive, and I think he is. And you’re wanting to know if your father is still alive. What was it again Father Daniel was supposed to have said?”

“That he might have beached the boat himself and vanished.”

“And you’re wanting to know why he said it?”

Julie nodded.

“The best I can suggest, then, is that when you’re in Dublin, you go and ask him yourself.”

T
HE CAR SPED PAST HER
as she followed the ambulette at a safe distance. They were all going north on the main highway and had reached midway in the ascent to the bridge over Barnsmore Gap. The Blue Stack Mountains were falling out of sight, blurring in the rearview mirror. She paid little attention to the speeding car: the ambulette driver had set a leisurely pace. She was turning phrases in her mind that might freshly describe the wild beauty around her. Stay simple, Jeff would say, let the event set the scene for you. She could do with fewer events. Or could she? If the reporting of events was to be her business. From
items
to
events:
could she make a transition? Her father had tried to write, tried and tried. The afternoon Edna O’Shea left her with his notebooks, she had closed them after numerous attempts to read a few pages consecutively, not wanting the sadness of it. Or afraid of contagion? Or of claiming an inherited disability by way of escape? Escape to what? Back to items? And were items so bad? Some of the best writers were gossipmongers. It became the stuff of fiction. Come on, Julie: it is fiction.

The ambulette braked suddenly, and Julie slammed her foot on the Nissan’s pedal. The shoulder belt sawed at her neck. She stopped within a couple of feet of the forward vehicle. It picked up speed again. Ahead of it the same car that had passed her raced over the hill and out of sight. She was fairly sure it was the same car. It would have pulled to the side of the road and then, as the ambulette was about to pass, darted out again. From then on she left more space between her and the hospital vehicle. It was some three miles on, well past the Gap, that the ambulette disappeared from her sight around a curve. She started to speed up and came near to colliding with a car that shot out from behind a thicket and drove parallel within inches of sideswiping her. When she accelerated, so did the other car. Two men. Then she saw that they were masked, the driver hunched over the wheel, peering ahead. The one nearest her, in the passenger seat, rolled down the window and motioned for her to pull off the road. She tried to pick up speed; then she thought to pull toward the shoulder and veer back at them, but they wouldn’t give any space between the cars. She clung to the road. An oncoming car gave her hope, but the driver blasted his horn and swerved off to avoid the car driving in tandem with her. Surely he’d stop or give an alarm? Wouldn’t the masks be noticed? The tandem car edged closer until contact occurred; they bounced apart; the steering wheel shimmied in her grasp, and she careened toward another smack. When it came, the other car slightly ahead, Julie gave way and jolted off the pavement. The Nissan struck the guard rail. The motor died, and the car bucked to a halt. The attack car stopped long enough to discharge the passenger, then streaked ahead and U-turned. Julie just managed to lock the door. She put her foot on the starter. The motor didn’t catch. The man pulled at the door handle, then pounded on the window. He would soon find something to smash it with. But what he did was pull off the mask and shout at her, “We’re not going to hurt you! I swear to God!”

Kincaid.

She trod again on the starter: a grinding whirr. Even as the other car crossed the road and parked in front, bumper to bumper. There was no sign of the ambulette. It had not turned back. Seamus would not have seen what happened. She had watched them strap him into place before they left the hospital. Julie reached across to lock the other door, but the shoulder belt delayed her until the man yanked open the door, pulled off his mask and climbed in beside her. Donahue.