Ratlines (4 page)

“And if I don’t wish to accept the assignment?”

Haughey’s eyes narrowed. “I must not have made myself clear, Lieutenant. I’m not asking you to investigate this crime. I’m ordering you.”

“With all due respect, Minister, you don’t have the authority to order me to do anything.”

Haughey stood, his face reddening. “Now hold on, big fella, just who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

Fitzpatrick raised his hands, palms up and out. “I’m sorry, Minister, all Lieutenant Ryan means is that such an order should come from within the command structure of the Directorate of Intelligence. I’m sure he meant no disrespect.”

“He better not have,” Haughey said, lowering himself back into his chair. “If he needs an order from you, then go on and give it.”

Fitzpatrick turned back to Ryan. “As the Minister said, this is not a voluntary assignment. You will be at his disposal until the matter is resolved.”

“All right,” Ryan said. “Are there any suspects in the killings?”

“Not as yet,” Haughey said. “But the obvious train of thought must be Jews.”

Ryan shifted in his seat. “Minister?”

“Jewish extremists,” Haughey said. “Zionists out for revenge, I’d say. That will be your first line of inquiry.”

Ryan considered arguing, decided against it. “Yes, Minister.”

“The Guards will give assistance where needed,” the director said. “We’d prefer that be avoided, of course. The fewer people involved in this the better. You will also have the use of a car, and a room at Buswells Hotel when you’re in the city.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Haughey opened the file he had taken from the cabinet. “There’s one more thing you should be aware of.”

He lifted an envelope from the file, gripping it by its corner. One end of it was a deep brownish red. Ryan took the envelope, careful to avoid the stained portion. It had been cut open along its top edge. He turned the envelope to read the words typed on its face.

Otto Skorzeny.

Ryan said the name aloud.

“You’ve heard of him?” Haughey asked.

“Of course,” Ryan said, remembering images of the scarred face in the society pages of the newspapers. Any soldier versed in commando tactics knew of Skorzeny. The name was spoken with reverence in military circles, regardless of the Austrian’s affiliations. Officers marvelled at Skorzeny’s exploits as if recounting the plot of some adventure novel. The rescue of Mussolini from the mountaintop hotel that served as his prison stirred most conversation. The daring of it, the audacity, landing gliders on the Gran Sasso cliff edge and sweeping Il Duce away on the wind.

Ryan slipped his fingers into the envelope and extracted the sheet of paper, unfolded it. The red stain formed angel patterns across the fabric of the page. He read the typewritten words.

SS-Obersturmbannführer Skorzeny
,

We are coming for you
.

Await our call
.

“Has Skorzeny seen this?” Ryan asked.

Fitzpatrick said, “Colonel Skorzeny has been made aware of the message.”

“Colonel Skorzeny and I will be attending a function in Malahide in a few days,” Haughey said. “You will report to us there with your findings. The director will give you the details. Understood?”

“Yes, Minister.”

“Grand.” Haughey stood. He paused. “My tailor,” he said, tearing a sheet from a notepad. He scribbled a name, address and phone number. “Lawrence McClelland on Capel Street. Go and see him, have him fit you up with something. Tell him to put it on my account. Can’t be putting you in front of a man like Otto Skorzeny wearing a suit like that.”

Ryan dropped the bloody envelope on the desk and took the details from Haughey. He kept his face expressionless. “Thank you, Minister,” he said.

Fitzpatrick ushered Ryan towards the door. As they went to exit, Haughey called, “Is it true what I heard? That you fought for the Brits during the Emergency?”

Ryan stopped. “Yes, Minister.”

Haughey let his gaze travel from Ryan’s shoes to his face in one long distasteful stare. “Sort of young, weren’t you?”

“I lied about my age.”

“Hmm. I suppose that would explain your lack of judgement.”

CHAPTER THREE

T
HE SUN HUNG
low in the sky by the time Ryan drove into Salthill. His buttocks ached from the journey, cutting west across the country, pausing outside Athlone to relieve his bladder by the roadside. On three occasions he had to stop and wait while a farmer herded cattle from one field to another. He saw fewer cars as he travelled further from Dublin, driving miles at a time without seeing anything more advanced than a tractor or a horse and cart.

He parked the Vauxhall Victor in the small courtyard adjoining the guest house. Fitzpatrick had handed him the keys along with a roll of pound and ten shilling notes, telling him not to go mad on it.

Ryan climbed out of the car and walked around to the entrance. A hardy wind carried salt spray up from the rocks. He tasted it on his lips. Gulls called and circled. Their excrement dotted the low wall that fronted the house.

The sign above the door read
ST. AGNES GUEST HOUSE, PROPRIETRESS MRS. J. D. TOAL
. He rang the bell and waited.

A white form appeared behind the frosted glass, and a woman called, “Who’s there?”

“My name is Albert Ryan,” he said. “I’m investigating the crime that occurred here.”

“Are you with the Guards?”

“Not quite,” he said.

The door cracked open, and she peeked out at him. “If you’re not the Guards, then who are you?”

Ryan took his wallet from his pocket and held up the identification card.

“I’ll need my glasses,” she said.

“I’m from the Directorate of Intelligence.”

“The what?”

“Like the Guards,” he said. “But I work for the government. Are you Mrs. Toal?”

“Yes,” she said. She looked back to the card. “I can’t read that. I need to find my glasses.”

“Can I come in while you look for them?”

She hesitated, then closed the door. Ryan heard a chain slide back. She opened the door and allowed him to enter.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said as he followed her into the dim hallway. “It’s just I’ve been plagued with all sorts of people since the news got out. Newspaper men, mostly, and others who just want to see if the body’s still here. Monsters, all of them. Ah, here we are.”

She lifted her spectacles from a table and perched them on her nose. “Let me see that again.”

Ryan handed her the card. She studied it, reading every word, before handing it back.

“I’ve already told the Guards everything I know. I’m not sure I can tell you anything different.”

“Maybe not,” Ryan said. “But I’d like to speak with you anyway.”

He looked to the room to his left where a middle-aged couple and a young priest took their leisure. The lady read a paperback book, while the gentleman smoked a pipe. The priest studied the racing pages of the
Irish Times
, marking the listings with a stubby pencil. Mrs. Toal reached in and pulled the door closed.

“I’d rather you didn’t disturb my guests,” she said.

“I won’t. Perhaps I could take a look at the room where the body was found. Then maybe we could have a chat.”

She turned her gaze to the stairs, as if some terrible creature listened from the floors above. “I suppose.”

Mrs. Toal went ahead. Old photographs of Salthill and Galway City hung on the walls alongside prints of Christ and the Virgin, and what appeared to be family portraits of generations past.

“It’s a shocking thing,” she said, her breath shortening as she climbed. “He seemed a nice enough man. Why someone would want to do that to him, I really don’t know. He may have been a foreigner, but that doesn’t account for it. And there’s me all booked out for next month, all them people coming in to see President Kennedy when he visits—they’re landing the helicopters just up the road, you know—and now I’ve got blood all over my carpet. I’ll have to do that room top to bottom. How can I expect anyone to stay in there with blood on the carpet? Here we are.”

She stopped at a door bearing the number six and fished a ring of keys from a pocket in her skirt. “I’ll not go in with you, if you don’t mind,” she said as she turned the key in the lock.

“That’s fine,” Ryan said.

He put his fingers to the handle, but Mrs. Toal seized his wrist.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said, her voice dropping low. “There was drink taken. I found a bottle on the bedside locker. I don’t know what sort of drink it was, but they’d been at it when it happened.”

“Is that right?” Ryan asked.

“Oh, it is. And he wouldn’t be the first man to meet his death when drink was taken. I know. My husband was one of them. He died right outside my front door. He had a bellyful of whiskey and porter one night, then he fell on those rocks out there. Split his head open and drowned when the tide came in.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Ryan said, meaning it. “I’ll come and find you when I’m finished here.”

“All right, so.” She nodded and went to the stairs. “Call me if you need anything.”

Alone, Ryan turned the handle and entered the room.

The smell came first, like metal and meat gone bad. He coughed and brought one hand up to cover his nose and mouth. With the other, he felt for the light switch and flicked it on.

A simple guesthouse room like any he’d ever stayed in. Tasteful floral wallpaper, patterned carpet, a washbasin in one corner, a wardrobe in another. A single bed with one locker beside it, and a chair facing them both.

And a reddish-brown cluster on the wall, small pieces of solid matter barely visible from this side of the room.

Ryan took slow steps towards the foot of the bed. Beyond it, a dark pool on the carpet, the vague shape of a folded body scraped in chalk. Powder dusted the surfaces of the windowsill and the bedside locker, ghosts of fingertips scattered through it.

A small suitcase sat open on the floor at the foot of the bed. Ryan crouched down next to it and sorted through the items within. Underwear, socks, three packets of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, and a bottle of imported vodka. He stood. A wash bag sat on the edge of the basin, a shaving brush and a razor, a toothbrush and cologne.

He caught sight of his own reflection in the mirror above them. Tiredness weighed on his features. He had been jowly since his late twenties. Now aged thirty six, he sometimes felt he looked like a forlorn bloodhound, especially when fatigue darkened his eyes.

A movement in the reflection startled him.

“Are you the G2 fella?” a voice asked.

Ryan turned. A man wearing a shabby suit and overcoat stood in the doorway. He held up his open wallet.

“Detective Garda Michael Harrington,” he said, returning the wallet to his pocket. “I was told you’d be visiting us, but I didn’t expect you for a day or two yet.”

Ryan extended his hand. “I wanted to get a head start, see the room before too much time passed.”

Harrington stared at the offered hand for a moment before shaking it. He held a manila folder in the other. “Fair enough. I’ve got this report for you. If you want a look at the body, it’s over at the Regional Hospital.”

K
RAUSS
’
S NAKED BODY
lay on the steel table, eyes closed, dry lips slightly pursed and parted as if locked in an eternal whisper. A Y-shaped incision traversed his torso, from the greying cloud of pubic hair to his shoulders. It had been neatly stitched after his organs had been returned to their rightful places. Below his navel was a hole, scorched and puckered.

Another line of stitches started behind one ear, ran across the top of his head, and terminated at the other ear. Ryan pictured the pathologist slicing the scalp, peeling it forward until it covered the eyes like a mask, sawing out a section of the skull, and finally removing the demolished brain.

It had been on Ryan’s eighteenth birthday that he first saw the inside of a man’s skull. A mist-shrouded field in Holland, some miles north of Nijmegen. Ryan couldn’t remember the corporal’s name, only that his head had opened like a crushed melon, bone and blood tearing away, the grey within.

He had dropped to the ground, the damp of the mud seeping through his uniform, and crawled to the hedgerow twenty yards ahead, certain beyond all doubt his own brain would be smashed out of his head at any moment. When he reached the others, the sergeant said, “Wipe your face off, lad.”

Ryan had reached up, felt the wetness and grit there, and vomited on himself.

He was no longer so squeamish.

On a drainer by a large sink, two acrylic glass vials held the deformed bullets. Ryan lifted and examined each in turn.

“We dug one out of the headboard,” Harrington said. “It went through the intestine and the kidney and out the back. The other was still in his head. The quack fished it out, said the brain was like jelly. He had to ladle it out. I didn’t understand that. There’s a hole blown out at the other side of his head from where the bullet went in, there was stuff on the wall, but still the quack found that inside him.”

“Gases,” Ryan said. “They expand inside the head and push outwards. If the killer used a suppressor, the bullet would have lost velocity. That’s why it didn’t exit the skull, and why the other only got as far as the headboard.”

“Ah,” Harrington said, doing a poor job of feigning interest. “Well, you live and learn.”

Ryan had read what little information the report contained as Harrington drove him over to the hospital. The only identifiable fingerprints in the room belonged to Krauss. The rest were a faded mishmash of traces left by Mrs. Toal and every guest who had stayed in the room over recent days. It seemed the killer had touched nothing with bare fingers.

A few possessions lay on a plastic tray. The lighter and cigarette case drew Ryan’s attention. He took a pen from his pocket and used it to turn the case, the light picking out the fine lines of the engraving.

Harrington noted Ryan’s interest. “I suppose that’s why a G2 fella’s looking into this.”