The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising (21 page)

58

O
ctober 10, 1919, was Eoin’s eighteenth birthday, and he was going to celebrate by having dinner with Róisín. He picked her up at the Mater Hospital at 6:00 p.m., just as the Angelus was ringing about Dublin. “Jaysus,” she said. “Those fookin’ church bells depress me.”

“Maybe I should save your soul,” said Eoin, “by thumping your craw for you!”

“I can thump my own craw, thank you very much.” Róisín looked cross but then broke out in a big smile. “Happy birthday, Eoin,” she said as she gave him a nice wet kiss, then immediately cut to the chase. “Where will we eat?”

“How about Vaughan’s Hotel?”

“Is it safe enough?”

“For now,” said Eoin.

They soon found themselves on Mountjoy Street, crossing in front of the Black Church en route to Parnell Square, when they ran into Dilly Dicker, who was coming from her red-brick, two-story home at number thirty. “Dilly,” yelled Eoin, “how are ya?”

“Eoin,” said Dilly with equal enthusiasm as she embraced her colleague.

“How are the mails?” inquired Eoin.

“Hush!” said Dilly laughing. “The Big Fella will kill us!” Dilly had been on many a mail-lifting caper with Eoin, even traveling to Holyhead on the night mail boat disguised as a man to lift important Dublin Castle posts.

“Dilly, this is my friend Róisín.”

“Hello, Madeline,” said Róisín coolly. “I think it was that job out in Donnybrook the last we met.”

Eoin didn’t know that Madeline was Dilly’s real name. Collins had come up with “Dilly” as a term of affection. What was amazing to Eoin is how much Dilly and Róisín looked alike. The two 20-year-olds could have been sisters.

“Yes,” said Dilly, “it was Donnybrook. Hiding the guns in Batt O’Connor’s house.”

Róisín nodded. “It was an interesting adventure,” she finally said.

“I didn’t know you two knew each other,” said Eoin.

“We do,” said Róisín, without enthusiasm.

“You and Mick were great in that National Loan film,” said Dilly, turning her attention to Eoin and changing the subject.

Before Eoin could answer, Róisín said, “We liked your rendition of ‘A Nation Once Again’ on the piano.”

“I got carried away,” admitted Dilly. “Eoin and Mick looked like such businessmen on the screen. The crowd really got into it. It was a grand occasion.”

“Well,” said Róisín, “we’re off to Vaughan’s for supper.”

“If you meet up with Mick,” said Dilly, “give him my love.”

“Oh,” said Róisín, “we will, we will!”

As they continued their walk to Vaughan’s, Eoin said to Róisín, “You weren’t very nice to Dilly.”

“I was polite enough,” said Róisín, before adding, “Have you ever noticed that the Munster Hotel is right across the street from Dilly’s digs? Cozy arrangement.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Dilly at number thirty, Mick at forty-four.”

“What are you saying?”

“You know what I’m saying.”

“I don’t.”

“Do you think Mick is shaggin’ Dilly?”

“What?”

“You know, dickin’ Dicker.” A gleam came into Róisín’s eye. “I think they don’t call it Mountjoy Street for nothing!”

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Eoin in exasperation.

“I’m sorry,” Róisín said, flushed. “It’s just my time of month.”

“What time is that?” asked Eoin, confused.

“You are an imbecile,” snapped Róisín. “No, you’re worse—you’re an Irish imbecile!”

Eoin was clueless as to what he had done. “What’s gotten into you? What did Dilly or I ever do to you?”

“You and her seem to be
really
good friends.”

“What do you mean by that?” Róisín shook her head. “You,” said Eoin belatedly, “are a mortal sin waiting to happen!”

Róisín stopped in her tracks and kissed Eoin roughly on the mouth. “You bet I am!” She took Eoin by the arm, and they continued on their way to Vaughan’s. They found a table for two in the dining room and ordered their supper. Afterward, as they were preparing to leave, Collins and Kitty Kiernan came in. “Well, well,” said Róisín.

“Well, well, what?” said Eoin.

“Oh,” said Róisín, “don’t be naïve.”

As they were exiting, they stopped at Collins’s table. “Hello, Mick,” said Eoin. He paused for a second before adding, “Mick, there was a man in my room when I woke up this morning.”

“Who?” said Collins, concerned.

“Me!” crowed Eoin. “It’s my eighteenth birthday today.”

“Well, happy birthday, Eoin lad,” said Collins laughing. “You remember Kitty from Longford.”

“I do, indeed,” replied the lad. “How are ya, Miss Kiernan?”

“Happy Birthday, Eoin,” said Kitty.

“And Róisín,” said Collins. “You look lovely tonight. Kitty, this is Róisín O’Mahony, who does great work for us at the Mater.”

Kitty nodded and Róisín gave a tight smile. “Nice to meet you, Kitty.” She turned to Collins. “We bumped into Dilly Dicker on our way over here, Mick. She asked us to send her love if we ran into you.”

“That’s very nice of you,” said Collins evenly, a bit baffled by Róisín’s tone.

“Well,” Eoin cut in, “good night. See you tomorrow, God willing.”

The “good nights” were liberally exchanged between the four of them, and Collins added a hearty “Happy Birthday!” Eoin and Róisín found themselves walking towards Sackville Street in silence. “Do you think Mick is doing Kitty?” Róisín finally asked.

“Róisín! What’s in God’s name has gotten into you?”

“Well,” she said coyly, “they do call him the Big Fella.”

“Mick does nothing but work, for God’s sake. Why are you, all of a sudden, so interested in that dirty stuff?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“I’m afraid for you.”

“For me?”

“What if something happens to you?”

“If it happens, it happens.”

“But what about me?”

“You’re young and beautiful. They’ll be sniffin’ around you before I’m cold in the Glasnevin ground.”

“I don’t want to be sniffed about,” said Róisín. “I want
us
to be happy.”

“We’ll be happy when Ireland is free.”

“I can’t wait another seven hundred years,” snapped Róisín.

Eoin took her by the hand, and they turned into Bachelors Walk so he could pick up the late post at the office. “I can’t wait that long, either,” Eoin said. “But for now, we’ll just have to muddle through.”

“I think I’m beginning to hate this country,” said Róisín, wondering if their love would ever have a chance to truly blossom in this Dublin City, now so ripe with revolution that it was beginning to rot.

59

E
oin was a notoriously early riser, so he was surprised when he was woken out of his sleep by Frank. “Eoin,” he said solemnly, “I have to talk to you.” Eoin couldn’t imagine what Frank wanted to talk to him about. “We had a customer in the shop from Dublin Castle,” said Frank. “A detective named Blood.” Eoin was silent, just taking it all in. “He bought me a drink last night at the Swan.”

“What did he want?”

“He wants me to inform on the neighborhood,” said Frank. “He said he’d pay. Apparently all those bombings are having an effect on Dublin Castle.”

Eoin got out of bed and started dressing. “Don’t mention a word of this to anyone else—even Da,” he told his brother. “Keep yer gob shut until I find out what’s going on.”

When Eoin arrived at Crow Street, he told Liam Tobin about his conversation with Frank. “I’ve never heard of this fellow,” said Tobin.

Eoin immediately went to his index cards and pulled out the one with Blood’s name on it. There was nothing but his rank and Dublin Castle phone extension on the card. “We don’t even know where he lives,” said Eoin.

“I want a report on this as soon as you know something,” said Tobin. “Check with Broy and Boynton.”

Eoin went to the Bachelors Walk office to pick up the first post and returned with it to Crow Street. He sorted the letters in the usual way. Besides the usual carbons from Broy and Boynton, there were also notes on Blood. Boynton said that Blood had a special interest in Collins, and Broy reported that Blood was over in Brunswick Street snooping around Collins’s file.

Eoin went back to Tobin. “That’s three reports—Frank, Broy, Boynton—about this Blood in one morning.”

“Type it up,” said Tobin, “and put it in Mick’s intelligence pouch for the day.”

Eoin met Collins at Vaughan’s at nine o’clock that night and gave him his intelligence update, with a special emphasis on Detective Blood. “Hmmm,” said Collins, “this boyo has the nose of a bloodhound.” He laughed at his own joke. Eoin was so tired from the long day that he just looked ahead blankly. “He’s somehow tied to you and the barber shop,” said Collins. “I’m concerned for you and your family, but I also have an office there on the third floor.” Even Eoin had no idea what was going on over his head in Collins’s latest office. “We’ve got to know
all
about him,” said Collins thoughtfully. “Find out from Boynton where he lives, what he likes, his vices, his quirks. I want this done yesterday. Do you understand?” Eoin nodded. “By this time tomorrow, we’ll know what we’re up against.”

Eoin was about to leave when he turned and asked Collins, “Do Boynton and Broy know that they both work for you?”

Collins gave a tight smile. “Not yet!”

Eoin nodded his head. “I thought so.” He paused before adding, “I guess I should keep me gob shut.”

“Yes,” said Collins. “We’ll introduce them to each other at the proper time. Remember,” he said, as he looked Eoin intently in the eye, “never let one side of your mind know what the other is doing.”

Heeding that advice, Eoin discreetly met with Boynton at the Stag’s Head the next day and got as much information as he could on Blood, including the gem that he lived at the Ivanhoe Hotel over on Harcourt Street. Eoin reported back to Collins that night at the Wicklow Hotel. “Who is this hoor?” he asked. “Dick McKee told me he was questioning the local DMP on the beat—one of our ‘good policemen’—about your family. That’s report number four on this hoor. This is not a man we can ignore.” Collins went over the limited information that Eoin, with Boynton’s help, had compiled. “All we know,” Collins added, “is that he’s a Belfast man, an eager beaver, and a general pain-in-the-goddamned arse.” Collins stood up and paced the room for a good minute without speaking. “Let’s let him know we know.”

“Is that wise?” asked Eoin.

“It’s worth a try,” replied Collins. “He may be a freelancer, trying to impress his bosses with his initiative. Let’s rough him up and see how he likes it.”

“If that doesn’t work?”

Collins grunted. “We’ll cross that Ha’penny Bridge when we come to it. Tell Mick McDonnell to get a few of the lads from the Squad to say hello to Detective Blood.”

If Sebastian Blood wanted to get Michael Collins’s attention, he had succeeded spectacularly.

60

S
ebastian Blood’s snooping around 31 Aungier Street was beginning to pay off.

He found that number thirty-one had two lives, one during the week and another on the weekends. During the week, there was Joseph and Frank—no surprise—occupants of the shop and the second floor. But he learnt that there was also a mysterious tenant working on the third floor, where Collins kept his newest office. On the weekends, he discovered there was a thin young man who came and went. He was always dressed conservatively in a blue three-piece suit and seemed to be in a rush, often with a briefcase in hand. Blood wondered if this was another son of Joseph’s, because he often sat in the shop and talked to the older Kavanagh. He had never seen this young man during the week, probably because he was never there early or late enough. All the activity was beginning to pique Blood’s fertile imagination.

But Sebastian Blood wasn’t the only one with an imagination. Unknown to him, he had been “tagged” by the Squad—and he was “it.” Their orders were to stake him out and then rough him up. While he was staking out number thirty-one, he was being watched by members of the Squad, standing down Aungier Street in front of William Fanagan’s Funeral Establishment. For days, they patiently followed Blood around Dublin. After a full week, they knew his routine. Up early at the Ivanhoe Hotel—located right next to
Sinn Féin
HQ on Harcourt Street—he always headed over to Cuffe Street to check out the barber shop before he proceeded onto his office at Dublin Castle. He spent an extraordinary amount of time just observing the shop, probably throwing together a couple of hours a day at various times.

The Squad had been working on their “methodology,” as Collins called it. Depending on the job, they would send out two to four men as the main attack column, covered by a backup team of the same number. The first group did the job, and the backups made sure the first group got away and were not interfered with by police or “innocent” bystanders.

Two teams from the Squad were waiting for Blood when he left Dublin Castle just after 6:00 p.m. They expected him to head over to Aungier Street before he returned to his hotel. But Blood had other ideas. He walked straight down Parliament Street, crossed the Liffey, and started heading up Capel Street. Blood was on a mission, and the four Squad members looked at each other as Blood forced them to quicken their steps to match the frantic tapping of his walking stick.

Blood made a right onto Mary Street. “He’s heading to the Volta,” said Paddy Daly to Vinny Byrne, the number-one team who were going to do the roughing up. The four Squad members broke into a trot in an attempt to get ahead of Blood. Byrne and Daly did just that, leaving their two comrades to trail Blood. Byrne and Daly bought tickets and went into the lobby. “He’s after the film,” said Vinny. Daly nodded. Somehow Blood had been tipped that the Volta Cinema was cooperating, showing Collins’s National Loan trailer at every showing. Byrne and Daly waited until Blood entered the lobby, then turned discreetly until he passed them. The movie had already begun, and they watched Blood go down and grab an aisle seat. Right in the middle of the movie, the screen went white, and Collins and Eoin appeared.

Sebastian Blood stood up and started talking to himself. “That’s the bloody kid from Aungier Street,” he said aloud, waving his cane in the air. “So that must be Collins!” He said it loud enough that Byrne and Daly could hear him, because they were seated right behind him. “This,” Blood called out to the theatre, “is an illegal film.” That was the last thing he said before Daly threw an abandoned overcoat over his head and Byrne hit him a vicious blow with a policeman’s blackjack, forcing Blood to drop his cane. Vinny liked to refer to his baton work as “Paddywacking” someone. He gave him a couple of shots in his upper arms, and Blood’s body began to go numb. Byrne and Daly pulled Blood into the aisle. The backup team stood guard, discouraging any “help” from arriving. “Stay out of politics, yer hoor,” warned Daly, “or we’ll take yer fucking head off the next time.” They rolled him over and took his badge, notebook, wallet, and more importantly, his Webley revolver. As an afterthought, Daly also retrieved Blood’s walking stick. The four Squad members left Blood barely conscious on the floor as Collins and Eoin continued to sell the National Loan on the screen.