The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf (28 page)

“And do we know what happened to Ford and his wife?”

McGarr thought he did and he told her: that after Clem Ford—or somebody who looked remarkably like him—had ferried the injured Karl Gottschalk into Westport harbor, the boat he was in was seen motoring past Clare Island due west. In addition to the Fords, Packy O’Malley was still missing, as now was Canning. It was his boat.

McGarr had contacted the Naval Service to learn if they had received any reports about it. But they had not, save for a sighting by one of the Spanish tuna fleet vessels of a small, probably Irish fishing boat some two hundred miles off the coast, still headed due west in heavy seas.

“In other words, he decided not to carry on.”

So McGarr assumed. Ford had lost his wife, a good friend in Packy O’Malley, and also Kevin O’Grady and Colm Canning. And there would be too many questions.

McGarr stood.

“Where are you off to?”

“A little unfinished business.”

At the hotel he changed into his walking gear, then loaded and checked the action of his PPK. It would not do to confront unarmed a man who had proved himself capable of killing so easily and so well.

HE DID NOT knock. With the barrel of his automatic pointed at the door, McGarr kicked it open and found Fergal O’Grady standing on the other side with a slane in his hands. “Put that down.”

O’Grady’s eyes were wide with fright. “Are ye’ going to shoot me now, ye’
seoinin
devil?”

“Only if I have to. Come with me.” McGarr turned and walked round the house, heading off across the fields toward the mountain. O’Grady followed slowly at a respectful distance, knowing full well where they were headed.

It took them the balance of the afternoon to scale the bald rocky bluffs of Croaghmore. The O’Malleys not resident on Clare Island had gone home, and the two men were the only figures on the mountain. As they climbed up through the summer heat the cool breeze off the Atlantic increased in strength until on top it became a gale that they had to turn their backs into. O’Grady’s woolen
brat
flapped wildly, exposing his gnarled old legs.

Yet the wind wasn’t strong enough to keep seagulls and crows from gathering round a thistly depression at the very top. Squealing and cawing, they dived at and fought with each other, trying to get close to what appeared to be a cleft in the
rock there. Every so often, one of the lucky would disappear within.

Nor was the wind strong enough to keep off the smell, once the birds had departed. It rose from the hole in foul puffs.

McGarr pointed at the hole. “I’m showing you this, so you know I know. Who’s down there?”

“Sure, if you know so much, you know that too.”

“It was his head that you carried over and threw off the cliff.”

“Is
that
what it was?” The old eyes widened in mock wonder.

“I’ll ask you again and only once more—who was it?”

O’Grady thought for a moment, as though deciding if he should answer. But then he nodded once, his white mane bobbing in the breeze. “You’d not be asking, if you were taking me in.”

McGarr did not reply.

“The answer is, damned if I know. I never saw him before in my life. But I’ll tell you one thing, and that thing I
do
know—he’s the man who killed my son.”

“How do you know that?”

It was O’Grady’s turn to stare at McGarr, but pityingly.

“He was climbing out of the cave.”

O’Grady’s expression did not change.

“How long have you known about this cave.”

“If I said, you’d not believe me.”

“What’s down there?”

“I think you know.”

“And you know.”

“Amn’t I after saying I do?”

“And what do you think of what’s there?”

“The gold, the jewels, the lucre? That it’s deadly. That it could and would and did kill. Pity it was my Kevin. But—I’ve seen to that, haven’t I.”

“And knowing about it—how long?—you never let on?”

“Why? It’s death. I said that from the beginning.”

“Or were tempted to take some for yourself.”

“Never. But don’t think Clem Ford never offered. Don’t think he didn’t try to buy me off. Wake up, man—
this
is the evil in the world!” O’Grady jabbed a finger at the hole.
“With this comes the power to make other people conform to
your
plan, to make the world into your image. Which is what Clement Ford tried to do. Buy me, buy you, buy everybody with his Clare Island Trust, as long as you did what he wanted. Go here, go there, go to university like Colm Canning who came back here emasculated and lost everything, including now his life.

“And trust! Trust
what
? Trust him, trust modernity, trust
seoinini
when we know, like our ancestors knew for ages before us, that we can only trust in the earth, in our legends, and in our gods. The rest of it kills!”

“How did you know your son’s killer would come out here?”

“Don’t snakes always come out of their holes? I knew it as surely as I know what you’re after here.”

McGarr felt his nostrils flare; he was rapidly losing patience with the didactic old man.

“Five good people died that we know about, and at least three are on your head. And you—you’re trying to clear your conscience, which you’ll never do. You failed, you scut, and but for me the man would have got away with my son’s murder.”

“So—what happens now?”

“To what’s down there?” O’Grady blinked and shook his head, as though astounded by McGarr’s ignorance. “Mirna Gottschalk, another
seoinin
, will carry on, of course—dispensing the corrupting largess to the ignorant, the damned, and the greedy who will take it at their peril.”

“Instead of living the good life according to Fergal O’Grady.”

O’Grady turned on heel and left McGarr to the wind.

In Mirna Gottschalk’s sitting room three hours later, McGarr asked her, “What are your plans for the Clare Island Trust?”

She did not seem surprised that he knew. She shook her head. “I have none.”

“By that, you mean it will continue?”

“Of course it will continue—as a memorial to Breege and Clem. They sacrificed their lives to help others, and I plan to carry on in that vein.”

McGarr listened to the wind roaring past the house. “And you’re not unhappy about the probable source of the wealth?”

“I am, surely. I’ve thought of little else since Clem brought me the packet. But how would one go about naming the original owners and finding and compensating their heirs, lo these fifty years later? Making it public isn’t the answer. The courts and the government—” She shook her head. It was plain she shared the distrust of so many others here in the West.

“I’ve been in touch with Leah Sigal,” she went on. “She says there’s a possibility of tracing the more spectacular pieces back to their rightful owners, but discreetly. Also, Astrid Neary tells me she knows of organizations that have been set up to compensate persons who had their assets looted during the war. And now that Eastern Europe is opening up, the Trust might contribute to those groups.

“But if there can be good news, it’s that Clem was careful, Monck and Neary dutiful, and there’s enough in the Trust to do all that and more.
If
we’re allowed to continue.”

McGarr checked his watch. It was getting on toward dinner, which he did not want to miss, having moved from the hotel to the lighthouse for the duration of their holiday. “I’ll leave this with you.” He placed the photocopy of Ford’s memoir on an arm of the chair. “I didn’t make a copy. Do you have another?”

She shook her head.

“Do you
know
of another?”

“Not unless somebody copied it when Karl was in hospital.”

McGarr shook his head. The copy had been found on Karl when he was rushed by helicopter to hospital in Dublin. Along with his other personal effects, it had been stuffed in a plastic bag that was then sealed. Ward had been the first to open it.

“Then it’s up to you. If anybody asks, I’ll say I never saw it. If anybody asks you if I ever saw it, you say no. Are we agreed?”

She nodded.

McGarr said good night.

SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, after having taken Lugh Sigal to gyms, weight rooms, boxing matches, films, the theater, to dinner with and without his mother, out for a weekend with the Frenches (Noreen McGarr’s parents) in Dunlavin, and even down with Ruthie and him to Sneem in County Kerry for another, Ward summoned his courage and sat the boy down.

They were in Mulligans in Poolbeg Street, a pub not far from Ward’s own digs that he frequented largely to read the papers over a quiet pint.

“What are you having?”

“Whatever you are.”

“Two pints, please.”

Lugh was shocked, overwhelmed, entranced. He was actually going to have a pint of stout with his favorite person in the entire world. And there he had just turned fifteen. But in Ward’s company laws did not seem to matter. He did what he thought was right.

Ward carried the brimming glasses over to a banquette by the windows, other men turning their heads to Ward in greeting or saying a few words, as always happened when they were out together.

“Is this your first pint?”

Lugh nodded.

“So—I have a bit of advice about anything like this. Drink slow, make it last, see how it feels. Today you’ll not get another.” Ward turned and faced him, making sure their eyes met before they clinked glasses.

Lugh sipped and tried to mask his disappointment. There wasn’t much chance of the pint—a full twenty ounces—not lasting. The bitter brew tasted like an oily yeast soup; he wondered how some men could drink gallons at one sitting.

“So.” Ward was nervous and repeating himself. “It’s a day to remember. And I hope you will.” Was there any chance he wouldn’t? “Because—” No, that was the wrong approach.

Ward took a healthy tug from the glass and grimaced; he didn’t fancy stout either, and had only ordered it—and not lager—so his son could say, in Irish fashion, that he had his first pint with his father.

Ward breathed out; he was at sixes and sevens. This was harder than anything he had ever done in his life. “Okay—you know how people have babies?”

Lugh tensed, wondering if Ward was going to try to explain about the birds and the bees; he’d had all of that at school. And elsewhere.

“You do?” The dark eyes flashed his way, and Lugh nodded. “Good. Because—are you ready for this? No, you couldn’t ever be ready for this—I’m your father.”

There was a pause in which the brakes of a bus, arriving at the terminus at the bottom of the street, thumped, then squealed. A patron at the bar said, “Excuse me, are you ready? Good. I’ll have—” and he proceeded to order for a group. Pint in hand, Ward stared down at his coaster.

Lugh said, “I don’t get it. Is this a joke?”

Ward shook his head and swung his eyes back to the boy. Ward was not a coward, not even an emotional coward, which he had long thought he was. “I’m happy it’s not. You are my son, I am your father. Can I tell you how I met your mother?” And he did.

When he was through, Lugh did not know what to think,
or even to think at all. After a while, he blurted out, “Jesus—this is great. But why didn’t my mother tell you sooner?”

“Because she didn’t think I was ready for marriage and all the responsibilities of being a father. And she was right.”

“But why did she let me think my father was…Sol?”

“Because she was married to Sol when she became pregnant, and she couldn’t tell you about me without my knowing too.”

“Then why didn’t she tell you—” But he knew the answer to that; he looked down into his pint. “She didn’t love Sol, she told me that. That’s why they got divorced. Didn’t she love you?”

“I think she did.”

It occurred to Lugh that she still did; once she started speaking of Hugh Ward, it went on and on. And then, whenever the three of them were together, she looked different, dressed different, even sounded different—younger. “Did you love her?”

“I did.”

“But you don’t now.”

“It’s fifteen years later.”

“And you love Ruthie.”

Ward tugged on his pint, then again turned to the boy. “The point is, I’m glad Leah told me. I know this is hard, and it’s something you’re going to have to think about. But I’ve gotten to know you, and you’re a good man. We still have the rest of our lives together, which should be a long time, please God. But what’s past is past. Are we agreed?” Ward raised his glass; they clinked.

After a while Lugh asked, “What are the chances of you and my mother…?”

Ward did not know that either. Every time he saw her she looked better and better, and he was reminded more and more of how they had been together. And one night when they were alone together while waiting for Lugh to return home from school, Ward had been tempted. Sorely. He had to make an excuse and leave, he had wanted her that much.

“What happens now?”

“That you know?” Ward hunched his shoulders and
wrapped his arm around the boy. “I have a son, and you have a father. It’s new, it’s different, I like it. More to the point, we’ve got to know each other, and I like you. Let’s enjoy it.” And try not to think of your mother.