Vagabond (45 page)

He smiled more broadly. Then he slapped – open fist across the cheek. No answer. He used the heel of the same hand across the bridge of the nose.

Ralph Exton gave him the answers. Danny Curnow used his handkerchief to wipe the man’s eyes and the dribble from the side of his mouth. He saw the fear.

Danny Curnow had not hit an informer across the face in twenty-one years but he lived in the past and the old ways ruled. He told Ralph Exton that a number-eighteen tram, from outside the gaol gate, would drop him back in town, and was gone.

The end of an afternoon to kill, then an evening and a night. Frankie McKinney didn’t rate Malachy Riordan as one for galleries or concerts. She could have done the castle with him, Charles Bridge, Stare Mesto, the Astronomical Clock and . . . He was staring into a shop window. She stopped ahead of him and saw the furrow deepen on his forehead. A man with shopping bags cannoned into her and hurried on without apology. Would he be more interested in the sites where freedom fighters had taken on the might of the Nazis? He was still at the window but she couldn’t see what was bothering him.

Frankie edged back. The Mercedes had gone. The transaction was complete and the money electronically shifted. She had seen no tail. She remembered the knotted muscles in his shoulders, which she had attempted to relax in the cemetery earlier. She had not imagined that a man of his reputation would be so alone, so taut. She saw past his shoulder into the shop window. It sold television sets. They were in banks, showing the same picture. On a screen at the centre of the display, there was a crudely drawn map of Northern Ireland, with a star shape, red and orange, that represented an explosion. A village main street flickered on the screen, mourning flags hanging from upstairs windows. A microphone masked part of a priest’s face. Then a rural view, with rain falling, drops on the camera’s lens, and cattle grazing at the edge of a field, kept away from a hedge by an electric fence. There were tyre marks in the field beyond, a bungalow in the distance. A policeman, uniformed and bulky in a bulletproof vest, spoke into a microphone.

A pair of faces, young, one with pimples on his chin, the other a squint.

Malachy Riordan was rigid. The next map appeared. Baghdad was highlighted and the locations of five explosions. The film was of ambulances, devastation and blood.

A woman stood on the far side of Malachy, and Frankie realised she was studying the sets on display. He dwarfed her. Frankie went to her and asked what had happened – everyone spoke some English.

She was answered briefly: ‘Another atrocity in Ireland. Two boys dead, their own bomb.’

Malachy Riordan had gone – he was shambling towards the lower end of Wenceslas Square. Frankie caught up with him. ‘Did you know them?’

He walked on. His mouth moved, but no words came. They crossed a street. A policeman blasted his whistle at them and vehicles swerved, hooting. He saw nothing around him. She held his arm, almost running to keep up with him.

‘Did you know them?’

He stopped in his tracks. He turned to her but said nothing. He had known Pearse and Kevin since they were kids at the village school, inseparable. They’d come up to the farm and messed in the barns while he was working, hanging on every syllable he uttered. He had known them long enough to put simple work their way: they had dicked for him in Dungannon, could kick a football or loiter with a bag of chips at a street corner and see the registration plate of a policeman leaving work. He had used them to go on their bicycles along lanes and check for him that cars were not parked in woods or gateways when he was going to drive that way with weapons in his car. He had sent them to Brennie Murphy and seen them blossom as they had learned more skills and tradecraft. They were the future. He had seen them, in his mind, with the RPG launchers on their shoulders or running along the hedgerows with the assault rifle. It was as if he had bred them. He had allowed them to take the device, lay and fire it. He would have rated them good or fine boys. He had laughed at how they had handled weapons with youngsters’ awkwardness and then he had shown them how it should be done. He was their prime influence, had been in life and was in death. He said nothing.

She asked again, ‘Did you know them?’

He’d known them well, and the priest who would have called to the field, then made the long journey to the front doors where the mothers would have known because beds had not been slept in. He knew the policeman who had been interviewed, had seen him on search operations and arrest sweeps, and in the corridors of the big barracks at Dungannon when he had been taken in. He knew the fields, and the farmer whose cattle had been grazing inside the fence. He knew the people who lived in the houses where the black flags flew. He knew too much. The boys would have been round after dark on the first night he was back, and they’d have gone together into the middle of a field. There, they would have crouched down and he’d have told them that rifles, machine-guns, launchers and explosives were coming. He squeezed his eyes shut, forced back the tears.

It was always informers. It was the curse of his people and their struggle that they bred informers. The graves in the villages were the evidence of it. Treachery. He scoured his mind for an answer. A bomb exploded when laid or when checked later. It did not carry the hallmark of a tout, but there would have been one. They spawned them. The bastards who took money were always there.

She held his arm tight, as if she was his friend.

Brennie Murphy was wary. There were two mothers he had no wish to see that morning. They were quiet funerals: these days, few would wish to involve themselves with masks and pistol shots over a pair of coffins. If the temperature of emotion was raised too high some awkward bastard would want answers. Who had sent out the boys? Who had known where they were and what they were doing?

He went in his car to the shop. He passed the flags, limp with rain, and in some windows there was the page from the Dungannon paper with the photographs of the boys. The first pictures issued had been from the police, custody pictures, not right for the day. These were from their last year at school.

There was always anger on the mountain when young volunteers died. The old who had guided them might be blamed. He needed to go to the shop because he had no cigarettes. He lived on his own. He had no friend to go for him while Malachy was away. Loneliness often gnawed at him. When it was too great he would drive away from the village to where no one knew him and he could drink. At the shop he parked, hurried from his car, shouldered past others and inserted himself at the counter. No one spoke to him. Sometimes the loneliness was almost unbearable.

The group of tourists he’d driven to Omaha from Gold, where the Mulberry harbour still lay as a ruin anchored in the sea, had gone forward to the German bunkers with their guide.

That afternoon the sun was shining. Dusty thought this part of the day, nudging towards early evening on the Thursday of the tour, was why Desperate had come across the Channel to this coast. This was where the fighting had been fiercest, the casualties heaviest, where the cemeteries were largest and the stakes greatest. Men had shut themselves away, so Dusty had heard and read, in abbeys and monasteries because the act of being there purged guilt: they dedicated themselves, as Dusty reckoned it, to cleansing their bodies and minds of any blame from association. It was all too heavy for him. He had done his job, jumped when told to, and passed no comment. Desperate was always quiet at Omaha, on the high ground above the wide beach – golden, flat, without a single rock that would have given cover. Dusty understood Desperate’s torments. His loyalty was to Desperate alone, not to Queen and country, but to Desperate.

Dusty’s war stories would have made choice telling. But there was no Crown and Anchor in Caen and no Royal British Legion. In any case they were censored and could not have been recounted with the Suez tales, or those from Bosnia, Basra or the Kosovo adventure. That he never told his share of anecdotes did not dull them in Dusty’s memory. One of the worst seemed to warrant Omaha as a place for recall.

An uncle of Dermot Brady had died. An interfering old man, and a nuisance on a grand scale, but the damage the uncle had inflicted had taken place after his funeral. In the will he’d left on his mantelpiece all his goods and chattels went to Dermot. A disaster at Gough: Dermot Brady was dependent on state handouts to keep himself, his wife and four kids alive. What Desperate gave him – twenty pounds a week – made the difference between a few pints on Friday and Saturday nights and no pints at all. Dermot Brady had been a taxi driver and had lost his licence. He had driven without it, was hauled in again and the magistrate threw the book at him. He’d go to gaol next time.

He was useful to the active-service units. There was to be a hit in Keady and the getaway car had to be fast to clear the roadblocks that went up immediately. He knew all the routes, was an expert in escape from hot pursuit, but the armed struggle hadn’t the cash to see him right.

Desperate had met him outside the bar on a Saturday night, and offered him a lift home. It had pissed rain that night, and the first raft of notes had slid into Brady’s hip pocket. He was useful, and most weeks he had something to give. They all knew him: the OC of Battalion, the OC of the company, the cell leaders, quartermasters and intelligence. His information was judiciously milked. All had gone well, until the uncle died and the will was read.

At the next meeting, Brady had played the big man with Desperate. He’d had enough, was packing it in. He’d finished looking death in the eye and hearing of touts ‘getting nutted’. ‘I’ve done my time and done it well. It’s over.’

Desperate had responded. ‘You’ve not done your time until I say you have.’

Brady had laughed and turned to walk away. Desperate had caught his shoulder, whacked him, then lectured him. Dermot Brady might as well go to the hardware store, buy himself a shovel, get down to the graveyard, dig himself a hole and lie in it. The PIRA would take it badly that their friend had screwed them over two years taking payment from the Crown. Desperate’s conclusion was that Dermot Brady was as good as dead if he left the car park with no say-so from him. It seemed that Desperate had been persuasive, because the next five weeks’ information came in and the profile of three active-service units was analysed. Desperate was reckoned to have done well.

It was a July evening and the meet was in a forest recreational car park, up behind Ballygawley and off the Omagh road. A breezy night, and there was a creak that Dusty had thought was a tree under strain. The shoes were level with their eyes. The body turned and the wind sang against the rope. His weight had almost broken the branch.

Desperate, in Dusty’s opinion, was always quiet on Omaha. He needed the woman who painted on the Baie de Somme. It was a fine afternoon and the sunshine made it almost pleasant to be outside, even there.

The guide said they called it Bloody Omaha
.

Forty-five thousand men went onto that beach, with an insupportable weight of problems: rough seas, the depth of the water when they were pushed out of the landing craft, too many tanks sinking immediately, the sea swamping the landing craft and men frantically baling with their GI-issue helmets, ineffective bombing of the strong points. Then there was a cliff to face, and half of the engineers, who were trained to scale those heights, were dead before they’d left the sand.

It was a cathartic moment for the tourists who stood high on the hill above the beach and watched sand yachts racing far below them. Around the group were the concrete strong-points and towards the horizon was the pure blue sea, the white crests of waves breaking at the shore. The guide would have quoted the words of Colonel George Taylor, of the Fighting 29th, when his men were pinned down at the cliff’s base and the sector advance was stalled: ‘Two kinds of men are going to stay on this beach, the dead and those about to die. Now, get off your butts.’

The group would have struggled to comprehend the scale of the casualties on the high ground and the beach. From V Corps at least three thousand men died, were wounded or posted as missing. An American lieutenant had yelled at his cowering men, ‘Are we going to lie there and get killed or are we going to do something about it?’ The guide said that 2,500 tons of supplies should have reached the beach in the first twenty-four hours, but only a hundred came ashore undamaged. The guide said, also, that it was a ‘near miracle’ that the landing succeeded on Omaha, and the final outcome depended on ‘heroic courage’. Harry Parley, of the 116th Infantry Division, recalled afterwards, ‘As our boat touched sand and the ramp went down, I became a visitor to hell.’

They group went back to the bus. They felt that being in this place, standing vigil, was recognition of the courage shown there. None wished to hurry away.