Harry's Game Part 4

The base was clearly to be the good Mrs Duncan. She was in the kitchen and was.h.i.+ng up the first sitting of breakfast when Harry came down the stairs.

'Well, it's good to be back, Mrs Duncan. I've been away a while too long, I feel. You miss Ireland when you're away, whatever sort of place it is now. You get tired of the travelling and the journeys. You want to be back here. If these b.a.s.t.a.r.d British would leave us to lead our own lives then this would be a great wee country. But it can't be easy for you, Mrs Duncan, running a business in these times?'

The previous evening he had formally given his name as Harry McEvoy. That was what she called him when she replied.

'Well, Mr McEvoy, they're not the easiest of times, to be sure. One minute it's all quiet and the place is full. Then you'll have a thing like last night, and who is going to come and sleep a hundred yards or so from where a soldier was shot dead? The travellers from the south find all this a bit near. They like it a bit farther away from where it all happens. Having it full like it is now is a luxury. What did you say your business was? I was fl.u.s.tered up a bit when you came, getting the teas and all, yesterday.'

'I've been away, ten years or so, just under in fact, at sea. In the Merchant Navy. Down in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, mainly.'

'There's a lot you'll see has changed. The fighting's been hard these last years.'

'Our people have taken a bad time, and all.'

'The Catholic people have taken a bad time, and now the Protestants hate us as never before. It'll take a long time to sort it ut.'

'The English don't understand us, never have, never will.'

'Of course they don't, Mr McEvoy." She flipped his egg over expertly, set it on the plate beside the halved tomatoes, the skinned sausage, the mushrooms and the crisp fried bread. "Look at all the ballyhoo and palava when that man of theirs was shot--Danby. You'd think it was the first man who had died since the troubles. Here they are, close to a thousand dead and all, and one English politician gets killed ... you should have seen the searches they did, troops all over. Never found d.a.m.n all.'

'He wasn't mourned much over here." Harry said it as a statement.

'How could he be? He was the man that ran the Maze, Long Kesh. He brought all his English warders over here to run the place for him. There was no faith in him here, and not a tear shed.'

'They've not caught a man yet for it?'

'Nor will they. The boys will keep it close. Not many will know who did it. There's been too much informing. They keep things like that tight these days. But that's enough talk of all that. If you want to talk politics you can do it outside the door and on the streets all the hours that G.o.d gave. There's no shortage of fools here to do the talking. I try and keep it out of the house. If you're back from the sea, what are you going to do now? Have you a job to be away to?'

Before answering, Harry complimented her on the breakfast. He handed her the empty plate. Then he said, "Well, I can drive. I hope I could pick up a job like that round here. Earn enough so that with a bit of luck I can pay you something regular, and we can agree on a rate. I want to work up this end of town if I can, not in the centre of town. Seems safer in our own part. I thought I might try something temporary for a bit while I look round for something permanent.'

There's enough men round here would like a job, permanent or not.'

'I think I'll walk around a bit this morning. I'll do the bed first... an old habit at sea. Tomorrow I'll try round for a job. Wonderful breakfast, thanks.'

Mrs Duncan had noticed he'd been away. And a long time at that, she was certain. Something grated on her ear, tuned to three decades of welcoming visitors and apportioning to them their birthplace to within a few miles. She was curious, now, because she couldn't place what had happened to his accent. Like the sea he talked of, she was aware it came in waves--ebbed in its pitch. Pure Belfast for a few words, or a phrase, then falling off into something that was close to Ulster but softer, without the harshness. It was this that nagged as she dusted round the house and cleaned the downstairs hall, while above her Harry moved about in his room. She thought about it a lot during the morning, and decided that what she couldn't quite understand was the way he seemed to change his accent so slightly mid sentence. If he was away on a boat so long then of course he would have lost the Belfast in his voice--that must have happened. But then in contradiction there were the times when he was pure Belfast. She soundlessly muttered the different words that emphasized her puzzlement to herself, uncomprehending.

They don't waste time in Belfast lingering over the previous day. By rhe time Harry was out on the pavements of the Falls Road and walking towards town there was nothing to show that a large-scale military operation had followed the killing of a young soldier the previous evening. The traffic was on the move, women with their children in tow were moving down towards the shops at the bottom end of the Springfield Road, and on the corners groups of youths with time on their hands and no work to go to were gathering to watch the day's events. Harry was wearing a pair of old jeans he had brought from Germany, and that he'd used for jobs round his quarters in the base, and a holed pullover that he'd last worn when painting the white surrounds to the staircase at home. They were some of the clothes the officer had collected when he'd called and told his wife that her husband was on his way to the Middle East.

The clothes were right, and he walked down the road--watched, but not greatly attracting attention. The time had been noted when he came out of the side road where Mrs Duncan had her guest house, and into the Falls. Nothing went on paper, but the youth that saw him from behind the neat muslin curtain at the junction would remember him when he came back, and mentally clock him in. There was every reason why he should be noticed, as the only new face to come out of the road that morning. Last night when he had arrived it had been too late to get a decent look at him. All Mrs Duncan's other guests were regulars, discreetly vetted and cleared by the time they'd slept in her house enough for a pattern to emerge.

Harry had decided to walk this first morning, partly because he thought it would do him good but more importantly to familiarize himself with his immediate surroundings. Reconnaissance. Time well spent. It might save your life, they'd said. Know your way round. He came down past the old Broadway cinema where no films had been shown for two years since the fire bomb exploded beside the ticket kiosk, and the open s.p.a.ce of the one-time petrol station forecourt where pumps, reception area and garages had all long since been flattened. Across the road was the convent school. Children were laughing and shouting in the playground. Harry remembered seeing that same playground, then empty and desolated, on West German television when the newsreader had described the attack by two IRA motor-cyclists on William Staunton. The Catholic magistrate had just dropped his two girls at school and was watching them from his car as they moved along the pavement to the gate when he was shot. He had lingered for three months before he died, and then one of the papers had published a poem written by the dead man's twelve-year-old daughter. Harry had read it in the mess, and thought it of rare simplicity and beauty, and not forgotten it.

'Don't cry," Mummy said 'They're not real.'

But Daddy was And he's not here.

'Don't be bitter," Mummy said 'They've hurt themselves much more.'

But they can walk and run---- Daddy can't.

'Forgive them and forget," Mummy said But can Daddy know I do? 'Smile for Daddy, kiss him well," Mummy said, But can I ever?

He was still mouthing the words as the Royal Victoria Hospital Dinned up, part modern, part the dark close red-brick of old Belfast, i t;i union and scores of others had been rushed here down the curved nil that swung into the rubber doors of Casualty.

I larry turned left into Grosvenor Road, hurrying his step. Most of lie windows on either side of the street showed the scars of the millict, boarded up, bricked up, sealed to squatters, too dangerous nt habitation, but remaining available and ideal for the snipers. The nibs on the right, a hundred yards or so down from the main gate of he RVH, had figured in Davidson's briefings. After a Proddy bomb uid gone off the local Provos had found a young bank clerk on the m ene. He came from out of town and said he'd brought a camera nan to witness the devastation. The explanation hadn't satisfied. After four hours of torture, and questioning, and mutilation, they Oiot him, and dumped him in Cullingtree Street, a little farther down towards the city centre.

Davidson had emphasized that story, used it as an example of the wrong person just turning up and being unable to explain himself. In the hysteria and suspicion of the Falls that night it was sufficient to get him killed.

The half-mile of the street Harry was walking down was fixed in his mind. In the log of the history of the troubles since August 1969 that they'd given him to read, that half-mile had taken up fifteen separate entries.

Harry produced a driving licence made out in the name of McEvoy and the post office counter clerk gave him the brown paper parcel. Harry recognized Davidson's neat copper-plate hand on the outside--'Hold for collection." Inside was a 0-38 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver. Accurate and a man-stopper. One of nine hundred thousand ran off in the first two years of World War Two. Unit aceable. If Harry had shaken the package violently he would have heard the rattling of the forty-two rounds of ammunition. He didn't open the parcel. His instructions were very plain on that. He was to keep the gun wrapped till he got back to his base, and only when he had found a good hiding place was he to remove it from the wrapping. That made sense, nothing special, just ordinary common sense, -but the way they'd gone on about it you'd have thought the paper would be stripped off and the gun waved all over Royal Avenue. At times Davidson treated everyone around him like children. "Once it's hidden," Davidson had warned, "leave it there unless you think there's a real crisis. For G.o.d's sake don't go carrying it around. And be certain if you use it. Remember, if you want to fire the d.a.m.n thing, the yellow card and all that's writ thereon applies as much to you, my boy, as every pimpled squaddie in the Pioneers.'

With the parcel under his arm, for all the world like a father bringing home a child's birthday present, Harry walked back from the centre of the city to the Broadway. He wanted a drink. Could justify it too, on professional grounds, need to be there, get the tempo of things, and to let a pint wash down the dryness of his throat after what he'd been through the last thirty-six hours. The 'local" was down the street from Mrs Duncan's corner. Over the last few paces to the paint-sc.r.a.ped door his resolve went haywire, weakened so that he would have dearly loved to walk past the door and regain the security of the little back room he had rented. He checked himself. Breathing hard, and feeling the tightness in his stomach and the lack of breath that comes from acute fear, he pushed the door open and went into the pub. G.o.d, what a miserable place! From the brightness outside his eyes took a few moments to acclimatize to the darkness within. The talk stopped and he saw the faces follow him from the door to the counter. He asked for a bottle of Guinness, anxiously projecting his voice, conscious that fear is most easily noticed from speech. n.o.body spoke to him as he sipped his drink. b.l.o.o.d.y good to drink, but you'd need to be an alcoholic to come in here to take it. The gla.s.s was two-thirds empty by the time desultory conversation started up again. The voices were muted, as if everything said was confidential. The people, Harry recognized, had come to talk, as of an art, from the side of their mouths. Not much eavesdropping in here. Need to Watergate the place.

Across the room two young men watched Harry drink. Both were volunteers in E Company of the First Battalion of the Provisional IRA, Belfast Brigade. They had heard of the cover story Harry was using earlier in the morning just after he'd gone out for his walk. The source, though unwittingly, was Mrs Duncan. She had talked over the was.h.i.+ng line, as she did most mornings, with her neighbour. The neighbour's son, who now stood in the bar watching Harry, had asked his mother to find out from Mrs Duncan who the new lodger was, where he came from, and whether he was staying long. Mrs Duncan enjoyed these morning chatters, and seldom hurried with her sheets and pegs unless rain was threatening. It was cold and bright. She told how the new guest had turned up out of the blue, how he hoped to find a job and stay indefinitely, had already paid three weeks in advance. He was a seaman, the English Merchant Navy, and had been abroad for many years. But he was from the north, and had come home now. From Portadown he was.

'He's been away all right," she shouted over the fence to her friend, who was masked by the big, green-striped sheet suspended in the centre of the line, "you can see that, hear it rather, every time he opens his mouth. You can tell he's been away, a long time and all, lucky beggar. What we should have done, missus. Now he says he's Lome back because Ireland, so he says, is the place in times of trouble." She laughed again. She and her friend were always pretending they'd like to leave the north for good, but both were so wedded to Belfast that a week together at a boarding house north of Dublin in the third week of August was all they ever managed ... then they were full of regrets all the way back to Victoria Street station.

The son had had this conversation relayed to him painfully slowly and in verbatim detail by his mother. Now he watched and listened, expressionless, as Harry finished his drink and asked for another bottle. In two days time he would go to a routine meeting with his company's intelligence officer, by then sure in his mind if there was anything to report about the new lodger next door.

Harry walked quickly back to Delrosa after the second gla.s.s of Guinness. He'd never been fond of the stuff. Treacly muck, he told himself. He rang the door bell, and a tall, willowy girl opened the door.

'Hullo, McEvoy's the name. I'm staying here. The room at the back.'

She smiled and made way for him, stepping back into the hall. Black hair down to the shoulders, high cheek bones, and dark eyes set deep above them. She stood very straight, back arched, and b.r.e.a.s.t.s angled into the tight sweater before it moulded with her waist, and was lost in the wide leather belt threaded through the straps of her jeans.

'I'm Josephine. I help Mrs Duncan. Give her a hand round the house. She said there was someone new in. I do the general cleaning, most days in the week, and help with the teas.'

He looked at her blatantly and unashamed. "Could you make me one now? A cup of tea?" Not very adequate, he thought, not for an opening chat-up to a rather beautiful girl.

She walked through into the kitchen, and he followed a pace or so behind, catching the smell of the cheap scent.

'What else do you?" Perfunctory, imbecile, but keeps it going.

'Work at the mill, down the Falls, the big one. I do early s.h.i.+ft, then come round and do a bit with Mrs Duncan. She's an old friend of my Mam's. I've been coming a long time now.'

'There's not much about for people here now, "cept work, and not enough of that," Harry waded in, "what with the troubles and that. Do you go out much, do you find much to do?'

'Oh, there's bits and pieces. The world didn't end, and we adapted, I suppose. We don't go into town much--that's just about over. There's not much point, really. Go to a film and there'll be a bomb threat and you're cleared out. The Tartans run the centre anyway, so you have to run for dear life to get back into the Falls. The army don't protect us, they look the other way when the Tartans come, Proddy sc.u.m. There's nothing to go to town for anyway 'cept the clothes, and they're not cheap.'

'I've been away a long time," said Harry, "people have been through an awful time. I thought it time to get back home. You can't be an Irishman and spend your time away right now.'

She looked hard at him. The prettiness and youth of her face hardened into something more frightening to Harry. Imperceptibly he saw the age of weariness on the smooth skin of the girl, spreading like the refocusing of a lens, and then gone as the face lightened. She reached into the hip pocket of her jeans, straining them taut as her fingers found a crumpled handkerchief. She shook it loose and dabbed it against her nose. Harry saw the green embroidered shamrocks in the corners, and fractionally caught the motif in the middle of the square. Crossed black and brown Thompson machine guns. She was aware he was staring at her.

'There's nothing special about these. Doesn't mean I'm a rebel and that. They sell them to raise funds for the men and their families, the men that are held in the Kesh. "The Men behind the Wire." Look. It's very good, isn't it--a bit delicate? You wouldn't think a cowardly, murdering thug would have the patience to work at a thing so difficult, be so careful. They think we're all pigs, just pigs. "Fenian pigs," they call us.'

She spat the words out, the lines round her face hard and clear cut now, then the tension of the exchange was gone. She relaxed.

'We make our own entertainment. There's the clubs, social nights. There's not much mid-week, but Sat.u.r.day night is okay. Only the b.l.o.o.d.y army comes belting in most times. They always say they're looking for the great commander of the IRA. They take ten boys out, and they're all back free in twenty-four hours. They stir us up, try to provoke us. We manage. I suppose all you've heard since coming back is people talking about their problems, how grim it is. But we manage.'

'That handkerchief," said Harry, "does that mean you follow the boyos, have you a man in the prisons?'

'Not b.l.o.o.d.y likely. It doesn't mean a d.a.m.n. Just try and not buy one. You'll find out. If you don't buy one there's arguing and haggling. It's easier to pay up. You've got to have a snot-rag, right? Might as well be one of these and no argument, right? I'm not one of those heated-up little b.i.t.c.hes that runs round after the cowboys. When I settle it'll be with a feller with more future than a detention order, I can tell you. And I'm not one of those that runs around with a magazine in my knickers and an Armalite up my trousers, either. There are enough who want to do that.'

'What sort of evenings do you have now? What sort of fun do you make for yourselves?'

'We have the raelis," she said, "not the sort they have in the country or in the Free State, not the proper thing. But there's dancing, and a bit of a band, and a singer and a bar. The army come lumping in, the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, but they don't stay long. You've been away, at sea, right? Well, we've got rid of the old songs now ... 1916 and 1922 are in the back seat, out of the hit parade. We've the "Men Behind the Wire"--that's internment. "b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday." "Provie Birdie", when the three boys were lifted out of Mountjoy by helicopter. Did you hear about it? Three big men and a helicopter comes right down into the exercise yard and lifts them out... and the screws was shouting "Shut the gates!" Must have been a laugh, and all. Understand me, I'm not for joining them, the Provos. But I'm not against them. I don't want the b.a.s.t.a.r.d British here.'

'On the helicopter, I was going through the Middle East. I saw it in the English paper in Beirut.'

She was impressed, seemed so anyway. Not that he'd been to an exotic sounding place like Beirut,, but that the fame of Seamus Twomey, Joe O'Hagen and Kevin Mallon had spread that far.

'Do the army always come and bust in, at the evenings?'

'Just about always. They think they'll find the big boys. They don't know who they're looking for. Put on specs, tint your hair, do the parting the wrong way, don't shave, do shave ... that's enough, that sorts them out.'

Harry had weighed her up as gently committed--not out of conviction but out of habit. A little in love with the glamour of the men with Armalites, and the rawness of the times they lived in, but unwilling to go too close in case the tinsel dulled.

'I think I'd like to come," said Harry. "I think it would do me good. I'm a bit out of date in my politics right now, and my voice is a bit off tune. James Connolly was being propped up in his chair in Kilmainham in my time, and they were wearing all their Green. It's time I updated and put myself back in touch. A lot of brave boys have died since I was last here. It's time to stand up and be counted in this place. That's why I came back.'

Til take you. I'll pick you up here, Sat.u.r.day, round half seven. Cheers.'

She was away into the kitchen, and Harry to his room.

SEVEN.

The man was moving the last few yards to his home. It was just .ifter two in the morning. Two men had checked the streets near his house and given an all-clear on the presence of army foot patrols.

It was his first visit back into his native Ardoyne since he had left 10 go to London nearly a month ago. His absence had been noted by i he local British army battalion that operated out of the towering, near-derelict, Flax Street mill complex on the edge of the Ardoyne. It was entered in the comprehensive files the intelligence section maintained on the several thousand people that lived in the area, and a week before two Land-Rovers had pulled up outside the man's house, made their way to the half-opened front door and confronted his wife. She could have told them little even if she had felt inclined to. She didn't, anyway.

She told them to "Go f.u.c.k yourselves, you British pigs." She then added, nervous perhaps of the impact of her initial outburst, that her husband was away in the S-)uth working for a living. The army had searched the house without enthusiasm, but this was routine, and nothing was found, nor really expected to be. The intelligence officer noted the report of the sergeant who had led the raid, noted too that it would be nice to talk to the occupant of No 41 Ypres Avenue at some later date. That was as far as it had been taken.

If Harry had been chosen for his role because he was clean, the same criterion had operated with the other man's superiors when they had put the cross against his name midway up the list of twenty or so who were capable of going to London and killing Danby.

Ypres Avenue was a little different from the ma.s.s of streets that made up the Ardoyne. The battle it was named after gave a clue to its age, and so its state of repair was superior to those streets up in the Falls where Downs had been hiding the last three weeks and where the streets took their names from the Crimean and Indian Mutiny battles, along with the British generals who had led a liberal stock of Ulstermen into their late-nineteenth-century fighting. But fifty-nine years is still a long time for an artisan cottage to survive without major repairs, and none had been carried out on any considerable scale in the Avenue since the day they had been put up to provide dwellings for those working in the mill, where the army now slept. The houses were joined in groups of four, with, in between, a narrow pa.s.sage running through to the high-walled back entrance that came along behind the tiny yards at the rear.

The blast bombs, nail bombs, and petrol bombs of four years of fighting had taken their toll, and several of the houses had been walled up. The bottom eight feet of a wall at the end of the Avenue had been whitewashed, the work of housewives late at night at internment time, so that at night, in the near darkness of the Ardoyne, a soldier's silhouette would stand out all the more clearly and give the boyos a better chance with a rifle. Most corners in the area had been given the same treatment, and the army had come out in force a week later and painted the whitened walls black. The women had then been out again, then again the army, before both sides called a mutual but unspoken truce. The wall was left filthy and disfigured from the daubings.

The army sat heavily on Ardoyne, and the Proves, as they themselves admitted, had had a hard time of it. This was good for the man. A main activist would not be expected to live in an area dominated by the military and where IRA operations had virtually ceased. He had been careful to link all his work with the Falls, away in a quite separate Catholic area from the Ardoyne.

Each house was small, unshaped, and built to last. Comfort played only a small part in its design. A front hall, with a front room off it, led towards a living area with kitchen and scullery two later additions and under asbestos roofing. The toilet was the most recent arrival and was in the yard against the far wall in a breeze-block cubicle. Upstairs each house boasted two rooms and a tiny landing. Bathing was in the kitchen. This was Belfast housing, perfect for the ideological launching of the gunman, perfect too as the model ground for him to pursue his work.

S.

r In the years the man had lived there he could find his way by the counting of his footsteps and by touch, when he came to the door of his own yard. The door had been recently greased, and made no sound when it swung on its hinges. He slipped towards the kitchen and unlocked the back door and went upstairs. That back door was never bolted, just locked, so that he could come in through it at any time.

It was the longest he had ever been away. The relief was total, lie was back.

He moved cat-like up from the base of the stairs, three steps, then waited and listened. The house was completely dark and he had found the banister rail by touch. There were the familiar smells of the house, strong in his nose--the smell of cold tea and cold chips, older fat, of the damp that came into the walls, of the lino and sc.r.a.ps of carpet where that damp had eaten and corroded. On the stairs while he waited he could hear the sound of his family cl.u.s.tered together in the two rooms, the rhythm of their sleep broken by the hacking cough of one of the girls.

There was no question of using the lights. Any illumination through the spa.r.s.e curtains would alert the army to the fact that someone in the house was on the move unusually late, coming home or going out. A little enough thing, but sufficient to go down into the files and card system that the intelligence men pored over, and which gave them their results. In the blackness the man inched his way up the stairs, conscious that no one would have told his wife he was coming home this particular night, and anxious not to frighten her.

He moved slowly on the landing, pushed open the door of the back room where he and his wife slept, and came inside. His eyes were now accustomed to the dark. He made out her hair on the pillow, and beside it the two small shapes, huddled close together for warmth and comfort. He watched them a long time. One of the children wriggled and then subsided with the cough. It had just been coming on when he had left home. He felt no emotion, only inhibit ion over how to break in and intrude on their sleep. Gradually his wife became aware of his presence. At first she was frightened, moving quickly and jerking the head of one of the sleeping children. She was defensive in her movement, the mother hen protecting her nest. The aggression went when she saw it was him. With a half strangled sob she reached out for her man and pulled him down on to the bed.

Beneath him he felt the children slide away to continue their sleep uninterrupted.

'Hullo, my love, I'm back. I'm okay. Safe now. I've come back to you.'

He mouthed the words pressed hard into the pit of her neck, his voice sandwiched between her shoulder and ear. She held him very tightly, pulling at him as if some force were working to get him away from her again.

'It's all right, love. I'm home. It's over.'

He rose to his knees and kicked off his shoes, wrenched at his socks and pulled away the trousers, jacket and s.h.i.+rt. She pa.s.sed one of the sleeping children over her body and pulled back the clothes of the bed for him to come into the empty s.p.a.ce.

Desperately she clung to him there, squeezing the hardness and bitterness and strength out of him, demolis.h.i.+ng the barriers of coldness and callousness with which he had surrounded himself, working at the emotions that had been so suppressed in the last month.

'Where've you been?'

'Don't... don't... I've missed you, I've wanted you.'

'No, where've you been?" she persisted. "We thought you were gone--were dead. There was no word, not anything. Where? There's always been a word before when you've gone.'

He clung to her, holding on to the one person that he loved and whom he needed as his life-line, particularly over the last weeks of tension and fear. He felt the tautness draining out of him as he pressed down on to her body. It was some moments before he realized that she was lying quite still, rigid and yielding nothing. His grip on her slackened and he rose a little from the bedclothes to see her face, but when he was high enough to look down at her eyes, she turned them away from him towards her sleeping children.

'What's the matter? What's this for?'

'It's where you've been. Why you've been away. That's the matter. I know now, don't I?'

'Know what...?" He hesitated. Stupid b.i.t.c.h, what was she blathering for? He was here. Flesh and blood. But what did she know? He was uncertain. How much had she realized through the frenzy in which he had held her? What had that crude and desperate weight of worry communicated to her?

'Are you going to tell me about it?" she said.

'About what?" His anger was rising.

'Where you've been...'

'I've told you. Once more. Then the end of it. I was in the South. Finish, that's it.'

'You won't tell me, then?'

'I've said it's finished. There's no more. Leave it. I'm home--that should be enough. Don't you want me here?'

'It said in the papers that his children were there. And his wife. They saw it all. That the man went on shooting long after he'd gone down. That the children were screaming, so was his wife. It said she covered him from the bullets. Put herself right over him.'