Authors: David Downing
It didn’t sound promising, McColl thought. When it came
down to it, Tiernan might be in England by now, preparing his “action on enemy soil.” Or the man could be in Germany, doing deals with England’s enemies.
But he would have to give Dublin a try, starting, he supposed, with Dunwood’s republican haunts.
“There’s a list with the briefing,” Dunwood told him. “I included anything I thought was relevant, but if you need anything else—or if by some miracle you actually find him—call the same number. Whoever answers will know where to find me.”
McColl spent the afternoon buying a new wardrobe from sundry pawnshops. There was no lack of choice following the lockout and its hardships; in some shops it seemed as if half the city’s population had brought in their coats once the cold weather ended. He begged a spare sack to carry his purchases in and, once he was back in his room, swapped his new wardrobe for the one he’d brought with him. Later that evening, when the streets were dark, he dropped the sack off the nearest bridge and watched it float away downriver.
Next morning he threw out his razor and took lodgings at one of the places Dunwood had listed. He paid extra for a room on his own, claiming with a laugh that his snoring might get him killed and that while he still had some money he might as well live high on the hog. His landlady, who looked like she hadn’t enjoyed anything since childhood, took his coins, placed them in a worn purse, and left him to appreciate the cupboard-size space, lumpy mattress, and gray sheets.
The only thing she asked him, in the four weeks he was there, was whether kangaroos really hopped.
It was not the most pleasant month of his life.
According to Dunwood’s false history, Paul O’Neill had been a tram driver in Brisbane, so it seemed sensible for him to seek similar work. Thankfully, there were no vacancies at the city depot, and he didn’t have to make up some story about Australian
trams having different controls. Over the next couple of weeks, he did the rounds of the factories and big stores, but none were hiring drivers. The only real possibility, had he actually wanted a job, was chauffeuring one of the local rich, who often advertised in the press for men “of good standing, able to drive and service a modern automobile.” If push came to shove, he would say that he’d been hired by some lord or other but dismissed the same day for inadvertently disclosing that he’d spent time in a Queensland cell.
Most of his waking hours were spent looking for Seán Tiernan and Colm Hanley. He attended every political meeting he saw publicized. There were Nationalist meetings at which old men were heckled by young republican firebrands for daring to say that Home Rule was enough, republican meetings at which old men were heckled by younger versions of themselves for daring to believe that independence was enough. There were cultural gatherings at which men insisted, in English, that Gaelic was the only language worth speaking and that Ireland had only truly been itself on some long-vanished misty morning, centuries before. He even attended two meetings of the local Protestants, who were bitterly divided over the issue of Home Rule now that their Ulster brethren seemed set on abandoning them to the Catholics.
Most of the pubs, clubs, and cafés on Dunwood’s list were in the poorer quarters. McColl spent many an hour nursing cups of tea or glasses of beer, playing skittles or dominoes or cards, talking with those he was with, eavesdropping on those he wasn’t. A simmering rage and despair over last year’s lockout never seemed far from the surface, and hatred of the bosses and their English protectors seemed more or less universal, but only a few seemed worried by the details of Home Rule or what happened in far-off Ulster. Most wanted jobs and a decent place to live, and if a revolution provided one, then they would thank the revolutionaries. Their Ireland was the tenement they lived in, not some emerald Eden or republican utopia.
He found no trace of Tiernan or Caitlin’s brother. And the reason, he decided, was simple—he was looking in the wrong places or, more precisely, among the wrong people. A few of the people he met would have worried Kell—those who hoped for guns, who wanted to bring Ulster to heel, who would even take help from the Germans if the opportunity arose—but none of them looked beyond Ireland. People like Tiernan and his friend Aidan Brady—they did. They might persuade themselves that they were fighting for a wider humanity, but they weren’t interested in ordinary people or mass movements. They were conspirators, outsiders. They barely trusted each other, and they used everyone else. Ireland to them was a vehicle.
Or, McColl thought, recalling Cumming’s phrase, an excuse.
But where else could he look? If Tiernan was trying to start a war, was Dublin the place to choose?
He decided he was approaching things from the wrong end and spent the third week of July scouring the city’s hotels and guesthouses for Germans. He found thirteen, eleven of them men, five of whom seemed, for various reasons, unlikely to be agents. But when he contacted Dunwood and asked that the remaining six be watched or taken in for questioning, he met with refusal. There were not that many men available for surveillance, and with the situation in Europe as tense as it was, the government had no intention of arresting a slew of innocent Germans on the off chance one was a spy.
Through the weeks of searching, McColl did his best to keep in touch with the world beyond Dublin’s tenements. In London the Irish Home Rule Bill passed in May was subjected to an amending bill, which further limited the original’s application to the northern counties. As this was still too much for Ulstermen to bear, yet not enough to satisfy the Nationalists, the process was essentially deadlocked.
In far-off Mexico, Huerta resigned and traveled into Spanish
exile on a German ship. McColl’s old acquaintance Mohandas Gandhi was also on the move, returning to India after more than twenty years in South Africa. He had to be almost fifty, McColl thought—time to go home and leave the stress of politics behind.
Europe, meanwhile, was still waiting for an Austrian response to the murder of the emperor’s heir. And with every day that passed, hope grew that the men in Vienna had lost their nerve.
In vain, as it turned out. On July 24 the British prime minister announced two unwelcome pieces of news: Talks held at Buckingham Palace to resolve the Irish deadlock had ended in utter failure, and the Austrian government had delivered an ultimatum to Belgrade, an ultimatum—as the newspapers made abundantly clear—that no self-respecting nation would dream of accepting. And the Serbs, as everyone knew, were almost overendowed with self-respect.
On Sunday the twenty-sixth, the day the Serbs were supposed to reply, McColl took a tram out to Howth. This small fishing port on the northeastern lip of Dublin Bay was the latest destination of the route marches that the Irish Volunteers had been undertaking on a weekly basis since mid-June, and he planned to scan the faces for the ones he was seeking. This march, though, turned out to be different—a small boat, the
Asgard
, was waiting for the marchers, heavily loaded with illicit rifles. The Volunteer leaders had been clever, McColl thought; he found himself wondering whether all the month’s marches had been designed with this one in mind. The first one had attracted a significant police and military presence, but over the weeks familiarity had turned to complacency, and there were not nearly enough police in Howth to prevent the
Asgard
’s unloading.
He watched from the cobbled quayside as hundreds of guns and several boxes of ammunition were loaded into taxis and driven away. The remaining rifles were shouldered by some of the marchers, and the Volunteers set off on their return journey with a noticeable spring in their steps. If the Ulstermen could arm themselves, then so could they!
McColl joined in, drawn more by curiosity and the crowd’s good mood than by any lingering hope of running into Tiernan or Colm. It was almost ten miles back to Dublin, but the exercise would do him good.
Everything was fine until the marchers reached the village of Clontarf, where a large posse of policemen and a detachment of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers were deployed across the road. McColl, in the middle of the march, could see talks going on up ahead and guessed that the police were demanding the surrender of the smuggled rifles. As if to confirm that fact, those bearing the illicit arms started slipping off across the fields that bordered the road. The authorities had no answer to this, other than to seize what weapons they could from those near the front and let everyone else go home. The remaining Volunteers dispersed, and the police headed back into Dublin with their paltry cache of guns, leaving only the soldiers and a crowd of hostile onlookers.
Eventually the troops set off, a jeering crowd in close attendance. As the procession entered the outskirts of Dublin, some of the soldiers made mock lunges with their bayonets to keep their tormentors at bay, and the latter were steadily reinforced by fellow citizens. By the time the procession reached Sackville Street, there were several hundred people shouting insults at the troops, and as they turned onto Bachelor’s Walk, the abuse turned to bottles and stones.
On more than one occasion in the last half hour, McColl had reached the conclusion that slipping away was the sensible option, but simple curiosity had kept him with the crowd. Now, as the last few ranks of the soldiers wheeled and raised their rifles, he realized his mistake. A uniformed arm went up, a single shot gave way to a brief but shocking fusillade, and people were falling, screaming, crying for help. The dense crowd of bodies between him and the soldiers seemed to melt away, and he found himself looking at a row of frightened young boys.
Someone screamed “Cease fire!” and there, at the edge of his vision, was Aidan Brady, disappearing around a corner.
For a few seconds, McColl stood rooted to the spot in surprise, staring at the space where Brady had been. And then he was in motion, leaping across one prone body and sidestepping another man on his knees. As he reached the corner that Brady had turned, he forced himself to slow and take it at walking pace. Several people were hurrying away down this particular street, Brady the tallest, bringing up the rear some fifty yards away. The American glanced over his shoulder only the once and clearly found no cause for concern in the ragged figure behind him.
McColl made sure to keep his distance. He didn’t want to lose Brady, but he was more afraid of tipping him off. Now that he knew the man was here, he could always find him again; tip him off and he’d go to ground along with the others.
He also had a vivid memory of what had happened to the cop in Paterson.
The gunfire by the river had brought a lot of curious people out of their homes, and the crowded pavements, along with the darkening evening sky, provided some welcome cover. Brady turned right, crossed Sackville Street, and followed a winding route to the small square in front of Amiens Street station. There was a line of cheap hotels across from the station entrance, and the American disappeared through the door of the third. The name—or misname—on the barely readable sign was
THE DUBLIN CONTINENTAL
.
McColl went into the station and was relieved to find a pair of public telephones in the booking hall. In Dunwood’s absence a message was taken, and McColl settled down to wait, keeping an eye on the illuminated hotel entrance through a convenient window.
It had been dark for an hour when Dunwood arrived. He listened to McColl’s story but had little help to offer. “I can maybe spare you a man in the morning,” he eventually conceded, “but
not tonight. Half the city’s in an uproar, and every man we have is out on the street.”
McColl tried, without success, to change his mind.
“It’s not even Tiernan,” Dunwood insisted, “just some American who knows him. And now that Tiernan’s got his guns, he’ll be out celebrating.”
“He wasn’t at the pickup,” McColl pointed out.
“The ones who matter never are,” the Irishman said wryly.
“All right. I’ll hold the fort this evening. But tomorrow …”
“I’ll try to have someone here by eight, but you’ll have to point the American out.”
“I’ll be here,” McColl said tiredly. He’d walked a long way that day and not had much to eat. As Dunwood disappeared around a corner, he realized he should have asked the man to fetch him something.
At any rate there was no time to dwell on his empty stomach. Only ten minutes had passed when Brady reappeared, this time wearing a cap and carrying a large carpetbag. He headed south toward the river, and McColl went after him, inwardly thanking the Dublin authorities for the inadequacy of their street lighting. Tonight there was no moon to help—the sky was overcast, with more than a hint of moisture hanging in the air.
Brady crossed the swing bridge over the Liffey, strode past the elevated Tara Street station, and turned left under the railway bridge. McColl reached the corner just in time to see the American walk in through the entrance of another hotel. It was, he knew, the Emerald Palace. One of the thirteen Germans had been registered there, a man named Suhr whom McColl had previously discounted.
He stood there, staring at the entrance. Should he risk going in and walking into Brady or risk staying outside and missing a chance to eavesdrop? He still hadn’t made up his mind when Brady reappeared with the German, whose cadaverous face looked almost frightening under the yellow streetlight. Suhr had been staying at the hotel with his wife, which was why McColl had ruled him out.
Maybe he’d brought her along for just that purpose, or maybe she’d wanted to see Ireland. Maybe she wasn’t his wife.
McColl hung back, ready to retreat if they came his way. But the two men set off in the other direction, zigzagging south to a wide and busy road, which they followed toward the bay. Given the hour and the rain now falling, most of those out would be hurrying home—if Dunwood’s uproar had ever existed, it was now the dampest of squibs.
Ships’ masts were visible over the roofs—they were approaching the docks. Brady and the German turned right down a narrow, cobbled street, and McColl reached the corner just in time to see them disappear through the entrance of the seedy-looking Killoran’s Tavern. Piano music and cigarette smoke were drifting out of the only open window.