The Death of an Irish Politician (13 page)

“That—that he did. Lived four years and seven months in Florence. I wonder how he got on there.”

“Tutored while he studied history at the university.”

“He also became involved with the establishment of the Italian Communist Party—sounds bad, doesn’t it? I hear you’re a capitalist of no slight leverage yourself, ma’am.”

“He’s entitled to his beliefs. I’m not a capitalist, I’m a realist.”

“It seems you must have gotten all that practicality from your mother, since from the time of your father’s leaving Florence in the late twenties right up until today—we’ve got him downstairs, you know; he’s confessed to the attempted murder of Ovens; they’ll put him away for good this time—his career as a human being has been all downhill. Murder, assassinations, bank robberies, gunrunning, sabotage, kidnapping, espionage for a hostile foreign power. No sooner was he released from prison than he was involved in some dirty deed or another, and there he was again, back in the pokey. One death sentence was commuted because the Taoseaich respected his mind, another because he had information concerning the IRA hierarchy, which David Nelligan believed they could pull out of him down at the Curragh.

“Well, this time it’s no noble cause, is it?” McKeon placed the dossier on his lap and folded his arms across his chest. “It’s just a bloody ugly little deed—trying to take the life of an unworldly, quiet, kindly man whose only crime was to love you, Leona, and hate the part he played in running antipersonnel
weaponry into the North at your insistence.”

McGarr thought he saw her wince a little when McKeon alluded to Ovens, but she said, “Cheap histrionics again, Sergeant? Please try to moderate your technique. Even the most convincing dramatic performance grows stale after a time.”

McKeon suddenly bawled, “Well, why do
you
think an experienced Fenian would ever even consider trying to conk a man with a winch handle in broad daylight? Do you think he would botch the job? Why does the man who resisted all the atrocities of the Curragh confess in five minutes? Why does he come along with us meek as a lamb? Because he feels his life is over, because he doesn’t want his only sibling to rot in the can the way he did? Things don’t match up here, and I’m betting you’re such a cold bitch you can sit there and watch him do it! I bet you’re such a ‘realist’ you can clap him into a cell for the rest of his life and not even bat an eye.”

She looked over at McGarr in the shadows, smirked, and drew deeply on the cigarette. Her skin, which was very white, was just slightly translucent and reminded McGarr of Carrara marble that had been smoothed to a gloss. She said, “My father is nothing but a jailbird anyhow. Have you ever thought of that? Maybe he’d never admit it, but it’s what he has always wanted, what he got for most of his life, and what he deserves.”

That was when McGarr pushed himself off the wall. “I don’t believe you mean that. Get O’Brugha up here, Bernie. We’ll let her tell that to his face.” McGarr had dealt with people like Leona Horrigan before. As long as she could dehumanize her conception of her father, she could make him her scapegoat. McGarr wondered if her father had ever told her about his fifteen years—a record, the dossier stated—in the Curragh solitary cells. McGarr doubted it. O’Brugha was a hard man, just the sort who would keep the ugliness of his imprisonment from his family at all costs.

And the old man was haggard. McKeon had awakened him and he looked as though he had aged ten years since McGarr had first seen him on the Killiney Yacht Club docks four days before. His jawbone protruded right back to his ears. His eyes were glazed and he breathed through his mouth. His hand shook when McGarr gave him a bottle of Harp.

His daughter hadn’t looked up when he entered the room.

McGarr didn’t offer O’Brugha a chair, just stood him across the table from his daughter.

After taking a swig of beer, the old man cleared his throat and, placing the bottle on the table, rubbed his eyes. The room was utterly silent. O’Brugha’s narrow shoulders barely held his suspenders. “How are you keeping, Leona? Have they been hard on you? Where’s your solicitor? You ought to have one,
you know. Hadn’t she?” he asked McGarr.

Still she hadn’t as much as glanced at her father.

McGarr said, “We haven’t yet used the cattle prods on her, Mairtín. After that, if she has told us what we want to know, she can call her solicitor.”

O’Brugha jerked his neck toward McGarr. He tried to smile. He realized McGarr was codding him, but it was as though the prison atmosphere of the Castle had reminded the old man of other days and other practices. “You boys don’t do that sort of thing any—” He glanced down at his daughter.

“No, we don’t. But they did it to you, didn’t they, Mairtín—out in the Curragh? Haven’t you told Leona about your fifteen years of solitary in a tiny iron cell no bigger than a steamer trunk? No heat, no light but what little came through the slit. How about the guards, Mairtín? Tell Leona what you told us out at the Harbour Bar about the Curragh. What sort of shoes did the guards wear?”

O’Brugha’s light blue eyes flashed down on his daughter’s head, then back to McGarr. He knew what McGarr had in mind, how these questions would work on Leona’s pity for him.

“What kind were they, Liam?” McGarr asked O’Shaughnessy. “Can you remember what he said they were?”

“Rubber shoes—‘so as not to disturb the sol
itude of one’s reflections’ was the way he put it.”

“And how long like that? Certainly fifteen years is a”—McGarr searched for the right word—“hyperbole.”

Leona Horrigan had raised her head and was staring at her father.

His eyes were moving about the shadows, seeing anything, everything but his daughter’s face, upon which the lamp over the day-room table shone brightest.

“Surely there must have been a break, a month, a day, several hours, a week at least?”

O’Shaughnessy answered McGarr. “Every prison has an exercise yard, Peter.”

O’Brugha was swaying beside the table. He put out his hand and steadied himself. When he looked up, his eyes met his daughter’s. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Sure and I could do a thousand years standing on my head. They’re just trying to box you in, Leona. Don’t be taken in by him.” O’Brugha pointed to McGarr. “He’s worse than any of them. He’s Nelligan but with greater guile. My life is over. When all is said and done, I rather like prison. Nowadays, they let you have books, a little job, the food isn’t half bad, and—”

“How long were the exercise periods?” she asked.

“Oh”—he flicked a hand off the tabletop—“hours—three, four.”

“Five minutes,” said McGarr, “including the
time it took them to haul you to and from your cell. How many times did they chuck you into that treeless courtyard, O’Brugha, and you too stiff to crawl through the clinkers? And nude! The IRA wouldn’t recognize the Free State, Leona—you know this, don’t you?—and so the prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms. You got a thin army blanket at night, but they took that away in the morning, didn’t they, Mairtín?”

O’Shaughnessy asked, “And how many years all told did you spend in prison? Twenty? Thirty years? Not
thirty
years!”

“Thirty-four years,” said Leona Horrigan and lowered her head.

“Time is relative,” O’Brugha said, sensing that they had broken her resolve. In his own way, he was pleading with her to keep her peace. “The years just flew by. I was there, now I’m here. Simple as that. It wasn’t at all as tough as they make out. A man has time for reflection, contemplation, meditation, just like the saints of old.”

McGarr asked, “And how about visions. Did you have any of those, Mairtín?”

Forgetting himself, O’Brugha said, “Oh yes—a man can find a great depth of solace in the
proper
vision.”

Again she looked up at him.

“You place such emphasis on the word ‘proper,’” said McKeon.

“A word that is in vogue today is ‘hallucination,’” said McGarr.

“And did you talk to yourself too, Mairtín?” asked O’Shaughnessy.

Leona Horrigan slowly turned just her head to McGarr. She was about to say something, when O’Brugha’s hand jumped across the table and grasped his daughter’s, which were folded in front of her. “Don’t, Leona. You can still take it back. Your solicitor isn’t present. They didn’t inform you of your rights. I’m an old man. A few more years wouldn’t touch me.”

She stared down at their hands. Her eyes were blinking rapidly. It was as though she were trying to summon either the courage to confess or the heartlessness to continue with the ruse that her father had committed the crime and would take her punishment for her.

McGarr said to Delaney, “Read her last statement before we brought O’Brugha up here, Dick.”

But before Delaney could flip through his notes, she said, “You’re nothing but a jailbird anyhow, Mairtín. Maybe you’ve never admitted it to yourself, but it’s what you’ve always wanted and what you deserve.”

The old man’s thin face received the words like blows. He staggered slightly and said, “Ah, yes. Yes.”

McGarr carried a chair over to the table and placed it alongside Leona’s. He then helped
O’Brugha into it. The old man kept patting her hands until she withdrew them.

Out in the office, McGarr said to Liam O’Shaughnessy, “I can’t sit around here and wait for her to crack.”

“She’s a hard case. You’d be older than O’Brugha before that happened.”

“So it’s time for us to be as devious as Horrigan, Liam. Have Slattery type up a report of this case. Use the interrogation log right up until that last bit where she denied him a second time. Then put in something like, ‘I tried to murder Bobby Ovens because he told me everything he ever had to do with me was foul—the guns, the bombs, my money, everything, including the way I paid his boatyard bill without asking him. And he was so damnably professional in his innocence, so American and officiously upright.’ That should do it. That’s what she wanted to say.

“Then take the report over to the Taoseaich’s office. Tell his secretary you want to make an appointment for me for”—McGarr checked his wristwatch; it was 2:10 in the afternoon—“say four-thirty. Leave nothing out about the Bombing Report or anything else. Then wait for me there.” McGarr turned as though he would walk away. “Oh”—he turned back—”one other thing. Please make sure you don’t leave the office for any reason. When that phone call comes, you’ve got to be there.”

O’Shaughnessy didn’t understand and was worried. “Just the one false note?” He’d have to sign the report himself.

“Don’t worry, Liam. I’ll say I misinformed you on purpose, if it comes to that.”

O’Shaughnessy was only somewhat relieved. Dishonesty of any sort bothered him terribly. “Where are you going?”

“Has Hubbard been released?”

“He got himself a solicitor—we had to let him go.”

McGarr could see Ward and Sinclair waiting for him in his cubicle. “Then I’m off to play poker.”

O’Shaughnessy looked down at McGarr in astonishment. “Not at a time like—” He was a gullible man for all his police experience.

“Two hands only. One with Hubbard and the other with Horrigan. They’ve got all the cards and I’ve got no choice but to try to bluff my way through.” McGarr didn’t add that the stakes he was gambling with were his reputation, career, and spotless criminal record. If he lost he’d have to buy a farm with his small savings and work it, because nobody would hire him after being sacked and jailed for high treason.

In his cubicle Ward said, “It’s like you guessed, chief. Your fingerprints are on that check.” Ward looked at McGarr as though he wanted him to give a plausible explanation.

“Any latents?”

“No, just several good impressions of Driver’s.”

“What about him, Paul?”

“Well, when I gave him a complete search at the hospital, I found this in his back pocket. He was sitting on it all the time we were at O’Donahue’s.” Sinclair handed McGarr a legal-size sheet of paper that had at one time been folded down to a three-inch square.

It was a confession, stating that Driver had delivered the Bombing Report to McGarr in two parts, one on the night of the twenty-third of October, 1975, at the Royal Hotel in Glendalough, and the second on the morning of the twenty-fifth at the Dolphin in Dun Laoghaire. There McGarr had paid him ten thousand pounds in the form of a cashier’s check.

“May I have a photocopy of these?” If McGarr was going to play poker, he at least needed a hand, even if all his cards were valueless.

While Hughie ran the documents through the machine, McGarr put on his hat and coat, then asked McKeon to accompany him. “Make sure you have a fresh pad, Bernie. I’m going to ask you to take a statement that I hope we can get signed.”

Next, they stopped at Will Hare’s Internal Security office. Will himself came out of his cubicle to greet them. “Going somewhere?” he asked. He was worried. “Things look mighty bad, Peter. Awful.”

“Talk to Ward and Sinclair and they’ll look worse,” said McGarr. “Look, Will—you wouldn’t just happen to have a copy of that Bombing Report hanging about that I could borrow, would you?”

“You must be mad. Is he right?” Hare asked McKeon.

“Not the real thing, just, say, the cover, the introduction, and then a number of filler pages so that it looks thick and important.”

Hare began shaking his head. He was a thin man with a beard so heavy and a face so creased he could not manage to shave properly. Thus he always looked rough and countryish. “I can’t do that, Peter. I’ve got to answer for those things. It’s impossible.”

“Even if, in so doing, you might clear up the whole messy business?”

“How?”

McKeon turned to McGarr as well. He too was interested in knowing what McGarr had in mind.

“Trust me.”

“That I can’t do.”

“Where’s the stuff?”

Hare’s eyes jerked involuntarily toward a walk-in safe at the back of the Internal Security office. The door was open.

McGarr started for it.

“Well—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Hare. “Stay out of there, Peter. Stop. You don’t have a security clearance.” He ran after McGarr.

“I don’t want the report, I just want a dummy. Something that looks like it.”