Authors: Bartholomew Gill
McGarr poured himself a cup of coffee, then carried the paper into the study to learn how much time he had. He opened his jacket and rearranged the weight of the Walther that he had slipped under the waistband of his trousers hours before and was now chafing his paunch.
“…all ports and airports have been closed indefinitely by the minister for Transportation, stranding thousands of travelers….”
McGarr turned down the volume and spread the newspaper on the table in front of the windows there. It was growing light now, and he could just see the figure of the P.M. making a transit of the side lawn, its head raised as though looking up at the house.
McGarr’s eyes lit on the front page of the
Times
that was filled with a blaze of banner headlines:
O’DUFFY ASSASSINATED
QUINN DEAD
FOUR OTHERS KILLED
WHEN MAD DOCTOR RUNS AMOK
SEVEN CRITICAL
He scanned those articles that capsuled the events of yesterday in Sneem. To prove its claim of assassination, the newspaper detailed the evident planning involved in cutting and fitting the steel plates that Gladden had fixed to the Land Rover, in the fact that he had not once tried
to change direction to spite of Ward’s efforts, and in the corpse of the other man found in the truck, who had died of traumatic injuries a day earlier. “The premeditated murder of a political leader is called an assassination. Taosieach Sean Dermot O’Duffy was assassinated by Dr. Maurice Gladden. Would that Dr. Gladden could tell us why.”
The headline lower on the page said:
GARDA CHIEF FIRED
WORLDWIDE MANHUNT LAUNCHED
It was Farrell’s version of McGarr’s suspension. Ward’s heroics were again mentioned, but nothing of McGarr’s own chase. “Chief Superintendent Peter McGarr was suspended without pay for two violations of Garda Siochana procedures, which Commissioner Farrell refused to discuss publicly beyond stating that the matter will be dealt with in an administrative hearing. ‘Criminal charges may be brought,’ said Farrell.”
In parentheses the reader was directed, on which one Moira O’Boyle—bless her hazel eyes and quick hand—rendered without flaw or favor the reportable parts of dialogue in which McGarr had engaged Farrell. And unlike Farrell, she understood the concept of bait. The article closed with:
McGarr stated he was in possession of note cards that Paddy Power, a former O’Duffy insider whose death he was investigating, had amassed for a planned memoir. When asked to surrender the cards as evidence, he refused, saying that he had not yet completed his investigation of Paddy Power’s murder. It is to be supposed that McGarr’s failure to arrest Dr. Gladden for presumed cause two days earlier was the second reason for his suspension.
Prologue also contained editorials, the last of which asked if the government was already engaged in a cover-up of the events leading up to the slaughter in Sneem and why McGarr,
…one of the Garda’s most senior and certainly most respected officers, has been summarily dismissed during such extraordinary circumstances without an official Garda statement of cause. If the byplay witnessed between the Commissioner and his Chief Superintendent is accurate, much needs to be explained, both by the Garda Siochana and now-suspended Chief Superintendent McGarr.
The
Times
was not the newspaper owned by Minister for Justice Harney’s father, and McGarr had his supporters too.
McGarr’s eyes worked down the rest of the page, which was filled with eyewitness descriptions of the disaster, follow-up stories on victims and survivors, and a list of the injured. He kept turning the pages, looking for any report of O’Duffy’s having announced the Eire Bank sale, wondering if a multimillion-pound sale to the Japanese of an institution that had been so favored by successive O’Duffy governments and so controversial throughout its existence could have gotten lost.
No, there it was at the top of the Financial Section. “
ONCE RUMORED SALE ASSASSINATION-DAY ACTUALITY
, the headline said. The article went on, “In an intriguing about-face which occurred moments before the calamity in Sneem, County Kerry, Taosieach O’Duffy announced the sale of Eire Bank to Nomura Bank of Kyoto for an undisclosed price.” There followed a brief history of Nomura Bank’s interest in Eire Bank, which dated back five years.
Beneath it was another small story about O’Duffy’s having “…endorsed Paddy Power’s call for a debt-for-equity swap of the national debt under the rubric of ‘
internationalizing
the burden of past, public borrowing.’”
McGarr began turning the pages back toward the beginning of the paper. Preoccupied with finding the Eire Bank story, he had seen but had passed over something else of interest. But what and where?
It was growing lighter outside, and again he saw the P.M. pass by the window, limping on its one gamy leg. Its head was lifted toward the windows, its wet, gleaming nose pulsing as it scented the air.
The phone rang again, but once only, before Noreen’s voice intervened and the same reporter—who judiciously had yet to give himself a name—came on to harangue McGarr about his duty to the reading public and the nation. Before hanging up, he added, “I’m going to keep ringing this fecker until you pick up. You’re gonna need us, you bastard. Every miserable line you can get.”
There was a time a mere day ago, McGarr thought, when no reporter would dare speak to him like that. Under the pain of being ignored for whole years, which made him think of Gladden, who had not been able to endure such a fate. What about himself? After years in the public eye, could he suffer being just another ordinary citizen? Or, worse, an outcast citizen who would be forced to live under an extraordinary dark cloud of suspicion and supposed guilt? He thought of Maddie and how cruel children could be to pariahs, or, rather, to the child of a pariah.
His eye then caught and riveted on one name in the list of those who had been injured at the bridge. “T. Bresnahan, Sneem. Critical.” Among the dead was a Mrs. Agnes O’Suilleabhain.
The radio was saying, “The manhunt has shifted to the Dublin Metropolitan Area where, it is suspected, Dr. Gladden has arrived with the help of Northern elements of the IRA. A Garda spokesman in Phoenix Park has reported the theft of an…” McGarr switched off the radio and reached for the phone before it could ring again. In the directory he found the hospital in Tralee where T. Bresnahan would have been taken. He dialed the number.
Not knowing if the call would still be put through under his own name, McGarr began to say, “This is Superintendent Liam O’—No,” he corrected, “This is Chief Superintendent Peter McGarr of the Murder Squad of the Garda Siochana. Please put me through to Detective Inspector Ruth Bresnahan. Her father, Tom, is a patient of yours, and she’s probably with him now.”
There was the slightest pause, then: “Yes, Chief Superintendent, I’ll ring the floor directly.” There was a long wait in which McGarr listened to the static crackling over the line and wished he had thought to get himself another cup of coffee.
There went the P.M. again, now lifting his entire body onto his haunches as he limped by, as in a strange, spastic dance. Why? McGarr wondered. Some effect of his injuries, no doubt. He had never seen the beast so curiously…animated, and he speculated that perhaps animals knew more than humans gave them credit for, and he was merely responding to challenge of the command McGarr had issued. Watch!
“Chief?” Bresnahan asked.
“Is it your father?”
“Yah.”
McGarr waited, but when she offered no more, he asked, “How is he?”
Bresnahan didn’t know what to say. She had been on her feet for nearly twenty-four hours, having to deal with her father, which had been easy enough physically, and her mother, who had gone to bits entirely, and O’Suilleabhain, who had maintained a grim smile through it all but was in a kind of emotional shock, she could tell—because of his mother.
All he had said was, “You know, my father died so early in my life that she was the only parent I actually had. Apart from your father, of course. But—” He would not survive either, and neither the doctors nor Bresnahan knew exactly why, which troubled her most.
When the speeding Land Rover, driven by Gladden, had breached the line of soldiers and bore down on them, Bresnahan had pushed her mother away from it and had then reached for her father, who had been standing on her other side. But he had ahold of Agnes O’Suilleabhain, who had stumbled.
It was then that Bresnahan glanced up and saw Ward hurl himself at the truck where, had he not turned the wheel, they all—Rory and herself included—would have been killed outright, caught flat-footed in the direct path of the maverick machine.
Instead the headlamp and bumper struck Agnes in the head and shoulders, and her body was shot, like a bail from a binder, into Bresnahan’s father, who also went down. He got up—too quickly, Bresnahan now suspected—clasped his neighbor to his bosom, and took a
half-dozen faltering steps away from the horrible scene toward the church where they had parked. But there were too many bodies and too much blood; his legs were weak, and he finally stumbled and fell.
By that time Bresnahan and O’Suilleabhain were standing over them, and they rolled her father off the even-then dead woman. His eyes, which were half-open, were dim and glassy, and there was a fleck of spittle on his chin. But otherwise the blood was hers, and O’Suilleabhain was saying, “You take Ma. I’ll take Tom, and we’ll get them help before—”
Pandemonium broke out: There were people running toward the bridge, and from off on the north side of the village an enormous explosion erupted. The next thing she knew she was in the car, and they were far from Sneem, O’Suilleabhain at the wheel and beating the quick, surefooted car over the unpaved narrow mountain roads to Tralee.
“Pa!
Pa!
” she kept saying to her father, but it was as if he couldn’t see or hear. Or as though what he had seen and heard had been too much for him, and he had simply quit, which was the gist of what he said to her later.
“The shock and his heart—” the doctors had told her. “I’m afraid there’s little we can do but revive him for a time, so—”
you can at least say good-bye
went unsaid.
Her mother couldn’t. “I knew it was coming, but I just can’t bring myself to face him, knowing I’ll not see him again. And it should be peaceful with no weeping, which he always hated.” And, like a child, she had come apart altogether, making it clear to Bresnahan that the tables had turned and her daughter was even now in charge.
And then, after they gave him the last injection of digitalis—a coincidence not lost on Bresnahan in spite of her anxiety and grief—he said he wanted to speak to “Ruthie alone. With the door closed.”
Bresnahan had then entered the room as though stepping onto a stage to play a scene that she would reenact—she knew even then—over and over again for the rest of her life.
The nuns and nurses had propped him up on the pillows and even combed his thick, steely hair. But for the cardiac
monitors taped to his hairy, bearish chest, his torso was naked, and he looked, as she had always thought of him, immense: at once square and wide and strong, and certainly not about to die. She was tempted to rush out and try to find some other doctor, who would see how sound he was and could save him.
But he had seen her, and that same substantial chest was heaving, his eyes were now wide open but glassy, and when he spoke her name, his breathing was labored.
He opened his hand, and she took it.
“Well, Ruth Honora Ann—here we are.”
At the end of the road
, she supplied without having to say it. Not being able to help herself, she felt tears streaming hot down her cheeks.
“It’s all right, really. I’ve been lying here thinking that the least that can be said about me is I was fierce proud and never lowered myself.” He kept having to pause to gather breath, like a runner at the end of a long race. “I did my duty, like my father and his before him. You know”—his eyes cleared for a moment—“living here between the mountains and the sea where we’ve lived since time out of mind.” Another pause. “Not like some, who don’t know or care where they live or why.” His eyes closed and his chest tensed, while the heart monitor drew some lines shaped like gentle waves; Bresnahan squeezed the rough calluses of his hand, but he did not respond for what seemed like the longest time.
When his eyes opened again, they were more distant. “It’s an important thing you do. I saw so today at the bridge. Mossie—” He tried to shake his head; there was yet another long pause in which Bresnahan tried to listen to the sounds of the hospital so that she would know that it all was real: a metal trolley passing, like a set of cymbals, in the hall; a nun’s beatific voice speaking a prayer over an intercom that could not be stifled completely; the clank and knock of the central heat, warding off the winter cold.
“But I’m leaving you now. Comfortable enough, you’ll see, at least for your ma.” His eyes tried to scan the room but quickly narrowed again. “Where she is. You do what you want, but I have one thing to ask you.” His head
turned fully to her, and his eyes fastened on hers. “Promise me you’ll keep at least a piece of the place, even if it’s just a cottage on the mountain that we’ve loved. And the name.” He then eased himself back into the pillow. “
Nead an Iolair
,” Bresnahan had said to herself. Eagle’s Nest.
It was the last Bresnahan heard from him. Or would, she suspected. Now he was just lying there, waiting for the spark to go out, which she now told McGarr, who did not reply.
Only when she asked, “Chief?” did she realize that McGarr had long since left the line.
And was already hanging from his own handcuffs. His wrists had been clasped behind his back, and his body had then been raised on a length of line from a rafter in his basement.
It was an interrogation technique—torture, to be precise—that British forces had practiced on terrorists in the North, and they now used themselves. The purpose? To gain information, such as the question Gladden asked before McGarr had passed out from the pain. “The note cards. You can tell me now or after your shoulders are dislocated. But tell me, you will.”