The Last Storyteller (40 page)

Ten minutes after ten o’clock. Two more drinkers. Quick goodbye.

Twenty minutes past. Holding brown paper bags of clinking bottles, they appear. Still laughing. I can hear them—the jokes, the happy jeers. They reach their own front door, he can’t find the key, he fumbles, they’re in, the door closes, they’re gone.

I wait. On the second of eleven o’clock, the car arrives, slows to a long, coasting, silent halt down the slope of the street. Out of the car step my two men from the lake. I can’t see what they’re carrying; they knock on the door, they bundle through. I hear the shots. Then the silence.

Nobody else seems to have heard them. The men from the lake emerge, close the door behind them, and drive away. Nothing else moves on that street. I wait. And wait. Nothing, not a sound not a sight.

The night closed down, and I slept like a child.

Early the next morning, I woke and went to the window. The street remained as empty as a hole. I stood for perhaps fifteen minutes. One man rode by on a bicycle, his cap down low on his forehead, his collar hunched up against the rain. For the next half hour I watched and saw not another being, not even a cat slinking home.

I shaved, washed, got my bag ready, ate breakfast, paid my bill. The rain began to lift. I walked to my car, which was parked around the corner, and drove away. By another road, I drove back to the edge of town and parked where nobody could see, under trees, off a lane. On pathways that I had mapped and measured days before, I reached the back of the
house. Couldn’t get in. The men from the lake had forgotten to open it for me. I got away from there, but not so fast that I’d draw attention to myself.

If I had calculated accurately, nothing would be found until evening. By now I knew every street, every house, every laneway, every rear wall, every back door. I could lurk near the cathedral and ramble back down toward the post office and the friary; if I timed it well, I’d be on hand when the commotion broke.

It worked. I saw the youngster arrive and hammer on the door. He got no reply. The woman next door put out her head.

“They were there last night,” she said.

The youngster hammered again.

“I have a key,” said the woman next door. “Mrs. Mitchell always gives me a key when she’s leasing out the house.”

At which moment I crossed the street, minding my own business. And ran back when I heard the screams.

The woman from next door came hurtling out, shrieking “Mother of God, Mother of
God!
” and the youngster, white as a sheet, crouched toward the street, looking to retch.

“What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” I asked, the concerned citizen.

The woman from next door, her hand to her mouth like a victim, pointed.

Nothing neat in there; the men from the lake hadn’t bothered with tidiness. One lay sprawled facedown on the stairs, blood congealing on the steps and in the hallway at his askew shoes. Another lay faceup in the doorway to the shoddy kitchen; they’d blown away most of his face and head.

Neither being what I wished to see, I searched. In the tiny sitting room I saw what I’d come for: the black mustache was accented now by a line of thickened blood. They’d shot him in the right eye and in the chest. His white shirt had turned mainly dark, and his mouth hung open in a rictus; dentures half-protruded.

Even in death he seemed loathsome. I looked at the hands by which he’d made his living. One had a bullet wound—he must have raised it to try to stop a shot. The other had the fingers curled round a gun. Did the men from the lake put it there? On his chest sat my placard: “Shot as British spies.” I knew my history.

I stood and surveyed.
Three lumps of dead human flesh. Odd how they’re bent out of shape. How will they straighten them for burial? Who will do that? This is like
Life
magazine in Chicago. I’m seeing it in black and white. Like the gangster movies. What’s that odor? Toilets and sweetness? But beginning to be overpowering. No, I’m not gagging. One last look. Blood is blacker than I thought
.

The man who had beaten Venetia savagely and, as I suspected from her veiled remarks, raped her often wouldn’t do it again. Nor would he mock and leave open to humiliation innocent people who merely wanted an evening’s entertainment. Never again would his henchmen taunt me and hold me helpless as he punched me and kicked me, and then throw me out onto the street.

I took my time, savoring—if that’s not too appalling a word—the sight of the three bodies. Especially that of Jack Stirling, Gentleman Jack, the man who raised you, my children, who violated your mother in so many ways, who forced his way time and again into her body. I told you I would pull no punches.

Then, as the wailing continued outside, I left, drawing the door closed.

“Go into your own house,” I told the woman from next door. “Take him with you.” The youngster had now turned green and was clinging to her. “I’ll tell the authorities.”

PART SIX
The Passing of the Torch

What is our most interesting emotion? The most compelling? Love? Jealousy? I’ll put a bid in for remorse. Better still, let me describe to you what happened that night and how remorse can strike.

That youngster who found the bodies, as I expect you’ve guessed, had come from the local hall. Jack had a second week’s booking starting that night; the management had found him the rented house.

Late on the Saturday night, as the hall was closing, and Jack and his pals had left—I’d watched them go to the pub—I’d easily learned where Jack was staying. I knew that they wouldn’t be able to tell him until Monday that somebody had asked about him. He was too suspicious not to be alert.

By now the disappearance of Venetia, though a puzzle, didn’t deter or deflect me. I didn’t care whether Jack had hidden her away somewhere or sent her back to Florida. She had moved from the front of my mind. Too much pain from that quarter. Too much hurt. Had to postpone even thinking of her. I dreaded what would happen when my feelings for her bloomed again. If they ever did.

While Jack and his pals were in the pub, I checked the house. Front and back. Opened the unlocked back door. They were living like pigs. Clothes everywhere, clean or soiled. Old newspapers that had held food packets. Empty beer bottles. Pigs. To be slaughtered.

Later, from my window, I watched them come home. Playing like puppies. Half drunk. Singing. Mocking. Taunting each other. Their accents
so different in the echoes of this small town. Soon never to gibe again.

On Monday, when I left the woman from next door and the green-faced youngster, I quit town. Found my car and drove away. In a neighboring village I found a telephone kiosk, spoke to the operator (no automatic telephones yet in the Irish countryside), and convinced her of my northern accent and rebel status.

“Shot as spies,” she repeated. “Oh Jesus in heaven.”

That night, I made it down to Mullingar. Ate and slept well. The next day I took the road to Lough Ennell and tried to keep my appointment with Rex Beaumont, the flamboyant ex-actor who lived in Belvedere Lodge. He had the full, accurate story of the Jealous Wall, a ruin in his gardens.

Local chatter said it had been built to stop a neighbor from eyeing another man’s wife. Not so. It had been built to prevent one man from seeing what a fine house his brother owned.

No Rex. I’d catch him again. The lake stretched like glass. Over there, on the left-hand shore, Jonathan Swift stayed. Same family as the Jealous Wall. And when Swift saw the tiny figures on the far, far bank of the lake, in a place named Lilliput, he had his Lilliputians. Lovely thought, delicious piece of lore. I drove out of Belvedere and turned right. I’d spend the night in Tullamore, where I knew of a music session with a fiddler home from New York. And wherever there’s a fiddler, there’s a story.

Not more than three miles farther, a girl of about twelve years old, lanky and shy, drove a small herd of cows along the road.
Ah. Mother used to do this
. I waited as she angled the animals into a field; they would spend the day there, until she fetched them again for the evening milking.

I opened the window when I reached her.

“Did you milk them all yourself?”

She blushed and trotted away.

I drove on. A mile later, a sledgehammer slammed into my heart, stomach, and chest. Actual pain. I stuck the brake to the floor and pulled to one side. As though hit by a sudden squall, my face became a panel of cold sweat. My bowels exploded. No control. Instant and foul mire beneath me, and I began to wet myself as freely as a faucet.

An anguish, in the form of a stabbing pain, entered my heart through my face, and left indelible wrinkles. People have laugh lines: do we also have pain lines? I do; I got them that day. My hands hadn’t left the steering wheel. I didn’t think I could detach them. The car sat on a fortunately wide verge. Condensation whitened the windows.

I couldn’t lean back; my body refused it. It would be years before I ceased sitting tensely. And my mind replayed that gaping “Chicago” scene, that black-and-white film. Gentleman Jack. And his friends. Is blood so black only when it’s old? The foulness congealing beneath me began to leak and forced action.

I heaved myself from the car, clambered over the ditch, lurched into the fields like a drunk, like a man shot, like a man with serious motor disability, and threw myself to the ground. The only action I could take.

Facedown I lay. I clawed at the ground, I scrabbled, I grabbed tufts and they came away in my frantic hands. My face merged with the earth. I think I was trying to burrow down into hell.

Then I heard the noise. Distinct and distinctive. From somewhere nearby. A moaning. Some poor soul in dreadful pain. I raised my head—I was listening to my own howling. For so many years that disconsolate sound echoed inside me, like the voice of a lacerated and outcast wolf. And nobody heard it but me.

I stayed in the fields all day. Anybody could have broken into or stolen the car. When I first rose to my feet I lurched off, away from the road, over a hill, into unknown territory. I saw nobody. Even the birds went quiet when I approached their trees.

What an awful thing it is to have taken human life. And in revenge. What could be worse? Remorse is a man staggering across fields he has never seen before, pitching himself face-first to the ground now and then, rolling every part of him into the earth, getting up, staggering some more, doing the same thing all over again.

Isn’t hell a place echoing to “weeping and gnashing of teeth”? I didn’t know how to gnash. But I wept. And how can you beg for forgiveness when there is nobody from whom to beg?

Somehow, time passed. Believe it or not, I saw a fox and her cubs in a hollow not far away.

The foxes took them down into the underground, down a rich maze of
burrows and coverts and into their own homes, those wide, low palaces beneath the earth, where fires blaze and food abounds, and there the foxes cared for the lovers …”

Not for me such comfort. Not for many, many years.

When evening came, and the dank filth of my own condition began to overwhelm me, I found a small river. It probably flowed into the lake that had been my last lovely sight of that day or many days to come. I stripped. In fact, I rended my garments. I know, children, that biblical references didn’t come with your cornflakes; Venetia and I shared paganism. The rending of garments signifies deep mourning of the most personal kind. And that is my definition of remorse: a mourning that is out of control and never ends, that can strike out of the bluest of skies, across the softest of snows.

Here endeth the lesson on remorse. I rolled in the little river and made myself wash my filthy body with my hands. Freezing water caught my breath, and my howling abated to a kind of nasal whimpering. How could I have done such a thing? How could anyone?

I retrieved essentials from my pockets and discarded my torn and ruined clothes, gave them to the gods of the stream. Naked, a white pillar moving in the dusk, I went back to the car. Trying not to shuffle, trying to stride. By now I had begun to mutter, and when I listened I heard myself giving me instructions:
The news will break in the morning. Front pages. Find the twins. Not Tullamore tonight. Dublin. Miss Fay, not Marian. No body contact allowed. From this day forth I am unclean
.

I always traveled with spare clothes; now I dressed by the roadside. Not a soul saw me. This indeed was a quiet land. The car stank. I opened all the windows and doors, lit matches. The sulfur smell of hell. I stood back and tried to think.

Is this a dream? Did this happen? Had I hired so-called freedom fighters to kill someone for me? If for a moment I were to stop and imagine it a dream, the justification laid that low.

But he was scum. Look what he did to Venetia. Who never harmed anyone. Who spread nothing but goodness and delight. And what he did to me. Above all to dear Miss Fay
.

No good. Nothing worked. The emotional pain settled in my chest and interfered with my breathing. I tried the accepted methods: sit back,
close eyes, breathe deep through the nose, hands open and simple. Didn’t work.