Gunner Kelly Page 18

  How Father would love to cross swords with this man! thought Benedikt. At least it would be a fairer and more rewarding match than Audley’s Cromwell against Father’s deadly 88s.

  “No … what I meant was that it’s Gunner Kelly we’re up against—not Michael Kelly.” Audley shook his head. “He was a Royal Artilleryman longer than he was an Irishman in Ireland, you know. And on a time-span, he’s twice as English as he is Irish.” Another shake. “Apart from which, what he did tell Becky was … that his problem was nothing directly to do with ‘the ould country’ … whatever that means, and if we can believe it—”

  The words stopped suddenly, and the open expression on Audley’s face closed in the same instant as he stared past Benedikt.

  “My dear How—” Audley bit off the rest of the name as though it had burnt his tongue. “Hullo, there, cher cousin!”

  “David.” The mid-Atlantic voice came from behind Benedikt, almost lazily, encouraging him to turn towards it without any indication of surprise.

  It was the good-looking young man in the well-cut suit who stood at the CIA man’s shoulder. Only, close-up the suit was even better-cut, as only the finest English tailor could mould a suit, and the man inside it wasn’t quite so young, with crow’s-feet corrugating the corners of the eyes which were as dark brown and as wary as had ever focussed on him.

  “Dr Audley.” The eyes flicked to the Englishman, and then came back to Benedikt. “Captain Schneider.” God in heaven, thought Benedikt. Another Irishman!

  VIII

  AUDLEY STUDIED the Irishman for a long moment. “You have the advantage of us … Mr—?”

  “Smith.” The Irishness of the voice was there, but it was unobtrusive, only just across the median line between the two countries. “But I doubt that, Dr Audley. For I have heard tell of you.”

  “Indeed?” Audley’s eyes moved to the American.

  “I have asked my friend to stay,” said the Irishman. “For the record.”

  Audley came back to him. “But there is no record.”

  “There’s always a record.” Under its softness the voice was hard. “But… shall we say … you have a friend with you, who wasn’t in the small print. So now I have a friend, too.” The man’s expression concealed the same contradiction as his voice, decided Benedikt: beneath its superficial amiability there lay distrust as well as apprehension.

  The American’s shoulder lifted slightly in apology: those, plainly, were the Irishman’s terms, and they could take it or leave it.

  “I see.” Just as plainly, the terms were not to Audley’s liking, even though he could hardly refuse them.

  “Do you, Dr Audley?” One corner of the Irishman’s mouth lifted. “You know … they say you have no liking for my country—and its inhabitants. And is that the truth, would you say?”

  Benedikt was torn by the need to watch the Irishman while checking on Audley’s reaction to such baiting.

  “ ‘They say’?” Suddenly Audley’s voice was as soft as the Irishman’s. “I would say … that if you paid a ha’penny for that information you were shamefully overcharged, Mr Smith.”

  “Is that so?” The man seemed perversely pleased by the denial. “And yet, is it not a fact that you’ll take no job across the water?” He cocked his head knowingly at the Englishman. “That when they put you down for Dublin once, it was a letter of resignation that they got back? What would you say to that, now?”

  Audley looked at his watch. “I would say that I am at last beginning to get an inkling of why they beatified Pope Innocent XI in 1956, Mr Smith. And I’m grateful to you for that, because it’s rather been preying on my mind.”

  “What?” Mr Smith frowned.

  “It simply has to be because he rang the bells of Rome to celebrate Protestant King Billy’s victory over Catholic King James—1688 and all that.” Audley turned towards Benedikt. “Do you spend a lot of time discussing the relative merits and demerits of North Germans and South Germans, Captain Schneider? Let’s see now … the North Germans are like the Southern English, aren’t they? Rather more anonymous than the … it would be the Bavarians, wouldn’t it be? And the Bavarians are the Yorkshiremen of Germany? Or the Lancashiremen? And then there are the Prussians—I presume they rather frighten you, the way the Scots frighten the English … But the Ulstermen, who are really only transplanted Scots, frighten us even more—damn good assault troops, I’m told, but dirty in the trenches … And then there are the Welsh—far too clever … not intelligent, mind you—it’s the Scots who are intelligent—but clever. Good rugger players, though. And I always think a man can’t be all bad, who plays rugby, so there must be some good in the Argentinians … And the Rumanians—and the Fijians … It’s not the colour of a man’s skin—it’s whether he plays rugger, that’s what counts, in my view. Black, white or khaki. Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, Frenchmen—you can always tell—tell at a glance.” He turned back suddenly. “Now, I don’t care whether you like the English or you remember Drogheda and Wexford every time you see one, and spit. You can have any prejudice you like—and if you want to believe that I think the moon is made of green cheese, you’re welcome. All I want to know is who wants Michael Kelly dead, and why. Nothing more, and nothing less.”

  The Irishman had a curious expression on his face now, which seemed to Benedikt to be compounded of conflicting emotions, and was altogether incomprehensible to him. But his mouth stayed closed and the silence between them lengthened.

  The American stirred. “You could try giving him your word, David. That you’ll play straight.”

  “Word of an Englishman?”

  “Just your word. No generalisations—you’ve made your point there, I guess.” The American drew a slow breath. “Hell, man—he may have something which you can play your ‘Great Game’ with. But it’s his skin that could end up nailed to the wall.”

  Audley looked down his nose at the American. “I said there was no record. He said there was, not I.”

  “So he doesn’t know you. Him and two billion others.”

  Audley thought for a moment. “Very well … For what it’s worth, Mr Smith … I haven’t met you today. I have no memory of you. Your name—your face—will never be identified by me. You do not exist … You have my word on that.” He looked to Benedikt. “Captain Schneider?”

  Benedikt stiffened. “My word is as Dr Audley’s.”

  The American looked at Mr Smith. “If the Captain’s word is good enough for David, it’s good enough for me, Jim.” Then he smiled. “So who the hell is Michael Kelly, then?”

  The Irishman looked at all of them in turn. “Who is Michael Kelly? And you with your great machines that can count the nine billion names of God Himself? He’s nobody, that’s who he is … He’s John Doe, and William Rowe … and William Smith and Wilhelm Schmidt, who never did any harm to anyone—that was all his own harm, and not the harm others gave him to do.” The Irishman spread his glance between them. “He was a British soldier, for his sins—his father’s sins—” the glance fixed momentarily on Benedikt “—and probably killed a few Germans in his time, that he never set eyes on at all.”

  “We know that.”

  “You do? And he was a Bradford taxi-driver after that— you’ll know that, too? And no one looked twice at him, because no one ever looks twice at a taxi-driver, providing he’s there on time and doesn’t over-charge—eh?”

  “We know that, too.”

  “So you do … Michael Kelly—John Doe, William Rowe, William Smith, Wilhelm Smith, Wilhelm Kelly, William Kelly, Aloysius Kelly—”

  “Aloysius Kelly?”

  “A common name. Two common names—Aloysius and Kelly … Though maybe Aloysius is not so common hereabouts. But—”

  “Aloysius Kelly.” Audley repeated the name quickly, as though he’d only just heard it the second before. “But he’s dead—” He looked at the American.

  “Dead—so he is!” agreed the Irishman. “Dead and gone these six years—seven years?”r />
  “Four years,” the American corrected him.

  “Four years, is it?” The Irishman accepted the correction. “But you’re right—it was seven years they were after him, but it’s only four years since they caught up with him—you have the right of it as always, Howard. But dead and gone—four years, or seven years, or seventy years, it’s all the same: dead and gone with all that was locked up in his head. And there are those that sleep a lot sounder for that, by God!”

  Benedikt looked at Audley. “Aloysius … Kelly?”

  “Yes.” Audley didn’t return the look. “What is Michael Kelly’s connection with him?”

  “Ah … now that machine of yours is good, but not good enough—eh?” The black-brown eyes dismissed the Kommissar as well as the British computer’s memory-bank. “The best connection of all, he had—the one that’s thicker than water, through the sister-son, which is one that counted strong from the old days.”

  “Hell!” The swarthy American shared his surprise with Audley. “He had no next-of-kin, damn it—”

  “There now!” Pure satisfaction peeled off the veneer of the Englishness in the man’s voice. “You have to go back … and you have to have the connections to get the sense of it, which your man prying wouldn’t take from it in a month of Sundays! For there was an age-gap you wouldn’t credit, between the one of them marrying young, and the other marrying late—and the scandal of the first one, that had to marry, that they always like to forget so they had the chance to … And it was a Kelly marrying a Kelly, that was no relation at all—and a difference of opinion between the families as well…”

  Benedikt gave up trying to disentangle that convoluted relationship. Michael Kelly’s father had served with the British Army, and that might have made for enmity. But he wasn’t sure which generation the man was talking about.

  “What has Michael Kelly go to do with Aloysius Kelly?” The edge of anger in Audley’s voice indicated that he had the same problem, and was cutting through it.

  “They grew up together—I’m trying to tell you, Dr Audley. The same church and the same school, and houses in adjoining streets. And they kissed the same girls down by the river, and put their hands where they shouldn’t under the same skirts … Or, perhaps Michael didn’t, because he was the good one, that did as he was told—and enlisted in the British Army, like his father before him … Not like Aloysius—he was the clever one—and the bad one, to your way of thinking, Dr Audley.”

  “The bad one?” Benedikt was tired of the nuances of their fools’ quarrels, which evidently encompassed Ireland’s own enmities as well as those he more or less understood.

  “His father was a Republican. They say he was one of those that lay in wait for Michael Collins.” The Irishman’s mouth twitched. “Michael’s was a Free Stater. And he wasn’t ashamed of wearing his medal ribbons—the DCM among them—the old man wasn’t. Out of their frame beside the fireplace, for all to see.”

  Mil Eliot zu Ruhm und Sieg, thought Benedikt: like the Elector of Hanover, the King of England had scattered his battle honours far and wide in the days of empire.

  “But … the two families—it was like there was an armed truce between them, the generation of the Troubles, and the Partition, and the Civil War, because there was blood between them as well as common to them … But the boys would have none of that—they were like brothers in the mischief they got up to between them … There’s this auntie, blind as a bat and sharp as the razor the barber shaves himself with—she remembers them both … until Aloysius went off to the seminary and Michael went to fight for the English—which was maybe just a little better than being a butcher’s boy, which was all the work he could get when they wouldn’t have him at the garage … It was always cars he was into, the auntie said: it was a driver he wanted to be for the English, but his father said it was a gunner he must be, because it was only the presence of the guns on the battlefield that turned mere fisticuffs into proper warfare—” The Irishman looked around him quizzically “—which is all these things are, I suppose, if you think about it—just bloody great guns on wheels, with an engine bolted to them … Anyway, that’s when the two boys split up—” He slapped his hand on the Tiger “—and went their own ways—and very different ways, by God!”

  It was time, decided Benedikt, to cut his own losses ruthlessly: both the Englishman and the American clearly knew what the Irishman was talking about, but he did not.

  “Who is Aloysius Kelly?” He could have asked the question of any of them, but Audley was the most likely to give a straight answer. “David?”

  “Hah!” It was the Irishman who reacted first. “Now that’s a question that’s been asked a time or two!”

  Benedikt waited. The big Englishman wasn’t looking at him, he was staring past him, past the Tiger, at nothing, as though he hadn’t heard. “David?”

  Finally Audley drew a breath. “Who was Aloysius Kelly …”

  “Of course.” They had all said as much: the Englishman and the American had argued over the length of time since that event, and the Irishman had agreed that it was four years since they caught up with him. “Who was he?”

  Audley looked at him. Then he looked at the American. “It was in Spain he was first spotted, wasn’t it?” He frowned. “With General O’Duffy’s Blue Shirts on Franco’s side?”

  “That’s probably just a story. He would have been absurdly young to have been with them on the Jarama.” The American frowned back at him. “Too young.”

  “They say he lied about his age.” The Irishman turned to Benedikt. “They say he first went into action alongside your General von Thoma’s tanks—they say the General wanted O’Duffy’s men with him because he reckoned they wouldn’t run away.”

  “But I don’t go for it.” The American shook his head. “I don’t reckon he was there so early.”

  “But he did go straight from the seminary,” countered the Irishman. “And he lied about his age, they say.”

  “Maybe. But if he was there he changed sides damn quick, that’s for sure.”

  “Ah … well, isn’t that the Irish for you!” Mr Smith smiled. “Going over from the winners to the losers.”

  “He went over—”

  “And nothing out of character.” The Irishman stuck to his guns. “He went there as a True Believer, straight from the seminary. And he went across like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, when he found another faith he liked better, having seen both sides—”

  “No!” The American shook his head again. “ ‘38—late ’38—is the first year I’ll buy. With Frank Ryan in the International Brigade—and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, not the British one, because it was long after the Cordoba trouble.”

  “Ah … Frank Ryan! Now he was a lovely man in his way, you know.” The Irishman half-closed his eyes. “A great gentleman, they say …”

  “And IRA since 1918.” The American looked at Audley.

  “And in contact with the Nazis, along with Sean Russell, in ‘41—they had a radio link going,” said Audley.

  “Which was a great waste of time for them both, to be sure,” murmured the Irishman.

  “But not for lack of trying,” said Audley.

  “That’s not what I mean, Dr Audley,” replied the Irishman mildly. “What I mean is that Aloysius Kelly was there beside him—and wasn’t he feeding it all back to Moscow, on his account, eh?”

  Audley sniffed abruptly, and turned to Benedikt. “Yes. So there you have it in a nutshell, Captain Schneider. Aloysius Kelly went to Spain and teamed up with Ryan, who was a long-time IRA man—”

  “Who’d fought alongside his father, in the Troubles and the Civil War,” supplemented Mr Smith.

  “But before that he’d been talent-scouted by one of their Political Commissars,” said the American laconically. “He was ordered to attach himself to Frank Ryan, who was an Irishman first and last—whoever was England’s enemy was his friend, it didn’t matter who—”

  “Which made him politic
ally unreliable—Frank, I mean—”

  “Jim! For God’s sake!”

  “I was only explaining—”

  Audley cut them both off with a gesture. “What they both mean, Benedikt, is that the IRA originated as the military wing of a nationalist movement—a nationalist sectarian movement. The fashionable idea now is that all twentieth-century guerrilla organizations tick because Marx and Lenin wound them up— that it’s all Marxist-Leninist magic that makes them work. But the truth is that most of them owe damn all to Marx, and even less to Lenin—the halfways successful ones, anyway … from Pancho Villa to Fidel Castro, by way of the Jews and the Algerians and the Cypriots … and even the Chinese and Vietnamese too. You could say they owe a lot more to any classical guerrilla leader in history—to Francis Marion, say—” he pointed at the American “—his ‘Swamp Fox’ in the Carolinas, fighting Cornwallis and Tarleton in the American War of Independence—Marx and Lenin didn’t teach him anything … And the IRA has always derived a hundred times more from the United States than from Soviet Russia and Colonel Gaddafi … But to do that, it was the end of British colonialism—not the beginning of the socialist revolution—that they campaigned for. The shift to the left in the IRA didn’t start until the ‘6os.”

  “Aha!” Mr Smith gave Audley a shrewd look. “And you not an expert on Ireland, eh?” Then he nodded. “Ah—but it was you who said what I had was not worth a ha’penny, wasn’t it! So I can’t say you didn’t tell me.”

  “I’m not an expert on Ireland, damn it!” snapped Audley irritably. “We’re not talking about Ireland—we’re talking about Aloysius Kelly.”

  “And the Debreczen meetings.” Almost imperceptibly the American had shifted his position from alongside the Irishman, until now he was nearly facing him. And there was a note in his voice which matched his change of position: the mention of ‘Aloysius Kelly’ had ranged him alongside Audley as an ally, he was no longer a neutral ‘friend’.