Scoundrel Page 6

  That night I phoned Namur in Belgium and left a message for an old friend called Teodor, and the following morning, with Rebel Lady’s papers safe in my sea-bag, I flew to Barcelona. My business there took two days. I telephoned Hannah, as I had on every night of my trip, to discover if any summons had come from Tunisia, but there was no message. “Except that American girl is still trying to reach you,” Hannah said.

  “Kathleen Donovan? I’ve told you I don’t want to meet her.”

  Hannah sniffed her disapproval. “So when will you be back?”

  “Late tomorrow. Real late. I’ll see you on Thursday.”

  Next morning I flew north to Brussels, collected my car from the long-term car park, then drove to Namur where Teodor was waiting for me. He needed to take photographs; one for the false Massachusetts driving licence and another, with different clothes and subtly different lighting, for the false American passport. Teodor was the finest counterfeiter in the Low Countries and had been supplying me with false papers for over ten years. He insisted he would only work for people he liked, which I took as a compliment. He was an old man now and, as he worked in his shirtsleeves under a bright magnifying lamp, I saw the concentration camp number tattooed on his forearm. He would talk about anything except that wartime experience, though once he had told me that he dreamed about the camp at least three times a week. “You’re going on a journey, Paul?” he asked me now.

  “Yes.”

  He reached for tweezers and a can of spray adhesive. “Why do I sense this is the last time I’ll see you?”

  “Because you’re an emotional and maudlin old fool.”

  He chuckled, then held his breath as he sprayed a tiny jet of adhesive on to one of the photographs. “There’s grey in your beard. You’re growing old, Paul, like me. Ah, good!” He pressed the photograph into place. “You’re going home, aren’t you?”

  “Am I?”

  “You’ve had enough, Paul, I can tell. You’re like an athlete facing his last and biggest race. You want to win, but you want to stop competing even more. Is it a woman?”

  “Mine just left me. She went off with a rich married frog who promised to give her an apartment in Antibes.”

  “You need a woman, Paul. You’re a very private man, but you can’t be so different from the rest of us. What do you plan to do? Settle in America and learn to play golf?”

  “I’m too young to play golf.” That made him laugh. “Besides,” I went on, “who says I’m retiring?”

  “I do. I know these things.” He bent close over his work. He had once told me that he had been a fine soccer player in his youth, but now Teodor had a withered right foot, a hump back, and a pencil drawing of his wife. She had died in Treblinka and all the photographs ever taken of her had been destroyed by the Germans. Teodor, years after the war, had gone to a police identikit artist and had patiently assembled a picture of his lovely Ruth which now hung framed above his work bench. “Of course she was not so pretty,” he had confessed to me, “but I remember her as even more beautiful.” Now he shot me a glance from under his thick white eyebrows. “You’ve been in Europe how long now? Almost ten years? Not many people last ten years, not in your kind of work.”

  “You don’t know what kind of work I do, Teodor.”

  He laughed softly. “I have deduced you are not an accountant. Nor are you one of those bureaucratic shits who live in Brussels off the taxes I take care not to pay. And despite what this passport says, Paul, I do not think you are a doctor. No, you are a man who keeps secrets, and that can be a very tiring profession. Not that it’s any of my business.” He straightened up. “Now come here, I need Dr O’Neill’s signature. Three times, and with different pens. I have even made you a Visa card as a parting gift, see?”

  I peered at the card under Teodor’s strong worklamp. “How the hell did you manage the hologram?” I asked in genuine admiration.

  “Mere genius, Paul, mere genius. But it will all be for nothing unless you collect a few items to support the fiction. Buy some medical journals and send yourself a couple of letters addressed to Dr O’Neill.” He held up a defensive hand. “I know! I know! I am teaching you to suck eggs. And let me give you this.” He fumbled through a drawer to find a pasteboard card printed with the American telephone number of an Alcoholics Anonymous group. “That always helps a doctor’s disguise, Paul. I use Alcoholics Anonymous for medical men and policemen, but if you were pretending to be a lawyer I would supply you with the business cards of massage parlours. These details count. Now, practise the signature before you sign. You’re a doctor, remember, so you scribble, you don’t write. Good. Again. Again. Better! Again.” Teodor was a perfectionist. “I can sell you a real credit card that will be good for nine months?” he offered. “Its owner is in a French prison and will take fifty thousand francs?”

  I left him two hours later with a whole new identity safe in my pocket, then, in a rainy darkness, I drove across country to Nieuwpoort. The autumn wind had gone into the north-east to bring the Low Countries a foretaste of winter. I drove fast, but even so it was almost midnight before I reached home and parked the Opel in the alleyway opposite my apartment house. When I switched off the engine I could hear the clatter of metal halyards beating on the masts of the yachts berthed in the South Basin. It was such a familiar sound, and one I would miss when I left Nieuwpoort. The wind gusted down the street, bringing the smell of sea and shellfish. I locked the car, ran across the road, and pushed open the apartment block’s unlocked front door.

  “Is that Mr Shanahan?”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” I reeled back from the shadow which suddenly rose inside the dark hall. Someone was waiting for me, someone who knew my name, someone who spoke in English, and I remembered my old training which had taught that, before making a kill, it was prudent to make the victim identify himself just to make certain it was the right person who was about to die.

  “Mr Shanahan?” It was a girl’s voice, American and unthreatening, which lack of menace did not mean she was not holding a silenced gun in the shadowed hallway.

  “Who the hell are you?” I was crouched in the porch, holding my sea-bag as a shield to protect my chest from the half-expected bullet.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. It’s just that the light bulb was broken in here, so I had to wait in the dark.”

  “Who are you?” I straightened up, sensing I was not to be shot.

  “Your secretary said you’d be back tonight. She’s real nice. Gee, I’m sorry. I really am. It’s just that I had to see you because I’ve got an Apex ticket and I can’t afford the penalty to change it, so I have to fly back to the States tomorrow and this was my last chance. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m real sorry.” The girl seemed to be more upset than I was. She had come to the doorway so that the streetlamp lit her face and I knew who she was, oh God, I knew who she was, and the venomous memories whipped into my consciousness. She looked so like Roisin, so achingly like the dead Roisin.

  “Who are you?” I asked again.

  “My name’s Kathleen,” she said, and thrust out a tentative hand as though to shake mine. “Kathleen Donovan.” Even her voice was like her sister’s, like enough to bring a mocking ghost to shadow the rainswept darkness. I did not shake her hand. “I just wanted to see you,” she explained weakly, and took her hand back.

  “What about?” I asked the question harshly for, though I knew the answer, I had to pretend otherwise. “Christ! Do you know what time it is?”

  “It’s late, I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that…”

  “You’ve got an Apex ticket.” I finished the sentence, then pushed past her into the hallway. “If you want to talk to me, Miss, what did you say your name was?”

  “Donovan. Kathleen Donovan.”

  “Miss Donovan. If you want to talk to me, then let’s talk where it’s warm.”

  I did not want to talk to her, but she looked so like Roisin that I could not say no. I wanted to probe the old wound.
Christ, I thought, but why did it happen? How could a woman turn a man’s blood to smoke and leave him forever miserable?

  Kathleen Donovan followed me up the uncarpeted stairs and edged nervously into my apartment. She looked tentatively around, as if judging my soul from the bare furniture, scraped linoleum, and half-empty shelves. “Coffee?” I asked her. “Or something stronger?”

  “Do you have decaffeinated?”

  “No.”

  “Then just a glass of water, please.”

  I fetched her a glass of water and poured myself a whiskey. I took my time in the kitchen, for I needed to reestablish my equilibrium. God damn it! Why now, of all times?

  I carried the two tumblers back to the living room where I gave her the water, put down my whiskey, then drew the curtains against the chill Belgian night. I lit the gas fire. “Sit down.” I spoke more gruffly than I intended, but I did not want her to know how she was unsettling me. She took off her coat and folded it over the sofa’s arm, then nervously perched herself on the sofa’s edge. She looked to be in her late twenties and was dressed in a sober tweed suit, a high-necked blouse and a string of plain blue beads. She wore no other jewellery, and I remembered how Roisin had hated glittering baubles. Kathleen had the same dark red hair as Roisin and the same long jawline and the same hesitant expression that suggested she was perpetually puzzled by the world. Indeed, Kathleen looked so horribly like her sister that it hurt just to be in the same room. “If you want me to make a marine survey,” I told her carelessly, “then you’re too late. I’m closing down the business.”

  “No.” She shook her head vigorously. “I don’t want to see you about boats.” She hesitated. “Doesn’t my name mean anything?”

  “Donovan?” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, no. The only Donovan I ever knew was a priest in Fort Lauderdale, and the whiskey killed him twelve years ago.”

  She looked stricken, almost as though I had struck her hard about the face. “I had an older sister,” she explained to me, then corrected her tense, “I have an older sister called Roisin. I think you knew her. In fact I’m sure you knew her.”

  Knew her? My God, but they were hardly the adequate words. The first moment I had ever seen Roisin was in a Dublin pub and I had known I would never be happy until I loved her, and when I loved her I suspected I would never be happy again. After she had left me a friend said there was such a woman for every man, but most men were lucky and never met their fate. But I had, and Roisin and I had loved in a sudden incandescent blaze of lust, until, just as suddenly, she had stalked away from me for another man. Later, months later, I had watched her die, and her ghost had haunted my life ever since. Now her younger sister was asking if I had ever known her. “I’m very sorry,” I said calmly, “but I’ve never even heard of her. What did you say her name was? Rosheen? How do you spell it?”

  Kathleen Donovan ignored my questions. Instead, for a few seconds, she just stared at me as she tried to gauge the innocence in my voice, then she tried to jog my memory. “She lived in Ireland for a while,” she said, “in Belfast. Just off the Malone Road.”

  “She was a student?” I asked. Lots of students lived near the Malone Road.

  “No, not really.” Kathleen began searching through her handbag and I watched her, marvelling at the resemblance. Roisin had been thinner than Kathleen, and had harboured a pent-up energy that could be terrifying in its intensity, but the two sisters had the same Irish green eyes and the same pale, vulnerable skin, though Kathleen seemed much calmer, more at peace with herself. Her eyes seemed to hold wisdom where Roisin’s had held nothing but an unpredictable wild-ness. Indeed, I suddenly thought with a pang of dread, Kathleen was just what I had hoped Roisin might become, and I uttered a silent prayer to a merciful God that he would keep me from falling in love. Especially now, for this was a time when I needed to be like Michael Herlihy, a sexless monk, devoted to the cause and to death; but I knew my weakness, and no one had exposed that weakness more ruthlessly than Roisin Donovan. “Here’s a picture of her.” Kathleen held a snapshot towards me.

  I glanced down at the photograph, forced my gaze away and sipped whiskey. “I’m sorry,” I tried to sound careless, “but I’ve never seen her.”

  “You lived in Belfast, didn’t you?” Kathleen asked me.

  “Yes, but that was ten years ago.”

  “In Malone Avenue?” she asked.

  “Near enough,” I said vaguely, “but so what? People were always coming and going in that area. It was a place for students, nurses, itinerants. I didn’t live there long, but I do assure you I lived there alone.” I forced myself to pick up the photograph. It showed a younger Roisin than I remembered, but the camera had perfectly caught the blazing intensity of her hunter’s eyes. “Sorry,” I said again, and tossed the picture down. I found I had finished my whiskey so poured myself another.

  Kathleen momentarily closed her eyes as though what she was about to say was very difficult and needed all her concentration if she were to articulate it properly. “Mr Shanahan,” she said at last, “I know it must be hard, because I know what Roisin was, is, and that means you can’t tell me everything, but I want you to understand that our mother is dying and she wants to know if Roisin is alive or dead. That’s all.” She stared at me with her huge green eyes that were sheened with tears. “Is it so very much to ask?”

  I swallowed whiskey. A car sped down the street outside, its tyres splashing on the wet tarmac. I was feeling foully uncomfortable and wishing that I had never given up smoking. “Tell me about your sister,” I said, “and I’ll see if anything jogs my memory.” I knew I should dismiss this girl, that I should send her unhappy and dissatisfied into the rain, but another part of me, the insidious part, wanted to keep her here so that I could torture myself with this revenant of Roisin.

  Kathleen bit her lip, took a breath, talked. “We grew up in Baltimore, but our parents were born in Ireland. In County Kerry. They emigrated in 1950. My father’s a plasterer, a good one, but there wasn’t work in Ireland.” She hesitated, as if knowing that she was straying off the subject. “Mom and Dad never regretted moving to the States. They wanted to forget Ireland, really, but Roisin was obsessed by it. I mean, really obsessed. I don’t know when it started, back in high school, I guess, but she was really mad at Mom and Dad for living in America. She wanted to be Irish, you see.”

  “I know the syndrome,” I said.

  “She learned Gaelic, she learned Irish history, and she learned Irish hatreds. Then she went to live in Ireland.” Kathleen hesitated and frowned up at me. A tear showed at the corner of one eye. “You know all this, don’t you?”

  I shook my head. “I told you. I know nothing.”

  Kathleen began to cry very softly. She made no noise, the tears simply brimmed from her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She fished in her coat pocket, found a shred of tissue, and angrily cuffed the tears away. “I’m so tired,” she said, “and I just want to know what happened to her. I want to know if she’s alive.”

  I tried to sound sympathetic. “I wish I could help.”

  “You can help!” Kathleen insisted. “She mentioned you in her letters! She said you had a house on Cape Cod! She said you were a yachtsman!” She sniffed and wiped away her tears. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”

  “Paul Shanahan isn’t such an unusual name,” I said.

  She dismissed that feeble evasion with an abrupt shake of her head. “I’ve spent three weeks in Ireland, talking to people who knew Roisin. They kept mentioning you. They said –” She checked.

  “They said what?” I encouraged her.

  “They said you might have had links with the IRA.” She spoke defiantly, challenging me with her unlikely truth. “They said that’s why Roisin wanted to be with you, because you were her introduction to the IRA.”

  “Me?” I sounded wonderfully astonished.

  “And one person I spoke with,” Kathleen pressed nobly on against my obduracy, “said you were in the IRA for su
re. He said you were one of their best-kept secrets.”

  “Oh, Lord help us.” I turned to pull the drapes aside and to stare down into the wet street. “The Irish do like their stories. They love to gossip, Miss Donovan, and they do it better than anyone in the world, but it’s only in Dublin bars and bad novels that Americans play heroic roles in the IRA. I went to Ireland to learn about traditional boatbuilding skills, and I stayed there because I liked the country, but I moved on here because I couldn’t make a living in Ireland.” I let the drapes fall and turned back to her. “I’m a marine engineer and surveyor. I’m not in the IRA, I never was, and I never knew your sister.”

  Kathleen stared at me, her eyes huge, and I wanted to cross the room and hold her tight and tell her all the truth and beg her forgiveness for that truth, but instead I stayed where I was. I could see the struggle on her face, the struggle of belief and disbelief. On the one hand I had sounded so very convincing, while on the other she had a mass of evidence that contradicted me. “I heard another story,” she said.

  “Go on,” I said carelessly, implying that all the stories in creation would not jog my memory.

  “I heard a rumour that Roisin is dead. That she was executed for betraying the IRA. I spoke to a policeman in Dublin and he said he’d heard she was working for American intelligence and that she’d been sent to Ireland to discover who in America was sending guns to the IRA. He’d heard that she’d been shot in the head and buried in Ravensdale Forest.”