Page 116 of Hang on St. Christopher

“I always like to cooperate with the police. You seemed really anxious to talk to me, so I thought I would give you the opportunity. But this wild-goose chase of yours is really a bit too much for me. Youse have all got a great imagination, so youse have.”

“You’ve got nothing to contribute to the case?” Clare asked, exasperated.

“I don’t see how I could, since I never met Eileen and I don’t really know Alan Locke that well.”

Brendan poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher on the table and smiled at us all again.

“You’re not getting the big picture, Brendan. Don’t you see what’s happening, here?” I asked him in Irish.

“What’s happening?” Brendan replied in Irish that wasn’t quite as good as mine.

“Your killers are being killed. Whatever coup de main you were planning against your pals in the IRA is being snuffed out before it gets going,” I continued.

“What are you talking about?”

“You sent at least two of your best people north as sleeper agents. Waiting for your orders to execute a plan. But someone has betrayed you. Someone has found out about that plan. You’ve been outgeneraled. They’ve killed your soldiers and they’re going to be coming for you next,” I said in English.

“Who?”

“I don’t know. But if you help us, we can stop this war before it gets started.”

“You don’t know anything, Duffy. You’re a fucking amateur. A part-time policeman who is swimming in very dangerous waters,” Brendan said.

“My client does not imply—” one of the lawyers began before Brendan cut him off with a gesture.

“I certainly appreciate the warning and your concern for my safety,” I said.

“Who said I had any concern for a fucking traitor who has taken the king’s shilling?” Brendan said, leaning across the table toward me. “You disgust me. You are worse than the Brits; you are worse than the Prods; you are the lowest form of fucking life there is. A Catholic in the police. A parasite who betrays his own. Now, why don’t you fuck off back to Belfast, the whole lot of you!”

His old-man jowls were seething with hatred and anger. He was practically shaking. It was disconcerting to see an older man lose it like this. What was the source of his hate? He hadn’t lost any kids to the war. He had a brother in jail and a brother on the run in France, but so the fuck what? He was rich, healthy, respected (or, if not exactly respected, at least feared).

It was strange. I had much more cause to hate than he. They’d tried to kill me and my wife and child. Assassins sent by the Army Council of the Provisional IRA. They had tried to shoot me and threatened to burn me alive. But I didn’t hate him or his brothers. Or any of them.

“Why are you still here?” he asked incredulously. When dismissed from his presence, people normally got the hell away from him as fast as they could.

“I was wondering how an old man such as yourself keeps the hate burning inside you. You’re shaking. There’s spittle on your chin. It’s not dignified.”

“How dare you speak to me of?—”

“I’ll speak to you any way I like, Brendan of the Long Arm.Coimhead fearg fhear na foighde.”

“This from the man who works for Thatcher!”

“You have to keep up with current events, Brendan. Thatcher’s gone. It’s Major now.”

“It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. We all know who’s calling the shots. It’s Cromwell come again to Ireland. You know it and I know it. She’s worse than Cromwell. She’s Hitler come again,” O’Roarke said.

I rolled my eyes and said nothing. This was getting us nowhere. Why was it, in conversations with these people, it always came back to the Easter Rising, the famine, or Cromwell?

“Mrs. Thatcher is not Hitler,” Superintendent Clare was saying, getting sucked in like a bloody idiot.

“That’s what they said about Hitler!” Brendan replied.

I couldn’t take much more of this. I got to my feet. “Really? Of Hitler they said he’s not Hitler? That doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

Brendan stood too. He pointed his finger at Clare and me and the rest of us. “I don’t know how youse can look in the mirror shaving in the morning. Traitors, the lot of you. Planter scum! Fucking Proddy planter scum!”

“I usually shave at night,” Crabbie said deadpan. “No time in the morning, what with the cows and everything.”