The Last Storyteller

  “We had a woman staying here once who was very like her in temperament. Here for six weeks, and she never said a word. The man she was with used to hit her.” I tightened my grip on her hands. “Stop,” she pleaded because she saw me ignite. “Don’t. You’ll do nobody any good.”

  I said, “Are you sure?”

  She eased from my grip but still held my hand. “The children are watchful. But the fellow—he has a terrible temper.”

  “Have you heard him speak to her?”

  Lily Egan now rolled her velvet eyes and whispered at the top of her dramatic scale, “Like you wouldn’t speak to a pig. Calls her stupid, thick, slow, an imbecile.” She mimicked him: “ ‘Children, look at what your stupid mother has done now.’ He called her a ‘sow’ the other day in front of me.”

  He had to die. I knew it. Children, forgive me. I know that he raised you. Forgive me.

  We both fell silent. Lily Egan never took her eyes off me. I leaned back against her wall.

  “What am I to do?”

  “Nothing until you calm down.”

  “When are they coming back?”

  “In time for the show,” she said. “Why don’t you go away and think about all this?”

  “Maybe I will.” I could feel my heat slipping away, and in the distance I saw my sanity rising like a peak above clouds.

  Lily Egan read more books than anybody I knew, cheap romances. She kept stacks of them all over the house, as carefully shelved and classified as in any library. Doctor-and-nurse romances occupied the parlor; boss-and-secretary in the dining room; test-pilot-and-pretty-servicewomen took the stairs; cowboy-and-cowgirl, the main bathroom. She had once told me that she kept what she called “the real stuff” in her bedroom. “And nobody gets in there,” she’d added.

  Now, and not to my surprise, she asked me, “Do you still love her?”

  I gave her the answer I had been giving myself over the years: “There’s nothing still about it.”

  If you’re wondering how she knew so much, children, remember that I had been traveling the countryside searching for your mother, and therefore everybody knew me as the young man whose wife had disappeared. See Ireland as a village and you will completely understand.

  “Well,” said Lily Egan, in her summarizing fashion, “if you love her, you’ll find a better way back into her heart than causing trouble.”

  I said, “I doubt it,” but I did leave.

  Fifteen minutes later, I saw him. Alone. I knew him at once: thin as a plank, white raincoat, and that swagger. For some reason, you had all parted company and he’d come down the main street to a newspaper shop for cigarettes.

  When he came out, fiddling with the packet, I stood in front of him, blocking his path. He thought it clumsy or accidental, but I blocked him again. After a question had crossed his face with a frown, he knew why I had come.

  “Are you who I think you are?”

  I nodded. Rocks cracked together inside my head. His English accent helped me. From the unsteady depths of our Irish history, I could demonize him. Not that I would need many reasons.

  My more rational voice asked, Why not maim him instead of killing him? For the rest of his life? Reduce him? Immobilize him? Scar him so that he’ll be banished evermore from public view?

  The answer came back, obstreperous and clear: Not enough. He has to quit the planet.

  Yet another voice, my sanest, said, Don’t do this, Ben. This is not for you. Stop.

  They say that when hired killers see their intended victims, they sometimes get qualms. Not me. He spoke again, his voice full of light and fright.

  “This is personal, isn’t it?”

  Again I nodded, refusing to dignify him with my words. I had warned myself, Don’t speak. Not until his last moments, just before the consciousness quits his eyes. Then tell him. Tell him why. Tell him that he has no place left. Tell him that he deserves to die.

  He said, “Venetia, is it?”

  I nodded again. The same slow nod. Never taking my eyes from his mouth. He said, “What good will it do you? She won’t go back to you. The children don’t know that you exist.”

  I hate the power of the banal. It controls our lives more than we acknowledge. The shop owner came out and spoke to Gentleman Jack.

  “Sir, you forgot your change.”

  “Actually,” said Jack, “I need something else,” and he ducked back through the door.

  PART TWO

  Gentleman Jack and His Friend

  26

  Jimmy Bermingham could sulk for Ireland—and had mastered that old Irish art form, reproach.

  “An hour and a half I’m here. In the pours of rain.”

  I could have said to him, “Why didn’t you wait inside?” But when “normal” I didn’t possess a confronting spirit, not even with people I didn’t fear.

  Children, you will soon ask yourself, How in God’s name did my father get in tow with Jimmy Bermingham? I have two explanations, one simple, one professional.

  Remember that I met him just after my first visit to Mr. O’Neill. I think the afterglow blurred my judgment of character—I wanted to think everyone as fine as John Jacob. And I was flattered that he had known of me.

  Secondly, as a collector of legends, traditions, and lore, I (obviously) kept a detailed official record. I also maintained a private journal, and I wrote it up almost every night. In it you’ll find all kinds of people who never made it into any official report. At times it reads like a freak show, and the more eccentric the person, the more vivid my entry. That, if you like, was my private collection.

  And that’s how I first allowed myself to keep the company of wild men. Such as Jimmy Bermingham. He called himself a poet, but he never wrote a line of verse. He said he was a patriot, but he was paid as a mercenary killer. He thought himself a demon lover, but—well, we’ll come to that.

  I soon perceived a man desperate not to see himself for what he was: a rake above rakes, a drinking, seducing fellow, weak and willful, a low-grade actor who could start a riot in an empty yard. Or turn a law-abiding man such as me into a criminal.

  Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have given such a man the time off my watch, but I was lonely. My forty-second birthday had just sped by, and loss still filled me up like moonlight in a grove—all light, shade, and sometimes beauty. I believed that I had come to terms with it—up to a point. Slowly, but sometimes in a rush, I had learned how to take rewards from everyday life. Jimmy, exuberant and smart, looked like such a reward.

  It also helped that I loved my job and felt secure in it. The Folklore Commission had only a few official collectors. I was a permanent and pensionable civil servant.

  Thus, some of that ancient anguish had dulled. Its weight had changed. Once I had been as bowed as Atlas with the world on his shoulders; then it grew lighter, a heavy knapsack of grief that I could leave aside now and then.

  Until I saw the Gentleman Jack posters. Until Randall needled me. And until, most savage of all, I saw what true yearning looked like in a man twice my age for whom love was a form of truth. Who could possibly wish to grow old as pained and tearful as that?

  I asked Jimmy, “Where do you want to go?” The lapel of his shattered coat still hung loose.

  “There’s a tailor in Limerick,” he said.

  I swear to you that I picked up no ambiguity; what man in such a moment wouldn’t have needed a tailor?

  In the car he said to me, “I’m glad I found you, Ben.” Found me?

  27

  Paddy Collopy was a tailor from a bad fairy tale. Cranky as a bitten mule, sitting cross-legged on a table, his waistcoat bristling with pins—if he’d ever stood straight he’d have made five foot three. Wires of steel-wool hair bristled from his nose. He had metallic skin on a face that hadn’t smiled since before the war.

  Collopy glanced from Jimmy to me, and back again—and then to me once more. He scrutinized my face as though trying to read something. Whatever he found gave him some c
hallenge.

  “You better know what you’re doing with this article,” he said to Jimmy Bermingham.

  “He’s no article, Pat,” said Jimmy.

  “Too many teeth for his own good,” said Collopy.

  He rose from his table. Bent sideways like an old nail, he limped across the room to a tall cupboard, then turned to glare at me again. He looked like a man who wanted to spit.

  Collopy reached for the cupboard door. He turned again and said to Jimmy, “You’re sure?”

  Jimmy nodded. “Yeh. He’s perfect for us.”

  The tailor took a small key from his vest pocket and unclipped the padlock. As a dignitary does at an unveiling, he stepped to one side and swung the door open. Inside stood a long crate whose wooden lid had been removed. Fake straw and other packing materials bunched on the bottom of the crate. Above them, in a chilling rank, six rifles caught the light on their polished stocks, their blue-gray barrels.

  Collopy said, “The rest is in the yard shed.”

  Jimmy Bermingham turned to me and said, as though we had discussed it, “How many cases do you think, Ben?”

  “Cases of what?”

  “Four? Six? We could put two on the back seat and fling a coat over them.”

  I’ve always been able to feel consternation physically: the skin on my face tightens and shrinks. You know by now from recent Irish history that in 1956 a group of activists calling themselves by the traditional name of the Irish Republican Army opened up with bullets and bombs on the Irish border and ran their campaign until 1962. That day I saw their newly arrived weaponry, shipped as “machine parts” from Chicago to the port of Limerick.

  “Are you joking?” Doubt and fury mix badly.

  Another man in the room, wide as a black van, moved behind me and blocked the door. I said to Jimmy Bermingham, “For Jesus’s sake!”

  “Calm down, Ben, would you?”

  “Calm down? I’ll tell you what’s not calming me down. The full legal term is ‘accessory before the fact.’ That’s what’s not calming me down.”

  “Stop shouting willya,” said Collopy, “or the whole parish’ll hear you.”

  “Ben, come on.” Jimmy had a new edge to him.

  “Come on what? I met you twenty-four hours ago.”

  “The boys need this stuff.”

  “What boys? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Willya stop shouting,” said the tailor again. He had more authority than I’d expected. “Listen to me.” He dropped his voice. “You’re in it now whether you like it or not.”

  “I’m in nothing. As a matter of fact, I’m out. Out of here.”

  I began to turn.

  Collopy said, “Whatcha gonta do? Tell the cops? You can’t step away from it. Jimmy and me know that you know. So if anybody official finds out, we’ll know who to blame.” He spoke those five sentences in a steady and clear-voiced pace; I reckon he had rehearsed them.

  Jimmy held out his palms. “Ben, you’re the ideal cover. We’ve to get these friends of ours”—he pointed to the guns; he would always call them “friends”—“a long way up the country. There’s lads waiting for them.”

  In my eyes he saw refusal.

  “Jimmy, what is going on?”

  “Shhh. Lower your voice. This is new stuff,” he said. “Big stuff. Just starting.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” I demanded.

  Collopy said, “They have six counties of our land. It isn’t over.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, grow up,” I said.

  Jimmy said, “Ben, there isn’t much you can do.”

  “Watch me,” I cautioned, and the wide, nameless man at the door jumped aside at the force of my departure.

  28

  What man in his right mind would let himself be dragged into some tin-pot, cack-handed, half-cocked revolution that was, even in its conception, anachronistic? We might have been a makeshift nation in those days, but were we yet, in the famous saying, a banana republic without the bananas?

  Think of it. Jimmy Bermingham wanted me to run guns up to the Irish border, where a bunch of rebels were about to attack a dominion of Britain. The odd thing is, emotionally my politics were completely with Jimmy and his friends. Our island is a single geographic entity, and it should always have been allowed to determine its own independence, rather than have a bite taken out of it by a neighbor.

  If I’d had to vote on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which divided the island into the twenty-six counties of what is now the republic and the six counties of what is now Northern Ireland, I’d probably have voted to fight on.

  After World War II, though, and its horrors in France, and bombed corpses, and body parts bagged by men with shovels, I would never again in my life have voted for anything that fired a bullet or threw a bomb, even in the cause of independence or nationalism.

  Now I had been trapped. Go along with it until you can think your way through.

  Jimmy Bermingham followed me onto the streets of Limerick.

  “Just this one load, Ben, okay? Then you’re out, right?”

  “One load to where?” I needed to keep calm. You’re in, and you can’t help it, but then get out.

  I never saw Collopy again. The wide, silent man brought out the crates. And so we set out, Jimmy and I, running guns.

  It rained for the entire journey. I said scarcely a word. Jimmy found this a challenge and said so; it brought one of our few exchanges.

  “Ben, you’re not in a good humor.”

  “With a car full of your ‘friends’?”

  “We’ll unload them tonight,” he said, “and then you’ll be okay.”

  At every road junction I looked all around me like a fugitive, expecting at any moment to be stopped.

  29

  The rain cleared, and a late sun wiped the sky clean. Many minutes from any major roads, we drove down a long lane through wild scrubland. Ours is a small island with a huge ego; we believe that the world revolves around us. This holds especially true of those who live off the beaten track. In their silent places, the liquors of their opinions ferment—patriotism, religion, politics. We had come to the lonely, low stony hills of impoverished County Leitrim.

  I shall give no true names here; their children still live, so I shall call the couple to whose house we came “Bob” and “Maisie.” And I’ll call the welcome they gave me “mixed”: in the kitchen, Bob thrust a glass of whiskey into my hand, and Maisie thrust a gun into my ribs.

  “How do we know he’s any good?” she said. She had iron-gray hair in a straggly bun and a university voice.

  “If Jimmy says he’s the goods, he’s the goods,” said Bob, who seemed to want little more in life than a new drinking companion. Maisie needed more; she thirsted for anarchy.

  I asked, “Could you please pull back your gun?”

  “Just reminding you,” she said. Eyes like bugs, black in a white face, and she kept sawing her upper lip with her lower teeth.

  “Tell him, Maisie,” said Jimmy Bermingham. “Tell him about the B Specials.”

  “B Specials”—the Northern Ireland police reserve. They harassed and killed Catholics along the border. So we were told. For sport, we were told.

  “A repressive power is always expressed through those whom it most wants you to trust,” she said.

  I looked puzzled at this proclamation.

  “What are police for?” she ranted. “To protect the people and their property, right? To let the world go about its business safely, right? They’re the officials we’re most invited to trust, right?”

  Bob, helpful and drinking, agreed: “That’s the general picture, Maisie.”

  “So when they, in the course of their duty, are encouraged to destroy that trust—well, then you know what kind of regime you have.”

  Bob took another swig. “That’s it. That’s the picture.”

  I made the mistake of saying, “But it’s in the north—it has nothing to do with us.”

  S
he hissed like an angry goose. “Where were you born? Is all of your native island not your concern?” Turning to Jimmy, she asked, “Where did you pick him up?”

  Jimmy said, “He’s actually okay, Maisie. And he knows the country like the back of his hand.”

  “How?” She festered with suspicion.

  “I work for the Folklore Commission,” I said.

  This restrained her, and she laughed.

  “Well, I bloody hope you brought your notebook.”

  That was the moment at which I should have risen from my chair and left that house. But I didn’t, and it’s in the not doing as well as the doing that we undo our lives.

  “Are you sure he’s one of us?” asked Maisie.

  I said, “No, I’m not. Not at all.”

  Maisie, striding like a hiker, exited the room. She returned within minutes and walked straight over to me. In her hands she held an old-fashioned rifle, its heavy stock gleaming with wood polish, a Lee-Enfield.

  “Here’s your choice,” she told me. “This?” She put the muzzle to my right temple. “Or this?” She thrust the gun at me so hard that I had no choice but to take it from her. “Which is it?”

  Guns discommode me. Their facility alarms me. Point and kill. Ruin someone’s life. Remove at a finger pull deeply loved people, as important in their spheres as the sun in the sky. The very weight of a gun disturbs me—an insolent object, insisting on its own importance.

  Maisie walked away from me, clapping her hands.

  “You’re in now,” she said.

  I looked around, cleared a space on the kitchen table, and laid the rifle down as gently as a glass.

  “Not me,” I said. But I didn’t storm and rant and rave as I should have done.

  “Your fingerprints are on that gun,” she said, looking out the window. “I won’t be wiping them off.”

  From my pocket I took a handkerchief and began with foolish movements to wipe the gleaming wooden stock. She strode over and pushed me away.

  “Listen to me.” She was at that moment every spitting female revolutionary the world has ever seen. “The border is a few miles away. And we lost one of our best men yesterday. They gouged out his eyes. In the back of their van. We know the bastard who did it. A B Special called Sammy Gilpin.” (Not his real name.) “That’s what’s going on here.”