The City in Darkness Page 21

  Stefan took in the streets of pale, old stone. The driver occasionally mentioned something they passed. The words ‘iglesia’ prefixed most of his comments; it was a city of churches, as Kerney had already told him. And as the taxi negotiated a street full of trucks and horses and men unloading baskets of fruit and vegetables, the taxi driver gestured across at a dark arch and said ‘Plaza Mayor’. Stefan looked round, but all he could see was the day’s business starting at the Central Market. The taxi climbed up through narrow, quiet streets to the high walls and pillared entrance of the Colegio de los Irlandeses, once a bishop’s palace.

  Stefan and the ambassador mounted the steps to the dark entrance.

  An old man in a dirty white jacket bustled from the porter’s lodge.

  ‘Buenos días, Señor Kerney.’

  ‘Buenos días, Chávez! Cómo está?’

  ‘Bien, bien!’

  The man scurried out to get the bags. A soldier in the grey-green of the German Army watched. He clicked his heels and then spoke in English.

  ‘A good journey, Herr Ambassador?’

  ‘Oh, not so bad. This is Mr Gillespie.’

  The soldier looked down at a clipboard he was holding.

  ‘Willkommen in Salamanca, Inspector Gillespie.’

  The room at the Irish College was less a room than a monastic cell. There were no Irish seminarians at the college now; the last left at the start of the Civil War; but the small bed, hard chair and bare table advertised that the building was there to house would-be priests. Above the bed was a picture of Jesus holding a red heart streaming with light; Batoni’s ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus’. Stefan knew it; it sat on the walls of thousands of Irish homes. He had met no one except the porter and the German soldier yet, but he had heard German along the college’s galleried cloister. The simple cells now accommodated the young German Intelligence officers who had replaced the priests. He walked back along the arched gallery, looking down into the cloister. It was a peaceful place; the presence of the uniforms didn’t sit easily with it. As he came down the steps a man in his early twenties was waiting, in black trousers and shirt, a clerical outfit but with no collar.

  ‘It’s Mr Gillespie, is it?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Good to meet you, sir. Michael Hagan, a Tipp man myself.’

  They shook hands. Stefan looked at Hagan with a harder, more curious stare than he could help. This was the man he knew from a letter in Billy Byrne’s room. This was the man who had really brought him here.

  ‘Wicklow myself.’

  ‘I’d know it a bit. And how’s old Ireland, sir?”

  ‘Hard to say,’ Stefan smiled. ‘I’m not sure we’re sure how we are.’

  ‘You’re out of it, like we are, that’s the thing. God keep it that way.’

  Stefan nodded.

  ‘It’s Mass at nine. There’s a bit off breakfast in the refectory now.’

  ‘I’ll happily go for the breakfast, but I’ll forgo the Mass.’

  Hagan looked surprised and a little put out.

  ‘It’s in the chapel, specially. It always is when Mr Kerney comes.’

  ‘I’d like to have a look at the chapel later.’ Stefan gave a mock-serious frown. ‘I’m afraid you’ve a Protestant within your walls, Mikey.’

  Hagan looked slightly awkward, then laughed as Stefan grinned.

  ‘It is Mikey, isn’t it?’

  Stefan remembered the signature on the letter to Billy Byrne.

  ‘It’s a good guess! It’s what everyone always calls me, Mr Gillespie.’

  Michael Hagan left Stefan at the door to the refectory. Stefan watched him go. There would be a right time. He wasn’t sure if it should be sooner rather than later; maybe he should try to win some confidence first. It would depend how quickly they left for Burgos.

  The refectory was a dark, vaulted room with little natural light. Several men sat on benches at a long table, all German, uniformed and in civvies. They looked up curiously. One stood up and walked towards him.

  ‘You’re with the Irish ambassador? Inspector Gillespie?’

  The man spoke in English; Stefan had decided that for now he would appear to know no German. He had a sense the German was gauging him.

  ‘Mr Kerney tells me you’ll be joining us later for a chat.’

  ‘Then I’m sure I will, Herr . . . I’m sorry I don’t know the rank.’

  ‘We don’t worry about rank. We’re not at home.’ He still gave his rank. ‘Konrad Eckhart, Major. That makes us the same, I think.’

  ‘More or less, I suppose,’ said Stefan.

  ‘Help yourself to what you want. The ham is excellent. We live on it here. There’s not much else. If you want some eggs, simply tell Chávez.’

  He turned to the man in the grubby white jacket behind the counter. Stefan recognized him as the Spaniard who brought the bags from the taxi.

  ‘Inspector Gillespie es un invitado del rector, un policía irlandés.’

  Chávez shrugged; he didn’t need telling.

  ‘We will talk later, Inspector.’ Eckhart left.

  ‘You want something, señor?’ asked the Spaniard.

  ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?

  ‘Claro!’ The old man leant forward and whispered, ‘Bacon?’

  Stefan wasn’t sure why he was glancing sideways at the Germans.

  ‘Ireland bacon, the rector’s bacon. Not for the . . .’

  Chávez winked and disappeared through a door into the kitchen.

  Stefan turned round and walked to the long table.

  ‘Mein Freund, hinsetzen Sie bitte!’ said one of the Abwehr men.

  Stefan smiled politely, but showed no comprehension.

  ‘Sit down, Inspector. I am sorry we do not all speak English!’

  He sat down. The Germans smiled pleasantly, then resumed their conversation, unaware that he could understand them. For a moment it was all about Kerney.

  ‘Their ambassador’s here to see Eckhart again.’

  ‘He’s coming out then, the International Brigade arsehole?’

  ‘Apparently, but that’s Eckhart’s baby now.’

  ‘You know the man’s a fucking communist?’

  ‘He must be some use, the orders come from Otto Melsbach.’

  ‘That’s all you need to know. What a tosser!’

  ‘So who’s this Irish cop?’

  ‘Minding the ambassador.’

  ‘He’s not army?’

  ‘Do the Irish have an army?’

  ‘I think they have a bicycle corps!’

  ‘If the Tommies don’t ask for the bikes back!’

  There was laughter as the Abwehr men headed for the door. Passing Stefan, they reined it in. The man who had asked him to sit down spoke.

  ‘Will you be with us long, Inspector?’

  ‘Home once the ambassador is in Madrid. Are you based here?’

  ‘Two years, some of us, but not for much longer. The war! The real war. The English! We shall give Ireland something to celebrate, I think!’ He turned to the others. ‘Der Krieg, wir geben Irland etwas zu feiern, ja?’

  The Abwehr men grinned enthusiastically at Stefan.

  ‘Ah, well, of course, we’re a neutral country altogether, I’m sure you wouldn’t expect me to have an opinion on anything like that, would you?’

  ‘I imagine you will all have an opinion when the time comes, Inspector.’

  ‘I imagine we will.’

  As the German officers walked out, Chávez came to the table with a pot of tea and a plate of fried bacon and eggs. He put it down and sniffed.

  ‘Soon they will be gone.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t enjoyed having them here, Chávez!’

  ‘Señor, how can you say it? They are our allies!’

  Stefan laughed. The Spaniard walked to the door, looking out after the Germans. Their voices were loud, their laughter echoing around the cloisters. As he ate Stefan heard something that could have been the old man spitting; on the oth
er hand, he could have been clearing his throat.

  Leopold Kerney and Stefan Gillespie sat in the library of the Irish College with Major Eckhart and another Abwehr officer, Oberleutnant Sebastian Triebel. Eckhart talked; Triebel made notes. The arrangements that had been only tentative in Lisbon were tangible; so much so that it was hard for Kerney not to feel that his involvement in Frank Ryan’s release was over. Yet Stefan saw a harder man as Kerney and Eckhart went through the details.

  ‘The Spanish have accepted the plan fully,’ said the German major. ‘Your lawyer Señor de Chambourcin has spoken to the ministry again. The ministry has spoken to the prison governor. I have spoken directly to Spanish Military Intelligence. It is agreed at the highest level. It has the approval of the Caudillo himself, though officially Franco knows nothing.’

  ‘When will it happen?’

  ‘In three days.’

  ‘And what does Mr Ryan know?’

  ‘He will know when the day comes.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll simply walk out of that gaol because the governor takes him to the gate and says, “Adiós, Señor Ryan”? What usually awaits a prisoner who’s shown the door is a bullet in the head.’

  ‘This is everything you have asked for, Mr Kerney.’

  ‘Shall we leave the bollocks aside, Major? My concern is with Frank Ryan’s freedom, so is my government’s. The position the Spanish have taken, and Generalissimo Franco in particular, gives us no choice but to take this route, but my responsibility doesn’t end in this room. Ryan too has to take this opportunity, but he won’t if there’s no trust. And I need the proper reassurances that he’s out of gaol and safely out of Spain.’

  ‘Because of the Spanish sensitivity about Ryan, the secrecy—’

  ‘I know what the Spanish want. That’s why it’s best I am in Madrid when it happens. I have discussed it with Oberst Melsbach at length. But Inspector Gillespie is here for a reason. He is my eyes and ears. He will go to Burgos to give Ryan my reassurances. And what comes next, Eckhart?’

  Stefan smiled; now he was Kerney’s eyes and ears!

  ‘I need to know what happens when Ryan leaves Burgos.’

  Stefan had not heard the authority that was in Leopold Kerney’s voice before. The ambassador knew who he was talking to. It was a tone Eckhart understood because in his world the tone of authority produced an almost Pavlovian response, especially in a conversation with a superior. Kerney was still an ambassador, and the position of a neutral country on England’s doorstep needed careful handling. There were people higher up the ladder in Berlin watching this. Kerney couldn’t push it too far but his assumption that he carried real authority here was enough to mean that he did.

  ‘He will be driven north, to the Asturian coast, to Pendueles.’

  Oberleutnant Triebel indicated the route on a map.

  ‘The Irish College has a summer house there. It is a small village. The rector has let us use it while we’ve been billeted here. No one thinks twice about German officers visiting. We have arranged Herr Ryan’s departure from Llanes, a harbour along the coast. An Italian cargo boat will call in to take him to the Mediterranean, to Naples. There he will have several options. Italian boats still go America. But all that depends on him.’

  Kerney looked at the map again. ‘Lisbon is closer,’

  ‘The Spanish don’t like the idea of Lisbon, neither do we.’

  The ambassador turned to Stefan.

  ‘All right, once Ryan leaves Spain, I think we can say that’s it.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Stefan.

  ‘You can see him in Burgos and you go with him to Pendueles.’

  ‘I cannot permit that, Herr Kerney.’ Eckhart pushed back his chair. ‘It hasn’t been easy to get Spain to agree to this, if anything goes wrong—’

  ‘My government doesn’t want anything to go wrong. We have good relations with Spain and we don’t want them compromised. And as a neutral country we tread a fine line with Britain. If this got out it would be more than embarrassing. I shouldn’t even be in a room with you. As far as my government is concerned I’m not. We are discussing a past IRA leader when the IRA has been bombing Britain. The Irish government is not without sympathy for Germany’s position, but if helping Ryan is a small matter for you it could have real consequences for us. We need our arses covered so to speak, and Inspector Gillespie is here to ensure they are.’

  Konrad Eckhart pursed his lips. Stefan felt the ambassador deserved a round of applause. He had taken all of Ireland’s weaknesses in this plan and turned them into strengths. Unacceptable actions in a neutral diplomat had become his justification for staying in the loop. The argument might not have impressed anyone higher up in the Nazi Intelligence hierarchy, but for a junior officer at the outer circle of the intrigue the threat of misreading a diplomatic puzzle was enough to persuade Eckhart he had better agree.

  ‘Do you see any problems, Triebel?’ he said in German.

  Triebel frowned, looking down at the map, and then shrugged.

  ‘What about Richard I, Herr Major?’

  ‘The cop will be gone by then. It may help that he confirms things.’

  Triebel nodded.

  Stefan could make no sense of what had just been said, but it was clear there were other things going on, as he suspected; there were other people involved.

  ‘Very well, Herr Kerney,’ said the major in English. ‘Herr Gillespie can accompany Herr Ryan to Pendueles, and you will have all your assurances.’

  As the two Irishmen walked out into the cloisters, Kerney grinned.

  ‘I don’t know about you, I could do with a fucking drink.’

  That night Stefan and the ambassador ate with the rector of the college, Alexander McCabe, a grey-faced man who could have been anything between fifty and seventy. He had stayed when the seminarians were evacuated at the beginning of the Civil War, presiding over the near-empty college before German Intelligence arrived. After three years the Abwehr men were leaving too, heading for the war in Europe. Doctor McCabe had got used to them. He had never considered what the Abwehr did in Spain. He didn’t have a lot of time for Adolf Hitler and Nazism or even, though he didn’t say it outside his rooms, for Generalissimo Franco. But in a world threatened by brutal atheism, when the real enemy of humanity was communism, as the rector and the Church saw it, you took your allies where you could find them. Whatever his opinion of Hitler, he was on the right side in the real war, not the one between Germany and the Allies, but the one against godless atheism that had been won at such cost in Spain.

  ‘We shall miss our Germans. They’ve been very pleasant to have about the place. And some are Catholics, so they’ve made Sunday Mass.’

  ‘You’ll have your priests back now. A new intake as well.’

  ‘I don’t know, Leo. Getting them here won’t be easy. The feeling in Ireland is that opening the college must wait on the cessation of hostilities in Europe. I don’t know how long that will be, but our Germans here have a strong sense that the war won’t last long. The British don’t want it, I’m sure. We can only pray they have the sense to come to terms with Herr Hitler.’

  Chávez appeared with a bottle of port on a silver tray.

  McCabe shook his head. ‘A bottle of whiskey – and some water.’

  The conversation moved from the war in Europe back to Spain and the peace Stefan sensed neither the rector nor the ambassador believed was as pervasive as they told one another. The subject of Frank Ryan arose very naturally. Kerney had visited him several times in Burgos after staying at the college, and the rector seemed to have an unexpected regard for the ex-IRA man who had fought doggedly on the ‘wrong side’ in the Civil War.

  ‘He’s an odd man, very odd. I don’t know him the way you do, Leo. He fought for a Republic that murdered priests and nuns. He consorted with every species of communist and atheist. But he is a good Catholic, as Mikey Hagan always says. It ought to be a contradiction. I don’t know why, but it feels like it isn’t. We are in
strange times. The road is unclear. I think even within the Church we cannot all pretend that we really see our way.’

  For Stefan, listening to the two men, there was considerable surprise hearing Michael Hagan’s name in the context of Frank Ryan and Burgos.

  ‘I think Ryan became more disillusioned with the Spanish Republic than he cares to admit, Alex.’ Leopold Kerney helped himself to another whiskey. ‘At least with what it turned into once the communists took over.’

  ‘There’s never a shortage of disillusion,’ said the rector. ‘Between these four walls I am not the kind of churchman who can applaud a regime that has replaced murderous atheism with something equally murderous.’

  ‘Gillespie is going up to see Ryan for me,’ said Kerney.

  ‘Good. I hear he’s come on considerably. You’ve met Hagan?’

  ‘Yes, I have, sir.’

  ‘He has visited Ryan himself. He has a real sense the man is on the up now. It’s all because of Leo he’s being treated more decently, though.’

  Stefan wanted to know more about Hagan, and enough whiskey had gone from the bottle on the table for him to feel that a blunt question would do.

  ‘So how does Hagan know Frank Ryan? Wasn’t he with O’Duffy?’

  ‘He was,’ said the rector, ‘that’s how he came here. He’s a mild-mannered feller but he was very insistent on going to see Ryan. I help him with the fares. It’s an act of charity, after all. But there is a story and it’s what made me reassess Ryan. Mikey was here with that gobshite O’Duffy, the only way to describe him. There were some genuine men among the drunks and wasters he brought to Spain, and Hagan was one of them, young as he was.’

  McCabe reached out for the bottle and filled his glass.

  ‘The only fighting they did was with each other. The only time they got near a battle O’Duffy was drunk somewhere and they were shot at by their own side. Some died, some got lost behind enemy lines. Hagan got lost. And Ryan saved his life. He would have been shot otherwise. He was wounded and he came here to convalesce with the other Bandera fellers.’