‘What is it, darling? I didn’t mean to upset you.’
She turned a tear-stained face to him.
‘Please, Patrick. Never ask me about this again. Promise me. Swear you will never mention it.’
‘I only ...’
‘Swear!’
He did as she asked and she seemed to grow calmer at once. She put her arms round his neck and kissed him on the forehead.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be angry with you. Don’t ask me to explain. It has nothing to do with us. Nothing.’
For a long time afterwards, he thought the pendant must have been the gift of another man, a lover left behind in Italy; though she had sworn to him that there had been no one serious before him, and he had believed her. The pendant tormented him from time to time in the years to come. But he never asked her about it again.
The Living
FOUR
And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon.
Exodus 12:29
Dalkey, Co. Dublin January, 1992
Three in the morning. The darkness inexplicably charged, the silence heavy and drugged. There would be another storm. It lay in his bones, like electricity, moving in a slow current. Outside, the cold chattered briskly, saying things he did not want to hear.
Light fell on light: across his desk, a tiny pool of yellow shining on ancient paper; through the window, a street lamp etching shadows out of the dim room. He could hear the sea in the distance, the tide coming in, small waves taking possession of the land. Or a single wave, repeating and repeating ceaselessly, until there was no more land, only water.
He had chosen the house for its view. It looked straight out onto Dublin Bay, and all last summer he had watched the sea perform its endless, slow ballet, as though it danced for him and him alone. Now, in mid-winter, he was no longer sure he had chosen wisely. The sound of waves made him restless, filling him with a terrible loneliness and a sense of foreboding. It was at moments such as this that he wondered if he had done the right thing in coming back to Ireland.
He rubbed his eyes. The crabbed and faded script was a strain to read, even with the help of a magnifying glass. Yellow light and ochre paper blurred. Fragmented letters ran across the page like frightened ants.
‘C’mon, Patrick. You hadn’t killed him, somebody else would’ve had to do it.’
Voices snagged at him, like branches sharp with thorns. The past was still angry and unforgiving.
‘He was coming in. He’d had enough. There was a signaclass="underline" Damascus station intercepted it. Why wasn’t I told?’
‘There was a slip-up. It happens. You know it happens. What’s it matter? Wasn’t like he didn’t have it coming. Somebody would have done it sooner or later. Not you, then somebody else.’
In the distance, waves possessed the shore.
He stood and went to the window. At forty-two, Patrick Canavan possessed very little. He paid rent on a house overlooking the Irish Sea: what little there was of his CIA pension took care of that. No wife, no children, no memories he could share with friends, no friends to share them with.
He opened the window all the way, pushing the sash up hard. Out of the night, out of the padded and frozen darkness, the sounds of the world rose up to him in waves: the stark lapping of water on stone, a train in the distance, loud on frosted rails, a ship’s horn, the bell on a rocking buoy.
Far out on the abandoned waters of the bay, he saw lights: ships coming in from the dark sea, from France and Spain and Italy, headed for Dun Laoghaire or Dublin harbour, an armada of tiny lights on a wind-darkened tide. The fog that had kept them out at sea so late had lifted, leaving a vast and empty darkness rich with stars. Out on the final edges of the night, a small boat passed like a firefly and was suddenly lost.
His eyes travelled over the darkness, and he thought how complete it was, how everything was dipped in it. How could twenty years make such a difference? he asked himself. Times change, people change, people die; but it was more than that.
He saw Beirut again, as though the darkness had become a screen for memories. On his left, the Syrian guard-post plastered with posters of Asad, to his right the abandoned al-Saqi Hotel, now occupied by a Hezbollahi group from Bi’r al-‘Abd. He saw the jeep turn the corner, the boy from Amal firing, low from the hip. And, in slow motion, Hasan Abi Shaqra running from the alleyway towards him, his own gun lifting, pointing, firing, Hasan falling at his feet, blood turning to dust on the dry earth. ‘He was coming in. He’d had enough.’
‘Come back to bed, Patrick.’
Ruth stood in the doorway, naked, her eyes dim with sleep. He turned from the window, blinking away the sunshine and the blood, suddenly cold.
‘I was working,’ he said, wondering why he felt a need to explain himself to her.
‘It’s after three. I woke up and you weren’t there. Come back to bed.’
He felt irritated by her presence, by the demands she made on him. It was so long since he had shared anything with a woman. He closed the window, shutting the world out.
She took him back to bed, her nakedness futile against his indifference. They lay there for a long time, shivering between cold sheets. Light from the street lamp filtered through the thin bedroom curtains, staining the bed with its unnatural light. Her arm lay beside his, almost translucent, like alabaster.
‘Do you love me?’ he asked, but she was asleep again, and he had not really wanted an answer. There was a sort of love between them, he supposed; and a physical passion that could still make him cry out, as though in pain. He tried to convince himself that the gulf between them was merely one of age - she was more than ten years his junior - but he knew it was really something he had built inside himself out of all the little emptinesses of his life.
Getting involved with Ruth had been a big mistake. He thought he loved her, but that wasn’t the problem. Ruth belonged to the Agency, the way everyone did at first, the way he had at the beginning. That was the problem. Or part of it, at least.
They’d met at a party three, maybe four months earlier, not long after his arrival in Dublin. An old friend from Langley, Jim Allegro, was here on special attachment with the Irish Ranger Squad, liaising on anti-terrorist tactics. Jim had heard of Patrick’s arrival through the grapevine and contacted him. ‘I’m having a party tonight - come round and meet some people.’
The party had been dulclass="underline" pieces of cheese and tinned pineapple on wooden cocktail sticks, stale French bread, cheap Australian red in boxes, wall to wall Dire Straits. The guests were the usual crowd: anaemic third secretaries from the embassy, a handful of spooks you could spot in a nudist colony, and awkward locals downing Guinness at a rate of knots. As usual, all the intelligence hounds were sniffing one another’s rears in a pack. She was sitting in a corner, going through Allegro’s bookcase like a censor looking for smut.
‘You won’t find anything in there,’ he said. ‘Jim’s cleaner than an operating table.’
‘On the contrary,’ she replied, ‘that’s precisely where all the messy things end up.’
How had he guessed she was in the trade? She didn’t look the type. Not that there was a type - but if there had been, she wouldn’t have been it. She was too well dressed for one thing. The sort of clothes that had their labels on the inside, if they had labels at
all. A single piece of discreet jewellery, a mere hint of expensive perfume. But for the accent, he would have taken her to be French. She was petite, with short blonde hair, a down-turned mouth, and tiny ears like shells.