Devereaux was out of breath. “Not bad for an old man,” he said aloud.
O’Neill moaned again and vomited at the sight of his own blood.
“Yer broke me fuckin’ nose,” he said in a muffled voice.
Devereaux smiled.
“Me fuckin’ face is caved in,” O’Neill said.
“You ought to see yourself,” Devereaux agreed.
O’Neill staggered to the bathroom, blood on his white shirt and jacket. He managed to stop the bleeding in a few minutes by placing a cold, wet towel on his mangled face. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, holding the towel.
“Why’d ya do that, you bloody murderin’ bastard?” O’Neill said. The voice was self-pitying.
Devereaux sat in the chair O’Neill had vacated. He had pulled on his tan trousers. He held the .45.
Devereaux waited.
“Yer gonna kill me,” said O’Neill. “Kill me just like ya killed that poor old pouf.”
“Who did I kill?”
“Hastings. Hastings, ya bloody-minded man, ya.”
Devereaux decided he did not need the gun. He emptied the clip and threw it on the floor, but placed the gun on the table.
“Tell me about Hastings,” Devereaux said quietly.
“Ya know about him, ya bloody bastard,” whimpered O’Neill. “I saw ya kill him.”
“Tell me about Hastings,” Devereaux said again.
“I followed ya from the pub. Ya went to his room. When ya came out, I went up meself and saw him. Ya cut his privates off — God rest his soul, the poor old bastard.”
“What are you to Hastings?”
The same voice, quiet and even, delivering the words with menace.
“Ya know all about me—”
“Who are you?”
“O’Neill, I tole ya last night—”
“Who are you?”
“Don’t keep askin’ me the same bloody question—”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a commercial traveler. Out of Belfast—”
“What are you to Hastings?”
The pain, the dull voice, frightened O’Neill. It was maddening, it was like hell. O’Neill felt sick again at the smell of his own vomit on the rug. He wanted to get up, to flee, but he knew his legs would not work. The Yank sat still on the chair with bare feet and bare chest and stared at him. Without pity or a sign of humanity in him.
“I knew… Hastings… fer years and years—”
He looked at Devereaux’s face.
“Y’see, I dealt with him when he was workin’ fer the English, y’see.”
O’Neill blushed. Sweat beaded on his forehead again.
“Y’might say I trade in a little information from time to time.”
Devereaux waited.
“Well, y’see, after he retired, I just kept on tradin’ with him. Nothing very serious atall. I’m a commercial traveler.”
O’Neill could not gauge the other man’s face anymore: A winter face with no mercy.
He suddenly dashed into truth the way a swimmer runs into a cold mountain lake: “I had something for Hastings. It was better than anything I had before. And he was goin’ to give it to the Yanks and he was goin’ ta get me ten thousand dollars fer it.”
Devereaux got up and opened the drawer of the dresser. He took out a dark blue shirt and put it on. Slowly, he buttoned the front as he waited for O’Neill to go on.
“I went to the Crescent and Lion last night to find that English whore. I figures you and him made a deal without O’Neill, is what I thought—”
“How did you know about the meet—”
“He tole me, didn’t he? How the hell d’ya think I knew about it, man?”
“And you knew it was me.”
“And weren’t you the only bloody Yank in the place? My God, O’Neill is not a bloody fool.”
“And why did I kill Hastings?”
O’Neill shivered. “How the hell should I know that?”
“Why did I kill Hastings?”
O’Neill considered it. “Ya didn’t need him and ya didn’t need t’ pay him the money—”
“Did he know everything you knew?”
“Of course he—”
“So I didn’t need you—”
O’Neill fell silent.
“Or need you now.”
O’Neill moaned like a lost soul. “I don’t want the money—”
“I would not need you now, now that I know—”
“Oh, Mother of God—”
Devereaux buttoned his cuffs while he watched O’Neill. He felt angry, with himself and with the Irishman. First, he had been foolish enough not to set the deadlock last night. And before that, he had permitted an idiot like O’Neill to follow him. He had been drunk and careless and he deserved O’Neill this morning. And O’Neill deserved his fear now because he had wanted to kill Devereaux and might have.
“Get some towels out of the bathroom and clean this mess up,” he said.
“What?”
“Clean this mess up. We’ve got a lot to talk about this morning. I’m going to order tea.”
O’Neill looked at him. “Tea? Now what would you be after meanin’?”
Devereaux went to the telephone on the nightstand. “You came here for your ten thousand dollars this morning.”
O’Neill nodded.
“Perhaps you’ll get it. After we talk. And I find out the worth of what you have and what you were willing to tell Hastings. Find out what was good enough to get Hastings killed.”
O’Neill felt reprieved. “Well, now,” he said. His face was flushed and streaked with dried blood. He felt pain over the mask of his features. None of that mattered. He tried out a jaunty voice, the voice of a man of the world: “Well, you’re a man to talk with, I can see, sur.”
The talk proved considerably more painful than O’Neill expected.
Devereaux probed like a dentist without a care for pain. He drilled around O’Neill’s information and then went deep into the past until he struck the nerve. What had been his relationship with Hastings? (R Section had scant knowledge of Hastings’ informal network of contacts.) Why had O’Neill agreed to run for British Intelligence in the first place; was it when Hastings was still with them? Why had he stayed with Hastings after his retirement? Was O’Neill still feeding the Brits?
O’Neill sat like a schoolboy in a chair by the misty window and looked down at the railway lines streaming out of Edinburgh. He wished for home.
O’Neill was a traveling salesman for a major British shoe manufacturer that had extensive factories and offices in Northern Ireland and in the Republic to the south. Because he was Catholic, his upward progress in the English-owned firm had been slow — especially in the Belfast offices — and he could reasonably aspire to no greater job than he now held and had held for the past fifteen years.
Which had fed a spark of bitterness in him against the Prods and the English who ruled Northern Ireland. And which, for O’Neill as others, had found outlet finally in the civil rights demonstrations begun in 1969 with Bernadette Devlin.
O’Neill had merely been a spectator at first in the civil rights movement (as it was then called). He attended a few of the peaceful rallies but did not take part in the protest marches in Londonderry and Belfast which so excited the Protestant minority. The tactics used by the civil rights people were borrowed from the black civil rights movement of the 1960s in America. Like that black movement, it finally fell victim to despair. Doubting the efficacy of peaceful protest to win rights, it turned to violence.
Then — as the provisional Irish Republican Army gradually replaced the civil-rightists as the rallying point for the unrest in the Catholic majority in the North — O’Neill felt himself stirred to something like patriotism. Or as much patriotism as a man with a family of nine children could afford.
O’Neill’s uncles from Mayo had fought in the “troubles” against the English in the teens and twenties. That fact dwelt heavily inside the little salesman.