Green stood in the middle of the hall, transfixed by the sound. At last, the notes were all struck and the clock resumed its slow, even tick-tock.
Noon.
The dark wood of the hall surrounded him, seemed to oppress him. The housekeeper would be in the back kitchen. There would be the stupidity of lunch again, the awkward conversation.…
He went to get his coat from the hall tree.
It was time.
13
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
Faolin made the sign of the cross with the others who were packed into the tiny church.
An old woman began to cry, sobbing softly. She buried her face in her hands. Her hands were wrapped with the beads of a black rosary. Her head was covered with a black scarf.
Faolin looked at her. She would be Deirdre Monahan’s aunt, the last person left in that little family. He had learned who they all were.
“I will go to the altar of God.” The priest held his hands apart and lights of the candles caught the shine in the satiny material of the black chasuble. The golden cross imprinted on the back of the loose garment glittered in the low, intense light of the candles.
“To God, the joy of my youth. Give judgment to me, O God, and decide my cause against an unjust and unholy people. From unjust and deceitful men, deliver me.”
Faolin stared at Lord Slough. The Englishman sat stiffly in the pew behind the coffin. His daughter sat next to him. They sat looking straight ahead, strangers to the service and to the surroundings.
“For you, O God, are my strength.” The old priest pronounced the English words as distinctly and solemnly as he had pronounced the Latin words in the old from of the Mass. He spoke as though he were pleading the psalm for himself. “Why have You forsaken me? And why do I go about in sadness, while the enemy afflicts me?”
Deirdre had not lived in the village for ten years, and her relatives were mostly dead, buried in the rocky spit of land up the road where her own remains would be buried in a little while. But most of the village of Innisbally had come to the church anyway, to stare at the spectacle of the English lord who lived in the old mansion in the burren hills.
That was why Faolin had come. He had told no one. They would say it was foolish, a risk. Perhaps. But he had to see this man he hated enough to kill.
Faolin held his cloth cap in hand. His eyes glittered in the candlelight. A statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus looked down on him. His coat was unbuttoned and open but he did not care. He did not wear a gun. These were not the enemy; only the English lord, who would die another day on the Irish Sea.
Faolin had come to Innisbally the day before, “passing through,” he’d said at MacDermott’s public house — on his way to see his aunt down in Limerick. A walking trip from Derry. What news of Derry, then? They had stood him a jar and then another, and even the young, toothless garda had bought him a whisky. The garda wasn’t a bad sort, just a country boy who had gone into the national police because he didn’t have the skill for the fields.
“Is it work ye’re doin’ in Derry, then?” the garda asked. The lad had never been beyond Galway City some twenty-six miles up the road.
Shaking his head, Faolin mumbled something about the dole and not findin’ work and perhaps emigratin’ to America—
They could all understand that. The village, which had had nearly five hundred families before the great famine and the subsequent waves of emigration, now had fewer than seventy-five people, most of them old. The children grew up and moved away. There was nothing in Innisbally, even by the standards of a poor country.
Faolin had gotten drunk with them; he could not remember the last time he had gotten drunk. They had warmed him with their openness and their generous hands — though they had so little — and they had made him angry, too. They had talked about Lord Slough who was coming down for the funeral Mass, a grand gesture, and then how his Lordship had taken on all the expense, even to the sandwiches and tea after, because old Mrs. Tone, Deirdre’s aunt, didn’t have a bob to her name.… Their gratitude made him angry but he had checked it, he thought, nearly to the last.
So he had fallen asleep drunk on the publican’s sofa and now, groggy with drink, he had agreed to go to the funeral Mass to see the English lord.
A sight to see, they had said. And Durkin had urged him to stay the morning and have a jar before he went on his way.
The bell rang and the priest raised the bread.
“This is My Body.”
Faolin instinctively bowed his head as he had done as a child and struck his breast lightly. Then he looked up again and surveyed the faces in the church; finally, he met a pair of eyes staring at him from across the church.
He returned the gaze.
A middle-aged man in a dark coat with a black mustache and clear blue eyes.
“This is My Blood,” the priest began. He raised the chalice. The bell rang again.
Faolin took his eyes away from the face and lowered them and struck his breast. When he looked up, the face had turned away and was staring at another part of the church.
The other man was not from the tiny village, Faolin decided.
He looked so sure, so certain that it was his right to stare at people.
A policeman, Faolin thought.
Devereaux had finally decided to act. He knew actions were foolish, but he could not wait any longer.
The afternoon after Elizabeth had come to him, he’d made up his mind. After love and after a kind of trust that comes with nakedness and lovemaking; he had felt her shiver and felt a little of her fear and finally had believed she was afraid of death.
They had stayed in the hotel room all that day, until late afternoon. They had not eaten, only slept and made love. Devereaux knew that was foolish, too; that he must decide about Hanley and R Section and about this double game against him, and now against Elizabeth. He must decide about Denisov and the blond-haired man.
And about Elizabeth.
The computer of his brain broke down; logical sequences did not seem to work; there were too many random facts and conclusions that did not seem to have any connection.
He lay in bed with her beside him. He stared out the window and let his instincts begin to reprogram the computer.
After a long time, he thought it was working again.
He thought he began to understand. Not all the parts. But there was a sort of logic to it if he excluded certain things that did not make any sense. There were always random threads in any assignment, parts that did not make sense. Parts that did not relate in the long run to the problem at hand.
When he thought she was awake, he began: “I want you to go to London.”
“My passport—”
“We’ll go back to the hotel. Before it’s dark. I want you to go to London tonight. To a house. A safe house. Then I want you to—”
“There’s no safe house,” she began.
“Yes.”
“R Section wants to kill me. And you—”
He looked at the dying light beyond the window. “No. Not the Section. Not Hanley.”
He felt her shiver next to him. He had already decided about Elizabeth.
“I thought of everything you told me,” he said. Devereaux was not comfortable with explanations. He did not like to explain the process of his thoughts. When he reported to Hanley at the end of assignments, he only told him what had happened, not why he had chosen to act. But Elizabeth was frightened. He felt it and wanted to make her understand.
“It doesn’t work,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense. There is no logic to a double section operated by one man. Therefore, there is no double section. There is a real R Section and then there is your ghost R Section. Your Hanley is a ghost Hanley; the office you saw was another office. I don’t understand it, how they did it, but I think I begin to understand why. And why you were sent here to spy on me. And why Blatchford was sent to kill me. It didn’t have anything to do with this mission.”