He ducked into Bewleys, his favorite coffee shop off Grafton, climbed the wooden stairs to the second level and the James Joyce room, named for the city’s favorite son. Jim Kopp had been on the run from the FBI for 17 months. Yet he frequented a place like Bewleys, which was a popular meeting place in the city. It was hardly the kind of dark corner where a fugitive would be expected to lurk. Despite his professed rejection of material things, Jim gravitated towards the trendy. Bewleys had energy, felt so alive. Had he not come this far? Was God not with him? The FBI tentacles were everywhere, he knew, but they had not found him. As he climbed the stairs, Jim could see the quotations stenciled onto the peach-colored walls, written in Gaelic, the language the Irish tried to preserve.
Is friotal aindéthe, Is bri na nadana. (I am the true word of the hidden gods, I am a word of poetry.)
Mise an ghaois/ Mise an deal bhadoir/ Mise gaoth ar muir. (I am the wisdom of the mind/ I am the conjuring sage/ I am the wind over the sea.)
Nurse a coffee, chat with a few of the regulars who knew him as Timothy, people like Peter, who was sacristan at a nearby church. And there was Terry, who had cerebral palsy and was in a wheelchair. Everyone on the street knew Terry.
Timothy rose, left his friends, walked to the end of Grafton. There is a war monument there—like a miniature Arc de Triomphe, it occurred to him—listing the death casualties for the South African War at the turn of the 20th century. He could read the scrolclass="underline" Third Battalion: L. Murphy. Murphy. His grandmother’s maiden name. He walked under the arch into St. Stephen’s Green. A pond, fountains, lush green grass, palm trees—not an uncommon sight in Ireland—rows of tall elms. He thought of the place as a Garden of Eden. Do not linger long. Yellow reflective jackets. The Gardai—Irish police, on foot patrol.
Jim Kopp loved the city but hated his life, the anguish of running, the fear. Exhilaration one moment, despondency the next. Such extremes. Having left the Morningstar hostel, he now lived at the Ivelagh Hostel on Bride Road, in the Christ Church area of Dublin. It was an old part of town crowded with apartments, row houses, markets. He lived on the top floor of the hostel, room 191, in a cramped dorm-style room with an armoire, some shelves, a bed, and barely enough room to turn around. From his window he could see the courtyard of a vocational school, and beyond that the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. On the main floor there was a kitchenette where tenants made toast and snacks, a common room, dining area, everything painted pistachio green. Compared to Morningstar, this was high living. He lived under the name Tim Guttler, came and went as he pleased, said hello to the manager, staffers. He worked odd jobs, earned about 74 Irish pounds weekly. Kevin Byrne managed the place, a burly man with gray hair and ruddy face who guarded the privacy of his tenants like a bulldog.
Jim Kopp was by now an expert at obtaining false identities. The names of the dead were perfect. He’d visit a cemetery, find the name of someone who would have been close to his own age. On July 4, 2000, he obtained a temporary driver’s license in the name of Sean O’Briain, date of birth January 2, 1960. He put together a new résumé and submitted it to an employment agency.
Jim Kopp made a good Catholic effort to mortify temptation, but drinking did not rank as high on his list of sins to resist as others, especially in Dublin. His weakness was Bulmers cider. Pubs are Dublin’s heart, places independent of time where the Irish take their worries out for the night and dance all over them. At pubs like O’Shea’s, walls shake from people clapping and stomping to
the sounds of Celtic Storm, the smoky room filled with faces that glow from the drink, heat, and uninhibited perfection of the evening. Young men and women, elderly, couples, singles, all joining as though part of a single body, feeding off the energy of one another. The mood peaks, incongruously, when the band launches into American standards like Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler,” and John Denver’s “Country Roads,” hitting the chorus hard: “Take me home, country roads, to the place, I BE-LONG!”
True to form, Jim also spent time in the trendy, cobblestoned Temple Bar area, where tourists and students flock. There was a sports bar boasting 100 TV screens he visited to watch American football, see if his hometown San Francisco 49ers were playing. (Did he mention that he had a connection—apologies if he sounds like a name-dropper, he hates doing that— with Joe Montana, the Niners legend? Not a direct connection, mind you, but he knew someone who knew Montana quite well. And he had once met Mark Bavaro, too, the former New York Giants tight end—a big pro-lifer.) He hung with his Irish friends, had a few drinks, perhaps more than a few drinks, walked the streets with them late at night, feeling like a regular guy at times. But could he feel anything for long? The friends who knew him as Timothy had no idea who he really was. Did Jim even know the answer to that question? He had been on the run for 20 months.
Early one morning, the pubs closed, the streets barren. He moved alone, briskly but cautiously, down the street, pulled his jacket pockets inside out. It was a trick he had learned to deter pickpockets, show them he had nothing to interest them, which was in fact pretty much true. With all his experience, Jim liked to think there wasn’t a city in the world he couldn’t walk through in the middle of the night. But then, he had never been wanted for murder before.
His internal radar had never been more sensitive. Footsteps clicking on the wet pavement behind him. Heavy steps. Perhaps two men? Gardai? Interpol? FBI? He walked faster, turned down an alley. Don’t think. Disappear. He felt his hands on cold metal as he pulled himself into the garbage Dumpster, sinking into the rot, the stench turning his stomach. Think about the shower, the inevitable glorious shower he could take in the morning. Suffer. Feel it. Be stronger from it.
Later, feeling secure again, he sat down to write, thoughts flooding his mind. His letters were a kaleidoscope of corny jokes, doodled happy faces, references to favorite movies and books, scattered Latin phrases, homilies attributed to his mother and father, Biblical passages. One letter, two, three, four, five. He wrote them all to the same person. He couldn’t help himself. He sealed the envelope. On the back, he wrote a return address in German. On the front, he wrote the destination in his looping handwriting:
Ted Barnes
385 Chestnut Street
Apt. 2D/Brooklyn, N.Y.
Brooklyn, N.Y.
June 2000
Loretta Marra looked at her friend as he drove. He was Dennis’s old friend, really, but over the last year or so she had grown to trust him, at least enough that he was driving Loretta and one of her sons to a walk-in clinic so the boy could get medical treatment. Loretta had kept a low profile but she wanted to quietly become active in the movement again. Federal law made old-style rescues too risky, but there were other ways to throw a wrench into the baby-killing business. One was to put industrial-strength glue into the locks at clinics.