“What do you mean? Who have you talked … who is with you?”
Ranklin said: “Take his pistol. Then talk all you want.”
“The Captain?” Peter said, peering through the gloom under the trees. “Why did you bring …”
“I’ll be takin’ the pistol, all the same.”
Ranklin glared at the shape that was Peter, wanting to hate him, reminding himself of the trail of blood that led across Europe to this muddy patch, of the dead soldier in the hall, wanting to want to kill him. He just felt cold.
But a soldier should feel cold. Not hate. The enemy was a thing, an obstacle, an obstruction to be removed. Think of this man as the enemy.
“The pistol?” Peter said. “Oh, it is in the car. I show you.” He turned to the car, turned his back on O’Gilroy and the shotgun.
And Ranklin, abandoning wanting and trying and thinking itself, raised the derringer at arm’s length and fired both shots into Peter’s back. Immediately, there was a third shot.
Ranklin jerked his glance at O’Gilroy, but the shotgun hadn’t fired. Peter fell, with very little sound in the wet grass and mud, gave one gasping moan and died.
O’Gilroy stepped forward, bent, and picked up the pistol that had been in Peter’s waistband, that he had grabbed when he turned his back. “Ye was quicker’n me, Captain. He’d mebbe’ve shot me.”
No, Ranklin thought dully, I wasn’t quick. I shot an unarmed man in the back. I didn’t know he had his finger on a trigger. I was just doing my duty.
“Only I didn’t know ye had a gun,” O’Gilroy went on. “Is it my turn now?”
“It’s empty.” Ranklin gave it to him and stooped over the body.
Surprised, O’Gilroy peered at the little pistol. “I niver saw the like before. And where was ye keepin’ it?”
“Taped to the back of my leg.”
“I’d’ve missed findin’ it meself.”
Ranklin straightened up holding a bunch of papers, then took out his matches and lit one of the car’s acetylene lamps.
“Jayzus,” O’Gilroy protested. “Ye’ll have every constable and all the Army itself on us – ”
“Just for a moment.” He read quickly through the papers in the lamplight. “Here we are: a second-class berth in the name of Vogel, on the Carmania to New York, later today. D’you want to see?”
Numb of mind, O’Gilroy glanced at the ticket and nodded. Ranklin turned off the lamp.
“Well now,” O’Gilroy said. He lowered the hammers on the shotgun, propped it against the car, and sat down on the running board. “And now d’ye … No. First, d’ye have a cigarette?”
They both lit up; Ranklin opened the rear door of the car and sat on the seat beside several bags of gold, just to get his feet off the ground. His thin evening shoes were leaking and his toes freezing.
“And what about the gold?” O’Gilroy asked quietly.
What indeed? Ranklin had already been thinking about that. If he piled it back aboard the car, drove to some corner of the island and buried it, O’Gilroy would be committing suicide if he denounced him. It would be plain theft and horribly disloyal but genteel poverty was horrible, too, and twenty thousand would just about put his family back on its feet.
And, of course, give him away, because it would be immediately clear that his family was back on its feet, most creditors paid off. The only reason he wanted the gold would betray that he had taken it. He sighed and put the idea behind him (but later, being as pessimistic about himself as about anything, he wondered which had been the stronger motive for leaving the sovereigns alone. Or, as it turned out, almost alone).
“When you think about it.” he said, “that steamship ticket was your death warrant – and Mick’s. He couldn’t have left you two alive. He would have killed Mick anyway.”
“I’ll remember who killed Mick,” O’Gilroy said tonelessly.
And I who killed Peter Piatkow, Ranklin thought. And exactly how.
“And the gold?” O’Gilroy prompted.
“As far as I’m concerned, you can take it – as far as you can get with it.”
“So ye was jist after himself.” He nodded at Peter’s body. “Wid yer little gun. And what would it all be for?”
“He was some sort of revolutionary – Anarchist, Communist, Menshevik, Bolshevik, perhaps all of them at one time – going to America to organise things there.” It was absurd to be discussing the Bureau’s affairs with this man, but Ranklin badly needed to sort out his own thoughts. “I was to prevent him, arrest him separately from – anybody else.”
“It sounds like somebody’s been talking about us,” O’Gilroy said thoughtfully, and almost stopping Ranklin’s heart. What had he betrayed now? Then he realised that just by planning to ambush the ambushers, the Bureau had given away its hand, and must have withdrawn its informant already – or be sure he was above suspicion. He started breathing again.
“Arrest him – or kill him?” O’Gilroy added.
“I was prepared for that,” Ranklin said stiffly.
“I see ye was. And nobody to know, is that it? And then what?”
“I do not have to explain myself to you.” Ranklin hoped his stiffness hid the fact that he had no idea.
“Ye do not, and that’s a fact.” O’Gilroy smoked and thought for a while. “But ye wanted his ticket and papers.”
Ranklin had assumed that was simply as proof, like taking Peter’s scalp. But now he, too, began to wonder.
“So if ye had a man waitin’,” O’Gilroy said slowly, “and wid his bags packed, he could be sailin’ in Piat-kow’s place. And them in America’d never know, not knowin’ him already. Would that be the way of it?”
Suddenly faced with the naked idea, Ranklin knew that had to be the way of it. But why hadn’t the Bureau trusted him with full knowledge? Because he might have been captured and talked, of course. And why hadn’t he worked it out for himself? Because he had set out doggedly to obey orders he hadn’t liked. And while O’Gilroy might be used to thinking in such crooked ways, he himself wasn’t.
And then came the appalling shock of shame that he had accidentally revealed the whole scheme to O’Gilroy.
“Do you believe,” he said as earnestly as he could, “that if you breathe one word of this to anybody, then if I don’t hunt you down and kill you, somebody else most certainly will?”
O’Gilroy thought carefully about that, then said: “No.”
7
Ranklin, who from his brief experience of the Bureau hadn’t believed it either, nevertheless felt rather taken aback. But O’Gilroy took a last suck at his cigarette, pitched it into the trees and went on: “No, there’s none of yez could do it, and most’d have the sense not to try. But what’s to worry? Yer talkin’ to a dead man, when word gets round I killed me sister’s boy and banjaxed the whole matter. How far d’ye think I’ll get, come the day?”
Ranklin instinctively glanced at the east, but the day was still on the far side of the world.
O’Gilroy said heavily: “And would ye believe I come along tonight jest to be sure the boy didn’t come to harm – Jayzus.” He shook his head. “Would ye have another cigarette? I’ve thinkin’ to do.”
They smoked in silence, except for the noise Ranklin made trying to shuffle life back into his almost-beyond-pain toes. Breaks in the cloud showed patches of vivid blackness, pinholed with sharp stars, and on the earth below, the mud flats looked like smooth slimy lumps of offal.
Halfway through his cigarette, O’Gilroy asked: “Was ye thinkin’ of gettin’ me strung up for the killin’ of that soldier?”
Ranklin was a bit surprised that the idea hadn’t even occurred to him. “No, as far as I’m concerned, that score’s settled with …” he gestured towards Piatkow’s body. “And the people I work for, they aren’t really concerned with Ireland.”
“Is that a fact, now?” O’Gilroy went back to thinking. Then: “Yer new to this work, then, Captain?”
“Yes.” Ranklin wished he hadn’t said that so vehemently.
“Ye’ll be needin’ some help, then.”
“I need to dispose of Piatkow. The channel here should be quite deep, in the middle.”