“I want you to meet Mrs. Fitzroy,” Mac had begun on that day nearly six weeks ago. “She wants to tell you a story about a fellow who might or might not be dead. At least he’s been among the missing for forty years. Mrs. Fitzroy, this is Rita Macklin—”
“I wanted to see you,” Mrs. Fitzroy had said and grasped her hand with a strong grip. “I know about your work. You found the priest who had the secret journal. Three years ago, I remember the story was in all the newspapers in Chicago.”
“Thank you,” she had said, holding the grip but giving Mac one of those “who the hell is this” looks.
“Mrs. Fitzroy is a friend of Mr. Camper,” said Mac, explaining and introducing at the same time. Carlton Camper was the publisher of the magazine. “Mrs. Fitzroy said that she wanted to talk to you and so Mr. Camper thought it was a good idea and so do I, Rita.”
“Oh, Miss Macklin, I know this is all dirty politics and clout,” Mrs. Fitzroy said suddenly, “I realize you think I’m an old lady who’s going to tell you some fantastic story, and I am. But you just listen to me and if you don’t think it is worth doing anything with, you can just tell me to get back on the plane for Chicago and I’ll leave you alone.”
Rita had smiled then, suddenly and genuinely, and she had taken Mrs. Fitzroy to the interview room and sat fascinated for two hours as the old woman brought out her family photographs and old clippings about her cousin in Ireland who had disappeared suddenly in 1944 while on a mission for the Office of Strategic Services — the OSS that preceded the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The story had been intriguing enough for Rita to follow up with a request to review CIA archives on the matter under the Freedom of Information Act. The file would be forty years old.
That is when she met Mr. Wallace, a junior officer in the CIA who met her in Langley, Virginia, at CIA headquarters one bright winter afternoon, bought her coffee in the cafeteria, led her to a windowless and soundproof interview room, and then explained for four minutes why she couldn’t see the files.
“I want to be perfectly honest with you, Miss Macklin.”
“No. I think that’s exactly what you don’t want to be with me. This case is forty years old, it’s got mold on it. I’m asking to see historical documents related to the war. Even the British release their war stories after a forty-year wait.”
“But there’s really nothing to release.”
“Then release it and let me judge that.”
“Why are you interested in this story, Miss Macklin?”
“Why are you interested in covering it up?”
And so it had gone.
A search of the clippings morgue at the Washington Post turned up not a word about Tomas Crohan because the file had been stripped. By tediously going through public library copies of the paper from the critical months in 1944 and 1945, Rita Macklin was able to find out that Tomas Crohan was believed to have been arrested by Soviet authorities when they entered Vienna in 1945. But why was he there? And what was the American connection to it? And why was it important forty years later to keep the matter buttoned up at Langley?
A clipping in the thin file at the magazine showed the Russians admitting capturing Crohan but that he had died in prison in 1946. The magazine had called Crohan “a prewar Irish hothead who had strong ties of friendship to the Nazi gang around der Führer” and who “championed Irish neutrality in the critical days of the war.”
Bits of clippings and, of course, the extraordinary letters hinting at dark involvement of the Americans with Crohan sent to Mrs. Fitzroy by her childhood friend, Father Cunningham.
It became intriguing enough to involve Rita’s attention day and night and when she had asked Mac for permission to pursue the story with Cunningham in Ireland, he really had no choice. He had smiled and said, “This is blackmail, isn’t it? Just because it’s a Camper request, I’ll have to do it.”
“Ireland is hardly a pleasure spot in winter.”
“True. But some get their kicks out of masochism.”
“Wrap yerself, ye’ll catch yer death,” said the housekeeper, Mrs. Ryan, who bustled around old Father Cunningham like a mother wrapping up a schoolboy for his daily trek to school.
The old priest muttered and allowed her to fuss with his buttons and scarf and then gently pushed her away.
“I’ll be back by two,” he said.
“See that ye are,” Mrs. Ryan said, standing with her hands on hips. “And why couldn’t ye see this person here, I want to know?”
“Ah, and would I get a better meal here than at the Shelbourne Hotel? And her to pay for it? Besides, she’s probably a pretty thing and I don’t want ye after scaring her out of her wits.”
So they ragged at each other in loud voices to the front door of St. Adrian’s rectory. Mrs. Ryan opened it, held it and slammed it behind the old man who went down the cold, glistening stone steps slowly, his gloved hand on the railing.
It had started raining and the rain blew gustily down the narrow, drab Dublin street. It began to glaze the walks with traces of ice.
The old priest took a step off the curb between two cars and paused at the street, looking both ways though it was a one-way street. By nature, he was a cautious man.
He stepped into the street and a small, black Ford Escort, which had been waiting for him in a double-park lane, suddenly bolted forward. The old man saw it out of the corner of his eye.
He turned and stared at the car and realized what was going to happen to him; curiously, he did not feel panic; it was as though he had expected this from the moment he had decided to write the first letter to Catherine Fitzroy after all these years of silence.
In that instant, he prayed for the soul of Tomas Crohan because he was certain that Crohan was dead. And then he realized, with something like calm relief, that he would see Crohan in a moment.
He did not even feel the impact of the car.
He felt he was flying; he felt removed from laws of gravity and chains of mortality.
In fact, he was literally flying from the impact across the narrow street even as the car was beyond him. The driver had not stopped or braked. The priest’s body crashed heavily through the window of the fishmonger across the way, cut by a hundred shards of plate glass that ripped his ancient flesh and clothing even though he was dead enough. He was dead before his bones crumpled on the white tile of the fish store.
At the far corner, Antonio braked, looked left and swung into the main street.
In thirty-one minutes, he was inside the terminal of the Dublin airport. He boarded the plane for Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen about the moment the police removed the body of Father Cunningham from the fishmonger’s and about the time Rita Macklin learned from a sobbing housekeeper named Mrs. Ryan that Father Cunningham had been killed on his way to meet her.
It was purely an accident, a dreadful thing, Mrs. Ryan told Rita Macklin when she called on the telephone.
But Rita Macklin did not answer because she felt a heavy chill descend over her; she suddenly felt tired; she suddenly, for the first time since the time of the other priest three years before, felt afraid.
She said nothing to Mrs. Ryan because there was nothing to say.
Except that it had not been an accident at all.
6
Kulak stared at the body half buried in the snow of the construction pit. There had been too many policemen and he had chased half of them away and used the few left to screen the site.