“I am careful.”
“Watching both ways when you cross the street?”
“You think he was killed. I mean, deliberately?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” She thought she did know.
“There aren’t too many coincidences in the real world,” Mac said.
“Except for priests,” she replied and she evoked another chuckle that sailed over the phone lines three thousand miles.
“Find anything?”
“Yes. And a big no.”
“What’s the yes?”
“Note on a meeting two weeks ago. With a man named Parker who lived in Dublin. That’s all it says, just Parker. He thinks Parker is a British agent. That sounds a little fantastic, doesn’t it?”
“You mean secret agent, spies, booga-booga? Just the thing we’re looking for, Rita.”
“Yes. Do you know how many Parkers there are in the Dublin phone directory? And what if the spy wasn’t even listed?”
Again, Mac chuckled. “What are you going to do?”
“When I get done, I’m going to the British Embassy and ask for him.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“It’s the only idea I have. Flush him out. Never hesitate, as Kaiser used to tell me.” Kaiser had been her first editor in Washington; he had been her father and mentor and her cynical conscience.
“You might not want to flush him.”
“Oh, I’m not afraid of a British secret agent. Unless he happens to be a Russian double agent.”
“Half of them seem to be,” Mac said. “So all this is tied to this Tomas Crohan?”
“I don’t know but I think so. I guess I believe in coincidences more than you do. I mean, I think they mean something, that they connect things that shouldn’t be connected. I went to Dublin airport and ran down every plane that left within two hours after Father Cunningham was killed. I eliminated the flights to Shannon because it seemed unlikely he was doubling back to another airport in the country. I think the killer wanted to get out of the country. Well, there was supposed to be a flight for Belfast twenty minutes after the killing. That’s a possibility. And there was a plane for Amsterdam at noon. And one other international flight — for Copenhagen at twelve thirty-five. That would be perfect.”
“Copenhagen? I don’t understand any of this.”
“Father Cunningham wrote that he had a visitor a year ago and it must have started him thinking about the whole business again. A man named O’Donnell, retired in the Irish government, he had been part of the De Valera government in the forties, during the war. He had known Cunningham then. Well, apparently they just had a get-together, a chat, but at one point, Cunningham brought up Crohan. He said he had known Crohan as a child and he had just received this letter about Crohan from his cousin, Mrs. Fitzroy, who lived in America. He told O’Donnell that Mrs. Fitzroy was convinced that Crohan was still alive in the Soviet Gulag.”
“So?”
“Well, you know how you need legs of a tripod to make the camera stand steady? Up to now, I’ve had two legs: Mrs. Fitzroy and the letter that Father Cunningham sent to her. Now I think I’ve got the third leg, except there’s a problem with it.”
“Rita, you’re talking me in circles again.”
She realized she was breathless, speaking too quickly into the ancient telephone receiver provided in a booth off the bare lobby in the little Buswell Hotel. The connection faded at times and it seemed Mac’s voice rose and fell like ocean waves.
“This fellow O’Donnell, who is dead now — he died six months ago of cancer — this fellow O’Donnell, he said he wasn’t all that certain that Mrs. Fitzroy wasn’t right. He said that he learned that Crohan was being held in some prison hospital or something in Leningrad.”
“Did he just divine this or did it come as a stroke of lightning from on high?”
She smiled. “Well, that’s the part that gets interesting and frustrating at the same time — that’s the part I can’t understand. It seems there was some sort of connection between British Intelligence and the Irish special branch or whatever it is. This O’Donnell was a liaison. Cunningham was writing all this out, almost like a term paper, he was going over it over and over again as though he didn’t understand it any more than I do. But this is what I think it means: Somehow, the British know that Crohan is alive in the Soviet Union. And somehow, they weren’t unhappy to let the Irish government know, too. For all I know, the CIA knows it, too, which is why they’ve been playing hard-to-get with me from the beginning.”
There was a pause so long that Rita thought for a moment they had been disconnected.
Finally, Mac spoke slowly. “Why? Why, Rita, would they all know this and keep it a secret?”
“Why do birds fly? Why do Swedes have trouble finding Soviet submarines in their waters? Why do we cancel grain sales and then renew them when nothing has changed? Why a lot of things?”
“Because it is not profitable to acknowledge that Crohan is alive.”
“That’s part of it. The Swedes didn’t exactly kill themselves trying to get Wallenberg out of the Soviet Union right after the war. The Swedes had to learn to get along with the Russians, even if they didn’t want to. And Wallenberg came from a big important family, a helluva lot more important than Tomas Crohan.”
“I don’t see where any of this is going to lead,” Mac said.
“Neither do I.”
“Fortunately, you have the time. We are a wealthy magazine and quite given to flights of fancy that consume both time and money. So what are you going to do?”
“Go to Leningrad,” Rita said.
“The direct approach,” Mac said.
“That’s the way Kaiser taught me,” she replied.
“Well, your Kaiser did a good job.”
Kaiser had done a good job on her. She hurried along Adrian Lane to Shelbourne where she could take a shortcut across the Kingwell Crescent to Baggot Street and find a taxi. It was bitterly cold as all the days became as they sank into early evening. She huddled in her wool navy coat, her head turned away from the direction of the wind. Rita wore an Irish wool cap on her head, pulled down over her ears.
There was nothing more to be gained from going through Father Cunningham’s possessions. Requiescat in pace.
Kaiser.
The thought of the old sausage of an editor had come back to her again and again while she sifted through the life of Father Cunningham contained in a few notes, a diary, and bits of memorabilia. Kaiser had no scruples but to get the story. There had been one photograph that finally struck her: Cunningham, a woman, a man. The woman must have been Mrs. Fitzroy, taken probably in the late 1930s. They were very young, probably teens or just into their twenties.
They were identified on the back of the snapshot by nicknames. “Toby” was Mrs. Fitzroy and the other identifiable figure was “Danny.” It must have been Cunningham. But who was “Sarsfield”?
Crohan. It must be Crohan. Wasn’t Sarsfield the name of an Irish rebel?
Kaiser would not have wanted her to wait. “Get the story out, little Rita.” But Rita would have to wait. There was a story here that kept growing and growing the longer she waited.
There was a tour out of Helsinki to Leningrad they had suggested at the American Express office on Grafton Street. It might be the quickest way to get into the Soviet Union. She would risk it and risk spending a couple of idle days in Helsinki waiting for the tour.
One of the flights after Cunningham’s death had been for Copenhagen. Had the killer gone back to Russia through the northern door as well? Was he a Russian?
Nothing is what it seems.
Damn, she thought. She had been haunted by the thought of Kaiser all day, Kaiser who had killed himself during the business with the other priest. And now she had to think of Devereaux again, even though he had been buried out of her thoughts for nearly three years. Devereaux had said nothing good could happen if they had remained together; Devereaux had frozen her out at last and now she even wondered if he was still alive.