Ratlines

CHAPTER ONE

“You don’t look like a Jew,” Helmut Krauss said to the man reflected in the window pane.

Beyond the glass, rolling white waves threw themselves against the rocks of Galway Bay, the Atlantic glowering beyond. The guesthouse in Salthill was basic, but clean. The small seaside town outside Galway City hosted families from all over Ireland seeking a few days of salt air and sunshine during the summer months. Sometimes it provided beds for unmarried couples, fornicators and adulterers with the nerve to bluff their way past the morally upright proprietors of such establishments.

Krauss knew so because he had enjoyed the company of several ladies in guesthouses like this one, taking bracing walks along the seafront, enduring overcooked meals in mostly empty dining rooms, then finally rattling the headboard of whatever bed they had taken. He carried a selection of wedding rings in his pocket, alongside the prophylactics.

This dreary island, more grey than green, so choked by the Godly, provided him few pleasures. So why not enjoy the odd sordid excursion with a needful woman?

Perhaps Krauss should have allowed himself the luxury of a decent hotel in the city, but a funeral, even if for a close friend, did not seem a fitting occasion. The security might have been better, though, and this visitor might not have gained entry so easily. For a moment, Krauss felt an aching regret, but immediately dismissed it as foolishness. Had he been the kind of man who submitted to regret, he would have hanged himself ten years ago.

“Are you a Jew?” Krauss asked.

The reflection shifted. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“I saw you at the funeral,” Krauss said. “It was a beautiful service.”

“Very,” the reflection said. “You wept.”

“He was a good man,” Krauss said. He watched gulls skate the updrafts.

“He was a murderer of women and children,” the reflection said. “Like you.”

“Murderer,” Krauss said. “Your accent is British. For many people in Ireland, you British are murderers. Oppressors. Imperialists.”

The reflection swelled on the glass as the man approached. “You hide your accent well.”

“I enjoy the spoken word. To a fault, perhaps, but I spend time refining and practicing my speech. Besides, a German accent still draws attention, even in Ireland. They shelter me, but not all make me welcome. Some cling to their British overmasters like a child too old for the teat.”

Krauss had felt the weight of his age more frequently in recent times. His thick black hair had greyed, the sculpted features turned cragged. The veins in his nose had begun to rupture with the vodka and wine. Women no longer stared at him with hungry eyes when he took his afternoon walks through Dublin’s Ringsend Park. But he still had good years ahead of him, however few. Would this man steal them from him?

“Have you come to kill me too?” he asked.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” the reflection said.

“May I take a drink, perhaps smoke a cigarette?”

“You may.”

Krauss turned to him. A man of middle age, between forty and forty five, old enough to have served in the war. He had looked younger across the cemetery, dressed in the overalls of a gravedigger, but proximity showed the lines on his forehead and around his eyes. Sand-coloured hair strayed beneath the woollen cap on his head. He held a pistol, a Browning fitted with a suppressor, aimed squarely at Krauss’s chest. It shook.

“Would you care for a small vodka?” Krauss asked. “Perhaps it will steady your nerve.”

The man considered for a few seconds. “All right,” he said.

Krauss went to the nightstand where a bottle of imported vodka and a tea making set waited next to that morning’s Irish Times. The front page carried a headline about the forthcoming visit of President John F. Kennedy, a story concerning a request by the Northern Irish government that he should venture across the border during his days on the island. The Irish worshipped the American leader because he was one of theirs, however many generations removed, and anticipation of his arrival had reached a point of near hysteria. Krauss intended to avoid all radio and television broadcasts for the duration of Kennedy’s stay.

Not that it mattered now.

Krauss turned two white teacups over and poured a generous shot into each. He went to soften one with water from a jug, but the man spoke.

“No water, thank you.”

Krauss smiled as he handed a cup to the man. “No glasses, I’m afraid. I hope you don’t mind.”

The man nodded his thanks as he took the cup with his left hand. Undiluted vodka spilled over the lip. He took a sip and coughed.

Krauss reached into the breast pocket of his best black suit. The man’s knuckle whitened beneath the trigger guard. Krauss slowed the movement of his hand and produced a gold cigarette case. He opened it, and extended it to the man.

“No, thank you.” The man did not flinch at the engraved swastika as Krauss had hoped. Perhaps he wasn’t a Jew, just some zealous Briton.

Krauss took a Peter Stuyvesant, his only concession to Americanism, and gripped it between his lips as he snapped the case closed and returned it to his pocket. He preferred Marlboro, but they were too difficult to come by in this country. He took the matching lighter from his trouser pocket and sucked the petrol taste from its flame. The set had been a Christmas gift from Wilhelm Frick. Krauss treasured it. Blue smoke billowed between the men.

“Please sit,” Krauss said, indicating the chair in the corner. He lowered himself onto the bed and drew deeply on the cigarette, letting the heat fill his throat and chest. “May I know your name?” he asked.

“You may not,” the man said.

“All right. So why?”

The man took another sip, grimaced at the taste, and placed the cup on the windowsill to his left. “Why what?”

“Why kill me?”

“I haven’t decided if I’ll kill you or not, yet. I want to ask a few questions first.”

Krauss sighed and leaned back against the headboard, crossing his legs on the lumpy mattress. “Very well.”

“Who was the well-dressed Irishman you spoke with?”

“An insultingly junior civil servant,” Krauss said.

Eoin Tomalty had given Krauss’s hand a firm shake after the ceremony. “The minister sends his condolences,” Tomalty had said. “I’m sure you’ll understand why he was unable to attend in person.”

Krauss had smiled and nodded, yes, of course he understood.

“A civil servant?” the man asked. “The government actually sent a representative?”

“A matter of courtesy.”

“Who were the others there?”

“You already know,” Krauss said. “You know me, so you must know them.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Krauss rhymed them off. “Célestin Lainé, Albert Luykx, and Caoimhín Murtagh representing the IRA.”

“The IRA?”

“They are fools,” Krauss said. “Yokels pretending to be soldiers. They still believe they can free Ireland from you British. But they are useful fools, so we avail of their assistance from time to time.”

“Such as arranging funerals.”

“Indeed.”

The man leaned forward. “Where was Skorzeny?”

Krauss laughed. “Otto Skorzeny does not waste his precious time with common men like me. He is far too busy attending society parties in Dublin, or entertaining politicians at that damn farm of his.”

The man reached inside his jacket pocket and produced a sealed envelope. “You will pass this message to him.”

“I’m sorry,” Krauss said. “I cannot.”

“You will.”

“Young man, you misunderstand me,” Krauss said. He downed the rest of the vodka and placed the cup back on the bedside table. “I admit to being verbose at times, it is a failing of mine, but I believe I was clear on this. I did not say ‘I will not’. I said ‘I cannot’. I have no access to Otto Skorzeny, not socially, not politically. You’d do better going to one of the Irish politicians that gather to his flame.”

The man got to his feet, approached the bed, keeping the Browning’s aim level. With his free hand, he opened Krauss’s jacket and stuffed the envelope down into the breast pocket.

“Don’t worry. He’ll get it.”

Krauss felt his bowel loosen. He drew hard on the cigarette, burning it down to the filter, before stubbing it out in the ashtray that sat on the bedside locker.

The man’s hand steadied.

Krauss sat upright, swung his legs off the bed, and rested his feet on the floor. He straightened his back and placed his hands on his knees.

Fixing his gaze on the horizon beyond the window, Krauss said, “I have money. Not much, but some. It would have been enough to see out my days. You can have it. All of it. I will flee. The rain in this damn place makes my joints ache anyway.”

The Browning’s suppressor nudged his temple.

“It’s not that simple,” the man said.

Krauss hauled himself to his feet. The man stood back, the pistol ready.

“Yes it is,” Krauss said, his voice wavering as he fought the tears. “It is that simple. I am nothing. I was a desk clerk. I signed papers, stamped forms, and got piles from sitting on a wooden chair in the dark and the damp.”

The man pressed the muzzle against the centre of Krauss’s forehead. “Those papers you signed. You slaughtered thousands with a pen. Maybe that’s how you live with it, tell yourself it was just a job, but you knew where—”

Krauss swiped at the pistol, grabbed it, forced it down, throwing the other man’s balance. The man regained his footing, hardened his stance. His countenance held its calm, only the bunching of his jaw muscles betraying his resistance.

Sweat prickled Krauss’s skin and pressure built in his head. He hissed through his teeth as he tried to loosen the man’s fingers. The man raised the weapon, his strength rendering Krauss’s effort meaningless. Their noses almost touched. Krauss roared, saw the wet points of spittle he sprayed on the man’s face.

He heard a crack, felt a punch to his stomach, followed by wet heat spreading across his abdomen. His legs turned to water, and he released his hold on the barrel. He crumpled to his knees. His hands clutched his belly, red seeping between his fingers.

Hot metal pressed against Krauss’s temple.

“It’s better than you deserve,” the man said.

If he’d had the time, Helmut Krauss would have said, “I know.”

CHAPTER TWO

Albert Ryan waited with the director, Ciaran Fitzpatrick, in the outer office, facing the secretary as she read a magazine. The chairs were creaky and thin-cushioned. Ryan endured while Fitzpatrick fidgeted. Almost an hour had passed since Ryan had met the director in the courtyard surrounded by the grand complex of buildings on Upper Merrion Street. The northern and sourthern wings were occupied by various government departments, and the Royal College of Science resided beneath the dome that reached skyward on the western side of the quadrangle. Ryan had expected to be ushered into the minister’s presence upon arrival, and by the look of him, so had Fitzpatrick.

Ryan had left his quarters at Gormanston Camp as the sky lightened, turning from a deep bluish grey to a milky white as he walked the short distance to the train station. Two horses grazed in the field across from the platform, their bellies sagging, their coats matted with neglect. They nickered to each other, the sound carrying on the salt breeze. The Irish Sea stretched out beyond like a black marble table.

The train had arrived late. It filled slowly with tobacco smoke and slack-faced men as it neared Dublin, stopping at every point of civilisation along the way. Almost all of the passengers wore suits, whether dressed for their day’s work in some government office, or wearing their Sunday best for a visit to the city.

Ryan also wore a suit, and he always enjoyed the occasion to do so. A meeting with the Minister for Justice certainly warranted the effort. He had walked south from Westland Row Station to Merrion Street and watched the director’s face as he approached. Fitzpatrick had examined him from head-to-toe before nodding his begrudged approval.

“Inside,” he’d said. “We don’t want to be late.”

Now Ryan checked his watch again. The minute hand ticked over to the hour.

He’d heard the stories about the minister. A politician with boundless ambition and the balls to back it up. The upstart had even married the boss’s daughter, become son-in-law to the Taoiseach, Ireland’s prime minister. Some called him a shining star in the cabinet, a reformist kicking at the doors of the establishment; others dismissed him as a shyster on the make. Everyone reckoned him a chancer.

The door opened, and Charles J. Haughey entered.

“Sorry for keeping you waiting, lads,” he said as Fitzpatrick stood. “It was sort of a late breakfast. Come on through.”

“Coffee, Minister?” the secretary asked.

“Christ, yes.”

Ryan got to his feet and followed Haughey and Fitzpatrick into the minister’s office. Once inside, Haughey shook the director’s hand.

“Is this our man Lieutenant Ryan?” he asked.

“Yes, Minister,” Fitzpatrick said.

Haughey extended his hand towards Ryan. “Jesus, you’re a big fella, aren’t you? I’m told you did a good job against those IRA bastards last year. Broke the fuckers’ backs, I heard.”

Ryan shook his hand, felt the hard grip, the assertion of dominance. Haughey stood taller than his height should have allowed, and broad, his dark hair slicked back until his head looked like that of a hawk, his eyes hunting weakness. He had only a couple of years seniority over Ryan, but his manner suggested an older, worldlier man, not a young buck with a higher office than his age should merit.

“I did my best, Minister,” Ryan said.

It had been a long operation, men spending nights dug into ditches, watching farmers come and go, noting the visitors, sometimes following them. The Irish Republican Army’s Border Campaign had died in 1959, its back broken long ago, but Ryan had been tasked with making sure its corpse remained cold and still.

“Good,” Haughey said. “Sit down, both of you.”

They took their places in leather upholstered chairs facing the desk. Haughey went to a filing cabinet, whistled as he fished keys from his pocket, unlocked a drawer, and extracted a file. He tossed it on the desk’s leather surface and sat in his own chair. It swivelled with no hint of creak or squeak.

An Irish tricolour hung in the corner, a copy of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic on the wall, along with pictures of racehorses, lean and proud.

“Who made your suit?” Haughey asked.

Ryan sat silent for a few seconds before he realised the question had been spoken in his direction. He cleared his throat and said, “The tailor in my home town.”

“And where’s that?”

“Carrickmacree.”

“Jesus.” Haughey snorted. “What’s your father, a pig farmer?”

“A retailer,” Ryan said.

“A shopkeeper?”

“Yes,” Ryan said.

Haughey’s smile split his face, giving his mouth the appearance of a lizard’s, his tongue wet and shining behind his teeth.

“Well, get yourself something decent. A man should have a good suit. You can’t be walking around government offices with the arse hanging out of your trousers, can you?”

Ryan did not reply.

“You’ll want to know why you’re here,” Haughey said.

“Yes, Minister.”

“Did the director tell you anything?”

“No, Minister.”

“Proper order,” Haughey said. “He can tell you now.”

Fitzpatrick went to speak, but the secretary bustled in, a tray in her hands. The men remained silent while she poured coffee from the pot. Ryan refused a cup.

When she’d gone, Fitzpatrick cleared his throat and turned in his seat. “The body of a German national was found in a guesthouse in Salthill yesterday morning by the owner. It’s believed he died the previous day from gunshot wounds to the stomach and head. The Garda Síochána were called to the scene, but when the body’s identity was established, the matter was referred to the Department of Justice, and then to my office.”

“Who was he?” Ryan asked.

“Here, he was Heinrich Kohl, a small businessman, nothing more. He handled escrow for various import and export companies. A middle man.”

“You say ‘Here’,” Ryan said. “Meaning elsewhere, he was something different.”

“Elsewhere, he was SS-Hauptsturmführer Helmut Krauss of the Main SS Economic and Administrative Department. That sounds rather more impressive than it was in reality. I believe he was some sort of office worker during the Emergency.”

Government bureaucrats seldom called it the war, as if to do so would somehow dignify the conflict that had ravaged Europe.

“A Nazi,” Ryan said.

“If you want to use such terms, then yes.”

“May I ask, why aren’t the Galway Garda Síochána dealing with this? It sounds like a murder case. The war ended eighteen years ago. This is a civilian crime.”

Haughey and Fitzpatrick exchanged a glance.

“Krauss is the third foreign national to have been murdered within a fortnight,” the director said. “Alex Renders, a Flemish Belgian, and Johan Hambro, a Norwegian. Both of them were nationalists who found themselves aligned with the Reich when Germany occupied their respective countries.”

“And you assume the killings are connected?” Ryan asked.

“All three men were shot at close range. All three men were involved to some extent in nationalist movements during the Emergency. It’s hard not to make the logical conclusion.”

“Why were these men in Ireland?”

“Renders and Hambro were refugees following the liberation of their countries by the Allies. Ireland has always been welcoming to those who flee persecution.”

“And Krauss?”

Fitzpatrick went to speak, but Haughey interrupted.

“This case has been taken out of the Guards’ hands as a matter of sensitivity. These people were guests in our country, and there are others like them, but we don’t wish to draw attention to their presence here. Not now. This is an important year for Ireland. The President of the United States will visit these shores in just a few weeks. For the first time in the existence of this republic, a head of state will make an official visit, and not just any head of state. The bloody leader of the free world, no less. Not only that, he’ll be coming home, to the land of his ancestors. The whole planet will be watching us.”

Haughey’s chest seemed to swell as he spoke, as if he were addressing some rally in his constituency.

“Like the director said, these men were refugees, and this state offered them asylum. But even so, some people, for whatever reason, might take exception to men like Helmut Krauss living next door. They might make a fuss about it, the kind of fuss we could be doing without while we’re getting ready for President Kennedy to arrive. There’s people in America, people on his own staff, saying coming here’s a waste of time when he’s got Castro in his back yard, and the blacks causing a ruckus. They’re advising him to cancel his visit. They get a sniff of trouble, they’ll start insisting on it. So it’s vital that this be dealt with quietly. Out of the public gaze, as it were. That’s where you come in. I want you to get to the bottom of this. Make it stop.”

“And if I don’t wish to accept the assignment?”

Haughey’s eyes narrowed. “I must not have made myself clear, Lieutenant. I’m not asking you to investigate this crime. I’m ordering you.”

“With all due respect, Minister, you don’t have the authority to order me to do anything.”

Haughey stood, his face reddening. “Now hold on, big fella, just who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

Fitzpatrick raised his hands, palms up and out. “I’m sorry, Minister, all Lieutenant Ryan means is that such an order should come from within the command structure of the Directorate of Intelligence. I’m sure he meant no disrespect.”

“He better not have,” Haughey said, lowering himself back into his chair. “If he needs an order from you, then go on and give it.”

Fitzpatrick turned back to Ryan. “As the Minister said, this is not a voluntary assignment. You will be at his disposal until the matter is resolved.”

“All right,” Ryan said. “Are there any suspects in the killings?”

“Not as yet,” Haughey said. “But the obvious train of thought must be Jews.”

Ryan shifted in his seat. “Minister?”

“Jewish extremists,” Haughey said. “Zionists out for revenge, I’d say. That will be your first line of inquiry.”

Ryan considered arguing, decided against it. “Yes, Minister.”

“The Guards will give assistance where needed,” the director said. “We’d prefer that be avoided, of course. The fewer people involved in this the better. You will also have the use of a car, and a room at Buswells Hotel when you’re in the city.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Haughey opened the file he had taken from the cabinet. “There’s one more thing you should be aware of.”

He lifted an envelope from the file, gripping it by its corner. One end of it was a deep brownish red. Ryan took the envelope, careful to avoid the stained portion. It had been cut open along its top edge. He turned the envelope to read the words typed on its face.

Otto Skorzeny.

Ryan said the name aloud.

“You’ve heard of him?” Haughey asked.

“Of course,” Ryan said, remembering images of the scarred face in the society pages of the newspapers. Any soldier versed in commando tactics knew of Skorzeny. The name was spoken with reverence in military circles, regardless of the Austrian’s affiliations. Officers marvelled at Skorzeny’s exploits as if recounting the plot of some adventure novel. The rescue of Mussolini from the mountaintop hotel that served as his prison stirred most conversation. The daring of it, the audacity, landing gliders on the Gran Sasso cliff edge and sweeping Il Duce away on the wind.

Ryan slipped his fingers into the envelope and extracted the sheet of paper, unfolded it. The red stain formed angel patterns across the fabric of the page. He read the typewritten words.

“Has Skorzeny seen this?” Ryan asked.

Fitzpatrick said, “Colonel Skorzeny has been made aware of the message.”

“Colonel Skorzeny and I will be attending a function in Malahide in a few days,” Haughey said. “You will report to us there with your findings. The director will give you the details. Understood?”

“Yes, Minister.”

“Grand.” Haughey stood. He paused. “My tailor,” he said, tearing a sheet from a notepad. He scribbled a name, address and phone number. “Lawrence McClelland on Capel Street. Go and see him, have him fit you up with something. Tell him to put it on my account. Can’t be putting you in front of a man like Otto Skorzeny wearing a suit like that.”

Ryan dropped the bloody envelope on the desk and took the details from Haughey. He kept his face expressionless. “Thank you, Minister,” he said.

Fitzpatrick ushered Ryan towards the door. As they went to exit, Haughey called, “Is it true what I heard? That you fought for the Brits during the Emergency?”

Ryan stopped. “Yes, Minister.”

Haughey let his gaze travel from Ryan’s shoes to his face in one long distasteful stare. “Sort of young, weren’t you?”

“I lied about my age.”

“Hmm. I suppose that would explain your lack of judgement.”

CHAPTER THREE

The sun hung low in the sky by the time Ryan drove into Salthill. His buttocks ached from the journey, cutting west across the country, pausing outside Athlone to relieve his bladder by the roadside. On three occasions he had to stop and wait while a farmer herded cattle from one field to another. He saw fewer cars as he travelled further from Dublin, driving miles at a time without seeing anything more advanced than a tractor or a horse and cart.

He parked the Vauxhall Victor in the small courtyard adjoining the guest house. Fitzpatrick had handed him the keys along with a roll of pound and ten shilling notes, telling him not to go mad on it.

Ryan climbed out of the car and walked around to the entrance. A hardy wind carried salt spray up from the rocks. He tasted it on his lips. Gulls called and circled. Their excrement dotted the low wall that fronted the house.

The sign above the door read ST. AGNES GUEST HOUSE, PROPRIETRESS MRS. J. D. TOAL. He rang the bell and waited.

A white form appeared behind the frosted glass, and a woman called, “Who’s there?”

“My name is Albert Ryan,” he said. “I’m investigating the crime that occurred here.”

“Are you with the Guards?”

“Not quite,” he said.

The door cracked open, and she peeked out at him. “If you’re not the Guards, then who are you?”

Ryan took his wallet from his pocket and held up the identification card.

“I’ll need my glasses,” she said.

“I’m from the Directorate of Intelligence.”

“The what?”

“Like the Guards,” he said. “But I work for the government. Are you Mrs. Toal?”

“Yes,” she said. She looked back to the card. “I can’t read that. I need to find my glasses.”

“Can I come in while you look for them?”

She hesitated, then closed the door. Ryan heard a chain slide back. She opened the door and allowed him to enter.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said as he followed her into the dim hallway. “It’s just I’ve been plagued with all sorts of people since the news got out. Newspaper men, mostly, and others who just want to see if the body’s still here. Monsters, all of them. Ah, here we are.”

She lifted her spectacles from a table and perched them on her nose. “Let me see that again.”

Ryan handed her the card. She studied it, reading every word, before handing it back.

“I’ve already told the Guards everything I know. I’m not sure I can tell you anything different.”

“Maybe not,” Ryan said. “But I’d like to speak with you anyway.”

He looked to the room to his left where a middle-aged couple and a young priest took their leisure. The lady read a paperback book, while the gentleman smoked a pipe. The priest studied the racing pages of the Irish Times, marking the listings with a stubby pencil. Mrs. Toal reached in and pulled the door closed.

“I’d rather you didn’t disturb my guests,” she said.

“I won’t. Perhaps I could take a look at the room where the body was found. Then maybe we could have a chat.”

She turned her gaze to the stairs, as if some terrible creature listened from the floors above. “I suppose.”

Mrs. Toal went ahead. Old photographs of Salthill and Galway City hung on the walls alongside prints of Christ and the Virgin, and what appeared to be family portraits of generations past.

“It’s a shocking thing,” she said, her breath shortening as she climbed. “He seemed a nice enough man. Why someone would want to do that to him, I really don’t know. He may have been a foreigner, but that doesn’t account for it. And there’s me all booked out for next month, all them people coming in to see President Kennedy when he visits — they’re landing the helicopters just up the road, you know — and now I’ve got blood all over my carpet. I’ll have to do that room top to bottom. How can I expect anyone to stay in there with blood on the carpet? Here we are.”

She stopped at a door bearing the number six and fished a ring of keys from a pocket in her skirt. “I’ll not go in with you, if you don’t mind,” she said as she turned the key in the lock.

“That’s fine,” Ryan said.

He put his fingers to the handle, but Mrs. Toal seized his wrist.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said, her voice dropping low. “There was drink taken. I found a bottle on the bedside locker. I don’t know what sort of drink it was, but they’d been at it when it happened.”

“Is that right?” Ryan asked.

“Oh, it is. And he wouldn’t be the first man to meet his death when drink was taken. I know. My husband was one of them. He died right outside my front door. He had a bellyful of whiskey and porter one night, then he fell on those rocks out there. Split his head open and drowned when the tide came in.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Ryan said, meaning it. “I’ll come and find you when I’m finished here.”

“All right, so.” She nodded and went to the stairs. “Call me if you need anything.”

Alone, Ryan turned the handle and entered the room.

The smell came first, like metal and meat gone bad. He coughed and brought one hand up to cover his nose and mouth. With the other, he felt for the light switch and flicked it on.

A simple guesthouse room like any he’d ever stayed in. Tasteful floral wallpaper, patterned carpet, a washbasin in one corner, a wardrobe in another. A single bed with one locker beside it, and a chair facing them both.

And a reddish-brown cluster on the wall, small pieces of solid matter barely visible from this side of the room.

Ryan took slow steps towards the foot of the bed. Beyond it, a dark pool on the carpet, the vague shape of a folded body scraped in chalk. Powder dusted the surfaces of the windowsill and the bedside locker, ghosts of fingertips scattered through it.

A small suitcase sat open on the floor at the foot of the bed. Ryan crouched down next to it and sorted through the items within. Underwear, socks, three packets of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, and a bottle of imported vodka. He stood. A wash bag sat on the edge of the basin, a shaving brush and a razor, a toothbrush and cologne.

He caught sight of his own reflection in the mirror above them. Tiredness weighed on his features. He had been jowly since his late twenties. Now aged thirty six, he sometimes felt he looked like a forlorn bloodhound, especially when fatigue darkened his eyes.

A movement in the reflection startled him.

“Are you the G2 fella?” a voice asked.

Ryan turned. A man wearing a shabby suit and overcoat stood in the doorway. He held up his open wallet.

“Detective Garda Michael Harrington,” he said, returning the wallet to his pocket. “I was told you’d be visiting us, but I didn’t expect you for a day or two yet.”

Ryan extended his hand. “I wanted to get a head start, see the room before too much time passed.”

Harrington stared at the offered hand for a moment before shaking it. He held a manila folder in the other. “Fair enough. I’ve got this report for you. If you want a look at the body, it’s over at the Regional Hospital.”

Krauss’s naked body lay on the steel table, eyes closed, dry lips slightly pursed and parted as if locked in an eternal whisper. A Y-shaped incision traversed his torso, from the greying cloud of pubic hair to his shoulders. It had been neatly stitched after his organs had been returned to their rightful places. Below his navel was a hole, scorched and puckered.

Another line of stitches started behind one ear, ran across the top of his head, and terminated at the other ear. Ryan pictured the pathologist slicing the scalp, peeling it forward until it covered the eyes like a mask, sawing out a section of the skull, and finally removing the demolished brain.

It had been on Ryan’s eighteenth birthday that he first saw the inside of a man’s skull. A mist-shrouded field in Holland, some miles north of Nijmegen. Ryan couldn’t remember the corporal’s name, only that his head had opened like a crushed melon, bone and blood tearing away, the grey within.

He had dropped to the ground, the damp of the mud seeping through his uniform, and crawled to the hedgerow twenty yards ahead, certain beyond all doubt his own brain would be smashed out of his head at any moment. When he reached the others, the sergeant said, “Wipe your face off, lad.”

Ryan had reached up, felt the wetness and grit there, and vomited on himself.

He was no longer so squeamish.

On a drainer by a large sink, two acrylic glass vials held the deformed bullets. Ryan lifted and examined each in turn.

“We dug one out of the headboard,” Harrington said. “It went through the intestine and the kidney and out the back. The other was still in his head. The quack fished it out, said the brain was like jelly. He had to ladle it out. I didn’t understand that. There’s a hole blown out at the other side of his head from where the bullet went in, there was stuff on the wall, but still the quack found that inside him.”

“Gases,” Ryan said. “They expand inside the head and push outwards. If the killer used a suppressor, the bullet would have lost velocity. That’s why it didn’t exit the skull, and why the other only got as far as the headboard.”

“Ah,” Harrington said, doing a poor job of feigning interest. “Well, you live and learn.”

Ryan had read what little information the report contained as Harrington drove him over to the hospital. The only identifiable fingerprints in the room belonged to Krauss. The rest were a faded mishmash of traces left by Mrs. Toal and every guest who had stayed in the room over recent days. It seemed the killer had touched nothing with bare fingers.

A few possessions lay on a plastic tray. The lighter and cigarette case drew Ryan’s attention. He took a pen from his pocket and used it to turn the case, the light picking out the fine lines of the engraving.

Harrington noted Ryan’s interest. “I suppose that’s why a G2 fella’s looking into this.”

Ryan did not reply.

“There used to be a man rented a farmhouse out towards Boleybeg, a German. He stayed there about six or seven years. There was all sorts of talk about him. I remember when he left, his cleaner told me she’d seen a swastika on his wall, and a painting of Hitler. I didn’t believe her.”

Harrington waited as if hoping Ryan would express some surprise. When Ryan didn’t, Harrington continued.

“Then there’s this Skorzeny, the Austrian, living in Kildare. I saw him in the newspaper, shaking hands with some bigwigs at a party. I’d never support the British, but what them Nazis did wasn’t right. I don’t like them coming and settling here just because we’re soft on them.”

“I’ve seen enough,” Ryan said.

CHAPTER FOUR

“What are you doing landing in on us this late?” Ryan’s mother asked.

“I was passing,” Ryan lied. He had pulled over at Athlone and agonised for five long minutes. In the end, he had headed north to Carrickmacree in County Monaghan instead of going straight back to Dublin.

The shop front stood in darkness when Ryan approached along Main Street. He steered the Vauxhall to the rear of the block and parked behind the small van his father drove when he delivered bread and milk around the town. He let himself into the yard and knocked on the door.

“You’d better come in, then,” his mother said. She stood back and allowed him to enter the small hallway.

Ryan’s father stood at the top of the stairway, a dressing gown over striped pyjamas, thick socks on his feet.

“Who’s that?” he called.

“It’s Albert,” Ryan’s mother said as she climbed the stairs towards him. Ryan followed.

“At this time?”

“That’s what I said.” She looked back over her shoulder. “If you’d telephoned, I could’ve had something on for you.”

Ryan never warned his parents in advance of a visit, and he always arrived in darkness. It had been ten years since there’d been any trouble, but still he remained cautious. They had nearly lost the shop after the petrol bombing. Before that, it had been Mahon and his cronies shouting insults in the street, stones thrown at windows, paint slashed across the glass once. Business had dwindled, almost to the point of his father having to admit defeat and leave the town, but enough of the locals had resisted Mahon’s pressure to boycott the shop to keep its doors open.

But the fire had been the worst of it, a last desperate act by a man too bitter and full of hate to let Albert Ryan’s transgression go, and he had stayed away for a full year before returning.

On occasion, he wondered if he would have joined up and gone to fight for the British if he had known the cost to his parents. Every time, he dismissed it as foolishness, knowing a boy of seventeen could have no such wisdom even if granted the foresight. He had stolen the money from his father’s safe to buy passage from Carrickmacree across the border to Belfast, then made his way to the nearest recruiting office, never once thinking of his mother’s tears.

Now he sat at his mother’s table with a mug of steaming tea, butter melting on a slab of toast. He hadn’t the appetite what with the mortuary’s low odours still lurking in his nasal passages, but he ate anyway.

Once the plate was clear, he asked his father how business was.

“Not the best,” his father said.

“Why?”

His father fell silent, staring into his mug. Instead, Ryan’s mother answered.

“It’s the Trades Association,” she said. “And that auld bastard Tommy Mahon.”

She covered her mouth, shocked at herself for uttering such coarse language.

“What did they do?”

Ryan’s father looked up from his tea. “Mahon decided he wanted me out of business for good, so he set his son up with a wee cash-and-carry down the way. He got his friends in the Association to have a word with some of my suppliers. Now I can’t get milk or bread. The only meat I can get is from old man Harney and his sons. They butcher their own animals out at their farm. The only eggs I can get is what I can buy when I’m out on my rounds.”

“They can’t do that,” Ryan said. “Can they?”

“Of course they can. They can do whatever they want. They call it protectionism. The associations, the unions, all them boys scratching each other’s backs. They have this country by the balls, and they’re going to run us into the ground.”

“Maurice!” Ryan’s mother scolded.

“Well, they do.”

Ryan’s mother changed the subject. “So, are you courting?”

Ryan felt the heat spread from his neck up to his cheeks. “No, Ma. You know I’ve no time for that.”

“Och, you’re thirty six,” she said. “You’ll be too old if you wait any longer.”

“Leave him alone,” Ryan’s father said. “He’s got time enough for that yet. There’s old man Harney’s boys are all past thirty, one of them’s over forty, and he’s no notion of letting them get married yet.”

Ryan’s mother snorted. “Sure, why would he when he’s got four big lads working for him and not a penny to pay for it? Our Albert’s not a farmer. He should be finding himself a nice wee girl and getting settled.”

“I’m far too busy,” Ryan said. “Besides, I’m living at the camp. I need a place of my own before I can go chasing after women.”

Ryan’s mother sat back in her chair, raised an eyebrow. “And what would you need a place of your own for? No decent girl would go to a bachelor’s home. And any that would, well, she wouldn’t be the sort for marrying, would she?”

Ryan slept hard and deep in his old room, tired from the day’s driving. The bed creaked and rattled as he stirred with the morning’s early light. He borrowed his father’s razor to shave at the washbasin in the corner of the cold bedroom, goose pimples sprouting across his body.

Once washed and dressed, Ryan made his way downstairs, creeping to the back door. His mother intercepted him.

“Where are you off to?” she asked.

“Just thought I’d take a quick walk. I haven’t seen the town in ages.”

“All right,” his mother said. “Don’t be too long. I’ll have some breakfast for you when you get back.”

The sun grazed the rooftops as he strolled along Main Street, a man walking a horse down the centre of the road the only other person he saw. The sound of the animal’s hooves echoed from the buildings. The man nodded as he passed. A cool breeze made Ryan button his suit jacket.

He passed shop fronts, businesses generations old, hand-painted signs above the windows, prices and offers written in white on the glass. A needlecraft shop, a dressmaker, a gentlemen’s outfitter.

They all seemed smaller now, as if the wood and bricks and glass had shrunk over the last twenty years. In the farthest parts of his soul, Ryan knew the reasons he seldom returned owed as much to his resentment of these buildings as they did to Tommy Mahon’s bullying. Even as a boy, he had felt a town like this was no place for him, its streets too few and too narrow, the people mired in its quicksand. Even now, he felt the place tug at his ankles, trying to regain its hold on him.

As a teenager, Ryan had wondered at his father’s endurance of the town, unable to understand how he did not crave a better life, a bigger life. One day, he asked his father why he took on the family business despite the pittance that it earned, why he had not left and made his own world elsewhere.

“Because you’ve only got the life you’re given,” Ryan’s father had said. “And it’s good enough.”

But Ryan knew it would never be good enough, not then, not now.

He stood outside the shop with the sign saying MAHON’S CASH ’N’ CARRY. Dark inside. He tried the door, found it locked.

Ryan took another look along the street, saw it was empty, and walked around to the rear of the building. A large car, a Rover, was parked in the alleyway, and a bicycle stood propped against the wall. Ryan heard a voice issuing commands from inside the building. He approached the open doors.

Gerard Mahon, Tommy Mahon’s son, stood smoking a cigarette with his back to the alley. A young boy, no more than thirteen or fourteen years old, stacked boxes of washing powder at Mahon’s instruction.

“Good morning,” Ryan said.

Mahon turned. He had gained weight since Ryan had last seen him, his face bloating with the onset of middle age. He stared for a moment before recognition softened his expression.

“Albert Ryan? Holy Jesus, I haven’t seen you for years. I thought you’d fucked off to England.”

“I’m just visiting my parents.” Ryan stepped into the shadow of the doorway, felt the cold of the building, smelled bleach and tobacco. “I see you’re branching out.”

Mahon smiled and took a drag on the cigarette. “A new venture. Your auld fella can’t have all the business to himself.”

“I suppose he can’t.” Ryan took another step inside. “It’s a funny thing, though. I heard he’s been having some trouble with his suppliers since your father set you up with this place.”

Mahon’s smile became a bitter slash. He wagged a finger in Ryan’s direction. “I set this place up myself. Anyone who says different is a lying bastard.” Mahon turned to the boy who had stopped stacking boxes to watch the two men. “Get into the shop. The floor needs mopping. Go on, quick now.”

The boy did as he was told and exited the store room.

Mahon turned back, flinched when he found Ryan so close. Ryan stood several inches taller than the other man and he used every one of them.

“I heard someone had a word with the Trades Association and made sure the suppliers stopped dealing with my father.”

Mahon shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. If your auld fella can’t stand a bit of competition, he’d best pack up and get out.” Emboldened, Mahon raised himself to his full height. “He should’ve got out a long time ago. We could do with a few less of your kind around here, anyway.”

“My kind? What kind is that, exactly?”

Mahon licked his lips, swallowed, sucked on his cigarette. “Protestants,” he said, exhaling smoke to plume into Ryan’s face. “Especially when they breed Brit lovers like you.”

Ryan slapped the cigarette from his mouth. Mahon stepped back, eyes wide.

“Here, now, you better watch who you’re—”

The blow caught Mahon beneath his Adam’s apple. He dropped to the floor, his knees cracking on the concrete, his hands going to his throat. Ryan kicked him hard between the navel and groin. Mahon collapsed onto his belly, his face turning from pink to purple.

Ryan undid his belt buckle and stood astride Mahon. The leather came free with one pull, and he crossed his hands to form a loop. He bent down, slipped the loop over Mahon’s head and around his neck.

Mahon gave an agonised croak as Ryan hauled him up onto his knees. He brought his fingers to his throat, tried to force them between the belt and his skin. Ryan tightened his hold. Mahon’s body jerked and bucked.

Ryan put his lips to Mahon’s ear. “Now listen to me. I will call my father in two days. If he doesn’t tell me his suppliers have delivered everything he wants, I will come back for you. Do you understand me?”

He loosened the belt. Mahon choked on air. Ryan pulled again, tighter than before.

“Do you understand me?”

He allowed Mahon to inhale.

Mahon mouthed a word, the only sound the hissing sibilant at its tail. He nodded and coughed, drool spilling from his lips.

Ryan took the belt away, let Mahon crumple to the floor. He walked to the doorway to the alley. Looking back over his shoulder, he said, “Two days.”

Mahon writhed, his hands up to deflect a blow that would never come.

Albert Ryan returned to his parents’ home, enjoyed the cooked breakfast his mother had prepared, and then set off for Dublin.

CHAPTER FIVE

Buswells hotel stood near the corner of Molesworth Street and Kildare Street, the white citadel and green gardens of Trinity College to the north, the sprawling open pastures and leafy walkways of St Stephen’s Green to the south. The voices of paperboys called the headlines over the grumbling of traffic. The bus strike had ended only a few days before, and the passengers looked happy to no longer have to rely on the substitute transport the army had provided.

The hotel’s receptionist handed Ryan a note along with his key as he checked in. He had stopped off at Gormanston on the way to Dublin and gathered a few clothes and wash things into the bag that now lay at his feet. The restaurant jangled and chattered with lunchtime clientele. Ryan recognised a Teachta Dála, an Irish member of parliament, watching a young woman cross the foyer, a key in her hand, heels clicking on the white marble floor. She paused at the foot of the stairs leading to the guest rooms, glanced back over her shoulder at the TD, and climbed. The Oireachtas, the seat of Ireland’s government, stood just yards around the corner. Buswells hosted many politicians and their companions, their secretaries, their assistants. The beds above creaked with the secret passions of the country’s leaders.

The TD waited a few moments before following the young woman, unaware he was being observed.

Ryan had never stayed at Buswells. It was not the city’s most luxurious hotel — the Shelbourne and the Royal Hibernian offered greater decadence — but the room that had been placed at his disposal would certainly be better accommodation than he was used to.

He carried the note and the bag upstairs, found his room on a small landing at the junction of two flights of carpeted steps. It held a single bed, a wardrobe, a corner washbasin and a radio on a bedside locker. Yellow and brown nicotine stains clouded the ceiling. Through the greying net curtain over the lone window, across the road, he saw the grandeur of the Freemasons’ Hall, white stone columns and arches, like a greek temple transplanted to a city side street. Ryan dropped his bag on the bed, took off his jacket and sat down. He opened the note.

Ryan fingered the fabric of his jacket. It had been a reasonable suit when it was new, any man would have felt well turned out, but it had begun to show its age. He had admired Haughey’s attire the previous day, the cut of the cloth, the way it flattered his frame. Even if you hadn’t known he was a government minister, you would recognise a man of wealth and influence. It took more than quality fabric to give such an impression, of course, but it couldn’t hurt.

Albert Ryan knew he had a streak of vanity, and of pride, like a vein of silver running through rock. That part of him smarted when he saw younger men who were better dressed, or who drove shining cars. He did not like this aspect of himself, found it ugly and not in keeping with a man of his upbringing. His parents had taught him the virtue of austerity, the Presbyterian values of modesty and hard work.

But still, the beauty of the clothing on Haughey’s back gave Ryan a longing in his soul.

He slipped his jacket on, left the room, and made his way back down to reception with the intention of having lunch. He crossed the high-ceilinged lounge. The maitre d’ greeted him at the glass doors to the restaurant. Ryan paused and surveyed the room and the diners, the expanse of white linen tablecloths, glittering silverware. His gaze travelled across finely cut lapels, French cuffs, silk ties.

The maitre d’ said, “For one, sir?”

Ryan watched the women draped on the men, the jewels and pale skin.

The maitre d’ leaned closer. “Sir?”

Ryan coughed. “Actually, I’m not hungry. Thank you.”

He left the restaurant, exited the building, headed north towards the river, and Capel Street beyond.

“Canali,” Lawrence McClelland said, smoothing the jacket over Ryan’s torso. “From Triuggio in Lombardy, not far from Milan. Much sought after, not many in Dublin. Very, very nice.”

Ryan studied his form in the full length mirror. Even if the trousers were too short, and the jacket too roomy for his midsection, the suit still looked magnificent.

He was the tailor’s sole customer, standing among racks of expensive cloth and tables laden with shirts and ties. The dark wooden panels seemed to rob the room of light and sound, a solemn quiet hanging over everything. A chapel of silk, herringbone and leather.

“Have you been to Italy?” McClelland asked.

“Yes,” Ryan said. “Sicily.”

“Sicily? Oh, I hear it’s quite lovely there,” the tailor said as he hunkered down to tug at the trouser hems. “I’m more familiar with Milan and Rome myself.”

Ryan had spent four days on the south eastern Sicilian coast in late ’45, a stopover on his way to Egypt. He had been billeted with three other men in an apartment in Siricusa, but he spent most of his time wandering the narrow streets of Ortigia, the tiny island connected to the mainland by a few short bridges.

He had rolled his sleeves up as he walked, opened his shirt wide, the sun beating on him like a blacksmith’s hammer. In the evenings, the place smelled of sea salt and warm olive oil. He ate in the trattorias and osterias that clustered in the alleys. Ryan had never before seen, let alone tasted, pasta. He ate platefuls of it, mopping up the sauce with fresh bread. He seldom saw a menu; the choice of food was that of the house, rather than the diner, but he didn’t mind. His lifelong diet had been either Irish or army food, the height of culinary sophistication a mixed grill in a swanky hotel, or perhaps a piece of fish on a Friday.

He took four days of pleasure in Sicily before crossing the short stretch of Mediterranean to Egypt and all its torments.

The tailor stood upright and set about Ryan with a measuring tape.

“Hmm.” McClelland placed his forefinger against his lips. “I might struggle a little to make this work for a man of your stature. A man as deep as you are through the chest will often have a more generous waistband, whereas you’re quite a slender fellow.”

He tucked the jacket into Ryan’s flanks, pinned the fabric in place. Standing back, he eyed Ryan from head to foot, the travel of his gaze slow and languid. “Athletic,” McLelland said. “And long legged. But I think I can let the trouser down enough to suffice. With the right shoe, of course. When do you need the suit for?”

“Tomorrow night,” Ryan said. “The minister said to put it on his account.”

McClelland’s face greyed around a thin smile. “Yes, the minister does like to take full advantage of our credit service.”

CHAPTER SIX

As evening light faded to darkness, Albert Ryan spent an hour at Helmut Krauss’s small home on Oliver Plunkett Avenue, close to Dublin’s docks. It stood at the middle of a terraced row of identical houses, Victorian or Edwardian, he couldn’t be sure. They faced newly-built tenement blocks, ugly structures that cast a sullen shadow over the street. A small patch of garden had been laid over with concrete slabs. A brass plaque by the doorbell carried the words HEINRICH KOHL: IMPORT, EXPORT, ESCROW SERVICES. A Garda officer waited on the doorstep to let Ryan in.

Inside the house, the parlour had been converted to a small office with an antique desk surrounded by filing cabinets. A telephone sat on the desk alongside a typewriter, a ledger and a selection of pens. The room contained only two chairs: one for Krauss, and one for a guest. It appeared the German did not employ a secretary.

Ryan opened the ledger at a random page and scanned the entries. Business names, ports of departure, dates, sums of money mostly in pounds. He ran his fingertip down the name column, turning from page to page, looking for anything of significance. The amounts of money were modest, the highest figures in the low thousands, and most coming to only a few hundred. The ports covered northern Europe, anywhere within easy sailing distance of Dublin or Dundalk.

He closed the book and turned his attention to the filing cabinets. All were unlocked and contained invoices, purchase orders, statements of account, and the occasional letter. Nothing to suggest Krauss has been involved in anything illegal while running his business here.

Ryan left the parlour-turned-office and went to the kitchen at the rear of the house. The cramped room smelled of grease and tobacco. A dresser stood to one side, well stocked with alcohol. Krauss apparently had a taste for vodka. More boxes of bottles stood piled on the floor, emblazoned with Russian text, obviously some perk of his import business.

A tin bath stood propped in the corner, a privy in the backyard. Ryan opened the cupboards, found nothing but stale bread, tinned food and cleaning materials. He made his way upstairs.

Two small bedrooms, one disused, the other filled with neatly arranged personal bric-a-brac. Rolled socks and underwear lay on the unmade bed, the items Krauss had chosen not to take on his trip to Salthill.

An open letter lay on a bedside table. Ryan reached for the lamp beside it, flicked it on so that he could make out the text in the thickening darkness. He sat on the edge of the bed and examined the single sheet of paper. German, handwritten in a neat script. Ryan understood little, but he recognised the name of Johan Hambro, and that of the churchyard near Galway he had been buried at a few days ago.

Given the mild disarray of the room, Ryan guessed that Krauss had left in a hurry, not taking time to tidy away the rejected clothes or make his bed. Krauss seemed to have been a man of order and discipline. Ryan imagined the German would be embarrassed to know a stranger now observed the mess in his home, however minor.

A chest of drawers stood facing the foot of the bed. Ryan opened the first drawer and searched through the folded shirts with their frayed cuffs and replacement buttons. The second held more socks and underwear, and the third revealed more of the same. But underneath them, a bed of photographs, postcards and letters.

Ryan lifted them out, one-by-one. The letters were mostly in German, and after a few, he gave up trying to distinguish recognisable names from the tangles of words. Instead, he focused on the photographs.

Many were family portraits, stern mothers and fathers, round-faced children, the occasional horse or dog. A few showed rows of uniformed men, tall men, strong men, peaked caps on their heads, lightning bolts on their collars. Some were formal portraits, the men standing upright or sitting with their hands clamped to their knees, staring hard at the camera. Others showed them eating and drinking, collars loosened, laughter almost audible from the heavy paper.

When Ryan thought of his time on the Continent, back when he was a boy pretending to be a man, these were the scenes he wished he could isolate in his memory. Officers lined up at long tables, mugs of beer, voices raised so high it made his eardrums hurt. But when he tried to focus on such sounds and images, others crept in, the burned and bloodied things, the howls and screams.

Yet he could not leave that life behind.

The only place that felt like a home was a barracks. The town or country didn’t matter, whether he slept in his room at Gormanston Camp, or some tin hut in a foreign field. Ryan might have understood this to be unhealthy had he ever given it thought.

In truth, he wasn’t sure if he missed having what most men would consider a home. A wife and children. Walls to contain them all. He had grown accustomed to eating in mess halls, sleeping on thin mattresses, living by the orders of his superiors. Only occasionally did he awake in the night, terrified by the advancing years and what his future life would be when the surrogate family he had chosen had no more use for him.

Ryan leafed through the photographs until he found one, a formal portrait of a young man, his cap worn with pride, his buttons shining in the studio’s lights. He recognised the handsome face of Helmut Krauss, twenty years before he lay dissected on a mortuary table. Such confidence, the surety held in the eyes, the subtle smile on the lips.

You never thought you could lose, Ryan thought. At one time, Helmut Krauss and his kind were certain they would possess the earth and every soul who dwelled upon it. Now Krauss burned in whatever hell had been set aside for him. Ryan searched his soul for pity and found none.

He returned the photographs and letters to the drawer before dropping to his knees and peering underneath the bed. A box lay within arm’s reach. A trail through the dust showed that the Guards had already dragged it out and examined its contents. Ryan grabbed the box’s edge and pulled, hoisted it up onto the bed, folded back the lid.

The Guards had been instructed to leave everything as they found it. Including the Luger P08 and Walther P38 pistols that lay on top of the red cloth, along with the paper bag of loose nine millimetre Parabellum rounds and a single leather holster. Ryan lifted the weapons from the box, examining each of them in turn. They appeared well maintained, smelled of fresh oil. He set them side by side on the bed, placed the holster and the bag of rounds next to them, and lifted the red cloth.

It unfolded to a large rectangle, a white circle at its centre, black lines intersecting. Ryan bundled the swastika into a ball and dropped it to the floor.

A manila folder lay at the bottom of the box. Ryan lifted the folder, opened it, revealing loose typewritten letters, written in English. He read the first.

It listed an address in Brittany. Ryan flipped through the remaining dozen, more letters of reference, all praising Helmut Krauss. The last few were replies from the Department of Justice. Ryan picked out phrases from the text.

Ryan returned the folder to the box, covered it with the swastika. He looked down at the two pistols, black and glowering on the bedspread. The Luger was much loved by collectors; Ryan had known many soldiers who had taken them home from the front, trophies of their battles on the Continent. But the Walther was also a handsome weapon, similar in performance to the Luger, but a more modern design by thirty or more years.

He tried each of them in the holster, found the Walther to be a better fit. That decided it. Ryan stripped the case from a pillow, stuffed the Walther, holster and rounds inside, and knotted the opening. He dropped the Luger into the box, which he slid back beneath the bed.

As he left the house, Ryan thanked the Garda officer who had let him in.

“I’m just taking a few items for examination,” he said, showing the weighted pillowcase.

The officer did not object.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Hello, who is this?” a man answered with a thick eastern European accent.

“My name is Albert Ryan. I’d like to speak with the Rabbi of your congregation.”

Ryan sat on the edge of his bed in Buswells, the telephone to his ear. The skin on his throat stung from shaving. Morning sun warmed his back.

“Well, you are. I am Rabbi Joseph Hempel. How may I help you?”

It took less than fifteen minutes to drive south from the city centre to the synagogue on Rathfarnham Road. The building stood back from the street, separated by a high wall and hedge, with well tended gardens. It was a grey block of a structure, flat-roofed, with five windows in the shape of the Star of David above a row of square glass panes. Its sturdy bulk, and the walls around it, gave the synagogue the appearance of a compound under siege.

Ryan pulled into the driveway through the open gates. Rabbi Hempel stood waiting in the doorway. He was a middle-aged man with square-framed spectacles, casually dressed with a knitted vest over an open-collar shirt and a suede kippah on his crown. His beard almost reached the bottom of the V formed by his top button. He extended his hand as Ryan got out of the car and approached.

“Mr. Ryan?” he asked.

Ryan shook his hand. “Thank you for agreeing to speak with me.”

“Not at all. Come to my office.”

Stained glass windows refracted the morning light inside the synagogue, bathing the rows of seats in a warm peace. The rabbi led Ryan to a room to the rear of the building. It was a modestly appointed office, books lined upon shelves, a sparse desk.

“Please, sit down,” Rabbi Hempel said. Once they were seated, and Ryan had declined any refreshments, the rabbi asked, “Are you a policeman?”

“Not quite,” Ryan said. “I work for the Directorate of Intelligence.”

“But you want to talk to me about a crime?”

“Three crimes. Three murders, to be exact.”

The rabbi’s lips pursed with concern. “Oh, dear. I can promise you I know nothing of such crimes.”

Ryan smiled to reassure him. “I know. But if I explain the nature of the murders, you might understand why I’ve come to you.”

Rabbi Hempel sat back in his chair. “I’m listening.”

Ryan told him about Renders and Hambro, and Helmut Krauss, and the blood on the floor of the guest house in Salthill. He told the rabbi about the note addressed to Skorzeny.

Rabbi Hempel sat in silence for a few seconds, gazing at Ryan across the desk, before he said, “I am not sure what alarms me more: that these people are permitted to come and live in peace in Ireland, or that your first assumption is that only a Jew could do such a thing.”

“It is not my assumption,” Ryan said.

The rabbi leaned forward. “And yet here you are.”

“It’s a line of inquiry I was instructed to pursue by my superiors.”

“Orders.”

“Yes. Orders.”

Rabbi Hempel smiled. “So many men have simply followed orders. The men who shot my parents and my elder sister at the edge of a ditch they had just forced them to dig, they were following orders. Does that absolve them?”

“No,” Ryan said. “But nevertheless, you must see why I have been asked to follow this line.”

“I do indeed see the reason. It’s likely a different reason than you believe it to be, but please, go ahead.”

“Thank you. Are you aware of any groups within your community, perhaps younger men, who have strong feelings about the war?”

Ryan realised the stupidity of the question too late, felt heat spread on his face.

“I promise you, Mr. Ryan, all in my community have strong feelings about the war.”

“Of course,” Ryan said. “I apologise.”

The rabbi nodded his acceptance. “That aside, there are no organised groups that I’m aware of. There are less than two thousand Jewish people left on the whole island of Ireland now, possibly only fifteen hundred. I can barely gather enough for a congregation. Believe me, there are no groups of disaffected young men, hungry for blood.”

“To your knowledge,” Ryan said.

Rabbi Hempel shrugged. “Who would have the motive? We have suffered comparatively little persecution here. The ugly episode in Limerick at the start of the century, some call it a pogrom, but those who were driven out were in turn welcomed in Cork. The bureaucrats at the Department of Justice did their best to block Jewish refugees entering Ireland before and after the war, but the Department of External Affairs put pressure on de Valera to intervene. Ireland has not always been welcoming, but seldom has it been overtly hostile. These are not the conditions that put hate in young men’s hearts.”

Ryan almost laughed, but choked it back. “There’s no shortage of hatred in this country.”

“The Irish have long memories,” Rabbi Hempel said. “I have lived in Ireland for more than ten years, and this was my first understanding of its people. Were it not so, perhaps Britain might have had another ally against the Germans. Instead, Ireland sat on its hands and watched as Europe burned.”

Ryan thought about letting it go, almost did, but said, “Ireland had barely found its feet as a state. It had been through the First World War, the War of Independence and the Civil War, all in less than a decade. It couldn’t afford to go to war again. It didn’t have the strength. Even so, a hundred thousand of us fought.”

The rabbi raised his thick eyebrows. “You?”

“Yes.”

“And did your neighbours appreciate your fighting for the British?”

“No, not all of them.”

Rabbi Hempel nodded. “Like I said. Long memories.”

As Ryan eased out of the synagogue’s driveway, heading back towards town, he saw the black car parked further down the road. And its two occupants, both men, neither of them watching him.

In his rear view mirror, he saw the car pull out from the curb. It kept a distance of thirty yards or so. He glanced as he drove, trying to make out the men’s features. All he saw were shapes, shoulders and heads, the impressions of shirts and ties. One of them smoked a cigarette.

As he crossed Terenure Road, another car pulled between them, driven by an elderly lady, forcing the driver of the black car to brake. It edged to the centre of the road, allowing the man at the wheel to keep Ryan in sight.

It stayed there, maintaining its distance, until Ryan reached Harold’s Cross, where he pulled to the curb. He watched in the mirror as the black car slowed then turned off towards the cemetery.

Ryan might have worried about who followed him, which thin finger of the government crept after him, but he had other things on his mind as he pulled away.

He had a suit to collect.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Célestin Lainé downed another shot of whiskey, let it bite his throat. Barely seven o’clock, and Paddy Murtagh was already drunk. Before long, he would start to sing. Rebel songs, he called them. The Bold Fenian Men, The Wearing of the Green, Johnson’s Motor Car. He would raise his voice, hoarse and tuneless, and would not fall silent until he passed out.

At least Lainé would not have to endure it alone this evening. Elouan Groix, a fellow Breton patriot, also sat at the table in the small cottage. Murtagh’s father had given Lainé the use of the two-room dwelling in a remote corner of his farmland, thus the young Murtagh was made welcome out of a sense of obligation.

Lainé and other members of Bezen Perrot, the small but dedicated band that he had led in the fight against the Allies, had fled to Ireland in the aftermath of the war. They had held on longer than many of the Germans they had battled alongside, but in the end, there remained no other choice but to run.

As a young man, Lainé had read La vie de Patrice Pearse by Louis le Roux. He had been left with a sense of awe, and of duty to those who had been martyred for Ireland in 1916. Like many autonomists, he had felt in his heart that those Irish lives had been sacrificed not just for Ireland, but also for men like him. The struggle to throw the French yoke off Breton shoulders needed the same spirit as had been shown by the Irish if it were to succeed, that shared Celtic fire in the warriors’ bellies.

The coming of the Reich had seemed like a kiss from God. A gift, a means to achieve what Bretons lacked the might to do for themselves. So as France fell, Lainé organised and recruited, armed his men with weapons supplied by the Germans, and fought.

Soon, Lainé discovered a talent he had never suspected he possessed. He had trained and worked as a chemical engineer, a useful vocation when manufacturing explosive devices, but a newly unearthed ability shocked everyone, including himself: he found he had an innate expertise in dragging information from prisoners.

On a hot night early in the occupation, Lainé and three comrades captured a Resistance fighter in fields north of Nantes. Two others had gotten away. Lainé began by asking for the names of the escaped men. The prisoner refused, giving only his own name, Sylvain Depaul. He was not from the area. Lainé would have known him otherwise.

They blindfolded Depaul and brought him to a barn on a sloping hillside. Cattle slept all around, oblivious to the men who crossed their fields. Lainé bound the résistant to a pillar. His wrists were slippery with sweat as they were fixed in place, tied tight to the wood. Depaul’s own belt was wrapped around his neck and buckled at the rear of the pillar, leaving him pinned and choking.

“Who were the others?” Lainé asked again.

“I’ve already told you,” Depaul said, the words coughed out from his restricted throat. “I was alone. I was just out walking.”

“With a Browning pistol?” Lainé stroked Depaul’s cheek with the weapon’s muzzle.

“For rabbits. I was going to make a fire and cook one.”

Lainé stabbed at Depaul’s lips with the muzzle, mashing the flesh against his teeth. Depaul turned his head away as far as the belt would allow, blood spilling from his torn skin.

“I have no patience for this,” Lainé said. “This is not a game. If you cooperate, you might live. I can’t guarantee that, but it remains a possibility. On the other hand, if you lie, if you hold back information, then it is a certainty that you will suffer and die.”

In Lainé’s mind, they were only words. He had been interrogated by police officers years ago, after the bombing of the Monument to the Unity of Brittany and France in Rennes. They screamed question after question at him, slapped his face, pulled his hair. Harsh, but hardly torture. He had never experienced such a thing. Thus, he was as surprised as anyone when he set the pistol aside, took an ivory-handled penknife from his pocket, heated the blade in the flame of the oil lamp until its tip glowed, then pressed it against Depaul’s cheek.

As the résistant howled, and the other men coughed at the smell of scorched meat, Lainé felt a surge of something he did not recognise in his chest. Power? Pride? As Depaul cried, Lainé smiled.

“I’ll ask you again,” he said. “Who were the others who fled when we captured you?”

Depaul growled, spat blood on his own shirt, swallowed his pain. “There was no one. I was alone.”

Lainé had not expected to be pleased at Depaul’s refusal to speak. Nevertheless, there it was: the pleasure of anticipating the next cruel act. He returned the blade to the oil lamp’s flame, watched as traces of Depaul’s blood and skin bubbled and burned away.

“I was on my own,” Depaul said, his voice liquid, no longer hard and defiant. “I swear. God help me, I’d tell you if there was anyone else, but there wasn’t, I promise.”

Lainé reached behind the pillar, seized the thumb of DePaul’s right hand.

“Once more, who were your companions?”

“Please, I was alone. There was—”

Lainé pushed the tip of the blade beneath Depaul’s thumbnail. Depaul screamed. The three Bretons stepped back. One of them ran outside, covering his mouth, vomit dribbling between his fingers.

Keeping the blade in place, Lainé asked, “Who were your companions?”

Depaul shook his head from side to side, his voice stretching thin as his lungs emptied.

Lainé explored the tenderness beneath the nail. The blade’s tip burrowed in, worked the keratin loose from the flesh until it peeled away.

Depaul talked.

He told them the names of his two companions, local men, and the location to which they had been heading. The British were to drop a crate by parachute into a field not even a mile away. When Lainé and his men reached it, they found it contained rifles, ammunition and radio equipment. Within twenty four hours, Depaul’s friends had been rounded up and executed alongside him.

As Lainé developed his newfound talent, his reputation travelled. Soon it only took the mention of the Breton’s name to convince a résistant to talk. It would have been a lie to deny the pleasure of such notoriety. Power in its purest form. The power of fear. Lainé grew accustomed to it quickly and never suspected he would lose that power.

Now in Ireland, in his mid-fifties, he had nothing. He had lacked the foresight to rob and rape as the Reich crumbled, leaving him to run with empty pockets. Had it not been for the contacts he had made with the IRA, heroes in his mind, he might never have escaped the wrath of the Allies and found his way to Ireland.

Lainé still remembered the crushing disappointment of finally meeting the Irish revolutionaries he had so idolised. In his imagination, they were the noble defenders of the working Celtic man. They were Patrick Pearse, they were James Connolly, they were Michael Collins.

In truth, they were a disjointed network of farmers, socialists and fascists, bigots and blowhards, an army whose war had come and gone decades before. They had sided with the Nazis during the war, even formulating plans to assist the Germans in an invasion of Northern Ireland to oust the British presence there, but they proved themselves incapable of such ambitious schemes.

Fleeing in defeat had been like swallowing thorns for Célestin Lainé. But now, years later, he knew it was better than the hopeless purgatory the fanatics of the IRA wallowed in. They had not quite won their struggle for independence; the northern part of their island remained under the thumb of the British and their Protestant caretakers, while the rest of the nation was ruled by a self-serving government that had turned on the brave warriors whose sacrifice had made its very existence possible.

And now the best the IRA had to offer was ill educated louts like Paddy Murtagh and his belligerent father Caoimhín, full of songs about the virtuous struggle of revolution and precious little else.

As Lainé feared, young Murtagh placed his glass back on the table, inhaled a breath that rattled wet and thick at the back of his throat, and sang.

“Come all you warriors and renowned nobles, who once commanded brave warlike bands,” he slurred.

Elouan Groix gave Lainé a weary look. Lainé shrugged, raised a hand to say, what can I do?

Murtagh drew breath and let more of the dirge spill from his mouth. “Throw down your plumes and your golden trophies, give up your arms with a trembling hand.”

As Murtagh inhaled at the end of the couplet, Lainé heard the dog outside in the yard. It jerked on its chain and let loose a torrent of yelps and barks.

He had found the animal at the side of a road two years ago, no more than a pup, its pelt clinging to its ribs, a waist so thin Lainé could encircle it with one hand. A month of nurture, and he had a healthy and devoted companion he called Hervé, a masculine name, even though the dog was a female. And one could not have wished for a more loyal and fearsome guardian.

Murtagh’s voice rose to the next couplet.

Lainé lifted a hand and said, “Quiet.”

Murtagh let his voice fall to a bubbling exhalation, stared at Lainé with confusion and mild hurt on his face.

“Listen,” Lainé said.

Hervé’s cries rose in ferocity. Her chain jangled as she lunged out there in the weakening light.

“What?” Murtagh asked.

Groix placed a hand on the Irishman’s wrist, squeezed, silenced him.

The dog’s barks melded into a furious stream of noise, the chain jerking and snapping.

Lainé turned his head, peered out the window over the sink. He saw the post to which Hervé was tethered. The chain stretched beyond his vision, somewhere to the side of the cottage. The post leaned under the strain.

“We have a visitor,” Lainé said.

He watched the chain tauten and drop, tauten and drop, threatening to uproot the post. Hervé’s voice seemed to crack under the strain of her panic, reaching up and up until Lainé was sure it could climb no higher.

Then the dog fell silent, and the chain sagged to the ground.

CHAPTER NINE

A full length mirror fronted the wardrobe in Ryan’s hotel room. He stood before it, his shoulders back, chest forward, stomach in. The grey cloth of the suit clung to his body, accentuated the masculine, flattered his frame. Even, dare he think it, made him appear handsome. Ryan smoothed the tie. The silk whispered on his fingertips. The cufflinks sparked like flints on his wrists.

He did not look like a shopkeeper’s son.

“You’ll do,” he said.

The Grand Hotel overlooked Malahide Estuary, north of Dublin, a broad wedding cake of a building, four storeys high, that had stood for more than a century. A receptionist directed Ryan to the function room. As he approached its doors, he heard a small swing band perform “How High the Moon.”

Waiters cleared away the remains of the meal that had recently been eaten by the guests. Some government affair, Ryan surmised, diplomats, judges, politicians. Men of power enjoying the spoils. They clustered in groups, girls and their suitors, elder men and their greying wives.

Couples danced, most of them stiff-backed, their bodies apart. A few showed less restraint.

For a moment, Ryan felt an imposter, an interloper. He didn’t belong here, amongst these people with their money and their good taste. His hand went to the silk of his tie. Its texture against his fingertips offered a sliver of reassurance.

“Are you lost?” a velvet voice asked.

Ryan turned, saw her. He opened his mouth, but words betrayed him, his tongue a tripwire. She stood with a young woman Ryan recognised as Charles Haughey’s secretary.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’re all charlatans here. Come on. I’ll let you get me a drink.”

She hooked her hand around his elbow, her forearm slender and bare, the skin of her wrist pale and freckled. In her heels, she stood only a few inches shorter than him, the length of her startling, the sleek line of her body drawing his eyes downwards. Deep red hair pinned up, eyes smoky green.

She gave her friend a smile and a wink as she guided Ryan away.

“Who are you with?” she asked.

Ryan gained control of his tongue. “I have to meet someone.”

“Who?”

“The minister.”

She led him deeper into the room’s currents. “Which minister? We have several.”

“The Minister for Justice.”

She smiled. “Charlie? I believe he’s holding court at the bar. Which is handy, seeing as you’re going to get me that drink.”

They walked together from the dimness of one room to the light of another. The music dulled, laughter and chatter swelled.

There was Haughey, perched on a high stool, surrounded by younger men, his face reddened with drink. He fixed Ryan with his hawk’s stare, winked, and continued his story.

“You should’ve seen the fucker,” he said, spittle arcing from his thin lips. “Galloping like his life depended on it. And it did, I’d have shot the bastard myself if he’d lost. Anyway, he’s coming charging up the straight, and wee Turley the jockey, he’s barely hanging on, he looks like he’s shitting himself. That other fucker, I forget his name, he’s looking back over his shoulder, sees my boy coming at him, I swear to God, he near fell off when he seen him.”

The young men laughed the laughter of the beholden.

Ryan felt warm air brush his ear, smelled lipstick. He shivered.

“I’ll have a G and T,” she said. “Lime. Never lemon.”

Ryan reached for his wallet.

Haughey called, “Hey, hey, hey, get your hand out of your pocket, big fella. It’s all taken care of.”

Ryan nodded his thanks and caught the barman’s attention. “Gin and tonic with lime and a half of Guinness.”

She let her fingers drop from his elbow to join with his, pulled his hand close to her, his knuckles brushing her hip. “Come on, a real drink.”

Heat bloomed on Ryan’s cheeks. He coughed. “Make that a brandy and ginger.”

“That’s more like it,” she said. Her fingers tightened on his before releasing them. She turned, leaned her back and elbows on the bar, the silken fabric of her dress telling tales.

The heat on Ryan’s cheeks spread to his neck.

She tilted her head, showing him the smooth place beneath her ear. “You haven’t asked my name.”

Ryan wondered for a moment if he should apologise. Instead, he put his hands in his pockets and feigned confidence. “All right. What’s your name?”

“Celia,” she said, letting the sibilant drip like honey, the vowels thick between her lips. “What’s yours?”

He told her as his assuredness flaked away like weathered paint.

“Well, Mr. Ryan, what business do you have with Charles J. Haughey?”

“Private business,” he said, his voice harder than he intended.

She arched a sculpted eyebrow. “I see.”

The sharp click of glass on marble, the shimmer of ice. Ryan handed Celia the gin and tonic. She held his stare as she sipped. Her tongue sought the glistening droplets on her lips.

Ryan swallowed the brandy’s burn, couldn’t meet her challenge. He might have seen the corner of her mouth curl in amusement as he looked away.

Haughey broke from his pack, the young men staring after him. He let his gaze crawl the length of Ryan’s form, shoe to collar. “McClelland take care of you all right?”

“Yes, Minister.” Ryan measured carefully the bow of his head, balancing deference and pride, the politician and the woman.

“Good.” Haughey nodded. “You’ll do all right. Won’t he, Miss Hume?”

Celia’s lips parted in a conspirator’s smile. “Yes he will,” she said.

Ryan couldn’t be sure whose conspiracy she sided with, only that he desired it to be his own.

“Come on,” Haughey said. “The colonel’s waiting.”

As the minister turned away, Celia’s finger snagged Ryan’s.

“Be careful,” she said, her smile lost.

Ryan followed Haughey to a darkened stairwell. The minister lit a cigarette as he walked, didn’t offer one to Ryan.

Mounting the steps, Haughey said, “Watch yourself with Skorzeny. He’s smart as a whip. Don’t be clever with him. Try it, and he’ll rip the shite out of you.”

“Yes, Minister.”

They exited the stairwell onto a carpeted corridor, numbered doors along the hallway. Haughey approached one set apart from the others. He knocked.

The door opened, swallowed Haughey, leaving Ryan alone in the corridor.

He leaned his back against the wall, not thinking of what waited inside the room. Instead, Ryan pictured the woman, remembered her scent, warm and sweet. Time passed, forgotten.

Haughey opened the door, stepped aside to allow two suited men to leave. They eyed Ryan as they passed. Once they had gone, the minister said, “Come on.”

CHAPTER TEN

As Ryan entered the suite, Skorzeny stood up from the leather-upholstered armchair, seeming to fill the room, the breadth and the height of him, the line of his shoulders stretching his pale suit like an oak beam. The scar traced a route from his eyebrow to the corner of his mouth, and onward to his chin, his moustache neat, his gaze bright. His thick greying hair swept back from his forehead.

Haughey stood between them, seemed smaller than he had a few minutes ago, the hawk gone from his eyes.

“Colonel, this is Lieutenant Albert Ryan, G2, Directorate of Intelligence.”

Skorzeny stepped forward, extended a hand so large it swallowed Ryan’s whole. Ryan imagined the hard fingers could have crushed his own had the Austrian felt so inclined.

“Lieutenant,” Skorzeny said, the accent sharp and angular, releasing his grip. “The minister tells me you’re the best he has. Is this so?”

Ryan’s hand tingled deep between the bones. “I don’t think I can answer that, sir.”

“No? Who knows you better than yourself?”

While Ryan searched for a reply, Skorzeny filled two glasses with rich brown liquid from a decanter. He gave one to Haughey, sipped from the other, offered nothing to Ryan.

“Please sit,” he said.

Haughey took the other armchair, leaving Ryan the couch.

“The minister tells me you fought for the British during the war.”

Ryan cleared his throat. “Yes, sir.”

“Why so?”

“I wanted out of my home town,” Ryan said, opting for honesty. He sensed a lie would not be entertained. “I knew it was the only way I’d ever get out of Ireland. I didn’t want the life my father had. So I crossed the border into the North and joined up.”

“Which regiment?”

“The Royal Ulster Rifles.”

“So you were part of Operation Mallard?”

“Yes, sir.”

Skorzeny took a cigarette case from his pocket, white enamel with the Reichsadler, the Nazi eagle perched atop an oak-wreathed swastika, embossed in gold. He opened the case, extended it to Haughey. The minister declined. Skorzeny lit a cigarette for himself. Smoke plumed from his lips and nostrils as he sat down.

“And Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein?” he asked.

Haughey looked from one man to the other. “And what?”

“Operation Watch on the Rhein,” Ryan said. “The Allies called it the Battle of the Bulge. I was involved to a lesser extent.”

“And after the war?”

“When I came home, I attended Trinity College, studying English.”

Skorzeny smiled. “Ah, Trinity. So you fenced?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You will come to my home so we can duel.”

“Sir?”

“To Martinstown House. I have fenced since my youth. I earned my Schmiss in a university match.” He indicated the scar, his eyes cold and glittery like marbles. “But I haven’t found a reasonable opponent in this country. Perhaps that is you. So tell me, how did you apply this education you received?”

“I didn’t. I re-enlisted in the Ulster Rifles and served in Korea as part of the 29th Independent Infantry Brigade. I was selected for special training there.”

“What was this training?”

“Commando tactics,” Ryan said. “Your tactics.”

Skorzeny gave a slight nod in thanks for the acknowledgement.

“Under control of 3 Commando Brigade, I led small units in raids on enemy positions. We slept in the trenches during daylight and worked at night.”

Skorzeny drew long and deep on his cigarette. “How many men did you kill?”

Ryan returned the Austrian’s stare. “I don’t know,” he said. “How many did you kill?”

Skorzeny smiled and stood. “We are soldiers. Only murderers keep count.”

He lifted the decanter and poured a third glass, crossed the room, and placed the drink in Ryan’s hand.

“So what do you know of these scoundrels who use dead men for messengers?”

Ryan took a shallow sip of brandy, smoother on his tongue and in his throat than the drink he’d ordered at the bar. “Very little, sir.”

Skorzeny retook his seat, crossed his long legs. “Well, a little is more than nothing. Go on.”

“They are efficient, careful, skilled. They left no traces at the guesthouse in Salthill. I wasn’t able to visit the scenes of the previous killings, but I can only assume they were as clean.”

Haughey spoke up. “I’ve seen the Garda reports. They found nothing useful.” He turned to Ryan. “What about the Jewish angle?”

“There’s nothing to suggest involvement by any group from the Jewish community.”

Haughey sat forward. “Nothing to suggest it? For Christ’s sake, man, there’s everything to suggest it.”

“There are no known organised Jewish groups within Ireland,” Ryan said. “We have only a very small Jewish population. It’s extremely unlikely that such a group exists. Even if it did, it’s less likely that it would have the capability of carrying out such actions.”

“Lieutenant Ryan is correct,” Skorzeny said. “These killings were done by professionals. Trained men.”

“The Israelis, then,” Haughey said. “The Mossad. Or that Wiesenthal fella, the one who got your friend Eichmann executed last year.”

Skorzeny looked hard at Haughey for a moment, then turned his eyes to Ryan. “Speculation aside, you are no closer to finding these men than you were forty-eight hours ago.”

Ryan said, “No, sir.”

“Then what do you suggest we do next? Simply wait for them to kill again? Or come for me?”

“I suggest interviewing everyone who was present at the funeral in Galway. The notes said only the priest who gave the mass was spoken to by the Guards. He said he knew none of the people who attended, didn’t speak to any of them, apart from one local man who made the arrangements. And that man has yet to be located.”

“You mean to interrogate the priest?”

“No,” Ryan said. “I suspect that you know at least some of the people who attended the funeral. You and Johan Hambro must have had mutual acquaintances. Tell me where I can find them, and I will interview them.”

Skorzeny shook his head. “Out of the question. My friends value their privacy. Even if I could tell you where to find these people, I cannot compel them to talk with you. They would simply refuse.”

“They may have seen something, someone, that could help us,” Ryan said. “It’s the only route I can see.”

“Then you will find another.”

Ryan stood, placed the glass on the coffee table.

“There is no other,” he said. “I’ll study the case notes, review my findings, and write up a report. Without your cooperation, that’s all I can do. Good evening.”

Ryan left the suite, closed the door behind him, walked to the stairs. He was halfway down the first flight when Haughey called to him from above.

“Wait there, big fella.”

Ryan stopped, turned.

Haughey descended the steps, thunder on his face.

“Just who in the name of Christ do you think you are? You don’t talk to a man like Otto Skorzeny like that. Are you trying to make a cunt of me or what?”

“No, minister.”

Haughey came nose-to-nose with Ryan despite standing a step higher. “Then what are you trying to do?”

“The job you assigned me, Minister. For that I need cooperation. Without it, you’ll get my report and that’s all.”

“I put you in that nice suit, big fella. Now you repay me with back talk. The fucking cheek of you.”

Ryan turned his back on the minister, left him huffing in the stairwell.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Otto Skorzeny checked his wristwatch. Late enough, so he poured another glass of brandy.

He found this Irishman Ryan interesting. A soldier who’d spent the majority of his career fighting for another nation, a nation most of his countrymen considered their enemy.

Skorzeny sympathised with the G2 officer’s position. All his life he had felt a lack of nationhood. As a younger man, and an Austrian, he had sided with the Germans, supported their annexation of his own land. After the war, he had drifted from country to country, Spain to Argentina and back again, then here, to this rainy island.

A nationalist without a nation.

The idea struck Skorzeny as oddly romantic. It was true that many nationalist revolutionaries were not natives of the lands they fought for. Like the Egyptian militant, Yasser Arafat, who stoked the Palestinian flames, urging war against the Zionists. Or Ernesto Guevara, the Argentinean who helped steer the Cuban revolution. Or, indeed, Eamon de Valera, that most ardent Irish nationalist and republican who was in fact only half Irish by parentage, and had barely escaped being executed alongside his comrades of the 1916 uprising by virtue of being born in, and therefore a citizen of, the United States of America.

Truth be told, Skorzeny would have preferred to be back in Madrid, enjoying his friend Francisco Franco’s hospitality. These killings might not have been quite so troubling had he been able simply to board a flight to Spain. But an Italian had brought an end to that. At least for the time being.

It had been three months ago, a warm Tarragona evening, on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. Franco had invited a score of his closest friends to spend the weekend with him, enjoying the sea air of the Catalan coast, perhaps to take a walking tour of the city’s Roman ruins. Skorzeny had flown from Dublin to Paris, then on to Barcelona, before travelling south by train to join Franco at his hotel perched at the end of the Rambla Nova.

A piano chimed inside the crowded hotel suite, mingling with the sound of the surf washing up on the rocks below, as Skorzeny enjoyed a white wine spritzer and a cigarette on the balcony.

“Colonel Skorzeny,” a voice said.

Skorzeny turned from the sea view, fading as the sun set, to see a well dressed man, blond-haired. For a moment, Skorzeny assumed him to be a former Kamerad, given his Aryan appearance, but somehow the accent didn’t fit.

“Guten Abend,” Skorzeny said. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

The man smiled, confessed in accented Spanish that his German was poor. Skorzeny switched tongues, he had always been talented in this regard, and repeated his greeting in Spanish.

“We met once, briefly, almost twenty years ago.” The man extended his hand, his slender fingers cool in Skorzeny’s grasp. “My name is Luca Impelliteri. When we met, I was a sergeant in the carabinieri.”

Skorzeny released his hand. “You’re Italian? I would have taken you for German.”

“My parents were from Genoa.”

“Ah. Northern Italians are of better blood than many of that country. The Sicilians, I believe, are the lowest. Am I correct?”

Impelliteri gave a hard smile. “I judge a man’s worth by his actions, not by his birth.”

“How noble,” Skorzeny said. “And how do you come to be in Spain?”

“I am adviser to the head of the Generalissimo’s personal security team. Tonight, the Generalissimo has graciously allowed me to join his guests for a drink.”

“He must be impressed with you,” Skorzeny said, allowing the slightest note of condescension to enter his voice.

The Italian nodded in a gesture of humility that Skorzeny knew to be as insincere as his own compliment. He regarded the faintness of the lines around Impelliteri’s eyes, at the corners of his mouth.

“You must have been a rather young officer when we met.”

“Twenty one,” Impelliteri said. “That was in September, 1943.”

Skorzeny took another look at the face, searched his memory. “Oh?”

“To be precise, the twelfth of September.”

Skorzeny lifted his glass from the ledge, took a sip of wine spritzer, waited.

“On Gran Sasso,” the Italian said. “At Hotel Campo Imperatore.”

“You were one of Mussolini’s guards?”

“In truth, I had never set eyes on Il Duce until you brought him out from the hotel, cowering in that ridiculous coat and hat he wore.”

“Did you surrender along with your fellow carabinieri?”

“Of course.” Impelliteri smiled. “Why would I lay down my life to keep a man like Mussolini from the Germans? You were welcome to him.”

Skorzeny returned the smile, raised his glass. “A wise choice for a young man. I would have crushed any resistance.”

Impelliteri’s smile broadened. “Would you? From where I stood, the only thing in danger of being crushed was the poor officer whose back you stood on to climb that wall.”

Skorzeny felt the smile freeze on his lips.

“But you did very well out of it all, didn’t you?” Impelliteri continued. “They turned you into a hero, the propaganda men. What did they call you? Yes, that’s it: Commando Extraordinaire, the daring SS officer who almost single-handedly saved their ally Mussolini from his own traitorous people before they could hand him over to the Americans. It was quite a story they made out of the rescue. I saw that little film they made about it. It did make me laugh.”

Skorzeny returned his glass to the ledge. “There was no story, only historical record. Do you call me a liar?”

“A liar?” Impelliteri shook his head. “No. Self-aggrandising, yes. An opportunist, yes. A fraud?”

He left the final question hanging in the warm Spanish air for a moment.

“You know, the Generalissimo, he holds you in the highest regard. He believes every word of your mythology. That’s why he welcomes you to his kingdom. It would be a shame if he ever found out the truth of it all.”

Impotent anger churned in Skorzeny’s belly. Had there not been a suite full of Franco’s guests just feet away, he would have grabbed the Italian by his throat and thrown him over the balcony ledge onto the rocks below. Instead, he held his silence as Impelliteri bade him goodnight and rejoined the party.

In a matter of days, Skorzeny wished he had felt no such reservations and killed the Italian then and there.

Now, he was marooned in Ireland, waiting in a hotel suite for that damned politician to return.

Eventually, a knock on the door, and Haughey entered, breathless and red-faced.

“Colonel,” he said, “I must apologise for Lieutenant Ryan’s behaviour.”

He topped up Haughey’s glass. “Not at all, Minister.”

“If you want me to kick him off the job, get someone else, I’ll understand.”

Skorzeny handed the glass to the politician. “No, Minister. I like this Lieutenant Ryan. He has balls. Let’s see what he can do.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ryan strode across the foyer, heading for the exit. Music boomed and moaned from the function room. He paused, listened. Autumn Leaves, he thought, picturing the woman, her deep red hair, her slender freckled wrist, her pale skin.

She’d said her name was Celia.

Go or remain?

He stood locked in quandary until he remembered the cold empty room back at Buswells Hotel, and the warmth of her breath on his ear. Ryan followed the tide of music back to the function room. He lingered in the doorway, seeking her among the swells of dance and laughter.

There, taller than almost everyone, near the archway that led to the bar, listening with a polite expression as a pudgy man shouted above the music. Ryan kept her in his sight as he crossed the room. She saw him approach, held his gaze as he drew near, ignored the man who bellowed at her.

“I saved your drink for you,” she said, lifting the glass from the table beside her.

The man ceased shouting, went to admonish Ryan for the interruption, then thought better of it. The music swallowed up his curses as he walked away, head down.

“Thank you,” Ryan said, taking the glass from her, his skin tingling where her fingers brushed his. He pulled a chair out from the table and she sat down. He joined her.

“How was the Minister for Justice?” she asked.

“Loud,” Ryan said. “Coarse. Angry.”

She smiled. “Sounds like our Charlie. He’ll be Taoiseach one day, wait and see. Charles J. Haughey will lead this country. To what, I don’t know, but he’ll lead it. Some think he’s a great man.”

“And what do you think?”

As Ryan asked the question, Haughey entered the function room alongside Otto Skorzeny. All eyes turned in their direction. Haughey basked in it while Skorzeny remained impassive. Young men raced to the bar to fetch drinks for them.

Celia stared at the politician. “I think he’s a monster. He wouldn’t be the first to lead a nation. What did he whisk you away for? What devilish plans were you and he cooking up with the infamous Otto Skorzeny?”

“No plans,” Ryan said. “Nothing I can discuss.”

“I see,” she said. “How intriguing.”

Haughey and Skorzeny advanced through the room, shaking hands, slapping backs. The minister noticed Ryan, his comradely smile freezing on his lips.

Ryan did not look away until Celia tugged at his arm.

“Dance with me,” she said.

Dread and panic sucked the blood from his cheeks. “No, I don’t, I can’t, I mean I’m not a very good …”

Her fingertips skimmed his jowls. “Such a saggy face,” she said, her smile crooked. “Come on. I’ll drag you up if I have to.”

“Really, I’d embarrass us both.”

“Nonsense. Don’t make me beg.”

Celia grabbed Ryan’s hand and hauled. He got to his feet, allowed her to lead him to the dance floor. The band played a mid-tempo tune he did not recognise. She took his left hand in her right, raised it up, brought her body close to his. Her left hand climbed his shoulder, his right found the small of her back. He pressed his palm into the hollow there, felt the suggestion of her shape, the firm and the soft of her.

They danced.

She lent him her grace, her balance, allowed his clumsy feet to follow hers across the floor. The air between them seemed charged, like dark summer clouds, ready to flash and spark. He felt the pressure of her breasts against his torso, did not pull away. She turned within his arms, her hip grazing him. Blood flowed and warmed that part of him. He felt a heaviness there, weight and heat. She felt it also, he knew, they both did. Her lips parted, shining red and pink.

Ryan opened his mouth to speak, but her expression shifted as she watched something over his shoulder. He turned his head to see what had taken her from him.

A middle aged man spoke in Haughey’s ear, the minister’s face pale, his brow furrowed. Haughey turned to Skorzeny, repeated whatever he’d been told. Skorzeny’s face remained a mask of calm. Only his eyes moved, seeking Ryan out. The music dimmed in Ryan’s ears, his feet ceased their awkward shuffling.

“What’s the matter, do you think?” Celia asked.

Haughey marched to the dance floor.

“I don’t know,” Ryan said.

The minister took Ryan’s elbow, led him away from Celia. “Looks like you’ve got what you wanted,” Haughey said.

It took a moment for Ryan to understand that the politician did not mean his dancing partner. “What?” he asked.

“A witness.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ryan struggled to keep up with Skorzeny’s Mercedes-Benz 300SL as it coursed through the countryside. Its white body disappeared behind hedgerows and reappeared on crests, dazzling in the Vauxhall’s headlights. Ryan felt the tires of his own car skitter on the road surface, barely clinging to the bends while the Mercedes seemed to float ahead.

Skorzeny hardly slowed as they passed through Kildare town. Ryan heard the Mercedes roar above the sound of his own engine as it turned up the incline towards Dunmurry. As the town’s buildings gave way to farmland, Ryan finally lost sight of the other car. He accelerated, leaning forward, peering through the windscreen for any sign of the Austrian.

Haughey had stayed at the party, thought it best not to get too involved. Yes, Ryan had agreed, keep your distance from the blood.

The road rose for half a mile ahead. Trees and gates whipped by, branches reaching out to skiff and clang the Vauxhall’s doors and wing mirrors. The brow came rushing up, and Ryan’s stomach floated with him as the car lost contact with the tarmac.

Searing red lights filled his vision as the Vauxhall slammed down. He stamped on the brake pedal, his body thrown forward, jamming his foot down again and again. The car groaned and juddered as it slowed, the Mercedes only yards ahead.

Skorzeny pulled away, exhaust bellowing. His hand slipped out of the driver’s window, waving, come on, keep up. Ryan cursed as he brought the Vauxhall under control.

He kept the Mercedes within sight until it turned into a lane so narrow Ryan hadn’t seen its mouth in the hedgerow. The single track cut through fields for a mile or more, the pocked surface jarring Ryan’s spine until the lane ended at a gateway barely wide enough for Skorzeny’s car to slip through. Ryan followed and parked alongside the Mercedes as Skorzeny climbed out.

“Who taught you to drive?” the Austrian asked as Ryan walked around the Vauxhall. “Your mother? You’d have lost me if I hadn’t waited.”

Before Ryan could agree or argue, a thin man stepped out from the side of the cottage, an oil lamp hanging from his fingers.

“This way,” he said, his accent thick.

This was Lainé, Ryan thought, the Frenchman. Skorzeny went first, shook the man’s hand, old friends.

“Who is this?” Lainé asked.

“Lieutenant Ryan of the Directorate of Intelligence,” Skorzeny said. “He’s helping us get to the bottom of this. He’ll want to speak with you.”

Ryan approached, extended his hand. Lainé ignored it and pinched a hand-rolled cigarette between his lips. He held the lamp up, let the tobacco dip into the flame. It flared, revealing the hollows of his face, the sunken eyes.

“Come,” Lainé said.

They followed him to the rear of the cottage. Skorzeny paused inside the doorway. Ryan reached the threshold and saw why.

A dead man lay on the stone floor, flat on his back. One neat hole in his forehead, another in his knitted pullover, the wool tattered and scorched. A broken shotgun and two unspent shells lay beside him.

Muddy boot prints crisscrossed the floor, circled the body. Ryan noted the damp soil caked on the Frenchman’s boots. The dead man’s shoes were dirty but dry.

Lainé indicated the corpse. “This is Murtagh. They kill him first.”

Skorzeny moved further into the cottage. Ryan followed.

Another man sat at the table, his head at an unnatural angle, a flap of scalp peeled back.

“This is Groix,” Lainé said.

The Frenchman walked to the other side of the table, pulled the chair out, and sat down. He shook, coughed, his eyes welling. Mud and what appeared to be blood dappled his cardigan. He set the gas lamp at the centre of the table. It threw yellow light around the room. Lainé’s tears sparkled.

“They kill Hervé. She only barks. She never bites. And they kill her.”

Skorzeny rounded the table, placed his large hand on Lainé’s bony shoulder. “Tell us what happened.”

The Frenchman sniffed, dabbed at his eyes with his sleeve, and talked.

Groix had gone to the window, leaned over the sink, peered out. He had craned his neck, explored every part of the small yard within reach of his gaze. The dog’s chain hadn’t moved for more than a minute.

“I see nothing,” he said in French.

It disappointed Lainé that for all Groix’s zeal he had never learned to speak Breton to any degree of competency.

Lainé stood behind him. “They’ve come down the hillside, to the back of the cottage. Do you have a weapon?”

“No. Nothing.”

Lainé had a pistol, an old Smith and Wesson that had once belonged to a GI. It lay beneath his pillow.

He turned to Murtagh, said in English, “There are men come and kill us.” He indicated the shotgun on the table. “Can you shoot this gun?”

Murtagh stood, his chair rattling across the floor. “What?”

“Can you shoot this gun?” Lainé repeated.

“Who’s coming?”

Lainé decided not to waste any more breath on the young idiot. He moved to the back of the room, as far from the door as he could get, while Groix stood useless at the window.

Murtagh reached for the shotgun, broke it, made a show of checking the shells. He spun around as something slammed into the back door, tearing the bolt from the frame. Two plosive sounds, like balloons popping, and Murtagh fell.

The men entered, one, two, three of them, weapons raised and ready.

Lainé froze. Groix whimpered and raised his hands as fluid trickled over his shoes to puddle on the floor.

The second man who entered said, “Good evening, Célestin.”

Groix turned his confused face towards Lainé.

The man said, “I don’t know your friend. Who is he?”

“Elouan Groix,” Lainé said.

“Both of you sit.”

Groix obeyed.

“You too,” the man said to Lainé.

Lainé crossed the room, skirted Groix’s urine, and sat down.

“Hands flat on the table.”

Lainé and Groix splayed their fingers on the wood.

The three men wore dark overalls, woollen caps rolled down to their eyebrows, leather gloves. Two carried Browning pistols with suppressors. The third carried an automatic rifle. One took up a position at Groix’s right, the rifle levelled at his temple. The other came to Lainé’s left, aimed his weapon.

The leader pulled up the chair Murtagh had sat in, placed his Browning on the tabletop, one hand resting upon it.

“So here we are,” he said, his accent English.

Tears rolled from Groix’s eyes. He sniffed.

“Here we are,” Lainé said. “Et maintenant?”

“A quick chat,” the man said.

“I say nothing.”

Groix spoke up, fear in his voice, hope in his wet eyes. “I will say. You ask. I will say.”

The man lifted the Browning from the table, aimed, squeezed the trigger. Groix’s head jerked as if pulled by a marionette string. Bone and skin came away, hair flaming and smoking. He said no more.

The man turned his attention back to Lainé. “You misunderstand. I’m not looking for any more information. I already know everything I need to know. You don’t have to say anything. Not to me. I will talk. You will listen.”

Lainé watched a dark line trace its way around Groix’s ear and down his neck towards his collar.

“So talk,” he said.

The man placed the pistol back on the tabletop. Points of red dotted his cheek. “You will pass a message to Otto Skorzeny.”

Lainé smiled, though it felt more like a grimace on his lips. “Like Krauss?”

“Not necessarily. I’d prefer you pass the message on in person. I want you to be able to tell Skorzeny how serious we are. How efficient. If you agree to do so, I’ll take you at your word and allow you to live. Will you pass on this message?”

Lainé reached for the tobacco pouch and papers, set about making a cigarette. “D’accord.”

The man nodded. “Good. Repeat these words to Skorzeny exactly as I say them. Only three words. Are you listening?”

Lainé leaned into the gas lamp and lit the cigarette. “Ouais.”

“Tell him: You will pay.”

Lainé snorted, picked tobacco from his lip. “This will scare Otto Skorzeny, you think?”

The man raised the Browning, pressed the suppressor to Lainé’s cheek. The heat of it made his eyelid flicker.

“Just repeat those words to him. That’s all.”

Lainé nodded.

“Good.” The man lifted the Browning and stood.

The other two men backed towards the door.

“Be seeing you.”

They pulled the door closed behind them.

The shaking started then, and Lainé was barely able to bring the cigarette to his lips. Even so, he smoked it until it burned his fingers then dropped it to the floor.

He did not look at Groix’s or Murtagh’s bodies as he left the cottage. The chain lay loose on the ground. He followed it until he found Hervé lying curled on herself. In the dimness, her eyes wavered in their sockets, seeking the source of his scent.

“There, baby,” he said as he crouched down beside her.

Two holes in her flank. He placed his hand there, felt the warm wetness and the faint insistence of her heart. She exhaled, a bubbling deep in her chest. Lainé lay down in the dirt and held her, whispering stories of heaven, until the bubbling ceased and her heart stilled. He kissed her once then got to his feet.

Ten minutes took him across the fields to Caoimhín Murtagh’s farmhouse. He rapped the door. Mrs. Murtagh answered.

“I need your telephone,” Lainé said.

She looked back over her shoulder, called her husband.

Ryan asked, “Does Murtagh know what happened here?”

“Non. He asks, but I say nothing. When you go, I tell him.”

“Good,” Skorzeny said, squeezing Lainé’s shoulder. “You did well. After you tell him, you will also leave this place. Take everything, leave no trace of yourself. Let this Murtagh deal with the police. Tell him he must not mention you to them. Offer him money if you have to.”

“Where do I go?”

Skorzeny considered it for a moment. “You may take a room at my house.”

“Merci.” Lainé’s voice turned to a wavering hiss.

“How old was the man with the pistol?” Ryan asked.

“I think forty five. The others, one was also this age, one was younger.”

“The other men didn’t speak?”

“Non.”

“So we can’t tell if they were British or not.”

“They look, how to say …” Lainé waved his open palm across his face. “Pale, like English men. Not like Spanish or Italian. Not …”

“Not Jews,” Skorzeny said.

“Non.”

Ryan said, “The Browning is a British service weapon.”

“You think SAS? MI5?” Skorzeny asked.

“I see no reason why British forces would target you. And if they wanted you dead, you would be.”

Skorzeny smiled, creasing his scar. “Perhaps. Then tell me, Lieutenant Ryan, who are these men, and what do they want?”

“I don’t know who they are. And only you can say what they want. One thing is clear, though.”

“What is this?”

“They must have an informant. If they know so much about you and your … friends, then someone must have passed this information to them. Maybe even working with them.”

Skorzeny went to the window, stared out into the darkness. “Then I will make enquiries. You will also. If you find this person before I do, you will notify me immediately.”

“And then?”

“Then you will bring him to me.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Charles J. Haughey sat at his desk, a cup of coffee and a glass of fizzing Alka Seltzer in front of him. Ryan sat opposite.

“So what do you need?” Haughey asked.

“I need the names and locations of all the foreign nationals who were Nazis or collaborators and are now resident in Ireland.”

“No,” Haughey said.

“Minister, I need this information if I’m going to find whoever has been working with these men.”

Haughey took a swig of the Alka Seltzer, belched, and said, “There are currently well over a hundred such people resident in Ireland. That we know of. There are very likely others that have sneaked in through some back door. I can’t go handing that kind of information out, even if I had it to hand. Besides, how many of them do you think know Colonel Skorzeny?”

“All right,” Ryan said. “Compile a list of those who have direct contact with Skorzeny. I can start there.”

Haughey leaned forward, his forearms nudging the coffee cup, making it rattle in its saucer. “What am I, your fucking secretary?”

“Minister, it is vital I find the informant before Skorzeny does.”

“Why?” Haughey asked. “Why can’t you just let him deal with it?”

“Because if Skorzeny finds the informant, I believe he will torture him. Then I believe he will kill him.”

Haughey’s secretary smiled as Ryan passed through the outer office. He paused at the door, turned, came back to her.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Last night, I saw you speaking with a woman. Her name was Celia Hume.”

The secretary’s lips curled in a smirk. She let her gaze travel the length of Ryan, took her time about it. “Yes, I know Celia.”

Sweat chilled Ryan’s brow and back as his cheeks smouldered. “Do you know where I could contact her?”

The secretary’s smirk blossomed into a crooked grin. “And what would a nice man like you want with our Celia?”

A small but bright flash of anger at the girl’s intrusion. He quelled it, returned her smile. “Just to say hello.”

“I see.” She scribbled a telephone number on a pad, tore off the sheet, handed it to him. “If she doesn’t want to say hello back, you can always give me a try.”

Ryan took the paper from her fingers, held her gaze despite how it burned his skin.

Late in the afternoon, a messenger boy brought a thick manila envelope to Ryan’s hotel room. A note inside said: Here’s your list of names. Be careful with them and destroy it when you’re finished.

It was signed, C.J.H.

Ryan pulled three sheets of paper from the envelope and spread them out on the bed. A dozen typewritten names in total, addresses, some of them only townlands. Ryan pictured those places, low cottages or grand houses at the ends of single track lanes, roads without names, places known only to the postmen who delivered to them.

One name seemed familiar to Ryan: Luykx, who had made his fortune with restaurants and bars. Beside that name, a scribbled note.

Don’t go near Albert Luykx. He’s a personal friend of mine. I don’t want him bothered.

Haughey had written elsewhere on the paper. Nationalities, organisations, ranks, relationships, professions. Some were businessmen, one of them a writer, one a schoolmaster, two doctors, more of them wealthy than not.

Ryan paid attention to those who were not.

Catherine Beauchamp, a novelist, a Breton nationalist like Lainé. She worked for a charity, a normal salaried job. But a decent job, nonetheless. She made a living. Would she crave more? Enough to turn on her friends?

And here was Hakon Foss. A Norwegian nationalist who had found work as a gardener and handyman, much of that work for Skorzeny and his associates. He would be in a position to see much of their comings and goings, perhaps enough to foster jealousy and rage at what they possessed and he did not.

Ryan scanned the list once more. The businessmen had all prospered in Ireland. Property, hospitality, a printing business, one of them a breeder of racehorses.

All endeavours that required capital, money, and plenty of it. These men fled the Continent with enough cash, or access to it, to establish comfortable lives. Why would they risk what they’d built for themselves? He thought once more about Catherine Beauchamp and Hakon Foss.

He would start with them.

Ryan checked his watch. Almost six. He took the folded sheet of notepaper from his pocket. The name Celia written in a fluid script, and the numbers.

He sat on the edge of the bed, lifted the receiver, dialled an outside line, then turned the wheel of numbers, heard the whirr of the mechanism as it returned to zero after each one.

The dial tone repeated in his ear five times before a gravel-voiced woman answered.

“I’d like to speak with Celia Hume,” Ryan said.

“She’s not here,” the woman said. “If you want to leave a message, I’ll make sure she gets it.”

“Please tell her Albert Ryan called.” He gave the hotel’s number, and his room, and she promised to pass the message on.

Ryan sat silent and alone for thirty minutes before the telephone rang.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Otto Skorzeny counted the money as Pieter Menten sipped coffee. Five thousand in American dollars, ten thousand in British pounds, and a further thirty thousand in Irish currency laid out on the desk in Skorzeny’s study. Menten had travelled by ferry and train, carrying the suitcase of money from Rotterdam to Harwich in England, then from the Welsh port of Holyhead across to Dun Laoghaire where Skorzeny collected him in his Mercedes.

The Dutchman had aged well, the years since the war having been kind to him. His long nose and high cheekbones gave him an aristocratic appearance, as if wealth were his by birthright, not labour.

The money had been delivered to Rotterdam by an Arab courier who retrieved the funds from a bank in Switzerland in return for a five percent commission. Skorzeny had been told by more than one source that the Arab was actually an Algerian of Berber descent, but he had never been able to confirm the speculation. Regardless of origin, the Arab travelled with two bodyguards, both hulking dark-skinned men also of uncertain nationality. Only a very brave or very foolish man would think of robbing him.

The Arab always took his percentage in dollars. Skorzeny had heard that he spent most of it in Rotterdam’s brothels, but again, he had no proof of this claim.

Satisfied, Skorzeny peeled off one thousand Irish pounds and handed them to Menten. He transferred the rest to the safe mounted in the wall behind his desk, shielded the combination with his broad body as he locked the door. He returned the landscape painting to its hook.

Menten lifted the cloth-wrapped rectangle that sat at his feet. “A small token,” he said in English.

Skorzeny took the package, unwrapped the cloth, revealing a small simply framed portrait of a young woman dressed in black. A bird perched on her hand.

“By Hans Holbein the Younger,” Menten said. “Painted on his return to Basel circa 1530. Exquisite, don’t you think?”

“Quite beautiful,” Skorzeny said, taking his seat across the desk from Menten. “And very much appreciated, mein Kamerad. Is it from your own collection?”

Pieter Menten’s personal art collection had once been so large he had required his own private train in order to transport it.

“No, it is newly acquired. From an old Kamerad, Dominik Foerster. Do you remember him?”

Skorzeny thought back, remembered a thin bespectacled man he had met once in Berlin. “I believe so.”

“I chanced upon him while spending a weekend in Noordwijk, on the Dutch coast. He was staying in a small boarding house under an assumed name. He was in rather a state of distress, living in constant fear of discovery by some fanatic or another. I told him he might be able to find sanctuary in Ireland, and perhaps travel on to South America if he had sufficient funds. Wisely, most of his assets are tied up in art he liberated from the Jews.”

Skorzeny held the painting at arm’s length, admiring the detail in the girl’s clothing, the glistening of her eyes.

“Yes, very wise,” he said. “Tell him to contact Abbot Verlinden at Priorij Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Gent. I will send a letter of introduction on his behalf. Abbot Verlinden will in turn make introductions to the appropriate institutions in Ireland and help our Kamerad make travel arrangements. Whatever costs he cannot meet personally can be funded from our account in Zurich.”

Menten smiled. “Thank you. Dominik will be most relieved. I will contact him on my return to Rotterdam in a few days. Before that, I have property to view in Waterford.”

“Waterford?” Skorzeney asked. “It’s beautiful country there. Have the Irish authorities been accommodating?”

Menten nodded. “As much as one could hope for. But my contact in the Department of Justice has advised me to take another name.”

Skorzeny had been fortunate to be denazified by the German authorities. It had taken a considerable sum of money, but the ability to live in freedom under his own name had been worth the cost of the bribes.

“You would be wise to take his advice.”

“I intend to.” Menten gave a nod, a look of regret on his round face.

“Good. Frau Tiernan will serve dinner in an hour or so. You will stay, of course.”

“Yes, thank you.” Menten leaned forward. “What of the killings? I heard about Kamerad Krauss before I sailed from Rotterdam.”

“There has been another,” Skorzeny said.

“My God. Who?”

“A Breton. No one important. An Irishman also. They caused me a late night, but my friend the Minister for Justice has put his best man on it.”

Skorzeny did not blush at the lie. He did not consider the minister a friend. More a useful acquaintance. He knew full well that the likes of Haughey were drawn to his notoriety, desired his company so that they could bask in his reflected glamour.

Fools, all of them.

“I’m glad to hear this,” Menten said. “Helmut Krauss was a good man. He didn’t deserve such a fate.”

“Helmut Krauss was a drunkard and a womaniser. We each meet the fate that awaits us, whether we deserve it or not.”

Menten withered under his stare, visibly struggling with the desire to argue with Skorzeny’s opinion of his old friend. Eventually, he moistened his lips and said, “Naturally, they will suspect Jewish extremists. Or the Mossad, perhaps.”

He considered telling Menten the truth, but realised it would be easier to allow him the comfort of his hate. “Of course,” he said.

Skorzeny had spent the following day in the fields, watching as his farmhands herded the sheep from one paddock to another. He admired the dogs and the way their master, a long red-faced rope of a man called Tiernan, controlled them with whistles and yips.

Skorzeny had observed from the top of the slope as the dogs arced out across the grass, and he was reminded of fighter planes flying in attack formations. Tiernan’s whistle gave a short pip, and the dogs halted, crouched low to the ground, their concentration absolute. One was the sire to the other, Tiernan had said, and the youngster took hardly any training at all, he simply watched what his father did and copied him.

Another blast of the whistle and the dogs sprang forward, working in tandem, circling the flock, gathering the sheep up like hands scooping earth. Within minutes, the flock had streamed into the next field and one of the farmhands had swung the gate closed behind them.

Their task complete, the dogs ran to their master and lay at his feet. Tiernan reached down and scratched each of them behind the ears with his knotty hands.

Not for the first time, Otto Skorzeny wondered at the difference between what brought him happiness now and twenty years before. As a younger man, it had been the smell of cordite, air burned by gunpowder, the thunder and screech of battle. And boys, strong beautiful brave boys, charging into death’s maw, all at his command.

Now his belly had grown and his hips and knees sometimes rebelled; now the inclines of his fields often robbed his lungs of breath as his thighs ached with the climb. But age did not concern Skorzeny to any great degree. Despite the signals of his deterioration, he remained in good health. He could count on another ten or fifteen years of good living, maybe a further ten of tolerable existence, before his heart gave out.

He would fill that time as he had this day, walking in his fields, admiring the work of the men who tended them, watching the dogs perform their duties with the dedication only a simple mind can summon.

And of course that made for good soldiers. For Skorzeny, the best infantrymen came from the working classes. Men used to spending their days toiling in factories or fields, their minds concerned only with the tasks before them. Give such men rifles and an enemy to shoot at, and one could see the natural order of life played out in gunfire and blood.

A good commando was a different beast entirely. That required a higher mind, and more than a little cunning, an intelligence matched to a hardness of the heart.

Someone like Lieutenant Ryan.

Skorzeny had seen it on the Irishman when he first entered the suite at the Grand Hotel in Malahide. Ryan had not flinched when he saw the bodies at the cottage, even at the gaping hole in Groix’s temple, the burnt hair, the torn scalp. Ryan had that flint at his centre, the same kind Skorzeny himself had.

And Ryan was smart. Not like Haughey, whose intelligence and guile served only his greed. Ryan possessed an acumen earned in the barren and bloody places of the world. Skorzeny had no doubt that Ryan could find the traitor. But would the Irishman bring the traitor here to him? Ryan would surely know what awaited the informant. Would he have the mettle to knowingly deliver a prisoner to such a fate?

Skorzeny could not be sure.

When he returned to his house, he washed and changed, then went to his study. He had intended to summon Lainé but found him already waiting there, smoking one of those stinking cigarettes he rolled himself.

The thin Frenchman sat hunched in the chair, arms and legs crossed, making him appear crippled, malformed. Skorzeny sat opposite and took a cigarette from the case on his desk. He quietly wished Lainé had stolen one of these instead of filling the office with his own bitter smoke.

Lainé asked, “Qui est l’Irlandais?”

Skorzeny had spoken French fluently since a young age. “I told you. Lieutenant Albert Ryan, G2, Directorate of Intelligence.”

“I don’t like him. I don’t trust him.”

“You don’t have to trust him,” Skorzeny said. “Just let him do his job. I have faith in his ability. He’s a soldier. Like me.”

Lainé inclined his head to show he hadn’t missed Skorzeny’s veiled insult. “What was I, a washerwoman?”

Skorzeny chose not to answer the question. Instead, he said, “I would appreciate it if you stayed in your room this evening. I have important guests coming to dinner.”

Lainé’s tongue licked tobacco flakes from his lips. He spat them out, pfft. “What guests?”

Skorzeny looked at the damp flakes that landed on the leather of his desktop. “Political guests. Esteban will bring you a tray and a bottle from the cellar.”

Lainé’s eyes brightened. “You have a cellar?”

“Frau Tiernan is cooking lamb, so I suggest the ’55 Penfolds Grange Shiraz. It’s Australian, but excellent.”

Lainé’s lip curled at the wine’s origin, then he shrugged and nodded. “All right. But I tell you, I don’t like the Irishman. How do you know he won’t betray us?”

Skorzeny shook his head. “He is a soldier. A good one. He will follow orders. Besides, I have placed someone close to him. Someone to keep watch for us.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The landlady showed Ryan to the parlour with its stiff-cushioned chairs and dark wallpaper. Two young women had peeked down at him from the landing above when he entered the boarding house. They had ducked back beyond the banister, giggling, when he looked up at them.

Mrs. Highland left Ryan alone to fidget on the settee. She returned a few minutes later, said Celia would be down presently.

“What are your plans for the evening?” she asked, hovering by the door as if standing sentry, her hair pulled back hard into a bun, her smile polite and tight-lipped.

“The pictures,” Ryan said.

“Oh? What’s playing?”

“The James Bond film. Dr. No. It’s based on a book by Ian Fleming.”

Her smile turned to a scowl. “I hear those books are really quite vulgar.”

Sweat gathered at the small of Ryan’s back. “I haven’t read any of them.”

“Hmm. As I’m sure you can see, I run a respectable house. I regard my girls not just as lodgers, but as wards in my care. I know some of their parents personally. I won’t insist, but I would be grateful if you brought Miss Hume back before eleven o’clock.”

Ryan smiled and nodded.

The door opened, and Celia entered. Her red hair gathered loose above her shoulders, the short-sleeved green dress simple and snug, an emerald broach the only embellishment. Mrs. Highland stood back, frowning at the sight of Celia’s freckled skin. Celia ignored her.

“Albert,” she said.

Ryan stood. “Celia.”

They stood in silence save for the ticking of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece until Celia said, “Thank you, Mrs. Highland.”

The landlady looked at them each in turn, cleared her throat. “Well, I’ll leave you two to make your plans. Good evening, Mr. Ryan.”

He bowed his head. “Good evening.”

Mrs. Highland left them, closed the door behind her. Ryan heard her scold the girls on the stairs.

Celia’s green-eyed gaze caused Ryan’s mouth to dry and his lips to seal shut.

When he thought he could bear the silence no longer, she said, “Mrs. Highland does like to fuss over her girls.”

Ryan’s laugh burst from him like a greyhound from a trap. He blushed, and Celia smiled.

“Shall we go?” she asked.

They sat in the flickering dark, still and silent. Other couples leaned close, touched, the silhouettes of their heads sometimes joining together. Everyone in the room oohed in soft unison as Ursula Andress emerged tanned and shining from the sea.

The girl next to Celia looked up for a moment before turning her lips back to the boy whose hand had slipped inside her blouse. Ryan watched the shapes of the boy’s fingers move beneath the fabric. When he raised his eyes, he saw Celia looking back at him, a sly smile, her eyes glistening in the dimness.

They walked south along D’Olier Street towards the northerly buildings of Trinity College, Celia’s arm hooked in Ryan’s. A rain shower had slicked the pavement while they’d been in the cinema, street lights reflected in the sheen. The windows of the Irish Times building glowed across the way.

“He’s ever so handsome,” she said.

“Sean Connery?”

“Yes. I met him once, at a party in London. Well, I didn’t meet him exactly, he was in the room. It was last year, just before Dr. No came out in England. You could tell to look at him he’d be a star. He had a grace about him, like an animal, a tiger or a leopard, something dangerous and beautiful.”

She spoke the words as if they were the most savoury ingredients of an exotic recipe.

“I don’t suppose it’s really like that, is it? Being a secret agent.”

Ryan smiled. “I’m not a secret agent.”

“Well, you’re G2. It’s the nearest thing we have to a secret agent in our little country.”

“Maybe so, but it’s nothing like that film.”

“No?” She forced an exaggerated frown of disappointment. “No lithe beauties coming ashore and throwing themselves at you?”

They reached the end of the street, the elaborate facade of D’Olier Chambers rising above them. Celia indicated the pub tucked away on Fleet Street, opposite.

“Buy me a drink,” she said.

Inside, thick curtains of tobacco smoke hung in the air. Ryan went to the bar while Celia found a snug at the rear. The barman stared in confusion when he asked for lime in the gin and tonic, so lemon had to do.

Suited men, red faced with shirt collars unbuttoned, guffawed and shouted. Journalists, Ryan guessed, writers for the Irish Times, downing whiskeys and pints of stout, exchanging stories. They had watched Celia as she entered on Ryan’s arm, their eyes following the flow of her through the room. Ryan had felt no offence at their covetous stares. Instead he had felt pride, his vanity glowing like a filament in his chest.

Many would have thought it scandalous for a young woman to enter a pub like this, but that didn’t seem to bother Celia. But the lack of lime in her drink did.

“Rum and Coca Cola would be fine next time,” she said, her smile polite but scolding.

Ryan wondered if he should apologise. Instead, he sipped his half of Guinness. Celia’s gaze settled somewhere beneath his chin.

“Isn’t that the same tie you wore in Malahide?” she asked.

His fingers went to the silk before he could stop them. “Is it? I don’t know. I don’t pay much attention to fashion.”

“Really? It’s a very nice suit. What is it?”

She reached across the table, lifted his lapel and read the label on the inside pocket.

“Canali. Italian. You dress well for a man who doesn’t follow fashion. Better than most of the men in Dublin, anyway. Have you ever been to Paris?”

“I’ve passed through,” he said.

She told him about her time there, stationed in the Irish embassy, a Third Secretary. How she walked around Montmartre, and how once, entirely out of the blue, a man came right up to her and asked her to model for him.

“And did you agree to it?” Ryan asked.

“Almost,” she said. She leaned close, shielded her mouth with her hand, and whispered, “Until he said it was to be a nude.”

She said her father was a High Court judge, now retired, a fussy old man, stiff with snobbery, but she loved him all the more for it. He told her about his father and his little grocery store where he had toiled for year upon year, just like his father before him, with little to show for it.

Celia told him about the garden party for President Kennedy that was scheduled for the Aras, President de Valera’s official residence. She had been promised an invitation, and confessed that the idea of being in the company of, perhaps even meeting, Kennedy and his beautiful wife made her giddy as the schoolgirl she had been at Mount Anville, the private convent where she had received her education.

They talked about the places they had been, each in the line of their work, he as a soldier, she as Third Secretary to one diplomatic mission or another. Ryan talked about the cold Dutch fields and the warm Sicilian streets, the days dug into gritty ditches in Egypt, the stifling wet heat of the Korean summer followed by the hard bite of its winter. Celia spoke of days typing letters, fetching coffee, collecting dry cleaning, the tedium made worthwhile by parties in hotel suites with cocktail bars and gilded furniture. Months spent in one city or another, weekends on yachts, banquets in palaces.

At twenty six she had seen more of life than almost any man, and certainly any woman, Ryan had ever known. So different from the girls he had shared coy exchanges with as a boy and a young man, so confident in her words and her gestures. Her hands did not lie curled in her lap. Instead they moved with her speech, bold and free. She did not wait her turn to speak in deference to his masculinity. She laughed from her belly, out loud, didn’t titter politely as if she sat in a church pew. She knew the world.

But not the barren places, the dark corners, the bleeding crevices. He measured his words, allowed her a glimpse of the harsh terrains he knew, but no more. Men came back damaged from such places, their souls scooped out of them. He did not wish her to think he was one of them, even if he sometimes feared he was.

Ryan neared the bottom of his second glass of Guinness — a pint this time — while Celia stirred her second rum and Coca Cola.

“It’s good to meet a man who’s travelled,” she said. “This country is so self-absorbed, our tiny little island. It’s as if we’re surrounded by a wall or a fence, like that one they’ve put up in Berlin, except it’s been built all the way around the coast. The only reason anyone gets on an aeroplane or a boat is to emigrate, and then the only places they can think to go to are England or America.”

“It’s expensive to travel,” Ryan said. “Who can afford it, unless they do it for a living?”

Celia leaned forward, pointed a finger, her eyes wide with an idea. “Then everyone should be a soldier or a Third Secretary.”

Ryan raised his own finger. “Then who would stay at home to tend the fields? Or go to church? We can’t leave all those priests with no one to preach to. Whose confession would they take?”

Her brow creased. “Clearly, I haven’t thought this through.”

“Why did you talk to me?”

Her smile faltered. The question had preyed on him since the night they danced, but he hadn’t meant to ask it aloud.

“In Malahide, I mean. Why did you come over to me?”

“That is an improper question, Albert Ryan.”

She brought her glass to her lips.

“But I’d like to know,” Ryan said.

Celia returned the glass to the table, watched the bubbles scale its walls and cling to the melting ice.

“I saw you walk in,” she said. “I saw the way you carried yourself. I thought: this man is not like the others. All those little boys and old men, politicians, civil servants, chinless pencil pushers and clock watchers. You were clearly not one of them. You were clearly something … else.” She looked up from the glass. “And also a little bit sad.”

Ryan felt naked, as if her eyes picked over the skin beneath his shirt. He couldn’t have borne it a moment longer if she hadn’t tripped him with a sudden smile.

“And then you opened your mouth, and you were like a schoolboy at his first dance in the Parochial Hall. I could almost imagine your mother spitting on her hankie and wiping your face before she let you out the door.”

“It’s a long time since my mother cleaned my face,” Ryan said. “Almost a month, in fact.”

Her chiming laughter and a hand on his knee caused a fluttering in Ryan’s belly. He excused himself and went looking for the WC. He found it at the rear of the room, the door hidden in a darkened corner, the mixed smell of disinfectant and human waste meeting him as he entered.

Ryan went to the toilet stall rather than the trough that served as a urinal. He preferred the privacy of the enclosed space over the vulnerability of standing exposed. When he was done, he pulled the chain and heard the roar of the flush.

He stepped out of the cubicle and saw a man at the washbasin, running water over the teeth of a comb. In the mirror above the basin, the man watched the reflection of the wet comb as it smoothed his thick dark hair to his scalp.

Ryan knew this man was not local, his charcoal-coloured suit too well cut, his skin too tanned. The man stepped aside to allow Ryan to wash his hands, but he lingered, taking his time over his grooming, watching himself over Ryan’s shoulder.

The man asked, “Did you enjoy the picture?”

Ryan took his hands from the water. “Excuse me?”

“The picture,” the man said, putting his comb in his pocket. “Did you enjoy it?”

His accent was American, but seasoned by something else. It had that nasal twang, but a depth to the vowels that was more European. His facial expression might have passed for friendly if not for his eyes.

Ryan shut off the tap and lifted paper towels from the stack above the basin. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

The man smiled. He had good teeth. “No, you don’t. I saw you in the movie house.”

Ryan estimated the man’s age at forty to forty five. He had small scars on his hands, and what might have been an old burn on the skin of his neck, not quite concealed by his collar.

“It wasn’t bad,” Ryan said, dropping the paper towels into the bin. “A bit silly. But I enjoyed it.”

“Silly.” The man weighed the word. “Yes, that’s a good way to describe it. Entertaining, but hardly realistic, don’t you think?”

Ryan stepped away from the basin, towards the door. “I wouldn’t know. Good night.”

“She’s very pretty.”

Ryan stopped, his fingers on the handle. He turned to see the man incline his head towards the door, and the unseen room beyond.

“The girl. Your date. She’s very pretty.”

Ryan let his hands drop to his sides, found his balance. “Yes, she is.”

“You’re punching above your weight a little, though, aren’t you?”

Ryan did not answer.

“I mean, you’re getting a little out of your league.”

“Who are you?”

The man’s smile broadened. “You don’t want to be out of your league, do you? If you get in over your head, who knows what might happen?”

Ryan shifted his weight forward on the ball of his right foot. The man braced.

“Who sent you?” Ryan asked.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you—”

Ryan moved, one hand going in low, the other high, ready to seize the man, turn him, pin him against the tiled wall. Ryan was quick, but the man was quicker. A hard hand on his wrist, pulling, stealing his momentum, using it against him. The man turned and ducked within Ryan’s reach, nimble like a dancer, the sharp point of his elbow jutting into Ryan’s groin, robbing him of air.

The tiles slammed into Ryan’s cheek. He tried to push himself away from the wall, but the man kicked at the backs of his knees, taking his legs from under him. Ryan’s kneecaps cracked on the cold wet floor. He felt the other man’s knee press hard between his shoulder blades, pinning his chest to the wall. A hand gripped his hair, pulled his head back.

Ryan heard a metallic click, saw the tip of a blade close to his right eye, felt it brush his eyelashes, the chill of it against his cheek.

“Be still, my friend.”

Ryan put his palms on the tiles, fought the heaving in his chest.

“I only asked if you enjoyed the picture,” the man said, his voice calm and even. “That’s all. Nothing to get worked up about, is it? Just a friendly question, right?”

The man released Ryan’s hair, took the knee from his back, the knife from his vision, and stepped away.

“I’ll see you around, Lieutenant Ryan.”

The door creaked, the chatter of drinkers swelling for a moment then receding. Ryan looked over his shoulder. Alone, he rested his forehead on the coolness of the tiles for a few seconds before dragging himself to his feet.

He went to the mirror over the basin, checked for any mark from the blade, saw none. His knees carried damp stains from the moisture on the floor, and his tie hung crooked. He straightened it, wiped at his knees with paper towels. When his breathing steadied, he left the WC.

Celia looked up as he approached. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” Ryan said. “I promised Mrs. Highland I’d have you back by eleven. We’d better be going.”

Celia scoffed. “Oh, Mrs. Highland can wait up. That dried up old bag should step out herself now and then. It’d do her the world of good to blow the cobwebs from her knickers.”

She giggled, brought her fingertips to her mouth. “I’m sorry, that was quite coarse of me, wasn’t it? Perhaps I’ve had one drink too many. You’re right, we should go.”

Ryan offered her his arm, and they made their way through the smoke and the red-faced men. He watched for dark hair and a well-cut suit, knowing eyes set in a tanned face, and saw no one but the drunken newspapermen.

The drawing room curtains twitched as they reached the doorstep. Celia rested her hand on his chest.

“I’d invite you in, but I’m afraid we’d have Mrs. Highland for company. Unless you want to watch her knitting, we’ll have to say goodnight here.”

“Here is fine,” Ryan said. Once more, he found himself short of words. He stood with his arms by his sides, the agony of silence between them. Celia broke it with a smile.

“I had a very nice time,” she said. “I hope you’ll call me again.”

“I will. Absolutely.”

“The restaurant at the Shelbourne isn’t too bad.”

“Then I’ll take you.”

Ryan couldn’t help feeling they were negotiating a contract, making promises, reaching accords. He didn’t care, as long as he would see her again.

“Good,” she said.

She leaned in, raised herself slightly on her toes, and kissed him. Warm, moist, fragrant lipstick. The tip of her tongue grazed his upper lip. When she moved away, he still felt her there, the heat of her.

“For God’s sake, Albert, don’t just stand there looking like you’ve seen the Blessed Virgin.”

He half coughed, half laughed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t expect … I didn’t know …”

She raised her fingertips to his cheek. “Such a saggy face. Goodnight, Albert.”

Ryan left her there and went to the car. The drive from Rathgar into town took less than fifteen minutes, and he spent it trying to think of the dark-haired man who bested him in the bathroom, and not the feeling of Celia’s lips against his.

He did not succeed.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Skorzeny left his brandy and his guests in the drawing room. He followed Esteban to the darkened study and picked up the telephone receiver. The boy flicked on the lamp, casting a pool of soft light over the desk.

“Who is this?” Skorzeny asked.

“Celia Hume.”

Skorzeny took a cigarette from the case on the desk. “Well?”

“We had a very pleasant evening. We went to the pictures, then afterwards, a drink.”

Skorzeny noted the softness of the consonants, the way she enunciated the words with care so as to hide the effects of those drinks.

Esteban lifted the desk lighter, struck a flame, and held it out. Skorzeny tasted petrol and tobacco, carried to his throat by the heat. He waved Esteban away. The boy left the room, closed the door behind him.

“Were any sensitive matters discussed?” he asked.

“No. At least, none that concerned you or the work Lieutenant Ryan is doing for you.”

“And what were your impressions of him?”

The girl paused, then said, “He is very sweet. Like a child, in some ways. But there’s something else to him, something I can’t quite describe. I know he’s a soldier, but it’s more than that. Something in his eyes, in the way he holds himself, the way he speaks. But not what he says. Something that frightens me, just a little.”

Had he felt so inclined, Skorzeny could have put it into words for her. Ryan carried the souls of the dead with him, just as every killer does. However gentlemanly the exterior, no matter how kind the man might appear, those souls will watch from behind his eyes.

“When will you see him again?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Soon, I think. He promised to call.”

“Good. Bring him close to you. As close as he desires to be.”

Silence for a moment, then, “What do you mean?”

Skorzeny flicked the cigarette against the crystal ashtray. “Do I not pay you well for this service?”

“Colonel Skorzeny, I am not a prostitute.”

“Of course not,” he said. “Goodnight, Miss Hume.”

He hung up and returned to his guests, picking up the story he’d been telling. The one about rescuing Mussolini from the hotel on Gran Sasso that served as the dictator’s prison. Skorzeny’s political guests always enjoyed that one.

He had told the tale so many times, at so many parties and dinners and banquets, he sometimes struggled to separate truth from fiction. In moments of doubt, he would remind himself that he was not a historian. If the people he met desired to be enthralled by stories of his adventures, who was Otto Skorzeny to deny them their pleasure?

Luca Impelliteri would deny them, given the chance.

The morning after the Italian had goaded him on that balcony in Tarragona, he had a message delivered to Skorzeny’s room inviting him to coffee. At noon, Skorzeny found Impelliteri waiting at a table outside a cafe on the Rambla Nova. He wore an open-necked shirt and sunglasses. He clicked his fingers to attract a waiter as Skorzeny approached.

“Please sit,” he said.

Skorzeny obliged. “What do you want?”

“Just a chat,” Impelliteri said, keeping his demeanour friendly. The sunglasses hid his eyes. “Coffee?”

Skorzeny nodded.

Impelliteri addressed the waiter. “Two coffees, and bring us a plate of pastries, whatever you recommend.”

“Not for me,” Skorzeny said.

“Oh, please, you must. The pastries here are the best I’ve tasted outside of Italy.”

The waiter went to fetch the order.

“You wanted to talk,” Skorzeny said. “So get to it.”

“Colonel Skorzeny, you’re an impatient man.”

“Amongst other things. Do not test me.”

The Italian smiled. “Well, then let’s not keep you any longer than necessary. As we discussed last night, I was there on Gran Sasso when you snatched Il Duce. I watched you run around the hotel, trying to find a way in. I saw you scamper away from the guard dogs — lucky for you, they were chained up — and I watched when you couldn’t climb a wall no higher than a metre and a half. You had to use one of your men as a platform to stand on. It was almost comical.”

The waiter returned, placed a coffee in front of each man, and a plate of pastries at the centre of the table. The confections glistened in the sunlight, red jam and yellow custard set in pastry cases that looked like they might blow away on the breeze. Impelliteri lifted the plate, presented it to Skorzeny.

“No,” he said.

Impelliteri shrugged and took one for himself, mimed ecstasy as he ate.

Skorzeny knocked the table with a knuckle to regain the Italian’s attention. “So you dispute the historical record of Operation Oak, you claim I and many of my Kameraden are liars, that you know better. Why should I care what you believe?”

Impelliteri dabbed pastry crumbs from his lips with a napkin. “You shouldn’t care what I believe. After all, who am I? But I think you might care what the Generalissimo believes. After all, you are a guest in Spain at his indulgence. If he were to discover you to be a fraud, that you had taken his friendship by deceit, then perhaps his indulgence might not stretch so far. Perhaps you would not find this beautiful country so welcoming. Please do try one of these pastries, they’re quite lovely.”

He held the plate up once more, and Skorzeny pushed it away.

“My friend Francisco will not believe such fantasies. He will take the historical record for the truth it is.”

“Historical record,” Impelliteri echoed. “You keep saying these words as if repeating them will make them real. There is no historical record. There is only SS propaganda, and your own bluster.”

Skorzeny stood, his chair screeching on the pavement as it slid back. “I’ve heard enough of this. Do not bother me again.”

He marched towards the hotel, the Mediterranean blue and glassy beyond.

Impelliteri’s voice called after him. “Wait, Colonel Skorzeny. I haven’t told you what I want, yet.”

Skorzeny stopped and turned, already sure in his gut what the Italian wanted.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Ryan slept little, the hotel bed feeling too narrow for his frame, too short for his legs. If he wasn’t thinking about Celia and the feel of her lips on his, he was brooding on the dark-haired man and his blade.

He played out scenarios in his mind.

In one, the man did not get the better of him, did not have him on his knees on the piss-soaked floor. Instead, Ryan outmanoeuvred the man, disarmed him, had him quaking and talking, telling Ryan everything he wanted to know.

In another, Celia brought Ryan to the parlour of her boarding house, dismissed Mrs. Highland as if she were a housemaid. And there, on the hard cushions of the settee, Celia kissed him again, this time letting her tongue linger, explore, quick and nimble. And she guided his hands over her body, finding the secret places, warm to his touch.

When he did sleep, he dreamed of her open mouth and the taste of her lipstick, the tobacco and alcohol on her breath. And as he moved against her, she became one of the whores the boys had brought him to visit in Sicily and Egypt, plump and eager, smelling of sweat and strong soap.

And the man watched from the corner, his knife held in his hand.

“She’s very pretty,” he said, the blade held out from his groin, shining and obscene.

Ryan awoke in the greyness of the dawn, the blankets twisted around his ankles. He freed himself and sat up on the edge of the bed, lifted his watch from the bedside locker. Just gone five. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, yawned, tasted the Guinness from the night before.

His stomach grumbled. An hour and a half before they served breakfast. Ninety minutes with nothing but his own thoughts. Exercise was the only answer.

Wearing just his underwear, he stood upright and stretched his arms towards the ceiling, feeling it work the muscles of his back. Then he bent forward, his legs straight, dropping his fingertips towards the floor, down, down, until they touched the carpet’s vulgar pattern.

Ryan lay on the floor, wedged his feet beneath the bed, twined his fingers behind his head, and started counting sit-ups.

The effort cleared the jumble from his mind.

He thought about Otto Skorzeny, once called the most dangerous man in Europe. Now a gentleman farmer. Had the eighteen years between now and the end of the war washed away his sins? True, the respect and admiration other soldiers held him in was deserved to an extent. He was a master tactician, a revolutionary of battle, had changed the way men thought about warfare. But he was also a Nazi. And not some poor man conscripted to that cause by accident of birth. No, he had been a member of the party long before the war, and had volunteered to fight for the Reich, had not been forced into service.

Whatever these killers wanted from Skorzeny, whatever fate awaited him, many would say he had it coming.

Many, but not all.

Ryan remembered the discussions in his father’s shop. As a boy, stacking shelves and sweeping floors for the odd penny his father would allow him, he listened to the men discuss the goings on in Europe. They talked about Chancellor Hitler. Would de Valera — still Taoiseach then, still riding on the back of the revolution — side with Chamberlain? If it came to it, would he ask his fellow Irishmen to fight alongside the British?

Unthinkable, some would say. Old Dev would never sell his people out to the Brits.

But that Hitler, others would say, he’s bad news. No good could come of his shouting and blustering. Someone needs to put some manners on him.

But he’s just a good nationalist, like us, looking out for his own people. Just like old Dev did, like Pearse and Connolly did in 1916.

Not the same, no, not at all. Dev and the rest fought for freedom. That Hitler’s a dictator, pure and simple, and he’s a fascist.

And so the arguments would go on as young Albert Ryan swept the floors and cleaned the windows, and Ryan’s father would keep his counter tidy and say little. Sure, it’s nothing to do with me, he’d say, let them fight it out if they want, just so long as they leave me and mine out of it.

In the end, Ryan’s father had been right. Ireland stayed out of it, after a fashion.

But Ryan did not. He saw what the Nazis had done, the charred remains of the continent they had raped and mutilated. The men, women and children, the human beings, left to wander the roads, everything they owned clutched in their hands or tied to their backs. They spoke of what they’d left behind. Not the possessions, but the bodies. The bodies of those they loved, abandoned to the dogs and the insects.

Ryan still dreamed of them. Not as often as he used to, but sometimes. He thanked God he had not entered the camps. The stories travelled across Europe’s wastelands, about the living skeletons, the mass graves, the bodies stacked high, half burned, half buried.

Men like Skorzeny had done that. Willingly.

And now Ryan was protecting them.

He stopped, his chest pressed to his knees, his breath held tight in his lungs. He had stopped counting, had no idea how many he’d done. No matter. He turned over, his body straight, his hands flat on the floor, and pushed.

Who were the predators who stalked Skorzeny? The man who had humiliated Ryan the night before, was he one of them? Or something other?

The floor rose and fell beneath Ryan, drops of sweat darkening the carpet’s fibres. He relished the sensation of the muscles of his shoulders and flanks taking the strain, the clarity of it. He worked until his body burned, his lungs straining, his mind flitting between a dark-haired man and a red-haired woman, uncertain of whom he feared more.

With his mind focused by the exertion, he returned to the file Haughey had supplied. He read and re-read the minister’s notes, and his own. The same two names snagged his suspicions however hard he tried to broaden his gaze.

Hakon Foss and Catherine Beauchamp.

He repeated the woman’s address in his mind and went to the map that lay on the desk.

Ryan had washed, shaved and dressed in his old suit, and was about to go for breakfast when the telephone rang. The receptionist asked if he could put a call through. The caller had declined to identify himself. A foreign gentleman, the receptionist said.

“Yes,” Ryan said, knowing.

“Good morning, Lieutenant Ryan,” Otto Skorzeny said.

“Good morning, sir.”

“What have you to report?”

Ryan told him he had two names he wanted to investigate further, people close to Skorzeny.

“Who are they?”

Ryan paused, said, “I’d rather not say.”

“No?”

“No.”

“And if I insist?”

“I will refuse,” Ryan said.

Skorzeny remained silent for some time before he said, “Very well.”

Ryan considered whether he should tell the Austrian about the dark-haired man. He saw no advantage in keeping the information secret, but neither could he see a way to impart the information without revealing to Skorzeny that Ryan had been left on his knees in the toilet of a public house. He knew by instinct and experience that to show such weakness to a man like Otto Skorzeny could be fatal. Should he take that risk?

Before he could decide, Skorzeny said, “I would like to extend an invitation.”

Ryan blinked. “Oh?”

“To my home. I’m hosting a small gathering tomorrow evening. You will know some of the people. Our friend the minister, for one. Tell me, do you have a sweetheart?”

Ryan hesitated. “I know a young lady,” he said eventually, then cursed himself for the way it sounded. He could hear the smirk in Skorzeny’s reply.

“Then, please, bring along this young lady whom you know.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And one more thing. Be ready for a match.”

“Sir?”

“We shall fence. I told you I’ve been seeking a reasonable opponent. You might be that man. I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

The telephone clicked and died.

Ryan enjoyed a substantial breakfast before dropping his good suit off at a cleaner’s, then walked to Capel Street where McClelland’s Tailors had just opened. Lawrence McClelland stood arranging shirt boxes on a shelf when Ryan entered. He turned to see the visitor, his face blank for a moment before recognition burst upon it.

“Ah, sir, how is the Canali doing for you?”

“Very well,” Ryan said.

McClelland circled the table stacked with garments and fabrics. “And what can I do for you this morning?”

“I’d like to see some ties,” Ryan said. “And maybe a couple of shirts.”

McClelland nodded, his chest deflating. “And should these also be added to Mr. Haughey’s account?”

Ryan did not hesitate.

“Yes, please,” he said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Ryan drove north out of Dublin, heading for Swords. The city thinned and gave way to green fields. Within a few minutes, the white hulk of the airport terminal came into view, an Aer Lingus craft leaping skywards from the near horizon. The airport had expanded apace since the terminal had been built in the early forties, routes to almost anywhere you could imagine.

The map lay open on the passenger seat next to Ryan, a circle drawn in pencil where he believed the home of Catherine Beauchamp to be.

He passed through Swords and its quiet Main Street, then the council housing of Seatown. Dirty-faced boys paused their soccer games to watch him pass. A gang of dogs chased the car, barking. They let him go after a hundred yards or so, satisfied they had protected their domain.

Ryan held the map across the steering wheel, his attention flitting between it and the way ahead. The road narrowed to a short bridge that crossed the river. On the other side, he turned right, the trail barely wide enough for the Vauxhall. Branches clanged on the metalwork.

He followed the road, hedgerows and trees to his left, water to his right. The spindle of a river broadened as he drove, at first only half a dozen yards wide, then a dozen, then fifty, then a hundred, until it swelled into the estuary.

Swans gathered in the reeds and wandered onto the road, blocking Ryan’s path. Fearless, they ignored the car as he inched towards them. He half-clutched, nudging forward, the swans merely waddling a few inches further along the track, no notion of making way for him.

Ryan got out of the car, tried to shoo them away. They hissed at him, then resumed their loitering. Ryan opened his jacket wide, like wings, and flapped at them, made himself as big as he could. At last, the swans were sufficiently annoyed to return to the water. He got back into the car and set off again.

Up ahead, the road arced out towards the water where the land formed a miniature peninsula. Water lapped on to the track, and the Vauxhall’s tires whooshed through it. As the wheels once more found a dry surface to cling to, a wall seemed to grow out of the hedgerow. Within it, set into an archway, a gate. Ryan slowed as he checked the map.

Yes, he believed this was it, the small nub of land stretching away to the estuary opposite the gate.

He pulled the car onto the coarse grass that grew between the road and the shore, applied the hand brake, and took the key from the ignition. A sharp wind blew in from the open expanse of water. Across the estuary, hazed in the distance, he could see Malahide.

Ryan walked back to the gate, found it locked. He peered through the bars, saw a low cottage beyond a beautifully tended garden and a gravel path, and off to the side, a barn that served as a stable.

A slender woman, a bucket of feed in her hands, stared back at him from the barn door. A horse ate from the bucket, its long neck reaching over a gate that had been cobbled together from wood and corrugated metal sheets.

“Catherine Beauchamp?” Ryan asked.

The woman put the bucket down, slipped her hands into her trouser pockets, and walked towards him.

“Who are you?” she asked, her French accent delicate as a petal.

“My name is Albert Ryan. I work for the Directorate of Intelligence.” He held up his identification. She stopped half way across the garden, too far away to see the card. “I’d like to speak with you,” he said.

“I’m not sure I wish to speak with you,” she said, her English perfect, a layer of grit in her voice. She wore her greying hair in a bob, held back with clips. Ryan could make out her fine features, now turning jagged with age, and the heavy smoker’s lines on her upper lip.

“I’m working for Otto Skorzeny.” It was barely a lie, and worth the telling, because her expression shifted when she heard the name. “I’m investigating the killings of Alex Renders, Johan Hambro and Helmut Krauss. And Elouan Groix.”

She flinched. Hadn’t she known of the Breton’s death?

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said, keeping her distance, a waver creeping into her voice. “I’m afraid you’ve wasted a journey.”

“Even so, I’d like to speak with you. It won’t take long.” He considered a gamble, decided to risk it. “I’d rather not tell Colonel Skorzeny you refused to cooperate.”

Her face hardened. She marched towards the gate.

“Threats might gain you some advantage in the short term, but they will cost you more in the long run, mister … what did you say?”

“Ryan. Lieutenant Albert Ryan.”

She fished a key from her pocket and unlocked the gate.

Beauchamp heated coffee in a pot over the fire before pouring two cups. She placed one on the table in front of Ryan. It tasted stale and bitter, but he did not grimace.

The interior of the cottage was not dissimilar to the one in which Elouan Groix had died, the home Célestin Lainé had abandoned. The kitchen served as a living area with its sink and fireplace. One of the two doors stood ajar, and Ryan saw a neatly made bed, and shelves stacked with books. The kitchen too housed full bookcases, four of them. On the table were several notebooks, jotters, loose sheets of paper. They carried looping scripts, arranged in rows, verses in a language Ryan did not recognise.

“I still write,” Beauchamp said, taking a chair opposite Ryan. “No one wants to publish me these days, but still I write because I must.”

“Poetry?” Ryan asked.

“Yes, mostly, and essays, and stories. I used to write novels, but I don’t have the will anymore.”

“In Breton?”

“Ouais,” she said, lapsing into French. “It’s a beautiful language, lyrical, like music. My work does not translate well into English. It doesn’t have the rhythm, the melody of Breton. Breton is more like the Cornish language, and shares much with your Irish. Tell me, how is your Irish?”

“I only remember a few words from school,” Ryan said.

She gave a sad smile and lit a cigarette. “You don’t speak your own language? You prefer to speak the words of your oppressor? Don’t you see the tragedy of this?”

“I never had the desire to learn.”

She let out a lungful of air and smoke, disappointment wheezing from her. “So go on and ask your questions. I will answer if I can.”

“How close are you to Otto Skorzeny?”

“Not very. He assisted me in finding my way to Ireland, along with some other Bretons. Célestin knows him better.”

“Célestin Lainé is a friend of yours?”

Again, that sad smile on her lips. She pulled one knee up almost to her chin, her heel perched on the edge of her seat. “Yes. More than that. Many years ago, we were lovers. Now, I don’t know.”

“Elouan Groix died at Lainé’s home.”

She stared at some distant point, far away from her cottage.

“Poor Elouan. He was a good man. But not a strong man. Not a fighter. How is Célestin? Was he hurt?”

“No,” Ryan said. “Mr. Lainé is staying with Colonel Skorzeny, as far as I know. You knew him in France?”

“Yes. We carried out actions together, back in the thirties.”

“And during the war?”

“He fought. I wrote. Propaganda. Essays, articles, that kind of thing. We distributed pamphlets in the towns and villages.”

“You were a collaborator.”

She turned her gaze on Ryan, her eyes like needles piercing his skin. “Call me that if you must. I considered myself a patriot and a socialist. The Germans promised us our independence, our own state, our own government. We believed them. Perhaps that was naive, but isn’t that the prerogative of the young?”

Beauchamp drew deep on the cigarette, its tip flaring red in the dim cottage. She held the smoke in her chest for a while before letting it leak from her nostrils. Then a cough burst from her. She took a tissue from her pocket, spat in it.

“Tell me,” she said. “Do you know the term: Dweller on the Threshold?”

Ryan shook his head. “No, I don’t.”

“It’s a spiritualist idea. Or occultist, depending on your point of view. It has different meanings to different people. Some consider the Dweller a malevolent spirit that attaches itself to a living person. Others describe it as a past evil, a dark reflection of oneself from a former life. We all have this thing. Something that hides in our shadow, something that shames us.”

She studied the swirling blue patterns of the smoke that hung between them.

“I don’t understand,” Ryan said.

“What I did during the war, the people I allowed to attach themselves to me, the things I wrote. What I allowed myself to be in that life. All these, they are my Dweller on the Threshold.”

“You mean guilt.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “If I had known the truth of it, the Germans who promised us so much, if I’d known what they were doing to those people, the Jews, the Roma, the homosexuals, I would have made a different choice. Do you believe me?”

Ryan did not answer the question. Instead, he asked, “Do you resent Otto Skorzeny?”

“In what way?”

“Any way.”

She laughed. “I resent that he has grown rich and fat. I resent that his love of money and power has drowned the love of his country. I resent that he allows himself to be a show pony for the Irish bourgeoisie. Are those enough ways?”

Ryan leaned forward, his forearms on the table. Pages of poetry rustled beneath his elbows.

“Has anyone ever come to you and asked about Colonel Skorzeny or any of the other people like you?”

She tried to hide it, but there it was, a flicker. Then it was gone.

“People like me?”

“Foreign nationals. Refugees from Europe.”

“You mean Nazis,” she said. “Collaborators.”

“Yes.”

She stubbed out the cigarette. Glowing tobacco embers floated up from the ashtray. “Why do you ask me this?”

“Whoever has been targeting Skorzeny’s associates, your friends—”

“My friends? They are not my—”

“Whatever they are to you, a well-trained and organised team of killers has been targeting them. And they have an informant. Someone with access to Skorzeny’s circle. Someone who has reason to turn against their friends. Someone like you.”

She shook her head, her eyes distant. “This is nonsense. Where do you get this idea? Nonsense.”

Ryan kept his silence, watched her as she turned her gaze to the window overlooking her garden and held it there. He counted the seconds until she said, “I would like you to leave now.”

“Listen to me,” Ryan said. “If you have betrayed Colonel Skorzeny, your only hope is to tell me now. If you have passed on information to others, tell me who they are, and what you told them.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. “I … I didn’t … not me.”

Ryan reached for her, touched her forearm. She recoiled.

“You know what Skorzeny will do to you. Talk to me and I’ll protect you.”

She shook her head and smiled. “Oh, you are a child, aren’t you?”

“On my life, I will—”

Papers scattered as she slapped the tabletop with her palm. “If Otto Skorzeny desires a man’s death, or a woman’s, then death will come. Don’t you know this? He plucked Mussolini from a mountaintop. He fucked Evita right under Perón’s nose. Then he robbed the fascist bastard blind and was thanked for it. This is his power. Not an office, not a title. No law will stop him.”

Beauchamp stood, went to the sink, gripped its edge.

Ryan got to his feet. “Please, you know the alternative. You know what Skorzeny will do to you if he gets to you first. Either you talk to me, or you—”

Her hand dipped behind the gingham curtain that hung below the sink. She turned, a small semi-automatic pistol aimed at Ryan’s chest. A.25 ACP, he thought. Her hand quivered, the pistol jittering in her grasp. The other hand gripped the slide assembly, pulled it back.

Ryan raised his hands as high as his shoulders.

“Does he know about me?” she asked.

“I didn’t give him your name,” Ryan said. “But he knows there’s an informant. I found you without any trouble. He can do the same. And he will. Please, let me protect you.”

Tears sprung from Beauchamp’s wide eyes, heavy, darkening her blouse where they fell from her cheeks. Her breathing quickened with fear, her chest heaving. She wiped at her cheeks, sniffed hard. “They told me I would be safe. They promised me. It was my penance. I told them what they wanted to know so God would forgive me. Has God forgiven me?”

“I don’t know. Who were they?”

“They showed me photographs. The children.” Her free hand went to her belly, clutched at the flesh over her womb. “The dead children. The bones. Their dead eyes. Their mouths open. Flies on their lips.”

“You didn’t do that to them,” Ryan said. He stepped around the table. “Like you said, you didn’t know. Please, put the gun down.”

“Will God forgive me?”

“I don’t know. Catherine, please, put the gun down. Talk to me. We can work something out. You can run, get out of the country.”

She asked again, her voice firm and final. “Will God forgive me?”

Ryan lowered his hands. “Yes. He will.”

Catherine Beauchamp smiled. She opened her mouth wide, brought the pistol up, put the muzzle between her teeth and closed her eyes.

Ryan said, “No,” but it was done before he could take a single step.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Célestin Lainé had enjoyed the Penfolds Grange Shiraz so much the night before that he had crept down to the cellar in search of a second bottle. He had descended the wooden steps, feeling the chill of the damp air crawl beneath his clothing, and gasped as his feet touched the concrete floor. Row after row of bottles from all over the world, some shining, some dusted with age. He had wandered between the racks, his tongue squirming behind his teeth, anticipating the delights ahead. It took several minutes to find the second Shiraz.

Now, in daylight, his brain seemed to grind against the inside of his skull. Of course, the only answer was more wine. He returned to the cellar hoping to find another Penfolds Grange, but there was none. Instead, he settled for an Italian white. It might have benefited from an hour on ice, but it was more than tolerable.

He wandered the grounds of Martinstown House, the uncorked bottle in one hand, the other holding his jacket closed. Skorzeny’s homestead was certainly impressive. Lainé had never been one for ostentation, displays of wealth — he’d never had the money — but still he had to admire the house with its sprawling wings, its arched windows, the gardens it nestled in. He stood back, surveyed the property.

Yes, Skorzeny had done well. Perhaps if Lainé had possessed a similar ambition, he could have attained such wealth. But then he’d only have spent it on drink.

He took a slug from the bottle. The wine cloyed at his throat, treacly sweet.

One of Skorzeny’s guards ambled past, patrolling the grounds, no attempt to conceal the Kalashnikov automatic rifle. Lainé nodded. The guard grunted some reply in German. A group of five men, refugees from East Germany who had been smuggled into Ireland, shared two rooms in one of the outbuildings.

Hakon Foss trudged across the front of the house, dressed in mud-caked overalls, a watering can in his hand. Lainé waved. Foss waved back.

The Norwegian knelt by one of the planters that lined up along the wall, spring flowers bursting like fireworks from the compost. Foss began plucking weeds from amongst them, dropping the scraps on the gravel beside him.

Lainé crossed the path.

Foss looked up from his work. “Hallo,” he said.

Lainé smiled. “You work hard?”

The Norwegian shrugged. “Not hard. I do this work two days ago. The Colonel, he calls, says come, do this work some more. What for?”

Lainé extended the bottle towards him. Foss smiled, took the wine from Lainé’s hand, and drank. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. He handed the bottle back and wiped his mouth.

“You don’t want this work?” Lainé asked. “You don’t want the money?”

Foss returned his stubby fingers to the compost. “Oh, yes, I want work. I want money. Always I want money.”

Lainé raised the bottle to his lips, swallowed. “To have money is good.”

Foss laughed, shrugged, nodded. “Yes. Yes. Money is good. And to eat. And a place for sleeping. Money is good for these things.”

Lainé smiled, patted Foss’s back, and said goodbye. He strolled away from the house, out of the gardens, towards the outbuildings. Chickens roamed and pecked at the earth. He nudged them aside with the toe of his boot.

He found Tiernan in an open barn, fussing over a roiling mass of fur, cursing. The red-faced man looked up as Lainé entered.

“How’re ya,” he said, giving a deferential nod.

One of Tiernan’s collies, a bitch, lay in a bundle of blankets. Half a dozen pups wrestled and ran around her, hemmed in by a makeshift pen of wooden boards.

“How old?” Lainé asked.

“Seven weeks,” Tiernan said. “Some stray fucker got to her. Six bloody mongrels, no use to anyone. I should’ve drowned the wee bastards by now, but I didn’t have the heart. They’re just about weaned now, so there’s no avoiding it. It’ll be the sack and the river for them as soon as I gather the nerve to do it.”

The old man reached out a hand, all sinew and knuckles, and scratched one of the pups behind the ear. It batted at his bony fingers with its paws, nipped his hard skin with needle teeth. Its siblings joined in the game.

“I will take one,” Lainé said. He hunkered down, placed the bottle by his side, looked from one pup to the next. All but one of them mobbed Tiernan’s hand, a black and brown male, smaller than the others. Lainé dipped his fingers towards it. The pup hesitated, sniffed at his skin, then its tiny tongue lapped at him.

“This one,” he said.

“All right, so,” Tiernan said. “But don’t let the missus see it in the house. She’ll have a blue fit.”

Tiernan’s wife served as Skorzeny’s housekeeper. A German woman, stout and fierce, she had come to Ireland before the war and married the Irishman. She had already scolded Lainé for walking mud into the house.

“I will hide it from her,” Lainé said.

He reached down, plucked the pup from the pen, and thanked Tiernan. It squirmed in his hands. He tucked it under his arm, took the wine in his free hand, and set off towards the house.

When he entered through the kitchen, Mrs. Tiernan stood arguing with the chef who had arrived that morning from the Horcher restaurant in Madrid, Skorzeny’s favourite eatery in Europe. The Spaniard had been flown over to prepare the feast for the following evening. Half a dozen pheasants lay in two rows on the kitchen table. Evidently Mrs. Tiernan and the chef disagreed on how best to prepare the birds, each speaking in their own language, miming their points with their hands, their voices rising.

Lainé slipped past unnoticed.

He made his way to the stairs, was half way up when a voice called, “Célestin.”

Lainé stopped, turned, saw Skorzeny.

“Yes?”

“What have you got there?”

“A pup,” Lainé said. He held the mite up, its little legs thrashing at the air.

“Don’t let Frau Tiernan find it in your room.”

“I won’t.”

Skorzeny pointed. “And that?”

Lainé’s fingers tightened on the bottle of wine. “I was thirsty.”

“No more,” Skorzeny said. “I want to begin questioning Hakon Foss tonight. You must be sober. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Lainé went to his room, placed the wine on the bedside locker and the puppy on the bed. It explored the blanket, sniffing, whimpering. Lainé rolled it on its back, scratched its belly. It boxed his hand with its paws.

Alongside the puppy, on the bed, sat a worn leather satchel, not unlike the kind of bag a doctor might carry. It contained no medicines, no pills, only tools. Sharp things. Jagged things.

From outside, below his window, Lainé heard whistling. Foss, cheerful in his labour, even if he believed his services were not truly required today. And he was right, the work was not needed. Skorzeny simply wanted the Norwegian here, on the grounds. At the end of the working day, he would be asked to stay for supper. Perhaps he would protest, say that he should leave for home, but Skorzeny would insist. Foss would eat well, perhaps have some wine.

Then Foss would be escorted to one of the outbuildings, and Lainé would bring his bag, and all his shining tools. Lainé and Foss would talk long into the night.

The puppy’s teeth closed on Lainé’s forefinger, causing a bright point of pain. Lainé pulled his hand away, scolded the little dog. He sucked the blood from his finger, tasted salt.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

Ryan fled, left her there.

He drove for an hour or more, main roads, country lanes, paying no attention to where he was heading as the sun dipped towards the hillsides. The scene played out in his mind, over and over. The muffled pop of the pistol, the shocked look in her eyes. Her body falling.

The fuel gauge slipped into the red. He took note of road signs and navigated his way towards a village. A petrol station stood at the middle of its one street. He pulled in and told the attendant to fill the tank.

A phone box stood on the other side of the road.

Ryan crossed to it. He told the operator what he wanted. The operator hesitated, and Ryan told her to just fucking do it.

Two more transfers, and he was through to Haughey’s secretary.

Three minutes later, he had what he wanted, and the secretary was in tears.

Ryan pulled to the curb outside the Royal Hibernian Hotel, its four storeys looming white over Dawson Street. He got out of the car, took the steps up to the hotel entrance two at a time, ignored the doorman beneath the awning.

Inside, porters and receptionists eyed him with suspicion. A man with a thin moustache asked, “Can I help you, sir?”

They knew Ryan didn’t belong here, and so did he. The clientele of this place dressed well, lived well, and ate well in its restaurant and tea rooms. They came from the country estates outside Dublin, or the grand city houses with archways leading to stable blocks. They rode horses through Phoenix Park, they went to the races, they took holidays abroad and gave generously to charities.

Ryan ignored the man with the thin moustache and strode through the foyer to the restaurant. The maitre d’ blocked his path. Ryan shoved him aside.

Charles J. Haughey looked up from his soup. A young woman, who Ryan guessed was not the minister’s wife, followed his gaze, turned back to Haughey, said something.

Ryan crossed the room.

Haughey pulled the napkin from his collar, dropped it on the tablecloth.

“What do you think you’re doing, Ryan?”

The restaurant’s patrons craned their necks to see the intruder.

Ryan straightened his jacket, smoothed his tie. “A word, Minister.”

Haughey smiled at his companion. “You might have called my secretary and made an appointment.”

“A word. Now.”

Haughey’s smile slipped away, the hawk’s glare hard on Ryan. “You might also keep a civil tongue when you talk to me, big fella. Come by my office in the morning if you need to discuss something. Until then, fuck off and leave me in peace. Understood?”

The maitre d’ appeared at Ryan’s side, addressed the minister. “Sir, is there a problem?”

“No problem,” Haughey said. “This gentleman was just leaving.”

The maitre d’ took Ryan’s elbow, tried to guide him away. Ryan shook him off, kept his gaze on Haughey. “Shall we discuss it here in the restaurant? Or somewhere else?”

The maitre d’ turned his pleading eyes back to the minister. “Sir, really, I must ask you to—”

“All right, for fuck’s sake.” Haughey stood, pushing his chair back to collide with the diner behind him. “Come on, then.”

Ryan followed him out of the restaurant. In the foyer, Haughey spotted the cloakroom, steered Ryan towards it.

The coat check girl said “Tickets, please.”

Haughey pulled a ten shilling note from his pocket, pushed it into the girl’s hand, said, “Piss off, love, go and have yourself a cigarette or something.”

She stood open-mouthed for a moment, then looked at the note in her hand, grinned. “Very good, sir.”

Haughey grabbed Ryan’s sleeve, shoved him into the cloakroom, slammed the door behind them.

“Right, now what in the name of holy God do you want, you ignorant shite?”

Ryan prised Haughey’s fingers from his sleeve. “I want off this assignment.”

“What? You dragged me away from dinner to tell me that? No. No fucking way. You were given a job, now you bloody well do it, do you hear me?”

“I don’t want your job,” Ryan said. “I won’t do it.”

Haughey placed the fingertips of his left hand at the centre of Ryan’s chest, raised the forefinger of his right. “Yes you will. You’ll do what you’re told, big fella, or mark my words, I will destroy you. Ask anyone about Charlie Haughey. They’ll all tell you the same. I take shite from no man, least of all a fucking jumped up squaddie like you. Believe me, boy, I’ll make you wish your father had pulled out of your mother, you hear me?”

“I won’t do—”

Haughey shoved Ryan back against the coat rail. “You hear me, big fella?”

Ryan launched his body forward, grabbed Haughey’s tie with one hand, gripped his neck with the other, pinching the windpipe. Haughey fell back into the coats, fur and tweed flapping around him, his eyes bulging.

“I watched a woman commit suicide today,” Ryan said.

Haughey’s throat made clicking sounds as his mouth opened and closed.

“She put the barrel of a pistol in her mouth and pulled the trigger. She did that because she knew what your friend Skorzeny would do to her. I will not protect a man like him. I watched too many good men die fighting his kind. I won’t take orders from scum like that.”

Haughey dug at Ryan’s fingers with his own. Ryan eased the pressure, let him breathe.

“I won’t do it,” Ryan said.

Haughey squirmed in his grasp, choking for air.

“Get your … fucking … hands off me.”

Ryan let him go, stepped back.

Haughey bent over, hands on his knees, coughed, spat on the cloakroom floor. He gulped and swallowed.

“Jesus Christ, man. What woman? What are you talking about?”

“Catherine Beauchamp. She was the informant. She told me before she died.”

Haughey made the sign of the cross, his chest heaving. “Mother of God. Have you told Skorzeny?”

“No.”

“All right, I’ll tell him. Did she give you anything?”

“Nothing,” Ryan said. He would not mention the pictures of the children, or the flies on their dead lips.

Haughey shook his head. “This is getting out of hand. It needs to stop. You can’t quit now. I won’t allow it.”

“You have no authority to—”

“The director put you at my disposal. That means you do whatever the fuck I tell you to do. I know you don’t like it. Neither do I. But I’m the Minister for Justice. Justice, you hear me? Do you understand what that means? You might think Otto Skorzeny is a piece of shit, him and his whole bloody crew, and for all you know I might think the same. You can think what you like, but murder is murder. I won’t have it. Not in my country. It’s my job to put a stop to it, and that’s what I’ll bloody well do. You have a problem with that, then you can talk to the director.”

Haughey straightened his tie, smoothed his hair, and went to the door. He turned back to Ryan.

“This is your country too, you know. You might have been a lickspittle to the Brits at one time, but this is still your country. You remember that.”

He exited, left Ryan alone with his anger.

Ryan left the cloakroom, marched across the foyer, and down to the street beyond. Darkness had fallen on the city, bringing with it a sickly drizzle. He buttoned his jacket, shoved his hands down into his pockets.

The western end of Molesworth Street faced the Royal Hibernian’s entrance. He decided to leave the car where he’d parked it and walk the two hundred yards or so to Buswells, at the eastern end.

Ryan kept his head down as he walked. The street was almost empty, but even so, he didn’t want to risk anyone seeing the rage that burned in him.

He paid no attention to the unmarked van as he passed it. Not until the dark-haired man in the good suit stepped out from in front of it to block his path.

“Good evening, Lieutenant Ryan,” he said in his not-quite-American accent.

Ryan stopped, his hands ready. “What do you—”

The blow came from behind, hard to the base of his skull. His knees gave way and he sprawled on the wet pavement. Before he could recover, someone straddled his back, and a hand pressed a rag to his nose and mouth.

Cold sweetness swamped Ryan’s skull. He tried to roll, throw his weight to the side, but the man astride his back grew so heavy, and Ryan was so warm here on the ground, and it was so soft.

Through flickering eyelids, he saw the dark-haired man hunker down in front of him, a smile on his lips.

Ryan wanted to say something, ask the man something, he couldn’t remember what, but anyway, it was too late.

The world had already disappeared.