The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep

Chapter 7

In the hours before breakfast I read a popular biography of Robert Emmet and several chapters from The Lives of the Saints. Around five-thirty I stepped outside the cottage. A mist was rising from the countryside and melting under the glow of false dawn. The air had a damp chill to it. It was not raining, but it felt as though it might start again at any moment.

A few minutes past six Nora came down and started breakfast. She wore a skirt and sweater and looked quite radiant. Her father and brother followed a few minutes later. We ate sausages and eggs and toast and drank strong tea.

Before long I was alone again. Tom had gone to return the bicycle and retrieve my suit and passport, Nora was off for church and then a round of shopping, and Dolan had left to join a crew mending a road south of the town. I sat down with a pad of notepaper and a handful of envelopes and began writing a group of cryptic letters. It would be well, I felt, to leave as soon as possible and it would probably not be a bad idea if some of my prospective hosts on the continent had a vague idea that they were about to have a clandestine house guest on their hands. I couldn’t be sure what route I might take, what borders would be hard to cross or where I would be unwelcome, so I wrote more letters than I felt I could possibly need. The intended recipients ranged as far geographically as Spain and Latvia, as far politically as a Portuguese anarcho-syndicalist and a brother and sister in Roumania who hoped to restore the monarchy. I didn’t expect to see a quarter of them, but one never knew.

I made the letters as carefully vague as I could. Some of my prospective hosts lived in countries where international mail was opened as a matter of course, and others in more open nations lived the sort of lives that made their governments inclined to deny them the customary rights of privacy. The usual form of my letters ran rather like this:

Dear Cousin Peder,

It is my task to tell you that my niece Kristin is celebrating the birth of her first child, a boy. While I must travel many miles to the christening, I have the courage to hope for a warm welcome and shelter for the night.

Faithfully,

Anton

The names and phrasing were changed, of course, to fit the nationality of the recipient and the language of each letter was the language of the person to whom it was sent. I finished the last one, sealed them all and addressed as many envelopes as I could. I couldn’t remember all the addresses but knew I could learn most of the ones I was missing in London. Almost all my groups have contacts in London.

I couldn’t mail the letters from Croom, of course, and wasn’t sure whether or not it would be safe to mail them all from the same city, anyway. But at least they were written.

When Nora came back to the cottage she kept blushing and turning from me. “I’m to have nothing to do with you,” she said.

“All right, then.”

“Must you accept it so readily?”

I laughed and reached for her. She danced away, blue eyes flashing merrily, and I lunged again and fell over my own feet. She hurried over to see if I was all right, and I caught her and drew her down and kissed her. She said I was a rascal and threw her arms around me. We broke apart suddenly when there was a noise outside, and the door flew suddenly open. It was Tom. His cycle-or mine, or Mr. Mulready’s-was in a heap at the doorstep.

“Mr. Tanner fell down,” Nora began, “and I was seeing whether he’d broken any bones, and-”

Tom only had time for one quick doubting look at her. He was out of breath, and his face was streaked with perspiration. “The old woman at the pub found your suit,” he said. “Went to the gardai. They traced you to Mulready, and the fool said you were bound for Croom, and there’s a car of them on the road from Limerick. I passed them coming back.”

“You passed them?”

“I did. They had a flat tire and called for me to help them change it. Help them! Two of them there were, and having trouble changing a tire. I asked where they were headed for, and they said Croom, and I said I’d be right back and give them a hand, and I came straight here. They’ll be here soon, Evan. They’ll ask at the tavern and find out you went there for directions to our house. You’d best go to your room.”

“I’ll leave the house.”

“And go where? In Limerick City they say that more are coming over from Dublin, and detectives from Cork as well. Go to your room and stay quiet. They’ll be on us in five minutes, but if you’re in your room they’ll never find you.”

I grabbed up my letters and snatched up the sweater I had been wearing. I opened the panel, scurried up the rope ladder, and drew it up after me. Tom raised the panel and locked it from below.

Perhaps it was only five minutes that I crouched in the darkness by the side of the trapdoor. It seemed far longer. I heard the car drive up and then the knocking at the door. I caught snatches of conversation as the two policemen searched the little cottage. Then they were on the stairs, and I could hear the conversation more clearly. Nora was insisting that they were hiding no one, no one at all.

“You bloody I.R.A.,” one of the police said. “Don’t you know the war’s over?”

“It’s not yet begun,” Tom said recklessly.

The other garda was tapping at the ceiling. “I stayed in a house just like this one,” he was saying. “Oh, it was years ago, when I was on the run myself. Stayed in half the houses in County Limerick and a third in County Clare. What’s the name here? Dolan?”

“It is.”

“Why, this is one I stayed in,” the garda said. “A hiding place in the ceiling, if I remember it. What’s this? Do you hear how hollow it sounds? He’s up there, I swear it.”

“And that’s your gratitude,” Nora said. “That Dolan’s house saved your life once-and may we be forgiven for it-only so that you can betray the house, yourself.”

The garda was evidently working the catch to the panel. I had secured the hook on the inside, and although he opened it, the panel would not drop loose.

“That was years ago,” I heard him say.

“Gratitude has a short memory, does it?”

“Years and years ago. And why keep old hatreds alive?” He’d loosened the panel slightly, enough so that his fingers could almost get a purchase on it. He tugged at it, and I felt the hook straining. It was old wood. I didn’t know if it would hold.

“We’re a republic now,” the other garda said. “Free and independent.”

“A free and independent republic under the bloody heel of the bloody English Parliament.” This last from Tom.

“Oh, say it at a meeting. At a parade.”

The garda had a better grip on the panel now. The hook-and-eye attachment couldn’t take the strain. It was starting to pull loose.

“You’re wasting your time,” Nora said desperately.

“Oh, are we?”

“He was here, I’ll not deny it, but he left this morning.”

“And contrived to fasten the hook up there after himself, did he? I hope you don’t expect an honest Irish policeman to be taken in by a snare like that, child.”

“And did I ever meet one?”

“Meet what?”

“An honest Irish policeman-”

At that unfortunate moment the hook pulled out from the wood, and the panel swung open all the way, the garda following it and falling to the floor with the sudden momentum. The other reached upward, caught hold of an end of the rope ladder and pulled it free. I was in darkness at the side of the opening. I could see down, but they apparently did not see me.

The policeman who had forced the panel was getting unsteadily to his feet. The other turned to him and drew a revolver from his holster. “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll go in there after him.”

“Take care, Liam. He’s a cool one.”

“No worry.”

I thought suddenly of the men’s toilet at Shannon Airport. I watched, silent, frozen, as the garda climbed purposefully up the rope ladder. He used one hand to steady himself and held the gun in the other. His eyes evidently didn’t accustom themselves to the dark very quickly, for he looked straight at me without seeing me. A Vitamin A deficiency, perhaps.

I glanced downward. The other garda stood at the bottom of the ladder, gazing upward blindly. Tom was on his left, Nora a few feet away on the right, her jaw slack and her hands clutched together in despair. I glanced again at the climbing garda. He had reached the top now. He straightened up in the low-ceilinged room, and he roared as his head struck the beam overhead.

I took him by the shoulders and shoved. He bounced across the room, and I threw myself through the opening in the floor, like a paratrooper leaping from a plane. Between my feet, as I fell, I saw the upraised uncomprehending face of the other garda.

“Up the Republic!” someone was shouting. It was days later when I realized that it was my voice I had heard.