All Our Yesterdays (4 page)

Conn sipped his tea and whistled “The Peeler and the Goat” softly to himself, the lyrics playing silently in his head.

A young medical student named Kevin Barry was hanged one gray morning in Mountjoy Prison. Crowds gathered early on the damp streets outside the prison, before the sun had dried the dew. British soldiers in tin hats stood with fixed bayonets, shivering in the early day. Armored cars moved over the slick streets, forcing passage through the crowd. A woman began to cry. “The poor boy. The poor boy. God help us all!” She swayed as if she would fall and people on either side held her up. Airplanes circled overhead, flying low, unexpected and alien, watching the crowd, like pterodactyls over prey. The mourning of the crowd rose toward them. “Mother of Perpetual Succor help us,” the women cried. “Mother of Perpetual Succor help us.” The Tommies stood motionless, bayonets fixed, eyes straight ahead. Most of them were very young. Conn moved among the people, shoulders hunched against the early chill, hands deep in his pockets.
Bad morning for Kevin Barry. Good morning for the cause
, he thought.
Whenever things looked grim for a free Ireland, the British would pitch in and supply another martyr
.

There was a warrant out for Conn. The RIC had captured one of the men from Hollyford, and beaten information from him. So Conn was assigned to IRA headquarters to recuperate. He had few duties as he got well. He attended planning meetings, acrimonious night-long discussions of revolutionary theory. The arguments made him restless. Revolution for Conn was a night on the barracks roof at Hollyford, not extended analysis of Foch’s principles. During most of
the planning he thought about Hadley. He lived from house to house, never more than two or three nights. Everywhere he went he carried two guns, the big Webley and a Browning automatic. Everywhere he went he was watchful and thought about Hadley. Days he sat in St. Stephen’s Green, among the orderly flower beds, where nursemaids pushed prams, and shabby undersized men with narrow faces sat on benches and looked at nothing. He watched the people, and kept an eye out for peelers, and mused on Hadley’s thighs and the smooth small slope of her stomach. Sometimes he went to the National Gallery and stared at the paintings hung on high white walls above polished floors in echoing rooms under distant ceilings. He thought of the sounds she made during lovemaking. Sometimes he read in the National Library. Always he was careful. Always he thought about Hadley. He saw her as often as she could get away.

On a soft evening when the spring had flowered into summer, they ate together in the dining room at the Shelbourne Hotel. They sat by one of the high windows that looked out across the traffic at St. Stephen’s Green. Lorries rumbled past with British troops standing on the sides. Armored cars with mobile turrets moved along the north side of the Green. Occasionally one would swerve in toward the sidewalk. People would scatter, and the car would resume course. The Auxies walked in groups. People gave way to them. They were professional fighters, tough and arrogant in their dull bottle-green tunics, tam-o’-shanter caps at an angle. Some Auxies paused to look in at the diners. Conn looked back at them. One of the Auxies, a thick-bodied man with an eye patch, saw Conn looking and stared back at him. They held each
other’s stare and then the Auxie tossed his head contemptuously, and they moved on. Conn laughed.

“Stared him down, did you?” Hadley said.

Around them carefully dressed older people were eating dinner. The waiters, in black coats and white aprons, moved humbly among them, never making eye contact, bowing and murmuring and backing away.
The Irish make terrible subjects
. Conn thought,
but they might make grand slaves
.

“Yes,” Conn said. “But I had more eyes than he did.”

He laughed again and Hadley laughed with him.

“Ah, Conn,” Hadley said in a stage Irish accent, “you darling boy. Look at you, with your curly black hair and your big smile and a strapping lad you be.”

“A credit to me race,” Conn said.

“And carrying two guns and stare down any Auxie,” she said. “You’re like a poster Irishman.”

“Faith and begorrah,” Conn said, and put his hand on top of hers.

The Shelbourne was dangerous for both of them. Hadley’s husband was well known among the Ascendancy Irish who often dined there, and Conn, were he recognized, would be shot on sight by any of the British officers billeted in the hotel.

“Where shall we go after dinner?” Conn said.

“It’s pleasant,” Hadley said. “Perhaps we can find a quiet place in the Green.”

Conn took a bite of muttonchop and drank some claret. He knew how dangerous it was here, and he knew that the danger was one reason they came. It excited her. For himself Conn knew that it was foolish to take such risks, but he knew also that Dublin was his city, and he was goddamned if he would let a
bunch of foreigners decide where he could eat. And he too enjoyed the danger.

“Be nice sometime if we were to do it in a proper bed,” Conn said. He paused and drank some more claret, and patted his lips with the starchy white linen napkin. “With clean sheets, and big pillows. And a door that locked.”

“I rather like the excitement,” Hadley said. “Doing it where someone might come upon us.”

“It’s exciting,” Conn said. “But it lacks a bit in the area of postcoital languor.”

She cut a neat small portion of her salmon and popped it into her mouth, switching the fork from her left hand to her right, the way Americans did. She chewed carefully while he looked at her face, how her big eyes held the light of the candles on the table. The light reflected in the windows now, as the evening came down. He could see them both in the dark window, younger than any of the other diners, sitting close together.

She finished chewing, and swallowed, and said, “I can get languor at home, thank you.”

“And love?”

She smiled.

“So Irish,” she said, and shook her head. “So Irish.”

He wanted to reach across the table and take her and bend her to him and force her to love him as he loved her. He felt his strength, felt the biceps engorge, swollen against the sleeves of his jacket. It was as if, for that moment, he might force her or kill her. He would make her yield…. And then it passed…. He felt the engorgement drain away…. And he felt diminished, as if he himself might drain away too…. The faith defended, he put his hand on top
of hers again, and patted it contritely. He felt the glassy stare of the stag’s head mounted high on the far wall of the dining room.

Later, in the Green, among some bushes, squirming beneath him in the darkness, moaning in his arms, she bit his shoulder and drew blood. And when it was over they stayed where they were, in silence, catching their breath, smelling the crushed grass beneath them and the damp smell of the Irish earth, and listening to the sound of the heavy lorries as they rolled by.

T
hey met on a cold night, in a high-ceilinged room, on the first floor of a four-story pinkish brick town house, in back of Trinity College, just up Westland Row from the train station. Mulcahy himself was there, the chief of staff, and Mick Collins, “the Big Fella” head of intelligence, seated behind a long table with maps and papers on it. The high windows were shuttered from the inside, and the doors were locked. The radiators were full on in the crowded room, and Ginger O’Connell, the training officer, portly and red faced, behind the table, was sweating in the heat. Rory O’Connor and Arthur Griffith made five command staff members behind the long table. Conn sat against the back wall on a straight chair that had been moved in from the kitchen.
If the peelers came fishing today they’d get a lot of big ones
, Conn thought.

“Let us be straight about this,” Collins said. “Their Secret Service has been better than ours.”

He spoke firmly, as he did everything. He wasn’t in fact such a big fella. Conn was taller. But he was blocky and athletic, and the certainty with which he said things made him seem bigger than he was.

“We need to slow it down until we can catch up. No one outside this room knows of our plans. There are few of us, each of you will have to act alone. It is the best way to keep it secret.”

Besides the command staff there were twenty men
in the reeking hot room. Collins looked around slowly, making eye contact with each of them. Conn felt the force in the Big Fella’s gaze when his turn came.

“We’ve all fought, we all know that it’s harder alone. Harder to act with resolve. It is why each of you was asked to volunteer. You are the best we have.”

Conn knew this was so and he was proud to be there. Still, it was one thing to fire at an anonymous enemy in the midst of a firefight. It was another to assassinate a man with a name, in his home, perhaps in his bed, sleeping with his wife…. He wondered if Hadley slept with her husband. He had seen him once, on the street with Hadley, walking on the west side of Merrion Square near Leinster House. A solid man, in his forties, with dark brown hair and a short thick beard like Grant, the American Civil War general. Hadley had made no sign as they passed, her hand resting lightly on her husband’s crooked arm. He had a pleasant face with a look of intelligence about it. There was about him what Conn thought of as the American look, as if he always slept soundly and dined well, and spent time out of doors. Conn felt something nearly like camaraderie with this man who did not know him. They had shared the same woman, felt the secrets of her body. He imagined bursting in upon them, revolver drawn, and Hadley’s husband startled sitting up in the bed beside her…. Of course they slept together.

“It is important that it all happen at the same time,” Mulcahy said. “I want everyone in Ireland to be talking about it on the way to Mass tomorrow. Not only will we cripple their intelligence with this single simultaneous
stroke, but it will be a statement, also, of how seriously a free Ireland must be taken.”

Mulcahy’s thick blond moustache was in odd juxtaposition, Conn thought, to his dark hair. It made him look a bit silly. But he wasn’t silly. Dickie was a good man. So was Mick. All of them were in this dark inherited brotherhood of idealism and savagery. All of them loved Ireland and hated England and loved each other. And he among them hated and loved as they did, though he loved Hadley Winslow more.

The wallpaper in the room had a design of Doric columns in pink and white. The ceiling molding was thickly ornamental. The radiators hissed and pinged with heat. There was no sound from the street.
It is an emblem
, Conn thought,
of the essential Irish soul: hot, secretive, and dangerous, sealed up with history
. Conn smiled to himself.
And about to do some damage
.

Collins took out a big gold pocket watch and studied it for a theatrical moment.

“Eleven o’clock. Time—if you’re going to reach your target before the curfew,” he said. “Wait till it’s after midnight, Sunday morning. And then be quick. It needs to be finished by sunrise.”

The men stirred. Each of them had a handgun, most had two. There were perhaps a dozen hand grenades in the room as well. Some of the men carried knives. Conn didn’t carry one. Sticking a knife into a man was a bit much, he thought.

Outside, the cold darkness was a brief refreshment from the steam ridden meeting room, But soon the chill became unpleasant and Conn buttoned his overcoat around his neck and turned up the collar. His target was a British Secret Service man named John Cooper, who lived on Haddington Road near the
Beggar’s Bush army barracks. Collins’s intelligence report said he lived in one side of a two-story house with his wife. There were no children. There was no dog. Cooper would be the only man in the house. He was described as thirty-five, balding, medium height, medium weight. Nothing unusual to identify him. A nondescript government functionary who had gone to bed peacefully and would die before morning.

In the still darkness Conn walked along Mount Street, among the endlessly similar four-story eighteenth-century brick buildings. The sky was clear black and the stars were bright. The moon was only a sliver above him and the stillness of the low city with its orderly streets and symmetrical green parks seemed penetrating. The streets were empty, and his footfall was loud and rhythmic as he walked. He liked the sound. The weight of his guns was comfortable under his coat. When he first began to wear them they seemed heavy, but now they were part of him, no more uncomfortable than his shirt. A steel-plated Lancia went by with a guttural purr. It slowed as it passed Conn, but it did not stop, and soon it picked up speed and drove on, ugly and implacable like an ancient nocturnal carnivore. If they stopped him he’d make a fight of it. He might be able to lose them in the back gardens of the neighborhood, and even if he couldn’t he would rather go down like a soldier of the IRA, which he was, with his guns in his hands. He smiled as he walked, liking the image of himself, two-gun Sheridan, and smiling at his own boyish heroism, though he was proud of it too, and he knew it to be real.

At Haddington Road he stopped half a block east of Beggar’s Bush before the two-story row house with a
red door. He was on his own. There had been
no
instructions. How he killed this man was up to him. He didn’t like it much, but he’d do it. He’d sworn an oath to a free Ireland, and this balding youngish man he was about to kill had chosen to be a Secret Service officer, had chosen to repress the Irish people, had chosen to run the risk that he was about to incur. Certainly this man had sent over many a good-hearted Irish lad.

Conn took the big Webley out, and cocked it, and held it by his side. He walked briskly across the street and up the front steps and rapped loudly on the front door. After a moment he rapped again. There was movement inside the house. The front door opened a crack and a voice said, “Who is it?”

“From the Castle.”