Shannon (52 page)

“I gotta think about that,” he said, so softly that she had to lean forward to hear his words. She waited. “You know, ma'am, I don't know that I ever killed anybody. I mean— I don't know. And when I say I don't know, that is the word I want to use, because we were firing from a distance. We were returning fire, and we never could see where our bullets were hitting. Their part of that terrain— it was awful dark in there. So I'm not troubled by it. Anyway”—his accent seemed to get more Irish— “I could never kill a fly. My mother brought us up to respect all of life as God's creation.”

Ellie's body took over. She folded her hands across her breasts in case the sudden chill should show. Her neck grew cold as though a slab of marble had been clamped to it; she felt a sweat in her hairline.
Enough. I saw this man come in many times. I saw him clean the blood off his bayonet. Jesus God, his own officers were afraid of him!

She began to clear the table, fighting for a space in her mind where she could build a plan. He rose to help her.

“No. I'll do it. Honestly,” she said.

“Ma'am, I was well raised.”

He loaded the tray better than she could, every movement economic, with superb use of little spaces. Ellie liked to see how people did things, and this man wasted no effort; his simplest movements had intelligence in them. He had the same view of life as she had: Get the small things done well and everything else will follow. She walked ahead of him into the house.
Is he looking at my legs? My neck? My behind? His feet make no sound. How can he walk so lightly?

Together they began to tidy the kitchen and get the breakfast things washed up. He had such competence and speed. His mood changed; he softened into intimacy, almost a flirtation, a closing of the distance.

He smiled. He teased, “What rank did you have? Were you a colonel?” as she told him where to stow things. And he strutted a little, he postured his hips in a stance in front of her, showing his body. Ellie found herself reacting.
Don't be disgusting, Ellie. Get out of the kitchen now. Go upstairs and call Robert.

She had her plan, an outing to friends downriver, down below Athlone: Lena and Larry Mullen.
Larry has friends and contacts; he'll listen and tell me if I'm some kind of fool. Not a long drive.

Robert came bounding down the stairs.

“I thought we'd take Vincent to Clonmacnoise,” she said.

Robert clapped his hands. “There's this swell place. We'll go in the car. It's an ancient monastery. Ellie has friends there; I actually stayed in their house without knowing they knew her— the Mullens. They have several children. I helped with haymaking.”

Vincent reciprocated the delight. How much of the smile derived from his own private joke? The previous evening, before he had knocked on the door, he had looked all around. He'd figured they had one means of escape— the car— and he'd made a small adjustment to the engine.

And so, with sweaters collected and doors locked, both men turned the handle over and over and over. Not a sound came from the engine other than a growl that died on the air.

Ellie sat at the wheel and frowned. “This car starts even in the frost,” she said. “Do you fellows know anything about cars?” She opened the side flaps of the hood and threw them back. Robert and Vincent stood beside her and peered helplessly in.

“We could go for a long walk,” said Robert.

“I have an idea,” said Vincent. “I contribute to a charitable magazine, I write for them. I thought this morning when I woke up that I'd like to write about this journey and about this house. How's about I ask you folks a bunch of questions and make notes. We can turn it into a lazy day.” Ellie could not overrule Robert's excitement; he was like a boy whose cousin had come to stay.

She said, “But you don't need me for this?”

The stranger said, “Actually ma'am, you're the person I do need. No offense, but the captain here, I mean— sorry, Robert— they don't want two Americans.”

Ellie had no way out so she smiled and said, “Well, if you think so.”

For three hours they sat, all through the afternoon. It became one of those immensely still days that Robert had already seen many times on the Shannon. Nothing moved. Now and then a bird whirruped by. From time to time, Robert stretched his legs. He walked the lawn, picked up a blade of grass, chewed on it.

Ellie answered questions— the house, her family, the river. She continued to watch Robert as keenly as she did every day. The afternoon strolled on, hot and still. In that quiet house, standing at the exact center of Ireland— three young people in their thirties, who had all been through a horrendous war, sat at a table in a garden while one of them contemplated how to kill the other two.

Vincent Patrick Ryan belonged in the clinical and precise category of hired killer. He liked neat work, no fuss; he liked to leave no traces. Control: That's the signature he liked, a corpse that could easily pass into a coroner's verdict as accidental death or misadventure. Only twice had he left traces that could result in verdicts of murder by person or persons unknown. Nothing could connect him to either crime.

At three o'clock, Ellie jumped up. “We missed lunch. Somebody around here must be hungry.”

Vincent thanked her and put his notebook away. “What time does it get dark around here? Ireland stays bright so much later than Boston.”

Robert agreed. “We'll have daylight until ten o'clock.”

Vincent said, “I think I'll take a nap.”

Robert said, “Good idea, me too.” Ellie, now on the alert all the time, hurtled from the kitchen and saw him halfway up the stairs behind the stranger.

“Robert, I need your strong hand.”

He laughed and called after Vincent, “Sleep well.”

“Thank you,” said Vincent. “See you guys later.”

He looked down through the balusters at Ellie, hustling Robert into the kitchen and closing the door.
She's on to me. She may not know it, but she's on to me. She's uneasy. I'd better hurry. Not rush, but hurry.

He had kept his bayonet from the marines— a souvenir in theory, a weapon in practice. He never traveled without it. It lived in a flap compartment at the bottom of his bag. After the war he took it to a saddle maker. The man made him a sheath of soft leather so that he could wear
the bayonet on the inside of his leg. He took the blade out, polished it hard, sheathed it again, strapped it to his leg just above the ankle— and practiced taking it out.

When Vincent came downstairs from his nap, clean and fresh for dinner, everything had gone prematurely dark. The sky had changed. Too risky, Ellie said, to eat out of doors.

“I haven't used the dining room for a long time.”

“Does this mean the weather has broken?”

“No,” she said. “The sun is going down very red. Look outside. Tomorrow'll be hot. But we could have a downpour before then.”

Vincent, the man who planned everything, went to the door, saw the bloodshot sky in the west, and smiled.
A swim in the rain at night would be fun.

“I forgot to look last night,” he said, when he came back into the house. “Is there a moon?”

“It's not full,” she said. “But it's bright late. I saw it last night; it's a waning moon. I think it was full about five days ago.”

She opened the dining room windows and the curtains didn't billow; they hung limp. For the next hour or so, she and the stranger chitchatted in the kitchen while she cooked and they waited for Robert. The Marine Corps came into their conversation again and again. They exchanged names: Hamilton, “Old Jule Turrill,” Colonel Catlin, hit by a German sniper in the lung. Vincent had never known how short of supplies the medics had been; she had never known how poor the troop communications had been.

An eavesdropper would have assumed that these two people in their mid-thirties, evidently secure and competent, were two old friends who had been in the same action during the war and were only now beginning to debrief themselves and unload a lot of the war's baggage. Not for a second would anybody have guessed that the man in the conversation intended to kill the woman that night or, at the latest, next day— and that the woman deeply suspected the man and could do nothing about it.

Robert came downstairs and slouched into the passageway toward the kitchen door. Ellie saw him coming and knew there had been a mood change.

“Excuse me,” she said to Vincent, and barreled out of the kitchen, closing the door behind her.

She stood in front of Robert and made him halt. He had not washed or changed; he looked disheveled and stale.
I'm right. There's something bad in this house now, and he's picked it up.

“Robert, my love, we're going back upstairs now, just for a minute or two.”

She turned him around and, holding his hand, walked up the stairs so briskly that she forced him to abandon his slouching walk and follow her.

In their room, she sat him down in the chair on her side of the bed, poured cold water from the pitcher into the basin, dipped a face towel in the pitcher of cold water, and began to wash his face. She helped him take off his shirt, and she washed his shoulders, neck, and chest as only a nurse can do. Then she tipped back his face and kissed him on the mouth, a slow soft kiss, the kind he most liked. She made him stand up and finished the undressing until he stood naked, and she continued to wash him.

From the closet she took a complete outfit of fresh clothes for him and, from the skin out, began to help him dress. Bit by bit, his mood changed. By the time she had sponged his face again with the cold face towel, he had picked up considerably.

Inside two hours, though, his mood would alter again— and extraordinarily.

Ellie went down first; Robert followed close behind.

“Look!” she said, and flung open the dining room door.

To the beauty of the room and the table, Robert came a little further alight. Since he had come to her house, Ellie had observed his eventual good reaction to anything of beauty— glass, linen, paintings, flowers. Now she sat him down at the head of the table, in her father's carving chair, and went back to the kitchen. Robert looked all around: the table set for three, the silver, the glass, the napkins edged with old lace. He couldn't tell that the windows were open, the candles barely flickered.

With Vincent helping, Ellie served dinner
.
They sat to a meal of boiled bacon and cabbage with potatoes.

“How can I ever again call it
ham?”
said Robert.

“I thought,” Ellie said to Vincent, “that you should eat our national dish.”

“I seem to have eaten little else in Ireland,” he said. By now he had figured out the method, the timing, and the time: midnight, about two hours away.

Vincent talked food with Ellie again. Never, he said, had “the national dish” tasted so good. Ellie had put some raisins and some honey from her own beehives in the cabbage.

“When it's almost boiled, I transfer it over to the pot where the ham is just about cooked. The cabbage finishes boiling in the same water.”

And she had cut the finest flakes of sautéed onion through the tiny white potatoes.

It all looked wonderful in that heavy Victorian room. The brooding furniture sparkled as the candles lit its polish. The glasses shone, reflecting the flat blades of the silver knives. Vincent reached down and touched the flatness of his bayonet in its sheath on his leg.

In the half-light the three people looked ever more beautiful. Their conversation sparkled too. Ellie made a concerted effort to draw Robert out further and further. She had been much encouraged by her recent successes in that direction, and now she began to tell Vincent of their journeys together— to the source of the Shannon and to the harper's grave. As she spoke, she invited Robert to take over. Where he faltered in mid-sentence, she jumped in so seamlessly that it seemed like a normal couple's assistance of each other in their sociable dinner-table conversation.

Vincent watched, listened, and laughed at the right moments. All the time, he considered his options.
Suppose they won't go out of doors after dinner, what should I do? Worry about that when it happens. This seems like just the sort oft night when people would go and look at the river after dinner. And I only need him to come. I can come back for her.

The meal traveled on; they crossed landscapes on that cream damask tablecloth with its Carrickmacross lace, handmade two centuries earlier by Ellie's great-great-grandmother. And they settled worlds and peoples in the gleam of those candles and knives, forks, and spoons that had been in the family for four or five generations.

Slowly, slowly, Robert Shannon's face cleared and he began again to
look like the figure he had once been— an elegant young man of intelligence and bravery.

At the other end of the table sat the woman whom an uninformed observer might think was his wife. Ellie, at last, had begun to relax. Michael Joyce had told her in Amiens, in that brief and desperately loving bedroom, that her smile could stop a tank. It could— or a heart, as it now stopped Robert's.

Between them, on one side of the lovely dining table, sat their killer. He looked from one to the other like a man at a slow tennis match, the hands bigger than weapons resting on the wonderful old linen. He smiled when they did, he laughed with them; he grew serious at their ideas.
Almost there. This is good. Almost there.