The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf (3 page)

By then, O’Grady would be firmly in place. Seeing him armed, they would make up some story and take themselves off on such a night, returning either to the hotel or their boat. The storm, which Ford could now hear moaning through the thatch, was simply too foul.

Three hours, Ford decided. He had three hours to trace the difficult overland path to Mirna’s, tell her the tale that would seem incredible to her after all the years she had known him, then get himself back and Breege into O’Grady’s car.

He’d also ring up Packy and have the fast boat ready to put off the moment they reached the harbor. They’d head due north toward Achill Island but continue on to Belmullet, which was a fishing port. There he might be able to hire a car.

He picked up the receiver and dialed.

O’Grady was just finishing his tea. Ford could hear kitchen sounds and O’Grady’s children in the background. But he agreed to come. “If you think you need me, Clem, I’ll be right up. But—why the gun?”

“Just bring one, please. And be prepared to use it.”

There was a pause before O’Grady asked, “How’s Breege keeping?”

“
She
’s fine. It’s me who wants you. I’ll explain everything when I get back. And don’t forget the gun.” Explain what, Ford wondered? He didn’t know, but some credible story would come to him when needed. He told O’Grady where he would leave the key, then rang off.

Breege, who scarcely ate enough to keep a bird alive, had
finished her meal. Ford made her sit beside the hearth in the chair that faced the door.

He then stuffed the Webley down between the cushion and the padded arm of the chair and pulled the chair shawl over it. “Kevin knows where the latchkey is, so you won’t have to get up to let him in. When you hear him at the door, call out. Make sure he answers, and you recognize his voice. If not, use this.” Taking her left hand, he made her feel the butt of the weapon. “Remember how I taught you to shoot?”

Breege wagged her still lovely, dark head. “But that was years ago, Clem. And this is all so cloak-and-dagger. Are you sure you’re
right
?”

In
every
way, Ford suspected she meant.

“I could not be wrong. It’s Rehm. He’s come for the cargo and to kill me. And anybody who gets in his way, make no mistake.”

“Did you tell Kevin that?”

“No, of course not. How could I?” Reading her expression, Ford thought for a moment that she finally believed him. “There’s still time to change your mind. Come with me to Mirna’s. She’s got the big new Land Rover. She can take us to the harbor. Packy is probably in the pub, and we’ll be gone by midnight.”

Breege turned her head and listened to the wind, her eyes seeming to track its passage from the distant Western ocean, over the cliffs and pinnacle of Croaghmore, and past the house. “No, Clem—I’m just not up to it. And as long as you say Kevin is on his way, I’ll rest easy. And, sure, I’ve got this.” She patted the side of the chair where he had lodged the Webley.

Bending to the fire, Ford picked up the special tong-like device that he kept among the fire irons there. He knocked aside the few remaining lumps of peat that were still smoldering, and he pried up a deep stone from the inner hearth. A strongbox came next. From it he extracted the manila packet that was all the box contained.

Years before they had discussed it—Breege noting that, after they were gone, older Clare Islanders might think to look under the bricks of the hearth. “It’s there in times past a family’s valuables were hidden from the tax collectors, rev
enuers, and Lawlife’s bailiffs.” Lawlife being the London insurance company that had owned Clare Island before the turn of the century.

With the packet now in hand, he replaced the box and the stone, and with a briquette of solid parafin he built a new fire for Breege.

Reaching for a notepad of his stationery Ford sat in his wing chair and scribbled the two addresses in Dublin that Mirna would need. He also added the name “Angus Rehm.”

Ford was left-handed and his script had a curious backward slant that was even less legible because of the mild arthritis that afflicted his large hands. He had to concentrate to form the letters, and it took more time. Seven minutes by the clock on the mantel.

Placing the slip of paper into the packet and then stuffing the packet into the liner of his hat, Ford stood up.

“Do you have everything you need?” Breege asked.

“If you mean the Trust envelope. I do.”

“Now, hurry back.”

“I will, and you be ready to leave, when I am.”

It took Ford another ten minutes to batten all the window shutters and to lock the front and cubby doors. Leaving by the rear, he locked that door as well, then walked round through the soggy soil to the front and left the key under a rock for O’Grady, as they had discussed. With a toe he eased the Judas stone against the door and checked his wristwatch by the light from the transom.

Forty-seven minutes had elapsed since Rehm had seen him on the hillside. He deducted that plus the hour it would take him to go and come back from Mirna’s. He would then have something less than an hour to tell her—no, to
convince
her of what he wished her to know, which was nothing less than fifty or so years of history. And, then what he wished her to do, which would change her life irrevocably.

MIRNA GOTTSCHALK HAD been born on Clare Island in 1941, four years before Ford arrived. Her father, Rudolph—then a young painter from Vienna—had once summered on the island, and in 1940 he came to stay. He told people he was attracted by the quality of light, the vistas of Clew Bay, and the island’s tranquility. Also, being a Jew did not seem to matter as much here as it did in Austria after the German occupation in 1938.

From Austria, Gottschalk had gone to Spain to fight for the Republic. But he had no sooner recovered from the wounds that he had suffered in the siege of Barcelona, than the Insurgents, led by Franco, took Madrid, and the bloody civil war was over. Fleeing across the border into France, he met a beautiful, young Basque woman who was also a political refugee. Together and with little more than their talents, they arrived in Ireland.

The house that they squatted in on Clare Island had been abandoned during the famine of the last century and was nothing but crumbling walls and dung, since sheep and cattle had sought shelter there over the years. It took the Gottschalks nearly a decade and plenty of hard work, but they created the most handsome and unusual dwelling on the island, Ford judged. With bits of the considerable flotsam that had washed
up on Irish shores during the war, they fitted out and furnished their building. They used everything they could get their hands on—packing crates, ships’ timbers, the entire cabin of an old freighter that had been finished in Philippine mahogany.

They added a studio in 1951 and, with the help of the Clare Island Trust, several long white outbuildings that served as a kind of factory. There they made “Clare Island sculpture”—also fabricated from driftwood, which they sold throughout Ireland and England. It was the enterprise that had provided the elder Gottschalks a living, and (now that they had passed away) allowed Mirna the freedom to paint what she would.

Topping the crest of the hill, Ford was relieved to look down at a light in the studio windows. It meant that Mirna was in there painting and would be alone.

But descending the steep trail seemed almost harder on his ruined knees than the climb up had been. Ford staggered several times, then slipped on the muddy slope, and fell in a long, bruising tumble that nearly brought him up against the door of the studio. His hat blew off, and he tried to scramble after it and the all-important envelope that it contained. “Christ!” he shouted. Finally in one, last, desperate effort before the hat swept over the cliff Ford’s hand grabbed the envelope. The hat, however, sailed off into the darkness and tumbled toward the sea, some four hundred feet below on the western side of the island.

Feeling hopeless, as though he could never respond to the challenge that Rehm represented, Ford cursed himself and his old age and with difficulty pulled himself to his feet. In a bit of moonlight that now appeared briefly as if to illuminate the event, he caught sight of his hat, still airborne and spiraling out into Clew Bay. The clouds closed again. Ford reached for the handle of the door—which, like most on Clare Island—was never locked.

Mirna Gottschalk turned from the canvas, then said, “Oh,
Clem
—I thought I heard a voice.” She began walking toward him. “But, I’m sorry, you can’t come in.”

Ford stopped. “What? Why not? Are ye’ not alone?”

Stepping in front of him as though to keep him from seeing into the room, she smiled. “Certainly I’m alone. Or are you
here with a proposition?” To show him she was fooling, she touched a hand to her hair which had turned gray early and was now closer to white. She kept it in braids.

In her mid-fifties now, Mirna Gottschalk-Byrne was still an attractive woman with a lithe body and the dark Spanish, good looks of her mother. The only bit of her father that Ford had ever been able to discern in her was her long, straight nose and hazel eyes.

Divorced now, she lived mostly alone, although she was visited from time to time by her son, Karl, and “suitors,” she called them, who never stayed more than a few weeks. During weekdays, of course, she was surrounded by other island women, who came to work on the driftwood ornaments that she designed and produced in the shop.

Ford tried to move around her, but she again stepped in front of him. “Really, Clem—can we go into the house? I’ll make you a cup of tea. You look”—her eyes ran down his muddy anorak and soiled trousers—“like you could use one. Did you fall? Where’s your hat.”

“No,” said Ford, easily pushing past the thin woman. “There isn’t time.”

“But”—she reached for his sleeve—“you’ll only ruin the surprise.”

“What?”

“The surprise that I’m making for your birthday. It’s not done, and I only have the week.”

She tried to prevent him, but Ford’s eyes swept the studio and fixed on the canvas and easel that was illuminated in the center of the room.

It was a large oil portrait of Breege, painted after Ford’s favorite photograph of her that had been taken in 1948. A print was clipped to the easel. He moved toward it.

“Well, so much for the surprise,” said Mirna.

It was Breege as Ford always saw her in his mind’s eye—as the dark, fey, young angel who had nursed him back to health and made him believe in life again. There was her slight smile and her full red lips, and the definite youthful sparkle in her bright, blind but very blue eyes. It was the same smile she had when Ford had declared his love for her, the one that said I love you too, and I’m yours. She had a
rose in her hair, and her long graceful neck was the color of ivory. She was wearing the ring that Ford had only then recently given her, the one with the large diamond and sapphire surround.

Tears filled his eyes, and he had to wipe them away. “It’s beautiful, but—” He pulled out his handkerchief.

“But what?” Mirna now moved beside him, obviously wishing to hear his reservation.

Ford blew his nose. “But nothing. It’s beautiful,
better
than the photograph, but”—he turned to Mirna—“I only hope to God that we’ll live to savor it. It’s why I’m here like this.” He swept his hand down his clothes. “I’ve only got”—he checked his wristwatch; it had taken him twenty-three minutes, longer than he thought, to get there—“a short time before Rehm gets to the cottage, and I must tell you something. For the good of—” of whom? Of Breege and him, certainly, but perhaps not for the good of Mirna herself, who would most assuredly be burdened with the knowledge. “For the good of the island.” He reached for her hands and shook them. “Will you listen to me, Mirna? As a favor to me and Breege?”

Mirna Gottschalk’s eyes were wide and round. “Why—what’s happened? Is it Breege?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway.”

“Who’s Rehm?”

“Angus Rehm—he’s the worst, the very worst!” Ford glanced at his wristwatch. “But you must listen to me.” Ford’s eyes flickered up at the black, rain-spattered wash of the studio windows. Where to start? There was so little time.

He straightened up. “I am not Clement Ford, I never was. Who I am doesn’t matter anymore. What does matter is this.” He waved the packet. “It’s the Trust, the Clare Island Trust. And it’s meant everything to Breege and me. It’s given our lives purpose and done much good for people who otherwise would have had little.

“Anyhow, it’s all in here. And you and your son, Karl—of all the people that we know in the world—deserve to control it. The first name and address on the top sheet is the firm you should contact to take control. They’re solicitors in Merrion Square. You need only to present yourself to them and
say exactly, ‘Dorfmann sent me.’ When she says back, ‘But I don’t know a Mr. Dorfmann,’ you’re to say, ‘Klimt says you do.’ Do you have that?”

Mirna cocked her head quizzically, her smile brittle, her eyes glassy. “I think so.”

“Repeat it.”

She complied, adding, “Don’t you want to sit down. I can get you—”

But he cut her off. “The second name and address is another firm that will help you dispose of what’s left in the cave, which is now the lesser part of the cargo I brought to the island. I haven’t had to trade with them in years, but the old man there is fair. It’s him you should see.”

“Cave?” Mirna asked, shaking her head, her brow furrowed. From her expression it was plain that she thought him daft and babbling, and she was concerned for him.

“Yes, cave. The map to it is also in here.”

“I know of no actual cave on Clare Island.”

“Well, damnit, there is one. Peig showed it to me when I first got here. Back in forty-five.”

She cocked her head quizzically. “And
what’s
in it?”

“Just something I put together at the end of the war. You’ll see. Now—the final name is of this man, Rehm, whom you should avoid at all cost. He’s my age or thereabouts, small, square, blond. Well…” Ford glanced at the windows, realizing that he no longer knew what Angus Rehm actually looked like. “He could be white or bald or…but, if he thinks he knows who you are, he’ll probably approach you as somebody else. Or he’ll have confederates, so you must be on your guard. Or”—Ford straightened up, the thought only now striking him—“he
is
somebody else by now.”

“Oh, Clem—can’t I make you some tea?” Her voice was filled with concern.

“No, you must promise me. You must avoid this man and take yourself away, ever should you know of his presence.”

Mirna shrugged and nodded. “Whatever you say.”

“I’ll come back, if I can, and answer your questions. And help you, because you’ll need help. But I must get back to Breege. This packet is now yours to do with as you see fit. I should have given it to you a long time ago. I know you and
Karl will handle it well, but promise me you won’t open the sealed pouch until you’ve taken a look at the cave and visited the solicitors in Dublin.”

Mirna nodded, but she was plainly dismayed.

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Ford thrust the manila packet into her hands and turned for the door.

“But—I don’t understand. Why are you telling me this? What’s in here? What’s happened?”

The blast swept into the room, as Ford pulled open the door. “Whatever you do, keep it to yourself. Tell
nobody
but Karl, and only after you swear him to secrecy!” Ford launched himself into the darkness.