The White Plague (2 page)

“An Overview of Irish Genetic Research.”

He thought the title pompous, but it was only a cover. The real research was into the acceptance of the new genetics by a Roman Catholic society, whether such a society had taken a position to cope with the explosive potentials in molecular biology.

The project was much on his mind that Wednesday morning but necessary preparations required his attention. High on his list was the need to transfer funds from America to the Allied Irish Bank. Mary wanted to go shopping for sweaters “to keep our darlings warm of an evening.”

“There y’ go,” John teased as they left the Sherbourne Hotel, stepping into the rush of tourists and businessmen. “Only four days in Ireland and already you sound like a local.”

“And why not?” she demanded. “And both my grandmothers from Limerick.”

They laughed, drawing a few curious stares. The children tugged at Mary, anxious to be off shopping.

Ireland suited Mary, John thought. She had pale clear skin and dark blue eyes. Jet-black hair – “Spanish Hair,” her family called it – framed her rather round face. A sweet face. Irish skin and Irish features. He bent and kissed her before leaving. It brought a blush to her face but she was pleased at his show of affection and she gave him a warm smile as they parted.

John walked away briskly, humming to himself, amused when he recognized the tune: “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’.”

John’s Wednesday appointment for “transfer of foreign funds” was at two
P.M.
at the Allied Irish Bank, Grafton and Chatham streets. There was a sign just inside the bank’s entrance, white letters on black: “Non Branch Customers Upstairs.” A uniformed guard led him up the stairs to the office of the bank manager, Charles Mulrain, a small, nervous man with tow-colored hair and pale blue eyes behind gold-framed glasses. Mulrain had a habit of touching the corners of his mouth with a forefinger, first left side then right, followed by a quick downward brush of his dark tie. He made a joke about having his office on the first floor, “what you Americans call the second floor.”

“It is confusing until you catch on,” John agreed.

“Well!” A quick touching of lips and tie. “You understand that we’d normally do this at our main office, but…”

“When I called, they assured me it was…”

“As a convenience to the customer,” Mulrain said. He lifted a folder from his desk, glanced inside it, nodded. “Yes, this amount… if you’ll make yourself comfortable here, I’ll just get the proper forms and be right back.”

Mulrain left, giving John a tight smile at the door.

John went to the window and pulled back a heavy lace curtain to look down on Grafton Street. The sidewalks were thick with people all the way up to the arched gateway into St. Stephen’s Green two short blocks up Grafton. The motor traffic was two abreast filling the street and crawling along toward him. There was a workman cleaning the parapet on the roof of the shopping center diagonally across the street – a white-coated figure with a long-handled brush. He stood outlined against a row of five chimney pots.

Glancing at the closed door of the manager’s office, John wondered how long Mulrain would be. Everything was so damned formal here. John looked at his watch. Mary would arrive with the children in a few minutes. They planned to have tea, then John would walk down Grafton to Trinity College and begin work at the college library – the real start of his research project.

Much later, John would look back on those few minutes at the bank manager’s “first-floor” window and think how another sequence of events had been set in motion without his knowledge, an inescapable thing like a movie film where one frame followed another without ever the chance to deviate. It all centered around Francis Bley’s old car and a small VHF transmitter in the hands of a determined man watching from an open window that looked down on that corner where Grafton met St. Stephen’s Green.

Bley, patient as always, eased along at the traffic’s pace. Herity, in his window vantage point, toggled the arming switch of his transmitter, making sure the antenna wire dangled out over the sill.

As he neared the Grafton corner, the crush of pedestrians forced Bley to stop and he missed the turn of the traffic light. He heard the tour bus gain clear of traffic off to his right, trundling off in a rumble of its heavy diesel. Barricades were being erected on the building to his left and a big white-on-red sign had been raised over the rough construction: “This Building to be Remodeled by G. Tottenham Sons, Ltd.” Bley looked to his right and noted the tall blue-and-white Prestige Cafeteria sign, feeling a small pang of hunger. The pedestrian isthmus beside him was jammed with people waiting to cross over to St. Stephen’s Green and others struggling to make a way through the cars stopped on Grafton and blocking Bley’s path. The crush of pedestrians was particularly heavy around Bley’s car, people passing both front and back. A woman in a brown tweed coat, a white parcel clutched under her right elbow and each hand grasping a hand of a small child, hesitated at the right front corner of Bley’s car while she sought an opening through the press of people.

John Roe O’Neill, standing at the bank manager’s window, recognized Mary. He saw her first because of her familiar tweed coat and the way she carried her head, that sleek cap of jet hair. He smiled. The twins were screened from him by the hurrying adults but he knew from Mary’s stance that she held the children’s hands. A brief break in the throng allowed John a glimpse of the top of Kevin’s head and the old Ford with the driver’s brown-sweatered elbow protruding.

Where is that damned bank manager?
John wondered.
She’ll be here any minute.

He dropped the heavy lace curtain and looked once more at his wrist-watch.

Herity, at the open window above and behind Bley, nodded once more to himself. He stepped back away from the window and toggled the second switch on his transmitter.

Bley’s car exploded, ripped apart from the bottom. The bomb, exploding almost under Bley’s feet, drove him upward with a large piece of the car’s roof, his body crushed, dismembered and scattered. The large section of roof sailed upward in a slow arc to come crashing onto the Irish Permanent Society Building, demolishing chimney pots and slates.

It was not a large bomb as such things went, but it had been expertly placed. The old car was transformed into jagged bits of metal and glass – an orange ball of fire peppered with deadly shrapnel. A section of the car’s bonnet decapitated Mary O’Neill. The twins became part of a bloody puddle blown against the iron fencing across the street at St. Stephen’s Green. Their bodies were more easily identified later because they were the only children of that age in the throng.

Herity did not pause to glance out at his work; the sound told it all. He tucked the transmitter into a small and worn military green pack, stuffed an old yellow sweater onto it, strapped the cover and slung the pack over his shoulder. He left the building by the back way, elated and satisfied. Barney and his group would get this message!

John O’Neill had looked up from his wristwatch just in time to see the orange blast envelop Mary. He was saved from the window’s shattered glass by the heavy curtains, which deflected all but one of the shards away from him. One small section of glass creased his scalp. The shock wave staggered him, driving him backward against a desk. He fell sideways, momentarily unconscious but getting quickly to his knees as the bank manager rushed into the room, shouting:

“Good God! What was that?”

John stumbled to his feet, rejecting the question and the answer that rumbled through his head like an aftershock of the blast. He brushed past the bank manager and out the door. His mind remained in shock but his body found its way down the stairs. He shouldered a woman aside at the foot of the stairs and lurched out onto the street where he allowed himself to be carried along by the crowd rushing toward the area of the blast. There was a smell of burnt iron in the air and the sound of cries and screams.

Within only a few seconds John was part of a crush being held back by police and uninjured civilians pressed into service to keep the area around the explosion clear. John elbowed and clawed his way forward.

“My wife!” he shouted. “I saw her. She was there. My wife and our children!”

A policeman pinned his arms and swung him around, blocking John’s view of the tangled fabric and bloody flesh strewn across the street.

The groans of the injured, the cries for help and the shouts of horror drove John into insensate rage.
Mary needs me!
He struggled against the policeman.

“Mary! She was right in front of…”

“The ambulances are coming, sir! There’s help at hand. You must be still. You cannot go through now.”

A woman off to John’s left said: “Let me through. I’m a nurse.”

This, more than anything else, stopped John’s struggles against the policeman.

People were helping. There was a nurse.

“It’ll be cleared up in a bit, sir,” the policeman said. His voice was maddeningly calm. “That’s a bad cut on your head. I’ll just help you across to where the ambulances are coming.”

John allowed himself to be led through a lane in the crowd, seeing the curious stares, hearing the voices on his right
ooing
and the calling upon God to “look over there” – the awed voices telling John about things he did not want to see. He knew, though. And there were glimpses past the policeman who helped him to a cleared place against a building across from the green.

“There now, sir,” the policeman said. “You’ll be taken care of here.” Then to someone else: “I think he was hit by a flying bit; the bleeding seems to’ve stopped.”

John stood with his back against a scarred brick wall from which the dust of the explosion still sifted. There was broken glass underfoot. Through an opening in the crowd to his right he could see part of the bloody mess at the corner, the people moving and bending over broken flesh. He thought he recognized Mary’s coat behind a kneeling priest. Somewhere within him there existed an understanding of that scene. His mind remained frozen, though, frigidly locked into limited thought. If he allowed himself to think freely, then events would flow – time would continue… a time without Mary and the children. It was as though a tiny jewel of awareness held itself intact within him, understanding,
knowing
… but nothing else could be allowed to move.

A hand touched his arm.

It was electric. A scream erupted from him – agonized, echoing down the street, bringing people whirling around to stare at him. A photographer’s flash temporarily blinded him, shutting off the scream, but he could still hear it within his head. It was more than a primal scream. This came from deeper, from some place he had not suspected and against which he had no protection. Two white-coated ambulance attendants grabbed him. He felt his coat pulled down, shirt ripped. There came the prick of a needle in his arm. They hustled him into an ambulance as an enveloping drowsiness overwhelmed his mind, sweeping away his memory.

For a long time afterward, memory would not reproduce those shocked minutes. He could recall the small car, the brown-sweatered elbow on the windowsill, but nothing afterward. He knew he had seen what he had seen: the explosion, the death. Intellectual awareness argued the facts
. I was standing at that window, I must have seen the blast
. But the particulars lay behind a screen that he could not penetrate. It lay frozen within him, demanding action lest the frozen thing thaw and obliterate him.

Despair and grief suit the Celtic mind more than do joy and victory. Every Celtic joy has its mixture of grief. Every victory leads to despair.

– Fintan Craig Doheny

S
TEPHEN
B
ROWDER
read about the Grafton Street bombing while sitting on the grass of the quad at the medical school of University College, Cork. As a third-year student Browder had learned enough about school routine to provide himself with a long lunch hour and a chance to crack the books and catch his breath between classes. He had chosen this luncheon spot, however, because some of the student nurses shared it and Kathleen O’Gara frequently was among that lunching troupe.

It was a warm day and this had brought many others into the quad, all of them preferring the green to the gothic stone monstrosity of the school, which often seemed to partake more of the old jail that once had occupied this spot than of a modern medical facility. The Cork
Examiner
in his hands was only a prop but he had been caught by the picture of a screaming man – “American Tourist Loses Family” – and he read the story, shaking his head now and then at the horror of it.

Browder’s attentions to Kathleen O’Gara had not gone without notice among the student nurses. They teased her about it now.

“There he is, Katie. I’ll loan you a handkerchief to drop in front of him.”

Kate blushed, but could not keep herself from looking across the green at Browder. He was a skinny, gawkish young man with sandy hair and widely set blue eyes. His whole bearing gave promise of his becoming one of those stoop-shouldered general practitioners who inspire so much faith among their patients by their towering benignity. There was a persistent thoughtfulness about him that she liked. The shyness was sure to become learned diffidence and a down-the-nose austerity that would go well with his finely chiseled features.

Browder looked up from his newspaper and met Kate’s eyes. He looked away quickly. He had been trying for two weeks to work up his courage, seeking a way to ask her to go out with him. He berated himself now for not smiling back at her.

He could not really define why she attracted him. She had a youthful figure, a bit on the sturdy side, but comely. Her skin carried those fine surface veins that gave a rosy hue to the complexion. Her hair now – that was a shining red-brown, part of the Viking legacy, and her dark brown eyes were set rather deeply under a wide brow. He knew she was recognized as a good worker, bright and cheerful, and he had heard another nursing student say about her: “She’s no beauty but good enough to get a husband.”