‘Al-salam alaykum, Patrick. You’re a long way from home.’
The soft voice sounded exaggeratedly loud in the hushed emptiness. It had come from a clump of shadows in the central aisle. Patrick took a step back, almost tripping at the foot of the altar.
What’s wrong? Getting nervous? You were never nervous, old friend.’
The voice was so familiar. Familiar yet strange, as though someone had borrowed it. The greeting had been Arabic, but the speaker was not an Arab.
‘Alex? Is that you?’
‘Who were you expecting? Jesus Christ? That famous Jew who abandoned the working classes for...’ A figure stepped out of the shadows into a pool of weak light. He gestured vaguely with a gloved hand. ‘... for this.’ What did he mean, Patrick wondered. The wood? The plaster? The cheap candles? The silence?
What are you doing here, Alex?’ Patrick’s voice was stiff and unwelcoming.
We’re on neutral ground now, Patrick. Relax.’
The newcomer held out a hand, but Patrick stayed where he was. Aleksander Chekulayev had been RGB station chief in Beirut during Patrick’s last spell of duty there. They had met several times before that, twice in Cairo, often in Baghdad, once in Najm al-Sharq, a dirty cafe in Damascus where Patrick had contracted food poisoning. His stomach remembered the fat little Russian in the same mouthful as it did rancid hummus. According to the political winds, they had been rivals, enemies, friends, partners in crime - sometimes all at once. Alex had tried to have him killed on one occasion. There is no such thing as neutral ground.
‘What is it, Alex? What do you want?’ He was not prepared for Alex. His thoughts were still on the altar with Eamonn.
‘I was about to ask you just that myself.’
Chekulayev took a cautious step forward. Patrick could see him more clearly now. The Russian seemed greyer than he remembered. Beneath its natural pallor, his skin appeared as though covered in a fine grey dust, and his eyes were circled by darker lines, like the hair-thin cracks on a raku bowl. Patrick wondered if the greyness was the price or the reward for a lifetime of thought and lies and insinuation.
Glasnost had sniffed at Chekulayev’s edges and drawn back, perhaps more saddened than frightened. He was too old to change, too young to have learnt how. The system might mellow, but he could wait. In the end, it would grow grey like him. In a sense, he was the system.
The Russian nodded in the direction of the altar.
‘May I see?’
Patrick said nothing. At least he had no reason to think Chekulayev was responsible for this particular mess.
‘Don’t worry, Patrick, I’m quite alone.’ He came forward slowly, like a mourner approaching the bier to view the deceased. Patrick stood aside to let him pass. The Russian stepped up to the altar and stood for about a minute, his head bowed, as
though in prayer. When he turned, his face was grim.
‘Not a pretty sight. You knew him?’
‘Yes. He was the priest here. And he was my friend.’ Patrick still felt numb, unable to take in the horror of Eamonn’s death.
‘Yes, of course, the priest.’ Chekulayev looked round, as though aware for the first time he was in a church. ‘The letters on the wall. Hebrew and Greek. You understand them, of course.’
Word for word, yes. But why they were put there, who wrote them - I’ve no idea.’ High above, the mice moved slowly in the darkness. Or were they bats after all?
‘Oko za oko, zub za zub?
Patrick looked puzzled.
“An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.” Someone wanted revenge. A spiritual revenge ... by very earthly means. What commandment had your priest sinned against, Patrick?’
‘Most of them, I should think. Or none. What difference does it make?’
‘To me, none at all. But perhaps it made a difference to someone. What’s this all about, Patrick?’
Patrick stared at the Russian, as though challenging him.
‘C’mon, Alex - what are you telling me? That you didn’t know what you’d find here, didn’t know I was here - is that it? I suppose you’re just in Dublin on holiday and dropped in here for an early-morning tour of one of the city’s less-visited churches.’
Chekulayev said nothing. It needed only a camera round his thick neck to transform him into the archetype of a certain type of tourist. His fawn coat and burgundy scarf were neatly pressed, his shoes reflected the light of the candles. He could have been a businessman on leave, meddling in holiness for his soul’s pleasure. But Alex Chekulayev did not have a soul.
‘Let’s sit down, Patrick. I feel exposed up here, like an actor on a stage. All those empty pews back there, all those shadows piled up behind the pillars - they make me nervous. Let’s sit down.’
Patrick shuddered and looked away. He remembered - how many years ago? - a performance of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. Where had it been? St Patrick’s? Christchurch? He forgot. But he had not forgotten those final images: Becket by the altar, pierced and bleeding, the knights-tempters with their reddened swords, the chorus of the women of Canterbury chanting in the shadows:
‘The land is foul, the water is foul, our beasts and ourselves defiled with blood. A rain of blood has blinded my eyes.’
A rain of blood. An eye for an eye. And now Alex Chekulayev like a ghost come out of nowhere to haunt his present. Or a knight with a bloody sword, stepping forward to regale his audience with rational explanations for a bloody act.
They walked together to the back of the church and sat in the rear pew, like penitents come to wait their turn for confession, ringed by shadows.
‘If I believed in anything,’ said Chekulayev, ‘I would become a Muslim. Churches are such gloomy places, don’t you think? They give me the creeps. But mosques are all right. No statues, no memorials, no dead men nailed to crosses. It’s morbid, don’t you think, this religion of yours?’
Patrick thought of Eamonn. He had never been morbid. Patrick realized that he had always loved the old man, even throughout the long years when they had seldom met.
‘You were going to explain how you come to be here.’
Chekulayev reached inside his pocket and drew out a packet of cigarettes. He held them out to Patrick.
‘No thank you.’
The Russian shrugged and took one before returning the packet to his pocket. He jammed the cigarette into a small ebony holder ringed by a thin line of ivory and lit it. He used a match, cupping the flame in thick hands. For a brief moment, his face was lit up, like an icon in darkness, faded and grey and peeling. The face had matured, thought Patrick. Or perhaps just aged.
‘Russian,’ Chekulayev said, meaning the cigarette. ‘At my age, you get used to things. And my people get suspicious of agents who acquire a taste for Western comforts. Just as yours are wary of a man with a penchant for leftish ideology. We never ask what a man thinks - that’s far too abstract. It’s what he wants that makes him dangerous.’ He breathed out a thin pillar of smoke. Patrick wondered if there was still a Russian word for ‘sacrilege’.
‘A few weeks ago,’ Chekulayev began, ‘I came to Dublin from Egypt. I was following rumours, a lead I’d picked up in Alexandria. Perhaps you’ve heard the rumours yourself. Tell me or not, as you like -it’s your decision.
‘Anyway, tonight I followed a man to the coast. He drove a little Citroen. A very careful driver. A little slow: not easy to follow. He parked his car on a road by the sea. After a while, he got out and walked down the road a little; then he began to wait. I waited too. You understand, Patrick. In this business of ours, waiting is of such importance.
‘But our friend was not too clever. He let himself be seen. Someone attacked him.’ The Russian put the cigarette to his lips and inhaled slowly. He did not look at Patrick.
‘I think you know what happened after that,’ he continued. ‘When you came out the second time, I followed you. That’s the truth, Patrick. You led me here yourself.’
Patrick felt the pew beneath his thighs, cold and hard. It reminded him of long Masses he had sat through as
