was no longer sure he had chosen wisely. The sound of waves made him restless, filling him with a terrible loneliness and a sense of foreboding. It was at moments such as this that he wondered if he had done the right thing in coming back to Ireland.
He rubbed his eyes. The crabbed and faded script was a strain to read, even with the help of a magnifying glass. Yellow light and ochre paper blurred. Fragmented letters ran across the page like frightened ants.
‘C’mon, Patrick. You hadn’t killed him, somebody else would’ve had to do it.’
Voices snagged at him, like branches sharp with thorns. The past was still angry and unforgiving.
‘He was coming in. He’d had enough. There was a signal: Damascus station intercepted it. Why wasn’t I told?’
‘There was a slip-up. It happens. You know it happens. What’s it matter? Wasn’t like he didn’t have it coming. Somebody would have done it sooner or later. Not you, then somebody else.’
In the distance, waves possessed the shore.
He stood and went to the window. At forty-two, Patrick Canavan possessed very little. He paid rent on a house overlooking the Irish Sea: what little there was of his CIA pension took care of that. No wife, no children, no memories he could share with friends, no friends to share them with.
He opened the window all the way, pushing the sash up hard. Out of the night, out of the padded and frozen darkness, the sounds of the world rose up to him in waves: the stark lapping of water on stone, a train in the distance, loud on frosted rails, a ship’s horn, the bell on a rocking buoy.
Far out on the abandoned waters of the bay, he saw lights: ships coming in from the dark sea, from France and Spain and Italy, headed for Dun Laoghaire or Dublin harbour, an armada of tiny lights on a wind-darkened tide. The fog that had kept them out at sea so late had lifted, leaving a vast and empty darkness rich with stars. Out on the final edges of the night, a small boat passed like a firefly and was suddenly lost.
His eyes travelled over the darkness, and he thought how complete it was, how everything was dipped in it. How could twenty years make such a difference? he asked himself. Times change, people change, people die; but it was more than that.
He saw Beirut again, as though the darkness had become a screen for memories. On his left, the Syrian guard-post plastered with posters of Asad, to his right the abandoned al-Saqi Hotel, now occupied by a Hezbollahi group from Bi’r al-‘Abd. He saw the jeep turn the corner, the boy from Amal firing, low from the hip. And, in slow motion, Hasan Abi Shaqra running from the alleyway towards him, his own gun lifting, pointing, firing, Hasan falling at his feet, blood turning to dust on the dry earth. ‘He was coming in. He’d had enough.’
‘Come back to bed, Patrick.’
Ruth stood in the doorway, naked, her eyes dim with sleep. He turned from the window, blinking away the sunshine and the blood, suddenly cold.
‘I was working,’ he said, wondering why he felt a need to explain himself to her.
‘It’s after three. I woke up and you weren’t there. Come back to bed.’
He felt irritated by her presence, by the demands she made on him. It was so long since he had shared anything with a woman. He closed the window, shutting the world out.
She took him back to bed, her nakedness futile against his indifference. They lay there for a long time, shivering between cold sheets. Light from the street lamp filtered through the thin bedroom curtains, staining the bed with its unnatural light. Her arm lay beside his, almost translucent, like alabaster.
‘Do you love me?’ he asked, but she was asleep again, and he had not really wanted an answer. There was a sort of love between them, he supposed; and a physical passion that could still make him cry out, as though in pain. He tried to convince himself that the gulf between them was merely one of age - she was more than ten years his junior - but he knew it was really something he had built inside himself out of all the little emptinesses of his life.
Getting involved with Ruth had been a big mistake. He thought he loved her, but that wasn’t the problem. Ruth belonged to the Agency, the way everyone did at first, the way he had at the beginning. That was the problem. Or part of it, at least.
They’d met at a party three, maybe four months earlier, not long after his arrival in Dublin. An old friend from Langley, Jim Allegro, was here on special attachment with the Irish Ranger Squad, liaising on anti-terrorist tactics. Jim had heard of Patrick’s arrival through the grapevine and contacted him. ‘I’m having a party tonight - come round and meet some people.’
The party had been dull: pieces of cheese and tinned pineapple on wooden cocktail sticks, stale French bread, cheap Australian red in boxes, wall to wall Dire Straits. The guests were the usual crowd: anaemic third secretaries from the embassy, a handful of spooks you could spot in a nudist colony, and awkward locals downing Guinness at a rate of knots. As usual, all the intelligence hounds were sniffing one another’s rears in a pack. She was sitting in a corner, going through Allegro’s bookcase like a censor looking for smut.
‘You won’t find anything in there,’ he said. ‘Jim’s cleaner than an operating table.’
‘On the contrary,’ she replied, ‘that’s precisely where all the messy things end up.’
How had he guessed she was in the trade? She didn’t look the type. Not that there was a type - but if there had been, she wouldn’t have been it. She was too well dressed for one thing. The sort of clothes that had their labels on the inside, if they had labels at
all. A single piece of discreet jewellery, a mere hint of expensive perfume. But for the accent, he would have taken her to be French. She was petite, with short blonde hair, a down-turned mouth, and tiny ears like shells.
Her next words had been, ‘Shall we get out of here?’ She had taken the initiative from the beginning, otherwise he would never have got as far as ‘Go’. They had driven down the coast in her small blue Mercedes. Everything was autumnal: the air, the sea, their mood. She drove too fast for the narrow Irish roads and too skilfully for it to matter. It was dawn when they arrived back at his house. ‘You have appalling taste’ was the last thing she said before leading him to bed.
After leaving the CIA, he had returned to Ireland to finish the doctorate he had abandoned eighteen years before. Coming back to Dublin had been like a physical blow: the old places, all the memories rushing at him, striking him deep in the pit of his stomach, and him helpless before their onslaught. Rathmines, Ranelagh, Donnybrook, Ballsbridge - the names had leapt out of maps and off the fronts of buses at him, each with its own sweet or bitter flavour, its own particular weight of memories and associations.
He had returned with such hopes, such expectations. Dublin would restore him to youth, or something like that. Dublin would revive in him the ideals of twenty-four years ago. Well, that had all been a fantasy, and he knew it now: even if the city had been preserved in aspic all these years, nothing of the past would have returned to him, or at the most a glimmer, a teasing reflection in a rusted mirror.
His years at Trinity had shaped his life. He had lived and worked in a palace of grey stone, surrounded by dreams and poetry. Not the past only, but a present that seemed not wholly real. It had been less the magic of the place than the enchantment of youth: he had come to understand that in time. But then he was aware only of snow falling on dark, pitted cobblestones, and sunlight on mullioned windows, and the bell in the campanile ringing out against the shadows at dusk as he walked through soft-lit courtyards to Commons. And Francesca. Always Francesca.
Now he was back, but the magic and the poetry had gone. He had tried to find them again in Ruth, but all that remained was a sense of bewilderment and shame. Pressed for a reason, he could have given a dozen. But at heart he knew there had only ever been one reason for his inability to love or be loved: Francesca’s death. But that was the past. He had to come to terms with that. In the dark, he lay listening to the sound of his own breathing, unable to surrender himself to sleep.
He slipped out of bed again, knowing sleep would not come. There had been so many nights like this: they just had to be endured. He crossed to the window, as though drawn by the pale lamplight. A man can resign from the Agency, but his mind and body never relax.
He heard the footstep just as his hand reached for the curtain. A single step followed by silence. He stiffened and lowered his hand. Silence. Cautiously, he eased back the edge of the curtain and bent his eye to the crack.
His dark-adjusted eyes found the man almost at once. On the opposite side of the street, away from the lamp. He was cold and restless and looked like someone who had been standing there a long time. Waiting for something. Or someone.
FIVE
