‘Oh no? Then why all the sudden mystery? Walks
in the middle of the night, mysterious phone calls. Come on, Patrick - I’ve been through all this. If you’re in danger, I’m in danger, so don’t play games.’
He held her clumsily, unable to respond, or perhaps afraid to do so. Outside, the sea still raged against the shore. Water lay against water, wave against wave, an unbroken ocean round the world, closing in on him, connecting him to his past. Beirut, Alexandria, Bandar Abbas - everywhere the sea, everywhere waves beating furiously against the land.
‘It has nothing to do with you, Ruth. Honestly. It’s something out of my own past. Something I have to handle myself.’
Who were you ringing?’
‘Eamonn De Faoite. He’s the parish priest at St Malachy’s in town. Sometimes he teaches Semitic studies at University College and Trinity. He was my teacher back in the sixties when I studied here. I think he’s in danger. I wanted to warn him.’
“Warn him? About what?’
Patrick shook his head.
‘I don’t know. I...’ He paused. ‘Listen,’ he resumed. ‘About eight years ago, I was in Egypt. The Agency was looking for support among the Coptic Christian population, as a sort of balance against the Muslim Brothers. There’d been anti-Coptic riots back in the early eighties; Sadat had exiled Pope Shenuda to Wadi Natrun; Islamic fundamentalism was spreading.
‘I was in a small village in the Delta. Myself and a local agent. The people we were staying with were Copts. They woke us very early one morning. Something had frightened them. They asked if I would go to the next village, a place called Sidi Ya’qub. They kept saying that something terrible had happened, that they wanted me to go to see if what they had heard was true. When I asked them to tell me what
it was, they just threw their hands up and shook their heads. Finally, I agreed. I took the jeep and drove over to Sidi Ya’qub.’
He paused. Outside, the troubled sea gave its voice to the storm.
‘It was one of the stupidest things I ever did. I very nearly got myself lynched. What had happened was this: Sidi Ya’qub had a school. The building was situated a short stretch outside the village proper, on a low ridge. Some men had come the previous afternoon and herded the children together, put them in a bus and driven them off. About thirty children altogether.
‘When I arrived, the village was frantic. They had been looking for the children all night. The police had been called in, the Muslim Brothers were there in force, everyone was acting crazy. Anyway, I stayed and gave a hand. I knew why the Copts in the next village were afraid: if anything had happened to the children, they would very likely be blamed. And if what had happened turned out to be unpleasant, they knew things could get very nasty.’
He hesitated.
‘Yes?’ she asked.
Well, it did turn out to be unpleasant. Very unpleasant indeed. They found the children shortly after noon, in an old temple about a mile from the village. It’s not much of a temple, not the sort of place that gets on the tourist trail. I went out there with everyone else after word came in that the children had been found.
‘There was a stone basin in the centre of the temple. Basalt, I think. And very large. It had been badly damaged, but it could still hold perhaps a hundred gallons or thereabouts.’
He closed his eyes. The memory of the temple and what had been found there was sharp in his mind now.
‘The ... the children were lying in a circle round the basin. Their throats had been cut and the basin filled with the blood. The basin wasn’t full, but the blood in it was deep. Their teacher was there as well. He had been drowned in the basin. The children had been stripped and tied with thongs. And someone had marked their foreheads with a circle, a circle containing a candlestick topped by a cross. That was when I had to get out, when they saw the cross.’ He paused. ‘I heard later that there was very nearly a massacre at the village where I’d been staying. They left just in time, before their neighbours got there. They’ve never gone back.’
Ruth stopped him.
‘I don’t understand what this has got to do with you and Eamonn De Faoite.’
‘I think they’re here,’ he said. ‘The people who killed those children. They’re here in Ireland. And I think they mean trouble. I’ve got to get to Eamonn. Now, tonight.’
‘How do you know they’re here? What happened?’
‘I saw one of them. I chased him.’
‘An Egyptian?’
Patrick shook his head.
‘No. That’s the strange thing. I don’t think he was an Egyptian. I think ... I’m sure he was Irish.’
What happened to him?’
He told her.
‘And you think they could be watching De Faoite?’
He shrugged. He had dressed now and was eager to be off.
‘It’s possible. Listen, Ruth, I’ve got to go.’
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘No, I’d rather you stayed here to watch the house. There may be another watcher.’
She stepped away from him. Behind her, the bed had grown cold.
‘That isn’t the reason is it?’
He had already turned towards the door.
‘I don’t want you involved, Ruth. I’m treating this as personal business: it has nothing to do with the Agency.’
‘You think so?’ She was growing angry again.
‘Okay, yes, I think so.’ But he was lying, desperate to avoid the thought that the past was drawing him in again, that no one ever truly escapes from that delicately fabricated world. ‘Don’t get involved, Ruth. Don’t get the Agency involved. I’ll be back when I’ve seen De Faoite.’
‘Suit yourself. But don’t expect me to be here when you return.’
It was still raining when he left.
SEVEN
He drove distracted through a world of lights and shadows, like a ghost passing through someone else’s dream. The final stages of his journey took him through a landscape of broken fanlights, rusted railings, and dark tenement walls on which someone had written ‘FUCK’ in foot-high letters, time and time again. It was an invocation of sorts. But who was listening?
The Liberties were the oldest part of the city, and not even the dark could cover the squalor and neglect on every side. As Patrick walked down Francis Street towards St Malachy’s, he could smell yeast from the nearby Guinness brewery, mixed with a rotting odour that came up from the quays. A thin, freezing mist had started to move in off the sea and was working its way slowly along the streets.
Above him, in a tenement, a curtain was twitched aside. Unseen eyes watched him pass, then the curtain fell back into place. A dog barked angrily on his left. Open doorways, stained and rotten, graffiti on the walls, a smell of urine from the hallways, broken windows, broken lights, broken lives.
Eamonn De Faoite had been parish priest of St Malachy’s as far back as anyone could remember. Every morning for almost sixty years he had left his scholarship upstairs and come down onto the streets to face his little world. The Liberties were his Calvary, he had told Patrick once: they had broken him and scourged him and nailed him to themselves, year in, year out, an eternal Easter. He had tended generations of the poor and the almost-poor: baptized them, married them, said Mass for them and their children, received their stammered confessions, administered the last rites, buried them in dealboard coffins. And still no resurrection.
He approached the presbytery carefully, his senses alert for any sign of a watcher: a parked car, a shadow that moved, a sound. There was nothing. Keeping himself close to the house walls, he reached the door. There was nothing for it now: if someone was watching, he would just have to let them see him.
He knocked on the presbytery door. His visits to De Faoite had not often brought him here. They normally
