Stefan couldn’t sit there any more. He stood up, angry, confused.
‘So are you saying they can take Tom away, or not?’
‘No.’ Emmet Brady stopped again. He smiled. ‘I’m not saying that.’
‘So what do I do?’
‘How far are you accommodating Father Carey now?’
‘Well, Tom starts at Kilranelagh Cross National School next week.’ Stefan found he was walking up and down beside the old man. ‘That’s what Carey wanted before. We’ll make sure he never misses Mass on Sunday. I’ll teach him his catechism and his rosary. My mother and father will never say a word about God or religion in the house. We’ll all keep our mouths shut.’
‘It’s personal with Carey. He’s made it very obvious, Stefan.’
‘I know that.’
The solicitor stood by the window. He turned briefly, looking out. Stefan stood behind him, saying nothing. It was quiet outside now. The noise of the cattle in the street below had gone. A car drove past.
‘So would you be happy taking on the Church, Mr Brady?’
Emmet Brady turned back towards him with a combative grin.
‘Why not, it’s my fucking Church, isn’t it?’
*
A week later Stefan drove his father’s John Deere tractor the mile or so along the road into the mountains, to the low stone building next to the chapel at Kilranelagh Cross. It was Tom’s first day at school. He sat on the trailer behind Stefan, by the pile of turf they were taking to the school, to keep the fires burning in the two classrooms. The crossroads below the big, long mountain called Keadeen was a bleak place on a January morning. There was nothing much there; the chapel and the school, a farm and a holy well, and further on along the road a shop with a bar in the back room. But Scoil Naomh Teagain, St Tegan’s School, was noisy with children starting back after Christmas now, and Tom’s nervousness was quickly swept away as he ran off into the classroom with his friend Harry Lawlor. He knew nothing about what was happening around him, only that he was suddenly going to school. Stefan and David and Helena all believed, in different ways, that the threat to Tom would pass; because to believe anything else was still impossible.
By the time Stefan had unloaded his turf into the shed at the back of the school, classes had begun. Driving back to the road he could see the desks in Tom’s classroom through the window. He saw Tom looking out, hearing the familiar noise, and waving. Then he saw Anthony Carey, stepping over the stone wall that divided the school from the chapel. The curate raised his hand in greeting; Stefan did the same. But Father Carey’s smile wasn’t a smile of reconciliation. It was a statement: don’t let yourself think this is the end. He had no intention of losing face. It wasn’t over.
Stefan didn’t go straight back to the farm. He took the road to Baltinglass, to collect cattle feed for his father. On the way he stopped at the post office to post the letter he had written to Hannah Rosen. He didn’t know where she was, but he addressed it to her father’s house as she’d asked him to. It would find her eventually. She wouldn’t like what he had to tell her. She had trusted him. He wanted to believe it was more than trust. But there was nothing he could do now. The investigation into the deaths of Susan Field and Vincent Walsh was over. The files were sitting in a Special Branch office somewhere in Dublin Castle, and he had no reason to believe they would ever be opened again. It was beyond his control, but he still couldn’t help feeling he had let her down. He knew how much it would matter to her. He wondered if it mattered as much to her as it did to him that they would never see each other again. He couldn’t know. And even if it did, it didn’t change anything. The case was finished. It was no use pretending otherwise.
PART TWO
Mr Sean Lester, the League of Nations High Commissioner of Danzig, was publicly insulted yesterday by Herr Greiser, President of the Senate, who threatened that Mr Lester might be forced to leave the city. Mud was thrown at the Commissioner’s car by a crowd of people as he drove through the city. Feeling in Danzig is running very high. The Diet was dissolved at the beginning of February, and new elections have been fixed for April 7th. At the last elections in May, 1933, the Nazis gained 38 seats out of 72, and thus had a small majority. They now aim at eliminating the Opposition altogether. Mr Lester, who has the task of holding the balance between the rivals, has apparently been suspected of partiality.
13. Oliva Cathedral
Hannah Rosen arrived in Trieste on the train from Milan. After Venice it followed the Adriatic south, running beside the sea all through a long afternoon as it finally approached the port. It was April and it was already hot. She knew people here. In the Via del Monte, where the city started to wind up the hillside overlooking the Gulf of Trieste, was the headquarters of the Jewish Agency. It was there for the thousands of men, women and children who came every year to take the boats to Jaffa and Haifa to start a new life. Less than twenty years ago, Trieste had been the main port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it was still the funnel into the Mediterranean for most of Central Europe. Few of the Jews who travelled to Trieste had much in common with the young socialists and communists who staffed the Jewish Agency office; they were simply people who believed that keeping your head down wasn’t going to be enough. They were running from what was to come, and they were no more than a drop in Europe’s Jewish ocean.
Hannah’s job was over. In Leeds, in London, in Manchester, in Bournemouth, in Lyons, Paris, Amsterdam, Milan — she had done what she had been sent to do. They weren’t large sums of money. No one ever said that now it was for guns, not tractors, but people had stepped back. Not everyone was so sure about guns. Yet the money still had to be moved, in cheques, money orders, bonds; it still had to reach its destination in ways the British government and the Palestine Mandate Police could not trace.
Leaving the Stazione Centrale, she didn’t head for the centre of Trieste and the Via del Monte. She turned left and walked the few hundred yards to the harbour. At the offices of the Adriatica Line she rebooked her next day’s passage to Haifa on the SS
From Trieste she shared her sleeper with a woman who spoke a little English. Hannah’s German wasn’t good, and it was coloured in ways she had been unaware of by the Yiddish her grandparents had spoken. She was surprised how easily it identified her. The woman was from Vienna, middle-aged, well-dressed and Jewish, and perceptive enough to know immediately that Hannah was Jewish too, despite the name she was travelling under, Anna Harvey. The conversation slipped from English into German and back again, but once the woman was in full flight she just kept talking; all Hannah had to do was listen to her, or at least pretend to. The woman didn’t make any real distinctions between England and Ireland, and if there were any she wasn’t interested in them. From Vienna it looked like the same place. She did think the English should keep out of European politics though. They had the rest of the world to make trouble in. As for the Nazis, she told Hannah everyone made too much of a
