“Going over from the winners to the losers.”
“He went over—”
“And nothing out of character.” The Irishman stuck to his guns.
“He went there as a True Believer, straight from the seminary. And dummy1
he went across like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, when he found another faith he liked better, having seen both sides—”
“No!” The American shook his head again. “ ‘38—late ’38—is the first year I’ll buy. With Frank Ryan in the International Brigade—
and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, not the British one, because it was long after the Cordoba trouble.”
“Ah . . . Frank Ryan! Now he was a lovely man in his way, you know.” The Irishman half-closed his eyes. “A great gentleman, they say . . .”
“And IRA since 1918.” The American looked at Audley.
“And in contact with the Nazis, along with Sean Russell, in ‘41—
they had a radio link going,” said Audley.
“Which was a great waste of time for them both, to be sure,”
murmured the Irishman.
“But not for lack of trying,” said Audley.
“That’s not what I mean, Dr Audley,” replied the Irishman mildly.
“What I mean is that Aloysius Kelly was there beside him—and wasn’t he feeding it all back to Moscow, on his account, eh?”
Audley sniffed abruptly, and turned to Benedikt. “Yes. So there you have it in a nutshell, Captain Schneider. Aloysius Kelly went to Spain and teamed up with Ryan, who was a long-time IRA man
—”
“Who’d fought alongside his father, in the Troubles and the Civil War,” supplemented Mr Smith.
“But before that he’d been talent-scouted by one of their Political dummy1
Commissars,” said the American laconically. “He was ordered to attach himself to Frank Ryan, who was an Irishman first and last—
whoever was England’s enemy was his friend, it didn’t matter who
—”
“Which made him politically unreliable—Frank, I mean—”
“Jim! For God’s sake!”
“I was only explaining—”
Audley cut them both off with a gesture. “What they both mean, Benedikt, is that the IRA originated as the military wing of a nationalist movement—a nationalist sectarian movement. The fashionable idea now is that all twentieth-century guerrilla organizations tick because Marx and Lenin wound them up— that it’s all Marxist-Leninist magic that makes them work. But the truth is that most of them owe damn all to Marx, and even less to Lenin
—the halfways successful ones, anyway . . . from Pancho Villa to Fidel Castro, by way of the Jews and the Algerians and the Cypriots . . . and even the Chinese and Vietnamese too. You could say they owe a lot more to any classical guerrilla leader in history—
to Francis Marion, say—” he pointed at the American “—his
‘Swamp Fox’ in the Carolinas, fighting Cornwallis and Tarleton in the American War of Independence—Marx and Lenin didn’t teach
not the beginning of the socialist revolution—that they campaigned for. The shift to the left in the IRA didn’t start until the ‘6os.”
“Aha!” Mr Smith gave Audley a shrewd look. “And you not an dummy1
expert on Ireland, eh?” Then he nodded. “Ah—but it was you who said what I had was not worth a ha’penny, wasn’t it! So I can’t say you didn’t tell me.”
“I’m not an expert on Ireland, damn it!” snapped Audley irritably.
“We’re not talking about Ireland—we’re talking about Aloysius Kelly.”
“And the Debreczen meetings.” Almost imperceptibly the American had shifted his position from alongside the Irishman, until now he was nearly facing him. And there was a note in his voice which matched his change of position: the mention of
‘Aloysius Kelly’ had ranged him alongside Audley as an ally, he was no longer a neutral ‘friend’.
“Oh no!
there’s nothing at all I know about that! It’s none of my business . . . what it was, or when it was. And I’m not having any part of it, either.” He looked around him, and Benedikt couldn’t help following his action. But now there was no one at all in sight: the great hall of tanks was inhabited only by fighting machines.
