“What had she told him?”
“She told him,” I said, “that the CIA was trying to infiltrate European terrorist groups, and that to preserve their agents’ secrecy they were not using field controllers or letter drops or any other communication systems. She called them stealth spies because they were undetectable. They wouldn’t report back to Washington until their whole mission was finished.” I paused, staring out of the window. A deer stood at the edge of the far dark woods. It sniffed the air, dipped its head, then was gone with a flash of its white tail. “Then she said I was one of those stealth agents,” I finished bitterly.
“Are you telling us she knew all about van Stryker’s program?” Gillespie asked.
“She knew about his idea of not using any form of communication in the field.”
“Did she mention van Stryker?”
“No.”
“Any other names?”
“No.”
“So it sounds like a wild accusation.” Gillespie was scornful.
I shrugged as if to suggest he must be right, though the truth was less pretty. Roisin and I had often talked about the possibility of the CIA infiltrating the IRA with an American agent. Their motives, we agreed, would be to do their British allies a favor as well as to eavesdrop on the rumors that were whispered through the European terrorist grapevines. We had embroidered the idea, suggesting how it might be done and how such an agent might avoid detection. It had not been Roisin who had dubbed such agents as “stealth spies,” but me. I had offered her that thought as if it had been mere idle speculation, but in reality I had been playing with fire; just like a cheating husband might get a stupid thrill from mentioning his mistress’s name to his wife, so I had not been able to resist describing van Stryker’s notion as a fantasy of my own. I could imagine just what psychological hay Gillespie and Adamson would make from such an admission, so I wisely said nothing.
Gillespie turned a page in his notebook. “And the Hasbaiya authorities believed her accusation?”
“They didn’t know whether to believe her or not, but they were worried to hell by her,” I said.
“So what did they do?”
“They sent a message to Ireland to discover whether anyone there suspected me, and that message saved me. It seemed that Seamus Geoghegan had taken refuge in Roisin’s apartment, and on the very day she’d left for Lebanon he’d been arrested by the Brits. They claimed to have been given information by an informer, and it could only have been Roisin. So it seemed that she was the traitor, not me, and that by accusing me she was merely trying to spread the guilt to confuse everyone.” I made a rueful face. “But even so she’d tarred me with suspicion, and that suspicion was enough to make them cut me out of the game.”
“What happened to Miss Donovan?” Gillespie asked.
“She was shot,” I said bleakly.
There was silence. Carole Adamson had scribbled a note which she now leaned forward to slide down the table. Gillespie unfolded the scrap of paper. In the fire a log collapsed in a shiver of cascading sparks. Gillespie screwed the note into a ball and tossed it at the flames. The ball missed the hearth, bouncing off the mantel and rolling on to the coir rug. “How much time did you spend in her company? I mean, on the way to Hasbaiya?”
“Three days. We met in Athens, flew to Damascus, then drove to Lebanon.”
“So you must have talked with her?”
“Sure.”
“Did you become lovers in those three days?” Gillespie asked.
“No!” I tried to make my answer scornful.
“What did you talk about on your journey?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “She wasn’t very sociable.”
“You must have discussed something!”
“The scenery, Irish beer, the heat. We chatted, that’s all.”
“Did you like her personally?” Gillespie pressed me.
“Like her? I don’t know.” I was feeling excruciatingly uncomfortable. “Hell! She isn’t important.”
There was silence again. The light was fading outside. It was deep winter and the days were short. The dark-haired woman looked at her watch. “I should be going, Peter.” She spoke to Gillespie. “I kind of hate driving in the dark.”
“Of course.” The spell was broken. I felt myself relax. People round the table moved, stretched, made small talk. The woman thanked me for my time, said I had been helpful, then followed Carole Adamson into the hall to find her coat. Gillespie said he needed to visit the bathroom.
They left me alone in the library. I was thinking of Hasbaiya, of Roisin. Seamus had once told me that conscience could be diluted in alcohol. “I’ll drink to that,” I had said, and now I helped myself to a bottle of rye whiskey kept in the drinks cabinet and carried it back to the deep library window. There I watched the snow, drank, and watched the snow again. Then I remembered the ball of paper lying on the coir rug, the one on which Carole Adamson had scribbled her note to Gillespie, so I turned and picked it up, uncrinkled the paper, and read her urgent words. “He’s telling lies! Telling lies!” And no wonder, by Christ, no wonder.
Roisin had been lucky in one thing only; she had died swiftly.
I later heard that Brendan Flynn had himself requested the act of mercy. He claimed that Roisin had been given neither the time nor the opportunity to betray the Palestinians, only the Irish, and that the Irish should therefore set the manner of her death and he wanted that death to be quick. I had always wondered if Brendan asked the favor because he too had been one of her lovers. Whatever, Roisin was taken to a dry gully beyond the camp and there shot. She took one bullet in the head and her blood had sprayed against the white heat of the sky and splashed on to the yellow, sulphurous rocks. I remembered her look of outrage and defiance as she had died. Her skin had been very red, burned by the fierce sun. She had very fair skin and burned easily.
I was ordered to bury her on the hillside where she had died. A German called Axel Springer offered to stay with me, though he did precious little to help as I hacked a shallow scrape with the long-helved spade. He talked instead, telling me he was a theology student at Heidelberg, but that his real religion was the Red Army Faction. I wondered why he had volunteered to help me, and only began to understand when he stopped me from rolling Roisin’s thin corpse into the stony grave. “I want to look at her,” Axel said in his heavily accented English, “she was very pretty.”
“She was beautiful,” I corrected him. Roisin had never been pretty, she had been too fierce and too committed and too scornful of weakness to be called pretty.
“It is a sexual thing, you see,” Axel said.
“What is?”
“Why girls like this become involved in terrorism.”
“You’re joking,” I said.
“I have never joked,” he said in all seriousness. “Work has been done by American feminists on the correlations between sexuality and terrorism, and they maintain a direct linkage between sexual desire and terrorist activity. It has to do with the relaxation of inhibitions, both in society and in bed. I can offer you the reading list, if you would like?” He smiled and held out a pack of cigarettes. In those days I had smoked so I took a cigarette, stooped to his light, and gratefully sucked in the comforting smoke. “Of course,” Axel went on, “the camp authorities recognize the sexual linkage. That is why they encourage girls like this one to attend. These girls are hardly good pupils, but they have their uses.”
“Their uses?”
“It is obvious!” Axel blew a plume of smoke that whirled away down the valley. “The Arabs want the white girls. It is their revenge for colonialism. But they would not have enjoyed this one.” He jerked his head at Roisin.
“Why not?”
“Too thin! Look at her!” He leaned down and ripped Roisin’s flimsy shirt open. “See? Just pimples!” He gestured at her breasts, which were very white and very small. “Pimples!” Axel said again, but he could not keep his eyes away from them, and it was then that I understood exactly why he had stayed behind to help me bury her.
