men were all masked, all gloved, and all dressed in black. They were experts at pain and humiliation and I suspected they had not been trained by torturers, but by psychiatrists. I remembered the nameless men who had gone from Belfast to Libya to learn the modern techniques of interrogation, and I knew that I would have no choice but to tell them what they wanted to know. Of course I wanted to be brave. I wanted to emulate those men who claimed to have resisted the interrogations in the cellars of Castlereagh Police Station, but all Belfast had known that such stories were bombastic rot. They had all broken; the only difference being that some had told their secrets in awful pain and some had told them quickly to get the ordeal done.
“Stand up,” the man ordered me. There was no emotion in the voice, nothing but resigned tones suggesting that this was a man doing a routine job.
I staggered to my feet. I was weeping and moaning, because the pain was all over me like a second skin. One of the three men went to the wall and uncoiled the hose. He turned on the tap, then triggered the jet of water at me. The ice-cold soaking was not a part of their brutality, but designed to wash me down.
By the time I was clean, I was also shivering. My teeth chattered and my voice was moaning very softly.
“Be quiet!” the man next to Sarah Sing Tennyson said.
I went very quiet. The cellar stank of feces and urine.
“Let me lay down the rules of this interrogation,” the man said in his quiet, reasonable voice. “You’re going to tell us what we want to know. If you tell us, then you’ll live, and that’s a promise. If you don’t tell us, you’ll die, but you’ll suffer a lot in the dying. None of us enjoys inflicting pain, but pain has its uses. So where is the boat?”
“She’s travelling deck cargo.” My teeth were chattering and I could not finish the sentence.
“Going to Boston?”
“Yes,” I said eagerly, “that’s right, going to Boston.”
“When will it arrive?”
I hesitated, distracted by the small sounds of the two men behind me, but they were merely shifting their feet. “They didn’t give me a date, but they thought the voyage should take about six weeks!” I hurried the last words, not wanting to be hit.
“They?”
“The shippers.”
“Their name?”
“Exportation Layetano.”
“In Barcelona?”
“Yes.”
A dozen rivulets of water trickled away from my shivering body toward the drain. There was no blood in the water. These men had hurt me, but without breaking my skin. They were experts.
“You arranged for the boat’s shipment?” The Ulster voice was curiously flat and neutral, as though he were a bored bank manager asking tedious details of a customer in order to determine whether or not a loan would be a wise investment for his bank.
“I arranged the shipment.”
“The boat’s name?”
“She used to be called
“Describe her.”
I stammered out the description: A forty-four-foot sloop, center cockpit, sugar-scoop stern, with a deep heavy keel, red anti-fouling under her bootline, white gelcoat above.
“How much gold is on board?”
“Five million dollars.”
Was there a second’s hesitation of surprise? Maybe, but then the metronome-like voice resumed. “Describe how the gold is stored aboard the boat.”
So I described the saloon’s false floor, and how the cabin sole lifted to reveal the slightly discolored fiberglass that needed to be chipped away to reveal the mix of sand and gold.
“Does the boat have registration papers?”
“Yes.”
“Well, where are they!” A hint of impatience, promising pain.
“They’re at my house.” I told the lie because I could not expose Johnny to these bastards. Then I screamed, because something thumped hard and sharp in my tender kidneys, and I was falling as another slash of pain seared down from my neck. I hit the wet concrete, whimpering.
“Get up.”
I slowly struggled up. A small, red, atavistic part of my brain counselled a sudden counter-attack, a whirling slash at the tormentors behind me, but I knew such an assault would be doomed. They were ready for me, they were fitter than me, they were better than me, and I was weakened, slow, shivering and so horribly vulnerable.
“Lies will be met with pain,” the man said in a bored voice. “The boat’s papers are with Johnny Riordan, yes?”
So they had known all along and had just been testing me. “Yes.”
“How much money did you give Riordan?”
I had almost forgotten giving Johnny any money, and I had to think quickly before anyone hit me. “About a thousand bucks.”
“Why?”
“To hire a crane to get the boat off the truck. Or in case the longshoremen at Boston need a bribe.”
“Who’s the importer?”
“I don’t know. Exportacion Layetano decide that.”
“The name of your contact at Exportacion Layetano?”
“Roberto Lazarraga.”
The questioner had been holding the black hood that had covered my eyes. He now tossed it to me, but I was so feeble and shaking that I muffed the catch.
“Pick it up.”
I picked it up.
“Put it on.”
I obeyed.
“Stand still. Hands at your sides!”
The blindness and my nakedness combined to make me feel horribly vulnerable. I could hear my four captors moving about in the cellar. Footsteps climbed the stairs, then came back. Something scraped on the floor, filling me with the terror of apprehension. There was silence for a few seconds, then feet banged hollowly on the wooden stairs again.
“Take the hood off,” the voice ordered, and as I did so the door at the top of the stairs slammed shut and I found myself alone. The scraps of my clothes had been taken away and the scraping sound had been merely the noise of a metal camp bed being placed by a wall. Three blankets were folded on the camp bed and a zinc bucket stood at its foot. I just had time to notice those amenities when the light went out.
I staggered to the cot bed, pulled the blankets about me, and lay down. I curled up. I was wet, cold and shaking.
God alone knows how long I stayed there. I was no weakling, but I could not fight these men. Their silence and their discipline spoke of their professionalism. I had watched an interrogation in Belfast once; sharing with Seamus Geoghegan a privileged view of some poor bastard being questioned about the betrayal of a bombing mission. The questioners wanted the name of the boy’s contact in the security forces and, in their desperate attempts to get it, had beaten the lad into a raw, red, sodden horror. The interrogators had argued amongst themselves as they worked, daring each other to inflict more hurt, accusing each other of being counter-productive, and finally they had abandoned their attempts with nothing to show for their work but blood-bubbling denials from the crippled twenty-year-old. He had lost one eye, most of his teeth and was sheeted with blood. He never recovered his full sight, and would never again walk without a dipping limp, and the IRA later learned it was the boy’s sister who had telephoned the security forces. By then she had moved to England and had married her soldier
