Scoundrel

“Yes.”

“You joined the Provisional IRA?”

“That was why I went to Ireland.”

“And the Provisional IRA asked you to live on mainland Europe?”

“Because it would be easier to liaise with foreign groups from mainland Europe than from Ireland.”

“Yet six years later they ceased to use you for such liaison. Why?”

I understood that this man already knew the answers and that the catechism was not for Haiti’s information, but to make me feel uncomfortable. “Because of a woman,” I told him.

“Roisin Donovan.” He let the name hang in the stifling air. “An American agent.”

“So they say,” I said very neutrally.

“Do you believe she was CIA?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I assume the CIA choose their operatives more carefully. Roisin was impulsive and angry. She had a hair-trigger temper. She was not a person you would choose to keep secrets.”

“And you?” Halil asked.

I laughed. “No government would trust me to keep a secret. I’m a rogue. Civil servants choose people like themselves; dull and predictable and safe.”

Halil raised the trembling cigarette. His hand quivered as he inhaled the comforting smoke and again as he rested the cigarette. “But these agents she spoke of, they were different. They were not predictable.”

I said nothing.

He watched me. I could hear the halyards beating on the metal mast, I could even hear the slight noise of the chronometer’s second hand ticking away above the chart table behind me.

“These agents”—Halil broke the long silence—“would be sent from America and would have no ties to home. They would stay away for years, never talking to their headquarters, never reporting to an embassy, never behaving like an agent, but just watching and listening until, one day, they would disappear.” He made an abrupt gesture with his good hand. “They would go home with all their secrets and never be seen again.”

“That was Roisin’s fantasy,” I said.

“Fantasy?” He made the word sinister.

“She made things up. She was good at it.”

“She accused you of being such an agent…” He paused, searching for a definition. “An agent who does not exist,” he finally said.

“I told you, she made it up.” Roisin had indeed accused me of being one of the secret secret agents. It had been a clever and compelling idea. She claimed that the CIA had sent agents abroad who had no links with home. There would be no threads leading back to America, no footprints, no codenames even, no apron strings. They were one-shot agents, untraceable, secret, the agents who did not exist.

“She made it up,” I said again. “She made the whole thing up.”

Halil watched me, judging me. I could understand the terror that such a concept would hold for a terrorist. Terrorism works because it breaks the rules, but when the authorities break the rules it turns the terror back on the terrorists. When the British shot the three IRA members in Gibraltar a shudder went through the whole movement because the Brits were not supposed to shoot first and ask questions later, they were supposed to use due process, to make arrests and offer court-appointed defense lawyers. But instead the Brits had acted like terrorists and it scared the IRA, just as il Hayaween was scared that there might be traitorous members of his organizations who could never be caught because they would never make contact with their real employers. The agents that did not exist would behave like terrorists, think like terrorists, look like, smell like, be like terrorists, until the fatal day when they simply vanished and took all their secrets home with them.

Now il Hayaween worried at that old accusation. “Your woman claimed the CIA had infiltrated a long-term agent into the Provisional IRA with the specific intent of exploring the IRA’s links with other terrorist groups.” He paused. “That could be you.”

“She was desperate. She was ready to accuse anyone of anything. She wanted to blind her own accusers with a smokescreen. And how the hell would she know these things anyway?” I saw that question make an impression on Halil, so I pressed it harder. “You think the CIA told her about the agents who don’t exist? You think maybe she read it in Newsweek?”

“Maybe you told her in bed.”

I laughed. There was nothing to say to that.

He considered my laughter for a few heartbeats. It was not wise to laugh at Halil because he was a man whose pride was easily hurt, and a man who repaid hurt with death, but this time he let it pass. “She blamed you for the man’s betrayal.”

That was an easy accusation to rebut. “I didn’t know where Seamus Geoghegan was, so I couldn’t have betrayed him. I was in Lebanon when it happened, and he was captured in Belfast.” Seamus was the Provisional IRA’s star, the il Hayaween of Ireland, and Roisin had given him to the British. Or so the Brits had said, and that accusation had finished Roisin. Her response had been to blame me, but she was the one who died.

Yet still her accusation echoed down the years. These men needed me, or rather they needed my sailing skills, yet still they worried that I might not be what I seemed. I tried to reassure Halil. “I’ve held my secrets for four years, even though I had no prospect of being fully trusted again, so surely, if I was one of those CIA agents, I would have given up and gone home long ago?”

“So the girl was lying?” Halil wanted to believe my denials. Not that I would have been allowed within ten miles of him if he seriously believed the old story, but he wanted to make sure.

“Roisin saw plots everywhere. She was also a very destructive woman, and that was why she betrayed Seamus Geoghegan.”

He frowned. “I don’t understand.”

Dear God, I thought, but now I had to try and explain psychology to a terrorist? “Seamus is frightened of women. He’s the bravest man ever born in Ireland, but he doesn’t have the courage to ask a girl for a dance because he thinks all women are perfect. He thinks all women are the Virgin Mary. I suspect Roisin tried to seduce Seamus, failed, and so she punished him.” I could think of no other explanation. Seamus had been one of my closest friends—and perhaps still was, though it had been four years since I had last seen him. He was now in America, a fugitive from British vengeance. He had been betrayed, arrested, tried and sentenced, but a year later, in a brilliantly staged IRA coup, he had escaped from the Long Kesh prison camp. By then Roisin was dead, for her betrayal of Seamus had earned her a bullet in the skull.

“You saw her die?” Halil asked.

“Yes.” She had died in Lebanon where she had been attending the Hasbaiya terrorist training camp. It had been Roisin’s keenest ambition to have the IRA send her on that course, and her eagerness had been transmuted by suspicion into an accusation that she planned to betray Hasbaiya as well as Seamus. Thus, as a favor to their Irish allies as well as to themselves, the Palestinians had arranged her execution.

“You didn’t try to stop the killing?” Halil asked me.

“Why should I have done?” I even managed a small callous laugh.

“Because you loved her.”

“But she betrayed my friend,” I said, and I saw, in the sudden poisonous recurrence of memory, the split second when the vivid blood had spurted from Roisin’s punctured skull to splash among the yellow stones. I had been wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh which I had wrapped about my face because the hot wind was blowing gusts of powdery sand off the hill’s crest. The keffiyeh had prevented Roisin from recognizing me, a small mercy. For a few moments, as the flies had gathered thick on the bloody margin of her death wound, I had suspected that I too was about to be shot for the heinous crime of being an American, but instead I had been curtly ordered to bury her. Afterward the Palestinians had questioned me about Roisin, trying to determine how much she had known and how much she might have betrayed to her masters in Washington. I had given them what reassurances I could, and then, shriven of her accusations but still not wholly trusted, I was cast into the outer darkness and given nothing but trifling jobs.

Till now, when it was Halil’s turn to assay my guilt or innocence in the shadowy scales of an old suspicion and, as he stared at me, I wondered once again why a man of his reputation was caught up in such a small matter