Chapter XIII

Rooster of a fighting stock

would you let a Saxon cock

crow out upon an Irish rock?

Fly up and teach him manners.

Patrick Joseph McCall, “Follow Me Up to Carlow”

On Sunday evening, Terry was back in London, and the three of them were sitting at Molly’s table, having a dinner of beef and Guinness pie with extra spuds, roasted, on the side. Molly was accepting compliments, and they were all enjoying a drink of whiskey.

The telephone rang, and Molly regarded it as one might regard a large brown rat making its remorseless way towards the baby cradle. But she got up and made her way towards the instrument. Brennan got there ahead of her and grabbed the receiver. “Yes?” No reply. “Who is this?” There was a soft click at the other end of the line, as the person hung up.

“What was that?” Terry asked. “Another anonymous call about fingerprints?”

“Yes, but it was just empty air this time.”

“Maybe the guy was spooked because you answered, Bren. Thought he’d get Molly.”

“Or maybe it was nothing, someone who realized he or she had the wrong number.”

“Sure. Tell me this. How long will it be before Conn goes to trial?”

“Lorna told us it could be months.”

“And he’s going to be sitting in a cell until that time.”

“They’re hardly going to let him out,” Molly said, “someone they consider a terrorist and cop killer.”

“But we don’t consider him either of those things, right?” Brennan asked.

There was no answer from his brother or sister.

“Right?” he repeated.

Still no response from Terry. But Molly finally spoke up for the defendant. “I can’t imagine Conn taking an innocent life.”

“You should have been a lawyer, Mol,” Brennan told her. “What constitutes an ‘innocent life’ to a member of the IRA? Is an English Special Branch police officer an innocent or a legitimate target?”

“Let’s not get into that again.”

“It’s the perennial question,” Brennan said. “It will never go away as long as human beings have to share the planet with others of their kind. I’m sure we all agree that Conn knows more about the murder than he’s letting on. We all came away with that impression. We just don’t know who he’s trying to protect, someone he loves or someone he fears. Of course if we had that figured out, we’d have solved the case. And we’re not likely to accomplish that.”

“We may never want the case solved,” Molly said in a quiet voice.

“You think he did it, don’t you, Molly?”

“I don’t want to think it, Terry, but Lorna told us the police recognized his voice in those warning calls, and the phone box was only minutes from the murder scene. The nine-millimetre bullets or whatever they were match some kind of gun used by the IRA.”

“Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic,” Terry said.

“Thank you, Air Marshal Burke. Then there’s the fact that I got those two calls. From public phones, in a noisy, high-traffic area. So I’d be hard put ever to identify the voice. But the message was clear.”

“Right,” said Terry. “Conn’s prints on the police car door.”

“That and a coarse message about sharing the ‘loopy lady.’ As if this is an appropriate time for tawdry reminiscences.”

“What did you say?”

Terry’s tone of voice was uncharacteristically sharp, and Brennan looked closely at him. Molly replied, “I said how inappropriate it is to —”

“No, I mean, what did the man say on the phone?”

“He said, ‘Tell your brother I haven’t forgotten the time we shared the loopy lady.’”

“Jesus!”

“What is it, Terry?” Brennan asked.

“You’re sure, Molly. Well, you couldn’t have made it up!”

“This person who made the calls, he thinks I’m Conn’s sister, apparently. Because he said ‘Tell your brother’ that nonsense about the woman.”

“It’s not nonsense. That message was for me.”

“What?” Molly and Brennan demanded.

“I shared the loopy lady with him.”

“With whom? What on earth are you on about?” Molly demanded. “Are you saying you shared a woman with some man, someone who would make an anonymous call … You’re not making any sense, Terry. At least I hope to God you’re not.”

“It’s Casey.”

“Casey?” Molly asked. “Who is Casey?”

“Well …” Terry began. He shifted in his seat and looked at his brother and sister. “It’s a long story, and I’m not sure how you’re going to take it.” It was a rare experience for Brennan to see his brother so reticent about a telling a story.

Terry got up and went to the drinks cabinet, brought the bottle of Jameson to the table, and refilled the three glasses.

“It all goes back to a trip I took to Belfast a few years ago, in 1983. I had a chance to substitute for another pilot on a flight from New York to Dublin, with a week of R and R afterwards. So I visited some of our clan in the oul hometown, one of whom was our uncle Finn behind the bar at Christy’s. Had a few scoops there, heard some music. Great gas. But in conversation with Finn, it came out that he was a little concerned about his youngest, Conn, who had moved to Belfast a couple of years before. Finn felt unable to travel to Belfast himself at that time, for reasons he made no effort to explain. Anyway, he gave me Conn’s address and number, the phone number for the building site where he was employed, and all that. I said that was grand; I had never been to Belfast and looked forward to seeing the city. Finn let out a snort at that and said, ‘Going, yes, I appreciate it. But looking forward to it? Terry, are you cracked?’”

Belfast

July 8, 1983

Signs of the Troubles were immediate as soon as Terry boarded the train for Belfast. Warnings were posted in the train cars, urging passengers to be vigilant and telling them what to do if they spotted an unattended parcel. He heard two women across from him discussing someone they knew who had been killed on the train. The women made the sign of the cross when the train arrived at Drogheda. Terry looked out at the town on the River Boyne, the grey buildings and church spires, and recalled what he had heard about Drogheda, and Cromwell, while growing up. As the train chugged along, Terry took in the beautiful scenery around him, green fields and rolling hills, swans in the shining waters. It was not so pretty when they got to the Northern Irish border. Oh, the countryside was still lush and green. But he could see the motorway where cars were being stopped and searched by British soldiers dressed in camouflage fatigues and armed with rifles.

Things looked even worse when he got to Belfast, as might be expected. Coming in on the train, he saw buildings with the windows blown out and yards full of rubble. There was graffiti on gable walls, typically white paint on grey stone: JOIN THE IRA and SMASH H BLOCK, and the other side’s efforts as well, NO SURRENDER and NO POPE HERE. Terry’s hotel was a short walk from the train station, so he headed there.

July eighth was a Friday, a work day. Terry called the number for Conn’s building company, and the woman who answered said Conn was busy but she would take a message, so Terry left his name and number.

Now, what to do, sit in my hotel room in the hope that the phone will ring, like a teenage wallflower? No, get out and see the sights.

Like everybody else, he had seen the latest Troubles on the television news, but nothing had prepared him for being on the ground in the embattled city. There were the murals, lurid and explicit, calling death down on the IRA on the one side or on the UVF/UDA/UFF — the Protestant Loyalist paramilitaries — on the other. There were police barracks with enormous blast walls around them to protect against car bombs. Nationalist and Loyalist neighbourhoods, Catholic and Protestant, were separated from each other by jerry-built walls and barbed wire. But what struck him most was the overwhelming military presence, the soldiers walking or running past with rifles at the ready. This was the British Army; this part of the island was, rightly or wrongly, still part of the United Kingdom. Armoured vehicles lumbered along the streets and sirens screamed in the distance. Terry lined up with the locals to be groped — body-searched — at control points in the city centre. How could people live like this?

He walked for two hours in weather that spanned the spectrum from warm and sunny, to cool and cloudy, to mist and rain, to sun showers. When he looped back to his hotel, there were no messages for him. He headed out again, in search of a pint or a glass of whiskey and a bite to eat. He had spotted some bars in the area behind his hotel, so he walked in that direction. He noticed on the way a couple of piles of wooden pallets stacked up, and Union Jack and Ulster Red Hand flags flying.

He found a bar called the Rangers Pitch and walked in. The place was half-full, and every one of the drinkers looked up and inspected him when he came in the door. Not wanting to be identified instantly as a Yank, a rich kid, a blow-in from the USA, he discarded the New York inflections of his speech and took on the voice he was born to, born in Dublin the year before his father bundled them onto a ship that slipped out of Cobh harbour in the dark of night and carried them to the new world. Now, in Belfast, he spoke to the barman in the tones of a man just hours out of Dublin. That was his first mistake. In the Rangers Pitch bar, the worst thing you could be, far worse than a Yankee tourist, maybe even worse — he realized now — than a Celtics football club supporter, was a blow-in from Dublin. He knew that instantly from the hostile looks he got from the punters and the barman himself. So, on his first outing, he had banjaxed things as only a dumb tourist could do. Well, he was going to stick it out. But, in a concession to his surroundings, he ordered a Bushmills instead of a Jameson. Bushmills, good Protestant whiskey, along with his pint of Guinness. He took his glasses to a table and sat down.

“Got all your pallets in place for Monday, Billy?”

The raised voice, the harsh northern accent, came from a man at the table next to Terry’s and was directed to the man’s drinking companion. Both were muscular types with their hair buzzed close to their skulls.

“Aye, Georgie, piled high as the Pope’s evil eye and as dry as a nun’s heart. One match and it will catch like the fires of hell itself.”

Right, Terry thought. Monday would be Bonfire Night, the eleventh, when the Orange Order lit fires to lead off the Twelfth of July celebrations. Celebrations marking the victory of King William of Orange over the Catholics of Ireland. Over Terry’s people. The Orangemen were still crowing over the victory and parading through Catholic neighbourhoods nearly three hundred years later. And legally permitted to do it. Fuckers. Terry sank his glass of Bushmills and started on his pint.

“You’ll see the flames all the way from the Falls Road,” Billy said, “not that anybody in this bar would be going to the Falls Road.”

“Right you are, Billy. Nobody from the Falls in this place. All local fellows here. Loyal to the Crown.”

We don’t want your kind in here was the message being lobbed at Terry Burke in the Rangers Pitch.

Terry had never been one to sit silent in a bar. Bars were for drinking and socializing and telling tall tales. He launched into one now, inventing as he went along.

“Just be careful around your fires this year, lads,” he said.

“Oh, aye? And why should we do that?”

“If you see something flying over you, take cover.”

“Our people don’t take cover. Our people don’t run away. Maybe you haven’t seen our motto out there on the gable walls. No Surrender. No surrender to a bunch of Fenian terrorists!”

“Up to you. I’m just giving you fair warning.”

“Warning of what?”

“Ever hear of something called the Green Slopper?” No answer. Terry took a long drink of Guinness and launched into his tale. “I’ve got a brother in the U.S. Air Force and he told me about it. It flies about five hundred feet up, operated by remote control. It’s triggered by smoke. You know, like those smoke detectors that make an ungodly racket and wake you up so you don’t burn to death in your home. But don’t let me get distracted about people being burned out of their homes. Like what happened here, at the hands of some.”

Terry figured he’d gone too far, and he’d better split. The anger on the faces of his drinking companions could erupt into violence any second. But he hadn’t finished his story.

“I’m talking about an unmanned airship, looks like a small zeppelin. Developed in America. It’s used to fight fires. Drops water on them mixed with a chemical. I don’t know what the stuff is, but it has a side effect. When it reacts with human skin it turns it green. Big blotches of green. The effect lasts for about two weeks, and it’s painful. Especially in the eyes. The Yanks won’t say whether it does permanent damage. You wouldn’t want to be standing around a bonfire looking up at this thing flying over. Wouldn’t want your wife and kids looking up at it.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve never seen one of those over here. So we won’t be losing any sleep, will we, Georgie?”

“You’re going to see one Monday night. You’re going to see thousands of Orangemen and their families turning green. Green as an Irish Republican on Saint Patrick’s day.”

“Fuck you! If the IRA think they can get away with this, they’ll wish they had never been born!”

“Lemme give you the heads-up, boys. It’s not the IRA that got hold of this.” He stood up and drained the last of his pint. “It’s the Brits. They’re fed up with the lot of you. They’re wishing they’d given the whole country back to us in 1921 and washed their hands of the place. Come July twelfth, they’ll be blaming the IRA for it. And the IRA may be happy to take the credit. But you’ll know the real story of who snuffed out your fires and painted you green.”

He raised his empty glass to them and sang them a line from an old rebel song, “Now FitzWilliam, have a care. Fallen is your star low,” and made a hasty exit from the Rangers Pitch.

Seconds later he heard the sound of angry voices erupting from the bar, and he ducked into the shadows between two nearby buildings. He recognized the strident tones of Billy and Georgie calling death down on his head. He surveyed the area around him, as best he could, in case he needed to bolt to another hiding place or a public space with people around. Though how much sympathy he could expect from the public in this part of town was an open question. After a few minutes he heard no more, and he cautiously emerged from the shadows.

Not one to push his luck — well, not one to press it again after he’d already pushed it in somebody’s fierce red face — he decided to forgo any further bar excursions for now. He made a beeline for his hotel and had his supper in the dining room, garnished with a couple more pints of Guinness. He was just finishing up his last satisfying sip when the hotel clerk came in to tell him there was a call for him.

Conn welcomed his cousin to Belfast and said he could not get away to see Terry that night, but they could get together the next day. How had he spent his first day in the city?

“Battled my way through all the tourists in the streets, walked along with my arms held out singing ‘Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows,’ and everybody in the street burst into song and joined in. That sort of thing.”

“Where did you say you spent the day? Sure as fuck wasn’t Belfast.”

“Oh, it was Belfast all right. Nearly got my ticket punched at the Rangers Pitch.”

“What are you telling me? Are yeh daft, going into a bar in Sandy Row?”

“Well …”

“Stay away from there. You’ll get yourself killed. You want a drink, I’ll take you for a drink. I have to work again tomorrow but I’ll collect you from your hotel tomorrow, half-six. Keep yourself tucked in your room till I get to you!”

†

Terry had not seen his cousin since their grandfather’s funeral thirteen years before, even though Terry had made the odd trip to Dublin in the intervening years. Conn picked Terry up in his Ford Escort and greeted him like the long-lost relation he was. Conn was now twenty-six years old, slim but muscular, with thick auburn hair and brown eyes; he hadn’t had a shave for a couple of days. He drove Terry through the gritty streets to his home, an upper flat in a terrace of red-brick houses near the Falls Road in West Belfast. There was no doubt whose side the Falls Road was on, with its IRA and BRITS OUT graffiti and the green, white, and orange tricolour flying everywhere.

“See that?” Conn pointed to a high-rise building nearby, a tower block around twenty storeys high, done in red and white panels. Terry imagined the rant his brother Brennan would unleash in the presence of yet another ugly experiment in 1960s urban planning and architecture. Brennan may have abandoned architecture for the priesthood but he still carried a torch for magnificent buildings. He’d be carrying a flamethrower for this one.

“Who has the misfortune to live in there?” he asked Conn.

“That’s Divis tower. It was built for poor Catholic folk to cram into,” Conn replied, “but that’s not why I’m showing it to you. There’s something much more interesting about that building. Top two floors of it are occupied by the British security forces. It bristles with listening devices and cameras, so we’re all under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. The army knows every house, every back alley, in some houses every room and the colour of the furniture. From up there, they can watch us Taigs here in the Falls, and the Prods in the Shankill if they’ve a mind to. But we haven’t exactly welcomed them to the neighbourhood. It got so dangerous for the Brits here they have to fly in and out of the building by helicopter. They land it on the roof. Too perilous for them to be on the ground anywhere near the building. But pay them no mind. Come on inside.”

They went up into the modest flat, with its second-hand furniture and posters displaying favoured bands and exhortations to true Irishmen to claim their country from the British Empire. A framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus had pride of place above the other emblems of Conn Burke’s life. There was a guitar leaning against the wall and an assortment of tin whistles on a table by the window. “You’re a musician, are you? Or somebody is.”

“I am. There’s a session most nights at my local. I join in when I can. We’ll head over there now.”

Terry looked at him closely and only then noticed that his cousin was exhausted. His eyes were bloodshot and underscored by dark circles. “Is everything all right, Conn?” No answer. “Late nights?”

“I’ve had some long nights, but I’m able for it. Come on, we’ll have a pint at Nolan’s.”

They walked down the Falls Road and turned into a side street. Nolan’s was a small, dingy bar that looked as if it had been there for a couple of hundred years. Two of its window panes were boarded up with plywood, and there were pockmarks on the exterior walls. Bullet holes. Conn and Terry walked in and were greeted by the barman and assorted drinkers in the room. Conn returned their greetings and announced that this was his cousin Terry, from New York. That brought about what-about-ye’s and raised glasses.

Terry noticed an old fellow in a tweed cap, standing in the corner with a pint in his hand. “And my tale ends thus,” the man declared. “‘Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee!’” There was a round of applause and the rhymer sat, looking pleased, and took a long draft from his glass.

Attention then turned to Conn as he stood at the bar waiting for two pints of Guinness to be properly poured. When they were ready, he handed one to Terry and led him to a table.

“Give us a story, Conn,” someone urged him from the back of the room.

“I don’t have one today.”

“Never stopped you before. Make one up.”

“I don’t know now …”

“Get on with it.”

So Conn took a leisurely sip of his pint, then stood and held his left arm out like a ham actor his first time onstage.

There was a young fella named Terry

Who didn’t know Belfast from Derry.

The man’s been around.

I thought he was sound.

But the truth was quite the contrary.

The poet took another drink, got his second wind, and continued.

Now we all want the same thing wherever we are.

To sit and relax, sure, and have us a jar.

So where does he head,

This fine Catholic lad?

He went into the Rangers Pitch bar.

This was greeted by an incredulous chorus of “No!” around the pub. Terry offered a sheepish acknowledgement of his gaffe.

Now the boys who inhabit the Rangers

Aren’t kind to the Pope-loving strangers.

But our Terry stayed cool

On his barstool.

Had his pint and ignored all the dangers.

Conn’s recital was met with appreciative applause, which he acknowledged with a theatrical bow. “Thank you for your kind attention.” And more than one of the punters offered to buy a pint for Conn and his reckless relation.

When the regulars had returned to their drinking, Terry and Conn had the opportunity to catch up on each other’s lives. Conn was working for a builder now but hoped to start his own company eventually. He would see how things went in Belfast. He wouldn’t want to be here forever. He thought Terry’s job had a little more to commend it.

“So you fly 747s, Terry. Doesn’t get any better than flying six and a half miles above the fray. How did you work your way into a career like that?”

“Like a lot of fellas, I started with the Air Force, then moved over to civil aviation.”

“I take it we’re talking about the American forces? Did you see any action?”

“No wartime service, if that’s what you mean. I signed up for the U.S. Air Force and had just completed my training when the Vietnam War ended.”

“When your people had to be evacuated off the roof of your embassy in Saigon, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“You’d think the U.S. would have stayed home after that lesson in humiliation, instead of getting involved in more foreign adventures around the world.”

“Doesn’t work that way, does it?”

“How did you feel about that war? Keen to be up in the skies blitzing the rice paddies?”

Terry replied,

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds.

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds.

“I know that one. Who was it, Yeats?”

“Yeah. ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.’ Only poem I can recite by heart, except for the ones I make up myself. ‘I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above.’ But so far, so good.”

“More dangerous on the ground, at least in this part of the world.”

“I hear yeh. But back to your question, I would have been sent to fight in Nam, but I didn’t support the war. The U.S. should never have gone in there. The anti-war movement was right. But that doesn’t mean I supported the protesters who treated our returning soldiers like shit when they hobbled home, injured and demoralized. That was unforgivable. Protest government policy, yes. But don’t take it out on the poor fuckers who were sent over there to do the job. Kind of like the Irish airmen Yeats was writing about. Airmen and soldiers who fought in the British Army in the First World War. Ostracized by many of their fellow Irishmen when they came home.”

“You said a mouthful there.”

Something about the expression on his cousin’s face led Terry to believe he was not just tossing off a commonplace remark.

“What do you mean?”

But Conn waved him off and got up to order two more pints. When he returned he said, “It’s a wonder you didn’t foresee your death in the Rangers bar. That could have been the end of you.”

“Yeah, I know. Had a bit of fun with them, though. If I was going down, I was going down in character!” He gave his cousin a summary of the nonsense he had made up about the Green Slopper raining on the Orangemen’s parade.

“Jaysus! As if there weren’t enough characters in the Burke family, now I’ve discovered another one. But wouldn’t that be brilliant, that green thing? If it doesn’t exist, somebody should invent it and sell it to us over here.”

“Where’s your initiative? Build it yourself and add it to the arsenal.”

“I may do that. Listen,” he said, checking his wristwatch, “I have to go soon. Make a call, maybe meet somebody. I could be late, but I won’t see you stuck for a lift back to your hotel.”

“I’ll come with you.”

Conn seemed to be thinking it over. “All right.”

“Do we have time to drink up?”

“Sure, then we’ll be off.”

Conn was clearly distracted but they finished their drinks, saluted the other drinkers, and made their departure. They walked back to Conn’s terrace. “Have to make a call from my flat.”

When they were back inside, Conn picked up the phone and punched in a number. Terry could hear the rings at the other end, and it rang for a long time. When there was an answering click, Conn listened to the faint voice coming over the line. Terry could not make it out. Conn finally said, “What should I bring? Neither do I! I can’t bring anyone, you know that. I know, I know. I’ve been working on it. Right. I will.” Click.

“What’s the trouble, Conn?”

He didn’t answer, but whatever he’d just heard had him disturbed. He got up and walked to the window. Stared out into the street. Then he turned and looked at Terry. “Do you know anything about, em, first aid?”

“Is someone injured?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he in need of a doctor?”

“Can’t do that.”

“What do you mean?”

Conn shook his head and put his hand up. Don’t ask.

“Is this an emergency?”

“It’s serious enough,” Conn replied.

“Well, I had military training when I joined the Air Force. So I have some knowledge of medical matters. I’m pretty well limited to battlefield injuries.” He caught his cousin’s gaze and held it. “Bullet wounds, that sort of thing.”

Conn nodded. “Let’s go.”

They got into the car and drove in a zigzag pattern through the dark, narrow streets of the city. Terry wasn’t half-bad as a navigator; even in an unfamiliar city, he noted that his driver was backtracking and retracing his route. And Conn spent a lot of time checking in his rear-view mirror. Making sure he wasn’t followed. Something told Terry it wasn’t the breathalyser he was worried about.

“Fuck!”

Conn brought the car to a screeching halt, reversed, and pulled away in the opposite direction. Terry, pinned to his seat, managed to twist around and look behind them. He saw two armoured trucks, with long bonnets and massive grilles, turning into the street. Conn careened away from the advancing army vehicles.

“Pigs,” he said.

Terry made a noncommittal sound in response.

“Humber pigs, I mean. Kind of a pig-snout look about the front of the vehicles. Last thing we need is an encounter with two pigs full of Brits.”

Conn drove until he arrived at a decrepit-looking block of flats. He surveyed the area and then made a turn into a crumbling asphalt parking area behind the building. “In here” was all he said. He used a key to gain entry from the back and headed up an iron staircase. They climbed in darkness to the third floor. Again, Conn’s head turned left and right before he emerged into a shabby corridor and made his way to a steel door. He let himself in, pulled Terry in behind him, and locked and bolted the door. The place was lit by one low-watt bulb, and the windows were shaded with black-out curtains. There was a galley kitchen to the left. On the right was the living room with nothing in it but a chair with clothing draped over it, and a mattress on the floor, covered with a white sheet. On it lay a man with bandages on his left shoulder and left lower leg. His face was dripping with water or sweat, and his dark hair was matted to his skull. His eyes followed Conn’s progress across the room. Then he caught sight of Terry and stared at him with alarm.

“My cousin. No worries,” Conn said. “Terry, could you have a look at his wounds?”

“What?” the man croaked.

“Terry’s had military training in America. He’ll look you over, and we’ll decide what to do.”

“I can’t fucking stay here, Conn. I’m going to die in this place.” His voice broke and he turned away.

“We’re going to suss things out, get you away from here.”

Terry smiled at the man and gently pulled the bandages away from his shoulder. Blood had seeped through. There was no sign of infection but that could change at any time, he knew, depending upon what debris, such as cloth fibres, had gone into the flesh with the bullet. He refolded the bandage and looked at the leg wound; infection had definitely set in there. And there was no telling how close the bullets were to bone or connective tissue.

“This fellow needs to be in a hospital. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. Why is he in this place and not under a doctor’s care?”

“He can’t be seen anywhere” was the terse reply from Conn.

“I have to get out!”

“Yes, you do, and Conn and I will see that you’re cared for. What have you had to drink and eat?”

“I’ve got supplies for him in the fridge,” said Conn.

They left the wounded man with assurances that could not have sounded anything but hollow.

†

When they were back in Conn’s flat, after taking a circuitous route home, Conn went to a cupboard and withdrew a bottle of Paddy whiskey. He poured them both a glass, and they sat at the kitchen table.

“Why is the man hiding there?”

“I can’t take the chance of having him walk out alone, and I can’t take the chance of being seen with him. I can’t get him out of the city on a train or a bus or a plane because somebody will spot him. Can’t get him across the border. Out of the question.”

“So I ask you again: why?”

Terry could see Conn battling with himself about whether to open up to his cousin or keep it all inside. Finally, Conn made his decision. “He’s RUC.”

“And that means …”

“Royal Ulster Constabulary. He’s a cop.”

“What? You’ve got a cop lying alone in a flat with bullet wounds, and you say he can’t go to hospital?!”

“That’s right.”

“And he was shot by … ?”

“IRA.”

“How did he come to be in the flat? With you as his caretaker?”

Conn looked away, then back at Terry. “I was there.”

“You were there when he was shot.”

“Right.”

“And?”

“It wasn’t me who fired the shots.”

“So which side of the firing line were you on?”

“I only learned about the hit that night.”

“So this was planned?”

“Not by me. By others. I got there too late to prevent it.”

“Why was he targeted? Are all cops automatically targets?”

“Not necessarily. But he … he’s a Catholic.”

“So you shot one of your own.”

“I didn’t shoot him! I wanted to prevent it, but by the time I found out it was too late.”

“Why did you want to stop it, you being a member — I assume — of the Provisional IRA? This man would have been considered a traitor to his people? Was that the thinking?”

“That was the thinking, but I didn’t agree with it.” The young man’s face was haggard in the dim light of his kitchen. He looked old beyond his years. He took a long sip of his whiskey, put his glass down, and sighed.

“You remember when we spoke at Grandda’s funeral. We sat beside each other.”

“I remember it well. You were just a young fellow at the time.”

“Thirteen.”

“But you had studied your history. Must have made top grades in that subject.”

“Learned at my father’s knee and my grandfather’s. I’d been close to Christy. Loved the man.”

“And during the funeral procession, if my memory can be relied upon, you fell in with the …”

“The volunteers, yes, those who are fighting for a united Ireland. And the battle goes on, to get the Brits out of the Six Counties here in the North.”

“You’re taking on the British and also those long-time residents who are loyal to them. You’re fighting on two fronts here.”

“Our war is against the Brits. And there is no front. It’s all around, everywhere. Guerrilla warfare.”

“And bombings.”

“I’m not a bomber.”

“Didn’t say you were.”

“I’m not in favour of them here, and I’m not in favour of the bombing campaign that’s been waged by our boys in England over the last ten years. We are an army; we should not be putting civilians at risk. Civilians are never targeted, but they are inevitably at risk in some of those actions. I’m against it, and the boys know I’m against it. Though they are right when they say that one bomb in London is worth a dozen in Belfast, if you want to capture the Brits’ attention. Dead bodies in the North of Ireland just don’t make the headlines like dead bodies in England.”

“I don’t doubt it, but that doesn’t excuse it.”

“No. Now back to our grandfather, and the day of his funeral. I told you about Kilmainham Gaol and Mick Collins?”

“Yes, an unforgettable scene. You told me about Christy being in there, and about his fellow prisoners when they learned that Michael Collins had been assassinated.”

“Right. Mick’s former comrades, who were now his enemies, jailed by his government. Hundreds of them on their knees, saying the beads at the news of his death.”

“Speaks volumes about the man, about Collins, doesn’t it?”

Conn nodded in agreement. “As much as the anti-treaty IRA disagreed, and still does, with the signing of the treaty, I have never doubted for a minute that Collins believed he had done the best he could for this country.”

“Not to mention the fact that Britain had threatened Ireland with ‘immediate and terrible war’ if the delegation didn’t sign!”

“Right, yeah. So he did the best he could. Now we have Jacky Casey, a Catholic from the Murph — the Ballymurphy housing estate here in Belfast — joining the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which has always been a bastion of Protestant power. Power deployed disproportionately against Catholics here in the North. Casey didn’t join the RUC to prop up Protestant rule in Belfast; he joined to promote the interests of Catholics within the force and within the community. He urged other Catholic lads to do the same. ‘Let’s outbreed them and outman them in the police force.’ That was his goal, and it was not to be sneered at. He should not have been targeted; he should have been supported.”

Conn looked down at his glass, his hands tapping the table beside it. “He received a bullet and a Mass card in the post one day. So he knew what was coming. When I heard about the planned hit, I left my position that night and rushed to the scene. I was minutes out of time. Casey was lying there in the street in agony. I told the lads I heard there was a patrol coming by. Said I’d take him in my car and get him out of sight before the army rolled in. They didn’t want that. They wanted his body on display as a lesson to others. But I told them it wasn’t worth it for them all to be arrested and put out of commission. I said I’d bundle Casey into the car, take him out to the sea, finish him off with a bullet to the head, and dump the body. So while they were watching, I lifted him up, handled him roughly — just for show, praying that I wasn’t doing further damage to him and drove him all over the city till I could be sure I wasn’t being followed. Then I dragged him up into that flat, which is an old safe house I use from time to time. He was barely conscious but I got the message across that I was going to get help for him and get him out of the city.

“That’s where we are now. There’s a great hue and cry over the fact that a young RUC officer is missing. I have to get him away from here and into a hospital where nobody will know him. But that’s the problem. Any bus or train station, the airport, the border crossings, are all too dangerous. He’d be recognized, and both of us would be in danger. He’d be killed, and I’d be killed for not killing him! I even thought of getting a boat and trying to get him across to Scotland. A daft idea, but that’s how desperate the situation is.” He looked up at Terry. “What the fuck am I going to do?”

Terry sat there without speaking. He was running a few daft ideas of his own through his mind. Never one to turn away from the unlikely, the improbable, or the unworkable — after all, he could keep an aircraft weighing a million pounds afloat on nothing but air — he said, “Does Belfast have a flying club?”

Conn stared at him. Then Terry could see the animation returning to his face. “There are a few, here and in other parts of the North. Yeah, there are.”

“Jacky Casey is a citizen of the United Kingdom.”

Conn made a face. “Yeah, which is the reason for all this trouble in the first place.”

“So he doesn’t need a passport anywhere in the U.K. He’d have his police card or some identification on him.”

“He would. He does, yeah.”

“Leave it with me.”

“You’re serious?”

“Have you ever known me to be less than serious?”

“Em, well …”

“Leave it with me, cuz.”

First thing the next morning, Terry was in a rented car and was on a mission. It took all the nerve he could muster, and he’d never been short of nerve, to walk in to the Antrim Aviators Club and find the right man to work on. The fellow was impressed with Terry’s credentials and was amenable to his request for an aircraft. He offered to look at the ferry roster to see whether there was a plane that needed returning to England. No such luck, but Terry was able to arrange the rental of a Cessna 172 Skyhawk with a huge downpayment on his credit card, after a transatlantic call to the credit card company and a promise to help the club member’s son embark on a flying career in New York, a promise Terry knew he would keep. That arranged, he went to a pharmacy and a grocery store for supplies for his patient, his refugee, and then went up to the flat where Casey was hiding, got him cleaned up and fed, stuffed him with painkillers, and then asked him casually if he knew anybody in England. He did. Some of his family had gone over there years before to find work. There were some Caseys in Luton, and his father’s brother lived in Manchester. Terry told him what he had in mind, and Casey began to tremble. It took all of Terry’s skills as a flight captain, father, and teller of tall tales, to get the poor, wounded, lonely, missing-and-presumed-dead policeman reassured.

The most difficult part of this breathtaking scheme was coming up with a distraction to allow Terry to get into the hangar in his rental car so he could sneak Casey onto the Cessna without being seen. But setting up the ambitious father in the flying club with a transatlantic call to an executive of Terry’s airline in New York gave Terry time to hustle Casey on board.

For an experienced pilot the flight itself was routine, at least in the technical sense. But in all his years of flying, in blizzards and turbulence, in lightning and fog, with drunken, aggressive passengers, Terry had never had a case of the nerves like this. Well, except for the time a mild-looking fellow in a three-piece suit managed to get onboard with a concealed gun and tried to hijack the plane and had to be taken down by the flight crew. Now here was Terry, flying out over the Irish Sea with a passenger who gripped his armrests with shaking hands and never turned his head from the window. What was he expecting to see out there? An interceptor aircraft coming up on their starboard side? The situation brought to mind a story Terry had heard some years before. The British had arranged for secret talks about Northern Ireland in the early 1970s and flew a delegation of top-level IRA men to England for meetings. Before the flight to England, the IRA group was flown to Belfast in a British Army helicopter. Circling over the war-torn city in the chopper, every one of the lads had the same terrifying thought, which none of them could admit: they were afraid their fellow IRA men on the ground, unaware of the talks and of the presence of their leaders in the helicopter, would fire a rocket at the chopper and blow it out of the sky.

Terry had to break the tension somehow, for his sake and that of his passenger. Looking away from his instruments, Terry scanned the aircraft for a distraction. It wasn’t hard to find. The interior of the plane looked like the interior of a brothel; never mind how Terry knew that.

“Jacky,” he called above the roar of the engines, “when Misty comes up for air over there, send her to me, would you?”

Jacky Casey stared back, uncomprehending.

“Come on now. We’re men of the world. We know what this place is: the scarlet fuzzy seat covers, the crimson curtains. It looks like a bordello on Valentine’s Day.”

Casey gazed around and seemed to notice his surroundings for the first time. It took a few minutes but Terry was able to engage him in a bit of banter about the gaudy interior of the plane. Someone had tried to make over the unremarkable cabin to look like a parlour, but whoever had done it had been looking in the wrong magazines. Pilot and passenger shared a laugh about that, which lightened the mood a bit. But the passenger was a young man with serious wounds, a man who was leaving his family, his colleagues, his country, to go into exile in order to save his life. Terry’s heart went out to the lad when he had to leave him with his uncle at the airfield in Manchester.

The following night, when Terry was back in Belfast in his cousin’s flat, Conn goggled at him across the kitchen table. “You really did this. You really got him there. You didn’t just …”

“I didn’t just fly him in circles over County Down and push him out of the plane, no. He is safe in England. His father’s brother lives there, only about an hour from Manchester. Casey called him, and the man dropped everything to head out to the airport. He arrived and took charge of his nephew, and I refuelled and pulled out. Casey is going to get the medical attention he needs and take it from there. I have to tell you, Conn, I still get the heebie-jeebies when I think of all the things that could have gone wrong before we cleared Northern Irish airspace.”

“This is unbelievable.”

“Read some of the stories of the flyers in the First and Second World Wars, the scrapes they got into, the artillery they dodged, the stalls they pulled out of, the landings and crashes they survived, the subsequent missions with the same things happening all over again. You talk about unbelievable; some of those stories, true stories, will make your head spin.”

“Jaysus, man, I owe you. What can I ever …”

Terry brushed it off. “I’ve already been rewarded. Took a flight I’d never taken before on a beautiful clear day and brought a man to safety. Maybe to start a new life in a country not wracked by war.”

“That’s because their war is over here.”