Chapter Three

The crazy Rooshun is what they call him in Ballymore, but in point of fact he is not Russian at all but Lithuanian, son of a long line of amber merchants.

Crazy Lithuanian. He would have thought that apt.

For generations his family plied the waters of the shallow foreshore of the Baltic, recovering some of the finest amber in the world.

He was the first of his family to leave the trade, and he did so with a vengeance. Left it for another world entirely, one that his family could never understand; that even he—after all these years removed from it—still cannot fully understand. A betrayal. An amputation from the family.

He grew up in a land that had become part of the Soviet Union. But, for his family—though originally of Russian origin—the Soviets were invaders. During the war, the Nazis occupied Lithuania, but the Red Army managed to regain control of the land by early 1945. It was then that Lithuanian partisans—including his own grandfather, Antanas—took to guerrilla warfare for nearly a decade. More than 30,000 of them were killed in that period, including Antanas. His grandfather’s place at the head of the Vosenko table was never usurped. Always a place setting for him, day in, day out. Vosenko’s own father, Ignas, kept this flame alive with stories of heroism and derring-do.

But this was all ancient history to Vosenko, who grew up in the 60s and 70s, and who was tired of the eternal clash, the threats of retribution and score-settling. The Soviet Union his family daily railed against was not the one he learned about at school. Not the one that his friends knew. It was a new world, an exciting world of Sputnik and yes, even decadent Western rock music. He might still be living peacefully in his hometown, Karklė, if not for that constant drumbeat of revenge. A simple amber fisher and merchant with a plump wife and a brood of children. But it was not to be.

He still remembers the day he had enough. No more of the continual enforced hatred. When his father launched into the usual tale of partisan heroism instead of a prayer at mealtime, Vosenko, just turned eighteen, said, “Please, Papa. Just one night without the stories. Without the old hatreds.” His two younger sisters watched in horror as the father reached across the table and slapped his son with a force that sent him sprawling from his chair.

He left his home that night forever.

He was not inherently a political animal, but ironically was elevated into the most political of animals, a KGB colonel. Though Lithuanian, he used his Russian heritage and his bilingual birthright and earned a place at Leningrad State University, which made him an actual traitor to his family.

He could live with that. He had to. But always in the back of his mind was the fear he was given a place because he was Lithuanian. A token student. The scholarship boy.

No matter. He excelled at his studies, proving himself more than an equal to any of the other students. Soon he was noticed by KGB talent spotters. He rose through the ranks of that service with single-minded purpose. Though the KGB liked to have their folks safely married, Vosenko lived a monkish life, duty over family.

And so it was, until he met the young Austrian woman, Reni, who seemed as much an outcast to her family as he was to his.

It was Miles Donovan who first spied him at the full moon on the peat bogs, punishing his body with push-ups and frog marching. Blowing vapor bubbles in the chill night air with the exertion. Miles did not like to speak of it at first: he’d been out poaching the Golden Lake, setting small dynamite charges to stun the fish and send them belly up to the surface where he could net them. A practice frowned on by the local Garda, so that Miles kept the full-moon physical fitness tryst to himself for a time. A pint too many at Malone’s over at the crossroads, however, finally loosened his tongue.

“Out there in the middle of night exercising?” Paddy McGuire said after listening to Miles’s story. “By Jayzus, there’s a crazy Rooshun for you.”

When he first arrived, there were those who thought he was an IRA man. That his isolated cottage out on the Fingle Moor was a safe house. Which would explain the lights on at strange times of the night and fit his stand-offish attitude.

The locals would never credit a grown man having to sleep with the lights on at certain times. Lights to dispel the evil memories that dreams could bring.

There were those in the village—mostly women—who thought the new man a most interesting case. The widow Bridget Parker was one such. She experienced a great yearning ache between her legs when the man would come into her shop for his tea and tinned sardines, or to pick up his mail, for Paddy McGuire, the mailman, was damned if he would go way out to Fingle just to deliver a letter now and again.

Bridget loved the size of him, the big strapping legs and shoulders of the man. But most of all, she loved his eyes: liquid blue/green, and they seemed to change color with the weather or with what he wore.

But that was long ago. More than twenty years now, and Bridget Parker had long since given up fantasies about the man. He was just the crazy Rooshun and they left him to himself.

It was, however, Bridget who first let his secret out. That would be the year after he’d arrived and settled in the run-down cottage on the moor. It had been a ‘Printed Matter’ envelope that had done it—her shop doubled as the local post office. Addressed to Walter Castle, like his other mail—though no one believed that name. You only had to hear him talk to know he’d come from someplace out foreign.

It was not really Bridget’s fault. If they wanted privacy, she told herself, then they wouldn’t go sending it ‘Printed Matter’ with the flap unglued.

In fact, the flap on the over-sized envelope was partially open, so Bridget was only doing her job when she tried to close it up.

“Almost an accident, like,” she told Mrs. Malone, wife of the publican who was in the shop ordering a hundredweight of potatoes. “I caught sight of his picture inside, don’t you know? Knew it was our Mr. Castle, and what do you think?”

Mrs. Malone was not thinking of anything other than the potatoes or Mr. Malone’s chronic lower back pain and was only being polite when she responded, “What, dear?” Never expecting the bombshell that Bridget then delivered.

“It was an advert for a book, all about the dirty goings on of spies. And it was wrote by our Mr. Castle, except that he isn’t Castle, no surprise to us, but an ex-KGB man named Yuri Vosenko.”

She clucked with satisfaction after this pronouncement and Mrs. Malone put her husband’s lower back pain clear out of her head. By seven o’clock that evening the word was spread from the crossroads pub via Miles Donovan and Paddy McGuire to most of the forty-three thatched and slate-roofed cottages comprising the tiny hamlet of Ballymore. To all but Vosenko’s cottage out on the lonely Fingle Moor.

After that, the locals gave the crazy Rooshun a wide berth: no more nocturnal spying by Miles or the other boys. Whenever they saw him, they’d give him a polite “G’day, Mr. Castle.”

At first, Bridget’s ardor was only intensified by this discovery; the crazy Rooshun had filled the dreams of more than one woman in the village.

But dreams can only last so long.

What sometimes fills Vosenko’s dreams now is the image of the young girl from Styria with half her head blown away and him having to hotfoot it away from the scene before he was caught up in it. Three decades after the fact, and still the image comes back to him at least once a month. A dream that no amount of physical abuse can purge; a vision that has not been dispelled by writing it. The memoirs and public secret-sharing of his life in the KGB were Vosenko’s attempt at exorcizing that ghost. Instead, what it did was earn him enemies from former colleagues but also royalty checks that allowed him to live a modest life in semi-seclusion in the northwest of Ireland.

He’s off to cut peat this morning. The rituals of life in Ireland are something Vosenko loves, something that he’s missed from his own life growing up in Lithuania. The communal cutting of the peat in the spring and early summer, piling it in pyramids to dry as small fires burn on the moor and the smell of fried bacon fills the clear air. And in September, after the long days, bringing the peat in, stacking it into the black willow baskets made specially for that purpose. He loves the feel of his body working hard, the bend and stretch and flex of muscles.

But now he needs to keep the medicine close at hand to stop the seizures. Just a month gone by since he was out at his lazy beds, digging potatoes and suddenly his whole body started twitching and he passed out. When he came to, he was face down in the loam, spitting chunks of peaty earth. Drove himself to the hospital in nearby Letterkenny. After a day in observation and tests, he got the news. And the ration of pills. A punctuation mark in his life. And not a comma.

So now he lives life as it comes. Pills close at hand. Tries not to think of it.

I am a peasant at heart, he tells himself, looking forward to the cutting on the moors today. Give me my potatoes, tea and hard work and I shall be satisfied.

Last night was particularly difficult for Vosenko. Another anniversary of her death. He counts them all.

Just after Reni’s death, he let vodka take the place of sorrow. By the time he sobered up, he knew that he had loved the girl. Loved her like you can only love once. With every fiber. Unconditionally. Even though he’d known she was a plant.

By the time he sobered up, he’d been transferred to Afghanistan, where he witnessed the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire.

By the time he sobered up, he also knew that he wanted out of intelligence for good. That he wanted only a little plot of ground somewhere to call his own.

He no longer anesthetized himself from the pain. And it got better over the years, just as they say it will. It’s now a dull ache, like an amputated stump; and only the occasional dream will send him out running on the moors in the middle of the night. Like last night.

He packs a lunch, gets his peat spade, the slane, then humps his way toward his Hiace pickup. His barrow is already in the bed of the truck.

Gulls circle overhead: a storm is blowing in from the west.

Despite the gathering storm, the largely sleepless night, and the doctor’s prognosis, Vosenko is filled with a curious sense of relief this morning. He came to a decision last night. Strange that it has taken so long to form in his mind, but Vosenko is not a vengeful man by nature.

Reni was Jacobs’ agent, he knew. The American deputy head of station in Vienna. And Vosenko, knowing that, provided backdraft and misinformation to the Americans through her. Something both he and Reni understood without stating it; something she thought was rather humorous. She never could take the world of espionage seriously; it was all a lark for her.

Jacobs: Reni’s controller.

It took three decades, but Yuri Vosenko has finally determined that somehow, somewhere he will repay Jacobs for Reni’s death.

It’s young Tom Rooney who stumbles on the site.

Vodafone has extended broadband to reach Ballymore, and now the Rooneys have finally come into the twenty-first century. A solid year of harping and complaining by young Tom, arguing he’ll never be able to make it in the new global economy without this research tool.

He’s an eighth-grader at the local grammar school and could give a flying fig about the global economy, but he knows it’s the argument that will work best with his mum, who is the one to make such decisions in the Rooney household. Couldn’t mention it’s Fortnite he’s after, or wandering about online to see what he could see. He’s convinced his mum that getting online is all about academics and his future career.

Vic, just gone six, is too bloody stupid to even realize what he’s done for them both. Later she’ll thank him. For now, she crosses her eyes at her older brother whenever she has the chance.

So, he’s “researching” when he stumbles across the Reckoning site. And jayzuz, the surprise of seeing the mugshot of the Rooshun makes him give a bit of a yip.

“What is it, Tom darlin’?” His mother has heard him from the kitchen.

“Nothin, Ma.”

But he wants to share it. And needs to come up with a likely excuse why he was on a revenge site.

“You’ll want to take a look at this, though, Ma. Stumbled on it, I did.”

She comes in, wiping her hands on the apron she wears day in, day out.

“What?”

He points at the screen. “Meant to type in ‘reconstruction.’ We’re doing a unit on American history after their Civil War.”

Where does that lie come from? he wonders. Some flogging tv program probably.

His mother breathes in quickly, clicking her tongue at the same time.

“If it isn’t our own blow-in.”

Twenty years a resident and Vosenko is still the newcomer.

“What’s all this mean?”

Tom feels a jolt of excitement. The big world is coming to boring Ballymore. “Looks like someone wants to get even with our Rooshun. Maybe we ought to show him this.”

“Man hasn’t spoke two words to me in all the years he’s been here.”

“Still,” Tom says. “It might be dangerous. Not just for him. What if there’s a shootout?”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. You watch too much tv, you do, young Tom.”

Young Tom, because his pa’s name is Tom, as well.

And then she thinks better of it. That memoir he’s written. The Rooshun was a spy. Maybe still is. “Can you make a copy of that?”

“What, you mean print the screen?”

“Right. And then put it in an envelope so he’ll pick it up at the Post.”