Brotherhood of the Tomb Read online

  She finished it and they went for coffee to Bewley’s instead, which was nicer anyway. By that evening, he had two fresh tickets for Deirdre. She met him outside the College gate and they walked down to Lower Abbey Street together. She was wearing a loose coat over a black cashmere dress, and in her ears were tiny jewels that he thought must be diamonds. He had never seen anything so lovely or so perfect.

  He sat through the play like someone in a trance. He remembered only Deirdre’s words to Naoise, as they wait for Ring Conchubar to come for them:

  Bend and kiss me now, For it may be the last before our death. And when that’s over, we’ll be different; Imperishable things, a cloud or a fire. And I know nothing but this body, nothing But that old vehement, bewildering kiss.

  He walked her home that night through autumn-weary streets, thinking of vehement kisses, of breath on clouded breath, yet afraid even to hold her hand. They talked about the play, which she had found hard to follow, about Yeats, about their studies. She lived in Rathmines with an Italian family who thought she was at a girlfriend’s rooms at Trinity Hall.

  ‘Shall I see you again?’ he asked when they arrived.

  ‘Of course. You don’t think I borrowed that book just to read some old poetry?’

  “You mean ...’

  She smiled and reached up to kiss him. Not vehemently, but enough to bewilder him thoroughly.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’ She smiled.

  Was I that obvious?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Kiss me again, Patrick. And this time close your eyes.’

  Autumn turned to winter, the sky over Trinity grew silent and heavy with snow. They were lovers now, both liberated and enslaved by the unexpected emotions that had come to rule their lives. Snow came, and rain, and days of bright, limpid sunshine when they walked for miles along Sandymount Strand or across the frosted solitudes of the Phoenix Park.

  She did not live in a golden palace, though she admitted that ancestors of hers had indeed built the famous Ca’ d’Oro, the House of Gold, whose exquisitely gilded exterior had once made it the most famous of the many palazzi on the Grand Canal. He found a book on Venice in the library and discovered that the Contarinis had been the noblest of the city’s noble families. Eight of them had been Doges. They had owned palaces everywhere.

  Her family now lived in what was, certainly, a palazzo, but not so grand as the Ca’ d’Oro. She promised to take him to Venice that summer, to meet her parents and the rest of the Contarinis. He wondered what she would make of Brooklyn or his uncle Seamus.

  He wrote poems for her, atrocious things that filled him later with acute embarrassment and aching sadness. One commemorated a walk they had taken early one morning on a bright day in winter, along the beach at Sandymount. That had been the scene of their first quarrel, an event that had left him hurt and puzzled long afterwards.

  Light lay on the sea like lozenges of silver. Far in the distance, beyond Dun Laoghaire, the Wicklow Mountains were veiled and elegant in an early morning haze. He held her hand. Above them, a seagull stooped through a world of violet and gold.

  They sat side by side on the sand, looking out to sea.

  When the summer comes,’ she said, ‘we’ll spend every day on the Lido, just gazing at the Adriatic. And in the evenings we’ll find somewhere to make love.’

  ‘It sounds perfect,’ he replied. ‘But not every day. I want to see St Mark’s. And Santa Maria della Salute. And...’

  She put her finger over his lips, then bent and kissed him gently. He drew her to him, his right hand cupping one breast. As she lay against him, he unbuttoned her shirt, then bent down to kiss her skin. As he did so, he noticed a small pendant on a fine chain round her neck. Taking it between finger and thumb, he lifted it closer.

  The pendant was made of gold. It was circular. One side was engraved with her name, ‘Francesca Contarini’, the other with a curious device: a seven-branched candlestick with a cross for the central column.

  ‘I haven’t noticed this before,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  Without warning, she snatched the pendant away from him and pulled it over her head. Angrily, she took it in her fist, then drew back her hand and flung it hard, into the sea.

  ‘Francesca! What’s wrong? What is it?’

  She stood, trembling, buttoning her shirt with a shaking hand. He got up and tried to hold her, but she pulled away from him and started walking quickly along the beach. Bewildered, he ran after her, but she pushed him off. He could hear her crying.

  He walked behind her until she tired. Her sobbing had grown softer. Behind them, their footprints were already being eaten by the encroaching waves. Finally she stopped and let him put his arm round her shoulders.

  ‘What is it, darling? I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  She turned a tear-stained face to him.

  ‘Please, Patrick. Never ask me about this again. Promise me. Swear you will never mention it.’

  ‘I only ...’

  ‘Swear!’

  He did as she asked and she seemed to grow calmer at once. She put her arms round his neck and kissed him on the forehead.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be angry with you. Don’t ask me to explain. It has nothing to do with us. Nothing.’

  For a long time afterwards, he thought the pendant must have been the gift of another man, a lover left behind in Italy; though she had sworn to him that there had been no one serious before him, and he had believed her. The pendant tormented him from time to time in the years to come. But he never asked her about it again.

  The Living

  FOUR

  And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon.

  Exodus 12:29

  Dalkey, Co. Dublin January, 1992

  Three in the morning. The darkness inexplicably charged, the silence heavy and drugged. There would be another storm. It lay in his bones, like electricity, moving in a slow current. Outside, the cold chattered briskly, saying things he did not want to hear.

  Light fell on light: across his desk, a tiny pool of yellow shining on ancient paper; through the window, a street lamp etching shadows out of the dim room. He could hear the sea in the distance, the tide coming in, small waves taking possession of the land. Or a single wave, repeating and repeating ceaselessly, until there was no more land, only water.

  He had chosen the house for its view. It looked straight out onto Dublin Bay, and all last summer he had watched the sea perform its endless, slow ballet, as though it danced for him and him alone. Now, in mid-winter, he was no longer sure he had chosen wisely. The sound of waves made him restless, filling him with a terrible loneliness and a sense of foreboding. It was at moments such as this that he wondered if he had done the right thing in coming back to Ireland.

  He rubbed his eyes. The crabbed and faded script was a strain to read, even with the help of a magnifying glass. Yellow light and ochre paper blurred. Fragmented letters ran across the page like frightened ants.

  ‘C’mon, Patrick. You hadn’t killed him, somebody else would’ve had to do it.’

  Voices snagged at him, like branches sharp with thorns. The past was still angry and unforgiving.

  ‘He was coming in. He’d had enough. There was a signal: Damascus station intercepted it. Why wasn’t I told?’

  ‘There was a slip-up. It happens. You know it happens. What’s it matter? Wasn’t like he didn’t have it coming. Somebody would have done it sooner or later. Not you, then somebody else.’

  In the distance, waves possessed the shore.

  He stood and went to the window. At forty-two, Patrick Canavan possessed very little. He paid rent on a house overlooking the Irish Sea: what little there was of his CIA pension took care of that. No wife, no children, no memories he could share with friends, no friends to share
them with.

  He opened the window all the way, pushing the sash up hard. Out of the night, out of the padded and frozen darkness, the sounds of the world rose up to him in waves: the stark lapping of water on stone, a train in the distance, loud on frosted rails, a ship’s horn, the bell on a rocking buoy.

  Far out on the abandoned waters of the bay, he saw lights: ships coming in from the dark sea, from France and Spain and Italy, headed for Dun Laoghaire or Dublin harbour, an armada of tiny lights on a wind-darkened tide. The fog that had kept them out at sea so late had lifted, leaving a vast and empty darkness rich with stars. Out on the final edges of the night, a small boat passed like a firefly and was suddenly lost.

  His eyes travelled over the darkness, and he thought how complete it was, how everything was dipped in it. How could twenty years make such a difference? he asked himself. Times change, people change, people die; but it was more than that.

  He saw Beirut again, as though the darkness had become a screen for memories. On his left, the Syrian guard-post plastered with posters of Asad, to his right the abandoned al-Saqi Hotel, now occupied by a Hezbollahi group from Bi’r al-‘Abd. He saw the jeep turn the corner, the boy from Amal firing, low from the hip. And, in slow motion, Hasan Abi Shaqra running from the alleyway towards him, his own gun lifting, pointing, firing, Hasan falling at his feet, blood turning to dust on the dry earth. ‘He was coming in. He’d had enough.’

  ‘Come back to bed, Patrick.’

  Ruth stood in the doorway, naked, her eyes dim with sleep. He turned from the window, blinking away the sunshine and the blood, suddenly cold.

  ‘I was working,’ he said, wondering why he felt a need to explain himself to her.

  ‘It’s after three. I woke up and you weren’t there. Come back to bed.’

  He felt irritated by her presence, by the demands she made on him. It was so long since he had shared anything with a woman. He closed the window, shutting the world out.

  She took him back to bed, her nakedness futile against his indifference. They lay there for a long time, shivering between cold sheets. Light from the street lamp filtered through the thin bedroom curtains, staining the bed with its unnatural light. Her arm lay beside his, almost translucent, like alabaster.

  ‘Do you love me?’ he asked, but she was asleep again, and he had not really wanted an answer. There was a sort of love between them, he supposed; and a physical passion that could still make him cry out, as though in pain. He tried to convince himself that the gulf between them was merely one of age - she was more than ten years his junior - but he knew it was really something he had built inside himself out of all the little emptinesses of his life.

  Getting involved with Ruth had been a big mistake. He thought he loved her, but that wasn’t the problem. Ruth belonged to the Agency, the way everyone did at first, the way he had at the beginning. That was the problem. Or part of it, at least.

  They’d met at a party three, maybe four months earlier, not long after his arrival in Dublin. An old friend from Langley, Jim Allegro, was here on special attachment with the Irish Ranger Squad, liaising on anti-terrorist tactics. Jim had heard of Patrick’s arrival through the grapevine and contacted him. ‘I’m having a party tonight - come round and meet some people.’

  The party had been dull: pieces of cheese and tinned pineapple on wooden cocktail sticks, stale French bread, cheap Australian red in boxes, wall to wall Dire Straits. The guests were the usual crowd: anaemic third secretaries from the embassy, a handful of spooks you could spot in a nudist colony, and awkward locals downing Guinness at a rate of knots. As usual, all the intelligence hounds were sniffing one another’s rears in a pack. She was sitting in a corner, going through Allegro’s bookcase like a censor looking for smut.

  ‘You won’t find anything in there,’ he said. ‘Jim’s cleaner than an operating table.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ she replied, ‘that’s precisely where all the messy things end up.’

  How had he guessed she was in the trade? She didn’t look the type. Not that there was a type - but if there had been, she wouldn’t have been it. She was too well dressed for one thing. The sort of clothes that had their labels on the inside, if they had labels at

  all. A single piece of discreet jewellery, a mere hint of expensive perfume. But for the accent, he would have taken her to be French. She was petite, with short blonde hair, a down-turned mouth, and tiny ears like shells.

  Her next words had been, ‘Shall we get out of here?’ She had taken the initiative from the beginning, otherwise he would never have got as far as ‘Go’. They had driven down the coast in her small blue Mercedes. Everything was autumnal: the air, the sea, their mood. She drove too fast for the narrow Irish roads and too skilfully for it to matter. It was dawn when they arrived back at his house. ‘You have appalling taste’ was the last thing she said before leading him to bed.

  After leaving the CIA, he had returned to Ireland to finish the doctorate he had abandoned eighteen years before. Coming back to Dublin had been like a physical blow: the old places, all the memories rushing at him, striking him deep in the pit of his stomach, and him helpless before their onslaught. Rathmines, Ranelagh, Donnybrook, Ballsbridge - the names had leapt out of maps and off the fronts of buses at him, each with its own sweet or bitter flavour, its own particular weight of memories and associations.

  He had returned with such hopes, such expectations. Dublin would restore him to youth, or something like that. Dublin would revive in him the ideals of twenty-four years ago. Well, that had all been a fantasy, and he knew it now: even if the city had been preserved in aspic all these years, nothing of the past would have returned to him, or at the most a glimmer, a teasing reflection in a rusted mirror.

  His years at Trinity had shaped his life. He had lived and worked in a palace of grey stone, surrounded by dreams and poetry. Not the past only, but a present that seemed not wholly real. It had been less the magic of the place than the enchantment of youth: he had come to understand that in time. But then he was aware only of snow falling on dark, pitted cobblestones, and sunlight on mullioned windows, and the bell in the campanile ringing out against the shadows at dusk as he walked through soft-lit courtyards to Commons. And Francesca. Always Francesca.

  Now he was back, but the magic and the poetry had gone. He had tried to find them again in Ruth, but all that remained was a sense of bewilderment and shame. Pressed for a reason, he could have given a dozen. But at heart he knew there had only ever been one reason for his inability to love or be loved: Francesca’s death. But that was the past. He had to come to terms with that. In the dark, he lay listening to the sound of his own breathing, unable to surrender himself to sleep.

  He slipped out of bed again, knowing sleep would not come. There had been so many nights like this: they just had to be endured. He crossed to the window, as though drawn by the pale lamplight. A man can resign from the Agency, but his mind and body never relax.

  He heard the footstep just as his hand reached for the curtain. A single step followed by silence. He stiffened and lowered his hand. Silence. Cautiously, he eased back the edge of the curtain and bent his eye to the crack.

  His dark-adjusted eyes found the man almost at once. On the opposite side of the street, away from the lamp. He was cold and restless and looked like someone who had been standing there a long time. Waiting for something. Or someone.

  FIVE

  Patrick let the curtain fall. For half a minute he stood by the window, forcing himself to be calm. Ruth was still asleep, her heavy breathing plainly audible to him across the room. Moving quietly in the darkness, he found his trousers and the thick sweater he had been wearing the day before. His shoes were beside the bed.

  Downstairs, he paused in the kitchen. A row of gleaming, wooden-handled Sabatier knives hung on a magnetic rack. He selected one with a six-inch blade and slipped it into his belt. It was razor-sharp: he knew, because he had honed the entire set three days earlier.

&nb
sp; The back door led into the garden, but he knew better than to go that way. There might be more than one watcher, and the odds were that a second man, if any, would be at the rear of the house.

  A side window gave onto the drive. He unlocked the dead-bolt and opened it without a sound. A blast of cold air took him unawares. The wind was rising. There was a roll of thunder, very far away, moving behind unseen clouds. The storm was coming.

  He dropped to the ground, poised against possible attack. Here, beside the house, the darkness was complete. Clouds came up fast, obscuring the stars. He crouched, listening. Beneath the pounding of his heart, he heard cold waves turning on the shore. Above him, branches shifted. His skin felt taut and nervous. In spite of the cold, he was sweating.

  Crossing the gravel of the drive took an eternity. Then grass, then the fence dividing him from the next house. A frosted lawn led down to a low wall on the other side of which lay the road. From here he could still see the street lamp, but there was no sign of the watcher. Automatically, he checked the knife: the other man would carry a gun, he was sure of that.

  Though he knew the darkness hid him, he felt utterly exposed as he sprinted across the road. On the other side, he vaulted the sea wall onto the path that wound along the beach. The tide was well in now, a heavy swell pushed by rising winds. The thunder sounded again, nearer this time, a low, animal growl threatening violence.

  He kept to the sand, crouching low. The waves covered any sound. The man was still standing where Patrick had last seen him, in the shadows just beyond the lamp. His back was to the sea. He moved restlessly, trying to keep warm. About six foot, Patrick reckoned, and well built. There would be a car nearby, perhaps another man waiting in it.

  Patrick removed his shoes. It was bitterly cold, but he had to be sure of silence. He slipped behind the wall, then over, never letting his eyes wander from his target. The frost felt like daggers on his bare skin. With his right hand he slipped the knife from his belt. Thunder like stones in the sky. Darkness closing in. The sea tormented, moving landward from the night.