1
Detective Garda Strafford stood at the foot of the steps of the Kildare Street Club and glanced for the third or fourth time up the road in the direction of Government Buildings. The Minister was ten minutes late—deliberately so, Strafford was sure: self-important men never passed up an opportunity, however trivial, to demonstrate their importance.
It was a warm October lunchtime; the sun was hanging about the sky somewhere, and the air was suffused with a soft, pale gold haze. Strafford, congenitally thin, wore a three-piece suit of dark tweed that hung loosely on his tall, skeletal frame, a dark green shirt, and a dark tie. In his right hand he held a soft felt hat, and a gabardine trench coat was draped over his left arm. His hair was so pale it was almost colorless, and a lock of it at the front had a tendency to droop over his eyes, so that he had to keep pushing it back in place with a quick gesture of his hand and four extended stiff fingers.
He looked up the street again.
Strange to think of a war going on in Europe while everything here was dreamily at peace, or at least looked to be. The Irish Republic, having declared itself neutral in the conflict, and intending to stay that way, didn’t even call the war the war, referring to it instead as the Emergency. The pub wits had a lot of jokes about that.
The Minister of External Affairs, Daniel Hegarty—Dan the Man, as he liked to be known among the party faithful and, more importantly, among the public, especially at election time—the person on whom Strafford was impatiently waiting, had the reputation of being halfway civilized. In his youth he had studied for a time at Heidelberg, and was said to have dined once with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory at the Russell Hotel. This side of things he played down, however. It was a mainstay of his political strategy to pretend to be a simple countryman, though he was nobody’s fool, as everybody knew.
A large, shiny black car drew up to the curb, the black-suited driver hopped out smartly and opened the rear door, and the Minister himself emerged, putting on his hat.
He was in his early forties, though he looked older. In shape he resembled a slightly compressed and elongated Guinness barrel. The impression was emphasized by a voluminous, long black winter overcoat, the great girth of which was compressed a little at what would have been the waist, if the man had had a waist, by a broad belt tightly buckled. His head was remarkably large, much too much so for his features, which were crowded together in the middle of a face as wide and round as a dinner plate. He wore rimless spectacles and sported a small black mustache, like a smudged, sooty thumbprint applied to the groove under his nose, which was a godsend to his opponents, whose nickname for him was “Adolf.” His little washed-blue eyes were deep-set in folds of fat, and his mouth, which made Strafford think of the valve of a football, was drawn down sharply at the corners. It was said his bark was worse than his bite—though there were quite a few people in politics who could show you the teeth marks he had left on various tender parts of their anatomy—and that when he was with his cronies he liked to relax over a bottle of porter or a glass of whiskey. He had even been known to crack the odd joke and, at the end of the hooley on the last night of the annual party conference, to sing a rebel song, in an unexpectedly light baritone voice.
“Are you Strafford?” he demanded. He had a strong Cork accent. “What age are you? You look like you should still be in short pants.”
He shook hands perfunctorily with the detective. His hand was soft and warm and surprisingly small, almost dainty, and for a moment Strafford entertained the notion that within the folds of that enormous overcoat there was concealed a tiny woman, a female assistant, or even a wife or daughter, whom the Minister bore along in front of him everywhere he went, to perform his handshakes. Strafford often came up with such droll notions. It made him think he must be fundamentally frivolous, surely a serious weakness in a policeman, though he didn’t know what he could do about it.
The two men climbed the steps, passing between the polished stone pillars on either side, and Strafford drew open the door with its big square glass panel and stood back to let the Minister enter ahead of him. Should he mention the legend that the glass had been put into the door during the War of Independence so that if there was a raid, the gunmen could be seen coming up the steps? Of course not, no, he thought, remembering in time that in those days the Minister himself had been a gunman. Strafford had considered pointing out too, farther along the outside wall, the frieze with the carved stone monkeys playing billiards, a striking curiosity—whose idea had they been? But he doubted that Dan the Man would be interested in such fanciful details.
Unlike Strafford, Minister Hegarty took himself very seriously indeed.
From the open doorway a waft of thick warm air came out to meet them, heavy with the odors of cigar smoke, overcooked beef, old wine, and old men. The Kildare Street Club represented the unofficial headquarters of Anglo-Irish, Protestant Ireland. Strafford could see from the way the Minister darted glances here and there, attempting to square his unsquarably fat and sloping shoulders, that he was not only unfamiliar with the place, but was intimidated by it, too.
The Minister removed his hat and struggled out of his overcoat. He wore a tightly buttoned, double-breasted suit of navy blue serge, a white shirt with a high, stiff collar, and a dark blue tie with a tiny knot that looked as if it hadn’t been undone since it was first tied. From the moment he’d stepped out of the car the Minister had reminded Strafford of someone, and now he realized who it was. In that constricted suit and strangulating tie, with his big head and a thin slick of shiny black hair stuck to his pale damp forehead, he was the dead spit of Oliver Hardy.
A stooped, white-haired old fellow in a dusty tailcoat materialized suddenly before them—he might have risen at that moment out of a concealed trapdoor in the floor—and the Minister started back, clutching his overcoat and his hat possessively to his chest.
“I’m here to see—” he began.
“Yes yes, Mr. Hegarty,” the doorman interrupted, reaching for the Minister’s things, “come right this way.”
Hegarty threw the detective a wild look—how had the porter known who he was?—and Strafford smiled and nodded encouragingly. He knew his way around places like this. His father had been a country member of the club, though he had long ago let his membership lapse. When Strafford’s father had come up for his regular weekend once a month, he used to amuse himself by standing in the bay of the big window that gave on to Nassau Street, in his loudest check suit and matching waistcoat, with his hands clasped behind his back and his watch chain and silk pocket handkerchief, the tokens of his class, prominently on show, glaring down at the passersby.
The Minister was at last induced to relax his hold on his overcoat and hat, and the elderly porter took them, and draped the coat over his arm and set the hat on top of it, and led the two men to the bar.
It occurred to Strafford that in the same way that Hegarty looked the spit of Ollie Hardy, perhaps he himself, in his turn, resembled a young Stan Laurel, pale and spindly as he was, with his concave chest and narrow head and mild, distracted manner. He had to press his lips tightly together to stop himself from grinning. His mother, long dead, used to say, when he was a boy, that he had an unnatural sense of humor, and he thought that on the whole she was right, although as he grew to manhood he had learned to keep it more or less in check. He had always been a solitary, and his private jokes were a kind of company for him, like, he supposed, a child’s imaginary friends.
The bar was empty, save for the barman, in striped trousers and a black waistcoat. The Minster ordered a Jameson.
“I suppose you’re not able to have a drink, being on duty,” he said to Strafford.
“Well, I’m not sure I am on duty, strictly speaking, Minister. I’ll take a Bushmills.”
Hegarty sniffed. Bushmills, of course: the Protestants’ tipple.
The barman set the two tumblers of tawny liquor on the counter, pointing out which was which, then placed beside each one a glass of plain water.
Hegarty lifted the glass of Jameson. “Sláinte,” he said, with the hint of a challenge; he was known to be very hot on the language question, and had once even proposed a ten-year plan to make the speaking of Irish compulsory throughout the country. He wore a little circular gold pin in his lapel to proclaim himself a Gaeilgeoir.
Strafford too took up his glass. “Sláinte,” he responded stoutly; social life was a minefield, in this still young nation.
They drank in silence for a while, facing the mirror and the ranked bottles behind the bar. Hegarty looked at his watch.
“He should be here by now, shouldn’t he?” he said testily. “I thought your crowd were always punctual.”
Strafford knew exactly what was meant by “your crowd.” He was one of the very few non-Catholics on the Garda Force and, so far as he knew, the only Protestant at detective level. He had enjoyed rapid advancement—he had been on the force for only a couple of years when he was taken off the beat and promoted to the rank of detective—though he still wasn’t entirely sure why he had joined in the first place. Maybe he had wanted to make a gesture of support for the new order. Protestants constituted only five percent of the population of the republic, and the majority of them had quietly withdrawn from public life after independence, leaving the running of the place to the new Catholic bourgeoisie. Strafford was a son of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy—though as an individual he could not have been further from one of Yeats’s hard-riding country gentlemen—and he had a slightly shamefaced sense of duty, towards what, exactly, he couldn’t have said. At any rate, he had by now reconciled himself to his anomalous position as a Protestant member of an almost exclusively Catholic institution of state, and hardly thought about it except on those occasions when it was brought forcibly to his attention.
He and the Minister had almost finished their drinks, and still there was no sign of the official from the British embassy who was the reason for them being there. Strafford could hear the Minister breathing down his nostrils, the sound of a man of consequence feeling slighted and having a hard time controlling his temper. Minister Hegarty was not accustomed to being kept waiting.
* * *
IN THE END, A GOOD quarter of an hour elapsed before Richard Lascelles turned up. He was one of those languid-seeming Englishmen—Strafford knew the type well—deliberately affected but with a backbone of tempered steel and a ruthless light glinting behind a carefully maintained, easygoing smile. He wore a British Warm overcoat and glossy, handmade brogues and carried a bowler hat balanced on the upturned underside of his wrist with a thumb hooked over the brim; it looked like a trick that had cost him considerable time and effort to master, to what end it wasn’t clear, except perhaps the small pleasure of so deftly performing something at once trivial and difficult.
Yes, Strafford decided, Lascelles, behind the suave exterior, would be a bit of a joker. That was something to keep in mind.
“Sorry I’m late,” Lascelles said, jerking his arm and making the hat do a somersault and catching it in his fingertips and setting it down on the bar; no end to his flashy adroitness. “Bit of a flap at the embassy.” He shook hands with Hegarty, and cast a quizzical smile in Strafford’s direction. “I was led to believe this was to be a private meeting?”
Hegarty introduced the detective. Lascelles smiled again, more warmly. It had only taken a closer look at Strafford’s clothes and general demeanor for him to place the young man precisely as to class, caste, and religion.
“You go along and see what he wants,” Strafford’s boss, Inspector Hackett, had told him. “You’ll be able to talk to him in his own lingo.”
The Minister’s department had objected to the detective being present, but the request for this meeting had come from the embassy via Hackett—the Brits knew and trusted him, insofar as they trusted anyone in this country—and it had been considered advisable that someone from the force should accompany the Minister.
Strafford thought the whole business distinctly irregular, given the tensions with Britain over neutrality and the British government’s bullishness on the question of the Royal Navy’s demand for access to Irish ports, which the Irish government had resolutely refused to grant. And why the Kildare Street Club, of all places? But then, most things were irregular, these days, with England’s cities under nightly attack by German bombers and the United Kingdom braced for an invasion.
“So,” Hegarty said, “what can I do for you, Mr. Lascelles?”
Lascelles had been offered a drink but had declined. Now he said, “Why don’t we go up and have that lunch? The chop is not bad here, and they have a cracking fine cellar.”
Hegarty and the detective drank off the last of their whiskeys, which they had been carefully nursing, and the three men climbed the stairs to the first-floor dining room. Here, three big, light-filled windows looked out across Nassau Street to the railings of Trinity College and the cricket ground beyond. A match, surely one of the last of the season, was in progress, the tiny figures in white moving over the grass in seeming slow motion, like the celebrants of an archaic religious ritual, which, it occurred to Strafford, in a way they were.
In the room a dozen or so men were at lunch, some in pairs but most of them alone; there were no women in today, though a couple of years previously it had been agreed, against some strong opposition, that members might invite ladies into the club for luncheon or dinner. In one corner a table set for three stood in conspicuous isolation: Hegarty’s people had called ahead to make sure no one would be seated within eavesdropping range. Although the embassy had not disclosed the nature of the business to be discussed, it was clear that it would be a matter of some significance, and it wouldn’t do if word of it were to be put about.
Hegarty and the Englishman both chose oxtail soup as a starter, and all three asked for grilled sole to follow. Lascelles suggested a glass of red wine, since they would have a bottle of white with the fish.
“The house claret is excellent,” he said.
A bottle of the claret was duly ordered, though Strafford took none, saying he would wait a while; as a rule he hardly drank at all—in the bar he had asked for the whiskey only to make a point, and he was feeling the effects of it now.
While they waited for the soup to arrive, Lascelles nodded towards the window and the distant cricketers. “Can’t help wishing I was out there,” he said wistfully, then turned back hastily to the two men at the table and added, “No offense to present company, of course.”
“So, Mr. Lascelles.” Hegarty’s rimless glasses flashed with reflected light from the window. “Will we get down to brass tacks? You have something to ask of me, I suspect.”
Lascelles directed his gaze once more towards the cricket match, leaning with one elbow on the arm of his chair and rubbing a fingertip slowly back and forth across his chin just under his lower lip.
“Well, the thing is, Minister,” he said, and hesitated, obviously choosing his words with care, “we—the embassy, that is—we’ve been instructed by our masters in London to approach your government with a somewhat delicate request.”
“What kind of request?” Hegarty made no attempt to suppress the edge of hostility in his voice. Lascelles took no notice; he wasn’t long in his post but already he had plenty of experience in dealing with Irish officialdom.
“It concerns a couple of children,” he said.
Hegarty stared. “Children?”
“That’s right. Two young girls, to be precise.”
Copyright © 2020 by John Banville Unlimited Company
