Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

‘Fraulein Rosen?’

‘Yes,’ she said automatically, unthinkingly in English.

He grabbed her wrist. Now she was aware of another man behind her, holding her other arm. She struggled and started to call out. ‘What are you doing? Let go of me!’ The second man put his hand over her mouth and then she was inside the car, the two men on either side of her. She was still being held tightly; her mouth was still covered. There was no room to struggle. The driver put the car into gear and pulled away. It had taken only seconds. No one had heard her over the sound of the brass band. Most of the people in the square hadn’t even noticed. Those who had were too used to seeing people pushed into cars by the Schutzpolizei or the Gestapo, or being thrown off the back of moving trucks by Nazi stormtroopers, to feel there was anything unusual going on. There was, after all, an election to win. It was just the rough and tumble of democracy. Inside the car the grip on Hannah Rosen’s arms was unyielding. The hand over her mouth pushed her head back even more painfully into the seat. There was no point fighting.

The De Havilland Dragon Rapide rattled down the runway at Baldonnel and pulled up into the sky south of Dublin. Below Stefan Gillespie were the hills that stretched down into Wicklow. It was a clear April morning, a little after nine o’clock. It was the first time he had been in an aeroplane. He was surprised how unsurprising it was. There was a sense of exhilaration when the bi-plane lifted off and he first gazed down at the countryside below, trying to recognise where he was as they headed east towards the sea. He looked at the fields pegged out with sheep and cattle, sloping up into the Dublin Mountains. He followed a road as it wound through the fields and the bare hillsides into thick, dark woodland. Somewhere underneath him were the slopes of Kilmashogue, where the bodies of Vincent Walsh and Susan Field had been buried. He had been a long way from that. He knew from Dessie MacMahon that the investigations had stopped. But unexpectedly it wasn’t over; that was why he was here. It was why he was flying to London, to take the Deutsche Luft Hansa plane from Croydon Aerodrome to Berlin and Danzig.

Very quickly the mountains were gone. The plane hummed with the steady drone of the propellers. They were over the sea. Stefan sat at the back of the plane. Only two other seats were occupied. The other passengers were Irish civil servants, travelling to a League of Nations meeting in Geneva. At Baldonnel they had plied him with questions. He had been pushed on to the flight by someone who knew someone, so there had to be something interesting about him. He made sure there wasn’t. They soon found his polite monosyllables irritating and the role he had come up with — a cattle dealer looking for new markets in Germany — decidedly down-the-country. He sat far enough back to make conversation impossible on the noisy two-hour journey to Croydon. The grey sea spread out below them, the waves catching the spring sunlight. There was a boat sailing to England. He looked down as the plane passed over it, and watched it until it had disappeared.

The months had passed quickly at Kilranelagh as winter moved into spring in the mountains. Stefan had plunged himself into work at the farm with an energy that absorbed his days and left him tired enough to sleep at night. The smell of stone and earth and animals was something to hold on to, and the longer the days were out in the fields the less time there was to talk about the threat that still hung over him and his parents, and over his son. Tom’s fifth birthday had come and gone now and he still knew nothing about the curate’s plan to send him to live with his uncle and aunt. Stefan had made it clear over and over again that he would never agree. There had been a brief exchange of letters between his solicitor, Emmet Brady, and the bishop in Carlow, then nothing. Tom was happy at school and happier still because, for reasons he didn’t understand, his father was at home. Father Carey was polite whenever Stefan saw him and had not referred to the matter since February now. David and Helena had read into that silence a truth Stefan was far less sure about. They thought it was done. For more than a month now none of them had discussed the threat as they had through the long winter evenings after Tom had gone to bed. But there were still nights when Stefan couldn’t sleep, however hard he worked. The curate’s bitter determination was still a shadow over him. He would lie awake, turning Emmet Brady’s cautious words around in his head for the hundredth time. He heard himself in the Four Courts, trying to persuade a judge not to take Tom away. And sometimes, as he imagined the judge telling him he was unfit to be a father to his son, he thought about the answer that was there, always unspoken, the answer even his mother and father must know had to be in his head. If it wasn’t finished, if it wasn’t forgotten, if the threat was as real as the old solicitor claimed it was, then one day the only option might be the journey to Dun Laoghaire, and the boat across the Irish Sea he had just been looking down at. But all that was for another day, however, a day he still hoped would never come. Now he was casting his mind back to the events of the previous morning and the reason he was on a plane to London.

The unfamiliar car had pulled into the farmyard at Kilranelagh early. He had never met Hannah Rosen’s father, but unexpectedly Adam Rosen was there, bringing back everything that had happened at the end of the previous year. Stefan had not forgotten Hannah, but he had pushed her to the corners of his mind. There seemed no point doing anything else. The other man introduced himself as Robert Briscoe. Stefan knew who he was. A Member of Parliament in Dublin and a close friend of Eamon de Valera’s; an old IRA man who had fought against the British and then against the Free State in the Civil War. He was also a leader of Ireland’s Jewish community. He was a surprising guest. The two men offered no explanation for why they were there. Briscoe spent no more than five minutes congratulating David Gillespie on the quality of his cattle, and Helena on the biscuits he smelled when he walked into the kitchen, but by the time he and Adam Rosen were installed in the sitting room, with a cup of tea and a plate of those biscuits, still hot from the oven, it felt as if he had been speaking to old friends for an hour. He had a politician’s skills and, as Stefan’s father remarked later, a politician’s handshake; a little too hard and a little too sincere. But despite all the good humour, neither David nor Helena had any doubt that when the sitting room door shut, the visitors weren’t there to discuss the weather.

‘It’s about Hannah.’ Adam Rosen spoke urgently once they were alone.

‘Isn’t she back in Palestine now?’

‘I wish she was.’ Hannah’s father hadn’t said much while Robert Briscoe was making conversation about cattle and cooking, but now it was obvious he was worried.

‘She’s in trouble, Mr Gillespie.’ It was Robert Briscoe who continued.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Stefan

‘She’s in Danzig. You’ll know why she’s there I think.’

It was all in front of him; the priest, Father Francis Byrne.

‘I can make a good guess.’

‘I’m sure you know a lot more than either of us, Mr Gillespie.’

Stefan frowned. At first he was simply puzzled, not because Hannah had gone to find Francis Byrne, but because of the time that had passed. It was months since he had last seen her, he had assumed she had left Europe completely.

‘I thought she went back to Palestine ages ago.’

‘She’s been on the Continent.’ Adam Rosen answered awkwardly. It was an odd turn of phrase. It sounded as if his daughter had been on a long holiday. ‘She didn’t tell anyone she was going to try and find this priest.’