Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

He would have said more, but he stopped. Stefan was smiling.

‘Because I’ve got the letters you wrote to Vincent Walsh.’

Fitzpatrick froze. He had thought there was nothing to this other than more unpleasantness, but the letters were different. Whatever the detective knew about their content, he still believed they had disappeared along with Hugo Keller. It hadn’t occurred to him that they were in the hands of this man who had done so much damage and caused so much pain. But the priest’s sense of who he was, his sense of his fundamental invulnerability, was still there.

‘Are you trying to blackmail me?’

‘Yes, I am. I’m glad you understand that, Monsignor.’

‘I see. And what are you going to do with these letters?’

He had found a smile, a half-smile, from somewhere. He was still stronger than this policeman. He had too many friends. No one would listen.

‘I’m going to do more than Herr Keller, I promise. I know a man who knows a man in London who’s in the market for that sort of thing. Journalist might not be the right word for it. He works for the News of the World . Nobody would ever publish anything in Ireland, of course not, but it’s still quite a story; buggery, abortion, unexplained deaths. And who knows what they’d come up with? Maybe they’d find some other fellers out there who remembered you. What would you do, sue? It would be some case. And they’re not so delicate with priests at the Old Bailey. One way or another you’d be finished in the Church. And I’d forget any plans you might have about sainthood.’

It really was blackmail, plain and simple. And there was nothing Robert Fitzpatrick could do about it. Blackmail is only ever as effective as the blackmailer’s determination to carry through his threat. The monsignor only had to look into Stefan Gillispie’s eyes to see that he meant every word he said.

‘I’m done speaking for the dead, Monsignor Fitzpatrick. Now I’m speaking for myself. You will help me or I’ll make it my only purpose in life to destroy you.’

An end was needed to the whole affair, but it was difficult for the Garda Commissioner and the Minister of Justice to find one. Among the few people who knew the story there were already different versions. Even Stefan’s version had its versions. There was the version for Ned Broy, the version for Dessie, the version for Susan’s father, the version for Hannah. The version he gave her was close enough to the truth, but didn’t contain everything. What the Commissioner told the Minister and what the Minister told anyone else was something else again. There were certain things that could be done. Sister Brigid Fitzpatrick took a sudden decision to spend the rest of her days behind the impenetrable walls of a contemplative order of Carmelite nuns in County Limerick. She would never leave. She understood what had to be done although she would never feel any need for her daily prayers to be prayers of penitence. She would shut her life off from the world for the same reason she told Sean Og Moran to kill: to protect her brother and allow him to fight the mystical war that would save mankind.

Monsignor Robert Fitzpatrick, who had done nothing of course, would continue to proclaim the conspiracies of Jews and communists, and there were many who heard him sympathetically within the Church. His ideas were, after all, not wrong in themselves; they simply needed to be voiced less stridently. Not everyone could warm to Adolf Hitler, and there were certainly some unpleasant aspects to Nazism; but the real enemy was still red, not red and black; the hammer and sickle not the swastika. And with democracy on its last legs, something had to bring order to the chaos of secularism and immorality it would leave in its wake. The Nazis came down on their opponents hard, no doubt about that, but these were hard times. And if Adolf Hitler did keep talking about eradicating Jews, why would anyone want to take all that bluster literally? The man was a politician after all. The Church didn’t have to like Herr Hitler to know that for now the future was with him. There was a longer game for the church to play than any Thousand Year Reich fantasies. It wasn’t as if Robert Fitzpatrick didn’t understand that. He spoke with the voice of the age. And somebody had to. Among the carpenter’s tools were axes and hammers as well as fine chisels; now was the time of the axe and hammer.

Nevertheless, whatever version of the story Ned Broy and the Garda Chaplain told Archbishop Edward Byrne, at the archbishop’s palace in Drumcondra, it was felt that Monsignor Robert Fitzpatrick would benefit from several years away from Ireland, researching his book on the Mystical Body of Christ at the Gregorian University in Rome. The need for all this new research came upon him almost as rapidly as his sister’s illness on her.

The day after Stefan Gillespie’s conversation with Robert Fitzpatrick in the University Church, he saw Hannah Rosen for the last time. They both knew it would be the last time and neither of them wanted to spend an evening talking about that, or worse trying to pretend there was something else to talk about. Instead they sat in the darkness at the Gate Theatre and let other people speak. It didn’t matter what the play was. It happened to be The Taming of the Shrew . It had the benefit of being long, but although it carried no special resonance for them, nothing that was about love felt easy. They would both have preferred an unhappy ending. However, they needed to be together and the Gate was a place to be that made silence something they could share. As they left the bar after the performance Micheal Mac Liammoir was heading towards it, out of costume now but with traces of make-up still on his face. He recognised Stefan and stopped, smiling.

‘The thin detective! And how’s the fat one?’

‘He’s not a great one for the theatre, Mr Mac Liammoir.’

‘Did we scare him off?’

‘There’s not much that scares Dessie.’

‘But it can be done.’

Stefan laughed. ‘This is Miss Rosen. Hannah, Mr Mac Liammoir.’

‘A pleasure, my dear.’ He took her hand. He turned back to Stefan, lowering his voice. ‘Did you ever find out anything about the boy, Vincent?’

‘We didn’t.’ It was an official lie. He didn’t like it any more for that.

Mac Liammoir looked at him harder. It was difficult not to feel he knew more, or at least that he already suspected there was more to know.

‘Well, we saw him off, just after Christmas. Eric Purcell was going down to Carlow to the funeral. I don’t know how he cudgelled the details out the mammy but he did, and in the end a few of us decided to take the train as well, chums from the theatre and other assorted reprobates. I’d always wanted the chance to sing the song, so I did, on the train. “Up with halberd, out with sword, on we’ll go for by the Lord, Feach MacHugh has given word! Follow me down to Carlow!” I’m not entirely sure Carlow has recovered yet.’ He spoke more softly. ‘If his mother and father didn’t know him, I hope they knew there were people who cared about him, and loved him, it was a lonely end.’

When they left the Gate and walked down O’Connell Street towards the river it wasn’t a journey they enjoyed, but they still didn’t want it to stop. What Hannah knew about Susan’s murder now was nearly as much as she could know. She seemed almost less angry than Stefan about the wall the state had already built around Monsignor Robert Fitzpatrick and Hugo Keller and Father Francis Byrne and Vincent Walsh and Brigid Fitzpatrick, and Susan Field too. She knew there was no further to go. There wasn’t the resolution public justice should have brought, but she could do no more to repay the debt she owed to her childhood friend, except for one thing. She could live. For the moment she was thinking about the other dead body on Kilmashogue, the man she knew nothing about, who had died in the same way her friend had, for the same reasons, for nothing at all it seemed to her.