Роберт Паркер - All Our Yesterdays

“You’re a cynical bastard, Conn,” the Old Gunner said. “They won’t hang you. We’ll get you out of here.”

“If the bolt cutters work,” Conn said.

“They’ll go through that bar like it was butter,” the soldier said.

“And if they don’t we can fight,” the Old Gunner said. “You’ve got the revolver, Conn. We can disarm the guards, and rush the main gate, bayonets fixed.”

“Two of us?”

“Three,” the soldier said.

“What three?” Conn said. “We can’t trust the others. You never know who’s going to be a pigeon.”

“I’m your third, Ga blimey,” the soldier said.

The Old Gunner put out a hand and the soldier shook it. Nobody spoke for a moment.

“Good soldiers make bad jailers,” the soldier said. “Nobody’ll try that damned bloody hard to stop you.”

“And when we get out,” the Old Gunner said, “there’ll be lads from the Fourth Brigade to support us.”

“So when do we go?” Conn said, speaking thickly, his mouth still swollen from the beating.

“Soon as you’ve healed enough,” the Old Gunner said. “And we’ll let Lloyd George explain to Parliament why they couldn’t hold the one man they’d caught for Bloody Sunday.”

In a week, the swelling around his eyes had receded enough so that he could see normally. His lip was still puffed, but less so, and his speech was nearly normal. A week and three days after the bolt cutters came in, they were ready to try.

That afternoon Conn said to the soldier, “Lend me sixpence for the tram.”

“I can give you five shillings,” the soldier said.

“No, sixpence will do. I’m tired of this place.”

The soldier laughed and handed him the silver.

“If it only cost sixpence all of us would go,” he said.

The soldier would leave the Old Gunner’s door open — the padlock closed but not locked, so that it looked secure. The Old Gunner could reach through the peephole and unlock it. Conn’s door had no padlock, but the lock could be opened from the outside by pressing against the jamb with the handle of a spoon.

An hour after lights out, the Old Gunner walked in stocking feet past the soldiers sleeping near him and came to Conn’s cell. His boots were slung by the laces around his neck. He struggled silently to pop the bolt on Conn’s cell door. In the silence Conn could hear the soldiers in the nearby cell. One of them muttered in his sleep. Several of them snored. He was listening so intensely in the darkness that Conn could hear the sound of the running water that never fully shut itself off in the toilet down the hall.

The bolt clicked back. They edged the door open, slowly, so that it wouldn’t squeak. Conn too had his boots around his neck. He gave the cutters to the Old Gunner, and held the.38 in his hand. They moved silently down the corridor past the guardroom, up the iron stairs. The iron door at the top was not locked. They went through it to the exercise yard. The ground was damp and the exterior walls were clammy in the night. The gravel was thunderous as they crunched across it in stocking feet. And the moon glared down like a spotlight.

At the gate the Old Gunner worked with the cutters while Conn stood pressed into as dark a corner as possible with his.38 drawn. He heard the Old Gunner laugh.

“Like butter,” the Old Gunner said.

They pushed half the gate open slowly. It groaned as they did so. Then they were out in the bright night. They pushed the gate slowly closed behind them. In the darkness to their left they heard movement and Conn saw the outline of a soldier’s peaked cap. Conn put his left hand out to stop the Old Gunner, and crouched a little and brought the.38 up. Had they been tipped? Were they waiting? A shot would wake up the garrison. Another figure stirred beside the soldier and Conn realized it was a woman. He could smell her perfume in the soft, damp Dublin night. Conn edged closer. The soldier and the woman were locked in an embrace. The soldier was fumbling beneath her blouse. Conn smiled. It might be a trap, but it wasn’t a trap for him. He edged back to the Old Gunner.

“Love,” Conn said.

A different figure appeared, wearing a tweed scally cap.

“Liam Sullivan,” the figure whispered. “Fourth Brigade. Catch the tram on the South Circular Road. Well keep the soldiers busy.”

“Are the girls yours?” the Old Gunner said.

“Hired for the event,” Sullivan said.

“Fucking for Free Ireland,” Conn said. “How sweet.”

“Actually it’s your freedom they’re fucking for,” Sullivan said. “But it’s still a good cause.”

As they moved silently along the outside of the jail wall they passed other soldiers and women, in various degrees of intimacy, and then they were away from the jail. Sullivan vanished into the darkness. They boarded a tram on South Circular Road and mingled with other people. Around them Dublin spread out as if it had no limit. The dun brick looked bright, there were people with colored scarfs and laundered clothes. The signs on stores and taverns seemed sprightly and amusing, and the air seemed to breathe very easily. They listened to the talk around them, and laughter. With senses sharpened by deprivation, they smelled food, and the pleasant yeastiness of the Guinness Brewery, and the fertile wet scent of the river.

“You were born to be shot, Conn,” Michael Collins said. “They’ll never hang you.”

“I’m through with it, Mick,” Conn said. “I’ve no heart for it anymore.”

“You swore an oath, Conn. Just like I did. We’d not rest until Ireland was free.”

Conn shrugged.

“I’m not the same man,” he said.

Collins looked at him thoughtfully. His round, smooth face showed nothing.

“It wasn’t the jail,” Collins said after a moment.

Conn shrugged.

“It’s the woman,” Collins said.

“You know about her?”

“It’s my profession.”

“Doesn’t matter what it is, Mick. I’m through. I have no more heart for causes.”

Collins nodded.

“Amazing,” Collins said. “You are one of the hardest men I ever knew. In a fight. Facing death.”

Facing death . Conn smiled to himself. Collins’s rhetorical flourishes would have seemed laboriously stilted in most men. In Collins it was so much a part of who he was that it seemed normal speech.

“You’d go up against anyone,” Collins went on. “One man or ten. But one woman” — Collins shook his head — “she broke you.”

“She betrayed me.”

They were silent.

“Thanks for getting me out,” Conn said.

“I like you, Conn. Or I used to. But we got you out because it was good for Ireland that you escape. The only person arrested for Bloody Sunday. In their strongest jail. It weakens them, Conn. That’s the point.”

“There’ll be reprisal,” Conn said. “Somebody’ll hang for my freedom.”

“And we’ll have another martyr. It’s not an adventure, Conn. It’s a war.”

“Well, it’s neither one for me, Mick. I’m out of it.”

“Then go away, Conn. Go far. South Africa, Australia, America. It won’t help us if they catch you. It’ll help us if you disappear.”

“I don’t want to stay here,” Conn said.

“Good. A lot of our boys don’t like quitters much.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Conn said.

“Nothing matters, does it?”

“No.”

“I’ll arrange it,” Collins said. “Where do you want to go?”

Conn had never thought of where to go. He’d only thought of leaving.

“The United States,” Conn said. “I’ll go to Boston.”

Collins grinned suddenly.

“Fancy that,” Collins said.