Kaddish in Dublin imm-3 Page 31

  Minogue shrugged.

  “I don’t know. But the reasons I stay at it are different from the reasons I joined up. I was obliged to give up being an iijit a number of years ago… and I’m very glad of getting the chance, I can tell you.”

  Fine smiled briefly and took up the pace again.

  “Well, there’s a bit more to this place here than meets the eye,” said Fine as he looked around the bog. He stopped and wiped drizzle off his forehead, and pointed toward what Minogue guessed was Kippure Mountain, hidden in the cloud.

  “I used to come up here for years. That was before they put the television mast up there and then the Army to guard it. You can’t be walking up there now because you’d be up for trespassing in a security zone. How would it look if I was up in court in front of myself one fine day, charged with trespass?”

  “I’d hope you’d be lenient on yourself,” said Minogue. He felt the rain plaster his hair to his forehead.

  “I still come up here the odd time,” Fine continued as he stared up into the clouds where Kippure was shrouded. “There’s something here for us Jews, you see. Did you know?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “The story has always affected me more than others I spoke to about it. That comes of being a poet in my spare time, you understand… An Irishman, a Dublinman, I believe, went to Spain some time in the seventeenth century and brought himself home a nice Spanish wife. They lived somewhere near Dublin, I can’t find out where. Every year the wife would go missing for a day or two, off on her own. During her lifetime nobody knew what she was at or where she went or why, but it went on year after year. She travelled alone, up into the mountains. Oddly enough, she was never harassed here, and you’d know from your history that the O’Tooles and the O’Byrnes didn’t care a damn for English rule in the country and did what they could until after the ‘98 Rebellion, pretty well… She came back safe and sound every year after the day’s absence. I suspect that her husband must have known what she was about.”

  “The Wicklowmen are a tough crowd, this is true,” Minogue agreed.

  The bog road where Kathleen was waiting for them was part of the Military Road which had been built with the aim of moving troops quickly and safely into the mountains of Wicklow to quell rebels and their families in the wake of the 1798 Rebellion.

  “Anyway. This woman came up here every year. After she died, it was found out that she came up here to Kippure on the exact day when our Day of Atonement fell.”

  He looked balefully at Minogue.

  “Yom Kippur,” Minogue murmured. “Kippure.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m astounded. I never imagined…”

  “Hardly anyone knows that,” Fine said, beginning his walk again.

  “We don’t know her name but her life reminds us of Ruth and the whole history of the Diaspora. The woman was a Marrano: that’s the Spanish for ‘pig’. Do I need to remind you of the prohibition against pork? Marranos were those who survived the Inquisition only by renouncing their faith. The other alternative was to get burned at the stake.”

  Burned, Minogue’s thoughts raced. Kelly in the car. For renouncing? Opus Dei had been founded in Spain and it had flourished under Franco. What did it mean? Was this what history was? Fine had spoken without irony when he uttered the word marrano. The facts were simple, the events past and unreachable. Why then did Minogue feel so stricken? Of course Billy Fine would be alive to the connection, this odd echo through time.

  “Apparently people liked this woman very much, and they named the mountain after her,” said Fine quietly, picking his way around a turf-cut already filling with water.

  “That was a terrible thing that she should have to…”

  “Worse has happened,” said Fine simply. “And we’re still here. Let’s avoid this survivalist stuff. There’s more to Judaism than what some Austrian crackpot or the Spanish Inquisition tried to do.”

  The two men were now in sight of the car. Minogue’s mind groped for the connection between Paul Fine and the woman who had come up here every year of her exile, centuries before. He wanted to go to Burke’s Residence and tell him that there could be no excuse, that people like Gibney would always follow because of the way the Church throttled Irish minds. But no: Burke and Heher and the rest of them would simply ask him for proof of causation… direct causes… necessary and sufficient cause. They’d tie Minogue up with sophistry.

  “Who’s in the car?”

  “Kathleen, my wife.”

  Fine turned and took a look at where Kippure Mountain should be.

  “Rosalie’s at home, packing. We’re off in the morning to London for a few days. We’ll stay with David and give him a rest from looking down people’s gobs to make a living. Then we’ll be off to Jerusalem.”

  “For a while, is it?”

  “A nice ambiguous question from a nice ambiguous Garda,” Fine smiled slowly. “We’ll stay a couple of weeks but then we’ll be back.”

  Minogue nodded. “That’s great,” he said.

  “I thought about it a lot. I don’t think I could keep quiet about the distaste I have for the way Israeli politics are going at the moment. It’s a very different country from what it was before. I don’t do very well with extremists: that may be a Dubliner’s trademark, that. As well as that, I think I might make an injudicious remark there a bit too often. Johnny Cohen says I’m not religious enough to ignore things, but I know he’s codding me. Then I was thinking about those Opus Dei people. There are extremists everywhere, aren’t there? It’s that simple.”

  “I wouldn’t be so quick to acquit certain institutions here,” said Minogue.

  “You’re a tough nut but you are an insider, you see.”

  “They’ve done nothing right for the people,” said Minogue. “Excepting for the odd priest, the rest of them have been sitting on us for too long.”

  “I believe Gorman. That may shock you,” said Fine.

  “It does.”

  “He was just a kind of an icon for them, as I see it. These people really wanted to install some kind of a government that’d suit their brand of Irish: Catholic, Nationalist, Conservative. Gorman’s no Peron: he was the one they chose to push for, and I don’t think he understood how far they were prepared to go. I don’t believe he would have thought of murder for a moment.”

  “Don’t you think he must have known, have felt some inkling?”

  “I don’t. Gorman wanted power. He wanted it enough so that he paid no attention to events that were happening. He wanted to believe that things were unfolding naturally, and that he was the man to deliver the country. A man with a mission, was Gorman. He saw what his ambition permitted him to see. I’ve met hundreds of people like him in court. Tell me, how many do you think would have rallied to Gorman if he had made his break at the Ard Fheis?”

  Minogue thought of Kilmartin’s anger, the widespread grumbling about leadership, the simple solutions.

  “I don’t know. There’s nobody admitting to even knowing the man now, of course. Not one member of the Dail or Senate,” he said.

  “I expected as much. An Opus Dei member has testified that Gibney argued with poor Kelly a few weeks back. And that was how Kelly knew of the plan to bring down the government, I expect.”

  “It was bred into Gibney to be ruthless, that’s what I keep thinking,” said Minogue. “And he had any amount of help he wanted, it seems. Our fella, Morrissey, actually fed him a telephone bug for Kelly’s home phone.”

  “I’m a Jew, remember. I’m not supposed to be privy to the depths of the Irish Catholic Nationalist mind and what it can hold. What about the others in this group?”

  “Well,” Minogue began, “it may well prove that everything leads back to Gibney. Morrissey is in more serious trouble than the others: he’s an accessory because he concealed knowledge of a crime. I maintain he abetted it. Gibney even got Morrissey to phone him if he heard anything about a body being washed up on the beaches. Morrissey heard i
t on the South Dublin Garda frequency first thing on Monday morning, and he admits to phoning Gibney. Gibney decided at some point he’d have to kill Brian Kelly, too. Best we estimate now is that he got into Kelly’s house and killed him there. The day your son was found.”

  “Thus the peculiar timing of this fake call from the Palestinian outfit to the newspaper.”

  “Gibney wanted to buy time as well as dirty up the motive. The Ard Fheis was only a week away then. There was the chance that your son would not be found at all-that’s why Gibney went to the trouble of putting him in the sea, I think.”

  Fine’s eyes wandered past Minogue and slipped out of focus.

  “Yes,” Minogue went on, “we have yet to get anything definitive from Gibney’s cohorts and it may be that he didn’t disclose to them what he was up to. It looks like he found some pretext to lure Paul out to Killiney. He might have used Brian Kelly’s name to set it up. Wily, organized-I think he had them all mesmerized. Leadership is an odd business. But Gibney’s associates are beginning to let slip that Gibney was obsessed with the way the country was being governed. Half of it is hindsight, I’m sure, patching up recollections to fit what has transpired. It’s possible that Gibney dithered over killing Brian Kelly. He may have thought or hoped that Kelly could be frightened off or brought back into the fold…”

  “Had a row with Mr. Kelly prior to murdering him, perhaps?” said Fine. Minogue shrugged.

  “What I still can’t get around is the fact that Gibney had such an effect,” said Fine. “How could he influence educated people to go along with this sort of thing? They were ready, before the weekend, to gun down the union man who’s leading the strike, weren’t they?”

  “That’s what’s coming out, all right,” said Minogue. “They had a plan to cause as much chaos as they needed to.”

  Fine turned up the collar of his anorak.

  “The ground-work was done years ago,” Minogue said. “Not directly, of course. But the whole process took its toll, that’s how Gibney was able to persuade all those people: the fella out in Radio Telifis Eireann to monitor what Paul did on the computer and then wipe it out when we came looking for Paul’s stuff; those civil servants; Gorman, even. They had been readied years ago.”

  “You’re talking about something I can’t comment on, you know,” said Fine. “I know piety and fervour in very different forms when they’re planted on to politics. That’s why I’ll be keeping my comments to myself when we’re in Israel.”

  The drizzle was turning to rain now. Kathleen rubbed the window inside.

  “The charges will stick, you know,” Minogue said. “We’ll get them all on conspiracy, if not accessory to.”

  “It was hardly a conspiracy at all,” said Fine in a resigned tone. “ They were simply afraid of Gibney after a while, by the sound of things. I suppose we have Archbishop Burke to thank for getting to these people before they did worse.”

  “And whoever it was who broke ranks and made that confession,” said Minogue.

  Fine stepped over the ditch and climbed up toward the road. Minogue walked around the driver’s side. The rain was drumming on the roof now.

  “Has the Commissioner kept you up on the evidence as it comes in?”

  “The whole bit,” said Fine. He seemed to Minogue to be concentrating on the rain as it hopped off the roof.

  “Yes. Court martials, the investigation tribunals in the Gardai-I believe the panel appointed by the Civil Service Commission is like the Inquisition all over again. Nobody has asked my opinion on the whole business yet, do you know that? It’s as if they’re going at it so ferociously to prove something.”

  “It may be the guilt. Atonement.”

  Fine took a lingering look back up into the rain and the gloom. Night was coming in with the rain clouds over the bog.

  “For Paul too, for not knowing him as well as I could have. I don’t think he’d like to see us run out of Ireland by this. Do you know what finally decided me, though? I remembered this afternoon. It was something Johnny Cohen said to me afterwards. We all carry a spare yarmulka or two in our fobs at funerals, so as Gentiles can wear them. Johnny was complaining that he had run out of them and he had borrowed every spare one he could find, but that there’d be people in the burial-ground without a covering over them. Catastrophe in Johnny’s mind, of course. There were that many at the funeral. We were very glad of that.”

  Again the image of the funeral circled in Minogue’s head. From a distance he heard his own voice, odd in the gathering, dripping gloom. “Not a part of the world or a season that a man could afford to be without some class of a covering over his head, is it?”

  Minogue opened the door of the Fiat.

  “Hop in there like a good man and introduce yourself. We’ll be down off this place before the night.”

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