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I staggered to the door, hesitated, tried to catch my breath, failed, and rapped on the door. I heard footsteps, and the door was drawn open. I looked at the little man in the doorway and remembered the Victor McLaglen I had visualized. This man was more a leprechaun, short, gnarled, with piercingly blue eyes.
“P. P. Dolan?”
“I am.”
“Padraic Pearse Dolan?”
He seemed to straighten up. “Himself.”
“You’ve got to help me,” I said. The words flowed in a torrent. “I’m from America, from New York, I’m a member of the Brotherhood-the Irish Republican Brotherhood-and they’re after me. I was in jail. I escaped when we reached Ireland. You have to hide me.” And, gasping for breath, I dug out my passport and handed it to him.
He took it, opened it, looked at it, at me, at it again. “I don’t understand,” he said gently. “The picture’s no likeness of you at all. And it says that your name is…let me see”-he squinted in the half light-“Mustafa Ibn Ali. Did I say that properly?”
Chapter 6
If you’ll come inside and sit by the fire, Mr. Ali,” the little man was saying. “It’s cold outside, and so damp. And would you take a cup of tea, Mr. Ali? Nora, if you would be fixing Mr. Ali a cup of tea. Now, Mr. Ali-”
I had made two mistakes, it seemed. When I changed my summer suit for proper Irish clothing, I had transferred only one passport and the wrong one at that. My own passport remained in my suit. And my suit, so carefully wrapped by the young clerk, had somehow been separated from me. I had carried the parcel into the pub, but I hadn’t had it with me when I left Mulready’s cycle shop. I’d left it either at the pub or with Mulready, suit and passport and all.
“My name’s not Mr. Ali,” I said. “I took his passport by mistake. He’s a Turk. He was my jailer in Turkey. He was taking me back to America when I escaped.”
“You were a prisoner, then?”
“Yes.” His face seemed troubled by this, so I added, “It was political, my imprisonment.”
This eased his mind considerably. Nora, his daughter, came over to us with the tea. She was a slender thing, small-boned, almost dainty, with milk-white skin and glossy black hair and clear blue eyes. “Your tea, Mr. Ali,” she said.
“It’s not his name after all,” her father said. “And what would your name be, sir?”
“Evan Ta
“Ta
I told him a bit of it. He became quite excited at the thought that I was an American member of the Brotherhood and that I had heard of him. “Do they know of me, then, in America?” he mused. “And who would have guessed it?”
But it was Nora who seized on my name. “Evan Ta
“Yes, that’s right-”
“You know him, Nora?”
“If it’s the same,” she said. “And Mr. Ta
He looked wide-eyed at me. “And was it you who wrote that article, Mr. Ta
“It was.”
He took the tea from me. “Nora,” he said, “spill this out. Bring the jar of Power’s. And hurry over to Garrity’s and fetch your brother Tom. I only wish my eldest son could be here, Mr. Ta
“Not in jail, I hope.”
“No, praise God, but working in an office there. For what can a young man do to earn his keep in this godforsaken country? Go quickly, Nora, and bring Tom back with you. And mind who you tell!” He shook his head sadly. “It’s a hell of a thing to say,” he explained, “but there are spies and informers everywhere.”
The four of us, Dolan and Nora and Tom and I, listened to the latest developments in the Evan Ta
It was assumed that I had taken refuge in Limerick. The gardai were presently combing Limerick City, their numbers reinforced by a special detachment of plain-clothes detectives sent up from Dublin, and an arrest would no doubt be made in a matter of hours.
“It looks bad,” I said. “Sooner or later they’ll turn up the suit and spot the passport. Once they trace me to the bicycle shop, Mr. Mulready will be able to tell them that I went to Croom. And if they follow me this far, they’ll be sure to find me.”
“You’re safe here,” Dolan said.
“If the gardai come-”
“This house has been searched before,” Dolan said. He drew himself up very straight. “Many times by the Tans and often enough by the Free State troops during the Civil War. Why, didn’t my father hide half the Limerick Flying Column here? And when Michael Flaherty and the Dwyer boy did for that British lorry outside of Belfast, wasn’t it here that they came? And hid in the upstairs room for three weeks before they got the boat for America. There’s many a man on the run who’s hid in Dolan’s house, and never a one of them that’s been taken. Nora will fix the attic room for you. You’ll be comfortable enough in the bed, and the gardai could search this house ten times over and never set eyes on you.”
“I couldn’t let you take such a risk-”
“Don’t talk nonsense. And don’t be worrying about your suit, either. Most likely it’s still in Mulready’s, waiting for you to come back for it. If you left it there, it’s still there now. And if you left it in the pub, sure they’ll take it to Mulready’s, knowing you’ll have to return to the cycle shop sooner or later. Tom can go for it tomorrow, and you’ll have it in your hands without the gardai ever knowing of it.”
“If they’re already there and see him-”
“Tom will be looking for them, and if they’re there, he will leave without being seen. Don’t bother yourself about it, Mr. Ta
I said I would sooner sit and talk with him. Tom put a few more cakes of turf on the fire, and Nora freshened our drinks. She asked if I had been born in America, and I said I had, and she asked what part of Ireland my parents had lived in.
“Actually,” I admitted, “I’m not Irish.”
“In the Brotherhood and not an Irishman!”
My explanation filled them with wonder. Padraic Pearse Dolan got solemnly to his feet and stood gazing into the fire. “I’ve often said it,” he said. “That men of goodwill throughout the world will rally to our cause, whether or not they be Irish. There are many demonstrations for the restoration of the Six Counties in America, are there not? The young people, the college students, with their marching and their picket signs?”
“But isn’t that mostly for Vietnam?” Nora asked. “And civil rights and the hydrogen bomb?”
“Vietnam, civil rights, bombs, and Ireland-all one and the same,” Dolan said. “It’s that the whole world is Irish in spirit, wouldn’t you say as much, Mr. Ta