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I agreed with this, and Nora filled our glasses again, and Tom took a harmonica from his pocket and began to play “The Boys From Wexford.” He was short and slender around nineteen or twenty, a few years younger than his sister and graced with the same dark good looks. We spent hours in front of the fire, finishing one jar of whiskey and tapping into a second, talking, singing, trading stories. Dolan had seen fighting, himself, on two occasions, against the Free State forces in 1932 and in the north a few years later. The earlier engagement had been the more heroic. He was only fifteen at the time and he lay in ambush with four lads not much older than himself. They trapped two Free State soldiers on a road near E
“Bloody British jail,” he said. “What fine breakfasts they served us, though! You’d never get a breakfast like that in Ireland. Two slices of gammon and three eggs.”
Nora sang “Da
“Never heard a one of them,” he said.
“They’re folk music,” I explained. “Handed down by the countryfolk from one generation to the next.”
“Then that explains it,” he said.
And midway through the second jar of whiskey I began talking about Turkey and why I had gone there. No one had asked; they had simply taken it for granted that I was a fine boy, that the Turks were heathens, and that any government with an unhealthy interest in me was surely in the wrong and thus merely illustrated the malevolence of officialdom. When I told of the fortune in Armenian gold their eyes went wide, and Nora sighed in amazement and shivered beside me.
“You’ll have your fortune,” Dolan pronounced. “You’ll be wealthy, with acres of land and a house like a castle.”
“I don’t want the money for myself.”
“Are you daft? You-”
I explained about the causes that had need of money. He seemed utterly astonished that I intended to endow, among several other worthy groups, the Irish Republican Army.
“You’ll want to think that over,” he said. “What would those bloody fools do with so much gold? They’d be after blowing up all of Belfast, and all be getting into trouble.”
“They might regain the six counties,” I said.
“Ah,” he sighed, and his eyes took on a faraway look. “You’re a fine boy, Evan. And it is a grand thing you would do.”
I hadn’t pla
When his father dozed off in front of the fire Tom Dolan showed me to my room. It was reached through a trapdoor in the second-floor ceiling. Tom stood on a chair, moved a lever, and a flap dropped from the ceiling, releasing a rope ladder. I followed Tom up the ladder and into a long, narrow room. The ceiling, less than four feet high in the center, sloped to meet the floor on either side. A mattress in the center of the room was piled generously high with quilts and blankets. Tom lit a candle at the side of it and said he hoped I wasn’t the sort who grew nervous in cramped quarters.
“To shut up tight,” he said, “you haul in the ladder and then catch hold of that ring in the panel with the stick. Draw it shut and fasten it, you see, and it ca
“It seems comfortable.”
“Oh, it is. I’d be here myself, and you in my bed, but Da wouldn’t allow it. He says you must be secure if the gardai come.” He hesitated. “How is it in America, Mr. Ta
“Evan.”
“Do they pay good wages there? And are jobs to be had? My brother Jamie’s been after me to come to London, but what I’ve heard of America-”
“Don’t you want to stay in Ireland?”
“She’s the finest country in the world, and the finest people in it. But a man ought to see something of the world. And there’s not such an abundance of things to occupy a younger man in Croom. Unless one’s a priest or a drunkard. I’m nineteen now, and I’ll be out of here before I’m twenty-one, God willing.”
He clambered back down the rope ladder and tossed it up to me, then raised the panel so that I could catch it with the hooked stick. I locked myself in, blew out the candle, and stretched out on my mattress in the darkness. It was still raining, and I could hear the rain on the thatched roof.
I was tired, and my body ached from the cycling. I went through the Hatha Yoga relaxation ritual, relaxing groups of muscles in turn by tightening them and letting them relax all the way. When this was completed I did my deep, measured, breathing exercises. I concentrated on an open white circle on a field of black, picturing this symbol in my mind and thinking of nothing else. After about half an hour I let myself breathe normally, yawned, stretched, and got up from the mattress.
I went downstairs. The turf fire still burned in the hearth. I sat in front of it and let myself think of the gold in Balikesir. My mind was clearer now, and I felt a good deal better physically, with the effects of the whiskey almost completely worn off.
It’s difficult to remember what sleep was like or how I used to feel upon awakening; sensory memory is surprisingly short-lived. I do not believe, though, that sleep (in the days when I slept) ever left me as refreshed as twenty minutes or an hour of relaxation does now.
The gold. Obviously I had gone about things the wrong way. It would now be necessary to approach the whole situation through the back door, so to speak. I would stay in Ireland just long enough for the manhunt for the notorious Evan Michael Ta
Europe was filled with such men. Little men with special schemes and secret dark hungers. And I knew these men. Without asking an eternity of questions, without demanding that I produce a host of documents, they would do what they had to do, slipping me across borders and through cities, easing me into Turkey and out again.
Was it fantastic? Of course. Was it more fantastic than lying on a mattress between the ceiling and the thatched roof of an Irish cottage? No, not really.
I was, I thought, rather like a runaway slave bound for Canada, following the drinking gourd north, stopping at the way stations of the Underground Railway. It could be managed, I realized. It needed pla
I was so lost in pla
“I knew you were down here,” she said. “Is it difficult for you to sleep up there?”
“I wasn’t tired. I hope I didn’t wake you?”