The Irishman had a curious expression on his face now, which seemed to Benedikt to be compounded of conflicting emotions, and was altogether incomprehensible to him. But his mouth stayed closed and the silence between them lengthened.
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The American stirred. “You could try giving him your word, David. That you’ll play straight.”
“Word of an Englishman?”
“Just your word. No generalisations—you’ve made your point there, I guess.” The American drew a slow breath. “Hell, man—he may have something which you can play your ‘Great Game’ with.
But it’s his skin that could end up nailed to the wall.”
Audley looked down his nose at the American. “I said there was no record. He said there was, not I.”
“So he doesn’t know you. Him and two billion others.”
Audley thought for a moment. “Very well . . . For what it’s worth, Mr Smith ... I haven’t met you today. I have no memory of you.
Your name— your face—will never be identified by me. You do not exist . . . You have my word on that.” He looked to Benedikt.
“Captain Schneider?”
Benedikt stiffened. “My word is as Dr Audley’s.”
The American looked at Mr Smith. “If the Captain’s word is good enough for David, it’s good enough for me, Jim.” Then he smiled.
“So who the hell is Michael Kelly, then?”
The Irishman looked at all of them in turn. “Who is Michael Kelly?
And you with your great machines that can count the nine billion names of God Himself? He’s nobody, that’s who he is ... He’s John Doe, and William Rowe . . . and William Smith and Wilhelm Schmidt, who never did any harm to anyone—that was all his own harm, and not the harm others gave him to do.” The Irishman spread his glance between them. “He was a British soldier, for his dummy1
sins—his father’s sins—” the glance fixed momentarily on Benedikt “—and probably killed a few Germans in his time, that he never set eyes on at all.”
“We know that.”
“You do? And he was a Bradford taxi-driver after that— you’ll know that, too? And no one looked twice at him, because no one ever looks twice at a taxi-driver, providing he’s there on time and doesn’t over-charge—eh?”
“We know that, too.”
“So you do ... Michael Kelly—John Doe, William Rowe, William Smith, Wilhelm Smith, Wilhelm Kelly, William Kelly, Aloysius Kelly—”
“Aloysius Kelly?”
“A common name. Two common names— Aloysius and Kelly . . .
Though maybe Aloysius is not so common hereabouts. But—”
“Aloysius Kelly.” Audley repeated the name quickly, as though he’d only just heard it the second before. “But he’s dead—” He looked at the American.
“Dead—so he is!” agreed the Irishman. “Dead and gone these six years—seven years?”
“Four years,” the American corrected him.
“Four years, is it?” The Irishman accepted the correction. “But you’re right—it was seven years they were after him, but it’s only four years since they caught up with him—you have the right of it as always, Howard. But dead and gone—four years, or seven years, or seventy years, it’s all the same: dead and gone with all dummy1
that was locked up in his head. And there are those that sleep a lot sounder for that, by God!”
Benedikt looked at Audley. “Aloysius . . . Kelly?”
“Yes.” Audley didn’t return the look. “What is Michael Kelly’s connection with him?”
“Ah . . . now that machine of yours is good, but not good enough—
eh?” The black-brown eyes dismissed the Kommissar as well as the British computer’s memory-bank. “The best connection of all, he had—the one that’s thicker than water, through the sister-son, which is one that counted strong from the old days.”
“Hell!” The swarthy American shared his surprise with Audley.
“He had no next-of-kin, damn it—”
“There now!” Pure satisfaction peeled off the veneer of the Englishness in the man’s voice. “You have to go back . . . and you have to have the connections to get the sense of it, which your man prying wouldn’t take from it in a month of Sundays! For there was an age-gap you wouldn’t credit, between the one of them marrying young, and the other marrying late—and the scandal of the first one, that had to marry, that they always like to forget so they had the chance to ... And it was a Kelly marrying a Kelly, that was no relation at all—and a difference of opinion between the families as well...”
Benedikt gave up trying to disentangle that convoluted relationship. Michael Kelly’s father had served with the British Army, and that might have made for enmity. But he wasn’t sure which generation the man was talking about.
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“What has Michael Kelly go to do with Aloysius Kelly?” The edge of anger in Audley’s voice indicated that he had the same problem, and was cutting through it.
“They grew up together—I’m trying to tell you, Dr Audley. The same church and the same school, and houses in adjoining streets.
And they kissed the same girls down by the river, and put their hands where they shouldn’t under the same skirts . . . Or, perhaps Michael didn’t, because he was the good one, that did as he was told—and enlisted in the British Army, like his father before him . . . Not like Aloysius—he was the clever one—and the bad one, to your way of thinking, Dr Audley.”
“The bad one?” Benedikt was tired of the nuances of their fools’
quarrels, which evidently encompassed Ireland’s own enmities as well as those he more or less understood.
“His father was a Republican. They say he was one of those that lay in wait for Michael Collins.” The Irishman’s mouth twitched.
“Michael’s was a Free Stater. And he wasn’t ashamed of wearing his medal ribbons—the DCM among them—the old man wasn’t.
Out of their frame beside the fireplace, for all to see.”
Mil Eliot zu Ruhm und Sieg, thought Benedikt: like the Elector of Hanover, the King of England had scattered his battle honours far and wide in the days of empire.
“But . . . the two families—it was like there was an armed truce between them, the generation of the Troubles, and the Partition, and the Civil War, because there was blood between them as well as common to them . . . But the boys would have none of that—
they were like brothers in the mischief they got up to between dummy1
them . . . There’s this auntie, blind as a bat and sharp as the razor the barber shaves himself with—she remembers them both . . .
until Aloysius went off to the seminary and Michael went to fight for the English—which was maybe just a little better than being a butcher’s boy, which was all the work he could get when they wouldn’t have him at the garage ... It was always cars he was into, the auntie said: it was a driver he wanted to be for the English, but his father said it was a gunner he must be, because it was only the presence of the guns on the battlefield that turned mere fisticuffs into proper warfare—” The Irishman looked around him quizzically “—which is all these things are, I suppose, if you think about it—just bloody great guns on wheels, with an engine bolted to them . . . Anyway, that’s when the two boys split up—” He slapped his hand on the Tiger “—and went their own ways—and very different ways, by God!”