It was time, decided Benedikt, to cut his own losses ruthlessly: both the Englishman and the American clearly knew what the Irishman was talking about, but he did not.
“Who is Aloysius Kelly?” He could have asked the question of any of them, but Audley was the most likely to give a straight answer.
“David?”
“Hah!” It was the Irishman who reacted first. “Now that’s a question that’s been asked a time or two!”
Benedikt waited. The big Englishman wasn’t looking at him, he was staring past him, past the Tiger, at nothing, as though he hadn’t heard. “David?”
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Finally Audley drew a breath. “Who was Aloysius Kelly ...”
“Of course.” They had all said as much: the Englishman and the American had argued over the length of time since that event, and the Irishman had agreed that it was four years since they caught up with him. “Who was he?”
Audley looked at him. Then he looked at the American. “It was in Spain he was first spotted, wasn’t it?” He frowned. “With General O’Duffy’s Blue Shirts on Franco’s side?”
“That’s probably just a story. He would have been absurdly young to have been with them on the Jarama.” The American frowned back at him. “Too young.”
“They say he lied about his age.” The Irishman turned to Benedikt.
“They say he first went into action alongside your General von Thoma’s tanks—they say the General wanted O’Duffy’s men with him because he reckoned they wouldn’t run away.”
“But I don’t go for it.” The American shook his head. “I don’t reckon he was there so early.”
“But he did go straight from the seminary,” countered the Irishman. “And he lied about his age, they say.”
“Maybe. But if he was there he changed sides damn quick, that’s for sure.”
“Ah . . . well, isn’t that the Irish for you!” Mr Smith smiled.
“Going over from the winners to the losers.”
“He went over—”
“And nothing out of character.” The Irishman stuck to his guns.
“He went there as a True Believer, straight from the seminary. And dummy1
he went across like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, when he found another faith he liked better, having seen both sides—”
“No!” The American shook his head again. “ ‘38—late ’38—is the first year I’ll buy. With Frank Ryan in the International Brigade—
and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, not the British one, because it was long after the Cordoba trouble.”
“Ah . . . Frank Ryan! Now he was a lovely man in his way, you know.” The Irishman half-closed his eyes. “A great gentleman, they say . . .”
“And IRA since 1918.” The American looked at Audley.
“And in contact with the Nazis, along with Sean Russell, in ‘41—
they had a radio link going,” said Audley.
“Which was a great waste of time for them both, to be sure,”
murmured the Irishman.
“But not for lack of trying,” said Audley.
“That’s not what I mean, Dr Audley,” replied the Irishman mildly.
“What I mean is that Aloysius Kelly was there beside him—and wasn’t he feeding it all back to Moscow, on his account, eh?”
Audley sniffed abruptly, and turned to Benedikt. “Yes. So there you have it in a nutshell, Captain Schneider. Aloysius Kelly went to Spain and teamed up with Ryan, who was a long-time IRA man
—”
“Who’d fought alongside his father, in the Troubles and the Civil War,” supplemented Mr Smith.
“But before that he’d been talent-scouted by one of their Political dummy1
Commissars,” said the American laconically. “He was ordered to attach himself to Frank Ryan, who was an Irishman first and last—
whoever was England’s enemy was his friend, it didn’t matter who
—”
“Which made him politically unreliable—Frank, I mean—”
“Jim! For God’s sake!”
“I was only explaining—”
Audley cut them both off with a gesture. “What they both mean, Benedikt, is that the IRA originated as the military wing of a nationalist movement—a nationalist sectarian movement. The fashionable idea now is that all twentieth-century guerrilla organizations tick because Marx and Lenin wound them up— that it’s all Marxist-Leninist magic that makes them work. But the truth is that most of them owe damn all to Marx, and even less to Lenin
—the halfways successful ones, anyway . . . from Pancho Villa to Fidel Castro, by way of the Jews and the Algerians and the Cypriots . . . and even the Chinese and Vietnamese too. You could say they owe a lot more to any classical guerrilla leader in history—
to Francis Marion, say—” he pointed at the American “—his
‘Swamp Fox’ in the Carolinas, fighting Cornwallis and Tarleton in the American War of Independence—Marx and Lenin didn’t teach him anything . . . And the IRA has always derived a hundred times more from the United States than from Soviet Russia and Colonel Gaddafi . . . But to do that, it was the end of British colonialism—
not the beginning of the socialist revolution—that they campaigned for. The shift to the left in the IRA didn’t start until the ‘6os.”
“Aha!” Mr Smith gave Audley a shrewd look. “And you not an dummy1
expert on Ireland, eh?” Then he nodded. “Ah—but it was you who said what I had was not worth a ha’penny, wasn’t it! So I can’t say you didn’t tell me.”
“I’m not an expert on Ireland, damn it!” snapped Audley irritably.
“We’re not talking about Ireland—we’re talking about Aloysius Kelly.”
“And the Debreczen meetings.” Almost imperceptibly the American had shifted his position from alongside the Irishman, until now he was nearly facing him. And there was a note in his voice which matched his change of position: the mention of
‘Aloysius Kelly’ had ranged him alongside Audley as an ally, he was no longer a neutral ‘friend’.
“Oh no! Debreczen is something else—” Mr Smith held up his hand, fingers widely spread, as though to ward both men off “—
there’s nothing at all I know about that! It’s none of my business . . . what it was, or when it was. And I’m not having any part of it, either.” He looked around him, and Benedikt couldn’t help following his action. But now there was no one at all in sight: the great hall of tanks was inhabited only by fighting machines.
“Fair enough.” Audley’s flash of irritability was gone. “No one could blame you for that. So ... we’ll just forget Debreczen—it’s something else that never existed. Right? And Aloysius Kelly too!”
Debreczen?
The Debreczen meetings? Benedikt frowned as the meetings fixed Debreczen for him. But what would an Irish veteran of the Spanish Civil War be doing in a nowhere-town in eastern Hungary, which—
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so far as he could recall—lay somewhere just on the better side of the Carpathians, almost equidistant from the borders of Slovakia and Rumania and the Ukraine?
The Irishman looked at Audley wordlessly, and Benedikt could see that Audley friendly frightened him more than Audley hostile. But then, perhaps that was what Audley intended.
“It’s Michael Kelly—our very own Gunner Kelly—who interests us, Mr Smith, you see?” Audley smiled, first at the Irishman, and then transferred the smile to Benedikt for confirmation. “Correct, Captain?”
Benedikt nodded. “That is correct.” If anything, he thought, a smiling Audley was more disturbing.
“And we left him taking the King’s shilling . . . forty years ago? No
—forty-five, it must be . . .” Audley carried the nod back to Mr Smith. “Which is a long time ago, when you think about it.”
A long time, indeed! Benedikt tried, and failed, to conjure up pictures of the Ireland of their time—the two Irish youths, one a butcher’s boy, the other a young seminarian . . . one to become a British soldier, the other to travel a very different road, serving under a newer flag and exchanging the true God for a false one.