The waiter returned, placed a coffee in front of each man, and a plate of pastries at the centre of the table. The confections glistened in the sunlight, red jam and yellow custard set in pastry cases that looked like they might blow away on the breeze. Impelliteri lifted the plate, presented it to Skorzeny.
“No,” he said.
Impelliteri shrugged and took one for himself, mimed ecstasy as he ate.
Skorzeny knocked the table with a knuckle to regain the Italian’s attention. “So you dispute the historical record of Operation Oak, you claim I and many of my Kameraden are liars, that you know better. Why should I care what you believe?”
Impelliteri dabbed pastry crumbs from his lips with a napkin. “You shouldn’t care what I believe. After all, who am I? But I think you might care what the Generalissimo believes. After all, you are a guest in Spain at his indulgence. If he were to discover you to be a fraud, that you had taken his friendship by deceit, then perhaps his indulgence might not stretch so far. Perhaps you would not find this beautiful country so welcoming. Please do try one of these pastries, they’re quite lovely.”
He held the plate up once more, and Skorzeny pushed it away.
“My friend Francisco will not believe such fantasies. He will take the historical record for the truth it is.”
“Historical record,” Impelliteri echoed. “You keep saying these words as if repeating them will make them real. There is no historical record. There is only SS propaganda, and your own bluster.”
Skorzeny stood, his chair screeching on the pavement as it slid back. “I’ve heard enough of this. Do not bother me again.”
He marched towards the hotel, the Mediterranean blue and glassy beyond.
Impelliteri’s voice called after him. “Wait, Colonel Skorzeny. I haven’t told you what I want, yet.”
Skorzeny stopped and turned, already sure in his gut what the Italian wanted.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ryan slept little, the hotel bed feeling too narrow for his frame, too short for his legs. If he wasn’t thinking about Celia and the feel of her lips on his, he was brooding on the dark-haired man and his blade.
He played out scenarios in his mind.
In one, the man did not get the better of him, did not have him on his knees on the piss-soaked floor. Instead, Ryan outmanoeuvred the man, disarmed him, had him quaking and talking, telling Ryan everything he wanted to know.
In another, Celia brought Ryan to the parlour of her boarding house, dismissed Mrs. Highland as if she were a housemaid. And there, on the hard cushions of the settee, Celia kissed him again, this time letting her tongue linger, explore, quick and nimble. And she guided his hands over her body, finding the secret places, warm to his touch.
When he did sleep, he dreamed of her open mouth and the taste of her lipstick, the tobacco and alcohol on her breath. And as he moved against her, she became one of the whores the boys had brought him to visit in Sicily and Egypt, plump and eager, smelling of sweat and strong soap.
And the man watched from the corner, his knife held in his hand.
“She’s very pretty,” he said, the blade held out from his groin, shining and obscene.
Ryan awoke in the greyness of the dawn, the blankets twisted around his ankles. He freed himself and sat up on the edge of the bed, lifted his watch from the bedside locker. Just gone five. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, yawned, tasted the Guinness from the night before.
His stomach grumbled. An hour and a half before they served breakfast. Ninety minutes with nothing but his own thoughts. Exercise was the only answer.
Wearing just his underwear, he stood upright and stretched his arms towards the ceiling, feeling it work the muscles of his back. Then he bent forward, his legs straight, dropping his fingertips towards the floor, down, down, until they touched the carpet’s vulgar pattern.
Ryan lay on the floor, wedged his feet beneath the bed, twined his fingers behind his head, and started counting sit-ups.
The effort cleared the jumble from his mind.
He thought about Otto Skorzeny, once called the most dangerous man in Europe. Now a gentleman farmer. Had the eighteen years between now and the end of the war washed away his sins? True, the respect and admiration other soldiers held him in was deserved to an extent. He was a master tactician, a revolutionary of battle, had changed the way men thought about warfare. But he was also a Nazi. And not some poor man conscripted to that cause by accident of birth. No, he had been a member of the party long before the war, and had volunteered to fight for the Reich, had not been forced into service.
Whatever these killers wanted from Skorzeny, whatever fate awaited him, many would say he had it coming.
Many, but not all.
Ryan remembered the discussions in his father’s shop. As a boy, stacking shelves and sweeping floors for the odd penny his father would allow him, he listened to the men discuss the goings on in Europe. They talked about Chancellor Hitler. Would de Valera — still Taoiseach then, still riding on the back of the revolution — side with Chamberlain? If it came to it, would he ask his fellow Irishmen to fight alongside the British?
Unthinkable, some would say. Old Dev would never sell his people out to the Brits.
But that Hitler, others would say, he’s bad news. No good could come of his shouting and blustering. Someone needs to put some manners on him.
But he’s just a good nationalist, like us, looking out for his own people. Just like old Dev did, like Pearse and Connolly did in 1916.
Not the same, no, not at all. Dev and the rest fought for freedom. That Hitler’s a dictator, pure and simple, and he’s a fascist.
And so the arguments would go on as young Albert Ryan swept the floors and cleaned the windows, and Ryan’s father would keep his counter tidy and say little. Sure, it’s nothing to do with me, he’d say, let them fight it out if they want, just so long as they leave me and mine out of it.
In the end, Ryan’s father had been right. Ireland stayed out of it, after a fashion.
But Ryan did not. He saw what the Nazis had done, the charred remains of the continent they had raped and mutilated. The men, women and children, the human beings, left to wander the roads, everything they owned clutched in their hands or tied to their backs. They spoke of what they’d left behind. Not the possessions, but the bodies. The bodies of those they loved, abandoned to the dogs and the insects.
Ryan still dreamed of them. Not as often as he used to, but sometimes. He thanked God he had not entered the camps. The stories travelled across Europe’s wastelands, about the living skeletons, the mass graves, the bodies stacked high, half burned, half buried.
Men like Skorzeny had done that. Willingly.
And now Ryan was protecting them.
He stopped, his chest pressed to his knees, his breath held tight in his lungs. He had stopped counting, had no idea how many he’d done. No matter. He turned over, his body straight, his hands flat on the floor, and pushed.
Who were the predators who stalked Skorzeny? The man who had humiliated Ryan the night before, was he one of them? Or something other?
The floor rose and fell beneath Ryan, drops of sweat darkening the carpet’s fibres. He relished the sensation of the muscles of his shoulders and flanks taking the strain, the clarity of it. He worked until his body burned, his lungs straining, his mind flitting between a dark-haired man and a red-haired woman, uncertain of whom he feared more.
With his mind focused by the exertion, he returned to the file Haughey had supplied. He read and re-read the minister’s notes, and his own. The same two names snagged his suspicions however hard he tried to broaden his gaze.