Beauchamp heated coffee in a pot over the fire before pouring two cups. She placed one on the table in front of Ryan. It tasted stale and bitter, but he did not grimace.
The interior of the cottage was not dissimilar to the one in which Elouan Groix had died, the home Célestin Lainé had abandoned. The kitchen served as a living area with its sink and fireplace. One of the two doors stood ajar, and Ryan saw a neatly made bed, and shelves stacked with books. The kitchen too housed full bookcases, four of them. On the table were several notebooks, jotters, loose sheets of paper. They carried looping scripts, arranged in rows, verses in a language Ryan did not recognise.
“I still write,” Beauchamp said, taking a chair opposite Ryan. “No one wants to publish me these days, but still I write because I must.”
“Poetry?” Ryan asked.
“Yes, mostly, and essays, and stories. I used to write novels, but I don’t have the will anymore.”
“In Breton?”
“Ouais,” she said, lapsing into French. “It’s a beautiful language, lyrical, like music. My work does not translate well into English. It doesn’t have the rhythm, the melody of Breton. Breton is more like the Cornish language, and shares much with your Irish. Tell me, how is your Irish?”
“I only remember a few words from school,” Ryan said.
She gave a sad smile and lit a cigarette. “You don’t speak your own language? You prefer to speak the words of your oppressor? Don’t you see the tragedy of this?”
“I never had the desire to learn.”
She let out a lungful of air and smoke, disappointment wheezing from her. “So go on and ask your questions. I will answer if I can.”
“How close are you to Otto Skorzeny?”
“Not very. He assisted me in finding my way to Ireland, along with some other Bretons. Célestin knows him better.”
“Célestin Lainé is a friend of yours?”
Again, that sad smile on her lips. She pulled one knee up almost to her chin, her heel perched on the edge of her seat. “Yes. More than that. Many years ago, we were lovers. Now, I don’t know.”
“Elouan Groix died at Lainé’s home.”
She stared at some distant point, far away from her cottage.
“Poor Elouan. He was a good man. But not a strong man. Not a fighter. How is Célestin? Was he hurt?”
“No,” Ryan said. “Mr. Lainé is staying with Colonel Skorzeny, as far as I know. You knew him in France?”
“Yes. We carried out actions together, back in the thirties.”
“And during the war?”
“He fought. I wrote. Propaganda. Essays, articles, that kind of thing. We distributed pamphlets in the towns and villages.”
“You were a collaborator.”
She turned her gaze on Ryan, her eyes like needles piercing his skin. “Call me that if you must. I considered myself a patriot and a socialist. The Germans promised us our independence, our own state, our own government. We believed them. Perhaps that was naive, but isn’t that the prerogative of the young?”
Beauchamp drew deep on the cigarette, its tip flaring red in the dim cottage. She held the smoke in her chest for a while before letting it leak from her nostrils. Then a cough burst from her. She took a tissue from her pocket, spat in it.
“Tell me,” she said. “Do you know the term: Dweller on the Threshold?”
Ryan shook his head. “No, I don’t.”
“It’s a spiritualist idea. Or occultist, depending on your point of view. It has different meanings to different people. Some consider the Dweller a malevolent spirit that attaches itself to a living person. Others describe it as a past evil, a dark reflection of oneself from a former life. We all have this thing. Something that hides in our shadow, something that shames us.”
She studied the swirling blue patterns of the smoke that hung between them.
“I don’t understand,” Ryan said.
“What I did during the war, the people I allowed to attach themselves to me, the things I wrote. What I allowed myself to be in that life. All these, they are my Dweller on the Threshold.”
“You mean guilt.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “If I had known the truth of it, the Germans who promised us so much, if I’d known what they were doing to those people, the Jews, the Roma, the homosexuals, I would have made a different choice. Do you believe me?”
Ryan did not answer the question. Instead, he asked, “Do you resent Otto Skorzeny?”
“In what way?”
“Any way.”
She laughed. “I resent that he has grown rich and fat. I resent that his love of money and power has drowned the love of his country. I resent that he allows himself to be a show pony for the Irish bourgeoisie. Are those enough ways?”
Ryan leaned forward, his forearms on the table. Pages of poetry rustled beneath his elbows.
“Has anyone ever come to you and asked about Colonel Skorzeny or any of the other people like you?”
She tried to hide it, but there it was, a flicker. Then it was gone.
“People like me?”
“Foreign nationals. Refugees from Europe.”
“You mean Nazis,” she said. “Collaborators.”
“Yes.”
She stubbed out the cigarette. Glowing tobacco embers floated up from the ashtray. “Why do you ask me this?”
“Whoever has been targeting Skorzeny’s associates, your friends—”
“My friends? They are not my—”
“Whatever they are to you, a well-trained and organised team of killers has been targeting them. And they have an informant. Someone with access to Skorzeny’s circle. Someone who has reason to turn against their friends. Someone like you.”
She shook her head, her eyes distant. “This is nonsense. Where do you get this idea? Nonsense.”
Ryan kept his silence, watched her as she turned her gaze to the window overlooking her garden and held it there. He counted the seconds until she said, “I would like you to leave now.”
“Listen to me,” Ryan said. “If you have betrayed Colonel Skorzeny, your only hope is to tell me now. If you have passed on information to others, tell me who they are, and what you told them.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. “I … I didn’t … not me.”
Ryan reached for her, touched her forearm. She recoiled.
“You know what Skorzeny will do to you. Talk to me and I’ll protect you.”
She shook her head and smiled. “Oh, you are a child, aren’t you?”
“On my life, I will—”
Papers scattered as she slapped the tabletop with her palm. “If Otto Skorzeny desires a man’s death, or a woman’s, then death will come. Don’t you know this? He plucked Mussolini from a mountaintop. He fucked Evita right under Perón’s nose. Then he robbed the fascist bastard blind and was thanked for it. This is his power. Not an office, not a title. No law will stop him.”
Beauchamp stood, went to the sink, gripped its edge.
Ryan got to his feet. “Please, you know the alternative. You know what Skorzeny will do to you if he gets to you first. Either you talk to me, or you—”
Her hand dipped behind the gingham curtain that hung below the sink. She turned, a small semi-automatic pistol aimed at Ryan’s chest. A.25 ACP, he thought. Her hand quivered, the pistol jittering in her grasp. The other hand gripped the slide assembly, pulled it back.
Ryan raised his hands as high as his shoulders.
“Does he know about me?” she asked.
“I didn’t give him your name,” Ryan said. “But he knows there’s an informant. I found you without any trouble. He can do the same. And he will. Please, let me protect you.”
Tears sprung from Beauchamp’s wide eyes, heavy, darkening her blouse where they fell from her cheeks. Her breathing quickened with fear, her chest heaving. She wiped at her cheeks, sniffed hard. “They told me I would be safe. They promised me. It was my penance. I told them what they wanted to know so God would forgive me. Has God forgiven me?”