“Are you sure it’s him?”
“Of course,” Skorzeny said. “He pissed on himself and ran. He is guilty. And you will make him talk.”
“I’ll try,” Lainé said. “But he’s strong.”
“Even the strongest man has a breaking point. You will find that point. Good night.”
Lainé watched Skorzeny stride towards the house, the Austrian’s head held high, his shoulders back, his coat-tails billowing behind him. Lainé hated and admired his arrogance in equal measure.
He went back to the outbuilding and found one of the guards giving Foss water. The Norwegian pulled his head away from the cup.
“Célestin,” he said. “Please, Célestin.”
Lainé ignored him as he washed the penknife in the bucket of water that sat on the ground. He scraped the blade on the bucket’s lip, charred flesh falling away.
“Célestin, help. Help. My friend. Help.”
Lainé rinsed the secateurs clean of Foss’s blood. He gathered the tools and returned them to the leather bag, then extinguished the blowtorch’s flame.
“Help, Célestin. I talk to no one. Tell him. Célestin.”
Lainé set the blowtorch on a shelf and carried his bag to the door.
“Célestin, please.”
He walked from the light to the darkness, back to the house. The kitchen stood dark and empty. He lifted a small plate from the drainer on his way to the cellar. He emerged a few minutes later with a 195 °Charmes-Chambertin under his arm. He carried the wine, the plate and his bag upstairs to his small room.
The puppy pawed at Lainé’s shins when he entered. It had messed in the corner, but he didn’t mind the smell. It would do until morning. He set the plate on the floor, then placed the piece of schnitzel he had saved from dinner upon it. The puppy sniffed and licked the meat.
Lainé used the corkscrew he kept in the top drawer of his bedside locker to open the bottle. Perhaps he should have let it breathe, but thirst insisted that he drink now. As he did so, he noticed the puppy struggling with the pork, the piece too large for it.
He reached down, lifted the schnitzel, bit off a piece of grey meat and breadcrumb, and chewed. When the meat had turned to a warm mush, he spat it onto his fingers and lowered it to the puppy.
Lainé smiled as it ate.
He hardly thought of Hakon Foss at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Ryan checked the time as he entered his hotel room. Half past one in the morning. He didn’t undress, just removed his tie and lay down on the bed.
Weiss had reapplied the blindfold, guided Ryan outside and into the van. They had driven for at least forty minutes, but Ryan had felt his weight shift from side to side with constant turns, so he guessed the garage to which they’d brought him was much closer to the city centre.
When the van stopped, the blindfold was removed. Weiss crouched beside Ryan.
“Remember what we agreed, Albert. You help me, I’ll help you.”
Ryan did not reply. They left him in an alley off Grafton Street, a few minutes’ walk from Buswells.
The night porter opened the locked doors of the hotel for him. Ryan gave him the room number, and the porter fetched the key from behind the desk.
“Rough night, was it?” the porter asked.
Now Ryan lay in the dark, his head throbbing, the room swaying around him in sickly waves. He tried to think only of Celia, but sleep crept up on him like a thief, and he dreamed of children and the flies on their dead lips.
Bathed and shaved, but weary — he had been woken by the light from his window not long after seven — Ryan walked the paths of St. Stephen’s Green, thinking. He found a quiet spot, a bench shaded by trees, overlooking the pond and the ducks swimming there.
Weiss had let him keep the photographs. He studied them now. The men in the group portrait — were any of them part of Colonel John Carter’s team? Ryan looked at each man in turn, committing their faces to his memory. The photograph was marked June 1943 on the back. Carter, all of them, would be twenty years older than in this picture.
He had spent the morning turning it over in his mind. How to find one man who could be hiding anywhere in the entire country?
Carter had left the military two years ago, Weiss said. He had married a woman from Liverpool, fathered a boy, but the mother and child had perished in a car accident. The last twenty years of his duty had been as part of the Special Air Service, the most secretive branch of the British Army. Any attempt to trace him through his service record would be futile.
But Weiss had dropped a thread for Ryan, something to tug at. The Isreali had made it appear incidental, a throw away comment, so that it would plant a seed in Ryan’s mind. But Ryan knew it had been deliberate. When he drove to Otto Skorzeny’s country home this evening, he would see whether or not the thread led to the destination he imagined.
“Albert.”
Celia’s voice startled him, first in the fright it lit in him, then the pleasure it brought. He looked up, saw her approach from the western end of the park, dressed in a manner that would have seemed businesslike on any other woman. She had been placed in one of the nearby government offices while she awaited a new foreign posting. Practically a secretary, she’d said, and deathly dull.
Ryan tucked the photographs into his pocket and got to his feet. Celia stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, her hand on his arm for balance, warm and delicate.
“You were looking terribly thoughtful,” she said.
“Was I?”
“What were you thinking about?”
Ryan smiled. “You.”
Celia blushed.
She ordered eggs Benedict. When the waiter reminded her that the Shelbourne Hotel’s breakfast service ended at ten o’clock, Celia pouted.
The waiter crumbled. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “And for you, sir?”
Ryan ordered the salmon, and the waiter left.
She sipped her gin and tonic. He took a mouthful of Guinness.
Celia asked, “Really, what were you thinking about in the park?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Work, that’s all.”
“You looked troubled.”
Ryan couldn’t hold her gaze. He studied the fibres of the tablecloth.
“Tell me,” she said.
“I don’t like the job I’m doing.”
She laughed. “Nobody likes their job. Apart from me, but I’m an exception. Everybody hates getting up in the morning and going to work.”
“I don’t mean it that way,” Ryan said. “I can’t talk about it.”
“Not even to me?”
“The job I’ve been ordered to do. It’s wrong.”
“How?”
“I can’t say any more.”
She reached out and placed her hand on top of his. The slenderness of her fingers made them appear brittle, fragile things. He turned his palm upwards, let her fingers slip between his.
“If it’s in service of your country, how can it be wrong?” she asked.
Ryan met her eyes. “You’re not that naive.”
“No, I suppose not. If you really can’t bear it, then tell them no, you won’t do it.”
“I have no choice. Not now. It’s gone too far.”
“Albert, stop talking in riddles.”
He ran his thumb across her fingernails, felt the smooth polish, the sharp edges.
“Yesterday, I watched a woman commit suicide.”
Celia’s fingers left his. Her hands retreated to her lap. She sat back.
“Where?”
“The other side of Swords,” Ryan said. “In her home. She did it out of fear.”
“Fear of who? You?”
“I tell myself no, not of me, but the people I’m working for. But then I remember, if I work for them, I am one of them.”