Into the square for the last day of September she wrote Home again.
Down in what was referred to as the “garden flat” but was really a basement, Mrs. Wassermann sat in her favorite overstuffed chair, hands folded. There had been a few days she had even spent in bed, but she forced herself up and dressed at a decent hour, mustering what self-regard she had.
For three weeks now, except the times when Carole-anne had insisted, she had not been out of the flat, not on her own. The world beyond the door could be pitiless, unless you were protected by amulet, charm, or spell. It was the way she’d been years ago, just sitting and looking out of her low window upon the feet of passersby. She’d been this way until Mr. Jury had fitted the door with extra locks, “Locks not even a bunch of drunken Irish rebels could kick through.”
The trouble was that he wasn’t here. Oh, she’d not minded when he’d gone out of London other times, for he’d only been away a few days at a time. But this time it had been nearly a month. And he’d gone to Ireland-Northern Ireland, which, as everyone knew, was still a dangerous place to be. He should’ve been back by now.
Mrs. Wassermann sighed and propped her head on her hand, her elbow on the arm of the chair, and watched feet walk by her window.
Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins sat at his desk in New Scotland Yard and looked dejectedly over at the other desk, behind which no one sat. He had lined up his usual anodynes: nose drops, eyedrops, black biscuits, Bromo Seltzer, apricot juice, a few herbs, and Fisherman’s Friends. He looked at all of them without spirit, without interest, without needfulness. He did not feel headachy, croupy, nauseated, muscle-sore, or feverish. That was the trouble; he missed his ailments. He needed them, usually.
One would think it would be a relief, this failure of need. But it wasn’t. It had always been a bit of a lark, mixing up the apricot juice with a tablet of Bromo Seltzer (that cure-all he had found when they’d gone to Baltimore), maybe with a little rue; or tossing back a few pills with the afternoon tea, which he would drink with a black biscuit or two. When he knew Superintendent Jury-his guv’nor-was going to Northern Ireland, Wiggins had made him up a travel packet of small vials with precise “indications” (Wiggins fell quite easily into pharmaceutical jargon).
He had been gone for nearly a month now. When Mr. Jury was sitting over there at the other desk, hands behind his head, watching one or another procedure of Wiggins’s mixing potions, commenting on the vanity of it all, quipping, Wiggins felt it was worth it. But now he felt more like the tree fallen in the forest with no one around to hear.
Was he, then, there?
As if to test out his there-ness, the phone by his hand rang.
Richard Jury! he hoped against hope. But it wasn’t; it was Brian Macalvie.
The next best thing. Wiggins smiled.
Fiona Clingmore sat at her desk, looking at her sponge bag, her Cucumber QuikFix facial, the new mascara wand and eyeliner, sighed, and with her forearm swept them into her desk drawer. Hardly seemed worth it these days.
But to put a good face on it, when Alfred Wiggins came into the office, she picked up her shell comb and ran it through her hair, before using it as an anchor to hold it on one side. She said to Wiggins, looking at the cat, Cyril, sitting and watching the door to the outside corridor, “Cyril does that all the time. He thinks your guv’nor must be going to walk through it any moment now.”
“Maybe he needs the vet,” said Wiggins, having the urge to cheer things down. “Maybe he’s sick.”
Fiona waved a deprecating hand, sweeping away such a suggestion. “Cyril’s not like you. I’ll tell you this, though. He”-and here she bent her head in the direction of the inside door to Chief Superintendent Racer’s office-“hardly knows what to do with himself with Mr. Jury gone. Why, he can walk right past Cyril, here, without so much as a ‘bloody damn’ or trying to kick him or setting those sardine traps. It’s like all the starch’s gone out of him. It’s like when you don’t get any sleep and then you don’t have any dreams, so you go kind of queer all over. Kind of crazy, you know. That’s him. When Mr. Jury’s not here it’s like he”-she nodded again at Racer’s office door-“goes berserk; he doesn’t have anyone to put a lid on him and so he keeps blowing off. You know, kind of like a pressure cooker exploding.” Fiona shook her head and sighed as she went about rubbing some cream into her cuticles.
For the cat Cyril, it was like imagining fish; he could look at the water until a darkness, a blotch, or a shadow in the riverbed slowly surfaced. Even if it wasn’t a fish, even if it was only a bit of paper that had unhooked from a rock, or maybe it would be a fortune cookie or a Christmas cracker, a shoe or a shark.
But the shark was already there, wasn’t he? On the other side of his office door, flapping and splashing, going at Cyril whenever he could, too stupid to be an imagined fish.
Cyril sat still as still water waiting for Him to come through the door. Any moment now. He always did sooner or later, but if Cyril stopped watching, He wouldn’t. He’d get away like a fish’s shadow. Cyril was sure if he put his whole being into watching, and not be distracted by sardines and fax machines, he could open the door and have Him come through it. Just like that.
Presto.
The old priest wrapped his hands around his pint of Guinness as if it were a cross.
“What happened was they picked me up in the Shankill, kidnapped me you could say, if ordering a man t’get into a car at gunpoint is kidnapping. We drove a distance from Belfast. It’s hard to say how far, for I scarcely recognized anything we passed, so dark it was. I’ve never seen a blacker night, dark as devil’s dung. I think where we ended up was Ballykillen, that’s north; I think we were near Craigavon.
“They talked the whole way, as if they were just a bunch of the lads out for a night on the town. There were three of them, a three-man unit-IRA, of course. And then they told me why they’d picked me up; they needed a priest to administer last rites.
I said to them, ‘You could surely of got a priest nearer to wherever it is yer taking me, now, couldn’t you?’ He said, ‘Ye looked good to us, Father.’ I asked, ‘Who’s sick-to-dying they had to scrape a priest off the streets?’ They laughed harder. ‘It’s an execution, Father. We’re about to kill a man.’
“I told them, no, I couldn’t do this, watch a man be murdered.
“ ‘But you won’t have to watch, Father.’
“Finally we stopped in front of this white cottage that in the pitch blackness looked like a moon against the sky. We went in. They’d taken a sledgehammer to the door, which I’d learned was just the IRA’s way of knocking. In the parlor, or what was left of it, for they’d pretty much trashed it, sat a man tied to the chair he was in. I don’t know if I ever saw a more pitiable sight than this fellow asking me to help him and knowing he was going to be executed. Every man there had a machine gun. I asked them what he’d done but they just waved the question away and told me to get on with it. I told this poor devil that only God could help him now and it was better to die absolved of his sins. Those words sounded so empty, what good were they to him? The three of these IRA boyos standing round with their guns. I did what they wanted. They took me back to the car and told me to wait.
“Why didn’t I stay with him? They wouldn’t’ve let me, but still… I would’ve gone to the police, but if I said anything to the police-well, those killers and all the others would still execute victims, but without any priest to offer them absolution. And yet I think there must’ve been something I could do. It was twelve years ago that happened.