Shannon (38 page)

In parallel with this business conduct, the young ex-soldier had grown quieter. The Accountant discovered a possible reason: Mr. Vincent was inclined to travel on weekends— mostly to New York and Chicago. When he returned from these trips he seemed close to beatific in mood, and the pulp-fiction side of the Accountant's mind wondered what Vincent was doing on his travels that made him so happy.

He also asked himself why Vincent was dressing so beautifully, why
he had no need of girls, and why his good moods now lasted almost the entire span of time between trips. Where was all this money coming from to pay for his now luxurious life? But he never asked a question, never raised the subject with anyone, least of all Mr. Vincent himself.

By now, Vincent Patrick Ryan had begun to educate himself impressively. He took myriad correspondence courses, he learned to speak French, he studied the history and geography of his native Ireland and his adopted America, and he read about animals and wildlife.

If observed independently, he appeared a quiet and studious man who went to an accountant's office most days of the week, used the Boston library service extensively, traveled first-class on trains, and troubled few. His taste for the good life had about it no hint of the banality often seen in evil men who want the best.

As the Accountant said, he was a model ex-soldier and a perfect veteran. “He didn't come back from the war like a zombie, giving everybody the creeps.”

This Accountant and his co-religionists— who were these men, these conspirators? Whence did they derive the moral energy, the philosophy, and the sheer permission to initiate and then enact this plot?

Precedent encouraged them. Their church had never hesitated to protect itself against its enemies. And these men belonged to confraternities or committees that vouched for their intensity of loyal and devotional belief.

Lay crusaders have always been easy to find in the Catholic Church; they bail out errant priests and bishops. These individuals in Boston prided themselves on their decency, their honorability toward parents, wives, children, neighbors, and business associates. They would have laid down their lives for their church— as had many before them all over the western world.

Admittedly, their plot represented an extreme case. Typically they were called upon to help with money or buildings, arrange for an alcoholic priest to be dried out and his debts paid, or some other stray difficulty resolved. In this case, the very seriousness of the situation drove them.

Allegations of a criminal nature against their cardinal had come from a man whose statements would be believed: He was a priest, a hero. This
called for a strengthening of attitude, all the more so since they had volunteered to themselves and no others for the task. That was how they found the moral energy— precedent for action in a time of danger to the Catholic Church.

Their philosophy dominated their lives: God and Country. That philosophy defined all such Catholic men, whatever the country. They covered for themselves and they covered for their priests— often, as in this case, without the clergy even knowing it.

If asked to summarize their philosophy in a word— and some of them would already have thought about it— those five plotting men would have said,
Honor.
This probably meant two things to them: the honor that is the principle of behaving with integrity, and the honor of serving their church.

As to the permission they gave themselves, the permission to organize the taking of a human life? Their church railed against the death penalty. Human life being God's finest creation, said their pope, must remain the most sacred entity in the universe. But they could invoke a different principle to derive permission for their conspiracy.

In this their Irish blood helped. Catholicism's detractors complain of double standards. So do critics of all faith-based religions, and nothing raises louder howls than a preacher of moral probity being caught in any kind of immoral activity.

The Irish, however, have the philosophical and emotional equipment to deal with this double standard; they are magnificently capable of holding diametrically opposing beliefs with equal sincerity. On the one hand they will abhor the taking of human life— and with the other hand they'll kill to keep an acre of land.

Once Robert's pen had first squeezed out the sentence about Belleau Wood and Hell, he began to write more freely. For a day or two or three he staggered a little, stumbled a bit, halted, started again, stopped. Bit by bit, though, first with single sentences and then with whole paragraphs at a time, his daily output increased. On some days he wrote nothing; other days a great deal came forth, and those were the efforts that induced afternoon silences and long, deep, and immobile sleep at night. When he came downstairs each day with the pages he had written,
she repeated the gesture of her hand on his arm. When she withdrew, he continued to feel her touch and later would lay his own hand there, not so much to emulate as to recall and relive. And the physical contact generated an echo— he shaved off his beard.

After that first day she didn't read his words— and told him that she wouldn't.

“Let me wait until you're finished,” she said. “And I think that maybe you'll need to read everything first.”

Archbishop Sevovicz rattled on his motorbike across the roads of the south. A bizarre, awkward creature in his cap and goggles, knees everywhere, he felt charmed by the similarities to rural Poland. He stopped many times, to chat with farmers, to look at cattle, and to ask directions.

All inquiries gave him the same one-word answer, which agreed with the only information that he had brought with him. He framed his questions to establish the most significant place on the Shannon and was pleased that he always received the answer he wanted— Limerick. Now he felt better.

This didn't minimize his problem: He had no clue as to where Robert might be by now. The young man had sailed in May and landed in June; perhaps if Sevovicz could find a bishop or riverside priest, it would be a man to whom he had written. That was his best— his only— hope. But he knew from his map that any dip into his network wouldn't work until he reached a parish— or diocese— whose pastures touched the river.

If only he'd known how difficult this focus made his task. No more than a handful of clergy had become aware of Robert's presence in Ireland. The priest in Tarbert knew, because the O'Sullivans had confirmed that Robert had arrived. After Limerick, the church connections took Robert away from the river— to the nuns in Portroe and to Father Reddan, some miles inland in Lorrha.

Thereafter, Robert had met no further priests in the network. Father Dillon in Drumsna hadn't even been watching out for him, and nobody in the entire country could have put Robert in Ellie's house. Nobody knew Robert's connection to an Irish nurse who had been in the American army during the war because she had never spoken of him; some aspects of the war had been just too painful.

Added to these problems, Sevovicz couldn't easily understand what the people were saying to him. In the town of Croom, on the road between Cork and Limerick, he stopped to find a meal. A restaurant on the main street suggested quality because it bore the name
THE CRITERION.

Inside, nobody else had come to dine. Sevovicz asked for a menu and with some back-and-forth chat established that the woman who attended him had no written bill of fare.

“It's stages in a play,” he heard the woman say.

“Yes,” said Sevovicz, “I understand the reference,” though he did not. And as he sat at his table, he reflected how cultivated Ireland must be that a woman in a small-town restaurant should liken her methods to the theater. Wrong: The woman had said,
It changes every day.

She stood there as he released himself from the leather gauntlets and hauled the cap and goggles from his head. In the grimy face his smile came out as white as a bathing beauty's. He eased his stiff limbs and looked up pleasantly as she said, “Bacon or beef?”

But he thought she said,
Aching, your feet?
so he said, “No, they're all right, thank you.”

The woman looked at him peculiarly and said, “Is it, like, you'd like both?”

And he thought she said,
Did you bring the bike on the boat? so
he said, “No, I got it in your city of Cork, I'm enjoying it.”

At which she, thinking that he had had bacon, meaning ham, with beef, on the same plate in Cork city, supplied him with precisely that.

Well,
he thought to himself,
the Germans also serve strange meals.

When he reached the city of Limerick, the worst of the civil war altercations had passed. Not wishing to draw attention to his own anxieties— but with ghosts walking over his grave— he asked a passing man, “Does anything interesting happen here?”

“Only a war,” said the man.

“Were people killed?”

“Oh, yeh. That kinda thing happens all right in a war.”

“Many?” Sevovicz could feel the alarm in his head under his cap.

“Men, mostly,” said the passerby. “About forty of ‘em.”

“Do you happen to know if any of them were strangers?”

“Ah, yeh.”

“From where did these strangers come?”

“Oh, there was fellas in here from twenty and thirty miles away.”

“Where does the bishop live?”

“Which one? We've a few to offer you.”

“The Catholic bishop.”

Sevovicz roared off to the address and found a house that he thought inadequate and not sufficiently imposing for a Prince of the Church; he certainly wouldn't have lived in it.

Nobody answered the doorbell or his poundings on the knocker. A neighbor appeared— the customary inevitability— and offered help.

“This is the bishop's house?” Sevovicz barked.

The neighbor agreed— but Bishop Hallinan was away and would be until the end of August.

Sevovicz sat on the saddle of his motorbike and didn't know what to do next. He hadn't even allowed himself to think the other unthinkables.

No inquiry took place on RMS
Celtic,
no call of
Man Overboard!—
nothing. The incident had happened too fast, and Mr. Vincent's bulk had blocked any possible casual view. He worked his eyes and ears energetically but found no indication that anybody on board had missed the man with whom— as he thought of it— he had dispensed. For the rest of the voyage he read on deck during the fine days, dined alone, stayed calm.

Vincent Patrick Ryan disembarked in Liverpool. From there he immediately took a steamer to Dublin, where a hackney car driver with a black horse and a long whip took him to the Gresham Hotel. All traces of Vincent Ryan's Ireland had long quit his persona— he looked and sounded thoroughly American.

In Dublin he acquired maps; he said he was researching his mother's family, the Shannons. Within a day or so he let it be known that he had money to burn. In a bar named— what else?— Ryan's, he stood rounds of drink every night and talked learnedly about the Shannon family, of whom he knew nothing and cared less.

One evening the barman had a quiet word.

“Watch out for the roll.”

Vincent Patrick Ryan raised an eyebrow.

“There's characters around here,” said the barman, leaning forward. “The sight of a wad of money, they're like a dog after a rabbit.”

Vincent Patrick Ryan looked at him. Had somebody threatened something?

The barman said, “Well, no facts, like. But I'm here thirty years.”

To which Vincent Patrick Ryan offered up his own fact, that he was an ex-marine who had fought in France and who knew how to kill a man with a chop to the throat.

The barman stood up from his confidential huddle. “Jayze, I'd salute you myself if I knew how.” He chuckled. “Once that word gets out … “

Vincent Patrick Ryan told him that he was letting the other drinkers see money because he wanted to hire a reliable guide who would help him to find his mother's family roots. But he knew perfectly well that his mother had died in Ballinagore of a slow and rotten cancer, and he knew too that he still could not risk bringing that memory too much to mind.

A guide appeared fast, a small jaunty fellow, a petty thief named Tommy Nolan, known as Squirt, and they agreed to terms.

The barman said, “Watch out. That fella'd steal the coal off a hot fire.”

On the train from Dublin to Limerick, Vincent Patrick Ryan asked, “If I stepped from a boat near the mouth of the Shannon, where would I begin to search?”

Squirt said, “Mr. Vincent, we'll get a map in Limerick.” In Limerick, Mr. Vincent also bought two bicycles, and they rode like a master and servant to Tarbert.

En route, waves of emotional pain swept through Vincent Ryan. So many of the fields, so many of the houses, so many things he saw reminded him of Ballinagore. For this he had not planned; these memories he had not anticipated. Once again he felt small and ugly and sore and uncertain and disliked. He knew that such feelings cut deep and lingered long.

A
s the narrative of Belleau Wood unfolded from him, Robert Shannon discovered two things about himself. First he found that he wished to avoid the flavor and direction of all “war memoirs” and make it as personal to himself as possible. In this he knew without asking that he had an ally in Nurse Kennedy.