The City Under Siege (Stefan Gillespie), page 5
‘I want to get back to it, though. That’s where my heart is.’
The young man stepped closer, smiling more broadly. Mac Liammóir wanted to step back, but he was wedged against the bar. He thought Narayan was going to make a pass, there and then. He couldn’t get away. He glanced at his watch. He was usually better with words, much better, but he felt he was going to be reduced to something like, Good God, is that the time already?
Narayan said nothing. The Irishman began to waffle.
‘You knew Eric Lake, anyway? He was a very old friend. I hadn’t seen him in years. He was a very kind man, kind to me … but you knew him too.’
‘Not well. He helped once … with a job. Front of house. It meant a lot.’
The words were pointed, as if they connected to Mac Liammóir.
‘I think we were meant to meet again, Mr Mac Liammóir. I had no idea I would see you today. But I have thought about you. The idea of coming to Ireland, you see, that’s the thing. The idea of working with you again. So, when I saw you, I was more than surprised. I was delighted. If I hadn’t gone, it wouldn’t have happened … Things are destined sometimes, don’t you think?’
Mac Liammóir didn’t think so at all. He was more uncomfortable than ever. And something in Vikram Narayan’s voice reminded him of what he had seen in his face before. A kind of desperation. His eyes were fixed, unwavering.
‘I think I can be honest with you. I need help. To get out of London. That’s what’s in my head.’ He reached forward and touched the actor’s arm. ‘I’m sure all sorts of things are in my head, seeing you again … all sorts.’
Jesus Christ! Mac Liammóir barely stopped himself saying the words.
‘I have some money,’ continued the young man, changing his tone suddenly. ‘Enough to get to Ireland, maybe enough to keep me a while. But I need the papers to travel. I need a job to go to if I’m to stay. And we’re old friends, aren’t we? We’ve worked together. You see why I was thinking of you. And of course, the opportunity of working at the Gate with you … wonderful.’
The Irishman could hear an emptiness in those last words. Narayan’s face was blank. The words meant nothing. All that was there, behind the smile, was the desperation. He didn’t appear to be drunk. For a moment Mac Liammóir wondered if he’d been taking drugs. He was sweating profusely.
‘You will help me, won’t you?’ he spoke quietly, but it was a plea, deep and troubling. He whispered, ‘I have a room we can go to … if you want to go.’
‘I don’t, Mr Narayan,’ said Mac Liammóir. He tried to sound kind.
The young Indian reached into his pocket. He took out a business card.
‘Take this, please.’
The actor took the card.
‘My address. I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing. We should approach this professionally, of course we should. Please … if I am too eager … forgive me.’
‘Vikram, I can’t take you into the company just like that. I hardly know you. We met for a few days, five years ago. We’re a small company …’ The actor trailed off. He could hardly tell the man there were no circumstances on earth in which he could offer him a job, even if there was a job. ‘Impossible.’
The young man shook his head. He spoke more softly.
‘It’s not safe for me here. Something happened … Ireland would be safe.’
Mac Liammóir said nothing, because the words meant nothing.
‘It’s the same for all of us who are working for Indian independence. I have, I always have. I told you, in Egypt. We talked about Irish freedom, Indian freedom. Do you remember? Ireland showed the way. We all look to Ireland.’
‘I see.’ The actor said something because he felt he must. He remembered no such conversation, but it could have happened. It was the kind of conversation he might have had. It was a conversation he had had with others.
Vikram Narayan moved closer, almost whispering now.
‘If you could offer me a job, then I could get into Ireland. I need the papers, that’s all. You shouldn’t believe what you hear about India. There are those of us who don’t want Britain to win this war. We feel like you. We know the words. We hold the thought.’ He smiled, as if he knew he was saying what Mac Liammóir would want him to say. ‘England’s difficulty is our opportunity too. Aren’t we all fighting in the same cause, in Ireland and India?’
Micheál Mac Liammóir had no ready answer to this unexpected appeal to his Republican instincts. It wasn’t long ago that he might have echoed the Indian’s words with enthusiasm. There was a cause that India and Ireland shared. There was a fight for freedom in the face of the British Empire that Ireland had not fully won, and India had still to win at all. But the war that was happening now made for less easy conclusions. His antipathy towards Britain had to be put beside his hatred of the darkness that was sweeping Europe. He could have that conversation, as people across Ireland did, and find himself in conflict with himself, but he didn’t want it now, here. And he didn’t believe Vikram Narayan wanted it either. These were words meant to impress him or put pressure on him. He could feel it. They were spoken with the intensity that was driving the young man’s voice. But they carried no conviction. Mac Liammóir wanted to get away. Narayan could see it.
‘You should help me. You have to help me.’
‘Mr Narayan, please …’
The young Indian’s tone changed.
‘I don’t care what I do. I need to get away. Do you understand?’ There was a quiet aggression in the voice. ‘I think you owe me that.’
‘Owe you?’ The actor frowned. ‘Dear boy, what do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I don’t think I do. But I do think I’ve had enough. A brief encounter in Cairo that memory tells me probably didn’t even happen … is hardly a debt.’
Narayan’s face came closer.
‘How does being queer go down in Ireland, Mr Mac Liammóir? It doesn’t go down well here, but with all that Irish holiness, what would they make of you, if they knew what you got up to? How about a story like that? I could say a lot that would make the newspapers sit up. I wouldn’t stop at Cairo. Papers don’t care if it’s true. What would Ireland think of the squalid old man you are?’
Micheál Mac Liammóir stared in disbelief. This had come from nowhere.
And then he laughed.
‘You think I’m a candidate for blackmail?’
‘Every queer’s a candidate for blackmail. I could do it.’
‘My dear boy, you’re right to say this isn’t a topic much talked about after Mass of a Sunday in Ireland. And you might think that Ireland, of all the places on God’s Holy Earth, would be the last to give a man like me protection. But you’d be wrong. Ireland is a land of glorious hypocrisy, and if I made a paragraph in the News of the World, the whole island would pretend it was never there. There may be a couple of deaf old ladies in Cahirciveen and Malin Head who are unaware of my sexual predilections, but that’s about the extent of it. Perhaps you missed the conversation with the military policeman just now, but on Eireann’s sacred shores, I really am a Very Important Poof.’
It seemed that abruptly all the energy had drained out of Vikram Narayan. But Mac Liammóir could see there were, surprisingly, tears in his eyes. At that moment the maître d’, who had watched for the last few minutes, approached.
‘Is there a problem, Mr Mac Liammóir?’
‘No, not at all. I think Mr Narayan is leaving.’
The young Indian looked deflated, beaten. He glanced nervously at the maître d’, as if he was a new kind of threat. He turned quickly and went, pushing past people as he did.
‘Do you know him?’ The actor looked at the maître d’.
‘He doesn’t come in often. I don’t think he has the money. Rather down on his luck. I’m sorry if he upset you, sir, but I’m sure he meant no harm.’
The maître d’ walked away. Mac Liammóir was less sure Vikram Narayan meant no harm. He finished his drink, collected his coat, and left.
Walking back towards his hotel in the blackout, Micheál Mac Liammóir was still troubled by the face of the young Indian. It pushed aside his awareness of the dull thud of explosions. They were a long way off. Along the river, the maître d’ had said. Only a few days in London had made that seem ordinary. The sense of desperation he had seen in Vikram Narayan’s face, even at a first glance, across the coffin at Kensal Green, would not go away. Whatever was wrong went deep. It was not idle, and whatever anger the actor felt himself about the attempt to blackmail him into helping the young man, he felt something else too. There was no reason why he should feel sorry for Narayan after what had happened, yet he did. Something made him think he should have tried to help. It was an uneasy feeling. It was the kind of thing you might feel for a stray dog that snapped at you in the street. What could he do? Why should he bother? But the tense, hopeless face remained in his head when those last angry, mad words were already fading. He put his hand in his pocket and found the business card. It was bent and dog-eared. It read: Vikram Narayan, Actor, Flat 6, 24A Greek Street. Mac Liammóir shook his head. There was something almost pitiful about the printed declaration. The man was afraid of something. And there was a connection, however slight. It meant almost nothing, but perhaps it was wrong to turn aside on the road. He had five pounds in his wallet. If he could help in no other way, he could give him that. He was very near Greek Street. It would take only minutes.
Micheál Mac Liammóir reached the door at 24A Greek Street, sandwiched between an Italian restaurant and a delicatessen. There was a list of names and some bell pushes. Narayan’s name was there, but when he pressed the bell, he knew nothing was happening at the other end. Probably none of them worked. A man cycled past, an air raid warden in a tin hat.
‘The front door’ll be open. You won’t get nowhere pressing those!’
The man disappeared into the darkness.
Mac Liammóir opened the door. It swung back to reveal a corridor and some stairs. There was a faint light from the landing above. It didn’t seem the best idea to be here, but he had made his decision. For whatever motive, a conscience he had no reason to salve needed salving. He walked up the stairs, looking at the door numbers. A second flight of stairs took him to the top of the house. There was only one door: Flat 6. It was ajar, and the room exuded a warm, orange glow. Narayan was home. Mac Liammóir wished he wasn’t. He could have stuffed the money under the door. But he would do what he had come to do. He knocked on the open door. There was no answer. He pushed the door and looked into a small, cluttered room, lit by a bedside lamp. There was an armchair, a table, a chest of drawers, a bed in one corner. The blackout blinds were closed. There was another door across the room. If Narayan was in the other room, maybe that would do as well as being out. He would leave the money on the table and scoot. He took the five-pound note from his wallet. He laid it down. It was as he looked up that he saw the bed in the corner. And the body of Vikram Narayan stretched across it. He saw the blood everywhere on Vikram’s clothes and on the sheets. The young Indian was dead. There was so much blood Mac Liammóir could taste the iron in the air.
5
West End Central
Inspector Stefan Gillespie sat at a table in the window of the Lyons Corner House at Piccadilly Circus, looking down at London going to work. The night had been quiet in the West End and he had slept well enough in the small attic room at the top of the offices of the Irish High Commission, across the road in Regent Street. No one lived at the High Commission, but for two months now, either side of Christmas, Stefan had shuttled back and forth between there and the Department of External Affairs in Dublin, carrying the briefcases that were the diplomatic bag. A train of Irish and British diplomats, politicians, businessmen and Army Intelligence officers followed the same route. He knew many of them now, British as well as Irish. Sometimes they spoke on the mail boat or the train, sometimes there was merely a nod, often there was nothing. He knew those whose journeys were public property and those whose travel arrangements led them into the offices of the British Army and British Intelligence – the men who weren’t meant to be noticed at all. Irish neutrality was a business that showed itself, clear and transparent, above the waterline, in all its necessary dealings with the British, but what mattered was the invisible iceberg beneath the surface. In many ways Stefan’s work as a courier was about what could be seen and defended, even if some of what he carried might not have been viewed positively in Berlin. There the conviction that Ireland was a constant thorn in the side of the British war effort was an article of faith.
Stefan found the job tedious and repetitive. It meant a lot of time doing nothing except sit on boats and trains, but if it was undemanding, it kept him out of Special Branch. He didn’t mind that his time wasn’t spent spying on other Irishmen and cataloguing dissent. He was used to London now. He knew the routines of the shelters and the Underground. He knew its atmosphere, intense and resigned, slow, yet full of a strange energy. He didn’t dislike being there. He found the anonymity of the city an easy thing.
It was still early, just after eight o’clock. There was a newspaper in front of him, but he wasn’t reading it. There was a break ahead, when he got back to Ireland: two days at home in Wicklow, with his young son, Tom, and his parents. He would take the mail boat that night. He looked at his watch. Shortly he would walk up to Charing Cross Road to find a book to take back for Tom.
He smiled. He knew he had to do better with the book than his effort at Christmas. It was the price of being at home so little. The Beano Book had not been unwelcome. It lasted for Christmas Day and it provided a series of bad jokes to repeat for several days more. But he had lost his sense of what Tom read, even what he thought. He had seen the book next to Tom’s bed was a translation of The Iliad, from the library in Baltinglass. It was something he had never read. Tom would be twelve before long, and in the last year, without Stefan seeing it, he had changed. He had grown quickly into someone Stefan didn’t know as well as he had. Being away so much it felt as if it had happened abruptly, when it really hadn’t at all.
‘Gillespie!’
Stefan looked up to see the High Commissioner, John Dulanty.
‘Miss Foye said you were here.’
Dulanty pulled back a chair and sat down. He had just arrived from his commute into London from a quiet house in the suburbs. He travelled into Waterloo every weekday, like any Londoner, and he was as unnoticeable as anyone else on the Southern Railway trains through Wimbledon and Clapham Junction. Stefan was barely ten years younger than the High Commissioner, but Dulanty’s balding head made him look older. His voice gave little indication of his Irishness. He had been born in Liverpool; he grew up in Manchester. He was one of a cohort of British civil servants and diplomats with Irish parents, who had left the service of Britain to work for the Irish state when it came into existence. His loyalty to his country now did not disguise the fact that the skin he inhabited seemed, at times, as English as Irish. In the midst of London’s war especially, he was as much a participant as an observer. He took out a cigarette. The Nippy, the waitress, in crisp black and white, hovered.
‘Just a cup of tea.’
The waitress disappeared.
‘I had a message from Scotland Yard when I got in. One of the assistant commissioners. I don’t know quite what to make of it. He didn’t know much himself. It was something he picked up, that he heard, that could become … I don’t know if embarrassing is the word … but awkward. As I say, I don’t know exactly what’s happened. I imagine you know who Micheál Mac Liammóir is?’
‘Yes, of course. I know him … well, I’ve met him.’
‘That might be helpful. I suppose, if you know him … you’ll know that he is a man with … with some less than normal social … when I say—’
Stefan smiled. ‘He’s queer. I’d say we can take that for granted, sir.’
Dulanty frowned. It was what he meant but he didn’t like it said. The waitress brought the tea. The High Commissioner waited as she walked away.
‘So, Mac Liammóir has been arrested. I don’t know if arrested is the right word, but he’s in custody or he’s being questioned. He was in some club in Soho.’ The High Commissioner said ‘club’ with an expression of distaste. He glanced round and lowered his voice. ‘That’s the gist of it. That’s all the Assistant Commissioner knew. Something happened between Mac Liammóir and … some chap … and the long and the short is that someone – I assume this man – is dead.’
Stefan Gillespie found it hard not to smile, listening to Dulanty’s delivery of a narrative he did not relish talking about, but those last words were serious.
‘Dead?’
‘Yes. It seems Mac Liammóir is … a witness … perhaps a suspect.’
‘Well, I find suspect very hard to believe, sir.’
The High Commissioner shrugged. He stubbed out his cigarette.
‘It appears Mr Mac Liammóir was over here for a funeral. I have had no request for consular help, but he may need it. I hope this is a mistake of some kind, but I’d like to know what’s happening. He is … a prominent figure at home – and to some extent here. It is a private visit, but he does … Well, with the Gate Theatre, as a director, an actor, he has represented Ireland all over the world. He is much admired. If he is involved in something … squalid … it’s not what we want splashed all over the newspapers. And if it’s more serious than that, it is something that Dev won’t …’ Dulanty shook his head. ‘He will go berserk.’
Stefan said nothing. He was a policeman. If there was a dead man somewhere, whatever the circumstances, his first thought was not what the Prime Minister of Ireland might object to in the newspapers.
‘We need to find out what is happening, Inspector. Do you see?’
‘Do you know where he is, Mr Dulanty?’
‘A police station … West End Central.’
‘I can’t just walk in there and ask what’s going on, sir.’
