Confessional. Part 35

'The only reason I've got this far,' Cussane said calmly.

They went into the living room. He didn't tie them up, but motioned them to sit on the sofa by the fire. He stepped on to the hearth, reached up inside the chimney and found the Walther hanging on its nail that Devlin always kept there for emergencies.

'Keeping you out of temptation, Liam.'

'He knows all my little secrets,' Devlin said to Tanya. 'But then he would. I mean, we've been friends for twenty years now.' The bitterness was there in the voice, the shake of raw anger, and he helped himself to a cigarette from the box on the side table without asking permission and lit it.

Cussane sat some distance away at the dining table and held up the Stechkin. These things make very little sound, old friend. No one knows that better than you. No tricks. No foolish Devlin gallantry. I'd hate to have to kill you.'

He laid the Stechkin on the table and lit a cigarette himself.

'Friend, is it?' Devlin said. 'About as true a friend as you are priest.'

'Friend,' Cussane insisted, 'and I've been a good priest. Ask anyone who knew me on the Falls Road in Belfast in sixty-nine.'

'Fine,' Devlin said. 'Only even an idiot like me can make two and two make four occasionally. Your masters put you in deep. To become a priest was your cover. Would I be right in thinking that you chose that seminary outside Boston for your training because I was English Professor there?'

'Of course. You were an important man in the IRA in those days, Liam. The advantages that the relationship offered for the future were obvious, but friends we became and friends we stayed. You cannot avoid that fact.'

'Sweet Jesus!' Devlin shook his head. 'Who are you, Harry? Who are you really?'

'My father was Sean Kelly.'

Devlin stared at him in astonishment. 'But I knew him well. We served in the Lincpln Washington Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Just a minute. He married a Russian girl he met in Madrid.'

'My mother. My parents returned to Ireland where I was born. My father was hanged in England in nineteen-forty for his part in the IRA bombing campaign of that time. My mother and I lived in Dublin till nineteen-fifty-three, then she took me to Russia.'

Devlin said, 'The KGB must have fastened on you like leeches.'

'Something like that.'

They discovered his special talents,' Tanya put in. 'Murder, for example.'

'No,' Cussane answered mildly. 'When I was first processed by the psychologists, Paul Cherny indicated that my special talent was for the stage.'

'An actor, is it?' Devlin said. 'Well, you're in the right job for it.'

'Not really. No audience, you see.' Cussane concentrated

on Tanya. 'I doubt whether I've killed more than Liam. In what way are we different?'

'He fought for a cause,' she told him pa.s.sionately.

'Exactly. I am a soldier, Tanya. I fight for my country -our country. As a matter of interest, I'm not an officer of the KGB. I am a lieutenant-colonel in Military Intelligence.' He smiled deprecatingly at Devlin. 'They kept promoting me.'

'But the things you've done. The killing,' she said. 'Innocent people.'

'There cannot be innocence in this world, not with Man in it. The Church teaches us that. There is always iniquity in this life - life is unfair. We must deal with the world as it is, not as it might have been.'

'Jesus!' Devlin said. 'One minute you're Cuchulain, the next you're a priest again. Have you any idea who you really are?'

'When I am priest, then priest I am,' Cussane told him. 'There is no avoiding that. The Church would be the first to say it in spite of what I have been. But the other me fights for his country. I have nothing to apologize for. I'm at war.'

'Very convenient,' Devlin said. 'So, the Church gives you your answer or is it the KGB - or is there a difference?'

'Does it matter?'

'd.a.m.n you, Harry, tell me one thing? How did you know we were on to you? How did you know about Tanya? Was it me?' he exploded. 'But how could it have been me?'

'You mean you checked your telephone as usual?' Cussane was at the drinks cabinet now, the Stechkin in his hand. He poured Bushmills into three gla.s.ses, carried them on a tray to the table in front of the sofa, took one and stepped back. 'I was using special equipment up there in the attic of my place. Directional microphone and other stuff. There wasn't much that went on here that I missed.'

Devlin took a deep breath, but when he lifted his gla.s.s, his hand was steady. 'So much for friendship.' He swallowed the whiskey. 'So, what happens now?'

To you?'

'No, to you, you fool. Where do you go, Harry? Back home

to dear old Mother Russia?' He shook his head and turned to Tanya. 'Come to think of it, Russia isn't his home.'

Cussane didn't feel anger then. There was no despair in his heart. All his life, he had played each part that was required of him, cultivated the kind of professional coolness necessary for a well-judged performance. There had been little room for real emotion in his life. Any action, even the good ones, had been simply a reaction to the given situation, an essential part of the performance. Or so he told himself. And yet he truly liked Devlin, always had. And the girl? He looked at Tanya now. He did not want to harm the girl.

Devlin, as if sensing a great deal of this, said softly, 'Where do you run, Harry? Is there anywhere?'

'No,' Harry Cussane said calmly. 'Nowhere to go. No place to hide. For what I have done, your IRA friends would dispose of me without hesitation. Ferguson certainly would not want me alive. Nothing to be gained from that. I would only be a liability.'

'And your own people? Once back in Moscow, it would be the Gulag for sure. At the end of the day, you're a failure and they don't like that.'

'True,' Cussane nodded. 'Except in one respect. They don't even want me back, Liam. They just want me dead. They've already tried. To them also I would only be an embarra.s.sment.'

There was silence at his words, then Tanya said, 'But what happens? What do you do?'

'G.o.d knows,' he said. 'I am a dead man walking, my dear. Liam understands that. He's right. There is no place for me to run. Today, tomorrow, next week. If I stay in Ireland McGuiness and his men will have my head, wouldn't you agree, Liam?'

'True enough.'

Cussane stood up and paced up and down, holding the Stechkin against his knee. He turned to Tanya. 'You think life was cruel to a little girl back there in Drumore in the rain? You know how old I was? Twenty years of age. Life was cruel when they hanged my father. When my mother

agreed to take me back to Russia. When Paul Cherny picked me out at the age of fifteen as a specimen with interesting possibilities for the KGB.' He sat down again. 'If my mother and I had been left alone in Dublin, who knows what might have happened to that one great talent I possessed. The Abbey Theatre, London, the Old Vic, Stratford?' He shrugged. 'Instead...'

Devlin was conscious of a great sadness, forgot for the moment everything else except that, for years, he had liked this man more than most.

'That's life,' he said. 'Always some b.u.g.g.e.r telling you what to do.'

'Living our lives for us, you mean?' Cussane said. 'Schoolteachers, the police, union leaders, politicians, parents?'

'Even priests,' Devlin said gently.

'Yes, I think I see now what the anarchists mean when they say "Shoot an authority figure today".' The evening paper was on a chair with a headline referring to the Pope's visit to England. Cussane picked it up. 'The Pope, for instance.'