The City of Shadows. Michael Russell

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      5. Clanbrassil Street

      The next morning Stefan Gillespie walked along Nassau Street, still aching from the attentions of Seán Óg Moran, to the telephone kiosks in Grafton Street. The city centre was quiet; it was Sunday and still early. He got through to the number in Rathgar that Hannah Rosen had given him. A man answered. It was an elderly voice, cautiously polite; it would be her father. When he gave his name as Detective Sergeant Gillespie, he could feel the coldness at the other end. It was the palpable wish that whatever was going on simply wasn’t going on. Stefan doubted that Hannah would have told her father very much of the previous day’s events; it felt like even the little she had said had been too much. When Hannah came to the phone, he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t pleased to hear her voice. There was a slight awkwardness as the conversation began. He asked her how she was. It wasn’t an unreasonable question after everything that had happened. Her answer sounded a lot more brusque than he either expected or wanted.

      ‘I’m fine. Have you found anything out?’

      ‘Not about Susan.’

      ‘When are you going to talk to Hugo Keller?’

      ‘I’m working on it.’

      ‘What does that mean?’ There was a hint of exasperation already. She wanted results and it felt like he was fobbing her off. He was. He didn’t have any information about her friend, and after the Shelbourne Hotel and the visit from Jimmy Lynch last night, his head was full of things he couldn’t even tell her, let alone explain. He couldn’t explain them to himself yet.

      ‘I wanted to see the letters, that’s all. Susan’s letters to you. I wondered if you could bring them in to me? I haven’t got that long today –’

      When he had decided to phone her, he had only half worked out why. He did need to see the letters of course, and the train journey to Baltinglass, travelling home to see his son for the day, would be a quiet opportunity to read them. It wasn’t just an excuse to meet her, but it was partly that too.

      ‘I can come into town.’ She wanted him to have the letters; at least it meant something was actually happening. But she also wanted to see him.

      ‘I won’t be here this afternoon. I thought –’

      ‘I can come now. Are you at Pearse Street?’

      ‘No. Maybe I could meet you somewhere.’ He hadn’t planned on going into the station anyway. It was his day off. But after last night he felt that the less anyone, especially Inspector Donaldson, knew about what he was doing, the more likely it was that he would be allowed to do it.

      He left the phone kiosk and carried on up Grafton Street. He turned into the little alleyway that led past the stone arch into St Teresa’s Church. There were a few early mass-goers heading that way. He could read their thoughts as they looked at his bruised face and blackened eyes. He would be better off going in through the arch and getting down on his knees than walking past. He was unaware that the fair-haired man who had been looking at the Christmas display in Switzer’s turned into the alley after him, following him as he walked on to Clarendon Street and Golden Lane, then along Bull Alley, past St Patrick’s Cathedral and into Clanbrassil Street.

      The ancient cathedral was very still. It would be another hour before the great bells started to ring for the Eucharist, calling the scattered remnants of Anglican Dublin to worship in what had once been the public heart of the city. In the new Ireland it was already a forgotten backwater; the power was somewhere else now. It brooded over Dublin like a befuddled, senile uncle whose past life it wasn’t quite decent to talk about. As a child Stefan had lived on the other side of Clanbrassil Street, in the Coombe, before his father’s promotion to inspector brought a move out of the cramped flat to a suburban terrace in Terenure. For four of those years he had gone to the cathedral’s choir school. He had sung in the choir stalls at matins and evensong and the Sunday Eucharist. Matins would be over now. As he glanced across at the great stone tower, he could see the light of the stained-glass windows he had once looked up at, day after day. He heard a snatch of half-remembered music in his head; Stanford’s maybe. ‘To thee all angels cry aloud.’ He walked on towards the noise and bustle of Lower Clanbrassil Street, a narrow, crowded corridor into the city from the suburbs to the south that was always busier on a Sunday than anywhere else in Dublin.

      It was the smell of bread that reminded him how he had walked home each Sunday after the Eucharist with Sam Mortimer, each of them eating a warm bagel from Weinrouk’s bakery. Mr Moiselle had always baked the bread there, but the smell of yeast and baking bread was only the first of the smells in Clanbrassil Street on a Sunday morning. He breathed it in now and other smells followed almost immediately. There was blood from the meat and poultry, slaughtered before dawn, hanging outside Myer Rubinstein’s butcher’s shop; the smell of new milk and sour cream from Jacob Fine’s dairy; through the open door of Doris Waterman’s grocer’s a pungent mix of salami and garlic sausage, salted fish and herrings, spices and pickled cucumbers. He had walked along Clanbrassil Street from time to time since he knew it as a child; as a student at Trinity in the brief, unhappy year he spent there; and as a recruit to the newly formed Garda Síochána soon afterwards, in an unforgiving uniform, to the sound of whistles and laughter from shopkeepers and their customers amused by his youth. But he had always been on the way somewhere else. He had never stopped. Today he did. He stepped into Weinrouk’s bakery, catching the sharp mix of words that was as pungent as Clanbrassil Street’s smells; the familiar voices of Dublin, the thick accents of Poland and Lithuania, and all the overlapping voices in between, loud and laughing and argumentative, peppering the English Dublin had made so distinctively its own with Yiddish.

      The voices felt stranger today than they had when he was a child; then they had been too commonplace to be remarkable. Then the Yiddish simply sounded like another kind of German. His own home was a place where English and German were spoken. His mother had been determined that he should have her language too; she called it hers, even though she had been born in Dublin like him, because words were something precious to her.

      In the crowded bakery he bought a bagel and the loaf of bread that he had often brought home for his German grandmother on those Sunday mornings. He would bring one back to Baltinglass for his mother today. The bagel was warm, as it always had been; he remembered that. At the counter, beside him, were two girls, aged around eight and ten, very neatly dressed, their hair in pigtails. He was surprised that Mr Moiselle spoke to them in German, not very good German it had to be said, though it may have been better Yiddish. СКАЧАТЬ