Ingrid told me that according to the article, the IAFNI was founded in 1982, supposedly to raise money for the families of Republican prisoners in Northern Ireland. I thought about Uncle Danny’s bucket and Conor’s explanation.
My card was running out, so I thanked Ingrid and she said she would see what else she could find if I wanted to call back in a few days.
I got a coffee, finished it slowly, then bought another phone card and went back to the pay phone. There was now a guy about my age inside and I could just barely make out his words through the glass: “I’m tellin’ ya. I’m tellin’ ya I didn’t get off with her. I swear I didn’t. I missed the last bus, was all, and I slept in a chair.” He stood there for a minute, holding the receiver in his hand, staring at it, and I guessed he’d been hung up on. I knocked on the glass and, dazed, he came out of the phone booth and sunk down onto the low brick wall, his head in his hands.
I squeezed past him into the phone booth. Roly Byrne answered on the first ring. It might have been my imagination, but I thought he was waiting for something.
“It’s Maggie D’arcy,” I said. “William and Gerald Murphy were definitely supporters of the IAFNI. They definitely fundraised for the Provisional IRA. Why would they be interested in Erin?”
“How the fuck did you get all that in the last couple hours?”
“What are you doing about it? What if they tried to recruit her or something and she said no and they were worried she’d tell someone so they”—I couldn’t say it—“did something to her?”
“Jaysus. Look, get off the phone. I’ll meet you in St. Stephen’s Green in an hour. By the famine statues. Okay?”
“Okay. Did you get some of this, too?”
“Not on the phone.” He slammed it down. I stood there for a minute, my heart pounding, listening to the beeping dial tone. The handset was cold on my face. It smelled metallic, faintly like blood.
He was already there when I reached the statues, thin gray figures, their suffering evident even from far away. As I got closer, I could see that one figure was feeding another from a round spoon, filled with rainwater.
Roly Byrne didn’t see me coming along the path but he was alert, checking in all directions, looking suspiciously over his shoulder. I found myself following his lead, pausing and checking to make sure no one was tailing me before I came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Christ!” His hand came up.
“What’s going on?”
“Let’s walk.” He set off at a fast pace, but I matched him step for step, even though his legs were longer than mine. He was breathing hard before I was.
“Right. You can’t be going around asking questions about this.” His eyes were hard, ice blue. I suddenly had a sense of what it would have been like to be on the other side of an interview table from him.
“But what if they know where Erin is? What if they kidnapped her or something? Doesn’t everyone understand that we might not have a lot of time if—”
“Look, I don’t want to sound harsh here, but this is something bigger than your cousin. This is…” He trailed off as a man in a black leather jacket came along the path in front of us.
“What?” I whispered, once the man had passed.
“Politics. You have to let this go for a while.”
I stared at him.
“Well, what else is going on? Did you go down to Glenmalure to talk to Gary Curran?”
“Yes. His mother swears he was there all morning, but I’d say there’s something off about that fella. We’re looking into it. We’ll talk to the young one who made the complaint back when they were at university. You may see something on the telly tonight,” he said. “We want to know if anyone saw her after she came back, if she came back. We’ll be putting up posters and doing some canvassing in Ringsend and around Busáras and Connolly station.”
“Okay, makes sense.” I hesitated for a moment and then I said, “I talked to her friends, the ones who visited back in the summer. They said Erin was trying to talk to them about some riots or something. She seemed frustrated when they weren’t interested.”
“When was this? August?” I nodded. “There were riots for marching season earlier in the summer, up in Belfast. Jaysus. You really think she’d get herself wrapped up in all this shite?”
“I don’t know. What does Detective McNeely think about all this?” I asked him.
“Ah, you can bet she’s as bewildered as I am.”
There was something else there, in his voice, something that made me ask, “You said it’s a long story why she doesn’t like Americans. What is it?”
He hesitated. “Look, Bernie was reared up in Armagh, in the north, right?” he said, and I nodded. “That’s only 120, 130 kilometers from here, but when she was a kid, it might as well have been fucking Vietnam or something, a world away. One of her uncles was interned after a bombing near a police station. I don’t remember when. It was a fucking jungle up there, D’arcy, snipers on street corners, shooting at the RUC on patrol. Loyalists killing people in the night. They brought the British Army in in helicopters. She grew up hating it, came here as soon as she could, joined the Gardaí. But, couple of years ago, one of her brothers got shot at a checkpoint by the Royal Marines. He was nineteen. Her favorite brother. They ambushed him.” He was still whispering.
“So, why does she hate Americans so much? I understand she might hate the British, but…”
His eyes flashed. “She thinks they’re paying for the fucking guns that keep the whole thing going up there? She hates the fucking violence. She hates the killing. We all do.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“I’m sorry too. This shite has my head done in. I’d better get back.”
“But you can’t just let it go,” I said. I could feel the panic starting. “She’s out there and it’s your job to find her.”
“We’re not fucking letting it go. Mind yourself, now. Ring me if anything seems weird to you.”
The summer after Erin’s seventh grade year. We’re walking home from the beach when she starts crying. We’re walking and talking about what we’re going to do over the summer and then suddenly she makes a gasping noise and she’s sobbing. I don’t understand why.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her.
“Nothing.” But the tears are rolling down her face. She’s wiping them away. “I don’t know.”
“Are you okay?” I whisper. You can’t push too hard with Erin. I know this already. If you say the wrong thing, she just … disappears. She shuts down and she’s not there anymore.
She turns away from me, her shoulders heaving and shaking.
I don’t know what to do. I stand there, looking out to make sure no one comes along and sees her. The sun is hot. I can feel a thin layer of sweat on my forehead. Finally, when she doesn’t stop, I go over and put an arm around her. Erin and I used to hug and touch each other all the time. We used to stroke each other’s hair, we used to give each other back scratches. But for the last few years, she’s only touched me once in a while. When I try to touch her hair, she pulls away. I’ve felt the loss of that touch so sharply that it hurts sometimes, a barely healed burn on my skin.