Hours of Gladness by Thomas Fleming Page B

1916, the gun and the gun’s best friend, death.
    What should a man with a belly full of Sten-gun scars do about this discovery? Moira knew the answer. Walk. Tell the truth and stop the killing. But Moira did not understand Deirdre. His dear Deirdre of the Sorrows. It was she and her heroic lineage of IRA heroes who had seduced Richard O’Gorman, son of an English mother and a neutralist father, into the patriot game.
    Since 1972, he had persisted in returning to Deirdre again and again for expiation and forgiveness. She was the only fragment of meaning he had left, his only link with mythical, mystical Ireland, the Kathleen Mavourneen of his student days. Perhaps he confessed his infidelities to her to avoid thinking about the other things on his conscience. The shopgirls blinded by the bombs on Drumlin Road. The informers kneecapped with Black & Decker drills.
    O’Gorman remembered the chief of staff weeping, almost hysterical, in 1969, when he was told that they had shot two rural policeman, the first of hundreds. “What will happen to their wives and children?” he’d cried. That was the moment when Black Dick O’Gorman had decided the Englishman (as they secretly called him) was not tough enough to be chief of staff of the Provisional IRA. After all, what had he done besides spend eight
years in a British jug for getting caught stealing guns from a military school? He had changed his name to the Gaelic spelling and learned their mother tongue to pass the time behind bars. But he still spoke Gaelic with an English accent.
    At the next meeting of the council, Black Dick had made his move (after killing a bottle of Jameson to steady his nerves). He had proposed Joe Cahill, a man who had actually seen some fighting in Belfast, as chief of staff. But the vote had gone humiliatingly against him. The Englishman swiftly concluded he must never show emotion again—above all to “the Politician”—the nickname he had instantly fastened on Dick O’Gorman, his enemy unto death.
    â€œHey, come on, where’s the stoof?” muttered Billy Kilroy, his cup empty once more.
    O’Gorman refilled it again, resenting the way this little Bogside twit talked to him.
    They told him at headquarters to treat Billy like a wired can of sodium chlorate, the marvelously potent explosive the Russians had once shipped them from Prague. “Tip him the wrong way and he could go off in your face,” Joe Cahill had warned his old friend.
    Bad nerves were one thing. Billy’s obnoxious assumption of superiority was another matter. Had they sent him along to mind the Politician the way the Russians used to send keepers when anyone about whom they had the slightest doubt went abroad? That would be a hell of a thing. Black Dick O’Gorman, fifty-four-year-old veteran of the first Belfast offensive, former member of the Irish Revolutionary Army Council (he was ousted by the chief of staff the day after the 1972 truce blew up). A man of his distinction guarded by a violent child like Billy Kilroy? Could the chief stoop that low in his determination to destroy him?
    It was hardly the same war in Belfast these days. So many of the old faces were gone, caught by Protestant
death squads in their houses or cars or walking home from a pub. The Prods had learned to imitate the IRA’s tactics with incredible skill and savagery. Not really surprising. They were Irish too.
    â€œHow we gawn to get the money?” Billy muttered.
    â€œCocaine,” O’Gorman said. “But we won’t have to touch it. The Americans are going to handle it for us. The Cubans have got it all lined up. All we’ve got to do is stand around and look heroic for the sods.”
    â€œDidn’t know they snorted mooch in Booston,” Kilroy said. For him, like many Irish his age, the United States and Boston were synonymous.
    â€œWe’re not going anywhere near Boston,” O’Gorman snapped.