The City of Shadows

There was a courtyard with high wooden gates. Across the courtyard was a long, low, factory-like building. The windows were more brightly lit here and where they were open there was steam billowing out into the frosty air. Stefan could hear the sound of women, shouting and laughing. The nun quickened her pace and led him inside. They were in a laundry. Women of all ages were working, some barely in their teens, some in their twenties, others middle-aged and older. They all wore the same grey, smock-like dresses. They were washing, starching, wringing, hanging up clothes, ironing, folding, packing clean linen into wicker baskets. The smell that had seemed like a pleasant childhood memory in the convent’s entrance hall was overwhelming now and almost made him retch. Soap, endless quantities of pungent, fatty soap, mixed with starch and steam and laundry water rank with the human body’s odours. This was not a place many men saw the inside of, but he was a policeman. He knew who these women were. Unwed pregnancy was not on the statute books as a crime in the Free State but every one of them was serving a sentence. As for the babies they’d borne there, those that survived were long gone, sent away for adoption or to industrial schools, with no knowledge of where they came from. He had never been past the hallway of the convent before, but as a guard in uniform he had brought girls here often enough; sometimes from a courtroom, sometimes straight from a police cell, because there was nowhere else to take them.

As he followed the nun the length of the building, he was assailed by whistles and shouted propositions. Black-robed nuns appeared as if from nowhere to discipline the laughing women. By the time he reached the end of the laundry, order had been restored. The nun brought him into an office where the Mother Superior stood, fingering her rosary beads with a ferocity that had nothing whatsoever to do with prayer. Two startlingly large sisters, who wouldn’t have disgraced a rugby front row, stood shoulder to shoulder before a closed door on the far side of the room. Mother Eustacia looked at Detective Sergeant Gillespie with profound irritation.

‘Are you responsible for this?’

‘Responsible for what, Reverend Mother?’

‘I see, you’re a fool as well as an incompetent.’

‘I understand there’s been a mistake.’

‘Yes, a mistake. You do know this woman isn’t pregnant at all?’

He was thrown by this unlikely non-sequitur.

‘The reason she was in custody –’

She cut him off.

‘We haven’t been able to examine her. We did try. I have a nun in the infirmary now as a result of the subsequent assault. However, she seems as aggressively confident about her condition in that respect as she does about everything else. I am, therefore, inclined to believe the woman.’

He was still puzzled. It didn’t make much sense of soliciting a miscarriage from Hugo Keller, let alone getting arrested for doing it.

‘Why did you bring her here, Sergeant?’

‘I didn’t bring her here, Reverend Mother.’

‘I don’t care which clown drove the car! She gave your name.’

‘As far as I know she was brought to the convent by Special Branch. A Sergeant Lynch I think. Or maybe someone else. They’ve got so many incompetent fools there it’s hard to pin them down. Women’s welfare isn’t their usual line of work, although they do specialise in dirty laundry.’

She looked at him, tightening her lips.

‘You’ll keep a civil tongue, Sergeant. Just get her out of here!’

‘Did she tell you who she is?’

‘Yes, Sergeant, she certainly did. And what she is!’

The Mother Superior offered no explanation and he could see that she wasn’t about to enlighten him. She nodded at the two nuns who were standing guard in front of the closed door. One of them opened it. In the small, cell-like room beyond the woman from Keller’s clinic sat on the edge of a table, smoking a cigarette. Her hair was dishevelled. Her clothes were torn in several places. She stood up and walked out into the office. Stefan could see that there was a bruise on her face. As she passed them the guardian nuns, despite their size, looked distinctly uncomfortable. It wasn’t physical fear. It was as if her proximity threatened them in some almost spiritual sense. The woman smiled with the insolent confidence she had shown when he was trying to question her at Pearse Street Garda station.

‘Do you know what she is?’ said the Mother Superior darkly.

‘What … she is?’

‘A Jewess, Sergeant!’

Mother Eustacia spoke the word as if she was still struggling to believe it. Stefan was unsure what would be an appropriate reply. He was mildly surprised; simply because it was information he had no reason to know. He glanced from the Reverend Mother, who was staring at him with wide-eyed indignation, to the woman, who was smiling. She seemed to be enjoying this. The look in her eyes made him want to laugh.

‘Well, in that case it’s even more of a mistake, Reverend Mother.’

The woman moved closer to him, drawing on the cigarette.

‘I’m glad they sent you, Sergeant. I didn’t like the other two.’

‘Did they do that?’

She wasn’t sure what he meant. Then she glanced down at herself, realising what he was looking at. She laughed.

‘Oh no, the sisters tried to give me a vaginal examination.’

The two big nuns gasped and then both crossed themselves. Stefan was startled, not so much by the words as by the matter-of-fact tone. Well, it was no more than a description of what had happened after all. But it wasn’t how a woman should speak, not anywhere, let alone here. The Reverend Mother pinched her lips more tightly.

‘You won’t shock me, young lady. I’ve known too much of the foulness of the human heart to be shocked by anything you can say.’

‘I’m sure. From what I’ve seen, you’ll be quite the expert.’

Mother Eustacia processed ahead of Sergeant Gillespie and the woman, with the small nun on wheels beside her, back through the laundry. Work continued all around as they walked, but the eyes of every one of the grey-clad laundry workers followed the figure of the woman. Her hair was still a mess; her clothes were torn; her face was bruised. But she walked with her head upright, her dark skin still somehow reflecting the warmth of a sun that would never find its way in through these windows. As they approached the door to the courtyard the small nun who had brought Stefan in scurried ahead to unlock it. The Reverend Mother turned to the woman. Her anger and indignation were undiminished. The very way this woman carried herself was another insult. But there was one weapon Mother Eustacia had left that would put her firmly where she belonged. She fixed her eyes on the woman, and with a look of almost infinite compassion she prayed for her.

‘Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness, hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness.’

‘I’m afraid I prefer my darkness to your light.’ The woman looked back at the laundry, at the pasty-faced girls and women, still working, but all watching her so intently. ‘You evil old bitch.’

Mother Eustacia slapped the woman hard across her face, with all the irritation, anger and humiliation she had felt welling up within her. But the woman barely blinked. She laughed as if the Mother Superior had just handed her a victory she hadn’t realised she even wanted. And there wasn’t a split second between that laugh and the sound of her hand striking the Reverend Mother’s face in return, quite as hard and quite as full of anger. There was complete silence in the laundry. No one spoke. Work had stopped. Every eye in the laundry was on Mother Eustacia, though the Reverend Mother seemed unaware of anyone else now. In her long years as the mother of this convent she had slapped many, many women, but no one had ever dared to hit her back. She turned slowly towards Stefan.

‘What are you going to do, Sergeant?’

‘I’m going to do what you told me, Reverend Mother. I’m going to get her out of here. As requested. For the rest, I think I’d call it quits.’

He grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her away. The nun on wheels was holding the door to the courtyard open, bog-eyed and fearful as she still stared at her Mother Superior. No one else moved. Then there was a sound. It was a clap. It was followed by another clap, and then another. Then there were more. The sound of slow clapping, from every girl and woman in the laundry, filled the building. The nuns turned back to their charges, shouting at them to stop. But they kept on. The Reverend Mother walked slowly back towards the office, as if she didn’t hear the noise at all. The women’s clapping grew even louder now. They would suffer for it, of course; but it would be worth it. Nothing would erase this moment.

As Stefan drove out of the convent and the high gates closed behind them, the woman brushed her hair back from her face. She looked at him, smiling, as if this sort of thing happened every day.

‘So, am I under arrest?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I’m glad you know what you’re doing.’

‘What I want to know is what you’re doing.’

‘I’m not sure any more. I thought –’

She stopped. For the first time he felt her mask slipping.

‘Do you know what happened to Hugo Keller?’ asked Stefan.

‘You mean you don’t know?’ She sounded surprised.

‘No.’

‘Those nice guards were going back to Merrion Square with him.’

‘Did they say that?’

‘He did. He was the one giving the instructions.’

Stefan drove on. Dessie always said that when things didn’t make sense, sometimes it was better left that way. It smelt like one of those times.

‘So where are you taking me now, Sergeant?’

‘I need a drink. You too. It’s not every day you’re beaten up by nuns.’

He expected her to bounce back a sarcastic remark; she had before. But she said nothing. She looked straight ahead through the windscreen. Then she put her hands to her face and sobbed, in almost complete silence.

*

Saturday. Dear Tom, Today I’ve been busy doing so many things I’m not sure what they all were. Some days are like that. But Christmas is coming, that’s the main thing. There’s the biggest Christmas tree you ever saw in O’Connell Street. They were there putting the lights and the decorations on. It’ll be something to see I’d say. The windows in Clery’s are full of toys. And boys from St Patrick’s were singing carols in Grafton Street. Tell your grandfather. The day you come up with Opa and Oma we’ll go and see it all. I hope the new calf’s getting better. Don’t worry about her. It’s no more than a bit of scour, and she’ll be tearing about again in no time.

Stefan put his pen down and looked up to see the woman watching him. He hadn’t seen her come into the bar. He had driven her back to her home in Rathgar so that she could repair some of the day’s damage. Now he was waiting in Grace’s, a pub close by. It sat at a busy road junction, south of the Grand Canal that marked the boundary between Dublin’s inner and outer suburbs, between streets where nothing ever grew and avenues wide enough for trees. The avenues of red-brick Victorian terraces fanned out all around Grace’s Corner, quiet and tidy, substantial and well-ordered. There was space here, and there was air, and on clear days, looking to the south and east, the round tops of the Dublin Mountains rose up in a ring, not far away.

The woman smiled. She was herself again. But make-up hadn’t quite covered the bruise on her cheek from the struggle in the convent.

‘You look a long way away.’ She sat down opposite him. There was a glass of light ale waiting for her. She picked it up and drank, still watching.

‘Not that far really, just West Wicklow. I was writing to my son.’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh?’

‘I suppose that’s not what I was expecting from a policeman.’

‘Having children?’

‘No, I meant –’ She laughed. ‘All right it was a silly thing to say.’

He folded the piece of paper in half and put it in his pocket.

‘How old is he?’

‘Four, nearly five. I’m up here and he’s down the country with his grandparents. I try to write something for them to read him most days. It doesn’t amount to much. Still, it makes me look for something in a day that’s worth saying to a child. It’s not always that easy to find.’

‘No. There won’t have been much today.’ She smiled, but behind it he could see the thing he couldn’t get hold of about her. Was it sadness, loss?

‘How often do you see him?’

‘I get down every Sunday I’m not working. It’s the best I can do.’

She wanted to ask more. She wondered why his son didn’t seem to have a mother. At that moment it felt as if they were two people who’d just met, sitting in a pub, starting to ask questions about each other. He wasn’t much older than she was. It felt ordinary in a way that nothing had for a long time. The pub felt ordinary too, in a way that she found reassuring. It was nearly two years since she had sat in Grace’s Lounge with the friends she grew up with, saying goodbye to them. The dark mahogany shone as it had always shone, so did the brass. There was the sound of familiar laughter, the smell of beer and cigarette smoke and furniture polish. The same watercolours of the same racehorses lined the walls; the same prints of the Curragh and Leopardstown, Fairyhouse and Punchestown. She wanted everything else to be the same, everything that couldn’t be. The feeling caught her unawares. And the guard sitting opposite her was unaccountably part of it. She didn’t know why he was so easy to talk to. But it didn’t matter how easy or how hard the conversation was. That wasn’t why she was there.

‘You look better now anyway,’ he smiled.

‘Hannah Rosen. That’s my name.’

‘I’m glad you’ve got one, but it doesn’t tell me much. It doesn’t tell me why you wouldn’t say who you were before. It doesn’t tell me why you solicited a miscarriage when you’re not pregnant. Or why you and Herr Keller were carted off by Special Branch, with him giving them orders. It doesn’t tell me why I don’t know anything about any of this, and you do.’

‘I don’t know much, really. I’m trying to work backwards.’

‘I’m a simple soul, Miss Rosen. Why not start at the beginning?’

She looked at him, hesitant, still not quite sure she could trust him.

‘Whatever it is you wanted from Keller, you didn’t get it, did you?’

She shook her head, watching him before she continued.

‘I’ve been away from Ireland for quite a long time. It’s almost a year and a half. In Palestine, I live there now. I’m probably going to stay there.’

The last words were spoken more reflectively. They weren’t for him at all. Clearly Palestine wasn’t a simple issue for her. But whatever issue it was it couldn’t have much to do with Hugo Keller and the Garda Special Branch.

‘I came back to Ireland for a reason. I came home be-cause –’ She had made her decision now. She liked him. She would trust him. ‘My friend, my oldest friend, Susan Field is – missing. She’s disappeared. She’s been gone for over five months. No one’s heard from her. No one knows where she is.’ She paused. Stefan just nodded, but didn’t say anything. She went on.

‘Susan and I have been friends since we were children. We grew up together in Little Jerusalem, in Lennox Street. We went to school together. We did everything together once. And all the time I’ve been in Palestine we’ve written to each other. A lot – I mean every few weeks. Her letters stopped coming at the end of July. I didn’t think there was anything wrong at first. I knew there was something, well, a problem – we still told each other everything. I thought that must have affected her. I thought she might not want to talk about it for a while. But somewhere I knew that wasn’t true. She would have written. There would have been even more reason to write if she was in trouble, not less. And then I got the letter from Susan’s father.’

Before she had been holding his gaze as she spoke, but now she was looking away from him. She was trying not to show how painful this was.

‘He said she’d disappeared. She’d been missing for almost six weeks then. None of her friends knew anything. The Guards couldn’t find any trace of her. They were still searching. He had to tell me – and he had to ask me –’

She met his eyes again now.

‘He had to ask me if I knew anything. I told him. But it didn’t make any difference. It was as if Susan had just walked out one morning and vanished off the face of the earth. The Guards, well, after all the weeks of looking for her, or supposedly looking for her, all they could come up with was that she’d taken the boat to England, and simply run away.’

‘Is that what Mr Field thinks?’

‘I don’t know. I think now he’s … almost forced himself to believe that. If he doesn’t, then what does he believe? She was twenty-three, Mr Gillespie. She was bright and full of life and independent and utterly bloody-minded. The idea that Susan would ever run away from anything is mad.’

‘You said there was a problem. What was it?’

‘Susan was a student at UCD. She was always very clever. But however clever you are you can get yourself into stupid situations. She had been having an affair with a man at the university. He was a lecturer. It started last year. She went into it with her eyes open. She made a choice.’

‘He was married?’

‘No, he was a priest.’

‘So that was the problem …’

‘It was one problem.’

‘Just tell me about it, Miss Rosen.’ He could see she needed to talk.

‘Well, I suppose … it was all very exhilarating at first. Susan needed that. She was always searching for excitement,’ Hannah smiled fondly. ‘But after a while it started to feel … claustrophobic. They couldn’t go anywhere. They couldn’t be seen together. And then she realised she was pregnant …’

‘That’s where Mr Keller comes in?’

She looked at him, trying to gauge his response, then she nodded.

‘Who else knew she was pregnant?’ he asked.

‘The priest. I don’t know …’

‘What about her parents?’

‘Her mother died five years ago. I’m sure she’d have talked to her if she’d been alive. Mrs Field was the heart of that family. Maybe too much. Susan always said she took the heart with her when she went.’ Hannah stopped, thinking about the past as much as the present. ‘Her father’s never been the same. I suppose he’s turned in on himself. He’s the cantor at the Adelaide Road Synagogue now. That’s his life, all his life. She couldn’t tell him. And her sisters are married. They’ve left Ireland. Things change, don’t they? It’s funny, I was always jealous of how close they all were.’

Stefan let her find her way back to the present before he continued. ‘A boat to England’s a common solution. It happens every day.’

‘Not Susan. And there was already a solution, wasn’t there?’

‘She’d made arrangements with Keller?’

‘It was the priest who knew about him. He did the arranging.’

Stefan couldn’t hide his look of surprise. It seemed to irritate her.

‘I didn’t mean to shock you, Sergeant.’

‘Shock would be overstating it, Miss Rosen.’ He smiled wryly.

‘Anyway, he knew where to go. He told her it was a proper clinic too, with a proper doctor. And he was going to pay for it all, she said.’

‘A gentleman as well as a scholar. It’s not what you’d expect.’

‘I don’t know. How do priests usually deal with these things?’

‘I don’t know either, Miss Rosen. I’m very rarely on my knees.’

‘That’s reassuring at least.’

‘So Susan wrote to you about the abortion?’

‘I had one letter telling me it was happening. Then she wrote to me again, the day before she went to the clinic. That was at the end of July. She was going on the twenty-sixth. I didn’t know it when I got that letter of course, but she disappeared the day after she sent it. And that’s all there is. No one knows where she went. No one’s seen her since.’

Stefan took this in.

‘Did she seem distressed about what was happening?’

‘I don’t think so. And I’d have known, even if she’d been putting on a brave face. It was something she had to do. She wasn’t jumping for joy, Sergeant, but I’d say the strongest feeling she had – was about drawing a line under it.’

Hannah dropped her head as she had done before, when she felt she was talking about Susan’s feelings in a way that didn’t quite fit a conversation with a policeman. Her hair fell forward each time and she brushed it out of her eyes, looking back up at Stefan with a slightly awkward combination of forthrightness and reserve. And each time, as their eyes met again, he was conscious that she was trusting him with her feelings as well as the facts. He somehow knew she didn’t do that easily. It happened of course, when people had no one else to talk to, when they’d bottled things up inside that they couldn’t tell anyone. As a policeman you relied on that sometimes. But this was different. At least he wanted it to be different. The sound of conversation and laughter all around him in Grace’s had faded away completely. Hannah spoke softly, but by now her words were all he heard. And he was conscious that he didn’t want her to stop talking to him.

‘So, do you think this abortion happened?’

‘Why wouldn’t it? She said she was going the next day.’

‘Isn’t it something she might have changed her mind about suddenly?’

She shook her head.

Stefan decided to take that at face value for the time being.

‘What did she tell you about Hugo Keller?’

‘She just knew what he did and that he did it in Merrion Square.’

‘And the priest set it all up?’

‘I told you. He was paying for it.’

‘So who is this priest?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t found him yet.’

He took note of the determination in those words; she would find him.

‘So your friend, who told you everything, didn’t tell you his name?’

‘When it started she almost liked the cloak and dagger element. It was as if she was breaking all the rules at once.’ There was the hint of a smile again, as Hannah thought about the friend she knew so well. Then she shrugged. ‘And she had a genuine desire to protect him. She was in love with him. She wanted to protect herself too.’ Hannah laughed. ‘Susan liked breaking the rules but she hated getting caught. She wouldn’t have called herself a practising Jew, but the idea of what people would say – an affair, with a goy, who was a Roman Catholic priest.’ She stopped. She wanted to keep laughing about her friend’s foibles, but all of a sudden it felt like another way of hiding her fear. Even what she was saying didn’t seem so funny now. ‘It wouldn’t have been nice. We Jews may have been the victims of everyone else’s prejudice, but we can find plenty of our own, Sergeant.’

‘When you contacted Mr Field, what did you tell him?’

‘I told him what she’d said in her letters.’

‘The affair, the abortion, the priest?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he passed the information on to the Guards?’

She nodded, slowly.

‘That couldn’t have been easy for him.’

‘I talked to him last week when I got home. He didn’t want to see me really.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know which was worse, his daughter disappearing, or what he found out about her afterwards, from me.’

‘Isn’t that a bit harsh?’

‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

‘All right, so what happened?’

‘The Guards didn’t come back to him for weeks. He went to Rathmines every day, and every day they said they’d be in touch when they had any information. Only there never was any. In the end they told him they had no reason to suspect foul play. Do you have a manual for those phrases? Anyway, it was the same story as before, there was only one conclusion. Susan couldn’t face him after what had happened. She did what that sort of girl does. She got the boat to England. But they did think, sooner or later, she’d contact him. That sort of girl usually does – eventually.’