The Dead City

Book 9: Stefan Gillespie

by Michael Russell

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Historical Thrillers; Mystery

Synopsis

In this dead city, the vultures are circling...

Berlin 1944. The beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. And the beginning of a dark journey for Garda detective Stefan Gillespie as he makes his way through war-ravaged Europe to the German capital. He carries secret instructions for the Irish ambassador, who is clinging on in the growing chaos - even though it's time to get out.

Bombs fall and bodies fill the streets. People starve. The true horrors of Nazi terror are everywhere now... and the Russians are coming. As Stefan searches for an Irishman trapped in Berlin who has betrayed his country and his friends, who cares if people are murdered along the way? And Stefan has to ask himself if saving one life matters in this devastation. And if it does, is it worth him risking his own?

Release date: August 1, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 90000

Sample

Kilkenny, May 1937

It was easier with him now. She hadn’t expected that. It felt comfortable to be with him, doing the sort of thing they had never done. A bright day. A morning train. A walk along lanes full of cow parsley and the blossom of blackthorn and hawthorn. And the bright stone of the abbey ruins almost glowing in the sunlight. Perhaps it was because nothing was expected, nothing demanded. They only had to walk and talk. And if he had too much to say, she could enjoy that as she had never done before, as he had never let her before. And when he did take a breath, her words matched his, and she could make him laugh in ways that had never been part of their lives as lovers. That was gone. Love was behind them, long behind. She didn’t know what they were now. Friendship wasn’t the right word. She liked him, more than she had ever liked him. Maybe he liked her in the same way. It was odd the way they fitted so effortlessly together when they were no longer together in the old way. If it had felt this way before, along with the rest, it might have been different. That thought had to come into her head, and then it had to be put away.

He had changed though. It was hard to say how. Less intense, less caught up in himself while giving the world a performance that said he wasn’t. Then again, more intense in other ways, and less sure of himself. The ebullience was still there. The easy rattle of conversation everyone knew, that leapt from idea to idea and left him laughing at himself when he didn’t quite know where he’d leapt to. But today, that leaping was for her. She had always seen it when they were with other people, only with other people. His wild energy had never been hers. He could switch it on and switch it off. For her, when they were alone, it was off. Love had been a different matter. He had struggled with it, troubled by the loss of self-control. There had been desire and passion and yes, love. Love must have been at the top of that list of words sometimes. But she didn’t look for the word and he didn’t say it. And when she sometimes tried to understand what he felt for her, and give it some kind of shape, it was only need that came into her mind. That was the only word that had any constancy. She couldn’t always tell herself that word was enough.

As for him, for a man whose words flowed so easily, he had very few for her. She persuaded herself there was no reason he should. Their bodies required neither explanation nor analysis. They were enough in themselves. But over time there was less comfort in the silence only their bodies could penetrate. In the space between them, the silence hung like an invisible weight. Somehow it shut the one thing that bound them together away in the dark, hidden from all the ordinary tumble of their lives. It was not that there was no joy. There was simply no fun.

The trip had been Frank Ryan’s idea. He was only in Ireland a few more days. He had come home from the civil war in Spain with his arm smashed by a bullet at the battle of Jarama. He was lucky. He was the bullet’s second victim. It had already passed through the head of the man next to him. He came home for a few months to recuperate. He called it a flesh wound, but bones had been crushed and they didn’t set right. The arm would never be strong. There would always be pain. He said nothing about it that day at Jerpoint Abbey, but putting her arm through his, Rosamond Jacob felt him flinch. She simply moved to take his other arm instead.

They took the train from Kingsbridge to Thomastown. It was such a day, he said, such a grand day, that they should make a day of it. A drink in the dark of a Dublin pub was no way to celebrate anything. He spoke as if there was something to celebrate. If there was, he didn’t elaborate, except to say he wanted to be with her. She had seen him only a few times since his return from Spain, mostly with other people. There were vestiges of their closeness that left them awkward in each other’s company. Neither of them felt there was any reason for that. Their relationship hadn’t so much broken as drifted away. They had parted almost without intending to. There was no resentment either way, just a sense of something unfinished that never could be finished. So when he announced this ramble through the Kilkenny countryside she was surprised. Now she was pleased.

It didn’t matter much what they talked about. The past was part of it, but they touched on that lightly. If love weighed heavy when there was love, the rest of what they carried from those years was lighter. It was full of the great events, and the great struggle and the furious politics that had shaped them, full of everything about Ireland that had given them purpose and pleasure. They remembered the fight for a brighter, better world, that drove them then with fondness and if the world was not so much brighter or so much better, they were still energised by it. But conversation had to return to what would follow this grand day and to Spain.

‘There’s terrible stuff about you in the papers,’ laughed Rosamond. ‘It’s all “up Franco” and “damn the evils of Communism”! You don’t get a good press, Frank.’

‘Ah, when did I ever?’

‘So what’s going to happen? Does Franco really have most of Spain?’

‘He has enough,’ said Ryan quietly. ‘If you said most, the fighting ebbs and flows, but what the Republic holds . . . matters. The war will be won in the cities . . .’

They walked on slowly. The sun shone on the abbey walls.

‘You don’t sound sure, Frank. You were surer in Dublin.’

‘I’m sure of some things,’ he continued. ‘This year we held them. Better than held them. It wasn’t many months ago people thought it was all over. The Republic was collapsing. We beat them back. A long way back. I’d like to just raise my fist and say what I say in every meeting . . . we’re on the march . . . stronger than ever. Well, we are on the march, but the Fascists can match us for marching, and when the marching’s done they’ve got Germany and Italy at their backs. We have to scramble for the bullets for our bloody rifles. They send in German bombers.’

‘How can you fight that?’

Frank Ryan shrugged. He took out his tobacco and cigarette papers.

‘A lot of the time, I don’t have the faintest idea . . . except that we do.’

He rolled a cigarette, very deliberately, as they walked on.

‘I tell you what though,’ he grinned. ‘I need to take as much tobacco back to Spain as I can. A suitcase maybe. Spanish cigarettes are the worst in the world!’

Rosamond Jacob laughed. Frank Ryan lit the cigarette.

‘There is a point to it all, that’s more . . . it’s not just Spain.’

She nodded. She didn’t need telling, but she knew he needed to say it.

‘We can’t just look in at ourselves on our little island and pick at our sores. We have to look out. If we won’t live as slaves, we have to stand with everyone else who won’t. Ireland is about Spain. Spain is about Ireland. That’s only the beginning. We have to think about the world, but till Ireland’s whole again, we can’t or won’t. It won’t do. Someone has to stand up and say Ireland’s with you!’

Rosamond looked at him, smiling. This was how she remembered him.

‘I know . . . but if you lose, Frank?’

All the old enthusiasm was in his face.

‘I say we won’t lose. Somehow we’ll stop them. You have to feel what we feel, whether it’s the Spanish or the fellers from all round the world fighting beside them. You have to remember what it’s worth. Didn’t it look like the English had won in 1916? Only the mad Irish said otherwise. But they hadn’t. After that, they could never win. Well, if our Republic’s still a job half done, we’ll get there. Spain is a part of getting there. I’m doing as much for Ireland as any fecker that’s here . . .’

She laughed, but those last words had less energy. He was defensive.

‘I know you want to believe that,’ she said.

‘I do believe it. There’s a new world in Spain, even under the bombs.’

He held her arm tighter. And the energy was there again.

‘We’ve men from twenty-five countries, more. Some of them soldiers, but most never held a gun before. They had to come. No one talks about sacrifice, no one needs puffing up, but that’s what it is. They have homes and families and good lives to live. They’re there because fighting Fascism, fighting Franco, Mussolini, Hitler . . . is humanity’s fight. Did I write that in a pamphlet? Sorry, I think I did.’

‘I don’t mind a speech.’ She smiled. ‘It beats Godless Communism.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Ryan. ‘I saw more of God burying a Communist who fell on a grenade to save a friend than in any pulpit here. The Church has blinkers on. Darkness is all round them, yet they don’t see it. If Fascism isn’t smashed, the Church won’t be able to stand against it. I’m not a Communist but I’ll fight beside anyone who takes a stand. It’s a crusade. For democracy above everything. That’s what holds the International Brigades together. And that’s why I have to go back.’

For a moment now, they had both run out of words.

‘I wish this was another kind of day, Frank.’

‘And what kind of day would you like? I did my best with this one.’

‘Yes, I know you did. That doesn’t make it easier.’

‘Isn’t it easy enough?’

Frank Ryan looked up at the high abbey walls and the trees beyond.

‘Let me breathe it in, Rosie. I need some of this to take back to Spain.’

He looked at her and smiled. She thought that somewhere in that smile, she was part of what he needed to take back to Spain. If that was what he really felt, it mattered. But she wasn’t sure she wanted it to. Too late. Much too late. And if he was going back to Spain to die . . . what was she supposed to do with it anyway?

‘Too much sunshine, Frank. Too many flowers in the ditches. Too many days that might have been . . . and weren’t. Maybe a drink in a Dublin pub would have been better. I don’t know if I want more to remember . . . if you don’t come home.’

‘Ah, for a no-nonsense Quaker maid you always had a little bit of the banshee in you, Rosie, however hard you’d deny it. But I have all the saints and scholars of Holy Ireland in my head. I can read the runes when it comes to fate. My wake will take place in Ireland, and only in Ireland. And we will come here again.’

They walked away from the abbey, through the long grass. She put her arm through his good arm again. She leant a little into him. Yes, he would come back.

‘I’m sorry . . .’ he said quietly.

‘About what?’

‘I wish things . . . I wish we had been . . . if I’d been different back . . .’

She held him tighter. Not intimacy, reassurance.

‘That’s done, Frank. Neither of us need be sorry for what we had together.’

‘Not sorry then.’ He stubbed out the cigarette. ‘That’s not what I mean . . .’

She wanted to leave it there. She wanted him to leave it there.

‘This is how I like my churches,’ she said, turning back to the ruins. She was changing the subject, almost. ‘Enough to be beautiful but with no one to tell you what to think or how to live. Or hear your confession. No confessions required!’

She smiled, and there was some mischief in that smile.

‘Now you’re laughing at me,’ he said.

‘A little. And I like that. I don’t know that we ever laughed very much when we were together. So feel free to laugh at me too. It might be good for both of us.’

He bent forward and kissed her. It was tender. Like a lot of other things that day, she would remember it. There must have been a first kiss. She couldn’t recall. But this one wasn’t a prelude to anything new. It was only an echo of the last kiss.

‘I look back,’ he said, ‘and I can’t remember when we lost each other.’

They moved on more slowly, towards the road.

‘I look back too sometimes, Frank, and I do wonder . . . if we’d found a different way . . . but we didn’t. It doesn’t matter now. You have something to do. I trust in what you’re doing . . . your fight. You’ve given me that. I will hold on to it.’

*

When Christmas came, the army of the Spanish Republic was back in Teruel. In parts of the city, Franco’s Nationalists still held out. But all they could do now was die rather than surrender. And they did. When Republican artillery had reduced the buildings the Nationalists held to rubble, the Bank of Spain, the Governor’s Palace, the Convent of Santa Clara, the troops went in to see that the Nationalists did indeed die, with bayonets rather than bullets, because bullets were in short supply. The city that had pushed the Fascist forces into Aragon, the last city that stood between them and the march to the Mediterranean, that would split what was left of the Republic in two, had been retaken. Once more the battle cry of the Republic, ‘No pasarán’, echoed through Teruel’s streets. But killing the few Nationalists who were left in the city was one thing, the Fascist army that was waiting to strike back was another. There still seemed a great victory to celebrate, however, when the first International Brigade units moved up to Teruel in support of the exhausted and depleted army that had seen off Franco’s best. And on Christmas Eve the men of the 15th Brigade gathered in light snow to hear Paul Robeson sing ‘Ol’ Man River’ and ‘Silent Night’.

The snow wasn’t light for very long. A four-day blizzard gave way to the coldest winter anyone could remember. For a time both sides were locked into a frozen landscape in which almost nothing moved. But when the snow began to clear, all the advantage shifted towards the Fascists. And when they came, they came with the bombers of Germany’s Condor Legion and Italy’s tanks. There were no Republican planes left to stop the Luftwaffe and only machine-gun bullets to bounce off Italian armour plating. Within weeks Teruel was back in Franco’s hands. The road to the sea was open to the Nationalists again. In their way was the Aragon Front, the army of the Spanish Republic and its International Brigades, broken and ill-equipped. They had left the corpses of 10,000 comrades in Teruel.

Frank Ryan had seen none of this. He had spent that Christmas and the two months before that at Albacete with several hundred new recruits, Americans, Canadians, British, Germans. All the enthusiasm and passion that had brought these men to Spain was still there when they moved up to the Aragon Front in March, but they brought little else on the trucks that took them to the 15th Brigade outside Batea. They were short of everything, guns and ammunition and above all experience. They had been trained to do little more than sit in a trench and shoot weapons they had barely fired, because bullets were only for the front. They had been trained to climb out of those trenches and advance, in the way their fathers might have done in Flanders, twenty years earlier. There was no time to train them for anything else, and no point, since the only weapons the Spanish Republic had left were the ones in their soldiers’ hands. The new recruits might have been surprised to find that the men of the 15th International Brigade who met them after their final march to the front were not big on enthusiasm. Their officers were not surprised. They knew. Frank Ryan knew before they left Albacete. The brigade was down to 500 men, exhausted and defeated. They had held the line despite everything, in the face of a new kind of war. But all along that line a high price had been paid. The dead outnumbered the living. The Aragon Front that Ryan had brought his new recruits to defend no longer existed.

‘The Germans have a new word for it, Blitzkrieg. Short for war that goes at the speed of a fucking rocket. And all we can do to stop it is throw bodies at it.’

The man who spoke was Wally Tapsell, the Political Commissar of the British Brigade that Ryan was now attached to. He was a Londoner who had a joke for almost everything. That didn’t exclude dying. But he couldn’t find the joke in what he was describing to Frank Ryan now, quietly, almost furtively, out of earshot of the new draft. Even the darkest humour needed a sense that the odds weren’t entirely against you. The odds had been shifted. There was only a dead cert left.

‘The planes come in first, fighters and bombers. Waves of them. And they’ve already had the Heinkels up for reconnaissance. They know exactly where we are. They don’t need to bother with artillery. They can break us in pieces from the sky. And then the tanks. That’s the Italians. And the infantry come behind them. It’s not like Jarama. It’s not army to army. We haven’t got the weapons to hold them. No planes, hardly any tanks. And the tanks we’ve got are shit. If we were putting them in for the London to Brighton rally, they might not do so bad, but what they’re up against . . . hopeless. And where do we even get the men? There’s not only Franco’s Spaniards and Moors behind the tanks. There’s 50,000 of fucking Mussolini’s too.’

‘And the front?’ asked Ryan.

‘God knows,’ replied Tapsell. ‘It can change in an hour. It’s broken though, there’s no point pretending it’s not. Where is anybody’s guess. They’re trying to move us around to fill the gaps, but you fill one, and there’s probably half a dozen more. And with German air cover . . . we can only really move troops at night now.’

‘Thanks for that, Wally,’ said Ryan. ‘And on the positive side?’

‘That was the positive side.’ Tapsell smiled. It was the best he could do.

The British Battalion, a mix of weary, battle-hardened men and the now more wary newcomers, whose enthusiasm could not but be dimmed by the atmosphere around them, took the road to Calaceite, eight miles away. They would reinforce the Canadians, who were still holding out. Darkness was their cover and they had no reason to doubt its effectiveness. They were still several hours from the front line and the night, in which everything now moved, was the place of safety that kept the planes of the Condor Legion on the ground. What awaited them at the end of the march was something else. The old hands knew what to expect. The rest would find out. But that was for the morning. In the meantime, the night was black and silent. There had been gunfire earlier, from the direction of Calaceite, artillery and tanks, but it had stopped as night fell. The column walked on, secure in the miles separating them from the front. At the head were Wally Tapsell and Frank Ryan.

Maybe it was weariness on the part of Tapsell and the other officers, or too much faith in the last Intelligence report that had radioed through, or just the relief that darkness brought, but there were no men scouting ahead or on the flanks. Just the long column, snaking along the road. And when they rounded a bend to see the shapes of several tanks to the left of the road in the darkness, the hours that still lay between them and Calaceite asked no questions. And Wally had found his joke.

‘There you go, Frank. Our tanks are so fucking precious we keep them behind the lines, in case they get scratched. I think our boys are working on a new tactic. Infantry goes in first and the tanks come behind . . . preferably a day behind.’

Frank Ryan took it that Tapsell knew what he was talking about. There were no orders. The column didn’t pause. The tanks were a little way from the road, parked up among thin, straggling trees. The Political Commissar looked across at a soldier who was leaning down from the turret of one of the tanks, watching as the brigade approached. He shouted, laughing and asking him if they’d lost their way.

‘Están todos perdidos, camarada? La guerra no está aqui!’

There was a single shot. Wally Tapsell lay dead at Ryan’s feet.

For a moment, silence. The column had stopped. No one spoke. There was the sound of a heavy engine. A slow grinding, almost screeching noise. The turret of the first tank was turning. The barrel of its gun was trained on Ryan and the men at the head of the column. The same sounds, coming out of the darkness, told them that the turrets of the other tanks were turning towards them. A shout. The language was not Spanish, but Italian. The first tank was rumbling forward.

‘Gettate tutti le armi! Tutti le armi. Tutti a terra!’

Still no one moved. There was no panic. But panic was only seconds away. And the result would be slaughter. Frank Ryan could see four tanks in the trees. There was no point resisting. An officer behind him stepped up to take Tapsell’s place. He raised his arms. He shrugged, then turned back to shout out his orders.

‘No one move! Pass it back! No one move! They have us!’

The officer walked towards the first tank. A spotlight from the turret of another tank swept the column. The sound of tracks creaking. The other tanks were moving now. Machine guns pointed. Frank Ryan put his own hands up and followed the officer. A second command came from the darkness, now in Spanish.

‘Suelten sus armas! Suelten sus armas! Yacen en el suelo.’

The order went back along the column in English from man to man. A rhythmic clatter as their rifles fell. From the trees across the road soldiers were emerging, their guns on the column. They had been waiting. One by one, the men of the British Brigade lay face down on the ground. Frank Ryan lay with the rest.

Dublin, October 1944

1944 had been a quiet year in Dublin, at least in Special Branch. There was a lot of noise in the summer, when the British and Americans finally landed in France, but all we were doing was watching as the lines on the maps moved across Europe. How many bodies each inch cost was for others to count. And if the mood of Ireland was mostly behind the Allies now, they still weren’t our bodies. Though the days I spent at the Censorship Office in the GPO, looking at letters coming into and going out of the country, told a story that wasn’t quite as clean. A lot more of those bodies were Irish than anyone in Ireland was prepared to say. There were some German spies to think about earlier in the year, as the North was full of American and British soldiers getting ready for D-Day. No one had to think very hard. Most of them were already locked up and the rest weren’t worth the board and lodging. The IRA was in the same state. The ones who weren’t interned in the Curragh didn’t stray far from their favourite bars. The great surge of spies and saboteurs the British were expecting didn’t materialise. We watched the Axis embassies to see if they were talking to anyone they shouldn’t be. The Germans had no one left to talk to now. The Japanese never talked to anyone anyway. And the Italians had changed sides. They were lazy enough days. Something almost happened when the Americans said they had information about a radio transmitter in the German embassy. I don’t know if we ever found out whether there was one, but apart from a few Allied Intelligence officers, no one got very excited. After all, there was nothing to transmit except that in Ireland, as everywhere else, the only bet a bookie might have been prepared to take on Germany losing the war . . . was when, not if.

There was so little going on that October that I spent two weeks at home, working on the farm at Kilranelagh, with my son Tom home from boarding school for half term. It was a good time. I had forgotten how good it could be. And then there was a phone call from Superintendent Gregory at Dublin Castle. He didn’t say what he wanted. He never did. Information didn’t have to be secret for him to sit on it. It didn’t even have to be important. He liked it that way. When I first knew him, I thought it was part of some elaborate scheme to keep us sharp and him in control. I don’t think it was. I think it amused him, and like most things that amused Terry Gregory, you could never understand why he thought it was funny.

When I got the train from Baltinglass the next day, I wasn’t going to Special Branch in the Carriage Yard, I was going to Stephen’s Green and the Department of External Affairs. It wasn’t the first time I’d been there. It wasn’t the first time I’d sat across a desk from the Secretary of the Department, Joseph Walshe. The last time I’d been in that room, a year earlier, I told him to fuck off. I don’t know what pissed him off more, telling him to fuck off or calling him Joe. I’d be surprised if a lot of people hadn’t told him to fuck off down the years, but he was a stickler for protocol, was Joe, and I’d say even when people did tell him to fuck off, he expected to hear ‘Mr Walshe’, or at least ‘Secretary’, at the end of the sentence.

Sitting in the big office again, I thought what I’d thought before. The furniture looked as if it had come from a clearance sale at some Anglo-Irish country house that had fallen on hard times. This time I concluded that’s exactly where it came from. Joe, meanwhile, did what he always did. He grunted and pointed at a chair. Then he turned several sheets of paper over in a file and peered at them. He already knew what he was going to say. The form was that you were kept waitin. . .