The 53rd Parallel Read online

  “If all da Irish veman are as brave and as lovely as you, my young Fraulein, I understand vy da British ver never eager to depart.”

  She pulled her hand back. “They hain't left yet, sir.”

  “Quite so, quite so. And perhaps ve can help.”

  “Perhaps.”

  As the men settled in their chairs at the great table, Maureen determined Russell was not among them.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen, but I must not be in the proper place. I don't see my man.”

  “No, this is vere you should be. He's been delayed a brief moment.”

  “I'll just wait outside 'til he calls me in.”

  One of the officers spoke in German to the others. “I said let's not engage in such foolishness.” Then he spoke in English. “Captain, go tell Mr. Russell to join us. It is clear we have a voman we can all trust amongst us.”

  Maureen sat in a corner of the boardroom alone with Sean Russell away from the big table where two angry German voices were taking turns making their case. Maureen focused on Russell's plans for her to smuggle the black valise that sat on his lap into Ireland. Behind his round glasses his face was drawn. She thought he was very tired, or sick, or both.

  “It's two things I'm good at, sir. When I don't want someone to find somethin', I can put it right under their noses an' still they'll miss it.”

  “To keep British soldiers from examining your trunks, you ask them to load a bus with the makings.” He started to chuckle, but it turned to a dry cough.

  When he stopped Maureen replied, “If you were there, you'd have seen it was the smartest play.”

  “And the other thing?”

  “I am loyal to the end. You can trust me, in every way. On me da's honor, you can trust me, to keep any secret, an' if you don't want me to know what's in this bag, on my oath, I won't look.”

  “No, it seems if you are the one risking bringing it home, you have a right to know what's in it.”

  He fished a key out of his pocket, handed it to her, and she unlocked the latch. It held stacks of British pounds, and Maureen smiled up at Russell, but he was not happy.

  “They're still refusing the joint attack in the North… and while there's enough here to purchase some arms, it's not as much as I hoped. Some keep promising more while others keep standin' in the way, an' it's a political argument I don't follow. The one thing they all agree on is how difficult it is to acquire British pounds right now, so they have that as a built-in excuse for so little… But it's a start.”

  He closed the valise and took the key from Maureen to lock it.

  She held the valise by its handle and placed it on the floor beside her. She didn't let go of the handle. “How much longer will you stay?”

  “Seems those negotiations have been less than satisfactory as well. I've suggested they get me to the west coast in one of their U-boats where I can flag down a fishing boat. I believe I need some time at home. I am a bit worn. As soon as I'm feeling better, I'll push harder to leave.”

  “I understand your plan to get the bag into Ireland, but then who do I give it to?”

  Russell removed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket, and offered a smoke to Maureen. She declined.

  “You get the money safely in Ireland. Then you keep it, hide it, make sure it is safe. When I am ready to retrieve it, I'll send someone around… They'll have this.”

  He placed his lighter in her hands.

  “Note the scratch on the base. Look at it closely. When someone places my lighter in your hands again, you will give him the bag. Until then, I want you to tell everyone we never even met. Tell them you never found me, understand? Even Kevin. The only people who know about this money are in this room. Ryan isn't even aware of it.”

  “Ryan?”

  “He's in Berlin as well, working his own angles.”

  “So we'd go public that Nazis are providing support if it meant a joint attack in the North. But if all they'll do is give us money, well, that connection can be kept secret, so it should be kept secret.”

  Russell's smile was brief and was colored by his sadness.

  “Kevin said you were bright. You'll be the first woman leading a brigade someday was his prediction.”

  “It's Ireland I serve, an' them that serves the cause. I'll do as you say.”

  Chapter 8

  Fog and Smoke

  This Man emerged from a thick fog bank riding upon the moose's back. The moose wasted no energy trying to shake him and continued its course, swimming powerfully from fog cloud to open water.

  The lakeshore had been hidden in fog all day, but now the outline was seen as a hazy silhouette. When the moose swam through the next wisps and rolls of fog, a tree-lined ridge appeared above the clouds and well back from the shore. A glowing light diffused by low, thick clouds marked the shoreline. These clouds were fog and smoke, waves of white and black smoke rolling out from shore to mix with the silver-white fog from the River's lake, and the moose's nostrils flared open wide, and it snorted once and tacked left, away from shore, away from the smells of the smoke.

  The wind picked up. The fog on the lake was pushed from behind and the smoke on the shore was swept into the trees. This Man could see the shore clearly. There were four funeral pyres, each large enough for many bodies, and there were many mourners, full villages of mourners, all along the shore.

  The moose paralleled the shore, swimming in open water now, and This Man rode on its back, singing The Path of Souls song, the same song the mourners chanted.

  And the sound that they made and the spirits that they called upon floated above them in the smoke of their fires.

  Chapter 9

  Time to Hide

  Maureen returned with the money secretly, without incident, following the plan she proposed to Russell and one he immediately endorsed. It meant she was to avoid Dublin to report in until she traveled to Derry to hide the valise behind the cottage where she lived with her mother.

  She gave Russell a sketch of her yard and marked where she would bury it so he could find it if anything happened to her.

  After she buried the valise, she took the bus to Dublin to lie to Kevin and the others as Russell had instructed. Later, alone with Kevin, when he asked again about the trip, she repeated the lie that she hadn't found Russell. Only then did he believe her. They agreed to meet two weeks later at a regular rendezvous point, and so she wandered a market morning in a small village near Letterkenny, expecting to find Kevin waiting there, but he wasn't.

  She sat in a tea shop then strolled the market again, and just as the vendors began to break shop and she was giving up she spotted Kevin; their arcs intersected near the last of the potato bins. He nodded for her to follow him down the street, away from the thinning crowds. She felt he had bad news.

  “Russell's dead.”

  “What?”

  “We'd been hearing rumors for two days. Timmy came by last night to confirm.”

  “I've heard said when you find Timmy standing at your door he's come to name the dead, the recent or the next. How'd they get him?”

  “It wasn't the Brits, no. It appears he died on his way back from Germany in the Nazis U-boat that was bringing him home. Seems they buried him at sea.”

  “Was Nazis killed him?”

  “First word is, it doesn't look like foul play.”

  “Buried at sea means no one has seen his body. Why are we sure it's not a rumor?”

  “We got word from Ryan. He's in Germany. He had it confirmed by their military.”

  “So then no one knows… what's our next step. So what's our next step?”

  Kevin studied Maureen as he answered, “Timmy says lay low for a wait-see. The story about Russell is spreading fast. Folks are furious as they're figuring Russell coming home in a Nazi U-boat can only mean the IRA and the Nazis are collaborating. And if we're collaborating then we're supporting them that's shooting at their sons.”

  “I haven't heard anythin' about it here.”
r />   “Folks were spitting with anger talking about it on the bus coming in. I heard some say they'd end their support of the Cause if it's true.”

  “It's why you warned the leaders.”

  “Looks like it might be even worse than I imagined.”

  “So it's time to teach me a new lesson. I'm not sure what you mean, 'lay low for a wait-see.'”

  “It means Timmy himself is heading to Boston for now, to talk to the boys there and keep them in line, and Johnny Boy, he's going to Chicago. And if Timmy sounds like a man staying gone for a while, Johnny Boy sounds like a man not planning on returning at all. Seems they're all looking for similar cover.” Kevin stepped away from Maureen, then turned to study her. “You know, Lady Girl, I don't think I've ever seen you do such as that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Take a misstep and lose your balance.”

  “My balance?”

  “You were headed in one direction and slipped when you changed it.”

  “I don't know what you're sayin' here Kev.”

  “Just now, when you said, 'So then no one knows.' You were going to say something more. Your voice was going one way, but then your words took you another.”

  “What does that even mean? So no one knows if there were plans for an attack in the North was the question was comin' to me, but I realized as I was askin' that there was a better question to ask, so I did.”

  “Well, what Timmy says is the only reason he could think of why I should contact him again before he leaves is if I learned anything more about those plans, or about any money, from yourself.”

  “What I've told you is all the truth to tell, Kevin.”

  “And I know I've never seen you hold in what you've got on your mind to say until just now. So listen clear, Lady Girl. I'm saying some are thinking a young woman as clever as yourself wouldn't have failed at the mission in Germany. And that you know more than what you've been saying. I'm telling them the daughter of Donovan O'Toole can be trusted to the very end of the line. But if they're right, if there is truth you haven't told, this would be a good time to say so, yeah.”

  Maureen believed she could trust Kevin with the full story, and that he would take responsibility for the money from her. But she never considered it, for she had sworn an oath to Russell. And they hadn't seen his body.

  “I never found him. Your man in Copenhagen had a train ticket and a promise a man would approach me when I got off the train in Berlin, but nobody contacted me at the station. I waited there, wearin' your yellow scarf, it feelin' more an' more like a noose around my neck, if you need to know. So, when three days go by an' no one has yet approached me, an' just enough travel money to get home is what I had left, this clever young woman was clever enough to know it was time I came back, that I do you no good wanderin' penniless around Germany.”

  “Then it's the best outcome of all. If we're laying low just on rumors we tried something, perhaps a successful operation with the Nazis would have been the death of the Cause.”

  “With so much left to be done.”

  “With so much left to be done.”

  “There's been rumors before. Are you certain Russell's dead?”

  “Timmy says Ryan's convinced.”

  “There's no reason I can think of to rush to certainty. About whether he is dead, and about whether the Nazis are innocent.”

  “You're right. But that doesn't change the fact that ceasing all operations and keeping low for now seems right in any case. Whether the Brits win this fight or lose it, they'll be so weak when it's over we'll have our best chance ever of getting them out full stop.”

  “Does leadership hold it against you that you were against Russell's plans?”

  “That's got no consequence when we're in danger of losing the people. In the end that's all we've got, and so it makes for a confusing time. Timmy says O'Hearn is so upset no one told him about Russell's mission that he's making threats about leaving and taking others with him to start their own organization. He says he wants to purify the organization.”

  “I can't say I blame him—he was senior to you and Timmy, but he didn't know.”

  “Russell wanted to keep him out of this. He knew he'd try to stop it. So maybe the only way to keep us from getting ripped apart is to just fade away for a while.”

  “I'm not sure I know what that means, or how I do that. You haven't taught me that.”

  “Never thought I'd need to. Let's meet in Castlebar on Friday, at the market, and see if the people in the countryside are as upset as the folks in the city. If I'm not there you need to cut and run, for so have we all.”

  Maureen sat on the beach as the sun set on the Atlantic. Waves were breaking and a cold wind cut. She tended a fire at the base of a great rock, and she cast a large shadow behind her on the face of the stone. Two days before she had waited for Kevin in Castlebar all day. The last bus came and left without a sign or a message from him.

  She came to this spot the night after Kevin told her Russell was dead. She slipped away from her cottage at two in the morning in case she was being followed, and traveled here to hide the money safely away from her cottage. She wasn't sure she wasn't suspected of something that might lead to her cottage being searched.

  When it was full dark and the beach had long been abandoned, she slipped between two cottage-sized boulders set well back from the high tide's reach. Behind them, hidden from view, she dug up the valise.

  As the driver tied her bike to the front of his bus, Maureen climbed in, carrying the valise in a rucksack. Traveling by bicycle from village to village was the safest way to travel, she decided, for only another bicyclist could follow her. She settled into her seat in a middle row on the last bus to Westport on her way to Leenane.

  It was early the next morning when she left the stillness of a small bed and breakfast and cycled along the narrow, stone-walled roads to the Maumturk Mountains. A car passed from behind, then another, and she grew anxious each time one approached and relaxed as they passed.

  Maureen climbed a ridgeline among the peaks and severe cliffs. The rugged mountain plains between the peaks held large pools of rainwater stained bog-brown. Wind whipped around her and half-wild sheep scattered when she approached. She continually scanned above and below for witnesses but found none.

  Two thousand feet above the sea, at the base of the highest peak around, Maureen had a full view of the coast line, the Connemara bogs between the mountains and the water, and the distant mountains of County Mayo to the northwest.

  She opened her rucksack and pulled the valise from it. With a fist-sized rock she struck at the lock, and after repeated blows it broke open. It was her first view of the money since Russell had showed it to her. It looked to be more than she remembered.

  She counted the first stack of twenty-pound notes and placed it on the ground, securing the notes in the strong wind with a flat stone. She counted two more stacks. When she'd counted £3,000, with more pound notes in the valise, she stopped.

  She returned the money to the valise, the last bit uncounted, and stood to study her mountaintop. Thin clouds scooted past just above her, the sky was a brilliant blue, and the highest peak glistened from a large vein of white quartz. In the rocky point above her a second large quartz deposit glowed. Maureen discovered she could align both quartz outcroppings with the tip of the highest mountain peak behind them, all three in a line.

  On this bearing she found a large boulder, cracked at its base and open at the ground where she could reach deep under the big rock. She carved up a sod of alpine grass and placed it aside, then dug a hole. She pushed the valise down in as far as it would go.

  Then she retrieved it, opened it, and removed five twenty-pound notes. She stuffed them into her pocket, then pulled two out of her pocket and put them back into the valise.

  Maureen returned the valise to the hole and covered it in a foot of earth and rock. She patted the sod in place, removed a sandwich from her rucksack, and leaned against the rock
to eat. Looking up she saw the rainbow gradually advancing before lowering clouds, vanishing, then reappearing, vivid and bold. It stretched across the bogs below and slowly faded away.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon exploring her mountaintop, leaving secret markers to be certain she could find this spot, for she didn't intend on returning for quite some time.

  Chapter 10

  Wild Rice

  When fading summer days and cool autumn nights dance together, it is the Moon of Manoominike-Giizis. This is the time the Ojibway harvest manoomin, the wild grain they eat as soup and cereal, that they use to thicken stews of venison or moose or bear, that they stir with the sweetness of the sugar bush and blueberries to make a confection, and that they trade to the factor at the Hudson Bay Post who calls it wild rice.

  Albert Loon stood in Nigig's bow and poled the canoe along the shallow bay. His wife, Susanna, sat behind him. Their six-year-old daughter knelt at her mother's feet, watching her use the two knocking sticks; with one Susanna would bend a stalk so the grain heads hung over the floor of the canoe, and with the other she gave the stalk a tap. Some grains dimpled the water's surface, but the little girl watched most cascade around her as a pile of manoomin kernels grew between them.

  Susanna's pace was Albert's to match as he poled to glide a quiet path between the plants.

  This Man sat in his canoe, hidden in the thickest growth, and sang a song of honor to the Great Creator.

  “We receive the gifts of Gitche Manitou. Because they are your gifts, we take only what we need. Because they are your gifts, we leave more than we will take. Everywhere we look we see the gifts of the Great Creator. This is a song your children the Annishinabe are happy to sing all the days of our lives.”