Scoundrel

He told me that the telephone number in Ireland had proved to belong to an Enniskillen shop owned by a sixty-eight-year-old spinster who dealt in religious statuettes, while Brendan Flynn, taxes by the Irish police with my story of a meeting in Miami, blithely retorted that he had been attending a conference on the future of Ireland at the University of Utrecht. Gillespie told me that two distinguished professors of International Law and a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church had signed affidavits supporting Brendan’s alibi. I had to laugh. Brendan had style. “Such people wouldn’t lie!” Gillespie reproved me.

“You take risks when you plant a bomb and you don’t want the excitement to end, so when the job’s done you go to a bar and drink. You boast. You listen to other men boasting.” That was true, but I could just as easily have said that we got drunk because we did not want to think about what we had just done. Because we knew that nothing had been achieved by the bomb and nothing ever would be achieved. The only believers in terrorism were the fanatics who led the movement and their very youngest and most stupid recruits. Everyone else was trapped in their roles.