This is my first fiction piece published outside of nthposition.com. I gave the background to the piece in an interview with Alt Hist’s editor Mark Lord you can read here . The original publication is in Alt Hist issue 3, which can be purchased through here .
One online review said this was too abrupt and sudden a story, and like much of my fiction things happen too quickly and somewhat arbitrarily. If I was minded to defend myself, I would say that this what life is often like, but really I have to accept the critique. I tend to have a single idea behind a story which I nervously unleash without doing the proper work of scene-setting.
DUBLIN CAN BE HEAVEN
All those grease-laden plates. Bacon. Eggs. Toast. Black
pudding. White pudding. Piled high, more meat on one plate
than he ate in six months in the mountains. For Harry, there
could never be enough. The ability to walk into Bewley’s on
Westmoreland Street and order a breakfast, freely available
(at least if you could hand over the funds) – this signal fact
was reason enough to love Dublin. What had Dublin, or
indeed Ireland, been to him before? There were names –
Michael Collins, de Valera, the Mayor of Cork on hunger
strike, a vague sense of a desperate struggle – but nothing
definite. Now Dublin was food, Dublin was breakfast,
Dublin was lunch, Dublin was dinner. Also, Dublin was no
ration cards, and no queuing. Every morning he ate slowly,
relishing the sensation of gradually filling up. As he chewed
he looked out at the street, or over towards the Liffey. How
different all this was from those months before coming to
Dublin, cadging coupons from the rest of the Balkan flotsam
and jetsam that ended up in London, being ignored by the
Foreign Office. Three years after the War, and still the British
lived like a defeated people. Here in Ireland, money could
talk as eloquently as ever.
He felt no embarrassment about spending his days
drinking coffee and eating well. He was enjoying the Dublin
spring. What else could one do? Only a few years before, he
had been used to sleeping in the open in mountain country,
eating husks and dirt. The mildewed flat in London, where
the Organisation worked and dreamt and slept, would have
seemed unimaginably luxurious to him in 1943. And as for
this city … well, anywhere that a man could walk into a cafe
and buy a fine cooked breakfast was a long way from where
he came from. A land where his name was not Harry, no one
had heard of Bewley’s, or Westmoreland Street.
Harry’s time in Dublin was turning into a failure. There
was no trace of Andrija Artukovic, the man Harry was in
Dublin to kill. They knew he had come here, via Switzerland,
in the last months of the War. Various clerical and political
personages had facilitated this passage; it seemed likely that
the Irish authorities were unaware of the nature of the
resident they hosted. Harry had obtained lists of foreign
nationals kept by the Gardai, had staked out the lodgings of
the few Croatians in the city, had walked the streets of
Galway, Cork and Athlone checking up tenuous leads that
went nowhere. He had lived rough for a week here and
there, staking out monasteries; rapidly he realised that Irish
Franciscans were rather different from their Croat confreres.
He had sent a telegram from the GPO in O’Connell Street
back to the Organisation in London:
THE BULL HAS NOT BEEN SOLD STOP REQUEST
FURTHER ADVICE STOP
Less than an hour later came the reply:
WILL SEND UPDATED PEDIGREE WHEN POSSIBLE STOP
MEANTIME STAY AT MARKET STOP
Staying at market would not be a problem. Harry had
been in the fields when the Ustaše came. He never looked
back, as he crawled from field to field, and then into the
mountains. He felt relieved that his mother and father had
died years before the War. He did not allow himself to think
about his brothers and sisters, and nephews. In the
mountains, he crawled through scree and dirt. Eventually he
stopped, lay there, and waited to starve. Then he realised
that the thirst he had begun to feel meant that he still wanted
to live. He met others, who had been hiding in the caves, and
they found a monastery atop a cliff that escaped the notice of
all the various empires which had tried to impose themselves
on the land. Here, they had formed the Organisation. Here,
they had fought back.
Artukovic was not the most senior figure in the puppet
Croat collaborationist state; but he was the one the
Organisation held most responsible for the fate that had
befallen their people. His words had unleashed a storm of
shootings, hangings, rapes, burnings, each act performed
systematically, part of a plan set out in cramped, precise
handwriting in endless memos from an anonymous office.
One of his associates had written that the Serb people ‘will be
converted to friendship, or will cease to exist’; while
Artukovic himself had been careful not to commit such
sentences to paper, he had gone a long way towards
achieving the latter aim.
At times they lived on grass and water’ sometimes
supplies were dropped in by air – bully beef, dried cereals,
and a few Webley revolvers. They had some contacts in the
villages, and through these via the underground had links to
the world beyond Festung Europa. A few Special Operations
Executive men visited courtesy of the RAF; one smashed on
the crags after his parachute didn’t open (they assumed), one
got captured and dismembered by the enemy immediately
on landing, and one landed successfully and went on to stay
with them for months. He provided them with a short wave
radio and was blown up by one of his own bombs, not before
providing the finishing touches that turned the loose band of
survivors into real partisans.
They had joined up with other groups, and they had been
the ones to rout the local Ustaše, they had driven most of the
Germans out too, and then suddenly Tito controlled all of a
country whose existence they were less than enthused by,
and they were expected to forget all that happened in the
name of brotherhood and piece. The Organisation left its
homeland, and ended up in London, thanks to some
sympathetic former SOE men and Foreign Office people.
Harry watched the Dublin crowd walk by. Men in sharp
suits, thin corner boys, nuns, priests, young country girls
looking frightened and virtuous. These Irish, so prim, so
pious, so neutral. Some of his colleagues in the organisation
had been scathing about this – to be neutral was to be at one
with them. He did not share this. He would have liked to
have had the chance to be neutral, and now he saw it as a
pretty thing, something to be cosseted and cherished and on
no account to be wilfully shattered, like the innocence of a
Then he saw him. Across the street, sauntering, heading
towards O’Connell Bridge. The feet that had walked into
offices and placed themselves under desks, from where he
had sent the orders for hundreds of thousands to be
butchered and violated, sauntering. The hands that signed
those papers, fat and pampered at the end of arms swinging
purposefully and confidently. That face, that face, the face
they had all studied and argued over – what it would look
like bearded, moustachioed, after three years of privation?
None of them had ever considered that it could be
unchanged. It was the same face as in the few photographs
he had ever allowed to be taken, that ordinary, rather
bumpkinish face—chubby cheeked, cherubic. There was no
sign of murderous conviction or righteous intensity, none of
the air of the demonic Harry had expected.
He hadn’t even lost weight. He was snug inside a three
piece suit, clearly expensively tailored. He too had been
enjoying the ready availability of meals in Dublin. He hadn’t
even lost a night’s sleep. Harry realised he was clutching his
coffee cup so tightly his knuckles were whitening. He
breathed in and out. He motioned to the waitress, threw
down a ten shilling note, galloped downstairs leaving the
staff initially startled and then delighted, and ran out onto
Westmoreland Street. He knew this would attract attention,
aware that Organisation had warned him to be discreet, and
to contact them if he became aware of Artukovic’s presence
in the Irish Free State before trying to do anything himself.
But this was him, right in from of his face, a vision from the
hell of his imagination; here he was, incarnate, banal,
everyday.
And where was he? Artukovic had disappeared. No –
there he was, a little further along. Harry’s view had been
obscured by a bus. He mastered his urge to race across the
street, and crossed as casually as he could, glancing each way
for traffic, He hurried his pace as he realised Artukovic was
almost at the corner, and could possibly double back into
D’Olier Street and disappear into some premises or other.
Harry saw with relief Artukovic had walked on, and was
about to cross the road to the central pavement of O’Connell
Bridge.
Harry quickened his pace again, to a kind of silent
almost-run. He looked around for any bodyguards, any sign
that the Dubliners knew what monster walked amongst
them. All the time, he ensured that he could always see the
back of Artukovic’s round head. The distance between them
shortened. Still, even as he was being pursued by vengeance,
even after all that blood and all that suffering, Andrija
Artukovic was sauntering, sauntering. Strolling along the
pavement in the middle of the bridge without a care in the
world. Harry felt the Webley Mark IV, a legacy of the SOE
man’s intervention, hanging in its holster inside his jacket.
Now they were feet apart; ten, eight, six, three. He
reached inside the jacket, and lifted the revolver out of the
holster a little, while keeping it concealed. He clicked the
safety. They were about two-thirds across the bridge. Harry
paused for a second. He could avenge the souls of his family,
his village, his people. Right now. This was a moment out of
legend, a moment for heroes.
He wanted to see that face. He wanted him to know what
was happening, even for a second. They had nearly reached
the end of the bridge, so close he could almost reach out and
touch him. He could almost reach out and touch him, this
man who signed the paper that sent armies of the night out
He could almost reach out and touch him, this man who
killed his family. Then, he did reach out and touch him.
Harry brushed Artukovic on the left shoulder. As he turned,
Harry pointed the Webley at his face, and began to stammer.
He wanted to tell Artukovic his name, the name of his
village, his father’s name, his mother’s name, his sisters’
names, his brothers’ names, his niece’s name, and to tell him
about the burnt out villages Harry and the rest the
Organisation walked through. He wanted to tell him that his
people had not died or converted, and that Artukovic was
facing the eternal damnation he deserved. He wanted to say
all this, but he had no words. He pulled the trigger.
Séamus Sweeney 