All Our Yesterdays Read Online Free PDF Page B

of them. Conn felt the force in the Big Fella’s gaze when his turn came.
    “We’ve all fought, we all know that it’s harder alone. Harder to act with resolve. It is why each of you was asked to volunteer. You are the best we have.”
    Conn knew this was so and he was proud to be there. Still, it was one thing to fire at an anonymous enemy in the midst of a firefight. It was another to assassinate a man with a name, in his home, perhaps in his bed, sleeping with his wife…. He wondered if Hadley slept with her husband. He had seen him once, on the street with Hadley, walking on the west side of Merrion Square near Leinster House. A solid man, in his forties, with dark brown hair and a short thick beard like Grant, the American Civil War general. Hadley had made no sign as they passed, her hand resting lightly on her husband’s crooked arm. He had a pleasant face with a look of intelligence about it. There was about him what Conn thought of as the American look, as if he always slept soundly and dined well, and spent time out of doors. Conn felt something nearly like camaraderie with this man who did not know him. They had shared the same woman, felt the secrets of her body. He imagined bursting in upon them, revolver drawn, and Hadley’s husband startled sitting up in the bed beside her…. Of course they slept together.
    “It is important that it all happen at the same time,” Mulcahy said. “I want everyone in Ireland to be talking about it on the way to Mass tomorrow. Not only will we cripple their intelligence with this single simultaneousstroke, but it will be a statement, also, of how seriously a free Ireland must be taken.”
    Mulcahy’s thick blond moustache was in odd juxtaposition, Conn thought, to his dark hair. It made him look a bit silly. But he wasn’t silly. Dickie was a good man. So was Mick. All of them were in this dark inherited brotherhood of idealism and savagery. All of them loved Ireland and hated England and loved each other. And he among them hated and loved as they did, though he loved Hadley Winslow more.
    The wallpaper in the room had a design of Doric columns in pink and white. The ceiling molding was thickly ornamental. The radiators hissed and pinged with heat. There was no sound from the street.
It is an emblem
, Conn thought,
of the essential Irish soul: hot, secretive, and dangerous, sealed up with history
. Conn smiled to himself.
And about to do some damage
.
    Collins took out a big gold pocket watch and studied it for a theatrical moment.
    “Eleven o’clock. Time—if you’re going to reach your target before the curfew,” he said. “Wait till it’s after midnight, Sunday morning. And then be quick. It needs to be finished by sunrise.”
    The men stirred. Each of them had a handgun, most had two. There were perhaps a dozen hand grenades in the room as well. Some of the men carried knives. Conn didn’t carry one. Sticking a knife into a man was a bit much, he thought.
    Outside, the cold darkness was a brief refreshment from the steam ridden meeting room, But soon the chill became unpleasant and Conn buttoned his overcoat around his neck and turned up the collar. His target was a British Secret Service man named John Cooper, who lived on Haddington Road near theBeggar’s Bush army barracks. Collins’s intelligence report said he lived in one side of a two-story house with his wife. There were no children. There was no dog. Cooper would be the only man in the house. He was described as thirty-five, balding, medium height, medium weight. Nothing unusual to identify him. A nondescript government functionary who had gone to bed peacefully and would die before morning.
    In the still darkness Conn walked along Mount Street, among the endlessly similar four-story eighteenth-century brick buildings. The sky was clear black and the stars were bright. The moon was only a sliver above him and the stillness of the low city with its orderly streets and symmetrical green parks seemed