The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf Read Online Free PDF Page A

light from the transom.
    Forty-seven minutes had elapsed since Rehm had seen him on the hillside. He deducted that plus the hour it would take him to go and come back from Mirna’s. He would then have something less than an hour to tell her—no, to convince her of what he wished her to know, which was nothing less than fifty or so years of history. And, then what he wished her to do, which would change her life irrevocably.

CHAPTER 4
    MIRNA GOTTSCHALK HAD been born on Clare Island in 1941, four years before Ford arrived. Her father, Rudolph—then a young painter from Vienna—had once summered on the island, and in 1940 he came to stay. He told people he was attracted by the quality of light, the vistas of Clew Bay, and the island’s tranquility. Also, being a Jew did not seem to matter as much here as it did in Austria after the German occupation in 1938.
    From Austria, Gottschalk had gone to Spain to fight for the Republic. But he had no sooner recovered from the wounds that he had suffered in the siege of Barcelona, than the Insurgents, led by Franco, took Madrid, and the bloody civil war was over. Fleeing across the border into France, he met a beautiful, young Basque woman who was also a political refugee. Together and with little more than their talents, they arrived in Ireland.
    The house that they squatted in on Clare Island had been abandoned during the famine of the last century and was nothing but crumbling walls and dung, since sheep and cattle had sought shelter there over the years. It took the Gottschalks nearly a decade and plenty of hard work, but they created the most handsome and unusual dwelling on the island, Ford judged. With bits of the considerable flotsam that had washedup on Irish shores during the war, they fitted out and furnished their building. They used everything they could get their hands on—packing crates, ships’ timbers, the entire cabin of an old freighter that had been finished in Philippine mahogany.
    They added a studio in 1951 and, with the help of the Clare Island Trust, several long white outbuildings that served as a kind of factory. There they made “Clare Island sculpture”—also fabricated from driftwood, which they sold throughout Ireland and England. It was the enterprise that had provided the elder Gottschalks a living, and (now that they had passed away) allowed Mirna the freedom to paint what she would.
    Topping the crest of the hill, Ford was relieved to look down at a light in the studio windows. It meant that Mirna was in there painting and would be alone.
    But descending the steep trail seemed almost harder on his ruined knees than the climb up had been. Ford staggered several times, then slipped on the muddy slope, and fell in a long, bruising tumble that nearly brought him up against the door of the studio. His hat blew off, and he tried to scramble after it and the all-important envelope that it contained. “Christ!” he shouted. Finally in one, last, desperate effort before the hat swept over the cliff Ford’s hand grabbed the envelope. The hat, however, sailed off into the darkness and tumbled toward the sea, some four hundred feet below on the western side of the island.
    Feeling hopeless, as though he could never respond to the challenge that Rehm represented, Ford cursed himself and his old age and with difficulty pulled himself to his feet. In a bit of moonlight that now appeared briefly as if to illuminate the event, he caught sight of his hat, still airborne and spiraling out into Clew Bay. The clouds closed again. Ford reached for the handle of the door—which, like most on Clare Island—was never locked.
    Mirna Gottschalk turned from the canvas, then said, “Oh, Clem —I thought I heard a voice.” She began walking toward him. “But, I’m sorry, you can’t come in.”
    Ford stopped. “What? Why not? Are ye’ not alone?”
    Stepping in front of him as though to keep him from seeing into the room, she smiled. “Certainly I’m alone. Or