Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (9 page)

Over time, our get-togethers expanded to include three or four other men, other friends of Seamus's from Andersonstown. Like him, they were in their mid to late thirties, and all had earned their Provisional stripes as younger men, either as foot soldiers on “active service” or by having been imprisoned during Internment. Now, by the late 1980s, their days of shooting and bombing were long behind them, and most had started families. They all described themselves as “businessmen”—even if, like Seamus, they never went into much detail about what that entailed.

As the group expanded, our gathering spots shifted from the bars in the “neutral” city center to the pubs and drinking clubs in IRA-controlled West Belfast, locations where the Andytown Lads felt more at ease. And as the numbers expanded, so did the amount of beer consumed.

There was a simple explanation for this. In Northern Ireland, drinking was done on the “round” system, which meant that when anyone went up to the bar for another beer, they bought for the entire table. It didn't matter if you had a full beer in front of you—or four or five full beers, as frequently happened to me in my novice days—you were about to get another one. There was also a rather unforgiving chivalric code that attached to the system: as a man, you couldn't beg off a round (pussy), or hand off your excess
beers to a more accomplished companion (pussy), or drop down to half-pints (the mind shudders).

I was already well acquainted with the central role that beer played in Northern Ireland society. At the end of our monthlong stay in 1985, my brother and I had done a rough accounting of our expenses, and had figured out that just about 25 percent of all the money we'd spent—and bear in mind that this total included hotels, meals, rental cars, all the usual expenses of daily life—had been spent on beer. But that had been amateur hour. In hanging out with the Andytown Lads on my subsequent trips, the beer portion of my expenses easily approached 50 percent, maybe higher. These guys did not mess around, and it was only by learning the nuance of their language that I was gradually able to develop a kind of early warning system for the kind of night I was in for: getting together when the Lads were “on the wagon” meant having four or five pints, going out for “a drink” meant anywhere from six to ten, while “going drinking” pushed that number into the mid-teens at least, perhaps even into the low twenties.

Needless to say, this wasn't the sort of thing where you just showed up and hoped for the best. Through trial and error and a couple of humiliating outings early on, I learned to prep with a light meal of brown bread, cheddar cheese, and lots and lots of water; getting my bladder revved up beforehand appeared to trigger a flushing impulse, so that by late in the evening it was as if my body wasn't even absorbing the alcohol anymore, I was just pissing straight beer; or maybe I was just so drunk it seemed that way. And though it's somewhat counterintuitive, I also learned to avoid the lighter lagers—the Harps and so forth—because there was something about them that would leave me stupefyingly wasted before I'd even hit double digits. Much better was Guinness, the sheer heft of it seeming to take up some of the alcohol, rather like what happens when one drinks after eating a large meal—or a half-dozen large meals, as the case may be. My overriding aim on such occasions was to stay observant and reasonably coherent, to reside
in that small space between knowing you really should go to the local hospital to get your stomach pumped, and still being able to formulate that thought in words.

If it was all a test of sorts, I apparently passed, because gradually the nature of our outings changed. Instead of meeting up on a weekend and whiling away the night at one dreary pub in West Belfast, the Andytown Lads took to suggesting midweek crawls when we'd all pile into a couple of cars and visit ten or twelve dreary pubs in a single night. A quick pint or two in one place, and then it was off to the next.

In my defense, it didn't actually take that long—maybe midway through the second crawl—for me to figure out what was going on. My newfound pals were running the protection rackets for the IRA. The rackets were one of the crucial cornerstones of the IRA's underground financial empire, and virtually all businesses in the neighborhoods they controlled paid into them. Presumably dunning the corner stores and candy shops was the province of enforcers lower down the chain of command—the Andytown Lads' portfolio seemed to consist exclusively of pubs and nightclubs—but it was the collective proceeds from the rackets, more than any other single revenue stream, that enabled the IRA to continue its “armed struggle.”

Not that any of this was ever explicitly stated. Mere membership in the IRA drew an automatic four-year prison term, so none of the Andytown Lads ever volunteered their paramilitary status to me, nor did I ever ask. For the same reason, I would make a point of looking in another direction whenever one of the Lads, having briefly disappeared into a back room with a club owner or manager, would return carrying a bank satchel or small tote bag. Although I was dying of curiosity, even asking what had happened to Harry's ear seemed a topic too delicate to broach.

A line of sorts was crossed on the night Seamus took me to a club in South Belfast that I hadn't been in before. No sooner had we entered than the club owner, a twitchy middle-aged man named Kenny, hurried over to
deliver an effusive greeting and usher us to a prime table overlooking the dance floor. As he watched Kenny scurry off, on his way to the bar to get us our drinks, Seamus gave a sly grin.

“I used to have problems with Kenny,” he said, “because he just never saw the need for our security service. Then he got firebombed a couple of times. Now he loves to see me come around.”

I became a regular tagalong on the Lads' “Tuesday night” runs (so called because the IRA's standard cut was roughly equivalent to the take on that slow—but not the slowest—night of the week). The owners and bartenders of these places got to recognize me. They were always very nice.

But what I also gradually came to understand was that, in providing the means for the conflict to continue, this underground economy had also transformed the conflict. It wasn't just the Provisionals. All the paramilitary organizations operating in Northern Ireland—the Provisionals' rivals on the Republican side, the various Protestant Loyalist paramilitaries on the other—now depended on the lifeblood of the protection rackets and their other criminal enterprises to survive. In the process, the war was no longer just a spiritual raison d'être for true believers on both sides, but an economic one, a source of livelihood for many, including my Andytown pals on their Tuesday-night runs.

Not that I was planning to get all high and mighty about any of it, but it was in hopes of further understanding this underworld aspect of the conflict that I made plans to return to Belfast in the summer of 1993. And in contrast to my past lassitude, this time I had two very specific objectives in mind. First, I was going to learn how Harry lost his ear. Second, I wanted to talk with someone high up in the IRA chain of command, someone who would be willing to discuss the inner financial workings of the organization.

But if I had any hope of achieving these goals, I had to be at the top of my game. At my girlfriend's house, I rose from the table, went into the kitchen, and brought out another six-pack.

“You're drinking
more
?” she asked.

“Training,” I corrected. “Training more.”

I'd been back in Belfast for nearly a month. I'd gone out on a couple of Tuesday-night runs, but this particular night was more on the mellow side of things, a gathering with the Lads at one of the IRA clubs just off the Falls Road. What with the wire-mesh grills over the windows, the anti–car bomb boulders out on the sidewalk, and the heavy security at the front door—no one got in here unless they were known—it was the sort of place where the guys felt most relaxed, were most likely to open up a bit.

Shortly after my return, I'd taken Seamus aside and told him of my desire to talk with a senior IRA commander. The request had discomfited him a little, but he said he'd see what he could do. I'd brought the matter up a couple of times since, not in any pushy way, and all I'd gotten from Seamus was that he was working on it.

In the meantime, it seemed a propitious moment to pursue my other objective on this trip, because by coincidence in the drinking club I was seated next to Harry. I leaned slightly in his direction.

“So tell me, Harry, what happened to your head?”

Harry turned to me with that befuddled look. “What's that?”

I saw my error. Dumb good luck had sat me next to Harry, but dumb bad luck had put me on his earless side. I had no choice but to raise my voice.

“What happened to your head?”

The others at the table all heard, of course, and for what seemed a very long moment, there was silence. Then the other Lads all started laughing uproariously.

I can't recall now how many of the salient details were provided by Harry himself and how many by the others, but the story's starting point was the day in 1970 when a teenage Harry had sought out his local IRA commander and asked to join up. As his initiation, Harry had been told to firebomb a particular Loyalist pub on the Shankill Road, a working-class
neighborhood just three miles north of Andersonstown that was the heartland of the Protestant Loyalist enemy. The aim wasn't to kill anyone, just to gut the place, so Harry was told to hit the joint in the middle of the night.

He had absolutely no experience with arson, but from a couple of guys in the neighborhood Harry learned how to fashion a Molotov cocktail. He surreptitiously cased the Shankill Road pub. He decided the best approach would be to launch the firebomb through a second-floor window, since second-story fires tend to go undetected far longer than first-story ones and the place would be finished by the time the fire department got there. He carefully figured the height of the second-story windows, the arc and velocity he would need to get the Molotov cocktail up there.

Fashioning a homemade grenade launcher—really more of a slingshot—Harry spent a number of days perfecting his aim, figuring out exactly how much pull he needed to get the gasoline bomb through the window, precisely how many seconds he had after the fuse was lit before the bottle exploded. Finally satisfied, he set out late one night for the Shankill Road.

It being well past curfew, the Shankill was completely deserted, but Harry was still nervous as he set to his preparations. So nervous that he somehow failed to notice a crucial detail, that in response to the rash of firebombings that was gutting pubs all over Belfast, the Shankill Road joint had recently put mesh grills over all its windows.

Harry lit the fuse, he had his arc down perfectly, but to his considerable surprise he watched the bomb bounce off the enmeshed window, carom high up into the sky, and finally plummet down to explode right next to his head.

It took rather a long time for these last details to emerge, since the other Lads at the table were laughing so hard they could barely speak.

“There was talk around headquarters of trying to claim it was a Loyalist atrocity,” Seamus offered, once the laughter around the table had subsided somewhat. “I mean, why else is a Catholic man running down the Shankill with his head on fire?”

This sparked a whole new round of giddy laughter, reinforced when one of the Lads decided to perform a dramatic reenactment of the incident, running around the table shrieking as he slapped at the imaginary flames engulfing his head.

At last, one of them tried to console the glowering Harry. “Aw, come on, it's a point of pride. You hear guys saying they'd give their right arm for the cause? Well, you gave your right ear.”

About a half-hour later, the topic of conversation having long since moved on, a couple joined our table. The man, short and dark-featured with a bodybuilder's physique, appeared to be in his mid forties, while the woman was quite a bit younger—maybe late twenties—and attractive in a slightly trashy way; I'll call them Liam and Mairead. They were known to all the Lads, and pleasantries were exchanged, but the mood at the table noticeably changed with their arrival: a sudden vague awkwardness, a note of sobriety. Initially I attributed it to Mairead's presence—women were rarely a part of these gatherings—but when she went off to talk with a couple of girlfriends, the stiffness remained.

Liam sat across from me, and I noticed him occasionally glancing in my direction, as if trying to ascertain who I was. There seemed little in the way of genuine curiosity, however; whenever I made eye contact, his gaze was opaque, his face expressionless, impossible to read. I also noticed that he was exempt from the round system. He did have a beer in front of him, but it was largely ornamental, something he perfunctorily took small sips from.

After about twenty minutes he half-rose out of his chair, causing all conversation at the table to stop. “May I speak with you for a moment?” he asked me gently.

We went to a small table in a quiet, far corner of the club. Liam had very dark eyes, almost black, and they now had an intensity that hadn't been there before. “So, Seamus tells me you want to talk with an IRA commander,” he said.

I nodded.

“You're talking to one.” A brief pause. “I'm only doing this because you're a good friend of Seamus's, and I'll only answer your questions on the understanding that you never identify me in any way. If you ever violate that, it doesn't matter where you go, we will hunt you down and we will find you.” Another pause. “Don't think of that as a threat. Think of it as a new fact in your life.”

I nodded again, but inside I was thinking it was just about the coolest threat I'd ever received, wondering which movie he'd cribbed it from.

While it was quite early in the evening—which meant I still had my wits somewhat about me—I wasn't at all prepared to start an interview, and groped for the first question to ask. Liam raised a hand.