Read Online All Our Yesterdays by Robert B. Parker - Free Book Online

iron door at the top was not locked. They went through it to the exercise yard. The ground was damp and the exterior walls were clammy in the night. The gravel was thunderous as they crunched across it in stocking feet. And the moon glared down like a spotlight.
    At the gate the Old Gunner worked with the cutters while Conn stood pressed into as dark a corner as possible with his .38 drawn. He heard the Old Gunner laugh.
    “Like butter,” the Old Gunner said.
    They pushed half the gate open slowly. It groaned as they did so. Then they were out in the bright night. They pushed the gate slowly closed behind them. In the darkness to their left they heard movement and Conn saw the outline of a soldier’s peaked cap. Conn put his left hand out to stop the Old Gunner, and crouched a little and brought the .38 up. Had they been tipped? Were they waiting? A shot would wakeup the garrison. Another figure stirred beside the soldier and Conn realized it was a woman. He could smell her perfume in the soft, damp Dublin night. Conn edged closer. The soldier and the woman were locked in an embrace. The soldier was fumbling beneath her blouse. Conn smiled. It might be a trap, but it wasn’t a trap for him. He edged back to the Old Gunner.
    “Love,” Conn said.
    A different figure appeared, wearing a tweed scally cap.
    “Liam Sullivan,” the figure whispered. “Fourth Brigade. Catch the tram on the South Circular Road. Well keep the soldiers busy.”
    “Are the girls yours?” the Old Gunner said.
    “Hired for the event,” Sullivan said.
    “Fucking for Free Ireland,” Conn said. “How sweet.”
    “Actually it’s your freedom they’re fucking for,” Sullivan said. “But it’s still a good cause.”
    As they moved silently along the outside of the jail wall they passed other soldiers and women, in various degrees of intimacy, and then they were away from the jail. Sullivan vanished into the darkness. They boarded a tram on South Circular Road and mingled with other people. Around them Dublin spread out as if it had no limit. The dun brick looked bright, there were people with colored scarfs and laundered clothes. The signs on stores and taverns seemed sprightly and amusing, and the air seemed to breathe very easily. They listened to the talk around them, and laughter. With senses sharpened by deprivation, they smelled food, and the pleasant yeastiness of the Guinness Brewery, and the fertile wet scent of the river.

Conn
    “Y ou were born to be shot, Conn,” Michael Collins said. “They’ll never hang you.”
    “I’m through with it, Mick,” Conn said. “I’ve no heart for it anymore.”
    “You swore an oath, Conn. Just like I did. We’d not rest until Ireland was free.”
    Conn shrugged.
    “I’m not the same man,” he said.
    Collins looked at him thoughtfully. His round, smooth face showed nothing.
    “It wasn’t the jail,” Collins said after a moment.
    Conn shrugged.
    “It’s the woman,” Collins said.
    “You know about her?”
    “It’s my profession.”
    “Doesn’t matter what it is, Mick. I’m through. I have no more heart for causes.”
    Collins nodded.
    “Amazing,” Collins said. “You are one of the hardest men I ever knew. In a fight. Facing death.”
    Facing death
. Conn smiled to himself. Collins’s rhetorical flourishes would have seemed laboriously stilted in most men. In Collins it was so much a part of who he was that it seemed normal speech.
    “You’d go up against anyone,” Collins went on. “One man or ten. But one woman”—Collins shook his head—“she broke you.”
    “She betrayed me.”
    They were silent.
    “Thanks for getting me out,” Conn said.
    “I like you, Conn. Or I used to. But we got you out because it was good for Ireland that you escape. The only person arrested for Bloody Sunday. In their strongest jail. It weakens them, Conn. That’s the point.”
    “There’ll be reprisal,” Conn said. “Somebody’ll hang for my freedom.”
    “And we’ll have