Chapter Forty Three

Banna Strand

The opening of the garden door was carried out with a discretion that meant only one thing: Professor O’Connell was meeting with one of his co-conspirators. Frank polished the interior of the phial until it glowed, and having examined his reflection, which appeared huddled against the interior surface, secured the airtight cap. He did not want any stray bacteria compromising the transfer that was to take place; to mar O’Connell’s Easter Offering of his mind and knowledge. The phial was carefully set down beside the tools that had been selected from the professor’s own collection. These would open the skull and remove the required substance. He felt his heartbeat quicken in anticipation of the energising ritual that lay ahead, rather as the diner relishes the flowing blood in a rare steak. He could taste the cerebral foam and the musty assurance of the quivering nutriment.

But first he must complete the other steps in his march to a perfect rebirth. He had to ensure that none of O’Connell’s colleagues lived to threaten in any way his new existence. He turned to the rows of test tubes and proceeded to fill each with the greenish gas. This resembled the bone gas in every respect but one: this gas would not melt the bones of its victims. Instead Frank had added a substance that would enrage the subject and cause them, if under stress and bearing arms, to inflict the maximum harm upon their enemies. The test tubes all full and sealed, he packed them carefully into the rough sacks which Clarke’s boys used to deliver the Sunday papers. This was the agreed method for getting the gas into the strategic locations which the committee had identified. The committee expected the gas to kill hundreds of British soldiers, police and informers, leaving them free to take over the major buildings and proclaim the new state.

Frank had already identified the British informer who most concerned the committee, and had used that connection only once: to impart the name of a diplomat and a beach in Kerry to the authorities, and to arrange for O’Connell to be unavoidably late leaving his house when the rising occurred. The door slammed, and the sound of a bottle of single malt being dragged from the press, opened and then heavily set upon the desk in the room below followed with the same fortissimo. Frank wiped his brow to erase any hint of foreknowledge from his appearance and went to meet O’Connell.

The professor was pouring a second large measure when Frank entered the room. “I take it you have received some intelligence. Is this drink a celebration of the day to come?”

O’Connell lifted the cut glass tumbler to his lips and drank with a sharp hissing sound before looking at Frank.

“Hardly a celebration. That liberal idiot has been taken in Kerry. The German’s are not going to help us. The Lord alone knows what Casement will tell the British now.”

“Surely this cannot stop the rising?”  Frank sat down opposite the doctor. “Are we not agreed that he nation will rise once Dublin is secured?”

“That is the hope, no, the belief of the committee, and many men have died to bring us to this point. However, German arms and German troops to cower the constabulary across the nation would strengthen us in our resolve.”

“But we have the gas. I can manufacture a great deal more by the morrow. All we need are couriers who know how to use it and the British forces will be more easily routed than by rifles in the hands of the idealistic but inexperienced.”

O’Connell shook his head, not in disagreement, but in an effort to dispel the fumes of whiskey that filled his head. “Is that possible, Frank? I thought it took weeks to make the vapour.”

“Indeed, it took weeks to develop the system. However, the system now exists and I can produce as much gas as necessary. Please tell Pearse. I will work through the night if it will further the great cause.”

He professor stood and grasped Frank firmly by the hand. “By God, I will. Mr Kørner. I thank you; the people of a free Ireland thank you. This will not be forgotten.” With that he was gone. Frank poured himself a small glass of the whiskey and enjoyed its cloying aroma and heat on the tongue. Now his only concern was that O’Connell would return here and not remain with the others until the rising began. In that case he planned to tell whoever came to collect the gas that here was a problem that required immediate attention from the professor. It would give him less time, but he was still confident of success. It would be a long night, and he needed to be alert. He had a book on the relative motions of bodies in space by a German physicist. Ideas that he knew were to be imminently developed in a new paper. He wanted to be able to grasp its burden and so set to the pleasant task of revision. His thinking passed from English to German, and from mundane strategy to cosmic processes. He was content.

Frank’s attention was wrested from the calculations, based on familiar stuff by Poincaré. Someone was shuffling beyond the garden door. O’Connell or a street urchin, come to collect the sacks of bone gas? For a second Frank shared the fears of discovery with the conspirators. Then he heard the heavy breathing of the professor; the professor alone. The game could now begin in earnest. The key grated in he lock. Turning, the cuboid of an iron alloy murmured in response and gave ingress to a dishevelled but ecstatic academic. Ice, familiar Arctic ice crystallised in Frank’s blood as he rose. One hand offered in greeting, the other weighing he knife.

Air, blood and digestive enzymes gurgled as Frank slit the throat. He manoeuvred the body into a chair and applied the device to the left nasal passage. A single upward blow with the mallet sent the blades into the brain. The pages of “Zur Elektrodynamik Bewegter Körper” rustled as Frank set the blades spinning at higher speeds than the lobotomising process they were designed for demanded. Now he broke through the other nostril and inserted a thin rubber tube. He placed the other end of the tube in his mouth and sucked until he tasted the bitterness of cerebral matter.

The foam that was O’Connell’s forebrain was carefully siphoned into the phial. This was then placed in a larger thermal flask, purchased by the former Frank from an excellent Parisian purveyor of household goods for Meursault’s mental matter. Café Délice was a label that hardly did justice to the liquid it contained, but for Frank this was as precious as life itself: in fact it offered him he morning jolt of immortality. He removed the body to a large trunk in the basement, bathed and dressed in clothes more suited to his destination. Equipped with his precious cargo and a diplomatic letter, the reward for the information supplied to the British informer, he walked from the asylum towards the docks as he sun rose on the day of the Easter rising.