“Why?”
“Personal. Patrick wants that money back I just took off him, and he doesn’t want to ask me for it himself.”
“Are you sure it’s not political?”
I shook my head. “There wouldn’t have been time to get the orders.”
“What about Michael Herlihy? He’s got the authority, hasn’t he?”
“Not for this sort of trouble, Seamus. Any orders for my killing would have to come from Belfast or Dublin. For Christ’s sake, you think Brendan will have me chopped up before he knows where the gold is? No, this is personal, Seamus. This is between me and Padraig.”
He grinned. “Then I’m on your side, Paulie. Two of them and two of us, eh?” He drained the last of his hot whiskey. “Poor wee fockers. Do we finish them off?”
“We just frighten them.”
“You go first then. I’ll be twenty paces behind.” He made a great play of shaking my hand and saying farewell, then I picked up my bag and pulled on my oilskin. A cheer greeted the abandonment of the war news and the beginning of a televised basketball game. The two men watched me go to the side door, saw that Seamus was ordering another drink, and so followed me towards the winter afternoon.
It was game time.
In the old days the Parish’s side door had opened into an alleyway that ran between the hall and an Italian bakery, but the bakery had long been pulled down to leave an abandoned lot which the Parish used as a place to hide stolen cars and the truckloads of merchandise that disappeared from Logan Airport’s bonded warehouses. The lot was hidden from the road by a high fence that acted as a neighbourhood bulletin board. The fence’s outer face was a mass of posters which currently advertised a teach-in on British propaganda techniques in the United States, auditions for the American Children of Ireland Marching Band and Twirlers, classes in spoken Gaelic, an announcement about the St Patrick’s Day parade arrangements, and twin appeals for contributions to help mark the tenth anniversary of the hunger strikes and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin.
The fence made the lot a fine and private place in the middle of which a police cruiser was now sitting with its engine running, its front doors open, and its emergency lights whipping an urgently lurid glow across the handful of parked vehicles. The car was empty, except for two discarded police caps that lay on the back seat. The cruiser explained why the pair of young men had appeared with their plaid coats buttoned to their throats. It was not that police uniforms would have scared anyone in the Parish, which had Boston’s Irish cops well under control, but inevitably the appearance of two policemen would have caused a stir and the two men had wanted to take me quietly. Besides the police cruiser there were two trucks parked in the lot, a red Lincoln Continental and a black Mercedes sports car that must have belonged to Tommy the Turd for it had a special Congressional licence-plate.
I cut right, going past the Mercedes towards the gap in the fence which would lead me towards East Broadway. There was a cold wind and a light rain in the darkening air, making me glad that I was wearing my thick yellow oilskin. I heard the Parish side door bang open behind me and felt the adrenalin warm my veins. “Shanahan!” someone shouted.
I turned, but kept walking backwards.
“Freeze there!” The two youngsters were nervous, but were determined to play the scene tough. They fumbled under their tight buttoned plaid coats for their pistols.
They were still trying to extricate their guns when Seamus came out of the Parish door. The two policemen, embarrassed by the unwanted witness, straightened up. I had started walking towards them, feigning innocence. “You wanted me, boys?”
“Don’t mind me, lads,” Seamus sauntered down the steps.
The cops tried to lose Seamus. “We just wanted a word with Mr Shanahan. Something private.”
“Private, is it? But Paulie and I are old friends. We go way back, lads. There’s no secrets between us, are there, Paulie?”
“You can talk in front of Seamus,” I said, “so what is it? A parking violation? Or a donation for the police orphanage?” I was six paces in front of them and Seamus was three paces behind, and the two cops were both sweating despite the chill wind, and no wonder, for Seamus had a certain reputation among the Irish. “So what do you want of me?” I asked them, and heard the Ulster lilt in my voice. I had caught the accent when I lived there, and at moments of stress it came back. Behind me the police car’s lights whirled in the gloom.
“It’s nothing.” One of the two cops had decided to back out of the confrontation. He held his hands palm outwards towards me. “Nothing at all. Forget it.”
“You’re disappointing me, boys.” I took a step closer. Seamus jerked his head to his left, telling me he would take that man, and I took another pace forwards when suddenly the Parish side door banged open again and an agitated Michael Herlihy appeared on the top step. “Stop it! Now! You hear me? John Doyle? O’Connor? You back off, now, both of you!” Herlihy’s voice was sharp as ice. He must have been close by, perhaps in the back room of Tully’s Tavern that he used as a South Boston office, when Marty Doyle had told him of my appearance in the land of the living. Herlihy, hearing that Patrick was having me beaten up by the Parish’s tame police, saw the small matter of five million dollars being complicated. Michael Herlihy wanted to find out just what attitude I was taking to the missing gold before he saw me tenderised, and so he had come full pelt out of his lair to head off the trouble. “Whatever you were doing,” he ordered the two policemen, “stop it!”
“Just what were you doing?” I asked the relieved policemen.
“Nothing, Mr Shanahan, nothing. We were just leaving! It was all a mistake.”
They moved to walk past me towards their car, but I put out a hand to stop them. “Hadn’t you heard, boys? The Parish has got valet parking these days. Isn’t that right, Seamus?”
“Right enough, Paulie.”
The two policemen dared not move for Seamus radiated a capacity for mind-numbing violence and was standing hard behind them. He was not restraining the policemen, but neither cop dared move a muscle as I climbed into their squad car, took off the parking brake and shifted it into reverse. I smiled through the windscreen, then rammed my foot on to the accelerator. The police car shot backwards, smack into the brick side wall of the neighbouring hardware store. “Sorry, boys!” I shouted. “I’m more used to boats than I am to cars!”
Seamus was laughing. Herlihy, whose office pallor had turned even whiter than usual, glared but did not try to stop me, while the two police officers just stood like whipped children. I pulled forward, hearing the tinkle of broken brake lights falling to the ground, then rammed the accelerator again, this time aiming the car at Tommy the Turd’s Mercedes. Herlihy flinched when he saw what I was doing, then closed his eyes as I rammed the police cruiser hard into the flank of the sleek black sports car. There was a horrible mangling noise. “It’s been so long since I’ve driven a car, boys!” I shouted. “But I’ll get it right, don’t you worry!”
A dozen men had come out of the Parish, attracted by the squeal and crash of tortured metal. Herlihy, tight with fury, turned and ordered them back inside. Seamus’s lawyer ignored the order and stood laughing while Tommy the Turd and his Waspy aide were wondering if the world had slipped gears. Patrick McPhee, knowing he had started this madness with his ill-judged summons for police help, fled in panic from Michael’s anger.
“Here goes!” I shouted. “I’ll get it right this time!” I shifted into reverse again, slammed my foot on the accelerator, and crashed the car back sickeningly hard into the brick wall. My head whiplashed on to the grille that protected the front seat occupants from whatever prisoners they had in the back seat. I killed the engine and climbed out, to see that the boot lid was spectacularly buckled. The cruiser also had a crumpled bumper and had lost a headlight and the best part of a wheel arch, while the expensive body panels of the Congressman’s Mercedes were horribly dented and gouged. “Replace it with a
n American car, Congressman,” I called to him, “a man like you shouldn’t be driving a European car, should you now?”
Tommy the Turd’s aide hurried the Congressman back into the Parish as the two policemen stalked past me. “Fuck you, Shanahan,” one of them muttered, then they pulled off their plaid hunting coats, climbed into their wrecked cruiser and, with a foul scraping sound, drove out of the lot.
Seamus applauded me. Michael Herlihy, looking more than ever like a beardless Lenin, spat at me. “That wasn’t clever, Paul,” he said.
“It wasn’t meant to be clever, Michael, just a scrap of fun. Did you never have fun, Michael?” I looked at Seamus. “He was always the class nerd, Seamus. Altar boy, chalkboard monitor, nuns’ favourite. Michael’s idea of a good time is to run in the Boston marathon, or have you even given up that small pleasure, Michael?”
Herlihy picked his way through the puddles of the parking lot until he was standing close beside me. “Where have you been these last few weeks, Shanahan?” He had waved Seamus aside, wanting to speak privately with me.
“I’ve been chatting to the CIA, Michael.” I smiled seraphically.
“You’ve done what?”
“You know I spilled the beans. Was it the FBI or the cops that talked to you?” I smiled down into his thin, bloodless face. “I got worried that the Arabs weren’t sending the Stingers to Ireland, but planned to use them here. I knew you wouldn’t have wanted that to happen, Michael, it would have been bad for the movement’s image, wouldn’t it now? So I played the patriot game.”
He ignored my blarney. “Where in God’s name is the money?”
“It’s funny, isn’t it,” I said, “how you lawyers always ask that question.”
“Where is it, Shanahan?” He was intense, hissing his words, his body tight as a whip.
I clicked my fingers ruefully, as though I had misplaced something. “I should have told you, Michael, the boat sank. It was a rotten boat, a real clunker. It went down off Sardinia. I tried to save the two Belfast boys, but they panicked and the boat went down like a stone with them still inside. And with all that gold weighing the boat down, they never stood a chance. Straight down. Nothing but a few bubbles and a floating lifejacket.”
“Don’t tell me lies.” Michael spoke menacingly.
I knew he was never going to believe the story, not in a thousand years, but it was worth a try all the same. “As God is my witness, Michael, just south of Sardinia. There was a sudden squall out of the north, a brute of a sea running, and –”
“No!” He snapped the denial, cutting me off. The rain flecked his glasses as his voice gathered intensity. “You’ve gone too far, Paul, and Ireland wants you to answer some questions.”
“No,” I said, “you’re the one who’ll have to answer questions, Michael. That money didn’t come from Libya, it came from Saddam Hussein, the bastard who’s doing his level best to slaughter American boys right now. So what you’re going to do now, Michael, is you’re going to forget the money, you’re going to forget the Stingers, and you’re going to forget me.”
“You’re insane!” Michael’s voice rose to a sudden shrill intensity.
Seamus crossed the lot to act as a peacemaker. “I’m taking care of it, Michael,” he said soothingly. “Paulie will find the money, won’t you, Paulie?”
“Leave this alone, Seamus!” Herlihy snapped, then looked back to me. “I’ll have your killed, so help me! I’ll have you killed!” Michael rarely displayed any emotions for he was one of nature’s Jesuits, a tough sinewy little son of a gun under a pale, thin and clerical exterior, but now, behind his rain-obscured glasses, he had lost his self-control. “You bring me the money, Shanahan, all of it, or you’ll wish you’d never been born.”
“Boo,” I said to him.
“Damn you!” He turned and stalked across the parking lot, then stopped at the Parish’s side door for a parting shot. “There’s a British Consulate in Boston, Paul.”
“You want me to go and tell tales to them, is that it?”
He pointed at me. “It takes one phone call, just one, and I can have the Brits on your back. You’ll end up like Gallagher.” Brian Gallagher had been an arms dealer who had been acquitted in a Boston courtroom of illegally exporting arms to Ireland, and two weeks after his acquittal his body had been found in a cranberry bog near Waltham. He had not died easily. No one knew who had killed him and, though rumour blamed Gallagher’s partners whom he was said to have cheated out of their money, Michael Herlihy was convinced that the Brits had sent a special forces undercover team to reverse the jury’s decision. “I won’t weep for you, Paul,” Herlihy called as a parting shot as he went inside.
“The Brits wouldn’t focking dare come here, would they?” Seamus asked.
“Christ, no! Michael’s always seeing Brits under the bed. He thinks he’s on their wanted list and it makes him feel like a hero. But Michael’s biggest danger is that he’ll get a shock off his electric toothbrush. Just forget him. He’s a jerk.”
“But a dangerous one.” Seamus picked up my discarded sea-bag and tossed it to me. “Look after yourself, Paulie. And don’t worry about Michael or about Belfast. I’ll clear you. I’ll say it was all a misunderstanding and that you’ll be bringing the money.”
“You’re a grand man, Seamus.”
“And fock the Brits, eh?”
“From here to forever,” I gave him our old refrain, then walked away, and I hoped to God that the Brits did not have a team in New England for I was already playing two sides against a third and I did not need a fourth.
But those worries could wait. Instead, through the spitting rain and with Patrick’s money in my pocket, I walked to the bus and was carried home. To Cape Cod.
It was dark when the taxi dropped me off. I could have phoned Johnny Riordan from Hyannis, and he would certainly have come and collected me from the bus depot, but I could not be sure that some nasty surprise would not be waiting at the house and so I had caught the taxi and told the driver to drop me off at the convenience store close to the dirt track which led over the sand ridge. I bought myself some milk, a tin of Spam, some bread and margarine, then walked back to the track which twisted through the pine woods and so led to my house on the salt marsh. I stopped on the sand ridge and watched the marsh and the house for a long time, but all seemed innocent under the high scudding clouds and so I finally walked down to the clam-shell driveway, found my house keys, then discovered that the half-Chinese differently gendered person called Sarah Sing Tennyson had changed the Goddamn locks. “Hell!”
I went to the kitchen window, found a decent-sized rock, and broke through one of the glass panes. No alarm shrieked. No one called out in warning, so I guessed Miss Sarah Sing Tennyson was not in residence.
I reached up, found and unlatched the window catch, then heaved up on the sash window. It did not move. The bitch had put in sash locks too, so I took the rock and smashed through the whole window: glass panes, nineteenth-century mullions and all, and, after knocking out the remaining shards from the old putty, I crawled through on to the draining board. I ripped my jeans and cut my thigh on a scrap of glass I had failed to dislodge, then pushed two cups and a plate off the draining board to shatter on the kitchen floor, but at least I was home. I groped around the kitchen until I found the newly installed light switch, then set about reclaiming my house.
I had made more enemies than Saddam Hussein in the past few weeks so my first necessity was the ability to defend myself. I went into the empty garage and found that most of my old tools were still under the bench. I took the crowbar back into the living room where Captain Alexander Starbuck had built a broad hearth out of four massive stone slabs. I lifted the right-hand slab, shifting it aside to reveal a deep dark hole in front of the fireplace. The hole was the best of all the many hiding places constructed in the house during Prohibition. At very high spring tides, especially if an easterly wind was holding the water inside Pleasant Bay, this hiding place could flood
, but those rare tides had never affected the whiskey hidden inside the hole, nor had they pierced the layers of thick plastic sheeting that I had wrapped and sealed around the long wooden box that I now wrestled up from the damp sandy hole and on to the hearth. I had last seen this box seven years before, when, just hours before leaving the house, I had wrapped and hidden it.
The telephone rang.
I swore.
It rang four times, then there was a loud click in the kitchen and suddenly Sarah Sing Tennyson’s voice sounded. “I’m sorry I can’t speak with you right now, but if you’d like to leave a message after the tone I’ll get back to you just as soon as I can.” Another click, a beep, and I assumed the caller had rung off, but then a man’s voice spoke. “Where the hell are you, Sarah? I’ve tried the loft. Listen, baby, just give me a call, OK? Please? This is William, just in case you’ve forgotten who I am.” The last few words were spoken in a petulant whine, suggesting that William had been severely pussy-whipped by Ms Tennyson. I grinned in sympathy for poor William, then laughed as I thought of the FBI or the CIA trying to decode the lovesick fool’s message. The phone, I was sure, had to be bugged. I might have been thanked by van Stryker, but that did not mean I was trusted.
I carried my unearthed box over to the long table that was littered with twisted paint tubes, sketch books, pads and magazines. I made a space, then used a pair of Sarah Tennyson’s scissors to slash through the plastic wrapping. I levered the top off the box and found the contents just as I had left them.
On top of the box was a US Army issue Colt .45 automatic dating from the Second World War. Its magazine held a paltry seven rounds, but they were powerful. I cleaned the pistol meticulously, dry-fired it a few times to make sure that everything was working, then pushed one of its magazines home. I dropped the gun into a pocket of my oilskin jacket, and, feeling a good deal safer, went to open my tin of Spam.