Liam was far more apprehensive. “We’re crossing the Atlantic in this wee boat?”
“Yes.”
“Fock me.” He went pale.
“It’ll do you good,” I told him. “Put some colour in your cheeks. By the time you reach Miami you’ll be a competent seaman.”
“But I get focking seasick, mister!” Liam said.
“You what?” I asked in horror. Flynn had sent me seasick crew?
“I told Mr Flynn that, but he said it didn’t matter! He said this would be like a focking cruise, so he did.”
“The aeroplane was real good,” Gerry said accusingly, as though Corsaire’s accommodation was a real disappointment after their charter flight from Dublin. For both boys it had been their very first aeroplane flight, but neither was looking forward to their maiden yachting voyage with quite the same excitement.
Shafiq, relieved that I had taken responsibility for Liam and Gerry, gave me Halil’s written instructions. They were simple enough. I was to take Corsaire to the north Tunisian port of Ghar-el-Melh where we should wait for the gold. Once the coins were concealed aboard Corsaire we were to sail for Miami. “And who the hell do I contact when I reach Miami?” I demanded of Shafiq. I could not believe I was simply supposed to call Michael Herlihy’s Boston office and risk being overheard by the FBI.
“They know who to contact.” Shafiq pointed to the two Irish lads.
“You do?” I challenged them.
“Yes, mister,” Gerry said.
“What a way to run a revolution,” I said unhappily. “So let’s get on with it.”
I stowed my few belongings, put my sextant in a drawer of the chart table, then rummaged through the supplies which il Hayaween had arranged to be put aboard. It took me two hours to check the boat, but everything seemed to be present, including thirty feet of flexible plastic tubing that I thrust out of sight in a deep cockpit locker, then, with nothing to hold us under the battlements of Monastir, I started Corsaire’s engine and singled up her mooring lines. The Palestinian influence had ensured that there were none of the time-consuming bureaucratic procedures that usually accompanied a Tunisian departure; instead, after bidding Shafiq farewell and shouting at Liam and Gerry to stay out of harm’s way, I cast off, reversed from the pontoon and motored towards the open sea.
At the very first surge of the waves Liam belched, gripped his belly and his cheeks turned a whitish green. I told him to stay on deck, for the last thing I wanted was to have the boat’s interior stinking of his vomit. He lay flat, groaning and unhappy, as we plugged head on into the persistent north wind. “Have you ever heard of Michael Herlihy?” I asked Liam, who shook his head miserably. “He’s much worse than you,” I said cheerfully. “He gets seasick just looking at a boat.”
“Oh, Jesus.” But he could not have been feeling too unwell, for he managed to light himself a cigarette. “How long till we get to wherever we’re going?” he said miserably.
“Two days to Ghar-el-Melh,” I said cheerfully, “then two or three months across the Atlantic.”
“Months?” He stared at me, saw I was not joking, so crossed himself. “Christ help me.”
The morning turned cold as we headed north into the Gulf of Hammamet. Liam’s seasickness got no better, yet he insisted on sharing Gerry’s enormous midday meal of eggs and bread fried in bacon fat and washed down with the sweet cola they had bought in Monastir. Liam fetched the meal back up in seconds. Gerry frowned at the bucket I had managed to thrust on to his friend’s lap. “Waste of good food, that.”
I asked them more about themselves and heard the all-too-familiar Belfast story of children born into bleak housing estates and growing up into the hopelessness of chronic unemployment. In another society they might have found menial jobs, but there were not even floors for them to sweep in Ulster, and the pointlessness of their lives had scraped their souls to a bedrock of hate that could only be appeased by the twin pleasures of drink and reducing other people to their own level of misery. Uneducated, unskilled and bitter, they were good for nothing except to be the foot-soldiers for Ireland’s Troubles, but even that calling had turned sour. Somehow, they were vague about just how it had happened, their names had been given to the security forces. Warrants for their arrest had been issued and so Liam and Gerry had been forced to flee south across the unguarded border with the Republic of Ireland and there, in what they called the Free State, they had found a refuge in a Dublin housing estate every bit as bleak as the Belfast ghetto from which they had fled.
“How do you like Dublin?” I asked Gerry. Liam was almost comatose, but Gerry seemed to be enjoying the afternoon. We were under sail, chopping north and east into a steep head sea that threw up great fountains of salty spray. I was sailing to save gasoline, and planned to tack back towards Cap Bon after nightfall. I was still not used to the boat which seemed clumsier than her lines had suggested. She was riding low in the water and making heavy work of seas that a boat of her length should have soared across. Her previous owner had over-ballasted her, perhaps out of nervousness, and doubtless he had made her into what he wanted: a safe docile boat that would have been comfortable enough on a fine summer day, but Corsaire was ill suited to this choppy and windy winter work and I dreaded to think how she would behave with an extra thousand pounds of weight in her belly. Still, short of beaching her and cutting a chunk of lead out of her keel, there was nothing I could do, and better a too heavy boat lumping across the waves than a lightweight bouncing across.
“Dublin’s focking terrible,” Gerry answered my question about how he liked living in Ireland’s capital, and Liam groaned agreement.
“Why is it terrible?” I asked.
“Because no one focking cares about us in focking Dublin,” Gerry explained indignantly. Like Liam, he used the word ‘fock’ as a modifier, an intensifier, and as an all-purpose replacement for any other word that momentarily escaped his restricted vocabulary. “Dubliners don’t focking care!” he went on. “I mean, Jasus, we’ve been risking our focking lives for Ireland, so we have, and the focking Dubliners couldn’t give a monkey’s toss what we’ve done! The focking Garda came round, didn’t they just, and they said they knew who we was and why we was in Dublin and if we so much as lifted a little finger they’d take us inside and beat the focking Jasus out of us. It’s your focking Ireland I’m fighting for, I told the focking policeman, and you should be focking grateful to me, but was he shit? He told me to fock away off!”
“It’s tough,” I said with careless sympathy. In my own Dublin days I had seen how IRA activists fleeing from northern arrests had come south expecting to be treated as heroes, only to find an utter indifference and even a distaste for their actions. One Dubliner, after listening to a northerner for a whole evening, had wearily told me that Britain’s best revenge on Ireland would be to give Ulster back to the Irish.
It took the lumbering Corsaire three days to reach Ghar-el-Melh, which turned out to be a small harbour surrounded by ancient fortifications. The harbour entrance was silting up so that I was forced to creep over the bar at what passed in the Mediterranean for a high tide. My pilot book told me that this dying port had once sheltered the feared Barbary pirates, but Liam and Gerry only cared to know whether or not the village under the deserted castle battlements might shelter a pub. “Probably not,” I said.
“No focking booze?” Liam, recovered from his seasickness by being safely anchored in port, asked in a horrified voice.
“Not a drop.”
“So how long are we going to be here?”
“Till the gold arrives,” I explained.
“Have you really got fock all to drink on board?” Gerry wheedled.
“Not a drop,” I lied. In fact I had hidden two bottles of Jameson Whiskey that I was saving for Christmas Day. I had hoped we would spend the day at sea, but Christmas came and the gold had still not arrived and so we just stayed at anchor in the deserted harbour.
Our Christmas dinner was Spam fritte
rs, tinned peas and French fries. Afterwards I brought out the surprise Jameson’s and the three of us sat in Corsaire’s saloon and, with their tongues freed up by the whiskey, Liam and Gerry told me the old and familiar Belfast tales. At first, trying to impress me, they spoke of their own heroic exploits; of bombs ripping British patrols apart or flattening whole sections of the city centre, but the stories were lifeless and bereft of Belfast’s sharp wit, suggesting that the truth was somewhat less colourful. I finally punctured their bombast when I told them I had lived in Belfast myself, and that during those years I had given shelter to Seamus Geoghegan when he was first on the run from Derry.
“You know Seamus?” Liam asked incredulously.
“Sure. Very well.” I saw my reputation soar in their eyes. Liam and Gerry were already wary of me, for I was a very strange creature in their starved eyes. I was foreign, bearded, tall, competent and taciturn, but now that they had discovered I knew Seamus, I became almost as godlike as Seamus himself.
“You really know him?” Gerry asked.
I crossed two fingers. “Like that.”
“Jesus.” He half smiled at me, then frowned, and I wondered if he was contemplating the difficulty of eventually killing me. Killing a stranger is easy compared to killing a man you know, and neither Gerry nor Liam, for all their bombast, struck me as men who would find a cold-blooded killing easy. Bur perhaps their job was merely to escort me to Miami where my death, if it was indeed ordained, would come from the hands of others.
As Christmas night wore on the stories of Gerry and Liam’s prowess were replaced by better and funnier tales. Liam told the night’s best story, that of the young boy who threw the nail bomb. “He was only a wee thing” – Liam stubbed his cigarette into the mess of gravy, butt ends and cold peas on his plate – “he can’t have been more than ten or eleven. It happened up in Turf Lodge, so it did. There was a riot one evening, nothing special, just something to pass the time like, but the focking Brits had sent a focking patrol up there to break a few heads, so the lads took the wee boy aside and asked him did he want to throw a nail bomb?” Liam paused to light another cigarette. “He said yes, of course he did, because all the wee boys are just waiting for the chance to do their bit, like. You know what a nail bomb is, mister?”
“Of course he focking knows!” Gerry said. “He lived in Belfast, didn’t he?”
“I know what it is,” I assured Liam. A nail bomb was a length of metal pipe crammed with explosives and plugged at either end with four-inch nails. It was thrown like a stick grenade and, when it exploded, it scattered a lethal shower of nails among the enemy.
“So they take the wee fella behind a house, right, and he’s shown the bomb, and he’s told that if he throws it properly then he’ll be given other jobs, like more responsible jobs, know what I mean?” Liam was enjoying telling the tale. “So they give the wee boy the bomb, light the focking fuse for him, and tell him to run like fock. Go, boy, they tell him, go! So the wee kid, he runs like fock, so he does, and he throws the focking bomb at the focking Brits, then he turns and focking sprints away like the devil himself is up his arse. But he’s just forgotten one thing, so he has.” Liam paused to increase the suspense of the tale’s telling.
I was pretending not to have heard the story. “He’s forgotten something?” I asked innocently.
“His focking dog!” Gerry could not resist interfering with Liam’s story. “He’s forgotten his focking dog!”
“Who’s telling this focking tale?” Liam’s indignation overcame his timidity.
“Keep your focking hair on!”
“Dog?” I asked.
“Aye!” Liam looked back to me. “The wee fella’s got a dog, see, and the dog focking worships the wee fella, and the dog sees this bomb sailing away towards the focking Brits and the dog thinks, that’s a stick, so it is! He thinks it’s a game of fetch, see? So the dog runs after the bomb, because he thinks it’s a game. But it isn’t! It’s a focking bomb! And the fuse is smoking and even the focking Brits are laughing by now! And the crowd screams at the focking dog, leave it alone, fock away off, but the dog’s got the bomb in its teeth now, see, and it’s carrying the bomb back to its wee master, and the crowd is all running away, so they are, and the dog’s wee tail is wagging like mad, and the wee boy is running like fock, and his ma is screaming at him to get a focking move on before he’s blown to focking bits, and the harder the wee boy runs the quicker the dog runs after him.” Liam paused to cuff tears of laughter from his eyes. He was laughing so much he could hardly articulate the punch line. “And then the focking bomb goes bang!”
“Oh, Mother of God, but did it fock!” Gerry put in.
“There was focking dog-scraps everywhere!” Liam was still half helpless with laughter. “There was bits of dog on the focking roofs! There was dogmeat everywhere!”
“Oh Christ, but did we laugh!” Gerry slapped the saloon table in applause for his friend’s story.
“No one was hurt,” Liam said.
“Except the dog,” Gerry said, and started laughing again.
“The wee fella forgot about his dog, you see?” Liam wanted to make sure I had understood all the tale’s nuances. Above us the wind sighed in Corsaire’s rigging and stirred the ketch’s long white-painted hull and slapped a halyard in mournful clangour against the aluminium mast. The companionway hatch was open, giving me a view of the high stars and a single wisp of elongated, moonlit cloud.
Gerry took a long drink of whiskey, then poured himself another mugful. “It’s funny you being an American,” he said at last.
“Is it?”
“Aye, it is,” he said truculently. “I mean you going to live in Ireland and all that. Jasus, if I had the chance I wouldn’t leave America, not to go to Belfast! No way! I’d stay in America. Get a job, make some money, eh?” He seemed to realise that he had already destroyed any hopes he might ever have possessed of making a normal existence; hopes of a job, a wife, children, of the small happinesses that make the world go round.
“I had a cousin that moved to America.” Liam, emboldened by the success of his last story, spoke in the expectant tone of a man telling a joke. “Landed at the New York Airport, so he did, and his uncle met him off the plane, and they was walking out of the airport door and there was this hundred-dollar bill lying on the pavement. Just lying there, so it was! ‘Well, pick it up!’ his uncle says. ‘Go on, lad, pick it up!’ And my cousin looks him straight in the eye and he says, ‘I’ve only just got here and you expect me to start work already?’ ” Liam waited for me to laugh, then grinned proudly when I did.
Gerry flickered a dutiful smile, but the thought of America and all its bright hopes that were beyond his reach had depressed him. “We used to make a lot of money off the Yanks,” he said wistfully. “We used to sell them rubber bullets! They’d pay a lot of money for a rubber bullet to put on their mantelpiece.” The black bullets, thick phallic missiles designed to incapacitate rather than to kill, were fired by British troops on riot control duty and had become a prized souvenir of the Troubles. I remembered a canny man in Derry who had set up a useful garden-shed business carving fake rubber bullets from old truck tyres. He claimed to have sold a couple of hundred of the counterfeits before the Provisionals, realising they were losing market share, had threatened to put real bullets in his kneecaps if he did not stop his trade. “And there was a game we used to play with the Yanks,” Gerry said after a while.
“A game?” I asked.
“You know, mister, with the Yanks who used to visit Belfast to see a bit of the Troubles. I mean they were good fellas, so they were! They gave us money, but of course they wanted to see a bit of the action, didn’t they? There was no focking point in flying all the way to Northern Ireland not to see a wee bit of aggravation.”
“So what was the game?” I knew the answer, but they were enjoying their moment of telling me tales and it would have been churlish to deny them the pleasure.
Liam, the more articulat
e of the two, took up the story. “We used to meet them in a bar, right, and ask if they wanted to meet the IRA. They didn’t know we were the IRA, did they? How could they? I mean, if you told every stray Yank that you was in the movement then you might as well tell the focking Brits. So of course the Yanks would always say yes, I mean why else were they there? They’d come all the way from Boston or Chicago to give us a wee bit of support, to pat us on the back, like, and slip us a dollar or two, so of course they wanted to meet the Provisional IRA soldiers. So we used to tell them, go to such-and-such a house at ten o’clock next morning. We’d give them the address, it was always an abandoned house, one of those that had been half burned out like, and we’d say that some of the boys were meeting there before going off to plant a bomb or shoot a soldier.”
“You could tell a Yank anything,” Gerry put in. “They’d believe you!”
“They wanted to believe, you see,” Liam, who did not want me to feel slighted, explained helpfully.
“So what happened?” I asked, as if Seamus Geoghegan had not told me this exact same story ten years before.
“Well, they’d go, of course,” Liam said, “and sometimes their wives with them, because the women are just the same. They’d be all excited like! I mean they were going to meet the real IRA! They were going to meet the heroes! But what they didn’t know was that we’d phoned the focking Brits on the security line, you know what the security line is?”