Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

31

Sleepless After Sunset

Mea culpa, mea culpa. My fault, my fault, I am not worthy.

Even with Sean and Deirdre looking on, Max thought a man who had come all this way with a woman to a remote Irish cottage ought do more than feel regret and move on.

“If I ran away after that intimate moment, Kathleen,” he confessed, “I wasn’t ready for the responsibility of such a pure and needful love. It was the worst mistake of my life. I’ve paid for it every day, and you’ve seen that I’ve paid for it every hour.”

He laughed a little. “I wish there was something that would redeem the moment for you.”

She shook her head. “You’ve won. You’ve forgotten, and I can’t.”

Before Max could answer, Deirdre spoke behind him. “See the glorious sunset you’ve brought with you, Michael Kinsella.”

He and Kathleen automatically looked away from each other to the picture window again, where the sky was bleeding all the colors of a watercolor box into undiluted strands of peach and aqua and magenta and orange and purple and scarlet and iridescent mother-of-pearl blue.

“Mother of God,” Deirdre’s soft croon sounded like a lullaby, “’tis the loveliest spot on earth.”

Max waited for Kathleen’s raw outburst, but she remained silent.

Deirdre said briskly, “Sean has things under control at the stove. We’ll sit outside. Will ye take out the settings?”

“Of course,” Max said, collecting Kathleen’s glass with his—broken glass was a weapon—and heading for the kitchen to deposit them on the table. Sean wasn’t there.

Deidre indicated a cupboard with tableware in ceramic pots and the dinner plates on a high shelf. Deidre must stand five-eight, Max thought, almost Molina tall.

He smiled to think of no-nonsense, emotions-stowed Molina peeking in on the dramatis personae in this domestic scene with utter shock.

Max reached for the plates and turned, almost bumping into Kathleen collecting knives and spoons and forks. He could feel her entire body tense to have someone standing this close, especially him.

He looked down on her shining black hair, wearing no black velvet band, and stroked his palm over it.

She remained frozen, staring down at the silverware in her hands, minutely trembling, fighting the instinct to lash out.

He stepped away without incident, and saw Deirdre watching.

“Michael, be a love, and take the butter dish out as well? Ah! Max, I mean.”

Hands full, luckily, Max and Kathleen elbowed themselves out the pantry door to be ambushed by a Cinemascope version of the sunset that suffused the entire sky.

While their eyes feasted, their nostrils inhaled the smoky aroma of grilled steak. Sean stood at a portable stainless steel barbecue setup against the cottage’s textured stone wall.

“A high-end barbecue?” Max asked. “Not a common item of Irish charm.”

“It charms the tourists,” Sean said. “The brews are on ice in the washtub, if that’s charmin’ enough for an Ugly American like you. And the ladies might need shawls against the goin’ of the light. Deirdre’ll give you a couple inside.” Sean stepped forward to pull the heavy wrought-iron chair out for Kathleen, who stared at the thing as if it’d bite her.

Max darted inside to take two big serving dishes from Deirdre and ask for the shawls.

Forty-five minutes later, the food was gone and the lingering sunset was nearly gone. Two lanterns moved from the side table now flickered on all their faces, almost like flames.

Sean had fetched a wine bottle for the women. Max had tired of the strong Irish ale and itched for three fingers of Jameson’s, but drank what his host did, eager not to challenge the habits of the house in this peaceful place.

“Have you thought of adding a fire pit, Sean?” Max asked. “It’d take away the chill.”

“Too American, Max. The tourists like their comforts, but also like a bit of the primitive. Except for the stainless steel barbie, a must for the Aussies.”

“You’re right. You don’t want to make this into a suburban backyard in Racine.” Max looked around. “St. Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland, it’s said, but I believe he exiled the mosquitoes too.”

“Aye, I don’t miss the mosquitoes in Wisconsin, as big as butterflies,” Sean told Deirdre.

“And now carrying exotic and lethal diseases,” Max said.

“But you don’t have mosquito problems in Las Vegas.”

“No, drought though.”

“I can’t stand it!” Kathleen’s voice shattered the peace. “Look at you. Two self-satisfied retiree ex-patriots reminiscing over your pints.”

“We are ex-pats of a sort,” Max told Sean, ignoring her outburst.

“I don’t mean from America, you dunces!” Kathleen had stood, her cheeks ruddy with wine and fury, her shawl clutched around her. “From the Cause. Even Michael here once gave a tinker’s damn about undermining the resistance’s bombing plots, and you, Sean, you were taken in by the IRA and ended up at a negotiation table. All that I did for years to raise money for guns and gold is fading like the setting sun into futility.”

“Because we’ve won the peace,” Deirdre said quietly.

“It will never last. The Orangemen still march in Belfast.”

“And,” Max said, “there’s still a price on my head, or else I wouldn’t be going to Belfast to find where Garry Randolph’s body has been buried.”

“Once again,” Kathleen said, “you set yourself on a quest for a dead man. I suppose the living aren’t good enough for you. I can arrange more such quests.”

“Sit down, Kathleen,” Deirdre said.

“Why should I sit at table with you lot of traitors?”

“This is my table and you will sit down, Kathleen.”

To Max’s amazement, she obeyed. Deirdre’s intense command must have echoed a nun’s from the Magdalene asylum. A stern parental “No!” can sometimes make an attacker pause. Max had used that trick, but Deirdre had not shouted.

“Body?” Sean asked Max. “Buried? Who is Garry Randolph?”

“The counterterrorism mentor I told you about,” Max said, “who performed as the magician Gandolph the Great. My bungee-based magic act was sabotaged in Vegas and I fell, broke both my legs and a good bit of my brain, the part that remembers. Garry took me to Europe to escape, heal and revisit my past. We were on the run and got tangled up with some IRA remnants in Belfast. Trying to outdrive a shooting spree, I…Garry got hit. I…do you have any whiskey?”

Sean nodded at Deirdre.

“I’ll have some too,” Kathleen said. Sullenly.

Deirdre paused beside her, and put a light hand on her shoulder. “I’ll bring the whiskey and then later you and I will have our say.”

The bottle wasn’t Jameson’s but a good brand, nevertheless. Deirdre brought Waterford lowball glasses and the lantern light made the whiskey into liquid orange sunsets in the bottom of their glasses.

So it came to this, Max thought, night coming on and the four of them all still alive and older and drinking together in Ireland. He wondered if he should check under the table for a bomb.

He told Sean how Garry had put him in a private Swiss sanitarium to recover, how assassins may have found him, and Max had to escape into the Alps with casts on both legs. He told how he survived to reach Zurich and contract Garry, omitting mention of the woman psychiatrist from the clinic who was his doctor and/or hostage or assigned assassin.

Reminding Kathleen of the dangerously bright and beautiful Revienne Schneider might trigger another jealous jihad. Seeing Revienne leave his Las Vegas house probably had spurred Kathleen to burn down the place with him in it. She’d certainly seemed surprised to see him when he’d hijacked her on this flight to the Old Sod.

“So,” Max concluded, “when I finally connected with Garry, we flew to Ireland. He hoped retracing the path you and I made many years ago, Sean, from Ireland to Northern Ireland, would help my memory. We interviewed all shades of former IRA members in Belfast, and irritated someone enough to try to kill me. Us.”

Max glanced at Kathleen, her shoulders hunched in the softly woven shawl, her hands cupped around the glass, warming the crystal as the liquor warmed her.

“What did you do with Garry’s body?” Sean asked.

Max shut his eyes. “I had to leave it with our abandoned car in Belfast, hoping that his friends among the old IRA people who made the peace would claim it for a decent burial.”

“And so do I,” Sean said, leaning forward to put his good right hand on Max’s wrist. “I’ll help you find your friend if you reach an impasse.”

Max was too stressed to do more than nod.

“Did the that trip, and this, help your memory?” Deirdre asked.

Max sighed. “Somewhat.”

Even with them there, he couldn’t afford to let down his guard in front of Kathleen. She’d palmed a steak knife when the meal was cleared. He’d disarm her before beddy-bye time. She might have slipped her straight razor through airport security too.

He laughed to himself, thinking of Matt Devine trying to glimpse if she had any cat-scratch scars on her back and the back of her legs during one of their 3:00 a.m. hotel rendezvous. He would bet the ex-priest had sweated that assignment.

Come to think of it, he was glad that job was done and he didn’t have to worry about it. Kathleen had definitely not been one of the two Darth Vader-masked figures who’d tried to threaten the cabal of magicians turned would-be heist operators, all in a search for Kathleen’s collected but now lost hoard of money and guns for the IRA.

Even as Max savored the straight whiskey and the cool darkness, he realized this family-like atmosphere was priming Kathleen nerves.

“Cheers,” Kathleen said, lifting her glass. “What was it we were to settle, Deirdre? Why are you so eager to embrace the man who left your husband there in the pub to be blown up, and you along with him?”

“Boys. They were boys, Kathleen.”

“Ireland makes boys men at fourteen.”

“Only because of the Troubles. And who was it hangin’ around the IRA men like a rock star groupie, jumpin’ on any fresh outsider comin’ in?”

“They were foolish not to use women in the Cause, except to breed more of them and nurse them when they were hurt or dyin’.”

“Sure, and you wanted to fight like a man, Kathleen, only you used woman’s wiles. You weren’t a patriot. You thrived on the anger and hatred for the British Protestants and army, well deserved, but you needed the high emotions and the dance of betrayal for your own selfish reasons. You lived to turn one against the other, and so you did. Oh, you knew how to flirt and tease and you ached to destroy. You craved the attention, but despised the men who gave it to you.”

“Deirdre,” Sean began.

“Stay out of it. This is woman’s work.” She turned to Kathleen again. “I saw you playing one American lad against the other. They were innocents wantin’ a bit of sin. They knew nothing of the grinding oppression we Catholics felt. Sure, they feared most the confessional back home once they’d stepped over the so-sweet forbidden fruit line thousands of miles away, not the tinderbox that was Northern Ireland. You were three-and-twenty. They were randy virgins of seventeen, well reined in by the Church. Our home-grown boys and men knew to dodge your temptations. They feared the confessional too. Or, if hardened, were willing to engage with you in a contest of who was using whom. But these two, their rivalry was trivial. Neither would have long resented the other for ‘winning the beauteous colleen’. And the winner would have felt duly guilty afterwards.”

Deirdre leaned forward on her folded arms. “You knew the pub needed clearing of innocents. Yet you lured one away and left the other unwarned. Did you choose Michael, or was he just the most susceptible?”

“What does it matter, Deirdre? Here they are again, holding hands on the table. If I thrived on destruction, as you say, it didn’t work.”

“It matters to me.” Deirdre’s passionate intensity matched Kathleen’s for the first time. “I risked my life to save the boy you left behind. What made him the expendable one, Kathleen? What were you thinking besides the need to see innocent emotions toyed with and innocent blood shed? Why Sean and not Michael?”

“No,” Max said. “We don’t need to know. I doubt even Kathleen knows or can be trusted to speak the truth of it.”

“You were more daring,” Sean told him. “I thought you were taking a risk, to your soul or even health, but certainly not your life, when you went off with her. The idea was exciting, but I could never have gone through with anything. I really didn’t want to win the prize. And,” he added, smiling that slightly off-kilter Huck Finn smile at Deirdre, “I got the real prize.”

“I may be sick,” Kathleen said.

“You are. Then and now.” Deirdre’s judgment was unsparing.

“She’d spent her time in hell three times over by the time she was twelve,” Max told Deirdre.

“Don’t you dare defend me,” Kathleen told Max, flaring to hiss-and-spit life. “That’s not what I needed from you.”

“You needed it from someone, and didn’t get it.”

Deirdre wouldn’t do it for sure. “So Sean and I should be put through Purgatory again, Max? I think not. You’re asking me to have her under my roof? I say no to even one night.”

“We can’t chain her outside, like a dog, Deirdre,” Sean said.

Deirdre looked pleased at the idea.

“We’ll drive on.” Max checked his watch. Cell phone reception in these rural areas was patchy, just as in congested Las Vegas.

“You’ll not go off alone with her again,” Sean said, “save in sober daylight.”

“What will we do with her, then?” Deirdre asked. “’Tis like having a scorpion under one’s pillow.”

Kathleen had sat back, swirling the whiskey in her glass, dropping out of the conversation, probably reveling in being considered so dangerous.

Max eyed her. Thought of the razor. “I’m a risk-taker, as you say, Sean. I’ll leave with her now.”

“No, man. These unlit rural roads are treacherous for a stranger. I won’t let you go,” Sean said.

“Wished that had worked the first time.” Max grinned ruefully. “All right, I’ll take her away in the morning. Meanwhile, you can put her in the main bedroom with me and lock your door for the night.”

“Be gone wi’ ye!” Deirdre exclaimed. “Do ye never learn?”

“On the contrary, I learn too much.”

Kathleen stood. “You expect me to accept such shabby hospitality? I’ll see you in hell.”

Sean nodded. “’Tis certain you know that terrain well.” He looked at Max. “You’re the super-agent man. Guard yourself well this night.”

Sean led Kathleen inside, but Deirdre stayed to catch Max by the sweater-clad arm. “You’ll not make the same mistake again with her. No shenanigans?”

“Not in a thousand years.”

Kathleen was quiet, even lamb-like, her shawl clutched around her, going upstairs. At the bedroom door she turned to look up at him, the spitting image of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara. “How noble of you to have sacrificed yourself again.”

“Inside,” he told her. “I know about the steak knife.” He tested the pocket of her silk blazer and pulled out the suspected plum.

He stuck his head into the hall before anyone disappeared for the night. “Deirdre, a lost lamb from the tableware for your dishwasher.” He flourished the knife.

“That’d be the chef’s,” Sean said. “You’re crazy, man.”

“Yup. But I enjoy a challenge. Do you mind taking custody of Kathleen’s traveling bag for the night?”

He handed it out and locked the door.

Kathleen spread her arms wide, the shawl serving as wings. “Do you need to search me for a nail file? A dangerous hangnail?”

“As tempting as ever. No. We’ll sleep in shifts. You in the bed first. I on the chair.”

“You don’t intend to sleep at all.”

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

“Luckily, it’s nearly midnight and this bedroom is on the east side of the cottage,” Max said. “The sun will bathe us in spotlights in no time.”

“Luckily for you.”

He took the chair and nudged the ottoman nearer with his foot. “Really, Kathleen? Can you never separate sex and homicide? You should be a cop.”

“I’m not a murderer. At least, not directly.”

“Perhaps yes, perhaps no. I suppose you could argue that you never intended your hired doubles to die for you. What you do excel at is seducing other people to do your dirty work. I understand why you have so little faith in humanity.”

“Oh, shut up. You ‘understand’. I’m sick in the head, and you’re a long-suffering hero.”

“I do like the sound of that, but I’m giving up the martyr thing. Can you give up the psychopath thing?”

She sat on the edge of the bed and kicked off her shoes. “I didn’t think.”

“About what? And when”

“At the pub. Who’d get blown up, who wouldn’t…other than that it wouldn’t be me, and, thanks to me, you. I knew Deirdre would take care of Sean. She’d been making cow’s eyes at him for an hour, but all he could see was me.”

“You were a sight to behold.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“No. I can’t mean that.”

She stared at him, seeking truth. “Your memory’s untrustworthy.”

“Yes. But…I can see what I might have thought.”

“And that was?”

“That was what those who’d worst abused you thought. That you had the passionate spirit of an innocent child bracketed in beauty. It inspired them to envy, and to commit torment and destruction. It must have inspired me with a need to capture it, but the only word the world knows for that is lust. Pity. I know why you had to become them to escape memories of the abuse, but it’s a goddamn shame.”

Kathleen leaned against the headboard, arms crossed, and shrugged.

“Did you know about Sean surviving right after the bombing, or find out later?” he asked.

“No. I left soon after you vanished. They’d been wanting me to go to the Americas to solicit money for the resistance, and it was better I lay low after having been at the pub before the explosion. In fact, I was listed as among the lost.”

“Is that when you started using the name Rebecca sometimes?” Max asked. “And why Rebecca?”

“Because she was a bad girl,” Kathleen said with sudden vehemence.

“In a book.”

“I see Miss Temple Barr has been refining your literary tastes to potboilers.”

“She mentioned the book, so I looked up a movie review. Rebecca was dead, but her selfish, manipulative spirit haunted everyone who’d been in her life. I suppose she was your role model? That’s why you used the name?”

Kathleen crouched like a cat at the edge of the bed, while her lips spelled out the answer. “‘Rebecca’ was the name the nuns assigned me in the asylum.”

“They didn’t use your given name?”

“They always changed the inmates’ names to show them what they had been and who they were meant to be…was nothing anymore. It also kept us hidden and unable to find even each other afterwards. I found the novel, though. The so-called heroine was a sheep.”

“But you were born there, to an…inmate. She couldn’t even name you?”

“My mother’s name was Kathleen, but they called her Dolores because her beauty brought her so much sorrow. I took her birth name back after I escaped.”

Max was confounded again by the endless cruelties piled on these young girls, innocents preyed upon by boys and men, some even in their own homes, all of them surrendered by their families with shame and rejection, and with no other place to go.

“Most of the records have been destroyed, the Church says,” Max mused. “Changing given names would further confuse any oral history. Clever and cruel.”

“The Church lies.”

“Doubtless. So does the government. Those severe, strict Old World attitudes of punishing women for their sexuality live on in the third world and even in the U.S., all in the name of religion.” Max paused. “Maybe not in Canada. Canada seems more civilized than most.” The dry comment put her off guard. “I’ve tracked you. The records say you and your daughter died.”

“They couldn’t admit I was able to run away with her.” Kathleen’s smile was radiant. “I was always a bad girl.”

“You were a formidable girl. And admitting you’d escaped might have caused an investigation into the pedophile priest who raped you.” He paused. “Why did you name your daughter Iris?”

“You’ve found her every secret. Not mine.” She smiled smugly. “Those I chose to take her to were atheists. I wouldn’t burden my child with a saint’s name or any variety the unBlessed Virgin’s name. The flowers have no denomination.”

“Well…Iris is the Greek goddess of the rainbow. You can’t escape religion in world history.”

“Do you say so? I didn’t get much education in Greek, although I learned Spanish and Portuguese in my travels.”

“Rebecca,” Max repeated, returning to Kathleen’s Magdalene name.

And then…he understood something more about her, something deep and devilish and unutterably sad. His feet pushed the ottoman away as he leaped up.

“Now I see it. Rebecca, the book and movie. That’s why you burned down my house! The housekeeper who was insanely devoted to dead Rebecca burned down the manor house, Manderley, so Rebecca’s husband and new wife would never have a place to call home. Maxim de Winter was her husband, and murderer. That’s why you torched Garry’s and my house. You wanted to destroy my memories of someone, anyone who loved me.”

“You’re mad.” Kathleen’s laugh was forced. “I don’t live my life by a book. You humiliated me there, in that house, for the first time since the Magdalene asylum. All of you people and even a pack of cats, as if one of you were a witch or warlock.” Her fingertips smoothed the fading quartet of slashes on her cheek.

“You had the satisfaction of inflicting some damage and humiliation yourself that night.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

“Did I knock some memory back into you?” She was sitting on the edge of the bed now, swinging her stocking-clad feet, which didn’t reach the floor, like a child. She was only a couple inches taller than Temple, Max reminded himself.

And here they were, reminiscing like classmates, as if they shared an advanced degree in Abuse and Terrorism 101.

“No,” he said. “No memories. And, I imagine, a lot of possible memories I could have resurrected died in the fire.”

“I should have torched that hellhole while we all were there.”

“You can’t afford repercussions of failed mayhem now. Sean knows you’re back. He was influential in the IRA in fairly recent years.”

“Influential in giving up the battle.” She narrowed her eyes. “Where do you think I hid my razor?”

“I’m hoping in the travel bag I sent away.”

“You can’t send me away.” She looked to the locked door. “You promised to control me.” She looked at the LED numbers on the bedside table. “We’ll not sleep and we’ve already discussed the only two books we have in common, Mr. de Winter.”

“Wait. But not the film.”

“I never saw the film of Rebecca.”

“I’m talking about the film of another kind of woman entirely.”

“Oh, that Philomena. Named after a girl martyred at fourteen in the early days of the Church.”

“Lord,” Max said. “That sounds like Malala Yousafzai and other schoolgirls attacked and even killed by a religion desperate to keep women controlled. When was this?”

“I learned my church history. In 304 Rome. She is the patron saint of babies, infants, and youth.” Kathleen’s voice reeked with irony.

“Oddly amazing.”

“Why?”

“Think about it. The book the film is based on, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, has inspired thousands of Magdalene-adopted children to seek their birth mothers and information. It isn’t easy, as we’ve said, with the girls in the convent forced to use other names and they never knew each other’s true identities.”

“Philomena went by ‘Marcella’—” Kathleen shook her head, her beautiful black hair as glossy as onyx. “It’s Martin Sixsmith who’s the hero, the detective, who followed the few clues there were. Philomena didn’t have the nerve to question the nuns and the Church. But Sixsmith…he was a fallen-away Catholic enraged by what he found. He had balls. He found the truth and created the exposé, not her.”

Max wanted to smile. Kathleen didn’t see that he was now playing Sixsmith to her Philomena Lee. She didn’t want to confront the reality of her grown daughter, as Philomena had. She wanted only to nurse past grievances. Max needed to keep her off-balance, blinded by the roles that had always worked for her in that past.

“I understand why your keepers gave you the name they did,” he said. “Google says Rebecca means ‘beautifully ensnaring’.”

“Oh, don’t think the nuns back then had Google to underline their evil, only a wrathful God. We shall see how true I am to that name on this trip,” she said, softly, seductively.

What really was her endgame? he wondered. She had his exclusive attention at last…but did she hope or need to seduce him again, or did she intend to kill him or get him killed?