Cat In A Zebra Zoot Suit

36

In the Ranks of Death

“This is my last quest, as you call it, of this trip, Kathleen, and it’s sorry I am to drag you along, but I can’t cut you loose until I leave Ireland in case you might kill me or in case someone else might want to kill you.”

“Oh, cut the music-hall Irish palaver, Max Kinsella. It’s tired I am of your endless do-goodin’ and breast-beatin’. I might rather be killed. So what am I expected to suffer through now?”

“I confess it’s all too easy to walk the walk and talk the talk in Ireland. I need to find the remains of Gandolph the Great, or be sure he was given a proper burial or cremation. I was forced to abandon his body in the car.”

“Is it a church burial in Belfast you’re after?”

“No. He wasn’t Catholic, just a damn good man. I promise my intentions are purely secular, Kathleen.”

“Despite the grandiose performing name, he sounds a right old fellow,” she admitted, “and a far more decent father figure than I had.” She shook her head and the glory of her flagrant thick hair the nuns had cropped. “Maybe you’ll less regret following the black velvet band if we find him.”

That “we” was revolutionary, so he didn’t mention it.

The car’s GPS guided Max over the curving hills to the M1 and a straight shot into Belfast in less than an hour. As Max and Garry had found on the previous visit, Americans were startled by how short distances and very little time could cross borders in the British Isles and Europe.

Belfast’s population was almost 700,000. As they drove into the city, its views were dominated by Belfast Castle high on a hill and other large and stately red brick and white marble ministerial buildings dating back to earlier centuries, but also new, striking simple and clean modern office complexes.

The “Peace walls” meandered like scars through city, bunkerlike dividers between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods painted with colorful urban graffiti six feet up, then bare concrete expanses topped by high-wire fences.

“Where are we to sleep tonight?” Kathleen asked, her eyes fixed on the passing buildings and cars.

Hours of their mutual wariness gave her tone the same weariness he felt.

“We’ll not be doing much of that, I’m thinking, with various factions sure to have an eye on me or you.”

“You want them to find us.”

“How else will I discover what happened to Garry’s body?” Max had Googled a hotel on the fringe of the city center. “We can rest at a decent hotel, have a leisurely dinner, and then go walking.”

“The perfect Max Kinsella night out. Feed the prey, then it’s on foot, looking for trouble to find you. You sure know how to wine and dine a woman.”

“I’m not going to get caught in another car chase.”

Max pulled the Honda into an interior parking garage. They left their luggage inside, with Kathleen pulling out a loose-knit dark sweater and Max a light black leather jacket for the evening chill.

“This is a cheap American chain hotel,” Kathleen said, sounding surprised and a bit indignant.

“We’re not newlyweds, Kathleen. It’s a solid, unassuming three-star hotel that’s been redone inside and will keep us invisible and off the street until dusk, when we go hunting.”

“Or being hunted.”

“What’s the matter? Home ground not a big enough advantage for you?” Max asked. “I’m the one who’s the target.”

In the dim parking garage, her posture and expression shifted. Max couldn’t quite read how. Perhaps she’d arranged earlier to hand him over to the Real IRA. Their reserved double/double bedroom with en suite would be a prison cell for them until a late dinner would have a walk through Belfast for a chaser.

Dinner had been decent—salmon filet for her and for him the interesting Irish-prepared barbecued ribs, corn on the cob, cole slaw, and chips. Kathleen mocked his all-American menu choice.

Max didn’t want to waste his time reading a long wine list, or drink much of it. He ordered a Bailey’s Irish coffee with whiskey, his favorite after-dinner drink with Garry Randolph.

Kathleen ordered hot chocolate with whipped cream, marshmallows and a shot of sweet syrup. He mocked her all-American soda fountain dessert.

Then they got up, hooked their outer clothes off the chair backs and went into the cool, dark streets.

Max took Kathleen’s sweater-clad arm. He didn’t want her either ahead or behind him. He veered for the narrower and darker streets, for the oldest cobblestoned ways, graffiti-lined walls of abandoned public housing buildings into trash-occupied alleys, where the smell of urine ebbed and flowed like rank incense.

Lounging knit-capped gangsta youths on corners straightened at the sight of Kathleen, but Max pushed her between him and the wall side and gave them a long wolfish lowered-head glare.

He knew where he wanted to go, but not if he was exactly in the right place. This time, he wasn’t still limping from his broken legs. He was more formidable, although he and Gandolph had fought their way out of the place he was hoping to find last time. The last time for Gandolph, by so few minutes.

A single man from behind took Kathleen’s arm on the wall side into his custody. Max didn’t turn to react, but spun to put his back the wall to confront the man coming toward them.

The men, wearing black knit caps pulled down to their eyebrows, were twenty to thirty years older than he, like Garry, but toughened by years of passionate, merciless urban warfare.

The advancing man spoke in a voice as soft and smooth and soothing as the best Irish whiskey.

“D’ye have such an ache to commit suicide, Michael Kinsella? Is that what brings you back to the Auld Sod again in so little time after suffering such a heavy loss your last time back?”

Max felt a swirl of triumph. Bull’s eye. This was same bunch he and Garry had encountered during the previous trip. They had bargained before; they could bargain again.

He let Kathleen drift behind him, cursing him under her breath as the second man brought her along behind like excess baggage.

Shoved down narrow, steep stone steps into a cellar, they inhaled a crude potpourri of stale ale and smoke.

A man stayed guarding the bottom of the stairs. A lone man behind a long bar stared up as they entered. The place was empty except for a half-dozen men wearing peacoats and sweaters and the ubiquitous knitted or billed tweed caps lounging at wooden tables and chairs against a smoke-blackened brick wall. Pint glasses filled with dark amber liquid topped by a dispirited frill of foam circled their tables.

Max felt suddenly thirsty.

Above them all, hanging tin kettles and bellows dripped from blackened oak beams. The dark walls held rough oil portraits of long-dead Irish Republican heroes.

Max and Kathleen were released and left standing in the middle, the main man moving to lean against the bar and confront them. Him. The light above the bar revealed his features. Max recalled his name and would use it.

“D’ye have such an ache to commit suicide, Michael Kinsella?” he repeated. “Is that what brings you back to the Auld Sod again in so little time after suffering such a heavy loss your last time back?”

“That’s just it, Liam. I’m here to find Garry Randolph’s burial place.”

The man nodded. “You two did a damn fine job of disrupting the IRA’s agenda to drive out English rule years ago. The peace was hard-bought, but it finally came and is many years old. And so did the penalty for your actions then come due at last here on our common soil. We are not inclined to exact further punishment on ye at this late date.”

“Apparently there are hold-outs,” Max noted.

Kathleen smiled. “Like rock ‘n’ roll, the IRA never forgets.”

Liam shook his head and paid her attention for the first time. “Kathleen, Kathleen, Kathleen, your nerve is as storied as your beauty, but we are all older now and cherishing different goals, different means. I can’t say which is the greater shock for my old eyes. The sight of you again, or the sight of you accompanied by this misguided American traitor to our cause.”

“He forced me back here,” she said.

Liam nodded. “Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows, although I believe you and he are not new to this truth. I have never known in that case whether you were following your IRA head or your cold, cold heart, Kathleen, sleeping with the enemy, but the result was to make us a formidable foe for years and cost us dearly before the peace.”

“I didn’t come to Northern Ireland an enemy,” Max said. “I was a sympathizer. And the dearly won peace now,” he added, “means nothing if the lingering past is not forgiven, although not forgotten.”

“Eloquent,” Liam said, then again repeated himself. “D’ye have an ache to commit suicide, Michael Kinsella? We still have old business with you and will do it privately.”

Liam nodded at his men. Two rose and swept Kathleen into a private room. Both she and Max started to object, but the movement was so swift that dissent was an afterthought.

Max wondered if the former IRA members wanted to spare Kathleen witnessing any brutal revenge they had planned, little knowing how much she’d rejoice in his maltreatment and bad luck.

Liam sighed and kept center stage, pacing in front of his patch of bar.

“Yes, the peace is here and holding, with exceptions. Too much blood has been shed,” he said. “We don’t hold a grudge against Randolph. He was a professional agent, he operated in Germany and Spain as well as Northern Ireland. You, on the other hand, Michael Kinsella, were a tourist and a turncoat, an Irish lad from America who betrayed us. At least you learned the taste for revenge we Irish have cultivated after centuries of brutal English rule.”

“So this is a kangaroo court,” Max said, looking around.

“Are you not going to plead mercy because of the stupidity of your youth?” Liam asked.

Max shook his head. “I did what I did to the best of my lights then and would do it again.”

“Yet now you know your cousin did not die in the bombing, did in fact join us later.”

“So you’ve been following us. Sean joined you in making the peace. And even though Deirdre saved Sean’s life, other innocents perished in that explosion. They deserved justice too.”

“We called in a warning. Whoever answered at O’Toole’s pub couldn’t hear in the hub-bub, put down the receiver and forgot it, thus tied up the line.”

“You had cars.”

“The time was tight and the traffic heavy.”

“You had feet, as some in the pub probably lost.”

“We were too late. During the peace negotiations, it was recognized the warning was intended and went awry. The men you and Randolph fingered for the job had their life sentences commuted at that time.”

“So they’re free, Sean is alive, and Garry is dead.”

“Yes, Garry Randolph is dead.”

Liam stood aside from his place against the polished wood bar.

Max stared past him, confused to see two empty pint glasses and a tall brass vase.

Not a vase, an urn.

“We’ve been expecting you. You’re not one to let go, that’s for sure.”

“You cremated him out of revenge?”

“Respect. His death was not intended. Yet he was an agent who acted against a free Ireland. We’d never put him in Irish soil for eternity.”

Max bit the inside of his cheek to keep from saying, doing something foolhardy, but regret for leaving Gandolph’s body behind still burned his soul like rock salt would sear the raw place inside his mouth.

Liam narrowed his unsmiling Irish eyes. “Swear his ashes will go anywhere except the soil below and the air above Ireland, and you can take them away.”

“I swear,” Max said.

“Then your work here is done.”

Max stepped to the bar, picked up the urn. It was lighter than he expected. Holding it gave him no self-defense moves.

The man guarding the door stepped aside. Max could carry Gandolph into the misty Irish night and back to…wherever a homeless man from Las Vegas would go.

“Hotheads remain among us,” Liam said. “We intended to get information, not to take a life, even yours.”

Max laughed wearily. “Sorry not to oblige you.”

“That could be rescinded at any time. We still want information.”

“About what? I’m retired. At least I am when I’m left alone. The two thugs you sent to find me in Las Vegas a couple of years ago forced me to leave for a while and then they beat up my girlfriend, a true threat to noble Irish manhood weighing in at one hundred pounds.”

“She must not have said anything.”

“She didn’t know where I was.” Max thought. “I don’t think she’d have said anything if she did. Stubborn as a Skye terrier and as good at rooting out vermin.”

Liam chuckled. “Her I’d like to meet. Sorry to inform you that you are not the high-value target you’d like to think yourself. We sent no men to find you, or to Las Vegas, although we may send some now.”

“What about the rogue branch?”

“Too lazy. They like to vent a bit o’ venom locally. We have a new benevolent mission.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“You don’t want to stay,” said a man from the fringes. Flanagan, Max remembered.

Liam nodded. “This is a kangaroo court, as you call it. Only you’re not the one on trial.”

“Maybe I don’t want to go,” Max said slowly.

“Watch and pray, then,” Liam said, consciously quoting Jesus’s instructions to his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Judas would shortly finger him for the Romans.

Max grew even more uneasy. That reference evoked brutality, betrayal and destiny. He eyed the handsome urn. Someone had respected Garry.

Would he be forced to choose between getting Gandolph or Kathleen out of here before the night was over?