Scoundrel

I rolled up the window, let in the clutch, and drove toward my house, which had been built 150 years before by a Captain Alexander Starbuck who, retiring from the profitable pursuit of whales in the Southern Ocean and quarrelling with his family on Nantucket, had come to this Cape Cod marsh and built himself a home snug against the Atlantic winds. My father had bought The Starbuck House from the estate of the Captain’s great-granddaughter and had dreamed of retiring to it, but the dream had never come true. Now I would make it home. I drove slowly up the driveway of crushed clam shells that splintered loudly under the tires, and stopped on the big turnaround in front of the house where my headlights shone stark on the silver-gray cedar shingles. It was a classic Cape Cod house: a simple low building with two windows either side of its front door, a steep staircase in the hallway and a snug dormer upstairs that must have reminded old Captain Starbuck of a whaling ship’s cabins. The house’s only addition since 1840 was the garage, which had been clad in the same cedar shingles as the house itself and thus looked as old as the rest of the building. It was a home as simple as a child’s drawing, a home at peace with its surroundings, and it was mine, and that thought was wondrously comforting as I killed the headlights and climbed out of the car. I took the sea-bag from the boot and found the house keys that I had kept safe these seven years, then walked to the front door.

My key scraped in the lock as it turned. There had never been electricity in the house, and I had no flashlight, but the moon shone brightly enough to illuminate the hallway. My sister Maureen, who used the house as a holiday home, had left some yellow rain-slickers hanging on the pegs by the door, but otherwise the shadowed hall looked just as I had left it seven years before. The antique wooden sea-trunk with its rope handles that I had bought in Provincetown still stood under the steep-pitched stairway, and on its painted lid was a candle in a pewter holder. I fumbled in the holder’s dish, hoping to find a book of matches.

At which point an electric light blazed about and dazzled me. I started back, but before I could escape something terrible struck my face and I was blinded. The pain made me want to scream, but I could not even breathe, and, vainly gasping for air and with my hands scrabbling like claws at my scorching eyes, I collapsed.

PART TWO

THE POLICE ARRIVED FIVE MINUTES LATER; THEIR TWO CARS rocking and wailing down the dirt track, then skidding ferociously as they braked on the clam-shell turnaround. A young excited officer, his pistol drawn, burst through the open front door and shouted at me not to move.

“Oh, go away and grow up,” I said wearily. “Do I look as if I’m about to run away?”

My sight had half returned and, through the painful tears, I could just see that the girl who had attacked me was now sitting on the stairs holding an antique whaling harpoon that used to hang on my bedroom wall. She had not used the vicious harpoon to cripple me, but a squeegee bottle which now stood beside her on the steep stairway. “He broke in,” the girl explained laconically to the three policemen who now piled excitedly into the hallway. “He says his name is O’Neill. Dr. O’Neill.” She sounded scornful. In the last few moments I had learned that this was one very tough lady.

“Do you want me to call the rescue squad?” the first policeman asked, while an older officer knelt beside me and gently pulled my hands from my face.

“What did you do to him?” the older man asked the girl.

“Ammonia.”

“Jesus. Did you dilute it?”

“No way!”

“Jesus! Get some water, Ted. Can we use your kitchen, ma’am?”

“Through there.”

“You used ammonia?” the first policeman asked in awed disbelief.

“Squirted him good.” The girl showed the officers the liquid soap bottle that she had used to lacerate me through the banister rails. “I used to know a policeman in Los Angeles,” the girl explained, “and he taught me never to piss a psychopath off, just to put the bastard down fast. Ammonia does that, and it’s legal.” The last three words were added defensively.

“Sure is.” One of the policemen had fetched a saucepan of water from the kitchen. My breath was more or less normal now, but the pain in my eyes was atrocious. The officer poured water on my face while outside the house the police radios sounded unnaturally loud in the still, cold night air.

“We’ll take him away in a moment, ma’am,” the older policeman, a sergeant, reassured the girl.

“Then bury the bastard,” the girl said vindictively.

“What did you say your name was, mister?” the sergeant asked.

“My name,” I said as grandly as I could, “is Dr. James O’Neill,” and I fumbled in an inside pocket for my false passport.

“Careful!” The sergeant moved to restrain me, then relaxed as he saw I was not pulling a gun. “I know you!” he said suddenly.

I blinked at him. My sight was still foully blurred, but I recognized the sergeant as Ted Nickerson, a guy I had last seen in twelfth grade. Damn it, I thought, but this was not what I had planned! I had planned to disappear in Cape Cod for a few weeks, hidden from sight while my ship came home, and the last thing I needed was for the word to spread that I had returned to America as bait for Michael Herlihy or il Hayaween.

“You’re Paul Shanahan!” Ted exclaimed. “Which means—” He stopped, glancing at the girl.

“Which means this is my house,” I confirmed.

“It’s not his house,” the girl insisted. “I rent this place! I’ve got a five-year lease!” She was shivering in a nightdress and an old woollen bath robe. My old woollen bath robe. She had bare feet, long black hair, and an Oriental face.

“This is the Shanahan house.” Ted Nickerson confirmed the ownership uncomfortably. He was still frowning at me. “You are Paul, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Bullshit!” the girl said with an explosively indignant force on the second syllable. “The house belongs to a guy in Boston, a guy called Patrick McPhee.”

“McPhee’s my brother-in-law,” I told her. “He’s married to my sister Maureen. Maureen holds the keys to the place while I’m away, that’s all! She uses it for summer vacations and odd weekends, nothing more.”

The girl stared at me. I guessed that by using Maureen’s name I had convinced her I was not your usual rapist breaking and entering, but might in fact be telling the truth. Ted Nickerson was still frowning, perhaps thinking about my false name. “How’s your face, Paul?”

“Hurts like hell.”

“Ammonia’s bad stuff,” he said sympathetically, “real bad.”

“How was I to know?” The girl was on the defensive now. “He doesn’t knock, he just comes into the house…”

“Like he owns it?” I finished for her.

“Oh, shit!” she said angrily. “Then why the hell are you calling yourself Dr. O’Neill?”

“None of your damned business,” I snarled, then struggled to my feet. My eyes were still streaming with tears and my throat felt as if I had gargled with undiluted sulphuric acid, but I was recovering. “Who the hell put electric light in here?”

“I did,” the girl said defiantly. “I’m a painter. I need decent light to work.”

“Did you put in the telephone as well?” Ted Nickerson asked her.

“Sure did.”

“Mind if I use it?”

“Help yourself. In the kitchen.”

The girl edged tentatively down the stairs that Captain Starbuck had built as steep as the companionways on his old whaling ships. One policeman was out in the car, and the other two were hovering nervously by the open front door. “Can we close the front door?” the girl demanded. “I’m kind of chilly.”

“Sure, ma’am.”

I went through into the living room from where I could hear Sergeant Nickerson grunting into the telephone in the kitchen. I found the new light switch and, in the glow of a lamp, saw a box of tissues on a table by the low sofa and plucked out a handful which I used to scrub my eyes. The tissues helped, though the remnants of the ammonia still stung like the devil.

The room, except for the electric light and the paintings, had not changed much. It was panelled in old pale oak and its low beamed ceiling was formed by the pine planks of the dormer storey upstairs. It was a shipwright’s house with a main floor of pegged oak that the girl had thoughtfully protected from paint drips with a dropcloth. The wide stone hearth was filled with ash on which I threw the crumpled tissues.

“Do you really own the house?” The girl had followed me into the living room.

“Yes.”

“Hell!” she said angrily, then, with her arms protectively folded across her breasts, she walked to one of the small windows that stared eastward toward the ocean. “The mailman told me he didn’t think Patrick McPhee was the owner, but I thought that was just troublemaking gossip.”

“McPhee’s always been full of shit,” I said savagely. “Marrying him was the worst day’s work Maureen ever did. So how long have you been here?”

“Three years, but I don’t live here permanently. I come here whenever I need to, but I’ve got a place of my own in New York.”

“Manhattan?”

“Sure, where else?” She turned to glare at me, as though the night’s misadventures were all my fault. “I’m sorry about your eyes.” She spoke grudgingly.

“Blame Patrick,” I said. I dislike my brother-in-law intensely.

“But I’ve invested in this place! I put in the electricity, and the phone!” She spoke accusingly. “I even had an estimate for central heating, but Maureen said I shouldn’t waste my money. I thought that was kind of weird, but I didn’t ask any questions. I was dumb, right? But I like this place too much. It’s the light.” She waved a peremptory hand at the window to explain herself.

“I know,” I said, and I did know. In fall and winter the light on the Cape is so clear and sharp that it seems like the world is newly minted. Thousands of painters had been drawn by that light, though most of them merely wasted good paint and canvas trying to capture it. Whether the girl was good or not I could not tell, for my eyesight was still smeared. In the dim electric light her canvases seemed full of anger and jaggedness, but that could just have been my mood.

“My name’s Sarah,” she said in a placatory tone, “Sarah Sing Tennyson.”

“Paul Shanahan,” I said, and almost added that it was nice to meet her, but that courtesy seemed inappropriate, so I left it out. “Sing?” I asked instead. “That’s an odd name.”

“My mother was Chinese.” Sarah Sing Tennyson was tall with very long, very straight and very black hair that framed a narrow, almost feral face. She had dark slanted eyes above high cheekbones. A good-looking trespasser, I thought sourly, if indeed she was a trespasser, for God only knew what the lawyers would make of this situation.

“When did you put the electricity in?” I asked lamely, supposing that at the very least I should have to reimburse her for that expense.

“Two summers ago.”

“I didn’t see any wires outside.”

“I had to bury the cables because this is all National Seashore land so you’re not allowed to string wires off poles. It was the same with the phone line.” She gave me a very hostile look. “It was expensive.”

More fool you, I thought. “And how much rent are you paying Patrick?”

“Is it your business?” She bridled.

“It’s my Goddamn house,” I bridled back. “And if my Goddamn brother-in-law lets my Goddamn house to some Goddamn girl, then it is my Goddamn business.”

“I am not a girl!” Sarah Sing Tennyson flared into instant and indignant hostility. I could allow her some irritation for being woken in the middle of the night, but even so she seemed to have an extraordinarily prickly character. “I am a woman, Mr. Shanahan, unless you wish to accept the appellation of ‘boy’?”

Oh sweet Jesus, I thought, the insanities that old Europe was spared, then I was saved from further linguistic tedium when the kitchen door opened and Ted Nickerson, still holding the telephone handset, stared at me. “Paul?”

“Ted.”

“I’m talking to a guy named Gillespie. Peter Gillespie. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“Nothing at all,” I said truthfully.

Nickerson had been staring oddly at me ever since he recognized me, and now his puzzlement only seemed to deepen. “He says he expected to see you in Europe. Does that make sense?”

Christ, I thought, but the CIA had been far quicker than I had expected. They had responded to my warning calls by putting out an alert. “We got a warning to look out for you two days ago, Paul,” Ted Nickerson said.

“Tell Gillespie I’ll call him in a few weeks.”

Ted shook his head. “I’ve got orders to hold you, Paul. Protective custody.” He moved his free hand to his holstered pistol, making Sarah Sing Tennyson gasp.

I half raised my hands in a gesture of supplication. “OK, Ted, no need for drama.”

“You’re not under arrest, Paul,” Ted said carefully, “just under police protection.” He spoke into the phone, telling whoever was at the other end that I was safely in the bag.

Which meant I had screwed up.

I met Peter Gillespie next morning. He came to the police station with an agent called Stuart Callaghan who was to be my bodyguard. “We guessed people might want to stop you talking?” Gillespie explained the bodyguard’s presence. “The guys with the missiles, right?”

“I guess they might too,” I said, though I suspected the people who wanted to stop me talking were more worried about the five million bucks in gold that should have paid for the Stinger missiles.

“You’ve had breakfast, Mr. Shanahan?” Gillespie had very punctiliously shown me his identification.

“Sure.”

“Then if you’re ready?” Gillespie was plainly eager to begin my debriefing. I was carrying, after all, over a decade of secrets that would feed the agency’s data banks. “We have a plane waiting at Hyannis Airport.” Gillespie tried to usher me toward the door.

“Hold on!” I protested. It was not yet eight in the morning, I had snatched two hours’ indifferent sleep in a holding cell, and I felt like death warmed over. “I’ve got to see someone before I leave. I want to use the telephone, then go back to my house.”

“If you need a razor or a toothbrush—” Gillespie began.

“I have to make a telephone call,” I interrupted him, “then visit home.”

Gillespie was plainly unhappy, but he was uncertain how best to handle me. I was no prisoner, despite being locked up overnight, yet I was certainly something very exotic. I might have been one of the CIA’s own, yet I had still come from the shadowy and unknown world of international terrorism, and that made me into a mystery. Perhaps they thought I had been contaminated by the vengeful creatures that came from the slums and refugee camps of the old world to give the new world its worst nightmares? Gillespie himself was very straight arrow; tall, fit, punctiliously courteous and businesslike, and clearly reluctant to let me use the phone, but he seemed to recognize my determination and so waved me toward a desk.

I needed to talk to an old friend. I would have much preferred to have talked with him in private, for I regarded my business with Johnny Riordan as an entirely personal matter and I doubted whether the CIA would agree with that view, but Gillespie’s presence was giving me little choice. I would have to risk the CIA knowing about Johnny.

Johnny and I had been friends since childhood, when his father used to look after the Cape house for my father. Old Eamonn Riordan was a fisherman, and a good one, but his son was an even better one. Johnny had a natural talent for boats, the sea and for living. He was a great man, a raw force of nature, a muscled lump of goodwill, common sense and kindness, but he was also a man I was loath to involve in any trouble for Johnny Riordan was a father, happily married, and without a mean fiber in his body except perhaps toward those politicians who constantly interfered with his livelihood. Johnny tried to scrape a bare existence from lobstering or scalloping or tub-trawling the seas about the Cape, but in the lean months, all twelve of them most years, he was forced to keep his family fed by taking on other jobs like stocking grocery shelves. Johnny thought the sacrifice worthwhile so long as he could continue fishing, for he loved the sea and was probably the finest seaman I had even met. I had not spoken with Johnny in seven years but I knew, if only he was home, he would not blink an eyelid if I did call. Nor did he. “So you’re back at last, are you?” he laughed. “Which means you’ll be wanting a meal.”

“No,” I said, “I want to meet you at my house. Now. Can you make it?”

“Sure I can make it. The politicians won’t allow us to go fishing these days just in case we catch something. I tell you, Paulie, those congressmen couldn’t catch their rear ends with their own bare hands, not even if you painted it scarlet for them. Did you hear about the new catch restrictions? Courtesy of Washington?”

“Just meet me!” I interrupted him. “Please, Johnny, now!”

Johnny’s pick-up truck was already parked in the driveway when Gillespie and Callaghan drove me home. Two golden retrievers wagged their tails in the back of Johnny’s truck, for no pick-up truck on Cape Cod was complete without at least one dog. I thought Johnny might have been waiting in the truck’s cab, but instead I found him ensconced before Sarah Sing Tennyson’s hearth where he was telling my tenant tall tales of prohibition; how the Cape Codders used to run rings round the federal agents, and how there were still forgotten caches of Canadian whiskey in some of the cranberry bogs and trap sheds. Sarah Sing Tennyson, like everyone else, was entranced by Johnny who had a natural and contagious enthusiasm. “Well now, look who it is!” he greeted me ebulliently. He was a big man, with a shock of black hair, a broad black beard and an open cheerful face.

“You’ve met my tenant?” I gestured at Sarah.

Sarah Tennyson smiled thinly. “Don’t you knock before going into other people’s houses?”

“This is my house,” I said.

“It’s good to have an artist living here, isn’t it?” Johnny tried to defuse the atmosphere with happiness. He gestured at Sarah Tennyson’s paintings which were mostly of the Nauset Lighthouse, but rendered so gloomily that they might have depicted a watch-tower in hell. “I was telling her how they tried to teach me to do art at school! What a waste! I couldn’t even draw a box, not even with a ruler to help. And good morning to you!” This last greeting was to Gillespie who had followed me into the house.

I hurried Johnny into the kitchen before he could start a general conversation about the weather and the fishing and the beaches. “Make free in my house, won’t you, Shanahan?” Sarah Sing Tennyson called after me.

“Mr. Shanahan!” Gillespie seemed to be worried that I might try to make a bolt out of the back door.

“This is family business,” I said firmly, then I dragged Johnny into the kitchen and slammed the door shut.

“What’s going on?” Johnny asked me. “She told me she’s renting the place! I knew she was here off and on, but I thought she just borrowed it from Maureen at weekends. But I haven’t seen Maureen for months, so I couldn’t ask her. I know Maureen’s husband is here sometimes, but—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I cut Johnny off. I knew I would have only a few moments before Gillespie interrupted us and I dared not waste a minute. “Listen,” I told Johnny, “there’s a boat being delivered to you. She’s coming from Spain and I had her sent to you. She’s coming deck cargo from Barcelona, and a customs agent will call you from Boston. I don’t know when she will get here, but probably in about six or seven weeks, OK? There shouldn’t be any customs duty to pay on her, because she’s registered in Massachusetts. These are her papers.” I took the original Rebel Lady papers from my oilskin pocket and shoved them into a bemused Johnny’s hands. “If there are any problems, this will help.” I began peeling hundred-dollar bills from the roll I had collected when I closed down my bank accounts in Belgium. “I paid for her carriage through to the Cape, but you’ll need to hire a big crane to get her off the truck.” I peeled away yet more bills. “She weighs damn nearly eighteen tons. Don’t ask me why she’s so heavy, but her original owner was probably nervous of tipping her over in a strong wind. Her new owner’s name is on those papers, and he asked you to take delivery, understand? You agreed to store her here for the winter.”

Johnny riffled through the hundred-dollar bills, then gave me a very disapproving look. “This isn’t drugs again, is it, Paulie? Because if it is, I’m not helping. Don’t even ask me.” He held the money back toward me.

I pushed them back again. “I swear to God, Johnny, this has nothing to do with drugs. On my mother’s grave, there’s nothing illegal inside the boat.”

“Nothing?” He was still suspicious.

“There’s gold aboard her,” I told him reluctantly, “which is why I don’t want anyone to know about her. If anyone asks what we’re talking about in here, you’re agreeing to look after this house while I’m gone. You understand, Johnny? The boat’s a secret.”

“Gold! In her hull?” Johnny seemed cheered by that thought, then watched in amazement as I slipped the rest of the hundred-dollar bills inside my false passport, added Teodor’s other false papers, then reached up to raise one of the spare bedroom floorboards that comprised the kitchen ceiling. Johnny supported the floorboard while I fumbled along the top surface of one of the kitchen’s old black beams. Eventually I found the cavity I had long ago hollowed into the beam, and into which I now dropped the passport, papers and money.

“There shouldn’t be any problems with the boat,” I told Johnny. “Her papers are in order and I’ll probably be back before she arrives anyway.”

“You’re going away again?” Johnny sounded disappointed, which was flattering after so many years.

“I’ll be away for a few weeks, no more. But listen!” I rammed a finger into his chest to reinforce what I was saying. “There might be some real bastards looking for this boat. I’ve covered her tracks pretty well, but if anyone wants to argue about her, back off. Give them what they want and leave well alone. These are nasty guys, Johnny, real nasty. They’re friends of Michael Herlihy, and worse, so if Michael asks questions, just tell him I asked you to look after the boat and you don’t know any more about it than that, and if he wants the boat, or if anyone else wants it, just let it go! You understand me? I don’t want you or your family to be hurt.”

My mention of Mick Herlihy had made Johnny very unhappy. “This is IRA business, isn’t it?” Johnny, like most of the American-Irish, had always insisted that the Irish Troubles were best left on the far side of the Atlantic. His own father, like mine, had loved to work himself into a lather about the injustices of Irish history, but Johnny had no belly for disliking anyone, not even the Brits.

“How is your dad?” I asked Johnny, rather than answer his question about the IRA’s involvement.

“He died last year, God rest him.”

“Oh, my God.” I crossed myself. “Poor Eamonn.”

“After Mom died he didn’t have much interest in anything,” Johnny said. “I couldn’t even get him out on the boat! He was living with us by then, and Julie would try and keep him interested, you know, ask him to take the kids down to the beach or whatever, but he just wanted to be left alone. Father Murphy said some people just know when their time’s come, and I reckon Dad decided his had.”

“I never heard about your mom either,” I confessed. “I’m sorry.”

“You should have stayed in touch, Paulie,” Johnny chided me, but gently, then he asked me again whether the gold on board the boat had anything to do with the IRA.

I was saved from answering because a very suspicious Gillespie pushed open the kitchen door. “What’s going on?”

“Paulie’s just telling me what he wants done with the house while he’s away.” Johnny, bless him, told the lie with all the conviction of a guileless man. “Are you sure you don’t want aluminum siding?” he asked me. “The salt plays havoc with shingles, Paul, you should think about it.”

“God no! No aluminum. Keep the cedar.” I, a practiced deceiver, sounded much less convincing, but Gillespie seemed reassured.

“If you’re through?” he invited me to accompany him.

“And for God’s sake, Johnny,” I went on loudly enough for Sarah Sing Tennyson to overhear me, “make sure the girl gets the hell out of here.”

Sarah Tennyson’s anger flared to instant meltdown level. “Don’t you dare come here again, Shanahan!” she shouted over Gillespie’s shoulder. “I’ve already talked to my attorneys this morning and they say I signed the lease in good faith and I’ve paid the rent on time, so this place is mine.” Johnny, ever a peacemaker, tried to calm her down, but she pushed the big man aside. “Do you hear me, Shanahan? This is my house for as long as the lease lasts, and if you break in here once more then so help me God I’ll sue you and I’ll take this house in lieu of damages and you will never set foot inside this place again. Never! Do you understand me, Shanahan?”

“Jesus,” Gillespie muttered in awe, and no wonder, for Sarah Sing Tennyson in full strident flow was a classy act.

“What I understand,” I said, “is that your lawyer can play let’s-get-rich with my brother-in-law’s lawyer, but I’m not involved, and I don’t care to be involved. So you get your money back from Patrick McPhee and you send me the bill for the phone and the electric installation, and then you can take away your finger paintings, give me back the front-door key, and vanish.”

She pointed to the front hall. “Get the hell out of my house, all of you!” Her scornful gesture encompassed Johnny, Gillespie and myself. “Out!”

“You pack your bags, and you get out!” I shouted as I was evicted from my own house. It was not the most effective of retorts, but it was the best I could manage and it left Sarah Sing Tennyson the undisputed victor of the hour.

“Let’s just do as she says,” Gillespie muttered. We scuttled ignominiously out to the driveway where Stuart Callaghan waited in the car. The hire car I’d rented at Logan Airport was also there, which hardly worried me. I had used the French prisoner’s credit card to rent it and I guessed its owners would eventually get it back.

I looked back as we accelerated up the clam-shell drive and I saw Sarah Tennyson, her face a mask of outrage and anger, watching to make certain we really did leave my property. I blew her a kiss, received a rigid finger in reply, then we were over the sand ridge and into the scrub pine, and gone.

“I don’t like Sarah Tennyson,” I told Gillespie, “but someone should warn her that she’s in danger if she stays in that house.”

“I’ll look after it.” Gillespie made a note in a small book, then glanced out of the airplane window at the monotonous cloudscape that unreeled beneath us. We had driven to the small municipal airport at Hyannis where our six-seater plane had taken off into a sudden flurry of wet snow. Gillespie had already told me that the agency intended to keep me out of harm’s way for as many weeks as it would take to empty me of secrets. “We’re kind of excited to have you back,” he had coyly confided as the plane had climbed through the clouds over Hyannis. “Not everyone thought that the Stringless Program would work.”

“It’s still called that? The Stringless Program?”

Gillespie glanced at the pilot, fearing that he could overhear our conversation, but the man was insulated with heavy earphones. “It’s still called that.”

“And you reckon it will take weeks to debrief me?”

“I’m sure you have a lot to tell us.”

I thought of Rebel Lady and hoped to God that Johnny had no difficulties with her. Gillespie had gone back to his notebook, Callaghan was snoozing and the plane was droning through a winter bright sky high above the gray clouds. At Hyannis Airport I had bought a newspaper that told of war preparations on either side of the Kuwaiti frontier. The paper also reported on last-minute bids to prevent the fighting. Congressman O’Shaughnessy’s house bill forbidding the use of American armed forces for one year had failed, yet the Congressman still preached his message of doom; he claimed now that the Pentagon had shipped fifty thousand body bags to the Gulf and said yet more were on order, and he was urging the President one last time to give economic sanctions a chance to bite. On an inside page was an article about the world-wide precautions against Iraq’s expected terrorist onslaught; there were armored vehicles patrolling European airports, air-passenger numbers had fallen drastically, and Western embassies throughout the world were mounting special guards. Saddam Hussein, happy to be in the spotlight of the world’s nervousness, swore that he would never surrender, but would instead swamp the coalition forces and their homelands in infidel blood.

“Strap in!” the pilot called back as the plane suddenly banked and dropped. Raindrops streamed sternward on the windows as we sliced into the clouds. The plane buffeted, dropped hard in an air-pocket, then reared back on a vicious up-current. An alarm beeped, then the servo-motors whined as the flaps extruded. “A bit rough, fellas!” the pilot apologized. “Sorry!”

Another lurch, another beep of the alarm, then we were out of the clouds and flying just feet above a dun-black and snow-streaked countryside. For a second I thought we were going to crash, then wet tarmac appeared beneath us, the wheels bounced, smoked and squealed, and we had come to earth. “Wilkes-Barre Scranton welcomes you,” the pilot said facetiously. “Hell of a Goddamned day to fly.”

The aircraft did not go near the small terminal, but instead taxied to where two cars waited. One was a limousine with black tinted windows and the other a police car. Two State Troopers wearing Smokey Bear hats and black rain-slickers stood by the limousine. Both troopers held rifles. The CIA clearly believed il Hayaween had a long reach.

We took Interstate 84 eastward into the snow-streaked forests of the Pocono Mountains. The bare trees had been splintered by ice-storms and the rock embankments which edged the road were thickly hung with icicles. We drove fast, our way cleared by the State Troopers. Deep in the mountains we turned off the Interstate and twisted our way up ever narrower roads until we reached a big painted sign that read “US Department of Agriculture, Rabies Research Station, Absolutely NO Unauthorised Entry.” The State Troopers, their siren at last turned off, pulled on to the road’s shoulder and waved the limo through.

I grinned. “I’m your mad dog, am I?”

Gillespie shrugged. “It keeps out the inquisitive.”

The limousine stopped at a checkpoint manned by uniformed guards. A high fieldstone wall topped with coils of razor wire stretched into the forests either side of the gates. The guards peered at me, examined Gillespie’s credentials, then the steel gates were mechanically opened and the limousine accelerated into a wide parkland studded with snow-shrouded rhododendrons. We passed between plowed snow-banks, across a stone bridge that spanned an ice-locked stream, and into view of a massive, steep-roofed house that looked like some French mansion unaccountably marooned in a North American wilderness.

This was evidently to be my home for the foreseeable future. Here, under the mansion’s coppered roof, I would be emptied of secrets, and it was not a bad place to be so emptied. The grand portico led into a palatial entrance hall that was furnished with a massive carved table, leather upholstered chairs, and a stone fireplace. Three stuffed mooseheads peered down from the dark panelled walls. A wooden staircase curled round three sides of the hall, embracing an intricate brass chandelier. I suspected the house had been donated to the government by the bewhiskered magnate whose varnished portrait hung gilt-framed above the stone mantel. It was the house of a nineteenth-century robber-baron; lavish, comfortable and bitterly cold. “Don’t say the central heating’s failed again!” Gillespie complained peevishly as he closed the heavy front doors.

“I’ll find out,” Callaghan said, and dived through a side-door.

Leading off the entrance hall was a library, its shelves, I later discovered, crammed with the collected writings of the founding fathers which was just the sort of dutiful yet unreadable collection one would expect of a patriotic millionaire. There was also a dining room, a kitchen, and an exercise room. The mansion’s scores of other rooms were locked away. Other activities were conducted in the house, for during my stay I would sometimes see strangers walking in the grounds, and once I heard women’s laughter coming from the other side of the bolted door in our dining room, but my interrogation was conducted in the isolation of the few rooms opening off the main hall and its immediate landing upstairs. My quarters were on that second floor; a private bathroom, a small kitchenette and a lavish bedroom which held a wide bed, a sofa, a desk, rugs, a bookcase full of thrillers, a reproduction of a drab Corot landscape and a television set. Unlike the downstairs rooms the heat here was working only too well. In my bedroom a steam radiator hissed and clanked under a barred window that could not be opened. I stooped to the thriller-packed bookcase. “A nice collection.”

“Not that we hope you’ll have much time for reading,” Gillespie said. “We expect to be holding conversations with you most days and for quite long hours, though there will be some evenings when you will be unoccupied. The refrigerator is stocked, but let us know, within reason, if there is any particular food you’d like added to the stock. There’s beer, but no spirits. The television works.”

“And the telephone?” I gestured at the phone beside the bed.

“Of course.”

“And it isn’t bugged?” I teased him.

“I couldn’t truthfully tell you either way.” Gillespie actually blushed as he half admitted I was under surveillance, but only a complete fool would have assumed otherwise. He ushered me toward the door. “We have a lot to do, Mr. Shanahan, so shall we go downstairs and begin?”

To unpick the past. To tell a tale of bombers and gunners, girls and boys, heroes and lovers. Confession time.

I WAS TIRED, DOG TIRED. “WE WON’T TAKE A LOT OF TIME today,” Gillespie promised, “but your messages to our people in Brussels were kind of intriguing.” He was being very tactful, not asking why I had appeared in America when I had promised to walk into the Brussels Embassy, nor asking why I had used a false name. “You talked about Stingers? About a meeting in Miami? You suggested a connection with Saddam Hussein? With il Hayaween?”

That was the urgent need; to discover just what evil Iraq had planned, and so I told Gillespie everything about the meeting in Florida where Michael Herlihy and Brendan Flynn had introduced me to the two Cubans named Alvarez and Carlos though I suspected they might as well have called themselves Tweedledum and Tweedledee for all those names signified. I described how the Provisional IRA had negotiated the purchase of fifty-three Stinger missiles for one and a half million dollars.

Gillespie wrote the sum down. I was certain that the library must be wired for sound, and that somewhere in the mansion tape recorders were spooling down my every word, but Gillespie was the kind of man who liked to make notes. “And why were you invited to the meeting?” he asked.

“Because I used to be the Provisionals’ liaison officer with outside terrorist organizations. I was the guy who fetched them their goodies. I was their money-man.”

Gillespie’s head came up from his notebook and for a second or two I thought he was actually going to whistle with astonishment, but he managed to suppress the urge. Nevertheless my words, if I could back them up with chapter and verse, meant that the CIA’s Stringless Program could chalk up one stunning success. “You liaised with all outside terrorist organizations?” he asked.

“So far as I know, yes, although in effect that was mainly the Palestinians and the Libyans. We did some business with the Basques as well, but they were never as important as the Middle Eastern guys.”

“Red Army Faction? The Baader-Meinhof people?” Gillespie asked.

“Never saw them.”

“The South Americans?” he asked hopefully.

I shook my head. “The IRA used to receive fraternal greetings from Cuba and Nicaragua, but no material support. We didn’t need it. We were getting enough weapons from the Libyans and enough money from America, so why should we bother with a bunch of half-crazy Nicaraguans?”

“Even so!” Gillespie was impressed by the Middle-Eastern connections, though I rather deflated the good impression by telling him how the IRA had ceased to trust me four years before which meant that much of my information was out of date.

“Why did they stop trusting you?”

“That’s kind of a long story.”

“We’ll get to it, I promise.” He tapped his notebook with the eraser end of his pencil. “If you’ve been inactive for four years, why did you stay? Why didn’t you come home?”

“Because I always hoped they’d reactivate me. They never cut me off entirely.”

“We’re fortunate they didn’t.” We were sitting in the lavish library, either side of the massive oak table. It was a comfortable room, supplied with a fire and a drinks cabinet and enough oak mouldings to have hidden a thousand microphones. Despite Gillespie’s notebook I knew the surveillance devices existed, not just in this room but in my bedroom as well, for the Agency would want to analyze my answers for the slightest indication of stress. Gillespie was chasing a commodity as rare as rainbow’s gold, the truth, and he wanted to make sure I was not bringing him fool’s gold. Maybe my return at this critical time had happened because the enemy had turned me? Maybe I was telling lies to make them look in one direction while il Hayaween attacked from another? I might be a hero of the Stringless Program come back from the world’s darkness, but that did not mean they would trust me.

Nor did I intend to trust them. I had my secrets, chief of which was the existence of five million dollars in a renamed yacht. The five million dollars were my pension, my security, and I had no intention of ever letting the government know that such a sum had even been discussed. The money was not important. What was important were the Stingers, and il Hayaween, and Saddam Hussein’s plans to spread terror world-wide.

“You say il Hayaween talked about bringing down an airliner at Heathrow with a Red Star?” Gillespie asked.

I nodded. “It’s much easier than trying to smuggle a bomb aboard.”

“But why a Russian missile? Why not the Stingers?”

“Because the Stingers are in America. I’m guessing that they never did mean to send all the Stingers to Ireland, but to deploy them in the States.”

“You mean…” Gillespie stared at me.

“I mean that if we attack Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait then he’ll bring down planes in Washington and Miami and New York and anywhere else he can.”

Gillespie blanched at the thought of guarding the vicinity of every major civilian airport in North America. “And do you believe the Provisional IRA would cooperate with such an action?”

“No,” I said firmly, “because the IRA wants American support. Part of their income and a lot of their respectability depends on Americans thinking of the Irish as harmless little leprechauns inhabiting an idyllic little island which is being unjustly treated by the nasty English, and blowing up American civilians with IRA weapons tends to sour that fairy-tale image. So I suspect the IRA are being used by il Hayaween. The Palestinians aren’t in a position to travel to Miami to buy the missiles, but the Irish are. However, once the missiles are paid for, then God knows what il Hayaween has in mind.”

“How were the Stingers paid for?”

“The usual method,” I said, “is electronic transfer. I never handled the money itself, just the request, but I know the Libyans liked to use a bank called BCCI…”

“We know about those bastards,” Gillespie said meaningfully, then shrugged an apology for interrupting me. “Go on, please.”

“There isn’t much more to tell. I requested the payment from Shafiq, he told me it was all OKed, and then I telephoned a number in Ireland to say that everything was on line and their money would be coming. They’d already paid a half-million deposit, so I only asked Shafiq for the one million.”

“You have the telephone number in Ireland?”

I gave him the number that had been in Gerry’s suit pocket, but warned him that it would almost certainly belong to a message-taker who would have no inkling of what the messages were about.

Stuart Callaghan, whose bodyguard duties seemed exhausted now that we had arrived at the safe mansion, had lit a fire in the library’s big hearth. Now, at Gillespie’s bidding, he took away the new details of the Stinger trade, doubtless to telephone them through to Langley so that the search for the missiles could be intensified. Gillespie still worried at my story. “What about the two Cubans. Were they Cuban-Americans? Or Cuban-Cubans?”

“I’ve no idea.”

Gillespie tapped the pencil softly on the table. “Comrade Fidel must be itching to do his bit for Brother Saddam, mustn’t he?”

“I guess so. I don’t know.”

“BCCI.” He drew a pencil round the bank’s initials. “You say the Libyans usually transferred money by wire?”

“Almost always. It’s heavy stuff to carry around in a suitcase.”

He half smiled at my half-jest. “So there should be a record of the transaction?”

“Bound to be.”

“And of the half-million dollar deposit. Where would that have come from?”

“Boston, I guess, but I don’t know. Herlihy must use a dozen banks.”

“Look for the money,” Gillespie said softly, “it’s always the same. Look for the money.” He looked up at me. “One last question before we break. Why did you use a false passport to enter the country?”

“How do you know I did?”

“Because we had an all-ports watch alerted for you.”

“Maybe I walked across the Canadian border?”

“The Canadians cooperate with our all-ports watch alerts,” Gillespie said softly. “And what about your hire-car? You used a French name and credit card? But it seems the card really belongs to a prisoner?”

“Habit,” I said, “just old habit. I guess I wanted to use false papers one last time. A whim.”

“You still have the passport and credit card?”

“I tossed them. I told you, it was my last time. I won’t need false papers again, will I?”

“No, you won’t.” Gillespie pretended to believe me. He closed his notebook and carefully snapped a rubber band around its leather covers. “I guess that’s the immediate business taken care of. What I’d like you to do now, Paul, is take a rest. You look bushed. Maybe we’ll pick up this afternoon? There’ll be someone with me by then.”

“Van Stryker?” Simon van Stryker had recruited me into the Stringless Program and I had liked him. I had spent years looking forward to meeting him again, hearing his congratulations.

“Van Stryker’s rather exalted these days. But you will meet him in due course. He takes an interest in you.” Gillespie paused and had the grace to look somewhat embarrassed. “We’ve asked one of the Agency’s psychiatrists to sit in on future sessions. It’s normal practice.”

“To find out if I’ve gone mad?” I asked lightly.

“Something like that, yes,” he replied just as lightly. In fact the shrink would be there to detect my lies.

“Fine by me!” I said.

“Great.” Gillespie smiled. I smiled. Just great.

The psychiatrist surprised me because her appearance suggested someone who ought to have been knitting baby socks for a grandchild rather than monitoring a debriefing about terrorism, but doubtless she was a lot shrewder than her motherly, plump exterior suggested. She was a middle-aged black woman who smiled pleasantly at me, then shook the snow off her overshoes and settled in the bay window at the far end of the long library table. “Terrible weather,” she said cozily, “just terrible. Do you mind if I call you Paul? I’m Carole, Carole Adamson.”

“Paul’s fine.”

“Don’t you mind me, Paul. I’m just here to listen.” She was wearing a thick wool cardigan, wooden beads, and had a comfortable smile. She also frightened me for I was only too ready to believe that psychiatrists possessed arcane powers, and that my every little lie and evasion would telegraph themselves to Carole Adamson’s shrewd and watchful eyes. I could not see her without turning in my chair, but I was very aware of her scrutiny.

Gillespie began the afternoon session by saying FBI agents had begun their search for the Stinger missiles and for their Cuban vendors. In the meantime, he said, he wanted to explore my history of terrorist connections. “I want to go back to the very beginning,” he said. “Who introduced you to the IRA?”

“A guy called Joey Grogan.”

“Was that in America?” Gillespie asked. “Or in Ireland?”

“In Boston,” I said, and felt a flicker of annoyance. I had come here to talk of il Hayaween and Stingers and the Palestinian training camps, and instead Gillespie wanted to plow this old field. “Why don’t you just look up the file?” I asked.

“Because the Stringless Program keeps no files,” Gillespie said in a tone which suggested I should have known that. “All we know about you is what we can read in police records, but as far as the agency is concerned, Mr. Shanahan, you have never existed. So we have to begin at the beginning. Where does Mr. Grogan live?”

“He’s dead.” Poor Joey had died of emphysema in 1986 and Peggy, his widow, had immediately absconded to a trailer park in Florida with sixteen thousand dollars collected from Boston’s Irish bars by the Friends of Free Ireland. The Friends ostensibly collected money to support the widows and orphans of IRA soldiers, which was hardly necessary considering the generosity of the British government’s social security system, but everyone assumed the donations were for buying guns anyway. In practice much of the cash never went further than Boston’s Irish bars, and what little did reach Ireland was a hundred times more likely to end up in a pub’s cash-till than in the hands of a gunman’s widow.

“You were recruited into the IRA before you met us?” Gillespie asked. “Before you met van Stryker?”

“I was supporting them, sure, but I didn’t join the IRA proper till I went to live in Ireland.”

“But you’re confirming you were a long-time supporter? Was that for ideological reasons?”

“Ideological?”

Gillespie shrugged. “The Provisional IRA is a self-professed Marxist organization, is it not?” He was being very prim.

I laughed. “Come on. Get real!”

“Well, isn’t it?” He had very pale blue eyes that were not quite as friendly as his diffident manner suggested.

I shook my head. “The IRA says it’s Marxist when they’re dealing with socialist supporters like Colonel Qaddafi, and they say they’re good Catholic boys when they’re treating with the American-Irish in Boston. Most of them wouldn’t know a Marxist if one raped them with a hammer and a blunt sickle. Two or three of the Army Council are probably Party members, but the IRA itself is either just a good old-fashioned patriotic liberation movement, or else a more than usually ruthless criminal organization, depending on just how close to it you happen to live.”

“So why did you join?”

“Because the Irish are my tribe! Because I learned about Wolfe Tone and Patrick Pearse long before anyone in my family thought to tell me about George Washington. Because I swallowed stories of the famine with my mother’s milk. There probably isn’t a family in South Boston that doesn’t claim ancestors who were put to the sword by Cromwell, or massacred in the rising of ’98, or starved in the famine, or beaten up by the Black and Tans. Those claims are our tribal badges!”

Gillespie wanted to know about my childhood, but there were no dark secrets there. I had been a happy child, dividing my time between our family’s Boston house, my father’s Cape Cod retreat, and his various business premises. Those premises ranged from the Green Harp Bar in Charlestown to a marina in Weymouth, but my father’s real fortune was made from his brothels in Scollay Square.

“Brothels?” Gillespie asked painfully.

“They pulled them down,” I said, “to build the new City Hall. Some people haven’t noticed any difference.”

“And your mother? What was her attitude to your father’s businesses?”

“My mother worshipped the Virgin Mary. She believed every mother was born to suffer, and she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. She endured my father and adored her three children.”

“But you must have been a trial to her?” Gillespie smiled to show he meant no offense. “We took the trouble to find your old police records.”

“I told you, Mom believed women were born to suffer. That’s what the priest and the nuns told her, and that’s how she wanted it.” Not that my police record held anything more sinister than the usual juvenile indiscretions. I had first been in court for beating ten kinds of living hell out of a man who had insulted my sister, and two years after that I did four months for receiving stolen goods.

“And your father died while you were in prison?” Gillespie observed.

“Yes.”

“How did he die?”

“He was in the back room of a Southie Bar when some bastards decided to burn the place down. They shot him first.”

“Why?”

“We were told it was an insurance scam.”

“You believe that?”

“Maybe they didn’t like his beer?” I smiled.

Gillespie stared thoughtfully at me. “It must have been upsetting for you.”

“What?”

“Your father’s death. You were only twenty-one, that’s too young to lose a parent.”

“What are you trying to prove?” I challenged him. “I thought I was here to help you guys, and instead you’re trying to make out that I’m some kind of basket-case because my pa died? I don’t need your counseling, Gillespie, or some crappy male-bonding session. I had a happy childhood, I thought Boston was a wonderful playground, and I think it’s sad that my parents are both dead, but I don’t suck my thumb or go in for pederasty or whimper in the night, so shall we move the fuck on?”

Carole Adamson tried to reassure me. “It’s important that we understand where you’re coming from, Paul. Your life is the context for the answers you give us.”

“What happened to your father’s killers?” Gillespie had been entirely unmoved by my protest.

“Beats me,” I shrugged, “the bastards were never found.”

“I thought two of the suspected killers were found in the Charles River? Strangled?”

“Were they now?” I asked innocently.

“And a third man was found with his head thrust down a toilet in a Roxbury bar. He had drowned. The police believe that you and your brother were in that same bar on that night, but could find no witnesses to verify that belief.”

“I thought you said I was in prison?”

“The parole board had released you on compassionate grounds before the funeral. And your brother was on leave from the Marine Corps.”

I shrugged and spread my hands as though I knew nothing. Gillespie turned a page in his notebook. “Your brother died in Vietnam?”

“Hue. And no, his death didn’t make me angry at America.”

Gillespie ignored the irrelevance. “So how did you earn a living after your father’s death?”

“I took over his businesses.”

“Including the brothels?”

“I told you, they pulled those down. No, all I kept was the marina at Weymouth and the Green Harp Bar in Charlestown. I sold everything else.” I had been twenty-one, rich as a dream and cock of the Boston walk, but the money had slipped away like ice on a summer sidewalk. I let cronies use the marina slips for free, I ran a slate for friends in the Green Harp and I flew to Ireland to play the rich Irish-American to the admiring natives. I also made the bookmakers happy. On one day alone I dropped a hundred thousand dollars at Fairyhouse, a fair bit of it on a horse called Sally-So-Fair which started at a hundred to one and finished as dogmeat. I had sworn the horse could not lose, mainly on the grounds that I had spent the previous night with two whores, both called Sally and both fair-haired, but they were each a better goer than the horse.

I had to sell the marina and a half-share in the bar to pay my debts. I promised my mother I would be good, but the promise was easier to make than the keeping of it. My half-share in the Green Harp made money, but the money trickled away on girls and booze and horses. My mother wanted me to marry some good Catholic virgin, but I had smelt the milk-and-diaper stench of respectability and knew it was not for me. I needed the spice of danger, and Joey Grogan brought it me.

Joey was a passionate man, drunk with Irish myths and obsessed with liberating his ancestral home. I had first met him when he arrived at the Green Harp Bar to empty the Friends of Free Ireland collecting box that we kept alongside the Parish Fund box and the Multiple Sclerosis box and the Send the Kids to Camp box and the United Way box and any other charity box so long as it was not a Protestant box, but Joey scornfully swept all the other boxes aside and told me that there was only one cause worth supporting, and that was the cause of a united Ireland. I watched, amused, as he broke the other boxes open and poured their miserable harvest of dimes and pennies into his own pile. Later he recruited me to help him assemble an arms shipment for Ulster. The shipment was small stuff, mostly old handguns that we bought on the street corners of Boston, but still good enough, Joey said, to kill Brits. We sent them in a container load of panty-hose bound for Cork.

“Panty-hose?” Gillespie asked in disbelief.

Five years later, I said, Joey and I were sending big stuff; Armalites, Ingrams and even a pair of M60 machine-guns that had been liberated from a Massachusetts National Guard Armory, but by then the Middle East had already overtaken America as the source of the Provisional IRA’s weapons. We had become minor league, and Libya was the heavy hitter. “What year was that?” Gillespie asked.

“It was ’76 when we sent the M60s. As a kind of reminder to the Brits of another ’76.”

“That was the year your mother died?”

“God rest her. She had cancer.”

There was brief silence. A log spat angrily in the fire, arcing a spark that smouldered for a fierce and smoky second on the sacrificial coir rug that protected the library’s parquet floor from just such embers. “Was it the death of your mother,” Gillespie asked mildly, “that gave you the freedom to enter the drug trade?”

“I was never in the drug trade,” I snapped. The debriefing had turned hostile because I resented this harrowing of my past. It seemed irrelevant to me. I had always been uncomfortable in the confessional because I hated to reflect on my actions. I was impetuous, generous and foolish, but not reflective. The truth was that I had smuggled drugs to make a quick buck, and a big buck, just as I had killed Liam and Gerry to make an even bigger and faster buck, but doing it did not mean I had to dwell on it, and I had small patience for my countrymen’s love of self-analysis and self-absorption. My dad had taught me to live life at full throttle and not to worry about the rear-view mirrors, but these sessions with Gillespie promised to be long, uncomfortable bouts of mirror-gazing and I did not like it.

Gillespie turned a page in his folder. “In 1977 you were arrested in a boat called the Fighting Irish off the Boca Inlet in Florida, and the boat was carrying half a ton of marijuana. The Coastguard had tracked you from the Turks and Caicos Islands.”

“I was charged?” I challenged him.

“Of course not.” Because instead of going for trial I had gone underground, saved by a codfish aristocrat called Simon van Stryker and his Stringless Program. I had become legitimate.

Simon van Stryker was a WASP superstar; a man born to inestimable privilege, with immaculate manners and a gentle demeanor which nevertheless suggested that he could be as ruthless as a hungry rattlesnake. He was tall, elegant, beautifully spoken, and had pale green eyes as cold as the water off Nova Scotia. The moment I first saw him I knew his type, just as he knew mine. I was two-toilet Irish and he was the codfish aristocracy. The codfish aristocracy had never liked my kind for we were the incontinent, fecund, ill-spoken Papist immigrants who had fouled up their perfect Protestant America in the nineteenth century, but van Stryker still became my recruiter, my master, my friend. Van Stryker had saved me from God knows how many years in a federal prison in the depths of the Everglades surrounded by alligators, rattlers, coral snakes and Aids-riddled rapists waiting in the showers.

Instead he had taken me to a house in Georgia, not unlike the house where Gillespie now took my secrets apart. There, surrounded by camellias and azaleas, van Stryker and his team had probed me and analyzed me and prepared me.

“Are you a patriot?” they had wanted to know, but they had hardly needed to ask for I had only to hear “America the Beautiful” for the tears to start. We Shanahans had always been emotional. We were Irish after all, the cry babies of the Western world, and of course I was a patriot because America was my country. My love for it was laid down like the sediments of the seabed, dark and immovable, and however hard the wind blew or high the seas broke, still that ocean floor was as calm and still and unchanging as the farthest cold cinders of the universe. To me patriotism was bred in the bone, a part of the blood, etched till death. Show me Old Glory and I cry, play me “The Star-Spangled Banner” and I weep.

So what did I feel about Ireland?

That was easy. Ireland was forty shades of green and smiling eyes and shamrocks and shillelaghs and the road ever rising to meet you and the St. Patrick’s Day parade when all South Boston went gloriously drunk. Ireland was dancing the jig and good talk and warm hearts and fellowship.

And England? they asked.

England was where the cold-hearted bores came from; the bank managers and the Republicans, the golfers and the Episcopalians.

And killing such cold fish was forgivable?

“I never killed one of the bastards in my life!” I protested.

But what about the work I did for the Friends of Free Ireland in Boston. Did I not collect money for the cause?

Sure I did, but so what if the money went to buy guns and bombs? It was for expelling the English from Ireland and hadn’t the English been slaughtering the Irish for centuries?

Had I ever seen a child eviscerated by a bomb? Simon van Stryker asked me.

I had shrugged the question away, but Simon van Stryker had photographs of the child. She had been three years old, waiting with her mother at a bus stop in Belfast. The mother had died too, her legs torn off by the bomb blast. The bomb had been the work of the IRA. For a new Ireland.

And here were pictures of a woman tarred and feathered. Her hair had been cut off before the leprechauns jeered at her and smeared her with hot tar and chicken feathers, and all because her husband, who had made three widows and eleven orphans, was in jail for life and she had assuaged her loneliness by sleeping with another man. The woman was nineteen. Her lover had been a Catholic, and him they had beaten into a wheelchair. They were the IRA.

And here was a man whose kneecaps had been shot away. A boy of sixteen had pulled the trigger and the victim would never walk again. The man was a Catholic and had been accused of giving information to the Ulster Defence Association which was one of the Protestant para-military groups, but in truth the victim had never talked to them. It had all been a mistake and the Provisional IRA had apologized for it. They made a lot of apologies because it helped convince Boston and New York that they were honorable men.

And here was another man, also a Catholic, whose kneecaps had been shot through. He had owned a hardware store, selling penny nails and epoxy glue, but he had refused to pay the IRA their protection money so one night they had come for him with a loaded gun and taken him into his backyard and shot him through the kneecaps while his wife screamed in the kitchen. Then they shot his dog to stop it barking and threatened to shoot the wife down if she did not stop her noise. They burned his shop down too.

Look at the photographs, Simon van Stryker had ordered me. Look at them. Look at them. I remember how the paths between the magnolias were drifted with fallen petals, thick as snowdrifts, the petals turning brown and curling at the edges.

Terrorism, Simon van Stryker told me back inside the Georgia house, is a means, not a cause. You can love the sinner, but you must hate the sin. Terrorism, by its very nature, is random. It must strike the innocent. Terrorism must kill the child if it is to shock the adult. Terrorism must hurt the helpless if it is to gain the world’s attention. Terrorism, he told me again and again, is evil. It did not matter how noble was the cause that the terrorist served, the methods were evil. You could wrap terrorism in a flag of the most delicate green, but that did not make it right.

“They have no choice!” I tried to argue with him.

“They chose evil,” he said. A terrorist chooses to use the bullet and the bomb because he knows that if he relinquishes those weapons then he is reduced to the level of ordinary politicians who had to struggle with the mundane problems of education, health, and unemployment. Terrorists, having no answer to those matters, talked in transcendent terms. They claimed their bullets would bring in the millennium and their bombs would make a perfect world. But in the end, van Stryker told me, it was still just terror, and if I wanted one creed to cling to over the years then I should remember that no matter how good the cause, it was wrong if it used terror as a means of achievement.

“What years?” I had asked.

“The years,” he said, “that you would otherwise have spent in prison for running drugs. I saved you from those years, so now you will give them to me. And to America.”

He explained that the CIA’s Division of Counter-Terrorism used the usual weapons of espionage against the various terrorist and insurgent groups which threatened American interests, but those usual weapons were rarely useful. Terrorists were too cautious to confide their plans to telephones that could be wiretapped, and they were too experienced to share their information with a circle of people who could be suborned into treachery. Terrorist cells were wonderfully designed to resist intelligence operations. It was possible to smash one cell, but to do no damage to any others. Terrorism’s secrets were protected by a wall of rumor and a moat of disinformation. Some terrorists did not even claim responsibility for atrocities they performed, preferring that the West should never learn who had inflicted the hurt.

“And the West is the target,” van Stryker told me. “We Westerners are the possessors, so we must be attacked and hurt and mauled and bombed and humiliated. But we in the West have one terrorist organization that is all our own, and which is trusted by the others, and if we can insert one good man into that organization then it’s possible, just possible, that he can travel far and deep into its darkness and one day, in his own good time, bring back news from that journey.”

“You mean me.”

“I mean you.”

“You want me to betray the Irish?”

“Which Irish?” He had rounded on me scornfully. “The IRA claims to detest the Free State’s Dublin government as strongly as they hate London. The Irish electorate doesn’t vote for the IRA and most of the Irish people want nothing more than to see the IRA disappear! Besides, my enemy is not just the IRA. My enemies are the friends of the IRA; the Libyans and the Palestinians.”

“So how do I reach them?”

“Let the IRA work that out. We’ll merely equip you with the skills that will suggest to them that you might make a perfect courier. IRA activists can’t move in Europe without the police of a dozen nations watching, but the Garda and the British Special Branch won’t take any interest in an American yacht-delivery skipper.”

We were walking along a damp path between the glistening leaves of the magnolias. “Supposing the IRA don’t do what you think they’ll do?” I asked van Stryker.

“Then I’ll have wasted your time, and a lot of government money.”

“And what do I make from it?” I had asked truculently.

“You’re free, Paul. You’re not in a Florida jail. You’ll be taught a trade, given the capital to start your own business, and a ticket to Ireland.”

“And when will you be finished with me?”

“When does a fisherman come home?”

“When his fish-hold is full.”

“So bring me back a rich catch in your own good time.”

We had stopped at the edge of the garden above a deep valley where a freight train wound its way northward. “Why me?” I asked him.

Van Stryker had laughed. “Because you’re a scoundrel, Paul, a bad lot, a rogue, a rascal. I can hire any number of MBAs, straight-arrows, Rhodes scholars every one, but how often do I find a scoundrel who runs guns to Ireland and who murdered his father’s killers? No, don’t deny it.” Van Stryker had offered me a quirky, almost affectionate smile. “When you sup with the devil, Paul, it is prudent to use a very long spoon and you’re my spoon.”

“And suppose I never come back?”

Van Stryker shrugged. “I didn’t say there was no risk. Maybe you’ll leave here and do nothing? Maybe you’ll betray this program? Maybe, probably perhaps, I’ll never hear from you again. All I can do is offer you a new life and what you make of it is up to you. You aren’t the only one I’m sending into the darkness, and if just one of you comes home it might be worth it.”

And now I had come home to tell my secrets.

All but one.

Gillespie spent the first few days constructing a framework of my years abroad. He wanted names, places, facts, dates. Then, when he had the chronology straight and a rough idea of just what secrets I could tell, he brought in the experts who came to the mansion by helicopter to pick my brains. They were the agency’s specialists on the Middle Eastern terrorist groups.

Gillespie imported no one to listen to my Irish tales, but instead took me through those years himself. I told him how I had gone to live in Dublin and then, at Brendan Flynn’s request, to Belfast where I had started a yacht-surveying and -delivery service that acted as a marvelous cover for the smuggling of weapons, explosives and gunmen across the Irish Sea. I described how I had planted two bombs in Belfast, not because the IRA had needed another bomber, but because they wanted to see if I could be trusted.

“Did anyone die in the explosions?” Carole Adamson asked.

“No,” I said. “We phoned in warnings.”

“We?” Gillespie asked.

“A guy called Seamus Geoghegan led the unit. They brought him in from Derry.”

“We know of Mr. Geoghegan,” Gillespie said. He told me Seamus was now in Boston, fighting off a British attempt to extradite him. Seamus’s defense was that he was a political refugee entitled to the protection of the American Constitution, while the British argued that he was a common murderer; the American Anglophiles claimed he was an illegal immigrant and the Anglophobes said he was a hero. It was a tangle out of which only the lawyers would emerge enriched. Gillespie asked me about Seamus, but I could add nothing to the public record.

“How did you feel about the two bombings?” Gillespie asked. Outside it was snowing gently, covering the already snow-heaped bushes with a new layer of glittering white.

“I was doing what van Stryker wanted me to do. I was infiltrating the IRA.” I said it defiantly.

“But did you enjoy it?” Gillespie probed.

“I got drunk after it. Both times.”

“Did you enjoy it?” He insisted on the question.

“It was exciting,” I allowed. “You take risks when you plant a bomb and you don’t want the excitement to end, so when the job’s done you go to a bar and drink. You boast. You listen to other men boasting.” That was true, but I could just as easily have said that we got drunk because we did not want to think about what we had just done. Because we knew that nothing had been achieved by the bomb and nothing ever would be achieved. The only believers in terrorism were the fanatics who led the movement and their very youngest and most stupid recruits. Everyone else was trapped in their roles. I remembered Seamus Geoghegan shaking like a leaf, not out of fear, but out of a kind of hopelessness. “It’s a terrible thing,” he had told me that day, “but if you and I had been born in Liverpool, Paulie, we’d be fighting for the focking Brits, wouldn’t we?” There was nothing ideological in the fight, nothing constructive, it was just a tribal rite, a scream, a habit, a protest. But it was also exciting, full of comradeship, full of jest and whiskey and daring. The cause gave our violence its license and it salved our consciences with its specious justifications.

“You have a conscience about what you did?” Carole Adamson asked me.

“I was doing it for America, wasn’t I?” I slid away from her inquiry.

And for America I had triumphed when, in 1980, the IRA asked me to be their liaison officer with other terrorist groups. They saw me as a man who could move about the world without attracting suspicion, and even suggested I move to Europe where my existence would provoke even less attention. I took the marine business to Nieuwpoort where I hired Hannah as my part-time secretary, rescued the cat from the alleyway opposite my house, and began trawling the dark seas for van Stryker’s profit.

“What sort of business did you conduct with these other terrorist groups?” Gillespie asked in his mild monotonous voice.

I spread my hands as if to suggest the answer could go on for ever, but then offered a short version. “The Basques were after our bombing expertise, especially our electronic timers, while the Palestinians got a kick out of providing us with weaponry. I was a kind of procurement officer with them.”

“And the weaponry is all of Communist origin?”

I nodded. “Most of the weapons came from Russia and the explosives from Czechoslovakia, but the Kremlin didn’t want their involvement to be too obvious so they used Muammar al-Qaddafi as a middleman.”

“And that was the extent of Qaddafi’s involvement? He was just a middleman?”

I shook my head. “He’s the IRA’s Godfather.”

“Godfather?”

“Whatever the IRA wants, Qaddafi will give them. Not because he cares about Ireland, he probably doesn’t even know where Ireland is, but because he hates Britain.” Qaddafi’s hatred had intensified following Margaret Thatcher’s permission for the American bombers to use British bases for their attack on Tripoli. After that raid nothing had been too good for the Provisional IRA. They had become the beloved of Allah, warriors of the Prophet, Qaddafi’s chosen instruments of vengeance.

“He gives more than weapons?” Gillespie asked.

“Weapons, advice, training, refuge.”

“Weapons training?”

“The Provisionals don’t need that. But I know they’ve sent at least two guys to Tripoli to learn interrogation techniques. Up till then, if they thought there was a traitor, they simply punched the poor bastard rotten and as often as not they killed the fellow before they got a squeak out of him. Nowadays, though, they use Libyan techniques. They’re much more painful and much more certain.” I paused as a great slough of snow slid off the roof and plummeted on to the walk outside the window.

“You arranged for this training?” Gillespie asked.

“Yes.”

“And the names of the trainees?”

“I wasn’t given their names. They were simply code named John and Michael.” Later Gillespie showed me photographs of IRA men, but I found neither of the two I had escorted to Tripoli.

The first experts arrived from Langley. There was a small and excitable man with pebble-glasses who knew an extraordinary amount about how illegal immigrants were smuggled into the south of France, and wanted to know whether terrorist groups used the same routes. I gave him what help I could. Another man, dry as a stick, tried to trace the financial links between Libya and the various groups, while a third came to ask me about the East German training camp at Tantow which I had visited twice. Every day there were more photograph albums, more pictures, more dull hours turning stiff pages of expressionless faces.

A dark-haired woman arrived to talk about Libya and its support of terrorism. She showed me a photograph of Shafiq and I told her about his taste for pomade and his lust for French women, and about his gray elegant suits and his penchant for cachous and Gauloise cigarettes. She wanted to know about the methods Shafiq had used to contact me, and the places we had met and the codes we had devised for our telephone conversations. I talked about the Centre to Resist Imperialism, Racism, Backwardness and Fascism, then gave the name of the whorehouse in Marseilles that Shafiq thought was his private domain, and I wondered how long it would be before some Western agent dragged Shafiq from the brothel’s front steps and into a waiting car. The car would have had the locks of its back doors removed so there could be no fatal last-second fumbling. Instead the doors would be tensioned with bungee cords that would swing shut as the car accelerated away. Or perhaps Shafiq would be seduced by some thin-boned French blonde who would suck him dry before releasing him to Qaddafi’s vengeance.

“You met Qaddafi?” the woman asked. She was attractive, with a quick face and a sharp mind. It was she who told me about Shafiq’s wife and three daughters in their Tripoli apartment. I never knew her name, nor those of any of the other experts who flew in from the CIA’s Langley headquarters.

“I met Qaddafi,” I said, and described his bitter anger after the American air raid on Tripoli. “He was especially mad at the Brits because Thatcher had allowed the bombers to take off from British airbases.”

“So you negotiated the arms shipments he sent to the IRA as revenge?” she asked.

“I didn’t have to negotiate. I had to stop him from shipping his whole arsenal. He would have sent everything he had.”

“What about his plans for revenge on the Americans?”

“I suspect he brought down the jumbo jet over Lockerbie,” I suggested, “but he didn’t talk to me about that, only about the IRA.”

“Now let us talk about il Hayaween,” the CIA woman said vengefully. “God, but I’d like his hide nailed to my barn door.”

I dutifully described his face, his clothes, his mastery of English, his sunglasses, his Blancpain watch, his injured right hand and his taste for American cigarettes. I had revealed most of those details in previous sessions with Gillespie, and the woman had come prepared with photographs of Blancpain watches so I could identify which exact model I had bought in Vienna. She also wanted some confirmation of the legends about him, but I had no knowledge of his sins. I had only heard rumors, such as the stories of his massacre of Israeli schoolchildren. “You believe that?” the woman asked.

“Yes, I think I do.”

Gillespie, who sat in on all the sessions, shuddered. “How does a man live with the knowledge of a deed like that?”

“Maybe he has no imagination?” Carole Adamson suggested from her customary seat in the window.

I shook my head. “The best killers have imagination. To be as cunning as il Hayaween you must have imagination. That’s what makes him so good. But he also thinks he’s doing God’s work.”

“Do the IRA think they’re doing God’s work?” Gillespie asked without a trace of irony.

I laughed. “There’s an old tale, Gillespie, of the airplane flying into Belfast and the pilot switches on his microphone and welcomes the passengers to Aldergrove Airport and says that the temperature is fifty-five degrees and there’s a light rain coming out of the north and if they’d like to turn their watches to local time then they should wind them back three hundred years.” The joke belly-flopped like a pregnant pole-vaulter. Gillespie and the CIA expert both frowned while Carole Adamson just shook her head to show she did not understand. “Three hundred years ago.” I explained, “Europe was being torn apart by the wars of religion. Protestant against Catholic. Try and imagine a small island, three hundred years from now, where the natives will still be knocking technicolor shit out of each other in the name of communism versus the free market.”

“So you do think the troubles in Ireland are about religion?” Gillespie asked. He was genuinely trying to understand. Terrorism, after all, was a very strange phenomenon to most Americans. It was a disease inflicted on the first world by crazed creatures from the slums of the old world and the refugee camps of the third, and Gillespie wanted me to explain the disease’s origin.

I shook my head. “Religion in Ireland just defines which side you’re on. The Troubles are about people who feel they have no control over their own lives, about people who live in public housing and have no jobs and eat bad food and smoke themselves to death and see their kids born to the same hopelessness and they just want to hit back against someone, almost anyone.”

“So you’re saying it’s an economic problem?” the smart dark-haired woman asked earnestly.

“It isn’t economic, but the Troubles are bound to feed off a bad economy. The IRA campaign of the 1950s collapsed because there was full employment, because no one felt deprived, because people were too busy paying off the instalments on their cars and television sets, but nowadays there are no jobs in Belfast, there’s no future, there’s no hope, so all that’s left is the pleasure of revenge. What else can the poor bastards do? They know the south doesn’t like them, and that the Brits would like nothing better than to get the hell out, and that in truth no one really wants anything to do with them at all, and so they fight back the only way they can; with bullets and bombs and the pleasure of knowing they’re reducing other people to their own level of misery.”

There was silence for a while. Outside the window the snow fell.

“Is there no conscience there?” Gillespie asked at last.

“The clever ones pickle it in alcohol, and the stupid ones put their trust in the clever ones.” I gave the answer glibly, but I was thinking of Seamus Geoghegan and how I had once asked him if he felt the pangs of conscience, and he had thought about it for a long time and in the end he had just shaken his head. “I don’t give a rat’s toss,” he had told me, “not a rat’s toss.” What he had meant was that it was best not to think about it, for thinking would only make him unhappy.

“I think perhaps conscience is overrated by the West,” the woman said musingly.

Gillespie seemed about to reply, but suddenly, shockingly, a telephone rang in the library. I had not even been aware that there was a telephone in the room and I jumped like a guilty thing, and even Gillespie seemed astonished by the bell’s sudden shrill. He scrambled to his feet and hurried to a recess at the back of the room where he tentatively lifted the instrument. He spoke a couple of words, then put the phone down before coming slowly back to the table with a look of surprise on his face. “It’s the war,” he said aloud and to no one in particular. “It started last night. We’re at war.”

AMERICAN AND ALLIED BOMBERS WERE FLYING OVER THE kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar. Tomahawk cruise missiles were hissing above the Land of the Two Rivers where Eden had once flourished and Babylon, the flower of all cities, had blossomed. “Dear God,” Gillespie had murmured at the news, then he suggested we break off the debriefing to watch the television in the dining room. The news seemed impossibly optimistic, telling of incredibly accurate allied bombing, remarkably light aircraft losses, and burgeoning allied hopes.

There was no word yet of an Iraqi response, and certainly no news of terrorist attacks. I half expected to hear of civilian airliners falling from the sky or of dreadful bombs ripping open Western city centers, but instead, over and over, the screen showed the flickering of tracer rounds above Baghdad being punctuated by the sheet lightning of bombs exploding on the horizon. There were pictures of fighter bombers screaming off Saudi runways, their wheels folding as the afterburners hurled the warplanes north toward the enemy.

I sat furthest from the screen. I was watching the allied planes attack Iraq but I was remembering the Israeli fighter-bombers over Hasbaiya. Usually their bombs or rockets struck before the Palestinians even knew the enemy was above them. There would be quick glints in the sky, a roll of wings and a billow of thunder, then the warplanes would vanish in the sky’s hot brightness as their burning flares, voided to decoy the defenders’ missiles, drifted slowly to earth. Afterward, out of the smoke and rock-dust, a few stunned survivors stumbled.

I knew that sooner or later Gillespie would want me to talk about Hasbaiya. I wished he would spare me that. I half expected him to raise the subject after lunch, but instead, and after courteously asking the dark-haired woman if she would mind waiting a few moments before resuming her questioning, he asked me one more time about the fifty three Stingers.

Gillespie’s problem was that neither the FBI nor the CIA could find a single substantiating fact for my story of the meeting in Miami and the sale of the missiles. Gillespie brought me photographs of warehouses close to the Hialeah racecourse, but even when I identified the building in which I had seen the Stinger it had done no good. A search of the warehouse discovered nothing, and its records betrayed no Cubans called Alvarez or Carlos. Now, as Gillespie took me back to the library for the afternoon session, he told me that the telephone number in Ireland had proved to belong to an Enniskillen shop owned by a sixty-eight-year-old spinster who dealt in religious statuettes, while Brendan Flynn, taxes by the Irish police with my story of a meeting in Miami, blithely retorted that he had been attending a conference on the future of Ireland at the University of Utrecht. Gillespie told me that two distinguished professors of International Law and a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church had signed affidavits supporting Brendan’s alibi. I had to laugh. Brendan had style.

“Such people wouldn’t lie!” Gillespie reproved me.

“Those bastards will lie through their teeth. Come on, Gillespie! Academics and churchmen? They love terrorists! They get their rocks off pretending that terrorists are doing God’s work. And especially the Dutch! I’ve been to those damn conferences in Holland. The Dutch are dull, so they love being on the side of the wicked. Say you’re a terrorist in Utrecht and you’ll have half a dozen priests and six academics all begging to lick your ass. That alibi’s a piece of crap.”

“And Michael Herlihy? He has two Boston lawyers willing to testify that he was taking depositions on that day.”

“You trust American attorneys? What about Marty Doyle? Did you question him?”

“He claims to have been driving Michael Herlihy all day. In and around Boston.”

“He’s lying! He drove me to the warehouse, then he drove Brendan Flynn and me to Miami Airport. So pull the bastard in and slap him about. He’ll tell you everything.”

Gillespie sighed. “This is America. We have to use due process.” He looked at me with silent reproof for a few seconds. “I also have to tell you,” he went on, “that the British and Irish authorities have heard nothing about Stingers. Nothing at all.”

“I saw one.”

“So you say, so you say.” But it was plain he did not believe me. “We’ll keep looking,” he said, though without enthusiasm, and then he turned to the dark-haired woman, who had waited patiently throughout the discussion of Stingers and alibis. “You wanted to raise a particular matter with Mr. Shanahan?”

“Hasbaiya,” she said bluntly.

I turned to her. The fire was snapping and hissing. “I’m sorry?”

“Hasbaiya.”

Of course they wanted to know about Hasbaiya, but the very thought of the place made me go tense. I was very aware of Carole Adamson’s scrutiny. “I’ve been to Hasbaiya,” I said as easily as I could.

“How often?”

“Often enough.”

“Twice? Ten times? Twenty?” The woman frowned at my generalization.

“Eight times. My first visit was in ’82 and the last in ’86.”

“You were attending training courses?”

Hasbaiya was the most notorious of the Palestinian training camps, a graduate school of death. It was not the only terrorist-training camp in the world, and not even the biggest. Indeed, in the old days, before their system collapsed, the Soviets ran a half-dozen such facilities, but Hasbaiya was the star in that dark firmament of evil.

“Did you train there?” the woman asked hopefully.

“No. My visits were just to introduce trainees.”

I explained that no one could attend Hasbaiya, or any of the other Palestinian training camps for that matter, without being vouched for by someone the Palestinians trusted, and I had been the person who verified that the trainees I took to the camp were who they claimed to be and not some American or Israeli agent.

“And you introduced eight IRA men to the camp?” the woman asked.

“Four IRA men, one woman, and three Basques. The IRA didn’t really think their guys needed outside training, but every now and then they’d send someone.”

“So how long did it take you to make these introductions?” the woman asked. “A day?”

“Five minutes. I’d take the person to the commandant’s office, say hello, and that was that.”

“And then you’d leave?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes they invited me to stay a few days.”

“Tell us about the camp.”

I described it. Hasbaiya was built in the grounds of an old winery on the upper slopes of Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley. Most of its territory was used as a training ground to turn Palestinian refugees into storm-troopers, but at the top of the camp was a more secret area where terrorists came to perfect their skills of ambush, assassination and destruction. Hasbaiya’s creed preached that death was the ultimate deterrent and that so long as the world feared death, so long was killing the terrorist’s best friend, but for death to be useful it also had to be familiar, and so Hasbaiya used death as an integral part of its syllabus. Every trainee went there knowing that men and women died there, and that to be squeamish in the face of that slaughter was to demonstrate an unworthiness of the cause.

Gillespie broke in. “Let me clarify this. You’re saying trainees died?”

“Sometimes, yes.” I paused, and I was thinking of Roisin, but when I spoke again I talked of another American girl who had gone to Hasbaiya full of the fervor of one who would change the world. “Her name was Kimberley Sissons,” I said, “and she came from Connecticut. I think she said her father was a corporate lawyer. She had a degree from Harvard.”

“You’re telling us they killed her,” the Langley woman asked.

“Yes.”

“For what reason?” Gillespie asked in his precise manner.

“They didn’t have to have a reason.” I hesitated again, wondering how to explain the inexplicable. “Were you ever in the army?” I asked Gillespie.

“The Marine Corps.”

“Well I’m told that sometimes the army or the Marines will give a recruit a live rabbit and tell him it’s dinner, but if the recruit doesn’t have the guts to kill the rabbit then he goes hungry. I think that’s how they treated the girls at Hasbaiya.”

Gillespie and the woman stared at me for a few seconds. “Girls?” It was the dark-haired woman who asked.

“It was mainly the Western girls who were killed. Not always, but usually.”

Carole Adamson intervened. “Was this a religious prejudice?”

“It was more to do with the fact that the Western girls argued.”

“Argued?” Gillespie at last sounded shocked.

“Look,” I tried to explain, “the Palestinians come from a culture that says a woman’s role is to be subservient to the authority of men. Then these middle-class American girls arrived, full of revolutionary fervor learned from some Marxist professor at Stanford or Harvard, and there was bound to be friction. The girls were all feminists, all argumentative, and all deeply into inter-cultural bonding, and they found it quite difficult to understand that their ordained place in the revolution was to be bonded between a lice-ridden mattress and an unwashed Palestinian.” I had sounded callous, but beneath the table my hands had been shaking. The dark-haired woman had gone silent and just watched me.

“So they were shot?” Gillespie asked. “For arguing?”

“Not always shot. Kimberley Sissons was strangled with copper wire.”

“Just for arguing? For standing up for her rights?” Carole Adamson sounded horrified.

“I told you,” I said, “it was a demonstration.”

“So who was the demonstrator?” Gillespie asked.

“Another trainee was ordered to kill her, and if he’d hesitated or disobeyed, then he’d have been the next to die. It was their way of making the trainees rethink their attitude to death.” I paused, knowing I had not given the real flavor of Hasbaiya; the febrile excitement that infected the place, the enthusiasm for killing and the triumph of mastering its dangers. “Maybe they were trying to destroy conscience?” I suggested.

“Did you kill anyone at Hasbaiya?” Gillespie asked.

“I told you, I wasn’t a trainee. I just escorted people there.”

“That doesn’t answer the question,” Carole Adamson said with an unaccustomed asperity.

“I did kill a man, yes,” I admitted.

“Why? Were you ordered to?”

I shook my head. “It was a fight.”

“Who was he?”

“A guy called Axel,” I said, “just Axel. I didn’t know his other name. He picked the fight, not me.”

“When was that?” Gillespie asked.

“On my last visit.”

“In ’86?”

“Yes.”

“And you’d simply escorted someone there?”

“Yes.”

“And he picked a fight? Why?”

I shrugged. “God knows.”

“How did you kill him?”

“With a spade,” I said, “like an axe-blow.” I had told the truth, but only a tiny shred of the truth, but the rest of the tale was my nightmare and not to be shared with Gillespie’s notebooks or Carole Adamson’s diagnosis or the dark woman’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Palestinians and Libyans.

Gillespie was consulting the early pages of his notebook where he had written down the framework of my story, the chronology. “Eighty-six,” he said. “Was that when the IRA stopped trusting you?”

“Yes.”

“Was that anything to do with Hasbaiya?”

I hesitated again. Outside the window the snow was dazzling, glinting with a billion specks of light. “Yes,” I admitted, knowing that in the end I would have to tell a part of the story. “I took an American girl to Hasbaiya,” I said, “and she accused me of being a CIA agent.”

“The girl’s name?” Gillespie was writing in his book.

“Roisin Donovan,” I said as casually as I could. “I think she spelt her first name R-O-I-S-I-N.”

“American, you say?” He frowned at me.

“Like me,” I said, “tribal Irish. But she came from Baltimore.”

“So tell me about her.”

I feigned ignorance. “To be honest I didn’t know too much about her, except that she’d moved to Northern Ireland and was very active in the Women’s Section of the Provisional IRA.” I could feel my heart thumping and I was sure Carole Adamson must be registering my discomfort. I myself was horribly aware of everything in the room; the crackle of the poor fire, the creak of my chair, the scrape of Gillespie’s pencil on the pages of his notebook, the skceptical gaze of the dark-haired woman.

“Why did she accuse you?” Gillespie asked. “Describe the circumstances.”

I took a breath. “I took her to Hasbaiya. We reached the camp and I took her to Malouk’s quarters. Malouk was the commandant. She went inside, spoke with him, and ten minutes later he asked me to stay on in the camp. Which I didn’t want to do because I had a boat-delivery job lined up for the following week, but Malouk wasn’t a man you argued with, so I said sure, and that night he arrested me.”

“Because Roisin Donovan had accused you?”

“Yes.”

“What had she told him?”

“She told him,” I said, “that the CIA was trying to infiltrate European terrorist groups, and that to preserve their agents’ secrecy they were not using field controllers or letter drops or any other communication systems. She called them stealth spies because they were undetectable. They wouldn’t report back to Washington until their whole mission was finished.” I paused, staring out of the window. A deer stood at the edge of the far dark woods. It sniffed the air, dipped its head, then was gone with a flash of its white tail. “Then she said I was one of those stealth agents,” I finished bitterly.

“Are you telling us she knew all about van Stryker’s program?” Gillespie asked.

“She knew about his idea of not using any form of communication in the field.”

“Did she mention van Stryker?”

“No.”

“Any other names?”

“No.”

“So it sounds like a wild accusation.” Gillespie was scornful.

I shrugged as if to suggest he must be right, though the truth was less pretty. Roisin and I had often talked about the possibility of the CIA infiltrating the IRA with an American agent. Their motives, we agreed, would be to do their British allies a favor as well as to eavesdrop on the rumors that were whispered through the European terrorist grapevines. We had embroidered the idea, suggesting how it might be done and how such an agent might avoid detection. It had not been Roisin who had dubbed such agents as “stealth spies,” but me. I had offered her that thought as if it had been mere idle speculation, but in reality I had been playing with fire; just like a cheating husband might get a stupid thrill from mentioning his mistress’s name to his wife, so I had not been able to resist describing van Stryker’s notion as a fantasy of my own. I could imagine just what psychological hay Gillespie and Adamson would make from such an admission, so I wisely said nothing.

Gillespie turned a page in his notebook. “And the Hasbaiya authorities believed her accusation?”

“They didn’t know whether to believe her or not, but they were worried to hell by her,” I said.

“So what did they do?”

“They sent a message to Ireland to discover whether anyone there suspected me, and that message saved me. It seemed that Seamus Geoghegan had taken refuge in Roisin’s apartment, and on the very day she’d left for Lebanon he’d been arrested by the Brits. They claimed to have been given information by an informer, and it could only have been Roisin. So it seemed that she was the traitor, not me, and that by accusing me she was merely trying to spread the guilt to confuse everyone.” I made a rueful face. “But even so she’d tarred me with suspicion, and that suspicion was enough to make them cut me out of the game.”

“What happened to Miss Donovan?” Gillespie asked.

“She was shot,” I said bleakly.

There was silence. Carole Adamson had scribbled a note which she now leaned forward to slide down the table. Gillespie unfolded the scrap of paper. In the fire a log collapsed in a shiver of cascading sparks. Gillespie screwed the note into a ball and tossed it at the flames. The ball missed the hearth, bouncing off the mantel and rolling on to the coir rug. “How much time did you spend in her company? I mean, on the way to Hasbaiya?”

“Three days. We met in Athens, flew to Damascus, then drove to Lebanon.”

“So you must have talked with her?”

“Sure.”

“Did you become lovers in those three days?” Gillespie asked.

“No!” I tried to make my answer scornful.

“What did you talk about on your journey?”

“Nothing much,” I said. “She wasn’t very sociable.”

“You must have discussed something!”

“The scenery, Irish beer, the heat. We chatted, that’s all.”

“Did you like her personally?” Gillespie pressed me.

“Like her? I don’t know.” I was feeling excruciatingly uncomfortable. “Hell! She isn’t important.”

There was silence again. The light was fading outside. It was deep winter and the days were short. The dark-haired woman looked at her watch. “I should be going, Peter.” She spoke to Gillespie. “I kind of hate driving in the dark.”

“Of course.” The spell was broken. I felt myself relax. People round the table moved, stretched, made small talk. The woman thanked me for my time, said I had been helpful, then followed Carole Adamson into the hall to find her coat. Gillespie said he needed to visit the bathroom.

They left me alone in the library. I was thinking of Hasbaiya, of Roisin. Seamus had once told me that conscience could be diluted in alcohol. “I’ll drink to that,” I had said, and now I helped myself to a bottle of rye whiskey kept in the drinks cabinet and carried it back to the deep library window. There I watched the snow, drank, and watched the snow again. Then I remembered the ball of paper lying on the coir rug, the one on which Carole Adamson had scribbled her note to Gillespie, so I turned and picked it up, uncrinkled the paper, and read her urgent words. “He’s telling lies! Telling lies!” And no wonder, by Christ, no wonder.

Roisin had been lucky in one thing only; she had died swiftly.

I later heard that Brendan Flynn had himself requested the act of mercy. He claimed that Roisin had been given neither the time nor the opportunity to betray the Palestinians, only the Irish, and that the Irish should therefore set the manner of her death and he wanted that death to be quick. I had always wondered if Brendan asked the favor because he too had been one of her lovers. Whatever, Roisin was taken to a dry gully beyond the camp and there shot. She took one bullet in the head and her blood had sprayed against the white heat of the sky and splashed on to the yellow, sulphurous rocks. I remembered her look of outrage and defiance as she had died. Her skin had been very red, burned by the fierce sun. She had very fair skin and burned easily.

I was ordered to bury her on the hillside where she had died. A German called Axel Springer offered to stay with me, though he did precious little to help as I hacked a shallow scrape with the long-helved spade. He talked instead, telling me he was a theology student at Heidelberg, but that his real religion was the Red Army Faction. I wondered why he had volunteered to help me, and only began to understand when he stopped me from rolling Roisin’s thin corpse into the stony grave. “I want to look at her,” Axel said in his heavily accented English, “she was very pretty.”

“She was beautiful,” I corrected him. Roisin had never been pretty, she had been too fierce and too committed and too scornful of weakness to be called pretty.

“It is a sexual thing, you see,” Axel said.

“What is?”

“Why girls like this become involved in terrorism.”

“You’re joking,” I said.

“I have never joked,” he said in all seriousness. “Work has been done by American feminists on the correlations between sexuality and terrorism, and they maintain a direct linkage between sexual desire and terrorist activity. It has to do with the relaxation of inhibitions, both in society and in bed. I can offer you the reading list, if you would like?” He smiled and held out a pack of cigarettes. In those days I had smoked so I took a cigarette, stooped to his light, and gratefully sucked in the comforting smoke. “Of course,” Axel went on, “the camp authorities recognize the sexual linkage. That is why they encourage girls like this one to attend. These girls are hardly good pupils, but they have their uses.”

“Their uses?”

“It is obvious!” Axel blew a plume of smoke that whirled away down the valley. “The Arabs want the white girls. It is their revenge for colonialism. But they would not have enjoyed this one.” He jerked his head at Roisin.

“Why not?”

“Too thin! Look at her!” He leaned down and ripped Roisin’s flimsy shirt open. “See? Just pimples!” He gestured at her breasts, which were very white and very small. “Pimples!” Axel said again, but he could not keep his eyes away from them, and it was then that I understood exactly why he had stayed behind to help me bury her.

“Cover her up,” I said. “It isn’t right to bury her half naked.”

Axel had squinted up at me. “What is your name?”

“Paul.”

“Paul. I think you have American bourgeois inhibitions. You should deal with that. It isn’t healthy.”

“I said cover her up!” I snapped.

“OK! OK!” But instead of pulling the torn shirt over her body he caressed her small white breasts with his right hand, and it was at that moment I had hit him with the edge of the spade. I hit him so hard that the steel blade sank three inches into his skull, but even so the blow did not kill him straightaway. He was still making an odd noise, half pain and half protest, as I pulled him off Roisin’s body and he remained alive all the time that I took to bury her and to cover her shallow grave with a heap of stones to keep the beasts and birds away from her flesh. Axel could not speak, but his eyes watched me and he made the strange noises as I told him he was going to hell and that for the rest of eternity he would suffer an unimaginable agony. In the end he died, but I did not bury him. Instead I left him to the wild-winged creatures that screamed in the night, then I carried my bloodied spade back to the camp where I confessed my deed, but no one cared that Axel had been killed, for in Hasbaiya death was a creed.

Outside the window the snow fell with the coming night.

The air war in the Gulf blazed on, yet still no reprisals seared America. No planes tumbled from the sky, no bombs slashed at city centers. Indeed it seemed that my story of Saddam Hussein taking a terrorist revenge on America was just that, a story, a fantasy. Gillespie still questioned me about the Cubans in Miami, and the million and a half dollars, but I sensed he no longer believed a word of my tale.

The days passed in a blanket of snow. I turned the pages of photograph albums and dredged up memories of meetings years before. The days began to have a dull rhythm. I watched the breakfast television news every morning, always expecting to hear that the allied ground troops had attacked the Iraqi army, but the air war went on and on. One morning I saw Congressman O’Shaughnessy expressing his concern that a ground campaign would cost thousands of American lives. It would be better, Tommy the Turd said, if the bombing campaign was given several more months to do its work. I was about to switch the set off when a news bulletin told of a bomb attack in London. The Provisional IRA had parked a roofless van in Whitehall, and the van had concealed a battery of mortars that had launched their bombs against Downing Street. The new Prime Minister and his cabinet had narrowly escaped injury. The news footage showed the burnt-out van standing abandoned in a sleety rain. Later that morning, just as I had anticipated, Gillespie asked me about the attack, but I could only offer him my strong suspicion that the spectacular operation had been planned as a strike against Margaret Thatcher, whom the IRA detested, but that the plan’s execution had been delayed to become a part of Iraq’s world-wide terrorist revenge. That delay might have cost the Provisional IRA their chance of killing Margaret Thatcher, but it had doubtless pleased Colonel Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein.

Two more terror bombs struck London, both random attacks at train stations. One commuter was killed. The bombs had been left in rubbish bins and had exploded in the rush hour. They were primitive attacks, far removed from the sophistication of the Downing Street bombs, and I suggested to Gillespie that the Provisional had been driven to such crudities by their eagerness to convince Saddam Hussein that they were truly cooperating. None of the London attacks had brought a united Ireland one day closer, but they had undoubtedly preserved the IRA’s standing with their most generous sponsor, Libya.

In the days following the IRA attacks, and probably in response to questions coming from London, Gillespie pressed hard about my knowledge of IRA active-service units, but I knew nothing that could help him. The only top IRA men I knew were Brendan Flynn and Seamus Geoghegan. The rest were already dead, or else I had never met them. Gillespie thought I was hiding them, but he was wrong. I was hiding gold coins, not men.

I knew the debriefing was coming to an end when Gillespie asked about my future, offering to give me the benefits of the Federal Witness Protection Program. “We’ll give you a new name, a new social security number, a new job, and a settlement grant somewhere far away from your old haunts. No one could possibly trace you.”

“You’ll make me a school janitor in North Dakota? Thank you, but no. I’m going back to the Cape.”

He frowned. “Is that sensible?”

“Probably not, but it’s home.”

He was still troubled. “You’ll have made enemies. They’ll know where to find you.”

“I don’t want to hide.”

He half smiled. “You need the risk, is that it? You can’t bear to think of spending a dull ordinary life?”

“I like the Cape, that’s all.”

“Then so be it,” he agreed reluctantly.

Next evening, at long last, Simon van Stryker came to offer me his blessing. I received no warning of his coming, though Gillespie had shown an air of expectancy all day and, when we gathered in the library before dinner, I found a tray had been placed on the table with an ice-bucket, crystal glasses, an old-fashioned soda-syphon, two kinds of Scotch and a half-bottle of sherry. “Is this a celebration?” I asked.

“In a way, yes,” Gillespie said, then he turned to the window as the sound of a helicopter thumped through the library’s double glazing. A brilliant beam of light swept across the darkening snow then shrank as the helicopter descended and a cloud of wind-stirred white crystals made a fog of the beam, then the machine itself appeared in the sparkling white cloud and settled on to the snow-covered lawn. The landing lights went out. None of us spoke.

A log tumbled on the fire, spewing sparks. Carole Adamson frowned into her sherry while Gillespie surreptitiously patted his hair. A moment later the heavy front door banged hollowly and there was a mutter of voices in the hall. “That will be him,” Gillespie said unnecessarily.

“Who?” I asked. Then the door was thrust open to reveal a tall, smiling man clothed in faultless evening dress and it was suddenly hard to imagine Simon van Stryker dressed in any other way. His hair was whiter than I remembered and I guessed he must be in his sixties by now, but he looked very fit and his face was still lean and animated. He strode across the room. “Paul Shanahan! You kept the faith! Well done!” He held out his hand. I shook it awkwardly.

Van Stryker greeted Carole Adamson. “I never had a chance to congratulate you on your paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. I have two points to debate with you, but perhaps they should wait? And Peter!” He held out his hand to Gillespie. “You’ve had a long task, well done.” He smiled at us, filling the room with an air of vibrant intelligence. He held his hands to the fire, shivered, then nodded acceptance of a whiskey. “But a very small one, Peter. I’m expected at a rather rigorous dinner at the White House tonight. I shall be late, but that’s better than not showing up at all.” He stood in front of the fire, staring about the high-ceilinged library with its rows of indigestible reading. “Some extraordinary men have told us their life stories in this room, Paul. I like to think of it as America’s confessional.”

“Do I get absolution now?”

Van Stryker laughed at my question, then thanked Gillespie for his whiskey. He took one sip then placed the glass on the mantel and I sensed it would not be touched again. “Help yourself.” He waved me toward the tray of drinks. Outside the window the helicopter’s engine grumbled. Van Stryker was clearly not staying long, but I was glad he had made the effort to come to this strange mansion in the snow-bound hills. I had needed to see him. For fourteen years he had been my mentor. “So what on earth happened to your Stingers, Shanahan?” van Stryker asked me now.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe they never existed?”

I shrugged. “Maybe, but I held one of them.”

He looked at me with his pale, clever eyes. “Have you told us everything?”

“At least three times, it seems.”

“Good for you, Paul,” van Stryker said, then frowned down at the coir rug. “If there were no Stingers, Shanahan, or only one of the beasts, why did they send you to Miami?”

“I don’t know.”

“We know you went there. We found your footprints in the airline’s computer.” He still stared down at the floor. “So why?” he asked softly.

“Maybe it was an operation that went sour,” I suggested, and did not add the suggestion that it might have gone sour because some clever bastard had purloined the purchase price. “Most operations do,” I said instead.

Van Stryker’s gaze snapped up to me and I knew he was wondering if I was one of his operations that had gone sour. “What’s happened to the rest of Saddam Hussein’s terrorist revenge?” he asked. “Has that gone sour too?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“All but for the Provisional IRA,” he said bitterly. “Of all Saddam Hussein’s allies only they have drawn blood. One dead civilian on London’s Victoria Station. Is that the very best il Hayaween can produce?”

Everyone seemed to be waiting for my answer. I shrugged. “Il Hayaween told me that the Syrians and the Iranians were not supporting Iraq’s terrorist campaign,” I said, as if that explained everything.

“Nor are they,” van Stryker said impatiently, “but one dead rail commuter? Is that Saddam Hussein’s best effort?”

“They almost got the British Prime Minister,” I suggested.

Van Stryker shook his head. “Our analysis shows the Provisionals had that attack planned for months. They just delayed it to please their Arab masters. No! There has to be something more!” He sounded angry. “Have you really told us everything, Paul?”

“Of course.” Though articulating the lie gave me a stab of guilt which I assuaged by telling myself that all I had held back was the real price of the missiles and the method by which the Libyans had tried to pay that price. The gold was mine. Yet I still felt guilty for hiding it, but that was the effect van Stryker had. He was a man who inspired loyalty, but I reassured myself that the gold was as harmless as a check, or a bank transfer. What mattered were the things the gold had been intended to buy. “Maybe,” I proffered, “the two Cubans were trying to rip off the IRA?”

“A rather dangerous game,” van Stryker replied with a humorless laugh.

“Not if you’re far enough away from them. They’ve never mounted an operation over here.”

“And they’d better not!” van Stryker said, then looked at his watch before turning to Gillespie. “What’s your evaluation of Shanahan, Peter?”

“I think the debriefing’s been very useful,” Gillespie said, though without enthusiasm. “I don’t think he’s told us everything he knows about the IRA, but that was never our prime target. We haven’t solved the Stinger story, and maybe never will, but what he’s told us about the Palestinian groups and Libya has proved most valuable.”

“The Israelis are pleased with us, you mean?” Van Stryker looked at me, but still spoke to Gillespie. “So you think Mr. Shanahan’s life has not been wasted?”

“Not at all,” Gillespie said stoutly.

“Dr. Adamson. What is your considered judgment of Paul Francis Shanahan?”

“I’m not sure I have one yet. He hasn’t permitted us to see him yet. He’s been protecting himself because he resents being questioned, which is why he treated this debriefing like a contest.”

“And who won?” Van Stryker asked lightly.

“I lost score.” Carole Adamson was suddenly no longer motherly and comforting, but sharp. “He’s hidden his real self behind a mask of flippancy.”

“You mean he’s a deceiver?” Van Stryker was still equable. “But isn’t that why we chose him in the first place?”

“But who is he deceiving? Because I tell you he’s hiding more than his personality behind that slippery mask. Whatever Mr. Shanahan sees as being in his own best interest will be kept good and private from us.”

“Paul?” Van Stryker turned courteously toward me.

“I’ve hidden nothing,” I said with wondrously feigned innocence.

“You entered America with false papers, did you not?” Van Stryker seemed unperturbed as he asked the question.

“For old times’ sake,” I said happily. “I’ll never do it again. Promise.”

Carole Adamson gave me a disinterested glance. “I wouldn’t worry about his papers. I’d ask him a few hard questions about Miss Roisin Donovan instead. That should lift a corner of his mask.”

Van Stryker held his hands toward the fire. “We know you lied about her, Paul. She lived with you in Belfast, yet you claim not to have known her?”

“Aren’t I allowed some privacy?”

“Not in America’s confessional, no.” He smiled, glanced at me, then looked back to the fire. “You were lovers?”

“Yes.”

“She had a lot of other lovers. Did you know that?”

I wondered how much they knew about Roisin, but I did not want to ask. I did not want to talk about her. “I know she had other lovers,” I said defensively.

“Does that hurt you?”

I had no intention of answering that question, or any damn question like it. I had been sent into the dark to bring back information, not the raw materials of psychoanalysis, so I said nothing. Van Stryker held his hands toward the fire. “Not that it matters,” he answered his own question blithely, “because she’s dead and you’re very much with us. But you always were a survivor, Paul. A rogue and a scoundrel, but an undoubted survivor.” He smiled at me. “I came here to thank you.”

“To thank me?” His gentle courtesy took me by surprise.

“You’re my first stringless puppet to come home. You’ve brought your cargo of information and I thank you for it. And we owe you money.” He held up a hand to still my exclamation of surprise. “I know we said you would not be paid, and officially we owe you nothing, but I’ll make sure the agency diverts some funds. Just as a token of our thanks. It will take time, maybe some months. And, of course, we may have more questions for you. In fact I’m sure we’ll have more questions for you. Questions are the one thing that never end. Peter knows where you’ll be, does he?”

“I’m going back to the Cape,” I told him.

“I envy you. Nancy and I have a summer cottage on the Vineyard, but we never manage enough time there. Life is too busy. We do some sailing as well, when we can.”

“You’ve got your own boat?” I asked him.

“A Nautor Swan,” he said casually. “A sixty-one-footer named for Nancy. We keep her at Edgartown, but of course she’s ashore now, on jackstands in our yard.”

It would be a Nautor Swan, I thought, and doubtless Nancy was beautiful and their children successful and the summer cottage on Martha’s Vineyard a waterfront mansion. This was the codfish aristocracy.

Van Stryker took a business card from his breast pocket. “If you do dredge anything up from your subconscious and want to talk to me, then that number will always reach me.” He held the card toward me. “And thank you, Paul, for taking the risks you did.”

I took the card. I felt awkward because I had told lies. They were not important lies, but still I felt I did not deserve van Stryker’s generosity, nor his thanks. Then I told myself that of course I did. I had been the poor bastard who dared the Beka’s Valley and the back streets of Tripoli. I was a hero, and I deserved thanks, peals of trumpets, and a boat’s belly filled with gold. I deserved it all.

“Now I really must go!” Van Stryker smiled a courteous farewell to Gillespie and Adamson, shook my hand one more time, and then was gone. Gillespie let out a long relieved breath. Outside the window the helicopter lights dazzled us as the machine hammered up into the darkness.

They let me go next morning. Gillespie gave me five hundred dollars in cash and an air ticket to Boston. It was Sunday and somewhere in the valley a church bell was tolling like a tocsin. It was a cold still morning and a new fall of snow glittered under the wintry sun. I pulled on my yellow oilskin and stepped into the bright new day, a free man again. And going home.

I KNEW HOW BADLY MICHAEL HERLIHY WOULD BE WANTING to discover the truth of the missing gold; he would be wanting it badly enough to have its location beaten out of me. Yet Michael was a lawyer, and a careful one, and he had never done anything in his life without massive forethought and a hedge of precautions, so I reckoned that if I swanned into Boston unannounced and took him by surprise there was a good chance that I could be away before he had a chance to react, maybe before he even knew I was in Massachusetts.

Yet, at the same time, I knew I could not avoid a confrontation with Michael forever, because if I was to live the rest of my life on Cape Cod, free to waste each day on its circling seas, then Michael and his henchmen would need to be faced down or bought off. I would also need to make sure that Sarah Sing Tennyson was safely evicted from my property, which meant I had to twist the tail of the bombastic ape who had married my sister.

The bombastic ape was called Patrick McPhee. He was a big-bellied man with a hair-trigger temper and a face like a steam shovel. He was a drunk, a failure, a bully and a lout. Everyone had warned Maureen against marrying him, but in McPhee my sister had seen a tall handsome young baseball player who boasted of his glorious future in the major leagues, and Maureen had first insisted on marriage then made it inevitable by becoming pregnant. My father raged at her, provided her generously with a dowry, then had walked her down the carpeted aisle of Holy Redeemer. Maureen had worn a lace-edged frock of glorious white, and within days she had the first black bruises to show for her trouble. “The screen door banged into me when I was carrying some shopping,” she told our mother, and a month later she had tripped across a curbstone, then it was a fall she took while stepping off a bus, and so it had gone on ever since.

Patrick had duly gone to the minor leagues and there failed. His pitching arm that was so good at raising bruises on Maureen turned out to be muscled with noodles. He came home to Boston where he drank, put on weight and lived off past glories and Maureen’s money.

That money had long been frittered away and all Maureen had to show for her impetuous romance was a crumbling house and five sullen sons who, God help them, took after their father. Christ, I thought as the taxi drove me down the wintry and rain-sodden street, but we had been a wicked family.

Maureen herself opened the door to my knock and, for a moment, just stared. “Oh, my little brother,” she finally said. She had put on weight and there was a bruise next to her right eye, suggesting she had turned away too late from a blow.

“Can I come in?”

“You’ve come this far, so why not the last step?” She pushed the screen door open and stepped aside to let me into the kitchen. “You remember Terence?” Terence was Maureen’s youngest and was now twelve or thirteen years old. He was sitting at the kitchen table stuffing his face with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He wore a Desert Storm T-shirt stretched tight across his huge gut. “Say hello to your Uncle Paul,” his mother told him, but the kid’s mouth was too stuffed with sandwich to let him say anything so he just raised a languid hand in greeting. In the kitchen corner a television blared, while another television, showing a different program, was just as loud in the living room next door.

Terence slumped off his chair and dragged open the fridge door. He stared bemused into its well-stocked interior, then delivered his verdict. “No soda.”

“I’ll get some, honey,” Maureen said.

“Why don’t you go and get it yourself?” I asked Terence in a reasonable voice.

“Leave him alone!” Maureen intervened, clearly practiced in defending her children from the wrath of adult males. “Go on upstairs, honey,” she told her son. “Take something to snack on.”

“Where are the other little charmers?” I asked when Terence had shambled out of the room and Maureen had switched off both televisions.

“Probably at Roscoe’s, playing pool. His lordship’s at the Parish of course, where else?” Maureen sat at the table and lit a cigarette. The ashtray was overflowing with butts and her fingers were the color of woodstain. She studied me for a while. “You look good. Where in God’s name have you been?”

“In the last seven years?” I dropped my sea-bag by the door and ran myself a cup of water from the tap. The sink was piled with unwashed dishes. “Mostly in Belgium. But here and there. I really came to see Patrick.”

“About that girl?”

I nodded. “Sarah Sing Tennyson.”

She shrugged. “I told his honor not to rent the house to her, but things have been tight these last few years. When were they not? You want a cigarette?”

“I gave up.”

“Good for you. I tried quitting and put on thirty pounds, so I started smoking again, but the thirty pounds stayed with me just the same. You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“I can smell it off you like the smoke off a bonfire. You know they’ve been asking about you?”

“Who has?”

“Herlihy and his friends. They’re fair mad at you, Paul. Are you going to tell me why?”

“No.”

“Why do I even ask?” She struggled to her feet, crossed the room and reached into a high closet for a fifth of gin and a fifth of Jameson’s. I noticed how thick she had become in the waist and ankles. My God, I thought, but she was only forty-two or -three yet she looked twenty years older; all but for her hair, which was as lustrous and thick as ever. “Help yourself.” She sat and pushed the whiskey bottle toward me.

“Patrick’s going to have to get rid of that Tennyson girl,” I said.

Maureen laughed. “Some chance! You know Patrick. He’s terrified of any woman he’s not married to. He’ll tell you that he’ll deal with her, but he won’t.”

“How much rent is he taking off her?”

“Five hundred a month, and even then he gets to use the house when she’s not there. God knows why she lets him.”

“Five hundred?” I was astonished. The house was certainly worth five hundred dollars a month; indeed, in the summertime, I could have let it for five hundred dollars a week, but Sarah Sing Tennyson had to be crazy to pay that much for part-time occupancy.

“Not that I get to see any of the money,” Maureen said bleakly. “His eminence takes it all for himself.”

“Is he in work?”

“Not so you’d notice. A bit here and there.” She shrugged and I guessed that nothing had changed. Patrick had pimped for a time, then worked as an enforcer for a debt-collector in Roxbury, but mostly he lived off what small income there still remained from Maureen’s inheritance and, evidently, off the rent he illegally took for my house.

I poured myself a generous finger of my brother-in-law’s whiskey, then grinned at the health warning printed on the label. “When did they start putting this shit on bottles?”

“About the same time the telephones stopped working.” She gave me the flicker of a smile, a hint of the old Maureen. “You’ve been away too long, Paul. You even sound like a foreigner.”

“I’m back now.”

“To Boston?”

“The Cape. When were you last there?”

“It must be all of four years. His excellency doesn’t approve of my going down there. He takes his Parish friends down if the girl’s not there, but not me.” She drew on the cigarette. I had given Maureen the keys to the Cape house so she could have an escape hatch, but I had never intended Patrick to take the place for his own amusement.

“What does he do there?”

She shrugged. “They play at being men, you know? They lose money at cards, drink beer, and shoot duck in the fall.”

“He won’t be doing it any longer,” I said, “I’m moving back in. Have you seen Johnny Riordan lately?”

She shook her head. “Not for three years. The last time he came here Patrick picked a fight with him. It didn’t come to blows, but they fair shouted the tar out of each other, and Johnny hasn’t visited with us since.”

“What was the row about?”

She sighed. “The usual, you know?” She explained anyway. “Patrick had just got back from Ireland, so he was sounding off about the Brits. How they were worse than the Nazis, and Johnny wouldn’t take him seriously.”

“Patrick went to Ireland!” I could not hide my astonishment.

“The Friends of Free Ireland arranged the trip. They had one week in Dublin and one week in Belfast. Father Shea went from Holy Redeemer, and Michael Herlihy travelled, of course, and some young fellow from the Congressman’s office went with them. Patrick was full of himself when he got back. He was ready to fight England single-handed! I wish to hell he would sometimes. So now he’s on the committee. A big man, he is, and busy! He’s planning wars against England when he isn’t drinking whiskey or losing money on the horses.” She lit another cigarette from the stub of the first. “Are you really moving back home?”

“Yes.”

“And with a sack of troubles.” She was silent for a few seconds and the smoke of her new cigarette rose in a smooth column that suddenly tumbled into chaos a few inches above her hair. “Is it a woman?”

I shook my head. “I lost my last girlfriend. She reckoned I’d never make her rich so she went off with a Frenchman.”

“Good for her. What happened to that girl you were sweet on in Ireland?”

“She died.”

“Poor thing.” Her right hand sketched the sign of the cross. “Be careful, Paul.”

“I always am.”

She grimaced. “Is it drugs again?”

“I’m long out of that.”

“I’m glad, Paul. That was a cruel business. So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll buy a fishing boat? Run after the tuna? I hear the Japanese buyers wait at the Cape wharves to buy fresh tuna. Cash on the nail, ten or even fifteen bucks a pound and no questions asked. I could make a good living with a tuna boat.”

“Sure you could, sure.” Maureen knew all about dreams that never came true. She was probably the expert.

I picked up my bag and went to the door. “You say Patrick’s at the Parish?”

“All day. I wish he’d stay there all night, too.” She got to her feet, walked to me, and put her arms round me. She said nothing, but I sensed she was crying inside, but whether at her wasted life or whether for relief at my homecoming I could not tell.

I drew back slightly and very gently touched the raw, yellow edged bruise beside her right eye. “Did Patrick do that?”

“No, it was Mother Teresa who hit me. Who the hell do you think did it?”

I kissed her. “Look after yourself,” I said, then I looked up and saw that Terence had come to the kitchen door from where he was staring aghast at us. I guess he had never seen anyone show affection to his mother and he was consequently in culture shock. I gave him the finger. “She’s my sister, punk.”

“Where are my trainers, Mom?”

“I’ll look for them, honey.” She pulled away from me.

“And you said you’d get me some soda, right? And these chips are stale.”

I let the door bang shut and walked fast away.

The hall was always called “the Parish,” though in fact it was not the parish hall at all, but belonged to one of Boston’s many fraternal orders who were happy for their big brick building to serve as a church hall, a social club, and as a meeting place where the local Irish community could vent its joys, sorrows and political indignations. During the hunger strikes, when the IRA men were dying inside Long Kesh, the Parish had been the scene of passionate gatherings, just as it had in the mid ’70s when Boston’s bussing crisis had turned the city into a battleground and the men of the neighborhood had sworn that not a single black child would ever cross their local school’s threshold. That battle had long been lost, but the older struggle went on, evidenced by two enthusiastic slogans which were hugely painted in green letters on the Parish’s side wall. “Brits Out of Ireland” and “Support the Provos!” the slogans read and were supported on either flank by gaudily painted arrangements of Irish tricolors, harps, and assault rifles.

The other enthusiasm of the Parish was sport, which meant basketball, and specifically the Celtics. The Parish was where men came to watch the Celts on a giant TV projection screen, and when the Celts were playing even the politics of old Ireland took second place.

Yet, that Sunday, when I pushed through the Parish door, there was no basketball on the big screen. Instead the crowd was watching a news channel. The land war in the Gulf had at last begun, and Saddam Hussein’s mother of battles was being joined on the sands of western Iraq. “We’re kicking ass!” a man I had never seen before greeted me ebulliently. “We are kicking ass, you bet! Kicking ass!”

I pushed through to the bar. The place was crowded and noisy, filled with smoke and the smell of beer. I glanced round, saw no sign of Patrick, so instead cocked a finger toward Charlie Monaghan behind the bar. Charlie stopped what he had been doing, stared at me, looked away, struck his head, looked back, grinned, then abandoned his customers to march down the bar with an outstretched hand. “Oh, Mother of God, but is it yourself, Paulie?” He reached across the bar to embrace me. “I thought it was a ghost, so I did! Paulie! It is you, is it not?”

“It is. How are you?”

“I’m just grand! Just grand! No complaints, now. Have you been hearing the news? We’ve been kicking ten kinds of shit out of the shitheads. And I’m not talking about Iraq, I’m talking about the basketball, so how will you celebrate it?”

“Give me a Guinness.”

“It’s on the house, Paulie.” He let his assistants take care of the other customers while he gave me the vital news that Larry Bird had recovered from the operation on his heel and was running, as Charlie Monaghan put it, like a buck deer in the springtime. “He’s playing like a hero! Like a hero! And last year they were saying he’d never step on the parquet again, not with his foot and being thirty-three and all, but now the other teams are having to double-guard him. Can you imagine that, Paulie? Double-teaming Larry Bird! It’s just like old times, Paulie!” Charlie had grown up in Letterkenny, County Donegal, yet to hear him talk about the Celts was to think he had lived his whole life in the shadow of Boston Garden. “I tell you, Paulie,” he went on, “but we’re going to be world champions this year, no trouble at all!”

I managed to check the ebullient flow long enough to ask where I would find Patrick.

“Patrick Ewing? He’s playing for the Knicks these days, but surely you knew that, Paulie?”

“Not that Patrick. I mean my brother-in-law.”

“Oh, Padraig? That’s what he calls himself these days. Patrick’s not good enough for him. It’s Padraig or nothing, so it is.” Charlie laughed, and no wonder, for using the Gaelic form of his name was an extreme affectation for a man like my brother-in-law who could barely speak his own language, let alone the Erse tongue. “He’s in the snug,” Charlie went on, “but he’s busy, so he is.” The snug was a back room of the Parish, much given to private business.

“Busy doing what, for Christ’s sake?”

Charlie scraped the head off the Guinness with a knife, topped up the glass, then slid it across the bar. Then, with a conspiratorial wink, he touched the side of his nose with the frothy blade. “He’s got Tommy the Turd in there.”

“The Congressman?” I sounded astonished.

“Aye! The cretin who wanted to give Saddam Hussein a whole year to get his army ready. Too dumb to succeed but too rich to fail.” A columnist in the Boston Globe had delivered that scathing verdict on Tommy the Turd and it had stuck like a hook in a cod’s gill, but the congressman’s scatological nickname had inadvertently been invented by Charlie himself who, with his lovely southern Irish accent, turned every soft “th” sound into a hard “t.” Thus “thus” became “tus,” “three” became “tree,” and House Representative Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third had forever been transmuted into Tommy t’ Turd.

And Tommy the Turd was now in conference with my brother-in-law? “Good God,” I said. For however dumb Congressman O’Shaughnessy might be, he was still mighty exalted company for Patrick McPhee. Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third was a thousand-toilet Irish, a Boston aristocrat whose family was one of the richest in Massachusetts. Tommy’s grandfather, Tommy O’Shaughnessy Senior, had been an immigrant from County Mayo who had made his fortune in cement manufacture. Tommy’s father had more than doubled the family’s wealth but, fearing for the company’s profits if his son ever took over the family business, Tom O’Shaughnessy Junior had purchased Thomas the Third a seat in the House of Representatives instead. Rumor had it that the safe Boston constituency had cost the family well over eight million dollars, but at least they had put Tommy the Turd where he could do no direct damage to the cement profits. “So what in the name of God is Tommy doing here?” I asked Charlie.

“Plotting, of course.”

“Plotting what?” The Guinness was far too cold, but that was something I would have to learn to live with now I was home again.

Charlie leaned across the bar and lowered his voice. “You know Seamus Geoghegan?”

“Of course I know Seamus. We’re old friends.”

“Well, you know he’s right here in Boston? And that the Brits are trying to extradite him? They failed at their first try, but now they’re having another go in an appeal court. So we need money to defend him.”

“We being the Friends of Free Ireland?” I guessed, remembering that my brother-in-law was now an official of that group.

“You got it, Paulie. Patrick’s on the committee of the Friends now, so he is. Michael Herlihy really runs it, of course, but Michael needs someone to tally up the cash and keep the membership list in order, and Patrick volunteered after he visited Ireland. Did you hear about that? Jasus, but Patrick came back from Belfast with steam coming out of his ears and there’s nothing he won’t do for Ireland these days.” Charlie chuckled and settled his elbows on the bar ready for the pleasure of telling a good story. “Last September he even hired a bus and drove a whole party of us down to Meadowlands in New Jersey. Two British Army bands were putting on a show in the Brendan Byrne Arena, and Patrick had the bright idea of slashing the tires of all the cars in the parking lot. When we reached the place he told us it was a blow for a free Ireland, so it was, but the moment a police cruiser came by, Padraig was running faster than loose shit off a hot shovel!” Charlie laughed. “Mind you, if you listen to him tell the tale now you’d think we won half the battle for Ulster that same night.”

“So now he’s touching Congressman O’Shaughnessy for Seamus’s legal aid?”

Charlie nodded, then held up a warning hand as he saw me turning to leave. “But he says he doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“To hell with that. He’s family, isn’t he? You think he won’t want to welcome me home?” I winked at Charlie, picked up the Guinness and my sea-bag, and went to the snug.

There were five of them in there. Two were strangers, but I knew the other three well enough. There was Patrick himself, Tommy the Turd and, to my surprise, though I should not have been surprised at all, the bright boy of Derry, Seamus Geoghegan himself.

“Who the fuck…” Patrick started to protest when I pushed through the door, then he recognized me and his jaw literally fell open.

I dropped my sea-bag at the door. “Patrick. Congressman,” I greeted them with a nod apiece, then smiled at Seamus. “Hey, you bastard!”

“Paulie!” He stood, grinning, arms spread. “Paulie!” He came round the table and embraced me vigorously.

“Watch my fucking Guinness, you ape!” I protested at his greeting.

“You’re in dead trouble, you know that?” He whispered the urgent words in my ear, then stepped back and raised his voice. “You’re looking grand, so you are! Just grand.”

“And yourself,” I said, then placed what was left of my Guinness on the table. “How are you doing, Patrick? Or is it Padraig now?”

“We’re in executive session here,” he said very pompously.

“Fock away off,” I said in my best Belfast accent. Tommy the Third looked vaguely worried, but that was his usual expression for the Congressman had always gone through life with only one oar in the water. “You remember me, Congressman?” I asked him.

“Of course,” he said, though he did not use my name, which suggested he did not know me from George Washington. “Might I introduce Robert Stitch?” Tommy went on with his customary politeness. He used courtesy as a defense against cleverness, and it worked, for he had a reputation, especially among women, of being an appealingly well-behaved and well-brought-up boy. “Robert is one of my Congressional aides,” he explained now.

Stitch was pure Boston Brahmin, a young codfish aristocrat, who offered me a curt unfriendly nod. He was reserving further judgment till he knew whether I would be a help or a hindrance to his cause.

“And that’s my lawyer, my solicitor like.” Seamus jerked his head toward a wild-haired, bearded and bespectacled man who stood and held out his hand.

“I’m Chuck Sterndale,” the lawyer said with a smile, “it’s good to meet you, whoever you are.”

“I’m Paul Shanahan,” I said.

“Paulie was with me in Belfast, so he was,” Seamus told the room happily. “The first time I did a runner from Derry and the fockers were all over my backside, Paulie put me up in his flat. We had a grand time, didn’t we, Paulie?”

“We had good crack.” I used the old Belfast expression.

“It was good crack, right enough.”

“You’re Irish, Mr. Shanahan?” Stitch asked cautiously.

“By ancestry, but I was born not a mile away from this room, but unlike some I can mention I actually went to Ulster to do my bit for the cause. Of course, I know that slashing tires in the New Jersey Meadowlands advances the struggle gloriously, but it’s not quite the same as pulling a trigger in Belfast.”

That got to Patrick, as I had meant it to. “What the fuck do you know?” His mouth was half full of potato chips that sprayed out across his beer glass as he bellowed at me. “I was in Belfast three years ago, and I fought when I was there! I did my bit! I got beaten up by the fucking Brits! You want to see the fucking scar?” He jerked up his left sleeve where a barely discernible white scratch showed against his Erin Go Bragh tattoo.

“Oh, that’s terrible!” I mocked him. “What happened, Patrick? Oh no! Don’t tell me you mugged another Salvation Army girl?”

“Fuck you!” He scooped up a handful of chips that he crammed into his mouth as if to show that he had nothing more to say to me. A cigarette was burning in a full ashtray beside him.

Tommy the Turd raised a pacifying hand. “I can vouch for Mr. McPhee’s story. Mr. Stitch was with Mr. McPhee on that day and he will testify that they suffered a clear case of unprovoked British brutality; clear, unprovoked, and blatant.”

“So what happened, diddums?” I asked Patrick.

Patrick glared at me while he tried to decide whether or not to indulge my curiosity, but immodesty got the better of him. “I had a meeting arranged, right? Me and Mr. Stitch were personally invited to meet with some soldiers of the Provisionals. Fellows like Seamus here, the real heroes of Ireland! They wanted a chance to thank us for our support. They’re good-fellows, they are, good fellows. So we were told to go to this abandoned house in Ballymurphy, and we went there in broad daylight, broad daylight! Just me and the Congressman’s aide, and you’ll never believe what happened! Never!”

“Clear, unprovoked, blatant brutality,” Tommy the Turd interjected solemnly.

Seamus winked at me while Robert Stitch, who seemed a good deal less proud of the war story than Patrick, stared at the table. “So tell me what happened,” I invited Patrick.

“There must have been a security lapse,” Patrick said, “because we hadn’t been waiting more than five minutes, not five minutes, and the IRA soldiers hadn’t even had time to arrive, when a British patrol came to the house. They knew we were there all right! They shut off the back entrance and attacked through the front. Attacked! Isn’t that the right word, Mr. Stitch?”

“They rushed the house,” Stitch said gravely.

“They didn’t ask who we were,” Patrick said indignantly, “they just attacked!”

“Blatant, unprovoked, clear brutality,” Tommy the Turd assured me. Stitch visibly winced.

Patrick shook his head modestly. “We fought back, of course. We were just defending ourselves, nothing more, but I tell you, those Brit bastards won’t forget meeting Padraig Aloysius McPhee of Boston, no sir! But there were too many of them, just too many.”

“Naked, unprovoked, blatant brutality,” Tommy the Turd told me, while Seamus held his breath in an attempt not to laugh.

“So tell me what happened next?” I asked. I had adopted a wide-eyed expression, full of astonished concern. “Did they take the two of you to the Royal Victoria Hospital?”

“We refused to accept any of the enemy’s medical help,” my brother-in-law said proudly. Stitch was examining the table-top even more closely.

“But surely the enemy arrested you!” I exclaimed. “I mean, sweet suffering Christ, Patrick, but hadn’t you just beaten the living shit out of a whole Brit patrol? So where did the surviving soldiers take you? The Castlereagh Police Station? The Silver City? Falls Road Police Station?”

“They realized their mistake,” Patrick said with immense dignity.

“You mean they apologized?”

“They discovered we were Americans,” he said, “and were forced to let us go.”

“Oh, it’s a rare tale,” I said, sounding deeply impressed.

“Shocking,” Seamus somehow managed not to laugh as he spoke, “nothing short of focking shocking.”

“Clear, naked, blatant brutality,” Tommy the Turd said. He was a dazzlingly handsome youth, stern-faced, machine-tanned and immaculately groomed. His father had recently bought Tommy an expensive blonde wife, which had started speculation that the Congressman was being equipped and coached for a run at the Presidency. “And unprovoked!” he added.

“So you can stuff your mockery, shitface,” Patrick said to me with a triumphant leer.

“I apologize, Patrick, I really do. I had no idea you’d fought so bravely. Now tell me why you rented out my house?”

“Is this relevant?” Robert Stitch intervened.

“Shut up,” I told him, then walked to the back of Patrick’s chair. “A five-year lease, Patrick? Five hundred a month? That’s thirty thousand bucks. You want to write me a check?”

“We’ll talk about it later, Paulie.”

“We’re talking about it now, you fuck. So how much money have you got on you?”

“Not now, Paulie!” He tried to stand up, but I put my hands on his shoulders and held him down.

“How long has the bitch been there, Patrick? Three years? That’s eighteen thousand bucks you’ve taken already! Have you got it handy?”

“Please, Paulie!” He heaved up, but I slapped him hard across the side of his head and he gave a gasp and sat down fast.

I reached into his inside jacket pocket and found his billfold that held a stack of twenty-dollar bills, maybe two or three thousand dollars’ worth. “I’ll take it as a down payment, Padraig, but I’ll be back for the rest. And in the meantime just tell Miss Sarah Sing Tennyson that you made a mistake and that she’s to get the hell out of my home. Do you understand me, Padraig?”

“You can’t take that money!” Patrick said nervously. “That’s not mine.”

“But nor is the rent you take off Miss Tennyson, Padraig.” I shoved the stack of bills into my pocket.

“But that was for the cause!” Patrick insisted.

“And so’s this,” I said, and I bent down and whispered in his ear. “I’m back home for good now, Patrick, and if I find another bruise on Maureen I’ll cut your balls off and feed them to the crows, so help me God.” I could see the sweat beading on his great shovel of a face. I straightened up and belted him across the right side of his skull again, this time so hard that he squealed with pain and almost fell off his chair. I grinned at Tommy the Turd who was looking terrified. “Naked, unprovoked, blatant brutality, Congressman. It’s the way of the Irish. Hey, Seamus, come and have a drink at the bar. We’ll plan some fishing trips, eh? Maybe catch a few blues and stripers.”

“Sounds grand, Paulie.”

I walked to the door. Robert Stitch was frozen, fearing an explosion of violence. Patrick was shaking like a leaf while Tommy the Turd looked as if he’d just pissed into his Brooks Brothers pants. Only Seamus and his lawyer were grinning. “Keep Seamus out of the hands of the Brits,” I told Chuck Sterndale.

“I’ll surely do my best, Mr. Shanahan. But some of that money you just took off Mr. McPhee would help me do it.”

“Mr. Padraig McPhee owes me thousands more, councillor, and it’s all yours, OK?” I looked at Patrick. “I’m having another drink with Charlie Monaghan now,” I told him, “and after that I’m catching a bus for the Cape. So if you want to make something out of what just happened, then you’ll know where to find me. See you in a minute, Seamus.”

I picked up my bag and went to the bar where Charlie Monaghan, who had a perfect sense for when trouble was brewing, gave me a Guinness and an apologetic shrug, then went to find something to do in the stock room. A group of kids was playing darts, but most of the room was still watching the big screen for war news. I saw Marty Doyle, Herlihy’s gopher who had driven me in Miami, scuttle across the far side of the room and I guessed he was going to inform his master that I had appeared in Boston. I waved at him, but he ignored me like a healthy man avoiding the gaze of someone stricken by the Black Death.

Seamus waited a few minutes before joining me at the bar. A couple of men who wanted some of the hero’s fame to rub off on them offered him a drink, but Seamus told them to get lost, then settled beside me and placed his foot on the brass rail. He was a man as tall as myself, with black hair and scary pale eyes. Except for the eyes it was a good face, bony and gaunt, a real portrait of a gunman. “What the fock’s going on, Paulie?” he asked quietly.

“I’m having a private row with Patrick about my Cape house.”

“I don’t mean that, and you know I don’t. Hey, you!” This was to one of Charlie’s bar assistants. “Give us a hot Powers!” His Northern Irish accent was so strong that it sounded like a “hot Parrs.” He watched as the hot water was poured over the sugar and cloves, then as a healthy slug of whiskey was added. He was not expected to pay for his drink; no real IRA man ever had to pay for a drink in the Parish.

Seamus lit a cigarette and squinted at me through its smoke. “Either you’re mad to come back here, or you’re wearing bullet-proof underpants. Your brother-in-law’s talking about you on the telephone in there and wee Marty Doyle is screaming that Michael Herlihy will cut you off at the knees, and you’re drinking a Guinness like you haven’t got a care in the world. You do know you’re in trouble, don’t you, Paulie?”

“Is that what you hear, Seamus?”

“Even the bloody Pope must have heard! Jasus! They’re saying prayers for you already.”

I laughed. I liked Seamus, really liked him. He was good crack. “You know it’s been the best part of ten years since we met,” I told him. “Can you believe that?”

“As long as that?” He shook his head in disbelief, then shot me a wary look. “But I’m hearing stories about you, Paulie, and they’re not good.”

“What are you hearing?”

“That you did a runner with some money. A lot of focking money.”

“Only five million bucks,” I said, “in gold. Be reasonable, Seamus.”

“Mother of God!” He almost choked on his hot Powers, then, because I had admitted my guilt so cheerfully, he grinned. “You’re mad! And they’ll never let you get away with it!”

“Who said I had it?” I demanded. “The boat sank.”

“And so it did, Paulie,” Seamus said, “and the Brits are giving us back the six counties for Christmas, and the Pope is giving me a cardinal’s hat. Who do you think you’re talking to, eh? Jasus, Paulie, if that boat had gone down then you were a fool not to sink with it.”

I shrugged. “It wasn’t their money, Seamus. It came from the Libyans or the Iraqis. It had nothing to do with Belfast, not a thing.”

“That’s not what I hear. I hear stories about Stingers.”

I gave a reluctant nod. “Fifty-three of them.”

Seamus grimaced. “I hear they paid half-a-million bucks as a deposit on the Stingers. And that you told them you were bringing the balance!”

“Herlihy should keep his damned mouth shut,” I said.

“He didn’t tell me!” Seamus said. “I heard it from Ireland, so I did. I reckon Brendan Flynn wants your guts for garters.”

“Fuck Brendan,” I said savagely.

“That’s not how it works, Paulie, and you know it. You can’t just do a runner with the money.” Seamus had turned to watch the big room with his pale, wary eyes. “You want me to talk to them? I’ll say you’ll bring the money in soon. I’ll say it was all a misunderstanding and that none of us wants any trouble. You want me to talk to them?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said grimly.

“You mean those two who vanished? Liam and Gerry? Brendan told me about them. Are they dead?”

I hesitated, then nodded. “They’re dead.”

For a second I was tempted to confess to Seamus that I had murdered them in cold blood, but Seamus evidently did not care for he just shook his head. “Brendan doesn’t give a fock about those two. They were just supposed to look after the taxi trade and the butchers’ shops. All they had to do was slap a few faces and keep the miserable fockers in line, but no, they had to go into business for themselves, didn’t they?” Seamus meant that Gerry and Liam, despite their big tales of dead soldiers and flattened city buildings, had only ever been enforcers for the Provisional IRA’s protection rackets. Their contribution to the new Ireland had consisted of beating up Catholic barmen, shopkeepers and taxi-drivers who were late with their weekly donation to the Provos. By far the largest part of the IRA’s activities was spent in running its protection rackets, just as the Protestant gunmen did in their parts of Ulster. “But Liam and Gerry weren’t content with looking after trade,” Seamus explained. “They decided to raid a couple of sub-post-offices in Ardoyne and Legoniel and they beat the shit out of a fellow who was married to Punchy O’Neill’s sister, so Punchy complained, of course, and Brendan turned their names in to the Brits, only they managed to reach the Free State before they were ever arrested, so naturally Brendan had to look after them. But they were never any good! All they did was collect the money. Jasus, Brendan’s not going to mind them going down the drain. He’ll probably thank you for switching them off, so he will! For God’s sake, Paulie, let me talk to him. Let me make it right.”

“Have a try,” I said, though only to make Seamus happy. There was going to be no deal over the money, none at all.

“What shall I say?” Seamus asked. “That you’ll bring the money in soon?”

“Sure,” I said, not meaning it at all.

“Five million, eh?” Seamus laughed. “And I remember when you and I couldn’t find a quid between us.”

“We were never that skint,” I said, “but they were good days.”

“Aye, they were. Better than these.”

“You don’t like it here?”

“Aye! I like it well enough. Boston’s OK.” He dropped his cigarette on to the floor and killed it with the toe of his boot. His skin was pock-marked, but that blemish had never stopped the girls chasing after him, though Seamus, who seemed to have ice-water in his veins when it came to guns or bombs, was rendered helplessly nervous by women. If Roisin were alone in our Belfast apartment Seamus would sit on the back stairs rather than try to talk to her without my help. It was not that he disliked women, just that he was simply terrified of their beauty and power. “Boston’s OK,” he said again with a wry tone. “Beantown. What kind of a focking name is that for a city? Beantown.”

“So what’s wrong with Beantown?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it. People are nice enough, so they are, but it isn’t like home, is it? The beer’s focking freezing, the summers are hotter than hell, and they’re always watching focking netball on the telly! Focking men’s netball! It’s a focking girls’ game, I tell them.”

“It’s called basketball,” I said, as if he didn’t know, “and it’s Boston’s religion.”

He laughed, then shook his head. “I miss Derry, Paulie. I really miss it. I mean I know it’s not much of a place, not worth a rat’s toss really, but I miss it.”

“I miss Belfast,” I said, and I did too. I loved that city. It was a dirty, ugly, battered city and I had never been happier than when I had lived there. The city’s first impression was dour; all bomb damage and hopeless dereliction, but the brick streets crackled with wit and were warmed by friendship.

Seamus grimaced. “I sometimes think that if they’d just let me go home for one short day I’d kiss a focking Apprentice Boy out of sheer gratitude.” He gave a brief and bitter laugh. “I told that to some fellow in here and he didn’t even know who the focking Apprentice Boys are! He’d not even heard of the Orangemen!”

“Don’t blame them,” I said. “They love Ireland, right enough, but they don’t want to know how complicated it is. You can’t blame them, Seamus, and their hearts are in the right place.”

But Seamus wasn’t listening to my explanations. “They had a fellow give a talk in here, what? Six months back? Something like that, and he said the focking Brits had built a focking gas chamber in Long Kesh, and that they were systematically murdering the whole Catholic population!” Seamus grimaced. “I mean, shit! I don’t like the focking Brits, but they haven’t got that bad. Not yet, anyway. I didn’t say anything, of course, what’s the focking point?”

“None.”

He laughed. “And your brother-in-law, eh? Getting slapped about in Ballymurphy! So the lads are still pulling that stunt, are they?” He shook his head happily. “What a prick Patrick is! I know he’s your family, Paulie, but what a prick!”

“I know. He’s a creep.”

“And family, that’s another thing! My da died last year and I couldn’t be with him. It isn’t right, a son not being at his father’s grave. And my mam’s not well. Something with her chest, her breathing, like. My brother wrote and told me, but what can I do?”

So there was a brother, and Kathleen Donovan had not lied to me, and I suddenly wondered what the hell use was five million bucks without someone to share it with? “Go back to Ireland,” I suggested to Seamus. “Your ma can cross into Donegal and see you there, can’t she?”

“She can, but the focking Garda will have me in Portlaoise Jail before you could spit. They want me for a wee job I did in Dundalk.” He grinned apologetically. I knew it would be no good asking what the wee job was, though it was almost certainly a bank raid. Seamus was a much wanted man, though nowhere was he wanted more avidly than in Northern Ireland where he had made his bloody and infamous escape from Long Kesh. The Provisionals had lost two men in the breakout, but they reckoned the propaganda value of Seamus’s freedom was well worth the price. But now, as an illegal immigrant in America and a wanted felon in Britain and Ireland, the battle for his political asylum was filling newspaper columns on both sides of the Atlantic. “They say I’m a focking symbol,” Seamus gloomily told me. “They say I’ll be Grand Marshal of their St. Patrick’s Day parade next year. They want to give me a medal of freedom on the State House steps. They’re even talking about making a focking film of me! Can you believe that? Some prick little actor in Hollywood says he wants to make a film of me! But I don’t want to be in a focking movie, Paul. I want to go home.”

“Go and see a plastic surgeon,” I suggested.

“I was thinking of doing that,” he said softly. “I tell you, with all the focking money they’re spending just keeping me out of jail I could have looked like Marilyn Monroe by now, tits and all.” He blushed for having dared say a rude word, and for a second I thought he was going to cross himself, then he just shook his head sorrowfully. “Shit, Paul, I just want to go home. I don’t want any more trouble. The younger lads can do some of the fighting now, eh? I’ve put a few quid away, so I have, and there’s a scrap of farmland near Dunnamanagh that would do me just grand. A few cattle, some arable, and a tight little house. That’ll do me right enough.” He paused, his eyes far away, then he lit a new cigarette. “I was thinking of Roisin the other day.” He had reddened with embarrassment, and I wondered just how badly she had humiliated him.

“I often think of her,” I admitted.

“I had a letter from her sister a few weeks back. It came to Chuck’s office, my lawyer, right?”

“Did you write back?”

He shook his head.

“What did the letter want?”

“She wanted to know what happened to Roisin, like. Christ, what was I to say?”

“The truth?” I suggested, though in my mouth the word tasted like ash.

“Who the fock knows if Roisin even had a sister?” Seamus asked me. “And Chuck said I shouldn’t write back, in case it was a set-up by the focking Brits. You know, to get information? So he chucked the letter away.”

“It’s just as well,” I said vaguely.

“And what was I supposed to tell the sister?” Seamus asked indignantly. “That Roisin was shot by the focking Arabs?”

“Right.”

“Focking maniacs, that’s what those Arabs are. Hanging’s too good for the fockers.” Seamus stared at the green cutout shamrocks that decorated the bar’s back-mirror. “She never did betray me, Paulie. No one did. The Brits said they had the information off her, but they never did. They were just making trouble, and I reckon their trouble worked for they got her a bullet, right?” He frowned. “And she was a rare girl. She had a tongue on her though, didn’t she just? Never heard a woman speak like it.” He suddenly froze, his eyes staring at the mirror which reflected the far side of the room. “Are those two boys after you, you think?”

Two men, both wearing plaid jackets buttoned tight up to their necks, had appeared at the far side of the hall. They were young, broad-chested, and convinced of their own toughness, and neither was trying to hide their interest in me. I suspected that Patrick had whistled them up in the hope that they could retrieve the money I’d just lifted from his pocket. “They’re looking for me, right enough,” I told Seamus.

“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 toward 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 neighborhood 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 and 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 license plates.

I cut right, going past the Mercedes toward the gap in the fence which would lead me toward East Broadway. There was a could 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 backward.

“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 toward 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 outward toward 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 forward 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 tenderized, 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 toward 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 backward, smack into the brick side wall of the neighboring 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 an 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’ favorite. 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 you 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 rumor 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.

I made myself some crude sandwiches, enlivened them with Sarah Sing Tennyson’s mustard, then, before eating and because the broken kitchen window was filling the house with bitterly cold air, I lit a fire with Sarah Sing Tennyson’s kindling and logs. I found some of my tenant’s cardboard and masking tape, which I used to make a crude repair to the window, and afterward used her coffee and grinder to make myself a pot of fresh-brewed that I carried with the sandwiches to my fireside.

Food had rarely tasted better. It was like the magic moment at the end of a sea watch, after a bitter trick at a frozen wheel in a stinging spray and a cold wind, when the worst of junk food thrown together in a pitching boat’s galley tastes like a banquet. It made me wonder why more five-star restaurants did not feature Spam and mustard sandwiches on their menus.

I also wondered what had happened to modern art for, as I ate, I stared in puzzlement at Sarah Sing Tennyson’s paintings. Two or three of the canvases were recognizably pictures of a lighthouse, and the rest were recognizably like the two or three that had some remote relationship to reality, but beyond that the canvases were a drab mess. She did not seem to brush the paint so much as trowel it on like rough plaster, yet clearly she was some kind of recognized artist for she had claimed to make a living from her painting. Her most puzzling effort was a splatter of purple and brown and white paint which, when I turned it round on its easel, bore a small and helpful label on its reverse: “Sunset, Nauset, October 1990.” If that was a sunset, I thought grimly, then the environment was in a worse state than the most fearful doomsayers suspected. I turned off the electric lights and carried the coffee to the big window.

The wind gusted at the black panes. Over its fretful noise I could just hear the roar of distant water where the ocean breakers tumbled on the outer face of the barrier beach. Closer, in the cold darkness, a thousand rivulets of salt water were creeping up from the bay, flooding the salt marshes and rippling the eel grass where the most succulent scallops grew. There were oysters out there too, and the best clams in the world, and mussels, and lobsters to make an appetite drool. And when a family tired of lobster there were cod cheeks or fresh swordfish steaks or bluefish or herrings, and in the old days it was a rare house that did not have a whole deer carcass hung up at winter’s beginning, and in the fall there were ducks and beach-plums and cranberries and wild blackberries. It was a good place to live. And to die, I remembered, and so, the sandwiches finished and the coffee drunk, I went back to my unearthed box.

I took out the Colt’s remaining magazines, then lifted out my second gun, my favorite, a semi-automatic M1 Carbine. It was a simple battle-ready rifle, also dating from the Second World War, yet it felt balanced and it fired beautifully.

I cleaned and loaded the M1 which, like the Colt, had been stolen in Boston for eventual delivery to the IRA. I had kept both guns back from their shipment, wanting them for myself, and now they would help protect Saddam Hussein’s gold. Thinking of the gold reminded me that in the morning I must find a public telephone to discover if Johnny had any news of Rebel Lady.

In the meantime I carried the two guns upstairs. Sarah Sing Tennyson had installed no electric lights on the second floor so I had to find a candle to light my way to the bedroom where I discovered my antique whaling harpoon back on the wall. The harpoon was a nasty piece of work; its rusting iron head was six feet long, wickedly barbed, and socketed on to a wooden pole handle that gave it another six feet of reach. I used the harpoon to brace the door in case an enemy tried to surprise me in the night, then I undressed, laid the guns close to hand, climbed under Sarah Sing Tennyson’s patchwork quilt, and slept.

I slept like the dead. I slept through the dawn and into the morning, I slept through the night’s rising tide and through the forenoon’s ebb and I did not wake till the seas were pushing in again to the marsh channels. A bright winter sunlight streaked the yellow panelled wall and lit the stripped-pine chest of drawers on which Sarah Sing Tennyson had placed two Staffordshire dogs. I could smell the ocean, and I could smell her scent on the sheets and pillowcases. It had been so long since I had smelt that in a bed, a woman’s smell, and I immediately, predictably, thought of Roisin.

There had been women enough since Roisin, but none like her. Sometimes I told myself that I had romanticized Roisin’s memory as a shield to protect myself from other entanglements, yet in truth I wanted entanglement. I wanted to be like Johnny. I wanted to wake to a house full of noise and children and dogs and muddle. I wanted a wife. I wanted what passed in this world for normality, and yet was such a rare privilege for it was only made possible by love.

I rolled over. Sarah Tennyson had hung four prints on the wall which divided the bedroom from the stairwell. They were old prints of faraway cities, all domes and spires and arches. Where had she bought them? With whom? And what men had come to my house and lain on these sheets and shaved in my bathroom and taken their evening drinks on to the deck to watch the shadows lengthen across the marsh? Had browbeaten William slept here and wakened to the sound of tidewaters creeping through the marsh? I smelt the woman-smell on the warm sheets and was jealous.

I turned on to my back. The bedroom dormer faced east toward the sea and once, when the bay’s tide had been unusually high, I had seen the water’s dappled ripples reflected by the rising sun on to this bedroom ceiling, though usually the high tides stayed a hundred yards off in the intricate channels beyond the deck. I had always dreamed of putting an old duck punt in the closest channel and, at the bay’s deep-water edge, where a secret tideway wriggled past Pochet Island, I had planned to moor a small cat-boat that a child could sail down past Sampson Island and Hog Island and Sipson Island and Strong Island and so to the new raw cut where the great Atlantic had ripped the barrier beach apart and clawed the houses off from Chatham’s foreshore. This was a place for kids to grow, for this was God’s adventure playground. It was a place where a child could play wild and yet feel safe. It was a place to romp with dogs along the tideline and to scratch for clams in the mud and to climb on fallen trees and to take a canoe across the bay to where the ocean beaches stretched empty. It was a place where God had so arranged matters that television reception was bad and a child could therefore grow without the worst corrosion of all.

Except I would raise no children here. I was forty, I had never been married, and Roisin, whom I had thought to bring here because she would love the bay and the beaches and the sea beyond, was dead. God, I thought, forty years old! In the trade of terror that made me an old old man. Most kids started in their teens and were burned out by their early twenties. They met girls who wanted babies, and mothers do not like their babies’ fathers to be serving life imprisonment in Northern Ireland’s Long Kesh or in Eire’s Portlaoise Jail, and so the milky new brides would nag their menfolk into giving up the gun. A few men, like Seamus Geoghegan, survived longer, but only because they had never been hen-pecked out of the business. I smiled, thinking of Seamus watching the Celts play netball.

There was a sudden noise above me. I froze, then slowly reached out with my right hand for the carbine. The noise was a scuttling sound, sudden and fitful, and I realized it was nothing but a squirrel come to the roof from its nest in the scrawny stand of pines that stood to the north of the house. I relaxed, resting the rifle’s stock on the patchwork quilt so that its muzzle faced the ceiling. I stared at the gun’s lean and efficient lines.

That was my fate, I guessed. Just as my brother had died in Vietnam, so I would die with a bullet in my guts, or in my heart, or exploding the blood vessels in my skull. I would die in a rage of adrenalin, snarling and shooting back at my enemies, but shot down like a dog all the same. But better to die of a bullet, I told myself, than to die alone and old and unloved. I had chosen my path, though now, smelling the smell of a woman in my bed, I doubted that the choice had been wise or even fair, for there would have been nothing drab about raising children in this good place.