The Bloomsday Dead

7: THE WANDERING ROCKS (BELFAST-JUNE 16, 4:00 P. M.)

The Lagan poised between tides. A break in the clouds. The sun at the very head of Belfast Lough. The daylight nearing its apogee. This is the only time of year and the only time of day that Belfast can take on a Mediterranean aspect, and then just for a moment. Waders on the muddy riverbank. Bees among the bankside flowers. Irises, wild roses, bluebells pushing up through dandelion and grass. Red dust from the Sahara falling on the apartment balconies. A turquoise cast to the sky-a deep blue that seems to make a noise like sighing. No one stirs. Birds. An egret preening itself on an ocher roof tile. Starlings on drooping telegraph wires. Seagulls following the customs boat. An entire duma of Arctic terns waiting in the glasslike trees for the tide to sink a little more.

And then a hazy disturbance over the water.

It’s ending now.

In a minute, gray clouds will rush in to fill the vacuum. The prevailing westerlies will banish that Saharan breeze and Belfast will become again the dour northern town of bricks, slate, and tarmacadam.

But let’s be Zen and appreciate the last few seconds of the golden light.

This is all new. There was no Lagan path when I lived here.

And it’s with some feeling of astonishment that I walk past the gleaming apartment buildings, condo complexes, and town houses.

Parapets, shutters, classical façades, in shades of coral and sunfaded white. Big windows that want to embrace the river and the city, rather than repel it. Someone made a fortune on the peace dividend around here. This used to be a scary towpath where street gangs would rule the day and the homeless would sleep at night. Filth, rusting shopping carts, and burned-out cars were the only ornaments for the choked water that was filled habitually with diesel and chemical pollutants.

But in the 1970s and ’80s terrorism and unemployment closed the shipyards and engineering works that ran along the river. The factories were gutted, the heavy machinery stripped and sent to Seoul. A decade of neglect and then the IRA cease-fire and the UDA cease-fire. The peace process. Millions from the United States and Europe for regeneration and suddenly this stretch of water must have seemed like a good investment. Clear out the factories, clean the river, make a nice Laganside path, build homes for yuppies.

And I quite like what they’ve done with it. Even when the sun is finally suffocated by a black cloud and it starts to drizzle. A different feeling here from old Belfast. The people who live in these apartments travel. They go places and they bring back tasteful souvenirs from the Algarve and Andalucía. Olive oil containers, spice racks, expensive wine. They know black people, they know gay people. They know who Yo-Yo Ma is. They think Vivaldi is vulgar and they are in love with

Easy to look down on people like that. But hopefully they’re the future. Eventually the tenements and back-to-backs will disappear. And along with them the parochialism, the subordination of women, the mistrust of outsiders, the hatred for the other side. It might take a hundred years and a civil war but if these people are the vector of things to come, the evil will wither away and Belfast will be like any other dull, wet northern European city. And if I for one live to see it, I won’t shed a fucking tear…

Game face on. I turned a bend in the river and saw the beginning of the long line of houseboats. Attractive converted barges that were tied up along the river. Some long and thin like coal boats, others squat, with an extra story on top. Most well maintained, decorated with flowers, all reasonably seaworthy. There were about two dozen of them moored behind one another stretching for about a quarter of a mile. They weren’t the famous teak houseboats of the Vale of Kashmir, but they weren’t the stinking old hulks that I was expecting.

I walked past a couple and stopped at the first one that had someone on deck. A young man wearing yellow shorts and a purple raincoat. He was patting a golden retriever and reading a book with the title Evolution: The Fossils Say No!

The breeze turned. I shivered and felt the cold on my stitches.

“Excuse me, I’m looking for the Ginger Bap,” I said, zipping my leather jacket over the Zeppelin T-shirt.

He looked up from the book. He had sleekit eyes and was practically a skinhead, but I figured he couldn’t be that bad because of his canine and sartorial choices.

At least that was my assumption until he said, “Why, what are they to you?” with more than a bit of hostility.

“They’re nothing to me, I was looking for them.”

“Didn’t catch your name.”

“Michael Forsythe. What’s your name, if you don’t mind me fucking asking,” I said with a wee tone in my voice.

“Donald… Did you say Constable Michael Forsythe?”

“No.”

“Are you not with the police?”

“No.”

He put down the book, his eyes closed, and he shook his head as if he didn’t quite believe me.

“Well, listen, to tell you the truth, I was thinking of calling the police, so I was,” he confided.

“Why was that?” I asked.

“There’s a smell coming from their boat, something awful, so it is.”

“Which one is it?”

“It’s the next one along. Down there, so it is, just right ahead of ya.”

I looked to where he was pointing. One of the larger boats. A highsided, flat-bottomed cabin cruiser that had been moored there for some time by the look of the slime on either side of the fenders. It was shipshape but there were bits of paper and leaves sticking against the safety rail.

“Robby noticed something was up first yesterday and then I twigged the smell this morning,” Donald said.

“I take it Robby’s your dog,” I said.

“Aye, he is,” he said, offering no more information.

“What happened that got Robby so upset?” I asked.

Donald’s natural Belfast reticence and his desire to get this off his chest conflicted inside him for a few seconds but eventually the latter won out.

“Well, it was pretty scary. Lying in me bed. I don’t know what time it was. Maybe three or four in the morning. Robby starts growling and I tell him to shut up, but he keeps carrying on and I get worried. So I look around the boat and go up on deck and check the ropes and have a wee shoofty about, so I do.”

“What ya see?” I asked.

“Nothing. Everything’s normal.”

“Ok, go on,” I said.

“Well, Robby’s whimpering now and I don’t know what’s going on, I comfort him and he goes back to sleep right. But it creeps me out and I don’t sleep too easy.”

“And then what?”

“Well, I got up yesterday and I went into the Tech and came back last night, everything seemed fine, except that Robby was a wee bit out of sorts the whole day, but he does that sometimes, didn’t really think too much about it. But by this morning first thing when I woke up I started smelling the stink, so I did.”

“From the Ginger Bap?”

“Aye.”

“Did you go over there?”

Donald’s eyes narrowed and he wiped his mouth. He wondered if he really should be talking this much to a perfect stranger. I smiled in the most friendly way I could. A smile that often has the unintentional side effect of scaring the bejesus out of people.

“Aye, I did go over. I said, ‘Barry, open up,’ but there was no answer.”

“Did you go on board?”

“No, I did not, it’s a strict rule around here, you don’t go on other people’s boats without permission. No way.”

“What did you do then?”

“Are you sure you’re not a peeler?” Donald asked suspiciously.

“I’m not a peeler, but I’m working for the peelers, so it would probably be in your best interests to answer my questions.”

“Look, I’m not causing trouble. I have never caused any trouble in my life, if you don’t count trouble at football matches and you’d be hard pressed to avoid a spot of bother at them Old Firm games cos they are-”

“Donald, please, what did you do next?” I interrupted.

“Nothing. I didn’t do anything. I just minded my own business,” he said.

“Ok, probably very wise. Now, do me a favor, Donald, tell me about Barry.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Does he live there alone?”

“Nah, he lives with his mate.”

“Who’s his mate?”

“I don’t know, student from Scotland or something. Barry’s an art student at Tech. Photography and shite like that. Other bloke’s in the same racket, I think. Almost everybody on these boats are students of some sort. I’m at the Tech myself. This is spillover accommodation. I don’t mind it.”

“So Barry must be at least sixteen if he’s at the Tech?” I asked.

“Barry? Probably near eighteen, thereabouts. You could say he looks a good bit younger, though.”

I nodded. It all seemed correct so far, but I had to be sure it was the right guy.

“What exactly does he look like?” I asked.

“I don’t know, average looking, I suppose.”

“What color was his hair?”

“What does his boat say?” Donald answered sarcastically. I looked at the Ginger Bap.

“Ginger hair. He’s a redhead,” I said.

“Aye, he has a ponytail.”

“Does he have a black sweatshirt with a bird on it?” I asked.

“Aye. Owls Football Team. Wee tiny owl. Black, dark blue, something like that.”

“You ever see Barry with a girl?”

“Oh, aye, them boys are a couple of jack the lads. Wee lasses in there left and right, so they are.”

“Did you see a girl going in there in the last couple of days?” I asked.

“The last couple of days? Well, for a start, I haven’t seen Barry at all for two days. But before that, I think I just seen him and the Jock. No wee girls.”

“Maybe you heard a girl’s voice or noticed anything unusual?”

“No girl and nothing unusual until yesterday morning,” he said.

“At around three in the morning, right?

“Right.”

“The two boys normally come back that late?”

“Nah, the bars close at twelve, so they’re there pretty sharpish after that, so they are.”

I nodded, touched the.38 in my jacket pocket. If what had happened was what I thought had happened, I wouldn’t be needing the gun but you never knew.

“Ok, Donald, thanks very much,” I said.

“Are you going over there?”

“Aye.”

“Do you think there’s something wrong?”

“Yeah, I do,” I said without emotion.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to sit tight and do nothing for the moment.”

“Do you think there’s been an accident or something? Maybe they left their gas on,” Donald suggested.

“Well, we’ll see.”

“I’ll go with you,” Donald offered.

“No.”

“It’s my neighborly and civic duty, so it is,” Donald said, annoying me now.

“No, you stay here. If you want to become a good citizen, you just go back to your novel and take it easy,” I said.

I walked quickly to the Ginger Bap.

When I got closer I saw that the vessel was listing slightly. Obviously you needed to pump the bilges every couple of days and obviously no one had worked the bilges for at least the last twenty-four hours.

And of course there was the smell. The unmistakable stench of death.

I suppose that’s what Deasey meant when he said the information wouldn’t do me any good. And Donald was probably right about the timing too. The bloody dog had heard something with its dog ears. Something it hadn’t liked. Whatever had occurred had taken place yesterday in the wee hours.

I stepped on the side of the deck. The boat rocked slightly. The plastic fenders squeaked against the quay. I leaned on the safety rail and pulled myself on board. I found the door to the main cabin. I turned the handle. Locked. I examined it closer; no, not locked, jammed. Whoever had done this had exited the boat and jammed the lock shut with a line of wire shoved between the bolt and the side. Either of the two boys would have had the key so it wasn’t them.

It was just a piece-of-shit wee bolt that gave after one kick from my Stanley boot. I pulled the hatch open.

The smell hit me. Putrefaction. Either someone was dead down below or a freezer full of meat was rotting. I gagged and stood back.

Donald’s dog started to bark.

“What’s going on?” Donald called over.

“Do you have a phone?” I shouted back.

“Aye.”

“You better call for an ambulance. Not the cops, not yet,” I said, and stepped inside. I held my T-shirt over my nose and took out the.38. There was plenty of light in the upper cabin and not a trace of disorder. Tidy cupboards, an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. A table with two half-full coffee cups on either side of it. The Belfast Telegraph from June 13 next to one cup and beside the other a magazine called Panties Panties Panties with a cover photo of a jaded Chinese woman wearing neither panties nor anything else.

Just then the boat groaned in the water. Instinctively I called out: “Is there anybody here?”

Of course there was no reply. I looked into the coffee cups. The boys had been up, drinking coffee to keep themselves awake. They’d been expecting someone. And that someone had arrived.

I held the T-shirt to my nose and pulled open the door that presumably led to the lower cabins. A ladder that went into the dark hole.

“Hello?” I tried again.

I stepped onto the ladder and kept the.38 in front of me. It wasn’t Bristol fashion but I was exarmy, not a navy ponce, so I descended the ladder facing forward with the gun out-just in case there were any surprises. A passing barge made the boat rock and the door closed behind me, leaving me in complete darkness. I wasn’t bloody having that. Whatever was down here I wanted to fucking see it. The curtains had been pulled over the rectangular portholes.

I stepped off the final rung, crossed the room, and tugged the curtains back.

Sunlight streamed in.

The cabin looked disturbed, but it hadn’t been ransacked. There had been no fight. The foldaway beds on either side of the central walkway were unmade and there were clothes on the floor. There were books and a clothesline pegged with black-and-white photographs. Crappy photographs of trees, mountains, small children, and bits of rubbish on the sidewalk. Also a galley, a CD player, and a set of CDs hanging on a stand.

The smell was even stronger down here.

Two doors.

One behind the stairs that led to the bilges and the engine; and a door at the end of the cabin that went to the heads and the rest of the boat. My hunch told me it was the forward door and as I approached I saw that there was a sticky residue leaking out underneath.

No, not leaking, it had leaked yesterday morning. Now it was just rotting.

“Aye,” I said sadly.

Carefully I pushed open the door with the.38.

Blood everywhere in a narrow corridor. On the wooden cabin floor, on the walls, even on the ceiling. I bent down and touched it, tasted it. Dry, brownish, and stale. At least a day old. A door to my left that was marked “WC.”

I eased it open.

This, presumably, was the Scottish student.

A good-looking blond-haired boy about twenty-one or twenty-two still wearing his pajamas. His hands were coarsely bound behind his back with a dressing-gown tie. He’d been shot twice in the head. The first bullet in the back of the neck had killed him. After he’d fallen dead into the shower unit, they’d shot him again right down on the top of his skull just to be sure. They’d done it with a nasty big-caliber weapon. If I hadn’t known for a fact that they’d used a silencer, I would have guessed a pump-action shotgun because the kid’s face was hanging off his head and his brains, blood, and bits of skull were everywhere over the tiny bathroom.

I nodded, walked back into the hall, put away the.38. No one was alive in here. They’d seen to that. Execution style.

The forward cabin.

A body wedged against the door. Carefully I nudged it ajar.

A broken mirror, bloody bedsheets, and a redheaded girl sprawled facedown on the floor with her throat cut.

“Oh, my God, Siobhan,” I said.

My legs weakened.

I bent down, gently turned her over.

It wasn’t her.

It was a boy. A slender youth with hippie-length red hair. His fore-head had been smashed in with a heavy object, a baseball bat or a hammer. They’d done this several times and then they’d cut his throat.

This was Barry, without a doubt.

I stood.

“Poor wee fuck, should have stuck to your photos and your small-time Mary Jane,” I said to myself.

I searched the rest of the forward cabin but there were no more bodies. And the guys who had done this wouldn’t have left any evidence.

I stepped over Barry’s corpse, avoided looking at the dead Scot, and did a scout of the central cabin. Finally I went to that back door and checked the bilges and the engine room.

She wasn’t here. No Siobhan.

Not even a trace of her.

I climbed the ladder and closed the cabin door. I opened the window and sat down at the boys’ table.

Barry’s job had been to win her confidence and get her out of the center of town. But he hadn’t been the one that had lifted her. I doubted that she’d ever even been here. He’d charmed her, won her over, walked her away from the bright lights and the cops and Bridget’s goons. Down some alley and then the real kidnappers had bundled her into a van.

They let Barry go home with his dough and then they’d come after him to make sure he kept his fucking mouth shut.

“Well, that’s that.”

I almost took a sip of two-day-old coffee to get the taste of blood out of my mouth.

I had to be a hundred-percent positive before I left…

I braved the stench and went back downstairs, doing a final and complete search just to be sure, but there were no smugglers’ bulk-heads or secret compartments or hidey-holes filled with kidnapped girls.

But she wasn’t here. She’d never been here. That wasn’t the plan.

Two bodies, buckets of blood, flies.

A complete dead end. No goddamn pun intended.

I sighed, climbed out onto the deck, took a deep breath.

“Fantastic,” I said, and to add to my joy, now the cops were coming. Four of them. Waddling along the Lagan path without a care in the world, chatting away.

Have to deal with those bastards and that will eat up a lot of precious time. That eejit called the peelers even after I told him.

“Shit,” I muttered and ducked back inside the boat. Maybe there was a way of avoiding them. Could I make it off the vessel without being seen? The peelers arrived at Donald’s boat. The dog began barking. Donald pointed at the Ginger Bap.

“Damn.”

No, there was no way out.

Not unless I jumped into the Lagan and swam for it and then they’d think I was involved and probably plug me.

Reluctantly, I climbed back out onto the deck and I waved at the cops to pedal their slow arses over here and get things bloody moving.

Four cops, one a woman. The lead with a big graying Zapata mustache. All of them in shirtsleeves, but only the lass wearing her bullet-proof vest. Nice-looking bit of stuff too, from this distance. Pert nose, cute figure, and blond hair almost hidden under her hat.

“Who are you?” the lead copper yells at me as if I’m a football hooligan messing about on the terraces.

I pick up a forget-me-not that has floated onto the deck. I sniff it.

“Get off that boat,” he shouts.

I do not reply. I don’t respond well to hectoring. Especially not from a bloody cop. Let the bastard come over and talk to me like a civilized person.

“Hey, did you fucking hear me there, pal?” Zapata tries again.

I hope he sees my ironic grin. I mean, I know two people have been murdered and it’s a pretty serious situation. But even so there’s no need for coarseness or incivility.

In my day the police had been called the Royal Ulster Constabulary and were a largely white male Protestant force. After the Patten Report their name had been changed first to the Northern Ireland Police Service, which had an unfortunate acronym, and then to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Supposedly, now they are less white, less male, less Prod, and more responsive to the public.

Old habits, however, clearly die hard.

I sit down on the deck and dangle my legs over the side.

I’d be smoking if I had a cigarette.

The lead cop decides to pretend I’m not there. That’s how his authority will survive my disobedience of his direct order. I see it as a small victory for the general public. Bloody cops. I lean my head back against the cabin behind me.

Blink.

And then there’s something I miss.

The stiffening of the air. A sudden tension. Violent thoughts leaking into the atmosphere.

For the last ten years I’ve been a wanted man. Hyperaware. Able to take in everything within my field of vision. Able to siphon out the chatter from the real data. Able to see what is relevant and what is not. Whether people are potential threats or harmless individuals going about their lives. Unlike Bridget, I haven’t had bodyguards, armored cars, lackeys. It has kept me cautious, suspicious, paranoid. It has kept me alive. I’m always looking for the assassin carrying the handgun under the bunch of flowers.

Bridget, however, has changed things.

She has given me an escape from that kind of thinking. Away from that life: if you find Siobhan the slate is wiped. You’re clean. Safe.

The killers will be withdrawn. You don’t have to sit next to the wall at the back of the bar. You don’t have to count the exits and memorize them. You don’t have to move house every single year. You can live like a normal man again.

An attractive proposition.

It would be nice to sit outside in a café, it would be nice to day-dream, to let people come and go.

And with these thoughts ebbing into my consciousness, it could be that my guard has fallen a little. The promise of that. That little chink of hope.

And perhaps that’s why I don’t see the van drive up an alley between the apartment complexes. Maybe that’s why I don’t notice the two men in ski masks getting slowly out.

The chugging of a river barge, birds, clouds, footsteps. Feedback through the police radios.

A midge lands on me and begins sucking my blood.

My mind preparing the talking points. I’m a private investigator working for Bridget Callaghan. I got a tip-off about a man called Barry who lived on a boat called the Ginger Bap. I came here to check him out, the lock on the cabin was already broken, so I went down and I found these bodies. I told Donnie over there to call you guys. Don’t worry, I’m a professional, I didn’t touch a thing.

Aye, that’ll do.

As they come closer, the air is so inert I can hear their entire tedious cop conversation. Zapata is talking about the decline of modern music.

“All just a beat and a backing track. No bloody talent needed for that. I remember when you could actually hear tunes and there were decent lyrics.”

“What are you going on about, there are A1 bands about these days, so there are. Fact is, you never listen to anything but the bloody Beatles. Love me bloody do, for Chrissake,” one of the other cops replies.

“Load of shite; tell ya, boy, I know more about it than you and your Downtown Radio country special. Garth Brooks and all that oul shite.”

The midge continues sucking my arm. Only the female of the biting species of midge eat blood. They need fats and protein to make eggs. Sperm is cheap. I let her get on with it. The cops are nearly over.

I stand.

“You were talking about rap a minute ago. Now what are you whittering on about? You should listen to modern stuff sometime, PJ Harvey or the White Stripes.”

“Same oul balls.”

“Gentlemen, please,” the woman says, mocking them.

“I used to be in a band, drummer in a three-piece,” the peeler who hasn’t spoken yet begins, but before anyone can say anything more, the rocket-propelled grenade aimed at me explodes ten feet short of the boat, right in front of the four cops.

Disastrous noise.

A clenched light-cone warning a second before the hail.

I literally hit the deck.

Talk, invective, all sucked away and burned in the air, like a record scraping off.

A civilian would perhaps have been killed by the explosion. The cops, even lulled as they are, still have a fast reaction-response time. The white flash of the blast gives them an instant to get down. An instant, it is hardly quantifiable. The time it takes for me in free fall to clatter to the wood. Three of the cops even get hands up to their faces before the shock wave rains debris and fire over their bodies and blows out four pairs of eardrums. The monstrous sound is metal twisting and advanced chemical morphology. An ammonia flare of Soviet-made fire, a smell like chaff igniting.

The shock wave rocks the boat and slides me across the deck right onto the port side.

The guy that fired the RPG on the embankment sees that he’s short and hurriedly begins to load another grenade. And now I notice him, when it’s too bloody late. And there’s a comrade next to him with some kind of heavy machine gun.

The grenade attached, the shooter gets down on one knee and aims at the boat, at me, not at the cops. So this isn’t an attack on the peelers by the IRA or a Republican faction, this a hit on yours truly.

The grenade launches, flies through the air in an instant, and hits the stern of the Ginger Bap.

A terrifying rip of noise and flame, the entire fiberglass rear of the boat exploding into pieces. This time I’m not quite so lucky. I’m thrown against the safety rail on the starboard side, the metal supports scouring into my back, the plastic rail gouging into my shoulder. I lie there stunned for a second and then I’m drenched in burning fiberglass.

I lose consciousness for a moment.

Blackness.

Pain.

Light.

Fingers. Arms. Pelvis. Stomach. Chest. Shoulder blades. Neck and head.

Motion? Yes.

A verb. Yes. A verb in my mouth.

Lips back. Tongue spit. Air migrating through my voice box. “Help.”

I try to sit up. I brush the burning embers off my body.

The peelers are hit too. Kevlar flak jackets kindling in the afternoon air. Hair and skin burning. Blood pouring out onto the swept street from unspecified multiple wounds. The blast echoing off the embankment like timpani fading diminuendo.

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” I mutter in disbelief. “What the-”

A crater where the rear hull of the boat had been and a rain of fragments.

I’m alive. Singed, but in one piece. The boat is sinking. The RPG man is preparing his third grenade.

Get overboard, Michael.

I try to move. Stuck. Pinned. Huge chunks of what looks like the cabin roof lying on my legs. I start pushing them off.

Look up.

The RPG man: still trying to load the grenade. The coppers: the first hit got them bad. It seems to me, though, that no one is actually dead. At least not yet. One of the boys has lost his shoe and by the looks of it a couple of toes. White-hot pieces of shrapnel embedded in the others-wound marks on their arms and legs. All of them yelling. Shouting into their radios. The young policewoman screaming about her shoulder. Something red sticking out of her uniform. Their words melded together in a patter of confusion. Crackled voices speaking back, telling them help is on the way.

The woman cop’s hat floats down among the smoldering flakes of metal confetti and lands burning on the deck, where other fragments have been dumped by the explosion.

In the split second between grenade launches and while I’m attempting to get the cabin roof off my legs I’m oddly fascinated by her. With her hat gone she looks like a person now. Her bob of yellow hair lying in a divot of rainwater, a scarlet trail oozing into the blond from a laceration on her scalp. She’s dazed and flailing, but now she’s doing the only sensible thing of the five of us.

She’s going for her gun.

What a damn fine idea.

I stop kicking the cabin roof and pull out the.38. I level it with a steady hand and take a shot at the grenade launcher.

He’s fifty yards off and it looks like I’m not even going to be close, but at least I won’t be alone. Blondie, with blood in her eyes and a hurt hand, somehow gets to a kneeling position and starts shooting her Glock 9mm semiautomatic.

“Die, you fuckers, die,” she screams.

She fires nine shots, I fire six, all of them missing.

We start to reload.

“Get here, right now,” Blondie barks into her radio, while slotting another clip into the Glock. One of the front peelers, with gray hair and nearest the boat, has clearly been flash-blinded, standing up, staggering in front of me with his hands over his eyes. I nearly shoot him by accident, but neither Blondie nor I have hit anything and now RPG man has got the third grenade in the bloody launcher.

I put him between the sights.

One round, two rounds, three rounds, six rounds. Every one a miss.

Flip chamber, punch ejector, reload out of the bag in my pocket.

Blondie has her 9mm ready. She holds it in both hands, patiently squeezes the trigger, and hits the van next to RPG man just as he fires the weapon. It makes him jump, the grenade arcs high into the air and drops harmlessly into the Lagan without even exploding.

The boat is tilting backward now, beginning to founder. We’re inclined thirty degrees off the vertical and the roof fragments start sliding off my legs by themselves. Help them with a kick and a shove.

Obviously that’s it for the grenades because RPG man turns to his mate and starts taking ammo from a box. His buddy is a skinny figure, but he must be strong because I see that what he’s holding is an old army-issue general-purpose machine gun. A GPMG or Jimpy, as we used to call ’em back in the service-an ugly belt-fed weapon that makes up in punch for what it loses in accuracy. Two-man operation. One shoots, the other feeds the belt. 7.62-millimeter slugs that’ll come at you at 550 rounds a minute.

These boys don’t have much experience with it because it takes them a long time to clear the breach. But then they do and when it gets going the Jimpy sings as bullets flow through the belt and spray over the embankment, the path, the river, and the boat. The shots random at first but gradually zeroing on the sinking Ginger Bap.

Shell casings pumping out of the gun and fast-moving rounds tearing up the tarmac.

“Shit.”

You’re supposed to fire it from a tripod but these guys have clearly seen too many ’Nam movies, where the old M60 got used in close-order action.

I stop reloading and lie down flat on the deck.

Jimpy rounds slicing into the Bap’s hull like a BB into butter.

Only way out, over the side.

I crawl backward for the safety rail and know that I’m not going to make it.

But I don’t need to. Blondie has her wits about her. She’s not fazed. One knee, balanced, two hands, aiming very carefully at the shooter. She fires off four shots, all four hitting the machine gunner in the chest, killing him instantly.

His partner yells something, picks up the Jimpy, and tries to fire it single-handed. No chance. He burns himself on the stock and in the afternoon murk I watch the tracer sailing harmlessly overhead like fireflies on the river.

A one-sided gun battle ensues.

The hood can’t work the machine gun and I’m shooting at him, Blondie’s shooting at him, and finally beside her Zapata pulls out an enormous Model 500 Smith amp; Wesson.50-caliber handgun. His bullets cross the dead ground toward the machine gunner in huge resounding whomps that would put the fear of God into anyone who wasn’t shooting back from an Apache helicopter.

A third cop joins the fray lying on his back firing with his left hand, his shots wild, but it’s all more than enough to draw the machine gunner’s attention away from me for good.

“Fucking pigs,” he screams and tries to lower the Jimpy sufficiently to get an angle on the peelers.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and even if he did, he can’t handle a gun like that by himself. In desperation he crouches low, balancing the gun on his knee, but the inevitable overheating happens, the weapon seizes and instantly bucks away from him.

He pulls out a revolver, shoots off a couple of slugs, drops the gun, runs for the van.

“Come back, you son of a bitch,” the policewoman yells, fires the last round in her clip and it bloody hits him, knocking him to the ground.

Good on ya, love.

“Cease fire,” Zapata yells.

And the silence is worse than the noise.

A dozen car alarms, ducks clacking, coppers moaning. Above us an army observation helicopter that has seen the whole thing. It’s unarmed, so it’s not as if they could have helped but even so, bastards.

I take it all in in a split second: The flash-blinded peeler sitting down, Blondie and Zapata looking for a tourniquet for their other colleague, way down the river a police Land Rover tearing along the Lagan path, and up on the embankment RPG man getting awkwardly to his feet and making a shambling run for it.

Time for me to go.

No point pissing about. The boat with a forty-five-degree list that was rapidly becoming a right angle. I crawled across the deck to the edge of the rail. The.38 slipped out of my hand and clattered down toward the cabin. Almost vertical now. Foolish to go after it. I’d be in for a dunking or worse. I climbed through the safety rail, sat on the edge of the Ginger Bap, and, like a big white rat, jumped off the sinking ship and landed on one of the fenders.

I pulled myself up onto the Lagan path, walked over to the coppers.

“Everybody ok?”

Zapata was sitting up. The woman standing. The others in agony, shrapnel making them feel like they were pincushions. I didn’t see anyone dying, though. I bent down to adjust the straps on my prosthesis.

“Who the fuck are you?” Zapata asked.

“I’m from America. FBI. Going after that guy,” I said.

“What guy?”

“The guy who fired the RPG is hit but he’s running,” I had to explain so they didn’t bloody shoot at me when I legged it.

That was all I had to say. Zapata nodded, bought it.

“Just for the record, I think they were trying to kill me, not you. You were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said and ran up the embankment after Mr. RPG.

I stopped for a quarter of a second at the place where they’d done the hit. The Jimpy was seething, the van was peppered with bullet holes and had two flat tires. A blood trail led down the alley. I was right, Blondie had hit him. A goddamn markswoman, that lass. She had killed the Jimpy guy and plugged this character, too.

In other circumstances, I would have gone back and proposed.

I followed the trail behind the first of the condo buildings, lost it on the pavement, and found it at a rusting yellow trash compactor where he’d paused for a second, leaning on it, getting a breather and revealing his position with his bloody paws.

He’d turned left and continued running along this street, which was parallel to the Lagan.

Worried me. If he kept going straight, eventually this road led out of these bankside condo developments and into a feeder road for the city. Once he was on that he could lose himself in the crowds.

He had a big lead, but he was hit bad and I was angry.

The blood drops closer now.

He was moving slower.

Two feet between drops.

Then one foot.

Then six inches.

I was near. I turned a corner. The trail led between two large apartment buildings and abruptly stopped.

Had he climbed into a getaway car? No way. They had come in that damn van and the van was still parked along the embankment.

I scanned the alley.

Concrete walls. No doors leading into the apartment buildings and no obvious hiding places like trash bins or a skip. I ran to the end of the street.

A field, a piece of waste ground, and one of the main roads.

Shit. I’d bloody lost him? It didn’t make sense. Who brings two getaway cars to a hit?

I searched the alley again.

The condo complexes on either side of the alley were identical three-story-high apartment buildings with balconies. No doors on the ground-floor flats, and the windows that I could see were closed.

People don’t just vanish.

Maybe he’d taken a moment, patched himself up, and run to the waste ground. I sprinted to the bottom of the alley again, but there appeared to be no one in that featureless cinder track. He could be hiding under a bunch of newspapers or garbage, but I didn’t think so. He was back here somewhere.

I examined the ground-floor apartment windows and saw that not only were they not open, but they didn’t open.

The only other possibility was that he might just have had the strength to climb up onto one of the second-floor balconies. I went to the nearest one and examined it closely. Nothing. The next one.

And what was that? A speck of red on the balcony rail. I smiled. Blood. Fresh blood.

With a heroic effort of will he had somehow climbed up there. Bullet wound or no bullet wound. I stepped back and surveyed the balcony. The door to the apartment was shut. I couldn’t tell if it was locked but I guessed it was. The lights were off and no one was home, and if you lived on the second floor it would probably be sensible to lock the balcony door.

My hunch was that he was still crouching up there, lying behind the concrete balcony walls, breathing hard, listening to me, hoping that eventually I would give it up as a bad job and piss off home.

“I’ll give you five seconds to stand up and then I’m throwing the hand grenade onto that balcony. Five, four, three, two-”

He stood.

He’d lost the ski mask. Bald guy, forties, gray face, gut. One of the old-timers. Reliable, he was rusty with the RPG, but it hadn’t been the first time he’d fired the weapon. I’m sure he’d knocked over quite a few Land Rovers in his time. His hair was singed from the back flare on the weapon and his denim jacket at the shoulder was ripped open. I faked holding the grenade in my hand.

“Get those hands up,” I said.

He put his hands over his head.

“Get down from there,” I ordered.

“I can’t get down, I’m hurt,” he whined.

“All right, I’ve had enough of you, try to kill me, would ya. I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

“Wait, wait, wait.”

Gingerly, he tested his weight on the balcony rail. He leaned his stomach on the edge, toppled over, and dropped to the ground. I saw now that the woman peeler had hit him on the buttocks or lower back. It was, in fact, only a glancing wound, but still, he’d been a moving target, a good hundred feet away, got to give her credit.

And yeah, he’d really messed up his shoulder from firing the rocket-propelled grenade. Torn jacket, lot of blood.

He tried to stand, so I belted him on the side of the face. He skidded into a wall and fell down sideways into a gutter. An empty revolver tumbled out of his inside jacket pocket. As luck would have it, a.38. See, that’s why you get a PC over a Mac. They’re shitty, but the bastards are everywhere.

I picked up the revolver, checked the chamber-seemed clean enough. I pulled six rounds out of my pocket and loaded the gun. I waggled it at him.

“Ok, now we talk,” I said.

Two stories up a man opened a window in one of the yuppie flats and looked out.

“What the bloody hell is going on down there?” he shouted in a Scottish accent.

“He’s trying to kill me,” the RPG man said.

“You say another word and you’re a dead man,” I muttered sotto voce and then to the yuppie: “Michael Forsythe, CID, this man has just attacked four police officers, I’m arresting him.”

“Perhaps I could see your identification?” the canny Scot demanded.

I pointed the gun at him.

“Get the fuck back in your fucking flat before I arrest you for obstruction of justice. If you’re nervous, mate, call the bloody cops,” I shouted back. He ducked his head inside and closed the window.

I turned the gun on RPG again.

“Ok, you, on your knees, hands behind your head. One move and it’s tea and crumpets with Beelzebub.”

He knelt. I did a quick pat down. I took the wallet from his back pocket. Five hundred quid and a driving license that said he was called Jimmy Walker. I kept the money and put the wallet back in his pocket.

I squatted down next to Jimmy, smiled at him, and smacked him in the ear with the butt of my revolver. He hit the ground.

“God,” he screamed.

“Who do you work for?” I demanded.

He kept his trap shut. I kicked him in the wound on his arse.

“Jesus Christ,” he gasped.

“Who do you work for?” I asked again.

“I work for Body O’Neill.”

“Who’s that?”

“Bloody hell, where are you from?”

“Who is it?”

“Commander Belfast Brigade IRA,” Jimmy said.

“You weren’t going for the cops, were you? It was me, wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was you,” he said.

“Why me? Why the hit? What did I ever do to Body O’Neill?”

“I don’t know. I do what I’m told.”

“What did O’Neill say I’d done?”

“I don’t fucking know. We were told to hit you, that’s all.”

“Why an RPG, bit excessive, no?”

“O’Neill said you were hard to fucking kill, he said you were slippery. He told us that we had to use overwhelming force. Sammy said you were the guy who had killed Darkey White years ago and had survived a couple of hits. He said we should fire a bloody antitank rocket at ya. See you survive that. Then we got the idea of the RPG.”

“Who’s Sammy?”

“My partner.”

“On the Jimpy?”

“Aye, is he-”

“The woman cop killed him. When did you get the order to hit me? Last night?”

“Are you joking? Like forty-five minutes ago,” he said, surprised.

“What did they tell you?”

“They said you were going to be at this boat called the Ginger Bap, one of the Lagan boats. Said we had to do it right now.”

“And Sammy and you had access to an RPG?”

“Yeah, Sammy and me learned how to fire one years back in Libya. We set it up when we saw you on the boat, but we nearly called it off because of the cops.”

“Aye. Cops’ll think you tried to hit them, won’t they? You may have jeopardized the entire fucking cease-fire. Well done.”

“We weren’t breaking the cease-fire, we were just trying to top you, you bastard,” he said defensively.

I sighed, shook my head. I would have liked to have killed him but as a public service I was going to have to let him live. If I shot the fucker then the peelers and the army and the British government might think this attack on four police officers represented a serious breach of the Republican cease-fire. It might mean a redeployment of the army on the streets and a rearrest of remand prisoners. That in turn might lead to a spiral of retaliatory violence. The Loyalists would probably respond with their own assault on a Catholic bar or something, a retaliation for that would be forthcoming, and who the hell knows, it might mean the start of a summer of slaughter.

So, as a good deed for my fellowmen I couldn’t kill this character. I had to let him live and tell the cops that no, he wasn’t aiming an RPG at them, but in fact was after a man called Michael Forsythe.

“One last time, you have no idea why me?” I asked.

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“They didn’t give you a fucking reason?”

“We didn’t have the time for that. They said that this was a time-imperative op and we had to get cracking. They knew you were going to the boat, but didn’t know where you’d go after. Had to hit you there.”

“Ok. I suppose I’ll have to talk to your boss. Where’s he?”

“I’m not going to tell you that.”

“No?”

“No.”

I stood, reloaded the.38, put my Stanley boot on his left hand, took very careful aim, and shot his thumb off.

He screamed, rolled on the ground, and tried to crawl away from me. I kicked him in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. I picked up the bloody thumb and knelt beside him.

“Now listen here, mate. Give you a choice. I’ll put this here thumb in your pocket and maybe the surgeons at the Royal can sew it back on. Maybe not, but at least you’ll have a chance. Otherwise I’m going to shoot your other thumb off and I’ll take both with me. How does that sound?”

“You fucker, you fucking fucker,” he managed between gasps of pain.

“Hey, maybe I’ll shoot your balls off too, what do you think?” I said breezily.

“What do you want?”

“Well, let’s take it slow. Sure O’Neill ordered the hit?”

“Yes.”

“And where would I find him right now?”

“Right now, he’ll be in the Linen Hall Library,” he said.

“You’re kidding me?”

“Linen Hall, I swear it’s true. He goes there from two to five every single weekday like clockwork. Upstairs in the reading room. He’s writing a book. I think it’s his reflections or something.”

“Better not be yanking me, Jimmy.”

“I’m not, I swear to God,” Jimmy said.

It was an unlikely place to find a commander of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA, but it was an unlikely place to make up out of the blue. I believed him.

I threw the thumb down beside him and as a further public service- to prevent him running away before the cops showed up-I clobbered him on the head.

I ran between the buildings until I came to the main road.

I wasn’t entirely sure of my bearings, but then I saw the gleaming dome of the city hall. The Linen Hall Library wasn’t too far from that, I seemed to remember.

“Onward and upward,” I said and jogged toward the center of town.

I didn’t know what I’d done to annoy Body O’Neill, to make him send assassins to Dublin to get me, to make him risk the cease-fire, but I was going to find out. I had a job to do and I didn’t have time for subplots.