Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

  “And no blacks voted for it?” John asked mischievously, sucking on his olive and giving me a wink. I was glad to see that he was making himself forget about yesterday in a haze of alcohol.

  “I’m sure some did, but it’s the goddamn Anglos. They’re all Fundamentalist Christian out here. Hate gays, hate non-Christians. They hate Catholics, Latins. Don’t believe me? Drive out on Federal sometime, ask those Mexican guys how they’re treated. While you’re at it, look at the cars, Jesus fish all over them or, occasionally, a Jesus fish eating a fish that says ‘Darwin,’ I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said ‘Warning. This car will become driverless in the event of the Rapture.’”

  Neither John nor I got what he was talking about, so Pat explained that Fundamentalist Christians believe they will all be spirited up to heaven during the Rapture, an event that will precede the Apocalypse and the Second Coming.

  Pat told us about the corruption of the Denver Fire and Police Departments, for which he blamed the white Masonic lodges. He then went off on John Elway and his series of car dealerships. He blamed the drought on the Coors people, and he even had it in for the Denver Zoo for reasons neither John nor I could fully understand. Paranoid and mad, but entertaining for a while. But we could see Pat wilt before us, he had limited energy, good enough for a few serious rants, but not a whole afternoon of it. Soon he had to lie down.

  “What do you make of that Pat guy?” John asked later in the apartment.

  “He’s all right,” I said.

  “What do you think his deal is?”

  “The they’re-out-to-get-me thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know, they are out to get him. They bloody fired him. He feels betrayed, and I think he’s gone a bit stir out here in a black neighborhood.”

  John nodded. The paper got delivered and the later edition of The Denver Post had the dismaying news that the Denver Police Department was watching bus terminals, the train station, and DIA in the hope of capturing the two assailants in yesterday’s apartment murder. Jack Wegener, a congressman from Colorado’s eighth congressional district, was quoted in the paper as saying that maybe now people would take seriously Pat Buchanan’s idea of building an electric fence on the Mexican border.

  We tried to nap for a bit, and later, when we heard Pat singing to himself, we went down the hall to pay him another visit and maybe use his phone.

  Pat made us two additional martinis and told us more about his favorite subjects; he hated the suburbs, SUVs, and Starbucks coffee. He said if he ever got money, he was going to open a chain of tea shops called Queequegs.

  “Pat, uh, about the phone …” I said.

  “Oh, yes, go ahead, take it in my bedroom for privacy.”

  Pat’s bedroom. Spartan, to say the least. A futon on the floor, one sheet, one pillow.

  The sun setting behind Lookout Mountain.

  The phone call that’ll change everything….

  I dial Ireland.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Facey,” I say.

  “Shit, Alex, is that you?” Facey says in a whisper.

  “It is.”

  “Alex, Jesus Christ, where are you? Still in America?”

  “I’m—” I begin.

  “No, don’t tell me,” Facey interrupts.

  “Ok,” I say, worried now.

  “Alex, listen to me very carefully, ok? Pay attention. I’ve been trying to reach you. I’m only a messenger. I’m only a messenger, don’t take it out on me. Ok?” he says, sounding scared.

  “Ok, Facey, just tell me,” I say.

  “Alex, I wrote it down, let me get the piece of paper, I’m going to destroy the paper once I tell you, can you believe it?”

  “Facey, just fucking tell me,” I yell at him, getting impatient now.

  “Alex, from channels, way above me, not me, I’ve been instructed to tell you, that if you come back to Northern Ireland, you will be, I don’t know how to say this, Alex, I’ll just say it, they say they’ll see to it that you’re killed. They say if you come back, they’ll kill you. They’ll kill you.”

  “Who will kill me?” I ask.

  “Alex, oh God, I don’t know, don’t ask me anything.”

  “Come on, Facey, I have to know everything.”

  Facey, gagging, unable to get the words out. I give him a few seconds.

  “Tell me, Facey,” I insist.

  “Oh, Jesus. I’m supposed to tell you to stay out of Northern Ireland and stay out of the UK and if they hear that you’re cooperating with the Samson Inquiry in any way, you a-and your dad will be in very serious trouble.”

  Facey goes quiet. I can hear him breathing. Someone in the police had passed the message down to Facey. Samson must be close to uncovering some heavy shit. They didn’t have to warn me. Obviously, they didn’t want to kill me, but they would if I showed up in Ulster again. Things must be getting serious. If I returned to Northern Ireland as planned on Friday, by Saturday night I would be facedown in a border ditch. They’d tip off a terrorist cell and get them to kill me. Tell the Prods I was a traitor, tell the IRA I was an important cop. Wouldn’t matter. Of course, it would cause a stink, but not much of one. It would be better for all concerned if I just stayed away.

  “Thanks, Facey,” I said.

  “Are you ok, Alex?” he asked.

  “I’m ok,” I said.

  “And you won’t come back, will you?” Facey said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Good,” Facey said, relieved. He had done his bit, he had secured his career and, maybe just as important, he had stopped his good pal Alexander getting bloody topped.

  * * *

  In a week our money had almost gone and the novelty of living in Denver had worn off. I really didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go back to Ireland, it wasn’t exactly safe staying here in Denver, and attempting to travel to another city might be the most dangerous thing of all with the cops still watching the bus stations, train stations, and airport. Could always rent a car and drive somewhere. But where? And what if our descriptions had been circulated to the car rental places? Stealing a car was out of the question. Easiest way to get caught. Best thing was to do nothing. Stay put. A lot of cops are lazy and their attention wanders. In another week they’d be thinking about something besides the Klimmer case. A week after, there would be many more pressing crimes to consider and a week after that, we could leave town wearing “We are Klimmer’s Murderers” T-shirts without attracting attention. Besides, we had a clean, rent-free, and safe place to stay, and scoring heroin was easily done with our dwindling bucks a mere fifteen-minute walk from the apartment.

  The boy who sold the ketch behind the Salvation Army place was a Costa Rican called Manuelito, nice kid, and he liked me because heroin was a minority taste in this town that was graduating toward crack, speed, crank, and other uppers.

  John could have gone home, if he’d wanted. But he chose to stay with me. Doing penance by hanging out with me in exile. I had finally told him everything. I had known John since childhood and to protect him and Dad and everyone, really, I’d kept mum about my resignation from the cops, but now he had to know. I couldn’t go back to Ulster, and he said he would stay with me, at least for a while.

  Pat was glad to have us, and when our dough began to run out, he told us about a man he knew who could make us a green card or a J-1 visa. We said thanks, but no, better not get caught doing anything illegal.

  Pat had good days and bad days. Sometimes he had energy and would clean the apartment and talk to us, other days he would lie in bed and we would minister to him water and very weak tea. Once we saw the old man who lived on four, but we never saw the nurse. Maybe she’d left and it had slipped Pat’s mind.

  All the time, though, we saw the Ethiopians. There were six of them. A father, mother, grandmother, two adult boys, and an eighteen-year-old girl. Only the youngest boy, Simon, and the girl, Areea, spoke any English. Simon and Areea both worked at Den
ver University as janitors and both were hoping to take classes there in the next quarter. The father and mother both cleaned offices in downtown Denver and the other brother worked in a restaurant. An interesting lot and they made spectacular food and we liked hanging out with them as much as possible. Even though they paid minimal rent, dough was tight and we didn’t like to inflict our presence too much. Still, the dad had character and Simon translated many stories about the corruption and general unpopularity of Haile Selassie, the crazy Jamaicans who somehow thought Selassie was the messiah, and a legend that the Ark of the Covenant was in a monastery in the Ethiopian highlands.

  Simon might have had the best English but the girl, Areea, found us the ad. Areea: slender, doe-eyed, straightened hair, tan complexion, pretty. The Ethiopians, improving their reading, took both The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News and when they were done Areea brought them up to us. I think she had a thing for John, which showed she was no judge of character.

  The ad was in The Denver Post.

  Red Rocks Community College seeks teaching assistants for its joint diploma in Irish and Celtic Studies. Teaching exp. a must, college teaching exp. preferred. Contact Mary Block, RRCC, 303-914-6000

  Areea thought this would be perfect, considering our Irishness and everything, but neither of us had teaching experience and although short of money this seemed just about impossible. John, though, had spotted something else.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, “Alex, look at this.”

  The ad two below Areea’s.

  Wanted: Young, enthusiastic activists, who care about the environment, no experience necessary, generous remuneration. Résumés to: Campaign for the American Wilderness, Suite 1306, 1 New Broadway, Denver, CO 80203.

  I gave the paper back to John and shook my head.

  “I don’t think so, Johnny boy,” I said.

  John took me by the arm and led me onto the balcony out of Areea’s earshot.

  “Alex, we just go see what it’s all about, we just show up, they don’t know us from Adam, they have no way of connecting us to Victoria or Klimmer. Klimmer was killed by two Hispanics, remember.”

  “First of all, fuck that, second of all, we don’t have a work permit,” I said.

  “Pat’s friend,” John said.

  “John, it’s asking for trouble,” I said.

  “Fuck it, Alex, it’s a bloody godsend, don’t you see, it’s why we were here, it’s almost a kind of message, we’re meant to work there, of all the ads Areea could have showed us, she showed us this one?”

  “She showed us the one above,” I said.

  “Alex, come on, don’t deny the significance of it.”

  “John, you’re crazy if you think I’m walking into the lion’s den, just because of some stupid ad,” I insisted.

  “Alex, it’s a job, we have no money for food, or, I might add, ketch. No one knows that we saw Klimmer, he said so himself. We wouldn’t be walking into the lion’s anything. The cops are looking for Hispanic guys in his death. There is no one to connect us to that at all. And once we’re back on the case, you could legitimately ask Mr. Patawasti for money again. Don’t you see, this is our way out.”

  “Your way out of guilt,” I said, and wished I hadn’t.

  “No, your way out of not starving and not going back to Ireland to a bullet in the brain. I’m going to see what it’s all about, you can come or not, up to you….”

  * * *

  I am seven feet away from Victoria Patawasti’s murderer. Here in this room. If Klimmer was right, one of those two men a mere three weeks ago took a .22-caliber revolver and shot Victoria in the head.

  Charles Mulholland, Robert Mulholland.

  But also sitting at the desk in front of me, Mrs. Amber Mulholland (Charles’s wife) and Steve West (vice president and personnel manager). The room: white carpet, nature scenes on the wall, a large plate-glass window that looked out on Barnes & Noble, McDonald’s, and the Rocky Mountains stretching fifty miles north and south in a huge panorama that took the breath away.

  And something else that took the breath away.

  Klimmer had been right about Amber Mulholland. You’d have to be crazy not to want to be with her.

  How could you focus on Charles or Robert, trying to figure which one was the killer, when she was there?

  Amber, tall, overwhelming, a blond, more than that, an iconic blond. A strikingly beautiful American woman of the type that I didn’t think they made anymore. Something old-fashioned about her. Sophisticated, clever. Hair falling in a cascade down her elegant back. A white blouse, pearl necklace, icy blue eyes, skin like porcelain, no, marble, no, vellum—soft, rich, extraordinary, in fact. Cheekbones like knife blades. Liz Taylor’s eyes. Audrey Hepburn’s neck. And no, again, forget comparisons. If the Führer had had his way all women would look like this. Radiant, regal, poised, strong.

  She didn’t look fake like Miss America. Miss America would be the girl doing Amber’s nails. She was the real deal. You couldn’t overwrite her. She had star quality. Grace Kelly rather than Madonna. Hitchcock rather than Chandler.

  Adroit, assured, and with the sort of sneering sangfroid that made you want to give her a three-picture deal, made you want to sell your family into a silver mine to spend the night with her. And something menacing about her too. This is the sort of woman who never had to lift a heavy box in her life. This is the sort of woman who could start a war between Greeks and Trojans.

  I learned later that she was about thirty years old, originally from Tennessee but, fortunately, she didn’t have a Southern accent. That would have been the clincher. If she’d said “Free the South from the Yankees,” you would have been out looking for guns and horses.

  And as Charles is talking and I’m standing there looking at her and not looking at her, two thoughts occur to me: she’s thin enough and beautiful enough to be a model or an actress or a person in her own right, not just Mrs. Amber Mulholland, and, second and more weirdly, she’s the inverse of Victoria Patawasti. In mathematics it is called the reciprocal. Victoria, bronzed and brown-eyed and heavy-lidded and dark-haired and beautiful. Amber, golden-haired and azure-eyed and pale-skinned and athletic and beautiful.

  And maybe there was a sexual motive, after all. Maybe Charles was having an affair with Amber’s dimensional opposite.

  Maybe.

  Maybe it was too much to be with her.

  You can only stare so long at the sun….

  But anyway, the here and now.

  The office, the mountains.

  Charles himself. Thirty-eight, tall, clean-shaven, handsome, cool, hair in a blond wave, breaking extravagantly to the left of a large intelligent face. Gray eyes with a slightly surprised expression on pale cheeks. Linen jacket, open-necked white shirt, fluttering hands, charming, just the type who could kill someone and be blasé about it in front of the missus or the cops.

  Robert Mulholland, the younger brother by five years, another blond. It’s like the Village of the bloody Damned in here. The same wave breaking on a barer beach, paradoxically, although younger, he’s losing his hair, but he’s still lean, handsome, pale, with glasses, taller even than his brother, more of a William Hurt look about him, black T-shirt, distracted, bored. Smarter? More cold-blooded? Fingers folded in front of him on the oak desk. Steady hand on a pistol grip.

  Both brothers nice, friendly, inviting. You didn’t need Hannah Arendt to talk about the banality of evil, experience has taught me that either of them could be the killer.

  I can’t help wishing I had John around.

  Is John here to support me? No, he’s not. John lied. For when he’d convinced me to go to CAW and made me see the sense of it, he said that it was better I go alone, too suspicious, the pair of us, two Micks, showing up.

  He was right, but even so.

  I had made it through the first stage, an interview with a man called Abe, and now this was the final process.

  The fourth person at the table, Steve West, a goateed, squ
at man, is doing most of the talking now. I don’t like him, he has his hat on indoors, and people like that can’t be trusted:

  “Well, uh, Mr. O’Neill,” he continues, looking at my J-1 visa (from Pat’s mate, a proficient little forger who mostly worked with the large Mexican and Central American communities but for only another hundred dollars rustled up an Irish passport), “Abe has passed you on to us, so you must be the sort we’re looking for, let me, uh, let me explain a little about the position. At this stage we’re looking for another dozen campaigners, to increase name recognition and membership of CAW. It’s important, especially now we’ve moved to Denver, that we increase membership. Membership is important for revenue and for political clout. The more members we have, the more influence we can muster and the more members we’ll get.”

  “I see,” I say. “And how many members do you have at the moment?”

  “Eight thousand five hundred, or thereabouts, five thousand of whom are in Colorado. I know, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club or Audubon, but we’re a very young organization and now we’ve relocated to Denver, we’re hoping to grow exponentially. We do have branches in Fort Collins and Colorado Springs, but also Sante Fe, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles,” Steve says.

  “How young an organization are you?” I ask.

  “Three years old, but it’s only really in the last six months that we’ve really begun to get things together. I’ve taken a leave of absence from my law firm and now that we’ve moved here to bigger offices, we’re hoping we can really grow,” Charles answers with a winning smile.

  “You’re from Ireland?” Mrs. Mulholland says, surprised, suddenly looking up from my entirely fictional CV. I have to not look at her to answer.

  “Yes,” I say.

  She passes the CV to Charles.

  “And you’re here on a J-1 visa?” she asks.

  “That’s right,” I say, “I’m going to be attending Red Rocks Community College for a year, doing their Celtic Studies diploma, and then I’m going back to the University of Ulster.”