The street they stepped out of the Mercedes into was gritty with filth. The bar’s neon light flashed bravely through thick dribbling stains of industrial grime. “Flamingo” it said, and its pastel pink light bathed the squalor of the street in delicate irony. The opposite footpath was an obstacle course of battered steel bins overflowing with at least a week’s fetid garbage. The pavement was cracked and splashed with ugly oil patches, the worst outside each of the scratched and rusting steel doors that stood in the walls stretching as far up and down the street as Hawker could see in the dimness. There were no streetlights and no other neon signs to challenge the pale glow of the Flamingo. Like cheap scent on an ugly old whore.
The buildings on both sides were low, like warehouses. There were few signs to indicate what kind of enterprise went on inside. There were even fewer signs of life anywhere, apart from rats around the bins.
No more than half a dozen vehicles were parked there, scattered among the bins wherever their drivers had found space to nose in. There was a battered old Mercedes, a Volkswagen or two, a handful of mud-splattered four wheel drive vehicles and incredibly, incongruously, a sparkling new BMW RS100 touring bike.
The jagged edges of several broken bottles glinted dangerously in the gutter outside the Flamingo as Hawker and Grivas followed Gaffney to the door, leaving their chauffeur to light a fresh cigarette as he resumed his lounging pose against the car.
‘Quiet,’ Gaffney said with a pleased smile blurring across his face. ‘No bastard sticking his nose in a man’s business here.’
The front door’s one good hinge protested loudly at the effort of allowing them into the warm, soggy atmosphere of the bar. The air was damp with stale alcohol. Thick blue clouds of tobacco smoke hung heavy under feeble lights in chipped plastic shades. The brightest light in the room was the one immediately inside the door, which said a lot about the cunning of the bar owner and the clientele he attracted. A newcomer was at once clearly recognisable to everyone in the place at the same time as being momentarily blinded against seeing them.
Hawker stepped instinctively to the side, out of the full glare, and focussed on the dark shapes materialising out of the gloom. Only one table had four shapes around it and Gaffney headed straight for it without hesitation.
Hawker and Grivas followed in line astern formation, weaving an erratic path through a jumble of tables and tattered chairs. In the dimness and haze the occupants of their target table were still not much more than an assemblage of shapes as they approached, and Gaffney kicked off on a droning litany of an introduction.
‘Hawker, Grivas,’ he announced, pointing to each with his thumb, and then with lazy forefinger jabs, ‘Kreuzer, Sullivan, O’Hara …’
But before he had worked his way around the table Hawker was already staring in shock, his eyes as wide as if the face smiling up at him had come back from the dead.
‘… Kelly.’ Gaffney finished.
‘Rourke,’ Hawker countered. ‘Linda Rourke.’
‘It’s been a long time, Paul,’ she said, holding the same open smile. ‘Long enough for folks to change quite a lot. Like getting married.’
‘You know each other?’ Gaffney’s surprise was as real as Hawker’s.
‘Knew each other,’ she corrected. ‘Intimately.’
Saturday 8 May 1982
The evening had passed into morning long ago and they were still in the Flamingo Bar.
‘Rourke? You mean of the Rourkes in North America? Boston, banking, mining and God knows what else?’ said Grivas.
‘Bullseye,’ Hawker replied. They had slipped into Spanish against the raucous English that filled the rest of the table. Gaffney was leading the others in a drunken chorus of bawdy songs. Linda Kelly had gone to the “bathroom” as she called it in her lyrical north east coast twang.
‘Her family think she’s dead, lost at sea, and I still find it hard to believe that she’s the Linda Rourke I knew. But it’s her alright,’ said Hawker.
He had spent most of the night catching up on the 13 year gap since he had last seen Linda. They had been in love then. Head over heels in the kind of ecstatic physical love that is the exclusive preserve of the young.
‘We met on board her father’s yacht during the SORC in ’67,’ Hawker told Grivas.
He was working that northern summer as a winch grinder on the yachts of rich Americans. Catching a ride in whichever boat needed a crew, he was following the Southern Ocean Racing Conference along the warm south eastern coast of the United States, when chance put him aboard Dennis Rourke’s famous racing ketch, the Shamrock.
Linda was also crewing for her father, the tomboy on vacation from college. Hawker’s first impressions of her were of gameness quite out of proportion with her size. Not that she was tiny. Wearing nothing but a faded pair of denim shorts and a sloppy T shirt that clung to her breasts when it was damp with the spray, she was easily the most attractive woman he had ever seen – a revelation for a young man who had grown up with refined señoritas and prim English schoolgirls.
On the boat she just looked so much smaller against the team of gorillas her father needed to work all the ropes. She had long coppery hair which she wore at sea tucked up into a Greek fisherman’s cap. Her face was dusted with freckles and blessed with a pair of dazzling green eyes that flashed and sparkled when she was enjoying herself. Which seemed to be all the time.
Hawker could remember her pluck when she volunteered to go up in the bosun’s chair after a broken halyard in Force 8 winds and wild seas. She convinced her father she should go because she was the lightest and would be the least strain on the already stressed gear, and she went up the pitching mainmast without a second’s hesitation.
That was during Hawker’s first race aboard Shamrock. He was stationed at the mast to help Linda back on deck and he caught her from falling when the winch slipped with her still six feet up. She impulsively threw her arms around him and electrified his spine with a kiss. It was a wet tangy kiss, flavoured with the salt spray of the Atlantic, and she gave it out of pure joie de vivre. He kissed her back, lips lingering close for a beat, then put her down gently before they both fell to the heaving wet deck.
Hawker had no idea how the instant attraction happened but there was no denying it. They made love for the first time the following night, in harbour, among folds of cloth stiff with salt in the sail locker, while the rest of the crew were carousing ashore.
They made love in the sail locker many times that summer, and on the soft sand of Florida beaches, and once in a rubber dinghy drifting under moonlight through the Keys.
Linda persuaded her father to keep Hawker on the Shamrock. She had a fiery relationship with the crusty old man that the rest of the crew all recognised and kept themselves well away from. At times she would hug him passionately or cuddle up to him like a little girl, stroking the ginger and grey stubble of his sea beard. At other times she would rage with rebellion, cowing one of the most powerful businessmen in the world with threats and curses. And, Hawker noticed, getting her way more often than not.
When the last of the season’s races was over Hawker had to return to his naval posting. Linda clung to him tearfully at the airport, her mane of coppery red hair worn down, so it stuck to her face in the tracks of her tears. He gently smoothed the strands of hair away from her cheeks and held her face close to his.
‘Promise you’ll write,’ she whispered. ‘Because I will.’
They wrote for a year. Over the New Year in the middle of it, Hawker got a week’s leave and flew on an impulse to Boston. He was broke when he arrived. She picked him up from the airport in a bright red Mustang hardtop and they went to the historic apartment near campus that her father had given her. They made hurried, urgent love by the fire, snow flurrying against the big bay windowpanes, with his bag where he dropped it inside the front door.
They hardly strayed from the warmth of that apartment for the five days they had together there. It was a cosy, wonderful time of disco
vering each other’s bodies all over again, and discovering new heights of pleasure without having to grab at moments of privacy as they had done all through the summer.
On the second day, though, there was a little incident which if they had both been more mature, or smarter, they would have recognised as a signal of the disaster to come.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked idly, noticing for the first time the black and white poster of a man’s head on the wall. It was hung in pride of place over a side table where Indian incense sticks burned in psychedelic coloured vases. The man had the intense features of a Latin American. He was shown with his chin held high and his eyes fixed with a burning passion on some high, far distant goal. He wore a jungle fatigue shirt and a dark beret, Spanish style.
‘You mean you really don’t know?’ she said.
‘Should I?’
‘Unless Argentina is totally cut off from the civilised world and the march of history yes you should. In fact, you should know him better than I do because he came from your country.’
‘Then I should know him, but I don’t. Who is he?’
‘Che Guevara.’
‘The rebel from Cuba. Castro’s attack dog. They just got him, didn’t they? Trying to force his ideas of society onto the mainland. But what does he mean to you here in Boston?’
‘He’s a hero to a whole generation. A martyr. He had the kind of guts to stand up against oppressive authority that I hope we can all have when the time comes.’ And she carried on into a heated monologue about the evils of unfettered power and the student movement, none of which he heard because he was concentrating on unfastening the font of her kaftan, letting the coarse cloth fall forward to reveal the soft white swell of her breasts. He fondled them gently, feeling her nipples harden under his fingertips until she pulled him back down to the bed and her hard political words dissolved into soft animal moans.
They said nothing more about Che for the rest of their time together that New Year of 1969, but neither knew it was to be their last time like this.
The crisis point came when he returned for the ocean racing season the next summer. He was to crew on Shamrock again and Linda was to come down from college the night before the first race.
She phoned him at the yacht club to tell him why she wasn’t coming.
‘Don’t tell my father, for Christ’s sake,’ she burbled with excitement over the long distance wires, ‘but I just can’t miss this. It will be the biggest protest movement the campus has ever seen. The first real protest! Just think of the effect that will have, when conservative old colleges like mine show our solidarity with the movement. They’ll see it’s not just a bunch of isolated radicals in Kent State they’re dealing with.’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ he growled back. ‘It’s none of my business I know, but if you want my opinion you should put your energy behind your country in this war, not against it.’
‘You’re right that it’s none of your business. How could I expect you to understand the complexities of the Vietnam situation?’
‘I understand that some poor bastard is dying for you, maybe even right now over there. Dying for you.’
‘Dying for fucking nothing! But what the hell other attitude could I expect from you? You’re military,’ she spat it out as an insult and it stung, even over a thousand kilometres of phone line. Then the line went dead.
That was the end of it. He stayed for several races, she never turned up for any. He wrote and got no reply. He went home early to his country and his career.
In time he forgot about Linda Rourke. Until now, 13 years later, in a pink bar named Flamingo, in a grimy back street in Montevideo.
‘After the Vietnam thing,’ she told him as soon as Gaffney gave them the chance to escape into a private moment together at the crowded table, ‘I was disillusioned with the US. I hated my family and everything they stood for. You know, they tried to buy me out of jail at one time?
‘I dropped out completely. Quit college, worked at a radical newspaper for a while, but wherever I went in the States I was haunted by my name. Rourke. The rich kid. A curiosity to my radical comrades as much as I was to the society I wanted away from. I guess they were the ones, the radicals, who finally drove me away. Not that they refused to accept me – they took my money readily enough – but it took me a few years to realise that while they were pretty good at pointing out the problems, all those beards and beads didn’t make them any hotter than everyone else at coming up with the answers.
‘I got into drugs, par for the course. Rock bottom was in the Fall of 1971. That’s when I decided to get out from under it. I went to Europe without any particular thoughts or plans. The streets seemed to be full of American kids like me.
‘I eventually drifted to Ireland. There was no bullshit about searching for my roots about it. I was just running away from the brand of American rebellion that seemed to follow me everywhere – Paris, Amsterdam, London, they were always there.
‘Anyhow, there I was in Dublin, discovering I did have a heritage, that my name meant a lot more than big bucks and black limos, when I met Tim Kelly.’
Her eyes glazed and Hawker could see the trace of a tear run down her cheek. The freckles were still there, though her skin was starting to show the strain of years of hard living. Her hair was shorter now, the same coppery red he remembered. Her lips were still full and inviting. Her figure, revealed nicely by the tailored jump suit she wore, was still trim and slim. The fresh spunky girl he’d fallen in love with had matured to an extremely attractive woman.
‘There was a pub I used to go to,’ she continued. ‘Very Irish, very boisterous. The boys who drank there talked revolution with real fire in their eyes. Tim was one of their leaders. The best advertisement for the Blarney Stone ever produced by Ireland.
‘I fell in love, Paul, and believe me it’s true, for only the second time in my life. It’s strange. Tim was the complete opposite to you. He wasn’t physical at all. He was a poet. A romantic. He filled me with the history of Ireland. He was a preacher obsessed with unifying the country and I was a willing student.
‘One day he came in and announced he was through with talking – he worked for Sinn Fein at the time – he was going into action. He joined the IRA. I followed, of course. That’s when we went underground, and I officially disappeared.
‘The IRA organised it. A sailing accident in the Irish Sea. Linda Rourke of the famous American family missing believed drowned. No body, of course, but my family bought it right down the line. I saw my own memorial service on TV. That was tough. I could see how hard it knocked my parents. That’s when I discovered I still loved them despite the gulf I’d worked so hard to dig between us. But there was no going back. I became Linda Kelly.
‘We couldn’t be properly married, except for the documents the IRA faked for me. Tim insisted on a church service no matter what, so we had one with a rebel priest in County Armagh. Then we went underground,’ she paused to take a long breath, ‘until death do us part.’
‘Is that how you came to pitch up in Uruguay?’ asked Hawker.
She swallowed a large mouthful of whiskey. ‘Tim was a fool. A romantic fool. He volunteered for jobs that were physically beyond him. Not physical fighting. I mean he was useless mechanically. He wrote his poems and polemics long hand because he couldn’t change the ribbon on a typewriter, yet there he was setting bombs. Blew himself up one night in London.
‘The organisation was good to me. I was, like, insane with it when they told me. Maybe I could have been dangerous. Pat Gaffney was on the run, he was involved with Tim’s job, so they bundled me up with him. We hit this place together and we’ve worked it together ever since. Very successfully, I might add.’
Hawker stared at her hard. ‘’Political conviction is one thing. Though I may not agree with you I can accept that. But dealing hard drugs?’
She flared. ‘My husband died for the cause we believed in. The money I make for that same cause here makes sure he did
n’t die in vain. Do you think I give a damn where that money comes from?’
She took another gulp of whiskey. It seemed to calm her.
‘You’re right,’ she said after a long pause. ‘It’s not something I’m particularly proud of. When I heard you were coming to use us for a different job, I thought that it was a subject that could be kept in the background. You’re still pretty straight, hey, Paul. How did you figure it out?’
‘Gaffney told me,’ he said simply. ‘What did he tell you about me and the job I had for you?’
‘Not much. It’s out of our usual line of business. It involves a short sea voyage and you need people who know their way around boats. And it’s vital to our organisation. I guessed that he was saying your outfit was offering a shitload of payment.’
‘He told you nothing more?’
She shook her head. ‘None of us wants to know any more. In this game you learn pretty quick that it’s safer to know too little than too much and I’ll give you a relevant for instance.’ She dropped her voice to an even lower murmur. ‘Apart from Gaffney no one else here knows about my … other life. Just him and a handful higher up in Ireland.’
‘Did Gaffney tell you who I’m working for?’ Hawker pressed further.
‘No. But if you want me to guess it’s not a drug deal. You’re too straight for that. So, it’s probably political. No skin off my nose. Although I do wonder, how did you run into Patrick Gaffney?’
‘Like you say, it’s safer not to know.’ Hawker noticed Grivas, sitting on the other side of Linda Kelly, half turn from his end of a conversation with Gaffney and John Sullivan, one of the other four names they were now putting faces to.
Grivas turned back to his three-way discussion. Hawker noted that he had made a point of talking with each of the group. As soon as Linda had returned from the toilet, he had abandoned Hawker and worked his way into a serious amount of talking with Sullivan. He was obviously making his own individual assessments, as if he were the one with responsibility for choosing the crew for this mission. It was equally obvious that he was doing it under Anaya’s orders. ‘Which shows how much that braided bastard trusts me,’ thought Hawker.
Prince Hunter Page 9
