“Why wouldn’t I be sure?”
Matt was silent for a bit. “You haven’t had a chance to—”
“To say good-bye to Max? I can’t say I won’t always wonder what happened to him, but I don’t need to close one book to start reading another. Life is like that. No neat answers. We just go on. Besides, if Max is out there to be found, Molina will find him. Some way, someday.”
Matt laughed in his turn. “There’s a match made in hell.”
He turned Temple to face him, pulled her close again. “So if we make a couple trips north first, then have a pre-wedding at the Lovers’ Knot at some point, when do we schedule the formal wedding?”
“When my miserable, messed-up hair has all grown out in its natural color again. I am not going to walk down any church aisle with a dye job on my hair instead of my shoes.”
Matt was laughing when he kissed her, and then they were too busy again to laugh.
One of the cats outside wailed like a banshee in the dark. Temple hoped it wasn’t Irish. Or Midnight Louie, registering his opinion of their plans. He was sure to have them, and make them very well known. In his own good time.
Chapter 64
You’ll Take Me Home Again,
Kathleen
The man was portly and in his fading sixties, with still a certain flair to his expression and his voice, but moving deliberately, and perhaps heavily, as though burdened.
He lowered himself onto the leather-upholstered chair before the desk and sighed unconsciously at taking the load of himself off his burdened feet.
All in all, he was the kind of man easily overlooked in a crowd: travel-wrinkled suit, more bags under his eyes than he probably had brought across the Atlantic with him.
He offered his passport over the desk to the younger, nattier man who sat behind it. Draped windows framed a misty day and the smoke-blackened walls of stately buildings from the last two centuries.
A teapot whistled faintly from an office kitchen a decent distance away. The sound was both shrill and alarming, and somehow comforting.
In the British Isles, tea was the soothing social drug of choice.
John Kelly took the passport. He was an assistant to the undersecretary to the U.S. Consul-General in Northern Ireland, and the stately buildings outside the windows of Danesfort House were in Belfast.
“You look as if you could use a spot of tea, sir,” he suggested to the visitor.
“I’ve just hopped the Atlantic. A bit confining for a lot of time for a man of my age and heft.”
“You should have decompressed in a hotel room.”
“Despite my condition, I’m eager to get on with this . . . task.”
“Your phone call said something about wanting to track the trackless. Rather intriguing.”
“I’d hoped it seemed so. I’m after an IRA agent from, oh, fifteen or more years ago.”
“Ah.”
A fiftyish female assistant, with hair as gray as her severe tweed suit, had arrived with a silver tea service. For a few moments liquids poured while utensils and china clinked.
When she left, the two men eyed each other through expression-concealing curtains of steaming tea. They sipped as cautiously as they talked.
Kelly spoke first. “Your name is apparently still potent in State Department circles, although no one would say why.”
“That is how it should be, in an ideal world.”
“Hmmm,” Kelly said. “This world is seldom ideal, but the Irish ‘troubles’ are now a cautiously optimistic mark on the global hot-spot map.”
“Is it true? Have 9/11 and the Mideastern terrorists so upped the ante on mass terrorist destruction that the Irish rebels have lost heart?”
Kelly templed his fingers. “In a post-falling-twin-towers world, yes; mere political-religious Western anarchy pales by comparison to Mideastern political-religious violence. Of course, unrepentant IRA holdouts still wreak some havoc, but the mainstream IRA has no stomach for pub and bus bombings now. I give them credit for that. They’ve seen the true and vicious face of modern terrorism, and they don’t want to be on that Most Wanted list.”
“The civil and religious wrongs that created this rebellion over five hundred years ago still persist.” The elderly gentleman set his teacup down on its saucer with almost supernatural quiet.
“Yes. But they modify. As do we. As for this former IRA agent you seek . . . I’ve heard of Kathleen O’Connor. Everyone has. She left very little trail. I take it, from your sparse hints, that you have evidence that she died in the U.S., unnoted. I’m not surprised. She was a legend here. Legends should die somewhere quiet and far away, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in South America. From what I’ve heard, she was an angry, beautiful woman, an effective agent, and a terrorist who would never give up the fight even when it moderated.”
“Yeats and Maude Gonne.”
“What?”
“The great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, loved a beautiful Irishwoman, Maude Gonne. But Maude was fiery, totally committed to revolution. She became the Cause. She had no time for beauty or love. Or poetry or Yeats. He mourned her before she was dead, because she was dead to any man in her passion for the motherland.”
“Your Kathleen O’Connor could be such a one.” Kelly handed over the copy of a disappointingly slim dossier. “Where is she now?”
“In a grave in Las Vegas under a simple headstone with her name and date of death. No one knew her birth date.”
“Why track a dead woman?”
“A dear friend of mine suffered much because of her for many years. It’s an obligation.”
“And he? Dead too?”
He hesitated. “You might say that I’m on a mortuary mission, Mr. Kelly. I want to dig up this Kathleen O’Connor’s history. I know her future and her fate. I want to know her past and the making of her. For my . . . lost friend’s sake.”
“ ‘You are old, Father William.’ ”
“Ah, the Irish. Always with the poetry. Lewis Carroll was old and still photographed lovely girl-children like Alice Liddell who’d inspired Alice in Wonderland decades earlier. Was this eccentric bachelor genius, or a repressed pedophile? Today’s world allows for many divergent interpretations. I seek my own Alice who went down the rabbit hole: Kathleen O’Connor, before she was IRA, when she was the child of an Ireland that had never been for centuries.”
“You have a touch of poet yourself, Mr.—” Kelly checked the name on the passport. “Mr. Garry Randolph. As you said, times have changed. What was vile, violent, and secret is now . . . just history, God willing. Do you have any idea how many Kathleen O’Connors there are, or were, in Ireland or Northern Ireland on any given day in any given year in any given century?”
“As many as shamrocks carpet the Irish ground and freckles dot the Irish face.”
Kelly chuckled at the puckish, poetic lines his guest had produced with a grin. “I now have ‘contacts’ among the new IRA. I’ll check with them. Kathleen O’Connor cut a wide swath for such a slip of a thing, I hear. Someone from her era may be willing to talk with you.”
He rose to see his visitor out.
The phone rang that evening in a suite at the Malmaison Hotel. He’d avoided the Europa Hotel, which before the IRA truce had the unenviable reputation of being “the most bombed hotel in Europe.” It was safe now, but he preferred the trendy comforts of a boutique hotel and the company of trendy young things with odd hair and arty tattoos sipping white wine and watching Fashion Channel runway shows on a huge, ceiling-hung television screen.
He had the money to indulge himself while following this cold trail on this haunting quest. Max’d had even more. He’d always made plain how he wanted Garry to spend it if, God forbid, he survived him.
From the black, red, and cream modernity of the rock and roll suite he gazed at the misty towers of murderous Belfast. The city was doffing its violent past like a London Fog coat, showing off a thriving young figure under it.
The voic
e on the phone apologized for calling during the dinner hour.
“I have an old fellow,” Kelly said, “maybe full of blarney, who remembers the girl in question. Something he said already made me think you should check the orphanages. Probably in County Clare. Do you know how many orphanages—?”
“Thank you. I’ve written down your information and will follow up.”
“And let me know, of course, what you learn. People in our line of work are always curious.”
Garry Randolph, once known as a magician named Gandolph the Great, nodded his head, although the man on the phone’s other end couldn’t see the gesture.
“Of course I’ll let you know, Mr. Kelly, but it may be a while.”
He hung up, biting his pale lower lip.
An orphanage. Talk about needles in haystacks. Not good, but he was used to dealing with orphans. And spies. And magicians.
He sighed again, and put a call through to Switzerland. Then he would call the contact in Las Vegas. While he waited to be connected, Garry brooded.
This was the most difficult assignment of his life, and perhaps would be the death of him, as Kathleen O’Connor had always been the death of so many, including herself, ultimately.
He remembered what that feisty, non-Irish redheaded love of Max Kinsella’s life had so appropriately nicknamed her, in a place and time that now seemed long ago and far away to an old man full of duty, and doubt.
Kitty the Cutter.
Tailpiece
Midnight Louie’s Deep
Purple Mood
I certainly have developed an appreciation for vivid color combinations after seeing the Ashleigh girls decked out in imperial purple and royal red.
To these traditional colors of empire are not only Red Hat Sisterhood members entitled, but all those of the feline persuasion born.
Humans, unfortunately, are a pallid lot compared to the coats of many colors, and patterns, that felines sport. Unfortunately, our human companions are also up to their hairless ears in family matters tinged with large doses of dysfunction. (Not that we of the superior species do not have a few dysfunctions of our own. But they are minor matters involving litter boxes and finicky palates.)
Too many dysfunctions, however, make for crime and punishment, and I am always all too happy to lend a mitt to the crime-detecting part of the formula.
I must admit that I am most relieved that the aging females of my species do not feel obliged to make a habit out of raiding the plumage of other creatures. I imagine Ma Barker in such a getup, and shudder. She is formidable enough in her natural state. With her coat and temperament, Black is the New Blue.
While it is satisfying to have cleared Miss Electra Lark of murder charges, I am not sure I like the direction in which my domestic life is headed. I preferred the uncertain days of yesteryear, when I always had to come home wondering, Who has been sleeping in my bed?
Now I have Goldilocks, all right, but she seems to be set on eliminating all the creative tension from my existence by installing domestic bliss in the form of Mr. Matt. I confess that I no longer know who’s who and what’s what, and I think that this is a distressing state for an author to leave her collaborator in! Not to mention our loyal readers!
On the other hand, something very intriguing seems to be cooking on the international front. Could a jaunt to Ireland be in my future? I do have Irish eyes, you know. Not that they smile.
Midnight Louie, Esq.
If you’d like information about Midnight Louie’s free Scratching Post-Intelligencer newsletter and/or T-shirt and other cool things, contact him at P.O. Box 331555, Fort Worth, TX 76163-1555 or www.carolenelsondouglas.com.
Tailpiece
Carole Nelson Douglas
Foresees a Rosy Future
Louie is such a sensitive soul.
He’s deeply affected by his environment, so his human companion’s change of partners is bound to affect his mood, if not his appetite. But people are far more inconstant than cats, so he will just have to display his inborn superiority and adjust.
I would respectfully suggest that humans must resort to celebrating their age instead of ignoring it because it shows so much. Those of Louie’s persuasion don’t show their age as easily as humans. That’s the benefit of an all-over fur coat: no wrinkles. Plus, any sags and bags are always camouflaged.
As for trips abroad, Louie, I would not practice your version of “Danny Boy” on the back fence just yet.
There are plenty of hot times coming in Las Vegas, even with Max Kinsella apparently MIA or DOA and Gandolph off with the IRA. But what’s new, after all?
Cat in a Red Hot Rage Page 33
