Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

  “What else happened last night?”

  “Not a damn thing. Except a prowler call on Maryland Avenue.”

  “You got out of the car there?”

  “For about ten minutes.”

  “Who called?”

  “Joe McCaffrey.”

  “We can forget that pinhead.”

  Bill O’Toole paced the small rug. On the wall behind him were plaques and awards from various organizations. He was a good cop. He had worked to make Paradise Beach the best-policed town in New Jersey. It was incomprehensible to Mick that Uncle Bill had allowed this Mafia garbage into their lives, even for dear old Ireland. He didn’t believe Uncle Bill gave a shit for dear old Ireland. Only assholes like Uncle Desmond liked jigging at the annual feis.

  “I wish I could believe you’re clean. But I don’t,” Bill O’Toole said.

  “Do you want my badge? You can have it right now. I didn’t buy this kind of bullshit when I took this job. Here’s my badge.”

  Mick held it out to Chief O’Toole. His shield. His ridiculous proof that he was trying to play it straight after Binh Nghai. He had evened part of the score there. He had taken the dishonorable discharge without a word. Maybe this was another step to squaring it once and for all.

  Bill O’Toole sank into the swivel chair behind his desk. “Get out of here. Get out of here and let me think.”

  IRISH EYES UNSMILING

  “The senator called. He wants to know what’s taking us so long,” Melody said. They were on the second-floor sunporch of the McBride house, just off their bedroom, five days after the money had vanished. A northeast wind buffeted the windows. Beneath a sky of unrelenting gray, the Atlantic heaved beyond the breakers. On the horizon, Leo could see the flagship of his father’s fleet, the SS Enterprise, heading for the inlet that led to the Great Bay and the McBride marina.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said I had a virus.”

  “I told the congressman the same thing. At least they’ll think we’re sleeping together.”

  “Who took that money?” Melody said. “They’re your relatives.”

  “I don’t think any of them took it. They may not like each other very much, but they’re basically loyal.”

  Melody, scornful as usual of Leo’s attempts to find some shreds of virtue in Irish-Americans, dismissed this as nonsense. “I’m betting on Mick. He’s a dead shot. And a trained killer.”

  “The little Irishman isn’t a bad shot either.”

  “Mick could be working with O’Toole. The screaming and yelling about the money could be an act. Mick took the money and buried it in the woods, the night he got rid of Zaccaro and his bodyguard.”

  “I doubt it,” Leo said. “I know Mick. He’d never inflict this humiliation on his grandfather. The old man isn’t as gaga as he looks. He’s horrified by what’s happening. He knows what the Mob is likely to do.”

  Melody ignored this lamentation. “It doesn’t make any sense for Kilroy or O’Gorman to take it. They know the IRA would find them, wherever they ran.”

  “Mick told me Kilroy thinks O’Gorman may have done it.”

  “They’re your relatives. Can’t you find out anything? If you hung out at the Shamrock a few nights, you might pick something up.”

  Leo shook his head. “Nobody likes me down there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m a big brain. I got high marks in school. And I didn’t go to Vietnam.”

  “What a bunch of Neanderthals.”

  “Patriots,” Leo said. “Neanderthal patriots.”

  His stomach throbbed. Pain curled into his chest. He had been a mess for the last two days, unable to eat any solid food, existing on milk and Maalox. Although they were sleeping in a double bed, they had not touched each other since the night the money vanished. Melody never said a word about him hitting her. In an odd, subliminal way, Leo sensed she liked it. Was there, deep in her Marxist psyche, some residual Christian guilt for her sexually liberated lifestyle?

  Melody had not tried to call O’Gorman again. But Leo was not at all sure it was in obedience to his order or because she feared another rejection. She had yet to utter a word of sympathy for Leo’s tormented stomach.

  More and more, whenever they discussed the money, Melody talked to Leo as if he had become a stranger. She felt menaced by his relatives, even by O’Gorman and Kilroy. She was like an explorer surrounded by vaguely hostile natives a thousand miles up the Amazon.

  For Leo, the vanished money created a special agony. He had to listen to his father and mother lament the loss of the bearer bonds. If they were still in Sunny Dan’s cellar, this upheaval would never have happened. Bill O’Toole would never have headed for Atlantic City to make a million at the craps tables. He would never have let a thug like Joey Zaccaro into Paradise Beach. Even if some other more obscure need had driven Bill to do business with Zaccaro, they could have paid off the missing money, told the Mafia what happened to Zaccaro, and sent O’Gorman and his friend Kilroy back to Ireland without their weapons.

  It was even more agonizing for Leo to listen to Sunny Dan talk about the bearer bonds when they went to his house for a family conference last night. A dozen times Dan had wished he could solve the whole thing with a quick trip to the cellar. Leo had seen how much the old man’s lost munificence meant to him. Without the money he was powerless. Without power, his existence had lost most of its meaning.

  Barbara, Mick’s mother, had insisted on everyone staying for dinner. Leo managed to choke down enough food to escape attention. He had never told his mother and father about his ulcer. He did not want anyone else in the family to know about it, especially Mick and Bill O’Toole. They would regard it as further proof that Leo was a wimp.

  After dinner, Barbara tried to cheer Dan up by leading them to the piano for some Irish songs. When they got to “The Kerry Dancers,” Dan broke down in the middle of it and had to be put to bed. Leo went home and vomited his dinner. Melody, watching a movie on TV, told him to close the door—he was drowning out the dialogue.

  Melody was unmoved by their close-up of Sunny Dan’s misery—and the perturbation of the rest of the family. But massive waves of guilt surged through Leo’s already ravaged stomach. He loved his grandfather. He remembered the expensive birthday presents he had gotten from him—a six-speed racing bike, a top-of-the-line Sony Walkman, a Leica camera. Leo’s father, determined to plow every cent back into his fishing fleet and cannery, seldom gave Leo anything more than a $50 savings bond. Leo remembered trips with other grandchildren aboard the cabin cruiser Sunny Dan had kept in the McBride marina—how the old man had baited their hooks and offered a $25 prize to whoever caught the biggest fish. He had been a kind of royal personage in their lives, dispensing gifts and cheer.

  The contrast between Sunny Dan and his tightwad father had always troubled Leo. He had wanted to love this remote, diffident, evasive man, who had scarcely said an intimate word to him since he was born. Only when Leo brought home A-pluses from his various schools had Desmond McBride loosened his wallet.

  High marks were a sign of the one thing Desmond wanted to prove—that the McBrides were several cuts above the rest of the family when it came to brains and ambition. For all his churchgoing and his befriending of clergymen, Desmond was incapable of seeing himself as guilty of the first deadly sin, pride. Or of the second, for that matter—covetousness.

  At times Leo wished he had never had a Catholic education. Although he was no longer a believer, he had a large amount of residual Catholicism in his psyche. He had embarked on his political career as a kind of substitute for a religious vocation. He saw himself as spiritually superior to most of the people his age in Washington—because he was acutely aware of the moral shortcomings of American society. But ten years of enjoying the perquisites of power in Washington—the hundred-thousand-plus congressional salary, the junkets, the lunches and dinners—had forced him to confess his hypocritical elitism.

  Melody,
on the other hand, viewed all the freebies as her due. She had the mind of a commissar. In her view, a consuming resolve to change the world entitled her to a lavish lifestyle. It also had a lot to do with being a Faithorne—a sense of belonging to a branch of the American aristocracy.

  Leo had moved far beyond the world of Paradise Beach, but when he came home for a visit, it claimed him in ways that were too subtle, too invisible, to elude. His mother’s aimless chatter about her bridge club often wandered into Marie O’Toole’s unhappy marriage and the peccadilloes of Wilbur Gargan’s numerous tribe, all of whom seemed to have gotten jobs in Atlantic City. That had led them to alcoholism, drug addiction, and the other charming vices of the gambling metropolis.

  Wilbur’s habit of pouring free drinks at the Golden Shamrock and letting his bartenders steal half the receipts while he got snookered had left his kids with nothing but their severely limited talents to face America’s cold, cruel capitalism. In Jersey City, Sunny Dan would have gotten them all on the public payroll as cops or firemen or schoolteachers. But Paradise Beach’s minuscule budget left no room for such largesse. Even putting Mick O’Day on the police force had stirred ugly comments from the voters.

  Once, Leo had managed to look on these family trials and traumas with mild, distanced amusement. But these days a return to Paradise Beach seemed to rivet him to their anguished bodies and afflicted souls with an intensity that approached the supernatural. Was this a foretaste of hell? Leo wondered.

  The telephone rang. Melody answered it. They were alone in the McBride house. “Oh, I’d love to … . No, he couldn’t possibly. His ulcer has him in agony. When? … A half hour? I’ll be ready.”

  “Who’s that?” Leo said.

  “O’Gorman. He wants to see us. I told him you were sick.”

  “Tell him you are too. You have a virus. You can get a note from the senator, proving it.”

  “He says he has important information the senator might want to hear. He’s afraid to talk about it on the telephone.”

  “Tell him I have a virus. A virulent dislike of him and his crony Kilroy.”

  Melody was pulling off her slacks and sweatshirt. She rouged her cheeks and coated her lips with about a pound of lipstick. It was the call-girl look—very popular in Washington these days. She dropped a crimson Givenchy dress with a pleated skirt over her head.

  Suddenly Leo McBride was saying words that seemed to be thrust into his body by some external power. “If you ball him, I’ll tell Bill O’Toole about the bearer bonds. You won’t get out of this town alive.”

  There it was, the spoken and unspoken part of the dirty secret they had been sharing for the last five years. But Melody did not beg for mercy. She simply stared at him. Leo realized how much he had revealed with that threat. She saw that he wanted to confess their betrayal and blame her.

  “I believe we’ve shared that reward money more or less equally,” Melody said.

  “It was never my idea,” Leo snarled. “You sucked me into it literally and figuratively.”

  “Maybe I can suck O’Gorman into protecting me from your adolescent guilt trip.”

  Leo McBride floundered, aghast. He should have known he could not penetrate Melody’s armored self-righteousness. She was simply refusing to remember how it had happened—and succeeding—while Leo McBride could not forget every word, gesture, expression, every snarl and plea and sob of the nightmare.

  He and Melody had been slugging down martinis, celebrating the passage of the treaties on Panama, the summit of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. It was such a noble deed, worthy of Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, the blessed trinity of the Democratic Party. The stolen canal had been returned to its rightful owners.

  Destiny seemed to be playing a searchlight down the coming years, in which a new Democratic Party, created in the 1972 convention, would continue to lead the world toward peace and justice. Unfortunately, after his fourth martini, Leo had grown sentimental and began defending the old Democratic Party. He tried to argue that the new one had grown out of the old one. The old party had the same desire to see justice and equality triumph at home and abroad.

  Melody had scoffed. For her the 1972 convention was part of the ongoing revolution. The word new was a door slamming on the stupid, corrupt past. Irked, Leo had told her she was ignorant. She had no idea how much money the old political machines had generated—money that had sent children and grandchildren to the best schools and erased NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs in banks and corporations.

  Melody had expressed mild surprise. As far as she could see, everyone in Paradise Beach except Leo’s parents seemed to be living only a few inches above the poverty line. That was when Leo, with a hiccup of pride, had told her about the bearer bonds.

  “How can you sit there and brag about something like that?” Melody had screamed.

  For the next week, she had harried him like a tigress toying with her prey. Every night there had been a lecture about the stench of corruption in his blood—and no sex. Finally she told him what he should do: report the bonds to the Internal Revenue Service. He had been suitably horrified and refused to do any such thing. “Then I’ll do it,” she said on the fifth night.

  Leo had shouted, cursed, gotten drunk. But he could not stop her. Nor did he refuse to help her spend the reward money, which blended with her righteousness to create an irresistible motive. The IRS paid informers 10 percent of all the tax money they recovered. Five hundred thousand dollars was a nice little nest egg. It had paid for the Ferrari and a vacation house in Virginia, complete with Jacuzzi and basement pool.

  But the toll the betrayal had taken on Leo McBride’s nervous system turned out to be a negative tax of sizable proportions. He had developed a peptic ulcer and sleeping problems that left him feeling like a dishrag on legs most days. Visits to Paradise Beach became a torment. Everyone, including his father, subtly blamed him for the lost bonds, though they never dreamt he was actually guilty.

  His mother, his aunts, even his uncle Bill O’Toole, seemed to imply in looks and remarks that his Washington connections should have prevented the raid. They seemed to think Washington was organized like the Jersey City of old—nothing happened without an okay from someone on top.

  Leo had in fact used all his Washington connections to quash any attempt to prosecute Sunny Dan Monahan for income tax fraud. Congressman Mullen, the recipient of at least $200,000 in donations from Dan in his twenty years in Congress, threw all his considerable weight behind the effort, and even Senator Kennedy, over Melody’s violent objections, was prevailed upon to make a phone call to the commissioner of Internal Revenue.

  But no one in the family gave Leo any credit for this achievement, and he began finding reasons to avoid visiting Paradise Beach. Melody, indifferent to his feelings as usual, had insisted their presence was a necessity at this conjunction of the Cubans and the IRA, to make sure his relatives performed up to par. Only when Leo had seen the CIA printout on Black Dick O’Gorman did another reason for her insistence occur to him.

  Outside, a car horn beeped. Melody pulled a wide, shiny leather belt around her slim waist. It had an oversize gold buckle. For some reason the buckle made Leo think of the incredibly fine blond hair of her pussy. It made him want her. What was happening to him?

  Melody walked to the door. “I wasn’t going to touch O’Gorman,” she said. “Believe it or not, I have some consideration for your feelings.”

  As usual, she had an uncanny instinct for exactly how to subdue him. “I’m sorry!” Leo wailed. “I’d never tell them. Never!”

  He saw Melody did not believe him. They had gone from strangers to enemies.

  LOVE IS A SOMETIME THING

  Dick O’Gorman knew he was in trouble the moment Melody Faithorne emerged from Desmond McBride’s front door. Her cheeks were as rouged and her lips as red as a face on a piece of Wedgwood pottery. Her crimson dress was one of those silly little things that cost $3,000 in Paris. Maybe she’d gotten i
t from Senator Ted, although it was obvious that she could terrorize her husband into giving her anything she wanted. How American to think she could glamorize Richard O’Gorman, the IRA’s quintessential idealist, into bed. When it came to understanding foreigners, Americans did not have a clue.

  “Sorry to trouble you so early in the day,” O’Gorman said. “But there’s a bit of pressing business I think we should discuss.”

  “You’ve rescued me from terminal boredom,” Melody purred with her brightest smile.

  There was no doubt what she had in mind. To make it clear that he did not have it in mind, he drove to the Golden Shamrock. The dismay on Melody’s face was almost amusing. O’Gorman had to remind himself that he needed this woman’s help. Could he keep her at arm’s length without antagonizing her? Perhaps not. But he was going to try—for the sake of Barbara O’Day.

  O’Gorman was in the sentimental phase of his fling with Barbara. She would be humiliated beyond measure if she found out he was also boffing Melody. It would cheapen him forever in her eyes—and in his own. But O’Gorman regretfully recalled that he had cheapened himself more than once in his checkered past for reasons all too similar to the ones that might require him to satisfy Melody Faithorne.

  “Can’t we go someplace more entertaining?” Melody said. “I’ve heard the food here is awful.”

  “They serve a very good fish-and-chips,” O’Gorman said. “It reminds me of Dublin days.”

  “I thought fish-and-chips was an English dish.”

  “You’d be surprised how much the English and the Irish have in common, after a millennium cheek by jowl.”

  Wilbur Gargan, the Shamrock’s outsize proprietor, greeted them at the door and led them to a booth with a nice view of the ocean. Melody ordered a vodka martini. O’Gorman chose Jameson. When her drink arrived, in an outsize cocktail glass that made it a double, she downed half of it in a single gulp.

  “Even Atlantic City would be more enticing,” Melody said.