by Bill Granger
“Fuck him,” she said, making the word sound like “fook.”
“I’m gonna fuck them all, darlin’, but I got to find out how many there are and what this is all about. So maybe I’ll just do as the fella says and you’ll do as you’re told as well.” The words were tenor light and carried the edge of a straight razor for all that.
“You coulda finished what you were doin’,” she said, just to say it; she didn’t really care.
“Insatiable you are.” He grinned.
“No, I’d just like to get meself off once in a while,” she said.
“And what’s that mean?”
“Whaddaya think it means?”
“Oh, shut your gob, girl, and stay where y’are. I’ll be back sooner than you know. We’ll find a pub—”
“Fuckin’ bloody country,” she said. Her sudden hatred of the English overwhelmed her. Perhaps it was sexual tension. “Fuckin’ snobs, I’d like to off the lot of them.”
“Ah,” he said. “Maybe this is about that very thing.”
Henry McGee sat on a red plastic chair at a plastic table, drinking lukewarm milky tea from a paper cup that leaked at the seams. The room was bright and dirty. The station was full of echoes and neglect was swept into every littered corner.
“Are you the man?” Matthew O’Day said, looming over him.
“Either me or the fucking towelhead behind the counter,” Henry said. “Siddown. Don’t order the tea, it’s shit.”
“Are you the big man?” Matthew said, still not sitting down.
“Siddown,” Henry said.
Matthew scraped a chair and filled it. His eyes were nearly as hard as Henry’s but he couldn’t match the color. Black hard eyes like coal, without any light at all, without any mercy in them.
“What’s it about then?” Matthew said.
“The girl got the message garbled,” Henry said.
“The bitch in the Shelbourne.”
“Exactly. I beat her up a little about it. Nothing permanent. Sometimes she gets to thinking she’s running the thing and you have to slap her down.”
“So what did she get wrong?”
“About the money. You still get the twenty-five in front,” Henry McGee said.
Greed took over. Whatever Matthew had expected, he hadn’t expected this. Things never worked out this way.
“When?”
“Tomorrow at noon, as soon as you deliver the package.”
“And what sort of package is it?”
“An ordinary package. Federal Express. Except it ain’t Federal Express, we’re just using their envelope. I made it all out for you.”
Henry put the overnight envelope on the table.
Matthew looked at it. “A bomb.”
“Not at all. There’s a legitimate parcel inside, a book ordered from an American publisher. It’s there now and it’ll be there later.”
“Then what is the book that’s worth a twenty-five-thousand-dollar delivery?”
“The less you know, the happier you’ll be. Don’t forget what happened to Brian Parnell.”
“Did you kill him?”
“No. I’ve got people for that.”
“If you got people, I been wondering why you need us then. I couldn’t get a third man.”
“Matthew. I want to explain something.” Henry leaned forward across the table. “I am the baddest motherfucker you ever met. I ain’t got time for a lot of romance. I want some things done and I want you and your people to do them. When it’s done, you’ll be a hundred thousand pounds richer and you can go back to your fucking rathole of a country and spend the rest of your fucking life blowing up British troops and Protestant schoolchildren. I don’t really give a rat’s ass. Except that if you fail me at any point in the next bunch of operations, if you, in other words, fuck up, I’ll skin you alive. That’s not just an expression, Matthew. I mean, I actually know how to do it. I’ll peel the skin off your body until you’re dead. I can make it last a long time.”
Silence. The words sank into both of them.
The early train from Cardiff chugged into the station and doors were flung open and the kind of people who spend Sunday mornings on trains descended to the fourth platform. The train seemed to shudder and sweat, like a farm horse returned to its stall after plowing. Matthew looked out at the platform and saw the words. His life had been hard, spent with hard men—and a few hard women—doing hard things. He believed everything the American had just said. He knew a bluff and he knew a real thing.
“So what about this package?” Matthew said.
Henry blinked as though his own words had caused him to go into a trance. Now he came out of it. The package.
“You deliver it.”
Matthew looked at the label. He didn’t know the name but he knew enough of London to know the posh address in Mayfair.
“What’s in it again you said?”
“A book.”
“Bloody unlikely.”
“Just do it. Don’t pry at the edges of the thing, Matthew. And certainly don’t open it if you want to be living tomorrow.”
“It is a bomb.”
Henry shook his head and grinned. “The trouble with terrorists like you—I’d like to give you some advice—the trouble with you is that you think along old lines. Bombs have been done. Kidnapping’s been done. The same dreary people wrapped in towels and mufti, reciting the same dreary demands of the Great Satan or the oligarchic conspiracy. Nobody listens. You terrify no one. To make a pun, it’s been done to death, we’ve seen it all. The nightly news is a bore and we practically expect to see the maps with the X’s marked on them to explain this is where Flight One oh-three went down and this is where Flight Sixty-seven went down. Northern Ireland is a joke, man, no one cares but you bloody people and the English soldiers who get paid for it. It’s Lebanon but in a different language. You see the Brits moving out of Belfast, Matthew? I’m serious.”
“A struggle of four hundred years. It doesn’t matter if it takes ten years more.”
Henry clucked. He was now enjoying himself. The rotten tea in the rotting cup was forgotten. “You don’t get it. You never will. But if you keep your eyes open, you might pick up a few pointers.”
Matthew made a face to say he had heard it all before. In fact, it was uncharted territory. A sense of outrage, wounded pride and all the rest of it, had suddenly been replaced by curiosity. It was the cat that had always kept Matthew alive in the dangerous years. What was the Yank’s game anyway? He looked at the address again and the name and tried to see it clear.
“And when I deliver it, what then? They’ll know my face.”
“No one who sees you in that house is ever gonna tell anyone about it.”
“Then it’s a bomb.”
“You’ve got a one-track mind, my Irish friend. One track. Like that train that came in. You only know where to go because the rails tell you. Go on back to your honeypot, Matthew, and take the package and deliver it after ten A.M. But not after ten-thirty. Then wait in your room for me. And one more thing: Send along your girlie to this address at nine tomorrow morning. We’ll await developments.”
“I don’t like to be set up.”
“You’re not,” Henry said. “Trust me. Trust the money I put down. There’s seventy-five thousand more coming.”
The money had its silent argument. Matthew picked up the cash and the package.
“Ten o’clock,” Matthew said.
“Now you got it,” Henry said. In fact, Matthew didn’t know what he had taken with that package. Not at all. The thought made Henry grin again.
22
Maureen was dressed for action: tight jeans, black sweater, black beret, black raincoat. Seeing her with her long, reddish hair and gray, unfeeling eyes, you could imagine the face of the assassin or the terrorist. She might as well have an Uzi under that long coat, might as well be waiting to blow up a school bus, or just waiting for death to deal or be dealt.
It was exactly nine o’clock
Monday morning, twenty-three hours after Matthew took the package from the man in the buffet.
Matthew had explained about the man he met in Paddington Station and the package and the mission, and when Maureen had complained she didn’t understand any of it, Matthew had grown angry because he was confused as well. The words that denigrated the struggle—the mocking, cynical words of the stranger in the buffet—had wounded him more than he knew. He told her to shut up and even slapped her, but that had not cowed Maureen. She had come back at him, teeth and hands and rage, and the tussle had alarmed the manager of the hotel, a small-boned Indian man who smelled of curry and had brown teeth. He threatened to call the police and that had calmed them down—not ended the fight, just made it a matter of silences and glowering looks at each other. Maureen had spent the afternoon by herself, walking the streets of the great, gray city, thinking about things, thinking about Matthew, thinking about poor bloody Brian lying in his own blood in the urinal of that public house. Most of all, thinking about the package and the man in the buffet who had so threatened Matthew and who had probably caused all the troubles that had fallen on the group in the last several days.
Maureen was certain she was going to meet him at this address.
It was an attached town house, graystone and Georgian, part of a street full of similar houses in a treeless neighborhood near Hyde Park. Heavy traffic noises from Maida Vale echoed down the block and made the curious, peopleless silence of the houses that much more sinister. There’d never be children on this block, Maureen thought; it was barren from birth.
She rang the bell.
Henry McGee opened the door for her. He was dressed as she was, ready for action. He wore a black pullover and black fatigue jacket.
“Right on time, honey,” Henry said. “Is your boyfriend following the plan?”
“He runs our operation,” she said, explaining. She looked at him closely. He was probably as old as Matthew but there was a difference. The eyes weren’t cold. Matthew had cold eyes, even in the middle of operations. This one was just as hard in the eyes but there was something else. Something that burned.
“Anything you say,” Henry said, smiling. He led her to the right, to an old-fashioned parlor filled with embroidered things and wallpaper flowers. The lamps had fringes on the shades. The room made her smile because it was bizarre in this context. Henry saw the smile. He decided something.
“I’m just borrowing it for the time being,” Henry said.
Maureen looked around the room. She might have been a child in her aunt’s house in Dublin. Framed photographs sat on a sideboard, and above the fireplace was a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II as a young woman. Her aunt had a photo of the Pope.
“You have quaint friends. English friends.” She turned and gave back his blazing look.
For a moment they stood apart and then Henry smiled again. “You take your friends where you can get them,” Henry said. “You strike me as not being as dumb as Matthew. I’m not saying you’re smart but you can show me that later.”
“I’ve got nothin’ to prove to you. I don’t even know why I’m here.”
“Because I wanted you here.”
“And you’ve not the control of me—”
“Save it,” Henry said. It was like a snap—quick, savage, the sense of necks breaking.
“What the bloody hell is this about? And why’d you kill Brian Parnell?”
“Brian Parnell wasn’t important. It was the message that was important and Brian didn’t figure. You figure—”
“And if I’d been caught in the roundup?”
“But you weren’t, girl. You weren’t. I want you to siddown and shut up and listen a bit.”
“I’ll stand.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Then stand.” Henry sat down on a stiff Chippendale. He crossed his legs. He looked at her for a moment.
“One million pounds. English pounds. That’s one million six hundred thousand dollars by the morning paper, and I like to think in terms of dollars because it makes the money more real.”
“What money?”
“I told Matthew it was a hundred thousand pounds to him. Well, it’s nine hundred thousand to me. What I need here is someone I can trust and that’s going to be you.”
“To do what? Rob a bank?”
“I can take care of that, honey. Robbin’ banks is easy but banks just don’t have that kind of cash lying around. Better that you rob the people who put their money in the banks. Let them make the withdrawals. On your behalf. You and me, girl, are in partnership, and there’s only gonna be two partners in the long run. What we need is a setup. It’s gonna be you or it’s gonna be Matthew. Which do you want it to be?”
“You’re crazy. I’ll not betray—”
Henry McGee held up his hand. “Betray. What do you think this is about? Matthew is greedy and just a little bit too stupid but I’m surprised you haven’t noticed that before. Matthew’s got you believing in him and that makes me wonder about you. You want betrayal as a reason for something, then you ought to look at Matthew O’Day, the famous Irish patriot and terrorist, who sold out his kith and kin for a lot less than thirty pieces of silver.”
She felt a sense of disorientation. She would sit down after all. The room was too familiar, too old, too much a part of her past; yet she had never been in this room before.
“Matthew is getting out of the game. Too long in the tooth—”
“Who are you?”
“You might say I was with SAS. Or something like that. On the other hand, I’m probably not.”
Jesus Christ. Maureen felt all the blood drain from her face. She stared at the hard man across from her but he was still smiling and he hadn’t moved. She looked at the window, the doorway.
“Don’t,” Henry said.
“What the hell game is this then?”
“A little game of getting rich. Y’see, you asked me about Brian. Well, I got Brian from Matthew. He said Brian was humping you and he was willing to betray him for a consideration. The consideration was that we wouldn’t kill him. We thought about it and took him up on it—”
“You killed those people in the pub on Galway Bay—”
“Not at all. Do you think we’d kill innocent people?”
“You do it all the time—”
Henry smiled. “Was he? I mean, Brian. Was he humping you like Matthew said?”
For the first time since coming into the strange room, she felt fear. It was hard to put her finger on it but there was a certain madness to this man, a madness without edges or depth. Not hatred, just cruelty for its own sake. She looked at the door again.
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe Matthew O’Day would betray any of us—”
“And the farm. Who knew about the farm except Matthew? And the cell? And who turned the lot of you in to the Garda after the bomb went off in that public house and killed all of those poor people?”
“You killed them yourself.”
“If you want to believe that, fine.”
Silence.
A clock struck the quarter hour with the first notes of Westminster chimes. The room was chill and the silence penetrated her bones until she shivered.
“Maureen, everything in this world is about money. Your cause, your terrorism, your puny strikes against the queen by blowing up postmen in Belfast… It’s pathetic when you come down to it, because nothing matters except the money. If your bunch had expended all its energies in getting money the last twenty years, you could have bought Ulster from the English, you could have made every Catholic family in Derry a millionaire. Christ, you’re all a lot of losers. I almost regret wasting my breath explaining this to you.”
“You’re a Yank, you’re not SAS. What the hell do you have to do with us?”
“Honey, my nationality is green, the color of money. So Matthew came to Dublin when we asked him and he got the proposition presented to him and he took it.”
“He did not.”
“He told me about Brian and said he mostly wanted to get Brian. So we took care of that for him.”
She stared.
“Why do you suppose he was in Dublin those three days when all hell was breaking loose in the west of Ireland? He’s no fool. He sold you, all of you, including little Brian of the big dick.”
“You bastard,” she said.
“One of my associates did the deed for Matthew, to show our good faith. Cut his throat and cut off his dick. What do you miss most, Maureen? His life or his prick?”
She crossed the room like a cat and struck him. She was very strong and the blow told. Yet he shook his head and stood and faced her. She struck him again. He smiled. She struck him a third time and then he hit her very hard and the pain went all through her belly and into her chest and she couldn’t breathe and she was going to die. She fell to the floor to make it easier to die. She waited for death and yet involuntarily struggled against death and was surprised that the struggle seemed to have meaning. She did not die. Breath came. The pain remained but she could breathe. She blinked her cold eyes and saw Henry standing over her.
“Christ,” she said. She heaved another cubic foot of breath into her lungs. “Christ,” she said again.
She struggled to rise.
Henry sat down again.
She stood up uncertainly, feeling the pain in the center of her body, staggered to the horsehair couch, and sat down. She rubbed her belly.
“I was saying,” Henry said. “I need a fall guy. Matthew picked you. I pick Matthew.”
“A fall guy?”
“An American expression, honey, I’m sure you’ve seen it in the movies. It means the mark, the setup, the guy who gets dumped on while the other guys get away.”
She waited, letting the breath sob into her.
“Matthew is delivering a package this morning. You know that. The guy he’s delivering it to is an American businessman living in London.”
“It’s a bomb.”
“I told you. It’s a book. It’s a novel called Halloween Witches. It’s supposed to be a fairly lousy book, I don’t know, I don’t read novels. The point is, the writer lucked out and the book became a movie. You wanna know what the movie is?”
