Barely a Crime

by Robert Ovies

  “You’re the girl who likes to run with scissors,” Kieran said, still with a smile. “Why the worry all of a sudden?”

  “I’m not worried, Kiero,” she said, leaning toward him. “I want it to be perfect maybe more than you do. But what I would have said if you’d have come back and we talked about it, like we agreed would happen, is, ‘I was thinking it was something around here, and probably simple.’ That’s what I would have started with.”

  “I told you why we had to decide there.”

  “Had to,” Crawl chimed in. “No way we could wait, Bren.”

  “Okay,” Brenna said, nodding. “But I’ll say it again. This man’s taking you all the way to Italy. And you’re thinking this is for something that’s barely a crime. But I’m thinking. . . Italy? And you need three days of rehearsing? He should have spelled out what’s really going on, that’s what I’m thinking. You deserve that. You deserve to know more than you know now. That’s what your meeting should have been for.”

  “It’d all depend on what it is he’s after,” Crawl said. He took a quick drink of stout. “As far as risk goes, I mean.”

  “The Vatican museums would be out, for example,” Kieran said. “The Vatican guards look stupid in their puffy uniforms and spears and bells or whatever, but they’re backed up by the whole Italian army. Doesn’t matter what he’d be after if he had something like that in mind.”

  Crawl agreed. “If it was the Vatican, he’d have to put more than fifty thousand on the table. Go in there for anything, it’d be worth a train load.”

  “But no big museum or famous art gallery or whatever is going to be no risk,” Brenna said.

  “Unless he’s got it figured just right,” Crawl said, raising his index finger. “That was the point I wanted to make. If you figure something out just right, your risk can go down to about nothing. You can do a lot with no risk, you get smart enough.”

  “And if you have enough money behind you,” Kieran added.

  “Well, he’s got that,” Crawl said. He slipped a small wedge of cheese into his mouth and pulled another drink from his nearly empty bottle.

  “I’d never go into the Vatican with him, though,” Kieran said. “Twenty million would be more like it, something like that was in the works.”

  Crawl grinned. “So you do have a price.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Twenty million, you said. At some point, we all have a price, don’t we? Yours is twenty million for the Vatican. Or maybe something less than twenty million, what do you think?”

  Kieran shrugged, tilting his head. Then he turned back to Brenna. “How about you, darlin’?” he asked. “Seriously. Twenty million might do it for me, even if it was the Vatican. What about you?”

  Brenna leaned back in her chair, eyeing Crawl. Then she smiled and nodded. “Okay. Twenty million, I’d go into the Vatican. Is that what you want to hear?”

  Crawl grinned and winked at Kieran. “Watch it, little brother,” he said. “Lady’s got expensive tastes.”

  Brenna laughed lightly and took another small piece of bread.

  “I bet he has twenty million, though,” Crawl said. “Could have twenty million connections, too. Some things depend more on connections than money.”

  “He bloody well knew about you two,” Brenna said. “He had somebody asking questions.”

  “But we know some things about him, too,” Crawl said.

  “Like what?” Kieran asked. “Besides that he has a lot of money. And connections, or he wouldn’t know all those things about us.”

  “What else?” Crawl asked, sitting up straight. “What else do we know about him?”

  Kieran put down his sandwich. “Okay. I’d say he’s German. He acts like a German. Click, click, everything in order; you know the way they are? He’s that way. He isn’t Irish, that’s for sure.”

  “You think maybe he’s Catholic, going to Italy to get something?” Brenna asked.

  Crawl shrugged. “Could be. Maybe to copy something, like I said. But what nationality do you think he is? Where’s he from? No, he’s not Irish.”

  Kieran said, “And he’s not Italian.”

  “Because?”

  “No passion. Stone man. I’ll stick with German.” Crawl pointed the neck of his bottle toward Kieran and said, “He’s American.”

  Brenna tilted her head. “Why do you say that?”

  “His accent, first of all. Like all the American movies. Maybe German blood, but he lives in the States. He’s got that sound.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” Kieran said, shaking his head. His bottle was empty. He put the empty on the floor and reached for a fresh one. “Lots of people talk like him. It’s all the American shows they watch.”

  “I know an American when I hear one,” Crawl said. “More important than that, though. He was talking about you and Willy Doyle, and you lighting him up with petrol.”

  Brenna sat up like a shot. “Who’s Willy Doyle?” she said. “And what the hell is this ‘lighting him up with petrol’? Does that mean on fire? On purpose?”

  “It was nothing,” Kieran said. “It didn’t even happen.”

  “Crawl knows about it, and the man from wherever-the-hell-he’s-from knows about it, so it must be something. Why can’t I know about it?”

  “It’s nothin’,” Kieran said again. “So, no, you don’t have to know about it.” He looked sharply at Crawl. “You were making a point.”

  There was the hint of a fresh smile on Crawl’s thin lips. He said, “I was saying, you noticed that the man said gasoline? He said something about the fire, but he used the word ‘gasoline’, not ‘petrol’.”

  “He did,” Kieran muttered. He nodded. “He said gasoline.”

  Brenna tried again. “Kiero, did you or did you not pour bloody petrol on a man named Willy and set him on bloody fire?”

  “Put a sock in it, Bren,” Kieran said softly, looking sullen. He took another bite of his sandwich and said, chewing, “We’re trying to figure out important things here, and you’re talking about nothin’. I already told you it’s nothin’, so don’t keep talking about it.” He paused briefly and added, “We can talk about it later. But it was nothin’.”

  “It’s not nothin’ if this stranger brings it up.”

  “Most important, though. . .” Crawl said, rapping his bottle twice, hard, on the table, “most important is, how did he know all that stuff about us? About you and me, Kieran? About my father and Maze Prison and your little sister, for God’s sake. You don’t talk about that, do you? Who knows about that stuff?”

  “Hell, no, I don’t talk about it,” Kieran said. He took another drink, a long one.

  “I don’t, either,” Crawl said. “Why would I ever talk about any of that to anybody?” He studied his bottle, looking at it as if it were a crystal ball. Then he said, “So. If he is from America, and somebody’s told him about all that, then we pretty well know who must have told him, don’t we?”

  The two men were silent for several seconds, staring at one another.

  Brenna waited, holding her breath.

  Kieran said softly, nodding to Crawl, “It must have been. Him or somebody else that he told, and they told Day.”

  Brenna asked, “Had to be who?”

  Kieran continued, still staring at Crawl, “So what are you thinking?”

  Brenna said it louder. “Had to be who?”

  “Michael,” Crawl told her. “It must have been Michael.”

  “Okay,” she said, “thank you. Now who’s Michael?”

  “Probably braggin’ about us, is all,” Kieran said to Crawl. “Braggin’ about his little brother back home in Northern Ireland.”

  “Somebody, please. Who is Michael?”

  “Michael is Crawl’s brother, Bren,” Kieran said. “He’s got an older brother.”

  Brenna beamed warmly and leaned to touch Crawl’s arm. “Well, hell, Crawl, I didn’t know you had a real brother. Oh, my goodness.”

&n
bsp; “Kieran’s like a little brother to me,” Crawl said, “but that’s from our moving in with him and his mother and sister, Michael and me. But Michael’s blood. He lived with Kieran, too, but he didn’t stay long.”

  “Just a short time,” Kieran said.

  Crawl took another drink, emptying his bottle. Brenna reached down to get him another.

  “He’s older’n me by two-and-a-half years,” Crawl said. “He married a tourist.”

  Kieran nodded. “Went to the U.S. with her. Blond-haired nurse, the lovely Sherri. Michael was a hard man, way deep in the Volunteer Force, but Sherri had a lot to offer, I guess. Got him out of there. He was only with us for a couple of months.”

  “Gone to California,” Crawl said, “city called Oakland, by San Francisco.” He raised his bottle as if for a toast. “Has a little boy of his own now, too. Roddy, named after our father. Michael drives a truck. Local delivery stuff. He wanted to drive national and see the country, but Sherri smacked him down on that one, I guess. He’s just drivin’ local, bein’ a good boy.”

  Brenna asked, “Have you seen him since he went there?”

  Kieran leaned forward. “Bren,” he said, “we’re not in a family tree discussion here, all right? The point we’re talking about is, is Day American and did Michael tell him all that stuff about us? And why would he do that?”

  “And what can he tell us about Day?” Crawl added. “That’s the main thing. If it was him that told Day, which it almost has to be, what can he tell us about Day?” He suddenly looked at Kieran and asked, “Does your mother even know all of that? Not about Willy, does she? Or about what happened in Maze?”

  “Hell, no,” Kieran said. “And even if it was Michael, he was just braggin’, is all.”

  “But this is good!” Brenna said. “You can just call him and ask him who he talked to. Unless he tells everybody he meets all about you two, he’ll probably remember, don’t you think? He might just say, ‘Oh, yeah, that guy. His name isn’t Day, though, it’s. . . whatever.’ ”

  “I will,” Crawl said. “It’s the middle of the afternoon there now, though. He’ll be busy deliverin’ pink nightgowns to a dress shop or some damned thing, but I’ll get to him later. He’ll be straight with me.”

  Kieran nodded, thought about it, then took another bite of cheese. “Maybe Day is from right there,” he said, “same part of California.”

  “But still,” Brenna said, “why come all the way to Ireland to hire you for a B&E over in Italy? Why not just get somebody from America? Or Italy? Why come to Ireland?”

  “But not to Ireland,” Kieran said, “did he?” He paused, then sat up suddenly and added, “He didn’t just come to Ireland, did he? He came to Northern Ireland! I think that could be important!”

  Crawl was already grinning.

  Kieran continued, now leaning forward and speaking quickly, “We’re going into a country that’s wall-to-wall Catholic, right? Catholic from the Pope on down. So Day comes to Northern Ireland to get two loyalist-connected ex-paramilitaries. . . to do what? Maybe to do something that he knows will make a lot of Catholics get sweaty. Could that be it? Find some guys that won’t mind going where he wants to go and taking whatever he wants to take and not get spun out by it.”

  Crawl was nodding now, as well as grinning, “Like you said, what have they got there but churches and museums?”

  “A church,” Kieran said, “or a museum, an art gallery, a monastery maybe. . . or we go back to the Vatican again. What else is there?”

  They had thought about it for just a few seconds when Brenna said, speaking very softly, “There’s a person. There’s a person, isn’t there? There’s the Pope.”

  They stared at her, letting that new entry sink in.

  “Here’s an original concept,” she said. She inhaled deeply. “What if he rehearses both of you for what’s just the set-up for something big, but not for where it’s really going? What if he never pulls the curtain all the way back?”

  Crawl said, “Are we talking now about. . . what if he’s after the Pope?”

  “Bloody hell,” Kieran muttered.

  Brenna said, “Think about it. What would happen if two Northern Irish Protestant loyalists, both with histories in the Ulster Volunteer Force, one of them the son of a UVF commander who was convicted and did time and even got killed in Maze Prison, got caught blowing up the Sistine Chapel? Or the Pieta? Or yeah, maybe even the Pope. But it happened without them ever realizing what the endgame—which had actually been planned from day one—was really going to be? And then, after everything’s over, nobody in the world could prove there ever was a Mister Whoever involved at all?”

  4

  It was 3:45 P.M. Immaculate Conception High School, located on the northern edge of Santa Fe, New Mexico, was being dismissed for the day.

  Formed by the Blessed Sacrament Sisters in 1931 as a coeducational mission school on the poverty-riddled northern ridge of the then-obscure city, the academy underwent dramatic changes beginning in the post-World War II years. The changes were driven not only by the increased wealth of the area but by the movement of that wealth into the most scenic part, the northern ridge, where the foothills that eventually rose beyond the Pecos Wilderness and into the full-blown majesty of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains achieved their first tenuous steps.

  The ridge’s changing demographics led to an increased demand among the wealthier citizens of the area for excellence in education, which led to a sharp increase in the size and the number of financial gifts bestowed on the academy by grateful parents and other patrons. Significant upgrades in the academy became not only possible but mandatory.

  By the late 1990s, the school was divided into two premier college-prep institutions: Sacred Heart High School for boys and Immaculate Conception High School for girls.

  On this day, as on many days, one of its brighter students, a petite junior named Marie Groves, was feeling less than impressed.

  Marie stood on the school porch near the student’s court. She was thin and just five feet four. She kept her black hair short and brushed flat, making no attempt to appear taller than she was. With the exception of her eyes, which were so alive they dominated her pale, heart-shaped face, Marie appeared to be even younger than her sixteen years. Her large, dark eyes, however, held a settled air of intelligence and wisdom, as if they had already visited places the rest of Marie’s body had yet to know.

  On this March afternoon, she was tired of the long school year, tired of her teachers and tired of being the only sixteen-year-old at Immaculate Conception without a driver’s license, let alone a car of her own. She was especially tired of the suffocating regimen of being driven back and forth from school to the fiercely restricted environment of her home in the Pecos Wilderness by her sixty-eight-year-old aunt and legal guardian, Mrs. Leah Ozar, who was even now rolling her whiter-than-white Lexus sedan into the parking lot.

  Marie had little doubt that the reason Aunt Leah rushed to whisk her away from school each day, as soon after the bell rang as possible, was so that Marie wouldn’t be tempted, in that short free moment between her classes and her long ride home, to take drugs, pipe-bomb the principal’s office, or lose her virginity in the bushes with one of the boys from Sacred Heart who came to visit the all-girl school every afternoon.

  Some days it was just harder to be pulled back home than others. Some days the girl’s highly regimented aunt seemed so intrusive and domineering that evasion, however momentary, seemed to be the only way she could assert herself.

  There were eighty yards of lawn between the parking lot and the porch where Marie waited in her mandatory plaid skirt and white blouse, with her black backpack hanging from her right shoulder and her fourteen-by-seventeen rag paper drawing pad tucked under her left arm.

  Aunt Leah got out of the car and waved. Marie drifted backward, pretending not to notice. Nearly two hundred girls and forty boys peppered the school lawn and granite-block porch, so it was easy for her to delay her kidn
apping, if even for just a few minutes, by seeming distracted.

  Aunt Leah started across the grass, walking gingerly on her tender right knee, her head held high, her flowing dress as white as her car. An ornate, three-inch cross of gnarled gold wire swayed on her ample chest, as it always swayed on her ample chest—winter, spring, summer or fall—letting everyone see that she, perhaps even more than anyone else in the city of Santa Fe, held her faith in proper perspective.

  Through the laughter and shouts and commotion, Marie heard her aunt call her name. Some of the other kids turned to look. Marie saw Theresa Wiles and Sean Taube laugh knowingly as she drifted toward a group of students gathered to the right of the smoked-glass doors of the school.

  Marie’s Uncle John, Leah’s brother, occasionally seemed to show that he cared. But these moments fell far short of the love Marie had experienced from her parents. Whatever Uncle John or Aunt Leah did for her never quite seemed like real love, so she found herself carrying a seed of sadness. But at least her Uncle John filled the distance between them with some warmth. Aunt Leah filled the distance with more distance, it seemed. With a call to order. With insistences that the rest of the world be as restricted, and as restrictive, as she was herself.

  Determined to delay the inevitable, and being simply hungry for new company, however short-lived, Marie wandered over to one of the boys from Sacred Heart, one she had seen before but not met, one who was taller than Marie by a foot, and blond. She smiled and said, “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “You’re from Sacred Heart, I guess.”

  “Yeah. My name’s Terry Kohl.” He extended his hand.

  Marie squeezed rather than shook it. “I’m Marie Groves.”

  On the lawn, Aunt Leah paused, as though sensing danger from sixty yards away.