Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Naked, unprovoked, blatant brutality,” Tommy the Turd told me, while Seamus held his breath in an attempt not to laugh.

  “So tell me what happened next?” I asked. I had adopted a wide-eyed expression, full of astonished concern. “Did they take the two of you to the Royal Victoria Hospital?”

  “We refused to accept any of the enemy’s medical help,” my brother-in-law said proudly. Stitch was examining the table-top even more closely.

  “But surely the enemy arrested you!” I exclaimed. “I mean, sweet suffering Christ, Patrick, but hadn’t you just beaten the living shit out of a whole Brit patrol? So where did the surviving soldiers take you? The Castlereagh Police Station? The Silver City? Falls Road Police Station?”

  “They realised their mistake,” Patrick said with immense dignity.

  “You mean they apologised?”

  “They discovered we were Americans,” he said, “and were forced to let us go.”

  “Oh, it’s a rare tale,” I said, sounding deeply impressed.

  “Shocking,” Seamus somehow managed not to laugh as he spoke, “nothing short of focking shocking.”

  “Clear, naked, blatant brutality,” Tommy the Turd said. He was a dazzlingly handsome youth, stern-faced, machine-tanned and immaculately groomed. His father had recently bought Tommy an expensive blonde wife, which had started speculation that the Congressman was being equipped and coached for a run at the Presidency. “And unprovoked!” he added.

  “So you can stuff your mockery, shitface,” Patrick said to me with a triumphant leer.

  “I apologise, Patrick, I really do. I had no idea you’d fought so bravely. Now tell me why you rented out my house?”

  “Is this relevant?” Robert Stitch intervened.

  “Shut up,” I told him, then walked to the back of Patrick’s chair. “A five-year lease, Patrick? Five hundred a month? That’s thirty thousand bucks. You want to write me a cheque?”

  “We’ll talk about it later, Paulie.”

  “We’re talking about it now, you fuck. So how much money have you got on you?”

  “Not now, Paulie!” He tried to stand up, but I put my hands on his shoulders and held him down.

  “How long has the bitch been there, Patrick? Three years? That’s eighteen thousand bucks you’ve taken already! Have you got it handy?”

  “Please, Paulie!” He heaved up, but I slapped him hard across the side of his head and he gave a gasp and sat down fast.

  I reached into his inside jacket pocket and found his billfold that held a stack of twenty-dollar bills, maybe two or three thousand dollars’ worth. “I’ll take it as a down payment, Padraig, but I’ll be back for the rest. And in the meantime just tell Miss Sarah Sing Tennyson that you made a mistake and that she’s to get the hell out of my home. Do you understand me, Padraig?”

  “You can’t take that money!” Patrick said nervously. “That’s not mine.”

  “But nor is the rent you take off Miss Tennyson, Padraig.” I shoved the stack of bills into my pocket.

  “But that was for the cause!” Patrick insisted.

  “And so’s this,” I said, and I bent down and whispered in his ear. “I’m back home for good now, Patrick, and if I find another bruise on Maureen I’ll cut your balls off and feed them to the crows, so help me God.” I could see the sweat beading on his great shovel of a face. I straightened up and belted him across the right side of his skull again, this time so hard that he squealed with pain and almost fell off his chair. I grinned at Tommy the Turd who was looking terrified. “Naked, unprovoked, blatant brutality, Congressman. It’s the way of the Irish. Hey, Seamus, come and have a drink at the bar. We’ll plan some fishing trips, eh? Maybe catch a few blues and stripers.”

  “Sounds grand, Paulie.”

  I walked to the door. Robert Stitch was frozen, fearing an explosion of violence. Patrick was shaking like a leaf while Tommy the Turd looked as if he’d just pissed into his Brooks Brothers pants. Only Seamus and his lawyer were grinning. “Keep Seamus out of the hands of the Brits,” I told Chuck Sterndale.

  “I’ll surely do my best, Mr Shanahan. But some of that money you just took off Mr McPhee would help me do it.”

  “Mr Padraig McPhee owes me thousands more, councillor, and it’s all yours, OK?” I looked at Patrick. “I’m having another drink with Charlie Monaghan now,” I told him, “and after that I’m catching a bus for the Cape. So if you want to make something out of what just happened, then you’ll know where to find me. See you in a minute, Seamus.”

  I picked up my bag and went to the bar where Charlie Monaghan, who had a perfect sense for when trouble was brewing, gave me a Guinness and an apologetic shrug, then went to find something to do in the stock room. A group of kids was playing darts, but most of the room was still watching the big screen for war news. I saw Marty Doyle, Herlihy’s gopher who had driven me in Miami, scuttle across the far side of the room and I guessed he was going to inform his master that I had appeared in Boston. I waved at him, but he ignored me like a healthy man avoiding the gaze of someone stricken by the Black Death.

  Seamus waited a few minutes before joining me at the bar. A couple of men who wanted some of the hero’s fame to rub off on them offered him a drink, but Seamus told them to get lost, then settled beside me and placed his foot on the brass rail. He was a man as tall as myself, with black hair and scary pale eyes. Except for the eyes it was a good face, bony and gaunt, a real portrait of a gunman. “What the fock’s going on, Paulie?” he asked quietly.

  “I’m having a private row with Patrick about my Cape house.”

  “I don’t mean that, and you know I don’t. Hey, you!” This was to one of Charlie’s bar assistants. “Give us a hot Powers!” His Northern Irish accent was so strong that it sounded like a ‘hot Parrs’. He watched as the hot water was poured over the sugar and cloves, then as a healthy slug of whiskey was added. He was not expected to pay for his drink; no real IRA man ever had to pay for a drink in the Parish.

  Seamus lit a cigarette and squinted at me through its smoke. “Either you’re mad to come back here, or you’re wearing bullet-proof underpants. Your brother-in-law’s talking about you on the telephone in there and wee Marty Doyle is screaming that Michael Herlihy will cut you off at the knees, and you’re drinking a Guinness like you haven’t got a care in the world. You do know you’re in trouble, don’t you, Paulie?”

  “Is that what you hear, Seamus?”

  “Even the bloody Pope must have heard! Jasus! They’re saying prayers for you already.”

  I laughed. I liked Seamus, really liked him. He was good crack. “You know it’s been the best part of ten years since we met,” I told him. “Can you believe that?”

  “As long as that?” He shook his head in disbelief, then shot me a wary look. “But I’m hearing stories about you, Paulie, and they’re not good.”

  “What are you hearing?”

  “That you did a runner with some money. A lot of focking money.”

  “Only five million bucks,” I said, “in gold. Be reasonable, Seamus.”

  “Mother of God!” He almost choked on his hot Powers, then, because I had admitted my guilt so cheerfully, he grinned. “You’re mad! And they’ll never let you get away with it!”

  “Who said I had it?” I demanded. “The boat sank.”

  “And so it did, Paulie,” Seamus said, “and the Brits are giving us back the six counties for Christmas, and the Pope is giving me a cardinal’s hat. Who do you think you’re talking to, eh? Jasus, Paulie, if that boat had gone down then you were a fool not to sink with it.”

  I shrugged. “It wasn’t their money, Seamus. It came from the Libyans or the Iraqis. It had nothing to do with Belfast, not a thing.”

  “That’s not what I hear. I hear stories about Stingers.”

  I gave a reluctant nod. “Fifty-three of them.”

  Seamus grimaced. “I hear they paid half-a-million bucks as a deposit on the Stingers. And that you told them yo
u were bringing the balance!”

  “Herlihy should keep his damned mouth shut,” I said.

  “He didn’t tell me!” Seamus said. “I heard it from Ireland, so I did. I reckon Brendan Flynn wants your guts for garters.”

  “Fuck Brendan,” I said savagely.

  “That’s not how it works, Paulie, and you know it. You can’t just do a runner with the money.” Seamus had turned to watch the big room with his pale, wary eyes. “You want me to talk to them? I’ll say you’ll bring the money in soon. I’ll say it was all a misunderstanding and that none of us wants any trouble. You want me to talk to them?”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said grimly.

  “You mean those two who vanished? Liam and Gerry? Brendan told me about them. Are they dead?”

  I hesitated, then nodded. “They’re dead.”

  For a second I was tempted to confess to Seamus that I had murdered them in cold blood, but Seamus evidently did not care for he just shook his head. “Brendan doesn’t give a fock about those two. They were just supposed to look after the taxi trade and the butchers’ shops. All they had to do was slap a few faces and keep the miserable fockers in line, but no, they had to go into business for themselves, didn’t they?” Seamus meant that Gerry and Liam, despite their big tales of dead soldiers and flattened city buildings, had only ever been enforcers for the Provisional IRA’s protection rackets. Their contribution to the new Ireland had consisted of beating up Catholic barmen, shopkeepers and taxi-drivers who were late with their weekly donation to the Provos. By far the largest part of the IRA’s activities was spent in running its protection rackets, just as the Protestant gunmen did in their parts of Ulster. “But Liam and Gerry weren’t content with looking after trade,” Seamus explained. “They decided to raid a couple of sub-post-offices in Ardoyne and Legoniel and they beat the shit out of a fellow who was married to Punchy O’Neill’s sister, so Punchy complained, of course, and Brendan turned their names in to the Brits, only they managed to reach the Free State before they were ever arrested, so naturally Brendan had to look after them. But they were never any good! All they did was collect the money. Jasus, Brendan’s not going to mind them going down the drain. He’ll probably thank you for switching them off, so he will! For God’s sake, Paulie, let me talk to him. Let me make it right.”

  “Have a try,” I said, though only to make Seamus happy. There was going to be no deal over the money, none at all.

  “What shall I say?” Seamus asked. “That you’ll bring the money in soon?”

  “Sure,” I said, not meaning it at all.

  “Five million, eh?” Seamus laughed. “And I remember when you and I couldn’t find a quid between us.”

  “We were never that skint,” I said, “but they were good days.”

  “Aye, they were. Better than these.”

  “You don’t like it here?”

  “Aye! I like it well enough. Boston’s OK.” He dropped his cigarette on to the floor and killed it with the toe of his boot. His skin was pock-marked, but that blemish had never stopped the girls chasing after him, though Seamus, who seemed to have ice-water in his veins when it came to guns or bombs, was rendered helplessly nervous by women. If Roisin were alone in our Belfast apartment Seamus would sit on the back stairs rather than try to talk to her without my help. It was not that he disliked women, just that he was simply terrified of their beauty and power. “Boston’s OK,” he said again with a wry tone. “Beantown. What kind of a focking name is that for a city? Beantown.”

  “So what’s wrong with Beantown?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it. People are nice enough, so they are, but it isn’t like home, is it? The beer’s focking freezing, the summers are hotter than hell, and they’re always watching focking netball on the telly! Focking men’s netball! It’s a focking girls’ game, I tell them.”

  “It’s called basketball,” I said, as if he didn’t know, “and it’s Boston’s religion.”

  He laughed, then shook his head. “I miss Derry, Paulie. I really miss it. I mean I know it’s not much of a place, not worth a rat’s toss really, but I miss it.”

  “I miss Belfast,” I said, and I did too. I loved that city. It was a dirty, ugly, battered city and I had never been happier than when I had lived there. The city’s first impression was dour; all bomb damage and hopeless dereliction, but the brick streets crackled with wit and were warmed by friendship.

  Seamus grimaced. “I sometimes think that if they’d just let me go home for one short day I’d kiss a focking Apprentice Boy out of sheer gratitude.” He gave a brief and bitter laugh. “I told that to some fellow in here and he didn’t even know who the focking Apprentice Boys are! He’d not even heard of the Orangemen!”

  “Don’t blame them,” I said. “They love Ireland, right enough, but they don’t want to know how complicated it is. You can’t blame them, Seamus, and their hearts are in the right place.”

  But Seamus wasn’t listening to my explanations. “They had a fellow give a talk in here, what? Six months back? Something like that, and he said the focking Brits had built a focking gas chamber in Long Kesh, and that they were systematically murdering the whole Catholic population!” Seamus grimaced. “I mean, shit! I don’t like the focking Brits, but they haven’t got that bad. Not yet, anyway. I didn’t say anything, of course, what’s the focking point?”

  “None.”

  He laughed. “And your brother-in-law, eh? Getting slapped about in Ballymurphy! So the lads are still pulling that stunt, are they?” He shook his head happily. “What a prick Patrick is! I know he’s your family, Paulie, but what a prick!”

  “I know. He’s a creep.”

  “And family, that’s another thing! My da died last year and I couldn’t be with him. It isn’t right, a son not being at his father’s grave. And my mam’s not well. Something with her chest, her breathing, like. My brother wrote and told me, but what can I do?”

  So there was a brother, and Kathleen Donovan had not lied to me, and I suddenly wondered what the hell use was five million bucks without someone to share it with? “Go back to Ireland,” I suggested to Seamus. “Your ma can cross into Donegal and see you there, can’t she?”

  “She can, but the focking Garda will have me in Portlaoise Jail before you could spit. They want me for a wee job I did in Dundalk.” He grinned apologetically. I knew it would be no good asking what the wee job was, though it was almost certainly a bank raid. Seamus was a much wanted man, though nowhere was he wanted more avidly than in Northern Ireland where he had made his bloody and infamous escape from Long Kesh. The Provisionals had lost two men in the breakout, but they reckoned the propaganda value of Seamus’s freedom was well worth the price. But now, as an illegal immigrant in America and a wanted felon in Britain and Ireland, the battle for his political asylum was filling newspaper columns on both sides of the Atlantic. “They say I’m a focking symbol,” Seamus gloomily told me. “They say I’ll be Grand Marshal of their St Patrick’s Day parade next year. They want to give me a medal of freedom on the State House steps. They’re even talking about making a focking film of me! Can you believe that? Some prick little actor in Hollywood says he wants to make a film of me! But I don’t want to be in a focking movie, Paul. I want to go home.”

  “Go and see a plastic surgeon,” I suggested.

  “I was thinking of doing that,” he said softly. “I tell you, with all the focking money they’re spending just keeping me out of jail I could have looked like Marilyn Monroe by now, tits and all.” He blushed for having dared say a rude word, and for a second I thought he was going to cross himself, then he just shook his head sorrowfully. “Shit, Paul, I just want to go home. I don’t want any more trouble. The younger lads can do some of the fighting now, eh? I’ve put a few quid away, so I have, and there’s a scrap of farmland near Dunnamanagh that would do me just grand. A few cattle, some arable, and a tight little house. That’ll do me right enough.” He paused, his eyes far away,
then he lit a new cigarette. “I was thinking of Roisin the other day.” He had reddened with embarrassment, and I wondered just how badly she had humiliated him.

  “I often think of her,” I admitted.

  “I had a letter from her sister a few weeks back. It came to Chuck’s office, my lawyer, right?”

  “Did you write back?”

  He shook his head.

  “What did the letter want?”

  “She wanted to know what happened to Roisin, like. Christ, what was I to say?”

  “The truth?” I suggested, though in my mouth the word tasted like ash.

  “Who the fock knows if Roisin even had a sister?” Seamus asked me. “And Chuck said I shouldn’t write back, in case it was a set-up by the focking Brits. You know, to get information? So he chucked the letter away.”

  “It’s just as well,” I said vaguely.

  “And what was I supposed to tell the sister?” Seamus asked indignantly. “That Roisin was shot by the focking Arabs?”

  “Right.”

  “Focking maniacs, that’s what those Arabs are. Hanging’s too good for the fockers.” Seamus stared at the green cutout shamrocks that decorated the bar’s back-mirror. “She never did betray me, Paulie. No one did. The Brits said they had the information off her, but they never did. They were just making trouble, and I reckon their trouble worked for they got her a bullet, right?” He frowned. “And she was a rare girl. She had a tongue on her though, didn’t she just? Never heard a woman speak like it.” He suddenly froze, his eyes staring at the mirror which reflected the far side of the room. “Are those two boys after you, you think?”

  Two men, both wearing plaid jackets buttoned tight up to their necks, had appeared at the far side of the hall. They were young, broad-chested, and convinced of their own toughness, and neither was trying to hide their interest in me. I suspected that Patrick had whistled them up in the hope that they could retrieve the money I’d just lifted from his pocket. “They’re looking for me, right enough,” I told Seamus.