Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  “Time?” O’Neill said.

  “One-thirty.”

  Now GRANITE was singing. Singing when he didn’t want to sing. When all he wanted was to get out. His head felt like it was going to explode.

  That’ll be another good man gone to jail, come Monday, he thought.

  GRANITE felt the pressure hemming him in from all sides—from Duggan and the others in the brigade, from O’Neill. And also from his wife and the bills she ran up.

  Now he had to go and face Duggan, who had another job for him to do that afternoon. One that he also wasn’t going to tell O’Neill about.

  Saturday, January 5, 2013

  Belfast

  Johnson hovered over his open suitcase. He picked up his laptop, took it to the table, and flipped open the lid. He was still undecided about whether to stay or whether to take the flight out of Belfast that was booked for that evening.

  There was a typically brief email from his son.

  Dad, are you back by Tuesday? I have a school game, state championships. Home v. Bangor. We need support! Love, Peter.

  Peter always liked his father to watch his high school basketball games. He brought him luck, he always said, and with reason. Peter, an industrious point guard with increasingly silky passing skills, had won every game Johnson had watched so far that season.

  He tapped his pen on the table and sipped from the cup of coffee that he had just made. Now he really didn’t know which option to take.

  Five minutes later, the text message arrived.

  I’ve decided to chat. Working Akimbo’s tonight at 5. Can meet in pub down road. Sunflower, 4.30. Moira.

  Half past four. And his flight was due to leave at half past five.

  Johnson laughed to himself. What the hell . . .

  He drained his coffee, went out onto the balcony of Donovan’s apartment, pulled out his pack of Marlboros, and lit one.

  He sat down on one of the chairs and smoked it slowly, watching the passersby below, the buses rumbling up the road, the buzz of taxis.

  Then he sent a reply.

  Good. Looking forward to it. See you there. Joe

  The response came straight back.

  OK. Will help if I can, but have to be careful. Can’t afford for my stepfather to find out.

  Chapter Nine

  Saturday, January 5, 2013

  Belfast

  Johnson turned the corner past the tattoo parlor onto Union Street. It was dark now, at twenty past four, and the butcher’s and thrift shops on the right had their steel shutters pulled down.

  His phone beeped. It was a text message from his sister, Amy, telling him everything was well with his two children back home. Her husband, Don, had taken them to the movies and then to lunch at their favorite burger joint. Did he know yet when he was heading back to Portland? No rush, but she needed to plan.

  Johnson smiled. Nothing had changed there then. Since they’d been kids, she’d always planned and diarized everything; he never did.

  Ever since Johnson’s wife, Kathy, had died in 2005, Amy and Don had helped him when necessary by looking after Carrie and Peter. It was a real blessing when he had important extended work trips, such as this one, which lasted some time.

  He put the phone back in his pocket, took out his pack of Marlboros, and lit one. He wasn’t even sure why he was smoking; he rarely did at home—normally just on work trips away. Maybe it was a comfort of some kind.

  There were few street lamps on Union Street, but he could see the lights from the Sunflower’s windows reflected in the wetness of the road next to it and the silhouette of the steel security cage at the door.

  Johnson leaned against a brick wall and looked toward the bar, past a small parking lot on the left with a steel security fence separating it from the road and the graffiti-covered wall of a tall warehouse building on the right.

  On the pavement outside the Sunflower, three people were involved in a scuffle. It looked like a woman and two men.

  Johnson’s first instinct was to go and look, but then he heard Donovan’s voice in his head.

  Whatever you do, if you see any fights, scuffles, just walk the other way.

  He hung back and waited.

  The woman screamed and shouted at the two men, one of whom slapped her hard across the face. She fell to the ground and screamed again.

  “You bastard,” she shouted and sat up on the tarmac. “I’ll bloody kill you, I will. That’s it. You’re finished.”

  The taller of the two men shaped to kick her on the ground, and she curled herself up into a fetal position as the impact came, straight into her buttocks. Then she shrieked again.

  That was too much for Johnson. His instinct was about to shout at the two men and intervene, but at the last moment he checked himself. Being identified as an American in a dark Belfast back street by two thugs might not be the smartest move right now, he calculated.

  The two men, both wearing black leather jackets, left Moira and turned and walked quickly in Johnson’s direction. The one who had done the kicking was tall, angular, and slightly stooped; the other was thicker set with a mustache.

  For a moment, Johnson thought they were going to start something, and he braced himself. The shorter man glanced briefly at Johnson as they passed, but they both walked on and disappeared out of sight around the corner.

  Johnson stubbed out his cigarette on the pavement and walked toward the woman, who had picked herself up. Now that she was in the light cast from the windows of the Sunflower, Johnson recognized her.

  It was Moira.

  Her hair had partly escaped the ribbon that held it back, and blood was dribbling from a split in her lip where she had been struck. Her black dress had muddy streaks from where she had landed on the road, and lipstick was smeared across her right cheek.

  The contents of her small handbag had spilled all over the road. Lipsticks, a hairbrush, a hair clip, a red ribbon, two credit cards, a few bank notes, and a tin of home-rolled cigarettes, from which the lid had become detached.

  She scrambled to stuff her belongings back into her bag.

  Johnson reached her just as she tucked the bag under her arm and limped onto the sidewalk.

  “Moira, it’s Joe. Are you all right? I saw what happened.”

  She looked at him with a blank expression. Then recognition dawned.

  “Oh, no, I’m not all right. Would you be all right if you’d just been beaten up by your bloody stepdad and his thuggish mate?” Her right heel had slipped halfway out of her shoe, and she tugged it back into position.

  “Come on, let’s go sit down,” Johnson said. “You can tidy yourself up. Can you walk?” He indicated toward the pub with his thumb.

  Moira looked at the pub. “No, no, definitely not in there.” Her voice rose sharply. “He might come back. I can’t go to work looking a mess like this—they’d fire me. I’m going to have to text and tell them I’m ill, then go home. Can you help me to my car? It’s not far.”

  Johnson nodded, thinking his chance of speaking to Moira had just gone south. “Sure.”

  She tapped a message into her phone, then looked up and down the street carefully in both directions before beginning to limp heavily in the opposite direction from Akimbo’s. After a few paces she stopped.

  “Do you want a hand,” Johnson asked. “You’re hobbling.”

  She hesitated. “No, I’m fine . . . actually, yes. My hip’s hurting, my back, my foot.”

  Johnson slipped his left arm around her waist, and she put her arm over his shoulders. He took her weight, her body pressed tight into his, and they continued slowly on. She was almost as tall as he was; her dark hair blew across his face, and he noticed she was wearing a delicate perfume that he vaguely recognized that only partly camouflaged the whiff of tobacco on her.

  “Him and his bastard friends, they think they own Northern Ireland,” she said.

  “IRA, yes?” Johnson asked.

  She nodded. “Yeah, but dissidents, living in the
past, all of them. Dinosaurs. They think violence is the only way to sort things out. They kill and beat people up, and they get away with it. Most people have moved on from that. The police are useless.”

  Johnson knew then he had to get Moira to talk while her outrage still burned hot, before the shutters he’d seen in her eyes the previous day descended again.

  “So what was that all about? With your stepdad, I mean?”

  Moira stopped briefly and looked at him. “You, I think.”

  “Me?”

  “Yep,” she said. “He said he’d heard some American investigator had been sniffing around, trying to find out where he was and where I was, and I was to keep my mouth shut, otherwise he’d seal it for me. I told him to piss off. I talk to whom I want to talk to. That’s when he hit me. It’s not the first time he’s done it, by a long way. Disagree with him, and next thing you know, wham. First time I’d seen the bastard in six months. He hates me, really does.”

  She winced and rubbed her hip, then looked at Johnson. “But I don’t care anymore. He can beat me up all he wants. I’m not going to let him win.”

  Moira paused. “Can you drive? I’m not sure I can like this.”

  “Your car, you mean?”

  “Yes, back to my place. It’s a clapped-out Corsa, piece of crap, but it just about works. I’m gonna tell you a few things.”

  The Corsa, once a vivid purple, was parked two streets away and was indeed clapped-out. Its bodywork was dented, scratched, and chipped, and inside it reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The floor was covered in mud, chocolate bar wrappers, and empty drinks cans.

  Johnson was surprised that a young woman who seemed to take such care over her appearance would own such a messy car.

  “I know what you’re thinking. I bought it off a friend a couple of months ago,” Moira said. “A hundred and ten quid. It was all I could afford. Fifteen years old. Haven’t had time to clean it since.”

  However, the engine started the first time, and she directed him to the end of the road.

  “Who are you, actually?” she asked suddenly.

  “I’m an investigator, I told you. I specialize in war crimes but not just that. I used to work for the CIA, years back, then became a Nazi hunter for the US government. I run my own business these days.”

  “What are you doing here in Belfast?”

  “I was called in by someone.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Sorry, can’t say. Someone concerned about the dissidents, the killings, because it’s affecting him and his business. He thinks the police are a waste of time. I don’t actually know if I’m going to do the job. Just thinking about it.” Johnson steered around a sharp corner.

  “And how did you find me?”

  Johnson told her about the old neighbor in Cavendish Street and the farewell party at Queen’s.

  She turned her head and looked at him. “Persistent bastard, aren’t you?”

  Johnson shrugged.

  “You should bloody do it,” she said.

  Johnson struggled to keep a straight face at this beautiful but foulmouthed twentysomething. “You’re a straight-speaking bunch here, aren’t you?”

  They stopped at some traffic lights and she gave him further driving directions.

  “Just to warn you,” she said, “my house is just as bad as the car. I share with two other nursing students. Both girls. They’re both away, though, so we’re okay to talk there.”

  The journey back to Moira’s house took just ten minutes. It was a small redbrick terraced house in St. James Crescent, in an area wedged between the M1 divided highway and Falls Road.

  “Catholic area here, I’m assuming?” Johnson asked.

  “Yeah, this is nearly all Catholic. But you go the other side of the M1, over there, and it’s Protestant. That’s the problem in this city.”

  Johnson couldn’t logically see why having two different groups of Christians in one city should be a problem at all. The line of Scripture that his mother often used when he was a kid, quoting Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, sprang to mind. What was it? A new commandment I give you: love one another. Something like that.

  He shook his head but said nothing and carefully parked the Corsa half on the sidewalk, half on the road, at Moira’s direction.

  “I was meant to be on a flight heading out of Belfast now, going home,” Johnson said. He looked at his watch.

  She gave a small laugh. “I think you should stay.”

  Again he supported her as she got out of the car, his arm around her waist and her arm around his neck. He could feel her body heat against his side, even through their coats, and her breath on the side of his cheek.

  It had been a while since Johnson had been that close to a woman. He saw her glance down at his ring finger, which was bare.

  “Good thing your wife can’t see you, taking a young woman home in this state,” Moira said.

  “My wife died in 2005,” he said. “I’m a single dad, with two teenagers back home. My sister looks after them when I’m away.”

  “Ah, sorry to hear that. My mother, Ann, was a single mom—my father died when I was two, and my mother married Dessie when I was four. She died when I was fourteen, eight years ago. So I know a bit about that kind of stuff.”

  They made their way into the house. She was right. It was a mess inside, a typical student house. Piles of unwashed crockery in the sink, cereal packets on the countertop, jam jars, empty baked bean tins, and a half-eaten baguette.

  She sat in the living room on a battered black faux leather sofa, the padding of which was emerging through various splits and tears.

  “If you go into the kitchen, you’ll find a bottle of Jameson,” Moira said. “Can you bring it here with two glasses? And a pack of painkillers from the cupboard above the fridge.”

  Once he’d found them among the detritus in the kitchen, she poured two large measures of Jameson into the glasses.

  Johnson sat at the other end of the sofa. “So what’s your stepfather’s story?” he asked. “What’s he done and why’s he so against you?”

  She took a couple of tablets from the pack, popped them into her mouth, sipped the whiskey, and sighed.

  “In my view? He’s just angry with everyone,” Moira said. “I think it’s partly about his dad. He was shot dead by somebody—I never exactly knew who.”

  “So nobody knows who did it?” Johnson asked. He took a large sip from his glass.

  “No.” Moira took another slug of whiskey. “I can’t stand Dessie’s violence, the killing. His republicanism I agree with, always have done—I’d like a united Ireland. But it has to be a political, democratic route, not his route.” She shivered.

  “But he gets away with it?”

  She snorted. “He’s a careful bastard. They’ve never pinned anything on him. He’s like a leopard—you never see him, but when he strikes he’s deadly.”

  Moira stared up at the ceiling, searching for the words to sum up her stepfather. When it came to killing, he’d rather do it from a distance, she said, where everything was emotionally detached, where he could somehow separate himself from the outcome.

  “His mates called him the Dentist,” she said.

  “Why?” Johnson asked, as he drained his glass.

  “Because they said he was so accurate with a rifle he could take out a tooth from a mile away.”

  She reached across and refilled his whiskey glass, then her own.

  Johnson sat back and sieved through what Moira had told him.

  “So the sniper killings that have happened recently—”

  Moira interrupted. “That’ll be him, no doubt about it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There’s nobody else who could do that. Not from such long distances. Look at that chief constable. The TV reports said it was done from three-quarters of a mile away.” She threw up her hands. “Bloody obvious, isn’t it? But he’ll get away with it. He won’t have left any traces behind. The
re’ll be no proof.”

  There was silence for a few seconds.

  “You don’t talk?” Johnson asked.

  “I’ve left him behind,” she said. “I came up here to Belfast when I left school at eighteen; I couldn’t wait to leave. I messed about for a couple of years, worked in a supermarket, then decided on this nursing course. I’m going to plow my own furrow. I don’t like the job I do at Akimbo, but it pays better than the supermarket, the tips are bloody good, and I fund my uni course that way.”

  Moira grabbed a road atlas of Ireland from the bookshelf at her elbow and shuffled across the sofa next to Johnson. She winced as she moved, rubbed her hip, then spread out the map over her knee, balancing half of it on his thigh.

  Their knees touched underneath the map.

  “Here, this is where he lives. It’s where I grew up. Willows Farm,” she said, unselfconsciously leaving her leg in contact with his. She pointed to a spot on the map right on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, south of Forkhill.

  She took another large sip of whiskey.

  Her stepfather’s farm spanned the border, she explained. Half was in the Republic, the other half in south Armagh.

  “But he doesn’t make most of his money from the farm,” she said. “The land is more handy for other things—like moving weapons from one side of the border to the other, smuggling from south to north, escaping after jobs, you name it.”

  “Smuggling?” Johnson said. “What kind of stuff?”

  “Cigarettes and diesel, mainly. They’re lethal, the smugglers down on the border. They’ll run you off the road if you get too close to a drop. We often used to have lorries coming to the farmhouse in the middle of the night, delivering cigs and stuff. I think his friend Patrick sends the smokes, from the States.”

  “From the States? Who is Patrick?”

  “Yes, Patrick McKinney. That’s where he escaped to. He smuggles cigarettes in from there, certainly used to, so I presume he probably still does. I think he lives in Boston. How d’you think they fund their operations? He escaped from the Maze prison along with my stepdad’s father, and they never found him.”