Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

  In his head Billy started hearing the clang of pans. It was the housewives whacking their pots to let them know a British patrol was coming. Jesus, Mary, turn it off! He didn’t want to think about Belfast anymore. He only wanted to remember Sofia, where they had treated them as revolutionary heroes. These Yanks wanted a double-talking television show for their money.

  Billy couldn’t turn off the pans. He couldn’t turn off the roar of the helicopter overhead. Or was it the roar of the motor of a Saracen in the narrow street? You can’t believe the noise those motherless armored cars can make while you’re lying facedown in a sewer drain with the shit floating past your nose.

  Broad Daylight Billy they called him, but when you shoot them in daylight, you have to know where to hide. The last time they ran tear gas into the sewer and blinded his cousin Eddie. He lay there in the gas and let it eat away his eyes.

  You can’t tell the Yanks that kind of story. They only want to hear the good ones, the wins. They think it’s a stupid movie with a happy ending guaranteed.

  “There he is!”

  It was the big Yank, the police chief, charging at him across the sand like a runaway Saracen. He grabbed Billy by the back of the neck and started roaring about the money. The mollycoddle Mayor McBride and Slick Dick O’Gorman were with him, their faces lost in the dark.

  “The money. You’ve got the money,” they shouted, the waves half-drowning their voices.

  It took Billy another minute to realize the gun money was gone. He swore he knew nothing about it. He told them about passing out. They didn’t believe him. “What the fook would I do with that kind of money?” Billy screamed. “There’s only one bastard in the organization who’d want that kind of money. You’re lookin’ at him.”

  Wishing it were a gun, Billy pointed his finger at O’Gorman. There was no question about it. Slick Dick was planning to sing the Ballymena anthem all the way to some bank in Brazil. He had the money. But Billy Kilroy vowed O’Gorman would not live to spend it.

  On the second floor of St. Augustine’s rectory, Father Dennis McAvoy, better known to others as Captain Arthur Littlejohn, sat at a desk writing a report to his superiors in London. He described how he had followed O’Gorman and Kilroy and the Irish-Americans to their rendezvous with Joey Zaccaro in the bathing pavilion, where he had no difficulty hiding in the cavernous men’s locker room and hearing and seeing everything that transpired. Afterward, he had followed Zaccaro and his bodyguard to the house on Leeds Point, where he decided to dispose of them and seize the money.

  I realize this is a bit irregular in the USA, but it’s no worse than some of the things we did to the Germans over here before World War II. My father was attached to Intrepid’s unit, you know, and I’ve heard a lot about his capers. Taking the money will, I think, put quite a dent in their plans, not to mention their confidence in each other’s honesty, if I may use such an inappropriate word in this context.

  I’m sending the money to our special address in Dublin where I trust it can be laundered into pounds. It should provide a nice boost to our Special operations in the Republic and in the north. I always thought it was a bit sticky, robbing banks in the Republic for our unattributable funds.

  Behind him on the bed was Joey Zaccaro’s briefcase, with the thousand-dollar bills in carefully counted piles. He left the letter unsigned and packaged the money in a cardboard carton he had obtained from Father Hart’s cellar. He did not mention his exact whereabouts or his disguise. Even at headquarters, not everyone was trustworthy. People talked over cocktails, in bars. His disguise would make especially good telling. Could there be a better way to befuddle the Paddys?

  Captain Littlejohn lay down on the bed and tried to sleep, but it was out of the question. He kept seeing Jacqueline Chasen spread-eagled on the double bed with Joey Zaccaro standing over her. It reminded him of a night when he was on reconnaissance in Belfast. He was in bed with his favorite informer, Maeve Flanagan, when two IRA gunmen burst into the room. He dove out the window although he was sure there would be another death squad waiting for him in the alley. But they had come for Maeve, not him, and let him go. Someone had tipped them that she was selling secrets as well as herself. They had tied her on the bed that way and done unspeakable things to her before she died.

  Littlejohn’s disguise somehow intensified his memory of Jacqueline Chasen on the bed. Did becoming a priest redouble the assaults of lust? An interesting question. Or was it a logical development in the soul of a man who was committing ritual blasphemy every day at the altar, consecrating bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ, distributing it as Communion, when he had no such powers? He was giving the faithful the equivalent of thinly sliced toast instead of the bread of heaven. He had told himself God would understand, but as he performed the rite each day, he had begun to grow indifferent to His opinion. He even began to think of his performances on the altar as acts of defiance, of accusation, to a God who allowed the atrocities the IRA committed in Belfast.

  Toward dawn, Captain Littlejohn slipped into a light doze. He dreamt he was somehow soaring over Paradise Beach in the night sky, looking down on the rows of houses and the white surf breaking on the sand. To his amazement and delight, he had grown a pair of immense dark wings. He swooped down on the house where O’Gorman and Kilroy slept and on the nearby houses of the mayor, Desmond McBride, and the police chief, O’Toole. Then he soared skyward again and descended on Leeds Point. Into Jacqueline Chasen’s bedroom he flew to softly, silently descend on her sleeping body and fold her in his winged arms.

  Like a princess in a fairy tale, she did not awaken. She returned his passionate kisses, she opened her body to his thrusting maleness. Sated, the angel soared again toward the stars, exulting in the power, the freedom that God had bestowed on him. Only then, as he gazed down on Leeds Point, did he notice that his feet had become cloven hooves.

  Captain Littlejohn awoke, trembling. Was it a warning, that dream, a warning against the pride that was festering in his soul? He stripped off his clothes and opened his suitcase. From the bottom he extracted a cat-o’-nine-tails. It was time to chastise the treacherous body, to do penance for deeds done on reconnaissance, for wishes that were equally sinful. He opened the window and allowed the cold March wind to chill his flesh.

  Captain Littlejohn knelt in the darkness and raised the whip to whirl its biting edges against his buttocks and back. But the pain did not create the penitence, the humility, he sought. Instead the defiant voice spoke in his soul again. He liked the image of himself as a dark angel, soaring above this tawdry American town, taking his pleasure where he found it, exulting in the power of his ingenious disguise, using his superior weaponry and intelligence to muddle the stupid Paddys and their witless American cousins. He liked it, and if God did not like it—that was God’s problem.

  STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT

  “I know it sounds odious,” Dick O’Gorman said, “but don’t let it give you the nyrps.”

  In Belfast, odious meant “peculiar.” The nyrps were nerves. O’Gorman was telling Hughie McGinty to keep calm. Was that all Black Dick was saying? That nickname was intended, as all Irish nicknames, to describe more than his appearance. In Belfast, McGinty’s nickname had been Dink.

  The telephone shook in McGinty’s hand. “You can’t tell me why the delay?”

  “We’re having some trouble with the Italians. The bastards aren’t coming through with the cash. They want to go on credit. We’re negotiating. It’s a bore but what can we do?”

  It didn’t ring true. It didn’t hit him right. But something else, something deadly, might hit Hughie McGinty in a day or two, if he was the reason why the Italians were stalling.

  “I’ll stand by,” he said.

  “Give Nora my regards.”

  “I can’t do that. She doesn’t know anything. She’d go crazy if she found out I was doin’ this. After what happened to her father and brother, she’d go crazy.”

  “I just wanted to say hello.�
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  “Well, you can’t.”

  “Ah, poor Dink. Still jealous?”

  “We’ve got two lovely kids. She thinks we’ve put Belfast behind us.”

  “So you have, up to a point. You’re a lucky sod, Dinko. Let’s hope your luck holds.”

  Click. The line was dead. Josh Moore was tapping his fingers on the counter. “Come on, Hughie. I want a dozen three-quarter-inch plywood cut to these numbers.” He shoved the slip at McGinty.

  “Right away, right away.”

  It was go go, rush rush, all day at Friel’s Lumber Yard, where McGinty was assistant manager. Eric Friel spent most of the day on the telephone with his latest girlfriend. He had inherited the lumberyard from his father and let McGinty run it, but declined to pay him a salary in accord with his responsibilities. Not the sort of situation that won the heart, McGinty was fond of saying. It didn’t stir admiration for American ways.

  In Belfast, McGinty’s father had worked in a lumberyard not unlike this one. It was owned by a Protestant named Dooley who treated his Catholic workers with uncommon generosity. That did not stop the IRA from burning the yard one night. It might even have impelled them to do it. McGinty’s American boss, Friel, to make matters completely confusing, was a Catholic, an RC cheapskate.

  McGinty had already joined the IRA when Dooley’s Yard went up. He had been recruited in high school by Richard O’Gorman, who taught Irish history and culture to seniors. After hours, he taught them revolution until the authorities caught on and pink-slipped him. O’Gorman had been McGinty’s hero until the night the car bombs started exploding. McGinty had managed to swallow the lumberyard even though it put his father on the dole. But he couldn’t swallow the car bombs. They killed innocent people. He refused to drive one of these rolling death machines anywhere. He let them call him a coward and threaten him with kneecapping. He still said no.

  Go go, rush rush, shoving plywood and oak and cedar into the trucks of builders who triple-charged their customers for it and got rich while Hugh McGinty struggled along on $26,000 a year. It was twice as much as anyone in Belfast made, but in America money came in and money went out at a terrifying pace. He was a dishrag when the day finally ended and young Friel tooled off in his gray Jaguar and McGinty guided his Ford Escort through the usual madness on S-3 to his split-level house in Metuchen.

  As he pulled off the highway and drove through the quiet suburban streets, the rage began to thicken in McGinty’s chest again. By the time he reached his house it throbbed there like a second heart. He was back in Belfast, with the engagement ring for Nora in his pocket and their emigration papers signed and approved, listening to Dick O’Gorman tell him about the night he went to Nora’s house to give her father and brother orders for the London bombing campaign.

  I went back the next night when I knew she’d be alone. I told her I just wanted to make sure she was all right. She cried and I put my arm around her. Before you could say King Billy we were in the bed screwing away. I came back many a night after that for a good month. You’ve got yourself a lively one, Dink me boy. A lively one.

  McGinty had known exactly what the bastard was doing. He was dumping shit on his head. It was better than kneecapping, better than gouging out an eye, to send a man to America tormented by the knowledge that the IRA had laid his wife. It was a way of saying, See what we can do to you? There’s nothing we can’t do to you. Thenceforth, they knew McGinty would be waiting for them, maybe hoping that if he did a job for them, they’d send word that it was all a lie. They might even send O’Gorman himself to apologize.

  At least a hundred times, McGinty saw himself in a shadowy bar, not much different from the pub in which he had heard the original story. O’Gorman, his heroic head high, the magical smile glowing, clapped him on the shoulder and said, I had to do it, Dink. It was orders. I had to tell you that awful lie. Can you forgive me?

  He did. In the bar scene McGinty always forgave O’Gorman. He wept and forgave the bastard who had poured cyanide into his belly ten years ago. He knew the scene was ridiculous. He knew it would never happen. The story was true. Nothing but the truth, the cyanidal truth, could cause such pain. That was why, when the sweet little thing from the Irish Mission to the UN had walked into Friel’s Lumber Yard and told him in her soft Dublin brogue what they wanted him to do—and added with shining eyes that Dick O’Gorman was going to be in charge of the mission—he had instantly vowed, before God and Satan, to betray him.

  The money was not important, although it was not unimportant either, McGinty told himself. He had heard about the federal witness program, how they paid plenty of money to a man for his services and then set him up in another part of the country with a new identity and a business of his own, maybe a liquor store or even a lumberyard in Arizona. They were doing a lot of building in Arizona.

  Ah. It didn’t matter what they did for him. It was hatred, nothing but hatred, that had sent McGinty to the telephone to offer his services to the U.S. government because he wanted to reduce the level of violence in Northern Ireland.

  He had made the call to the FBI before he stopped to figure out what he would tell Nora, if they asked him to testify. He had swallowed the awfulness of that possible moment by convincing himself that would be the time to fling all the cards on the table. To find out from her if the story O’Gorman had told was true and, if it was—he knew it was—offer to forgive her in return for her forgiveness. It would be a scene drenched in sanctifying grace, in sacramental beauty. Nora Collins, the daughter of the IRA, a woman with a father and a brother serving life sentences in British jails, forgiving her husband the informer.

  Was it possible that Nora knew already? Was he talking in his sleep? Crying out to the FBI to protect him? Had O’Gorman called to check him out and she told Black Dick everything? Worst of all, was she in on the secret from the start? Did she know what O’Gorman had told him? Was she keeping him the way that Russian woman had kept Lee Harvey Oswald until the moment came for him to pull the trigger?

  “Shewy darlin’, what’s wrong?”

  Nora had her arms around him, her blond head on his chest. The tender sensuality in her voice, the use of Shewy, an affectionate version of Hughie, stunned him. He had opened the door and stepped into the house without realizing it. His rage and fear were turning him into a robot.

  “What the devil are you talkin’ about?” he said.

  “You had the most awful skelly, I was sure you got pinked.”

  For a moment he had to stop and think to remember that a skelly was a fixed look. He was losing touch with Belfast slang.

  “Pinked? That twit Friel wouldn’t last a week without me.”

  Brian, seven, and Bridget, nine, both as plump as any Protestant brat in Belfast, came rushing in to search his pockets. They were tremendously disappointed to find nothing. Most nights he stopped to buy them some gum or candy and they had great fun going from pocket to pocket, while he whooped and yelled and claimed they were tickling him to death.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ll play dropsies. Tonight I’m going to win.”

  Brian got out his collection of baseball cards and they started playing the old Belfast game. The contest was to land a card so it touched or covered another card. If you covered more than half, you kept the card. Nora went back to the kitchen to cook dinner. They played dropsies for a half hour and McGinty let them win all his cards. According to the rules, they got a nickel a card. They came to dinner delighted to have an extra fifty cents to spend on candy in the school lunchroom.

  McGinty said grace and sliced the pork roast. Nora sighed and wondered where in the world he had learned to carve meat so beautifully. They never had anything worth carving in Kilwickie. For a moment a surge of love overwhelmed the rage throbbing in McGinty’s chest. She was always giving him little compliments, trying to tell him how grateful, how happy she was to be living in this land of plenty with a husband who went to work every day, even if it was to a job he disliked. She was so gent
le, so tender, so different from hard-edged American women who treated a man as if he were a walking cash register.

  Nora chattered gossip from the block, mostly news about pregnancies and job changes. They were all around the same age, all in the great American race for the dollar. At times McGinty wondered if it made sense, to work so hard. He remembered the lyrical descriptions O’Gorman had given them of a socialist Ireland, where every man would share equally in the riches of their green island. It was believable, almost touchable. A life of ease and plenty for every man, without the grinding competition of capitalism.

  The vision made no sense on this churning, surging continent with its rivers of cars and hundreds of millions of people. America was a thousand Irelands. She was too vast for comprehension. All you could do was dash into her future until you ran out of luck or strength.

  “That young fellow called today. Houlihan. You haven’t been able to get the poor lad a job?”

  “No. What’s he doing calling here?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he tried you at the yard and the line was busy. He said to tell you he needed word because he might have another job.”

  “He did!”

  “What’s it to you?” Nora said, baffled by his tension.

  “Nothing I suppose. But I’ve got a builder all warmed up to give him one. It’ll make me look a bit of a fool.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  Anxiety mingled with sympathy on her waif’s face. She still found it hard to believe that a Catholic would not get fired for the smallest mistake. “It’s nothin’ for you to worry about,” he said.

  But it was something for him to worry about. He would have to go see his two patriot boys tonight. He cooked up a story about getting behind on the books at the lumberyard and drove south to Madison Township, calling from a highway phone to make sure both Houlihans would be home. Jerry, the older brother, met him at the door.