“What’s happenin’?” he said, peering past McGinty into the night, as if he thought there might be an army of policemen right behind him.
“Not a thing. That’s what I came down to tell you. We’ll have to stand by for word from our commander in chief.”
Houlihan invited him into a slovenly living room. Children’s toys and last week’s newspapers were all over the place. It made McGinty doubly grateful for Nora’s housekeeping. Houlihan’s wife was a nurse who worked nights. Maybe that was why she never found time to clean the house.
“What’s this about another job?” McGinty said.
“It isn’t me. It’s Larry. He’s turning flooter-futted,” Houlihan said.
“Get him out here.”
Larry Houlihan shuffled from his bedroom in response to his brother’s call. He was as tall as Jerry but much thinner. On his emaciated face was a haunted look. He had spent eighteen months in Long Kesh, the special prison the British had built for the IRA in Belfast. For his last two months he had participated in an attempt to launch a hunger strike, a tactic that had scored a propaganda victory a decade ago. The experience seemed to have left him a permanent skeleton.
“What’s wrong with you?” McGinty demanded.
“I can’t sleep thinkin’ about what could go wrong. I got enough bad dreams about the Kesh.”
“I thought you were the one I could depend on,” McGinty said. “You were the one who saw what they’re doin’ to our best men. You saw the beatin’s. You saw your friend Joe Walsh go to the limit in the strike. You didn’t, for reasons no one holds against you. But here’s a chance to redeem yourself completely. To strike a blow that will maybe free your friends.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Larry said. “But I couldn’t take another stretch in the jug. Any jug.”
“Even if the worst happened, if you did have to go back, you could look people in the face,” McGinty snapped.
“He’s right,” Jerry said. “We’ll stick with you. But tell them it can’t drag on forever. We can’t sit here eternally on day wages. My wife and I are thinkin’ of goin’ to California. Takin’ Larry with us. Maybe he wouldn’t be so jumpy in the sunshine. Maybe he’d get his appetite back.”
“Maybe you’ll be able to go back to a new Ireland,” McGinty said.
He almost gagged on the manure he was shoveling down the throats of these two wet-eared donkeys. He was recruiting them for nothing but prison, nothing but rage and hatred at Hugh McGinty and his kind for all eternity. When it was O’Gorman, no one but Slick Dick and his irresistible prick, that he wanted to put behind bars. Maybe he could persuade the FBI or the judge that the Houlihans were innocent.
“Come on now. Let’s go over to the clubhouse and hoist a few.”
He drove them to the headquarters of the Friendly Sons of the Shillelagh and they stood at the stupendous bar and drank whiskey with beer chasers until midnight. Larry told more stories about the things the British did to people in Long Kesh. How some of the hard core were beaten for hours at a time to crack them. Eventually he got to the hunger strike. He always got to the hunger strike. How Joe Walsh told him as he was dying that he wanted Larry to quit. He wanted one of them to live and carry on the fight.
“It was a right haun,” Larry said, his eyes wild. “The leadership admits the whole thing was a right haun from go. What did it accomplish? Who remembers Joe now?”
“Mistakes get made. God knows we’ve been makin’ mistakes since the battle of the Boyne,” McGinty said. “But does that mean we should give up on Ireland?”
Yes, whispered Nora’s sweet voice. Yes. McGinty could hear her telling him what a mess Ireland was, how wise, how brave he was to get himself and her out of it. Jesus God, why hadn’t he told that Dublin bitch from the UN mission to go jump in the Hudson? Why had he made that call to the FBI?
It was 1 A.M. by the time McGinty stumbled through the door of his own house. Nora was waiting for him, watching some movie about the American gangsters of the 1930s. One of them got shot and died on a church’s steps as she turned off the set.
“You ran off before I could give you the good news,” she said with a weary smile.
“What’s that?”
“I’m pregnant again.”
“Holy Mother of God.”
NOW WE ARE ENEMIES
“Yes, many a night I spent with Dylan in Dublin,” O’Gorman said. “After a pint or two he’d recite that wonderful poem about refusing to mourn the death of a child killed in a Nazi air raid.”
“Really!” Jacqueline Chasen said.
They were sitting in a booth in the restaurant half of the Golden Shamrock. Jackie was wearing gray slacks and a peekaboo nylon blouse. While his eyes admired the flawless face and marvelous body, O’Gorman sensed something had gone wrong inside, something was broken. Jackie was looking for someone to fix it, someone with wisdom and courage.
It was a role Dick O’Gorman always liked to play. With a minimal effort, he could bed her before the end of the afternoon, he was sure of it. But two sleepless nights and the memory of Barbara O’Day’s tears of shame made that a less than enticing idea.
One of O’Gorman’s conceits, like his refusal to carry a gun, was the idea that he never left a woman weeping. He wanted them all to believe in some starry future when Black Dick would return with renewed ardor. In part it was sentimental, a desire to maintain a high opinion of his benevolence, in part practical. More than once in his unpredictable travels he had discovered the usefulness of having an O’Gorman worshiper stashed and waiting. He had to repair the damage with Barbara Kathleen before anything else could be put on his agenda.
Anyway, it was hard to think of Jacqueline Chasen as a sex object. She was too much a part of the incredible tangle of suspicion and rage and fear that was clotting his brain. The money had disappeared in her house. He was much more interested in talking to her about the money than about a drunken twit like Dylan Thomas. But how?
He had drawn up a list of potential suspects. Only a handful of people knew the money existed. O’Toole and his bastard of a nephew Mick O’Day were high on the list. So were McGinty and his two boyos. And the two operators from Washington, Leo McBride and his oversexed wife. But what could he do to extract the truth from any of them?
A lot was at stake for Dick O’Gorman as well as the IRA. If he blew this operation, he would be demoted and suspected forever. Kilroy would spread the slander through the ranks that O’Gorman had stolen the money, and that would give the chief of staff a good reason to eliminate Dick O’Gorman from contention permanently with a bullet. What better way to make sure that the traitor would not get to Switzerland to invest his stolen cash in a villa on Lake Lucerne?
Beyond the Irish-Americans and the Irish, of course, there was the gray, amorphous world of the Mafia. O’Gorman could not take it seriously, if Joey Zaccaro was a sample of its leadership. Morons like Joey Zip were able to accumulate millions because the Americans had so many trillions floating around they scarcely noticed the detachment of a stray million or two. It was part of their capitalist system, a permanent state of banditry and warfare among all comers. Even if some of the Mafia’s top men were intelligent, it made no sense for them to shoot Zaccaro and steal their own money.
O’Gorman decided he would have to take some chances—with juicy Jackie here and with the others. “I gather you had a less than peaceful night before last,” he murmured.
“Who told you?”
“We’re thick with the police chief, O’Toole.”
Effortlessly he began weaving his favorite persona, the wary romantic revolutionary on his last mission. He told her what Zaccaro had planned to do with the money and asked her help to recover it. Her lovely brown eyes widened, her breathing grew deeper. If she was acting, it was a first-rate performance. By the time O’Gorman finished his story of the mission, he was satisfied that Mick had not blundered into Jackie’s house by chance, shot the two Mafiosi, and decided to steal the money.
She told him everything, including the trip to the Pines to bury the bodies. As intelligence, it was more or less useless, until she described the gun again. “It had a big bulge below the barrel. It clicked. That was the only noise it made.”
O’Gorman felt a chill penetrate his flesh. It had nothing to do with the brisk March breeze that was whipping against the windows of the Golden Shamrock. One of his last assignments in Belfast had involved identifying British officers who were operating as part of their Secret Intelligence Service while ostensibly on staff duty at division or regimental headquarters.
They all had private guns beside their official Browning automatics. Some preferred German Lugers, others Spanish Stars. One had somehow acquired a Chinese Type 64 silenced, a gun that the IRA had been trying to buy for a decade. It was easy to identify because it fired a special subsonic 7.65x17mm rimless cartridge. Autopsies of three IRA leaders recently assassinated in the Irish Republic had produced these cartridges.
Was there an SIS agent—possibly the same man—in Paradise Beach? If so, he would have to be a recent arrival. He had killed a man in County Armagh less than two months ago. The SIS did not operate like the Russians, who planted agents in countries like the United States for a decade without using them. SIS did not have that kind of manpower. They were mostly volunteers on temporary duty. But they were a daring, deadly foe. It was certainly not beyond their imagination to send an agent here in disguise, if they had somehow picked up the news of this operation.
“Do you have any British friends?” O’Gorman asked Jacqueline Chasen.
She shook her head.
“Any British neighbors on Leeds Point?”
“Only the devil.”
She told him the story of the British camp follower who had given birth to a creature with cloven feet during the American Revolution. Although he laughed heartily, O’Gorman did not find it amusing. There was still enough Catholicism in his blood to make him uneasy about Satan. One of his Jesuit teachers at Clongowes, the Irish college, had been fascinated by the devil. He had collected stories of satanic possession.
Jackie had nothing more to offer except her lovely self. For the moment, survival was more pressing. Borrowing Desmond McBride’s car, O’Gorman drove north to Madison Township with Bill Kilroy beside him in the death seat muttering insults about melodeon-legged Dubliners. He was a marvelous example of the basic north-south hatred and suspicion that sprang forth whenever anything went wrong. It was enough to make a man despair of a united Ireland.
“Shut up and get ready to play a part you’re born for,” O’Gorman said.
“What’s that?”
“Killer.”
They pulled into the Houlihans’ driveway at three o’clock. Larry, the younger of the two, the one who had turned skite-the-gutter in the hunger strike, opened the door. O’Gorman threw him inside with a shove that sent him flying down the hall on his back. Billy pounced on him, the muzzle of his Zastava under his jaw. “Where’s the yella man? You’ve got ten seconds to tell us.”
Houlihan’s death’s-head face was blank with terror. It was incredible. The man had no more flesh on him than he had the day the British let him out of Long Kesh because they were afraid he might die on their hands.
Jerry Houlihan came rushing from the kitchen wearing an apron over his jeans. “What the hell’s this?” he cried.
Billy kept a knee in Larry’s chest and turned the Zastava on Jerry. “Shut yer yap.”
“We’re lookin’ for the money you stole two nights ago down in Paradise Beach,” O’Gorman said. “This is Kilroy. You’ve no doubt heard of him. I’m O’Gorman. Black Dick.”
“We didn’t steal a penny of it,” Houlihan said.
“Oh? But you know it’s gone. How did you manage that? Are you a mind reader?”
“McGinty told us.”
“You’re a bloody liar. He doesn’t know it’s missing.”
“He told us. He came down last night and told us there was trouble about the money!”
“You know what we do to liars. And informers. And thieves who steal from the people.”
Houlihan backed away from the Zastava. “Jesus Christ, it’s the truth. Call him off. It’s the truth.”
“We’re goin’ to search the house. If we find anything, even a single bill, you’re dead men. Tell us the truth and we’ll let you off. It was McGinty’s idea, wasn’t it?”
The brothers Houlihan shook their heads in hysterical denial. It was convincing.
They tied their hands and feet and left them on the living room rug like a couple of trussed sheep while they tore the house and garage apart. There was no money.
“Either you’re lucky or smart,” O’Gorman said.
“What about loyal?” Larry Houlihan said. “Why the hell do you think we volunteered?”
Tears ran down his cheeks. He was shaking all over. Just the sort of man they needed to drive weapons through five states to Boston.
“I always heard you was a bastard. Now I know it,” Jerry Houlihan said to O’Gorman. “His nerves is shot. Can’t you see that? He won’t sleep for a week now.”
“If I’m a bastard, it’s because we’ve got crybabies like you in the ranks,” O’Gorman said.
Warning the Houlihans to say nothing and await orders, they freed them and drove on to McGinty’s house in Metuchen. Billy was impressed to find McGinty inhabiting what was, on Belfast terms, splendor. He stared at the green lawns, the old trees, the comfortable split-level house.
“Does everybody in this fookin’ country live this good?”
“Except in New York. Most of them are in tenements worse than Belfast’s Blacks.”
“Whyn’t they bomb the bejesus out of the Prods like we done?”
“They’re Prods themselves. They’re undeveloped politically.”
It was just five o’clock when they knocked on McGinty’s door. Nora answered it. “Hello, sweetheart,” O’Gorman said, pushing her back down the hall.
“Dick?” she said, her pliant, kissable mouth a twisted O. “What are you doin’ here?”
“I wish it was a friendly visit. But it isn’t. Maybe you can make it one, by answering a few questions. You might even save Hughie’s neck if you tell the truth.”
He told her what Hughie was doing for them and what had happened. “Just give us back the money or tell us where it is. Hughie’s got to be in on it. No one else outside our little circle knew about it. We’ve checked out everyone else.”
“He promised me he’d never go near you again!”
“A man will say almost anything to get you to drop your knickers, Nora dear,” O’Gorman said.
“There’s no money. He would have told me about it. He tells me everything. We made a promise—”
Her eyes went blank realizing that Hughie had already broken the promise.
“Was Hughie doing some gardening by any chance, yesterday?”
“No.”
“You’re sure? If we find it without your help, punishment becomes a necessity.”
“There’s no money. None!”
The doorbell rang. In bounced a bonny boy and girl, prime young American heifers. Nora shooed them into a back bedroom. O’Gorman thought of the scrawny Catholic children of Belfast and said, “Get rid of them.”
She sent them back to the neighbor’s yard where they had been playing. As at the Houlihans, O’Gorman and Billy went through the house like a pair of hurricanes. No money. Nora sat in the living room, weeping.
“Tell Hughie his luck is holding so far,” O’Gorman said. “How about a kiss for old times’ sake?”
“I’d rather die.”
“Ho ho,” chortled Billy. He liked seeing O’Gorman get a turndown.
“Maybe you’ll oblige Billy here before we go, in that case. He’s been as celibate as St. Patrick since we got to this godforsaken country.”
“I’ll kill myself first,” Nora said.
“Aw, come on now,” Billy said. “It’ll be so quick y’ won
’t scarcely notice it. They called me Gary Cooper in Sofia. Wham bum, thanks, mum.”
“Get out. I’m goin’ to write my father and tell him about this. He’s still got influence.”
“With whom?” O’Gorman mocked.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
Nora buried her face in the chair. They left her that way and headed back to Paradise Beach, Billy smacking his lips over what he would have done to Nora in bed if she had said yes. O’Gorman was beginning to think Billy couldn’t get it up for anything but a Saracen tank. Talking about it day and night was a sure sign. It had to be the origin of the platitude about all talk and no action.
Billy’s sexual fantasies did not distract his tiny brain from the main point. As they zoomed over the causeway to Paradise, he growled, “That was a good act, O’Gorman. But it don’t change me mind. I’m gonna search your digs the way we just tore apart them sods’ the minute we get back.”
“You will like hell.”
Billy took out the Zastava. “I give you this argument once before. But it don’t make much sense to shoot you before we land the fookin’ weapons. Just get it through your fookin’ head that I’m in charge of this thing.”
“Prove it, you squirmy little asshole.”
From his wallet Billy fished a letter. He handed it to O’Gorman as they rolled to a stop in front of Desmond McBride’s house. It was Billy’s orders. It yammered on about the purpose of the expedition and finally got to the meat: “In all decisions which involve political considerations, you will exercise final authority.”
There it was. They were putting this Bogside twit whose education consisted of a month’s brainwashing in Bulgaria in command of Richard O’Gorman, graduate of Clongowes and the University of Dublin. “I was supposed to show this to you on the fookin’ plane and tear it up. But I decided it’d only string y’out and we wouldn’t get nothin’ done. Now drive me over to Monahan’s and you go for a walk somewheres while I do the lookin’.”
Hours of Gladness Page 15