“After that, all my enemies converged on me, bent on destroying me even if it meant closing the factory and throwing Northern Ireland into a depression. A stock issue deal I’d just about finalized with Bache, Halsey fell through. I’d been setting up a holding company to bring all aspects of my empire under one control center, and the entire effort, months of work, collapsed. Margaret Thatcher’s henchmen closed down the NIDA money just when we’d gotten factory operations humming and were producing cars faster than we could sell them. All we had to do was solve some minor marketing problems and free up some cash to finance the cars in transit, and we’d have been in the clear. Marian Gibson wrecked everything I’d spent my life building up, practically bankrupted me, and I have vowed to destroy that woman’s life. She will never get out from under the pile of legal shit I’ve thrown over her.”
Then he looked me squarely in the eye and said, “Jake, when Roy and I decided to hire you it was because we investigated you thoroughly and found your background fitted our needs perfectly. I hope you aren’t going to let us down after all the blood, sweat, tears and millions we’ve put into this.”
“What about my background convinced you I was right for this job?”
“Why, that five-year hiatus papered over as Missing in Action. We saw through that in a New York minute. That was cover for when you were with the CIA running drugs in the Golden Triangle region, wasn’t it?”
Shit on my shoes? Hey, now I get it. Todd Sonarr did that too. Talk about chickens coming home to roost. And not even my own chickens. “I can’t tell you anything about that,” I said, and that was a true fact. If I did, and the word got out, I’d be in breach of national security agreements I’d signed and up for a term in Federal prison. I had no doubt that DeLorean would use that as a weapon against me if the occasion arose.
“I’d say your statement proves my point,” DeLorean concluded. “You’ve obviously had plenty of experience we can use.”
Not much I could say to that. How do you argue with a megalomaniac? His story screamed Drug Deal, and I was already a party to it. Witnesses could ID me at that Bonaventure meeting, brief as it had been. What could he do to me if I finked out on him? Turn state’s evidence? Tell them it was all my idea? This would require some thought. They couldn’t force me to do a drug run, but how to get out of it and avoid prosecution for conspiracy wasn’t clear. With someone like DeLorean running the show, anything could happen. He was a media celeb, and a lot of very important public people took up every yarn he spun. If it came to a criminal trial I could probably beat the rap, but what would an indictment for drug running do to my chances of getting any more good freelance advisory gigs? DeLorean was a master of destructive litigation, Evanston had said. What if he sued me? In our legal system he could file suits ‘til the cows came home. Even if they were groundless, even if I won them all, the costs of defending them would ruin me. If I counter-sued, that could be a lifetime occupation. Not to mention a major gamble of lawyers’ fees.
“You can count on me, John,” I said. “I’ll be on that plane.” All the while looking for the safest exit door, I didn’t add. I excused myself, and he returned to scouring the accounting files, in anticipation of the looming Prime Minister’s visit, I suspected. I needed to get some defense up, and that was information I might be able to use if worse came to worst, so I went to my desk and wrote some notes, certainly a better use of my time than continuing a conversation with someone as unhinged as John Z. DeLorean. Criminally insane? Depends on how you define it.
After I documented my meeting with DeLorean I fished out Roisin’s phone number and rang her up. She was free and eager for a date the next night. I picked her up after work Friday, not that I was actually doing work. I figured what the hell and borrowed the DMC demo car for the date. She was a husky, ginger-haired beauty in her mid-twenties, reflecting Scottish ancestry long past. She lived with her parents on the Protestant side of the plant so I used that gate—little chance my PING buddies would spot me, as the two neighborhoods mixed no more than our Crips and Bloods did. Her district seemed more prosperous than what I’d seen of Twinbrook. Her place was a modest, two-story brick rowhouse, with a white picket fence enclosing their little plot of lawn. She answered my knock and ushered me into a respectable ground floor of small rooms crowded with floral-print upholstered furniture and a formal dining room suite.
She introduced me to her parents, a pleasant enough pair of greying, polite fifty-somethings. They installed me on a parlor loveseat with lace doilies on the arms. After amiably chatting about nothing and sharing a cup of tea and some biscuits with them, Roisin excused us and I escorted her out to the curb. “Ah, one of them flash cars from the factory?” she marveled at the DMC. “We used to see them all the time, taking the road between the plant and the harbor, but no longer. This is the first I’ve been up close enough to touch one. I admire the stainless steel finish. Very posh, these are. Belfast took pride in ‘em. We’ll miss them factory jobs, sure,” she sighed as she ducked under the gull wing and settled into the leather bucket seat. “Thank them bloody Papists for spoilin’ it.”
“Oh, how did they do that?” I asked.
“They ain’t inclined to do a decent day’s work, for one thing. For another, all their rioting and petrol bombs, they make a body think twice about situatin’ a business hereabouts. You set up one day, and the next day the Papists set your place ablaze? Not worth the risk. ‘Tis well known that Mr. DeLorean had no use for ‘em. He wouldn’t have brought his factory to Belfast, but for the government money.”
“Some say the factory was running a loss, and it became a big waste of government money to keep pouring it in.”
“Oh, bugger the government,” she spat. “They have all the money they need. They could be keepin’ the factory running easy enough, except for the Papists. If they don’t want to work at least they should not bugger things up for them of us that does. Unemployment is somethin’ fierce in Belfast, you know. Mr. DeLorean’s factory gave us hope of better times ahead. It wasn’t just the factory, but all the other businesses what sprang up around it. My pa is back on the dole now. Had been long out of work, and then got hired, had steady work for two years and now this.”
Roisin steered me to a pub, Horatio’s Cellar, an establishment not remarkably different from The Duke’s Dalliance. Dinner was decent pub food, and the local brew was up to the mark. As we finished she asked, “Have you any fondness for music?”
“Some types more than others, but sure. You have anything particular in mind?”
“A band of local lads, Stiff Little Fingers, are performin’ tonight. My friends will be goin’. Is that of interest to you?”
“That it is. Lead on,” I said, since I had no better ideas for entertaining her. From what I’d seen of downtown Belfast, we’d have as good a time here in the suburbs and avoid the checkpoints to boot. I’d lost interest in rock concerts years ago, especially the stuff kids were doing lately. And especially, it turned out, Stiff Little Fingers. It was four mop-topped boys a few years out of high school. Three guitars, a drum set and loud, defiant wailing and screaming—punk-rock, Northern Ireland style. This joint, The Tin Ear, was a different sort from where we ate, geared to raucous, beer swilling crowds and noisy bands, not sit-down dining. I wasn’t twice the age of everybody else in the crowd, but close. Some of the younger lads shot me sideways glances but most ignored me.
Irish music is okay, always enjoyed the rollicking songs of the Clancy Brothers. But I never liked punk rock, no matter whose. Roisin was into it, though, and if it made her happy…“This is what we produce here in Belfast,” she enthused, bouncing with the music, though not dancing, it wasn’t that kind of music. “Them Dubliners can have their Bono and his U2. Stiff Little Fingers came up out of the Troubles in 1977, and their songs speak to our hearts.”
Whatever.
I nursed a couple bottles of lager, fed some to Roisin, and put
up with Stiff Little Fingers for an hour or so, feeling thoroughly out of place in that place. I’d gravitated us away from her buddies in the mosh pit, back toward the rear of the throng where the racket wasn’t so deafening and the bodies weren’t so dense. I was idly scoping out the press of rock-mesmerized kids when—oh oh—a couple guys who looked like Seamus and Kelly from the PING swaggered right past us to merge with the mounds of bobbing hair. Really them? Had they seen me? Their attention was focused forward on the band, and since I measure just a little below average height, I didn’t stand out. They didn’t pause nor turn around for a second look before they disappeared into the mob. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure it was them, but…“Tell me, Roisin,” I said, raising my voice to defeat the din, “do the Catholics mix with the Protestants at these performances?”
“For Stiff Little Fingers, they surely do,” she shouted back. “It’s not as though everybody here’s at odds in all matters. All Belfast reveres those lads. They have such a deadly wicked beat, you know.”
I’d had my fill of their deadly wicked beat—I’ve been in mortar attacks that were quieter—and I didn’t want to risk being spotted here by PING people and blowing my chances of thwarting the bomb plot. The band was nearing the end of the set. When they stopped playing, lights would go on and people would mill around. Time for a tactical withdrawal. I shouted in Roisin’s ear that I’d be playing for her team tomorrow and wanted to be sure I was well rested. “That you do, Jake,” she agreed. “And I’ll be there watching, you can be certain. You did fine the last time.” I steered her out an exit door at the back of the hall and hurried her to the DMC. As we approached her parents’ place she patted the center instrument/gearshift console and remarked, “This thingummy here is an impediment, you know.”
“An impediment to what?”
“To a pair of people as might want be a little closer to one another,” she said.
“I take your point, but it’s bolted down. Can’t remove it. Any ideas?”
“Would you like to see what my room looks like?” she asked coyly.
“Wouldn’t your parents object to that?”
“I do have my own room, you know, and a cozy one it is. My folks goes to bed early, and they’re right sound sleepers.”
I parked the car and as we topped the stoop and she put her key in the lock she whispered, “Now, I don’t want you be thinkin’ I’m the kind of girl what makes a common practice of wantonly invitin’ men up to her room.”
“No, of course I would never think such a thing,” I assured her.
Inside, she eased the door shut behind us. “Best we remove our shoes,” she whispered as I looked up the stairs into the dark hallway above. “And mind you avoid the fourth step from the bottom. It emits a right audible squeak.”
My second try at Gaelic football went better than the first. My defense play improved a little—I got in a few clean tackles and managed a couple steals. Teammates fed me the ball a few times so I could try my hand at offense. The result: called three times for taking too many steps before “doing something,” twice for throwing the ball rather than butting it with my fist, and once for changing the ball from one hand to the other. I managed to make it through three sequences of “four steps/bounce” and then successfully kicked the ball downfield to a teammate. Who promptly lost the ball to a slap-away. But there also was the matter of kicking the ball up from the ground into my grasp: as often as not I booted it straight to an opponent. If I kept at the game I estimated I could achieve competence in six months or so. What the heck, it was fun.
The weather that Saturday was cold and drizzly giving way to light rain by game’s end—mud football. We enjoyed it at UCLA on the few days when it rained in Southern California. The other team chose a Lisburn pub for post-game libations, and we trooped over there with our entourage to dry off our exteriors while wetting our interiors. “So, how’d it go with Roisin?” Riley asked me, while she was across the room chattering with a little covey of friends.
“She took me to a Stiff Little Fingers bash,” I said.
“A boonch of screamers, them,” said Riley.
“The kids admire ‘em, though,” Brian McPaidrig put in. “Belfast’s top group, screamin’ or no.”
Rory McRiley, another teammate, changed the topic. “Redheaded women buck like goats, they say.”
“Wouldn’t know, I never bucked a goat,” was my reply to that.
“Ha ha, good one, Jake,” quipped Paidrig McRory. “Did she caution you about that fourth stair from the bottom?”
“The thing about Irish girls is that they’re all or nothin’,” Riley McBrian observed. “Either they fook nobody, or they fook everybody.”
So I guess I was beating the odds so far, for whatever it was worth. Post-game banter in Ireland was not different from in Southern California or anywhere else jocks gathered after a game. They drank better beer here, that was about the only difference. About the time I reached the halfway point of my second pint Rory McRiley said quietly, “Jake, there’s some fellows in the back room would like to make your acquaintance.”
“Football players?”
“That among other things.”
“Sure, I’d be happy to meet them,” I said. “Lead the way.” We picked up our schooners and he took me down a corridor.
At a door past the WCs he knocked and a voice inside told us to come in. It was a sort of meeting room, with a scarred, beer-stained table around which half a dozen members of the other team sat in a collection of non-matching chairs. “Mr. Jake Fonko, is it?” said their team captain, rising to greet me. “I’m Brennan McCampbell. Call me Brennan, I’ll call you Jake, football chums and all. You played a right good game for a novice. You played American football, did you?”
“In high school and college. Nothing big time. Surfing is my sport.”
“Åye, I’ve seen the movies, Hawaii and all. Good luck with it here in the Emerald Isle. If you ever found some suitable rollers, freeze your nuts off, you would. Looks like thrillin’, where you can do it, though.”
“For them that like team sport it falls short, but it’s given me some memorable times.”
“Can’t be faultin’ them blonde beach bunnies,” put in Cormac McKieran down the table. “Think you could get some of ‘em interested in Gaelic football?”
“They’d have to dress ‘em in fur bikinis,” quipped Campbell McCormac.
“Riley McBrian was tellin’ us something of your background, and the thought crossed my mind that you might be in the way of lending us some help,” said Brennan.
“Depends. What do you have in mind?”
“Here’s the thing,” Brennan began. “These six northern counties have been having the Troubles as you may have heard.” I nodded. I’d heard. “The Protestants are in the majority here, as the Catholics are in the counties to the south. The Catholics hold it against us that our people were moved here in the times of Oliver Cromwell and, they say, stole their land. Now, that was around 1649, a long time to hold a grudge, but they’ve been keepin’ it goin’ right along. There’s a strong strain of Scot amongst us—industrious folk, they are. The native Irish are inclined to take life more easy, some of ‘em too easy perhaps. (“They draw their dole money from the government one day and throw petrol bombs at it the next,” Dermot McBrennan quipped.) It’s not as though we can’t get along as friends and neighbors. The problem is, some o’ the Catholics think all of Ireland should be theirs—the Nationalists, the Republicans, those sorts. It’s not that they’re denied representation here in the North, but being the majority our side more often holds sway.
“Well, some, in their impatience (“They’ve been impatient for 400 years!” Cormac McKieran put in.) take matters into their own bloody hands. Bombin’s, shootin’s, beatin’s, riotin’, protestin’, landmines and such. The Northern Counties are part of the United Kingdom, so the English station gover
nment troops to maintain law and order, but they’re no match for the rebel groups. ‘Walkin’ targets’, they call the soldiers on patrol. They cruise about in their Saracen armored lorrys and they conduct roadblocks, but they take more casualties than they inflict. Temptin’ targets for petrol bombs.
“Now, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, that is, the local police force, the RUC, is doin’ their best. They make arrests and put the ones they catch away. But there’s only so much they can accomplish. Their impediment is that they must abide by the laws, whereas the Rebels of course don’t. So some of us Loyalists have formed our own militia groups to stand up to the Republicans. They have their Provos and INLA and PING and so forth, and bloody savages they are. We here have formed the Ulster Regular Guerillas, the URG, to give ‘em tit for tat. They kill a constable, our boys kidnap a priest, for example.”
Oh oh.
“These lads have heart, you’ve seen them givin’ their all on the football pitch, and we’re armed— rifles, Mills bombs, you know. But we lack actual fightin’ experience, rank amateurs as they say. The fact is, we’ve just formed our unit and we’re feelin’ our way along. Riley tells me you were a commando in Vietnam. So what we’re wonderin’ is, could you help us out?”
“I don’t know what help I could give,” I said, trying to sound on the negative side of tentative. I was already in trouble enough with the Troubles, entangled in the PING. Now I’m being recruited by the URG?
“Anythin’. Weapons trainin’. Tactics. The harder paramilitary groups, they welcome our help, but they don’t treat us seriously yet. Some of us served in the military, but none has seen actual combat. We’re of a mind to be blooded, to prove our mettle. But there’s much knowledge we lack. How do you set up an ambush, for example? Were we to do something like that successfully, we’d prove our worth and gain acceptance.”
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 1 - 3 Page 55