“I’ll go with you,” Casci said.
“To Church?” She’d scooped her clothes up and jogged to the bathroom. Without the emollient of G&T, midnight ambience and horniness, her Yankee copper wouldn’t be quite so forgiving about the state of her. She had to shout quite loud. Roddy Estate Agent had said the house would have got an extra twenty grand if she’d put in an en-suite. Thank God she hadn’t: this morning, that would be a proximity too far.
“I was going to ask you anyway.”
She came back into the bedroom – brushed, washed, covered up. Louis had taken advantage, too. The moment she’d left the room, he’d jumped up, pulled on his kecks and shirt, obliterating all memory of nakedness and intimacy.
“Ask me what?” She sat in front of her dressing table mirror. She liked this pose; like something out of Jane Austen. The lady brushing her hair in front of her gentleman companion. Joan Fontaine in Rebecca. The old-fashioned, low-level eroticism of it. Loretta Young in The Bishop’s Wife.
“Where I could catch Mass.”
She looked round at him in amazement. “That’s a joke – yes? Where you can catch Mass?”
“I’m not sure what’s amusing you.” He was smiling, but uneasy. “The way I speak, or the fact that I go to church?”
“Do you go to church? Or is this just some weird way of thanking a girl?”
“Do you?”
“Only if mummy insists.”
“I go sometimes. The shit you face every day. You want to believe something. Then you get there…”
“And it’s all nonsense.”
He smiled; turned away.
“Today’s one of the days you want to go?”
“Why not. You’re going.”
She nodded; hoping it was boredom pushing him towards St. Catherine’s, not guilt.
They got into church late, the only pew available one up from Rosa. The poor woman had to sit through the whole service – including an overly long sermon by Father Mike – glancing back at her daughter and the strange new man.
When it was finally over, Father Mike stood at the church door in his full vestments to greet his parishioners, like he was the Doge of Venice. When Maddy and Louis arrived, he gave one of his warmest welcoming smiles. “Good morning! Maddalena. Thank you for coming. This must be… Chas?”
“Matt, Father.”
“The spiritual atheist?”
“Actually this is neither Chas nor Matt. This is Louis.”
Her mother stared in turns at Maddy and the unknown man. Where, in conversation in Sarti’s, she’d liked the idea of her daughter having an adventurous love life, it was quite a different matter inside the chapel door. Particularly when there seemed to be three of them on the go at the same time. Chas, Matt and Louis.
Louis putting on a smile every bit as charming as Mike’s and probably every bit as habitual. “Lovely service, Father. Thanks.” Then he bowed slightly: “Signora.”
Slick enough to make Maddy wonder if she’d been more of a victim to the seductive arts last night than she’d realised. This morning the guy was a genuine expert. The accent suddenly seemed more Kennedy-like, the voice deeper, gravelly. But thanking a priest for saying Mass? Calling her mother signora? These were touches of genius. Maddy didn’t know whether to feel a little proud in the reflected glow, or creeped out.
“You sound American, Louis?”
“Product of Father Duffy of County Tyrone’s strictest of schools. St Joseph’s Sunnyside, Queens, New York.”
“What kind of strict school, Louis?” Rosa asked, fearing borstals.
“For altar boys.”
Bang on the money. Father Mike and Rosa laughed loud and heartily. Louis, like an old pro, knew he’d scored a direct hit, and left the stage quickly and elegantly.
“I’m going to see if I can pick myself up a Sunday News. See how the Yankees got on.”
Another round of handshakes, another little bow for Rosa, an acceptably intimate nod for Maddy, and he was off. Glasgow’s very own Bill Clinton for a day. Maddy waited for the swell of interest in him to die away, answering her mother’s and the priest’s questions about who he was, how long he was here for… She remained dignified and hesitant, giving as little away as possible.
“Just a colleague.” But she heard the note of coquetry in her own voice; felt a flush in her cheek. “Now, what about Nonno?”
As she asked, the Parish Priest, Monsignor Connolly, joined them. Maddy’s little sunny moment was over. Mike Jamieson she could take – overly matey and simplistic as he was. Connolly was that other kind of priest, straight out of central casting: old, hairy-nosed, dandruffed soutane, bad-tempered. There was no priest so ugly, however, that her mother didn’t immediately flirt with him.
“I’m so sorry you can’t make the celebration, Father.”
It transpired that, actually, he wouldn’t be in time for saying the Mass at Nonno’s house, but might just be able to make it along in time for coffee and sandwiches after, and a wee drink.
“That’d be wonderful, Father!” Rosa was over the moon. Two priests at her little party.
“And you must be the granddaughter.” He stared at Maddy through hazy, perhaps cataract-shrouded, eyes. He had the look of a man who was forever a moment away from tears – either of anger or despair. He was taller than Maddy, uniformed in black and magenta, a High Priest of an ancient and arcane order. But that wasn’t what made him scary. Something else; a darkness, a feeling that he’d seen things no human wants to see.
“Maddalena.” She put out her hand. Well, she had seen things too. Had Monsignor Connolly watched as a pathologist turned over two dead boys like they were pebbles? Seen the smashed jaws, the slashed, dead skin? They looked at one another for a moment, then Connolly turned away, spoke to the mother.
Maddy tried to keep an interest as the little trinity around her talked times and numbers of guests, the crockery needed for a house Mass, candles and cakes and donations. Monsignor Connolly took Rosa into the sacristy so he could write down a few crucial details. Nonno’s name, age, the date of his Adventure, the names of all his children and grandchildren, dead and alive.
Maddy was left alone with Mike, waiting for Louis’s return.
“He scares young children,” Mike laughed.
“Scares me.”
“You don’t have to live with him!” Then, gravely: “Joking apart. He’s as good a man as ever I’ve known.”
“Is he? In what way?” She wouldn’t have spoken so cheekily to Connolly himself. The old man intimidated her; Father Jamieson merely irritated her.
“Most of us live on the surface of things. Going about our jobs, eating, sleeping, watching TV…”
“I seldom get to watch TV, father. And you ought to try my job for a day or two.”
“I wasn’t meaning you personally, Maddalena.”
He was good at this; might even have made a half-decent lawyer. And he was, in a way, right. Izzy and Manda could deal with the same cases as Maddy, yet were capable of leaving behind the murdered prostitutes, revenge killings, wives battered to death, and go happily home to Marks and Sparks microwave meals and Friends.
“Monsignor Connolly I think of as older in every way. Deeper. You know – I think of him as a deepwater fish.”
A weird line – one that could only be leading somewhere in particular. They both saw Louis returning, crossing the road, leafing through a Sunday Mail. Maddy hoped he’d come over quick – Jamieson was about to deliver some well-practised homily on her.
“Unbelievers are like fish, too. Not big, ancient creatures like Joe Connolly whose eyes can see in the darkest deep. Most agnostics – like you and your friends, Maddalena – swim in shoals. God is the water. He’s all around you. You need Him to breathe, to exist, yet you have no notion of His presence.”
And with that, he was off. His little lecture – which had the feel of being both learned from someone else and repeated at every opportunity – completed.
As she and
Louis walked away – the policeman still flicking though the paper, genuinely trying to find the result of a baseball game – she put her hand through his arm.
“How seriously do you take this stuff?”
She nodded back at the chapel. He shrugged.
“You’re a mackerel.”
“Excuse me?”
Ian Lennon was somehow always outside. Even in the blank airless box of the interview room, he brought in a whiff of earth and root and callous nature. The smart suit and leather shoes didn’t tame him. His was a wildness that didn’t just threaten but got into your bones, like a snell shower. Russell leaned forward reluctantly, a man bending into a headwind. Casci peered the way a tourist would at an old mossy castle in the mist, or at a bleak and craggy view.
“Aye I’ve been to New York.”
“To do what?” DI Coulter didn’t feel frightened or frustrated by the gardener; he was a puzzle he had to solve. How to disentangle the creeper from the husk of the old, empty tree.
“To see the Statue of Liberty.”
“Three times?”
“And the Twin Towers. And where they used to be.”
“I’d appreciate it, sir, if you wouldn’t make light of that tragedy.”
“Sorry, pal. Never liked those buildings. And you see worse things on the telly every night of the week. Just, unfortunately for them, not in America.”
Casci had been playing interested onlooker until now. He drew his chair closer to the table. Opened a folder. “Information was recorded about your visits.”
“So much for the land of the free.”
“The third and last visit you made – according to our intelligence – was November 1996—”
“Before the Good Friday Ceasefire,” Russell interjected. No one made any comment on the observation.
“You stayed with a Mr. Toby Lafferty in Washington Heights. You made two inland trips. One by train to Chicago, where you met with Mr. Jack Burton and a Mr. Enrique Gotzone. So far correct?”
Coulter watched Lennon closely as Casci read through the notes. The gardener was a man who’d been trained in the “whatever you say, say nothing” school. His instinct was to stonewall, obfuscate, mislead. Even when he didn’t have to it came as naturally as breathing.
“If you say so.”
“Messrs Lafferty and Burton are both Irish Republicans,” Casci said. “There’s no point in you denying that as we know—”
“I’ve no intention o’ denying it. Most Yanks have sympathy with the Irish over the colonial English. Almost anybody I’d meet would fit that bill.”
“They were active Republicans.”
“True. Toby liked his golf.”
“It might interest you to know, Mr. Lennon, that since your last visit to our country we’ve apprehended Mr. Lafferty. And become quite friendly with Mr. Burton.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“You’ll know a Mr. Lane as well?”
“What is this? A memory test? So far we’ve got a Burton, a Lafferty, now a Wayne.”
“Lane. Bernard Lane. Collected a lot of money for your cause.”
“The Bring Back Dana campaign?”
“What do you know about Enrique Gotzone?”
“Names are getting harder now.”
“Joseba Gotzone. Pal of Jack’s.”
“Jack. Lafferty?”
“Burton.”
Coulter was impressed by Casci: he showed no irritation at Lennon’s attempt to confuse. He kept a serious face and didn’t take his eyes off his prey. The pair of them following in the slipstream of each others’ flow, like birds wheeling together in the air.
“Maybe I had a beer with him and a few others. In Chicago.”
“Gotzone is also a fundraiser for the Chavez regime in Venezuela.”
“Chavez. Definitely never had a drink with him. That a Cork name?
“Fundraising mainly done by money laundering. Gotzone is a Basque name – does he have ETA connections?”
“No, now I’m totally lost.” Lennon eyed Casci, then Coulter.
“Must take you back, Ian,” Coulter tried to mirror Casci’s insouciance, “to the good old days with Charlie in the Empire and the Cottars.” Lennon didn’t react; Casci did, though, turning to Coulter inquisitively. “First we ever heard of our good friend Mr. Lennon here,” Coulter explained, “was way back. Before I was out of uniform. He used to run for Charlie Dempsey–”
“So you say. Proof?”
Coulter kept talking to Casci without glancing at Lennon. “Dempsey owned a couple of pubs in the north of the city. From the Empire Bar and the Cottars Arms he organised a protection racket for every other pub north of the river. Ian here used to collect – and clean up any messes–”
“You’re talking shite.”
“But you’ve got to hand it to old Charlie, he wasn’t an out-and-out crook and bully. Some of the dosh from his pubs and ancillary services went to good causes.”
“Let me guess,” Casci said. “Good causes based in Northern Ireland.”
“Exactly.”
“If you had proof o’ any of that,” Lennon smiled, “you’d have Charlie in jail. At the very least you’d have closed him down.”
Still Coulter ignored him; continued talking quietly to Casci, as though only the two of them were in the room. “Young Charlie, who’s taken over the business from his dad, has lost the old man’s hunger for good works.”
“It’s a demise in community concern we’ve noted in our country too, sir. No one works for charity any more.”
Now Coulter turned to Lennon. “So Mr. Gotzone’s activities would hardly have been a mystery to you. You were in the States collecting funds for IRA coffers.” Lennon said nothing; hardly blinked. “What was the deal with Gotzone? Swapping dirty cash? Sharing contacts?”
“What has any of this got to do with the lassie whose body I found?”
Russell was scribbling in his notebook – pointlessly, given that the tape machine was recording. Casci closed over his folder – he knew the rest of the story from this point on.
“Enrique Gotzone is now in a penitentiary in Pennsylvania. He ran not dissimilar operations to Charlie Dempsey senior and junior. Was a link in a gun-running chain, too, shipping defective arms from Ohio ammunitions factories to Central America and, more recently, Afghanistan. His work brought him into contact with Yardies from Jamaica, Barbados, and Haiti.”
“So?” Lennon seemed genuinely puzzled.
“Several Haitian kids have turned up dead. Shot in parks, their faces slashed.”
“Thought I was helping you wi’ enquiries into the death of Frances Mullholland?” Lennon directed the question to Coulter. “Not the boys in Kelvingrove.” He turned back to Casci. “That lassie wasn’t shot in a park.”
“One of the boys – a Goodman Lane – we can connect with your old buddy Jake Burton through the boy’s father, Bernard. Ever come across him, Ian?”
“I am seriously confused here, officer.”
“And a girl was found in a garden. You were in the New York area at the time of Goodman Lane’s death. And at the time of the murder of a Ti-Guy Plissard.”
“Who’s he when he’s at home? It all sounds like a big mess to me. If you don’t mind me saying. gentlemen.”
Lennon stared hard at Coulter. Then he turned his stony look, for the first time all afternoon, on John Russell. Russell looked startled, moved back in his chair, like a child accused of something he hadn’t done.
Later, he wouldn’t remember so much the difficult days. The cold nights high up in Piedmont moving from farm to farm, some not much bigger or better than their own, hoping to pick a few grapes, dig a field, clear a well. The hot days under a dogged French sun that seemed to sit lower in the sky than in Elba, burning your skin by being nearer rather than hotter. The long treks, sore feet, uncomfortable cart rides, sleeping some nights on the bare ground, others in cheap hostels dirtier than anything the ground had to offer.
For years to c
ome Ettore would remember how the absence of Carlo and Vittore created an emptiness inside him, like a belly swollen from hunger. But he’d never talk of it. Nor of the worry he felt, wondering if Vittore was growing at last, if Carlo was getting any stronger. A sense that time was running out; that he and Antonella were like long-distance athletes, people from an ancient world with an Herculean task to complete in order to save the lives of their sons.
But in the years that followed, when it was over and what was done was done, what he talked about and, mostly, what he remembered, was the adventure of it all. Walking through valleys in the Alps in soft summer afternoons, side by side with Antonella, like they were young sweethearts again. The freedom of being without roof or sink, no children tugging at their skirts and sleeves. How the walking seemed to refresh Antonella so that he’d look at her once again like he used to. How at night they rolled together in unexpected places, foreign rooms, beaches, on trains, like a pair of illicit lovers.
They discovered towns together. Cuneo. Then Pinerolo. Then the poverty and bad language and cheap food of Torino. The pass across the border from the snowy valley of Aosta. Then Francia, a whole, new, strange country.
“I don’t think they really speak like that,” Antonella said after a day or two. “They do it for foreigners. But when they go home, they speak like everyone else.” For the first time in years they found the ability to laugh.
Somewhere beyond Grenoble they found work in a smart hotel undergoing refurbishment. Ettore helped clear a whole wing of all its furniture and break everything up. Antonella got serving tables for a week while the full-time waitress was ill. For Ettore it was back-breaking and for Antonella, humiliating. She wasn’t a natural attendant. But the food was better than anything they had ever eaten before. In decades to come, the best meals they ate were likened to the Alpine Spa Retreat’s restaurant. Ettore could have got another week’s work out of them, but they had money for a train now, and to keep them in rations for nearly a month. And besides, Antonella was in danger of being dismissed for cheek to the high-station clientele.
For the rest of their lives they entertained people with their stories of that Great Adventure, and particularly their four months in Paris. Stories about singers and entertainers they met and found out later were actually prostitutes or thieves and not the slightest bit ashamed of it. About gamblers, and speculators, and Americans, and barge-owners who made their lives on canals. They met circus acts and philosophers whilst Ettore worked at the Gare d’Austerlitz and Antonella cleaned houses and museums.
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