I can see that my Miss Temple has no idea where she should put this ring. It would look tacky on her third finger, right hand, although the jewelry biz is busy marketing a “right hand” diamond ring as every woman’s necessity, to up sales.
Even I know that two major pieces of bling on the same person’s petite ten fingers is tasteless. I know my Miss Temple’s scarf drawer is not lucky for ring storage, not after Mr. Matt found Kitty the Cutter’s worm Ouroboros ring inside, and no one can figure out how it got there. The evil K the C had stolen the tail-sucking snake back from Mr. Matt after forcing him to wear it as a sign of her murderous power over everyone he knew.
“Wait a minute!” Miss Temple shouts.
I jump slightly at the racket, but at last my roommate has leaped into action. She has stood to yell after the long-gone Molina.
“You must be off duty if you’re drinking, even if you can get a driver home. Giving this ring back is not an official act.”
Nice point, but the door is shut and Molina is out of hearing range. Only I am here to get the message.
Miss Temple sits again to squirm on her uncomfortable side chair, and so I come out of hiding to loft onto the empty sofa she is leaving vacant for me.
I can read her mind like it was pile of tea leaves.
She eyes the anemic pink liquid and melted ice cubes in her glass, obviously wondering if maybe she had imbibed more hard liquor than she realized. She looks puzzled and a little sad.
At last she looks up and spots me. Now is the time for some distracting action on my part!
But which part?
I leap onto the sofa arm so I have an artistic pedestal and begin sucking my rear-toe hairs. This is quite the athletic feat. I know I look a little silly and that therefore Miss Temple will find me talented and endearing and forget her woes. As they sing: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag.”
I am certainly an old kit.
“Oh, Louie,” she says, totally won over by my native charm and cute little nibbling acts. “You must have been hiding in the spare bedroom until the fuzz was gone, or until your toe fuzz needed a grooming. Now, do not fall off the sofa and hurt yourself.”
As if I couldn’t do a double axel on the way down and land with all four sets of shivs stapled to the wood parquet floor!
Of course I do nothing of the kind to damage the décor, but I give my Miss Temple one of my best world-weary, totally superior glances. She had never heard me come in, has no idea that I have seen and heard the entire scene. I can go barefoot around this place too, so she will never hear me sneaking up on her.
She smiles gratefully at my presence.
“Louie,” she says, “you are the only male in my life I have no worries or doubts about whatsoever. Unless you fall off the sofa arm.”
Oh, please. The one to worry about is she herself.
After all, I had returned to my center of operations and paused to check in on my Miss Temple, only to find her entertaining the enemy. Cordially. With powdered drink mix and hard liquor.
I suppose my antipathy to Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina is nothing personal.
She has her job to do, and I have mine. We both nail crooks, and her way is a lot less personal than mine usually, because she has underlings.
Yes, yes, you could argue that because I am a prominent member of the Feline Nation, the entire population of humans become my automatic underlings.
But there is a communication disconnect, so I am forced to exert precious time and energy in leading these self-involved and inarticulate creatures down the most logical garden path. Certainly they chatter a great deal, but much of it is meaningless.
At any rate, Molina, as my roommate and her intimates so abruptly call her, has not been on any personal crime-solving trail, nose to the groundstone, until she recently got too nosy about where Mr. Max Kinsella kept a safe house in Vegas and she broke the law by breaking and entering.
Miss Midnight Louise witnessed the whole episode, so we had plenteous blackmail material to hold over Molina the next time she came around bullying my Miss Temple about the whereabouts of Mr. Max Kinsella. Of course, it would be troublesome to manipulate what we know into public awareness, and now here is the dreaded Molina sharing alcohol content with my Miss Temple.
One never knows when or by whom the sanctity of one’s home will be violated. Mr. Max had a way of breaking and entering as an expected unexpected guest. That method had much in common with my comings and goings, plus it gave my Miss Temple the frisson of unpredictability. We suave dudes know how to keep a dame interested.
Big Mama Molina apparently just rang the doorbell and walked right in. So crude and rude!
I eye the abject form of a plastic baggie on the sofa. A lowly commercial object representative of our plastic culture nowadays, which I might sometimes allow to entertain me for a few moments while my shivs staple holes into it until its ziplock closure begs for mercy.
Now it is weighted with a small object that would make it quite bat-worthy, even for a dude of my serious size and dignity. Unfortunately, I recognize a precious object and know better. I edge near to examine this item, once stolen and held for ransom, to refresh my sometimes delinquent memory.
It is a subtle, fiery gemstone set into a white-gold circumference small enough for my Miss Temple’s size-five feet and fingers. She wears the same size in shoes and rings, which is handy for dudes who wish to shower her in Jimmy Choos and Fred Leightons. (She has, however only one each of these two gentlemen’s high-end foot and finger fripperies, and many of her shoes nowadays are from resale shops.)
Again seeing my Miss Temple’s long-withheld keepsake of Mr. Max and what harassment she must put up with in his absence only makes me more determined to settle the hash of these Neon Nightmare Synth people and solve the tri-venue tunnel murder all to my mistress’s greater glory and ability to further lord it over the official fuzz, like Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina.
Miss Temple has always been right. The Molina eyebrows are way too furry for a lady.
Breakfast of Champions
“I’ve had a breakthrough,” Max told Garry Randolph at breakfast in the hotel the next morning.
“What?” Gandolph, startled, sprayed the word into his cup of morning hot chocolate.
Watching him mop up the ring around the cup, Max felt the painful nostalgia of finally surprising the man who, he guessed, had always surprised him, at least during his vulnerable younger years after O’Toole’s Pub.
“Freud was right,” Max opined. “Dreams are the key. At least mine were. I’ve recovered some pretty vivid memories from before my engineered fall at the Neon Nightmare. I dreamed a whole cast of characters. Old-school magicians or charlatans . . . Cosimo Sparks?”
“ ‘Old-school’ is right. Cosimo was strictly minor, even in his heyday. Retired to Vegas from better days in the Midwest. Did social-club benefits and auctions. Thought when they said how the mighty have fallen they meant him. A stumble maybe, but his career successes were mostly in his own ego.”
“Carmen?”
“Ah. Your type, right? Femme fatale. Poisonous young thing, once. When I was still working, which is several years ago, as you know, she tried to seduce me into replacing Gloria Fuentes as my assistant. Indeed! Give up a trained veteran who still looked PDG.”
“PDG?”
“Pretty damned good. At my age, you appreciate women who manage that, and some do into their nineties now. It’s in the head,” he said, tapping his right temple. Max winced, sensitized to the word temple now. “Anyway, I don’t dump a loyal partner for a few crow’s-feet when I’m all over sags and bags.”
“That’s so encouraging,” Max said.
“You just twinkled, wicked boy! Making fun of your old partner in a double-edged way. Go to it! That’s the spirit. ‘Curse, if you must, this old gray head. . . .’ ”
“Enough, ‘Barbara Frietchie.’ I had that poem in grade school too. From what you tell me, we both honored our ‘country�
��s flag,’ as in that old poem, more than the average.”
“Charmin’ Carmen.” Gandolph mused. “That moniker came later when she conned the guy who made a mint becoming the Cloaked Conjuror into taking her on. Ramona Zamora was her real name. Oh, she was tasty, though. Nineteen and hungry. But what was really in it for me to dump Gloria for a young thing but a few blow jobs and a kiss-off?”
“Garry! Have I ever heard you talk that way before?”
He had the grace to look apologetic. “No.” He rubbed a hand over his weary features, giving them a passing face-lift. “I used to respect women more, and the world.”
“Didn’t Gloria die?”
“Hardly. She was killed last year. Only fifty-eight. Police couldn’t find her murderer right away and probably retired the case. Woman accosted and killed in a parking lot. It’s the major unsolved cliché crime of our time.”
“Helluva time,” Max muttered.
“Don’t let me hang up your dream memories. I can’t believe your subconscious has dredged up those familiar names from my days of yore. I helped you set up the Phantom Mage persona and act at the Neon Nightmare. We knew the Synth members met there, or even owned the place, but you never reported names back to me. Just questions about the Synth, which I’d never heard of before. Who else has your memory conjured?”
“Czarina Catherina, the usual fake medium in a fake turban.”
“Oh, I’d exposed her years ago in Cleveland.”
“More details about your unsuspected sex life, Gandolph? Really, I’m still too young for such confessions.”
“I exposed her as a fake, bilking people out of money for ‘messages’ from dead loved ones.”
“You don’t think one can get messages from dead loved ones?”
Gandolph glanced at him with worried eyes. “Occasionally, there are cases and mediums that seem . . . actual. What do you think you saw in your dreams last night, Max?”
“I think one of the four Synth members present is still a mystery to me, because I saw myself in a mirror, and I was Sean.”
“You recognized him, and them. A giant step forward, Max.”
“Really? I saw Sean as the full-grown man he’d never lived to be.”
“You think he’s ‘haunting’ you?”
“I think he’s always haunted me, but we don’t know for sure, do we?”
“I do know you were that rarity in Irish-American family life—an only child.”
“So Sean and I must have been more like brothers than cousins. The same age. What do you know of our families?”
“The cold facts. Nothing personal. Sean was part of the usual large brood. He was a gregarious, charming boy, from what I gathered, but immature. Unlike you.”
Max laughed. “ ‘Gregarious.’ Why do I know that’s not me?”
“You were always the ‘run silent, run deep’ sort, Max. Charming too, when you found it useful. And cursed with maturity.”
“Even about girls, women? Even about revenge?”
“Why do you think you ended up with the enchanting Kathleen O’Connor, who was an ‘older woman.’ Technically?”
“I don’t know. I saw her dead in my dreams, just a swatch of her face on the dark ground, no features. She’d have been in her early twenties when we met, and she already had been through hell.”
“Twenty-three to your seventeen. A huge gulf at those ages.”
“Gandolph!”
“Yes, Max?”
“Her mother was condemned to a Magdalen house, and she in her turn. She was an unwed mother by her late teens. What happened to her infant?”
“Adopted out? Could have died during childbirth. Teenage mothers—”
“God! Don’t tell me we need to look for another lost soul!”
“I don’t know, Max. It doesn’t concern us now. If getting pieces of your memory back means you’re going to obsess about Kathleen O’Connor again, all right. I can live with that, as I did before. But we don’t have time to hunt younger generations of old losses. The burying of the terrorism hatchet so long impaled in this island seems to have released some collateral mischief. That’s why our old enemies are talking to us. They want what we know.”
“What I know is cobwebs and night frights.”
“Perhaps more than that, behind the veil?”
“I saw a ring,” Max remembered. “An unlucky opal ring. The seductress in the dream, your real-life Carmen, produced it for me, but I declared it synthetic. Like dreams, like my not-quite-teen angel, Kitty the Cutter, like God knows what else is synthetic.”
“ ‘Synthetic,’ Max? An odd word for a dream.”
“What? Dreams don’t come in three syllable words? Mine do.”
“Listen, Max. We’re playing a cat-and-mouse game with these ‘retired’ Irish operatives. They want to know something from us or they’d never cooperate. We desperately need to know what, and what not, to tell them during these upcoming negotiations.”
“I get it.”
“No, you don’t. Even your dreams are trying to tell you. We’ve been tracing the vague trail of a conspiracy, or cabal of individuals, many of them magicians or former magicians, and unsolved murders in Las Vegas.”
“And we’re now in Northern Ireland, because . . . ?”
“Because it may have started but not ended here. You dreamed up the word synthetic, clearly referring to what these magicians call themselves—the Synth.”
“Sounds like they suffer from a lisp.”
“This is not funny, Max!” Gandolph’s fist hit the hardwood arm of his chair. “This is not a holiday jaunt.” He rubbed his banged fist with the other hand, brows forming an anxious knot above the bridge of his nose. “It’s obvious your subconscious is trying to break out of your amnesia. Going back to the scenes of your youth might leapfrog a lot of time and pain. So might this.”
Gandolph spun his laptop so Max could see the drawing of a city map split by mostly red and green blocks of color covering innumerable neighborhood names.
“The Orange and the Green sides,” Max guessed. “Orange, east; Green, west. When’s the Broadway musical coming?”
“This ‘tune’ is too bitter to play in America. To this day,” Gandolph said, “this is a land packed with atrocities vividly remembered on both sides of Belfast and both sides—south and north—of the island itself.”
“And you hope my and the nation’s toxic history might stir my memory in a way happier places wouldn’t?”
“Something is stirring.” Gandolph shut the laptop, locking away the hundreds of lethal neighboring borders invisibly marked on half a million Belfast minds.
Max shook his head. “Sean and I came wandering north into Protestant Ulster during the thick of the ‘Troubles,’ didn’t we? American-Catholic lambs to the slaughterhouse. That was stupid.”
“Yes, it was. That’s the first thing you admitted, after the pub bombing.”
“You’re not going to fill in the blanks for me, are you?” Max asked.
“No, Max,” Gandolph assured him. “Your memory will either kick-start itself here in this traumatic place, or it won’t. Best to know as soon as possible which is the case. The city has changed, and you need to.”
“How has it changed, other than being a tourist and travel hot spot?”
“Oh, can’t you sense the raw energy of a bad place turning better? The locals boast that tourists want to come here. Peace and prosperity are their Horsemen of the Post-Apocalypse. What’s more, they’ve made a point of saying that a visit to Belfast will reveal far more about the British and Irish psyche than visiting Dublin or London will. We’re staying in the gentrified city centre, in a decent hotel chain.
“Even better for our purposes, the peace has made access to information on past skirmishes and fighters on both sides of the conflict easier. The government offices we need to visit are nearby, and so are the . . . unofficial sources I’ve contacted. My recent quest to investigate Kathleen O’Connor and her involvement in the ‘Troub
les’ back then and her whereabouts now has attracted serious interest.”
“Dangerous interest?”
“We won’t know until we go through the motions, right?”
Max finished his coffee, stood, and stretched without comment. “A middling hotel, huh? These beds are going to be murder on my legs and mobility.”
“If that’s the only variety of murder we encounter here, I’ll be happy.”
The morning was late enough that Gandolph rushed them off to an appointment he’d managed before leaving Zurich. Belfast’s city centre was obviously a work in progress, Max noted. Grand piles of Victorian architecture jostled glitzy new development. A border of frayed older structures betrayed the ongoing “urban renewal” process of a downtown business district anywhere in the U.S.
They were headed to a Victorian pile. No elevators to mar the vintage grandeur. Max had to suffer managing a long, stone, internal staircase worn swaybacked in the middle, and a long, echoing hall before arriving at an office higher than it was wide or broad. For all the exterior stateliness, this grandly high-ceilinged room broadcast an air of desertion, except for the two London Fog–coated middle-aged men awaiting them across a hard-used wooden table.
A dark, noisy, smoky pub would have been a far better setting for this meeting of obvious law-enforcement types, whether they were still undercover operatives or not. The guidebooks said the pubs weren’t uneasy ground in Ulster now. No one wanted to remind the tourists that now packed them of frequent pub bombings in the pre-peace days.
Inside the huge building, the temperature seemed lower than the brisk, fifty-degree air outside. Max’s legs and hips ached as if they’d been encased in ice water for hours. Maybe he’d grown too used to Las Vegas heat. He’d bet that little redhead would have warmed him up; “cute” didn’t rule out hot.
The two waiting men unconsciously rubbed their bare hands together for warmth, then exacted army-green file folders from their cheap, scuffed briefcases. Gandolph had brought a well-used black case of his own.
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