Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Shoved down some steps into a cellar, they found no warm, red-amber glow of wood and musical instruments and flushed crowds holding topaz-toned pint glasses filled with stout and ale and beer.

  A lone bartender studiously refused to look up as they entered. The bar had only one customer, a powerful-shouldered man wearing a peacoat over a sweater and the ubiquitous billed tweed cap, huddled in a corner. Above them, hanging tin kettles and bellows dripped from blackened oak beams. Crude oil portraits of long-dead Irish Republican heroes made a sober row of faces along the dark wood walls.

  They were shoved against a smoke-blackened brick wall, hemmed in by two of the shadow-jawed thugs while the third went to whisper to the man behind the scantily equipped bar.

  Max pulled out two rough wooden chairs for Garry and himself. By the time they sat, the usual pint glasses filled with dark amber liquid topped by a dispirited frill of foam circled their table, dispensed from the barman’s universal round brown plastic tray.

  “Not your usual elegant tourist surroundings, eh?” the waiting headman commented more than asked.

  Max and Gandolph sipped in tandem and cocked their heads to signal they were listening.

  “Came along like lambs,” another man chuckled. “You hardly needed all three of us, Liam,” they chided their leader.

  “Yes,” Gandolph said, “we’re quite harmless, although not tourists.”

  “I thought this lame beanpole was the great boy-betrayer, Kinsella,” another muttered into his first chugalug of ale.

  “Great?” Max inquired with indifference. “I’m a great ale-drinker, ’tis true.”

  “And blarney man,” the leader replied. “The fool has introduced me, but Liam is all you’ll know of me.”

  “And your taste in ales,” Max said, nodding at the red-gold brew in their glasses.

  “Aye, and you’re used to drinkin’ yours out of a bottle or a can, like a modern-day traveler,” the second man said. “Tourists, Liam, that’s what we’ve netted.” And he spat on the floorboards.

  Max finally drew the tall golden glass closer to him. “I like to know the name of a man who has ambitions to spit-polish my shoes.”

  A glowering silence held as all four Irishmen tensed while they made up their minds to be insulted or not.

  Liam led again. “Honest Irish spit and sweat is worth ten times an Englishman’s piss.”

  “Then,” Max said, “I’d be grateful for names of my drinking companions.”

  “Just last names; they’re all common enough around here,” Liam agreed gruffly, after taking a long, considering dip into his very dark ale. He nodded at his cohorts: “Finn, Mulroney, Flanagan. I’m Liam, first and last, as far as you two are concerned.”

  “And I’m Blarney,” Gandolph said, startling everyone, including Max, by breaking his stone-faced-elder silence. “I was darting about Ulster under the dark of the moon before you lot were even out of grammar school. Those surnames could serve well on a music-hall act, but not a one of them was key in the real IRA I knew of old.”

  Dark-jacketed shoulders shrugged, lifting their sinister hooded hummocks. Max must have forgotten that the Emerald Isle required outerwear even in the spring. No wonder his leg bones ached. He should have bought long johns in Zurich, not designer togs. He wasn’t about to consider the image of himself in long johns with Revienne. The reality had been bad enough.

  “And what are you grinning at, Kinsella?” Finn demanded. “Your last name is not only known but notorious. No laughing matter, even in these namby-pamby ‘peaceful’ days.”

  “So the Ulster Easter settlement of ninety-eight is not as settled as some think?” Max asked soberly.

  “The IRA fools!” Liam said. “Cowed by the specter of being compared to ‘Islamic terrorists.’ ”

  “That nine/eleven slaughter did stir up worldwide revulsion,” Gandolph observed mildly.

  Shoulders shrugged again, making Max swallow hard to keep his mouth shut. He too had reacted violently from rage and loss and cost of lives, to hear it.

  Gandolph was an older, less-fit man, but he plowed courageously ahead.

  “Then, too,” he mused in a maddeningly deliberate way, “after nine/eleven the U.S. Irish community had things closer to home to worry about than sending gun money to the Auld Sod, especially the British-run north of it, the nine counties of Ulster.”

  “Shut your mouth or I’ll forget your age,” Flanagan said, half rising. His motion made the pints’ liquid contents sway like yellow hula skirts.

  “Don’t spill the beer, man,” Mulroney said softly.

  “Better beer than blood,” Gandolph answered, his expression harder than the parish priest’s on confession day. “You’re all youngsters compared to me, and I can tell you that you’ll tire of blood by the end.”

  Max was as surprised as the Ulstermen to see Gandolph’s steel. He must not remember enough of the man who claimed to have been his mentor, and regretted it for not the first time.

  “And the beer?” Max asked. “Does it have a name too, Flanagan?”

  As Flanagan sank back down in his chair, the man clawed the glass into his grasp and pulled it to his chest like a miser hoarding liquid gold. “A Bass brew, once made here in Ulster.”

  Max nodded at Liam’s much darker glass. “And that looks like a Moor house’s Black Cat.”

  “Heaven forefend! You’ve been too long absent from the emerald shore, Kinsella. That nancy brew is tricked out with chocolate and coffee, like a Brit toff would swill.”

  Max heard himself say, “Blame it on Belfast’s annual beer festival, where all the showy brews take home the prizes.”

  How did he know that? Nobody regarded him as if he were mad.

  Although Liam said, “You’re daft, man. No workingman drinks those devil-adulterated brews. Only U.S. yuppies.”

  Again, Max didn’t know why or how, but he knew that yuppies were more than over across the Atlantic. He scrubbed his face with a hand.

  “What’s wrong with your legs?” Liam asked.

  “Broke ’em,” Max answered.

  “Both of them, man? How?”

  “Pushed off a mountain,” Gandolph said.

  “The mountains here are nearer hills,” Liam noted.

  “Lovely rugged Irish hills,” Max agreed. “No, a major peak was my downfall, thanks to someone’s unknown hand. Away on the Continent.”

  “An Alp then, it would be,” suggested Mulroney, sounding suitably impressed.

  Max nodded modestly.

  The four men eyed at each other. “We know you by old reputation,” the spitter known as Finn said, “but you now appear to be as diminished in that respect as we are in ours.”

  “What reputation?” Gandolph asked, his eyes darting from man to man.

  Max stretched his aching legs under the table and watched the men’s bodies jerk slightly, like a quartet of puppets sharing the same oversensitive string.

  “Easy, boys,” he said. “The damp isn’t kind to knitting bones.”

  “That’s right,” Liam jeered. “You’re used to a balmy desert climate.”

  Max eyed Gandolph. He was the Las Vegas expert as well, given Max’s memory was as bum as his legs on certain subjects, like his own past.

  “Is there a man among you,” Gandolph asked, “that did as much as my friend here at seventeen?”

  Silence, then Finn burst out, “He was a wonder, all right, a boy doing a man’s work—vengeance for his friend’s life. But he was on the bloody wrong side! He betrayed IRA men to the British taskmasters!”

  Max was playing a role now, from Gandolph’s prompting on the plane trip from Zurich.

  “He was a friend,” Max said, “that’s true, and we were boys, and we stuck our Irish American noses where they didn’t belong. But Sean Kelly was more than that. He was my cousin.”

  “Ah.” Liam leaned back in his rickety chair. “Blood.”

  “Blood,” Max repeated, with feeling, and, oddly enough, he felt what
he didn’t remember. Loss. Rage. Guilt. And, he could reflect now, it must have been driven by a blinding surge of ungoverned testosterone, stirred by the incredibly damaged siren and Magdalen asylum escapee Kathleen O’Connor.

  He was back there, at least emotionally, drowned in bitter regrets darker than Liam’s oxblood-colored ale. His hands were fists on the table, opening and closing without his will.

  Gandolph put a hand on Max’s shoulder. “My associate has survived a major accident. So you know who he is and what he did. We know nothing of you. What do you want with us? All that is over and done with.”

  “Injustice never fades away,” Liam said. “It festers.”

  “We know that,” Gandolph said. “We’ve fought it in our way.”

  “Yes.” Liam swallowed half of his pint at one go and wiped the foam from his mouth with one swipe of his jacketed forearm. “And we are weary and forgotten too. At least, Kinsella, someone cared enough to try to kill you. We can’t drum up more than a few callow youths to hurl Molotov cocktails at marching Orangemen.”

  “What do you want of us?” Gandolph asked. “We’re long retired.”

  “As are we,” Flanagan noted.

  “We want our due,” Mulroney growled, not looking them in the eyes.

  “Information,” Finn added.

  “Odd,” said Max, feeling strangely sane and calm again, “that’s just what we want here.”

  Liam leaned so far back in his chair it almost tipped over. Almost. Liam knew how to command attention too.

  The barman picked up a tray and poured another round into a fresh sextet of glasses.

  Now the serious bargaining would begin. Chances were it involved blood and something much akin to it.

  Max wanted to think it might be love of homeland and loyalty to one’s comrades, but he knew what Gandolph had always thought, always known.

  Gandolph knew it was money.

  Guy Wire

  Temple was jerked back down to earth by a . . . jerk.

  “This is a dance floor, bimbo,” a tattooed Asian college-age punk assured her. “Shake something or get off it.”

  “I’m gonna ‘shake’ you,” Temple said, turning and eeling sideways in dance moves until she finally reached the crowd’s fringe.

  She wanted to sit down at one of those god-awful bar-height freestanding tables and resurvey the scene from top to bottom-feeder. She held the purse tight to her hip all the way, happy to find a deserted table and sling the heavy bag atop it while she did her Alp-climbing routine to get herself up on a seat and her wedgies, um, wedged onto a crossbar.

  It seemed that everybody who was going to hook up here tonight had already done so, so she was relatively invisible and “safe.” From her perch she realized that the light works were flashing multicolored tattoos over the dancers and bystanders. The shiny black floor reflected the zodiac-sign patterns.

  That made subtle sense. The classic pickup line was “What’s your sign?”

  Temple almost wished some jerk would approach and ask her that.

  “Ophiuchus,” she’d answer. “Rhymes with mucus.”

  Now that was a turnoff!

  Okay. The Neon Nightmare scene was making her crabby and snarky. That’s the mood she needed to snoop. She ordered a club soda with a lime wedge from a passing barmaid to secure her place at the table.

  Then she watched the sides of the pyramid, with the light lasers glancing off their shiny black surfaces. Looking this hard, she realized the walls weren’t all smooth surfaces but a random pattern of black Plexiglas struts crisscrossing the entire interior to break up and further refract the lights.

  Max would have been able to play off those fractured surfaces like a rock-climbing wall, particularly if he’d been tethered.

  The barmaid returned with the club soda. At least with these high-rise tables and stools, Temple was actually on a level with the waitress’s punishing spike heels. Vegas glamour was hard on workingwomen’s feet.

  “I’m not starting a tab,” Temple said, pulling out one of the twenties she’d stuffed down her purse’s exterior pocket.

  “Struck out,” the waitress murmured sympathetically.

  “Actually, I’m covering this scene for Whatsup magazine, the Vegas Restaurant Association guide.”

  “Oh, yeah? Really? Then you’re like a reviewer?”

  “Just like that.”

  “We only serve appetizers, but they go like hotcakes.”

  Good thing Temple wasn’t planning on quoting the poor girl. “I bet. I’m really reviewing the ambience.”

  “ ‘Ambi’-wha? We don’t discriminate.”

  “No, no. I mean the atmosphere. That neon lightning-bolt effect is, er, awesome.”

  “Oh, right. Awesome.”

  “Does it wear your eyes out, working in so much flashing light?”

  “Naw, you get used to it. Don’t even think about it.”

  “I hear the magic act you had until recently was awesome too.”

  “Magic act?”

  “Guy on a bungee cord, up in the pyramid?”

  “Oh, him. Yeah, he was something out of Cirque du Soleil. A high-wire act, only with rebound. You know, at the big hotels.” She giggled. “He swept down one night and whisked my tray out of my hands just before I reached my table. Maybe he was a magician, because he bounced around and then set it right in front of my customers. Not a drop spilled.”

  Temple was impressed. Max must have used the same natural laws of inertia that allow magicians to pull a tablecloth out from under a place setting without upsetting the glass and china.

  “What about the bosses here?” she asked sympathetically. “They treat the staff okay?”

  “Great. They’re almost invisible. Leave it to our floor manager, Craig. I think they’re—what do they call them?—‘backers.’ They trundle on past the bar and dance floor and sneak up to the offices they have up top that overlook the whole scene. Can’t blame them. It must be an awesome view, like overlooking Times Square in a New York City hotel, all those lights and people milling below.”

  Temple glanced up, agreeing mentally.

  It was time she found a different perspective on this case, this scene. A perspective the Phantom Mage had, and the Synth.

  She gave up her primo seat on the crowded bar floor and headed for the blue neon Restrooms sign off to the side.

  She had no intention of resting.

  Once there, she took a hard right, putting her back against the pulsing, light-vibrating patent-leather black wall.

  It did indeed vibrate.

  Cool.

  She edged along it, feeling behind her for those unmistakable vibes, hunting the angled crossbars that riddled the surface if you looked hard enough.

  It took only a couple minutes to realize she was edging upward, a bit above the bar and dance-floor level. Another two minutes to understand she was ascending a very subtle interior ramp, like the interior of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. Or a pyramid.

  Give or take a few thousand years, what was the difference?’

  The purse at her hip swung with her motions, because both her hands were behind her, searching for some sensitive spot where she could feel a hidden door in the wall and enter the maze the Phantom Mage must have known well, which Max could have mastered.

  Could they be one and the same? Maybe. She was unsure, not knowing if the Phantom Mage, a suggestive name, had hit the wall or pulled off a vanishing act in front of a nightclub full of people and a trained ex-cop. It was odd she’d never read about the accident, but Vegas establishments were used to making bad publicity disappear too.

  When she glanced down, she realized she had moved upward to become one of those self-elevating mysterious figures often glimpsed on the fringes of the Neon Nightmare. Neon lights flashed across her fuchsia jacket and red hair, making her part of the artificial night sky. Making her into an object, not a person.

  She continued edging upward, trying not to look down and get dizzy
.

  A spiderweb brushed her ankle.

  What was she? An animated broom?

  Oh. Another brush. Another spiderweb.

  Her ankle almost turned as she suddenly stepped onto horizontal ground.

  One of those “perches” Rafi had mentioned.

  Temple shut her eyes and felt the flashing lights on her eyelids, the cold heat of their constant stabs on her body.

  If one was the Phantom Mage . . . If one were Max . . . If one were one and the same, she might have stood here, on this narrow horizontal ledge, waiting to skydive into the dark below. She would never have done such a thing in her right mind. It was insanely dangerous.

  So she took a step backward. Into the spiderweb. And felt the wall behind her swing inward. Her step backward became a stutter of steps as her weight sucked her inside. The purse at her side swung. Only her hand on the top edge steadied it. Steadied her.

  Her back was against a wall again, but she was facing sideways to her previous position. The light and noise had vanished, as if she’d . . . passed through a giant cat door in the wall.

  Now the airy tickle at her ankles felt familiar. Not a draft, but a wafting, supple furred tail.

  Louie? There was nothing wafting and supple, or subtle, about him. He’d have used a claw tip to the anklebone to snag her attention.

  Whatever. Whoever. She was inside the Neon Nightmare walls, where Rafi Nadir had never dreamed she could go. Had Max done this before her? Did cats see in the dark?

  Did they? Because she could use a guide.

  Temple edged along the smooth and dark but dimly lit inner corridor, watching the faint reflection of herself opposite. A vague glow of light lit this pathway. She wasn’t surprised when the wall behind her again gave way with a tiny click at the same time as a plumy fan wave brushed her knee.

  With no fuss and some fear, she turned to face a softly lit room, like the intimate bar in an exclusive—and weren’t they all, with today’s prices?—Manhattan private club.

  This was Vegas, though, and Temple knew she was standing there in the Synth’s inner sanctum, at the heart of the mysteries of unsolved murders and Ophiuchus—and Max’s disappearance.

  Not that anybody other than a pussycat noticed.