Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Guns and Gravy

  “We know,” Liam said when all the glasses were a fifth empty, “that you know about the Synth.”

  Max couldn’t help smiling. Until last night, he hadn’t remembered.

  “Stop yer eternal smirkin’,” Finn ordered in this thick brogue. “You’ve worked as a magician all over the Western world, accident or no accident. Whoever pushed you off that Alp wasn’t the only one willin’ to kill you. They evidently wanted to shut you up.”

  “We want the reverse,” Liam said, interrupting his cohort. “Tell us what information you want first, and we’ll decide then whether we have the patience to tease what we want out of you two or should just beat your brains out for it.”

  “Our bloody brain tissue,” Gandolph said, “would not be noted for coherence, but I see no reason we can’t trade fairly here. What you want to know means little to us, and I suspect the doings of Kathleen O’Connor all these years later are of scant interest to you, now that she’s dead and buried.”

  “You know that for sure, old man?”

  “Max bore her no good will and has vivid memories of witnessing her crash on a motorcyle. He checked himself that she was dead. The authorities who arrived after his anonymous call concurred, and they buried her.”

  Max was glad Gandolph could speak for him. He didn’t know whether it was strategy or pride on his part that he didn’t want these political thugs to know his mind had been more damaged than his legs recently.

  “Word is,” Liam told Max, with a relishing smirk of his own, “that you bore the lass plenty of love when you first met her all those years ago. Off wi’ her in the woodlands of Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park, communin’ with nature, weren’t you, when O’Toole’s Pub was becoming beer-soaked toothpicks with a blood chaser?”

  Max could wince convincingly at Liam’s deliberately harsh words. He didn’t remember Kathleen or details of their physical encounter, thank God, but he knew he’d been the virgin in that transaction, and probably unaware of that at the time. The idea of being intimate with such a damaged young woman struck him with double guilt now, though he suspected she’d lured him into it. He knew, from that “Great Unknown Encyclopedia of General Knowledge” still allowing him access, that abused children can become manipulative and even hypersexual, convinced that the entire world is a lie and everyone in it a hypocrite and out to prove that to themselves and everyone else.

  “She was a beauty, but a notorious slut,” Flanagan recalled, with nostalgia. “She’d sleep with anyone, even an American lad who didn’t know which side of his pants zipped.”

  Max’s left leg under the table was long enough and his hip and torso just strong enough to hook an ankle around the man’s chair leg and jerk it out from under him. The pain was worth the gesture.

  Flanagan’s rosacea-red face sank under the table like a surprised sunset, as the other three men made fists on the hops-stained wood.

  “Have your fun at my younger days’ expense, but not at Kathleen’s,” Max said, his own fists white-knuckled. “We’ve just learned she was a Magdalen girl before she escaped.”

  “No lie, man?” Liam exclaimed. “Truth to tell, no wonder she was of a mind to use herself hard. She was the only woman then strong enough to push her way into our patriot game and play a real role.”

  Flanagan had pulled himself and his chair back to the table. “Peace, man. ’Tis a fact that except for you, she only slept with those who’d give us tip-offs or money. A bit jealous we were, you but a boy from America, and she gave it to you free.”

  “Free it was not,” Max said. “My cousin died in that O’Toole’s Pub blast that occurred while she was spending her pinchpenny favors with me.”

  “Ah, true.” Liam nodded into his glass. “It is blood indeed that drives you. And guilt. That I understand, and respect. Wealthy and poor Irish Americans may have paid millions before the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement to buy us guns and gravy and information, but even the fiercest of them little remembered what it was to live in a land, your own land for centuries, where you and yours were despised and spat upon and your religion persecuted and your children denied education and civil treatment and every opportunity every day.”

  “My forebears immigrated to America,” Max conceded, aware that his own immediate family was a lost memory to him. Perhaps his Irish heritage was why he’d fallen for a natural redhead like Temple Barr.

  “That’s just it!” Mulroney said. “Your forebears emigrated. Driven out of their own land by famine or force of some other kind, uneducated, unregarded, considered less than the sheep that graze the scant Irish leas.”

  “Which is amazing,” Gandolph noted, “given how the Irish distinguish themselves abroad. Soldiers of fortune, law enforcement, politics, the literary and musical arts. Amazing how any downtrodden people or race always do distinguish themselves when out from under the tyrannical, biased boot heel. ‘The world is mean and man uncouth.’ I quote the late, great playwright, Berthold Brecht.”

  “A man of the people,” Finn agreed, nodding.

  “So tell us more of Kathleen O’Connor,” Gandolph said. “We wondered if her dark personal history and agenda sometimes played against even the IRA.”

  “In what way?” Flanagan demanded.

  “Max came to wonder, years later, if Kathleen didn’t toy sadistically with him. Now, we think, perhaps with all her lovers. The price of her body was his cousin’s scattered corpse. Max concluded she must have known about that IRA pub bombing ahead of time and let Sean die.”

  “To torment the surviving lad?” Liam asked. “That would be . . . sick. If so, she wound up betraying our own daring freedom fighters, for we well know what your friend here did to locate the bombers and lead the British soldiers to them. We put a price on his head for more than a decade because of it. Don’t think a one of us has forgotten that, as young and foolish an American as he was then and as busted up as he is now.”

  “I don’t ask any quarter,” Max said, “now, nor did I then. Patriots always overlook the death of innocents in their own just passion against injustice, though they commit the same sins. Sean and I, we came here to Ulster because we felt that same passion against injustice to our kind. You could have recruited us, instead of making an enemy of me.”

  “And a relentless enemy you became,” Liam admitted. “The Agreement seems to have put a period to the ‘Troubles’ for good and all, or I wouldn’t be talking to you two, but standing over your dead bodies. Yet you boys are turnin’ my head around. You’re saying Kathleen, our secret weapon, as dedicated as a silver bullet, used our secret plans to punish you somehow? Why, man?”

  “She hated all men,” Gandolph said. “And probably the clergy. Did you ever notice a taste for seducing priests?”

  “She’d seduce a stump for the cause,” Mulroney said, rolling his eyes, “except us boyos. Said she didn’t want to stir dissension among us. We got not a bit of it, just the money from her ‘adventures.’ When the doings in Ulster simmered down, and the U.S. money slowed down even for the alternative IRA after nine/eleven, she was off to any Catholic country she could find to ‘recruit’ wealthy Irish émigrés her own way, on her back. She screwed her way across the U.S., of course, and Canada, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, even the Caribbean and Continental Europe.”

  Liam nodded. “She traveled constantly the last years after the settlement in ninety-eight. Always a faithful source of supply, no matter the mood of the moment.”

  “And then she disappeared,” Max suggested.

  “Spectacularly,” Liam said. “She was talkin’ about sending us a bloody fortune and even a shipment of smuggled assault weapons from Mexico. Had us all salivating. Then . . . the Peace Agreement happened, to the surprise of most of the world, including us.”

  “The most surprising thing,” Max said, “is that the Agreement has worked.”

  “Nine/eleven did us in,” Mulroney said, shaking his head. “Our cause was
just, and our people had paid with their lives and souls and hearts over centuries of oppression, but that mass destruction of what would be a fair-size town here, of seeing the same New York City that had finally allowed our immigrants to thrive have its tallest buildings attacked from the top, the very sky—”

  “It shook our souls,” Flanagan allowed.

  “The IRA listened to the widows,” Finn said, “our own and others from all over the world.”

  Max nodded.

  “That doesn’t mean,” came Liam’s slow, soft voice, “that we’re willin’ to surrender what’s ours. Guns, yes. Money . . . no. We have our widows-and-orphans fund, with plenty in need, and our own loyal boyos maimed or their minds frayed like denim at the knees.”

  “You want Kathleen’s score,” Max said.

  Liam’s pale eyes glinted. “Correct. You don’t be needin’ to put any polish on it, as you see. That money was donated by our American kin. We need it for putting our people right here in Ulster.”

  “And you think we’d know its whereabouts?” Gandolph asked.

  “I think if you don’t, you’d know how to find it.”

  “The woman is dead!” Gandolph said. “My friend was almost killed.”

  “And why would that be?”

  “Some avenging Irish soul from the past, perhaps?” Gandolph was now taking over negotiations.

  Max realized they had played these roles before—one leading, one subsiding, always in tune, always partners. He watched the older man as Liam would see him: shrewd, a bargainer, a man with the confidence of unspoken but serious connections and faith in his partner.

  Damn! Max thought. I am a lucky man.

  And he wondered if he’d been as lucky in love recently, and his traitorous memory also had betrayed him there.

  “You both know Las Vegas,” Liam was saying. “We’d go there ourselves, but we’re village boys, as lost there as those be-damned nine/eleven terrorists who wanted a last girly show for all their hatred of the West.”

  “You’re expecting my friend,” Gandolph said, “to go back to where he was almost killed?”

  Liam eyed Max. “He was ‘almost killed’ a lot of places and had the nerve to come back here, didn’t he?”

  “We know and honor loyalty,” Flanagan put in. “It’s kept us alive long enough to see peace. We just want what’s ours.”

  “What do you want?” Liam asked.

  “The whole truth about Kathleen O’Connor,” Max said. “That woman dogged my life from boyhood on and created plenty of collateral damage.”

  “You lived to see her dead, man,” Liam urged. “Let her go.”

  “People died because of her. I killed indirectly because of her. Truth is still truth,” Max said, “and we haven’t found all of it.”

  “Granted,” Liam said. “We can help you find what you want, if you find, and deliver, what we want.”

  “How are we to know the money is for the community good, as you claim?” Max asked.

  “We are all brothers of Erin,” said Liam.

  “Money is the root of all evil,” Max answered. “Neither my friend nor I need Kathleen’s . . . dark dowry. If we find it, we could donate it to the organization of your choosing.”

  “And ask if we trust all the bureaucrats who run cities and countries any more than we trust you two.”

  “We’ll be in Belfast a while longer,” Gandolph said. “I’m sure we can negotiate further.”

  “And you have other contacts here willin’ to lay out Kathleen’s trail of broken hearts and blood money?” quiet Flanagan said, slamming a fist to the tabletop.

  “Perhaps,” Gandolph said. “You of all men know that negotiations are always open and situations change and men’s motives and hearts with that.” He stirred to get up, being older and more likely to telegraph his intentions.

  Liam and his friends leaned tight across the table as the headman spoke. “You’re not leavin’ until you commit to a deal. We’re alone here and outnumber you, a cripple and an old man who’s not been out in the field for too many years.”

  Max stood, pushing the wooden table over on them as Gandolph drew two collapsible metal canes from his trench-coat pockets and snapped them to full length into stiffening steel whips.

  By then Max had smashed two pint glasses on the table’s downed edge and was holding them like jagged glass fists.

  The pair backed to the door, an eye on the barkeep, wary behind his sleeve-polished wooden barrier. The reek of spilled beer steamed up from the damp wood like purified piss.

  Max and Gandolph pushed open the heavy pub door with their backs and inhaled the night chill and mist on matching deep breaths.

  “They let us go because they can find us anytime they want,” Gandolph said, after a deep gulp of air.

  “And we them.” Max darted his eyes up to the lit-up pub name above. O’Flaherty’s.

  “It’s good to have contacts on both sides of the law,” Gandolph said. “Peace doesn’t mean total harmony.”

  “We don’t need Kathleen’s blood money,” Max agreed, “but we need to find out more about where it came from and where it is now. We know she was haunting our backyard recently. Damned if this little set-to hasn’t exercised my memory as well as my legs. Don’t tell me I’m going to have to go back to Vegas to track down the last bloody acts of Kitty the Cutter and look up that little redheaded spitfire you like so much.”

  “Oh, Max,” Gandolph said, mopping his brow with a fine white linen handkerchief he pulled from a breast pocket. “You’ll be the death of me yet.”

  “Meanwhile, let’s get the hell back to our hotel,” Max proposed.

  “And pick up a Big Mac on the way.’ ”

  “I hope you’re referring to a firearm.”

  “Sounds like we’d have better luck at that back in Vegas, after all.”

  Getting Their Irish Up

  Blackie and Blackjack (people are so unimaginative in coining street monikers for strays, but that is how I was named, back in my Palo Alto days) are running alongside me now that we are in the tunnel, aka Chunnel.

  “This is a terrific shortcut, Mr. Midnight,” Blackie tells me. (I have instructed them in proper protocol and respect.)

  “I love all these wall-to-wall billboards,” Blackjack adds. “I love to watch people-fights.”

  “The urge is mutual among species, unfortunately,” I say. “But these images are from motion pictures. They form what is called a diorama, and when those tracks are filled with automated vintage cars, the place will be Slaughter City for ignorant cross-traffic. Keep your eyes peeled for rats and cut the chatter. We need to save our wind for a long subterranean journey with a pyramid climb at the end of it.”

  “Wow, Mr. Midnight,” Blackie says. “You sure know your way around exotic Las Vegas nightlife.”

  What can you do with a pair of wet-behind-the-ears two-year-olds? Granted, the ear wetness is from grooming, which is commendable, but I could use some second wind here.

  “Say, what is that big silver metal door?” Blackjack asks, as I skid to a stop.

  “Our path to enlightenment, boys, and reunion with our clan. It is called a ‘safe,’ but it was not very for the murder victim found inside recently. See that rat hole to the side of it? Dive in there.”

  “Huh? We are not hungry.”

  “Look, Blackie, I do not care about the state of your stomach. You should not have been duping the Crystal Phoenix chef and gorging yourselves in Midnight Louise’s place. Now I want you two to shimmy-shimmy inside there until you get behind the safe. The rat-size tunnel widens there to boxer size.”

  “Ooh, people-fighting,” Blackjack says, sparring with his front mitts.

  “I meant dog-breed boxer-size. Just shut up and move.”

  Both are still street-skinny, which I cannot say for myself. I hope they will push the passage a wee bit wider for me when I bring up their rears. And do not make any smart remarks bringing up my rear. I am not in the mood.

&n
bsp; Anyway, I finally writhe my way through, leaving too many excellent side hairs along the trail. Blackjack and Blackie are waiting in the dim light of the tunnel beyond, their eyes gleaming the same eerie green I am told mine do when viewed at the right angle in the dark. I instruct them further.

  “We need to be quiet once we reach the big warehouse under the Neon Nightmare. You will hear much thumping and caterwauling and chaos from the nightclub. Ignore it. We will walk secret ways known only to Bast and me.”

  The luminescent greens of their eyes grow rounder. That is what I need, cowed underlings. Pity there are no humans I can call on to do the job, but this requires the small and wiry underground fighter.

  Really, this mission is getting to be like herding people. Blackie and Blackjack are ever ready to go off task, speculating about the reason for the tunnel, and then oohing and aahing like tourists when we hit the huge storeroom I anticipated would underlie the Neon Nightmare.

  I am not about to waste time explaining a giant neon-sign graveyard to the uninitiated.

  “Start climbing, and make it snappy,” I order. “This is not a kit playground. This abandoned jungle gym for giants could be dangerous.”

  Above us, the ceiling that is the Neon Nightmare floor vibrates with the thump of deep bass speakers. Occasional flashes of the nightclub fireworks penetrate the depths.

  My two intrepid assistants run under a giant 3-D high heel to hide.

  “Thunder and lightning, Mr. Midnight,” Blackjack whines. “Ma Barker would never let us out in it.”

  “Ma Barker is not here, and I am. Would I hide behind a human woman’s footwear, no matter how large, like even Miss Lieutenant Molina size? I would not! Now get out and get moving. I need every set of shivs and fangs available.”

  “Ma Barker runs our clowder, Mr. Midnight,” Blackie says. “The rules are rules, and we obey, or we get a home fixing, and I do not mean a nice hot meal.”

  “Great. I have robo-mice for muscle. I guess I will have to do some home fixing myself.”

  “Nooo, Mr. Midnight!”