Nicky frowns. “We knew any valuables found in a Jersey Joe Jackson stash would be . . . out of date.”
“Yes. Of course, dear.”
Uh-oh. That is the prelude to a forthcoming contradiction.
“However,” Miss Van von Rhine goes on in that sweet, reasonable, feminine way that always stiffens my hackles into boar bristles, “bearer bonds are worth the loss of interest to international illegal parties who need ready cash. In fact, despite the colorful update of Gangsters attractions, we Americans have been pikers in the ‘gangster’ stakes since Prohibition was reversed, at least north of the border, as Las Vegas is.”
“Agreed, my dear niece-in-law,” Macho Mario rumbles from his kingpin seat on the chartreuse satin chair, which is usually my private throne.
I guess I will submit to age before beauty. This time.
“Anyway,” Miss Vanilla goes on in her tooth-decaying way, “bearer bonds have remained popular in South America, which made me wonder why a North American rat was playing Foosball with one. Upon further studying of the document in question, I saw that it was dated.”
“It was in Jersey Joe’s locker, albeit it was otherwise empty,” Eightball O’Rourke puts in, while chowing down on a caviar cracker. “He has been gone since the seventies.”
Ouch! Not true, especially here in the Ghost Suite. And maybe now!
The hairs on my backbone are standing up and singing “Clementine.” And I cannot even carry a tune, much less wear a size-nine boot or carry a bearer bond. I do so hate to see humans of my gender rushing toward their doom, unless it is Santiago.
“The bearer bond was dated nineteen ninety-seven,” Miss Van puts in, as if we should all get it now.
“So it is a teenager,” Macho Mario disparages. “It is still worth the ten thou. That is a pretty good baccarat-room tip in these times.”
Are mine the only vibrissae that are reaching for the ceiling in this room? Can Macho Mario be that behind the times?
Yes.
Miss Temple takes up the theme. “What was a major world event in nineteen ninety-eight, one that was actually positive?”
There is a long, long silence. Nobody remembers much by years, only by personal ups and downs.
“Uh . . .” comes a lone, cautious response from a Fontana brother. Ralph, the second youngest to Nicky. “. . . Windows Ninety-Eight?”
“Good answer!” Miss Van responds. “But not relevant.”
Frankly, the last thing on the Fontana brothers’ minds is being relevant, and the whole clan heaves a sigh of relief.
“And,” Miss Temple adds, “on the pesky international front, the peace accord in Ireland.”
“What should peace have to do with this mess here today?” Macho Mario asks.
“After what Temple told me she learned at the Neon Nightmare, a lot,” Miss Van von Rhine says. “I will let her take up the narrative.”
“I do not want a ‘narrative,’ ” Macho Mario says. “I want an answer to who killed who, so long as it is not a relative, and why.”
“Commendable,” Miss Van says dryly. “I will let Temple continue with what she risked life and limb to learn at the Neon Nightmare.”
Macho Mario frowns. “Her knees did seem to be dry and nubbly today.”
My Miss Temple rolls her eyes. “It is not what happened in nineteen ninety-eight, it is how what happened in the Irish peace process that year that made the U.S.’s nine/eleven attack so earthshaking over there. I did some research and—”
“—And I hope this is not another boring TV news thing,” Macho Mario says.
“I will cut to the chase,” Miss Temple says. “On record, there is only one ‘beneficiary’ of nine/eleven, as admitted by the Dean of Saint Anne’s Anglican Cathedral in Belfast. He cited the ‘worldwide revulsion against terror it sparked.’ As American dollars to support the IRA cause vanished almost overnight, the dean concluded for the Protestant side that ‘We here in Ireland are perhaps the only beneficiaries of nine/eleven.’ ”
“What do the Irish have to do with it?” Macho Maria demands. “Gloomy northern folk with a jones for justice and music and alcohol hard and soft, like their heads.”
“Yet they did what almost no one in the world has managed in recent decades, Uncle Mario,” Nicky says. “They made peace.”
“And because of that wonderful step forward for humanity,” Temple says, “the core of this whole puzzle of murder and magic was a war chest.”
I yawn and make my way to the buffet. I see that this is going to be a talky party, and I prefer rebuilding my strength to social chitchatting. I have a lot to face in the future: having both Three O’Clock and Miss Midnight Louise hounding me when I visit the Crystal Phoenix and Gangsters and the additional stress of Ma Barker crowding me near the Circle Ritz.
And having someone sleeping in my bed again, when Mr. Matt comes back.
I am starting to feel very crowded by family on all fronts. Maybe I should just move! I could run away and join the Big Cats and the evil Hyacinth at the circus, or more realistically, the Fontana brothers at Gangsters. Nobody crowds them.
Do not worry for one minute about Midnight Louie not landing on his feet in some lavish and satisfactorily lethal new situation. Yes, sir, I have more options than a trader in pig futures.
Closing Call
“Back to the hole-in-the-wall pub with the alternative IRA chappies?” Max asked, after Gandolph had thoughtfully shut his cell phone.
Max was reclining against one of the made-up beds’ headboard, his stockinged feet and legs stretched out on the goose-down coverlet.
They were digesting an informal but fine dinner they’d had at a restored restaurant on the square: pepper steak with béarnaise sauce for Max, and pan-fried monkfish with curry-mango sauce for Garry. The after-dinner coffee had been dark and rich, and the Bailey’s Irish Cream liqueur that accompanied it absolute heaven: Irish whiskey and cream that would draw any cat in the world away from looking at a queen.
“Back to the alternative IRA,” Gandolph confirmed, “if you can move your lazy after-dinner Irish-American frame.”
“Barely,” Max admitted. “You know, that’s one ‘memory’ that came to me after the coma: after-dinner coffee with you when I was young and green and listened to everything you said as gospel.”
“Good. The way to a man’s memory is through his stomach, then.” Garry stood, slapping one of Max’s feet. “Come on; Liam sounded excited. I think the scent of money has recharged his desire to deal. We can take the Mondeo.”
“And drive down that rat hole of unrestored slum streets?” Max asked, rising.
Gandolph fetched their black trench coats, bought on the square, from the narrow hotel wardrobe. The night often misted. “Yes. My GPS has the coordinates, and I checked the computer maps for routes. That’ll spare your legs, at least.”
“Modern spy ware,” Max mocked. “I’ve been retired too long.”
“Not long enough,” Gandolph said. “We’re in this only to name and disarm your would-be murderers. I don’t want you back in the counterterrorism game. It’s totally new, more brutal, and not happening in our bailiwick anymore. One last round to ensure your future safety, and then we’re retired for good.”
Max nodded. “Agreed. Four votes from me and my damaged legs and brain.”
“Recuperating, Max. Not damaged.”
“No,” Max said, struggling to stand while shrugging into the hokey trench coat. “Not damaged as Kathleen O’Connor was, glory be. Lead on, Macduff.”
Gandolph laughed. “We’ve got something from these guys or they wouldn’t have called! We can tell them some Las Vegas legend in repayment. Maybe give them the location of Ted Binion’s now-empty vault.”
Max laughed. “You’re bad, Garry. I wager these Old World types never heard of that. A hidden, secret underground vault in Las Vegas. It sounds like Nancy Drew.”
“Then Temple Barr would be in on it,” Garry quipped back.
Temple
Bar or Temple Barr? Max produced a crooked grin. At least that name was securely etched on his memory now. Too bad the woman wasn’t.
Gandolph was now a geographical magician, Max admitted to himself.
The Mondeo was parked down a narrow street, where its black body color vanished into the ill-lit night. Yet they were only a two-alley walk on rough stones from the bar. Max had his fists in his coat pockets and his head down against the coat’s turned-up collar. He might look like a skulker, but it was bone-chilling weather, not that cold to a Midwestern-boy but cutting deep with the dampness.
“I never thought I’d welcome the sight of this place,” Max said, holding the unwelcoming thick wood door open for his senior partner.
“If this is useful, with what we know from the Magdalen asylum, we can head home to sunshine and slot machines.”
“Was I ever a gambling man, Garry?”
“Only with your life, Max. Only with your life. Which is starting anew now, believe me.”
Max nodded, caught up in his old friend’s sense of achievement. A life all came down to a D. H. Lawrence title, didn’t it? Friends and Lovers.
Max was so mellow he was able to look on the dour set of disenfranchised revolutionaries with a historical distance. Their battles and time and temper were over. Here, at least, it was a new and more peaceful world.
This time Max and Garry bellied up to the bar and brought their pints to the table, not as prisoners, but peers.
Brusque nods around the scarred table were a somewhat sheepish welcome.
“You’re walking better,” Liam observed.
Max didn’t mention he’d walked less far to get here.
“What have you got?” Garry asked. “Something ‘fresh,’ you said.”
“Oh, fresh, all right,” Liam answered, lifting his glass. “Fresh as County Antrim cream.”
Max and Garry exchanged glances as they sat. That sounded good.
“First,” the leader said, “we want something for the pot from you.”
Gandolph nodded. “You may have heard Las Vegas was founded by American mobsters.”
“Aye. Not the Irish mob. The Italians and the Jews.”
“The Irish aren’t much for the desert,” Max put in.
“Unless we’re pounding railroad tracks through it.”
“That would be the Chinese out West,” Max said with a smile. “The Irish stuck to the mines and the East Coast.”
“ ‘Suckin’ up the coal dust into our lungs,’ ” Mulroney said, quoting an old work song.
“Desert dust in Las Vegas, lads,” Garry said. “Sometimes gold dust, but more often silver. If you check the Web, you’ll see there’s been news of a hidden vault opened under a Las Vegas hotel.”
“Empty,” Liam sneered. “You think I don’t get the news of the world hourly?”
Max was astounded, and thus was gagged from saying anything to back up Gandolph.
“Still . . .” Garry went on, “there’s a Vegas cadre of magicians—”
“Magicians?” Finn hooted. “We’re to be interested in a gang of magicians?”
“You should be, because a lot of deaths over the past two years or so could come to lie down like lambs at their feet, and they may roar like lions before this hidden-vault business is over. Such a vault was found a decade ago in the desert, loaded with collectible American silver dollars worth millions. Millions, lads. Wouldn’t that do your ‘charitable’ causes some major good?”
“A treasure hunt is what you’re offerin’ us instead of solid information?” Flanagan said.
Liam put a hand on Flanagan’s sweater-clad arm. “Our American sympathizers gathered millions and millions in treasure for our cause over the decades. This lad and his cousin came here almost twenty years ago because they were afire with our just grievances. I’ve never doubted the sincerity of our American cousins. Do you, Michael Kinsella, swear that there might be something to this Synth and its hidden treasure?”
“I’ve trusted this man with my life since he whisked me away from your lot,” Max said, “after I found and triggered the O’Toole’s Pub bombers in the name of my slain cousin.” He regarded Gandolph with complete sincerity. “I believe that every word he’s told you now is true.”
“You betrayed our kind and our cause, but not your kin and kith,” Liam said. “In our old days there would be a blood price, but in these new days, we cannot deny it’s no more than we would have done.”
“So,” said Gandolph. “We’ll return to Vegas and endeavor to find your lost promised fortune. What is this . . . jewel . . . of information you have for us?”
“Kathleen O’Connor is your lost jewel, yes?”
“If you speak in terms of long-delayed vengeance,” Max said.
“Hard to get over kin betrayed and slain, is it? And ye’ve only had twenty years of it, lad.”
Max nodded, soberly. These men had truly had cause. Centuries of it, enough to no longer feel like men, but trapped, snarling animals. If he and Gandolph indeed found Kitty the Cutter’s last savagely patriotic stash, they’d send it to the widows and orphans of Ulster, both sides.
He glanced at Gandolph, knowing his unilateral resolve would be honored there.
“All right, then,” Liam said, hunkering down over his pint and lowering his voice. “You’ve proven your mettle to me. We asked around, as you wanted. We asked about Kathleen O’Connor. No man who saw her forgot her. Some didn’t wish to speak of her, defending her to this very day. Some spat at the mention of her name. One, only one woman who is our liaison to the charities knew of her.”
Max and Garry leaned in and strained their ears to hear Liam’s soft conspiratorial tone.
“She’s contributed to the charities within the past year.”
Max reared away, almost physically seared by the implications. “No. I saw her dead.”
“I don’t know what you saw, man, but she put forty thousand American dollars of bearer bonds into the widows’ and orphans’ coffers within the past three months.”
“How do you know it was she?” Gandolph asked, his grammar precise even during the stress of hard bargaining.
“Because Rose Murphy, one of our longest, loyalest supporters, said it came in from a name Kathleen used to use. From the U.S.”
“And what name was that?” Max asked.
“Rebecca.”
Max tensed again. He and Garry and Liam knew from the documents that was Kathleen O’Connor’s name in the Magdalen asylum.
“Just Rebecca?” Gandolph asked. “A lot of women bear that name. How can you be sure it was Kathleen, then?”
“Not just Rebecca. Rebecca Deever. That was the code name she used for all her U.S. activities after she left the homeland. Even I recognize it from ‘donations’ and weapons shipments before the bloody ‘peace accord.’ ’Twas from her, no doubt. Even I didn’t know about these last decade’s sendings. She went around me and my associates. Directly to the women. You see, it worked both ways, Max, you and Kathleen. We IRA men blamed her for inflaming you so much our bombers were tracked down by your vengeance.”
“Then she did know O’Toole’s was scheduled to be hit while Sean was there?”
Liam shrugged. “Should have. You understand, man, we were as mad at you for bein’ with her at the time as you became angry with yourself. We never understood why she spent her time and self with you.”
“Causing heartache and guilt and murderous jealousy,” Max said. “That was the only real ‘cause’ that drove her, setting men against one another over her and enjoying the mayhem. She was avenging herself on the entire male sex, and Irishmen particularly.”
“For the years at the Magdalen asylum,” Finn suggested.
“And,” Max reminded them, “for that recorded teenage pregnancy and the baby taken away, never to be found.”
Liam nodded, eyeing his fellows. “We played into her hands as well, then.”
“So does it matter, then, whether the money is from her or her ghost?�
� Max asked. “Isn’t that where you intend any money Kathleen raised in the States to go? To your widows and orphans?” He kept his voice disingenuous yet silken.
“Mostly,” Liam whispered back, “but we do have our own priorities, even now. Remember. You’ve promised to help find her stash of cash. Even if she’s not still alive, there’s a backup pile of it, and we deserve every bit of it.”
“You certainly do,” Gandolph said abruptly, with Oliver Hardy emphasis. Max marveled that his own mind could remember eighty-year-old Laurel and Hardy comedy routines, but not the tragedies of his recent life.
Gandolph put down his pint glass and sat back. “A fair bargain. We want her; you want her amassed foreign treasure. We still both need each other, but mostly we—Michael and I—need to get back to the States to hunt her and the guns and roses and money she promised you.”
At Gandolph’s prodding, Max rose.
He felt like a walking zombie. Nothing settled. He’d been prepared to bury Kathleen O’Connor as an old enemy dead and gone for both their benefits. Now he had to deal with her resurrected and still poisonous? Did forgiveness go that far? Recovering terrorism money for shaky, defanged terrorists? What was Gandolph thinking?
Probably way ahead of him and his on-off memory.
Max swaggered to the pub door, because it was either that or limp. Gandolph was right behind him.
Then the door crashed inward with a crowd of dark-coated men behind it . . . five, by an instant count: the two ex-IRA men they’d met with and three more of that ilk.
He and Gandolph had led them here, for sure.
“Out of the way,” Gandolph shouted, pushing Max into the wall and then through the open door behind the incoming newcomers. The room behind them exploded with Irish curses and splintering wood and glass as the two gangs met full force.
Max was out in the misty night, scrambling over the slippery-damp cobblestones, his hand rushing Gandolph along with him to the sanctuary of their car.
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