by Bill Granger
“Nice prick,” Henry McGee said.
Brian turned; he was so amazed that his mouth hung up and his hand moved to cover his penis.
Henry slashed his throat ear to ear. Blood filled Brian’s shirt and mouth. He thought he was shouting though no sound came forth. He stood a moment, feeling the life drain out of him, staring at Henry McGee’s dark face and black eyes.
Henry left Brian in the outdoor pisser, crossed into the public house, went out the front, and got into the rental Ford. He had a ways to go.
The second and third were from Kerry and, like typical Kerrymen, they were farmers and simple men of simple wants and pleasures, who had given up the land for a secure job in the Garda. They were assigned to a peaceful district of County Clare out where the burren hills fall down to the rocks that edge Galway Bay. They had stopped their black patrol car behind the public house that was on the edge of the bay beneath the hills. They were on duty and it wouldn’t do to have a patrol car parked prominently in front of a boozer. Besides, they were drinking milk and just wanted a bit of ham and bread to go with it and break the routine of the day.
They consumed lunch and the next thirty-four minutes of their lives.
The driver was Kevin O’Donnell and he wasn’t married because he was only thirty. Irishmen do not rush into such institutions. His partner was John Rochford, twenty-eight.
That’s the way they were listed in the first report in the Irish Independent, which bannered the story across the front page.
When Kevin pressed the accelerator, the ignition circuit was completed and the bomb was detonated. The explosive was one pound of Plastique wrapped around the carburetor.
The bomb blew out all the windows of the public house, the front door, the door to the kitchen, broke 312 glasses in the bar as well as the mirror, and made widows of six women in the village whose husbands had the misfortune to be standing at the bar when the blast came. In all there were nineteen killed outright, three who died later at Galway Hospital, and fourteen severely injured, including a nine-year-old boy who was blinded by flying glass. Two dogs were also killed.
By nine P.M. that night, Wednesday night, Irish troops and the Irish Garda had sealed all roads in Galway and Clare counties. It was just as well that Matthew O’Day had stayed in Dublin because he could not have traveled to Dublin from his farm in Clare without being apprehended. The Irish government did not tolerate attacks on itself by the Irish Republican Army and there was no doubt that some lunatic faction of the IRA or of the even more extreme Irish Liberation Army had lost its sense and decided to kill two of the Republic’s policemen.
Sweeping, brutal roundups all that day and night resulted in the arrests of ninety-four suspected IRA terrorists across the Republic. And Matthew O’Day spent the next twenty-four hours in his room in the Shelbourne, desperately aware of the hunt going on across Ireland, desperately aware of the simple threat of the girl in the bar: He would regret it.
Maureen Kilkenny called him at midnight. He had been waiting for her call. He was a little drunk and his voice slurred but he thought his senses were alert.
“Jesus, Maureen, I’ve been waitin’ on you.”
“Brian was killed. Murdered. Everything’s going crazy. Brian was killed in a public house.”
“By whom? In that explosion?”
“No. That’s the other thing. They came out to the farm and arrested a half dozen of the others. Michael. Deirdre. O’Neill…”
She recited their names, and each name hammered Matthew’s heart. The best of them.
“Brian was cut. Slashed. The bastard even cut his prick off and shoved it in his mouth. What the hell is going on, Matthew? I’m scared—”
“Where are ya, girl?”
“I saw the arrests from the field. I was down at the ocean with the dogs and I saw the cops coming down the road with their fucking lights on and sirens; when they arrested O’Neill he started to put up a fight and it was what they wanted. The bastards’re no better than the Brits. They beat him half to death before they put him in the car. They found the guns, Matthew.”
“Jesus, Maureen, Jesus.”
“Who the hell killed them? The coppers in that car bomb? Who the hell did this? And Brian—” Her voice caught. She once rolled a bomb in a baby carriage into a Protestant grocery and walked out as cool as anything, right across the street, down to the car, got in the car and they drove off just as it exploded. In a baby carriage. She was talking too fast now.
“Easy, girl,” Matthew said, seeing the nameless woman in his mind. He’d kill her. But then, who was behind her? How many were there? They must have a gang, they blew up a police car in one end of Clare and had time to kill one of his boys at the other end. Matthew’s experience told him to be calm now, to think this through. The nameless girl would be killed but in time. Once Matthew could see how many there were. And get some money again. He thought of the loss of the farm and all those weapons, irreplaceable weapons in an arms market suddenly turned upside down. America could supply weapons but that took time and organization to set up. In the meantime, the cells of terror would have to survive on their own. He saw all this in mind while he calmed down Maureen.
“I’m at a public telephone,” she said. “It’s damned cold but I couldn’t make a move until things quieted down. A public telephone someplace in Kerry. I got across on the ferry, I walked for hours, I had some grub in a grocery; then I lit out for the fields. I’m sleeping in the fields.”
“Don’t go back to the farm,” Matthew said.
“What do you take me for? An idiot? Where’s this going to end?”
“You gotta get to Dublin. We can get out of here—”
“I’m fucking across the country from Dublin. Am I getting through to you? The roads are covered with coppers and soldiers.”
Christ. He had to think. A line of sweat beaded on his forehead.
“Matthew?”
“I’m here, Maureen.” He thought about it. “I can’t come to get you, that’s for sure. There’s nothing for it but to hitch or steal a car. Could you steal a car?”
“Thanks, Matthew. I appreciate your help on this.”
“Cut it, girl, just cut it. I got me own problems but I’m working on it. Can you get here by tomorrow night?”
“What if I can? You’ll still be there?”
He thought about the nameless girl and the appointment on Thursday at lunch in the bar. Yes, he’d still be there. He’d be very careful now and not make quick assumptions because the girl was very dangerous and so were her friends. It was absurd but Matthew faced the fact: The terrorists had been terrorized by the same methods used in the trade. But this wasn’t for a cause, this was for money.
Money.
“Jesus,” he said, not to Maureen but himself. He began to see exactly what it all meant.
16
Devereaux stepped painfully onto the walk. He had accepted a cane because he needed it. The shoulder was in a flexible, light cast, which meant it was too inflexible and very heavy. His knees were both bandaged. The day was cheerful and warm in the way that Washington can be in November. He realized that he had not really expected ever to leave the hospital. But here he was, an invisible man in an indifferent world full of careening traffic and hurrying pedestrians, broad streets full of trees, embassies hidden by ornate federal façades. He thought it was the tonic he needed most, to be back in the world, however brutal it was.
The taxi took him to the hospital across town. He went into registration and was told Miss Macklin had been discharged two days earlier.
He took another long taxi ride out to Bethesda, staring at nothing as the car careened up the length of Wisconsin Avenue into the vulgar, expensive heart of the commercial district in Bethesda.
On a premonition, he asked the cab to wait at the apartment building.
He rang the bell a long time and then he rang all the bells in the entrance. A door buzzed open and he went into the inside hallway. Behind a chained door th
at opened a crack, a woman demanded to know what he wanted.
He told her.
She peered out and saw the cane and saw the way the man leaned on it. A cripple. She had an instinctive feeling of superiority and it supplanted her fear. There was nothing to fear from a cripple.
“She still isn’t back from the hospital.”
“They said they released her two days ago.”
“I’m here all the time.” She wore a housedress. She seldom changed her housedress, seldom went out, seldom did anything except watch television endlessly and drink Southern Comfort by the case, which was delivered every two weeks by the liquor store.
“If they released her, she didn’t come here,” the woman said. She smiled at the cripple. “You meet her in the hospital? You don’t look in such good shape yourself.”
“No,” Devereaux said.
“You wanna come in? You wanna drink? I got some Southern Comfort,” she said, thinking about it.
Devereaux said, “I’m sure you do.”
She slammed the door as he turned away.
Mac opened the door of his corner office and looked across the newsroom to the reception desk. He had never met this man who had meant so much to Rita Macklin for all these years. He felt a wave of resentment because of the pain Devereaux had caused Rita. Oh, hell. He felt jealous, too. He was nearly sixty years old and he felt protective of his reporter, but he also loved her in that part of a man’s conscience that can’t lie to himself.
Mac crossed the newsroom. It was a magazine newsroom and very modern, full of computer terminals and earnest young men and women in pastel-colored shirts and blouses, men and women alike: cool, dedicated, a bit distant, as silent as the screens they watched their words on, superior to the world around them because they were the Swarthmores and Yales and—by God—Harvards of the earth and they expected an inheritance any day now. Mac was the dinosaur sent among them to remind them of how it was in the old days when reporters wore hats indoors and shouted “Copy!” because words were put on mere paper then. Quaint. They sucked up to him because he still had power, they drank Perriers with him (though he drank martinis), they watched his hands to see if the power would slip at an opportune moment. Mac was old to them and power was in feeble hands.
Mac stood behind Velma at the reception desk.
“She asked about you every day.”
Devereaux said nothing. He had not eaten. He felt a peculiar weakness from the mere exertion of riding in taxicabs around a breathlessly alive city he was a stranger to.
“She wanted you and you never came and you could see her sink and sink,” Mac accused him.
Velma looked at the curious man with a cane who could cause pain to women. She wondered what it would be like, to be hurt by a man who looked like that. She wondered if she might enjoy it.
Mac said, “Why are you here now?”
“Where’s Rita?”
“You could have come to see her.”
“I did,” Devereaux said. “The night after she was attacked, the same man did it to me. I’ve been in the hospital. No telephones. No way in and no way out. Security.”
“Jesus Christ,” Mac said.
Devereaux said, “Tell me.”
“Christ, man, you look like you’re going to fall down. Come in. Take my office—”
Velma looked at Mac. “Do you want coffee?”
But the men were moving away from the reception desk through the carpeted newsroom, through the pastel-colored blouses and shirts fastened to terminals and keyboards that made click-click-click sounds to imitate the typewriter and provide some visceral satisfaction in the silence.
Mac closed the door. Devereaux sat in the chair in front of the desk. There was a view of L Street from the window, which did not commend itself. Mac went to the window and communed with it. He spoke to the glass: “Rita has mental problems.”
“There was a neurologist named Krueger…”
“Dr. Krueger suggested that she could be helped in a place, a sanitarium that—”
Devereaux said, “Where is she?”
“Dr. Krueger said you might ask, cause her more problems—”
“Look at me.”
Mac turned.
Devereaux was on his feet. His face was still ashen but his eyes glittered and there was something in his bearing at that moment that supplanted every weakness that might be in his body.
Mac said, “I didn’t know any of this. It was your fault, you and the damned agency or whatever it is that you work for, you abandoned her.”
“Yes.”
“Then you admit it.”
“I hurt her. I thought I should leave her so that she could live normally, that everything I was would cause her grief and death.”
“And that’s what happened, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Who shot her?”
“I know. The same man who tried to kill me. I want to make Rita well. Then I’m going to kill him.”
“What kind of a world do you live in? Are you insane?”
“No. Neither is Rita. You don’t believe she’s insane, do you?”
“She’s so sad. So broken down. I can’t stand to see her fading away, day by day. Jesus Christ, you, people like you, you’re really evil, you’re rotting meat…”
Devereaux said, “Dr. Krueger. He treats her.”
“She’s grown to depend on him.”
“He’s a druggist,” Devereaux said.
“There’s pain, there’s sedation, she needs—”
“Tell me where she is.”
“No.”
“I don’t want to hurt her.”
“She’s going to learn to get along without you.”
“No.”
Mac smiled. “Oh, the sadist returns. What do you do when you’re not pulling the wings off butterflies?”
Devereaux said nothing.
“You gonna threaten me? You ought to know that won’t work. I’ve been threatened. Even beaten up in a stinking Ankara jail. So don’t threaten me because I’m not afraid of things.”
“Not you,” Devereaux said. “She likes you.”
“How do you—”
“She told me more than once. She even loves you. You can tell me and save me time. I’m weeks behind the man who did that to her. To me. I’ll get him but he’s got a lot of time on me. But I won’t leave to get him until she’s well, if it takes the rest of my life.”
“You left her before.”
“But that was in my previous life,” Devereaux said.
“You’ve reformed.”
“I died,” Devereaux said.
Mac watched him.
Devereaux got up from the chair and went to the same window. Both men stared down the narrow length of L Street.
Devereaux said, “I can almost tell you the moment I died. I won’t tell her that, it might frighten her. I don’t mind telling you. I thought nothing mattered except a few things that I wanted to see and preserve in mind. I had three or four things that I wanted to see endlessly because they filled up everything. I couldn’t have those things. Then I met her and she began to show me how important it was, the old feeling I used to have for three or four things.”
“What things?”
“It doesn’t matter. I can’t explain it to you, but you can believe I had those things and they were enough. Then I couldn’t have them anymore. And I shut down. Until Rita Macklin reminded me.”
“I don’t really understand you.”
“I didn’t expect to come back to life a second time. But it happened and now I have to find Rita and tell her whatever words will make her well. She won’t be the same but at least she’ll understand why she’s different now. And then I’m going to kill the man who tried to kill her.”
“Who is he?”
“You don’t need to know. He’s a terrorist, I suppose. I mean, I assume that’s what he does now.”
“This is connected to your agency—”
“I don’t
work for them anymore.”
“You. And her. You retired once from it—”
“The war wasn’t over then.” Devereaux made a smile that might have meant anything. “Even your magazine says the war is over. Peace and love. The triumph of reason. Men have ceased their quest for domination over other men. Pax Americana, and every day is now officially December twenty-fifth.”
“You don’t believe in what you see?”
“I don’t care.”
“I want her to be back; I love her,” Mac said.
“I thought you did,” Devereaux said. “Let me see her.”
“What if it’s the wrong thing? To let you see her?”
“I won’t hurt her.”
“You said that before.”
“That was before I died,” Devereaux said. He turned from the window and looked at the editor. He smiled as if he regretted his words and wanted to apologize for them. There was something in his eyes and in the smile that touched Mac. Something rueful and very honest.
“What are you now? A reborn Christian?”
“No. I’m just alive again but I remember my previous life.”
“She can’t be hurt—”
“I love her,” Devereaux said. In his previous life, he would not have spoken because he thought all words were lies. He was growing used to words. He could reach out into the world and talk. Everything was changed now, he had lost so much, even a fine, simple hatred for Henry McGee. Henry just had to be killed, that was all, it was like killing the bear that time in the woods on the mountain above Front Royal. He wanted the bear to go away but the bear was lazy or crazy or something and the bear became a threat and he had to kill the bear.
“For Christ’s sake, what am I supposed to do?”
Devereaux stared at Mac and felt the pain in the words. He waited.
Mac fumbled for a piece of paper on his desk. He held it out.
Devereaux looked at the paper. He handed the paper back to Mac.