“John Updike? Sounds like a porn name,” I said.
“Joan Updike would be more appropriate. . . . Oh, and see over there, that’s where Jackie did a hundred and five in the Porsche and got caught by the state police.”
“Who’s Jackie?”
“My boyfriend,” Kit said breezily.
“Nice boy?”
“Who cares about nice?” she said in her best Madonna.
“Well, I’m sure he’s perfectly charming, but I can tell you one thing about him that you don’t know.”
“What?”
“He isn’t good enough for you,” I said.
Kit turned her head slightly and looked at me.
“Are you making a pass?” she asked with a smile.
My lack of an answer was my answer and it unsettled her in a way I found I liked a lot.
At Ipswich we approached a well-lit place called the Clam Box, where you could smell fried fish through the Toyota’s sunroof and broken window. Dozens of cars. Perhaps fifty people waiting outside.
“Look at that place, it must be good,” I said. “I’m hungry.
You wanna pull in?”
“Best fried clams in New England,” she said.
“Really?”
“You ever have a fried clam?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s the best. Huge lines all summer. Ted Williams goes there.”
“You want me to stop the car?” I asked, slowing down.
Kit shook her head.
“I should get home,” she said.
We drove on and as we got closer to Newburyport, farther from Boston, she regained more of her composure and beamed at me.
“Not good enough for me,” she mused. “Who do you think you are, mister?”
She seemed happier. I patted her knee and she didn’t seem to mind. I was impressed. I mean, I don’t how I would have taken it if someone had tried to assassinate my da half an hour ago, but I doubt I could have been as cool as this. Clearly, a tough wee soul lived under the late-teen veneer.
“Where you living in Salisbury?” she asked.
“Not sure yet, everything’s a bit up in the air.”
“How old are you?” she asked.
“I’m twenty-five, twenty-six in a month or so.”
“Twenty-six? You’re, like, seven years older than me.”
“So?”
“You’re totally an old man,” she mocked.
It made me wince a little. No one wants to hear something like that from a pretty girl and this girl was very pretty.
“How old are you? Nineteen?”
“Nearly twenty,” she said.
“You’re a mere child,” I mocked back.
She looked at me with fake annoyance.
“What’s your name? I know you said it but I forgot.”
“Sean.”
“No, your second name, I remembered the Sean.”
“Sean McKenna. Oh my goodness, what’s yours? In all the excitement I forgot to ask.”
“Katherine, but everyone calls me Kitty, or Kit; I used to hate it, oh my God, I used to hate it, but I kind of like it now. Kit, I mean.”
“I suppose it’s because of Kitty O’Shea,” I said.
“Who was that again? The name’s familiar,” Kit asked.
“You don’t know who Kitty O’Shea is?”
“No.”
“That’s what I was about talking about when I said you were a mere child,” I said.
She wanted to ask but she was too pissed off and I enjoyed watching her fume. We came to a road junction in the small town of Rowley. We could either go left or straight on.
“Where to?” I asked.
“Straight on, oh wait, I can hardly bring you home, Dad wouldn’t like that. What are we going to do with you? Where are you staying, in Salisbury?”
“Nah, for the moment I’m still back at the youth hostel in Boston.”
“I’m sorry, Dad wouldn’t like me to bring you home. Do you want to drop me and then you can take the car back to the city?”
“I don’t want to drive a stolen car, it’s freaking me out a bit, to be honest. I don’t want to be deported after my first week in America.”
“Ok, then, we should go straight on, we’ll go to the bus station in Newburyport. I definitely can’t leave this car at Dad’s house. Sonia can pick me up and you can get the bus back to Boston. I can’t drive you, I’m pretty messed from when you fell on top of me,” she said and winced at her own lame excuse.
“You don’t have to say thanks or anything,” I said.
She fought the urge to thank me, her punky little pride unable to accept the fact that she had been in danger and I’d helped get her out of it. We drove in complete silence for the next couple of minutes. Dark now, but I could tell that the landscape had become swampy. It smelled of marsh gas and seawater.
Mosquitoes and a million types of fly bouncing into the windshield and a sign that said “Newburyport, Plum Island— 5 Miles.”
“So who’s Ted Williams?” I asked, to resume the conversation.
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
“Only the greatest baseball player ever. The last man to hit over .400, war hero, batting champion again and again.”
“I thought Babe Ruth was the greatest player,” I said innocently.
Kit looked at me as if she were having a fit. Her nose had wrinkled up and she was plucking at the pointy strands of hair over her forehead.
“Are you trying to rile me up?”
“No.”
“This is a Red Sox town,” she said.
“So?”
“You don’t know about the Red Sox and the curse of the Bambino?”
“No.”
“Well, anyway, it’s a long story, No, No, Nanette and all that, suffice to say, we don’t talk about Babe Ruth. We don’t, in Massachusetts, talk about any Yankees players. It’s a rule.”
“Sorry, I don’t know much about baseball, nothing actually. We don’t play it in Ireland. I’ve only heard of Babe Ruth, oh, and Joe DiMaggio of course, because of Simon and Gar-funkel, and yeah, Lou Gehrig because of the disease. Oh aye, and Yogi Berra, you know because of the cartoon.”
“What did I tell you about Yankees players?” Kit snapped, her face turning bright red. She was working herself up into a little bit of a state. More of a state than immediately after a man had tried to bloody kill her da. Odd but a good thing perhaps— you keep your calm for the dangerous things, you lose your cool over the trivial.
“They were all Yankees? Jesus. Sorry. Who are the famous Red Sox?” I asked.
“I don’t walk to talk about it now,” Kit said, still a little ticked off. Petulant and furious, she looked even more fetching.
“I was just asking,” I said.
“Obviously you’re, like, totally ignorant about the whole business,” she said.
“I just said I was,” I protested.
“And you fucking are.”
“But that’s what I said.”
“And you were right.”
She turned away from me, so that I couldn’t see that she was laughing. I wanted to pull the car over, grab her, and kiss her.
It was completely the wrong thing to do, but also . . .
“Why are you slowing down? The bus station is still a couple of miles, come on,” Kit said.
True enough, we were getting close to civilization. A big town. The trees giving way to houses. Old wooden homes, some with signs saying that they dated back to the 1630s. Traffic started to increase and I could definitely smell the sea. We stopped at a red light. A sign to the right pointed to Rolfe’s Lane, Plum Island, and Plum Island Airfield.
“This is where you’d turn to take me home but Daddy really wouldn’t approve of me bringing you to the house, he just wouldn’t. Sorry,” Kit said.
“It’s ok,” I said. “So what do I do?”
“Go straight through town and then turn right at the bus station. T
here’s a big parking lot, we can dump the car, you can get a bus back to Boston, I’ll phone Sonia.”
“Who’s Sonia?” I asked.
“My dad’s new wife. I guess my stepmom now. My mom died two years ago. Well, not my real mom, my real mom is out there somewhere, it’s complicated.”
“Is she a wicked stepmom?”
“No, she’s nice. She doesn’t like Jackie very much, though.”
“Jackie—the boyfriend, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I like Sonia, sounds like she has good horse sense. I want to meet her.”
“No way, Dad wouldn’t like it.”
We drove along High Street. Enormous mansions to the left and right built during Newburyport’s boom times in the nineteenth century on profits from the whaling and the China trade.
We turned into the parking lot at the bus station, got out of the car. I started walking away.
“You really are naive, aren’t you?” she said, took off her jacket, and wiped down the steering wheel, the gear stick, the dash.
“Can’t leave prints,” she said.
I nodded, slapped my forehead.
We walked to the bus station.
A lovely night. Warm and the heavens packed with constellations and a waxing moon. We walked in silence across the parking lot and she led me into the station entrance. Not much of a bus station, more of a halt, a desk, a guy, a phone, a Coke machine, half a dozen chairs. She phoned Sonia while I asked the man at the desk about the next bus to Boston.
“Ten minutes, Boston and Logan,” he said, though it was more like tea meen, bosson, logue.
We went outside. Moths bewitched by the big arc lights over the car park, crashing into them and falling stunned to the ground.
“Let’s get away from shere,” I said and led her away from the lights and under an oak tree. We sat on one of the enormous roots. Kit’s hand reached round to mine. Her fingers were cool and delicate. She turned me to look at her.
“I’m like totally dating someone, you know . . . Jackie, but, but I want to give you this in case I never see you again,” she said.
She pulled me toward her and kissed me on the lips. I opened her mouth with mine and I found her tongue and we kissed there in the night under the moon and the arc lights.
She was young and beautiful. So alive. I kissed her and held her and put my hands on her bum, squeezed her ass, and ran my hand up her back and leaned down and kissed her small pert breasts.
A car honked.
“Sonia,” she said, gasping.
She broke away and stood and then came over and kissed me again.
“I never thanked you,” she said.
“You just did.”
“Yes,” she said, blushing happily.
“Will I see you again?”
“Sean McKenna from Ireland, I’ll remember that.”
Sonia honked the car horn again.
“I have to go. Sonia’s not one to gossip, but Jackie, you know, he can be a bit jealous. And I don’t want him to go after you. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Don’t worry, I avoid hurt,” I said.
She kissed me on the cheek.
She signaled Sonia, ran to the car, climbed in. Waved at me as she drove past.
I avoid hurt, I said to myself with a thin smile. Of course.
I’m at the other end of the stick. I’m the hurter. I’m the goddamn nimrod that could destroy all of them. Jackie, Gerry, Sonia, Seamus, and even the famous Touched McGuigan.
And you too, Kit. You too.
Aye.
Stay young, stay beautiful, stay away if you know what’s good for you.
I walked into the bus station, put fifty cents in the pay phone, and called Samantha at the safe house. Jeremy answered and told me to hold on.
“Are you ok?” Samantha asked. “How did it go?”
“Better and worse than we could have hoped,” I said. “I drove Kit home, but the bar was a disaster. For a start there were two assass—”
“Not on the phone,” Samantha snapped. “Where are you?”
“I’m in Newburyport, at the bus station.”
“Newburyport. Ok, let me think. Ok, we want to get to New York. What’s the number there?”
“Let me see, Newburyport 555-9360, the area code’s 978.”
“I’ll call you back in five minutes.”
“There’s a bus going back to Boston right now, do you want me to get on it?”
“I’ll call you back,” she said.
The bus came and went and the man behind the desk gave me a hangdog look.
The phone rang. It was Samantha. I was pissed off.
“Yeah, well, now we’re screwed, I just missed the last bus to Boston,” I said.
“No, no. This is what I want you to do. Get a taxi to the airport at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. There’s an 11:50 flight to New York. I will meet you there. Is that clear?”
“It’s clear,” I said, rubbing the tiredness from my eyes and hanging up.
The cab ride took an hour and cost seventy bucks. Samantha arrived at the airport the same time that I did, landing in a helicopter.
She bought us tickets for the last flight out to New York.
She found a quiet corner of the almost deserted airport and debriefed me.
“I heard all about it,” she said, shaking her head. “The FBI cocked it up. But at least you met Kit? Didn’t you? Our plan worked.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “I drove with her all the way to New-buryport. I think she liked me.”
“Excellent, it’s our way in,” she said. “And as expected, take a look at this.”
She handed me a faxed copy of tomorrow’s Irish Times. The banner headline occupied the whole front page: “IRA Announce Unilateral Cease-fire. Protestant Groups to Follow.”
I gave her back the fax and frowned.
Something didn’t sit right. I examined my feelings and found that I resented her for making me use Kit in this way. Regardless of what her father represented or what he’d done, I liked the girl.
“Come on, then, we’re going to a bureau training facility in New York,” Samantha said.
We boarded the plane. A Short 360 with the two of us and a couple of tired businessmen as the only passengers.
First class was empty and I switched to the right-hand side of the aircraft so I could follow the coast as we headed back down the Atlantic.
We took off steeply. The plane reached ten thousand feet.
Portsmouth lit up and very clear.
The harbor, the river, the highways.
Below us, farther down the coast, a long barrier island. I found a stewardess.
“Is that Plum Island, Massachusetts, down there by any chance?”
She called the captain on her little phone.
“Yes, it is,” she told me.
That’s where she lived. And Samantha was right—she was the way in. But the way had a name and she was beautiful and quick and I doubted that she was and ever could be my enemy.
3: BACK TO THE BIG A
New York City. Overdescribed. You know what it’s like even if you’ve never been. This was August in New York so it was all that and more and you couldn’t get a doctor, electrician, or plumber on the weekends.
Dan grinned.
Manhattan behind his head. The Twin Towers, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State blurring in the heat haze. We were out in the wastelands of Queens, where the subway lines used letters from the end of the alphabet and the video stores had an Urdu section.
He sipped his coffee.
“You’re pretty much fucked, Michael,” he said with more than a hint of gleeful schadenfreude. It wasn’t contempt. Dan liked me, but he sometimes felt that I was more trouble than I was worth. Dan was my FBI controller who liaised with the U.S. Marshals Service and the Witness Protection Program. It was Dan’s job to make sure I didn’t get killed. As I saw it, he was letting me walk into a snake pit, without raising too much
of a stink about it. He said it was over his head, but everyone always says that when they’re scared or they can’t be arsed.
“You’ll be fucked if I die,” I said.
“You won’t die,” Dan assured me. “At least not on my watch.”
I didn’t say anything. I needed a lot more convincing than this. Dan rubbed his cheeks, smiled.
“I like what you’ve done to your hair, it’s very contemporary. Now that Cobain’s dead that whole look you used to have is on its way out. If you were a bit more tanned you’d look like an Israeli commando,” he said.
“They did it to me. It’s their idea of a disguise.”
I took a sip of the coffee, too. It was from the deli round the corner, made, no doubt, by a recent immigrant who knew the ingredients and the method for making coffee but certainly not how it was supposed to taste.
“I can’t drink this. What are we doing out here?” I asked.
“You’re lucky you’re not in Union City or Weehawken. The lower echelons of the bureau got priced out of Manhattan a long time ago. Count your blessings, buddy.”
“Count my blesssings? Dan, they want me to infiltrate a rogue IRA splinter group. What exactly is the blessing aspect of that?” I asked.
“Well, you’re not back in Mexico, which, as I understand it, is the alternative,” Dan said with complacency.
“True, but I’m worried about being shopped to Seamus Duffy. And that, pal, is your department. If I was you, I’d be on the phone to Janet Reno telling her that as a matter of policy I have to be protected from these Brits who are doing their damnedest to get me killed. I am very disappointed in you, mate.”
Dan looked hurt. He was a big guy, chubby, blond hair, about thirty. He had a penchant for wearing polo shirts and golfing gear. It only made him seem fatter. And when he looked sad, it was all the more pathetic. He tapped his chin nervously.
“Michael, I know you think that you’re the center of the world but you ain’t. Janet Reno? Come on. You got yourself into this mess and you’ll have to get yourself out of it. Our job is to make sure you don’t get killed by the people you ra—, er, the people you helped put behind bars. If you messed up in Spain, that’s your own problem. I think, if you recall, I warned you not to go abroad.”
“I needed a vacation.”
The Dead Yard Page 6