The Dead Yard

by Adrian McKinty

  I passed him the cigarette.

  “Keep it,” I said.

  Samantha appeared outside and my mood flipped yet again.

  From mousy Diana Prince to Wonder Woman. Green eyes, Roman nose, crimson lipstick, acherontic hair tied in a severe plait behind her head. A sharp black business suit, pumps, powerful hips; she seemed slimmer, ten years younger, and the heels brought her up to about five nine. She looked corporate, competent, professional.

  “Do you like the car?” she asked.

  “It’s a bit bold, don’t you think?”

  “Not really. I’m Pitt’s rich country cousin. Of course I would drive a classic car. It’s part of my character,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  I got in the passenger’s side.

  Jeremy slid into the back next to a sallow-faced, bald man called Harrington, who was to be the FBI liaison. They didn’t exactly inspire confidence either. Harrington was listening to a Walkman, Jeremy staring gormlessly into space.

  “So basically there’s only going to be four people watching me,” I said to Samantha while she fiddled with the radio.

  “Who’s the fourth?” she asked breezily.

  “Simon. The guy in Salisbury.”

  “Oh, he’ll be flying back to England as you soon as you make contact with the Sons of Cuchulainn.”

  “So, the three people in this car,” I said in as neutral a voice as I could.

  Samantha sighed.

  “I have to warn you, Michael. We are here under sufferance. You can’t just go around running foreign agents in a host country without conditions. This has to be a low-key affair.

  And there’s also Dan, I thought to myself. Dan says he’ll keep an eye on things.

  “You should give him the speech, Samantha,” Jeremy said from the backseat.

  Samantha nodded at him in the mirror.

  “In your case, Michael, it probably won’t be necessary. But sometimes I’ve had to restrain my more enthused agents,” she said.

  “Oh no, I’d love to fucking hear it,” I said.

  “Well, maybe I’ll give you a précis, Michael. Basically, I tell anyone I’m running that there’s to be no silly heroics. No theatrics, no diminishing of the problems. You see, some people can get carried away, they don’t want to let me down, let the side down.”

  “So what does that entail?”

  “At the first sign of trouble, darling, you really have to let me know. You should remember it’s my safety too. God forbid they suss you, grab you. They’ll make you talk. They’ll make you talk and then they’ll come for me. So at the first inkling that you may have slipped or done something, or someone has rumbled you, you come to me, we’ll talk it over. And if things haven’t gone as planned I’ll make sure you’re out with an honorable discharge and all threats dropped.”

  “No extradition?” I asked.

  She nodded. Maybe she wasn’t such a cold-hearted cat after all. And I found myself fighting two contradictory impulses. The first, to find a way out of the assignment and my association with these people. And the second, a desire to do the job, to get it right, to please Jeremy and Samantha and Dan. The second I had to battle against.

  In Cambridge we dropped Harrington and Jeremy at another nondescript FBI safehouse on Harvard Square, and after an enormous traffic jam on 98 we didn’t get into New-buryport until close to midnight.

  We quickly found the All Things Brit store on State Street.

  A twee, quaint, touristy street with a Celtic imports store, a sewing shop, a chocolate shop, an antique maps store, and three ice-cream parlors.

  The place was quiet. The kids were in Boston and the tourists were in bed.

  “We shouldn’t really be seen together, darling, but it looks as if there are no witnesses. Come on in and I’ll show you the shop,” Samantha said.

  She parked the Jag and found the keys to All Things Brit. We went inside. It was the usual collection of tat. British foods, Barbour jackets, pipes, hats, damp-looking woolen things. The decor that of an old vicarage that would appear complete only with a spinster lady shrieking over the body of a poisoned industrialist.

  I thumbed through a selection of Masterpiece Theatre videotapes while Samantha hung up her coat.

  “Let me show you the upstairs and then I’ll drive you up to Salisbury, it’s only about fifteen minutes away. McCaghan takes his family up to Salisbury Beach every Friday night in summer. They have a fireworks show just over the state line. That’s why we picked it as a place for you to be. You’re not following him to his home on Plum Island, you’re not showing up on his doorstep asking him for a job. You’re just accidentally bumping into Kit at the fireworks display. It won’t seem strange at all. I expect Kit will be happy to see you.”

  “I expect so,” I said sourly.

  “Hopefully, Touched will have you checked out and they’ll ask you to join them down at their rather palatial home on Plum Island, which is only a mile or so from here. It’s an actual island, by the way—a barrier island, quite nice, I went there bird-watching with Pitt, the whole bottom two-thirds is a wildlife reserve. I think we saw plovers, egrets, that kind of thing.”

  “Fascinating.”

  She led me upstairs to Pitt’s flat. A poky affair. On one side of the stairs, a bathroom and a den that barely had room to squeeze in a sofa, drinks cabinet, and bookcase. On the street side, a tiny kitchen and a bedroom dominated by a big cast-iron bed with red silk sheets and pillows. Above it, an enormous skylight that let in the heavens.

  “I am going to have this completely redecorated. I think a Mediterranean theme will work very well here. We’re near the sea and this is a working fishing port. What do you think?” Samantha asked.

  “You think we’ll be here long enough to bother about that?”

  “Oh good Lord, I have no idea. Could be weeks, could be months. Would you like a drink? Pitt’s got an excellent Scotch collection. All island single malts, wonderful, I promise. And the brandy is to die for. He really is a very resourceful and charming man.”

  She went into the den.

  “He used to be in the civil service or the Foreign Office or something, did I tell you that?” she shouted in.

  “You told me that,” I said, unable to shake the somber feeling that had been following me round all day. The feeling that Death was making his way back into my life again after five long, lean years.

  She came back with the drinks. I sat on an ottoman and she sat on the bed. She kicked her shoes off and let her hair down. She had poured two generous glasses of a sixteen-year-old Bowmore and brought the bottle, too. She knocked hers back in one. I followed suit and she poured us both another. Again she scooted her drink. This time I sipped mine.

  She undid the top button of her blouse.

  “How nervous are you, on a scale of one to ten?” she asked. I held up five fingers.

  “That sounds about right. The Greeks tell us. . . . well, never mind what the Greeks tell us. Finish that and let me go to the loo and I’ll drive you up to Salisbury. Simon will be dying to meet you.”

  I finished my glass of whisky. She retired to the bathroom.

  “I’ve been thinking. You know what your problem is,

  Michael?” she said through the bathroom door.

  “No. What?”

  “Men will always hate you and women will always love you.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Pour me another drink,” she said.

  “I thought you were going to drive me.”

  “Pour me another drink,” she insisted.

  I poured two more whiskies. She came out of the bathroom a little unshaky on her feet, with her blouse completely off and draped over her shoulders and her beautiful, voluptuous body stunning me under the stars. She took the glass and drank the whisky and lay down on the bed.

  “Kiss me,” she said.

  I kissed her. I removed my shirt and sat beside her, and she put her arms round me and I kissed her
neck and ran my hands down her back. I stood to take off my trousers and when I lay beside her again her eyes had closed and her breathing had eased and she was asleep.

  I stood there for a minute and then lifted her onto the pillows and placed the silk sheet over her.

  “I suppose it’s the sofa for me,” I said to myself.

  But I sat on the ottoman and watched her for a while. Her eyes fluttered, and when she was deeply asleep I lay down on the other side of the bed and wrapped myself in the blanket and closed my eyes.

  And there we were, chaste and together in this big bed. A bed where, perhaps inevitably, Samantha and I would finally make love immediately after my first harried and traumatic contact with the Sons of Cuchulainn.

  A bed where Samantha would get no sleep at all as the operation she was running gradually spun out of control.

  A bed where Touched McGuigan would stand and admire his handiwork and I would gasp in horror at a scene of murder, torture, and a body bleeding slowly to death in those red silk sheets under a bright blue and endless sky.

  4: TROJAN HORSE

  On the sand at Salisbury Beach, in the far north of Massachusetts, a Greek and a Trojan battling it out over the upturned hulks of the Greek ships.

  It was warm and the sea breeze was only enough to ripple the hair on my arms and make a slight sound on the clandestine greenness of the waves. We skirmished, sweated, and our swords caught the light from the last of the dog-day sun setting slowly over the blurred headlands of Maine and New Hampshire.

  Everything in silhouette.

  The dome of Seabrook Nuclear Power Station, the crowd of onlookers, the children screaming as the whirligigs of the amusements tossed them in the air and turned them to the wide expanse of sky and brought them down again.

  We hardly noticed as we moved over the upturned gunwales, a mainmast, and the tattered remains of an anchor chain, following a motion of rehearsed delirium. Bronze clanging off bronze and the sand becoming wet with the turning of the tide. Lunges, ducks, parries—an exotic play of shape and form in the living grease of the sea air and the sun.

  The sky aquamarine and the Atlantic heavy and distant in the violent beginnings of the summer dusk.

  My opponent seemed to have the advantage, using his shield to force me into defensive postures. He was playing Achilles and he was bigger than me. I suffered under his pushing and shoving for a while and then, in a moment of drama, I leapt over the carved prow of the boat and made a run for it across the sand.

  The crowd booed.

  I turned and ducked as a javelin came screaming at me.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” I said under my breath.

  I stood my ground and Achilles drew his short sword, spat.

  Lights appeared on the Ferris wheel. Faces. They might be watching us, but the view was so good up there you could see the Isles of Shoals and Cape Ann and if you were really lucky, Mount Washington, way up in the White Mountains. Achilles caught his breath and approached, lifting his sword for the killing stroke. He was an English guy called Simon. He’d been in the RADA briefly and had also done summer stock. If he’d stayed in acting rather than joining MI6, this, he said, would definitely have been the low point of his career. You could tell he was pissed off. That bloody javelin had nearly killed me.

  I’d known him for eight days and we both worked for Salisbury Beach’s Department of Tourism. As a tourist town, Salisbury Beach was down on its luck. Everything had an old-fashioned, seedy, worn-out feel to it—think Blackpool, England, or, I guess, Coney Island, New York, on a bad day in 1977. If Martha’s Vineyard and Provincetown are your archetypes for the Massachusetts seaside, you should probably avoid Salisbury Beach. And the people who came here weren’t exactly flying in from the Riviera; a condescending wanker would say they were fat, Kmart-clad white trash who smoked cheap cigarettes, drank Old Milwaukee, and lived in trailers.

  In this part of Massachusetts, it wasn’t Congregationalists, East Anglians, old money, and Puritans. Here it was Portuguese, Italians, bog Irish, and Greeks. The latter particularly relevant for us, since as part of their sponsorship of the Salisbury Beach Summer Pageant, the Greek community put on the Trojan War, specifically the death of Hector, every day at six o’clock. Except that after eight repetitions of this shite, today I didn’t feel like cooperating.

  I lunged at Simon and seemed to slip a little on the sand. Simon seized the moment and raised his sword to plunge it into my back. The crowd oohed. It was a second before Simon realized that it had been a ruse. I came up underneath him, hooking his parried sword and swinging it harmlessly through the air. I hit him on the back between the folds of his leather armor, and Achilles, son of Peleus, went down into the sand cursing while I applied the coup de grace and took applause from the dour Massachusetts crowd. I helped Simon up.

  “One in the eye for the invading Greek dogs,” I said.

  “You’ll get in trouble for this,” Simon said.

  “Who from?”

  “Cleo, for one,” Simon said.

  “Who’s that? That hatchet-faced woman on the Chamber of Commerce?” I asked.

  “The muse of history, you ignorant Paddy,” Simon said.

  We walked back across the sand.

  The crowd took some photographs and drifted away from the performance, moving back towards the fair, where they bought Cokes and cotton candy and the more adventurous sampled the local delights of dulse and saltwater taffy. I helped Simon with his gear.

  “You’ll be sorry when they hear about your little stunt. The Greeks see Hector as a Turk, they won’t stand for this, they’ll do you, mate,” Simon said.

  “They won’t fire me, no one else would take this gig. By the way, every day you’re closer with that bloody javelin.”

  “Sorry about that. Come on, we’ll go to the pub, check out the talent,” Simon said.

  “If there’s gonna be girls, shouldn’t we shower first?”

  “Nah, the lure of show business will impress the babes. You wanna hit the pub or not?”

  Of course I wanted to hit the pub. It was Friday night. My second Friday night here. Last Friday, Kit, Gerry, and the whole Sons of Cuchulainn had singularly failed to show up at the End of the State Bar for the fireworks show, despite the fact that Samantha Caudwell had assured me that they came each and every Friday. Bloody British Intelligence. Going to be the death of—

  “Quite the display there, macho man.”

  I looked over. A girl in the crowd: pretty, Daisy Dukes, high-tops, a pink shirt showing her shoulder tattoo and the dark outline of her nipples. My heart danced a jig. Kit. Simon nudged me in the ribs.

  “I think you have a classical mythology groupie over there, mate,” he said.

  Kit came over and shook me civilly by the hand. She seemed older or more tired than a little over a week ago, when I’d seen her last. What fresh nightmares were Touched and Gerry cooking up that were disturbing her sleep?

  “I’ve been looking for you for a while. I thought that was a line you told me about Salisbury. It’s good to see you again,”

  she said.

  “Good to see you, too,” I said and I meant it.

  “But Sean, what the hell are you wearing?” Kit asked, suddenly taking me in.

  “You like my summer wear? I’m setting the fashion. Seriously, Trojans are in for ’97,” I said.

  “In America that’s a brand of condoms,” Kit said soberly.

  “You think I didn’t know that,” I said, over the top and saucy.

  Kit laughed.

  “Are you going to introduce me?” Simon asked.

  “Aye. Simon, this is Kit; Kit, this is Simon.”

  The two of them shook hands.

  “How do you know Sean?” Simon asked Kit.

  “Sean and I go way back,” Kit said with a beautiful, sweet smile.

  “Yeah, we do,” I agreed. “We backpacked around Africa together. Boy, we had some times. Remember Clarence from Australia? Eaten by a lion.”


  “It was shocking,” Kit agreed. “It only left the head.”

  “No way,” Simon said, pretending to believe us.

  “Way,” Kit assured him.

  Simon looked at the pair of us. Kit could barely contain her giggles.

  “You’re having me on,” he said.

  Kit burst out laughing. Slapped Simon on the back.

  “Got ya,” she said.

  By this time we were up off the beach, walking along the seafront in the direction of the End of the State Bar.

  The town sprawled in a long line all the way from the Mer-rimack River to the New Hampshire border. But the beach strip was the worst. A desperate air hanging over everything. A grim, worn sadness that coated the half-drunken people in their shapeless T-shirts and denims. I tried to ignore it all as we walked toward a fish-and-chip stand.

  “Are you hungry?” Simon asked Kit.

  Kit nodded, which was a relief because Simon and I were famished. In the mornings we did beach clearance, picking up rubbish and the occasional dead thing, and in the evenings we performed the pageant for the Greek Fair. It was hard work for shit pay and we hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. We stopped at the fish-and-chip stand and I bought her a cod.

  “Our first meal,” she said coyly. She ate and the food perked her up. Now she looked healthy, happy, pleased to see me.

  “You mentioned that you were looking for me,” I said between mouthfuls.

  “I was. You told me you were working up here, you didn’t tell me what you were doing.”

  “Would you?”

  “No, I suppose not,” she said, looking at my outfit.

  “What are you doing up here?” I asked, and she explained to me that her dad and her stepmum, Sonia, were at the End of the State Bar. She’d come with them, but it was karaoke at the moment, so she had decided to go for a walk and accidentally caught our act on the beach. Not, of course, knowing that I was Hector until I took my helmet off.

  Simon asked her about the nuances of our performance. Kit, being polite, told him it was a terrific show.

  “You know, when Sean got the job of Hector he knew next to nothing about sword fighting; there’s a technique to the stage fight, choreography, much more difficult than you would think. I taught him everything he knows,” Simon said.