“Damn right he was. You know me, Gerry, I’m a bit liable to fly off the handle. Fucking Sean, cool as a cucumber. He was a bloody natural.”
“Is that right, Sean?” Gerry asked happily.
“Nah, wee bit of exaggeration. Touched ran the show. I was just helping out.”
Gerry patted me on the head with his meaty paw.
“He’s modest, too, unlike some people I could mention,”
he said, looking inside the house. Hinting, perhaps, that Jackie was not flavor of the month. Touched put his arm round me and led me to one side.
“Ok, mate, do you trust me to divvy up?” he asked, his cold, greedy eyes waiting for an answer.
What choice did I have?
“Of course, Touched.”
“Good lad. One thing about me, I’m honest, never cheated a mate in me life. Pal of mine will buy the stash for eighty percent of cost. He’ll wash it in one of the casinos in New Hampshire. We’ll lose a fifth but still, it’s going to be a good score,” Touched said.
I knew what that meant. After the “washing” and the divvying up, Touched was going to steal about half the money for himself.
Gerry dragged me away from Touched’s claws.
“Come on inside. We’re sitting down to dinner and then we’re all going to go to the beach. We’ve had the maid make up your room in the guesthouse, you’ll be living here now, not in that shithole,” Gerry said.
“Thank you very much, but my stuff is over at—”
“It’s already been brought over. You’re one of us now, Sean. Part of the family. Now come on in, Natalia has made the most amazing dinner for us and Kit has been working on a pie.”
I walked inside the house.
“Kit, you give him a quick tour, but it has to be quick, we’re sitting down to dinner in five minutes.”
Kit breezed me through the house. All eleven bedrooms, six bathrooms, observation deck, TV room, lounge, and finally dining room. It was actually worse than I was expecting, the McCaghans combining their talents to create a bad-taste masterpiece. Sonia, who seemed to have an old-money sophistication about her, was either colorblind or had decided that decor was not a place to fight her battles.
The paint scheme was gold, green, and silver. The carpets three-inch-thick white shag on which zebra-patterned throw rugs had been placed for contrast. No window was free of lace curtains, taffeta bows, ivy, and other elaborate treatments. Entire rooms were filled with white leather furniture, pictures of dirty gamins, kittens, and puppies. They had delicate and unfunctional chairs that you wouldn’t dare touch, never mind use, and the beds were huge puffy affairs on which stuffed animals slept in cozy proximity. It also wasn’t unusual to find antique porcelain dolls sitting on chairs, gazing out to sea with creepy eyes. No books anywhere but the coffee tables displayed copies of Architectural Digest, New England Home, and France Sud. Gerry had also invested in a great store of contemporary Irish art. The usual tat: the stony fields of the Burren, rain in the Mourne Mountains, sheep in the Antrim Plateau, deserted beaches in Donegal, gap-toothed children sitting in rowboats. Dozens of these artworks, in lovely antique gilt frames and placed seemingly at random all over the house.
The whole thing would have turned the stomach of a weaker man, but fortunately I was made of sterner stuff.
Kit’s room was the only sane one in the house and even that was a bit overboard. She had painted the walls black, hung a massive Indian shawl from her ceiling, and put up several askew posters proclaiming her loyalty to The Cure, Nick Cave, and, alas, Poison. There were statues of the Buddha, Ganesh, and that scary deity with swords and lots of legs.
“Nice,” I said.
She brought me downstairs to the dining room, which was relatively subdued and dominated anyway by a spectacular view of the Atlantic coast: the curve of Plum Island and Cape Ann stretching to the south, New Hampshire and Maine to the north.
“Amazing view,” I said to Gerry.
“Can you believe they only had a tiny window in this room before we bought it? I knocked out the wall and stuck in support columns. Best view in PI.”
Sonia showed me to my place next to Kit and facing the ocean. The sun had set, so the sea had become a bewitching shade of lavender and it would have been perfect had I not been sitting opposite Jackie, who looked as if he’d fallen off a bus. Something that gave me a tremendous and childish feeling of satisfaction. Two black eyes, a cut chin, a cut lip, bruises on his cheeks.
“Goodness, Jackie, are you ok? Kit told me you’re thinking of suing the End of the State, because something fell on you? Is that right?”
“Aye,” he said sourly and sipped from a Waterford crystal glass that was filled with fizzy beer.
Touched sat next to Jackie. Gerry sat at one end of the table, Sonia at the other. Seamus, Touched explained, was not feeling well and had gone next door to the guesthouse for a wee lie down.
There were two Mexican servants who brought in several bottles of expensive white wine and a formal dinner of soup, lobster, another fish course, and finally lamb. Although it seemed that their command of English was not particularly impressive, I could see that we were not to allude to this afternoon’s events except in the most oblique of terms.
Gerry, though, was in rare form and pontificated on international politics, domestic politics, and baseball. Touched contradicted him here and there and Sonia was the voice of reason. Or if not reason exactly, at least of more informed comment than either of the other two. Jackie remained sullen for most of the meal and before the dessert came, asked permission to excuse himself from the table.
“Gerry, do you mind if I leave? The tide marker is giving me the heave-ho,” he said.
“No, of course not, we’ll all be joining you later. Off you go, Jackie,” Gerry said.
Jackie stood and it was then that I noticed he was wearing board shorts and wet-suit booties. He ran to the guesthouse next door and appeared on the dunes in front of the house wearing an ankle strap and black rash guard, and carrying a surfboard.
“What was he talking about? The tide marker?” I asked Kit.
“That thing on the wall,” she said, pointing at a clock with LOW and HIGH where the twelve and six should be.
“So what does that mean?” I asked.
“Well, if you look, the arrow is almost into the low, so that means for the next few hours surfing conditions will be pretty close to perfect on the Plum Island beach break.”
“Jackie surfs?”
“Yeah, he’s very good. He had an amateur tryout at Mon-tauk a few weeks ago. He was seventh out of about forty or fifty. We all surf, well, me and Jackie do. Jamie as well, before he ran away. But Daddy and Sonia both bodyboard.”
“I love the ocean,” Gerry said. “I love the feeling of being in the ocean.”
Sonia nodded in agreement.
“It’s really the best feature of living on Plum Island,” Sonia said. “It can be such a hassle, sometimes the bridge is closed and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Sean, but there can be a lot of insects. . . .”
“No.”
“Well, that’s the downside but the upside is a beautiful unspoiled beach, and you should see what it’s like in the wildlife refuge, it’s America before the white man came and wrecked the place,” Sonia continued.
“I’ll have to check it out,” I said, trying to sound sincere.
“Oh, it’s a family rule, if you live in this house, you have to do something in water,” Gerry insisted.
“Even made me boogie board and I hate the fucking stuff,”
Touched said.
I turned to Kit.
“Where did Jackie learn to surf? He’s a goddamn Mick. We don’t surf. Charley don’t surf. Micks don’t surf. That’s it.”
“Oh no, he’s from Sligo, that’s a big undiscovered surfing mecca. Amazing breaks out there, completely unspoiled. He’s very good,” she said with admiration.
Many a good pejorative Yeats line about the eejits fr
om Sligo but Sean wouldn’t know them.
“So how come you’re not going out there with him?” I said, trying to keep the sneer out of my voice.
“Oh, it’s too gnarly at the moment, I need the really low tide. But Jackie’s good enough to surf it right now.”
Something remarkably like jealousy was growing in my breast and Gerry mercifully changed the subject to the island itself.
“It’s all changed, Sean. Plum Island used to be very poor. Irish crab, lobster, and clam men eking out a desperate living on a bleak spit of sand south of the Merrimack River. Thoreau once called the dunes of PI the ‘most desolate walk in New England.’ And in the book Albion’s Seed . . . well, anyway, I’m growing prolix, but things are quite different now. Boston spreads her influence north and more people have begun commuting into the city using the highway or Route 1.”
“The real boom is going to start once the light rail hub’s finished in Newburyport, the train taking you to North Station in downtown Boston in less than an hour,” Sonia added.
“Oh yes, Sean, I could see all this a couple of years ago when we moved. What was once an unwholesome spot for poor crabbers and a couple of summer houses is now valuable real estate. Once we get water and sewage lines here it’s going to be paradise itself.”
When the meal was over, we were going to eat a rhubarb tart that Kit had made early this morning, refrigerated, and then immediately popped in the oven the moment we’d come back. Bank robber, wannabe revolutionary, goth girl, and rhubarb tart maker—obviously a Renaissance woman.
She went to get it and a brief moment later there was a scream from the kitchen. She came back into the dining room with a furious expression on her face.
“Daddy, did you eat all the ice cream? You know we have to have it with vanilla ice cream because it’s the perfect combination. You know I put that ice cream to one side, because I was saving it,” she said furiously.
“I took it,” Touched lied, saving Gerry’s bacon. “Sorry about that, Kit.”
“Well, we can’t not have ice cream,” she said, huffing.
“I’ll go to White Farms and get some more,” Touched said.
Kit shook her head.
“No, they don’t do good vanilla. I’ll have to go to Grandma’s in Newburyport. Anyone come with me?”
“I’ll go,” I said, seizing the opportunity.
She ran upstairs to get her car keys and her sunglasses. Touched led me out the back onto the porch. He reached in his pocket and brought out a huge wad of twenty-dollar bills and gave it to me.
“Your cut. Five grand,” Touched said.
“For me?” I asked.
“For you, me old mucker. A fifth to my laundryman, five percent to the general fund, and the rest between the four of us. Equal shares, too, you, me, Kit, and Seamus, no finder’s fee for me or anything,” Touched said without a trace of a lie in that cold, unemotional face.
“Cheers, mate,” I said happily, knowing now that he must have pocketed at least twenty thousand for himself.
“Nay probs, Sean boy, now don’t go crazy, flashing it about. Rainy day and all that,” Touched said in what was about as close to a speech on fiscal prudence as I was likely to get. “Anyway, that should keep you in eggs. Ok, I have things to do, wee thing to scout tonight, down at the National Guard, shit, shouldn’t have said that. Wipe that from your mind. It’s the next wee op we might be going on, don’t worry about it.
Anyway, I’ll be gone when you get back. You just look after yourself, don’t let that young lady talk you into risking your life on a bloody tree in the middle of the bloody ocean.”
“I won’t.”
Kit appeared, grabbed me.
“We’ve got to get the ice cream before the pie cools,” Kit said.
She led me to the four-car garage and got in a pink Volkswagen Bug that had Greenpeace and WWF stickers on the back windshield. Hardly the vehicle of a committed terrorist. Maybe the signs of complexity in her character.
We drove into Newburyport and I let Kit chat about surfing and music. She wanted to talk about anything, just not what had happened that day, which was fine by me. She blabbed away and I stole looks at her and was a good listener. As we pulled into State Street she scanned for parking and I spotted the All Things Brit store.
“Kit, have you ever tried clotted cream? It’s fantastic, it would go really well on the rhubarb tart. It’s an English thing. I’ll bet we could get some at that British food store.”
“But I was going to get ice cream.”
“We can get both. It’ll be a real treat. Your da will love it and if you want to be really decadent, you can even put it on the ice cream.”
Kit nodded and luckily found a parking spot right in front of All Things Brit, which was only a block from the ice-cream store.
“I’ll check out this cream of yours, and then we’ll have to dash to Grandma’s. I mean, look, the line is out into the street.”
All Things Brit was just closing down for the night. The woman who ran it was wearing a frumpy orange and brown floral dress and a huge grin.
“I’m just closing up, can I help you darlings at all?” she asked happily.
“Yes, we’d like some clotted cream, please,” Kit said.
“Certainly, my dear, and can I just say that you’re the prettiest girl we’ve had in here all day,” Samantha said.
I rolled my eyes behind Kit’s head. Samantha’s face was transparent with delight.
“We have a full selection in the refrigerator by the door,” Samantha said.
Kit walked over to look.
“Oooh, this does look good, we’ll get have to get some for everyone,” Kit said.
“Kit, I know which ones to get, I’ll pick them out, you run and get on line for the ice cream and I’ll meet you up there,” I said.
“You don’t mind paying?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I’m flush at the moment.” Kit smiled and dashed outside to join the line at Grandma’s.
There were no other customers in the shop but someone could come in at any minute. I knew I would have to speak fast.
“I’m in,” I said.
“To the cell?”
I nodded.
“Congratulations,” she said with a condescending grin that I didn’t like at all.
“It’s as I’ve said, Samantha, it’s a bit of a shambles. I think they’re falling apart. They’ve had three defections altogether. That Mike guy, someone called O’Neill, and a kid called Jamie. They’ve been decimated by the assassination attempt on Gerry. Don’t think the IRA isn’t smart, because they are. The psychological effect of that hit has paid dividends. They’re running. They’re running scared and I don’t think they’re going to do anything major at all. They’re all talk.”
“So who’s left in the group?”
“The total group is just Sonia and Gerry, Touched, Jackie, Kit, Seamus, and me. That’s it. Sonia’s no player, though, and Kit is just a wee girl and Seamus has been knocking back two bottles of vodka a day since the hit in Revere. So I think this whole goddamn mission has been a waste of time. Everyone has basically got the IRA’s message and they’re not going to do anything. I think you can let me go back to Chicago with a handshake for a job well done.”
Samantha looked at me.
“What else?”
I sighed.
My hand was on the counter. She put hers on top.
“There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said.
“It’s really nothing.”
“What is it?’
“Well, it’s very stupid, you might have heard about it on the radio. That bank robbery in New Hampshire. That was us.”
Samantha’s eyebrows raised.
“It’s not what you think. God knows, Gerry doesn’t need the money, it was just a test, to see if I was up to it.”
“Was Gerry involved?”
“No.”
“Gerry’s the one we want.”
“I know.”
Samantha smiled.
“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we give it a couple of weeks. If it doesn’t look like they’re going to do anything—if, as you think, they are running scared—I’ll pull you out. We’ll see. Who was in on the robbery?”
“Touched, Kit, me, and Seamus.”
“Hmmm. I’d take three convictions for armed robbery and consider this a successful operation. We might even agree to suspend Kit’s sentence if Gerry would return to Northern Ireland to stand trial. He might do that to keep his daughter out of jail. What do you think?”
“No, Kit waited in the car. She wasn’t involved at all. You can’t arrest her for anything,” I lied, firmly.
“Of course we can, she’s an accessory. Anyway. You’ve done well. I’ll check out the robbery to see if the police have any leads. We might have to get the locals to slow-play if you left any clues. And I hope you’re right, I hope they’re not trying anything. But you’ll have to tell me the truth. If they are planning something big, we’ve got to know.”
“But if not, I’m out. Right?”
“Right.”
Kit came back in with the ice cream.
“What’s keeping you?” she asked.
Samantha hurriedly removed her hand from mine. I don’t know if Kit saw but if she did, she didn’t think anything of it. We drove home, distributed the ice cream, and as she had predicted the combination of rhubarb and vanilla was close to perfect. . . .
An hour later.
Kit and me sitting on the dunes. Gerry and Sonia body boarding on the beach break. Sonia had changed into a neat one-piece swimsuit that showed off her lithe body and long legs. Gerry, unfortunately, was also showing off his body, in a pair of size 48 board shorts.
Touched was off doing something secretive that involved the Massachusetts National Guard and Seamus was sleeping away his hangover.
Kit had changed into a black Body Glove one-piece wet suit and was resting her feet on a surfboard that said “Hello Kitty” above an anime cat.
There were about a dozen surfers on the water and at least twenty or thirty kids and older people body or boogie boarding on the breakers. Amazingly, Gerry was one of them. Amazing and a bit terrifying. A wave could easily have swept him up and plonked him down on some poor unsuspecting five-year-old.
The Dead Yard Page 15