Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  He frowned. “Is that sensible?”

  “Probably not, but it’s home.”

  He was still troubled. “You’ll have made enemies. They’ll know where to find you.”

  “I don’t want to hide.”

  He half smiled. “You need the risk, is that it? You can’t bear to think of spending a dull ordinary life?”

  “I like the Cape, that’s all.”

  “Then so be it,” he agreed reluctantly.

  Next evening, at long last, Simon van Stryker came to offer me his blessing. I received no warning of his coming, though Gillespie had shown an air of expectancy all day and, when we gathered in the library before dinner, I found a tray had been placed on the table with an ice-bucket, crystal glasses, an old-fashioned soda-syphon, two kinds of Scotch and a half-bottle of sherry. “Is this a celebration?” I asked.

  “In a way, yes,” Gillespie said, then he turned to the window as the sound of a helicopter thumped through the library’s double glazing. A brilliant beam of light swept across the darkening snow then shrank as the helicopter descended and a cloud of wind-stirred white crystals made a fog of the beam, then the machine itself appeared in the sparkling white cloud and settled on to the snow-covered lawn. The landing lights went out. None of us spoke.

  A log tumbled on the fire, spewing sparks. Carole Adamson frowned into her sherry while Gillespie surreptitiously patted his hair. A moment later the heavy front door banged hollowly and there was a mutter of voices in the hall. “That will be him,” Gillespie said unnecessarily.

  “Who?” I asked. Then the door was thrust open to reveal a tall, smiling man clothed in faultless evening dress and it was suddenly hard to imagine Simon van Stryker dressed in any other way. His hair was whiter than I remembered and I guessed he must be in his sixties by now, but he looked very fit and his face was still lean and animated. He strode across the room. “Paul Shanahan! You kept the faith! Well done!” He held out his hand. I shook it awkwardly.

  Van Stryker greeted Carole Adamson. “I never had a chance to congratulate you on your paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. I have two points to debate with you, but perhaps they should wait? And Peter!” He held out his hand to Gillespie. “You’ve had a long task, well done.” He smiled at us, filling the room with an air of vibrant intelligence. He held his hands to the fire, shivered, then nodded acceptance of a whisky. “But a very small one, Peter. I’m expected at a rather rigorous dinner at the White House tonight. I shall be late, but that’s better than not showing up at all.” He stood in front of the fire, staring about the high-ceilinged library with its rows of indigestible reading. “Some extraordinary men have told us their life stories in this room, Paul. I like to think of it as America’s confessional.”

  “Do I get absolution now?”

  Van Stryker laughed at my question, then thanked Gillespie for his whisky. He took one sip then placed the glass on the mantel and I sensed it would not be touched again. “Help yourself.” He waved me towards the tray of drinks. Outside the window the helicopter’s engine grumbled. Van Stryker was clearly not staying long, but I was glad he had made the effort to come to this strange mansion in the snowbound hills. I had needed to see him. For fourteen years he had been my mentor. “So what on earth happened to your Stingers, Shanahan?” van Stryker asked me now.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe they never existed?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe, but I held one of them.”

  He looked at me with his pale, clever eyes. “Have you told us everything?”

  “At least three times, it seems.”

  “Good for you, Paul,” van Stryker said, then frowned down at the coir rug. “If there were no Stingers, Shanahan, or only one of the beasts, why did they send you to Miami?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We know you went there. We found your footprints in the airline’s computer.” He still stared down at the floor. “So why?” he asked softly.

  “Maybe it was an operation that went sour,” I suggested, and did not add the suggestion that it might have gone sour because some clever bastard had purloined the purchase price. “Most operations do,” I said instead.

  Van Stryker’s gaze snapped up to me and I knew he was wondering if I was one of his operations that had gone sour. “What’s happened to the rest of Saddam Hussein’s terrorist revenge?” he asked. “Has that gone sour too?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “All but for the Provisional IRA,” he said bitterly. “Of all Saddam Hussein’s allies only they have drawn blood. One dead civilian on London’s Victoria Station. Is that the very best il Hayaween can produce?”

  Everyone seemed to be waiting for my answer. I shrugged. “Il Hayaween told me that the Syrians and the Iranians were not supporting Iraq’s terrorist campaign,” I said, as if that explained everything.

  “Nor are they,” van Stryker said impatiently, “but one dead rail commuter? Is that Saddam Hussein’s best effort?”

  “They almost got the British Prime Minister,” I suggested.

  Van Stryker shook his head. “Our analysis shows the Provisionals had that attack planned for months. They just delayed it to please their Arab masters. No! There has to be something more!” He sounded angry. “Have you really told us everything, Paul?”

  “Of course.” Though articulating the lie gave me a stab of guilt which I assuaged by telling myself that all I had held back was the real price of the missiles and the method by which the Libyans had tried to pay that price. The gold was mine. Yet I still felt guilty for hiding it, but that was the effect van Stryker had. He was a man who inspired loyalty, but I reassured myself that the gold was as harmless as a cheque, or a bank transfer. What mattered were the things the gold had been intended to buy. “Maybe,” I proffered, “the two Cubans were trying to rip off the IRA?”

  “A rather dangerous game,” van Stryker replied with a humourless laugh.

  “Not if you’re far enough away from them. They’ve never mounted an operation over here.”

  “And they’d better not!” van Stryker said, then looked at his watch before turning to Gillespie. “What’s your evaluation of Shanahan, Peter?”

  “I think the debriefing’s been very useful,” Gillespie said, though without enthusiasm. “I don’t think he’s told us everything he knows about the IRA, but that was never our prime target. We haven’t solved the Stinger story, and maybe never will, but what he’s told us about the Palestinian groups and Libya has proved most valuable.”

  “The Israelis are pleased with us, you mean?” Van Stryker looked at me, but still spoke to Gillespie. “So you think Mr Shanahan’s life has not been wasted?”

  “Not at all,” Gillespie said stoutly.

  “Dr Adamson. What is your considered judgment of Paul Francis Shanahan?”

  “I’m not sure I have one yet. He hasn’t permitted us to see him yet. He’s been protecting himself because he resents being questioned, which is why he treated this debriefing like a contest.”

  “And who won?” Van Stryker asked lightly.

  “I lost score.” Carole Adamson was suddenly no longer motherly and comforting, but sharp. “He’s hidden his real self behind a mask of flippancy.”

  “You mean he’s a deceiver?” Van Stryker was still equable. “But isn’t that why we chose him in the first place?”

  “But who is he deceiving? Because I tell you he’s hiding more than his personality behind that slippery mask. Whatever Mr Shanahan sees as being in his own best interest will be kept good and private from us.”

  “Paul?” Van Stryker turned courteously towards me.

  “I’ve hidden nothing,” I said with wondrously feigned innocence.

  “You entered America with false papers, did you not?” Van Stryker seemed unperturbed as he asked the question.

  “For old times’ sake,” I said happily. “I’ll never do it again. Promise.”

  Carole Adamson gave me a disinterested glance. �
��I wouldn’t worry about his papers. I’d ask him a few hard questions about Miss Roisin Donovan instead. That should lift a corner of his mask.”

  Van Stryker held his hands towards the fire. “We know you lied about her, Paul. She lived with you in Belfast, yet you claim not to have known her?”

  “Aren’t I allowed some privacy?”

  “Not in America’s confessional, no.” He smiled, glanced at me, then looked back to the fire. “You were lovers?”

  “Yes.”

  “She had a lot of other lovers. Did you know that?”

  I wondered how much they knew about Roisin, but I did not want to ask. I did not want to talk about her. “I know she had other lovers,” I said defensively.

  “Does that hurt you?”

  I had no intention of answering that question, or any damn question like it. I had been sent into the dark to bring back information, not the raw materials of psycho-analysis, so I said nothing. Van Stryker held his hands towards the fire. “Not that it matters,” he answered his own question blithely, “because she’s dead and you’re very much with us. But you always were a survivor, Paul. A rogue and a scoundrel, but an undoubted survivor.” He smiled at me. “I came here to thank you.”

  “To thank me?” His gentle courtesy took me by surprise.

  “You’re my first stringless puppet to come home. You’ve brought your cargo of information and I thank you for it. And we owe you money.” He held up a hand to still my exclamation of surprise. “I know we said you would not be paid, and officially we owe you nothing, but I’ll make sure the agency diverts some funds. Just as a token of our thanks. It will take time, maybe some months. And, of course, we may have more questions for you. In fact I’m sure we’ll have more questions for you. Questions are the one thing that never end. Peter knows where you’ll be, does he?”

  “I’m going back to the Cape,” I told him.

  “I envy you. Nancy and I have a summer cottage on the Vineyard, but we never manage enough time there. Life is too busy. We do some sailing as well, when we can.”

  “You’ve got your own boat?” I asked him.

  “A Nautor Swan,” he said casually. “A sixty-one-footer named for Nancy. We keep her at Edgartown, but of course she’s ashore now, on jackstands in our yard.”

  It would be a Nautor Swan, I thought, and doubtless Nancy was beautiful and their children successful and the summer cottage on Martha’s Vineyard a waterfront mansion. This was the codfish aristocracy.

  Van Stryker took a business card from his breast pocket. “If you do dredge anything up from your sub-conscious and want to talk to me, then that number will always reach me.” He held the card towards me. “And thank you, Paul, for taking the risks you did.”

  I took the card. I felt awkward because I had told lies. They were not important lies, but still I felt I did not deserve van Stryker’s generosity, nor his thanks. Then I told myself that of course I did. I had been the poor bastard who dared the Beka’a Valley and the back streets of Tripoli. I was a hero, and I deserved thanks, peals of trumpets, and a boat’s belly filled with gold. I deserved it all.

  “Now I really must go!” Van Stryker smiled a courteous farewell to Gillespie and Adamson, shook my hand one more time, and then was gone. Gillespie let out a long relieved breath. Outside the window the helicopter lights dazzled us as the machine hammered up into the darkness.

  They let me go next morning. Gillespie gave me five hundred dollars in cash and an air ticket to Boston. It was Sunday and somewhere in the valley a church bell was tolling like a tocsin. It was a cold still morning and a new fall of snow glittered under the wintry sun. I pulled on my yellow oilskin and stepped into the bright new day, a free man again. And going home.

  I knew how badly Michael Herlihy would be wanting to discover the truth of the missing gold; he would be wanting it badly enough to have its location beaten out of me. Yet Michael was a lawyer, and a careful one, and he had never done anything in his life without massive forethought and a hedge of precautions, so I reckoned that if I swanned into Boston unannounced and took him by surprise there was a good chance that I could be away before he had a chance to react, maybe before he even knew I was in Massachusetts.

  Yet, at the same time, I knew I could not avoid a confrontation with Michael for ever, because if I was to live the rest of my life on Cape Cod, free to waste each day on its circling seas, then Michael and his henchmen would need to be faced down or bought off. I would also need to make sure that Sarah Sing Tennyson was safely evicted from my property, which meant I had to twist the tail of the bombastic ape who had married my sister.

  The bombastic ape was called Patrick McPhee. He was a big-bellied man with a hair-trigger temper and a face like a steam shovel. He was a drunk, a failure, a bully and a lout. Everyone had warned Maureen against marrying him, but in McPhee my sister had seen a tall handsome young baseball player who boasted of his glorious future in the major leagues, and Maureen had first insisted on marriage then made it inevitable by becoming pregnant. My father raged at her, provided her generously with a dowry, then had walked her down the carpeted aisle of Holy Redeemer. Maureen had worn a lace-edged frock of glorious white, and within days she had the first black bruises to show for her trouble. “The screen door banged into me when I was carrying some shopping,” she told our mother, and a month later she had tripped across a kerbstone, then it was a fall she took while stepping off a bus, and so it had gone on ever since.

  Patrick had duly gone to the minor leagues and there failed. His pitching arm that was so good at raising bruises on Maureen turned out to be muscled with noodles. He came home to Boston where he drank, put on weight and lived off past glories and Maureen’s money.

  That money had long been frittered away and all Maureen had to show for her impetuous romance was a crumbling house and five sullen sons who, God help them, took after their father. Christ, I thought as the taxi drove me down the wintry and rain-sodden street, but we had been a wicked family.

  Maureen herself opened the door to my knock and, for a moment, just stared. “Oh, my little brother,” she finally said. She had put on weight and there was a bruise next to her right eye, suggesting she had turned away too late from a blow.

  “Can I come in?”

  “You’ve come this far, so why not the last step?” She pushed the screen door open and stepped aside to let me into the kitchen. “You remember Terence?” Terence was Maureen’s youngest and was now twelve or thirteen years old. He was sitting at the kitchen table stuffing his face with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He wore a Desert Storm T-shirt stretched tight across his huge gut. “Say hello to your Uncle Paul,” his mother told him, but the kid’s mouth was too stuffed with sandwich to let him say anything so he just raised a languid hand in greeting. In the kitchen corner a television blared, while another television, showing a different programme, was just as loud in the living room next door.

  Terence slumped off his chair and dragged open the fridge door. He stared bemused into its well-stocked interior, then delivered his verdict. “No soda.”

  “I’ll get some, honey,” Maureen said.

  “Why don’t you go and get it yourself ?” I asked Terence in a reasonable voice.

  “Leave him alone!” Maureen intervened, clearly practised in defending her children from the wrath of adult males. “Go on upstairs, honey,” she told her son. “Take something to snack on.”

  “Where are the other little charmers?” I asked when Terence had shambled out of the room and Maureen had switched off both televisions.

  “Probably at Roscoe’s, playing pool. His lordship’s at the Parish of course, where else?” Maureen sat at the table and lit a cigarette. The ashtray was overflowing with butts and her fingers were the colour of woodstain. She studied me for a while. “You look good. Where in God’s name have you been?”

  “In the last seven years?” I dropped my sea-bag by the door and ran myself a cup of water from the tap. The sink was piled with
unwashed dishes. “Mostly in Belgium. But here and there. I really came to see Patrick.”

  “About that girl?”

  I nodded. “Sarah Sing Tennyson.”

  She shrugged. “I told his honour not to rent the house to her, but things have been tight these last few years. When were they not? You want a cigarette?”

  “I gave up.”

  “Good for you. I tried quitting and put on thirty pounds, so I started smoking again, but the thirty pounds stayed with me just the same. You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “I can smell it off you like the smoke off a bonfire. You know they’ve been asking about you?”

  “Who has?”

  “Herlihy and his friends. They’re fair mad at you, Paul. Are you going to tell me why?”

  “No.”

  “Why do I even ask?” She struggled to her feet, crossed the room and reached into a high closet for a fifth of gin and a fifth of Jameson’s. I noticed how thick she had become in the waist and ankles. My God, I thought, but she was only forty-two or -three yet she looked twenty years older; all but for her hair, which was as lustrous and thick as ever. “Help yourself.” She sat and pushed the whiskey bottle towards me.

  “Patrick’s going to have to get rid of that Tennyson girl,” I said.

  Maureen laughed. “Some chance! You know Patrick. He’s terrified of any woman he’s not married to. He’ll tell you that he’ll deal with her, but he won’t.”

  “How much rent is he taking off her?”

  “Five hundred a month, and even then he gets to use the house when she’s not there. God knows why she lets him.”

  “Five hundred?” I was astonished. The house was certainly worth five hundred dollars a month; indeed, in the summertime, I could have let it for five hundred dollars a week, but Sarah Sing Tennyson had to be crazy to pay that much for part-time occupancy.

  “Not that I get to see any of the money,” Maureen said bleakly. “His eminence takes it all for himself.”

  “Is he in work?”

  “Not so you’d notice. A bit here and there.” She shrugged and I guessed that nothing had changed. Patrick had pimped for a time, then worked as an enforcer for a debt-collector in Roxbury, but mostly he lived off what small income there still remained from Maureen’s inheritance and, evidently, off the rent he illegally took for my house.