Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  Those docklines, like the yacht’s rigging, were thick with ice. The wind stirred Rebel Lady, jarring her against her frozen ropes and quivering her long hull. I stepped cautiously down into her cockpit and found that her companionway was unlocked. I pulled the boards free, slid back her main hatch, and ducked inside out of the wind.

  To find the gold was gone. I had not really expected anything else, but a mad optimism had lurked at the back of my thoughts ever since I had glimpsed Rebel Lady at the wintry dock.

  The saloon was a shambles. My interrogators had taken axes to the false floor, ripping and tearing away the fibreglass to expose the gold beneath. Then they had taken my hoard. Five million dollars’ worth of gold, all gone, or all but one krugerrand that I found lost in a heap of sand and fibreglass chippings. I picked the coin up, span it on my palm, then pushed it into a pocket as a souvenir of a wasted voyage. I thought I saw another coin glinting in the rubble, but when I cleared the sand and shreds aside I saw it was just the shiny head of one of the keel-bolts.

  I went back to the cockpit. My interrogators had done well. They had got exactly what they wanted. The gold would pay for the Stingers, and I did not doubt that some of the Stingers would stay in America to be used for Saddam Hussein’s revenge against the United States. That revenge was the true purpose of il Hayaween’s operation. The Brits would lose some helicopters over South Armagh, but the real targets were the great lumbering wide-body passenger jets struggling up from American airports with their cargoes of innocence.

  I climbed back to the dock and walked slowly back towards the house.

  Then I stopped because I heard a car’s tyres grating on the gravel drive. Voices sounded happy and loud. “Let’s use the back door!”

  There was nowhere to hide, so I stayed still.

  First around the corner was a pretty slim young woman in a long fur coat. She was running and her breath was misting in the cold air. She had golden hair, a wide mouth and blue eyes. She saw me and suddenly stopped. “Darling?” She was not speaking to me, but to Congressman Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third who followed the woman around the side of the house. He just stopped and gaped at me.

  Then two men appeared. One was the Congressman’s waspish aide, Robert Stitch, the other was Michael Herlihy.

  Congressman O’Shaughnessy still gaped at me, but Stitch was much quicker on the uptake. “Shall I call the police, Congressman?”

  “I wouldn’t, Congressman, I really wouldn’t,” I advised Tommy the Turd.

  The Congressman suddenly recognised me. “You’re Shannon, isn’t that right?”

  “Shanahan,” I corrected him, “Paul Shanahan.”

  “This is my wife, Duffy.” Tommy, playing as usual without his full deck, resorted to his inbred courtesy.

  The pretty Duffy smiled at me. “Hello.”

  “You already know Mr Herlihy?” O’Shaughnessy enquired of me as though this was a pleasant meeting in his golf club. “Mr Herlihy is the Treasurer of my Re-election Campaign Committee.”

  I ignored Herlihy. “Nice house, Congressman.” I nodded at the huge mansion.

  “Thank you,” he said happily. “Really, thank you.”

  “Just what the hell are you doing here?” Stitch intervened in the pleasantries.

  “Do we really need to have this conversation in the yard?” Mrs O’Shaughnessy, who looked horribly wasted on the Congressman, asked plaintively. “I’m freezing!”

  Herlihy walked towards me as Tommy the Turd escorted the delicious Duffy into the house. “What are you doing here, Shanahan?” Herlihy spat the question.

  “There’s your boat,” I pointed at Rebel Lady. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “That?” He stared astonished at the yacht.

  “That! You bastard!” I grabbed him by the collar of his coat, ran him along the dock and pushed him down into the cockpit. “There! Look! That was where your precious money was!”

  A gust of wind shook the boat, and a sluggish wave heaved up the wounded hull and Michael Herlihy immediately paled, swore, and dived for the gunwale where, with a gut-heaving wrench, he voided his expensive brunch into the sea. “Oh, God,” he groaned, “oh, God.” The very smallest movement of Rebel Lady’s wind-stirred hull had instantly provoked his chronic seasickness. “Oh, my God,” he said again, and leaned over the sea to throw up once more.

  I left him there. “Bastard,” I shouted at him, then stalked away.

  Stitch moved to confront me. “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police?” he asked me nastily.

  “Yes,” I said. “Try explaining to the police why the Congressman allowed his cellar to be used by a Provisional IRA hit squad for the last two weeks.”

  “He did what?” He backed away from me, not sure I was telling the truth, then decided that he had better employ some quick damage control just in case I was. “It isn’t true! We’ve been researching the trade deal in Mexico. We haven’t been here.” He was scenting an appalling scandal and was already rehearsing the excuses that would leave his Congressman unscathed.

  “Just bugger away off,” I told him.

  “Who on earth moved the cellar things into the hall?” I heard the delectable Duffy O’Shaughnessy ask from inside the house. Robert Stitch, fearing some new mischief, ran through the open kitchen door, as Michael Herlihy, his face as white as the ice-slicked rigging, managed to clamber up from Rebel Lady’s cockpit on to the dock’s planking. I paused at the corner of the house and watched as Michael staggered feebly away from the sea. He was reeling. I had forgotten just what a terrible affliction his seasickness was.

  “Herlihy!” I called.

  He looked at me, but said nothing.

  I fished the single gold coin from my pocket. “Here’s the rest of your money, you bastard.” I tossed it to him.

  He let the bright coin fall and roll along the path. “Where are you going?” he called as I turned and walked away.

  “Home. And leave me alone, you hear me?”

  I walked down the long gravel drive and out through the high fence to the road. Johnny arrived twenty minutes later and we drove away.

  Miraculously, I was alive.

  “Who struggles by in that little house?” Johnny asked as we drove away from the high-hedged mansion on the beach.

  “House Representative Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third.”

  “Tommy the Turd lives there!” Johnny sounded surprised, though he must have known that Tommy’s only qualification for high office was his inordinate wealth.

  “And don’t forget the Back Bay mansion,” I said, “or the house in Georgetown, or the ski-lodge in Aspen.”

  “I’d like someone to tell me one day,” Johnny said sourly, “why the bastards who want to put up my taxes are always so rich.” I offered no response and he shot me a sympathetic look. “So what happened to you back there?”

  “I screwed up.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I thought I was cleverer than I am.” I hoped that evasion would suffice, but Johnny deserved better from me. “I guess I was falling out with the IRA.”

  “You shouldn’t have had anything to do with them in the first place.”

  “They have a good cause,” I said mildly.

  “If it’s that good,” he demanded flatly, “then why do they need to murder for it? No one bombs people to solve world hunger. No one kills to save a kid from leukaemia, and those are good causes.”

  “I won’t argue.”

  “And the gold?”

  “All gone.”

  He laughed. To Johnny the only rewards worth having were those that had taken hard work, the rest was dishonest at worst and meretricious at best. Johnny and his kind were the backbone of America, the good heart of an honest country that somehow contrived to put men like Tommy the Turd into Congress. “You want the money back you gave me?” Johnny asked me. “I haven’t spent it.”

  “Keep it,” I said. Christ, I thought, but I would have to get
a job now. I would have to join the nine-to-five. I would have to become like the rest of the world, and that was one of the great terrors of the secret world, because belonging to a sanctioned organisation of killers gave a man the feeling of being special, of being apart, of being above the petty cares and constricting rules that hampered other people, but now, after years of arrogance, I would have to earn my bread. I wondered how much money van Stryker planned to give me; not enough, I suspected, to pay for the years of lotus-eating idleness I had planned beside the Cape Cod waters. I wondered what the yacht-delivery business was like in the States and supposed it mainly consisted of taking plastic powerboats up and down the Intracoastal Waterway either side of winter. I doubted it would be easy to break into such a business, but what else was I good for? “I had dreams of buying a tuna boat with that gold,” I confessed to Johnny. “Now I doubt I could even afford a can of tuna.”

  He chuckled. “You don’t want a tuna boat. There are too many of them already, and they’re all using aeroplanes as spotters. When the fish are running it’s like the Battle of Midway out there. Ten years ago you could harpoon a big fish every week, but now You’re lucky if you see a decent sized fish all summer.”

  Another dream dead, I thought, and I leaned my head on the window at the back of the cab. So what was I going to do? Had the last fourteen years been for nothing? “Is there much of a market for boat surveying?” I asked Johnny.

  “Not that I know of.” Johnny drove placidly on. “But young Ernie Marriott’s met a girl in New Bedford, which means I need a crewman every so often.”

  “Are you offering me a job?”

  “I’m offering you freezing hands, a wet ass, hard nights, and maybe the chance of a penny or two if the government lets us catch a fish when We’re not filling in forms.”

  “You’re on,” I said.

  “But it isn’t a career,” Johnny warned me. “I can hardly keep my own family in bread. Still, it’s better than working in one of these places, right?” He waved his hand at a crazy-golf park which, though boarded up for the winter, still betrayed a drab gaudiness designed to bring in the summer customers. We were driving east on Route 28, the Cape’s southern artery and a showplace of shoddy businesses and cheap motels; proof that when mankind arrives in paradise he will drown the glory of the angels with neon signs and honkytonk bars. “Another few years,” Johnny grumbled, “and this will all look like Florida.” He brooded on that sorry fate for a few miles, then turned a frown on me. “Did you really tell Sarah Tennyson to fetch the boat for you?”

  I shook my head. “She lied to you, but I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  “So there was nothing between you two?”

  “Me and that ballbreaker? You’ve got to be joking.”

  He laughed. “She was convincing to me. So who the hell was she?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, Johnny. She’s probably a terrorist groupie. Some girls get their kicks by hanging around killers.” And did that include Kathleen Donovan? God, that hurt, that she had set me up for the snatch.

  “So she isn’t an artist?” Johnny sounded disappointed.

  “Not with paint,” I said, “but I think the Provos put her in my house to act as a tripwire.” And she had played that part so cleverly! By acting shocked and being tough when I returned she had convinced me that she was an innocent bystander. Christ, I thought, but I had even asked Gillespie to warn her of trouble, and she was a part of that trouble all along.

  “So did she get the gold?” Johnny asked.

  “The Provos did. It was meant for them anyway.”

  He shook his head in disapproval, then, being Johnny, he found a silver lining on the cloud. “But at least you got the electricity put into the house, didn’t you?”

  “But why?” I asked that question aloud, suddenly struck by an incongruity. Sarah Sing Tennyson had been in my house three years already. That made no sense, not if she had merely been placed there as a tripwire for my return – for who could have foreseen the Gulf War three years ago?

  “Why what?” Johnny asked.

  “God knows.” I was suddenly disgusted with myself and with everything I had done in the last few weeks. What did it matter whether the girl had been in my house three months or three years? I had played the game and lost. It was over.

  I stayed that night with Johnny, and next day went home and began clearing out my house. I took Sarah Tennyson’s daubs, piled them on a patch of sandy ground beyond the deck, splashed them with gasoline and slung a match at them. The oil paint burned well, making lovely colours in its flames as the black smoke plumed thin across the marshes.

  I took the dust-sheet off the oak floor, then sanded and waxed the boards. I scrubbed the kitchen, dusted the stairways, and aired the bedrooms. I had lost the Colt .45 when I was snatched, but I found the carbine under the bed. I hid it away, then replaced the broken kitchen window and put new locks on the doors. When a telephone bill arrived addressed to Ms Sing Tennyson I sent it to Herlihy’s law office, then had the telephone disconnected. I neither wanted it, nor could afford it.

  I lived spare. What small supplies I needed I could buy every day at the convenience store. On the days when the tides were slack I went trawling for cod with Johnny and he paid me wages from the pile of money I had given him for Rebel Lady. I used a chunk of my own cash to buy myself a cheap pick-up truck and debated whether I should equip it with a golden retriever or a black labrador. I was one of at least a hundred people who applied for a mechanic’s job at an Upper Cape marina, but at forty I was reckoned too old for the position. My remaining cache of money dwindled and it was painful to remember that, just a year ago, I had been sole proprietor of Nordsee Yacht Delivery, Services and Surveying, with a handy cash flow and profit enough for my needs if not for those of the unlamented Sophie. Now, thanks to my own greed, I was down to my last few bucks, though I still owned the renamed Roisin in Ireland and, come the spring’s revival in the boat market, I decided I would order her sold and use the money to eke out a few more months on the Cape.

  One fine March morning Sergeant Ted Nickerson, the policeman who had rescued me from Sarah Sing Tennyson’s ammonia on the night of my return to the Cape, dropped by the house. “Just keeping an eye on the place,” he explained as he climbed out of his cruiser. “So you’re home for good now, Paul?”

  “Yes.”

  “The CIA finished with you?”

  “Ask them, Ted.” I was not feeling sociable.

  “But you’re OK, Paul?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Nickerson walked to the edge of the drive and stared southward across the bay. He noticed the remnants of the bonfire on which I had burned Sarah Tennyson’s canvases. “I could probably arrest you for lighting that fire. You must have broken at least a dozen federal regulations, not to mention the state laws and the national park rules and the town ordinances.” He spat in disgust. “A man can’t even piss over the side of his boat these days without breaking the law.” He took a cigarette from a pocket and shielded the lighter with his free hand. “We got a telephone call a while back. From a young lady called Kathleen Donovan. She was kind of distressed. Said she thought you were being kidnapped. Were you?”

  “Yes,” I said, but did not add that she had been a part of it.

  “But we had orders not to interfere with you. If anything happened we were to talk to a guy in the Washington office of the FBI. So we did, and he seemed to think you could look after yourself. And if you’re here now then I guess he was right?”

  “I guess so, too.” The FBI, I surmised, had acted for the CIA who had sensibly not wanted a small-town police force to tangle with international terrorists. But I also noted that neither the CIA nor the FBI had seemed unduly worried by my disappearance. No one had inquired about me since, evidently no one had looked for me while I was gone, and I could only surmise that van Stryker or Gillespie considered that I deserved whatever mischief came my way. I had been useful to them, now I wa
s useless and discarded.

  “But I thought you ought to know about the young lady,” Ted went on, “especially as she sounded kind of upset. She particularly wanted me to let her know if you were OK.” He took a scrap of paper from a pocket. “That’s her phone number. Of course I could give her a call myself, but if you want to speak to her then you’ll be saving the police department the price of a long-distance phone call.” Nickerson held out the piece of paper.

  I took it. “Thanks, Ted.”

  “Just being neighbourly, Paul.” He hesitated. “I suppose you’re not going to tell me what this is all about?”

  “One day, maybe.”

  “Yeah, and maybe one day the Red Sox will win the Series.” He climbed into his car and wound down the window. “The Goddamn town wants to declare police cars a public facility and therefore smoke free. Fuck ’em, I say.” He waved his cigarette at me, reversed the car, then drove away.

  I stared at the piece of paper. It felt like one last chance. Or, of course, it could be another trap to snare a fool, just as Kathleen’s last visit had been, but my future was not so golden that I needed to take care of it and so I drove the truck up to the main road and, with my last few quarters, placed a call to Maryland.

  Kathleen Donovan lived in a small house on the ragged outskirts of a one-street country town. The house had two storeys, a wide verandah, and a windbreak of scrub pine. Behind it was a meadow with an old tobacco drying shed decaying in its centre. “None of it’s mine,” she said. “I just rent it.”

  “It’s nice,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster.

  “Not when the wind’s in the south. Then you can smell the chicken farm beyond the swamp.” She laughed suddenly, knowing I had lied out of politeness. “I just wanted to get away from Baltimore.”

  “To be near your folks?”

  She shook her head. “To get away from them. I spend three or four nights a week up there, and it’s good to get away. It’s real nice here in spring, you know, when the dogwood is out?”