“Do you remember that kid?” he asked.
“Don’t, Gerry.” McKenna’s voice carried a warning.
“I met his mother today. I was in the graveyard and she came up to me.”
“I know you did,” McKenna said, taking the glass from Fegan’s fingers.
“She said she knew who I was. What I’d done. She said—”
“Gerry, I don’t want to know what she said. I’m more curious about what you said to her. That’s what we need to talk about. But not here.” McKenna squeezed Fegan’s shoulder. “Come on, now.”
“He hadn’t done anything. Not really. He didn’t tell the cops anything they didn’t know already. He didn’t deserve that. Jesus, he was seventeen. We didn’t have to—”
One hard hand gripped Fegan’s face, the other his thinning hair, and the animal inside McKenna showed itself. “Shut your fucking mouth,” he hissed. “Remember who you’re talking to.”
Fegan remembered only too well. As he looked into those fierce blue eyes he remembered every detail. This was the face he knew, not the one on television, but the face that burned with white-hot pleasure as McKenna set about the boy with a claw hammer, the face that was dotted with red when he handed Fegan the .22 pistol to finish it.
Fegan gripped McKenna’s wrists and prised his hands away. He stamped on his own anger, quashed it.
The smile returned to McKenna’s lips as he pulled his hands away from Fegan’s, but went no further. “Come on,” he said. “My car’s outside. I’ll run you home.”
The twelve followed them out to the street, the boy sticking close to McKenna. McKenna had climbed high in the party hierarchy, but not so high he needed an escort to guard him. Even so, Fegan knew the Mercedes gleaming in the orange street lights was armored, both bullet- and bomb-proof. McKenna probably felt safe as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat.
“Big day today,” McKenna said as he pulled the car away from the curb, leaving the followers staring after them. “Sorting the offices up at Stormont, my own desk and everything. Who’d have thought it, eh? The likes of us up on the hill. I wangled a secretary’s job for the wife. The Brits are throwing so much money at this I almost feel bad taking it off them. Almost.”
McKenna flashed Fegan a smile. He didn’t return it.
Fegan tried to avoid seeing or reading the news as much as he could, but the last two months had been a hurricane of change. Just five months ago, as one year turned to the next, they’d said it was hopeless; the political process was beyond repair. Then mountains moved, deals were struck, another election came and went, while the shadows gathered closer to Fegan. And more often than before, those shadows turned to faces and bodies and arms and legs. Now they were a constant, and he couldn’t remember when he last slept without first drowning them in whiskey.
They’d been with him since his last weeks in the Maze prison, a little over seven years ago. He’d just been given his release date, printed on a sheet of paper in a sealed envelope, and his mouth was dry when he opened it. The politicians on the outside had bartered for his freedom, along with hundreds more men and women. They called people like him political prisoners. Not murderers or thieves, not extortionists or blackmailers. Not criminals of any kind, just victims of circumstance. The followers were there when Fegan looked up from the letter, watching.
He told one of the prison psychologists about it. Dr. Brady said it was guilt. A manifestation, he called it. Fegan wondered why people seldom called things by their real names.
McKenna pulled the Mercedes into the curb outside Fegan’s small terraced house on Calcutta Street. It stood shoulder to shoulder with two dozen identical red-brick boxes, drab and neat. The followers waited on the pavement.
“Can I come in for a second?” McKenna’s smile sparkled in the car’s interior lighting, and kind lines arced out from around his eyes. “Better to talk inside, eh?”
Fegan shrugged and climbed out.
The twelve parted to let him approach his door. He unlocked it and went inside, McKenna following, the twelve slipping in between. Fegan headed straight for the sideboard where a bottle of Jameson’s and a jug of water awaited him. He showed McKenna the bottle.
“No, thanks,” McKenna said. “Maybe you shouldn’t, either.” Fegan ignored him, pouring two fingers of whiskey into a glass and the same of water. He took a deep swallow and extended his hand towards a chair.
“No, I’m all right,” McKenna said. His hair was well barbered, his skin tanned and smooth, a scar beneath his left eye the only remainder of his old self.
The twelve milled around the sparsely furnished room, merging with and diverging from the shadows, studying each man intently. The boy lingered by McKenna’s side as the politician went to the unstrung guitar propped in the corner. He picked it up and turned it in the light.
“Since when did you play guitar?” McKenna asked.
“I don’t,” Fegan said. “Put it down.”
McKenna read the label inside the sound hole. “Martin. Looks old. What’s it doing here?”
“It belonged to a friend of mine. I’m restoring it,” Fegan said. “Put it down.”
“What friend?”
“Just someone I knew inside. Please. Put it down.”
McKenna set it back in the corner. “It’s good to have friends, Gerry. You should value them. Listen to them.”
“What’d you want to talk about?” Fegan lowered himself into a chair.
McKenna nodded at the drink in Fegan’s hand. “About that, for one thing. It’s got to stop, Gerry.”
