Brownlow House. I unfolded the paper. In large block letters, the
message read WATCH OUT FOR SIMMS. It was signed YOUR YANK FRIEND.
My Yank friend warning me about Adrian Simms. The guy with the fedora. Why? Why should I worry about Simms, and why should this guy bother warning me? Whose side was he on, and how come no one seemed to know who he was? Well, a warning was a warning, no sense ignoring it. I went back into the pub, and took the page from the paper with Adrian's picture on it. Now I had pictures of Pete Brennan, Eddie Mahoney, and Adrian Simms. Plus, I could give a good description of Red Jack Taggart and Andrew Jenkins. I needed to find someone who'd seen one or more of them in the wrong place at the wrong time, someone who wasn't with the IRA or the Red Hand. But I could have used someone to watch my back, not to mention my flanks.
I missed Diana as a partner. She had a different way of viewing information, and when we talked about a case she would often ask a question or make a comment that made me think about things in a new light. I felt lonely without her, and without Kaz as well. Lieutenant-not to mention Baron-Piotr Augustus Kazimierz was assigned to Eisenhower's HQ by the Polish Army in Exile. Kaz had lost his entire family when the Nazis invaded while he was studying languages in England. I'd showed up, and then he'd lost Daphne, Diana's sister, the only person left in the world he loved. Since then, he'd worked with me, and for a short, rail-thin, bespectacled intellectual, he'd proved damned handy with a gun as well as with his razor-sharp mind. Kaz might have stood out a tad in Northern Ireland but he knew how to keep to the shadows. This mystery Yank wouldn't have been a mystery for long if I'd had Kaz on the prowl.
But I was alone so I headed down the Banbridge Road and thought about the note. The writing bothered me. The clumsy block letters might have been an attempt to disguise the handwriting of the person who wrote it, which meant I might have a chance of comparing it to some sample I had. But in Northern Ireland whose handwriting might I recognize? Kaz was good with codes and ciphers, and he might have been able to pick up on disguised handwriting.
That led me to wonder what role Adrian Simms played in all this. A friendly local cop, got along well with Yanks, and was reasonably tolerant of Catholics for an Orangeman. A guy who hadn't made the cut for the Royal Black Knights, who had a social climber for a wife, according to Tom. It could just be village gossip or could be absolutely true and have nothing to do with anything. I thought Adrian had told me he'd been brought up in Dublin, then moved north. He'd accounted for his live-and-let-live nature by acknowledging that he'd been the minority in the Republic, so he knew how it felt. But why had the Knights turned him down? And why had I been warned about him?
The only reason for the warning I could figure was money. Maybe Simms had wanted to shower his wife with cash so she'd forgive him for a Catholic in the woodpile. That was a stretch, though.
I slowed as I passed through Banbridge on the same route I'd taken the day before. As my speed decreased, my thoughts seemed to slow down too, making it easier to see a pattern. Usually the simple answer was the right one, and the simple explanation here was that Simms was more of an extremist than he let on. Perhaps he was in the Red Hand, and Jenkins had been irritated by my papist questions. Maybe I was being warned about the Protestant militia. But then why didn't the note say that? Watch out for Simms. That was all he'd written.
Slow or fast, nothing much made a lot of sense. I decided to let it percolate in my subconscious. That's what it's there for, Dad always said when he was stuck. Let it earn its keep. OK, I decided to give it a try. I let my mind go blank and watched the scenery drift by. Thirty minutes later, I was in Armagh, my mind still empty. I guess my subconscious was working really hard but what I was aware of was how hard the seat in the jeep had become. I drove along a narrow roadway, row houses built of light brown stone glowing in the sunlight, their brightly varnished doors in red, green, and blue flashing by as I kept the wheel turned into the curving road. In the distance, the twin spires of the Roman Catholic Saint Patrick's Cathedral reached high from the crest of a hill overlooking the city. I was driving by the other Saint Patrick's, the Protestant cathedral that stood on the ground where Saint Patrick himself had built his first stone church, four centuries after the death of Christ. They'd drummed that into us in catechism class, and it had always stuck with me, that the Protestants held the sacred ground where Patrick himself had laid the stones of the first church in Ireland. That and the fact that Patrick had voluntarily returned to Ireland after having been kidnapped from Britain and sold into slavery in Ireland, then escaping and making it back to his home across the Irish Sea. There he'd had a dream that the people of Ireland begged him to return to preach to them. I always thought it could have been a trick, and he should have stayed home. Maybe there would still be snakes on the island but it might have saved everyone a lot of trouble.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
I sat in the jeep, parked across the street from the bank, and watched. I wanted to get a feel for the pattern of movement in and out, where people came from and where they went after their banking was done. The clientele was mixed, businessmen and workers, older ladies in big hats, and a couple of guys in uniform. Respectable, like a downtown bank in Worcester or Springfield on a slow day.
I walked up and down the street. Lots of limestone had gone into this burg, the buildings all three or four stories, neat and square, the line of rooftops following the curve of the ground, chimneys dotting their procession like a connect-the-dots drawing. I heard the bells of both cathedrals chime, the high notes of the Catholic Saint Patrick's competing with the deeper tones of the Protestant Saint Patrick's. Either way, they both told the same story. Time was slipping away. It would have been helpful to have Kaz along. We could have split up, asked our questions, and be done in half the time. But there had been no chance of that. Kaz hadn't made the trip to Jerusalem. He'd been ordered back to London by the Polish Government in Exile-the folks who actually were in charge of him, if anyone was. He was listed as a liaison officer with Eisenhower's headquarters but he worked with me in Ike's secret Office of Special Investigations, dealing with low crimes in high places, the kind of thing Uncle Ike wanted taken care of quietly, so as not to hinder the war effort. With me in Northern Ireland helping the Brits, Diana with the SOE, and Kaz back in London on whatever was up with the Poles, the only guy minding the shop in Algiers was Corporal Mike Miecznikowski-Big Mike-a Detroit cop who'd joined us after Sicily. I hoped Kaz would be back soon, and I began to think about the past few months as the good old days, the four of us working together, never thinking we'd soon be scattered all across Europe like this.
I stopped in O'Neill's pub. It looked bright and cheery, the outside painted yellow and the door sporting a fresh coat of varnish. I asked the barkeep if he'd seen any of the guys in the pictures I laid out on the bar.
'Are you not drinking?' he replied, more in amazement than confrontation.
'Too many stops to make. I'd be drunk before I was done. Recognize any of these fine fellows?'
'Who are you then?' He kept running a rag over a glass that was by now bone-dry.
'Just a Yank. Humor me, OK?'
He puffed out his cheeks and sighed at the demands I put upon him. He looked at the two old men at the bar and one older gent at a table, and probably decided this was the most interesting thing that was going to happen today. He looked at the photos of Pete Brennan, Eddie Mahoney, and Adrian Simms, picking up each one, studying it, and setting it down with careful ceremony.
'Never saw any of them,' he said. 'But I know that's Clough.' He tapped his finger on the picture of Adrian with Sam Burnham standing near him as he directed traffic.
'Congratulations,' I said. I described Red Jack Taggart and Andrew Jenkins. He said they reminded him of several fellows, all regulars. I guess bald and stocky did cover a lot of men.
'Do you do your banking over there?' I pointed with my thumb toward the Northern Bank, visible through the front windows.
'Course not, are ya daft? That's a Protestant bank. Bank of Ireland for us. For a smart lot of boys, you Yanks don't really know very much, do ya?'
'Lucky for us we're quick studies. Thanks.'
I stretched my legs for a couple of blocks and turned around, crossed the street, and walked back to the bank. A few doors short of it, I stopped at a small tobacco shop and newsstand. I bought some penny candy from a barrel so I could at least hand some coins over as I asked my questions. This fellow wasn't as wary or talkative as the barkeep.
'No, no, certainly not.'
