“Blame Patrick,” I said. I dislike my brother-in-law intensely.
“But I’ve invested in this place! I put in the electricity, and the phone!” She spoke accusingly. “I even had an estimate for central heating, but Maureen said I shouldn’t waste my money. I thought that was kind of weird, but I didn’t ask any questions. I was dumb, right? But I like this place too much. It’s the light.” She waved a peremptory hand at the window to explain herself.
“I know,” I said, and I did know. In fall and winter the light on the Cape is so clear and sharp that it seems like the world is newly minted. Thousands of painters had been drawn by that light, though most of them merely wasted good paint and canvas trying to capture it. Whether the girl was good or not I could not tell, for my eyesight was still smeared. In the dim electric light her canvases seemed full of anger and jaggedness, but that could just have been my mood.
“My name’s Sarah,” she said in a placatory tone, “Sarah Sing Tennyson.”
“Paul Shanahan,” I said, and almost added that it was nice to meet her, but that courtesy seemed inappropriate, so I left it out. “Sing?” I asked instead. “That’s an odd name.”
“My mother was Chinese.” Sarah Sing Tennyson was tall with very long, very straight and very black hair that framed a narrow, almost feral face. She had dark slanted eyes above high cheekbones. A good-looking trespasser, I thought sourly, if indeed she was a trespasser, for God only knew what the lawyers would make of this situation.
“When did you put the electricity in?” I asked lamely, supposing that at the very least I should have to reimburse her for that expense.
“Two summers ago.”
“I didn’t see any wires outside.”
“I had to bury the cables because this is all National Seashore land so you’re not allowed to string wires off poles. It was the same with the phone line.” She gave me a very hostile look. “It was expensive.”
More fool you, I thought. “And how much rent are you paying Patrick?”
“Is it your business?” She bridled.
“It’s my Goddamn house,” I bridled back. “And if my Goddamn brother-in-law lets my Goddamn house to some Goddamn girl, then it is my Goddamn business.”
“I am not a girl!” Sarah Sing Tennyson flared into instant and indignant hostility. I could allow her some irritation for being woken in the middle of the night, but even so she seemed to have an extraordinarily prickly character. “I am a woman, Mr. Shanahan, unless you wish to accept the appellation of ‘boy’?”
Oh sweet Jesus, I thought, the insanities that old Europe was spared, then I was saved from further linguistic tedium when the kitchen door opened and Ted Nickerson, still holding the telephone handset, stared at me. “Paul?”
“Ted.”
“I’m talking to a guy named Gillespie. Peter Gillespie. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“Nothing at all,” I said truthfully.
Nickerson had been staring oddly at me ever since he recognized me, and now his puzzlement only seemed to deepen. “He says he expected to see you in Europe. Does that make sense?”
Christ, I thought, but the CIA had been far quicker than I had expected. They had responded to my warning calls by putting out an alert. “We got a warning to look out for you two days ago, Paul,” Ted Nickerson said.
“Tell Gillespie I’ll call him in a few weeks.”
Ted shook his head. “I’ve got orders to hold you, Paul. Protective custody.” He moved his free hand to his holstered pistol, making Sarah Sing Tennyson gasp.
I half raised my hands in a gesture of supplication. “OK, Ted, no need for drama.”
“You’re not under arrest, Paul,” Ted said carefully, “just under police protection.” He spoke into the phone, telling whoever was at the other end that I was safely in the bag.
Which meant I had screwed up.
I met Peter Gillespie next morning. He came to the police station with an agent called Stuart Callaghan who was to be my bodyguard. “We guessed people might want to stop you talking?” Gillespie explained the bodyguard’s presence. “The guys with the missiles, right?”
“I guess they might too,” I said, though I suspected the people who wanted to stop me talking were more worried about the five million bucks in gold that should have paid for the Stinger missiles.
“You’ve had breakfast, Mr. Shanahan?” Gillespie had very punctiliously shown me his identification.
“Sure.”
“Then if you’re ready?” Gillespie was plainly eager to begin my debriefing. I was carrying, after all, over a decade of secrets that would feed the agency’s data banks. “We have a plane waiting at Hyannis Airport.” Gillespie tried to usher me toward the door.
“Hold on!” I protested. It was not yet eight in the morning, I had snatched two hours’ indifferent sleep in a holding cell, and I felt like death warmed over. “I’ve got to see someone before I leave. I want to use the telephone, then go back to my house.”
“If you need a razor or a toothbrush—” Gillespie began.
“I have to make a telephone call,” I interrupted him, “then visit home.”
Gillespie was plainly unhappy, but he was uncertain how best to handle me. I was no prisoner, despite being locked up overnight, yet I was certainly something very exotic. I might have been one of the CIA’s own, yet I had still come from the shadowy and unknown world of international terrorism, and that made me into a mystery. Perhaps they thought I had been contaminated by the vengeful creatures that came from the slums and refugee camps of the old world to give the new world its worst nightmares? Gillespie himself was very straight arrow; tall, fit, punctiliously courteous and businesslike, and clearly reluctant to let me use the phone, but he seemed to recognize my determination and so waved me toward a desk.
I needed to talk to an old friend. I would have much preferred to have talked with him in private, for I regarded my business with Johnny Riordan as an entirely personal matter and I doubted whether the CIA would agree with that view, but Gillespie’s presence was giving me little choice. I would have to risk the CIA knowing about Johnny.
Johnny and I had been friends since childhood, when his father used to look after the Cape house for my father. Old Eamonn Riordan was a fisherman, and a good one, but his son was an even better one. Johnny had a natural talent for boats, the sea and for living. He was a great man, a raw force of nature, a muscled lump of goodwill, common sense and kindness, but he was also a man I was loath to involve in any trouble for Johnny Riordan was a father, happily married, and without a mean fiber in his body except perhaps toward those politicians who constantly interfered with his livelihood. Johnny tried to scrape a bare existence from lobstering or scalloping or tub-trawling the seas about the Cape, but in the lean months, all twelve of them most years, he was forced to keep his family fed by taking on other jobs like stocking grocery shelves. Johnny thought the sacrifice worthwhile so long as he could continue fishing, for he loved the sea and was probably the finest seaman I had even met. I had not spoken with Johnny in seven years but I knew, if only he was home, he would not blink an eyelid if I did call. Nor did he. “So you’re back at last, are you?” he laughed. “Which means you’ll be wanting a meal.”
“No,” I said, “I want to meet you at my house. Now. Can you make it?”
“Sure I can make it. The politicians won’t allow us to go fishing these days just in case we catch something. I tell you, Paulie, those congressmen couldn’t catch their rear ends with their own bare hands, not even if you painted it scarlet for them. Did you hear about the new catch restrictions? Courtesy of Washington?”
“Just meet me!” I interrupted him. “Please, Johnny, now!”
Johnny’s pick-up truck was already parked in the driveway when Gillespie and Callaghan drove me home. Two golden retrievers wagged their tails in the back of Johnny’s truck, for no pick-up truck on Cape Cod was complete without at least one dog. I thought Johnny might have been waiting in the truck’s cab, but instead I found him ensconced before Sarah Sing Tennyson’s hearth where he was telling my tenant tall tales of prohibition; how the Cape Codders used to run rings round the federal agents, and how there were still forgotten caches of Canadian whiskey in some of the cranberry bogs and trap sheds. Sarah Sing Tennyson, like everyone else, was entranced by Johnny who had a natural and contagious enthusiasm. “Well now, look who it is!” he greeted me ebulliently. He was a big man, with a shock of black hair, a broad black beard and an open cheerful face.
