“To find out if I’ve gone mad?” I asked lightly.
“Something like that, yes,” he replied just as lightly. In fact the shrink would be there to detect my lies.
“Fine by me!” I said.
“Great.” Gillespie smiled. I smiled. Just great.
The psychiatrist surprised me because her appearance suggested someone who ought to have been knitting baby socks for a grandchild rather than monitoring a debriefing about terrorism, but doubtless she was a lot shrewder than her motherly, plump exterior suggested. She was a middle-aged black woman who smiled pleasantly at me, then shook the snow off her overshoes and settled in the bay window at the far end of the long library table. “Terrible weather,” she said cozily, “just terrible. Do you mind if I call you Paul? I’m Carole, Carole Adamson.”
“Paul’s fine.”
“Don’t you mind me, Paul. I’m just here to listen.” She was wearing a thick wool cardigan, wooden beads, and had a comfortable smile. She also frightened me for I was only too ready to believe that psychiatrists possessed arcane powers, and that my every little lie and evasion would telegraph themselves to Carole Adamson’s shrewd and watchful eyes. I could not see her without turning in my chair, but I was very aware of her scrutiny.
Gillespie began the afternoon session by saying FBI agents had begun their search for the Stinger missiles and for their Cuban vendors. In the meantime, he said, he wanted to explore my history of terrorist connections. “I want to go back to the very beginning,” he said. “Who introduced you to the IRA?”
“A guy called Joey Grogan.”
“Was that in America?” Gillespie asked. “Or in Ireland?”
“In Boston,” I said, and felt a flicker of annoyance. I had come here to talk of il Hayaween and Stingers and the Palestinian training camps, and instead Gillespie wanted to plow this old field. “Why don’t you just look up the file?” I asked.
“Because the Stringless Program keeps no files,” Gillespie said in a tone which suggested I should have known that. “All we know about you is what we can read in police records, but as far as the agency is concerned, Mr. Shanahan, you have never existed. So we have to begin at the beginning. Where does Mr. Grogan live?”
“He’s dead.” Poor Joey had died of emphysema in 1986 and Peggy, his widow, had immediately absconded to a trailer park in Florida with sixteen thousand dollars collected from Boston’s Irish bars by the Friends of Free Ireland. The Friends ostensibly collected money to support the widows and orphans of IRA soldiers, which was hardly necessary considering the generosity of the British government’s social security system, but everyone assumed the donations were for buying guns anyway. In practice much of the cash never went further than Boston’s Irish bars, and what little did reach Ireland was a hundred times more likely to end up in a pub’s cash-till than in the hands of a gunman’s widow.
“You were recruited into the IRA before you met us?” Gillespie asked. “Before you met van Stryker?”
“I was supporting them, sure, but I didn’t join the IRA proper till I went to live in Ireland.”
“But you’re confirming you were a long-time supporter? Was that for ideological reasons?”
“Ideological?”
Gillespie shrugged. “The Provisional IRA is a self-professed Marxist organization, is it not?” He was being very prim.
I laughed. “Come on. Get real!”
“Well, isn’t it?” He had very pale blue eyes that were not quite as friendly as his diffident manner suggested.
I shook my head. “The IRA says it’s Marxist when they’re dealing with socialist supporters like Colonel Qaddafi, and they say they’re good Catholic boys when they’re treating with the American-Irish in Boston. Most of them wouldn’t know a Marxist if one raped them with a hammer and a blunt sickle. Two or three of the Army Council are probably Party members, but the IRA itself is either just a good old-fashioned patriotic liberation movement, or else a more than usually ruthless criminal organization, depending on just how close to it you happen to live.”
“So why did you join?”
“Because the Irish are my tribe! Because I learned about Wolfe Tone and Patrick Pearse long before anyone in my family thought to tell me about George Washington. Because I swallowed stories of the famine with my mother’s milk. There probably isn’t a family in South Boston that doesn’t claim ancestors who were put to the sword by Cromwell, or massacred in the rising of ’98, or starved in the famine, or beaten up by the Black and Tans. Those claims are our tribal badges!”
Gillespie wanted to know about my childhood, but there were no dark secrets there. I had been a happy child, dividing my time between our family’s Boston house, my father’s Cape Cod retreat, and his various business premises. Those premises ranged from the Green Harp Bar in Charlestown to a marina in Weymouth, but my father’s real fortune was made from his brothels in Scollay Square.
“Brothels?” Gillespie asked painfully.
“They pulled them down,” I said, “to build the new City Hall. Some people haven’t noticed any difference.”
“And your mother? What was her attitude to your father’s businesses?”
“My mother worshipped the Virgin Mary. She believed every mother was born to suffer, and she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. She endured my father and adored her three children.”
“But you must have been a trial to her?” Gillespie smiled to show he meant no offense. “We took the trouble to find your old police records.”
“I told you, Mom believed women were born to suffer. That’s what the priest and the nuns told her, and that’s how she wanted it.” Not that my police record held anything more sinister than the usual juvenile indiscretions. I had first been in court for beating ten kinds of living hell out of a man who had insulted my sister, and two years after that I did four months for receiving stolen goods.
“And your father died while you were in prison?” Gillespie observed.
“Yes.”
“How did he die?”
“He was in the back room of a Southie Bar when some bastards decided to burn the place down. They shot him first.”
“Why?”
“We were told it was an insurance scam.”
“You believe that?”
“Maybe they didn’t like his beer?” I smiled.
Gillespie stared thoughtfully at me. “It must have been upsetting for you.”
“What?”
“Your father’s death. You were only twenty-one, that’s too young to lose a parent.”
“What are you trying to prove?” I challenged him. “I thought I was here to help you guys, and instead you’re trying to make out that I’m some kind of basket-case because my pa died? I don’t need your counseling, Gillespie, or some crappy male-bonding session. I had a happy childhood, I thought Boston was a wonderful playground, and I think it’s sad that my parents are both dead, but I don’t suck my thumb or go in for pederasty or whimper in the night, so shall we move the fuck on?”
Carole Adamson tried to reassure me. “It’s important that we understand where you’re coming from, Paul. Your life is the context for the answers you give us.”
“What happened to your father’s killers?” Gillespie had been entirely unmoved by my protest.
“Beats me,” I shrugged, “the bastards were never found.”
“I thought two of the suspected killers were found in the Charles River? Strangled?”
“Were they now?” I asked innocently.
“And a third man was found with his head thrust down a toilet in a Roxbury bar. He had drowned. The police believe that you and your brother were in that same bar on that night, but could find no witnesses to verify that belief.”
“I thought you said I was in prison?”
