“The parole board had released you on compassionate grounds before the funeral. And your brother was on leave from the Marine Corps.”
I shrugged and spread my hands as though I knew nothing. Gillespie turned a page in his notebook. “Your brother died in Vietnam?”
“Hue. And no, his death didn’t make me angry at America.”
Gillespie ignored the irrelevance. “So how did you earn a living after your father’s death?”
“I took over his businesses.”
“Including the brothels?”
“I told you, they pulled those down. No, all I kept was the marina at Weymouth and the Green Harp Bar in Charlestown. I sold everything else.” I had been twenty-one, rich as a dream and cock of the Boston walk, but the money had slipped away like ice on a summer sidewalk. I let cronies use the marina slips for free, I ran a slate for friends in the Green Harp and I flew to Ireland to play the rich Irish-American to the admiring natives. I also made the bookmakers happy. On one day alone I dropped a hundred thousand dollars at Fairyhouse, a fair bit of it on a horse called Sally-So-Fair which started at a hundred to one and finished as dogmeat. I had sworn the horse could not lose, mainly on the grounds that I had spent the previous night with two whores, both called Sally and both fair-haired, but they were each a better goer than the horse.
I had to sell the marina and a half-share in the bar to pay my debts. I promised my mother I would be good, but the promise was easier to make than the keeping of it. My half-share in the Green Harp made money, but the money trickled away on girls and booze and horses. My mother wanted me to marry some good Catholic virgin, but I had smelt the milk-and-diaper stench of respectability and knew it was not for me. I needed the spice of danger, and Joey Grogan brought it me.
Joey was a passionate man, drunk with Irish myths and obsessed with liberating his ancestral home. I had first met him when he arrived at the Green Harp Bar to empty the Friends of Free Ireland collecting box that we kept alongside the Parish Fund box and the Multiple Sclerosis box and the Send the Kids to Camp box and the United Way box and any other charity box so long as it was not a Protestant box, but Joey scornfully swept all the other boxes aside and told me that there was only one cause worth supporting, and that was the cause of a united Ireland. I watched, amused, as he broke the other boxes open and poured their miserable harvest of dimes and pennies into his own pile. Later he recruited me to help him assemble an arms shipment for Ulster. The shipment was small stuff, mostly old handguns that we bought on the street corners of Boston, but still good enough, Joey said, to kill Brits. We sent them in a container load of panty-hose bound for Cork.
“Panty-hose?” Gillespie asked in disbelief.
Five years later, I said, Joey and I were sending big stuff; Armalites, Ingrams and even a pair of M60 machine-guns that had been liberated from a Massachusetts National Guard Armory, but by then the Middle East had already overtaken America as the source of the Provisional IRA’s weapons. We had become minor league, and Libya was the heavy hitter. “What year was that?” Gillespie asked.
“It was ’76 when we sent the M60s. As a kind of reminder to the Brits of another ’76.”
“That was the year your mother died?”
“God rest her. She had cancer.”
There was brief silence. A log spat angrily in the fire, arcing a spark that smouldered for a fierce and smoky second on the sacrificial coir rug that protected the library’s parquet floor from just such embers. “Was it the death of your mother,” Gillespie asked mildly, “that gave you the freedom to enter the drug trade?”
“I was never in the drug trade,” I snapped. The debriefing had turned hostile because I resented this harrowing of my past. It seemed irrelevant to me. I had always been uncomfortable in the confessional because I hated to reflect on my actions. I was impetuous, generous and foolish, but not reflective. The truth was that I had smuggled drugs to make a quick buck, and a big buck, just as I had killed Liam and Gerry to make an even bigger and faster buck, but doing it did not mean I had to dwell on it, and I had small patience for my countrymen’s love of self-analysis and self-absorption. My dad had taught me to live life at full throttle and not to worry about the rear- view mirrors, but these sessions with Gillespie promised to be long, uncomfortable bouts of mirror-gazing and I did not like it.
Gillespie turned a page in his folder. “In 1977 you were arrested in a boat called the
“I was charged?” I challenged him.
“Of course not.” Because instead of going for trial I had gone underground, saved by a codfish aristocrat called Simon van Stryker and his Stringless Program. I had become legitimate.
Simon van Stryker was a WASP superstar; a man born to inestimable privilege, with immaculate manners and a gentle demeanor which nevertheless suggested that he could be as ruthless as a hungry rattlesnake. He was tall, elegant, beautifully spoken, and had pale green eyes as cold as the water off Nova Scotia. The moment I first saw him I knew his type, just as he knew mine. I was two-toilet Irish and he was the codfish aristocracy. The codfish aristocracy had never liked my kind for we were the incontinent, fecund, ill-spoken Papist immigrants who had fouled up their perfect Protestant America in the nineteenth century, but van Stryker still became my recruiter, my master, my friend. Van Stryker had saved me from God knows how many years in a federal prison in the depths of the Everglades surrounded by alligators, rattlers, coral snakes and Aids-riddled rapists waiting in the showers.
Instead he had taken me to a house in Georgia, not unlike the house where Gillespie now took my secrets apart. There, surrounded by camellias and azaleas, van Stryker and his team had probed me and analyzed me and prepared me.
“Are you a patriot?” they had wanted to know, but they had hardly needed to ask for I had only to hear “America the Beautiful” for the tears to start. We Shanahans had always been emotional. We were Irish after all, the cry babies of the Western world, and of course I was a patriot because America was my country. My love for it was laid down like the sediments of the seabed, dark and immovable, and however hard the wind blew or high the seas broke, still that ocean floor was as calm and still and unchanging as the farthest cold cinders of the universe. To me patriotism was bred in the bone, a part of the blood, etched till death. Show me Old Glory and I cry, play me “The Star-Spangled Banner” and I weep.
So what did I feel about Ireland?
That was easy. Ireland was forty shades of green and smiling eyes and shamrocks and shillelaghs and the road ever rising to meet you and the St. Patrick’s Day parade when all South Boston went gloriously drunk. Ireland was dancing the jig and good talk and warm hearts and fellowship.
And England? they asked.
England was where the cold-hearted bores came from; the bank managers and the Republicans, the golfers and the Episcopalians.
And killing such cold fish was forgivable?
“I never killed one of the bastards in my life!” I protested.
But what about the work I did for the Friends of Free Ireland in Boston. Did I not collect money for the cause?
Sure I did, but so what if the money went to buy guns and bombs? It was for expelling the English from Ireland and hadn’t the English been slaughtering the Irish for centuries?
Had I ever seen a child eviscerated by a bomb? Simon van Stryker asked me.
I had shrugged the question away, but Simon van Stryker had photographs of the child. She had been three years old, waiting with her mother at a bus stop in Belfast. The mother had died too, her legs torn off by the bomb blast. The bomb had been the work of the IRA. For a new Ireland.
And here were pictures of a woman tarred and feathered. Her hair had been cut off before the leprechauns jeered at her and smeared her with hot tar and chicken feathers, and all because her husband, who had made three widows and eleven orphans, was in jail for life and she had assuaged her loneliness by sleeping with another man. The woman was nineteen. Her lover had been a Catholic, and him they had beaten into a wheelchair. They were the IRA.
And here was a man whose kneecaps had been shot away. A boy of sixteen had pulled the trigger and the victim would never walk again. The man was a Catholic and had been accused of giving information to the Ulster
