in soon. I’ll say it was all a misunderstanding and that none of us wants any trouble. You want me to talk to them?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said grimly.
“You mean those two who vanished? Liam and Gerry? Brendan told me about them. Are they dead?”
I hesitated, then nodded. “They’re dead.”
For a second I was tempted to confess to Seamus that I had murdered them in cold blood, but Seamus evidently did not care for he just shook his head. “Brendan doesn’t give a fock about those two. They were just supposed to look after the taxi trade and the butchers’ shops. All they had to do was slap a few faces and keep the miserable fockers in line, but no, they had to go into business for themselves, didn’t they?” Seamus meant that Gerry and Liam, despite their big tales of dead soldiers and flattened city buildings, had only ever been enforcers for the Provisional IRA’s protection rackets. Their contribution to the new Ireland had consisted of beating up Catholic barmen, shopkeepers and taxi-drivers who were late with their weekly donation to the Provos. By far the largest part of the IRA’s activities was spent in running its protection rackets, just as the Protestant gunmen did in their parts of Ulster. “But Liam and Gerry weren’t content with looking after trade,” Seamus explained. “They decided to raid a couple of sub-post-offices in Ardoyne and Legoniel and they beat the shit out of a fellow who was married to Punchy O’Neill’s sister, so Punchy complained, of course, and Brendan turned their names in to the Brits, only they managed to reach the Free State before they were ever arrested, so naturally Brendan had to look after them. But they were never any good! All they did was collect the money. Jasus, Brendan’s not going to mind them going down the drain. He’ll probably thank you for switching them off, so he will! For God’s sake, Paulie, let me talk to him. Let me make it right.”
“Have a try,” I said, though only to make Seamus happy. There was going to be no deal over the money, none at all.
“What shall I say?” Seamus asked. “That you’ll bring the money in soon?”
“Sure,” I said, not meaning it at all.
“Five million, eh?” Seamus laughed. “And I remember when you and I couldn’t find a quid between us.”
“We were never that skint,” I said, “but they were good days.”
“Aye, they were. Better than these.”
“You don’t like it here?”
“Aye! I like it well enough. Boston’s OK.” He dropped his cigarette on to the floor and killed it with the toe of his boot. His skin was pock-marked, but that blemish had never stopped the girls chasing after him, though Seamus, who seemed to have ice-water in his veins when it came to guns or bombs, was rendered helplessly nervous by women. If Roisin were alone in our Belfast apartment Seamus would sit on the back stairs rather than try to talk to her without my help. It was not that he disliked women, just that he was simply terrified of their beauty and power. “Boston’s OK,” he said again with a wry tone. “Beantown. What kind of a focking name is that for a city? Beantown.”
“So what’s wrong with Beantown?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it. People are nice enough, so they are, but it isn’t like home, is it? The beer’s focking freezing, the summers are hotter than hell, and they’re always watching focking netball on the telly! Focking men’s netball! It’s a focking girls’ game, I tell them.”
“It’s called basketball,” I said, as if he didn’t know, “and it’s Boston’s religion.”
He laughed, then shook his head. “I miss Derry, Paulie. I really miss it. I mean I know it’s not much of a place, not worth a rat’s toss really, but I miss it.”
“I miss Belfast,” I said, and I did too. I loved that city. It was a dirty, ugly, battered city and I had never been happier than when I had lived there. The city’s first impression was dour; all bomb damage and hopeless dereliction, but the brick streets crackled with wit and were warmed by friendship.
Seamus grimaced. “I sometimes think that if they’d just let me go home for one short day I’d kiss a focking Apprentice Boy out of sheer gratitude.” He gave a brief and bitter laugh. “I told that to some fellow in here and he didn’t even know who the focking Apprentice Boys are! He’d not even heard of the Orangemen!”
“Don’t blame them,” I said. “They love Ireland, right enough, but they don’t want to know how complicated it is. You can’t blame them, Seamus, and their hearts are in the right place.”
But Seamus wasn’t listening to my explanations. “They had a fellow give a talk in here, what? Six months back? Something like that, and he said the focking Brits had built a focking gas chamber in Long Kesh, and that they were systematically murdering the whole Catholic population!” Seamus grimaced. “I mean, shit! I don’t like the focking Brits, but they haven’t got that bad. Not yet, anyway. I didn’t say anything, of course, what’s the focking point?”
“None.”
He laughed. “And your brother-in-law, eh? Getting slapped about in Ballymurphy! So the lads are still pulling that stunt, are they?” He shook his head happily. “What a prick Patrick is! I know he’s your family, Paulie, but what a prick!”
“I know. He’s a creep.”
“And family, that’s another thing! My da died last year and I couldn’t be with him. It isn’t right, a son not being at his father’s grave. And my mam’s not well. Something with her chest, her breathing, like. My brother wrote and told me, but what can I do?”
So there was a brother, and Kathleen Donovan had not lied to me, and I suddenly wondered what the hell use was five million bucks without someone to share it with? “Go back to Ireland,” I suggested to Seamus. “Your ma can cross into Donegal and see you there, can’t she?”
“She can, but the focking Garda will have me in Portlaoise Jail before you could spit. They want me for a wee job I did in Dundalk.” He grinned apologetically. I knew it would be no good asking what the wee job was, though it was almost certainly a bank raid. Seamus was a much wanted man, though nowhere was he wanted more avidly than in Northern Ireland where he had made his bloody and infamous escape from Long Kesh. The Provisionals had lost two men in the breakout, but they reckoned the propaganda value of Seamus’s freedom was well worth the price. But now, as an illegal immigrant in America and a wanted felon in Britain and Ireland, the battle for his political asylum was filling newspaper columns on both sides of the Atlantic. “They say I’m a focking symbol,” Seamus gloomily told me. “They say I’ll be Grand Marshal of their St. Patrick’s Day parade next year. They want to give me a medal of freedom on the State House steps. They’re even talking about making a focking film of me! Can you believe that? Some prick little actor in Hollywood says he wants to make a film of me! But I don’t want to be in a focking movie, Paul. I want to go home.”
“Go and see a plastic surgeon,” I suggested.
“I was thinking of doing that,” he said softly. “I tell you, with all the focking money they’re spending just keeping me out of jail I could have looked like Marilyn Monroe by now, tits and all.” He blushed for having dared say a rude word, and for a second I thought he was going to cross himself, then he just shook his head sorrowfully. “Shit, Paul, I just want to go home. I don’t want any more trouble. The younger lads can do some of the fighting now, eh? I’ve put a few quid away, so I have, and there’s a scrap of farmland near Dunnamanagh that would do me just grand. A few cattle, some arable, and a tight little house. That’ll do me right enough.” He paused, his eyes far away, then he lit a new cigarette. “I was thinking of Roisin the other day.” He had reddened with embarrassment, and I wondered just how badly she had humiliated him.
“I often think of her,” I admitted.
“I had a letter from her sister a few weeks back. It came to Chuck’s office, my lawyer, right?”
“Did you write back?”
He shook his head.
“What did the letter want?”
“She wanted to know what happened to Roisin, like. Christ, what was I to say?”
“The truth?” I suggested, though in my mouth the word tasted like ash.
“Who the fock knows if Roisin even had a sister?” Seamus asked me. “And Chuck said I shouldn’t write back, in case it was a set-up by the focking Brits. You know, to get information? So he chucked the letter away.”
“It’s just as well,” I said vaguely.
“And what was I supposed to tell the sister?” Seamus asked indignantly. “That Roisin was shot by the focking Arabs?”
“Right.”
