“Here goes!” I shouted. “I’ll get it right this time!” I shifted into reverse again, slammed my foot on the accelerator, and crashed the car back sickeningly hard into the brick wall. My head whiplashed on to the grille that protected the front seat occupants from whatever prisoners they had in the back seat. I killed the engine and climbed out, to see that the boot lid was spectacularly buckled. The cruiser also had a crumpled bumper and had lost a headlight and the best part of a wheel arch, while the expensive body panels of the Congressman’s Mercedes were horribly dented and gouged. “Replace it with an American car, Congressman,” I called to him, “a man like you shouldn’t be driving a European car, should you now?”
Tommy the Turd’s aide hurried the Congressman back into the Parish as the two policemen stalked past me. “Fuck you, Shanahan,” one of them muttered, then they pulled off their plaid hunting coats, climbed into their wrecked cruiser and, with a foul scraping sound, drove out of the lot.
Seamus applauded me. Michael Herlihy, looking more than ever like a beardless Lenin, spat at me. “That wasn’t clever, Paul,” he said.
“It wasn’t meant to be clever, Michael, just a scrap of fun. Did you never have fun, Michael?” I looked at Seamus. “He was always the class nerd, Seamus. Altar boy, chalkboard monitor, nuns’ favorite. Michael’s idea of a good time is to run in the Boston marathon, or have you even given up that small pleasure, Michael?”
Herlihy picked his way through the puddles of the parking lot until he was standing close beside me. “Where have you been these last few weeks, Shanahan?” He had waved Seamus aside, wanting to speak privately with me.
“I’ve been chatting to the CIA, Michael.” I smiled seraphically.
“You’ve done what?”
“You know I spilled the beans. Was it the FBI or the cops that talked to you?” I smiled down into his thin, bloodless face. “I got worried that the Arabs weren’t sending the Stingers to Ireland, but planned to use them here. I knew you wouldn’t have wanted that to happen, Michael, it would have been bad for the movement’s image, wouldn’t it now? So I played the patriot game.”
He ignored my blarney. “Where in God’s name is the money?”
“It’s funny, isn’t it,” I said, “how you lawyers always ask that question.”
“Where is it, Shanahan?” He was intense, hissing his words, his body tight as a whip.
I clicked my fingers ruefully, as though I had misplaced something. “I should have told you, Michael, the boat sank. It was a rotten boat, a real clunker. It went down off Sardinia. I tried to save the two Belfast boys, but they panicked and the boat went down like a stone with them still inside. And with all that gold weighing the boat down, they never stood a chance. Straight down. Nothing but a few bubbles and a floating lifejacket.”
“Don’t tell me lies.” Michael spoke menacingly.
I knew he was never going to believe the story, not in a thousand years, but it was worth a try all the same. “As God is my witness, Michael, just south of Sardinia. There was a sudden squall out of the north, a brute of a sea running, and—”
“No!” He snapped the denial, cutting me off. The rain flecked his glasses as his voice gathered intensity. “You’ve gone too far, Paul, and Ireland wants you to answer some questions.”
“No,” I said, “you’re the one who’ll have to answer questions, Michael. That money didn’t come from Libya, it came from Saddam Hussein, the bastard who’s doing his level best to slaughter American boys right now. So what you’re going to do now, Michael, is you’re going to forget the money, you’re going to forget the Stingers, and you’re going to forget me.”
“You’re insane!” Michael’s voice rose to a sudden shrill intensity.
Seamus crossed the lot to act as a peacemaker. “I’m taking care of it, Michael,” he said soothingly. “Paulie will find the money, won’t you, Paulie?”
“Leave this alone, Seamus!” Herlihy snapped, then looked back to me. “I’ll have you killed, so help me! I’ll have you killed!” Michael rarely displayed any emotions for he was one of nature’s Jesuits, a tough sinewy little son of a gun under a pale, thin and clerical exterior, but now, behind his rain-obscured glasses, he had lost his self- control. “You bring me the money, Shanahan, all of it, or you’ll wish you’d never been born.”
“Boo,” I said to him.
“Damn you!” He turned and stalked across the parking lot, then stopped at the Parish’s side door for a parting shot. “There’s a British Consulate in Boston, Paul.”
“You want me to go and tell tales to them, is that it?”
He pointed at me. “It takes one phone call, just one, and I can have the Brits on your back. You’ll end up like Gallagher.” Brian Gallagher had been an arms dealer who had been acquitted in a Boston courtroom of illegally exporting arms to Ireland, and two weeks after his acquittal his body had been found in a cranberry bog near Waltham. He had not died easily. No one knew who had killed him and, though rumor blamed Gallagher’s partners whom he was said to have cheated out of their money, Michael Herlihy was convinced that the Brits had sent a special forces undercover team to reverse the jury’s decision. “I won’t weep for you, Paul,” Herlihy called as a parting shot as he went inside.
“The Brits wouldn’t focking dare come here, would they?” Seamus asked.
“Christ, no! Michael’s always seeing Brits under the bed. He thinks he’s on their wanted list and it makes him feel like a hero. But Michael’s biggest danger is that he’ll get a shock off his electric toothbrush. Just forget him. He’s a jerk.”
“But a dangerous one.” Seamus picked up my discarded sea-bag and tossed it to me. “Look after yourself, Paulie. And don’t worry about Michael or about Belfast. I’ll clear you. I’ll say it was all a misunderstanding and that you’ll be bringing the money.”
“You’re a grand man, Seamus.”
“And fock the Brits, eh?”
“From here to forever,” I gave him our old refrain, then walked away, and I hoped to God that the Brits did not have a team in New England for I was already playing two sides against a third and I did not need a fourth.
But those worries could wait. Instead, through the spitting rain and with Patrick’s money in my pocket, I walked to the bus and was carried home. To Cape Cod.
It was dark when the taxi dropped me off. I could have phoned Johnny Riordan from Hyannis, and he would certainly have come and collected me from the bus depot, but I could not be sure that some nasty surprise would not be waiting at the house and so I had caught the taxi and told the driver to drop me off at the convenience store close to the dirt track which led over the sand ridge. I bought myself some milk, a tin of Spam, some bread and margarine, then walked back to the track which twisted through the pine woods and so led to my house on the salt marsh. I stopped on the sand ridge and watched the marsh and the house for a long time, but all seemed innocent under the high scudding clouds and so I finally walked down to the clam-shell driveway, found my house keys, then discovered that the half-Chinese differently gendered person called Sarah Sing Tennyson had changed the Goddamn locks. “Hell!”
I went to the kitchen window, found a decent-sized rock, and broke through one of the glass panes. No alarm shrieked. No one called out in warning, so I guessed Miss Sarah Sing Tennyson was not in residence.
I reached up, found and unlatched the window catch, then heaved up on the sash window. It did not move. The bitch had put in sash locks too, so I took the rock and smashed through the whole window: glass panes, nineteenth-century mullions and all, and, after knocking out the remaining shards from the old putty, I crawled through on to the draining board. I ripped my jeans and cut my thigh on a scrap of glass I had failed to dislodge, then pushed two cups and a plate off the draining board to shatter on the kitchen floor, but at least I was home. I groped around the kitchen until I found the newly installed light switch, then set about reclaiming my house.
I had made more enemies than Saddam Hussein in the past few weeks so my first necessity was the ability to defend myself. I went into the empty garage and found that most of my old tools were still under the bench. I took the crowbar back into the living room where Captain Alexander Starbuck had built a broad hearth out of four massive stone slabs. I lifted the right-hand slab, shifting it aside to reveal a deep dark hole in front of the fireplace. The hole was the best of all the many hiding places constructed in the house during Prohibition. At very high spring tides, especially if an easterly wind was holding the water inside Pleasant Bay, this hiding place could flood, but those rare tides had never affected the whiskey hidden inside the hole, nor had they pierced the layers of thick
