and that she was given the last rites and a proper Christian burial. I don’t think Mom and Dad want the truth. They don’t approve of terrorism. Nor do I.” She said the last three words very forcefully, then lobbed another scrap of shell that skittered along the sand. “I’ve had to think about terrorism,” Kathleen went on, “because of Roisin. Even before she went to Ireland she believed in violence. She collected money for the cause and she used to collect newspaper clippings about dead British soldiers and dead Irish policemen. Mom hated it. She thought Roisin was sick, but Dad said it was just the Irish sickness and a good reason to live in America.”
“But what if you can’t live in America?” I asked. “What if you’re a Catholic living in Protestant Ulster?”
“That’s not an excuse for murder,” Kathleen said firmly. “And if the IRA can’t wear a uniform and show themselves in battle, then they’re not real men, they’re just arrogant people who think they know better than the rest of Ireland, but the truth is they’ll burn in the same dreadful hell as whoever put that bomb on the Pan Am plane, or the men who shot the nuns in El Salvador, or the terrorists who killed our Marines in Lebanon.” She turned and looked defiantly at me. “I suppose you must think I’m very naive? Or very stupid?”
I stared at the sea. “The British did terrible things to the Irish.”
“And we did terrible things to the native Americans, so you think that the Cherokee or the Sioux should be able to bomb shopping malls or ambush American servicemen?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think that.”
“So what do you think?” she challenged me.
I knew that only an answer of the most rigorous honesty would serve my purpose here, and my purpose was not to feed a proud tribalism, nor to be defiant, but to match Kathleen’s truthfulness with a genuine response. “I think,” I spoke slowly, “that terrorism is wrong, but I also think it’s seductive because there’s a glamor in the men and women who fight a secret war, but at the very heart of it, and God I hate to admit it, but at the very heart of it we all know that the British would do almost anything to be free of Ireland. Yet everyone agrees there’d be a bloodbath if the Brits left, that the Catholics would set on the Protestants, or the Protestants on the Catholics, and that threat of violence is the only justification the British troops have for staying in Ireland, and so every bomb and every bullet the IRA uses only makes their justification stronger. So the IRA and the INLA and the UVF and the UDA are the only people keeping the British there, because the British sure as hell don’t want to be there. They hate the place! They quite like the Free State, but they dislike Ulster, and they detest Ulster’s Protestants! But who in the whole wide world does like the Northern Irish Protestants? Do you think Dublin wants to swallow those one million God-drunken stiff-necked bastards? And if the British won’t protect them, who will?” I paused, gazing at the gray horizon. “I don’t think any of it makes a blind scrap of sense, because I don’t think a single bomb has brought a free Ireland one day closer, but even so I still can’t see how any self-respecting lad growing up in Ballymurphy or Turf Lodge or the Bogside has any choice but to go on making the bombs. I think it’s a tragic, miserable, gut-wrenching mess. That’s what I think.”
“And the CIA wants to be involved in that mess?” she asked me, showing her incredulity at my claim to have worked for the American government.
“I don’t know.” I was feeling cold. “I was never a proper agent. I mean I didn’t take an oath or anything like that. They didn’t even pay me, but they asked me to find things out, and I did. But not about the IRA. They just used that as a kind of introduction.” It sounded lame, but it was the best I could do. “For me it was a kind of game, but not for Roisin. For her it was a cause. That was why she wanted to go to Hasbaiya. She wanted to learn how to kill without flinching. She wanted to win Ireland all by herself, and I just wanted to have a good time.” Which is why I had killed Liam and Gerry, because they stood between me and the gold. They had not died for Ireland or for America or for anything. Just for me. It made me feel shallow, but I did not know how to make myself profound. I remembered Liam’s eyes glazed with the green light and shuddered.
Kathleen stared at me for a long time. “Roisin really hurt you, didn’t she?”
How pale the sea was, I thought, and how cold. “More than I ever thought possible,” I admitted, “more than I ever thought possible.”
“I’ll take that coffee now,” she said in a small forced voice, “if it’s still on offer.”
“Yes,” I said, “it is.”
We walked away from the sea, our shadows long and dark against the white winter sand.
We did not talk much as we walked back around the head of the bay. I was nervous of Kathleen’s disapproval, while she had too much to think about. We made small talk; how good it was to live near the sea, that it was cold, but that the winter had nevertheless been mild. As we neared the house I asked where she lived, and she told me in Maryland not far from her parents. She said she had trained as a dental hygienist. “But I’m out of work right now.”
“I wouldn’t have thought teeth were affected by the recession?”
“They are, but that isn’t why I’m jobless. I was stupid enough to marry the dentist, you see, and now we’re divorced. It’s kind of messy.” She sounded resigned to the mess. “At least we didn’t have kids.”
“Ah,” I said, which was inadequate, but about as much as I could manage. I was nervous, because I so wanted Kathleen to like me. Indeed, I suddenly felt as though my whole future happiness depended on Kathleen’s approval of me. I saw in her a quieter, gentler Roisin.
“David ran off with one of his patients,” Kathleen went on, then shook her head. “I sometimes wonder why we all make each other so unhappy. It wasn’t meant to be that way, was it?”
I thought of my dreams of bringing up Roisin’s children beside the water. “No, it wasn’t meant to be that way.” And I thought of Johnny Riordan and knew that there was at least one happy person among my friends, then I remembered I had to telephone Johnny, though not from the telephone in my house, and I wondered if Kathleen would give me a lift up the road to the public phone booth in the small shopping complex. But first I had to make coffee. “I’ve only got caffeinated,” I said as we walked about the side of the house, “and it isn’t even my coffee. It belongs to someone who was squatting in the house.”
“Maybe I won’t have any then.” She stopped at the corner of the house and gave me a very nervous smile. “Maybe I’d just better be going.”
“That’s fine by me.” I hid my disappointment. “But can you give me a ride up to the main road?”
She nodded. “Sure.”
“I’ll just get some small change for the phone,” I told her, and I pushed open the kitchen door which I had left unlocked because Sarah Sing Tennyson had not thought to leave me a new key when she changed the locks, and there she was. Sarah Sing Tennyson was standing in my kitchen with a squeegee bottle in her right hand.
I began to twist away. I had the Colt .45 hidden in my oilskin pocket, but she was much faster than me. She squeezed, and my hands flew to my burning face and I half heard Kathleen scream with fear, then a figure ran out of the kitchen, past Sarah Tennyson, and told Kathleen not to worry, that I wasn’t being hurt, then something hit me viciously hard across the skull. My knees began to give way, a man’s voice grunted as he hit me again, then all went dark.
PART THREE
I RECOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS IN A MOVING VEHICLE. THAT IT was moving was about all I could tell for my head had been shrouded in a sack or bag and I had been thrust down into a fetal position on the carpeted floor of the van or car. My eyes were in terrible pain, my face was smarting and my nostrils filled with the stink of ammonia. I tried to stretch out, but discovered that I had been trussed into immobility. For some reason, though, I had not been gagged. “Who the hell—”
I had begun the question before I screamed. A terrible pain stabbed up from my kidneys. The pain was fearful; a sobbing, aching, dreadful lance of horror that seared through my abdomen. It seemed to take minutes for the pain to subside. I gasped for breath, half gagging on the bilelike taste of vomit in my mouth. I kept my eyes screwed shut for to open them was to invite a visitation of the stinging pain left by the ammonia. Then I remembered Kathleen and had a sudden terror that she would be hurt just because she had been visiting my house when these bastards ambushed me. “Please…” I spoke with a deliberate humility, but no sooner had I opened my mouth than the pain sliced into my back again and my screams sounded like the terror of a wounded animal.
