“Except in women, Brendan?” I asked the question sarcastically, probing a four-year-old wound.
“She was more trouble than she was worth, that one.” He spoke of Roisin, but his casual tone did not entirely disguise the old hurt. He let go his bone-crushing grip and slapped my back instead. “So will you fetch the boat over? Will you do it now? Because it’ll be just like the old days! Just like the old days.”
“Sure,” I said, “sure.” Because it would be just like the old days.
In the old days I had been the Provisional IRA’s liaison man with the Middle East. I was the guy who made the deals with the Palestinians and who listened for hours to Muammar al-Qaddafi’s plans for world-wide revolution. I was the Provos’ sugar daddy who brought them millions in money, guns and bombs until, suddenly, they decided I could not be trusted. There was a whisper that I was CIA, and the whisper had finished me, but at least they had left me alive, unlike Roisin who had been executed on the yellow hillside under the blazing Lebanese sun.
The Provisional IRA’s leaders claimed that Roisin had betrayed a man. Roisin had tried to shift the blame on to me, and that brush of suspicion had been enough to cut me off from the IRA’s trust. They had let me run the odd errand in the past four years, and once or twice they had used my apartment as a hiding place for men on the run, but they had not shown me any of their old confidence—until now, when suddenly they wanted a boat delivered and I was the only man remotely connected to the movement who understood the intricacies of bringing a boat across the Atlantic.
“We would have asked Michael to bring the boat over,” Brendan explained, “but he gets sick just looking at the sea!” He laughed, and Herlihy gave him his thin, unamused smile. Michael did not like being teased about his chronic motion sickness, which seemed an unsuitable affliction for a black-gloved soldier.
Brendan poured me a whiskey. We had gone back to his room in a waterfront Miami hotel where, bathed in blissful air-conditioning and with a bottle of Jameson Whiskey standing on the low coffee table, Brendan was explaining to me why it was necessary to bring the yacht from Europe to America. “The Cuban bastards insist on gold, so they do, and Michael tells me it would be next to impossible to find the gold over here.”
“Treasury regulations,” Herlihy explained. He was not drinking the whiskey, but had a bottle of mineral water instead. “Any transactions involving more than ten thousand dollars must be reported to the Treasury Department. The legislation was enacted to track down drug dealers.”
“So your old pals the Libyans obliged us,” Brendan took up the tale again. He was standing at the window, puffing at a cigarette and staring down at the pelicans perched on the sea-front pilings below. “I’ve seen them in the Phoenix Park zoo, so I have, but it’s not the same, is it?”
“The Libyans, are giving you the gold?” I wanted to make sure it was Libya, and not Iraq.
“We don’t have that kind of scratch ourselves,” Brendan said happily, “but we did manage to raise the deposit. Or Michael did.”
“You raised half a million bucks?” I asked Herlihy in astonishment. The folks in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and the other cities where the Irish-Americans lived could all be generous, but they were not usually wealthy and their donations were mostly small. And those small donations had been shrinking thanks to the politicians from the Irish Republic who had been touring America to preach that the IRA was an enemy of the south just as much as it was an enemy to Britain. Now, suddenly, Michael Herlihy had raised half a million dollars? “How the hell did you do it?”
“It’s none of your business,” Herlihy told me sourly.
“Your business, Paulie,” Brendan said, “is the five million in gold. The Libyans are putting it up, God bless them, but they’re insisting we make the arrangements for moving the gold from there to here, and that’s when we thought of you.” He smiled happily at me. “Can you do it now?”
He sounded genial enough, but Brendan always sounded genial. Many men had died misunderstanding Brendan’s open, happy face and bluff, cheerful manner. Beneath it he was implacable, a man consumed by hatred, a man whose every moment was devoted to the cause. If I turned down this job he would probably kill me, and to the very last moment he would smile at me, appear to confide in me, call me “Paulie,” hug me, and at the end, murder me.
I took a sip of whiskey. “Has anyone found out how much five million bucks in gold weighs?”
“A thousand pounds, near enough,” Brendan said, then waited for my response. “Say three big suitcases?” I was not worried about the space such an amount of gold would take up, but what its weight would do to a sailboat. However, a thousand pounds of extra ballast would be nothing to a decent-sized cruiser. “Well?” Brendan prompted me.
“I can carry a thousand pounds of gold,” I said.
“How?” Herlihy snapped.
“None of your business.”
Brendan laughed at the hostility between us. “And of course, Paulie, there’ll be a good wee fee in this for you.”
“How much?”
“The half-million deposit that we’ll get back when the gold arrives. Does that sound good to you?” Brendan glanced at Herlihy as though seeking confirmation and I sensed that the two of them had not agreed on that fee beforehand. I also saw Michael Herlihy blench at the amount and for a second I thought he was going to protest; then, reluctantly, he nodded.
“The point being”—Brendan beamed at me—“that I know a boat filled with gold could be a hell of a temptation, even to a man as honest as yourself, Paulie, but I look at it this way. If you try to steal the gold then you’ll have made an enemy of me, and one day I’ll find you and I’ll make your death harder and slower than your worst nightmares. Or you can keep the faith and walk away at the end of the job with a half-million dollars, and I reckoned that half a million should be enough to keep any man honest.” He smiled, as if pleased with his reasoning, then turned back to the sun-bright sea beyond the tinted glass. “Look at the size of those fowl! Can you eat them now?”
“Half a million sounds good to me,” I said as equably as I could.
“Not that we’re utter fools, Paulie”—Brendan was still staring at the pelicans—“because we’ll be giving you some company on the trip. Just to help you along, so to speak.”
“To be my guards, you mean?” I asked sourly.
“To be your crew.” Brendan turned back to me. He was keeping the tone of the conversation light, but that was because he knew I could not turn him down. By just coming to Miami I had agreed to whatever he wanted. “Say two of my lads to be your crew?” he went on. “Work them hard, eh?”
I shrugged. “Fine.” And why, I was wondering, if the Libyans had insisted that the Provisional IRA transport the gold, had Shafiq approached me first? And why had Brendan and Michael not agreed on my fee before they met me? Or perhaps they had agreed, but Brendan, with his usual enthusiasm, had suddenly decided to quote a much higher figure because he wanted to tempt me. But that suggested he also had no intention of letting me live long enough to collect the money. I suspected the half-million-dollar fee was nothing but a bait to make me take the job, and that Brendan’s two guards would chop me down the moment the voyage was done.
Indeed, the whole affair seemed oddly ragged. The Provisional IRA had learned from too many past mistakes and these days they did not launch half-baked schemes, and they certainly did not leave details like an unagreed fee dangling in the wind, which suggested that this operation was being planned hastily, perhaps in the single short month since an Iraqi army had stormed across the defenseless frontier of Kuwait. “The important thing now,” Brendan went blithely on, “is to choose the right boat, and you’re the best fellow to do that.”
“If I’m going to sail it across the pond,” I agreed, “then I want to choose it.”
“So would you mind flying right back to Europe?” Brendan asked. “The Libyans are in a hurry to ship the gold, so they are.”
“We’re in a hurry,” Michael Herlihy amended the explanation, then added a reason for the haste. “Next April is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Easter Rising and we’d like to give the British a bloody memorial to mark the occasion, and we can’t ship the Stingers to Ireland till you’ve brought us the gold.”
“You want me to fly back tomorrow?” I asked Brendan, and sounded surprised. I had hoped for a chance to fly north and visit the Cape Cod house that I had not seen in seven years, and maybe to visit my parents’ grave in Boston, but Michael and Brendan were in too much of a hurry.
They were in even more of a hurry than I suspected. “Not tomorrow,” Brendan said, “tonight,” and, like a
