Scoundrel

ducked inside out of the wind.

To find the gold was gone. I had not really expected anything else, but a mad optimism had lurked at the back of my thoughts ever since I had glimpsed Rebel Lady at the wintry dock.

The saloon was a shambles. My interrogators had taken axes to the false floor, ripping and tearing away the fiberglass to expose the gold beneath. Then they had taken my hoard. Five million dollars’ worth of gold, all gone, or all but one krugerrand that I found lost in a heap of sand and fiberglass chippings. I picked the coin up, spun it on my palm, then pushed it into a pocket as a souvenir of a wasted voyage. I thought I saw another coin glinting in the rubble, but when I cleared the sand and shreds aside I saw it was just the shiny head of one of the keel-bolts.

I went back to the cockpit. My interrogators had done well. They had got exactly what they wanted. The gold would pay for the Stingers, and I did not doubt that some of the Stingers would stay in America to be used for Saddam Hussein’s revenge against the United States. That revenge was the true purpose of il Hayaween’s operation. The Brits would lose some helicopters over South Armagh, but the real targets were the great lumbering wide-body passenger jets struggling up from American airports with their cargoes of innocence.

I climbed back to the dock and walked slowly back toward the house.

Then I stopped because I heard a car’s tires grating on the gravel drive. Voices sounded happy and loud. “Let’s use the back door!”

There was nowhere to hide, so I stayed still.

First around the corner was a pretty slim young woman in a long fur coat. She was running and her breath was misting in the cold air. She had golden hair, a wide mouth and blue eyes. She saw me and suddenly stopped. “Darling?” She was not speaking to me, but to Congressman Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third who followed the woman around the side of the house. He just stopped and gaped at me.

Then two men appeared. One was the Congressman’s waspish aide, Robert Stitch, the other was Michael Herlihy.

Congressman O’Shaughnessy still gaped at me, but Stitch was much quicker on the uptake. “Shall I call the police, Congressman?”

“I wouldn’t, Congressman, I really wouldn’t,” I advised Tommy the Turd.

The Congressman suddenly recognized me. “You’re Shannon, isn’t that right?”

“Shanahan,” I corrected him, “Paul Shanahan.”

“This is my wife, Duffy.” Tommy, playing as usual without his full deck, resorted to his inbred courtesy.

The pretty Duffy smiled at me. “Hello.”

“You already know Mr. Herlihy?” O’Shaughnessy inquired of me as though this was a pleasant meeting in his golf club. “Mr. Herlihy is the Treasurer of my Re-election Campaign Committee.”

I ignored Herlihy. “Nice house, Congressman.” I nodded at the huge mansion.

“Thank you,” he said happily. “Really, thank you.”

“Just what the hell are you doing here?” Stitch intervened in the pleasantries.

“Do we really need to have this conversation in the yard?” Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, who looked horribly wasted on the Congressman, asked plaintively. “I’m freezing!”

Herlihy walked toward me as Tommy the Turd escorted the delicious Duffy into the house. “What are you doing here, Shanahan?” Herlihy spat the question.

“There’s your boat,” I pointed at Rebel Lady. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“That?” He stared astonished at the yacht.

“That! You bastard!” I grabbed him by the collar of his coat, ran him along the dock and pushed him down into the cockpit. “There! Look! That was where your precious money was!”

A gust of wind shook the boat, and a sluggish wave heaved up the wounded hull and Michael Herlihy immediately paled, swore, and dived for the gunwale where, with a gut-heaving wrench, he voided his expensive brunch into the sea. “Oh, God,” he groaned, “oh, God.” The very smallest movement of Rebel Lady’s wind-stirred hull had instantly provoked his chronic seasickness. “Oh, my God,” he said again, and leaned over the sea to throw up once more.

I left him there. “Bastard,” I shouted at him, then stalked away.

Stitch moved to confront me. “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police?” he asked me nastily.

“Yes,” I said. “Try explaining to the police why the Congressman allowed his cellar to be used by a Provisional IRA hit squad for the last two weeks.”

“He did what?” He backed away from me, not sure I was telling the truth, then decided that he had better employ some quick damage control just in case I was. “It isn’t true! We’ve been researching the trade deal in Mexico. We haven’t been here.” He was scenting an appalling scandal and was already rehearsing the excuses that would leave his Congressman unscathed.

“Just bugger away off,” I told him.

“Who on earth moved the cellar things into the hall?” I heard the delectable Duffy O’Shaughnessy ask from inside the house. Robert Stitch, fearing some new mischief, ran through the open kitchen door, as Michael Herlihy, his face as white as the ice-slicked rigging, managed to clamber up from Rebel Lady’s cockpit on to the dock’s planking. I paused at the corner of the house and watched as Michael staggered feebly away from the sea. He was reeling. I had forgotten just what a terrible affliction his seasickness was.

“Herlihy!” I called.

He looked at me, but said nothing.

I fished the single gold coin from my pocket. “Here’s the rest of your money, you bastard.” I tossed it to him.

He let the bright coin fall and roll along the path. “Where are you going?” he called as I turned and walked away.

“Home. And leave me alone, you hear me?”

I walked down the long gravel drive and out through the high fence to the road. Johnny arrived twenty minutes later and we drove away.

Miraculously, I was alive.

“WHO STRUGGLES BY IN THAT LITTLE HOUSE?” JOHNNY asked as we drove away from the high-hedged mansion on the beach.

“House Representative Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third.”

“Tommy the Turd lives there!” Johnny sounded surprised, though he must have known that Tommy’s only qualification for high office was his inordinate wealth.

“And don’t forget the Back Bay mansion,” I said, “or the house in Georgetown, or the ski-lodge in Aspen.”

“I’d like someone to tell me one day,” Johnny said sourly, “why the bastards who want to put up my taxes are always so rich.” I offered no response and he shot me a sympathetic look. “So what happened to you back there?”

“I screwed up.”

“Meaning?”

“I thought I was cleverer than I am.” I hoped that evasion would suffice, but Johnny deserved better from me. “I guess I was falling out with the IRA.”

“You shouldn’t have had anything to do with them in the first place.”

“They have a good cause,” I said mildly.

“If it’s that good,” he demanded flatly, “then why do they need to murder for it? No one bombs people to solve world hunger. No one kills to save a kid from leukaemia, and those are good causes.”

“I won’t argue.”

“And the gold?”

“All gone.”