He laughed. To Johnny the only rewards worth having were those that had taken hard work, the rest was dishonest at worst and meretricious at best. Johnny and his kind were the backbone of America, the good heart of an honest country that somehow contrived to put men like Tommy the Turd into Congress. “You want the money back you gave me?” Johnny asked me. “I haven’t spent it.”
“Keep it,” I said. Christ, I thought, but I would have to get a job now. I would have to join the nine-to-five. I would have to become like the rest of the world, and that was one of the great terrors of the secret world, because belonging to a sanctioned organization of killers gave a man the feeling of being special, of being apart, of being above the petty cares and constricting rules that hampered other people, but now, after years of arrogance, I would have to earn my bread. I wondered how much money van Stryker planned to give me; not enough, I suspected, to pay for the years of lotus-eating idleness I had planned beside the Cape Cod waters. I wondered what the yacht- delivery business was like in the States and supposed it mainly consisted of taking plastic power boats up and down the Intracoastal Waterway either side of winter. I doubted it would be easy to break into such a business, but what else was I good for? “I had dreams of buying a tuna boat with that gold,” I confessed to Johnny. “Now I doubt I could even afford a can of tuna.”
He chuckled. “You don’t want a tuna boat. There are too many of them already, and they’re all using airplanes as spotters. When the fish are running it’s like the Battle of Midway out there. Ten years ago you could harpoon a big fish every week, but now you’re lucky if you see a decent sized fish all summer.”
Another dream dead, I thought, and I leaned my head on the window at the back of the cab. So what was I going to do? Had the last fourteen years been for nothing? “Is there much of a market for boat surveying?” I asked Johnny.
“Not that I know of.” Johnny drove placidly on. “But young Ernie Marriott’s met a girl in New Bedford, which means I need a crewman every so often.”
“Are you offering me a job?”
“I’m offering you freezing hands, a wet ass, hard nights, and maybe the chance of a penny or two if the government lets us catch a fish when we’re not filling in forms.”
“You’re on,” I said.
“But it isn’t a career,” Johnny warned me. “I can hardly keep my own family in bread. Still, it’s better than working in one of these places, right?” He waved his hand at a crazy-golf park which, though boarded up for the winter, still betrayed a drab gaudiness designed to bring in the summer customers. We were driving east on Route 18, the Cape’s southern artery and a showplace of shoddy businesses and cheap motels; proof that when mankind arrives in paradise he will down the glory of the angels with neon signs and honkytonk bars. “Another few years,” Johnny grumbled, “and this will all look like Florida.” He brooded on that sorry fate for a few miles, then turned a frown on me. “Did you really tell Sarah Tennyson to fetch the boat for you?”
I shook my head. “She lied to you, but I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“So there was nothing between you two?”
“Me and that ballbreaker? You’ve got to be joking.”
He laughed. “She was convincing to me. So who the hell was she?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, Johnny. She’s probably a terrorist groupie. Some girls get their kicks by hanging around killers.” And did that include Kathleen Donovan? God, that hurt, that she had set me up for the snatch.
“So she isn’t an artist?” Johnny sounded disappointed.
“Not with paint,” I said, “but I think the Provos put her in my house to act as a tripwire.” And she had played that part so cleverly! By acting shocked and being tough when I returned she had convinced me that she was an innocent bystander. Christ, I thought, but I had even asked Gillespie to warn her of trouble, and she was a part of that trouble all along.
“So did she get the gold?” Johnny asked.
“The Provos did. It was meant for them anyway.”
He shook his head in disapproval, then, being Johnny, he found a silver lining on the cloud. “But at least you got the electricity put into the house, didn’t you?”
“But why?” I asked that question aloud, suddenly struck by an incongruity. Sarah Sing Tennyson had been in my house three years already. That made no sense, not if she had merely been placed there as a tripwire for my return—for who could have foreseen the Gulf War three years ago?
“Why what?” Johnny asked.
“God knows.” I was suddenly disgusted with myself and with everything I had done in the last few weeks. What did it matter whether the girl had been in my house three months or three years? I had played the game and lost. It was over.
I stayed that night with Johnny, and next day went home and began clearing out my house. I took Sarah Tennyson’s daubs, piled them on a patch of sandy ground beyond the deck, splashed them with gasoline and slung a match at them. The oil paint burned well, making lovely colors in its flames as the black smoke plumed thin across the marshes.
I took the dust-sheet off the oak floor, then sanded and waxed the boards. I scrubbed the kitchen, dusted the stairways, and aired the bedrooms. I had lost the Colt .45 when I was snatched, but I found the carbine under the bed. I hid it away, then replaced the broken kitchen window and put new locks on the doors. When a telephone bill arrived addressed to Ms. Sing Tennyson I sent it to Herlihy’s law office, then had the telephone disconnected. I neither wanted it, nor could afford it.
I lived spare. What small supplies I needed I could buy every day at the convenience store. On the days when the tides were slack I went trawling for cod with Johnny and he paid me wages from the pile of money I had given him for
One fine March morning Sergeant Ted Nickerson, the policeman who had rescued me from Sarah Sing Tennyson’s ammonia on the night of my return to the Cape, dropped by the house. “Just keeping an eye on the place,” he explained as he climbed out of his cruiser. “So you’re home for good now, Paul?”
“Yes.”
“The CIA finished with you?”
“Ask them, Ted.” I was not feeling sociable.
“But you’re OK, Paul?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
Nickerson walked to the edge of the drive and stared southward across the bay. He noticed the remnants of the bonfire on which I had burned Sarah Tennyson’s canvases. “I could probably arrest you for lighting that fire. You must have broken at least a dozen federal regulations, not to mention the state laws and the national park rules and the town ordinances.” He spat in disgust. “A man can’t even piss over the side of his boat these days without breaking the law.” He took a cigarette from a pocket and shielded the lighter with his free hand. “We got a telephone call a while back. From a young lady called Kathleen Donovan. She was kind of distressed. Said she thought you were being kidnapped. Were you?”
“Yes,” I said, but did not add that she had been a part of it.
“But we had orders not to interfere with you. If anything happened we were to talk to a guy in the Washington office of the FBI. So we did, and he seemed to think you could look after yourself. And if you’re here now then I guess he was right?”
“I guess so, too.” The FBI, I surmised, had acted for the CIA who had sensibly not wanted a small-town police force to tangle with international terrorists. But I also noted that neither the CIA nor the FBI had seemed unduly worried by my disappearance. No one had inquired about me since, evidently no one had looked for me while I was gone, and I could only surmise that van Stryker or Gillespie considered that I deserved whatever mischief came my way. I had been useful to them, now I was useless and discarded.
“But I thought you ought to know about the young lady,” Ted went on, “especially as she sounded kind of
