Scoundrel

“I’m sure he is.” I felt as though my dizzying scaffold was collapsing all around me in splintering poles.

“Let’s have a coffee,” she said, and we sat in the coffee shop and she told me about her trip to Europe, and about her adventures in Dublin and Belfast, but I was not really listening. I did a good job of pretending to listen; I smiled at the right places, made intelligible comments, but inside I was desolate. I was alone. Roisin was gone for ever. I had thought she could be clawed back from the past, out of her Beka’a grave, but it was not to be.

“I hope you found out what you wanted to know,” Kathleen told me when we walked back to the truck.

“I did, thanks.”

“I guess you won’t see Sarah Sing Tennyson again?”

“I guess not.”

She put her hand on my sleeve when we reached the truck. “I’m sorry, Paul.”

Me too, I thought, me too. “Good luck with the teacher.”

“Sure. Thanks.” She smiled. “Good luck in Washington, eh?”

“Sure,” I said, “sure,” and drove back to Cape Cod.

It was past one o’clock when I reached the house. It was a dark night and the moon was hidden by high flying clouds. I was too tired to open the garage so I just left the truck on the clam-shell turnabout then walked to the kitchen door. I was weary and I was disgusted with myself. I had made a fool of myself. Dear God, I thought, but I had really believed I could fall in love with a ghost. I unlocked the door, pushed into the kitchen, and froze. I could smell tea. It was not an overpowering smell, just an aroma, but unmistakable. Tea.

My M1 carbine was hidden in the living room so, for a weapon, I pulled out my fish-filleting knife that had a wicked sharp blade and then, very slowly, I edged toward the living-room door.

It was jet dark in the house. I could hear the wind and the eternal beat of the far waves, and I could still smell tea. Had Sarah Sing Tennyson dared come back here? I had an idea that women drank more tea than men, but the Irish also drank tea, so had Herlihy sent someone to kill me after all? I reached the living-room door. For a second I contemplated turning on the light, then decided that darkness was probably a better friend than the sudden dazzle of the electric bulb.

I pressed down the door lever, crouched, and pushed the door open. It swung into the living room’s darkness. I was crouched low, the knife in my right hand. The M1 was hidden four paces from me, held by strips of duct tape to the underside of the long table. I was gauging just how long it would take me to free the weapon when a man’s voice sleepily spoke my name. “Shanahan?” The voice came from my right.

My heart leaped in panic, but I managed to stay still and to say nothing.

“Shanahan?” the man said again, and this time I heard the fear in his voice. I suspected he had been dozing and was now scared of what the darkness had brought into this cold room. “I’m going to turn a light on, OK?” the man said, and I suddenly recognized the voice of my CIA interrogator.

“Oh, Christ. Gillespie? Is that you?”

“It’s me, yeah.”

I felt the tension flood out of me. “Jesus. Did you have to wait in the dark? I could have filleted you.”

“To be honest I fell asleep. But I didn’t want to leave a light on in case you got scared and thought the ungodly were waiting for you. Which is why we left our car up at the post office.”

“How the hell did you get in?” I was still crouched, but now leaned my back against the door jamb.

“Stuart Callaghan picked the lock of the front door. He’s good at things like that.” Gillespie was moving cautiously across the dark room. He had been sitting in the old settee in the bay window and now he shuffled toward the hall door beside which Sarah Sing Tennyson had put the main light switch.

“So what the hell are you doing here?” I eased the filleting knife back into its sheath.

“We need to know about the boat, Rebel Lady? And about the money on board her.” He sounded very disapproving, as though it was bitterly unfair of me to have deceived him.

“How the hell did you find out about Rebel Lady?” I asked.

“It’s our job to find things out,” he said in a pained voice, then he found the switch and suddenly the room was filled with light. Gillespie must have been cold for he was wearing one of the yellow plastic rain-slickers that had been hanging in the hallway.

“How did you know I’d be here?” I asked him.

“The police told us you were in residence. A guy called Ted Nickerson?”

“I assume you’re not alone?” I asked him.

“No. Callaghan is upstairs. I decided one of us would wait for you while the other slept. But I didn’t mean us both to fall asleep.” He yawned, then walked to the table where he had left his cellular telephone. “You look kind of bushed,” he said. “What happened?”

“I just drove ten hours there and ten hours back to be stiff-armed by a girl. I thought I was in love with her.”

“Ah.” He seemed embarrassed by my revelation and uncertain how to respond. “I’ll just report that you’ve surfaced,” he said and picked up his telephone.

I was still leaning against the kitchen door and Gillespie was pressing a number into the telephone when he suddenly coughed and looked up at me with a puzzled expression.

At least I think he coughed. It was hard to tell because at the same time the whole room was shockingly filled with the sound of a gunshot and the splintering crash as the bullet shattered a pane of the bow window behind Gillespie. The CIA man jerked forward and I realized the cough was the sound of the air being punched from his lungs by the violence of the bullet’s strike. He staggered, but managed to stay upright. The bullet which had hit him had been deflected and weakened by the window glass. He blinked. I was taking a breath to shout at him to get down when a second bullet, fired through the broken window and thus undetected and unchecked, struck him in the back, and this time Gillespie was hurled violently forward and I saw a vent of bright blood mist the room’s center, then he crashed to the floor and I heard the air sigh from his lungs as he slid forward on the polished oak boards. His cellular telephone spun into the kitchen where it lodged against the rubbish bin.

I edged back into the kitchen shadows. Gillespie was not moving. I could just see his back. Two bullet holes. The first shot had hit him high on the left shoulder, the second must have shattered his spine. There was the faintest trickle of blood; a surprisingly small amount considering the sudden spray that had reddened the living room’s air. I could see some blood on the floor, and more on the edge of the table that concealed my carbine.

Callaghan was surely awake now? Two bullets? The sound of the gunshots was reverberating in my ears. The marksman had to be in the marshes beyond my terrace. Should I stay where I was, or try to run into the dark? Or should I try to fetch the gun hidden under the table? But to reach the gun would mean going into the light that had made Gillespie a target. I slid the knife free again. It was a feeble weapon in the face of this night’s savagery, but the best to hand.

A footstep sounded outside the house. Not by the kitchen, but beyond the bow window. Someone was on the deck. Christ, I thought, but the bastard is coming inside to make sure of his work! I edged back out of the wash of light which came from the living room and I thought I saw a shadow at the far window. A black shadow. II Hayaween? Please God, I prayed, but let this not be il Hayaween. Maybe the shadow was just my imagination? Then the shadow moved, grunted. The gunman was looking through the window to see what his bullets had accomplished, but Gillespie’s body had slid across the floor and was half hidden from the window by the heavy table.

I gripped the filleting knife’s cord-wrapped handle. The killer was working with a high velocity rifle, so what chance did I have if he came indoors? None. What had Sarah Sing Tennyson said? Never piss a psychopath off, but put him down fast. I needed an ammonia squirt, not a damned fish-gutting knife.

The shadow had gone. Maybe I should run for it. No, not with the killer still outside. So wait, I told myself, wait.

Gillespie’s hands made small scratching noises as his fingers contracted into claws. That was not a sign of life, but a natural process as the body relaxed in death. The wind at the broken window stirred the brown drapes.

Footsteps sounded sudden and loud on the steep stairs from the bedrooms. The stairs, built in the nineteenth century, were pitched far more steeply than twentieth-century building regulations would allow and the hurrying Callaghan tripped on them, stumbled, then hit his shoulder against the wall at the bottom. “Shit!” he swore, then