“No.”
“Roisin always thought you grassed on Wild John Macroon.”
“I wish I had.” Macroon had been the boy she had slept with before we parted. “But I didn’t. I didn’t need to, he was always going to get himself killed.”
“That’s true enough.” Seamus pulled on the cigarette. “She was a fearful strong girl, so she was.”
“I know.”
“What was that record she was always playing? About Sandy Row and throwing pennies?”
“Van Morrison,” I said. When I had lived in Belfast it had sometimes seemed that Van Morrison’s album
“She got mad at me,” Seamus said sadly.
“Because you wouldn’t go to bed with her?”
“Aye.” He looked at me with astonishment, amazed that I had known such a thing. “I should have done, shouldn’t I?”
“Probably.”
“But it wasn’t her that betrayed me,” he said, “the Brits just said that to get us all worked up.” The British ploy had clearly rankled in him. He went quiet again. A half-inch of ash dropped down his sweater’s front. “So she was shot?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, knowing I could not avoid the subject.
“In that Arab place?”
“Yes.”
Seamus’s pale knowing eyes looked at me. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Me, Seamus?” A thousand acts of contrition had not let me deliver those two words with any conviction. “Me, Seamus?”
“It was you,” he said, “that shot her.”
I hesitated, not sure whether I even trusted a man on the lip of eternity, but then I nodded. “Yes. But she didn’t know it was me. I was wearing a head-dress, see, and they just gave me the gun.”
“And then you shot her?”
“Once through the head. Quick.” I wondered how Seamus had known, then guessed it was written on my soul for all the damned to read, and I wondered how I could ever have hoped for happiness with Kathleen after what I had done to her sister on that yellow hillside in Lebanon.
“You poor focker, Paulie,” Seamus said, then he suddenly tensed and his whole back arched with the onslaught of a terrible pain. “Oh, Jasus,” he wailed.
“Is it hurting?”
“Like the fock, it is.” He was crying now. “Oh, Jasus,” he said again, and the second cigarette rolled out of his mouth and I heard him muttering, and at first I thought he was saying a Hail Mary, but before I could decipher the prayer his voice had dribbled away into incoherence. I rescued the fallen cigarette from a fold of his sleeve and stubbed it on the floor. I thought he had died, but suddenly he opened his eyes and spoke with an awful clarity. “It’s hard to kill someone you know.”
“It is, yes.”
“But you don’t have much choice, do you?”
“No.” If I had not shot Roisin, then I would have been shot. But did that make it right?
Seamus had gone quiet. I rocked away from him, but he twitched a hand toward me as though he needed my proximity. “Just tell me it’s going to be all right, Paulie.”
“It is,” I said.
“Tell me.” His hand twitched toward me again.
I held his hand to give him the solace of human touch. He had known so little love, while his talent for rage had been used by lesser men.
“Tell me,” he demanded again.
“Ireland will be one,” I told him, “united under God, ruled from Dublin, and there’ll be no division left, and no more tears, and no more dying.”
“Oh, God, yes,” he breathed, then tried to speak again, and his tongue seemed to rattle in the back of his mouth, but his willpower overcame the spasm of death to let him quote a line of verse. “‘Life springs from death,’” he said, but he could go no further, and I waited and waited, and still he said nothing more, and so I edged even closer to him and put my face down by his face and there was no breath in him at all, nothing, and so I touched his eyes shut with my right hand and finished the words for him. “‘And from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations.’”
Seamus Geoghegan, the bright boy of Derry, was dead.
MY HOUSE WAS A DISASTER. IT HELD THE CORPSES OF TWO CIA men and an IRA gunman, and if the newspapers ever got hold of that poisonous stew then the fuss would never stop. What I needed now was a piece of efficient housekeeping.
I took Callaghan’s automatic, the money and the passport from the hiding place in the beam, then left through the kitchen door. I climbed into the pick-up. The engine started first time. I rammed it into gear, slewed the steering wheel round, and accelerated up the track. I flicked the headlights on, scaring a rabbit out of my path.
I turned left on to the main road. I could see the white-painted panel van in the parking lot of the abandoned shopping precinct. The main shop was a seasonal outlet for cheap beach accessories like inflatable dolphins, plastic buckets and parasols. Next door was a shed that used to sell good ice-cream but now advertised frozen yoghurt. I pulled up in front of the yoghurt shop where my pick-up’s headlights illuminated the legend on the van’s body: “Shamrock Flower Shoppe. Blooms for all Family Occasions. Weddings our Specialty”; then I killed the lights, left the engine running and ran across to the white van.
I rapped on the driver’s door, startling Marty who had evidently been fast asleep. He unlocked the door. “Is that you, Seamus? Jesus, I must have dropped off.”
I ripped the door open and dragged Marty out of the seat. He yelped in panic as I spun him round to the dark side of the van, away from the road, and he screamed as I slung him down on to the gravel where I rammed my knee into his belly and the muzzle of the pistol into his throat. “Say a prayer, Marty.”
“Jesus! Is it you, Paulie?”
“No, it’s Cardinal Bernard Law, you shithead. This is our new way of making converts. Who the hell do you think I am?”
“Where’s Seamus?”
“He’s dead, Marty.”
“Oh, Mother of God.” He tried to cross himself.
“Now listen, you fuck.” I thrust the gun’s cold barrel hard into his Adam’s apple. “You’re not going to give me any trouble or else Mrs. Doyle will be collecting the life insurance and moving to a Century Village in Florida and you’ll be nothing but a framed photograph on top of the television set. Is that what you want, Marty?”
“No, Paulie, no! I’ll do whatever you want!”
“Then get in the back of the van.”
I dragged him up, hustled him round, and pushed him through the van’s rear door. The body of the van was filled with flower boxes fastened with lengths of green wire which I used to pinion Marty’s wrists and ankles. I gagged him with a strip of cloth I cut from his sweater, then felt through his pockets till I came up with some small change. “Now just wait here, Marty, and don’t make a peep or I’ll use you for target practice.”
There was a telephone beside the frozen yoghurt shop. I pulled a visiting card from my pocket and punched in the numbers. It was an 800 number, a free call, but when it was over I needed Marty’s quarters to call Johnny who sounded pissed off at being woken in the middle of the night, but he recovered quickly enough when I told him what I wanted. “I’ll meet you by the dinghy,” he told me, “in half an hour, OK?”
“I’m sorry, Johnny,” I told him.
