that remained in his place.
The Kipster was a cynical bastard, full of high sentence, but never obtuse: a poet, a prince looking down upon the great unwashed with only contempt. He was above it all, untouchable and untouched. He was master of his instrument, so much so that it was all an inside joke to him. I didn’t recognize the writing because it came from a very different place than from where the Kipster’s art had come. It all came too easily for the Kipster, which is why he foundered when the words stopped coming to him on the cusp of the ’90s. I had nothing to hold on to but the empty shell of the Kipster. His old protagonists were whimsies and straw men, put up like bowling pins only to be knocked down. They were sacrifices meant as meat for elitist snobs. His protagonists were soulless, ironic follies to be run up the flagpole like a fat girl’s underthings.
Other than a complete loss of talent, one of the reasons I’d managed but seven first lines in all these years was the very nature of the man I thought of as McGuinn. He was a real man, not a construct. There was nothing about his bloody and violent life that even remotely resembled Kant Huxley’s or any of the other cool-boy protagonists that had flowed from the Kipster’s fingertips. The other things that had daunted me for so long were setting and form.
I wasn’t a biographer, not in temperament or by training, but what McGuinn had given me was basically the details for the biography of a murderer. The killings-their mechanics, the reasons and rationalizations behind them, the stories of the victims-as fascinating as some readers might have found those things, weren’t what interested me. Nor, do I think, were they what motivated McGuinn. It was his emotional journey and evolution from teenage murderer to soldier to assassin to target that got my attention. Besides, I’d spent all of two months in Ireland and the North. I didn’t know the place or the people, and I certainly had only a superficial understanding of the conflict. I’d been a glorified tourist, nothing more. A mostly drunk one at that. Even if I’d been up to the writing, I didn’t understand the context.
Just because I lost my talent for writing didn’t mean I’d lost my instinct for good work and a good story. I still had an eye and ear for fine ingredients even if I had lost the recipe. And McGuinn’s life had all the best ingredients. Whenever I imagined the book, I imagined it as fiction with Terry McGuinn in an alien setting. What could I have added to something set on the streets of Belfast? Nothing. If I wanted to give meaning to this man’s journey, he needed to be a stranger in a strange land. But until the St. Pauli Girl brought me to that old hangar and anointed me with gunpowder, I had no idea of where that strange land would be. It was those shots-the sight of Jim Trimble’s still body and the fat kid rolling around, the church pews, the spray of beer, the landscape of Jim’s scars-that had, after so long, helped me to arrive at a destination.
What a perfect concept, I thought. An assassin being hunted by his enemies and his brothers alike ends up hiding in an unremarkable place in the center of nowhere. Yet even in this netherworld, he cannot escape the blood. The contrast was delicious, because the violence McGuinn finds isn’t born of passion or religious hatred, but of boredom and sport. A man who was certain he understood violence and blood as well as any who had ever lived is thrust into a world he can’t fathom. Now that was something I understood, being exiled in a world that defied my comprehension.
It was a place to start, but I wouldn’t be satisfied to simply use what little I had seen at Hardentine Air Force Base, nor did I want to confine my characters in a concrete bunker. No, the fictionalized McGuinn needed to operate against the backdrop of the real world, even if it was a withered and tiny speck of the world. He was too large a character to stick in a box somewhere and duel like a gentleman. Red crosses on dirty T-shirts might have been dramatic enough for the boys and girls from Brixton, but they would not suffice for a killer like McGuinn. In my novel, there would be blood, lots of blood, and very little of it spilled for a good cause. First things first. I had to get McGuinn involved with the wrong people. No better way to do that, I thought, than with the noir conceit of a beautiful woman.
He thought he’d go feckin’ mad, did Terry McGuinn. He could put a rifle round through a man’s ear hole at several hundred meters or build an IED out of household chemicals and a plastic bottle, but he was banjaxed by his loneliness. It was his curse to have been born a social sort. The Prods would say it was a curse he was born at all. When he’d been forced to lay low in the States in the past, there was always someone to share a pint of the black stuff. As an honored soldier of the Republic, he was seen to. Now he was a scurrying rat, hiding from the shadows in his bedsit above a novelty shop. And just lately the walls of the bedsit had been closing in on him.
Och ocon-“woe is me” were the words that had recently seeped into his thoughts, and he despised himself for letting them in. McGuinn was not a man to rue the trail of blood that followed him across the Atlantic, nor to pray the rosary before a shrine to his victims. Soldiers and innocents, it was all the same shite. In the end, we all got off the train at the same station. But even assassins fall prey to the blues and he had ’em fierce. “Jaysus,” he thought. What he wouldn’t give for a pint and a chat without having to look over his shoulder.
Some of the wee Mexicans at the slaughterhouse were friendly sorts, though nary a one spoke twenty words of English. McGuinn could manage a bit of Basque, but his Spanish was crap. No matter. He couldn’t envision himself and a bunch of Pedros sitting around passing the poteen. Besides, those lads were as busy keeping their heads down as was he.
He was so wrecked, he’d gone out of pocket for a bit of flange. Never before had he paid for a woman. A point of pride, that. No longer. McGuinn had killed in coldest blood without giving a toss, but could not forgive himself for the sin of paying for a piece of skirt.
“Escort service, me arse,” he snarled, shredding the postcard advert into confetti. “In the photos they all look like Christie Brinkley. Bollix! When they showed up at your door they look like buckets of snot.” But desperation improved their looks and never did he turn them away.
Christ on his cross, now he was talking to himself. Worse, he was showing his age. Though still a fine-looking flah, Christie Brinkley was older than his own self. He had to get out of there, now. Taking a bullet could be no worse than this lonely hell. He tucked the Sig in the small of his back and walked out into the night.
The first two pubs he tried were woeful disappointments-as if that was news in this town, the disappointment mecca of America-but McGuinn thought he spotted some promise in the twitchy neon sign above Ralph and Jim’s Bar and Grill. Dark lit and moody with a single ceiling fan that turned with the urgency of a sloth, the establishment was not without its charms. The bar surface was so pitted it was positively lunar and the red vinyl snugs were held together by duct tape and prayers.
McGuinn waved a twenty to get the bartender’s attention. “A scotch neat and a burger with chips.”
“I can do the scotch,” the barman said, “but the kitchen’s been closed since Jim took sick.”
“And when was that?”
“The second Eisenhower administration. Ralph and Jim were dead before I was born.”
McGuinn paid for his scotch and moved over to the jukebox, which was a bit of a revelation itself. That it was an authentic juke with real vinyl to play was shock enough, but that it contained Thin Lizzy tunes was brilliant. He stuffed in quarters.
“Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak,” he sang along, pumping his fist in the air.
“Who is this?” A siren’s voice interrupted his reverie.
The voice belonged to a diabolical blond with untamable tresses and eyes that fairly glowed blue in the dim- lit bar. She was thirty years his junior with curves in abundance where the Almighty had planned them to go. Her skirt was short; her legs long and tanned. And her smile was white and inviting, but it was her eyes that held McGuinn’s attention.
“Have ya never heard of Thin Lizzy?”
“Tin Lizzy?”
McGuinn laughed his first honest laugh since he’d arrived in this beshitten town and there was more than a bit of nervousness to it.
“That’s Thin Lizzy-T-h-i-n-Thin. Great Irish band.”
“Like U2?”
“Not likely. Phil Lynott was a Dubliner, not a poser like Bono. Citizen of the world, me arse. He’s a singer in a feckin’ rock band, not Ghandi.” He finished his drink in a gulp. “I’m empty. Can I get ya a drink?”
“A Bud.”
“What’s yer name, darlin’?”
“Zoe.”
“Lovely name for a stunning woman,” McGuinn said, feeling almost human again. “Guard the juke with yer life. Any bollocks tries to play U2, come fetch me.”
