Deirdre paused beside her, and put a light hand on her shoulder. “I’ll bring the whiskey and then later you and I will have our say.”
The bottle wasn’t Jameson’s but a good brand, nevertheless. Deirdre brought Waterford lowball glasses and the lantern light made the whiskey into liquid orange sunsets in the bottom of their glasses.
So it came to this, Max thought, night coming on and the four of them all still alive and older and drinking together in Ireland. He wondered if he should check under the table for a bomb.
He told Sean how Garry had put him in a private Swiss sanitarium to recover, how assassins may have found him, and Max had to escape into the Alps with casts on both legs. He told how he survived to reach Zurich and contract Garry, omitting mention of the woman psychiatrist from the clinic who was his doctor and/or hostage or assigned assassin.
Reminding Kathleen of the dangerously bright and beautiful Revienne Schneider might trigger another jealous jihad. Seeing Revienne leave his Las Vegas house probably had spurred Kathleen to burn down the place with him in it. She’d certainly seemed surprised to see him when he’d hijacked her on this flight to the Old Sod.
“So,” Max concluded, “when I finally connected with Garry, we flew to Ireland. He hoped retracing the path you and I made many years ago, Sean, from Ireland to Northern Ireland, would help my memory. We interviewed all shades of former IRA members in Belfast, and irritated someone enough to try to kill me. Us.”
Max glanced at Kathleen, her shoulders hunched in the softly woven shawl, her hands cupped around the glass, warming the crystal as the liquor warmed her.
“What did you do with Garry’s body?” Sean asked.
Max shut his eyes. “I had to leave it with our abandoned car in Belfast, hoping that his friends among the old IRA people who made the peace would claim it for a decent burial.”
“And so do I,” Sean said, leaning forward to put his good right hand on Max’s wrist. “I’ll help you find your friend if you reach an impasse.”
Max was too stressed to do more than nod.
“Did the that trip, and this, help your memory?” Deirdre asked.
Max sighed. “Somewhat.”
Even with them there, he couldn’t afford to let down his guard in front of Kathleen. She’d palmed a steak knife when the meal was cleared. He’d disarm her before beddy-bye time. She might have slipped her straight razor through airport security too.
He laughed to himself, thinking of Matt Devine trying to glimpse if she had any cat-scratch scars on her back and the back of her legs during one of their 3:00 a.m. hotel rendezvous. He would bet the ex-priest had sweated that assignment.
Come to think of it, he was glad that job was done and he didn’t have to worry about it. Kathleen had definitely not been one of the two Darth Vader-masked figures who’d tried to threaten the cabal of magicians turned would-be heist operators, all in a search for Kathleen’s collected but now lost hoard of money and guns for the IRA.
Even as Max savored the straight whiskey and the cool darkness, he realized this family-like atmosphere was priming Kathleen nerves.
“Cheers,” Kathleen said, lifting her glass. “What was it we were to settle, Deirdre? Why are you so eager to embrace the man who left your husband there in the pub to be blown up, and you along with him?”
“Boys. They were boys, Kathleen.”
“Ireland makes boys men at fourteen.”
“Only because of the Troubles. And who was it hangin’ around the IRA men like a rock star groupie, jumpin’ on any fresh outsider comin’ in?”
“They were foolish not to use women in the Cause, except to breed more of them and nurse them when they were hurt or dyin’.”
“Sure, and you wanted to fight like a man, Kathleen, only you used woman’s wiles. You weren’t a patriot. You thrived on the anger and hatred for the British Protestants and army, well deserved, but you needed the high emotions and the dance of betrayal for your own selfish reasons. You lived to turn one against the other, and so you did. Oh, you knew how to flirt and tease and you ached to destroy. You craved the attention, but despised the men who gave it to you.”
“Deirdre,” Sean began.
“Stay out of it. This is woman’s work.” She turned to Kathleen again. “I saw you playing one American lad against the other. They were innocents wantin’ a bit of sin. They knew nothing of the grinding oppression we Catholics felt. Sure, they feared most the confessional back home once they’d stepped over the so-sweet forbidden fruit line thousands of miles away, not the tinderbox that was Northern Ireland. You were three-and-twenty. They were randy virgins of seventeen, well reined in by the Church. Our home-grown boys and men knew to dodge your temptations. They feared the confessional too. Or, if hardened, were willing to engage with you in a contest of who was using whom. But these two, their rivalry was trivial. Neither would have long resented the other for ‘winning the beauteous colleen’. And the winner would have felt duly guilty afterwards.”
Deirdre leaned forward on her folded arms. “You knew the pub needed clearing of innocents. Yet you lured one away and left the other unwarned. Did you choose Michael, or was he just the most susceptible?”
“What does it matter, Deirdre? Here they are again, holding hands on the table. If I thrived on destruction, as you say, it didn’t work.”
“It matters to me.” Deirdre’s passionate intensity matched Kathleen’s for the first time. “I risked my life to save the boy you left behind. What made him the expendable one, Kathleen? What were you thinking besides the need to see innocent emotions toyed with and innocent blood shed? Why Sean and not Michael?”
“No,” Max said. “We don’t need to know. I doubt even Kathleen knows or can be trusted to speak the truth of it.”
“You were more daring,” Sean told him. “I thought you were taking a risk, to your soul or even health, but certainly not your life, when you went off with her. The idea was exciting, but I could never have gone through with anything. I really didn’t want to win the prize. And,” he added, smiling that slightly off-kilter Huck Finn smile at Deirdre, “I got the real prize.”
“I may be sick,” Kathleen said.
“You are. Then and now.” Deirdre’s judgment was unsparing.
“She’d spent her time in hell three times over by the time she was twelve,” Max told Deirdre.
“Don’t you dare defend me,” Kathleen told Max, flaring to hiss-and-spit life. “That’s not what I needed from you.”
“You needed it from someone, and didn’t get it.”
Deirdre wouldn’t do it for sure. “So Sean and I should be put through Purgatory again, Max? I think not. You’re asking me to have her under my roof? I say no to even one night.”
“We can’t chain her outside, like a dog, Deirdre,” Sean said.
Deirdre looked pleased at the idea.
“We’ll drive on.” Max checked his watch. Cell phone reception in these rural areas was patchy, just as in congested Las Vegas.
“You’ll not go off alone with her again,” Sean said, “save in sober daylight.”
“What will we do with her, then?” Deirdre asked. “’Tis like having a scorpion under one’s pillow.”
Kathleen had sat back, swirling the whiskey in her glass, dropping out of the conversation, probably reveling in being considered so dangerous.
Max eyed her. Thought of the razor. “I’m a risk-taker, as you say, Sean. I’ll leave with her now.”
“No, man. These unlit rural roads are treacherous for a stranger. I won’t let you go,” Sean said.
“Wished that had worked the first time.” Max grinned ruefully. “All right, I’ll take her away in the morning. Meanwhile, you can put her in the main bedroom with me and lock your door for the night.”
“Be gone wi’ ye!” Deirdre exclaimed. “Do ye never learn?”