One cell phone bobbing up and down was clutched in Buchanan’s pasty hand.
He, unfortunately, was definitely and indubitably not dead.
Road to Ruin
“This whole blasted island is only the size of Wisconsin.”
“Indiana, actually,” Gandolph corrected.
Max knew he’d sounded cranky just then and had deserved correction for that, if not his geography. His whole body ached from a mere three-hour flight and now this drive across half of Ireland. If he took a wrong turn and needed to reverse direction, his shoulders ached so much he had to turn the car around in several moves on the narrow road. So much for the aftermath of grand gestures. He found it easier to admit to being a mental grouch than a physical one. Call it the House syndrome. Wait! That was a television show popping up in his memory. Old or new?
Gandolph must have put up with a lot from him, because he continued speaking in a calm, professorial way. “Ireland is a small nation; always was, Max, but it always loomed large in your personal history.”
“Where am I actually ‘from,’ Garry?”
The older man sighed. Older people often did that. Trouble was, Max was so inclined himself these days.
“Your birth family was … is … in Wisconsin.”
“ ‘Birth’ family? I’m adopted?”
“No, not at all. After Sean’s loss, you adopted a number of foreign lands, a different future, and a different family, which you constructed piece by piece. It was all your choice. Forced upon you, but a choice, nevertheless. A hard choice. Especially for a boy, not a man.”
Max stomped on the brakes so the modest family car, the Mondeo, did a dramatic TV-chase U-y. Only when they were facing the opposite direction on the deserted country two-lane did Max realize his immature gesture might have strained an older man’s neck. Good thing they’d left the major highway, the “colorfully” (not) named M1, to find a quaint place (or a good bush) for a rest stop.
“Sorry,” Max said. “I’m acting like an ass.”
Garry blinked, then chuckled. “So what’s new? Glad to see the old form is still there.”
The man Max still often thought of as Gandolph the Great massaged his nape. He wore a soft wool scarf over his suit jacket. Garry Randolph, past seventy, had far more reason to ache than Max did, or at least to complain about it.
“Why,” Max asked softly, “do I get the idea you know me way too well?”
“Somebody has to, Max. You’ve always been Mr. Mystery to everybody who cared to know you.”
“ ‘Cared to know’ me. Am I that bad?”
“That … demanding. Never more of anyone than of yourself.”
Gandolph—and Max now focused on the older man as a magician in the classical sense of a mage, like the wizard Gandalf his stage name played upon—shook his head.
“You’re a hard case, Max Kinsella, but hard times made you so. Why do you think we’re following the sad trail of Kathleen O’Connor?”
“She’s an irresistible siren, that girl renamed Rebecca. I remember the movie.”
“Just the movie? There were several TV versions as well.”
“Rebecca was a beauty, but she was an evil woman, a manipulator, a man-eater,” Max said.
“Granted. Notorious women leave longer legends than noble ones.”
“And dead before the novel began, yet she had more vitality even when dead than the novel’s pallid nameless heroine.”
“That was the point, my boy. Evil can be not only attractive but vital. Some women are poison.”
Max glanced at his mentor as the accelerating Mondeo clung to a curve. “You have Revienne in mind?”
“Don’t you? Oh, what a lovely candidate for a femme fatale. Blonde. Beautiful. French, but don’t forget she’s half German. Easy for her to be at war with herself. I know nothing about this woman, Max, except her impressive résumé as a psychiatrist. When I discovered she was associated with the sanitarium I whisked you to in desperation, I seized upon her services. I knew every step of the way it could all have been set up by whoever attempted to kill you back at the Neon Nightmare club in Vegas. Or not. It’s hard to believe any man would encounter two she-devils before he was thirty-five.”
“And Kathleen O’Connor was indeed demonic?”
“After our visit to the Convent of the Little Flower near Dublin and a glimpse into its presumed impious prisoners, wouldn’t you have been?”
“Unbelievable how past wrongs keep raising their monstrous heads. I remember reading about the Irish institutional abuses a decade ago, and here they are making headlines again.”
“Victims never forget. And … it’s easier to track records, and people, now.”
Max glanced at the open netbook on Gandolph’s lap. “You find anything online on Kathleen as opposed to the downtrodden Rebecca?”
“Kathleen O’Connors are as common as grains of sand on a beach, in Ireland or out. We’ll have to rely on personal interviews with old enemies. Next stop, Belfast and any ex-IRA men we can turn up.”
“You’re sure they’re ‘ex’? I do remember headlines about pub bombings and outrages against innocents in my vague ‘way back when’ youth.”
“You don’t remember family? Where you lived? Wisconsin? A street? The house?”
“Pieces. As if Picasso had played Guernica with images of my past. A long empty echoing hall, in a school or possibly a church. Snow covering a looming pair of fir trees in a front yard. Concrete stairs and a metal railing to a white-painted door. Midwestern, it looked. I felt more at home on the Alpine meadows, come to think of it.”
“You were on the run. That’s been half your life, the most recent life. No faces from your past haunt you?”
“No faces. It’s as if someone had erased the most intimate parts of my memories.”
“You’re sure Revienne didn’t drug you? Hypnotize you?”
“No. How could I be sure she didn’t? I stayed off the pain pills and injections in the Swiss clinic as soon as I was conscious, but anything could have been pumped into my mind or veins before that. My apparent memory loss could be totally induced.”
“That’s the Max I remember. Always suspicious.”
“Not a fun guy.”
“Not now. You used to be amusing company.”
“I don’t know whether to be relieved or insulted. When did we stop keeping company?”
“Just over two years ago. We split up when you got the Vegas hotel job. You’d met Temple Barr in Minneapolis, and it was love at first sight.”
“Wasn’t I … more careful then?’
“Not about her. You whisked her away from her native city and family to live in sin with you in Vegas while you headlined a magic show at the Goliath. I, and our employers, understood you deserved a life. Hiding behind the magician persona had always been a natural cover for you. I was relieved we both seemed to have ‘retired’ due to true love, and I resumed my long-ago hobby of unmasking fraudulent psychics.”
“A contradiction in terms, isn’t that last?”
“So I’ve always found, but I have hopes. Anyway, your redheaded girlfriend got involved promoting a hokey Vegas Halloween séance in which I was playing the undercover patsy … and you came along eventually to safeguard her, so I had to fake my own death.”
“A true Gandalf.”
“I’ve always been Gandolph. What do you mean by true?”
“The book! Even I remember The Lord of the Rings. You took your stage name from the wizard Gandalf the Grey, right? He appeared to die in the novels and then came back.”
“Really? Sounds more like your role in Las Vegas, if you ever revisit the place. That ‘revival’ thing is just a bizarre coincidence. I didn’t actually read the books. Do you know how long each of the three is? I plucked the Gandalf mojo out of the popular-culture air ages ago. My last name was Randolph. I needed a ‘magical’ moniker. ‘Gandolph.’” Garry chuckled and patted the hair at his temples. “Time did make me ‘Gandolph the Grey,’ though.”