Dark-jacketed shoulders shrugged, lifting their sinister hooded hummocks. Max must have forgotten that the Emerald Isle required outerwear even in the spring. No wonder his leg bones ached. He should have bought long johns in Zurich, not designer togs. He wasn’t about to consider the image of himself in long johns with Revienne. The reality had been bad enough.
“And what are you grinning at, Kinsella?” Finn demanded. “Your last name is not only known but notorious. No laughing matter, even in these namby-pamby ‘peaceful’ days.”
“So the Ulster Easter settlement of ninety-eight is not as settled as some think?” Max asked soberly.
“The IRA fools!” Liam said. “Cowed by the specter of being compared to ‘Islamic terrorists.’ ”
“That nine/eleven slaughter did stir up worldwide revulsion,” Gandolph observed mildly.
Shoulders shrugged again, making Max swallow hard to keep his mouth shut. He too had reacted violently from rage and loss and cost of lives, to hear it.
Gandolph was an older, less-fit man, but he plowed courageously ahead.
“Then, too,” he mused in a maddeningly deliberate way, “after nine/eleven the U.S. Irish community had things closer to home to worry about than sending gun money to the Auld Sod, especially the British-run north of it, the nine counties of Ulster.”
“Shut your mouth or I’ll forget your age,” Flanagan said, half rising. His motion made the pints’ liquid contents sway like yellow hula skirts.
“Don’t spill the beer, man,” Mulroney said softly.
“Better beer than blood,” Gandolph answered, his expression harder than the parish priest’s on confession day. “You’re all youngsters compared to me, and I can tell you that you’ll tire of blood by the end.”
Max was as surprised as the Ulstermen to see Gandolph’s steel. He must not remember enough of the man who claimed to have been his mentor, and regretted it for not the first time.
“And the beer?” Max asked. “Does it have a name too, Flanagan?”
As Flanagan sank back down in his chair, the man clawed the glass into his grasp and pulled it to his chest like a miser hoarding liquid gold. “A Bass brew, once made here in Ulster.”
Max nodded at Liam’s much darker glass. “And that looks like a Moor house’s Black Cat.”
“Heaven forefend! You’ve been too long absent from the emerald shore, Kinsella. That nancy brew is tricked out with chocolate and coffee, like a Brit toff would swill.”
Max heard himself say, “Blame it on Belfast’s annual beer festival, where all the showy brews take home the prizes.”
How did he know that? Nobody regarded him as if he were mad.
Although Liam said, “You’re daft, man. No workingman drinks those devil-adulterated brews. Only U.S. yuppies.”
Again, Max didn’t know why or how, but he knew that yuppies were more than over across the Atlantic. He scrubbed his face with a hand.
“What’s wrong with your legs?” Liam asked.
“Broke ’em,” Max answered.
“Both of them, man? How?”
“Pushed off a mountain,” Gandolph said.
“The mountains here are nearer hills,” Liam noted.
“Lovely rugged Irish hills,” Max agreed. “No, a major peak was my downfall, thanks to someone’s unknown hand. Away on the Continent.”
“An Alp then, it would be,” suggested Mulroney, sounding suitably impressed.
Max nodded modestly.
The four men eyed at each other. “We know you by old reputation,” the spitter known as Finn said, “but you now appear to be as diminished in that respect as we are in ours.”
“What reputation?” Gandolph asked, his eyes darting from man to man.
Max stretched his aching legs under the table and watched the men’s bodies jerk slightly, like a quartet of puppets sharing the same oversensitive string.
“Easy, boys,” he said. “The damp isn’t kind to knitting bones.”
“That’s right,” Liam jeered. “You’re used to a balmy desert climate.”
Max eyed Gandolph. He was the Las Vegas expert as well, given Max’s memory was as bum as his legs on certain subjects, like his own past.
“Is there a man among you,” Gandolph asked, “that did as much as my friend here at seventeen?”
Silence, then Finn burst out, “He was a wonder, all right, a boy doing a man’s work—vengeance for his friend’s life. But he was on the bloody wrong side! He betrayed IRA men to the British taskmasters!”
Max was playing a role now, from Gandolph’s prompting on the plane trip from Zurich.
“He was a friend,” Max said, “that’s true, and we were boys, and we stuck our Irish American noses where they didn’t belong. But Sean Kelly was more than that. He was my cousin.”
“Ah.” Liam leaned back in his rickety chair. “Blood.”
“Blood,” Max repeated, with feeling, and, oddly enough, he felt what he didn’t remember. Loss. Rage. Guilt. And, he could reflect now, it must have been driven by a blinding surge of ungoverned testosterone, stirred by the incredibly damaged siren and Magdalen asylum escapee Kathleen O’Connor.
He was back there, at least emotionally, drowned in bitter regrets darker than Liam’s oxblood-colored ale. His hands were fists on the table, opening and closing without his will.
Gandolph put a hand on Max’s shoulder. “My associate has survived a major accident. So you know who he is and what he did. We know nothing of you. What do you want with us? All that is over and done with.”
“Injustice never fades away,” Liam said. “It festers.”
“We know that,” Gandolph said. “We’ve fought it in our way.”
“Yes.” Liam swallowed half of his pint at one go and wiped the foam from his mouth with one swipe of his jacketed forearm. “And we are weary and forgotten too. At least, Kinsella, someone cared enough to try to kill you. We can’t drum up more than a few callow youths to hurl Molotov cocktails at marching Orangemen.”
“What do you want of us?” Gandolph asked. “We’re long retired.”
“As are we,” Flanagan noted.
“We want our due,” Mulroney growled, not looking them in the eyes.
“Information,” Finn added.
“Odd,” said Max, feeling strangely sane and calm again, “that’s just what we want here.”
Liam leaned so far back in his chair it almost tipped over. Almost. Liam knew how to command attention too.
The barman picked up a tray and poured another round into a fresh sextet of glasses.
Now the serious bargaining would begin. Chances were it involved blood and something much akin to it.
Max wanted to think it might be love of homeland and loyalty to one’s comrades, but he knew what Gandolph had always thought, always known.
Gandolph knew it was money.
Guy Wire
Temple was jerked back down to earth by a … jerk.
“This is a dance floor, bimbo,” a tattooed Asian college-age punk assured her. “Shake something or get off it.”
“I’m gonna ‘shake’ you,” Temple said, turning and eeling sideways in dance moves until she finally reached the crowd’s fringe.
She wanted to sit down at one of those god-awful bar-height freestanding tables and resurvey the scene from top to bottom-feeder. She held the purse tight to her hip all the way, happy to find a deserted table and sling the heavy bag atop it while she did her Alp-climbing routine to get herself up on a seat and her wedgies, um, wedged onto a crossbar.
It seemed that everybody who was going to hook up here tonight had already done so, so she was relatively invisible and “safe.” From her perch she realized that the light works were flashing multicolored tattoos over the dancers and bystanders. The shiny black floor reflected the zodiac-sign patterns.