They drove through a cobblestoned touristy area of shops and art galleries on Dublin’s southern side while Gandolph consulted maps on his cell phone.
“Lunch?” he asked, looking up.
“You’re not as pretty as my last lunch companion, but why not?”
“You drive, Max. I’ll direct.”
“Got it.”
“You don’t seem to have problems keeping to the left.”
“Probably like riding a bicycle,” Max said. “Once learned, it engraves itself on your brain.”
“Then I’m glad this trip of ours is taking you down an engraved memory lane.”
“I can’t say I remember this part of Dublin at all, but back then, it was probably shabby and in need of restoration, considering how popular and tidy it is now.”
“They say the cobblestones date back to the seventeenth century.”
“Our quest hardly needs to look that far backward,” Max said, driving slowly to avoid pedestrians.
“The next right will bring us to a car park. Can you walk about a bit?”
“Need to,” Max said.
The day sported an encouraging swath of blue sky when they strolled back to the main square. Sunlight gleamed off the paint and chrome of lightweight urban motorcycles herded and chained against a lamppost. It glinted from the clear glasses of passersby. Few wore sunglasses, as Max did. For him, they were an instant disguise and a screen from behind which he could examine the scene and its thronging extras.
“I’d forgotten the first-floor flower boxes,” Max commented. “The beauteous, bounteous hanging flowers draping every pub sign in the British Isles.”
“You do remember that floor levels are counted with ‘one’ starting above street level.”
“Such bizarre small changes of custom,” Max said, “but telling. Oh,” he added, stopping as he saw where Gandolph was heading, “the lady in red. A bit gaudy, but welcome in a land of frequent gray weather.”
The pub ahead occupied a curving corner spot, its sweeping exterior enameled scarlet except for a deep green background at the top, bearing the large gilded letters of its name.
“The Temple Bar,” Max read aloud.
Gandolph was silent.
“Can’t say I’ve ever been here before,” Max went on. “There’s a Temple Bar in London, isn’t there?”
“And in Las Vegas,” Gandolph said in an odd, cautious tone. “Two, you could say.”
“What’s with the same name everywhere?”
“Here,” said Gandolph, “the tourist guides report that a family named Templeton lived in the square in the sixteen hundreds. Temple Bar in London was a gate to the city in earlier centuries, later becoming part of the four Inns of Court, the city’s legal conclave.”
“You are a bundle of trivia today, Garry. And what about Las Vegas, which I should remember something of?”
“Temple Bar is a landing on Lake Mead. In the Arizona section, really, but it attracts Vegas tourists.”
“I doubt this place does,” Max said, after another long gaze at the blazing wall of red.
“Ah,” Gandolph enthused, “but the oysters and Guinness are famous here; the music is traditional and free and has won the Irish pub music crown for years; and the ‘craic’ is unbeatable.”
“Craic?”
“The local gossip and josh and chatter, which any passing patron can join into.”
“I’d prefer to listen, and be drawn into the food and drink.”
By then they’d entered the set-back double red doors and found a tiny free table. Amid the manic music of fiddle and harmonica and drums and the shouted neighboring craic, the pair ordered and ate, imbibing Irish laughter along with the oysters and smoked salmon and Gubbeen cheese and molasses-dark Guinness. They listened rather than talked, for once.
“Was there a reason,” Max asked later, as he threaded the Mondeo back through the Temple Bar area and drove out of the city, “for us to stop there?”
“To fuel up on food and drink and happy music for our journey,” Gandolph said, his shrug saying, “Isn’t it obvious?”
“And to fuel up my memory?” Max asked.
Gandolph looked over with a rueful smile. “I always have hopes on that.”
“So I didn’t pass the Temple Bar test.”
“This journey is not a test, Max. No pass or fail. Just what is.” Silent but somehow content, he and Gandolph continued north into the fringes of County Fingal, forging into less traffic the farther they went. Above them, massed clouds skated across the sky, creating alternating slashes of sunshine and shadow on the sweeping green and gray-stone countryside.
A Chieftains CD on the car player alternated cheery and soulful Irish folk music, jigs segueing into ballads.
“The song selection is setting the stage for my split personalities?” Max asked wryly.
Garry Randolph looked calm and relaxed in the passenger seat. Gandolph the Great’s magician-nimble fingers, though, were tapping the central console in a nervous stutter that didn’t quite keep time with the addictively rhythmic Celtic music.
“I’m looking for signs of the careless, passionate young man you were, yes,” Garry admitted. “Oh, you fell in love with Ireland when you and your cousin, Sean Kelly, drove from County Clare to Dublin, diagonally across the glorious rolling scenery. Seventeen, fresh out of high school, and on your own. Sean was eighteen. Why did you graduate younger?”
“I can’t remember why, or arriving here then, but I must have skipped a year in grade school. Somehow.”
“So, you were mature for your age. Yet a bit raw. Socially awkward.”
“Got me. You’re the historian.”
“You were still a virgin.”
Max laughed. “What an embarrassing thing to bring up now, Garry. I know I’m not anymore, at least, from recent events.”
Max’s impish grin met Garry’s stone face.
“You have no idea who Ms. Schneider really is or what her agenda was, or still might be,” Garry said. “You were foolish, Max. That kind of sexual bravura got you and Sean tangled up with the IRA all those years ago when you were green and seventeen. You don’t need to act impulsively anymore.”
“Maybe I did, just then.” Max’s fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “All right. You’ve briefed me on the short form of my personal and professional history with Ireland. I know you entered the picture after my dalliance with Kathleen O’Connor and after Sean waited out our tryst in a Northern Ireland pub, which an IRA bomb blew up, and with it my cousin, to smithereens of pint-glass shards and bone while he was nursing a lonely Guinness.”
“O’Toole’s.”
Max flashed him a confused look.
“The bombed pub’s name was O’Toole’s. Notorious now. Never rebuilt.”
“Okay. I can believe the Irish colleen we co-courted was a modern-day Mata Hari playing guilt trips with the pair of us, or even that she hated teenage boy virgins or American naïveté or something enough to set one of us up for the kill and the other for a world of survivor’s pain and guilt. I can even believe I tracked the three pub bombers and got them killed in a hail of British troop bullets. Why we’re going back to Northern Ireland at this late date I don’t get. That’s one insane war that’s wound down.”
“I’m following your instructions,” Garry said, “on what to do if anything ever happened to you in the mortal way: find and follow the trail of Kathleen O’Connor, her history and motives. So that’s what we’re doing.”
“The man who wanted that may not be dead now, but he doesn’t remember the why or wherefore of such a request. From what you tell me, I’m the one who’s left the ‘love of my life’ in Vegas thinking I’ve vanished. This … redhead.”
“Her first name is Temple.”
“Even the name is just an improper noun to my blasted memory. Is she Greek or Roman?”
“Neither. One of a kind.”