He picked up his whiskey and carried it around the polished metal bar to her side. He stood next to her for a moment and let her look up at him.
“And who are you?” he said.
“That doesn’t matter; you can call me what you want,” Marie Dreiser said. “The important thing is you came.”
“I came because I am always available to opportunity,” Matthew O’Day said. He had a soft Irish voice for a man so large; it was a tenor’s voice, and when he was little, he had sung in the parish choir. He didn’t sing anymore now and he had not been in a church except to attend the inevitable funerals for thirty years.
“Then sit down and listen,” Marie Dreiser said. She wasn’t at all nervous. Henry McGee knew she wouldn’t have been. They had gone over it, gone over what she would say and what her response would be if the big man said the wrong thing.
“I still want your name,” he said.
“Call me what you want. I told you,” she said.
“Nobody’s that hard,” he said. He sat down, the smile still fixed to his broad features.
“Maybe I am,” she said.
“All right.” Still smiling. “Maybe you are. Let it go for the sake of argument, girl.”
“We want a job. It’ll involve three people, two men and a woman. Presentable people, not children, not people who can’t be trusted.”
“What makes you think—”
“Terror,” she said. So soft and calm that it amazed him. She turned her eyes on him and he saw that it really didn’t matter what he called her, what he thought of her. A moment before, he had felt a vague stirring between his legs. He liked the wild thing you found in nearly all women, the place in them that was too hot and too hard and too wet all at the same time, the thing that was revealed when all the layers of civilization impressed on women were stripped away and they became what they always were. He had seen it in her eyes watching him. But now he saw something else. That wild thing in her was covered with ice a thousand feet thick, and nothing could penetrate it.
“You need money to exist,” she said. “For your cause.” The last word was very precise; she had put it in italics and surrounded it with quotation marks. “We offer you one hundred thousand English pounds with payment upon completion.”
“We’re not criminals. What you want is criminals. The city is full of them. You can hold out your hand and grab a bunch of them.”
She held out her thin hand and draped it on his lapel. Her eyes mocked him in that moment. “I know what I’m touching,” she said. “You’re quite right about criminals. We don’t have any need for them. We want what you have to offer.” She let her hand slide up the lapel of his Irish tweed jacket until it rested on his neck.
“I’ve got a room here,” he said.
“We know,” she said.
“Are you interested?”
She smiled then. It was a small smile. “Perhaps. Later. We’ve got business, Mr. O’Day. It’s better to attend to business.”
“I might want to make it part of the business,” he said.
“Payment in sex?” She was smiling and that bothered him. “All right, why not? Are you any good at it or would I have to pretend that you were?”
“You’ve got a mouth on you,” he said. He sat up straight on the bar stool and she still held him by the neck. He might be ten years old and she might be the nun in the parish school, holding him by the neck until he spelled the word correctly.
“Oh yes,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “A mouth and a sex. A tongue and teeth and there isn’t anything I couldn’t do or haven’t done, so when I say that, Matthew, I only am being honest. I don’t mean to insult you. I can pretend if I have to. I can make you feel like the biggest man in the world. I can do anything, Matthew, I just wanted you to understand that.”
“You’re a bloody bitch,” he said.
They were utterly silent. They were surrounded by sound. There might have been no one else in the world in that moment.
“Matthew. You have terrorists and we want the use of them. Of their services—”
“We’re not terrorists for hire—”
“But you are.” The voice was still soft. The conversations in the room formed a roar around them. There had been drinking since eleven in the morning and some of the voices were louder than they should have been. A woman laughed and her voice screeched until it subsided into a giggle. Everyone was damned amusing all of a sudden. “You became that when we contacted you. When you accepted our offer to come to Dublin.”
“Who are you?”
“People in business,” she said.
“You act like spies, like the goddamned SAS.”
“The SAS would not have been subtle. We contacted you through the Czech broker. You know him. We know all about you and your group. About the farm in County Clare and the business you did in Antrim last July. You killed fourteen men in a public house.” She smiled. He wanted to pull away from her. “You blew them apart. You and Maureen and what was the boy’s name? Was it Brian Parnell? Yes, we know, and if we were SAS, we wouldn’t be sitting in the Horseshoe Bar in Dublin talking, would we? SAS would have you in one of their safe houses, wouldn’t they? They’d have a noose around your neck and another around your balls, Matthew, and they’d be pulling and tearing just to hear you scream. We aren’t hurting you, are we, Matthew?”
Jesus Christ. There was ice and shards of ice were prickling his flesh. He hadn’t ever felt this way about a woman.
He pulled back and she let her hand drop onto her lap. She stared at him but didn’t speak now.
“I want a hundred thousand pounds. Up front.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“We don’t have it.”
“Then you’ve wasted my time.”
“Sit down,” she said.
“I don’t think you’d be a very good fuck. I think you just like to fantasize about it,” he said.
“Sit down,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m being honest. You should appreciate honesty,” she said. “We’re in the business of terror and so are you.”
“Is that right?”
“The Czech connection,” she began. She paused and waited for him to sit down. “The arms trade has been interrupted.”
“You know everything, do you?”
“The IRA factions have been supplied by Czech armament makers for twenty years. The events — in Prague and elsewhere — have… interrupted your supplies, Mr. O’Day. You’re becoming terrorists without bombs, without automatic weapons, back to slingshots and street fighting. You don’t terrify many people that way. One hundred thousand pounds is a lot of money. On completion of the business.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Why shouldn’t you? Would we go through all this ceremony as a joke?” In that moment, the veneer over her English words fell away and she was revealed as a German, as one of the cynical street people of a place like Berlin who think the world is a joke and only the fools don’t get it. “We’ve taken the time to contact you in a way you trust. We’ve arranged to meet you on neutral ground, in your own capital city. What do you suppose this is about?”
“You still haven’t told me why I should trust you. About the money, about anything.”
“You have no choice.”
“Ach,” he said. He started to get up again.
“If you walk away from me, you’ll regret it.” She shrugged and turned to her glass of beer. “I was told to tell you that. If you started to walk away. I don’t know why you’ll regret it but I believe it and so should you. I’m only the messenger but I believe everything I tell you. You’ll be paid, and paid when the job is finished. I believed it when I was told we need you.” She glanced at him. “You should believe everything as well.”