“You coulda finished what you were doin’,” she said, just to say it; she didn’t really care.
“Insatiable you are.” He grinned.
“No, I’d just like to get meself off once in a while,” she said.
“And what’s that mean?”
“Whaddaya think it means?”
“Oh, shut your gob, girl, and stay where y’are. I’ll be back sooner than you know. We’ll find a pub—”
“Fuckin’ bloody country,” she said. Her sudden hatred of the English overwhelmed her. Perhaps it was sexual tension. “Fuckin’ snobs, I’d like to off the lot of them.”
“Ah,” he said. “Maybe this is about that very thing.”
Henry McGee sat on a red plastic chair at a plastic table, drinking lukewarm milky tea from a paper cup that leaked at the seams. The room was bright and dirty. The station was full of echoes and neglect was swept into every littered corner.
“Are you the man?” Matthew O’Day said, looming over him.
“Either me or the fucking towelhead behind the counter,” Henry said. “Siddown. Don’t order the tea, it’s shit.”
“Are you the big man?” Matthew said, still not sitting down.
“Siddown,” Henry said.
Matthew scraped a chair and filled it. His eyes were nearly as hard as Henry’s but he couldn’t match the color. Black hard eyes like coal, without any light at all, without any mercy in them.
“What’s it about then?” Matthew said.
“The girl got the message garbled,” Henry said.
“The bitch in the Shelbourne.”
“Exactly. I beat her up a little about it. Nothing permanent. Sometimes she gets to thinking she’s running the thing and you have to slap her down.”
“So what did she get wrong?”
“About the money. You still get the twenty-five in front,” Henry McGee said.
Greed took over. Whatever Matthew had expected, he hadn’t expected this. Things never worked out this way.
“When?”
“Tomorrow at noon, as soon as you deliver the package.”
“And what sort of package is it?”
“An ordinary package. Federal Express. Except it ain’t Federal Express, we’re just using their envelope. I made it all out for you.”
Henry put the overnight envelope on the table.
Matthew looked at it. “A bomb.”
“Not at all. There’s a legitimate parcel inside, a book ordered from an American publisher. It’s there now and it’ll be there later.”
“Then what is the book that’s worth a twenty-five-thousand-dollar delivery?”
“The less you know, the happier you’ll be. Don’t forget what happened to Brian Parnell.”
“Did you kill him?”
“No. I’ve got people for that.”
“If you got people, I been wondering why you need us then. I couldn’t get a third man.”
“Matthew. I want to explain something.” Henry leaned forward across the table. “I am the baddest motherfucker you ever met. I ain’t got time for a lot of romance. I want some things done and I want you and your people to do them. When it’s done, you’ll be a hundred thousand pounds richer and you can go back to your fucking rathole of a country and spend the rest of your fucking life blowing up British troops and Protestant schoolchildren. I don’t really give a rat’s ass. Except that if you fail me at any point in the next bunch of operations, if you, in other words, fuck up, I’ll skin you alive. That’s not just an expression, Matthew. I mean, I actually know how to do it. I’ll peel the skin off your body until you’re dead. I can make it last a long time.”
Silence. The words sank into both of them.
The early train from Cardiff chugged into the station and doors were flung open and the kind of people who spend Sunday mornings on trains descended to the fourth platform. The train seemed to shudder and sweat, like a farm horse returned to its stall after plowing. Matthew looked out at the platform and saw the words. His life had been hard, spent with hard men — and a few hard women — doing hard things. He believed everything the American had just said. He knew a bluff and he knew a real thing.
“So what about this package?” Matthew said.
Henry blinked as though his own words had caused him to go into a trance. Now he came out of it. The package.
“You deliver it.”
Matthew looked at the label. He didn’t know the name but he knew enough of London to know the posh address in Mayfair.
“What’s in it again you said?”
“A book.”
“Bloody unlikely.”
“Just do it. Don’t pry at the edges of the thing, Matthew. And certainly don’t open it if you want to be living tomorrow.”
“It is a bomb.”
Henry shook his head and grinned. “The trouble with terrorists like you — I’d like to give you some advice — the trouble with you is that you think along old lines. Bombs have been done. Kidnapping’s been done. The same dreary people wrapped in towels and mufti, reciting the same dreary demands of the Great Satan or the oligarchic conspiracy. Nobody listens. You terrify no one. To make a pun, it’s been done to death, we’ve seen it all. The nightly news is a bore and we practically expect to see the maps with the X’s marked on them to explain this is where Flight One oh-three went down and this is where Flight Sixty-seven went down. Northern Ireland is a joke, man, no one cares but you bloody people and the English soldiers who get paid for it. It’s Lebanon but in a different language. You see the Brits moving out of Belfast, Matthew? I’m serious.”
“A struggle of four hundred years. It doesn’t matter if it takes ten years more.”
Henry clucked. He was now enjoying himself. The rotten tea in the rotting cup was forgotten. “You don’t get it. You never will. But if you keep your eyes open, you might pick up a few pointers.”
Matthew made a face to say he had heard it all before. In fact, it was uncharted territory. A sense of outrage, wounded pride and all the rest of it, had suddenly been replaced by curiosity. It was the cat that had always kept Matthew alive in the dangerous years. What was the Yank’s game anyway? He looked at the address again and the name and tried to see it clear.
“And when I deliver it, what then? They’ll know my face.”
“No one who sees you in that house is ever gonna tell anyone about it.”
“Then it’s a bomb.”
“You’ve got a one-track mind, my Irish friend. One track. Like that train that came in. You only know where to go because the rails tell you. Go on back to your honeypot, Matthew, and take the package and deliver it after ten A.M. But not after ten-thirty. Then wait in your room for me. And one more thing: Send along your girlie to this address at nine tomorrow morning. We’ll await developments.”
“I don’t like to be set up.”
“You’re not,” Henry said. “Trust me. Trust the money I put down. There’s seventy-five thousand more coming.”
The money had its silent argument. Matthew picked up the cash and the package.
“Ten o’clock,” Matthew said.
“Now you got it,” Henry said. In fact, Matthew didn’t know what he had taken with that package. Not at all. The thought made Henry grin again.
22
Maureen was dressed for action: tight jeans, black sweater, black beret, black raincoat. Seeing her with her long, reddish hair and gray, unfeeling eyes, you could imagine the face of the assassin or the terrorist. She might as well have an Uzi under that long coat, might as well be waiting to blow up a school bus, or just waiting for death to deal or be dealt.
It was exactly nine o’clock Monday morning, twenty-three hours after Matthew took the package from the man in the buffet.
Matthew had explained about the man he met in Paddington Station and the package and the mission, and when Maureen had complained she didn’t understand any of it, Matthew had grown angry because he was confused as well. The words that denigrated the struggle — the mocking, cynical words of the stranger in the buffet — had wounded him more than he knew. He told her to shut up and even slapped her, but that had not cowed Maureen. She had come back at him, teeth and hands and rage, and the tussle had alarmed the manager of the hotel, a small-boned Indian man who smelled of curry and had brown teeth. He threatened to call the police and that had calmed them down — not ended the fight, just made it a matter of silences and glowering looks at each other. Maureen had spent the afternoon by herself, walking the streets of the great, gray city, thinking about things, thinking about Matthew, thinking about poor bloody Brian lying in his own blood in the urinal of that public house. Most of all, thinking about the package and the man in the buffet who had so threatened Matthew and who had probably caused all the troubles that had fallen on the group in the last several days.