Maureen was certain she was going to meet him at this address.
It was an attached town house, graystone and Georgian, part of a street full of similar houses in a treeless neighborhood near Hyde Park. Heavy traffic noises from Maida Vale echoed down the block and made the curious, peopleless silence of the houses that much more sinister. There’d never be children on this block, Maureen thought; it was barren from birth.
She rang the bell.
Henry McGee opened the door for her. He was dressed as she was, ready for action. He wore a black pullover and black fatigue jacket.
“Right on time, honey,” Henry said. “Is your boyfriend following the plan?”
“He runs our operation,” she said, explaining. She looked at him closely. He was probably as old as Matthew but there was a difference. The eyes weren’t cold. Matthew had cold eyes, even in the middle of operations. This one was just as hard in the eyes but there was something else. Something that burned.
“Anything you say,” Henry said, smiling. He led her to the right, to an old-fashioned parlor filled with embroidered things and wallpaper flowers. The lamps had fringes on the shades. The room made her smile because it was bizarre in this context. Henry saw the smile. He decided something.
“I’m just borrowing it for the time being,” Henry said.
Maureen looked around the room. She might have been a child in her aunt’s house in Dublin. Framed photographs sat on a sideboard, and above the fireplace was a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II as a young woman. Her aunt had a photo of the Pope.
“You have quaint friends. English friends.” She turned and gave back his blazing look.
For a moment they stood apart and then Henry smiled again. “You take your friends where you can get them,” Henry said. “You strike me as not being as dumb as Matthew. I’m not saying you’re smart but you can show me that later.”
“I’ve got nothin’ to prove to you. I don’t even know why I’m here.”
“Because I wanted you here.”
“And you’ve not the control of me—”
“Save it,” Henry said. It was like a snap — quick, savage, the sense of necks breaking.
“What the bloody hell is this about? And why’d you kill Brian Parnell?”
“Brian Parnell wasn’t important. It was the message that was important and Brian didn’t figure. You figure—”
“And if I’d been caught in the roundup?”
“But you weren’t, girl. You weren’t. I want you to siddown and shut up and listen a bit.”
“I’ll stand.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Then stand.” Henry sat down on a stiff Chippendale. He crossed his legs. He looked at her for a moment.
“One million pounds. English pounds. That’s one million six hundred thousand dollars by the morning paper, and I like to think in terms of dollars because it makes the money more real.”
“What money?”
“I told Matthew it was a hundred thousand pounds to him. Well, it’s nine hundred thousand to me. What I need here is someone I can trust and that’s going to be you.”
“To do what? Rob a bank?”
“I can take care of that, honey. Robbin’ banks is easy but banks just don’t have that kind of cash lying around. Better that you rob the people who put their money in the banks. Let them make the withdrawals. On your behalf. You and me, girl, are in partnership, and there’s only gonna be two partners in the long run. What we need is a setup. It’s gonna be you or it’s gonna be Matthew. Which do you want it to be?”
“You’re crazy. I’ll not betray—”
Henry McGee held up his hand. “Betray. What do you think this is about? Matthew is greedy and just a little bit too stupid but I’m surprised you haven’t noticed that before. Matthew’s got you believing in him and that makes me wonder about you. You want betrayal as a reason for something, then you ought to look at Matthew O’Day, the famous Irish patriot and terrorist, who sold out his kith and kin for a lot less than thirty pieces of silver.”
She felt a sense of disorientation. She would sit down after all. The room was too familiar, too old, too much a part of her past; yet she had never been in this room before.
“Matthew is getting out of the game. Too long in the tooth—”
“Who are you?”
“You might say I was with SAS. Or something like that. On the other hand, I’m probably not.”
Jesus Christ. Maureen felt all the blood drain from her face. She stared at the hard man across from her but he was still smiling and he hadn’t moved. She looked at the window, the doorway.
“Don’t,” Henry said.
“What the hell game is this then?”
“A little game of getting rich. Y’see, you asked me about Brian. Well, I got Brian from Matthew. He said Brian was humping you and he was willing to betray him for a consideration. The consideration was that we wouldn’t kill him. We thought about it and took him up on it—”
“You killed those people in the pub on Galway Bay—”
“Not at all. Do you think we’d kill innocent people?”
“You do it all the time—”
Henry smiled. “Was he? I mean, Brian. Was he humping you like Matthew said?”
For the first time since coming into the strange room, she felt fear. It was hard to put her finger on it but there was a certain madness to this man, a madness without edges or depth. Not hatred, just cruelty for its own sake. She looked at the door again.
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe Matthew O’Day would betray any of us—”
“And the farm. Who knew about the farm except Matthew? And the cell? And who turned the lot of you in to the Garda after the bomb went off in that public house and killed all of those poor people?”
“You killed them yourself.”
“If you want to believe that, fine.”
Silence.
A clock struck the quarter hour with the first notes of Westminster chimes. The room was chill and the silence penetrated her bones until she shivered.
“Maureen, everything in this world is about money. Your cause, your terrorism, your puny strikes against the queen by blowing up postmen in Belfast… It’s pathetic when you come down to it, because nothing matters except the money. If your bunch had expended all its energies in getting money the last twenty years, you could have bought Ulster from the English, you could have made every Catholic family in Derry a millionaire. Christ, you’re all a lot of losers. I almost regret wasting my breath explaining this to you.”
“You’re a Yank, you’re not SAS. What the hell do you have to do with us?”
“Honey, my nationality is green, the color of money. So Matthew came to Dublin when we asked him and he got the proposition presented to him and he took it.”