“He did not.”
“He told me about Brian and said he mostly wanted to get Brian. So we took care of that for him.”
She stared.
“Why do you suppose he was in Dublin those three days when all hell was breaking loose in the west of Ireland? He’s no fool. He sold you, all of you, including little Brian of the big dick.”
“You bastard,” she said.
“One of my associates did the deed for Matthew, to show our good faith. Cut his throat and cut off his dick. What do you miss most, Maureen? His life or his prick?”
She crossed the room like a cat and struck him. She was very strong and the blow told. Yet he shook his head and stood and faced her. She struck him again. He smiled. She struck him a third time and then he hit her very hard and the pain went all through her belly and into her chest and she couldn’t breathe and she was going to die. She fell to the floor to make it easier to die. She waited for death and yet involuntarily struggled against death and was surprised that the struggle seemed to have meaning. She did not die. Breath came. The pain remained but she could breathe. She blinked her cold eyes and saw Henry standing over her.
“Christ,” she said. She heaved another cubic foot of breath into her lungs. “Christ,” she said again.
She struggled to rise.
Henry sat down again.
She stood up uncertainly, feeling the pain in the center of her body, staggered to the horsehair couch, and sat down. She rubbed her belly.
“I was saying,” Henry said. “I need a fall guy. Matthew picked you. I pick Matthew.”
“A fall guy?”
“An American expression, honey, I’m sure you’ve seen it in the movies. It means the mark, the setup, the guy who gets dumped on while the other guys get away.”
She waited, letting the breath sob into her.
“Matthew is delivering a package this morning. You know that. The guy he’s delivering it to is an American businessman living in London.”
“It’s a bomb.”
“I told you. It’s a book. It’s a novel called Halloween Witches. It’s supposed to be a fairly lousy book, I don’t know, I don’t read novels. The point is, the writer lucked out and the book became a movie. You wanna know what the movie is?”
She didn’t speak, didn’t move. The pain was going down but it was still there, glittering inside her like the eyes of this man.
“Halloween Heaven.”
Maureen stared.
“They were showing that movie on Flight One forty-seven when the Arabs blew up the plane. You know. The plane that crashed a few weeks ago.”
“I don’t get it.”
“The man runs the fucking airline. His name is Trevor Armstrong, sounds like a fuckin’ Brit but he’s a New Yawk boy, Groton and Harvard, doncha know. We’re sending him a copy of the book. That’s the message. The important thing right now is the messenger. Matthew is doing this because of his expertise in bombs. He’s confused but he thinks it might be a bomb. He’s working for me, for us. He sold you all when he blew up that police car outside the pub on Galway Bay. He got fifty thousand dollars for that one. I’m sure he never told you that. And we also gave him Brian Parnell’s dick. Don’t you get it? He wanted that, he wanted us to mutilate him. Bloody, isn’t he? But you know that, Maureen, you worked with him.”
Silence. She thought about it. She stared at the hard man and the silence ticked along. When she spoke, her voice was cold and low and the brogue was broader than it had been.
“And what’s this about then?”
“Aren’t you paying attention? What the fuck do we want with the IRA except terror? We’re hardly hiring you for your expertise in folk singing. About terror, honey. We’re going to wring a little money out of an American businessman who can’t afford to have another one of his airplanes blown up. Not right before Christmas and not with that other plane still in everyone’s mind.”
“Are you gonna blow up a plane then?”
Henry smiled. It was a dreamy smile, as though he saw something that no one else in the world could see.
“Not at all, honey. I’m not a terrorist. I don’t have any cause. I just need a fall guy and a little time and a little luck.”
“That bastard,” Maureen said finally, beginning to see it, beginning to see the betrayal that Matthew was capable of, beginning to see why Brian’s body had been mutilated, beginning to see everything that Henry McGee had been trying to get her to see. “That bastard,” she said again.
And Henry saw that he had her.
23
Matthew O’Day delivered the envelope at 10:23 A.M. The housekeeper took it and signed for it.
The entire transaction took ten seconds and in that time, Marie Dreiser managed to click off nineteen frames. She used a Minolta A2 autofocus with machine drive and ASA 400 black-and-white Kodak film. The camera was practically foolproof, which was just as well because Marie had never used one before in her life.
She stood at a new-style phone booth wearing a tan raincoat and black jumpsuit. Matthew O’Day never saw her. His eye was on the housekeeper and the package, which he was still certain was a bomb.
He hurried down the street away from Marie and toward an enclosed park. She finished the roll of film by clicking shots of his retreat. When the roll was finished, the camera rewound the film automatically. She popped the back, took out the film, and slipped it into her pocket.
The whole thing was exciting; it made her blood run faster. She felt very alive. It was too bad about the one killing but Parnell was a terrorist and Henry said she shouldn’t feel sympathy for terrorists.
When the news had flashed on the television set in the Buswell Hotel in Dublin about the explosion outside the public house, she had thought of Henry and she had thought of running away. There was murder — didn’t she want to kill the old priest in Rome who had a hand in the death of her Michael? — but this was slaughter, this was beyond revenge or even anger.
She had waited to see the truth of the thing in Henry McGee. He had come back to her at midnight, his clothes dirty, his face wild. She had accused him of the bombing and he had smiled at that. He said the bombing was “just serendipity,” just a coincidence.
Henry had not blown up the people in the public house. Henry had told her that. “I can’t be in two fucking places at the same time,” he had said to her when she had asked him. “But I’m fucking going to use it. Let ’em think we’re omnipotent. That’s the point. Let ’em think we got a gang here instead of just a crazy German girl and one old man.”
He wasn’t an innocent and she didn’t have to worry about him as she had worried about the one innocent she had ever met in her life. Michael. She still thought of him. She had tried to save him and she could not and then Henry had come along and he was good enough, he was warmth in winter in bed, he was pleasure; and if he caused her pain at times, well, what of it? Her life was pain, and pain was existence, wasn’t it? People got their pleasure through the pain of others. When she stole sausages from the delicatessen, the old man in the straw hat behind the counter knew, he knew her pain; he had put his hand under her skirt for a long time, he had molested her — how many times was it? — just touching her and exciting himself in the process and putting his fingers all over her. Was she going to feel ashamed of herself because of what he did? Hell no, they could all go straight to hell if they thought she was going to be ashamed or was going to be afraid of them because of what they could do to her. She’d do it to them first.
So Henry had only killed a terrorist named Brian Parnell, and around the same time, some other mad group had blown a police car to smithereens. What did it matter to her? Henry was there and still full of warmth and life and she had lived too long as a little rat girl alone in the depths of Berlin and she needed him because she needed warmth. She had accepted Henry’s lie about the public house bombing because she needed to believe in someone, not to end the pain of existence but to make it endurable.