Trevor turned to the fire so that his back was to Dennison.
“My former wife. Allison. As you know, we had a… strained divorce. Allison is threatening me now with refusing to let our son visit me. She’s removed him from his home and I don’t know where he is. This is a painful private matter and I’ve consulted with the FBI about it. Cassidy from the FBI was… there to give me details.”
“I see, sir. I’m sorry, sir. It didn’t relate to the airline at all.”
“Not at all.” He turned back to Dennison. The trembling had stopped. “But you understand my wish to keep this matter as confidential as possible. You know now. Even Jameson doesn’t know. I appreciate your discretion.”
“You have it, sir,” Dennison said.
Trevor looked at him closely in the firelight. What did he detect there? A slight change in expression, a certain shifting of the center of the universe. Dennison knew something now that he had not known a moment before, and that gave him leverage suddenly with the boss. Him and the boss. They might have a pint together sometime. A moment before, Dennison thought he might lose his position at any moment; now he knew he wouldn’t and that made it different. Trevor saw this in an instant in the slight change of expression on Dennison’s potato face, a slightly different cast to his eyes. It angered Trevor but he held his anger. Not now, not now. Not with the world watching, with Carl Greengold watching in New York, not with a potential twenty-two-million-dollar profit waiting to be had. Not now.
30
There were two persons Maureen Kilkenny had to kill. Henry McGee explained it to her after sex.
The sex was something new for her. Henry kept at it for a long time and she came and came and gulped and sobbed in her coming and dug her fingers into his back and arched her spine and almost screamed. Did scream.
He made her weak with her wanting.
And when it was over and she crawled across his chest to snuggle under his chin, he explained about the killings.
The first was a girl named Marie Dreiser. She was nineteen years old or maybe older, it didn’t matter. He described her in loving detail.
“What’s she to you then?” Maureen let a jealous note betray her voice.
“A piece of ass,” Henry said. “Which is what you are at the moment. But you are a fine, fine piece of ass, the best I’ve had in a long time.”
“You bastard,” she said, and pushed up, and he hit her. They fought across the bed and he pinned her down, kneeling on her arms. And she bit at his penis and nearly got it.
He pulled back sharply but laughed at the same time.
“Fire. You got belly fire, girl, I like a girl with that.”
“I can kill ya,” she said.
“I don’t want you to kill me, honey. I want to screw you and give you all the money in the world and put you up at the Savoy Hotel and take you out to Connaught’s. Or maybe we’ll go live in Paris for a while. Or Tahiti. I like Tahiti. It’s warm. Would you like to be warm?”
“You’re crazy, whoever you are. You talk crazy.”
Henry smiled. “I ain’t crazy, Maureen. I need you and that’s why you’re something to me. I didn’t know if Irish girls could fuck. You do nice work. I bet you had practice.”
She snarled at him.
Henry kept the grin. He was a naked, leering, dark-faced satyr and Maureen saw hellfire around him. For a moment, she cowered on the bed.
“This Marie person is nothing to me,” Maureen said.
“I know that, honey. I’ll pay for her. Ten thousand and do it neat and soon. The second person you’ll do for free.”
“I will then?”
“Matthew. Your supreme leader. The man who betrayed you.”
“Ah. That’s different. That’s nothing to you—”
“Honey, you still don’t get it. Terror pays. I am talking five million dollars, honey. It could buy you silk underwear thrown away every day. It could buy you any damned thing in the world. Are you so committed to the Irish struggle you wouldn’t like to buy your way across the world and ride in limousines and have servants to beat?”
He talked so damned queer. But he kept coming back to the money. And to specifics. Like killing this girl.
“Why don’t you kill her yourself?”
Henry shook his head. The hotel room around them was full of dark oak furniture of the nineteenth century and it cost $325 a night. That had impressed Maureen right away, along with the brocaded lobby and the scraping bellboys. Yes. She could learn to live with wealth and power.
“I’d like to. I really would.”
She believed him.
“But I got places to go and people to see in the morning. This thing is coming to the flashpoint. Either I get it done now or it don’t get done. You kill the bitch and I’ll be putting the seal on the deal. Then you kill Matthew O’Day. I want the bastard dead by tomorrow night. Timing is everything.”
“Where’s this Marie then?”
Henry saw it. He had her again.
“She’s waiting for me in the house off Maida Vale where you interviewed this morning.” Henry stepped back to the bed and slipped into the sheet. He pulled her to him. He kissed her and it made her crazy again and made her belly start scratching again. God, he was a lover!
And then he stopped just when she wanted him to go on. She rubbed herself against him.
“Go over there and kill her first thing. And then you find Matthew back in that shithouse hotel and you finish him off. And then you come back here, honey, and take a nice bath and slip into bed and wait for me. I should be along around teatime.”
“Then how am I supposed to kill this girl?”
“I’ll give her a call. Tell her you’re coming and that you’re part of the plan. She doesn’t understand all of the plan, she thinks this is about using the IRA.”
“Is it?”
“Not at all. Matthew O’Day dropped a parcel for me this morning that had a book in it. You both thought it was a bomb. It isn’t. Matthew is the fall guy, I told you. I got a set of photographs of him delivering the parcel to a certain house in Mayfair. The thing is: Three or four or five folks in that house died shortly afterward.”
“Then it was a bomb.”
“Bomb, bomb, bomb. You Irish got bombs on the brain. It wasn’t a fucking bomb, you stupid cunt. It was a setup. I set up a terrorist named Matthew O’Day because I needed a dead fish to give to the cops when it’s time to blow. I don’t intend to leave a trail, honey.”
She really didn’t understand. He suddenly mounted her and penetrated her and the sharpness of the act, the roughness, made her cry out. But that passed in a moment. They made sex again, urgent and demanding, and after a while, he pushed her out of bed and she went down on her knees and she wanted to do it exactly the way he wanted her to do it.
When that was done again, she held him around the waist and looked up at his dark face.
“Jesus, man, you’re a fookin’ bull,” she said.
“I’ll fuck you three times a day,” he said.
“Why’s this girl got to be killed then?”
“She betrayed me,” Henry McGee said. “I can’t stand that.”
“How did she?”
“I can’t tell you. Not now. Are you with me, Maureen, or are you too stupid to see your chances?”
He overwhelmed her. She shook her head but she couldn’t shake him loose from her. He crawled inside her skin and sat there, warming his hands on her belly fire.
She shook her head again.
“Yes,” she said, as she shook her head.
31
Devereaux left in the morning. Rita would meet him in three days in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. He said he had to make contacts and move quickly but he said they would both kill Henry McGee, that he would not kill the man without her. It was a promise and she believed him.