On Wednesday he had an idea that took him to Spalding’s motor yacht. He searched it, and the following morning he took a page from Spalding’s book of tricks and, using an alias, bought an inexpensive mobile phone with prepaid minutes. On St. Stephen’s Green he stood across the street from Paquette’s hotel, slipped one of the forged documents he’d found hidden on the motor yacht into an envelope, addressed it to Paquette, sought out a young lad passing by, and asked him to deliver it to the hotel bellman.
“What’s in for me, then?” the lad asked in a distinct Irish brogue that left no doubt of his Dublin roots.
“Ten euros,” Fitzmaurice replied. “Here are five for you now. Tell the bellman to delivery it straightaway and give him this fiver for his trouble. You’ll have your second five when you report back to me that it’s done.”
The young boy took the envelope, stuffed the bills in his pocket, and gazed up at Fitzmaurice with mischief in his eyes. Before he could dart away ten euros richer, his job left undone, Fitzmaurice grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, opened his jacket, and let him take a good long look at his holstered handgun.
“You do not want to be skipping off without doing your little task, now, do you, my lad?” he asked pleasantly.
The wide-eyed boy gulped, shook his head, ran across the street clutching the envelope, and disappeared into the hotel. Within a few minutes he came back into view, returned for his fiver, and took off down the sidewalk toward Grafton Street.
Fitzmaurice waited a decent interval before dialing Paquette’s mobile number. “Did you get the document?” he asked when she answered.
“Who is this?” Paquette replied.
“That’s not important. Did you get it?”
“Yes.”
“I have all of the remaining forged papers George Spalding used to convince you to help him. If the Garda comes calling again, I’m sure you could make use of them.”
“How much do you want?” Paquette asked.
“Money isn’t at issue. A favor would suffice.”
“What kind of favor?”
“Simply tell all that you know about George Spalding’s recent adventures in Ireland to a journalist. He will call you later in the day on your mobile and arrange to meet you.”
“Why should I trust you?” Paquette asked.
“Would you rather I destroy the papers?”
“No, don’t do that.”
“Very well, then,” Fitzmaurice said. “If you handle this as I ask, you’ll have sufficient proof of your innocence to avoid having any charges being put forth.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“It serves a larger purpose,” Fitzmaurice replied. “Are we agreed?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’ll receive the remaining documents from the journalist after he’s met with you.”
At noon Fitzmaurice stood outside Davy O’Donoghue’s Pub on Duke Street and waited for John Ryan, an investigative reporter for the largest newspaper in Ireland, to make his appearance. An eccentric by nature, Ryan was hard to miss as he came strolling down the street with his full beard and shock of thick, curly hair badly in need of a trim. He wore a double-breasted suit and carried the ever-present, prized walking stick his grandfather had won in a game of cards from the famous Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey some eighty or more years ago.
“Why are you loitering about in front of O’Donoghue’s,” Ryan asked as he drew near, “when you should be inside with a pint in your hand waiting for me?”
“To resist temptation,” Fitzmaurice answered. “You know I can’t drink while on duty.”
“ ’Tis an insufferable rule you are forced to live by. What scandalous information do you have for me today?”
“A story to match your considerable journalistic talents.”
Ryan laughed and waved the walking stick at the entrance. “Well, in we go, then. There’s not a moment to lose.”
Davy O’Donoghue’s didn’t cater to the tourists or the up-market types who worked in the city center, but to the true working-class denizens of Irish pubs who ate their lunches at the bar or at the small tables jammed together at the back of the narrow room that would forever smell like stale cigarette smoke, even though such unhealthy behavior had now been banned in all drinking premises throughout the Republic. In defiance of the law O’Donoghue occasionally lit up a cigar while standing behind the bar, much to the delight of his clientele, who would quickly follow suit. The pub was one of the few city-centre drinking establishments that had escaped becoming a tourist stop on the famous Dublin pub crawl.
Amid the clamor and the clatter, with their elbows knocking against those of nearby diners, Ryan listened and ate lunch while Fitzmaurice talked. After he put aside his plate and drained his pint, Ryan said, “ ’Tis a very interesting story, but certainly not front-page news without proof that this Spalding fellow pointed the finger at Carrier as a member of his smuggling gang. Is there nothing Paquette can tell me about this Carrier chap?”
“She has no knowledge of him,” Fitzmaurice replied. “But she’s a starting point that would allow you to ask questions about the highly unusual way in which this case has unfolded.”
Ryan held up his empty glass for a refill, and the bartender gave him a nod in return. “Which would be greeted in return by nothing more than official denials, protestations of ignorance, invocations of court orders barring disclosure of information, and the like. I don’t doubt what you’ve told me, Hugh, but I see no way to pursue it without more evidence in hand.”
Ryan paused to accept his fresh pint from the bartender. “Using only Paquette as the gambit to expose all the diplomatic maneuvering and skullduggery you’ve told me about simply won’t work. What you’ve given me will result in nothing more than a wee story buried in the back pages of the front section of the Sunday edition.”
Fitzmaurice put his hands palms down on the table. “You won’t do it, then?”
Ryan saluted Fitzmaurice with his pint and took a swallow. “You know there’s not a peeler or a judge in the Free State who could make me reveal an anonymous source of information. Not even you could do it when you tried, and we go back to the days when we were lads playing football in the alleys on the north side of the Liffey.”
Fitzmaurice laughed. He knew it to be so. The only possible way to get John Ryan to reveal his sources would be to take away his drink and lock him up in a hospital detoxification ward. “You’ve not answered my question.”
Ryan set his pint down and leaned forward. “Did you record Spalding’s confession that implicated Carrier and make a copy for yourself?”
Fitzmaurice nodded. “You know me well, John Ryan.”
“Did you use a video camcorder or a tape recorder?”
“A camcorder, of course.”
Ryan held out his hand. “Let me have the disk with the video file on it.”
“I can’t just give it to you. Noel Chancy would know in a instant that I am your source.”
“Is the confession on the Garda server?”
“Yes.”
Ryan smiled, took out a business card, wrote on it, and pushed it toward Fitzmaurice. “Take the DVD to a city branch library where no one knows you, use one of the computers, and send it to the Web address on the back of the card.”
Fitzmaurice picked up the card and waved it at Ryan. “This is all well and good, but how does one explain the sudden appearance of a Garda interrogation video on the World Wide Web?”
“Are the Garda computers harder to crack than the Pentagon’s? A sixteen-year-old-boy in Norway ran riot in the U.S. military computers earlier this year, and from what the newspaper’s technology reporter tells me, the U.S. government still doesn’t know how deep the boy penetrated. So I should think we have more than adequate cover and deniability. In this particular instance I would imagine that some college student viewed the video while probing the Garda computers during a cyber visit, decided it was a worthy and interesting example of his technical wizardry, and put it on the Web for all to see.”