“Nice of you to come in person.” His tongue slicked up the corner of his mouth like a sleepy lion’s. She knew his voice immediately. Brian Donaldson.
She took out her cigarettes and lit one, offered them to Donaldson but he refused, tipping his glass at her as if one weakness was enough. He was in his midforties and handsome beyond the scars. A square jaw, blue eyes and the manner of a man in charge. His face had wrinkled into the memory of a smile, tide marks around the eyes and mouth.
“Kevin Hatcher’s dead.” She didn’t want to tell him Kevin was injured. They might go to the hospital and finish the job.
He shook his head. “Who’s this?”
“Kevin Hatcher,” she repeated. “Hatcher and Terry Hewitt were working together on a book, about expats in New York.”
“Irish expats?”
“Scottish. They took photos of people, street portraits, and Terry wrote a little bit of text to go with them. A coffee-table book. A light thing really, an excuse so that they could go off on a trip to New York together.” She imagined Kevin and Terry eating peanuts on the plane, giggling together, and found herself tearful. “Two good guys. Now they’re both dead. I told you about the guy who came to my house? Michael Collins. Very threatening, said he spoke for your people.”
“He doesn’t.”
“You said you didn’t know him.”
“Neither I do, but I know who speaks for us.”
“I think you knew who I was talking about when I described him before, but I wanted to show you this.” She unrolled the photocopies. “I found him in the background of one of the portraits.”
Donaldson peered down at the grainy enlargement, flattened it and looked again.
Collins was laughing in perfect profile, and his glasses were perched on his nose.
“Is this the whole photo?”
“No, it’s an enlargement. That’s why it’s so grainy.”
“I was going to say, it’s not a very good photo of anyone.”
He sifted slowly through the other pictures.
Collins wasn’t as distinct in them-she wouldn’t have recognized him herself if his face hadn’t been emblazoned on her mind-but Donaldson didn’t seem to be looking at him anyway. She watched him examine the street, the buildings on either side, the fat man by the driver’s door, the car license plate, the slice of the black woman’s face at the edge of the photocopy.
Going back to the enlargement, he looked through all the pictures, one by one, stone faced. He pushed them across the table to her.
“Do you know him?”
“Never seen him before.” His tone was studiously flat, his eyes steady and expressionless.
“Yes you have.” She rolled the pictures up into a tight cylinder. “I’m not researching a story, Donaldson, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Journalists are always researching a story. They don’t wonder what time it is without researching a story.”
“This isn’t about a story.” She tapped the rolled-up sheets. “This cunt sent someone to my son’s school this morning. He’s been to my fucking house. I need to know what kind of threat he is.”
Donaldson’s expression didn’t waver. “We’ve all lost family.”
“You bastard.”
He blinked, lifted his glass, and swallowed three-quarters of a pint of Guinness, watching her over the rim. Placing his glass on the table, he did a clean sweep of his top lip with his tongue. Never once did his gaze waver. He was waiting for her to speak.
“If violence is a gamble…” she said carefully, “if it’s about who has the higher stake, remember that I’m talking about my son here.”
Donaldson stared through her, his fingertips turning the rim of the empty glass as white scum slid slowly down the inside.
“Do you hear me, Donaldson?”
“I can hear ye fine, girlie.”
She pointed across the table with the rolled-up sheets, leaned across at him, and poked him hard in his soft chest. “Tell your friend this and mark it welclass="underline" neither you, nor he, nor the entire mustered armies of thugs who’ve hijacked the history of the Fenian Brotherhood of Ireland want to get between me and my young.”
Donaldson looked down at where she had prodded him and slowly raised his eyebrows in amusement, as if a threat from her was a joke.
Paddy could feel herself getting hot and angry; never a safe combination.
“Donaldson, for all I care you may be the king of the fucking Maze, you may have cut your own ear off in a bet-you might just be that fucking hard-but if there’s a whisper of a threat to my wean, I will find you and I will ruin you.”
She sat back and caught her breath, hoping she frightened him a little bit.
Donaldson smiled. “Miss Meehan, d’ye not think every wumman who’s ever lost a child thinks that? We’re all fighting for our children, they’re why we’re fighting.”
She stood up and leaned across the table, her nose an inch from his. “I’m not talking about the struggle. I’m talking about you. I’ll ruin you.”
He laughed a puff of grainy Guinness at her. “Are ye trying to threaten me?”
She sat back down and looked at him. A total miscalculation. He hadn’t flinched, hadn’t even bothered to keep his poker face on. In fact, he looked a little bored, as if he’d heard a hundred threats of bloody violence and ruin.
She sighed and looked out of the booth. “I was trying to, but it doesn’t seem to be taking.”
Donaldson chuckled to himself, shaking his tits at her, his neck folding over into two round rolls.
She held the sheets up. “I will find out who this guy is.”
He swatted her adamance away with a flick of his wrist. “Aye, ye maybe will. Ye maybe will.”
“Have you thought about the effect these killings are going to have on your organization? Killing teenagers in Ulster is one thing-”
“We don’t kill Ulster teenagers.” For a flash his nose wrinkled, mouth turning up at the corner, shoulder rising as if he couldn’t bear the accusation.
“Charles Love,” she said, referring to a sixteen-year-old Catholic boy accidentally killed earlier in the year by a remote control IRA bomb intended for soldiers.
“Love was an accident.” Donaldson narrowed his eyes. “Seamus Duffy wasn’t: the RUC shot him dead last year. He was fifteen.” He shrugged. “We could go on and on.”
“Killing journalists on neutral soil is going to undermine everything you’ve worked for. Even your Americans won’t fund this sort of thing.”
“We are not killing journalists on neutral soil.”
“Does that mean Scotland ’s part of the civil war now?”
“No.”
“So you don’t count Kevin and Terry as journalists? Why? They weren’t anything else. I’ve known Terry since he was a teenager and he would never work for British Intelligence.”
“You’d be surprised who’s working for British Intelligence.” It was an aside, a sad note to self more than a statement. Looking for a consolation drink, Donaldson tipped his pint glass a fraction, remembered it was empty, and set it straight.
“You’re wrong,” Paddy told him. “Two nights ago Kevin said there was no one after him. He thought Terry had been killed by someone he met in Liberia, for Christsake. If you’re justifying this by saying they were part of some big espionage plot, you’re wrong.”
Donaldson leaned over the table at her and spoke slowly. “We are not involved in this, officially, unofficially or in any of the gray areas in between. We didn’t do it. We wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t us.”
“As far as you know,” she said flatly, implying that he was nothing but a foot soldier.