Later clippings reported that McBree admitted to attending a training camp in Lebanon, and they cited off-the-record speculation that he had been training both PLO and ETA guerrillas in hand-to-hand combat.
McBree was pictured in New York, a stolen snapshot of him at an airport. Just as Aoife had said, he was sent there with a mandate to restructure Noraid, ostensibly to make it more efficient but actually to shift power to a new raft of soldiers. He was ruthless in taking power away from the factions supporting the armed struggle and giving it to those who wanted a negotiated settlement. McBree’s hand-to-hand combat training must have come in useful, Paddy thought. His wife had stayed home in Ireland while he was gone and a bomb had gone off near his house. Police suspected infighting in the Republican movement.
He had been in her house. She thought back to the blunt letter opener, imagined herself trying to stab him, and realized how lucky she had been. Sweating lightly, she sat back and saw Bunty’s Monkey watching her, his arms crossed, looking smug.
The Donaldson clippings told her little of interest. He was pictured at a couple of press conferences, looking slimmer, less debauched. His son had died in the Maze and Donaldson himself was forced out of Northern Ireland after a turf war.
The joint clippings filled out his story. His son, David Donaldson, had been stabbed to death aged nineteen by a junior member of a Loyalist paramilitary group just two days after he was brought in on remand. The assassin had been given an amnesty under Martin McBree’s orders, only to be found with his throat cut the day after his release. Rumor had it that McBree averted a gang war to give his group leverage with the prison authorities, and to afford the Donaldson family the courtesy of killing the assassin themselves.
Donaldson owed McBree. He would have phoned him the minute she left the Shammy, reiterating every detail of what she had said, telling him that her son’s safety was her only concern.
She sat back and thought about what Aoife had said: McBree was a good guy but only compared to the likes of the Shankill Butchers.
NINETEEN. CALLUM IN THE STREET
I
Maggie, the social worker assigned to his case, came in the morning and sat with Callum in the living room. She asked him questions about how he felt and he guessed the right answers: scared about the press, ashamed of his offenses, happy to be free. She waited long after they had run out of things to say to each other, drank a cup of tea Elaine gave her, and then said she’d come back next week, same time.
Elaine avoided him. She spent most of her time in the kitchen. It was two in the afternoon and she was no longer strained but nippy now, sniping at the two babies, waking them when they fell asleep, trying to make them sleep when they were awake.
Callum hadn’t moved from the sofa since watching Count Duckula with the kids before school, because no one had told him to and he didn’t want to just wander around the place. He went to the toilet a couple of times, accepted a cheese sandwich from Elaine and a cup of tea when Maggie came, and watched the television all day while the toddler came in and out. Sometimes she approached him, curious, pawing at his trouser leg, but she always went away. He didn’t know how to play with her.
Finally Elaine came back into the living room.
“Right.” She had her purse open and was looking through it. “Here’s two quid. Could you go three doors up and get me four pints of milk and a loaf?”
Callum looked around. She couldn’t mean the toddler. “Me?”
“Aye. Save me going.” She held the notes out to him and he took them. They looked at each other. She went into the hall and came back with his coat. “Just out the door and to the left, three doors down.”
He stood in the close and looked across the road to the door where he had seen the rat feet hiding. He could see straight through to the dirt in the backyard, to the bin shed and next to it a big puddle with two small children crouched on its shore, playing. Women bustled past the close mouth, hurrying down the street, summer tops and jeans. Old women wore overcoats.
He stepped out of the close, one, head down, keeping close to the wall, two three four five steps, slipping along to the left until he came to a shop door with stickers advertising cigarettes and bananas. Nineteen steps outside, alone, and nothing bad had happened.
The door jingled as he opened it. A small Asian man looked up from the counter and then looked away again. Callum hurried over to hide behind the shelves, struggling to catch his breath. Twenty-six steps outside and nothing had happened. No one had looked at him twice. No one had recognized him. Maybe he wasn’t as famous as Mr. Stritcher said he was.
The radio was on in the shop, a jagged song with an insistent fast beat that the cheery DJ announced was by somebody Hammer. Callum liked it. He played another one, a slower song with long notes and a sad way about it.
Callum stood still, staring at the bread and the boxes of cakes, and listened to the end. Wonderful. A mind can only hold one thought at a time and his mind now was full of beautiful music. He could feel the beat on his face, the stirring, sweeping notes through his chest. He wanted to dance, to sway and move his feet.
“Ay, you there, are ye going to buy something?”
The shopkeeper was talking to him. Callum stepped around the stand and looked at the man. He was tiny really, wore a turban and that made him look bigger, but he was less than five foot four and skinny, comical. “Eh?”
“Are you going to buy something or just stand there?” The man was so small and so angry. He wouldn’t have lasted a minute in prison. Men that slight couldn’t get that angry in prison unless they had a knife or a minder, and then, Callum realized, even if they had a really big argument it wouldn’t come to blows. That was why he was so angry, because it was safe to be angry. He poked his finger at Callum rudely.
“Yeah, son, I can see the top of your head over those shelves there. What you doing standing so long? You’re not stealing from me, eh?”
Callum held his jacket open to show he had nothing, hadn’t hidden a loaf in there. “I was listening to the radio. Forgot what I was doing.”
“Aye, yeah, you like those tunes nowadays, bang bang bang? You like them, you young ones, at your discos. Load of old rubbish, man, garbage.”
The tiny old man and Callum smiled at each other. You young ones. I am young.
“What you come in for anyway, eh?”
“Milk.”
“Over there at the back.” He waved Callum towards a fridge with a glass door. Cartons of green and blue were stacked up on top of each other.
“I don’t know which one to get.”
“Who is it for? For you?”
“No, a baby.”
“Blue.”
Callum put it on the counter and held out the two pound notes. “And a loaf, please.”
“You get that off the shelf. White, brown?”
They gave you a choice of white or brown in prison but they tasted the same. He thought he remembered the cheese sandwich being white.
“White, I think.”
The old man punched the price into the till and charged him one twenty. He gave him his change. “Where you from?”
“Just moved near here.”
“Good,” he said, still sounding angry, but half smiling as well. “You be a good customer to me, yes? Don’t give your money to those bastards in supermarket.”
“OK.” Callum smiled, taking the change from him. “OK.”
Outside he smiled all the way along the road, swinging the loaf by the neck, thinking about the music he had heard and the funny man. He was at the close mouth before he realized he hadn’t been counting.