Maureen was dressed for action: tight jeans, black sweater, black beret, black raincoat. Seeing her with her long, reddish hair and gray, unfeeling eyes, you could imagine the face of the assassin or the terrorist. She might as well have an Uzi under that long coat, might as well be waiting to blow up a school bus, or just waiting for death to deal or be dealt.
It was exactly nine o’clock Monday morning, twenty-three hours after Matthew took the package from the man in the buffet.
Matthew had explained about the man he met in Paddington Station and the package and the mission, and when Maureen had complained she didn’t understand any of it, Matthew had grown angry because he was confused as well. The words that denigrated the struggle—the mocking, cynical words of the stranger in the buffet—had wounded him more than he knew. He told her to shut up and even slapped her, but that had not cowed Maureen. She had come back at him, teeth and hands and rage, and the tussle had alarmed the manager of the hotel, a small-boned Indian man who smelled of curry and had brown teeth. He threatened to call the police and that had calmed them down—not ended the fight, just made it a matter of silences and glowering looks at each other. Maureen had spent the afternoon by herself, walking the streets of the great, gray city, thinking about things, thinking about Matthew, thinking about poor bloody Brian lying in his own blood in the urinal of that public house. Most of all, thinking about the package and the man in the buffet who had so threatened Matthew and who had probably caused all the troubles that had fallen on the group in the last several days.
Maureen was certain she was going to meet him at this address.
It was an attached town house, graystone and Georgian, part of a street full of similar houses in a treeless neighborhood near Hyde Park. Heavy traffic noises from Maida Vale echoed down the block and made the curious, peopleless silence of the houses that much more sinister. There’d never be children on this block, Maureen thought; it was barren from birth.
She rang the bell.
Henry McGee opened the door for her. He was dressed as she was, ready for action. He wore a black pullover and black fatigue jacket.
“Right on time, honey,” Henry said. “Is your boyfriend following the plan?”
“He runs our operation,” she said, explaining. She looked at him closely. He was probably as old as Matthew but there was a difference. The eyes weren’t cold. Matthew had cold eyes, even in the middle of operations. This one was just as hard in the eyes but there was something else. Something that burned.
“Anything you say,” Henry said, smiling. He led her to the right, to an old-fashioned parlor filled with embroidered things and wallpaper flowers. The lamps had fringes on the shades. The room made her smile because it was bizarre in this context. Henry saw the smile. He decided something.
“I’m just borrowing it for the time being,” Henry said.
Maureen looked around the room. She might have been a child in her aunt’s house in Dublin. Framed photographs sat on a sideboard, and above the fireplace was a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II as a young woman. Her aunt had a photo of the Pope.
“You have quaint friends. English friends.” She turned and gave back his blazing look.
For a moment they stood apart and then Henry smiled again. “You take your friends where you can get them,” Henry said. “You strike me as not being as dumb as Matthew. I’m not saying you’re smart but you can show me that later.”
“I’ve got nothin’ to prove to you. I don’t even know why I’m here.”
“Because I wanted you here.”
“And you’ve not the control of me—”
“Save it,” Henry said. It was like a snap—quick, savage, the sense of necks breaking.
“What the bloody hell is this about? And why’d you kill Brian Parnell?”
“Brian Parnell wasn’t important. It was the message that was important and Brian didn’t figure. You figure—”
“And if I’d been caught in the roundup?”
“But you weren’t, girl. You weren’t. I want you to siddown and shut up and listen a bit.”
“I’ll stand.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Then stand.” Henry sat down on a stiff Chippendale. He crossed his legs. He looked at her for a moment.
“One million pounds. English pounds. That’s one million six hundred thousand dollars by the morning paper, and I like to think in terms of dollars because it makes the money more real.”
“What money?”
“I told Matthew it was a hundred thousand pounds to him. Well, it’s nine hundred thousand to me. What I need here is someone I can trust and that’s going to be you.”
“To do what? Rob a bank?”
“I can take care of that, honey. Robbin’ banks is easy but banks just don’t have that kind of cash lying around. Better that you rob the people who put their money in the banks. Let them make the withdrawals. On your behalf. You and me, girl, are in partnership, and there’s only gonna be two partners in the long run. What we need is a setup. It’s gonna be you or it’s gonna be Matthew. Which do you want it to be?”
“You’re crazy. I’ll not betray—”
Henry McGee held up his hand. “Betray. What do you think this is about? Matthew is greedy and just a little bit too stupid but I’m surprised you haven’t noticed that before. Matthew’s got you believing in him and that makes me wonder about you. You want betrayal as a reason for something, then you ought to look at Matthew O’Day, the famous Irish patriot and terrorist, who sold out his kith and kin for a lot less than thirty pieces of silver.”
She felt a sense of disorientation. She would sit down after all. The room was too familiar, too old, too much a part of her past; yet she had never been in this room before.
“Matthew is getting out of the game. Too long in the tooth—”
“Who are you?”
“You might say I was with SAS. Or something like that. On the other hand, I’m probably not.”
Jesus Christ. Maureen felt all the blood drain from her face. She stared at the hard man across from her but he was still smiling and he hadn’t moved. She looked at the window, the doorway.
“Don’t,” Henry said.
“What the hell game is this then?”
“A little game of getting rich. Y’see, you asked me about Brian. Well, I got Brian from Matthew. He said Brian was humping you and he was willing to betray him for a consideration. The consideration was that we wouldn’t kill him. We thought about it and took him up on it—”
“You killed those people in the pub on Galway Bay—”
“Not at all. Do you think we’d kill innocent people?”
“You do it all the time—”
Henry smiled. “Was he? I mean, Brian. Was he humping you like Matthew said?”
For the first time since coming into the strange room, she felt fear. It was hard to put her finger on it but there was a certain madness to this man, a madness without edges or depth. Not hatred, just cruelty for its own sake. She looked at the door again.
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe Matthew O’Day would betray any of us—”
“And the farm. Who knew about the farm except Matthew? And the cell? And who turned the lot of you in to the Garda after the bomb went off in that public house and killed all of those poor people?”
“You killed them yourself.”
“If you want to believe that, fine.”
Silence.
A clock struck the quarter hour with the first notes of Westminster chimes. The room was chill and the silence penetrated her bones until she shivered.
“Maureen, everything in this world is about money. Your cause, your terrorism, your puny strikes against the queen by blowing up postmen in Belfast… It’s pathetic when you come down to it, because nothing matters except the money. If your bunch had expended all its energies in getting money the last twenty years, you could have bought Ulster from the English, you could have made every Catholic family in Derry a millionaire. Christ, you’re all a lot of losers. I almost regret wasting my breath explaining this to you.”
“You’re a Yank, you’re not SAS. What the hell do you have to do with us?”
“Honey, my nationality is green, the color of money. So Matthew came to Dublin when we asked him and he got the proposition presented to him and he took it.”
“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.