Too late for anyone else is just the beginning for you. Jeremy could not understand the sentiment. He walked home, and he thought of how he had always been too late.
Even Gunner had known it.
He had warned him.
Impossible Wright had forgotten, for example, that they were too late for the woman shot dead in her driveway at Dortmund. Impossible Wright had forgotten that they were too late for the family optimistic enough to have repainted their walls before the lot of them was gunned down at home. Impossible that Wright had forgotten that they were too late at every turn.
Jeremy thought of the afternoon Gunner had warned him not infrequently. Gunner’s hand long and white on the horseshoe latch, the tension around the mouth. Jeremy had agitated something hard in his pocket, change or keys, as Gunner said, “There’s a witchy air around our rooms these days. I’ve a mind to disappear, Allsworth.”
And because, at the time, he had not known they were too late, Jeremy had slid an unimpressed screen over his own unnerving. He had returned warning with warning: they’d find him. They had before.
“There are places you won’t follow.” Gunner had grinned, then let the smile fall off his face. And was it memory or some retrospective flourish: that space between Gunner’s eyes closing like a fist, how something had passed overhead, drawing a shadow? “There are few places to begin anew and many to end, Allsworth. Maybe I want to do the democratic thing and die.”
Jeremy could not unconvince Gunner of the sense blood remembered, that he was born knowing to scream for air, ancient indecencies—so why not the other thing? His sense was his father died so his son would be a freedom fighter who’d die for his son to be a freedom fighter, death his antecedent. “From wee boys on, it is sixers in our streets, vehicles of war driving by our doorsteps. We were Fianna Éireann when we could walk.”
On that afternoon, they had volleyed. Morbid sentiment. Official craic. Irish platitudes. You were not born a soldier. An alibi. I will not have someone thrown in the ditch for my body, and you’re somewhere in London drinking gin and tonic. No one asked you to smuggle Barrett Lights. Sure of that now, are you?
They had gotten tired.
They had reached a point that Gunner had laughed quietly, or shook noisily. His eyes squeezed and his jaw hinged, a little askew, and Jeremy had stared.
Gunner had been quiet a moment, thumbing a fingernail beneath the edge of his lower lip. “Feeling’s not right, Allsworth. It’s nothing you can put a name to, but I feel it on my neck, in endless smiles. The circumference constricts. You could get me out of here.”
Too late for anyone else. Yes, Gunner had known it was too late.
And of course Gunner had been right. Gunner had known the push of history was already beyond them.
Because too late was just the beginning. In those days, One Rock had had a mostly unrequited penchant for information on Terrence Feeney, a Sinn Féin man with ties to the Social Democratic and Labour parties and a proselytizing touch. Feeney had shown himself dangerous at the last ardfheis. Feeney could light fire through a microphone, that big voice that made ideas big, individuals big: you can be a terror of a hero with a homemade spectacle and a free heart. He was less careful than Adams, presented as the great stylist of street warfare with his everyman pathos and dirty fingernails. But it was still unclear whether Feeney was only a starlet party whip or whether his orations included operations commands, still unclear how directly he killed.
One Rock had pressed Jeremy, and Jeremy had pressed Gunner. He had told Gunner the way out of informing was bringing home a human trophy. There were tactics passed from One Rock. Jeremy looked at Gunner and told him to bait Feeney with botched ops. Lay on the rue and missed opportunities. Shake your head. Feeney will say next time. They are so hopeful, soldiers. The soldier will want to have learned better. The soldier will share a new plan.
“Or he will think I’ve turned tout,” Gunner said.
And so it went, the regular argument over whether Jeremy was trying to get Gunner killed. How they do it: You lose your sight first. They just drive you over a border with a bag over your head. Maybe over the radio Phil Lynott is singing. Maybe you hear the car door slam or open. There is a sound to the end of brotherhood coming out of a gun. Feeney was too beloved, Gunner believed. Mistakes are seminal in his proximity. They cascade in the gazers and fans.
“He’s protecting Feeney,” One Rock had said. “His own fear being the alibi.”
“He was quaking.”
One Rock tilted his head. “They could have been movie stars.”
In the quiet notches of days that followed, Gunner had repeated party lines, and Jeremy had called silence an insult to the deal. He had offered scant flattery for the rumors that trailed off, and he had bottled up his face so that it emitted no light. Air compressed, released. Someone was always holding his breath.
But no matter the approach, no matter the slices of persona Jeremy applied, Gunner had become less reliable. Sometimes, Jeremy waited at the tree or the lot or the back room, and Gunner didn’t show. Later, Gunner would ask how he’d have explained why he wasn’t at the garage or the shebeen.
“Use your artistic sensibilities,” Jeremy had said.
“Like Patrick Mayhew’s as he declares Britain neutral on Northern Ireland?”
“Or the ones involved smuggling guns,” Jeremy had said.
There had been, too, the time that Gunner changed the place of their meeting to Andytown, placing Jeremy on the same block as the May murder of a Sinn Féin member named Alan Lundy. There was the time a bullet smashed through a window less than a meter from Jeremy’s gullet; they both dropped beneath the desk, Gunner’s face blank as milk. And there was the time that, waiting in the alley behind a hair salon, it was not Gunner who came but Brendan Kelly, mouth curled like sideways question punctuation.
“Of all the places in all the world,” Jeremy had said the next day, speaking quickly to mitigate the tremble.
“This isn’t Casablanca,” Gunner had said.
“What reason had Brendan to be at the salon where you should have been?”
“Yourself is not the only one who wonders.”
The ominous matches persisted. It was a time of echoes. It was a time of double down. It was a time death came cheaper with big bombs, those bloody protest fireworks rearranging the composition of buildings. It was too late. Wright must remember that it had been too late.
Now, almost two decades removed with London beneath his feet, what did Jeremy remember though? Jeremy remembered that when, on television, they watched the president of the Republic of Ireland shake Gerry Adams’s hand, Wilmington had spit on the floor. He remembered that Gunner’s step lost its buoyancy. He remembered that one afternoon he had gone to St. Malachy’s, found himself surrounded by all that brightness, the thick white filigree that seemed to drip off the church ceiling, and he knelt and did not know whether to hope there was or was not a god. He remembered that. But most of all, what he remembered was the green philodendron falling down behind One Rock as he said that Gunner was dead, that Jeremy was too late.
“Was it fast?” Jeremy had asked.
“Dead on arrival,” One Rock had said.
“And the boy?”
“Went home with the grandmother.”
“And painless?”
One Rock had tilted his head. “No one ever does report back.” Jeremy had been too late.