"What's with her?" Reedy asked. "Did I cuss or belch without knowing?"
"No, nothing like that," Marlene said as she scrambled to collect her things. "But it looks like we may be heading back to Manhattan sooner than I expected. Thank you so much, everyone. I'll explain later, but we have to run. See you at the parade, James."
"I'll be three sheets to the wind on green beer, so I may not see you first," he shouted as she hurried away. "I'm the second guy in on the right in the second row."
Marlene disappeared out of the restaurant door, which slammed behind her. Reedy looked around at the others and shrugged. "What an odd group of people," he said.
21
It was so simple, Lucy thought as she ran out of the restaurant. "A Son of Man will march among the sons of Ireland and silence the critic for the good of us all." Of course, it has to mean the St. Patrick's Day Parade!
The line in the poem was obviously a code to proceed with a plan to march in the parade, probably mixed in with one of the legitimate Irish groups, and then…And then what? "Silence the critic for the good of us all"? What in the hell does that mean? They're going to kill somebody who's critical? Of what? And kill who?
Lucy called John Jojola and asked him to get in touch with Tran and meet her in Manhattan as soon as possible. "What about Jaxon?" he asked. "You going to call him or do you want me to?"
"Neither," she said. "Please don't call him, not right now. I want to talk to you about this first, but not on a cell phone; they're too easy to intercept. I read about it in Scientific American."
In the days following the murder of Cian Magee, Lucy had gone into a deep depression, deeper than she'd let on to her folks, and wanted to return immediately to New Mexico. She'd only agreed to stay until Christmas in the hopes that being with her family would help.
Racked by guilt, she spent hours trying to find any Cian Magee family members or friends she could for a memorial service. Of the former, there were none. And of the latter, there were three she located from a partly burned address book found in his apartment. Two of them had never met him because he didn't go out and they'd never visited his bookstore. I only talked to him on email, one told her. I'm a shut-in over in Newark, and we both liked to talk about the Celts. He loved that saying by an anonymous Roman philosopher, "Celts are the men that heaven made mad, for their battles are all merry and their songs are all sad."
I didn't know that, thank you, Lucy had said, and hung up. The depth of Cian's isolation ate at her. I should have been a better friend, she thought.
The memorial service had been a miserable affair: a cold, blustery day beneath gray skies that spit hard bits of snow that stung like sand. The only mourners present were the minister for hire, herself, her mother-who had insisted on paying so that Cian could be buried next to his parents instead of a potter's field-and Ariadne Stupenagel, who'd asked if it was okay to write the obituary.
A few days later, the reporter had followed up with a touching narrative about the life and death of Cian Magee that had woven the life of a lonely man into the question marks surrounding his murder. Stupenagel had pushed hard to get the story about why Lucy was at the Celtic bookstore when it was firebombed. But Lucy and her father had agreed with Jaxon that it was not the time for the reporter to write a story about the Sons of Man.
If they still exist, and if they are behind these events, Jaxon had said, then we have to find out who they are and what they intend to do. We have to solve the rest of the poem's riddle, and we won't be able to do that if they think we're onto them.
You'd think that any group that has managed to keep its presence a secret for two hundred years, which I'm having a hard time buying, her father had said, would surely duck back down the rabbit hole before you could say Alice at the first hint of publicity.
Right, Jaxon had agreed. If they do exist, we need them to feel like their secret is still safe. I'm not sure how much I buy into all of this, either, but I go back to the thought I had with Cian and that is the possibility of an Isle of Man nationalist connection to the Irish Republican Army. Are you sure you don't remember the names these families adopted from the book?
No, Lucy had said, shaking her head. I didn't get to see that part of the book. Cian mentioned them but he was trying to save some of the story for…for you…and building the dramatic tension for me like any good Irish storyteller… And then there was no time.
Lucy had not told Jaxon everything Cian had described in the book. She didn't know why she was reluctant to do so, but she just couldn't get past the fact that he arrived at Cian's apartment only after it was too late to save him.
Back in New Mexico, she'd begun connecting dots like her father, though she wasn't aware of his notepad, and hers kept leading to a conclusion that he still refused to see and that was that Jaxon was a prime suspect. Why would he be so anxious for me to keep quiet about the Sons of Man? she thought. Then she'd gone to Colorado to see her mother and had been accidentally handed the answer to the riddle. The St. Patrick's Day Parade, when the Sons of Ireland marched!
Returning to New York, she felt like the coyote in a story Jojola had told her: he kept returning to the trap, knowing it was dangerous, but he just couldn't stay away "until one day, he got too close." It was a parable along the lines of curiosity killing the cat, but Lucy wondered if she or the coyote really had a choice in the matter or if it was their fate.
Two days after her return, Lucy got a call on her cell phone. She looked at the caller ID and didn't bother to answer; she knew there would be no one on the other end if she did. Instead, she waited until 7:00 p.m. and then "went for a walk" with Ned.
Leaving her twin brothers in her parents' loft on Crosby and Grand, they strolled to Canal Street, then headed east into the heart of Chinatown. Pretending to be window-shopping like tourists, they suddenly nipped into Chen's Shanghai Emporium on Baxter and walked quickly to the back of the store. The family who owned and ran the store ignored them, even when they passed the sign that read Employees Only and went into a back storage area.
Maneuvering past boxes of silk gowns and rubber-soled slippers embroidered with dragons and flowers, along with crates of "authentic" Mandarin swords and brass Buddhas, they found themselves face-to-face with an enormous Asian man. He was dressed in a bright yellow and red, flower-printed Aloha shirt and baggy jeans; the outfit didn't match his expression, which was essentially no expression at all and never changed as he opened the door to the office he was guarding and indicated they should go in.
Inside, John Jojola and Tran were playing a game of chess. Jojola had just taken Tran's queen and placed his king in checkmate, which set the volatile Vietnamese gangster into a fit of rage. "You cheat, you American pig," he said, and added a few more slurs in Vietnamese.
"You're the contents of a water buffalo's bladder," Lucy translated.
"I've been called worse," Jojola chuckled, "including by him. Now, pay up, you old scoundrel, before I call immigration and have you thrown out of the country."
Still grumbling and giving Lucy the evil eye, Tran yanked a fat wallet out of his pants pocket, plucked a dollar bill from its interior, and flung it at Jojola. "May your descendants look like apes and marry poorly because of your unnatural greed," he cursed.
Lucy hugged both of the men and nodded toward the door. "Shouldn't that guy be like all dressed in black, with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, and aviator sunglasses?"
"How cliche," Tran scoffed. "Why would I want a bodyguard who looks like a bodyguard? Nobody gives a guy in an Aloha shirt a second thought."