“Maybe you told her in bed.”
I laughed. There was nothing to say to that.
He considered my laughter for a few heartbeats. It was not wise to laugh at Halil because he was a man whose pride was easily hurt, and a man who repaid hurt with death, but this time he let it pass. “She blamed you for the man’s betrayal.”
That was an easy accusation to rebut. “I didn’t know where Seamus Geoghegan was, so I couldn’t have betrayed him. I was in Lebanon when it happened, and he was captured in Belfast.” Seamus was the Provisional IRA’s star, the il Hayaween of Ireland, and Roisin had given him to the British. Or so the Brits had said, and that accusation had finished Roisin. Her response had been to blame me, but she was the one who died.
Yet still her accusation echoed down the years. These men needed me, or rather they needed my sailing skills, yet still they worried that I might not be what I seemed. I tried to reassure Halil. “I’ve held my secrets for four years, even though I had no prospect of being fully trusted again, so surely, if I was one of those CIA agents, I would have given up and gone home long ago?”
“So the girl was lying?” Halil wanted to believe my denials. Not that I would have been allowed within ten miles of him if he seriously believed the old story, but he wanted to make sure.
“Roisin saw plots everywhere. She was also a very destructive woman, and that was why she betrayed Seamus Geoghegan.”
He frowned. “I don’t understand.”
Dear God, I thought, but now I had to try and explain psychology to a terrorist? “Seamus is frightened of women. He’s the bravest man ever born in Ireland, but he doesn’t have the courage to ask a girl for a dance because he thinks all women are perfect. He thinks all women are the Virgin Mary. I suspect Roisin tried to seduce Seamus, failed, and so she punished him.” I could think of no other explanation. Seamus had been one of my closest friends—and perhaps still was, though it had been four years since I had last seen him. He was now in America, a fugitive from British vengeance. He had been betrayed, arrested, tried and sentenced, but a year later, in a brilliantly staged IRA coup, he had escaped from the Long Kesh prison camp. By then Roisin was dead, for her betrayal of Seamus had earned her a bullet in the skull.
“You saw her die?” Halil asked.
“Yes.” She had died in Lebanon where she had been attending the Hasbaiya terrorist training camp. It had been Roisin’s keenest ambition to have the IRA send her on that course, and her eagerness had been transmuted by suspicion into an accusation that she planned to betray Hasbaiya as well as Seamus. Thus, as a favor to their Irish allies as well as to themselves, the Palestinians had arranged her execution.
“You didn’t try to stop the killing?” Halil asked me.
“Why should I have done?” I even managed a small callous laugh.
“Because you loved her.”
“But she betrayed my friend,” I said, and I saw, in the sudden poisonous recurrence of memory, the split second when the vivid blood had spurted from Roisin’s punctured skull to splash among the yellow stones. I had been wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh which I had wrapped about my face because the hot wind was blowing gusts of powdery sand off the hill’s crest. The keffiyeh had prevented Roisin from recognizing me, a small mercy. For a few moments, as the flies had gathered thick on the bloody margin of her death wound, I had suspected that I too was about to be shot for the heinous crime of being an American, but instead I had been curtly ordered to bury her. Afterward the Palestinians had questioned me about Roisin, trying to determine how much she had known and how much she might have betrayed to her masters in Washington. I had given them what reassurances I could, and then, shriven of her accusations but still not wholly trusted, I was cast into the outer darkness and given nothing but trifling jobs.
Till now, when it was Halil’s turn to assay my guilt or innocence in the shadowy scales of an old suspicion and, as he stared at me, I wondered once again why a man of his reputation was caught up in such a small matter as the six occupied counties of Northern Ireland. The death of a few Brits in that wild damp island could hardly count for much in il Hayaween’s wider world, and certainly not at a time when the Arab world had found a new champion to flaunt Islam’s banner in the face of the hated Americans.
And perhaps Halil sensed his interest was raising an unhealthy curiosity in me for he suddenly waved a dismissive hand. “Look at the boat,” he said off-handedly, “and tell me your opinion.” It seemed my suggestion of using a power-boat had not met his approval and so, under the silent gaze of Shafiq, Halil and his two bodyguards, I clambered about Corsaire. I did not have nearly enough time to make a proper survey, but I decided she was a handy craft, well made and well maintained. Her mainsail was furled inside her aluminium mast, while her vast genoa was stored below to keep it from the ravages of sunlight. Her hull was fiberglass and her deck was teak. A sturdy inflatable dinghy was folded away in an aft locker, together with an electric-powered pump to inflate it. She was a sensibly designed boat, and the only feature I disliked was her engine which, though capable enough at sixty horsepower, was fuelled by gasoline, but at least the motor banged into healthy life as soon as I connected the batteries and turned the ignition key.
I poked and pried through the accommodations below. Many of the French owner’s belongings were still aboard; thus in the aft cabin I discovered a sweater, a half-bottle of brandy hidden behind the pilot books, a copy of Playboy, two tins of sardines, a can of sugar, a sleeping bag, the top half of a bikini and a broken pair of sunglasses. I lifted the main cabin sole to find the bilge filled with flexible water tanks between which was the decaying body of a rat; clearly the source of the boat’s foul stench. Rat poison lay in white chunks on top of the shiny keel-bolts. I lifted the stinking remains of the rat and, to Shafiq’s shuddering disgust, carried it topside where I chucked it into the harbor.
“You like the boat?” Halil asked me.
“I’d prefer a diesel engine.”
“Why?”
“Gasoline fumes explode. Diesel is safer. But she’ll do.” The engine compartment was well ventilated and equipped with an automatic fire-extinguisher slaved to a gas-alarm so that, even in the unlikely event of a fuel-fire, Corsaire would probably survive. “She’s not a bad boat.” I spoke unfairly for she was better than that; she was an elegant, nicely built craft and, judging from her broad beam and deep cabin, she would probably prove a stable sea boat. She had clearly been equipped for long voyages because she had a single sideband radio mounted with the expensive instruments above her chart table.
“You can take her to America?” Halil asked me. He was sitting in the center cockpit, close to the big destroyer wheel.
“Sure,” I said cheerfully, “as long as she’s prepared properly.”
“Meaning what?” Halil was suspicious.
“For a start I need to get her out of the water and have her hull scrubbed down. She’ll want a couple of layers of good anti-fouling paint. Then she’s got to be equipped and stocked for a three-month voyage. I’m told there are two Irish lads going with me, so I’ll need food for them and—”
“Make a list,” Halil interrupted me.
“She needs a liferaft, charts…”
“Make a list,” he said impatiently.
“And there’s paperwork!” I warned him. “I’ll need a bill of sale, a Tunisian clearance permit, insurance papers—”
“Make a list!” he snapped at me again.