“Hurts like hell.”
“Ammonia’s bad stuff,” he said sympathetically, “real bad.”
“How was I to know?” The girl was on the defensive now. “He doesn’t knock, he just comes into the house…”
“Like he owns it?” I finished for her.
“Oh, shit!” she said angrily. “Then why the hell are you calling yourself Dr. O’Neill?”
“None of your damned business,” I snarled, then struggled to my feet. My eyes were still streaming with tears and my throat felt as if I had gargled with undiluted sulphuric acid, but I was recovering. “Who the hell put electric light in here?”
“I did,” the girl said defiantly. “I’m a painter. I need decent light to work.”
“Did you put in the telephone as well?” Ted Nickerson asked her.
“Sure did.”
“Mind if I use it?”
“Help yourself. In the kitchen.”
The girl edged tentatively down the stairs that Captain Starbuck had built as steep as the companionways on his old whaling ships. One policeman was out in the car, and the other two were hovering nervously by the open front door. “Can we close the front door?” the girl demanded. “I’m kind of chilly.”
“Sure, ma’am.”
I went through into the living room from where I could hear Sergeant Nickerson grunting into the telephone in the kitchen. I found the new light switch and, in the glow of a lamp, saw a box of tissues on a table by the low sofa and plucked out a handful which I used to scrub my eyes. The tissues helped, though the remnants of the ammonia still stung like the devil.
The room, except for the electric light and the paintings, had not changed much. It was panelled in old pale oak and its low beamed ceiling was formed by the pine planks of the dormer storey upstairs. It was a shipwright’s house with a main floor of pegged oak that the girl had thoughtfully protected from paint drips with a dropcloth. The wide stone hearth was filled with ash on which I threw the crumpled tissues.
“Do you really own the house?” The girl had followed me into the living room.
“Yes.”
“Hell!” she said angrily, then, with her arms protectively folded across her breasts, she walked to one of the small windows that stared eastward toward the ocean. “The mailman told me he didn’t think Patrick McPhee was the owner, but I thought that was just troublemaking gossip.”
“McPhee’s always been full of shit,” I said savagely. “Marrying him was the worst day’s work Maureen ever did. So how long have you been here?”
“Three years, but I don’t live here permanently. I come here whenever I need to, but I’ve got a place of my own in New York.”
“Manhattan?”
“Sure, where else?” She turned to glare at me, as though the night’s misadventures were all my fault. “I’m sorry about your eyes.” She spoke grudgingly.
“Blame Patrick,” I said. I dislike my brother-in-law intensely.
“But I’ve invested in this place! I put in the electricity, and the phone!” She spoke accusingly. “I even had an estimate for central heating, but Maureen said I shouldn’t waste my money. I thought that was kind of weird, but I didn’t ask any questions. I was dumb, right? But I like this place too much. It’s the light.” She waved a peremptory hand at the window to explain herself.
“I know,” I said, and I did know. In fall and winter the light on the Cape is so clear and sharp that it seems like the world is newly minted. Thousands of painters had been drawn by that light, though most of them merely wasted good paint and canvas trying to capture it. Whether the girl was good or not I could not tell, for my eyesight was still smeared. In the dim electric light her canvases seemed full of anger and jaggedness, but that could just have been my mood.
“My name’s Sarah,” she said in a placatory tone, “Sarah Sing Tennyson.”
“Paul Shanahan,” I said, and almost added that it was nice to meet her, but that courtesy seemed inappropriate, so I left it out. “Sing?” I asked instead. “That’s an odd name.”
“My mother was Chinese.” Sarah Sing Tennyson was tall with very long, very straight and very black hair that framed a narrow, almost feral face. She had dark slanted eyes above high cheekbones. A good-looking trespasser, I thought sourly, if indeed she was a trespasser, for God only knew what the lawyers would make of this situation.
“When did you put the electricity in?” I asked lamely, supposing that at the very least I should have to reimburse her for that expense.
“Two summers ago.”
“I didn’t see any wires outside.”
“I had to bury the cables because this is all National Seashore land so you’re not allowed to string wires off poles. It was the same with the phone line.” She gave me a very hostile look. “It was expensive.”
More fool you, I thought. “And how much rent are you paying Patrick?”
“Is it your business?” She bridled.
“It’s my Goddamn house,” I bridled back. “And if my Goddamn brother-in-law lets my Goddamn house to some Goddamn girl, then it is my Goddamn business.”
“I am not a girl!” Sarah Sing Tennyson flared into instant and indignant hostility. I could allow her some irritation for being woken in the middle of the night, but even so she seemed to have an extraordinarily prickly character. “I am a woman, Mr. Shanahan, unless you wish to accept the appellation of ‘boy’?”
Oh sweet Jesus, I thought, the insanities that old Europe was spared, then I was saved from further linguistic tedium when the kitchen door opened and Ted Nickerson, still holding the telephone handset, stared at me. “Paul?”
“Ted.”
“I’m talking to a guy named Gillespie. Peter Gillespie. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“Nothing at all,” I said truthfully.
Nickerson had been staring oddly at me ever since he recognized me, and now his puzzlement only seemed to deepen. “He says he expected to see you in Europe. Does that make sense?”
Christ, I thought, but the CIA had been far quicker than I had expected. They had responded to my warning calls by putting out an alert. “We got a warning to look out for you two days ago, Paul,” Ted Nickerson said.
“Tell Gillespie I’ll call him in a few weeks.”
Ted shook his head. “I’ve got orders to hold you, Paul. Protective custody.” He moved his free hand to his holstered pistol, making Sarah Sing Tennyson gasp.
I half raised my hands in a gesture of supplication. “OK, Ted, no need for drama.”
“You’re not under arrest, Paul,” Ted said carefully, “just under police protection.” He spoke into the phone, telling whoever was at the other end that I was safely in the bag.
Which meant I had screwed up.
I met Peter Gillespie next morning. He came to the police station with an agent called Stuart Callaghan who was to be my bodyguard. “We guessed people might want to stop you talking?” Gillespie explained the bodyguard’s presence. “The guys with the missiles, right?”
“I guess they might too,” I said, though I suspected the people who wanted to stop me talking were more worried about the five million bucks in gold that should have paid for the Stinger missiles.
“You’ve had breakfast, Mr. Shanahan?” Gillespie had very punctiliously shown me his identification.
“Sure.”
“Then if you’re ready?” Gillespie was plainly eager to begin my debriefing. I was carrying, after all, over a decade of secrets that would feed the agency’s data banks. “We have a plane waiting at Hyannis Airport.” Gillespie tried to usher me toward the door.
“Hold on!” I protested. It was not yet eight in the morning, I had snatched two hours’ indifferent sleep in a holding cell, and I felt like death warmed over. “I’ve got to see someone before I leave. I want to use the telephone, then go back to my house.”