“I’ll be away for a few weeks, no more. But listen!” I rammed a finger into his chest to reinforce what I was saying. “There might be some real bastards looking for this boat. I’ve covered her tracks pretty well, but if anyone wants to argue about her, back off. Give them what they want and leave well alone. These are nasty guys, Johnny, real nasty. They’re friends of Michael Herlihy, and worse, so if Michael asks questions, just tell him I asked you to look after the boat and you don’t know any more about it than that, and if he wants the boat, or if anyone else wants it, just let it go! You understand me? I don’t want you or your family to be hurt.”
My mention of Mick Herlihy had made Johnny very unhappy. “This is IRA business, isn’t it?” Johnny, like most of the American-Irish, had always insisted that the Irish Troubles were best left on the far side of the Atlantic. His own father, like mine, had loved to work himself into a lather about the injustices of Irish history, but Johnny had no belly for disliking anyone, not even the Brits.
“How is your dad?” I asked Johnny, rather than answer his question about the IRA’s involvement.
“He died last year, God rest him.”
“Oh, my God.” I crossed myself. “Poor Eamonn.”
“After Mom died he didn’t have much interest in anything,” Johnny said. “I couldn’t even get him out on the boat! He was living with us by then, and Julie would try and keep him interested, you know, ask him to take the kids down to the beach or whatever, but he just wanted to be left alone. Father Murphy said some people just know when their time’s come, and I reckon Dad decided his had.”
“I never heard about your mom either,” I confessed. “I’m sorry.”
“You should have stayed in touch, Paulie,” Johnny chided me, but gently, then he asked me again whether the gold on board the boat had anything to do with the IRA.
I was saved from answering because a very suspicious Gillespie pushed open the kitchen door. “What’s going on?”
“Paulie’s just telling me what he wants done with the house while he’s away.” Johnny, bless him, told the lie with all the conviction of a guileless man. “Are you sure you don’t want aluminum siding?” he asked me. “The salt plays havoc with shingles, Paul, you should think about it.”
“God no! No aluminum. Keep the cedar.” I, a practiced deceiver, sounded much less convincing, but Gillespie seemed reassured.
“If you’re through?” he invited me to accompany him.
“And for God’s sake, Johnny,” I went on loudly enough for Sarah Sing Tennyson to overhear me, “make sure the girl gets the hell out of here.”
Sarah Tennyson’s anger flared to instant meltdown level. “Don’t you dare come here again, Shanahan!” she shouted over Gillespie’s shoulder. “I’ve already talked to my attorneys this morning and they say I signed the lease in good faith and I’ve paid the rent on time, so this place is mine.” Johnny, ever a peacemaker, tried to calm her down, but she pushed the big man aside. “Do you hear me, Shanahan? This is my house for as long as the lease lasts, and if you break in here once more then so help me God I’ll sue you and I’ll take this house in lieu of damages and you will never set foot inside this place again. Never! Do you understand me, Shanahan?”
“Jesus,” Gillespie muttered in awe, and no wonder, for Sarah Sing Tennyson in full strident flow was a classy act.
“What I understand,” I said, “is that your lawyer can play let’s-get-rich with my brother-in-law’s lawyer, but I’m not involved, and I don’t care to be involved. So you get your money back from Patrick McPhee and you send me the bill for the phone and the electric installation, and then you can take away your finger paintings, give me back the front-door key, and vanish.”
She pointed to the front hall. “Get the hell out of my house, all of you!” Her scornful gesture encompassed Johnny, Gillespie and myself. “Out!”
“You pack your bags, and you get out!” I shouted as I was evicted from my own house. It was not the most effective of retorts, but it was the best I could manage and it left Sarah Sing Tennyson the undisputed victor of the hour.
“Let’s just do as she says,” Gillespie muttered. We scuttled ignominiously out to the driveway where Stuart Callaghan waited in the car. The hire car I’d rented at Logan Airport was also there, which hardly worried me. I had used the French prisoner’s credit card to rent it and I guessed its owners would eventually get it back.
I looked back as we accelerated up the clam-shell drive and I saw Sarah Tennyson, her face a mask of outrage and anger, watching to make certain we really did leave my property. I blew her a kiss, received a rigid finger in reply, then we were over the sand ridge and into the scrub pine, and gone.
“I don’t like Sarah Tennyson,” I told Gillespie, “but someone should warn her that she’s in danger if she stays in that house.”
“I’ll look after it.” Gillespie made a note in a small book, then glanced out of the airplane window at the monotonous cloudscape that unreeled beneath us. We had driven to the small municipal airport at Hyannis where our six-seater plane had taken off into a sudden flurry of wet snow. Gillespie had already told me that the agency intended to keep me out of harm’s way for as many weeks as it would take to empty me of secrets. “We’re kind of excited to have you back,” he had coyly confided as the plane had climbed through the clouds over Hyannis. “Not everyone thought that the Stringless Program would work.”
“It’s still called that? The Stringless Program?”
Gillespie glanced at the pilot, fearing that he could overhear our conversation, but the man was insulated with heavy earphones. “It’s still called that.”
“And you reckon it will take weeks to debrief me?”
“I’m sure you have a lot to tell us.”
I thought of Rebel Lady and hoped to God that Johnny had no difficulties with her. Gillespie had gone back to his notebook, Callaghan was snoozing and the plane was droning through a winter bright sky high above the gray clouds. At Hyannis Airport I had bought a newspaper that told of war preparations on either side of the Kuwaiti frontier. The paper also reported on last-minute bids to prevent the fighting. Congressman O’Shaughnessy’s house bill forbidding the use of American armed forces for one year had failed, yet the Congressman still preached his message of doom; he claimed now that the Pentagon had shipped fifty thousand body bags to the Gulf and said yet more were on order, and he was urging the President one last time to give economic sanctions a chance to bite. On an inside page was an article about the world-wide precautions against Iraq’s expected terrorist onslaught; there were armored vehicles patrolling European airports, air-passenger numbers had fallen drastically, and Western embassies throughout the world were mounting special guards. Saddam Hussein, happy to be in the spotlight of the world’s nervousness, swore that he would never surrender, but would instead swamp the coalition forces and their homelands in infidel blood.
“Strap in!” the pilot called back as the plane suddenly banked and dropped. Raindrops streamed sternward on the windows as we sliced into the clouds. The plane buffeted, dropped hard in an air-pocket, then reared back on a vicious up-current. An alarm beeped, then the servo-motors whined as the flaps extruded. “A bit rough, fellas!” the pilot apologized. “Sorry!”
Another lurch, another beep of the alarm, then we were out of the clouds and flying just feet above a dun-black and snow-streaked countryside. For a second I thought we were going to crash, then wet tarmac appeared beneath us, the wheels bounced, smoked and squealed, and we had come to earth. “Wilkes-Barre Scranton welcomes you,” the pilot said facetiously. “Hell of a Goddamned day to fly.”