“War?” Marty seemed oblivious to the American-led build-up of forces in Saudi Arabia. “It’s about Larry,” he finally said, “they reckon it’s healed, see? He’ll be as good as new!”
“What’s healed?”
“His heel! He had surgery on it.” Marty giggled at a sudden dawning of wit. “His heel’s healed. Get it?”
I stopped in the middle of the terminal and looked down at Marty’s bald head. I was tired, I was hot, and Marty was yapping at me like a poodle in heat. “Who the hell is Larry,” I asked, “and what the hell are you talking about?”
“Larry Bird!” Marty was astonished at my obtuseness. “He missed the end of last season because of his heel. It had a growth on the bone, or something like that.”
“Oh, Christ.” I started walking again. I might have known that the most important thing in Marty’s world would be the Boston Celtics. The Celts were a religion in Boston, but somehow, perhaps because I now lived in a small harbor town on the Belgian coast, my devotions to the old hometown religion had lapsed.
Yet it felt good to be back on American soil, even in Florida’s unfamiliar tropical heat. I had been away seven years. I had never meant the time to stretch so, but somehow there had always been a reason not to fly the Atlantic. I had bought tickets once, only to have the lucrative chance of delivering a brand-new boat from Finland to Monaco change my plans. Nor did I have family reasons to go home for my parents were dead and my sister was married to a buffoon I could not stand, and so, these last years, I had worked in Nieuwpoort and nursed my dreams of one day going home and living a long, easy retirement in the Cape Cod cottage I had inherited from my father. I was saving up for that retirement, and that savings account had been another reason for not spending money on expensive transatlantic air fares. But I had still been away for too long.
“Michael’s waiting for us.” Marty held the back door of the limousine open for me. “And there’s a fellow come over from Ireland to meet you. Brendan, his name is. Brendan Flynn. He arrived yesterday.”
“Brendan Flynn?” That did surprise me, and it chilled me. Brendan was one of the Provisional IRA’s top men, maybe third or fourth in the movement’s hierarchy, and such men did not travel abroad for trivial reasons. But nothing about this odd deal smelled trivial; it was transatlantic air tickets, suites in the Georges V, a white limousine at Miami International. I had walked into it eagerly enough, but the mention of Brendan’s name gave the whole business a real blood smell of danger.
“It must be something big, Paulie, for a fellow to fly all the way from Ireland. And you’ve travelled a few miles too, eh? From Paris!” Marty was fishing for news. “So what do you think it’s all about?” he asked as we swung clear of the airport traffic.
“How the hell would I know?”
“But you must have an idea!”
“Just shut up, Marty.”
But Marty was incapable of silence and, as he drove north, he told me how he had seen my sister just the week before, and that Maureen was looking good, and how here boys were growing up, but that was the way of boys, wasn’t it? And had I heard about the New England Patriots? They had been bought by the electric razor man, but they were still playing football like amateurs. A convent school could play better, so they could. And who did I think would be up for the Super Bowl this season? The Forty-Niners again?
Marty paused in his stream of chatter as we neared the Hialeah Racetrack. He was looking for a turn-off among a tangle of warehouses and small machine shops. “Here we are,” he announced, and the softly sprung car wallowed over a rough patch of road, turned into a rusting gate that led through a chain link fence topped with razor-wire, and stopped in the shade of a white-painted warehouse that had no identifying name or number painted on its blank anonymous façade. A stone-faced man sitting in a guard shed beside the warehouse’s main door must have recognized Marty for I was casually waved forward without any query or inspection. “You’re to go straight in,” Marty called after me, “and I’m to wait.”
I stepped through the door into the warehouse’s shadowed, vast interior. Two forklift trucks stood just inside the door, but otherwise I could see nothing except tower blocks of stacked cardboard boxes. The air smelt of machine oil and of the newly sawn timber used for the pallets, or like machine-gun oil and coffin wood. I was nervous. Any man summoned by Brendan Flynn did well to be nervous.
“Is that you, Shanahan?” Michael Herlihy’s disapproving voice sounded from the darkness at the far end of the huge shed.
“It’s me.”
“Come and join us!” It was a command. Michael Herlihy had little time for the niceties of life, only for the dictates of work and duty. He was a scrawny little runt of a man, nothing but sinew and cold resolve, whose idea of a good time was to compete in the Boston marathon. By trade he was an attorney and, like me, he came from among Boston’s “two-toilet Irish”; the wealthy American-Irish who had houses on the Point and summer homes on the South Shore or on Cape Cod. Not that Michael was what I would call a proper attorney, not like his father who, pickled in bourbon and tobacco, could have persuaded a jury of Presbyterian spinsters to acquit the Scarlet Whore of Babylon herself, but old Joe was long dead, and his only son was now a meticulous Massachusetts lawyer who negotiated trash-disposal contracts between city administrations and garbage hauliers. In his spare time he was the Chairperson of Congressman O’Shaughnessy’s Re-election Committee and President of the New England Chapter of the Friends of Free Ireland. Michael preferred to describe himself as the Commander of the Provisional IRA’s Boston Brigade, which was stretching a point for there was no formally established Boston Brigade, but Michael nevertheless fancied himself as a freedom fighter and kept a pair of black gloves and a black beret folded in tissue paper and ready to be placed on his funeral casket. He had never married, never wanted to, he said.
Now, in Miami’s oppressive heat, he was waiting for me with three other men. Two were strangers, while the third, who came to greet me with outstretched arms, was Brendan Flynn himself. “Is it you yourself, Paulie? My God, but it is! It’s grand to see you, just grand! It’s been too long.” His Belfast accent was sour as a pickle. “You’re looking good in yourself! It must be all that Belgian beer. Or the girls? My God, but it’s a treat to find you alive, so it is!” He half crushed me in a welcoming embrace, then stepped back and gave my shoulder a friendly thump that might have felled a bullock. It was rumored that Brendan had once killed an IRA informer with a single flat-handed blow straight down on the man’s skull, and I could believe it. He was a tall man, built like an ox, with a bristling beard and a voice that erupted from deep in his beer-fed belly. “And how are you, Paulie? Doing all right, are you?”
“I’m just fine.” I had meant to reward four years of silence with a harsh reserve, but I found myself warming to Brendan’s enthusiasm. “And yourself?” I asked him.
“There’s gray in my beard! Do you see it? I’m getting old, Paulie, I’m getting old. I’ll be pissing in my bed next and having the nuns slap my wrist for being a bad boy. God, but it’s grand to see you!”
“You should see me more often, Brendan.”
“None of that now! We’re all friends.” He put an arm round my shoulders and squeezed and I felt as though a hydraulic press was tightening across my chest. “But, my God, this heat! How the hell is a man supposed to stay alive in a heat like this? Sweet Mother of God, but it’s like living in a bread oven.” It was no wonder that Brendan was feeling the heat for he was wearing a tweed jacket and a woollen waistcoat over a flannel shirt, just as if Miami had a climate like Dublin. Brendan had lived in Dublin ever since he had planted one bomb too many in Belfast. Now he dragged me enthusiastically toward an opened crate. “Come and look at the toys Michael has found us!”