“I miss Belfast,” I said, and I did too. I loved that city. It was a dirty, ugly, battered city and I had never been happier than when I had lived there. The city’s first impression was dour; all bomb damage and hopeless dereliction, but the brick streets crackled with wit and were warmed by friendship.
Seamus grimaced. “I sometimes think that if they’d just let me go home for one short day I’d kiss a focking Apprentice Boy out of sheer gratitude.” He gave a brief and bitter laugh. “I told that to some fellow in here and he didn’t even know who the focking Apprentice Boys are! He’d not even heard of the Orangemen!”
“Don’t blame them,” I said. “They love Ireland, right enough, but they don’t want to know how complicated it is. You can’t blame them, Seamus, and their hearts are in the right place.”
But Seamus wasn’t listening to my explanations. “They had a fellow give a talk in here, what? Six months back? Something like that, and he said the focking Brits had built a focking gas chamber in Long Kesh, and that they were systematically murdering the whole Catholic population!” Seamus grimaced. “I mean, shit! I don’t like the focking Brits, but they haven’t got that bad. Not yet, anyway. I didn’t say anything, of course, what’s the focking point?”
“None.”
He laughed. “And your brother-in-law, eh? Getting slapped about in Ballymurphy! So the lads are still pulling that stunt, are they?” He shook his head happily. “What a prick Patrick is! I know he’s your family, Paulie, but what a prick!”
“I know. He’s a creep.”
“And family, that’s another thing! My da died last year and I couldn’t be with him. It isn’t right, a son not being at his father’s grave. And my mam’s not well. Something with her chest, her breathing, like. My brother wrote and told me, but what can I do?”
So there was a brother, and Kathleen Donovan had not lied to me, and I suddenly wondered what the hell use was five million bucks without someone to share it with? “Go back to Ireland,” I suggested to Seamus. “Your ma can cross into Donegal and see you there, can’t she?”
“She can, but the focking Garda will have me in Portlaoise Jail before you could spit. They want me for a wee job I did in Dundalk.” He grinned apologetically. I knew it would be no good asking what the wee job was, though it was almost certainly a bank raid. Seamus was a much wanted man, though nowhere was he wanted more avidly than in Northern Ireland where he had made his bloody and infamous escape from Long Kesh. The Provisionals had lost two men in the breakout, but they reckoned the propaganda value of Seamus’s freedom was well worth the price. But now, as an illegal immigrant in America and a wanted felon in Britain and Ireland, the battle for his political asylum was filling newspaper columns on both sides of the Atlantic. “They say I’m a focking symbol,” Seamus gloomily told me. “They say I’ll be Grand Marshal of their St. Patrick’s Day parade next year. They want to give me a medal of freedom on the State House steps. They’re even talking about making a focking film of me! Can you believe that? Some prick little actor in Hollywood says he wants to make a film of me! But I don’t want to be in a focking movie, Paul. I want to go home.”
“Go and see a plastic surgeon,” I suggested.
“I was thinking of doing that,” he said softly. “I tell you, with all the focking money they’re spending just keeping me out of jail I could have looked like Marilyn Monroe by now, tits and all.” He blushed for having dared say a rude word, and for a second I thought he was going to cross himself, then he just shook his head sorrowfully. “Shit, Paul, I just want to go home. I don’t want any more trouble. The younger lads can do some of the fighting now, eh? I’ve put a few quid away, so I have, and there’s a scrap of farmland near Dunnamanagh that would do me just grand. A few cattle, some arable, and a tight little house. That’ll do me right enough.” He paused, his eyes far away, then he lit a new cigarette. “I was thinking of Roisin the other day.” He had reddened with embarrassment, and I wondered just how badly she had humiliated him.
“I often think of her,” I admitted.
“I had a letter from her sister a few weeks back. It came to Chuck’s office, my lawyer, right?”
“Did you write back?”
He shook his head.
“What did the letter want?”
“She wanted to know what happened to Roisin, like. Christ, what was I to say?”
“The truth?” I suggested, though in my mouth the word tasted like ash.
“Who the fock knows if Roisin even had a sister?” Seamus asked me. “And Chuck said I shouldn’t write back, in case it was a set-up by the focking Brits. You know, to get information? So he chucked the letter away.”
“It’s just as well,” I said vaguely.
“And what was I supposed to tell the sister?” Seamus asked indignantly. “That Roisin was shot by the focking Arabs?”
“Right.”
“Focking maniacs, that’s what those Arabs are. Hanging’s too good for the fockers.” Seamus stared at the green cutout shamrocks that decorated the bar’s back-mirror. “She never did betray me, Paulie. No one did. The Brits said they had the information off her, but they never did. They were just making trouble, and I reckon their trouble worked for they got her a bullet, right?” He frowned. “And she was a rare girl. She had a tongue on her though, didn’t she just? Never heard a woman speak like it.” He suddenly froze, his eyes staring at the mirror which reflected the far side of the room. “Are those two boys after you, you think?”
Two men, both wearing plaid jackets buttoned tight up to their necks, had appeared at the far side of the hall. They were young, broad-chested, and convinced of their own toughness, and neither was trying to hide their interest in me. I suspected that Patrick had whistled them up in the hope that they could retrieve the money I’d just lifted from his pocket. “They’re looking for me, right enough,” I told Seamus.
“Why?”
“Personal. Patrick wants that money back I just took off him, and he doesn’t want to ask me for it himself.”
“Are you sure it’s not political?”
I shook my head. “There wouldn’t have been time to get the orders.”
“What about Michael Herlihy? He’s got the authority, hasn’t he?”
“Not for this sort of trouble, Seamus. Any orders for my killing would have to come from Belfast or Dublin. For Christ’s sake, you think Brendan will have me chopped up before he knows where the gold is? No, this is personal, Seamus. This is between me and Padraig.”
He grinned. “Then I’m on your side, Paulie. Two of them and two of us, eh?” He drained the last of his hot whiskey. “Poor wee fockers. Do we finish them off?”
“We just frighten them.”
“You go first then. I’ll be twenty paces behind.” He made a great play of shaking my hand and saying farewell, then I picked up my bag and pulled on my oilskin. A cheer greeted the abandonment of the war news and the beginning of a televised basketball game. The two men watched me go to the side door, saw that Seamus was ordering another drink, and so followed me toward the winter afternoon.
It was game time.
IN THE OLD DAYS THE PARISH’S SIDE DOOR HAD OPENED INTO an alleyway that ran between the hall and an Italian bakery, but the bakery had long been pulled down to leave an abandoned lot which the Parish used as a place to hide stolen cars and the truckloads of merchandise that disappeared from Logan Airport’s bonded warehouses. The lot was hidden from the road by a high fence that acted as a neighborhood bulletin board. The fence’s outer face was a mass of posters which currently advertised a teach-in on British propaganda techniques in the United States, auditions for the American Children of Ireland Marching Band and Twirlers, classes in spoken Gaelic, an announcement about the St. Patrick’s Day parade arrangements, and twin appeals for contributions to help mark the tenth anniversary of the hunger strikes and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin.