Herlihy walked toward me as Tommy the Turd escorted the delicious Duffy into the house. “What are you doing here, Shanahan?” Herlihy spat the question.
“There’s your boat,” I pointed at Rebel Lady. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“That?” He stared astonished at the yacht.
“That! You bastard!” I grabbed him by the collar of his coat, ran him along the dock and pushed him down into the cockpit. “There! Look! That was where your precious money was!”
A gust of wind shook the boat, and a sluggish wave heaved up the wounded hull and Michael Herlihy immediately paled, swore, and dived for the gunwale where, with a gut-heaving wrench, he voided his expensive brunch into the sea. “Oh, God,” he groaned, “oh, God.” The very smallest movement of Rebel Lady’s wind-stirred hull had instantly provoked his chronic seasickness. “Oh, my God,” he said again, and leaned over the sea to throw up once more.
I left him there. “Bastard,” I shouted at him, then stalked away.
Stitch moved to confront me. “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police?” he asked me nastily.
“Yes,” I said. “Try explaining to the police why the Congressman allowed his cellar to be used by a Provisional IRA hit squad for the last two weeks.”
“He did what?” He backed away from me, not sure I was telling the truth, then decided that he had better employ some quick damage control just in case I was. “It isn’t true! We’ve been researching the trade deal in Mexico. We haven’t been here.” He was scenting an appalling scandal and was already rehearsing the excuses that would leave his Congressman unscathed.
“Just bugger away off,” I told him.
“Who on earth moved the cellar things into the hall?” I heard the delectable Duffy O’Shaughnessy ask from inside the house. Robert Stitch, fearing some new mischief, ran through the open kitchen door, as Michael Herlihy, his face as white as the ice-slicked rigging, managed to clamber up from Rebel Lady’s cockpit on to the dock’s planking. I paused at the corner of the house and watched as Michael staggered feebly away from the sea. He was reeling. I had forgotten just what a terrible affliction his seasickness was.
“Herlihy!” I called.
He looked at me, but said nothing.
I fished the single gold coin from my pocket. “Here’s the rest of your money, you bastard.” I tossed it to him.
He let the bright coin fall and roll along the path. “Where are you going?” he called as I turned and walked away.
“Home. And leave me alone, you hear me?”
I walked down the long gravel drive and out through the high fence to the road. Johnny arrived twenty minutes later and we drove away.
Miraculously, I was alive.
“WHO STRUGGLES BY IN THAT LITTLE HOUSE?” JOHNNY asked as we drove away from the high-hedged mansion on the beach.
“House Representative Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third.”
“Tommy the Turd lives there!” Johnny sounded surprised, though he must have known that Tommy’s only qualification for high office was his inordinate wealth.
“And don’t forget the Back Bay mansion,” I said, “or the house in Georgetown, or the ski-lodge in Aspen.”
“I’d like someone to tell me one day,” Johnny said sourly, “why the bastards who want to put up my taxes are always so rich.” I offered no response and he shot me a sympathetic look. “So what happened to you back there?”
“I screwed up.”
“Meaning?”
“I thought I was cleverer than I am.” I hoped that evasion would suffice, but Johnny deserved better from me. “I guess I was falling out with the IRA.”
“You shouldn’t have had anything to do with them in the first place.”
“They have a good cause,” I said mildly.
“If it’s that good,” he demanded flatly, “then why do they need to murder for it? No one bombs people to solve world hunger. No one kills to save a kid from leukaemia, and those are good causes.”
“I won’t argue.”
“And the gold?”
“All gone.”
He laughed. To Johnny the only rewards worth having were those that had taken hard work, the rest was dishonest at worst and meretricious at best. Johnny and his kind were the backbone of America, the good heart of an honest country that somehow contrived to put men like Tommy the Turd into Congress. “You want the money back you gave me?” Johnny asked me. “I haven’t spent it.”
“Keep it,” I said. Christ, I thought, but I would have to get a job now. I would have to join the nine-to-five. I would have to become like the rest of the world, and that was one of the great terrors of the secret world, because belonging to a sanctioned organization of killers gave a man the feeling of being special, of being apart, of being above the petty cares and constricting rules that hampered other people, but now, after years of arrogance, I would have to earn my bread. I wondered how much money van Stryker planned to give me; not enough, I suspected, to pay for the years of lotus-eating idleness I had planned beside the Cape Cod waters. I wondered what the yacht-delivery business was like in the States and supposed it mainly consisted of taking plastic power boats up and down the Intracoastal Waterway either side of winter. I doubted it would be easy to break into such a business, but what else was I good for? “I had dreams of buying a tuna boat with that gold,” I confessed to Johnny. “Now I doubt I could even afford a can of tuna.”
He chuckled. “You don’t want a tuna boat. There are too many of them already, and they’re all using airplanes as spotters. When the fish are running it’s like the Battle of Midway out there. Ten years ago you could harpoon a big fish every week, but now you’re lucky if you see a decent sized fish all summer.”
Another dream dead, I thought, and I leaned my head on the window at the back of the cab. So what was I going to do? Had the last fourteen years been for nothing? “Is there much of a market for boat surveying?” I asked Johnny.
“Not that I know of.” Johnny drove placidly on. “But young Ernie Marriott’s met a girl in New Bedford, which means I need a crewman every so often.”
“Are you offering me a job?”
“I’m offering you freezing hands, a wet ass, hard nights, and maybe the chance of a penny or two if the government lets us catch a fish when we’re not filling in forms.”
“You’re on,” I said.
“But it isn’t a career,” Johnny warned me. “I can hardly keep my own family in bread. Still, it’s better than working in one of these places, right?” He waved his hand at a crazy-golf park which, though boarded up for the winter, still betrayed a drab gaudiness designed to bring in the summer customers. We were driving east on Route 18, the Cape’s southern artery and a showplace of shoddy businesses and cheap motels; proof that when mankind arrives in paradise he will down the glory of the angels with neon signs and honkytonk bars. “Another few years,” Johnny grumbled, “and this will all look like Florida.” He brooded on that sorry fate for a few miles, then turned a frown on me. “Did you really tell Sarah Tennyson to fetch the boat for you?”
I shook my head. “She lied to you, but I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“So there was nothing between you two?”
“Me and that ballbreaker? You’ve got to be joking.”
He laughed. “She was convincing to me. So who the hell was she?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, Johnny. She’s probably a terrorist groupie. Some girls get their kicks by hanging around killers.” And did that include Kathleen Donovan? God, that hurt, that she had set me up for the snatch.
“So she isn’t an artist?” Johnny sounded disappointed.