“If I’m going to sail it across the pond,” I agreed, “then I want to choose it.”
“So would you mind flying right back to Europe?” Brendan asked. “The Libyans are in a hurry to ship the gold, so they are.”
“We’re in a hurry,” Michael Herlihy amended the explanation, then added a reason for the haste. “Next April is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Easter Rising and we’d like to give the British a bloody memorial to mark the occasion, and we can’t ship the Stingers to Ireland till you’ve brought us the gold.”
“You want me to fly back tomorrow?” I asked Brendan, and sounded surprised. I had hoped for a chance to fly north and visit the Cape Cod house that I had not seen in seven years, and maybe to visit my parents’ grave in Boston, but Michael and Brendan were in too much of a hurry.
They were in even more of a hurry than I suspected. “Not tomorrow,” Brendan said, “tonight,” and, like a conjurer, he produced the air ticket from a pocket of his tweed jacket.
“To Paris, then on to Tunisia. First class, Paul!”
They were trying too hard, I thought. They did not need to entice me with first-class tickets. It smelled as though they were persuading me to do something I did not want to do, and surely they should be treating me like a volunteer? The discrepancy was just another unlikely ragged edge to add to my disquiet, but also to my curiosity. A lot of people were going to a lot of trouble to make me accept this job, and that much effort suggested there could be a huge reward hidden among the details, so I said I would fly out that night.
Brendan went with me to Miami Airport. “It’s grand to be working with you again, Paulie, just grand.”
I ignored the blarney. “You couldn’t find anyone else with the right qualifications, was that it?”
For a half-second he looked blank, then laughed. “Aye, that’s the truth of it.”
“So you’re being forced to trust me again?” I could not keep the bitterness from my voice. Little Marty Doyle was driving us and I could see his ears pricking with interest at our conversation.
“You know the rules, Paul,” Brendan said awkwardly. “It only takes a touch of suspicion to make us wary.”
“Wary!” I protested. “Four years of silence because some bitch accuses me of being in the CIA? Come off it, Brendan. Roisin invented fairy stories like other women make up headaches.”
“We know the girl lied about you,” he admitted sombrely. “You’ve proved it. You could have betrayed us any time in the last four years and you haven’t. And besides, Herlihy had a word with his people in Boston and they said the girl was fantasizing. There was no way the Yanks were running an operation like she said. All moonshine, they said. It was a good wee story, though. She could tell a good wee story, that girl. She was good crack.”
I wondered who Herlihy’s people were, and supposed they were Boston police who could tap the FBI who, in turn, could call in a favor from the Central Intelligence Agency. So someone had run a check on Roisin’s allegations, and I had come up snow-white. “Did Herlihy’s people check on Roisin as well?” I asked.
“She was a one!” Brendan said in admiration, carefully not answering my question. “Jesus, she was a one. She had a tongue on her like a focking flamethrower. You could have used her to strip varnish!”
“But was she CIA?” I asked.
“Just a troublemaking bitch, that’s all.” He was silent for a few seconds. “But she was a lass, wasn’t she?”
I had always thought that Roisin and Brendan had been lovers, and the wistfulness of his last words brought the old jealousy surging back. Roisin had been a gunman’s groupie, a worshipper of death. She would have bedded the devil, yet still I would have loved her. I had been besotted by her. I had thought the world revolved about her, that the sun was dimmed by her, the moon darkened by her and the stars dazzled by her. And she was dead.
I caught the night flight to Paris.
SHAFIQ WAS WAITING FOR ME AT THE SKANES-MONASTIR Airport. He was wearing a suit of silver-gray linen with a pink rose buttonhole which on closer inspection turned out to be plastic. I was a shabby contrast in my crumpled, much-travelled clothes. “So how was Miami?” Shafiq asked me.
“Hot.”
“And the girls?”
“Exquisite. Ravishing. Limpid.”
That was the answer Shafiq wanted. The poor man dreamed of Western girls, especially French girls and, in the old days, he had insisted on making our summer rendezvous on the Riviera so he could stroll the promenades and stare down at the serried rows of naked French breasts displayed on the beach. It never bored him, he could gaze for hours. The casual display of nudity fed Shafiq’s fantasies and once, sitting in the café of the Negresco, he had shyly told me his ambition of finding a French bride. “Not a whore, you understand, Paul? Not a whore. I have enough whores.” He had paused to cut into a Napoleon-kake, then carefully scooped the creamy custard which had oozed from between the pastry layers on to his teaspoon. Shafiq loved sweet things, yet stayed skeletally thin. “I am tired of whores,” he said when he had licked the spoon dry. “I want a fragile Parisian girl, with white skin, and small bones, and short golden hair, who will smile when I come through the door. She will play to me on the piano and we shall walk our dog beside the Seine.” I later discovered that Shafiq had a fat dark wife and three moustached daughters who squabbled in a small Tripoli apartment.
Now he escorted me to the parking lot where his rented white Peugeot waited. Out of sailing habit I cocked an eye at the weather. The day was cloudless, while the wind was in the north and cool enough to make me glad I had brought a sweater. “Where are we going?”
“The marina at Monastir.” Shafiq unlocked the car. “There are boats for sale there, Western boats. You should see them, Paul! They sail into the harbor and the women wear bikinis so small that they might as well not have got dressed at all. They are, how do you say it? Almost in their birthday clothes?”
Shafiq was filled with an irrepressible verve, like a lover in the first freshness of passion. I had seen other men thus animated, men going on their first bombing mission to make a new Ireland out of dead bodies; but I could not understand why Shafiq, who had grown middle-aged in the service of violence, should find buying a western yacht such an energizing experience. He accelerated out of the parking lot, spitting a stream of Arab profanities at a taxi driver who had dared to sound a protesting horn at the Peugeot’s irruption into the traffic stream. “We are going to meet someone,” Shafiq announced, as though he had arranged a great treat.
“I thought we were buying a boat?”
“We are, we are, but you are going to meet someone first. His name is Halil!”
“Halil.” I repeated the name with none of the enthusiasm with which Shafiq had invested the two plain syllables. “So who is Halil?”
“He is in charge of this end of the operation. Just as Mr. Herlihy is in charge of the other.”
Herlihy was in charge? Not Brendan Flynn? I tucked that oddity away as just another slight dissonance that made this whole affair so strange. “So who’s Halil?” I asked. The name was clearly a pseudonym, but in the past, with a little pushing, Shafiq had often been ready to betray such confidences.
But not this time. “Just Halil!” Shafiq laughed, then raced past a truck loaded with piled crates of squawking chickens. “But Halil is a great man, you should know that before you meet him.” Shafiq’s words, friendly enough, were nevertheless a warning.
“Is the gold ready?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe? Maybe not. I don’t know.” There were chicken feathers stuck under the Peugeot’s windscreen wipers. Shafiq tried to shift them by flicking the wipers on and off, but the feathers obstinately stayed. Abandoning the attempt he lit a cigarette and grinned conspiratorially at me. “You saw the Stingers?”