Scoundrel

“Hold on!” I protested. It was not yet eight in the morning, I had snatched two hours’ indifferent sleep in a holding cell, and I felt like death warmed over. “I’ve got to see someone before I leave. I want to use the telephone, then go back to my house.”

  “If you need a razor or a toothbrush –” Gillespie began.

  “I have to make a telephone call,” I interrupted him, “then visit home.”

  Gillespie was plainly unhappy, but he was uncertain how best to handle me. I was no prisoner, despite being locked up overnight, yet I was certainly something very exotic. I might have been one of the CIA’s own, yet I had still come from the shadowy and unknown world of international terrorism, and that made me into a mystery. Perhaps they thought I had been contaminated by the vengeful creatures that came from the slums and refugee camps of the old world to give the new world its worst nightmares? Gillespie himself was very straight arrow; tall, fit, punctiliously courteous and businesslike, and clearly reluctant to let me use the phone, but he seemed to recognise my determination and so waved me towards a desk.

  I needed to talk to an old friend. I would have much preferred to have talked with him in private, for I regarded my business with Johnny Riordan as an entirely personal matter and I doubted whether the CIA would agree with that view, but Gillespie’s presence was giving me little choice. I would have to risk the CIA knowing about Johnny.

  Johnny and I had been friends since childhood, when his father used to look after the Cape house for my father. Old Eamonn Riordan was a fisherman, and a good one, but his son was an even better one. Johnny had a natural talent for boats, the sea and for living. He was a great man, a raw force of nature, a muscled lump of goodwill, common sense and kindness, but he was also a man I was loath to involve in any trouble for Johnny Riordan was a father, happily married, and without a mean fibre in his body except perhaps towards those politicians who constantly interfered with his livelihood. Johnny tried to scrape a bare existence from lobstering or scalloping or tub-trawling the seas about the Cape, but in the lean months, all twelve of them most years, he was forced to keep his family fed by taking on other jobs like stocking grocery shelves. Johnny thought the sacrifice worthwhile so long as he could continue fishing, for he loved the sea and was probably the finest seaman I had ever met. I had not spoken with Johnny in seven years but I knew, if only he was home, he would not blink an eyelid if I did call. Nor did he. “So you’re back at last, are you?” he laughed. “Which means you’ll be wanting a meal.”

  “No,” I said, “I want to meet you at my house. Now. Can you make it?”

  “Sure I can make it. The politicians won’t allow us to go fishing these days just in case we catch something. I tell you, Paulie, those congressmen couldn’t catch their rear ends with their own bare hands, not even if you painted it scarlet for them. Did you hear about the new catch restrictions? Courtesy of Washington?”

  “Just meet me!” I interrupted him. “Please, Johnny, now!”

  Johnny’s pick-up truck was already parked in the driveway when Gillespie and Callaghan drove me home. Two golden retrievers wagged their tails in the back of Johnny’s truck, for no pick-up truck on Cape Cod was complete without at least one dog. I thought Johnny might have been waiting in the truck’s cab, but instead I found him ensconced before Sarah Sing Tennyson’s hearth where he was telling my tenant tall tales of prohibition; how the Cape Codders used to run rings round the federal agents, and how there were still forgotten caches of Canadian whiskey in some of the cranberry bogs and trap sheds. Sarah Sing Tennyson, like everyone else, was entranced by Johnny who had a natural and contagious enthusiasm. “Well now, look who it is!” he greeted me ebulliently. He was a big man, with a shock of black hair, a broad black beard and an open cheerful face.

  “You’ve met my tenant?” I gestured at Sarah.

  Sarah Tennyson smiled thinly. “Don’t you knock before going into other people’s houses?”

  “This is my house,” I said.

  “It’s good to have an artist living here, isn’t it?” Johnny tried to defuse the atmosphere with happiness. He gestured at Sarah Tennyson’s paintings which were mostly of the Nauset Lighthouse, but rendered so gloomily that they might have depicted a watch-tower in hell. “I was telling her how they tried to teach me to do art at school! What a waste! I couldn’t even draw a box, not even with a ruler to help. And good morning to you!” This last greeting was to Gillespie who had followed me into the house.

  I hurried Johnny into the kitchen before he could start a general conversation about the weather and the fishing and the beaches. “Make free in my house, won’t you, Shanahan?” Sarah Sing Tennyson called after me.

  “Mr Shanahan!” Gillespie seemed to be worried that I might try to make a bolt out of the back door.

  “This is family business,” I said firmly, then I dragged Johnny into the kitchen and slammed the door shut.

  “What’s going on?” Johnny asked me. “She told me she’s renting the place! I knew she was here off and on, but I thought she just borrowed it from Maureen at weekends. But I haven’t seen Maureen for months, so I couldn’t ask her. I know Maureen’s husband is here sometimes, but –”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I cut Johnny off. I knew I would have only a few moments before Gillespie interrupted us and I dared not waste a minute. “Listen,” I told Johnny, “there’s a boat being delivered to you. She’s coming from Spain and I had her sent to you. She’s coming deck cargo from Barcelona, and a customs agent will call you from Boston. I don’t know when she will get here, but probably in about six or seven weeks, OK? There shouldn’t be any customs duty to pay on her, because she’s registered in Massachusetts. These are her papers.” I took the original Rebel Lady papers from my oilskin pocket and shoved them into a bemused Johnny’s hands. “If there are any problems, this will help.” I began peeling hundred-dollar bills from the roll I had collected when I closed down my bank accounts in Belgium. “I paid for her carriage through to the Cape, but you’ll need to hire a big crane to get her off the truck.” I peeled away yet more bills. “She weighs damn nearly eighteen tons. Don’t ask me why she’s so heavy, but her original owner was probably nervous of tipping her over in a strong wind. Her new owner’s name is on those papers, and he asked you to take delivery, understand? You agreed to store her here for the winter.”

  Johnny riffled through the hundred-dollar bills, then gave me a very disapproving look. “This isn’t drugs again, is it, Paulie? Because if it is, I’m not helping. Don’t even ask me.” He held the money back towards me.

  I pushed them back again. “I swear to God, Johnny, this has nothing to do with drugs. On my mother’s grave, there’s nothing illegal inside the boat.”

  “Nothing?” He was still suspicious.

  “There’s gold aboard her,” I told him reluctantly, “which is why I don’t want anyone to know about her. If anyone asks what we’re talking about in here, you’re agreeing to look after this house while I’m gone. You understand, Johnny? The boat’s a secret.”

  “Gold! In her hull?” Johnny seemed cheered by that thought, then watched in amazement as I slipped the rest of the hundred-dollar bills inside my false passport, added Teodor’s other false papers, then reached up to raise one of the spare bedroom floorboards that comprised the kitchen ceiling. Johnny supported the floorboard while I fumbled along the top surface of one of the kitchen’s old black beams. Eventually I found the cavity I had long ago hollowed into the beam, and into which I now dropped the passport, papers and money.

  “There shouldn’t be any problems with the boat,” I told Johnny. “Her papers are in order and I’ll probably be back before she arrives anyway.”

  “You’re going away again?” Johnny sounded disappointed, which was flattering after so many years.

  “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 tr
acks 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 practised 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 Programme would work.”

  “It’s still called that? The Stringless Programme?”

  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 grey 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 armoured 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 sternwards 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 apologised. “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.”

  The aircraft did not go near the small terminal, but instead taxied to where two cars waited. One was a limousine with black tinted windows and the other a police car. Two State Troopers wearing Smokey Bear hats and black rain-slickers stood by the limousine. Both troopers held rifles. The CIA clearly believed il Hayaween had a long reach.

  We took Interstate 84 eastward into the snow-streaked forests of the Pocono Mountains. The bare trees had been splintered by ice-storms and the rock embankments which edged the road were thickly hung with icicles. We drove fast, our way cle
ared by the State Troopers. Deep in the mountains we turned off the Interstate and twisted our way up ever narrower roads until we reached a big painted sign that read ‘US Department of Agriculture, Rabies Research Station, Absolutely NO Unauthorised Entry.’ The State Troopers, their siren at last turned off, pulled on to the road’s shoulder and waved the limo through.

  I grinned. “I’m your mad dog, am I?”

  Gillespie shrugged. “It keeps out the inquisitive.”

  The limousine stopped at a checkpoint manned by uniformed guards. A high fieldstone wall topped with coils of razor wire stretched into the forests either side of the gates. The guards peered at me, examined Gillespie’s credentials, then the steel gates were mechanically opened and the limousine accelerated into a wide parkland studded with snow-shrouded rhododendrons. We passed between ploughed snow-banks, across a stone bridge that spanned an ice-locked stream, and into view of a massive, steep-roofed house that looked like some French mansion unaccountably marooned in a North American wilderness.

  This was evidently to be my home for the foreseeable future. Here, under the mansion’s coppered roof, I would be emptied of secrets, and it was not a bad place to be so emptied. The grand portico led into a palatial entrance hall that was furnished with a massive carved table, leather upholstered chairs, and a stone fireplace. Three stuffed mooseheads peered down from the dark panelled walls. A wooden staircase curled round three sides of the hall, embracing an intricate brass chandelier. I suspected the house had been donated to the government by the bewhiskered magnate whose varnished portrait hung gilt-framed above the stone mantel. It was the house of a nineteenth-century robber-baron; lavish, comfortable and bitterly cold. “Don’t say the central heating’s failed again!” Gillespie complained peevishly as he closed the heavy front doors.

  “I’ll find out,” Callaghan said, and dived through a side-door.

  Leading off the entrance hall was a library, its shelves, I later discovered, crammed with the collected writings of the founding fathers which was just the sort of dutiful yet unreadable collection one would expect of a patriotic millionaire. There was also a dining room, a kitchen, and an exercise room. The mansion’s scores of other rooms were locked away. Other activities were conducted in the house, for during my stay I would sometimes see strangers walking in the grounds, and once I heard women’s laughter coming from the other side of the bolted door in our dining room, but my interrogation was conducted in the isolation of the few rooms opening off the main hall and its immediate landing upstairs. My quarters were on that second floor; a private bathroom, a small kitchenette and a lavish bedroom which held a wide bed, a sofa, a desk, rugs, a bookcase full of thrillers, a reproduction of a drab Corot landscape and a television set. Unlike the downstairs rooms the heat here was working only too well. In my bedroom a steam radiator hissed and clanked under a barred window that could not be opened. I stooped to the thriller-packed bookcase. “A nice collection.”