Scoundrel Read online

  “I can carry a thousand pounds of gold,” I said.

  “How?” Herlihy snapped.

  “None of your business.”

  Brendan laughed at the hostility between us. “And of course, Paulie, there’ll be a good wee fee in this for you.”

  “How much?”

  “The half-million deposit that we’ll get back when the gold arrives. Does that sound good to you?” Brendan glanced at Herlihy as though seeking confirmation and I sensed that the two of them had not agreed on that fee beforehand. I also saw Michael Herlihy blench at the amount and for a second I thought he was going to protest; then, reluctantly, he nodded.

  “The point being” – Brendan beamed at me – “that I know a boat filled with gold could be a hell of a temptation, even to a man as honest as yourself, Paulie, but I look at it this way. If you try to steal the gold then you’ll have made an enemy of me, and one day I’ll find you and I’ll make your death harder and slower than your worst nightmares. Or you can keep the faith and walk away at the end of the job with a half-million dollars, and I reckoned that half a million should be enough to keep any man honest.” He smiled, as if pleased with his reasoning, then turned back to the sun-bright sea beyond the tinted glass. “Look at the size of those fowl! Can you eat them now?”

  “Half a million sounds good to me,” I said as equably as I could.

  “Not that we’re utter fools, Paulie” — Brendan was still staring at the pelicans — “because we’ll be giving you some company on the trip. Just to help you along, so to speak.”

  “To be my guards, you mean?” I asked sourly.

  “To be your crew.” Brendan turned back to me. He was keeping the tone of the conversation light, but that was because he knew I could not turn him down. By just coming to Miami I had agreed to whatever he wanted. “Say two of my lads to be your crew?” he went on. “Work them hard, eh?”

  I shrugged. “Fine.” And why, I was wondering, if the Libyans had insisted that the Provisional IRA transport the gold, had Shafiq approached me first? And why had Brendan and Michael not agreed on my fee before they met me? Or perhaps they had agreed, but Brendan, with his usual enthusiasm, had suddenly decided to quote a much higher figure because he wanted to tempt me. But that suggested he also had no intention of letting me live long enough to collect the money. I suspected the half-million-dollar fee was nothing but a bait to make me take the job, and that Brendan’s two guards would chop me down the moment the voyage was done.

  Indeed, the whole affair seemed oddly ragged. The Provisional IRA had learned from too many past mistakes and these days they did not launch half-baked schemes, and they certainly did not leave details like an unagreed fee dangling in the wind, which suggested that this operation was being planned hastily, perhaps in the single short month since an Iraqi army had stormed across the defenceless frontier of Kuwait. “The important thing now,” Brendan went blithely on, “is to choose the right boat, and you’re the best fellow to do that.”

  “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 shipjthe 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 fantasising. 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 favour 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 trouble-making 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-grey 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 harbour 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 energising 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?”

  “I saw one.”

  “What a weapon! What a weapon! Now you understand about the boat, yes?”

  “No.”

  “Paul! You don’t want the heroic fighters of Ireland to have Stingers?”

  “I’d like them to have battle-tanks and rocket artillery, but I don’t think it makes sense to pay for the weapons by stuffing a boat with gold and sailing it across the Atlantic. Haven’t your people heard of cheques? Or bank drafts? Or wire transfers?”

  Shafiq laughed. “Paul! Paul!” He spoke as though he were chiding me for a familiar and lovable cantankerous-ness, then he fell silent as the Peugeot threaded the traffic close to the harbour. Above us towered the turrets and castellated walls of the Ribat fortress, while next to it, from loudspeakers installed in the minaret of the Grand Mosque, a tape recording called the faithful to prayer. We turned a corner and there, spread beneath us in the October sunshine, was the marina. The Mediterranean sailing season had not yet ended and so the pontoons were thick with boats, many of them flying big elaborate race flags so that the ancient harbour looked as if a fleet of mediaeval war vessels had gathered under its gaudy banners. “Halil is waiting on the boat,” Shafiq said, suddenly nervous.

  “The boat? I thought I was choosing the boat?”

  “Halil has found something he thinks is suitable. It might be best if you agreed with him.” Shafiq was palpably anxious. Clearly Halil, whoever he was, had the power of life and death and Shafiq was trying to impress that fact on me.

  I was determined not to be impressed. “Halil is an expert on crossing the Atlantic?” I asked sarcastically.

  “He is an expert on whatever he chooses to be,” Shafiq squashed me. “So come.”

  We walked past the security men and down one of the long floating pontoons. Shafiq was so apprehensive that he scarcely spared a glance for the sun-tanned women in the cockpits of the moored boats. Instead he led me towards the pontoon’s far end where a handsome sloop was moored. “That’s the boat!” Shafiq had paused to light a cigarette. “You like her?”

  “How can I tell?” I said irritably, yet in truth I did like the white-hulled Corsaire. The name was painted across the swimming platform of her sugar-scoop stern above her hailing port, Port Vendres, which was the French Mediterranean harbour nearest to the Spanish frontier. Corsaire looked a handsome boat, expensive and well equipped, effortlessly dominating the smaller and scruffier yachts further down the pontoon. She was not the product of any boatyard I knew, making me suspect that she had been custom designed and specially built for a wealthy owner who had his own particular ideas of what made a good cruising boat. This man had wanted a fractional rig, a centre cockpit, and a long low freeboard on a boat some forty-four feet long. The design, I grudgingly admitted to myself, did not look like a bad choice for a transatlantic voyage. So long as she was in good condition.

  “Why is she for sale?” I asked Shafiq.

  “Her owner left her here last winter. Tunisia’s winter rates are cheaper, you understand, than in France? But he’s since fallen ill and he needs to sell her.” Shafiq raised a hand in greeting to the two young men who sat in Corsaire’s cockpit beneath a white cotton awning that had been rigged over her boom. He spoke to them in Arabic, gesturing at me, and they grunted back brief replies. I had seen such men before: thugs plucked from the Palestinian refugee camps, trained to kill, then given guns, girls and the licence to strut like heroes among their exiled people.

  “Is one of them Halil?” I muttered.

  “They’re his bodyguard.” Shafiq replied in a low voice, then smiled obsequiously as the two young men gestured us to climb aboard. Then, while one stood guard, the other ran quick hands across our bodies to make certain neither of us was armed. If any of the Western yacht crews saw the intrusive body search, they ignored it, for Tunisia, despite its Western trappings, was still a Muslim and Arab country and a man did well to leave its customs and barbarities unremarked. One of the bodyguards relieved me of my sea-bag, then pointed me towards the main companionway. “Be respectful, Paul!” Shafiq hissed at me. “Please!”

  I ducked down the steep stairs. To my right was the chart table and instrument array, to my left the galley, while ahead was the spacious saloon with its comfortable sofas and fiddled shelves. The saloon seemed very dark after the bright sunlight, but I could just see a young man sprawled on the furthest sofa. At first glance he looked no more prepossessing than the two brutes in the cockpit, and I assumed he must be a third bodyguard protecting his master who would be in the forward sleeping cabin, but then the young man took off his sunglasses and leaned his elbows on the saloon table.

  “I am Halil.”

  “I’m Shanahan.”

  “Sit.” It was a command rather than an invitation. Behind us the washboards were slammed into place and the hatch slid shut, imprisoning me in the Corsaire’s belly with the man called Halil. It was stuffy and humid in the boat, and something in the closed-up hull reeked of decay.

  I sat on the starboard settle. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the gloom, yet I could still see nothing noteworthy about the man who raised such fears in Shafiq. Halil looked to be in his middle thirties and h
ad a dark-skinned, unremarkable face. His black hair was thick and brushed straight back, and his only idiosyncrasy was a thin moustache like a 1940s bandleader. He was wearing a white shirt, no tie and a black suit. He looked strongly built, like a peasant, while his left hand, the only one visible, had short square fingers. A burning cigarette rested in an ashtray on the table and beside it was a packet of Camels and an expensive gold lighter. “The owner wants 650,000 French francs for this boat,” Halil said unceremoniously. “Is that a fair price?”

  “If she’s in good condition,” I said, “she’s a bargain.”

  “She is frivolous.” Halil brought his right hand into view to lift the cigarette. He sucked deep on the smoke, then restored the cigarette to the ashtray. His right hand, I noticed, had been shaking so that the cigarette smoke trembled.

  “Frivolous?” I asked.

  The dark eyes flicked towards me and I began to understand Shafiq’s nervousness, for there was something almost reptilian in the blankness of this man’s eyes. “Boats, Shanahan,” he lectured me, “should serve noble purposes. They can be used to bring fish from the sea, or to carry goods, or to be gun platforms for fighting, but only a frivolous people would build boats for pleasure.” He spoke English in a deep-toned voice that invested his words with authority. “You think such a frivolous boat is worth 650,000 francs?”

  “I think she’s worth more.”

  “I shall offer 600,000,” he said flatly. But why was he making the offer, I wondered, and not the Provisional IRA? Brendan Flynn had insisted that the Irish were responsible for transferring the gold, yet this dark-voiced man was quibbling over Corsaire’s price as though it would come from his budget and not the IRA’s.

  “You’d best make no offer till I’ve inspected the boat,” I told him, “and I’ll want her hauled out of the water so I can see her hull.”