Scoundrel Read online

  I shrugged. “I’m sorry. None of it means a thing.”

  My denial had no effect. “The policeman told me it was Roisin who betrayed Seamus Geoghegan. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?”

  “He’s the fellow the British are trying to extradite from America, right?”

  “He’s a friend of yours,” Kathleen accused me.

  I laughed. “Let’s be serious? I’m a boat surveyor!”

  “I met Seamus Geoghegan’s brother, Mr Shanahan, in Derry. He was the one who told me about you and the IRA, and that wasn’t bar gossip. He told me his brother stayed in your apartment in Belfast once, and he said his brother met Roisin at your apartment. He told me!” The last three words were a protest at my obduracy.

  I shook my head wearily. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t know Seamus Geoghegan and I’ve never met his brother and I don’t know your sister, and I’m really sorry.”

  Kathleen dismissed my denials with an abrupt gesture. “Maybe it’s all true, Mr Shanahan! Maybe she was in American intelligence and did betray Geoghegan! But does that make you a member of American intelligence too? Is that why you can’t talk to me?” She paused, eyes bright, desperate for an answer. “For God’s sake,” she went on, “my mother’s got a year to live! Maybe less! All she wants is to know the truth, that’s all! To be certain. Do you know what it’s like to grieve for a child, but not even to know if you need to grieve? Mom keeps thinking Roisin will come home, that she’s alive somewhere. For the love of God, Mr Shanahan, I’m not a security risk! I just want to know, that’s all! You don’t even have to tell me anything! Just give me a nod, that’s all!”

  The gas fire hissed. Kathleen stared up at me. I took a deep breath. “I really can’t help you,” I said.

  “Oh, you bastard!” Kathleen Donovan said tiredly.

  “I think you should go,” I said gently. “Can I drive you somewhere?”

  “You can burn in hell.” She snatched up her coat and stood. For a moment I thought she was going to spit at me, then she turned and walked away. The front door of the apartment banged as she stormed out and, a moment later, I heard her footsteps clatter away on the pavement outside.

  Oh dear Christ. I sat on the sofa, leaned my head back and closed my eyes. Roisin, Roisin, Roisin. God damn it. I remembered her smile, her laughter, her moments of tenderness, but she was dead, and I was a bastard. I could have told Kathleen the truth, all the truth, but I had long schooled myself against the truth. The truth makes a man vulnerable. The truth betrays. Lies are a shield, a fog, a maze in which to lose the curious. I told myself Kathleen Donovan could have been a stooge for British Intelligence, or even for the Provisional IRA. Maybe Brendan Flynn had sent Kathleen to see if I would betray my membership of the IRA, thus marking myself as a security risk and not to be trusted with the Libyan gold. And if I had so betrayed myself then Brendan would never have dared leave me alive with my knowledge of a missile in a Miami warehouse, and soon a Provo hit squad would have come to Nieuwpoort to leave my bullet-ridden body floating in the River Yser.

  So, I reassured myself, I had been right to tell Kathleen nothing, because the first rule was to trust no one and the second rule was never to tell the truth, ever, for the truth is like gold. They were good rules, even if they did mean having to send a girl away in tears into a wet windy night, and even if it did mean drinking the rest of the bottle of Jameson to smear away the memory of Kathleen’s hurt face, and even if it did mean adding another sin to the tally of rotten sins.

  Oh dear sweet God, I thought, but let the memories go away.

  I heard nothing from Tunisia in November. December came and in the streets of Nieuwpoort the Christmas lights struggled to shine through the winter rains. I lived frugally and wondered if the whole deal had collapsed. Perhaps the Cubans had found other buyers for the Stingers, or perhaps Halil had found another yachtsman to deliver Corsaire to Miami. When Shafiq had first contacted me everything about the Stinger deal had been urgent and exciting, while now the whole scheme had slowed to a crawl, if not to utter immobility. Perhaps, after all, this was proving to be just another operation gone sour in the planning, only to be abandoned. Most operations ended like that. They began with a rush of enthusiasm that was slowly eroded by reality, but I did not break security by contacting Dublin to find out. Instead I just waited patiently and hoped that I had not destroyed my business for nothing.

  Kathleen Donovan did not try to contact me again. Some nights, lying alone in the cold apartment, I regretted not telling her the truth, but took solace from my suspicion that she had been sent to prise me into indiscretion. Maybe, I told myself, the British had sent her, and maybe she had not been Roisin’s sister at all, but merely a lookalike recruited by the Brits. The British were ruthless bastards; too many IRA men had simply disappeared, vanished without trace from their homes on either side of the Irish border. I began to convince myself that British Intelligence, coming four years late on my cold trail, had sent the girl to trap me into indiscretion. And it had been a clever touch, I thought, to bring in Seamus Geoghegan’s name. Did Seamus have a brother? He had never mentioned one, but even if he had, would such a brother say I was in the IRA? I told myself Kathleen Donovan’s story stank like rotting fish, but then I would recall her stricken eyes and my conviction of her falsity would waver. There had been an innocence about her that rang very true, yet I told myself that in the world of secrets the false always rang true.

  The winter nights drew ever longer and still I heard nothing from either Tunisia or Dublin. If Michael Herlihy had paid the deposit on the Stingers then it was looking like a lost cause, unless, of course, the Libyans had found another way to deliver the five million dollars. That seemed the likeliest answer; that common sense had afflicted everyone involved and persuaded them of the stupidity of committing five million dollars to a small boat in a wide sea.

  I eked out my own cash. I still made a little money surveying boats, but the waiting and the inactivity were eating into my savings and, as Christmas neared, I began to think of selling Rebel Lady. I had bought her for a song and, if I fetched her from Ireland to the stronger market of mainland Europe, I might be able to make a pretty profit on her even in a recession.

  Then, just before Christmas, I was woken in the middle of a cold night by the chatter of the fax machine. I walked naked to the living room, switched on the light, and saw the message. I was requested to make a survey of a cruising yacht presently laid up in Marseilles. Would I please send an estimate of my travel costs and a statement of my usual fees to M. Jean Piguet. That name was the key, the ciphered message which meant Corsaire was ready, and that the golden voyage would happen after all.

  I felt a pulse of excitement. I had not felt that surge of adrenalin for a long time. It was the seductive kick of danger and the anticipation of risk. The time had come to vanish.

  I did not sleep any more that night. Instead I packed my sea-bag with what few belongings I wanted to carry into my new life, then waited for the winter dawn. At nine o’clock I went to one of the fishing harbour cafés and used its public phone to call Barcelona, then I made a long call to Brussels. Afterwards, the dice thus irrevocably thrown, I threw my sea-bag into the back of the car and, just as Teodor had suspected, left Belgium for good.

  Shafiq was again waiting for me at the Skanes-Monastir Airport. He was jittery with excitement, craning to catch a glimpse of me over the heads of the arriving passengers. “Did you think we had forgotten you?” he asked archly.

  “I thought you’d found someone else to do the job,” I said.

  “Paul! Paul!” he chided me. “It just took longer than we expected to assemble the gold, nothing else. Is that all your luggage?”

  “I don’t need more.”

  “One small bag to cross the world?” Shafiq laughed and led me out of the terminal. It was a brisk day with a north wind and a sky of high scudding clouds and Shafiq was in a mood to match the weather; capricious and nervous. He was doubtl
ess relieved that the operation was at last beginning, but that beginning only increased his terror that something could now go wrong. “So what did you make of Halil, Paul?”

  “A dangerous man.” I spoke with a careful neutrality.

  “A dangerous man! Merely dangerous!” Shafiq threw my sea-bag and heavy yellow oilskin jacket into the boot of his hired car. “Is a tiger dangerous? Does a hawk kill? Ha! Dangerous.” He mocked the inadequacy of my description, then accelerated into the airport traffic. “He is a great man,” Shafiq said solemnly. “One day they will name a city for him in Palestine, a great city! Built on the bones of the Jews.”

  “What happened to his right hand?”

  Shafiq mimed a pistol being fired. “He was shot in the wrist. The bullet severed some nerves and tendons. He can still use the hand, but clumsily. It happened in Lebanon, near the Israeli border.”

  “Thank Allah it was his right wrist” – I spoke in a very matter-of-fact voice – “and not his left. It would have been a shame to have lost that pretty watch.”

  Shafiq glanced at me, smiled, then roared with laughter. “That’s good, Paul! Very good! You are not so blind, eh? But you will say nothing. You understand me? Nothing! Halil has a long reach and a lethal grip.” I noted how Shafiq still used the pseudonym ‘Halil’ rather than the nickname il Hayaween. Both of us might know Halil’s identity, but it would be risking fate to admit it openly, even to each other.

  “Am I going to meet Halil today?” I asked.

  “Not here, not in Monastir, but he will bring you the gold.”

  “Where?”

  “At Ghar-el-Melh. It’s on the north coast and will be safer, much safer. Not so many eyes watching.”

  “Do I pick up my crew there?”

  “No. They came yesterday.” Shafiq sighed and I suspected he was glad that I was taking Brendan’s two gunmen off his hands.

  “What are they like?” I asked.

  “They are young,” he said grandly, and as if that quality forgave all their sins. “It is a pity,” he went on, “that we could not have sent Palestinians to help you, but such men would surely have raised, suspicions on their arrival in America.”

  “I think that’s a fair statement,” I said drily.

  “So these two will suffice.” It was a grudging judgment.

  “Have you met them before?”

  “Never.” He looked more lugubrious than ever, then gave a brief shake of his head. “It isn’t like the old days, Paul. I don’t deal with Ireland any more, and I hear nothing from anyone. These days I just work at the Centre and run a few errands. I go to Marseilles sometimes, but never further north.” His mood had plunged as he made the sad confession and I supposed that poor Shafiq must have been tarred by Roisin’s accusation that I was one of the deep penetration CIA agents; the ones whom Halil had described as ‘the agents who did not exist’. What a clever story she had told! If an agent did not exist then he could not be detected, which meant anyone could be an agent, even Shafiq, so poor Shafiq had been relegated to the minor leagues, sowing discontent among French Arab immigrants by carrying messages to mad-eyed clerics in backstreet Marseilles mosques. Then, when it was decided that I was the perfect man to sail Halil’s gold across the Atlantic, Shafiq must have been reactivated as the person most likely to recruit me. No wonder he had seemed so pleased to be in Paris; it must have been Shafiq’s first visit to his dream city in four years. “Just errands,” he now added in a self-pitying echo.

  “But you must be important, Shafiq,” I sounded him out, “if they trust you to work with Halil.”

  “Ah, yes! They trust me.” He tried to sound confident, but failed. He shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Things change, Paul. Things always change.”

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, looking away from Shafiq into the monotonous flicker of an orange grove, “is why a man as important as Halil, and a man as experienced as yourself,” I added that sliver of flattery to prime him, “should be dealing with a matter as trivial as Ireland. Nothing that Brendan Flynn is doing will bring the destruction of Israel one day nearer, yet your movement is devoting its best men to his ambitions! It is all so” – I paused as though searching for the exact word, then launched it like a killer blow – “so unsophisticated, Shafiq!”

  I had known the accusation would goad Shafiq who, sure enough, shook his head angrily. “What we are doing is just one tiny part of a massive operation, Paul. You see only a, what do you call it? A cog! You only see a cog while all around us, unseen, great millwheels are turning.” He was pleased with the metaphor and embellished it by taking both hands off the wheel and churning them vigorously in the air. “Halil is the planning officer for the world-wide punishment of Iraq’s enemies! And the enemies of Iraq are the enemies of Palestine! And wherever those enemies might live, Halil’s work will be seen! That is not unsophisticated!”

  I stared at him in silence, knowing I dared not ask the obvious questions, but would have to glean what scraps I could. “Stingers? In Ireland?”

  Shafiq waved a dismissive hand. “Everyone knows that Britain does America’s bidding, and that America is Israel’s master, so Britain must be made to suffer. Your anti-aircraft missiles will hurt Britain, but they are only a small part of the pain the West will feel as a punishment for opposing the legitimate demands of Iraq and the Palestinians.” He had become quite angry as he trotted out the well-worn propaganda.

  “Oh, I see now!” I said, in a tone that suggested I had been culpably obtuse. “We had to wait for the gold to arrive from Iraq! What is it? Gold captured in Kuwait?”

  Shafiq waved a hand in a gesture that I could translate as an affirmative, but which also suggested he knew he had revealed too much.

  “What I still don’t understand” – I was pushing my luck to see if I could tempt Shafiq into further indiscretion – “is why Halil sends money by boat when he might just as well send it electronically.”

  “Ha!” Shafiq accompanied the scornful exhalation by once more throwing his hands into the air. The Peugeot wandered towards the oncoming traffic, provoking a chorus of horns. “Everyone knows,” Shafiq said when he had regained control of the car, “that the Americans can now monitor every electronic transfer of money in the world! It is the computer that does it! So instead we shall be old-fashioned. We shall smuggle gold like a pirate! I thought that would please you, Paul. Does it not please you?”

  “Oh it does,” I said, “it truly does.” But it pleased me even more that I had been given a glimpse of the truth, il Hayaween’s truth, that the Stingers were not just meant to make Britain weep, but were a small part of the world-wide campaign of terror that Saddam Hussein had sworn to unleash on his enemies. And that il Hayaween was the coordinator of that threatened slaughter which had provoked governments across the world to guard their airports, harbours and military installations. So Brendan Flynn, I realised, had not been dealing with Tripoli, but with Baghdad, and Baghdad’s urgency would explain why the price of the Stingers had gone so high; because a world-wide terror campaign would hugely increase the demand for illicit weapons, and that increased demand would be reflected in inflated black-market prices. It all made sense, so much sense that I wondered why I had not understood the equation earlier.

  Shafiq was suddenly scared that he had been far too indiscreet. “I have said nothing you can repeat, Paul! Nothing!”

  “Shafiq!” I said earnestly and with a hurt expression in my voice. “Shafiq. You and I are old friends. We have endured much together. We have taken risks for each other and protected each other. We have trusted each other.” I was laying it on with a gold-plated trowel for I knew it would all be music to Shafiq’s ears and, sure enough, tears showed in his eyes as I went on. “We have been fellow soldiers, and do you think I am the kind of man to betray an old comrade? My dear friend, I have heard nothing today that I had not already guessed, and I have heard nothing today that I will ever repeat to another soul. May my mother die of worms if I tell you
a lie.”

  “Thank you, Paul, thank you.” Shafiq took a deep breath as if to contain his emotion.

  We turned into Monastir’s marina. It was winter, and the pontoons looked drab. There were plenty of yachts, but most were under wraps, their sails unbent, waiting out the winter months until the Mediterranean spring fetched their owners south again. There were a handful of liveaboards in the harbour, but not as many as usual for the prospect of war in the Gulf had scared people away from Muslim countries. Only Corsaire looked fully ready for the sea, even to the extent of having two crewmen sprawled in her cockpit. “Are they my guards?” I asked Shafiq.

  “Your crew.” He sounded hurt that I should be so distrustful. “I hope you like them.”

  “I’m sure I will.” I plucked my oilskin and sea-bag from the boot, then went to meet the two men Brendan had sent to guard me and, I suspected, to kill me when my usefulness was done.

  My God, I thought when I got aboard Corsaire, but was this the best the Provisional IRA could drag up? It was no wonder that Shafiq had sounded so unenthusiastic about Liam and Gerry, for they were hardly the stuff of legends.

  Liam was a skinny youth with a starved wan face, red hair and jug ears. He had timid, furtive eyes, suggesting that for all his short life Liam had been surrounded by stronger people who had left him pinched, resentful and ratlike.

  The only ratlike thing about his companion was a small pigtail that decorated the nape of his thick neck. Gerry was a beefy, red-faced man whose cheap shirt strained across his plump back and bulging stomach. He had a massive chin, small eyes, and cropped black hair. He greeted me with a surly nod, as though trying to establish a pecking order at our very first meeting.

  I chucked my sea-bag into the after cabin and ordered them to tell me about themselves. “We can’t be strangers and shipmates,” I said cheerfully, “so tell me your stories. How old are you for a start?”

  They were both twenty-three, both born and raised in Belfast, and both now living in Dublin. They pretended to be battle-hardened veterans of the Irish Troubles, but their boasting was uncomfortable and unconvincing. They had the restricted vocabulary of deprivation, the fouled lungs of chain-smokers and the thin minds of ignorance. Liam and Gerry were the cannon-fodder of riots and revolution, the spawn of decaying industrial cities, and they were supposed to be my shipmates for the next three months. I asked if either had ever sailed before. Liam shook his head, though Gerry claimed to have spent some time aboard an uncle’s lobster boat. He was vague on the details, but bridled indignantly when I asked if he was competent to steer a simple course. “I can look after myself, mister!”