In another corner of the room sat a smooth-faced, dark-haired Irishman with a face that rivaled Richard Burton's for charmâand dissipation. The world-weary eyes belonged to a man who expected no surprises from life. A suggestion of contempt shadowed the proud mouth. This had to be Richard O'Gorman.
Leo McBride instantly sensed a rival. He was the local matinee idol, suddenly facing a man with an aura of larger fame. Beside O'Gorman sat another Irishman, a creature who looked as if he had recently been dug out of a Donegal bog after a sleep of ten centuries and restored to life by a local McFrankenstein. Was this what the Irish looked like before the Normans and the Spanish arrived to give them a decent bloodline? Billy Kilroy's hunched, scrawny frame and bleak, stupid visage were enough to drive romanticism out of anyone's soul. That commodity had been eroding in Leo's psyche for quite a while.
“Here he is!” Sunny Dan shouted in his old man's
cackle. “The only guy in the family who's still in politics. I mean real politicsânot the penny-ante game you play, Desmond.”
There was his father, hunched against the wall, fingering his drink, which was as dark as Dan's. That meant he would never drink it. The rest of the family kept trying to get his father drunk. But Desmond McBride was a cautious, careful man who simply refused to buy the raucous lifestyle of the Monahan clan. Leo admired him for it. Desmond had kept his head clear and refused to let their exile to this seashore town stop him from making money. His tuna-canning factory was the biggest business in South Jersey. His fishing fleet had grown to over a dozen boats.
But at times Leo wished his father would get drunk and talk to him man to man. Did he know what the rest of the clan called himâ“the altar boy”? Did he really love his wife, whose incredible avoirdupois overflowed the chair beside him? Was his enthusiasm for Ireland a genuine passionâor a way of lording his money over the less affluent members of the family?
“Hello, Son,” Desmond said.
“Hi, honey,” his mother said.
Leo kissed them bothâand noticed disapproval darken Mick's eyes. He would never kiss his fatherâif he had one. But Desmond McBride had kissed his father and from Leo's earliest memory had insisted on a kiss from his son.
Leo shook hands with Mick and turned to Dick O'Gorman and said, “Leo McBride from Congressman Mullen's office.”
“Ah, yes. And this is your wifeâfrom Senator Ted's?”
Melody was kissing “Mom” and “Dad” McBride and “Grandpa” Monahan. She was incredibly mushy when she donned her family persona. But when she heard O'Gorman refer to her, she whirled like a ballerina and gave him a smile that went considerably beyond family affection.
“So this is the famous Black Dick O'Gorman!” she said.
“Not around here,” O'Gorman said.
“Oh, we're among friendsâaren't we?” Melody said, swinging her sheen of blond hair like a swatch of gold.
She turned to the rest of the room. “This man has done more to free Ireland than anyone alive today,” Melody said. “There are people at the State Department who revere him. People in the CIA who can't wait to see him become the first prime minister of a united Ireland!”
“Well, I'll be damned,” Sunny Dan Monahan said.
Maybe we're all damned, Leo McBride thought as he watched his wife begin seducing O'Gorman in public. Gazing around the room, Leo saw no recognition of what was happening on anyone's faceâexcept perhaps Mick O'Day's. But he had the cop's habit of presuming the worst about everyone. He could be discounted. The only person who matteredâthe only one who knew what was going to happen and cared about itâwas Leo McBride, the son of the altar boy.
Was he going to do anything about it?
Probably not. But the subterranean Leo could not help wondering if there was a limit to how much humiliation his psyche could swallow. He knew something about his reckless wife that she did not want mentioned in Paradise Beach. The mere threat to reveal it might make her behave. The mere thought of her pleading for mercyâeven for a few minutesâwas an incredibly delicious sensation in Leo McBride's scarred soul.
W
ith the arrival of the VIPs from Washington, all concerned sat down to a feastâa fine chunk of roast beef, gravy, mashed potatoes. O'Gorman sat next to Melody Faithorne, struggling to conceal his distaste. Her bone-china face, her blond hair, might have stepped out of an ad in British
Vogue.
And her name! There had to be a Lord Faithorne somewhere in the British peerage.
Her eyes, her manner, kept telling him she was his for the asking. She would have to find out the hard (or should it be the soft?) way that Dick O'Gorman preferred to do the seducing. Women who flaunted their availability stirred some primitive disapproval in his Celtic soul.
As for her pretty-boy husband, something was eating him. O'Gorman could only hope it was not second thoughts about their joint enterprise. They needed his federal bona fides in Boston to get the weapons out of the country with properly forged documents. Sitting opposite him were Desmond McBride and his wife, who was
almost as wide as she was tall. They could safely be dismissed for the time being. Not so Barbara's brawny, blond, six-foot son, Mick. He explained why Old Dan had made a point of introducing his daughter as Mrs. O'Day.
Mother and son did not seem to get along well. Mick answered most of her questions about how he had spent his day off with surly monosyllables. O'Gorman found this almost as encouraging as the absence of Mr. O'Day. He was unmentioned; a casual exploration of the house had revealed not a trace of him in a picture or any other memento.
A chance remark shocked O'Gorman out of his erotic daydream. “I keep hoping he'll get off night duty. Maybe then he'll find a nice girl and settle down. But I think he actually likes driving that police car around in the dark.”
The glaze of hostility on Billy's face had to be met without an instant's delay. “So you're a policeman?” O'Gorman said to Mick. “That means you work for your uncle. Desmond here's told me all sorts of good things about him.”
O'Gorman was reminding Billy that they had the chief of police in their pocket, so there was no need to worry about living in the same house with a mere patrolman.
“Uncle Bill's okay,” Mick said. “But I've never heard him say a word about Ireland.”
“A man may keep some of his deepest sentiments in the silence of his heart,” O'Gorman said.
God how he loathed the part of the sententious Irish philosopher. But Barbara O'Day's eyes filled with tears. Was she hiding something in the silence of her heart? Something more pertinent than love of Ireland?
“The Irish are the natural vanguard of resistance to oppression,” Melody Faithorne said. “The British began our era of capitalist subjugation. It's only just and right that the Irish should be the ones to give them the coup de grace now that America has knocked them flat.”
The creature talked nonsense almost as brainless as Kilroy, O'Gorman thought. But he raised his glass and
solemnly avowed they were in the fight to the finish.
Old Dan told stories about Democratic national conventions he had attended, all the way back to Al Smith, whoever that was. In spite of his name, the fellow was apparently Irish-American and had once been nominated for president.
In his cover role as a professor of Irish literature, O'Gorman told stories designed to make Ireland and its four-hundred-year struggle for freedom seem like a historic vaudeville act. He loathed each and every one of these tales. Naturally, Old Dan and Desmond McBride and his fat wife loved them.
So did Barbara O'Day. When she laughed, she wrinkled her nose in an utterly charming way. Her breasts danced beneath her white blouse. Only Mick was unamused. Boredom, even a patina of hostility, immobilized his strong-jawed, stubborn face. What was wrong with the boyo? Perhaps his unhappiness had nothing to do with Ireland and things Irish, but O'Gorman disliked anyone who resisted his charm.
After dinner, Old Dan slipped Mick some money and told him to take O'Gorman and Billy Kilroy down to the Golden Shamrock. Desmond McBride said he wanted to go home to work on his taxes, but Dan said, “Jesus Christ, have some fun for once,” so he tagged along. So did his son Leo and his wife, who offered them a ride, which squashed O'Gorman and Billy in the suitcase-sized rear seat of their Ferrari. But it gave them a few minutes for some frank talk.
“Here's the name of the customs inspector you need to see in Boston,” Melody said, handing him the envelope. “Also the name and address of the warehouse where you can stash the weapons while you work out the details. There's five thousand dollars in there for incidental expensesâa gift from the senator.”
“Thank him for me. I hope we can meet someday.”
“When you become premier,” Melody said.
“It might be better to lay off that stuff. I'm just a traveling
lecturer as far as the Monahans are concerned.”
“Old Dan's too gaga to notice. Mick and his mother are too dumb,” Melody said.
“One important point,” Leo McBride said in his reedy voice. “Deniability. If anything goes wrong, you never met us.”
“Jesus God, what do you think we are? In the IRA if a man blabs, he's dead in twenty-four hours,” O'Gorman said.
“Yah,” Billy said. “And he means dead.” Billy put his finger against the back of Leo's head in the shape of a make-believe gun and clicked his tongue.
“You don't have to worry about us,” Leo said. The shrill tone only further convinced O'Gorman that he was not to be trusted.
The Golden Shamrock turned out to be a bar whose walls were papered with, surprise, golden shamrocks. The proprietor, William Gargan, known to one and all as Wilbur, was the fattest man O'Gorman had ever seen. Wilbur slapped his immense belly and blamed it on the famine of 1847. He said the Gargans had been hungry ever since.
Gargan kept calling Desmond McBride “Big Brother” in a sarcastic way. Eventually O'Gorman figured out that they were brothers-in-law. They had each married daughters of Dan Monahan's. Gargan dispensed Guinness and Irish-whiskey chasers with a munificent hand. He barely noticed Billy and O'Gorman.
O'Gorman told some more vaudeville stories. Billy drank the whiskey and Guinness and was soon snookered. That meant he started telling stories about the Belfast wars. He bragged about the eighteen notches in his ArmaLite rifle and the way he dodged the hot pursuers. O'Gorman decided it might be best to manufacture a hero out of the blithering Patriot Boy and confirmed his claims, though O'Gorman made a point of declaring he personally abhorred the violence and had persuaded Billy to abandon his ArmaLite. But O'Gorman confided to one
and all that Billy was the best shot in the Six Counties, and probably in all of Europe and possibly in the world.
“He can't be better than Mick,” growled a voice on the outer fringe of the circle of listeners. “There isn't a stinking communist in the world who's a better shot than Mick.”
The circle parted, giving O'Gorman a chance to confront his antagonistâa lean, red-haired man roughly his own age, with a cynic's mouth and knowing, bloodshot eyes. He cradled a dark glass of liquor on his chest as if it were a newborn child. O'Gorman had met his like in a hundred bars and pubs. He was the local self-appointed expert on world politics and history.
“Now, now, don't use such a term for an Irish patriot,” O'Gorman said.
“âWe must hate. Hatred is the basis of communism.' That's what Lenin said to the commissars of education. Is there any difference between that and the IRA's creed?”
“What is your name, sir?”
“Oxenford.”
“I'm amazed that Celtic blood tolerates an Englishman in this bar, much less your opinions,” O'Gorman said.
“Englishman?” taunted his opponent. “The Oxenfords have been Americans since 1665.”
“The Professor knows what he's talkin' about. He's read more books than everyone else in the whole town put together,” Wilbur Gargan said. “He teaches history in the high school. If he wasn't such a lush, he might be teachin' at Princeton.”
O'Gorman cursed himself and the Irish whiskey in his belly for failing to anticipate the power of local custom. These Irish-Americans took both sides of their hyphen seriously.
Unbothered by any compunctions about local custom or hopes of popularity, Melody Faithorne scornfully attacked Oxenford's credentials. “My family arrived in 1620 on the
Mayflower.
But that doesn't prevent me from supporting the poor and oppressed around the world.
That's America's mission! Its reason for existence!”
“Your half-baked New England righteousness won't fly in New Jersey,” Oxenford said. “This is Middle America, where we worship money without hypocrisy. Americans have never pursued anything but the fast buck. That's the real translation of âWestward ho.' The only reason why every immigrant ever came here.”
“Hey,” proprietor Gargan said, bored with ideology. “How about a friendly contest? See who's a better shot, the IRA or the U.S. Marines.”
“Have you got your gun with you?” Oxenford asked Mick.
“Sure,” Mick said, and unzipped his black jacket to reveal a shoulder holster with a Colt .38 in it.
“Let's go down in the cellar and have a match,” Gargan said.
“My lad's a bit tipsy,” O'Gorman said.
“I can outshoot a fookin' cop drunk or sober,” Billy said.
They all adjourned to the cellar of the Golden Shamrock, which had apparently been used as a shooting gallery to settle similar contests. Gargan bragged that Mick had outshot all comers, from fellow ex-marines to ex-paratroopers to visiting New York detectives. A mattress on the far wall had a paper cutout of a man pinned to it. Standing at the far end of the cellar, Billy put six bullets into the head. The shredded cutout was replaced and Mick took the gun and put six bullets in exactly the same place.
Upping the ante, Gargan ordered the contestants to stand with their backs turned while he moved the target to the far right corner, then the far left. Both times, firing as they turned, Billy and Mick put six bullets into the head. They turned the target upside down and the result was exactly the same: a dead heat.
“Let's try it in the dark,” Mick said.
“In the dark?” O'Gorman said.
“That's the real test of a marksman,” Oxenford said, smirking at Mick like a lunatic parent.
“It'll take thirty minutes,” Mick said.
“Why?” O'Gorman said.
“That's how long it takes to get night vision.”
O'Gorman was forced to acquiesce. They trooped out of the bar and across Ocean Avenue to the beach. Oxenford pinned the target to an oar someone had brought along and plunged it into the sand, just above the high-tide mark. Proprietor Gargan kept the chilly offshore wind at bay for the required thirty minutes with hefty slugs of Jameson.
“I'm ready,” Mick said.
He fired six times at a hundred paces. They examined the target with the help of a flashlight. Each bullet was in the same place. The head.
Mick handed the gun to Billy. “I can't see a fookin' thing. I don't get this shootin' in the dark.”
“Give it a try,” O'Gorman said.
Billy fired six times. The bullets went whistling out to sea. Oxenford declared Mick the winner and lurched home, well satisfied with his night's work. O'Gorman wondered how the Americans lost in Vietnam with that kind of marksmanship in their ranks.
Melody suggested a walk on the beach. O'Gorman said he had no interest in freezing to death. She went home in a huff, dragging her pretty boy with her. O'Gorman shuddered at the demands she was going to make on his equipment before midnight.
Back in the Golden Shamrock, O'Gorman was soon cursing Oxenford under his breath. No one was impressed by Billy's Belfast stories anymore. They had decided he was a joke. Billy did not like it. He drank until he was blotto. Mick O'Day poured him into his car, which had a motor that rumbled like a 747, and they drove back to Sunny Dan's house. O'Gorman lugged Billy upstairs and dumped the sod into his bed. He lay there going, “Naw, naw, naw,” his teeth grinding.
From the second-floor landing, O'Gorman could hear Mick's deep voice downstairs. “The Professor says that
little guy's a goddamn communist. What the hell is Uncle Desmond up to?”
“I told you a long time ago to stop listening to that man,” Barbara O'Day said. “The whole Oxenford family are a bunch of godless atheists!”
“I don't listen to him very much, but he knows a lot about world politics.”
“He's full of it! I've told you that a hundred times!”
“I gotta go to work.”
“Work. I bet you've got another divorcee on the string. Someone told me they saw your car parked out on Leeds Point for most of the morning.”