The Dead Yard (8 page)

"You’ll be fucked if I die," I said.

"You won’t die," Dan assured me. "At least not on my watch."

I didn’t say anything. I needed a lot more convincing than this. Dan rubbed his cheeks,
smiled.

"I like what you’ve done to your hair, it’s very contemporary. Now that Cobain’s dead that
whole look you used to have is on its way out. If you were a bit more tanned you’d look like an
Israeli commando," he said.

"They did it to me. It’s their idea of a disguise."

I took a sip of the coffee, too. It was from the deli round the corner, made, no doubt, by a
recent immigrant who knew the ingredients and the method for making coffee but certainly not how
it was supposed to taste.

"I can’t drink this. What are we doing out here?" I asked.

"You’re lucky you’re not in Union City or Weehawken. The lower echelons of the bureau got
priced out of Manhattan a long time ago. Count your blessings, buddy."

"Count my blesssings? Dan, they want me to infiltrate a rogue IRA splinter group. What exactly
is the blessing aspect of that?" I asked.

"Well, you’re not back in Mexico, which, as I understand it, is the alternative," Dan said
with complacency.

"True, but I’m worried about being shopped to Seamus Duffy. And that, pal, is your department.
If I was you, I’d be on the phone to Janet Reno telling her that as a matter of policy I have to
be protected from these Brits who are doing their damnedest to get me killed. I am very
disappointed in you, mate."

Dan looked hurt. He was a big guy, chubby, blond hair, about thirty. He had a penchant for
wearing polo shirts and golfing gear. It only made him seem fatter. And when he looked sad, it
was all the more pathetic. He tapped his chin nervously.

"Michael, I know you think that you’re the center of the world but you ain’t. Janet Reno? Come
on. You got yourself into this mess and you’ll have to get yourself out of it. Our job is to make
sure you don’t get killed by the people you ra—, er, the people you helped put behind bars. If
you messed up in Spain, that’s your own problem. I think, if you recall, I warned you not to go
abroad."

"I needed a vacation."

"Try Disney World next time."

"You wouldn’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like to be in my shoes with a bloody
contract on your head," I said.

He rolled his eyes.

"As to that—" Dan began, but before he could continue Samantha popped her head round the
door.

"Is everything going all right?" she asked. "We really have to get back to business, Michael,
time is of the essence."

"Everything’s not going all right, actually, Samantha. Dan is refusing to help me get out of
this bloody Faustian bargain."

Dan looked at me cross-eyed, knowing that he should have gotten the reference but he just
wasn’t quite smart enough to remember it. Dan would be the guy on
Jeopardy
who wouldn’t
get to play the final game because he had a negative score. Samantha, though, considered it an
insult, for if I were Faust she was Satan. She stepped completely into the room. She was wearing
a fetching yellow sundress that was see-through from certain angles.

"We have a deal. Don’t make me cross this early in the day," Samantha said.

"Why don’t you come over here and tell me that," I said with mock aggression that she took to
be real. Samantha was not one to be bullied. She thought stabbing me in the foot had already
established that but clearly she had to do more. She walked right up to me and stared. All five
foot six of her glaring at me. I moved back a little and sat on the edge of the table. The angle
was now perfect and I could see the outline of her breasts. I don’t know if it was an English
thing or the humidity but whatever the explanation Samantha sometimes did not wear a bra. Her
breasts were pale, very large, and inviting. And there was no getting around the fact that she
was an attractive woman. A beautiful face, seductive, heavy-lidded eyes, a cleavage that would
have fitted snugly in the court of Louis Quatorze. Even Dan was impressed and had to look away, a
big grin spilling over the edges of his face.

"You are not getting out of this, Michael. The FBI and the United States government are fully
on board. The only way you’ll get out of it is if I say that your services are no longer
required," Samantha said, those eyes flashing imperiously, the voice that of Thatcher about to
invade the Falklands.

"Or I get killed," I muttered.

"Quite," she said, indifferently, and the coldness in her face repelled and aroused me in
confusing ways.

"Well, comforting as always. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to talk to Dan alone, please,"
I demanded, flitting between an urge to either throw the scalding coffee at her and push her out
the window or squeeze her bum.

Samantha said nothing, nodded to Dan, and exited the room, closing the door gently behind
her.

"I like her," Dan said. "They say she sleeps with her agents. Jeremy told me something about a
Stasi colonel."

"Is that so?"

"Apparently. Word of advice. Don’t do it. It’s not good for anybody. Get emotionally involved
and all that."

"Aye, that would be terrible, if she got overly concerned about me getting topped."

"You’re not going to get killed."

I stood up, walked around the room, and gazed through the window at the godforsaken flatlands
of Queens Boulevard. Manhattan was a distant dream. Out of the question with all the goons and
exgoons that I knew. I sipped some more of the rancid coffee and sat down again.

"Please, Dan, as a friend," I said as a jet on its way to La Guardia shook the building. Dan
groaned and closed his eyes.

"Michael, all this is bigger than you or me. If those idiots up in Massachusetts manage to
blow up a British consulate or kill an ambassador or something it will jeopardize the entire
peace process in Northern Ireland. With things screwing up in the Middle East, with the president
stuck with an angry Congress, rumors about his sexual activities, basically, apart from the
economy, the Northern Ireland thing is the only card Clinton has left to secure his legacy in
history. There’s no way I can pull you out of a well-thought and well-planned operation run by
the Brits and the bureau to get at least an insight into this group’s activities. There’s nothing
I can do to extricate you from this. My job is to make sure Duffy doesn’t kill you, that’s
all."

"Listen, Dan, me old mate, if you let me go back to Chicago, I won’t get in any trouble again,
I promise. I’ll live a quiet life within my means."

Dan blinked with a tired melancholy, shifted his weight, and wiped the sweat from his
forehead.

"Sorry."

"Duffy will find out and he’ll kill me and your career will be over," I tried, on a different
tack. And I had a flash of that evil old man on his huge Port Jefferson estate casually ordering
a couple of driller killers from West Belfast to keep working me over while he sipped Bushmills
whiskey and watched his new Lord of the Dance tape.

"You don’t need to worry about Duffy. Duffy is on his way out. He’s seventy years old. You
think he thinks about you ever? You don’t have to worry about him. That contract has long since
lapsed. You practically did him a favor getting rid of a power-grabbing maniac like Darkey
White."

This was news to me.

"Are you sure about that?"

"Duffy was never serious about going after you. He had to do a big show, issue the contract.
It’s irrelevant now in any case. Duffy doesn’t even have close to a million in ready money
anymore. We’ve been closing down his operations one by one. Not just him. They’re all on the way
out. The Italians, the Irish, the Russians. The bureau has broken them all. They have a lot more
on their minds than old scores."

"Dan, do you really believe this or are you telling me what I want to hear?" I asked.

He looked at me and I saw that he wasn’t lying, or if he was it was a new skill.

"It’s the truth, Michael. Darkey White is old news. You destroyed his crew completely. You
weakened Duffy and now he’s down and soon he’ll be out. There is a contract on your head but
Duffy won’t pay it and no one else cares enough to collect it. You can go to northern
Massachusetts and you can fly with these fanatics and they won’t know you from Adam. I guarantee
it. Even if it was South Boston, I’d say go. Five years is a long time, my friend. And you
are
my friend, Michael, and I do look out for you, don’t think I don’t."

He inched closer to me, threw his empty cup in the bin.

"Look, Michael, I’ll keep my eye on this English bitch, this whole op. If it don’t look
kosher, I’ll send in the Seventh Cav."

"How will you keep an eye on it?"

"We got a good guy as liaison. Harrington. I know him from back in Virginia. If he doesn’t
like it, or one aspect of it, I’ll make sure you’re pulled out. I’ll go against the AG and the
whole State Department to pull you, Mike. I promise."

I smiled.

He’d made me feel better. Just to know that there was someone, anyone, on my team helped a
great deal. He passed me a box of cigarettes but I declined. He lit one himself.

"Anyway, I have news about your old friend Scotchy Finn," Dan said, smoking his cigarette.

A dead hand grabbed my heart.

"Scotchy Finn?" I asked incredulously.

Scotchy and I had broken out of that Mexican jail five years ago, except that I had made it
and he hadn’t. He’d sacrificed his life for mine, dying there on the razor-wire fence that went
around the prison. I still had nightmares about it. Scotchy falling through the razors, urging me
to go on, screaming…

Dan slapped his forehead.

"What am I talking about? Scotchy Finn, no, no, no, he was an old pal of yours, right? I must
have read that name in the report. Er, no, Sandy Finney, that’s who I meant. Sandy Finney."

I looked at Dan suspiciously.

"I don’t know any Sandy Finney."

"Sure you do, you called him Shovel."

"Oh aye, I remember him," I said. I had kneecapped Shovel and banged his old lady while he was
in the hospital. One of my more charming moments as a gangster.

"What about him?"

"He was murdered last week."

"Sorry to hear it," I said.

"More than just a murder, Michael. Much more than that. Ever since Darkey’s death there’s been
a power vacuum in the west Bronx. The Dominicans, the Irish, the Russians. It’s been crazy.
Shovel had risen to the top of the new Mick crew. But now he’s dead. An internal feud. A whack.
It’s hard to tell for sure but we think the new underboss for the Bronx is someone who you will
definitely remember," Dan said and licked his lips.

"Oh, the suspense," I said sarcastically.

"I won’t tell you then," Dan muttered, his eyes wide with delight.

"Tell me."

He blew out a line of smoke.

"Bridget Callaghan."

"Darkey’s Bridget, my Bridget?" I asked, amazed and excited.

"Yeah, Bridget. She’s only a small-time player but she’s going places. Protecting herself,
protecting her family, by rising up."

"She’s married?"

"Nah. Doesn’t need to be. Not just a man’s game anymore. She’s the business. If I was the
worrying kind, Michael, she’s the one I’d be worried about. Not now. She ain’t got it now, but in
a couple of years."

Bridget, a player? Sweet, adorable Bridget, my ex-girl, Darkey’s ex-girl, who had shot me in
the stomach, would have shot me in the head, and now was looking to take over her late fiancé’s
operations. I wouldn’t put it past her. I wouldn’t put anything past her. She was a rare
bird.

"Tell me everything," I said.

Dan and I talked some more and I blew off my schedule for the rest of the day and he took me
out to a bowling alley round the corner where I let off some steam and had a few drinks. Dan and
I were to bowling what Laurel and Hardy were to competent piano delivery but we drank a lot and
we nearly got into a ruck with a Polish short-order cook over the tactics of the Polish football
team. The cook denigrating Ireland’s approach as unglamorous and cowardly and praising Poland’s
much freer passing game. The dispute had then degenerated into a slagging match over the two
countries’ landscapes, women, and finally, Second World War record. The Pole threw a punch,
missed, and Dan hustled me out of there before the altercation progressed to international
incident.

Instead we bought cheap vodka at a liquor store and drank it in the safehouse. And I felt
better. I knew Dan and I trusted him. And if he said it was going to be ok, I wanted to and I did
believe him, at least while the vodka lasted and that early August daylight kept away….

Training days.

Jeremy made me watch dreary British civil service–produced videos from the early 1980s on how
to do a drop safely, how to contact your control, emergency techniques, the Official Secrets Act,
my rights under the Geneva Convention and the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights.

Then I got briefings on Gerry McCaghan, Touched McGuigan, and the other players in the Sons of
Cuchulainn. Following the hit, Samantha said that two of them had already defected back to the
IRA. In other words, left Gerry and run like the blazes. Samantha reckoned that the SOC were down
to a rump of perhaps seven or eight, maybe not the biggest terrorist organization in the world,
but Timothy McVeigh had already shown what a dedicated team of just three could do.

Back in the OC, Touched and Gerry had killed at least a score of people between them and of
course those were only the ones we knew about.

After the morning briefings, Samantha took me to the big loft room and questioned me on every
detail of my new identity. My name was Sean McKenna. A good name, because it could be Catholic as
well as Protestant and there are thousands of the buggers. Sean McKenna, though, was a Catholic.
Like me, he grew up in Belfast. He went to Belfast High School (a file had been created and
placed in the school’s database), he worked construction in London with the MacLaverty Brothers
(two unimpeachable MI5 contacts), he lived in Spain for a year and worked bar. In Spain he made
some money and traveled the world for a couple of years. A nice clean bio that kept me away from
any connection with the British government, the police, or the centers of the establishment.
Also, it was vague enough (Spain, traveling the world) not to tie me down to anyone that the lads
in the Sons of Cuchulainn might know.