Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

They dragged her out the same way, hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed now, with the gaunt beauty of a martyr, and slammed her small frame into a chair.

“How have they treated you?”

“It’s not been a stay at the Paris Ritz,” she muttered so under her breath he didn’t make out “Paris Ritz” at first.

“You’ve not been beaten or molested?” he asked.

“They’ve not gotten that close.” Her voice was a rasp.

He expected that she’d not made it easy for them to be easy on her. Nothing to be done about that now.

Max turned again to Liam. “The money your agents long ago collected in the Americas was also long ago converted to a more compact, more easily smuggled form of currency.” He stepped up to the empty table in front of him, reached into a side pocket and paused, smiling, at the scrape of metal on wooden tabletops around the room. Political rebels favored showing weapons that announced their presence, unlike secret agents and hired killers.

“If I may—?”

He eased a large jeweler’s pale chamois bag into the light. “Small plastic bags are more usual,” Max said, producing a magician’s square black silk cloth out of thin air. Now there came the restless shuffles of shoes on damp-swollen wood. “This is more impressive.”

He wafted the cloth. It settled without a wrinkle on the rough wooden tabletop.

Then he poured out the pouch’s contents. Tiny crystalline clicks announced a tumbling cornucopia of white and rainbow-hued cut gemstones onto the dramatic black background.

“Holy Mother of God,” Liam breathed.

Even Kathleen stood, weaving on her feet, forgotten by her guards. “Judas priest,” she whispered, but she wasn’t looking at Max.

He nodded at her “Yes, Santiago’s work.”

Liam looked from him to her, fearing a code.

“Santiago?” he asked.

“I mentioned him before. He partnered Kathleen in raising IRA funds, but got greedy when it was time to deliver the goods. He converted the North and South American IRA donations to gemstones in Brazil, where the dealing is good, and then concealed them in Las Vegas. I found them.”

“Where? How?” Kathleen demanded. Max shook his head at her to stay silent as her captors gripped her arms again.

He spoke only to Liam. “How and where doesn’t matter. I stopped in Antwerp en route here to establish their current value on the international market.”

Max put a hand to his left breast pocket, eyeing the surrounding intent gazes and palms on pistols. “Pax. Only getting out a signed statement of value.”

Liam nodded when he raised his eyebrows, so Max moved his hand farther inward to pull out a thick business-size envelope of heavy cream paper.

“This is a signed and witnessed appraisal on each stone, and estimation of the value, by Poirot Père et Fils of Antwerp, gem dealers since eighteen-eighteen. Cost me a bundle.”

The men started rising to crowd around.

“Her by my side first.” Nothing but stage presence and voice supported Max’s command.

And a man keeping his word.

Liam nodded.

Kathleen straightened her shoulders and shrugged off her keepers’ hands. Ten uncertain steps had her within two feet of Max, gazing on the jeweled cache. “Santiago. He was never going to deliver the money,” she muttered.

“How do I know,” Liam asked Max, gesturing his men to fan out behind him, “if you didn’t take a ‘tip’ from the pouch on the way here? How do I know this isn’t a magician’s illusion, or fakes.”

“There comes a point,” Max said, “when an Irishman has to take the word of another Irishman or what has all this bloody business been about for centuries and decades? Or the peace, for that matter. I made enough money as a performing magician to want to find this…prize, these funds, given by immigrant Irish folk and their descendants from street sweepers to self-made millionaires, to go to those women and children who suffered generation after generation. I believe that’s what Kathleen wanted it to go for, although her partner was a true Judas and hid these dearly purchased gems from her as well.

“And, Liam, I trust you to do as you say. If you find me wanting, you know where to find me, or ask Sean, but he’ll tell you go to hell.”

“We do still have a hostage of sorts,” Liam answered with a crooked smile. “So you swear by Sean’s name and broken body?”

“I swear. And on the grave of my friend, Garry Randolph.”

Liam looked away. Overzealous ex-IRA men had shot Garry dead in Max’s passenger seat during a fruitless, damn foolish street chase through Belfast.

Max sighed, opened the envelope and unfolded the papers to the last page, to point out a karat weight figure to Liam.

“Holy Mother of God! That many? That much?” His men crowded closer to see.

Beside him, Max sensed Kathleen cringing at Liam’s repeated ejaculation, for women sworn to the holy mother of God had abused her beyond breaking.

“You’d better put the jewels all back yourself,” he cautioned Liam, who nodded and started to do so. No suspicion must fester among brethren.

Max reached without looking for Kathleen’s left arm, a stick of itself, and dragged her almost-limp body up the stairs.

The night was chill and damp. The scent of rank fish-and-chips oil tainted the air. Only a few stars poked through a tiny skylight of unrelenting black night.

The air revived Kathleen a bit. Especially when Max slung her over the back of the motorcycle seat and yelled, “Hang on. You know you know how.”

After twenty seconds, he felt her small hands making fists in the bomber jacket pockets, curling into the lining. He pulled in the clutch and opened the throttle into spurting speed and started the ’cycle waltzing along Belfast’s ancient, war-torn streets.

“Where are you taking me?” Her voice against his shoulder came and went like a thread on the wind.

He smiled. Her will to live was not dead. You can’t keep a bred-in-the-bone psychopath down.

“The Paris Ritz sounds like a good idea,” he shouted back.

38

We’ll Always Have Paris

“What’s happening in Las Vegas?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Kathleen tilted her head over the lip of the wineglass she held in her saw tooth-nailed almost-to-the-quick grip. No manicurist could restore those cuticles and nails without a two-month grace period, at least. He pictured Kathleen clawing at every exit from her captivity minute after minute, like a wild thing with only raw desperate persistence on its side. It had been cruel to let them imprison her, but he’d had no choice. He’d had to win her ransom and settle affairs at home before going abroad again.

The candlelight glanced off the epee-thin white cat-claw scars on her left cheek. It was hard for a woman to claim they were four dueling scars contracted at Heidelberg University as a “badge of honor”, as heroes did in operettas.

“Midnight Louie” was an intriguing name, but it didn’t sound like one that belonged to an unmasked Zorro.

He was amazed to realize that Kathleen’s eyes were really green, not vividly green, but a sad, fatigued, pale, old-grass green, without the lurid surprise of the blue-green contact lenses she had worn while wreaking chaos on everyone he knew in Las Vegas.

“Temple Barr has married Matt Devine,” he finally told her, “and they’re hosting a locally filmed national TV talk show together,” he said.

“Married, are they? Happy, are they? Where does that leave you?”

“Not unhappy.”

She started laughing low in her throat. The harsh merriment gradually got louder, until people turned around to see what was so horribly funny. “A wishy-washy state for you. Their joint new career sounds as improbable as us doing the same thing. What will you do now?”