Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

“I don’t know. Not a another show, per se.”

“You still have the Max Kinsella magic. You took those Irishmen for a ride.”

“A last gasp. With Garry gone—”

“Oh, Unholy Mother of God. I burned his…your house down, didn’t I? I was crazy mad, wasn’t I? Don’t take that as an apology.” But she looked uneasy.

“If you need to know you significantly impacted anyone’s life, you can take credit for me.”

“And you reward me with a stunning new black dress at the hotel boutique and dinner at the Paris Ritz. You must admit I made your life…interesting.”

“And what have you made of your life?”

She lifted her hands as if washing them free of herself. “Revenge has kept me alive since I was a toddler. It’s let me down. You’ve let me down. You won’t be the motive for my manias any longer, you can’t stop me from recognizing that I cannot fix what other people did to me. I thought if I could break you, or yours, it would justify my past, my failures. I just wasted everybody’s time and you all go on, whole, while I continue to break apart. It isn’t fair.”

“No, it isn’t. You’re right. I was a little in love with you and it could have been a lot, if not for the IRA bomb and my missing cousin. What can you be, Kathleen? Besides what you are? Think about it.”

He reached into his suit pocket and took out a small, square black-velvet box. He knew she’d conned many men into such a gesture for years since they’d met so long ago, but she’d never conned the boy he had been, or who had tried to be a man then. Like Molina, she was approaching forty, a dangerous age for a woman, a single woman. As a young woman, she’d underestimated her strength and saw only weaknesses. Hers. And his.

“It was an unforgettable moment, Kathleen, and still is.” He opened the box to show two-karat diamond ear studs dangling emerald green shamrocks.

She gasped. “You swore to Liam.”

“Ninety-nine-point-five percent true. I had to save something out for you.”

“For me?”

“For what you suffered. ‘Her eyes, they shone like the diamonds…’”

“‘You’d think she was queen of the land,” she continued. “And her hair hung over her shoulders, tied up with a black velvet band.’ That’s how you always thought of me?”

“How could I not? You were a woman. I was a clumsy kid. I’m not a poor man, even with a burnt-down house, Kathleen. What do you want? Could you be a memoirist, a historian of the Magdalene asylums? Write your own Philomena? Join the Magdalene protesters trying to reunite severed mothers and children? An artist? I could send you to the Sorbonne. To any university.”

“To psychiatrists?”

“Only if you wanted to frustrate them. Anyway, I ‘liberated’ something else.” He produced a second black-velvet box, this one holding a pendant, a small but magnificent emerald teardrop edged by pavé diamonds.

“For your daughter Iris. From you.”

She folded her hands at her breastbone, as amazed as any sixteen-year-old prom queen.

“Thank you for this, and for this.” She looked around the grand, gilded restaurant and out onto glittering Paris. “Will you keep an eye on my daughter?”

“Of course. I found her. Iris will do fine, Kathleen. You did the right thing.”

“Perhaps the only right thing in my life. I know you can manage to give my daughter my gift without letting her know it’s from me.”

“You’re still young, and beautiful. You can have a life not caged by the past.”

“You make me see there is only one thing that sets my heart and soul aflame, that has ever done so. Sadly, it is no longer you. I was that far successful in banishing my first obsession. I need to look elsewhere for a reason to live. So you’re right. My hatred needs a new home. And it isn’t Paris. And your self-hatred?”

Max shook his head, regretful. “What a terrible twist of fate that the few, possibly redemptive moments of our lives were so quickly followed by the worst years.”

“Hmm .” Her eyes gazed into some bottomless sinkhole he’d never seen. “No. I’ll never be normal. When hatred is the only thing keeping you alive and in one entire piece for so long, happiness seems like torture.

“The nuns hated our ruinous beauty, my mother’s and mine,” she mused. “That crazy cat did me a favor by marking my cheek. I feel I can no longer tart myself out for a cause gone by. So I’m a lost cause who needs another to pursue.”

“Then,” Max said, “I have someone I want you to meet. But first, a last, just dessert?”

She decided swiftly on chocolate.

39

Past Acts

Once they were bowed out of the Paris Ritz by an elderly doorman who might possibly have done the same for Princess Diana and the owner’s beloved late son, Dodi—although the hotel had been massively renovated since then—Max took Kathleen’s left arm and steered her away from the brightly lit tourist areas.

As in all major world cities, the distance between dazzling affluence and exclusivity was as thin as the gap between a five-star restaurant and the Dumpster behind its back entrance.

Max sensed the excitement in Kathleen’s rigid frame as he pulled them down a narrow, filthy-smelling street to a tiny European Car with No Name.

Once inside, he handed her a black hoodie and donned a black leather jacket over his fine suit coat.

“I would have preferred a motorcycle,” she said.

“Too unprotected. We’re going into a No Go zone.”

“Like Belfast was during the Troubles.”

He nodded. “The French authorities do not want us going there and the residents do not want us going there.”

“Defying both sides. I love it!”

“No swagger until we’ve found our connection.”

She was gazing out the small windows. “Drug connection?”

As the streets narrowed, the stench of food and raw sewage deepened. Max’s moving gaze flicked on idling teenage punks and drug dealers watching them pass with the eyes of starving wolves.

He twisted in the cramped driver’s seat to pull the Beretta 92 FS pushed into the back of his belt out and into a side jacket pocket, feeling like a slumming Fontana brother.

Kathleen was scanning from left to right. “Men in skirts and women in head scarves. Oh, my. Reminds me of the priests and nuns in the Magdalene asylums.”

Max ignored her. He had to spot a specific mid-rise building that had an open market in front. Under a striped awning, a mélange of scents and people and various languages roiled.

“Men in robes and caps, women in black, like me,” Kathleen commented. “One with a white tote bag over her shrouded shoulder. Shades of Temple Barr. Excuse me, Temple Devine. Bet she loves that surname.”

“Not much. She still works under her maiden name.”

“Strange to view the world from an eye-slit in the fabric covering your head and face and neck, like a wimpy balaclava, or…a nun’s wimple and veil among those orders who still wear habits.”

Max sighed. “Speaking of that, put on this Hijab before you exit the car. The world is different, and the same.”

He jerked the car to a stop near a brass monger’s tables, and hustled Kathleen out of the car. Wearing the expensive flats he bought her and the long black gown and long-sleeved top with hoodie, which he jerked down over her scarf-covered head, she passed for a Burqa-clad woman.

Inside the carpet-hung doorway were dim, shawl-covered lights and another woman swathed in the ISIS-required full-face black Niqab to reveal only her hands and eyes.

Max nodded to the woman and indicated Kathleen. “Rebecca.”

Kathleen flashed him an accusing glance. That was the name the Magdalene nuns had forced upon her when young.