Adrian McKinty: The Dead Yard

“You’ve been living in America?” the man asked.

“What the hell is your name?”

“Jeremy Barnes,” he said, blowing a Gauloise in my direction.

“Oh, and I’m Samantha Caudwell,” the woman said in an even more upper-class accent than Jeremy’s. The sort of snide Queen’s English Olivia de Havilland used when she was badgering Errol Flynn in those films from the 1930s.

The smoke from the cigarette drifted over. Only pseuds and poseurs smoked Gauloises. Jeremy, however, seemed not to be either of these.

“You’ve lived in Paris,” I said, surprising Jeremy with a good guess. Jeremy looked a little taken aback but quickly recovered his poise.

“Yes, yes indeed. They told us you were good,” Jeremy said.

“Who’s they?”

“The FBI. The U.S. Marshals Service. We’ve read your file, Brian, or should I say, Michael. We know everything about you.”

“Aye?” I said, trying to appear casual.

“Yes. Shall I tell you what we know?”

“Maybe you should tell me a wee bit about yourself first,” I said.

“No, I don’t think so, old chap. Would you like a drink?” Jeremy asked and threw a flask onto the cot.

“I’d like water.”

Jeremy tossed me the water bottle.

“Good idea. Water first, then the brandy,” Jeremy said. “Ok.”

I drank the half-liter bottle of water, unscrewed the hip flask, and took a sip of brandy. I threw the flask back.

“Your name is not Brian O’Nolan. Your real name is Michael Forsythe. You went to America in 1992 to work for Darkey White. You ended up killing Darkey White and wiping out his entire gang. You turned informer and the American government set you up with a new identity. I gather that recently you’ve been living in Chicago,” Jeremy intoned placidly.

I said nothing.

“You speak fluent Spanish. That, and only that, can possibly account for your desire to take a vacation in the Canary Islands,” Jeremy mocked.

“I’ll ask again. Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

“Mr. Forsythe, I am the person who could get you out of this cell, today. Right now in fact. In the next five minutes you will have to make a decision. That decision will be either to come with me or stay here, get tried, get convicted, and then spend the next few years in the Columbaro Maximum Security Prison in Seville. Perhaps you’ll choose the prison. Miguel de Cervantes began Don Quixote there. A fascinating place, apparently.”

“Who do you work for?” I insisted.

Jeremy finished his cigarette. Slowly lit another.

“What do you see?” Samantha asked from behind Jeremy.

“What do I see?” I repeated.

“Yes. Tell us,” Jeremy said.

I sighed. Leaned back. What game were they playing?

I looked the two of them over. They were relaxed, confident, obviously serious. This was a test.

“Ok, I’ll play if you want to. I guessed Paris because of your fags. Easy,” I said to Jeremy a little warily.

“What else?” he asked.

“You went to Harrow. Not on a scholarship, your father probably went to Harrow and his father before him. Your granddad probably used to tell you stories about how Winston Churchill was in the remedial class when he was there.”

Jeremy laughed and choked on his cigarette. I continued.

“You’re wearing a linen jacket. Expensive, but more than that, a kind of uniform. You knew you were going to have to go to Spain to see me, but you took the time to change from English clothes into something more sartorially suitable. Why? Why not shorts and T-shirt, or a polo shirt, or a cotton shirt and chinos? Hmmm. You feel you have to wear a jacket because you’re on duty. You look like an army officer but you’re in civvies. Maybe you were in the army or maybe the RAF, you don’t seem like a navy man anyway… So why are you here? You work for the government. You and your wee secretary have flown all the way to Spain. You don’t have a tan, you’re not even red, you came here right from the airport. To see me. Huh. Why? A job. You need me for a job. You’ve come to make me a job offer.”

Samantha whispered something to Jeremy. He nodded. I was impressing them with this bullshit.

“Who do I work for?” Jeremy asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it.”

“Why should I?” I asked petulantly.

“Why indeed?” Jeremy said, smiling.

“Ok, let me see… Christ, I have it, it must be the Old Bill. You work for the cops.”

“Not the police, why would the police want you?”

I sat forward on the edge of the bed. Yeah, he was too much of a patrician for the cops. He was a highflier, he worked for- “British bloody Intelligence,” I said.

Jeremy’s jaw opened and closed. Samantha moved a little closer. Jeremy turned round to look at her.

And then I saw I was being dicked. I’d been wrong. Samantha was the superior officer. Jeremy was the underling. She was watching both of us, using him as a barrier to assess me, seeing if I was right for whatever it was they wanted me for.

Well, enough of that for a game of soldiers.

“Hey, Sammy, why don’t you do us a favor, get your boy out of here and we can talk business,” I said.

Jeremy looked startled. Samantha tried not to appear nonplussed.

“We do think we’re clever, don’t we?” she said, mispro- nouncing her Rs in that way they teach you at only the most elite of English boarding schools.

I said nothing.

“You may leave, Jeremy. Please wait for me outside,” she ordered. Jeremy stood, winked at me, and knocked on the door. The guard opened it and let him out. Samantha moved to Jeremy’s seat and picked up the file he had left on the chair.

British Intelligence. Well, well, well. I suppose they wanted someone with insight into the workings of the rackets in Belfast. If the peace deal everyone was talking about came off, then they’d want to make sure all those bored paramilitaries in Ulster didn’t move into organized crime and drugs. I could be very useful on that score. Or maybe they wanted someone to spruce up their training programs for undercover ops. I could probably do a job like that. I was army trained and I’d interrogated the shit out of people before. Might be a nice little earner if I played my cards right. The FBI kept me safe but they didn’t exactly keep me flush.

Samantha skimmed through the folder, pretending to notice things for the first time.

“I don’t have all day, you know. I’m very anxious to find out if Stella can learn to love herself again,” I said, holding up my novel.

Samantha smiled and continued to thumb my file.

“You’ve been quite the naughty boy, haven’t you, Michael?” she said, her tone as condescending as if she were a Victorian missionary and I, a recidivist cannibal chieftain caught with a hut full of human heads.

“Depends what you mean by naughty.”

“Killing several unarmed people in cold blood.”

“You want to tell me my life story or you want to get on with it?” I said, irritated.

“Don’t get cross. I’m here to help you,” she said.

“You’re here to bust me out of this joint,” I sneered.

“That’s right,” she said, crossing her legs and accidentally hitching up her skirt a notch.

Really not a bad-looking chiquita if you liked that sort of thing and, if truth be told, I did like that sort of thing. You could tell that underneath the prim, proper, repressed, King and Country exterior… the rest of the sentence is cliché, but I’d bet money it wasn’t far off the mark.

“Michael, first of all, I feel that it’s very important that I’m honest with you. You’re obviously too smart to fall for a line, so I’ll tell you how it is. Although it looks like we have all the cards, in fact I have a poor bargaining position. If time were not a factor, you would need us much more than we would need you. But, alas, time is a factor,” she said in that roundabout diplomat way again.