Carole douglas - Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

"No." Max washed his face with his hands, as if rinsing away the glaze the years had left behind. "He's used to hearing confessions."

Matt stirred uneasily. "Not recently."

Max's smile was ironic. "These are not recent sins I'm confessing."

He sat on the couch then, impinging on Louie's territory, and retold the story Temple had first heard after the death of Gandolph at the Halloween seance.

The two Irish-American boys, cousins from Milwaukee, going to the Auld Sod as a high-school graduation present. Their first solo trip. Of their unplanned foray to northern Ireland to see the "Troubles" for themselves, rash young would-be players of the patriot game.

The game was diverted with their encountering a gorgeous young Irish woman, a bit older and all the more intriguing for that. Gawky gallantries escalated into a grim competition for the first girl who seemed likely to actually sleep with one of them. Good Catholic girls in Milwaukee's parochial schools were too good and too Catholic, but the aura of danger in Northern Ireland, seeing the grinding inequity, made the boys feel passionate and reckless and lucky.

Matt saw Max hesitate before finishing the tale, and cut to the chase, because to him the ending was inevitable, and he didn't want to hear the details of Sean's defeat. "You won," he said. "The girl"

Max shrugged. "She chose me to go with to the cinema that night. Sean knew better than to come along. She made plain that the trio was now a couple. So I went off to lose my virginity, and Sean went to a pub to brood over his." He began speaking in the fragments of headlines, as if to distance himself from the facts. "IRA bombed it that evening. Sean, a stranger, must not have been thinking too clearly and went to an Orange pub. Car bomb parked outside. Blew off the front of the building. Six killed; three maimed. They had to have a closed coffin at the O'Shaughnessy and Meara funeral home in Milwaukee."

"What did you do when you found out?"

"Went back home with what was left of the body. Went to the funeral. Found out I wasn't the only one who blamed me for it. Sean's family and friends. The Kellys and the Kinsellas ended up at each other's throats. I couldn't stand it so I went back."

"To Kathleen."

"Christ, no. I never wanted to see her again, and I didn't. I did some foolish things to see if I could get myself killed too, and wasn't very good at it." He glanced at Temple who was still standing nervously by, like a referee. "I never told you much about Kathleen."

"Not about the movie and sequel."

"And not this part either: I did hear about her, a couple years later. She was with the IRA, probably had been then too. Her specialty was seducing rich foreigners and cajoling major money out of them for the cause. When I heard this, her turf was South America."

"South America?" Matt sounded startled.

"Lots of Irish emigrated there in the nineteenth century. They intermarried with the Spanish population. Some became quite wealthy. Soldiers of fortune. I think Kathleen was just . . .

practicing on Sean and me."

Temple and Matt were silent, each mulling over the final rev-elation.

"What did you do then?" Matt asked.

"Became an exile. Toured Europe. Studied magic. Became the stunningly successful illusionist you see today."

Matt saw that Temple wanted to say something, but she held her tongue instead. He hadn't heard all of it. "Then... why is she here, calling herself Kitty, after all these years? Why look me up? Why hand me Effinger?"

"My guess," Max said, "is that they planned to eliminate Effinger, and your search for him played into their hands."

"She really thought I was an assassin?"

Max shrugged. "That's the kind of world she's lived in for almost twenty years. So I suspect she was punishing you for not being what she thought you were. She expected a lot from her men, even back then."

"What about 'Remember me, you bastard'?"

Max sighed. "I'm afraid that was meant for me. So was Temple's kidnapping. She didn't like it when I broke off our relationship. She wanted me to stay in thralldom and work for the IRA. I had very different ideas."

"How different?"

Max glanced at Temple. She held herself still, trying not to influence him either way.

Max suddenly leaned forward, his gaze fixing Matt as commandingly as a hypnotist's.

"I suppose you're in this somehow. You've been attacked. You need to know. What I had to do was infiltrate the IRA to find and turn in the ones who had bombed that pub."

"But. . . you were a sympathizer."

"Sure. But that's what domestic terrorism does to a land, to its people, even to passing-through patriots like me. I became as determined to get that particular arm of the IRA as any Orangeman. And, of course, when I did, they became determined to get me. Luckily, by then I'd attracted the attention of some people who wanted to prevent violence by all sides, and they took me under their wing."

"So you've been more than a magician all these years, you're--"

"Basically, we're spoilers. We root out and rat on plans to knock off banks or casinos for money to support terrorist acts; we carry out arms interception raids, we blow the cover on planted bombs."

"We? You're part of a faction, like everybody else?"

"You could say that."

Matt kept silent, absorbing this knowledge. He looked up suddenly. "What was she like then?"

"Kathleen?"

"Yes. Kathleen, not Kitty."

Max glanced at Temple. She understood that current ladyloves weren't supposed to know too much about old flames, about the oldest flame, the very first girl. She eyed the sketch of the woman in question on the coffee table. There was nothing girlish about her now.

"Charming," Max began. "To Sean and me she seemed passionate, endearingly intense about political matters, but we were pretty green. She was . . . flirty, teasing, innocent of the ways of American girls yet always seeming... intoxicatingly available. We were bewitched. We jockeyed for position like young colts, falling all over our own big feet and each other's."

"Nothing like the woman who cut me?"

"No. If I hadn't seen that sketch with my own eyes I'd never believe they were one and the same. I'm still not sure," Max added pointedly.

Matt nodded, ignoring the jab at his honesty, or maybe sanity. He too stared at the portrait of Kitty built from his memory and blood. He seemed oddly contemplative for a man considering an enemy.

"Did it ever occur to you," he asked Max very deliberately, like an attorney leading a reluctant witness, "that if Kathleen led you away from Sean that night, she also might have pushed him in the direction of the IRA-targeted pub?"

"Kathleen? But, why? She wanted us both on the IRA side. She must have known that would turn me against them. As a recruiter--"

"Maybe she was always more than she seemed, more than a mere recruiter. The woman I met liked inflicting cruelty. She didn't get that way overnight. What could be crueler than giving you what you wanted at your cousin's expense, not just the cost of losing out at romance, but the cost of his life itself?"

Max was truly confounded. Temple had never seen his guard drop so low. That it would vanish this way in front of Matt Devine was even more astounding. But Max was stunned. The sheltered ex-priest had suggested a dark twist of human motivation that the seasoned counterterrorist had never looked back to see.

"But killing Sean would make her recruitment ploy ineffective," Max reiterated. "It would be counterproductive."

"To the IRA, sure. But maybe Kathleen O'Connor had another objective." Matt stared at the sketch as if hypnotized. "Was she a virgin?"

This was more than Max Kinsella ever wanted to reveal about his first love affair. "How should I know? I was the usual teenage oaf in my own mind, so infatuated with the brave new world before me, with finally crossing the chasm to manhood, so I thought then ... all I can say is she was willing. Everybody seemed to be happy with how it went, which you may find out some day, unless you already have. Nobody hurt anyone."