Carole Douglas - Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

“Then where in bloody hell is it?”

“Over the years my main South American associate managed to smuggle bits of it into the U.S. and get it safely hidden.”

“Wonderful. Your associate can now make arrangements to get it to us.”

“He’s dead.”

“What kind of a lame excuse is this?”

“Ask him.” Her head gestured in Max’s direction.

Every angry, disbelieving face in the room turned his way.

“Santiago,” he said to Kathleen. “He’d been smuggling in some of the loot every time he had a U.S. gig?”

“Yes.”

“Gig? Santiago, the city?” a man Max remembered as Mulroney asked.

“Santiago,” Max explained to the group, “was a noted South American architect and concept designer. He’d never be suspected of smuggling, and would have had myriad ways to conceal almost anything in his project materials.”

“‘Was’, past tense.” Liam strode to loom directly before the seated Kathleen. “Then she’s telling the truth. The man is dead.”

“Not only dead. Murdered.” Max emphasized the last word.

“Murdered. When?”

“Only weeks ago.”

“By whom?”

“Unsolved,” Max said with a sigh. “It could have been someone from the association of magicians called the Synth, which I mentioned to you on my last visit.”

He had an offbeat and very secret suspicion who might have killed the flamboyant architect-designer, but that was unrelated to IRA issues. Or…was it? Was Santiago’s death part of a political conspiracy instead of a planned sleight-of-hand treasure hunt and heist? Maybe the disgruntled magicians with their “Synth” secret society hadn’t been as ineffective as everyone thought.

Liam remained dubious. “What were these ‘projects’ this Santiago created? And what was the bloke’s surname?”

Max only now remembered that Temple had discovered Santiago’s antecedents in South America had been Irish. Nothing these guys need know. “He never used a surname. Just the one name. Like Cher or…Bono.”

“And what did he design, exactly?”

“Recreational fantasy attractions and rides, Disney for adults. His latest project presented Las Vegas’s mobster past with an underground vintage car ride and holographic gangland figures.”

“Like we would build a theme park based on the Troubles,” Liam said, looking around at the shaking heads of his compadres. “Crazy. Americans are crazy, man.”

“We are,” Max said with a crooked grin. He was crazy for sure, volunteering to act as a buffer between the IRA has-beens and Kathleen.

The lead interrogator turned back to Kathleen. “So this man died and all the IRA money is lost in Las Vegas? You expect me to believe that?”

“Vegas got famous on people losing money there,” Kathleen quipped.

The man behind her suddenly lifted up the back legs of her chair and slammed them down, jolting her.

“This is serious, woman,” Flanagan said. “If we don’t like your answers, we’ll stop askin’ questions and just take you out and shoot you as a traitor.”

“You wouldn’t do that to a woman,” Max objected, shocked.

Kathleen ran a hand through her shaken locks and rounded on him with disbelief.

“Oh, Max Kinsella, you’re still as naive as you were fresh out of American high school. They already have. Look up on your phone Jean McConville, widowed mother of ten, quite an accomplishment by the age of thirty-seven. Accused of spying for the British, she was abducted, shot in the back of the head execution style, and secretly buried. Only in the same year as your sainted film, Philomena came out, twenty fourteen, was a seventy-seven-year-old man arrested for the crime. Women who worked with the IRA knew her story by heart. And all of us approved.”

Kathleen turned her head to look every man in the room in the eye. “Say here, this is me, that you’ve known since I was a girl. I was always for Ireland and the IRA. I raised millions for you in the Americas.”

“And lost a couple million more,” Flanagan muttered. “Yeah, you had the gift of partin’ men from their money for the cause, but I’ve always suspected what you were doin’ off there alone in Boston or São Paulo or Santiago, say. I told the brothers, you can’t trust a whoring wacko.”

In the silence, Max watched Kathleen’s face. For the first time he saw color suffuse it, a flush that painted a measle-scape of color on her cheeks, like blotchy rouge.

Her knuckles as white as baroque pearls, her hands tightened on the chair’s wooden arms, as if they were bound there, and Max worried they soon would be.

Kathleen would not go quietly.

“And who among ye held back and refused such tainted money? Who ran off to Confession or asked the priest to baptize the thirty pieces of tainted silver? How were my methods worse than to go secretly begging for pence to the good Catholic parishes of Chicago and Boston and St. Paul while I was being showered with pounds from the bad and the beautiful of Miami and New Orleans and Palm Springs and Rio and, yes, Santiago. But no, all along you didn’t approve of the way I got it. What a stinking kegful of hypocrites! You’re worse than pedophile priests murmuring rosaries while abusing altar boys.”

Max held his breath.

Some element of the men’s long silence suggested guilt.

“What we think of your bedding habits is not the point, Kathleen,” Liam said. “The trouble is we have no reason to believe you’re not a thief who’s held back the last fruits of her recruiting. Who has cheated the widows and orphans. ’Tis maybe natural you’d want a retirement allotment, now that your assets are aging, but we can’t let you cheat us. We couldn’t let that happen before the peace, nor after it. Either tell us where that fabulous horde is, or you’ll go to your grave with the secret.”

She set her jaw and stared straight ahead, silent.

She was too proud to tell them she didn’t know.

Max kicked himself again. “She doesn’t know.”

“If we wanted to hear from you, Yank, we’d have told you so.”

“Listen. She did screw up. She’d been searching for me for years and finally found me in Las Vegas. She’s been bedeviling the hell out of me and mine there ever since. I didn’t ask to be the object of her obsession, but a stalker doesn’t have time to mastermind a delicate smuggling operation.”

“You sound like a fellow who could.”

Max shrugged. “I’m a magician by trade, a secret agent by circumstance. Las Vegas is one of the surveillance capitols of the world. Better than Dubai, perhaps. It’s not easy to hide, or move, or remove , money and guns there.”

“Guns?” Liam was startled.

“Yes, and guns.”

“So,” he narrowed his eyes. “Who do you think that treasure trove should go to?”

“The money to the IRA for those widows and orphans, if you mean that.”

“We do. What about the guns?”

Max shrugged. “To someone responsible, or be destroyed.”

“Like the resistance?

“Depends which resistance.”

“The Kurds?”

“God, yes.”

“Good.” Liam picked up his glass and walked to the bar. He hoisted the virtually untouched pint and handed it to Max, then touched the rolled glass lips in a toast. “You get us that money.” He looked back to Kathleen. “We’ll keep Mata Hari here on ice, so you’re not distracted by a stalker. If you fail, she pays the price.”

“No!” Kathleen sprang up, but strong hands pushed back down onto the chair. “He hates me! He doesn’t know anything about what you call the ‘hoard’, I won’t have my life depending on a turncoat to the IRA since the day I met him.”

“Oh, you two have a tangled history, don’t you?” Flanagan smirked. “Be interestin’ to see what he does, won’t it, Kathleen? Will he walk away again and leave you angry and alone?”