Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

“Victims never forget. And … it’s easier to track records, and people, now.”

Max glanced at the open netbook on Gandolph’s lap. “You find anything online on Kathleen as opposed to the downtrodden Rebecca?”

“Kathleen O’Connors are as common as grains of sand on a beach, in Ireland or out. We’ll have to rely on personal interviews with old enemies. Next stop, Belfast and any ex-IRA men we can turn up.”

“You’re sure they’re ‘ex’? I do remember headlines about pub bombings and outrages against innocents in my vague ‘way back when’ youth.”

“You don’t remember family? Where you lived? Wisconsin? A street? The house?”

“Pieces. As if Picasso had played Guernica with images of my past. A long empty echoing hall, in a school or possibly a church. Snow covering a looming pair of fir trees in a front yard. Concrete stairs and a metal railing to a white-painted door. Midwestern, it looked. I felt more at home on the Alpine meadows, come to think of it.”

“You were on the run. That’s been half your life, the most recent life. No faces from your past haunt you?”

“No faces. It’s as if someone had erased the most intimate parts of my memories.”

“You’re sure Revienne didn’t drug you? Hypnotize you?”

“No. How could I be sure she didn’t? I stayed off the pain pills and injections in the Swiss clinic as soon as I was conscious, but anything could have been pumped into my mind or veins before that. My apparent memory loss could be totally induced.”

“That’s the Max I remember. Always suspicious.”

“Not a fun guy.”

“Not now. You used to be amusing company.”

“I don’t know whether to be relieved or insulted. When did we stop keeping company?”

“Just over two years ago. We split up when you got the Vegas hotel job. You’d met Temple Barr in Minneapolis, and it was love at first sight.”

“Wasn’t I … more careful then?’

“Not about her. You whisked her away from her native city and family to live in sin with you in Vegas while you headlined a magic show at the Goliath. I, and our employers, understood you deserved a life. Hiding behind the magician persona had always been a natural cover for you. I was relieved we both seemed to have ‘retired’ due to true love, and I resumed my long-ago hobby of unmasking fraudulent psychics.”

“A contradiction in terms, isn’t that last?”

“So I’ve always found, but I have hopes. Anyway, your redheaded girlfriend got involved promoting a hokey Vegas Halloween séance in which I was playing the undercover patsy … and you came along eventually to safeguard her, so I had to fake my own death.”

“A true Gandalf.”

“I’ve always been Gandolph. What do you mean by true?”

“The book! Even I remember The Lord of the Rings. You took your stage name from the wizard Gandalf the Grey, right? He appeared to die in the novels and then came back.”

“Really? Sounds more like your role in Las Vegas, if you ever revisit the place. That ‘revival’ thing is just a bizarre coincidence. I didn’t actually read the books. Do you know how long each of the three is? I plucked the Gandalf mojo out of the popular-culture air ages ago. My last name was Randolph. I needed a ‘magical’ moniker. ‘Gandolph.’” Garry chuckled and patted the hair at his temples. “Time did make me ‘Gandolph the Grey,’ though.”

Max chuckled too.

Chuckled. His mood was improving. No wonder he’d partnered with this guy.

“This route doesn’t seem familiar,” Max complained ten minutes later. “Sean and I had to have taken the M1 heading north before.”

“It shouldn’t,” Gandolph said. “Times have changed. I’m tracking our route on a Yahoo! map on my computer. The M1 wasn’t much of anything when you and your cousin made your way north. How? Hitchhiking, perhaps? Once you had ID’d and targeted the three IRA members who’d blown up O’Toole’s Pub and killed Sean, among six other victims, my job was to recruit you and get you off the island and onto the Continent for concealment and training. You were on the IRA’s most-wanted list for years.”

“When did that change?”

“Officially? Ages ago, as international grudges go. Since the Good Friday Agreement was signed by the British and Irish governments in nineteen ninety-eight, most of the politically motivated violence tapered off. International repugnance for the horror of nine/eleven finished off the ‘Troubles’ the way hundreds of years of relentless hatred and undying hope could not. The IRA has evaporated except for last-gasp ‘alternate’ groups. Recently, Belfast was named the safest city in the UK.”

Max snorted. “My memory is dysfunctional, not my nose for political hatred. The English have tried to destroy the Irish for almost five hundred years. And vice versa. Enmity is in the blood.”

“Quite true, Max, but it can’t compete with fundamental Islam’s jihad against Christian nations, for longevity. Give the Irish credit for knowing when they’re outgunned. At any rate, Belfast is the new tourist hot spot.”

“That bridge toll I paid near Drogheda?”

Gandolph nodded. “That was for crossing the Bridge of Peace. Less than two euros a car. You didn’t even notice.”

“It was a bloody highway toll. They’re as common as grass.”

“Exactly. We’ve crossed the border. You didn’t notice the changes in signage.”

Max looked around wildly. “It can’t be that simple. I may not remember much, but even my aching bones know that.”

“It won’t be simple,” Gandolph said, “but it at least will be possible now.”

Max spotted a pub sign. The place was stage-Irish rustic and called Durty Mulligan’s.

“That looks like a fine place to get stewed,” Max quipped.

Gandolph ran a vein-knotted hand through his pepper-dusted white hair. “Ah, it’s like old times again, without the imminent danger.”

“Are you sure?”

Gandolph shrugged. “No one’s had time to fix on us and figure out our mission. For now, we can eat, drink, and be merry, eh?” He eyed the attractive pub that had probably been put up five years ago.

“And you can catch me up even more on my forgotten past,” Max said.

“I said ‘be merry.’ Time enough for business when we’re back on the road.”

Once they were seated over a pint in the Belfast pub, though, Gandolph revved up his computer.

“We should have been doing this in the Temple Bar area of Dublin,” he said wryly.

“When I didn’t even know who she was and that we’d had a … serious connection? Even smacking me in the face with her name in foot-high gold letters didn’t trip my memory trigger. You’d think if our love affair was that intense, I’d remember it.

“And why do all these things come wireless nowadays?” Max asked, unable to keep an irritable edge out of his voice. He felt both antsy and reluctant. “It’s intrusive, and we could be tracked.”

Did he want to see the Web site of this “Temple Barr” in Dublin’s fair city or Belfast or anywhere on the globe? If she was his “lost love,” he had forgotten that fast enough to sleep with a sleek, mysterious blonde of the possibly traitorous sort, who could have seduced an alpine walking stick.

So all he’d get out of perusing his past now was looking at a woman betrayed, thanks to His Truly. Or Untruly, rather.

Garry … Gandolph, starting to look familiar and trustworthy, was as eager as a boy, though, bringing up the “Web page” as if unveiling a magical feat. Even Max knew the old guy was behind the times, more at sea at these tech things than how Max himself would be with an intact memory. His rush of affection made plain that he needed to keep that superior knowledge from his mentor.