Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

Did they? Because she could use a guide.

Temple edged along the smooth and dark but dimly lit inner corridor, watching the faint reflection of herself opposite. A vague glow of light lit this pathway. She wasn’t surprised when the wall behind her again gave way with a tiny click at the same time as a plumy fan wave brushed her knee.

With no fuss and some fear, she turned to face a softly lit room, like the intimate bar in an exclusive—and weren’t they all, with today’s prices?—Manhattan private club.

This was Vegas, though, and Temple knew she was standing there in the Synth’s inner sanctum, at the heart of the mysteries of unsolved murders and Ophiuchus—and Max’s disappearance.

Not that anybody other than a pussycat noticed.

Guns and Gravy

“We know,” Liam said when all the glasses were a fifth empty, “that you know about the Synth.”

Max couldn’t help smiling. Until last night, he hadn’t remembered.

“Stop yer eternal smirkin’,” Finn ordered in this thick brogue. “You’ve worked as a magician all over the Western world, accident or no accident. Whoever pushed you off that Alp wasn’t the only one willin’ to kill you. They evidently wanted to shut you up.”

“We want the reverse,” Liam said, interrupting his cohort. “Tell us what information you want first, and we’ll decide then whether we have the patience to tease what we want out of you two or should just beat your brains out for it.”

“Our bloody brain tissue,” Gandolph said, “would not be noted for coherence, but I see no reason we can’t trade fairly here. What you want to know means little to us, and I suspect the doings of Kathleen O’Connor all these years later are of scant interest to you, now that she’s dead and buried.”

“You know that for sure, old man?”

“Max bore her no good will and has vivid memories of witnessing her crash on a motorcyle. He checked himself that she was dead. The authorities who arrived after his anonymous call concurred, and they buried her.”

Max was glad Gandolph could speak for him. He didn’t know whether it was strategy or pride on his part that he didn’t want these political thugs to know his mind had been more damaged than his legs recently.

“Word is,” Liam told Max, with a relishing smirk of his own, “that you bore the lass plenty of love when you first met her all those years ago. Off wi’ her in the woodlands of Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park, communin’ with nature, weren’t you, when O’Toole’s Pub was becoming beer-soaked toothpicks with a blood chaser?”

Max could wince convincingly at Liam’s deliberately harsh words. He didn’t remember Kathleen or details of their physical encounter, thank God, but he knew he’d been the virgin in that transaction, and probably unaware of that at the time. The idea of being intimate with such a damaged young woman struck him with double guilt now, though he suspected she’d lured him into it. He knew, from that “Great Unknown Encyclopedia of General Knowledge” still allowing him access, that abused children can become manipulative and even hypersexual, convinced that the entire world is a lie and everyone in it a hypocrite and out to prove that to themselves and everyone else.

“She was a beauty, but a notorious slut,” Flanagan recalled, with nostalgia. “She’d sleep with anyone, even an American lad who didn’t know which side of his pants zipped.”

Max’s left leg under the table was long enough and his hip and torso just strong enough to hook an ankle around the man’s chair leg and jerk it out from under him. The pain was worth the gesture.

Flanagan’s rosacea-red face sank under the table like a surprised sunset, as the other three men made fists on the hops-stained wood.

“Have your fun at my younger days’ expense, but not at Kathleen’s,” Max said, his own fists white-knuckled. “We’ve just learned she was a Magdalen girl before she escaped.”

“No lie, man?” Liam exclaimed. “Truth to tell, no wonder she was of a mind to use herself hard. She was the only woman then strong enough to push her way into our patriot game and play a real role.”

Flanagan had pulled himself and his chair back to the table. “Peace, man. ’Tis a fact that except for you, she only slept with those who’d give us tip-offs or money. A bit jealous we were, you but a boy from America, and she gave it to you free.”

“Free it was not,” Max said. “My cousin died in that O’Toole’s Pub blast that occurred while she was spending her pinchpenny favors with me.”

“Ah, true.” Liam nodded into his glass. “It is blood indeed that drives you. And guilt. That I understand, and respect. Wealthy and poor Irish Americans may have paid millions before the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement to buy us guns and gravy and information, but even the fiercest of them little remembered what it was to live in a land, your own land for centuries, where you and yours were despised and spat upon and your religion persecuted and your children denied education and civil treatment and every opportunity every day.”

“My forebears immigrated to America,” Max conceded, aware that his own immediate family was a lost memory to him. Perhaps his Irish heritage was why he’d fallen for a natural redhead like Temple Barr.

“That’s just it!” Mulroney said. “Your forebears emigrated. Driven out of their own land by famine or force of some other kind, uneducated, unregarded, considered less than the sheep that graze the scant Irish leas.”

“Which is amazing,” Gandolph noted, “given how the Irish distinguish themselves abroad. Soldiers of fortune, law enforcement, politics, the literary and musical arts. Amazing how any downtrodden people or race always do distinguish themselves when out from under the tyrannical, biased boot heel. ‘The world is mean and man uncouth.’ I quote the late, great playwright, Berthold Brecht.”

“A man of the people,” Finn agreed, nodding.

“So tell us more of Kathleen O’Connor,” Gandolph said. “We wondered if her dark personal history and agenda sometimes played against even the IRA.”

“In what way?” Flanagan demanded.

“Max came to wonder, years later, if Kathleen didn’t toy sadistically with him. Now, we think, perhaps with all her lovers. The price of her body was his cousin’s scattered corpse. Max concluded she must have known about that IRA pub bombing ahead of time and let Sean die.”

“To torment the surviving lad?” Liam asked. “That would be … sick. If so, she wound up betraying our own daring freedom fighters, for we well know what your friend here did to locate the bombers and lead the British soldiers to them. We put a price on his head for more than a decade because of it. Don’t think a one of us has forgotten that, as young and foolish an American as he was then and as busted up as he is now.”

“I don’t ask any quarter,” Max said, “now, nor did I then. Patriots always overlook the death of innocents in their own just passion against injustice, though they commit the same sins. Sean and I, we came here to Ulster because we felt that same passion against injustice to our kind. You could have recruited us, instead of making an enemy of me.”

“And a relentless enemy you became,” Liam admitted. “The Agreement seems to have put a period to the ‘Troubles’ for good and all, or I wouldn’t be talking to you two, but standing over your dead bodies. Yet you boys are turnin’ my head around. You’re saying Kathleen, our secret weapon, as dedicated as a silver bullet, used our secret plans to punish you somehow? Why, man?”

“She hated all men,” Gandolph said. “And probably the clergy. Did you ever notice a taste for seducing priests?”