Lessons in History
modified on 8/23/98
(from the novelization by Kirk Mitchell)
A house across the street from teh O'Bradaigh-Doves' showed no lights. No car in the driveway. ANd newspapers were littered on teh veranda behind a lilac bush, where a neighbor had no doubt tried to thide them until the owners returned from vacation.
GAerity leaned hi sbicycle against a porch pillar and eased down onto the steps. He sat quietly in the darkness, peering at the house across the street. Both the Wrangler and Dove's motorcycle were pearked in the driveway. Light was spilling from the kitchen window onto the sunbrowned side lawn. He would see the shape of Kate's head throught ht ethin curtains. And hear the row going on between the newlyweds.
"Ah, love can be a torment," Gaerity whispered.
A firefly winked on a few inches in front of his eyes.
Reacting instantly, he captured it in his cupped hands, then peeked through a tiny hole he crated by slightly relaxing his curled thumb and frefinger. Suddenly the cramped blackness inside his hand flashed brilliantly. A miniature explosion.
He freed the little beetle into the night.
The front door across the street slammed shut, and Liam came hurtling down the walkway. Gaeirty leaned back into the mottled shadow of the lilac bush.
Liam straddled his motorcycle, started the engine, and sped down the street. Quite recklessly, Gaerity believed.
Actually, Dove had hoped that the motorcycle ride would calm him down before he reached the square. His chest felt tight, an dhis mouth was dry. Boston no longer felt like Boston. It felt like Belfast, a war zone. He almost expected to see troops in full battle dress, window-shopping when not clearing the kids off the corners if more than two of them gathered together.
He threaded through the cars, ignoring the horns that brayed at thim.
It was early rush hour, and Commonwealth Avenue came to a halt in both directions east of the Back Bay Fens. The stench of this long, meandering swampland was especially sour today. Like peat bogs. Standing at a traind door, wathcin gCounty Armagh roll past greenly through an open window. The smell of bogs and reed-choked ponds filled his nostrils. I'll only be down in Crossmaglen for a wee bit... and then I'm back to you. He had decided that her business down in that border town had nothing to do with family. Her kin were from Tandragee, at least twenty miles from Crassmaglen. And tree other members of the cell had left Belfast at first light with Gaerity. He had begun to fear the power of Ryan had over her. Over himself...
The facades of the library and Trinity Church bleared into another time, another square. He was running through an outdoor market. Brightly colored fruits. Green vegetables. Mounds of cabbages. Women, their faces framed by kerchiefs, startled as he ran past. Children shrieked as he called for them to move aside. Ahead, Dove saw the lorry pulling away from him. Four teenagers, including Gaerity, sat in the bed, squeezed between bushel baskets of produce. The fifth member of the cell drove.
Ryan grinned and waved.
"Gaerity!" Dove cried out to him, begging him to stop, for he had glimpsed the bulky thing sprouting wires attached to the lorry's undercarriage. "Ryan, please!"
Dove crashed into a vendor's stall, tomatoes boucing all around, and scrambled u again. "Shiofra, stop him!"
Just when he thought he'd lost the lorry for good, the driver slowed. Dove closed the distance, but Gaerity bounded from the bed and dropped him with a crack on the head from the butt of his pistol.
Dove's vision went to white, and he could taste blood where the blow had made him bite his tongue. When he could see again, two British soldiers were hurrying toward the lorry, fingers on the triggers of their assault rifles.
He half-turned, his ears still ringing, and watched helplessly as Shiofra and the tree others, faces hidden under black hoods now, reached down among the baskets for their own weapons, Sten guns and sawed-off twelve-gauges. They were trapped in and around the lorry, forced to make their stand there, for two more Royal grenadiers were charging across the square to reinforce the first pair.
Where was Gaerity?
Dove rolled over and saw Ryan across from the square. In his hands was his latest facination, the remote control for a flying model airplane. The plane had been discarded and the device altered to ignite explosives from a safe distance.
Crying out, Dove lunged forward at a frantic crawl, quickly staggered to his feet, and raced for Gaerity, who looked terribly disappointed. Betrayed. Astonished that is most loyal comrade would turn against him. Dove slammed into him just at Ryan poised both thumbs over the freqency transmission button. The two boys went down to the pavement with Dove thinking that he'd caught Gaerity in time. But then, sickeningly, he felt a hot, blinding wind pass over him. A sound like the Banshee's howl. Mixed in it, faintly, were the screams of woman and children.
Dove could see the lorry tumbling through the air. Then he covered his head with his sweater as the fireball reached out to him, sucked the air out of his lungs, and passed on. Chunks of hot metal and asphalt danced around him. Flinching, he crept forward on his knees and elbows to a body. Hand tremblin, he reached out and rolled up the black hood to reveal the scorched and misshapen face beneath.
"Help me, Liam," she said, her eyes fixed dully on his. "Help me."
"Shiofra."
"Help me."
He grasped her hand, which squeezed back, weakly. "He said he'd never use you like this. He promised."
Help me, Liam.
"Yes," said the older but still familiar voice at the other end. Sirens were wailing in the background.
Gaerity sat in a deep easy chair with his feet propped up on an ottoman. He was holding his wristwatch in his right hand. His eyes were on its face as he said, "Hello, Liam. It's been a very long time... hasn't it?" then, grinning, he timed the silence.
Exactly thrty-four seconds elaped before McGivney said, "Ryan."
"You don't sound awfully suprised, Liam."
"I might've been this morning. Not now. Not after you left your calling card in the trolley."
"Damn sporting of me, wouldn't you say?" Gaerity strapped his watch back on his wrist. "At least I gave you a running start. More than you gave me." He went on leafing throught he family photograph album he'd rested on his lap. "I had the Royal Special Air Service on my heels all the way into County Monaghan that night. Nothing like a crack British anti-terrorist squad to keep a fell on his toes. Well, t least I had six years of relative freedom before Interpol nabbed me in West Berlin."
"How'd you get to the robot?" McGivney asked.
"Listen, I don't mean to lecture Boston's finest--but you could learn a thing or two from the old country. Alway best to include a barracks as part of your headquarters complex. All I had to do was bypass the foil strip sensor on a window last night andI had the run of the place till seven this morning, when... Who's the good old boy who farts like a foghorn--Maner? Yes, I believe it's Maner. He showed up to open the shop."
Another troubled silence.
"Oh, I know exactly what you're thinking, Liam," Gaerity said. "Now we've got to sweet pthe whole bloody building. One thing after another."
"Is this a sanctioned hit?"
Gaerity asked coyly, "Sanctioned?"
"The leadership collective of the old group. Did they send you here? If they did, come after me, you son of a bitch. Not my friends."
"Calm down, Liam. I can tell you're having a difficult time with your temper. You must learn to manage it. God knows I did in Castle Gleigh. A stone cell is a very tight space in which to be left alone with your anger." Gaerity yawned and stretched. He heard a slight wheeze beneath him. Reaching down between the seac cushion and the arm of the chair, he found a rubber toy in the shape of a dog bone. It wheezed like an asthmatic when he gave is a squeeze. "No, Liam. I'm not here for the old gang. I've outgrown that. The IRA and all its misguided splinters. They're nothing more than territorial terrorists." He baused, examining the fang-chewed toy. "Dogs are territorial."
"They why?"
"To give you pain and ease my own. I'd love to give you my pain. But that's not humanly possible. I can't put you in a stone cell for seventeen years, can I? So my options are few." Gaerity glanced at a photograps of McGivney with Lizzy and Kate wrapped around him. "Interesting, but few."
"I didn't kill those kids. Neither did the Brits. You did. You're the reason they died. Not me."
"I could care less about that. You talked, Liam."
"Like hell I did. I ran. All the way to Boston."
"On your lonesome?"
"No, I had help. Both sides of the Atlantic."
"From whom?"
"Sinn Fein."
A new wrinkle, but it changed nothing for Gaerity. "You betrayed the cause, boy-o."
"Shit," McGivney hissed, losing his enforced calm entirely now, "you never gave a damn abou the cause. You just got your rocks off by--"
"Rocks?"
"--your puny little balss off by using people and then destroying them. And you really creamed in your jeans if you could do both at the same time. Say it, you're engraged because I had the guts to cross you!"
"Yes!" Gaerity roared. "I took you, a waif born of rummies, befriended you, lifted you out of the gutter, and made you a Titan! A leveler of cities, a destroyer of worlds!"
"I wasn't a Titan Ryan, I was a soldier in an ugly little war. And I drew the line at killing civilians."
"The line, boy-o?" Gaerity asked contemptuously, recovering his calm. "Do you think a smattering of Latin and a headful of catechism prepared you to see an inch further than your ginhead of a father did? I hate to tell you, but there is no line. And if you make on, it's as artivicial as the Greenwich meridian. There is no division between right and wrong. They are one, hopelessly intertwined like a ball of snakes. Kali and Vishnu are one. Out of death came life." He flung the dog toy across the living room, and it bounced off an upright piano. "Ever hear of the Big Bang? They think the universe was created by blast. Imagine that--an explosion was the seat of creation!"
"Oh Christ."
"I taught you how to pay true homage to that, McGivney." Gaerity dropped the photo album to the floor and rose from the chair. He could hear a car pulling into the driveway. "And how did you repay me? You cast me into a hole for seventeen years."
"I cant believe I ever bought your shit."
"You still do--and I'll prove it, Liam. I now present you with a moral dilemma. A riddle, if you like. Let's see if you have the imagination to deal with it. River Street Bridge and Copley Square were just the beginning. You can save your dear ones or your hard-won incognito of James Dove. Can't have it both ways.... or can you? See, here's the nasty bit--I did talk when they finally got a hold of me. I told them you helped that day in the market. Have you checked yourself out lately on the Interpol network?"
McGivney was finally shouting. "I'll find you, you son of a bitch!"
"Oh, I'm sure you will. Must run now. Kate and Lizzy just got home."
From the sidewalk, Kate heard a shovel striking the earth in the backyard. She hesitated, turned for the neighbor's, bu thten strode for the gate. "Jim?"
No answer but the thunk of the spade biting into the earth.
Angry now that he refused to speak, she cracked the gate and peeked into the twilit yeard. Dove was digging a hole. He paused briefly, his face gistening with sweat, then went on digging.
Boomer was lying on his side near it, obviously dead.
"Oh Jimmy," she said.
"My name is Liam." He added, nothing more, just went on digging.
She went the rest of the way into the yeard, sank into a lawn chair. She had known for months now that this was coming, that one day the revelation would break free and nothing would be the same from then on. She felt a strange buzzing inside her head, just as she had when hearing that her father had died in a boating accident, her mother two years later of cancer. This was like learning of a death.
"Liam what?" she finally asked. Her tone was flat.
"McGivney." He jiggled the handle to penetrate the tough mat of grass, then stopped. He looked up. the evening star had risen over the sumac tree in the rear of the yard. "I've never even been to Philadelphia. I was born and raised in Belfast."
Somehow, she knew all this. None of it was unexpected. He was too careful in how he talked. Like someone masking an accent to blend in. "And Belfast has finally made it here."
"I wish you'd seen that sooner... Liam."
"No use keeping anything from you."
"Rather like how you say it." He began digging again. "So, you see, it wasn't the job. Not completely. I'd accumulated more than enough of the stuff of nightmares before I ever got to Boston. I didn't have a childhood like you or Lizzy. Grew up with troops on the corners. Armored vehicles at the crossroads. Sting of tear gas, and so-and-so from the neighborhood gunned down by the Ulster Defense Association." At last, he looked at her. "Know how black children sometimes looko up to pimps and drug dealers? Works the same the world over. My idol was into bombs. A bright, funny, charismatic sociopath who made me feel important for the first time in my life. Made me feel as if I had prospects. A destiny."
"What happened over there? What d'you keep dreaming about, Jimmy?"
"Come to think of it, I like the way you say that better." He thought a moment, his hands twisting over the haft of the shovel. "A bombing attack on market day. He sacrificed four of my young friends to take out four British soldiers. A draw in my book. But a victory in his, I suppose. There was a bit of self-serving cunning in what he did, I later figured out. The foursome had delivered a lot of bombs for him. Sooner or later, one of them was bound to get caught. And talk. Better to recruit a whole new batch off the schoolyard, as he did all of us."
"But what do you see at night when you cry out?"
"There was a girl among them..." Then he couldn't go on. At least not about the vision that snapped him awake, screaming. "I was young, but i suppose I was in love with her."
"What was her name?"
He just shook his head. Then he tossed aside the shovel and gently lowered Boomer into the ground.
"If you won't talk about that," she pressed, "then at least tell me this--how safe is your identity here?"
"Resonably save, Kate."
"What about the checking the department does on new hires?"
"Mine was whitewashed by a captain in personnel. See, his brother was a Sinn Fein man in Belfast, and it was held to be in the best interests of the cause for Liam McGivney to vanish. But I have to tell you, there could be problems now."
"How?"
"He's over here."
"Who?"
"My schoolyard recruiter, Ryan Gaerity. He killed Blanket. And today he got Rita and Cortez at Copley Square."
She leaned over with her elbows on ther knees, took several deep breaths.
"But it's me he wants. He came to the house this afternoon for me."
"Why?"
"I tried to stop him back then. And that's the one thing he won't tolerate." He stepped over to her. The nightfall was almost complete, and she coudn't catch his expression. But she thought he was going to touch her. Instead, he deposited a key in her hand. "You've got to leave, Kate."
"This is my home. What about Lizzy?"
"Listen, go to Max's place out on the cape. We've stayed there in better times, so Lizzy doesn't have to be wise to why you're going now. Tell her I'll be out for a weekend as soon as I can get away from work. Make it sound like a vacation." Then he went back to the grave, began covering Boomer with earth.
"Is that it?" she asked.
He said nothing.
"I leave just because you say I should leave? I don't even know who you are."
"Yes, you do, Katie," he said quietly.
--------
More than anything now, he feared leading Gaerity to his friends. Not that this tough old bastard wouldn't give Ryan a time of it. Inwardly, Dove saw Blanket's face for an instant. Then Rita's and Cortez's. His stomach started to seize again, but he made himself think only of Gaerity's face. Mut put everything on the back burner except finding him before the next attack on the squad.
"Poacher," Dove called down to O'Bannon, "put up your hands."
"Why?"
"It's the county gamekeeper."
"Which county?"
"Armagh. Let me see your fishing permit."
"To hell with your English permit," O'Bannon said, still reeling. He leaned back, and his Donegal tweed cap fell off.
Dove approached and squared Max's cap back on his head. "What've you got?"
"Mackerel, I'm sure."
"Fine night for them."
"Aye." The moon had risen. "A fighter."
Dove said, "Most anything will fight when it's hooked in the gob."
"You're sounding particularly Irish tonight."
Dove kept silent about that for the moment. But yes, he felt easier about it now. Kate knew.
O'Bannon landed his fish, a portly mackerel. "Pregnant," he said after inspecting her with his flashlight. "Will you look at that? Almost burstin' with her spawn." He gently released her. "Go forth and multiply."
"How late do you usually stay out here?"
"As late as it takes to get sleepy," O'Bannon said, easing back with a sigh. "Grow old and your head gets too thunderin' full of sleep." He dug two Harps out of his ice chest, offered one to Dove.
"Not tonight."
O'Bannon nodded as if he understood. "Heard what happened at Copley Square. What's this city comin' to? As bad as bloody Ulster."
"More than you know."
O'Bannon's moonlit face turned toward him.
"It's Gaerity," Dove went on.
"Oh Jimmy, that can't be. They caught up with him several years after..." A hesitation came into O'Bannon's voice, perhaps unconscious. "...Crossmaglen. They sent him up to Castle Gleigh and threw away the key."
"I talked to him on the phone today."
"Go on. Are you sure?"
Dove touched his hand to his eyes for a second, then lowered his voice. "He murdered McNulty with a concussion bounce. Blew Rita out of the truck today. Cortez..." He saw the truck on its side in the square, flames shooting out of the broken windows. "Gaerity's using them to get back at me. Using and destroying them. Just as he did Shiofra and the others back then. He blames me for what happened."
"The devil can take that bastard," O'Bannon said, his voice suddenly raw with bitterness. "If you hadn't tosses the monkey wrench in, that lorry would've blown smack dab in the middle of the square, not on the fringe like it did. Dozens killed. Maybe hundreds. And not just my niece and those other poor kids." Max fell silent, and Dove knew that he was seeing Shiofra O'Bannon's face. He hoped that Max's recollection was more pleasant than his own last memory of it.
Dove then said, "I told Kate this evening."
"Everything?"
"Yes. Except I kept your name out of it. Shiofra's too."
"Ah, Jimmy--she's your wife, not your priest. how do you step back from it now?"
"I don't know if I will."
"You better--or it's off to Castle Gleigh with you too."
"I mean I'm not going to lie to Kate anymore. I can't, not after what's happened." Dove paused. "Max, Gaerity was at the hose this afternoon. he was sitting in my chair when Katie drove up with Lizzy. I spent an hour tearing the place apart for a device."
"Holy Mary." O'Bannon took a fierce pull off his bottle. "Well, you've got to get her and the child out of town. There's no doubt about that."
"Already done. Hope you don't mind, but I gave Kate my key to the cottage. They should be there by now."
"Mind? I'd belt you in the head if you'd thought twice about it." O'Bannon rebaited and cast again. "I'll find out what I can about Gaerity through the network. If he's here like you say, he's uing the community. A bastard like him can't get by without milkin' some poor mindless paddies."
"I don't want you getting involved."
O'Bannon gave a soft harrumph as he stared out across the harbor. "You tried to save my brother's only child. I wish there'd been a way to humanly pull it off. For her sake as well as yours, for I know how you've suffered fromt he thing all these years, Liam McGivney. NOw you've thanked me a thousand times for bringin' you over, greasin' your way pas personnel. But the greater debt is still mine. And so it'll be till I take my last breath."
Dove couldn't speak for a long moment. He watched the landing lights of a jet glimmer down over the harbor. "Then pay me back this way, Max. Stay out of it." He started back for the bike.
"Where you headed, Jimmy?" O'Bannon called after him.
"Squad building. Gotta sweep it. Gaerity was inside it, too."
"Just like the devil," O'Bannon said angrily. "Everyplace at once, and nowhere up to any good."
More to come...
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