A Trouble of Fools (21 page)

She didn’t say that her mouth and jaw still ached from the beating. She didn’t have to.

The old guys settled down, doomed to a long sermon in an uncomfortable pew.

“No Second Troy,” Margaret repeated.

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“Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?

What could have made her peaceful with a mind

That nobleness made simple as a fire,

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

That is not natural in an age like this,

Being high and solitary and most stern?

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

Was there another Troy for her to burn?”

Silence greeted the ending of the verse. A shrug or two, maybe a few pairs of guarded, narrowed eyes.

Margaret let the paper fall. It drifted into the hallway. She took no notice of it. ” ‘Taught to ignorant men most violent ways,’ ” she repeated. “Now—” She stared at the assembled faces in the room, and seemed to lose the thread of her thoughts. I wondered if she was searching for a face not present. I wondered if she was looking for her brother. She shook her head, and blinked her eyes rapidly. Then she went on. “To the point of our meeting. I hired someone to look into Eugene’s disappearance, since none of you gentlemen would tell me where he’d gone. My investigator has some slides to show you. I trust you will find them enlightening.”

She gave up the floor, and moved, ramrod-stiff, toward the fireplace. Joe Fergus rose as if to offer his seat. She ignored him and passed by.

There was a murmur when I stood up.

“Still a cop,” Sean Boyle muttered. “Worse, a spy.”

“Shut your trap, Sean Boyle.” Margaret Devens wheeled to face him, and snapped out the words with more spark than I thought she had left. “And don’t any of you speak until Miss Carlyle is through. Then you’ll get plenty of chance for talk, and I hope you’ll take it.”

I’d set up the slide projector early that morning, done a dry run with Roz—my darkroom wizard—as audience, be157

cause I hate it when my visual aids flop. My first slide was a view of Margaret’s living room, post-goon squad.

“You know Miss Devens is upset about her brother’s disappearance,”

I began. “You might think she’s angry about

what happened to her house, or maybe about the fact that you collect for the IRA.”

“IRA” got a couple of guys to sit upright.

“And if they did,” Margaret interrupted with a quiet intensity, “it’s true they should be ashamed. Big shots, every one of them. They know what IRA money buys. Bombs at holiday resorts to kill hardworking people who’ve finally saved enough for a trip to the seaside. Plastic explosives in department stores the day before Christmas. Machine guns, maybe, to murder mothers and fathers in front of their children—”

I

hadn’t had Margaret aboard during the dry run.

“The British have no right—” somebody started to say.

“No right?” Margaret echoed, cutting the protest short.

“No right? Who cares who’s got rights? Children with their arms blown off, and their legs left bloody stumps? Shut up, you fool. Don’t talk to me about rights!”

“Miss Devens,” I said. “Should I go on?”

“Oh, yes,” she said bitterly. “Let’s go on.”

Roz, fairly respectable in one of her longer miniskirts, moved a step closer to Margaret, ready to break her fall if she fainted. Roz is good like that.

I flashed a blowup of a police mug shot on the blank white wall. It was greeted by a general mutter of puzzlement.

“This

is Horace ‘Bud’ Harold,” I explained. “He has a rap sheet that runs to multiple pages.” I hit the button, showed him at the schoolyard, passing something along to a kid. In the blowup, you could see that it wasn’t a packet, wasn’t the glassine envelope I’d expected. It was a small vial, a fact I was certain would interest my Cambridge cop pal, Jay Schultz. “He is a drug pusher. That vial is full of crack. Cocaine.

He sells it to kids.”

“So what?” The voice came from the back of the room. I glanced over at Sean Boyle. His red face remained blank. He hadn’t recognized his passenger’s bodyguard.

“Let me show you a couple more slides,” I said. I did them in sequence. First, the mug shot, then the dealing shot, then a good shot of the well-dressed man, in suit and tie, heading down the front walk accompanied by his strong-arm guard.

I used a pencil as a pointer. “This guy look familiar?” I asked, indicating Wispy Beard. Boyle craned his neck for a better view.

“Now watch carefully,” I said, and I showed the slides of the well-dressed man boarding Boyle’s cab, Horace and the gym-bag-toting goon by his side. The goon passed the gym bag to the passenger. I’d gotten a slice of Maria’s thigh in a couple of shots, but they were pretty good photos on the whole.

“A man’s got the right to call a cab,” Boyle said slowly, “even if he associates with undesirables.” You could tell he was thinking hard. “You sure those two are the same man?”

I flashed both pictures of Horace Harold on the wall so he could see for himself. “I tailed him to the house. He brought a satchel with him. It’s possible the contents were transferred to a gym bag. I assume your passenger left a gym bag in your cab, as usual, and then you took it over to some bar, maybe the Rebellion, and split up the boxes, and made your deliveries—”

“Wait a minute,” Joe Fergus said, rising to his full five six. “We shouldn’t say anything. Jackie wouldn’t—”

“You’re twice-over fools,” Margaret said, the words bursting out of her. She couldn’t keep them bottled up, and her cold intensity drowned out Fergus’s tenor. “Big-deal cab drivers helping out the IRA. Something to brag about at the bars. And all the time, you’re running cocaine, and heroin, and God knows what poison around the city like the pack of hoodlums you are.”

“What did she say?”

“Cocaine?”

“What the hell!”

“Drugs? None of us would—”

Shouts, denials, accusations, and general bedlam broke out.

“Hang on,” I yelled. “Just look at the damn photos.” I skipped a few slots in the carousel projector because things were moving faster than I’d expected. I hit the button, and John Flaherty’s grinning face appeared on the wall.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said flatly, “but I’ve heard it from a good authority that you guys have been helping the IRA for a while, in a small way. You picked up change from bar canisters, converted the change to cash, and passed it along to somebody higher up, right?”

“Don’t say anything,” Boyle ordered the troops, which was fine by me.

“Then this man came along. John Flaherty, he calls himself.

Jackie.”

“Jackie wouldn’t have a thing to do with drugs—”

“Shut up, Corcoran,” Boyle said. “I, for one, don’t believe a word of it. We know Flaherty. It’s some trick to get us to admit to helping the Provos. Jackie would never get mixed up with drugs. Cocaine, heroin, where would he get it from, eh?”

“Did Jackie ever tell you where he used to work?” I asked.

“In the Republic,” Boyle said proudly. “All over the southern counties. Then in the North. Belfast. Deny. Underground.”

“He’s

an Irish national, then?”

“Is that a crime?”

“Anybody seen his passport?”

Silence.

“They’d have checked it at the company,” somebody piped up. “When they hired him. You’ve got to do that with foreigners.”

In her jerry-rigged basement darkroom, Roz had worked wonders, shooting terrific slides of enlarged B&W negatives of Flaherty’s employment application. The slides, rushed through a professional lab that offered six-hour service, were grainy, but legible. Every space remained blank, except for the name slot: “John Flaherty,” and the address rectangle, which was filled with a number and street in Dorchester. I’d checked out the address. The Vietnamese couple who’d answered the door of apartment 2A were extremely polite.

They smiled and bowed, but spoke little English. The building superintendent had never heard of any John or Jackie Flaherty. I told the old men about the phony address.

“So what?” Fergus shouted. “He’s on the run. There are plenty of damned informers, and a lot of Ulster storm troopers who want him dead.”

The men, by general murmur, agreed with Fergus.

“If Flaherty was an Irish national, his passport number, his visa status, would have to be on file, right?” I said. “You know how strict Gloria is about that staff, don’t you? Can you think of any reason she might have approved an application like this one, with nothing, no work history, no references?”

I had another slide ready for them. A blowup of a second sheet of paper, this one with less information on it.

Just a name this time: “John Flaherty.” A scrawl occupied the rest of the page. “Hire,” it said. It was signed “Sam Gianelli.”

The

second enlargement wasn’t as sharp as the first. I hadn’t given Roz much time to work on it. I’d wanted to replace it in Green & White’s locked files before Gloria realized it was gone.

“Do you want to ask me again?” I said. “How he might have gotten ahold of drugs? Or have any of you heard of the Gianelli family?”

“Not Sam,” somebody murmured. I was glad it wasn’t me. I’d been singing that refrain for a day or two now.

“Didn’t any of you open the parcels you ferried around the city?” I asked.

“They were sealed. For our protection, so the FBI couldn’t trace us with fingerprints.” The voice was Joe Fergus’s, insistent, demanding.

“Listen,” I said. “It’s no good. I’ve talked to cops: State.

Boston, Cambridge. I’ve asked around. The word is that 161

nothing, no money, no munitions, is moving out of Massachusetts, except legitimately, through the Ireland Fund.

Everything going to Ireland is watched, and counted, and counted again, ever since the Valhalla business.”

“All that proves is that Jackie and the IRA are smarter than the cops, or the cops are in it with them, and plenty are,” came a voice from the back of the room.

“You tell me,” I said. “Where are the guns coming from?

Armories? Dealers? How are they getting to Ireland? Where are the ships? They’re not moving out of Gloucester anymore.

Nothing’s sailed from the South Shore. Nothing out of Boston. What about the planes? Is Aer Lingus taking off from Logan loaded with guns? Has Jackie found a way to fool the airport metal detectors? Maybe he’s using an Air Force base. Are planes taking off from Hanscom Field? For Ireland?” I started at one end of the room and tried to meet each man’s eye, to put the questions to each of them. “Nobody here got curious enough to ask? Well, let me tell you this. Irish arms are not circulating in this state. What is moving in Massachusetts is cheap, smokable cocaine—crack— in little vials like the one you saw on the screen. And I think you’re moving it, as unpaid, blind couriers. ‘Mules,’ they call them in the trade.”

“I don’t believe a word,” Sean Boyle said.

I had an answer. In the form of a slide. A copy of an old mug shot, granted, but Roz does good work, and the resemblance was clear.

“Your precious John Flaherty has a record,” I said. “A friend of mine ran the name for me, and came up with a drug bust and conviction back in ‘seventy-nine. Three months in the Concord Reformatory. He was not an Irish national in ‘seventy-nine.”

He hadn’t even used an alias for his operation at Green &

White. How dumb can you get?

The old guys didn’t say anything. They stared at young Jackie Flaherty with numbers across his chest and a defiant glare in his eyes. His hair was longer, tousled. I expected somebody to protest. I mean, a record isn’t everything.

There are felons who go straight. I didn’t think our Jackie was one of them.

“Somebody here is FBI,” one of the men in the back declared, a loyalist to the core. “As soon as we admit to anything, we’re all in the slammer.”

Margaret Devens drew herself up to her full height. “You have my word, Dan O’Keefe, and you have no reason to doubt my word. No one here has any authority to keep you.

Leave if you like. If it were up to me, I’d arrest the whole lot of you, for what you tried to do, and for what you did. God knows which is a worse sin, but evil is evil, and either way, it’s a burden you’ll carry forever on your soul.”

Nobody said anything for a full minute, maybe two. I could hear the dining room clock ticking away.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve shown you that one of your ‘IRA’

couriers hangs out with a known drug dealer. I’ve given you a source of the drugs, the Gianellis. Maybe I’ve even shaken your faith in Jackie. Here’s your chance to prove me wrong, to say, “I opened that parcel, and it contained one automatic pistol with a green ribbon tied around the barrel.’”

Nobody said a word.

“How about you, Boyle? You want to tell me that the courier in the photo didn’t use the name ‘Maud’ when he called G and W?”

Silence.

“So none of you got curious enough to open a package,” I said.

“My brother Eugene was an inquiring man all his life,”

said Margaret Devens, softly. “A curious man, not one to take things on faith.”

“Oh, my God.” The words punched the wind out of Sean Boyle, and he sat heavily on the couch.

I said, “Tell us where Eugene went.”

“Well, he’s in Ireland,” Joe Fergus said petulantly. “In Ireland.”

“Dear Lord,” Margaret whispered, “the man still believes.”

“Boyle

had a postcard,” Fergus insisted.

While Boyle was patting his jacket pockets, I held it up.

“Never mind where I got it,” I said. “Is this the one?”

Boyle grabbed it, checked both sides, nodded.

“Tell them what you told me, Margaret,” I said.

“It’s not his handwriting,” she said. “Not even close.”

Roz had enlarged the smeared postmark. I didn’t have the heart to tell them the card had been sent from Dublin, New Hampshire.

“My God, if this is true,” Sean Boyle said slowly, “then Eugene’s not—maybe not in Ireland at all. Margaret, believe me, we thought he was on his way with a shipment of arms.