The Bloomsday Dead (21 page)

I watched him for five minutes to check for goons. Really should have been a couple of hours, but time was of the essence. No one that I saw. No one that wasn’t born before World War I, anyway.

I stood next to him.

A bald, wizened seventy-year-old, with a bit of a Parkinson shake, round reading glasses, and a wispy beard. Depressingly, this scholarly looking gent, who apparently was one of the most feared paramilitary commanders in Belfast, was also dressed in leisure wear: a white UCLA sweatshirt and black jeans. I checked that no one was paying attention and removed the .38.

“Body O’Neill?”

He looked up.

I pointed the revolver at him, real close so that he could see it through those thick lenses.

“Yes?”

“I want to ask you some questions.”

“Who are you?”

“Michael Forsythe,” I said.

Mild surprise in his watery yellow eyes.

“Ahh, I see, Michael Forsythe. For some reason I thought you might be dead by now,” he said.

“You know, funnily enough, that’s what I want to talk to you about,” I said, winking at him.

He smiled, stroked his limpid cheeks, looked around the room.

“Sit,” he suggested.

“Why not?”

I sat beside him.

“You don’t mind if I just check you for a gun?” I said.

“I would rather you didn’t touch me. I assure you, I am unarmed,” he said.

“What’s that? A pacemaker?” I asked.

“I asked you not to touch me,” he said, embarrassed.

“Yes, but I have the gun,” I explained.

He frowned, looked around the room.

“You know why I like this place?” O’Neill said.

“What place, the city?”

“No, the library,” he said.

“No, why?”

“It’s eclectic. Postmen, dockers, students, everyone. You can bump into Seamus Heaney, and occasionally you’ll see Gerry Adams in here researching his socalled memoirs.”

“Now listen to me, O’Neill. I’m sure you’re just fabulous at playing for time, but I have a whole series of questions and my patience is already stretched very thin.”

“You have questions for me?”

“Yes, I bloody do. First, why have you been trying to kill me since Dublin?”

“Better start talking, O’Neill,” I said with menace.

“The interview form is not one I enjoy, Mr. Forsythe. Question-and-answer is such a barbaric manner of discourse. If you have any questions, you should probably take them up with Mikhail.”

“And who the fuck is Mikhail?”

“I’m Mikhail,” Mikhail said, thumping my hand with a knuckle duster and removing the revolver from my grip in a fast, continuous motion. I winced and turned. Mikhail was a six-foot-six Neanderthal. Shaven head, narrow Mongolian eyes. Clearly the bloody bodyguard, fresh in from slaughtering insurgents in Chechnya.

My hand was killing me. Mikhail shoved a snubnosed silenced .22 automatic into my ribs. He passed his boss my .38.

“We don’t want a scene, Mr. Forsythe, but Mikhail will kill you stone dead if you say another harsh word,” O’Neill said quietly.

“Kill me in front of all these witnesses?” I asked.

“What witnesses? No one will hear a thing and we’ll shove you under the alcove desk and walk straight out of here. No one will find you until closing time and by then I’ll have an alibi and the case will be insoluble,” O’Neill said.

“Miss Plum knows I wanted to talk to you.”

“Look around, no one can even see us here, and I assure you, Mikhail is very nervous about going to prison. He had a bad experience in a Communist gulag. If you look even a wee bit like you’re going to shout or cause trouble, he’ll shoot without a second thought,” O’Neill said.

I nodded.

“Ok, or what?” I asked.

O’Neill looked baffled for a second. He hadn’t thought about the “or.”

“Or you come with us outside,” O’Neill said.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“In case you decide you’d like to join us, I’ll just make a phone call,” O’Neill said sarcastically.

He popped open his cell.

“You won’t bloody believe it, Tim. Meet me outside the Linen Hall right now with the van and a couple of heavy lifting boys,” he said.

I nodded at Mikhail.

“How did you get a library card, you don’t seem the literary type?” I asked.

Mikhail ignored me. O’Neill hung up, smiled.

“I’m curious, how did you find me here, Mr. Forsythe?” O’Neill said.

“I’d love to tell you, but question-and-answer is just such an uncivilized form of discourse. Spot me a couple of Manhattans and we’ll have a right old chin wag about anything you like.”

“Oh, I don’t think we’ll be doing much talking, Mr. Forsythe. Very little of what you could say would interest me,” O’Neill said.

“I think you’ll find you’re mistaken, I’m quite the amiable companion. For instance, I’ll bet you didn’t know that today is Bloomsday. Down in Dublin they are having a real shindig. And this might interest Mikhail: on this date in history Yuri Gagarin—”

I’d been trying to say all this in an increasingly loud voice, not so loud that Mikhail would pop a cap in my stomach, but loud enough to bring Miss Plum over. Regardless, O’Neill stopped me with a wave of his hand since his cell phone was vibrating.

“Hello. . . . It is. . . . Excellent. . . . We’ll be down in two minutes,” he said.

He turned to face me with the grisly smile of an executioner.

“Stand, please, Mr. Forsythe.”

I stood.

“Mikhail, I think Mr. Forsythe and you and I will take a walk outside. We’ll go down the fire escape. I’ll want you to walk ahead of us very slowly, Mr. Forsythe, and if you stumble or fall, or cry out or do anything I don’t like, Mikhail will shoot you in the brain.”

I hesitated and stared at him.

“But I have no real incentive to go, do I? You’re going to kill me once I get outside and into that van,” I protested.

“We’ll kill you right now. The .22 won’t make a sound. At least if we postpone it, you’ll have more of a chance. Maybe once we get in the van, you’ll talk me out of it, who knows?”

“I might convince you not to top me?” I said.

“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Forsythe, it’s unlikely, but stranger things have happened.”

I had no choice but to do what he said. I began walking toward the fire escape.

O’Neill beside me, holding my gun, Mikhail behind us.

“Maybe you should go back and put your book away. That Miss Plum is terribly overworked,” I said to O’Neill. He was tiring of my glibness now. His lips narrowed into a grim slit.

We reached the stairwell.

An echoing concrete space, devoid of people.

“We could kill him right here,” Mikhail said in some kind of Yugoslavian accent. I knew this because my old landlord in New York City had been a Serbian.

“Let’s not bring the library into it all,” O’Neill said with distaste.

Mikhail did a thorough search of my body, gave O’Neill my bag of .38 shells and all the money I had left in my pocket.

We walked carefully down the concrete steps and reached the fire exit door. O’Neill turned to Mikhail.

“You keep the gun on him, I’ll go out and see if there’s any peelers. Shoot him if he so much as blinks.”

O’Neill slipped out into the street. When he had gone, I turned to the big guy.

“Don’t take him literally on the blinking thing,” I said.

Mikhail nodded sullenly.

Mikhail laughed, said nothing. Before I could think of anything else, O’Neill came back.

“It’s all clear, Tim has the van,” he said.

He looked at me.

“One move, one sound, Forsythe, and we’ll fucking kill you in the street, understood?”

I nodded.

He opened the fire exit door.

I stepped outside.

A big red Ford van double-parked twenty feet away along the pavement. A couple of meatpackers waiting beside the rear doors.

I walked slowly onto the sidewalk. The streets were comparatively empty. It was nearly six o’clock and Belfast has a short rush hour. Everyone who needs to get home is usually on a train or a bus by 5:30. Thursday was late shopping night, but today was not, alas, a Thursday. Only two witnesses on the whole street. A religious preacher with a megaphone and the bootleg video salesman.

“Faster,” O’Neill instructed.

The preacher spotted us and asked Mikhail and myself if we knew that our lives were hanging by a thread. Mikhail prodded me with the gun before I could give my ironic answer.

We stopped at the van. One of the meatpackers looked at me.

“That runt’s Michael Forsythe?” he said skeptically.

“That’s him,” O’Neill said. “Mikhail, help him inside.”

I didn’t want to get into the van. The van meant death. I made a last desperate plea to O’Neill.

“Look, please, whatever I’ve done, I don’t think this will solve anything. I’m not a bad lad, I don’t care what you’ve heard. Really, we should talk this over,” I said.

“Just get in the van,” O’Neill demanded.

No way. If I got in that van, I was toast. This would be my last opportunity to make a run for it, even if Mikhail did bloody shoot me.

I dropped to the ground, breaking Mikhail’s hold on my shoulder. I scrambled to my feet.

“Help, they’re gonna murder me,” I screamed at the top of my voice, tried to push past Mikhail and the other goons.

Someone thumped me in the head, I ate tarmac. Mikhail and one of the other boys picked me up bodily and threw me inside the van. I screamed all the louder, attracting the attention of the only person now left on the street.

“What the hell is going on there?” the video guy shouted.

“Get the police, I’m being kidnapped—” I managed before someone belted me in the mouth, the boys jumped in, and the van doors closed. O’Neill and Mikhail got in the front while three goons grinned at me in the back. We sped off into the traffic, Mikhail driving fast for some safe location.

A pretty large van that you could almost stand up in, about ten feet long. It was basically a shiny box with hooks in the ceiling that I didn’t like the look of one little bit. It was either a dry-cleaning delivery vehicle or a portable torture chamber. They weren’t meat hooks because the van wasn’t refrigerated.

The three boys were crouched at one end. I was up near the cab. No chance against the boys, but maybe if I could smash the glass through to the driver’s compartment I could cause an accident.

I thumped the glass with my elbow, it bounced off harmlessly, the van turned a corner, the three boys jumped me at once. I tried to clobber one, but these were big shits who knew exactly what they were doing. We didn’t even fight, they just grappled me to the floor and pinned me down.

One sat on my legs and the other two held down each arm.

O’Neill slid back the glass partition.

“Do you have him, Tim?” he asked.

“Aye, we got him.”

“Good.”

“What do you want us to do with him, Mr. O’Neill?” one of the goons asked. This eejit seemed to be the leader. Tim, tall, well built, viciously scarred, wearing a Man. United goalkeeper’s shirt and a Yankees cap.

“Well, first thing. We just did a cursory pat down, make sure he’s got nothing on him,” O’Neill said.

They violently searched me.

“Hey, he’s got no left foot, see that?” Tim said.

They stared at the prosthesis.

“You would never have known, I seen him walk just like a regular person,” Tim said.

“Get off me, I’ll fucking kill you all,” I yelled, but Tim bitchslapped me across the face and shoved a handkerchief in my mouth to shut me up. Now that I was restrained and quiet, O’Neill could give full vent to his fury.

“What in the name of God is going on, Tim? I thought people were taking care of him and, lo and behold, he comes up to my private sanctuary. You know he pointed a gun at me while I was working on my book?”