The Magdalene Cipher (29 page)

“Yeah, well—see if you can reach him. Tell him Merry Kerry's at the bar.”

“Mary Kelly?”

“Merry . . . Kerry,”
Dunphy corrected. “Like
Happy Kerry
,
except with different letters. And while you're at it—check behind the bar. I think there's a package for me.”

It was half past eight when Tommy sailed in with the diminutive, but burly, Francis Boylan at his side. “If it isn't himself!” Tommy cried, his brogue even thicker for all the months he'd been in Spain. “I tried to reach ya time and again,” he crowed, “but all I got for my trouble was a lot of funny noises on the phone. I thought you were tits up, f'sure!”

Big
abrazo
,
then Dunphy disengaged to shake hands with Boylan. “The night's still young,” he replied. “I could go at any second.” Finally, he introduced Clementine
.

“Pleased to meet ya,” Tommy said, embracing her with a bit more enthusiasm than was strictly necessary
.

“And this is our host,” Dunphy announced, taking Clem by the elbow and introducing her to “the great Francis Boylan.”

The Irishman shook hands and turned to Dunphy with a look of approval. “Good job.”

Soon, they were seated around a platter of
tapas
,
drinking, with Tommy complaining about the “hard life” on Tenerife
.

“It's killin' the two of us,” he claimed. “Francis, here, is a ghost of the man he was. Just look at him, wastin' away, with the bags under his eyes—”

“He looks rather fit to me,” Clem said
.

“Thank you,” Boylan remarked
.

“It's the sex and the sun and the booze,” Tommy insisted. “I mean, when you think of it, there's a thousand women a day flyin' in, and every one of them's charged up for a good time. So, if you're livin' here full-time and know your way around—well, it's a wonder there isn't a medical study bein' done.”

In the hours that followed, they tested the kitchen at the Broken Tiller and found the chef in good form. Between mouthfuls of swordfish and new potatoes, french beans and Riesling, Dunphy told his companions about Blémont, and his encounter on the flight from Madrid
.

“So you nobbled the man's money,” Boylan said. “And now he's after gettin' it back.”

“He is,” Dunphy replied
.

“Well, who can blame him?” Tommy asked. “I'd do the same.”

“Of course you would,” Dunphy explained, “anyone would. But let's keep it in perspective. This is a very bad man. It's not like I robbed the Poor Clares.”

“Still . . .”

“He's an anti-Semite!” Dunphy insisted. “And it wasn't even his money in the first place.”

“Then let the Jews rob him!” Tommy suggested
.

Before Dunphy could reply, Boylan offered a suggestion. “I could have a word with him, if you'd like. Send a couple of lads around. Ask for a bit of patience.”

Dunphy thought about it, then shook his head. “It's my problem. I'll handle it.”

“In that case . . .” Boylan reached around to the small of his back and came up with a sleek little handgun. Sliding it into the pages of a folded copy of the local newspaper
,
Canarias7
,
he pushed it across the table to Dunphy. “It's a P7,” Boylan said. “Heckler & Koch. Eight rounds in the clip.”

Clem rolled her eyes, sat back, and looked away
.

“
Thank you
,
Jesus!” Dunphy exclaimed, jamming the gun into the space between his belt and his shirt. “I'll get it back to you before we leave.”

Boylan nodded. “I'd be grateful. It cost a grand.”

“So where are you staying?” Tommy asked
.

“I don't know,” Dunphy said. “We just got in a couple of hours ago.”

“Then you may as well stay at Nicky Slade's,” Boylan suggested. “You remember Nicky, don't you?”

“The merc,” Dunphy said
.

“The very one,” Tommy agreed
.

“It's a nice place,” Boylan remarked, “and Nicky won't be needin' it for a while.”

“Why not?” Dunphy asked
.

Boylan glanced at Tommy, then back to Dunphy. “Well, he's traveling, isn't he?”

“I don't know. Is he?” Dunphy asked
.

“He is,” Tommy replied. “In fact, he's traveling for the foreseeable future.”

“So it's an extended trip,” Dunphy suggested
.

“It is.”

“And why is that?” Dunphy inquired
.

“Well,” Boylan explained, “because the man's in bad odor, isn't he?”

“With who?”

“Certain parties.”

“Which parties?”

“NATO,” Tommy replied. “You're very insistent—y'know that, don't ya?”

Clem giggled, and Dunphy frowned. “How do you get in ‘bad odor' with NATO, for Christ's sake?”

“In fact, there was a small typo on one of his end-user certificates,” Boylan said
.

“
Was
there?” Dunphy asked
.

“Indeed, there was,” Tommy replied. “And wouldn't ya know, the bureaucrats are makin' a federal case of it.”

“What was the typo?” Dunphy asked
.

“From what I've been told, he typed
chardonnay
in one of the tiny spaces on the form when, strictly speaking, the appropriate answer would have been closer to
grenades
.
a”

They got to Nicky Slade's place a little after midnight. It was one of a dozen small condos on a quiet street in Las Galletas, just down the coast from las Americas, and not far from the beach. A trio of flight attendants were renting the house on the left, Tommy said, while an elderly Scotswoman occupied the one on the right. “You'll be fine here,” Tommy told them
.

A musty smell greeted them as they entered. “Must be NATO,” Tommy joked. The place had apparently been unoccupied for weeks. But that was easy to fix. With the windows opened and the drapes pulled back, a fresh breeze soon cleared the air. Dunphy switched on the lights in the living room
.

“I'll bring the Pearlcorder with me in the morning,” Tommy said. “So you can listen to the tape.” He meant the tape recording that Dunphy had sent to himself in care of the Broken Tiller
.

“Just give me a call before you come over,” Dunphy replied. “I don't want to shoot you through the door.”

“I'll make a point of it,” Tommy promised, backing out with a little wave. “Cheers.”

Dunphy locked the door behind him and went into the kitchen. Opening the refrigerator, he found half a case of Budweiser, two kinds of mustard, and not much else. Reflecting that a case of Bud must have cost a fortune in the Canaries, Dunphy snapped one open and returned to the living room
.

“I think your friends are nice,” Clem said, looking through a pile of CDs. “Though . . .”

“What?”

“A bit rough.”

Dunphy nodded. “Well, yeah,” he said. “It's what they do.” Removing the handgun from his waistband, he laid it on the coffee table next to a vase of dusty silk carnations. Then he walked over to the windows and took in a lungful of warm sea air
.

“Do you think they'll find us?” Clem asked
.

“I don't know,” Dunphy said, wondering which pursuers she had in mind—Blémont or the Agency. “I don't think we were followed from the airport, but then, I didn't think we were followed from Jersey, either. So what do I know?”

She put a CD in the tray, and soon, a soulful voice filled the room with the complaint that
“Easy's gettin' harder every day.”
a “Iris Dement,” Clem said, swaying to it
.

Dunphy leaned against the windowsill and sipped his beer. He was looking out across a little garden (who would have guessed that someone like Slade would be a gardener?), gazing at a string of lights on the dark horizon. Freighters and passenger liners, sailboats and tankers. It was a beautiful, even romantic, scene, but he couldn't get into it. He was thinking about the men on the plane—Blondie and the Jock. And how they'd disappeared, once they'd landed on Tenerife
.

Which should have been comforting
.

With no bags to fetch, Dunphy and Clem had soared through Customs and then through the airport, taking the first cab they'd found into town. If his pursuers had been anywhere near, Dunphy would have seen them. But they weren't. Which made him wonder if . . 
.

Nah
.

For a moment, Dunphy had entertained the possibility that he had somehow scared them off. But how likely was that? Blondie hadn't seemed frightened, really—more inconvenienced than anything else. So . . 
.

They must have called ahead from Madrid. Had someone waiting at the airport. Which meant . . 
.

With a grimace, Dunphy pulled the curtains shut and checked the locks on the French doors leading out to the garden. The locks weren't much. A good kick would send them flying open
.

Returning to the living room, he retrieved the nine-millimeter that Boylan had given him, and slipped it in his pocket. Clem was still moving to the music
.

“Jack?” she asked
.

“Yeah.”

“We're going to be all right, aren't we?”

Tommy came by in the morning, a little after ten. Since there wasn't anything to eat in Slade's apartment, they went out for crescent rolls at the local market, then drove into las Americas
.

“We might as well go to the Tiller,” Tommy suggested. “Boylan's coffee is as good as any—and it's twice as strong.”

They left Tommy's red Deux Chevaux at a car park near the Cinema Dumas and walked down the hill to the Broken Tiller. The same kid who'd been there the night before was standing behind the bar, drying glasses
.

Otherwise, the place was deserted. Dark and cool
.

“Espressos, Miguel!”

“None for me, thanks,” Clem said. “I'm going for a swim.”

Dunphy looked skeptical. “Aren't you forgetting something?”

She gave him a puzzled look. “What?”

“A swimsuit,” Dunphy replied, sitting down at a table in a corner of the bar
.

Clem kissed him on the top of the head. “You're so cute,” she said, and turning on her heel, walked out into the sunlight with a bath towel under her arm
.

“This I've gotta see!” Tommy exclaimed
.

“No, you don't,” Dunphy told him, and taking him by the elbow, pulled him into the seat beside himself. “You bring the Pearlcorder?” he asked
.

“I did,” Tommy replied, retrieving it from the pocket of his shirt and handing it to Dunphy. “Is it the professor you've got on tape?”

Dunphy nodded, pressing the microcassette onto the tape recorder's reels. “It's the last tape we made before he was chopped.”

“Well, if you don't mind,” Tommy said, “seein' as how only one of us can listen to it at a time, I'll take my coffee down to the beach.”

Dunphy plugged the earphones into the Pearlcorder, and slipped them on over his head. “You aren't going to ogle my girlfriend, are you?”

“Come on!” Tommy protested. “What do you take me for?”

“A pervert.”

Whatever Tommy said in response was lost to Dunphy as he pressed the Play button, and the little reels began to turn
.

Oh, that's right! You have the Kirman!

It took Dunphy a little while to sort out the voices, and another minute to guess what they were talking about—in this case, a chair that Schidlof was having covered
.

The second conversation was relatively transparent—Schidlof making a doctor's appointment for what he suspected was bursitis. Then Dunphy's coffee appeared, suddenly and out of nowhere. Hunched over the Pearlcorder, listening intently through the earphones, he hadn't heard Miguel's approach
.

“Thanks,” he said, a bit too loud. And took a sip
.
Yowzah!

The third and fourth calls were from students, asking Schidlof if they could rearrange their meetings with him. The fifth call was placed by Schidlof, and it was international—Dunphy counted fifteen distinct tones before the phone began to ring at the other end. And then an American voice came on the line
.