“How does the IRA have money for a pension program?”
She looked confused by the question. “They have an empire.”
They have extortion, security rackets, and wire transfers from idiotic Irish Americans sympathetic to the cause. They own hotels, pubs, nightclubs, taxi firms, party rental companies.
“Party rentals?” I asked.
“You know, bouncy castles,” she said. “For children’s birthday parties.”
“Right. Of course.”
I work through my fry-up and note the cars arriving at the station. Their drivers must be brave. Police officers know they’re being hunted now, all the time. The detective inspector in Coleraine, whose funeral Seamus attended, was in his driveway when a man said, “Alex?”
“Yes?” he said, and the man shot him in the face.
The gunmen always say the victim’s name first. They don’t want to accidentally kill the wrong person. They’re fine with killing the right person, though, even if, in this case, the man’s daughter was asleep in the backseat of the car. She’d fallen asleep on the drive home from a school concert, he’d been about to carry her up to bed.
The gunmen were told by their officer commanding not to watch the news for a few days, so they wouldn’t see the family’s grief. They shouldn’t have to suffer through that, apparently.
A waitress stops at my table. “Everything okay for you here?”
“Grand, thanks.”
Seamus has plans for me. Marian said, “He couldn’t have designed you any better. If Seamus met you at nineteen, he might have asked you to go to Trinity, to get a job at the BBC. He could have spent years working to get someone into your exact position. He said it’s like finding a sleeper agent.”
He thinks I’ll be able to blend in at certain establishments. “Do you ride horses?” he asked me at Gallagher’s on Monday.
“No.”
“You could learn, though.” He wants me to visit a pony club, after hearing some senior army staff bring their girls to it. “Do any of your friends have daughters?”
“No.” I’m not using Poppy, or any other girls, as a cover.
“None?” he asked. “What are the odds?”
“None who are old enough. You don’t teach a toddler horse riding.”
You might, actually. I’ve no idea when they start. Neither did Seamus. Pony club wasn’t exactly part of his upbringing either.
“What about golf?” he asked.
There’s an expensive golf club in Bangor, with judges and government ministers among its members. Marian said he has been trying to get someone in there for years, and I might pass.
A silver Citro?n arrives at the police station. I wait until it disappears behind the steel cordon, then write down its registration number. I have some potato bread, some tea. This is how Seamus started Marian, with these small errands or favors, and I hate to say it, but I understand now why it worked. It does make you feel special.
At work last week, our interview guest asked me to bring him a coffee, instead of our runner. A group of teenagers tried to essentially walk through me on the pavement. The bus ran late. Finn refused to eat any of the food I’d carefully prepared for him, and I had to scrape it off the floor, the wall, and myself. My point is, I don’t often feel powerful of a day. Most people don’t.
Except now I do. I’m in a café eating a fry-up, at a melamine table with a sticky surface and bottles of red and brown sauce. But I’m also operating on a different plane, one that includes every battle fought in this war. The siege of Derry, Burntollet Bridge, the Grand Hotel. And now here I am, in this café, and we might be almost at the end. Of course I feel special.
* * *
—
By the time Tom returns home with the baby, I’m on the sofa with the culture pages from the Sunday paper. The house is clean, the dishwasher running, the laundry folded.
“How was your day?” he asks.
“Good,” I say, lifting Finn onto my lap.
“What did you do?”
“Oh,” I say. “You know, this and that.”
29
IF HE WAKES UP, there’s a bottle in the fridge,” I tell Olivia.
“How long will you be gone?” she asks, sounding alarmed.
“It shouldn’t be too late. I just need to run back to the office.”
Olivia nods. She knows, vaguely, that my job has to do with the news, which could involve being called in on a Sunday night.
Seamus sent a message telling me to meet them at Gallagher’s. I don’t want to go. From here, Belfast seems like the far side of the moon. Before leaving, I tuck a blanket around Finn. He brushes his face on the mattress, then rolls onto his stomach and scoots his arms under himself.