Soldier of Fortune 5, page 4
part #5 of Soldier of Fortune Series
The next day was a little better: I found the only bookstore in The Bronx and bought enough books to last me through the end of the week. I found another coffee shop to have breakfast in. That night I had dinner in a Chinese place with no Chinese in it but the owners and waiters. That’s always a bad sign. Through with dinner, I bought a pint of Jack Daniel’s at a tiny liquor store whose owner was so jittery that he half pulled a gun out of a drawer when I came in. Still no calls, no messages. I drank half the Jack Daniel’s and went to bed.
The third day I walked up the Concourse and found a tiny park named Edgar Allan Poe. In the center of it was the tiny house EAP and his child bride lived in. It’s open to the public, so I went in to have a look-see. The rooms look like they belong in a dollhouse. There wasn’t much to do after that. There was a big department store near the intersection of Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse. I went in and bought a clean shirt and two pairs of shorts. In the afternoon I finally found a movie house and watched a space western. A bad guy told the space sheriff to get out of town before the purple sun set. They had their showdown and the bad guy got disintegrated by the space sheriff’s super-advanced laser gun. Where the hell was Higgins? Still no calls, and no one came to fetch me, as Higgins had promised. That night I called Kentucky Fried and had a bucket of chicken delivered. I drank the other half of the Jack Daniel’s. It was going on four days since my long talk with Higgins. What the hell was the Irishman up to? Maybe he just wanted to cut me loose. After all, what could I do to him? He had the whole army of IRA killers behind him. I finally fell asleep.
I was awakened by a gun held to my head.
The lights went on and there was Higgins and his two Irishmen. I looked into the muzzle of the 7.65 mm V227 Czech automatic whose cold touch had jerked me from sleep. “Put it away,” Higgins told the poetic looking gunman who held it steady on my face. This was the sad-eyed guy who belonged on a book jacket. He put the Czech piece in his pocket and backed away from the bed.
“What goes on here?” I said to Higgins. “I waited and waited and now you come like this. What time is it?”
“The middle of the night,” Higgins answered. “It’s three-fifteen. I know you waited and waited. That’s what you were supposed to do. You did it. You were watched all the time.”
I propped myself up in bed. “So what’s the verdict?”
Higgins sat down at the little writing table with the Gideon Bible in the drawer. Cars were going by on the Concourse, but it was quiet. “You seem to be what you say you are,” Higgins said. “What you gave me checks out. My people couldn’t find a single thing wrong with it, which is not to say that there may not be something wrong with it.”
I shielded my eyes against the overhead lights. “What do you think might be wrong with it?” The two gunmen looked on with that lack of interest you find in bodyguards.
“The fact that I can’t find anything wrong with it,” Higgins said. “I don’t meet the truth very often. You haven’t had trouble sleeping?” He nodded toward the bottle of Jack Daniel’s with sour mash still in it.
“I just had a few drinks. This place isn’t Vegas. What did you want me to do? Sit up and stare at the door? I didn’t feel I was in any danger.”
“You might have been in some danger. Matter of fact, you were in great danger if your background hadn’t checked out. You might have thought of that.”
The educated mick was full of tricks, even at that hour of the night. “I thought of it,” I said. “Would it have done me any good if I’d sat here with a gun in my hand?”
No smiles this time; he was quite serious. “You could have sat here behind a light machine gun and we’d still get you. A grenade or two, don’t you see?”
“In New York City?”
“There would be nothing to involve the Provisional IRA,” he said. “You’ve been mixed up with so many revolutionary groups, it could be anybody. You feel like a cup of coffee?”
“You want to go out for coffee?”
“I was thinking more of coffee here.” A nod sent the poet down the hall to get coffee from the machine. When he came back with it, Higgins told the two of them to wait in the car. “Sugar?” he said to me. “Now listen to me,” he went on after he stirred five sugars into the bad coffee. “I’m here to send you to Ireland, but first I want to say a few things. For my sake as well as yours. There is an old IRA saying: ‘Once in, never out,’ and it’s as true today as it was forty or fifty years ago. You can’t just change your mind and call it quits. We can’t allow a man to quit even if he’s the kind who would rather die then turn informer. That’s not the point. The point is discipline, and there are no exceptions. Any man who runs out on us, even tries to, must expect to be killed.”
“I hear what you’re saying.”
“Yes, but do you understand? I know you’ve been all over the world, but you haven’t been to Ireland. It’s different there, take my word for it. It’s a small country, with few places to hide for a man without family, friends. Your American passport will be no protection. It’s against our policy to kill anyone on American soil. If it has to be done, it’s done quietly and the body never turns up. The United States is our golden goose and we’re not about to kill it with bad publicity. But once you’re in Ireland, north or south, well, the rules don’t apply there. Just last year a man who thought he could quit the organization was shot going up the steps to a New York-bound plane. Shot from nearly a third of a mile.”
“I know how it’s done,” I said. “I’ve done it. What you want to know is, do I have second thoughts? I don’t. What you’re worried about is that I’ll turn out to be a fuck-up.”
“Or worse. But we need men so I’m going to send you across.”
“Where? Belfast?”
“Certainly not,” Higgins said. “Go into Belfast without someone to make the intros and you’d run into a stone wall. That’s the least that could happen to you. You’ll go to Dublin and check into a small hotel on the South Side. The name of it is The Pimlico—that’s the district it’s in—and down the street from it there’s a big pub, Mack’s. You got that. You’re to go there every night, an hour before closing time. Have a few drinks and wait to be approached.”
“More waiting?”
“You wait,” Higgins went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “The organization may or may not want to take you in. That’s got nothing to do with me. Over here I’m just a man of all work. A talent scout if you like. Don’t do anything to get yourself noticed by the Irish police. What you are is an Irish-American tourist come to visit the land of his forefathers. Dublin is full of such idiots, so you won’t stand out.”
Chapter Four
THE AER LINGUS jet made a stop at Shannon, then flew on to Dublin.
They say Dublin looks like a scaled down London. Maybe it does. Coming in from the airport I saw palm trees growing in front of suburban houses. Nearly all the cars were English: Vauxhalls, Morris Minors, Ford compacts. There were wide streets with 18th century buildings and lots of statues. O’Connell Street, the main drag, had flower beds instead of garbage. A lot of people rode bicycles but not on the sidewalk as they do in New York. I saw no bums, hookers or three-card monte players. The uniformed cops didn’t carry guns.
O’Connell Street was elegant, a show place for tourists; where I was going was not. This was old Dublin, a wilderness of closed-up movie houses, fruit markets, and pubs. The street where the taxi let me off was lined with red brick houses with TV aerials on top. Before I got out the driver said, “You sure you have the right hotel? The Pimlico is hardly in the five-star class, don’t you know. Very well, then. But if it’s local color yer after, you couldn’t have picked a better place.”
A warm drizzle made the street even dingier than it was. The rain in Ireland is enough to give even a Rotarian the blues, and no wonder the Irish are depressed when they’re not being violent. It rains and it rains. The Pimlico Hotel was a five story, red brick building with a broken neon sign with 1930’s lettering; in some windows there were lifeless potted plants; rooms could be rented by the day or week. Down the street was Mack’s pub.
I went in and the room clerk was expecting me. He needed a shave and a clean shirt, but he carried on like the manager of the Waldorf. “I’ve been saving the best room in the house for you, Mr. Rainey,” he told me with that peculiar confidential manner you find in some Irish. “That took some doin’, I can tell you, now that the summer tourist season is upon us in full flower. But you come highly recommended, I don’t mind tellin’ you. Sorry we don’t have a bellboy on duty at the moment, but I can carry up your luggage if you like.”
I had one small aluminum suitcase but I gave him a dollar for the kind thought. The Pimlico was just a place with rooms; no restaurant, no bar. It was clean enough, but had a stale smell. My room, a double, was on the second floor overlooking the street. It had a double bed, a worn red carpet, two armchairs, a desk with a black and white TV set on it. Everything was old fashioned modern. The tiny bathroom was clean but missing a few tiles. I had stayed in a lot worse places.
I locked up and went to Mack’s for a drink. Higgins said it was big, but I didn’t expect it to be so big. A sign said it had been in business since 1875 and it smelled of all the booze that had been consumed since then. There were frosted glass doors and a bar that ran away into the distance. Behind the bar at least a dozen bartenders were working their asses off trying to keep up with the demand for drinks. It was like a Bowery beer palace of the 1890s. But no TV set here, no jukebox; this was a place for serious drinkers. Noise? Yes, they had noise, and it came in waves, like wind on the beach. There would be a momentary lull, as though the wind had dropped, then the gale of boozy conversation would rise up to full force.
I found a place at the bar and ordered a double Bushmill’s, the best of the Irish whiskies. The bartender took a quick look at me. “You want ice in that? We have ice if you want it.” I said no thanks and he hurried away to pump Guinness stout into huge, thick glasses. The air was thick with tobacco smoke; later I was to learn that in Ireland everybody smokes all the time. They smoke and they drink and never take their vitamins. Also, they talk a lot.
Most of the drinkers were workingmen, but there was a sprinkling of other types; the middle-aged fat man drinking gin and lime on one side of me looked like a bookie. Horse blanket suit, yellow vest, gray bowler hat. A hungover bookie: his plump, hairless hand shook as he raised the glass to his mouth. The guy on the other side called for another cider and stout. I expected him to get two drinks, but the awful shit he was drinking came mixed. Only a few women were in the place, middle-aged, fat or thin. Mack’s was too far from the downtown business district to get a “smart” office crowd. Two pasty kids in black vinyl, with punk rock haircuts, came in and ordered what they called dago red. They talked about getting their guitars out of the hock shop. I finished my drink and went back to the hotel and read the papers.
Dinner that night was ham and eggs. Irish cooking is terrible, but there isn’t much you can do to wreck ham and eggs. The Irish can and do ruin coffee and I got a cup of one of their best efforts. By ten o’clock I was back at the bar in Mack’s.
Irish bars close early so they drink hard to get a buzz on before the dreaded “last drinks” warning is chanted by the manager. Mr. Mack must have been a very rich man; the enormous saloon was jammed all the way to the end of the endless bar. The place was wide as well as long, and there were four lines of tables across from the bar. Plenty of young guys were in there; they could have been IRA, they could have been anything. The air reeked of tobacco smoke and stout, the wine of the country in Ireland. There were more women than there had been during the day, most of them middle-aged or elderly broads powdered and heavily lipsticked, demure and ladylike in the way they put away the booze. Now and then some character with a load on would burst into song; when this happened he was silenced by the manager or one of the bartenders, but nobody got tough about it. There was no bouncer; the bar staff looked tough enough to handle anything. That’s what I thought until the four gunmen walked in.
Anybody can carry a gun, but that doesn’t make a gunman. I can always spot real gunmen by the way they look at other people. They can be revolutionaries or mobsters, but the look is the same. The lives of ordinary people mean nothing; they have gone beyond decency or mercy. Some of it is the gun, the rest is the knowledge that they have the skill and the nerve to use it.
These four guys walked in and the break in conversation went back to the end of the bar. It was 10:35. A drunk shouted, “Bang! Bang! Bang!” and was shushed by those closest to him. The four gunmen weren’t much to look at; cheap raincoats, average height, faces like gas station attendants. All had dark hair; one wore glasses with salmon-colored plastic frames. This guy was the most sinister, and when he jerked his thumb over his shoulder the people at the table across from me got up quickly and went out. Up and down the bar men downed their drinks and left. Unlike ordinary gunmen these guys didn’t raise their voices or throw their weight around. One of them, a kid of no more than nineteen, got drinks at the bar and took them back to the table. More people finished their drinks and took off. But a hard core of the curious stayed on, afraid of the shooters but unwilling to miss out on whatever little drama might unfold. The gunmen drank their pints of stout and looked at me. I didn’t get it. If they were there as contact men, then what the hell did they think they were doing? Soon everybody was staring at me, wondering what business I had with the boyos. The way they were acting, I didn’t know myself.
It got to be 10:35. Then the gunman with the glasses beckoned the manager to the table and whispered in his ear. The manager’s florid face turned pale and he jerked upright as though pulled by a string. Sweat popped out on his face and he dabbed at it with a handkerchief. He gulped several times before he was able to speak. “Closing time,” he called out in a shrill voice. “Drink up, gentlemen and ladies. No more drinks. Closing time.”
There was a murmur of complaint, but the place was cleared out inside of sixty seconds. I stayed where I was. The bartenders took off their aprons, put on their coats and left. The manager was the last to go and he spoke to the gunman with the glasses before he did. “Go easy on the place, for God’s sake,” he said. “You know I’m with you fellas all the way. Don’t I contribute to the best of my ability and never miss a week.”
The gunman nodded. “Everybody knows you’re a patriot, Jimmy. Go on home now. Your licensed premises is in safe hands.”
The manager went out through the frosted glass doors, then the street door banged. “Make sure it’s locked,” the gunman with the glasses told the kid. The kid came back and nodded and sat down. I hadn’t moved from where I was.
Layers of smoke had drifted up to the ceiling. Empty glasses or half-finished drinks were everywhere. Someone had left a hat on the bar. The old fashioned clock behind the bar whirred and bonged the quarter hour. It was 10:45. No traffic sounds came from the street, then a single car went by. The noise of the car faded.
“Higgins sent you over here, is that right?” the boss gunman said.
Suddenly I knew these guys had nothing to do with Higgins. I wasn’t sure how I knew; instinct, I suppose. That, and the way they were handling what should have been an unnoticed contact. And one man should have come instead of four.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Well, of course you are,” the boss gunman said. “I’m lookin’ at you, aren’t I? Be a good fella, Yank, and just answer the questions as they’re put to you. You go by the name of Rainey and you’re here to join the Provisional IRA, would that be right now?”
“But you’re not the Provisional IRA?”
“You’re pretty bright for an American, catchin’ on so fast and all that. I’ll tell you ’cause there’s not a blessed thing you can do about it. We’re the Marxist Official IRA, or to use our new name, the Irish Republican Socialist Party. Ireland is a Catholic country, most of it, and it was decided that the Marxist tag was a bit off-putting.” He smiled a mirthless smile; here, I knew, was a Communist fanatic. And not just an old-fashioned Red, the kind you used to see selling copies of the Daily Worker on street corners. This guy was the new breed, and he had more in common with the Libyans than the Russians.
“Now you know all about us,” he said in an unpleasant tenor voice. “How’s about you tell us all about you?”
“Like what?” I wondered if they had come to knock me off. There was a longstanding feud between the Provos and the Marxists. People often lumped them together, but I knew the Marxists were hardline Communists and the Provos were not. This made no difference to the people they killed, but the political difference did exist.
“Ah, don’t be so bashful,” the gunman said calmly. “The thing of it is, Yank, you can answer my question of your own free will, or we can beat you till there’s blood coming out of your ears, out of your arse, all the bodily orifices. We wouldn’t mind that one bit, ’cause I don’t mind tellin’ you, we can’t stand Americans and especially fellas that served in the fuckin’ Green Berets. First off, what kind of a silly notion brought you all the way to Ireland?”
I said, “I’m of Irish descent. I thought I’d do something for Ireland.”
“You wanted to wrap yourself in the green flag and shed your blood for the land of saints and scholars?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“Neither would I, Yank. What you’re here for is the money, isn’t that a fact?”
A beer pump dripped behind the bar; that was the only sound in that great cavern of a room. I knew they meant to kill me as soon as the talking was done. Running wouldn’t do any good; they’d drop me before I even got close to the door.
