Soldier of Fortune 5, page 5
part #5 of Soldier of Fortune Series
“I expect to be paid for my work,” I said.
“With maybe a little bank robbery as a bonus,” the gunman said. “By any chance did you ever hear of a fella named Larkin? Dan Larkin, a Green Beret like yourself? Works for the Provos some of the time, works for himself the rest. A real bad boy, you must have heard of him.”
“I don’t know any Larkin. The Green Berets were a big outfit.”
“So was the SS and not much difference between the two. But you’re not in Viet Nam now, Yank. You’re not dealin’ with little brown men in black pajamas. You did a foolish thing comin’ here, but then you Americans are always buttin’ in where you’re not wanted. All the countries you’ve interfered in. Viet Nam, Chile, now Salvador and Nicaragua. Funny thing how you always back the wrong side. Are you sure you don’t know Dan Larkin?”
“1 never even heard of him.” I tried to figure out who had tipped them off that I was coming. It couldn’t be one of Dowd’s people, or they would have mentioned my visit to Boston. That left Higgins and his men, but I couldn’t be sure of anything.
The guy with the glasses was the only one that talked; the others sat with their coats open, their hands motionless on the edge of the table.
“You’re a fuckin’ liar, Yank, and a bad one at that,” the gunman said. “Higgins may have sent you, but you’re here to join up with Larkin’s filthy gang. What’s the matter with you bitching, bastard Americans? Aren’t there enough rackets to go round in your glorious democracy? Answer up, you son of a bitch?”
This guy was working himself up. His voice remained calm, but his eyes glittered behind his cheap glasses. The others watched stone-faced. Behind the bar the clock bonged out the hour. It was eleven o’clock.
“I’ve never been in the rackets,” I said. “But if I wanted to join up with this Larkin, why couldn’t I find him myself?”
“Because you knew finding him wouldn’t be that easy. We haven’t been able to find him and we’re better at finding people than some foreigner just off the plane. Like the cute fella you are, you thought the Provos’d lead you to him. Might as well admit it, Yank, not that it’s going to make an awful lot of difference.”
“I tell you I don’t know anybody named Larkin. I came here to join the Provos. I don’t understand. I thought you people were fighting for the same thing, that you were on the same side.”
Another vicious smile. “We’re on nobody’s side but our own. We’re goin’ to remake this fuckin’ petit bourgeois country if we have to drown it in blood. But that’s neither here nor there. What is here is you. You should have stayed at home in that plastic country of yours, but you didn’t. The thing of it is, we don’t want you joining the Provos, we don’t want you hooking up with Larkin. We’re goin’ to make an example of you, Yank. We’re goin’ to kill you and dump you on the steps of the American Consulate with a sign hung around your neck. It’s goin’ to say: No American mercenaries wanted in Ireland.” He nodded to the kid. “Do the necessary, will you, Rory?”
The kid was taking a silenced automatic from under his coat when there was the furious roar of an automobile engine and the street door went down in splinters as a small car rocketed into the bar with a man firing a submachine gun from the sun roof. Three of them died in the first long burst. The guy with the glasses was wounded but able to run a few feet before the car struck him from behind with terrific force, and he went down under the wheels. I hadn’t been able to do anything but throw myself on the floor. The car turned, shattering tables and chairs, then it drove back to where I was. The guy sticking up out of the sun roof gave the bodies two more bursts to make sure they were dead. I got up off the floor and the guy in the sun roof said in a phony British accent, “Your carriage awaits you, m’lord.”
No one can say the Irish don’t have a sense of humor.
“Get in, Rainey, and be quick about it,” the man behind the wheel said. “The rozzers will be along in a minute.”
I got in and the car drove out of the wrecked bar, bumping down from the sidewalk before the driver straightened out the steering wheel with much effort, and headed off into the drizzling rain. The machine gunner reached up to pull the sun roof shut, then threw himself down on the back seat, laughing like a madman.
“For Jaysus sake, will you shut your fuckin’ gob,” the driver said.
“Ah, how can I help laughin’?” the machine gunner said. “If I saw what we just did in a film I wouldn’t believe it. The look on their faces when we came through that door! Rainey, you must have seen plenty of films. Would you believe it?”
“Thanks for getting me out of there,” I said without turning my head.
More laughing, then the guy in the back said, “Ah, it was nothin’, if you leave out the trick with the car. We got there a few minutes to closing time and found the place locked. Well, that didn’t look right, so I climbed up on the window ledge so’s I could see in over the top of the frosted glass. And there you were bein’ menaced by four of the worst villains in Ireland.”
“They’re not so villainous now,” the driver said, cursing the damaged steering. “This fuckin’ thing keeps pullin’ hard to the left.”
“What do you care?” the guy in the back said, still laughing. “The fuckin’ car is stolen, isn’t it?”
“That isn’t the point, you donkey. I just hope it doesn’t give out before we get far enough away. Then we’ll dump it and walk. The front end is wrecked, the headlights are smashed. Thank God for all this lovely rain.”
The car went through dark streets smelling of beer. “That’s Guinness’s Brewery you’re smellin’,” the guy in the back said. They hadn’t told me their names. “The biggest and finest brewery in the world. They even have their own fleet of ships to take Guinness’s stout to the four corners of the world.”
The driver had to make a wide turn to get around the next corner. “Those ships over there just go across to England,” he said.
“The English may hate us, but they love our Guinness,” the other guy said, rattling off sentences that had nothing to do with anything. A lot of young soldiers were like that in Nam. In any war. The killing was over but the scene of the killing was played over and over in their heads. The wild delight of finding yourself still alive when so many others were dead. I remember one young black guy who started doing Amos and Andy impersonations right after a bloody ambush. The medics had to give him a shot to put him under after he’d been unable to sleep for four nights in a row.
“This is far enough,” the driver said, turning into a cobblestoned alley with beer trucks in it. He braked, switched off the engine and we got out. It wasn’t until then that I realized both men were wearing thin cotton gloves. They threw the gloves under the car, then we went down a hill toward a wide street with bright lights and traffic.
“Make sure you have that little gun tucked in so’s it won’t make a bulge,” the driver said. “The rozzers will be combing the city tonight.”
The other gunman patted the side of his raincoat. “Snug as a bug in a rug,” he said. “And don’t call it a little gun. It’s an Ingram, used by police departments all over America. Isn’t that right, Rainey?”
The driver unzipped his fly and took a leak against the front tire of a beer truck. “For pity’s sake, can’t you give your jaw a rest? You’re like an old maid that’s just found a husband. Twitter! Twitter! Tweet! Tweet!”
“Fuck you.”
“The same to you and yours.”
These guys were an odd couple, but there was nothing funny about them. First and last, they were ruthless killers. They might be the best of friends, but they didn’t have to be. Sometimes you work best with someone you don’t like; all that’s called for is trust, an awareness that the other man won’t let you down when the going gets rough.
Going down the hill the driver looked at his wristwatch. “The bus won’t be along for a bit and we don’t want to be standin’ there in the street if a police car comes creepin’ along. What about a nice feed of fish and chips? Motion carried. Fish and chips it is.”
A sign said we were in St. James Street: the fish and chip shop was called Lombardi’s. “You can’t beat the Eyeties for this kind of scoff,” the driver said as we went into a brightly lit restaurant that smelled of fish and boiling oil. “With the Eyeties it’s fish and chips or ice cream. There isn’t a big town in Ireland that doesn’t have Eyeties runnin’ one or the other.”
It was getting on toward midnight, but the place was well filled with late workers, drinkers from the bars on their way home, and a few street hookers, the first I’d seen in Dublin. A drunk was shaking a vinegar bottle, getting more vinegar on his crotch than he did on his plate of fried fish. No one took any heed of the drunk, no one took any heed of us. The three Italians behind the counter called off orders in nasal Dublin accents. Behind the counter three vats of cooking oil bubbled furiously. We got our orders of fish and chips, two pots of strong tea, and sat down.
I’ll say this for the food: it was good and hot. Not good, just good and hot. And greasy. My two buddies doused their chow with vinegar until their plates were overflowing with the stuff. The Irish may not know good food, but they know what they like. “Well, isn’t this grand,” the talkative one said, actually rubbing his hands together. I still didn’t know their names, and maybe I’d never get a chance to find out.
Stuffing a piece of fish into his mouth the gabby one said, “There go the police.”
“Let them,” the driver said without looking at the window.
“They’ve turned and are comin’ back real slow.”
“That’s why we’re in here, not standin’ bare-arsed at the bus stop. Can’t you stop bein’ so jumpy and leave us eat our bloody food in peace? The police have no business with us. All we are is three fellas on our way home from the pictures.”
The other gunman grinned; he wasn’t scared, just hyped-up. “That’s a lovely alibi, but suppose they ask us what picture was playing?”
“You tell them Birth of a Nation. They’ll believe anything, coming from you. If they set one foot inside this place we’ll let them have it. But it shouldn’t come to that. We’re miles from where it happened.”
The gabby gunman looked out the window, then back at us, grinning all the time. “The buggers are gone away. You really didn’t mean to kill Republic coppers, did you? That’s against policy, or hadn’t you heard? We’re not supposed to get the Republic coppers too pissed off at us. How could we hide here if we did?”
The driver swallowed a cup of milky tea in two gulps. “I’m not going back inside, policy or no policy. I’ve done all the jail time I’m goin’ to do. Sure I’d kill them. Wouldn’t you?”
“With pleasure.”
“Nobody said you had to get pleasure out of it. Don’t mind this fella, Rainey. He’s demented from watching too much Kojak on the telly. Before that it was Starsky and Hutch. I can’t stand the fuckin’ telly meself. A good football game, all right. The rest of it isn’t worth a tinker’s curse. All that sadistic carry-on, all that shootin’ and killin’. A bad influence on Irish youth, if you ask me.”
The other gunman ate the last of his fish and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “You’re right,” he said, grinning at his murderous partner. “What Ireland needs is gun control. Hey now, how long till the bus comes?”
“I’ll let you know when the fuckin’ bus is due,” the driver said, looking at his watch. “Make yourself useful and bring us another pot of tea.”
Nothing had been said about the killing and I didn’t bring it up because I knew there wouldn’t be any answers. They might bicker and clown around, but they operated under a strict discipline that I found impressive. They had done their job and required no thanks for it. They had saved my life, but they would take it away just as quickly if someone gave the order. They were so ordinary, so much like the men they had killed in the bar, that it was hard to believe they were what they were. There was none of the Latin guerrilla swagger about them; not even a trace of that macho bullshit. And that, I thought, was what made them so dangerous.
“I wish to Christ we could take a taxi instead of the fuckin’ bus,” the gabby one said. “When I was in England that time I put in six months punchin’ tickets. Bastards sacked me ’cause they said I didn’t have the right attitude to make a career bus conductor.”
“No taxis,” his partner said. “The rozzers question taxi drivers all the time. ‘Why yes, officer, I distinctly remember three men I picked up in St. James Street. One of them looked like an American. You say you found the death car abandoned not far from where I picked them up? A lucky thing for you I have such a good head for faces.’” The driver resumed his normal voice. “No fuckin’ taxi. Now swallow your tea and let’s get out of here.”
On the way to the bus stop I ventured a question. “You wouldn’t want to tell me where we’re going?”
“You’re going to be debriefed,” the driver answered. “I thought you knew that all along.”
Chapter Five
THE DEBRIEFING WAS done by a man wearing the uniform of an officer in the Irish National Police.
We got off the bus at O’Connell Bridge in the center of the city, then walked down along the river to the docks. Freighters and container ships were tied up on both sides of the river, dark, silent hulks in the oily water. A match flared as a watchman on one of the freighters lit his pipe. We passed a sailor lying dead drunk in a puddle of water. The moon was covered over by dark, rolling clouds.
“This way,” my escort said, turning into a narrow street of warehouses. Halfway down he stopped at a steel door and reached up high to press a concealed electric bell. There was a faint answering buzz, then the door clicked open and we went into a big empty storage room with a single weak bulb burning overhead. At the end of the room, steel stairs went up to another door. The man went up ahead of us and knocked. The door opened and we were motioned to come on up. It was then that I saw the uniform.
The upstairs room had concrete walls, a steel floor, a steel desk, six or seven folding chairs. A radio transmitter and a short wave radio stood on a table against the wall. On the desk was a scanner radio, the kind that monitors police calls. I didn’t get the uniform; but the guy wearing it sure as hell looked like a real cop. The moment he spoke, I knew he was.
“I’ll get to you in a moment, Rainey,” he said to me. He was an old bird to be mixed up in this kind of stuff. Sixty, at least, and maybe a few years older than that. Tall, thin, gray-haired and ramrod straight, he looked like a man long accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed without question.
“What the hell happened down there tonight?” he demanded. “You were sent to bring this man here. How did it turn into a massacre? Don’t fiddle with the truth, Gallagher. Did you get drunk or what?”
Gallagher was the driver. “There was no other way, Chief. They were about to kill him.”
“Get on with it, the rest of it,” the policeman said. He remained perfectly still while Gallagher talked. I couldn’t make out his rank by the badges he wore, but I knew he had to be pretty high up in the Irish National Police, which was run, more or less, along military lines. An intelligent man, but hard as nails.
“The car was the only way to get in there before the Marxists killed him,” Gallagher said, getting to the end of his story. “They’d have plugged him straight off if we tried to break down the door. It was car or nothin’, Chief. You think we should have let them kill him just to avoid bad publicity?”
“That has not been suggested,” the policeman said stiffly. “We can’t let them harm anyone connected with us. They knew Rainey here was under our protection and yet they went ahead with it. Looks like our little truce hasn’t worked out too well.”
The talky gunman spoke up. “They’re the ones that broke it, Chief.”
“I know that, O’Shea. Ah well, it wouldn’t have worked anyway. You can’t trust a Communist to keep his word, not even when he comes from your own country. Or especially when he comes from your own country. You did fine, both of you, but you know, there’s going to be one hell of a flap because of this. I’m supposed to be at my place down the country, but I phoned in and said I’d be back in two hours. Both of you better stay here till the hue and cry dies down. I have no idea when that will be. It will be in every Irish and British newspaper by morning. The television jackals will worry it to death. Worse than the publicity, we have to think about reprisals. Of course—”
Gallagher looked puzzled. “Did you just think of something funny, Chief?”
“Indeed I did. We’re going to blame the whole thing on the Ulster Defense League. Those Orange bastards are always talking about what hard men they are. Now let them take credit for something that’s more than talk. The nerve of those Presbyterian sods, invading the Republic and shooting up respectable public houses. Mrs. Thatcher is going to hear about this. Nobody got a good look at you, did they?”
O’Shea grinned at the savage old cop. “Only the dead men, Chief.”
“That’s just grand, O’Shea. So out of evil comes good. I know you’ve fallen away from the church, and more’s the pity. I always say, ‘Put your faith in Jesus and His Blessed Mother and they will take care of you.’ Shit! I think this is going to turn out all right. As soon as I’m officially back on duty I’m going to get two or three anonymous phone calls telling me about certain sinister characters with Belfast accents seen lurking in the vicinity of Mack’s pub. I’ll have the entire force searching for Orange terrorists before the sun comes up. Boys, we’re going to pull out all the stops on this one. Now off to your beds, I want to talk to Rainey.”
After they’d gone the man they called “Chief” took two bottles of warm stout out of his desk drawer, opened them, and gave me one. “You’ll see my picture in the papers so you might as well know who I am. My name is Frank McShane and I’m chief superintendent in charge of the Special Branch. We call it the S Branch for short. On the Continent we’d be called political police. That name isn’t favored in Ireland, but that’s what we are. Higgins in New York thinks you’re a good man, but that—no offense meant—remains to be seen. However, the immediate question is, how did the Marxists know you were coming to Ireland? Take your time and think about it. What did they say when they came into that bar?”
