Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (54 page)

Three hundred and forty-two men lifted out of a list of four hundred and fifty. Three hundred forty-two, and Catholic to a man. That had been a tactical blunder, he supposed, made in the smug arrogance of the Orange inner circle. Somewhere in that number the two Riordan men had been swallowed up. And, at present, he’d no bloody idea where they might be spit out. He’d managed to trace Pat as far as Girdwood Barracks, but had met with an unnerving silence on any information beyond that. Casey, on the other hand, seemed to have disappeared into the ether, so insubstantial was any intelligence he’d managed to gather concerning the older of the Riordan brothers.

He climbed the stairs wearily, legs the consistency of gelled lead. He needed sleep desperately but knew that even a few hours of rest were a luxury he could not afford.

He stripped down in the bath off his bedroom, turned the taps up until the ancient pipes shrieked in protest, and then stepped into the scalding hot water. He scrubbed down quickly, wishing he could rinse his mind clean along with his body.

He leaned against the tiled wall for a moment, closing his eyes. Behind the lids he could see the streets, burned into his retina by fire and rage. His ears still rang with the cries of children suddenly fatherless, the screams and curses of women whose men had been yanked, without mercy, from their arms. And underlying the howls of human misery, the flat, metallic keen of the dustbin lids, banging the cobblestones as they had done so many times before in his demon-haunted city.

After his shower, he toweled down, chose a simple blue shirt and charcoal dress pants and dressed quickly, mind running over the myriad phone calls he would have to make, the bereft and terrified families he’d promised to look in on today and the promises he’d no idea how he was going to keep.

In the kitchen, where a pot of hot coffee was brewing and the scent of fresh rolls fragranced the air, he looked out over the city. Thick, black coils of smoke rose against a brittle blue sky, the imperial domes of the city smudged in the haze.

Standing there, the sound of coffee drizzling in the background, he was suddenly overcome by a stab of despair so sharp he couldn’t breathe around it. It came to him bluntly, the way such epiphanies often did, that he was, after all, only one man. One man, with all the frailties that the human condition came carelessly packaged with.

His hand sought a chair blindly and he found himself guided and pushed gently downwards by a pair of hands that, though not often felt, were recognized instantly.

“Sit down before you pass out,” she said tartly.

He sat, the wave of weakness abating slightly, and looked up.

“You look worse than I feel,” he said shortly, “and that’s saying something.”

“Compliments so early in the morning, Jamie?” she retorted, and then sat down heavily across from him, as though her bones had suddenly telescoped down into her knees.

“What happened to your face?”

“Belfast confetti,” she said with a weak smile, flinching as he touched her left cheek, which was turning a vivid and Stygian black.

“Rock or bottle?” he asked, rising to get the coffee, legs still slightly wobbly.

“Paving stone,” she said ruefully, “fortunately it just glanced off.”

Jamie looked at the blackness that bloomed around the sharp edges of her scar, the one she’d sustained in yet another battle that hadn’t been hers to fight, and thought he’d define fortunate in different terms than she’d become accustomed to.

“Where’s Lawrence?”

“Outside with Finbar. He’s like a little powder keg right now, thinks he can somehow avenge Casey and set him free all in one go. If we knew where he was, that is.”

Jamie set coffee down in front of her and a roll still warm from the oven.

“You have to eat,” he said, as she pushed the plate away from her and shook her head.

“Can’t,” she said wearily.

“Can,” he said and shoved the plate back. “You won’t do him any favors if you get sick. He needs you whole and well.”

Her head came up swiftly, eyes lit with hope. “You know where he is?” she asked with a sharp intake of breath.

He shook his head regretfully. “No, not yet. Pat’s in Girdwood Barracks. Have you seen Sylvie?”

She shook her head mutely, eyes dropping to stare at the tabletop as she bit her bottom lip in disappointment.

“Have you even cried yet?” he asked, tone softer.

“No,” she whispered, and he could hear the control beginning to slip in her voice. “He asked me not to. Told me not to give the bastards the pleasure of my tears. So I didn’t. I stood in the street, Jamie,” her head came up and he saw her eyes were glittery with unshed tears, “and took pictures like I was composing some storybook; I took pictures while they chained my husband like a savage to a truck. My husband,” she gasped, as if only now the enormity of the last twenty-four hours had caught up with her, “barefoot, half-naked and chained and I—I took pictures. Oh God, I’m sorry Jamie, but I think I’m going to be sick.”

“No you’re not,” he said briskly, wondering whose very sensible voice was speaking through him, “just stick your head down between your knees and breathe slowly, the shock has finally caught you up is all.”

“Better?” he asked a moment later as her head re-emerged above the table, strands of hair glued by tears into the battered mess on the left-hand side of her face.

She nodded weakly.

“Right then, do you think you could manage some tea? Maybe a bit of bread?”

He didn’t wait for her acquiescence, but put the kettle on to boil and set the bread to toast. Coffee was a good eye opener, but it was useless in a crisis. There were times, as any Irishman worth his salt knew, when only tea would do.

He watched her carefully while she ate, more to humor him than anything else, he suspected, and drank down the entire cup of tea.

“We’re going to have to have your face looked at,” he said as she gingerly wiped her face with a napkin, “your cheekbone could be fractured. Is it hurting you a great deal?”

She shook her head, “No, it’ll be fine, I don’t need a doctor.”

“We’ll see,” he said sternly and then added, “you need to go upstairs and get some rest.”

“No.” Her brow was set in a stubborn line he’d become well acquainted with over time. “I have to find out where Casey is being held, I have to locate Pat.”

“There’s no way to get near Pat right now.”

“If Pat’s there, then it’s likely Casey—”

He shook his head, hating himself even as he did so, but he couldn’t provide her with false hope.

“He’s not.”

She shook her head in denial. “You can’t be certain of that.”

“He’s not. I don’t know where he is Pamela, but I do know for certain it’s not there.”

“No, you don’t know for certain, you can’t—some were taken to Crumlin Road and—and...”

He shook his head again, feeling as if he were kicking a defenseless creature.

“He wasn’t. Liam Connelly is in Girdwood, so is Thomas O’Faolin and Jimmy McGurty and the other men who were put in that truck yesterday morning. But Casey isn’t with them.”

“You’re not God, Jamie Kirkpatrick, you can’t know everything,” she said pushing back her chair and lurching to her feet, the smell of fear beginning to pulse off her in rapid beats. “I have to go,” she dragged the back of a sweater sleeve across her eyes.

“And where will you go?” he asked gently.

“I—I don’t know, but I have to find him, Jamie.”

“What did he tell you, what did he ask you to do?” he asked, tone still gentle, but now insistent, pushing her memory.

She shook her head and dug in the front left-hand pocket of her jeans. “He left this for you, told me to go to you.” Her face twisted slightly, tears still standing in trembling pools above her bruised cheeks. “Did the two of you plan this in advance? Did you know? Did he know?” she asked, voice rising in agitation.

“Everyone knew this was coming, it’s hardly a surprise,” he said calmly and saw the answering spark of frustration in her stance. He sighed, rubbing the vertical crease between his eyebrows. As practiced as he was at the art of lying, he didn’t quite feel up to the challenge of it this morning.

“Yes, he came to me some weeks ago, asked me to see that you were safe. We both knew there was a possibility that no house was going to be a safe house. He knew someone was betraying him to Joe Doherty, now he’s got a better notion of who that is.”

“What?” she asked in a hoarse whisper, disbelief stark against her pale skin and under it something uncertain, a flicker of doubt, a hesitation that told him more about the state of her marriage than he was comfortable knowing. “Are you saying this was all a game, a ruse to smoke some rat out of hiding?”

“No, not at all. He really was worried they’d come for him at home. I don’t think he wanted that sort of trouble to touch your house.”

“Well it’s touched us now,” she said angrily.

“Pamela, he never wanted this to happen.”

She slumped down in the chair again, tears slipping the dam of anger and sliding down her bruised skin.

“I know,” she whispered. “I just feel so—so angry and helpless.”

“So do I,” he said.

The clatter of a boy and dog sounded just then in the hall. Pamela hastily wiped her tears away.

Maggie entered the kitchen, followed by Lawrence and Finbar, both rather disheveled from the events of the last twelve hours.

“Found this one behind the byre, smoking.”

Lawrence had the grace to look slightly shamefaced, as Pamela raised a brow at him.

“We need to find the lad a bed,” Jamie said, rising to his feet, every muscle feeling like it had been beaten with a large stick.

“He’s to be fed first,” Maggie said firmly, already filling a pot with water and measuring out steel-cut oats into a bowl. She nodded over her shoulder at Jamie, “Ye’d best find yer own bed, before ye drop on the spot.”

“I’ll get to it soon enough,” Jamie said, knowing he wasn’t fooling Maggie for a second.

The kitchen around them was warm and quiet, sunlight glowing in the surface of the granite counters, and gleaming off the tile above them. One might almost think that below them the city too still slept, though the sound of sporadic gunfire in the distance cured one quickly of such imaginings.

Once Lawrence was occupied with his oats and a small lake of cream, Finbar happily and noisily chewing a soup bone under the table, Pamela turned to Jamie.

“Why did he send me to you?”

“Because other than his brother, it appears I’m one of the few people he trusts.”

“What are we going to do now, Jamie?”

Jamie shook his head, feeling unutterably fatigued.

“
We
are not going to do anything. I have an idea or two, but you’re going to have to trust me to do this alone. Can you do that—trust me?”

“You know I trust you Jamie.”

“Yes, I suppose I do know that.”

“What now? Not just for us,” she indicated the city below, “but for everyone.”

“I imagine the violence will be fairly bad for the next while,” Jamie replied, “and the government, whether it realizes it or not, is finished, they’ve signed their own death warrant. The road back is closed forever, all we can do now is look ahead and pray.”

At present, that seemed very little.

ON THE FLOOR OF THE GIRDWOOD BARRACKS gymnasium, in the midst of what he estimated was close to two hundred men, Patrick Riordan sat, slightly bruised, and clad only in a hastily grabbed undershirt and grubby jeans. He hadn’t even had time to stick his feet in a pair of shoes.

He shivered, pulling his arms as tight to his sides as his manacled hands would allow. Internment came as no great surprise to him, but he’d thought he might escape the sweep. Hindsight, however new, made that assumption look very foolish.

If the government was desperate enough to kidnap unarmed socialists, it was highly unlikely Casey, with his past IRA associations, was going to escape the net.

They’d been here since early morning, and he guessed it was some time in the afternoon now, heading toward tea time. Not that he was likely to get his tea today.

Thus far he’d had his particulars taken down, been photographed, and his personal effects, which consisted only of the celtic cross he wore around his neck, removed from him. Then he’d been led down a long corridor and into a small holding room, where he’d been confronted by two Special Branch RUC men who had questioned him extensively about IRA doings (of which he knew nothing), his ties with local Communists (it had taken him a bit to realize they meant the Young Socialists) and then he’d been accused of pretty much every crime from petty vandalism to attempts to blow up the Queen. He’d also been kicked and punched in the stomach, and slapped hard enough across his left ear that it was still ringing.

He had yet to have so much as a drink of water, which might be a blessing of sorts, because so far no bathroom privileges had been offered to any of the lifted men.

Next to him, half lying on the floor, was an elderly man who was obviously hard of hearing. He’d been kicked for his inattention to orders roughly a half dozen times.

“Do ye think they’d allow me to go to the latrine if I asked?”

Pat turned, slightly startled by the man’s voice.

“I don’t know. Drawin’ their attention may not be wise.”

The man let out a small whimper, obviously in a great deal of discomfort.

“I’ve the weak kidneys—had them since the War,” he said piteously, “I’d not complain otherwise, but I’m like to go all over the floor if they don’t let me to the toilet.”

Pat gestured to the closest MP, a grommet-faced specimen that he’d have given a wide berth to on the street. However, here he couldn’t be quite so picky.

“What d’ya want?”

“This gentleman,” he jerked his head toward the old man, “needs to use the facilities. He’d not ask only it’s got to the point where it’s an emergency.”

“He can piss his pants for all I care.”

This bit of speech drew forth a groan from the old man.

“Christ, can’t ye have a grain of compassion? The man’s in dire agony here.”