Habit of Fear (32 page)

“Unlock your door or he’ll smash it in. We’re not going to hurt you.”

“Go to hell,” Julie said and again trod on the starter. Again a futile whirr. And how far would she go with him beside her? A car approached. Donahue grabbed her hand when she was about to lean it on the horn. Kincaid waved at the passing car in neighborly fashion.

Donahue thrust himself across her and flicked open the door lock. There was something sickeningly familiar in the unwashed smell of him. His lank, dark hair fell in a clump across his forehead like a dead mouse. “For Christ’s sake, Frankie, open the door. Can’t you do anything for yourself?”

Kincaid opened the door and started talking at once. “All we want is to tell you something. We never wanted to hurt
you
,” Kincaid pleaded. “Never.” He was sweating, and yet the wind was cold. He was still running scared, Julie realized, quite as wildly as he had been the night she saw him at the Wolfe Tones concert.

And he spoke the truth, small honor to them. Poor old Missy Glass was meant to be their prey. She could not look at either of them, but her panic fell away. “What do you want to say to me?”

“Not here. A place people won’t be gaping at us. And where they won’t be coming back right away to look for you.”

“Where?”

Donahue gave an order: “Bring the Ford, Frankie. I’ll turn this job around for her.” To Julie: “It’s not far. You can even phone your friend on the way and tell him what happened. I swear you’ll be all right.”

Kincaid added, “I swear it, too. I want you to see my mother when you get home.”

Oh, God. Julie glanced at Kincaid and thought of how he resembled a Cabbage Patch Doll—he who had played ticktacktoe on her naked body with his switchblade. She turned her head to look full at him: watery eyes, a slithering tongue over wet lips, and a growth of beard to match the new red crop on the top of his head. She could taste her loathing. “And if I won’t go with you?”

“Christian charity: that’s all we’re asking of you.”

“No kidding.” Then: “If you can start the car for me, Mr. Donahue, okay. But I’m going to drive.”

There was no conversation between them, only his directions and not many of them, for the dirt road was crossed but once, with a public house, the Fox and the Hart, at the intersection. She declined the offer of a phone call from there. She did not want to enter the building, to give Seamus’s number aloud, to advertise her vulnerability.

The cottage, some twenty miles’ drive from where they had left the highway, was thatched, newly whitewashed, and had but one door and two windows. Fire, the smoke wafting around it, glowed in the hearth like a red, rheumy eye. A very old woman was ladling water from a bucket into the kettle when they entered. Nothing was said to or by her. She had grown small in age, Julie thought. Kincaid explained that she did not speak English. A clothesline, hung with blankets, separated the room into two parts. The cottage would be where Kincaid and Donahue had been hidden away in Ireland. It smelled of smoke and damp clothes and human rot. Smoke-filtered sunlight shone through the front window. Donahue led the way to a scarred porcelain-topped table, around which were three crude chairs. He parted the heavy curtains over the back window, and the light seemed to focus attention on a bunch of artificial flowers in a jug in the center of the table. “I bought her them when I was in Sligo,” Kincaid said.

The sensitive type. Julie said nothing.

The old woman shuffled to the fireplace with the kettle. There was an alcove alongside the fireplace and in it a bed. When the old one had hung the kettle on the bracket, she proceeded to the alcove, climbed up on the bed, and drew a curtain across to close herself in.

“My God,” Julie said, “won’t she suffocate?”

Kincaid said, “She goes in there all the time. Unless she’s sitting on the stool poking the fire and rocking and crying. Sometimes it gets weird, like she was trying to freak us out. She doesn’t mean nothing by it, but Jim and me, we sing when she starts in. We must’ve sung every song we ever heard—lullabyes, country, ‘Yankee Doodle,’ ‘God Bless America,’ oh boy, you better believe it. But she ain’t violent or anything, and we take good care of her. Jerry Devlin—he’s our …”

When Kincaid paused, not having the word he wanted, Donahue provided one: “Our keeper.”

“Anyway, he bought her a transistor radio once, you know? And what did she do with it? She took it outside and dug a hole and buried it. She wouldn’t believe it wasn’t a bomb.” He seemed unable to stop talking.

Julie got her question in while he drew a deep breath. “Are you going to tell me what you want from me?”

Both men were silent then. They looked from her to each other and then down. They were sitting, their shoulders sloped, their hands out of sight beneath the table. Kincaid’s were fidgeting: she could hear them rasping against one another, then she heard the wheeze of the old woman’s breathing behind the curtain. Shoes and all in there, Julie thought. Finally Donahue said, “You came looking for us, right?”

“Wrong,” Julie said. “If I had my way, I’d never have to see either of you again in my lifetime.”

“You want us in hell, right?” Kincaid this time.

“Okay.”

“Maybe what’s happened to us ain’t hell, but it’s pretty close. Me and Jim aren’t like we were that morning when we did that to you. We don’t want to be excused or anything. Pigs. Animals. It was like we went crazy, you know?”

“I was there,” Julie said.

“It was the booze we had, and some guy put something in it. We’d gone to a bunch of porn movies and got ourselves hotted up …”

“Look, Mr. Kincaid. You can tell this all in court. I may even have to be there. You said something about Christian charity—where does that come in? If you’ve got any of it, you’ll let me go.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re right, and like Jim says, it’s all bullshit anyway. Excuse me. We did what we did and we were going to take our punishment if it wasn’t for our families and Mr. Quinlan. And we wouldn’t’ve had to get beat up to do it, either.”

“That’s bullshit too,” Julie said. She would never forget the night she left Seamus in order to view these men in a lineup and to share Detective Russo’s despair when she couldn’t and Missy Glass wouldn’t identify them.

“Okay. When we thought we could get away free—who wouldn’t? That don’t mean we weren’t sorry or ashamed of ourselves. If it wasn’t for Jim being in it too, I think I’d’ve killed myself.”

Julie drew a deep, audible breath. Her eyes were stinging from smoke, and she rubbed them. “Can’t you leave the door open?”

“That makes it worse, more downdraft or something,” Donahue said. “It won’t be so bad when the fresh turf catches. …” To his partner: “Stop explaining, Frankie. Just tell her and get it over with. Do you want me to do it?” To Julie: “He’s a craw thumper Do you know what that is?” He beat at his breast to illustrate the
mea culpa.

“Yeah.”

He took over then. “I’m not saying we’d’ve turned ourselves in if the goons hadn’t threatened to ship us out in cement if we didn’t. …”

The goons, Julie thought. Then: Wait a minute. These two had denied to Lieutenant Marks that they’d been assaulted at all. Why were they admitting it now? She interrupted him: “Why tell me this? Why didn’t you tell the Grand Jury or the district attorney?”

“Mr. Quinlan wouldn’t let us. I wanted to, but the thing was, I saw the driver of the car that night up close. A little guy—you’d’ve almost thought he was a midget. He jumped out and started kicking us and spitting on us. But Mr. Quinlan said I couldn’t be sure of seeing anybody under the circumstances. I was to stay with my original story—me and Frankie having a fight—until he said different.”

Julie understood. She knew Romano’s driver, Little Michael, a man not over five feet tall and very slight. His was a lifetime loyalty to the boss, and Michael would himself have been outraged on her behalf. To put him on the scene was a perfect Romano link.

She did not want to hear any more. “Why can’t you tell all this to a priest or somebody and leave me out of it? What am I doing here? If I’d been going to turn you in, wouldn’t I have done it the night I saw you in Donegal? I don’t want to know why you attacked me. I don’t want to know why you would have attacked that poor old street woman if I hadn’t come along when I did.”

“Just calm down and I’ll try and tell you.” Donahue pointed at the curtained alcove. “That old lady in there—that’s our penance, ma’am. Frankie and me aren’t going back. We’re going to stay here till she dies. And take good care of her. She’d be put away if it wasn’t for us. And she will be if they extradite us. Back home—if they got us and put us on trial and called in the psychiatrists. …” He shook his head. “We did something crazy, like perverts. Now, you aren’t going to believe this, but
we didn’t want to do it
.”

“Oh, Christ,” Julie said.

“I told you she wasn’t going to understand.” His lips were drawn tight. Sweat rose beneath the mouse of hair on his forehead. His eyes, screwed up, seemed even smaller.

But something in what he had said provoked her curiosity: the suggestion of psychiatrists. “You didn’t want to do it,” she said. “And so?”

“So we did every stinking thing we could.”

“You sure did,” Julie said, and for the first time participated in whatever it was they were trying to communicate. “What does Joe Quinlan have to say about your staying here?”

“He doesn’t know yet. And he didn’t exactly bring us over here himself, like by the hand. He talked to us just the once. You’d’ve thought he’d want to know everything. But he didn’t want to know anything. It was like he told
us
what happened. Like he believed everything my mom and Frankie’s mother and the priest told about us. The people we’ve met over here—they’re his cousin’s family, and they think he’s a whole bunch, Mister Big, he’s God! He keeps them alive, see, when there’s flood or famine or the sheep get sick, and their biggest thing is a united Ireland, maybe a United States of Ireland. I could tell you a lot of things, but I learned to keep my mouth shut.”

“What do they think about you two?” Julie asked and remembered that Edna O’Shea had wondered the same thing.

“They don’t know about you. They think we’re being sequestered so’s we can give evidence in a big trial coming up.”

Julie would as soon they stayed in Ireland and let the Irish cope with their penance or their plunder. She doubted it could happen. Quinlan would whistle, and they would respond, whether or not they chose to. “I’m back at the same old question, what do you want from me?”

“We want you to say you forgive us,” Kincaid said instantly.

She was stunned. Then she thought of what seemed a subtle, even a devious distinction: they didn’t ask her to forgive them, but to
say
she forgave them. But she soon realized that she was wrong. The distinction was her own.

“The old lady in there won’t last very long, and the handouts we get from plastering and spraying whitewash, they don’t come to much,” Donahue explained. “We’ve taken an oath or I’d tell you what else.”

“You’ve joined the IRA,” Julie said, not needing to hear more.

“I’m not saying, and nothing’s happened yet. But I was good in high school chemistry,” Donahue went on, “and Frankie wants to hang in with me. Maybe we can do something and makeup, see?”

Like killing people outright, Julie thought. Nor could she believe that any revolutionary movement would trust such partisans as these. Possibly a mortician might be useful to them.

“What else can I do for you?” she said with ironic intent.

“If we don’t come home in the spring,” Kincaid now took over, “go and see my mother for me. You can tell her everything.”

“And do you think she will believe me?”

“I wrote her a letter if you’ll take it. That’s what I wanted to ask you, will you take it to her—you know—if something happens to me?”

Jim Donahue shook his head. “It won’t make any difference to anybody.”

The wretched Kincaid stared at his partner across the table, stuck out his weak chin, and said, “It will to me.”

“O
F COURSE IT HURTS
!” Seamus shouted, and Julie was glad that she had not been the one to ask the question. “It hurts because they kept me strapped to a bloody ironing board when I should have been sitting up normal and looking about me.”

“I only asked because you’re in such a temper and they left something to give you for the pain.” The housekeeper screwed up her mouth and gave a little toss of her head.

“I appreciate your solicitude, Mrs. O’Gorman. But if you’d make us a hot toddy, I’d appreciate it more. The hour’s at hand. And don’t be afraid to tilt the bottle, love.”

Mrs. O’Gorman left the room, a model of dignity, holding in much of herself with her elbows. She was built along the lines of a large carrot, broad at the top and tapering down. She was ruddy-faced, a reluctant smile, and wore her gray hair braided and twisted around into a peak on the top of her head as though it might add to her stature. From the moment she had opened the cottage door, top half, then the bottom, one hand on the dog’s collar, Julie had doubted her welcome. Both Mrs. O’Gorman and the great black and tan hound dog had hovered near the bedside since her arrival. The dog, on Seamus’s command, had finally curled up on his blanket beneath the double window.

Seamus, as soon as O’Gorman could be heard clattering in the kitchen, reached for Julie’s hand and pulled her toward him. “To hell with the bastards and their mockery of contrition. You’re here, and that’s all that matters. Will you give us a kiss? I’m dying to know if we can do it after all the bum starts.”

Julie got up from the chair and leaned down over him, her thigh on the side of the bed. There was no other way, really, him flat on his back. It was their first kiss, and grew longer and deeper, and when Seamus put his hand to her breast, she made a little sound at the shock of pleasure.

On the instant the dog leaped up onto her back with a growl that mounted in fury. He caught the shawl of her heavy sweater and shook it as he might have an animal he had by the neck. Julie twisted away and covered her head with her arms. Seamus shouted and cursed the animal and got up in the bed to grab him. Mrs. O’Gorman came running, shouting also, and flailed her apron in the air.