Malarkey (8 page)

Everyone laughed.

McDiarmuid cocked his head. "I don't smoke myself, as you
know, but the data processors are smokers, to a woman, and their
productivity sank like a stone the day your man told them no more
fags on the job. 'Twasn't so much the idea, mind you, as the way he
laid down the law. He gave them a lecture, and two of them old
enough to be his mother. It's a miracle they didn't call in the labour
council."

Novak groaned. "Or strike. A strike is just what we need
with the baroque disk in production." He turned to me and his eyes
lit with manic fire. "It's a great disk. Classy."

"Super," Tracy chimed in. "We call it Going for Baroque and
it's got everything—architecture, sculpture, theater, music, Rubens
up the kazoo. Liam did three major gardens, including Blenheim, for
the Great Creating Nature bit."

"What do you mean 'did' the gardens?"

"Photographed them," McDiarmuid said. "Some video.
Mostly stills. There are grand gardens at Powerscourt, by the by,
Mrs. Dodge. Just up the Dublin road."

"Did you film them, too?"

He shook his head. "Powerscourt's nineteenth century, too
late for the disk."

"Liam's a brilliant photographer," Barbara assured me,
earnest. "He did combat footage in Bosnia for the Irish
Times
."

McDiarmuid gave her another ironic salute with the wine
glass. "Prepared me to fight off the hordes at Blenheim."

"Lee's film of Blenheim," Tracy said with an ecstatic sigh, "is
pure Bach."

Alex smiled at her. "Tracy did the audio, Lark."

Dad said, "I didn't know you were musical, Tracy."

"The disk sounds fascinating." I was having trouble
imagining how all those things could fit together. So far neither of my
computers could read CD-ROM disks. "Is the disk, er, interactive?" I
had at least heard that buzzword.

All five of them hastened to assure me how thoroughly
interactive their creation was. Dad listened with an air of
bemusement. Alex poured another round of wine.

The Stonehall shop talk, though confusing, was less
uncomfortable than hearing them gripe about the late Slade
Wheeler. I thought how quickly they had put Grace Flynn from their
minds, but my judgment may have been unfair. They didn't know me,
and only Tracy and the Steins knew my father. I wondered what they
might have said of Grace had we not been there.

My stomach was approaching lunch Pacific Standard Time
or a late dinner Greenwich Mean Time. In other words it rumbled. I
wondered whether my father was tired. I was tired, and I needed to
call Jay. Abruptly I decided to do just that.

Alex seemed the softer-hearted of the two Steins. I pulled
him aside and explained. He led me down the hall to a small office
with one of those intimidating devices equipped with fax, voicemail,
intercom, and assorted mysterious buttons with asterisks. I have a
simpler phone in my bookstore.

He showed me how to get an outside line. "That should do it
if the post office isn't on strike."

"What?"

"All public communications, including the post office and the
telephone system, come under the aegis of one government
department. The workers are a moody lot. They strike at the drop of
a hat. I don't think they're out this week, though. You're in luck."

I may have been in luck at the Stanyon Hall end, but I was
out of luck at home. I got our message tape again and said something
noncommittal. Jay was probably still at the college. If I had called him
there, I would have got the building secretary or his voicemail.
Discouraged but relieved, I hung up.

As I made my way back to the salon, a voice hailed me from
above. "Who're you?"

I watched a black apparition descend the staircase. It had to
be Kayla Wheeler. She wore black tights, a black mini-skirt, and a
black tee shirt with the logo of some obscure band fading across her
not insignificant bosom. Her hair was dyed dead black, and she wore
grape-purple lipstick and a lot of black eye gunk against matte-white
foundation. Her fingers were loaded with blackening silver
rings.

On a ninety pound, nineteen-year-old waif, the
Transylvanian get-up would have been effective if a bit passé,
but Kayla was almost as large as her brother had been and the
poundage was less compactly distributed. She was also at least five
years older. I was too dumbstruck by her appearance to respond to
her question, so she repeated it.

"Who the bloody hell are you?"

I introduced myself without embellishment, explained that I
had found her brother's body, and offered my sympathy.

She wasn't interested. Her watery gray eyes wandered as I
spoke. "I got lost down a fucking servants' stair. Some prick in the
kitchen waved a butcher knife at me. Where is everybody? I want a
bloody drink."

I understood Barbara's reluctance to sit in the same car with
the woman. Kayla was wearing a heavy perfume over unclean
underwear and stale smoke, and her voice sounded like a murder of
crows. Her accent was California flat with an overlay of British punk
idiom. The resemblance to her dead brother was striking.

Silent, I led her to the drawing room. She made straight for
the drinks trolley and whinged at Alex while he concocted a large gin
for her. She pouted, she whined, she sneered at my father when
Barbara introduced him to her, she lit a Player's and waved it in
Barbara's face. I ought to have despised Kayla, but I found I was
sorry for her. It was hard to tell how much of her unhappiness was
the result of her brother's death and how much was endemic. The
others said polite condolences that made their distance from her
obvious.

Kayla occupied the couch, gulped gin morosely, and
scattered ashes on her black garments. Alex, who looked as unhappy
as his guest, hovered over her. Barbara opened a window wide and
left the room to parley with the chef.

I poured myself another glass of wine and drifted back to
Dad. He was listening to Tracy tell him about her post-graduate
accomplishments. She was, it seemed, a sound engineer. Novak and
McDiarmuid were having a low-voiced argument over the work
schedule. I pretended not to listen. It was chilly with the window
open.

I wondered how Maeve's mission to Grace Flynn's father
was progressing. Maeve had the confidence of a woman with a
university degree in a country in which relatively few have access to
universities. She seemed to know exactly what to do, and it was also
clear she had a support system in mind that was not limited to the
convent. Things were changing for Irish women, as the election of
Mary Robinson as President ought to have suggested. I don't know
why I was surprised.

When Barbara returned she announced dinner. Her chef
insisted. He was an Irishman trained in Paris and New York, she told
me as we lined up for the buffet in the dark Victorian dining room.
He had burned out operating his own restaurant in Kinsale and liked
the idea of running the Stanyon kitchens while he thought his
options over. I gathered he was a formidable personality. He had
promised to save something for Maeve and Sgt. Kennedy.

All of us, led by Kayla, loaded our plates, and I was relieved
to find a long dining table to sit at. I dislike balancing a plate on my
knees. Little touches of fancy cookery let us know the chef could pull
out the stops if he wanted to, but the meal was basically plain fresh
food cooked just enough. I have never tasted more delicious veggies,
but I did wonder at the appropriateness of the main course. The
chef's tribute to the late Slade Wheeler was a large, perfectly roasted
capon.

I sat between Kayla Wheeler and Liam McDiarmuid. Kayla
ate with morose intensity. She had clearly decided I was no bloody
use, so she didn't trouble me with conversation. I asked Liam about
his adventures in the Balkans.

He was a slight, mousy man who tended to fade into the
background. Close to, I saw that his eyes, dark gray and thickly
lashed, were quite beautiful. He shot me an ambiguous look and the
eyelashes dropped. "Ah, the ladies. They always want to hear tales of
gore."

Few things annoy me more than generalizations about the
ladies. As I spooned a bit of the starter—an artistic mèlange of
minced tomato, basil, scallion, and lime juice in an avocado half —I
considered making a sharp response. I did the next best thing. I
fluttered my eyelashes at him and tittered.

He got the point. Not stupid. "Sure, it went over a treat with
the girls of County Wicklow."

"Grace Flynn, for instance?"

His spoon clattered on the plate but he said, with
composure, "Grace is young for the likes of me."

That was true.

After a moment, he added, "I was a stringer. Do you say
that?"

"Yes."

"I'm fond of that part of Europe. I used to holiday in
Dubrovnik. As the war began to spread, I saw the opportunity, so I
went out to Sarajevo."

"My God."

He nodded. "It was a horror. Still is. I helped document mass
execution of prisoners of war for Amnesty International. A fine time
we had of it digging up skeletons." He took a sip of wine. "So my
'adventure' wasn't entirely self-serving, but it did bring my work to
Alex's notice."

"And you took this job."

"I thought virtual reality would be an improvement on the
mundane kind."

I finished my starter. "And is it?"

He toyed with his spoon. "I've worked in the States, but I
needed high tech credits."

"You should have a substantial reputation in the trade when
the baroque disk hits the media stores."

"I hope so."

"You didn't answer my question."

"Ah, you're a hard woman. I'm an artist, trained to present
the truth, so to speak. There's all kinds of fakery involved in the
images we create. That's one reservation I have."

"And?"

"The game playing." He shoved his starter aside without
finishing it.

Game playing.

"Interactive disks developed from computer games."

"Nintendo?" Like a great many women, I had found the early
computer games boring and faintly repulsive because they seemed
to involve little beyond zapping an imaginary enemy.

He said softly, "The corpses we dug up were boys in their
teens and twenties playing at war. When I heard of Slade's war
gaming I was appalled. He was writing an elaborate game program
whilst teaching Irish lads guerrilla tactics. I'll admit drilling boys in
the art of war is not unheard of in these parts, but the Provos at least
have a cause."

I recalled that the Provos were the provisional branch of the
Irish Republican Army. "Ulster?"

"The six counties." He pulled his plate toward him with the
air of a man about to do his duty. His tone was light, mocking. "Ulster
is the ancient province. It's not Ulster without Cavan, Monaghan, and
Donegal, or so my grandfather would have it. He's a strong Sinn Fein
man is my grandfather."

"The North, then."

"The North, God help it." He shoved at a bit of new potato. "I
saw what the Serbs and the Croats were doing to each other. The so-
called ethnic cleansing is sectarian slaughter, the Orthodox killing
Catholics and vice versa, and everybody murdering Moslems. There's
no end in sight. I kept seeing the obvious parallels. Car bombs are
bad enough. I'd hate to see a Bosnian bloodbath in the streets of
Derry or the fields of Antrim. It could happen if enough lads were
willing to play the game."

"Was Wheeler—"

"Political? No. That was the horror of it. He thought he was a
conservative, but he'd no philosophy. The man had never heard of
Edmund Burke. He was as ignorant as my grandda's dog about Irish
history, too." He stabbed a bit of potato. "Of course, most Americans
are."

"My father isn't," I said peaceably.

"True for you." He chewed. "'Twas the skills of warfare that
interested Slade. I wanted to do a photo essay on his game players,
but he told me he'd break my hands if I tried."

"Nice."

He shrugged. "I doubt he could have. He liked that kind of
talk. But it made me wonder what he didn't want photographed. And
all the while his lads were sneaking through the Stanyon woods
zapping each other with paint the color of fresh blood."

"I'll say they were." Neither of us had been paying attention
to Kayla Wheeler, but something of what McDiarmuid was saying
must have got through to her. "One of those yobboes killed Slade and
shot him with a paint gun after he was dead. The Garda inspector
told me when he phoned me in London."

She had a penetrating voice. Her remark brought the hum of
conversation to a dead stop. My father looked appalled, the others, in
varying degrees, avid.

"He had a splash of red paint on his forehead when I found
him," I admitted, since Kayla had let the cat out of the bag
anyway.

"And you didn't mention it?" Barbara sounded affronted. My
father gave me a reproachful look. He was pale.

I felt my cheeks burn. "Sergeant Kennedy asked me not
to."

Barbara snorted. That seemed to be her ingrained response
to Kennedy in his police role. She turned her attention back to the
dead man's sister. "Did they tell you whom they suspect?"

Kayla ripped a piece of bread in half and slathered it with
butter. "One of the wargamers. Mahon didn't name names." She
snickered. "Slade was playing around with a local girl. Maybe
somebody got jealous."

Universal shuffling and mumbling. Silverware clanked.
Nobody was meeting anyone else's eyes.

Incredible as it seemed to me, Kayla had missed Grace's
performance. I wondered whether anyone would bother to tell her
what had happened. I also thought of the motorcyclist, Artie. Had he
been one of Wheeler's toy soldiers? His relationship with Grace was
unclear. Protective? Possessive? He could have been a friend, a lover,
an old schoolmate, though I thought he must have left school several
years before. If he were a significant wargamer, a lieutenant of some
sort, he might have felt a need to protect his dead captain's
woman.