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  “How long has your dad been into that?” I asked Kit.

  “Since we moved here from Boston.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Since my mom died.”

  “It looks like fun.”

  “Family that surfs together stays together.”

  We sat and watched her da and Sonia and then she pointed out Jackie on the beach break. Of all the surfers there, he was catching the most waves. He really was very good.

  “Jackie is definitely the best one there,” I said generously.

  She turned to me and I caught her looking at my prosthetic foot.

  “Come on, let me show you some moves,” she said.

  “It looks easy in theory,” I said.

  “It’s not that hard.”

  I lay back in the sand.

  “Maybe another time. For now I just want to be mellow, sit down, enjoy the evening.”

  Kit nodded. “We got the rest of the summer to learn to surf and at least into October. If you’re wearing a wet suit nobody would even notice your, uh . . .”

  “My foot. You can say it, I don’t give a shit.”

  She smiled.

  “Hey, I was thinking, you know what we’re a bit like today?” she said after a moment’s pause.

  “What?”

  “You ever see that movie Point Break?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t go to the movies much.”

  “You haven’t seen it? I thought everybody had seen that movie.”

  “Is Lee Marvin in it?”

  “Who’s Lee Marvin?”

  “Ok, I guess he’s not in it. So, ok then, I haven’t seen it.”

  “It’s Keanu Reeves. Have you at least heard of him?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s like us, it’s about this gang of bank robbers who go surfing. And look at us, we robbed a bank today and now we’re going surfing,” Kit said with obvious pleasure at the intersection of celluloid and reality. I smiled.

  “Listen, if you want to get into the water to complete the similarity, don’t let me stop you, I’m fine here,” I said.

  “I’ll go in a minute,” Kit said. “I’ll sit beside you for a little bit more. Maybe encourage you to body board at least.”

  I shook my head.

  “Honestly, I’m not going in. I’m no Keanu Reeves.”

  She laughed.

  “You wouldn’t want to be anyway. He was the bad guy, well sort of, he played this undercover FBI agent who wants to stop them robbing all the banks. . . .”

  Kit’s talk continued for at least another two or three sentences, but I didn’t hear a goddamn word. The blood had chilled in my veins and I was trying not to show it.

  “Ok?” she asked finally.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  I had obviously agreed to her departure. She got up, grabbed her board, said hi to Gerry and Sonia, and paddled out into the water.

  FBI agent. Jesus. Out of the mouths of babes.

  Kit sat in the water for a long time and finally took a wave. Jackie had also selected the same wave. He cut back and forth several times and even attempted a 360. Kit just rode it sedately into shore.

  She ran back up the beach.

  “See how easy it is?” she said, sheer joy making her look cool and confident and happy. Big contrast from earlier in the day.

  I nodded. She sat down on the sand. The sun had long disappeared over the salt marsh and the sky behind us was a burnt amarillo. And in front, from Cape Ann all the way up to Canada, a pink haze dissolving into black.

  Kit leaned back beside me and we sat together watching a fleet of fishing boats from Gloucester heading up to the Grand Banks.

  Beautiful.

  The still Atlantic. The endless shore. Golden light disappearing beyond the Earth’s curve. The sea breeze tousled her hair and calmed me and I imagined us out in that blue swell. Dissolving, becoming part of all that space.

  My fingers went down into the wet sand.

  Kit’s were there too. The darkening sky. Birds. The tide coming in.

  Water lapping at our ankles.

  Her fingers touching mine. She was beautiful and young and I liked her. She had a depth that she let no one see. Not Jackie, not her dad.

  She was in that stage of transition from teenager to woman.

  She was breaking out of the mold she’d been in for years and anything was possible. College, the pro surf world, or smalltime terrorism.

  She reminded me of Bridget. Bridget in the half minute after she found out I was alive and as she was deciding that she was going to have to kill me.

  I looked at her.

  Could Kit kill me?

  Could I kill her?

  Before the week was out, I’d know the answer to both those questions.

  7: DEATH ON THE PARKER RIVER

  Gray wind. Green water. A vesper of sound on the cadence of the bog. Rose petals, seraphim, Levantine cotton sheets. The ceiling, a facsimile of a busy part of the Sistine.

  I slip outside.

  Fog rolling in lazy tongues, the dead sound of a buoy bell, and the ocean hidden, silent, pretending to be benign.

  I rub my face and look at the sky.

  It unnerves me.

  There’s an ashen silver aftertaste on the horizon as if the morning has come reluctantly out of the east, hungover, snarled in a slabber of ugly clouds. There’s hardly any sun. Only a smudge behind the clouds over Cape Ann. Chilly, pon-derable, empty of life and color. A cicatrice covering old wounds.

  Something bad is going to happen today.

  Aye.

  I lean on the balcony rail. My hand comes up coated with dew.

  A night of no moon and no dreams. No saltwater kisses from cool lips. A fall into the black pit and out again.

  I yawn and look down at the dunes. Dogs, speed walkers, joggers. And Jackie carrying his surfboard with grim determination. Carrying two surfboards.

  And of course, a moment later, coming from the big house, Kit in full wet suit and bare feet. They meet, kiss, and walk along the shore to the point where the waves are breaking over the reef.

  I go back inside and grab a cup of coffee that has brewed itself in the automatic percolator. I walk out onto the balcony again. This is the only one of the guesthouse rooms that has a balcony. I suppose it’s because I’m the flavor of the month, the beamish boy.

  It’s early. Six in the morning, but I have slept well. My first decent night’s sleep in a fortnight, since before the riot began in Spain. The air-conditioning chilling the room down to a lovely fifty-eight degrees, the bed very comfortable, and for once, my blood not food for biting flies.

  I sip the coffee and watch the clouds break up and the sun rise and creep over the vortex of wooden structures that make up the landscape here. A few big houses, a beachside café, a bait-and-tackle shop, a lobster bar.

  I edge round the dewy wooden balcony, one hand on the guardrail and one hand holding my coffee. I take another sip of joe and almost wave to a woman in the mansion opposite who’s got a glimpse of me through her upstairs bathroom window. She pulls down her blind before I can do anything, a violated look on her face. Impossible to tell through the dirty glass if she was in her nightclothes or not.

  On the roof of the same house they have constructed a kind of shanty hut, which when I look closer is an observatory with a telescope peeking out of a metal dome. After a time a man comes out of the gap in the metal that serves as the observatory’s door. He’s so knackered from a night’s stargazing that I’m convinced for a moment that he’s going to plummet to his death right before my eyes. But gradually he gets his act together and finds the outside stairs to the floor below.

  I finish the coffee and go to the en suite loo, pee, brush my teeth, and put a dressing gown over my shorts and T-shirt. The robe is a plush white terry-cloth job with a gold-leaf monogram that says “G.McC.” And again it occurs to me that Gerry must be bloody loaded.

  I’m about to wonder what I do next
when I notice that a note has been pushed under the door.

  I pick it up, read it:

  “Dux femina facti. Sonia requests our presence at breakfast at seven o’clock sharp. Be there, in casual attire. —Gerry.”

  I have no idea what the Latin means but I find it extremely irritating. Who is he trying to kid? He’s not a Yankee shipping magnate brought up on Homer, Virgil, and Emerson, he’s a fucking scumbag killer from Belfast who got kicked out and somehow lucked himself into becoming a bloody multimillionaire in America.

  “Aye, well, watch out, mate, I’m the likely lad who’ll bring you down. You and your playing-both-ends minx of a daughter,” I mutter, angry at her, too.

  A maid shows me the inside passage from the guesthouse to the main house and I quickly find the kitchen. Seamus, Touched, Gerry, and Sonia are sitting at a large oak table eating sausages, waffles, and blueberry pancakes. Everyone is dressed. Seamus and Touched in T-shirts, Gerry in a huge white jacket, white shirt, and—God save us—white cravat.

  It’s hard to believe that these happy people are killers. Everything is soft. It’s either a diversion or a reinvention. Whatever it is, it gives me the creeps.

  Gerry in the middle of an explanation about something.

  “Ok, now listen to this. Are you listening, gentlemen? If you bring your forefingers very close in front of your eyes, as close as you can without them touching, and you hold your hands close to a bulb or a lamp, you can actually see the light refract its way around your fingertips and interference patterns emerge. Try it. At dawn on the grassy steppes of Tuva they call this the ‘Hun Huur Tu.’”

  Everyone begins holding his fingers up to the sunlight streaming in through the window. Then Gerry notices me.

  “Ah my boy, our new warrior, another one of the few, sit, sit, did you sleep well? Sit, have some coffee and pancakes, Sonia made them and they are the finest you will ever taste on this or any other world.”

  Oh Jesus, I think to myself, he’s talking like a pompous ass again. Does he think he’s Sydney fucking Greenstreet?

  I sit down. Pour myself a glass of orange juice.

  “You’re right, I can see little black lines between my fingers. You are full of information, Gerry,” Touched says, but there’s no way I’m going to take the bait and ask what the hell they are talking about.

  I fill my plate with Belgian waffles, deliberately ignoring the pancakes.

  “Did you sleep well, Sean?” Sonia asks.

  “Fantastic, thank you. Best sleep since coming to America,” I tell her.

  “I’m so pleased. We put you in Jamie’s old room. It has the balcony,” she says.

  “Aye, thank you, it is a nice room. I saw the sunrise from the balcony. It was lovely,” I say.

  “No, not such a nice sunrise today, Sean, the fog ruined it a bit, but you’ll see wonderful sunrises as the summer winds down and the autumn comes and the sun moves a little higher in latitude,” Gerry says.

  “I’ll look forward to it,” I tell him and take a bit of sausage and maple syrup. Touched and Seamus get into a conversation about car mechanics, and bored by this, Gerry picks up a stack of newspapers.

  “Help yourself to a paper,” he says to me. “We get the Globe, the Times, and the Journal.”

  “Uh, no thanks, I don’t like to face bad news until I’ve got some food in me belly.”

  “Very wise,” he says.

  Sonia’s been looking at me funny. I smile at her. Sip coffee and OJ and eat the fantastic grub. Catch her eye again.

  “Sean,” she begins with embarrassment, “I couldn’t help but notice last night, on the beach and now this morning, um, I hope you don’t think I’m being rude, but your left foot . . .”

  “Oh yeah, that . . .”

  “Did you lose that in the Troubles in Belfast?” she asks sincerely.

  I flash up her bio in my head. Forty. Politics or history professor at UNH. One of those leftie it’s-all-the-fault-of-dead- white-guy types. The sort that used to screw Black Panthers and have posters of Che. Have to check but I bet her father is a general or an admiral or the CEO of the Ford Motor Company. I don’t know what she thinks life is like in Ulster, but she probably imagines it as something akin to apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South. It’s tempting for me to say that I lost my foot to a British plastic bullet but I’ve already spun Kit the line about the motorbike accident.

  “Bad motorcycle accident when I was a kid. My fault. Going too fast.”

  “I am so sorry to hear it,” she replies sweetly, and her smile makes me soften to her immediately.

  “I’m over it,” I tell her.

  “Good, and I am relieved it wasn’t in the armed struggle, you would no doubt, by now, be consumed with hate,” she says, her accent becoming a little more obvious as the passion rises in her voice. Patrician, boarding school, Seven Sisters, yachting in Newport, yet with a foreign tilt. Maybe a couple of years in the bloody Sorbonne. Although you’d think after a year living with Touched she’d be cursing like a trooper, smoking like a chimney, wearing green, dropping folksy remarks about the wee people, and swearing by Irish coffee as a nostrum against colds, stomach upset, and other ills.

  “Nah, just me falling off me bike,” I say. “Is that a bit of a foreign accent you have there?”

  Sonia smiles, pleased, but before she can answer Touched cuts her off.

  “Sean,” he mutters, staring at me with interest.

  “What?”

  “Let’s see your foot,” he says.

  Without self-consciousness I lift it onto the table.

  “Does that mean you can’t run or lift heavy things or anything like that?” Touched asks with a bit of concern.

  “Nope,” I say, and then ignoring Touched, “So, Sonia, have you been over to Ireland ever?”

  “I have yet to visit, but I am passionately engaged in the struggle for you to free your homeland from the imperialists.”

  Oh boy, here it comes, I say to myself with some prescience.

  “Yes, Sean. It is a tragedy. The tragedy of the green. Since Elizabeth the Bloody sent the English into your country, it has been four hundred years of oppression and terror.”

  Gerry cannot let his wife fall into doctrinal error and he takes up the conversation:

  “Sean, as you probably know, the English came over with Strongbow, so it’s eight hundred years of oppression.”

  And now Touched, seeing this an opportunity to propagandize, throws in his two cents:

  “Eight hundred years, Sean. That’s why we have to fight the stubborn English-loving Protestants of Ulster who still won’t permit their Catholic brothers in the Six Counties to join with their fellow Irishmen in the South. We have repeatedly told them we would make them welcome and we even put the Orange Order’s color on our own national flag. But they’re different from us, Sean. They have no real culture or sense of pride. They’ve had their chance to be convinced by reason, but neither they nor their masters in London will listen to reason. That’s why it’s the time for force, Sean. The time for force.”

  My smile fixes and I nod but actually I couldn’t care less if Northern Ireland was part of the Republic of Ireland or Britain or the People’s Republic of fucking China. I hadn’t lived there for six years and every year that passed I found it harder and harder to give a shit. And Touched was wrong. I’ve met plenty of Protestants and Catholics and they’re so alike that the differences between them have become ridiculously exaggerated. Freud, I think, calls it the narcissism of the small difference. Ethnically, culturally, and even spiritually, they’re the same bloody people. Not that you could convince these eejits.

  I’ve zoned out for a minute and when I zone back in I find that they’re looking at me, waiting.

  “Sorry, what was that?” I ask.

  “Jesus, get some coffee in ya. Pay attention. I was just saying, Sean, that it’s like history was put on hold for fifty years. Sonia here doesn’t realize that in the 1970s a bunch of men arose in
the North with the vision of Michael Collins. Us. Me and Gerry, a new generation. Our generation. The IRA. We decided to use force against the might of the British Empire. Have to. Brits don’t understand anything else. People say, ‘What about India?’ Well, I say, ‘What about Palestine in ’47?’ Eh?” Touched says, triumphantly.

  “Didn’t the IRA kill Michael Collins?” I ask naively.

  Touched starts mumbling some lame reply while I take a good look at Sonia. Perhaps the smartest person in the room. Certainly if the bios were correct the only one of us who had been to university. How exactly had she ended up falling for this nonsense? How had she met Gerry in the first place?

  “How did you meet Gerry?” I ask her.

  She laughs.

  “We met at an Ireland-Quebec friendship dinner in Boston,” she says, a surprising and surprisingly boring answer.

  “I never heard of such a thing.”

  “It is part of the small-nations commerce initiative that the Boston Chamber of Commerce ran last year. I am in the Chamber of Commerce and my mother was from Quebec,” she says, except that she pronounces it Kaybeck.

  “Are there a lot of similarities between Quebec and Ireland?” I ask and steel myself for the floodgates to open, which of course they do.

  “Quebec, like Ireland, is oppressed by a tyrannous neighboring culture. Our voice has been drowned out. A free Quebec would be a bastion of socialism, liberty, and idealism in North America, just as a free socialist Ireland would be the ideal counterweight to imperialist England. This is something you don’t know, Touched, but the Quebec people . . .”

  I cease to listen. One of my attributes. In my book, Quebec’s only interesting because it’s a quirky, French, Catholic part of Canada. If Quebec were ever independent it would be a dreary, white, monoglot, Catholic country. Probably turn fascist in a decade. Still, it decides me. She’s not the smartest person in the room. Not her, not Touched, not Gerry, certainly not Seamus. Dangerous, yes, but they weren’t going to outthink me. Her lips stop moving, she has finished her lecture.