The Bloomsday Dead Read online

  “Please, please, please, don’t kill me, you’re not supposed to, you’re not supposed to, in the name of the Father and the Son and the . . .”

  And as I begged, I leaned forward, let my hand run down my trousers, and removed the tiny three-shot .22 pistol that I kept there for just such an emergency. My ace in the hole. In South America it was considered cowardly to strap a gun around your ankle. That was something a puta would do.

  Better a live puta than a dead hero.

  “You are going to die, Irish pig,” Shotgun said.

  “Yeah, you’re right, tough guy, but not today,” I said, tumbling from my kneeling posture into a forward roll that carried me over the hard-wood floor, while at the same time grabbing the gun from my ankle holster and shooting the chatty bastard in the neck. He fell forward, frothy, arterial blood spewing from a mortal wound.

  I scrambled to the side and Rique fired twice with the 9mm, hitting the piece of carpet where I’d been a tenth of a second ago. I dived behind the sofa and took two shots of my own, missing the dodgy bugger both times. Shit. That was the end of my little gun. Had to move fast now. I tossed the weapon and picked the boom box off the floor and threw it at him. It missed, exploded into the wall, spewing CDs, batteries, and sparks.

  Rique shot again, sending a bullet into the ceiling above my head. I hurled a vase and then a small glass coffee table.

  The door opened.

  Hector came in.

  “Thank God, over here, mate,” I said.

  Rique yelled at Hector: “He’s unarmed. Shoot him.”

  Hector pulled out his revolver.

  “You said I wouldn’t be involved,” Hector muttered.

  Rique turned to lecture him.

  “Do as you are told, and . . .” Rique began.

  I picked up my favorite leather armchair and ran at Rique. It was studded leather with a metal back, so it might afford some protection.

  I charged the bastard, hoping he wouldn’t have sense enough to shoot me in the legs.

  But Rique was flustered by all the things happening at once. He fired off the rest of his clip into the leather chair before I smashed into him, driving him backward into the tinted plate-glass window. My Irish was up and my momentum easily took out the thick safety glass.

  Chair and assassin smashed through the window and tumbled through the early-morning air onto the car park below. I was lucky I didn’t fall out after them. I scrambled to a dead stop, but I didn’t even pause to admire my luck or watch Rique smash to pieces on the hood of the Japanese ambassador’s limousine, which, rather inconveniently, had just pulled up outside. Instead I strode across the room and grabbed the gun out of Hector’s hand. He was dazed and bleeding from a cut on his fingertip he’d somehow managed to acquire when he’d taken his pistol out.

  I pistol-whipped him across the face and kicked his legs from under him. He collapsed to the floor.

  “Hector, Hector, Hector,” I said with disappointment.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry,” Hector said, his eyes filling with tears. I checked the revolver, saw that it was loaded, cleaned, ready.

  “Hector, you realize this is going to have to go on your résumé,” I told him.

  “Oh, please don’t hurt me, they said they would kill my family, they said—”

  I put the gun in his mouth and rattled it around his teeth.

  “Save it, mate, they already told me, you came to them, you sought them out. What was the finder’s fee?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I love you, boss, I don’t know what—”

  Clicking the hammer back is such a cliché in these situations, but in my experience it is a shortcut to the truth.

  I clicked the hammer back.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” he said.

  “Damn it, Hector, if you needed the money I would have loaned it to you.”

  “I wanted to earn it.”

  “There are better ways,” I muttered.

  “You would know,” Hector said petulantly, making a move for the knife he kept in his pocket. That wasn’t going to happen twice in the same hotel room. I kicked his arms apart, so that he was spread-eagled on the floor. I took the gun out of his mouth and placed it a couple of inches from his forehead.

  “You are one disloyal asshole,” I told him without much passion.

  He closed his sad brown eyes.

  “No more disloyal than you,” he said.

  “There’s a difference,” I explained. “I did it to save my skin, you did it for the goddamn money.”

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “I’m going to salvage your honor, my friend,” I said.

  Hector understood. He blinked away the tears, flinched.

  I pulled the trigger, blowing off the top part of his head, his blood and brains spraying over me.

  I placed Hector’s gun in the dead assassin’s hand, I put the three-shot .22 in Hector’s bloody paw.

  I poured myself a whisky, picked up the phone, and called down to the front desk.

  “Oh, my God, Hector saved my life, he’s dying, he’s dying, get help up here quick,” I said and hung up.

  It didn’t take long for me to see flashing lights racing along the seafront. They’d send the paramilitary police for this one and I’m sure Bridget would have a plan B as per usual. Time to skip.

  I stood, stretched, drank the whisky.

  And as the stench of a slaughterhouse rose and the cold sea air blew in through the smashed window and the blood of both bodies pooled into the imitation Persian rugs, I washed my hands in the bath-room sink, grabbed my shoulder bag, packed, and got ready to run again.

  2: SIREN (NEW YORK—JUNE 15, 4:00 P. M . )

  The inquiries of the Peruvian police would take days. I didn’t have days. My cover was blown. I was screwed if I stayed in this country. I ran them a story that the two characters from Colombia had come into my room with guns and started asking all sorts of questions about the Japanese ambassador, Hector arrived, pushed one out the window and shot the other while taking a mortal wound himself.

  The story would work if they wanted it to work. They had uncovered an assassination plot and a local boy was the hero.

  I told them I was registered under the United States Witness Protection Program and now I had to fly the coop on the first flight out. They weren’t down with that at all. But they also didn’t want to mess with the FBI.

  A signed statement, a videotaped statement, a fake contact address later, and I was all set to go.

  It was too late to get a reservation now, but I didn’t need to beg the airlines. I had a perfectly good ticket on the flight to New York. Bridget’s ticket. And from New York I could go anywhere in the world.

  It wasn’t exactly the safest thing to do, but it was convenient.

  The downside was obvious. Almost certainly she’d find out about the Lima fuckup and she’d quickly organize someone to meet my plane at JFK. They’d have my photo and maybe a threatening look or two but it wouldn’t matter a tuppeny shite because in New York I’d have the good old federales rendezvous with me and I’d disappear once again into the black hole of the WPP. Aye, and this time I’d go the full De Niro. Gain twenty pounds, dye my hair, move to bloody China.

  I checked in, boarded the plane, found my seat, relaxed. The movie they were playing was O Brother, Where Art Thou? which I’d already seen, so, there was nothing else for it but to tilt my chair back as far as it would go and try to get in an hour or two of kip. But even in first class that was practically impossible. You don’t come down from a gun battle just like that. I read Peruvian Golfer until it was chow time. A pretty stewardess gave me a dozen options and I picked the eggs and she brought me scrambled ones that tasted almost like eggs. We started chatting and one thing led to another and she gave me her phone number in the Bronx and if it had been Manhattan I might have kept it.

  We flew over Panama, the western edge of Cuba, the land of Johnny Reb, and touched down at J
FK a few minutes early. As soon as the wheels squealed I called up Dan Connolly in the FBI. He wasn’t at his desk, so I dialed his cell phone and left a message.

  “Dan, it’s Michael F., I’m in the shit again. I know it’s a chore but I’m going to need someone to meet me at International Arrivals of the British Airways terminal in JFK. I just touched down. I’ll wait as long as it takes. You can reach me on the cell.”

  I hung up, found my U.S. passport, went through immigration, and forgot totally about the coca leaves in my shoulder bag. I panicked that customs was going to pull me over, but it didn’t, and I walked into the arrivals hall. Waited.

  Tens of thousands of people. New York City just out through the doors. But there was no way I was leaving the airport without my escort from the feds.

  Bridget, if she was smart, would have a couple of guys on me right now. Not that they could do anything in here. She had wasted her chance again. And she nearly had me going there with that cock-and-bull story about the kid. For the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was impossible that Bridget could have an eleven-year-old child. I would have heard, somebody would have told me. I mean, for Christ’s sake, I’d seen her in court when I’d been accusing Darkey’s confederates. She wasn’t in the dock, but I’d spotted her in the public gallery in that black suit of hers, giving me the evil eye. No way she’d just given birth. And besides, Darkey didn’t want kids. He told me and Sunshine that he’d adopt a hardworking Asian boy when he was in his sixties. It was a joke, but I didn’t see Bridget defying him by not taking her birth-control pills.

  No way.

  I was hungry and bored. I sauntered over to Hudson News and bought the Times, Daily News, and Post, joined the line of carbohy-drate lovers at Au Bon Pain. I ordered a big coffee, cheese Danish, sat down, and enjoyed reading the press in English for a change.

  Did the Tuesday crossword and scoped the crowd to see if I could spy out Bridget’s men. But the place was far too hectic. Maybe she’d be on the ball, maybe not, it didn’t matter.

  Au Bon Pain was getting crowded and a German couple with a baby annexed the free seats at my table. I got up and looked for another hangout.

  At the end of the terminal sat one of those fake pubs which seemed as good a location as any for a long wait. I walked to the City Arms, ordered a Sam Adams. My cell phone rang when I’d drunk my beer and was thinking of popping for another.

  “Where are you now, Forsythe?” Dan asked.

  “No hello?”

  “Where are you?”

  “JFK.”

  “What are you doing there? You can be acquired at JFK,” Dan said.

  “Acquired? Acquired? You wanna watch it, mate. You’re beginning to sound like the FBI manual.”

  “Shanghaied, kidnapped, lifted, whatever you want. You were never supposed to come back to New York,” Dan insisted.

  I hadn’t been to the city in seven years, not since our days in the FBI field office in Queens.

  “I had a ticket, it was first class, seemed a shame not to use it. Besides, I had to get out of Lima. Bridget, God rest her big bum, sent two Colombian assassins to blow my brains out.”

  “I read about it on the wire. You handled it in your usual lowkey way, didn’t you? You know the story is on CNN.”

  “Is it? Well, it can’t be helped,” I said cheerfully.

  Dan muttered some inaudible obscenity that involved my mother.

  “Michael, like I say, we have talked about New York. You’re not supposed to come here, ever.”

  “As if they are going to acquire me in the middle of the most heavily policed airport in the Western Hemisphere. Get real. This isn’t Al Qaeda, these guys need an exit strategy after a hit. Wouldn’t get twenty feet in here.”

  “Well, I’m glad you seem ok about it. I’m not. Where exactly are you?”

  “I’m in the City Arms in the BA terminal.”

  “Can you hang tight for about half an hour? I’ll have a couple of guys come over there and meet you. I can’t get down there in person at the moment. But I’ll see you later today.”

  “Ok, do I know the guys?”

  “You don’t. Uhm, let me see, ok. They’ll ask you if you think the Jets have a chance next year, to which you’ll reply—”

  “I don’t want to talk about the Jets,” I interrupted. “Ask me a baseball question. I can do baseball.”

  “You don’t need to know the sport, Michael, you just have to say what I tell you to say.”

  “I don’t want to do a question about the goddamn New York Jets. I want to do a baseball question. I know baseball,” I protested.

  “Jesus. It doesn’t matter what the sport is.”

  “Of course it does, I’m not going to walk up to someone and say ‘So who do you like in the curling world championships? They say the ice is fast this year.’ Right bloody giveaway that would be.”

  Dan laughed and then sighed.

  “You know, Michael, sometimes I wish you weren’t so good at staying alive. Sometimes, I wish . . .”

  “Better leave that thought unsaid. Joe Namath, he plays for the Jets, right?”

  “Thirty years ago.”

  “Ok, forget him. They can ask me what I think about the dodgy Yankees pitching rotation. And I’ll say: ‘I don’t think it stacks up against the Sox,’ how about that?”

  “Fine, whatever you like. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Thanks, Dan.”

  “All right, hang tight. Sending some people to pull you out of yet another jam.”

  “You love me really, I can tell,” I said.

  I closed the phone, grinned. What Dan didn’t realize was that if you’ve been fighting for your life a few hours earlier you can afford to be a bit bloody glib.

  I got some lunch, a heretical Irish stew that contained peas and sweet corn.

  Went to the bog, washed my face, ordered a Bloody Mary, sat with my back to the wall, decided to check out the señoritas. New York was a paradise after four months in Lima. Not that the Peruvian girls weren’t attractive but there it was mere variations on a theme whereas here it was the choral symphony. Coeds, redheads, blondes, business-women, stewardesses, cops, women soldiers, and on the far side of the bar two skanks straight out of a Snoop Dogg video trying to tease a Hasidic man by kissing in front of him. The man, me, and about fifty-two hundred other people trying not to look. Blond hair, long legs, white stilettos, pretty faces. Russian. Touching each other on the ass and toying with each other’s hair. You didn’t get that in Lima either.

  “New York City,” I said with appreciation.

  Next to the Hasid a goofy-looking character seemed to spot me. He gave a half wave, walked over quickly, and plonked himself down in the seat directly in front of me. It panicked me for a second. Sort of thing I’d do. Have a couple of hookers do a big distraction and send the guy in while my dick was doing the thinking for me.

  He didn’t have a scary vibe at all, though, and I relaxed a little as I looked him up and down. He was wearing a grin a decibel or two quieter than his ensemble of Hawaiian shirt, shorts, purple sandals, fanny pack, and bicycle messenger bag. Twenty-five or twenty-six, blond hair, goatee. Reasonably good-looking. He wasn’t carrying a piece and he wasn’t interested in the hussies, which meant he was either a homosexual, or part of their team, or he really wanted to talk to me.

  “Hey, you’re in my view,” I said.

  “Mr. Forsythe?” he asked in a serious FBI way.

  “No.”

  “Mr. Forsythe, am I glad to see you. You look a little bit different from the photograph. A little bit older.”

  “Aye, well, you’re no picnic yourself. You ever hear the expression sartorially challenged?”

  His eyes glazed over.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “What am I talking about? What are you talking about? Aren’t you supposed to ask me about the Yankees? Don’t they teach you anything?”

  Before he could answer, a cold f
eeling went down my spine. This wasn’t Dan’s man. I pushed my chair back from the table and looked him in the eyes.

  “You’re not with the feds,” I said.

  “No, no, not at all,” he said with a little laugh. “What gave you that idea?”

  “Who are you? Are you Bridget’s?”

  “Yes. I work for Ms. Callaghan. I was told to meet you off your flight. I was instructed to ask you if you are going to continue on to Dublin.”

  “You must be joking. Continue on to Dublin? So Bridget can torture me, with, what was it, arc-welding gear? You must be out of your mind. Nah, I’m just going to sit tight here, wait till my good buddies in the FBI show up, go off with them. Easy. And if you want to try anything here and now with a couple of hundred witnesses around, dozens of plainclothes cops, you go ahead. See how far you bloody get.”

  “No. You don’t understand. I am not muscle, Mr. Forsythe, I am an attorney, I work for Ms. Callaghan. Please excuse the way I look, I was on my way to Puerto Rico, actually. But I was told to wait here to talk to you.”

  “You’re an attorney? Pull the other one, pal, it has bells on. Keep away from me,” I said.

  “I am an attorney, Mr. Forsythe, and I do work for Ms. Callaghan. I have a message to convey to you,” he said.

  Still keeping my distance from him and watching his hands, I set down my coffee cup and snapped my fingers.

  “Let me see some goddamn ID,” I demanded.

  “Certainly.”

  He reached in the pocket of his shorts and removed a wallet. He showed me a bar association card, a Columbia law library card, a driver’s license, and a membership in the Princeton Club.

  “Ok, sonny, first of all, what exactly did they tell you about me and how did you know what flight I was on?” I demanded.

  “They told me that since I was going to JFK, could I meet flight 223 from Lima, Peru, and find a Michael Forsythe. They faxed me your picture. Unfortunately, I had to go the bathroom briefly, and typically that was the moment that you, well . . . of course that was the precise moment when you came through. I had a sign made with your name on it, do you want to see the sign?”