The Dead Yard Read online

  “Try Disney World next time.”

  “You wouldn’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like to be in my shoes with a bloody contract on your head,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes.

  “As to that—” Dan began, but before he could continue Samantha popped her head round the door.

  “Is everything going all right?” she asked. “We really have to get back to business, Michael, time is of the essence.”

  “Everything’s not going all right, actually, Samantha. Dan is refusing to help me get out of this bloody Faustian bargain.”

  Dan looked at me cross-eyed, knowing that he should have gotten the reference but he just wasn’t quite smart enough to remember it. Dan would be the guy on Jeopardy who wouldn’t get to play the final game because he had a negative score. Samantha, though, considered it an insult, for if I were Faust she was Satan. She stepped completely into the room.

  She was wearing a fetching yellow sundress that was see-through from certain angles.

  “We have a deal. Don’t make me cross this early in the day,” Samantha said.

  “Why don’t you come over here and tell me that,” I said with mock aggression that she took to be real. Samantha was not one to be bullied. She thought stabbing me in the foot had already established that but clearly she had to do more. She walked right up to me and stared. All five foot six of her glaring at me. I moved back a little and sat on the edge of the table. The angle was now perfect and I could see the outline of her breasts. I don’t know if it was an English thing or the humidity but whatever the explanation Samantha sometimes did not wear a bra. Her breasts were pale, very large, and inviting. And there was no getting around the fact that she was an attractive woman. A beautiful face, seductive, heavy-lidded eyes, a cleavage that would have fitted snugly in the court of Louis Quatorze. Even Dan was impressed and had to look away, a big grin spilling over the edges of his face.

  “You are not getting out of this, Michael. The FBI and the United States government are fully on board. The only way you’ll get out of it is if I say that your services are no longer required,” Samantha said, those eyes flashing imperiously, the voice that of Thatcher about to invade the Falklands.

  “Or I get killed,” I muttered.

  “Quite,” she said, indifferently, and the coldness in her face repelled and aroused me in confusing ways.

  “Well, comforting as always. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to talk to Dan alone, please,” I demanded, flitting between an urge to either throw the scalding coffee at her and push her out the window or squeeze her bum.

  Samantha said nothing, nodded to Dan, and exited the room, closing the door gently behind her.

  “I like her,” Dan said. “They say she sleeps with her agents.

  Jeremy told me something about a Stasi colonel.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Apparently. Word of advice. Don’t do it. It’s not good for anybody. Get emotionally involved and all that.”

  “Aye, that would be terrible, if she got overly concerned about me getting topped.”

  “You’re not going to get killed.”

  I stood up, walked around the room, and gazed through the window at the godforsaken flatlands of Queens Boulevard.

  Manhattan was a distant dream. Out of the question with all the goons and ex-goons that I knew. I sipped some more of the rancid coffee and sat down again.

  “Please, Dan, as a friend,” I said as a jet on its way to La Guardia shook the building. Dan groaned and closed his eyes.

  “Michael, all this is bigger than you or me. If those idiots up in Massachusetts manage to blow up a British consulate or kill an ambassador or something it will jeopardize the entire peace process in Northern Ireland. With things screwing up in the Middle East, with the president stuck with an angry Congress, rumors about his sexual activities, basically, apart from the economy, the Northern Ireland thing is the only card Clinton has left to secure his legacy in history. There’s no way I can pull you out of a well-thought and well-planned operation run by the Brits and the bureau to get at least an insight into this group’s activities. There’s nothing I can do to extricate you from this. My job is to make sure Duffy doesn’t kill you, that’s all.”

  “Listen, Dan, me old mate, if you let me go back to Chicago, I won’t get in any trouble again, I promise. I’ll live a quiet life within my means.”

  Dan blinked with a tired melancholy, shifted his weight, and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  “Sorry.”

  “Duffy will find out and he’ll kill me and your career will be over,” I tried, on a different tack. And I had a flash of that evil old man on his huge Port Jefferson estate casually ordering a couple of driller killers from West Belfast to keep working me over while he sipped Bushmills whiskey and watched his new Lord of the Dance tape.

  “You don’t need to worry about Duffy. Duffy is on his way out. He’s seventy years old. You think he thinks about you ever? You don’t have to worry about him. That contract has long since lapsed. You practically did him a favor getting rid of a power-grabbing maniac like Darkey White.”

  This was news to me.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Duffy was never serious about going after you. He had to do a big show, issue the contract. It’s irrelevant now in any case. Duffy doesn’t even have close to a million in ready money anymore. We’ve been closing down his operations one by one. Not just him. They’re all on the way out. The Italians, the Irish, the Russians. The bureau has broken them all. They have a lot more on their minds than old scores.”

  “Dan, do you really believe this or are you telling me what I want to hear?” I asked.

  He looked at me and I saw that he wasn’t lying, or if he was it was a new skill.

  “It’s the truth, Michael. Darkey White is old news. You destroyed his crew completely. You weakened Duffy and now he’s down and soon he’ll be out. There is a contract on your head but Duffy won’t pay it and no one else cares enough to collect it. You can go to northern Massachusetts and you can fly with these fanatics and they won’t know you from Adam. I guarantee it. Even if it was South Boston, I’d say go. Five years is a long time, my friend. And you are my friend, Michael, and I do look out for you, don’t think I don’t.”

  He inched closer to me, threw his empty cup in the bin.

  “Look, Michael, I’ll keep my eye on this English bitch, this whole op. If it don’t look kosher, I’ll send in the Seventh Cav.”

  “How will you keep an eye on it?”

  “We got a good guy as liaison. Harrington. I know him from back in Virginia. If he doesn’t like it, or one aspect of it, I’ll make sure you’re pulled out. I’ll go against the AG and the whole State Department to pull you, Mike. I promise.”

  I smiled.

  He’d made me feel better. Just to know that there was someone, anyone, on my team helped a great deal. He passed me a box of cigarettes but I declined. He lit one himself.

  “Anyway, I have news about your old friend Scotchy Finn,” Dan said, smoking his cigarette.

  A dead hand grabbed my heart.

  “Scotchy Finn?” I asked incredulously.

  Scotchy and I had broken out of that Mexican jail five years ago, except that I had made it and he hadn’t. He’d sacrificed his life for mine, dying there on the razor-wire fence that went around the prison. I still had nightmares about it. Scotchy falling through the razors, urging me to go on, screaming . . .

  Dan slapped his forehead.

  “What am I talking about? Scotchy Finn, no, no, no, he was an old pal of yours, right? I must have read that name in the report. Er, no, Sandy Finney, that’s who I meant. Sandy Finney.”

  I looked at Dan suspiciously.

  “I don’t know any Sandy Finney.”

  “Sure you do, you called him Shovel.”

  “Oh aye, I remember him,” I said. I had kneecapped Shovel and banged his old lady while he was in the hospital.
r />   One of my more charming moments as a gangster.

  “What about him?”

  “He was murdered last week.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” I said.

  “More than just a murder, Michael. Much more than that. Ever since Darkey’s death there’s been a power vacuum in the west Bronx. The Dominicans, the Irish, the Russians. It’s been crazy. Shovel had risen to the top of the new Mick crew. But now he’s dead. An internal feud. A whack. It’s hard to tell for sure but we think the new underboss for the Bronx is someone who you will definitely remember,” Dan said and licked his lips.

  “Oh, the suspense,” I said sarcastically.

  “I won’t tell you then,” Dan muttered, his eyes wide with delight.

  “Tell me.”

  He blew out a line of smoke.

  “Bridget Callaghan.”

  “Darkey’s Bridget, my Bridget?” I asked, amazed and excited.

  “Yeah, Bridget. She’s only a small-time player but she’s going places. Protecting herself, protecting her family, by rising up.”

  “She’s married?”

  “Nah. Doesn’t need to be. Not just a man’s game anymore. She’s the business. If I was the worrying kind, Michael, she’s the one I’d be worried about. Not now. She ain’t got it now, but in a couple of years.”

  Bridget, a player? Sweet, adorable Bridget, my ex-girl, Darkey’s ex-girl, who had shot me in the stomach, would have shot me in the head, and now was looking to take over her late fiancé’s operations. I wouldn’t put it past her. I wouldn’t put anything past her. She was a rare bird.

  “Tell me everything,” I said.

  Dan and I talked some more and I blew off my schedule for the rest of the day and he took me out to a bowling alley round the corner where I let off some steam and had a few drinks. Dan and I were to bowling what Laurel and Hardy were to competent piano delivery but we drank a lot and we nearly got into a ruck with a Polish short-order cook over the tactics of the Polish football team. The cook denigrating Ireland’s approach as unglamorous and cowardly and praising Poland’s much freer passing game. The dispute had then degenerated into a slagging match over the two countries’ landscapes, women, and finally, Second World War record. The Pole threw a punch, missed, and Dan hustled me out of there before the altercation progressed to international incident.

  Instead we bought cheap vodka at a liquor store and drank it in the safehouse. And I felt better. I knew Dan and I trusted him. And if he said it was going to be ok, I wanted to and I did believe him, at least while the vodka lasted and that early August daylight kept away. . . .

  Training days.

  Jeremy made me watch dreary British civil service–produced videos from the early 1980s on how to do a drop safely, how to contact your control, emergency techniques, the Official Secrets Act, my rights under the Geneva Convention and the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

  Then I got briefings on Gerry McCaghan, Touched McGuigan, and the other players in the Sons of Cuchulainn. Following the hit, Samantha said that two of them had already defected back to the IRA. In other words, left Gerry and run like the blazes. Samantha reckoned that the SOC were down to a rump of perhaps seven or eight, maybe not the biggest terrorist organization in the world, but Timothy McVeigh had already shown what a dedicated team of just three could do.

  Back in the OC, Touched and Gerry had killed at least a score of people between them and of course those were only the ones we knew about.

  After the morning briefings, Samantha took me to the big loft room and questioned me on every detail of my new identity. My name was Sean McKenna. A good name, because it could be Catholic as well as Protestant and there are thousands of the buggers. Sean McKenna, though, was a Catholic. Like me, he grew up in Belfast. He went to Belfast High School (a file had been created and placed in the school’s database), he worked construction in London with the MacLaverty Brothers (two unimpeachable MI5 contacts), he lived in Spain for a year and worked bar. In Spain he made some money and traveled the world for a couple of years. A nice clean bio that kept me away from any connection with the British government, the police, or the centers of the establishment. Also, it was vague enough (Spain, traveling the world) not to tie me down to anyone that the lads in the Sons of Cuchulainn might know.

  As for the radical element, an arrest record had already been created for me—vandalism, petty theft, jail time in Manchester— and the big story was that when I was sixteen I had the shit beaten out of me and got charged with rioting by the Northern Ireland cops for throwing a petrol bomb at a police Land Rover. Again they put all this on file and backdated the records. If, as Samantha suspected, Gerry had a contact in the Boston PD, they could look me up in Interpol and there would be my rap sheet.

  Sean’s parents were conveniently dead and he was an only child, but so that he wasn’t lonely he had a host of cousins in County Cork. Just like every other Mick in the world.

  Samantha was thorough. Questioning me again and again, asking about every month of every year of my fictional life. She got me tired, tried to catch me out, called me Brian, Michael, interrogated me, woke me at night to question me, sleep-deprived me. Every trick in the goddamn book. It was a new game for me. You’d think the army training would all have come back with a vengeance but it didn’t help for shit. In the army you learn the application of deadly force, how to wait between bouts of deadly force, and how to clean boots. They don’t teach you this kind of thing, unless you’re in the Special Air or combat intelligence and I certainly was never a good enough soldier to be asked to try out for those boys. And that special ops course on my résumé that Samantha thought so highly of had really been an SAS staff sergeant and a dozen of us getting drunk and trying not to fall off the windy cliffs of Saint Helena. But I remembered the discipline, and learning a new identity was easy for me. I’d played many roles in my quarter century on planet Earth. This was just another one.

  I had to trust Samantha, though, because her role was crucial.

  She was my control, my contact on the ground.

  They were going to put her into a British food and merchandise store in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The owner was a man called Pitt, an old Foreign Office hand, who had been contacted and asked if he wouldn’t mind taking a vacation for a couple of months. Pitt’s supposed cousin Samantha was going to run the store while he was away. She’d been up there once already to meet the man and learn the workings of his shop. He was happy to be doing something hush-hush for Her Majesty; and after all, MI6 was compensating him well for his cooperation.

  Any time I wanted to talk to her all I had to do was walk right into the store. Easy.

  I was to be based in the town of Salisbury Beach, about five miles away from Newburyport, but they hoped that would only be temporary until I made contact with Kit again. I was going to be sharing a flat with a Six agent called Simon Preston that Jeremy had recommended for the job.

  With me, Samantha played it both ways. Keeping me sweet, keeping me off balance. I don’t know if it was a tactic or just her approximation of a happy medium.

  Trying to calm me: “You’ve done well, Michael. Jolly well. As good as I’ve seen. I’ve run twenty-year veterans behind the Iron Curtain that don’t have it down as good as you.”

  Trying to scare me: “Oh yes, Michael, you’re going to have to be careful. McCaghan will be like a wounded bear now following the assassination attempt. We don’t know what he’s capable of. He’s already killed scores in Northern Ireland. He’s ruthless. Cold-blooded. He could do anything. . . .”

  But this talk was unnecessary. I already knew the stakes and I was already scared enough.

  * * *

  A Friday night. A going-away party that had the uncomfortable feeling of a wake. A long evening of drinking with Dan and Sam. Dan drunk in two hours, Samantha sober enough to order me to bed.

  The next morning she woke me before dawn and said that we were ready for the drive up to Massachusetts. S
he looked terrible, and I got the impression that she had stayed up drinking all night after I’d gone to bed.

  It made me nervous.

  “Rough night?” I asked. She grunted a response.

  I went outside and bummed a cig while everyone got their keek together.

  I smoked the fag and looked at the predawn activity in the borough of Queens. No one was watching me. I could run now.

  Bolt into the street, hit the subway, and they’d never bloody find me.

  I shook my head. Pure fantasy. I wouldn’t run. I needed their help, I needed their protection, even if it meant risking my own life to get it.

  Jeremy pulled up outside the safehouse in an old Jaguar Mark 2 from the 1960s. Burgundy or plum with sparkling chrome. I don’t know where Samantha got it from but you wouldn’t call it discreet. And that also disturbed me. The thing you had to remember when dealing with these people was that the Britain of the Empire was long gone. The Brits may have conquered India and won two world wars but they also had a complacency and an incompetence that had gotten many people killed. Jeremy and Samantha were the descendants of the people who had been responsible for the disasters of the Somme and Gallipoli in World War One. The people who had tried to walk to the South Pole instead of taking dogs, who had built the unsinkable Titanic, who had lost America, surrendered at Singapore, starved Ireland, appeased Hitler. And now that I thought about it, wasn’t it MI6 that had been so thoroughly and completely penetrated by the Russians that the KGB were practically running British Intelligence for a time in the 1950s?

  And the FBI wasn’t that much better. What the hell was I doing with these people?

  “Ready for the show?” Jeremy asked, getting out of the car with a stupid grin.

  I ignored him and let the gloom take over again.

  Go for it, Michael. Punch Jeremy and run. Live on the lam. By your wits. Like the old days. Except that in the old days I didn’t have a contract over my head and an arrest warrant waiting for me in the Republic of Mexico.

  “Take a puff?” Jeremy asked.