Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

“Back to the hole-in-the-wall pub with the alternative IRA chappies?” Max asked, after Gandolph had thoughtfully shut his cell phone.

Max was reclining against one of the made-up beds’ headboard, his stockinged feet and legs stretched out on the goose-down coverlet.

They were digesting an informal but fine dinner they’d had at a restored restaurant on the square: pepper steak with béarnaise sauce for Max, and pan-fried monkfish with curry-mango sauce for Garry. The after-dinner coffee had been dark and rich, and the Bailey’s Irish Cream liqueur that accompanied it absolute heaven: Irish whiskey and cream that would draw any cat in the world away from looking at a queen.

“Back to the alternative IRA,” Gandolph confirmed, “if you can move your lazy after-dinner Irish-American frame.”

“Barely,” Max admitted. “You know, that’s one ‘memory’ that came to me after the coma: after-dinner coffee with you when I was young and green and listened to everything you said as gospel.”

“Good. The way to a man’s memory is through his stomach, then.” Garry stood, slapping one of Max’s feet. “Come on; Liam sounded excited. I think the scent of money has recharged his desire to deal. We can take the Mondeo.”

“And drive down that rat hole of unrestored slum streets?” Max asked, rising.

Gandolph fetched their black trench coats, bought on the square, from the narrow hotel wardrobe. The night often misted. “Yes. My GPS has the coordinates, and I checked the computer maps for routes. That’ll spare your legs, at least.”

“Modern spy ware,” Max mocked. “I’ve been retired too long.”

“Not long enough,” Gandolph said. “We’re in this only to name and disarm your would-be murderers. I don’t want you back in the counterterrorism game. It’s totally new, more brutal, and not happening in our bailiwick anymore. One last round to ensure your future safety, and then we’re retired for good.”

Max nodded. “Agreed. Four votes from me and my damaged legs and brain.”

“Recuperating, Max. Not damaged.”

“No,” Max said, struggling to stand while shrugging into the hokey trench coat. “Not damaged as Kathleen O’Connor was, glory be. Lead on, Macduff.”

Gandolph laughed. “We’ve got something from these guys or they wouldn’t have called! We can tell them some Las Vegas legend in repayment. Maybe give them the location of Ted Binion’s now-empty vault.”

Max laughed. “You’re bad, Garry. I wager these Old World types never heard of that. A hidden, secret underground vault in Las Vegas. It sounds like Nancy Drew.”

“Then Temple Barr would be in on it,” Garry quipped back.

Temple Bar or Temple Barr? Max produced a crooked grin. At least that name was securely etched on his memory now. Too bad the woman wasn’t.

Gandolph was now a geographical magician, Max admitted to himself.

The Mondeo was parked down a narrow street, where its black body color vanished into the ill-lit night. Yet they were only a two-alley walk on rough stones from the bar. Max had his fists in his coat pockets and his head down against the coat’s turned-up collar. He might look like a skulker, but it was bone-chilling weather, not that cold to a Midwestern-boy but cutting deep with the dampness.

“I never thought I’d welcome the sight of this place,” Max said, holding the unwelcoming thick wood door open for his senior partner.

“If this is useful, with what we know from the Magdalen asylum, we can head home to sunshine and slot machines.”

“Was I ever a gambling man, Garry?”

“Only with your life, Max. Only with your life. Which is starting anew now, believe me.”

Max nodded, caught up in his old friend’s sense of achievement. A life all came down to a D. H. Lawrence title, didn’t it? Friends and Lovers.

Max was so mellow he was able to look on the dour set of disenfranchised revolutionaries with a historical distance. Their battles and time and temper were over. Here, at least, it was a new and more peaceful world.

This time Max and Garry bellied up to the bar and brought their pints to the table, not as prisoners, but peers.

Brusque nods around the scarred table were a somewhat sheepish welcome.

“You’re walking better,” Liam observed.

Max didn’t mention he’d walked less far to get here.

“What have you got?” Garry asked. “Something ‘fresh,’ you said.”

“Oh, fresh, all right,” Liam answered, lifting his glass. “Fresh as County Antrim cream.”

Max and Garry exchanged glances as they sat. That sounded good.

“First,” the leader said, “we want something for the pot from you.”

Gandolph nodded. “You may have heard Las Vegas was founded by American mobsters.”

“Aye. Not the Irish mob. The Italians and the Jews.”

“The Irish aren’t much for the desert,” Max put in.

“Unless we’re pounding railroad tracks through it.”

“That would be the Chinese out West,” Max said with a smile. “The Irish stuck to the mines and the East Coast.”

“ ‘Suckin’ up the coal dust into our lungs,’ ” Mulroney said, quoting an old work song.