Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

“Hmm. The fabled Irish landscape is awakening your memories.” Garry Randolph leaned forward from his window seat behind Max. “I’m afraid poor old Ireland is the technological Celtic Pussycat since the recession. And, my boy, don’t go all dismal and depressive. Can’t you see that blur of green meeting the pale blue and pink horizon is nothing so rank and modern as smog, but the legendary Irish mist?”

“ ‘Irish mist,’ ” Max mocked. “You’re resorting to a stage brogue too? I can see why. Green fields and hedges … silver ponds and rivers. The landscape below us is incredibly beautiful, an emerald harp strung with silver strings.”

“I knew the Auld Sod would bring out the poet in you, Max.”

Max snorted in reply. “Bring out the memoryless lunatic, more likely,” he added after a moment.

Both men had to raise their voices over the drone of the Cessna’s nearby engines, while the cottages and farmhouses—white with dark thatched roofs, like a patch of mushrooms—grew large.

No one could overhear them. The pilot was muttering little nothings about landing to the Dublin Airport control tower, where a man answered in the universal English of pilots, but with an Irish accent.

Max leaned nearer the tiny curtained window to view a lit Christmas tree–shaped grid of landing lights on the ground, pointing arrowlike to the runway. As the plane flew lower, the lights winked red and then green. Intimations of Christmas, Max thought, in an ancient druidic land seen through the mist… .

The pastel dawn seemed a distant dream he and Garry were rushing headlong into. Maybe it was a metaphor for his lost memory, a pale purple haze of terror and delight awaiting him in this beautiful, so-long-troubled landscape.

In moments, runway lights were blinking past the Cessna’s miniature window. A smooth landing led to a smoother taxi to a small hangar.

Max sensed that his six-foot-four frame always hungered to unkink from the plane seat and deplane. Here he had to duck considerably to exit, and navigate his injury-stiff legs down a steep, narrow, drop-down stairway.

He groaned at the bottom, waiting for his older, stouter friend.

“Tell me you didn’t hire a Morris Mini,” Max pleaded, wincing for his recently healed broken legs.

Garry slapped him on the arm. “Am I a secret sadist? Your lovely blonde shrink at the Swiss clinic is, perhaps. Gandolph the Great—never!”

“You were a magician,” Max repeated. “They are basically tricksters. And someone presumed dead longer than I have been,” he reminded him.

“We were magicians. Are still. Aaah.” Garry inhaled the crisp morning air. “How do you feel about a Ford Mondeo?”

“A Ford Mon Dieu? I’ve never heard of it. So much forgotten.”

“Getting frisky and funny and slightly profane now that you’re on native soil, are we? My good lord, Max, you’re back. A Mondeo is the across-the-pond version of the Ford Contour or the Mercury Mystique; the latter name I think better befits our mission. And you as well.”

Max spotted the shiny black sedan and nodded glumly. “Serviceable and dull family four-door. Just what old undercover, presumed-dead magicians like us need. Plenty of game-leg room up front, I see.”

“Ah, that’s the old Max, yearning to go fast and furious. This is a journey into the past. Yours and Ireland’s—and Northern Ireland’s itself.”

“And you naturally thought such a sentimental journey required a car of a funereal color?”

Max was surprised to see the upbeat old man’s face grow sober.

“Max, you’ve just weathered a terrible physical ordeal, one that might have killed another man. And it’s an immense psychological trauma to wake up an amnesiac. Yet a worse psychological trial awaits you. Take it one step at a time. You can’t make a rabbit jump out of a top hat unless you first figure out how it got in.”

“Did I really do that?”

“What?”

“That corny rabbit trick?”

“No, my lad. You used doves. A cornucopia of doves.”

Obviously Garry thrived on being mysterious.

Max sighed. “You keep hinting that this land is my land, but I’m obviously as American as hell.” Max frowned. “Despite having a knack for vaudeville Irish accents. What kind of an Irish name is Max, anyway? It might be of German derivation, like the non-French part of the lovely Revienne Schneider.”

Garry pursed his lips. “German? No. Never. You’re American Irish through and through. We keep this secret also: how you became ‘Max.’ Your given birth names were Michael Aloysius Xavier.”

“Quite a triad of antique saints and one major archangel. That’s why you registered me as ‘Michael Randolph’ at the Swiss clinic! You thought I’d unconsciously respond more naturally to the name Michael. How long have I been ‘Max’ ?”

“Since you were seventeen.”

“And how did that come about?”

“I rechristened you to save your life.”

“What the hell? Why does a seventeen-year-old need his life saved?”

“Because you were a hell of a seventeen-year-old and you got three men killed. They deserved it, and you did it.”