Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

Max shook his head. “Sean and I came wandering north into Protestant Ulster during the thick of the ‘Troubles,’ didn’t we? American-Catholic lambs to the slaughterhouse. That was stupid.”

“Yes, it was. That’s the first thing you admitted, after the pub bombing.”

“You’re not going to fill in the blanks for me, are you?” Max asked.

“No, Max,” Gandolph assured him. “Your memory will either kick-start itself here in this traumatic place, or it won’t. Best to know as soon as possible which is the case. The city has changed, and you need to.”

“How has it changed, other than being a tourist and travel hot spot?”

“Oh, can’t you sense the raw energy of a bad place turning better? The locals boast that tourists want to come here. Peace and prosperity are their Horsemen of the Post-Apocalypse. What’s more, they’ve made a point of saying that a visit to Belfast will reveal far more about the British and Irish psyche than visiting Dublin or London will. We’re staying in the gentrified city centre, in a decent hotel chain.

“Even better for our purposes, the peace has made access to information on past skirmishes and fighters on both sides of the conflict easier. The government offices we need to visit are nearby, and so are the … unofficial sources I’ve contacted. My recent quest to investigate Kathleen O’Connor and her involvement in the ‘Troubles’ back then and her whereabouts now has attracted serious interest.”

“Dangerous interest?”

“We won’t know until we go through the motions, right?”

Max finished his coffee, stood, and stretched without comment. “A middling hotel, huh? These beds are going to be murder on my legs and mobility.”

“If that’s the only variety of murder we encounter here, I’ll be happy.”

The morning was late enough that Gandolph rushed them off to an appointment he’d managed before leaving Zurich. Belfast’s city centre was obviously a work in progress, Max noted. Grand piles of Victorian architecture jostled glitzy new development. A border of frayed older structures betrayed the ongoing “urban renewal” process of a downtown business district anywhere in the U.S.

They were headed to a Victorian pile. No elevators to mar the vintage grandeur. Max had to suffer managing a long, stone, internal staircase worn swaybacked in the middle, and a long, echoing hall before arriving at an office higher than it was wide or broad. For all the exterior stateliness, this grandly high-ceilinged room broadcast an air of desertion, except for the two London Fog–coated middle-aged men awaiting them across a hard-used wooden table.

A dark, noisy, smoky pub would have been a far better setting for this meeting of obvious law-enforcement types, whether they were still undercover operatives or not. The guidebooks said the pubs weren’t uneasy ground in Ulster now. No one wanted to remind the tourists that now packed them of frequent pub bombings in the pre-peace days.

Inside the huge building, the temperature seemed lower than the brisk, fifty-degree air outside. Max’s legs and hips ached as if they’d been encased in ice water for hours. Maybe he’d grown too used to Las Vegas heat. He’d bet that little redhead would have warmed him up; “cute” didn’t rule out hot.

The two waiting men unconsciously rubbed their bare hands together for warmth, then exacted army-green file folders from their cheap, scuffed briefcases. Gandolph had brought a well-used black case of his own.

Max decided to cast the men opposite as familiar actors to tell them apart: an innocently nondescript Kevin Spacey and a young Brian Aherne, burly and buzz-cut.

“This is the O’Toole’s Pub survivor, Mr. Randolph?” the Kevin clone asked, nodding at Max without greeting him, as if he were still a minor who didn’t require being consulted. Insulted, yes.

“Not a survivor,” Max corrected. “I was nowhere near when the bomb exploded. I’m a surviving relative of a victim.”

“A fine point,” Brian noted. “Are you always so scrupulously accurate, Mr. Kinsella?”

There was no point denying who he was here. For all he knew, he “owned” one of those inch-thick file folders of hidden history.

“You’d have to ask Mr. Randolph,” Max said. “My condition—”

“—is damn unfortunate,” Brian erupted. “Not much exchange of anything here. We hold all the ‘cards’ ”—he gestured to their files—“and you lot want all the old information.”

Gandolph had somehow pulled out his own file folder. Everyone noticed it at the same time, as if it had blossomed on the creased and nicked oak. The retired magician’s sleight of hand had sufficed to startle the two world-weary agents. That was a fine edge of advantage.

“We discovered,” Gandolph said, “where Kathleen O’Connor came from, which may explain a lot about her.”

“Kitty,” Max said, before he knew it was coming out. “Kitty the Cutter, we called her in Vegas.”

The Northern Irishmen couldn’t hide their eyebrow-raising surprise at that declaration.