Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

“That’s just what we don’t have,” Kevin said. “Where she came from and where she went. The mayhem she wreaked in between, yes. We’re bloody experts on that.”

“She’s dead,” Max said harshly.

“You have proof?”

Max licked his lips and glanced inquisitively at Gandolph. “I don’t even know why I said what she was called just now.”

“Who was the ‘we’ who called her Kitty the Cutter?”

“I don’t remember.” Max refused to involve another innocent bystander like the Vegas redhead.

“What was the reason?”

“Ditto,” Max said. “I’m like that nowadays. Sorry, gentlemen. I know it’s a bore. It bores the hell out of me too.”

Another silence. This one lasted.

“Lad,” Brian, the older man, said softly, “everyone who ever saw Kathleen never forgot her. Everyone mentioned what a beauty she was. Elizabeth Taylor with ultramarine eyes instead of violet. I don’t think even amnesia is an excuse for forgetting that.”

Beautiful?” Max was apparently the one man who forgot all but an anonymous wedge of the temptress’s face, but he guessed she’d used colored contact lenses to produce those unearthly deep blue-green eyes no one forgot. “She killed my cousin and two fistfuls of innocents along with him.”

Eyebrows lifted again.

“How much did you fill him in?” Kevin asked Gandolph.

“Not that much. You need to understand he was almost killed in Las Vegas less than two months ago and escaped another attempt on his life in the Alps just this last week. He got himself to Zurich with two barely healed broken legs and what wits he has, memory or no memory.”

“I remember the common things of our lives and times,” Max said. “Just not my own damn history before I awoke from a coma a couple weeks ago.”

“So you think O’Connor’s dead?” Brian prodded. “We’d have to see for ourselves to believe that. She’s had more lives than a witch’s cat. She seems to thrive on trouble, other people’s, and exploiting it.”

Max buried his face in one eye-shading hand. They’d take it for stress. He was really trying to block out this torn photograph that had appeared in his dreaming mind’s eye: a pale white cheek on the dark ground, the just-recalled eerie green wink of a nearby cat’s reflective eye, a whole lot of disbelief on his part, and … guilt? Regret? Savage satisfaction? The exact emotions were as fugitive as his memory.

“We now know why this woman was so lethal,” Gandolph said. “I made these notes from our visit to a former Magdalen asylum on our journey from Dublin.”

He handed over a printed copy. Max thought he must have used the hotel’s business travelers’ setup. Dangerous, even printed direct from his laptop.

“Magdalen asylum? Sweet Jesus!” swore the younger man, Kevin. “She was kept in one of those places? No wonder.”

“She’d be young for that,” Brian mentioned, troubled, “even given her thirty-nine years or so.”

Max sat dazed for a moment, struck by the Irish lilt on the words thahr-ty nigh-en. It was hard not to imitate the tongue-misted accent that was like a lullaby for his troubled mind, maybe because he and Sean grew up in Catholic schools and churches where some of the older nuns and priests still kept a bit o’ the brogue.

“Forty?” he asked. “Kathleen would be forty now?”

“About that,” Kevin agreed.

“And she’s still wanted?”

“If she was involved in that pub bombing fiasco, yes.” Kevin consulted some pages. “Three loyal IRA men were named, and run down, thanks to an American kid named Michael Kinsella. ‘Cousin of one of the victims.’ You say you can’t remember being that young and fierce?”

Max shook his head violently to expel the image of a dead woman’s pale cheek. They took it for a simple no.

“You can’t remember,” Brian said, “but we’ve got many more files on her suspected activities. If anything here helps you recall anything we could use …” They passed him a couple of files while pulling Gandolph’s paper pile to their side of the table. It felt like the exchange of human hostages in paper-doll form.

Max flashed Gandolph a glance. They didn’t know about his Mystifying Max magician persona, then, or of his undercover counterterrorism work. If they still wanted information on Kathleen’s later activities, it might explain why someone still wanted to kill him.

Was it only about revenge for stalking and finding those IRA pub bombers all those years ago? Vengeance didn’t have a half-life, like nuclear waste did.

Max nodded agreement and pushed back his chair, liberating his legs from under the cramped table.

While Gandolph gave thanks, set up another appointment, and made farewell noises, Max tried to avoid hobbling to the door with the old-fashioned transom window above it. His body was dreading the long walk and then the worn, perilous stairs to descend, but his hopes were clutching at the files he’d turned to jam into Gandolph’s case. He’d need both hands free for the stairs, but at last his mind was liberated from day-to-day survival issues and could exercise its memory.