Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

A lone bartender studiously refused to look up as they entered. The bar had only one customer, a powerful-shouldered man wearing a peacoat over a sweater and the ubiquitous billed tweed cap, huddled in a corner. Above them, hanging tin kettles and bellows dripped from blackened oak beams. Crude oil portraits of long-dead Irish Republican heroes made a sober row of faces along the dark wood walls.

They were shoved against a smoke-blackened brick wall, hemmed in by two of the shadow-jawed thugs while the third went to whisper to the man behind the scantily equipped bar.

Max pulled out two rough wooden chairs for Garry and himself. By the time they sat, the usual pint glasses filled with dark amber liquid topped by a dispirited frill of foam circled their table, dispensed from the barman’s universal round brown plastic tray.

“Not your usual elegant tourist surroundings, eh?” the waiting headman commented more than asked.

Max and Gandolph sipped in tandem and cocked their heads to signal they were listening.

“Came along like lambs,” another man chuckled. “You hardly needed all three of us, Liam,” they chided their leader.

“Yes,” Gandolph said, “we’re quite harmless, although not tourists.”

“I thought this lame beanpole was the great boy-betrayer, Kinsella,” another muttered into his first chugalug of ale.

“Great?” Max inquired with indifference. “I’m a great ale-drinker, ’tis true.”

“And blarney man,” the leader replied. “The fool has introduced me, but Liam is all you’ll know of me.”

“And your taste in ales,” Max said, nodding at the red-gold brew in their glasses.

“Aye, and you’re used to drinkin’ yours out of a bottle or a can, like a modern-day traveler,” the second man said. “Tourists, Liam, that’s what we’ve netted.” And he spat on the floorboards.

Max finally drew the tall golden glass closer to him. “I like to know the name of a man who has ambitions to spit-polish my shoes.”

A glowering silence held as all four Irishmen tensed while they made up their minds to be insulted or not.

Liam led again. “Honest Irish spit and sweat is worth ten times an Englishman’s piss.”

“Then,” Max said, “I’d be grateful for names of my drinking companions.”

“Just last names; they’re all common enough around here,” Liam agreed gruffly, after taking a long, considering dip into his very dark ale. He nodded at his cohorts: “Finn, Mulroney, Flanagan. I’m Liam, first and last, as far as you two are concerned.”

“And I’m Blarney,” Gandolph said, startling everyone, including Max, by breaking his stone-faced-elder silence. “I was darting about Ulster under the dark of the moon before you lot were even out of grammar school. Those surnames could serve well on a music-hall act, but not a one of them was key in the real IRA I knew of old.”

Dark-jacketed shoulders shrugged, lifting their sinister hooded hummocks. Max must have forgotten that the Emerald Isle required outerwear even in the spring. No wonder his leg bones ached. He should have bought long johns in Zurich, not designer togs. He wasn’t about to consider the image of himself in long johns with Revienne. The reality had been bad enough.

“And what are you grinning at, Kinsella?” Finn demanded. “Your last name is not only known but notorious. No laughing matter, even in these namby-pamby ‘peaceful’ days.”

“So the Ulster Easter settlement of ninety-eight is not as settled as some think?” Max asked soberly.

“The IRA fools!” Liam said. “Cowed by the specter of being compared to ‘Islamic terrorists.’ ”

“That nine/eleven slaughter did stir up worldwide revulsion,” Gandolph observed mildly.

Shoulders shrugged again, making Max swallow hard to keep his mouth shut. He too had reacted violently from rage and loss and cost of lives, to hear it.

Gandolph was an older, less-fit man, but he plowed courageously ahead.

“Then, too,” he mused in a maddeningly deliberate way, “after nine/eleven the U.S. Irish community had things closer to home to worry about than sending gun money to the Auld Sod, especially the British-run north of it, the nine counties of Ulster.”

“Shut your mouth or I’ll forget your age,” Flanagan said, half rising. His motion made the pints’ liquid contents sway like yellow hula skirts.

“Don’t spill the beer, man,” Mulroney said softly.

“Better beer than blood,” Gandolph answered, his expression harder than the parish priest’s on confession day. “You’re all youngsters compared to me, and I can tell you that you’ll tire of blood by the end.”

Max was as surprised as the Ulstermen to see Gandolph’s steel. He must not remember enough of the man who claimed to have been his mentor, and regretted it for not the first time.

“And the beer?” Max asked. “Does it have a name too, Flanagan?”

As Flanagan sank back down in his chair, the man clawed the glass into his grasp and pulled it to his chest like a miser hoarding liquid gold. “A Bass brew, once made here in Ulster.”

Max nodded at Liam’s much darker glass. “And that looks like a Moor house’s Black Cat.”