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  This, I reminded myself, was Jim Mulvaney and there was every chance in the world that he had engineered a transatlantic quasi-kidnapping not because he loved me or missed me but simply because he knew he could pull it off.

  He did not love me any more than he had loved Leisure Suit's Mazda.

  “I'm not staying,” I said. My hand found its way around his pint glass and I had a long sip.

  A shriek filled the room.

  “Jim Mulvaney!” my mother exclaimed. “Would you look at us, here, in enemy territory!”

  As Mulvaney kissed her on the cheek, the thugs at the closest table turned to glare.

  He put his arm around me. I took it off.

  “No passport until you meet Mulvaney's friends!” My mother, who'd never made a deal she couldn't modify, shook a long red fingernail at me.

  With an extended open palm, Mulvaney steered us toward two men at a round solitary table on the edge of the room, their backs hard against the wall.

  One stood. He wore a ratty sweater; a thick black beard obscured his face. So Mulvaney was in fashion.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said, taking my hand.

  “I'm on the next plane to Paris.”

  “A pity.”

  I looked again.

  “Gerry Adams,” he explained.

  Terrific. Thanks to Mulvaney, and my mother, I'd just shaken hands with the commander of the Irish Republican Army.

  Not that he admitted to it. He was Irish. Why would he?

  “I admire your organizing skills,” I told Gerry Adams stiffly.

  He was, I knew, now portraying himself as merely a peace-loving politician.

  “And we all appreciated your eloquent condemnation of Oliver Cromwell Day,” he replied.

  Double terrific. Mulvaney had twisted my story, turned it into Provo propaganda. He'd probably told them it was all his idea, too.

  I nodded in the direction of Thug Number Two. “Gerry Adams's PR man?”

  “Yep,” Mulvaney replied, pleased as punch.

  Danny Morrison, in a leather jacket, was boyish and handsome. He also looked familiar.

  “Director of Public Relations, Sinn Fein,” he said, waving from his seat.

  I waved back. “You do know how Mulvaney feels about PR men?”

  Morrison winked, pulled out a chair for my mother. “Yer man Mulvaney's a troublemaker,” he said.

  Even the IRA thought so.

  A waitress came. Drinking seemed to be my only option, so I ordered a gin and tonic. My mother asked for an apricot sour, which was what she drank at bar mitzvahs, weddings, and other shul events, except for Las Vegas Saturday Nite, which had been brazenly reinstated as “Take a Chance on Saturday Nite”—and at which no alcohol was served. The waitress grimaced at Danny Morrison, as if my mother was all his fault.

  “You don't have apricot sours in Belfast?” my mother asked, amazed.

  Morrison nodded toward the bartender. “Tell yer man to mix blackberry brandy with vodka.” He turned back to my mother. “Made from Israeli blackberries.”

  I made a mental note to enlighten my mother about the IRA's ties to the PLO. They were also hooked up with Basque separatists, the worst of the Sandinistas, Fidel Castro, and everyone else in the world who had ever contemplated bombing as a civic duty.

  “Every war should have a PR man like you,” I said coolly.

  Morrison winked at me. “Every war should have a wee bottle of apricot brandy.” He reached into the lapel pocket of his tweed jacket, pulled out a matching cap, and held it open like a mock beggar. A pair of sunglasses with sky-blue lenses rested inside. He put them on, then nodded, as a fellow bus passenger might.

  So it had been a Morrison, only not Van.

  • •

  Half an hour and two blackberry vodkas later, my mother swore that Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison were two of the nicest men she'd ever met.

  “She liked the Irgun, too,” I informed them.

  Mulvaney's blue eyes stayed calm. Lunchtime in Belfast and he was already drunk?

  My mother now clucked over Project Children, Northern Ireland's answer to the Fresh Air Fund.

  “I could take a wee Belfast girl,” she offered. Her Irish accent was dreadful. “For a summer of peace in Brooklyn.”

  “Just keep the child away from Las Vegas Saturday Nite,” I said.

  “Leave your mother alone,” Mulvaney said softly. “Everyone makes up for being a survivor in their own particular way.”

  What, I wondered, had Belfast done to him?

  The other thing that surprised me, although it shouldn't have, was that my mother was telling Danny Morrison that she had once saved her own life by hiding in a haystack.

  Mulvaney leaned toward me. “Can you buy an ArmaLite with Israeli bonds?”

  “Do not,” I warned him, “try to sweet-talk me.”

  Suddenly, a hand landed on my shoulder. It was plump, female, and sported a thick bracelet with a large golden charm, an antique-looking insignia: hands, a heart, and a crown melded together.

  A crown at the Felons Club?

  “Hower yew?” A large woman in a yellowed Aran sweater, her wild hair dyed three shades of blond, bent down and smacked a wet kiss on my cheek. “I'm Suzie McBreeze, Jim Mulvenna's landlady.” So this was her. I'd heard, too, that she had a husband on the run and a rap sheet of her own.

  Two more Aran-sweatered women accompanied her. One, small and mousy, greeted us with a giggle and sat. She probably killed people from behind the scenes.

  “Me name's Joan Collins,” said the other, her wrinkled face glowing over the announcement. “Just like yer woman on Dinnn-est-teee.” Gerry Adams nodded at her in a way that made me sure they had known each other for years.

  “Welcome to Mother's Night!” Suzie said, plopping down next to me. Between her legs she held a narrow canvas bag. “Three glasses of tonic water,” she demanded from the waitress. “With three limes. Ach, it's hot as a Peeler station in here.”

  “Peeler?” I said, trying not to sound interested.

  “Cops,” Mulvaney said. “A guy named Peel was the first Brit police chief. Well, the first real one, anyway . . .”

  Suzie removed her Aran sweater to reveal a white ruffled blouse, which—when it had been in style twenty years ago—was called a Lizzie, after Elizabeth Taylor. Her yellowed bra peeked out from behind cracked buttons.

  I caught a glimpse of Marsha McCain at the next table.

  Mulvaney moved his hand up my leg. I shook him off and kicked him hard in the shins. Gently, he kicked me back.

  “Tell me again?” I asked Suzie. “What night?”

  “Mother's Night!”

  “What,” I asked, “does one do on Mother's Night?”

  “Ach aye,” she said. “What does it look like we're doing?”

  The three tonics arrived. “Sobering up?” I asked.

  “Just watch.”

  She unzipped her canvas bag. A large bottle of gin with a spout top sat securely inside it. Carefully, Suzie put her glass of tonic on the floor under the table and, without taking the gin out of its bag, poured herself a healthy shot.

  “Tumblers, girls!” she said to her two friends.

  I looked at Danny Morrison.

  “It's okay. They're heroines of the revolution.”

  “Mother's Night,” Suzie repeated with a wide grin.

  “It's barely afternoon,” I said, suddenly remembering that. Mulvaney's hand scooted up my leg again. I banged my knees shut, hard.

  “We start early.”

  Stevie Wonder blared through the Felons Club. Suzie and her friends dabbed their eyes, sipped their contraband gin, and sang to their absent men. . . .

  “I just called to say I love you . . .”

  My mother put her hand on Suzie's shoulder. Suzie put her own hand on top of it and left it there till the song finished.

  “Yer Jewis, right?” Suzie asked, leaving out the final “h,” as if she was speaking some backward, drunken, Bel
fast version of Cockney.

  My mother nodded. “Israeli blackberries,” she said, cheerfully holding up her glass.

  “Are yew a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?”

  “A Catholic Jew,” my mother said, not missing a beat.

  “Chaim Herzog was from Belfast,” Suzie said.

  Sure he was.

  “Wasn't he a Protestant Jew?” my mother asked.

  “Ach aye,” Suzie said sadly, turning to me. “And yer man's coming here. State visit.”

  Sounded like a non-story to me.

  • •

  I was jarred out of Israel in Belfast by the sound of Mulvaney asking Danny Morrison about Nicaragua. I glared at him. I did not need his help on the Sandinista dog story anymore. Nor would I take it.

  Nor should he dare to steal it.

  Like a scolded child, he made an intercontinental detour, back across the Atlantic. “Can you get me onto the Shankill?” he asked. Now he was beyond drunk. The Shankill Road was the bastion of the Ulster Defense Association, Protestant paramilitaries and sworn enemies of the IRA.

  But Danny Morrison raised a pint of lager and said that if Mulvaney wrote a story from the Shankill it would prove that he was a fair journalist, not merely a Provo drinking buddy, even if that was exactly what he appeared to be at the moment.

  “We'll introduce yew to Paisley.” The Reverend Ian Paisley, the most prominent of Protestant extremists, was large and feral, an instigator who portrayed himself as an earnest preacher.

  Could this get worse?

  I didn't have to wait long for the answer. “A new couch, even new upholstery, is not always the only solution.” My head bounced back to my mother. She was giving the Provisional IRA home-decorating advice.

  Suzie dove down to fill her cup with more gin. “It started as a wee hole in the seat and now it's the fookin' Grand Canyon. There's these wee bits of stuffing . . .”

  “I can send you some inexpensive slipcovers from Brooklyn,” my mother offered.

  “Aye, that would be brilliant,” Suzie said.

  “In an interesting print to highlight the rest of your décor,” my mother added.

  Mulvaney was next at the jukebox. “Sunburns at the shore / nights in Singapore / you might have been a headache / but you never were a bore.”

  Only the Bob Hope version, but bad enough.

  “Would you like to dance?” he asked me, returning to the table.

  We never had.

  “If I cared,” I told him, “I would hate this song.”

  “You don't listen to lyrics.”

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “I really do not know what I am doing here. First you leave me. Then you drag me back, practically by my hair.”

  “I got here and realized I was wrong—”

  “I'll dance with you, Jim.”

  Who else but my mother would interrupt my best moment?

  When they had finished, my mother congratulated Mulvaney on being the only man on earth who danced worse than her husband. Then she announced she was leaving for the Europa Hotel.

  I'd read about that place, too. It had been bombed so many times it made the airport buses look like coach tours to Shangri-la. If my mother was nostalgic for her pogrom, the Europa was the place to be.

  I got up, too.

  “I don't have a reservation for you,” she said.

  “Fine. I'm going to the airport.”

  “You don't have a passport.”

  “I'll call my editor. He'll know someone.”

  This, I realized, was highly unlikely. The State Department did not maintain a satellite office in Ronkonkoma.

  Danny Morrison walked to my side of the table and closed his hand over mine. Not too tight but tight enough. “The airport is closed.”

  “It's the middle of the day.”

  “They've had a bomb scare.”

  Did they realize this was an epidemic?

  His hand didn't move.

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do you think he knows that?” Mulvaney said.

  Suddenly more thugs appeared behind my mother. Morrison had ensured this would run as smoothly as an armed assault on Buckingham Palace. As they escorted her out, she told them her ideas for a new Project Children brochure. “A scene from Oliver Twist might work,” she mused. “Don't forget to wear your sweater!” she called back to me as they moved en masse through the doorway.

  “That's it,” I said, trying to pull out from the PR man's grasp.

  With one hand Morrison slipped off his leather jacket. Around his shoulder was a holster with a black gun that looked like a sharpened piece of coal.

  I looked at Mulvaney. “Are you absolutely nuts?” I said. “You're going to have your friend shoot me?”

  Danny Morrison chuckled and shook his head. “Wouldn't be very good for me public relations to shoot the press, now would it?” he said, loosening his grip.

  “You can leave,” Mulvaney said. “But I wish you wouldn't.”

  Sex for Siding (continued)

  My contractor shows up in the morning, as promised. I look out from one of our windows, which are not Andersen windows but could and should be, and reexamine his long, muscular arms, his tan, and, yes, his siding.

  I no longer care what he reads.

  The fact that he is not, literally, my contractor, that he still belongs to the neighbors, makes him all the more intriguing.

  Still, I stay inside. Best not to have him see me like this, in a house with old windows and yellow wooden shingles that should be torn down.

  Or replaced with something better.

  I can't help watching him, though. Every now and then he looks across at our house.

  As luck would have it, a Federal Express truck arrives with a package for my husband, which I open quickly. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field. Until now, he has been working without the benefit of a manual.

  Didn't I tell you he was brave?

  I ponder whether to give it to him or not but I am interrupted by the contractor, who waves, then turns back to his aluminum siding. He wears a tight white T-shirt, blue jeans that are even tighter.

  “It's a manual,” I say, holding up the book.

  “Don't need one,” the contractor replies.

  A cigarette dangles from his lower lip. He turns and hangs a narrow piece of trim along the edge of the roof. It looks like a Home Depot take on nineteenth-century gingerbread.

  “Would you like to learn how to do this?” he asks, without turning from his work.

  I go upstairs and deliver Syd Field to Mulvaney. He cracks it open as if it is a case of Irish whiskey. Then he shuts it.

  CHAPTER 20

  Belfast: The Connoisseur's Tour

  Marsha McCain, the red-haired California girl gone Provo, stopped me at the bulletproof booth. “Drinking beer makes women crazy,” she said. “And fat.”

  “I drink gin,” I told her. “Lucky me.”

  I walked out into the murky dusk of the Falls Road, the beleaguered main thoroughfare of West Belfast.

  I was supposed to be on the Champs Élysée.

  Mulvaney drove up to the curb behind the wheel of a vintage, oversized silver Thunderbird, a car that belonged in Northern Ireland as much as I did. I had agreed to take a quick tour of West Belfast, after concluding that my other choice was to spend the rest of my life inside the Felons Club.

  He screeched to a stop, rolled down the window.

  “Nice car,” I said.

  “I got tired of trying to find a Catholic taxi,” he replied as he got out the wrong door.

  Only Mulvaney would find a quintessentially American car that had a steering wheel on the British side.

  We drove and I examined the sights: shops with metal grates pulled halfway down and the occasional virulently anti-British mural, including one of terrified, and terrifying, women that said “Stop the Strip Searches!”

  “So which one of those Felons Club charmers was California girl's lover
boy?”

  “He's in prison,” Mulvaney said, very matter-of-fact.

  I felt myself frowning.

  “She's a great story,” he offered.

  Did he think I'd fall for that? Interview someone, then sleep with her after the story runs. Oldest reporter's trick in the book.

  She, though, looked dumb enough . . .

  “She must be lonely,” I said.

  “Not interested.”

  “And why is that?”

  He stopped, smiled blue. “The Provos would kill me.”

  Jim Mulvaney, Master of the Squandered Opportunity.

  He put his foot to the gas. With a screech, he swerved left off the Falls Road and stopped short between two looming Celtic crosses.

  “IRA Cemetery,” he reported.

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “you are doomed to be a Long Islander.”

  “Why's that?”

  “You drive everywhere.”

  Suddenly he took off again, flying past ornate tombstones. I leaned against duct tape, a feature of all Mulvaney vehicles, apparently, and hoped it would hold. He screeched to another stop, alongside a black vase stuffed with dying red carnations and daffodils and got out.

  “You gotta see this,” he said, motioning me to join him.

  What are my choices? I thought.

  “Read it!” Mulvaney insisted.

  I moved closer to the flower pot tombstone. “Oh God, Mulvaney!”

  “Great, huh?”

  The gold letters said JIM MULVENNA. His blue eyes looked skyward, and that gave me the jitters. The air had an odd, familiar feel to it. Could this be what was wrong with Mulvaney? That he was a ghost who'd returned to the scene of his former life?

  I read out loud from the base: “‘Our dear son, killed in action' . . .”

  “Yeah, he got hunted down in the woods.”

  Guerrilla warfare.

  “Did he deserve it? He must have done something.”

  “They've all done something. The question is, what was done to them to make them do it? What made their fathers do what they did? In the middle of the day the streets are filled with men. Catholic men. You could spend a lot of time counting the factories here that won't hire Catholics. Counting the sons in trouble, too . . .”

  I stood there between the two Jim Mulvaneys—one doomed, the other potentially so—and imagined I was stuck in a bad country-western song brought to America by who else? The Irish. Rain clouds dotted the black sky and my teeth chattered.