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  • •

  “Mulvaney,” I say, “at this point my character is about to lose her job because of things that your character did. If you want to stay in this book, heretofore known as my novel, you need to give me a compelling narrative reason to keep you.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Hansel and Gretel

  The next morning I boarded a plane to Bilbao, delighted to be running after my own story. Pity the poor girl stuck with an interreligious carousel, or a bevy of overmodest revolutionaries.

  Or a Kosher Irish Butcheress.

  Like many Latin American tales, Colm McEligot's began in Spain.

  At the Design Centre we'd talked over cappuccinos late into the afternoon, perusing centuries-old Iberian politics until he finally told me I was beautiful and wrote down the alias of a Basque assassin who wanted to talk.

  “This will make the Nicaraguans comprehensible,” he'd promised.

  Now, seated on the plane, I closed my eyes to ponder the career opportunities an exclusive interview might provide.

  The overhead compartment opened with a jolt and someone dumped a heavy bag inside.

  “Doctor,” greeted the flight attendant.

  I opened one eye, hoping against hope for a Castilian cardiologist and, instead, saw a glimmer of pinstripes, now wrinkled. “Goddamnit, Mulvaney! What are you doing here?”

  “I'm looking for a fugitive who killed some Spanish honcho. Years ago. But he ain't ever talked.”

  It took me a moment. Then I understood.

  Colm McEligot had tipped us both off to the same story. It was, I had to admit, a plot development hard to resist.

  Which didn't mean I wouldn't try.

  “I know where to find the guy,” Mulvaney said, his eyes grinning blue as a poker chip.

  I still didn't.

  “But I don't know the name he uses.”

  Being handed different parts of the same story, by the same questionable source/character, was bad enough. Worse was that we'd pitched this story to different—and viciously competing—editors at Newsday.

  As I had guessed he would, Safari Suit had agreed to send me on this story I proposed, as a last-ditch attempt to keep his job. Mulvaney must have heard—my Spanish assignment would have lasted about five seconds as a secret in Ronkonkoma—and leaned on his renewed friendship with Leisure Suit.

  And on Leisure Suit's craven, if provincial, desire to be Foreign Editor himself.

  Mulvaney pulled a mangled handful of Irish punts from the pocket of that ratty suit. Where were his other sartorial attempts at satire? The stained plaid shirts, the never-to-be-returned tuxedo, the green sport jacket? Finally, he excavated a small notebook and, as we took off, ordered Rioja for two, which, on this particular morning, seemed like a good idea.

  He poured. I tried not to look.

  “Are we working together?” he asked, handing me my cup.

  “Nope.”

  “How ya gonna find the guy?”

  “Herri Batasuna,” I said. The ETA-backed party, the Spanish moral equivalent of Sinn Fein. “They must have a PR man.”

  “Look,” he said, blue eyes wet with red wine, “don't believe me if you don't want to, but that Herri Batasuna PR man won't give up a thing. The guy doesn't talk. He makes your buddy at Huntington Hospital sound like the biggest canary ever to leave a dropping on the L.I.E.”

  “He can't be that bad.”

  “Oh yeah? How about not bragging about past escapades. Not even if you confessed and did time. How can you run a subversive organization without a little boasting?”

  “So I'll find him myself.”

  “And how will you get it in the paper?”

  “Safari Suit.”

  “He just capitulated to Leisure. This morning.”

  • •

  I sat back and gave the overhead a dirty look.

  Mulvaney poured me another airline cup full of Rioja. “This romance—”

  “It is not a romance, Mulvaney.”

  “It has too much staking of turf. Why can't we just work together?”

  “Because you will do something underhanded.”

  “I promise to share all bylines.”

  I didn't believe him. But I had a nebulous interview subject and now, without Safari Suit, a shakier chance of publication. I knew defeat when I saw it.

  “Deal,” I said as I unenthusiastically clinked plastic against plastic. “So where is this guy?”

  “We'll have to drive there. I know the name of the bar. But I need his current alias.”

  “What for?”

  “Code. The only way he'll talk.”

  “Xanti Zarate,” I said.

  Mulvaney's eyes widened. I had never seen a poker chip that blue.

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “do not for a moment think this means I am sleeping with you.”

  At the airport we rented a SEAT, a tiny Spanish automobile. “Flimsy car,” Mulvaney said, as if he was a man who typically drove a Cadillac.

  There was a silence during which I wondered how the King of Duct Tape was going to make idle conversation on a long drive with an old girlfriend who hated his guts but needed him at the moment.

  “All that time we spent together and you never told me why you killed your kindergarten teacher.”

  “You never asked.”

  “I think I did.”

  “You wouldn't get it. It's too Freudian.”

  “Why wouldn't I get Freud?”

  I sighed. “Okay, on the first day of school—September, warm—my mother dressed me in wool pants and a sweater.”

  He grimaced, the way men do when they want to signal that fashion does not interest them. Interesting, coming from him, the prince of strange getups.

  “That kindergarten teacher ruined my first day of school. She was an old biddy who dyed her hair red. She put on too much rouge and it got stuck in her wrinkles. And she had favorites—little girls in crinolines named Valerie. She took one look at my pants, glared at my mother, and said, ‘Mrs. Fischkin, would you please send your daughter to school tomorrow dressed like a girl.'”

  “So?”

  “Forget it, Mulvaney.”

  “How'd your mother take it?”

  “She paid no attention. The other class had this nice lady with a long gray ponytail and her name was Miss Sunshine.”

  “That's Mulvaney-true,” Mulvaney said.

  “Go look up the records. The other teacher was Miss Sunshine.”

  “Then she made it up.”

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “you, a person who makes up everything, are suddenly taking offense? Inconsistency! That's your other big problem! So what if ‘Miss Sunshine' was a made-up name? For a kindergarten teacher it was a very nice name. It showed that she cared about her students, even in the unlikely instance that she was hiding from the feds or in some sort of elementary school—based witness protection program. If my teacher had a different name, she might have lived longer.”

  “So you killed your kindergarten teacher because you didn't like her name?”

  “No, she developed facial spasms in the middle of reading ‘Hansel and Gretel.'”

  “You poisoned her?” His blue eyes turned cold, murderous, delighted. “Did you cry?”

  “Nope. I just sat there and counted my blessings. Her last words were ‘Valerie, get the principal.'”

  “What'd you tell your mother?”

  “The true-truth. ‘Hey, Mom, my teacher's dead.'”

  He took one hand off the steering wheel, put it on mine. I thought that was strange until I reminded myself, yet again, that Mulvaney and I met covering a murder.

  “Did you smile?” he asked.

  “Let's just say I had the demeanor of a restrained yet satisfied victor.”

  Mulvaney thinks he can set up the conclusion of this book so that it looks like, at every twist and turn, I need him.

  “Mulvaney,” I say, “it's a nice development. But it's not enough to make a woman hand over her novel.”


  “You're kidding. It's a brilliant interplay of characters. This is how you start to tie an ending together.”

  Screwball comedy may have its limitations.

  But simple endings are not among them.

  You can always turn another twist.

  CHAPTER 29

  Mysteries of Spain

  Pamplona was, indeed, without bulls.

  Mulvaney stopped in front of the only taverna not shuttered and peered through its open window. “No one's drinking,” he said.

  From inside came a long high scream—a little girl, terrified. Angry, too.

  In the distance, police sirens roared closer. Two cars skidded to a halt and four oversized officers barreled out of them. Their stomachs hung over their pants. Together, they had six hairy facial moles, three guns in waist holsters, and a nightstick.

  No time with Mulvaney was ever quiet time. Who needed bulls?

  Two of the cops leaned against their car. The other two swung open the taverna doors. We followed them toward the escalating screams, through the barroom with its rough-hewn wooden walls dotted with alternating portraits of dozing shepherds and ferocious lumberjacks. They led us past a carved sign—“Damas”—and into the dark heart of those screams, the ladies' toilet.

  A crowd of damas—some hombres, too—stood around a thin man, an El Greco type, as he swung an axe at the heavy wrought-iron hinges of a wooden stall door, thick like the walls.

  “Xanti Zarate,” Mulvaney said, out loud and triumphant again.

  “Are you sure?” I wasn't. Too easy.

  “Be with you in a minute,” the axeman replied.

  No way would I show Mulvaney that this impressed me.

  At each whack the little girl behind the door screamed. A brown and white mutt yapped happily at my feet.

  I hoped this wasn't going to be another dog story. But you never could tell.

  The spectators chattered, their words ancient, heavy, and decidedly not Spanish. “What are they saying?” Mulvaney asked.

  Basque was not among the foreign languages offered by Midwood High School.

  A cop blew a whistle.

  The man put down his axe. “Ah,” he said, sweating over his black leather jacket. Then, in respectful bourgeoisie Spanish, he told the officers that his small daughter, claustrophobic under the best of circumstances, had accidentally locked herself in the toilet and was now entombed by the heavy door. There wasn't even enough space to crawl out.

  The cop called outside on his radio, the crowd chattered in that hard, old tongue, and then, finally, noticing Mulvaney and me, went silent.

  The two extra officers appeared with two ladders. Xanti Zarate, Basque assassin, put one against the stall and lowered the other gently inside and then softly cooed the solid words of his dying language to his daughter, who did not stop screaming even as she climbed and was scooped into her father's arms.

  Once on the ground, though, she grinned and plumped her wheat-colored pigtails. Around her neck she wore a large gold locket.

  I bent down and the dog yapped again at my feet, as if it knew me. But if it did, it would also know how I felt about pets.

  “Bonita!” I said to the girl, pointing to her locket. She was about five and opened it to show me a photograph of a dark, slight woman. “I speak English,” she announced. “And Euskera. I am not supposed to speak Spanish. Do you speak Euskera?”

  “Oh my God!” I said, staring hard at the picture. I knew I'd never forget those eyebrows.

  Mulvaney nodded at me.

  Amalia Sanchez, the alleged Nicaraguan last seen in the Huntington Hospital emergency room, had been Basque all along.

  Talk about a Long Island angle.

  “I'm not allowed to tell you where my mother is now,” the little girl said. The dog yapped at me again.

  “Danielito Ortega Saavedra Perrito!” I said. At the mention of its alias, it yapped louder. “You're supposed to be in Managua!”

  For years I have wondered what it was that made me agree to drive back to San Sebastian with Mulvaney later that day. We could have rented two rooms in a highway motel outside Pamplona, written, and gone our separate ways. A good business arrangement.

  So why did I say yes when he suggested we write on the beach? “Long Island in Spain,” he'd said. “Remember how beautiful it looked on the way here?”

  Was my head so easily turned by a man who could come up with a good story, even when it had been my own story to start? Was this my lifelong role? To be a link in a giant game of telephone, to start a tale and then have Mulvaney end it in a way I would not expect?

  Or was it timing?

  We got into the SEAT.

  He told me that the Irish had been involved.

  “Aren't we always?” he asked.

  Self-deprecating humor. Charming.

  “I've been checking for a while. I did it for you.”

  Devotion.

  “But without you I wouldn't have known to look. I wouldn't have known there was a story.”

  Flattery.

  Then he took one hand off the steering wheel and poured Rioja with the other as if his life depended on my reaction to that sip.

  Boom.

  Crash.

  But we didn't, really.

  “You helped me turn it into a story,” I agreed, taking another sip. He'd probably also helped Colm McEligot to “tip” me off to Xanti.

  As the wine hit, though, I remembered San Sebastián, the spectacular view down. Long Island, except better. Long Island with altitude.

  I lifted the Rioja and poured him a cup. “I'll tell you what, Mulvaney. We can share the byline.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “I was going to give it all to you.”

  “I'm sure,” I said. And I was. After this I'd have plenty of stories without Mulvaney.

  We glowed, together, as we contemplated how this would get good play. The best. Then we reminisced about our reporting.

  After the bathroom rescue, departure of the police, and formal introductions, we had all moved to the bar. Xanti ordered a round and assured us that, even as a wanted man wielding an axe, he had not been troubled by the cops in the bathroom. “Law enforcement intelligence is not what it used to be,” he'd said, giving his daughter's pigtails a playful tug. “Not anywhere. On Long Island they assumed if I spoke Spanish and sold Communist books, I had to be a Sandinista.”

  I asked him about Amalia but he shook his head sadly, called her “my gorgeous victim of history,” and regaled us with centuries' worth of Basque struggles against the tyranny of Spain. “We are not Spanish,” he said. “We never have been. They conquered us. We only wanted to govern ourselves, speak our own language.”

  I asked him if the Basques were the lost tribe of Israel, lost again from Ireland.

  Xanti, though, was too busy to answer, recounting, as he was, the tale of some old oak tree in Guernica where centuries ago, in what sounded to me like Fairytaleland, Spanish kings had sworn to respect Basque law.

  Then the modern Guernica. 1937. A pogrom, Franco-style. Three days of murderous bombing.

  “Retribution,” he'd said, in an attempt to explain ETA. I didn't buy it but I wrote it down. It was, I knew, leading to the reason why we'd come.

  In 1973, Xanti had been one of the ETA thugs who murdered Luis Carrero Blanco, the premier of Spain and, as a Franco crony, no angel himself. Xanti told us this and drank an entire glass of wine, quickly. “We pretended to be a jazz band,” he said. The “musicians” rented storage space on a busy Madrid thoroughfare. Inside one of their drums they hid a jackhammer.

  By night they dug a tunnel, an elongated bombing post from which they killed the premier in an instantaneous smash-up of shattered metal and glass.

  No one, Xanti claimed, had ever told this story, this way, before.

  “Why now?” I asked Mulvaney as we approached the glittering Spanish beach city. “And why'd he tell us?”

  “You already know,” he said. “Why does anyone ever tell any
thing to a reporter? Because they want it out in the open for their own purposes. Herri Batasuna needs to remind the Spanish government that if it doesn't give in to a few political demands, there are competent, experienced bombers waiting in the wings.”

  “That's sick.”

  “You expect these people to be posters for Mental Health Week?”

  Mulvaney pulled a smaller paper bag out of the one that held the now-empty wine bottle. “Look inside.”

  I pulled out a gold ring. It had the same design as the charm on Suzie's bracelet. A Claddagh ring. Heart, hands, crown. Love, friendship, loyalty.

  Colm had told me the Claddagh came from the Spanish Armada. They'd decorated their shields with it, then sent it back, embossed with jewels, to the Irish women they had conquered, in lieu of conquering the country.

  Being an Irish legend, this had the tiniest chance of being suspect.

  “Mulvaney, what is this?” In Ireland, the Claddagh was also used on wedding rings.

  “You don't have to wear it,” he said. “But could you find a better place for it than a paper bag?”

  Mulvaney says this chapter is perfect. He lists what it has: “weapons, drinks, murder, mayhem, jewelry, and love.” How, he asks, could you go wrong?

  I, though, have another problem, a monumental one.

  “Mulvaney,” I say, “what I've written is a screwball comedy that romps lightly, much too lightly, through international minefields. I'm making light here of some serious end-the-world behavior. Our characters do a Marx Brothers shtick with your doctor's bag while people in Belfast are being shot right and left. Then we glorify the people who give them the guns, who store those guns in their couches. . . . And, to add insult to injury, I am not portraying any of these people as bad. In fact, some of them have a certain charm. . . .”

  Mulvaney starts toward my computer, to edit. I pull the chair away before he sits. He stares incomprehensible blue. “What's the big deal?” he asks. “Just explain their motivation.”

  “Motivation!” I say. “They want to blow up the world!”

  “The IRA and the Basques just want their own countries back.”