Exclusive Page 16

  “Yeah, but they'd blow up the rest of the world if they thought that would work. . . .”

  “You still could write seriously about the strip searches.”

  “Mulvaney! Are you even listening? The Brits were strip-searching people who hid guns in their couches. And here we are telling the tales of how we made friends with more people like that?”

  “We were not making friends,” he says. “We were getting stories.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Love, Friendship, Loyalty

  From San Sebastián we called Claire, ready to write.

  Claire said she needed Mulvaney and me to dictate budget notes for two stories for the next editorial meeting. “He makes us meet six times a day now,” she moaned.

  “Just make sure Leisure Suit sees my bylines,” I told her.

  Main: Notorious Basque assassin—alleged crimes include killing Spanish premier—hid out in Huntington for years, disguised as a Nicaraguan alternative bookstore owner and aided by the Irish Republican Army. Xanti Zarate (an alias) fled Long Island last year as his bookstore—Liberate Me—burned, perhaps not by accident, and as he was pursued by Suffolk County detectives for the wrong murder from the wrong venue.

  Exclusive, in-depth interview with fugitive Zarate from an undisclosed location in Spain. A wife and alleged accomplice, who lived with Zarate in Huntington, is no-show for interview. Will include react from Suffolk County Police Public Information Officer, to be provided by bureau in Ronkonkoma.

  Art: Photo of Daniel Ortega Saavedra (also an alias). Ortega Saavedra is Zarate's dog and a former Huntington resident. By Barbara Fischkin and Jim Mulvaney

  Sidebar: Somewhere in Spain, fugitive Xanti Zarate risks discovery to take his young daughter out to lunch and speak to Newsday reporters. When the child accidentally locks herself in a bathroom stall, local police rush to the scene to free her but do not realize they should arrest the father. A European “slice of life,” a bright with serious undertones that asks the question “Why isn't law enforcement intelligence—local and international—what it used to be?” Will include additional quote from Suffolk County Police Information Officer. By Jim Mulvaney and Barbara Fischkin

  From his doctor's bag, Mulvaney pulled out two of the thinnest electric typewriters I had ever seen and handed one to me.

  “A present,” he said. Then he pulled out the phone cord and plugged it into the typewriter.

  That Mulvaney could do this amazed me.

  We exchanged notes and then, for perhaps the fiftieth time in our ill-fated romance, assessed our different skills.

  He wrote fast. I wrote with more flair. He'd write the main. I'd do the sidebar. Then we'd edit each other's stories.

  I wrote a lead. It was full of flair. I stopped to watch him. I had always liked to watch him write. He wrote in a fury as if nothing else, and everything else, in the world mattered. With the right facts, his hands could explode in a flat second.

  He watched me watching him.

  “It's very hot in this room,” I said.

  Mulvaney opened a window. A warm breeze arrived from the ocean. It cooled my forehead but inside I felt like a brick of peat, one that could warm all of Ireland.

  But we were in Spain.

  “You are right,” he said, and slowly unbuttoned the white shirt he wore with his suit pants. The jacket had disappeared miles ago. As he undid the buttons, he looked at me.

  I wrote another paragraph. Mulvaney stripped to his underwear. Nervously, I flipped through my notes, trying to find a good quote. When I couldn't find one, I took off my skirt.

  Mulvaney picked up his typewriter and pulled out the plug. “It has batteries, too,” he explained.

  Then he plumped the pillows on the bed and set up an office there. “Try writing here,” he said. “The sheets are cooler.”

  I looked. They were white satin with ripples like small mounds of snow.

  I moved.

  Suddenly I had no more need for quotes.

  “These are great stories,” I said, although we were not writing at all. Instead, slowly, we discovered how it felt to speak freely in your own ancient language, to live in a country that had the right name, its correct old name.

  Later, Claire agreed the stories were great. “I've never known either of you to write as well,” she said.

  We went out and hit one tapas bar after another. Off the main square, the Parte Vieja, a man sang in Euskera. “He made up his own songs,” Mulvaney assured me.

  Well, if anyone would know . . .

  Around his neck, he wore the camera he had used to take a picture of Xanti's dog, the only photograph we'd been permitted. We almost didn't get that one, because Mulvaney had no film. Then he found a roll in his doctor's bag.

  I started to take Mulvaney's picture and he showed me how to focus. That when he tried, he could focus, intrigued me. He took me by the shoulders and we danced, accompanied by our own Basque soloist.

  “You dance worse than your father,” he said.

  “No, Mulvaney, you dance worse than my father. I dance worse than you.”

  “Why do you always have to be so competitive?”

  “Being the best is best,” I said. “Otherwise you should be the worst. The middle is boring.”

  Dancing with Mulvaney felt more like another activity. I didn't tell him because I finally understood that he did not get metaphors. I had tried for months to decipher what it meant when he walked too fast. He used to say that it was obvious. He walked too fast because the rest of the world moved too slow.

  We did not return to the hotel until dawn. “Mulvaney,” I said, “now you are walking too slow.”

  “The ring?” he asked.

  “I have it,” I said. “It's in my pocket. I need to think.”

  “You're not going to throw it away, are you?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  He looked relieved. I had spent so much time thinking about myself as Jewish that I had neglected to properly identify Mulvaney as Catholic.

  “Remind me again why we didn't turn in Xanti Zarate?” I ask Mulvaney. “As you remember, there was no dearth of cops.”

  “How can you write what you just wrote and ask me that question?” he asks, pouring my wine. “We should be talking of love.”

  With any luck I will not have to write another bedroom scene involving my husband. That done, I can turn my attention to world affairs.

  “Those were Basque cops,” Mulvaney insists. “They knew exactly who he was.”

  Mulvaney-true, I think.

  “We were there to do an interview, not make an arrest,” he continues.

  “The guy killed the premier of Spain!”

  “He killed a Franco crony. A big crony. You said it yourself. You even wrote it.”

  “Mulvaney, have you ever heard of the legal system?”

  He is ignoring me. “If you look behind some of these other guys, the guys who only want their own countries back, the ones who don't want to take over the world, then you'll find, in some, a core of decency.”

  “Mulvaney, somebody is going to shoot you!”

  “Sometimes you'll find humor and a zest for what is good in life. You will find retribution that may be deserved and is certainly comprehensible. And you'll find competence, too. You'll find Nelson Mandela.”

  “You'll find Winnie. And it is cheap to use Nelson Mandela to defend the IRA.”

  “Nelson Mandela also killed people. Look, who was the first person ETA killed this century?”

  “Mulvaney, I don't keep track of these things like you do.”

  “It was that Manzanas guy.”

  “Apples?”

  “Literally, yes. But in real life, nothing that sweet. He was the Gestapo's man in San Sebastián. He helped them get the Jews fleeing France.”

  “Old business.”

  “If your mother heard that, she'd smack you. Old business it's not. The Spanish government gave the guy a posthumous medal, saying he was a super cop murde
red by ETA. But that's all they're saying. ETA was pretty pissed about it.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “There you go.”

  “There I go what?”

  “Glorifying assassins.”

  I'll need a second book just to explain the first. “You can't be right about this without also being wrong.”

  “Hence screwball's the way to go.”

  “There is no way I am going to write a screwball comedy and put Tiananmen Square in it,” I say.

  “Unless you're talking about the way they came up with their official body count,” he replies.

  CHAPTER 31

  Partition

  Midmorning, days later, I was still doing the very things I had vowed never to do again with Mulvaney.

  Some of them more than once.

  Did it count if you did them in Spain?

  The bellboy banged on the door but we didn't answer. He announced he was leaving the mail outside.

  After Mulvaney fell back asleep, I retrieved two packages from Ronkonkoma. One had blank reporters' notebooksin it.

  Leisure Suit had successfully FedExed supplies overseas. Maybe he was qualified to be foreign editor.

  The other had been half opened by customs to reveal a bundled stack of upside-down Newsdays from earlier in the week.

  Ah, I thought.

  Without scissors, I pulled at the plastic ties to loosen them and slid out a newspaper. A small box on the front page read “Former Huntington Bookstore Owner Details Spanish Premier Assassination in '73. See page 3.”

  It was true. Good play was as good as good sex.

  I took a moment for humility. What, really, had we done except get a confession on a decade-old murder in a foreign country that was no longer a world power? Lucky for us a whale hadn't hit the beach lately.

  Forget humility. We had gotten a confession on a decade-old murder. And we had delved into the psyche of an assassin. Quickly, I turned the page, eager to see my name.

  And Mulvaney's.

  No matter what happened to our so-called romance, it would be nice to show a double byline to the grandchildren we weren't going to have.

  But all the byline said was “by Jim Mulvaney.”

  I assessed how much I'd drunk the night before.

  By Jim Mulvaney.

  I tried to stay calm. Maybe they'd given me a tagline at the end of the story, which, although not great, would be better than nothing.

  “Continued on page 32.”

  The jump to our story was buried underneath a short about Nassau County Comptroller Peter King and his plans for yet another trip to attempt to bring peace to Northern Ireland.

  Lots of Peter King but no tagline.

  Alongside the jump was the sidebar. “Mysteries of Spanish Bathrooms,” by Jim Mulvaney and Barbara Fischkin.

  Fuck.

  It sounded like I went to Spain with Mulvaney to write a home-decorating story. And needed his help to do even that.

  This was worse than Pamplona without bulls.

  Much worse.

  I shook him awake. He pulled me back into bed. I grabbed the blanket from him.

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “not now. Not ever again!”

  “What?”

  My head nodded toward the pile of Newsdays.

  Slowly he stood, then stopped. Mulvaney's dread, like most things about him, is selective, informed when it needs to be, even when he is naked. He looked at me. Blue eyes. “I am hoping,” he said, “that you are trying to tell me that Leisure Suit was a jerk and identified Xanti by his real name.”

  We'd had to cough that up to the editor. He had promised to leave it out of the story, although he'd told us that if he ever got subpoenaed he would tell all, especially if they threatened him with expulsion from Suffolk County.

  Mulvaney picked up the package, pulled out a paper, opened to the page. “Oh shit,” he said apologetically. “I swear I dictated your byline.” He put his arm around me.

  I pulled it off.

  Facts: He had romanced me, screwed me, then really screwed me.

  Conclusion: He used his quirkiness to charm. But deep down he was a creep.

  • •

  We flew back to Dublin in silence, hailed a taxi without making eye contact. Mulvaney asked the driver to drop him off on O'Connell Street in front of the post office, the site of the Easter Uprising of 1916, the beginning of the Irish Revolution.

  “Partition,” he said, coldly referring to the ending of that particular chapter of Irish history. “You stay south. I'll go north.”

  He took his doctor's bag from the trunk and leaned through the open window, handing me a tangled clump of Irish punts, presumably to pay the driver.

  I pushed his hand away.

  “I put your byline on the story,” he said. “It fell off, so you blame me. If you think I am that petty, we are done.”

  “Bylines,” I said, “are not like towels hanging on a fence. They are not like Band-Aids. They are not like Humpty Dumpty.”

  I rolled the window down farther and eyed his crotch. “They are not like balls. They do not fall off.”

  I sped away, alone in the taxi. What a jerk! He'd just broken up with me because he'd done something unforgivable. And he still needed to use Irish history as a crutch.

  Most people would say “I'm leaving.”

  Mulvaney had to first reenact a battle fought almost seven decades earlier, a battle that eventually led to the division of Ireland into the Republic in the South and the six counties that made up the North. A solution that only brought on more war.

  Our troubles were like Ireland's. We had periods of uneasy peace, fragile cease-fires, proclamations of unity, compromise, subterfuge, and then bang, bang, war again.

  It had taken a lot of work to understand Mulvaney and metaphors. But I'd only gotten it half right. He didn't get metaphors but he did make them happen.

  I've always been an overzealous fan of dry cleaning. Well-pressed clothing wrapped in plastic sends me into spasms of bliss. This condition has only escalated in the years since I've known Mulvaney. I use dry cleaning to blot out the sloppiness inherent in marriage. I also use it to help me accept the inevitable.

  “Name?”

  The suits and blouses are tallied and piled. The clerk's pen is perched at the top of the bill, waiting.

  “Mrs. Mulvaney,” I say.

  Everywhere else my name is still Barbara Fischkin. It is only at the dry cleaners that I say I am Mrs. Mulvaney. I have been Mrs. Mulvaney at dry cleaners on four continents.

  Perhaps I just want to shift the blame for my dirty, wrinkled clothes onto Mulvaney and his ancestors. Every wife needs some private way to get back at her husband for his sins, both real and imagined.

  CHAPTER 32

  Message Pending

  A thick, white card scribbled in fountain pen was under my door at the Kilronan House. Colm wanted me to go back to Paris with him. “Sam Beckett,” he wrote, “slept in his bathtub until Nora took pity and brought him a proper mattress and frame. . . .”

  I'd asked him into the Irish bed of a Joycean character.

  Now he was asking me into the Joycean bed of an Irish character.

  Would Beckett watch?

  No wonder I didn't know what I wanted.

  • •

  My mother had sent a clip from Ms. magazine. Two paragraphs on excessive strip searches of women prisoners in Armagh. “An interview for Jim to do,” she'd noted in the margin.

  I hid in the Kilronan House for days. Then I went to pubs without phones. I didn't answer my own.

  At Toner's on Baggot Street, the cracked mirror behind the bar had fogged and the men in it all looked familiar. Three times I thought I saw Mulvaney.

  At last, a woman appeared. She held up a long strand of black hair.

  “Blondes have more fun,” she mouthed.

  The story of my life.

  “They have more fun because they don't have to fly to Ireland just to get a drink. . . .” />
  I turned. “Claire,” I said, and started to cry.

  It really was her.

  She ordered two glasses of Guinness and handed me a linen handkerchief with shamrocks, the kind they sell to tourists at the airport. “It's better than you think,” she said. “At least you don't have a job.”

  “He finally fired me.”

  She nodded. “He really liked the Basque story. But then you disappeared.”

  I had.

  “I'll fix it,” she said. “Just give me something Mulvaney can't do.”

  Suddenly I felt great, like my hard, old self. “They're torturing women in Armagh Prison,” I said.

  Claire sighed impatiently. “I said one Mulvaney can't do.”

  “You want him asking Irish females why they don't like to take their clothes off?”

  Claire, who really had come for just a drink, needed to get back to New York. To prolong the visit, I rode with her to the airport.

  “It was a sorry chain of events,” she said. The byline question. I wished she hadn't brought that up. “It started when the Men got a computer nerd to help them finish Naked Returns the Stranger. Well, you know what bad drunks computer nerds are . . .”

  A concept I could imagine . . .

  “They took him to the Ground Round, plied him with Long Island Iced Teas. Finally, he spit up a way for them to use Message Pending under disguised identities. . . .”

  Our taxi stopped short at Departures and a string of rosary beads jangled around the rearview mirror. So much for the illusion of nonsectarianism.

  Claire leaned over and paid the driver with a few new, smooth punts. “This, of course, was just what the Men, particularly the Non-Naked Men, wanted to hear. Having had a taste of sex writing, they wanted more of it. They wanted it more dangerous, too.”

  The taxi driver coughed; Claire gave him a dismissive wave. “And now they had the tools to do it. And instead of writing together, they wanted to compete. Whoever sent the dirtiest anonymous note to the highest-ranking Newsday executive would win.”

  Clearly the Men, all of them, needed to get out of Long Island.