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  “Unfortunately the publisher stopped it. But not before he came all the way to Garden City to tell us that he had never felt so beloved. There wasn't an orifice of his, or a backroom in Ronkonkoma, left out of the picture.”

  “Darlin'!” the Catholic taxi driver said.

  Claire kissed me, opened the door, got out. What did this have to do with Mulvaney?

  She peered in through the open back window. “All those Messages Pending crashed the system. That was the night you reported from Pamplona and wrote from San Sebastián. You guys did a great job, but back in Ronkonkoma the place was a mess.”

  She handed me a printout—with a Pamplona dateline. “I made this before the crash.” This was, indeed, the way stories looked right after reporters filed them, before they were formatted to be published.

  “I had to type some of the stories back into the system,” she called back as she ran to her plane. “I'm the one who left your byline off.”

  Claire then disappeared into the Irish fog.

  The printout had my name on it.

  Colm was not at the Kilkenny Design Centre. If I wandered inside the gates of Trinity, I might find his office. I could finally see the Book of Kells, too. My second time in Dublin and I'd had yet to see The Book. Who'd had time for illuminated manuscripts?

  I bought a cappuccino and read the Irish Press instead. It was the most Republican of the Dublin dailies, and it made a big deal over the impending burial of three IRA men in Belfast, purposely delayed until Peter King's visit. King, who loved drama as long as it didn't happen on Long Island, had arranged to arrive in Belfast on Orangeman's Day. That was when Protestants in the North celebrated their centuries-old victory at the Battle of the Boyne—and the legacy of Oliver Cromwell—with more verve than anyone at the Huntington Yacht Club could ever imagine.

  The IRA men, caught digging up a cache of guns, had been shot on sight, an echo of what had happened to Jim Mulvenna years before. The other Jim Mulvenna.

  How, I wondered, did Peter King explain the convolution of events like this funeral to his constituents at Jones Beach?

  I thought of the Claddagh ring, back in its paper bag. Should I throw it away?

  Or sell it?

  If I kept this up, I might need the money.

  Love, Friendship, Loyalty. Here in the land of poets they couldn't come up with anything less sentimental? How had Mulvaney managed to give this to me without being a cliché himself? He had taken the ring out of a crumpled bag. Most men would have handed over a box tied with a ribbon.

  “You're not going to throw it away, are you?” he had asked.

  He was so sure of himself. He'd gone to war. He talked to people who killed other people. My mother said he wrote like an old man. She meant that he was confident. He was always confident about his stories. The ones he wrote, the ones he told, and the ones he made up, especially those. He acted confident about me.

  But that's what it was, an act. “You're not going to throw it away, are you?” What was it about Mulvaney besides the blue eyes?

  “Hullo. I'm Jim Mulvaney.” He'd walked up to me in the newsroom. I did not walk up to him. Then he'd cooled down. But then he'd followed me. Mulvaney would never admit that he had done more than follow a story into what was, coincidentally, my parents' shul. I finished my coffee, stared at a swirl of froth lining the bottom of the fashionable white mug. Colm would never follow me anywhere. He would wait for me. But if I did not show up, he would not try to find me. He would shrug his shoulders, leave for Paris, and get a cancan girl to sleep with him in the bed Nora Joyce brought for Samuel Beckett.

  Why would a man who had your mother kidnap you and bring you to him in Northern Ireland care who got the byline?

  The next day I called Claire in Ronkonkoma. Had she ever been here?

  “The professor reacts,” I said. “Answering a question is easier than asking one.”

  “That he can't ask questions,” Claire said, “does not make a man unattractive to me.”

  “You must be on deadline; you're changing sides.”

  “Just making sure you know what's attractive to you.”

  “It is more than mildly intriguing to wonder if there is something I can do to rattle Colm.” But it is not, I thought sadly to myself, the same as watching the effect you have already had on someone who is at ease with the world but not necessarily with you.

  “The prison—can you get in?”

  How hard could it be to get into prison? “This isn't about Mulvaney,” I said.

  “Don't forget the Long Island angle!” she replied, and hung up.

  Public retribution in marriage is not a bad thing either. Mulvaney disagrees.

  He may say we are still married because there is always another story but I say it's because there is always another argument. He thinks we can be at peace because I am finished with Colm. I, though, reserve the right, years from now, to blame Mulvaney for making me dump a perfectly compelling fictional character.

  If we accept marriage, we accept it with its flaws.

  Even if it means he might throw Marsha back in my face.

  CHAPTER 33

  Doomed

  Stormont Castle in Belfast, the baronial seat of Northern Ireland's provincial government, had once been a simple Georgian house. Now, though, it was awash in turrets and griffins, the result of an ostentatious remodeling that had milked its Catholic tenant farmers dry. Outside, around the city, bonfires raged and the Pope burned in effigy.

  A third-tier, pimply British PR man met me in the vast, empty lobby. He did not look happy about being the last one at the office on the eve of Northern Ireland's most important Protestant holiday.

  I'd timed this hoping for a rube who might say yes.

  “Sure, you can tour the prison,” he told me.

  I cheered to myself. “Tomorrow, okay?” Who said war zones had to be inefficient?

  He grinned and put a hand to his splotchy face. “Just make sure you don't interview anyone.”

  This could put a damper on my story.

  “We are doing you an enormous favor,” he assured me. “We generally do not let media into the Northern Irish prisons at all.”

  “How come?” I asked, feigning absolute curiosity.

  Troubled, he paused. “These places are filled with our prisoners.”

  “Yes?”

  “And we don't think our prisoners should be exposed to the media.”

  “Protecting your prisoners from the ruthlessness of the media is very enlightened.”

  “I mean, it's not for us to allow them the platform to expound their views.”

  “On how they feel about taking off their clothes?”

  His face blushed beyond its spotty red. He cleared his throat. “To expound Provisional or Republican propaganda,” he said.

  “So you'd let me in to see Protestant women who are political prisoners?”

  “Hard to tell,” he said. “We don't have any.”

  On Orangeman's Day, downstairs at the Armagh Arms Bed and Breakfast, Protestant men surrounded me. This was their day, an unabashed show of Cromwellian pride. Later, in nearby Drumcree, they would march purposely through a Catholic neighborhood, instigating the locals, many of whom were no angels either.

  Armagh Prison itself was a two-hundred-year-old brownstone fortress that loomed at the end of a long park. Impressive for a holding pen, even if it wasn't as splendid as Stormont. The large woman at the gate, a low-level Amazonian, smiled into the morning clouds, waiting for the inevitable downpour.

  “I am here to visit my cousin,” I said, handing her the worn slip of notebook paper Mulvaney had given me in another time, in another city. This was not the way I had wanted to get in.

  “Ach,” she said, as she opened her jacket and fondled a pistol, gleaming and silver in a holster around her waist. “From America? Aye? Me cousin's in Massapequa.”

  I rejoiced. A Long Island angle!

  “Massapequa's beautiful.” I forced my eyes away
from her gun. Had I ever been to Massapequa?

  “Aye,” she said, her eyes dreamy. “Dew yew know how I can get meself a wee visa?”

  I gazed hard at the stone walls. “But not as pretty as here,” I said.

  “Aye,” she said, nodding. “And yer name?” She put pencil to clipboard. “Missus what?”

  I froze. What were the chances that Barbara Fischkin would have a cousin in Armagh Prison?

  “My name . . .” I gulped, feeling like one of the imposters on I've Got a Secret. “My name is Mrs. Mulvaney.”

  “Brilliant!” said the guard, although that was not my assessment.

  • •

  Mulvaney's Alleged Cousin greeted me looking like she worked in a department store. “Nice,” I said, admiring her cinched purple knit dress, sheer nylons, and delicate velvet pumps.

  “It's because I'm a political prisoner, not a wee ord'nary, daysent criminal,” she emphasized.

  We sat in a classroom, at tiny desks. She offered me a tin of biscuits and tea she poured from a thermos decorated with small stick-on daisies. Unlike Xanti, she admitted to nothing. Easier to confess, I thought, when the cops don't have you—or want you.

  “They say I was in a house where explosives were made and that I was in a convoy of cars carrying them,” she told me. But without elaboration. She couldn't possibly be Mulvaney's cousin.

  I listened with what I hoped was a reporter's ear, which was supposed to mean I was on nobody's side.

  The PR man did not want to understand why the least-privileged citizens of his country were so angry. Yet the Alleged Cousin had tried to kill people. I didn't doubt that some of the women they strip-searched were innocent. But not this one.

  An hour later, I walked out of Armagh Prison knowing I'd have to tell its story deadpan. Here are the terrifying things some of these women did. Here are the terrifying things none of them can stand. Down the road, at a small tearoom, I ordered a pot and began scribbling. Who were these women?

  Mothers, young girls, fifty-year-old women, women with black lingerie that got confiscated because the prison said it was an IRA color. The guards even searched women who had just had babies, their breasts dripping with milk.

  “Like most security, the strip searches are random,” the Alleged Cousin had told me. “You don't know the night before if they are going to make you take off your clothes in the morning or not. They do no internal searches but they get to our insides in other ways. They look at you steadily, comment on your hair—and I don't mean the hair on your head. Remember, these people are our captors. They decide for how long we stand naked. There's that old enmity, that old hatred: ‘We have you where we want you.'”

  She was a vital, young woman. But how long would that last? I thought of Amalia, worn and separated from her young daughter. Was a Basque Republic worth it? Did Suzie McBreeze keep a couch full of guns because she wanted a free Ireland? Or to avenge her husband and son? The Alleged Cousin had been a little girl the first time she saw Protestants kill one of her neighbors, Catholic like her. Her brother, like Suzie's son, went to prison as a teenager after he burned up a bus.

  All these people simply wanted to be who they were, without suffering any harm. To pledge allegiance to Euskadi, instead of Spain. To work in Northern Ireland and call yourself a Catholic.

  But all these people had guns and bombs.

  There. I could say it. I could report it out. But could I figure it out? Could I feel it, if it wasn't my own story?

  “Yew the Yank who's been in the prison?” A large woman in a guard uniform loomed over me. I closed my notebook, hoping she would think it was a tourist's log.

  Without waiting for an answer, she sat. Her thick arms rested on the table. I slipped the notebook into my knapsack.

  She wore a waist holster with a gleaming silver gun. “Mrs. Mulvaney?”

  “Miss Mulvaney.”

  “Yew related to that American reporter who lives in Andytown?”

  “No,” I said. It was true.

  “But yew'r American, too?”

  I nodded.

  She stood to leave. “American women don't mind taking off their clothes. So watch what yew tell people.”

  From the pay phone at a bank, I called Claire, who accepted the charges but displayed no sympathy.

  “Scared by a prison matron? When'd you become such a wimp?”

  The Orangeman parade was about to explode. “Get there!” she insisted.

  “How?” I asked her, still shook.

  “What is wrong with you? Do whatever the locals do. It's Northern Ireland. Hijack a car, fergodsakes!”

  Mulvaney, she said, could use some help.

  I took a bus to Drumcree. The closer we got, the louder the drums banged. From the back window, I saw a line of men in drab black suits and bowler hats turning the corner, marching perpendicular to the bus. They had white gloves, white hair. Even the hair of the young men was white. Their skin was dry, translucent. Each one looked like his own kind of ghost.

  But there was color in their politics. Their own color. Orange, not green. Fringed orange shawls, draped over shoulders.

  Another line followed, then another, until the parade grew into an endless white mass punctuated by orange, with drumsticks flapping eerily in the wind.

  “FTP?” I said, reading the letters off a drum. “What's that, a football team?”

  “No such luck, darlin',” the bus driver said. “It stands for ‘Fuck the Pope.'”

  He opened the door and motioned for me to step down. “Enjoy the parade. Yew'r not Catholic, are yew?”

  The street filled with more bowler hats, drums, shawls. Behind me, a row house door opened, spewing out teenagers with shaved heads, some punctuated by isolated tufts of spiky hair dyed orange. Skinheads.

  Warriors with cricket bats, they followed their leader and crowded next to me on the sidewalk.

  “Fookin' teague!” one of them screamed. The boys raised their bats higher and turned to me as if they might pounce. Great, they thought I was Catholic.

  “No, there's a fookin' teague marchin'!” the outraged skinhead leader cried out.

  In the midst of the Orangemen, I saw a swirl of plaid. It was taking notes.

  If only he had worn the tuxedo . . .

  “Get the fooking teague!” the skinhead leader ordered.

  The boys, bats flashing, stormed the parade line. Mulvaney, who was supposed to be covering these troubles, was now inciting more of his own. I grabbed the shoulder of a marcher who passed by me.

  “They can't beat him,” I shouted, still not thinking they would. “He's an American reporter.” I sounded like my mother.

  The marcher pulled my hand off him, pushed me to the ground, and kept walking.

  The boys circled their prey. I screamed. I heard wood crack.

  Then, slowly, too slow, behind the sticks, a flash of white and orange turned into a tall, paunchy bear of a man. He plucked the skinhead leader from the circle, held him by his collar.

  The marchers stopped. The drums got quiet.

  “You do not go after this bloke!”

  It was Ian Paisley, Northern Ireland's most famous Protestant extremist. No worse than the IRA in what he encouraged. No better. But nowhere near as popular in America. Was that because he was too obvious with his hatred, prejudice, fire and brimstone? Or was it because Protestants from Ulster had come to America too long ago?

  His voice boomed like an angry preacher.

  “Anyone who lays a finger on this man will answer to me.”

  The skinheads loosened their circle. Mulvaney's face bled but his eyes blazed as he walked toward me.

  “Where's your T-Bird?” I asked, hoping for a quick getaway.

  “I took the bus,” he said. “Doncha remember what you said to me about driving and doomed Long Islanders?”

  “Jim Mulvenna?” A silver gun was poised an inch from Mulvaney's ear, held in the black-gloved hand of a uniformed RUC man.

  “Jim Mulvenna i
s dead,” Mulvaney said, his eyes a miraculous, mischievous blue. “Buried with the Provos.”

  Without even a smile, the RUC man shoved Mulvaney into the back of a car that sped off as the door shut behind them.

  As soon as Mulvaney was gone, I missed him.

  “Are you happy now?” I ask my husband. “At least I was tender when they carted you off.”

  “A slight improvement,” he says.

  “Don't get used to it. That was the last bit of mush I am putting in this book.”

  “It's the first bit of mush you've put in the book, and it's barely mush at all. It's barely a sentence. It took a whole book for you to say you might miss me if I went to prison.”

  “It's a well-placed, tender sentence. The best expressions of love are short.”

  I get a long blue stare in response.

  What I should have written when they carted him off to prison is this: Why do I always like men better when they become unattainable?

  CHAPTER 34

  Expectations

  Something with long red hair drove up in a generic California convertible, an impractical car for a place where the sun never shone.

  “Need a lift?” Marsha McCain asked.

  A surfboard decorated in green, orange, and white, the colors of the Irish flag, stuck out from her open trunk. She slithered toward the passenger side, stretched her skinny arm, and opened the door. I looked for a Claddagh ring. She didn't have one.

  I had no idea where the RUC had taken Mulvaney.

  “You better drive fast,” I said to Marsha McCain. “It's a long way to the American consulate.”

  When we got there, we were greeted by an iron gate and a heavy chain. Marsha slapped her head like a beach bunny who had suddenly remembered there are no waves in Nebraska. “Closed for Orangeman's Day,” she said.

  Diplomacy, I felt, should have its limits.

  My red-haired companion did not know where the Consul General lived or drank, confirming her own status as a mildly attractive but ineffectual human being.