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  “My attorney?”

  “Yes. Me.”

  “You have a license to practice in Northern Ireland?”

  “Small, inconsequential point.”

  “Don't worry,” Peter King said, “the last thing the Northern Ireland Office wants is for Mulvaney to spend any time in Long Kesh. Think of the stories he would find. Think of the stories that would be written about him.”

  Now I was worried. He would love that.

  “I hope you are not saying that this is any old love story.”

  He is twisting my words. I should be used to it.

  “Mulvaney,” I say, “there is not one individual in the world who is like you.” This is true-true. I have never met another Jim Mulvaney.

  Now his blue eyes smile.

  “You've never said that.”

  What he doesn't know is that I am saying it now just in case I decide never to let him out of prison. I could do that and change my life. I could change my past.

  Writing a novel about your husband has its virtues.

  But why not end it on a sweet note?

  “I've written a whole book—well, almost a whole book—saying there is no one like you.” I stop and kiss him on the lips. “And how many women even write books about their husbands?”

  “Many,” he says. “But they don't admit it.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Castle Arrest

  All of us, the dog included, were led out of the Stormont elevator into an immense Georgian reception area with marble columns and a carved ceiling. It resembled nothing as much as the Foreign Affairs ballroom in Dublin. These people all had the same architects. Why couldn't they get along?

  “It could use another renovation,” my mother offered. “Some updating. Flowered carpeting might make it seem warmer.”

  Queen Asta yelped in agreement.

  How long, I wondered, would I have to wait for someone to arrest that mutt?

  A narrow section of the wall popped open, revealing a bare office with a round table. As we entered, the wall slammed shut behind us.

  “Mulvaney!”

  The sight of him took my breath away. I had to admit it. I could write a whole book saying it didn't, then revise everything with one small gulp for air.

  Even better, no one had beat him since the skinheads.

  Two soldiers stood close, as if escape was a distinct possibility.

  “How are you?” he asked, filling the room with blue.

  “How do you think I am?” I snapped.

  No way was I going public with my affections at Stormont Castle, the seat of Northern Irish oppression.

  The soldiers moved closer to me.

  “Great,” Mulvaney said. “Go ahead and let everyone know what a bitch you are. Use a man to help you get a story. Then leave him in Dublin.”

  The soldiers moved back toward him.

  “Mulvaney, you left me in Dublin.”

  “And you stole my story.”

  “You gave me that prison story.”

  “Only the story. You took my name!”

  As if I would ever want it.

  The door popped open again and in trotted the Northern Irish PR man, followed by his boss, Britain's Secretary for Northern Ireland, a man who never uttered a word anywhere if it had the potential to be quoted in a newspaper.

  When the PR man saw me, he shook his head, dug a silver cigarette lighter out from the pocket of his smooth, dark suit, and tapped it on the table. “Mrs. Mulvaney,” he said.

  I do not speak to anyone in public relations, I told myself, and took a seat between Ackerman and King. At times like this, it's best to put your faith in America.

  The door opened, with more reverence this time, and a man carrying a large briefcase entered. He patted the Real Mulvaney on the back. “Mrs. Mulvaney,” he said, nodding to me. This was getting tedious. “I'm Mulvaney's solicitor.”

  Along with a wife who wasn't his wife, Mulvaney now had a lawyer who wasn't his father.

  “I despise Catholicism,” boomed the next voice in the doorway, and both Ackerman and King gasped. “But I like Mulvaney!” The large, white-haired man tapped his walking stick on the marble floor of Stormont Castle, as if he owned it.

  “Reverend Paisley!” A nervous Peter King offered his hand. “It's a start. Mulvaney's a start.”

  Were they really going to attempt to solve this conflict one Catholic at a time?

  Being married to Mulvaney, I approach all refrigerator Post-it notes with trepidation.

  “Gone to Hollywood,” this one says. “Keep revising.”

  I return to my own life, otherwise known as “the raw end of the deal.”

  The agent e-mails to say he is going to Elaine's. He'd like to take me. But he understands. I am writing.

  “have red yr book still lik it,” he notes. It will, he says, go nicely with “the screnply” that Mulvaney is now presenting to movie moguls on the West Coast.

  “Have you been telling your life story?” I ask my wayward husband when he calls from a phone booth on Sunset Boulevard.

  “It's not called ‘telling,'” he says. “It's called ‘pitching.'” He is proud that he knows film-business lingo.

  “Like in baseball?” I ask.

  “Yep, it's a metaphor.”

  Hollywood has changed him already.

  “Mulvaney,” I say, “pitching isn't you. I do not think of you and imagine the precision of a good arm, the focus of a swishing bat, the ballet of a fly ball caught.

  “I think you should bowl your story in,” I continue, not without rancor. “When I see you, Mulvaney, I see a lead ball hitting a dozen hard objects. I see perilous alleys, rumbling crashes. What about hockey? Or chariot racing? Now, there's a sport that reminds me of you.”

  Pitching, he insists, is what it will be. And they want it in one sentence.

  • •

  The next time my husband calls from Hollywood, I suggest he tell the moguls that the screenplay is based on a marriage manual. Surprising how quickly I have embraced the art of misrepresentation. “It's based on a book that tells you how to get married and stay that way.”

  “Even the agent would have a problem saying that with a straight face,” Mulvaney tells me.

  I argue my case. Traditional marriage manuals explain how to get and keep the perfect man. But what about all the women who fall in love with deranged human beings and find they have no choice but to marry them? They need a book. A film, too.

  How to Get and Keep the Imperfect Male.

  “There are more women like me than you think,” I say. “Ones who battle their better instincts and lose.”

  “One sentence.” He is adamant.

  “Okay, this film shows you how to marry a man with a mess under his bed, including perhaps—but not limited to—a few handguns.”

  “Staying married is harder than getting married,” he says.

  No kidding, Mulvaney. Newlyweds, I tell him, should buy platform beds.

  And consider aluminum siding.

  CHAPTER 38

  Silver Linings

  The PR man tapped that silver lighter. “As spokesman for the Northern Ireland Office . . .” He tapped more. Why didn't he just smoke? Or get a gavel? “I am here to charge James Edward Mulvaney Jr. with illegal possession of numerous weapons!”

  “What?” I stood.

  I should have known. I did know. At Suzie's house. I knew and chose to ignore it.

  “Shh,” warned the Real Mulvaney.

  The PR man's lighter gleamed in my eye. “You arrested him because I went to prison!” I said.

  The PR man grinned. “Aye. And then we found a pile of guns under his bed.”

  How, I wondered, had they found anything in that mess?

  Ceremoniously, he fished into the lapel pocket of his cheap polyester suit—couture beyond even Mulvaney—extracted a set of photographs, and slid one across the table. A photograph of a heap of shining silver guns.

  “An unauthorized doctor's bag
, too,” the PR man added, tossing another photo my way.

  I looked at Mulvaney. He'd turned so green his eyes weren't blue anymore. So maybe he did do it.

  Nah. He was nuts. But he wasn't a gunrunner.

  The British Secretary for Northern Ireland whispered into the ear of the PR man.

  “Speak, Mulvaney!” the PR man ordered. “Speak for yourself. Unless, of course, you'd prefer me to do it for you.”

  Mulvaney, graduated now from green to gray, stood hesitantly and launched into an explanation so unlike him that I'd rather our grandchildren didn't know about it.

  Mulvaney's stories, especially Mulvaney-true stories, are told with triumph. They are Irish drinking songs with no hangover. Romance with no breakups. Rebel music but only if the rebels win. This was none of those things.

  I could see on his face that he imagined he'd never be a reporter again.

  Everyone talked at once. The PR man tapped his lighter for order. I turned my head, hoping to focus it on anything that did not shine. But my eyes stopped, instead, at more glare, the silver gun in the prison officer's holster.

  I remembered the guns in Suzie's couch.

  “Hold it!” I said. “Silver's wrong.”

  “It's a lovely color, dear,” my mother insisted. “And a neutral shade.”

  “Ida!” my father said.

  I watched Mulvaney's pallor disappear. He knew what I knew and tilted his head to the door.

  “Uh, outside please,” I said to the Real Mulvaney. Then to the others, “I want to speak to our lawyer.”

  Mulvaney, my Mulvaney, the unreal one, smiled blue.

  “He can't practice here,” said the boy PR man.

  “He can if I authorize him on my behalf,” the solicitor argued with magisterial self-importance.

  “Have you ever been to Rockaway?” I asked him.

  In the ballroom, I gripped the Real Mulvaney's arm. “The guns they say they found are silver. The guns Suzie kept in the couch were black matte.”

  He nodded. “The bad guys always use matte because they don't glow in the dark.”

  As far as I was concerned, they were all bad guys. “So who uses silver?”

  “People who are supposed to have guns.”

  “Like cops?”

  “Like prison officers,” the Real Mulvaney said. “Silver guns are easier to keep. They don't rot like the black ones.”

  Nothing like imagining a good story and then actually coming up with a fact. And what was that photo of silver guns if not a fact? The Brits had planted a pile of silver guns under Mulvaney's bed. Their own guns. Then they'd retrieved them as “evidence.”

  “Be careful,” the Real Mulvaney said. “You could make it worse. Let Pete and Gary handle this. Unless, of course, you think you can prove it.”

  If only I could imagine an expert witness, one who knew weapons and how to use them. A distinguished academic type, Irish, with connections to all factions in this farce. He would get Mulvaney off and sweep me away to a quiet French restaurant, one that really was in France. Then he'd pour the red wine for me, not as well as Mulvaney but more quietly, with fewer spills, and gently offer me the opportunity to decide between the two of them.

  No. He would tell me there was no need to decide. I could have them both.

  The key to being a happy woman: Live with true love and an escape route.

  In real life the PR man called us back inside and announced that the Northern Irish Secretary intended to arrest me, too, for stealing prison guards' guns and giving them to Mulvaney.

  This, I told him, would not improve the romance.

  “You've done it now,” Mulvaney says. He is back from California, without a deal or a refusal. We know people who've gone on for years like this. It is the same as some marriages.

  “This is what every woman wants,” he says. “To aggrandize a man in her imagination and make him fall in love with her. Then knock him down so that she can spend the rest of her days telling him he is a failure who has made her life a prison sentence.”

  “You don't know how it ends,” I say.

  “It ends with you,” he says. “Proving you can't share a story.”

  True-true: I don't know how it ends either.

  But I bet someone in Hollywood has an implausible suggestion.

  CHAPTER 39

  Can We Get It Annulled?

  Ian Paisley stood over Mulvaney and banged his Orangeman's walking stick, hard, on the marble floor of Stormont.

  “I saved this young man's life because I believed he was a fair and balanced reporter,” he bellowed in his broad Northern Irish brogue. “Now I hear that he is nothing more than a Papist-loving gunrunner, aided by a Jewish floozie!”

  Decades later, Ian Paisley would recount how his words on the occasion of the Mulvaney arrest were heard far and wide—in Australia, even—and became the slogan for a great global communications network.

  “I am not a floozie,” my mother declared.

  “Ida!” everyone—except the Northern Irish Secretary—said in unison. “He's not talking about you!”

  Clutching Queen Asta, my mother dug into her psychedelic carry-on and pulled out Exodus, her airplane book.

  “A homicidal Jewish floozie!” Paisley added.

  Who, I wondered, had told him about my kindergarten teacher?

  My mother shook her finger at Paisley and waved Leon Uris in his face. “People who have an ancient history in a land should run it.”

  I put my head in my hands. My mother was shouting IRA rhetoric at Ian Paisley.

  The room went silent. Like the start of a funeral.

  Then from out of nowhere came a tap-tap-tap.

  The old bear was tapping his walking stick. Thoughtfully.

  I saw my mother examining his face. She took a breath.

  “As a Protestant . . .” my mother said.

  Mouths around the room dropped.

  “As a Protestant Jew . . .”

  Paisley stopped tapping and looked at my mother with genuine interest. “I understand what the good Unionists of Northern Ireland are suffering. . . .”

  Where had she learned to flip-flop on the big issues like this? From watching American presidential elections on television? From Brooklyn Democratic politics? The shul? The shtetl?

  “I grew up in a place where the people all worked hard,” my mother continued. “They didn't drink.” She glared at me, the Real Mulvaney, Peter King, even at Mulvaney. “They held jobs and minded their own business, and they were still oppressed because of their religion!”

  A small smile appeared on Ian Paisley's face.

  Felshtin, a tale for all persuasions.

  Slowly he bent over to pet Queen Asta. “Indeed, it was canines that helped our people win the siege of Londonderry in 1689.”

  Yeah, I thought, they ate them to stay alive.

  Paisley raised his stick. “We, the Protestants of Northern Ireland,” he boomed, “made sure that this land was ruled not by a Johnny-come-lately Catholic king but by those who had a verifiable ancient claim. The British. The least they could do is put us in charge.” Paisley's voice resounded through Stormont Castle. “Instead they want us to pay taxes for dole payments to Catholic women who live like rich American television stars.”

  So Ronald Reagan wasn't the only one with a welfare queen.

  Paisley grunted. Then, just when it seemed as if this whole ridiculous twist would be received with the dismissive reaction it deserved, my mother put her hands together, like a good churchgoer, and thanked “the saintly Protestant farmer” who had risked his life to save hers.

  “Praise the Lord!” Paisley said, raising his walking stick toward the heavens.

  The last time she told that story, I could have sworn the farmer was Catholic.

  “Can everyone who isn't under arrest and doesn't expect to be meet me outside?” Gary Ackerman said, quick as a wink.

  In a startling surge of overconfidence, Queen Asta, my mother, Peter King, the Real M
ulvaney, the Real Solicitor, Ian Paisley, Britain's Secretary for Northern Ireland, his PR man, and my father followed Ackerman back into the ballroom.

  Mulvaney and I stayed. Coconspirators again.

  Codefendants, too.

  The negotiators returned a half hour later to announce a settlement. We would be released as long as no one ever mentioned the planted guns.

  Mulvaney and I looked into each other's eyes. We both knew the drill. Agree to anything. Write later.

  “This settlement could not have been accomplished without Reverend Paisley,” the PR man said, confirming, despite the old bear's complaints, that Protestant Unionists had undue influence over the British government in Northern Ireland.

  “I do like it,” Paisley said. “Ida and I have a lot in common. And I don't mind the homicide of the kindergarten teacher too much.” He bent over to pat Queen Asta and chuckled. “Lord knows, we've got plenty of old homicides here.”

  Everyone nodded cautiously.

  “There's only one problem!” Paisley boomed. The crowd drew closer. Slowly he raised his walking stick and pointed it at Mulvaney and me.

  “They've made a mockery of everything we the good Protestant people of Northern Ireland, the rightful and righteous leaders of this province, hold sacred!” He took a breath and recovered. “They have violated the sanctity of marriage in pursuit of tawdry reporters' stories!”

  “I never—” I began.

  “Oh, that's easy,” my mother interrupted. “They'll just get married.”

  “No!” I pleaded, envisioning a chuppah on the deck of Pier 92.

  “Shush!” said everyone, except the British Secretary for Northern Ireland.

  Gary Ackerman nodded at Paisley, who nodded back. Then the congressman hurriedly pushed us into the ballroom, downstairs, outside, down the steps, and into a commodious taxi, as if Mulvaney was a deposed Third World dictator with American protection and a large entourage.

  In the backseat, Mulvaney took a sip from a bottle of gin that had materialized out of nowhere. Had Suzie planted it in the taxi? Her last act before she went on the run?