An Unexpected Guest (15 page)

Niall laughed.
“Touché.”

“You’ve become French-speaking.”

He laughed again. “You always were a clever one. Quiet but clever. That’s what first took me about you. That and…”

They both looked at her hands. They were so thin, so fine, and the rings Edward had given her sparkled. She clasped her fingers together on her lap, covering the diamonds. “Where have you been, Niall? You’re supposed to be dead.”

Niall closed his eyes. She could see the exhaustion in the skin around them. He looked the same but different, no longer old for his age but timeless, his body still lean, but the black of his now-cropped short hair flecked with gray. He was wearing a dark blue cotton sweater, boots, and faded blue jeans. Clare felt an unsolicited stirring in her own body. When he reopened his lids, his eyes were just the same as they’d always been: penetrating.

“You could say I
am
dead. You as good as killed me. But, Mother of God have mercy on me, I’m not here to ask you why you did what you did. I’m not here to give out to you. I just want my life back.”

A sparrow flew to their feet, pecked around, and left. She searched his face for an explanation. Probably she would not have the life she had today, would never even have married Edward, if she hadn’t first known Niall. She would have become a secondary school language teacher at a good private academy or maybe worked for an international bank, sending her kids to do their First Communion, wearing a claddagh ring as a tribute to her heritage. She would have married a fellow Harvard grad or maybe one of the boys from her hometown in Connecticut. They would have gone to reunions together and remembered mutual classmates over beers and sweet cocktails with other alumni couples. Without Niall, she’d have done nothing, known nothing. He’d forced her to resurrect herself from the ashes of his betrayal. But what had she done to him? She’d meant nothing to him. He’d used her, and then he’d left her.

She looked at the hands, in her lap, that had first drawn him to her, the skin on them translucent. She’d looked at them this morning and seen the spidery veins of an aging woman. She’d looked at her face in the mirror and seen the years she’d spent without him.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

A ringing, a ridiculous sound: a clip from Mozart’s
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
They both stared at her purse. She withdrew her BlackBerry and saw the name of the caller posted on the screen.
Edward
.

She squeezed the cell phone between her palms, as though the apparatus were a small wriggly rodent, unruly, foreign and unmanageable, until it stopped ringing. She turned the ringer off, lodged it back inside her purse, and closed the zipper.

“The money,” he said. “I’m talking about the money.”

She gathered her purse up and slid to the far end of the bench, turning sideways so that she could face him head-on. The sky was brighter, the afternoon later. She could hear all the birds. She could hear the breeze in the lindens.

“Are you planning to blackmail me? Is that why you’ve come back?”

The eyelids over his still-sharp blue eyes snapped open and shut like a spring-jointed door over a summer’s day. He started to speak, then turned his face away, lifting a forearm by his face.

She heard the footsteps too and glanced over her shoulder: Two middle-aged women were strolling up the walkway from the Woods, arm in arm. They were happy. They were laughing. Clare looked back again at Niall. She watched the light in his eyes flicker over them, then relax. Crossing his arms over his chest, he turned his attention back to her.

“Blackmail you? After what I done for you? And how could I blackmail you, even if I were wanting? Think, Clare. We’re in this together.”

“I’m not in anything,” she said.

He shrugged. “
Were
in this. As you like.”

Another twosome approached, a mother pushing her baby in a stroller, talking on her phone. The museum was closing, the park was emptying.

Niall didn’t flinch this time, but he waited until the woman and her child had passed before speaking again.

“Look, you don’ have to worry about anyone ever knowing about you. I never told anyone, never will. If I had done, you’d be in the ground now yourself for what you did, wouldn’t you? That’s why I faked my own death, isn’ it? I never even told anyone you were my woman.”

Heat rushed over Clare, coloring her neck and prickling the roots of her hair. They’d lain together in damp sheets, their limbs heavy from the summer heat, and beside him her body had turned from that of a gangly girl’s into a woman’s. His pale skin, the tautness of his energy. The hollows they’d carved out of sand as they’d traveled up the coastline. His knee right now, right next to her.
Niall.
She’d looked up the meaning of his name in Widener Library: “passionate, from old Irish.”

But he was
I.R.A.
Niall had never uttered the word, but he hadn’t needed to. She had been a love-besotted stooge, ready to do whatever he asked, and asked he had, and then just as swiftly discarded her. Niall, explaining they were just helping regular people. Niall, taping those bills to her torso, still warm from his own hands. Niall, walking away from her in the airport, not even looking back.

“Who was it really for?” she said. She braced herself for the words she’d never heard, and had waited for, so many years. “That money?”

Niall took a cigarette out, tapped it. But he didn’t light it. “I understand it weren’t your country. That’s what they told me when they gave me the ticket to come over: The Americans, they like to think themselves more Irish than the Irish, but there you are, driving to the good jobs, dropping the kids off at the good schools. No one saying, Fuck off, you Fenian bastard, burning you out your own home, hammering you just for walking down the street. No bombs exploding before your eyes either. Easiest job they could have done me, collecting the funds from the Americans.”

He put the cigarette back in the pack and looked at her with that fixed way she so remembered. “But you, Clare. You were different.”

The bastard. She drew her leg away from his. “You said it was just to help ordinary people.”

“It was.”

“And the camper? The trip we made to Maryland?”

Niall sighed. “Come on, Clare. It was a war. And we were fighting the only way we could. What were we supposed to defend ourselves with? Sticks and stones? I wish it could have been different, but I done what I done and I don’t regret a second. It was for the freedom of the Irish people—it was
worth
fighting for.”

“Worth innocent bloodshed? People died, Niall.
Ordinary
people
.”

“
We
died.”

“Not just you.”

Niall shrugged. “You don’t really understand how it was. We didn’t even have a bath in our home when I was a lad. A lad like me: either you were one of them or you died fighting. But I didn’t come here to debate you. Think what you like. I’m done. I just want the money.”

“What money?”

“I know you didn’t keep it so you could spend it yourself. You hid it somewhere, didn’t you?”

“Honestly, Niall. I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“The money. That money.”

“
That
money?”

“
That
money.”

“Niall, I don’t have that money. You know that. I gave it to the man in Dublin just like you told me to do.”

Here he had to come back and sit next to her in the gardens, wearing that blue sweater and with those same piercing pale eyes, his rolling voice like swells on the sea, talking about the Troubles, talking about his peoples’ struggles, sucking her back more than two decades into a life she’d so carefully set behind her, and she’d gone and said it. If he was wearing a wire? Maybe he had come clean with the British government and made a plea bargain with them by handing her over. Would Edward be able to hire someone who could get her out of this? Would he
want
to?

Niall frowned. “You gave it to the man?”

He looked, if possible, more confused than she was. He wasn’t wearing a wire, and Interpol wasn’t waiting in a van on the street.

She tipped her head yes.

“Are you taking the piss out of me, Clare?”

A breeze brushed through the holly, causing ragged shadows to flash across his face.

She wanted to ask him the same thing. Instead she said, “No. I did what you asked. And then I waited for you. You never came.” She’d come out with it; there was no turning back. “Why didn’t you?”

“To St. Stephen’s Green? After?”

“I waited.”

“When you didn’t show up with the money, I thought maybe you’d done a runner. But how could you’ve done, you with a life like you had? So my next thought was, maybe she’s gone to the Brits.”

There must be some explanation, some code. But whatever it was, she couldn’t break it. “But, I
did
show up with the money. I’m telling you, I gave it to him just like you told me.”

He held her wrist fast. His skin was dry and heated, just as she remembered it. “I’m not playing games here. I’ve been hiding for my whole man’s life now. My cousin said it was me in that casket, he the only one who knew it was really Sean O’Faolain, what was drowned and my cousin fished him out. Sean O’Faolain lying under a gravestone with my name on it, and everyone thinking he’s the one disappeared and not me. The poor bastard, he looked so bad no one could tell the difference. I’ve been a dead man in the county records for twenty years since.

“Do you understand, Clare? I don’t exist either in life or in death. You erased me.”

Niall was still Niall, resolute, enigmatic, a battered but unfaltering church along the windswept shore, but now she was the one holding the door open, and from inside she heard the echo of weeping. She wanted to slam it shut. She wanted him to stay as she remembered, the stone she couldn’t overturn, the fire she couldn’t douse. She wanted him to stay the Niall he was in her memory. She wanted him to stay only in her memory.

She shook her wrist free from him. Still she couldn’t bring herself to stand up.

“But I don’ think you went to the Brits with it,” he continued, trying to hold her not by force anymore but by watching her face closely. “They’d have got my name out of you whether you’d wanted to give it or not, the bastards. I would have heard about it, even as a dead man. So, what, then? What did you do with it?”

His eyes were trained on hers, completely serious. He wasn’t talking in code. He meant exactly what he was asking.

“I gave it to him,” she said softly. “I swear. I did just what you said.” She saw it all. The airport. The taxi ride. The miserable house that had been the wrong color. The number beside the bell. “Eighty-three Portobello Road. Just like you said. He followed me right up. He came almost immediately. I gave it all to him. And then I waited.”

And now she waited again. Niall said nothing. Shadows emerged from his sharp eyes, lassoed her, dissipated into the late spring afternoon. He breathed in and out slowly. He stretched his arms out across the back of the bench, and leaned his head back against it.

“Eighty-three Portobello Road? You gave it to a man there?”

“Yes. I did.”

“Clare,” he said. “The address I gave you was
thirty-eight
Portobello Road. You would have gave the money to a pimp.
Eighty-three
Portobello was a whorehouse. Everyone come down to Dublin knew it.”

A
door through time dropped open beneath her, and she was falling weightless, into the past. Twenty-five years of fear and guilt, accompanying each step she put forward in life, evaporated. The ecstasy, the lightness of burden she felt, were indescribable. Replaced with something else, a strange new blend of joy and release mixed with guilt and compunction. This was the miracle she couldn’t have hoped would happen. The miracle she didn’t deserve. She had never helped kill anyone. She’d just helped a pimp get richer than he’d ever dreamt possible. A part of her wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh. She wanted to stretch out on her back in the budding grass and laugh until she cried, sending her howls of laughter up to the gathering evening above her. Laugh at her newfound freedom; laugh at the ridiculousness of how she’d earned it.

But seeing the expression on Niall’s face, she couldn’t laugh. He had trusted her, and she’d ruined him.

“I—”

Niall got up. He walked around back of the statue of Andrieu, and for a few moments, she wondered whether he might just continue walking.

“Niall—”

She heard him sigh. He came back around and sat down again beside her. She searched his face for anger, tears, anything, but his expression was impassable. “I combed the streets of Dublin. And I started thinking: could she have scared? But I saw you on the plane coming from Boston, I saw you still had the big stomach. I knew you must have brought it. So, I walked around, asking myself: what could she have done with it? I even went down to Dublin ferry, thinking you might have taken the boat to England. I asked myself: how far could have she gone, this American girl? How far would she go in betraying me?”

He stopped, as though expecting not her but history to answer the question. It had. Her imperfectness had betrayed him, completely.

“If you’d have gone to the Brits,” he continued, “if they knew about me and found me, they’d’ve put me away at least ten years, maybe twenty. I couldn’t tell my own either. Ne’er mind me. Someone would have found you and killed you. So I walked the streets of Dublin, walked them up and down, all the time asking myself which would be worse: the Brits or my own. It was like a song in my head, drumming over and over. I went out to the airport the day you were to go home and watched as every passenger boarded, waited until the plane was but a tiny speck in the sky, disappearin’ over the water.

“Can you imagine,” he said, “what that bastard would be thinking, you unloading all those dollars on him? Must have been one happy fuck.”

“Niall—” she started again.

He shook his head and stared at Andrieu’s feet. In a life of nothing but bad news, this still was a wild blow. She couldn’t think of one single thing to say. They sat in silence until he looked up at her. He shrugged and released a short laugh. “Ha.”

“I was not so smart as you thought,” she said.

He shook his head again. “Fuck. I got what I asked for, didn’t I? The whole thing was daft. The whole plan. I was just a lad, you know. It weren’t as though I was the most experienced Volunteer. Throwing rocks about all I’d done before they sent me over. That’s
why
they sent me.”

“I’d thought you were older than anyone I’d ever known.”

“So I was pretending. But I wasn’t, or I would have known better than to mix up a woman and a mission. And my own woman at that. Feck, you got me goin’, did’n’ you?”

Her chest ached. From regret, from relief, she wasn’t sure why. She crossed her arms again over it. “Look, Niall. The thing is. You—we—didn’t kill anybody. I mean weren’t involved in anyone’s dying. That’s what this means. Think about it.”

He shrugged and hung his head. “Yeah, maybe. Except for myself. You just don’ understand. I was a soldier. Killing’s not a sin when you’re a soldier.”

“Maybe not—but not everyone who died in your war was also a soldier.”

“Eh—” Niall started to speak, then stopped as the elderly trio whose path she’d crossed earlier in the main path of the garden came walking past. He lowered his head again, lifting one hand to screen it.

She turned from their vision also, feeling for a moment what Niall had doubtless felt every waking moment for the last quarter century.

“I have seen you, haven’t I?” she said once the walkers had passed out of view.

“You’re always surrounded by people. Even all the police on your street know you, so. And I didn’t know if you were with them now. So, for a long time, I just watched you. Sometimes with the papers, the Internet, sometimes for myself.”

She
had
seen him, not in Cairo, never when she was living in America. Visa issues would have made that impossible. But in England maybe, definitely in Paris. Maybe not outside the hairdresser’s, but this morning. He’d withdrawn into the obscurity of dusk and denial, unsure how or whether to let her know he was amongst the living. But he hadn’t been able to tear himself completely away.

Not, at least, from the trail of the money. He himself must have had hardly a penny.

“How did you live?”

“I got my ownself over to England on a boat and picked up work, shoveling rock or pushing sand. Day work you didn’t need a past for. When some other Nor’n Irish come along, I’d move on. Before he could start asking the questions.”

He didn’t give any specifics, and she didn’t ask.

“I saw when you got married,” he continued. “It was written up in the English papers. I saw too whose name you took. Servant of the British crown. That’s when I started feeling sure you must have done it for a reason. I took myself as far away as I could with no passport and no money to have a good one made, for a long time then. I’d seen you drawing. I knew you could do my likeness.”

“I didn’t betray you,” she said. “I’d never have done that. Not on purpose. Ed—my husband has had nothing to do with it. I never told him.”

Had he followed Edward as well? His enemy, suddenly so real, so intimately linked to his own time on this earth? Had he watched Edward leave the Residence just this morning, tall and increasingly solid in his well-made suit, seen him reach out one large manicured hand with its family ring on one finger and wedding ring on another, and open the door to the car waiting for him? Her Edward, who had protected her all these years. Her Edward, in Niall’s eyes. Had Niall shaken his head and asked himself,
So, that’s what she chose?

Her Edward. Clare started at the thought. She checked her watch. In two hours, Edward would be returning, bringing the P.U.S. with him, their guests following shortly.

Everyone expected so much from her. She, of all people! She was pale, beige, remote. She was cool, calm, efficient. She had molded herself into something perfect. But she wasn’t perfect. She was anything but perfect. And still they would keep asking all these things of her. Now, here was Niall, wanting something from her also. Something she didn’t have to give him.

“Why now?” she said, sharper than she’d meant to. She softened her voice. “If you’ve been following me all this time, if you decided to risk my being some sort of British informant, why did you step up to ask me about the money
now?
Why today?”

Niall cracked his knuckles and looked away. “The flowers. I stepped in here once, trying to keep out of sight, and saw right away you must come in here of your ownself, to sit. Next door to your house, and all the flowers—I told myself, this is where I’ll get her alone. No one for her to run to. But the fecking rain in Paris.”

“Today’s the first day of sunshine,” she said.

He dropped his hands and nodded.

She sighed. How could he know her so well? “Yes, but why
now?
If you were worried I’d turned on you, why not take the risk last spring, or last autumn, or last summer? Or ten years ago?”

Niall studied her, as though he was figuring out how much he wanted to reveal. Finally, he said, “Because when they closed down the Maze, they transferred Kieran Purcell to another prison facility, where he met a lad I’d once been working an oil rig with up in the North Sea. It was good pay, a good team, I’d stayed on longer than I should have. And they get to talking about tattoos and the ways the R.U.C. had for distinguishing Volunteers, ’cause there was a time some were getting new identities, and this guy tells Kieran he met a boy who was pretending to be from the south but was from Derry—he knew my accent, see—about five ten, black hair and eyes as light as the sky on a winter morning, who kept saying he’d been out of Ireland since 1982 and didn’t have any family there, even though everyone has family in Ireland, who had this strange scar on his neck, looked like a sickle, and what could one do about that…Ol’ Kieran, he puts it all together. So when he gets sprung this winter, he goes to my cousin and tells him he’s been wondering whether it really were me in that coffin and might it not be interesting to have the old box dug out. They’ve got all those ways now for identifying a toenail and all that, don’t they. And then ol’ Kieran says if it turns out not to be me in there, where was I, and what did my cousin know about it, because he knew my cousin was like my own brother, and we queued up together to join the Struggle, and he the one who said it were O’Faolain he pulled out of the water. And that’s when my cousin put the notice in the paper, like we agreed twenty-five years ago, if ever any trouble come on him.”

“You mean this man Kieran wants the money? If you hand it over to him, he will leave it alone? But if not…?”

“Kieran was a good man. Dedicated to the Cause. Half the years I’ve been hiding, he spent in the H Block. He’s not looking to go back in there for no good reason.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I mean they’re saying it’s all peace and good neighbors now, but people remember. One tout tried to go back a couple years ago, had been hiding in some village in England. Did you read about him? He died an accidental death soon after. And twenty years in prison, you think ol’ Kieran’s going to get a job now?”

“You mean this Kieran knows about the money that went missing and if he was to get it, he wouldn’t tell anyone you’re still alive? That your cousin covered for you?”

“Feck, Clare, I dunno. Sure, he knows about the money. Maybe he’ll keep his gob shut and disappear to Barbados. Ol’ Kieran. Or maybe he just wants to know I wasn’t fecking with them—he gave his best years to the Cause, spent them in prison, didn’t he—and will give it all to the Church. Most likely he turns it over to whoever’s still kindling a flame, and gets a pension for his woman. It’s not like my cousin was asking him to spell out his plans. You don’t feckin’ ask questions of people like Kieran. I just know he wants the money, and if he doesn’t get it, he’s going to put trouble on my cousin.”

She shifted on the bench. “But if you gave him the money and he handed it over to whomever… They’d know you were alive. Wouldn’t they, mightn’t they…?” She wasn’t sure how best to put this. “You know?”

“Come looking for me?” Niall shrugged. “If they did, I’d feckin’ well deserve it. But my cousin’ll spin them some yarn about a tout going to the R.U.C. on me and the money, and that’s why I went into hiding. He convinced everyone it was me in the coffin, didn’t he? They’re old men now, the ones who knew me. They get the feckin’ money and that will be the end of it.”

And she saw in his eyes the hesitation.

He took her hand up, looked at the palm, then laid it back down on her knee, arranging it like a mortuary worker arranging the limbs of a corpse.

“I mean,” he said, “if you still had it. If you hadn’t given it over to the wrong person.”

He stood up and shook his head.

“Forget it. Forget it.”

But it had been there. For a moment, he’d been ready to ask her. Even though he knew she didn’t have
that
money. She stood up, too, still exactly his height, still eye to eye. He knew about her comfortable lifestyle. “Where will you go?”

“Same place I’ve been all these years. Nowhere.” He turned to leave.

“No.”

He stopped and looked at her.

She reached her hand out and, gently feeling her way between his hair and collar, ran her finger down the slick silvery length of his scar, a familiarity she’d never dared when they were lovers.

He didn’t flinch but took her hand slowly away with his, lowered it to her side, left it there. They stood in silence, watching each other.

“You never were like the other girls, Clare. Still aren’t.”

She shook her head.

“I would have come back, you know. I would have.”

“Niall—”

“There’s a church next to the Centre Pompidou.”

He paused. When she didn’t say anything further, he squeezed her hand and stepped back. “Tomorrow I’m gone. That’s how you want it, you’ll ne’er lay eyes on me again.”

He walked away, disappearing amidst the sharp-edged trees.