The Whole Truth (6 page)
She dropped by a café to eat. When the Earl Grey and blueberry scones came, she barely touched them. She paid her bill and left, her disinterested expression lingering behind somehow as though her weariness had the power to create solid mass from the shitty circumstances of her life.
She didn’t like being depressed, or one binge away from destroying her life again, perhaps for good. She knew she had to take steps to turn herself around, and that included more than leaving the bottle alone. The alcohol was capable of crushing her, certainly. Yet Katie knew her real demons lay
within
, much of it emanating from the death of an innocent little boy. It was a guilty secret of devastating degree.
And every minute she could feel those demons trying to take her over. She walked down the crowded street in Glasgow feeling more alone than ever.
D
UBLIN WAS ONE OF
Shaw’s favorite cities. With a pub and bookstore on virtually every corner, what wasn’t to love? Half the population was under thirty and the second most spoken language was Mandarin Chinese: young, diverse, and well-read pub dwellers, who often settled differences with a glib Irish tongue, speedy Irish fists, or sometimes both.
Shaw had gotten into two fights in Dublin pubs, both one-punch victories for him. He could have held back and made them suffer, but combat to him had always had one rule: when given the opening, deliver the haymaker and let somebody else sweat the eulogy.
When the opponents had regained consciousness they’d each asked the victor his name.
“Shaw.”
“Scottish?”
“No.” The truth was Shaw didn’t really know his origins. For him, one past was often as good as another, when you needed it to be.
“Well, damn, that explains it,” one of them had said in his brogue, with soft, truncated vowels and rock-hard consonants as he rubbed his smashed jaw. “You’re bloody Irish!”
After tossing his bags in his hotel room and changing clothes, Shaw pounded along the 709 hectares of Phoenix Park, a green paradise over twice the size of Central Park. Along his run he passed the residences of the U.S. ambassador and the Irish president and failed to salute at either one, though at various times he’d worked for both as a freelancer. He covered five miles in half an hour. Not his personal best, but a good pace. He could run it faster and he knew the time would come when he would have to.
He returned to his hotel, took two showers, put on lotion and extra swipes of deodorant, and still swore he could smell the stink of the Amsterdam canal oozing from his every pore. He checked his watch. He still had some time to kill so he took a stroll, finally reaching the spot on the river Liffey where as recently as 1916 the Brits had sent a gunboat up and commenced lobbing shells into Dublin proper to quell the “Uprising.” It was no wonder, Shaw thought, that the Irish were still a bit prickly with respect to their neighbors to the east.
Wars. They were the easiest things to start and hardest things to end. Shaw knew this, unfortunately, from experience.
He checked his watch again. It was time to go see Anna.
Anna Fischer. Born in Stuttgart, university-educated in England and France, she was now currently living in London, except when she was giving a speech, which she was doing in Dublin. Hence Shaw was here too. He and Anna often hooked up around the world, yet this time was different. And the nerveless Shaw suddenly felt his heart rate quicken and his breathing grow more shallow. It really was time.
T
HE WALK TO TRINITY COLLEGE
took only about ten minutes with Shaw’s long-gaited pace and pent-up anticipation. Her lecture nearly over, he waited for his lady across from a side entrance to the college close to Maggie’s Bookshop, a favorite of theirs. He spent a few minutes chatting with the woman who ran the shop.
On one shelf he found a copy of a book that Anna had written on the subject of the origins of fascist governments entitled
A Historical Examination of Police States.
The love of his life was fun-loving in many ways, emotional and romantic, but she also possessed an IQ far to the north of genius level and the issues that dominated her professional life were serious ones indeed. Was there ever a more potent combination to win someone’s heart than brains and beauty?
When Anna came out, the hug lingered. She pressed her long fingers directly into the small of his back, kneading as she moved up the spine. She could always sense pain in him and he was a man who hid such things extremely well.
“Tense?” she asked, her German accent virtually nonexistent. Anna Fischer could speak fifteen languages at last count and all of them like a native. After six years at Oxford writing brilliant research papers and books, she had joined the UN as a simultaneous translator. After that stint, she’d accepted a position at a think tank in London and did work on international policies and global issues of unfathomable complexity with not an easy answer in sight. She was certainly far smarter than Shaw, yet never made him feel it.
“A little.”
“Bad flight from Holland?”
“Ride was great. Just an old rugby injury.” Actually it was the free fall into the canal cesspool, but she didn’t need to know that.
“Boys and their games,” she said in a mock scolding tone. “Is that how you got that?” She pointed to the bruise on his face courtesy of the Iranian who would never see freedom again.
“Luggage came out of the plane bin faster than I thought it would. Looks worse than it is.”
When they finally let go of each other, Anna stared up at him, but at five-eleven and wearing two-inch pumps she didn’t have to crane her neck too much. Still, Shaw had never been more grateful for his imposing height.
“How was the speech?” he asked.
“It was fairly well attended. However, in the interests of full disclosure I have to add that the heightened numbers were probably due largely to the catered food from the best Indian restaurant in town, and the open bar. I’m disappointed you missed it. I could have at least imagined you in your skivvies.”
“Why imagine when you can see it for real?”
She kissed him and intertwined her long fingers through his thick ones.
He held out her book he’d purchased.
“You
paid
for it? I could’ve given you one for free. They sent me all the unsold copies. They were so numerous I used them as furniture in my office.”
“Well, this one you’re getting the full royalty on. Will you sign it for me?”
She took out her pen and wrote something in the book. When he tried to see what, she said, “Read it later. After Dublin.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re interested in police states?” she asked.
“As much as I get around I’m usually in one at least once a month.”
He’d literally run into her on a Berlin side street three years ago. She was in the process of being mugged by two men and he’d just finished a solo mission not unlike the one in Amsterdam and was not in a particularly good mood. When the thugs saw him they made a big mistake by thinking they’d rob two birds at the same time. The police showed up a few minutes after Shaw called them when he’d finished beating both men unconscious. He’d hit one of them so hard he had nearly broken his hand on the man’s skull.
He’d walked Anna back to her hotel after she refused to go to a hospital. He held ice against her face for an hour and then slept on the floor of her hotel room because she was still so unnerved by the attack.
Shaw had never had a serious relationship with a woman before. That might have stemmed from his relationship with his mother, or rather his lack of one.
Abandonment did that to you.
Yet from the moment he saw Anna Fischer, bruised and bloodied though she was, on that dimly lit avenue in the German capital, Shaw knew that his heart was no longer his alone.
Nearly three years had now passed and her feelings had clearly deepened toward him. He knew that Anna loved him. Yet he could sense her growing bewilderment at his lack of commitment.
Well, that was about to end. Shaw was not yet free from Frank but he could wait no longer. He would make this work. Somehow.
“You’re pensive,” she said over dinner. At age thirty-eight she still wore her hair long. It curved seductively around her sculpted Germanic bones.
“No, just hungry. With men they carry the same expression. I suppose they don’t serve coddle here.” It was a working-class meal of rashers, potatoes, onion, and sausages with pepper poured thick.
“Not here, no, but we can go elsewhere.”
“That’s okay. Food’s gotten better in Dublin over the years.”
“Yes, though I still can’t understand why Irish stew has no carrots.” She smiled impishly over her wineglass. “Even the British have carrots in their stew.”
“And that’s exactly why the Irish don’t.”
Later, as they were finishing their meals she said, “So what were you doing in Amsterdam this time?”
“As little as possible.”
“Your consultancy work slowing down?”
“Come on. I have a place I want to take you to.”
Shaw could feel the strain in his voice and sensed that Anna could too.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You’re acting very mysteriously.”
Shaw tongued his dry lips and attempted to smile. “I thought that was one of the things you liked about me. Mystery?”
He didn’t believe his own words and it was clear she didn’t either.
He rose. His legs quivered a bit and he silently cursed himself.
I jumped into a damn canal from four stories up and beat a gang of nuclear terrorist nutcases almost single-handedly. You’d think I could manage this without acting like a lovesick teenager.
A little later they entered a small pub north of the Liffey, which was the decidedly poorer and less glamorous half of Dublin. Yet Shaw liked it here, as did Anna.
As she’d once said, “How can you possibly not love every molecule of a city that produced Swift, Stoker, G. B. Shaw, Yeats, Wilde, Beckett, and Heaney? And the master, Joyce.”
Just to see her reaction he’d answered, “I’m more into Roddy Doyle.”
“And I’m more into Maeve Binchy,” she’d shot back.
He ordered for them, which was unusual. When it arrived she said, “What is it?”
“Barm brack. It’s sort of a fruitcake.”
“Fruitcake! Don’t they use those for doorstops and to poison people?”
Shaw cut her a slice. “Just try it. You’re an adventurous gal.”
Anna stabbed the cake with her fork and it clinked against something. Her wide eyes grew even wider as she probed the barm until her fingers closed around it.
Shaw said, “Legend has it that if you find the ring in the barm brack, you’re destined to be married.”
There was no turning back now, he knew. The next few moments would decide his entire life, and the sweat burned through his shirt. He drew a deep breath, slipped from his chair, and rested one knee on the old plank floor that was worn smooth from centuries of drunks and at least one man proposing. Taking her shaky hand in his firm one, he slipped the ring on her finger and said, “Anna, will you marry me?”
T
HE DRUM-DRUM OF THE RAIN
woke him. As he tried to get back to sleep the vibration next to his head elicited a small groan from him.
Shaw snatched up the device and read the message he’d just been sent.
Frank.
In the bed next to him was Anna. They’d properly consummated their engagement and then drank a bottle of Dom, glasses balanced precariously on flat bellies.
She slept soundly as Shaw rose, walked into the adjoining room, and punched in a number, knowing it would be answered immediately.
“Your gig over in old Dublin?” Frank said cheerfully. Shaw could imagine the man lounging in a chair somewhere, probably several time zones away, wearing the smug, shit-eating grin that masters reserved for conversations with their servants.
“What, your men not checking in with you regularly? Not that you need them to.” Shaw stared at his right side when he said this, where the old scar was. “And by the way, it’s 3 a.m. here. The thought ever run through that thick head of yours?”
“We’re a 24/7 op, Shaw. You know the rules.”
“
Your
rules.”
He yanked open the drapes and stared out at a dismal curtain of rain drenching the area.
“We need you, Shaw.”
“No you don’t. And even people like me need some damn R&R.”
“I can tell from your grumpy tone that you’re not alone.”
Shaw of course knew that Frank knew exactly where he was and who was with him. Yet the other man’s tone made him look away from the window and then race back to the bedroom to check on Anna. She was still sleeping peacefully, blissfully unaware that he was currently haggling with a professional psycho.
One of the woman’s long, elegantly formed legs lay on top of the sheet. It made Shaw want to wake her up, make love to her again. But then he had Frank on the phone. He returned to the other room and gazed out the window, exploring every crevice of the streets and alleys below for Frank’s boys. They were down there. They were always down there.
“Shaw, you still breathing?”
“I told you where I was going. So why keep me under the scope?”
“You did it to yourself. With all this crazy talk about retirement.”
“It
wasn’t
crazy talk. I’m done, Frank. The last one
was
the last one.”
Shaw could envision Frank shaking his head with the dent in the back from where he’d been shot at close range with a nine-millimeter SIG Sauer sporting custom grips. Shaw knew these intimate details because he’d been the one who’d shot Frank.
“We have a lot of work to do. The world is a very dangerous place.”
“Yeah, because of people like you.”
“It’s noble what we do, Shaw. It’s a matter of honor.”
“Save the babble for the rookies.”
Shaw heard the squeak of the chair as Frank sat up straighter.
Okay, here it comes.
Frank’s voice was tight and hard as cement. “And where exactly are you going to retire
to
, you prick? A supermax facility?”