Chapter Fifty-Three
Fifty-Three
No one on this side of the city called it Londonderry. Londonderry was the name the loyalists used, and there weren’t many loyalists here in Bogside, a community just west of the River Foyle.
Tiny row house communities stretched for dozens of blocks in each direction; paint was chipped from the walls that surrounded every tiny back garden.
Someone had spray-painted “IRA” on a wall nearby—quite recently, it seemed—and a crafted stone sign at the head of the development read “End British Internment of Irish Republicans.”
This was the heart of Derry; these people weren’t pleased to be part of the United Kingdom, to put it mildly, and even though the vast majority of the IRA killing had stopped with the peace accords decades earlier, there was still dissent, and counterdissent, and some people here continued to suffer for their disloyalty to the Crown.
The skies were low and ashen gray; darker wisps of pasty clouds hung seemingly within reach, and the frigid wet air kept most people in their homes. Christmas decorations in windows did little to brighten the day.
Those who did walk the narrow pavements towards the few low-end shops here on the east bank of the River Foyle were all bundled up in coats and hats, many carrying umbrellas.
On Meenan Drive, the sixth tiny house on the left looked like all the others: flaked paint walls, a tile roof that needed repair, a wooden gate on rusty hinges that led to the car park.
The woman who lived in the sixth house on Meenan stood in her tiny back garden, arms across her chest to ward off the cold that her heavy coat couldn’t keep out, and she stood there on a cracked patio watching her son crawl in his heavy jumper.
He was eight months old and moving surprisingly well, his head up, his curly blond hair blowing in the wet breeze as he awkwardly played with an orange ball on the ground.
Bumping it with an arm, a hand, his head.
It was silly, but he was having fun, and it made the woman smile.
Twenty-four-year-old Deirdre Coyle reached for her phone to take a video for her ma, but realized she’d left it inside on the kitchen table, so she darted in to fetch it.
Inside, she answered a quick text from a friend; it only took her a moment, and then she stepped back out into the back garden, tightening her jacket as she did so.
She had her attention focused on the device in her hand, and it wasn’t until she looked up towards little Ronan, still sitting there on the wet concrete with his ball, did she realize a man was there, in her garden, standing next to the wet linen hanging on the line, the wooden gate door shut behind him.
She lurched back when she saw him, and her phone dropped to the ground. He wore a coat with a hood, had a dark brown beard, and his hands were stuffed in his pockets.
He stood three steps away from her child.
Though instantly terrified, she manufactured a little strength in her voice when she spoke. “Who the feck are you?”
Her eyes flitted down to her son, and she saw him looking up at the man now.
The man put a gloved finger to his lips, indicating she should keep quiet.
He stepped a little closer, then surprised her by sitting down on a small chair by the table. “Can I talk to you for a moment? Then I’ll go. I promise.”
He was American. She sat down across from him; her eyes kept checking her son.
He said, “I’m not here for him.”
“Why would you be here for him?”
The man did not respond for several seconds; he almost seemed confused by the comment. Finally, he said, “I’m not here for you, either.”
“What you want, then?”
“I’m here for him. For your father-in-law. I know that you know where he is. And you know how to get in touch with him.”
“You’re the American. The killer.”
The man nodded.
The chill in the air seemed to blow through her bones.
He said, “I’ve learned a lot about Charlie in the past several days. A lot I couldn’t have known before our paths crossed. He was just a regular guy, but a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, working the wrong job for the wrong employer when the wrong thing was done to the wrong person.”
Softly, with apprehension and no small amount of confusion in her voice, she said, “Aye.”
“I’m the wrong person,” he said, confessing, it seemed, to the murder of her husband.
Deirdre did not speak. She could tell he wanted to talk, so she decided to let him. Still…her hands shook now. Her body shivered.
The American said, “He got me good.” He touched his breast. “Right here. Any other day, he’d have been the one walking away from that encounter, not me.” He shrugged. “I had a vest.”
When he said nothing else, she finally found the words.
“You had to kill him. That it? You had to fight it out with Bulgarian mobsters, couldn’t have stayed home in America and watched the telly, gone to work in an office, paid yer taxes, and raised yer bloody children like the rest of the world?
You’se sayin’ it wasn’t your fault, that you was forced to pick up a gun and go swinging it around a nightclub full of gangsters.
“You just had to. That yer story, yeah?”
A long exhale, nearly silent, came from the man; his body slowly deflated with it.
He looked to Ronan, then back to Deirdre.
He said, “It won’t make any sense to you.
It won’t change a thing. But…yes. I went there with a purpose, a purpose I believed in.
Still believe in. Everything after that, everything that happened to those men.
To your Charlie…it wasn’t my plan, but I know that what I did, in the end, did manage to make a—”
She shouted over him. “Why the feck are you here? You can’t be so daft to think I’m gonna believe ya, gonna forgive ya.
Sure, if you need me to beg for the life of me boy, for me own life, I’ll get down on me bloody knees, but there’s nothing else I have that you could possibly want, so why don’t you feckin—”
“I told you I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I just need to find your father-in-law.”
She pulled swirling locks back over an ear. “I’d have thought it would’ve been ’im tryin’ to find you.”
“That’s already happened. He came to America. A lot of people have died because of it. I need to put an end to this.”
“End it by killing Campbell Coyle, ya mean?”
The American shrugged. “End it, one way or the other.”
“ ‘One way or the other’ won’t bring my Charlie back.”
The American shook his head now. “No. It won’t do anything like that.”
“And an old man’s vengeance on you is not my problem, is it?”
“It’s not about vengeance with your dad.”
“He’s not my da. He’s my dead husband’s da. He’s Campbell bloody Coyle to me, when I’m not calling him ‘that eejit son of a bitch.’ ”
She cocked her head. “But…if it’s not about vengeance, what’s it about, then? All the killin’ you say he’s done?”
The American said, “It’s about this little innocent guy right here.
Campbell has it in his head that someday, in eighteen years, maybe, your little boy is going to pick up a knife or a gun and come looking for the American who killed his father.
I thought it was insane when Campbell told me this a few days ago.
Now…now things have changed. Now I feel exactly what Ronan might someday feel. ”
Deirdre scoffed. “My Ronan won’t be a Coyle. He’ll be a McDermott, just like his ma, as soon as I get me maiden name back.” She added, “He won’t know about the legacy of murder and depravity and foolishness on his da’s side.”
The man said, “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You raise that kid right, not the way I was raised, not the way Campbell was raised, Charlie was raised. You raise him pretty much any other way, and none of us have anything to worry about.”
“I plan on raising him right.”
“I have money. If you need—”
“I don’t want yer money. I have a job now. I pay me bills.”
“But I can help.”
“You’ve done yer damage. There’s no makin’ up fer it.”
The man with the beard looked down.
She said, “I can stop Ronan from coming fer ya in the future. He’s not gonna have a fecked-up childhood where that’s gonna make a lick of sense to him. I can promise ya that. But I cannot stop Campbell from coming fer you now.”
Now the man looked back up. “I’m here because I want him to do that. We were close, he and I. Not much farther away than I am to that street out there, and we were armed, but it didn’t happen, and then he left. I think he’s come back to Northern Ireland to regroup.
“I just need you to tell me where he is.”
She thought a long time, then said, “The second to last thing I want to do in this world is protect Campbell Coyle.”
The man seemed to understand immediately. “And the last thing in the world you want to do is help the man who killed your husband.”
“Ya may be a monster,” Deirdre said. “But yer not bloody stupid.”
She added, “ ’Ere’s what I’ll do. I’ll call him. Campbell. I’ll tell him to call ya. Tell him yer here. Ya didn’t come for Ronan, though God knows ya could have done us both right here and there was nothing to stop ya.”
The man shook his head. “That won’t change anything. Coyle killed my father the other day. He and I are on a collision course. I’m not coming here to talk him out of anything. I’m here to kill him.”
The young woman stared at the American for a very long time. Finally, she said, “I feel sorry for all you lot. You know no other way. But rest assured, Ronan will know another way. He won’t grow up in your world.”
The American said nothing.
“Charlie killed some people in Africa. He didn’t talk much about it. But he drank, and he blamed himself fer something. I think he knew what he did was wrong.”
“Even if what he did wasn’t wrong, in this line of work, it’s the doing it that gets to you.”
He then said, “Please. Tell Campbell to give me a place to meet him. We’ll end this. He doesn’t do that, and I’ll keep looking. Just like he did to me in America. Sooner or later, this will end. But we might as well settle it sooner.”
She nodded; the wind blew her red hair in her face.
The American rose to his feet. “Thank you. I wish you both a long, peaceful life.”
“I can’t say the same for you, sir. God forgive me, I know I should…but I just can’t. Charlie meant too much to me.”
There was a sadness in his voice. “I get it.”
The man turned away, stepped out through the gate, shut it behind him, and walked out onto the street, as Deirdre Coyle stood, hefted her son, and held him close, warming him from the cold.
Protecting him from the world.