The little Afghan boy’s name had been Behnam. She’d been told the name meant goodness and honor. And he had possessed both qualities she’d found. Curly black hair, a smile that could melt the stoniest of hearts, full of life right up to the moment it was violently taken from him.
Her fault. He’d died. She’d lived. But not quite all of her had made it. A part of Katie had perished with the child. When she’d received the second Pulitzer her emotions had been such that no wordsmith, no matter how gifted, could have hoped to capture them in mere language. It was her night; everyone was telling her how brave, how wonderful, how talented she was. Her wounded arm bundled up in thick bandages and a brace, the really serious internal damage the bullet had done mostly hidden away in her emaciated, weakened body, had only seemed to emphasize in a dramatically visual way her unequivocal birthright to the prize. Yes, a deserving winner if ever there was one. She’d smiled, hugged them all with her one good wing, and generally given off the aura of someone perfectly at peace with herself and her exalted position in life.
She’d gone home alone that night to her apartment in New York and woken up the next morning in her underwear on her living room floor, an empty bottle of Jack on her gut, hating herself. Yes, perfectly at peace. Other than her very soul having been rent in two, she was doing fine.
CHAPTER 10
KATIE SAT AT THE FUNERAL and took copious notes that she would somehow fit into a story that people would read one minute and forget the next. Walking back from the gravesite she exchanged a few pleasantries with people she didn’t know. Her reputation had suffered such shipwreck that no one there recognized her other than one old codger from the Times who shot her a condescending smile. He was eighty-four. He should be covering the death page, she felt; it was a great way for him to check up on his contemporaries. Yet it was also very plainly true that he was here because he wanted to be. Katie was here because she had nowhere else to go.
Back in her hotel room she typed up her piece. The official bio of the departed Scot had long since been archived, as were those of all persons with even a remote connection to celebrity. Her story was simply to add atmosphere, her take on the proceedings. Yet there were only a few ways to describe the event of someone’s passing. People are sad; people cry. People go home and keep on living; the departed, out of necessity, stays behind.
Andrew MacDougal had enjoyed a long career in European politics but had been “retired” for over thirty years and thus he’d long since faded from the public eye. The whole story would encompass fewer than five hundred words and it would only be that long because the president of Katie’s newspaper was Scottish. If there was a picture attached to the story, it would no doubt show the dead man in this prime kilting years.
She shook her head at the thought of it. A nearly seven-hour flight to London and a ratty connector to Glasgow, with the same on the way back. All that for a man who’d ended his political career when Katie was still a child. And all while the news story of the millennium was playing out right before her eyes.
She of course had been following closely the events of Konstantin and all the rest. She had even sent carefully worded e-mails to her editor suggesting that perhaps since she was over this way anyway, a trip to Moscow might be worthwhile. She took it as a bad sign that he never bothered to respond.
I write about dead people while the story that could resurrect my career rolls on. Lucky, lucky me.
After she e-mailed her obit masterpiece off, Katie had the rest of the day free. Hell, she might even extend her stay. It wasn’t like she had anything to go back to. She could venture to the ancient city of Edinburgh, which was just a short hop to the east. Glasgow was Scotland’s largest city and not particularly inviting ground for a recovering alcoholic since it was filled with enticing pubs and clubs. By comparison, the capital of Edinburgh was a bit more sedate. And who knew, another hundred-year-old Scotsman worthy of obit page status might drop dead while she was here. She could bag two prone Scots with one roll of parchment. If she were lucky she might even get a bonus.
Katie made a wide detour around the hotel bar and hit the streets.
She’d never really spent much time in Scotland. Ireland was where all the news was, at least when the IRA was active. Very early in her career she’d once been caught in a crossfire in Belfast that had gone on for half a day. She’d phoned in the story while squatting behind a rusted Fiat and dodging bullets. After it was over, she’d made the bar rounds, and then taken a bath back at her hotel. It was only then that she’d found the flattened bullet stuck in her hair. It must have ricocheted off something. She’d kept that slug all these years; it was her lucky piece. Yes, she kept it, wore it around her neck in fact, despite it obviously having stopped working a long, long time ago.
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.
CHAPTER 11
DUBLIN 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.