“What’s your name?”

“Michael Connelly.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Tell him I used to work for the Sparkle Clean laundry service on the Road back in the day.”

“That place closed down years ago.”

“We’re thinking about going back into business.”

There was another silence. Then the voice said, “Be a good lad and let me have a look at your face.”

Keller hesitated before glancing into the lens of the security camera. Ten seconds later the deadbolts of the door popped open.

“Come inside,” the voice instructed.

“I prefer it out here.”

“Suit yourself.”

A wad of newsprint somersaulted along the shadowed pavement, driven by a cold wind from the River Lagan. Keller turned up his coat collar. He thought of his sunlit terrace overlooking his valley in Corsica. It seemed alien to him now, a place he had visited once in his childhood. He could no longer conjure the aroma of the hills or a clear image of the don’s face. He was Christopher Keller again. He was back in the game.

He heard a rattle and, turning, saw the door of Tommy O’Boyle’s opening slowly. Standing in the narrow breach was a small, thin man in his late fifties, with gray stubble on his face and a bit more on his head. He looked as though he had just seen a ghost. In a way, he had.

“Hello, Billy,” said Keller genially. “Good to see you again.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“I am dead.” Keller put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Take a walk with me, Billy. We need to talk.”

19

GREAT VICTORIA STREET, BELFAST

THEY HAD TO GO SOMEWHERE no one would recognize them. Billy Conway suggested an American doughnut shop on Great Victoria Street; no IRA man, he said, would ever be caught dead there. He ordered two large coffees and pounced on an empty table in the back corner, next to the fire exit. It was the Belfast disease. Don’t sit too close to glass windows in case a bomb goes off in the street. Always leave yourself an escape route if the wrong sort comes through the front door. Keller sat with his back to the room. Conway eyed the other patrons over the rim of his cup.

“You should have called first,” he said. “You nearly gave me a coronary.”

“Would you have agreed to see me?”

“No,” said Billy Conway. “I don’t reckon I would’ve.”

Keller smiled. “You were always honest, Billy.”

“Too honest. I helped you put a lot of men into the Maze.” Conway paused, then added, “Into the ground, too.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Not that long.” Conway’s eyes flickered around the interior of the shop. “They gave me quite a going-over after you left town. They said you gave them my name in that farmhouse down in South Armagh.”

“I didn’t.”

“I know,” Conway said. “I wouldn’t be alive if you’d given me up, would I?”

“Not a chance, Billy.”

Conway’s eyes were on the move again. He had helped to save countless lives and prevent untold millions in property damage. And his reward, thought Keller, was to spend the rest of his life waiting for an IRA bullet. The IRA was like an elephant. It never forgot. And it surely never forgave an informant.

“How’s business?” asked Keller.

“Fine. You?”

Keller gave a noncommittal shrug of his shoulders.

“What business are you in these days, Michael Connelly?”

“It’s not important.”

“I assume that wasn’t your real name.”

Keller made a face to say that it wasn’t.

“How did you learn to speak like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like one of us,” said Conway.

“I suppose it’s a gift.”

“You’ve other gifts as well,” said Conway. “It was four against one in that farmhouse, and even then it wasn’t a fair fight.”

“Actually,” said Keller, “it was five against one.”

“Who was the fifth?”

“Quinn.”

A silence fell between them.

“You’re a brave man to come back after all these years,” Conway said after a moment. “If they find out you’re in town, you’re a dead man. Peace accord or no peace accord.”

The door of the shop opened and several tourists—Danes or Swedes, Keller could not decide—came in from the street. Conway frowned and drank his coffee.

“The tour guides take them into the neighborhoods and show them where the worst atrocities happened. And then they bring them to Tommy O’Boyle’s to hear the music.”

“It’s good for business.”

“I suppose.” He looked at Keller. “Is that why you came back? To take a tour of the Troubles?”

Keller watched the tourists file into the street. Then he looked at Conway and asked, “Who was the one who interrogated you after I left Belfast?”

“It was Quinn.”

“Where’d he do it?”

“I’m not sure. I really don’t remember much except for the knife. He told me he was going to cut out my eyes if I didn’t admit to being a spy for the British.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Obviously, I denied it. And I might have begged for my life a little, too. He seemed to like that. He was always a cruel bastard.”

Keller nodded slowly, as though Conway had spoken words of great insight.

“You hear about Liam Walsh?” Conway asked.

“Hard not to.”

“Who do you suppose was behind it?”

“The Garda says it was drugs.”

“The Garda,” said Conway, “are completely full of shit.”

“What do you know?”

“I know that someone walked into Walsh’s house in Dublin and killed three very hard men without breaking a sweat.” Conway paused, then asked, “Sound familiar?”

Keller said nothing.

“Why’d you come back here?”

“Quinn.”

“You’re not going to find him in Belfast.”

“Did you know he had a wife and daughter here?”

“I’d heard rumors to that effect, but I was never able to come up with a name.”

“Maggie Donahue.”

Conway lifted his eyes thoughtfully toward the ceiling. “Makes sense.”

“Know her?”

“Everybody knows Maggie.”

“Work?”

“Across the street at the Europa. In fact,” Conway added with a glance at his watch, “she’s probably there now.”

“What about the kid?”

“Goes to school at Our Lady of Mercy. Must be sixteen by now.”

“Know where they live?”

“Just off the Crumlin Road in the Ardoyne.”

“I need the address, Billy.”

“No problem.”

20

THE ARDOYNE, WEST BELFAST

IT TOOK BILLY CONWAY LESS than thirty minutes to establish that Maggie Donahue lived at 8 Stratford Gardens with her only child, a daughter who was called Catherine, after Quinn’s sainted mother. The neighbors were unaware of the source of the child’s name, though most suspected that Maggie Donahue’s absent husband, be he dead or alive, was an IRA man of some sort, quite possibly a dissident who had rejected the tenets of the Good Friday Agreement. Such sentiments ran deep in the Ardoyne. During the worst of the Troubles, the Royal Ulster Constabulary regarded the neighborhood as a no-go area, too dangerous to patrol or even enter. More than a decade after the peace accords, it was the scene of rioting and clashes between Catholics and Protestants.

To supplement the cash payments she received from her husband, Maggie Donahue worked as a waitress in the Lobby Bar of the Europa Hotel, the most bombed hotel in the world. That afternoon she had the misfortune of attending to the particular needs of a guest named Herr Johannes Klemp. His hotel registration card listed a Munich address, but his work—apparently it had something to do with interior design—required him to spend a great deal of time away from home. Like many frequent travelers, he was somewhat difficult to please. His lunch, it seemed, was a catastrophe. His salad was too limp, his sandwich too cold, the milk for his coffee had gone bad. Worse still, he had taken a liking to the poor creature whose job it was to make him happy. She did not find his attempts at small talk appealing. Few women did.