Northern Spy(40)

“Don’t you dare,” I said, and she gave a little shrug.

“Your granny’s very stubborn, so she is,” Marian tells Finn. We wander the garden, past the rusty dahlias and chrysanthemums, while she tells me Seamus, Damian, and Niall’s views on the Church, which are atheist, social attendee, and believer, respectively.

“Marian, do you remember when I brought Finn to your flat last winter?”

“Which time?”

“Soon after he was born. You’d had people over the night before.”

“Right. What about it?”

“Who’d been at your house?”

“Oh. Seamus, Damian, and Niall.”

“Is that why you were acting strange?”

“Was I?” she says.

I ate baklava with her that morning, which Damian had brought her the night before. I don’t know why the thought is so upsetting, but decide not to consider it too deeply, not yet.

We show Finn the topiary animals, then return through the woods to the car. “See you tomorrow,” says Marian.

“What’s tomorrow?”

“Aoife’s wedding.”

“Oh, god. I forgot.”

Our cousin will be married tomorrow at St. Agnes’s in west Belfast, with a reception at the Balfour hotel, which the IRA owns. Marian tells me that her unit will be at the wedding, herself, Seamus, Damian, and Niall.

“I can’t go, then.”

“You have to go,” says Marian. “It’s what you’d do normally. It will look worse if you don’t turn up. Have you met her fiancé?”

“No.”

“His uncle’s Cillian Burke,” she says, and I groan.

“What’s Cillian like?” I ask, hoping Marian will answer that he’s not so bad, that the media has exaggerated him.

Marian looks thoughtful for a moment, then she says, “His nickname is Lord Chief Executioner.”

My heart sinks. She says, “Cillian likes the Balfour. They have a private bar, did you know that? I think the army council meets there sometimes. I need your help,” she says, but I’m already shaking my head. “I want to place a listening device.”



* * *



—

After the ceremony, we’re handed confetti to throw. I stand smiling on my high heels in the crowd outside the church, talking with my mam and my aunt Bridget. Soon the confetti will be in the air, as the bride and groom run under it, and then this part will be finished. Everyone will stand around for a bit, as the confetti starts to disintegrate on the damp ground, and then they will turn from the church toward the Balfour.

Cillian Burke is standing in the center of a group on the church lawn, shaking the packet of confetti against his palm. He’s one of those vigorous, forceful bald men, whose baldness seems like proof of vitality, his eyes two bright chips under a smooth, heavy brow. He has on an expensive suit and a pressed white shirt. He must have a gun on him, tucked into the band of his trousers. I wonder how many guns are in the crowd at this moment, and how many other people are also scared. Statistically, I’m not the only informer here.

Cillian smiles, shaking another man’s hand. The trial against him collapsed, but he must still be under surveillance. Police or intelligence officers will be in a vehicle parked somewhere nearby, monitoring him. How fast will they get here, if something goes wrong?

I’ve been near Cillian before. When I was a teenager, a Portakabin on the Falls Road was turned into a sort of nightclub. The walls were covered in plush pink fabric, which always smelled faintly of vomit. The Ballroom of Romance, we called it. We went sometimes, and the local hard men went, and I remember Cillian sitting with a girl on his lap, my age, maybe a year older, maybe sixteen.

Bridget laughs with my mam, glitter flashing above her eyes, and I smile, pretending to have heard the joke. I have on a black dress sprigged with white flowers and a velvet blazer. I shouldn’t feel self-conscious. This is my home. I grew up three roads from here. My granny’s Requiem Mass was at this church. My father’s initials are carved on a tree on the Black Mountain. The bride is my sweet cousin Aoife, who used to take baths with me, used to sleep over on a trundle bed, and still eats off my plate at family dinners.

I’m not the imposter here, they are. Cillian Burke, and the rest of them. Marching in memorial parades, in ski masks and mirrored sunglasses, like we’re meant to be proud of them.

“How’s your wee one, Tessa?” asks Bridget, but then a cheer goes up from closer to the chapel, and we toss our confetti in the air.

When we reach the Balfour, I look up at the red lights of the utility towers on the mountain ridge, then follow the crowd inside. The smell is instantly recognizable, unwashed carpet and whiskey. Waiting inside are the guests who couldn’t attend the ceremony. Because of Cillian, the police will have been monitoring the chapel. They will have used long-range lenses to photograph every guest. The ones waiting at the hotel are IRA members, trying to stay underground. They’re safe here, though. The police have never raided the Balfour. Too dangerous, presumably. Marian is standing among them, in a blue crêpe dress, the only woman. When she sees me, she breaks away from the group and comes to hug me.

“What are you drinking?” she asks. “Want to try mine?” She hands me her old-fashioned, and I take a long swallow, the bourbon settling my nerves a little. “Come meet my friends,” she says. My pulse is racing fast enough that they might see the vein jumping in my throat. “Lads, this is Tessa.”