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I took a seat in the corridor and closed the door on the two peelers watching the German porn flick.

The keen copper came back. “Slider McFerrin?” he asked. “Aye.”

“James McFerrin, lives with his ma at 6 Kilroot View Road, Bangor. You think he’s mixed up in this?”

“He might be.”

“Well, he’s a player all right.” “What can you tell me?

“I can’t tell you anything. Watch your step, though. Bad family. He’s one of six boys. Eldest was killed by his own side, the ma runs bootleg whiskey, and he’s done time in the Maze for murder, assault, and grievous bodily harm. He was released under the Good Friday Agreement. Nothing about theft, phones or otherwise, but he’s a bad ’un.”

“Cheers, mate.”

I walked out into the station car park. It was raining again now. The drains had been blocked up and narrowed to tiny slits so that a terrorist couldn’t crawl into the sewers and blow the police station up from underneath. The car park was flooding and a peeler with a foot pump was trying to get the water out of the bigger potholes. It was a sorry sight.

“You couldn’t give us a hand there?” the peeler asked, mistaking me for a plainclothes detective.

“Fuck, no,” I told him.

I left the cop shop, walked a few blocks, found a taxi stand outside the Ulster Hall. They were just letting out a revival preacher, a Dr. McCoy from the Bob Jones ministry in America. Revival meetings were popular in Belfast. From the airbrushing on his poster, Dr. McCoy seemed a wee bit more suspicious than most, and sure enough, the patrons had been so thoroughly fleeced that no one even had any dough left for a taxi. I skipped to the front of the line.

The driver of the black cab was glad to see me.

“Hanging about here for bloody ten minutes,” he complained. “I suppose the rest of your mates are waiting to get beamed up.”

I got the joke, told him the address in Bangor.

“I see you’re wearing a Zeppelin T-shirt. Did you know that the Ulster Hall was the very place where Zep played ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for the first time?”

I said I didn’t know, but there was an extra fifty quid in it if he shut up and another fifty if he drove to Bangor like the hounds of hell were after him.

A wind from the Arctic taking the black smoke from Kilroot Power Station and blowing it down over the bad facsimiles of houses in the dour northern part of Bangor. The shore and the oily sea slinking back into themselves and the smell of burning permeating everything. Ash on clotheslines and whitewashed walls and on almost all the wind-ward-facing surfaces, as if the golden head of the enormous belching chimney top was in some sinister coitus with the dank and cheerless settlement.

Kids out playing football, older folks sitting in deck chairs, chatting. It was a break in the rain, and in Northern Ireland you used those breaks when you could get them.

The people were Protestants. I knew this not because they were physically unlike or dressed differently from Catholics— indeed, anyone who says that he can tell a Catholic Irishman from a Protestant Irishman by looking at him is a liar, since a third of all marriages in Ulster are across the sectarian divide. Nah, I knew it because the curbstones had been painted red, white, and blue, there were murals of King Billy at the ends of the street, there was a painted memorial for the battle of the Somme on the side of a house, and the flags flying in this neighborhood were the Scottish saltaire, Old Glory, the Union Jack, the Ulster flag, and the Israeli Star of David. If there were Catholics on this street, they kept bloody quiet about it.

I knocked on the door of number six.

A kid answered. About ten, freckles, brown hair, patched sweater, cheeky looking.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I’m looking for Slider.” “He’s away,” the kid said. “Where is he?”

“Don’t know.”

“Who does know?” “Ma.”

“Is she home?”

“She’ll be back in five minutes. Down the shops. Do you want to wait inside?”

“Well, are you sure that would be ok?” “Aye. It’s fine.”

I followed the kid inside the council house.

A broken light and a narrow hall filled with a death-trap assortment of toys: skateboards, roller skates, cricket balls. The kid opened a door to the left and I followed him into the living room. Boards on the floor, bare walls, and some kind of grotesque papier-mâché statue in the middle of the room. Another kid, a little younger than the first, adding more wet paper to the statue.

“What in the name of God is that?” I asked.

“It’s the fucking pope, what do you think?” the first kid said.

I looked again. The Holy Father’s head was lying on some old plywood and empty vodka boxes. It was still crude, with black-marker facial hair and possessing only a hastily drawn lopsided grin, instead of the full black-toothed variety that would frighten even the youngest children. Just over six feet high and draped in a white sheet, it looked more like a Klansman than the leader of the Catholic Church.

“Do you not think it’s any good?” the younger kid asked. “What are your names?” I asked the first.

“I’m Steven, he’s Monkey,” the first kid said.

“You’re telling me that that’s supposed to be the pope?” I asked Steven, looking at my watch.

“Aye, it is.”

“What’s it for?”

“Are you not from around here?” Steven asked.

And then I remembered. Of course. The Twelfth of July was coming up. The anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, when Protestant King William defeated Catholic King James, a victory celebrated every year by burning the pope in effigy.

The kid looked at me for an answer. “No, I’m not from around here.”

I lit a cigarette and sat down on a ripped leather sofa. The kids demanded a share and so I lit a couple more.

“Well, what you think of the pope?” Steven asked, smoking expertly.

What I thought was that that was the whole problem with Protestant ideology in Northern Ireland. They had gotten it all wrong—the way to really preserve a culture was to celebrate and nurture the memory of a glorious defeat, not a famous victory. That’s why Gallipoli, Gettysburg, the Field of Blackbirds, the Alamo became the foundation myths for the Kiwis, the American South, Serbs, and Texas. Every year the Shi’a celebrate a massacre and, of course, Christianity is founded upon an execution.

“The pope doesn’t have a beard,” I said.

“See,” Steven told Monkey, shaking his head dramatically and dropping the ash from his cigarette onto the bare floor.

“What exactly are you saying, wee lad?” Monkey said. “I told ya,” Steven said with satisfaction.

Monkey’s face went through a spasm.

“You told me he had a beard like Jesus in The Passion.” “I did not,” Steven replied indignantly.

“Did so,” Monkey said, clenching his fists. “Not.”

They had both forgotten I was there. They were about to come to blows and even if they didn’t, they were giving me a bloody headache.

“Ok, lads, give it a rest. Steven, here’s a fiver, away you go and find your ma for me,” I said.

The kid took the note and sprinted out into the street. The other wean looked at me suspiciously, puffed on his cigarette, and went back to his work.

“Are you from America?” he asked after a while. “Aye, now I am,” I said.

“What’s it like out there?” he asked wistfully. “Exactly like the movies,” I said.

The kid nodded. Just as he had suspected.

“I saw that Beyoncé Knowles the other day at the supermarket. Boy, is she a hottie,” I said.

“You saw Beyoncé at the supermarket? What was she buying?” the kid asked.

“She was with Madonna and J.Lo; there was a special on Rice Krispies, they all had their trolleys loaded up.”

“Beyoncé was getting Rice Krispies?” he asked, impressed. “Uh-huh.”

But before I could build an entire cathedral of lies, the living room door opened and a breathless Steven brought in a plump fifty-year-old woman wearing a Yankees cap, a bright yellow dress with green hoops, and sand-covered Wellington boots. She had the circumspect dark eyes of a sleekit old cow, so I knew I’d have to go careful. Monkey had stubbed his fag in the ashtray, but the woman immediately began sniffing the air. She grabbed Monkey by the ear.

“Aow,” he said.

“Have you been smoking, young man?” she asked him. “Nope.”

“Don’t lie to me,” she said, twisting the ear a little more off the vertical.

“I haven’t, honest.”

“You better not. Stunts your growth and you’re not shooting up as it is, so you’re not.”

That was a low blow and both boys knew it. They winced. I stood.

“Mrs. McFerrin, I was smoking, the boys weren’t smoking, it was me.”

She looked at the three cigarette ends in the ashtray and eyed me suspiciously.

“What are you doing here?”

“Well, I wanted to talk to you about some business….” I began.

“Business, is it? Well, sit down, I’ll go to the kitchen and make some tea.”

“I don’t have time for tea. I’m in a rush to make a flight,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. Her face scrunched up impressively. She looked for a moment like an accordion that had fallen from the cargo hold of a 747.

“No tea, no business,” she said coldly.

I had clearly insulted her by declining her hospitality, and that in Ireland was a huge mistake.

“I would love a cup of tea, if you don’t mind,” I said. She went into the kitchen and I heard the kettle boiling. I looked at my watch. I really had no time for this shit, but I couldn’t beat the information out of her, not in front of her weans. The two kids went back to their pope.

“Maybe he needs a belt or something,” Monkey said as he looked at the effigy anew.

“You ever see the pope wear a belt?”

“What about those ropy belts that monks wear around their cassocks?”

“Around their what?” Steven asked, and both boys cracked themselves up laughing. I didn’t see the funny side of anything right now.

“Mrs. McFerrin, I have to get going,” I shouted into the kitchen, straining to keep calm.

She came back in with a teapot and a selection of chocolate biscuits. She poured some tea and I took a biscuit.

“Well,” she said finally in a whisper. “How much poteen do you want?”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You’re here to buy poteen, aren’t you?”

“No, no, I’m not, I’m looking for Slider, my business is with him.”

“Slider? I wouldn’t have a clue where he is. I haven’t seen him for two days,” she said.

My heart sank.

“It’s really important. Slider and I go way back, but you see the thing is, Mrs. McFerrin…um, I’ll tell you what it is, I was just at the Ulster Hall there, Dr. McCoy from the States was in town doing a revival, and the thing is, I’ve been born again, but now I’m going back to Beverly Hills. I work over there. And I want to clear all my debts now that I’ve seen the light. You see, I owe Slider a thousand pounds, and I want to pay him before I go.”

It was a crazy story, but this was a crazy house. Greed lit up the fat lady’s face.

“Well, son, that’s a wonderful thing, you finding the Lord Jesus and everything. But I just don’t know where he is or where he’s been,” she said.

“Doesn’t he live here?”

“Not the last wee while; oh, but you know who might know, wee Dinger,” she said.

“Who’s Dinger?”

“He’s my youngest; he’s a wee bit, a wee bit, you know, special, that way…but Slider looks out for him. Takes him on trips and stuff. He’s been taking him somewhere all this week, just for the run in the car. So Dinger might know.”

“Where’s Dinger now?” I asked.

“Where he always is. On the beach,” Steven said. “Whereabouts?”

“He’ll be the only one out there.”

“Well, it’s been great talking to you, thank you very much, Mrs.—”

“Houl on a minute, big fella, I get a finder’s fee, don’t I? I told you where Slider is, or at least someone who knows where he is, so that’s five percent. That’s fifty quid,” she demanded. I didn’t want her to kick up a fuss. I give her five tens. She smiled and put it in her pocket. I hope it chokes ya, I said to myself, and went outside to look for the youngest member of the clan.

The moon unhooking itself from the sea. The first stars. It was the gloaming now. The lingering summer twilight that in Northern Ireland and Scotland can last until nearly midnight at this time of year.

The tide was out and the sand was wet and freezing. Seaweed on the dunes. A few beached starfish and transparent jellyfish. You could see most of Belfast Lough spread in a big U-shaped

curve, and from here in Bangor it was only about twenty miles across the water to Scotland. Tonight with the setting sun illuminating the hills in Galloway it seemed much closer.

Dinger was alone on the beach, gathering shells. I walked over from the seawall.

“Good shells?” I asked.

He dropped the collection with contempt and stomped away from me. He was in bare feet and jeans and a sweater too big for him. He had black hair and big eyes. He was about nine. He didn’t look “special” or any more special than his brothers or his hatchet-faced ma. When he was far enough away from me, he began singing. He drew something in the sand with a piece of driftwood. He looked behind him to see if I had gone yet, and then he picked up a length of seaweed and popped some of the float pods on the strands. They went snap and briny water came out of them, trundling down his fingers onto his sweater. Some of the weeds were covered with diesel and were slimy and difficult for him to pull up.

“Can I help you with that?” I asked.

“You’ll have to clean your shoes before you go in the house,” he began, and then ran from me again.

Jesus, this was going to be more difficult than I thought. I had trouble catching him with all my injuries and my fake foot.

Dinger stopped abruptly and sat down next to a dead seagull, its wings covered in what looked like a thick glue and its head completely black. Tankers occasionally came down this way on their journey to Belfast, so it was possible there had been a small slick or an illegal dumping.

“It’s dead,” Dinger said to me.

“Yeah, I see that, it’s very sad. You’re Dinger, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Everything dies,” Dinger said. He regarded the seagull for a moment. He picked it up by the wing and offered it to me.

“No, thanks. Listen, Dinger, I want to talk to you about your brother Slider,” I said.

“What’s that?” Dinger asked, pointing to a rock covered in the brown edible seaweed called dulse. Dinger crawled over to the rock, lifted up the dulse, pointed at it.

“You know what that is?” Dinger asked again. “Of course, it’s dulse,” I said.

Dinger broke off a dry piece and offered it to me. I took it from him.

“Eat it,” he said.

I put it in my mouth. It was salty and revolting. I swallowed and struggled to keep it down.

“Thank you,” I said.

“What it taste like?” Dinger asked. “You never tasted dulse?”

“No,” he said, his mouth opening and closing like a suffocating fish.

“What it taste like?” he asked again.

It tasted like something that had been shaved off the bottom of a trawlerman’s seaboot and then matured by nailing it to the floor of a particularly nasty whorehouse for a couple of decades.

“It tastes ok,” I said. “You wanna try?”

Dinger shook his head. He wasn’t a complete fool. It started to rain. He pulled out a Glasgow Rangers hat and put it on. It was wool, so it didn’t do much against the rain but it kept the wind out of his ears.

“Dinger, I want to talk to you,” I tried again.

“Do you want to go on an adventure?” Dinger asked me.

“Dinger, I’d love to, some other time, but listen, I wonder if you could do me a favor? I’m looking for your brother Slider

and your ma said that you knew where he’s been going all week. He’s been giving you a ride in his car, hasn’t he?”

“You talk to my ma?” “Aye.”

“Huh. We go on an adventure.”

It was really getting late now and I wondered if I was wasting my time with this wean.

“If I go on an adventure with you, will you tell me where your brother is?” I asked him.

“Yes, I tell if you do dare,” Dinger said conspiratorially. “I already ate the seaweed, isn’t that enough?”

“You do dare,” Dinger insisted angrily. “Ok, ok, what’s the dare?”

“I dare you to walk along the pipe,” he said, pointing to a sewage outflow pipe that led from the shore to the lough. It didn’t look like a particularly dangerous task, even though it was covered with seaweed and barnacles. The tide was still out and the water was only a few feet deep.

“Ok. If I walk along that pipe for a minute, you’ll tell me where Slider is? Agreed?”

Dinger nodded.

“Shake on it,” I insisted.

Hesitantly and with a great deal of consideration, he put out his left hand. His fingers were crossed and I knew that he was trying to stroke me.

“Ok, Dinger, your right hand and no crossies,” I said. Dinger frowned and put out his right hand instead.

I climbed on top of the sewage pipe and walked along it for a few paces. It had the worst smell in the world and a few sad- looking gulls flying about picking up complete turds from the

water. The stench was too fucking much. I jumped off and walked back to Dinger, who was now petting a stray dog.

“Dogs hear things in ultraviolet. They hear everything high pitched, like Batman. No, it’s not called ultraviolet, it’s something else. Ultrasomething but not ultraviolet,” he said.

I grabbed Dinger by the arm and held him tight. I bent down so that I was eye level with him.

“Now, Dinger, listen to me. I kept my part of the bargain, I walked along the pipe. You have to keep your end. Where’s your brother?”

“I don’t want to tell you,” Dinger said, tears coming into his eyes.

“Why not?”

“If I tell you, you’ll go away and I will have nobody to play with. Monkey and Stevey don’t play with me.”

“I’ll come back and I’ll bring Slider with me. You like Slider. Slider takes you places, doesn’t he? Slider takes you on adventures.”

Dinger’s face brightened.

“Slider takes me on adventures. He says secret missions like on TV.”

“Slider took you on a secret mission?” I asked, letting go of his arm and sitting next to him on the sand.

Dinger shook his head. “Secret,” he insisted.

“Oh, you can tell me, I’m Slider’s best and oldest friend and I want to find him. We’ll all go on an adventure together, would you like that?” I said.

Dinger grinned.

“And we can go in Slider’s car?” Dinger asked.

“Of course we can go in Slider’s car, and we can get ice cream afterwards. You and me and Slider.”

“Yeah, and we don’t ask Stevey or Monkey.”

“No, we wouldn’t ask them. Just the three of us, you and me and Slider. Now, where is Slider?” I asked softly.

“He’s with the car.”

“Where did he go in the car? On a secret mission?” Dinger nodded solemnly.

“Where in the car?” I asked.

“To the secret place. To the lodge, the old lodge with the arch,” Dinger said in a whisper.

“Where’s the old lodge, Dinger?” “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” I persisted. “No.”

“Oh, that’s a shame, we won’t be able to get Slider and go on an adventure,” I said.

“We go adventure,” Dinger said, bursting into tears.

“Dinger, you think for a minute, where is the secret lodge?”

Dinger stopped crying immediately, closed his eyes, and held his breath.

“Orange Lodge,” Dinger said.

“Yeah, it’s an Orange Lodge, where is it?”

His brow furrowed and he touched his forehead onto the sand.

I knew hardly anything about the Orange Order, just the basics: it was a working-class Protestant secret society founded in the eighteenth century. It honored the memory of William of Orange, who had become king of Britain and Ireland after he defeated James the Second, the last of the ill- starred Stuart kings.

Dinger stood up.

“Go home, Lucky, go home,” he said to the dog, who looked at him for a second and then ran across the sand. When the dog was definitely out of earshot, Dinger beckoned me close with his finger.

“I know where,” he whispered triumphantly. “Where? Where’s the lodge?”

“Near that big monument,” Dinger said. “What big monument?”

“The big monument across the water.” “In Scotland?” I asked, stifling a panic.

“No, no, no, just over there,” he said, pointing out across the lough.

A monument over there.

I tried to see what he was pointing at, but it was so dark that you couldn’t see anything across the lough except the lights of Belfast, Rathcoole, and Carrickfergus.

And then it came to me.

“Jesus, you don’t mean the Knockagh Monument, do you, Dinger?”

The Knockagh Monument was a huge war memorial that had been placed on Knockagh Mountain near Belfast. I didn’t know much about it, except that it was a massive granite stone, which I think was carved with the names of the Irish dead from the two world wars. It was certainly enormous, and from up on top of the mountain you could see fifty miles in every direction. It was a make-out place for teenagers. A single road to the monument surrounded by forest and farms. An isolated, out-of-the-way spot. I didn’t recall any old abandoned Orange Lodges around there, but I didn’t know the area that well.

Dinger nodded excitedly.

“Dinger, let me get this straight. Slider took you to an Orange Lodge near the Knockagh Monument?”

“Bird kite, an eagle kite,” he said.

“You flew a kite at the Knockagh?”

“Aye. Knockagh, Knockagh, Knockagh. Slider said wait in car and we go see all of the world and fly the kite. Eagle kite.”

“He told you to wait in the car outside an old abandoned Orange Lodge near the Knockagh, right? And there was an arch outside the lodge?”

“Secret mission. Wait in the car at the lodge. Doink, doink, doink.”

“Did he ever mention a girl, a little girl?” I asked. “We fly the kite, very windy.”

“Ok, forget the girl. Can you tell me anything more about the lodge?”

“We fly kite,” Dinger insisted.

“You went from the lodge to the Knockagh Monument and flew the kite?” I asked.

“Yes,” Dinger said, exasperated with all the questions. He started walking away from me. But I had enough.

“Thanks, Dinger,” I said and ran across the beach.

I digested the information. The kid might have made up the whole story and he was a bit of a looper, but Slider had been taking his kid brother somewhere this week. It could be that they were holding Siobhan in an abandoned Orange Lodge with an arched gateway not too far from the Knockagh Monument.

Slider tells Dinger to wait in the car while he delivers food or whatever to the rest of the kidnappers, and then immediately afterward he takes Dinger to the Knockagh, where they fly their kite.

Well, no good deed would go unpunished. Slider was only looking out for his retarded kid brother, but holy mother of God, I’d fucking kill him to get the girl.

And I really felt that I was close to her. This was a good lead. Slider was part of the gang. And if I were a betting man, I’d give you evens that Slider’s wee brother had just told me where they were holding the girl.

I might have to top you, Slider, but it’s your mistake, you’re not supposed to tell anybody. Nobody. Not your ma, not your da, not your bro. You certainly don’t bring him with you and tell him to wait in the car. Your mistake….

I ran off the beach and into the center of town. I saw a taxi. Flagged it down.

“I’m on a call, you can’t get in,” the driver said.

I opened the door and got in the passenger’s side. I gave him most of the money I had left in my wallet. Several hundred dollars and euros. I took the gun out of my pocket and held it in my hand. I didn’t point it at him. Carrot and stick.

“Listen, mate, I need your fucking cab. You’re going to tell the peelers that I hijacked ya, but you’re going to wait till after midnight. Ok? Do we have a deal?”

“You need my cab for a couple of hours and you want to pay me five hundred euros? Fucksake, mate, you didn’t need the gun.”

“So we have an agreement?” I asked.

“I won’t call the cops at all. But you’ve got to tell me, where are you gonna leave the car?”

“I don’t know. I have to go. Take the money, and if you’re calling the peelers, you better fucking wait till midnight. Ok? I won’t need it after that,” I said.

“No problem, squire, no skin off mine. Ratty old beast, just make sure you keep the clutch way down when you’re changing gears.”

The driver and I swapped positions. I drove out of town.

The Knockagh was, of course, all the way on the other side of Belfast Lough. You had to go through the city to get there. I checked my watch. It was almost ten now. But that was time enough. More than time enough. No need to be reckless. I slowed from ninety to seventy-five.

“Hold on, Siobhan, hold on, ya wee skitter,” I said to myself. Words affectionate and reassuring. Affection for her and her wean. Darkey’s kid, yes, but half the genes belonged to her. And for Bridget’s girl I would move the Earth. I’d done a lot already. I’d do more.

And you behind the mask. It’s already been decided.

Long before you or I was ever born.

Sit tight. In your bolt-hole a world away, a drive away, from here.

Do you feel that breeze on the back of your neck? That’s me.

Aye.

Sleep soft, assassins. Embrace your loved ones. Kiss your wives. Drink your fill of the cool night air.

Your days on this world have been reduced by the thousand and the ten thousand.

For I am coming. I am coming.