Me: But why would I need a gun?

Him: Because someone might shoot you.

Me: Like who?

Him: Like my wife. Like her bleedin’ boyfriend Racey O’Grady. Like her boyfriend’s mother—she’s the one to watch out for, Tessie O’Grady, misses nothing.

Colin (speaking unexpectedly): A legend in Dublin crime.

Mr. Big (frowning): If I need your help…

Then Mr. “Big” stood up. Even smaller than I’d expected. Very short legs.

Mr. Big: I’ve a meeting now. Colin here will drop stuff round to you later. The gun, more money, photos of Detta, Racey, all that. Just one more thing, Miss Walsh. If you fuck this up, I’ll be annoyed. And the last time someone annoyed me—when was it, Colin? Last Friday?—I crucified him on that pool table.

Me: You personally? Or one of your assistants?

Him: Me personally. I’d never ask my staff to do something I wouldn’t be prepared to do myself.

Me: But that’s exactly what happened in that film, Ordinary Decent Criminal. Couldn’t you have used your imagination and crucified him to something else? The bar counter, for example. Just to put your personal mark on it, as it were. No one likes a copycat.

He was looking at me funny, and like I say, Anna, it’s good job I don’t believe in fear because if did, I’d have been cacking myself.

And on that compelling note, it ended. Frantically I keyed down to see if there was any more, but there wasn’t. Feck. I’d enjoyed it hugely. No matter how much she insisted every word of it was true, I knew it was wildly exaggerated. But she was so funny and fearless and full of life that a little of it had rubbed off on me.

38

I checked my watch again. Only four minutes since the last time I’d checked. How could that be? It felt like at least fifteen minutes.

I was pacing, actually pacing with nervy excitement, waiting for it to be time to leave for the spiritualist-church place, for their Sunday service. It was taking every ounce of my restraint not to tell everyone—Rachel, Jacqui, Teenie, Dana. Only the fear that they’d have me institutionalized kept me quiet.

Back and forth I went from the living room to the bedroom, bargaining with a God I no longer believed in. If Aidan shows up and speaks to me today, I’ll…I’ll…what? I’ll believe in You again. You can’t say fairer than that.

See, I told Aidan. See what I’ve promised. See the lengths I’m willing to go to. So you better show up.

I left home miles too early and got the subway to Forty-second and Seventh and walked across town, passing Seventh, Eighth, Ninth Avenue, my stomach churning with anxiety.

The closer I got to the Hudson, the more bleak and warehousy and seagully the landscape became. This part of town was a world away from Fifth Avenue. The buildings were lower and more cramped, crouching on the sidewalk like they were afraid they were going to be hit. It was always colder here and the air was different, sharper.

The farther west I walked, the more my anxiety burgeoned; there couldn’t be a church here. What should I do? I asked Aidan. Keep walking? I felt even worse when I found the building—it certainly didn’t look like a church. It looked like a converted warehouse. Not terribly converted either. I had made some dreadful mistake.

But in the lobby, a sign on the wall listed THE CHURCH OF SPIRITUALIST COMMUNICATION as being on the fifth floor.

It did exist.

A couple of people passed by me on their way to the elevator, and full of sudden happiness, I ran and squeezed in with them. They were three other women about the same age as me and they looked very normal: one had a bag that I’d have sworn was a Marc Jacobs, then I noticed that another had her nails painted with—I almost gasped—Candy Grrrl Chick-chickachicka (pale yellow). Of all the brands in all the world? What were the chances? I took this as a Sign.

“What floor?” Marc Jacobs bag asked me. She was nearest to the button panel.

“Fifth,” I said.

“Same as us.” She smiled.

I smiled back.

Obviously talking to the dead on a Sunday afternoon was more commonplace than I had realized.

I followed the trio out of the elevator, down a bare-floored corridor, and into a room, full of several other women. Everyone started saying hi to one another and an exotically attired creature approached me. She had long dark hair, bare shoulders, a long fringey skirt (I had a moment of teenage flashback), and tons of filigree-style gold jewelry, around her neck, around her waist, up her wrists and arms and fingers.

“Hi,” she said. “Belly dancing?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re here to learn to belly dance?”

It was only then that I noticed that the other women in the room were also wearing long bell-infested skirts, little belly tops, and spangledy slippers and that my three elevator mates were changing out of their ordinary clothes into jangly fringey things.

“No, I’m here for the Church of Spiritualist Communication.”

Now that was a conversation stopper if ever I encountered one. The entire room became one discordant jangle as everyone whipped around to look at me.

“Not here,” the chief lady said. “Probably down the hall.”

Under the gaze of the filigreed girls, I retreated. Out in the corridor, I checked the number on the door. It was 506; the talking-to-dead-people were in room 514.

I carried on down the corridor, passing rooms on both sides. In one, several elderly women were singing “If I Were a Rich Man”; in another, four people were clustered around what looked like a script; and in yet another, a man with a rich baritone was singing about the Windy City being mighty purty while someone accompanied him on a clapped-out-sounding piano.

The whole place reeked of amateur dramatics.

I had to be at the wrong address. How could there be a church here? But I consulted my piece of paper again. It said room 514—and there was a room 514. Right at the end of the hallway; it looked nothing like a church; just a bare room with a circle of ten or eleven hard chairs on a dusty, splintery floor.

Uncertainly, I wondered if I should leave. I mean, how mad was this?

But hope intervened. Hope and desperation. In fairness, I was early. Extremely early. And I’d come all this way, I might as well see if anyone else showed up.

I sat on a bench in the corridor and passed the time by watching the proceedings in the room across the way.

Eight buff young men—two rows of four—were stamping and clattering across the bare boards, singing that they were going to wash some man right out of their hair, while a sinewy, older man yelled dance cues. “And TURN and SHIMMY and THRUST and TURN, smile, guys, SMILE, for fuck’s sake, and TURN and SHIMMY and…okay, stop the music, STOP, STOP!” The piano tinkling petered out.