Hours of Gladness by Thomas Fleming Page A

the wintry Atlantic at forty thousand feet with a tailwind pushing their ground speed to 620 miles per hour. Kilroy held out his cup again. O’Gorman filled it. The quicker the little back-talker shut his fabulous eyes, the better, as far as O’Gorman was concerned. But the liquor only seemed to make Billy garrulous.
    â€œWhy the fook we gawn to the States?”
    â€œThat’s where the money is,” O’Gorman said.
    â€œI’d rather go to Sofia.”
    â€œSofia is no longer an ally. The Russians have sold out them—and us—to extract their tits from the Afghanistan wringer.”
    This enormous fact did not even register on Billy’s small brain. The staggering changes in the globe’s political landscape since Russia’s disastrous plunge into Afghanistan and the election of Ronald Reagan to the American presidency meant nothing to him. The world barely existed beyond the borders of Belfast, and even there he saw things through the telescopic sight of an ArmaLite. Compared to Billy and his kind, men with tunnel vision were broad-minded.
    â€œLast time I was in Sofia, they gimmy this Bulgarian bitch. Christ, she had an ass as wide as a Saracen, but she made up for it with her mouth. Anything like that in America?”
    â€œIn American you have to persuade them.”
    â€œFook that.” Billy held out his cup again.

    O’Gorman poured himself another drink too and pressed the oversize button that released his seatback. He sipped his whiskey reflectively, out of Billy’s line of conversational fire.
    Dick O’Gorman was good at persuading women—Irish, English, American, French, Italian. Even an Arab or two when he’d jetted to Beirut to promote an alliance between the Palestine Liberation Front and the Irish Republican Army. But he was not good at persuading the people who knew him best, the members of the IRA’s ruling council. They went right on bombing and maiming and assassinating enemies real and imaginary. After thirty-six years he was thoroughly sick of the whole business.
    More and more O’Gorman relived those months in 1972 when he and William Whitemore, the British secretary of state for Northern Ireland, had met almost every day to negotiate a settlement that would have made the IRA a powerful force in Irish politics, north and south. But the stony-eyed men around the chief of staff had found the mere idea of talking to a British politician treasonous. O’Gorman and Whitemore had been within days of an agreement when the orders to break the truce went up to Belfast and the bombs began exploding, the snipers’ bullets whining again.
    Now it was too late to negotiate. The world had made one of its incomprehensible turns. The governments that had pledged their allegiance to socialism, to the classless society of O’Gorman’s youthful dreams, were floundering, while the resurgent capitalists gloated in London and New York, Bonn and Tokyo.
    He should have quit in 1972 and gone to England with Moira and told the whole disgusting story to the newspapers. It would have put the IRA out of business in a month. Instead he let Moira go alone and sing her pathetic solo to the Brits. Sweet little Moira with her burning idealist’s eyes and overheated thighs. The chief of staff himself had made a pass at her, the horny puritanical bastard,
but she had belonged to him. To Black Dick O’Gorman with the belt of scars across his belly where a burst from a Sten gun had hit him during the first battle of Belfast in 1956.
    He could still remember the pain that had raged in his body until whiskey and hypodermic needles quenched it. But it was not as acute as the pain that had coruscated through his mind in 1972 when his chance to become a political leader of international stature had vanished because his fellow revolutionaries had no ideas in their thick skulls beyond the one enunciated by the glorious, brainless Easter martyrs of