The Second Coming by John Dalmas

In Canada, Russell had found a new cause and a new group—the (at most) loosely organized Catholic Soldiers in America. Most, like himself, were from Ireland, while of the rest, most were Canadians and Americans of Irish descent. (Poles, Italians, etc, need not apply, though a few token Québecois had been accepted.) Their cause was the salvation of Catholicism as they considered it should be, a Catholicism partly of the past, and partly of their various imaginings.

They had no real working plan. They brooded darkly in apartments and flats in Montreal, where the RCMP could not molest them, and plotted to murder “enemies” whose prominence would gain them publicity. So far they’d bagged two liberal bishops and a senator, as well as less prominent Catholics who’d offended them. None of the murders had taken place in Quebec, of course.

In his physical habits, Jack Russell was an orderly man, and believed everyone should be. It was that, he considered, which made him a superior planner and superior person. Thus he looked around Thomas Corkery’s Boston efficiency apartment with evident distaste.

Disgraceful! he thought. It was nearly noon, and the bed was scarcely made, a lumpy quilt simply thrown across it. Books were stacked on a window sill, most with library labels on their spines. Probably overdue. Newspaper sections and separate pages lay on sofa and table as if scattered by the wind. A banana peel lay black and curling on the kitchenette counter, making Russell’s nose wrinkle, while on the table sat a saucer with a dozen cigarette butts. He could see three different coffee cups sitting about the room, all undoubtedly dirty and perhaps half full. For all that Russell knew, still others could be hiding beneath newspapers, all no doubt used by Corkery himself. The man would hardly be having guests, for who would come here, short of necessity?

At least there was no sign he’d taken to drink again. Russell himself, of course, was a conspicuously sober man, and hated working with drinkers. Unreliable! The habit was especially incompatible with one of Corkery’s strongest points, his marksmanship with handguns. It was said he could shoot the spade out of the ace of spades at 10 feet without sighting.

“What brings you down from the frozen north?” Corkery asked. “Is it a job you have for me? Some little task—some wetwork you’d rather hire out than do yourself?”

Except for “wetwork,” he said it in Gaelic, which he spoke fluently by the standards of the time. Spoke it deliberately here, to put his guest at a disadvantage, for Russell had barely learned it in school. Used carefully, allowing for his limitations, he could understand it, but he spoke it miserably, his tongue clumsy as a peat spade. Even as Corkery spoke, a great burly tomcat entered through an open window, probably from a fire escape, Russell thought. It jumped from the sill and stalked over to Corkery, followed by Russell’s exasperated glare. Leaning, Corkery began to scratch the scarred, nearly earless head, and a deep thrumming rose from the beast’s throat. Russell’s thin lips compressed. He was allergic to cats, as Corkery undoubtedly recalled, and the petting would make it worse.

Corkery’s blue eyes peered across at him mockingly. “I used to call him Cuchulain, but recently I renamed him Pius XIV, in honor of the late lamented. God rest his soul. Would you care to pet him?”

Russell refused to honor the offer by replying. Corkery stood, and Pius XIV, after briefly rubbing at his human’s shins, stalked to a bowl in a corner, to lap milk no doubt souring.

“So,” Corkery said, “what is it you’d have me do?”

“I’ve an execution I’d like you to carry out.” Russell answered in English, hating Corkery for his one-upmanship. The Gaelic was no proper measure of a man’s Irishness, nor any sign of virtue in Corkery. It was circumstance, nothing more. Corkery had grown up in rural Kerry, apparently in a family that still used it at home. As for himself, he’d grown up in Dublin, where one seldom heard it except in school.

“A killing is it?” Corkery sounded interested, speaking English now. “And who would it be?”

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