Lucy said, “Right in front of him?”

“Right to him. Then he looks at me. ‘Where’d you find this guy?’ I said, ‘Roy, you won’t believe it when I tell you.’ Roy goes, ‘I don’t believe anything about him now, including that bullshit brogue he’s putting on for us.’ ”

“What did Boylan say?”

“Boylan rolls with stuff like that. He tells you about pubs in Dublin, believe it. But anything else, I don’t know, maybe you can cut in half. Except when he tells you he’s done time. I knew that as soon as I looked at him.”

“How?”

“It’s something you know if you’ve been there.” They were approaching the entrance to Ralph & Kacoo’s. Jack paused, taking Lucy’s arm. “He doesn’t know what we’re doing, but he’ll slip around on you trying to find out.”

“I’ll be sweet and innocent,” Lucy said.

“The question is, can we use him? See what you think.”

Jerry Boylan ate his oysters with lemon; he’d loosen the meat, then raise the shell to his mouth, let the oyster slide in, and as he began to chew, shove a hushpuppie into his mouth and take a sip of beer. Jack and Lucy watched, finished with oysters and crab cakes, Lucy stirring her iced tea, both of them fascinated by the man’s ritual: through two dozen oysters, chewing, sipping, talking, tongue moving around in his mouth… He said to Lucy, “Sister, you’re testing me, aren’t you? Wanting to know why I went to Nicaragua but timid to ask. There was a cousin of mine entered the nunnery and took the name Virginella. I said to her”-Boylan frowning-” ‘Why on earth would you want to be known as a little virgin? Girl,’ I said, ‘if you’re going to be a virgin think of yourself as a big one, a world-class virgin.’ But do you see the paradox, Sister? One vow is an impediment to the other. Humility prevents her proclaiming her virginity.” French bread with a pat of butter resting on it disappeared into his mouth.

Jack said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Please.”

“What were you doing in Managua?”

“Come right to it, uh, Jack? Sure, I’ll tell you.” Boylan sat back with his glass mug of beer. “It was on Easter Sunday, barely a month past, I was at Milltown Cemetery. On the Falls Road out of Belfast toward Antrim, is where it is.” He looked from Jack to Lucy. “I’m there for the seventieth anniversary observance of the 1916 Rising. There in the biting cold and rain to honor our dead…”

Jack said, “And that’s what you were doing in Managua?”

“Ask what you like, you don’t have a pistol in your hand this time,” Boylan said, and smiled. “Oh, you’re a cute hoor, Jack, but ridden with flaws and impatience, if I judge you right. Don’t know what to make of me or the present turn of events, so you bring this lovely sister to have a look, uh? But then your insecurity causes you to interrupt, just as I’m about to tell how I met the Nicaraguans.” He turned to Lucy again. “It may appear, Sister, I’m coming round about, fond of rhetoric, which is often the mark of a revolutionary; but I’ll spare you catchphrases. What you’re waiting to learn is what Sandinistas were doing in Ireland on a cold Easter Sunday.”

“Or at any time,” Lucy said.

“If you hear we deal with terrorists, it’s a lie. This group from Nicaragua are musicians that go by the name Heroes and Martyrs: revolutionaries who’d fought their battles and won and came to tell us about it in song, in their ballads. Well, a man fighting for his own cause is going to be moved, inspired. I wanted to know more. So I arranged to travel back with the Heroes and Martyrs to Nicaragua. It would give me the chance, also, to visit an older brother I hadn’t laid eyes on in nearly ten years. A humble Jesuit priest who serves his flock in the village of León.”

Jack stared at Boylan sipping his beer, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. There was no way to stay ahead of this guy. He could come at you from any direction. First with a cousin who was a nun, now a brother who was a priest.

But then Lucy said, “I wouldn’t exactly call León a village.”

Jack jumped in. “And I’ve never met a Jesuit who was especially humble.”

It was brief satisfaction. Boylan, unmoved, said, “Everything is relative. Towns, the clergy, even revolutionaries, depending from where you view them. Now the contras are the rebels and I think to myself, Isn’t that a lovely name for the gougers, bloody killers of innocent people? Then I learn that people who live in comfort are paying for their atrocities.”

He was wearing the same shapeless herringbone jacket, the same red-and-gray patterned tie, probably the same shirt… looking at Jack now, his slicked-back hair shining in the restaurant’s overhead lights.

“Have you seen innocent people murdered, Jack, as the sister and I have? Do you know what it’s like?” Boylan eased back again as he turned to Lucy. “The first time, Sister, it will be twelve years ago next month. I was sitting in Mulligan’s having a pint when I heard the bomb explode, that hard terrible irredeemable bang… I remember it today as I remember, too vividly, what I saw in Talbot Street as I turned the corner and heard the screams in the smoke that hung like a bloody fog.”

Jack’s gaze edged past Boylan’s grave expression. His eyes returned as the man continued, then moved off again… and held.

“There was something else, too, the smell of it, now implanted in my nostrils forever. Not the smell of death you hear spoken of, but the stench of people’s insides lying on the pavement. I saw a woman sitting against a lamppost staring at me, or at nothing, both her legs blown off.”

Jack got up from the table.

“Haven’t the stomach for it, uh, Jack?”

“I’ll be right back.”

“You have to see it. Like me and the sister here… Isn’t that right, Sister?”

Jack followed an aisle toward the rear of this big roomful of people busy with lunch, nodding to waiters he knew as he came to a table against the far wall.

Helene sat with a cup of coffee, dishes cleared, her head bent over an open book, frizz-permed red hair jutting out to both sides.

“What’re you reading?”

Her brown eyes came up reflecting light and there was the nose that fascinated him, the tender, delicate nostrils. Helene closed the book with one finger in it and glanced at the cover before looking up again, now with a different expression, almost sly, a girl with a secret.

“Self-Love and Sexuality.”

“Is it any good?”

“Not bad. It says if you don’t like yourself you won’t have fun in bed. Or you have to like yourself first, before you can love anybody else.”

“If you don’t like yourself… Why wouldn’t you? I mean since you’re all you have.”

“I don’t know, Jack. There must be some people who don’t.”

“You think people that are assholes realize it? No, they think they’re fine. But even if it’s possible not to like yourself, you go to bed with somebody-what’re you doing in there, analyzing yourself?”

“I’m glad you straightened me out on that,” Helene said. “What’re you up to?”

“I’m not working at the funeral home anymore.” Helene waited and he said, “I’ll find something.”

Her eyes held on him, still waiting. In the open top of her blouse he could see freckles he used to trace with a finger, making up constellations, getting down to her twin suns and from there to the center of her universe. Something between two people who liked themselves and maybe had loved each other and were remembering it now-both of them, if he could believe her eyes.

“That’s a pretty girl you’re with.”

“I didn’t think you saw us.”

“When I came in.”

“She used to be a nun.”

“Really? What is she now?”

“She’s looking.”

“I guess everybody is. I spend half my life being interviewed. I end up typing memos for some weenie, I’m not even sure what he does. Offices are full of people doing things that, if they didn’t, it wouldn’t make any difference. Or the company’s making some dumb thing nobody needs and they act like they’re serving humanity, the higher-ups.” She said, “I’ve been thinking about you, Jack, since we ran into each other. Well, even before that… I miss you.”