I Hear the Sirens in the Street

branch on State Street was not the one that contained the safety deposit boxes. I had to go to the adjunct branch on Jefferson Street; but I knew that already.
    I had a toasted cheese sandwich at Fowles Diner and found a review of Fanny and Alexander in an old Boston Globe someone had left lying around. The reviewer liked the film, but didn’t say what happened at the end.
    I walked down to the little harbour and strolled along a pier that had rows of lobster boats and fishing smacks. An attractive lady with a screaming infant asked me the way to the McDonald’s. I told here I was a stranger here myself and she hazarded a guess that I was from Down Under. “Belfast,” I said, and she smiled and wished me a pleasant trip.
    I found an Irish pub called Molly Malone’s. It was an embarrassing explosion of kitsch and sentimental Oirishness. Comedic leprechauns jostled for space with photographs of the dead hunger strikers and framed newspaper headlines celebrating infamous bombings. There was a collection tin for the IRA on the bar and posters that said things like “Death to the RUC”, and “Death to the Brits”. No Mick with any self respect would ever drink in a place like this, which was why it was packed to the rafters.
    I went next door to a dive bar and got a bottle of Sam Adams for a buck fifty. I knew that I was only delaying the inevitable, so I gulped my brew and went back outside.
    Jefferson Street.
    The Ten Cent Saving Bank’s adjunct branch was a brown concretesingle-storey structure that had all the aesthetic charm of a nuclear fall-out shelter. But perhaps that was the point. Your stuff will be safe here even in the event of the apocalypse …
    I took out my key and walked boldly inside.
    You had to go past a clerk who was sitting behind bullet-proof glass.
    He was a thin, bald man with a comb-over and a caterpillar moustache that conveyed a great well of sadness. He was reading The Parsifal Mosaic by Robert Ludlum.
    The boxes, presumably, were in a room to his right behind a locked metal door.
    “Key number,” the man said.
    “Twenty-seven,” I said.
    “Let me see it, please,” the man said.
    I took out the key and passed it under the partition. He examined the key and looked at something in a book and passed the key back.
    “Do you have any identification, Mr O’Rourke?”
    I slid O’Rourke’s licence through the partition. I had a story ready that Mr O’Rourke had passed on and I was his son-in-law closing up his estate, either that or a policeman investigating his estate. I hadn’t completely decided on the narrative, but neither proved necessary. The guard nodded and passed the licence back and even though O’Rourke and myself looked nothing alike he pushed a buzzer which opened the inner door.
    I went through into the next room which was a kind of antechamber. An armed security guard was sitting on a stool and staring into space. He was a big white guy, about thirty, who looked like he could handle himself. There was a TV monitor above his head.
    “Good morning,” he said, cheerfully enough.
    “Good morning,” I replied.
    The boxes were behind an armoured door. “Through here?” I asked.
    “Yeah. Take as long as you like,” he said. “But we close at four.”
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “I’ll buzz you through and lock you in, but I’ll keep an eye on you on the TV monitor. When you want out, knock the door one time. I’ll hear.”
    “Okay.”
    He unlocked the armoured door and I went inside the room and waited until he closed the door again. There were a hundred safety deposit boxes in two rows. In the centre of the room there was an oak table.
    I went to box 27, put the key in and turned it.
    I pulled out a long metal box and set it on the table.
    I opened the box.
    Inside was a brown envelope.
    I opened the envelope.
    Photographs. A dozen 8x10s. Black and white, taken with a telephoto lens.
    They were all of the same subject.
    A group of four middle-aged men having some kind of meeting at a restaurant. There were photographs of the men going inside the restaurant, photographs of the men sitting by the window and shots of them coming out again.
    One of the men, unmistakably, was John DeLorean.
    I stared at the photographs for five minutes to confirm that I was right, but there was no possibility of a mistake. Who the other men were I had no clue at all, and I wasn’t sure where the photographs had been taken. The only car I could see was a Volkswagen Beetle,