Border Angels by Anthony Quinn Read Free Book Online Page B

standing in one of the throngs gave a sudden start and slipped quietly out of view.
    Instead of going straight up to his room, Ashe sat on a sofa in the foyer and buried his head in a newspaper. Patches of his journey back from the shrine began to take shape in his mind like a print emerging from a solution. He got an impression that someone had paused behind him earlier in the town.
    A waiter walked by, and Ashe ordered some coffee. He finished it quickly. The feeling that there was someone out on the street, very close, grew stronger. Someone was following him, he realized. Several times a year he stayed in this hostel, and almost everything was familiar. The excitement of this new sensation helped fill a little of the emptiness he felt within. He guessed that the person watching him, whoever it was, had a connection with his past, but he was unsure as to what extent the person wished him harm. How should he act? Was he meant to make a run for it and imitate fear? Or would that prolong the suspense unnecessarily? Through the hotel window, he watched a pair of cats scavenge through a heap of discarded tapas wrappers. He leaned forward and stared at the hostel doors. Whatever violence the evening held for him, he was glad that at least he had spent the day in prayerful meditation.
    He walked to the doors and looked up and down the street. He was like an animal that needed a den with many exits. He made his way out to the olive and fruit groves that bordered the village, the tension in his body making his knee hurt more than usual. The dogs that lay slumped in the shade of the trees roused themselves to bark at his passage. Along the hillside, water gushed through the irrigation channels, weaving through trees hung with ripening citrus fruit.
    He climbed through the terraces and stopped under the branches of a leafless almond tree. A dry spiced scent filled the air. There was little cover beyond the tree. The mountainside turned into a flinty wilderness stretching several hundred feet toward the snow-capped peak. He surveyed the fertile terrain below and caught sight of a familiar figure from his past clambering through an olive grove. Screwing up his eyes, he tried to fix on the details. The man had a severe haircut—or perhaps he’d grown bald—he was too far away to make out. Unfortunately, he had spotted Ashe and was now waving to get his attention. It was too late to evade him.
    “What are you doing here?” asked the man as Ashe slithered back down the hillside.
    “I came to pray.” Ashe clapped the dust from his hands. “I haven’t finished yet.”
    “No amount of praying will undo the past.”
    “There’s no mistaking that,” said Ashe, hobbling by him. “If I’d known it was you following me, I’d have made sure you never caught up. I would have slipped town and you’d never have seen me again.”
    “You’ve always wandered where you wanted,” replied the man. In spite of Ashe’s limp, he had to run to stay up with him.
    “I’m on a journey.”
    “Isn’t life a journey? Good or bad?”
    “What do you want from me? Why have you followed me here?” Ashe stared at the man’s face, absorbing the detail he had been avoiding, the ugly scarring that pockmarked his cheeks and nose. What he saw resembled a botched plaster-cast mask of the face he had known all those years ago.
    “I’ve been sent to offer you a job. We have a problem back home. One that the party bosses are very concerned about.”
    “I’ve already done my service. I’ve paid. Many times over. Fifteen years in jail. The best years of my life.”
    “Haven’t we all?”
    “But I’ve quit the organization, cut my ties. It’s been ten years since I even set foot on Irish soil.”
    “Don’t you think I deserve at least a little of your time? After all we’ve been through in prison?” The man’s eyes briefly clouded over. A spasm ran through his facial disfigurement.
    Ashe’s mind resurrected images of the cell they had