It’s not a long drive from the airport to the hotel—ten minutes or so—but Rosie had clearly worked her magic in that time. Steve looks happy. Rosie always looks happy.
The sliding doors open once again, and three students with rucksacks emerge. Eddie is taking his sweet time. What if customs have stopped him? He wouldn’t be stupid enough to carry a gun, surely? There are ways of smuggling…
A sudden noise, and the back windscreen of the Mercedes shatters. Amy throws herself down. Someone is firing from directly behind the car. Firing and getting closer. She risks a look into the rearview mirror. It’s Eddie Flood.
He’s not just good, he’s very good. But she’s still alive.
Eddie has a gun, and Amy has nothing. She has a car, sure, but no way of starting it. Amy lies flat across the front two seats. If Eddie wants to check she’s alive, he’s not going to be able to do it from any of the back windows; he’ll have to go to the driver’s side door.
Right on cue, Eddie appears at the window and levels his gun. Amy hooks one foot under the door release, and then kicks out with the other leg, sending the door swinging open and Eddie flying across the concrete. Amy springs up, opens the passenger side door, and, as Eddie regains his balance, she dives over the parapet of the car park, landing on the Welcome to Dublin floral display. Eddie fires one more shot from above, before, sensibly in Amy’s view, realizing this is all too public. The few onlookers were already screaming and pointing. The taxi drivers suddenly have something new to talk about.
Amy runs across the airport access road and jumps into the first taxi on the rank.
“Temple Bar Hotel,” she says to the driver, while keeping her head out of sight.
“That’s a nice hotel, right enough,” says the driver. “That’s you being shot at, is it?”
“Afraid so,” says Amy.
“Welcome to Dublin,” says the taxi driver, putting her foot hard to the floor and screeching away. As they take a bend at speed, one final shot smashes the back window.
The driver looks at where her window used to be, and at Amy brushing glass from her jacket.
“I’ll not ask if it’s business or pleasure.”
62
“It’s such an honor,” says Mark, the makeup artist. “But it’s very hard to make you look any more fabulous.”
“Thank you,” says Rosie. “And I’ve had almost no sleep.”
“You are so drama,” says Mark. “So drama. I love it.”
“Whenever drama is in short supply, you must create your own,” says Rosie. “When I’m not writing stories, I try to live them.”
“Oh, you are extra,” says Mark. “You are extra extra, you know what I mean?”
Rosie does know what he means. She is “drama,” and she is “extra.” She has always been able to create chaos out of nothing, to spin the people around her like plates. Rosie can turn a calm sea into a maelstrom with a single word here, or a single glance there. It can be tiring, but it keeps reality from the door.
“You’re like Lizzo,” says Mark. “We’ve had her on. She brought her own makeup people, though.”
Chaos is a jungle in which it’s easy to hide, and Rosie has, therefore, enjoyed the last day or so very much. And she is aware there is more fun to come.
Rosie had taken Steve for a drink straightaway. Steve had objected at first, but Rosie had once persuaded a Buddhist monk to do LSD in an infinity pool, so Steve was no match for her. “Just one pint,” he had said.
Several hours later, they were still in the residents’ bar when Amy had appeared, with a slight limp and a story to tell.
A floor manager pokes her head around the door of the makeup room. “On air in five?”
“She hardly needs a thing,” says Mark. “I told her, you’re like Lizzo.”
Amy had told them that Eddie was in Dublin after all, the sly old fox, armed to the teeth and determined to finish the job that Kevin had started. Amy didn’t give them the whole story, however much Rosie pleaded, but she had broken glass and magnolia petals in her pocket, so something interesting had gone on. Rosie ordered more drinks for them all.
“What’s the big announcement, then?” Mark asks, adding some final hair spray.
“Secret, I’m afraid,” says Rosie.
“What’s said in the makeup room, stays in the makeup room,” says Mark. “It’s like Vegas.”
But what to do about Eddie. He was in Ireland, he was armed, and he would surely be following them to Cork. So, Amy is currently buying a gun for €4,000, while Rosie waits to go on Ireland’s leading breakfast television show. You have to play to your own strengths.
One drink turned into another and then, as so often in life, into another, at which point Rosie’s current plan to foil Eddie Flood came into focus. At six p.m., as the bar started to fill with revelers just beginning their evening, Rosie sent a message to a man called Michael O’Doherty, the producer of An Irish Breakfast, promising a scoop, and they all promptly went to bed.
Michael, whose main guest of that morning was due to be a pet psychic, jumped at the chance, and at 6:45 a.m. a car came to the hotel to take Rosie to the studios of RTÉ. They stopped en route at a newsagent with a photocopier, stopped once again for Steve to be sick, dropped Amy off on a nondescript suburban street corner with her pockets filled with cash, and arrived at the studio with time to spare.
Steve is currently lying down in a darkened dressing room. Some people just can’t handle twelve pints of Guinness. Rosie and Amy were fresh as daisies.
On the TV high on the wall of the makeup room, Rosie hears one of the hosts, Kellie, say, “And, coming up, one of our favorite guests is back. Rosie D’Antonio will be joining us on the sofa with a big announcement. And she needs your help.”
Her co host, Ryan, casually handsome, like so many Irish men, moves on. “More on the shots fired at Dublin Airport early Monday morning. There are no confirmed casualties. Niall Clark has this report.”
The floor manager reappears. “Okay, that’s us. After this VT, can I get you into the studio?”
Rosie takes one last look at the screen, where a group of animated taxi drivers are being interviewed. She is led through a heavy metal door, into the air-lock space they always have in TV studios to let you know that you are leaving the world of reality and entering the world of television. The floor manager opens a second metal door, and Rosie finds herself in the Irish Breakfast studio. Niall Clark is finishing his report as the two hosts ignore the VT, heads down in their scripts.
On the screen a female taxi driver is saying, “I never saw anything,” though Rosie notes that she has plastic sheeting taped across the space where her rear passenger window should be.
Kellie and Ryan look up as Rosie is seated next to them. They look thrilled to see her, as well they might, knowing they’ve been saved an interview with a man staring into the eyes of a dog and saying, “I feel like he’s lost someone recently.”
