“Is that what we’re doing?” Will asked. “I had no idea you felt that way about me.”
Nolan sighed. “I need to make a move.”
Will rested his cheek on his hand and batted his eyes at Nolan. “Well, make it lover boy.”
Nolan glared at him. “Will you be serious for five minutes?”
“Fine.” Will sat back in his seat. “What kind of move are we talking about?”
“I need the names of the BPD officers on Seamus’s payroll.”
“That’s no walk in the park,” Bridget said.
“I know.” Nolan kept his voice even, trying not to betray the fact that his body was on fire for her, that his heart felt like it was being turned to coal under the weight of her eyes. “It’s been almost a month and I still have no idea where he keeps his records.”
“Seamus doesn’t have records,” Bridget said.
“He has to have some way of keeping track of all the money coming in and going out, all the debts people owe him, the interest.”
“I’ve never seen so much as a notebook,” Bridget said. “I think he might be paranoid about writing things down. I don’t even think he owns a computer. I always assumed he kept it in his head.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Will said. “He’s part of the old guard.”
He’s also IRA,Nolan thought.
“But he’s paying the cops somehow, probably in cash,” Nolan said.
“That’s how he pays the rest of us,” Bridget said.
“Exactly. Which is why I’ve started thinking about the envelopes,” Nolan said.
Will looked at him. “The envelopes?”
“He counts the money on the table at the Cat and puts each person’s share into envelopes. Mine always has my name on it, doesn’t yours?” Nolan asked.
“Yeah, but he keeps them with him on the table,” Bridget says.
“And the whole thing doesn’t take long,” Will added. “They bring in the money on Mondays, dump it on the table, count it, split it, and off it goes.”
“In the envelopes,” Nolan said.
Will nodded.
“How is it distributed?” Nolan asked.
“If you’re at the Cat on a Monday, he hands it to you,” Will said.
“And if you’re not?”
“He sends it out with the guys in Operations,” Bridget said.
Nolan wondered if she’d ever put together the official hierarchy of Seamus’s operation with that of the IRA. Nolan hadn’t — not until Marchand had told him about Seamus’s background. Like a lot of second-generation Irish immigrants, the IRA was as foreign to Nolan as Hamas or ETA. Nolan heard about them on the news, but he never gave much thought to them beyond his father grumbling from time to time about the “savages” who’d spent decades blowing up Ireland.
After the Syndicate clued him into Seamus’s background, Nolan had done some research and had been surprised to find obvious correlations between Seamus’s structure and that of the IRA.
Like the IRA, Seamus divided the territories surrounding Boston into areas he called Commands. Soldiers assigned to day-to-day operations were grouped into Companies which were part of a larger brigade. The people charged with managing the day-to-day runnings of the organization were said to be in Operations. It was loose, smaller than an organization designed to take back a country, but Nolan had been able to see the influence.
“So the guys in Operations hand out the money,” Nolan said, getting back to the conversation at hand.