Page 3 of Hang on St. Christopher

I smiled at this romantic notion, but actually this was pretty disturbing.

If the peelers were way back there, who was in charge of the streets?

I soon found out.

I walked to the multistory car park near the cinema and discovered that the security barrier had been torn down, the guy in the pay booth was long gone, and several cars from the first level had evidently been nicked. Car thieves the world over loved Beemers, so I was pretty relieved to find my black 1991 325i still in one piece. Yeah, I know, I go on about the BMW 3 series, but this beast could do zero to sixty in seven and a half seconds, and 145 on the motorway, and sometimes in a crisis situation it was good to know that you could do 145 mph on a motorway.

I looked under the Beemer for mercury tilt switch bombs and, finding none, got in.

I put the key in the ignition, and the engine and the radio kicked to life. Nirvana came out of the stereo speakers. Say what you will aboutNevermindbeing a compromised punk album with Pixies, Rainbow, and Boston riffs, but it was still good to hear decent music again on BBC Radio 1 after a decade of synth and bubblegum-pop darkness. And although in the UK the bestselling albums of the summer were still Simply Red, Annie Lennox, and Michael Bolton, it meant something that in the USNevermindhad knocked Michael Jackson from the number one slot on theBillboardchart.

I’d driven about half a mile on Great Victoria Street before I encountered the first paramilitary roadblock. A dozen men in balaclavas had thrown burning tires across the road and were preventing vehicles from heading north. They were wearing matching denim jackets and were armed with aluminum baseball bats, knives, and machetes, and at least two of them had sawn-off shotguns.

I couldn’t see exactly what was going on ahead of me, but it was obvious what must be happening. The paramilitaries would be interrogating every driver at the roadblock. If they liked the answers the driver gave to their questions, they would let them go; if they didn’t like the answers, they would order them out of their car, hijack the vehicle, and make the driver walk home.

I looked to see if I could do a U-turn, but the traffic behind me was dense with evacuees.

Everyone was trying to get out of the city. The police and army were nowhere to be seen.

It was something of a tight spot. If the paramilitaries were Protestant and they found out I was a Catholic, they would order me out of the car and they might try to kill me. If the paramilitaries were IRA men and they found out I was a Catholic policeman, they’d order me out of the car and almost certainly try to kill me.

That was Belfast in July: a poetry reading, a quiet pint of the black stuff, a lynch mob armed with baseball bats and guns...

The car in front nudged forward toward the roadblock. The acrid stench of burning tires came in through the vents.Où sont lesburning tires of yesteryear? Everyone on this street was time-traveling and PTSD-ing. All those previous bonfires and riots in seventies Belfast, eighties Belfast, and now nineties Belfast.

I suppose I could have gotten out and made a scene and tried to arrest the lot of them. And if I were one of those crusading cops from off the telly, that’s exactly what I would have done. But that wasn’t my scene.

The car ahead was let through the roadblock, and now it was my turn.

A chubby man in a balaclava leaned in and tapped the driver’s-side window with gloved fingers. He was holding an Armalite assault rifle. His mate had a 9mm pistol.

“Wind your window down!” he said.

I wound the window down and turned the radio off.

“Yes?” I inquired.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Who’s asking?”

The man turned to a shadowy figure behind him in a gray denim jacket, who was holding a pump-action shotgun.

“He’s asking who’s asking,” the man said.

“Who’s he to be asking us?” the man with the shotgun said.

“I just want to know if you’re IRA or UVF. I can tell you’re not the police,” I said.

The man with the shotgun came forward and slapped the windscreen.

“We’re doing the bloody questions!” he said.

All the other men at the roadblock turned to look at me.

Jesus, I had screwed this up already with my big mouth.

The man with the shotgun had arms covered with tattoos too ineptly done to read. His pudgy lard-colored neck, however, was holding up a gold chain with Ulster in block letters. He was, therefore, a Loyalist paramilitary. They were all Loyalist paramilitaries. UVF or UDA. A delicious shiver of pure fear made its way slowly down my spine. If they were in a particularly bad mood and looking for a random Catholic to kill, I could be their man for today.