Islandbridge

by Brady, John

  The same Lally was bound for big things, to be sure. And why not? Lally definitely had the lingo: relationships, interdiction, proactive. There was much reaching out, plenty of building bridges, a fair bit of empowering. The phrase “comfortable with” had showed up too often in the TV and radio interviews where Lally seemed to pop up quite often this past year. Minogue had even heard him say “win-win” twice, when he had introduced Moser earlier on.

  Lally’s law degree, his year at Europol, the live Internet feeds and video conferencing up on the big screen at his meetings – none of this had impressed Kilmartin much. He had confided to Minogue that he believed that Lally had set up these meetings as fodder for his own promotion. A trick bicyclist, was Kilmartin’s irrevocable verdict on Lally: basically a media man, an operator, not a real copper anymore.

  Well, little would impress Superintendent James Kilmartin these days, Minogue was beginning to believe. Indeed, he often wondered if Kilmartin was chafing even more than he was himself to get back to what he knew and liked. That consisted of chasing murderers and catching them, and dressing in his best suits to attend court, where he liked to stare at the defendant as he gave testimony, and particularly as a verdict was announced.

  But Kilmartin’s bluntness, and his ferocity, made up for his temperamental deficiencies. He was beyond ardent, a zealot in fact, and had often been brutal in tracking and seizing a killer. Shrewd enough to call on the right people, Kilmartin had not minded taking troublemakers on the Squad staff. It helped morale immeasurably that he wasn’t shy about buying a round of drinks either. Even Tommy Malone, the first Dublin-born Guard that Kilmartin had inducted into the Murder Squad, had allowed that Kilmartin was bearable, some of the time.

  This did not cause James Kilmartin to let up in his slagging of Dubliners and their accent, as personified in his final “hire” before the Squad was disbanded – Garda Thomas Malone. But Malone had proven as dogged and as smart and as capable as any who had ever come though the Squad. This was no small feat. Kilmartin in his cups was willing to quietly concede that fact also, to concede that Malone had been up with the likes of former Squad members Plateglass Fergal Sheehy, Jesus Tony Farrell, and Head-The-Ball John Murtagh.

  Kilmartin didn’t restrict himself to Dubliners, however. It was pretty much anyone not graced by fortune to have been born in his native County Mayo. Accordingly, Minogue routinely fell under the rubric of “a Clare savage,” or perhaps a “buff,” or “mucker.” Kilmartin seemed oblivious to the fact these almost archaic terms of lethal understatement had resonance only for himself really. Minogue didn’t mind one bit. Hiding within them remained a refuge, a strength, even a weapon.

  Solely for the sake of a staged row, Minogue would occasionally affect to seek redress in the matter of Kilmartin’s slurs. The scene for this mischief was usually licensed premises. The raillery itself was the point. It built thirst, and sooner or later it would end in a bit of play-acting, and elaborately fake umbrage to go with an extravagant show of bad language.

  Minogue felt obliged to do some pro forma jabbing back at Kilmartin, and his reminders that County Mayo was no Parnassus, and that Mayo men no standard bearers of civilization, only kept things simmering nicely. After all, Minogue liked to remind his friend, the same Jim Kilmartin’s fellow Mayo men couldn’t all be as thick as they were reputed to be. Hadn’t they had the good sense to kick Kilmartin out of the county years ago, and up to annoy Dublin . . . ?

  Moser had a remote in his other hand, and it acted like a mouse. Minogue squinted at the names that had appeared on the map. The walls on the squadroom had always been plastered with maps, even after a case had been cleared. Ambiance, was Kilmartin’s explanation, and he even directed Eilís, the Squad secretary, to rearrange them rather than remove them.

  Minogue shifted a little in his slouch in an effort to dislodge himself from this slide into reminiscence. A total waste of time, to be sure, and in all fairness, it had to be said that the closing of the Squad had been engineered with a grand, soft landing for them all in the land of Cushy Numbers, or Grand Strokes, as Kilmartin called their new posts.

  Since the disbanding of the Garda Murder Squad, Kilmartin spent plenty of time in the monthly get-togethers down in Willie Ryan’s Pub near the old Technical Bureau offices by Islandbridge, boasting about the perqs of gadgetry trials, and the budgeting and faraway conferences that were part of his new nine-to-five in Procurement. It was as cushy as Minogue’s posting to Liaison, and his twice-a-week Alliance Française lessons to get him to become one of the Garda point men in for European police initiatives that were rolling into Ireland now. The Big Time, as Kilmartin called it: no more economy-class policing, no sir.

  Maybe it was time to give the regular meetings of the old Squad members at the Willie Ryan’s Pub a miss for a while then, Minogue reflected now. “Club Mad,” John Murtagh’s name for the get-togethers – it had come from his harrowing tale of food poisoning after a tryst with a Danish gymnast at his first, and only, Club Med holiday – had served its purpose. It had run its course, and everyone should move on, as they say. Or maybe not, Minogue wondered yet again. Jesus Farrell still showed up most times too, but he often spent much time on his mobile, phoning in bets. Sheehy, Plateglass Fergal Sheehy, was gone to Serious Crimes again. He had gone moderate on the jar. Minogue had heard that Sheehy wasn’t happy in the job at all.

  But still Minogue could feel for Kilmartin. Plainly, it was because he had the same rebel heart in his own new job himself. There had been too many days when he’d felt like a civil servant, or someone whose job was to be in meetings, or to be trapped in reports of meetings that only gave way to preparations for other meetings.

  At home some evenings, Minogue’s gaze stayed fixed on the page of his book without seeing a word for minutes at a time. Meanwhile his thoughts brought him to the ditches and alleys, and the small rooms where he listened and watched as someone lied or sweated more, or cried, or all three. To be hunting down a killer, to be staying awake and half-raving even, for forty hours, and to be living on yesterday’s sandwiches and too much instant coffee as well as a few pints that soon soured in the gut, or to be standing in the long grass beside where a human being’s body had been discarded. . . . How could any man in this day and age justify that shameful excitement to anyone, to his wife and family especially, or even to his own waking self?

  “Jesus fell for the second time,” Minogue thought: now he was becoming annoyed as well as a little ashamed of his wandering thoughts. He sat upright and wrote a new heading in his notes, using the most recent words to appear onscreen: “The Balkan Route.” This meeting was important, he told himself, just like the other ones Lally organized. It was here for a good reason. Crime trends and developments on the continent mattered. It was very good for morale and staff development to attend these sessions, and to want more of them. Information shared was better information. No more reinventing the wheel, less time playing catch-up. This is Europe we’re in; our streets have brown and black faces, and everything is on the move. Prosperity puts Ireland on the map for organized crime anywhere.

  As much as he fought to stay focused, and as much as he wrote, Minogue soon felt his ra-ra efforts foundering yet again.

  Whatever the merits and practical benefits of the monthly sessions here in Garda HQ in Harcourt Square, they certainly were prized items for the Garda Press Office. There they were mined and recycled for sorely needed press releases that indicated the Guards were an up-to-the-minute, modern European police force, on top of things. The names of the organizations involved had great weight, Minogue had to admit: Europol, Interpol, US State Department.

  So too did the attendees, giving the meetings an aura of well-considered and coordinated work around these meetings. “The Snowmen,” the in-house nickname for the Garda Drug Squad Central, was represented by Malone now, in his second meeting. Paddy Cowan was Criminal Assets Bureau, one of “The Laundrymen.” Cowan seemed to take lots of notes, but Minogue had beg
un to suspect he was faking it.

  Minogue remembered then that the CIB’s nickname was being usurped by a newer one: “The Binmen.” It had come from outside the Gardai, and therefore would be slow to gain acceptance. But Minogue liked it. He liked it because of its origins, a well-publicized case where detectives had systematically robbed rubbish to gather richly incriminating evidence. That rubbish removal became the nub of a celebrated and lengthy – but failed – court case that a defendant had launched to make the detectives’ gleanings inadmissible.

  Turlough – “Tayto” – Collins was CDU, going back to the Old Testament. Super now too, or Inspector? Minogue couldn’t remember. O’Brien . . . Donal, was it . . . ? . . . he the specky-our-eyed senior civil servant from Revenue, who apparently spoke Russian of all things, and liked to holiday in Latvia or someplace. And Larry Donohue, Immigration Bureau, next to him, all sixteen stone of him, with a humpy back that made him resemble a badly dressed bear, Larry the one-time terror at the boozing sessions in the Garda Club, but gone on the dry these years. Why didn’t the Immigration Bureau have a decent nickname yet?

  He’d done it again, he had. Daydreaming about nicknames now? “Jesus fell for the third time,” he thought, savagely. He must have ADD or something.

  He searched for more names to write down, and took great care with the accents and the dots on some of the words. One word had a letter tail hanging under it. For a moment he considered sheltering behind an excuse he’d heard from Kilmartin not long ago. It was something about the projector thing being a subliminal signal thing. That, Kilmartin had announced triumphantly, was what the problem was with these dog-and-pony PowerPoint come-all-ye’s: it tricked your brain into thinking you were going to the pictures! Relax, and enjoy the show!

  He redoubled his efforts to attend to what Moser was saying and pointing to on the screen. How could he blame Inspektor Moser one bit for causing him to daydream? But to be fair, it had been one of Moser’s phrases earlier, on the “no borders” one, on which Minogue had suddenly slid down and into the empty bog-land near Glenmalure, the Dwyer country of West Wicklow that he loved, a place of roaring wind over high boggy plateaus that seemed a million miles from Dublin. He could almost hear the grass hissing in the wind, nearly see the cloud shadows moving over the heather all about. He had been thinking a lot lately about Dwyer, the Wicklow Rebel of 1798 who had ranged here for five years before they got to his family and he was transported to New South Wales. Dwyer was forgotten, of course.

  Moser caught his eye and smiled. Minogue nodded, a little pleased that his efforts to attend closely had drawn Moser’s notice. He raised his eyebrows and smiled back at the genial and well-spoken visitor from Austria. He noticed that Lally was offering a smile too. Did everyone know he was adrift here? He wrote a lengthy note about some of the stats on the screen.

  But as he wrote, he simply had to admit it: nothing had really changed. It was still PowerPoint hell.

  His detailed and useless note finished, Minogue began to scrutinize a new map projected up on the wall. Was Romania really there? Was it always? The State Police “Bundespolizei” logo in the corner of the screen was the same as the one on Moser’s embossed business card. Well, who needed to learn German for that one? They were changing the name soon though, he half-remembered Moser saying. There was some amalgamation of police services there, and it had a funny side to it, apparently.

  The smuggling routes came back on with a mouse click. Oops, Minogue caught himself in time: Bucharest, not Budapest. Well, had Bulgaria moved too, changed? He felt a vague shame inch in. But for years, places like Bulgaria or Albania, or states he now couldn’t list in place of where Yugoslavia had been – these places had all been map names, vaguely Iron Curtain, neither here nor there. There was a lot to learn, maybe even more to unlearn.

  His mind went again to Kilmartin, delivering yet another one of his orations back after Christmas. Was it just after the funeral for Malone’s brother? Yes, it was. Terry Malone had turned up dead within a week of parole, overdosed and lying on a bench in Fairview Park. That was at the New Year.

  Kilmartin, then: We’re in the ha’penny place compared to what I seen beyond in friggin’ Amsterdam at the conference, let me tell you. A right wake-up call, oh yes.

  The funeral, yes. That’s when Kilmartin had been muttering away to him at the back of the church while they watched the proceedings. It wasn’t just the family and relatives, and the neighbours. There had been thieves, and thugs, and Guards and priests, and social workers, and prostitutes and even a scruffy-looking teacher who had gotten Malone and his brother Terry into boxing years ago. Scattered around in the mostly empty pews toward the back, Minogue remembered a goodly number of lost-looking gougers and hollow-eyed women whom he suspected were probably living rough.

  The mix of people had brought a tension to the ceremony that had only seemed to grow until it filled the church. That was until a demented man staggered in halfway through the Mass demanding to know if the circus was in town and if anyone had ever thought about what that bastard Oliver Cromwell had done to Ireland. The priest, a man with a Spanish-sounding name, had paused, smiling, and waited for the rant to run its course.

  Detective Tommy Malone crying and sagging into his mother was a sight Minogue would not forget. Even Kilmartin had never spoken of it after that day. Malone, the detective who had tried to take a bullet out of his own thigh lying in a laneway in Bray while a stunned Minogue stood swaying and eyeing the delta of dark blood spreading from under the man Malone had shot dead. The same Tommy Malone, Central Drug Squad, pleading with Parole to gate his brother or he’d die. Malone thumping two dealers not a week afterwards, one into hospital, glaring morosely at Minogue over a pint that afternoon, ready to jack it in.

  Minogue’s mind was yanked back to the present yet again by the sight of someone stretching up ahead. Lally was taking notes still, and nodding. This was too much, really. Maybe he should just stand up, or pinch himself, or something to keep his mind on things here. Yet again he focused on the map, and studied the arrows that began appearing in quick succession there. Moser had some remote in his hand, and he never even needed to look down at it, or even to point it.

  Roads appeared, routes he supposed they should be called, or arteries. Moser looked around but settled on Minogue again. Moser must be on to him now, for habitual lapses in attention.

  “Is it okay if I play with the English language perhaps, just a little?”

  Lally smiled and nodded.

  “Actually, I should not say play,” and Moser made air quotes. “What I am actually referring to is a word. People say ‘smuggle’ but we say ‘traffic.’ This is true, yes?”

  Lally blinked and smiled again, and shrugged.

  “You see, the times we have?” Moser asked. “Traffic is not cars, not only. It is drugs, it is guns, it is money, it is people. If we say ‘smuggle’ you think . . .?”

  Ah, Minogue realized, audience involvement was being called for, and with the introvert’s reflex, he shifted his eyes to his clipboard.

  “Pirates, no?” said Moser, though it wasn’t evident to Minogue that anything had been decided. “Things in hiding. In bags. In boxes maybe?”

  Minogue began to wonder how you trafficked people. Under a lorry? Were there more of those false compartments, like the poor divils in that container in Wexford, the ones who’d died on the boat over and were left at the dock? There had been a vanload of Russians pulled in at the Lucan bypass a month or so back too. They weren’t Russians at all, but Romanians and Bulgarians and people from places that Minogue didn’t know. According to Kilmartin, who still heard everything and asked everything, the people in the van were being shipped out to meat processors in the midland counties where they were to work. Like slavery, he had said, paying back the smugglers – traffickers – for years to come.

  “Well,” said Moser. “Let me tell you a little about my home country. Austria.”

  Minogue sat back. Moser was good �
� he had surely sensed that it was probably more than Minogue who had been woolgathering here.

  Austria, he thought: that was a nice thought. There had to be a fair bit of yodelling, and Alpine meadows dotted with daisies, to be sure, along with cows. Plenty of them too, cows with bells. Cake of course – a lot of cake. There were surely flowers in window boxes, white walls, dark wood – and good pubs, without a doubt. Vienna was waltzes and buildings and more cake. Those leather trousers for the kids still, though? Everything seemed dainty and well made. No way were they as wound up as the Germans. Or were they? Hadn’t Hitler . . .?

  “My country has always been the crossroads of Europe,” Moser continued. “Yes, Austria. It used to be an empire, going out into Russia, you see? But sooner or later everything moves through Austria. Everything you could imagine, and not just fine Austrian beer, I must remind you.”

  A few smiles came up for that. Minogue wondered if Moser wasn’t playing back a little stereotype of an Irish over-fondness for the drink on him, for his postcard take on Austria some moments before. Maybe Austrian coppers read minds?

  To look like he was paying attention, Minogue looked at Austria and then let his gaze drift down toward the Balkan countries. He still wasn’t sure of them. He re-read names of cities there, and resolved to memorize them along with the correct names of the new states that had been Yugoslavia. Vlores, a nice-sounding name of a place in Albania: but hadn’t Moser said something about it being a centre for trafficking? Well there was a name farther back toward central Europe, a name you wouldn’t easily forget – Split.