Islandbridge

by Brady, John

  “It used to be Austria was a kind of an island, you see?” Moser went on. “Of course I do not mean a real island, physically, like yours here. But I mean back with the Eastern bloc, how you say, the Iron Curtain?”

  Minogue squinted at Romania. They’d shot the dictator fella there. And his wife.

  “Well, my friends, if I may say, my new Irish friends – Ireland is certainly an island on the map. Obviously, you say. There is water all around it! ‘You qualify’ – as we say at the checkpoints on the roads when we have a man who blows over in the alcohol, you know? The alcohol?”

  “Breathalyzer,” said Lally and smiled. “Breathalyzer, we call it, Peter.”

  “Ah,” said Moser rubbing his hands, and smiled. “That is the graduate course in English. For that I must study more or live here in Dublin.”

  A murmur ran through the thirty-odd people in the room, a few snorts of humour. Minogue sat up more and cast a quick glance back at Malone. Malone was fidgeting, and he had his mobile under his clipboard.

  “What I am here to tell you, you already know,” Moser said then in a low voice, and paused.

  Minogue watched Moser’s smile fade slowly into a kind of gentle regret. Plenty of practice with that one, Minogue was fairly sure, but still masterful enough to get all eyes on him.

  “What I am here to tell you does not seem correct, by the geography you have had in your schools. No. I am telling you that Ireland is not an island.”

  It took another bout of vibrating for Minogue to realize that it was his own phone doing that against his chest. Well, he was getting better at it. It was a month now since Kathleen had stopped secretly switching it on and leaving it in his jacket pocket in the mornings. She’d shown him how to make it vibrate when there were texts too.

  “As you say,” Moser went on, “Or as they say in the island next door, your neighbour.”

  Again Moser paused for effect. Minogue kept his eyes on him while he corralled the mobile from a corner of his pocket.

  “A poet, he says ‘No man is an island.’ Correct?”

  Lally nodded. Well, Minogue thought as his fingers fastened on the phone at last, poetry, policing and PowerPoint, all in the one go. Top that.

  “That was not a police officer but a poet, Mister Doan.”

  “Donne,” Minogue said before he realized it.

  “Ah,” said Moser and smiled at him. “Thank you.”

  He met Moser’s eye, for politeness, and managed a little smile.

  “My friends they are true,” said Moser. “My friends who visit Ireland. They tell me that everyone Irish knows the English language – and the English! – better than the English. The Island of the Saints and Scholars? No?”

  No, Minogue wanted to say. Neither was in stock for some time now. The Celtic Tiger is a man-eater. It’s all gone. Saints were the first.

  He held the mobile up behind the chair in front of him and squinted at the text message.

  NO MORE PPOINT CRAP NEED TALK U ABOUT SOMTHNG CUPPA T CALL ME OUTSIDE UKNOW STAIRS NO JOKE.

  He closed the phone, but he waited awhile before looking around. Malone’s baleful stare greeted his wandering gaze.

  “There are no islands, anymore,” said Moser. “For our purposes.”

  Now two photos of lorries came onscreen. They were full of packages of something. Minogue waited for Moser to finish his sweep of the room. Something was coming up. Yes, Moser had put plenty of pizzazz into this part, the finale. Moser clicked and a picture of crumpled bodies, three, in some uniform, a black stain under them, came up. Spots on the shirt of one had to be bullet wounds.

  “We have left Austria,” said Moser. “This is the city of Zagreb. A normal, how you say, a routine day.”

  Minogue glanced over at Malone again. Malone made his eyes wide. Right, Minogue understood: he had forgotten to turn his own mobile on to ring.

  Moser had another picture of seized drugs, alongside what looked like assault rifles. He was piling it on, for sure. Kilmartin would be annoyed to have missed something like this.

  Moser’s eyes were on Minogue at the first ring. Minogue let it ring twice and put out his best half-embarrassed look.

  “Sorry.”

  He got a dip of the head from Moser.

  “Seriously?” he said into the phone. He turned away and put his finger in his other ear.

  “Well . . . ,” he said, a few times, skeptically, and he rolled his eyes.

  Then he closed the phone, and faced the presentation again. He gave the mobile a lingering glare, while he let his face assume an air of purpose and struggle. He closed the performance with a smile of gentle contempt. He came up with a bout of minor head shaking, for the finish-up.

  He stood, abashed. Moser looked like an all-knowing teacher now.

  “No rest for the wicked,” Minogue said. It was the best he could come up with.

  He took the stairs, stopped by the window on the third floor. Two detectives passed, one with a howiya. A buddy of Murtagh’s, he thought. Were the Hold-Up Squad sending people to these sessions now . . . ?

  He pushed Recent and waited.

  The drilling and the pounding were still going on in Harcourt Street outside. Would they never get those foundations in, and turn to just putting up bricks? He felt the drills’ resonance up through the floors here at CDU. The Puzzle Palace – as nobody called it anymore. The new light rail, the Luas, was almost finished. Minogue could soon leave his arthritic Citroën, with its stealthily failing seals and incontinent sump, at home now if they took his parking away.

  Buckets of rain last night had rinsed the air. Footpaths were covered with spores and small leaves, hammered down from their branches onto the footpaths.

  No ring from Malone, as usual.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’d like to thank the academy.”

  “I’m in a meeting sir, the Euro- policing one on smuggling – I mean, trafficking.”

  “I’d just like to say it’s been an awesome experience and my costar and–”

  “–Really, sir? I don’t know if I can, right now.”

  “You’re buying. Real coffee. Cake too – the whole shebang.”

  “Is Kearns available, sir? It’s just that this meeting is going on.”

  “You’re better than I thought. Practice, no doubt.”

  “I could, I suppose . . . let me see.”

  Minogue had already seen the stack of handouts behind Moser’s table, the printouts of the presentation.

  Malone put his hand over the speaker. While he waited for Malone to execute his grand spoof, Minogue eyed the pigeons resting on the parapets of the early Georgian terrace opposite. Below, the footpath was being reset, with real cut stone. Even this part of Dublin was going to be dainty soon, no doubt, as dainty as the heritage streets on the continent.

  “Fifteen minutes, sir,” from Malone.

  He didn’t miss the tone, or the paced delays in Malone’s words that only amplified the subtle mockery, before the connection went.

  Chapter 3

  MINOGUE HALF-LISTENED to the conversation that the man waiting next to them at the pedestrian lights was having on his mobile.

  “But how was I to know?” the man repeated, louder. Minogue’s eye went to a movement overhead then, a swivelling crane with what looked like a hopper of cement rolling out toward its tip. The lights changed. A motorbike went through on the red, inches from a man beside Minogue still yapping intently on his mobile.

  He and Malone crossed to the top of Grafton Street, and were soon enveloped in the smell of baking. He took in the distant clangs of empty aluminum kegs being bounced around on the footpaths or up on the delivery lorries outside the pubs, even as their full replacements were being wrestled and rolled down. A tattooed hawker with a huge trolley of Celtic jewellery rumbled down a side street, singing.

  Malone said something about PowerPoint, but half of it was lost in the start-up of a compressor outside of the soon-to-be-opened clothes shop. “Duds”
sounded a bit risky for such a venture still, Minogue believed. Then again, it was a new line being sold by Sheela, lead singer of Sheela Na Gig, the toast of America since her album last year.

  Malone’s words came to him as the noise stopped.

  “. . . part of the package. Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Minogue. They rounded a swarm of foreign students in the middle of the street. Minogue took in the unmarked Opel parked behind some bikes on South Anne Street. There were pickpocket teams coming in from Moscow even, he had heard somewhere.

  “Well, you’re in that line of work now yourself, aren’t you,” Malone said.

  Minogue eyed the huge telly in the window of the Screen Shop. It was news, live, with footage from a helicopter somewhere over Malahide.

  “I am not,” Minogue said, and stopped. “I’m not really a PowerPoint type.”

  “At least you switch on your mobile now,” Malone said. “So I’ll keep me hopes up.”

  The camera was zooming in on people’s gardens and rooftops. There were a half-dozen cars parked in front of one house.

  “What,” said Malone. “Are you buying one of those, the flat-screen things?”

  It zoomed in on trees, zoomed out again.

  “Kilmartin bought himself one,” Malone said. “Gadget Man, you know?”

  The camera seemed to try again, centring on a patch of garden. Those were Guards there standing in the garden, Minogue was sure. He put his hand over his forehead and leaned in to see through the glare.

  “Any invites yet?” he heard Malone say.

  “What invites?”

  There was a sheet there all right, out in some garden in Malahide. With the boughs intervening, the camera couldn’t get a proper view,

  “Kilmartin’s place,” Malone said. “To see his DVDs.

  Widescreen, mad sound. The whole bit.”

  “No.”

  “He bought all of 007 when they came out. I swear to God.”

  The newscaster’s face looked pensively up and away, listening to whatever the reporter was telling her, and then stared into the camera to say something. Stock-market numbers jumped up on the screen now.

  Minogue turned away, almost colliding with an elderly woman who had slowed to look in the window too.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said hurriedly.

  “That’s a miracle,” said the woman, and rearranged her bag.

  “Hardly now, ma’am. I’m sorry – mere clumsiness, to be sure.”

  “No,” she said. “That on the television. A miracle.”

  Minogue squinted back through the glare. A reporter was talking into a microphone on a street. Behind were two Guards, and one was talking to a man with a look of intense concentration on his face and was continually running his hand through his hair. A title came up in yellow beside the station logo. Somebody McCann.

  “A miracle,” she repeated. “Isn’t it?”

  There was something of a cat, or a nun about this woman, Minogue believed. Maybe it was the small whiskers on her upper lip, and that placid and severe calm he knew too well from his own schooldays with the nuns so long ago.

  “I don’t know,” he tried.

  “It’s a visitation then,” she declared. “A sign, a message to us to mend our ways here now.”

  She fixed Minogue with a piercing, but somehow distracted eye.

  “The Almighty sent that poor man to us,” she said. “He’s trying to get Ireland back on track.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, ma’am.”

  “The plane,” she said, with a little impatience now. “A man fell out of a plane, a stowaway. A refugee. It’s just like the Holy Family, don’t you see?”

  Minogue lined up next to Malone at the coffee counter at the back of Bewley’s.

  “I’ve heard of that kind of thing before,” said Malone. “They go in a wheel well but it gets fierce cold up high, and they freeze. If the landing gear doesn’t, you know . . .”

  Minogue couldn’t stop thinking of a body plummeting into the suburbs of Dublin.

  “He’d have been, you know, before he landed, I say,” said Malone. “Dead, like.”

  Minogue let Malone pay for the coffees and buns. He scouted out a table under the stained glass on the back wall of the restaurant. The stained glass here had the feel of a church about it, balm to the pagan Minogue, still longing for the cloths of any heaven, no matter the benedictions cast on him from the roaring, New Ireland.

  Bewley’s restaurant was doomed, he knew. There might be only months to go before it was closed. So many new restaurants and coffee places had opened up in the past few years, and the Bewley family that had started it themselves was gone these years. The Bewleys were Irish Quakers, and Minogue had always felt somehow obliged to them, and glad to patronize their restaurant. He never mentioned this odd duty to anyone, a duty that was actually an escape too. This was because he understood there was no exact connection between the Bewleys and the other Quakers who had kept ancestors of the now-dispersed Minogues – Minogues of Australia, and of Birmingham and Canada and Philadelphia – alive in the Famine.

  But as always, the gladness began to leak into him as it always did here, just to be alive, and to be in this mad and vexing city.

  There today he could see it in how a woman’s head leaned in to murmur some solace, or explanation, or advice to a man in his forties. The man’s eyes were huge behind his glasses, and his skin had a pink flush that seemed to go with Down’s. His features were bound in an earnest attention to words that he might not grasp at all. But just to hear the voice, the tone, might be sufficient, Minogue imagined.

  Farther over, an old woman was reading the paper, and beside her were two men, one with the wind-burned face of a mountaineer or a heavy drinker, and the other with a rueful and serene expression. They were talking in low tones, and only episodically, but their heads remained almost touching across the table between them. Elsewhere, somebody whistled, and there was a hiss of steamed milk, and a quick racket of plates being stacked badly. A name was called out somewhere; there was a short, rattling laugh from a waitress and she rolled her eyes.

  Minogue watched Malone heading over with his tray. Malone definitely lost a bit of weight. Gone back to the training? Hardly: more like he’d been through the mill, with his brother found dead of an overdose. What would it do to you to bury your twin brother?

  He wondered then what Kilmartin had said to him at the session on Thursday, the last “Club Mad” get-together. Kilmartin, the Tyrannosaurus from Mayo, always looking like the suits he wore were belonging to somebody else, had his hand on Malone’s shoulder early in the session. He’d said a few words that Malone had nodded at.

  Minogue was as surprised as the others, and remembered laughing as hard as Murtagh even, when Malone joined in bits of Kilmartin’s awful karaoke version of “Suspicious Minds” toward the end of the night.

  “Might as well tell you,” Malone said, clearing the tray. “We’re not alone.”

  “You watch Star Trek now, is it?”

  Malone nodded up at the railings for the mezzanine floor that was open to the patrons here below. With its low ceiling, it was a place of last resort for Minogue. Legs he saw between the banister, and then the head inclining around a pillar. It was Kilmartin giving him a solemn nod.

  “What’s he doing here?” Minogue said. “Are you expecting him?”

  Now Kilmartin was up, heading for the stairs.

  “Tell you in a minute.”

  Kilmartin crossed the floor with his cup held carelessly at the edge of the saucer. Jaunty, but like a wrestler maybe, Minogue reflected. Marauding, scanning the faces, with a look and a walk that said this overweight countryman was born to be a Guard and would be so, per omnia saecula saculorum.

  A faint smell of cigar ash wafted to Minogue as Kilmartin sat in at the table and tugged at his shirt cuffs.

  “So,” said Kilmartin. “The usual suspects? You pair of rogues here?”

&nbs
p; “They’re letting anyone in here these days,” Minogue said.

  “Look who’s talking,” Kilmartin retorted. “Now, tell me, this gig that the both of you are mitching from, this ‘Policing on the Frontiers of Europe Today.’”

  “How well you know all about it.”

  “I know everything,” said Kilmartin. “So says Maura. Okay: it was right there in the newsletter, you gamóg. Next to the cartoons.”

  For a moment Minogue considered turning it on Kilmartin. It was the kind of thing he’d like to be in on almost as much as with all the tech talk he loved about his post in Procurement.

  “‘Basically’ Lally runs those gigs, still?”

  “None other,” said Minogue.

  “A legend entirely. But that fella, he tries too hard, if you ask me. Here, I’ll let me tell you my grief with this multimedia lark. Share my pain, will you.”

  “You have PowerPoint in your life?” asked Malone.

  “Don’t talk to me about that frigging curse-of-God thing. I said to a fella – Noel Conroy, the Assistant Comm., you know him, Tipperary – Nenagh in actual fact, a brother of his in Aer Lingus? I says to Noel: ‘Noel, I says, look: I’ll run you up a little presentation that’ll show the helicopter thing in action.’ I was trying to play cute, you see – I already had a thing given to me from a fella in the States when I was over, a higher up from Washington. A CD with pictures and that.”

  “Do you mean a salesman?”

  “Feck off. Actually a cop from Maryland or somewhere. So I says to Noel, I says, ‘No bother at all. Have it for you tomorrow.’ Well . . . ! Jesus wept, lads. I might as well have cut me own throat.”

  “It’s a curse, the computer,” said Minogue. “I’ve heard it said.”

  “I’m nearly destroyed with it. I had to go out and pay a fella on the QT to do it. Out of my own pocket! Worked great, says Noel. Brilliant, says I. No bother.”

  Kilmartin paused to take a sip from his cup.

  “So Conroy knows you’re the expert,” said Malone. “Now you’re shagged.”

  “Enough out of you, bucko,” said Kilmartin. “And don’t be vulgar.”

  His friend, colleague, and tormentor of twenty and more years was clearly enjoying himself, Minogue saw.