Islandbridge

by Brady, John

  “A revelation, now,” said Kilmartin. He lost the rest of his words in a shake of his large head that bowed to the glass again.

  This was a road leading to Africa, a bridge between peoples, the woman continued, an air bridge that went to heaven.

  The interviewer’s face took over the screen, and then the camera went back to the flowers and the cross by the gate to the McCann’s house.

  “I can see it now,” Kilmartin said. “Pilgrimages to Malahide. Never much liked that part of the world, I’d have to say.”

  “You never liked any part of the whole city of Dublin.”

  “That’s County Dublin out there, smart boy. Get your facts right, for once. And I gave that place fair go. Remember the housewarming for Hoey?”

  “You trying to fix the lawnmower, after a few jars? Maybe Maura’d be better at recalling that.”

  Kilmartin gave him a glare.

  “Leave that remark in the gutter where you found it.”

  Minogue watched the barman approach with the soups.

  “Plant them here, boss,” Kilmartin said to him. “Thanking you.”

  The napkins were cloth, Minogue saw. Kilmartin pushed his glass aside and leaned in over his bowl. He unrolled the napkin and placed it on his lap, and began pushing his spoon around the soup.

  “Did I tell you,” he said. “Maura has fellas in the kitchen, gutting the place? I come home of the Tuesday, early, and there’s this van. Well, you can imagine.”

  Minogue held the first spoonful up: way too hot.

  “I counted. It’s four years and two months since she had it done before. A perfectly fine kitchen. Now do you remember what a normal kitchen was, and us young fellas? Do you?”

  “You’re making it up, Jim. There were no kitchens in Mayo.”

  But there was no energy in Kilmartin now, and his spoonful of soup stayed gently swaying over the bowl. He stared down at it for several moments.

  “Middle-age crazy,” he said. “Isn’t that the expression? ‘You’re cracked, Maura,’ says I.”

  “You might be getting off light enough with a kitchen makeover. I’ve heard of people buying holiday homes in South Africa.”

  “Well,” said Kilmartin and turned to him again, “do you know, but you might be right. The thing is, everyone else is doing it. And face it, Maura’s right. It’s a tony area we’re in, I don’t mind admitting. It is, so face facts, I says to myself later on after I got me brain back, so you have to keep the value of the place up. ‘It’s an investment,’ says she. Maura’s very good with the money, always has been. And it hasn’t stopped going in that agency of hers this past long while. They can’t get people to work in Ireland now – Irish people, I mean. Not the menial jobs. Sure she has to go all over Europe looking for people. Visas, permits, faxes – God, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “You have to hand it to her,” said Minogue. “She’s come a long way.”

  “Ah, you’re right. But do you know what she said to me the other day? You know how she’s always asking what I’m about, and all the gossip and the backstabbing and that in the job – but she gives me a funny look. Says she: ‘You should work for us, Jim. You know everybody.’ ‘Us’ being her outfit.”

  Kilmartin grimaced before hoisting another spoonful of soup.

  “I blew a gasket over the kitchen, I have to tell you. It’s on me conscience, Matt.”

  “Conscience?”

  The barman laid down the sandwiches.

  “What are those?” Kilmartin asked.

  “They’re baguettes,” said the barman.

  The news had something about Gaza. There was a torn and burning car, people flailing and shouting, and then ads.

  Minogue concentrated on finishing the soup. It wasn’t bad at all. Kilmartin was ahead of him with the baguette, but he detached at least half of the bread before eating it.

  “A right halla-balla yesterday,” said Kilmartin between mouthfuls. “Don’t you think?”

  “The thing in the church, with Tommy Malone?”

  “Yes. Tell me, did anything else come to you after our little chat?”

  Minogue shrugged.

  “You mean, do I believe it anymore, or any less?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Still the same, Jim. Still the same.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I haven’t got a clue.”

  “Have you been in touch with you-know-who, since?”

  “You-know-who, who?”

  “Malone.”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “And: none of your business.”

  “Did I say it was? You’re a bit touchy on the subject. Proves my point.”

  “What point?” Minogue couldn’t stop himself from asking.

  “What I said to you yesterday. The ‘irregularity’ involved. Is that a nice way to say that Malone is stepping out too far, way too far?”

  When Minogue didn’t answer, Kilmartin gave him a sidelong look.

  “And needs a wake-up call? Well?”

  “There’s plenty of irregular action in Tommy’s line of work. That much I know.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “The GNDU is its own world by times, Jim. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “‘Irregular,’ is right. ‘GNDU’: God, I wish we could just go back to ‘The Drug Squad.’ Well, fair enough, you’re not codding there. They have their quirks, we all know that. But what the hell exactly is going on in the man’s head?”

  “Phone him and ask him, why don’t you.”

  “As if I would. Don’t get me wrong. Sticking up for Malone – highly commendable and all, thanks very much now. But I know you’re not a gobshite behind it all. I did my bit of research this morning, made some calls, about the business yesterday.”

  The pause was a signal, Minogue knew, and he also knew then that Kilmartin’s lunch invitation had not been happenstance. He glanced over and made the required eye contact, the okay for Kilmartin to release the catch.

  Kilmartin leaned in again.

  “Emmett Condon,” he murmured. “I know you said that Lawless didn’t say Condon’s name. What did he say again, ‘the cop who ODed’?”

  “That was it, all right.”

  “Well who else could it be. So I did a little homework.”

  Minogue stared at the spread napkin splayed on the countertop by Kilmartin’s hand.

  “Talk about in over his head, in a big way. Well Condon sure was. The whole thing was wild entirely.”

  Minogue nodded, and went back to the last of his soup.

  Kilmartin sat back and folded his arms. He pretended a keen interest in the half-dozen new patrons who had arrived. Then he looked up at the television, while he drained his glass.

  “Know what I’m saying?”

  Kilmartin’s effort was a poor imitation of Malone’s Dublin accent.

  “The whole business was a guidebook to what not to do.”

  Minogue decided against trying to finish the baguette, but he picked at the last pieces of ham. Kilmartin shifted his weight on the chair, and crossed his other leg.

  “Ah,” said Kilmartin, and a look of distaste took over his features. “This whole, what would you call it . . . ‘Serpico Syndrome’? You know what I’m driving at?”

  Minogue nodded.

  “Condon got a lot of backs up. He wasn’t one bit shy about letting you know that he knew the Real Deal. He put a fair number of noses out of joint.”

  “Did you hear talk he might have played offside?”

  “He was in early on the whole international thing there. The Russian fellas in that hotel, do you remember?”

  Minogue remembered something about three men in a hotel in Drogheda with a suitcase of money, some guns, and Ecstasy pills.

  “Well, I also found out Condon went after stuff that he’d tell no-one about. They still can’t figure the half of what he was doing. Now, that looks bad. And in his own time, even, he’d be cr
uising around, nosing around. Sure he didn’t keep the job at the office at all. His marriage went on the rocks, and everything. Did you know?”

  “Not until now.”

  “Well, what else could be the result of that messing around, I ask you? He showed up in hostels and the like, trying to find background to things he was following up on. But no one really knew his hobbies in that regard, no siree. So, isn’t that an eye-opener?” Minogue nodded. He fixed his friend with a glance.

  “Jim, if you can’t find out more, well Aughrim is lost.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “A Guard couldn’t pick his nose without you knowing.”

  Kilmartin was pleased by this. As usual, he tried not to show it.

  “But it’s sad too,” he said then. “Really now. They haven’t found anything to really clear Condon. No-one can actually come out and say . . . Well, what could they say anyway? It was an accident?”

  Minogue shrugged.

  “There’s a whole reorganization of that section done, all because of it. It showed them up something fierce stupid, especially the command there. They let Condon off the leash, and bejases if he didn’t go native, or something. You know what that means?”

  “Something about west Mayo?”

  “If I want clowns, I’ll buy a ticket to the circus. Zero oversight, is what I’m saying. The simple fact of the matter is, no-one got to Condon in time to reel him back in and see what the hell he was into. You think they’re going to open the vaults to the coppers doing the case, who are they, a few duffers out of Kilmainham Station? Robbed cars and lost dogs is all they have on their caseload there, I’m betting.”

  “You don’t mean that in a bad way though,” said Minogue.

  “Of course I don’t. I’m only saying it. Believe you me I take no pleasure in saying it either. It goes back to this whole decentralization crap that bulldozed the Squad. You see the consequences now, I feel like telling them. Actually, I don’t feel like it.”

  Minogue looked down into his glass again. Kilmartin picked off a piece of crust and looked at it. Then he leaned in toward Minogue.

  “They didn’t even know where Condon was on any given day,” he said. “Kept his cards very close to his chest, did Condon. Now you’d have to ask yourself, why would an undercover officer be doing that?”

  He dropped the piece of crust.

  “But my point here is this,” he said. “What does it say when Malone is so keen to get himself mixed up in that kind of thing? That’s what really concerns me. Right?”

  Minogue had nothing to offer.

  The barman changed the channels with a remote, from snooker to ads, to more ads, and then a picture of a black infant with very loose skin sitting on a dusty patch of ground. The image lingered long enough for Minogue to see that flies wouldn’t give up trying to land on the child’s face.

  “Something else, Matt,” said Kilmartin. “You won’t like me telling you, I know.”

  Minogue knew that the odd show of reluctance on Kilmartin’s part was part of the performance. He waited him out by eyeing a snooker game the barman had settled on.

  “It might be wise to stay away from our friend on this issue. There’s talk.”

  “There’s always talk, Jim.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m talking to the deaf here. But you know this could be some kind of a stitch being set up on Malone. Obviously, right?”

  “Am I supposed to go off and give Tommy Malone some fatherly advice here?”

  “Christ, no! Look, I have no axe to grind here. We want to see Malone right. But, let’s face it, he has had an awful time of it this past while, with his brother dying on him.”

  Minogue nodded.

  “And don’t forget,” Kilmartin went on. “Malone himself getting shot in the arse out in Bray last year, that famous visit to Bray. I mean people are finding out there is such a thing as that post-traumatic stress effort. What was the name of that place there in Bray?”

  “‘Wonderland.’ The leg, the upper leg. I was there, remember?”

  “The upper leg then. Doesn’t that attach to the arse anymore? And then I hear the old love life is a bit rocky with Malone this past while. What more can go wrong?”

  “You’re like an old woman, Jim.”

  “You think I don’t care about Malone, but I do. Listen, didn’t Sonia’s old man – Sonia’s, I mean, a lovely girl to be sure – didn’t he put the kibosh on the engagement? No mixee Irish, or Dublinman, with nice Chinese girl.”

  “Sonia’s family is from Macau. That was a Portugese possession.”

  “From a cow?”

  “Macau.”

  “How very not interesting,” said Kilmartin. “Anyway. My advice to Malone was to go and learn some Chinese, even a few words. That’d get the Chinaman off his back.”

  “Tommy can barely speak English, Jim. You said so yourself.”

  “Ha ha ha ha! Good one. That’s the style.”

  Then Kilmartin’s face turned serious.

  “All I’m saying is, watch where you put your feet. Condon was an eye-opener entirely, but that’s the way things are going to go. I mean, the money in crime is gone astronomical. You get the public hearing about coppers on the take – or whatever, I’m not accusing anyone, I’m just saying – and you’re in big, big trouble.”

  The barman asked if they wanted another pint. Certainly not, Kilmartin declared, anymore than they wanted another baguette. He asked the barman if they’d be getting sandwiches back on the menu, proper ones.

  Minogue caught a glance from the barman as he picked up the change that Kilmartin was assembling on the counter. He finished the last of his lager, and looked away. For a few moments, his mind turned to a body frozen stiff and falling from a plane that was carrying hungover, sunburned Irish people home from a holiday.

  Kilmartin was standing already.

  “Baguettes,” he muttered. “What’s the point of that, I ask you.”

  Chapter 7

  KATHLEEN MINOGUE took the ice cream out of the fr stopped by the sink to get a clean spoon. Then she stood still, listening. Now Minogue too heard the little cry.

  “Iseult’s awake,” she said. “Thank God she had that little nap, I say.”

  Iseult’s footsteps sounded in the room upstairs. Soon they were on the stairs, pausing every few steps.

  Iseult stuck her head in the doorway. She looked very pasty-faced.

  “I must have nodded off,” she said in a husky, sleep-clotted voice.

  Minogue briefly eyed his daughter’s new hair-do, or rather her hair-crop. To him it was still a stark and even brutal helmet of hair dropped on her by a cruel modernist architect. Her hands ran to her swollen stomach and she arched her back a little.

  “Sit down here,” he said. “Will you eat a bit?”

  “Later,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Minogue returned the look of concern from Kathleen.

  “Will you consider taking the night off, love?”

  Iseult shook her head and rubbed at her eyes.

  “Put the feet up, slap Jude Law or one of them hunks up on the DVD maybe?”

  She opened her eyes. The evening light caught the faint lines that ran from her eyes down toward the freckles still plentiful on her cheekbones. Remember not to mention Pat, he told himself yet again.

  Pat the Brain had taken a small apartment in Limerick. The official version was that the commute to his lectures there from their flat in Dublin had been too much. A nice lad, always liked him, were the words that kept coming to the surface in Minogue’s mind, stupidly, in the early mornings while he lay there waiting for the first light. It wasn’t worry that was waking him up, he tried to persuade himself. It was more trying to figure out what he had missed, the signs that surely must have been more obvious that Iseult’s marriage was not doing well at all.

  “No thanks,” said Iseult. “I have to get it finished.”

  Minogue noticed Kathleen’s eye dart to his again.
r />   “Taxi it home here afterwards, will you?”

  “Ma, I’ll be grand. I get my best work done at this time.”

  “I’m only saying, love,” Kathleen said. “You’ll get a better sleep here.”

  Minogue counted the days backward. Seven months pregnant. Iseult was unyielding about getting the welded bits on her effort before tomorrow. She had sent them some snaps of the installation she was being paid to make for a Dutch merchant bank in the Financial Centre. “HyBrasil” was her title for it. Try as he might, Minogue couldn’t divine in that tangle of metal any trace of the mythical island to the west.

  “Who’s going to be there with you?” he asked.

  “Robbie, the Eskimo.”

  “He’s not really an Eskimo, come on.”

  “Of course he’s not. He’s from Edmonton. It has something to do with a sports team. He’s being ironic.”

  “Do you have to pay him some of the commission?”

  “No, I don’t. I offered, but he won’t take anything.”

  Minogue had yet to meet the man. Iseult’s version of how he’d gotten involved was that he had seen her messing around with a blowtorch, and offered to help. He’d said it was only so she wouldn’t burn the place down.”

  “And what does he do,” Kathleen said. “This man Robbie, what else, like?”

  Iseult rolled her eyes.

  “He’s an artist, Ma,” she said. “There is no ‘else.’”

  Minogue took the ice cream and cut off a piece, and put it on a clean plate in front of her. She gave him a weak smile. He caught himself before the words came out, the worries he and Kathleen had about fumes and so forth, for the baby.

  She picked at it, and took bigger spoonfuls. It was soon gone. She turned the spoon over before placing it in the bowl.

  “Ready when you are,” she said, and made an effort to smile. “I’ll just take a walk up the garden to get my head back, okay?”

  Gathering the dishes, Minogue caught a glimpse of Iseult before she got beyond the apple trees.

  “This is her last night at it, she says,” Kathleen said. “God, I hope so.”

  Kathleen washed, he dried, and like so many times in these past few months since they’d realized that their daughter’s marriage was disintegrating, they worried separately and silently.