The Going Rate

by John Brady

  He was able to squeeze the trigger once but then his arm fell as did everything else, sideways and buckling. He heard his own knees hit the cement, and the skin tearing as his momentum carried him scraping along the laneway.

  He came to a stop, and felt his chest rising and falling on the slimy, cold cement. This new sideways world was way too bright. He’d need to lie here a few moments only, until he could figure out if he had broken something. Slowly, he flexed his fingers. The pistol was gone somewhere.

  There were footsteps on the cement nearby, soft shoes at a walk.

  Mulhall wanted to shout, but the voice that came out was a whisper.

  “Hey,” it said.

  He wasn’t sure if he had actually spoken the words.

  “Why did you do that?”

  It was his own voice. His chin and his cheeks were scraping the cement.

  “Who are you?”

  Someone was breathing hard nearby.

  “Ma?” Mulhall said then. “Jesus, Ma. I’m having a terrible dream.”

  There was a ticklish movement around his cheek, and something red flowed by his chin. A car started nearby but the noise soon died away. This is a concussion, he decided. He must have slipped or something.

  “Going to wake up now,” he said, or thought.

  He was being rolled over. The sky was blinding him.

  He couldn’t focus his eyes. A shape moved dimly not far above him. He heard the strained breathing again, breathing out the nose. A black spot appeared between him and the shape above, wavering slightly, and Mulhall had a moment to conclude that it was the barrel of a gun.

  Chapter 2

  GOOD FRIDAY CAME AND WENT, and in its wake the Easter. A freakishly warm holiday Monday drew Minogue into the garden, and there he worked fitfully at rehabilitating the rockery. It was a yearly ritual now. That was how he missed the phone call with the news that the Commissioner’s wife had died.

  He replayed the message twice to be sure he had the funeral details right. When Kathleen came home, he waited until she was settled before telling her the news. She was more upset than he had expected. After a while, he brought out two kitchen chairs, and then two tumblers of Jamesons to the patch of grass that was now home to a dozen or more large, marooned rocks.

  The sun made an unexpected appearance, taking the edge off the cool air, and turning the scruffy spring growth a bright green while it incited more noise from the birds gadding about unseen in the undergrowth.

  The whiskey was quickly downed.

  Kathleen and he sat together for the better part of a half-hour, adrift in the smells of torn earth, the stirring leaves and grass, and the birds’ unceasing bustle. Every now and then Kathleen recounted things that Rachel Tynan, artist and teacher, had done in the recent past.

  Minogue did not tell her that it had been only a fortnight ago that he had spotted Rachel Tynan and her husband on Dunlaoghaire Pier. She had been pale and thin, and she moved haltingly along arm-in-arm beside him. Minogue had not wanted them to see him, and a gap in the sea wall let him escape. His excuses – it was dusk and they wouldn’t have spotted him, they needed no interruptions – had crumbled long before he had gotten home, but the shame of his evasion stayed with him.

  Wednesday was a long time coming, but by nine o’ clock that morning, Minogue was backing out of the garage in his new Peugeot, listening for squeaks from the chassis as it rolled down to the gate. He was trying not to be impatient, but he was losing. The collar on his new shirt chafed. He just couldn’t find a decent driving position in his new car, and he was bewildered as to how he had missed this on the test drive. And now, Kilmartin, the very one who had guilted him into taking him along to the funeral, was late.

  At least he had time for a re-read of the file he had been hurriedly handed yesterday afternoon.

  Tadeusz Klos, a twenty-three-year-old Polish national, had arrived in Ireland five days before the assault that ended in his death. Klos had been beaten and stomped into a coma a stone’s throw from the Custom House, in the centre of the city. The considerable amount of blood that he had left on the footpath behind him was quickly determined by the State Pathologist to have been cranial in origin. The report did not mention that it would have been thickly mixed with that night’s rain into something that Minogue knew would be as greasy as it would be acidic from the roadway to where it had flowed. Klos was resuscitated twice in the ambulance. He died about a mile short of the hospital entrance.

  The briefing file contained a copy of a passport photo and four photos taken in the hospital. Three of the four haunted Minogue much of the evening and early morning. It took a lot to crush a man’s skull with kicks.

  The matter was being handled by a crew from Fitzgibbon Street Garda station, and they were going full tilt at it. Already there were copies of emails in Polish, complete with literal, often clumsy, translations. The inventory of effects from Klos’ room at the hostel offered little. His wallet was missing, but no one had tried to use his bankcard since the assault.

  There were no arrests as of last night. Nor were there suspects.

  Mr. Klos had a mother, but no siblings. His parents had separated when he was a child. His father had minor convictions from a decade back. He had not had a close relationship with his son, or his former wife. There was a matter of alcohol abuse in the father’s history.

  Klos had what looked like a post-secondary certificate of some kind to do with tourism. He smoked roll-your-owns. There were no indications of drugs on his person or in his belongings. In his pockets were clippings from a Polish newspaper published in Dublin. Along with those items were scribbled notes including phone numbers of restaurants and hotels and an immigrant aid office on Church Street, and several Dublin City bus tickets. There were remnants of potato chips in his pockets, foil from bars of chocolate, matches. An optimist apparently, Mr. Klos also carried three condoms.

  An iPod type of thing was found at the scene, in several pieces. A note from the Technical Bureau declared that its flash memory could not be read, as it had been trodden on. Minogue surmised that this deed would have been close to the moments when Klos’ white earphone wire had been pulled up through his jacket and lodged in his zipper, peeling the plastic back to the bare wire.

  The file made no mention of friends and associates, Polish or otherwise, in Dublin. Klos’ mobile phone, an unlocked Nokia he’d brought with him from Poland, with an Irish SIM card, had not been found. There was one page to the mobile phone records. He had made two brief calls to his mother, seven to the hostel where he was staying, four to restaurants. Two restaurant managers deposed that Klos’ English was spotty. One thought he “had issues.” Meaning? “Wouldn’t look me in the eye… shifty impression…”

  Minogue had already read the copies of statements from people in the hostel several times, in full. One mentioned the Internet café where Klos had visited, and a reference to Skype, an MSN account, Hotmail. No-one knew Klos’ passwords. A search of the routine online jungle – MySpace, Bebo and FaceBook – came up dry. Googling Klos’ name returned four hits, all relating to Polish sites and sources, but only one relating to him, or rather his email address.

  This was Minogue’s fourth re-read of the files on Klos. In spite of their efforts, the team was getting nowhere. His gaze slid from the pages and over the dashboard to the passenger seat. The bit of sun yesterday had really awakened the new-car smell again. Kathleen had told him that the new-car smell was very toxic. She didn’t mean to take the good out of it, she reminded him.

  Peter Igoe, the Chief Super for Minogue’s department, had floated into the office yesterday afternoon with this file under his arm, and a tight smile that Minogue knew right away meant trouble.

  Igoe wasn’t above flattery. While going over what was needed of Minogue in this afternoon’s meeting concerning Klos, he made much of Minogue’s past expertise in the Murder Squad. The Poles needed to leave that meeting knowing that the Gardai were putting everything they had into the inves
tigation.

  Naturally, Minogue wouldn’t be called upon to give any detailed answers specific to the case. The case detectives would do that, with the Technical Bureau to back them up. The optics needed to be sharp, Igoe had said. Telephone calls had been made between governments. Minogue already knew that the newspapers in Poland had fairly leaped on the matter.

  PR, in other words, Minogue muttered that evening when Kathleen asked why he seemed so cross-grained. He should be flattered to be invited, was her retort; another feather in his cap et cetera.

  Minogue had to let that go by. Since his posting to the International Liaison Unit at HQ in the Phoenix Park, his wife’s proud conviction had been unshakeable: her husband finally had a proper nine-to-five. He should be delighted to be out of the pressure-cooker that had been Jim Kilmartin’s fabled Murder Squad, now decorously disbanded two years ago.

  So now with the guidance of the Aspergian Sergeant Áine Collins in the Europol National Unit, Minogue was learning how to process Analytic Work Files. He worked with coppers from London and Spain, and another from Austria, a gateway for Eastern European crime. The dubious excitement of a month on the Offshore Financial Centres section awaited. He had taken to making up his own acronyms from those initials for the OFC.

  So far on his way through the unit, Minogue’s training had taken in matters that Kathleen believed were very exciting. There were counterfeit designer goods coming in from China to figure out. A Croatian immigrant making good money as a window-washer had three passports. The case of three Nigerian brothers who preyed on West African refugees with a mixture of witchcraft, intimidation, and extortion was still dragging through the system. The twenty-first century…?

  Minogue powered down the window, pausing and reversing it twice to test it. It was quicker than he liked, but there was no slack. He looked down to the files again. He might as well practise pronouncing names. Klos, like close. Tad-eh-oosh.

  Another name he had to know was that of the middling bigwig from the Polish Embassy, an attaché named Juraksaitis, who would be accompanying Mrs. Klos. Juraksaitis was to be pronounced like You’re Excited.

  A diesel clanking announced Kilmartin’s arrival. Minogue watched him in the mirror as he reversed a battered and sagging farm Jetta he had borrowed from his brother, to the curb behind. There was some difficulty to locking the door. Kilmartin put his overcoat on the back seat next to Minogue’s funeral gabardine and he sat in.

  Chapter 3

  DERMOT FANNING’S BIKE had a puncture. It was the same wheel as last week’s. It might even be the same puncture. He leaned the bike back against the wall and he resolved to be calm about it. There were basically two possibilities: a) a fresh puncture, b) he hadn’t mended the last one right. It was likely b), he decided. It was all too easy to pinch the tube during a repair, enough to cause a slow puncture.

  But the truth was, there was a c). He could have bought a new tube and a new tire as well. This he had refused to do, citing to Bríd the outrageous prices of same. This wasn’t news, of course.

  Bríd, his wife, needed the car: a teacher couldn’t be late. Their daughter Aisling had still said that she liked going to the child-minder’s on Dadda’s bike anyway. That had changed lately, when she had become very clingy with Bríd in the mornings. Tears, haste, annoyance, guilt. Repeated several times daily. Were there Terrible Three And A Halve’s?

  Fanning didn’t like to think that Aisling had picked up on something between himself and Bríd. He felt sure that Bríd had been on the brink of asking him why exactly Aisling had to go to a child-minder’s all day. It was understood that he needed time to himself for his writing and the freedom to think – or not think.

  He checked the windows around the house again. Then he set the alarm, pulled the door behind him, and he locked it. It was only a quarter to ten, so he had plenty of time yet to get into town, and up to that restaurant in Smithfield. Even if he were a few minutes late, it wouldn’t be the end of the world to keep Breen, Colm Breen, Irish film’s mover and shaker, waiting for once. And whether Breen liked to be reminded or not, he and Dermot Fanning went back a long, long way. Breen had been the gawky newcomer in the Film Society then, and Fanning the third-year student running the meetings.

  Breen had become master of the schmooze, his country accent massaged to mid-Atlantic over the intervening years. To be fair, he had always made time for Fanning, and as much as it had angered Fanning over the years, Breen’s praise had also buoyed him.

  But it was no time to think of the past now. This was business, networking, something he had neglected for far too long, and realized its costs only lately.

  Some things were working his way, Fanning saw then, as the 62 bus appeared at the bend. He stayed downstairs after he got on, at the back of the bus, and took out his notebook. He thought about the points he wanted to leave Breen with, the three key things he’d remember. It took only a few moments of this for Fanning’s mind to turn to what was coming up later after the schmooze with Breen, however. The field trip – he had described it to Bríd. He had fudged it for her benefit though. A dog fight would horrify her, freak her out completely. Her husband attending one would be even worse.

  As the bus carved its way through the lighter post–rush-hour traffic, Fanning’s spirits lifted. He was raring to go on this script, and he was so close now. Nobody had yet treated Dublin crime the way it should be treated, as social commentary, as critique – as family drama. Breen would get it, probably. But if he didn’t, well there were others outside of Ireland. The Sopranos would look like summer school compared to what he would be coming up with. He’d have a draft by the summer for sure. Then it’d be summer holidays for Bríd, and they’d have the summer of their lives, the three of them.

  The bus shuddered to a sudden halt by a zebra crossing. A black woman waited uncertainly by the curb, her hands on a buggy laden with at least two children that Fanning could see. A car horn sounded somewhere, then another. People were so impatient, Fanning reflected. He heard the driver say something that had an exasperated tone to it. Then he too hit the horn. With a stricken smile, the woman pulled the buggy back, and shook her head.

  Fanning’s thoughts went to Aisling. After dinner he’d bring her out in the buggy. Bríd could decompress, have her bath, a cup of tea on her own. Actually, he might even take Aisling over to Bríd’s Ma and Da in the car. Ah, no. What was he thinking? It was not casual anymore. Danny, the Da, was okay, but the Ma was a different kettle of fish. Maybe it was just her age, but she was definitely going over to the dark side this last while.

  Time was she was almost fawning over him. He’d heard she talked about him as her son-in-law, very well respected as a writer, you know. Fanning could see her trying not to be annoyed at him this past while, however. It was the little things gave her away. A look, a pause, the way she spoke slowly; the subjects she avoided, and the ones she went to too often. Her favourite in that area was loaded, of course: “God the changes we’ve seen in our own lifetime! My oh my, all the jobs and the opportunities out there nowadays.”

  Fanning was first off the bus. He legged it up the quays smartly, not at all displeased with the dank, colder air coming at him over the parapet of the River Liffey. His Dublin had always been shabby and smelly, and real. That Dublin was still there if you knew where to look. Fanning had never had time for any nostalgia about Good Old Dublin. The new restaurants and apartments being steadily inserted into parts of the city centre areas that had been no-go areas were welcome. Sometimes, though, their sudden arrivals gave Fanning a feeling of bafflement, and even dismay. Still, he was careful not to fall in range of the running joke in Dublin for at least a decade now: “When did that place go up?”

  Fanning was entering Smithfield sooner than he had expected, and within minutes of leaving the quays he was turning the corner in sight of the restaurant. There was Breen in the window, and as per caricature, he was on his mobile. Fanning stepped back, and he took up a spot next to a delivery van. No wa
y would he be caught sitting meekly and waiting for Breen’s phone conversation to end. He’d watch the performance instead.

  He could have predicted Breen’s smiles and shrugs, and the fake, rolling laugh that he retailed. Scene Two would roll out just as predictably. That was when Breen would wear that that put-upon look, the smile of regret that he excelled in. It would be followed up with an apology for being “so busy.”

  The hardest bit to take would be Breen’s attempt to be the common man, a hapless beleaguered gobshite, sighing that he was “running around like a fart in a bottle,” or he “didn’t know whether he was coming or going.” Then, Breen’s twinkling eyes would almost disappear when he put out his fake smile. Fanning wondered if anyone had ever told Breen how fat he was getting these past few years, how … fulsome was the word, Fanning thought then, the exact word. He was pleased the word came to him so easily.

  Fanning didn’t mind Breen’s act itself as a piece, say, of theatre. After all, Breen the impressario was a character study in his own right. He would find his way into a Dermot Fanning script soon enough. But the sting in it all was that Breen assumed that Dermot Fanning was stupid enough to be taken in by it all.

  Fanning felt the injustice glow stronger in his chest, and so he distracted himself by beginning a careful, neutral study of the buildings around him. More than their lines or even shapes, he observed their textures and shadows and tones, all the things that escaped day-to-day notice. Behind the crane swivelling slowly overhead somewhere near Capel Street were light-grey clouds, like a cannonade from some long-ago naval battle. The sky to the south was parchment – no: pearl.

  The cobblestone lane was new. The old one had been torn up last year and had been meticulously replaced. Brickwork had been repointed, pipes proudly exposed. Copies of recently discovered daguerrotypes of Dublin from the 1840s and 1850s had been placed in salient windows of the restaurant.