A Carra ring imm-6

by John Brady

  “All right,” he said to Hoey “Show us the married man trick. You know, where you make the money disappear?”

  Airport Police and Fire Officer Derek Mitchell, twenty, and six weeks into his new job, checked his walkie-talkie and headed out toward Dublin Airport’s long-term car park. The breezes which had played around him by the doors to the freight depot were gusts out here.

  He waved at the Guards sitting in the squad car by the ramp. One of them managed a nod. “Don’t strain yourself,” Mitchell murmured. The news that the Guards were going to make a new Garda station at the airport was only a rumor anyway. This squad car sitting by the ramp up to the terminal was for show now. That mob of fans had been turfed out and four of them had been arrested. Even Fogarty hadn’t seen anything like it. It was the van with the tinted windows showing up that’d torn the arse out of the situation. No wonder those Saudi Arabians would be thinking we were all bloody barbarians. Well, they should talk: the women in masks, veils, or whatever, hiding their faces. And for what? Like furniture covered up. Chattels, that was the word.

  It had taken three Guards to get the big lug into the squad car. The one who had clocked Brennan. He was sixteen, it turned out. Derek Mitchell sort of felt sorry for Brennan. Brennan, who should have known better, was going home with a thick lip. He might even be concussed someone said — but that was maybe Brennan already taking a dive with compo in mind. Using his head better now after getting clattered than before. Brennan, yeah, aiming for an easy way out. It was Brennan had told him the Guards were going to set up a station at the airport, that the APFS would be in the ha’penny place then.

  The wind was rising. He zipped his jacket up higher. It took major work to push the button through the frigging buttonhole on his collar. His thumb hurt like hell from pushing the edge of the button. Bollocks: it was too tight now.

  He rubbed his thumb hard against his forefinger and watched a plane make its approach over the Irish Sea. It just hung there. Stats: at any given moment a million people were flying up there. That was day and night too. Where’d he read that? He rolled the volume dial of his walkie-talkie over and back. Now, think about it: was he the only person in the world, the civilized world like, to think about how mad air travel was?

  All they were basically were metal tubes, for God’s sake, tons of weight, full of people getting fired through the air at five hundred miles an hour. Madness really. People reading the papers, having their dinners, watching films, sitting on toilets, sleeping — all five miles up there.

  He turned and looked around the sky. There were dirty gray, rolling rain clouds to the west. It was getting colder. He eyed the canopy over by the fire depot. It’d be a quarter after seven before he’d log into the last checkpoint next to the decks for the drop-offs. They should give him a car or something, like for the dog patrols on the perimeter rounds had. A bike even! Ah it was exercise, wasn’t it.

  The windscreens were covered with clouds. It made Mitchell dreamy. The long-term car park always looked full. That was because people parked as close as they could to the walkway. A lot of the cars had the flashing lights that told you the alarm was set. What a bloody pain the alarms were out here! If people decided to ignore the notices about the alarms, then they actually deserved to get their cars robbed. Well not ignored exactly, but the Guards didn’t care much to be told about alarms going off. A good gust of wind could do some of them. A lot them didn’t have automatic resets either. There was a surge of engines from the far side of the hangars. A car started up a few rows over. He walked on. He knew he’d given up checking every car. He walked slower, tried to get a system going where he’d be covering all the cars in both directions, row by row. There might be video in here now, no matter what Fogarty had told them about it taking another few months at least. There could be cameras just for keeping an eye on patrols. But he didn’t have to be the FBI for God’s sake, did he. Just cover himself, that’s -

  He was quick but still late. He let his hand settle on his hair instead and watched the damned hat tossed rolling down the roadway between the rows. It bounced as the brim rolled under. Then it lodged against a wheel and fell over like a really bad actor in a really bad cowboy film from a million years ago. He stared at the hat. There were specks of rain on the windscreen of the Golf next to him now. He picked up the hat, jammed it on his head, held it there.

  He walked faster now. There was a blue Escort with an English number plate. He stopped, turned away from the wind, and jammed his stupid hat between his knees. He peeled back the pages in his logbook until he got to to the notes he had scribbled down from the patrol board. It was a blue Escort, Dublin registration, they were looking for. Someone had scribbled VIP and TV on the sheet too. He wondered if the other patrol APFS bothered with the board at all. Robbed cars was the Guards’ job anyway. As in, those two layabouts sitting in their squad car back at the ramp. Someone had told him the Guards didn’t try anymore because there were so many being stolen, in Dublin at least. Brennan had wised him up to the fact that it was only for insurance that the Guards had to post the bulletins to them. Well he’d better keep a note of it, just in case. Show he was on the ball at least. The pages flapped and clung to the pencil. He wrote blind anyway.

  His eyes watered from the gusts now. He looked back down the rows he’d done. A right iijit he must look, his hat jammed between his knees, the pages still flapping and cracking in his other hand. No wonder the probationer APFS got the long-term patrols for months. He managed to close his notebook with one hand and slip it into his pocket. It was going to lash rain any minute: de-fin-itely. He looked across the rows of car roofs. They were all one color from this angle. A blue Escort? There were probably dozens of them here. He bit his lip. A raindrop smacked his hat brim. Part of him had decided not to go back down those rows again anyway.

  CHAPTER 2

  Minogue rubbed his eyes. The bar at the Garda Club was filling up. He’d seen Liam Nugent wave from the door, swing his imaginary hurley stick. Minogue had to wave his fist at him, of course. Nugent, a Wexford man recently promoted to CI and doing well in Fraud, shrank in mock terror. County Clare’s chances of getting to the quarter finals in this year’s All-Ireland had come to depend on Wexford getting beaten by Kilkenny — again. Minogue’s eyes drifted back to the television.

  The weatherwoman clicked a wand thing she kept in her hand. He rubbed his eyes again. When he opened them he could see Ireland’s weather in relation to weather systems across Europe. They were having a tough time of it with rain and sleet in northern Italy. Apparently the Austrians were getting some lightning bolts. Weatherwoman clicked again and satellite pictures slid by. A cold front was on the way from Central Europe.

  Minogue thought again about staying. Kilmartin had made his mind up, settling in with a mountain of sandwiches in front of him. He’d turned serious now too, laying into the System. Minogue didn’t want to hear it again but he caught the odd phrase. What exactly were Guards supposed to do in these situations, Kilmartin wanted to know — duck?! Wear suits of armor? Put their hands in their pockets, and look the other way? Or whistle a shagging jig, maybe? What chance did we have when push came to shove? Et cetera.

  The policemen huddled around Kilmartin examined their drinks, cast longer glances at the television. Kilmartin wasn’t going to give up. Where was the incentive to follow through if the system was stacked, he demanded. Had to hold our ground, didn’t we? Oh, by Christ wasn’t the public was being codded! Face facts crime in Dublin was out of hand. Larry Smith had been only one in a whole mob of gangsters. And the young offenders — oh don’t get him started on that one! A mess entirely. As if one of ’em stabbed you and robbed you it wouldn’t hurt as much or something! You could buy a gun in a pub in Clondalkin for seven hundred quid. Ah, what was the point of talking!

  Hoey was heading off now. Malahide was a long enough commute. Minogue asked him how the new house was working out.

  “I’m trying to get a lawn going,” Hoey said.
r />   “What’s a lawn?” Malone asked.

  “They have them down the country,” said Hoey. “Green things.”

  Kilmartin had started into the joke about the taxi driver and the prostitute. Minogue swiveled the stool about and looked around the room. He spotted a woman in conversation with a superintendent in civvies. Lawlor, that’s who he was. Lahlah. It was “Bridges” Lawlor a few years ago. Minogue had seen him on television a lot this past while. People’s feelings toward the Guards was his thing, he half-remembered. The community policing thing, building bridges. That was it, building bridges in the poorer areas of Dublin so that the gangsters would be rooted out by their own communities.

  The woman looked familiar. The big glasses on her put Minogue in mind of a frog. He tried to place her, believed he was coming close, but soon gave up trying. Lawlor seemed to be explaining something complicated. She didn’t often return his smiles. She nodded every now and then, but her eyes went often to the ruck around Kilmartin.

  The weatherwoman and her maps disappeared in a flurry of stars. She was replaced by sliding words and the twirling logo of Radio Telifis Eireann. The shine on that, Minogue thought, we’re international now, we have everything. And why not. Taxpayers, a lot of them probably German taxpayers still, would be paying for Kilmartin’s junket to the States. He’d be visiting Quantico of all places, to get the lowdown on how the FBI profiled their serial bad guys. He wondered what they’d have made of the likes of Dublinman and all-around thug, drug dealer, vandal, robber, and scut Larry Smith.

  Kilmartin was well into his joke now. The taxi driver had been informed by his passenger that she had no money for the fare. A face appeared on the screen, a telephone number below it. Kilmartin’s voice was louder but Minogue still caught most of the words from the announcer. Touring the west of Ireland in a rented blue Ford Escort.

  “No sign of your man yet,” Malone said.

  The snapshot looked like the regulation crop of a group scene. A wedding maybe. The large, even teeth, the tan, they could only mean American. Minogue wondered what exactly it was that made the face so easily typed. The beefy neck? Some stock expression of ease and entitlement. Well after all, he’d grown up and belonged to people who owned the planet more or less. Cheap petrol, big cars. Hamburgers, planes that went to space and back. Big smiles, genuine a lot of them; guns in every house. Prosperity. And Daithi Minogue, whose letters came less frequently now, and who hadn’t been back for a visit lived there. The pang sliced hard across Minogue’s chest and he felt suddenly almost desperate.

  “That Yank, the tourist,” Malone repeated. “What’s his name again?”

  “Shawnessy,” Minogue said.

  “What do you mean Shawnessy? Shock-nessy. ” Minogue eyed Malone.

  “That’s how they say it over there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There was a fella on Miami Vice once. A crook, a lawyer. Shawnessy, they pronounced it.”

  Malone looked up from his work balancing beer mats and frowned.

  “Now do you believe me?” Minogue asked.

  Malone’s house of beer mats collapsed. He shrugged and swore and grabbed his glass. Stress, Minogue thought as he yawned with a sudden aching weariness, another meaningless word. The screen filled with burning buses. A lanky teenager throwing a rock froze and shrank, and was yanked back in miniature to a corner of the screen. Was that Derry, Minogue wondered.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Malone. “Is that going on tonight? It fucking well better not be.”

  “It’s archival footage.”

  “What?”

  A British army Land Rover sped over a roadway littered with stones. A petrol bomb burst against its roof.

  “History, Tommy It’s old stuff.”

  Someone with a scarf wrapped around his lower face was caught and frozen in place as he hoisted a petrol bomb. He too was dispatched as a fading, still shot to the bottom of the screen. The making of a great athlete, Minogue believed, that kid. Probably in his thirties or even forties by now, with kids, a few pints in the local, a half-decent house paid for by Her Majesty, the trousers getting too tight on him. The pictures slid back to reveal a dimly lit studio, where four people sat around a table.

  “Maybe the locals ate him,” Malone said. Minogue turned to him.

  “The American, like.” Malone nodded toward Kilmartin.

  “They did say the west of Ireland, didn’t they?”

  “Our American cousins are here to enjoy history, Tommy. Not to live it.”

  He looked back at the television. Spotlights revealed the panelists one by one. Minogue sighed. God, not that windbag from the university again. Worse, that hairy, know-it-all journalist what was his name, the one wrote about Ireland disappearing. As if.

  Then Kilmartin’s fist crashed into his palm. One of tonight’s designated gobshites to edify, a detective with a long nose that he constantly rubbed with the same paper hankie, made a solemn nod. Kilmartin’s eyes were hooded now. He pulled back his thumb, pointed his finger at his head, dropped the thumb. He eyed the red-faced sergeant who began to nod slowly himself.

  “Smih’ goh’ hih’,” said the sergeant.

  The phrase was a take on another Dublin criminal family member’s reaction to the news of Larry Smith’s murder. Together with a mostly mangled Dublin accent, it had done the rounds of Garda stations for months now.

  “Play hard, die hard,” said Kilmartin.

  “Damned right, Jim,” said the sergeant. “That’s the way she goes. A-okay.”

  “One hundred percent effective,” Kilmartin said, his voice gone soft now. “Yes sirree… The Larry Smith Solution.”

  Minogue looked around the room. He’d missed the transition from hilarity to gravity. The woman with the glasses, frog-woman, hadn’t. She was watching Kilmartin intently. Lahlah’s smile had faded. His eyes shifted from the group to the barman leaning on the bar listening to Kilmartin.

  Sure that his message had reached and clutched and held the minds of his colleagues, and surer still that they’d hold it forever, Chief Inspector James Kilmartin arched his back over the counter. He looked with a lazy defiance from face to face. Murmurs of approval ran through the group of policemen. Glasses went to mouths, a flick of the head from several. The red-faced sergeant put his fist on the counter and pulled an imaginary trigger. The brotherhood, thought Minogue, the clan.

  “Job well done there, Jim,” said the red-faced sergeant. “No complaints here, let me tell you.”

  Superintendent Lawlor tweaked his nose and turned to talk to frog-woman. I know her, Minogue thought, I do. Who the hell was she anyhow? He watched her feign an interest in what Lawlor was saying with some newfound fervor. Her eyes went toward Kilmartin again. Lawlor kept talking. She looked down at the empty glass Lawlor was pushing around on the countertop. Lawlor’s face eased when she reached for her bag. He nodded to Minogue as he passed on the way to the door.

  Derek Mitchell turned away from the gusts. He looked at the sky again.

  “Make up your bloody mind,” he groaned.

  The raindrops were beginning to bead and run together on the car roofs now. He’d come back around by the long-term car park again, on the trot this time. Ahead of him were the rows of cars he had passed earlier. It’d be no use saying that it was raining. Five minutes and he’d be finished, anyway. Or drowned, shag it.

  He slowed to look in the window of a newish Volvo. The stick thing must be a control for the stereo. The CD changer was probably in the boot and — His hat flew off and sailed over the roof. He watched it bounce off the roof of an Opel. He was beyond being annoyed. There was a certain elegance to it, he had to admit. It rolled down onto the bonnet and fell on the tarmacadam. He stepped around the front of the Opel in time to see the hat on the move again. It rolled on the edge of its crown, wobbled, and changed direction. Drops of rain hit his forehead. The hat began to roll in a circle, it rebounded off a wheel, and fell over. Gusts still stirred it.

 
He took his time strolling over. He picked up the hat and rubbed it with his sleeve. To hell with that stupid folder of regulations: this bloody hat was staying under his arm until he got back indoors. He looked down at the mossy growth already working its way into the tarmacadam here. Then he slowly returned to his hunkers. He stayed there for a half a minute, moving from foot to foot, staring at it from different angles. He had already decided to call in. He just didn’t want to make an iijit of himself.

  No, it wasn’t the color that had caught his eye, he thought while he waited for the shift super to show up. It wasn’t even red, for God’s sake. But somehow he’d known right away what it was. That was before he’d checked the car, even. It was only after he’d stood up again that he’d realized it went right back under the bumper of the car anyway. He’d walked around the back of the car, seen the sticker: Emerald Rent-A-Car. The Emerald Isle, he murmured: if this was what he thought it was, this was trouble. His fingers kept the hat rotating in his hands. He hardly noticed the rain soaking into his hair.

  He looked over at the Escort again. It looked different now, as though everything had moved away from it and it stood alone, changed. It wasn’t what might be in the car that was getting to him. It was how normal everything seemed, how weirdly ordinary and dull and boring. More than creepy: the hairs were still standing on the back of his neck.

  No sirens, no squad cars. Where the hell were they? He tugged on the antenna, rolled the volume dial until it hissed. No one was talking, why not? He didn’t want to call in again. It’d sound like he was losing it or something. The drone of lorries slowing on the dual carriageway carried over the hiss of traffic. He watched a jet rise above the terminal and followed the quivering trail from the exhaust. The rain was getting heavier.

  When he looked back he saw Fogarty and two Guards heading his way. Fogarty, the fat bastard, was huffing and puffing. Derek Mitchell stepped back to the bumper of the Escort and thumbed his notebook open.