The Murk Beneath

by L. D. Cunningham

  Many had found that out to their cost. I was drenched with sweat. Jordan retrieved the towel from the cage wall and walked over to me.

  “Dry yourself off, Michael. Better yet, dust yourself down. Take a few days off to recover. Then report back here on Monday at six. The grand opening is at eight and I’m in need of an extra body. I’ve had to let one of my guys go. Turned out he kept things from me.”

  Geary. It had to be. Grace had to be pissed off about that.

  “You won’t keep things from me, Michael, will you?”

  “No, Mr Jordan, I won’t.”

  But I had. Savage, for instance. No, Savage was going to be mine. After the car park in the Bridewell, it would have to be me. Jordan smiled. It was a warm one.

  “You’re catching on, Michael.”

  He turned to leave the cage, but turned back before he reached the cage door.

  “I’ll get O'Keeffe to work with you on your combat skills. General cardio too. It’s time for you to get yourself in shape, Michael. I’ve a feeling you’ll need to be.”

  He left the cage. I left the cage. In more ways than one. I’d been caged up long before I’d walked into Jordan’s gym, had felt the walls of that inner cage slowly creep inward so that they had become suffocating. The images of Robbie O’Meara; the laughing mob of Guards from the Bridewell; the fear of The Gentleman finding out about the growing relationship with Grace. But I felt then like I might be able to find the door to that inner cage, to walk right through it.

  Outside the unit a van had arrived. A man was taking a sign out of the back of it. I asked if I could take a look. The man obliged and I read the words: jordan academy. I could see then that Jordan was ready to face the public, to stop hiding behind his holding company. Was this his way of giving two fingers to the CAB? I thought there was something more sincere to it, though. He intended to give something back to a community he had helped destroy.

  On the way back to the car I had conflicting emotions. On the one hand I’d connected with a woman for the first time in more than a decade; on the other the weight of having to hide that relationship from a psychopath had lifted. It was high time I became a glass half full person, so I decided I’d adopt the latter perspective.

  But perspective isn’t emotion and I was missing Grace already.

  Jordan seemed to have dispensed with me as a sleuth, seeing me more as hired muscle judging by my assignment as a bodyguard at the grand opening of his gym. Keeping things to myself that I might well have shared with him no doubt fuelled his revision of me.

  I had time before the opening to continue my crusade. If there was one thing Savage wasn’t going to beat out of me it was the detective.

  The card game was on Tuesday nights. To get into the game, I would need to visit the Eel, make him see a genuine interest in gambling, and skill enough with the cards. I bet frequently on the dogs – and I’ll admit I had an irrational tendency to go with the number three dog. Cards, though, was another thing.

  You didn’t make appointments to see the Eel. He didn’t exactly have office hours. But if there was one place I was likely to find him slithering, it was the Steamship. I figured that if there was a time he’d be there, after nine would be it.

  I walked in to see the same barman as before. A couple of sinewy old timers were sitting on stools at the bar, neat whiskeys in hand. When all they ate was drink, I suppose it was no wonder their tendons were standing proud from their skin like concentration camp survivors.

  The barman just nodded to the bead curtain separating the bar from the Eel’s private rooms. I took that to mean the Eel was in. When I parted the bead strings, I could see that there was a game going on in the card room. I sized up the five guys at the table. None was Mogs’s red-haired card sharp.

  Jimmy’s office door was open – enough that he could see the game, make sure there was no funny stuff going on. He looked up to see me, took his legs off his desk. He beckoned me to enter. He didn’t seem too pleased to see me.

  “The Mangler returneth,” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure? And before you answer, I don’t do customer service, don’t do returns.”

  I hadn’t shot the gun, couldn’t say whether it was in good working order. I would shoot it soon, though. No good thinking about the money back guarantee when it misfires as some cretin closes in for the kill. But I was here on other business.

  I waved a hand. “Nah,” I said. “All good on that score.”

  Jimmy invited me to sit, so I did. I eased back in the chair, wanted to appear relaxed, like I belonged in the sordid setting.

  “I liked what you said the last day about the game,” I said. “About how you kept things clean.”

  Jimmy took a bottle of Jameson from a desk drawer, slid a glass to me. It seemed the upper echelons of Cork’s scum lived on the stuff. I gladly accepted, raised it and gave the Eel a silent toast.

  “You wouldn’t see the pot sizes in my games if there was a doubt about the games’ integrity.”

  He poured himself a glass, took a sip.

  “They know the consequences,” he said, nodding towards the players at the table. I noticed an empty chair at the table. “Why the interest, Mickey?”

  “I’ve got a few Gs put away for a rainy day. And guess what? It’s raining.”

  Metaphorically, of course; it was actually quite pleasant outside. I took a sip from the glass, gestured with it towards the game outside.

  “Besides, I’ve got to find new ways to use my hands.”

  Best to play Jimmy’s game, send myself up a little bit.

  Jimmy’s grin, which had been conspicuously absent, lit up his face.

  “Until some wise ass insults your card skills and …” He rose from his chair suddenly, reached halfway across the desk towards my head, his hands in a choke position. “You ring his neck!”

  He howled like a hyena. Heads turned at the card table, quickly turned back again to their cards.

  “I’m just pulling your langer, boy,” he said, no hint of shame in his voice or demeanour. In the Eel’s lair, he acted with abandon. You just had to go with it. Water off a duck’s back and all that.

  “I’m more … disciplined these days, Jimmy,” I said.

  Maybe there was some truth in that. Would be soon enough, if not.

  Jimmy turned the dial down to a snigger.

  “The threat of a strangling would put it up to a bluffer, that’s for sure,” he said.

  “Not if I bluff them first.”

  Jimmy pointed at me.

  “At first, I took you for a hooligan. A legend, but a hooligan. I mean, the Mangler, for fuck’s sake. But maybe there’s more to you than meets the eye.”

  He topped up both of our glasses.

  “You play a bit? Poker, I mean.”

  “Now and again,” I said.

  “Well, I couldn’t give a tit about that. As long as you know the rules and you bring enough cash to cover your losses.”

  The last time I had played poker – and this was five card draw, not any of this new hold ‘em shite – the minimum stake was twenty pence.

  “I’m only interested in tournament play, though,” I said. “All in or all out kind of stuff.”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “That figures. You seem the all or nothing type. No half measures.” A sick grin twisted his lips. “Maybe that’s why you use both hands to strangle instead of one.”

  I was getting tired of Jimmy’s choke references – and the more he belaboured the point, the worse his jokes got. It portrayed me as one-dimensional, kind of made me wish I’d taken out a few more guys with various techniques – a shooting here, a billy clubbing to the back of the head there.

  “There’s a game Tuesday nights,” he said. “Winner takes all, house takes a twenty-percent cut. Starts at eleven. The games rotate – next Tuesday is Omaha Hi-Lo night. Buy-in is five grand.”

  Jimmy examined my response, perhaps looking for a flinch that would betray my financial limit. I didn’
t flinch.

  “There’s a seat available at the table. Six or seven players with you included.”

  Tuesday night. The night after the grand opening. Three nights to get hold of the five thousand and brush up on my Omaha Hi-Lo – four cards in the hole, two pots to play for, but I was short on strategy.

  “Sounds good,” I said. “And the other players?”

  No harm in asking.

  Jimmy had a sly grin.

  “You’ll find out on the night. But you better bring your A game. These guys don’t mess around. Good sports, though.”

  For a high stakes game in a seedy pub where the house takes twenty-percent, I doubted they were good sports. The kinds of guys that played in these back street, back room games were doing so with ill-gotten gains. Not that the sizable cash payments I’d received from Jordan were any less ill-gotten. Maybe that’s why the size of the buy-in didn’t bother me – it wasn’t any more my money than the brown envelope backhanders that found their way from property developers to the councillors on planning committees right around Ireland.

  “Tuesday night at eleven? Count me in, Jimmy.”

  He smiled.

  “Bruce Lee has a good ring to it as a poker nickname, don’t you think, Mickey?”

  I didn’t know whether a nickname like that would buy me any more table cred, but where was the harm?

  “Knock yourself out, Jimmy.”

  “You’ll go by that so. The others will have their nicknames as well. There’s no real names in my games. The reasons should be obvious.”

  They were. But I needed a name for my red-haired fellow. I started to get up.

  “Fancy playing a hand or two in the cash game before you go?” Jimmy asked. “There’s a seat open.”

  I didn’t have much cash on me, didn’t want to waste time at a table without my red-haired rumour spreader.

  “Not tonight, Jimmy. I’ll keep my powder dry for Tuesday night.”

  As I left Jimmy’s office, I noticed one of the players at the table was wearing a grey hoodie and earphones. Before I left the game room, he got up, flicked back his hood, pulled out his earphones, and started pulling at his hair.

  “Fucking runner, runner,” he shouted. “The odds must be two-hundred to one.”

  I left him to despair his bad beat.

  The grand opening of Jordan Academy was a flashy affair. A who’s who of Cork’s sporting elite were there, along with a number of councillors and reporters. Terence Goulding was there also.

  A grotesque-looking man in his fifties, Goulding had to rely a lot on his considerable charm and deep pockets. On his arm hung his latest twenty-something. I’d heard she was an aspiring actress of some kind. I guessed Terence was her casting couch. Once established, I had no doubt she’d move on and Goulding would replace her with another twenty-something.

  I recognized another man. He had the most distinctive head – it was Scoobs. I made eye contact with him and he waited while I made my way to him. I grabbed two glasses of Prosecco on the way.

  “Fancy meeting you here, Geoff” I said. “I had you pegged for the type, alright. Muscles like you have.”

  I took a sip of the Prosecco and worried I sounded like I was coming on to him.

  “Ah, call me Scoobs. Everyone does. Funny, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “The two of us being called after cartoon characters.”

  Scoobs. Scooby Doo. Fair enough. But me called after a cartoon character?

  “You know,” he said, “like the red-haired guy that used to be on TV years ago.”

  First of all, Bosco was a puppet who lived in a jack-in-the-box, not a cartoon. Secondly, apart from sharing my surname with a saint, the name Bosco was of Italian origin. Six generations removed, my mother said, from a sailor who had settled in Kinsale.

  “You hear what I said?” Scoobs said, snapping me back into the moment. “The red-haired guy.”

  “Yeah, yeah. The guy who lived in a box. I know what you mean.”

  “Class,” he said, rather annoyingly I found.

  “So the MMA,” I said. “You try it out yourself?”

  “Try it out? I’ve fought in CWFC.”

  I was getting tired of all the fight-related acronyms.

  “Cage Warriors,” he clarified. “It’s an MMA promotion in Ireland and the UK. I’m top-ten ranked in the light heavyweight division.”

  “That’s impressive,” I said.

  I didn’t know the promotion, didn’t know if it was respectable or whether it was staged in barns and car parks.

  “I’m fighting in two weeks time in Neptune Stadium.”

  A legit outfit if it was being staged there, I assumed.

  “I might just come along.”

  “Hey … I’ll get you a ticket. If I see you around here, I’ll see what I can do.”

  I thanked him. But I was supposed to be minding Jordan, so I looked around to find him. He was talking to a mountaineer I was familiar with, Eddie Cushnahan. Cushnahan had scaled Everest twice, survived the impossible on K2 when an avalanche took out most of his companions.

  I nodded to Jordan, didn’t expect to speak to Cushnahan when I assumed my duties as a bodyguard. But Jordan introduced me to Cushnahan. I was glad to shake his hand.

  “Eddie here is a survivor,” Jordan said. “Isn’t that right, Eddie?”

  Eddie laughed, but there was regret behind the laugh. Survived at what cost?

  “I just did what anyone is programmed to do,” Cushnahan said. “When you’re hanging from a rope at twenty-thousand feet, you don’t really have time to think things through. You do what it takes.”

  Jordan seemed impressed. “I know exactly what you mean. You do what it takes.”

  A waiter came by and Jordan took a glass of orange. I still had my Prosecco.

  “Enjoy the rest of the evening,” Jordan said to Cushnahan.

  He began to walk towards someone else I knew. Someone who’d knocked on my door a number of times in the past, but now had an army of people to do it for him.

  On the way, Jordan said: “People don’t know the full story about Cushnahan. If they did, they might take back the freedom of the city. But I respect him even more for leaving his friend behind. The friend’s leg was shattered, no chance of making it. You have to make difficult choices when you are at the top – mountain, gang, it makes no difference.”

  He turned suddenly and a plastic grin formed on his face.

  “Ah, Niall. Very good of you to accept the invite.”

  They shook hands vigorously. I wasn’t introduced so I stepped back a step and put on my best secret service blank face.

  “Follow me,” Jordan said to Niall O’Donnell, TD for the Cork North Central ward.

  Though there was a strict limit on political donations in Ireland, there were ways and means of buying political favour. Jordan was skilled in this regard and with Goulding at his ear there was always a legitimate stroke he could pull. The grand opening was no exception.

  O’Donnell was on hand to cut the ribbon and stand next to Jordan for photographs. When it came to politics, the past was the past. Jordan was legit now, accounts and everything. Being linked to the opening of an academy for disadvantaged kids was like manna from heaven and ne’er a shilling exchanged. Jordan would cash in the favour at some later date.

  O’Donnell cut the ribbon across the sliding door to rapturous and somewhat drunken cheers.

  A little later, when Jordan had a quiet moment, he said to me: “He’s in my pocket now, that one.” He was looking at O’Donnell. “And it didn’t cost me a penny. That’s the difference now. Back in the day I’d have stuffed a brown envelope in his handkerchief pocket. Now I understand that a photo opportunity is more powerful than a bundle of readies.”

  All in all, I thought the grand opening had gone very smoothly. I’d discreetly ushered away a couple of drunken camogie players before things got sloppy. And I think I might have looked the part as well. Maybe being in the emp
loy of The Gentleman wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

  I slept late the next morning and spent the rest of the day relaxing, listening to chillout music and reading a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. The card game was on my mind, though. I imagined scenarios, played through entire poker hands. I imagined myself scooping up huge piles of cash, wearing a ridiculous fur coat, diamond rings on my fingers, a gold chain around my neck, a Cuban cigar in my mouth. I imagined the red-haired man opening up to me over a large whiskey. You’d like Savage if you got to know him better, I imagined him say before I put an imaginary fist in his face.

  I was the first to arrive for the Eel’s card game. I didn’t know the routine, didn’t know if it was a sin to arrive late or whether it was a more casual arrangement.

  I hated looking so eager. But I was buzzing. I was my own man now. Jordan wasn’t pulling my strings; I simply clocked in and out as his bodyguard. I wore the rigout I bought for the date with Grace that never happened. I looked sharp.

  The Eel shook my hand. I offered him my bundle of cash, but he refused.

  “The others need to see you lodge it with the bank.”

  The Eel, of course, was the bank.

  “Otherwise they’ll wonder if the game is rigged.”

  My red-haired man arrived a couple of minutes later. As Mogs had described, he was about late forties, five-tenish and slim. He had a wild look about him that matched his hair. He looked reckless, like he’d bet on whether he could spit into a tin of beans across the road.

  Three others arrived over the next three or four minutes. They all seemed to know each other, some probably by their real names. But rules were rules. Jimmy was a stickler for them. A look at the bloodstain on the table was always there as a reminder.

  Jimmy introduced me as Bruce Lee, couldn’t help giggling as the words left his lips. The others were The Professor, Quick Hands, Four Fingers and the red-haired man was The Jackdaw.