The Death of an Irish Tradition

by Bartholomew Gill

  Color had again risen to her cheeks, but her expression was joyful. “Straight away, sorr. Oh—” she turned back, “—would you mind if I called my mother? She’s been waiting to hear.”

  “You’d better clear that with your boss.”

  McKeon was reaching for his hat on the pegs near the door, and Bresnahan made straight for him.

  Back inside the cubicle, McGarr picked up the phone and carried it to the window. There he dialed Dermot Flynn at R. T. E. and asked him if he was interested in a scoop.

  “Something to do with the murder?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Will we—I mean, I—will I be getting an exclusive?”

  “It’s a promise.”

  Another pause. “What do you want from me?”

  “Well, seeing you asked…”

  Frayne looked down at the toilet sink and wondered what the hell he was going to do about that. The stain was black from the dye he’d put in his hair and indelible, it seemed; streaks had seeped into the porous areas where years of steady dripping had worn away the enamel.

  He’d been a fool to take a room in the kip, but O’Rourke knew the place and assured him the old “army” men would keep their mouths shut. But a good job it was that he couldn’t sleep and had gotten up early—the dye, the clothes, only a whim had made him buy all the papers, and thank God for that. He’d only been trying to make a few quid on the side—Christ, the others had jobs, the most of them—but he knew what they’d say. No orders had been given, and when they found out who he’d been working for and why, he was as good as dead.

  What to do? He didn’t know. There were just too many possibilities, and Frayne had never been much for planning.

  He leaned against the wall and felt for the Skorpion in the sling under the new tan suitcoat. “It’s too big for you, sir. I’m telling you that, sir.” Jesus, he’d felt like blasting the bitch, her making a stink right there on the floor of Clery’s with everybody carrying a paper under their arms. But, forget it—Christ, he had to think.

  He looked down at the stain again. If they shopped him—no, they wouldn’t, it wasn’t their way. Could he be sure of that? He could. A kneecapping—he flexed his legs—a bullet in the back of the head, but knowing who he was they’d probably take him any way they could. Yes. Could he count on that? He could.

  But could they justify it, here in the kip? He kept his eyes on the stain. They could. It was in all the papers, wasn’t it? The old man could say he saw the papers and came up to ask a few questions, taking a gun along just to be safe. The police, of course, would know he was lying, that he’d been sent to—but he’d get off with excessive force, if they gave him that.

  But Frayne didn’t get that sinking feeling he’d known when he’d gotten into tight situations with the others. He was alone here, and he didn’t have to worry about bumblers. The bastard had money and he’d squeeze him, so he would. Frayne had never cared for orders, and the little money he’d seen from all he’d done for them up in the North had been pissed away on expenses. And the way they had handed it out to him in dribs and drabs, like he was a beggar boy—.

  And it stank, the dye—sulfurous and chemical—and the color it made his hair was wrong, some blue-black tint, phony and wiglike.

  He stepped to the mirror, which was cracked and spattered. The whole place was filthy, smelling like the city, ages of dust and exhaust and industrial fumes. My God—he had shadows all around where he’d tried to brush it on his eyebrows. It wouldn’t come off his skin completely, no matter how hard he’d scrubbed, and his hands—he looked down at them—had outlines around the nails of the first three fingers of his right hand. Frayne felt the wrath rise in him. Dirt. He hated dirt and filth and—.

  He turned away from the mirror and the image of his face—dishlike, the nose long and thin cheeks hollow; a face that was not uncommon, though, and that was something—and took a cautious step into the bedroom.

  O’Rourke, he’d been gone too long.

  He stopped. They’d send O’Rourke first, not the old man. And O’Rourke could get back with them that way.

  Frayne looked around the low bedroom, the floor that heaved toward the one window, wide but looking right out on the street, and he wondered if he had left anything and if it would matter. No—not now.

  And he heard the floor creak.

  “Jack?” a voice called out.

  O’Rourke.

  Frayne’s hand moved inside his coat and came up with the machine pistol. Silencer? It didn’t matter much either, but he had three floors, and the others had probably been tipped off. He fitted the sleeve on the muzzle and tightened it down.

  “Jack?”

  Had he forgotten anything? he again asked himself, a sort of calm coming to him, now that he had decided. He’d squeeze him, sure. He’d squeeze him good or kill him. There was always England and the drug racket, if he couldn’t come up with anything in the trade. He put in a stroke or two that way before. There was money in drugs, and the scum—.

  Not in the hall. O’Rourke was cautious. He’d have somebody backing him up out there, or on the stairs. How many could they have gotten together on such short notice? The old man. The barman too; Frayne had seen him around before when they’d taken a shipment. And that other bloke, the one from the kitchen. Four, tops. He had to take at least one of them there in the room.

  Frayne moved around the bed so his back was to the window and knelt, placing the gun flat on the bed where his left arm would conceal it, his right hand still on the grip and the trigger.

  “Jack, for chrissakes, you’ve got a phone call.”

  “Who is it?” he asked the door.

  “It’s him, I think. Says it’s urgent.”

  “Tell him I’ll call back. I’m busy.”

  “You know he doesn’t want that.”

  O’Rourke was very near the door, and Frayne knew he wouldn’t try to kill him while he was at his prayers. O’Rourke was religious. Weak. And Frayne suddenly hated him for that weakness. He’d shopped him, hadn’t he? And yesterday—he could have waited. He had a weapon in the Rover. He could have—.

  The knob turned and Frayne lowered his head, still able to see the door out of the corner of his eye.

  It swung wide. “Jack?”

  Ah, he was right. O’Rourke had one hand behind his back. “Can’t you see I’m busy, Billy? Give us a moment’s peace, for God’s sake.”

  O’Rourke took one cautious step into the room. He was a short man, young and stout with a full black beard that made his face seem stolid and imposing, and his eyes—some hazel shade, like a pig’s—were agog, unnatural, frightened. The coward, Frayne thought, even dressed as he was, as a priest, a guise nobody would question, and him without his description in the papers.

  Frayne didn’t have to look up. He jerked up his right hand and squeezed. The pistol popped thrice, each time higher—the chest, the throat, the upper lip to the side of the nose. Like those jewels Frayne had seen Indian women in London wearing on the side of their nostrils, but this one snapped O’Rourke’s head back and splattered the wallpaper above the door, and he fell forward onto his face, his fat body coming down hard and dead and sliding over the slope of the floor. Dust from the filthy carpet puffed up from under him.

  Frayne opened the folded butt, a brace that was made of aluminum tubing and fit over the barrel and the sleeve of the silencer. He had seven rounds left in the ten-round clip, but he pulled it out and inserted a twenty-round magazine.

  That was one thing about the bastard. He wasn’t cheap and he knew guns. The Skorpion was a blow-back weapon with a high rate of fire, but there was an inertial mechanism in the grip that delayed the bolt and reduced the rate of fire to a controllable cycle. Weighing only three and a half well-balanced pounds, it was an ideal weapon for a situation like this. Frayne wondered how he’d gotten them. Jesus, with a couple thousand of these—.

  Frayne wasn’t nervous or jittery, he wasn’t even thinking of the ot
hers that he knew were there, the fact that he was three floors from the street, that if they had heard the shots and knew O’Rourke had taken some they’d send up maybe more than he could handle, and he’d heard another footfall on the stairs and then in the hall. Whoever it was, he stopped.

  There was quiet for a while there inside the kip. Out on the street he could hear cars, lorries, and Frayne wondered if those other people could know that here was where it was happening, the news, what they’d be reading about in the papers tonight and tomorrow, and really how much it differed—what he’d read, for instance, about himself and the cop in Galway—from the way he felt going through it, what he saw. And did it matter? Yes and no. Yes, that he had savored every word, every letter; but no, he preferred it the way it was, like this, in a quiet and calm that made it all seem like a special kind of child’s play, but dangerous and bloody.

  But Frayne was good at what he did, and he knew it.

  “Billy-boy?” He heard the old man’s voice on the stairs. “Somethin’ happen up there? We heard a clump like the ceiling fallin’ in.

  “Jack?”

  Frayne said nothing and remained where he was, kneeling at the side of the bed. He thought of the dusty carpet and how it might smudge the knees of his new tan trousers, and he was filled with loathing for the kip and the old man who owned it and those other old roustabouts who could live—.

  He heard the board creak again, the one out in the hall, and again. Two of them, one to decoy, the other to fire. Frayne had seen it used before, but not by him.

  He again laid the Skorpion alongside his left arm and bent his head.

  “Billy?” the old man asked again, his voice heavy with fear. “Jack?”

  Frayne then saw him in the doorway, nothing in his hands but a bulge to the side of the tattered cardigan he wore, and in this weather. His eyes, like O’Rourke’s had been, were bugged and fearful and false. “What happened to Billy-boy, Jack?”

  Frayne kept his head down, waiting for the old man to step away from the door and for the other one to appear with the—.

  The old man’s eyes shied to the left, and he stumbled as he stepped back, so that Frayne, snapping up the Skorpion with both hands, caught the other man as he walked into the fire.

  The burst drove him—bloated and fat, like O’Rourke, a barstool warrior full of all sorts of tripe about the Troubles—back into the hall, nailing him against the wall, a cluster that tore bright red pennies in the white smock and seemed to hang him there for a moment, his eyes bulging, his mouth with only a few teeth as yellow as that donkey’s in Drogheda gaping.

  The first one, the owner, had fallen and he scrambled up and tried to flee down the dark hallway, but the doors were locked.

  In that same great calm Frayne watched him for a while, as he clawed at the doors, then fished in his pocket for a ring of keys that he dropped at his feet, looking with horror over his shoulder at Frayne. Then he left off and turned around, his hand moving inside the cardigan. But he stopped. “Ah, Jack-boy,” he whined. “Ah, Jack—”

  The slug seemed to take off the front of his head, like it was charged and exploded, and the door into which he was driven cracked.

  Frayne moved down the stairs slowly, keeping the butt of the weapon in the crotch of his arm, grasping the long housing of the magazine in the other hand.

  And everything seemed more real to him—the sunlight flooding through the begrimed stairway windows, stuck shut with grease and dirt; the stench of the latrines at the end of each hallway; voices from the other rooms, the sweet-sour reek of bacon and eggs and tea that wafted up from the dining room.

  Frayne lowered the weapon as he turned the corner of the landing to the street floor, keeping it against the wall and his body.

  Two men came out of the dining room, farmers by the look of their windburned faces, trying to save a few quid in a kip before the Horse Show, no doubt. Frayne hated that sort of niggardliness. They probably owned half a county between them. One of them glanced up at Frayne and nodded.

  Frayne smiled.

  “See your man about?” the farmer asked.

  Frayne stopped and put his body between the man and the gun. What was two more? he thought, but he had to use the phone before he left. He hated those little kiosks; they were traps, and he wasn’t going to get caught in one.

  “He stepped out to change a note for me. Maybe you can catch him. The bank’s just up the street.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  The two men went out, and Frayne waited for the door to close on the sunlight again before he moved down the stairs, across the hall, and into the bar.

  The barman was alone there and, looking up, he was surprised to see him. And frightened, there was that too.

  Keeping him in sight, Frayne closed and locked the door.

  The man was tall and thin with craggy features and gray hair cropped short along the sides, the rest of it a bushy spray.

  Frayne didn’t raise the gun, only said, “Both hands on the bar and keep them there.”

  The man complied, and his eyes watched Frayne move by and pull the phone onto the bar.

  Frayne folded the struts of the gun butt back over the silencer and the barrel and laid it on the bar pointing at the man, his hand still on it.

  With the other hand he dialed the number. When it answered, he listened for the sound of the voice. Satisfied, he said, “I’m here. I want the money.”

  He heard a laugh that was deep and wet and winning. “Relax, Jack. I’ve got it, boy, and it’ll be in your pocket before the day’s out, just like we agreed.”

  Then the voice dwindled to a near whisper. “Listen, Jack—they’re at each others’ throats, they are, and I’m only after leaving the Show Ground myself. The place is swarming with police.”

  Frayne liked that even less. He’d dealt with finks before, and the bastard was trying to pull out on him. And after what had happened upstairs Frayne would need all the help he could get and money—more than he’d been promised by far—and a way out of the country. “Then you don’t want the horse either?”

  The barman’s body was trembling now. He wasn’t looking at Frayne but out across the tables to the two windows that long, yellow shades covered. The sunlight made them brilliant. And Frayne could hear something like water dripping.

  “Ah, Jack—she’s weak, so it’s said. We’ve done enough.”

  “We’ve done enough?” Frayne roared into the phone. “You don’t know the half of what we’ve done.”

  The barman was whining now, shaking all over. Frayne looked at the man’s trousers, which he could see down the length of the bar. They were sodden. The coward had pissed in them. Frayne had no use for cowards, not here, not anywhere.

  “Listen to me now and listen good,” Frayne went on, not taking his eyes off the barman. “You set this thing up and it’s not done, not by half. You’ll be reading about what we’ve been up to while you’ve been out at the feckin’ Show Ground and all, and now I want double, cash, small notes, and a way out of the country or you’ll find yourself among what we can do.

  “Do you get me?”

  The man on the other end smiled. Frayne was predictable and thus controllable. He’d be stopped, of course, and that would be all to the good. “It can be arranged.”

  “Double.”

  “That too.”

  Frayne didn’t care for the way he had agreed so quickly.

  “I might be needing you again, you see.”

  Nor that either, but he said, “Then be there with everything.”

  “But it’ll take—”

  “No buts, just be there.” Frayne dropped the receiver into the yoke.

  The man on the other end paused before hanging up. Even so, he thought, perhaps it would be wise to take precautions, in case of contingencies. Only Frayne and one other could tie him to the whole bloody mess, and Frayne was too close, too available.

  But it was nice the way he was playing
Frayne. Dicey, to be sure, but with a certain control. It was that which he enjoyed most.

  Back in the kip Frayne turned to the barman, who was wilting, head down, body shaking, tears streaming from his eyes, only his hands on the bar keeping him from falling.

  Frayne walked by him toward the door. “You dirty, filthy, cowardly man, you. You probably cacked in your britches as well,” he muttered.

  At the door he shouted to the man, “Did you?”

  The man broke down, nodding his head, and something spluttered from his nose.

  From the other end of the bar Frayne gave him a burst, all up and down his back, aiming at the pants. The man fell softly, crumpling down into his own filth.

  Frayne waited to hear if the shots would bring some others. He then placed the Skorpion in the sling under the jacket, put on the sunglasses and cloth cap, and stepped out of the bar, locking the door behind him.

  Out in the street he dropped the key in the gutter and began walking toward the library.

  Watching the girl step down the stairs of the funeral parlor, Ward wondered how much love had to do with loneliness, the wanting to have a personal, an inviolable touch with another person and the…life force—children, family, a generational perspective, back and forward in time, one that helped you understand the process of birth, growth, aging, and death.

  And he wondered how much it had to do with feeling a certain lack in oneself that the other person could and would fill. Take the way she moved—easily, fluidly—or the way she had been when she’d played for him, carried away, or her talent itself, the…artiness in her approach to the world that was so different from his own. She was everything that he was not, but there was a trap in that too—she’d be a concert pianist, traveling here and there, and he’d be a cop for the rest of his life, that much he knew was certain. And if she gave in, she’d be unhappy. And if he allowed his feelings to carry him away, he’d be unhappy.

  But perhaps it was just the impossibility of the situation that made him watch her legs all the more closely, the narrowness of her waist in a pleated, flower-print dress that swayed with each step, her smile from under the flounced hat—full, holding nothing back. She swung the pocketbook like a little girl.