The Death of an Irish Tinker

by Bartholomew Gill

  Why not? thought McGarr, thanking the woman and moving toward the door. Ireland had suffered its own Inquisition for close to a millennium with no end in sight.

  “Will you keep me informed?”

  “If you like.”

  “It’s not often one finds a dead person chained to the top of her tree.”

  And one who had not wished to die like that. But apart from the approximate age of the corpse, McGarr knew nothing else.

  When he got home to his house in Rathmines a few hours later, he placed the folded evening newspaper on the kitchen table and stepped into the pantry.

  “Who was the ancient hero who was chained up in the tree for birds to eat?” he asked his wife, Noreen, who was preparing dinner at the stove.

  “Prometheus.”

  McGarr reached for a glass and the bottle of malt on the sideboard.

  “But it wasn’t a tree, and the bird was an eagle that feasted upon his liver. Eternally, since Prometheus was himself immortal.”

  McGarr was glad they weren’t having liver tonight. From the aroma in the kitchen he could tell Noreen was cooking her own home-cured pork sausages simmered in seasoned bouillon. She served them with boiled potatoes, pea beans, sauerkraut, and a variety of mustards.

  Suddenly famished, McGarr raised the glass to his lips and wished he did not have to go back into the office. But the volume of unsolved cases had increased dramatically along with the burgeoning drug problem, and only plain, dogged police work would close them.

  “What was his crime?” McGarr stepped around the door to watch Noreen at work over the Aga that was making the kitchen toasty. It was the hour of the day he enjoyed most.

  “It was one of commission: He went too far. Jupiter gave him the order to make mankind out of dirt and water.”

  And when he did, he must have had you in mind, thought McGarr. A redhead like McGarr himself, Noreen was a diminutive but well-knit woman with alabaster skin and green eyes.

  A full fourteen years younger than McGarr, she managed her parents’ picture gallery in Dawson Street and was a devotee of the arts in every form.

  This evening she was wearing a black kimono that pictured a bird of paradise on the back in vibrant detail and black Japanese slippers with brilliant red piping. In all, she looked like a member of some smaller, finer, and more colorful race.

  “But Prometheus took pity on our sorry state,” she went on, while moving between stove and fridge, “huddled shivering and fearful in the darkness when night came on. So he stole fire from the heavens and carried it down to us. Of course, it was more than just fire. It was light, heat, and eventually culture and civilization.”

  “And for that he got the max?”

  “Well, max enough. Nothing was ever the max in the classical world, myths being subject to amendment.” Noreen turned from her labors to regard McGarr: the rumpled khakis that he’d climbed the “Cliquot tree” in, what amounted to a two days’ growth of beard since he’d been up most of the night before, and the rather full glass in his hand.

  “Prometheus himself might have ended his agony at any time,” she went on. “By submitting to Jupiter’s authority and telling old Jupe what he wanted to know. He was a clever lad, you see, who knew a thing or two. Chief among which was not to drink more than one of those things in your hand before having tea. And, two, he might spill the beans about how Jupiter would beget a son who would displace him and end the hegemony of the Olympians. Are you with me, tatty one?”

  McGarr wouldn’t be without her, but now he really did want another.

  “Needless to say, Jupiter required more detail, which Prometheus refused to supply.”

  “Being the stand-up guy maker that he was.”

  “Well, he liked the odd skirt, as did Jupiter. In fact, with Prometheus all chained up on the mountain, Jupiter couldn’t keep his hands, et cetera, off female humans, which was the other little thing that Prometheus knew.”

  “This is getting racy.”

  Noreen raised an eyebrow. “Human beings, as it turns out, are not the only racy lot, and Prometheus knew that if Jupiter kept messing with mere mortals, there’d come a day that a human would give birth to a Jovian by-blow who would grow up to be a peerless thug and who would set Prometheus free. Therefore, he could wait.”

  Turning back to her cooking, Noreen continued. “And that new superlout was none other than Hercules, who at the time was himself a human and had yet to gain his immortality via the twelve labors.”

  “So, Prometheus was freed by his own creation. The one that Jupiter ordered him to make.” McGarr shook his head. “The irony of it all.”

  “Well, let’s say the ‘Byron-y’ of it all. It’s probably the taliped bard’s best poem. Are you ready?”

  McGarr smiled. Noreen was without a doubt putting on a show, but it always amazed him that she forgot almost nothing of what she read. Or at least not what she called “the good parts.” He swirled his glass. “Work away.”

  Setting down her stirring spoon, she placed one foot before her and raised her chin dramatically. She then regarded him, her eyes suddenly glazed. “It’s my look of cosmic disdain.”

  The rock, the vulture, and the chain,

  All that the proud can feel of pain,

  The agony they do not show,

  The suffocating sense of woe,

  Which speaks but in its lowliness,

  And then is jealous, lest the sky

  Should have a listener, nor will sigh

  Until its voice is echoless.

  Thinking of the corpse he had viewed earlier in the day, McGarr could not imagine the agony that the man had endured, his wrists and ankles being the evidence.

  When McGarr now only nodded his appreciation of her performance and did not utter a quip, Noreen twigged on the possibility that he might have had some “professional” reason for asking about the myth. No detail of his investigations was uninteresting to her.

  “Here, let me top up that glass.” She moved toward the pantry and the bottle. “Don’t think you’re going back to the Castle; don’t even imagine it. Day’s over, end of quest. It’s nasty out there, and you look…destroyed is not an adequate word.”

  McGarr watched mutely as she topped up the glass. Demolished would be more accurate, were he to drink it all. “I don’t think you want to know.”

  “Try me.”

  When he had finished, Noreen shook her head. “I can’t believe it was murder. I think your first thought is more likely. That it was something he or she went along with willingly but then thought better of.

  “How else could they have got him up there, naked and—I assume—in the middle of the night? Even if nobody was home, that tree can be seen for miles.” She waited for an answer, but McGarr only stared down into the brimming cup.

  “I mean, how many murders have you ever investigated that were actually carried out in a manner so elaborate? And why would anybody go to such lengths when a knife or a bullet would suffice with a minimum of attendant risk?”

  McGarr reached over to the kitchen table and opened the paper. Banner headlines declared:

  CROW BAIT

  NAKED MAN CHAINED TO TOP OF CLIQUOT TREE

  “Something like Jupiter did with your man—”

  “Prometheus,” Noreen supplied.

  McGarr nodded. “To send a message. To show who rules and what could happen to anybody who thwarts his will. Thirteen generations of pain is a long time. I bet it felt like that to the man in the tree.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Bang!

  Dublin

  February

  IT HAD BEGUN six months earlier in the dead of winter. With the men who put the other man down. They could not have seen Biddy Nevins. She was on her knees across the street with a large concrete planter between her and them.

  Kneeling on the footpath, she was counting the change people had tossed her for her colored chalk drawing of a page from the Book of Kells. In fact, it was the page that was presently
on display in the Trinity College Library at the other end of Grafton Street.

  Around noon Biddy had called into the college and glanced at the book, a new page of which was turned every day. She had then drawn the page perfectly on the pavement, the ornate Celtic design and complex Latin phrasing letter perfect. Biddy herself, however, was illiterate and unschooled, even in art.

  It was a talent that she had discovered while in hospital, recovering from the gear—as heroin was called—that had marred six years of her young life. Biddy needed only to glance at a printed page, a painting, a person, or a thing once, and she could draw it like a photocopy.

  It was also the talent that had led her to be called the Queen of the Buskers, her own Mickalou with his music being the King of the many sidewalk artists and minstrels who plied Dublin’s most fashionable commercial district. Closed to traffic, Grafton Street was usually thronged with shoppers; now, as a cold winter evening set in, however, nearly all had gone home.

  It was a shout or a scream that caused Biddy to look up from her take and over at the men. Streetwise since her Traveler father had dropped her off in Dublin during the winter she turned nine—to “harden” her, he said—there was little that could occur around Biddy that she did not ken. Which made what was happening on the corner across from her stranger still.

  Standing in deep shadows by the gates to St. Stephen’s Green were two big shadogs, called shades by Biddy and her other Traveler friends. Dressed in their winter blues, their broad chests were spangled with the silver buttons of the Garda Siochana, Ireland’s national police. But it was the man between them who was crying out, “Jesus, no! Please! I beg yeh, I’ll do anyt’in’! Name it, Tod. Just fookin’ name it, and it’s fookin’ yours. Isn’t it enough you’ve already fookin’ crippled me?”

  It was then that Biddy noticed that the two shades were holding the man up, as though there were something wrong with his legs. And a fourth man—the man he was appealing to—now stepped out of the shadows to look up the street in the direction that the traffic flowed around the large park in the center of Dublin. There was little traffic at this hour of a winter evening, when most people were having their tea, but the lights of an oncoming bus caught the short, dapper man whom Biddy recognized immediately and loathed.

  Called the Toddler because of how he was built—round and wide—and how he walked, which was flat-footed, he was without a doubt the biggest drug dealer in the country. “And one wily fooker altogether,” said Mickalou, who had got straight with Biddy and had once run for the Toddler when he had no other choice in life.

  Biddy stopped counting, scooped up the remaining change, and tossed it into her chalk box. She did not want to be anywhere near the Toddler, even across a street, and she had Mickalou and their four-year-old daughter to get home to in the flat they rented off Patrick Street, about a half mile away. She’d pick up a few bangers, a cabbage, and a loaf on the way, and they’d eat in for a change on such a bitter night.

  But Biddy had only just closed the lid when the man cried out again, “No! Please! I have a wife, a fam—” And the two cops rushed him out of the shadows toward the double-decker bus, the front of which now lurched around the corner. They hurled him headfirst under the large back wheels.

  There was another pitiable cry that was cut short by a sharp, cracking sound, like a balloon bursting or a backfire, and the bus roared off toward Dawson Street, where it would turn.

  It had been the man’s head. It was flattened on the tar, his popped eyes lying side by side like a cutout with a halo of blood and brain. And yet one arm now jerked up, as though to feel the damage, before falling back onto the tar.

  Biddy did not realize that she was now on her feet and had taken a step or two toward the street until the Toddler turned his head to her. It took only a moment for both of them to react.

  Like a salute, the Toddler’s hand darted at her as Biddy turned to flee. “Get her! Get that Tinker bitch!” And the two shades—who couldn’t be shades—sprinted across the street, one angling off to keep her from running into King Street toward the shopping arcade there. The other one came right for her.

  Down the dark brick promenade of Grafton Street Biddy Nevins plunged, her chalk box under one arm, the heavy woolen greatcoat that she wore against the cold flapping behind her. Now nineteen, she was a tall, thin woman with yellow gold hair that formed tight natural curls she wore long. Like some other Travelers whose clan had “married close,” she had one blue eye, the other brown. But her high cheekbones and fine, even features were those of her mother’s prominent Traveling family, the Maughams, and she looked all of what she was: an exotic creature in every regard.

  Who could shift, because she had been forced to and fast for most of her life. She pegged by Cathedral Street and Moore Lane, which were too narrow and too dark to enter and hope for help if she was caught. And the one, the smaller shade, was right on her heels.

  With her heart in her mouth and her chest bursting, Biddy rushed by Bewley’s Tea Room and the lighted display windows of Dunnes and Switzers and the Brown Thomas department stores, before cutting into Wicklow Street. If only she could find a shade, a real shade, but that wouldn’t help her either if there was only one.

  Madly she racked her brain for a refuge down the streets and laneways where, as a child, she had begged and stolen and run in a wilding pack with other abandoned children. They had terrorized tourists, stolen cars and anything that wasn’t nailed down, and booted drugs, which was the beginning of the end for so many of them. And now maybe for her, here where it all had started.

  But would she want the police? she asked herself, glancing back to find that she now had a half block lead on the only one of them she could see. God, no. Not if she could avoid it. Cops would mean giving her name and later detectives, who would come around when they put together why she was running with who she was, with her work, and with the dead man. Biddy only ever drew Book of Kells pages there on the wide squares at the top of Grafton Street.

  No shades could protect her from the Toddler when no shades had been able to put him away for lo these many years. He was, like, immune or in with them—the shades—who, some said, now worked for him. Could this be proof? No—in spite of all that had happened to her, Biddy refused to believe it; otherwise…there’d be no point in carrying on. There had to be somebody out there in “Buffer Land,” as Mickalou called the settled society, who was good. Who believed in right and wrong. They couldn’t be all like the politicians—on the take.

  Bang. Biddy ran right into him—the second shade who was not a shade. He must have circled around through William Street and run fast. Bouncing off his broad chest before he could grab her, Biddy shot the box of chalk and change up into his big rough pan, shouting, “He’s not the police! He’s not the police!” at a car in William Street that had slowed to watch the altercation. “He’s a fookin’ murderer!”

  And her hands—they came up hacking, scratching, punching at his face, churning—fast, faster—so he couldn’t grab her. Her boot—she got that in too, right between the bastard’s legs. Once, twice. He roared and lunged for her. Christ, where was the other one? He couldn’t be far behind.

  But the big one had caught hold of her lapel and now began lifting her off her feet with one hand while cocking the fist of the other. Spinning, Biddy slipped one sleeve and then the other, as the hand, the arm, the fist punched past her ear. She pivoted and left him crouched there, holding the garment.

  To hell with it, she thought, as she sprinted down the slight hill and toward the many headlamps she could see lashing by at the other the end of the street. Like any other “Tinker bitch,” she had a closetful of cast-off clothes back at the flat. The heavy thing had only been slowing her down.

  It was then she heard the shots, not one but a bunch of them booming like a cannon in the tight pack of buildings along the narrow street. A shopwindow near her head cracked, a second bullet knocked out a piece, and Biddy only just jumped into the road w
hen the whole works—a wall of glass—crashed into the street.

  Bolting right out into the busy Dame Street as she had years ago after nicking some buffer’s billfold, Biddy ran right at the oncoming cars where no sane person would follow. All she could think of was Mickalou and her baby, the only two people who mattered in her life. It was plain now they would kill her; hadn’t the shots proved it?

  The Toddler would have stopped at her chalk drawing and would now know who she was: Mickalou the Gypsy minstrel’s girl. The “Tinker bitch” that he’d already called her. Another junkie and therefore expendable, somebody the Toddler had been killing slowly for years and now would finish. No—now had the right to finish, like the man he put under the bus.

  Didn’t the Toddler and his gear rule? There was graffiti like that—THE TODDLER RULES or TOD’S TOT, THE TOTAL GEAR—all over the city. Or the drawing that was printed on glassine tabs, of a smiling Toddler with top hat and spats, holding something (Biddy knew what it was!) behind his back.

  Written on the bottom was the sentence they all said to each other so often nobody gave a thought to what it meant: IT’S DEADLY! It was scrawled in shooting galleries, in pub loos, on walls where people were poor and stupid, the way Biddy herself had been for all those years.

  And the expression on his face? That said, Come and get it, you stupid dead fucks. Come into my world and let me kill you slowly. I’ll take everything from you, and after it’s mine, I’ll take what’s left of your worthless lives. If I choose.

  With one phone call the bastard would learn where she and Mickalou lived, and he’d take away Mickalou and hold him until he got her. Then he’d kill Mickalou too, and maybe even the baby. It was her fear speaking to her. But why not? Why not a baby? It would add to the way people spoke of him, to the terror. The awe. It was said that the Toddler never killed the same way twice, and it was always never certain that he had. Only that the people he wanted dead got dead. Sometimes horribly, like just now at the top of Grafton Street. God, why hadn’t she packed up sooner and gone home?