The Death of an Irish Tinker

by Bartholomew Gill

  And watching the miserable, round, little, bald fucker—drug pusher, multiple murderer—waddling toward her, Biddy’s eyes snapped to the desk, looking for a letter opener or a scissors. Anything sharp.

  She wasn’t the same Biddy Nevins who’d allowed herself to be run out of the country twelve years earlier. She’d slit the bastard’s throat right there in front of everybody and then tell why. She didn’t care. She’d go to prison. Why not? Dublin and Oney, her daughter and her daughter’s generation, would be rid of a death-dealing leech.

  “In a pub,” Biddy said to the reporter. “They had a pint; then they had each other in a snug. Nine month later there was me. It’s why I feel so at home in bars.” It was her standard brave answer, even though false. Biddy never went into bars. She was afraid of them, categorically. Alcohol, like the gear, could and would kill her. “We didn’t see my father again, never cared to entertain the possibility. I hope we never will.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I hate fucking men.” The Toddler was nearly close enough to hear.

  “Are you a lesbian?”

  “Whenever I fancy a woman. Not often, mind. Not always. But you have a look about you, you do. Busy tonight?”

  The reporter’s pale eyes widened. She looked away, color appearing in her face. “Well, I fancy you too, but not in that way.”

  “Aw, shucks, and there I thought we might get something off tonight.” In spite of her nonchalant pose, Biddy was feeling reckless. “You change your mind, give me a shout. You have my card.”

  “What about your mother?” the reporter managed.

  “Was she a lesbian too?”

  The woman shook her head slightly; it was not what she meant, but she would hear the answer.

  “It would have been better had she been.”

  “Why?”

  “Males suck. Which is the only good we’ll ever get out of them.”

  The reporter’s laughter was nervous. “May I quote you?”

  Biddy nodded. “With your editor’s leave. She a woman?”

  Now the reporter was truly confused. “Where was I?” She consulted her steno pad.

  “Me mither.”

  In tow with the gallery owner, the Toddler now joined them.

  “Oh, yes—is she still alive?”

  Biddy looked straight into the Toddler’s face, making sure his hard black eyes met hers. “Thankfully she’s dead as well. It’s curious being dead, you’re just never heard from again. It’s like taking the ferry to England. But for keeps.”

  “Beth, excuse me, are we interrupting?” asked the gallery owner, knowing he damn well was but wanting to announce to the reporter that the photographs were selling briskly. “I’d like you to meet a patron of yours, Mr. Des Bacon, who just bought three of your prints. Des—Beth Waters.”

  The Toddler’s hand came out, and for a moment Biddy only looked down at it, still furious, wanting to snub the bastard but knowing she would only be calling attention to herself. She touched her fingers to his, then glanced up at him again.

  With a slight smile, he was studying her. “I’m a great admirer of your work, Ms. Waters. I’m only after telling Mal, here, that I wish I’d arrived earlier—so much has been sold.”

  “Well, there are several pieces left,” the owner, Malachi Jordan, put in. “In particular there’s the footpath shot, which I think is the most spectacular work in the show.”

  “I agree,” said the reporter. “It’s almost cubist, the way the footpath flags are arranged so that the images fuse into one another. Or is it a collage of those postcards you can buy in the Trinity College Library, Beth? The ones that are pages from the Book of Kells.”

  Biddy could feel her heart pounding in her ears as the Toddler turned and peered down the length of the gallery toward the photograph that she knew she shouldn’t have included in the show. Her mother, Maggie, had said it was wrong. And Ned, her father, had advised against including the piece.

  “Yeh just can’t get over livin’ on the fookin’ edge” was how he’d put it, now that he had quit drinking and was “Mr. AA” and could suss out everybody’s “motives.”

  And maybe to spite him—since she still had not completely forgiven him for kicking her out of the van when she was nine to be prodded and pricked by sharp and blunt instruments of every description and size—she had decided to hang the picture. But only in the back of the gallery, she had made the owner promise. “It’s not really for sale. I’m just including it because it’s so completely Irish.”

  “The Book of Kells, you say? That’s always intrigued me. I must have a look.” He turned and began making his way through the others in the room.

  Jordan was right on his heels, saying, “I must tell you, Des, that Beth has said it’s not really for sale. Hasn’t even been priced. But I’m sure we can work something out that’s fair to…”

  It was as if an alarm had gone off in the Toddler’s brain, louder with every step that he took closer to the last piece by Beth Waters. A large photograph, it pictured a footpath shaped like a vortex and flagged, supposedly, with other, smaller photographs of pages from the Book of Kells.

  The closer he got, the more impossible it seemed that she could have so perfectly sized down the photograph of each flag that the illusion of a vortex was created. And utterly convincingly. Which would have taken—what?—something like a computer. Yet the Toddler could tell at a glance that the entire effort was traditional photography. After skeet and competition target shooting, it was Bacon’s second hobby.

  No. Removing a pair of reading glasses that had become necessary now that the Toddler had entered his forties, he saw instantly that the picture was not an example of rephotography at all. It was an artful deception.

  Having been cut in diminishing sizes, the flags had then been arranged in a whorl, and the pages actually painted or drawn in with—he took a step closer and adjusted the glasses—yes, with pastel chalk. The entire composition had then been photographed from above by means of what, a crane? Or some tall building that did not cast a shadow.

  But the precision of the drawings. Now that was something he recognized. There was only one person that he knew of who was capable of such fine detailing in chalk.

  Stepping back from the photograph, as though to consider it from a distance, the Toddler felt as he had in Vietnam when he found himself cut off from his firebase. Suddenly he knew who Beth Waters was and why she had seemed so reluctant to shake his hand.

  Gone were the long, brassy curls, the thick gold Tinker earrings, the fresh complexion from kneeling out on the footpath at the top of Grafton Street in every kind of weather. But he knew it was she from her height, which was tall, her build, which had been angular then but was now full and womanly, and her flat, distrusting, streetwise Tinker eyes. Back then one had been brown and the other blue. But the simple addition of a contact lens could change that.

  “Do you like it?” Mal Jordan asked.

  “Oh, yes, very much. How could you not?” The Toddler replied automatically, as he racked his brain to think of how he could deal with her and not compound the problem that she represented. Twelve years now and running. He had done everything he could to track her down, hired snoops, computer surveys, even paid government employees to search tax, dole, and public assistance records in Ireland and England.

  With no luck on Biddy Nevins. Because—he now knew—she had been Beth Waters all along, which was a name he recognized from the past, of a doper who had done herself in. When? Around the time he’d had the trouble with Mickalou Maugham and Biddy.

  Since then the Toddler had remained very much the Toddler, keeping himself feared and therefore respected in the Trade, as drug dealing was known to its principals. But gradually he had left the dicey realm of street-level dealing to become a wholesaler, often internationally on a scale that he would not even have imagined twelve years earlier.

  In fact, the pains he had taken to buffer himself from any possible criminal charge ext
ended to his staff. The Toddler no longer employed a single Irish national. Instead he relied upon ten, skilled operatives from Cambodia, where Lance Corporal Des Bacon had once survived undercover for almost a year during his sniper/scout days with the U.S. Marines.

  None of his staff spoke English, making testifying against him difficult, and if some problem arose, the Irish government would probably just deport them as illegal aliens. Whereupon the Toddler would merely bring in some others—most likely their brothers and sisters or cousins or neighbors—as replacements with the next shipment of heroin. They’d do anything to get out of that hellhole, and what the Toddler paid was for them and their families a small fortune. Consequently, they were loyal to a fault and would do anything he asked.

  Also, Des Bacon had become almost respectable, at least among the merchants and tradespeople who supplied the goods and services he required. Since his granny’s death a decade ago he had moved out to Hacketstown in the Wicklow Mountains, where he now had a large estate, horses, a shooting range, and more Cambodians as staff and who thought him a god. And told him as much. In short, the Toddler had not been threatened by anybody—a rival, the police even—in so long he hardly remembered the feeling, which he now found…intolerable. There was no other word for it.

  Scanning the vortex of pages from the Book of Kells, he suddenly panicked, imagining it sucking him down. But panic was good. It was what had kept him alive, scuttling on his belly through the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, and would here, could he just channel the fear.

  It occurred to him that the biographical statement by the door said “Beth Waters” was an Englishwoman who now lived in Dublin. He would buy the photograph and pretend he had not sussed who she was. For the price, however, he’d get her address. The rest—how to take her out without incriminating himself—would come to him as it always did, as a fully formed plan of action. But it had to come fast. Maybe this time she’d go straight to the police, now that she was no longer just another Knacker wench out begging in the streets.

  “So, d’you want it?”

  The Toddler nodded. “I can’t resist it.”

  Jordan’s smile was triumphant. “Let me see if she’ll put a figure on it—one that’s fair to both of you.”

  Which meant as high as he thought the Toddler would go, working, as he was, on commission.

  Forcing what felt like a pleasant smile into his face, the Toddler slowly turned and glanced down the length of the gallery toward where the woman—“Beth Waters,” née Biddy Nevins—had been standing. But she was gone.

  That was it then. She knew he knew, and he’d have to act fast.

  “I can’t understand it. She said she was going to the loo, but she’s not in there either. My assistant checked.”

  “Maybe she nipped out for a drink.”

  “Well”—Jordan glanced at the wine on the table in the center of the room—“I was under the impression that she did not drink.”

  “I wonder—would you have her address?”

  The other man’s brow suddenly furrowed.

  “Not to worry, Mal; if I buy anything else, it’ll be through you exclusively. I appreciate your thinking to invite me here and your concern for my collection.

  “Now then—the address, please. I’m in a bit of hurry. And let me pay you for what I just bought.”

  The Toddler was carrying a weapon that he was never without. But it was small caliber, meant for defense only. And he’d have to drive all the way out to Hacketstown—twenty mainly mountain miles each way—to equip himself more completely. By then she’d be gone, he was sure.

  Better to catch her now, before she went to ground. Given the chance, he’d take her with his hands and have done with the problem. But at the very least he’d know where she was.

  CHAPTER 9

  Split!

  BIDDY NEVINS WAS shaking with fear and anger by the time the taxi dropped her off in front of her large Victorian house in Ballsbridge, and she could scarcely fit the key in the lock. Her eyes were blurred with tears.

  Suddenly the door opened, scaring her more to think that the almighty Toddler might have beat her there.

  “My God in heaven,” said her mother, Maggie, “ye’re a wreck, so. In bits.” She craned her head to look beyond Biddy into the street. “Where’s Mal? And the limousine?” The gallery owner had arranged for one to pick Biddy up and bring her back as part of the “show” of the opening. With the expense entirely justified by all the pictures that had been sold, was Biddy’s bitter thought, as she stepped around Maggie and rushed into the house. And never again.

  “What be the matter, child?”

  Biddy stopped in the hallway, where the others, alerted by Maggie’s voice, now appeared: her father, Ned, and Tag Barry, her young lover, from the sitting room. On the stairs above her stood Cheri Cooke. Even her daughter, Oney, now seventeen, came out of the kitchen and began moving up the long hall.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” she said, her eyes searching the pattern of the Persian carpet on the floor. “But didn’t the miserable, murderin’, little bastard show up at the opening?”

  “Who? The Toddler?” her father asked.

  “Lookin’ for you like?” Eyes wide, Maggie scanned the street before closing the door.

  “Maybe it was by chance. But one thing’s for sure, he’d been in there before, buyin’.”

  “But how’d he cop on to you?” Although only in her early sixties, Cheri Cooke was arthritic, and she now began hobbling down the stairs, her feet angled to the side, both hands gripping the rail. “Didn’t you have your contact in?”

  Disgusted with herself, Biddy swirled her head; nobody else was to blame. “Ach, wasn’t it the bleedin’ footpath picture?”

  “The one with the pages from the book?” Tag swirled his right hand, which, as usual, clutched a bottle of beer. “Didn’t I tell yiz all it was a fookin’ mistake? How could yiz have let her put it in?”

  Biddy glanced at the handsome young man, who was often mistaken for her brother or Ned’s son, the three of them looked so much alike. Out the night long, Tag had not been back to stop her from taking the final picture as…an afterthought, she’d felt so confident of its merit. So much time had passed. And she had been so secure for so long in her identity as Beth Waters.

  “But the pic was rapid all the same,” said Oney, who resembled Mickalou more than Biddy. She was tall, thin, and dark with curly black hair and hazel eyes flecked with silver chips. Or so they appeared to an adoring mother. As Oney had begun to fill out, Biddy—with her artist’s appreciation—had judged her to be one of the most beautiful creatures that she had ever seen. Which made Biddy fear for her child’s future, and never more than now. “Deadly.”

  Precisely, thought Biddy. “Well, he knows, and now there’s nothin’ for it but to quit this place. Now.”

  Her eyes took in the lovely hall with its sculptured plaster ceiling and period furnishings. Even the Victorian wallpaper was special, made to a pattern that Biddy had copied out of a book and Cheri had commissioned a craftsman in Nottingham to make at great cost. “Nothing’s too good for you,” Cheri had said. Biddy might now be well off, but Cheri was rich.

  Tag took a few unsteady steps closer, the bottle clutched to his chest. “But why, Bid? The fook does he t’ink he is he can roust people from their own bloody kips?”

  Biddy had met Tag in Belfast only the year before, and although he fancied a drop, he did no drugs. When sober, as was now seldom, he could be good company. “I’ll ring up some o’ me lads on the Falls Road. We’ll sort the shagger out!”

  Looking at him, Biddy felt her nostrils flare. It would be one thing, did he mean a word of it—she might even let him—but Tag was all piss and wind, like the proverbial Tinker’s mule. He would not stand a chance against the Toddler, who, if anything, was probably more powerful than he had been a dozen years earlier. Biddy thought of how…self-possessed he seemed and how easily he had purchased the three photographs, sp
lashing out 22,500 pounds as if it were nothing.

  No, there was nothing for it but to bolt. Again. Spreading her fingers wide. “If you tried that or anything like it, he’d only kill more of us. You don’t know the man. He’s hard and capable, and he’d snuff you, me, all of us without a second thought.

  “Now then, we’re leaving, and that’s that. You”—she pointed at Oney—“you go with Maggie and Ned. Right now.”

  “Me? Why me? I’ve me friends and school and”—boyfriends was the next thought—“and can you not see you’ve allowed this man, this fuckin’ Toddler—”

  “Mind your mouth, you.”

  “—to control you and to control our lives from my earliest memory right up to this very moment.”

  Which you would not be knowing had his Bookends dashed you from the top step of the caravan that night in Tallaght, Biddy thought. She had been told of it by Maggie, to whom she now turned. “Do you mind?”

  “Oh, aye, I mind. This place is heaven,” said Maggie, her eyes wide with concern. In recent years her face had become a system of loose, sallow wrinkles from all the weather she had endured. Always thin, she was now gaunt, and dressed in Biddy’s old clothes, which Maggie wore with pride, she looked rather like a scarecrow. “But I mind death more.

  “Come you,” she said to Oney. “And you too, Ned. The sooner we take to the road, the better.”

  “In the Merc,” said Biddy. “It’ll get you farther faster.”

  “No!” Cheri Cooke complained, finally having reached the bottom of the stairs. “My Mercedes? You won’t take my Mercedes!”

  Biddy spun around on her, suddenly hating the woman’s niggardliness in spite of her millions. The only time Cheri opened her hand was when she saw some advantage with Biddy herself—to control her.