Listen, in Yugoslavia, Ratko says, and he’s off on some story about the Old Country. This one involves Tito and the National Science Institute’s attempt to control the weather for a crucial World Cup match in the middle 1970s. The whole story reeks of bullshit, but Ratko’s fat face is choking with laughter, and whether it’s true or not all three of us are in stitches by the end of it:
The snow comes—Ratko concludes—and Yugoslavia beats West Germany, two to nil, and Marshal Tito promotes the colonel to general after game and everybody in the whole country but Tito knows truth but we like him, and no one wants to spoil it by telling, and poor Tito go to his grave thinking Yugoslavia leads world in controlling atmosphere….
Ratko laughs, and his face goes pink and he is barely able to contain himself.
Tears are in my eyes, too, and Bridget looks over at me and kisses me. And I’m thinking we should run away together. Ratko, of course, is right.
We have another shout, and Ratko must have knocked a few back already this morning because he starts to sing a depressing little Serbian number about the Field of Blackbirds.
Michael, you sing something, Bridget says, and it’s not the time and it’s not the place and I’m not in the mood, but how could you say no?
Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling, from glen to glen, and down the mountainside, the summer’s gone…
I give her the first couple of verses, but I can’t finish the song. I’m all choked up and a little disappointed in her. Why doesn’t she ever listen to me? I was serious about us going away together. I mean, really, what is there for us here?
Bridget lies down on the couch with a grin on her face, but Ratko senses my mood and a cloud of gloom passes over him, and I know I’m going to have to cheer him up now with the one topic that will please him.
Listen, Ratko, you know the way you’re always saying that Danny the Drunk is some kind of genius, well, this morning, I’m in McDonald’s and he comes off with some remark about the emperor V—
Why is this place always so dirty? Bridget asks Ratko, sitting up, interrupting me. It annoys me and my mood flips. Maybe we’re not so bloody compatible.
Ratko stands, sighs.
I better go, my friend, he says, terribly slowly and tragically, like bloody Topol or some East European dissident being carted off to Siberia. I can see he really has to go, so I don’t press him.
Aye, well, see ya, mate, I say, closing the door after him.
I turn to Bridget.
Well, that was nice, wasn’t it? I say.
But she’s been quiet, and now she lifts her head and stares at me. It’s the look. I can tell. She’s about to say something that will frighten the bejesus out of me. Please, God, make her not be pregnant. Darkey would insist they get married, and then if it came out looking like me? Please make it not be that.
Let’s go away this weekend, both of us together, she says.
Where would we go? I ask, relieved.
She shrugs, tugs at a knot in her hair. She looks like the mouse I always call her.
What happened last night, Michael? she asks.
I can’t tell if she’s avoiding the question, or bored with the subject, or suddenly remembering that she likes to live only in the world of the possible, or maybe she’s just now recalling the horror of less than a dozen hours ago.
With Andy?
No, afterwards. What did you do? she asks.
What did I do or what did we do? I ask.
What did you all do afterwards? To get back for Andy. You had that blood on your shirt, and, and I heard something, she says and does not finish.
I look at her. This baby talk has irritated me, irritated me more than it should irritate me, but it still has.
Ok, Bridget, if that’s the game, let me ask you a question. What exactly is it that you think this nice guy Darkey does?
He works, he has a business, she says nonchalantly.
And what is it we do, me and Andy and Scotchy and Big Bob and his boys? We have our union cards, but I’m no brickie or spark or anything like that. I wish I was, I’d get more.
I know what you do. I think I do. Darkey pays Mr. Duffy and Mr. Duffy gives Darkey building contracts and Darkey employs you to make sure that all the regulations are right.
She doesn’t fool me. She’s being coy. She knows it all. All the ugly little details, which makes me wonder even more what game it is exactly that she’s playing. Does she want the details so it strengthens me over Darkey, or do the details strengthen him over me?
Well, that’s mostly it, I suppose, I say, confused.
What happened last night? she asks again.
No one died, if that’s what you want to know, I say.
Breath escapes from her body and her face loses its rigidity. So that is what she wanted to know. That’s the line. Murder is the line. As long as it stops at that. But that’s ok. There are worse places to draw it than that.
You should head up. You should head up home, and I’ll come on a different train, I say after a moment.
She looks at me. Her eyes are green. Emerald, in fact.
Michael, what do you want to do with your life?
What do you want to do with your life? I say straight back.
You first, she says, twisting her hair with a finger.
I don’t know. You know, I, I read a lot of books on the train and stuff, I begin, embarrassed.
You read books?
Yes, Jesus, of course. Anyway, I might try to get to college or something. I don’t have any O or A levels, but I don’t think that matters over here.
She yawns inadvertently.
What does Darkey want to do with his life? I ask, sarcastically.
She smiles in a dreamy way. Jesus, they’ve discussed it—their future—and it’s one she likes. Christ on a bike.
He has all these silly romantic notions, she says.
Darkey, romantic? The thought makes me sick, but I don’t say anything. I stare at her but she doesn’t see. She’s getting ready to go.
I’ll take a cab up, she says.
Lucky for some, I say, but it doesn’t touch her.
She gets dressed and kisses me with real fondness. I walk her to the front door. She looks at me and kisses me again on the cheek.
Say goodbye to me in Irish, she says.
I don’t know it, I say.
Say goodbye, she insists.
Slán leat, I mutter.
Slán leat, she says.
The person leaving says slán agat, I say, wearily.
Slán agat, she says happily, kisses me, turns, goes down the stairs. When I hear the front door wheeze open I run up the three floors to the roof and check to see if any of the cars I’d singled out earlier follow her. She’s in the street and she’s walking down to Amsterdam to get a cab. A blue Ford, which was one of my four plates, turns on its engine and does a U-turn and heads down to Amsterdam. Could be complete coincidence, I tell myself. A cab comes and she gets in, and the Ford accelerates past the cab, just making the light, which the taxi doesn’t, and, on balance, you have to think that this is a wee bit of a good sign.
The train again. This time it was full of commuters and slightly more cosmopolitan. Harder getting a seat, but I managed in the corner. I got out my paperback. Rich people, Long Island, days gone by. A death.
The crowd thinned as we edged out of Manhattan. I put the bookshop bookmark in and as I did so I noticed that a note had been written on the back of it. “Too much reading, not enough fucking.” Bridget’s ornamental handwriting. It ticked me off. Bloody dangerous. What if someone in the Four P. says, “What’s that you’re reading there, Mike?” grabs the book, bookmark falls out, sees the scrawl, recognizes it? Jesus. I ripped up the bookmark and dropped it on the floor.
I got off at the last stop and went up the steps.
Early, Pat said.
Aye, train wasn’t as bloody useless as it usually is, I said.
Time for me to pour you a pint, Pat
said.
Cheers, I said.
He poured me a pint of Guinness, but Pat, bless his heart, was second-generation Irish and, in any case, something happens to the black stuff when it leaves the Pale. It takes a real professional schooled in Leinster and within a stone’s throw of the Liffey to pour a stout correctly. Pat hadn’t got the gift or the patience or indeed the right materials to work with. It wasn’t a bad jar for the Bronx or indeed New York, but still…
I thanked him anyway and took a big gulp and ate some Tayto Cheese & Onion.
The others arrived and I bought a round, and at seven we went upstairs to the meeting. Darkey must have come in the back way, because I didn’t see him till we were up there.
The room was full of cigarette smoke, which was particularly annoying since I was, as of this morning, trying to give up. Darkey was sitting at his usual spot at the head of the table and Sunshine was to his immediate left. Darkey liked to run this side of his operations the way he ran the other aspects of his business. This was a meeting, he was the CEO, we were executives.
We were in the function room above the front bar of the Four Provinces. The room was seldom used for anything else but Darkey’s weekly meetings, which usually took less than an hour. Darkey had a lot on his plate, and this side of things he left to Sunshine.
Under Darkey and Sunshine there were two small crews. Me, Andy, Fergal, and Scotchy in one; Big Bob, Mikey Price, and Sean McKenna in the other. Various people floated in and out, David Marley being a good example. Of course, we were one short tonight because Andy was in Columbia-Presbyterian down on 168th recovering from his pretty nasty hiding. When I say crew, it was less formal than that. We didn’t really work all the time. Sunshine more or less took care of everything, and it was only in extreme cases that we had to be sent charging in. Pay was a bit erratic too, because Sunshine doled it out in terms of hours worked. If he could have made us punch in and out, I’m sure he would. We hardly ever saw Big Bob and his two boys, because it was the rare day that all seven of us were needed for something. Most of the time Big Bob, Sean, and Mikey did the collections. These were monthly or fortnightly, and it was usually pretty easy work, and I think they got regular pay for it. Certainly they dressed nice (Bob wore suits), and they hardly ever had to do any of the seedier stuff. (They were the ones, too, who got to go to the meetings at Mr. Duffy’s in Nassau County, and this made Scotchy madder than anything because that was supposed to be some place. I’d been once to Mr. Duffy’s Tribeca pad, and it was spectacular enough.) Under Scotchy the three of us did all the shit jobs: anything that needed doing, heavying, guarding, collecting, a lot of times manual fucking labor.
The arrangements couldn’t have been more different from back in the Old Country, where there’s a rigid command structure and a cell structure, and everything gets talked to death before anything gets done. Here it was laid-back and informal and looked a lot as if Darkey kind of made things up on the hoof. But Sunshine kept people in line. Basically, my job was as a bruiser. I’d been reluctant to come to America, because from the ages of fourteen to sixteen I’d been part of a gang running rackets in North Belfast. I’d seen some pretty unpleasant things, and when my cousin Les suggested I go to work for Darkey White in New York, I didn’t really want to be part of it. I was sick of all that. At sixteen I’d quit the life and run off and joined the army, but that hadn’t worked out either. And then I’d been on the dole forever and when my check went up the old fiasco spout I’d really had no choice. Les promised she could get me a job as a brickie like her brother-in-law (and we’d all done a bit of that when on the double), but Sunshine didn’t need brickies. So it was the other side of the law. The operation wasn’t as big as I’d been expecting, though. Darkey basically ran two rackets, Union and Protection, and with only mild intimidation they pretty much ran themselves. There was some loan-sharking too, but only to the very latest immigrant Micks, and this business was not so important. In fact, I supposed that none of this was that important to Darkey now that he had successfully diversified his portfolio into other areas.
I was dreaming. Darkey was speaking:
So it seems that Scotchy took the initiative and settled things in a way that made clear our position. Shovel is in the same hospital as poor Andy, but from what the doctors tell us Andy will probably be up and around in a couple of days. Shovel will be lucky to be out before Christmas. A job well done, Scotchy.
There were nods and murmurs of contentment. Darkey continued:
And if anyone thought about visiting young Andrew, I’m sure all of his friends would consider this as a nice gesture. I have been to see him already and he’s a brave one.
Darkey smiled.
He was a middle-aged man with lots of worries, but I had to admit he looked well. He was pudgy, but he worked out and dyed his hair, and he had a slightly corrupt state senator sort of cast about him. He had blue, almost black eyes. He was lightly tanned, and you couldn’t tell him, but he didn’t look Irish at all. Arabic, I would have guessed. Scotchy, extremely drunk, sells a story that Darkey’s father was in fact some Portuguese boy and not Darkey’s father at all, which is just typical Scotchy talk, but you can see where he’s coming from. The nickname was inevitable since his last name was White. Hs real name is Terence, but everyone in his presence calls him either Darkey or Mr. White. For a minute, as I was sitting there, I wondered what Bridget called him at home.
He was still speaking. Loved the sound of his own voice:
But once again to that fucker who did him. Excellent job. I heard you in particular performed wonders, Michael. When you want the cream, Sunshine, you have to look to where the pasture is greenest, and Michael, you and Scotchy are two of my very best, Darkey said warmly.
I was, despite myself, glowing with pride, and Scotchy up at the other end of the table turned and winked at me.
Thank you very much, Mr. White, we both said.
Sunshine gave us an appreciative nod too, and Big Bob muttered something like “Well done.” It was true that Scotchy, Fergal, and myself were the only real Irish at the table, all of us from the North too, and despite our lowly positions in the hierarchy, being from Northern Ireland did give us a certain cachet. Scotchy typically played his up to the hilt, of course, talking about his teenage scrapes and how to make nail bombs, booby traps, and other crap, but I liked to keep quiet about it, and I think that worked even more effectively.
Darkey’s spiel was done and Sunshine took over, telling us about a few wee boring things. Darkey then began again with a bit of talk about some local union election, but I’d long since stopped paying attention. There was some further housekeeping after that, but Sunshine didn’t like to burden us with details. The only thing that really stuck in my head was the meeting with Dermot we’d had to postpone from yesterday, Sunshine saying that he would go with us in a few days to impress the serious nature of the situation on the young scallywag.
There was nothing much left, and after a while Fergal, myself, Sean, and Mikey Price were dismissed downstairs. Bob came with us to use the bathroom, gave us a pissed-off look, and went back up.
The bar was pretty full, and Pat had to find us a poky table in the corner. It was Mikey’s shout, but I went since Fergal was well into the story of the first part of last night’s adventures. When I got back carrying—rather precariously—four pints, Fergal was finishing up the story at McDonald’s, except in this version we all got Big Mac meals to show what hard bastards we were.
Mikey was lapping it up, but Sean McKenna had been to federal prison in Texas and had done four years upstate at Ossining or Attica or one of those places and therefore wasn’t that impressed by our little tale. You could tell he had something better on the back burner. In his narrative someone was going to be beheaded by a jigsaw or disemboweled with pliers or crucified to a ceiling or tortured with arc-welding gear. I went to the bathroom before it got started.
I chatted to Pat and Mrs. Callaghan and asked around for Bridget, but appare
ntly she was out with some girlfriends.
When Scotchy came down, he said that Darkey and Sunshine wanted to see me.
This is the moment when I really should run for the bloody door, I told myself, but I didn’t have the bottle for it and went upstairs.
Darkey, Sunshine, and Big Bob looking at some papers.
Uh, wanted to see me? I said.
Darkey, not looking up, Sunshine smiling.
Yes, Michael, come over here, Darkey said.
I sat. Darkey turned and looked at me. Bob stood up. To free his weapon hand?
Michael, we talked last night and Sunshine and I were discussing you earlier. I just want you to know that if you continue to be loyal and work hard you will go far with us, Darkey said and handed me an envelope containing five twenty-dollar bills.
Thank you, Darkey, I said.
Sunshine grinned. Now be off with you, he said.
I tried not to appear like I was running out of there.
Try to see Andrew, Darkey said as I was just at the door.
I’d had my regulation four rounds anyway and so I said goodbye to the lads. It was a long ride back and, following Darkey’s hint (despite my exhaustion), I wanted to stop at 168th to drop in and see how Andy was doing. Not to visit—visiting hours were probably only daytime anyway—just to look in and see how the big wean was.
Try to see Andy, he’d said. As an example of what might happen to those intimate with Bridget? Hmmm.
The hospital was spread out all over the shop, and I had to ask four different security guards before finding the right place, and even then I walked into a huge homeless shelter by mistake.
’Course, no visiting in the ER, and once the nurse found out that I wasn’t family, she sent me on my way with instructions to come back at a presumably more Presbyterian hour.
I tried to exit after that but instead found myself in a different part of the hospital entirely. I discovered a bog and went and relieved myself and was just trying to figure out how in the hell I was supposed to get out of there when who should I see but Mrs. fucking Shovel. She was standing there, staring right at me with murder in her eyes and a shaking cup of coffee in her hands. I’m sure Scotchy would have turned and legged it. I should have bolted too. It would have been the sensible thing, but instead I went over to her and said:
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