Little Criminals

by Gene Kerrigan

  When he replaced the floorboard, Crowe poured another coffee and sat down at the kitchen table again. On a fresh page of his notebook, he made a list of the weapons, using Ct for Colt, R for Ruger, H&K for Heckler & Koch, and Gk for Glock. He thought about it for a moment, then he assigned a piece to each crew member, writing their initials alongside the weapons. He flicked back through the pages until he found the list of initials and put a final tick beside Mky. A busy day, a lot done. Do the work, get the result. No big deal.

  He tapped out another number on the phone.

  Martin Paxton put down the phone and put on his sheepish face.

  Deborah said, ‘Ah, no.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Martin, for Christ’s sake—’

  ‘I won’t be long. He just needs to—’

  Deborah walked out of the room, shrugging off her denim jacket as she went. She dropped it in the hall and slammed the door of their bedroom.

  Paxton waited a few minutes, let her get rid of the first wave of anger. He and Deborah had been at the door of the flat, on their way out, when the phone rang. It was the second time in the past couple of weeks that Frankie had blown an evening out by ringing at the last minute.

  ‘Deb?’

  Standing outside the bedroom door. From inside, a blast of music. Fuck it. When she started throwing George Michael at him, there was no answer to that. He picked up Deborah’s jacket, hung it on a hook near the front door and pulled on his pale blue Hugo Boss jacket. When he left he pulled the door gently shut behind him.

  When Martin Paxton arrived at the pub, Frankie Crowe was sitting at the bar, working on a beer mat. He folded it in two, broke it apart along the fold, then folded the two pieces again. He did it once more, and he now had eight small, rough-edged pieces of cardboard. He placed each carefully on top of the other, forming a little tower, beside two similar cardboard constructions.

  Standing at Frankie’s shoulder, Martin noticed that his whiskey hadn’t been touched. He said, ‘They did a survey of barmen once, and you know what their number-one pet hate is?’

  ‘What’ll you have?’

  ‘That,’ Martin pointed at the torn cardboard, ‘they hate that. A pint.’

  Frankie pointed at a free table near the back. ‘I’ll bring it over to you.’

  The pub was having a quiz night, conducted by a DJ who read each question in a country-and-western accent. ‘To what section of the orchestra does the timpani, the timpani, belong?’ In between the questions, the DJ played what he referred to as funky music.

  After they’d been sitting at the table five minutes, Martin knew that Frankie’d been out to Walkinstown to get the hardware from Tommy Sholtis. ‘And Milky’s got a couple of places picked out. He’ll source the cars.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Mostly Frankie spoke, mostly Martin listened, and they were happy with that arrangement. The only thing Frankie had to say that mattered was that he’d decided they were asking for too little. They’d always intended to go for a million. Frankie had been mulling it over.

  ‘Break that down between the four of us, and take out what we have to shell out to Milky and Tommy Sholtis, we’re talking not a lot more than two hundred grand a head.’ Frankie shook his head. ‘That kind of money, fuck sake, what’s that worth these days? Wouldn’t even buy a decent house in this town, even on the Northside.’

  You have to think ahead, Frankie said. The kind of money you get from a score like this could take you up to the premiership. He knew people, came across them all the time, who were crying out for investors. Bankroll a shipment, the white stuff flows in from Amsterdam, you take a margin, sell it on, leave the distribution to the people who want to take that risk. A slice of the profit goes back into the next deal, and the next and the one after that.

  ‘It’s like planting a money tree.’

  The million ransom, after the split, was too skinny for what Frankie had in mind. ‘Guy got himself a bank, the job must be worth two million. We double the ransom.’

  Martin Paxton didn’t think it mattered. If it worked, it was a big piece of money, either way. If it didn’t work, sin scéal eile. He just nodded.

  There wasn’t much else to discuss about the job. Nothing that couldn’t have waited until next day. It was just the way Frankie needed to go over things again and again.

  Frankie took a long drink. ‘Two million. That’s real money. A long way from napkin rings.’

  Martin raised an eyebrow.

  ‘First thing I ever stroked,’ Frankie said. ‘From Lenehan’s in Talbot Street.’ He shook his head. ‘Napkin rings. Me and a couple of the lads went into town. Barely out of short trousers. Security guy was giving us the evil eye. Maybe if he hadn’t been such a pushy fucker I wouldn’t have bothered. They were just there, the napkin rings. Customer asked him something, whatever, he looked away, the napkin rings went up my sweater and we were out of there.’

  ‘Johnny Dillinger’ll never be dead, what?’

  ‘I didn’t even own any napkins.’

  The pub DJ was reading out the answers to a section of the quiz. He punctuated the questions with bursts of throbbing music. Martin was about to suggest they get the hell out of here when Frankie held up a finger to the Asian lounge girl and then pointed to their almost empty glasses.

  ‘OK,’ Martin said, ‘but I have to go after this one.’

  ‘She’s got you rightly domesticated.’

  Martin grinned. ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Can’t say I blame you. This the big one?’

  Martin never felt comfortable talking about that kind of thing. ‘You know, it’s fine.’

  Frankie nodded. He seldom asked about personal shit and he’d met Deborah only twice. ‘Nice’, was all he said to Martin after the first time he met her. After Frankie’s trouble with Joan, he and Martin had only once talked about what happened. It was a drink-sodden evening that ended with Frankie curled up on the floor of Martin’s flat, sobbing.

  ‘I could have ended up down the juvenile, and off to the happy house for stealing fucking napkin rings.’

  ‘Kind of hard to shift on the black market.’

  ‘I once tried to add it all up, what it comes to, a dozen years of stroking. It’s more than I’d get stacking shelves at Tesco, right enough. But not enough to make it worth the time you spend slopping out your potty in Mountjoy. You know what I mean?’

  Martin shrugged. ‘I make a decent enough living. We both do.’

  ‘I’m not knocking it. All I’m saying, it’s time to step up, Martin.’

  The quiz DJ was into the next round of questions, asking the name of the current US Secretary of State for Defense.

  Martin said, ‘Still planning on running this past Jo-Jo?’

  ‘It’s the wise thing to do. Once we’re OK with Jo-Jo,’ Frankie said, ‘anyone tries to take advantage, they know they’ve got him to worry about, too.’

  After the kidnap, word would get around. It usually did after a big job. Nothing solid enough to give the police a handle, but enough to point scavengers in the right direction.

  ‘And what if Jo-Jo says no?’

  ‘One thing clear. Whatever Jo-Jo says, this is going ahead, even if we have to take whatever shit he hands out afterwards. It’s not like we need permission. Talking to him, we’re just doing what’s the right thing to do.’

  Martin didn’t say anything. What he was thinking was that if Jo-Jo put a damper on the job and they went ahead, things could get very uncomfortable, very quickly.

  Deborah had two glasses of red wine ready when Martin got back to the flat. They kissed. After a while, he said he was sorry, she said something similar and they left the wine alone for a while. Later, she brought him his glass in bed. Martin could have done without the wine, after three pints of Guinness down the pub, but he reckoned it wouldn’t be terribly sensible to mention that.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said.

  ‘This thing, it’s definitely on, then?’

>   ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  Deborah looked like she was deciding not to say something, then she said it. ‘He’s a strange man, Frankie Crowe. I know you don’t—’

  ‘Please,’ Martin said.

  ‘Is he lonely or what?’

  ‘Look, Deb, in the first place, if it wasn’t for Frankie, I wouldn’t be around to fuck up your evening.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘You were there, were you, on the next landing?’

  ‘I know you, you’d have survived. You’ve got strength, Martin. You’re strong enough to have done it without Frankie.’

  She had no idea.

  Martin had once tried to explain to her about how men relate to each other in prison. The best way to protect yourself is to come across like you’re a guy that others need protection from. Back down, even on something that doesn’t matter, you mark yourself as a fall guy. They’ll be queuing up to use you as a demonstration of how tough they are.

  ‘It wasn’t so much that Bomber Harris had it in for me. It was more like, when he wanted to show people he was hot shit, the easiest way to do that was give someone a walloping, and I was the chosen one.’

  Martin closed his eyes. ‘Someone beats you down like that, you lose your nerve, they own you.’ He was quiet for a moment. Deborah watched him. Then he said, ‘Bomber Harris owned me. Frankie came along, he was Abraham Lincoln, you know what I mean?’

  Debbie said she did. Then she said, That doesn’t mean that Frankie has to own you, either.’

  He looked at her. ‘You’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘You really don’t.’

  Martin’s wine glass was empty. He fetched the rest of the bottle from the kitchen and filled his glass, leaned across Deborah and saw that her glass was still almost full.

  ‘It’s not Lent, is it?’

  Deborah picked up her glass, took a small sip and put it down again. She waited a moment and then she said, ‘That’ll have to do me for a few months.’

  Martin said, ‘Oh,’ and sat on the side of the bed. He said nothing for a while, then he said, ‘You sure?’

  She nodded.

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Just today.’

  They hugged and talked in whispers for a while and Deborah told him she’d already worked out dates. They talked about that, about the things they’d have to do. In the middle of this, Martin shook his head and softly said, ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Scary, isn’t it?’ Deborah said.

  They agreed not to tell anyone for a while. Deborah’s parents had immediately taken a liking to Martin, a polite chap with a job in software being an appropriate match for their librarian daughter. Then Martin was pulled in for questioning about a job he didn’t do. The police let him out next day, but Deborah’s mother had been there during the raid, mouth open, face pale. After that, her parents made no effort to disguise their loathing.

  Martin took a slug of wine. He put the glass down and said, ‘That’s it for me, too. For the duration.’ He leaned over and kissed her. ‘You’re a genius, that’s what you are.’

  5

  There was a plate of biscuits in the centre of the table. No chocolate ones left. Lots of pinks and yellows and a few of the round brown ones, with the sugary white cream sandwiched in the middle. Eeny, meeny, miney, mo. Justin Kennedy was chewing the third and last of the chocolate biscuits from the plate. He gestured to young Faraday, who hopped up and hurried over to the table in the corner of the room. He came back with the coffee caddy and refreshed everyone’s cup.

  Albert Gibson was still yammering on. Albert Gibson was a fool, and that was just one of the many things Justin Kennedy was grateful for.

  They were in the main conference room of the offices of Justin Kennedy & Co., on the top floor of a building round the corner from St Stephen’s Green. The building was owned by, and the offices rented from, Flynn O’Meara Tully & Co., the legal firm with which Justin Kennedy had made his name as a mergers and acquisitions expert, with a promising sideline in property. Six years earlier, Kennedy had amicably parted from Flynn O’Meara Tully, having built a reputation as a good man to have on side in any major deal. If you were assembling a site for development, buying or merging a company or taking it to the market, putting together a consortium or sourcing finance for a deal, Justin Kennedy could be relied on to save you a lot of grief.

  There’s security in being a prized performer at a place like Flynn O’Meara Tully, but no matter how much they pay you there’s always some no-talent gobshite further up the corporate food chain taking a bigger share of the proceeds and the credit.

  From independent advising and consulting, Kennedy moved to taking a percentage in the deals he handled, and increasingly to initiating his own projects. As yet, he saw himself as merely moving out of the base camp of the higher peaks of the Dublin financial landscape, but he knew precisely where he was going. The current deal was a routine but high-fee transaction that would pay the rent.

  Behind Albert Gibson, the window of the conference room ran almost the length of the room and more than half the height. It framed a panorama of the Dublin skyline, where a familiar sprouting of cranes decorated the city. From where he sat, Kennedy could see three tall buildings commemorating deals in which he had been involved, and from which he could remember the billing totals to the cent. Two of the cranes were markers for similar deals-in-the-making. Before this takeover thing was done and dusted, he’d be up to his neck in the next deal and getting another couple out of first gear.

  Kennedy had been shepherding such deals for the best part of a decade. The work involved connecting ideas people with money people and identifying obstacles before they became problems. Once the numbers were credibly established, every deal had its own logic. It was all about recognising the pattern the negotiations would take and staying ahead of the curve, preparing responses before the opposition thought of the questions. Kennedy had figured out the pattern of this one weeks ago.

  An Irish company, Kwarehawk Investments, was merging with an American corporation. Like lots of such developments since the economic boom peaked, Kwarehawk was merging in the sense that a fat little fish merges with the gaping jaws of a shark. Over the previous ten years, successful Irish businesses, having prospered for a while, queued up to be sold off to large foreign outfits, mostly British and American. Whatever the business – newspapers, PR firms, hotels, radio and TV stations, phone companies, pharmacy chains, electronics stores – as soon as it established a feasible profile it was rushed to the global market place. The founders of successful Irish companies tended to take the money and run. Maybe it was what Justin Kennedy thought of as the chicken factor – an absence of long-term confidence – or maybe just an impatience to get hold of the loot. Whatever, smoothing the way for such deals had become a significant part of Kennedy’s business.

  Justin Kennedy’s firm had been hired to guide the Yanks through the intricacies of Irish company law. Two American lawyers had come over to earn big money for being told what to say. Gibson had brought along three sidekicks to pad out his firm’s fees. Kennedy had young Faraday for the same reason, but mostly to pour the coffee. Helen Snoddy, a freelance consultant on contract to Flynn O’Meara Tully, was sitting to Kennedy’s left. Tall, thin, brunette, primarily Prada, with a touch of Vuitton, just twenty-seven, smarter than anyone in the room and aware of it, she supplied specialist advice on tax matters. Sometimes an aspect of a deal had to go through three or four shelf companies and a couple of offshore jurisdictions before the tax liability was small enough to please the players. And Helen always knew the shortest route between any given deal and the nearest tax sanctuary.

  Kennedy adjusted his face to display mild interest in Gibson’s meandering, and let some coffee wash down the last crumbs of the chocolate biscuit. Gibson was chubby and bald, the kind of bald where the remaining tufts of hair are fluffed up and teased and treated with the care given to rare plants. It had taken him two weeks to prepare his fi
gures, based on two months of negotiations. Another week to get his PowerPoint presentation to his liking – although the figures could have been printed off on one side of A4.

  One of the Americans asked a question about the timescale of an assortment of software licences. Justin Kennedy nodded his approval. Inwardly, he groaned. The short answer was that the software licences were irrelevant, applying to material already obsolete. But Gibson would never give a short answer. Helen Snoddy glanced at her watch. Kennedy could see that the top of the page open on her legal pad was decorated with doodles, prominent among which was a quite impressive caricature of Gibson, with a clown’s nose.

  Kennedy took another mouthful of coffee and tried to stop his gaze drifting back towards the biscuits. He decided to exercise restraint. Another twenty minutes of this and his secretary would intervene to announce that lunch was ready to be served.

  At two thirty on the dot, the kids of St Ciaran’s National School spilled out the doorway, draining the last of their drinks from their beakers, dragging jackets along the ground behind them. The boys used lurching shoulders and swinging schoolbags to continue the little skirmishes left over from lunchtime in the schoolyard. The girls mostly came in bunches, clustering, chattering.

  Little more than a week back at school, Sinead was already settled down and loving it. Over the summer, the school’s old prefab classrooms had been demolished and a row of new prefabs had been built. Frankie Crowe wasn’t happy that his daughter was being educated in a shanty schoolroom, but he had to admit that the prefabs were at least clean and warm. The main school buildings were more solid, but shabby. Despite the voluntary donations and the kids’ sponsored walks, there wasn’t money for plaster on the breeze-block walls, and some of the classrooms had no ceilings, just steel girders beneath a corrugated roof.

  Sinead came running. These days, whenever he came for her, at school or at the house, she ran to him. Another year or two, a welcoming hug for her dad would be out of the question when her friends were around. She handed him her schoolbag and ran to catch up with Carla and Patsy, her best friends at school. Frankie walked behind, the schoolbag over one shoulder. Only when they got to the main road and the other two turned right, did she wave them goodbye and drop back to walk alongside Frankie.