A Carra King

by John Brady

  “Get back!” he grunted and he shoved the girl.

  He caught a glimpse of a sticker by the bottom corner of the windscreen. Squiggly writing, dots, a piece of a moon. Oh Jases, he muttered. Where did they put their CD signs now, those diplomatic plates? Well it was their own bloody fault. He turned and grasped the big fella’s collar. The doors to the terminal slid open. Fogarty and Jimmy Doyle and the new fella what’s his name were coming out full tilt now. About bloody time —

  The big fella turned. The loose look on his face had turned to something narrow and Brennan knew he’d have to get a hold of him rapid, pull him off balance. Behind the lug though, a window on the van slid down to reveal two startled brown eyes staring at Brennan. Masks, he wondered, but no, some of those things the women wore because . . . APF Brennan opened his mouth to say something and then fell backward as something connected with his cheekbone.

  Chief Inspector James Kilmartin was on a roll now, and he knew it. He slid off his stool and hitched up his trousers. Minogue knew the routine: the cute countryman, nobody’s fool — so look out. He looked at the faces in the huddle around “The Killer” Kilmartin here in the bar of the Garda Club. One of the Guards, a red-faced Sergeant, kept shaking his head and rubbing his eyes. Every now and then he’d repeat things Kilmartin had said and he’d chortle softly. Kilmartin levelled a finger and swept it around slowly by each of the Guards.

  “So it’s getting dark now,” he said. “This poor Yankee tourist, he’s getting kind of worried, isn’t he?”

  Over at the far end of the bar Sergeant Seamus Hoey was rolling depleted ice cubes around the bottom of his glass. Minogue counted back: it was seven months since Hoey had transferred out of the Squad. He now worked in Crime Prevention. Kilmartin still thought this was hilarious, annoying, stupid. A Guard didn’t just opt to leave the Squad, especially to join a joke shop like Crime Prevention. On top of that he’d become a teetotaller of nearly one year’s standing. Kilmartin had stopped slagging him about that after Minogue had asked him whether he’d still be making the jokes if Shea had succeeded in his suicide attempt. Detective Garda Tommy Malone, who had taken up Hoey’s position in the Murder Squad, was staring at the goings-on in Hoey’s glass. He seemed to be mesmerized. Malone was simply knackered, Minogue decided, same as himself. The few pints had slammed the door on the adrenalin that had kept them going these last few days.

  Kilmartin’s voice grew louder.

  “I mean here he is, out in the back of beyond, down amongst the buffs of County Clare . . .”

  Kilmartin looked across at his friend and colleague, Minogue, and his wink gave way to a leer. Minogue raised an eyebrow to register the slur against his native county. This seemed to enliven Kilmartin.

  “So anyway,” he went on voice, “here’s this fecking tourist, this poor iijit of a Yank, beginning to wonder if he’d been given proper directions at all. Researching his ancestors, walking in ditches and staring at ould cowsheds — you know the routine! What happens but doesn’t he fall over this courting couple in behind a ditch . . .”

  The red-faced Sergeant began to chortle. Kilmartin paused and leaned back, let his tongue trace his bottom lip.

  “Now you know what they’re up to, ” he said.

  The Sergeant laughed outright. Malone drifted over to Minogue and laid his glass on the counter.

  “Another pint, boss? My twist . . .”

  Minogue shrugged. Hoey had followed Malone over now.

  “Is this the Family Member one?” Hoey asked. “Or the Old Log Inn?”

  “Family Member,” said Malone. “But we won’t know for a while yet.”

  Minogue looked at his watch. Half-six. Kilmartin had insisted on taking them all to the Garda Club. Sure didn’t they have plenty to celebrate, Goddamn it, was the Chief Inspector’s tack: (a) Tynan fighting off the decentralizing shite from the Department of Justice for another year. Who’d have thought he’d be coming to our rescue at all? Then (b), finally getting the Chief Supers with their whining about dispersing the Squad buried for another year too? Tynan again, strangely enough, and this time telling those yobs just how bad crime had gotten here in Dublin with the frigging jackals and hyenas and wolves doing their own take on the Celtic Tiger rigamarole? Not to speak of (c) Hoey’s promotion, the speed of it and all . . .? And not to mention (d) that bastard Harte finally coughing up for the Dunshaughlin shooting?

  Laughter erupted from around Kilmartin. Minogue had missed the punch line again. Now Kilmartin was heading their way. Minogue tracked the Chief Inspector’s approach, the slow rolling gait, the faked punch to the stomach of the laughing sergeant, the clumsy headlock and guffaws. High spirits entirely, and why not: Kilmartin was away on three weeks’ leave as of this evening. He could nurse his sore head on the plane to Boston tomorrow. As of one hour ago, in fact, Minogue had become acting head of the Murder Squad.

  Kilmartin drew up opposite Malone.

  “Well now, Molly,” he said. “Anudder one, den? My twist and all, now.”

  “No,” said Malone. “Thanks.” Kilmartin turned to Hoey.

  “Coke, Sergeant?” Shea Hoey seemed to consider it. Kilmartin eyed him.

  “I don’t want you drinking your way into Bolivia now, but . . .” he added.

  The barman pointed the remote at the TV across the room. An ad for a hamburger chain came on. Minogue wished he’d eaten before the three pints. He thought about sausages in Bewleys. What day was it today anyway? Thursday he was to meet his daughter Iseult for lunch. The baby was due in three months. Trimester, that was the word: her last trimester.

  The spinning globe and floating letters slowed and jumped off the screen. Small pictures then turned into movies as they sprang to the front. A military vehicle unloaded food next to a dusty track. Sudan? Or was that last year? Next was a dusty plain. The camera moved from a close-up of bleached bones to a shimmering horizon. Next came a scene of a riverbank protest. Had to be Ireland. Yes, slurry had killed thousands of fish in Cork.

  “Oh I know when my money’s no good,” said Kilmartin and moved off to the Guards at the far end of the bar.

  Too lazy to get up, Minogue watched Hoey begin to flip a beer mat. As well as studying for his Sergeant’s exam, Hoey had taken to conjuring tricks. To cod his new missus, was Kilmartin’s theory. Not so. Áine Finnucane, not Áine Hoey, had brought Hoey to the inner-city school where she taught remedial. A lot of hard cases, Hoey had reported: broken homes, some already into drugs, families in and out of jail. So Hoey had prepped himself with sleight-of-hand tricks to get the kids’ interest. He’d ended up more or less hypnotizing them, Hoey reported, but wasn’t sure if he’d gotten through to them about anything else. That didn’t seem to matter to Hoey. He kept returning on a regular basis to “put on shows” at other inner-city schools also. Áine, a woman Minogue liked a great deal indeed because of how she laughed as much as what she had done teaching and building in Africa, had told Minogue that a lot of the kids in her school now called Hoey the Magic Cop.

  Malone dropped some coins on the counter.

  “All right,” he said to Hoey. “Show us the married man trick. You know, where you make the money disappear?”

  Airport Police and Fire Officer Derek Mitchell, twenty, and six weeks into his new job, checked his walkie-talkie and headed out toward Dublin Airport’s long-term car park. The breezes that had played around him by the doors to the freight depot were gusts out here.

  He waved at the Guards sitting in the squad car by the ramp. One of them managed a nod. Don’t strain yourself, Mitchell murmured. The news that the Guards were going to make a new Garda station at the airport was only a rumour anyway. This squad car sitting by the ramp up to the terminal was for show now. That mob of fans had been turfed out and four of them had been arrested. Even Fogarty hadn’t seen anything like it. It was the van with the tinted windows showing up that’d torn the arse out of the situation. No wonder those Saudi Arabians would be thinking we were all bloody barbarians. Well
, they should talk: the women in masks, veils or whatever, hiding their faces. And for what? Like furniture covered up. Chattels, that was the word.

  It had taken three Guards to get the big lug into the squad car. The one who had clocked Brennan. He was sixteen, it turned out. Derek Mitchell sort of felt sorry for Brennan. Brennan, who should have known better, was going home with a thick lip. He might even be concussed someone said — but that was maybe Brennan already taking a dive with compo in mind. Using his head better now after getting clattered than before Brennan, yeah, aiming for an easy way out. It was Brennan had told him the Guards were going to set up a station at the airport, that the APFs would be in the ha’penny place then.

  The wind was rising. He zipped his jacket up higher. It took major work to push the button through the frigging buttonhole on his collar. His thumb hurt like hell from pushing the edge of the button. Bollocks: it was too tight now.

  He rubbed his thumb hard against his forefinger and watched a plane make its approach over the Irish Sea. It just hung there. Stats: at any given moment a million people were flying up there. That was day and night too. Where’d he read that? He rolled the volume dial of his walkie-talkie over and back. Now, think about it: was he the only person in the world, the civilized world like, to think about how mad air travel was? All they were basically were metal tubes, for God’s sake, tons of weight, full of people getting fired through the air at five hundred miles an hour. Madness really. People reading the papers, having their dinners, watching films, sitting on toilets, sleeping — all five miles up there.

  He turned and looked around the sky. There were dirty grey, rolling rain clouds to the west. It was getting colder. He eyed the canopy over by the fire depot. It’d be a quarter after seven before he’d log into the last checkpoint next to the decks for the drop-offs. They should give him a car or something, like the dog-patrols on the perimeter rounds had. A bike even! Ah it was exercise, wasn’t it.

  The windscreens were covered with clouds. It made Mitchell dreamy. The long-term car park always looked full. That was because people parked as close as they could to the walkway. A lot of the cars had the flashing lights that told you the alarm was set. What a bloody pain the alarms were out here! If people decided to ignore the notices about the alarms, then they actually deserved to get their cars robbed. Well not ignored exactly, but the Guards didn’t care much to be told about alarms going off. A good gust of wind could do some of them. A lot of them didn’t have automatic resets either. There was a surge of engines from the far side of the hangars.

  A car started up a few rows over. He walked on. He knew he’d given up checking every car. He walked slower, tried to get a system going where he’d be covering all the cars in both directions, row by row. There might be video in here now, no matter what Fogarty had told them about it taking another few months at least. There could be cameras just for keeping an eye on patrols. But he didn’t have to be the FBI for God’s sake, did he. Just cover himself, that’s —

  He was quick but still late. He let his hand settle on his hair instead and watched the damned hat tossed and rolling down the roadway between the rows. It bounced as the brim rolled under. Then it lodged against a wheel and fell over like a really bad actor in a really bad cowboy film from a million years ago. He stared at the hat. There were specks of rain on the windscreen of the Golf next to him now. He picked up the hat, jammed it on his head, held it there.

  He walked faster now. There was a blue Escort with an English number plate. He stopped, he turned away from the wind and he jammed his stupid hat between his knees. He peeled back the pages in his logbook until he got to the notes he had scribbled down from the Patrol Board. It was a blue Escort, Dublin registration, they were looking for. Someone had scribbled VIP and TV on the sheet too. He wondered if the other patrol APFs bothered with the Board at all. Robbed cars was the Guards’ job anyway. As in, those two layabouts sitting in their squad car back at the ramp. Someone had told him the Guards didn’t try anymore because there were so many being stolen, in Dublin at least. Brennan had wised him up to the fact that it was only for insurance that the Guards had to post the bulletins to them. Well he’d better keep a note of it, just in case. Show he was on the ball at least. The pages flapped and clung to the pencil. He wrote blind anyway.

  His eyes watered from the gusts now. He looked back down the rows he’d done. A right iijit he must look, his hat jammed between his knees, the pages still flapping and cracking in his other hand. No wonder the probationer APFs got the long-term patrols for months. He managed to close his notebook with one hand and slip it into his pocket. It was going to lash rain any minute: de-fin-itely. He looked across the rows of car roofs. They were all the one colour from this angle. A blue Escort? There were probably dozens of them here. He bit his lip. A raindrop smacked his hat brim. Part of him had decided not to go back down those rows again anyway.

  TWO

  Minogue rubbed his eyes. The bar at the Garda Club was filling up. He’d seen Liam Nugent wave from the door, swing his imaginary hurley stick. Minogue had to wave his fist at him, of course. Nugent, a Wexford man recently promoted to CI and doing well in Fraud, shrank in mock terror. County Clare’s chances of getting to the quarter-finals in this year’s All-Ireland had come to depend on Wexford getting beaten by Kilkenny — again. Minogue’s eyes drifted back to the television.

  The weather woman clicked a wand thing she kept in her hand. He rubbed his eyes again. When he opened them he could see Ireland’s weather in relation to weather systems across Europe. They were having a tough time of it with rain and sleet in Northern Italy. Apparently the Austrians were getting some lightning bolts. Weather woman clicked again and satellite pictures slid by. A cold front was on the way from Central Europe.

  Minogue thought again about staying. Kilmartin had made his mind up, settling in with a mountain of sandwiches in front of him. He’d turned serious now too, laying into The System. Minogue didn’t want to hear it again but he caught the odd phrase: What exactly were Guards supposed to do in these situations, Kilmartin wanted to know — duck?! Wear suits of armour? Put their hands in their pockets, and look the other way? Or whistle a shagging jig, maybe? What chance did we have when push came to shove? Et cetera.

  The policemen huddled around Kilmartin examined their drinks, cast longer glances at the television. Kilmartin wasn’t going to give up. Where was the incentive to follow through if the system was stacked, he demanded? Had to hold our ground, didn’t we? Oh, by Christ wasn’t the public being codded! Face facts: crime in Dublin was out of hand. Larry Smith had been only one in a whole mob of gangsters. And the young offenders — oh don’t get him started on that one! A mess entirely. As if one of ’em stabbed you and robbed you it wouldn’t hurt as much or something! You could buy a gun in a pub in Clondalkin for seven hundred quid. Ah, what was the point of talking . . .!

  Hoey was heading off now. Malahide was a long enough commute. Minogue asked him how the new house was working out.

  “I’m trying to get a lawn going,” Hoey said.

  “What’s a lawn?” Malone asked.

  “They have them down the country,” said Hoey. “Green things.”

  Kilmartin had started into the joke about the taxi driver and the prostitute. Minogue swivelled the stool about and looked around the room. He spotted a woman in conversation with a Superintendent in civvies. Lawlor, that’s who he was. Lahlah. It was “Bridges” Lawlor a few years ago. Minogue had seen him on television a lot this last while. People’s feelings toward the Guards was his thing, he half-remembered. The community policing thing, building bridges. That was it, building bridges in the poorer areas of Dublin so that the gangsters would be rooted out by their own communities.

  The woman looked familiar. The big glasses on her put Minogue in mind of a frog. He tried to place her, believed he was coming close, but soon gave up trying. Lawlor seemed to be explaining something complicated to her. She didn’t often return his smiles. She nodded ev
ery now and then, but her eyes went often to the ruck around Kilmartin.

  The weather woman and her maps disappeared in a flurry of stars. She was replaced by sliding words and the twirling logo of Radio Telifís Éireann. The gloss on that, Minogue thought, we’re international now, we have everything. And why not. Taxpayers, a lot of them probably German taxpayers still, would be paying for Kilmartin’s junket to the States. He’d be visiting Quantico of all places, to get the low-down on how the FBI profiled their serial bad guys. He wondered what they’d have made of the likes of Dublinman and all-around thug, drug dealer, vandal, robber and scut Larry Smith.

  Kilmartin was well into his joke now. The taxi driver had been informed by his passenger that she had no money for the fare. A face appeared on the screen, a telephone number below it. Kilmartin’s voice was louder but Minogue still caught most of the words from the announcer. Touring the west of Ireland in a rented blue Ford Escort.

  “No sign of your man yet,” Malone said.

  The snapshot looked like the regulation crop of a group scene. A wedding maybe. The large, even teeth, the tan, they could only mean American. Minogue wondered what exactly it was that made the face so easily typed. The beefy neck? Some stock expression of ease and entitlement. Well after all, he’d grown up and belonged to people who owned the planet more or less. Cheap petrol, big cars. Hamburgers, planes that went to space and back. Big smiles, genuine a lot of them, guns in every house. Prosperity. And Daithi Minogue, whose letters came less frequently now, and who hadn’t been back for a visit lived there. The pang sliced hard across Minogue’s chest and he felt suddenly almost desperate.

  “That Yank, the tourist,” Malone repeated. “What’s his name again?”

  “Shaw-nessy,” Minogue said.