“The Irish?” As much as I only wanted the briefest of conversation with Dan, I settled back in my chair to listen.
“The Real IRA,” he replied.
“Fuck,”
“Why do you think your sister is in Ireland? She supports them too, it’s how she got to leave. She was given money in return for her assistance.”
“Well, I’d like to say it’s been fun chatting but… Just get me that information as quick as you can.”
I finished the call and as I did a memory surfaced. I picked up the letter from Aileen.
‘Dad died, we don’t know how, he was found dead in a ditch….’
I wracked my brain for the right words. Carrig had told me he would kill my father, his body would be found in a ditch one day. Had he done that? I looked at the piece of paper on my desk. Carrig’s cell number stared straight back at me.
It was a couple of hours later that I received a text. I wasn’t surprised to receive the text, I doubted Dan was in a hurry for a second conversation, neither was I. Padriac had indeed made the trip to DC; he had been picked up by the cops for being drunk. How Dan would know that interested me, I made a note to do a little investigating. If Dan could get that kind of information he could prove to be useful in the future. I deliberated, we had contacts in the local police but I wanted no association with Padriac, nothing to connect me with him - what I had in mind for my dear brother meant I had to stay as far away from anyone connecting us as possible.
****
Robert and I drove home, it was clear that he thought something was up, I was quiet but he didn’t press for information. Being pushed to reveal what was on his mind was something he hated so he never did the same to others. He knew I would tell him when I was ready. Instead of heading into the house with him, I made my way to my apartment. I needed just a little time alone to decide what I was going to do. I would tell Robert, I had to. It was possible he would get caught up in my past. I took Padriac’s note from my pocket and read it again.
Guess who, brother? I see you’ve done well for yourself and it’s only fair you take care of your family. You fucked off and left us to deal with the shit that was our dad. I bet you don’t care but he beat the shit out of mum and then Aileen. Broke mum’s heart you did. He wouldn’t let her come find you and we all paid the price. So, it’s only fair you pay now. I know where you are, who you are. Think you’re some big shot, huh? Well, brother time to face the past. I’ll be in touch.
Padriac
I chuckled a little at the thought that Padriac had been left to deal with the shit. Aileen had said in her letter that he had disappeared shortly after so I knew Pad hadn’t dealt with anything. His threat didn’t bother me as such, I certainly wasn’t afraid of him. What bothered me was the statement that he knew who I was. If that was true then he knew of Robert as well. I made my way over to the house; it was time to talk to Robert.
I found him sitting on the sofa with a glass of wine in his hand. I grabbed a beer before I joined him.
“You okay?” he asked. I guessed he had seen the look of concern on my face.
“Rob, I have a problem, a big problem,” I said.
“What’s wrong?”
I reached inside my jacket pocket, pulled out the note and handed it to him. As he read I slumped forwards a little, resting my chin on my hands, my elbows on my knees.
“Trav, when and how did you get this?” he asked once he had finished reading.
“It was on the car windscreen, at the office.”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“I wanted to check it was legit first.”
“We need to know what he knows. It might be that we do nothing until he gets in touch again but you need to tell me about your family, so we can prepare. We need the guys in on this as well.”
I then told him about the conversation with both Aileen and Dan, including the information that my brother was involved with the Real IRA.
That was the part I had dreaded. In all our years together I knew far more about his past than he knew about mine. He knew there was more to the story of why I ran away from home, I was sure. But now it was time to tell him the truth. While I grabbed another beer, he called Mack.
I’d already told him about my dad being a drunk, of Padriac and Carrig and the beatings they dished out on a regular basis and how I had stabbed Pad. So I told him about my mom, the many times she had just watched and not intervened and how I felt nothing for her. There was a pause; I guessed Robert thought I had finished my story.
“Okay, let me scan this so we have a copy,” he said as he made his way to the home office.
When he returned, I continued. “Rob, there’s something else. Padriac didn’t just beat Aileen and me.”
He looked at me and waited for me to continue. I swallowed hard.
“Do you remember when we paid your Father Peter’s a visit? I wanted to deal with Cara’s dad for a reason. I never got to pay Padriac back for what he did to Aileen and me.”
I hadn’t looked at Robert while I spoke, I didn’t want to see shock or disgust on his face. My brother had abused both Aileen and I, her far more I imagined. I felt no shame for myself; neither did I feel embarrassed as such. I had a lot of anger inside but what I didn’t want was pity. I never wanted to see pity in his eyes. If I saw that he felt sorry for me, I think that would have finished me.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t want it to go any further than us. Maybe, one day, I’ll talk about it but not now.”
Robert rose to grab some more beers, as he did a pair of headlights swept across the room. Mack had arrived. The front door opened and closed and he joined us on the sofa. Robert went through what had happened and showed him the note.
“Trav, do you want to tell us about him?” Mack asked.
“Padriac is the oldest, ten years older than me I think. After him came Aileen, then Carrig. They were all born in Belfast; I was born in New York. My dad was a drunk, beat us kids and mom. The older boys take after their father. Padriac was the worst. Me, mom and Aileen took the brunt of his beatings,” I said.
“We need to find out who knows you are here,” Mack said.
“Aileen's old boyfriend, Dan, brought me here when I was a kid. I contacted him. He found out Pad was in town.”
The conversation went back and forth for a while as we decided on a strategy. Mack left to check the CCTV cameras for the parking lot and I could have kicked myself for not doing that when I had the office to myself.
“Trav, you know this will get sorted and how, don’t you?” Robert asked after he had shown Mack to the door.
“I don’t have any feelings towards him, Rob. If I catch up with him myself, he’ll wish he never started this for sure. I’m just worried about dragging you into all of this.”
I finished off my beer and left to walk back to my apartment. I felt exhausted.
Chapter Thirteen
“Hey, bro. You okay?” Robert said as he crossed the drive the following morning.
I’d left the Range Rover idling, waiting to make our way into the office.
“Ready to take on the world,” I replied.
I’d slept fitfully the previous night. Thoughts of Aileen, Padriac, her letter and his note had whirled around my brain. I had needed to speak to her but I began to wonder if I would actually call her back. She knew where I worked, she could contact me if she wanted to, and I thought I might leave it to see if she did - to see if she was serious enough with her apology to make the effort.
Because of the early hour, the foyer was empty save for Stan, who rose from his security desk to greet us. I often wondered if he ever left the building. We travelled up the eleven floors and were met by Mack, Richard, Paul and Jonathan. They were already waiting with coffees in Robert’s office.
“Thank you for coming in early, we have a problem that I want to discuss with you,” Robert said as we sat.
He explained ab
out the blackmail note and Mack passed around a copy. Robert asked Mack if anything was found on the CCTV and Mack handed out a grainy photograph of a man, overweight and in a dark jacket. He wore a baseball cap pulled low to shield his face. Mack explained that the CCTV clip showed the man walk to the car, place the note under the wiper and walk away again.
“There are some things I should tell you, a bit of family history. But first you should know, I have no idea if this is true or not. My parents fled Northern Ireland in the mid seventies with three kids. My mom was heavily pregnant with me at the time. They were taken in by a family and for a couple of years they moved around. I was told my dad was a butcher and the reason they fled was because the security forces were after him. He’d had something to do with the Shankill Butchers, part of the Ulster Volunteer Force, and responsible for some horrific deaths. Death by a butcher’s knife,” I said.
“Fuck,” Paul said. His wife, Rosa, was Irish and he understood what that meant.
“Exactly,” I replied.
Paul had met Rosa on a trip to Southern Ireland; her family were connected with the IRA in some way. Joe wanted no part in dealing with the Irish and no matter what the deal was, he wouldn’t touch it.
“I found all this out over a period of time, when I was a kid, but I wouldn’t have been old enough to really understand what it meant,” I said. “Anyway, whether it’s fact or fiction, Padriac loves to tell a story when he’s drunk and he might be running out of an audience for ‘my dad’s a Shankill Butcher’. I might be his next source of bar talk.”
I left out any reference to Carrig; what to do about him was something I wanted to ponder on some more.
“Mack, get hold of Tony, let’s get to Padriac before he sobers up and decides on his next move,” Robert said.
Tony was an investigator with special skills, shall we say. He was someone we used when we needed to track an individual that perhaps had information we wanted. He was a strange man. To look at him you would think he was a kindly old grandfather, always smiling and happy, but his skills were not something even a hardened criminal wanted to see.
The guys stood and left. They made their way back to their respective floors to start their day. Mack left to contact Tony and I sat with Robert, finishing off our coffee.
“Didn’t get very far, did we?” I said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“We think we’ve shed our old lifestyle but it’s always there, in the background.”
****
It was about midday when Mack called. Tony had already located Padriac. Seemed he did have a big mouth after all. He had been in a bar the previous night just around the block and had been thrown out after he started singing Irish rebel songs.
It was also midday that my ‘issue’ with Shelly was resolved. She had gone out of my mind for a few hours, although I had received a text from her the previous evening, a text that I had ignored. After I returned from making coffee I found a brown envelope on my desk. There was no writing on the front and I took a cautious look inside. I pulled out two large photographs of her sitting in a bar, her hand resting on a guy’s thigh. She wore the same clothes she had on when she visited Robert. I guessed what had happened; Robert or Mack had given me a way out. I played the game.
Storming into Robert’s office I threw the photographs down on his desk. “Fucking bitch,” I said.
He looked at the photographs before speaking. “Shit, bro. I’m sorry. What are you going to do?”
“Finish it, obviously.” I collected the photos and as I walked towards the door and back to my own office, I deposited them in the bin.
About ten minutes later, I received a text from Robert, wanting to know if I wanted to box a few rounds. I was up for that. We met in the gym, and no matter what time of day it was the ‘Oh my God, he’s in the gym’ message had spread around the office. Fully made up women without a bead of sweat on their brows were working out, and by working out, I meant checking us out. Eyes followed as we made our way to the treadmills and ran side by side.
“You’re getting a bit loose there, bro,” I said as I tried to outrun him.
“Loose?” Robert replied.
“Yeah, not as ripped as me anymore. Too much dining out, my friend,” I said with a chuckle.
No matter how hard I worked out, no matter how much weight I lifted, I would never have the muscles Robert did. He was the proverbial brick shithouse, but it was fun to tease him every now and again. After our run we climbed under the ropes of the ring. We sparred for a half hour or so and I tried desperately not to show my chest heaving from the exertion. Every now and again Robert would smirk, he knew I was getting out of breath and he pushed me a little harder, upped the pace a bit.
Workout over, we showered and changed back into our suits. We took the elevator back to the eleventh floor. I was glad, my legs were still sore from all the boxing. Mack came out of his office once he saw us in reception.
“Meet your brother,” he said as he crossed the room.
In his hand he held a photograph of an older man, unshaven and looking like the drunken bum I was expecting.
“You sure it’s him?” Robert asked.
I stared at it for a while. “You know what? That could be my fucking father standing there. I’m looking forward to meeting him again.”
****
I was sitting in my apartment after a dinner Evelyn had prepared, nursing a beer and watching some trash on the TV - a celebrity and I use the word loosely - reality show. There were times when I totally got Robert’s aversion to TV, but sometimes I just wanted noise in the room. I was comfortable living on my own, it had taken time but I didn’t like silence. I loved to annoy Robert at times with either whistling or some inane chatter in the car.
My phone vibrated on the coffee table I was resting my feet on, and picking it up I saw a call from Robert.
“Think we are on for tonight, bro. You up for this?” he said.
“For sure, I’ll be outside in five,” I replied.
Of course I was up for it. That night I would meet my brother for the first time in over twenty years, and I was looking forward to it. I knew Mack had told Tony to ply Padriac with drink, get him to talk, and that way we’d know for sure what he knew, or thought he knew. I dressed in black jeans with a dark T-shirt, and pulled a black hoodie over my head. As I entered the garage I took a licence plate from a drawer and exchanged it for the real one on the Range Rover. If checked, the plate belonged to a Mr. Hardy in San Francisco. Mr. Hardy did indeed own a Range Rover, of the same year and the same colour.
I heard the crunch of gravel as Robert, dressed similarly, crossed the drive. “Ready?” he said.
“Always,” I replied.
Before heading off, Robert checked the glove compartment to make sure we had what we needed and on his nod, we left.
“Where to?” I asked.
“14th Street Bridge,” he said with a smirk.
“Very appropriate.”
Robert and I had met under the 14th Street Bridge, it was a place the drunks slept, a place most ending up falling in the Potomac and drowning - yes, a very appropriate place. I whistled softly to myself as I drove. During the journey Robert brought me up to speed. Tony had been plying Padriac with beer and once he got the point of being kicked out of the bar, Tony offered to walk him home. That walk would detour beneath one of the busiest bridges in the city.
We pulled across a grassed area and stopped the car. With the lights off, the Range Rover was difficult to see from either the road or the traffic making its way over the bridge. We walked down the bank and towards the pier. I could make out two figures, one standing and one lying on the concrete.
“Robert, Travis, charming brother you have here,” Tony said as we approached.
“What did you get from him?” Robert asked.
“Well, he knows who both of you are and that you have money, Trav. He boasted that his brother owned a big company and that he got his money from c
rime. He didn’t go into details and when I pushed, he just tapped the side of his nose. He certainly knows something, or rather, he thinks he knows something. I didn’t have enough time to get it out of him before he got kicked out. I’m more than happy to take him to my ‘operating room’ for further investigation if you like,” Tony said.
He had a gleam in his eye that reminded me that the guy was a total psychopath.
“Did anyone hear him talk?” I asked.
“No, the bar was empty and to be honest, the staff kept away from him. Until he grabbed the barmaid’s ass of course. Then they hauled him out.”
“Okay, thanks, Tony. I’ll be in touch,” Robert said.
That was Tony’s cue to leave, and as he left I walked over to the slob of a body lying under the bridge. Every now and again I’d hear him groan. I looked down at his face; there was no family resemblance at all. The guy lying there was grossly overweight and stunk of piss; the front of his pants was stained.
Robert handed me the gloves he had found in the glove compartment and we put them on before rifling through his pockets. There wasn’t much, just a scrap of paper and some coins, which I put in a plastic zip-lock bag. We rolled him over to check his back pockets; we didn’t want anything left on the body that could easily identify him. Finding nothing, we rolled him towards the river. I would have liked to have sobered him up, beat the fuck out of him and see the fear in his eyes, but this would look more like an accident, another drunken bum that had fallen into the river.
The sound of the traffic drowned out the noise of him hitting the water and we stood and watched as he floated away, the current quickly taking him from the bank. The cold water must have revived him, though. His head came up and he sputtered. His arms flailed as he tried to fight the current and get back to the shore. But there was one moment when his eyes locked on mine, he recognised me, and he knew exactly what had happened to him. My only hope was that he saw my smile as he was pulled under the dark cold water of the river.
We walked back to the car and I reversed onto the side of the road, waiting for the traffic to clear. We drove back to town.
Travis: To accompany the Fallen Angel Series - A Mafia Romance Page 21