Of course, I’m lucky that I set my reputation in stone at a young age, showing my mettle with a particularly audacious mob killing. It brought me fame in the kind of circles that really matter as far as my trade is concerned, adulation and notoriety in roughly equal measure. All grist to the mill. Now I have been doing this for close to thirty years, and in that time I have found myself in all kinds of situations. Pretty early on though, I reached a stage where I had become financially secure, and so I could afford to be selective in the work that I chose to undertake. There are always two things to look out for: a job that will further strengthen my reputation, and the kind of fee that just can’t be turned down. There are certain moral dilemmas too, of course, but I deal with that in the same way somebody who works in a factory that pollutes the environment does; I tell myself that I am merely a tool, that I am simply carrying out the formalities of a decision which has already been made. I have a certain skill, a rare ability, and I am only using the gifts which have been given to me. Nobody knows me, and that helps too. I work under a pseudonym. The people who hire me are aware of this, and they humour me as an eccentric. Maybe they’re right. I love what I do, I am good at it, and I don’t expect it is something of which I will ever tire. Such a tremor of excitement as I set the stage and watch all the pieces of my plan fall together as one matter of fact, and then the thrill as I make the kill. It is a hunt, and I am the predator. The perfect predator too because, more often than not, my prey is utterly ignorant of my presence. They lie there, drawing that final breath, and their staring eyes flush with the last glimmer of shock and incomprehension. The level of passion I find in the act, that great surge of adrenaline, will be difficult to give up, and yet I know that I will, and soon. Mid-forties is not old, not yet, but it is getting there. Any of these days now one of my senses may begin to fail, or my attention to detail may slip a notch.
Until now I have resisted all urge towards comfort, feeling that a barren life will help to keep me sharp. But more and more there are dreams. A glimpse of some distant land across a television screen and the yearning to see that place for real. Or the idea of making the hotel rendezvous a thing more permanent than its current heartbeat existence. There is a rare but surprising sort of comfort in such longings. My nest egg is safe, and sizeable enough to offer a pleasant retirement. There are times now when I go to work and the details, the minor and mostly unimportant things which I have for so long taken for granted, seem suddenly more like obstacles. I overcome them, but with an effort that previously I never needed to spend. It can be wearing. Not that I don’t love it still – the excitement is never lessened, killing people is a drug that never lets you down – but I recognise the symptoms of unrest as the first steps toward making a mistake, toward a job going bad. I love what I do, but I don’t want to be the fighter who steps into the ring that one fatal time too many. A year, I reckon, maybe two. No more than two, certainly. I will take my time with what I do take on, and I will only take the work that absolutely cannot be refused. Generally, if a client comes to me, he can well afford my asking price. I will give it that long, two years, just like I said, and then I’ll find a nice place and settle down. Maybe even marry.
I’ve seen part of that fantasy. A home, up in Maine, a fishing village that fills up nicely in the summer months but empties out even better come the Fall. Right on the coast, but with a stretch of woodland to the back of town. I’ve been there – for pleasure, not work – just got the urge once to wander and somehow ended up there.
It was coming into winter and they were waiting on the snow that the cold had to bring. I stayed at a small guest-house on the edge of town and they were glad to have me, glad of my money. The woman who ran the place was nice, not pushy but making clear her situation just the same. Widowed, ten years now, her husband had gone down with his boat while out pulling for herring. That is the way of it in those parts. She was about of an age with me, nice to look at and with a lovely smile, a mile from the movie star models that carry waiflike on the breeze around the trendy parts of New York. I don’t go much for waiflike. I had planned to stay a couple of days, but then I got to waiting for the snow, just like everyone else, and ended up there for the best part of a fortnight. Maggie, her name was, though I got the sense that it was usually Mrs Wainwright. Anyway, a few days in, she coaxed her father into taking me out for a spot of hunting, and after a few hours in the cold some barriers came down and I found that old man to be a great companion. He hardly spoke a word to me the whole time we were out but still managed to teach me the correct way to flush quail and to take them as they lit from their nests. After our first hunt we stopped by a bar on the way back to the guest-house, intent on putting away a few shots of rye. I was paying; the old man nodded and said what a natural way I had with a rifle. Night had a habit of falling fast up there, but that evening we still had a window of light left to us, the sky a red stripe off to the west. We walked back slowly to the guest-house, feeling the good heat of the rye welling up inside of us, and I knew that this was the kind of town in which I could settle down. Nothing fancy on offer, and the air of reticence could be crushing to any kind of enthusiastic spirit, but reticence was what I needed.
We hunted every day after that, Maggie’s old man and I, and he was never anything other than that, Maggie’s old man. I was Mister, when he addressed me as anything at all. After the two weeks, leaving was like surgery, but I had to go because there were things to be done, loose ends and all that. I promised that I’d return, though, and that I’d stay in touch. Maggie was like everything else about the place – strong. The kind of woman used to disappointment, I guess. But she smiled, and surprised everyone by kissing me. I scribbled down an address, something which I had never done before for any woman, and she already had my real name so she was already far ahead of the pack. She knew some things about me, probably had guessed some others. I promised that I’d write, and I did, regularly. Still do. For now I won’t call what we had anything more than friendship, but I do plan to visit again soon. There is a little house up there, right on the water and up at the far end of town. Nothing fancy, whitewashed cedarwood in need of freshening up, a step above a shotgun shack. Things need tending, especially the roof, but when I saw it I knew that it was just the kind of place I wanted for my retirement. Now when I write to Maggie I mention it, hint at my plans, and it is on the market still, with little or no interest apparently. Maggie writes every week, and she talks as if I belong there. Maybe I do.
My work tires me now. I’m fine usually once things are under way and I can fall back into the grooves that experience has cut, but it is the looking out for work, trying to decide between jobs, that wears me out. I take longer and longer to decide, and I know that is a weakness, but what makes it worse is that I know if I turn down this job I will have to wait around for another. I’m almost there, have almost reached the figure that will set me up for all the time to come. Just a few more jobs, one year, maybe two. Until then, I’ll keep looking around. And I’ll keep writing. You might think that there are only so many ways to kill people in a story, but I have been doing this for years now, and one thing I know is that there is always some fresh twist which can be added to any tale.
All that Jazz
‘I’m from Poland,’ she says, then immediately regrets it.
‘Oh, really? What part of Poland?’
‘Krakow.’
This is a lie, but it is better to lie than to say Poznan, because people have heard of Krakow and having heard of it they think, or feel, that they somehow know it. Recognition always dawns across their faces. Saying Poznan would just offer an opening and invite conversation, and that always leads to complications. Jazz drips from the walls, stuttering piano that clears the way soon enough for a brushy, convoluted drum solo. It is live, but echoey here in the bar, leaking through the wall and the crowded doorway from one of the hotel’s four performance rooms. This is a room for the serious Jazz, the eclectic stuff that she just adores. But the
bar is crowded and nobody seems very bothered about what the musicians are doing up on stage. She tells them Krakow, any who ask, because it is a game, a way of keeping the predators at bay. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ This one is an overweight, ruddy-faced man in his forties and maybe even his fifties, which makes him ten years or even double that too old for her. He has red hair clipped short. Tufts of it rise from the ugly puce flesh of his scalp, in a shade of copper that in this light seems somehow pale. He leans in as his kind always do, and penned into this bar room there is nowhere to go, no escape. She nods, not wanting a drink at all, but this too is the way it always is. Five or ten minutes later, there is a hand on her hip, drawing her close again and again, despite her polite efforts at struggle. Every move is a leading question. When he speaks it is right in her ear, shifting his body so that he can rub some of his weight against her shoulder, and he makes a gesture with his mouth that he seems to consider works as an apology; he can do nothing else but push this close in order to make himself heard above the noise of the room. All she wants is to be away. Every word she utters to a man in this place is taken for an invitation. He asks for her number, then thinks better of it and pushes his own at her, ornately embossed on a little saffron business card, and asks outright for a date. ‘Call me,’ he says, ‘and we’ll do something. Dinner, maybe.’
But that is not the end; his hand is still on her hip and maybe her gyrated efforts at escape have only encouraged him more, because he hasn’t yet given up on tonight. When he leans in again she braces herself for more words, some other sordid invitation or proposition, but he chooses to forego the chat-up line and instead presses his face into the hollow of her neck. His hot damp breath coats her throat and cheek with a stale Guinness stench. She wants to cry out, but doesn’t. She is here for the music, maybe the only one in this room who is. But she is lonely too, and after a second or third glass of beer she begins to feel a creep of exhilaration at the idea that someone wants to know her, even someone like this, a man old enough to be her father and one whose only attraction to her is his heartbeat. It is easy to push away the thought that he would be happy to know any woman tonight. The room is full of women, but a Pole just seems a little more exotic to him, she knows, some small detail that can be bragged about to his work-mates on Monday, and with just a little more enthusiasm than usual. In comparison with the other women in the barroom she is dressed very modestly. A couple of girls push past, arm in arm and swapping gales of laughter. They can’t be more than twenty and, in skimpy dresses worn too short and far too low-cut, their exposed flesh seems to glisten. They laugh the laugh of the drunk and uninhibited, tossing their long strawberry blonde and brunetted hair and baring their perfect teeth and then the enticing flicker of their tongues. They are on a night out, and the Jazz festival is the place to be tonight, the place that has drawn an influx to the city from all over Ireland and even beyond. It is a place to be seen, the perfect Sunday night platform for their talents. They laugh, a little bit drunk, and totter along on stiletto heels, knowing they have the attention of everyone they pass. And then they are gone.
This balding redhead’s breath is slick against her neck and she tries to shrug him off. She is not those girls; for one thing, she is thirty, and beyond such needs. Even when she was twenty though, she was never them. She is simply dressed, in black faded denims and a light grey wool sweater. It is warm in here, but it is late October too. Her style is simple, but alluring in its way. She is slim and fit, and the clothes hug her shape and emphasise it with a worthy boast to all who care to look.
‘I have to go,’ she says, suddenly angry. With effort she pushes him back and if he is slow to understand then at least he yields. ‘I have to meet a friend upstairs at ten.’ She has lived here in this city for nearly six years. Her accent is still instantly noticeable but her English is excellent. Six years here, a mother of one, the best mistake that she has ever made and the price she has paid and still pays for the foolish illusion of love. She has been through this before, and nobody gets into her bed through the pity door any more.
Deliver us from Evil
It was late, after midnight, when the telephone rang. Joe Leary, already knowing who it was, sat up in bed, his chest tight with fear. He lifted the receiver in the hollow between the third and fourth metallic chime, raised it slowly to his ear and listened.
‘Yeah?’ He clenched his eyes shut, hoping that there was sufficient brevity in one syllable to hide the quiver in his throat. When he opened them again, the bed-sit seemed a little brighter.
‘You got the note …’
Though he hadn’t heard it in more than five years, the voice was instantly recognisable to him, cutting through everything, right to the bone.
The talk that followed worked mostly in silences, punctuated only with the rooted code of words carefully designed to guard against tapped lines and unwanted listeners. The caller’s tone carried the same high lilting familiarity of years before, with the rounded vowels and the drawn consonants, a voice so foreign here in England but kindred with his own.
‘I did.’ One upper wedge of the window’s glass held some of a streetlight’s orange spillage, and rising from his bed to stand, Joe could see needles of rain streaking through the unearthly glow on a slight diagonal.
‘There’s a place, The Hawthorn Bar on Xavier Street.’
‘I know it.’
‘Lunchtime, then.’
There was a moment of trying desperately to think of something to say, some way to scream, No, for Christ’s sake, haven’t I given ye enough? But no such way offered itself, only a stranger’s acceptance coming from his own mouth, and all that remained then was to wait for the lilt to rise again.
When it came though, it held only the false nostalgia of, ‘It’s been awhile, Joe,’ and after a few moments of breathy stillness, he found himself listening to the tinny in-and-out drone of a broken connection.
Growing up on the Falls Road, it was hard not to take a stand. Most of the men on his housing estate were died-in-the-wool types and staunch in their treason, their destinies marked and their hatreds defined virtually from the womb. Joe’s way in had been different, and probably all the more dangerous for it.
His father, Tommy, was a man who had never raised so much as his voice in anger, at anyone or anything. A bus conductor who existed in a war zone and yet seemed blind to all manner of bigotry, he lived the simple, ordinary life of a husband and father. He enjoyed a pint of stout in the social club on a Sunday evening and maybe a game of rings or a few hands of Forty-five, but he was always just as content to play his old squeezebox melodeon by the fireside on a winter’s night while the kids sang the songs of generations past. Joe recalled often how the old man could make that accordion cry; he had a version of Carrickfergus that could pull a heart asunder.
It was a British soldier’s plastic bullet that had torn open his throat, and that was the way of things in Belfast during the bad years of the 1970s. The street cordoned off, seven soldiers watched him take twenty minutes to die, him slumped and gasping in the muddy gutter between road and footpath, and four hours later they approached to prod the body with the polished toes of their black boots and to mutter sympathy for the poor bastard, whoever he was, their machine guns levelled and at the ready, just in case.
Dead, his staring eyes held fast to the charcoal shell of his hometown sky and the blood slowly crusted around the wound in his throat and stained the wet tarmac with a shining darkness. An accident, they said, a tragedy, as Tommy Leary joined the growing list of fallen innocents, he perhaps the most innocent of all.
From then on there were father figures all along the Falls for the eleven-year-old Joe. His every breath, sleeping and waking, took on a bitterness, and hatred found an easy foothold, intensifying over months and years like a slowly acting poison in the bloodstream.
There was an allure about the movement, a camaraderie, a strong feeling of place. ‘Your father was a good man,’ they all said, everyone, men
and women alike. ‘A bed in heaven to him.’
But it was Dan Keogh who drew him in. Dan had been in his thirties back then, a tall thin man with slightly hunched shoulders and a growth of golden beard cropped closely in to his gaunt face. He had sharp blue eyes that smiled only for Joe and for his own child, Bríd.
What followed had the echoes of a second schooling, and at the age of sixteen Joe’s graduation to the rank of active soldier was marked by an ambush on a border patrol. Dan had accompanied him, and another, a man of about the same age, named Mick Scott, brought in from Tyrone for the job. Joe remembered how he had been terrified on the way, but how impressed he had been too, at the way the two men laughed and chatted easily about other men they knew. As if the end of the road held nothing more substantial than a game of bowling, or a hurling match. He sat alone in the back seat of the Ford Cortina, sucking in deep breaths as they passed through a string of small villages, and trying in vain to catch some of the men’s carefree manner.
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