by Ingrid Black
Finally came the execution.
There seemed to have been quite a campaign to have Howler’s sentence commuted to life imprisonment. He’d been a particular favourite of the nuns. He’d found Jesus when he was inside – don’t they all? – and his new religious friends were gathered outside the night he died, praying, singing hymns, lighting candles, bleating to reporters about the cruelty and injustice of taking human life. Pity Howler hadn’t embraced that creed a bit earlier.
“Did he make a last statement?” I said, noticing it wasn’t in the pile.
“He did,” said Burke. “I thought I printed it out for you. Isn’t it there?”
I rifled quickly back through the pages.
“I can’t see it.”
“I’ll print you another one off,” he said. “It was very touching. He said he was very sorry for all that he’d done, and all the hurt he’d caused, and he asked the family of the dead girl for their forgiveness. He said that he was going home now to the Lord where he would answer for his sins, and he hoped they’d find some comfort in his death.”
“Your dictionary obviously has a different definition of touching than mine.”
“And your dictionary obviously doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the word repentance,” said Burke.
“I believe in the word,” I said, “I just don’t know whether it amounts to much.”
“At least he was facing up to what he’d done,” said Burke. “That’s something. Some of these men keep the families of the victim on the rack right to the end. They enjoy it. I guess that’s why there was such a campaign around Howler. The sinner repenteth and all that. There was even a documentary about the campaign to save him one of the public access networks. I could try and get hold of a copy, if you like, but I wouldn’t raise your hopes too high.”
“My hopes are never high. That way everything is a pleasant surprise.”
“This is definitely the guy you wanted to know about then?”
“It’s him alright,” I admitted.
“And you think this is the same guy your old friend JJ has an interest in?”
I’d told him when I called earlier from outside the library on Pearse Street about seeing Kaminski in Temple Bar.
“I not only think it,” I said. “I know.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know, is all.”
“You just know? So it’s that kind of knowing, is it?” he said. “That’s the kind of knowing I think I’m better off not knowing too much about. That’s the kind of knowing that could get a girl into a lot of trouble.”
“I like being in trouble.”
“You do, don’t you?” said Burke. He shook his head with mock sadness. “It’s a wonder to me you never wound up in the next cell to a guy like Howler.”
“I’d need a sex change first.”
“You know what I mean. Still,” he shrugged, “you know your own business, and I know how to mind mine. Though I must admit I’m curious as to how an ex Bureau man’s presence in Dublin is supposed to be connected to an execution in Texas.”
“I’m curious too,” I said. “All I know is that this Howler was writing to Cecilia Corrigan and now she’s dead too and Kaminski’s sniffing around her corpse. It was nothing, an accident, but I can’t help feeling there must be some connection.”
“And you thought the key to the code was Howler?”
“That was the idea.”
He was silent a moment, considering.
“Maybe,” he suggested in due course, “Kaminski thinks this Howler might have passed on information to her before he died, and he wants to know what it was.”
“Maybe’s a big country.”
“Then take this stuff with you as your guide,” said Burke. “You haven’t had a chance to study it properly yet. Though if you want my advice, I don’t like the way it looks.”
“Explain yourself, soldier.”
Burke shrugged. “It just feels wrong. You be careful.”
“What could happen?” I said. “Howler’s dead, the woman he was writing to is dead.”
“But the guy who got you interested in this is still very alive and running round the city, and you don’t know what the hell he’s doing. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Nothing can happen to me. I’m indestructible.”
“That’s what all the folks in the graveyard thought.”
Burke looked up as the bell on the door jingled and a small fat guy in an ill-fitting T-shirt with a hammer and sickle on the front was framed against the sunlight in the door. I recognised him. He was known as Red Ned, though I doubted that was what it said on his birth certificate. He was one of Burke’s poker circle, though far as I knew it wasn’t the night for poker. Unless the cowards had started organising games without me.
“Am I early?” he said as he came in.
“You’re early,” confirmed Burke, “but come in anyway.”
“Saxon,” the newcomer nodded. “You’re the last person I expected to see here.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m just off. I didn’t realise the time. What am I missing?”
“We’re having a meeting here later on,” said Burke. “We get together a couple of times a week to plan the overthrow of the capitalist system.”
“Aren’t you boys a little old for all that bullshit?” I teased.
“We’re giving capitalism until next Tuesday to crumble, and if it doesn’t then we’re taking up embroidery. You’re welcome to join us,” Burke said. “Having you on board during the revolution might just tip the balance.”
“It’s a tempting offer, but I promised Fitzgerald I’d go round and prepare lunch.”
“Listen to you,” said Red Ned with a wink. “You’re starting to sound like a housewife.”
“That’s what I hate about you pinkos,” I said with staged offence. “Soon as you start to lose the argument, you immediately resort to insults.”
“Words are the only weapons we have against the oppressors,” he said solemnly.
“You’re breaking my heart. I’d better get out of here before you have me weeping with more hard luck stories about the workers.”
“It’s your loss, comrade.”
“I doubt that, but I’ll make you a deal. You start the revolution without me, and if things start going your way I’ll make sure to switch sides in time for the victory parade.”
“Spoken like a true mercenary,” said Burke.
Chapter Ten
I picked up some food that could be heated later from a tiny Middle Easter place I’d discovered once whilst walking near Fownes Street. It wasn’t far out of my way. I didn’t know if Healy liked Middle Eastern food, but he’d have to put up with it. Fitzgerald had sent me a message earlier that he’d be coming too. Briefly I considered walking back to my apartment and taking the Jeep out from the underground car park, but by the time I’d got up there and taken the car from its place, I’d have wasted another fifteen minutes. By the time I struggled through the traffic to her house, I’d have wasted even longer. I decided to take the train instead.
Tara Street was near. A train rattled over the bridge above as I approached the station, filling the air with its thunderous clang, making the air seem hotter somehow as it disgorged a bellyful of carbon fuels into the atmosphere and melted another iceberg, if you believe all that jazz about global warming. Typical that I’d missed the train. Then I saw with relief that it was going the other way. Trains were fairly regular, but even so I didn’t want to be kept hanging around longer than necessary.
It was a relief to turn off the street into the stygian gloom of the station. It felt like the last remnant of coolness in the city. Oasis in the desert. Inside, I bought a ticket at the booth, and then pushed through the turnstile to take the escalator up to the crowded platform.
I stood with my back to a pillar and lost myself in the buzz of conversation that rose and receded like a tide around me. I avoided catching anyone’s eye.
I didn’t feel like being dragged into conversation. My body might’ve been in Dublin, but my brain was in Texas. I was with Jenkins Howler, and I have to admit I’ve enjoyed better company.
To keep focussed, I let my eyes fall to the platform.
There, just before the drop onto the tracks, a line had been newly drawn, along which was also painted a warning: Do Not Cross The Yellow Line.
I smiled.
Crossing the line was what I was best at. What I’d always done. I had crossed the line this morning again in JJ’s room. I shouldn’t have intruded on his privacy like that. Another twinge of guilt came, but I suppressed it impatiently. It was important to suppress guilt or you’d never get anything done. Never get anything interesting done, at least.
But there were other lines I’d crossed, throughout my life, and it was only after you crossed them that you realised nothing would ever be the same again. And by then it was always too late. There was no going back. Sometimes it was for the best. Sometimes not.
The biggest line I’d ever crossed was when I joined the FBI. Behind me then was one world, and the new world I entered made me see everything in an entirely different light.
Or perhaps light is the wrong word, since what I saw was so dark.
Those experiences tainted my world, and made it impossible that I could ever go back to feeling positive or trusting about things again. I lost my faith in human nature. I lost my faith in people to do the right thing, or to stop bad things from happening.
Leaving the FBI was another huge step, because now my mind had been battered and changed, but there was nothing I could do with my thoughts anymore but brood on them, impotently. There is less that can be done in the FBI than you hope, disappointment is perpetual, a feeling of inadequacy pervades the soul. But at least you can do something, even if it is never enough. Once outside, I was permanently barred from that world I had come to know. I’d dwelt there once. Now it was a foreign country. I was across the border.
Perhaps if I’d taken a different path, and tried, I mean really tried, to put it behind me, then I could have made things work. I could have moved on. But no. With my great talent for screwing up, I had carried on writing about that world, and hanging round on its edges, even wound up with a woman who still worked in the investigation of murder which meant that it was constantly within my orbit, though there was nothing I could do about it but look on.
From the other side of the line.
And yes, I had killed a man once. That was another crossing of the line, albeit one I tried to revisit in my memory as little as I could, easier said than done though it was.
Dreams were the worst.
They’re beyond rational control.
I was grateful when my melancholy thoughts were interrupted by the snaking arrival of the train around the bend into the station.
That is, I called it a train, but the locals knew it as the DART. The letters stood for Dublin Area Rapid Transport, though there were times when the Rapid part of the acronym sometimes felt more like a vague aspiration than an ironclad promise. Still, it was a good way to get around certain parts of the city if you didn’t feel like driving. I climbed aboard.
No seat, it was too busy today, so I simply grabbed a pole that connected floor to ceiling and held on as the carriage jerked forward, trying to concentrate on where I was going, because I didn’t want to start daydreaming and miss my stop. I’d done that before.
Instead I stared out of the window and watched them go by, the names of the stations ticking off in my head like the ticking of a metronome.
Pearse.
Grand Canal Dock.
Lansdowne Road.
Sandymount.
Sydney Parade.
It was only as the train pulled out of Sydney Parade that I realised it was where I was supposed to get out. I’d been staring at the station’s name written on a metal sign, feeling hollow. Sydney had been my sister’s name. She was dead now. Her funeral was the last time I’d been home to Boston, and sometimes I didn’t know if I’d ever go back again.
After Sydney died, there was nothing there worth going back for.
I stepped off at the next station, which had been saddled with the singularly ugly name of Booterstown, and began walking back along the seafront. The tide was out. A wide expanse of sand and flatness stretched into the distance, the monotony of the view broken only by occasional walkers like drawings of stick men lingering among the pools of stranded water. The sea beyond was as still as a lake. The masts of sailing boats scarcely moved.
I was on Strand Road.
Not far now.
**********
Fitzgerald lived in a cul de sac across from the sea with a view of Howth Head from her bedroom. Cul de sac: they had to be the three most terrifying words in any language, next to I love you and it’s a boy. The houses had been put up about five years ago, and they didn’t look like they’d last much longer than the stuff I’d bought for supper. They were the sort of houses that a child would make out of Lego. Front door, four windows, chimney, like a sketch of something that might one day be a house rather than the real thing. I hated it here.
So did Fitzgerald, but for her it was just a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place to take a shower. It was like a hotel without chambermaids to root around in your underwear drawer and use your toothbrush to clean the toilet. She kept irregular hours. It was all she needed.
We’d often talked about getting a house together. It made no sense to keep two places going when as often as we could we were either at one or the other. Living in two places simply multiplied the time we spent travelling between them, and travelling was getting more difficult round the city with every month that passed. Fitzgerald said she could remember a time when you could get from one side of Dublin to the other in a half hour. Now you’d have no chance of doing that unless you grew wings. Traffic choked the city more tightly than a noose. But still, somehow, we’d never got beyond talking about it. There was always something else that pushed house hunting onto the back burner.
We wanted different things, that was the problem. She may have hated her house, but cross the road and there was the strand and the wide sweep of Dublin Bay, Howth Head opposite and Bray Head in the distance. This is where she liked to walk. If she could have her way, she’d have lived out in the country, with roaring fires, and logs piled by the stone hearth, and seven dogs sleeping at her feet. She should’ve married a farmer and they could’ve got themselves a smallholding out West where they could tend pigs and grow parsnips and make wine out of nettles. My longing had always been for the city, for bustle and noise. Trying to find a compromise between the two extremes was like negotiating an end to the Cold War. Not that we were likely to come to blows about it, just that what we wanted was so far apart as to make any chance of finding a happy medium pretty much impossible.
It was complicated by the fact that houses in Dublin were so expensive.
I had enough money not to have to worry about it, and Fitzgerald had her house to sell. Pooled together, we had plenty. But it never ceased to shock me what people in Dublin paid for what in any other city would’ve been regarded as unremarkable properties.
That was why people were moving further and further out of the city and commuting in each morning, just so they could afford a place of their own, and houses in the centre of town that would once have been lived in were now offices for insurance brokers and lawyers – Dublin was full of lawyers, and I used to think the States was overrun with them – and were locked up and dark at night, giving an eerie, otherworldly quality to the streets. The gardens in the middle of the old squares were dark and deserted. Take a small turn off the main street and the city which a moment ago had been thronged and noisy had almost ceased to exist at all. A vista emptier than the post-nuclear winter landscape had taken its place.
Yet even that had to be preferable to this, I thought, as I walked up the path to Fitzgerald’s house and a curtain twitched in response in the window nex
t door.
It was that kind of place. The kind where they keep tabs on you to make sure you never have any privacy. Your privacy offends them. And the fact that Fitzgerald wasn’t married to a chartered surveyor and spending her days rearing three kids probably offended them too. I resisted the childish temptation to stick out my tongue at the neighbours, and let myself in. There was no sign of her yet, but then I hadn’t expected there to be.
A murder investigation doesn’t watch the clock.
I stacked the food in the fridge to keep for later.
Whenever later turned out to be.
To pass the time, I lifted a Coke from the ice box and turned on the large fan which Fitzgerald had set up on the worktop in an effort to keep cool, and I sat with the news reports about Jenkins Howler that Burke had printed off for me fanned out on the kitchen table and held down with various pieces of cutlery to stop them blowing away.
And there was his last statement. The page must’ve got stuck to the back of another sheet. That was how I’d missed it. It was only the breeze from the fan that made it work loose. I read it through slowly, ending at Howler’s last words.
“Warden, I’m ready.”
Well, bully for him.
That’s what many condemned men said when the time came, and it always made me angry. They had no right to be ready. Their victims hadn’t been given the chance to prepare themselves for death, to find Jesus, or make their peace with the world.
They had simply been snatched away from life, violently.
The Texas Department of Criminal Correction was certainly thorough, I’ll say that. For each execution, there wasn’t only a record of the offender’s last statement, but a sheet detailing their previous criminal convictions, history of education, height, weight, eye colour, the county they came from, you name it, as well as an account of the crimes for which they were being punished. There was even a note of the ethnic origin of their victims. Killers tended to stay within their own ethnic group. It was black on black, white on white, Hispanic on Hispanic. Burke would say that proved him right when he argued how every act had its origins in the social, economic and racial circumstances out of which it had been born.