The Judas Heart

by Ingrid Black

  “Then who was it?”

  “Victor Solomon,” I told him.

  He wore a bemused expression that said her answer didn’t make logical sense.

  “So Randall gets away scot free?” he said.

  “He’s still wanted in connection with Mark Hudson’s murder,” said Fitzgerald defensively. “I’d hardly call that getting away with anything.”

  “Randall won’t have been so stupid as to let you pin that one on him.”

  “He was stupid enough to be seen at the spot where Hudson’s body was found.”

  “Yeah, that was convenient for you, wasn’t it?” said Kaminski. He shook his head roughly. “No, there was a reason for that. There was a reason for everything. He has it all worked out. He’s been ahead of you every step of the way.”

  “His fingerprints were all over Hudson’s car,” Fitzgerald insisted. “Inside and out.”

  That silenced him for a moment.

  Then he shrugged that off too.

  “He’ll have the right answer for that too,” said Kaminski. “He always does. He’s going to wriggle off the hook for this the same way he wriggled off it when he murdered my wife. Even if you do pick him up, you’ll end up holding him for a couple of days and then wave him off at the airport with a slap on the wrist for breaching immigration rules.”

  “You don’t have much faith in the police here in Dublin, do you, Mr Kaminski?”

  “Do you blame me?” he said. “Look at that chump you sent to watch over me.” He gestured towards Stack who was standing by the door looking about as inconspicuous as an elephant at a geisha party. “He has cop written all over him. Did you ever stop to wonder,” he continued, “what would’ve happened if Randall had seen that trailing around after me like a devoted puppy all day? He’d know you were going to be waiting for him at the fair tonight. He wouldn’t show. Maybe it’s already too late. Maybe he already has seen him.”

  “And I told you, that’s a risk we’re both going to have to take,” said Fitzgerald, though I could tell she understood what Kaminski meant. “I couldn’t let you wander about on your own. I don’t trust you. I still don’t know that you’re even telling the truth about the fair.”

  “Just make sure you keep well away from me tonight,” he warned. “I’m not having you messing up my chance to get Randall after all the work I’ve put into hunting him down.”

  “I know how to do my job,” Fitzgerald said coldly.

  “Make sure you do.”

  To avoid any further conflict, she showed him the map of the funfair and the surrounding streets, pointing out the relevant details of the surveillance operation to him, but he scarcely glanced at it.

  “You’ve been wired up?” she asked him eventually, giving up on the briefing.

  Kaminski nodded.

  “Then if you see Randall, simply say the word and we’ll take over.”

  “Yippee,” he said sarcastically. “Can I go now?”

  Fitzgerald checked her watch.

  “It’s almost nine,” she said. “You can go. But be warned, Kaminski. No games. There are more than enough of my officers around out there to stop you doing something stupid, so don’t even bother trying. You’ll only embarrass yourself.”

  I thought he was going to say something in response to that, but whatever it was he decided to keep it to himself. Maybe he felt contemptuous silence was all that we, his tormentors, deserved. Instead he turned and walked away, weaving through the lines of plastic chairs to the door where Detective Stack was waiting.

  “Good luck,” my voice rose after him, trying to sound encouraging.

  He flinched slightly, but that was all.

  “Shall I follow him?” asked Stack once Kaminski had gone.

  “He’s on his own now,” Fitzgerald replied. “Did you search him before we arrived?”

  “Yes, Chief. He wasn’t too pleased about that either.”

  “He wouldn’t be. He was clean?”

  “He didn’t have anything on him.”

  “Good. There’s no way I wanted him taking any kind of weapon along with him tonight. The temptation would be too great. Unless he’s received some special Marines training in unarmed combat, I doubt there’s much danger of Buck Randall coming to harm.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” I said, but even as I said it I wasn’t sure if I believed it. Part of me feared that Kaminski was right. That Buck Randall, even if he was placed in custody, would somehow contrive to ensure that no dirt stuck to him. What was better – for a guilty man to escape justice, or for Kaminski to finish this once and for all?

  I didn’t trust myself to give the right answer.

  **********

  By now the shadows were lengthening at last, the sky fading.

  Night wouldn’t be long.

  There was no sign of Kaminski as we left the building soon after.

  “You don’t think...?”

  “That he’s run out on us? No, I don’t think he’s run out on us.”

  Still, it was a relief when Fitzgerald managed to get through to Walsh and he told her he could see Kaminski approaching Merrion Square from the other direction.

  “Why’s he going that way?” I wondered aloud as we made our own way to the square. “He must’ve walked straight past the road leading to Merrion Square, gone the complete wrong way, and then turned back on himself further on.”

  “Probably trying to piss us off,” she suggested.

  He was succeeding.

  “Come on, let’s go join the party.”

  The light was noticeably more strained than it had been before we went into the dental hospital. Night took a long time coming in summer, but once it started it came on fast. I felt a sense of growing expectation gathering inside my chest.

  This was it.

  Within the hour, we might be face to face with Buck Randall.

  We took a more immediate route than Kaminski, for all the world like two women out for a summer evening’s walk to the fair. At least, that’s how I hoped we looked. Kaminski’s words about Detective Stack practically having the word cop tattooed on his forehead had lodged in my brain. Fitzgerald blended in to my eyes, but then I might be too familiar with her to be able to judge her dispassionately. Did she look like a cop?

  What, for that matter, did I look like?

  Certainly no one gave us a second glance as we joined the growing mass of people making their way down towards Merrion Square where, above the rooftops, the top of a ferris wheel could be seen now turning slowly, lights flashing in the shape of the metal, standing out more sharply against the thickening dark sky. Dark – yes it really was now.

  I could hear music thudding, bass and drum, into the warm night, mingled with snatches of laughter, the squeals of the nervous on the fairground rides. A sign above the gate said: Opening Night.

  “You know,” Fitzgerald said as we walked through the gate into the square, and looked around all the stalls and rides laid out before us, “it’s a shame we have to waste a night like this. I love funfairs. There was one we always used to go to out in the West every summer when I was a child. It sat right at the edge of the sea. It probably only had a couple of dodgems and a few arcade games, but to me it was like Las Vegas.”

  “You mean, hookers and Mafia hit men everywhere you look, and little old ladies from Idaho feeding their life savings into slot machines?”

  “Something like that,” she said. “Only without the hookers and the hit men.”

  “And the little old ladies didn’t come from Idaho.”

  “I doubt it,” agreed Fitzgerald.

  I didn’t say anything about what I felt. I’d always hated funfairs, whatever I’d said to Fitzgerald last night. Always seen something seedy and untrustworthy in them. If the fairground was a man, he’d be the kind of man who could as easily knock you around as show you a good time. There’s an air of jollity about them, but underlying that simmers a barely-concealed mood of anger and menace and resentment. The people
who attach themselves to the wandering fairgrounds are those who have nothing else left. They’ve been driven out of the world of light and onto the road in broken-down trucks, the modern day equivalent of outlaws and renegades. There’s always the feeling at the fair that someone is going to get hurt, and you just hope it isn’t you.

  Caught up with that, there is the promise, or maybe that should be the threat, of bad sex and sudden intimacies that could feel more like violence. Strange enemies lurk in the shadows, and you’re never quite sure if they belong there or not.

  People did, admittedly, seem to be having a good time at the fair tonight - stumbling dizzily out of the funhouse, and showing off at the test your strength machines - so maybe it’s just me who gets grouchy under their influence. There were plenty of small children running round too, eating candy apples and pink floss on sticks, clinging onto oversized teddy bears that their fathers had won by tossing wonky rings onto hooks on a wall or firing corks out of mounted shotguns at moving yellow plastic ducks. Couples walked arm in arm. Bursts of tinny music competed raucously with each other from each ride that we passed.

  I tried looking like I was there to enjoy myself like everyone else, and staying alert for any sign of Buck Randall. That wasn’t proving so easy. I knew what his picture looked like, but the man himself might’ve come here tonight in disguise. In fact, that was most likely how he had come. He wanted to keep the advantage over Kaminski.

  The crowds didn’t help. I hadn’t expected the fair to be so busy, but then why wouldn’t it be? It was a mild night, not a chance of rain. The lights and music beckoned.

  I began to think half the city had turned out for the fair’s first night.

  A couple of times, I caught a glimpse of someone who might be Randall... or was I only projecting Randall’s features onto some other stranger because I wanted to see him so badly? And I couldn’t stare too long, because if it was Randall then I couldn’t alert him to the fact that other people besides Kaminski might be expecting him to turn up.

  Once I caught myself staring and realised it was Kaminski I was staring at. He was staring back at me like he’d been trapped by the same trick of the mind, his eye latching unconsciously onto something known.

  So I had to content myself with sideways glances and stolen looks, and couldn’t decide whether they were better or worse than nothing. In fact, I soon realised, I’d have been better placed to see Randall, if I was watching the fair from one of the windows in the surrounding buildings. That might’ve been exactly what Randall was doing.

  Say he was holed up in one of these apartments. Say he’d rented an office for the week or the month. It was the easiest thing in the world to camp up there tonight and observe the scene below, god-like, through binoculars. I saw Kaminski, standing by a hot dog stand, squeezing mayonnaise onto his food and trying to look nonchalant.

  What if Randall was watching him at that precise moment? What if every move he’d taken had been observed from the very moment he passed through the gate?

  And what if Kaminski wasn’t the only one being watched?

  Everywhere I looked now, I seemed to see one of the surveillance team lingering, lurking, idling self-consciously – a figure here by the coconut shy, another there by dodgems. Or was it only the fair’s own security guards, talking to one another over walkie talkies, watching out for possible trouble? They were all looking alike to me now, and a kind of panic gripped me temporarily, a sense that the situation was not as much under control as we’d imagined.

  I turned to speak to Fitzgerald- and found that I’d lost her somewhere along the way. A moment before, I was sure, she’d been there. I’d felt her hand touch my elbow, guiding me in the right direction as the crowd threatened to carry me on the wrong path. Now there was no sign of her, and no sign either of Kaminski at the hot dog stand.

  Where was he?

  **********

  I pushed my way back into the pressing throng of bodies and on through towards the place where I’d last seen him. The sizzle of meat cooking turned the air rancid again, like it had been the night Rose Downey was attacked. The stench of burning fat was offensive as stale sweat.

  Greasy paper, now scrunched into stained balls, littered the ground around the food stalls like flowers at a funeral.

  Then I thought I saw not Kaminski, but Fitzgerald, a couple hundred yards away from where I was standing now, her back turned to me, walking towards the helter skelter. I resisted the urge to call her name, and instead plunged back into the tide.

  Waded through the crowd as if through heavy water.

  But she wasn’t at the helter skelter. Nor at the carousel beyond. I was walking now without direction, simply going round, searching for some anchor to fasten my fractured impressions of the scene that evening back into place. Light was throbbing in my temples, and with it the screech and whine of machinery. The music was getting louder. The carousel spun crazily, horses hurtling round after one another’s tails, mouths pulled back in demonic grins. Indistinct figures stepped expertly among the waltzers as the cars turned in a blur of faces.

  I heard a voice.

  Shouting.

  “Stop!”

  It was Kaminski. And soon other voices had joined his. A murmur was spreading through the crowd, like Chinese whispers. I couldn’t catch what it said, but I could see where it was coming from. The hot dog stand. The direction I’d come from minutes before.

  “It’s the police,” I heard a woman ahead of me in the crowd say to her companion.

  “What the fuck are they doing here?” he answered testily.

  The idea that the police might actually have a good reason to be somewhere was one which many citizens of Dublin still considered too implausible to be entertained for a second.

  As I got closer, I heard someone else say that the police had some guy on the ground – could it be Buck Randall? - and there was a crackle of police radios. The music continued from the rides, but seemed to have fallen back until it was hardly audible anymore.

  All I could hear was the commotion up ahead.

  “Stand back!”

  “Let her through,” said Fitzgerald, because there she was, standing with a cellphone pressed to her ear, and reaching out with her other hand for my arm to drag me into the circle. And the plain clothes cop who’d been trying to keep a boundary between the police who’d grouped together at this point and the rest of the restless crowd threw up his hands theatrically in exasperation like the futility of the task had just become apparent to him.

  “Have you got him?” I mouthed to her, but she was talking so fast and so loud that nothing I said could get through. She simply pointed at Patrick Walsh who, I now saw, was standing looking somewhat redundant and ineffectual a couple yards away.

  “Walsh,” I said, “what’s going on? Have you got Randall?”

  Before he could answer, Kaminski’s voice cut in angrily.

  “Don’t you tell me to calm down, you fucking incompetent fuckheads!”

  He was standing in the middle of a group of police officers who were trying to hold him back. His nose was bleeding. His shirt was torn. Another man I didn’t recognise, an unpleasant-looking character with a ring of studs through his lower lip, sat on the grass nearby in handcuffs, trying to kick out at Kaminski’s legs whenever he got the chance.

  “What is it, JJ?”

  “They lost him!” he spat when he saw me. “They fucking lost him! How in God’s fucking name did you people let him get away? What the fuck were you thinking?”

  At which point, I considered it safe to assume that no, we hadn’t got Buck Randall.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “I got a call,” said Fitzgerald as she lay back on Kaminski’s bed next morning, pillow at her back, arms folded behind her head, legs outstretched to the end of her boots. “One of the surveillance team said Kaminski had seen someone who might be Buck Randall. I tried to get your attention, but the place was too noisy and you were distracted, you weren’t heari
ng me.”

  I’d been surveying the windows round Merrion Square, imagining our every move being watched, and missing entirely what was happening right there on the ground.

  I guess I must be more out of practise than I knew.

  “By the time I reached the place where Randall had apparently been spotted,” explained Fitzgerald, “it was too late. Kaminski said he’d lost visual contact. No one else had seen him, so I wasn’t sure what to think - or, more to the point, what to do next. Melt back into the crowd again and wait for another sighting? Try to move in and close him down, shutting off the exits and searching the crowd one by one? Well, I knew I couldn’t do that. It would’ve been chaos, there were too many people milling around.”

  “So what did you decide?” I asked.

  “I didn’t have the chance to decide anything,” she said with feeling. “Suddenly there was another shout. I heard someone calling out Buck Randall’s name. It was Kaminski again. Next thing a scuffle had broken out. I ran over. It looked like some guy had punched Kaminski and now they were grappling together like the worst pro wrestlers you ever saw. It was almost comic. The one thing I could see is that it wasn’t Randall he was fighting with.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I can’t even remember his name. He was just some scanger who’d gone along to the fairground with his girlfriend.”

  “Scanger?”

  “Yeah, a scanger, you must know what a scanger is. Let me think. What would you say? White trash maybe. It’s an old Dublin word. Think young person of limited intelligence and even more limited vocabulary, who has an inordinate fondness for shaving their heads, dressing in cheap sports gear, and piercing their body with too many pieces of metal.”

  “I’m following you. It’s a new word on me, but I’m following you.”

  “This particular representative of the species, anyway, was at the fairground last night. Kaminski claimed he saw Buck Randall through the crowd, he tried to push his way through, ended up upsetting some popcorn belonging to this delightful individual’s girlfriend. Next thing you know, he’s landed one on Kaminski’s nose and they’re rolling around in the dirt trying to knock one another’s lights out – the young scanger to defend his fair maiden’s honour for the grievous hurt of losing her popcorn, and Kaminski just so he could get away and pursue what he said was Randall. The surveillance team came running, thinking Kaminski had their man, and instead found the world’s most pathetic fight in progress at their feet. By the time it had been broken up, the evening’s work was comprehensively ruined.”