Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

Hence the saving of the hotel over and over, for Farrell would not have Whitewells taken from his world. He imagined that the bomb that got away would crumble him worst if he remained behind. In his nightmares he never dissolved in a flash of white heat, but was left kicking through another rubble in the city center, as he’d once scuffed through Smithfield Market, finding caps of Crested Ten, shards of snifters, spoons, melted picture frames, smoking tufts of brocade, breathing the stink of materials you’d never think would burn. Maybe it was warped to feel so deeply for a building, but Farrell did understand the affection designed into the neutron bomb. Still, it would take him several of these rescues and a last night to feel the same protective passion for his own life.

  Bream taught Farrell all he knew, which is not to say they grew fond of one another. Farrell battled for hardcore information about how to neutralize a trembling fuse through a barrage of philosophy. Though the hemorrhaged corporal made an unlikely mystic, every switch had its tract, like the Salvation Army, where you had to sit through “Rock of Ages” to earn your soup. Even the way Bream referred to bombs suggested religious awe, rarely pronouncing B-O-M-B, but euphemizing, the thing, the device, what you’re dealing with, as the Orthodox avoid the real word for Jehovah. “Remember, no matter how many times you’ve seen the same box, the same size, the same switch, treat every device as a stranger.”

  “I treat my own mother as a stranger,” Farrell quipped. “It shouldn’t be so hard with a crate.”

  “On the contrary,” said Bream. “It’s bastards like you can get quite matey with crates.”

  They worked late, and Farrell was not allowed any whiskey until eight—when Porter would intone, Ye-et I wi-ill be me-e-e-e-erry! like the end of Ramadan. Porter himself wouldn’t touch the stuff before the dot of noon.

  “Who’s to say,” Farrell commented two weeks in, “I’m not in the IRA? In which case you’re a right eejit.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “No—”

  “So I’m not.”

  End of story.

  “Besides,” Bream added the next week, picking up the way they did now, all conversations going on at once. “If you were a Provo, you might have had the courtesy to offer me a few quid.”

  Farrell shrugged. “You didn’t ask.”

  “You’re a taker.”

  This was true. He sozzled Bream’s whiskey every night and never once replenished the cabinet. He sat down to meals and didn’t offer to wash up, didn’t question that the two women prepared them, and didn’t even learn their names. Odd, fresh from such a guilty childhood. But Farrell had indexed the population according to how comfortable they were taking, and how much. The more you took, the more you got. Farrell accepted what was given him not because he’d been a spoiled little boy but because he was clever.

  Porter was a regular anthology of grim fairy tales, but Farrell didn’t always find these instructive—like the time Porter leaned over a clock and found the long hand actually touching the contact. The corporal ran. Nothing happened. Later he found that a blob of luminescent paint on the hand had insulated the metal from completing the circuit.

  “So?” asked Farrell, annoyed. “You were lucky. Save the pointless anecdotes for the Rose and Crown.”

  “There is a point. Never reduce yourself to luck. I shouldn’t have been bending over any clock.”

  “Then get a desk job,” Farrell muttered.

  “You have GOT to concede to operate remote!”

  “I am tired of operating remote!” and though this was one more running argument, the cry came from so deep inside the Catholic that Porter retreated.

  When Farrell left Beverly, Bream handed him a package of army pigsticks, all tied up like a pencil box for Farrell’s first day of school. There was no smooching, no promises that Farrell would be in touch. Farrell did hear, not much later, that Porter had snuffed it. His off-license, the Rose and Crown, even the taxi company that slopped the corporal into the back seat evenings—all sent flowers. Farrell didn’t. He felt no more grief over the old man’s death than he would have over his own.

  Besides, in Belfast Farrell had his hands full, with a lot to learn. Bream was right, the technology was always evolving; you had to keep pace with the state of the art. “Irish, don’t study history for once!” Bream opined, warning that most of what he’d taught Farrell was outdated. “And every device captured alive is an informant.” For neutralized bombs weren’t simply triumphs but tiny universities you could take back home.

  Farrell spent the evenings he was not out on call reconstructing the latest ingenuity, so when the circuit connected a light bulb went on. Good practice, lousy symbolism: explosion as bright idea. His homework grew more demanding by the day. The Provos were getting crafty at packaging, scrambling their tokens of affection with irrelevant wiring, so that radiograms looked like the scribbling of disturbed children. Some of these boxes, too, were so rife with anti-handling devices that getting inside was a Houdini demonstration in reverse, all locked with chains and ropes and handcuffs with a clock ticking.

  Still, those were the days, when disposal had a little variety. Lately all you heard was Semtex, Semtex, Semtex—Coca-Cola to British Telecom, every product line suffered monopoly over time. In the latter seventies, you found Frangex, Gelamex, Quarrex, and piquant blends of HME, from the sharp diesel of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil to the fragrant marzipan of nitrobenzene. (ANNI made you dizzy, and Farrell knew British operators who could no longer eat certain Christmas cakes, since the smell of almonds made them sick. Farrell, on the other hand, would walk in bakeries just to breathe. The smell was nostalgic.) Back then commercial was scarce and the opposition was resourceful. “I can walk into any kitchen and make a hole in the room,” Porter had declared. “Soap suds, flour, seltzer; throat lozenges, sugar, cream of tartar, even dried bananas: add ten minutes of education and stir.” Dead on, for Farrell dismantled bombs made of anything from fermented garbage to Styrofoam coffee cups, in casings from a tampon incinerator to a stuffed toy bear.

  As a result Farrell’s relationship to ordinary objects electrified. Piles of shoe boxes, a pocketbook by an empty chair, sacks of rice delivered to Chinese restaurants all shivered with menace; mailings from the Ulster Museum threatened more than harassment for checks. Not to mention cars. Farrell couldn’t walk down the street without noting whether the Cortina there was riding low, or pass pubs without knocking on arriving barrels of Tennants, confirming by the cong that they were only full of beer. They weren’t always, either. Farrell’s whole world anthropomorphized. Call it paranoia, insanity, but for Farrell, whose environment had more the ugly tendency to go numb, in whose former life people had become objects rather than the other way around, the animation was delightful, like living in a cartoon where clocks danced, refrigerators talked, the cow jumped over the moon. So did Farrell, if he wasn’t careful.

  Those days, too, the business was surprisingly personal, if sometimes infantile—like the wine case left in Whitewells Magic Markered in three-inch-high letters, IRA on one side, TE-HEE, HE-HEE, HO-HO, HA-HA! on the other. He grew to recognize the style of particular bombmakers, each with their explosives of choice, a distinctive twist to their connections, pet booby traps. He gave them names, too: Rat, Mole, Toad, and Mr. Badger. Farrell had favorites. Irrationally, he preferred the better-made bombs. He scorned sloppy wiring. Inaccurate switches made of clothespins and rubber bands filled him with the same disdain he felt toward incompetence anywhere. Elegant devices filled him with admiration. He had to remind himself they were intended to spread old ladies on Fountain Street like sour cream, because prizing open a carton all neatly layered with Semtex and fresh herring, Farrell wanted to shake somebody’s hand.

  Farrell had run his private bomb disposal service for five years. However inconceivably, he was still alive and that made him cocky. They had been far more active years than he’d ever have predicted, for potty as locals considered his project at first Farrell found he filled a need. In the mid
-seventies, Provisional bombings of other Catholics were not so rare. Weary of the dole, the odd Taig would join the army or RUC, double targets for being Crown forces and turncoats. “Known” informers could consider themselves fertilizer. For a time, Catholic bakers, lorry drivers, even binmen who served the army would sometimes notice fishing line over the gates to their walkways. (The Provos had a faddish side—for a while there, fishing-line trip switches were all the rage, and Farrell would constantly reach into his suit pockets to find stray lengths of nylon tangled with his change.)

  Furthermore, in the absence of police protection for large parts of West Belfast, the Provos had assumed law enforcement; their courts were quick, their sentences simple, since—well, you could hardly blame them—they couldn’t maintain a private Long Kesh of their own. Robbery on behalf of the IRA was respectable, but the organization looked askance at lads who asked chip shops for donations to more obscure causes. As a result, Farrell had rescued more than one lowlife hood the world was surely better without, but O’Phelan’s service was ever distinguished by its indiscrimination.

  For Farrell’s clients were by no means all Catholic. While at first none too eager to call in a papish bomb man, plenty of Prods were even less anxious to call in the army to complain those Provy wankers had hit their brothel, their unlicensed bookie joint, their cache of Kalashnikovs. Uncooperative victims of Loyalist protection rackets had often preferred Farrell to the RUC likely to press for names, and it was healthier not to turn in these civil servants on either side of the divide. Protestant businessmen sometimes planted bombs on their own premises to collect government compensation; Farrell had twice been asked to disassemble devices by next-door shopkeepers unwilling to inform, but equally unenthusiastic about getting in on the scheme. Besides, as far as the Prods were concerned, why not a Catholic bomb man? The thing goes off, one less Taig.

  Just practically, it was sometimes simpler to drag that lanky bastard in, with an unclaimed package on a shoemaker’s bench that could as well be cakes as Togel. The army would ship the whole block up the road and divert traffic and string that bloody white plastic cordon everywhere, all very well if the whole panto was still interesting, which it wasn’t the third time in a week. O’Phelan was sure enough a wog, some even claimed not the full shilling, but he worked well and fast and alone and didn’t fuck about, just sent you down the way, and by the time you’d scoffed a pack of fags he was done, like. The army would tinker for hours with their wretched robot, which never seemed to work, and send it into the shoemaker’s from half a mile away, all for three sticky buns. O’Phelan? He looked in the bag. Took a bite. You bought him a drink, and that was that.

  While the Provos were none too delighted to have their gratuities waylaid, they could only applaud Farrell’s undermining of Orange racketeering and compensation fraud, and they took particular pleasure, being themselves keen for panache, in some of O’Phelan’s more outlandish pranks, particularly the ones involving cattle—Paisley’s ram, or the bull he rented for the Apprentice Boys parade. More than one pint was raised up Andytown Road after the Great Bonfire Sabotage of ’79. No one ever figured out what exactly got sprayed or sprinkled or nested into the piles of planks and tires and shipping flats compiled over the months to celebrate William of Orange’s tired old triumph over James at the Battle of the Boyne, but once those monsters went up, this unbelievable reek rose over the whole of the Shankill, to drift in a noxious cloud all the way to City Hall, with a smell so censorious it amounted to political commentary.

  Besides, the Provies themselves had found Farrell handy on occasion, while not about to give the Brits the satisfaction, still happy to let O’Phelan risk scrapping with Loyalist car bombs rather than endanger their own personnel. And while the Provisionals were a professional crew whom, on a technical level, Farrell respected, you got the odd gombeen who’d made a bollocks of the science-fair project in his own basement and turned up in Whitewells very pale. Often enough they didn’t want their cell leader to discover the cock-up, and there was that Seamus character a few years back whose gelignite had gone volatile under the floorboards of his own mother’s sitting room—not only the gelignite was weeping. In these cases, no Provo was about to call in to the police: “Gee, we were about to blow two hundred pounds in a hijacked post van outside your barracks on Malone Road, but damned if John didn’t bump the dowel and set the timer ticking. So could you possibly disarm the thing and keep it from decimating an entire block of Beechmont, including my house, or could you take it back with you so the little bundle of joy can explode in the bosom of the RUC, where it belongs?”

  For what made Farrell O’Phelan’s service possible was he didn’t tout. In a city where everyone needed protecting from everyone else, there was a place for neutral resort. Surely any number of Farrell’s customers would have turned to the army rather than no one had he remained curled around a bottle of Talisker five more years. But given a choice, it was often a gentler business to dismantle than to betray. And there was no question that a critical contingent of Farrell’s customers would never have informed on their husbands, brothers, lovers if that meant taking the bus the next fifteen years to the Kesh. Sure that poor Sandy Row frazzle terrified by a Smith & Wesson in the house would never have offered any soldier as she had Farrell a hundred quid to burgle the gun from her own linen closet.

  Because so many of his tip-offs came from women. Women who were tired of propping for hours in the emergency waiting room of the Royal Victoria, the cushions liver red, as if not to show stains, maybe a son this time, maybe only a cousin, the nurses lovely as can be but strained, running out of compassion, of comprehension, finished even with rage and just onto their jobs because it was the fourth gunshot wound that night. It was with the women that the “party” Estrin observed wore off first; the Royal Victoria is one shithouse party. So once more the lads would be a-scurry all important like, looking for an alligator clip, angry their black turtleneck was in the wash, and it wasn’t hard to get the scoop if you were determined (they weren’t supposed to tell you, but of course you were married, he was your brother). Nor was it hard to imagine later that night, back in the Royal, running out of cigarettes, forced to worry back and forth between the boy and that rattletrap car; the nurses always warned you not to leave it overnight or the joyriders would plow it through checkpoints and you could pick it up in the morning smoking in front of Divis Flats. Well, that was when they crept out as if for milk or some air or a jar and nipped to a phone box or down to Whitewells, to return utterly terrified, and later to suffer the consternation of their men cursing that fuckwit O’Phelan up one side and down the other, come three in the morning to sleep, maybe not well exactly but at least at all.

  It was early 1982 and the hunger strikes were over. As in most pauses here, the Province was both relieved and deflated. While Protestants had pretty much ignored the strikes and were now glad to get back to Princess Di, with big color photos of horses and swish outfits on the front page of the Telegraph, Catholics were demoralized. Once more the mood of this city had seemed apocalyptic, promising to climax in—they didn’t even know what; and once more the place had subsided. The Provisionals had won a whole new flush of converts, thanks to the careful, perfectly alienating maneuverings of the British government; Farrell suggested that Britain’s every move in the strikes had been so brilliantly calculated to recruit for the IRA that you had to suspect Margaret Thatcher of being an undercover Irish terrorist herself, and when she died they were sure to plant her in Milltown Cemetery right next to Bobby Sands. However, the new ranks were at a loss—the final hunger strikers had been taken off and were back to potato bread and rashers; all the energy focused at ten funerals began to disperse.

  Perhaps it was fear of an era having peaked that had made Farrell such a soft touch for one more job. The strikes had provided the freelancer with busy months, his favorite kind, grabbing taxis and snatching two hours’ sleep at a time; having come into Whitewells the year before, he was
more mobile than ever, jubilantly irresponsible with cash. However, even in this frenzy he had begun to feel insidiously irrelevant. Dismantling devices never changed why they were there and why another would spring up tomorrow live as ever down the road. Many of those days were so thick he didn’t even have time for whiskey, and with a clearer head he had eyed the H-blocks, priests and Red Cross whisking in and out as Farrell raveled on the fringe.

  For Farrell’s disposal service uncomfortably recalled Uncle Malachi’s vigorous attack on jellyfish in Donegal. At the time Farrell had admired his uncle’s netting in the shallows as a tide of men-of-war forced vacationers from the shore. Uncle Malachi was the first independent disposal man in Farrell’s memory, burying the stinging creatures by the dozen in gelatinous pits. Farrell had shouldered in to dig and fill the six-foot graves of sand. However, the holocaust was ineffectual: amid thousands of men-of-war his uncle barely dented the population. At the end of the week, even at the age of seven, Farrell had to admit his uncle’s self-important trooping of the beach with his net dripping glutinous red strings was silly. The tide brought the creatures in; only the tide could take them away.

  So Farrell envied the more celestial bodies, princes of tides; his peripheral mischief seemed childish, failing to satisfy his growing appetite for the center. Farrell may have made a career out of isolation, but less by choice than because he’d been an asthmatic little boy, bound in coverlets while the neighbors played rugby.

  The boy who showed up at Whitewells that night, tousled brown hair and sporty red cheeks, must have reminded Farrell of the footballers outside his bedroom window as a child, and of the others later, with anoraks and cigarettes and girls. He couldn’t have an anorak, it wasn’t warm enough, so his mother bundled him even at sixteen in an enormous wool coat that reached below his knees—not unlike the coat he wore now, come to think of it, though so much of what Farrell was at forty-three he’d taken years to grow into. As for cigarettes, he tried one once and it sent him shamefully to his inhaler. And girls? He’d skipped straight to women.