The kid had scuttered across the lobby and clutched Farrell’s sleeve. “Farrell—I mean, Mr. O’Phelan,” he stumbled, breathing fast. “Just the man I need, so you are. For fuck’s sake, clear the bloody hotel. There’s a bomb—”
“Where?” Farrell steadied the boy’s shoulders with both hands. The jacket, he remembered, was oily.
“They put a bleeding gun to my head, mate! Nipped me into a black taxi and some big tube skelps me with a gun, like.” The boy displayed a rather unremarkable wound on his temple. “On Castle Street they stick me with a shopping bag—”
“Skip the yarn, boyo. Where’s the bag now?”
But the kid stubbornly told the story. “Don’t take it wrong, sir, but when they cart me to Whitewells I’m relieved like. This is Mr. O’Phelan’s hotel, I think. I’m to take the bag in and not come out with it, and Lord, Farrell, I’m shaking and I carried it to the roof, I hope that’s all right. I figure it’s safest like? Where you can take it on? ’Cause haven’t I seen you slick as you please snip up a car bomb outside me brother’s in Ballymurphy. I wouldn’t call the frigging Brits if it were a live Pershing missile in this hotel. O’Phelan, that’s what I say to anyone cares to know: you got something that ticks, you call Farrell O’Phelan—”
Right: over the top. How often had Farrell rehearsed the picture since, the shine in those eyes not fear but excitement, a tugging about the mouth where he might have found the twitch of pride, in the breath an intake of triumph. Farrell stooped solicitously to hand the kid a fizzy orange. An orange! The boy’d have half a bottle of Power’s down him in the hour, and barely feel it, too. Wet bleeding-heart meddler, with nothing better to do than cock up his own people, in a tie— Well, see what would happen to that dandy pinstripe in ten minutes’ time. Aye, that was the breath when Farrell remembered it later: as if the boy were taking in lungfuls of smoke, as if so close to Farrell he could smell meat cooking.
Farrell quizzed the proxy with the overenunciation of an uncle probing a three-year-old for what the nasty man had done to him in the park: Did he look in the bag? What did he see? Exactly. Did they tell him to do anything to the bag? Where did he put it, exactly? How heavy was it? Did he smell anything? Did it make any noise? The boy answered with the precision of someone who had looked in the bag a long time.
For, Farrell assured Estrin, there was such a thing as real humility and this was it. How often had he listened in pubs as men chatted up some frumpy clart. They told her she was beautiful and she believed them! Didn’t the wretched girl have a mirror? Yet Farrell the savvy, the suspicious, was only another skirt, wasn’t he, because the boy had chatted him up, isn’t that right? And Farrell wouldn’t see it because he wanted, like any girl, to feel pretty, when really he was about to get fucked.
Relating this, Farrell spoke of himself with contempt, but this time with no aftertaste of self-congratulation, no oh-what-a-worm-am-I. It was one thing to feel I am so competitive, so manipulative, such a good liar; I am a raving self-serving loner, which was all very nice actually, with a big isolated grandeur like Whitewells; quite a different business to feel I am so credulous, I must seem like a prat. Farrell would gratefully take the label of egomaniac over ordinary patsy. He would gladly be a drunk, but not a popinjay, trussed up and easily fooled by a fifteen-year-old boy ogling up at Farrell as if having just won an audience with Michael Jackson. Lord, vanity makes you a sitting duck.
The kid skidded out the door along with the evacuating top-floor guests, perhaps to keep his face from any of Farrell’s surviving friends. Then, what friends? Farrell’s careful dearth of affiliation lightened the consequences of his disposal.
Farrell smoothed into the lift. The gate sang shut. The right angles of the car seemed unusually perfect, each straight edge serene. The brass lattice shone a defiant white-gold; he admired the exquisite symmetry of its diamonds. The compartment resonated with such cold, mechanical accuracy that it was as if he weren’t in a real lift at all, one of those poor approximations most human projects come to, but an earlier, purer stage of design—his feet rested on the draftsman’s table. His own motions, too, achieved this quality—he reached for the button with that same precision he later observed in Estrin when she was half-jarred. The guests would be shuttled down the stairs, so the car sped uninterruptedly up; Farrell stood in the exact middle, so straight it was less like taking an elevator than growing rapidly tall enough to reach the top floor.
Before walking the last flight to the roof, he checked his kit, spreading the heavy leather case open on the floor; there was a loop for every cord, hook, and grip, snips, and one mangled paper clip he’d used for five years. Frankly, aside from pigsticks, it was a treasure trove of ordinary bits, like the desk drawers of a boy.
Up the stairs, his step sounded not loud exactly, but slowed from a single sound to a series of discreet grittings and slidings. His depression of the panic bar dissected, tick-squeal-thunk.
Farrell had often been asked, Isn’t defusion exciting? or, Don’t you get scared? He answered, “No,” unable to explain that you didn’t enjoy the luxury of emotion. Not only did the niceties of what you would order for dinner or whether you wanted a drink slough off, but so did your mother, your country, your age, the date, your sex; certainly your religion was one of the first frills to go, for bomb disposal was a regular short course in nonsectarianism. All that remained was yourself and the device, together so enormous that there was no space left for any feelings about either of you. He had heard of Brits losing their bowels, but only after the job was through. Because at the time you feel nothing. Farrell, who often enough when he felt anything felt rotten, revered this condition, though you were not catatonic—you felt nothing and everything, for he would recognize the exact temperature of that air as it hit his face when he opened the door for the rest of his life, and he could tell Estrin precisely what that roof looked like, down to which slates were loose, which were splattered with pigeon shite. He could tell her the shopping bag by the wall was from Brown Thomas; Treasures of use and beauty/Pretty toys for children gleamed in the light of his torch. Next to the bag was an ancient mattress with a pattern of mildew like the Shroud of Turin. While he did not have any feelings about these things, he did know they were there with a profundity which perhaps amounted to an emotion at that—a seeingness we have no name for.
Into this blinkered concentration one thought did intrude itself; much as Farrell dismissed it as an indulgence, it would not go away. As he crunched closer and the bag mocked, Things for the best-dressed man, the thought insisted itself, petulant. Fair enough; he turned to it at last. But quick now.
Face it, the notion slapped at him. No professional from NIHQ would ever get so close to that bag as to read the ad, save on a fuzzy video screen a block away. The army would use Wheelbarrow, and don’t imagine you couldn’t rustle up a robot if you tried. You could have sent it on the lift, hulking and chunking up those stairs—sure it wouldn’t be as elegant, they’re ungainly monsters, but could do this job as well. And don’t claim you haven’t time to think this through—your right foot is still falling heel to toe. You just don’t want to hear, but you’re going to: because for that matter you could have called the army yourself. No one would be implicated unless the glypes left prints on the putty, and that would be their own fault. So why are you here—from pride? What’s going to happen to your pride if in the next sixty seconds that princely Dublin shopping bag turns into a frog? Answer me, do you want to die? Is that why you drink so much, to dissolve? And if so, why dismantle the bomb? Why not fling matches? Why bother with the bomb at all, why not dive over the edge there—it’s ten stories. Why are you on this roof, boyo?
Farrell was almost angry—his first feeling, which he could ill afford. He bore down on the bag: a simple exercise. The proxy had described a timer and a cigar box with wires—probably one of those 5 p copper dets the Republic had been shipping up by the binful lately. Sounded like commercial, though, which meant the modest size
of the bag was no indicator of modest capacity; some of the smallest bombs were the most destructive. But at least commercial didn’t have a mind of its own like HME—commercial went when you told it to. As for switches, he could rule out a tilt, necessarily set once the bag was at rest, which they’d never trust to a proxy; and the kid had described only leaving the bag and streaking downstairs. Likewise, with a clock it wasn’t radio-controlled. He planned, then, to cut in if the wires were accessible, or to plant a disruptor if the mechanism was fully encased.
Farrell shone his torch into the bag. The box was as the boy had said, with the usual Boots clock, whose metal minute hand would hit the contact at twelve. He breathed easier; twenty minutes left. A disruptor was chancier than cutting the detonator free, and commercial wasn’t likely to do anything resentful for being jostled. Gently Farrell rustled the bag open a bit wider, tipping it to get a better look at the sides of the box. The almond scent of Frangex wafted from underneath.
All his information intersected at once: the boy downstairs had talked too long for a fifteen-year-old convinced the building in which he was standing was about to take off for Mars, and the flattery had been too profuse: for the wire straggling from the box was unconnected. More; insulated to its very tip, it had never been connected. The minute hand had not yet moved, nor would it—the clock was not even wound. The proxy was a fake; the timer switch was a fake; but the bomb was not a fake, for in that tiny rustle, with sound so disassembled, there was one sound smallest of all that pierced the drone of traffic below, stiletto: a click. A distinctive click that Farrell had rehearsed up to his ear when laying out his practice toys five years before: the sound of a micro-tilt switch touching its plates. Inside that Brown Thomas bag was a birthday present for Farrell O’Phelan; why, they could as well have included a pink ribbon and a card.
He should have known he would be all right, for he was allowed the moment in which to think he would not be. The bomb that went off he wouldn’t hear; for all his flirtation with explosion, in its most intimate embrace he would see nothing. That was the turn: to want to experience your own death was to want to avoid it. If you tripped your last switch, you never finished its pretty echoes on the plate; if you loved fire, inside a flame its curl and lick were only taken away; if you loved heat, you had to keep clear enough to feel the blaze. To love death was first to love, so that all his attraction to apocalypse was still attraction, live desire, and he’d been a fool, a raving nutter, to assume he actually wanted the Frangex to ignite on any evening—for love of death and dying were not only different; they were antithetical.
chapter nine
As You Are in Pieces, So Shall Your Cities Fragment
I don’t understand. Why are you here?”
“I shouldn’t be.”
“Why didn’t the bomb go off?”
“Irps. That’s how you can tell an IRSP device, my dear: it doesn’t work.”
“What did you do when it didn’t blow?”
He smiled. “I looked up.”
Clear winter skies are rare in Ireland. This one, innocent, earnest, suggested the shoe box he’d constructed as a boy, with an eye hole on one end and pinpricks on the other—held up to the light, it had made a child-size firmament, and true to form, Farrell hadn’t settled for random dots but had carefully poked out accurate constellations. Funny how you were never satisfied with anything until you made it yourself, when there was a real sky out there and all you had to do was lean from the window. Why draw mountains like saw’s teeth when you could hike through the Mournes? Farrell wiped the last traces of vomit on his sleeve. He didn’t care if this observation was succinct, for he was luxuriating in the lushness of his own mind; memory, on the edge of extinction a moment before; having been a boy—in this lifetime of unnecessary perceptions, they had always been his greatest joys, tiny searing moments of mental incision like the pinpricks overhead. It’s true the sky was more lovely than usual, more blue, and the air, while cold, at least had temperature at all, and it was temperature itself he relished—but most of all it was thinking, he loved thinking, so when he thought, You prat! he was euphoric to have ideas about himself at all. Greedily he thought, My mother feels guilty over my childhood and doesn’t know how to apologize; he thought, And I will never let her, he thought, My sisters have been cruelly underestimated; he thought, yes, right next to this, You can give the Protestants everything they want in fact, but if at the same time they lose in theory they will keep fighting. He seized at any illumination however small, rolling in his own head like somersaults in heather, like burying his face in a young girl’s hair. Farrell watched the gradual shifting of stars with the much faster turns of the way he looked at them, the dizzying spin of explanations for why they were there, smoothing the contours of his own ideas, shivering across his intellect, running suppositions like scales, showing off for himself, reciting chess gambits and trying whole new daring attacks; setting up the puzzle of Irish politics, not quite sure how to move, treasuring the fact he was not sure, since so much of thinking, good thinking, is being stymied. It was voluptuous, autoerotic; he could feel the luscious bumps and quivers of his naked brain, sweet, moist, and veiny, full of unexpected leaps from left to right, until he came to the single insight as though emerging from a copse to a clearing, I do not need the bomb. I am the bomb.
Yet later he would return to the hotel, as he had this evening, once more weary of himself, impatient with Estrin’s intrusions, with the ceaseless chatter in pubs and chip shops across this island, but really because his own patter was just as circular, just as stale, stultified by the same unmoving board the North set before him, the lumps of his head gone dry. But I did need the bomb. I needed the bomb to know I didn’t need it. I still need the bomb. He missed bombs but was sure he’d only lost the nerve for them, and in this way had only taken a giant step backward.
So that was the last disposal,” he concluded. “And I didn’t even finish that. I went back to the lobby. Ordinarily I would have dismantled the thing, pocketed the switch if it deserved further study, neutralized the explosive. Instead, I called the army. They used Wheelbarrow. Weren’t about to take my word for it the bomb was duff. Took forever, of course, and how I recognized the pretentious officiousness of the bomb squad. They could have it, I decided. I stayed across the way, at Kelly’s Bar. They had to carry me back to Whitewells. It takes real application for me to get a hangover, but I’d applied.”
“You stopped because you got careless, or because you got scared?”
“I quit because I’d never been scared. I wasn’t courageous, but naïve. Everyone else in Belfast knew what a bomb was but me, who opened them up like Christmas crackers. I didn’t want to die; I thought I was immortal. But not anymore.
“So the next day I changed everything. I stopped drinking anything but wine, after eight. I gave up red meat, sweets, cholesterol. I took regular exercise. For a while I even slept. I instituted security at Whitewells that stopped just shy of the rectal mirror search. And I retired utterly from bomb disposal. I regard myself as a reformed suicide.”
Estrin struggled up in bed, resisting fatigue she couldn’t justify; she’d only unloaded the kegs of Smithwick’s that afternoon, run ten miles, had dinner. Farrell did this to people. How little sleep had Farrell gotten, and for what exalted cause? Somehow his tale left her both entranced and disquieted. It was a good story, wasn’t it? And he wouldn’t lie?
Her uneasiness was with hue: the story was colorized. He couldn’t leave it alone. He wasn’t lying except in the way he lied all the time.
“Dostoevsky,” said Estrin.
“Alyosha, Dmitri, or Ivan?”
“Moral nit-picking of Alyosha; dopey romanticism of Dmitri; intellectual impudence of Ivan. And you left out Smerdyakov: a bit of a bastard.” (Farrell swelled like a tick.) “But I was thinking of his real life. When he was condemned to death and marched out to the square blindfolded. The firing squad cocked their rifles. Then the tsar commuted the sentence.
Dostoevsky was obsessed with it, that moment.”
Estrin’s voice trailed off, passingly envious of his misadventure, wishing she could prop Farrell on her pillows and tell tales of Frangex; but she caught herself in time, realizing, though the stories didn’t tell as well, there were plenty enough times careening a motorcycle down the coast road in the Philippines, between checkpoints on the Gaza Strip, when she’d banked a little low and felt the machine begin to slide, when she’d miscalculated an angle at 120 k and been forced into the oncoming lane, a breath from an Arab bus. He’d been talking, simply, of almost getting killed, and hadn’t everyone felt that? Didn’t we all walk the world immortal and get reminded? Get reminded one last time, too late? For Farrell had a tendency to absorb all the drama in the room, a sponge in a puddle. It was greedy, but it was also Estrin’s fault for imagining there was a limited quantity of anguish in the world that he could steal.
For all his fractiousness, there was a side to Farrell that was irrepressibly kind. The pale, dilute blue pupils always glistened on the verge of tears; even at his most irate, they tinted with pity. True, the pity extended to himself, and he wouldn’t like to hear that; but he must have suspected in moments of genuine self-scrutiny that it extended only to himself, and the way he looked back at Estrin now belied that. They were eyes that wanted most to protect you from themselves, and they would fail.
“So many countries, all on your own,” he whispered, taking her to his lap. “Do you not get lonely now?”
“Get? Stay. But you, I wonder if you don’t top me. You’re about the loneliest person I’ve ever met.”
Estrin searched the runny pools overhead, eyes that kept the same constant chemistry in bars or in bed: one part humor, two parts pain. He was hard to find in them. The amusement masked their surface, while the sadness blackened the centers to wallow in its own secret abyss, like a swimming hole whose location he refused to share. As you pursued him across the iris, he flecked from spear to spear, tripping creek stones, always a step ahead. To dive in that serous blue and aim for the deep part was reliably to hit rock. The amusement mocked you. The sadness denied you. This is impossible, they said. I miss you, they said. Why can’t you look into my eyes? He would run from you, only to turn impatiently and blame you for not catching up.
Ordinary Decent Criminals Page 12