“I’ve gotten all the…young buck stuff out of me system, so to speak.”
And into somebod(ies) else’s without doubt.
“Now it’s love for me, and nothing less. I’m looking for my mate for life.”
Really, now? Christ—this wasn’t a rush, it was a blitzkrieg.
“And tell me, Rory, do you know what love is?”
“I do. There are two kinds of romantic love. There’s love which is lust. It can strike you heady and hot, and you know what you want and must have. Then there’s the second kind of love.”
Based on “economic incentive,” Bresnahan thought.
“It’s an unfamiliar feeling, at least to me. A kind of”—there was a long pause, while they drew all too near the men making peat—“recognition. You know, that this is the one for you. That she is the one from which your children should come. It’s a more important, better, bigger love than the first, but it’s a double wonder when the two kinds of love are focused on the same person.”
Bresnahan had neither the strength nor the will to resist his moving her hand behind her back and drawing her to him. Her head was spinning from all the “drops” she had taken in the sundry cottages they had visited, and the man she loved had never said any such thing to her. Nor even hinted.
She did manage to take a few quick steps forward, pulling O’Suilleabhain with her, and in the twilight the peat cutters looked up.
“Fine night,” she said, breaking away from him.
“’Tis that, miss. But you should mind the company you keep,” said the youngest of the three, who, as spreader, had the job of pitching the cut and shaped sods to the outermost edges of the turf bank for drying.
“And why is that?” The blade of the slane was about all she could see of the man, who was below them producing the lumps of peat. Like some unusual field animal, the single tooth of its right-angled blade, silvery now with the risen moon, was taking timed and regular bites through the soft, obliging bog that was here seven layers deep. The meithel, or turf-cutting team, also consisted of a breensler who piked the sods up to the spreader. Peat was usually harvested in late winter or early spring and disposed of in autumn, unless, of course, it was all in the way of a cash crop that your land would yield.
“Night like this, strange moon and all—the man you’re with sprouts fangs as well as horns, and there’s no telling whose neck he might bite.”
“Not yours, Diarmuid. Which has felt neither soap nor water in a fortnight.” O’Suilleabhain laughed, his perfect teeth flashing in the moonlight. He then clasped hands with the spreader and introduced Bresnahan, and reintroduced Bresnahan to the men whom she had known all her life. The slanesman even climbed out of the pit to get a look at her. “Big Tom’s girl.” He was the old man they had come to see. “I thought you were with the Guards.”
“She is,” O’Suilleabhain explained, “and this is the new uniform.”
The other young men began laughing.
“She’s investigating what happened to Paddy Power.” O’Suilleabhain then began speaking low and fast to the spreader, who started to laugh. “Go over now, she didn’t! Breathalyzer? Ruthie—that’s gas. You’re a gem.”
But Bresnahan had asked and the slanesman was telling her what he and his brother had seen on Sunday morning. “It was something to ponder and discuss, I’ll say. We were working our way up to the Waterville Road and West Cove for to make a delivery.” He pointed to rows of peat banks that could be seen stretching off to one side of the bog. “And me and Mick up on an ass rail of turf.
“We had no drink on us to speak of, but when we come to the Rathfield ruin, we stopped.” He meant a former mansion that had been torched by the IRA. “For a call of nature, you know.”
“Like Tarzan,” said the young man who was known as a local wit. “Though the message wasn’t vocal.”
“There I was,” the old man went on with a sigh, “in the ruin behind a wall bent low like, when up pulls this long red car as bright as a hen’s egg. And wasn’t I surprised when out steps a country man. He pulls off a greatcoat and stuffs it in the boot. Next comes his hat, and he isn’t a he at all. No, he’s a her. The Wellies come off next, and then back into the car, and off she goes at a gallop. I don’t think the whole thing took longer—”
“Than it took him to stanch his nose.”
The old man inclined his head and smiled, as though to say, what I have to put up with.
“How did you know it was a woman?”
“By her breathalyzer, how else?” And the two young men fell all about, laughing.
“Long blond hair. Though, you know, trousers, like yourself is wearing.”
Bresnahan was wearing tights; it was dark, but she wondered how good the old fella’s eyes were. “What make, the car?”
“You’ll have to ask Mick. I wouldn’t know one from the other, not being in the market, so to speak.”
“Mick?” Bresnahan looked at the breensler.
“He’s over at the Scariff Inn in West Cove, playin’ the spoons.”
Said O’Suilleabhain. “I’ve bloody big quid burning a hole in me pocket. Tell you what, we’ll pop down there and I’ll lay the whole thing on the bar for all to admire. And enjoy.”
Good traditional Irish music touched something deep in Bresnahan. Having been preserved with fierce racial pride, it was a mixture—curious in this day and age—of life and antiquity, and it acted upon her as a kind of aphrodisiac, especially with a drink in hand.
The deep, rapid throbbing of the bodhran was the wild beating of the smitten heart. The fiddle, concertina, and flute, dueling together, were the spirits soaring, while the spoons provided the crack of mental activity, of reality and the need to make…connections in life.
Or to dance, which she had often on the flagstone floor of her father’s kitchen, while he beat time on his knees and watched with love and pride, and later in parish halls and teach an ceoil (houses of music) that were a feature of a handful of villages here in the West.
And standing hip to hip with Rory O’Suilleabhain, unable to keep her feet from moving as the music swelled to its rousing conclusion, Bresnahan felt more disloyal to Hugh Ward, whom she loved—or, at least only this morning had thought she loved—than when holding O’Suilleabhain’s hand or at any other moment in the two years that Ward and she had been together.
Ward had once said of such music, “Crude culchie shite, every last thump of it,” and most of the other jackeens she knew in Dublin thought the same. Had she been denying what was really dearest and best about who she was? Was there any need? Now.
The music had stopped. O’Suilleabhain, handing her a tray of “jars” that he had purchased for the group of players, whispered, “Now’s your chance with Nick. Remember, now—I’ll be watching,” in a way that tickled her ear and sent a shiver down her spine. She wondered if “Now’s your chance” could be prophetic. For her.
“An Audi,” said the spoon player, who was a decade younger than his brother, the slanesman. “Brand, spanking new with a bumper sticker that said:
EIRE BANK
EUR BANK OUR BANK
Bresnahan had seen them before; every third car in Dublin seemed to have one.
“Could you recognize the person—him or her—again?”
“I didn’t get a good-enough look, I’m sorry to say.” He raised the creamy head of the pint and took a long drink that closed his eyes and left a buff-colored ring on his upper lip.
Bresnahan sipped from her own glass.
“I was perched on the ass rail, like I said, and my eyes were fixed on the long blond mane, me wondering if the woman was a transvestite, a cross-dresser, or off to a costume party. Like yourself, say.” He paused for another sip, his eyes glinting with the gaiety of the large, packed pub. “Your father get a glimpse of you yet? I see Rory has.” He winked. “Remember, it’s a band”—he showed her the third finger of his left hand—“or nothing. Any other accommodation—you could have another murder to in
vestigate, too close to home.
“Care to dance?”
Bresnahan only smiled and turned her head to the bar where O’Suilleabhain was holding forth, his handsome head thrown back in uproarious laughter. She let her eyes roam the room, noting how many others seemed to be having an uninhibited good time. They were her people all right. And his.
“Rory’ll be in Dublin within the year, count on it,” said the spoon player.
And what to do about that.
CHAPTER 18
Something
EARLY IN THE afternoon McGarr had found Noreen waiting for him when he got back to their suite in Parknasilla. She was standing before the sideboard on which sat three groupings of note cards and the receiver of the baby monitor that McGarr had asked Ward to place in Frost’s room. Only static was coming from it now. Placed near its speaker was the tape recorder that, since Maddie’s birth, Noreen had used to dictate correspondence and notes to the two employees of her picture gallery in Dublin. The device was automatic and voice-activated.
In one hand she held a tall glass filled with ice and an amber-colored fluid. The other hand was placed firmly on a hip that was sheathed in a pearl-gray chemise. A dressing gown was draped from her shoulders. Her auburn hair, which was wavy, had been freshly combed, and in all she looked provocative, apart from the determined glaze in her eyes.
With a finger she indicated the first grouping of note cards. “This is all that’s said of Gladden. Here is a card that I thought germane to Power’s thinking, at least in regard to this debt conference. And this last is the ‘Frost’ stack, which for some reason you failed to go through with the same thoroughness as you did the headings for the two women. “It’s him who murdered Paddy Power, make no mistake.”
McGarr removed his mac and hat and looked into the other room. No Maddie. Considering what Noreen was wearing, maybe there was hope. “It’s who?”
“Frost. He’s a slimy bastard.”
McGarr glanced at the monitor.
“That’s right. Hughie got the monitor into the room, and he’s just finished boffing Nell Power, I think it was.”
Who? Hughie or Frost?
“Imagine—his best friend and partner, the man without whom he’d be nowhere—isn’t even in his grave, and he’s out…”—she couldn’t bring herself to repeat the word—“the widow.”
“The ex-wife,” McGarr corrected, glancing at the two audio devices on the sideboard. “How do you know it was—”
“What? Do you think I was born yesterday? It was savage, with all sorts of creaking, shrieking, and moaning, like two animals in rut. Slaps even, as though they were practicing some type of sadomasochism.”
Boffing? Where had she gotten that word, McGarr wondered. Out of a mystery novel? He hadn’t heard “boffing” in decades and then only on the BBC or through a wall.
“You never heard the like of what went on between them. It was—” She shook her head and drank from the glass. “Tell me something, do women often throw themselves at you?”
Only savagely. Unfortunately. Which had something to do with being short, squat, bald, and truculent. Frost, on the other hand, was tall, thin, handsome, wealthy (McGarr supposed), sometimes charming, and looked a good fifteen years younger than McGarr, though he was not.
“And, when they do, do you take advantage of them?”
“Advantage” was an interesting interpretation of having to catch a body thrown at you without breaking something, if only your willpower or your ego. Still, McGarr said nothing.
Noreen shook her head. “Ach—you’re all the same.”
Slimy bastards, McGarr thought.
Noreen turned and entered the bedroom, the silk whistling over her hips.
McGarr considered trying to find the source of the amher fluid in her glass, but instead turned his attention to the note cards.
“Excuse me.”
McGarr looked up.
“Were you expecting something?” The glaze was still in her eyes.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know, something.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You had that look.”
But didn’t he always, these days.
“Well?” she demanded.
“Well, what?”
“Well, let’s get to it. We might not have another opportunity like this for a while.”
Put that way, could he refuse, bandages and all?
Sometime later while still in bed, he lit a cigarette and cupped a palm under his head. Noreen was dozing beside him, and he thought of how they were joined, bonded, locked (?) together for life and were performing a delicate, intricate, enormously complicated dance in step, the patterns of which would affect at least Maddie for all of her life. So far so good, largely because each had sympathy as well as love for the other. It was the given part of a good match, how two people went about their shared life together.
He also thought about Paddy Power, the note-taker, the man with a saying borrowed from this thinker and that. He had two significant others, with neither of whom he could form a permanent bond and who didn’t seem to mourn him much. Yet Power had been loved by the world, or so all of the newspapers were saying. Outsiders. People who didn’t know him well. Apart from Mossie Gladden, who had seemed genuinely aggrieved when viewing Power’s corpse. And angered.
Which caused McGarr to remember how Power had been found, laughing wildly—savagely, grotesquely—and waving the single note card over his head, as though to say, this is the prize. There is no answer, no real knowing. Why strive? Death is the only certainty, which is the biggest and best laugh of all.
The note card, the one that he had been waving—McGarr had marked it with his pen. Easing himself out of bed so as not to wake Noreen, he padded into the sitting room and found it among the others on the sideboard.
Sunday, 3:30 Parknasilla: debt conference
Have stopped again to catch my breath before descending the narrow path through the cliff face. From time to time the sharp report of Mossie’s high-powered rifle comes to me and then howls through the mountains. Target practice, he’s told me, for the dogs that summer people leave when returning to the city. Jackals, he calls them. The wily and strong have survived and reproduce, preying on Mossie’s sheep. For a time he took to trapping the dogs, but with no takers even for the pups of such animals, the local dog warden only had to put them down.
Now he uses the rifle.
Not very enlightening. Nor probably even accurate, Power merely having accepted Gladden’s explanation of why he was shooting. Hadn’t the farmers in the Sneem House pub told McGarr that morning that they hadn’t seen a wild dog in ages, men who were out on the land much more than any doctor-politician-gentleman-shepherd or any financial wizard?
McGarr then remembered the target that he had found in Gladden’s press with “Sean” duly marked on top. McGarr made a mental note to ask Superintendent Butler of the Kenmare Barracks to call in on Gladden and relieve him of the weapon, which was illegal in Ireland. He would have taken it himself, had he not been “distracted.” He tugged at the bandages on his neck that had begun to itch.
Next he skimmed the cards on Shane Frost that Noreen had culled that morning. Most had to deal with Power’s changing opinion of Frost as time passed. The first negative assessment was undated but was yellowing with age:
If life is most successfully perceived from a single window, then Shane’s singular advantage is in viewing people and things strictly for their utility. He has no larger view than what he sees for himself, and thus is your basic, hollow ‘economic’ man who will work hard and devote himself only to those projects that will win him quick, substantial profits. At gaining those, he has few peers, which is why I continue to associate with him. He is utterly ruthless, and I would not want him working against me.
Some time later, Power wrote:
Shane has grown so mean and niggardly that I don’t think I’m far wrong in guessing that he has
never married because the very idea of sharing his wealth in any way, even with a wife and children, is anathema to him. I don’t think I have ever met a wealthy man so considered about every expense. He’ll pay for drinks or buy you dinner, but he keeps a running tally on everybody, it seems, and always comes out ahead.
I think of his old father dozing there in his chemist shop, never throwing anything away, always with one eye half-open on the door and the other on his ledger. People call him the meanest man in Sneem and delight in telling stories about his avarice in which—imagine!—he takes pride.
Already stories circulate in Dublin about Shane. Like father, like son.
McGarr thought of another thing he had been told that morning in the pub—about how Frost had employed a gang of men from Dublin to build his house in Sneem, the same who had worked on the Eire Bank headquarters, local opinion be damned. Doubtless it was economics again, and the house was probably a “perk” of the Dublin contract, gotten for next to nothing. Or nothing.
Other cards went on in the same vein of critical assessment, the most recent being dated
January 22 Dublin
I keep asking myself what happened to Shane. Formerly, though always careful, he was a hell of a good fellow. Perhaps it is who we’ve become as the years have gone on, and the system that’s flattened us out. We’ve all had to change. With Shane, however, the process has been rather more severe.
Today I divulged to him my proposal for the national debt, and he nearly jumped when I mentioned how necessary an immediate write-down of no less than 20 percent would be. “Why?” he demanded. I told him for good faith, to show that we in the banking community were compassionate and willing to “take a hit,” as the Americans say, along with everybody else.
“You mean your good faith,” he replied, and then charged me with hypocrisy in espousing compassion for the very “yokes”—by which he meant average rate-paying citizens, I believe—whom I had formerly despised. I told him I never despised anyone; I had simply made a mistake, as had he.
The Death of Love Page 21