The Death of Love

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Did. I did own a piece of Eire Bank. Three percent. Wish it was three hundred percent, but it’s a done deal, don’t you know. That’s catchy, isn’t it? Somebody ought to write a tune with that line. You know, ‘It’s love/ I snatched her flower/ It’s a done deal, don’t you know.’”

  Harney looked down on the bandages that sheathed McGarr’s upper body. “Do I hold the glass to your lips?”

  “Straw,” said McGarr, picking up one on the hospital-bed table and lowering his mouth to its end.

  “Now, that’s a first. Hogan’s Own through a straw.”

  “Better than a needle,” said McGarr, which caused Harney to laugh overloud and overlong.

  Pulling up a chair, he had to remove the plastic tote sack with the bound sheaf of photocopies before sitting. The printing on the sack said, PARKNASILLA in tangerine letters on a buff background. A GREAT SOUTHERN HOTEL.

  “So—you got Gladden and the others.” Harney’s girth was such that his breathing was voluble, and his eyes narrowed down on McGarr in a kind of sly smile. “To your continuing good health and progress in the world.” He raised his glass.

  McGarr closed his eyes and pulled on the straw; he wondered how many of his clothes he could manage to put on by himself. He would close the door and leave a note that he had taken a stroll and would be back soon, which would give him something of a lead. It would take him—what?—a half hour to walk to the Castle, and he might be lucky enough to catch a cab outside the hospital, if there weren’t any reporters about.

  “May I be frank?”

  Better than Francine, McGarr thought, the warm seep of the malt making him feel momentarily buoyant in spite of the continuing pain.

  The new cigar was out, Harney holding the flame from a large gold lighter to its end. “Paddy Power’s note cards—do you have them?”

  McGarr blinked, but he did not glance at the sack that had been placed against the wall.

  “Did you read them?”

  Again.

  “Can you tell me what they say?” Harney swirled the cigar. “Generally, I mean.”

  “Generally, they’re”—McGarr rejected the words explosive, inflamatory—“revelatory.”

  “Of what? Give me an instance.”

  The debt. How it was derived, who particularly it has enriched, and who is not paying it back.” He watched Harney’s smile sag. “Other matters—government participation in your housing scheme in Clondalkin and elsewhere. How the permissions were gained, roads built, palms greased—that sort of thing. Eire Bank, as you would suspect, merits a full heading. Stack of cards so big.” McGarr held out two index fingers to demonstrate the size. “The only heading larger is that for Sean Dermot O’Duffy,” who would be canonized in your newspaper, he did not add. McGarr tugged on the malt.

  Harney extracted the cigar from his gob and examined its gluey end. “Which is why you didn’t turn them over to Farrell.”

  Or anybody else.

  “Which is why you even risked your career to keep people from reading them?”

  McGarr only tilted his head.

  “Who else has read them?”

  “Gladden, Gretta Osbourne perhaps, and certainly Nell Power. She had them long enough to read them in their entirety.”

  “I’ve spoken to Nell,” who would do nothing to jeopardize the Eire Bank deal, he did not have to add. “Shane Frost?”

  McGarr thought for a moment. If Kieran Coyne could be believed, somebody had dropped the note cards off in the hallway outside of Coyne’s office. If it had been Frost, would he have had the time or inclination to read them? Why, when he probably knew most of the revealing information that the cards contained? “Maybe.”

  “Anybody else at all?”

  McGarr shook his head.

  “Not your wife?”

  McGarr only stared at the man. He did not want to make Noreen a target. Harney was not a gunman, but with the stakes high, so too was the propensity for risk. Again he thought of Eire Bank and Shane Frost. What was the price of two more lives? Or three, counting Nell Power.

  With the cigar in the center of his mouth, Harney leaned back and folded his arms across his considerable chest. “So, what now?”

  McGarr did not honestly know. He would consult with McKeon and O’Shaughnessy, who, apart from Ward, were the only two men he trusted. Only then would he decide.

  “Farrell won’t last forever,” Harney went on. “In fact, there’re some who think he got it all wrong—how you handled the Power investigation, Gladden, and surely the note cards. Already the Times is indicating—”

  McGarr nodded. Thank God for the Times.

  “You saw it? And I’ve heard other rumblings. You know, from Joe and Jane Soap. Nobody can protect a public figure from a Gladden or an Oswald, who will find a way to do what they will, regardless. Which wasn’t your job anyway. You were investigating what Gladden was calling a murder, though there’s plenty to say he was the murderer himself. And then it wasn’t as if Farrell had had no warning, was it? With Gladden ranting the day before and the village crawling with the police and the army. And his rifle, of course. He might have used that to assassinate the taosieach and not your wife’s Rover.”

  Harney straightened up in the chair and pulled the cigar from his mouth. “It occurred to me immediately, you see—why was the vehicle not searched? And in it both the rifle and the dead man he had been secretly treating and he hoped the Gardai would mistake for himself, after he drove the Land Rover over a cliff.”

  McGarr knew why. As a local and a medical doctor, Gladden was probably known to the Guards who had been assigned that end of the village. He might have told them that the man was sleeping or had been sedated, and he was only waiting for the bridge to be cleared so he could drive him back to his house in Waterville or some other place to the west.

  Harney stood and began pacing. “No—your command was—is—the Murder Squad. Also, you had earlier conferred with the taosieach who had advised you not to hassle the poor demented Dr. Gladden. My own son was a witness to that. In retrospect, it was a mistake on O’Duffy’s part—one of the few in his illustrious career, which is unparalleled in modern Irish history—but certainly it wasn’t your mistake. You didn’t take Gladden in for assaulting you because his arrest would have provided him the—”

  “Forum,” McGarr supplied.

  “—that he so desperately desired. The note cards? Well”—he turned to McGarr—“the reason you didn’t turn them over is there were none. They got destroyed in your wife’s car, the one Gladden fired at. From then on it was nothing but a brilliant, brave, and selfless ruse designed to lure Gladden back to Dublin, which worked. You had to lead Farrell and the government and the press and the people on, even to filling those three plastic sacks with the blank note cards from Shane’s father’s chemist shop and carrying them with you to Rathmines.”

  Again Harney examined the cigar. “Did I give you one of these, Peter? They’re grand and help a fella muse and speculate.” Out of his jacket he pulled a fistful of cigars that he placed on the bedside table. From the bottle he topped up both glasses and drank off his own in a swallow.

  “What we would have to know, however, is that the cards—all copies—are destroyed. Utterly.”

  But then, thought McGarr, he’d only have Harney’s word that the “government,” as it were, would fulfill its side of the—was it?—bargain.

  “There’d be hell to pay, if they ever came back to haunt us.” Harney reached for his hat and topcoat. “Well, now—I’ll let you think on the matter. I must be off. You can reach me anytime through the Spectator. Just tell them who you are, and somebody will get back to you with a place we can meet.”

  Harney began stepping toward the door but turned back. “Did I ask you how old you are? Fifty-one, I’d hazard. Four years from retirement, if you choose. Think of it, four years as commissioner and then on to something else, like the Dail. Given the publicity and how you bagged Gladden, you’ll be a lifelong hero and
simply unbeatable from wherever you choose to stand for election.

  “Wife leave that?” he asked without pause, pointing to the plastic tote sack against the wall.

  McGarr nodded.

  “Can I ask what’s in it?”

  “A photocopy of Paddy Power’s note cards.”

  Harney’s body rocked; he had guessed right. A puff of fine blue smoke sailed from the cigar. He blinked. “Can I…take it with me?”

  McGarr shook his head.

  Harney considered the sack further. “Why not?”

  “Because there are things in those cards that you weren’t meant to see.”

  “Meant by a dead man.”

  McGarr nodded. “Think if they were your cards.”

  “But I’d be dead and what would it matter? To me.”

  McGarr said nothing.

  “Tell me now—I wasn’t meant to see them, but you were?”

  “No, but I did in the course of an investigation.”

  “And that makes you arbiter of who should and shouldn’t see them? You’ve arrogated that right to yourself and yourself alone.”

  McGarr cocked his head. “It’s not as if I asked or was appointed. Another way to look at it is—Paddy Power never intended anybody to see them in their present form. Many of the cards are his most private thoughts, filled with confessions and confidences and the like.”

  “Which are safe with you?”

  “I don’t own a newspaper,” or have a son who wishes to be taosieach, he did not add. “Thanks for the bottle and the smokes, which are much appreciated.”

  Harney’s eyes were fixed on the sack, which, used effectively, could be a potent weapon in his political arsenal. He then glanced at McGarr in the bed in his bandages.

  “The door is behind you, sir. Why spoil an otherwise-pleasant visit?” When Harney still did not move, McGarr laboriously pulled back the covers. There, resting on his stomach, was his Walther, which collected Harney’s eyes.

  “What—you’d shoot me?”

  “Think of it this way. We’re already in a hospital, and you’ll probably not die, though my aim won’t be perfect.”

  “Don’t you have the original cards and another copy?” Harney had been speaking to somebody—Frost, McGarr bet.

  He said nothing.

  “Haven’t you understood what we’ve just been discussing? It’s your future, man. These cards will either make you or break you.” Harney’s tone was now stern. “There is no third course.”

  McGarr could think of several, including mailing the originals to a rival and uncommitted newspaper, though that would be as wrong as allowing Harney to walk out with the photocopy. “I appreciate the…counseling, is it?”

  Wrinkles furrowed Harney’s brow. “You wouldn’t shoot me.”

  McGarr’s hands moved toward the Walther. He worked the slide, then pointed the barrel at the sack. “As I was saying, thank you for the chat, the bottle, and the cigars. They’ll warm my afternoon.”

  The muscle in Harney’s jaw tensed, as he bit down on the cigar, which puffed. He turned for the door. “I can hardly believe it! The son of a bitch would have shot me from his hospital bed!” He chuckled. “Now there’s a hard man for you. I only hope he can dial my number as easily.” At the door Harney stopped and winked. “Still friends?”

  “Is it here we sing ‘It’s All in the Game’?”

  Harney began laughing. It was the same rich, deep, contagious laugh that he had entered with.

  The moment the door closed, McGarr made a phone call, then began the painful process of easing himself out of bed and into his clothes. At the closet he managed to fit his legs into his trousers and to slip on his shoes if not his socks. Somehow he got shirt, suit coat, and mac slipped over his shoulders, and the last garment buttoned to the chest. His hat, which he needed if only for anonymity, he put on by placing it on the back of a chair, then sitting in the chair and easing the fedora over his brow.

  With the Parknasilla sack in hand, he waited until the hallway was nearly empty of nurses, then made his break for the service stairs. A sizable group of reporters had gathered in the lobby of the hospital, but a Garda public-affairs official was speaking to them, and McGarr, walking beside a nurse who was pushing an invalid in a wheelchair, managed to make the street unseen.

  There, he found a cab. Rummaging through the Parknasilla sack to make certain it contained the complete photocopy of Power’s notes, he also discovered Noreen’s voice-activated tape recorder. On it was a note that had been attached by the cord of an earplug. Written in her neat script, it said, “Cued to Frost/Osbourne exchange. Fast-Forward to beep, then Play.”

  McGarr unwrapped the cord, placed the plug in his ear, and sat back and listened.

  Passing Dublin Castle, where his office was located, he glanced up and was struck by how worn and dirty the place looked. Something should be done about it, but when and by whom? With staff and budget cutbacks there was no time and no money, and then nobody, not even he, really, cared for more than the few moments it took to consider some more pressing matter. Like O’Duffy, Sneem, and Gladden. Or Paddy Power and Gretta Osbourne. And the debt and who got what. And Harry Harney and son.

  It was institutional plaque, he decided. A kind of governmental arteriosclerosis in which facts and figures just got lost or were vaguely and transiently remembered. Things happened and got lost. Detail piled upon detail, and particular facts, such as those in Paddy Power’s note cards and McGarr’s own files, really didn’t matter.

  He studied the statue of Justice that topped the main entrance gate. He hoped the jingle that was known in the last century no longer applied, at least to him. “Statue of Justice, mark well her station/,” the lyric went, “Her face to the Castle, her back to the nation.”

  CHAPTER 26

  On History, Which Is Not Life

  THE SKY HAD turned leaden again, and wide flakes of wet snow were landing with the delicacy of holy wafers on the windscreen. Outside in the street, however, the slush reminded McGarr that he was not wearing socks, and he shuffled as quickly as his open shoes and strapped arms would allow toward the warm yellow lights of Hogan’s, a turn-of-the-century, center-city pub.

  In spite of her father’s death, Bresnahan was at the bar, a drink in front of her. Wearing some tight wrap of stylish, somber wool, she was staring down at her glass. Even sitting on a tall barstool, her long, shapely legs reached the floor; twined, they had become objects of momentary adoration, whenever a sip permitted eyes to view beyond the lip of a glass.

  McGarr placed his plastic sack on the bar and waited for her to raise her head.

  “Chief,” she said. “I was told you’d be coming.”

  McGarr’s eyes flickered toward the snugs.

  “Bernie’s already here. He’s in back now,” she went on bravely. “Hogan gave him the carton with the original note cards and the Nell Power copies.” There was a pause, while her gray eyes, which were brimming with tears, met his, then dropped to the sack. “Another copy?”

  “My own kind of insurance.”

  “Did you see the article in the Cork Examiner? I didn’t think anybody could possibly support anything about Mossie Gladden now, but there they are, saying if the cards had been made public, maybe Gladden wouldn’t have been moved to do what he did.”

  “Busy fingers.” He meant that somebody down at the Cork Examiner had had some space to fill, but it showed how everything that had happened in Sneem would be played over and over in the media. McGarr waited until she glanced at him again. “You don’t have to be here.”

  “Nor do you, Chief. But you are. And it’s only right that I should deliver this in person.” Across the top of the bar she slid a typewritten sheet of paper, which McGarr scanned. It was her resignation.

  “But don’t you want to wait a bit to see how you feel in a couple of days, a week, a month even? I’m no longer in charge, as you know, but I’m sure Liam—”

  But Bresnahan was shaking her head. “The
funeral’s on Tuesday, and I have my mother to look after. I’m just in town to pick up a few things. Sorry about the phone, Chief. When we got cut off, I thought it was just a malfunction. It never occurred to me that—”

  “How could you have known? And you had so much else on your mind. I hope that’s not what this is all about.” He shoved the resignation toward her, as though to have her take it back. When she did not, he went on, “We’re all very sorry about your father. If there’s anything we can do—”

  She shook her head and looked up at the windows, her gray eyes bright with tears. “Even he knew it was coming, and he left the farm and my mother in good shape. She’ll not want for much.”

  “And you plan to do what? Live there?”

  She nodded, and a single tear rolled down the creamy skin of her face. Somehow McGarr just didn’t see her back on a farm in Kerry; she had grown beyond that and would be lost without Dublin.

  “Heard from Hughie?”

  She nodded. “They’ll be letting him out of the hospital today. In Limerick. His left leg is in a cast, but otherwise he says he’ll be fine.”

  “Going down to fetch him?”

  She shook her head and began digging in the purse for a hankie. Tears were flowing freely now. “I don’t know. Rory O’Suilleabhain?” she asked. “He’s simply beside himself, asking me to marry him. I know it’s just the losses—his mother and my father—and him grieving, but he’s the fella from the next farm, and the local T.D….?” She glanced up at McGarr, her eyes defiant, as if challenging him to tell her she was wrong. “He’s not much, and Rory plans to stand for the seat. He’ll win.” She sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be seeing you again.” She blotted her eyes, then stood and turned, as if she would simply walk away.

  “Whoa! Wait a minute. Sit down for a moment.” McGarr waited until she had and looked up at him. “Tell me this now, do you love this Rory O’Suilleabhain?”

  She shook her head. Tears were running freely now, and she began blowing her nose.

  “What about Hughie?”

  “I don’t know,” she said through honks.