Francie Boylan paused, as if to burst into some wet-eyed song with a lot of “Tora loo” to it. Instead, he said, “Would you like to know what Pap says of spring?”
Ruby did. I did not.
“Joe Boylan, he says spring’s when the milk tastes like onions.”
“How’s that?” Ruby asked. I was sorry she did.
Francie Boylan took a deep breath, then spoke as if reciting drilled lessons from a classroom: “It’s because cows put early out to pasture eat on the onion grass, which sprouts just after the pussy willows, but before the forsythia … That would be along about the same time as the skunk cabbage coming in …”
And I had to endure about a half hour more of bucolic travelogue until the landscape turned thankfully urban. Which comes suddenly in Ireland, even at the edge of its capital. With no suburban sprawl of announcement, there lay Dublin before us: city of a half million, just beyond the fields. Shipyards and docks, huddled buildings, flax mills, trolley cars, and the sweet steam of breweries and distilleries. Ruby rolled up her window.
We drove first through working-class ghettoes that skirted the city, row upon row of smudged red-brick houses all strung together, low and slanting. Skinny children with dirt in their faces and scabbed knees played in these poor streets; games of bally-cally and Annie-over, as I myself had played in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, in another time and Irish place. Then the broad commercial high streets of succeedingly better districts, with housewives in head scarves setting off to market with their mesh bags, and gray-haired pensioners ambling along with their blackthorn sticks looking for the likes of themselves for another long day’s gossip. And finally, in the diamond of Dublin—O’Connell Street itself.
“Baile Áthe Cliath—that’s Dublin, in the Gaelic,” Boylan said to us, now that our eyes were accustomed to the city and we seemed in the mood for sound as well as sights. “There’s plenty of us never gave up using the glorious name.”
“The old-timers?” I asked.
“Aye, and certain younger ones with respect for all the blood’s been spilled in these here streets.”
“During the Easter Rebellion?” Ruby asked.
“That and other times, and long ago,” Boylan said. He brought the car to a stop at a red light, and pointed out the window toward an ancient public house. Three boys in their teens, wearing leather jackets and construction boots loitered and smoked outside the door. “Have a look at where Black Monday began, back in the year of 1209. That’s when gangs of lads such as them standing right there now set out to massacre the ones lording it over us in our own Baile Áthe Cliath.”
“Who might that have been?” I asked, as if I did not know.
“The English!” Boylan spat.
“You’re a young man, Francie, but somehow you’ve got an old man’s grudging memory.”
“And not a pretty one, neither.”
“How do you come by it?”
“We got our way of remembering all the evil the English done. Ever hear tell of a shanachie?”
I said I had not.
“The shanachie’s a storyteller. His pap before him was the same, and his pap’s old man before that. Back it goes in a shanachie family, through all the hundreds of years of English bastards committing their crimes against us.”
Ruby said, “But now you have it in the history books.”
Francie Boylan shook his head at this innocence, and said, “That’s depending on who’s doing the writing and who’s doing the publishing, colleen. Freedom of the press belongs to them rich enough to own a press. A poor Irishman has only his God-given tongue. Nae, there’s no better way of understanding the horrors than listening to the shanachie telling it true to your face.”
“You’ve grown up with shanachies’ stories, Francie?” I asked.
“I’ve heard my share of tales.”
I surprised myself by saying, “Maybe you could tell us one?”
Boylan pulled off to the side of the street without a word, expertly wedging the Citroën between two smaller cars. Across the way from where we now sat was a massive, official building, with stone columns at the top of marbled stairs and people flooding in and out its great doors. Boylan cut the motor and secured the brake, then turned round in his seat to face us.
“Why are we stopped?” I asked.
“So’s I’ll be telling the tale proper like, Mr. Hockaday.”
“All right.”
Once again, Francie Boylan drew deep from his breath, and deeper still from memory: “It was six months into the great hunger caused by the potato blight, and half the Irish nation was homeless, and most was starving. Those in the villages, too proud to die in the streets for all to see, would crawl up into the bog caves and dig scalps in the wet ground, there to wait for sweet death in lonesome dignity. In the diseased fields, children with their bloated bellies and ribby little chests lay dead and scattered like a battle’s losing soldiers, their lips green from chewing grass at the end. Families, what was left of them, lay about all day in their rags and fevered stink, clinging together, moaning from the pain of scurvy and dropsy, bodies filled with sores.
“And all this while, the English landlords serving up more and more evictions in all the counties where the croppies, the tenants, could nae afford to pay, what with the business of starving to attend.
“In County Galway, in the village of Ballinglass, on the thirteenth of March of 1846, an English bitch by the name Mrs. Gerrard called in a detachment of the Forty-ninth Infantry of the Royal British Army, commanded by Captain Brown, as well as the local English constabulary, and ordered some three hundred croppies to leave their houses—so’s the land could be cleared of the people who had made it their lives, and turned more profitable as grazing ground for cattle.
“The English troops worked with a ferocity that gladdened Lucifer’s heart. They demolished every wretched thing; they set fire to thatched roofs, and tore off them made of slate and pounded the slate down to slivers; they pulled down the walls, they crushed a family’s possessions under horses’ hooves. The women ran about mad and wailing, and them that was not yet booted aside by mounted soldiers barricaded their doorposts, screaming like banshees. Any bare-handed man fool enough to attack a soldier or constable met his maker, quick as an English sword could arrange the introduction. The children cried themselves dry.
“And that night, in the hopeless dark and wind, the people slept in the ruins, only to be driven out at dawn—and the very foundations of the tumbled houses then torn from the ground, and burnt and pulverized, and no neighbor allowed to take in these damned and despised left in the ashes.
“Turned from every door, the people dug their scalps—burrows of two or three feet deep, covering themselves against the cold with sticks and turf. The ones better off had scalpeens, merely a bigger burrow, sometimes inside the smoky ruins of a tumbled house.
“But in the days and weeks that followed, not even this misery could satisfy the shameless bitch and her soldiers. Even these poor folk huddled in their holes, oft’ times hanging on to a dead one for days, were hunted down and evicted.
“Word of this particular outrage could not be kept silent, reaching even into the Parliament at London, where some few shook their well-fed barbarian heads at the news of us dying and suffering so—but where most held honest and true to the grotesquery of their self-interest. On the twenty-third of March in that year of 1846, Lord Brougham defended Mrs. Gerrard and all her evil ilk, by saying: ‘Undoubtedly, it is the landlord’s right to do as he pleases. The tenants must be taught by the strong arm of the law that they have no power to oppose or resist. Property would be valueless, and capital would no longer be invested in cultivation of the land if it were not acknowledged that it is the landlord’s undoubted, indefeasible and most sacred right to deal with his property as he wishes.’”
Francie Boylan paused then, finished with his oral script. He added to it his own conclusion, “And so it is left not to books of history, but to these stori
es told face-to-face, to keep alive this lesson, among so many others at Irish expense: the landlord is no lord of the land, he is the scum of the earth.”
Ruby asked quietly, “And you, Francie—you’re a shanachie?”
“I’ve heard tales from my pap, and from my grandfa’r, too, but I’ve remembered precious few to tell myself,” Boylan said. He shook his head in self-reproach. “It’s the truth I’m a disappointment to the family tradition, yet I do enjoy believing I serve the cause in my own way.”
“The cause?” I asked.
“Aye—the cause of memory, Mr. Hockaday.” Boylan smiled his undertaker’s smile. “Including all the nightmares.”
Boylan then turned toward the great pillared edifice across the way. “That would be the General Post Office,” he said, absently, “where the uprising began on that fine Easter Sunday of 1916.” He gazed intently at the swarm of people on the wide marble steps, his eyes moving over the crowd, as if seeking out someone in particular.
And I was overcome by a sensation as deeply instinctual to a cop as hair rising up off the back of an edgy cat; an instinct I was told way back at police academy I would likely develop, and which I would be wise to trust. I knew in this flashpoint, and without a scrap of logic, that it was no time to be turning my back. Impending violence may have no more immediate logic than this; no more logic than the sudden, profound regret I knew in being without any of the usual weapons I carry.
Francie Boylan was suddenly done with staring at the post office steps. He said, abruptly, “It’s come time.” Then he switched on the ignition, gunned the engine, and pulled the Citroen away from the curb.
With shoulders squared and his sights purposefully ahead of him now, Boylan drove us slowly up O’Connell. The street whose gutters had so long known the running of Irish blood; where in certain doorways still, as I had seen only moments ago, were the brooding faces of a new generation of Irishmen unwakened from history’s nightmares.
And there at the wheel in front of me sat the young Francie Boylan with his old man’s memory. He was not in the least distracted by the men at my back: the ones clattering down from the Post Office, now charging toward us.
Chapter 11
There were three of them.
Solid-built men in tweed caps and dark flapping suits. Faster on foot than the slow-moving Citroen in the choke of O’Connell Street traffic; gaining on us, grimly, like pursuing bogeymen in quagmire dreams, each of them with a menacing hand tucked in his coat.
Now their emergent faces. Red and relentless, encased in women’s nylon hose, rendering their features flat, meaningless, surreal.
Drivers panicked, and angered. Tires screeched, horns honked. Shrieks of warning cut through the traffic hum.
But still, our driver’s senses did not stray.
And the breathless bogeymen drew close enough to kill.
They pulled guns from coats. Long-barreled revolvers that might have been .44s, like my own big, ugly Charter Arms Bulldog. Which regrettably was locked in a closet back in New York.
They were now only steps away. I saw flat eyes behind the nylon, and the murder in them. And did I hear Francie Boylan’s curt, forbidding words again? “It’s time now.”
Ruby screamed.
“Hock—!” I put a muzzling hand at the back of her neck and shoved her roughly to the floor. “Stay there!” I ordered.
Boylan, startled, swung around for a look at this minor commotion. And what a look was now revealed in his face.
Francie Boylan was no longer the earnest chauffeur, nor the compelling shanachie; certainly not a stoic functionary in whatever deadly mission was under way. He was all arrogance now, like the sulking toughs loitering in the doorway of old Black Monday’s pub, waiting for his chance at taking a blow for all the real and imagined slights to an Irishman’s honor.
But it was me who struck first, not him. I filled Francie Boylan’s troubled face with my fist. His nose broke, bursting red. “You son of a bitch!” I shouted at him.
Boylan cupped his blooded nose and fumbled the steering wheel, and the Citroën veered. Outside, I heard the assassins growl.
I crouched at the back window, clutching the door handle. Fists and gun barrels pounded the outside of the car, as if to force us to a stop. I pulled the handle and jerked open the door, shoving it quick and hard into the knees of the closest gunman. He was knocked to the street, screaming as a wheel crushed one of his limbs.
Up front, Boylan struggled with his wound and the spinning wheel, screaming back at me, “You bloody American bastard! You bloody, fookin’ bastard you—!”
I pulled the door shut, then jerked it open again. And broadsided another one. He fell, and in the sliver of space between the door and the body of the car I saw a masked head crack against the pavement.
The third assassin opened fire. Two bullets ripped through the door I held, just above my head, searing through the leather of the front passenger seat, slamming into the dash.
A third shot. Boylan screamed, “You fookin’—!” And this became Francie Boylan’s final life utterance.
With a corpse at the wheel, the Citroën careened out of control. Our chauffeur was only so much more nameless blood spent in O’Connell Street.
The car shot forward, spinning as blindly as a billiard ball cued off the mark. We caromed off a line of other cars and trucks for several eternal seconds, until everything came finally to a jolting halt, then quiet; the silence was more shocking than all preceding sounds of ripping steel and shattering glass.
The stillness was broken as a crowd of people left the sidewalks, surging tentatively through the twist of cars toward our Citroën, at the epicenter of the wreckage. From the floor came Ruby’s frightened voice: “Hock, be careful!” I knelt down and leaned across the seat, touched her shoulder, then poked my head up for a look to the street.
The crowd was milled all around us now. Somewhere, back beyond the line of damaged vehicles, were two gunmen downed in the street. The third man, the shooter, was no doubt gone with the wind.
I touched Ruby again, and said, “All clear. Are you all right?”
“I guess so.” Ruby had made a protective ball of herself during the siege. Knees bent, hands and arms looped over her head. She rose now from this huddle. She touched scrapes on her forehead, and a wrist. That was my fault. She looked me over, and said, “You’re white as paste and shaking, do you know it?”
This was true. “A drink will do us both,” I said.
For once, Ruby agreed.
I then took close notice of the wide-eyed people packed around the Citroën. They were not so much looking back at me, nor at Ruby unfolding herself and sitting up. It was the mess of Francie Boylan that held their attention, and had them gasping, and looking like they needed drinks far more than either of us.
What was left of Boylan’s head was splattered against the driver’s window, like the remains of a melon heaved against a wall. His ear had been blown away, replaced by an oozing hole roughly the size and shape of a coffee cup. Clearly, this was a wound caused by hollow-point dumdums, the preferred ammunition of an assassin engaged in a close-up job of work. Just as clearly, here were bullets far more common in New York than Dublin.
Ruby finally set eyes on Boylan. She covered her mouth, then quickly turned her head, and said, “My God, Hock—what is this, what’s happening?”
I knew the answer, but could not yet say it. I stared at the sea of Irish faces instead—horrified, sickened faces beyond car windows blown to shards by bullets.
And for one fugitive moment, it seemed as if I was asleep. Asleep in a bullet-riddled Citroën; in O’Connell Street, no less, with the press of its awful history. Not asleep at home, not exactly in that familiar, restless state when I can hear my father’s ghost. But asleep just the same, as if my head was submerged in water; as if I was suddenly distanced from the raucous world above me, and freed from the rush and confusion of O’Connell Street, its noises secondary to secret sounds bel
ow the surface of what I could merely see.
In this momentary sleep, I imagined other Irish voices, floating somewhere in time through the pubs and the parlors of Dublin. Quiet, revealing voices that made sense of Ruby’s natural question. I listened, as if to sleeping friends of my own father’s ghost.
Ruby asked, again, “What’s happening here—?”
“Bloody politics,” I answered.
Eamonn Keegan, chief of the Dublin Garda, was a dapper fat man born to the great oak desk that divides his office into two unequal realms: the baroque expanse of himself, and the Oriental rugs and mahogany and red leather that warm Keegan’s side of things, versus two puny chairs on a patch of bare wood floor where Ruby and I sat as hardly more than a pair of rowdy convicts dragged by the scruffs of our necks to an audience with the warden.
That was not quite how we had arrived at the chief’s office, now fully two hours ago. But it was the true sentiment of our police escort from the murder scene in O’Connell Street.
A fleet of uniformed Dublin cops showed up there first, with their black wool jackets and trousers, leather Sam Brown belts with holstered .38s, and visored caps with black-and-white checkerboard bands. Theirs were among the more suspicious faces peering at me, right as I said, “Bloody politics.” After which they hauled Ruby and me out of the Citroën and trundled us off to a police wagon with no windows. This was for initial questioning by somebody in a bad suit and hemorrhoids called Constable Mulcahy.
We sat on a dimpled steel bench inside the police wagon, with Mulcahy on the one opposite, flanked by two uniforms fondling big rubber saps they might have been happy to use. Since I do not own one, I am forever leaving home without an American Express card. However, I am at all times obliged to carry the NYPD gold shield. This I hustled out of my pocket like it was a crucifix and Ruby and I were faced off against three vampires.
Drown All the Dogs Page 7