Mulcahy sniffed at the shield, rotated his suffering buttocks on the cold bench, and wanted to know, “What sort of trouble are you bringing us all the way from New York now?”
When somebody asks me a loaded question, and sneers like Mulcahy had just sneered, I find it useful to reply with something disarming. That way, I sometimes dig out the reason behind the prejudice. Besides which, there is little percentage in any other style of response. So I wriggled my own hips in imitation of Mulcahy’s discomfort, and asked, “What do you do for that?” Mulcahy’s face shook, and he said, “What—my arse?”
The uniforms laughed like they were a couple of kids who had just broken wind in a church pew. Ruby rolled her eyes, and whispered, “Oh, Hock!”
I said to Mulcahy, “When I was working the Bronx—this was way back, when I was a rookie assigned to precinct prowl duty—I had to ride around in squad cars all day and night. I can see I don’t have to tell you about the occupational hazard of that. But maybe you’d like to know, I came across the surefire cure.”
“Never mind any of that!” Mulcahy snapped. “It’s murder we got here and now.”
“When you can’t stop scratching your after-side? Damn straight it’s murder …”
I waited for Mulcahy to bark again, but he said nothing. Instead, he again shifted his afflicted buttocks.
So I continued, “What happened was, one night I’m just like you—grilling a perp, squirming in my seat, wishing to God I could go someplace for a good long scratch. Now, the perp is this Bronx drug dealer called Sweet Dick, who notices my predicament and says to me, ‘You want to lose that ol’ bad itch, man?’ I say sure I do. And Sweet Dick says, ‘Well, you come on over to my crib and I fix you up good … ’”
I paused. Mulcahy said, “Well—?”
“So we go over to Sweet Dick’s place. He takes a little jar of Vaseline down off a kitchen shelf and says, ‘No peeking now, man—trade secret, you know.’ He goes off to the next room by himself. In a couple of minutes, he comes back and gives me the jar, and says, ‘To thine ownself be kind, just rub this on your skinny behind.’ Which to Sweet Dick is the funniest thing anybody’s ever said. You should have heard him laugh.”
“Did you use the stuff?” Mulcahy asked, anxiously. “Did it work?”
“Sure, I used it. Never had one more problem with the itch. Not until I ran out of the stuff and had to go find Sweet Dick again. Trouble was, I found him dead. Which in New York can happen.”
“Never mind that. What was in the stuff?”
“Well, I eventually had to go to the police lab for a chemical analysis …”
“What the deuce was in it, man?”
“Petroleum jelly and cocaine.”
The uniforms sniggered some more.
Mulcahy’s eyes narrowed, and he said, “I’m marking you down as uncooperative.”
“Noted.”
He looked at both of us, sneered again, and said, “Maybe we’ve just got us a couple of real political types here, what?”
Ruby spoke up at this. “I won’t speak for the gentleman, but I’m certainly no politician,” she said. “Constable, do you know why a politician has one more brain cell than a horse?”
“No. Why?”
“So he doesn’t crap in the street during parades.”
“That corks it!” Mulcahy said. He stood up, furious at us both for spoiling his interrogation, more furious yet at the fire in his seat. He moved a hand discreetly back behind himself. “We’ll now be taking you down to Keegan himself for formal questions about your bloody politics.”
Which, as I said, was fully two hours ago.
We had spent most of this time minus our passports in a small closed room with a couch and two side chairs, a table with ashtrays and lukewarm tea in a flowered ceramic pot and the Dublin newspapers. And a mirror along the top half of one wall.
“I recognize a two-way viewing and holding room when I see one,” I whispered to Ruby. “They’ve probably got the room wired for sound, too. We should talk about anything but politics.”
“Better we should talk about nothing, period—until we see a lawyer, or at least somebody at the American Embassy,” Ruby said. “So I’m going to shut up now. Later, I’m going to scream. I suggest you do the same.”
Good advice, I agreed. After all, we were a couple of shady foreign characters by the lights of whomever was observing us from the other side of the mirror. So we mostly drank tea and caught up on the news and stayed cool. And therefore looked guilty as hell of something, as I have always assumed of the calm, cool and collected types I myself have sweated in such rooms.
Eventually, we were shown into Keegan’s office. That was ten minutes ago, with us sitting all the while in the puny chairs and him ignoring us while he scanned a short stack of papers an aide had spread out on his desk.
Chief Keegan now clipped down the tip of a cigar and lit up. He did not offer me one. The sweet aroma of Cuban tobacco mixed nicely with the other smells in the room: old books lining the shelves behind Keegan, bay rhum gleaming on his jowls, lanolin slicking down his thinning black hair.
He looked up and across his desk at Ruby, and said, “Madam, what exactly is the nature of your association with Mr. Hockaday?”
“Detective Hockaday.”
Keegan smiled at her, but not to be friendly to a tourist. My guess was he would have liked to slap the insolence off her face. “As you say,” he said to Ruby.
“Hock and I, we’re slow-dancing together,” Ruby said.
The chief riffled through papers, shaking his great, glistening head. His eyes narrowed between pudgy, hooded lids, and he said to Ruby, “That’s a very amusing answer, madam. Here I thought perhaps Constable Mulcahy was exaggerating, but I now see for myself how you’re the uncooperative type.”
Then Keegan turned to me. “Let’s try you, Hockaday. Have you any clue as to what happened today in O’Connell Street?”
“That’s a professional question?”
“Maybe so.”
“What makes you think I’ve got a professional answer?”
Keegan leaned back in his chair, puffing his cigar. “There’s been time enough for us to make certain inquiries—Detective.”
“That’s real nice,” Ruby said.
“She means it’s nice you’re calling me Detective,” I said to Keegan. “She doesn’t think it’s nice the way we’ve been treated here. Neither do I.”
Keegan waved a hand and said, dismissively, “You know how these things are.”
“Where I come from, there’s a local custom called professional courtesy. That means we don’t go around figuring some out-of-town cop who happens to witness a shooting on some crowded street is the one who pulled the trigger—which means we don’t confiscate his passport and then sit him down for two hours in a little room with a phony mirror.”
“So that’s the way we’re making you feel now? I’d hate to think the Garda could be responsible for straining Irish-American relations.” Keegan, yawning, picked our passports out from the papers on his desk and handed them to us. “Speaking on behalf of all Dublin, my apologies to you and the lady. You’re quite free to leave, you know—right this minute if you fancy.”
“You forget, you asked me a question.”
“True. But tell me, did I receive the professional courtesy of an answer?” Keegan now displayed the malignant smile.
I did not take the smile kindly, and said, “What’s the joke, Chief?”
“There’ll be no jokes coming from this side of the desk, Hockaday.”
“Except for the gag about your treating us here like a couple of murder suspects.”
“Murder, you say?” Keegan pulled forward, consulted his papers again. “But look here—according to Constable Mulcahy’s report, you said it was something more than murder. Something about politics, was it now?”
Ruby nudged me, and said, “Maybe we ought to go.”
Davy Mogaill’s words were in my head: “What doe
s a right-born American know about politics?” So I said to Keegan, “Maybe we’d better just trust the Dublin Garda to sort it all out.”
“Trust—now there’s a quality lacking in our brave new world,” Keegan said. “And yet I cannot forget me sweet father always telling me, Never put trust in the inevitability of a glorious morning sun or your mother-in-law’s smile.” He paused, fixed me with a stare, and asked, “How about your own father, Hockaday? What’s he tell you?”
I have given the same answer to questions about my father many times over the years. The words are always the same. They have always served as the numb explanation for the fact of my life, until I heard myself saying them now: “My father was a soldier, he died in the war and I never knew him.”
“Is that so?” Keegan said, with no particular trust in this simple fact.
I changed the subject. “Let’s move this along, Keegan. Everybody in O’Connell Street saw the same thing we did: three armed men running down from the Post Office steps. I took down two of them, the third one got away after nailing our driver. Now then—who the hell was it after us, and who the hell is Francie Boylan?”
Keegan’s eyes danced and he began laughing, loud and merry, like a boy watching a chair collapse under a fat lady. No doubt he was laughing because I had just broken any halfway competent detective’s first rule for asking questions in a hostile situation; which is, keep your mouth shut unless you know the answer. That much of the amusement I could readily understand. But there was more behind Keegan’s laughter, and to understand it all would wind up consuming the balance of a sentimental journey to my ancestral land.
“The answers to your questions, Detective Hockaday—why, they’ll add up to so much more than simple murder, wouldn’t they now? And wouldn’t you agree how this is all so much more complicated than one of your American whodunit novels?” Keegan was good at this, and he was enjoying himself; now it was me wanting to knock the insolence off his face.
“Hock, it’s time to go,” Ruby said.
“The lady’s so right,” Keegan said.
Again, I asked the artless question. “What’s his politics?”
“Whose politics would you be wanting to know?”
“Boylan’s.”
“Francie Boylan,” Keegan said, folding his hands, “is our living and dying Irish history.”
“Meaning—?”
“Boylan was a fanatic. As Father always told me: fanaticism is protected by ignorance and is, therefore, irrefutable. And what about your father, Hockaday?”
“You asked me that before. And I told you, he died in the war.”
“That you did.”
“Our work here is done,” I said, rising. Ruby stood up and took my arm. We headed for the door.
“Only one thing more,” Keegan said.
I turned and looked at him, saying nothing. He was smiling again.
“I nearly forgot,” Keegan said. “When I was on the line to New York, chatting with your Inspector Neglio, he asked me to pass along a bit of unfortunate news.”
“What news?”
“It’s about a friend of yours, the inspector says. A priest, name of Timothy Kelly …” Keegan paused to study my reaction to this, then said, “Poor chap, it seems he’s killed himself.”
Keegan might well have cold-cocked me. He asked, “Would you like to use the telephone?”
“Thanks, not here,” I managed to say.
“No, I shouldn’t think so.” Keegan stood up from his desk and crossed the floor over to us, boards creaking under the weight of his tread. He offered his hand to me, suddenly as full of fraternal regard for a fellow Irish cop as his remarks only a moment ago were full of ambiguous suspicion. “Sorry for your troubles, Hockaday.”
“I have the feeling they’ve just begun.” I did not take Keegan’s hand.
“You’ll be staying at your uncle’s place then, in Dún Laoghaire?”
“Isn’t that what it says on my visitor’s declaration? You must have read that.”
Keegan only smiled.
“If I leave town, maybe I’ll let you know,” I said.
“The Dublin Garda will appreciate the consideration.”
“Which the Garda will get, in direct proportion to the cooperation given to me.”
“And what sort of cooperation might an innocent visitor to the Emerald Isle be needing?”
“You show me yours, Chief, and I’ll show you mine.”
We left him standing there in his snug office, unsmiling.
Outside in the street, and well away from Garda headquarters, Ruby asked, “What in the world just happened in there?”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the medallion Father Tim gave me the day before in New York. Was it to protect me against such a fate as Francie Boylan met? I held it flat in my hand and looked it over again, at the one side stamped with the initials H.O.S., the other with the fasces. I looked at it as if I expected the thing to talk to me. “Always keep this in your pocket while you’re on the other side, Neil. And for the sake of your life with Ruby Flagg, remember it’s there when you need it.”
I closed my eyes, remembering the vision of Father Tim in the sanctuary of Holy Cross making his novena to St. Jude, and later in the back of a taxicab with tears in his eyes; seeing in this my failure to heed an old friend’s desperate farewell. And my betrayal of him and of Davy Mogaill, too, as I remembered as well asking myself, Can you ever really know about your friends?
When I now failed to answer Ruby, she asked, “You look pained, Hock. What is it?”
… Again came the dreamt Irish voices across time, telling me to think not of how poor Father Tim might have died, but how in life he shaped my naïveté. And reminding me of the two earthly things he loved best: politics and the movies, which he used to joke were one in the same. “Watch and see some day if voters don’t start electing men to the highest public office right off the silver screen,” he used to say. People used to laugh….
“I’m remembering the way I’d go to the movies when I was a kid, never paying attention to the show times,” I said. “I’d just walk into the theater whenever, right in the middle of a picture; it didn’t matter. I could always stay on past the end, and wait for the next performance—until I caught up with all scenes I’d missed at the beginning.”
“We all went to the movies that way,” Ruby said. “We were all young once.”
“Things are so bright and clear when you’re a kid, aren’t they? An afternoon at the movies is the same as forever. There’s always time to get the whole story.”
“And now that you’re not so young?”
“Time is running a race with confusion. No matter how it comes out, something’s gaining on me.”
“Something should, Hock. I notice whenever you’re feeling sorry about your middle-aged self you forget two things.”
“What—?”
“There’s no magic in being a little boy forever. And you’re not alone, you’ve got me.”
“Thank heaven for little girls.”
“Do that sometime. Thank heaven. Right now, hadn’t you better call New York?”
Chapter 12
Another six rings.
The sharp sound of a telephone in the stillness of New York’s predawn startled Mogaill from his whiskey haze. He dropped his glass to the floor.
Once again, he did not pick up the call.
“What’s he going to think of me not answering?” Mogaill asked.
The man with the black-and-white beard and the .45 automatic sitting across from him, smoking a steady stream of Camel straights, stretched himself and said, “Maybe he’ll figure you finally drown’t yourself in booze.”
“And maybe he’ll come searching for me.”
“They’ll not be much to find now, will there?”
“You’d best take proper care of me. Sooner or later, they’ll come searching, and they’ll not be amused to find one hair of me harmed by the likes of you.” Mogaill reached down o
ver the arm of his chair and recovered his glass on the floor, then picked up the liter of Black Bush on the table next to him. He poured another drink, for himself only.
“You’ve drunk enough by now to fill the Mouth o’Shannon.”
“Can’t you see, my old friend? It’s only my drinking makes you interesting.”
“I don’t come here to be insulted.”
“You’re entitled to your opinion, wrong as it is.”
“You know what I come for, you hump.”
“I do indeed. You’ve come because you cannot help but what you are, Finn. A very little man with a great big gun.”
“We’re both of us plenty big enough to shut up a smart mouth!” Finn clacked the cartridge of the automatic.
“And how would killing me advance you, or your betters—or your sinful cause? Think careful now.”
“No need to kill you, Davy. When I shoot, I’ll be aimin’ for your kneecaps, or your elbows, or hips. You’ll be spendin’ the rest of your days wish’t I’d plugged your heart.”
“Spoken like a true patriot.”
“Aye, a patriot’s what I am.”
“And would you be claiming yourself a man of principle?”
“‘Tis a dark shame we don’t say the same of you no more.”
“Nae, the shame’s on patriots like you, Finn. You’re good at fighting for principles, but not so good at living up to them.”
“You’ll not slow the struggle usin’ your pretty words.”
“What a shocking, unpatriotic thing you say. Anybody knows it’s words are a true Irishman’s best weapons.”
Finn jumped from his chair, lunged at Mogaill and whipped his mocking face with the pistol. Mogaill’s drink flew from his hand, whiskey and blood dribbled down his chin. In his defense, Mogaill roared with laughter. And Finn, his pistol raised for another blow, could only tremble in confused anger.
“Sit down with your gun now,” Mogaill commanded. “Pathetic, isn’t it, how a patriot such as you’s no match for laughter?”
Finn’s arm slowly fell. Mogaill laughed again, and said, “If you owned a tail, I’d see it now curling out between your knees.” Finn sat down. With as much authority as he could muster in his voice, which was not much, he said to Mogaill, “Let’s us talk of the agreeable thing near to both our hearts.”
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