Drown All the Dogs

by Thomas Adcock

  Mogaill recovered his glass, poured more whiskey into it, and gave it a grand wave. Then he said, “By which you’re meaning—the olde sod itself?”

  “Aye, Eire.”

  “As Sean O’Casey wrote, ‘The terrible beauty is beginning to lose her good looks.’ But then, being a high-ranking member of an ignorant army, you wouldn’t be much of a reading man, would you?”

  “It’s words like that’ll do you in when you’re facin’ the ones less kind and tolerant as me,” Finn said, lighting another Camel. “We’re friends for years, Davy. Which is why I’m lettin’ you live, out of respect for the past—”

  “My deepest gratitude to you all,” Mogaill said, interrupting.

  “But the cause’s bigger and older than our friendship. So, never forget, I’m still fightin’, along with those you abandoned. And we’ve no patience for your satire.”

  “Stop wasting time then, bring on your grim comrades. I’ll tell them same as you what I think of your damnable politics. Not that any man jack of you would understand.” Mogaill finished his drink. “The way I see it, politics is the pursuit of you trivial types, you little men with your big guns. When you succeed, you become important in the eyes of other trivial men.”

  “Blast you! I remember the day you was the surest of us all.”

  “That was then. Today I’m saying there ought to be a kind of politics where a man needn’t be certain of every thing, nor every minute. All the good of this life thrives on continual uncertainties provided by God. Did you never hear that, Finn?”

  “More pretty words!”

  “No decent Irishman owns ears so hard as yours.” Mogaill shook his head.

  “I ought to blow away a kneecap now.”

  “First give me a moment, please, I’ll be having another jar.” Mogaill picked up the bottle. It was empty. “Damn the luck!”

  “The sun’s coming soon, and with it, the others.” Finn clacked the automatic again. “You know what we’ll be needing to hear.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Mogaill. His arm dropped over the side of his chair, his hand down to the black box, out of Finn’s sight. Then he rose from the chair.

  “Where you goin’?” Finn said.

  Mogaill rubbed blood on his chin. “To wash me Irish mug for your lovely friends.”

  Mogaill walked to the bathroom as the telephone began ringing again. Finn followed him, and stood outside the locked door as Mogaill ran water.

  Chapter 13

  “It’s not even daybreak back in New York,” Ruby said. “Where the hell is he?”

  I hung up the phone. “Well, you said he’d be safe and sound at home, didn’t you? Innocently passed out drunk.”

  “That was before our little cruise down O’Connell Street with Francie Boylan, and before Keegan was telling us about your priest’s suicide. Now I’m not so sure there’s anything Irish that’s innocent.”

  I picked up the telephone again.

  “Who’re you calling?” Ruby asked.

  “Tomasino Neglio. He’s not Irish.”

  I gave the overseas operator Neglio’s home number and said it was collect. There was a half-minute of hissing through the trans-Atlantic cable, then Neglio picked up on the second ring. He complained about it to the Dublin operator, but he accepted the charge. By the sound of him, I guessed he had not managed to get back to sleep after Keegan’s call.

  “Answer me one thing,” Neglio said. “How is it you can’t just go away for a nice holiday and leave everybody alone, including us back here in New York?”

  “So you miss me already?”

  I heard him blowing over the surface of hot coffee. “Hock, what gives over there? And for the love of Christ, don’t tell me it has anything to do with this Father Kelly smoking himself over here.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Little things, like first I hear all over the TV and radio how there’s this priest who shoots himself inside a confessional at your old choirboy stamping grounds, Holy Cross—”

  “What?”

  “That’s the way I said it myself when I heard the news. So I call up the PDU at Midtown-North and they give me over to one Lieutenant Ellis, and guess what he tells me? He says you, Hock, are one of the last persons to see old Father Kelly while he’s still able to rattle his beads.”

  My words were slow and weak, and I realized I sounded like a nervous perp hit with a question that cuts straight to the bone. “I paid the cab fare … he was going home …”

  “Not quite,” Neglio said. “Right about when your plane was lifting off the runway, Father Kelly was in that confessional giving it one last shot, so to speak.”

  I decided for the time being to keep quiet about the troubling talk I had had with Father Tim after showing him my father’s photograph, and about the odd medallion Father Tim had given me. Which is to say, I decided to make this personal. This despite the fact I was first warned against making cop work personal when I was wearing the Police Academy crewcut. Smart cops back off personal cases like rich people back out of rooms full of relatives. Which maybe says something about how smart I am.

  “Did he go quick?” I asked.

  “He shoved this antique Mauser in his mouth and it was lights out—one shot, smack into the cortex. From the bullet, he didn’t suffer. What led up to the bullet, that’s the excruciating question.” Neglio paused, then said, “I have to tell you, Hock, I don’t think Lieutenant Ellis is going to be so quick about shutting down the book on this one.”

  “No?”

  “Not with Mogaill from central homicide sticking his nose into this suicide for some reason or other. And not when he eventually hears about how you just so happen to be on the scene of a murder in Dublin. You see how it looks?”

  “Davy Mogaill—?”

  “A pal of yours, isn’t he?”

  “He was my rabbi.” I took a breath. “When I landed here, there was a message waiting for me to call him at home.”

  “But you didn’t reach him, did you?”

  “No. How did you know?”

  “I couldn’t reach him either. Know where I could find him?”

  “The message said to call him at home. He’s out in Middle Village, Queens, off Metropolitan Avenue.”

  “I’ll send a car to the house. Get back to me. And Hock, take care of yourself.”

  Chapter 14

  Nothing I knew of the life of my uncle prepared me for the sight of the house in Dún Laoghaire.

  Ruby and I stood with our bags in Ladbroke Street after the taxi left us, gaping at number 10, where Liam Hockaday had resided so long as I knew: the big corner place in a row of Baroque houses and elegant old trees, overlooking the cold blue Dublin Bay and its fleets and ships and ferries that trafficked the Irish Sea. There were five storeys of ivy-covered stone, bay windows of beveled glass in lead panes, wooden pilasters and a square-arched Georgian doorway. For the first time in the two hours since we had left the Dublin Garda, we talked of something besides Father Tim’s suicide and the possible whereabouts of Davy Mogaill.

  “It’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen,” Ruby said. “Why didn’t you tell me you come from money, Hock?”

  “Because nobody ever told me.”

  I knew, of course, that my bachelor uncle had extra to spare. He sent a weekly check to my mother, drawn on the Bank of Ireland, right up to her end. But this was common practice; even a poor Irishman provided something regular for his brother’s widow. That check was greatly needed when I was a boy, but the amount of it never betrayed the grand house where it was written and signed, no more than Uncle Liam’s appearance or manner led anybody in New York to imagine he was anything more than what he said he was: a longshoreman, retired, from Dún Laoghaire.

  The last time I saw Liam Hockaday was nearly twenty years ago, during the first week of December when my mother died. I thought of him now, standing beside me then at the open grave in St. John’s Cemetery, Queens; me in my crisp rookie blues, him in his scu
ffed brown shoes and tobacco-reeked tweeds and black rain slicker, crossing himself, wet nosed and weeping, dropping red roses into her final resting place, whispering in Gaelic in frosted whiskey breath that danced in the dank gray air.

  … And who else was there among the tiny party to see her off? Father Tim, who sang a Eucharistic hymn, a cappella, and sprinkled holy water atop the lacquered pine casket. Two anonymous grave diggers in parkas and boots, as accustomed to tears and loss as they were to fog and damp earth. And my solemnfaced rabbi, Davy Mogaill …

  “Well, come on, let’s go,” Ruby said, lifting a bag.

  “I feel like I ought to be carrying a chicken under my arm,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “There’s an Irish stereotype I’ve heard about all my life. It’s about the shirttail relation who pops up one day here in County Dublin from somewhere out in the countryside, firmly believing that one skinny, freshly strangled chicken in a burlap bundle is fair exchange for the vaguely estimated weeks he’ll be eating and sleeping and drinking at your expense.”

  “Oh, we’ve got shirttails like that in Louisiana, too. Not one of them’s Irish, and some don’t bother about the chicken.” Ruby started for the house. I picked up two remaining bags and followed her. She said, “Anyhow, we were invited, remember?”

  … Invited by Patrick Snoody, my uncle’s “loyal friend.” Who seemed surprised to meet the two of us when he pulled open the big Georgian door following a long chorus of chimes.

  “However did you arrive?” he asked, glancing up and down Ladbroke Street over my shoulder. There was only a bicyclist. Snoody shaded his slitted eyes with a hand and watched the bicycle disappear down the hill toward the bay.

  “We took the intercity line down the coast, then a taxi from Parnell Square at the piers,” Ruby said, pointing in the same direction Snoody was looking.

  “Thanks all the same for sending Francie Boylan after us,” I said.

  Snoody shook his large gray head, and said, “I’ve heard.” He made no effort to stand aside for us. Big as the doorway was, Snoody nearly filled it with his considerable height and girth. He wore a well-cut suit and his speech told me he had been to good schools back when people still valued speech, and this was as imposing as the size of him.

  “You don’t mind if we come in to see my uncle, do you?” I said.

  “Terribly sorry,” Snoody said. “What a savage I’m being. Please, do come in.”

  We were then able to step past him into a rectangular entry hall with a tiled floor and mahogany wainscoting. A curved staircase lay at the far end of the hall, which continued beyond the steps. Arches off either side of the front hall led into a pair of opulent sitting rooms, one dark and small and cluttered, the other sunny and laid out sparely, as if it were ready to be photographed. I could tell the rooms were opulent on account of the cornices and moldings and plaster rosettes on the ceilings, not to mention the paintings all over the place in gilt frames with little lamps over them. Also there was enough marble and onyx around to furnish a nice mausoleum.

  Ruby and I set down our bags where Snoody told us to, in front of a desk with a telephone and a stack of mail. Next to this was a tall pegged stand for coats, hats and umbrellas. On the desk was a sketch in a gold filigree frame, supported by an easel. Ruby said, “Look at this, Hock.” I said, not very brightly, “Real old, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed it is,” Snoody said. He stood close in back of us, close enough for me to feel the puff of his breath on my neck. How big men like him are able to move so quick and quiet is a wonder to noisy types such as myself. “It was done in chalk, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, about 1750,” Snoody said. “It’s titled Study of the Head of Tiepolo’s Son, Lorenzo. Quite famous really, it was used as a figure in a fresco at the palace of the prince-bishops of Würzburg.”

  “And here it is in my own uncle’s house,” I said, turning to face Snoody. “This is my uncle’s house, isn’t it?”

  Snoody laughed through his nose, and said, “You’re in the right place, Mr. Hockaday.” He looked down at our bags. “Well, since Mr. Boylan won’t be around anymore,” he said airily, as if Francie Boylan had merely quit his job on the household staff, “I’ll have cook take your things upstairs. Will you, ah … will you be wanting separate rooms?”

  “I’ll be wanting to talk to you about Francie,” I said, “but first I want to see my uncle. Where is he?”

  “One room, one bed,” Ruby said.

  “If you’ll wait in there,” Snoody said, motioning toward the drawing room all ready to become a cover shot. “Cook will prepare your room. I’ll fetch Liam. You’ll find whiskey and sherry on the table by the chimneypiece. Or if you’d rather tea—”

  “No, the booze will do fine,” I said. Snoody gave me a sneer nearly as sour as Ruby’s. Then he stalked off down the back hallway.

  “He doesn’t like me, right?” I said to Ruby as we stepped into the drawing room.

  I headed straight for the refreshments at the fireplace, chimneypiece as Snoody called it. Ruby sank into the cushions of a short peach and green damask couch angling out from the fireplace over a pale blue and cream Oriental rug. She looked ready to fall asleep there.

  “Not very much,” Ruby said. “Sometimes I feel the same, like now for instance.”

  “It’s not like I’m not officially on duty, you know.” I picked up a crystal decanter. I also picked up two glasses and showed them to Ruby.

  “This round, you drink alone,” she said. I poured my whiskey.

  On the wall over the liquor table I noticed another sketch of another guy’s head in another chunky frame, this one with a tiny gold plaque attached. I read it off: “Portrait of a Young Boy, Annibale Carracci, 1591.”

  I sat in the twin couch opposite Ruby, sipped a smooth brown single-malt whiskey, the likes of which I have never tasted, and set it down on the low table between us. “Some of this fruity art, I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think, maybe old Patrick and Liam are a couple of ballerinas?”

  Ruby looked at me like I was diseased. “I think you can be a class-A Philistine sometimes, Hock.”

  “Well … Uncle is a lifelong bachelor. I’d bet Snoody is, too.”

  “You want to try for being a third?”

  “I’m thinking out loud.”

  “There’s thinking, and there’s jabbering. Only one of these things is done by mouth.”

  “I’m only trying to figure what it is that’s hidden here—”

  Noise from the hallway cut me off. There were suddenly two people doing enough hollering for a dozen out there. I recognized Snoody’s patrician voice, the second belonged to a woman we could not see from where we sat. She was well past her maiden days and was what my mother used to call bogside Irish, with the thud of Gawd in her talk.

  “You’ll not be makin’ me party to the wild depravity of the streets!” the woman shouted.

  “I tell you, Cook, you’ll take these grips upstairs to the red room!” Snoody bellowed, his rolled r’s echoing softly in the hall. “And you’ll make damned quick business of it!”

  Ruby and I sat very still in our couches, awkwardly amused.

  “Moira Catherine Bernadette Booley shan’t sing the glories of Gawd on Sunday, then turn’round t’be servin’ Satan Monday! Nae, I’ll not be turned wicked, e’en in the horrible face o’your blasphemin’ the name o’Gawd! Sooner’d you crown me with boilin’ tar!”

  “Whatever makes your bloomers roll up, cook old girl!” This surprising vulgarism from Snoody caused Moira the cook to gasp, loudly. To be perfectly clear, Snoody added, “If it’s tar you want, it’s tar you shall have!”

  “Jaysus, Mary and Joseph—Gawd be merciful to your fallen servant!”

  There was then the sound of, what—wheels? And Uncle Liam’s voice, more cancerous than I recalled: “What’s all this caterwauling now with the two of you?”

  “Mr. Liam, he’s meanin’ for them two in there to fornicate,” said Moira. I presum
ed by them two she was referring to Ruby and me.

  “Good Lord, Patrick, you’re not offending Cook’s pure and Christian sensibilities again?” Liam asked.

  I heard Snoody’s haughty nose again.

  Moira charged, “Aye, he’s blasphemin’! And threatenin’ a true child o’Gawd besides.”

  Liam answered, “Dear Moira Catherine, with all the suffering and rot in this corroded vale—really now! What of the crimes of the odd curse, some old fellow’s noisy intemperance, or even some unchaste traffic about the jolly bits? Well might you wisely conclude, this is all wee stuff.”

  “Take the bags upstairs now,” Snoody said, calmly.

  Moira made a final appeal to Liam: “Did y’get your peep at her in there, sir? Looks like the golliwogg, she does. Mixin’ of the blood’s against Gawd’s holy principles.”

  “I’ve always preferred God’s people to His principles,” Liam said.

  Moira gasped.

  “Take the bags, Cook,” Snoody said. Liam added, “You might as well do as he says, dear Moira Catherine. Then please, take the next hour of your day and pray mightily for our nefarious souls.”

  There was much huffing about this, and more of Snoody’s nose laughter. Then feet clumping on the staircase and luggage bumping ever upward, step by step. Snoody stalked off somewhere. The wheels sounded again. And Uncle Liam entered the drawing room.

  He had shrunk some in twenty years’ time, as men do, and his skin had spotted. And there was the wheelchair.

  I have seen sick old people shape themselves to wheelchairs like infants to their cradles. But not Uncle Liam. There was a small quilt snugged over his knees, to warm the idled legs and keep the blood flowing, but this was his sole concession to immobility. Otherwise, he had not yielded himself to the thing. His back was still defiantly straight, his shoulders thrust back, stomach tucked. At a distance, even in the chair, Liam Hockaday looked perfectly capable of taking up cap, coat and stick for a brisk walk down to Parnell Square. His arms and elbows flailed as he rolled himself toward us, as if the exertion were highly resented.