Drown All the Dogs

by Thomas Adcock

  Then before going up to brief Ruby on my encouraging breakfast chat with Moira, I said to her, “My uncle told me a riddle last night, I wonder if you’ve ever heard it.”

  “That’d be the one about the man with no eyes and the plums?”

  “Yes. Do you know the answer?”

  Moira smiled, bravely. And said no more.

  The radio thumper was saying, “God be true, but every man a liar …”

  From Dún Laoghaire station to Dublin’s central depot is a journey just short of an hour, which was enough time for me to peruse a newspaper and start up a case book. At the station, I had purchased a bus ticket, the Irish Guardian, a spiral-bound journal, and a ballpoint pen from a news agent who was good enough to negotiate the price in American dollars. I would have to change over to Irish pounds later in Dublin, when the banks opened.

  Page one of the newspaper found the world in its usual precarious moment. Prosperous nations were variously mired in economic recession, others were in full-blown depression—or civil war. And everywhere, criminals and half-wits claimed to know the pathway out of chaos. These were the leaders of nations, and their followers seemed to be taking them seriously.

  I turned to page two. A social item about Trinity College reminded me that this would be the appropriate place to begin a day’s research, since I now knew my father had studied there. I folded up the paper to read later. I then noted the Trinity College association in a section of the journal where I had set aside a lot of blank pages for Aidan Hockaday entries, which I had more than a passing hunch would prove somehow central to all others.

  For the next quarter hour, as the bus bumped along the harbor route toward Dublin and my hand cramped from the effort to keep the notes legible, I set down in writing the main elements of the case as I saw them. At the core were a few seemingly unrelated occurrences: Father Tim’s suicide, Davy Mogaill’s disappearance, the murder of Francie Boylan. Surrounding these were scores of messy questions and nasty impressions. And my suspicions; foremost among them, a guess that more was yet to occur.

  “Excuse me for disturbing your work …”

  I looked up from my notebook and across the aisle of the bus to a man about my own age, turned toward me. He wore the suit and hat of an earnest businessman, round wire-rimmed glasses and a small black moustache so neat it looked more like a grease-pencil drawing than clipped whiskers. He had the Irish Guardian spread open atop a leather briefcase balanced across his knees.

  “I wonder,” he asked, “would you be an American?”

  “Yes,” I said, wishing I had not.

  His moustache stretched out thin as a pin over his smile, and he said, “I thought so …”

  I was expected to respond at this point, I suppose, but instead I returned to my notebook.

  “It was your clothes, actually,” Moustache said.

  I was wearing chinos, a nylon windbreaker with the logo of a New Jersey bowling alley on the back, a cotton jersey, a Yankees cap and PF Flyers. Not too many men somewhere in the middle of their lives wear that sort of thing in Ireland, I suddenly realized. I looked up at Moustache again.

  “And your teeth,” he said. “Brilliant.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Your American teeth—brilliant white.”

  “I see. Thanks.”

  “And your name, it would be Hockaday?”

  “It would.”

  “Got it then, I have.” He leaned forward and squinted at me through his glasses. “I’m not sure I would have guessed from your picture alone.”

  “My what—?”

  “Why, in here,” he said, tapping his newspaper. He looked at my copy of the Guardian, folded beside me. “Oh … I see. You don’t know about it. Sorry then, sir … Please, never mind …”

  Moustache got up, as awkwardly as he had just spoken, and moved to another seat. In the new location, he whispered to a woman sitting next to him and now she craned her neck around to get a load of me, too.

  I picked up my copy of the Guardian and riffled through it, until I came to a page fully taken up with the story of Francie Boylan’s murder. There was a smaller accompanying story, decorated with my own rookie photograph, made on the day I graduated from New York Police Academy. I read this smaller article:

  Garda Questions American Detective & Actress in O’Connell Street Massacre

  by Oliver Gunston

  A pair of visiting Americans from New York City—a police detective by the name Neil Hockaday, and a stage actress by the name Ruby Flagg—figure prominently, and mysteriously, into yesterday’s spectacular midmorning slaying of Francis “Francie” Boylan, a longtime local sympathizer of the Ulster-based Irish Republican Army. The Americans were held for an unspecified time for questioning at Dublin Garda headquarters, then released conditionally.

  Detective Hockaday and Miss Flagg were passengers in a private car driven by the late Mr. Boylan, a chauffeur by trade. They were unharmed when a gang of masked gunmen attacked the car (see main article, this page). Chief Eamonn Keegan of the Dublin Garda, who personally interviewed the two Americans, would not disclose their destination on the day of the murder, or their itinerary in Ireland. “That would be a confidential matter for our continuing investigation,” he told the press.

  Nor would Chief Keegan provide any sense of the interrogation, except to say, “We made it known to Detective Hockaday and Miss Flagg that we might wish to discuss this matter with them again, here in Dublin.” When asked if he or the government had confiscated their United States passports, Chief Keegan refused comment. He said, however, that the Americans had been “reasonably coӧperative.”

  Contrary to Chief Keegan’s unrevealing view was that of Constable Aisling Mulcahy, who was first on the scene at the site of the O’Connell Street slaying. “They was both your typical New Yorkers,” he said. “All full of smart-mouthed jokes and not seeming to care a whit for the gravity of a violent murder of an IRA man. In fact, the lady even tried joking about politicians.”

  Ironically, the celebrated New York police career of Detective Hockaday—or “Hock”, as he is known in the popular press there—is highlighted by his involvement in that city’s most baffling homicides. According to a prominent American journalist interviewed for this article by trans-Atlantic telephone, Detective Hockaday was, in fact, on holiday after solving one of the grisliest killing sprees in the entire legendary history of New York crime.

  Said William T. Slattery of the New York Post, “Hock single-handedly cracked a series of murders that had this city completely terrorized, which is saying something. And that wasn’t the first time he’d hunted down a crazy killer all by himself. This last one, though, I hear it shook him up real bad. You don’t deal with the kind of maniacs and lunatics that Hock does every day without it starting to creep your dreams, you know? So he and his girlfriend, Ruby, took off for a little R&R over there in Ireland, I also hear. But he isn’t gone twenty-four hours before a priest friend of his commits suicide right in a church in Hock’s own neighborhood, and there’s a bomb that goes off in the house where his best friend in the department lives—Captain Davy Mogaill of central homicide, of all things. Then as soon as Hock lands in Dublin—bang, some IRA goon is cut down right in front of him. Some rest, some relaxation.”

  Detective Hockaday’s commanding officer, Inspector Tomasino Neglio, was also reached by telephone. Without elaborating, he acknowledged all that Mr. Slattery said, but termed the violence that seems to have dogged Detective Hockaday “coincidence.”

  The Guardian was unable to speak directly to Neil Hockaday or Ruby Flagg, as no one else contacted was willing or able to disclose their whereabouts in this country.

  I tore out that entire page of the Irish Guardian, folded it in quarters and filed it in the back of my case book. I also wrote down the name of the reporter, Oliver Gunston, as a possible source to run down in Dublin. He would see me, of course. And if I played it right, I would learn a lot more from him than he would from me
.

  At the newspaper office, I could also pick up another copy of the Guardian and send it back to Slattery, who would be thrilled to have it, since it would likely be the first time anybody called him a “prominent American journalist.” Maybe the last. For myself, I was only happy that Slats had enough sense to wire over some ancient photo of myself to the Irish Guardian, assuming he was the source. It would make life in Dublin easier if I could go around relatively unrecognized except for my clothes and my brilliant teeth.

  And then, thinking carefully about this publicity, I wrote down one more messy question: Would it be in someone’s unkind interest here to have me recognized?

  Chapter 23

  “Moira?”

  “Aye—?”

  “May I come in?”

  “If you’ll want your mornin’ tea, I suppose you must. You’ll nae have me cartín’ pots up and down stairs so early, Miss Fancy Thing.” Moira sniffed loudly, and made a great show of taking a kettle of steaming water off the stove and pouring it into a brown teapot. She might be a servant in the house, but this kitchen was her realm, by Gawd. She turned off the radio halfway into the second of the morning’s obituary readings. Then, clucking her tongue, she said, “To think we’d want to start the day hearin’ which of the neighbors dropped in the night! Such depressin’ stuff, that.”

  “Yes—and what with so few souls sure of leaving for glory these days,” Ruby said, stepping down the stair into the kitchen. She had remembered Hock’s tip about thumper talk at the earliest opportunity and the warming effect it had on Moira’s frost. Much as it cut against her own grain, Ruby now saw the practicality of Hock’s advice. Moira’s head was tilted, as if in loving study of a sister not seen in decades. And what had it cost Ruby to sink her hook with but a single hackneyed ad-lib?

  “Come you,” Moira said, smiling her brave smile and motioning for Ruby to take a seat at the butcher block table where Hock had eaten breakfast some two hours before. “I would’ve thought from your blasphemin’ the night before you was noureligious.”

  “My lack of religion’s got nothing to do with the fact that I’m a believer the same as you, Moira.”

  “Well, I only thought—”

  “Have you ever noticed how many religious people think they are thinking when they are only rearranging their prejudices?”

  Poor Moira was now very confused. What passed for conversation in her life were mostly one-sided exchanges between Liam and herself or Snoody and herself, and mostly for the purpose of fulfilling the men’s needs. No great thought was required of anyone in such discourse. Moira had supposed this fallowness to be the way of the world beyond the great house in Ladbroke Street. Certainly she knew no different in the few other places she had ever been. But here was this woman—this American, this black woman!—speaking to her as if she had a man’s own brain. And what was that she said about prejudices?

  Ruby saw the pain of thought in Moira’s doughy face. She sat down at the table, glanced at her wristwatch, and said to Moira, “Here it’s already after nine. I know Hock’s gone off to Dublin, but where are the others?”

  “What I got on my hands here is two old men what both ran out of their yeast many years ago. So’tis a late risin’ house.”

  “Perfect, we’ll have the chance to talk—just us girls.”

  Moira ran a hand over her hair net. A tinge of color crept into her jowls. “My, I ain’t been called a girl since the country days when me legs was thin as the rushy grass,” she said.

  “Lucky you,” Ruby said. “My legs were never thin.”

  “Pish, you’re a reedy young thing still.” Moira set out cream and sugar, and poured tea into Ruby’s cup. She asked, “Would you care for a bit of soda bread? It’s fresh this mornin’. And mind, I churn me own butter. There’s marmalade, too.”

  “I’ll be pleased to thank you—and God—for another good meal.”

  Moira, mouth open, fetched bread, butter, marmalade and utensils and set these out. Ruby bowed her head and mumbled a short prayer. When she was through, she smiled, and asked Moira,

  “Won’t you please get a cup and sit down yourself? We can share this pot.”

  Had the men ever asked her such a thing? Stunned with gratitude for this simple generosity, Moira did as she was asked. “Thank you, Miss Ruby.” Moira sat with her hands folded in her lap while Ruby poured her tea. Then, with eyes lowered in apologetic guilt, she said, “Oh Gawd, I passed a remark the other day, viciously meant for you t’overhear—about the golliwogg. I’m so mortally sorry, Miss Ruby, I—”

  “This time, we’ll forget it, Moira. Only do me a favor from now on?”

  “Aye, anything.”

  “Lose the Miss, okay? No more Miss Fancy Thing, and no more Miss Ruby. Please—just Ruby.”

  “Ruby, aye.”

  “Good. Now Moira, tell me—are you happy in this house?”

  Moira’s eyes looked faraway past Ruby. She said, “I been here me whole life as a woman, Miss … Ruby, I mean.”

  “But you didn’t answer. Are you happy?”

  Again, there was the great pain of thought in Moira’s face. She put fingers on her lips, as if unsure of what words might come out. She said, “Nobody ever asked such a thing of me. I don’t know how to say what I’m thinkin’.”

  “Say it honest.”

  “If you’ll have it plain, then here goes. Happiness ain’t what I’m livin’ now,’tis what I remember.”

  “When you were a girl?”

  Moira blushed. “And Liam a boy.”

  “You were lovers?”

  Moira stroked her throat, and Ruby confirmed her intuition. Moira said, “I’m to this day an innocent woman. Do you understand?”

  “I meant no offense, I’m sorry.”

  “Nae, it’s me the one who’s sorry. Holy Mother preserve me, but I am sorry for bein’ innocent.”

  Ruby reached across the table and touched Moira’s hand. Moira scarcely noticed, faraway as she was. Nothing was said between the women for several minutes. They drank tea.

  Then Ruby said, “You must still love him very much.”

  “Must I?”

  “You’ve been here all these years.”

  “And every day for all these years, I confess I spat in his morn-in’ tea. Now that is somethin’, but I don’t call it love, from what I remember of love.”

  “I’m sorry …”

  “Aye, but what good does it do? Soon, He Who Rolls—it’s what I call him here by meself—he’ll be down and callin’ out his wants. Rashers and pork sausages and my soda bread, and a soft fried egg … and later, a cup of Van Houton’s cocoa. That’s how the mornin’ goes here. And my life as well—day by day, year by year. It ain’t likely to change, you see, no matter how sorry anybody is.”

  “Moira—?”

  A man’s voice. Ruby and Moira looked up to see Snoody entering the kitchen. He walked with chest thrust forward and hands clutched at jacket lapels, as if he was commander of all he saw.

  “You’ve company this morning,” Snoody said to Moira, nodding with a sniff at Ruby. “So this is why you’re late with his tea.”

  “Here I’ve kept you from taking Liam a delicious pot of morning tea?” Ruby said to Moira with a sly smile. Then Ruby laughed, and so did Moira, as if she had not laughed in years.

  “What’s this?” Snoody said, his nose wheezing with alarm.

  “Sorry, but there’s a change today,” Ruby said. “You two boys are on your own, I’m taking Moira to breakfast in the village, where somebody will serve her for once.”

  “I don’t understand, Ruby.”

  “It’s easy enough. When you want something, get it yourself. The baking that Moira’s started, for instance. Take over, Snoody. Any questions, look it up in a cook book.” Ruby stood. “Coming, Moira?”

  “Aye, I’ll come.”

  “Look here—!”

  “Give him your apron, Moira,” Ruby said.

  “All right.” Moira unswaddled herself
and handed over her flour-stained apron.

  Snoody held it at arm’s length from himself, and said, “I say now, look here—!”

  But Moira held up her hand and silenced him. She directed her words at Snoody, but it was Ruby they were really meant for:

  “A man without eyes saw plums on a tree. He neither took plums nor left plums. How could this be?”

  Snoody’s hands dropped from his lapels. He started to say something to Moira, then thought better of it. Moira glared at him.

  Ruby said, “That’s the riddle Liam told Neil.”

  Snoody said, “When was that…?”

  Before she could answer, Moira took Ruby’s hand and pulled her across the kitchen, out toward the hallway. “Come quick now,” she said, “before himself starts up his growlin’.” They left Snoody where he was, searching for the makings of a pot of tea.

  Moira took down a coat from a rack in the hallway and slipped it on, along with a kerchief for her head. She offered Ruby one of her own sweaters. If there were two Rubys, the sweater would have fit perfectly. The telephone rang. Moira let it ring, bustling past it with Ruby for the door and into Ladbroke Street.

  When they had rounded the corner and were walking downhill toward the village diamond, Moira asked, “Has your fine detective solved the riddle?”

  “Not yet,” Ruby said.

  “Shall I be wicked and give you the answer?”

  “Be wicked.”

  Chapter 24

  The day had grown perfect for sitting just where I was. April sunlight dappled yellow through new leaves of old trees and all across the greenswards of the walled campus, a collection of ancient stone halls connected to one another by bricked archways. I was perched at the bottom of the steps to the Trinity College Library, considering for a moment whose feet had trod where I now sat. George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce. And, of course, Brendan Behan. If Davy Mogaill ever surfaced, I would tell him of my sublime loitering.

  Professors in caps and turtleneck sweaters beneath tweed coats passed. They carried battered pigskin briefcases and smoked pipes that wreathed their heads in gray smoke. They would glance at me, studiously uncurious about yet another reflective Irish-American tourist writing banal sentiments in his notebook. Students passed, too. In twos and threes, sometimes in boisterous clumps. I was jealous of them all, for their youth and for the good luck of their years learning at a place like this. I consoled myself by noticing that these students, like all the ones I envied at the better schools back home in the States, smelled of dirty laundry.