Gunston said, “Slattery, your countryman—he’s been telling me so many charming things about you.”
“So I read,” I said.
“Aye. Well, come with me.”
Gunston led the way through a maze of carpeted corridors and shoulder-high cubicles where men and women who looked more like stockbrokers than newspaper reporters were hunched over glowing video display terminals. Nobody was smoking. Nobody was drinking. Nobody was hollering for a copy boy; in fact, in the whole place, there were only the sounds of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass on Muzak and the soft clacking of computerized keyboards. Like modern public buildings and their lobbies, news rooms have taken a serious turn for the worse.
But the cubicle of Oliver Gunston was a better world, a comfortable one. It contained the standard-issue computer, but the contraption was shoved into a corner on a table by itself and partly shrouded by a tasseled throw. Gunston did his real work on a Royal manual standard typewriter, with crumpled paper overflowing a wastebasket to prove it. His desk was a battered rolltop model with an ashtray containing a cigar butt and a bottom drawer containing a fifth of Irish Mist and some shot glasses.
He sat down at his desk in a carved mahogany chair and poured out two hospitable drinks. I took my place in an overstuffed, time-stained lounger with a lace doily on the back.
“That was my father’s chair, which I rescued from the clutches of the rag and bone man,” Gunston explained, handing me a whiskey. “My wife won’t have it in the house, and so here it reposes.”
“It’s a good one,” I said. I was suddenly homesick for the easy chair in my own parlor in Hell’s Kitchen, a green silk brocade Salvation Army number with fringes on the bottom. The salesman told me it once belonged to a downtown whorehouse.
“My father used to read his books and newspapers in that chair every evening when he came home from the shop,” Gunston explained. “He worked the kind of job where there was no greater luxury than to finally sit down at the end of a day.”
“I know what he means.”
“Meant,” Gunston said. “He died when I was a kid.”
“We’ve got something in common.”
“Oh?”
“We both have hollow places,” I said.
“So your father’s dead.” This was no question, the way he put it. It was more a statement of recognition. Gunston knew about the hollow place just like me. We could have been brothers.
“My father was a soldier,” I said, as usual. “He went to the States, went off to the war and never came back. I never knew him.” This was not enough for Gunston. To him I owed a larger answer. But what? I drank down half the whiskey, and added, “He and my mother lived in Dublin before I was born. My mother’s gone now, too.”
“And it’s why you’re here, to learn about them?”
“I sure as hell didn’t come all this way to see Francie Boylan get whacked in O’Connell Street. For that kind of thing, I could have stayed home in New York.”
“So I hear.” Gunston laughed and put back his drink. I did the same. He poured us two more, then put the bottle back in the drawer. “And what have you found out that you never knew before?” he asked.
“Am I being interviewed?”
“I always decide that sort of thing later.”
“So you’re a thinking journalist?”
“That’s not extraordinary,” Gunston said, laughing again. “Unusual, but not extraordinary. The truth is, I’m far more keen on stories than I am on newspapers. Can you understand that?”
“Maybe if I was a newspaper reporter instead of a detective.”
“Aye, you’d likely see the meaning then. Perhaps like G. K. Chesterton saw it.”
“The English novelist who wrote about Father Brown, the priest-detective?”
“Quite right. And did you also know he was once a newspaperman?”
“No.”
“He despised the trade something fierce. When he’d had his fill of it, he burned his bridges by writing, ‘Journalism consists largely in saying Lord Jones died to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.’ You see my meaning now?”
“Yes, I think so. And if you want to help me, Gunston, I think you’ll find I’m only a very small part of a story that’s going to be much too big for your newspaper.”
“Well then, I believe I’ve been waiting a very long time for you to drop by, Detective Hockaday.” Gunston finished off his second drink and rubbed his hands. “Just how may I be of help?”
“You were asking what I’d learned about my parents. We could start there. My father’s name was Aidan Hockaday and he was common as tap water, from County Carlow. My mother was well born, here in Dublin—Mairead Fitzgerald, of the—”
Gunston cut in. “Of the Bloor Street Fitzgeralds?”
“That’s right.”
“What did your father do when he was here in Dublin?”
“He was a student. He graduated summa cum laude from Trinity College, back in thirty-five. And he was a member of something called the Dublin Men’s Society of Letters.”
“Good, that’s something to go on,” Gunston said. He wheeled his chair from his desk to the computer. “I’m going to access the morgue,” he said, turning toward me after switching on the contraption. “By which I mean the library here at the Guardian.”
I told him I knew from morgues, and morgues.
Gunston typed out my father’s name on his keyboard and AIDAN HOCKADAY went up in instant orange letters on the gray computer screen. Then the screen responded by offering a choice of command requests. Gunston selected NAME SEARCH. Seconds later, the computer informed us there were exactly two Guardian clips on file containing my father’s name.
“It’s that easy…?”
Oliver Gunston, a man with a hollow place, understood the question. He said, “It is, once you decide your old da’s worth knowing. How about it?”
“Let’s have it.”
“Ready or not, here she goes,” Gunston said, accessing ITEM #1. When my parents’ engagement announcement flashed on the screen, an inch or so of very small type, Gunston said, “Here we’ve got the publishing of the banns. Not particularly illuminating, but do you fancy reading it?”
“Go ahead to number two,” I said.
When ITEM #2 was punched up, Gunston said, “Now here then, what’s this fine bit of intrigue?” I got up from my chair and read the screen, over Gunston’s shoulder:
GAVAN FITZGERALD FOUND HANGED, ONE-TIME CHIEF OF DUBLIN GARDA
—Investigators Suspect ‘Peep o’Day Boys’—
by Patsy Converse
[14 October 1937]
Lord Gavan Fitzgerald, the prominent barrister and chief of the Dublin Garda during the last three years of the republic’s British rule, is the apparent victim of a bold political assassination. His disemboweled body was discovered early yesterday morning, hanged by the heels from a scrub tree in the rubbish alley that runs back of his home in fashionable Bloor Street.
“A real coup de grâce it was,” said Detective Kerry Devlin, attached to the Lucan station house. “The killers cut out his heart in his bed, dragged out the body and hanged it, and draped the Union Jack around the body, along with an evil sign, lettered in what we believe to be Lord Fitzgerald’s own blood.”
The sign read, “We wish to grow peaceful crops, but we must dig our furrows with the sword.”
Detective Devlin said further, “It’s the work of the Peep o’Day Boys, I’d wager. It’s all according to their violent style. We get the anonymous telephone call at dawn telling us about a dead man in a Bloor Street alley, and we find what we find.”
The barrister Fitzgerald, a loyalist to the Parliament at West-minster throughout the …
“Lord Fitzgerald? That’s my grandfather. My God, he was lynched…!”
“And the bloody Union Jack, it was the winding-sheet for his corpse,” Gunston said, rubbing his hands again. “Fascinating stuff.”
I backed away from the computer screen. Actually, I
nearly staggered away. I had to stop reading to catch my breath, which was suddenly hard in coming. Also I had to clear a slight taste of vomit from my throat, which I accomplished by drinking up the rest of my whiskey.
“You never knew this?” Gunston asked.
“Where I was raised, you didn’t ask too many questions about where anybody came from, including yourself.”
“And here you wind up in a profession where it’s questions that sauce your goose?”
“What can I tell you? Irony’s like gravity, it’s a law.” I moved back to the computer, and scanned several more paragraphs. This was mostly background information on Gavan Fitzgerald, and the politics of his time. I could study it later. I asked Gunston, “Can you run me a printout?”
“Aye, and anything else you’ll need, in return for my having the bigger story exclusive. This is big, isn’t it?”
I nodded agreement, and said again, “It’s deep … deeper than I ever imagined.”
I read more, searching for my father’s name. There it was, in the final paragraph:
The Lord’s good wife, Lady Beatrice, was taken by neighbors to the Sisters of Mercy Hospital, where she is under treatment for nervous shock. Their daughter, Mairead, could not be located, but was known to have sailed for New York, also yesterday morning, from the port of Dún Laoghaire. Accompanying Miss Fitzgerald was her fiancé, Aidan Hockaday.
“Now punch up the other thing,” I said, weakly. I felt like walking in the open air, for miles.
“Right.” Gunston typed on his keyboard as he said the words, “Dublin Men’s Society of Letters.”
There was a single item, in a column of social notes, dated May 22, 1936:
LITERARY SOCIETY FÊTES W. B. YEATS
The Trinity College organisation known as the Dublin Men’s Society of Letters is pleased to announce an evening fête this Sunday fortnight, open to friends and admirers of William Butler Yeats, the poet and political activist. Mr. Yeats will read from especially selected works. The event is to be held at the Ould Plaid Shawl public house.
Tickets and further information may be sought by contacting the Irish Literature Department of the college, care of Professor Peadar Cavanaugh.
Later, maybe when I was no longer feeling like my head was trapped inside a bell, I would do the notebook work. Just now, I needed that walk. And so I left Gunston a list of references to run through his computer and headed back out to Grafton Street. Fosdick was snoring softly as I passed him in the lobby.
I was glad for the crowd and the noise of the mall. And thankful for the task of locating a bank where I could convert my American dollars to Irish pounds. I craved prosaic distractions the way a thirsty man on a desert craves a cold beer. I needed a break from unending revelations, and from knowing that only more would come before I returned home.
Two days into this Irish sentimental journey, and what had I learned? That one man’s politics is another man’s murder; dear old Father Tim’s idea of a lucky marker turns out to be a Fascist souvenir; my Uncle Liam is stinking rich, bound to a wheelchair and talking in riddles; my mother’s side of the family were fullblown aristocrats, with wealth and pedigree; Grandma Finola had a long-standing fling with a priest called Father Cor, which Grandpa Myles put to scandalous rest with murder and suicide; and the Lord High Chief of the Dublin Garda, Gavan Fitzgerald, met his Maker the same as Mussolini, both Fascists hanged.
What next?
I shuddered at the thought, then turned into the first bank I saw. I changed over three hundred dollars’ worth of my traveler’s checks and decided I should probably drop by to see Chief Eamonn Keegan again, this time under my own steam. Keegan seemed the patrician type. Maybe he would be more willing to chat with me about the murder of Francie Boylan if I told him I was descended from old Lord Fitz.
What would Inspector Neglio say to this bloodline? And Davy Mogaill, wherever he was?
I left the mall and made my way back to O’Connell Street, then over toward the Post Office and up to the Garda headquarters. I paid no particular attention to a half-dozen or so chattering schoolgirls walking my way, nor to the red-faced nun accompanying them who nodded and said, with the faint whiff of whiskey on her breath, “Top o’day.”
Chapter 27
“Before we go back, I should write it all down. Wait …” Ruby went through her pockets, searching for a pen without success. “I should have run upstairs after my purse. I don’t even have money.”
“There’s a bit in me pocket,” Moira said. “Money, that is. Sorry I don’t have nothin’ to write with, though.”
“I’ll owe you.” Ruby put her hand in the air. A waiter glided over and Ruby negotiated the loan of a blunt pencil. With this and a clean paper napkin, she said, “Okay, Moira, first let’s have the riddle again.”
“A man without eyes saw plums on a tree. He neither took plums nor left plums. How could this be?”
Ruby wrote slowly. Moira said, “Mind you get the words down exactly as I’m saying them.”
“Okay,” Ruby said, finishing. “And the answer?”
“Now it’s all got to do with plurals, don’t you see? The man had one eye, so he’s without eyes. There were two plums hanging on the tree and he took one of them, therefore neither taking nor leaving plums.”
“I love it!”
“Do you think your shamus might ever get it?”
“It’s always possible. I like to tell him he’s smarter than he looks.”
The cook who had enjoyed every bite of a restaurant breakfast tipped back her head and laughed. Ruby could see now, for the first time and in spite of the years and the weight and the net still matting down her hair, that Moira Catherine Bernadette Booley was desired by men once upon a time. In country days when me legs was thin as the rushy grass.
“I’ll miss you somethin’ horrible when you’re off to America again,” Moira said. “If only I’d known you long ago, Ruby. Oh, my life…!” Moira’s brown eyes filled with unembarrassed tears.
“Say it,” Ruby told her.
“There’d be a different woman sittin’ here before you,” Moira said. “That’s what I’m meanin’. Never did I dare to be lookin’ to someplace I’d not seen, someplace where lights are burnin’ all night. Never did I figure I owned the right to a sweet man feelin’ obliged to say kind words to me every day. You done that with yourself, Ruby, haven’t you? But we were backward in my day, most of us, and we daren’t dream such things. Oh, but I wished I’d been a fine rebel girl like you.”
“I don’t know what to say …”
“This Hockaday, he says kind words to you, and knows you won’t have it the other way? Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Gawd bless you, Ruby. Your man’s like his daddo before him.”
“Neil’s father? You knew Aidan Hockaday?”
“Aye, and the girl who chose him, too.”
Slowly, Ruby began to sense the hidden, mournful texture behind all that Moira had told her; that when Moira talked of certain things, she had, like Hock himself, a way of turning words into walls. Ruby asked, “Are you saying you knew Mairead, Neil’s mother?”
“A beauty she was. A beauty and a rebel, and the reason I dreamed up the poser about the one-eyed man.”
Chapter 28
“Would you believe a guy like me’s got a literary side just like yourself, Captain?”
Mogaill, experienced as he was in asking sly cop questions, sensed the trap in this. He said nothing. He tightened the grip on the .38 jammed against his head.
“How about now I recite a little something for you?” Ellis suggested. “Something real poetical I come across the other day while I’m on a call about this paddy cop down a Hell’s Kitchen air shaft, dead with the dawn.”
“It’s good you can find something uplifting out of Constable Farrelly’s untimely death,” Mogaill said.
“Uplifting I don’t know. Inspector Neglio, he don’t agree neither. Right away, he sees there’s some kind of bad
politics in back of Farrelly’s poem. Real stinking bad politics, Davy. The kind the whole world went and had a war about once.”
“Say what you want to say and be done with it.”
“Okay. I come across a brass medallion in Farrelly’s gear. One side’s got this dago Fascist shit branded on it, according to Neglio, and the other side’s got this here verse: ‘When nations are empty up there at the top … When order has weakened or faction is strong … Time for us all to pick out a good tune … Take to the roads and go marching along.’ “
“There’s some who’d believe a real patriot wrote that,” Mogaill said. “What about you, Ray? Are you a patriot?”
Ellis thought for a moment, then said, “If my country needs me, I’ll answer the call. But they better not call me collect.”
“We’re not so different, you and me.”
“Regular allies, that’s us. So what do you need to make like a paranoid here with the gun?”
“I see how it’s playing against me. You have things all connected I’d bet. The DA could make an indictment out of this as easy as he’d put salami and cheese to bread and call it a sandwich, then it’s off with me to a prison full of violent types I sent up myself over the years. I’m not anxious to visit the like. So I am about to blow my brains out, but it doesn’t mean I’m crazy.”
“That sort of makes sense, Davy. I’ll level with you: we got this Irish goon Arty Finn connected to Constable Farrelly on account of I sweat the super and find out Farrelly’s crib is being paid the first of every month by none other than Finn. So naturally we see how there’s something that don’t smell too good here, especially this bad poem I come across on the medallion. Where you come in, Davy … well, let’s say it ain’t very smart politics that you took a powder right after your house goes up with a bomb and Finn goes up with it. Also there’s little things that tell me a bumper took out Farrelly, the kind of good bumper nobody ever catches in this town, and I got to wonder if you come in here, too.”
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