Drown All the Dogs

by Thomas Adcock

“Level with me some more. How are you carrying these two?”

  “You mean in the cop court of appeals?”

  “Aye.”

  “The jury’s still out, Davy. We’re debating the righteous factors.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as if it’s a public service that Finn and Farrelly got whacked, such as your getting in touch like you finally done,” Ellis said. He picked up the cassette tape from Father Kelly’s telephone answering machine, bouncing it in his thick hand, like he was flipping a coin. “Then there’s this here you give me to run down to Neglio. Maybe it’s going to save your bacon?”

  “When you check the politics.”

  “So what’re we going to find?”

  “The voice of a true patriot. But not our kind.”

  “What kind?”

  “The kind that holds a knife at the throat of the world.”

  Ellis put down the tape, and said, “Give me the gun now, Davy.”

  Chapter 29

  Reflecting on it, of course, I must have looked as much the mark as Swedish tourists clomping around New York in sandals and socks. Or the Japanese with their cameras. Or the Germans with wallets bulging in their back pockets.

  Me in my sneakers and brilliant white teeth and my Yankees cap. Oh, boy, was I asking for it.

  The old nun said, “Top o’day.”

  I turned to her, touching my cap, and said, “Hi.” Nobody but an American says Hi.

  The girls were all in their uniforms. White blouses, pleated wool skirts of tartan plaid, knee socks, and green cardigan sweaters. A perfectly common sight that time of day in any Dublin street. Nothing to excite anybody but a pederast.

  Yet there was something off about it all. When they came close, flocking around me, I saw hardness in these girls’ faces. They were familiar to me, faces I see in New York every day and recognize far more quickly; faces older than their time, toughened from living on unearned money.

  What happened next occurred well within the pathetically short amount of time it takes the average television commercial to get the average viewer lathered up about something useless or fattening. All I knew for fifteen or twenty seconds was that a gang of girls, eight to ten of them, had me surrounded on a corner of O’Connell Street and they were mumbling something that had me confused and disoriented.

  It then struck me that all the green cardigans had slipped down over their hands. Which only after a few more seconds did I realize were roaming unseen all over places where I had pockets. But never once did I feel a thing.

  Then out of the corner of an eye, I saw three terrible and deflating things happen in a blur. One freckle-faced girl passed something to the nun, now in back of me, something that looked a lot like my wallet newly stocked with three hundred dollars’ worth of Irish pound notes. Another girl, standing outside those surrounding me, reached toward the nun and then sprinted up a side street and out of sight. And finally, I saw my wallet fall to the paving stone like it was a potato peel.

  I had now caught on to the big picture, but still my words were those of the tourist mark. I shouted, “Hey—wait a minute!” And much to my surprise, that is exactly what the nun and all the little schoolgirls did, only the nun did not look so holy anymore, nor the girls so little.

  “What’s your trouble, my son?” the nun asked sweetly.

  “You’ve got the trouble, Sister!” I shouted boldly. My face was now far redder than the nun’s had ever been. People on the street passed me by, some oblivious, some smirking. And I could do nothing more than shout at the nun. “You and your little band of thieves—you better all stay right here if you know what’s good for you!”

  “If it comforts you, son, I’ll stay,” she said. She now addressed the girls, those remaining after the runner who had made off with my cash. “Girls, we’ll be stopping in our own pursuits now to help this poor aggrieved traveler as best we can. We must be good Samaritans in life, don’t forget.”

  The girls mumbled in sweet agreement and put their sweaters back on. I grabbed the sleeve of a man in a suit, and said, “This pack of thieves just stole my wallet!”

  He struggled, pulling himself free, and screamed, “You bloody American fool!” Then he hurried up the street, stopping at what looked to be a police call box.

  “Why, my son, isn’t that your wallet right there on the ground?” the nun said, laying a hand on my clenched arm.

  I stooped to retrieve my wallet. While I was down, I heard laughter. When I stood again, there were the thieves’ faces surrounding me again, now full of overstated concern. Behind them was an amused crowd of Dublin idlers with nothing better to do than snicker at a tourist’s dilemma.

  I opened the wallet. Thankfully, my passport was still there. Two weary cops ambled up to the scene of this weary old crime. Although now, I realized, there was no sign of anything amiss. There was only me with my red face and my wallet in hand, and my good Samaritans.

  “That’s the madman!” said a man in a suit coming up behind the two cops. “He attacked me—called me a thief!”

  “Oh, it wasn’t as bad as all that,” said the nun in my defense. “The American gentleman here seems to have lost something. Do you suppose you could help him, Constables?”

  The cops rolled their eyes. One of them took aside the guy in the suit and told him he should run along, and that the American madman would be restrained. The other cop said to the nun, “Piss off, old darlin.’ “The idlers had a good round of laughs.

  Then the cop asked me, “All right now, what’s your name, where are you from, and what’s the story?”

  “Neil Hockaday, New York, and this so-called nun is running a school of pickpockets.”

  “On the last, I am pained to confirm that you’re correct,” the cop said. “Sorry to say, you been robbed by the tinkers, my friend. Our Irish gypsies. Amazing and cleverly disguised they are. And quite talented, too. They’ll steal your shoes while you’re dancing.”

  “Tosh with your slander!” the nun protested.

  “What’s your hotel, mister?” the cop asked me.

  “I’m staying with my uncle,” I said, hoping that a good address might benefit me. “Liam Hockaday, of Ladbroke Street in Dún Laoghaire.”

  “I know that place,” the cop said, duly impressed. Then he had to criticize my clothes. “You come from Ladbroke Street into the city dressed like you are, like a bloody damn larrikin?”

  The nun stepped up close to me, squinting up her eyes and breathing her whiskey fumes. With no further pretense to sisterhood, she asked, “Would you be the same Hockaday what was in the newspaper this mornin’, the one connected with the murder in O’Connell Street?”

  Murmurs swept through the crowd. The two cops’ necks went red. This was not going at all the way I intended; try as I might, I could do nothing to get even myself under control.

  I decided to ignore the fake nun, and complained instead to the cop, “They stole three hundred dollars of mine!” The way I sounded to myself, I should have been wearing Budweiser shorts and an I-love-NY button back in Times Square and squawking about being clipped by a three-card monte dealer.

  The cop took a leather-bound notepad from his belt and a pen from his coat. He said, “Murder? What’s that name of yours again?”

  “Neil Hockaday,” I said.

  “Reilly!” he called to his partner. “We’d best take this one in.”

  “Come on now, men,” I said, as Reilly clamped his hand around my elbow, “I’m a police officer myself. Look, I’ll show you—”

  Somebody in the crowd piped up with, “Run! The American might have a gun!” Nobody moved.

  “I was only going for my badge,” I said, slowly pulling out the shield from my pants pocket, then showing it to Reilly and the other cop. They each inspected it carefully. “If that’s not enough for you, it so happens that my grandfather was once chief of the Dublin Garda.”

  “Don’t know of anybody called Hockaday what was chief,” Reilly said.


  “His name was Lord Gavan Fitzgerald,” I said.

  The cops looked at each other, scowling. The crowd murmured. The nun closed in on me again. She said, “Let’s hear your mother’s name.”

  “Mairead,” I said.

  Somehow the old nun’s face softened into a mass of lacy wrinkies. She started to say something, but Reilly the cop shoved her aside again.

  “Gavan Fitzgerald was a Brit,” Reilly said with a spit, as if relieving himself of a mouthful of dishwater.

  Somebody in the crowd shouted, “Bugger the Brits!”

  The other cop cuffed me, my wrist to his, and said, “You’re comin’ with us, Fitzgerald.”

  “It’s Hockaday!”

  The nun trailed along beside me as I was pulled through the jeering crowd. She said, “Listen good and close to me, boy. They call me Sister Sullivan, and I knew your mother well. My camp’s up the North Road, out from the city. Ask any tinker you see along the way, they’ll know. Only be sure to tell them you’re Mairead Fitzgerald’s boy. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded yes, confused.

  The nun said, “You’ll be needin’ us. These bloody constables, they—”

  Reilly shoved her away. “Piss off, we told you!”

  Back to the airless room with the bad couch and chairs, the table full of newspapers and ashtrays and thin cold tea. And the two-way mirror. When I wanted to use the loo, a cop had to go with me. I might as well have been put in a cell.

  I had been inked and photographed, with and without my cap, for unstated reasons. I was not allowed a telephone call, although the desk sergeant rang up the American Embassy on my behalf. For three hours, I waited, alone. Then finally, company came. He was fat and wheezy with a huge gray moustache full of crumbs. I did not bother to stand up.

  “Mr. Hockaday, I presume?” he asked, waddling in with a briefcase that looked like it might have been through the invasion of Normandy in ‘44. “I’m Brady.”

  “Are you from the embassy?” I asked.

  “Well, your embassy sent me. I’ll be your counsel if you like.”

  “You’re a lawyer?”

  “Solicitor. Here in Ireland, we’re solicitors and barristers.”

  “Whatever. Can you get me the hell out of here?”

  “That depends. What, exactly, did you do to land you here?”

  I opened the tea-splattered Irish Guardian to the story of Francie Boylan’s murder and my photograph and showed this to Brady. He took the newspaper and studied the stories, shaking his head. I said, “That’s what happened to me yesterday. Today, the tinkers robbed me. And now these cops of yours somehow think it’s their duty to hold me here, only I don’t know why.”

  “So, you were dipped, were you?” Brady laughed dryly and sat down, flopping his briefcase on the table and the paper on top of it. “How much are you out?”

  “Three hundred, American.”

  “That wasn’t all you had, was it?”

  “I’ve got a couple more traveler’s checks.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Why thank Him?”

  “Because money makes God’s green earth go’round, Mr. Hockaday. We all need money, don’t we? You need it, I need it … You do understand?”

  “I understand about chasing ambulances.”

  “As you Americans say, time is money. Let’s not be wasting time.”

  “Funny, but I was talking with somebody just this morning who told me you Irish have a different idea about time. Or course, it turns out he’s a liar.”

  “I haven’t the slightest—”

  “I’m sure you don’t, so skip it. But tell me, Brady, what do you mean the embassy sent you?”

  “The American Embassy is a busy place. Everything’s a matter of priority. You can’t expect the embassy to dispatch a staff member every time some hapless American is dipped.”

  “Which is where some chaser like you comes in.”

  “At your service, Mr. Hockaday.”

  “That’s Detective Hockaday. I’m an officer of the New York City Police Department. Like it says right in the Guardian.”

  “Very good … Would you happen to have any of those extra traveler’s checks actually with you at this time?”

  “Is law school difficult, Brady?”

  “Exceedingly.”

  “Then how come there are so many lawyers?”

  “Really, Detective Hockaday! Time is money.”

  “Now that we’ve got to know each other like this, I think it’s time we saw the boss. Be a good solicitor and earn your keep. Go tell the boys behind the mirror I want to see Keegan, and not about some cockamamie tinkers. I want to talk politics, tell them. Think you can handle that?”

  Half an hour later and I was out of the airless room, with Brady and a constable on either side of me. We walked down a corridor toward a stairway that I recalled from the day before led up to Eamonn Keegan’s office. And though I must have been more exhausted at some other time in my life, I could not remember when.

  I would have remained in that room an extra half-hour if I knew I could sleep without dreaming. As it was, I dreamt without sleeping; walking along through that corridor, thinking of myself as the condemned man in one of those grainy prison movies where everything is all sweat and shadows on brick …

  “So here we go down the dance hall, Louie,” the turnkey says to me as I am doing my shuffle-shuffle in paper shoes, and my head is shaved down to the scalp in the back so they can attach the electrodes.

  “It’s been real swell knowin’ you and all the lousy screws,” I bravely grunt, cocky to the end. “See you in hell.”

  “Yeah, see you.”

  The warden, who is marching ahead of us along with a priest talking Latin, turns now and says with an alligator grin, “Next stop—Old Sparky.”

  Steel cups rake the iron bars of death row, and this is the final music.

  And then the guy at the switch turns out to be none other than Tommy Neglio, who before he throws the juice says to me, again, “You’ve got an imagination that’s very full and active, and just this side of being lunatic. It’s what I always look for in a detective …”

  Which is when Brady informed me, “Lucky enough, it seems Chief Keegan has a message for you. Something from your superior in New York, according to his aide.”

  “Yeah, that’s lucky, all right,” I said, imagining how Neglio might not think me diligent about keeping in touch like he had asked.

  My mind ran riot about the possible message. Had Davy Mogaill turned up? What troubles did he have?

  But I had troubles of my own just then.

  I asked Brady, for what it was worth, “What’s the percentage of my getting the hell out of here?”

  “Not to worry. We’ll soon have this all sorted out, and Chief Keegan will see you’re no outlaw.”

  “Some people would point out that I’m a cop.”

  “Best you let me do the talking, Detective Hockaday.”

  Not far into the next several minutes of scattered chaos, it was clear that nobody would ever again be talking to Eamonn Keegan.

  Chapter 30

  That night around seven o’clock, I was back in my uncle’s splendid house in Ladbroke Street considering the dark wisdom exercised by most Irishmen in leaving their ancestral land as soon as possible. If I was not reasonably certain that by now my name was wait-listed at every Irish port of departure, I would be out getting wised up myself.

  But there I was in the red room in the pillowed couch by the fireplace, snugged in a terrycloth robe after a long hot bath, warmed by a double Scotch, a low blaze of sweet-smelling fruit-wood branches and an armful of Ruby in black silk. If only this was all in the peace and quiet of New York City where I belonged.

  “Afraid once you start talking you’ll never be able to stop?” Ruby asked.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “It’s got to happen. Or else you, Hock, are going to blow like Mount St. Helen. You went out of here this mo
rning to Dublin, then you dragged yourself back an hour ago looking like a train wreck …”

  “And I don’t feel much better than that now,” I said.

  “Okay, so take a deep breath,” Ruby said. “And then tell me about the time in between.”

  “Did you ever have a dream where you float around in the air, up over everything that’s happening?”

  “We all have that one.”

  “That’s what today was, only my eyes were wide open. I was there, but I kept floating higher and higher until I didn’t believe anything anymore. When I see the newspapers in the morning, then I’ll know it happened.”

  “What’s it … ?”

  That I could not tell Ruby without first a build-up to the main event.

  So I filled her in about Trinity College and the class of’35 student yearbook, my run-in with Clooney and O’Dowd and going to the Ould Plaid Shawl with Peadar Cavanaugh, and Cavanaugh’s stiff advice to go home. Then about Oliver Gunston and his computer, and the Guardian item from October’37 that introduced me to the lynching of my grandfather, Lord Gavan Fitzgerald, as well as the item from May’36 about the Dublin Men’s Society of Letters that proved Cavanaugh a liar. Then about me, a street-weary cop from New York getting himself robbed by a gang of dippers disguised as Dublin schoolgirls. And about “Sister Sullivan” and the invitation to her tinkers’ camp. And about me getting hauled off to the Dublin Garda again …

  “Stop it, you’re making me dizzy,” Ruby said. I paused, and she pressed both hands to her head. “You had a grandfather who was a cop—who was lynched? You were mugged by little girls—then arrested? They called the embassy—?”

  “You should have seen the beauty they sent over to help me,” I said. “This chaser by the name of Brady. He looks like W. C. Fields in pinstripes.”

  “So, you’re out on bail—or what? I don’t understand,”

  “Neither do I. Brady went off leaving me twisting in the wind for a half hour, then he comes back and says we’ve got clearance to go see Chief Keegan, who it so happens has a message for me. From Neglio, I suppose. You remember Keegan …”

  “What’s to forget?” Ruby said. “Big guy in a big office, and he smelled of bay rhum and lanolin.”