“Also those good Cuban cigars.”
“I liked the way he smelled, but the rest of him bothered me. I didn’t much care for the way he dropped the news about Father Tim, or that insinuating way he grilled you about your own dad …”
“He won’t be bothering us anymore.”
“How’s that?”
That I was now ready to relate.
Just before all hell broke loose in the headquarters of the Dublin Garda, there was I with Brady and the constable helplessly imagining myself as some character in a movie. I was also thinking about the murk of Irish politics at home and abroad that had conspired to bring me to this point. And remembering how Father Tim used to get laughs by claiming politics and the movies were one in the same.
“Don’t worry,” Brady said again. He was holding my arm, and maybe my tension was contagious because he felt moved to add, “It’s always darkest before the dawn.”
This bromide did not help. I hate it when people say that because I know very well how light versus dark can really be. Many times I have gathered with cops the night before some huge raid that will ruin the criminal life of some poor unsuspecting perp. Gatherings like this are usually held at one of a dozen Italian places in the Belmont section of the Bronx, where on any given evening there is likely more firepower concentrated beneath dacron polyester suitings than anywhere else in America. We eat and we drink, we reflect with lionhearted amusement on the awful fate of a worthy quarry; we avoid discourse on the potential for the opposite truth. And we all know, deep in our cop bones, that it is always lightest before the dark.
I felt it then, and was not completely surprised when Chief Eamonn Keegan’s aide came barreling out from his office like he was on fire. He grabbed hold of the constable on the one side of me and included him in his sprint toward the stairs, yelling something I could not make out in the clattering echoes of the corridor.
Brady and I stood there alone. And from down the stairway below rose the first distant sounds of bells and sirens, then stampeding feet.
“What now?” I asked my learned counsel.
“A jolly good time to leave,” Brady said, glancing down the corridor to the alternate stairs.
“You’re advising me to walk out, just like that?”
“Aye, if you’ve any brains, man.” Brady moved away from me, toward the other stairway, which did not seem to be the focus of a stampede.
I ducked into Keegan’s office and found him slumped forward across his desk. His arms were outspread and his mouth was puffed open, blowing out air and spattered blood like some freshly hooked flounder hauled up on deck and struggling against the stacked odds of his ever swimming again.
I moved over to Keegan, careful to sidestep the steady spray of blood shooting from between his lips like paint from an aerosol can. His skin was still warm to the touch. Also he was still flopping around pretty good, but this was purely on reflex. The two knives in his back, one for each lung, were sunk clear up to the handles.
The plain wooden chairs at the front of Keegan’s desk, where Ruby and I had sat during our interrogation of the other day, were now half slimed in red. There was a wad of sticky paper in Keegan’s right hand. It slid out easily from his loose fist. I put this away in a pocket.
On the wall behind Keegan’s desk, between bookshelves, was an open window. In the corridor behind me came now the urgent sounds of nearby cops. I decided, finally, to take the advice of the lawyer my country’s embassy saw fit to provide me. My status as innocent bystander at two homicides in as many days was unlikely to reflect well upon me, especially now in the tender stages of this new one. Before hauling ass out that window, though, I first helped myself to a couple of cigars lying there on the desk I was afraid might go to waste.
I had no problem making a hasty exit, thanks to the fire escape leading from Keegan’s window to the courtyard below. Once down on the ground, I followed an alleyway between two wings of the massive Garda headquarters. This led to a tall lace iron gate to the street. The gate was unlocked and untended, oddly enough. I walked through and found myself not far from where I had entered headquarters almost four hours earlier.
An ambulance had pulled up to the entrance, and white-coated men with gurneys and portable blood transfusion equipment rushed into the building. Vans arrived and disgorged reporters and photographers. A barricade line of constables was set up in a large semicircle arcing out around the press and emergency vehicles.
I began walking slowly away from the scene, but turned when a sweet-voiced girl called my name. Then another. I considered making a run for it. Not from the police, but from the sight of two girls in school uniforms trotting my way, green sweaters flapping. Fleeing would bring unwelcome notice, and maybe even a shot in the back, so I waited for them. But this time, I stuck my hand in a pocket and held tight to my wallet.
“Mr. Hockaday—?” the first girl asked. The second one was close behind. And chasing her was—who else?—Brady.
“What do you want now?” I said.
“Here, take it, sir,” the tinker girl answered, extending a roll of bills.
“What’s this—?”
Brady, now caught up to us, was quick with more advice. “Looks like lovely money to me.”
“It’s all of it there, sir,” the second tinker girl said. “Bless you, we had no way of knowin’.”
“What’s this?” Brady asked. “Knowing what?”
The tinkers ignored Brady, addressing me, “Sister Sullivan, she clued us in about your mum, and said to wait here’til you showed yourself again. Don’t need your business, friend.”
And then they left me, trotting back toward the expanding crowd of onlookers, doubtless with visions of a hundred purses and wallets to their credit before all the commotion died down. As for me, I held in my hand all three hundred dollars’ worth of my Irish pound notes. Brady tried manfully to close his amazed mouth, which had dropped open at the sight of the cash.
I turned and continued walking. Brady fell into step, doing what he had to do in the way of staying true to his nature.
“The contingency of one-third is customary in such matters,” he said, puffing to match my pace. Had the chaser actually managed to count what I had, I wondered?
“I should pay for that advice of yours?” I said.
“I notice you took it.”
“As a convenience, yes. I am now on my way to the American Embassy to explain everything that happened here to somebody slightly less hysterical than one of your Dublin constables. I will also find the moron responsible for sending you over to me, then I’ll settle his hash. Then, I am going to drop by whatever Irish courthouse I find appropriate to see about having you disbarred, or whatever you call it over here.”
“Of course,” Brady said, generously, “we could negotiate a more favorable recompense.”
“How about twenty-five bucks and you get lost?”
“Done.”
I gave Brady what he claimed was twenty-five dollars’ worth of pound notes, he gave me his business card and we went our separate ways. I saw that Brady’s route took him toward a pub. I was tempted to follow him there, but figured it safer to do all further drinking for at least the day somewhere beyond Dublin’s city limits.
So I flagged a taxi and had the driver take me to the central depot, where I bought a ticket back to Dún Laoghaire. I had fifteen minutes to kill before my train arrived, so I put in the overseas call to Inspector Neglio.
“Where the hell were you when I called before?” he said. There was no Hello, Hock to start off the conversation. When his secretary put him on the line, it was a straight-out Where the hell were you?
“When was that?”
“It would have been nine or so in the morning to you, middle of the goddamn night for me. The phone there rang twenty times before I got an answer, then I had to talk to some character called Snoody who told me you were gone off somewhere and that Ruby and some cook had left him to make breakfast all by himself. Who
the hell is Snoody?”
“My Uncle Liam’s man.”
“His man?”
“Like in butler.”
“Butler?”
“Turns out there’s a little money here.”
“A Hockaday with money? That’s like a fish with a bicycle.”
“You want to just tell me what you called about this morning?”
“Not your rabbi. Another cop.”
“Is Mogaill all right?”
“He isn’t dead so far as we know. The other cop is.”
“Who—?”
“The name is Dennis Farrelly. Ever hear of him?”
“Why do I have the feeling I’m under interrogation here?”
“Maybe because I’ve got a feeling that whatever the hell’s been going on since that priest of yours offed himself somehow begins with you, Hock—and maybe’s going to end with you if you don’t watch your butt.”
“So who is Farrelly?”
“A question mark we found the other day in Hell’s Kitchen, right about three blocks from your place. I went up for a look myself.”
“And—?”
“It plays like Farrelly was tipped off the roof, in the dark of morning.”
“What’s a dead cop I never heard of got to do with anything?”
“He’s a Dublin cop. Staying in a mattress paid for by Arty Finn, your IRA friend from Nugent’s, the guy killed by the bomb in Mogaill’s house. What Farrelly’s doing in New York, you tell me.”
“Tell you what, Inspector? And what makes you think Arty Finn’s my friend?”
“All I know is I’m seeing Irish cop or Irish priest or Irish goon on everything that’s making my job a pain these days.”
“You and I, we’re on the same side here, paisano. Read a little history some day. If it makes you feel any better, you’ll find out the Irish are a fair people, they never speak well of each other.”
“Look, Hock, I’m—”
“Skip it, I can’t afford this call. When’s the last time you talked to Eamonn Keegan?”
“The Dublin chief? Maybe an hour ago. I left him another message, about Farrelly and what we found on him besides his badge.”
“What was that?”
“Some kind of medallion from back in the Second World War, with a Fascist logo on one side and some poetry on the other.”
I pulled Father Tim’s medallion from my pocket and looked at it. I asked Neglio, “On the side with the logo, the axe tied up with the rods, did you find the letters H.O.S.?”
“That’s right.”
I turned over the medallion. “And the verse reads, ‘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’?”
“Hock, what is this crap anyways?”
I thought of my dream of war on the plane coming over, and of my father’s ghost voice warning about a world gone cockeyed. And I said, “It’s spies and betrayals and secret codes and treacheries and propaganda, and the very thickest plots and all manner of deception and cruelty required to preserve a man ’s civilization …”
But was it only me saying these words?
“That’s all?” Neglio said.
“One thing more. I just left Chief Keegan’s office. He’s been murdered.”
Ruby slipped away from me, leaning forward toward the table in front of the couch. She picked up the decanter of single-malt Scotch and the unused glass and said, “On that, I’ll have a drink with you.” She poured for herself, and also refreshed my own glass.
We watched the fire for a minute or two, sipping. Then Ruby asked, “Well, what do you want to do about it?”
“About what?”
“Spies, betrayals, secret codes, treacheries … cruelty. The whole nine yards you just rattled off.”
“I have to narrow it all down.”
“To what?”
“To the ghosts and me.”
“You’re starting to lose me.”
I put back my drink, and said, “I’m lost myself, Ruby. I used to be a regular detective with a pretty good record at cracking regular cases. I used to expect that if I looked, I would see. But I am on a whole different kind of case now. A grand case, like my rabbi said—the mystery of my own makings. And now I’m starting to see without looking.”
“You’re saying the case is getting away from you? That it’s too big?”
“Not that. I mean there’s something about me I have to figure out before any of the rest of all this makes sense.”
“Like Inspector Neglio said?” Ruby suggested. “All this begins and ends with you?”
“Not quite. What I have to do is find out where I belong here.”
“Or something here that belongs to you.”
“Christ, I wish I could just go home.”
“And where would that be?”
“I’ll have to sleep on it. Ask me in the morning.”
“Okay, but meanwhile there’s two questions you can answer for me right now.”
“Shoot.”
“First—for God’s sake, Hock, you stole the cigars off Keegan’s desk?”
“They were good Cubans. Fidel would say I liberated them from a state of unuse.”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “All right, then what about a little matter of evidence missing from the crime scene.”
“The wad of paper,” I said. “How could I forget?”
“Let’s see it.”
I stood up and walked over to a chair near the bed, where my clothes were hanging. I went into a pocket of my chinos, took out the paper, returned to the couch and sat down.
“What possessed you to take that?” Ruby asked as I flattened the paper out in my lap.
“I don’t know, I didn’t think about it.”
“Well … maybe it was a case of seeing without looking.”
“How do you mean?”
“Maybe you saw—without looking—that there was a possibility this evidence was never going to see the light of day. So you pinched it, on intuition.”
“I don’t know about—”
“Look—who else gets close enough to a police chief at the Dublin Garda headquarters to kill him but a cop? Who else but a cop was responsible for securing that gate from the alley to the street? So who should be trusted with evidence—a cop?”
“I see what you mean.”
“And this is all before you find out about Dennis Farrelly doing whatever he was doing as Arty Finn’s guest in New York.”
I flattened out the wad of paper. On it was a page from my own family’s violent past, which I had only just learned on this remarkable day. Smeared red letters, hurriedly written in what I had no doubt would test as Eamonn Keegan’s own blood, read, We wish to grow peaceful crops, but we must dig our furrows with the sword.
How I wished I could just go home.
Chapter 31
“Like yourself, I got this literary side to me,” Ray Ellis said. He took a notebook out of his coat pocket, snapped off two rubber bands and thumbed through the pages until he found what he was looking for. “How’s about I read you a little rhyme I come across in the late Constable Farrelly’s crib?”
Davy Mogaill drank coffee with his left hand and said nothing. The gun in his right hand was still aimed at his head. His left hand was on the table, resting near the answering machine tape.
“So that don’t get a rise out of you? Leave me just go ahead and read—”
“Nae—please, allow me: ‘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.’”
“Yeah, that’s it, word for word.” Ellis closed his notebook with the rubber bands and put it away. “Also you probably know the rhyme’s stamped on the back of this special coin Inspector Neglio says is from the Mussolini days.”
Mogaill nodded.
“When did you learn t
hese charming lines, Captain?”
“On my wedding day in Ireland.”
“Marriage and them garbage politics, they mix?”
“They say all’s fair in love and war.”
“You ask me, that’s a freaking crock.”
“Once again I say, you’re really quite perceptive.”
“Meaning also maybe this here talk we’re having, it ain’t about exactly who whacked Finn and Farrelly but what the hell for?”
“Exactly, Lieutenant.”
“So we’re talking what—payback, like you mentioned on the phone?”
“Did I?”
“Yeah, I was listening real careful, Davy.”
“Were you careful about your listening when Brenda was alive?”
Ellis shrugged, and said, “I heard what everybody else heard.”
“And what were these rumors about my late wife?”
“That I ain’t saying until you put away the damn gun. There’s more guys shot over the subject of broads than all the other reasons for getting shot put together.”
Mogaill lowered his gun slowly. “You do understand, Lieutenant, I haven’t got a whole lot to live for outside a mortgage and my pension?”
“That I get. Just let’s take it gentle on my clock.”
“Fair play. Now, about that gossip…?”
“Everybody seen you and Brenda didn’t have your typical marriage. You know, with her being home looking after a mess of little rug runners? You had the nice house out in Queens, with the geranium pots and all. But hell, Davy, half the time she was over on the other side instead of being here with you in New York. We also seen that. I guess it was just everybody’s feeling that you and her had one of them, you know—understandings.”
“Understandings?” Mogaill’s tone was mocking, and so was his smile.
“Well—”
“You’re telling me everyone thought these long separations of ours were about sex—or the lack thereof?”
“Give us a break here, Davy. Nobody much gave a rat’s fanny about your sex life one way or the other.”
“Nor much more about Brenda and me, I’d bet. Americans are like that. Once the glandular questions about a person are settled, there’s little interest in anything else. You’ve political campaigns here that revolve around nothing but sex, and not very interesting sex at that.”
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