Drown All the Dogs

by Thomas Adcock

  He snatches my sleeves and pulls me against him, and I see his eyes are as blue as his shirt, and he says, “Thanam o’n dhoul, do ye think I’m dead?”

  Chapter 33

  This time, I had sense enough to leave behind the sneakers and the Yankees cap. Rounding the corner of Ladbroke Street to make my way down to the station, I now looked no more conspicuous in my Harris tweed jacket and suede chukka boots than any man I saw yesterday strolling through the Trinity College campus. For a topper, I had borrowed somebody’s tweed cap hanging on a hallway peg, and this I could rake down low over my face if the need called.

  Again, Ruby and I decided to split up for the day. This time, I did most of the deciding.

  I said to Ruby, rising with the first light of morning, “We’re leaving for County Carlow this afternoon. I’ve got some things to do in Dublin first.”

  “When did you decide on that, Hock? In your dreams?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s where we’ll go.”

  I wanted to look up Gunston again, I told her. Ruby told me she wanted another go at Moira anyway, and she hoped outside the house and out of the range of Snoody’s big ears.

  That decided and agreed, I dressed sensibly and left the house, this time bypassing Moira’s kitchen.

  I bought passable coffee and a copy of the Guardian at the train station and tried to appear nonchalant as I scanned the news of Eamonn Keegan’s assassination under a huge block-lettered streamer. GARDA CHIEF FOUND STABBED TO DEATH! KILLER ESCAPES IN BROAD DAYLIGHT! IRA TERROR SUSPECTED! Fortunately, there was nothing in the story about a New Yorker in a baseball cap on his way to the chief’s office right about the same time somebody gave him the business with a pair of long knives before escaping through a window and alleyway to the street.

  So far as the various constables and officers quoted in the report were concerned, this “brutal murder” was “obviously the work of the boys from the north” and “clearly proved” the “common knowledge in police circles” that Eamonn Keegan was a “political enemy of the IRA.” The story, accompanied by a photograph of the crime scene cropped so as not to be too distasteful for the Irish breakfast table, covered almost a third of page one, jumping to nearly as much space inside. But in all that ink, the story was infuriatingly trite and incomplete. A lot of journalists these days ought to turn in their press cards and take honest work as stenographers.

  Is there such a thing as a nonbrutal murder? What, exactly, is obvious about Ulstermen and blades? Or political enemies? And if Eamonn Keegan ran afoul of the IRA—if, in fact, such conspiracy did him in—could it mean that elsewhere in the Dublin Garda there was political sympathy for shadowy terrorists?

  My pal Slattery at the New York Post, who is nobody’s stenographer and everybody’s idea of a tabloid crime writer, once advised, “Hock, times change and worms turn, no matter what side of an iron curtain they’re on. The Russkis used to have Pravda, now it’s us. Over in Moscow, they’re enjoying the shock of a relatively free press. Here, we should be reading our papers like the Russians did for all those years. You have to always ask yourself, How come they’re telling me this? There used to be guys like Izzy Stone asking that for you, making the interesting connections between the official line and the real deal, but nobody’s hiring too many Izzy Stones anymore.”

  Like his American cousin, Oliver Gunston was also turning out to be one of the fine exceptions proving the rule of his tarnished trade. As I leafed through the remaining pages of the Guardian while waiting on line to buy my train tickets, I saw that he had managed to get the real deal into print. For attentive readers, there was this article, published between advertisements for trusses and depilatories:

  Cashiered Constable Dennis Farrelly Said to Be a Suicide in New York

  by Oliver Gunston

  A former constable of the Dublin Garda, discharged from duty two months ago, was found dead yesterday in a New York City slum. Dennis Farrelly, age 44, was declared a probable suicide by the authorities in New York, despite unresolved questions as to the circumstances of his death, and his very reasons for being in the United States.

  Mr. Farrelly’s body was discovered, completely nude, in the fetid, rubbish-strewn central air shaft of a six-storey tenement house in “Hell’s Kitchen”, the unofficial name of a colourful Manhattan neighborhood traditionally populated by Irish emigrants. He had apparently taken a small flat in the house, according to Detective Lieutenant Raymond Ellis of the New York Police Department.

  In a telephone interview with the Guardian, the blunt-speaking Lieut. Ellis suggested, “The guy could have still been distraught about getting canned off the police force over there in Dublin for all anybody knows. His career’s shot, so maybe he figures he can start over again in America. Probably he was like a lot of your unemployed foreign persons who think there’s still decent wages over here. So when he sees he’s a chump, he feels even worse about himself and he takes a leap off the roof in the dark of morning. It happens all the time, I regret to tell your readers. Maybe since he was naked there was also something strange about the guy that you probably don’t want to talk about in no family newspaper. Lots of things happen, especially in that bad neighborhood where Farrelly was staying.”

  Mr. Farrelly was cashiered by the late Chief Eamonn Keegan, who, perhaps coincidentally, was himself murdered yesterday afternoon here in Dublin (see related story, beginning page one). Chief Keegan, in a not altogether popular exercise of his power, sacked Mr. Farrelly for violating the Garda’s code of conduct.

  Specifically, Mr. Farrelly was accused of fraternizing with a “front group”, so-called, of the officially banned Irish Republican Army. He was said to have attended recent meetings of the secretive “Hearts of Steel” political club, an ultrapatriotic right-wing tendency long believed to be defunct. During the Battle of Britain, the club expressed public sympathy for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, and many of its members were also part of the short-lived Irish Fascist movement popularly known as the Blue Shirts. By the end of World War II, the Dáil’s Eireann Committee on Terrorist Organisations had declared the club to be a financial conduit for the IRA, a declaration unrescinded to this day. It was on such basis that Chief Keegan dismissed the Constable Farrelly.

  At the time of the sacking, Chief Keegan issued to the press a written statement that said, in part: “Let my action be clear warning to all others of the Dublin Garda that so long as I’m alive I shall not tolerate any manner of association with the IRA.” Many constables and officers denounced this statement as a gross libel against their professional and patriotic integrity.

  This entire matter was near to being forgotten until yesterday’s untimely deaths of both principal players in the minor scandal, Mr. Farrelly and Chief Keegan. As a striking backdrop to these deaths, the former a curious suicide and the latter an outright homicide, there is the additional matter of the horrific assassination two days ago in O’Connell Street of Francis Boylan, a professional chauffeur and well-known IRA sympathizer who was transporting a visiting New York City police detective and his female companion …

  There were another few paragraphs to the story. But they were pretty much a rehash of the previous Gunston piece, wherein Ruby and I were making a nice innocent trip to Ireland, and then the cock-a-doodle-do quotations from Keegan and Neglio laying everything off on coincidence, including Father Tim and Davy Mogaill’s house blasting away.

  So I took a moment at this point, as Slattery and all good Russians would, and turned back to the far less revealing story on page one, and asked myself, How come they’re telling me this? I also counted up the dead bodies so far (four, and maybe running). By that time I had reached the ticket window.

  I paid for my Dún Laoghaire-to-Dublin off-peak round-tripper. Then I walked out to the city-bound platform with a second cup of passable coffee. I then killed my waiting time by using a public telephone to call Gunston at his office.

  “I see by the paper this morning you got pretty
busy when I left you the other day,” I told him. “That’s a fine enterprising story.”

  “Good of you to notice,” he said.

  “How did you come on it?”

  “Well, there’s this bare-bones item came in from New York over the Reuters wire, and it seemed in need of some fuller suspicion, shall I put it?”

  Gunston said this expansively. Reporters love bragging about their exploits as much as cops. I could just see him and his green eyeshade now, propped back in his mahogany chair with his feet on the rolltop desk, cigar in hand.

  “So I rang up your friend Slattery once again, and of course he put me on to Lieutenant Ellis,” Gunston said. “Cracking good quotes, don’t you think?”

  “Cracking.”

  “The rest of it was a bit of research, then suggesting to the reader that in politics two plus two doesn’t add up to three no matter what certain ones holding office would have you believe.”

  “And then, of course, getting it into print.”

  “So, you see how it is. Your friendship with Slattery’s not for nix.”

  “I’ve heard about struggles with the editors if that’s what you mean.”

  “Ah, newspaper editors! They’ve all the dash and romance and imagination of pigeons, yet they’re not so beautiful against the sky.”

  “Anyhow, I want you to realize—what you got into the paper was very helpful. And what you left out was very appreciated.”

  “You mean about how it so happens you were detained at Garda headquarters for a second time? And that you’re Gavan Fitzgerald’s grandson, and how this is all very, very deep?”

  “I see you realize real good.”

  “I’ve got my fine sources. If you’ll stay good to our little bargain I’ll even tip some of them your way today.”

  “Ollie, if I ever figure out my story, you’re the biographer.”

  “Good-o. Now I’ve been talking about you with a fellow called Dermot Brennan. He’ll be grand for filling us in on the finer historical points of the muddy politics we’ve begun to bare. I’d like for us three to have a talk.”

  “I’m on my way into the city. I can be at the Guardian in, oh, forty-five minutes.”

  “Best we meet away from here. And we cannot make it nearly so soon. The plan is, we’ll have a bite of lunch at noon. Dermot’s occupied with his morning lectures. He’s on the faculty at Trinity, you know.”

  “Small world. Too small.”

  “You’re saying that sarcastic like.”

  “I’ve got my reasons.”

  “And sources, too? Mind our bargain, Detective Hockaday.”

  “I do all right by the helpful press. Ask Slattery.”

  “I did. He tells me you’re a half-honest cop in a town three-quarters on the take.”

  “I don’t mind if you quote him.”

  “Aye, he said you’d be flattered.”

  “So—lunch today, Ollie. How about the Ould Plaid Shawl?”

  “You know the place—?”

  “Here’s my train. See you at noon.”

  So there I was enroute to a morning in Dublin suddenly gone blank. I spent the time on the train working on my case notebook, jotting down the information from Gunston’s article, and looking over previous entries for something I could maybe run down before lunch.

  A cluster of question marks beside the scribbled name Joe B. stared up at me from one of three pages devoted to the Francie Boylan assassination that had kicked off my arrival in Ireland. I decided to look up the bereaved family, namely the father that Francie had mentioned.

  The telephone directory at Dublin’s central depot listed Joe Boylan to a house in Goff Street. I wrote down a three-digit address, then dialed the accompanying five-digit call number from a pay phone. When a man answered, I hung up. In my business, I have generally found it productive to land unannounced at somebody’s home.

  Out in O’Connell Street, I flagged a taxi.

  “The devil you say!” the hack complained as I told him Joe Boylan’s address. He turned around in his driver’s seat, and after three or four seconds’ worth of assessing his fare, asked, “What’s a Yank like you want t’be doin’ in grotty old Goff Street?”

  “Family,” I answered, saying the first thing that came to mind.

  “The poor relations got their teats caught up again?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Aye, it’s the usual.” The hack pulled the taxi out into traffic. I caught him swiping looks at me in his rearview mirror as we rode along, north from Dublin’s diamond. “Elsewise, my friend, you’re wantin’ to lose some teeth in a journey to Goff Street. Have you never seen the district?”

  “No.”

  “Where d’you make home in America?”

  “New York.”

  “Oh, well then, New York bein’ a city where your best friend in all the world is the one not hittin’ you over the head, I suppose you’ll manage in our Goff Street.”

  “I suppose.”

  Joe Boylan’s house was narrow and sagging and the color of grime, squeezed into a long row of identically ugly houses. Cracks in the window over the street were filled with tin foil and yellowed bits of newspaper. A gray dog with a bony chest scavenged from an open rubbish barrel outside the door. Down at the far end of Goff Street, where the horizon was filled by sulfurous factory haze, boys picked up stones from the gutters and threw them at one another.

  Taxis were rare here. “Can’t you feel’em peerin’ at you from behind the shades and curtains?” my driver said.

  I told him I could. And I imagined what lay behind those shuttered windows, all up and down Goff Street: squawling children, women so tired they looked touched by the hand of death, men with little to do but nurse their resentments.

  “How about waiting here for me?” I asked the driver.

  “It’d be wise,” he said, cutting the taxi engine and lighting a cigarette. “There ain’t a trolley line in ten blocks of here.”

  I knocked at the Boylan door and discovered I was on the mark about the scene inside. A girl of twenty with watery blue eyes, pocked skin and hair the color of a brown paper bag answered. She held a squawler slung across a hip, there was another one screaming from someplace behind her.

  “Joe Boylan live here?” I asked.

  “And who’d be wantin’ t’know?”

  “I was with Francie when he died, ma’am. My name’s—”

  She was shoved aside by a thickset man in a sleeveless undershirt and wool trousers hitched up with braces. He was about the age my father would be, with a blazing red beard and flammable breath. “Get on out with you,” he told the girl, cuffing her. She and the baby stumbled toward the back of the dank-smelling house. The baby shrieked.

  “I’d be Joe Boylan,” he said to me. “State your bleedin’ business.”

  I tried to mask my surprise at the sight of him. Francie had spoken of a man from the Dún Laoghaire countryside, a gentle soul who measured the spring by the taste of onion in cow’s milk, between the blooms of pussy willows and forsythia. Here now before me was the waste of a man from a hard street, and drunk before noon.

  “Your son Francie was telling me about you before he died.”

  “Where’s it you’re from then?”

  “New York.”

  Joe Boylan looked past me to the taxi. He asked, “What’s this?”

  “I asked him to wait. I only want a few minutes of your time.”

  “Would you be a policeman?”

  “Yes.” I showed him my badge.

  Boylan tried slamming the door in my face. But I stopped it with my foot, like a salesman. He shook at the latch furiously, and said, “Nae, I don’t talk t’your murderin’ kind!”

  “I’m an American!” I shouted, as if it somehow made sense.

  “You’re the bastard meant to take them bullets what killed Francie!” Boylan hissed at me. There was shrieking from inside. This time from the girl.

  I moved back out of the door, my tho
ughts as staggered as my step. Bullets meant for me?

  I said, “Wait … What are you talking about?”

  Boylan snarled, “You heard me, you Irish-American bastard! Go home t’your stinkin’ friends in New York what raise the money for our own simple fools here! Shame on your blood money, you bastard you!”

  “I don’t understand …”

  “Joe—!” the girl shouted from behind Boylan. I saw her red-knuckled fingers wrap around one of his hairy wrists, pleadingly. “Oh, Joe, leave it be! Come inside—!”

  He broke from her, swinging the door open to the street, roaring at me loud enough for all his neighbors to hear, “This here’s the American what should’ve been shot! Not me Francis! Now comes the bastard here, to call on Francie’s widow nice as pie!”

  Boylan shambled out the door, with his fists up and flailing. He growled, and took a looping swing at me with his right. I had plenty of time to raise a defense, and Boylan’s punch slapped into my open hand. I caught his clumsy left uppercut in the same way.

  I pushed him off me, but he wanted more. He lowered his head and charged at me like a bull, spitting and shouting “American bastard you!” I grabbed a handful of his beard and yanked hard enough to send him crashing to the cobblestones.

  Francie’s widow was as blindly frightened now as the baby, who still clung to her like a chimp. “Jaysus!” she cried. “Oh—Joe!” Up and down the street, people had left their shuttered windows and clustered in open doors for a better view. Likewise, my driver was out of his taxi, gawking like a lawyer at a five-car pileup.

  I bent over the downed Boylan, whose face was mashed sideways into the stone grit of the street outside his door. He lay quite still. A drunk is relaxed when he falls, and therefore seldom breaks a bone. And even though blood trickled freely from Boylan’s flat nose, he was probably more humiliated by the fall than injured.

  “Don’t hurt him no more, mister!” the widow said. Tears flowed from her pale eyes. “Joe’s all me and the babies got now, don’t y’see?”