“I didn’t come here to hurt anybody,” I said to her. I slipped a hand under Boylan’s dazed head, lifting it from the stones, and told him, “You’ve got me all wrong, Boylan.”
“Please, mister—he’s pourin’ blood,” the widow said.
“Let’s get you inside,” I said to Boylan, lifting him to his feet. “The girl will clean you up. Then you and I are going to have a talk.”
“Don’t be forgettin’ me now,” the driver said.
I gave the hack a five-pound note and said there was another one coming on top of the fare back to O’Connell Street. This bought his satisfaction and continued patience.
Francie’s widow helped me guide her father-in-law’s bulk through the front door and onto his back on a lumpy couch in the front parlor, the only furniture in the room besides a chair and a rug and a round table with a bottle and glasses on it. A small boy in diapers wearing a mangy sweater crouched under the table, hands covering his eyes.
I thanked the young widow, and asked her name.
“Catty, short for Catherine,” she said, putting her baby down on the rug to crawl.
Boylan grunted and came to life. He reached for the bottle on the table. I said to Catty, “Maybe you could bring some hot water and soap, and a rag?”
She left us and I propped up Boylan into a sitting position on the end of the couch. There was the sound of snapping springs as I moved him.
“I’ll pour us two,” I said.
“Why not?” said Boylan, the fight gone out of him, even from his voice. “First y’killed me boy, then y’beat me down in the street. Now here y’come into me house like you own the bloody place. You might’s well steal yourself a nip o’my own poteen.”
“Politics killed your Francie, not me.” Any fight left in me was gone, too. It was not difficult to feel pity for the mess of Joe Boylan. “And I won’t steal a drink from you. I’ll pour one, or I’ll pour two. You call it, Boylan.”
He waved a paw, and said, “Go on with you, we’ll both drink.”
Catty came back with a bowl of soapy water and a cloth. She swabbed Boylan’s face and nose while I poured out the dark brown poteen. “Aw thanks, girl,” he said to her when she was finished. I gave him his drink and sat down in the chair with my own.
The boy came out from beneath the table, toddling my way. He stopped in front of me and stared at my face, confused and sad-eyed.
“Da?” the boy said to me.
“Nae, that’s not your da,” Boylan told him. He asked Catty, “Can you not take the lads off?”
Catty scooped up the baby from the rug and plopped him on her hip. She stepped over to the older boy and put out a finger; he grasped it obediently, though never taking his eyes off me. Then the three of them, Francie Boylan’s achingly young widow and his two fatherless sons, walked slowly from the parlor to the back room.
“I’m sorry for your troubles,” I said.
Boylan smiled and tipped his glass back. I had a sip of mine, which was enough. Joe Boylan’s poteen had a sour heavy taste, like English beer mixed with a dash of three-in-one oil. I put my glass back down on the table.
“That what you come for?” Boylan asked.
“It’s one reason,” I said, nodding. And then, knowing something about the world’s cops and the world’s Goff Streets, too, I added, “How many of the Dublin Garda have stopped by to offer condolences?”
“It ain’t likely we’ll be havin’ the district constable drawin’ up his seat to this afternoon’s tea.”
“Then you see I’m different.”
“By Christ, maybe you are.” Boylan scratched his beard. “But now why should that be?”
“I say politics killed your son. You know it’s the truth. And you say the murderers who did Francie were after me. I should maybe learn a truth of my own. It puts us on the same side, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, and ain’t it grand of us to be seekers of the bloody truth!” Boylan said, grunting in derision. He finished his drink and held out his empty glass, waving it for another. I poured.
“I am only saying this: what you know could be put together with what I know …”
“Then I’ll only be askin’, to what end? Is there some great and worthy thing t’be found here that’s goin’ to prevent Francie’s two young tads from growin’ up cannon fodder like their da? And what about this here street full of cannon fodder? You and your fine friends back in New York, you think you’re helpin’ these dumb fool lads by your stinkin’ damn dollars sent for the Irish Republican Army?”
I thought of Davy Mogaill and the dumb fool lads at Nugent’s bar playing “Ireland United” on the juke and drinking up their surcharged whiskies. I then passed along my rabbi’s sentiments, “Marching feet never changed a thing, they only produced more marching feet.”
“Aye, but just you try tellin’ it to these boyos’round here in Goff Street. Our kind of lads got nothin’, they know they’ll never have nothin’—and they bleedin’ well know they’ll always be most of the rest of the world despisin’ them, near as much as tinkers. So what d’you truly think they’ll be choosin’ to do with their feet?”
I told Boylan I would place my betting money with the IRA.
“Then you proved t’me you ain’t half the twit you look t’be. Your only trouble is, you ain’t yet seen through that uncle of yours what summoned you here. Well, it was poor Francie’s trouble as well.”
Liam summoned me?
I poured Boylan yet another drink, though his eyelids were dropping off toward drunkard’s sleep. And I asked, “How do you mean, see through my uncle?”
Boylan spat the name, “Liam Hockaday! Him and that wicked-spirited shadow of his!”
“Patrick Snoody?”
“Aye, and to a fiery hell with them two!” Joe Boylan roared again, his free hand shooting up as a fist. The two boys screamed from the back room, and Catty tried shushing them. Boylan tried standing, but failed. And then looked close to tears.
“I’m sorry for—”
Boylan cut me off, wanting me to hear his fullest accusation. “That devil uncle of yours, he’s one of them rotten old dogs of war what’s twistin’ up the minds of our poor lads like me Francis…!”
“Francie had something, though,” I said. “He carried history, he was a shanachie.”
“Nae, you ain’t gettin’ it yet. Francie was clever and learn’t the old stories, true enough. But he never was smart enough to see how trainin’ a parrot’s done for the good of history and for it’s evil, too.”
“Which is where Liam Hockaday and Patrick Snoody come in?”
“Aye. Them and the whole bunch of the old haters.”
“You’re saying—?”
This time Boylan succeeded in standing, with a great deal of grunting and the help of his hand braced against the wall. He said, “I’m sayin’ it’s time you left me house and me sorrows. There’s no sense to talkin’ more on the old hates, or the new. Just be goin’ now, you American bastard you.” He added, “Please.”
So I left.
And as I walked through Boylan’s door to the street and the taxi, I realized my steps fell heavier than when I had come. As if something in me had gained weight, maybe my hollow space. I would have to learn to move with that.
Bullets meant for me?
Liam summoned me?
Old dogs of war?
When we had turned off from Goff Street to the road leading south to the diamond, the hack turned a worried face to me, and said, “I hate to say it, but I swear that brown car back there’s followin’ us. I seen him before, waitin’ up at the corner of Goff’til we pulled out.”
“Don’t stop for traffic lights,” I said.
Chapter 34
After a long hot bath, Ruby wrapped herself up in a robe and stood at the window looking out over Ladbroke Street. The morning dew, ice white, still traced grass blades in the shallow yard. Tree branches, heavy with buds, shivered in a wind that swept up the hill from Dún Laoghaire’s wate
rfront.
She chose her clothes accordingly: cream-colored cotton sweater, waist-length jacket of olive green leather, tan corduroy trousers, walking shoes. She also selected a green and yellow silk scarf and tied this loosely around her neck.
Then she removed everything from the closet and bureau drawers and carried them to the bed. She folded and refolded all the clothes—her things and Hock’s, too—and stacked them carefully in preparation for the suitcases.
Packing was Ruby’s responsibility by default. She had accepted this as a cost of throwing in with a travel slob like Neil Hockaday. Hock was the kind who was perfectly satisfied with any old thing thrown into a D’Agostino shopping bag at the last minute. Ruby took luggage seriously. Socks tucked into the corners of the case, breakables in paper and plastic wrap and cushioned by small soft items, everything pressed and neatly folded, everything kept level.
She and the suitcases would be ready to leave for Carlow this afternoon, by God. Ruby’s clothes, and Hock’s as well, would look very, very nice on arrival.
Before going downstairs, Ruby took a moment to organize her thoughts about the business of Moira as carefully as she had the suitcases and her day’s ensemble. What was it she had yet to learn from Moira? What approach might work best? How much could she expect to pry out of her in the short time available?
Ruby decided to pursue the single essential question of a cloistered, somewhat batty cook’s acquaintance with Hock’s well-born mother, Mairead Fitzgerald. What was it Moira had said of her? “A beauty she was. A beauty and a rebel, and the reason I dreamed up the poser about the one-eyed man.” If Ruby could get to the bottom of all that, she had the right to call the morning a good day’s work.
She daubed on some maroon lipstick and brushed her eyelids lightly with black liner. She gave herself a final mirror check, pulling the collar of her sweater just so, poking her hair, smoothing the front of her trousers. Then she left the red room and walked down the staircase.
Snoody passed through the hall at the bottom of the stairs on his way into the formal parlor. He turned and looked up at Ruby, but offered no morning greeting. Neither did Ruby.
The radio in Moira’s kitchen was tuned to the same demented Mississippi thumper Ruby had heard the day before. It put her in mind of a less than pleasant memory from her girlhood back home in New Orleans: her mother, Violet, dragging her off to the Crescent City Miracle Tabernacle and the Reverend Zebedeh Flowers scaring everybody silly with his screeching and swaying and his big, piercing, bulging eyes fixed directly on Ruby Flagg as he described the eternal tortures of the damned, meaning even little girls who foolishly put off being sanctified in the baptismal font.
Ruby called, “Moira?” But there was no answer.
The thumper wound up his radio sermon with a prayer from the Psalms, “Cleanse Thou me from secret faults!”
Ruby called out again to the still kitchen, “Moira … Moira?” Again, there was no answer.
A flourish of organ music ended the thumper’s spot. Now somebody was reading the day’s obituaries.
“Moira?”
No answer.
Ruby crossed through the kitchen, past the table where she had sat for tea yesterday with Moira. She opened a door to the back garden, stepped out into the chill and saw nothing but a cat lapping up milk in a dish set out on a patio block. Ruby went back inside.
There was another door, probably leading down to the cellar. Ruby opened it. Beyond the first few risers of a steep wooden staircase, all was blackness. There was a heavy smell of apples and coal.
Ruby felt around the wall for a light-switch plate. She found it and pushed. From below, where the stairs took a right-angled turn, a bare strung bulb popped on.
“Moira—?”
No answer.
Ruby stepped back from the doorway, unsteadily. She turned, and looked behind her. On the table was a half cup of tea, and a cutting board with pie dough and a knife. She went to the table and picked up the knife, then returned to the cellar entrance.
One more time. “Moira—?”
Not even the echo of her own voice in the thick, dusty air. Ruby stepped carefully down the stairs, the dough-streaked baker’s knife in a tight overhand grip.
When she made the turn, she met the cook. In soundless shock, Ruby’s first thought was to wonder if poor Moira Catherine Bernadette Booley had been a good girl sanctified in the baptismal font.
Moira’s huge bell of a body swung gently from a rope doubled around her neck and secured to the low ceiling between two flights of cellar stairs. One arm dangled, the other was dropping slowly away from the rope at her neck. Spit bubbles lined Moira’s blue lips. One foot twitched, inches above a life-saving stair. The eyes were reddened from blood and they bulged, like Zebedeh Flowers’s bulging eyes.
There was a scurrying sound in the dark of the cellar, below. A rati Ruby guessed—hoped. She raised the knife.
“Miss Flagg, are you there—?”
Snoody called her name.
Ruby fought against time and panic, and the comparatively dainty fear of a rat. She rushed toward Moira’s swinging body, put the knife against the rope and sawed back and forth, back and forth. Moira fell, her lifeless body crumpling along a wall. Then she slid on her dead back, head-first, clattering down the stairs into the smell of apples and coal.
“Miss Flagg—!”
Now Snoody was stamping his way down from the kitchen. Ruby turned and waited, knife raised.
“No!” she shouted up the stairs. “No!”
Snoody stopped where he was. Ruby heard him waiting, nose whistling nervously.
“Miss Flagg—what on earth’s going on?”
“You tell me, Snoody.” She tried to keep terror from her voice. She slipped the knife under her jacket and looked around the landing wall. There was Snoody facing her, frozen midway on the first flight of stairs down to the cellar, his hands empty. She repeated, “You tell me!”
“Miss Flagg, I don’t understand you …”
“Keep away from me!”
“Not to worry, I shall,” Snoody said, moving backward up to the kitchen, his hands against the staircase walls.
“What do you want with me?”
“I only came to tell you, madam, there are policemen here.”
“Police—?”
“To see you, and young Mr. Hockaday. Where is Mr. Hockaday? I can’t find him.”
“Us—?”
“They’re waiting. In the hallway, madam. Are you quite all right?”
Police?
A sense of relief washed over Ruby. Then she shook her head. No, she thought, something is wrong.
Snoody said, “Shall I tell them you’ll be up directly?”
Of course. What else? “Yes … tell them,” Ruby said.
Snoody disappeared. Ruby heard him walk through the kitchen. And again, she heard the rat noise below. Moira made no sound.
Ruby moved up the stairs, slowly. She returned the knife to the table, then ran cold water at the sink and rinsed her hands and face. She walked out to the hallway beyond the central staircase, where she saw four men in suits and topcoats, holding their hats in front of them, waiting. Snoody was saying something to them.
“I’m Ruby Flagg,” she said to the men in the topcoats. She worried, suddenly, about rope fibers in the knife blade she had left in the kitchen. “You wanted to see me?”
A dark-haired man stepped forward. He produced a Dublin Garda shield, and said, “And would your Mr. Neil Hockaday be about, too?”
“He left, early this morning.”
“Left for where, Miss?”
“Dublin.”
The policeman was not happy about this. He turned and conferred with the others, then turned back to Ruby and said, “All right, you’re to come with us now, Miss.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re under arrest is why.”
Chapter 35
The driver did me one better by losing the brown car entirely.
He accomplished this by zigzagging his way through a river of traffic, southbound on the North Road, then darting off through a maze of side streets.
“Did you see who was in the car?” I asked him.
I only saw the general shape of a man at the wheel myself. There might have been another man, but I could not be sure. “Sorry, guv, I only seen the car itself.”
We continued through the side streets, and districts not much different from the one we had left.
“How long was he waiting, back there in Goff Street?”
“Don’t know, really.”
He finally stopped the taxi at a trolley station. “If it was me,” he said, “I’d want t’be out of this here taxi, just t’be safe and sure. I’ll wait by you here until the trolley comes if y’like.”
“You don’t trust the Garda, do you?”
“I do not, guv.”
“How can you trust me?”
“Your five quid in me pocket’s a fine down payment on trust. You might clinch it by handin’ over that other fiver you mentioned. Then there’s the regular fare, of course. Which is two pounds and four.”
I gave him two more fivers and said he should keep the change.
“God bless America,” he said.
“That’s not what I heard in Goff Street.”
“There it’s full of hotheads, unlike meself. I am personally aimin’ to grow old, not bold.”
“You might turn out to be the gentlest man I’ll meet today.”
“Aye, and potentially the oldest, as I say. No charge for this advice, my American friend: mind well your step.”
The trolley came rattling to a stop.
“Can I get to Trinity College on this line?” I asked.
“Aye, tell the conductor to call you for University station.”
I stepped out of the taxi and said good-bye to my gentle driver, adding in Gaelic, “Ni cheolfad a thuille go bhfuighfidh me deoch.”
“And what’s it mean, guv?”
“It’s the only Irish I know, taught to me at a fine New York establishment called Nugent’s bar by a friend named Davy Mogaill. It translates, I’ll sing no more’til I get a drink.”
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