Drown All the Dogs

by Thomas Adcock

  “Everybody resents paying high interest.”

  “Aye, resentment. Like a child’s textbook, boy.”

  “What are you saying my grandfather had to do about this?”

  “He exploited the situation, like any rich bastard will do to keep the focus off his own parasitic failings.”

  “How?”

  “You first must understand how deeply us tinkers is hated. We’re descended from the ones to first lose their land during the famine. Our ancestors lost their footing, and we never had a chance to get it back, you see. Tinkers, they call us, since the only work anybody’s willing to give us is repairing their pots and pans. Tink, tink, tink we go at our work all the day long. Tinkers we become. People look at us, and they remember them times of famine hell from what the shanachies told them.”

  “And they’re afraid.”

  “Aye, you catch on quick like your angel mother. The regular folk, they think if they touch us they’ll lose the roofs overhead and the underfoot, and wind up like us, sleeping under the stars their whole lives.”

  “It’s a short step from fear to hatred.”

  “Most times it’s no step at all.”

  “You say Lord Fitz exploited the situation.”

  “Him and his cronies come up with the bright idea of herding all us tinkers from small camps like mine here into big flocks where the coppers can watch us close. Your grandfather, he had the jump on Hitler when it come to concentration camps.”

  “This happened here?”

  “It would have, but for the angel Mairead come to be our savior.”

  “How—?”

  “Lord Fitz maps a brilliant plan he bruits about the Dáil. He says anybody owing usury to the gombeen men should have the right to abolition of debt, with full protection by the government, in return for debtors testifying against tinkers in special courts set up to speed concentration. He’s naturally hailed as a genius.”

  “I get the picture.”

  “Like your mum. She saw the injustice right off, unlike the useless rich girls she knew. So, she come out to the nearest camp of tinkers she knew, which happened to be one run by me own daddo, may God rest. Me and her, we got along just fine. She took what she knew back into the city, and went about speaking to any fine ladies’ group with open minds. She’d tell them ladies how my people are human beings with rights, and we’re about more than tink, tink, tink. And she’d tell them, too, that poverty is the greatest crime of all.”

  “Somebody told me my mother was political.”

  “Aye, she was. She and your daddo, they was quite the team. With her pushing one way at the ladies’ clubs, and your dad pushing his fine friends at Trinity College, poor Lord Fitz never stood a chance of seeing his grand plan for exterminating us tinkers. It was the beginning of the end between your mum and her pa.”

  “My parents, they put the stop to concentration camps?”

  “They did, and more. Your mother was famously quoted at the time, on the subject of the law. And this became the shame of the Fitzgeralds, old Lord Fitz being a right proper barrister and all.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Mairead, she says, ‘More people are hurt by law makers than law breakers.’ This truth she’d say to her proper ladies’ clubs. The ladies, bless them, they knew it. After all, it was their own husbands and brothers and fathers in the Dáil what didn’t see fit to give them the basic right of voting back in them days.”

  “If you could have seen her in New York,” I said, “you’d have trouble thinking of her as a radical.”

  “Radical she was, until they pounded it out of her.”

  “Who—the Fitzgeralds?”

  “Them, but they weren’t alone in taking her down. I don’t like to say it, but your daddo had a part in it. Also that uncle of yours.”

  Sister stood up and stretched herself.

  “You’re not through talking to me, are you?” I asked her.

  “Any more talk from me’s going to require a drop of whiskey. What about you, boy?”

  “Maybe later.”

  Sister reached under her habit and pulled out a flask. She colored another cup of coffee with whiskey, and went on.

  “So far as I know, the first political types your mother hooked up with was the Hockaday boys—meaning your father and his brother.”

  “Uncle Liam?”

  “Sure, there was quite the mix down at the pub they all went to way back then. I can’t remember it’s name …”

  “The Ould Plaid Shawl?”

  “That’s it. Everybody of a certain type went there. Those caring about such things as voting, I suppose. Me, I say if voting made a difference they’d outlaw it.”

  “I think like you.”

  Sister smiled. “Well, it was fascinating times the young people had for themselves then. Wonderful nights of arguing politics into the purple dawn. Then the pairing-off part of it, if you know my meaning.”

  “Meaning my mother and father.”

  “Not at first.”

  It took plenty of time for the full meaning to sink in. My head, which had only just begun easing up on me, went spongy again. But Sister waited patiently as I thought out what she had intimated.

  “There was someone else,” I said. “Why shouldn’t there be? She was young, beautiful …”

  I knew what Sister meant. But I could not say it myself.

  “Let’s put it this way,” Sister said, “if you had a brother, how would you like your Ruby straying over to him?”

  Liam telling me, “Lose your darling and you’re a bloody fool like myself. I lost a darling of my own, long ago, and now you know the great regret of my life.”

  Liam standing beside me at the open grave in St. John’s Cemetery, Queens; me in my crisp rookie blues, him in his scuffed brown shoes and tobacco-reeked tweeds and black rain slicker, crossing himself, wetnosed and weeping, dropping red roses into her final resting place …

  “I’ll have that drink now,” I said.

  Sister found a glass, and filled half of it with whiskey from her flask.

  I drank a bit, and the fugitive thought of my grandmother Finola came to mind. I asked, “When she married my father, did that end it with Liam?”

  “Aye, so far as she was concerned.”

  “But not him?”

  “That takes a bit of explaining. Would you be wanting another drink?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Now, I don’t know all the details, of course. But seeing them all together every so often as I would, I knew Aidan and Mairead was the proper combination. Your uncle, he was lacking in the high spirit your father had. He might have been the smart choice for Mairead of the two of them Hockadays, but she went with her heart … Sure you don’t want a drink?”

  “Thanks, no.”

  Sister fixed another for herself, this time without the bother of coffee to get in the way.

  “Funny to think of it,” she said, “but old Lord Fitz might have come to like Liam as a son-in-law, even coming from nowhere like he did. Liam done all right for himself, didn’t he now?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Fitz hated Aidan, though. And Aidan, being a high-spirited radical of his time—why, he hated Fitz and the poops something fearsome. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was the major attraction for Mairead. I said she was an angel, I didn’t say she was smart about her men, did I?”

  “No.”

  “Mairead was crazy to get married. She wanted the whole big affair, with the church and all her family. I suppose she couldn’t entirely abandon all that she’d come up with.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Lord Fitz—well, you might imagine his reaction.”

  “Not good.”

  “He told Mairead, ‘I’ll break him, your Aidan—and I’ll break you, too, if you don’t leave him.’”

  “And of course, she didn’t.”

  “Didn’t leave your dad, no. The two of them announced their engagement. Then Lord
Fitz broke them, all right.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He started by seeing to it no priest in Dublin would see fit to marry Aidan and Mairead. This just about killed your mother. Then the bastard Fitz went to work on your dad.”

  “I think I can guess. He kept my father from working?”

  “He did. The bastard saw to it no magazine nor newspaper in the city would publish Aidan Hockaday. Then when your dad had to find himself a teaching job, this was closed to him, too. Aidan was desperate for work. Everywhere he turned, he found the doors closed. Never did he get the breaks. Everybody seemed to know Aidan Hockaday was on his way for a position, and they’d have their doors all ready to slam in his face. It was as if Lord Fitz was one step ahead of him, like he had a pipeline into Aidan’s life …”

  “Like an informer.”

  “Aye, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the informer went by the name Liam. There was such a bitterness between the brothers.”

  “Did they ever get over it?”

  “Not until your dad and mum had no choice but to leave for America.”

  “You make that sound like a terrible fate. I’m told my dad always wanted to go to New York. I even have a letter he once wrote to Liam, telling him how much he loved the city.”

  “All I can tell you is that at the time Mairead, at least, was devastated. Mostly because she wouldn’t be making the journey as a proper bride. I said she was a fine radical, I never said she was entirely comfortable about it.”

  “Where did they finally get married?”

  “Maybe this will upset you to know, but the two of them were married by my own daddo—in our tinker camp, by our own ceremony.”

  “You’re telling me…?”

  “I’m saying so far as I know, they was never proper and legal about it, for what that’s worth.”

  “And that’s what you meant by it wasn’t over between my mother and Liam so far as he was concerned?”

  “Aye, it was my impression. I’m sorry to be telling you all this, boy. But Ruby, she explained to me how you come here to know it all.” Sister turned to Ruby, and said, “Tell him that’s right.”

  Ruby, who had sat so quietly at the table with Sister all this time, said to me, “You’ll be okay with all that, won’t you, Hock?”

  “Do right by your bonny, and never lose her. You’ll not wish to wind up in life lying helpless and lonesome on your back, listening to some faraway melody with lyrics that’s stabbing your heart with the memory of old love.”

  There were two plums hanging on the tree, and he took one of them, therefore neither taking nor leaving plums …

  Chapter 41

  The next day, the pain in my leg subsided enough for me to stand. I could even walk a bit without having to hang on to Ruby.

  Oliver Gunston, meanwhile, was having a grand time of it. Once more he took page one by storm, this time by reporting the outraged reactions of government and Trinity College officials to the Nevermore Plan, as dramatically revealed by Peadar Cavanaugh’s suicide manifesto.

  He was still keeping our names out of the paper, and Gunston had to know by now the same thing that the tinkers had found from their own Garda sources: at least some of the cops were gunning for Ruby and me. He would also assume, since we were not in custody, that we were either dead or in hiding. And so leaving us out of the story for the time being was Gunston’s demonstration of positive thinking.

  Under the circumstances, I decided we should get on with the trip to County Carlow.

  “What’s there for you, Hock?” Ruby asked me.

  “You’ll think I’m nuts when I tell you.”

  “Like I don’t already.”

  “I want to visit a dream.”

  “Of your father?”

  “This dream is mostly a place. My father’s in it, but so are some others, including Uncle Liam. The place is a sheepeen, and there’s a wake going on.”

  “In a pub, how convenient.”

  “There’s a big house up on a hill, and a stream …”

  “Does any of it make sense, Hock?”

  “Not until we get there.”

  “What if we don’t?”

  “Then nothing will ever make sense.”

  “We can’t have that.”

  Sister Sullivan made us the loan of a twenty-year-old Volkswagen beetle and the gift of some travel advice.

  “I don’t need to be telling you to stay off the motorways,” she said. “Stick to the little roads the sheep and the farmers use, and you’re not likely to be troubled by coppers who might have the eye out for you still. If you leave by noon, you should make it over the Wicklows and into Carlow by five o’clock easy.”

  “We’ll be back in a day or two,” I promised bravely.

  One of the other tinker women packed up a basket of roast beef sandwiches with mustard on black bread and gave it to us with a gold-toothed smile. Her husband wanted me to take his revolver along for the ride, but I declined the offer.

  We were on our way.

  An hour south of Dublin, one of the tires blew and there seemed to be a lot of steam gushing up from under the hood. Ruby can sew, she understands stereo components and she can actually set the clock on a VCR. But cars are out of her league. I myself am no good at any of it.

  Fortunately, the breakdown occurred near a lakeside village called Pollaphuca, which had a roadside garage. We left the Volkswagen with a mechanic by the name of O’Malley, then followed his directions to an inn where we loitered over tea and biscuits. I used the telephone there and placed a call to Neglio.

  “It’s about goddamn time you called,” the inspector said. As usual, our opening long-distance pleasantries were brief. “What’s the matter? Somebody cut you a new place to sit down and all this time you couldn’t drag your butt to a phone.”

  “Gee, it’s lovely to hear your voice,” I said. “And how’s every little thing in New York?”

  “There’s harps all over town can’t wait to see you again, Hock. Only I don’t guarantee an entirely friendly reception line.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Slattery over at the Post, he’s running a pickup from that Dublin rag that went and spilled it all about your Irish Nazis.”

  “The Nevermore Plan?”

  “Whatever. That swell little club your old man started up back during the war. It’s got the homefront harps rattled so bad you’d think Washington was going to enact Prohibition again.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You ought to. You been to enough St. Paddy’s Day parades in your time. For every shillelagh in the crowd there’s about a dozen old glories, right? Nobody’s quicker with that patriotic crap than your tribe.”

  “Unless it’s your paisanos.”

  “Now you’re getting it, Hock. Old wops, they like to be one hundred percent American. That way, the WASPs don’t get tense and start thinking Mafia and Mussolini and like that. You come from a house where the kitchen smells like ravioli, somehow you got to blend in with these people whose kitchens smell like … I don’t know, lettuce. This is just basic survival in the melting pot, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Same with harps. Ask the old guys, they know because they’re still sensitive. Just when you’re comfortable and they’re renting you rooms like a human being and hiring you for jobs and they aren’t calling you mick so much anymore, along comes this war story about Irishmen and swastikas.”

  “Rattling stuff.”

  “Well—Davy Mogaill anyhow, he’s pretty rattled.”

  “Mogaill? He’s back?”

  “Oh, yeah …”

  With the mention of Mogaill, there was now something strained in Neglio’s voice. He sounded like the guest at somebody’s house trying to be polite by not mentioning the smell of a dead mouse somewhere under the rug.

  “Well—where was he?” I asked.

  “Actually, we don’t know. Lieutenant Ellis, he says your rabbi must have been dazed in the
explosion at his house when Arty Finn got it and he just wandered off in the dark—for like a few days.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “AWOL so far as I’m concerned.”

  “But he’s all right? What happened?”

  “I guess he’s okay. Right now he’s holed up someplace. Who knows? I got the feeling he’s waiting for you to get back here before he surfaces.”

  “Waiting for me?”

  “One night out of the blue, Mogaill calls up Ellis, and the two of them have a meet up in the Bronx. Your rabbi’s got two things on the agenda. Number one, a tape recording he wants you to know about. Number two, he clears some of the dirty air by telling a story about his dead wife. Who it turns out was some kind of IRA bomb specialist—and also Arty Finn’s little sister.”

  “Brenda was her name.”

  “That’s her, and when she was among the living she was tunneling under Mogaill pretty good. Davy can tell you better than me. Anyhow, from the tape and from what Ellis figures, it looks like Finn got about what he deserves. Same with this Farrelly character.”

  “So, you’re telling me—?”

  “You figure it, Hock.”

  “Public service?”

  Neglio said nothing, which was a good answer. A cop of Neglio’s rank would not want to admit out loud that toe tags would pretty much be the extent of the homicide investigations of the unlamented Arty Finn and Dennis Farrelly. People have the strange idea that murderers are usually brought to justice. They do not keep score, and they watch entirely too much television.

  “All right,” I asked, “so what happens to Davy now?”

  “He shows up for work sometime, or else I guess he becomes another Judge Crater. If it was me, I’d show. Who’d want to save the city all those years of pension checks?”

  “You mentioned a tape recording.”

  “That’s right. Actually, it’s the audiocassette tape from that priest’s answering machine.”

  “Father Tim.”

  “Timothy Kelly, that’s right—the one who ate the gun. I had the tape transcribed. Your voice is on it, Hock. So is his—and so is this one very intriguing other caller, which makes sense now with those newspaper stories.”