“What other caller?”
“Remember what you said about public service?”
“I remember.”
“Keep that in mind when I tell you what happened. This guy calls your priest, long-distance it sounds like. He doesn’t give a name, but he asks, ‘What is a true patriot?’ The machine’s still on, like Father Kelly picked up in the middle of the call. So we’ve got him gasping on the line like maybe he’s going to blow chunks, and then the padre just says, ‘True patriots have guns in their hands and poems in their heads … Nevermore!’”
“Right, it makes sense,” I agreed.
I did not have to guess the authorship of that poetically coded exchange. Or that Farrelly was the caller. Neglio had stopped guessing, too, by the sound of him.
I thought of poor Father Tim with his rosary in his red-knuckled hands, praying to St. Jude that day I last saw him and his troubled pale face and his puffy neck broken out in a rash. I felt in my pocket, and there was the medallion he gave me. And I thought about a line from Peadar Cavanaugh’s letter: I am an old dog of war … my commander has issued a final call, which shall mean my death, one way or another. I choose my own way out of this vale.
“Hock…?”
Neither one of us had said anything for several seconds.
“I’m here, yeah.”
“You don’t want to get any deeper in this shit, do you?”
“Not really.” I rubbed the back of my thigh, where the dressed wound was still sore.
“Come on home where you belong, Hock. It’s all over now.”
“Maybe for you, and maybe in New York. But I don’t belong there until it’s over here.”
“Don’t be talking like a goddamn martyr.”
“I won’t die for anybody’s opinion.”
“You won’t have any choice if you get caught in the crossfire of a couple of Irish hardasses having themselves a debate.”
“I’ll be seeing you, Inspector.”
“You wish.”
I hoped.
We drank tea, and I filled in Ruby on my talk with Neglio. When we grew weary of hanging around the inn, we hiked back to the garage. O’Malley had the VW patched up, and now was trying to figure exactly how much he could soak me.
“The tire, she’ll run you only fifty quid since I happened to have a recap lying around and I wouldn’t be wanting to cause undue hardship to a traveler,” O’Malley said. He pulled the stub of a pencil from behind his ear, and wrote down this amount on a pad of paper spotted with grease.
“No, of course not,” I said.
O’Malley looked up at me, then he screwed his face into pained concentration and said, “Then let’s see now … that radiator. The great leaky old thing, what a horror of a job that was …”
Ruby kicked the new tire. It sounded like a beach ball bouncing along the Coney Island boardwalk. I saw that it had about as much tread, too. Fifty Irish pounds for a bald beach ball.
“How much for changing the water and adding a little radiator sealant?” I asked.
“Oh,’tis far more craft to it than that—”
“How much?”
“Another fifty, I’m afraid.”
“I’d be afraid to ask for that much, too.”
“Shall we call it eighty-five quid in all, accounting for the wee break it’s my pleasure giving to American passers-by?”
“Better sixty-five, and a fond memory of Pollaphuca.”
“To that I would suggest seventy-five, sir, keeping in mind the sickness of my littlest child.”
Ruby kicked the tire again, and said, “Pay it, Hock. It’s another three hours to go, and in this thing we’d better get there before dark.”
“Hock, that’s an interesting name,” said O’Malley as I peeled off some bills and put them into his hands.
“It’s Gaelic for sucker.”
Ruby drove for the next hour over a flat and lonesome and not particularly interesting terrain. I shut my eyes and tried lying back to sleep, but learned this is impossible in a VW.
There was the engine’s high-pitched whine, air whistling through windows that would not shut tight, and the occasional whump-whump of wheels slamming over the road’s many rough spots. Also the scritch-scratch of old windshield wipers beating back something between drizzle and a shower.
I finally gave up. When I opened my eyes, I found Ruby staring at me.
“Are you watching where you’re going?” I asked her.
“I guess I can see as far as I need to,” she said, glancing up the road for a second or two. Then she turned back. “So, you were dreaming about me?”
“What’s to dream? You’re here.”
“Yes, I am. Cleft and all.”
“What?”
“Back in New York, when I took you out to dinner for your birthday, you told me you loved the cleft in my chin.”
“I remember.”
“Do you remember proposing?”
“I wish you’d watch the road.”
Ruby did not turn away. She said, “You made out like you were joking, but we both knew better. So, that was your first proposal. Remember your second?”
“You fell asleep.”
“I said I’d get back to you.”
“Yeah, you did. It’s raining, for crying out loud. Will you look at the road once?”
“I know where we’re headed. Do you?”
“We have to talk about this now? Bodies are falling down around us like maple leaves in October, with me being almost dropped myself. We’re on the run from the cops in a VW that could break down any minute. And my old man is … I don’t know what, a Nazi.”
“Life can be stormy.”
“Gee, I guess it can.”
“There’s calm at the eye of a storm.”
“Meaning you?”
Ruby smiled, looked at the road, then back at me. “I hate to say it, but being calm is woman’s work. Men aren’t so good at hard work like that.”
“I see why you hate to say it.”
“Tell me about my cleft again.”
“First you tell me, what you think it would be like for you if you threw in with a cop.”
“What’s to know that I don’t already know, Hock? I know you snore on your back with your mouth open.”
“Look, I’ve been married before. I can’t help thinking if I did it again I’d be like the crackpot who shows up at the station house confessing to some crime he read about in the newspaper.”
“God, you’re romantic for a guy who snores on his back.”
“I don’t get a break, do I?”
“O’Malley already gave you one.”
“Some break. If you don’t look out, we’re going to run off the road.”
“Not if I hear what I want to hear.”
“Okay, okay. Will you marry me, Ruby?”
“Maybe three’s a charm,” she said.
Then Ruby pulled the VW to a stop at the roadside. She opened her door and stepped out, crossed around the front of the car and pulled open my door.
“You drive now,” she said.
“Don’t tell me you’re suddenly sleepy again.”
“Shove over behind the wheel and just drive, Hock.”
For the next thirty minutes, with the question hanging in pregnant silence between us, I drove. Then as we began the long incline up into the green Wicklows, the rain let up and the sun appeared as a fresh ball of orange in the white-washed sky of early afternoon. And stretching over the road we traveled, from the hilltop at our left to the one at our right, was a perfect Irish rainbow.
Ruby said, “They say there’s gold at the end of a rainbow.”
I said, “They never mentioned which end.”
Chapter 42
Twice I had seen this ancient place in my new dreams. Its cold, smooth walls and colored glass windows, atop a hill back up from the low sheepeen. I could wonder what lay inside, but I had seen its exterior, and only in the foggy moonlight.
Now it was near
sundown. Now I was here for the third time. Now, inside the graystone manor house.
Ruby and I stepped through a slate-floored vestibule, then into a long and very dark entrance hall with a collection of different-size rugs laid end-to-end down the middle of the floor. The place smelled of tobacco, stale beer and ammonia. Back at the end of the hall, we could see a man’s head and shoulders behind a desk with a lamp on it. As we walked toward the desk we saw eight rooms along the way, four to a side. Only two seemed in use. A group of old women with knitting in their laps sat in one, watching a blinking television set. The other occupied room was a bar, the quietest one I have ever seen, with a scattering of old men drinking pints.
The desk was a carved mahogany beauty that did not belong. It was massive enough to serve a major hotel in New York or London, and it spoiled the dramatic view of a grand staircase behind it. There were a couple of Chinese garden pots at either end of the desk, inside of which were date palms dying from lack of oxygen and light.
“How might I help you?” the man at the desk inquired. He looked up from the newspaper he had been paging through. He was somewhere past sixty years of age, not by much, with a nimbus of silver curls around his head, a long sharp beak of a nose and hard brown eyes that darted quickly over Ruby and me, and our bags. “Would you be passin’ through, or stayin’ over in Tullow?”
“You’re Mr. Roarty?” I asked.
“Aye, Ned Roarty.” A middle-aged woman with gray streaks in her black hair appeared behind him. She was taller and younger than Roarty, and maybe thirty pounds bigger. Her features were mannish, and the same as his, the hard eyes, sharp nose and thin pursed lips, turned down at the corners as if she had just drunk vinegar. Roarty pointed an ink-stained thumb at her, and said, “This here’s me daughter, Annie.”
“The sign outside, it says you have rooms?” I asked.
“The sign don’t lie,” Roarty said. His eyes danced over our fingers. When he saw they were bare of rings, he asked sternly, “You’ll be wantin’ two rooms then?”
“Just one,” I said.
“Maybe with a window looking out over that beautiful stream,” Ruby said.
Ned Roarty muttered, “We’ll see, ma’am, we’ll see.” He turned and scanned the wooden cabinet fixed to the wall behind his desk. The cabinet was a warren of mail slots, most of which were empty except for the kind of room keys sold nowadays in antique shops. Roarty hummed and contemplated the possibilities. His daughter stared at us with her sour face.
“Here now’s the ticket,” Roarty said, turning back to us with a big iron key in his hand. He shoved aside his newspaper. Beneath it was a pen and the cloth-bound registry, which he opened and tipped toward me to sign. He said to Ruby, “Number Six is a lovely suite with front bay and balcony, ma’am. All the way up top o’ the stairs, so’s you’ll see down to where the water bends round and into the falls where they cast for salmon.”
“That sounds very good,” Ruby said.
“How much?” I asked.
“You’re stayin’ how many nights?”
“I don’t know, it depends.”
“Dependin’ on what, might I ask?”
“On whether three’s a charm.”
“I don’t follow you, sir.”
“I never meant you should. I only asked the price of the room.”
“Shall we say fifty quid, one night’s advance?”
I nodded and signed our names in the registry. Ruby opened up her purse and paid him. Annie Roarty came around from behind the desk, not cheerfully, picked up our bags, and said, “Come, I’ll take ye, long’s you paid.”
We followed Annie Roarty’s steady trudge up four flights of wide and echoing stairs, until we reached our suite. I naturally considered the ironies at work. Here we were again, being led to our quarters in a great house by a large, sullen woman; here we were again, entering into a house that breathed mystery.
The suite had seen better days. The sitting room was plainly furnished, to put it charitably. There were two straight-backed chairs covered in torn silk, a small round table stacked with yellowed paperback novels, and a couch that dipped badly in the middle, as if a fat guy with a lap full of bricks had sat in the same spot every day for twenty years. The adjoining room contained a dresser and wardrobe, both of dented veneer, and a bed the fat guy had slept in. Plaster on the ceiling and most walls puckered with brown water stains.
As Roarty had promised, though, the balcony was very good. I stepped out and saw the stream below, down past the sheepeen at the bottom of the hill, winding crookedly into cascades around a bend of thick fir trees. The darkening Wicklows brooded on the horizon. There were rock ledges and boulders dotting the cold rushing water, covered in whitened grass like piano shawls, just as they were in the dreams. I almost expected to see Davy Mogaill smoking a pipe, calling to his Brenda in the evening mists, as in the dream.
“Like’t all right then?” Annie was asking.
I turned from the view of the stream. Annie stood next to Ruby in the bedroom, just inside the French doors to the balcony. Ruby was looking at me, but speaking to Annie. “It will do us fine,” she said.
“I’ll be goin’ then,” Annie said. But she did not move.
I stepped back into the bedroom and gave Annie a pound note. Then I pulled another fiver from my wallet, and said, “This would be for your time in telling me something about this place.”
“Such as what, sir?”
“The emptiness of the house, such as. I have the feeling we’re the only guests.”
“Well, that’s so.”
“How do you survive?”
“By sellin’ the furnishin’ around the place, year by year,” Annie said, turning the fiver over in her hands, as if she had not Seen one in a long while. “We’re down t’bone now, as you see, sad and plain. And here’s what I’m sellin’ you now, my troubles.”
“Where did your business go?”
“I don’t know no better than anybody else in Tullow. I can only say we ain’t got the rich hunters comin’ in from Dublin like the old times, and there’s precious little reason for anyone t’be here on any other account. Poor old Tullow’s never seen fit to accommodate to new times of the outside world, so you see what you see, a peelin’ old country inn without enough good payin’ customers to keep proper standards.”
“This was a hunting lodge once?”
“Aye, the last time it had any importance. Downstairs there was a fine big kitchen and master chef, and two refrigerated rooms for the wild game, and a wondrous dining hall. Oh, the grand dinners that was served here once.” Annie slipped the money into a side pocket of her skirt, then placed hands on wide hips and surveyed the room, her eyes falling on a water stain snaking down from the ceiling to a baseboard along one wall. “Shameful how everything’s tumblin’ down, but what’s there to be done? It’s been a lovely place, though, before the world went all fast and vile.”
“How long ago was this a hunting lodge?”
“Oh, five year it’s been now, truly. We’d have the faithful ones up to a year ago, though. But only for the ghost of past comforts.”
“And before it was a hunting lodge?”
“Goin’ way back t’my girlish days, this here was a monastery. The monks took it over when the English was all driven out from their fine country mansions, see.”
“Of which, this was one?”
“Aye.”
“You’ve been a great help to me, Annie.”
“I have, sir?” Annie Roarty’s face now filled with curiosity, as much question as I saw in Ruby’s own face. Then something else in Annie, some dread that overtook the hardness in her eyes. She said hastily, “I’d best go now, you’ll be wantin’ privacy after your journey.”
Ruby walked with her to the door. I returned to the balcony. When Annie was on her way down the steps, Ruby closed the door and locked it.
It was almost black now, and the air more chilled than it had been only a minute ago. I could no longer
see the bend of the stream, nor many of the boulders. There was only a crescent moon in the sky, and the dark hills of the Wicklows that framed the valley of my forebears were felt, but invisible.
Ruby came to my side.
“This place badly creeps me,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “He’s here.”
Chapter 43
Captain Davy Mogaill, rocking on his barstool with his head in his hands, said, “Well … I appreciate what you done.”
“Skip the blubber. I saved your life is all. Want this?” Lieutenant Ray Ellis offered Mogaill a White Owl cigar wrapped in cellophane. Mogaill opened it, and lit up. Ellis asked, “What are you going to do now?”
“What would you recommend?”
“Climb out of your freaking grave.”
“I’ll consider that.” Mogaill finished what was in his glass, then knocked it twice on the bar as the signal to Terry Two for another round. “But first, my friend, I’ll be having myself a long, sweet drunk.”
Terry Two approached, reluctantly. He and Ellis passed a look. Then Terry said to Mogaill, “It’s enough now, Davy, isn’t it?”
Mogaill laughed grimly, and said, “Can you not see I’ve two options? I can drink, or I can weep. Drinking’s ever so much more subtle.”
“Go ahead, I’ll buy the hump one more blast,” Ellis said, covering his own glass with his hand. Terry Two shook his head and poured another Scotch for Mogaill. Ellis said to Mogaill, “And then, Davy, it’s time.”
“Time? That awful place where everybody’s lost?”
“I told Inspector Neglio you’d at least call him in the morning.”
“And then what?”
“You do what you have to do.”
“Resign?”
“Looks like it, Davy.”
“I don’t know how I’d live.”
“You got your pension if you do the right thing now, and house insurance. That ought to be enough. It ain’t like you got a kid in college. You want something to do during the day, you could maybe move down to Coconuts, Florida, or someplace. Get your-self a chief-of-police gig “
“Maybe.”
“Come on now, Davy. Bottoms up. Then we go home.”
“Where’s home?”
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