Aidan dropped the shotgun, and covered the hole in his chest with his hand. “It’s over?” he asked. He seemed so defenseless, yet he had just taken a gun from beneath his bedcovers and killed a man he could not see.
I pulled myself to my feet, and answered, “Yes.”
“You there is it, Neil?”
I started toward him. “Yes.”
“Come, there’s not much time …”
I was now at his side. He was having difficulty breathing.
“I tried this a year ago,” Aidan said, rushing himself, wanting me to understand. I smelled the sweetness of blood on his dying breath. “He come at my calling for a hunting trip in the Wicklows, which was when I shot him. He was to be the first dog drowned, see …”
“Only you missed.”
“Aye, I dropped him, but it never finished him off. He went to the wheelchair, but the faking old fox never stood until he figured his moment of revenge was right.”
“Meaning until he found you?”
“That’s it.”
“I know it’s more than politics,” I said. “I know about you and my mother and Liam—about the three of you, going back to your days at Trinity College.”
“He loved her first. And said I stole her away, which I did, only to abandon her and you to the cause. And even though I was gone to the life of Aidan McGing, your mother stayed true. This infuriated him, this above all else. To Liam, the idea of a lass so fair and fine as Mairead throwing away her womanhood like she done … well, by his lights it was unforgiveable.”
God of irony. Liam with Moira in his house all those years, poor mooning Moira, the girl next door who threw away her womanhood; Moira, who knew how very deep and secret this all was, poor Moira, who died for what she knew. Did she hang herself, or did Liam kill her? Or Snoody? Who would ever know?
My father gasped, and pitched forward. I put a supporting arm around his thin shoulders, and my hand over his, covering the wound. Death would be quick. I had to put the questions to him now, to confirm the final bits of the puzzle.
“I don’t understand about Patrick Snoody,” I said.
“Patty was loyal to me, up to a point. After the hunting incident, I wanted him to take out Liam. He could do it clean and simple, no more than slipping a pillow over an old man’s sleeping head. But Patty refused, and said he wouldn’t see either of us brothers killed unless by old age. Or maybe Patty figured that drowning Liam would set the cycle in motion for his own end. Well, it was then I knew I had to go into hiding somewhere. I could trust nobody in Liam’s house, see.”
I saw only madness. And marching feet, and more marching feet. And like the man who gave my father and me the name of Hockaday, I now shed tears for all wronged Irishmen.
“Liam brought me here, to help him hunt you down,” I said.
“I believe so, Neil. He was sick and vengeful, and wanted me bad enough to use even you in a dangerous game …”
Vengeful and sick the both of you!
“The way I’m figuring, he’d lure me out one of two ways no matter what happened to you. Liam could have you set up for killing. That’d enrage me, and force me to show myself. Or, he could rely on you as a detective to do your nosing about. Then he’d follow you straight here to me, which we see that he’s done.”
Aidan gasped again, and his head wobbled and fell to the side. He said one more thing before dying, “Now, boy, flee! Flee the rest of your Irish treachery! Go home, go home …”
I laid him back down in his bed and shut his blind eyes forever, ashamed of the only thing I could feel: contempt for my father, who cheated me out of his life. I left him, and walked through the door. Cor McGing still stood there in the hallway. But his presence now grew dark and strange, his voice an echo of my father’s dying breath.
“I’ll be sorrier than you know for doin’ this,” he said, reaching into his side pocket. He pulled out the same model of German pistol Liam had used on Roarty, still moaning away down at the bottom of the stairs. “I truly loved Aidan and Liam. But while they were survivin’ one another all these many years, there was no way of servin’ them both. Nae, they forced us all to choose between them, see, starting with your own mum.”
“Give me the gun, Cor,” I said, stepping forward. He refused me, raising the pistol instead, waving it wildly around. I retreated back into the doorway, my hands uplifted.
“Some say, it was a devil’s bargain either way. Well, I chose to bargain with your da, though he was bent on destroyin’ the cause these past few years. No matter, I stuck by him, a loyal soldier.” McGing advanced, looking coldly past me to see the bloody waste of Liam and Aidan. “No need of choosin’ sides now that we see both devils are gone.”
“Cor, the gun,” I said, trying again. “Give it to me. We’ll end all of it, right here and now.”
“Nae, I’m no longer bound by your da’s wishes. And I did not serve Liam. So it’s me and saying all on his own—Nevermore!” He stepped very close to me now, pistol flailing, as if he were hacking his way through tall fen grass. “I cannot let you be goin’ to tell the outside world about this, boy—none of it, not a word.”
McGing—my grandfather, my Grandmother Finola’s dutiful priest and lover—pointed the pistol straight at my belly.
Flee the rest of your Irish treachery …
The pistol shook in his trembling hand.
He cocked the trigger.
And I thought back, one week to the day, of another desperate priest.
Always keep this in your pocket while you’re on the other side, Neil. And for the sake of your life with Ruby Flagg, remember it’s there when you need it.
I pulled Father Tim’s medallion from my pocket.
“What’s that you’re doing?” McGing said.
“Take it.” I handed him the medallion.
McGing dropped the gun, discharging a shot that cracked deep into the floorboards, harming no one but the mice. Though it well might have been the other way around, my grandfather looked at me now the way a mortally wounded man eyes his killer in that final, horrible twitch of life: eyes full of pity, resigned to the world’s unending fool violence. No killer ever forgets this look.
A killer I surely was, for I had slain something that lay inside my Grandfather Cor McGing. Something dark, and worthy of death.
Of the medallion, he asked, “It’s Tim’s, is it?”
I picked up the warm gun. “It was.”
McGing turned the medallion over and over, lips scarcely moving as he whispered an intemperate verse, stolen by dogs of war. 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. Obedience to the corrupted sentiment of an Irish poem had defined my grandfather’s life, had turned his heart to steel. But now, with the passage of a fallen comrade’s medallion, he wept.
“By honor mutually pledged among us brothers in the cause, I’m obliged to spare you, come what may.” McGing stopped for a moment, as if the sound of his voice no longer made sense to him. He held up the medallion. “It’s the meaning of the thing, see. On giving you this, Tim Kelly took his life. By his ultimate sacrifice, he insured your own safe passage among us.”
It was not in me to be grateful for such twisted mercy. Again, I felt only contempt. “Some honor,” I said.
Chapter 47
Go home. Dark as it was, we decided to leave that night.
I did not bother leaving money for the dinner bill I had signed. Also I helped myself to a portable tank of gasoline I found in Ned Roarty’s garage. If Roarty wanted payment, I told him, he should call out the local constabulary. Of course then he would have to explain about the bodies upstairs. He saw things my way.
Anyhow, I considered my debt more than covered by medical services rendered, in as much as I cleaned up the swollen mess of his shoulder. Liam’s bullet had landed in a soft spot between meat and bone. Lucky for Roarty. Once the blood was sponged a
way, I managed to calm down Annie, too. Then she and her old man took a few drinks together, and she was off to fetch the village doctor to extract the bullet and keep his mouth shut about it, at least until Ruby and I reached Dublin.
On the road at last, with the scattered lights of Tullow growing tiny behind us, Ruby said, “You seem so angry, Hock.” She was right. It was only anger that kept me from collapsing into grief, like Cor McGing. For several minutes, I had nothing to say, and I knew this worried Ruby. She placed a hand lightly on my arm as I drove.
Finally, it came out of me. “I was looking for something here, and I hate what I’ve found. My father and my uncle took their vengeance, making everybody pay for the brutality of it; I’ve got a grandfather on one side who exploited the weak, and another who kept what he calls honor. None of these guys are honorable, they’re cowards. This is my ancestral heritage, a string of cowardly bastards. So I’m showing my appreciation for my native land in the usual Irish way.”
“Which is—?”
“I’m getting out of it as fast as I can.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re only a man, sadder but wiser.”
“And still with my hollow places.”
“Not anymore, Hock. There’s your mother in you. You should know that, and think about her every day. She was glorious. I think you’ve been looking for a hero, now you’ve found one.”
Ruby stretched herself. “I’m going to try to sleep now,” she said, settling herself as comfortably as she could in her half of the tiny car. I thought about Mairead Fitzgerald Hockaday as I drove.
There would be no rainbow this time through the Wicklows. Only the musty dark outside, and the phosphorescent glow of the dashboard, and the high winds that kept us bouncing along in the Volkswagen.
On the other side of the mountains, daylight broke. Ruby took the wheel now while I slept. I did not dream. And knew that I would never dream of my father again.
When I woke, we had reached Sister Sullivan’s camp at the north end of Dublin’s countryside. My bones felt broken, and I vowed never to set foot in a VW ever again.
We washed ourselves in a spring, near where the horses were kept. I lay down in a green field, in the warmth of the morning sun, and shut my eyes. Ruby went off. For coffee, she said.
I dozed.
There was a stirring in the grass, and I woke. The tinkers were ringed around me, the men in suitcoats and hats, the women dressed in their most colorful skirts. Children with scrubbed faces held hands over laughing mouths.
Ruby wore flowers in her hair. Sister Sullivan held a Bible in her hands.
Ruby smiled, and said, “I’ll marry you now, Neil Hockaday.”
And so we were wed, as my own parents were.
Late that afternoon, we walked into the American Embassy in Dublin.
“We’ll be seeing the ambassador now,” I said to a fussy reception clerk.
“Oh, will we?”
“Tell him it’s Mr. and Mrs. Neil Hockaday.”
Ruby corrected me. “I said I’d take you, Hock. Not your name.”
“Just whom shall I say is calling?” the clerk insisted.
“Tell the ambassador I’m the guy who’ll see he’s canned the hell out of here unless I get what I want. The name you already heard.”
About five minutes later, I was using the ambassador’s security line to ring up Inspector Neglio in New York.
“I’m coming home, boss. Only first, there’s a wee bit of trouble here for me. Let’s see how big a guy you are. Talk to the ambassador, and get us on the next flight out.”
Neglio squawked, but he and the ambassador got us to the airport with no trouble from anybody.
Before we boarded for New York, I telephoned Oliver Gunston.
“Here’s what I want you to do for me, Ollie. Find a decent lawyer and have him call me in New York. I’ll be claiming the estate of my late Uncle Liam Hockaday of Dún Laoghaire. There’s not much trouble to dividing the proceeds. The money goes in two directions. Enough for yourself to take a year off to write your book on all this, and the rest to a tinker woman called Sister Sullivan, to do with as she sees fit …”
“There’ll be trouble about that, all right,” Gunston said.
“Then I’d advise you to engage the firm of my maternal grandfather.”
“Lord Fitzgerald’s shop? Representing tinkers? I like it.”
“Tell them they’ll be handling the matter pro bono. Say that it’s reparations for what old Fitzy did to a lot of poor folks. And if they don’t like it, tell them I’ll be back in Dublin to make things very embarrassing.”
“I like it!”
“Now, about the house. It’s a big place in Ladbroke Street out there in Dún Laoghaire. I want it to go to some people in Goff Street, Dublin. To Catherine Boylan, Catty for short, the widow of the late Francie Boylan. To her babies, and her father-in-law, Joe. Put the place in Catty’s name. Joe took a swing at me once.”
Epilogue
“Sorry I gave it all away, babe. I never even thought. You could use some of that cash yourself, couldn’t you?”
Ruby was thumbing her way through an impossible stack of bills, a risky combination of which threatened to close down her theater. Bills are not the nicest part about returning home to New York after a trip, which is why I was ignoring my own.
“Well, it might have been …” She stopped herself. “No! I can always go back to the ad agency.”
“I thought you hated that.”
“I said I hated the clients. You know what a client is?”
“Tell me again.”
“Five guys who share a brain.”
“How can you stand it?”
“The money. That part of the business I never hated.”
“What would you do at the agency now?”
“Well, Jay called this morning. Jay Schuyler, my old boss. Elegant guy, you’d like him. He’s everything you’re not.”
“What did he want?”
“He wondered if I was available.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know. He said maybe he’d call me sometime, about being a consultant on some special project.”
“Such as what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe somebody will discover yet another part of the human body in need of deodorizing.”
“This you want?”
“The money I want.”
I shrugged.
“Mr. Hockaday, cheer up. I love you.”
“What do you love most about me?”
“Like mother, like son. That’s you.”
“When the purse is empty, the heart is full?”
“Speaking of which, don’t you have to be running uptown to see Davy Mogaill in that nasty bar of yours?”
Mogaill was chatting with Terry Two when I arrived at Nugent’s. I expected to find him a drunken wreck, but instead he was a man transformed. There he was sipping something clear and bubbly in a glass with a red straw. It appeared to be plain seltzer.
“All part of the new Davy Mogaill,” he explained when I asked what he was drinking, confirming my worst suspicion. “I’m now cultivating the cheerful mood. The less I drink the more cheerful I am.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said. I told Terry Two I would have a red label, and asked Mogaill, “Your new self won’t mind?”
“Boozing’s your pity now,’tis no longer mine.”
“On the other hand, I’d say leaving the department’s a pitiful way for a cop to sober up.”
“Say what you will. But I’m feeling I’ve got the weight of an old dead world off my back. I am clear-brained, for I am no longer the head of homicide in a homicidal town.”
“That’s nice for you, Captain.” I was trying to be enthusiastic. I was not succeeding. “Real nice.”
“Here now, you’ve got no cause for being a bloody dog in the manger. Not you, Neil, blessed as you are in coming back from Eire. There’s hope in living to tell the story.”
“There’s hope, too, in the blessing of new marriage.”
“Hope is fragile, Davy.”
“Aye, heroes know this. It’s why they protect hope, and all other fragile things of life.”
You’ve been looking for a hero, now you’ve found one.
My head went cloudy, and I saw my mother. Sleeping in the early morning when I’d get up for school at Holy Cross. She’d worked all night, pulling stick … I’d go up and say good-bye to her there in her bed, lying on her back with her hair stringing around her head and her closed eyes like they were ready for pennies. I’d kiss her on the cheek. I don’t think she ever knew. And Ruby. I saw my wife, too—lying on a beach with sand white as sugar; and in Ireland, in the green field of a tinker’s camp, with flowers in her hair.
These were the hopes of my life. And so I, descended from only one hero among a string of cowardly bastards, would somehow have to become less fragile than hope. I wanted to say all this to Mogaill, but I could not. Booze had made pictures much easier than words.
Davy gave up waiting for me to say something.
“Did you know,” he asked, “that I’m decorating a new apartment in the old neighborhood? Right around the corner from Nugent’s here, up on Isham Street.”
“Sláinte.”
“Thank you, Neil. And, speaking of fragile hope, I am also planning a business venture.”
“Oh?”
“Sure, sure. Now I got the usual retirement advice: leave New York, go down to Coconuts, Florida, collect the pension. You know.”
I groaned.
“My sentiments exactly. But me, I decide I’m staying here. So, I’m in the snoop dodge.”
“PI?”
“Already have my license application pending.”
I put back my drink, and ordered yet another. Mogaill was now watching me drink the way I have myself watched many other cops drink, him included.
Drown All the Dogs Page 34