Dublin Noir

by Ken Bruen

  “Relax, Jimmy,” the man said.

  Lowe’s mouth went dry and the rest of him was bathed in sudden sweat. “Flynn?” he asked finally. The man reached into his coat pocket and pulled out five photos and laid them on the bench.

  “She brought them to Dublin, Jimmy, same as you,” he said, pointing at the photos as he spoke. “And Dublin’s the last stop.” He said some names but Lowe had trouble hearing him. A roar filled his ears as he looked at the pictures of the five dead men, and suddenly he couldn’t see. He must’ve been leaving again because the man had him by the arm and the woman looked worried.

  “Five, in five years,” the man said. “You make it half-a-dozen.”

  Lowe slumped on the bench. “Flynn?” he said again. It was an old man’s voice.

  The woman shook her head in disgust. “There’s no Flynn but herself—Kathryn Margot Flynn.”

  Lowe gripped the little bottles in his pocket and looked at the ground. “You’re cops?”

  “She is,” the man said, nodding at the redhead. “I’m private, working for your employers. The good news is they just want their money back. You make that happen, and keep your mouth shut, and they won’t prosecute.”

  Lowe clawed at his gut. “What’s the bad news?”

  The redhead looked down. “I am,” she said. “I don’t care fer yer girl leaving bodies all over my city, but I got no proof of anything. That’s where you come in.”

  Lowe slumped on the bench. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. He looked at his hands and saw the little whiskey bottles in them. He cracked the metal cap on one and the man took his arm.

  “Let’s wait on that, Jimmy,” he said, but Lowe shook him off and drank one bottle and then another. The woman spoke, but Lowe couldn’t make out the words. His head was down and his eyes were closed. He was waiting for his balance and another bubble to ride, but in his heart he knew it was no good. The best part was over.

  THE GHOST OF

  RORY GALLAGHER

  BY JIM FUSILLI

  He’d left London in disgrace. A banking scandal, one of the worst. More than a half-billion pounds sterling in losses, bolloxed up every trade he made for months, going deeper and deeper. The end of days for the 230-year-old Ravenscroft Bank. Hundreds sacked. Pensions gone. Dreams shattered. Suicides, at least five of them, including Desmond Chick, for thirty-eight years the janitor at the Con Colbert Street branch in Limerick, a widower, raised three sons himself, working dusk till dawn. Sent away without so much as a plaque for comfort, he cried himself to death, they say, too old to start anew and as heartsick as if he’d lost his Minnie all over again.

  The trader, meanwhile, was sentenced to four and a half years. Got out in three. Good behavior, though the arrogant shite never owned up to what he’d done. Eleven hundred days in Coldbath Fields and every one spent planning to cash in like Nick Leeson did—a book, Ewan McGregor on the silver screen, lectures—his reward for breaking the Barings Bank in ’95. Now you can play poker online with Leeson, punters thinking, Here’s yer guy, he’ll ride a bad patch straight to hell.

  None of that for this trader, save a photo that went on the wires: scowling, bruised, itching, hollow eyes darting this way and that, maybe two stone lost to labor. No publishers, no producers; banking scandals old news now, a story already told. His wife gone off with an orthodontist, moved to Hamburg. Not even a word from his mot Trudi, tossed aside by the Sun after she told of their life together, all coke and cognac, laughing at regulators and the likes of Desmond Chick before they tracked him down.

  Ah, Trudi, bleached-blond and beyond plump, a hostess now at the Odyssey in Bristol, and she knows her time has passed. Her fifteen minutes and all. Let the Remy warm her belly and she’ll talk the ear off a man’s head, give him something she never told them at the Sun. Ever hear about the only time he expressed regret? No? Well, Ducky, we were in that big comfy bed of his in that hotel in Tokyo, and he props up on his elbows, and he says, Trudi, they can keep it all, the bastards. Every last piece, every last shilling. But I’ll tell you, I’d give my left thumb to have back my old guitar. That being what they call a white-on-white 1961 Fender Stratocaster. Owned and played by Rory Gallagher, it was. Rory Gallagher, love. Sure, you heard of him. Rory—Rory Gallagher, for fuck’s sake …

  As for the trader, the bitter prick, still thinking who he was, packed up and disappeared. Did a good job of it too. Four years gone by now, and not a word. Man barely qualifies as a bit of trivia these days.

  Funny, isn’t it? Sometimes, when the world is turning and the craic is good, it almost seems as if it had never happened.

  The trader, clever man, reemerged in Dublin, just another stranger brought in on the wave of the Celtic Tiger. Had a plan, he did: shaved his head, and when his auburn hair grew back he done it blond and spiked. Put 80,000 miles on the Audi, nose redone in Nice, jaw in Seville. Teeth in Milan.

  Didn’t have to do much about the accent. Born in Sligo, he was, not London, as he claimed.

  As for wardrobe: gone were the Spencer Hart suits, Turnbull & Asser shirts, Hermès ties, Fratelli Rossetti shoes. Would’ve run around like Kevin Rowland, scruffy Dexy himself, Come on, Eileen, if he could’ve, if it wouldn’t have drawn eyes. Instead, old jeans, T-shirts, a gray Aran sweater, and a brown knit, and he put holes in the elbows with a Biro, having tossed the Parker Duofold. (Not true: Like all else, the fountain pen was seized and sold at auction.)

  Figured now he could hide in plain sight, more or less.

  With all the expenses, he still had about 300,000 euros stashed here and there. No one knew, not even Trudi.

  Decided to buy himself a perch and look down on the world, laugh as the rabble passed by. But then it came to him: no, he wanted his nose in it, wanted to smell the stench of ordinary life, to listen to the love song of the forlorn, revel in their petty grievances, in their miseries, watch as the bloody stasis took hold, watch as the light dimmed and died.

  The trader bought himself a pub.

  A dump over on the north side of the Liffey, off the Royal Canal, a regular shitehole it was, a right kip. Entrance in a stone alley beyond mounds of rubbish, and you couldn’t stumble upon it without a map. Celtic Tiger, my arse, it seemed to say. Two steps down and the rainwater flooded the drain, and that was all right too. Mold and rotten wood, the floorboards sagging.

  The place reeked of failure, of resignation.

  Perfect.

  “Welcome home, you bastard,” the trader said as he stepped over the moat, dusted his hands, coughed.

  It needed a name, didn’t it?

  The trader, who by now was calling himself Eamonn or English Bill, depending, thought about it, and his first instinct was to call it “Rory’s.” No, “Ballyshannon,” after Rory’s birthplace. “The Calling Card,” that’s a good one, after Rory’s—

  “I must be out of me feckin’ mind,” said English Bill to no one.

  Which wasn’t far from true now, was it? Talking to shadows, the cobwebs: took more than one roundhouse to the side of the head in the community shower in Coldbath Fields, he did, though well short of what he had coming.

  Pitch black now in the pub and he doesn’t know it, maybe his eyes have gone weak again. Thinking a little crank would do him good.

  “The Rag and Bone,” he said, his throat feeling like he ate sand. Thinking of his childhood, and Yeats.

  Yeah, and soon tour buses are parking out front and the Japs are snapping photos, thinking they’ve tripped over history.

  Back to square one, and two hours later, still not a clue. And then another hour after that, come and gone.

  Cheesed off, he came up with “Póg Mo Thóin,” as in “Kiss My Arse,” but he let it float, and he fell asleep on the bar, woke up to the gnawing and cheep-cheep chatter of a rat inches from his skull.

  Got up, pissed in the sink when the jax was two feet away. Cupped his hand and took a mouthful of brown water, felt the rust wash over his Italian teeth.

  Soon
, sunrise and thin white light through the veins in the painted windows, and he can see the booths against the mud-brick walls, drunk-tilted and ready to fall in on themselves, creaking even in the shouting silence, and who’d give a shite?

  And then, like inspiration, like Yeats dreaming, “Cathleen Ni Houlihan,” it comes to him: “Desmond’s.”

  Brilliant.

  But he don’t know why.

  “Desmond’s,” and he likes the sound of it. “Desmond’s.” Likes it because it don’t mean nothing.

  They started coming within minutes after the Guinness and Murphy’s trucks pulled out, smelling it as they stumbled along, squat little men, and they were the dregs and had nothing to say. The same story, again, again: never had a break, this bastard or that, she was hell on earth she was; ah, but me dear sweet mother, I’ll tell ya, and me da, Fecky the Ninth he was, but, God, I loved him. Sitting but a stool apart, three, four of them, each brutalizing the same tune. Clay faces in the flicker of cheap candles, a motley bunch straight out of Beckett, and moths flew up from under their tattered greatcoats.

  The trader wanted entertainment, stories of the long, long fall, and soon he realized he had put Desmond’s at the end of the shite funnel, and who but them was going to appear?

  “Jaysus,” he said as he rinsed a glass in foul water, “the sin of pride, my arse.”

  “What’s that you say, Eamonn?” asked one of the sagging men, spider veins, rheumy eyes, fingers stained piss-yellow, paralytic before noon.

  “I said, ‘Get the fuck out.’ All of you.” Shouting, bringing it from the bellows. “You and you and you!” Finger stabbing the air, and there’s the door. “Out! O. U. T.”

  The men shrugged, plopped down, hitched up their trousers, and slouched out, forearms a shield from the sun.

  And then the trader made a mistake.

  He jammed the bolt across the door, poured himself a pint to wash the crystal meth off the back of his throat, went into a threadbare carton, and dug out Rory’s BBC Sessions, cut in ’74 but released when he was in Coldbath Fields, four years after Rory died. Whipsnap “Calling Card,” “Used to Be” like a cold knife against yer spin. The trader blasted it, oh did he blast it, and they heard it in the alley through the cracks, the ancient splinter wood, rattling bricks. The trader had every piece of music by Rory Gallagher that was ever recorded—all the officials, bootlegs too, bits of tape, third-generation copies; snatches of solos, rehearsals, sound checks, Rory turning the white Strat into a chainsaw, Rory levitating.

  The bastards didn’t get the trader’s stash when they sent him up, the pricks, they let his lawyers cart it away; and he could tell you which was the solo in “Walk on Hot Coals” on Irish Tour ’74 and which was the night before, two nights hence, thanks to some boyo who smuggled in a recorder under his coat. The trader had twenty-one versions of Rory doing “Messin’ with the Kid,” one more kick-ass than the next, and he blasted every one of them, and more, for four days and nights straight, shaking Desmond’s to its foundation.

  And when he opened the door, they were lined up halfway to the Liffey, shivering in the cold, shuffling, frozen fingers tucked under their arms. Hopeful eyes now. Expectations.

  Word was a Rory pub was opening by the Royal Canal, and they wanted in. Rory was their man. Rory pushed the blood through their veins, and if someone was going to pay him tribute, they were going to be there, ice and snow and wind and hunger be damned.

  “What the fuck?” the trader said, squinting against the silver light, suddenly wishing he hadn’t the need for more crank and something other than stale crisps.

  By 8 o’clock they were three deep at the bar, totally jammers, and the snug was swollen, and Rory wailed, setting the fingerboard ablaze, and the trader had hired himself a bouncer and a lass to clear the tables. The next day he needed a man to pull the taps, and a plumber to fix the jax.

  By the time he closed on Saturday night, he’d netted 1,100 euros on nothing but beer and Rory. The guy from the chipper round the block offered him a stake, saying business tripled since Desmond’s was born, thinking he’s on to the new Temple Bar. The Black Mariah pulled up, the Gardaí came in, and the trader prepared to slip them a gift, “Sinner Boy” pounding the walls and all, but they loved Rory too and as long as no one lit up a fag and the coppers got in, Desmond’s was sweet, at least for now.

  “Jaysus,” the trader said as he made a neat stack of his notes, “the whole country’s full of eejits.”

  He folded the bills, crammed them in his pocket, and was thinking he’d found justice. Finally, he told himself, he was getting his due.

  He did the lass on the cold floor, ripping her from behind, and she went home in tears, mascara running down her baby cheeks.

  A week or so later, past closing time, but the little pink man in far booth stayed glued to the wood, though the power had been cut and the votive candles gave little light.

  The bouncer was in the alley, tossing them off cobblestone, so the trader, his ears ringing, went across the beer- soaked boards.

  “Thinking of moving in, are ya?”

  The little pink man reached into his coat and placed an ergo machine on the tabletop.

  The trader blew onto his hands, the chill returning now that the crowd was gone.

  Suddenly, a piercing note from a Stratocaster split the air, followed by a blinding flurry that knocked the trader to his heels.

  The music continued for almost four minutes, burning ice daggers, an angel blasting pure light. Pinwheels, butterflies, blood spatter on virgin walls. Grace.

  Neither moved, the little pink man starting intently at his enraptured host.

  “Where’d you get it?” the stunned trader asked when silence returned.

  “It” being a Rory he’d never heard.

  Little Pink Man eased back toward the brick.

  “Well?” the trader repeated. The crystal meth had him pumping nitro, bugs crawling on his lungs, and yet it had been Rory, beyond doubt.

  In a small, eerie voice, Little Pink said, “We call him up, is what we do.”

  The trader frowned, scratched the top of his head. “Listen, just what’s your game—”

  “We call him up and up he comes,” Little Pink repeated. “Now, for someone like yourself, that is all and more. A mystery, true. But all and more, is it not?”

  The trader couldn’t focus to study the visitor, there in his too-big hound’s tooth, his black tie pulled tight to his pink neck. Nose a ball of putty, a hint of an impish smile.

  Little Pink reached with a translucent finger, popped open the machine and pointed to a silver disk much smaller than a standard CD. Candlelight skittered across its surface.

  “Take it,” Little Pink said as he wriggled out of the snug. “Take it and know there’s more.”

  The top of the man’s head, covered in curly red hair, sat below the chin of the trader, who had snatched up the disk as if it were the gold of Mag Sleacht.

  “Who are you?” His accent slipped, revealing his years far from home.

  Little Pink turned up his coat’s collar, the darkness carrying a chill. “I’m the man who’s knowing how to bring you to Rory, I am.”

  The trader watched as the little man leaped the moat and vanished.

  A moment later, the bouncer, whizz-wired like his boss, said he hadn’t seen a little pink man, no, Eamonn, why? And if you don’t mind, I’ll be on me way …

  “Lock it behind ya,” the trader said, turning his back.

  Pitch black save the light of the player, cranked to the gills he was, listening over and over and over to the guitar solo until near dawn, the hair on the back of his neck up, Rory, Rory, and the trader knew whatever the little pink man wanted he’d get. All of it, the hidden 300,000 euros, the money in the till, the money yet to be made. Desmond’s, if need be. All of it.

  All. Of. It.

  It took four days for Little Pink to return, four unbearable days, and he brought Fat Pink with him. They stood in the doorw
ay on the business side of the moat, deadpan and composed.

  The trader saw seraphs, and he tried to turn off the frenzy in his mind and under his skin.

  The bouncer, dim bastard, held them back, being it was past midnight, and the trader had to scramble across the room to halt their dismissal, freezing the dope with an X-ray stare as he grabbed Little Pink by the forearm.

  “Come,” he said, almost desperately, “come.”

  They went to the little office he’d fashioned out of the storage room.

  “Jaysus, where have you been?”

  “It’ll cost you,” Fat Pink said, his voice a throaty growl.

  “Huh?”

  “What me brother is saying is that the ghost appears at no charge, but we have our expenses,” said Little Pink, collar up on the hound’s tooth.

  He saw they had not a mind for charity.

  “Sure,” said the trader. “Expenses.”

  The Pinks kept still.

  The trader took a breath. “Go on.”

  “We all get what we pay for,” Little Pink said. “In the end, the accounts tally.”

  And with that, the trader had found his hitching post. Negotiations had begun.

  “But you’ve seen this place,” he said. “Be flattery to call it a dump.”

  Big Pink looked askance at the beam an inch or so from his head. The cobwebs had cobwebs, and the wood wore moss.

  “Suit yourself,” Little Pink said, with a faint shrug.

  The visitors spun slowly toward the door.

  “No, no. No,” said the trader, groping again for Little Pink and to hell with negotiating. “What I’m saying is I don’t know what I can raise.”

  “Sure you do.” Fat Pink said it.

  Little Pink dipped into his pocket: the machine, the button, and this time it was Rory on the twelve-string acoustic guitar, a slow, agonizing, gorgeous blues. No singing, not yet, but pain released from deep in the heart of Ireland filled the musty room. The sweet chirping of blackbirds too, and platinum rain, and yer ma’s tears.

  “Oh,” the trader moaned. “Oh, sweet Jaysus.”

  The music stopped when Little Pink popped open the device.