by Ken Bruen
It was strange, though—two minutes with an English businessman who didn’t know how to smile, and suddenly he felt that if he didn’t get in touch with Lucy right now, see her this very evening, he’d regret it for the rest of his life. What was that all about?
Kate was smiling at him as he walked toward the desk. She was a pretty girl, and Danny had said she was easy, but he wasn’t sure he wanted it anymore, not with her, not with any of these other girls.
“I’ve just got to make a call.” She smiled back at him, coquettishly, he thought, but girl, it wouldn’t be tonight.
“Mr. Parker, you do not have to write essays on Joyce, and when we’re discussing him, I will not mark you down for opting out of the conversation, but if you insist on writing essays and speaking your mind, please be so kind as to read something other than Dubliners.”
The others laughed but Parker was smiling, too. She only teased him because she knew he could take it and because he was probably smarter than all the rest put together.
“You know, Dr. Burns, I have skim-read Ulysses.”
“Would that be the jogging tour of Dublin, Mr. Parker?” That earned another laugh, but the hour was upon them and they were already putting their things together. Parker was first out the door. Clare was the last, waiting till everyone had left before shyly handing in an essay.
She started to read through it once she was on her own again, but was only a page or two in—impressive, if lacking a little in flair—when there was a knock at the door and it opened a fraction.
“Come in.”
The man who stepped into the room was about thirty-five, six foot, the average kind of build that couldn’t easily be read under a suit. Facially, he looked innocuous, which immediately put her on guard.
“Dr. Elizabeth Burns?” She nodded, smiling, and he closed the door behind him.
“Call me Liz, Mr… . ?”
She’d gestured at the seat across from her desk, and as he sat down and placed his briefcase in front of him, he said, “Patrick Jeffers. The office sent me.”
The office. It was about twenty years since she’d heard anyone call it that.
“And what office would that be?”
He didn’t answer, just smiled awkwardly and relaxed into his seat.
He seemed to relax then, confident and in control as he said, “I’ve got a lot of admiration for people like you.” She offered him a quizzical expression. No one had ever contacted her like this, so whoever he was, she wanted to draw him out a little more. “People in 14. And no, I don’t expect you to admit it, but being buried deep the way you were for, what was it, four years, that really takes something.”
Her expression unnerved him a little, and with no wonder, for she was wearing a look of utter astonishment. “Mr. Jeffers, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. People in 14 what?”
He nodded knowingly, uncomfortable, as if he’d spoken out of turn and made himself look unprofessional, which he had. At the same time, she was unnerved herself, wondering what this Jeffers was doing here, wondering why she’d had no word that he was coming. He knew she’d been in 14, so somebody must have sent him.
“You don’t sound Irish.” He tilted his head questioningly. “Jeffers is an Irish name, but you don’t sound Irish. Irish grandparents, perhaps?”
“Yes, I think so.” He hesitated before saying, “So you’ve heard of the name? I think you’re the first person since I arrived who recognizes it.”
“There’s actually a folk song, somewhere down in the southwest, though the exact location escapes me at the moment, about the death of a Jeffers.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that.”
“Of course, there’s also the American poet, Robinson Jeffers.”
“Yes.”
She could tell he didn’t like being sidetracked. He was here on business and wanted to get on with it. “What do you want here, Mr. Jeffers? Why has your office sent you?”
“Yes, I’m really just here to deliver a message.” He bent down and picked up his briefcase, but started to cover himself, saying, “Just some paperwork you need to read and sign.”
Amateur! He was opening the briefcase on his lap and she had absolutely no doubt what kind of message he was about to produce from it. There were all kinds of thoughts running through her head, questions of whether she’d been double-crossed, and if so, by whom, questions of who he was working for and whether she’d have to move on, but there was something more immediate, an instinctive reflex that would never leave her.
She picked the phone up off the desk and threw it hard. It cracked him on the head with a clatter, and then a further clatter as the briefcase and the gun inside it fell onto the floor. He was dazed for only a second, but she was around the desk before he came up for air and she was pulling the telephone cord tight around his neck.
“Who sent you?”
His arms flailed, trying to strike her a body blow but unable to find her where she stood directly behind him.
“Who sent you?”
He took another approach, trying to pull her hands off, then trying to get his fingers under the cord, desperately tearing at his neck, drawing blood with his fingernails. He wouldn’t talk; he was at least that professional. She yanked up the tension an extra notch, and the flailing of the arms gave way to a more convulsive movement through his entire body. She had to use all her strength to keep him in the seat, but she couldn’t resist leaning down, whispering breathlessly into his ear.
“You know that song about Jeffers? It’s a celebration. See, Jeffers was a diamond trader, and he was English.”
She couldn’t get the phone working again, even after she’d disentangled it from his body. She took her cell phone and dialed. When Lambert picked up, she said, “Someone came after me. I’ll need removals.”
“Someone from the north?”
“No, he claimed to be one of us.”
“Name?”
“Patrick Jeffers. Passport backs that up.” She looked at the passport she’d retrieved from his jacket. He certainly had the right look.
“Jeffers? There has to be a mistake. Let me just check something.” She could hear Lambert tapping away on his computer keyboard. He was as much an old-timer as she was and always hit the keys like they belonged on a manual typewriter. “Liz, Patrick Jeffers is on his first assignment, but he’s in Damascus; he’s a Middle East specialist.”
She looked at the throttled body, slumped in the chair like a drunk, and now that she thought of it, he hadn’t seemed to recognize the name of Robinson Jeffers, and surely he would have, as surely as she knew who Robbie Burns was.
“Well, I hope he’s doing better than the Jeffers in front of me now.”
Lambert laughed. She liked Lambert; he had a good sense of humor. People didn’t need to look much in this game, but a sense of humor was an absolute must.
PART IV
NEW WORLD NOIR
THE HONOR BAR
BY LAURA LIPPMAN
He took all his girlfriends to Ireland, as it turned out. “All” being defined as the four he had dated since Moira, the inevitably named Moira, with the dark hair and the blue eyes put in with a dirty finger. (This is how he insisted on describing her. She would never have used such a hackneyed phrase in general and certainly not for Moira, whose photographic likeness, of which Barry happened to have many, showed a dark-haired, pale-eyed girl with hunched shoulders and a pinched expression.)
When he spoke of Moira, his voice took on a lilting quality, which he clearly thought was Irish, but sounded to her like the kind of singsong voice used on television shows for very young children. She had dark HAIR and pale BLUE eyes put in with a DIRTY FINGER. Really, it was like listening to one of the Teletubbies wax nostalgic, if one could imagine Po (or La-La or Winky-Dink, or whatever the faggotty purple one was named) hunched over a pint of Guinness in a suitably picturesque Galway bar. It was in such a bar that Barry, without making eye contact, explained how he had conceived
this trip to exorcise the ghost of Moira, only to find that it had brought her back in full force (again), and he was oh so sorry, but it was just not to be between them and he could not continue this charade for another day.
So, yes, the above—the triteness of his speech, its grating quality, his resemblance to a Guinness-besotted Teletubby— was what she told herself afterward, the forming scab over the hurt and humiliation of being dumped two weeks into a three-week tour of the Emerald Isle. (And, yes, guess who called it that.) After her first, instinctive outburst—“You asshole!”—she settled down and listened generously, without recriminations. It had not been love between them. He was rich and she was pretty, and she had assumed it would play out as all her relationships did, for most of them had been based on that age-old system of give-and-take, quid pro quo, parting gifts. Twelve to twenty months, two to three trips, several significant pieces of jewelry. Barry was pulling the plug prematurely, that was all, and Ireland barely counted as a vacation in her opinion. It had rained almost every day and the shopping was shit.
Still, she nodded and interjected at the proper moments, signaling the pretty waitress for another, then another, all for him. She nursed her half-pint well into the evening. At closing time, she slipped the waitress twenty euros, straight from Barry’s wallet, and the young woman obligingly helped to carry-drag Barry through the streets to the Great Southern. His eyes gleamed a bit as she and the waitress heaved him on the bed, not that he was anywhere near in shape for the award he was imagining.
(And just how did his mind work, she wondered in passing, how did a man who had just dumped a woman two weeks into a three-week trip persuade himself that the dumpee would then decide to honor him with a going-away threesome? True, she had been a bit wild when they first met.
That was how a girl got a man like Barry, with a few decadent acts that suggested endless possibilities. But once you had landed the man, you kept putting such things off, suggested that the blowjob in the cab would follow the trip to Tiffany’s, not vice versa, and pretty soon he was reduced to begging for the most ordinary favors.)
No, she and her new accomplice tucked Barry in properly and she tipped the waitress again, sending her into the night. Once the girl was gone, she searched his luggage and selected several T-shirts of which he was inordinately fond. These she ripped into strips, which she then used to bind his wrists and ankles to the four-poster bed. She debated with herself whether she needed to gag him—he might awaken, and start to struggle—and decided it was essential. She disconnected the phone, turned the television on so it would provide a nice steady hum in the background, then helped herself to his passport, American Express card, and all the cash he had. As Barry slept the rather noisy sleep of the dead-drunk, snorting and sawing and blubbering, she raided the minibar—wine, water, cashews. She was neither hungry nor thirsty, but the so-called honor bar was the one thing that Barry was cheap about. “It’s the principle,” he said, but his indignation had a secondhand feel to it, something passed down by a parent. Or, perhaps, a girlfriend. Moira, she suspected. Moira had a cheap look about her. She opened a chocolate bar, but rejected it. The chocolate here didn’t taste right.
They were e-ticketed to Dublin, but that was a simple matter. She used the room connection to go online—cost be damned—and rearranged both their travel plans. Barry was now booked home via Shannon, while she continued on to Dublin, where she had switched hotels, choosing the Merrion because it sounded expensive and she wanted Barry to pay. And pay and pay and pay. Call it severance. She wouldn’t have taken up with Barry if she hadn’t thought he was good for at least two years.
It had been Barry’s plan to send her home, to continue to Dublin without her, where he would succumb to a mounting frenzy of Moira-mourning. That’s what he had explained in the pub last night. And he still could, of course. But she thought there might be a kernel of shame somewhere inside the man, and once he dealt with the missing passport and the screwed-up airline reservations, he might have the good sense to continue home on the business-class ticket he had offered her. (“Yes, I brought you to Ireland only to break up with you, but I am sending you home business class.”) He was not unfair, not through and through. His primary objective was to be rid of her, as painlessly and guiltlessly as possible, and she had now made that possible. He wouldn’t call the police or press charges, or even think to put a stop on the credit card, which she was using only for the hotel and the flight back.
Really, she was very fair. Honorable, even.
“Mr. Gardner will be joining me later,” she told the clerk at the Merrion, pushing the card toward him, and it was accepted without question.
“And did you want breakfast included, Mrs. Gardner?”
“Yes.” She wanted everything included—breakfast and dinner and laundry and facials, if such a thing were available. She wanted to spend as much of Barry’s money as possible. She congratulated herself for her cleverness, using the American Express card, which had no limit. She could spend as much as she liked at the hotel, now that the number was on file.
It was time, as it turned out, that was hard to spend. For all Barry’s faults—a list that was now quite long in her mind, and growing every day—he was a serious and sincere traveler, the kind who made the most of every destination. He was a tourist in the best sense of the word, a man determined to wring experience from wherever he landed. While in Galway, they had rented a car and tried to follow Yeats’s trail, figuratively and literally, driving south to see his castle and the swans at Coole, driving north to Mayo and his final resting place in the shadow of Ben Bulben, which Barry had confused with the man in the Coleridge poem. She had surprised Barry with her bits of knowledge about the poet, bits usually gleaned seconds earlier from the guidebook, which she skimmed covertly while pretending to look for places to eat lunch. Skimming was a great skill, much underrated, especially for a girl who was not expected to be anything but decorative.
It had turned out that Yeats’s trail was also Moira’s. Of course. Moira had been a literature major in college and she had a penchant for the Irish and a talent, apparently, for making clever literary allusions at the most unlikely moments. On Barry and Moira’s infamous trip, which had included not just Ireland, but London and Edinburgh, Moira had treated Barry to a great, racketing bit of sex after seeing an experimental production of Macbeth at the festival. And while the production came off with mixed results, it somehow inspired a most memorable night with Moira, or so Barry had confided over all those pints in Galway. She had brought him to a great shuddering climax, left him spent and gasping for breath, then said without missing a beat: “Now go kill Duncan.” (When the story failed to elicit whatever tribute Barry thought its due—laughter, amazement at Moira’s ability to make Shakespearean allusions after sex—he had added, “I guess you had to be there.” “No thank you,” she had said.)
She did not envy Moira’s education. Education was overrated. A college dropout, she had supported herself very well throughout her twenties, moving from man to man, taking on the kind of jobs that helped her meet the right kind of guys—galleries, catering services, film production offices. Now she was thirty—well, possibly thirty-one, she had been lying about her age for so long, first up, then down, that she got a little confused. She was thirty or thirty-one, possibly thirty-two, and while going to Dublin had seemed like an inspired bit of revenge against Barry, it was not the place to find her next patron, strong euro be damned. Paris, London, Zurich, Rome, even Berlin—those were the kind of places where a certain kind of woman could meet the kind of man who would take her on for a while. Who was she going to meet in Dublin? Bono? But he was married and always prattling about poverty.
So, alone in Dublin, she wasn’t sure what to do, and when she contemplated what Barry might have done, she realized it was what Moira might have done, and she wanted no part of that. Still, somehow—the post office done, Kilmainham done, the museums done—she found herself in a most unimpressive town house, stud
ying a chart that claimed to explain how parts of Ulysses related to the various organs of the human body.
“Silly, isn’t it?” asked a voice behind her, startling her, not only because she had thought herself alone in the room, but also because the voice expressed her own thoughts so succinctly. It was an Irish voice, but it was a sincere voice, too, the beautiful vowels without all the bullshit blarney, which was growing tiresome. She could barely stand to hail a cab anymore because the drivers exhausted her so, with their outsized personalities and long stories and persistent questions. She couldn’t bear to be alone, but she couldn’t bear all the conversation, all the yap-yap-yap-yap-yap that seemed to go with being Irish.
“It’s a bit much,” she agreed.
“I don’t think any writer, even Joyce, thinks things out so thoroughly before the fact. If you ask me, we just project all this symbolism and meaning onto books to make ourselves feel smarter.”
“I feel smarter,” she said with an automatic smile, “just talking to you.” It was the kind of line in which she specialized, the kind of line that had catapulted her from one safe haven to the next, Tarzan swinging on a vine from tree to tree.
“Rory Malone,” he added, offering his hand, offering the next vine. His hair was raven-black, his eyes pale-blue, his lashes thick and dark. Oh, it had been so long since she had been with anyone good-looking. It was something she had learned to sacrifice long ago. Perhaps Ireland was a magical place after all.
“Bliss,” she said, steeling herself for the inane things that her given name inspired. “Bliss Dewitt.” Even Barry, not exactly quick on the mark, had a joke at the ready when she provided her name. But Rory Malone simply shook her hand, saying nothing. A quiet man, she thought to herself, but not The Quiet Man. Thank God.