Dublin Noir

by Ken Bruen

  “How long are you here for?”

  They had just had sex for the first time, a most satisfactory first time, which is to say it was prolonged, with Rory extremely attentive to her needs. It had been a long time since a man had seemed so keen on her pleasure. Oh, other men had tried, especially in the beginning, when she was a prize to be won, but their best-intentioned efforts usually fell a little short of the mark and she had grown so used to faking it that the real thing almost caught her off guard. Nice.

  “How long are you staying here?” he persisted. “In Dublin, I mean.”

  “It’s … open-ended.” She could leave in a day, she could leave in a week. It all depended on when Barry cut off her credit. His credit, really. How much guilt did he feel? How much guilt should he feel? She was beginning to see that she might have gone a little over the edge where Barry was concerned. He had brought her to Ireland and discovered he didn’t love her. Was that so bad? If it weren’t for Barry, she never would have met Rory, and she was glad she had met Rory.

  “Open-ended?” he said. “What do you do that you have such flexibility?”

  “I don’t really have to worry about work,” she said.

  “I don’t worry about it, either,” he said, rolling to the side and fishing a cigarette from the pocket of his jeans.

  That was a good sign—a man who didn’t have to worry about work, a man who was free to roam the city during the day. “Let’s not trade histories,” she said. “It’s tiresome.”

  “Good enough. So what do we talk about?”

  “Let’s not talk so much either.”

  He put out his cigarette and started again. It was even better the second time, better still the third. She was sore by morning, good sore, that lovely burning feeling on the inside. It would probably lead to a not-so-lovely burning feeling in a week or two and she ordered some cranberry juice at breakfast that morning, hoping it could stave off the mild infection that a sex binge brought with it. Honeymooners-cystitis, as her doctor called it.

  “So Mr. Gardner has finally joined you,” the waiter said, used to seeing her alone at breakfast.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’ll have a soft-boiled egg,” Rory said. “And some salmon. And some of the pancakes?”

  “Slow down,” Bliss said, laughing. “You don’t have to try everything at one sitting.”

  “I have to keep my strength up,” he said, “if I’m going to keep my lady happy.”

  She blushed and, in blushing, realized she could not remember the last time she had felt this way. It was possible that she had never felt this way.

  “Show me the real Dublin,” she said to Rory later that afternoon, feeling bold. They had just had sex for the sixth time and, if anything, he seemed to be even more intent on her needs.

  “This is real,” he said. “The hotel is real. I’m real. How much more Dublin do you need?”

  “I’m worried there’s something I’m missing.”

  “Don’t worry. You’re not.”

  “Something authentic, I mean. Something the tourists never see.”

  He rubbed his chin. “Like a pub?”

  “That’s a start.”

  So he took her to a pub, but she couldn’t see how it was different from any other pub she had visited on her own. And Rory didn’t seem to know anyone, although he tried to smoke and professed great surprise at the new anti-smoking laws. “I smoke here all the time,” he bellowed in more or less mock outrage, and she laughed, but no one else did. From the pub, they went to a rather depressing restaurant—sullen wait-staff, uninspired food—and when the check arrived, he was a bit slow to pick it up.

  “I don’t have a credit card on me,” he said at last— sheepishly, winningly—and she let Barry pay. Luckily, they took American Express.

  Back in bed, things were still fine. So they stayed there more and more, although the weather was perversely beautiful, so beautiful that the various hotel staffers who visited the room kept commenting on it.

  “You’ve been cheated,” said the room-service waiter. “Ask for your money back. It’s supposed to rain every day, not pour down sunlight like this. It’s unnatural, that’s what it is.”

  “And is there no place you’d like to go, then?” the chambermaid asked when they refused her services for the third day running, maintaining they didn’t need a change of sheets or towels.

  Then the calls began, gentle but firm, running up the chain of command until they were all but ordered out of the room by the hotel’s manager so the staff could have a chance to clean. They went, blinking in the bright light, sniffing suspiciously at the air, so fresh and complex after the recirculated air of their room, which was now a bit thick with smoke. After a few blocks, they went into a department store, where Rory fingered the sleeves of soccer jerseys. Football, she corrected herself. Football jerseys. She was in love with an Irishman. She needed to learn the jargon.

  “Where do you live?” she asked Rory, but only because it seemed that someone should be saying something.

  “I have a room.”

  “A bed-sit?” She had heard the phrase somewhere, perhaps from a London girl with whom she had worked at the film production office. Although, come to think of it, Ireland and England apparently were not the same, so the slang might not apply.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” She must have used it wrong.

  “I like this one.” He indicated a red-and-white top. She had the distinct impression that he expected her to buy it for him. Did he think she was rich? That was understandable, given the hotel room, her easy way with room service, not to mention the minibar over the past few days. They had practically emptied it. All on Barry, but Rory didn’t know that.

  Still, it seemed a bit cheesy to hint like this, although she had played a similar game with Barry in various stores and her only regret was that she hadn’t taken him for more, especially when it came to jewelry. Trips and meals were ephemeral and only true high-fashion clothing—the classics, authentic couture—increased in value. She was thirty-one. (Or thirty, possibly thirty-two.) She had only a few years left in which to reap the benefits of her youth and her looks. Of course, she might marry well, but she was beginning to sense she might not, despite the proposals that had come her way here and there. Then again, it was when you didn’t care that men wanted to marry you. What would happen as thirty-five closed in? Would she regret not accepting the proposals made, usually when she was in a world-class sulk? Marriage to a man like Barry had once seemed a life sentence. But what would she do instead? She really hadn’t thought this out as much as she should.

  “Let’s go back to the room,” she said abruptly. “They must have cleaned it by now.”

  They hadn’t, not quite, so the two of them sat in the bar, drinking and waiting. It was early to drink, she realized, but only by American standards. In Rory’s company, she had been drinking at every meal except breakfast and she wasn’t sure she had been completely sober for days.

  Back in the room, Rory headed for the television set, clicking around with the remote control, then throwing it down in disgust. “I can’t get any scores,” he said.

  “But they have a crawl—”

  “Not the ones I want, I mean.” He looked around the room, restless and bored, and seemed to settle on her only when he had rejected everything else—the minibar, the copy of that morning’s Irish Times, a glossy magazine. Even then, his concentration seemed to fade midway through, and he patted her flank. She pretended not to understand, so he patted her again, less gently, and she rolled over. Rory was silent during sex, almost grimly so, but once her back was to him, he began to grunt and mutter in a wholly new way, and when he finished, he breathed a name into the nape of her neck.

  Trouble was, it wasn’t hers. She wasn’t sure whose it was, but she recognized the distinct lack of her syllables—no “Bluh” to begin, no gentle hiss at the end.

  “What?” she asked. It was one thing to be a stand-in for B
arry when he was footing the bills, to play the ghost of Moira. But she would be damned before she would allow a freeloader such as Rory the same privilege.

  “What?” he echoed, clearly having no idea what she meant.

  “Whose name are you saying?”

  “Why, Millie. Like in the novel, Ulysses. I was pretending you were Millie and I was Bloom.”

  “It’s Molly, you idiot. Even I know that.” Again, a product of a quick skim of the cards on the museum’s wall. But Millie? How could he think it was Millie?

  “Molly. That’s what I said. A bit of play-acting. No harm in that.”

  “Bullshit. I’m not even convinced that it was a woman’s name you were saying.”

  “Fuck you. I don’t do guys.”

  His accent had changed—flattened, broadened. He now sounded as American as she did.

  “Where are you from?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Do you live in Dublin?”

  “Of course I do. You met me here, didn’t you?”

  “Where do you live? What do you do?”

  “Why, here. And this.” He tried to shove a hand beneath her, but she felt sore and unsettled, and she pushed him away.

  “Look,” he said, his voice edging into a whine. “I’ve made you happy, haven’t I? Okay, so I’m not Irish-Irish. But my, like, ancestors were. And we’ve had fun, haven’t we? I’ve treated you well. I’ve earned my keep.”

  Bliss glanced in the mirror opposite the bed. She thought she knew what men saw when they looked at her. She had to know; it was her business, more or less. She had always paid careful attention to every aspect of her appearance—her skin, her hair, her body, her clothes. It was her only capital and she had lived off the interest, careful never to deplete the principle. She exercised, ate right, avoided drugs, and, until recently, drank only sparingly—enough to be fun, but not enough to wreck her complexion. She was someone worth having, a woman who could captivate desirable men—economically desirable men, that is—while passing hot hors d’oeuvres, or answering a phone behind the desk at an art gallery.

  But this was not the woman Rory had seen, she was realizing. Rory had not seen a woman at all. He had seen clothes. He had seen her shoes, high-heeled Christian Lacroix that were hell on the cobblestones. And her bag, a Marc Jacobs slung casually over the shoulder of a woman who could afford to be casual about an $1,800 bag because she had far more expensive ones back home. Only “home” was Barry’s apartment, she realized, and lord knows what he had done with her things. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t yet alerted the credit card company—he was back in New York, destroying all her possessions. He would be pissed about the T-shirts, she realized somewhat belatedly. They were vintage ones, not like the fakes everyone else was wearing now, purchased at Fred Segal’s last January.

  And then she had brought Rory back to this room, this place of unlimited room service and the sumptuous breakfasts and the “Have-whatever-you-like-from-the-minibar” proviso. She had even let him have the cashews.

  “You think I’m rich,” she said.

  “I thought you looked like someone who could use some company,” Rory said, stretching and then rising from the bed.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Twenty-four.”

  He was she, she was Barry. How had this happened? She was much too young to be an older woman. And nowhere near rich enough.

  “What do you do?”

  “Like I said, I don’t worry about work too much.” He gave her his lovely grin, with his lovely white, very straight teeth. American teeth, like hers, she realized now.

  “Was I … work?”

  “Well, as my dad said, do what you love and you’ll love what you do.”

  “But you’d prefer to do men, wouldn’t you? Men for fun, women for money.”

  “I told you, I’m no cocksucker,” he said, and landed a quick, stinging backhand on her cheek. The slap was professional, expert, the slap of a man who had ended more than one argument this way. Bliss, who had never been struck in her life—except on the ass, with a hairbrush, by an early boyfriend who found that exceptionally entertaining—rubbed her cheek, stunned. She was even more stunned to watch Rory proceed to the minibar and squat before it, inspecting its restocked shelves.

  “Crap wine,” he said. “And I am sick to hell of Guinness and Jameson.”

  The first crack of the minibar door against his head was too soft; all it did was make him bellow. But it was hard enough to disorient him, giving Bliss the only advantage she needed. She straddled his back and slammed the door repeatedly on his head and neck. Decapitation occurred to her as a vague if ambitious goal. She barely noticed his hands reaching back, scratching and flailing, attempting to dislodge her, but her legs were like steel, strong and flexible from years of pilates and yoga. She decided to settle for motionlessness and silence, slamming the door on Rory’s head until he was finally, blessedly still.

  But still was not good enough. She wrested a corkscrew from its resting place—fifteen euros—and went to work. Impossible. Just as she was about to despair, she glanced at a happy gleam beneath the bedspread, a steak knife that had fallen to the floor after one of their room-service feasts and somehow gone undetected. Ha, even the maids at the oh-so-snooty Merrion weren’t so damn perfect.

  She kept going, intent on finishing what she had started, even as the hotel was coming to life around her—the telephone ringing, footsteps pounding down the corridors. She should probably put on the robe, the lovely white fluffy robe. She was rather … speckled.

  But the staff came through the door before she could get to her feet.

  “How old are you, then?” the police officer—they called them Gardaí here—asked Bliss.

  “How old do I look?”

  He did not seem to find her question odd. “You look like the merest slip of a girl, but our investigation requires more specific data.”

  He was being so kind and solicitous, had been nothing but kind all along, although Bliss sensed that the fading mark on her cheek had not done much to reconcile the investigators to the scene they had discovered in the hotel room. They tried to be gallant, professing dismay that she had been hit and insulted. But their shock and horror had shown through their professional armor. They clearly thought this was a bit much for a woman who insisted she had been doing nothing more than defending herself.

  “Really? You’re not just saying that?”

  “I’d be surprised if you could buy a drink legally in most places.”

  Satisfied, she gave her real age, although it took a moment of calculation to get it right. Was she thirty or thirty-one, possibly thirty-two? She had added two years back in the early days, when she was starting out, then started subtracting three as of late.

  “I’m thirty-one.”

  “That’s young.”

  “I thought so.”

  TOURIST TRADE

  BY JAMES O. BORN

  It might have been a death spasm or a reflex, but the man’s hand flew up and his long, clean fingernails raked across Reed’s face. He hardly reacted. So he had a scar to match the others now. His father had done worse to him by the time he was ten. This might be a tad more serious, as he could feel the blood trickle into his right eye. Reed leaned away so he wouldn’t feel the man’s last, moist breath. The knife was still firmly buried in the man’s solar plexus. The long K-bar survival knife with a half-serrated edge had cut through his skin and into his heart like, well, like a sharp knife slicing through skin and heart. No wonder the U.S. Marines issued these things. Fucking Americans, they did everything too big. A seven-inch blade on a knife! That was three inches too many. The man coughed like he had been smoking Camels most his life—they were in Dublin, so it might have been true, but Reed had picked this fella because he looked like a tourist. That had been the first goal: always a visitor.

  In this case, Reed had seen the man come from a pub off Swift’s Row and simply fell in behind him. He was careful
never to be seen with a victim. The first thing that tipped him to the man’s lack of roots in Dublin was that he had on a yellow shirt under a blue windbreaker. No Dub worth his balls would be caught in such an obnoxious outfit. These Dubliners loved their black. Black shirts, black jackets, God help him but he had noticed even the kids favored black on their way to school. Must’ve made the weather look brighter by comparison. Not like home in the west.

  Looking into the man’s pale-blue eyes he pulled out the big K-bar, feeling the rough edge catch on some gristle and maybe the last rib. It sounded like his old man sawing on the Christmas turkey when he was a kid. More blood, but similar.

  He examined his right hand with the latex surgical glove. It was uniformly red from the fingers to the wrist. The handle of the knife had a string of flesh or tendon hanging from it. Reed watched the man slide down the wall into a sitting position, then slump into his final posture. He didn’t check for a pulse. If this bloke could survive that hacking, he deserved to live. Didn’t matter anyway. An attack like this, even if someone survived it, still accomplished his mission.

  He wiped his forehead with his left hand and realized he needed to stop the bleeding with a rag. He glanced around the alley. There was nothing obvious. He had stumbled into the cleanest alley in Dublin. Easing out toward the street he found a wad of newspaper and wiped his forehead. He ripped a section off for a makeshift bandage. Holding it to his face, he started on his way.

  He headed out onto the empty street. Most the streets were empty now-a-days. People didn’t feel safe in Dublin after dark. He had seen to that. As he came to Wellington Quay near the Millennium Bridge, he casually flipped the knife over the small seawall and into the water. The glove was tied around the handle and the neat little package made hardly a splash as it sank to the bottom of the channel. This was getting expensive. A new knife every time and the fucking K-bar cost nearly thirty-five euros. So far, with housing and food he’d spent a fortune on this endeavor. All for a righteous cause. That’s how he looked at it. That’s how he had to look at it.