His face was a mess, his skull smashed in. If he didn’t get assistance he’d be in serious trouble. Blood on the brain, coma, death.
I had really cocked up this time.
His hand reached up and he pulled me close.
He was barely there, about to pass out, almost choking from the blood in his mouth.
“You fuck . . . Forsythe . . .” he said weakly.
One second. Two. Three.
“How do you know my name?” I asked.
“Fucking kill you . . . Forsythe,” he mumbled, his voice trailing away.
His eyes closed and he fell into the black pit of unconsciousness.
I stood, nodded.
Well, well, well.
He was an assassin. No other way he could have known my name. Son of a bitch. I had been right.
Finish the bastard off? Nah. Wasn’t worth it.
But, oh Jesus, Bridget. What were you playing at? It didn’t make any sense. Didn’t she realize I’d get the first flight out now?
Blackness at the edges of my eyes.
I fell down onto the street.
I examined my belly. Losing blood. The gash wasn’t deep, but I didn’t like the look of it.
Blinked.
Stumbled.
Got up again.
The fog was lifting but I couldn’t see any houses or pedestrians or passing cars. I went to the Mercedes and got in. He’d left the key. I started the car and drove it about half a mile, anywhere, just to get away.
Pulled it into an alley. Passed out. Woke.
Blood flowing through my fingertips. Oozing, not pouring. Looked in the car for anything to do first aid. Nothing.
Opened the door. A swaying pavement, houses.
A sign said we were on Holles Street, which was near Marrion Square. Miles from Connolly. The cabbie’d had no intention of taking me to the train station. He was heading for the docks the whole time.
His job was supposed to be to lift me or kill me. But it was still puzzling. He had no gun. Why not? And why only one of him? And if it was a purely random shakedown how in the name of Jehovah did he know my name?
I grabbed my backpack, opened it, swallowed a couple of Percocet, got out of the car, popped the trunk.
Washer fluid, oil, spare tire, rags, assorted tools, big roll of duct tape. Do the job. I took off my T-shirt, ripped a rag in half, poured on the washer fluid, cleaned the wound.
Jesus.
Ride that pain.
I dried my belly with another rag, used a third as a bandage, and wrapped it on with four good turns of duct tape. Do for now.
Had to go, cops would be on me, needed to get some agua.
In a minute. In a minute.
I got back in the car, closed my eyes, and the blackness came and I was gone again.
4: CIRCE (DUBLIN—JUNE 16, 9:15 A.M.)
A sliver of moon. A lemon sky. Morning drawing a breath across the window. Bridget’s hair spread out over the white sheets in a gossamer bloom of vermilion and gold.
She’s asleep on the pillow next to me. Eyes closed, mouth open.
The fan’s on, but I can still hear the phone ringing in the other room.
It can only be Scotchy, so I’m letting it go.
A smell of honeysuckle. The faint murmur of the city. Sunflowers poking up through the bottom of the fire escape.
Her body is so still and white and beautiful it could be carved from Botticino marble.
It can only be Scotchy telling me to meet him at the airport. We’re flying down to Florida for a funeral. Darkey’s there already, which is why we’ve got this night together. Our only night together.
Her breathing becomes more shallow. Her eyelids flutter.
“What’s that noise?” she mumbles.
“Nothing, go back to sleep.”
She yawns.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Watching you.”
“Get the phone, Michael. It might be important.”
“It’s never important.”
“Get the phone,” she insists.
“It’s Scotchy, it’s nothing,” I tell her.
She shakes her head in disgust. Out of all the boys in Darkey’s crew, it’s Scotchy she hates the most. Something about that feral weasel-faced wee hood. He’s never made a pass at her, nothing like that, he wouldn’t dare cross Darkey, it’s more his unfathomable unpleasant mind and that sleekit, native cunning. You could tell that under all that bigmouthed bluster there was something darker going on. Put the wind up anybody.
The phone gets louder.
“Just get it. Could be Andy,” she says.
“Ok,” I say. I take her hand, kiss it, then stand. I slide off the mattress, open the bedroom door.
Suddenly she wakes fully, looks at me with those deep green eyes. I wait to see if she’s going to say anything but she doesn’t. I walk into the living room. The phone’s fallen under the sofa. I move a roach trap, grab it.
“No. Wait. Don’t get it,” she says urgently, almost in panic. “Don’t get it. Don’t get it. You’re right, let it go. Come here instead.”
But it’s too late. I’ve already picked up the handset and heard Scotchy’s nasal intake of breath before he speaks.
“Hello.”
“LaGuardia, one hour, Bruce,” Scotchy says. “Hurry up.”
“My name’s not Bruce,” I tell him for the thousandth time.
“One hour. Hurry up.”
I put the phone down. Bridget sighs. Yes, it’s too late. . . .
Lima.
But there was no ocean. And the sky was the wrong color. Eggshell rather than deep blue.
What was going on?
Ask Hector, he’ll tell me.
“Hector. Hector.”
Uhhh.
Where was my cell phone? I tried to sit, but an awful scrabbling pain took my breath away. I was in a car. A street sign said “Holles Street Maternity Next Left.”
Holles Street, Dublin?
It all came back. Hector was toast. I’d shot him in the head. I’d thrown an assassin out the window and I’d killed his partner with an upside-down .22 shot in his throat.
A woman in a blue dress was staring at me.
“Are you all right, love?” she asked.
I got out of the car. Out, into the morning with no idea where I was going, or what in the name of God I was going to do next. Sunlight. Cirrus clouds. Nothing Irish about the day, but I knew it was definitely Dublin because the Liffey was a presence beyond the gray forms of the buildings. A smell off it that reminded me of gasoline. I couldn’t see it, but I could sense it was there, sluggish, like some dead thing on what was already a deadly morning. The lovely Liffey moving along effluent into the tidal basin, coating the pylons, bridges, and the wee blind alleys on the water’s edge. And there definitely was a stink from off it. If not petrol, diesel. Enough that I could tell. Dublin. Aye. That’s right.
There were stars in front of my eyes, as if my retina had become detached. I blinked for half a minute and the stars vanished.
I walked away from the car.
Only just in time.
Two men pulled up in a Ford Sierra, got out, and headed for the Mercedes.
Your average eejit might have thought, Ah, couple of car thieves.
But not me. Their suits were crumpled and dirty. Even from here they stank of fags and coffee. What man, who wore a suit, got this dirty this early?
Bloody cops or I’m a Chinaman.
“Morning,” one of them shouted across the street to me, with no love at all in the greeting and sleekit peeler eyes.
I nodded in reply and then thought better of it.
“Lavly day, innit?” I said in estuary English.
In about five minutes they’d have a warrant out for me. Why not have them thinking I was a Cockney?
Backpack was still in there, but my IDs and cash were in my jacket. Screw it. I hobbled down the street, and when I was out of sight I ran as best as I could with a duct-tape b
andage, sore foot, artificial foot, jetlag, painkillers, possible detached retina, sleeping pill, and no idea where I was going.
I was wrong about the five minutes.
It couldn’t have been more than two.
“Hey, you,” the cops yelled. “Stop.”
I had about a couple of hundred yards on them. Even with my handicaps, if I couldn’t lose them in rush hour in a busy city like Dublin I deserved to be bloody caught.
I turned a corner and found that I was at Trinity College.
Excellent.
I ran in through the gates and chucked myself into a seething mass of students, visitors, and other extras in my little scene.
Total chaos.
Even more chaos than usual, which meant that a big party of tourists had just arrived, or that it was exam time, or graduation.
“What’s the craic?” I asked a forlorn girl who was looking everywhere for her friends.
“It’s the parade,” she said and pointed to a corner of the quad where a big disorganized line had formed and was filing out into the street. I saw then that it was part of the Bloom thing. The kids were all dressed in Edwardian gear, some were riding old-fashioned bicycles, and there was even a horse-drawn omnibus pulling drunken members of a rugby team.
As good a place as any.
I joined the procession just as the two peels arrived at the college gates. One of them still had his cigarette in his mouth. Jesus, didn’t they want to catch me? Let go your fag, you cheap Mick flatfoot.
They were both around twenty years older than me. Just about the right age to be thoroughly beaten down by the system, cynical and fed up. Maybe a couple of younger coppers would have stopped everyone from leaving Trinity, called in assistance, created a huge palaver. Not these characters. The parade wove its way past them without either lifting a finger. But even so, no point being a bloody fool about it. I snatched the flat cap off one kid’s head, threaded my way through the crowd, tripped another kid, and ripped the Edwardian jacket off his back as he fell down.
“Jesus,” he said, but whether that was followed by anything else, I don’t know because I had taken three steps to the side and four back. I pulled the Edwardian coat over my leather jacket, put on the flat cap.
I followed the kids out of Trinity and into the road.
Nice.
Now I was in a parade of a couple of hundred similarly dressed and high-spirited students heading for O’Connell Street. Like to see them find me now.
We marched merrily away from Trinity and turned north.
I wasn’t that familiar with Ulysses but it was an easy assumption that a lot of the weans were dressed as characters from the book. There were barbers, undertakers, bookies, priests, nuns, all of them in old-timey gear and most so cute you could forgive them for being young, exuberant, and irritating. And besides, they’d saved my hide.
Some of them were drinking and I got passed a can of Guinness, which I took gratefully.
“Cheers, mate,” I said.
“Sure, ’tis no problem,” a girl said. She had red cheeks and brown hair and was dressed as a tarty maid.
I took a large swig of the Guinness. Its effect was restorative.
“Are you for going to the party, young sir?” she asked in bad Edwardian. She was about nineteen or twenty and came from somewhere in County Kerry.
“Alas, fair lady, I have no time for such an enchanting offer,” I said. “I’m pressed by agents of the Castle.”
“Maybe another time,” she said and clinked her can of alcohol-free beer into mine. And maybe I would another time, but now I had to get out of town. It had been a staggeringly difficult twenty-four hours and what I needed more than anything was a place to gather my wits and lie low.
I knew no one in Dublin and I figured that all the old safe houses and chop joints I used to hang out in were probably gone. But seeing the Kerry girl dressed like that had given me an idea.
Back in my day, running with the teen rackets in 1990 Belfast, Chopper Clonfert used to take us lads to a whorehouse near the Four Courts on one of the north quays of the Liffey. It primarily catered to lawyers and civil servants but Chopper worked big time for the rackets and he was the Belfast rep. So the girls, without too much feeling of resentment, would let us have a freebie. If it was still there (and this was nearly fifteen years ago), it might be a good place to bolt to for a while. I couldn’t use Chopper’s name to get in (Chopper had long since turned legit) but I could just pose as an ordinary client. With my long coat, flat cap, and haggard demeanor, I did look a bit like a crappy Dublin family-services lawyer or something.
Aye, the beginnings of a plan.
Go there, get my bearings, clean up. Maybe see to this wound. Anyway, I needed to be gone from the madding crowd and it was probably not a good idea to walk around too much longer in a blood-stained T-shirt.
Also I wanted to call Bridget from a quiet spot. I needed to know what the score was. Hopefully, her tone of voice would tell me. Had the cabbie been hers? Had he been anybody’s? Had I hallucinated or misremembered him saying my name? Bridget wouldn’t have all the answers but she’d have some of them.
And with that solved, it would make the next step clearer. Had to get out of Dublin. But whether I had to get out of Ireland, too, was the big question.
The cops didn’t worry me; if the cabbie lived he wouldn’t talk and if he died there’d be another gangland murder along tomorrow to occupy their limited attention span. In my eyes the Garda Síochána was only a notch or two above the Irish Army and, as an exmember of the British Army, I had nothing but contempt for that body. Any squaddie worth his salt would join the Irish Guards in London; any peeler up to scuds would get into one of the big metropolitan police forces across the water. Irish coppers and soldiers were second-rate.
But complacency is also one of the byways on the road to ruin. I would have to put my contempt on the back burner and play it bloody safe.
“Are you a lecturer?” the girl finally plucked up the courage to ask.
“No, no, not really,” I told her.
“Are you a mature student?”
“Yeah, you could say that, I’m always learning,” I replied.
“Well, I think that’s great, it’s wonderful to go back to university at your age, education is very important.”
“Shit, how old do you think I am?”
“Forty?” she suggested.
Well, Jesus, let’s see how you look after a knife fight, love.
“Ach, I’m barely in my thirties,” I said. “Just been partying all night, that’s all.”
“What are you studying?” she asked, but before I could make something up, we’d arrived at the O’Connell Street Bridge and a scene of complete bedlam. This parade was clearly not part of the official Bloomsday festivities and the cops were totally unprepared. Traffic was still trying to come off the quays and up the street and the parade wanted to head north onto O’Connell Street.
Buses, cars, trucks, bicyclists, and pedestrians had formed an ugly confused mess right in the center of the city. Some of the students were getting restless. They began shouting at the peels and chanting. Baffled tourists were getting separated from their tour groups, taxi drivers were yelling, the cops were flailing about uselessly waiting for instruction. It was all fine by me. The more disorder the better.
“Honey, I must be off,” I told the girl.
She held my sleeve.
“Are you not going on to Jury’s?”
“I can’t, sorry,” I said. “I have to go, really, it’s like I said, I’m on the run from Johnny law.”
She reached into her tart handbag looking for something. She tipped it upside down and out dropped a big hippy Volkswagen key chain. I picked it up and gave it to her. By this time she had found what she was searching for—a piece of card with a Dublin telephone number on it.
“It’s my cell. Give me a call if you’re not doing anything later,” she said.
“I will, if I don’t g
et lifted,” I said.
“Riorden,” she said and offered me her hand.
“Brian,” I said and slipped away from her and the rest of the students. I dipped under the boom mike of a BBC camera crew, escaped a video unit from RTE television, and just about avoided being knocked into a bus by one of the old geezers from 60 Minutes.
I walked west and at a green phone booth took a look back for tails.
Nobody after me at all. I’d lost the cops and they’d lost me. Excellent.
Lost them. Now part two of the plan. The Four Courts. Where the hell were they?
Somewhere on the water.
I stopped a man in jeans and a Joyce T-shirt.
“Excuse me, you don’t happen to know whereabouts the Four Courts are? I know it’s around here somewhere, but I can’t quite remember.”
“Oh, my goodness. I am frightfully sorry, but I have no idea,” he said with an English accent.
The next woman:
“Weiss nicht. I live here, but I do not know. Four Courts? I haff a map of ze whole city in—”
And it took me six more people until I found a Dubliner. You wouldn’t have seen that in the old days either. People immigrating to Dublin.
The native, though, told me it was piss easy, just follow the river and I couldn’t miss it.
I followed the river and didn’t miss it.
The big domed gray legal building right on the water. Barristers, judges, solicitors, clients all milling about the front.
“This is the Four Courts, isn’t it?” I asked a solicitor having a smoke.
“’Tis indeed,” he said. “Do you need a lawyer?”
“Nah, but could I bum a cigarette?”
He lit me a ciggy and I sat down on the steps. Everything was hurting. The fag helped a bit.
I could think.
Now that I’d found the Four Courts, I had to search my memory to locate where the brothel had been. It was certainly on this side of the water. And it was pretty close by because I remember Bobby Fullerton seeing his brief at the Chinese restaurant, which was right next to the brothel.
Hmmm.
It seemed simple enough. And although I’m not a negative individual, I had to admit that the chances of all those things still being there after all this time seemed unlikely.
The Bloomsday Dead Page 7