We drove over the Boyne Bridge.
The river seemed clean and Drogheda looked better than I’d ever seen it. Prosperity suited the Republic of Ireland. There were new signs up all over the town pointing to Tara, Newgrange, the Battle of the Boyne, and other wonders of County Meath.
“Ever been to Newgrange?” I asked.
“No.”
“Should go. Fascinating.”
She said nothing. We drove on for a while. The silence was irritating.
“What you studying at Trinity?” I asked.
“French,” she said, reluctant to give me any information.
“French. Old mate of mine studied French at NYU. Sunshine. He was quite the character. He was always quoting the Flowers of Evil guy.”
“Baudelaire, and it’s Fleurs du Mal,” she said with condescension.
“Yeah, well, had a bit of a sticky end, did Sunshine, although it wasn’t totally unjustified,” I said to myself.
The girl stole a look in my direction.
“Is that what you do? Terrorize women and hurt people?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“I try not to hurt anybody. But sometimes, when needs arise, you have to step on a few toes,” I explained.
“Aren’t you worried about the consequences?” she said.
“What consequences?” I replied, genuinely puzzled.
“Hell,” she said.
I laughed.
“Of course. We’re in Ireland. Hell. No. I don’t think about hell. There is no hell. Hell is a place in Norway, halfway between Bergen and the Arctic Circle,” I said and popped a digestive biscuit in my mouth.
“Don’t you believe the Bible?”
“Fairy stories. I suppose they don’t teach you Darwin in the Republic of Ireland.”
“Of course they do, it’s not Iran.”
“But you don’t believe him?”
“I don’t see how believing in Darwin and the Bible is mutually exclusive.”
“It is. I mean, do the bacteria in your stomach go to heaven when they die? Eight hundred million years ago, we were those bacteria. It’s just silly.”
She slunk into silence, nodded to herself in the rearview mirror. Whatever else happened today, at least she and me were going to go to different places, even if she was an unwed mother-to-be. Still, all this talk hadn’t been good for me. Morbid thoughts of eternal punishment weren’t the things I needed to have floating through my mind when every mile was bringing me closer to Belfast.
“Is Baudelaire your favorite?” I asked.
She pursed her lips, shook her head.
“Montaigne,” she said.
“Go on, give us a burst.”
“No.”
“Go on, humor the guy who has a pistol pointed at your kidneys.”
She thought for a moment and turned to face me.
“I’ll make you a deal,” she said.
“Ok, I’m listening.”
“I’ll give you a Montaigne quote if you do something for me.”
“Ok.”
“That thing is really making me frightened. Really frightened. If you put the gun away, I promise I won’t try anything. I’ll drop you off in Belfast without any fuss or problems at all.”
I put the revolver in my pocket. No one could refuse such a reasonable request.
“Now the other part of the deal. Let’s hear what that Montaigne fella has to say,” I said.
“Je veux que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux.”
“Very apt, I’m sure,” I said, although the only word I understood was death.
We got through Drogheda and a bypass skirted us around Dundalk. The border to Northern Ireland, which had once been a big deal with army, police, helicopters, road blocks, razor wire, mines was now only apparent in the roadside markings which changed from yellow to white. We were in Northern Ireland a good couple of miles before I even noticed that.
“We’re in the north,” I said, surprised.
“Yes,” she said.
“I thought we’d have to bluff our way through a checkpoint, or at least customs,” I muttered.
“They got rid of all that years ago,” she said with quiet contempt.
We drove through the Mourne Mountains: bleak stony slopes, bereft of trees, people, and even sheep. Next Newry and Portadown— two nasty wee shiteholes unloved by God, the residents, and everyone else. Shit-colored housing estates where men went to the pub, women raised the kids, the TV was always on, and if it wasn’t chips for dinner there would be hell to pay.
Marsh on our left and right.
A few planes landing at the airport. An army helicopter. Ugly cottages and redbrick homes and I knew we were closing inexorably on the city.
“I’ve never been to Belfast,” the girl said. Her first words in fifty miles.
“You haven’t missed out on much.”
“Maybe you should let me out. I’ll only get us lost.”
“I’ll tell you where to go when we’re close enough.”
And as we came up the motorway, I began to smell the city. Rain, sea, bog, that burnt aroma of peat, tobacco, and car exhaust.
The sky was gray. It got colder.
Then the landmarks.
A place where I’d had a car accident.
A Protestant mural for the Ulster Volunteer Force. A Catholic mural for the Hunger Strikers.
Milltown Cemetery, where a madman had run amok at an IRA funeral, throwing hand grenades. The city hospital, so ugly Prince Charles had been flown in especially to denounce it.
She turned off for the city center. Close enough.
“You can stop the car, just go in anywhere along here.”
She slowed the car and pulled in off the hard shoulder. Got a little bit of a panic attack, started hyperventilating. No doubt the possibility flitted through her mind that I was going to kill her now.
She was looking for an escape route, for witnesses. But the traffic was fast moving and the shoulder was deserted.
I reassured her anyway.
“Take it easy. We’re parting company. I’m not going to touch you,” I said.
She nodded nervously.
“You really pregnant or were you lying to save your skin?” I asked.
“I’m pregnant. Three months,” she said with a blush.
“The dad know?”
“He knows, but he doesn’t want to know.”
“Your parents?”
“Of course not.”
“Keeping it?”
“Think so.”
“Either way you’ll need some dough. Take this,” I said, giving her almost all the money I had in my wallet. Easily ten or eleven grand.
“You can’t give me this,” she said, aghast.
“Oh, I can, it’s not stolen or anything, but don’t tell anyone.”
“But you can’t give me all this money,” she protested.
“Yes, I can. I’m an eccentric millionaire. That’s just the sort of thing I do.”
She hesitated still, but I forced it on her. I gave her a look that communicated how impolitic it would be to refuse. She took it wordlessly.
“You see that roundabout up ahead?”
She nodded.
“I said, do you see the roundabout?”
“I do.”
“Ok. These are the rules. You turn round right now and you head to Dublin and you don’t stop once until you’re there. You park your car in your space and you go about your life as if nothing had happened. You tell no one what transpired here today.”
“I understand.”
“Good. Now go back to your existence. You had to cross the line into my life for a while. But it’s over now. Good luck with the kid. If your folks don’t dig it, I’d say fuck ’em all, go to London and present yourself at social services. They’ll give you a flat and that dough will tide you over.”
She nodded silently.
She opened her mouth to say something, changed her mind, and then finally aske
d it: “What’s your name?” she managed in a whisper.
“Michael,” I said.
“Wasn’t there a Michel in the Bible, a woman?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“It would be a pretty name for a girl,” she mused.
“Aye.”
I got out of the car and walked away.
She sat there frozen for a second.
“Drive,” I said.
She nodded, put the car in first, stalled it, restarted it, got it going, and headed for the rotary. She exited the roundabout and sped down the other side of the dual carriageway. And I stood there and almost wistfully watched the car take her back into the land of civilized people.
Sunshine in Dublin. Rain in Belfast. How could it be otherwise? Each place within the city colonized by the greasy empire of Belfast rain. Every timber, stone, neck, collar, bare head and arm. The dull East Ulster rain that was born conjoined with oil and diesel fumes and tinged with salt and soot. Arriving in broad horizontal sheets, as part of the fabric as the city hall or the lough or the furnaces in Harland and Wolff.
I breathed deep. That air redolent with violence and blood. And everywhere the reminders of six years of sectarian cold war, thirty years of low-level civil war, eight hundred years of unceasing, boiling trouble and strife.
They say the air over Jerusalem is thick with prayers, and Dublin might have its fair share of storytellers, but this is where the real bullshit artists live. The air over this town is thick with lies. Thousands of prisoners have been released under the cease-fire agreements—thousands of gunmen walking these streets, making up a past, a false narrative of peace and tranquility.
Until the seventeenth century it didn’t even exist on the maps. It was drained from the mudflats and named in Irish for a river, the Farset, which has since been culverted over and is now part of the sewage system.
Ahh, Belfast.
You gotta love it.
I walked down Great Victoria Street to the Europa Hotel. The last time I’d seen this place, all the windows within half a mile had been blown out by a thousand-pound bomb. The Crown Bar was destroyed, Robinsons Bar was still smoldering, and the Unionist Party headquarters was a hole in the sidewalk.
Bill Clinton had been to Belfast three times since then. George W. Bush had come during the mopping-up phase of the Iraq war. With American help, Tony Blair and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern had brought a peace deal between the Protestants and Catholics. A shaky peace deal with many ups and downs, but a peace deal nonetheless. Cease-fires had been declared and all the paramilitary prisoners had been released, and although the two sides hadn’t come to a final agreement, at least they were still talking. There were dissidents on both wings, but there hadn’t been a serious terrorist bombing in Belfast in six years. Enough time for McDonald’s and Burger King to destroy the local food franchises and for real estate developers to go nuts in virgin territory.
The gleaming new Europa, though, was taking no chances. They had a security guard in a booth at the car park and metal detectors installed just inside the double doors.
Metal detectors.
I considered my options for a moment.
I didn’t want to give up my weapon. Gunless in Belfast was like being gunless in Dodge. Next to the Europa there was a Boots chemist.
I entered, hunted around for things that might be useful, and finally purchased a pack of Ziploc bags. I went across the street to the rebuilt Crown Bar. I avoided the temptation to buy a pint and hustled back to the toilets, found a cubicle. I took out the gun and placed it in one of the Ziploc bags. I squeezed all the air out and sealed the bag. I put this bag upside down in another Ziploc bag and sealed it and then put the two bags inside a third bag and sealed it as well. The shells were already in a bag but I didn’t like the look of it. I sealed them up in Ziplocs. I took the top off the toilet tank and placed the gun inside. It floated for a second and then sank to the bottom of the cistern. Well, maybe it would be ok. I remembered reading that in Vietnam the soldiers had protected their M16s with condoms, so perhaps this would work. I chucked in the .38 rounds and they floated.
I closed the tank, exited the pub, waited for a break in the traffic, recrossed Great Victoria Street. Went through the double doors and the metal detector.
The Europa was like any other soulless, dreary corporate hotel, except they were playing up the Irish touches: green trimmings, fresh shamrock plants on the coffee tables, a couple of framed Jack B. Yeats paintings, and spotty, unhealthy-looking people behind reception.
The piped music was the slow movement from Beethoven’s Seventh, which, although not Irish, certainly was depressing enough to create a Belfast ambience.
“Hi,” I said.
“Good morning, sir, welcome to the Europa Hotel, Belfast’s premier city-center hotel, featuring a full range of services and a new Atkins-friendly cuisine,” the receptionist said. A very young brown-haired kid with a gold earring and a slight West Belfast lisp.
“I have an appointment to see Bridget Callaghan,” I said.
“The presidential suite. I’ll announce you,” he said.
“Don’t announce me.”
“I have to.”
“No, no, I’m an old friend, I’ll just head on up there.”
“Mr. Moran doesn’t allow anyone up to the presidential suite without being announced first.”
I didn’t want to press the point, so I gave him my name and stood there while he made his call.
“Hello, this is reception, I’d like to speak to Mr. Moran. . . . Yes, Mr. Moran, this is Sebastian at reception, there’s a, uh, gentleman to see Ms. Callaghan, a Michael Forsythe, shall I send him up? . . . Yes, he’s alone. . . . Certainly.”
He hung up the phone and nodded at me.
“You can go up. It’s the top floor.”
“Thanks.”
I went to the bank of elevators, pressed the up button, and while I waited I admired the plate-glass windows I had helped put in twelve years ago.
The doors dinged.
Two long-haired goons in tailored suits were standing inside the lift. Definitely Yanks, since both looked like rejects from Arena Football or the World Wrestling Federation. One was an ugly-looking white guy, the other an angry thick-necked black man.
“Moran?” I asked the white guy.
“Forsythe?” he asked me.
“Aye,” I said, wondering yet again if there would ever be an occasion when I’d be happy to answer that question.
“Dave wants to see you. You better get in the elevator,” he said.
“I’m here to see Bridget.”
“Everyone who wants to see Ms. Callaghan sees Dave first.”
“Ok.”
“Can we pat you down?” he asked.
They did a fast, efficient search, found nothing. We all got inside the lift. The white guy pressed the button for the top floor. The black dude gave me the skunk eye.
“Are you eyeballing me?” he said in a completely aggressive manner. It took me aback. Jesus, who did Bridget have working for her these days? Hotheads? Eejits? Not wonder they couldn’t do something as simple as killing a traitor like me.
“Yeah, I am eyeballing you. You look like Barry Bonds on anger-management day. Have you ever noticed that your neck is actually bigger than your head?”
The black guy made a move, but the lift opened on the top floor. With the men on either side of me, I walked to a door just off the presidential suite. They knocked and waited.
“Enter,” another American voice said.
We went in. The blinds were pulled down in a huge room that stank of cigarette smoke. A fat little character wearing a wrinkled red shirt, sitting in a leather chair, poring over documents. He stood. He was about forty, looked about fifty, balding, a leathery expression, evil slits for eyes. I had the feeling that I had seen him before.
“We meet at last, Forsythe. Finally. You fucker,” he said in a Nassau County honk that was so contaminated with f
ury he was barely able to get the words out.
“You have the better of me, who are you?” I replied.
“You know how many times I’ve dreamed of this moment,” he said more to himself than me.
“Who the fuck are you?” I asked again.
“You bastard, Forsythe. A nod to these two guys and they’ll take you to the roof and throw you the fuck off,” he said, grinding his fist into his hand. An unconscious gesture, but it reminded me so much of other little nut jobs—Napoleon, Caesar, Hitler—I couldn’t help but suppress a laugh. I sat down in the leather chair opposite him. It was an empty threat. If he was going to top me he would have done it instead of blabbing about it. I smiled.
“You’re wasting my valuable time,” I said. “I’m here to see Bridget Callaghan.”
The man stared at me and gestured to the two goons.
“You can go,” he told them. I turned and waved.
“See ya. Have fun bench pressing each other,” I said. They left without responding.
I looked at the man.
“Ok, so who are you?” I asked.
“We’ve met before,” he said.
“Have we? I don’t remember. Just tell me your goddamn name.”
“David Moran. Bob Moran was my brother,” he said with grim satisfaction.
I nodded. Yeah. We had met before. And now I understood. I’d killed Big Bob Moran at his house in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Big Bob had been the henchman for Darkey White. He had set me up in Mexico, implicated me in a drugs buy, and gotten me thrown in a Mexican prison, where three of my crew had died. If any fucker on this Earth deserved to die it was Big Bob Moran. I had killed him and in twelve years I had shed not a tear or had one moment of remorse for what I’d done. If Bob’s brother worked for Bridget, so be it. I understood his point of view. You had to pay for blood, no matter if that blood was as vile a concoction as the one that you’d find in the late Big Bob.
“Bob had it coming,” I told Moran.
“We all have it coming,” Moran said.
“I don’t want to start anything with you, I’m here to help Bridget, what’s done is done as far as I’m concerned. It’s past. Over. Dead.”
The Bloomsday Dead Page 10