“So you don’t think that was a crank note?”
“I don’t know, Michael, but what else can I do?”
“Aye.”
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“I’m going to take this photograph and go down to the Malt Shop and ask some questions.”
She leaned heavily on the table. She looked, for a moment, like she was going to fall forward into my arms.
“Thank you,” she muttered softly.
“Thank you, Bridget,” I said stupidly.
I stood and looked out the window.
“Ok, there’s the bat signal, I have to go,” I said.
She grinned weakly and turned to me. Our eyes locked longer than was strictly necessary.
“Good luck, Michael.”
She didn’t offer me her hand. I didn’t offer mine. We continued to stare at each other. But then she nodded. The interview was done. I turned on my heel and walked out of the room.
Moran and a couple of heavies were waiting outside the door. Moran stopped me.
“Are you filled in?” he asked.
“I am.”
“I hope you can help, Michael, I mean that sincerely. Siobhan’s the priority.”
I nodded.
“But remember what we talked about,” he said quietly.
I didn’t reply. I walked quickly through the length of the suite, turned into the corridor, and pressed the button for the ground floor. I was glad to be getting away from these people.
“Goodbye, Mr. Forsythe. Have a great day,” Sebastian said.
“I have other plans,” I said and walked out of the hotel.
6: THE RAT’S NEST (BELFAST—JUNE 16, 2:15 P. M . )
I exited the Europa Hotel, ran across Great Victoria Street, and juked into the Crown Bar. It was packed full of civil servants finishing their lunchtime pints, desperately trying to think of a reason for not going back to work. In the 1980s they might have called in a bomb scare, but you couldn’t have gotten away with that in Belfast nowadays.
I went to the bog, locked the cubicle door, retrieved my .38 and the bag of shells.
I checked the gun. Dry as bone. I’d have to write Ziploc a letter and let them know how useful their product was at keeping water away from firearms. I loaded the weapon and shoved it my pocket.
When I came out of the toilet, I saw one of Bridget’s goons sitting casually at the bar, smoking a cigarette.
Moran had obviously put a tail on me so I would be easier to find and kill when the midnight deadline came and went.
He would be the first order of business. I pulled the fire alarm next to the toilet and in the ensuing chaos sat next to him at the bar.
“I want to talk to you. Come with me to the snug,” I said.
He was a young guy, early twenties, easily intimidated.
“Listen, I don’t want to cause any—”
“The snug, over here.”
We walked over to one of the large enclosed booths while the barman assured everyone that the alarm had gone off by accident and told the customers to resume their seats. But still, it was pretty noisy and in a sec it wouldn’t be, so as soon I closed the snug door, I grabbed an empty Guinness bottle from the table and smashed it over the tail’s head. He slumped over and I laid him on the floor. With some care I removed the glass from his scalp and put him in the recovery position. He’d be right as rain in half an hour. I searched him for guns but all he had was a flick knife—what the hell was he going to do with that? I opened the snug door, walked quickly through the bar, slipped out the side entrance, turned right on Great Victoria, and headed south toward Bradbury Place and the Malt Shop.
The streets were packed. Shoppers, walkers, students, skateboarders, and a new phenomenon, Eastern Europeans begging with wooden bowls and makeshift signs that said “Please Help.” I gave them a few quid and hurried on. The first edition of the Belfast Telegraph had just been printed and about every fifty feet a newsboy was standing on a bunch of papers yelling “Telleyo, telleyo.”
The headline was “Hospital Cash Crisis.” I scanned the paper, nothing about Bridget or Siobhan, and I wondered if the peelers had asked for a news blackout. By the time of the third edition, some of the havoc I had wrought would be the lead story and cover photograph. But that was in a couple of hours. Not quite yet.
I binned the paper and started looking for the Malt Shop.
I was pretty familiar with this district, but there were new buildings up, old buildings gone. Nice restaurants, fancy cars. And despite my predictions, a plague of Starbucks. The big change was how differently people dressed from when I’d last been here in 1992. Back then half the men would have been in jackets and ties, the rest would have worn button shirts, and all the old-timers wouldn’t have been caught dead outside in anything less than a three-piece tweed suit and flat cap. Now everyone was dressed in casual wear: bright floppy T-shirts, shorts, sandals, cargo pants and the number of football shirts was staggering. Manchester United, Glasgow Rangers, and Glasgow Celtic being the most common. The women, too, were dressed down in baggy jeans and T-shirts and a lot of them were wearing Real Madrid football shirts, which at first I thought was some kind of solidarity thing with the bombing back in March but then I noticed that the shirts all had David Beckham’s number.
The final status symbol worn by a good chunk of the under-thirty population was a New York Yankees baseball cap. Cheap airfares, weak dollar, any mug could go to New York these days.
Still, it wasn’t all bad.
Two o’clock is quitting time for a lot of schools. And I’d like to find the man who isn’t moved by hordes of beautiful seventeen- and eighteen-year-old sixth-formers striding toward the train station in short skirts, patent leather shoes, white shirts, and ties.
I couldn’t go farther down the street because the cops had blocked off the road for a march and “historical pageant” by a small group of Independent Apprentice Boys who were reenacting a scene from the siege of Derry. The IAB were in full regalia, sweating in the humidity. Dark suits, black ties, black bowler hats, and orange-colored sashes. The scene was the famous one where the Protestant apprentice boys locked the gates of Derry to stop the Catholic armies from capturing the city—an actual historical event that had happened over three hundred years ago. I had never heard of the reenactment being performed in Belfast before. They’d probably gotten a cultural grant from the European Community. The “Boys” were actually forty- and fifty-year-old men with beer guts, bad mustaches, and hair so unkempt Vidal Sassoon would have broken down and wept. They were all obviously the worse for drink. The Catholic army this afternoon was an intoxicated man in a green sweater with a pikestaff.
“You’re not getting in,” one of the Boys was saying to him.
“Aye, no fucking way,” said the other.
“We’re shutting the gates,” a third managed between belches.
The man in the green sweater did not seem that put out. Right in front of me, another of the Apprentice Boys climbed on top of a parked car and began stamping on the roof. It had an Irish Republic license plate and the Boy was obviously under the impression that it, too, was a representative of King James’s Catholic army. A peeler went over and told him to get down. The peeler was old, fat, and bored. He tapped his service revolver once and the Boy, spooked, got off the roof.
“Right, that’s it, I think you’re all through,” an inspector shouted and waved for the other coppers to reopen the streets. They began lifting the yellow tape.
“Black bastards,” the other Boys yelled in protest. “Black bastard” not a comment on race but rather on the policemen’s very dark green uniform, which appeared black. Indeed, in Northern Ireland the small number of foreign immigrants gave the wannabe racist scant opportunities. There was a sizable Chinese community, although racists tended to ignore them for fear that each one was a potential Bruce Lee who would kick their shit in.
The Boys refused to get off the street and the peels had
to send in the riot police. While I waited to get going, I asked one of the school-girls if she knew where the Malt Shop was—a pretty brunette who looked as if she had never been exposed to sunshine in her life.
“Aye,” she said, looking to make sure her friends weren’t too far away. “You’re going the right direction but it’s on the other side of the street, just past the Ulster Bank.”
“Thanks very much.”
“No problem, although I tell ya, I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” she said, her big brown eyes blinking slowly.
“Why’s that?”
“You a tourist? Are you from America?”
“No, well, sort of, I am from out of town,” I admitted.
“If you want a milk shake go to McDonald’s, that place is a bit dodgy,” the girl said.
“Is it now? Like what? Drugs?”
“I don’t know. If you go looking for drugs you find them anywhere. ’Course they still do good milk shakes like.”
“Well, thanks for the tip.”
“I could do with a milk shake myself,” she said with something close to a giggle.
“Love, if I was ten years younger, had slept, was untroubled by heavies, and not trying to solve a missing person’s case before midnight, I would be honored to buy you a milk shake, but as it is . . .” I said, shrugged apologetically, saw the street was finally cleared, and hurried in the direction of the Ulster Bank.
I was down on the Golden Mile now.
Belfast was mostly a nineteenth-century phenomenon, a side effect of a booming linen industry, docks, and shipyard. Its population had increased tenfold in less than a hundred years. Catholics flooding to certain sectors of the town, Protestants to others; and it has remained a segregated city. Prod and RC sections as clearly delineated as the black and white neighborhoods of Boston or Detroit. East Belfast: almost entirely Protestant. West Belfast, divided between a Protestant ghetto along the Shankill Road and a Catholic ghetto along the Falls Road. Impossible to wander into the wrong neighbor-hood by mistake. The Shankill Road bedecked with murals depicting various Protestant heroes, usually in the primary colors of red, white, and blue. The Falls Road had murals showing Catholic heroes, in green, white, and gold. The exception, however, was South Belfast. The area I was walking in right now. This part of the city was where the university district met the commercial heart. This was middle-and upper-class Belfast. Houses were more attractive, the streets were wider, trees didn’t get ripped to be turned into kindling around bonfire time and there were a lot of students, couples, and young people. Here there were no Protestant or Catholic bars. No murals, no flags, and little sectarianism.
But even so, you’d be kidding yourself if you thought the paramilitaries let these businesses thrive without interference. The Malt Shop would certainly be no exception.
“That must be it,” I said to myself as I caught a glimpse, three blocks ahead, of a miraculously unvandalized 1958 pink Cadillac that had been turned into an outside eating booth.
I jogged to the café with a feeling of urgency. Outside, three other cars that had been converted into tables. Another Caddy, a red Ford Thunderbird, and a distinctly anachronistic De Lorean. Despite the intermittent drizzle, all were packed.
I went in.
A large fifties-style diner, with a soda fountain, waiters on rollers skates, Buddy Holly on the jukebox, and other artifacts from the hazily misremembered days of the Eisenhower administration. The menu was standard diner fare with the occasional Ulster speciality such as deep-fried Mars bars served in a piece of soda bread. Completely bunged full of weans, enjoying malts and milk shakes.
A waitress in a nylon polka-dot dress and dreadlocks skated up to me.
“Help you?”
I took out the picture of Siobhan.
“I’m looking for this girl. She was seen with one of the regulars in here. Skinny ginger-haired kid. Ring any bells?”
The girl groaned. Clearly this wasn’t the first or even the second time someone had come by asking these questions. Bridget’s boys, the police, Bridget’s boys again, and the police again.
Well, they weren’t me.
“Listen, love, this is bloody serious, have you seen this girl?” I asked with an intimidating burr.
She shook her head.
“You’ll want to see the manager,” she said.
“Eventually,” I said. “I’ll show the photo around first.”
“You’re not allowed to bother the customers,” she said.
“Says who?”
There were at least three dozen people in the Malt Shop, not one over twenty-five. I showed them the photo, asked about the mysterious redheaded kid, but no one had seen a bloody thing. I tried my hand with the waiters and the dudes behind the counter, but again all I drew were blank expressions.
This in itself was a wee bit suspicious.
Nobody said, “Oh aye, she looks a bit familiar” or “A kid with red hair, aye, there’s a lot of kids with red hair” or “I think I might have seen her, did she have a wee dog?”
None of the usual stuff.
I mean, I know that Belfast people are very good at keeping their mouths shut, seeing nothing, and minding their own business. That’s why they had to replace jury trials with secret three-judge courts— no witnesses wanted to testify in front of twelve strangers and no juries wanted to convict terrorists who would come seeking revenge. And I know that Ireland has a well-established and long-standing culture of silence going back at least to the horror of informers during the 1798 Rebellion. But this was different. This was deeper. This was like everyone had been schooled. This was like the word had gone out.
And what had Bridget said? He had smelled of pot. And what the schoolgirl just told me? This place is druggie central. Aye, I could see that now. The paramilitaries ran this particular establishment with a grip of iron. There were probably a couple in here right at this very moment.
I sat down and ordered a malt.
The place began filling up with more schoolkids and students. A couple of cops came in, were given free malteds, and sat slurping them in the window seat. Useless wankers.
I found Dreadlocks again.
“Ok, love, go get the manager, I’ll talk to him now,” I said.
“He’s in a meeting.”
My eyes narrowed.
“Go get the manager,” I said very quietly.
“Ok,” she said.
The manager: twenty-one years old at the most, thin, greased black hair, earring, a zigzag line of stubble from his sideburns to his chin.
He sat down at my table.
“Are you another policeman?” he asked in a Dublin accent.
“What’s that on your face, you forget to shave?” I asked, to start the conversation on the wrong foot.
“It’s called style,” he said.
“Is that how they’re spelling shite these days? Seen this girl?” I asked, showing him the photograph.
“I’ve told you all before, I haven’t seen her.”
“Let me tell you something, fuckface. You might have fooled Bridget Callaghan’s boys because they’re from out of town, you might have fooled the peelers because they don’t want to know. But I know this place is a clearinghouse for pot, I also know you’re protected by the paramilitaries, and I also know you’ve seen this girl.”
He said nothing, stared at the floor.
“You’ve seen her and you’ve seen her with a ginger-bap kid and you are fucking going to tell me the name of that boy.”
The manager looked at me.
He bit his lip, scratched at his bad skin. I saw that I was right. He wasn’t going to win any poker hands anytime soon. He had seen her. And he did know the name of the boy. And what’s more, he wanted to tell me all about it. He hesitated, opened and closed his mouth. Dried the froth from his lips.
He’d changed his mind. He couldn’t afford to tell me. He didn’t know me from Adam.
“He’s a wee hood, drug dealer, and a girl’
s life is at stake. You must know who he is,” I barked.
“I don’t know who he is, and I’ve never seen the girl,” he said, and his eyes flitted around the café to see if anyone was watching him.
I had to raise the stakes.
I took out the .38 and set it on the table.
“Listen to me, I’m not someone to be fucked with,” I said.
“You better put that gun away, there’s a couple of cops over at the window,” the manager said.
“I seen them. And if I have to, I’ll fucking kill them, too. I need to find this girl,” I said.
The color remaining in his face drained away. But he was caught between the devil he knew and a new one with a gun. He took a drink of water, made his call.
“Listen, I’m telling you, I never saw the girl, and I never seen that boy everybody’s talking about. You can ask anybody in here. They’ll all say the same.”
“I have asked everybody in here and they all have said the same, which is bloody suspicious. Who are you all afraid of?”
“Nobody.”
“Who runs this place?”
“I’m the manager.”
“No, who really runs it. Who are you paying off to?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about the man that you pay protection money to every week, I’m talking about the man that makes you let him sell drugs on your fine premises here.”
He shook his head.
“Was he just dealing pot or was it stronger stuff too?” I asked.
“I don’t know. If kids are buying marijuana it’s nothing to do with me,” he said. I tapped the table. Well, at least that was one thing confirmed.
“Look, I’m very busy, I have to go,” the manager said, starting to get up.
“Sit the fuck down. Do you know who Bridget Callaghan is?”
He nodded, sat.
“Do you know what she’ll do to you if she finds out that you’re preventing her from getting her daughter back in one piece?”
He nodded again.
“I mean, this is Bridget Callaghan I’m talking about here,” I said.
The Bloomsday Dead Page 13