From out of the City

by John Kelly

  FIVE

  THE HEAT on Nassau is ferocious and Schroeder, for shade, jooks under the awning of an electrical goods store. A Slavic security guard (technically a giant and swelled even further by body armour) checks him out, inhales hard through his nose and spits out onto the pavement what seems like a live frog. Schroeder gags and sets off in search of some other shelter but is immediately shoved back by a soldier – American – all dressed up for a chemical attack. The over-muscled grunt looks ridiculous but he has a weapon the size of a crocodile and, being virtually obliged to use it, he’ll get no argument from Schroeder. Even the Russian giant retreats indoors until the patrol has passed. This end of the street, being on the perimeter of Trinity, is now firmly in American hands and, as their own graffiti has it, they don’t fuck around.

  I know that Schroeder needs a hit and the only watering hole on Nassau Street is Liddley’s – a place frequented exclusively by gobshites, frauds and the operatives who feed off them. If a public house could be a vulgarian’s brain then this is it. Scams, schemes, deals, plots and plans are the blood supply of the place and transfusions are available for the price of a drink and an earful of shite. It’s nothing but a pumping source of corruption and rot and it’s no surprise that of the twenty or so public houses from which I lease security feeds, Liddley’s has long yielded the most useful intelligence. The comings and goings, the huddles and the confabs, the flare-ups and rows. In fact Liddley’s is priceless in a way its patrons could never even begin to comprehend.

  The minute Schroeder walks in he feels that sour buzz of impotence and greed – the rank essence of nothing ever getting done. But then he sees Paula Viola and he’s thrown. There are twelve crooked televisions all bunched together, all hanging from the ceiling like the eyes of a giant dragonfly and while it’s usually golf or Japanese pop, at this precise moment the screens all star Ms Viola reporting from around the corner. He must have just missed her by seconds and he curses aloud. She’s dressed, as seems her current preference, as a tight-skirted lawyer in hidden lingerie. It’s a look which Schroeder finds compelling and his fugue is immediate, vivid and detailed. All that perfume and grainy swish. The brand-new bob of damson red holding her cheekbones in its grip. Overwhelming.

  – I’m standing outside Leinster House where just moments ago … I’d give her one! somebody shouts from the darkest corner and Schroeder winces and glares. He tries to focus again but the screens then flash from Paula to a podium on the steps of the Government Building and a line of microphones waiting for a voice. A pre-emptive press conference is about to start, the official line about to be fired into the atmosphere like handfuls of ack-ack. Paula will be heading there right now but Schroeder knows he won’t get anywhere near her, not a government press conference conducted these days with as many machine guns as cameras. So he decides to stay where he is. Sit in Liddley’s and make the most of it – a bar lit like a bubbling antique aquarium. He checks the stock – Seagrams, Kentucky Gentleman, Noilly Prat, English Market Gin, Mr. Boston, Dewar’s Blended Scotch, Mount Gay Rum, Stolichnaya and Jameson. Floor to ceiling booze. Paddy the bartender, a notorious grump, is a West African as tall as a baobab and when Schroeder addresses him in French he looks like a man about to murder.

  – You speak Wolof? asks Paddy.

  – What do you think? asks Schroeder.

  – Then do not talk to me please.

  – Sorry pal, says Schroeder, I mistook you for a bartender. You being behind the bar and all …

  – I give you a drink. That is all. Then I go home.

  Paddy is called Paddy after Patrick Viera, a footballer who once played for Arsenal and, every night without fail, the crowd in Liddley’s end up singing, to the tune of “Nel plu dipinto di blu” –

  Viera. Oh oh oh oh / Viera. Oh oh oh oh. / He comes from Senegal / He plays for Arsenal.

  – You want a drink or not?

  But Schroeder persists with the poking.

  – So where’s home, Paddy?

  – What?

  – I’m just asking where’s home … when it’s at home.

  Paddy glares.

  – Phibsboro.

  – I didn’t mean that.

  – You mean Africa?

  – Africa’s a big place.

  – Senegal, says Paddy warily, wiping the bar.

  – I’ve been there, says Schroeder. Dakar. Great music. And there was a brilliant footballer once used to play for Arsenal …

  Paddy places his hands on the bar and locks his arms straight. It’s a silent posture of total confrontation.

  – I’m just making conversation, says Schroeder. Everybody I met in Senegal was extremely pleasant.

  – This is not Senegal.

  Schroeder gives up. The dull sport of disruption running quickly out of steam.

  – Just give me a vodka and tonic. No ice. No lemon. Le do thoil.

  On the dozen televisions Gibbon, the Minister for Justice and Security, is now literally snarling. Backlit by stained glass, like some humourless ecstatic, he’s suggesting an absurd alliance of terrorist groups and declaring the dud avocado a direct attack on the democratic values of the State. He will not rest etc., etc. And then, as if to calm the very air in front of him, he raises his hands and grins. President King will be coming to Ireland at the end of the month and he will be as welcome, he repeats, as the flowers in May.

  Someone in the bar shouts Fuck off, Gibbon! but Schroeder is losing himself in the stained glass. The Four Green Fields of Evie Hone multiplied by the twelve crooked televisions into something kaleidoscopic. It’s all far too trippy for Gibbon as he delivers his statement in his usual manner, as if proclaiming a truth from an ancient book, and then says he won’t be taking any questions. He never does, and so the press conference ends with the usual shouting and kerfuffle and the Minister somehow seeming to vaporize as the screens quickly switch to oriental strippers. They look young, amateur and very unhappy, and Schroeder turns back to the bar.

  A surly vodka and tonic now sits before him on the chrome. It’s packed to the brim with ice, a hunk of lemon and a swizzle stick with a shamrock head. Schroeder looks down the bar for Paddy Viera but he seems to be concentrating hard on the till, poking at it with a screwdriver. Schroeder chucks the stick and the lemon onto the floor beneath his feet and, just as he sets about dredging out the infected, cola-coloured cubes, he senses someone right up beside his ear. The accompanying odour is unmistakable.

  – Oh for fuck’s sake, says Schroeder.

  Jules Roark is a yappy little shit from Kerry. He has a face like a Chihuahua and the breath of a humpback whale, and Schroeder reacts as if he has just received very bad news – with a deep sigh of surrender.

  – Jays, that’s not very friendly, yips Roark. I thought we were close.

  – Then you must be on one seriously bad batch.

  – Want some?

  Roark’s mouth opens and closes as he awaits Schroeder’s response, thermo-regulating like an infant gharial. The whiff coming off him is making Schroeder ill and so he tries to savour the first hit of the vodka. And it’s good. Even in Liddley’s, even with tonic in it, even with Roark in his nostrils, the Stoli never lets him down.

  – No. I don’t want some. I’m just having a quiet drink. On my own.

  I know all about Roark. Roark is a dog. He scored heavily some years ago with a non-fiction title called The Mass Is Over: The Death of Irish Catholicism, and he was still smugly inhaling the nitrous oxide of its success. Huge numbers of people bought the book, whined about it on talk shows and then went out and bought it all over again. And then fuelled by such brainless outrage, the book sold in numbers and Roark, the scaly little shit, made enough money to quit doing whatever it was he did. On top of that he was a tout for the government (he had most of the attributes and all of the stench) and he was also possibly working low-level for the UIA.

  It’s ten years ago now, during the Jerusalem War, that the UIA finally displaced the CIA (now largely
relegated to duties such as minding people like Princess King while she goes to lectures) and went about its work in earnest. And once the Middle East was truly boiling, they seemed free to do as they pleased and their operations became breathtakingly shameless. Kidnappings, assassinations and the reopening of all the secret detention centres in Poland, Morocco, Uzbekistan and, of course, the not so secret one at Shannon.

  I know for a fact that the UIA was involved in what happened in Colombia and it was, without question, up to its oxters in all those African countries which barely lasted long enough to create even the shortest of histories. In fact there has been no world event in the past decade which might not be explained by way of the United Intelligence Agency. And yet, officially, it doesn’t exist at all. It’s a ghost and a shape-shifter, something which leaves its agents free to operate like phantoms across all borders and jurisdictions.

  The only world leader to ever publicly “out” the UIA was President Torres of Mexico. He claimed that only three people knew the actual truth of the UIA’s purpose and the full extent of its operations – The President of the United States, The President of the New Republic of China and the President of the European Alliance. And then, barely a month after he made his remarks, he went into hospital for routine surgery and quickly died, all by himself, in the middle of the night. A superbug it was said at the time, previously unseen and especially virulent. He was, they said, killed by a mutating fluke of bad hygiene and nothing more. Of course nobody believed that, especially the Mexicans, who still suspect the real cause of death to have been a lethal syringe under the malicious pressure of a UIA thumb. Almost certainly a member of his own security detail. And of course I concur. Numquam perit solus Caesar.

  – So Roark, says Schroeder, you still working for them?

  – Jays, that’s a very rash remark, says Roark. Very rash.

  – I’d say you’d be one of their greatest assets.

  – There are things one shouldn’t talk about.

  – Did you ever hear of mouthwash?

  – Ah, you’re a gas man, Schroeder.

  Schroeder groans as Roark attempts to climb the stool, only conquering it at the third attempt, and celebrating his achievement by cramming a wedge of lemon into his mouth and chewing it hard, making a sickening noise, all spittle and juice. Schroeder closes his eyes and tries to make Roark disappear. It doesn’t work.

  Schroeder had indeed been rash with that UIA remark but he was dead right. The UIA (at bottom-feeder level) is full of people like Roark – enlisted freaks and misfits who can buy drugs, use cash, sell guns and wreck lives without any interference or sanction. They report to everyone and to no one. They’re everywhere and all they have to do is finger anybody they want fingered and that’s that. Hacks and scribblers are particularly well represented in the ranks, overly keen to have fellow hacks and scribblers under constant scrutiny. Along with schoolteachers, pub philosophers, academics, politicians, pop stars, clerics, workplace agitators and restaurant gossips.

  Utterly deluded but totally dedicated, touts like Roark now see themselves as gatekeepers and guardians and are encouraged to think in this way, not just by their handlers, but by the general paranoia now all but pumped into the atmosphere by people like Cascade and Gibbon. But what always remains unclear is what particular gates they are keeping and what precisely they are guarding against, and this makes them all the more lethal. Roark fits the profile perfectly. A cokehead. Vulnerable. Half-a-journalist. And very far up himself. I had long been convinced that he was tailing Schroeder – the way he popped up all over town like his own personal hyena, always trying to sell him charlie and guns. This day was no different. It followed a pattern.

  – Bit of bother up the road, says Roark. The chieftain himself got one of them. He sure loves riding in that Caddy.

  – Hope they got his insurance details.

  – Fuck ’em! They were asking for it! They knew they’d be rounded up. They were just trying to get in early.

  – You’re a charitable soul, Roark.

  – Jays, there’ll be none of them left by the time yer man gets here. You know he’s a serious alco. Drinks like a fish. Like some kind of especially alcoholic fish. And we already know that Cascade’s a total pisshead.

  – An alcoholic fish?

  – A mullet or something.

  – A mullet?

  – Yes. A fucking mullet. But with a drink fucking problem.

  Roark almost crawls on top of the bar to hook Paddy Viera.

  – Hey Pat! Two more vodka and tonics when you’re ready, sunshine.

  – Not for me, says Schroeder. I’m not staying.

  – Insurance details! That’s a good one for fucksake. A slippery tit, our Mister Cascade. Tequila slammers by all accounts. King’s a bourbon man. Imagine going on the lash with that pair!

  The two drinks appear and Paddy, staring at the melting mess of ice cubes in front of Schroeder, snaps the plastic from Roark’s claw. Roark winds up for another insertion and finally it comes.

  – I’d definitely shag her.

  Schroeder exhales.

  – You’d shag who?

  Roark’s eyes widen.

  – The President’s young one. Princess. What’s she like close-up? Dishy huh?

  – It was one tutorial. Someone was sick. I filled in. That was the height of it.

  – What did you talk about?

  – It was the creative writing course.

  – Yeah but what did you talk about?

  – Creative writing.

  Roark clutches his own crotch in a way which greatly exaggerates his potential.

  – Character development eh?

  – Roark, you’re such a swell guy.

  Roark falls silent, doubtless some sexual fantasy set in the Long Room of Trinity, but soon he reactivates with an eager jump.

  – Did I tell you I was working on a thing about the end of Catholicism?

  Schroeder’s head sinks between his shoulders.

  – Wasn’t that your last one?

  – This time Schroeder my man, I’m going global. Universal Church, Universal Market. And Ireland is just the same as everywhere else now anyway. More like China than anything, now the lid is off it. Way more like China than America even. Way more.

  – Way more.

  – And when you think about it. The more China modernizes, the more ancient everything about it seems to become. People are doing stuff which might have seemed normal a thousand years ago but which is just a tad embarrassing at this stage of the century. Mountaintop hermits, levitating priests, horseback bandits, pirates, slaves and warlords. And all those monks setting themselves on fire.

  – Fascinating, says Schroeder.

  Roark takes another sniffy breath.

  – It’s like the De Danann, the Fir Bolg, the Celts, the Vikings, the Normans, the English, the Planters, the Poles and the Africans all suddenly turn up here at the very same moment in history, with all of their customs and religions and philosophies and politics – not to mention all their myths and race memories – and they’re all trying to get noticed. That’s what it’s like. Thousands of years all uncorked at once. A time-shattered culture-fuck is what it is. So many people all trying to get heard.

  – You don’t say.

  – Time-shattered.

  – You should write that down.

  – Total culture-fuck. I just thought of it there now.

  – Perhaps you’re a genius?

  Roark flicks a finger inside his nose. Something flies.

  – I’m just saying. It’s the reason these monks keep setting fire to themselves. It’s the only way to get noticed. The whole of Asia is ablaze with holy men these days.

  He swivels away, sipping at his drink and looking at the miserystrippers. But then he swivels back again and angles in close.

  – You want to buy a gun?

  – Will it work on you?

  Schroeder points at Paddy Viera, his index finger aimed right betwee
n his eyes. With the same finger of his other hand he gestures at two vacant spots on the bar.

  – Two vodka and tonics. No ice. No lemon.

  Many drinks and many hours later Roark passes out in the toilets, his nose squashed and bleeding between two broken levees of powder. Schroeder, himself very drunk, tries several times to secure a coffee, but no joy. Finally he asks Paddy (in French) to shout him a taxi and Paddy tells him (in English) that he can get one on the street. Then Schroeder asks him (in Irish) why he is being such a shit and he gets no answer at all.

  On the dozen screens a shark seems to be eating a tourist at some marine circus in England. There is blood in the water and the camera is shaking. The great white is chomping and Schroeder is just about to leave when Paddy Viera grabs him by the elbow.

  – You think I’m not a Christian.

  Schroeder looks at him and tries to focus.

  – I couldn’t care less what you are, Paddy. Although you’ll never, in your fucking puff, win bartender of the year.

  – I’m a Christian.

  – Well good luck to you. Not many of you guys left.

  – And I believe in the Devil too.

  – Good man, yourself.

  Schroeder is far too drunk for any of this and he panics a little when Paddy suddenly clamps his forearm with his spider-long fingers.

  – The Devil he is playing with us. And with God too. Schroeder pulls his arm away but Paddy leans in even closer.

  – The Book of Job.

  Schroeder searches his flooded brain for information. He read it years ago. Job. An angry man.

  – God, says Paddy, he asks the Devil where he has been and the Devil says, From going to and fro on the Earth, and from walking up and down in it. This is what the Devil says to God.

  Schroeder makes another attempt to ease his arse off the stool.

  – They play a game, Paddy says. God and the Devil. And the wicked prosper. It is the wicked who prosper.

  Then he reaches across and grips Schroeder’s face. Schroeder thinks he’s about to be kissed. Tiny veins make red rivulets in the yellowy white of the bartender’s eyes. There’s no life in them anywhere.