From out of the City

by John Kelly

  – Me neither.

  Schroeder has tried. He has cooperated. He has played ball. But he will not linger for this.

  – Goodbye, Claude. I really do have to go now.

  – Some of these people are good men. Honourable men. Women too of course. Some want to end all wars and I am helping them do it. I give guidance. A letter every day. I feel that all good men are open to the Word of God. We can all be redeemed.

  Schroeder thinks again of Paddy Viera. The lifeless eyes. The spider-long fingers.

  – So people keep telling me.

  – Are you a believer? In redemption?

  – Only in novels, Claude. Publishers insist on it.

  – I’ll pray hard for you.

  – Goodbye, Claude.

  As Schroeder leaves Redding’s, he turns to see his childhood friend sandwiched between the two hookers. He’s wearing the same gormless face he wore on the day he was ordained. The hookers are stroking his arms and blowing in his ears. They’re telling him they have a room upstairs and that they’ll do things to him that will take the eyes out of his head. He seems helpless. Stupid. Lost. He’s at their mercy now and Schroeder watches as they drag him away. He doesn’t intervene. It’s nothing to do with him. Not this. And not now. But Schroeder also realises that the sight of his old friend being coffined in the elevator by two vampires isn’t the only reason he never wants to see him again. Claude is deranged. As mad as a cut snake.

  All of the above, indeed much of the foregoing, may at times seem unnecessary. But this, as I keep repeating, is not some script buffed to perfection to meet the rules of some formulaic plotline. Not one single word and not one single scenario so far is aimed with any accuracy at some overwhelming coitus in the third act. So don’t expect it. It will not happen unless it does. For what I am dealing with here, as I have stated from the very beginning, is the actual truth. This is about real people, real events, real thoughts and real behaviour. And do any of us believe that real people ever act as demanded by the conventions of a novel or a script? Of course they don’t. And furthermore, the characters I am dealing with here are in many ways unknown, even to themselves, and so my refusal to invent or reinvent them is steadfast. At least in the normal sense of invention. For the root of invention is “discover” and, yes, invention in that sense is ongoing. I’m discovering the thing. I’m discovering it all.

  TWELVE

  TWO DAYS LATER and I discover Schroeder at a sidewalk café on Wicklow Street. Solemn in the shade of an awning, he’s handling the cruets before him and savouring the fumes of anise which rise like inspiration from the marble. He’s just about to start scribbling on the inside cover of the Murakami when he spies Chantal, in a tight leather jacket, wheeling her bicycle diagonally across from the parking lot and coming straight for him. She’s wearing Wayfarer shades and the red-curtain sheen of her hair is heavy and wet as if she’s just out of the shower.

  – Well, she says. If it isn’t the creepy guy.

  Schroeder is thrown.

  – You look like you’re just out of the shower, he says.

  – There you go. I rest my case.

  Chantal chains her bicycle to the trunk of a rusting lamp post and Schroeder notices the crimson shine of her fingernails. All moulded perfection beneath the smooth, zipped sheen of leather, she sits down beside him and orders an espresso.

  – So what gives, creepy guy?

  – Are you following me? Schroeder asks.

  – You wish.

  – What’s your name?

  – Margaret.

  – Seriously?

  – You got a problem with Margaret?

  – I’ve been calling you Chantal.

  She seems to weigh the name in her mouth.

  – I like it. Mind if I use it?

  – All yours.

  – You gonna buy me a coffee or what?

  – Sorry about the other day.

  The green eyes flash.

  – I’m a big girl.

  She unzips her jacket and Schroeder runs the movie of the lost hours to come. Mid-afternoon suntrap, bedroom curtains drawn. All-nighters on a dozen pillows and the purple dawn. Lush life. Sleep until lunchtime with that delicious, physical fatigue one can almost swallow and breathe. He tries to channel some blood flow back to his brain.

  – Margaret what?

  – Lynch.

  – As in mob hangings?

  – As in the wine.

  – Good answer.

  – You been in the Ninth Circle of Temple Bar lately?

  – That was a definite once off.

  – You did good. I was impressed.

  – I liked your theory about the danger stimulating you.

  – Did you indeed?

  – I mean the writing.

  – Oh, it does that too.

  – Does what?

  – It turns me on.

  – What does?

  – Danger. It turns me on.

  – What do you mean?

  – I mean sexually.

  – Well, that’s a new one.

  – No it’s not. And what turns you on, Anton Schroeder?

  – When a woman calls me by my full name.

  – And why do you think that is, Anton Schroeder?

  – I don’t know. It seems proprietorial somehow. Inappropriately so.

  – Interesting. And there was me, Anton Schroeder, thinking it was just the zip.

  There is nothing I can do here. This woman, whoever she is, is much too skilled and he is utterly lost in her now. Yes, her Left Bank body is an increasing delight he wants to take home and unwrap, but there’s much more to it. In her novel company all the anxieties and humiliations of recent weeks seem to shed like dirty clothes. He takes a deep breath and allows himself to plunge into what looks like sheer possibility.

  – Do you think we might go for a coffee sometime?

  – We’re having one now.

  – I mean go for a drink some night? Chantal looks at her fingernails and smiles.

  – It’s not a good time to be out in the evenings.

  – It doesn’t have to be in the city. We could go somewhere quiet. Chantal flicks her hair.

  – Bit too much on my plate at present.

  Schroeder makes a clown’s sad face.

  – No, she says, it’s not like that at all. In fact I think we’ll be seeing plenty of each other.

  – You do?

  – It’s starting to look that way. Yes.

  With Schroeder’s pen, she scribbles on a napkin, folds it in four and pushes it across the table. When Schroeder reaches for it she slaps her hand on his.

  – Not here.

  – All a bit cloak and dagger isn’t it?

  – Well, at this stage it’s mostly cloak.

  She squeezes Schroeder’s hand very slightly but breaks away suddenly when two truckloads of soldiers roar up Exchequer Street. The trucks empty and the soldiers (Irish) trot to each side of the street and begin to seal the place off. Chantal stands, zips up her jacket and nods to the napkin in Schroeder’s hand.

  – Put that away, like a good man.

  Schroeder closes his fist around the napkin and pushes his chair back.

  – You sure about that drink?

  – I’ll be seeing you.

  Then she bends over, puts both her hands low on his hips and kisses him on the cheek – an electrifying brush of spearmint breath shooting across his ear.

  – Anton Schroeder, she says, I think that really is a gun in your pocket.

  Schroeder sneezes three times as he watches Chantal unlock the bicycle, step sideways into it and steady herself on the kerb. He is now actually trembling a little as she looks over her shoulder with a final burlesque smile before diving off into the traffic, her sleek leather back up and down like a dolphin in the waves. The soldiers are shouting now but Schroeder just stands there hypnotized like some willing stooge who knows well that Chantal’s seductive performance (whatever it is) isn’t quite over
yet and that soon he’ll be scoffing raw onions and pretending to be Elvis.

  The soldiers herd everyone along the sidewalk and into Grafton Street, named for Charles Fitzroy, 2nd Duke of Grafton, wayward son of the illegitimate son of Charles II. And from there they are marched in total silence in a slow parade towards the Green. All except Schroeder who ducks out at Duke Street, named for the very same reprobate, slipping the throng and exiting left through the Garda checkpoint with some improvised yarn about diabetes, low sugar and what would happen if he went hypo. He needs the chocolateria on Dawson Street, he says, and they let him pass.

  Once safely at the far end of Duke Street he stops in front of a liquor store and unfolds the napkin now all damp and inky in his palm. He’s hoping for a phone number accompanied by some provocative scribble just to keep him on edge until the next time – accomplished tease that Chantal most certainly is – and yes there is indeed a number. But the message which comes with it, in backward leaning capitals, is something he has to read three times before it goes in.

  YOU MAY BE IN DANGER. USE THIS NUMBER.

  The cell shudders on cue, hard in his groin. The Galwegian voice again. Chantal.

  – Don’t do anything stupid, she says.

  Schroeder looks up and down the street.

  – Where are you?

  She hangs up and Schroeder crosses the street and sits on the sill of a store specializing in cod history for tourists – family trees, maps and coats of arms. He reads the note again and he thinks about that day in the ruins of Temple Bar and suddenly he’s not quite so sure about who exactly is following who. He feels as if the scenery is being shifted all around him, as if props are being silently carried off stage and replaced by pieces from an altogether different production. In the window he sees a trinity of helmeted heads in profile proper, visors snapped closed like space warriors. He gazes at their sinister duplication. The motto reads Avise la Fin. The clan is O’Cinneide. A second later the cell shudders once more.

  – Fucksake, Chantal, what’s going on?

  – Chantal? Very fancy.

  Francesca. She has forgotten a pair of boots and wants Schroeder to leave them for her on the doorstep. He hangs up quickly and tries to compute. Francesca calls back.

  – Don’t you dare hang up on me!

  – Not a good time, Fran.

  – Chantal, eh? You’ve always wanted a Chantal.

  – Seriously. This is not a good time.

  – Is she French?

  – I don’t know anything about her.

  – You don’t hang about, do you?

  – Look Fran, call me later.

  – Chantal what?

  – I don’t know.

  – Where does she live?

  – I don’t know that either.

  – Where does she work?

  – I have to go.

  Half an hour (and several drinks) later Schroeder is standing among the giant iron bins of Middle Abbey Street. Musclemeds is locked and grilled and even though there are three of Chantal’s bespoke pyramids in the window, the place looks as though it hasn’t been open in years. Either that or Chantal doesn’t take much pride in her work. The place is a dump set in a dump, and Middle Abbey Street, as usual, reeks of danger and worse.

  Go home, Schroeder. Go home.

  And he’s just about to leave when he senses a sudden sun’s eclipse. A shadow rises behind him and he turns to see a man the size of Croagh Patrick, his acned neck suggesting a beefhead out to score illegal protein within the Musclemed pyramids of Chantal. But when he makes a bouncer’s gesture with his outstretched arms, Schroeder knows that the man has only one true purpose here. It’s a classic move which signifies that Schroeder should either move away from the area immediately or have his neck snapped like a stale baguette. Schroeder steps backwards, then sideways, like a man about to convert a try and, once satisfied that he’s on his way, the giant turns and walks silently into the traffic, his back obscuring the full width of a passing truck.

  Jump on the LUAS, Schroeder. Go home.

  But Schroeder isn’t done yet. Chantal says that she works in this place and yet, evidently, nobody works here at all. And he realises that she has directed him here for a purpose and that he must now find out what this place actually is. And if he really is in danger, then he must confront it. Seek it out. Bring it on. So speaketh the Pernod and the Presbutex. And so he finds his way into Musclemeds through the old Scientology building about five doors down – the first in a parade of derelict shells without any kind of front door. Everything smells of dead cats and carbon and, once inside, he walks up a ribcage of stairs which creak like a long funeral beneath his feet. He hauls himself up into the attic and then makes his way back through the roof-spaces – a well known squatters’ trick, not that he’s ever tried it out until now. And not that, come to think of it, he has ever broken into a building either, and certainly not with a pistol in his pants.

  The roofs have been opened and stripped like the hull of a salvaged ship and the fragile space is full of sky and pigeons, their nests, their carcasses and their shit. So many slates are missing that Schroeder gets a terrifying sense of being adrift, as if he’s actually walking in the sky itself and that he’ll be blown out into the street at any minute. It’s worse up here than in any basement dungeon and yet, whether it be déjà vu or the fragmented remembrances of old nightmare, much of it seems recognisable. Below him, what seems like miles below, the sounds of the city are so intense and clear, it might be the exotic audio of Beirut or Bangalore.

  Once directly above Musclemeds, he lowers himself through the ceiling and drops to the floor – the thud of his landing seeming to make the whole building shake. Now locked inside the bleached whalebones of the street, the Glock obscenely in his hand, he walks down three flights of stairs and with every creak he squeezes the gun a little tighter, expecting at any moment a web of ricochets to strap him to the wall.

  In the store itself there’s nothing but a counter and scattered tins of protein. But there’s also a back room and Schroeder pushes the door, imagining what it feels like to fire at some shadow figure which has already taken him down in a shower of lead. He takes a deep breath and, gun-first, he enters. Light leaks from the room, the Glock glows in his hand and his finger tightens on the trigger as he peers into the half-lit room.

  A man sits motionless at a table. A tiny figure with silver gaffer tape stretched hard and deep across his mouth. Yet more tape winds around his upper arms, his torso and his wrists. The man doesn’t move and Schroeder tries to focus, trying somehow to bend his vision beyond the concealing darkness. He steps towards the table, flicks out at an anglepoise and suddenly there’s a little still life with bottle of Stolichnaya and two tumblers. As for the figure, Schroeder recognises at once the terrified Chihuahua eyes of Roark – all trussed up like a battered, silver, tout cocoon.

  Schroeder puts the gun on the table and starts to ease the tape from Roark’s mouth. Roark sucks in air and his head rolls back and there’s a whole new stench of urine. There’s a lot of blood too. Dried and fresh. And teeth are missing. Everything is mashed, split and hanging, and when he tries to speak, all Roark can manage is a groan as his eyes sink to the gun resting between them. Perhaps he thinks that if this is a game of spin-the-bottle then the turn is now Schroeder’s and he leans away as if to present his cheek to a bullet. It has been coming for years. The typical tout’s demise and it looks as if Schroeder is the one to do the deed.

  – Who did this to you? asks Schroeder.

  Roark moans.

  – Big guy? Bald head?

  Roark nods with his eyes.

  – Was there a woman? Red hair?

  Roark stiffens and his moans go all gurgle and choke.

  Schroeder looks around the room. Bare boards. Dust. And another door to his left. This one iron, barred and padlocked. This is exactly the sort of place where people get hung up by their heels and made to confess to all manner of recent atrocities. It�
�s a place where that very anglepoise is used to illuminate the truth in a terrified pair of eyes. A place where people disappear completely. And now Schroeder feels like he’s in the middle of some terrible trial. Some kind of practical exam where he must behave as is expected of a man with a loaded gun. He has been brought here as surely as Roark has been, and perhaps his task really is to shoot this tortured tout in the back of his rolling head. That certainly seems to be the picture. What else could it be? The hog-tied maggot. The back room. The loaded Glock.

  Minutes pass. Many powerless, clueless minutes with Roark spluttering and Schroeder trying to think straight. It all comes back to Chantal and so he smoothes out the napkin on the table and rings the number and waits for the connection. And as he’s waiting he sees that Roark’s eyes are growing wider and then, in that same instant, his heart bumps when he hears a ringtone in the very air behind his head – the opening bars of “Amhrán na bhFiann.” Roark twists in pure terror and Schroeder turns to find Chantal – her tight leather torso gleaming in the light. Schroeder clicks off his cell and the national anthem stops.

  – Give me the gun, Schroeder.

  – What’s going on here?

  – Give me the gun.

  He hands it over. It makes no difference.

  – What the hell is going on?

  Roark sounds like he’s choking to death. Chantal ignores him.

  – So you made it?

  – What is this place?

  – It’s where I work. I told you.

  Schroeder gestures to Roark.

  – And is this the kind of work you do? She shrugs.

  – So you’re UIA or what?

  – Oh please!

  – No. Really. What exactly are you? Exactly.

  – I’m a civil servant. Exactly.

  Chantal pours two vodkas.

  – You know, Anton Schroeder, you’ve more balls than I thought.

  – Just the two. Same as you.

  Chantal takes a long drink, swallows without a wince and then, looking hard at her empty glass, she sighs in approval at the vodka’s kick. Then she sets the glass down again, precisely on the ring she had raised it from. Schroeder reaches for his drink and looks around the room.