From out of the City

by John Kelly

  – Look, is this some kind of test? Some stupid role-play thing?

  – No, Schroeder, it’s not.

  – So what does she do?

  – We’re not sure.

  – Well let’s see now. Does she, and let’s just pick an example from the top of my head, does she kill people?

  – There’s no evidence for that.

  – Good. Well that’s something at least.

  – But then of course there wouldn’t be.

  – What?

  – Evidence.

  – Jesus!

  – Ever wonder why Walton set himself on fire?

  – It was a suicide.

  – But why did he do it?

  – I don’t know. He had a bad experience in Paradiso. Jakki Jack wasn’t Jakki Jack. He lost the plot. How do I know?

  – It was Francesca.

  – What?

  – Francesca.

  – Why?

  – Maybe she didn’t like the pictures?

  – So she what? She set him on fire? And anyway, I thought you said she was in Beijing.

  – She is. She did it by proxy. She told Walton that Jakki Jack was dead. Blown to pieces in that Frankfurt bomb. And, somewhat traumatized by this, he did what he did. She didn’t set him on fire herself. He did.

  Schroeder takes the Glock from his pocket and holds it up to the light. He hops it a few times in his hand, feeling the weight of it in his palm, staring at it as if it were small dead pet. Then he hurls it spinning high into the air and out over the waves. He watches it rise, then stall, then plummet, and then he waits for it to land in the soup with a suck and a plop.

  – So much for fucking Chekhov, he says. I seem to be a little out of my depth here.

  – That’s a fair assessment, says Taylor Copland, and she turns as if to resume her stroll. But Schroeder is going nowhere and he hunkers down on the stones.

  – Why should I trust you on any of this? I mean, you’re not a Galway girl on a bicycle, you’re an American with a fuck-off weapon in your glove compartment.

  – I’m telling you what I know.

  – Well tell me this then. Why would Francesca destroy the letter? Why?

  – Use your head, Schroeder. To protect you from any association with Claude Butler.

  – But this was before King was killed. She’s not a clairvoyant for fucksake. She didn’t know Claude was going to do what he did.

  Taylor Copland purses her lips and flicks her hair.

  – Let’s wait in the car, Schroeder.

  – Wait for what exactly?

  – Let’s just wait in the car.

  – I don’t imagine I’ve much choice.

  – Not a whole lot. This goes well beyond you and me.

  Schroeder and Taylor Copland sit together for an hour, saying almost nothing and looking out at the swelling smog on the horizon. Walkers and joggers continue to bob along the shore. Three teenagers in wetsuits take off towards Dalkey in canoes. Crows mob a raggedy heron and pair of yellow dogs mate miserably in the grass. Taylor Copland closes her eyes and Schroeder tries to pinpoint the moment when his life stopped being his own. He can’t do it.

  – What exactly are we waiting for? he asks eventually.

  Taylor straightens up and Schroeder follows her eyeline out towards the little tub of tower on Dalkey Island. She gets out of the car, rests her arse on the bonnet and they both look out into the waves. A rigid hull inflatable is bouncing across the water, fins of white water in its wake. Taylor signals Schroeder to get out and together they walk down towards the shore. The inflatable is coming straight for them and Schroeder can make out three men in black waterproofs. Schroeder’s breath catches as the boat hushes onto the beach and a lifejacket lands at his feet.

  – I guess your ride’s here, says Taylor Copland.

  – Where am I going?

  – The Garden of Ireland.

  – I’m going to Wicklow? In a boat?

  – The roads are blocked, Schroeder. Go with these men. You’ll be met. You’ll stay in a safe place for a couple of weeks and then we’ll take it from there.

  – And what am I going to do in fucking Wicklow?

  – You do nothing. You stay there. You’ll be safe.

  – I’m not going anywhere. I don’t believe any of this crap. It’s all bullshit. And anyway I have to do an interview.

  – You won’t be doing that. I’ve already spoken to Ms Viola.

  – I’m doing that interview! And you can’t stop me.

  – What is it with you and her, Schroeder? I’ve been following you and you’ve been following her. OK she’s an attractive woman, but jeez Schroeder that thing in Brown Thomas was just a little too creepy.

  – She wants an exclusive interview and she can have it.

  – At this time, Schroeder, an interview is not a runner. Absolutely no way. Go to Wicklow. Lie low. It’ll give me time to sort things. In any case you were seen leaving Dublin Airport two hours ago and soon they’ll be tearing up Paris looking for you.

  – So I’m in Paris, am I?

  – Misleading intelligence from an impeccable source. And one other thing. When you get to Wicklow. Shave your head. And keep it shaved.

  – So now you’re telling me to shave my head?

  – And grow a beard.

  – You want me to shave my head and grow a beard?

  – Just do it, Schroeder. I’ll explain next time I see you.

  – This is just bullshit.

  – Get in the boat, Schroeder.

  Schroeder steps back.

  – And how do I know these guys aren’t going to kill me?

  – Because I’ve told them not to.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE PALE NOW EXTENDS well beyond Dublin but the Garden of Ireland lies beyond it still. A sparsely populated county, Wicklow is home to tiny settlements of outsiders and outcasts – environmentalists, potters, marijuana farmers – and the crusty remnants of the aristocracy. The rest are a scattering of lost and lawless crews which, for the most part, exist like kernes in the oily muck of its forests and valleys. It’s a place where a man might easily merge with the hedges and dissolve in the ditches and this, of course, is why Schroeder has been delivered here – to a charred cottage in one of the county’s farthest corners – a deep, plunging valley shot across by occasional jays and lorded over by buzzards anticipating a corpse of some kind – perhaps even that of Schroeder himself. Quite the thought for his thanatophobic self.

  But Schroeder, by his own account, is treated well and is free, within reason, to experience the many strange and exhausting flavours in the Wicklonian air. The steady supply of vodka helps. The pills too (even Presbutex), and whenever he requests something specifically to help him sleep – really sleep – this is also provided. It passes the time and Schroeder takes it as a better class of oblivion than dead drunkenness or resorting to anything with even trace amounts of opiate. The difficulty, of course, is that after a few days of uninterrupted slumber, Schroeder has absolutely no idea of exactly how long he has been there, and with time now twisted beyond even the understanding of his chunky Swiss watch (the first mention of this accoutrement), all he can be sure of is that it has been weeks rather than days. Not that it matters much anyway. There’s nothing he can do about any of this. This is the back of beyond and it cannot be escaped.

  In those first few days all questions are stone-walled and all anxieties are casually dismissed. Sometimes the Beetroot Man makes the odd remark about his growing beard, but the others – seven of them in all – are utterly silent and seem to float like phantoms, concealing themselves in various positions around the rocks and lanes – watching, waiting and guarding against some mystery which Schroeder has yet to understand. The only real moment of panic comes when the Beetroot Man takes Schroeder around the side of the farmhouse and asks him to stand up against the gable wall. Schroeder imagines Kilmainham bullets but all the man does is take his picture. A mugshot, it seems. The ragged beard an
d the shorn head all lumps and bumps like a bowl of alabaster eggs.

  At night he stands at the window, raising his arms like a magician conjuring himself. Sometimes he is Vitruvian Man, Leonardo’s perfect man, the geometric algorithm, the circle squared. But, at thirty-nine, the perfect lines and proportions are hardly credible and he becomes some desperate sidekick, starfished with leather manacles to a turning wheel, awaiting the rotor of hurtling steel. The blindfolded knife-thrower is spun and pointed vaguely at the revolving, rickety wheel, and Schroeder hears the daggers hurled at the crucial gaps between his limbs and feels the blood run from the side of his head, the thud of steel into cork and board and the audience gasping as one – the cold knives whacking against the heat of his ears and the curried sweat of his armpits. No place to be, he tells himself, pinned to a wheel in Cill Mhantáin, and he squirms and strains to free his ankles, wrists and neck. To get down off the cross and fly.

  At times he can barely recognise himself. The lumpy head. The beard darkening on his jaws and every delta of leathery skin seemingly trapped within rivers of corkscrew veins that pulse and strain with crazed cells and messages. He holds up his arms and makes a Y of himself, allowing his hands to droop like a dancer’s and, admiring his new and languid shape, he bends one knee over the other and hangs his head low to one side – a three-step transfiguration from shorn magician to Vitruvian Man to knife thrower’s assistant to Jesus Christ himself. Same ribs, same stretched muscles, same sinews in the neck.

  He tries, at times, to figure things out, but always in the end he realises that there’s nothing sensible he can surmise or even reasonably speculate upon. And as a result he gets a little monkish – meditative even – contemplating the smallest things. A beetle making its way across the flags, a spider on the ceiling, a slater under the mat. The only thing he doesn’t dwell upon – thanks be to medication and booze – is the body count back in Dublin. The President whacked, the priest popped, Walton cooked to blackened jerky on Sandymount Strand and that shit Roark nibbled by three-eyed mackerel as he bobs his way to Wales.

  And to think that he could be at home in his front room with Paula Viola sitting right in front of him and willing to do anything – anything – just to get the story. Unbuttonings and loosenings, clips and straps, fingernails and tongues. And he knows that he will, if he ever gets away from here, make sure, no matter what, to give her that exclusive. And while he’s thinking of her, I’m thinking of him. And I confess that I’m worried sick. I’m not a believer. How could I be when I’ve studied so much human nature in my time? But in this latest crisis I pray a little even so. To all the many gods of my childhood. In the hope that maybe one of them might remember me. Ah, you again. The little heretic …

  When I was eleven years old I believed so fervently in a higher power that I simply couldn’t accept, as was expected of me, that there was only one. And so I figured, in an imaginative heresy of my own, that there was a multitude of gods – billions of them – and that each person on Earth had a god all to themselves. One each. For the most part these deities got on well enough with each other, but whenever they fell out, that was when trouble started either for the individual or for the country in which he lived. Things might well remain local if you were lucky, but if enough gods got drawn into the row then you had a war. Maybe one god would take it out on another god or perhaps even a group of gods would gang up on another group, the consequences for mankind depending on the severity of the dispute. It was a dangerous theory for an eleven year old and they tried to make me recant. But I never did. Not formally anyway. And so, for want of anything more constructive to do, I now pray to them all. And I pray for Schroeder’s safe return.

  And then, early one morning, Taylor Copland shows up and asks Schroeder to join her in the kitchen. She settles herself against the sink and looks him up and down.

  – You look like the Taliban.

  – Not a good look, is it?

  – Not in my home town.

  She indicates that Schroeder should sit, and pours him a coffee.

  – Good news, Schroeder. You’re in the clear.

  – In the clear with who?

  – With everybody concerned. I’m sorry it took so long. But it’s sorted.

  – How long have I been here?

  – Too long, I know. But you owe me big time.

  – For what exactly?

  – For convincing certain people that you’re no danger to anybody. That you had no prior knowledge of the President’s assassination. That you know nothing much about anything.

  – But I didn’t have any knowledge of it! I don’t know anything!

  – Sure. And in the absence of the letter there’s no reason to believe otherwise.

  – And what about him? The mailman? He knows what was in it.

  – He’s out of the picture.

  – What does that mean?

  – It means he’s out of the picture.

  – Jesus!

  – The important thing, Schroeder, is that nobody can connect you to Butler.

  – And what about Redding’s Hotel? Those hookers weren’t hookers. You said so yourself.

  – They were watching Claude. Not you.

  – But they must have found out who I was?

  – Of course they did. But they were ordered to forget about it. And they did that.

  – Ordered by who?

  – By the people who give orders.

  – And the bartender?

  – He wasn’t a bartender.

  – Is anybody who they fucking say they are?

  – Probably not.

  – And who am I now? With my fetching new look?

  – Go freshen up, Schroeder. We’re going to Dublin.

  And so this especially elastic stretch of narrative snaps back once more. The characters like yo-yos. The action up and down like a hoor’s drawers and the plot condemned by the powerful-altogether suck of Louisiana sinkholes. So then what’s to be said of this Wicklow diversion? This uneventful sojourn in the Garden of Hibernia, this almost Edenic idyll under armed guard in the lawless, distant hills beyond? Has it, in any way, transported or enraptured us, and if so, to what degree? But then to ask whether the story has been pushed along, as is customarily demanded, would be to ask the wrong Q. For the A is not concerned with plot and its devices and my feelings on same are known. My sole issue, I repeat, is the truth. Verum ipsum factum, as per Vico of the Vico Road, Killiney, County Dublin. So bear with me. I’m almost done.

  Half an hour later, in some dead man’s suit and sipping vodka from a flask, Schroeder is on his way back to Eblana, Deblana, Dubh Linn. Taylor looks focussed and severe, her gun breathing heavily in the glove compartment.

  – But won’t they come after me anyway? Schroeder asks. To be sure to be sure?

  – No need. Everyone has bought the Claude story. It’s plausible after all. And nobody wants to fire up a conspiracy theory by taking out the guy’s school pals for no good reason.

  – And you’re still saying he didn’t do it?

  – He didn’t.

  – And you’re saying I can go about my business as normal?

  – Not quite. Not yet.

  – I’ve got the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me.

  – Look, Schroeder, I’m looking after you.

  – I’m not convinced.

  – And to think there was a time when you’d have crawled across cut glass for me.

  – That was Margaret Lynch. She was an Irish girl on a bicycle.

  Schroeder angles his face into the breeze.

  – And I need to contact Paula Viola.

  – Told you, Schroeder. Not a runner. Not at this juncture.

  – So this is a juncture, is it?

  – Be patient. We’re getting there.

  Taylor drives with one hand on the wheel, clicking gum against her teeth. There are battleships in the bay. One of them Irish. The rest American.

  – What’s in the vodka? Schroe
der asks.

  – Nothing dangerous. But it’ll keep you calm. You’ve had a tough time.

  – Well, whatever it is, I like it.

  – You know, Schroeder, I’m thinking. You sure have a lot of women in your life. Paula, Francesca, the late great Ms Jack. And then there’s me, and variations on the theme of me. You must be quite the man.

  – Men born of women.

  – Well, we certainly seem in charge of your particular tale. What there is of it.

  – I need to contact Paula Viola. She’s expecting a call.

  – All these women, Schroeder. You must be quite the guy. If I wasn’t a vagitarian, I’d try you out myself.

  Schroeder drops the flask in his lap.

  – What did you say?

  Taylor Copland reaches over and picks up the flask.

  – I’m just saying I wish she’d interview me.

  Schroeder starts sneezing violently. Seven or eight wild sneezes in a row.

  – Oh, Schroeder, you’re so damn easy.

  Taylor Copland hands Schroeder a laminated pass which bears his Wicklow mugshot. Schroeder stares at himself, bearded, anxious and bald.

  – Put it on, please.

  Schroeder rubs his eyes with his knuckles and angles the laminate to the light. He reads his name aloud. Professor Cosmas Rafferty. Department of English. Trinity College Dublin.

  – Who the fuck is Cosmas Rafferty?

  – You are. For the next few hours anyway.

  – And where are we going exactly?

  – You’re going to work. Exactly.

  – There’s no Cosmas Rafferty in the English Department.

  – He started a year ago. Irish-American. Does that whole Northern writer schtick.

  – Another one? Spare me.

  The front of Trinity looks like a thronged Jerusalem marketplace, a brightness of t-shirts and tops set against the grim sulk of military couture. Olive-drab and baby-shit brown. Students gather at the first checkpoint, their laminates swaying in the sun. Above it all, set in copper permanence, Edmund Burke surveys the sangars with distaste while Goldsmith, stuck on a page, ignores the whole thing