Shadow Box

by Peter Cocks

  I had to agree. This man was nothing like the Irish thug I had seen working for the Kelly firm in London a couple of years before, the thug who was known for his expertise in kneecapping and extreme violence. This Dolan was affable, as warm as his brother Martin had been steely cold.

  “You need to be your own man in this game, Kieran,” Dolan said. “The feckers you’re working for mess you about just as much as the ones you’re working against.”

  His view chimed with my own and, against my better instincts, I felt myself warm to Paul Dolan.

  “Listen, there’s plenty of stuff I want to talk to you about,” he said. “But not here. Let’s finish our drinks and then we can go somewhere else. Somewhere quiet.”

  I checked myself. I was being suckered in by blarney charm. Somewhere quiet would probably mean a bullet in the back of the head in the park opposite; another statistic on New York’s daily list of shootings.

  “I’m OK here,” I told him.

  “Sure.” He wasn’t pushing it. “So how did you find your way to New York?”

  “I got on the plane in Manchester and seven hours later, there it was.”

  “Didn’t know you were a wise guy,” he said.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “Listen, Kieran, there’s not much I don’t know about you. I know what you’ve been up to. I keep in touch. You were on a college course with my niece, Hannah. I know you managed to lure my brother out of hiding, which is a miracle St Anthony would have been proud of.”

  I wondered if he knew his brother’s fate.

  “I don’t think I lured him,” I said. “They just let me hang around Hannah long enough until her dad got funny about it…”

  Dolan gave a humourless chuckle.

  “Unfortunately the same guys who are after me got to Martin first.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said. I’d seen the pictures.

  “Well, that gives us something in common. We’ve both had brothers murdered by the same firm,” he said flatly. “Probably by the same killer.”

  I looked at him, taken aback. He knew about my brother?

  “Who do you think?”

  “You know the big fecker? Tommy’s hitman?”

  “Donnie Mulvaney? Yes, I know him.”

  “He had a go at shooting you as well, didn’t he, Eddie Savage?”

  I walked around Tompkins Park with Paul Dolan.

  I started to feel a little more sure he wasn’t going to kill me. Just a little. We probably had similar motivation in terms of getting even with the Kelly firm.

  “How did you know I was Eddie Savage?” I asked. “Did you recognize me?”

  “You don’t look that different,” he said. “Your hair’s different, or something.”

  I rolled up the sleeve of my polo shirt and showed him my harp tat. He laughed.

  “Who made you get that?” He shook his head. “Every little wannabe Paddy gangster has one now, along with a Celtic band and a Claddagh ring. There was a time when that tat would have opened any door and put the fear of God up people. It means nothing any more.”

  “So how did you find me? How did you even know about me?”

  “Tony,” he said. “Tony Morris told me you needed someone to look after you.”

  “Now you’re messing with my mind,” I said. We sat down on a bench and Dolan tipped a Marlboro from a soft pack. “Tony didn’t know where you were. They had you under surveillance when you got out of prison and you gave them the slip.”

  Dolan looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

  “Tony’s colleagues might not have known where I was, but Tony knows everything. He contacted me when he thought you’d had your chips.”

  “So you got me out?”

  “I did. Tony pulled a big, fat favour on me and I contacted Martin and our IRA colleagues when they were holding you. It was a feckin’ high-risk activity stepping in and getting you out.”

  Dolan took a long drag on his cigarette.

  “So Martin didn’t know you were working on Tony’s behalf?”

  “No way. I’d have been dead by now if he had. Now he can’t know. Weird that my bro’s death makes me a little safer.”

  He exhaled the last of his Marlboro and stamped it out.

  “So you were in London all the time, when they thought you’d done a runner?”

  “Sure I was. But the net was closing in. I had to get over here for one reason or another.”

  “My lot didn’t want to bring you in, anyway,” I said.

  “I guess they didn’t, but they didn’t want Kelly to wipe me out on the mainland, either. That wouldn’t have been useful to them. I was hiding from the Kelly firm more than anyone else.”

  “So what were you doing?”

  “Gathering a bit of information. And counter-intelligence stuff, like sending Tommy Kelly postcards from here and there from his daughter to crank him up.”

  “That was you? Why would you do that?”

  “Because Tony Morris told me to.”

  I started to feel uncomfortable, my vision of Tony altering as he spoke. Suspicions rose in my mind: wrong leads that Tony had given me; information slipping into the wrong hands; Tony turning up at my mum’s. Coincidences.

  Tony being suspended.

  “Why do you do what Tony tells you to?” I asked, knowing full well that when Tony said jump, I jumped.

  “Because I work for him,” Dolan said.

  “Tony Morris is one of the most manipulative, conniving, cold-hearted bastards to walk this planet,” Dolan told me.

  As it got dark, we had walked back into the East Village and found a small, quiet Italian for a plate of pasta and meatballs.

  “He twists, he turns, he lies, he slips under the wire. He deals with killers and pitches killers against killers, and doesn’t mind too much who gets caught in the crossfire. Yet if he walked in here now, you’d never even notice him; he’s like a shadow.”

  Some of Dolan’s description rang true, but this hinted at hidden depths that put Tony in a different league. If what Dolan said was right.

  I had to keep reminding myself that I was eating meatballs with a proven IRA killer and not just a sociable Irishman who knew a worrying amount about me.

  “But you work for him? Like I do?”

  “I owe him my life. And Martin’s … until just now.”

  “How?”

  Paul Dolan looked around. There were only a couple of tables eating, out of earshot from us.

  “Imagine two young men, not unlike yourself, full of fight and energy, and put them into what they see as an unfair political situation. Me and Martin were very active in the nineties.”

  “IRA?”

  “Sure. It’s in our blood. Even my great-granddad fought in the twenties. He was there with Michael Collins in 1916, so we’d hear all the tales growing up. It came natural to us.”

  I could hear the start of a long, Irish story about to unfold. I cut in.

  “So where does Tony fit into this? I know he was in Ireland in the army, then intelligence.”

  “Well, Martin and me were involved in a plot to blow up King’s Cross Station in London, mid-nineties. It was to be our big showdown: we didn’t care how many would be killed. I would have been about your age, a wild kid, fucking and fighting. Martin was twenty-two, more serious. We were passionate, wanted to earn our stripes. We wanted to bring London down to show them how serious we were, that they couldn’t just gloss over the Troubles with a few feckin’ mealy-mouthed politician’s words.

  “There was this guy who’d been drafted in to help us, Michael O’Neill, from London. He was an expert bomb-maker, been in the army, had worked for London Transport and knew London and the Underground system inside out. We didn’t; we were in Belfast making plenty noise and not much action. O’Neill’s bona fides were good: Irish family living in Kilburn, he’d been sanctioned by Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams themselves. God knows how. Well-placed British intelligence, I guess.

&nbs
p; “Mikey O’Neill came up with a fantastic plan that four well-placed bombs would fuck up every single underground line. Feckin’ genius. The ones who weren’t killed at King’s Cross would have been suffocated in tunnels or crushed as tube trains tried to evacuate hundreds of metres below the streets. Then there would have been gridlock on the roads, and other, smaller bombs at key points from Covent Garden to the City would have killed more and brought all of London’s transport system to a standstill. It would have been Armageddon, IRA-style.”

  “So, Michael O’Neill,” I vaguely remembered the name, “was Tony?”

  “Right, Sherlock. He was good; really good. We were all a few years younger than him and he spoke like a leader. It was an amazing plan and he blindsided us with it. He got us excited – so excited we got whipped up by the size of the enterprise. We chatted about it to one another when he wasn’t there, got drunk, spoke to too many people, impassioned that this was going to be our war to end all wars and that after that, the British government would roll over once and for all.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Like I say, as our enthusiasm took hold, too many people knew. We played into his hands. As you’ll know, when too many people know something, there will be a leak. A couple of things started to filter through to London. All the Paddies from Lewisham to Cricklewood wanted in. So Mikey O’Neill, Tony, calls a meeting in the back room of a great big beer hall way out in the country in Omagh and reads us the riot act. Stands there with the IRA beret on and all. Tells us that if we’re blabbing, this is never going to come off and we’re to shut the feck up and report only to him. And anyone found talking will be severely punished. So we did. Reported every movement, via him, straight to anti-terrorism intelligence in London. Or what he chose to tell them.”

  “So he gathered all the information to himself.”

  “Sure he did. Like I said, he’s a manipulative bastard. What information he kept to himself gave him leverage over us and his bosses. Hundreds of names and addresses. Some would even admit to previous bombs, murders and punishments to show him they were man enough for the job.”

  “Took some balls,” I said. “A lone Brit, making the IRA report back to him.”

  “I never said Tony Morris doesn’t have bollix,” Dolan said. “Nuts like bastard watermelons. But cold, like I said.”

  “Tony?”

  Dolan laughed. “He worked like a feckin’ Nazi. He’d raise suspicion among us that so-and-so was talking, so they’d be taken out and given a hiding as an example to the rest of us.”

  Tony had hinted as much to me.

  “Punishment squads?”

  “Yeah. Trouble was, my old man was in charge of punishments.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Padraigh Lynch. That’s the family name. I’ve changed it once or twice. Da was a very instinctive guy, he’d been on the front line for most of his life. He began to have his suspicions about this London Irish bloke calling all the shots. We were kneecapping guys I’d known all my life, played football with as a kid.”

  “So what happened?”

  Dolan took a sip of beer, looked upwards as if recalling a bad memory. Breathed out.

  “My old man goes to Michael O’Neill, Tony, and tells him we can’t keep beating up our own or there’ll be none of us left. O’Neill tells him we have to weed out the blabbermouths if we want this thing to come off.”

  “And?”

  “So, Mikey O’Neill calls my da a couple of days later, says he has an informer and to make sure me and Martin are there to see the job’s done properly.

  “We turn up at the farm, just outside Newry. There’s a couple of cars there outside the abattoir where they kill the pigs and cattle. Mikey O’Neill’s driven up outside and he’s got this eejit kid, Christie McCarthy, bound and gagged in the boot.”

  The scene was familiar to me. I could picture it, just as I had been dragged from a car to a warehouse, and it made my neck prickle.

  “Da’s standing there, looking none too pleased. ‘This isn’t right, lads,’ he says. ‘The kid’s a feckin tool.’

  “‘A tool who can scupper this whole operation,’ your man Mikey says. ‘Take him inside and hang him up.’

  “So Mikey instructs me and Martin to get the kid out of the boot. He’s about nineteen, but simple, acts like twelve, and we drag him in. I can still see his eyes begging me to let him free, let him know what’s going on. But Mikey’s having none of it. He bullies it through, showing my old man the charge sheet; that Christie’s been talking about how he’s going to blow up London and the Queen.

  “So we hang Christie up with chains around his ankles and he’s crying, and Mikey says to me, ‘What are you waiting for?’, and I say no. Then Mikey gets cross and says he thought we were men with a cause, and if we can’t deal with an informer, how are we going to blow up feckin’ London? And Christie’s squealin’ like a pig, he sounds pathetic, crying like a baby.

  “Then Martin loses it; starts whacking Christie on the legs with a lump of wood, shouting, ‘Christie, admit it, get it over with,’ and Christie’s screaming, not knowing what he’s admitting to…”

  Dolan was silent for a moment.

  “I don’t know if it’s some kind of bloodlust, or whether I’m trying to get it over for the kid, who’s screaming the place down, but suddenly I’m whacking his shins and body with an iron bar.”

  He looked down at his plate, continuing quietly.

  “Eventually, we run out of steam and his body’s there, twitching, tortured and we see his shattered legs, teeth gone from his mouth, burns on his body. And your man, Mikey – Tony – says, ‘This will be a lesson to all of them.’ Like he didn’t want to lose any proper men, but it was OK to sacrifice Christie. Then he says to my da, ‘Finish him off, Padraigh.’ And my da’s crying now, holding a gun to the back of Christie’s head, and he puts him to rest with two shots.”

  I shook my head and drank a glass of water. It was hard to hear. Things I could not bear to believe about Tony.

  “So we bury the body in the country, and Mikey goes back to Belfast. Then at three in the morning, me and Martin are dragged from our beds, blindfolded and beaten, and at seven we find ourselves in an interview room somewhere in Belfast with Mikey – Tony Morris – sitting the other side of the desk with some plainclothes men.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Acts like he’s never seen us before. Tells us there’s been a simultaneous round-up of all bomb suspects in London and Northern Ireland, names and addresses we’d all given him. Tells me and Martin that as we’re the ringleaders we’ll get the worst of it, spreads in front of us evidence of bomb plans, secret camera pictures of Christie being killed, and asks us what we want to do. Stitches us right up and has us by the bollix.”

  “What were the options?”

  “He had enough for four life sentences each. And another for circumstantial evidence of killing Christie, the eejit kid. It didn’t look good. It still haunts me. We’d have never seen the light of day again. Or we could do a deal: continue as we were, as fully signed up members of the IRA who’d slipped off the hook, but at his mercy. He could get us shot or pull us in at any moment to do the time unless we fed him information. He guaranteed he’d keep his sources secret; he didn’t want every clerk in intelligence knowing where he got his information. I chose to have a life, if not exactly freedom, and so did Martin, until recently. Our secret was safe with each other.”

  “So you became informers?”

  “Up to a point. Like I say, you have to play your own game, but we had to be careful or he could have handed us back to the IRA as informers working with him, which would have been worse than the peelers. We were stuffed. Then, a couple of years ago, Martin couldn’t take it any more. He cut ties with Tony and went off the radar.”

  “So he went AWOL and Tony put you inside the Kelly organization?”

  Dolan nodded. “Same deal, making the Irish link with Tommy through The Harp. And we
fucked Kelly over, with a little help from you.”

  “You still had to do time after that, though,” I said.

  “It was welcome, to be honest. It had to look good. I only got the conspiracy to pervert justice charge, so I took the rap. In fact, I’d never felt more relaxed – fifteen months in an open prison, reading books and playing pool. Most of my prison mates were pretty civilized, City fraudsters and the like. I learned a lot. And Tommy Kelly wasn’t going to get to me in that kind of jail.”

  Dolan had finished his food. Mine remained uneaten, my stomach churning with horror and uncertainty.

  “So that’s your Tony Morris for you. He’s the hardest, coldest bastard alive, but, I have to say, true to his word. That’s why I’m here, and that’s why Martin’s dead. You don’t need to see me again and I don’t need to see you, but if you do need me, I’m duty bound to help, if you see what I mean.”

  He called for the bill and wrote a number on a napkin.

  “Don’t put this in your phone, for Jesus’ sake. Keep it safe. I have a few other things to do for Tony, and if any of it affects you, I’ll let you know. But take my advice and change hotels until your case officer arrives. There’s one on the other side of Waverley Place where you can keep a lookout for him, and he can call you when he gets here.”

  Dolan wrote the name of the hotel on the napkin and handed it to me.

  “Be safe,” he said. “But be your own man, or they’ll yank your bollix in all directions.”

  We shook hands as we parted, and I walked back through the East Village, my mind working overtime about what exactly Tony’s game was. Neither Napier nor anyone else knew anything about his off-record dealings, as far as I knew. He always acted the innocent in front of Napier. After all, he had been suspended for letting Dolan give him the slip, but now it looked like he had done so deliberately.

  I got back to the Washington Square Hotel and told them I’d be checking out in the morning.

  “Welcome to New York, Mr Maloney.”

  The information on the screen obviously added up.