Irregulars (25 page)

‘There’s been enough waiting round, and sure they’re sending our lads all over the country along with the army. We’ve not the bodies to be sitting on these boyos for days on end. Our vigil at the pub is up tomorrow as it is.’

Nora had not heard this. If Dillon and the others are standing down, she would be stood down as well. Murphy would return to England and O’Hanley would still be out there somewhere, planning his revolution, orchestrating the murder of his former friends. Friends like Dillon. She stays silent and watches the van as they follow it up Dame Street, their pace improving as the horse and tram traffic thins.

Left at George’s Street, heading south. Onto Aungier and then Camden Street, where they are only two cars behind the van.

‘The Dardanelles,’ Dillon says, almost fondly.

‘Pardon?’ Nora says.

‘What the Auxiliaries called this street in the Tan War for all the abuse and shite their lads got showered down on them in their Crossleys. More than piss-pots and rotten eggs was thrown from these windows, I’m telling you. Conor Hogan, a lad on the run up from Clonmel at the time—a mate of Danny Breen’s—chucked a Mills bomb from three stories up a tenement … there …’—he points up at a building of carbon-blacked brick and missing windows—‘… dead on into the back of a Crosser mashed with Tans. Blew two of them to hell and sent five others home missing fingers and feet.’ Nora cannot see Dillon’s face but she knows he is smiling.

‘Here we are, lads,’ Jimmy says, and they watch the van pull up in front of a shop with a red and white awning, and on its window is painted: Gilhooley’s Butchers and Purveyors of Fine Meats.

‘Drive past it, so. Pull up by the Bleeding Horse, Jimmy.’

‘The wha?’

‘The pub, on the corner there. We need to be close enough so we don’t have their friends picking us off as we march them to the car. You’ve bracelets with you?’

‘I do,’ the driver answers.

‘Two sets then,’ Dillon says. ‘They’ll do us.’

Nora says, ‘Look, if we take them here, O’Hanley will find out about it. You know that, don’t you? He’ll scarper and we won’t get him.’

Dillon turns this time. His eyes burn under the sharp brim of his trilby. ‘You’re not making the shout on this, girl. Is that clear? We’re taking them now. They’ll tell us what we need to know and we’ll pinch O’Hanley to-fucking-day, before he hears of it. If it will calm your nerves, go into the pub and ring CID and have them send a watcher to see who leaves when we’re gone and where they go. Otherwise, stay here or come with us, I don’t give a shite.’

Nora nods, trying to hold Dillon’s stare but finding she cannot. Her eyes flash to Jimmy, who is turned in his seat and watching the exchange. His eyes are rheumy and bloodshot, and in their own way, sad.

‘I’ll go with you.’

‘Fine, then, let’s shift it. We’ll put a bead on them, put them on the tiles and cuff them. Then we’re off, right?’

Jimmy and Nora nod, and the three exit the car and gather at the Ford’s touring trunk. Dillon opens the trunk and hands the Thompson gun to Jimmy, who detaches the drum magazine and taps it against his thigh and replaces it. Nora takes the Winchester 1897 pump shotgun and it is heavier than she remembers. Her training comes back to her.
The Yanks called it the Trench Sweeper in the war.
Dillon shoves a handful of shells from a box in the trunk into Nora’s fist and she opens the gun’s breech and fingers the shells home as she had been taught. When she is finished, she attempts to rack a shell into the chamber and finds the pump action thick and resistant. She tightens her grip, uses her whole arm and the pump slides back, the shell slotting home with a hollow thack. Only now does she scan the footpath and see the men gathered in the open doorway of the Bleeding Horse pub. She glances at them for a moment, and en masse they turn away from her gaze and drift back into the pub. A bright flare of elation flashes in Nora’s heart at this. The power in her hands. Knowing she could walk into that pub and …. She lets the thought die, and notices now that the footpath around them has emptied of passers-by.

‘Right so,’ Dillon says.

Without speaking, they cross the road, Dillon with his side-arm hanging at his side, Jimmy the driver holding the tommy-gun in the same way, and herself, with the shotgun carried across her chest as if she were on a parade ground. There is a giddy lightness to her step, and she narrows her focus to the front of the butcher shop, a chauffeur-driven Rolls–Royce braking hard and letting them pass, a horse in blinders and its cartload of vegetables obscuring the shop front for the moment and keeping them from the view of whoever is inside. They round the horse cart and a woman pushing a pram gasps and hurries forward, one hand on the pram, the other dragging another small child behind her who cries out in surprise at his mother’s sudden violence.

Low autumn sun between tenements across Camden Street reflects off the front window, and Nora tries to peer through the glare and into the shop. Nothing.

Dillon enters first, Jimmy following with Nora behind them. Again her eyes dilate in the interior light of the shop and she is startled by the sound of Dillon’s voice, a sudden roar.

‘You! You! Get down on the floor to fuck, right now, you!’

He is pointing the Luger at the young man from the hotel. He and a younger boy stand at the back of the shop in front of a curtained doorway leading into the rear of the building. The walls of the shop are white tile, and the meat under the glass is a garish red in contrast. Two men in their twenties in blood-smeared white smocks are frozen behind a thick butcher’s block, which is bowed in the middle from years of daily sanding, scored with dark purple grooves from the running of bloody knives. Next to them stands an older man holding a sheaf of newspaper blossomed open around a cut of beef. The older man is Gilhooley, and the two at the block are his sons, Nora assumes. A customer, a woman of middle age in a black shawl and headscarf, drops her wicker basket of shopping, onions bouncing out and rolling into corners and under feet. The woman begins to mutter, and Dillon turns to her.

‘Shut it, you!’ He waves the pistol in Nora’s direction. ‘Get her out of here.’

Nora tucks the Winchester under one arm and grips the woman by the shoulder with her free hand. She is turning the woman towards the door when her eye is drawn to a flurry of movement, the butcher’s boy from the hotel darting through the curtained doorway into the rear of the shop, followed by his young passenger from the van. Dillon swings his gun back around and fires two rounds blindly through the curtains. Two brassy shell casings clink and spin on the floor amidst the sawdust and loose onions.

‘Stay here, hold these here!’ Then Dillon is gone through the curtain in pursuit. Heavy footfalls, more shots from the rear of the shop, the sound of a door slamming and Dillon cursing, clanking pans and breaking dishes.

Nora shoves the woman out the open door, the woman stumbling onto the footpath where she falls and cries out. A passing pensioner stoops to her aid and looks into the shop. Nora takes the Winchester again in both hands, and levels it at the pensioner through the open door. She waves the gaping barrel at him as he helps the crying woman to her feet and takes her away, his face a mixture of fear and disgust, and in this moment Nora knows she will never forget the look he gives her for as long as she lives.

She re-enters the shop where Jimmy holds the Thompson gun on the older man, and his two younger assistants, one of them holding a pink and white concertina of pork ribs, the other a heavy cleaver. The older man’s mouth hangs open as if the words he had been about to speak are frozen in his throat. Acrid gun smoke hangs in the air making lazy spirals above the glass cabinet of meat. The smell is sharp to Nora’s nose, and a memory of her brief musketry training flashes in her mind and then is gone, her eyes flitting between the three silent men. She notes the Adam’s apple of the man holding the cleaver rise and fall and for a second. It is the only movement in the small shop.

The youngest of the three men, holding the rack of ribs, is the first to speak. His voice is soft with rage and his eyes drag back and forth between Nora and Jimmy.

‘What right have you to come in here? Who in fuck are yis bastards? Chasing youngfellas. Them lads have done nothing, they haven’t, so yis can fuck off out of here. Me da’s only tryin’ to run a business and you barging in here firin’ guns at youngfellas …’

His voice is rising in anger as he speaks, and Nora brings the shotgun to bear on him, moving it next to the young man beside him, then to the older man and back. She wonders should she tell the second lad to put down the cleaver but does not, thinking it not her place, thinking that he might refuse and leave her and Jimmy in a position where further, more drastic action might be their only option.

She turns her eyes to Jimmy and notices the barrel of the Thompson gun is shaking, darting from one man to the next.

‘… like yis Free State fuckin’ cunts own the place now, haring round with yis’r guns and harassing the dacent people of Ireland!’

Jimmy says something above the young man and Nora only catches part of it. ‘… quiet you down, now. There’s no need for that.’

‘Fuckin’ hard man with the big gun, without it you’re nothing, are yeh? And bringing a bint in with yis? Who do yis think yis are?’

Nora watches the senior man set the newspaper and meat onto the counter behind the glass and lift a long carving knife from a magnet on the wall. Nora’s voice is dry and brittle in her mouth. She licks her lips and says, ‘Put that down, sir. Please …’

There is a hint of pleading in her tone and the senior man catches it, disdain flashing in his eyes. ‘You do what you like, young miss, with your shotgun there. I’ve work to finish.’ He lifts a heavy, de-boned shoulder of beef from the glass cabinet, slaps it with a fleshy thud onto the butcher’s block and begins slicing it with a vigour and violence that Nora knows is a show for her and Jimmy. She lets her eyes go to Jimmy and sees him swallow then cough and hack at the phlegm in his throat.

The young man with the pork ribs continues. ‘I’d gut you soon as look at you without your gun, yeh big loaf of shite, yeh.’

Nora realises for the first time that Jimmy is a big man. Big and lumbering, with flat feet and a large arse under the tail of his suit jacket. He is speaking again and Nora can hear his words more clearly, his voice rising to compete with the young man who is shouting now, his face as red as the meat behind the glass.

‘If yis touch a hair on that lad’s head, yis’r fuckin’ dead, yeh hear me, you too, you poxed cunt …’ This, directed at Nora.

‘… Shut yer mouth, I’m telling you, boyo, you shut your mouth …’ Jimmy’s face flushes red then white.

Nora watches a rivulet of sweat bead its way down Jimmy’s cheek, and sees the twitching of muscle under the boozy jowl and a sudden burst from the Thompson gun—a half-second long eruption in the confines of the shop that sends a stream of lead smashing through the rack of ribs in the young man’s hands and on through into his heart and lungs, his white coat blooming a bloody garden, the young man stuttering back to the white-tiled wall behind him, as if the machine-gun fire were music he would dance to. For a moment he rests there, his back to the wall, before sliding down, red wash on the tiles like someone had applied it with a brush.

And Jimmy’s voice high-pitched with manic chatter: ‘I told him to shut it, I fucking told him to shut his hole!’ He turns to Nora now. ‘It just went off … it did …’

There is a second of stunned silence before the young man with the cleaver cries out. ‘Dinnie! Jesus, you’ve shot Dinnie! Da, he’s shot Dinnie!’

The older man lets loose a bellow of such animal rage and sorrow that gooseflesh ripples up Nora’s back and for an instant she is frozen and watches as the young man with the cleaver turns and brings back his arm as if he will hurl it at Jimmy. As he does this the older man pulls the carving knife from where it is wedged in the fibrous folds of the beef and reaches as far as he can over the glass cabinet to swing the knife. He is suicidally out of reach, and Jimmy fires another burst and keeps firing, stippling the glass meat cabinet, shattering the tiles on the wall behind the men, taking splintered chunks from the butcher’s block and ripping into the older man and the younger, the cleaver dropping with a clank over the sound of the tommy-gun before it can be thrown, the butcher now, like his son, jigging under the hail of bullets and then falling forward to smash through the glass case and onto the meat below.

‘Stop! Jesus, stop, Jimmy!’ Nora hears herself now, her voice futile and shrill in the sudden silence as the Thompson’s magazine empties, smoke rising from its barrel, cordite thick in the air to mingle with the viscous metal scent of blood.

Jimmy turns to look at her and his face is white, his eyes red and bloodshot from booze and gun smoke. Dillon bursts back through the curtains from the rear of the shop, his Luger levelled at Jimmy first, then Nora. He sees the butcher and his sons, sprawled on the sawdust and draped over the shattered glass meat cabinet.

‘Fuckin’ Christ, Jimmy.’

One of the younger men on the floor moves, his hand flopping on his chest, his other sifting limply in the sawdust for the cleaver. He makes as if to speak and blood runs from his lips. Dillon steps around the cabinet and fires one round into his chest and he is still.

‘Right, let’s shift it, to fuck. Out to the car and mind we’re not given the jump. I couldn’t find the other lad but if he’s brother to these and he’s heard the shooting, he’ll be back if he’s any kind of man at all.’

Nora swallows and her throat is dry, scorched with smoke and terror. She follows Dillon and Jimmy out of the shop, but instead of scouring the street and surrounding windows, she lowers her head, fearful of being seen.

But the street and footpaths, for the moment, are empty. No men gather in the doors of the Bleeding Horse as they pile into the car, taking their weapons in with them. Nora watches Dillon, the Luger in his hand, resting on the bonnet as he hand cranks the Ford’s starter.