Islandbridge (14 page)

As much as he fought to stay focused, and as much as he wrote, Minogue soon felt his ra-ra efforts foundering yet again.

Whatever the merits and practical benefits of the monthly sessions here in Garda HQ in Harcourt Square, they certainly were prized items for the Garda Press Office. There they were mined and recycled for sorely needed press releases that indicated the Guards were an up-to-the-minute, modern European police force, on top of things. The names of the organizations involved had great weight, Minogue had to admit: Europol, Interpol, US State Department.

So too did the attendees, giving the meetings an aura of well-considered and coordinated work around these meetings. “The Snowmen,” the in-house nickname for the Garda Drug Squad Central, was represented by Malone now, in his second meeting. Paddy Cowan was Criminal Assets Bureau, one of “The Laundrymen.” Cowan seemed to take lots of notes, but Minogue had begun to suspect he was faking it.

Minogue remembered then that the CIB's nickname was being usurped by a newer one: “The Binmen.” It had come from outside the Gardai, and therefore would be slow to gain acceptance. But Minogue liked it. He liked it because of its origins, a well-publicized case where detectives had systematically robbed rubbish to gather richly incriminating evidence. That rubbish removal became the nub of a celebrated and lengthy – but failed – court case that a defendant had launched to make the detectives' gleanings inadmissible.

Turlough – “Tayto” – Collins was CDU, going back to the Old Testament. Super now too, or Inspector? Minogue couldn't remember. O'Brien . . . Donal, was it . . . ? . . . he the specky-our-eyed senior civil servant from Revenue, who apparently spoke Russian of all things, and liked to holiday in Latvia or someplace. And Larry Donohue, Immigration Bureau, next to him, all sixteen stone of him, with a humpy back that made him resemble a badly dressed bear, Larry the one-time terror at the boozing sessions in the Garda Club, but gone on the dry these years. Why didn't the Immigration Bureau have a decent nickname yet?

He'd done it again, he had. Daydreaming about
nicknames
now? “Jesus fell for the third time,” he thought, savagely. He must have ADD or something.

He searched for more names to write down, and took great care with the accents and the dots on some of the words. One word had a letter tail hanging under it. For a moment he considered sheltering behind an excuse he'd heard from Kilmartin not long ago. It was something about the projector thing being a subliminal signal thing. That, Kilmartin had announced triumphantly, was what
the
problem was with these dog-and-pony PowerPoint come-all-ye's: it tricked your brain into thinking you were going to the pictures! Relax, and enjoy the show!

He redoubled his efforts to attend to what Moser was saying and pointing to on the screen. How could he blame
Inspektor
Moser one bit for causing him to daydream? But to be fair, it had been one of Moser's phrases earlier, on the “no borders” one, on which Minogue had suddenly slid down and into the empty bog-land near Glenmalure, the Dwyer country of West Wicklow that he loved, a place of roaring wind over high boggy plateaus that seemed a million miles from Dublin. He could almost hear the grass hissing in the wind, nearly see the cloud shadows moving over the heather all about. He had been thinking a lot lately about Dwyer, the Wicklow Rebel of 1798 who had ranged here for five years before they got to his family and he was transported to New South Wales. Dwyer was forgotten, of course.

Moser caught his eye and smiled. Minogue nodded, a little pleased that his efforts to attend closely had drawn Moser's notice. He raised his eyebrows and smiled back at the genial and well-spoken visitor from Austria. He noticed that Lally was offering a smile too. Did everyone know he was adrift here? He wrote a lengthy note about some of the stats on the screen.

But as he wrote, he simply had to admit it: nothing had really changed. It was still PowerPoint hell.

His detailed and useless note finished, Minogue began to scrutinize a new map projected up on the wall. Was Romania really there? Was it always? The State Police
“Bundespolizei”
logo in the corner of the screen was the same as the one on Moser's embossed business card. Well, who needed to learn German for that one? They were changing the name soon though, he half-remembered Moser saying. There was some amalgamation of police services there, and it had a funny side to it, apparently.

The smuggling routes came back on with a mouse click. Oops, Minogue caught himself in time:
Bucharest
, not Budapest. Well, had Bulgaria moved too, changed? He felt a vague shame inch in. But for years, places like Bulgaria or Albania, or states he now couldn't list in place of where Yugoslavia had been – these places had all been map names, vaguely Iron Curtain, neither here nor there. There was a lot to learn, maybe even more to unlearn.

His mind went again to Kilmartin, delivering yet another one of his orations back after Christmas. Was it just after the funeral for Malone's brother? Yes, it was. Terry Malone had turned up dead within a week of parole, overdosed and lying on a bench in Fairview Park. That was at the New Year.

Kilmartin, then: We're in the ha'penny place compared to what I seen beyond in friggin' Amsterdam at the conference, let me tell you. A right wake-up call, oh yes.

The funeral, yes. That's when Kilmartin had been muttering away to him at the back of the church while they watched the proceedings. It wasn't just the family and relatives, and the neighbours. There had been thieves, and thugs, and Guards and priests, and social workers, and prostitutes and even a scruffy-looking teacher who had gotten Malone and his brother Terry into boxing years ago. Scattered around in the mostly empty pews toward the back, Minogue remembered a goodly number of lost-looking gougers and hollow-eyed women whom he suspected were probably living rough.

The mix of people had brought a tension to the ceremony that had only seemed to grow until it filled the church. That was until a demented man staggered in halfway through the Mass demanding to know if the circus was in town and if anyone had ever thought about what that bastard Oliver Cromwell had done to Ireland. The priest, a man with a Spanish-sounding name, had paused, smiling, and waited for the rant to run its course.

Detective Tommy Malone crying and sagging into his mother was a sight Minogue would not forget. Even Kilmartin had never spoken of it after that day. Malone, the detective who had tried to take a bullet out of his own thigh lying in a laneway in Bray while a stunned Minogue stood swaying and eyeing the delta of dark blood spreading from under the man Malone had shot dead. The same Tommy Malone, Central Drug Squad, pleading with Parole to gate his brother or he'd die. Malone thumping two dealers not a week afterwards, one into hospital, glaring morosely at Minogue over a pint that afternoon, ready to jack it in.

Minogue's mind was yanked back to the present yet again by the sight of someone stretching up ahead. Lally was taking notes still, and nodding. This was too much, really. Maybe he should just stand up, or pinch himself, or something to keep his mind on things here. Yet again he focused on the map, and studied the arrows that began appearing in quick succession there. Moser had some remote in his hand, and he never even needed to look down at it, or even to point it.

Roads appeared, routes he supposed they should be called, or arteries. Moser looked around but settled on Minogue again. Moser must be on to him now, for habitual lapses in attention.

“Is it okay if I play with the English language perhaps, just a little?”

Lally smiled and nodded.

“Actually, I should not say
play
,” and Moser made air quotes. “What I am actually referring to is a word. People say ‘smuggle' but we say ‘traffic.' This is true, yes?”

Lally blinked and smiled again, and shrugged.

“You see, the times we have?” Moser asked. “Traffic is not cars, not only. It is drugs, it is guns, it is money, it is people. If we say ‘smuggle' you think . . .?”

Ah, Minogue realized, audience involvement was being called for, and with the introvert's reflex, he shifted his eyes to his clipboard.

“Pirates, no?” said Moser, though it wasn't evident to Minogue that anything had been decided. “Things in hiding. In bags. In boxes maybe?”

Minogue began to wonder how you trafficked people. Under a lorry? Were there more of those false compartments, like the poor divils in that container in Wexford, the ones who'd died on the boat over and were left at the dock? There had been a vanload of Russians pulled in at the Lucan bypass a month or so back too. They weren't Russians at all, but Romanians and Bulgarians and people from places that Minogue didn't know. According to Kilmartin, who still heard everything and asked everything, the people in the van were being shipped out to meat processors in the midland counties where they were to work. Like slavery, he had said, paying back the smugglers –
traffickers
– for years to come.

“Well,” said Moser. “Let me tell you a little about my home country. Austria.”

Minogue sat back. Moser was good – he had surely sensed that it was probably more than Minogue who had been woolgathering here.

Austria, he thought: that was a nice thought. There had to be a fair bit of yodelling, and Alpine meadows dotted with daisies, to be sure, along with cows. Plenty of them too, cows with bells. Cake of course – a lot of cake. There were surely flowers in window boxes, white walls, dark wood – and good pubs, without a doubt. Vienna was waltzes and buildings and more cake. Those leather trousers for the kids still, though? Everything seemed dainty and well made. No way were they as wound up as the Germans. Or were they? Hadn't Hitler . . .?

“My country has always been the crossroads of Europe,” Moser continued. “Yes, Austria. It used to be an empire, going out into Russia, you see? But sooner or later everything moves through Austria. Everything you could imagine, and not just fine Austrian beer, I must remind you.”

A few smiles came up for that. Minogue wondered if Moser wasn't playing back a little stereotype of an Irish over-fondness for the drink on him, for his postcard take on Austria some moments before. Maybe Austrian coppers read minds?

To look like he was paying attention, Minogue looked at Austria and then let his gaze drift down toward the Balkan countries. He still wasn't sure of them. He re-read names of cities there, and resolved to memorize them along with the correct names of the new states that had been Yugoslavia. Vlores, a nice-sounding name of a place in Albania: but hadn't Moser said something about it being a centre for trafficking? Well there was a name farther back toward central Europe, a name you wouldn't easily forget – Split.

“It used to be Austria was a kind of an island, you see?” Moser went on. “Of course I do not mean a real island, physically, like yours here. But I mean back with the Eastern bloc, how you say, the Iron Curtain?”

Minogue squinted at Romania. They'd shot the dictator fella there. And his wife.

“Well, my friends, if I may say, my new Irish friends – Ireland is certainly an island on the map. Obviously, you say. There is water all around it! ‘You qualify' – as we say at the checkpoints on the roads when we have a man who blows over in the alcohol, you know? The alcohol?”

“Breathalyzer,” said Lally and smiled. “Breathalyzer, we call it, Peter.”

“Ah,” said Moser rubbing his hands, and smiled. “That is the graduate course in English. For that I must study more or live here in Dublin.”

A murmur ran through the thirty-odd people in the room, a few snorts of humour. Minogue sat up more and cast a quick glance back at Malone. Malone was fidgeting, and he had his mobile under his clipboard.

“What I am here to tell you, you already know,” Moser said then in a low voice, and paused.

Minogue watched Moser's smile fade slowly into a kind of gentle regret. Plenty of practice with that one, Minogue was fairly sure, but still masterful enough to get all eyes on him.

“What I am here to tell you does not seem correct, by the geography you have had in your schools. No. I am telling you that Ireland is
not
an island.”

It took another bout of vibrating for Minogue to realize that it was his own phone doing that against his chest. Well, he was getting better at it. It was a month now since Kathleen had stopped secretly switching it on and leaving it in his jacket pocket in the mornings. She'd shown him how to make it vibrate when there were texts too.

“As you say,” Moser went on, “Or as they say in the island next door, your neighbour.”

Again Moser paused for effect. Minogue kept his eyes on him while he corralled the mobile from a corner of his pocket.

“A poet, he says ‘No man is an island.' Correct?”

Lally nodded. Well, Minogue thought as his fingers fastened on the phone at last, poetry, policing and PowerPoint, all in the one go. Top that.

“That was not a police officer but a poet, Mister Doan.”

“Donne,” Minogue said before he realized it.

“Ah,” said Moser and smiled at him. “Thank you.”

He met Moser's eye, for politeness, and managed a little smile.

“My friends they are true,” said Moser. “My friends who visit Ireland. They tell me that everyone Irish knows the English language – and the English! – better than the English. The Island of the Saints and Scholars? No?”

No, Minogue wanted to say. Neither was in stock for some time now. The Celtic Tiger is a man-eater. It's all gone. Saints were the first.

He held the mobile up behind the chair in front of him and squinted at the text message.

NO MORE PPOINT CRAP NEED TALK U ABOUT SOMTHNG CUPPA T CALL ME OUTSIDE UKNOW STAIRS NO JOKE.

He closed the phone, but he waited awhile before looking around. Malone's baleful stare greeted his wandering gaze.