Islandbridge (29 page)

His midafternoon, caffeine-starved brain lurched back to Lawless. The man's words played back to Minogue, in no order: higher-up in the Guards; for years now; getting the lowdown on what the Guards were up to; know when the Guards were coming down on someone. Lawless swearing that his brother wasn't lying, but had been hearing about this for a while in jail, and why would he lie, and what could be done for his brother now that he had provided such important information, and here they were trying to help the Guards, and he was taking risks passing this on, and why were they suspicious of him, and didn't he have Father Coughlin here believing in him, and he trying to rehabilitate himself, and . . .

Chapter 13

M
INOGUE STARTEDWHEN
the foot-tapping at the bottom door began, and his heart raced. He must have actually dozed off. It was Malone at the door, and his hands were full. He had foraged well enough to land some Coconut Creams.

“Are you okay?” Malone asked. “Something happen?”

Minogue shook his head and heeled the door closed behind him.

“Did you check they're not poisoned?”

“No way. I rob – I got them out of a package.”

“Who did you have to fight for them?”

“It's self-serve here, I think.”

Minogue ignored the dull film on the spoon. He pressed the pad of thick creme attached to the biscuit below, fought again to rid his mind of the photos from where Lawless had been murdered. The smell of tea began to win over the room.

“
Jayzuz!
” cried Malone, and held out the cup. “The tap water here must be from Liffey or something! Straight from Islandbridge or somewhere –
poxy
. But I'll drink it.”

Minogue blew on his tea. Neither man spoke until they had half a cup and three of four biscuits gone. Minogue listened to the varying hush of the rain still landing on the glass. He believed it was easing.

“Tommy. About Lawless.”

Malone looked over.

“Is there any word on what they've found?”

“Shot three times,” said Malone. “The back of the place where he had a flat. No witnesses yet.”

“Not a single one?”

“Last I heard, no. Nobody heard anything. There's no casings at the scene either. I talked to one of the team there, he told me someone waited for him there. They – he – knew Lawless's moves, his habits.”

“Was it really Coughlin, sorry, Father Coughlin, found him?”

“It's true,” said Malone. “When he didn't show for his group thing . . .”

Malone shrugged and took a sip of tea, and grimaced.

“Coughlin is bulling mad, I hear,” he said. “Livid. He went straight to Tynan.”

Minogue watched Malone detach a biscuit.

“I wish I'd actually written down the exact words Lawless used there in the church, Tommy. How's your recollection there? It was the second time around for you, right?”

Malone looked up toward the ceiling.

“Okay,” he murmured. “Here it is. There was ‘higher-up in the Guards, for years now.'”

“‘Years'? How many? Did he say?”

Malone shook his head.

“And he said ‘Getting the lowdown on what the Guards were doing.' He said that they would know ahead of time from this ‘insider' if the Guards were coming down on someone.”

“Right,” Minogue said. “I remember that. That was it, though?”

Malone shrugged.

“That's it,” said Malone. “What are you thinking?”

Minogue remembered Tynan's unspoken suspicions.

“I don't know,” he said after several moments. “But whatever Emmett Condon was into, people don't want it sticking to them.”

“The fellas he worked with, you mean?”

“Everybody. Maybe even his family. They're circling the wagons a bit, if you read through their statements. Emmett Condon's father is a retired Guard, you know.”

“Ouch.”

“Ouch, is right. I think maybe someone got to them, like a senior fella. Maybe O'Toole, the head of Condon's section. Gave them the bad news early.”

“Let on like Condon had done the dirty? Best not to dig too deep?”

“I am wondering that self-same thing, if something like that happened.”

Minogue sipped at the tea again. The metallic aftertaste wasn't getting better. He became aware that Malone was looking at him.

“What?”

“Condon really was bent,” said Malone. “Wasn't he?”

The question hung in the air. Minogue kept at the tea, listening to the rain. He reached for another Coconut Cream.

“Well? Do you?”

He wanted to tell Malone to go find some course on etiquette, or diplomacy, or tact or something. A Guard had died, he wanted to say, doing the dirty work on the front lines. He looked away toward the papers strewn across the table instead.

“He could well have been,” he muttered.

Four o'clock came but the minute hand seemed to get jammed before the twelve. Minogue got up and went to the window.

The rain had moved off a half-hour ago. It had been quickly replaced by a steely brightness that glowed more and more, until finally the sun broke through. It blazed on the leaves and patches of grass, and glared back from puddles and glass and metal into the clear air. The more ragged and torn clouds retreated far off, beyond the trees that rose over the rooftops between the Garda Station and the Liffey, and the infinite acres of the Phoenix Park beyond. The river would be brown in the sunlight now, Minogue knew, and remembered even seeing the turbid rain-swollen waters a weird azure under O Connell Bridge not long ago.

He studied the blues and greys that had been deepened by the rain. Off over the city, the little bit of the city left to see here, he believed there was a softer light already. It was the pearly tint that he'd had to concede was apricot, one day in a roistering argument with Iseult. His eye roved from rooftop to chimney across the horizon, and he wondered what his daughter was up to at the present time. Welding was only the latest. Her intent, said she, with a glitter in her eye, was to make that iron contraption float in the air. HyBrasil, he whispered: The Isle of the Blest, indeed. For a moment he tried to remember the Magrittes, the ones where the boulders floated over the seascape. Seven months' pregnant, her marriage adrift, working through the night. Contrary is as contrary does, to be sure.

“What?” Malone asked.

“I didn't say anything, Tommy.”

“You were muttering.”

Minogue looked over.

“I always mutter.”

He returned to his idle stare, this time toward the Phoenix Park.

“Did you read his missus' statements yet?” Malone asked. “Condon's? Jaysus, but she's bitter.”

They had finished the summaries an hour ago. They had been passing the transcripts and statements between them.

“I did,” said Minogue. He heard Malone yawn and turn pages.

A sharp and pleasant glow came to him then when he realized that it might be sunny like this at Killiney this evening. He'd phone Kathleen, warn her. She was usually good for five or ten minutes down on the beach, at the water's edge. For himself, he didn't want to do much there except stand around and gawk at the water again. As had become a habit in recent times, she would leave her culchie husband to his thoughts and go back and sit in the car overlooking the beach. Now Kathleen had a mobile, he often returned to the car to hear her gostering away on the phone.

Yes, he thought: skipping stones out over the waves at Killiney tonight, the rolling waters he depended on, would be where he would wash away the feeling of being tainted by what he was coming to believe about Emmett Condon.

“Separated a year,” said Malone and got up with a grunt. Minogue heard the floor give as Malone walked slowly to the window.

“What are you looking at?”

“My escape route,” Minogue said.

“Huh.”

“How many deer are there in the Phoenix Park?”

“How would I know? How would anybody know? Why are you asking?”

Kilmainham, and the area next to it, Islandbridge, would always be grimy parts of old Dublin to Minogue. No amount of film studios or cappuccino bars would fix it. But they'd said that about the Temple Bar even, hadn't they?

“You know,” said Malone, “I have a lousy feeling about this business. That girl? The one supposed to be something to Condon?”

“If she's not a figment of this fella McHugh's half-cooked brain, you should be saying first.”

“I got that earlier, okay? If she's not here legally, well . . .”

Minogue turned to him.

“Okay,” said Malone. “She doesn't show up, so (A) She doesn't exist; (B) She does and she's done a bunk, under whatever papers she has, probably fake anyway – out of the country; or (C) She's gone under a new name, moved to, I don't know, Cahirciveen, Ballygobackwards.”

“Do we have an embassy in Ballygobackwards?”

“There's thousands – tens of thousands – of them people here now. They get a one-year permit, crap jobs, pay's not great. That's bad enough, right? But if she was illegal in the first place, well, who's going to help her out in a thing like this?”

Minogue nodded.

“I mean, she'll know she'd better take a dive somewhere after Condon turns up dead. Because that is serious. Right?”

“Would she leave the country then? Go home?” Minogue asked.

“What if she can't?”

“Why ‘can't'? She hasn't the fare?”

“How about because she's going to get in worse trouble if she tried that?”

Minogue began to get it now.

“Her– what am I going to call it– her manager here?” he asked.

“Pimp,” said Malone. “Whatever. Let's say he holds her papers, and she can't travel. Or he threatens her family. Or threatens to tell them what she does here. That goes on, you know.”

“I've heard of them owing money they can't pay back.”

Malone nodded.

“Our best hope is that she's lying low here, maybe under another name.”

“Wouldn't she turn up somehow though?” Minogue tried.

“Like how – with that lousy dot-to-dot I-don't-know-what-kind-of-a-thing, of a face their computer spat up for Missing Persons? Hah. Like I said. I've seen PlayStation One games with better faces than that.”

Minogue's thoughts drifted to the presentation yesterday. There had been countries he'd heard of but didn't know whether they were parts of Russia or floating somewhere the far side of Berlin, or Vienna or somewhere.

“I don't know,” he said. “There's just so much we don't know here.”

“Well, I do know a few things,” Malone said. “And one of them is this. A lot of the people they're working for here in Ireland are no angels. And it's Irish people I'm talking about who are doing the gouging and the under-the-table stuff. Fellas in Immigration there, they could tell you stories.”

Minogue headed back to the cluttered table. He looked at the picture again.

“Sometimes I wonder,” Malone began. “Are we doing to people what was done to us?”

“That bad, do you think?”

“Them people who are cleaning toilets and cleaning offices in the middle of the night. And then, bejases, we turn around and tell them their time is up and they can go home. Home to what?”

“You and Karl Marx, Tommy. I never knew.”

“Ah now. It sucks. It's not right. Anyway, what I'm saying is, she'd be doing her best to stay away from any of us. But I don't want to push that any further now.”

“Push it,” Minogue said. “It's all you're good for sometimes.”

Malone let out a breath.

“Well, we better face up to it at some point,” he said, and he scratched his head hard. “We keep on coming back to it, don't we? Maybe what happened to Condon . . .?”

Malone turned quickly from the window.

“Happened to her as well?”

Chapter 14

October 15, 1985

E
IMEAR
K
ELLY COULDN'T BEAR
to do the paperwork. “Widow”: she couldn't bear to read it, much less say it: even think it. So, in the end it was Breda who came through. Now Breda herself was getting married in a few months. She had been in insurance since she'd come up to Dublin. Breda smoothed it all out, made the phone calls, brought the forms out to the house. But the same Breda had broken down in tears just after starting. She'd kept apologizing for it. Before she left, she even apologized for telling her there was a ray of light in this, and that Declan would have been happy for her. It was such a stupid thing to say, and it had just come out of her and she didn't know how or why. Still, the house was hers now, mortgage-free, wasn't it? And there'd be payments coming in each month, if all went well with the Garda Pension and Benefits crowd. And God help them if they didn't hurry up! Then she cried again, for nearly a half-hour.