Resurrection Man (4 page)

The windows of the Gasworks bar were covered with wire mesh. You entered through an unlit corridor of sandbags. Heads turned towards the door when he entered the bar. Ryan felt suspect. There was no sign of Coppinger. As soon as he walked in he knew he was going to be singled out. He had
trouble summoning the correct responses. It was a question of assembling an identity out of names: the name of school attended, the name of the street where you lived, your own name. These were the finely tuned instruments of survival. He lurched towards the toilets. Inside he leaned his head against the wall in front of him while he pissed. The sound of running water was deafening, ruinous. He read the word Adamant stamped on the massive Victorian urinal. The name had a monumental quality. It had the strength of great certainties. Cast-iron, porcelain. The men who installed it built bridges, gasworks, canals. They were capable of assessing the
qualities
of a material, its interior conviction, and measuring it against their own. Brass taps, lead pipes. He heard a voice behind him, almost inaudible over the sound of flushing water. He waited to be pushed against the wall and interrogated, realizing it was a mistake to leave the crowded bar for this place which dealt in functional truths, and it was a minute before he recognized Coppinger’s voice.

‘Fuck’s sake, I reckoned you’d be skulking in here scared out of your shite, Ryan, you big girl’s blouse you.’

They sat in a corner away from the bar. Coppinger pointed to a sheet of fake wood stuck roughly over the bar.

‘There’s bullet holes behind that,’ he said. ‘Fuckers opened fire through the window last month.’

Ryan had noticed people pointing out bullet marks and bomb sites. They added to the attraction of the city.
Blood-spots
on the pavement were marked by wreaths. Part of a dark and thrilling beauty.

Coppinger was talking about the knife killing. He had been given a list of possible names for those involved. His informant had insisted that he did not write them down. They had to be committed to memory. Coppinger had sat for an hour in a parked car on the Ormeau embankment chanting names until it seemed that the recitation was an end in itself, a means of
fathoming the forces at work. As if the knowledge they were looking for was concealed in the names themselves. It seemed possible. It was a clear night. There was mist on the river and the words in his mouth became strange. He could have been naming distant galaxies. He began to detect elemental
properties
in these words devoid of their associations, the dense tribal histories attached to a name.

‘Who was mentioned?’

‘Darkie Larche. Onionhead Graham. Mostly Darkie’s crew. Problem is something like this isn’t Darkie’s style.’

‘Any idea where they’re operating out of?’

‘The usual places were mentioned. The Pot Luck. The Gibraltar. Maxies maybe.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Not a whisper. People’s jumpy as fuck on this one. You ring the peelers even and you talk to someone who won’t give their name and they pass you on to some other bastard won’t give his name and they put you on to the press office who says that investigations is continuing.’

‘Are they pursuing a line of enquiry? Are they looking for anyone in particular? The driver of a blue car seen in the vicinity? A woman walking her dog near the scene? A woman walking her dog’d be a good witness. It’s something to do with kindness to animals and regular habits.’

‘Nothing like that. Nobody round here sees nothing no more. Even a woman walking the dog’s looking the other way.’

‘Give me some of those names again.’

‘Darkie Larche. Onionhead Graham.’

‘I don’t know, where do they think they are? Chicago in the twenties? Maybe we should be looking for information from the fucking FBI, the fucking Pinkertons. Maybe it’s just the police know fuck-all, sounds like they know fuck-all.’

‘It’s like everybody’s frightened, the peelers and all. Even the hard men’s worried. Word is you mention the subject to them they go buck mad. Like don’t remind them. Hard enough
to find out things as it is but this one’s buried far as everybody’s concerned. I don’t know why you’re so worried. There’s enough going on every day to keep you busy for a month, even if you do find something out you’ve got an editor won’t touch the stuff if it was money and I think he’s right. Like nobody wants to read about it. Like nobody wants to see pictures of starving darkies on the TV. Somebody gets shot they don’t mind so much. It’s like the poor shot fucker could’ve got out of the road if he’d any sense and not stood in front of guns going off. Or maybe it’s like he must of done something to deserve it. There’s something official about getting shot with a gun. It’s like the gas chamber, fucking guillotine. It’s kind of legitimate. Like once you got a gun you got to have somebody to shoot at. Load the magazine, pull the trigger and whatever you’re having yourself. But people don’t want to read about maniacs cutting people up with knives.’

‘You’re wrong there. I know you’re wrong. People love to read things like that. Innocent victim of sex fiend. Lapping it up. Sexual organs mutilated. Policemen with thirty years’ experience controlling their emotions.’

‘You’re right. There’s nothing like a set of mutilated sexual organs.’

‘Or a partially undressed corpse. Signs of recent
intercourse
.’

‘Like the slut must of done something to deserve it.’

‘We’re getting away from the point.’

‘Are you looking for a conspiracy theory here.’

‘Nothing like a good conspiracy theory when you’re drinking in a bar, you don’t know if you’re going to get yourself shot for walking in the door just.’

‘A cover-up at the highest level’d be better.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Seriously.’

‘Seriously fuck you.’

Ryan left Coppinger at the bar and emerged cautiously on to the Ormeau Road. To be seen coming out of the Gasworks could formally identify you as a target. You looked for cover. You watched the headlights of oncoming cars, staring into the filament. Engine notes were important. Military vehicles had a high-pitched diesel whine which made you think of curfew breaches, peremptory orders to halt, unexplained gunfire in the night. Even the sound of his own feet seemed illicit. He thought about the file of blurred photographs at the paper of those who disappeared without explanation. Photographs taken at birthday parties, family gatherings. A sense of the inevitable about the self-effacing smile. Something is being masked, the bitter knowledge that they will soon find
themselves
lost in the untenanted houses of the dead.

Dorcas said it was true she did conceal worries about Victor in her heart as anyone would. There was so much going on in the way of shootings and killings being committed on a regular basis and much of it covered up by government order as well. Though James once said not to worry, you had more chance of getting yourself hurt in a road crash or accident at work as you would have of getting shot – and he could prove it by statistics which surprised her. He could surprise you like that, she said, in the way he usually said nothing you thought he didn’t know what was going on. She knew for instance he concealed a passionate nature once, though you wouldn’t think it to look. It was a case of still waters.

But Victor had this gift to make you laugh. Even when he was young he could have you in stitches by mocking the neighbours or acting the big gangster he saw in the pictures. But there were times you would see an anger and a darkness there so that he would fight often with other children. He had as many sides to his nature you couldn’t keep up. But he never raised his hand to her in all his born days nor would any son that loved his mother, though on occasions she put a strap to his backside taking no pleasure from it but being driven by a grim necessity of duty. When he was a child sometimes he would cry for no reason, which she understood as it was a frequent occurrence of her own nature, just starting for no reason when she was at the washing line or salt tears pricking her eyelids suddenly when she was out shopping so that at
times she was driven to refuge in a public toilet in the city centre to stay there with the tears tripping her.

He had an eye for the women too. That was his father in him she thought. She had the opinion that women were an undue influence in his life. He was forever watching after them the way they walked and all. She reckoned that woman Heather had a hand in his destruction. To look at her you’d have thought that butter wouldn’t melt. He said to Dorcas he could laugh with her which is what attracted him. She said to him she knew what attracted him: the big Zeppelins she had on her and the little girl voice. But she found him heedless of her concern although when he was visiting he left her outside in the car. She could see he was in a fog of lust with her around and said to him once did she come with a warning like a prescription from the chemist: do not drive or operate heavy machinery? It was a case of an old story at work from the start and he knew it not being able to look her in the eye.

After a job Victor would meet with the others in the Pot Luck to watch the evening news. It was an early ambition of his to have a job as first item on the news but then he became distrustful of the narrative devices employed. The
newsreaders
’ neutral haircuts and accents, the careful placing of stresses to indicate condemnation or approval, the measured tones of reassurance. The suggestive, shifting vernacular used left Big Ivan more confused than anyone. He heard accounts of events he had been involved in which conflicted with his experience. He felt that rich portions of his memory were being snatched from him. Victor wondered if this had anything to do with Big Ivan’s sudden conviction that he had been adopted at birth. He would read aloud stories of children abandoned in telephone boxes with scrawled notes describing their tiny marginal lives. One night he told Victor that he knew what his real parents were like. His father was tall and handsome. His mother had a resonant and ageless beauty, but both were
concealers of a secret grief. Victor put on a face of concern when Big Ivan spoke of this, though in his private thoughts he considered that if he had been the father of a baby in the likeness of Big Ivan he would have abandoned if not strangled it.

When the unit’s activities were mentioned on television Willie Lambe would give himself over to an uncritical delight. He imagined himself in later years being interviewed in front of the camera. His confident grasp of the issues raised. His early life. He would admit to dark times, lean periods when he struggled with despair but then explain the benefits of an optimistic nature and share insights gained through hardship. He would praise the role of family life.

That March Victor was asked to carry out a kneecap job on three members of the organization who had burgled an elderly woman’s house. It was a question of discipline and
maintaining
the image of the organization. He knew that the men involved were members of the Gibraltar bar unit. Darkie Larche’s men. It would be necessary to arrange a meeting in the Gibraltar to get clearance for the punishment. He didn’t like this. He knew how Larche would react. The great Victor Kelly looking for permission. He could see Larche standing at the bar going this Kelly character doesn’t know his arse from a hole in his trousers has to come to me and ask permission. Victor would walk into the Gibraltar and Larche would laugh and slap him on the back. Like he was some big friend. Hey, you behind the bar there, give my mate Victor a drink there, your fucking arm broke or something? The great Victor Kelly, come on with that drink there, your fucking leg tied to the piano?

When he had set up the meeting Victor planned the job down to the last detail. It was almost as if the punishments had been carried out. When he shut his eyes it was like watching a film with the volume turned down. He could see
men bundled into a car, their faces obscured, brought to a secret location. The interrogation. The blue muzzle flash. He could see himself being driven away from the scene with the face of a man troubled in his heart. He thought that this must be what they called a premonition.

The meeting took place in the top room at the Gibraltar. Darkie Larche was there with three older men from the area. Victor sat down at the table. Darkie said nothing. The three older men looked like the frail members of a government in exile, deeply versed in the politics of failure. Victor put his case simply, projecting an air of humility. He listened while the three men gave the matter grave deliberation, reached agreement in principle. Darkie did not speak.

Downstairs Victor insisted on buying the drinks. A group of younger men gathered around him and he sensed that the three older men were uneasy in his presence. His sports jacket with checks that cost ninety pounds, his ability to cause bursts of nervous laughter, the deadly vacancy in his eyes.
Occasionally
Darkie looked across the room and raised his glass to him. Later in the night he called for silence in the bar. He said that he was pleased to see Victor there and welcomed the new spirit of co-operation. That Victor was welcome to join the Gibraltar unit at any time. He said that he himself did not personally believe rumours to the effect that Victor’s father was a Catholic. The silence in the bar was maintained. Everyone was looking at each other with an awareness of hidden weapons. They knew that the insult could not go unanswered. The young men stepped back from Victor and the group around Darkie rearranged itself imperceptibly. Victor observed the way they all changed position, the choreographed movements leading towards a duel. He felt detached, interested in the outcome. This was an ability he had, to step outside himself, think on different levels. He had a sense of dusty main streets, the clink of spurs. Going to the pictures he had learned respect for the western showdown. Men working from necessities buried deep in their nature. The brief
exchange of words as an acknowledgement of men puzzled beyond endurance. The heat. The formal desolation. Two men feeling marooned in the hinterland of their own desire. The smell of leather, gun oil and sweat.

Victor stepped away from the bar wondering how he could get to the Browning under his jacket. He could see the butt of a revolver in Darkie’s belt. Then he felt the attention of the room shift to the door behind him. Risking a glance he saw Willie Lambe standing there with a police issue Walther in his hand. Suddenly everyone had guns, people were moving between him and Darkie. He considered taking out the
Browning
, blazing away. He could feel the three older men around him, talking gently, moving him towards the door.

‘Car’s waiting, Victor.’

Heather saw Victor for the first time at one of the parties. He came in with two others. The first thing she noticed was his black curly hair and dark skin so at first she thought that he was foreign, a sailor off one of the boats. She had a weakness for men with foreign looks. He looked like he might think in another language. She wondered if he might be an Arab. She had read somewhere that Arabs liked plump women and she imagined him discussing the plumpness of women in a strange and cruelly shaped alphabet. He looked like a man who carried within a tense coil of stored words capable of describing rare and dangerous sexual acts. The congress of the snake.

When Darkie came in she asked him who he was. Darkie barely looked towards him.

‘Dangerous territory. That’s the famous Victor Kelly. Flash bastard. Thinks he’s God’s gift to women, sun, moon and stars shine out of his fly.’

‘I thought he was a foreigner,’ she said, giggling.

‘Could say that, supposed to be his da’s a Taig from the Falls.’

‘They say Taigs is good at it.’

‘Don’t.’

‘What?’

‘Just fucking don’t.’

‘What are you looking at me like that for?’

Darkie had a sensation of faint recollection as if he was twenty years from that moment and stirred by a particular memory.

‘What look?’

‘That kind of sad parting look. That fond farewell look. Kind of all the good times we had together sort of a look.’

‘I haven’t a baldy what you’re on about.’

Since the parties had started she had seen less of Darkie during the week. When they met he was reluctant to touch her as though the time they had spent together was inscribed on her skin, faint outlines easily erased. He subjected her to long silences so that she had become an authority on the types of male silence. There were silences of sorrowful reproof. Fond silences. Dumb silences. Doubtful silences. Nursing of wounds silences. There were the profound viral silences belonging to the terminally ill.

‘Introduce me.’

‘What?’

‘I have to say everything twice to you these days. Introduce me. I want to meet him.’

Heather knew he would refuse. Later she approached the group by the window. They were talking and laughing among themselves in the alcove formed by the velvet curtains she had bought herself in Corry’s. Darkie said she was picking
whorehouse
furnishings but she didn’t care. She loved the touch of the red fabric and the way it made you want to rub against it.

The three men stopped talking and looked up as she came towards them. It was like an oriental scene from a film she had watched. Suddenly she felt as if she could go down on her knees, make ritual gestures of submission and repentance. The other two were impassive, unimpressed by the way she
found herself walking, swaying from the hips, eyes downcast. Victor moved sideways on the sofa to make room for her. She sat down.

Later she said he had these blue eyes could see right through you. After a while she noticed that Big Ivan and Willie Lambe were drunk out of the mind. It was like the way they were most of the time, locked, so that they hardly knew what they were doing. Not Victor. He was Mr X-Ray with this good smell off his leather jacket and aftershave, a bottle of which he kept in the glove compartment of his car, a new one every week. His personal habits were very good also. He gave her a cigarette and took one and lit them both with a gold Dunhill lighter. But he was hardly what you would call a smoker, she said; he would spend his time looking along the butt like it was a gun barrel or blowing smoke rings to make you laugh like
somebody’s
uncle, but it was really like a cigarette was something he found dropped from the sky he didn’t know what to do with.

She said that it wasn’t hard to guess from the way she talked that she was smitten straight off which was the God’s honest truth not something she ever wished to hide. She was mad for him like no other man. He could make her cream herself just by looking. She said she could have had him there on the sofa or anything and you could tell he felt that way too. Without a word being spoken they went to the spare bedroom which she kept locked at parties because of a horror of walking in on a couple which would make her feel used in her own body. Before they got in bed he took out this big gun he had stuck in his belt and spun it around in his hand all the time watching himself in the mirror on the wardrobe with an expression of being somewhere else completely, until she said to him come here, please, hurry up. I can’t bear it.

Afterwards they went for a drive in his car. Victor always had energy, a terror of sitting still. Sometimes Heather saw him act like an escaped prisoner with involuntary backward glances as if there were dogs on his tail. They moved carefully among the sleeping bodies on the living-room floor. Victor made a game of it, pretending to stumble and put his foot in
someone’s
mouth, bringing it down an inch to the side of the person’s head. He did this in slow motion so Heather could hardly bear it, choking back giggles. She had a feeling that McClure was awake and watching them. Nothing she could put her finger on. Just somebody’s eyes open, a glimpse of intrigue in the dark.

Dawn had broken. There was a fine drizzle falling and Heather laughed at the way rain beaded in Victor’s hair like a hairnet you’d see an old woman wearing. He took a firing position outside the house and pretended to shoot down a seagull. His hand described it falling, arcing across the city. He made the sound of a crippled engine with his lips, the sound of a fuselage crumping on impact, exploding in a blaze of aviation fuel. Games. They drove slowly about the city. At first Heather thought he was driving at random; then she saw the pattern. He was driving carefully along the edges of Catholic west Belfast. She had never been this close before although she had seen these places on television.
Ballymurphy
, Andersonstown. The Falls. Names resonant with
exclusion
. Now they were circling the boundaries, close enough to set foot in them. Victor drove up into the foothills until they were looking down on the west of the city, its densely
populated
and mythic new estates, something you didn’t quite believe in. He looked down at it then turned to her. You never ask what where I’ve been or what I’ve been doing, he said. Never. You don’t even think, he said. Yes, Victor, she said. He stopped the engine and reached for her. She thought he wanted to do it within sight of the enemy. He pointed out different parts of the city to her. New Lodge. The Short Strand.
He described how you could wipe them off the map from here. Artillery fire directed with precision. Repeated sorties. She could feel his excitement at the idea. He saw himself as a general conducting pre-dawn briefings with a roomful of men with drawn faces, targets circled on a map. He pulled her towards him and undid the buttons on her blouse then slipped his hand inside her bra without unfastening it so that he could feel the floral pattern at the top pressing into his hand. They stayed like that, her head turned towards him with a kind of disbelief in her eyes. The nylon left a mark on the back of his hand which did not fade until that afternoon. A ceremonial motif, relic of some half-forgotten rite.