Secret Isaac (15 page)

“Nobody. I took it from a hobby shop on Tremont Avenue. Ah, it was a long time ago.”

He fisted the knife with a loving hold that made Annie nervous. “How come you never showed it to me?”

“Because it likes to stay in my pocket,” he said, his mouth suddenly full of teeth.

She burped, but the king didn't mind. His head was in her blouse. He had her unbuttoned to the waist, and he sucked on her nipples. Her man was like no other man in the world. Soon he was under her skirts, and Annie thought she would die. Her panties were wet from the king. She'd have picnics every day of her life, climb in tattered skirts, gobble a pear with warts on it and a swollen back, nibble cheese off a knife, if that's what her man desired.

They fell asleep on the mountain, among the goat droppings, with most of Annie crooked under Dermott's shoulder. Then she opened her eyes. “Jesus, how did it get dark so fast?”

You couldn't see your fingernails. It was the worst blackness she'd ever known. The elves must have put a roof on Cashel Hill. Mercy on her that she could still hear her man breathe, and grope for his chest. The fingers under his shirt had woken him.

“Dermott, this hill has a witch. We must have slept for twenty hours.”

“We didn't sleep much at all. The fog crept up on us. And the fucker won't burn off. We'll have to sit and wait.”

“Wait for what?” she said.

“Until somebody finds us.”

“Who's going to find us on Cashel Hill?”

“Farmers,” Dermott said. “They have to be out looking for their herds. They'll stumble into us.”

“Not when you murder their cows,” Annie said. “They'll leave us here to rot. That way all the farmers will get even with you.”

He laughed in the fog, and it terrified Annie. Because there wasn't a mouth or lips to go along with it. “Annie, how did you dream such a farmers' plot? Stop worrying. The Fisherman won't let it happen. I'm too important to him.”

That didn't satisfy Annie Powell. She prayed for Jude to intervene, to pull this fog down off Cashel Hill. The king heard her mumble. “What's that noise?”

“I'm praying,” she said.

“I thought it was a dead cow mooing at us.”

She began to cry. Her saint wouldn't come. Dermott made fun of the dead. Their bodies would shrivel and sink into the mountain. No more Dermott. No more Anne. The sky must have turned upside down. She saw a dozen moons float in the distance, under her feet. Dermott saw them too. He wasn't surprised. “That's our rescue party.”

The moons seemed to draw closer and then retreat. They turned into glowing sticks. They're only lanterns, Annie assured herself. No moon could stretch itself into a fiery stick. It's Coote and his old men, with a pack of lanterns. Now she prayed that the Fisherman wouldn't bump into Cashel Hill. She'd rather stay lost with Dermott and die in peace.

The lanterns broke into packs of four. It took half an hour for one pack to edge up close. A voice came up off the fog. “Derrrrmott Bride.”

“Ah,” Dermott said. “They've also learned to moo.” He called back into the fog. “Hello, boys. It's Annie and me.”

Then a lantern was in her face. It blinded her until she blinked over the light. She recognized one of the Fisherman's people. Other lanterns approached in a pattern of sways.

Four lanterns looked down on them. “There he is … the king and his whore.”

A pistol with a fat nose appeared in the haze off the lanterns. “Oh, we'd love to kill you, my dears.”

She heard that soft, familiar smack. Dermott had opened his knife. He pushed Annie behind him. “Come for me, pretty boys that you are.” He lunged, and the pistol fell.

“God, he cut me … he cut me …”

The Fisherman arrived out of the fog. He didn't have his jelly boots. “What's this shit?”

The old men grumbled around him. “Coote, Coote, we come to rescue this bastard, and he shoves his blade at us. He cut up poor Johnny Boyle.”

“Bitches, cunts,” he said. “I heard you threaten him. Get out of here, or I'll send you back to First Avenue where you belong. You can sit in the Dingle with Tiger John.” He came up to Annie and kissed her on the cheek. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” She stood near Dermott and the Fisherman and started to climb down Cashel Hill.

Dermott had to remain at the Fisherman's house. Annie went to Dublin with O'Toole. “You're both so smart,” she said. “You and my man. That's Coote's house. Castlecoote. So why did you call it Castledermott?”

The donkey was tightmouthed with her. Then he snarled, but the snarl wasn't for Annie. “It's the Fisherman's castle, all right. But he bought it and fixed it up with Dermott's money. Those salmon in the lake didn't jump out of the Fisherman's pants.”

What was she supposed to do in Dublin without her man? Wade the River Liffey and grab whatever salmon she could find? It was a dirty stream. Fish couldn't breathe in there.

“When's Derm coming back?”

“Who knows? Him and the Fisherman are playing cards over my body.”

“What does that mean?”

“They're deciding what to do with little James. Keep the lad here, or throw him back to Ameriky.”

“Dermott wouldn't give you away.”

“Business is business,” he said.

She wasn't going to listen to a donkey all her life. So she shopped on Grafton Street, bought colored undies and other useless things with those banker's checks, and walked on O'Connell Bridge. She couldn't keep away from the child beggars who cut a territory for themselves along that bridge. She wanted to take a cloth with her and wash their faces. The beggars stood below her knees. She couldn't believe children could exist so small. She fed them candy from Switzer's to improve their shrunken state. The beggars got used to Annie Powell. “There's the lovely,” they would say, with the practiced smiles of bitter old men. “There's the girl.” They had shriveled skin for five-year-olds.

Annie would devote an afternoon to watching them beg. The children never harmed her. But there was something sinister in the methods they used. They would attack tourists on the bridge, feel around in your pockets, a slew of beggars that wouldn't let you go. They would grab at gentlemen's trousers and ladies' skirts, paw you with fists that were impossible to shake free, like an army of educated rats, and you'd be pulling them to the south side of the bridge and onto Lower O'Connell Street before you were finished with them. They'd have a few of your coins and maybe your pocketbook. These children labored at all hours.

Annie found them sleeping in plastic bags, huddled against the bridge in harsh weather. It might have been a ploy to gain sympathy from innocent people. But their shivering was real. Annie would have liked to march them into the Shelbourne for tea and sandwiches. The porters wouldn't have allowed it. It was Dublin, dearie, and a decent hotel couldn't have beggars passing through.

But Annie wasn't helpless. Didn't the porters say
madam
to her? She was Dermott's lady, and she occupied a suite at the hotel. The Shelbourne prepared huge mugs of tea that Annie brought out to the bridge. The children drank the hot tea with the same grizzled smile. Then, on her fourth day back in Dublin, they kissed her hand in the rain and led her over the bridge. They winked and touched the shallow part of her skirts. They weren't taking Annie by force. It was an invitation to follow them. She wouldn't desert the children now.

Up Gardiner Street they went, Annie and the beggars, to an old house in an obscure alley, off Mountjoy Square. There was the stink of fish and oily margarine. Did they bring her home to meet mum and dad? Doors shut behind her. She didn't remember climbing stairs. She was in a room that might have been a kitchen or a storage place. It seemed high as a barn to Annie. Jesus, there was a dead chicken on the wall, hanging by its neck. Piles and piles of clothing: shirts and vests and a hundred different trousers. A clothes barn it was, with a dead chicken to watch over it and scare away the wrong customers. She was crazy to come here. She shouldn't have crossed the Liffey with these beggar children.

They whirled around her in a cruel dance, pawed at her, as if she were a tourist lady. “Havin' fun?” they said. Her blouse came apart in their fists. They tore the skirts off her body. They held her bra and underpants. She was naked in front of the children. They tried to feel between her legs. Annie turned on them, became a savage of a girl. She was no dummy in the window that children could poke at and fondle with grime in the webbing of their hands. She threw lots of trousers at them, cursed the tea she had brought to O'Connell Bridge.

She might have won, but a man and woman stepped into the fight. They smacked her down to the floor and let the children have their way with her. Their hands were all over Annie Powell. She screamed for Saint Jude. The man kicked at the children and drove them off. Annie didn't care for his smile. He wore a beautiful vest, but his face was as marked as any beggar child. A runt in man's clothes he was.

“Pretty lady,” he said. “You'll fetch us a price. Who owns you now?”

“Dermott Bride.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He's from America,” she said.

“Indeed. What does he do, your Mr. Bride?”

“He bought into a castle,” she said. “He works with the Fisherman.”

“Explain that to me?”

“They plan to open the Paradise Hotel … out of Galway. It's for people who like to hunt for salmon. Hunt and fish.”

“Does he have a Dublin address.”

“The Shelbourne, St. Stephen's Green.”

“Ah, that's better,” he said. “That's good. You'll write him a note explaining the circumstances, that unless he comes up with a thousand pounds … in English money, not Irish … he'll see you dead.”

Even without her skirts, they couldn't threaten Annie in a clothes barn. She wasn't going to be bullied by a runt in a vest who managed beggar children. “My man's in Connemara,” she said.

“Isn't that too bad. You'll have to wait with us until he comes to Stephen's Green.” He nodded to the woman. “Ethel, don't bother tying her wrists … if she hollers, you can split her head with a grease pan.”

Annie wouldn't give up her courage to a hag with a pot in her hands. This hag wore the same kind of vest. Was it Dublin, or another country they had lured her to? Her saint had gotten her out of the fog. Jude wouldn't abandon Annie Powell. The beggars scratched the chicken on the wall. They were happiest when they tweaked its neck. Annie heard a slight rumble outside the barn. The rumble repeated itself. She knew what that meant. Her saint had come in the form of a donkey. O'Toole was knocking over doors to get to her. The rumbles were growing loud. The beggars hid behind sacks of clothes. The man and woman hugged themselves as the door to the barn came down. Jamey hopped over the door with dust on his shoulders. He didn't even look at the man.

“Annie girl, put on some clothes.”

Her own things were ruined. They searched for a vest and pants among all the heaps. She walked out with Jamey in a beggar's uniform.

“How did you find me?” she said.

“I figured you were tangled up with the gypsies when you didn't come back to the hotel. They've got competing families, you see. I paid one family to spy on the others.”

“Why didn't you go to the police?”

“The gardai are a joke … they snore in Dublin Castle. They're as dumb as American cops. I should know. I was a detective until this son of a bitch Sidel threw me into the street.”

They smuggled her around porters and clerks at the Shelbourne, with Annie naked under her vest. She wouldn't stop muttering about the beggar children.

“It's not their fault, Jamey O'Toole. Their parents train them to stick their fingers in your pocket.”

“I say it's in the blood. They're born with a thief's eye. Once a gypsy, always a gypsy. Don't you ever go near Mountjoy again. They'll shave the hair off your legs and sell it to the feather merchants. There isn't a piece of you they couldn't barter with.”

“You've a low opinion of human nature, Mr. O'Toole. Children can be taught
not
to steal.”

“Fair enough. But it's a friendlier world inside this hotel. There'll be no more teas on O'Connell Bridge.”

The donkey guarded her until Dermott arrived. He wouldn't snitch to the king about Annie girl. Never once did he mention gypsies, beggars, Mountjoy Square. Her man seemed preoccupied. The king mumbled to himself. He had a blackness under his eyes. He hardly noticed Annie Powell. It went on for days. Then he slapped his pockets and said, “Jamey boy, climb into your darkest suit. We're going to church.”

The donkey couldn't believe it.

“What about me?” Annie said.

“Girl, any dress will do.”