The Bloomsday Dead (14 page)

“Yeah, I know. Not even a teenager yet. I shouldn’t have let her go. I’ve no excuses. I was trying to do too much in too short a time, Michael. She was bored here in the hotel and it was only a few blocks away.”

“How often did she go there on her own?”

Bridget said nothing, started to cry a little. I passed her the box of Kleenex. She took a tissue, whispered a thank-you. And again I thought this is what happened to you when you thought yourself invulnerable. When you’d been at the top too long.

“How many times did she go there in total?”

“I don’t know. The place wasn’t here the last time we were in Belfast. We went there for breakfast on Friday. She had been there on Thursday. She went back Friday afternoon. And then she went there on Saturday. Or at least she said she was going there on Saturday. The police have been there and asked questions already. No one even remembers her. I sent my boys to ask around, and they can be pretty intimidating, but no one seems to recall her or that red-haired boy. It’s a very busy place. It’s a whole scene. I suppose he wasn’t a regular either.”

“Well, no one remembered him.”

“The cops went down there?”

“Yeah, they brought a photo of Siobhan to show around, but no one had noticed her. Michael, I’m not sure that that’s where she really went. I really have no idea.”

“Do you have another photograph of her?”

Bridget nodded.

“Could I have it, please? I’m going to need it.”

Bridget walked across the room, grabbed her handbag, took out a purse, removed a Polaroid, gave it to me. I examined the girl.

She was pretty with coppery blond hair and big green eyes. She had none of Darkey’s coloring or his pug nose. All her looks came from Bridget. Rosy cheeks and a charming, happy smile which suggested that she got the joke. In the photo she was wearing a blue dress with flowers around the collar.

“That’s from a few months ago,” Bridget said.

I nodded, shaken from my reverie.

“Is this what she was wearing when she went missing?” I asked.

Bridget smiled.

“God, no, you can never get her into anything formal. On Christmas when she visits her grandma, that’s about the only time she’ll wear a dress.”

“Blue jeans and white Adidas sneakers and an Abercrombie sweat-shirt with a hood.”

“What color was the sweatshirt?”

“Bright yellow.”

“That’s good, that’s pretty distinctive,” I said, trying to give her some crumb of comfort.

“That’s what the cops said too, but they drew a blank.”

“Well, we’ll see. I’ll ask around.”

“Thank you,” she said sweetly.

“Did she have any other friends or family here?”

“No.”

Bridget lit herself a cigarette, brushed the hair back from her face. I couldn’t think of any more questions. I had a lot to be going on with. I could get cracking right now. But I was reluctant to leave her. I didn’t want to go so soon after being deprived of her presence all these years.

“Is that enough?” she asked.

I nodded.

Bridget stood.

“Wait a minute, Bridget, let me ask you something.”

She turned, leaned unsteadily against a table.

“What?”

“Bridget, I’m going to do my very best to find Siobhan, but I need to know that I can trust you. I was attacked in Dublin by two men. I talked to Moran and he said it was nothing to do with him or you. Is that the truth?”

Bridget shook her head.

“Michael, I don’t know anything about that. I sent those men to kill you in Lima but by the time the op was on, Siobhan had gone missing, my men had found nothing, and the police were clueless. I thought you might be able to help where they couldn’t. I called the assassins off. I don’t know who tried to hit you in Dublin, but it was nothing to do with me. I promise.”

I didn’t need to reflect on it for a while. I believed her.

“Ok,” I said. “I’ll do my best. I’ll do more than my best. I’ll bring your daughter back,” I said.

Bridget wrote something on a piece of paper. She handed it to me.

She touched the side of my palm. Her fingertips were cold. I shuddered involuntarily. I smelled her hair and the sweat on her body. I felt her breath.

“Two phone numbers,” she said.

I looked at the note.

“The top one is my cell, the bottom one is Moran’s.”

“Ok, I’ll call in periodically,” I said.

I put the note in my jacket pocket.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

“I’m going to raise ten million dollars and I’m going to go to the police station and wait for them to call.”

“So you don’t think that was a crank note?”

“I don’t know, Michael, but what else can I do?”

“Aye.”

“What are you going to do now?” she asked.

“I’m going to take this photograph and go down to the Malt Shop and ask some questions.”

She leaned heavily on the table. She looked, for a moment, like she was going to fall forward into my arms.

“Thank you,” she muttered softly.

“Thank you, Bridget,” I said stupidly.

I stood and looked out the window.

“Ok, there’s the bat signal, I have to go,” I said.

She grinned weakly and turned to me. Our eyes locked longer than was strictly necessary.

“Good luck, Michael.”

She didn’t offer me her hand. I didn’t offer mine. We continued to stare at each other. But then she nodded. The interview was done. I turned on my heel and walked out of the room.

Moran and a couple of heavies were waiting outside the door. Moran stopped me.

“Are you filled in?” he asked.

“I am.”

“I hope you can help, Michael, I mean that sincerely. Siobhan’s the priority.”

I nodded.

“But remember what we talked about,” he said quietly.

I didn’t reply. I walked quickly through the length of the suite, turned into the corridor, and pressed the button for the ground floor. I was glad to be getting away from these people.

“Goodbye, Mr. Forsythe. Have a great day,” Sebastian said.

“I have other plans,” I said and walked out of the hotel.

I went to the bog, locked the cubicle door, retrieved my .38 and the bag of shells.

I checked the gun. Dry as bone. I’d have to write Ziploc a letter and let them know how useful their product was at keeping water away from firearms. I loaded the weapon and shoved it my pocket.

When I came out of the toilet, I saw one of Bridget’s goons sitting casually at the bar, smoking a cigarette.

Moran had obviously put a tail on me so I would be easier to find and kill when the midnight deadline came and went.

He would be the first order of business. I pulled the fire alarm next to the toilet and in the ensuing chaos sat next to him at the bar.

“I want to talk to you. Come with me to the snug,” I said.

He was a young guy, early twenties, easily intimidated.

“Listen, I don’t want to cause any—”

“The snug, over here.”

We walked over to one of the large enclosed booths while the barman assured everyone that the alarm had gone off by accident and told the customers to resume their seats. But still, it was pretty noisy and in a sec it wouldn’t be, so as soon I closed the snug door, I grabbed an empty Guinness bottle from the table and smashed it over the tail’s head. He slumped over and I laid him on the floor. With some care I removed the glass from his scalp and put him in the recovery position. He’d be right as rain in half an hour. I searched him for guns but all he had was a flick knife—what the hell was he going to do with that? I opened the snug door, walked quickly through the bar, slipped out the side entrance, turned right on Great Victoria, and headed south toward Bradbury Place and the Malt Shop.

The headline was “Hospital Cash Crisis.” I scanned the paper, nothing about Bridget or Siobhan, and I wondered if the peelers had asked for a news blackout. By the time of the third edition, some of the havoc I had wrought would be the lead story and cover photograph. But that was in a couple of hours. Not quite yet.

I binned the paper and started looking for the Malt Shop.

I was pretty familiar with this district, but there were new buildings up, old buildings gone. Nice restaurants, fancy cars. And despite my predictions, a plague of Starbucks. The big change was how differently people dressed from when I’d last been here in 1992. Back then half the men would have been in jackets and ties, the rest would have worn button shirts, and all the old-timers wouldn’t have been caught dead outside in anything less than a three-piece tweed suit and flat cap. Now everyone was dressed in casual wear: bright floppy T-shirts, shorts, sandals, cargo pants and the number of football shirts was staggering. Manchester United, Glasgow Rangers, and Glasgow Celtic being the most common. The women, too, were dressed down in baggy jeans and T-shirts and a lot of them were wearing Real Madrid football shirts, which at first I thought was some kind of solidarity thing with the bombing back in March but then I noticed that the shirts all had David Beckham’s number.

The final status symbol worn by a good chunk of the under-thirty population was a New York Yankees baseball cap. Cheap airfares, weak dollar, any mug could go to New York these days.

Still, it wasn’t all bad.

Two o’clock is quitting time for a lot of schools. And I’d like to find the man who isn’t moved by hordes of beautiful seventeen- and eighteen-year-old sixth-formers striding toward the train station in short skirts, patent leather shoes, white shirts, and ties.

I couldn’t go farther down the street because the cops had blocked off the road for a march and “historical pageant” by a small group of Independent Apprentice Boys who were reenacting a scene from the siege of Derry. The IAB were in full regalia, sweating in the humidity. Dark suits, black ties, black bowler hats, and orange-colored sashes. The scene was the famous one where the Protestant apprentice boys locked the gates of Derry to stop the Catholic armies from capturing the city—an actual historical event that had happened over three hundred years ago. I had never heard of the reenactment being performed in Belfast before. They’d probably gotten a cultural grant from the European Community. The “Boys” were actually forty- and fifty-year-old men with beer guts, bad mustaches, and hair so unkempt Vidal Sassoon would have broken down and wept. They were all obviously the worse for drink. The Catholic army this afternoon was an intoxicated man in a green sweater with a pikestaff.

“You’re not getting in,” one of the Boys was saying to him.

“Aye, no fucking way,” said the other.

“We’re shutting the gates,” a third managed between belches.

The man in the green sweater did not seem that put out. Right in front of me, another of the Apprentice Boys climbed on top of a parked car and began stamping on the roof. It had an Irish Republic license plate and the Boy was obviously under the impression that it, too, was a representative of King James’s Catholic army. A peeler went over and told him to get down. The peeler was old, fat, and bored. He tapped his service revolver once and the Boy, spooked, got off the roof.

“Right, that’s it, I think you’re all through,” an inspector shouted and waved for the other coppers to reopen the streets. They began lifting the yellow tape.

“Black bastards,” the other Boys yelled in protest. “Black bastard” not a comment on race but rather on the policemen’s very dark green uniform, which appeared black. Indeed, in Northern Ireland the small number of foreign immigrants gave the wannabe racist scant opportunities. There was a sizable Chinese community, although racists tended to ignore them for fear that each one was a potential Bruce Lee who would kick their shit in.

The Boys refused to get off the street and the peels had to send in the riot police. While I waited to get going, I asked one of the school-girls if she knew where the Malt Shop was—a pretty brunette who looked as if she had never been exposed to sunshine in her life.

“Aye,” she said, looking to make sure her friends weren’t too far away. “You’re going the right direction but it’s on the other side of the street, just past the Ulster Bank.”

“Thanks very much.”

“No problem, although I tell ya, I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” she said, her big brown eyes blinking slowly.

“Why’s that?”

“You a tourist? Are you from America?”

“No, well, sort of, I am from out of town,” I admitted.

“If you want a milk shake go to McDonald’s, that place is a bit dodgy,” the girl said.

“Is it now? Like what? Drugs?”

“I don’t know. If you go looking for drugs you find them anywhere. ’Course they still do good milk shakes like.”

“Well, thanks for the tip.”

“I could do with a milk shake myself,” she said with something close to a giggle.

“Love, if I was ten years younger, had slept, was untroubled by heavies, and not trying to solve a missing person’s case before midnight, I would be honored to buy you a milk shake, but as it is . . .” I said, shrugged apologetically, saw the street was finally cleared, and hurried in the direction of the Ulster Bank.

I was down on the Golden Mile now.

Belfast was mostly a nineteenth-century phenomenon, a side effect of a booming linen industry, docks, and shipyard. Its population had increased tenfold in less than a hundred years. Catholics flooding to certain sectors of the town, Protestants to others; and it has remained a segregated city. Prod and RC sections as clearly delineated as the black and white neighborhoods of Boston or Detroit. East Belfast: almost entirely Protestant. West Belfast, divided between a Protestant ghetto along the Shankill Road and a Catholic ghetto along the Falls Road. Impossible to wander into the wrong neighbor-hood by mistake. The Shankill Road bedecked with murals depicting various Protestant heroes, usually in the primary colors of red, white, and blue. The Falls Road had murals showing Catholic heroes, in green, white, and gold. The exception, however, was South Belfast. The area I was walking in right now. This part of the city was where the university district met the commercial heart. This was middle-and upper-class Belfast. Houses were more attractive, the streets were wider, trees didn’t get ripped to be turned into kindling around bonfire time and there were a lot of students, couples, and young people. Here there were no Protestant or Catholic bars. No murals, no flags, and little sectarianism.

But even so, you’d be kidding yourself if you thought the paramilitaries let these businesses thrive without interference. The Malt Shop would certainly be no exception.

“That must be it,” I said to myself as I caught a glimpse, three blocks ahead, of a miraculously unvandalized 1958 pink Cadillac that had been turned into an outside eating booth.

I jogged to the café with a feeling of urgency. Outside, three other cars that had been converted into tables. Another Caddy, a red Ford Thunderbird, and a distinctly anachronistic De Lorean. Despite the intermittent drizzle, all were packed.

I went in.

A large fifties-style diner, with a soda fountain, waiters on rollers skates, Buddy Holly on the jukebox, and other artifacts from the hazily misremembered days of the Eisenhower administration. The menu was standard diner fare with the occasional Ulster speciality such as deep-fried Mars bars served in a piece of soda bread. Completely bunged full of weans, enjoying malts and milk shakes.

A waitress in a nylon polka-dot dress and dreadlocks skated up to me.

“Help you?”

I took out the picture of Siobhan.

“I’m looking for this girl. She was seen with one of the regulars in here. Skinny ginger-haired kid. Ring any bells?”

The girl groaned. Clearly this wasn’t the first or even the second time someone had come by asking these questions. Bridget’s boys, the police, Bridget’s boys again, and the police again.

Well, they weren’t me.

“Listen, love, this is bloody serious, have you seen this girl?” I asked with an intimidating burr.

She shook her head.

“You’ll want to see the manager,” she said.

“Eventually,” I said. “I’ll show the photo around first.”

“You’re not allowed to bother the customers,” she said.

“Says who?”

There were at least three dozen people in the Malt Shop, not one over twenty-five. I showed them the photo, asked about the mysterious redheaded kid, but no one had seen a bloody thing. I tried my hand with the waiters and the dudes behind the counter, but again all I drew were blank expressions.

This in itself was a wee bit suspicious.

Nobody said, “Oh aye, she looks a bit familiar” or “A kid with red hair, aye, there’s a lot of kids with red hair” or “I think I might have seen her, did she have a wee dog?”

None of the usual stuff.

I mean, I know that Belfast people are very good at keeping their mouths shut, seeing nothing, and minding their own business. That’s why they had to replace jury trials with secret three-judge courts— no witnesses wanted to testify in front of twelve strangers and no juries wanted to convict terrorists who would come seeking revenge. And I know that Ireland has a well-established and long-standing culture of silence going back at least to the horror of informers during the 1798 Rebellion. But this was different. This was deeper. This was like everyone had been schooled. This was like the word had gone out.

And what had Bridget said? He had smelled of pot. And what the schoolgirl just told me? This place is druggie central. Aye, I could see that now. The paramilitaries ran this particular establishment with a grip of iron. There were probably a couple in here right at this very moment.

I sat down and ordered a malt.

The place began filling up with more schoolkids and students. A couple of cops came in, were given free malteds, and sat slurping them in the window seat. Useless wankers.

I found Dreadlocks again.

“Ok, love, go get the manager, I’ll talk to him now,” I said.

“He’s in a meeting.”

My eyes narrowed.

“Go get the manager,” I said very quietly.

“Ok,” she said.

The manager: twenty-one years old at the most, thin, greased black hair, earring, a zigzag line of stubble from his sideburns to his chin.

He sat down at my table.

“Are you another policeman?” he asked in a Dublin accent.

“What’s that on your face, you forget to shave?” I asked, to start the conversation on the wrong foot.