The Bloomsday Dead (20 page)

The only other possibility was that he might just have had the strength to climb up onto one of the second-floor balconies. I went to the nearest one and examined it closely. Nothing. The next one.

And what was that? A speck of red on the balcony rail. I smiled. Blood. Fresh blood.

With a heroic effort of will he had somehow climbed up there. Bullet wound or no bullet wound. I stepped back and surveyed the balcony. The door to the apartment was shut. I couldn’t tell if it was locked but I guessed it was. The lights were off and no one was home, and if you lived on the second floor it would probably be sensible to lock the balcony door.

My hunch was that he was still crouching up there, lying behind the concrete balcony walls, breathing hard, listening to me, hoping that eventually I would give it up as a bad job and piss off home.

“I’ll give you five seconds to stand up and then I’m throwing the hand grenade onto that balcony. Five, four, three, two—”

He stood.

He’d lost the ski mask. Bald guy, forties, gray face, gut. One of the old-timers. Reliable, he was rusty with the RPG, but it hadn’t been the first time he’d fired the weapon. I’m sure he’d knocked over quite a few Land Rovers in his time. His hair was singed from the back flare on the weapon and his denim jacket at the shoulder was ripped open. I faked holding the grenade in my hand.

“Get those hands up,” I said.

He put his hands over his head.

“Get down from there,” I ordered.

“I can’t get down, I’m hurt,” he whined.

“All right, I’ve had enough of you, try to kill me, would ya. I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

“Wait, wait, wait.”

Gingerly, he tested his weight on the balcony rail. He leaned his stomach on the edge, toppled over, and dropped to the ground. I saw now that the woman peeler had hit him on the buttocks or lower back. It was, in fact, only a glancing wound, but still, he’d been a moving target, a good hundred feet away, got to give her credit.

And yeah, he’d really messed up his shoulder from firing the rocket-propelled grenade. Torn jacket, lot of blood.

He tried to stand, so I belted him on the side of the face. He skidded into a wall and fell down sideways into a gutter. An empty revolver tumbled out of his inside jacket pocket. As luck would have it, a .38. See, that’s why you get a PC over a Mac. They’re shitty, but the bastards are everywhere.

I picked up the revolver, checked the chamber—seemed clean enough. I pulled six rounds out of my pocket and loaded the gun. I waggled it at him.

“Ok, now we talk,” I said.

Two stories up a man opened a window in one of the yuppie flats and looked out.

“What the bloody hell is going on down there?” he shouted in a Scottish accent.

“He’s trying to kill me,” the RPG man said.

“You say another word and you’re a dead man,” I muttered sotto voce and then to the yuppie: “Michael Forsythe, CID, this man has just attacked four police officers, I’m arresting him.”

“Perhaps I could see your identification?” the canny Scot demanded.

I pointed the gun at him.

“Get the fuck back in your fucking flat before I arrest you for obstruction of justice. If you’re nervous, mate, call the bloody cops,” I shouted back. He ducked his head inside and closed the window.

I turned the gun on RPG again.

“Ok, you, on your knees, hands behind your head. One move and it’s tea and crumpets with Beelzebub.”

He knelt. I did a quick pat down. I took the wallet from his back pocket. Five hundred quid and a driving license that said he was called Jimmy Walker. I kept the money and put the wallet back in his pocket.

I squatted down next to Jimmy, smiled at him, and smacked him in the ear with the butt of my revolver. He hit the ground.

“God,” he screamed.

“Who do you work for?” I demanded.

He kept his trap shut. I kicked him in the wound on his arse.

“Jesus Christ,” he gasped.

“Who do you work for?” I asked again.

“I work for Body O’Neill.”

“Who’s that?”

“Bloody hell, where are you from?”

“Who is it?”

“Commander Belfast Brigade IRA,” Jimmy said.

“You weren’t going for the cops, were you? It was me, wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was you,” he said.

“Why me? Why the hit? What did I ever do to Body O’Neill?”

“I don’t know. I do what I’m told.”

“What did O’Neill say I’d done?”

“I don’t fucking know. We were told to hit you, that’s all.”

“Why an RPG, bit excessive, no?”

“O’Neill said you were hard to fucking kill, he said you were slippery. He told us that we had to use overwhelming force. Sammy said you were the guy who had killed Darkey White years ago and had survived a couple of hits. He said we should fire a bloody antitank rocket at ya. See you survive that. Then we got the idea of the RPG.”

“Who’s Sammy?”

“My partner.”

“On the Jimpy?”

“Aye, is he—”

“The woman cop killed him. When did you get the order to hit me? Last night?”

“Are you joking? Like forty-five minutes ago,” he said, surprised.

“What did they tell you?”

“And Sammy and you had access to an RPG?”

“Yeah, Sammy and me learned how to fire one years back in Libya. We set it up when we saw you on the boat, but we nearly called it off because of the cops.”

“Aye. Cops’ll think you tried to hit them, won’t they? You may have jeopardized the entire fucking cease-fire. Well done.”

“We weren’t breaking the cease-fire, we were just trying to top you, you bastard,” he said defensively.

I sighed, shook my head. I would have liked to have killed him but as a public service I was going to have to let him live. If I shot the fucker then the peelers and the army and the British government might think this attack on four police officers represented a serious breach of the Republican cease-fire. It might mean a redeployment of the army on the streets and a rearrest of remand prisoners. That in turn might lead to a spiral of retaliatory violence. The Loyalists would probably respond with their own assault on a Catholic bar or something, a retaliation for that would be forthcoming, and who the hell knows, it might mean the start of a summer of slaughter.

So, as a good deed for my fellowmen I couldn’t kill this character. I had to let him live and tell the cops that no, he wasn’t aiming an RPG at them, but in fact was after a man called Michael Forsythe.

“One last time, you have no idea why me?” I asked.

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“They didn’t give you a fucking reason?”

“We didn’t have the time for that. They said that this was a time-imperative op and we had to get cracking. They knew you were going to the boat, but didn’t know where you’d go after. Had to hit you there.”

“Ok. I suppose I’ll have to talk to your boss. Where’s he?”

“I’m not going to tell you that.”

“No?”

“No.”

I stood, reloaded the .38, put my Stanley boot on his left hand, took very careful aim, and shot his thumb off.

He screamed, rolled on the ground, and tried to crawl away from me. I kicked him in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. I picked up the bloody thumb and knelt beside him.

“Now listen here, mate. Give you a choice. I’ll put this here thumb in your pocket and maybe the surgeons at the Royal can sew it back on. Maybe not, but at least you’ll have a chance. Otherwise I’m going to shoot your other thumb off and I’ll take both with me. How does that sound?”

“You fucker, you fucking fucker,” he managed between gasps of pain.

“Hey, maybe I’ll shoot your balls off too, what do you think?” I said breezily.

“What do you want?”

“Well, let’s take it slow. Sure O’Neill ordered the hit?”

“Yes.”

“And where would I find him right now?”

“Right now, he’ll be in the Linen Hall Library,” he said.

“You’re kidding me?”

“Linen Hall, I swear it’s true. He goes there from two to five every single weekday like clockwork. Upstairs in the reading room. He’s writing a book. I think it’s his reflections or something.”

“Better not be yanking me, Jimmy.”

“I’m not, I swear to God,” Jimmy said.

It was an unlikely place to find a commander of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA, but it was an unlikely place to make up out of the blue. I believed him.

I threw the thumb down beside him and as a further public service— to prevent him running away before the cops showed up—I clobbered him on the head.

I ran between the buildings until I came to the main road.

I wasn’t entirely sure of my bearings, but then I saw the gleaming dome of the city hall. The Linen Hall Library wasn’t too far from that, I seemed to remember.

“Onward and upward,” I said and jogged toward the center of town.

I didn’t know what I’d done to annoy Body O’Neill, to make him send assassins to Dublin to get me, to make him risk the cease-fire, but I was going to find out. I had a job to do and I didn’t have time for subplots.

Probably Darkey White’s long-lost brother. Or Bridget Callaghan’s tragic lover. Or a kid I used to bully in primary school. It would be something stupid. And if I had to murder the son of a bitch so he’d leave me alone, then so be it.

I wasn’t exactly sure where the Linen Hall Library was, but every-body else in Belfast was, so I was there pretty sharpish.

An attractive, dark, squarish building near the city hall with a bunch of people outside standing around a stall that was selling books, bootleg videos, and “comedic” singing fish.

“Is this the entrance to the Linen Hall Library?” I asked him pointing at a pokey wee door.

I ignored him and entered the building. An old concierge sitting at a desk. Behind him a glass door that led up the stairs to the library.

“Evening,” I said, walked past the desk, and tried the handle on the glass door.

“See your card,” the concierge said.

“I don’t have a card.”

“No card, no admittance.”

He was one of those sons of bitches who had spent their entire lives thwarting the interests of people like me. Sleekit wee bureaucrat. It had made him shriveled, small and boney. He looked half dead under a peaked security guard’s hat.

“Listen, I need in to the library,” I said.

“Well, you can’t get in without a card. You’ll have to get a card.”

“I don’t want a card, I just want to see somebody up in the reading room. I don’t need to join or anything.”

“I cannot let you in without a card,” he insisted.

“This is ridiculous, I just need to see somebody in the bloody reading room.”

“Well, you’ll have to go through me,” he said, eerily echoing the extremely violent thoughts that I was having that very moment. Let’s see, shoot the bastard, break through the door, run upstairs . . .

But that was a crazy idea. This was the center of Belfast, the cops would be here in two minutes. And besides, a gunshot down here would send everyone upstairs into a panic. Give O’Neill a chance to run for cover.

“Can I send a message up to someone in the reading room? It’s quite urgent.”

The concierge thought about it for a moment.

“Shall I send Miss Plum down to see ya?” he asked.

“Miss Plum from the library?”

“Yes.”

“Aye, and get Colonel Mustard with the lead pipe as well,” I said.

“What?”

“Please get her, it’s quite urgent, it’s a matter of life and death,” I said solemnly.

He raised an eyebrow and picked up the phone.

“Miss Plum, yes, it’s Cochrane. I’ve got a young man here who wants to get in to the library. He says it’s very urgent. Could you see your way to coming down here with a temporary card at all?”

Apparently Miss Plum said yes.

“She’s coming right down,” Cochrane told me.

I tapped my foot on the floor. I was bristling with anger and impatience. I had to deal with O’Neill right now while my blood was up. I had to know why he had been trying to kill me ever since I had arrived in this fucking country, and I had to put a bloody stop to it. Three attacks in one day: that was miles better than even Bridget’s record. And holy mother of God, now they’d even taken to sinking ships in order to nail me. What would be next? Aerial bombing? Anthrax?

Aye, well, we’d see O’Neill about that.

But there was another reason for seeing him too.

Something Seamus Deasey had said. Outside the pub, when he had told me Barry’s name and the fact he lived on a boat on the Lagan, Seamus had slipped in a boast that having Barry’s name and address wouldn’t do me any good. At the time I hadn’t even considered it, but now it seemed that Seamus had known that Barry was already dead. Seamus knew that Barry had been murdered.

How?

I could be wrong, though. He could be in it up to his eyeballs and I might have missed the one chance to break the case wide open. Would have been easy: kidnap Seamus, take him to a wee hidey-hole, and get cracking with my experimental interrogation techniques. But nah, even then I don’t think he would have fessed up to knowing anything about Siobhan Callaghan.

So where did that leave things?

Since no one had messed with the scene, the only way Seamus could have known about Barry’s murder was if something had leaked out about it, or he had heard some word on the street, or perhaps the murderer had actually asked for Seamus’s permission to kill his boy. If he’d been a Belfast assassin, he probably would have had to do that. You don’t go around whacking members of other people’s crews, be they capo, soldier, or lowly drug dealer, without getting the ok from on high. ’Course, if the hit men were from abroad, London or Dublin, say, then it wouldn’t matter, but a Belfast-based assassin would have had to get a permission slip. Oh, you’d maybe explain that Barry had raped your sister or insulted your granny or some such shite like that. You’d give Seamus a couple of grand blood money and he’d be happy enough.

It was pure speculation. But the more I thought about it, the more I was reasonably certain that Seamus had not only known that Barry was dead but that he had a fair idea who’d been involved in it. Following my little stunt in the Rat’s Nest, I wouldn’t be able to get within a million miles of Seamus, but Body O’Neill was one floor above me. One minute up the stairs. For if Body O’Neill was the commander of the IRA in Belfast, it meant he was Seamus Deasey’s superior. O’Neill could order Seamus to tell me what he knew about young Barry. All it would take would be a sufficiently persuasive argument to convince O’Neill of the justice of my cause.

Maybe a Belfast six-pack would do the trick.

But certainly he could solve a lot of the questions that were troubling me. And I was damn well going to get the information I bloody needed about the hits on me and everything else I wanted to know.

I looked at the concierge.

“She’s taking her time, isn’t she?”

He nodded awkwardly.

“Know much about the library?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said with the sinking feeling that he was going to tell me.

“When the Luftwaffe bombed Belfast in ’42, the military target was the docks and the shipyard but Göring instructed several Heinkel 111s to hit cultural and civic targets, and among those were the city hall and the Linen Hall Library.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Thousands died but the incident doesn’t even merit a mention in most histories of World War—”

“Shocking.”

“And did you further know—”

I had to interrupt.

“Look, I’m sorry to be rude, but you wouldn’t mind paging Miss Plum again, would you?”

He paged her.

“Miss Plum, that gentleman is in quite a rush to get in,” he said into the speakerphone.

“It’s not André with the lobsters, is it?” Miss Plum’s voice replied.

The concierge looked at me.

“You’re not André with the lobsters, are you?”

My knuckles whitened.

“Do you see any lobsters?”

“It’s not André, Miss Plum,” the concierge said.

“But it is very urgent,” I said into the intercom.

“I’ll be right down,” she said.

“Great.”

Eventually, after I’d endured more tedious tales of the library’s fascinating history, Miss Plum’s legs appeared at the top of the stairs.

She opened the glass door and came out to meet me.

A chubby, redfaced Kate Winslet type, brown eyes, tight skirt, pert, snarky mouth.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi, look, I have an urgent message for a Mr. O’Neill upstairs.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, do you know Mr. O’Neill? Is he here today?”

“He’s here,” she said.

“Well, I wonder if you might let me up to see him.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible. You’ll have to join the library to get in, at the very least you’ll have to get a temporary card. Oh, don’t get so worried. You just have to fill out a few forms, provide proof of residence,” she said, looking with displeasure at the burnt fiberglass that had stuck to my leather jacket.

“Please, I’m in a big rush, I don’t have time for forms, I really just need to see him,” I said. I didn’t have time for bloody paperwork, and it was years since I could produce any proof of Belfast residence.

“I’m sorry, it’s the policy, this is a very select institution,” Miss Plum said with a winning smile.

She was a charming girl and in general I avoid killing women, but I was right on the goddamn edge here.

“Ok, look, Miss Plum, what’s your first name?”

“Jane,” she said with a tiny sniff of suspicion.

“Look, Jane, first let me say I completely understand the policy. Very sensible, keep out the riffraff. Second of all, let me compliment you on your style, appearance, and professionalism. Has anyone ever told you that you resemble a thin Kate Winslet? You have an extraordinary skin tone. If you ever want a job with the Olay people, look me up, my cousin’s the vice president. But this is an emergency. Mr. O’Neill’s mother is dying. He’s turned off his cell phone and I just need to see him, to let him know, so he can rush to her side for the final moments. The priest has already read the last rites, we all believe she’ll pass within the hour.”

“His mother?” Jane said, shocked.

“Yes, his poor wee mother,” I said, staring off into the middle distance.

“Bloody hell, she must be over a hundred,” the concierge said.

“O’Neill’s an elderly gentleman then, is he?” I thought but some-how also said aloud.

“Oh aye, he’s well into his seventies,” Jane said.

“Well, I’m just the messenger,” I said, a bit thrown.

“Could be,” I began hesitantly. “But the information I have is that she’s on her last legs. Could I just go up and let him know? It really is at a matter of life and death, surely you can make an exception for that?”

I smiled at her and placed my hands in a pleading gesture.

“Well, it’s not really the done thing. . . .”

Thank Christ, I thought, and followed her up the stairs.

I was in such a hurry now that I didn’t even admire her bum waggling from side to side as it rose up the marble steps.

The reading room was a charming little affair, with old book tables, neat shelves, and a tidy Georgian appearance. Various oddball types reading magazines, newspapers, and books. The more stereotypical iron-faced librarians, with horn-rimmed glasses and a capacity for unspeakable deeds, patrolled the reference area, enforcing the strict rules on silence, shelving, and pencils only.

“That’s him sitting at the alcove behind the window seat,” Jane said.

“I don’t see him.”

“That’s because he’s in the corner, in the alcove.”

“Ok, yeah, that’s the top of his bald head, is it?”

“Uhhuh.”

“Thanks very much,” I said.

“Now please, try hard not to cause a disturbance,” she said.

“Oh, don’t worry, love, disturbances are not my thing at all.”

I thanked her and walked to the corner alcove. The most secure spot in the whole place. Walls on three sides, near the emergency exit, but his one mistake—he had shifted his chair around so that he could get more light on his book from the alcove window. Silly old fool. Now his back was to the entrance. Anybody could just walk over.