The Death of Love (2 page)

WHAT WAS DESCRIBED for a while as the “untimely death” of Paddy B. “Buck” Power began for Peter McGarr in the wee hours of the next morning. His infant daughter, Madeleine, either did not yet quite sleep through the night or had inherited from McGarr his penchant for early rising. Mark that
earlier
rising.

For when her plaintive cry went up from the nursery across the hall from their bedroom in Rathmines, a neighborhood of Dublin, McGarr’s eyes snapped open. It was a call etched so deeply into his mind that he believed he had been listening for it the night long. Yet he quickly glanced at the bedside clock, which read 5:00 to the digit, and closed them again.

He then feigned a deep, not overly sonorous, masculine sleep, which, as everybody knows, is deeper and far less perturbable than feminine sleep, especially with a baby in the house. In such a pose he listened to his wife pull her thirty-year-old body out of bed and shuffle sleepily toward the hubbub that was now in full, wailing spate.

McGarr’s concern for the noise level of his snores was an obeisance to the fact that Noreen, when fully awake, had a keen appreciation for detail. Also the—compact was not quite the word—they had made in regard to the baby’s care called for equal attention to every reasonable need by
both
parents. “That includes nightly feedings, nappy
changes, baths—the lot,” she had told McGarr when announcing her pregnancy.

“This is
not
going to be your typical Irish parenting arrangement, Peter McGarr. When I think of how my mother’s career practically disappeared in my wake, and how my father always seemed to be out after a horse or a painting or at some convenient wet or other…And your
own
mother! My God, how did she deal with
nine
children with your father a veritable wraith between the job, the pub, and the lads?”

Which was, McGarr had thought, a rather neat explanation of their essential difference: she the only child of landed Protestant gentry who concerned themselves with horses, fine art, and the conservation of principal; he the fifth son of a Catholic Guinness Brewery worker who still lived, please God, a rather full life almost exclusively in the present. True, McGarr’s mother was now dead, but he knew many another woman who had borne as sizable a burden and was still totting messages back for her man. A quick study, however, McGarr had said not a word. Instead he had taken himself down to his local to savor the advantages of patrimony in either persuasion.

McGarr was chief superintendent of the Murder Squad of the Garda Siochana, the Irish police. He was also by the sworn testimony of many a hard man an even harder man himself. But listening now, as Noreen soothed and changed Madeleine, then—singing to her lightly—carried the child into their bed, made him feel shabby indeed. Truly he desired to adhere at least to the spirit of sharing, but at fifty-one and after a life of studiously practiced, if judicious, abuse, his flesh was just not up to 5:00
A.M.
baby service. McGarr smoked, he drank, he ate whatever tasted good, and it was well known to his staff that it sometimes took him whole hours in the morning to gather enough bonhomie to make polite conversation, and
never
without an eye-opener.

“Over. Push, push, push it, you lummox,” Noreen now said to him, jabbing his shoulder with a hand. “Yah can’t cod me. I know you’re fakin’ and awake.” Not for the first time, McGarr noted how his wife’s usual ascendant tone muted during early morning feedings and made her sound
like a hake-monger in Moore Street. But ever discreet in regard to her Anglo-Irish temper, he again held his guilty tongue and rearranged himself near the edge of the bed where, ten or so minutes later, he could watch them sleeping.

There was something about the picture of his child having been nursed asleep in the arms of his wife that McGarr found endlessly appealing. Like himself, both were redheads: Noreen, an auburn-haired woman with regular, if somewhat sharp, good looks; Madeleine, a study in pink with fresh cheeks and wavy strawberry-blond hair. Still half-awake, she was twining her cherub-pudgy legs and flexing her toes, like tiny fingers, in a kind of recumbent dance that McGarr had dubbed foot language.

At such moments she seemed to him more than just another person or another life or, you know,
his
child; she was also an opportunity, the chance for Noreen and him to provide her all the good, sustaining experiences that they had enjoyed in their own childhoods and to eliminate those that they now knew had been bad.

So precarious, precious, and transient seemed the life of
his
daughter that it was as though McGarr had been tendered with her birth a list of priorities, which supervened all else, and he would warden with ferocious love. In his billfold he would carry no photos for ready viewing, nor would he tell cute stories to others who had children themselves. But he would always carry in his heart that first fierce affection for this little person, who had now thrown both arms back on her mother’s chest and was sleeping with blissful, guileless abandon.

In such a way McGarr saw in Madeleine the possibility of making the world better. For a man who for over thirty years had daily involved himself with the details of destructive behavior and violent death, such a renewal of hopeful spirit had struck him like a revelation, and in that way he had himself been reborn.

In the tiny toilet under the stairs fifteen minutes later McGarr stared at himself appraisingly in the long mirror on the back of the door. He did not like what he saw: a stocky, bald, middle-aged man with a long face, morning-murky gray eyes, and an aquiline nose that had been
knocked off-center more than once and now looked a bit flattened. The want of a shave made his shadowed chins look doubled or trebled, and the sorriest truth was that his formerly well-muscled body was running to fat. He looked…beaten wasn’t quite the term, but battered sprang immediately to mind. His throat would be the death of him yet, so it would.

Or could it be mainly his posture, he hoped. Throwing back his shoulders, he snapped up his muscles into a strong-man pose. With his body tensed like that, he looked not half-bad, and he wondered if somehow he could initiate a course of bodybuilding—weights, Nautiluses, tensioners, and the like—someplace out-of-the-way where nobody at Dublin Castle, where he worked, would know. A bit of a tan would also help to convey a younger image. Perhaps with sunlamps and ointments and so forth he could coax some color into his pale flesh and give out the story it was from gardening.

But cautiously, gradually, discreetly over time, for McGarr was nothing if not a private man, and it would not do to have anybody in the Garda Siochana thinking he was worried about his age or fitness. McGarr was two posts from commissioner—a political appointment that before Madeleine’s birth he had decided he did not want—but that he could now see himself “retiring” from to some consultancy or private security firm with the enhancement of a commissioner’s pension. One could serve the public only so long without becoming jaded, which he sometimes suspected was the cause of his long periods of silence. Plainly he had seen too much.

It also occurred to him that he could cut back on what—or at least how much—he ate, drank, and smoked, but at that moment he heard the kettle piping, and he wondered if hunger alone could have prompted this dire assessment of himself. He had worked late the night before and not had his tea, and from the light aroma that still lingered in the kitchen he could tell Noreen had baked scones last evening for the morning’s breakfast.

He would look into a regimen of
moderate
exercise, he decided. Some fine Saturday morning when he was out with Madeleine, he would wheel her down to the public li
brary on Rathmines Road and investigate what they had in the way of fitness books, you know: presses, sit-ups, exercises that could be practiced over the winter in the privacy of one’s cellar. He might even buy himself a set of weights to throw around down there. Noreen herself had a video that she played through the telly to help her tone up after the delivery.

In the meantime—he opened the oven—there were the scones, which would toast up nicely under the gas ring while he fetched butter from the press and the jar of gooseberry preserves an uncle had sent from the hills of Monaghan. He would sit himself down at the kitchen table and rouse his sorry heap of past-prime flesh with a caffeine-rich pot of dark-roast coffee and look out at his back garden, which was his hobby. Now, in early October, the raised beds were fuzzed with the new green of winter “wheat.” All else in the way of work had been retired until early spring.

McGarr had always enjoyed the crisp days of fall, especially when they were bright, like now, and the weather was holding. He had burned anthracite in the Aga for three nights running, and its pleasant, quiet heat pervaded the kitchen. With cup in hand while waiting for the scones, he glanced over the eaves of his neighbor’s house at the dawning sky.

Lit by a pale sun, it was an oval of old blue porcelain that was greening at the edges and chipped here and there with hyphens of coded cloud. He had opened the window a bit, and his nose now caught a slight sour stench from the canals, the rivers, and Dublin Bay, which were purging in the cool autumn air. Tomorrow it would storm without fail; winter was a day away.

The phone rang, startling him, and he rushed to pick it up, lest the sound wake the baby.

“Up early, McGarr?” It was Fergus Farrell, the commissioner of the Garda Siochana.

“I am that, given my present…er, predicament.”

“That’s right. How
is
Madeleine?”

Hearing some movement in the hall behind him, McGarr turned to find Noreen holding the still-sleepy child, who raised her arm to him in praetorian salute. “Just
fine, presently. Quiet and, I should imagine, hungry.” He pointed to the scones and mouthed “hot” to Noreen.

Passing him, she muttered, “Predicament, eh? It better be good.” She meant the reason for such an early morning phone call.

But it wasn’t in any way. “I hate to disturb you at such an early hour, Peter, but we’ve had some bad news. Paddy B. “Buck” Power has died.”

McGarr’s head went back. Paddy Power was an important person in Irish public life whose career had been followed closely by the Irish press. Power had advised successive Irish governments on finance, founded his own commercial bank, which prospered, and then moved on to New York, where he seemed to profit from every vicissitude in world markets. But mostly Paddy was a philanthropist.

Monthly, it seemed, Power’s odd face, beaming an impish, off-center smile, had appeared in Irish publications, photographed with bigwigs at some prestigious event. To McGarr’s way of thinking, he was one of the handful of Irish emigrés who, having achieved celebrity status in world circles, had become necessary bragging points for a country that, because of her checkered history and present sorry state of affairs, wished at least to be loved.

Two, maybe three, years ago, McGarr now remembered, Power had returned to Ireland, and through his Paddy Power Fund had engaged in a broad range of philanthropic activities. Rumor had it that Power was about to enter the political arena and had even been mentioned as a candidate for president, which under the Irish Constitution was a largely ceremonial but high-visibility post.

“And now you’re calling me?” McGarr asked.

There was a pause before Farrell said, “Well—I’m not certain I should. It appears to have been a natural death, some sort of heart seizure. But another man is crying foul, and we wouldn’t want anybody to think we’re not on the job.”

We
, McGarr thought. As far as he was concerned, Farrell was never on the job. He was a political animal (as was now said), who spent most of his time nosing about
with politicians and party hacks. And how was it that a claim of wrongful death had been phoned to him and not to the Murder Squad? According to procedure, McGarr’s staff should have been called first, and he would have known of it immediately.

“Dr. Maurice J. Gladden.”

“Mossie Gladden?” McGarr asked. “The politician?”

Out in the kitchen Noreen straightened up from the range and turned to him. Although a backbencher for his entire career in the Dail, Gladden had been a character and was well known to most Irish voters.

“
Former
politician, I seem to remember. He was Paddy’s doctor and, you know, friend.” Farrell paused, as though dwelling on the last word. “It was common knowledge Paddy had a heart condition, which Gladden himself had treated him for. But now he’s claiming it was murder, and working himself up into a…state.”

Common knowledge to whom? McGarr wondered. Certainly not to him, and he had followed “Buck” Power’s brilliant career with no little interest.

“Paddy and Mossie grew up together there in Kerry. As luck would have it, Mossie answered the emergency call. Now he’s ranting and raving, threatening to go to the press if the
murderer
is not apprehended immediately.”

McGarr waited. They had come to the important part—what Farrell thought he could ask of him.

“I want you to go down there, Peter, and find out what you can. If Paddy
was
murdered, as Gladden claims. I want you to do your duty as you have lo these many years. If he wasn’t, all the better. But, Peter”—again McGarr listened to the buzz of the phone line, while Farrell chose his words—“I’ve phoned you this morning because over the years you’ve exercised rare discretion in situations that might have become inflated.

“I don’t know what your politics are, nor do I care. But given all the problems the country has now—the debt, unemployment, emigration, the lot—we don’t need any more bad news. If an investigation is warranted, so be it, but I want you to proceed, at least for the moment, on the assumption that he died by the natural cause of heart failure.”

McGarr looked away, his eyes suddenly wary. Farrell might be commissioner, but he was not a pathologist, who was the only expert qualified to determine the cause of Paddy Power’s death. Finally there was the rhetorical
we
again, which McGarr liked least of all.