The Devil I Know (11 page)

I looked down at my jacket. An amber streak of whiskey had slashed my shoulder. I touched the stain and looked at the moisture on my fingertips as if it were my life’s blood, and sometimes I think it is. Sometimes I think that whiskey is my life’s blood. I levelled my eyes at Hickey in fury before turning to leave.

I stamped on the hip flask on my way to the exit. ‘Ha!’ Hickey shouted after me. ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ I left him to gouging his holes in the earth. Gouging is what gougers do best.

I dabbed at my shoulder every ten paces or so once I was out of his sight, still checking for blood, an animal unable to keep from licking its injury and allowing the wound to heal. The whiskey felt cool, like menthol. It felt sticky and fascinating too. The bare branches of the trees approaching the castle gates were stark against the thin winter light, accentuating the meshed ganglions of rooks’ nests. I was in a black frame of mind. ‘What is greater than God?’ Larney
demanded
as I passed between the stone columns, as if the correct answer were the password required to gain admittance to the demesne. I shook my head at him: another time.

‘What is greater than God?’ he persisted, ‘and more evil than the Devil?’ The Jack Russell refrained from impeding my progress. It just stood there.

‘Not now,’ I said. ‘Please.’

Larney practically danced in delight. ‘That’s not the right answer!’

‘Damn your riddles.’

An expression of dismay swept across his face, a slapped child. I looked away and pressed on. I had no kindness to give him. There was no kindness in me that day.

‘Nothing,’ Larney called in my wake and the dog discharged a quick-fire, whip-crack volley of barks to see me off.
Ar-Ar-Ar
, rebounding against the orchard wall. The rooks exploded from the trees as if blasted at by a shotgun.

I thought that Larney had retreated to his den and I was some distance up the avenue having more or less forgotten him, being embroiled in black riddles of my own, worming seething ciphers, a stew of deformed faces, or maybe it was just one face – yes, it was just the one face, but a face that I had seen more than once, a face that had baited me throughout the days of my drunken iniquity and which had of late resurfaced in my peripheral vision – when Larney shouted the answer again: ‘Nothing is greater than God, young master. And Nothing is more evil than the Devil!’

‘Where does this Larney individual fit in to all this?'

Is that a riddle? There’s no straight answer. It seems very dark in here all of a sudden. Does anyone else think it’s very dark in here all of a sudden? Or is it just me?

‘I'm afraid it's just you, Mr St Lawrence.'

‘And so, returning to the Claremont development, according to the file, it was launched in . . .'

April 2007, Friday the 13th. Hickey wanted to make a big splash. That’s what I heard him blathering down the phone to the various parties involved in the launch – the publicists, the estate agents, the interior architects, the landscape technicians, the colour specialists, the fabric engineers, the carpet consultants. There were no gardeners or painters and decorators left in the country any more. You could get a degree in Lego.

Hickey was audible from outside the Portakabin, even over the racket of the construction work. He had the kind of booming voice that carries across rooms, across oceans, across the waking world into sleep. I don’t need to tell you this – you’ve endured his garbled deposition.

‘I want to make a big splash!’ he’d be declaring inside the prefab while I’d be procrastinating outside, one foot on the beer crate. This stance sums up my life. ‘Lookit lads, give us a big splash!’ ‘I’m after, like, a big splash!’ As I say, he was troubled with so few ideas that he had learned to pound the living daylights out of each one.

He appointed a top London PR company, and the publicity machine had kicked in by February. The old ply hoarding was replaced by twenty-foot-high glossy boards reading
Join the jet set! Register your interest now
. Two-page-spread advertisements were placed in the national papers, and feature articles were published in the Sunday supplements. The property pages tripped over their adjectives. Profiles of Hickey appeared in various business sections, many
accompanied
by photographic portraits of him gazing off into the distance with Ireland’s Eye in the background and a sea breeze in his hair. He had grown it long over the winter for this purpose. Long hair was required now that he was moving in different circles, or intending to. It signalled that he was a mover and shaker.

We were in the Site Office with the newspapers spread out on his desk, one headline more fatuous than the next. ‘Bag Yourself a Little Piece of Paradise!’ ‘Live the Dream by the Marina!’ ‘Join the Millionaire’s Circle with This Exclusive Beachfront Development!
Prices starting from an unbelievable €379,000 for a one-bedroom apartment
.’ The prefab smelled of sour milk and rashers.

‘“An unbelievable €379,000 for a one-bedroom apartment?”’ I read out. ‘They’re right. That is unbelievable.’

Hickey swung his steel-toed, mud-caked builder’s boots up onto the desk. He slurped his milky tea and did his post-pint sigh,
Ahhhhh
. ‘Starting from,’ he said. ‘Read the small print again.’

I read the small print again.
Starting from an unbelievable €379,000
. ‘Come on, Dessie. Who in their right mind is going to part with that for a one-bed flat?’

‘There’s only one apartment going on the market at that price an it’s a single-aspect, ground-floor, 440-square-footer facing the bin store. The rest a the one-beds clock in at around 400 grand. The two-beds are over the half-a-million mark. An the ones with the views . . .’ He winced at the price and reached for his hard hat. ‘Wait’ll you see,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘There’ll be a queue at the gate, so there will.’

He opened the door onto a furnace roar of activity. Out on the site, everything was in flux. Cranes swinging, hydraulic arms pistoning, diggers milling back and forth. It wasn’t going to be finished in time for the launch. ‘Doesn’t have to be finished,’ Hickey said without breaking his stride. Again, the problem of keeping up with him across muck. ‘We’ll be selling most of it off the plans. Just so long as the show apartments are ready to give the punters the general idea. Come on an have a look.’

We walked past the hulk that would one day become the landmark hotel. It was now visible from the castle, its square head gazing sadly in the window like Frankenstein’s monster.
Open autumn 2007!
the brochures promised, but I didn’t see how that was feasible. A digger had finished backfilling the section of trench housing a pipe. I paused to watch it pound the ground with its metal head like an animal gone berserk before realising that Hickey was shouting at me again. ‘Go back an get a fucken helmet! Before we’re fucken shut down!’

By the time I returned with a helmet, Hickey was laying into another patsy, a man with a suit under his high-viz jacket. The road couldn’t be finished in time for the launch, the man was trying to explain to Hickey, because the pipes—

‘Jesus wept, just lurry the fuckers in. That’s what I’m paying you for. Nobody gives a shite if they’re not perfect – the effing things are going to be
buried
– but we’ll all give a major shite if there’s no road on launch day an me clients have to stagger across planks in their Gucci heels.’

‘Who was that?’ I asked when the man had been dispatched. ‘What was he saying about leaking sewage?’

‘That dope?’ Hickey spat on the ground. ‘He’s me supervising engineer. Moaning again about pipes getting broken an misaligned if they aren’t encased in a protective structure before being backfilled what with the heavy construction machinery driving up an down over them while the rest a the apartments are being finished, blah blah. I don’t know what that fella’s problem is. Nobody gives a flying fuck about pipes an tanking an pressure tests an what have you since the Building Control Act of 1990. The Building No Control Act, more like. It’s all self-certification now – you’re basically correcting your own exams. Give yourself 100 per cent, I keep telling him. Who’s going to check? The County Council? Ask me hoop. They’re only obliged to inspect 15 per cent of all sites so they’re not going to go near the big ones, are they? That’d be too much like doing a day’s work. They’ll inspect Missus Murphy’s new granny flat instead. I’m not asking him to put his head on the block. He only has to state that the work complies with the building regulations to “a substantial extent”.’

‘Really? That can’t be true.’

‘Are you calling me a liar? That’s the law in this country. That, an wearing a safety helmet.’ He signalled to a roller to compact the soil over the sewage pipes, to compact the pipes themselves. I caught sight of my reflection in its approaching windscreen, just standing there in my yellow dunce’s cap, letting it happen. Then M. Deauville rang. I plugged my ear with my finger and shouted to him that it was fine, it was grand, everything on site was dandy, not a bother.

‘Is he coming to the launch?’ Hickey wanted to know when I got off the call.

The prospect had never occurred to me.

‘Bring him along,’ he said, and it sounded like a challenge. ‘I’d really like to meet the bloke.’

So would I. The shadow of the boom swung over my grave again and I shuddered.
Tocka tocka
. So would I.

‘They’ve started queuing,’ Hickey phoned to tell me not one, not two, but three days before the apartments were due to go on sale. Three whole days. I came down to see it with my own eyes.

The main road was choked with parked cars all the way back to the Burrow Road underpass. Family members were coming and going to sit it out in shifts. How did they sleep like that, with two wheels down on the road and two up on the kerb, the blood either draining from their heads or rushing to it? Ideal conditions for a killing, Hickey observed, rubbing his callused palms.

He had relegated the Site Office and its upended beer crate to a corner and installed a Sales Suite in its place with twin box balls flanking the entrance. Twin box balls were the signal. They were the wink and nod. A pair of twin box balls at a residential entrance was the telltale sign that the occupants had fallen victim to the property-lust plague.

Hickey had laid a tarmac road over the sewage pipes but it was already showing signs of buckling. I kicked at one of the ruckles. It had split in the centre like a soufflé. ‘Shut up,’ he warned me though I hadn’t opened my mouth. The Sales Suite was a large Portakabin carpeted in tan velvet pile with black leather sofas and orange pendant lamps. On a podium was a variation on the original architectural model of the development, displayed like the Book of Kells in a glass case which Hickey clouded up with his breath.

Large-scale floor plans of the individual apartment blocks were mounted on the walls. The plans were peppered with a pox of red stickers. About a fifth of the apartments had already been sold. To whom? I looked at Hickey, who shrugged. ‘A couple a the lads.’ He’d done a few deals to get the ball rolling. At the far end of the suite was the door to the private salesroom where, he said, the sweet magic was going to happen.

It was Hickey’s idea that we sit outside at bistro tables and keep an eye on the Sales Suite from a discreet distance. He wanted to watch his grand plan unfold. He’d had the landscape architect or the balcony dresser or the bespoke furniture designer or all three mock up a sort of afternoon-tea al-fresco vibe to give an impression of . . . He couldn’t think of the word. ‘What’s it?’ he asked me, clicking his fingers, ‘
genteel
living?’ but genteel wasn’t quite it. ‘What’s the word I’m looking for, Tristram? Begins with a G.’ ‘Dunno,’ I replied. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘it’s a lifestyle we’re selling here is my point.’

We couldn’t have asked for a better day – the first promise of summer and the show apartments glinted as they glinted in the brochures. Work had been going on around the clock under stadium floodlights which bled a spectral glow into the night sky. The crews were on double and treble pay to get the job done. A second internal wall of glossy hoarding had been erected within the site to screen the prospective buyers from the ongoing construction work. The unfinished blocks were sheathed in green netting. At the end of an avenue lined with flags stood our show block, the Lambay building. Tender new foliage shimmered at its base – the garden had been unloaded the morning before from the back of a truck. As had the Sales Suite, the bistro dining set and even the lawn. The last time I’d seen it, less than a week previously, the site had been a battlefield in Flanders. You had to hand it to D. Hickey. He had pulled off an elaborate scam.

He put on his sunglasses and sat back to contemplate the sales queue with satisfaction, watching the world go buy. The punters had been living in cars for three days by then and were dazed, dehydrated and desperate. The taxi drivers, their wives, anxious young couples, their parents, nurses and guards, all lining up to join the jet set, pressing coins into our palms like medieval supplicants. The smart money – or the slightly less stupid money – hadn’t wasted time viewing the show apartments but had gone straight to the private salesroom to slap down deposits. When they came out the other side with their contracts, they headed across to get an idea of the asset they’d just acquired, calculating the resale value when they went to flip it at completion.

Those still stuck in the queue sized up the people ahead of them, worrying that they had their eye on the same apartment, and so discussing their second choice, and their third. Plan B, Plan C and Plan D. They muttered to their partners, they muttered into their phones, they muttered to their gods, anxious not to be overheard. So preoccupied were they with their quarry that they didn’t register Hickey and I trained on them. They didn’t register that
they
were the quarry.

Hickey leaned in. ‘Is he coming?’ I didn’t have to ask whom he meant. I was keeping my eyes peeled for M. Deauville too.

‘He says he hopes to be able to make it.’
Tocka tocka
over the phone as he had checked airline schedules last night. A nervous tingle on my part at the prospect of coming face to face. ‘But he couldn’t promise. Depends on flights.’

Hickey nodded. ‘Busy man.’

I nodded back. ‘Busy man.’

That’s when Ciara, head of the sales team, emerged from the salesroom with her clipboard. I checked my watch. The apartments had been on sale for an hour and twenty minutes. Hickey lowered his sunglasses to wink at me. ‘Here we are now.’ He pushed the glasses back up his nose.

‘Well?’ he asked when she drew up. ‘Are we in business?’

‘We are, Mr Hickey. Just to confirm that the first fifty-eight units are now sold. A number of investors made multiple purchases. A farmer from Tipperary bought ten.’

Hickey brought his fist down hard on the bistro table: ‘Yes!’ His teaspoon bounced and landed on the gravel. Ciara stooped to pick it up. ‘Good girl. Right. Withdraw the next sixty-five units from sale.’

I jolted upright in my chair. ‘
What?​
’ but Ciara had already
Yes-Mr-Hickey
-ed him and was marching back to the Sales Suite, bursting with self-importance. I turned to Hickey. ‘Run that past me?’

He punched a number into his mobile phone and raised it to his ear before cocking an eyebrow my way. ‘We decided that if trade was brisk we’d release fifty-eight apartments today an call it Phase One, then hold back the next batch, add 30 per cent to the price, an call it Phase Two. We’ll launch Phase Two in six weeks. Then there’s Phase Three an Phase— Ah, howaya Mr McGee, D. Hickey here. Grand job, grand job.’

I stared at him in his suit. He never looked right in a suit, same as I never looked right in jeans. A tuft of black bristles protruded from his ear, the match of the black bristles sprouting from his nose, as if something were growing inside him, forcing its way out. He was a few rungs behind on the evolutionary ladder, or perhaps a few rungs ahead on the evolutionary ladder, or on some as yet undocumented stretch of the ladder which had taken off on a tangent, so he was not a man but something hybrid, something wolfish, something that wore its pelt on the inside, because they were a new breed, weren’t they, these developers. And their development was escalating. Soon they would take over. They’d enslave us. Too late: they already had. A commotion had broken out in the sales queue. An agent had placed a sign in the window:

Phase One

Sold Out

Ciara was struggling to force shut the door of the Sales Suite. People were clamouring for entry. Tired people, thwarted people, demoralised people, panicked people, people shouting that they’d been queuing for days.

Ciara clicked her fingers over her head like a flamenco dancer and cried ‘Security!’ Two heavies from the former Eastern Bloc, who were built like the former Eastern Bloc, appeared and enquired if there was a problem. Fucking right there was a problem, said one man pointing at them, and a struggle ensued. The insurrection was efficiently quashed by the hired goons, as insurrections in the former Eastern Bloc tended to be.