‘Hugo is rich, not heroic,’ Julia says.
Hugo is a friend of theirs who made a serious fortune when the dot-com madness was at its height. NASDAQ was soaring. You felt like an idiot not to be making millions from stock in some heavily loss-making internet initiative. Hugo was an investment broker, then an investor, then a divestor. He got out at exactly the right time, emerging with his personal wealth in the tens of millions.
‘What’s the difference?’ Danny asks. ‘He’s done it himself.’
‘His old man is loaded,’ Paul points out.
‘Your old man is loaded,’ Alexander says to Paul, then scans the table to recall who else has a loaded father. ‘Let me see. I don’t know about Karina’s dad or Aoife’s dad, but you’re both Southsiders, so your folks must be reasonably well off. And Danny comes from landed fucking gentry.’ Alexander pauses here, slightly prolonging the eye contact with Danny. The Carters were big landlords in County Galway. Danny’s parents still live in the ancestral home, though the estate is only a small fraction of what it once was. Alexander refrains on this occasion from mentioning that his own Ballyryan ancestors lived in a cottage within a few miles of Danny’s folks’ place. Danny doesn’t like him to talk about this. ‘My parents were civil servants. That rules me out. Julia is a Belfast Catholic, which rules her out, on the balance of probabilities, as well as in fact.’
‘Excuse me,’ says Julia in mock hauteur. ‘My dad is a businessman.’
‘A small businessman,’ Alexander retorts. ‘He’s practically a tradesman.’
‘He makes more money than you do.’
‘That wouldn’t be hard.’
‘What’s wrong with being a tradesman?’ Karina asks sharply.
‘Absolutely nothing. Tradesmen are magnificent creatures. But in socio-economic terms, while they might do well, they’re never going to be really rich.’
‘The last plumber who came to us owned three houses,’ drawls Aoife. ‘He was just back from a fortnight in the Caribbean.’
‘If he owns three houses, he’s a landlord, not a plumber.’
‘That explains why the toilet still doesn’t work,’ quips Danny.
‘My dad is a tradesman,’ says Karina. ‘We’re a working-class family and proud of it.’
‘He’s a builder,’ Paul almost shouts. ‘There’s a bit of a difference.’
‘Getting back to Hugo,’ Danny interjects. ‘Even if his father has a few bob, it doesn’t matter. He’s living the Celtic dream. The guy was in college with us, went drinking with us, and now he’s a multi-millionaire.’
‘He didn’t go drinking with us that often,’ Julia points out.
In college, Julia hung around in the same circles as Alexander, Danny and Paul. It was actually through Danny that Alexander first got to know her. She and Danny had some sort of fling in first year, though Alexander has never been able to work out exactly what sort. It is not a subject he would ever raise with Danny, and Julia has always been sketchy about it. Whatever it was, it ended quickly. By the time Alexander met her, she and Danny had apparently agreed that their relationship was – as she put it then – platonic.
‘Maybe that’s why he’s so successful,’ says Aoife hoarsely. ‘He steered clear of pissheads like you guys.’
‘And he never took any drugs,’ Alexander says. ‘He was fairly straight that way.’
‘He wasn’t straight,’ says Danny. ‘Hugo was above straight. The man was perfectly balanced: captain of the rugby firsts, honours student, well able to hold his liquor, never veered from the lovely Emma, who is now herself a high-flying marketeer. He’s a hero, I tell you. A role model.’
‘Why don’t you suck his dick if you’re so keen?’ says Aoife in abrupt, raw irritation, tipping the dinner table into sudden embarrassment, like a plane dipping unexpectedly into a steep turn.
‘Tell us about your junket to Africa,’ Danny says to Paul.
A little bit pissed, enjoying his food, an ideal conversation opening before him, Paul relaxes back into his seat, a grin of pleasure spilling onto his lips. He is chubbier now than he was in college, but still boyish, good-looking. He has let his fair-brown hair grow this past year. It is longer than bankers usually allow themselves, and this contributes to the air he has of being perfectly satisfied with life, with himself.
It is just the three lads talking now. Karina is down in the kitchen frying venison steak, having told Paul to stay put, that she would do it herself. At the other end of the table, Julia, after a few attempts, has drawn the reluctant Aoife into a civil conversation. They are talking about Dermot, Aoife’s cousin, a journalist who used to work with Danny in Irish Investor. Now he is a political reporter with the Irish Times, a rising star. Alexander and Julia met him only once, a couple of years ago. It irritates Alexander – although he gives the appearance of not attending to this conversation – that Julia always asks after Dermot.
‘It wasn’t a junket, man. I was doing business there. We were putting together the finance for an electricity plant. I met the entire government. You have to laugh at these places. The stuff is straight out of a comic book. The President flew in from out of town to help close the deal. They hailed his coming like he was the Son of God. Some flunkey burst into the meeting room. “The President’s plane has landed.” Then the man himself arrives in a fucking armour-plated Rolls-Royce that is so fucking heavy it’s leaving ruts in the dust-track. I kid you not. He has this big army escort with him, all these fat generals with swagger sticks. Everybody laughs like they’re Idi Amin. Actually, the President himself was impressive – a small thin dude, intelligent.’
‘Is there much corruption?’ Alexander asks ingratiatingly. ‘Does it affect business?’
‘You factor it in at ten per cent of cost. . . . They have a great attitude to corruption. In a neighbouring country, recently – I heard this from a guy at dinner, he could have been the Chief Justice for all I know. Anyhow, this neighbouring regime got something like one hundred million dollars in aid from the EU for a big capital project. The King embezzled the money and spent it on a Learjet for himself. . . . So I’m saying to the guy who is telling me this: “That’s a terrible state of affairs. How did he get away with that?” And he says to me: “It takes great balls.” He’s full of admiration for this King, big wide smile on his mug. And then I twig it. Corruption isn’t bad. It’s good. It’s initiative.’
Paul speaks with animation and flourish.
‘Sure it was the same here,’ says Danny. ‘The boys topping the polls even after all the dirt came out, actually getting more votes. It goes to show that we’re a Third World country that’s been fast-forwarded to Richville. To begin with, the peasants don’t believe that they’re good enough to make money the straight way.’
‘Food’s up,’ says Karina, coming through the doorway, expertly carrying three large plates – waiter style – with juicy bloody medallions of venison. She passes them to Paul, Alexander and Danny, who are the nearest.
‘I’m not going to have one after all,’ says Aoife, reaching for the box of Marlboro in front of her. ‘I’m sure no one minds if I smoke. I’m a bit off my food. I’m up the pole in fact.’ She lights her cigarette, inhales, grimaces, exhales, begins to speak again while the smoke is still flooding out through her mouth and nostrils. ‘Danny’s not very virile, but he’s fertile.’
Alexander has always regarded Aoife as a bit mad, appropriately mad, since you would have to be fairly unbalanced to stay shacked up with Danny for the guts of ten years, given his record of alcoholism and financial irresponsibility. He has thought this from the first time he met her, in Hailey’s Comet.
Alexander and Julia were together in Trinity from around the time of their first Trinity Ball till just after the final exams. Their relationship disintegrated at that point, with Alexander going to London (and not wanting her to come with him), and Julia getting ever f
riendlier with her aspiring playwright, and deciding that she wanted to go into acting. Four years later, Alexander, long since back in Dublin, was firmly, if not very excitingly, established. By this time Julia had tired of her acting career, which had mostly consisted of waitressing and teaching English as a foreign language. She had done a Higher Diploma in Education, and was teaching Drama in a girls’ secondary school in Dún Laoghaire. They fell into bed one drunken night (having met by happy coincidence at a party) and suddenly everything was back on. Within a few months, they had moved into the flat in Rathmines.
Around this time, Danny and Aoife were similarly beginning to cohere into a couple-like arrangement. Danny called Alexander on the phone one night:
‘Come down to Hailey’s to meet the missus. Bring Julia if she’s on for it.’
It was already fairly late. Julia wasn’t in the mood. She was drifting toward bed for an early night as Alexander hopped into the taxi.
Hailey’s Comet is a tough working-class pub off the south quays, near to where Danny was living at the time. As a counterpoint to his comparatively aristocratic roots, Danny is attracted to roughness and unpretentious wit. He made Hailey’s his local.
The night in question was Children’s Allowance night and the pub was having a karaoke special. Everyone was drinking cans. Alexander didn’t inquire as to the reason for cans precisely, but guessed it had something to do with sub-legal imports.
Aoife has a tall hatchet face with an imposing nose and big electric-red hair. Her brow is noble. Sometimes she looks beautiful, sometimes ugly. She is a woman in whom Alexander has zero sexual interest, regardless of how drunk he is. But Aoife that night appeared to find him attractive. She and Danny, together with a group from the house, were heavily intoxicated, bleary-eyed.
‘So this is your famous friend Alexander? You never told me he was so handsome.’
With some local tarts singing Stand By Your Man on the karaoke, Aoife sat heavily on Alexander’s lap, kissed his mouth with her beery lips, and ran her clumsy fingers through his newly cropped hair. Alexander was sober and too far behind them to be interested in catching up; besides, the next day was a working day. He bore her intrusions with embarrassment, trying to be a good sport. Danny looked on and laughed, glad that the two were having a good time. Later, Aoife was so drunk that she pissed herself. Thankfully, she was back in her own seat at this point. (The seating in Hailey’s Comet was upholstered in vinyl rather than cloth, perhaps as a result of previous similar occurrences.) Alexander noticed a streak of liquid running under his stool. With his eyes he followed it upstream across the tiled-lino floor till he came to the point where it was spilling vertically, splashing, from the nearest bank of seating, falling in parallel with a pair of legs in jeans and boots. She was sitting in a little pool. He looked up at her. She was drawing on a joint that was doing a round; and shitfaced though she was, in the moment when their eyes met, she was watching him shrewdly as he observed her. Nobody else had yet noticed the spillage.
‘I don’t give a shit,’ she said to him in a low angry voice. ‘They can go and fuck themselves.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t smoke if you’re pregnant,’ Karina snaps.
‘I don’t give a shit,’ says Aoife.
‘Well you should.’ Karina is surprisingly irritable.
‘Jesus, spare me. . . . Doesn’t anybody have any Class A drugs?’
‘If you don’t like what’s on offer, you can leave,’ Karina replies, but in retort rather than as an ultimatum.
The others are grinning discreetly at Aoife’s heartfelt plea for cocaine.
Alexander guesses in this moment that Karina and Paul don’t have any children yet because they haven’t been able to conceive, or Karina hasn’t been able to hold the conception.
Karina appears to be debating with herself whether or not to take the argument further. She stands at the far end of the table from Aoife, arms hanging long by her sides. Her lips twitch. Her eyes are shining with additional moisture, but she has it mostly in control, whatever it is that is bothering her.
‘Sit down,’ says Paul soothingly, rising from his seat. ‘I’ll dish up.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I have a good anecdote,’ offers Alexander.
‘Come on so, out with it,’ says Danny with a laugh.
Alexander is known in this group for his occasional stories, which are often nothing more than quirky details that have caught his attention and been subjected to the magnifying glass. When he relates these things, the laugh – if there is one – is usually focused more on him than on the subject-matter itself. He doesn’t mind Danny laughing at him for being odd. The pecking order between them has always been evident. Condescension from Paul used to enrage him, but gradually – as Paul’s greater success in life has unfolded – he has become more resigned to the slights.
Karina allows herself to sit. She and Aoife face each other from opposite ends of the table, Karina angry, Aoife indifferent, poker-faced.
‘I’ll help you serve dinner,’ Julia says to Paul, getting up. ‘It’ll give me a chance to nose around the kitchen.’
‘It’ll also give you a chance to escape Alexander’s anecdote,’ says Danny, which causes a ripple of amusement. Karina smiles slightly.
Paul and Julia leave the room. They can be heard laughing as they pass through the hall.
‘You know how my office is near the canal. There’s a big courtyard that’s surrounded on three sides by literally hundreds of windows. Anyhow, a few weeks ago a duck comes flying into the courtyard and lands on my outside windowsill, which is a pretty big coincidence.’
‘It’s not a coincidence at all,’ Danny says. ‘The duck had to land somewhere. I hope that’s not the punchline.’
‘There is no punchline. It’s not that kind of story. . . . The duck has an egg in his mouth. I sense that it’s a male duck. Anyhow, he has an egg in his mouth which I would say is a duck’s egg, judging by the size. He looks around to the left and the right, like somebody about to commit a crime. He lays the egg on the sill. . . . The coincidence here is that I spot him and see the whole thing. I would say that with ninety-nine per cent of the windows, there wouldn’t be anybody there, looking out, at that precise moment. They’d be on a call, looking at the PC, whatever. . . . He lays it down on the sill. He spears the shell with his beak, lifts the egg up into the air and opens his throat to swallow the contents. He could be drinking his own young here. And one of the striking things about it is how inefficient he is. Most of the yolk spills down onto his breast.’
Alexander demonstrates with his hands on his own breast how the contents got distributed.
‘Four out of ten,’ says Danny.
‘Five,’ says Karina, returning to herself.
‘It’s better than that,’ says Aoife, directing a line of smoke away from the table. This is already a gesture of conciliation.
‘Think Silence of the Lambs,’ says Evil Neville to Alexander, his diamond eyes twinkling.
Alexander is conducting the first of a set of individual interviews with his team members to get to the bottom of the astrology calls mystery. He now has additional information available to him: print-outs of the call records for each person’s phone, including his own, over the last three months. The records show an even distribution of calls to premium numbers, mostly at lunchtime.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. Are you saying that the person who is making the calls is also a serial killer, or a cannibal, or a cannibalistic serial killer?’
‘Boy, you should know your classics better. The villain in the movie isn’t Hannibal Lecter. It’s the guy who is killing the girls and skinning them in order to make a girl suit. What’s the pattern with his victims?’
‘Get to the point.’
‘The geographical distribution of the victims was random, deliberately random, to disguise t
he fact that the killer lived really close to his first victim. He coveted first what he saw every day, and later diversified geographically in order to confuse the authorities.’
‘You’re confusing the authorities,’ Alexander says.
‘From which phone was the first call made?’
Alexander leafs through the records in front of him. It strikes him for the first time that the calls began about a month or so after Neville himself took up the job. But the lists of calls show that the first call, in fact the first five or six, were made from Imelda O’Brien’s phone.
‘Are you saying that Imelda is making the calls?’
Neville smiles.
‘I wouldn’t want to incriminate a colleague.’
‘Have you seen her make the calls?’
‘I can’t say.’
George Lucey, Alexander’s boss, brusquely enters the room without knocking. He strides right up to the desk, standing so close to it – next to where Neville is sitting – that the wooden overlap at the edge presses into his thighs. George is not very good with personal space. When he comes up to people, he stands right next to them. Now, with the desk in the way, he is standing right next to that.
Alexander nods to Neville to leave.
‘Everything OK for today, Mr Vespucci?’ George asks Alexander. He means whether or not everything is in order for the Council overnight meeting that will begin later in Ashdale House in County Wicklow. The Council has an overnight session once or twice a year. The members arrive in the late afternoon, discuss matters of state for a couple of hours, break; then reconvene for a long dinner, followed by drinks in the bar well into the night. The next morning, they meet again for a plodding, hung over strategic think-in.
‘I don’t like that fellow,’ George adds in a confidential whisper once Neville has closed the door. George scrunches up his face and shakes his head as though he has just tasted something bitter, this to underline his dislike for Neville. The facial expression is so ridiculous that Alexander has to bite his inner cheek to keep himself from laughing.
Being Alexander Page 3
