by John Brady
But this was his city still. It was a steady gladness he felt when he met with more foreign faces in the streets this past while. The accents and the languages—Arabic the other day in Mary Street—and he walked closer to hear them. The olive and brown and coffee skins he wanted to look at closer; how dark a woman’s hair was, how white an eye set in that face. All somehow new, all beautiful, every day. Would they always be that exotic? He’d have to watch himself, too. The trouble he could get himself into for staring, asking questions. People took offence easily this day and age.
“Fact is,” Malone said, and wiped his lips. “You see, your missus and me, well we know what’s going on. You don’t. I mean, you weren’t born in Dublin. So it’s nobody’s fault, see?”
Minogue watched a man he guessed to be, wanted to be, from the Sudan arrive in the room. The height, he thought, the thin frame, a smile lingering somewhere on the face. He wanted to wave at him, to sit by him, to ask him stupid, probably offensive questions about his family, the heat there, goats. Yes, he was definitely losing it.
“Why don’t you bring up that topic with Jim Kilmartin at the next veteran’s session,” he said to Malone. The superior intelligence of the Dubs. The perpetual thickness of us culchies. The inferiority complex thing.
“Don’t tempt me. You don’t mess with a Dublin man.”
Minogue wanted to ask him about his brother.
“So,” Malone said. “Are you going to stick it out? The magic carpet route to Brussels, or wherever?”
“I don’t know, Minogue said. I just don’t.”
“I heard what happened, you know,” Malone said then.
For a moment, Minogue didn’t get it.
“She screwed up,” Malone said. “Hegarty, is it? She came the heavy. I don’t care what anyone says about women have to be brutes to keep up, all that. She was trying to impress you. Ever think that? The Murder Squad, all that glamour?”
“My arse and Katty Barry,” said Minogue, with little feeling.
“All I’m saying is, you shouldn’t go round carrying a frigging cross over it. Unless of course there’s a part of you likes that sort of thing.”
Minogue took a sip of lukewarm coffee and he eyed Malone.
“Suddenly you’re Freud today, is it,” he muttered.
“What, the chef fella on Sky Channel?”
Malone wiped the corner of his lips again, he crushed the serviette, and sat back. He yawned and stifled a belch.
It was all gone, that life, Minogue knew. He would not admit to anyone how much he missed it. The sessions they’d have after a case, he remembered, maybe the second best part of the job. Yes, closing time in Willie Ryan’s in the snug, Kilmartin in top form, the shirttail out on him and the tie half off. Leo the barman listening in, like a child watching giants. Hoey listening, looking like Buster Keaton for all the world. John Murtagh fighting with Kilmartin about how nurses could be more trouble than they were worth on a date. Plate-glass Sheehy and Jesus Farrell fighting over how horses were being drugged and passing tests still, and how could a man make a fair bet these days. Tommy Malone, a sideliner, strangely sagacious with the drink, asking the hard questions he’d be embarrassed to ask sober. How do you show people how to really notice things, not to just stagger around in the effing daze they call normal?
“Are you listening to me?”
Minogue’s hangover that hadn’t happened today might have been a cruel trick. A dullness behind his eyes was turning into the beginnings of a headache. He shifted his gaze from the clientele back to Malone.
“You’re not on a leper list, that I know of.”
“You checked, did you.”
“Yeah, I checked. I found out that what’s his face, the Fraud boss, bounced you.”
“Moriarty.”
“Yeah. He’s got cred, he does. He just had to contain the situation, according to his way. No hard feelings, is what it is. No shite on you. That’s the story I’m hearing.”
Malone began slowly shuffling plates and cups on the table.
“Gas,” he said. “Isn’t it? One day it’s you doing a check on me, see if I’m headed for the dock, and then it’s me sorting you out. Oh yes, thing’s are going well today.”
“Chasing frightened clerks and petty thieves is not what I’d call ‘going well.’”
“Oh here we go again,” said Malone. “What is it with you? Does everything have to be life and death, or something? What, on your knees in some ditch, swabbing and scrubbing and poking?”
“It’s not how it looks.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I haven’t heard that from you ever.”
“You mean to tell me that all that while in the Squad you were actually listening?”
“Who cares? It suits me the same way it suits you, to be taken for a gobshite sometimes.”
“Ah. The Dub, the Hard Man routine. A good performance, Tommy.”
A small, thin smile started around Malone’s mouth.
“Kilmartin never did get that, did he? He was always onstage himself, in anyhow. Like nobody knew.”
The thought of Kilmartin crying, thinking he could let it out alone, cut hard into Minogue.
The man from Sudan glanced over. Minogue looked away quickly. He’d been staring again.
Malone stirred the teapot. Minogue stole another look at the man from Sudan.
“The source of the Nile,” he murmured. Malone stopped stirring.
“Well yeah, if that’s the way you want to put it,” he said.
Malone looked at his watch.
“We’re squared up then,” he said. “I don’t have to watch me back. Right?”
“Ruoyyggh,” said Minogue.
“Practise that more – no, wait. Don’t.”
Minogue sat in over the table.
“I want to talk to you about something,” he said. “Some official stuff, about drugs. Party drugs. Drugs going to kids at dances, that class of idea.”
“Is this about that girl they found dead out the south side?”
Minogue nodded.
“It looks like she took some kind of pill that was laced with something else.”
“‘Cut,’” said Malone. “Like, mixed in.”
“Adulterated, is it?”
“That shows up a lot,” Malone said. “Especially this last year or so. You’re talking about Ecstasy, are you? She was at a club, right?”
“She was. She got confused, panicky maybe. She made it a bit of the way home.”
“How’d she do that?”
“It seems like she tried to walk it. She ended up lying down for a rest, it looks like.”
“Well,” said Malone. “I can see that. Her judgement gone, that’s the story there.”
“What I’m wondering,” Minogue said, “is this. Can we go backwards from what they’re saying in the preliminary? The drug she got, if you follow me.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Maybe not, though. Look, it’s not that easy. Tell me a bit of what they’ve said so far from a PM.”
“Initials MDMA. Flour, would you believe—they think also.”
“Ouch. There’s nothing there that’ll point you to the one source. That I do know.”
“Go on.”
“Tell you what—you need a bit of background, don’t you? Come back up to the Fort a minute with me, I’ll give you a package. It’s an information thing they give you when you’re starting out in Central.”
The two detectives made their way up Grafton Street and headed out along by the College of Surgeons. Minogue listened to Malone talk about amateurs getting into the manufacture; a lab started in a place near Kildare town but the word had gotten out somehow and it turned out a no show, except for recovery of materials and that; continental connections, of course. Holland was big.
They found no way but to wade through a tribe of Spanish students coming at them by the traffic lights.
“The ingredients?”
“That’s it,” Malone said. “A lot of them are explosive, you
know. Being made, I mean. The chemicals, like?”
“Volatile.”
“That’s right. I saw a video of fellas going into a lab with bomb shields and suits. Germany, it was. It took them three days to get the stuff out.”
A tour bus now, the older double-deckers with the roof peeled off, came by. Sardine tins, Minogue always thought of and knew it wasn’t fair. Once he thought of Magritte’s people floating, drifting off the bus into the louring sky over Dublin. There’d be rain before the morning was out.
“It’s complicated,” Minogue said.
“Well yeah, sure. But it’s not Einstein territory, you know. There are regulars. Well there were.”
They waited for the bus to turn onto the Green. A woman with very big teeth waved shyly from the top deck. Indianapolis, Minogue thought, for lack of a longer word. Polyester nation too, by the look of her. He felt ashamed of his disdain. The guide’s voice barely made it over the noise of the traffic, something about coming up to the College of Surgeons, site of resistance during the Easter Rising. He waved back.
They crossed to the Green and sidestepped the crowds under the memorial arch. There were couples lolling on the grass everywhere, two with dogs. Malone sniffed the air and glanced at Minogue. Any one of a dozen couples could be smoking the dope here. The path ahead went arrow straight to the gate out to Harcourt Street. Even with an overcast sky, the thick foliage overhead carved light and shade on the path.
“I’ll tell you something now and keep this under your hat,” Malone said when the crowds were behind them. “Lately, I’m hearing a rumour that the higher-ups think there’s someone on the inside who’s feeding out just enough little scraps of info to gougers involved in the trade.”
He rubbed his thumb against his fingers, gave Minogue a knowing look.
“In your mob?” Minogue asked.
“Dunno. But it’s someone somewhere who has access. Not just in Drug Squad Central, but in other stuff. There’s a big undercover thing going on . . . that we’re not supposed to know about it. The Internals?”
He glanced over at Minogue.
“Well, there’s millions, what am I saying, tens of millions involved. I’m not joking. And there’s plenty of sharks and bigger sharks eyeing it.”
“Like who?” asked Minogue.
“Well, there you are,” Malone said, looking over his shoulder into a dense thicket of holly near the Yeats monument. “What can I say? That’s the limit for me.”
“Okay,” said Minogue. “But the girl, you know. Her family—”
“—Oh listen to you. Look, amn’t I telling you? This isn’t snakes and ladders. You don’t just walk down the path from the pills to the bad guys.”
Minogue had thought of Colm Kenny a few times on the drive into town. The people who gave it to her had murdered her.
“Sure who am I talking to?” Malone said, with that flick of the head that Minogue recognized was Malone’s way of closing the show because gobshites had arrived.
“I don’t follow you, Tommy. I’m nobody in this. Pure ignorant.”
“Not for long, pal. You’re headed for Serious Crime sometime, aren’t you? Well go to the door that says Drug and Crime Syndicates first. Maybe it says Kingpins and Big Time frigging Mobsters. Seriously: talk it up with Criminal Assets. They’re the ones who do a lot of the poking. Remember how they got Al Capone?”
They reached the gate that faced onto Harcourt Street. Minogue thought about stopping in at Kennedy’s for a little present for Iseult: a few brushes maybe, or that sort of thing. Daithi, well he’d drop into Conradh na Gaeilge a few doors up and get a few postcards in Irish? Lame, but Katy had bought two bumper stickers in Irish there.
Malone glared at a van driver who ran the amber as it turned red. They gained the far footpath, Minogue searching for telltale drops of rain, thinking of the sunroof, the smoke that came from the exhaust now.
“Come on up for a minute in anyhow,” Malone said as they rounded the curve on Harcourt Street and came in sight of CDU. “I’ll give you the whatchyoumacallit. Give you a bit of an edumacation in this.”
“Tommy.”
“What?”
“Who’s at the head of all this?”
“The head of all what?”
“The drugs business here.”
Malone gave him a blank look, and then fixed his eyes on the gateposts and the barrier in front of the checkpoint.
“Like, who’d be at the top?”
Malone faced him.
“Listen to me. You might land a dealer. Fair play to you. I’m willing to bet you a fiver right here and now that he’d be a scut, a small-time shite who’s probably on the needle himself. He’ll be a let-down because you’ll see you’re dealing with a stupid little bastard. The problem starts when you realize that he’s not that stupid that he wants to cough up anything that would lead you to the big boys. He knows he’d last about one and a half minutes in any jail in Ireland.”
“Is there a witness protection thing?”
Malone’s frown turned to a pitying look.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” he said. “But remember, there’s going to come a time when you’re going to have to say something to yourself, and it’s this: the girl wasn’t forced to swallow them. You know?”
“You said sharks and plenty of them.”
Malone looked beyond Minogue at the traffic speeding down toward the Green.
“Well, we know that there’s fellas from the North have moved in.”
“Weren’t they always in there somewhere?”
“Course they were, but the ‘movement’ didn’t like it. Officially. Drugs, especially the hard drugs, was bad juju, according to them. You know about kneecapping dealers and the like as much as I do. But that’s changed.”
“How?”
“Well. It used to be the thing hereabouts, that some of the gougers here could call in a favour, say, from fellas who were in with the IRA. There was INLA too. They had the hardware and the rep, right. So, they sort of hired fellas on a one-off job basis.”
“Just as a threat, you mean? For the protection rackets?”
Malone looked back at the Inspector for a moment.
“Well, what do you call the two Albanians, the two Albanians who are turning out to be someone else’s, the other day?”
Minogue studied the haircut behind Malone’s ear for a moment.
“That’s part of it?”
“For damned sure it is. My money is on the fellas from up in the North.”
“Can you link them?”
Malone made a frown.
“What do you think.”
He cleared his throat and spat an expert, compact gob halfway into the street.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “Like I was saying, it’s complicated.”
Malone had his card out now. Minogue didn’t know what he wanted to ask yet. The Guard at the barrier gave him the nod but looked closer at Minogue’s photocard.
“He’s game ball, Larry,” Malone called out, already making for the door. He’s the coach for the ladies’ snooker team here.
“A right go-boy you’re teamed up with,” the Guard said to Minogue. “The language I do hear out of him. Fierce.”
“They shouldn’t be giving jobs to the Dublin crowd,” said Minogue.
“Only the dacent farmers’ sons. A good Corkonian is all we need.”
He returned the wink and hurried after Malone, all the while wondering why his heart had suddenly lightened. He wondered also how he knew that today—and soon—he’d be tearing up the latest version of his letter of resignation.
Credit Cards on the Brain
Quinn was sweating even more by the time he got through Smithfield. He’d gone to all the vegetable and fruit dealers he knew that Canning liked to hang around. It was from the old days, Canning had told him. He’d shifted stuff off the containers and the boats there, done his driving lorries all over the country half-locked and mostly enjoying it. The s
lap and tickle shops down near the Four Courts, knocking shops where he’d seen a High Court judge sneaking in one day—and had turned that into a bent court case that nobody knew about.
Quinn’s armpits prickled with the heat. He felt another bead roll down the small of his back. He had started to take off the jacket once, but had changed his mind. He couldn’t get the picture out of his head of the damned gun falling onto the footpath and going off. He sat on the cement block near a closed loading dock and watched the entrance to the market. The smell of rotting fruit he didn’t mind at all. Some faces he still knew. He returned some howiyas with nods.
There was no sign of Canning anywhere. He took out his phone and tried Canning’s number again. Same. Quinn didn’t let himself think any further than what he thought when he started out this morning: Beans Canning was just giving him grief, rubbing his nose in it. Like a child, he was, annoyed he wasn’t getting what he wanted so the bastard sulks. More than once Quinn thought of Canning sitting in a pub all day or playing cards like they used to down at Kelly’s in the North Strand.
He stood up and headed back toward Capel Street. The doors of the pubs were open. He still remembered the first times he’d gone into the pubs here, way underage, nod-and-wink then. The cool, dim inside, the malty smell of spilled stout.
There was nothing he could do. No-thing. He had to sit tight and wait and get straightened out. Change the message on the answering machine at the office and phone Canning every once in a while. Have a shower. God knows, even a snooze. He could phone Grogan, that’s what he could do. Maybe it was time to back away from things a bit, let things settle here. He was getting infected, that was it, he thought suddenly. They were mad, and they’d make him mad too—the paranoid carry-on, the need they had for violence.
He stopped in the shade of a cloth wholesaler that he’d never seen open, and studied the grime built up behind the mesh on the windows. Now why couldn’t he do that; buy and sell places like this and make money that way, instead of trying to keep it together here with Beans and that gang from Belfast. Grogan could see daylight up there: he’d be able to understand things from this end. He thought about the way Grogan had talked about his son those times. Everyone had feelings, for God’s sakes.
