City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  But he speaks to the girls like he is interested in what they have to say, a facility their parents don’t always have the time or energy to maintain, and he remembers to distinguish between them: that Aoife hates to be teased, for example, whereas Ciara adores it; or that Aoife loves to run and swim, whereas Ciara prefers to sit for hours on end, drawing and listening to music and dreaming. And he never says how was school or are you looking forward to your holidays; instead he comes armed with things to tell them, funny or scary stories or news about comic books and new movies, as if they are people in their own right and he feels he should be interesting to them. As a result, they genuinely like him in a way that has taken them all by surprise, particularly as Aoife was in the throes of a full-fledged love affair with her dad and had initially felt her loyalty to Kevin was incompatible with anything other than hostility toward Ed. This faltered because Aoife doesn’t have a talent for hostility, because Kevin was very laid-back about the whole thing, and seemed to like Ed (most men did, Anne had noticed, apart, she supposed, from the ones who were trying to kill him) and because Ed knows how to pay people—women and little women—attention in a way that doesn’t seem—hell, that probably isn’t—self-serving. And it’s very difficult not to respond to that.

  Now when he visits and the girls are still up, or if they’re around at weekends, they run to him before she can get anywhere near, and scream and hug him, and she finds herself having to turn away. It’s hard not to feel excited by that; equally, it’s impossible not to feel anxious. She knows Ed’s daughter died when she was almost two years old; she would be Ciara’s age now, he had told her. She doesn’t know what to make of that, doesn’t want to talk about it (nor does he), but she thinks about it a lot, and sometimes she sees something in his face when he’s with the girls, an expression of such intense, aching sadness that it’s impossible not to feel for him.

  And yet at a certain level, she doesn’t give a damn about how he gets on with anyone but her. Yes, she feels convulsed by occasional surges of the Where Are We Going With This pheromone, but that is as if to say, even if she has no interest whatever in watching Desperate Housewives, she feels on some level that she is obligated; in other words, she’s a woman, and occasionally she feels a compulsion to corner a man and emotionally blackmail him into making promises neither truly believes will bring them happiness. She succumbed to that urge once; never again. Now she is a divorced woman who doesn’t want any more children and who has a reliable father for those she has. And what she missed, more than anything, was what she has now: a man she is powerfully attracted to but doesn’t know, perhaps can never know completely. A man, if she is being honest with herself, with more than a hint of danger about him. Not violence, not roughness, just the sense that he cannot let himself be contained. Her twenties had been spent in thrall to any number of men, boys in truth, who were far too dangerous: too much adrenaline got to be as enervating as too little. One ended up in jail, and one was dead; eventually, they’d all been dangerous, but fools with it, and none had been kind or tender enough. She supposes it had something to do with her father dying when she was in her teens: instead of looking for security, she had wanted the opposite: a succession of wild, sexy, reckless boys to prove over and over again that there was no such thing as happy ever after. And now, after a marriage that proved the same thing in a more protracted and painful way, but that has left her relatively secure, at least financially, she is more than ready for the grown-up version.

  Maybe Ed saw that in her, a certain kind of hunger, a certain kind of damage. It hasn’t been easy since they met: not alone had he had to sift through the Fogarty family entrails to find her father’s murderer, he felt implicated in the subsequent suicide of her sister, Margaret. She told him it wasn’t his fault, that if anyone was to blame, it was Anne for not simply letting the whole thing rest. Would she have done it all again if she had known in advance what it would lead to? But if she hadn’t done it, she wouldn’t have met Ed Loy, wouldn’t have this voice in her head, this excruciating pain in her heart, this sense in her fortieth year of having been brought back to full, vivid life in all its stupid, sweet, throat-aching intensity. Would she have traded her sister’s life for that? The older she gets, the fewer questions she wants to ask. She is afraid of what the answers might be.

  She is afraid for Ed, too, and not just that he will one day take a beating he could not come back from, although that is not a minor concern: the state of his poor head after his run-ins with Jack Cullen’s gang was like something from a David Cronenberg movie, one of the early ones with rubbish special effects. But more generally, she worries about Ed’s relationship with booze. Not that he drinks too much, although he certainly drinks a lot. Anne still makes this distinction, which would probably make her look like someone who drank way too much to those who don’t think there’s a distinction worthy of the name. Americans, in other words. Maybe she does drink a lot. She doesn’t drink as much as she wants to, but that’s only because she has to get two girls to school every morning and get herself to work, and that’s difficult enough without a hangover.

  But she likes drinking, and she likes drinkers, and she is uneasy that Ed has stopped drinking, as she sees it, because he is trying to accommodate himself to a version of her that she doesn’t want to acknowledge: in brief, the suburban housewife, the little woman, ever vigilant for signs of excess testosterone and wayward behavior in her male. He isn’t a drunk. His drinking hasn’t shown in his face or in his physique, it doesn’t make him aggressive or angry or sloppy, at least, not with her. On the contrary, it loosens his tongue, and lightens his mood, and makes him fun to be around. As far as she is concerned, it isn’t a problem. Worse, there’s a sense that, in not drinking, he is somehow craving her approval, even if he isn’t conscious of it. She doesn’t want Ed Loy to need her approval. By the time a relationship gets to that level of weakness and dependency, it’s probably fucked anyway; certainly, the best of the fucking has gone out of it. She’d rather see him less often but more intensely than have him popping in during the week, determinedly sober and not quite himself. She wasn’t going to lay down the law: if he thought his drinking had become a problem, that was up to him. But she was going to make it clear that it was far from being a problem for her. Not only did she not want to marry the man today, she didn’t want to change his ways tomorrow.

  She hopes she can avoid the subject altogether, though. And if half what she has heard about Ed and Jack Donovan is true, chances are Ed is in the jigs somewhere right now, or in an early house, or in some bleary-eyed state of never again, never again. She likes him like that. Maybe she’ll meet him for lunch back at hers, if he has the time, make it clear to him that he doesn’t have to fit into what he imagines is her timetable, or become the person he thinks she wants him to be, that that is exactly what she doesn’t want. She sends him a text in the spirit of the one he had sent her last night. She can remind him in person that he promised to bring her onto Jack Donovan’s Nighttown set, and meet whoever was working that day—as far as she can work out, every Irish actor she’s ever heard of is in the movie, and while she isn’t exactly a starstruck teen, it would beat the hell out of the school run, not to mention commiserating with Southside ladies over the seemingly terminal demise of Dublin, the former gold-rush town.

  Geri Foster appears in her front window and looks out. Anne is officially late. She gathers her things together, gets out of the car and walks up the driveway. After all, who knows what the future will bring? Miracles might happen yet. It could only be a matter of time before someone plucked up the courage and decided to hell with the expense and the social disgrace, there was nothing for it but to do up the living room.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jack’s car drops me off in Holles Street, where I have an apartment on the third floor of an eighteenth-century house across the road from the National Maternity Hospital. I consider going to bed, but the swim has invigorated me, and in any case, I’m not going to b
e shamed by Jack Donovan: if he can follow a night’s drinking with a day’s work, so can I. I collect the papers and some eggs from the newsagent on Grand Canal Street. As I open the door to my building, three highly excited young children run squealing up the steps of the NMH, followed by what looks like their (no less excited) grandmother, while a glassy-eyed man in his thirties unloads a baby seat from an SUV. I have whiled away hours at my window watching the repetitious, endlessly enthralling drama unfold, day after day: the mothers exhausted and overwhelmed, the fathers proud and scared, the grandparents swaggering or blasé, the siblings excited and jealous; and then the notable exceptions in each category: the unaffectionate, the indifferent, the resigned and the bored; meanwhile swarming across the stage like jesters and like fools, the smokers: the boyfriends and uncles and sisters, but also in their peach and fuchsia, in their leopard skin and polka dot, ladies and gentlemen, in all weathers, on the steps and on the street and in the wheelchair entrance, the smoking mothers, seeking precious refuge from their infants in the slow, fatal kiss of a cigarette.

  After a bout of bronchitis, at the urging of a doctor who told me if I didn’t, I was going to die, I stopped smoking, but every day, the changing faces of these ridiculous women make me crave anew the stupid release tobacco brings. Tommy says it’s the puritan and the scold in me, that I just love to torture myself, but then Tommy also accuses me of being broody for paying the NMH any attention at all. I don’t know how to answer that. Maybe I am broody. Is that a sin? It’s evidently a hanging matter in Tommy’s book. But then, it’s easy for him to say: he has a daughter, Naomi, seventeen she must be now. He has no need to brood.

  There’s nothing like a swim to work up an appetite. In the kitchen, I fill the moka with water and espresso and screw it tight, and while it’s on the heat, I break some eggs and scramble them in olive oil and mix some chives through and put them on a plate with a few slices of smoked salmon. It’s an indulgent breakfast, but the way I work, I can’t always depend on eating lunch. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

  The papers are full of Nighttown-related stories, as they have been since news that the film would shoot in Dublin was announced. In an economy not just reeling from the worldwide recession but sucker-punched to its knees by the Great Celtic Tiger Property Bubble, a hubris-to-nemesis saga that has yet to run its course (I bought this apartment eighteen months ago at pretty much the top of the market, so the only thing in doubt is not whether it’s now worth less than I paid for it, but by how much), the decision to film here was greeted as a vote of confidence, an omen signaling even better things to come and, at some hysterical level it seemed, proof that if Hollywood still loved us, we, the Irish, were still intrinsically lovable, the infants of the Western world, always landing on our feet no matter what manner of scrape we find ourselves in. The Irish Times ran a piece on the business page about tax breaks for film investment, and how the regulations here were not now as competitive as they were in the UK, and that certainly the costs were far greater than they would have been in Eastern Europe. The article concluded that Jack and in particular his producer, Maurice Faye, deserved credit for insisting that the movie be shot here, and Maurice was quoted saying something suitably flag-waving in which the word brand—as in, the Jack Donovan Brand, the James Joyce Brand, the Birth of a Nation Brand and the Ireland Inc. Brand—featured heavily. Which is I guess how film producers speak these days.

  Nighttown was manna for the tabloids, of course, since the action takes place almost entirely in 1920s Dublin brothels, and therefore features any number of actresses wearing vintage lingerie, and often not much of that. The film’s publicity office had initially refused to issue any “official” stills, but there were so many leaked shots from the set, which in any case was effectively a terrace of eighteenth-century houses near Mountjoy Square and therefore, given the less than salubrious nature of the area, impossible to keep entirely secure, and so many fetching extras only too happy to pose for the press at the drop of a hat, that a deal was worked out: in return for a small number of sanctioned photographs of the leading players, the tabloids agreed to limit their attentions to strictly arranged press calls. Of course, this was inevitably a deal more honored in the breach than in the observance, and as a result, the papers thought all their Christmases had come at once. The shots in general were not difficult on the eye, but I examine them with particular attention this morning until I find what I’m looking for: in the corner of an ensemble shot in what presumably is some kind of waiting or anteroom, three women with long black hair and deep blue eyes sit together, limbs interwoven, a three-headed entity. I thought of what Conor Rowan, Jack’s first AD, had said about the missing extra, Nora Mannion: that Jack had wanted to use her with two other women of similar coloring. I couldn’t tell which was Nora, and the shot was blurry, but I was struck by how closely each of the three Graces, or Fates, or Furies, resembled Jack’s PA and girlfriend, Madeline King.

  The other aspect of the newspapers in which I take an interest is the coverage of drug dealer and organized criminal Podge Halligan’s appeal against his sentence for manslaughter. I have known the Halligans all my life, back from the time when they were disorganized criminals, you might say.

  Podge Halligan is the most unpredictable of the Halligan gang, volatile and violent and quite possibly insane. The last time I was in his company, he pounded my head to a bloody mess and tried to finish me off with a scythe. He raped Tommy Owens, then told him it was “because he liked him.” His brothers, Leo and George, were almost certainly relieved when Podge pleaded guilty, at their insistence, to the manslaughter of a drug-addicted county councillor for whom he had cooked up a hot shot. Since then, George, who among the brothers bears the closest resemblance to a normal human being, or at least, can give the most skillful impersonation of one, has successfully laundered most of his criminal wealth through a handful of small businesses and thence into a succession of property ventures. He has also become a noted racehorse owner. But the deal George made with the devil seems to have come unstuck in the past year or so.

  It’s true that the Criminal Assets Bureau, which can seize property and cash as the proceeds of crime if it cannot be accounted for legitimately, has never landed a glove on him. And he never borrowed large sums from the banks to finance his deals: he never needed to, such was his income from drug dealing. He has never had a difficulty with cash flow. No, George’s problem now is that his wealthy friends, from whom he received deposits for apartments and development land and so on, have lost vast sums of money in the crash, and are reluctant to proceed on deals for properties and sites whose values have plummeted since they were signed. And while in the past, the Halligans rarely needed to issue more than an irritated reminder to see the brisk payment of outstanding accounts, they’re now faced with employing more vivid forms of debt collection, involving the use, or so I understand, of carpenter’s tools and garden implements. This is not what George spent many years climbing the ladder of business respectability for, and at a stroke would disqualify him from rubbing shoulders with, if not quite the great and the good, certainly the rich and the powerful, in the owners and trainers’ ring at race meetings up and down the country. But dinars are dinars, and if the rumors were true that George had even been obliged to carry out some of the persuasion himself, well, maybe recession tears the motley off all our backs and reveals the essential man within: in George’s case, the fact that beneath the pinstripe suits and the contrast-collar shirts and the diamond-tip tie pins breathed a brutal, violent, ruthless thug was no great act of dramatic revelation, to me at least.

  Leo Halligan had got out of jail a couple of years back with the intention, if not of actually killing me, certainly of making me wish I was dead, as a way of avenging the part I had played in putting his brother behind bars. He ended up helping me out on a couple of cases and forming an alliance with my friend Tommy Owens that I viewed with unease and concern. Not so much for Leo, who is wild and cunning and capable
of looking after himself, but for Tommy, who is none of these things.

  But the prospect of Podge Halligan getting out of jail raised the stakes considerably; he was too wily to issue direct threats, but there was no doubt in my mind that once he was out, it would only be a matter of time. And with George having rediscovered his inner thug, and Leo always apt to value blood loyalty above any other consideration, I could not expect a friend of any kind at the Halligan court.

  By the time I get out of the shower, there are four messages on my phone. One is an extremely promising text from Anne Fogarty; the other three are voice mails from Madeline King, asking me to contact her as soon as possible in ascending degrees of urgency. I call her before I am dressed, but once I am dry.

  “Ed, fair play to you, I thought you’d crashed out after your night with Jack.”

  “I’m wide-awake. What’s up?”

  Madeline is attempting a bright Galway jauntiness that sounds forced.

  “Remember Nora Mannion yesterday?”

  “The extra that went missing? Sure. What, has she been found?”

  “No. What do you mean, ‘found’? Nothing like that.”

  “Nothing like what, Madeline? You left three messages in twenty minutes, that sounds like an emergency to me. What are we talking about?”

  There’s a pause, and then Madeline exhales audibly. It sounds like a lament.

  “It’s a total fucking shitstorm. Kate Coyle—another extra, she was part of the trio with Nora and Jenny Noble Conor Rowan mentioned last night, you know, the Fates or whatever—”