Islandbridge

by Brady, John

  Kelly had written down the telephone number for the Garda member’s assistance line and had even phoned once. It was after a night shift and he remembered sitting in the driveway outside the house, with the rare sunny morning flooding through the car. He persuaded himself that what his ma had always said would come to be true, and that he wouldn’t have to sit there ever again looking at his own house and hold back his panic. Time, she’d say, it just takes time. Or maybe it was like O’Keefe had said: sometimes things just take care of themselves.

  October 28, 1983

  They buried Junior Rynn out of Raheny Church on a Friday morning. It was one day after Eimear’s birthday. Kelly parked out of the way, on a road behind the shops there. He had no umbrella, but the hood of his anorak soaked up enough of the steady drizzle. He bought the Racing Post and found a spot to stand in the bookie’s office across from the church where he could see out of the fogged and barred window onto the road.

  It struck him again that now he felt nothing, absolutely nothing. A thousand times in the past few days he had Junior Rynn being knifed, and shot, and slashed, and begging to be killed just to end his agony. In this endlessly revived play, Kelly poured acid on Junior Rynn’s face, burned him bit by bit, put him on broken glass and walked on him. Then he shot him again and again, starting methodically from the toes up, and waiting a minute while between each shot, aiming six inches higher than the last shot. His shin, his knee, his groin: all the while alive and conscious, and roaring.

  He had tried to find out more about what had happened to Rynn, but even O’Keefe had heard nothing more than the same rumour that Junior Rynn had tried to put one over on some people with connections to the IRA in the North. It was only speculation.

  The church car park filled steadily. The group of men near the door grew larger, and the cigarette smoke gathered above them more. A heavy-set man in a leather jacket turned his fat, bright-red face every now and then to spit. In the door of a church, Kelly thought, if that didn’t tell you something about this crew. He didn’t doubt there’d be some Guards around the funeral somewhere, and not just the traffic men on point duty. He looked for vans where there’d be cameras, but he couldn’t tell.

  Two older men came into the bookies and began watching the screen.

  “A big turnout,” said one to the other, and coughed.

  Kelly went out onto the footpath now. He stood by the hairdressers’ and lit a cigarette. Eimear had told him again last night that she hoped that’d be his last package, what with the baby on the way. He didn’t smoke in the house. It was temporary, he didn’t know why, he told her. It had been nine years since he’d smoked. He’d be off them soon, no bother.

  There was a light brown tinge to the cloud cover, and no sign of any change from the drizzle. It seemed to get in everywhere, no matter what you wore. Then, from the direction of the city centre, came the headlights of the funeral cortege. The hearse, an old American car, seemed to float in a watery gleam over the roadway in. The door to the hairdressers opened beside him, and a woman with a towel wrapped around her shoulders came out. He glanced at the wet curly hair, smelled burned hair from the dryers.

  “Is it starting,” she said. “God – there’s tons of flowers, look.”

  The hearse drew up close, and driver and the sidekick stared ahead under their brims. Behind came four other funeral cars, one completely loaded with flowers.

  Kelly thought of Junior Rynn lying in the coffin moving by a hundred feet from where he stood. If it was to be an open coffin at all, Rynn’s face would be plastered with makeup, or whatever they did in the funeral director’s. He’d be all dolled up in a suit too no doubt, and holding rosary beads, like was done for everyone nearly. These were the same hands that had held the pistol, flashing and bucking, blasting the life from those two men in the laneway.

  There were three Garda motorbikes. One of them was dismounted already and holding up the city-bound traffic. Kelly saw him wipe the beads of drizzle off his visor; and his white gloves raised and lowered sharply against the greys, chopping the air as he signalled. So a gangster gets the Guards to help with a funeral – no: but they did it for any funeral, any big funeral.

  Kelly watched the way the people outside the church turned to the arrival of the cars. Most blessed themselves. These people were blessing themselves for a killer, he thought, and they were passing condolences, some of them genuine. People who should and did know better were now sympathizing with the parents who’d raised a mad dog of a son, a man who’d only have gone on to worse if he’d lived.

  O’Keefe had heard from a detective that Junior Rynn had been taken out of a car as he was parking at a pub down the Naas Road. Rynn’s girlfriend told the police there had been three men dressed in balaclavas, and according to her, one of them spoke with a definite Northern accent. Kelly remembered O’Keefe raising an eyebrow and repeating the “definite.” He told him that his friend-of-a-friend detective said that the Northern bit was only a screen. The Guards were quietly working on an assumption it was a turf war in Dublin.

  The door of the bookies opened and the two men came out. As though it were a design laid on people everywhere, Kelly thought, they had to sidle over his way, to stand together in a group.

  “There they are,” said one.

  “God rest him,” said the woman of the interrupted hairdo. “The only son.”

  “Isn’t there another one?”

  “It’s a girl. There – she’s there. That’s her in the car, I think.”

  “She’s dug out of him, isn’t she?” said the woman. One of the men coughed several times.

  Kelly dropped his cigarette into a puddle. He watched the gaberdined men from Fanagan’s open umbrellas over the doors to the cars.

  “God forgive me.” He heard one of the men, the cougher, say. “But it’d put you in mind of that film.”

  “Look at all the stuff in the car. Flowers, wreaths, what have you. Jaysus, there’s hundreds of quid in it. Thousands, maybe!”

  “No wonder they call him the Godfather,” said the other. “But not to his face, bejases!”

  Kelly knew the cougher was angling his comments to draw him in.

  “The biggest one I ever seen, I’ll tell you that – no, wait. No that was only on the telly, the Bobby Sands one. Was that last year?”

  “It was two years back,” said the other. “Eighty-one.”

  “Well, you remember Dev’s funeral, don’t you?”

  “No. Why would I remember Devalera’s funeral?”

  “I’m only saying.”

  “I know. I’m only saying too, amn’t I.”

  They fell into a touchy silence then. Kelly watched the umbrellas seem to carry the emerging legs and trousers and black coats across the pavement to the church door. It was quite unbelievable, he decided, and most of all it was because it looked so normal. Here were the lugs and thugs and low-lifes, every variety of the scuts that Dublin produced so effortlessly, all pretending reverence here at a church they’d gladly rob or set fire to, if the humour took them.

  The cougher cleared his throat

  “Oh, I’d say you’d have to be counted today,” he said. “Put in an appearance, as they say. There’d be notes kept by some people, if you know what I mean. Both sides.”

  “You’re dead on there. There’s Rolo Murphy. He must be sixty now. Weren’t the Rynns and Rolo on the outs for years?”

  “I heard. But like you said. That’s all by-the-by now – look, that’s Yo-Yo Keogh, isn’t it . . .? It is. Look there he is, Jumbo Rynn. The father. God, but he looks shook.”

  Kelly watched Rynn shrug off the offer of an umbrella and glance at an outstretched hand before he turned to wait for the coffin. He pulled the drawstrings on his hood tighter under his chin.

  With the traffic stopped now, he heard the gurgle of rainwater from a drain, the grumbling transmission of the bus waiting for the Guard’s white glove. The only movement by the church now was the slow, silent work of one of Fanagan
’s men to draw the coffin out to the waiting men.

  Kelly watched them take the weight, saw the sways and bobs before they had their balance, the arms go out to the shoulder opposite.

  “By God, that crowd must have practised,” said one of the men. “They have the drill down pat.”

  Kelly’s stomach felt like it was welling up under his ribs. He smelled the cigarette off his own breath still. Soon the praying and the holy water and the incense would get going in the packed church. There’d be people Rynn paid to do all his dirty work, who bided their time in jail over the years knowing he kept a place for them, people who thought nothing of taking a drill to your knees or selling heroin to your daughter. But there’d hardly be one member of a family who had suffered because of the bastard, no one to stand up and tell the truth: The man in that coffin deserves to be there on account of what the bastard has done to people.

  “Ah well, we all get our turn, don’t we?”

  It was one of the men, Kelly realized. It was him they were talking to.

  “You’re right,” he said.

  “We’ll hardly be shuffling off with this kind of a classy effort though, hah?”

  Classy, Kelly thought. His arms tingled when he imagined grabbing this Dublin gouger beside him, and shoving him along with his mate into the window behind.

  He nodded, and watched the church door. The long strands of hair that Rynn had tried to keep over his baldy head were now sliding down with the drizzle. Mrs. Rynn, to judge by the cut of her, had appeared now, and she was in a bad way, hanging off other women. Kelly was pretty sure that one of them was the daughter. With her dark, bruised-looking eyes and the ruination all over her face, the mother looked so doped up that she wouldn’t see much beyond the tip of her nose.

  Then Kelly sneezed. He hadn’t felt it coming, and it wasn’t going to be the only one. He turned away and pulled down on the strings of his hood just as the second sneeze came. He searched around his pockets for hankies and found some, fairly mashed, but unused. The one he tried to separate and spread out on his hand escaped his fingers and fell to the wet cement. He took another, and wiped his nose, and then balled up the hankie and put it back in his pocket.

  When he let his eyes find the front of the church again, he froze. His blood began pounding in his ears. Slowly he let his eyes move to the trees and their sparse leaves to the side of the church car park. He did not want to make any sudden moves. He could see that Rynn had still not moved. He didn’t want to look at him to check he had stopped staring. Had it been the sudden movement when he sneezed, he wondered, or the clumsiness with the hanky that had drawn Rynn’s eye over here.

  The two men beside him were blathering again, something about the 2:30 race at Cheltenham. For a moment he let his gaze go back toward Rynn’s figure in the church door. Strangely, it was no surprise really, none at all, when he saw that Rynn was staring his way still.

  November 8, 1983

  He was a half an hour from the end of the shift, with more than half of the statement typed when the phone call came. Cullen, the new Guard, held up the receiver.

  “Something to do with a motorbike stolen?”

  Kelly looked at the night pressing in on the window and then made a face.

  “I don’t know now,” said Cullen. “But he sounds like he’s had a few.”

  Kelly Tippexed the misspelling in “altercation” and blew on it, before he reached for the extension. Again he tried to remember: there had been the crash over near that pub, what was it, Healey’s, but it was a van and a car.

  He checked the clock again and jabbed at the glowing button.

  “Garda Kelly?” he said.

  “Yes, Garda Kelly.”

  The voice was a man’s, a smoker’s wheeze layered on a weary, Dublin drawl.

  “Who is this?”

  “You don’t know me?”

  Kelly felt himself go still, balancing at the front of the chair. He dug his elbows into the desk.

  “Well? Open your mouth and say something.”

  “Yes.”

  He had almost made it, Kelly thought. In fifteen more minutes, he’d have been on his way home. A cup of tea, a bite of a sandwich, Eimear still awake maybe, after her twentieth trip to the toilet.

  He stared at his incident book splayed out on the desk in front of him: Rynn knew his shift tonight. He had probably picked this time, exactly. He looked around the station. Cullen was scribbling something in a notepad and then turning back to the typewriter. Being new, he took pains to get everything perfect in his reports, and even had a dictionary in his locker. Fahy, the duty sergeant, was on his phone extension, smiling lazily about something and murmuring every now and then.

  “Hey!”

  Rynn’s sudden growl startled Kelly.

  “Are you awake there?” Rynn growled. “I’m expecting more than a ‘yeah.’ Okay?”

  Kelly brought the phone to the near edge of his desk, and he turned aside.

  “What?”

  “What do you mean ‘what’?”

  “Well, I didn’t expect–”

  “–No, you didn’t expect. Of course you didn’t expect.”

  The words that cut off his were cut off in turn by a cough.

  “You think I’m blind, is it?” Rynn went on, hoarsely. “Is that what you think?”

  “Look,” Kelly began, but he lost track as the panic took hold.

  Rynn said nothing. Kelly’s nails dug harder into his palm.

  “I’m at work,” he said.

  “Well aren’t you great.”

  “I can– you can . . .”

  “Go on. What can you do? Or are you going to tell me what I can do?”

  “No. I meant now’s not a good time.”

  It might have been humour more than mockery that he heard in Rynn’s snort now.

  “It never is, is it? What do you want?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t want anything.”

  “I said: what do you want. What do you want from me? Or are you going to give me something, is that it? Jesus, wouldn’t that be something now.”

  “Nothing,” said Kelly. “I don’t want anything from you. I don’t.”

  “‘Sell’ then. What do you want to sell?”

  “No. That was never, I mean, that’d never happen.”

  “Listen to me, Kelly. Whatever you could offer me I wouldn’t want. Do you get that?”

  He wondered how well Rynn could hold his drink. Maybe it was some drug, some sedative, they’d put him on.

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s wrong. No, no it’s wrong. I’ll tell you what I want, yeah, I will. Are you listening?”

  He thought of Rynn’s grey face from the church door that morning last week. It was like a dead man’s really, the solid, squat bulk of him in a coat that could never suit him, and his whole body slack and sagging.

  “Tell me why you were there. That’s what I want. Tell me that.”

  Kelly’s hand reached for the button to drop the call.

  “Revenge, was it? To make sure, maybe?”

  “No.”

  “Did you want to see him? To put a curse on him, was it, you Garda bastard? Was it?”

  “No. I wouldn’t.”

  “You would,” said Rynn in a strangely calm voice. “You would if you could. Don’t you think you have me codded, not one bit. Did you go there just to laugh at me, because if you did, you have to answer for that. Yes, you do.”

  “That’s not it,” Kelly said. “No.”

  “I lose my own son? And the other one, you, got to walk away? Because I took a chance on you?”

  “No,” Kelly said. Rynn did not seem to have heard him.

  “So you can finish your little cop thing there, and go home and do the garden or something, or wash the bleeding car– Is that the way it is?”

  “I have a baby coming.”

  Immediately he heard his own words, Kelly recoiled.

  “What did you just say?”
<
br />   “No, nothing, I was thinking of something else.”

  “A baby, I heard you say baby.”

  “No. I meant something else. No.”

  In the quiet at Rynn’s end, Kelly imagined him pouring more whiskey.

  “He’s gone,” said Rynn. “But you’re not. You wanted to rub it in on me.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “You wanted your revenge. You wanted to get back at him, at me.”

  “I would never do that. I’m not that kind of person. I’m not.”

  Rynn didn’t speak for several moments.

  “You’re scared,” he murmured. “Aren’t you?”

  Kelly leaned further over the desk pressing his elbows down harder.

  “You are,” Rynn said. “And so you should be. I’ll tell you why. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You better be. ’Cause I do want something now. Oh yes I do. I never expected one thing out of you, not a thing. And I never said nothing to you after that. You got an envelope – and don’t say you didn’t – and your wedding, and your little house and what have you. But that wasn’t good enough for you, was it?”

  “I only went to– I was just curious,” Kelly said.

  “You were curious? Jesus.”

  “I don’t know why I went, I don’t. I really don’t. Look, I’ve been having problems ever since then. I mean, it’s been hard.”

  “Don’t you start telling me about hard times. My son’s dead.”

  “There’s things going on, stress, that sort of thing. I’ve been learning a bit. It’s the subconscious, I think.”

  “What in the name of Jesus are you on about? Are you mad, or something?”

  Kelly’s neck ached from the tension. He watched Cullen stretch again.

  “I’m not sleeping right,” he said. “So my thinking is off. That’s all it was. But I’ll be getting better. It was a mistake going, look, I don’t know why I went. It wasn’t what you think, what you said, I mean.”