The Death of an Irish Politician

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Shall we flatten him?” Liam asked his brother.

  “Not without some hot oil and a pan.”

  Plainly embarrassed, Eileen tried to smooth the tufts of her hair. She then wiped her hands on the apron several times.

  “Pour yourself a sup, girl,” said Murphy, “just in case they’ve come for you.”

  Reaching for Eileen’s hand, which was as rough as nailboard, McGarr said, “It’s not Eileen I’m after but some information about the schooner Virelay. It put in here about a year and a half ago.”

  Eileen flushed. She turned her head sharply to Murphy and said, “Oh, God, didn’t I know it. Didn’t I say it’d come to this. Don’t tell him, Spud. Don’t do it.” She pronounced his nickname “Shpood.”

  McGarr added, “Ovens was attacked Friday. Head split open.”

  “Muscha—say no more, no more,” the old woman muttered as though to herself. She poured a drink into a custard cup the like of which the others were using and tossed it back. She wiped her mouth with her apron.

  “I’m investigating only the attack.”

  “Where did it happen?” Murphy asked, reaching for his cup.

  “Killiney Bay.”

  “Then why come here?”

  “I think you know. We found gun oil on the cabin flooring of the boat. His charts show us he was headed here. I’m not interested in the whereabouts of whatever arms the boat might have carried, who handled them, or where they were stored, only in the person or persons who tried to kill Ovens. I’ve come here because we’ve been unable to learn much about the man. He stumps me. One of our few clues is the gun oil on the floor. Was Inishmore Virelay’s landfall?”

  “Not a word, not a word,” muttered Eileen.

  Murphy flicked a thumbnail up the head of a match, which burst into flame.

  “Ah, Spud boy, don’t. Don’t. He’ll clap you in the can as quick as you can say King Billy was a bloody bastard.”

  When all turned to her, she said defiantly, “Well, he was! Does that upset you? If it does, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  Murphy sighed, the smoke pouring through his nostrils. He took the pipe from his mouth. “I knew this would happen to them.”

  “Them?” McGarr asked.

  “Please, God, don’t let the foolish man say more.”

  “Ovens and his sweetheart. A fetching thing, she was. Ample.” He nudged Noreen’s elbow and chuckled.

  Noreen said, “I thought you liked trim women with lots of fire.”

  “I like women, woman. Give us a squeeze. I can tell you’re a girl with a good ear for a deserved compliment.” Murphy pulled Noreen to him and kissed her cheek.

  “Listen to him, would you? And why do you think we’ve been unmarried all these years? It’s barbarous the way he’ll chase a skirt. The merest flutter of a hem in the wind!”

  But then Murphy’s mood sobered. “Sure, there was something tragic about the two of them.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Lee was what he called her. It’s the American for Lea, she told me.”

  “Irish?”

  “I think so, but, you know, a city girl.”

  “Last name?”

  “I never caught it, but later I was told by a certain well-placed Dublin fellow I should feel lucky I didn’t. Somebody very, very important she’s connected with, you see.”

  “In what way?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “And do you have a hint who that might be?”

  “No. I figured it was better not to know, in case—and then here you’ve appeared and fortunately I’m unable to tell you more.”

  “Good boy, Spud. Good lad.” Eileen reached for the jug.

  “Tragic in what way was their relationship?” asked Noreen.

  “Love stories are dear to the hearts of all beautiful women.” Murphy took the opportunity to give Noreen another squeeze. “Sure, and I could tell you a barrel of them garnered from personal experience.”

  “Take my advice, y’ talk too much. And keep your bloody mashers to yourself. In that barrel of which he speaks,” Eileen confided to Noreen, “he plays the part of the worm, if you can understand me completely.” She tossed back her drink.

  Now the wind was howling through the chinks in the roof.

  “Ovens arrived here a confused man. He had not known what the cargo she had asked him to transport really was. Small arms—sure, he had agreed to carry that much. But—”

  Eileen moaned.

  “—jelly, rocket launchers, and the sort of antipersonnel mines the Geneva Convention should ban? He found them hidden under the guns when he tried to repair his busted motor.

  “And the girl got here the next day saying she knew nothing about it.” Murphy drew on the whiskey and looked out the side window where the sea was clapping into the wall and sending up spumes of spray that blew across the road. “Just two kids the Provos played for fools.” Murphy mused for a second. “Or were they? I wondered, to tell you the truth, if she wasn’t acting. Something about her was just not right. He landed. I radioed my contact. She got here within hours, as though she had been waiting in Galway City. He told her about his finding the other weapons. She seemed to share his dismay—”

  Eileen finished the story. “And three hours later, a boatload of gunmen arrived, stuck up half the town, and took everything off that boat including galley knives. When the Yank objected, two others held the man like so”—Eileen threw back her arms as though being held; suddenly she was very drunk—” and the chief bully boy beat him senseless.” She tossed her head from side to side. “And the little skirt as much as says, ‘Ah, what the hell. That’s the way it goes,’ like those brigands had stole a tub of tripes. She then pays me brother Mick a small fortune to haul her to Limerick, of all places. As far as I’m concerned, that’s where she belongs.”

  “Like she knew—” Murphy tried to say.

  “Like she knew what was up all along. There you have it, the unvarnished truth.”

  “Are they married?” Noreen asked.

  Again Eileen answered. “Perhaps, but not to each other. She had a ring mark on her fourth finger left hand that was bigger than the ring she wore. There’s certain of us what notices them things.” Without turning her head from McGarr, she directed her eyeballs, which now were as red as her face, to Murphy.

  “Now that was a detail I missed completely,” Murphy said sheepishly into his raised custard cup. He drank, then explained. “You see, Eily and me are getting married just as soon as my aged mother passes on. We’re waiting so we can have a home to call our own. Building materials is scarce in these parts, and what with the inflation and all—”

  “And she’s a relic, that bitch!” Eileen hollered. “I promise, I’ll do the hag in one of these days!” Murphy led her behind the curtain.

  As Noreen and McGarr stepped outside, they heard her say, “You’re a divil with the ladies, Murph boy. Give us a touch. Who knows—it’ll probably be all we’ll have to remember.”

  “Later, later,” Murphy said and returned to the O’Shaughnessy brothers to help dent the crock.

  The McGarrs walked arm and arm down the road directly into the blast off the water. The whiskey had made them warm enough to ignore the cold wind that thundered in their ears, tight enough to marvel at the cascading water. They tried to talk without success. This place was harsh, but so different from mild Dublin they loved it. Behind a low stone outcropping, a myriad of bright wild flowers thrived in patches of yellow and deep red.

  They had to spend the night in Eileen’s guest room, since the seas had risen too high for them to return to Galway. The room was on the second floor, its bed a deep valley that threw them together. Toward dawn, the weather broke and the sun rose so bright it woke them. Eileen was already up with hot tea, fried herring, scones, and marmalade. Over breakfast Spud Murphy tried to convince McGarr that he should join the IRA. It was his patriotic duty to the ideal of a thirty-two-county Republic such as what the martyrs,
“the poets and dreamers of the Easter Rising had envisioned.” McGarr told him he was neither a poet nor a dreamer, and the thought of becoming a martyr he found positively chilling. With that, Eileen broke out a small crock and they shared several libations.

  At the dock in Galway City, a Garda sergeant was waiting for McGarr with the message to call the Pierce Hotel in Naas and ask for the minister for justice. McGarr imagined Horace C. K. Hubbard had contacted his own well-placed friends.

  McGarr was wrong.

  From the moment he saw the minister standing at the hotel bar, he knew the request for this meeting was in some way extraordinary. A tall man whose paunch had fallen, David Horrigan grasped a whiskey in his right hand and stared into it as though trying to divine some mystery at the bottom of the glass. The minister, however, did not drink. And although the bar with its flagstone floor and shaded windows was cool, Horrigan’s brow was beaded with sweat. Because of the recent change in government ministers, McGarr didn’t know the man well and wondered why he was away from his office on a working day and why he had asked McGarr to meet him here, outside Dublin.

  Plainly, Horrigan hadn’t expected Noreen to be along and her presence irked him. His pleasantries seemed forced. At length, he asked her if he might have a word with McGarr alone, and leaving her to lunch in the dining room with the publican’s wife, whom Noreen knew from her days at University College, Dublin, the minister for justice and McGarr climbed a flight of stairs to his suite on the second floor, which Horrigan explained so: “Like you, Peter, I grew up in Dublin on Clanbrassil Street near the Four Courts. Like yours, my family was poor. I’ve been going through your dossier, which I took the liberty of lifting from the files a few moments after you left the Castle Saturday afternoon.”

  “Gerald told me everybody had left.” Horrigan’s office was not in Dublin Castle but on St. Stephen’s Green, and whereas the minister was responsible for the Garda, as a politician he did not normally have free access to their files.

  “I was hoping it would seem that way.” Horrigan was nervous, and his hand shook as he fit the door key into its lock. “Where was I?”

  “Hotel living.” McGarr was now on his toes in every sense. Seldom had he ever allowed a governmental officer of Horrigan’s rank to engage him in such familiar conversation. Much political in-fighting was transpiring in Dublin mostly because of the differing approaches to the trouble in the North. Horrigan had made no bones about his position: a united Ireland controlled in Dublin. He wanted England to purchase at market price the land and real property of any Scotch-Irishman who couldn’t live with a Dublin-based government, and then have England set up a program of resettlement back where Cromwell’s campaigners had come from, across the Irish Sea in Scotland and northern England. He wanted the Dublin government to repudiate the 1937 constitution that had declared a special relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and Ireland and had prohibited divorce and contraception. McGarr thought this an interesting but naïve plan, impracticable and designed only to put Horrigan in office. It had proved tremendously popular.

  Horrigan swung the door wide and McGarr stepped into a room appointed not in standard hotel gauche but rather a period setting that McGarr judged as accurate and tasteful as any of the mansions he had visited during his many burglary investigations. Most of the pieces were Chippendale originals. A finely detailed oriental rug with blue and green patterning on a beige background covered most of a parquet floor. The windows were French, specially constructed in the recent past. Brilliant linen drapes gathered the light from the courtyard. “My father was a farrier who worked for the Shelbourne Hotel whenever they had too much work for their own man to handle. I, being the oldest, was let out as a step-and-fetch-it, bootblack, you know what I mean.” Horrigan had opened a sideboard that contained a number of crystal decanters below. “And I said to myself that if some day I could afford it, neither house nor farm nor boat nor castle would be my abode. Nothing but a hotel for me with hot-and-cold running servants, a kitchen, bar, stables, and lots of company. And so here I am. Malt?”

  “Please.”

  Horrigan poured McGarr a generous drink and dropped the stopper back into the neck of the decanter.

  McGarr was trying to remember the details of this man’s life. His address in Dublin was the Shelbourne, in fact a suite of rooms on the top floor overlooking St. Stephen’s Green. He had made his money by slippery practices. As the government’s lawyer, he had negotiated with a cartel of international oil companies the establishment of a deep-water port in Bantry Bay that could accommodate the supertankers of the future. When the combine came to purchase land for their storage tanks and refinery, David Horrigan’s father, mother, sisters, and brothers just happened to be the new owners of every square foot of waterfront property along the projected site. Horrigan had resigned his post and had remained unavailable for comment for nearly ten years, long enough time, he must have felt, for his gains to have become legitimized. He surfaced as a major contributor to the coffers of the Fianna Fail resurgence.

  To the carping queries of a journalist during a television interview, Horrigan, a man with a lively intelligence, had explained his checkered career so: “And how did those other politicians, the ones with the English names we still kowtow to and let control disproportionate shares of the countryside, gather their fortunes? They made laws that declared them more equal, allowed them to steal us blind, and when there was nothing left they clapped us into a slavery more vicious and pervasive than that of Czarist Russia. Why? Because we were ‘barbarous,’ which meant we no longer owned anything. When I was growing up, their cry was no different. The LAW!, they shouted whenever any of us started agitating for a redistribution of the country’s resources. I decided I would study this law which had been so good to so few. What did I learn? That the law was the tool by which the name Horrigan could appear on the deeds of several thousand acres of Bantry Bay shoreland instead of the name Guinness or Ormond or Watson. I don’t like the way things are any more than other patriotic. Irishmen, but, since they are, then I must conform until I enjoy a position preeminent enough to allow me and my people—the ones from the Dublin gutters like me, the ones from the rustic poverty of the country like my wife’s people—to effect sweeping change in this country. It is to this end I am working.” That statement and his stand on the Northern Ireland question gave him a seat in the Dail. His contributions to the party gave him his cabinet post.

  Handing McGarr the drink, Horrigan scrutinized the detective in a way that made McGarr self-conscious. He was still in his boating garb. “You don’t know me,” Horrigan said, pacing in front of the mantel, on which the gold balls of an eight-day clock spun silent in a vacuum, “nor I you, outside of the bare details of our lives. It’s because of our backgrounds—Dublin, poverty, the law—that I chose to call you and not somebody from Internal Security or some other agency. What I’m going to put to you, you needn’t accept, since my request cannot be official.” Horrigan turned to McGarr suddenly. “In this I’m thinking of you. If I have to go, no reason I should take anybody with me, much less you, who haven’t an idea of what’s happened.” Greying hair curled onto his brow. His face was characteristically Irish: bulbous nose, puffy cheeks and jowls. He was not a handsome man. His dark blue pin-striped suit was expensive, but he appeared uncomfortable in it.

  He turned toward the window. “Sometimes I wonder how things happen and why so fast. It seems only weeks ago that I left school, got married, felt so young and enthusiastic. Now”—he let his narrow shoulders fall—“I feel so old.”

  “How old are you?” asked McGarr, somewhat embarrassed at this confessional monologue.

  “Forty-three.”

  He looked at least fifty.

  “I thought I saw things a little clearer than other people, you know, what was happening here in Ireland, what I should do to get ahead, how I could help myself and the country, the sort of family I wanted, the friends, the whole…works.” He let out a little
laugh. “You know, I was wrong. It made me happy thinking I knew, and in that way I deluded myself no less than the dreamer who crawls into the amber world of a porter bottle.” He moved to the sideboard and poured himself a whiskey.

  “Certainly that won’t help,” said McGarr. “Tell me why you’ve called me here.”

  “I’ve watched you work. You’re from Swift’s Dublin. That’s the sensibility I work in, but being a public man, I keep my kit bag of verbal palliatives close by.”

  McGarr shook his head. “I’m from McGarr’s Dublin.”

  “That’s what I mean, just what I mean!” Horrigan sat opposite McGarr in a wing-back chair that wrapped him in shadow. He took a sip of whiskey and shuddered as he swallowed. “We deal in the real, no—”

  “Bull shit,” said McGarr.

  “Exactly. Now, this is what has happened, why I called you here. Did you work on the Bombing Report?”

  McGarr nodded. He had headed the investigation, and he knew Horrigan knew that.

  “Then you know it blames the IRA, says it was a cheap political ploy. They had hoped to blame it on some one of the ‘loyal orders’ or some Protestant extremist group and thereby bring the fighting home to the Republic. They hoped to arouse public sentiment and support. Do you know my position?”

  “On the IRA?”

  Horrigan nodded.

  “Not in so many words.” The IRA was as complex an organization as could be devised by the Irish people, who are an enigma unto themselves, since, unlike the government, it claimed to represent their dreams as well as the most glorious moments of their past.

  Horrigan said, “I support them.”

  “All of them?” Some IRA elements were committed to urban terrorism.

  “All of them. The rhetoric means nothing to me, nor the violence. For every drop of British blood now being shed up there, they have sucked buckets of ours. People say, why those British colonists have been living in Ulster for three hundred years! That just goes to show how tight is the iron grip those patriots, who now call themselves Proves or Maoists or whatever, are trying to break. In 1916 the average Dubliner thought the show at the GPO was a bloody farce.”