The Going Rate

by John Brady

  Sa Bhaile – My Place. Staff would speak Gaelic if requested, was the boast, or the “brand,” but diners could expect a savvy, cool dining experience in what had been a livery, a storehouse, a bicycle factory, and then lain abandoned for decades, and was now a backdrop for celebrity snapshots. The lettering on the restaurant sign was harsh modern, doubtless intended as a statement to that effect.

  But he really should be thinking about his pitch, the three points, and no more. Three was a natural number for people to remember, a trinity, just like the old Irish proverbs. Breen sure as hell wasn’t one to take notes. He didn’t have to. The higher up in the firmament you were, the more causal things seemed to be. A whim, a mood, a coincidence, pure luck: they were the reigning deities in the world of film. The true talent had never been the actual writing.

  Fanning had been to book launches here. No-one he had met those times seemed to be interested in the fact that ten years ago this area was where you’d come to fence stuff, to rent a gun, to buy heroin.

  Oh oh: Breen had spotted him. He held up his hand, his fingers spread, and then detached the mobile slightly from his ear. He issued the smile and the eye-roll that Fanning had predicted, and went back to his call. Fanning had mustered a smile, and he slowly nodded his understanding.

  His chest felt overfilled. He took a few steps toward the door of the restaurant, and made a last effort to get his thoughts in order. With Breen you basically had one minute, and it had to be clear and simple, the less said the better. Breen wouldn’t admit to calling it a pitch, of course. It was always “a chat,” or a “bring me up to date.” He wanted to just gossip, or tell a joke, or drop names and tell anecdotes.

  Fanning let his breath out slowly and drew in another just the same. He was conscious of his smile, and maintaining it. Smiling alone, the act of it, made one relax, he had read.

  Breen knew what the business wanted, network or studio. For one thing, poverty in Ireland didn’t sell anymore. As a matter of fact, Ireland didn’t sell anymore. Anyway, as Fanning well knew, the whole business was full to the gills with talent and writers. A few of the younger ones were smart enough to latch on the foreigner thing, like that Mira’s Story, about the divorcee who emigrates to the wilds of Galway. Light, merry, conflict-of-cultures stuff. Throw in a woman’s empowerment, craggy Irish faces, bleak and rain-swollen bog, and the search-for-home stuff. It wasn’t hard, when you thought about it.

  Fanning strolled to the window display of a new decorative ironworks. A slideshow was projected onto a piece of glass just behind the window of the shop. He’d seen the stuff before, but it was still eye-catching. Pictures and movies seemed to float in the air, like holograms. Celtic designs twirled and shrank, and were morphed into door-knockers. Old photos of Victorian gaslamps dissolved into replicas in front of homes that looked Dublin-ish, or at least the U.K. A hotel balcony from a photo of Joycean Dublin gave way to an exact copy, mounted on a French window of a home with Killiney Bay in the background: “For your Juliet balcony.”

  The show began to loop yet again. Just before Fanning turned away, a logo caught his eye, and he stared more intently as it appeared and grew. It was the Magritte all right, Memory: the bloodied head, the stone. Sure enough, he saw it was Mick Lally’s outfit – doublin.com. Talk about coincidence.

  He hadn’t spoken to Lally in five years. Mick Lally, the great Bohemian, slagger and friend all through university and beyond, had gone into multimedia. Every time that Fanning had seen mention of Lally’s company, he was reminded of their endless arguments about Fassbinder or Antonioni and Foucault – everything and anything, for God’s sake. It was Lally who had been his partner in the first screenplay he’d ever done, made in pubs and flats, often stoned and more often half-drunk too.

  He turned away. Breen was standing in the window, waving, with that hang-dog look. He made a big issue of powering off his mobile, and winked. Fanning took in the shirt collar opened the regulation two buttons, the straining belt turning down on his hips. As he made his way over to the restaurant door, he tried harder to smile in return.

  Chapter 4

  TRAFFIC ON THE N11 WAS SLUGGISH, with a lot o odd, clumsy driving. To Minogue, it seemed as if every driver driving this main road south out of the city was clumsy or distracted today.

  Kilmartin eyed a Porsche passing another car with a few feet only to spare, and then racing toward the next back bumper.

  “That goddamned recession can’t come soon enough,” he said, mildly.

  Red lights dogged them past Foxrock. Things only got worse by Cabinteely, with traffic lights on the blink, and a flustered-looking Guard on point duty directing stop-and-go traffic. Gámóg, Minogue heard his friend whisper almost fondly when they got by at last.

  Kilmartin craned his neck to look up through the steeply raked windshield at the sky over South County Dublin.

  “A drop or two on the way,” he said. “A day for the old umbrella.”

  This made no sense to Minogue. All an umbrella would do for a man up on Calary Bog on a day like today would be to pitch him airborne, and to fling him to hell back down to the coast.

  They got a good stretch of open road, and were soon in sight of the roundabout at Shankill. Minogue drove hard through the curve. The Peugeot settled back on itself with ease on the far side.

  “A fair bit of go in it,” said Kilmartin. “For such a dainty little car.”

  He tried the radio then, but seemed to have little appetite for figuring out the buttons or the sophisticated display. He turned it off almost after a few moments.

  “It’s always that one on anyway,” he said. “She drives me up the walls with that voice of hers. A real bitch. Like a teacher I had back in the Primary.”

  Minogue eased up at seventy, and listened to the faint whirr of the tires and the wind rushing by. He pretended to check traffic in the mirror so he could steal an occasional glance at his passenger, the new James Aloysious Kilmartin, this familiar stranger with a beard, a suit, and an odd stillness about him. Minogue wanted to believe that any return of Kilmartin’s mocking ways was good news.

  Kilmartin had gone quiet since his suspension back in October. Persuaded to talk about anything in the news, he usually spoke in a tone of gentle contempt. Minogue missed Kilmartin the exultant cynic more than he would ever admit, even to himself.

  Kilmartin had lost weight – maybe too much. Could he have even shrunk a little? He seemed to be using air-quotes a lot, as though nothing was to be taken at face value anymore, and more than a few times, Minogue suspected that Kilmartin had a wandering head.

  There were too many topics of conversation out of the blue. Did Minogue know that Irish sailors had given Columbus the know-how to get across the Atlantic? Had he noticed the word scenario cropping up everywhere? Did he notice that no-one spoke in sentences any more? And what did Minogue know about the Culdees, the old Irish Christians who ignored Rome? Global warming, WiFi networks, the vomeronasal organ, J. Edgar Hoover’s belief that De Valera was a secret Jew?

  He and Kilmartin still went on the walks each week. They were on varying days: one up at Carrickologan, the other at Dunlaoghaire Pier, or Killiney Beach. The walks had begun as a gesture but they had passed quickly through routine, into habit, and they ended up as duty. Minogue was less than thrilled about his. His real walks – as distinct from strolls with Kathleen – had been in the spirit of Augustine, solitary and self-escaping. James Kilmartin was a ruiner of walks.

  But to his credit, Kilmartin had never been first to bring up mention of his travails. It had been Minogue who had worked up the nerve to ask him about Maura in the weeks and months after she had tried to kill herself. He had been met with an uneasy silence. The topic was a nogo area.

  Kilmartin didn’t join in the mischief and slagging at get-togethers in Clancy’s pub with the other veterans of the Murder Squad. Tommy Malone, their colleague from Murder Squad glory days didn’t give up trying, however. He offered Kilmartin openings galore, with talk of
culchies and cowshite and country music, all delivered in the disdainful nasal Dublin drawl that Kilmartin had tried to mimic. But these sterling efforts had done little to animate this new James Kilmartin who had emerged from the shambles of that night when everything had gone up in smoke on him: wife, job – Kilmartin’s whole life, pretty well.

  He seemed to have settled on renouncing things. The house that he and Maura had been so proud of was up for sale. His Audi was sold. No cigars. He took only the occasional drink, and rarely ate a meal in a restaurant. Though he now rented a boxy apartment near Thomas Street, he actually spent a lot of time on the family farm in Mayo. That was where his older brother Sean, gone very bad with the arthritis, was avoiding making decisions about the future, Kilmartin told Minogue. None of his brood wanted to make a go of the farm, apparently.

  Kilmartin’s time there in boggy, wild and wet Mayo were more in the nature of dude ranching, he told Minogue. Bringing in the cows, driving the tractor; fixing drainage in the same boggy fields he had worked decades before; repairing sheds, the barn. Biding his time.

  One evening, he listed his foods for Minogue. It was as though they were a guide to the New James Kilmartin: cabbage for the dinner – spuds of course; porridge every day; fish on Friday. Evenings on the farm meant sitting by the fire, reading the paper or the odd bit of television. No satellite tolerated, no sirree. A game of cards with the neighbours, or he’d try reading books he wished he had read years ago. A bit of yoga too, imagine that. He was trying to improve himself, he told Minogue, filling in gaps, so to speak.

  Kathleen Minogue had spotted Kilmartin early in the New Year, looking through the self-help section in a Dublin bookshop. She swore that she had seen earphones and the tell-tale white wire of an iPod on him too. Minogue felt a strange embarrassment and even pity when he had heard this.

  For Minogue’s part, he kept track of the progress of the internal investigation into the shennigans at the Kilmartins’ house that night. The Ombudsman’s Office had been up and running nearly two years now, but it was still the Commissioner who had the final say in discipline.

  Minogue had now been interviewed three times about that night at Kilmartin’s – or as Plate Glass Sheehy had whispered in his ear one evening at Clancy’s pub, in a parody of a come-all-ye that Kilmartin would have appreciated in better times, “The Night Before Jimmy Was Stretched.” Well, nearly stretched.

  The interviews had been low-key, and terribly polite all the way. Two of the “chats” had been with that reed-thin sergeant, Feeney; Feeney of the strangely white teeth and peppermint breath, Feeney with the skin tight over his forehead, a man who seemed to be perpetually straining, or holding back some great revelation, or fury.

  The same Feeney had a soft manner that Minogue didn’t trust one iota. There had been a civil servant there at the second meeting, a woman from Justice who liaised with the Director of Public Prosecutions. Minogue remembered she wore those small and severe oblong glasses that were the style everywhere now. The suspicion, maybe even the assumption, that a friend of Jim Kilmartin’s like Minogue had to have been privy to Kilmartin’s doings sat like another party in the room. It was hardly news that Coopers looked after one another, was it.

  Several fragments of the conversation had lodged in Minogue’s mind, and he had replayed them over and over again since.

  “You and Superintendent Kilmartin are friends for some time.”

  “That we are.”

  “Working together for many years, I believe.”

  “A good long while, yes.”

  And on it had gone, with Feeney making observations more than asking questions. All very mild and civil, like a chess game. Minogue knew that a lot of it was for the benefit of the civil servant. She’d had to report to her department and minister, and so he had resolved not to react strongly to anything Feeney might say or insinuate. He had nevertheless prepared an aggressive statement, and he often itched to pull the pin on it.

  Even at the time, he was glad that his chance never came, and more pleased yet when he got out of the meeting. He was nevertheless dismayed that he had been unable to divine: whether anyone clearly believed a) Kilmartin had been dirty, or b) had been in cahoots with his wife when she was having her odd phone conversations – very, very odd indeed – with the head of a Dublin crime family.

  It wasn’t so much a shunning of Kilmartin that Minogue had observed since that night. It was noticing how few of Kilmartin’s contacts in the Guards had made a point of meeting Kilmartin face-to-face, or showing up at any of the sessions in Clancy’s.

  Well who could blame them, Kilmartin had quietly explained to Minogue. They probably thought he was gone off the deep end. Or maybe being seen with him might affect their careers. Kilmartin had chuckled to himself then, Minogue recalled. Career, Kilmartin had mused wryly later on, and raised a smile. He had turned the word from a noun back into a verb, hadn’t he?

  The point was, Kilmartin was owed, and that was that. Minogue wasn’t going to budge on that. It had been James Kilmartin who had set up the shaky Matthew Minogue in his Murder Squad years ago, when Minogue himself was damaged goods. Jittery, inert, and numbed by his own near-miss with death, Minogue was soon a probationer with Kilmartin’s Squad, and the years that followed had been Minogue’s best, working with Kilmartin, close to the dead.

  A few cars passed faster now as the city traffic fell away. Minogue again pretended to check his far mirror. He saw that Kilmartin had fallen asleep.

  Chapter 5

  COLM BREEN DID A LOT of his trademark slow nodding while Fanning talked. He kept his spoon going, carefully turning it on the tablecloth in a series of quarter rotations clockwise, stopping every now and then to rotate it back. Fanning refused to be distracted, or irritated, by it.

  Fanning was aware that he was nearing the end of his time.

  “It’s so intense,” he said. “Dublin, the real Dublin. No U2 concerts, no trendy apartments by the Liffey stuff. Life in the raw.”

  “Gritty, Dermot. That’s the key.”

  “Gritty doesn’t go near it. Think of it as a medieval city all over again.”

  Breen nodded again.

  “What I’m trying to get across,” Fanning went on, “is something beyond any genre, you know. That’s the thing about it being a medieval city.”

  “Right,” said Breen. “Not a lot of people would see that.”

  “Dublin itself is the story – now I know that sounds corny.”

  “No way. You’re not one of those fellas trying to rewrite Ulysses. Thank God.”

  “There’s the nobility, if you want to call them that, behind their railings and burglar alarms. Then there’s the ones with nothing, nothing to lose, I mean.”

  “‘Two Irelands,’” said Breen. “‘Two Dublins’?”

  “Exactly. It’s its own world, unto itself. But universal, like a city is a city.”

  “Well, they say it’s worse than we think it is. Worse than the Guards let on.”

  Fanning had expected this. He had his sombre tone ready.

  “That it definitely is, without a doubt. A senior Guard has told me exactly that.”

  He felt sure that this quiet affirmation had had an effect on Breen.

  “The underworld,” Breen murmured thoughtfully. He looked out the window.

  “Tell you something else,” said Fanning. “Going around with the guy I’m with, it’s pretty scary. It’s like a completely foreign city. And I know Dublin.”

  “Your guide to the underworld,” said Breen, another wry smile creeping into his fleshy face. “This Orpheus, let’s call him. Is he a big thing, what they say, ‘connected’?”

  “Well he talks a lot. Watches too many gangster flicks probably.”

  “Scarface? Tony Soprano?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Living the dream, is he.”

  “We could talk about the semiotics of it.”

  Breen actually smiled.

  “Jesus, Dermot. Spare me
. Remember all that crap?”

  It was another test, but Fanning had a lot of ground to give. He smiled, and he shrugged. Breen uncrossed his legs and sat up.

  “So what’s the going rate for this, em, tour of the underworld?”

  “The usual thirty pieces of silver.”

  Breen seemed to enjoy that.

  “But he gets me places,” Fanning went on. “Even if he is a name-dropper.”

  “Names?”

  “Not any big scandal, well not yet. ‘You’d be amazed who buys heroin in this city,’ he says. Things like that. And he talks about his sources in the Guards.”

  “Bent ones?”

  “Hasn’t said outright. He has a contact in the Drug Squad, the Central one.”

  Breen’s face became fixed in an expression of kind interest.

  “‘The Wire’ you’re talking about, maybe?” Fanning knew he had to be careful.

  “Possibly, sure. Why not. Let’s say it’s a starting point, but better.”

  “Take the bad guys’ side then? The O’Sopranos, maybe?”

  He almost forgot to acknowledge Breen’s quip.

  “It could go that way,” he said. “I mean it could be done. But the real star of the story? The real star is Dublin. Local. Vernacular. Right in your face.”

  Immediately, Fanning wished he hadn’t uttered those words.

  “I’m not saying it right, Colm – but you know what I mean. The Dublin we know, or at least we think we know. But in fact we don’t?”

  Breen’s brow creased.

  “But Dublin’s a destination now,” Fanning said. “We’re on the map, right? Boomtown, the Celtic Tiger, all that. I know it’s jaded by now – for us, like. But the U.S. viewers? No, they’re behind, obviously.”

  “No more colleens and shamrock, thank you very much. The Quiet Man done gone.”