The Going Rate

by John Brady

  “Listen. Have you ever stopped on any street here and just listened?”

  “Listened?”

  “I mean the languages. Arabic, I heard the other day. Polish, lots obviously – but I mean, it’s kind of like we missed out on some stage. Like we went straight from the past, and we woke up in the future, and found the place is full of foreign – immigrants, I mean. New faces, is what I mean, I suppose.”

  “Well you can certainly hear them when you buy a cup of coffee, or a pint.”

  “Absolutely,” said Fanning. “You’re right there.” He wondered when Colm Breen had last walked into an ordinary pub and bought an ordinary pint to drink with ordinary people. Decades.

  “Let me just fire a few images your way,” he said to Breen. “Then I’ll be off. You know me, I’ve been around. But this place today – no-one, I mean no-one has this. Ready?”

  Breen smiled, and nodded.

  “Everyone who can get their hands on one carries a gun.”

  “Really,” said Breen.

  “Broad daylight, I swear. People I’m seeing are not just thieves, or B and E go-boys. These are serious people. You can feel the voltage off them. It’s nothing for them to go to Amsterdam and do deals, or Bangkok – anywhere.”

  “I heard that.”

  “The cops don’t want people to know the situation. Oh sure, they make statements and they talk about the new seizure laws and all the rest of it. What they don’t say, is that they’re not on top of this at all.”

  “Scary.”

  “You’re telling me. The hair stands up on the back of my neck. It’s life or death stuff. There are no laws for these people, no rules. Psychopaths.”

  “Russians, I heard? Eastern Europe stuff?”

  “You’re reading my mind! That’s in the story too. When the old guard, the Dubs let’s call them, decide to settle with all these fellas coming into the country and starting their own gigs.”

  Breen leaned in over the table.

  “Is that what’s going on at the moment, these shootings the past while?”

  “‘Spring cleaning,’ Murph calls it.”

  “Murph.”

  “My contact, takes me around and about. My tour guide. Told me that the guy killed the other night was a friend of his. The name of Mulhall, I think.”

  “Really,” said Breen. “Isn’t that kind of, well, too close for comfort? Pardon the cliché and all that.”

  “Well Murph doesn’t seem to think so. ‘It’s only messers and two-timers need to worry,’ says he.”

  “And this character was a friend of his,” said Breen. “What does he say about his enemies, I wonder.”

  Fanning couldn’t be sure if Breen was ahead of him here in the irony stakes. He thought again of their early days together as students, when Breen was an awkward gobshite that he had taken under his wing in the Film Society.

  “Murph’s not the fastest bunny in the forest, I have to say,” he said.

  “You trust him?”

  “As much as I trust any skanger, I suppose.”

  Breen smiled.

  “Plus he keeps telling me how well-in he is. Mr. Untouchable.”

  Breen‘s smile faded into a dreamy look.

  “‘Spring cleaning,’” he said. “‘The Rites of Spring.’ Plenty grotesque.”

  He rearranged himself in his chair. His eyes slipped out of focus for several moments, and then snapped back to Fanning’s.

  “Tell you what, Dermot Fanning: you’ve got the makings of a damn good documentary here. A damned good one.”

  The anger detonated into Fanning’s chest. He tried to match Breen’s grin.

  “We need the whole ball of wax,” he said. “Inside out. The full emotional whack: characters, levels, conflict. Family, feuds. Revenge. The voices, the faces. You won’t be able to take your eyes off them.”

  “It sounds huge.”

  “There’s a series in this, for sure. I’m telling you, I started out with the usual, you know: a knockout pilot, and eight episodes ready. But that won’t be enough, it just won’t. There’s so much.”

  Breen smiled again.

  “You are the real McCoy, Dermot. By Jesus. You’ve got the fire in you.”

  “I hope that’s a good thing?”

  “Of course it is, don’t be silly. Of course it is.”

  “‘Stories tell the higher truth.’”

  “I was waiting for that one,” said Breen.

  Fanning didn’t want to notice that a tail of Breen’s shirt had become dislodged, and now hung over his belt.

  “We’re talking The One,” he said. “Look, I know I’m just rabbiting on here. But have a look over the summary, the first chapter. I know you’re a busy man.”

  “No sweat, Dermot. Never a problem. It’s the story, the writing, in the final analysis – always. And by God I know you have it in you.”

  Fanning watched Breen’s hand resting on the folder, as though to guard it. He knew he should leave it at that, but he couldn’t resist.

  “Ask me where I’m going right after,” he said. “Ask me.”

  “Okay. Where are you off to?”

  “A dog fight.”

  Breen sat up.

  “You mean dogs fighting?”

  “Exactly. Murph has an in, and he’s bringing me.”

  “Where are you going to see this?”

  “About two miles from where we’re sitting.”

  Fanning waited a few moments. He was pleased with Breen’s reaction.

  “I don’t know the address,” he went on, “But it’s the real thing. And a lot of the big shots show up.”

  “The bad guys.”

  “Yep. It’s a kind of neutral place, where they might bump into one another but no-one starts throwing shapes. Business gets discussed, and all that. But it’s for betting. Been going on for years.”

  Fanning finally felt he was getting through to Breen. He stared at him.

  “Oh. And they go for blood-lust, I’d have to say. That medieval thing, it keeps on coming back, you see.”

  Breen’s blank expression gave way a little. He gave Fanning a rueful look.

  “Savage,” he said. “Incredible. But are you going to be able to handle it?”

  “I’ll have to, won’t I.”

  “Christ, I hope, you know…”

  “I’ll be okay. But you can see where this could go.”

  Breen nodded. Then something slid into his thoughts and his face changed.

  “Absolutely, yes. Okay. Let me know. Okay?”

  Fanning had chosen his words carefully for this moment.

  “I wanted you to know first,” he said.

  Breen’s schmoozing smile appeared He leaned on toward Fanning.

  “Thanks, Dermot. That means a lot to me to hear you say that. A lot.”

  “This is the one. I’m sure of it.”

  “If anyone can get this – I mean really get it – it’s you, Dermot. We’ll talk?”

  Chapter 6

  THE MOTORWAY BEGAN ITS LONG, banked inland, and Sugar Loaf mountain slid into view over the trees. Minogue eyed the low clouds shrouding its peak. The rain would surely have started up on Calary Bog and its Protestant church where they were headed.

  “What?” Kilmartin asked, with the urgency of the suddenly awoken.

  “You were asleep.”

  “I am not. What did you say before that?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Well you cursed. Under your breath. That I know.”

  “I must have been thinking of someone else.”

  A heavily loaded lorry overtook them, swaying a little as it returned to its lane. There were left-hand drive cars coming toward Dublin from the Rosslare ferry now. Many towed caravans, French a lot of them.

  Kilmartin sat up, and turned in his seat.

  “Oh oh,” he said. “Thought I heard something. Action stations.”

  The blue lights of the Garda car came up fast in Minogue’s mirror. He checked
the speed, and felt for his wallet. The squad car went by at ninety. He got a quick look at the two Guards inside. They were in traffic gear. The passenger with a mobile to his ear looked to be about twenty.

  “Bigger rogues than us to be chasing. What speed were you doing?”

  “Seventy something,” Minogue said. “Eighty, maybe.”

  He was already anticipating the route from the turn-off at Kilmacanogue, along the Roundwood Road that climbed up to Calary Bog.

  It had been months since he had been up here. The houses would peter out within a half mile of the motorway, he recalled, and then more and more rock would surface in the scruffy, marginal fields. A mile or so in, the kingdom of brambles, ferns, and furze would take over. He half-remembered views of Glencree, with whitethorn hedges and the yellow, spring-flowering gorse leaning in over the road.

  “Super-cops,” Kilmartin murmured.

  The squad car had taken the ramp up the overpass toward the start of the Roundwood Road. It was long gone by the time Minogue drew up to the stop sign. Descending then toward the junction, he spotted an old man, ruddy-faced and gaunt, standing in the car park of the pub. Beside him was an old Land Rover. A Wicklow collie sat in the passenger seat, apparently following its master’s lead in watching Minogue and Kilmartin. The old man’s long face had something of a horse about it, Minogue decided, especially with the breezes tossing the tufts of snowy hair that swelled out from under his tweed hat.

  Kilmartin had spotted him too.

  “I don’t care what anyone says,” he said. “There’s a look to them.”

  Political correctness was still alien to Kilmartin, but Minogue had to admit that his friend was probably right. This was borderland after all, the edge of the Pale in former times, raider’s country. Rachel Tynan’s family name had been Weekes, a name with a distinctly Cromwellian sound to it, to Minogue’s ear.

  He had often forgotten that the Tynans’ mixed marriage meant something to other people, especially because Tynan had spent a few years as a Jesuit seminarian. He had once heard a whispered superstition concerning why their marriage had remained childless.

  “They’re very organized,” said Kilmartin. “That’s all I’m saying. I mean there he is, making sure that iijits like us find their way up to this church.”

  The turn off the motorway seemed to have awoken Kilmartin.

  “She planned it all, I heard,” he said, warming to his topic. “Mrs. Tynan, I’m talking about. Rachel, I should call her now, I suppose. She planned this place here, the event even.”

  Recent years had drawn her back, Minogue had heard, and especially as her illness advanced, here to where she had spent her childhood. Those visits had resulted in a series of paintings of the bog with a grandeur of space and skies that Minogue had believed that no-one but himself had marvelled at.

  He felt the tires bite loose gravel by the verge of the road.

  “‘A celebration,’” Kilmartin went on. “None of this, what’s the word? None of this… lugubrious stuff. A lot to admire in that, I must say. Yourself?”

  As earnest as Kilmartin seemed, his words were unconvincing to Minogue. It was long an open secret that funerals still put Irish people in quiet good humour.

  Minogue said, “Couldn’t agree with you more.”

  “Why’s that? – Oh I see now. You’re getting your Irish ready for the mass above. What am I saying, ‘mass.’ Christ. The ceremony, I mean. The service – the celebration. Whatever.”

  Minogue had half-forgotten that the service was to be in Irish. There would be paintings, he had learned, hers and her students,’ displayed in the small church. Music was to be a big part of the event also.

  The rain had come through here not so long ago. Wet ditches and half-dried roadway now ushered Minogue and Kilmartin up the narrowing road toward Calary, the Peugeot jiggling as it followed the shape of the road, leaning and swaying to its rises and dips – its very camber even, altered as it was yearly by the boggy soil beneath. Minogue struggled to detect which of the puddles might be potholes. It was no use. At least there was no oncoming traffic.

  They were almost by a quarry when the bend abruptly revealed cars stopped in the road ahead. Minogue didn’t like the faint squeak from the brake pedal.

  There were people out on the road.

  “Oh Christ crippled on a crooked crutch,” Kilmartin said with little feeling. “And His Blessed Mother of course. Is that who I think it is, standing on the ditch there? ‘Ill Be Hooves’?”

  “Could be him, all right.”

  “It is,” Kilmartin added. “And what’s-his-face there. The sidekick. On a mobile, Delahunty. That hoor. Pinky and Perky, the pair of them. Christ.”

  Minogue recognized Deputy Commissioner Eoin Burke, sleek in a well-cut navy-blue coat. It was Burke’s MBA-style talk and his fondness for press conferences, more than the suspect touch of dandyism, that had drawn the name on himself. A testy exchange on Meet the Press, a current affairs free-for-all that encouraged what were called stakeholders to vent about anything, had been the occasion of Burke’s folly.

  Unwisely, Burke had thought himself equal to all comers, but under pressure early, he lapsed into chiding a rabid whinger, a self-styled citizen’s rights maniac who was widely hated by rank-and-file Guards, the very people on whose behalf Burke believed he was sallying forth: “It ill behooves Mr. X here to be criticizing hard-working Gardai who…” And that was enough.

  Minogue recalled Delahunty from a seminar on something to do with Biometrics. Much like Burke, Superintendent Delahunty worked at being approachable. That only made things worse. Both men were being groomed for something new, however, something very high-tech.

  There were a half-dozen cars, a lorry, people standing around. Minogue put down the windows. Engines had been turned off. The wind was uncertain here, but it seemed to be picking up. Radio traffic filtered through the hedges, along with a more subdued but steady racket from the bickering, warbling birds of County Wicklow.

  He pulled on the handbrake. Tight, maybe too tight. He couldn’t ignore the squeak from the chassis as the Peugeot tried to roll back against the brake.

  “I’ll see what the story is ahead,” he said to Kilmartin. “Are you coming?”

  “I’m not,” Kilmartin replied. “I’m grand here. In your nice new French car.”

  Minogue climbed out of the car, lit a cigarette, and began to stroll toward the other Guards. The first lungfuls of smoke invigorated him as much as made him dizzy.

  There was a mocker’s gleam in Burke’s eyes. He shook Minogue’s hands a bit too heartily.

  “Matt. Never knew you smoked.”

  “Eoin, how’s things with you and yours.”

  “Top form, and thanking you. Is that himself inside in the car with you?”

  “None other.”

  “The funeral, I take it? Or what are we calling it, the memorial service?”

  “I’m not sure of the official title. To pay our respects.”

  Burke squinted at the shiny windscreen of the Peugeot, mischief flickering around his mouth. Minogue half-remembered Kilmartin grumbling about Burke’s self-promotion some years back: was it a wall-eyed bastard he had called him?

  “You frisked Jim, I hope.”

  Minogue prepared to give him the eye, and to verify if Burke’s eyes did indeed merit Kilmartin’s jibe, but a gust of wind took Burke’s hair and drew it straight up. Minogue glanced up to the rioting comb-over instead. He hoped Kilmartin was watching.

  “What do we have up the road?” he asked Burke.

  “Crash,” said Burke. “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago. The ambulance came already. Hardly worth your while to find another road now. Not that there are any up here.”

  Delahunty closed his phone and issued Minogue a nod.

  “They’ll give us the go-ahead in a minute,” he said. His modulated Cork accent couldn’t quite shed that nasal uplift at the end, and robbed of its melody, it came across to Minogue as strained, and even quer
ulous.

  The wind was now prancing about in uncertain bursts, tugging and then releasing Minogue’s coat. He looked at the drooping brambles that swayed and jerked over the roadway, and the new rushes bowing in the breeze.

  He caught Burke glancing back at his new Peugeot.

  “Wild enough, here,” said Burke, stifling a yawn. “Nice all the same,” Minogue said.

  “I suppose,” said Burke, suspecting contrariness. “But if it’s wild we want, we should go back to Dublin, hah?”

  Minogue made no reply. He had long ago given up trying to find a subtle way to advertise that he, a countryman like most of his fellow Gardai, was not therefore a reflexive slagger of Ireland’s capital city.

  “Baker’s dozen the other day,” said Delahunty. “Including that Mulhall fella.”

  Minogue didn’t like the light-heartedness in his tone.

  “Canoodling with his mate’s wife, I heard,” Delahunty added. “‘Lying low?’”

  “How many’s that for the week now?” Burke asked.

  “Eight in the last ten days,” Delahunty said. “Spring cleaning is what they’re saying. And a fine Hundred Thousand Welcomes to our friends from across the water.”

  Quite the pair, Minogue thought. He drew on his cigarette, and realized he had no idea what Delahunty meant.

  “Welcome to Ireland,” said Burke. “‘We have enough of our own bad guys and gougers thanks very much. So bang bang, and pip-pip. Home in a box.’”

  Delahunty turned to Minogue with renewed interest.

  “But sure you’d be the man of the hour on that,” he said. “Wouldn’t you? Liaison keeping tabs on the flotsam and jetsam washing up here from wherever?”

  “Hardly,” said Minogue. “I’m only a runner-in there. Learning the ropes.”

  Neither man believed him, Minogue was sure. The subject was gone after a brief lull. It was Minogue’s chance to disengage.

  Burke had read his mind apparently. He demanded to know what Minogue thought of the big upset at the Munster Finals last year. Minogue mustered his own staged indignation.

  “I’m always upset by Cork hurlers,” he declared. “Especially the one or two good ones they seem to be able to muster.”

  “Oh the diehard Clare fan,” said Burke. “Go away with you, and the rest of the Clare crowd. Department of Lost Causes.”