The Going Rate

by John Brady

  Minogue managed to make his way back down the road, alternately eyeing the saturated mash of dirt and humus by the ditches, and the mountain slopes in the distance.

  He elected to finish his cigarette standing by the passenger side of his Peugeot.

  Kilmartin stepped out presently.

  “Stretch me legs,” he said. “And just so’s you know, I won’t be hiding in a car from the likes of Burke. Ill Be Hooves himself. He’ll have to find someone else’s grave to dance on.”

  “Sounds like you’re setting yourself up to having a go at him.”

  “I would if I wanted to,” said Kilmartin, mildly. “No better man, I tell you.”

  Minogue was suddenly uneasy. Kilmartin might be unpredictable, already moved off into the territory where nothing much mattered any more, and where he had nothing to lose. He exchanged a glance with him.

  “Look at you,” said Kilmartin, with a wry expression. “Expecting the worst.”

  “Behave yourself,” Minogue said. “You Mayo bullock, you.”

  Kilmartin looked through the dense thicket of hedge.

  “I saw them eyeing me,” he said. “Those two feckers. What’d they say?”

  “They asked to be remembered to you.”

  “You lying whore’s ghost. I could tell by Burke’s face.”

  Kilmartin buttoned his overcoat. Minogue noted how loosely it fit him.

  “You should have the sense to give up the fags now,” said Kilmartin. “I’m going up here a bit and see what the commotion is.”

  Minogue took a last, long drag of his cigarette while he watched Kilmartin’s progress up the road. In time, he set out after him. He kept his distance following him nonetheless, all the while taking in the forward cant, that assertive flat-footed gait, and the weary swagger that still hinted at a man who had been limber and strong, and once purposeful.

  Chapter 7

  THEY LEFT MURPH’S CAR PARKED at the side of the warehouse. Fanning made a quick survey of the half-dozen sagging and rusted transport trailers huddled on the broken asphalt alongside the building, slowly sinking in amongst the weeds. A smell of engine oil hung in the air, pierced every now and then by a brackish, industrial tang. He heard the hush of traffic on the bypass a half-mile away.

  “Any more news on your friend,” Fanning said. “Mulhall?”

  “News?” said Murph. “What do you mean news exactly?”

  “Like, what happened?”

  “He got offed, didn’t he. That’s the news.”

  “I just thought you might have heard something since. Being as you’re in a position to hear things.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well he was a friend of yours, you said.”

  Murph made a flick of his head.

  “There’s friends, and there’s friends,” he said.

  Two men were waiting by a metal-clad door propped open at the side of the warehouse. They didn’t seem interested in Fanning’s or Murph’s arrival. While Murph stopped to light another cigarette, Fanning counted seven parked cars, and two vans.

  “Hey,” Murph said. “Stop gawking! That scrutinizing. I seen that before.”

  Fanning said nothing. The excitement he had felt on the drive here was gone, and in its place was a restlessness that was making him more uneasy as the minutes passed. He was used to Murph’s oscillations between bluster and sly charm.

  “So cut it out,” Murph added. “People’ll think you’re a copper.”

  “Which reminds me,” said Fanning. “What did he say, your copper, Malone?”

  Murph turned on him, blocking his path.

  “What? Are you out of your mind? You’re asking me here?”

  “Just asking. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Don’t even think about stuff like that here. Do you know what’d happen if anyone here heard you? Have you any idea? Jesus!”

  “Okay. I get it. “

  “You’ve got to start using your head, man. Anyone here got wind of that stuff, they wouldn’t even ask me about it. They don’t care, you know?”

  “I said I get it. Sorry.”

  “Sorry? Like that’s going to help? Listen, this isn’t a story here, I keep telling you. Stuff happens in this world, you know. It’s not on a page, or has special effects, or anything like that. The real world, you understand?”

  Fanning saw that Murph’s chest was not heaving so much now.

  “Like, we’re talking people with no morals or anything,” Murph went on. He leaned in.

  “Mental issues, you know? Nutters. I mean a lot of these people got hard going when they were kids. Abuse and all that? So, like, now, well I mean to say – would you turn out normal after that? You know?”

  These people, Fanning thought. If anything crystallized Murph, with his delusions, that had to be it right there.

  “Am I getting through to you at all?”

  “Oh sure. I forgot, I suppose. I get it.”

  Murph’s straining and bloodshot eyes still bored into his.

  “So did he?” he murmured. “Malone…?”

  For a moment he thought Murph would actually hit him.

  “No he didn’t,” said Murph between clenched teeth. “And he told me to stop annoying him with it. He doesn’t want anything to do with it.”

  Fanning took a step back but Murph’s sour breath seemed to have stuck on him. He spoke in a low voice.

  “I don’t know if I want to go in there with you. I mean, what’ll you come up with next?”

  “It’s okay. I know, now.”

  “But do you? Really, do you?”

  “Let’s just go in. Look, I spoke out of turn. Bad timing. Okay?”

  “But you’re the fella with the degrees and the books and everything. And what am I? Kicked out of the school. Haven’t read a book for years – but at least I know reality from fake, from, from fantasy.”

  “I hear you. Can we go in now?”

  “If you make a promise to keep your trap shut, maybe, just maybe.”

  “I promise.”

  He watched Murph search his face for any sign of irony.

  “Remember me telling you, my turf, my rules?”

  “I remember.”

  “You better. You don’t ask anybody anything in here. Not even ‘what day is it.’ None of that, you know, what do you call…”

  “Small talk.”

  “That’s right! No chit chat. This is a business here. The people that come to this don’t come here for the scenery, I can tell you. They want to relax a bit, sure. But they’re betting. And they take it serious. They’re not there to talk to you, and they don’t want to be wondering who you are, or what you’re doing here. All they know is, you’re with me. So that’s good enough for them. They’ll leave it at that.”

  “What if one of them starts talking to me?”

  “Not going to happen,” Murph said quickly. “I’ll do the talking, if there’s any. I set this up, with Jacko – that’s him at the door there, in the red, the butty little fella.”

  Fanning watched Murph draw hard on the cigarette and begin to smoothen out a patch of broken bitumen with slow, rhythmical side-to-side movements of his foot. Then Murph jerked his head up.

  “And none of that jotting down notes effort,” he said. “Like you were doing in the pub the other– Hey: you carrying that recorder thing I seen you using before?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. And give me your phone.”

  “It’s off,” Fanning said. He had to clear his throat. “I’m not using it.”

  Murph squinted at him, and he grimaced. Fanning tried not to notice that his yellowing teeth had a shade of green near the gums.

  “My turf, my rules,” Murph said. “Phones are cameras, remember.”

  Fanning got his thumbnail under the catch, took off the lid, and slid the SIM card into his wallet.

  A Fiat van arrived. Instead of parking with the others, it made its way wallowing and swaying over the asphalt toward the back of the wareho
use. Fanning caught a quick glimpse of the driver, a late middleaged man with a greying seventies moustache, and a stud in his ear. One of the two men who had been standing by the door, a skinny twentysomething-looking one in a hoodie, walked after the van. From around the corner of the warehouse, Fanning heard a door being pulled up.

  “That was Tony,” said Murph. “In the van. Pretty well top of the heap. Goes all over the country with them dogs of his. There’s a story about him I can’t tell you.”

  “I won’t be using names,” Fanning said.

  Murph chuckled.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let me just ask you something then. What would you do, if you were breeding a fighting dog and it turned on you, the dog?”

  “I don’t know. I’d get it put down, I suppose.” Murph tugged at his nose. The rash on his nostrils became a brighter red.

  “‘Put down? There is no putter-downer for a dog like this. What would you use, I’m saying.”

  Then he winked at Fanning, and he took a last, hurried drag of his cigarette before flicking it into the weeds.

  Jacko was flabby but sort of well tended in a wholly unoriginal way, with the stock Beckham stubble and cropped hair, and a plain silver chain showing by the zipper of his jacket. Turning his head for a moment, revealed a small Bluetooth earpiece that Fanning had not noticed before. His empty gaze settled again on Fanning as he followed Murph to the door.

  “We’re here and gone, Jacko,” Murph said. “Just a sampler, is all.”

  Jacko flicked a look from Fanning to Murph and back.

  “Yous are here to play or not?” he asked.

  “Course we are,” Murph said. “Been looking forward to it.”

  “Where are you coming from,” Jacko said to Fanning. “Who do you know?”

  “Jacko, man, come on,” Murph said. “He’s with me, he’s sound.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Jacko, we already talked about this. You know me, you know the score.”

  “Well the score’s nil-nil right now. Far as I can see.”

  “Look,” said Murph. “Phone me, later on. I might have something for you.”

  “Stuff. What sort of stuff.”

  “This and that. Situations. Transportation business. Stuff like that.”

  “Really. I’ll talk to my parole officer about it.”

  Three more men appeared from where the cars were parked.

  “Step aside for these men here,” said Jacko.

  “How come they don’t get hassled?” Murph asked.

  “They paid the admission fee. That’s how.”

  “Ha ha,” Murph said. “Nice one, Jacko. There’s no such thing.”

  Jacko shifted on his feet.

  “There is now, brother. So step aside.”

  Chapter 8

  “WHAT’S YOUR HURRY,” Minogue called out after Kilmartin.

  As Kilmartin drew closer to their car, Burke and Delahunty seemed to feel the time was right to retire to its interior. Kilmartin gave them a short, ecclesiastical stare before he conceded a nod in, and passed on. Minogue ignored a wink from Burke as he passed them himself.

  He recognized several Guards biding their time in the cars ahead, a Deputy Comm from Cork, a few more Superintendents. He passed two ancient priests sprawled in the back of an old Passat, some of Tynan’s former Jesuit mentors from his seminary days, he was willing to bet. A fat, frustrated-looking man sat in the champagne-coloured Lexus ahead of them, talking into his mobile and making elaborate gestures, all the while glancing at papers on the passenger seat. Beyond the Lexus was a bread van, with its driver leaning on the door of a lorry that preceded him, talking with little enthusiasm to whoever was in the cab.

  A dozen or so metres farther on was the back end of a squad car, the Primera that had sped by Minogue on the motorway. Kilmartin slowed and then stopped, and moved his head about to get a better view of something.

  “You can see some of the goings-on from here,” he said.

  “Not sure I want to.”

  “The van went off the road. Looks like it rolled too, down that bank. Look, you can just see a bit of it.”

  There was a car on its side in the ditch, and beyond that an ambulance. The fire brigade must have come down from Roundwood, the ambulance too. As though on cue, a Guard came skipping back from the road and waving.

  “Ambulance,” he called out. “Make way, now. Pull in tight. Ambulance.”

  Minogue and Kilmartin found a spot close into the ditch. Kilmartin squinted as he looked back over the cars toward Minogue’s Peugeot. Other cars had drawn up behind it.

  “I left room,” Minogue said to him.

  They watched the ambulance nose by, and then pick up some speed. A man with a white dressing held to his head appeared on the road in its wake. The blood that had run down the side of his face and onto his shirt was a brighter red than Minogue expected. It was the overcast day, he decided. The white shirt that made it stand out.

  The man’s dark growth of beard ran right up almost to his eyes. He was talking fast, his eyes glittering and darting about. He was soon shouting. Nobody calmed him.

  “What the hell’s that fella saying,” Kilmartin said under his breath.

  “Okay,” he said after a few moments. “Let me guess. Romanian.”

  A Garda stepped over to the man and took him by the upper arm. The man looked confused, then cowed, and then angry.

  “Aisy there now,” Kilmartin declared. “That man’s in shock.”

  Another Guard came over hurriedly. The man seemed to get the idea.

  “Do they have their own language, those people?”

  Minogue spotted bloodstained paper towels in the ditch. There was movement amongst a group that had gathered behind the squad car.

  “There’s your problem right there,” Kilmartin said. “Shouldn’t be on the roads here. Shouldn’t be let near a car, even.”

  A hatless grey-haired Garda sergeant approached the group, and said something to them. They answered a question with a vigorous nod. The sergeant made a flourish with his hand in the direction of Calary. The group turned almost as one, and headed back toward the line of cars. Minogue turned too. Kilmartin was already on his way.

  Back in the the car, Kilmartin became almost expansive.

  “They tried everything, I heard,” he said as Minogue turned down the lane toward the church. “Lourdes, even.”

  The place reminded Minogue of an oasis, with small, hilly fields hard-won from the bog, and clumps of trees. Cars had been parked tight into the banks that lined the lane. Minogue had to wait for people to walk ahead of his car before he could follow the directions toward a parking place.

  “A great turn-out,” said Kilmartin.

  Though the church itself nestled amongst a stand of mature trees, the banks and the small, hilly fields seemed to form a funnel for the wind.

  Kilmartin suddenly unhitched his seat belt.

  “What are you at?”

  “I can’t,” said Kilmartin. He pulled at the door release. “Sorry. I just can’t.”

  “Christ almighty Jim, don’t jump out. At least let me stop the car.”

  “I’m sorry, Matt, I am.”

  The wind tore the door from Kilmartin’s hand, and Minogue felt it bounce back hard on its hinge. Papers erupted behind Minogue with a loud flapping sound. Two, then three pages, were whipped out the open door, one bouncing off a hedge before soaring and twisting in the wind.

  “Close the door at least, can’t you!”

  His belt held him back. He pulled up the handbrake and released his belt, and dove across the passenger seat to get at the door handle. Another page hit the top of the door, curled, cracked, and flew out. Another was flattened against the front window. Minogue lunged at it, and crumpled it just in time to have another nick him in the cheek as it went by.

  He cursed again. Kilmartin, hunch-shouldered and indifferent to anything but his own hurried strides along the muddy lane, did not look ba
ck.

  Pages hurtled over car roofs, one slapping a windscreen of a Nissan. It was one of the hospital pictures, the full-on one of the man’s swollen face streaked with blood. One of the laser-printed photos was inching its way up his window. It flapped once and then took off, higher than any of the others.

  Cars were waiting behind. Minogue let off the handbrake and headed toward a gap in the high bank by a bend, where a man was waiting to direct him.

  The farmyard was half-full of cars already. He turned off the ignition and leaned back to get the folder from the back seat. There were only two pages left in it. He heard paper rustle when he moved his feet by the pedals. There was another page half under the seat. Ten pages missing, fifteen?

  He took out his mobile and he waited, his thumb over the Send, trying to compose a sensible question: Eilís, thank God you got a transfer over to Liaison, you know how thick I am, so you won’t mind asking for copies of that file…?

  A man rose up from a crouch in Minogue’s side vision, holding up one of his pages. Minogue closed his phone.

  Kilmartin’s face had changed completely. The page flapped enough to tear as he held it up to eye level. He tugged on the door handle, and holding the door against the wind, slid into the passenger seat with a sigh.

  “Mother of God, Jim. What the hell was all that about?”

  Kilmartin didn’t look up when he spoke.

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “There’s three-quarters of my briefing notes flying around Wicklow – scene photos, personal information!”

  “No need to be roaring at me. I couldn’t help it.”

  Minogue looked around the farmyard for any of the pages.

  “A savage bit of wind,” said Kilmartin, quietly. “Always like this up here?”

  “It’s March,” Minogue declared. “That’s what it is.”

  “Fierce bleak too. Bog, bog, and more bog.”

  Minogue threw another glare at Kilmartin. Sure enough, he had that faraway look again.

  Within a few moments Kilmartin started out of his thoughts, and ran his hand along the armrest.

  “It was a panic attack,” he said.

  “A panic attack.”