The Going Rate

by John Brady

  Fanning saw Murphy swallow hard, and then straighten up. Then, clearing his throat, he rolled his shoulders and he walked back toward the man in the leather jacket who had come out.

  Chapter 12

  MRS. KLOS – ANYA KLOS – WAS VERY, VERY SHAKY. Her hands trembled when she took out a pencil to place beside a pad of paper on the table. She was trying too hard to keep her head from trembling too. Minogue wrote the name of his section, a telephone number, and his email on the pad after the introductions.

  Danute Juraksaitis’ narrow black-framed glasses said something to him: economist, doctor, lawyer. Something serious, thoughtful, exact. She made only the briefest of smiles at the exchange of cards. Then she took a small notebook from another bag by her feet.

  Mrs. Klos blinked a lot. She seemed to be holding her breath.

  Hughes began with condolences. He spoke slowly, and with a simple eloquence that impressed Minogue. The real Ireland still existed, he began to believe again. Hughes looked from one woman to the other, pausing often, and nodding for emphases. Did they understand what he was saying? Would they like anything repeated? Did they know that they could interrupt him at any time?

  Danute Juraksaitis spoke to Mrs. Klos in Polish. A look that Minogue read as ironic crossed her features briefly, and she glanced at Hughes.

  “Mrs. Klos has some of words in English,” she said. “The rest is up to me.”

  Hughes made a sympathetic smile. Then he began with the times, the log of events that had preceded the arrival of the squad car to the laneway where Tadeusz Klos lay. He paused at the end of each sentence and waited for the translation, and a nod from Mrs. Klos.

  “Ambulance?” Danute Juraksaitis said.

  “The one phone call does ambulance and Guards,” said Hughes.

  “They think he was alive then?” she asked. “That is why the ambulance?”

  “Well that wasn’t clear,” Hughes replied. “That wasn’t what the two Guards believed.”

  As Hughes’ reply was translated for her, Minogue studied the changing expression on Mrs. Klos’ face

  “But the ambulance?”

  Mrs. Klos’ face twisted up, and she quickly put her hands over her face. She shook her head and she turned away. Danute Juraksaitis put her notebook face-down on the table and stood up slowly, her hands clasped awkwardly. Then she placed a hand on Mrs. Klos’ shoulder. Sharp intakes of breath brought Mrs. Klos’ shoulders up, and they sagged again as the sobs seized her.

  “Tea is needed here,” Minogue said. “Coffee. Something. Anything.”

  He didn’t wait for a comment, but got up and headed for the door.

  He took his time getting to the canteen. He was aware he was trying to remember that perfume. Those glasses on that woman were actually severe, in a way. The thought of her brought a mild confusion to him, and a twinge of something unfamiliar.

  The coffee he found waiting for him had been sitting in the pot since Adam was a boy. He opted instead for two teapots of boiling water and four bags of Lyons’ Tea. The milk would be a problem, but it was a chance for a detour down to the cafeteria.

  “I’ll bring the jugs back so I will,” he said to the cashier.

  “How do they know you won’t rob them,” asked the sergeant in line beside him. Had he met him a few years back?

  “The crime of the century,” he said to the sergeant, hiding his irritation. “All my plans ruined now.”

  The Guard laughed as he counted out his own coins.

  “I’ll vouch for this fella,” he said to the cashier. “One of Kilmartin’s crew.”

  “And how is the bold Jim anyhow?” the sergeant whispered

  “As ever.”

  “Really? Well tell him I was asking for him, there’s a good man. Tell him ‘The old dog for the long road,’ will you?”

  “‘The pup for the path’?”

  “Exactly. Good man!”

  Minogue trudged up the steps balancing the tray loosely. Was every Guard in Ireland going to be asking about Kilmartin? His thoughts returned to Tadeusz Klos, and his mother. She didn’t look Polish, he thought. But what did Poles look like, then? A Slavic or Russian look?

  He was careful opening the doors from the stairs. He stepped into the hallway, and he paused, listening to the cylinder at the top of the door hiss softer as the door came closer to rest. There were voices from the open area beyond the conference rooms. Someone had recently had an egg sandwich. But unless his mind was playing tricks on him, there was the faintest trace of that same perfume again. Hardly possible, his mind declared, but there it was.

  Hughes had a map of Dublin spread out on the table. He was pointing out where the hostel was.

  “The city centre here is very walkable,” he said, and waited. Minogue saw him wince and move his hand reflexively to his lower ribs.

  Mrs. Klos did not seem much interested in the map. Minogue laid down the tray. Danute Juraksaitis had finished noting something. Her gaze turned to the teapots and then met Minogue’s eyes for an instant.

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Klos. Then she said something in Polish.

  “You are so kind,” said Danute Juraksaitis. “Mrs. Klos said.”

  Minogue looked at Mrs. Klos. Her eyes were red and there were blotches on her face from crying.

  “Nothing stronger I’m sorry to say,” he said. Mrs. Klos waited for a translation. Hughes cleared his throat and continued while they waited for the tea to draw.

  “The clubs serve drink,” he was saying. “Alcohol?”

  He cleared his throat again, excusing himself as he did. A pallor had settled on his features, and Minogue thought he spotted beads of sweat near his hairline. He hadn’t realized that Hughes had been that nervous.

  “Pretty well every night of the week is party night now,” Hughes went on. “Dublin is very busy. Very modern.”

  Minogue could not understand one word that Danute Juraksaitis translated of this. Mrs. Klos nodded.

  “It is the same in Poland Mrs. Klos said,” said Danute Juraksaitis. “The young they want… life. Fun. This is freedom.”

  A rough translation, Minogue decided.

  Hughes turned to Danute Juraksaitis, and cleared his throat yet again.

  “So, in the light of what has happened since,” he said, tentatively. “What’s in the briefing here…”

  Mrs. Klos leaned in slightly toward Danute Juraksaitis.

  “Did Mrs. Klos need help understanding it maybe?” Hughes asked.

  No, was Mrs. Klos’ translated response.

  “It was forwarded to her by our federal police,” said Danute Juraksaitis.

  Then she said something to Mrs. Klos. It was answered with a nodding of the head. Minogue saw now that Mrs. Klos’ head had begun to shake, and her face had taken on that slack, stricken look he had seen too often over the years. He looked to see where she might fall, if she was indeed to keel over in a faint.

  “It was explained to her,” she added.

  Minogue busied himself pouring the tea while he eyed Mrs. Klos’ state surreptitiously. Hughes’ voice was tight when he spoke now.

  “I could move on then and tell you what we know so far. What the investigation has come up with?”

  He took his cup while he waited for the translation.

  “Or maybe Mrs. Klos would prefer to ask questions right away?”

  With Hughes’ question translated, Mrs. Klos shook her head gently, twice. Hughes nodded slowly. After several moments Minogue realized that everyone was staring at the teapot. It looked like nobody was keen to resume the conversation.

  The scent of the tea took over Minogue’s senses, along with the tings, slurps, and the stirrings of spoon against the cups. Mrs. Klos used three sugar bags, and blew on her tea. Danute Juraksaitis didn’t touch hers.The room felt smaller now. More small beads had formed on Hughes’ forehead.

  Supposedly moody, passionate, the Poles, Minogue wondered – but where had he picked up that stereotype? There was surely some common thing be
tween the Poles and the Irish. It couldn’t just be the Catholicism. A rough history too maybe, with their own overbearing neighbours, and their own wide scattering to America.

  Mrs. Klos shifted in her seat. She said a few words in a flat tone. Minogue noticed that Danute Juraksaitis had half-moons on her fingernails, that her hands moved slowly and deliberately when she translated, pivoting at the wrists as though she were doing tai-chi.

  The silence in the room turned to awkwardness.

  “I wouldn’t risk the coffee here,” Minogue said.

  “True for you,” said Hughes.

  Mrs. Klos smiled thinly when the translation had finished. She said something in Polish, with the word Guinness in it.

  Danute Juraksaitis turned to the policemen.

  “She said she has tried Guinness.”

  Minogue pretended to be shocked. Mrs. Klos made a so-so gesture with her free hand. The smiles faded as quickly as they had arrived.

  “Mrs. Klos,” Hughes began then. “I’d like to begin?”

  Mrs. Klos tilted her head to listen to the translation, but her empty stare lingered on the map.

  “And I’ll be asking you for information.”

  That was enough to break her stare when the translation came to her.

  “…Things about your son that you might not like to say…”

  With the awkwardness thickening the atmosphere even more, Minogue released part of his mind out onto the coast of his native Clare, to the waves crashing on the Flaggy Shore. He wondered all the while if Danute Juraksaitis would balk, and suggest legal counsel.

  “…For example, his friends, or troubles…” he heard Hughes continue. “Such as problems with the law back in Poland…”

  Mrs. Klos bit her lip and her eyes went out of focus.

  “She says she will help,” said Danute Juraksaitis.

  “Only to help us see if there is any connection to here, perhaps another Pole, I mean, Polish person he knew…?”

  Mrs. Klos listened carefully, and looked from Hughes to Minogue and back.

  “It’s okay, she says. Tadeusz – her son – was not an angel always.”

  Hughes seemed to be waiting for an okay from Mrs. Klos. Danute Juraksaitis murmured something to Mrs. Klos, who nodded.

  “I’ll ask her a few questions then?”

  Danute Juraksaitis nodded. Minogue saw her Biro waver as she held it over her notebook. He looked again at the half-moons on her nails, the sinews that ran to her knuckles, her wrist bone. She wrote slowly and sparingly as she listened to Hughes. When he stopped to await her translation, she turned the Biro on its head and let it tap on the notebook as she spoke to Mrs. Klos. Minogue found himself wondering if she was always so grave and so poised.

  Mrs. Klos had only vague answers for Hughes, and Minogue was reasonably certain that everyone in the room was aware that he was merely going through the motions, asking the questions that they expected a policeman to ask. Who really knew their children, he heard himself say within.

  Chapter 13

  Bríd had picked up a pizza from Superquinn on the way home from the child minder’s. Aisling was clinging to her, and her cheeks were red. She’d been crying. Fanning was at the door first.

  “Go to Daddy,” said Bríd, trying to pick up her schoolbag along with the shopping bags.

  Fanning put his hand on his daughter’s back. She clung tighter to Bríd.

  “Let’s see if your dolly talks to us today,” he tried. She sniffed and buried her face in Bríd’s collar.

  “Sit down why don’t you,” he said to Bríd.

  “I can’t,” she said. “Take the bags will you?”

  It was the hardest time of the day. Bríd in from school, tired after the day with those hellions. The blood-sugar low, Aisling cranky and fighting one bug or another since before the Christmas. If it wasn’t a sore throat it was teeth, or a cold, or diarrhea. The kettle popped.

  “Cup of tea? Or something decent?”

  Bríd’s frown eased a little.

  “Have we something to celebrate?” she asked.

  He smiled.

  “Well this gorgeous woman just walked in the door, an angel in her arms.”

  “You’re such a ham.”

  She sniffed the air.

  “You’ve had a little something already, have you?”

  “Pretend we’re living in Paris,” he said. “Just for this evening.”

  “And you’re Johnny Depp?”

  He knew she was searching around this hour of no man’s land for something easy, something innocent to say. Still his irritation was building. He needed a knife to get a start on stripping the wrap off the pizza.

  “Pepp-er-only,” he sang to Aisling. “Pepper-only and geese, Aisling. Won’t that be the bee’s knees? The cat’s pyjamas?”

  Aisling made no move. He closed the oven door and tickled her ankle. She didn’t react. Bríd frowned at him.

  “You’re in fine fettle,” she said. “Things went well for you today?”

  “Pepp-er-only?” he said to Aisling. “Geese too?”

  “It’s not geese,” she said still buried in her mother’s neck. “It’s cheese, Daddy. Don’t be silly.”

  “Breakthrough Day?” Bríd asked him.

  It was a code word he wished she’d forget, something from long ago when they’d talk together for hours about what he had written that day.

  “Well, I talked to Breen.”

  Bríd made a face.

  “He liked it,” Fanning went on. “Very positive.”

  Bríd closed her eyes and sighed. Aisling let herself be picked up. Fanning loved the weight of his daughter. The ease and trust she expressed with her whole body when she draped herself over his shoulder. Her cheeks were raw from crying.

  “Are your toothies hurting you, love?”

  She shook her head.

  The smell of her hair, even the staleness of her clothes. But most of all the feel of her baby fat cheeks on his neck.

  Bríd yawned and draped her coat over the couch.

  “He always ‘likes it,’” she said. “But he does nothing about it.”

  Fanning felt Aisling grow alert in his arms. She must sense his anger.

  “We’ll get there,” he managed to say.

  “I thought you had another one of your field trip things today.”

  Fanning’s anger vanished when he saw again the arm raised, the thumb cocking the hammer, the barrel inches from the bloodied dog’s head.

  Aisling twisted around awkwardly, and leaned back against his arms.

  “Daddy, you’re wivering.”

  “Shivering,” Bríd said quickly. “Shivering, Aisling. Don’t use Daddy’s make-up words any more.”

  Fanning’s arms were turning to water. A sour taste filled his mouth, and an image of the men yelling to finish the fight flared in his mind again.

  “Are you okay,” Bríd asked. “Have you the flu or something?”

  Aisling was playing with his shirt buttons.

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  “Well I’m wasted,” Bríd said.

  She sat down heavily on the couch and began drawing out notebooks from her bag. Fanning heard the gunshot again, felt how his ears had rung.

  “Staff meetings,” she murmured. “The tenth circle of hell.”

  The dog would have been thrown into a pit or something, its torn lifeless body there to rot and be forgotten about. They’d find others, train others.

  “And it’s a marking night too,” Bríd said. “Jesus.”

  Aisling seemed to have calmed down. His strength was coming back. He began to dandle her a little, bobbing and weaving gently.

  “That can wait,” he said.

  “It can’t,” she said without looking up.

  “If people only knew,” he said, “how much work teachers actually do.”

  She glanced up with that curious smile that had so aroused him in the past. Then her expression changed, and her eyes lost focus


  “Breen,” she murmured. “I’d like his job. If that’s what you could call it.”

  Fanning poured soup into bowls. He put an ice cube into Aisling’s and tested it with his little finger. She was crying again, and Bríd was trying to humour her.

  Bríd found time on the weekends to make the soups for the week. It was something she liked doing, she said, because she knew that Aisling would be getting at least one solid part of her day’s food homemade and organic too.

  Fanning admitted he was hopeless about food. He enjoyed a meal, and the more variety the better, but something happened to his brain when it came to organizing and cooking a serious meal. He’d liked to make Bríd laugh back in their early days, about cavemen multitasking, cooking with fires and so forth.

  Time had gone strange somewhere in the past few years. The clock ruled now, with things that had to be done, and by a certain time. Awkward bills came in the post, and everything cost so much. They’d had a few heart-to-hearts about it, the money / house / career – monster. It didn’t help really.

  He and Bríd had been together since third year – except for the summers when he had gone to London and Copenhagen, that is. They had just carried on after they got their degrees, even staying in the same flat. Both of them were vehemently for staying in Dublin while so many had left. There was not even a hint of any boom back then. He had always regarded himself as being on the ball, alert to social change, to the zeitgeist, no matter how small the signs. Being alert was his strength, he felt, noticing things, especially things that everyone else seemed to ignore.

  He licked the soup off his finger and he took out a bib for Aisling. It was the only one she’d allow now, the one with the elephants. There was something sticky on the floor underfoot. A door closed hard in the adjoining flat, where the Spanish kids had arrived before Christmas, and he heard their television go on.

  Aisling had stopped crying. He heard Bríd’s footsteps in the hall. Aisling was asleep on her shoulder, her cheek almost flag-red now. Bríd hadn’t even had a chance to get out of her school clothes. Gingerly, she edged onto the seat. Teeth, she mouthed at Fanning. He turned to the cooker and checked on the pizza. He glanced back at Bríd to offer her a smile. It was a small way of saying thanks for all that she did. But her eyes were closed too now. Already her breathing had slowed. He wondered why she hadn’t put Aisling down if the child was so sleepy or aching with baby teeth? Even lie beside her a few minutes like at bedtime.