The Going Rate

by John Brady

  Minogue saw that Garda Dwyer had taken a step closer to Rogers.

  “Yous are the ones screwing things up,” said Rogers. “I know what I’d do with those two, those two… scumbags. They’d be telling me what I needed to know. Right quick they would too, oh yes.”

  “We’re obliged to protect everyone’s rights in this, Mr. Rogers.”

  Rogers opened his eyes wide, sat back, and gathered the ends of his jacket on his lap. Minogue had no difficulty recognizing the Dublinman’s sign of contempt.

  “Rights?” said Rogers. “Now there’s a good one. A funny thing, those ‘rights’ of yours. You ever notice that the only time you hear that word is for other people? It’s never for ordinary people like us. Always for the what-do-you-call-ems, the asylum types, and the refugees and all, always for foreigners. Oh yes – it’s all about their rights, the Muslim crowd and their school, or getting a house for someone from fecking I-don’t-know-where in Africa…”

  “This has nothing to do with why we’re here,” said Minogue.

  “Like hell it hasn’t. What’s he doing here, that fella who got us all into this mess? Have you thought about that, have you?”

  Minogue tried to absorb what he had heard. He saw a pained look spread across Rogers’ face, a man at the outer limits of reasoning, already sensing that he could not ever convince the people around him.

  “I mean to say,” he said, almost in a whisper, “what’s a fella from Poland doing down those streets that time of night?”

  Mrs. Rogers’ gaze had settled on the tabletop, but her chest was heaving. Minogue knew her peripheral vision was scanning the situation. He looked back at her daughter. Shoulders turned in, ragged parting in her hair revealing a white scalp. Fourteen; a hormone hurricane; cub of the Celtic Tiger.

  “Mr. Rogers,” he said. “I’m going to ask you to leave the room.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll be leaving too,” said Minogue.

  “Do what you like. I’m her father.”

  Minogue gave it a few moments until he felt the tension was sufficient.

  “Her mother will stay, as will Garda Dwyer here. Garda Dwyer is–”

  “–the law is the law.”

  “Garda Dwyer is trained in working with youth, and women.”

  Rogers’ jacket made a squeak as he shot forward from the chair.

  “What? What’s this? What are you getting at?”

  “I’ll explain to you outside.”

  “You won’t.”

  “All right. I won’t.”

  “If it’s what I think it is, that’s why I’m here. I’m her father, I told yous.”

  “I do get it,” said Minogue.

  “This is my daughter we’re talking about! My daughter!”

  Minogue eyed the jabbing finger, the reddening face, and then he looked over to Rogers’ wife. She hadn’t budged. He took his cue from her and took his own turn examining the tabletop. He’d give it a count of five. While he waited, he replayed Rogers’ angry outburst. Daw-thar, muy, daw-thar. There was a sure sign of alarm, and panic, in Rogers’ outburst.

  The count was up. Minogue sat back and put his hands on the chair rest. He looked directly at Rogers.

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” said Rogers.

  “I’m trying to get you to have a cup of tea is what I’m trying to do.”

  “I’ll kill him,” said Rogers. “Them, predators they are.”

  The signals from Garda Dwyer were steady now. For a moment, he imagined her flooring Rogers with some super-specialized karate kick. Unlikely. “You’re under a lot of stress, Mr. Rogers,” he said. “But that remark you made is on tape.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t.”

  Minogue stood and stepped around to the back of his chair. Casting a wary glance at Rogers, he was almost surprised to see that Rogers’ eyes were brimming with tears. He was indifferent to it, however. He saw that fourteen-year-old Ali Rogers was now a lot less slumped, and that she was even looking through a fringe of hair out at her father.

  Rogers sobbed only once. He held his forefinger under his nose. He stumbled on the chair leg as he left the room. Neither mother nor daughter said a word.

  Minogue heard Garda Dwyer begin her talk just as he pulled the interview room door closed.

  Rogers leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.

  “It’s tough,” Minogue said. “Very tough.”

  Rogers nodded. He wiped away tears with his forefinger and thumb.

  “We’ll do the best we can.”

  Rogers let out a deep breath and shook his head. Minogue imagined Rogers at work on that massive tunnel under Dublin Port. Some huge piece of equipment wielded effortlessly no doubt, hell-for-leather and proud of the new Ireland he was building too, probably. Had he been there at the face of the tunnel, Minogue wondered, and cheered as the last of the rocks and clay crumbled and the other crew’s faces appeared? He’d made good money on the job, a man of Rogers’ skills. A good provider, Minogue would bet. A little pity leaked into him now.

  “Donegal Rogers?” he asked.

  “What? I mean, pardon?”

  “It’s a Donegal name you have. The Rosses, Gweedore?”

  Rogers’ face eased a little.

  “No, no,” he murmured and he sniffed. “Sort of wish I was though. My da’s da was Donegal. Annagary. But that’s a long time ago.”

  “Donegal is still there,” said Minogue. “I checked last September in person. Sure enough, there it was.”

  “It was, was it.”

  “Bloody Foreand, Glenties. All that, and more. God’s country.”

  Rogers let out another long, deep breath and he settled his head more against the wall. He looked at the ceiling tiles.

  “I wish to Christ I was there, yes. I haven’t been in years.”

  Minogue nodded.

  “They had nothing, my grandfather’s people,” Rogers went on in a low voice. “Nothing. It might as well have been the eighteen hundreds he used to say.”

  “Come over here,” said Minogue. “I’ll inflict a cup of Garda tea on you.”

  He half-turned to make sure Rogers wasn’t still leaning against the wall.

  “As long as you promise not to kill anyone,” he added.

  Wall was waiting for the all clear signal. Minogue nodded.

  “It’s so hard not to get angry, you know,” he heard Rogers say behind him. “These days.”

  Minogue turned and motioned to the seat.

  “You’re going to have to control yourself,” he said to Rogers. “This is a murder investigation.”

  Rogers blinked.

  “If you get stroppy again it’ll be the hard option for us,” Minogue said.

  “Is that the best you can offer?”

  Then he sat heavily into the chair and he sighed. “Hard times is right,” he sighed.

  “Pardon?”

  “Hard times I said. You got me thinking of my grandfather again. How they had nothing, them times. But he done all right, the family, and all. All reared, all healthy, thank God. And I’m not saying we had it easy now – before the boom, I’m saying. But how quickly we forget, don’t we?”

  For a moment, Minogue recalled his days walking the fields and the Burren headlands while he tried to keep the sea in sight, walking through the hazel thickets that had grown over a dozen abandoned villages.

  “I mean I worked in England so I did,” Rogers was saying. “But I always wanted to come home here. And I did. We’re doing all right now, doing very well, I don’t mind telling you – until now, anyway.”

  He seemed to have noticed Minogue was waiting for him to finish.

  “We have everything now,” he murmured. “Don’t we? Our kids anyway.”

  “In a manner of speaking, I suppose,” Minogue conceded.

  “Oh we have it all, there’s no doubt. But the crazy thing is, you know what I’m thinking this past while now? Do you?”

  “I don’t. Tell me, why don�
��t you.”

  “Them hard times?” He nodded his head for emphasis. “They’re back. But like, in the opposite way. Aren’t they?”

  Chapter 34

  “YOU’RE NOT GOING TO FALL ASLEEP THERE,” said Cully, “are you?” Fanning didn’t answer, but kept his eyes on the road ahead, where the farther reach of the headlights met the darkness. They drove under the Western Bypass and took the steep parts of the Edmonstown Road with ease.

  “You’re looking a bit too relaxed there,” Cully said.

  Fanning was undecided yet on Cully’s tone. It was probably the sly mockery he suspected.

  “I’m fine,” he said, and scratched at his face again where some of the rubber glue had been hard to get off.

  “Wasn’t so hard, was it. The shop? Nice little acting job there?”

  Fanning wouldn’t tell him it was more embarrassing than nerve-wracking. That it had felt like some stupid dress-up, with a kinky undertow to the whole thing. They weren’t porno mags in the bag either, just crap celebrity stuff. It was when he took the full weight of the plastic bag on his fingers that it turned nerve-wracking: a handgun weighed a lot.

  He pressed his window up. The night air had a bite to it up here.

  A signpost glowed in the lights: Cruagh. That was a mountain road too, he remembered dimly, leading up through the forested state lands of the Dublin Mountains. Cully steered left. The car began to make its way through steep, wooded hills looming close to the road. Fanning felt the uneven tarmacadam patches and the half-repaired potholes thump at the BMW’s tires. He searched for any patch of sky ahead to give shape to the darkness.

  He looked across the dashboard again at the glow from the panel. Cully’s hand, rather his wrist, rested on the gearshift between them. He steered with his right hand only. The car shuddered once on a deeper pothole and Fanning heard a hiss of water sprayed from a puddle along with pebbles scattering.

  “How far?”

  “Not far,” said Cully.

  “You know a good spot?”

  “A good spot for what?”

  It was a wot, more than the Dublin whah, Fanning registered.

  “For what you said.”

  Cully looked over. Fanning refused to take his eyes off the windscreen ahead.

  “For the…?” Cully said.

  “You know.”

  “Definitely, feeling quite at home, I have to say. Aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean?” Fanning asked.

  “Snappy comments. Much more, what’ll we say, assertive?”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Who said anything about it being bad.”

  “Okay. I’m just trying to get some information.”

  “Research,” said Cully and made a quick jerk of the wheel to steer around a long puddle.

  “Right.”

  “Good.”

  “Nothing to worry about then, is there.”

  Fanning hesitated. He wondered if Cully was inviting some kind of bluntness. Maybe it was a test of some kind.

  “Sure there is. There’s a hell of a lot to worry about. There’s a loaded gun in here.”

  “A pistol – call it a pistol. A gun can be anything. Or call it a firearm.”

  “There’s a loaded gun under my seat. A ticket to a ten-year stay in Portlaoise Maximum Security.”

  “Well you’re not going to advertise the fact it’s there, are you?”

  “What do you think.”

  “Well no worries then. Right?”

  Fanning said nothing.

  “Oh wait,” said Cully after a few moments. He shifted in his seat and half-turned to him. “I get it.”

  “You get…?”

  “You’re thinking, this a one-way trip. Aren’t you?”

  Fanning examined the beads of muddy water that had been flung up from the puddles on to his window.

  “Of course you are,” Cully said. “You’re not an idiot. You’ve weighed it up right?”

  Fanning shrugged.

  “And I’m not an idiot either. You told people where you went, didn’t you?”

  “Do I even know where I’m going here?”

  “Too bloody right you did. I would too.”

  Fanning looked over at him.

  “We’re adults, remember,” Cully said. “What we’re doing is getting established. Just getting to know the ground. Sussing things out.”

  “A recce, like.”

  Cully glanced over.

  “You used the word before,” Fanning said.

  “You have a good memory then.”

  “Just don’t say ‘relationship,’ or ‘win win.’”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a joke. PowerPoint talk. You know what PowerPoint is, right?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Fanning didn’t try to hide his skepticism.

  “You didn’t expect that, did you.”

  “Actually no,” Fanning allowed. “Do you give seminars or something with PowerPoint?”

  Cully seemed to consider a response.

  “As a matter of fact,” he began, but then shrugged away the rest of what he was about to say.

  “Go on.”

  Cully shook his head

  “Some other time, maybe.”

  The road through the pine forest crossed the river that ran along the valley floor dividing Two Rock Mountain, whose coastal side was part of the skyline of Dublin city, from Djouce, the first of the mountains that backed higher into Wicklow.

  The car began to sway and even wallow as the roadway cut its way around the side of the valley. Fanning was visited by brief, scattered memories now of picnics when he was small, of the rock-strewn stream in the darkness alongside.

  The headlights tunnelled in to the night, revealing the clumps of died-back grasses that the winter had bleached. Fanning inclined closer to his window and again looked up to the sky. There was only the faintest lightening high up where the slope met the night sky over Dublin City.

  Cully was humming.

  “Creepy isn’t it,” he said. Innit, Fanning heard.

  “Be different now in the summer,” he added.

  “You know the place here?”

  “Well, I did. Some time back.”

  Then, when Fanning didn’t follow up with questions, Cully added, “Boy Scout stuff? Didn’t get out of the city much then.”

  “Dublin, like? Growing up?”

  Cully nodded, and resumed humming. There was no break in the flat darkness of the mountains to Cully’s side.

  “Expecting someone?”

  “No.”

  He thought he heard Cully snort faintly. Then he slowed and scrutinized the roadway ahead.

  “Around here. The road.”

  “A forestry road?”

  “I suppose, yes.”

  “It’s just a track then.”

  Cully nodded.

  “Just about… there.”

  He braked hard enough to scatter the gravel from the edges of the road.

  “Here?”

  “Yep, this is it.”

  The BMW’s bonnet leaned and then dropped as it descended, lopsided, through the long puddle, the lights scouring across the undergrowth, then bobbing up to the conifers.

  “There’ll be a gate,” said Fanning. “You wouldn’t want to try going up in a car anyway.”

  The yellow gateposts caught the headlights.

  “We’re in luck,” said Cully.

  Fanning put his hand on the armrest to moderate the slow bucking of the car. He heard a metallic thump as Cully drove over a rut that turned into a low embankment.

  “Won’t be much left of Murph’s car at this rate,” he said.

  Cully opened the window, and cold air scented with pine needles and sodden earth filled the car. Fanning heard a swish from the front wheels as Cully steered through another puddle. The rear wheels sizzled, spinning for a few moments, spraying water and mud hard on the underside panels of the car. Cully eased off the accelerator and sat forw
ard as if to coax the car through.

  The wheels found grip then and the BMW shot out of the slough. They were in the woods now. The track took on the dull khaki colour of the needles. The trees seemed to be moving in slow procession with passage of the headlights.

  “How loud does it get?” Fanning asked.

  “Louder than you think.”

  Cully switched off the engine.

  “What about a silencer thing?”

  “A suppressor, it’s called. You’re not going to get one of those.”

  “Why not?”

  “Let me explain something. Even if that dickhead had one to fit the piece of junk he gave you, he wouldn’t give it to you. You know why?”

  “Because, I don’t know, I’d wreck it?”

  “Because you’d be renting the gun to use it.”

  “So…?”

  “You don’t get it. That’s bad for business. If you use it, it’s dirty. I don’t mean dirt, I mean it’s tainted.”

  “Traceable?”

  “Right. So if you’re asking for something with your ‘silencer’ thrown in…”

  “I get it,” said Fanning.

  He listened to the ticks of the engine cooling. Staring into the darkness he could soon distinguish gaps of less dark sky. Cully released his belt and let it slide quietly into place. He yawned and pulled back the sleeve of his jacket to see his watch. He made no move to get out of the car.

  “Are we going to…?”

  “Soon.”

  “What are we waiting for?”

  Cully rubbed at his eyes pinching the bridge of his nose and then stretched.

  “We are waiting,” he said slowly in a stagy voice, “we are waiting, for the right time. That’s what we are waiting for.”

  Chapter 35

  MINOGUE STRETCHED AGAIN. A familiar sournes came to his nostrils – the stale smell of late hours in the same shirt and jacket, of early morning hours spent sitting in interview rooms, or slouched in cars.

  Duggan had moved his chair back to the wall so he could lean his head and shoulders against it. Wall looked as fresh as ever somehow. Minogue wondered how, but then decided that Wall’s strong faith probably had an inner glow of freshness and cleanliness, signs of everlasting life conferred on the chosen, perhaps. Like the clean-cut Mormons.