by John Brady
To stem his own anxiety, Minogue turned to Hoey. “Do you know any Jews here at all, Shea?”
“Not a one, sir. I wouldn’t know one if I saw one.”
“Do you know how many Jews there are in Ireland?”
“I don’t.”
“There’s about 2, 000, so there is. North and south. Fewer every year, too, I’m thinking.”
“Is that a fact? I heard a joke there a while ago. Maybe now’s not the time, though. Ah… harmless enough though. It’s about a roadblock with a gang of thugs up in Belfast. Doesn’t matter if they’re Catholics or Protestants for this one. They stop this fella driving his car and they stick a gun in the window, like. ‘Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?’ they ask. ‘Neither,’ says the man. ‘I’m a Jew.’ So that sets them back a bit. They have to think about that one, you see. Finally one of them asks: ‘Are you a Protestant Jew or Catholic Jew though?’ ”
“I think that’d be a good one another time,” Minogue allowed. “Do you know Abrams, the jewellers down in Dame Street?”
“Beside the hat-shop? I do.”
“They’re Jews. I bought Kathleen’s ring there. It didn’t fit properly so I brought it back. She thought I had bought it for another girl. Or so she said. Bernard Abrams was in it then. He fixed it. I was by the place there a few months ago and the son was selling out. To go to Canada, I think.”
“Hold on a minute. There’s a Dr Lewis up in the Rotunda: he’s a Jew, isn’t he?” Hoey asked.
“To be sure. If you hadn’t been a Galwegian, you’d have been one of the thousands that Lewis delivered. It was him who landed Kathleen and meself with our two. Three actually…” Minogue felt a tingle, all that was left after the years had cauterized the memory of their first child, an infant, Eamonn. They had been told at the time that the child had forgotten to breathe.
“Well the Lewises go back a long time. A family of doctors,” Minogue added.
He took a deep breath in an attempt to calm himself. Damn and blast that Jimmy Kilmartin, the sleeveen: all that talk about Victor Hugo and loaning him books to read in the hospital hadn’t changed him an iota. Damn him the more for infecting me with his own anger and anxiety, thought Minogue as the car turned into the street where Fine’s house was.
“There’s a funny thing, now,” Hoey began as though talking to himself. “Hold on, is it 147 we’re wanting?” He leaned over the wheel looking for door numbers. “There it is,” he muttered.
“Yep. A funny thing,” Hoey murmured as he turned off the ignition. “I don’t know what words to use when we’re talking about this. I hear meself saying ‘Jews’, then ‘Jewish’, and I don’t like the sound of either. I don’t mean the words themselves. I don’t know what it is.”
“Like a ‘Jew’ is not an Irishman too? Or is it a declaration?” Minogue suggested.
“Something like that maybe.” Understanding flickered in Hoey’s eyes before he lapsed into the preoccupied frown. “And ‘Jewish’ doesn’t sound strong enough, like someone’s only tending to be Jew. Ah I’m not making any sense. It’s just words.”
“Did Fine ever send away any gunmen?” Hoey asked as he parked the car.
“I don’t think he did. The nearest he would have come to the Special Criminal Court might have been an appeal on a sentence that got to the Supreme Court.”
“So they wouldn’t have been trying to get at him through the son for that. But it’s the Palestinian thing that gives me the willies, so it does,” Hoey whispered.
Minogue walked ahead of Hoey to Fine’s large Victorian house. The half-dozen stone steps up to the door seemed a penance to Minogue. Damn and damn Jimmy Kilmartin again. He knocked. Hoey was licking his upper lip nervously as he looked to the scroll on the door-frame.
“You take a few notes here if we can talk, Shea, all right? I’m jittery, I don’t mind telling you.”
Minogue heard the latch being pulled back inside. His apprehension crested as the door opened slowly. He breathed out and felt his body root him through leaden feet to the step, while the September sky pressed down on him.
Fine stood in the doorway. Minogue identified himself. Fine beckoned the two detectives inside and they followed him into a parlour. Fine walked slackly to the fireplace and leaned his shoulders on it. Minogue heard him breathing through his nostrils.
“We can come back-”
“Stay put now,” Fine said, looking beyond them to the window. Minogue feared the worst but Fine did not pounce.
“I’ll look into the matter of how my wife got to hear of this from the neighbour and not from the Gardai some other time. I expect there’s some reason, some excuse,” Fine said. “I had a call from the Garda Commissioner five minutes before you came. I’ll take the matter up with him. It’s nothing for you, for you personally, to feel awkward about.”
“Your Worship, I might as well-”
“It’ll be better if you call me Mr. Fine.”
“Mr. Fine,” Minogue began again,“I’ll give you as much as I know, as much as we know, if you want to hear it.”
“I do, in as much as I need to hear it sooner or later,” Fine replied.
“Your son was shot three times. Where he was shot suggests some kind of a punishment killing, an execution. There are no signs that he was otherwise abused before he died. It’s very likely that he died instantly. From what our forensic technicians tell us, and this is in the absence of the State Pathologist’s work yet to be done, Paul was shot at very close range.”
“He was shot in the head,” Fine said, as though addressing nobody. Minogue’s stomach coiled with the anguish. He heard Hoey draw a breath and hold it as he perched on the edge of the chair.
“Yes, he was,” Minogue replied hoarsely.
Fine blinked several times. His eyes looked out on nothing local to the room or the men in it. Minogue believed that he saw Fine grow smaller, become a different man in that minute’s silence. Hoey’s jittery animal eyes darted to the ceiling when the cries sounded upstairs again. Footsteps skipped quickly down a staircase. A bearded man in his middle years opened the door, glanced at the two policemen and gestured to Fine. Fine left the room. Minogue noted the skullcap, the yarmulka, as the bearded man turned and drew the door closed behind Fine.
Hoey blew his breath out between tight lips. “Jesus, I hate this. I really hate this. I’m not cut out for this at all. Christ, I’d give anything to be out of here this second. I’m not up to it.”
The doors opened and Fine returned. The bearded man followed him and laid a tray on a set of nesting tables. Minogue busied himself making unnecessary way for the arrival of the coffee, the better to allow Fine to take out his hanky and wipe away the tears. Hoey had noticed too and he co-operated by standing up and fussing about awkwardly.
“Ah, that’s too kind of you now, Mr. Fine. Our tongues were just hanging out for the want of a bit of something in this line. We’ll have this down and be out of your way in a flash,” Minogue said. He looked up at the bearded man, seeing a face perhaps familiar.
“You may know Johnny Cohen here, Inspector. He’s a cantor up at the temple in Orwell Road,” Fine sighed as he dabbed his eyes.
Minogue stood and shook hands with Cohen.
“Johnny is a relation of my wife, Rosalie. His wife, Carol, is upstairs with her, along with Rabbi Silverman. I expect there’ll be a gaggle of people descending on the house any minute so let’s get started,” Fine said, sitting heavily into an armchair.
Minogue sat down gingerly, anxious not to spill any coffee into the saucer. He felt an odd relief at Fine’s words. Fine had a Dublin accent, soft and nearly ironical, so unlike the contorted blends which Minogue heard regularly in the suburbs. A real Dubliner, a Jew, one of the great legal minds on the island, and he still used expressions like ‘a gaggle’. Fine’s face now seemed bigger, open.
“You know,” Fine said slowly, the cup next to his lip as he stared out the window, “Johnny and I, the first thing we said when he came to the hou
se an hour ago.”
Cohen paused by the door at the mention of his name.
“If I recall, it was Johnny actually got the words out first.‘I hope and pray that Paul is not dead because he is a Jew,’ you said, Johnny.”
Fine’s eyes stayed fixed and vacant while he sipped at the coffee. Cohen’s head dropped and Minogue could see the eyelashes batting rapidly. Hoey’s body seemed to scream as Minogue noticed him squirm. Cohen looked to Minogue’s eyes once as he closed the door. Minogue had to break the contact and stare down at his cup, his mind raging with shame and helplessness.
“I hope the same, Mr. Fine,” Minogue said to his cup.
Minogue thought about Hoey’s question before he slammed the car door.
“Peculiar because he’s so ordinary? What did you expect, Shea?” he asked.
Hoey shrugged and started the engine. Minogue took his notebook and flicked through the pages.
Paul had been born on 12 July 1956. Fine even remembered the time: a Thursday morning around three. Fine had last seen his son on Friday, in the restaurant of the Art Gallery in Merrion Square. Who would make the formal identification of the body, he had asked. If he was up to it himself, Minogue had replied, they could bring Justice Fine to the hospital now. Fine had said that he couldn’t go then, not before his wife’s sister showed up at the house.
“Your handwriting is gone as bad as mine,” Minogue murmured. “But go on: what did you expect?”
“I don’t know. Something different, I suppose.”
Minogue remembered his own pleasant bewilderment when he had first visited the Jewish Museum. An older man who had been sitting at a desk had looked up at Minogue as he entered and asked him if he had been to the Museum before. Minogue replied that he had not. The man rose from his seat, introduced himself as Stanley Davis-he was called Stan- and led Minogue on a tour of the synagogue. Where Minogue had expected the rich accents of Eastern Europe or the Middle East, he heard only the practised diffident stoicism, the tones of men ever ready to disabuse a non-Dubliner of any presumptions about Dublin. He heard in Davis’s voice something else too, an easy mix of earnestness and resignation.
Stan had pointed out his son in several of the photographs housed in the folders which he had been working on when Minogue arrived. The son at sports events, the son at garden parties (did people still have them?), the son rigged out in tennis gear and shaking hands with a tennis star. No detail of genealogy escaped Stan Davis and he had a story to go with every face in the albums. Where was Stan’s son now? Oh, he had done very well in the insurance, and he had up and gone to London. Stan’s wife had died two years ago. Stan didn’t want to take up the son’s offer of his own flat in London yet, he said, but he didn’t look at Minogue as he said it. He wanted to see the Museum off the ground before he left. That’d be his legacy if he did leave, Stan had said. Minogue remembered Stan Davis’s wan face, a man in his seventies but with the clear and grave countenance of a child looking at him as if to say: Well, that’s my story and what do you think?
Minogue continued glossing over Hoey’s notes. Hoey lit a cigarette. The coffee had killed Minogue’s incipient appetite, leaving him with a smouldering space in his belly. Fine had anticipated the questions and the details which the detectives sought. He had left the room twice during the interview, both times to answer the phone. He took the first call before the lumbering Johnny Cohen had made it down the stairs at a run. Cohen had pounced on the second ring with the second call.
“He must have had a row with Paul somewhere along the line,” Hoey murmured. “And they sort of kept their distance, if you follow me.”
“Um. I remember the way he mentioned about Paul dropping out of the uni after two years, all right,” Minogue agreed.
“Not to say there would have been bad blood or that class of thing. God, no. Just the usual family thing,” Hoey emphasized. Minogue heard the caution behind Hoey’s qualification: he was giving himself, not the Fines, the benefit of any doubt as to whether Jews were also mired in ‘the usual family thing’.
“I mean to say, look at the other two children in that family,” Hoey continued. “One a dentist, the daughter some type of a research scientist. Careers and families, the whole bit.”
Both policemen watched the taxi stopping in front of their own car. A middle-aged woman emerged hurriedly from the back seat, her eyes red from crying. She ran to the gate and pushed it open. A younger woman stayed to pay the taxi-man and then she too hurried up the steps to the door, which was already opening. Fine stood in the doorway, his arms by his side, the shock clear on his face now. Both women embraced him. It seemed to take an effort more than he could summon for him to embrace them in return. He stood with his eyes closed as they drew him back into the house between them.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Hoey whispered tersely. His fingers jabbed at the packet of Majors in his haste to get another cigarette. Minogue felt the stab of grief keener this time.
“For the love of Christ,” Hoey mumbled, his hands shaking with the lighted match wavering at the end of the cigarette. “Will this day never end?”
“That’s the sister-in-law he’s been waiting on, I’d say. He’ll be out in a minute,” Minogue said. His chest heaved once, twice. He wondered if Hoey felt the same ache of shame as he did, the same confusion after realizing that it was shame.
It was five minutes before Fine reappeared at the door. Johnny Cohen was with him and both men were wearing black hats with modest brims. Hoey was out of his seat and holding the back door open by the time the two men had walked to the gate. Fine was very pale now.
There was no talk in the car. Minogue stared out the front window all the way to Vincent’s Hospital. Cohen had his hand under Fine’s arm when they stepped from the car.
Minogue heard Hoey’s ‘Jases’ under his breath before he himself saw Kilmartin and God Almighty, Garda Commissioner Lally, in the hall. God Almighty was in a civvy suit. Kilmartin danced attendance on him, seconding his nod to Minogue before they advanced to meet Fine. Minogue saw Kilmartin’s signal to stay back. The Commissioner took Fine’s hand. Fine nodded but seemed dazed. He did not look at any of the policemen’s faces. Cohen seemed to be trying to get closer to Fine, his hand firm under Fine’s elbow now. The Commissioner’s head bent close to Fine’s and Minogue heard “condolences… family… sincere… outrage…” Kilmartin followed with a briefer handshake. Minogue heard an “everything possible…” at the end of Kilmartin’s whisper.
Minogue went to the toilet. He took his time washing his hands. He washed his face then, and checked that his hairline had not scampered back another inch or two since that morning. Then he stooped and took a drink from the tap. He recalled the doctor kneeling by the body on the beach, shaking his thermometer, and shivered at the commonplace indignity of death. Kilmartin barrelled into the toilet just as Minogue was ready to take more stock of the face looking back at him from the mirror. Kilmartin stepped to the urinal and fumbled.
“That’s the boy, all right. At least we got that part right.”
“Did he give God Almighty an earful about not hearing it from the Gardai first?” asked Minogue.
“No he didn’t. Relief all around, let me tell you. Jases, I would have given out the pay about that if I were him.”
“I’ll wait outside,” said Minogue.
“Don’t be running off on me now, do you hear me, Matt? God Almighty wants to see the pair of us after you’ve seen Fine home.”
Minogue did not try to hide his unease.
Hoey drove stiffly, with almost ostentatious care, as though carrying a delicate or explosive cargo, Minogue thought. Billy Fine’s slack, pale face didn’t turn to meet Minogue’s eyes but stayed, instead, directed toward the window. Minogue did not take notes: he knew that Hoey was soaking it all up too. Hoey steered the car up through Ranelagh on the return journey to Fine’s home, while Johnny Cohen held Fine’s hand on the back seat. Minogue had watched Cohen dart occasional angry stares
at him during the drive, and had returned them several times. All right, be protective, Minogue was ready to tell Cohen, but don’t get in the way of any scrap of information that’ll help us to catch Paul Fine’s killer.
“Lily couldn’t stand Dublin,” Fine murmured. “That’s the long and short of it. And I don’t blame her for that, not one bit. The heartbreak was that Paul couldn’t stay away from Dublin, probably for the same reasons that Lily couldn’t stay in it.”
Cohen coughed; a sure sign, Minogue decided, of anger that he was trying to control. He sensed that Cohen was the prickly guardian of a community which did not welcome prying Gentiles.
“How long were they married?” Minogue asked.
“Two years,” said Fine tonelessly. “She tried, you know,” he then said and glanced momentarily at Minogue. “Even with our community here she still felt like a stranger.”
Minogue watched Cohen scratching behind an ear, and wondered if Cohen could hold off making a remark.
“ ‘Strangers in a strange land’,” said Fine. He let out a sigh and his free hand went to his eyes. Minogue looked away as Fine’s head went down. Cohen leaned close to his friend and whispered in his ear. Fine nodded several times and relaxed against Cohen’s bulk. Hoey’s frown had deepened, and he seemed to be squeezing the wheel very tightly as if willing the car to move. Minogue waited.
“Anyway,” Minogue heard Billy Fine say,“that’s our lot, maybe. Paul wasn’t as thick-skinned as our other children. David’s set up as an orthodontist in London. Never come back, I imagine. Julia’s engaged to an American fella she met at a conference on plant genetics…”
Minogue stole a glance at Fine and noted the wry expression.
“We’d given up her getting married,” Fine added with the beginnings of a faint smile. He met Minogue’s cautious eye and smiled weakly. “Tough piece of work, the same Julia.”
“Great,” said Minogue. “The only way to be, I’m thinking. We have one like that. She’d frighten the wits out of lesser mortals.”
