Kaddish in Dublin imm-3

by John Brady

  “Resist at all?” asked Kilmartin.

  “No sir. If he had shut up he would have been home in bed by eleven o’clock instead of walking home at half-two in the morning. He’s a member of the Irish-Arab society, quite legit. More of an intellectual than anything else. He has a tongue like a rasp on him. He knew a lot about Irish politics, if that’s any consolation. Never heard of or knew anyone called Fine. He spent Sunday afternoon studying in his flat and he gave two names to corroborate.”

  Hoey turned to the next statement. Minogue knew that they had nothing to help the investigation along, with these three students. They read through the remainder slowly. Keating sat at the table quietly without announcing himself.

  “Did you put in a ‘want’ to police where this Ebrahim fella is supposed to be visiting, in Nottingham?” Minogue asked.

  “Yes sir. There was a reply on the telex this morning. He is there, and his sister is married and living there too.”

  Gallagher’s lists, Minogue thought: have to go back to them and widen the net.

  “Only one admitted to knowing about the murder. None said anything to suggest that they knew Fine at all or knew that he was a Jew,” Hoey went on. “None professed to know of any organization called the League for Solidarity with the Palestinian People. One of them, the Mahoud fella three statements back, said he’d like to hear more about them. Smart-arse. Later on, as you’ll see if you read the end of his statement again, he says that if anyone’d know of such a group, he would.”

  “Bit of a braggart, is he?”

  Hoey shrugged and looked around the table as if to invite optimism.

  Kilmartin coughed. “If we’re going to follow along with this line,” he began slowly, “I see two possibilities.”

  He paused to light his cigarette.

  “The outfit we want is a splinter, maybe a whole new group. It’s baptism of fire, if you like.”

  “Like a declaration to take them seriously?” said Keating.

  “Yes. I can’t see IRA involvement here at all, beyond maybe renting out some guns to this group. These people are likely young and have some contact with groups who have guns. A new crowd arriving here doesn’t have that contact, but a splinter group would. As for the IRA, they wouldn’t have anything to do with killing a Jew. Pardon me putting it like that. If they wanted to take a swipe at the judiciary here, they wouldn’t have picked Fine’s son. And if they did, they would admit doing it, am I right?”

  Minogue nodded.

  “So you have educated or semi-educated people with heads full of theories about how the Irish are in the same boat as the Palestinians maybe,” Kilmartin went on. “Fringe people, maybe did a bit of university, enough to get themselves confused.”

  “Where ignorance is bliss…” murmured Hoey.

  “Now you have it. Learned just enough to stay stupid. Definitely not for the man in the street. He doesn’t give much of a shite what’s going on in the Middle East-until some of the UN troops start getting shot. The IRA will take the guns and talk about the Palestinian cause but bejases…” Kilmartin concluded with a scornful pull at the cigarette.

  “Gallagher says that the IRA wouldn’t touch Muslim fanatics with a ten-foot pole, sir,” said Keating. “On account of how the Ayatollah and his mob hate anything to do with socialism.”

  “Oh, does he now?” said Kilmartin.

  “But there might be another kink in this, sir-if you’ll pardon me saying so,” rejoined Keating. “Remember that Fine used to be enough of a Leftie for the Branch to have a file on him. Could we be talking about some class of a falling-out here?”

  “We need to know where he was killed,” Minogue interrupted. “I think we’re jumping the gun here. What was the other possibility you thought of?” he asked Kilmartin.

  “Just that it might be a group we know who did the murder-except that they don’t want to get a bad name on the head of it.”

  The policemen fell silent.

  “The timing of the call to the paper,” said Minogue. “That’s something I’m having trouble with.”

  “We up and left for Killiney after the call came through from Dalkey Station,” Hoey joined in. “While ye were on the train out, that’s when the call came into the Press.”

  “Ten twenty-nine,” said the exacting Keating.

  “And that was only twenty minutes or so after the body was first sighted and reported to Dalkey Station. That’s odd. Why call then to claim responsibility?”

  “Maybe they were going to call that time anyway,” suggested Keating. “We can’t be sure right now that it wasn’t coincidence.”

  “The world treats persons who rely on coincidences rather harshly,” said Minogue. “I think they knew that Fine was to be found shortly or had just been found.”

  “Couldn’t have anything to do with the oul‘ lad who saw him though,” said Kilmartin. “Seventy-odd years of age. He’s nothing to us at all, at all.”

  “Yes, but why call if there’s no body? I mean, if they dumped Paul Fine in the sea so as he might float off and not be found… They must have known that the body would be found. Leave the motive for killing him in the first place: what does it say about the planning that went into the killing? They attempted to make the body disappear, to all intents and purposes. So why would they want to call and claim responsibility for a murder, when they didn’t want the body found?”

  “Unless they saw, or knew about, the oul‘ fella finding him Monday morning,” said Kilmartin. He was beginning to enjoy himself, Minogue realized, speculating out loud, prodding discussion. Maybe Jimmy Kilmartin had longed to play second fiddle for a long time so that he could throw ideas around and not have to feel silly if they came to nothing? Or was there a little malice in it, seeing how much Minogue could stay on top of an investigation which looked like it could become an intractable mess?

  “Or it means that the body wasn’t dumped that far away from where it was found,” said Keating vaguely. “It could have been pushed in from Killiney beach itself, and the tide didn’t do the job they hoped it would.”

  “There’d have been people on that beach until dark,” said Hoey. “They’d have seen any body floating even fifty feet offshore.”

  “But the point is,” Minogue tried to recover his thread, “if they had planned this killing and they really wanted to have the body disappear, they could have arranged that. So, the timing of this killing was not of their choosing, I think. It may be that there was no elaborate plan to kill Paul Fine at all.”

  The policemen took turns scrutinizing the walls.

  “What word from Pat Gallagher on the Ports of Entry lists?” Minogue tried.

  “Em, nothing yet,” said Hoey quietly.

  “Where’s this Mary McCutcheon one?” asked Kilmartin. “Someone has to know what Fine was at over the weekend.”

  “She’s up in Sligo doing a story, sir,” said Hoey. “She’s to come down to Dublin on the train this morning first thing. She only heard about it last night herself. She’s a reporter for the Irish Times.”

  “Is she his girlfriend or intended or what?” asked Kilmartin.

  Hoey shrugged. “Paul Fine’s Da knew of her but never met her. Mickey Fitzgerald says that she was more or less Paul’s girlfriend. Ten ten, the train schedule says, in Kingsbridge.”

  “She’s not a Jew, though,” Kilmartin observed. No one answered him.

  “Nobody else know where he was over the weekend? Downey or Fitzgerald out in RTE? This man had no friends, is it?” complained Kilmartin.

  “Still looking, sir. He seems to have kept to himself since he came back from London,” said Hoey.

  “All right. We’re taking a radio car up to Kingsbridge, meet this Mary McCutcheon. The first thing you hear off anyone at the beach today, contact us. And get a hold of Sergeant Gallagher: try and get him over here by half-eleven, we’ll meet him here. Tell him we’ll be wanting to go through the universities today. Get every name off C3 lists for Republicans and Lefties wi
th any connection-even rumoured- to Arabs or Muslims or Palestinians. Cross-check against students and radicals, look for any match-ups. Even for travels to any part of the Middle East. See if there are any gunmen after being released from Portlaoise prison this last while, any fellas that ever did freelance stuff.”

  Minogue paused. “Do we have the manpower this morning, at the beaches and the coastal points?”

  “Yes, we do,” Keating answered.

  “So how does it feel to be in charge of a hundred Gardai? Didn’t I tell you that Hoey and Keating can do the brunt of it? How will they ever learn if they don’t get to do the real McCoy?”

  “Right, Jimmy.”

  Kilmartin slammed the door while Minogue extricated himself from behind the wheel. Minogue would not tell Kilmartin that it was he, not Kilmartin or Hoey or Keating, who had to answer finally to Justice Fine and a jittery Commissioner.

  The Sligo train was not in yet but it was suggested that it was running on time. Kingsbridge Station would have been a jewel of a building had it been kept up on the inside over the last fifty years. Its Victorian mass had recently drawn film-makers to use parts of it, Minogue remembered. The station lay next to the Liffey within sight of the Phoenix Park. It was not near enough to the city centre for travellers’ comfort, neither was it sure of itself in any age which did not make much of the ceremony of train travel. The quays next to the station were suffused with the sulphurous stink of the Liffey, long an open sewer, and the tangy hop smell of the Guinness brewery. Minogue, climbing out of his sleep even yet, did not welcome the characteristic Dublin stink.

  “Are we going to hold a sign up with her name on it, like at the airport?” asked Kilmartin. The noticeboard clicked overhead.

  “Is that the Sligo job on the way in?” Kilmartin asked a passing porter.

  “Sligo and Donegal,” the porter drawled, content that he was addressing a policeman from the provinces-a culchie-who might not yet know that no trains went to Donegal.

  Mary McCutcheon walked straight to the two policemen.

  “Are we that obvious?” Kilmartin asked astringently.

  “I’m a reporter,” she answered. Minogue introduced himself and Kilmartin, skipping the ranks. She looked like she hadn’t slept and didn’t care that she hadn’t. She smoked, inhaling the smoke deeply as though to still her darting eyes. There was something mannish about her, Minogue believed. Stayed up late, no stranger to a gin and tonic? She wore cord jeans and a blouse which looked like a shirt.

  Mary McCutcheon hoisted her bag better on her shoulder and walked between the two men. “It hasn’t sunk in with me yet,” she said to neither of them. “That much I’m sure of.”

  Her eyes were yellowed but still intense, with dark-bluish marks under them. Middle thirties, Minogue guessed, glancing at her again. Runs herself hard.

  “Thanks for coming down so quickly,” Minogue said. “Will you tell us where you last saw Paul?”

  “Last week. Wednesday. We met in Gaffney’s pub about eight.”

  “Was it a date, like?”

  She smiled grimly up at Kilmartin. “To anyone else it might have been. We’re old friends, put it like that. We work in the same business, more or less.”

  It took considerable probing from Minogue to get by Mary McCutcheon’s edges. She seemed to lose her caution when Minogue told her that yes, Paul Fine had been shot to death. She shook herself abruptly once more after that news, when Minogue mentioned who had claimed responsibility in the call to the Press. “I heard that,” she murmured, stabbing her cigarette at the ashtray: they were in the buffet now. “Who or what the hell are they? My first reaction is not to believe it,” she said.

  After a challenging look to both men she lapsed into an account of herself and Paul Fine. She was separated from her husband, who still lived in London, just like Paul’s ex-wife Lily.

  “We met over there, two peas just out of our pods. There was a crowd used to go to the navvies’ pubs where we could expect to find Irish people. He was trying to sort out what he wanted and I was trying to forget my fella. Hilarious, you’re thinking. What was funny was that we both admitted that we missed Dublin terribly, more than we ever expected. You’ve seen what the city has turned into here: the back-biting and the knocking and the booze and the poverty… all that. This damn town is rotten with journalists and only a few are worth not slamming the door on. Sounds pretty flimsy, doesn’t it? Like a bad cliche-‘You don’t miss the place until you leave it.’ I don’t know.”

  She looked around the buffet as if targeting something to comment on.

  “Neither of us really knew what it was that dragged us back to this place. I took a drop in pay for the privilege of living here and getting taxed to hell and back again. That’s what seemed funny to us then. We didn’t believe in that emigrant nostalgia shit, but it happened. Dublin. He was Dublin for generations, a Dublin Jew. Me, I’m Wicklow about fifteen years back. Paul had been to Israel and the States.”

  Minogue remembered the picture of Paul Fine standing with his parents in front of a pile of stones in some sunny, dusty place.

  “He said he’d like to try Canada. A lot of his friends from school went there. But he admitted that even there he’d probably still want out. Back to Dublin.”

  “So you kept in touch with him when you came back here?” asked Minogue.

  “Yup. Let’s get down to basics here now. For a while we thought there might be something for us. Together, I mean. For starters, I’m a shiksa.”

  “A what?”

  “A Gentile. A non-Jewish woman. A non-starter for marriage prospects. Well it didn’t work out, as you probably can guess. Paul was on the rebound from Lily. He was very hurt, very guilty. Lily is a tough piece of work. Tough but fair. He always said she was right to stick with her career, that he had agreed to try London, that her job was more important. No, it didn’t take with us and we knew it wouldn’t. We took the unusual step of staying friends. I actually got even more… fond of him. Me and my mother stuff. I wanted to help him, I think. That was two years ago.”

  Did she know anything about Paul’s work in RTE, Minogue asked. Very little. He liked RTE but said that some of the other people there were hatchet-men. Meaning? Too keen for any story, ones with dirt, vendettas with the church and politicians. She didn’t mind that one bit, she said: it was about time. Had he mentioned what stories he was working on recently? No. What did he do at weekends? Another few seconds’ scrutiny of Minogue this time. Visited his parents sometimes, met her for dinner if she was in town. A film, a concert. Sometimes went away for a weekend to bed and breakfast it in Galway or Mayo. He liked the west.

  “Didn’t he have school-friends or pals he went to university with? Wouldn’t they stick together socially?” Kilmartin risked.

  “ ‘They?’ ” she asked acidly. “You mean Jews?”

  Kilmartin blinked. Minogue heard his feet moving under the table.

  “Paul Fine was a Dubliner. That’s not to lay claim to anything glamorous, I know, but maybe that was part of what I saw in him, my mothery business. The difference between him and my hus-my ex-husband-was that my ex expected me to mother him when he wanted it. Paul didn’t. If I don’t bowl men over and intimidate them, I seem to mother them to death. Paul didn’t fit so well. I think he slipped through the cracks here and there. Some people might call that backing away, but I wouldn’t. He wanted to escape a few things, not in a cowardly way though… I know he didn’t attend synagogue. His friends? I don’t know. They moved away. I’m talking about educated people, doctors and accountants and dentists and engineers. To the States and Canada, London. Paul stayed. That’s all. I suppose it was stubbornness and being one of the oldest Jewish families in Ireland. I’m sure that counted for something.”

  Kilmartin asked about Paul’s Left-wing aspirations. Her face showed she was mastering the temptation to cut at Kilmartin again.

  “It was an intellectual commitment. He was caught in a lot of ways. For example, he
could agree intellectually about Begin and the Right wing in Israel being racists themselves. But you felt that if you pressed him, he’d want to say or feel something else. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “I think I do,” Minogue said.

  “Maybe it was being Dublin more than, or as much as, being a Jew too. Ideologues don’t do very well in this city. There’s that saving grace of scepticism, isn’t there?” she said morosely. “So Left wing and Right wing is diluted here, maybe even dissolved. The tribal stuff predates it, the territorial bit too.”

  She seemed to gather herself in a frown of concentration. “What I mean is that nobody that I remember pressed him or took him on as regards his opinions. You can tell your Special Branch pals that Paul was very uncomfortable with extremists.”

  She glared at Minogue. Her anger fell away across her face then, as speculation and remembrance took over.

  “One doesn’t argue the toss with an Irish Jew, you see,” she said resignedly. “And I think he knew that people would never bite him for his opinions the way we bite one another here. Yes, it is a ‘we’ and a ‘they’, isn’t it?”

  “Strangers in a strange land,” Minogue murmured. He didn’t care that Kilmartin would take umbrage at his fraternizing with the enemy she had proved she was with her sarcastic remarks.

  Mary McCutcheon blinked. Ash fell from her cigarette. “He used to say that too. As a sort of a joke. Where did you hear it?”

  “I heard his father use the expression the other day,” replied Minogue. No one spoke then. Minogue mustered some energy to draw himself out of the swell of pity he felt approaching.

  “Tell us, Mary, if you can, any conversations you had with Paul about the Middle East or Arabs. Any connections he drew between the Middle East and Ireland, say. Did he know any Arabs or the like here?”

  Mary McCutcheon did nothing to ease Minogue’s discomfort at the vagueness of his fishing expedition. She smiled, as though disbelieving the claims of a suitor.