All the Dead Voices

by Declan Hughes

  “Ten grand if you find out who it is.”

  “Who could it be, other than you or your boss? Who else knows?”

  Lamp shook his head.

  “Loose lips. No one keeps a secret. And the shower of gobshites we employ, they can barely get out of bed without instructions. If Leo says you know your way around, I’ll believe him. Ten grand.”

  I looked at him.

  “Who killed Paul Delaney?”

  Lamp shook his head.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who tried to have me killed?”

  “I don’t know, truth be told.”

  “That’d be a good idea. How do you think we’ll get along with that?”

  Lamp gave me that grin again, as if he knew he had to mark the joke without finding it in the slightest bit funny.

  “Are you and Jack not seeing eye to eye, Lamp?”

  “Not at all. Where’d you get that? Jack and I are solid. Serious, where’d you hear that?”

  “Well, if you didn’t send those boys after me, who did? Jack? I thought you were supposed to handle that side of things for him. Come on, they were your boys, weren’t they?”

  “They weren’t, end of. Tell me what you’ve heard about me and Jack.”

  “It’s only what everyone’s saying. And you can’t really blame them. I mean, if I owned a club, even a pretty skanky joint like the Viscount, I’d be a little taken aback if the chap I relied upon for protection went and shot it up. A little taken aback, and then, when I’d gotten over my understandable surprise, a trifle irked. I think.”

  “That’s…and I want you to tell them, Ollie and Dave. That was wrong. It should never have happened. I was out of me box that night, they were right to refuse me.”

  “Is that an apology then?”

  “It should never have happened.”

  I laughed. Whenever the IRA botched an operation and slaughtered civilians, which was more often than not, or when they murdered them intentionally, which was not unusual, part of the republican movement’s strategy was to wheel out someone from Sinn Féin to deliver a brazen nonapology apology. It always took exactly the same form as Lamp’s: blowing up that mother and her infant children was wrong. It should never have happened. (Implied was: but it’s not our fault, it can’t be, we have right on our side.) It was like saying to your wife, “I’m sorry we had a row.” (Nothing to do with me, bitch.) Stood to reason Lamp had republican form if he’d been Jack Cullen’s right-hand man all this time.

  “No, and they’re good to come back. Dessie and Liam too. I expect they’ll be coming for the funeral, will they?”

  Everyone suddenly seemed very interested in the return of the Delaney brothers: first Ray Moran, then George Halligan, now Lamp.

  “I didn’t see Jack around the Viscount last night,” I said. “How would he have known I was there, or what I said? Devlin and Cummins followed me directly. They would have been waiting outside for me the second I came out. No, it must have been Ray Moran. His master’s voice.”

  “Moran doesn’t have that kind of authority,” Lamp said. “But it’s probably fair to say you were being watched. Modern technology, it’s amazing how quickly word gets around.”

  “So nobody knows who these boys were, but Ray Moran spots them picking me up anyway? And was that you then who had to clean it all up last night in the alley? Because the boys were still breathing when I left.”

  Lamp grinned, for real this time it looked like.

  “Well, that’s what you say. And I believe you. But there’s them as wouldn’t be so sure. Them who’d be excited if they got a little present in the post, or by special delivery. A knife with Cummins’s and Devlin’s blood. And your prints on it. A good match too, not a partial.”

  He’d led me up to it, but I hadn’t seen it coming. I took a long draft of Guinness and nodded.

  “Don’t be that way, Ed.”

  “Don’t be what way? When someone is threatening to set me up for murder, what way should I be? I don’t remember, Lamp, I got expelled from finishing school before they got to that bit. I can’t walk across the room with a book on my head either. Tell me how I should be.”

  “Ah here, now, this is exactly why I didn’t, because I could have, brought it up in the first place. And others would have. It’s, and the ten grand still stands, you can take five with you tonight. In fact…”

  “In fact. That sounds promising. In fact, unless I take the money…”

  “Exactly. ‘Unless.’ I knew you’d see it immediately.”

  “Fuck you. That knife is not going to stand up in court. The chain of evidence has been broken, the Guards wouldn’t even try and introduce it.”

  Lamp couldn’t stop grinning; now he practically chuckled.

  “Well. First off, it’s a pleasure talking to a man of intelligence for a change, a thoughtful man, instead of the fuckwits and cretins I’m thrown together with in an average day. Second, two things: if that knife were to be found at the scene by DI Pearson, the investigating officer—now, for example—they could claim it had been overlooked, or missed, or—and this is what I’d advise DI Pearson to assert—that he had instituted a second search, just in case.”

  “The scene is no longer secured. The knife could have come from anywhere. It’s bullshit.”

  “Not necessarily. The killer dropped it down a drain nearby. DI Pearson’s diligence, his never-say-die spirit led him back for a last look. The killer’s DNA is on the weapon. But let’s say you’re right, Ed. You probably are. You strike me as the type who usually is. And fair enough, even if there are close-circuit photographs of you at or near the scene at that particular time—and I’m pretty sure there are—maybe that wouldn’t be enough without the forensic evidence. So you wouldn’t be on trial for murder, or even manslaughter, chances are. Which is good, I think, for you in anyway. What mightn’t be so good, for a fellow whose way of life depends on making accommodations with the Guards, is every cop in this town knowing that you were there at the time those lads were killed, that you have scars suggesting you took a bit of a battering, and most important, that there’s a knife with their blood and your prints all over it.”

  That was when I knew he had me.

  “Because of course, the Guards aren’t going to string you up themselves, but they’re not exactly big chain-of-evidence merchants, the Guards—not deep down. Not when it comes to what they believe. And I think—and of course, I’m not a Guard, far from it, but I think they’d believe you were guilty. And leading on from that, I think every one of them, including your great mate DI Dave Donnelly, wouldn’t hesitate—they’d take every opportunity to harass you, prevent you doing your job, bad-mouth you around town from high to low—and don’t forget, young Simon and Dean had friends, who might think seriously about avenging their deaths—I think they’d do everything they could to fuck you. And I think that’s what you’d end up, Ed Loy—totally fucked.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The wheels might have been coming off the economy at a frantic rate, but you wouldn’t have known a thing about it if the only place you ate your dinner was Shanahan’s on the Green. Mind you, if you could afford to dine in Shanahan’s Steakhouse every night, you probably didn’t care: you’d stored up enough nuts to get you through however long the winter lasted. No one looked very happy on it, mind. In the cocktail bar downstairs, which was called the Oval Office, and boasted a lot of Irish-American memorabilia on the walls, as well as “the original J.F.K. Rocking Chair from Air Force One,” which had something to do with his lower-back pain, or so I was told, expensive-looking older men were grimly pouring champagne for hard-faced younger women who glowed and purred with feigned enthusiasm. Shapeless men of my age with high complexions and bloated features and tragic hair were there with their wives; their women were polished and buffed and groomed, and looked exhausted and desperate and starved, smiling glassily as the shambles they had married shouted his way through some interminable nonanecdote about rugby or property
at his shambles of a friend. What was all the money for, the women’s despairing faces seemed to cry, if it couldn’t keep you young, or let you live forever?

  A very beautiful maître d’ with her wavy hair in barrettes who sounded Spanish came down to tell me my party were already seated above in the dining room and looked forward to my joining them. By then I had ordered a martini, Tanqueray, straight up, with an olive and a twist of lemon, and I had my heart set on drinking it by myself before I joined the dance, not to mention feeling in serious need of it after my instructive encounter with Lamp Comerford, so I told her to say I was taking care of business and I’d be with them shortly. Donna Nugent was at my side before I’d taken another sip.

  “I might have known, skulking at the bar! They will let you bring it to the table you know, they’re Irish Americans, not Saudi Arabians. But no, Ed Loy always has to act like the designated knacker, doesn’t he? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what happened to your ear?”

  This said as she kissed me on the mouth, gave my chest a tug, and brushed the back of her hand across my crotch.

  “Hi Donna,” I said. “You’re looking only gorgeous.”

  She was too. Donna Nugent had black hair piled up at the front and falling long at the back in a 1940s style, and her huge dark eyes were ringed with black shadow; her lips were pale and her face was full and unlined; she had something between a dimple and a double chin that she was very aware of and kept trying to hide by lifting her head and tossing her hair around; she looked like a little girl pretending to be a pony when she did this, and it always made me laugh. She was tall, about five ten in chunky forties-style heels, and wore a tight black skirt that fell to midcalf and black stockings and a black basque top, as she always did, and was carrying maybe a stone in weight around her bust and hips, which was not unusual; it made her look incredibly sexy, if you were a man, or fat, if you were a woman. Donna was very much a woman.

  “Don’t stare at me I know I know Diet Day One once we get this fucking bridge open and I’m not at the trough every Jasus night with this investor and that one I’ll be living on rice cakes and Rooibos tea for a month and then you’ll see. Skinny bitch. That’ll be me.”

  “I think you look great, Donna.”

  “Fuck off and drink up, I need this job. Here, c’mere.”

  Donna took my drink and sank half of it.

  “Oh my God that’s very good, that is martinitastic, that’s gone straight there. I have a suite in the Shelbourne, incidentally, and no excuses, understood? I don’t care what you’re after from Bobby, only don’t make a show of me, but I want that up front, so to speak.”

  “Whatever you say, Donna.”

  She leant in and gave me a kiss then, pushing her tongue at mine, her eyes losing their focus for a moment. My eyes weren’t the clearest either. Donna always smelt of musk and spice, and of some overwhelming eighties perfume like Opium.

  “Later, dude,” she said.

  I followed Donna’s swaying behind up the stairs of the Georgian building and into the main dining room, which had all the ceiling roses and the chandeliers and the floor-to-ceiling sash windows and the period mantelpieces and the great gilt-framed mirrors you’d hope for if you wanted to impress on visiting Americans that Dublin had once been a great eighteenth-century city.

  You could have gone further by pointing out how, because Ireland sat out the Second World War for reasons that are not always clear even to Irish people and certainly to no one else, but that had something to do with not deeming it possible, or at least wise, to fight alongside the British, having fought against them less than twenty years before, even if the enemy was the greatest menace to world freedom, including Ireland’s, ever known, there were few bombs dropped on Dublin, so the architectural fabric of that great Georgian city was still intact up until the 1960s when, flush at last with a bit of inward investment, we decided to haul down as much of the colonial oppressor’s heritage as we could manage before anyone objected and lash up as many hideous blocks of our own as we could muster, in the name of modernity, progress and independence. But the money soon ran out, and buildings like this managed to survive long enough for us to realize that they belonged to us after all, and were more than worth preserving. I could see eighteenth-century prints on the walls that may have been Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode sequence, I couldn’t see clearly enough, and I had a quick flash of Jack Cullen’s Viscount club the previous night: compare and contrast, write on one side of the paper only.

  Before we reached our table, Donna turned to me and said: “Your job is to keep Dee Dee happy. And how does anyone do that? By crawling up her hole.”

  Thus it was that Bobby Doyle’s first impression of me was of a grinning idiot evidently so delighted to be out and about in a fancy restaurant that he couldn’t stop giggling.

  “Tall Happy Irish Guy!” announced a perfectly groomed slender blond woman of about fifty in a slow, braying singsong American accent, as if she were talking to a table full of pre-school children. This, I was told, was Rory McBride; her husband Martin, a pink, balding fellow of about the same age with a ginger-gray mustache and a genial beam on his round face, was an old colleague of Bobby Doyle’s from San Francisco.

  Bobby Doyle sat opposite me, a gaunt, expressionless man with a perfectly shaved head; quiet authority lay behind his glittering eyes; he lifted his hands to me and looked at me directly, a greeting pitched somewhere between an invitation and a warning: sing for your supper and watch your step.

  Dee Dee, his wife, was another perfectly groomed slender blonde in her fifties, but her look was a little more opulent than Rory’s: white gold at the neck and left wrist, pearl silk dress a little lower cut, breast enhancement a lot more pronounced. On top of which, she favored the burnished orange complexion especially beloved of Irish women of all classes, no matter what their coloring, and enough makeup on top of that to make her glow in the dark.

  Before I could start crawling, Donna leant into me and, in a stage whisper audible two tables away, but which no one at our table affected to hear, said: “Fuck sake, ‘Rory,’ what is the matter with Americans and names? Yeah, yeah, we love the way you’re so innovative and New Frontier and who do you want to be today, but Rory is a fucking boy’s name, okay? And while we’re at it, Kelly is a surname, and Shannon is a fucking river. It’s Just Wrong!”

  “I’m not going to have to separate you two, am I?” said Bobby Doyle, his accent a very mild Northern Irish, Donegal or Derry maybe. He smiled then, the merest quiver of his lips and a flash of his eyes. Donna clapped a hand over her mouth and pantomimed a vow of silence. Rory and Martin made laughing faces without actually laughing; they clearly knew Donna of old.

  Rory said, “Donna is so funny,” as if it were a genetic disorder that civilized people bred out of themselves.

  “Do you know what you want, Mr. Loy?” Dee Dee asked me in a solemn, wide-eyed manner. Dee Dee smelt strongly of lavender, and had an affected, fluting, over-elocuted accent through which little barbs of Dublin occasionally protruded, and she gave the impression of always being just a little behind the joke, although there was a shrewdness in her pop eyes that made me suspect this was just what she’d like you to believe, and that you’d do well not to underestimate her.

  “Does any of us know what we want, deep down, Dee Dee?” I said. Dee Dee popped her wide eyes even wider and put her hand to her mouth, as if I’d propositioned her, as if, indeed, I’d asked to crawl up her hole. She gave a girlish giggle.

  “I’m going to have to keep a close eye on you, I can see,” she said happily.

  As I scanned my menu, I saw Donna dealing me a nod of approval. I ordered—there was steak or forget about it, essentially—and the menus, which had no prices on them, were taken away. Two bottles of champagne arrived, and when the wine—Veuve Clicquot—was poured, Martin McBride got to his feet and then, after a nudge from his wife, sat down again, cleared his throat and began to speak.

  “Friends, it’s always good to be
back in Ireland, back in the old country, as we don’t say much anymore, but perhaps should. Because it is the old country so many of us sprang from, and though we’ve chosen a new world to continue our onward voyage, we come back to the port we set out from, the harbor of refuge that is Ireland, that is the great and ancient city of Dublin.”

  Donna Nugent gave a little whoop here, and Bobby Doyle cracked a smile, and leant across and said something quietly to McBride. Donna meanwhile passed me a place-setting name card, on the reverse of which she had written “A Hunderd Dallars!” It referred to McBride’s accent, which was a classic Irish-American stew of mangled vowel sounds and diction that managed to be staccato and drawling at the same time. The wave of Irish emigrants that left for the USA in the eighties rarely altered their accents; that was considered altogether too Paddyish, an Ancient Order of Hibernians type of thing to do. The rare ones who did quickly became figures of fun; I can remember Donna bumping into an old school friend of hers in a bar in North Beach, and turning to me later to say, in disbelief: “She’s turned into an Irish American.” “A hunderd dallars” was the expression Donna coined for an Irish arrival who had gone native with indecent haste. I wrote the ritual response, “Down on deh taybill,” on the card and passed it back.

  “Now I don’t want to hog the floor,” McBride said.

  “Oh Martin you do,” his wife said.

  “And I know it’s a cliché for the returned Yank to start wittering on about history and he’s barely out of the airport. But I think I can be forgiven for invoking the term historic on this occasion, as we approach Easter Monday, that movable anniversary of the 1916 rising, which this year is to be memorable for another reason: the opening of a great construction which exemplifies and celebrates all that is great about Irish independence, the first volleys for which were heard way back in the revolution of 1916: a bridge, friends, a bridge from the past to the present, a bridge in the name of God and the dead generations of Irishmen and Irishwomen, a bridge between those who chose the New World but will not set the old aside and those who have returned to the Old World to build it anew. Friends—and I mean friends—it’s the vision, the obsession, and finally the life’s work of one great Irishman. I give you Bobby Doyle and the Independence Bridge!”