All the Dead Voices

by Declan Hughes

  And then there was Podge. No doubt about it, Podge’d have his ear to the ground. Even from jail Podge’d know what was going on, probably quicker than George or Leo themselves. Podge’d have no qualms about having Dessie hit: at his brother’s funeral, at the graveside, on the altar, the more spectacular, the more obscene, the more grotesque the better. Podge wasn’t interested in peace on the streets. Why would he be? Wasn’t he safe in the Joy? Peace on the streets meant business was booming for everyone but him. Fuck that. And hitting Dessie was personal. Hitting Dessie would make Podge happy.

  Wasn’t gonna happen.

  Not in this life.

  Wits about them, eyes wide open, ready for anything.

  No fucking bother.

  The Delaney Brothers.

  CHAPTER 13

  At around five on Holy Saturday morning, Donna Nugent finally fell asleep. I pulled my clothes on and quietly left the room. I walked from the Shelbourne to Holles Street, where I took a Valium, went to bed and, after a while, slept. I’d set the alarm for ten, and when I woke, I got up with some difficulty and went to the kitchen to fix some coffee. Passing the living room, I had a momentary hallucination that Tommy Owens was sitting in one of my armchairs doing something with his mobile phone. I stayed in the kitchen until the coffee had brewed, and until I had drunk some of it, enough to make me feel at least semiconscious.

  Every part of me seemed to ache; blood was seeping from my nose, and I had been grinding my teeth; I felt a profound, indefinable sense of dread. I refilled my mug and brought it through to the living room, where Tommy Owens, in the flesh, was now standing by one of the sash windows looking down into the yard. I toyed briefly with the idea of asking him how he’d got in, but decided against it. Tommy’s ability to do this kind of stuff was simultaneously what made him so useful and so annoying.

  “Jesus Ed, you look like shit. Someone’s been giving you a doing. Who was it? Must have been a woman, Jack Cullen’s boys aren’t that good.”

  It occurred to me to answer, but when I opened my mouth, my jaw ached so much I closed it again at once, like a fish.

  “What’s for breakfast then? Smoked salmon and scrambled eggs sounds good to me.”

  I looked at Tommy for a moment. He had passed through a phase of relative conformity after his mother died and he’d been working as sacristan at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Bayview, but either the Catholic Church had abandoned its standards altogether or Tommy had leapt over the wall. His hair had returned to the bird’s-nest thatch that was its natural state; his chin bore the weasel wisps that the charitable might call a goatee; he wore olive-green combats and black Caterpillar boots and an Iggy Pop T-shirt and a brown flight jacket; his face radiated his traditional aura of mischief and derision; his tiny eyes flashed merrily, guiltily about the room, begging to be found out, wondering what to steal. He looked good though: healthy, resilient, cocky, all the things I didn’t feel. The coffee had brought me out in a sweat, and I was shaking a little, or shivering in the morning chill, I wasn’t sure which. Tommy came up close and peered at me.

  “Fuck sake Ed, are you on drugs? Have you been doing coke? You have, you fucking monkey!”

  Tommy’s incredulous grin was gleeful at first, but it quickly ripened to embrace dismay and then disgust. I held up a hand and did the fish thing with my mouth a couple of times. I didn’t know what to say, and even if I had, I couldn’t say it. Nothing was working. I felt like hell. I wanted to sleep for a month. There were thirty-seven missed calls on my phone. I had tried, and I had failed, and now I felt like going home. I looked at Tommy and thought that I might cry. His face softened and compassion entered his eyes and I nearly did. Maybe I did, I don’t know. I wasn’t entirely sure what was happening to me.

  Tommy took my arm and led me to the bathroom and pushed me in and I had a very long hot shower and then as long as I could bear of a cold one. By the time I came out and got dressed, a mug of fresh coffee and a plate of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon was waiting for me on the table. We ate in silence, until eventually I recovered basic motor skills like assembling thoughts and forming words, and I formed enough of them to tell him what I thought I’d been doing. Tommy laughed a little, and then a lot. Then he shook his head and sat back in what’s-the-world-coming-to mode.

  “She always looks like such a nice girl on the television,” Tommy said. “She was on fucking Questions and Answers with the great and the good so she was, giving it this and that about the drug problem.”

  “What was her solution?” I said.

  “You know. All this about social deprivation.”

  “I blame the parents.”

  “Well, Donna doesn’t. ASBO’s the wrong way to go. She blames the lack of facilities. Sports grounds. Youth clubs. That’s what would wean nineteen-year-old killers off guns and drugs, apparently, youth clubs. Is she a bit of a Shinner, Ed?”

  “I think we’d have to say she’s very close to someone who was, and maybe still is. Strange thing is, I don’t really know her very well.”

  “There’s plenty of women I don’t know very well, but I don’t get to spend Good Friday in bed in a fancy hotel suite with them and a big bag of drugs on their boss’s tab,” Tommy said. “And if I did, I wouldn’t be so fucking gloomy about it, I can tell you that for nothing.”

  “I’m not gloomy. What can I say? I’m just a simple lad. Don’t have the constitutional fortitude for the high life.”

  “You’re being very brave about it though.”

  “Anyway, you’d end up falling in love with them.”

  “You usually fall in love with them yourself. What’s different about Donna Nugent?”

  “Maybe that’s why I’m so gloomy.”

  “So young, so doomed. Except, not that young really.”

  “I’m as young as you are, Tommy. I just don’t look it. Today. Anyway, what’s up? If it’s just social, you saved my day, or at least, set me up for it. Thank you. If not, spit it out.”

  Tommy and I had been friends all our lives. He was the only person from Ireland to visit me when I lived in L.A., apart from my mother. When I came back, Tommy was a total shambles, running drugs across borders, a mule for Podge Halligan. But while initially I seemed to spend a lot of my time getting Tommy out of scrapes, lately Tommy had begun to return the favor. I wouldn’t say he was indispensable, but when someone saves your life, it’s hard to begrudge him letting himself into your apartment when he feels like it, even if you’re pretty sure you never gave him a key.

  I watched him now as he hauled himself across to the window, his ruined foot the legacy of a stomping George Halligan gave him so Leo wouldn’t stab Tommy for stealing his bike. He raised the sash and sat on the sill and lit a cigarette and directed a gust of smoke out into what was for the moment a bright spring morning. When he turned back, his face was suddenly grave. Tommy had an old woman’s sense of conversational melodrama: if there was an announcement or a revelation to be made, he liked to set a solemn tone well in advance. I always felt he was just about holding back from saying Do you know what I’m going to tell you? Generally speaking, it was no laughing matter, however; nor was it this morning.

  “Charlie Newbanks came to see me last night. He’s worried about you. And after what he told me, so am I.”

  Before he could get any further, I stood up and signaled to him to follow me through to the office. Tommy rolled his eyes, but I didn’t care. Maybe all the blood and the rage, the bitterness and disappointment and loss that clung to every case I worked couldn’t be corralled in one room of my apartment, maybe it was destined to seep through the walls and taint the air throughout. It didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try. Someone once told me acknowledging the difficulty of prayer was itself a prayer, and what’s more, the kind of prayer God wanted to hear. I wasn’t conscious of carrying around gouts of wisdom to console myself with in the wee small hours, but there are some things that stick with you.

  There was a long time when I didn
’t see the point in trying at all, when the death of my daughter and the ruin of my marriage and the death of my mother all folded into one great shroud that I tried to hide beneath, that I hoped might one day smother me; the delirium of murder and betrayal, of abuse and violence and hatred that arose from the cases I worked was a welcome distraction from my own grief, maybe even an objective justification of my entitlement to it. But grief that’s too well nurtured curdles into self-pity; sodden with booze, it slides toward self-loathing, self-destruction follows you down; then one day without noticing, you’re having trouble seeing your reflection in the mirror; worse, you don’t even care anymore. I had been living there a long time. Sometimes I felt like that’s where I still was, where I’d always be. The only thing was, I didn’t want to be. The only thing was, now I thought I had to try.

  In the office, Tommy walked to the window and scowled down at the street.

  “All those mothers and babies. Do you not find it fucking depressing, Ed? I know I would, every day. All that fucking optimism and energy and let’s hear it for the future. Jasus.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh.

  “I don’t mind it, Tommy. And it looks like it’s cheering them up. Anyway, there we were, you and Charlie Newbanks. Is there any point in asking how you know him?”

  On top of the flair for melodrama, Tommy had an old woman’s nose for gossip too; over the course of a lifetime of petty and not-so-petty crime, it had given him a near-encyclopedic knowledge of and often a personal acquaintance with pretty much every lowlife south of the river; I suppose my perennial surprise at how much farther his tentacles extended was a reflection of how little I wanted to know about that side of him.

  “Until it’s useful to you,” Tommy would sniff with an indignation he wasn’t quite able to sustain; I think he had things he’d prefer to keep to himself as well. Don’t we all?

  Tommy grimaced at my ignorance, as if I were a lazy student who simply wouldn’t pay attention; sometimes he forgot I’d spent the best part of twenty-five years away. Not this time though.

  “Charlie Newbanks was at national school with us, Ed. He only came in sixth class, he’d been living in town and his da done a bunk to England, and his ma was left with eight or nine and couldn’t cope, and Charlie and his sister were farmed out to their granny, the da’s ma stepping up to do her bit. Do you not remember? Ah you probably wouldn’t, Charlie went to the Tech then, with all the other corner boys. Not your scene at all.”

  Tommy leered happily at this, always happy to maintain that I was some kind of snooty rich kid, when, as he knew, his parents—a civil servant and a teacher—had been more assuredly “middle class,” one of Tommy’s favorite epithets, than the motor mechanic and shop assistant who raised me. But Tommy was drawn to trouble, and trouble followed him; Tommy cultivated the street, and the street rose up to embrace him; in accent and manner and habits, he had almost become what he beheld. Almost, but not quite.

  “No, I would have been away at Harrow by then, Tommy. Or maybe I was grouse shooting on our country estate. Charlie Newbanks. At the Tech. And?”

  “I was doing nights there when I started at your da’s garage. And Charlie and me, we hung around, we did a bit of this and that. Charlie done his apprenticeship as a sparks, kept his hand in throughout the eighties. Rewiring houses, fuse boards, power points, checking each place out as a target, which had valuables or a safe, keeping a note, then maybe six months later, maybe a year, in and out. Paintings, one time, this big house out in Howth. Anyway, it all got a bit too heavy for me, Charlie hooked up with his brother back in Cumberland Street, Portland Row there. They were talking about doing some huge fucking stately home down the country, Laois or Offaly or some fucking place, going in armed, tying the old couple who lived there up, all this.”

  “And you drew the line.”

  “I fucking did, you know I did, and don’t be fucking looking at me as if I had to think about it. So the lads went in and wasn’t it a setup, there was Special Branch and all sorts and a gunfight and Charlie’s brother got shot, brown bread, can you believe it, dead on account of some fucking Art? Well out of that one.

  “Few years on Charlie’s doing a little dealing in his neighborhood, dope mainly, a little E, I’m doing the same around the colleges, Bolton Street, Kevin Street, Trinity, we bump into each other up in Cathal Brugha Street there, the College of Catering, one of his boys is throwing shapes ’cause he thinks I’m on his patch, Charlie to the rescue. So we hook up. He’s working for Jack Cullen then, or for one of Jack’s boys.

  “Now Cullen was one of the big players in the heroin trade throughout the eighties, when the North Inner City was rotten with it. ’Course it was being run for him by other people, mainly by Lamp Comerford, so Jack could be seen supporting the Concerned Parents Against Drugs groups and so forth like the socially concerned Provo he was supposed to be, but that’s what was happening. But then smack got so you couldn’t give it away, AIDS and hep C and skeletons rattling around with McDonald’s cups of methadone, fuck all margin in that. Now it’s the nineties and there’s talk of an IRA cease-fire and Jack Cullen’s boys are getting set up for the future, it’s coke and E all the way, drugs for people with a few dinars in their pockets.”

  “George Halligan told me some of this already, about how Cullen and Ray Moran met. Were you working for George back then?”

  “For Leo mostly. Leo had the notion I’d be right for the students, wouldn’t intimidate the little darlings. Anyway, what I’m saying is, Charlie and me go back, all right? Charlie’s sound. Cullen brought him in after his brother was killed, because Charlie had built up quite a rep as a blagger; Cullen put him in charge of a fair few jobs to keep the IRA accounts healthy. The Cullen gang were the Southern Command’s highest earners, banks, post offices, security vehicles, and that was mainly down to Charlie. Don’t think he ever joined the ’RA himself, but I could be wrong. Those days are done now but. He crews for Lamp on the door at the Viscount and a couple of Jack’s other spots now, but he’s a plain dealer, not a psycho.”

  “He must have had to look the other way quite a lot if he’s crewing for Lamp.”

  “So he looks the other way: that’s as much as to say, he lives there, he knows them, what else is he gonna do? Shut the fuck up and stop interrupting me will you? What I was going to tell you was, I used to deal with Ray Moran when he was Ents Officer at Trinity, I gave him freebies so I could deal at the gigs they had in the Buttery and the Exam Hall and at the Trinity Ball and the rest of it. Only doesn’t Mr. Smart-arse Fucking Student get the idea that he could do this himself if he can get a supplier. And he has all these new friends in the IRSP, who have friends in the INLA, who can source dope for him.

  “So I’m getting edged out of the picture, fair enough, Leo knows the score, you don’t want to be having skirmishes over turf in Trinity fucking College, bring all sorts of attention down on you. So Moran starts making a few bob, and the INLA get behind him, officially or not, it’s hard to know with that mob, couple of lads down from Belfast, anyway, they start clearing the few dinars and that’s when they think, fish-in-a-barrel time, let’s take the city on, they spill out into the Lombard Street flats and across the river right onto Jack Cullen’s patch, not Moran, he’d have had more sense, or else he’d just be too fucking scared to go north of Pearse Street, it’s the nordie boys pushing this now.

  “I get a call from Charlie Newbanks ’cause at first they think it’s me, they think it’s the Halligans losing the fucking place and Lamp Comerford has boys tooling up to fucking do us. So I explain, no, it’s these INLA gobshites, trying to keep Moran out of it ’cause I feel sorry for the fucker, you know, out of his depth, but Charlie knows straightaway who it is and Moran gets hauled in. Lamp Comerford scares the fuck out of Moran and tapes his eyes up and drives him around and so on, then delivers him to Jack Cullen in person.

  “Now it’s what happened next that’s the interesting bit.”

  With that, Tommy stopped
and looked enigmatic. Or at least, I assumed that was the intention; in fact, he just looked like he’d come to a halt and maybe forgotten what he was talking about.

  “All right then, Tommy. What happened next?”

  Tommy grinned from ear to ear.

  “Nobody knows.”

  “What do you mean, nobody knows? What’s interesting about that?”

  “What’s interesting is, whatever happened in there, Ray Moran goes in a scared-as-fuck student who’s been doing a bit of small-time dealing, and he comes out with a deal to be Jack Cullen’s bagman, his front, his representative on earth. How did that happen? Nobody knows.”

  “George says Moran killed Brian Fogarty for Cullen, or had him killed.”

  “That’s just bullshit, I was talking to Charlie last night about this. How does Moran transform himself overnight into a killer? And even if he was capable of it, why would Jack Cullen depend on him?”

  “He wanted Fogarty taken out, but he didn’t want it traced to him. And it needn’t have been Moran himself: he had those INLA guys, they were always happy to do the IRA’s bidding, or at least, they were if they knew what was good for them. And then Moran is tied to Jack Cullen for life.”

  Tommy shrugged.

  “That’s possible, I suppose. Charlie doesn’t think it happened that way though. Charlie thinks it was Lamp who done Fogarty. Almost as if he was jealous of Moran. Because the whole thing was, the same time Moran came on the scene, the IRA cease-fire was being talked about in republican circles, and Cullen had read the runes, he could see what a lot of people couldn’t: that sooner or later, there’d be no place for the armed struggle, no place for the Provos. And he was like, we need a new way to operate, we can’t keep taking our rivals out, we can’t keep doing things the old way. The Lamp Comerford way. Charlie said Lamp was bulling when he heard this, he felt he was being sidelined.”

  “Was Lamp in the IRA himself?”