Open-handed

by Chris Binchy

  His hand reached down and turned the key. He switched on the lights and revved the engine. The rats vanished. He put the car into drive and accelerated out, the wheels screeching as he came to the top of the ramp. He spun the steering-wheel as he left the hotel and drove straight out on to the main road, quiet at this time. He stopped at a red traffic-light, had a quick look, then drove on through. Two minutes later he pulled in at a twenty-four-hour shop and double-parked the car. He bought a cup of tea and smoked a cigarette on the pavement alongside a group of taxi drivers who were complaining about the heat. He lit a second cigarette off the first, dumped the cup in a bin, got back into the car and drove on. Through the docks and over, out along the sea, the air-conditioning off and the windows open, the warmth of the middle of the night giving him comfort. He still wasn’t sure what he was going to do.

  He turned off the lights and cut the engine as he rolled up at the kerb outside the house. Only the porch light was on. He sat there for a moment, then got out, closed the door quietly, locked the car and unclipped the key from his bunch. He walked across the lawn towards the house. Then, as quietly as he could, he posted the key through the door. There was no sound at all. Walking away from the house he tried not to think too much, down streets he had only ever walked with Sylvester in the direction of the sea and the main road back into Dublin. When he was sure he was far enough away from the house he took out his phone, scrolled through his address book and hit dial.

  ‘Dessie,’ the man said, on answering.

  ‘Yeah. How did you know it was me?’

  ‘Your number’s in my phone.’

  ‘You people,’ Dessie said. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Well, you’ve my number too, haven’t you? You’re the one calling me.’

  ‘I suppose I am,’ Dessie said.

  What can I do for you?’

  ‘Here, do you want to meet me?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘It’s pretty late.’

  ‘I know what time it is. Do you want to meet or not?’

  He heard the fellow yawn.

  ‘I’m assuming this isn’t a social thing.’

  ‘No,’ Dessie said. ‘It’s not.’

  ‘Are we going to talk? Have you got something to tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yeah.’

  ‘And it can’t wait until the morning?’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ll want to talk to you in the morning.’

  ‘All right,’ Hennessy said. ‘Where will I meet you?’

  59

  Marcin was hoovering the lobby when the doors of the lift opened and Agnieszka walked out. She stopped for a second when she saw him, then kept walking.

  ‘It’s you,’ Marcin said, and looked at her again. ‘What happened to your face?’

  ‘I have to go,’ she said, as she passed him. Two businessmen were drinking in the lounge and they glanced over in their direction at the drunk porter and a beautiful girl. She picked up her pace and walked towards the exit. Marcin went after her.

  ‘Hey,’ he called. ‘What happened to you?’

  She stopped. ‘Marcin. Please. Just let me go. I have to get out of here.’

  ‘Can I help? Can I do anything for you?’

  ‘No. Go back to your work.’

  ‘Do you need a taxi? Or some money?’

  ‘No. I’m all right.’ She seemed very agitated. ‘I can look after myself.’

  ‘Every time I see you you’re running away,’ he said.

  ‘Why do you think that might be?’ she said. ‘Have you any idea?’ He looked at her the way he always had. The way all those young guys from home always did, as if at any stage she would say something that would answer the only question that ever mattered to them. It drove her mad.

  ‘Did he do this to you?’ Marcin asked then, and she paused for a moment, surprised. ‘Was it him?’ he said.

  ‘How do you know him?’ she asked.

  ‘That fucker,’ Marcin said. ‘That fucking bastard.’

  ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘Really, I just do.’ She walked out of the door and Marcin could hear her heels clicking quickly across the marble of the porch, then silence. He walked back in and went behind the reception desk. There was no sign of the manager and Marcin didn’t know or care where he was. He sat at a computer, took a card out of the drawer and validated it. He got up and walked quickly across the lobby to the lift.

  ‘Here,’ Ray called after him from somewhere. ‘Where are you off to?’ The doors of the lift opened and Marcin got in. He pushed the button and went up.

  Straight in, he told himself. No knocking, no listening, just straight in. It might be too late anyway. The lift doors opened and Marcin skipped soundlessly down the corridor. But when he came to the room, he stopped outside it. It was silent. Was he sure this was the one? It always was, wasn’t it? He said the number over and over in his head. He stuck the card in the slot, saw the light turn green, opened the door and went inside.

  The man was asleep on the still-made bed. He was slighter than Marcin remembered, seemed almost to be floating on the bed’s surface, and his face was boyish, babyish even, in its blank, sleeping calm. He held his tie in one hand and the top two buttons of his shirt were open. Marcin saw his jacket draped across the back of a chair. How would he wake him? Was it fair to call his name, then batter him as soon as he woke? Or did he even deserve that much of a chance? Marcin moved closer and stood above him, watching his chest rise and fall.

  ‘Hey, Fuckface,’ he said, but the man didn’t stir.

  He took another step towards the bed and at that moment noticed the Marks & Spencer bag on the floor. There was a padded envelope sticking out of it, and sticking out of that was money. He could see a lot of money. Without moving his feet he hunkered down. His knees clicked like twigs breaking in the dim humming silence of the room and he looked up at the man, but nothing had changed. He moved his head and bent to see into the envelope, his body swaying, head throbbing. It was full of folded wads of fifty-euro notes. He felt light-headed from holding his breath. He checked the man again and, concentrating for a second, thought about who he was and where he was and what he was doing there. Then he stopped thinking. He lifted the plastic bag by the handles. The envelope slid to the bottom with a quiet crinkling sound and Marcin felt its weight. He stood up, took two paces back towards the door, watching the man as he went, turned the handle and stepped out into the corridor. The door clicked closed behind him. For a moment, five seconds maybe, he stood there listening and waiting to see what would happen next. What he would do. Then he ran. The air whooshed in his ears as he pounded down the corridor.

  He pressed the button for the lift but decided against taking it and used the stairs instead. Around and down he went, as quickly as he could. He kept on going until he got to the basement, then headed for the staff room. There was nothing unusual about what he was doing. He was carrying a plastic bag. If he had met any of the others they wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary, apart from the fact that his hair was standing on end, his face was chalk-white and he had lost the power of speech. In the staff room he went to his locker, got out his backpack and stuffed the bag into it. There was nothing else in there that he would need. He went up the stairs, walked through the kitchen and out the back door, meeting no one as he went. He ran around the side of the building and was heading for the gate when he saw the box at the entrance and remembered the security guard. He stopped where he was. Could he jump the back wall? He turned and looked up at the barbed wire and roller fencing. The easier way was better. He walked down the drive and past the box. The guard nodded at him as he went and pushed back the glass sliding window.

  ‘Half-day, is it?’

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ Marcin said, smiling.

  The man laughed. He was very young. ‘See you later,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Take care.’

  And then he was on the road. There was a bag on his shoulder w
ith more money than he had ever seen in his life. His head clouded at the thought and he stopped for a moment, holding on to the railing beside him until his head cleared and he was steady enough to continue. Think about nothing, he told himself. I am going home. He walked on, but after ten minutes was in unfamiliar territory and realized that this was the wrong direction. He would have to turn and pass the hotel again. Pass the security guard who, even now, might have been alerted to the crime that Marcin had committed. He stepped into the middle of the road. Fifteen seconds later a taxi came around the corner at speed, braking sharply when the driver saw Marcin standing there with his hand in the air. He walked to the door and saw the man looking at him through the open window.

  ‘Rathmines,’ he said.

  ‘What are you doing? Do you want to get yourself killed?’

  Marcin remembered then that he didn’t have the fare. He could get it out of the bag but that didn’t seem like a good idea. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I forgot. I’ve no money.’

  ‘Fucking idiot.’ The taxi drove off. He walked to the other side of the street and stayed tight to the wall as he passed the hotel, not looking, not turning his head. He crossed the main road. It was too exposed here. If a police car came along he would start running even though he knew he shouldn’t. He headed for the lanes and in there, hidden and unseen, he began to relax.

  60

  Declan Hennessy was sitting at the counter drinking coffee when Dessie walked in. It was quiet and bright and the place was mostly empty. Just a few couples at tables and groups of friends bunched up together in the booths, squeezing the last moments of enjoyment out of the night with hot dogs and cheeseburgers.

  ‘There you are,’ said Hennessy.

  ‘All right?’ Dessie said, sitting beside him and turning off his phone.

  ‘Can I get you anything? Strawberry milkshake? Banana split?’

  ‘Are you trying to be funny?’ Dessie said.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Hennessy said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Tea,’ Dessie said.

  The girl brought a mug with boiling water and a teabag still in it. She was uniformed, black and white, trousers that meant her arse was the first thing you noticed.

  ‘Nice,’ Hennessy said, after she’d gone.

  ‘What kind of a place is this?’ Dessie asked.

  ‘You’re the one who wanted to meet in the middle of the night. What do you want to tell me that can’t wait until tomorrow?’ He took out a small silver box and put it on the counter.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m going to record this.’

  ‘Do you have to?’

  ‘It’s better all round. So we can be clear on exactly what you’ve said. I won’t be misinterpreting you afterwards.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dessie said. He looked around. ‘Do you think I can smoke here?’

  ‘Why would you be able to smoke here?’

  ‘Because it’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘The law’s still the law. Look. You don’t have to be nervous. This is just between us.’

  ‘It’s not about being nervous. It won’t make much difference anyway. He’ll know where this is coming from.’

  ‘What do you want to tell me?’

  Dessie looked at the recorder on the counter in front of him, green light glowing. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t I ask you a few questions and you answer? If there’s anything else that occurs to you, even if it seems irrelevant, just go ahead and say it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  So they began. Hennessy knew a lot already, the names of developments and people they had met. Money that had been handed over and bills that had never been paid. Dessie’s role was mostly to confirm. Yes. He was there. I remember him. Yes. The full amount. In cash. All those trips and days driving, sitting in the front, not really listening but still picking up enough. The conversations he’d sat through over dinner.

  Dessie couldn’t tell him anything about Sylvester’s days as a councillor or what dealings he’d had with O’Donnell back then.

  ‘So when did you meet him first?’

  ‘Who? Sylvester?’

  ‘O’Donnell.’

  ‘We went to Prague, the three of us. Sylvester was trying to get the company going and O’Donnell said he’d do him a favour and have a look at a few places.’

  Hennessy laughed. ‘Is that what he said?’

  ‘Yeah. Here, you obviously know all about this trip. What are you asking me for?’

  ‘You tell me what you know.’

  Dessie shrugged. ‘Marek set it up. There was this new block of apartments he had and O’Donnell looked at them. They were top quality. He was very interested. So he bought twenty.’ He laughed at the memory of it. ‘Marek got him a deal on them. He was in early and I think that saved him a lot.’

  ‘Do you know how much he paid for each of them?’

  ‘I think it was fifty thousand.’

  ‘That was a good deal. Those apartments launched at a hundred thousand.’

  Dessie nodded. ‘He was in flying form that week, all right.’

  ‘And how was Sylvester?’

  ‘Like a two-year-old. This was the start of it for him.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘Nothing. We had a couple of nights out and that was it. We came home.’

  ‘And what happened to those apartments?’

  ‘O’Donnell sold them about a year later.’

  ‘Do you know how much he got for them?’

  ‘Sylvester told me. I think it was about a hundred and twenty each.’

  ‘So, O’Donnell did very well out of it.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Hennessy nodded. ‘Do you know about the rest of the money he might have paid to Marek?’

  ‘No. What money was this?’

  ‘The other fifty thousand per apartment that Marek would have got, under the table?’

  Dessie looked at him, trying to work it out. ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he said.

  ‘Do you really think that a guy like Marek would sell something half-price to anyone?’ Hennessy asked.

  ‘You seem to know more about this than I do.’

  ‘You didn’t think it was odd?’

  ‘I thought there might be something going on,’ Dessie said, ‘but I wasn’t paying too much attention. Wasn’t my job.’

  ‘Right,’ Hennessy said.

  ‘So he paid more for the apartments than they said. What’s the problem? Surely that’s his loss.’

  ‘Not really. He went to the Czech Republic and, on paper, spent a million euro on property. Then a year later he sold it and came back with two million. A million euro profit. All nice and shiny and legit.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘One hundred per cent profit in a year? Sounds great,’ Hennessy said. ‘But in fact he paid Marek the full price. He just swapped a dirty million for a clean one.’

  Dessie let this sink in. ‘And you know all this as fact or are you just guessing?’

  ‘Somewhere in between.’

  ‘Would Sylvester have known about this?’

  ‘Who cares? I imagine he did, but he’s only a bit-player. His three per cent or whatever isn’t really the point. I’m not especially interested in Sylvester. I mean, if he let himself get dragged into all of this, I’m not going to cry for him if it ends badly. But he’s not the main event. Now, is there anything else you want to tell me?’

  He didn’t know about the girls. The weekly meetings in Room 538. It would come out anyway. If Sylvester was exposed somebody somewhere would talk.

  ‘No,’ Dessie said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Right,’ Hennessy said. ‘Thanks for that.’ He turned off the machine and nodded at the girl to get the bill. ‘Which direction are you going?’ he asked.

  ‘West,’ Dessie said.

  ‘I’m going south. Can’t help you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll get a taxi.
’ They stood up.

  ‘Can I ask you,’ Dessie said, ‘why do you people hate him so much?’

  ‘What people? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘I don’t know. The press.’

  Hennessy laughed to himself. ‘Well, I can’t speak for everybody in “the press”. But I don’t hate him. He’s a nobody. I can tell you that I think he embodies everything that’s negative about a certain type of person who gets involved in public life in Ireland. He’s corrupt, unprincipled, in it for himself. He’s drawn to power as if he’s entitled to it, despite the fact that he’s not that bright or capable and has no core beliefs. He’s a small-time crook, happy to facilitate the big-time operators, turned on by the idea that they need him. He’s prepared to sell himself for his own personal short-term gain and doesn’t give a damn what the consequences of his actions might be for others. He’s a nothing person. Believes in nothing. Means nothing. Good for nothing.’ He smiled. ‘Since you ask.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Dessie said, shaking his head. ‘That’s not him at all.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what are you doing here, Dessie? Why the change of heart?’ Hennessy said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Dessie said.

  ‘Seriously? What is it? Guilty conscience?’

  Hennessy stood smiling at him, as if all of this was just a bit of harmless fun. There was no way of taking back the things he’d said. Words preserved in that little silver box. Words that would line up on a page and change everything for them all. Sadness came to Dessie, sudden and heavy. ‘He let me down,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck,’ Hennessy said. ‘I wouldn’t want to cross you. With friends like that… I’ll be in touch. Thanks again.’ He left without looking back.