A Carra King

by John Brady

“What do you mean Shawnessy? Shock-nessy.” Minogue eyed Malone.

  “That’s how they say it over there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There was a fella on Miami Vice once. A crook, a lawyer. Shawnessy, they pronounced it.”

  Malone looked up from his work balancing beer-mats and frowned.

  “Now do you believe me?” Minogue asked.

  Malone’s house of beer-mats collapsed. He shrugged and swore and grabbed his glass. Stress, Minogue thought as he yawned with a sudden aching weariness, another meaningless word. The screen filled with burning buses. A lanky teenager throwing a rock froze and shrank, and was yanked back in miniature to a corner of the screen. Was that Derry? Minogue wondered.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Malone. “Is that going on tonight? It fucking well better not be.”

  “It’s archival footage.”

  “What?”

  A British army Land Rover sped over a roadway littered with stones. A petrol bomb burst against its roof.

  “History, Tommy. It’s old stuff.”

  Someone with a scarf wrapped around his lower face was caught and frozen in place as he hoisted a petrol bomb. He too was dispatched as a fading, still shot to the bottom of the screen. The making of a great athlete, Minogue believed, that kid. Probably in his thirties or even forties by now, with kids, a few pints in the local, a half-decent house paid for by Her Majesty, the trousers getting too tight on him. The pictures slid back to reveal a dimly lit studio, where four people sat around a table.

  “Maybe the locals ate him,” Malone said. Minogue turned to him.

  “The American, like.” Malone nodded toward Kilmartin.

  “They did say the west of Ireland, didn’t they?”

  “Our American cousins are here to enjoy history, Tommy. Not to live it.”

  He looked back at the television. Spotlights revealed the panelists one by one. Minogue sighed. God, not that windbag from the university again. Worse, that hairy, know-it-all journalist what was his name, the one who wrote about Ireland disappearing. As if.

  Then Kilmartin’s fist crashed into his palm. One of tonight’s designated gobshites to edify, a detective with a long nose that he constantly rubbed with the same paper hankie, made a solemn nod. Kilmartin’s eyes were hooded now. He pulled back his thumb, pointed his finger at his head, dropped the thumb. He eyed the red-faced Sergeant who began to nod slowly himself.

  “Smih’ goh’ hih’,” said the Sergeant.

  The phrase was a take on another Dublin criminal family member’s reaction to the news of Larry Smith’s murder. Together with a mostly mangled Dublin accent, it had done the rounds of Garda stations for months now.

  “Play hard, die hard,” said Kilmartin.

  “Damned right, Jim,” said the Sergeant. “That’s the way she goes. A-okay.”

  “One hundred percent effective,” Kilmartin said, his voice gone soft now. “Yes, sirree . . . The Larry Smith Solution.”

  Minogue looked around the room. He’d missed the transition from hilarity to gravity. The woman with the glasses, frog-woman, hadn’t. She was watching Kilmartin intently. Lahlah’s smile had faded. His eyes shifted from the group to the barman leaning on the bar listening to Kilmartin.

  Sure that his message had reached and clutched and held the minds of his colleagues, and surer still that they’d hold it forever, Chief Inspector James Kilmartin arched his back over the counter. He looked with a lazy defiance from face to face. Murmurs of approval ran through the group of policemen. Glasses went to mouths, a flick of the head from several. The red-faced Sergeant put his fist on the counter and pulled an imaginary trigger. The brotherhood, thought Minogue, the clan.

  “Job well done there, Jim,” said the red-faced Sergeant. “No complaints here, let me tell you.”

  Superintendent Lawlor tweaked his nose and turned to talk to frog-woman. I know her, Minogue thought, I do. Who the hell was she anyhow? He watched her feign an interest in what Lawlor was saying with some newfound fervour. Her eyes went toward Kilmartin again. Lawlor kept talking. She looked down at the empty glass Lawlor was pushing around on the countertop. Lawlor’s face eased when she reached for her bag. He nodded to Minogue as he passed on the way to the door.

  Derek Mitchell turned away from the gusts. He looked at the sky again.

  “Make up your bloody mind,” he groaned.

  The raindrops were beginning to bead and run together on the car roofs now. He’d come back around by the long-term car park again, on the trot this time. Ahead of him were the rows of cars he had passed earlier. It’d be no use saying that it was raining. Five minutes and he’d be finished, anyway. Or drowned, shag it.

  He slowed to look in the window of a newish Volvo. The stick thing must be a control for the stereo. The CD holder was probably in the boot and… his hat flew off and sailed over the roof. He watched it bounce off the roof of an Opel. He was beyond being annoyed. There was a certain elegance to it, he had to admit. It rolled down onto the bonnet and fell on the tarmacadam. He stepped around the front of the Opel in time to see the hat on the move again. It rolled on the edge of its crown, wobbled and changed direction. Drops of rain hit his forehead. The hat began to roll in a circle, it rebounded off a wheel and it fell over. Gusts still stirred it.

  He took his time strolling over. He picked up the hat and rubbed it with his sleeve. To hell with that stupid folder of regulations: this bloody hat was staying under his arm until he got back indoors. He looked down at the mossy growth already working its way into the tarmacadam here. Then he slowly returned to his hunkers. He stayed there for a half a minute, moving from foot to foot, staring at it from different angles. He had already decided to call in. He just didn’t want to make an iijit of himself.

  No, it wasn’t the colour that had caught his eye, he thought while he waited for the Shift Super to show up. It wasn’t even red, for God’s sake. But somehow he’d known right away what it was. That was before he’d checked the car, even. It was only after he’d stood up again that he’d realized it went right back under the bumper of the car anyway. He’d walked around the back of the car, seen the sticker: Emerald Rent-a-car. The Emerald Isle, he murmured: if this was what he thought it was, this was trouble. His fingers kept the hat rotating in his hands. He hardly noticed the rain soaking into his hair.

  He looked over at the Escort again. It looked different now, as though everything had moved away from it and it stood alone, changed. It wasn’t what might be in the car that was getting to him. It was how normal everything seemed, how weirdly ordinary and dull and boring. More than creepy: the hairs were still standing on the back of his neck.

  No sirens, no squad cars. Where the hell were they? He tugged on the antenna, rolled the volume dial until it hissed. No one was talking, why not? He didn’t want to call in again. It’d sound like he was losing it or something. The drone of lorries slowing on the dual carriageway carried over the hiss of traffic. He watched a jet rise above the terminal and followed the quivering trail from the exhaust. The rain was getting heavier.

  When he looked back he saw Fogarty and two Guards heading his way. Fogarty, the fat bastard, was huffing and puffing. Derek Mitchell stepped back to the bumper of the Escort and thumbed his notebook open.

  “All right there, er,” he heard Fogarty call out. “Derek?”

  Mitchell watched squad car lights flicker from across the car park. More of them, well finally, like. He held onto his hat. What if it wasn’t blood though? The two Guards looked him up and down. A handset came alive with a staticky country accent. Fogarty gave up on the hair.

  “Over there,” he said to Fogarty. He had to clear his throat again. “In there, under the exhaust pipe. You have to get down here to really see it.”

  Malone hit eighty in spots on the Airport Road. Minogue didn’t ask him why he was driving like a bloody lunatic. Maybe he was trying to keep pace with two unmarked Opels that had passed them near Whitehall. The Nissan leaned hard into the be
nd as they closed on the roundabout at the entrance to the airport. Minogue felt the tires bite. He looked at the shredded supermarket bags fluttering in the hedgerows.

  “They’re after shutting the whole airport down?” Malone asked again.

  Another unmarked, a Granada, came up behind, flickering light askew on the roof.

  “That’s what they told me,” Minogue said.

  Maybe he could get a sandwich. But the grub in the terminal restaurant always had a peculiar taste. It had taken a few years to dawn on him that the taste of everything he’d eaten or drunk there over the years had something to do with him sitting across the table from his son with the minutes winding down for the boarding call. The lump in his throat, Daithi Minogue’s pale, slack face. Hangovers, the dull and persistent pain that came up his chest to his throat. Daithi’s “it’s only six hours away Ma” didn’t wash with Minogue either. Well, it wasn’t six any more, it was more like twelve to the West Coast.

  The Minogues’ only son liked the States. Kathleen Minogue still sent him the Positions Available every Wednesday. He was in no hurry to get married. Semiconductors seemed to be most of his work. Why not head back to Silicon Valley here in Dublin, the new economy? Well . . . Daithi Minogue was sure he was being earmarked for an operation in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was where it all came together, Daithi had explained.

  “So it’s a full scale thing,” said Malone. “Because of that incident with your man. In Monaghan?”

  “I suppose,” said Minogue.

  The tires began to growl. Malone let the steering wheel drift a little. The Nissan tilted suddenly to the right as Malone turned off the roundabout.

  “Brian Whelan,” Malone said. “Right?”

  Minogue nodded. Garda Brian Whelan, two years on the force, had been making what he and his partner believed was a routine check of a vehicle parked on a street in Castleblaney, County Monaghan, two weeks after Christmas. The car had disintegrated when Whelan opened the passenger-side door. The remains of Joseph Brogan, known as a tout of checkered reliability to the RUC and the Guards, were found amongst the wreckage of the car. The talk was still that it was settling scores and staking out territory for a gang made up of IRA men. This was during a cease-fire.

  The first roadblock was next to a landscaped knoll that hid the cargo terminals from the traffic. The shrubs here hadn’t flourished in the four years Minogue had begun noting them on his trips here. He wound down his window and slipped out his photocard. A Guard with watery eyes and blond hairs growing high on his cheeks laid his hand on the roof of the Nissan. Had the Bomb Squad arrived yet, Minogue wanted to know.

  “Ten minutes or so,” the Guard replied. “No smoke yet, but.”

  Shrmooaak, Minogue registered. County Cork, and not inclined to hide it.

  “There’ll be a site van along by and by,” he said. “Steer them right, like a good man, will you.”

  “I will.”

  No “sir.” Minogue looked up at him.

  “Ye’d better meander over that way,” the Guard said. “Everything that side of the hill is locked up tight, so it is.”

  “Tighter than that Munster cup you have below in Cork, I hope,” Minogue said. The Guard’s smile revealed pointy teeth. A fox, Minogue thought. A Cork fox.

  “Clare, are ye?”

  “Not on your shagging life,” said Malone.

  Malone coasted down the empty road. Minogue’s belly growled again. He strained to catch a glimpse of the car parks on the far side of the shrubs. A Guard in full motorbike regalia waved them down a roadway away from the car park. A line of flagpoles followed the curb. Most of the flags were tangled in their ropes. Snapping and straining, the American one still floated free.

  Caty, his son’s fiancée, with no h because it was the Polish version, had fallen in love with Ireland. Minogue wasn’t sure what or whose Ireland she was in love with. She wanted to live here, learn Irish; walk the back roads, talk to everyone, learn everything. Caty was a sociologist, raised in a devout Polish-American family in an outer suburb of New York City. Her grave accounts of immigrants in American cities impressed Minogue. He didn’t understand how she could see Poles and Irish as similar though, the centuries of oppression thing.

  He remembered her sitting on an outcrop over the Burren not two months ago, writing notes. A strange sight entirely, with the stone fields all about her. It was one of those pet days, with roaring sunshine and the clouds low and fast, when even the hills seemed to be on the move. Interrogating him afterwards: what had happened to all the families in these ruined villages now hidden under hazel and ivy? Was it true like Daithi had told her, that he’d wanted to move to the States himself years ago? Were Clare people really musical, second-sighted? Was the Celtic Tiger destroying the real Ireland? And why did everyone seem to talk ironically here anyway?

  “Jases,” said Malone. “It’s a right bloody maze here.”

  He turned the Nissan down toward a collection of dumpsters and airport vans clustered around the back doors of what looked like a warehouse. Several uniforms moved around between the vehicles.

  “Yellow,” said Malone. “The lorry. There we are.”

  He parked by an airport van. Minogue checked the battery before he pocketed the cell phone.

  “Does anyone really think it’s booby-trapped,” Malone said. “Your man’s car?”

  Minogue shrugged. A Guard stepped down from the rear door of the communications lorry. Minogue stepped out onto the grass and turned his back to the wind. He looked around the sky. At least it had only been a shower. But instead of the wind slicing at his face, he imagined for several seconds the air full of glass, pieces of torn metal scything through the shrubs, the blast hitting them before they’d even hear it. He stopped buttoning his coat. Couldn’t happen, he almost said. There was a peace deal in the works. The sharp ache in his chest ebbed slowly.

  He rapped on the door, stepped in. Two technicians were seated side by side in front of a console. One tugged on his handset and raised the pencil he’d been tapping on the counter.

  “How’s things, lads?” Minogue asked.

  Someone was smoking. Minogue glanced at the monitors. He stopped at the one that held steady on the hatchback of the Escort. The picture shuddered, shrank to allow other cars in and then closed on the Escort again. The technician closest to the cab of the lorry turned and lifted his cigarette from the ashtray. O’Reilly, Minogue thought.

  “Pretty close now,” he said.

  Minogue watched him suck hard on the cigarette. Some skin problem, a face like a well-cooked pudding, a wispy moustache. O’Reilly tapped at the partition door into the cab.

  “So what,” came the voice from the door as it opened. “Ask them if I give a shit. Go ahead. This isn’t one a their bloody concerts, their gigs here. This is a security shut-down.”

  Minogue’s eyes returned to the monitor. The camera was steady on an armoured lorry parked sideways across the entrance to a car park.

  “Fine and well,” the voice went on. “Make whatever calls you want. That’s your business.”

  Minogue recognized the soft voice, how the speaker managed to squeeze in a light cough in the middle of a sentence. “Make whatever ah-uh calls you want . . .” A mannerism, Minogue wondered, or a conscious put-down.

  The speaker backed in through the partition door. The cell phone clenched in his hand was identical to Minogue’s. Superintendent Damian Little stared at the phone as though it had bitten him. He addressed nobody in particular.

  “Fucking yobs,” he murmured. “Did you ever hear the like?”

  O’Reilly smiled and unplugged his headset. The police radio traffic was constant now. Little straightened up and looked at the two arrivals.

  “Will you lookit,” Little said . . .

  “How’s Damian?” Minogue said. Chiselled, they’d call that jaw; action hero model, maybe. Did women really like that class of a fella? The Adam’s apple standing out on his neck, the veins running beside t
hem. Weights, Minogue understood vaguely, something strenuous and even close to a torturous rapture that photos of athletes showed so clearly.

  Little grasped Minogue’s hand. The grin spread to a tight smile. Right, Minogue remembered: that little-boy gap between his teeth, what he remembered along with Little’s intensity that came through so strangely in his drawl. The almost slow-mo, gentle tone Minogue associated with teachers on automatic, priests in confession maybe. As though you were on the slow side, and the speaker was taking account of it.

  “The undertakers themselves. How’s Matt?”

  “Fair to middling, Damian. That wasn’t us you were referring to now was it?”

  Little’s leather jacket creaked as he brandished the cell phone. Minogue plucked out his own and waved it. Little smiled.

  “For fuck’s sake you wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “Show business.”

  Malone stepped around Minogue.

  “Well, stop the lights,” Little said. “Tommy Malone. Moving up too, huh?”

  “Dead on,” said Malone. “How’s it going.”

  “Don’t mind me, I heard you left the Killer whistling over a case there.”

  “Only rumours.”

  “Ah you should have come over to us,” said Little. “When you had the chance, man!”

  For all Malone’s physical abilities and the hard-chaw self he brought to work, Minogue still couldn’t imagine Malone as one of the Emergency Response Unit cowboys.

  O’Reilly tapped on the monitor. Little’s smile dropped off his face. He leaned in over the screen. The camera covering the army bomb disposal lorry drew back to reveal a huddle of figures gathered around what looked to Minogue to be a small tank. The gofer, they called it now, this drone that had been bought with much fanfare from an outfit who’d perfected the design in Belfast.

  It began to move, stop, move again. A voice on the radio said “Switching over.” Little touched a button by the monitor and the policemen were staring at pavement and the bottom of a tire. The picture jerked and turned to frame a row of parked cars.

  “Aw Christ,” said Little and he turned away. “They’ll be ten minutes before they send in the damn thing. And for what? This isn’t bomb territory, this thing.”