The Valparaiso Voyage

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘What money?’

  Pete Clancy watched me, suddenly alert again. ‘The four off-shore accounts that are still open.’

  ‘You said your father laundered all his money in the tax amnesty,’ I reminded him.

  ‘I did, didn’t I?’ Clancy replied. ‘I went over every tortuous penny with Eamonn. Are you saying I shouldn’t have trusted him?’

  If Pete had seen everything then surely he knew that only two accounts remained open. I had often envisaged the scene when the quarterly bank statements arrived, via Des Traynor, two months after my disappearance. Phyllis, beyond tears, curled into a ball in their bedroom, clutching Cormac’s photograph as though she might somehow bring him back to life. And in the attic above her, my father sitting on a sack of old papers, rocking inside his own unfathomable grief, closing his eyes and opening them again to stare at the statements as if the correct balance might somehow reappear.

  ‘You’re the one who keeps saying how honest he was,’ I replied carefully.

  ‘He was too honest for his own good,’ Clancy said. ‘Money was secondary to Eamonn’s need to be used. Some people are like that, they crave being used, it gives them status. Normally they become treasurers on Tidy Towns Committees. They can’t spend money but love counting it – even when it’s not theirs. Eamonn would do anything for Daddy. Right to the end he saw Daddy as the sort of hero I imagined him to be when I was twelve. He loved him.’

  I had almost forgotten the shotgun in my hands. I placed it carefully on the floor between us and hunched down against the wall. ‘Give us a cigarette,’ I said.

  Pete lit one himself, then tossed the packet and the matches over. I struck a match and inhaled. ‘You know the mad thing,’ I told him. ‘I believed the old cunt loved me. In his own fucked-up way that put every other thing first.’

  ‘It was the way of fathers back then,’ Pete replied. ‘Business first and last, with us wheeled out for press photographs.’

  ‘Don’t even try and compare,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not. Your father was in a league of his own – 007.5 Daddy used to call him – the Walter Mitty of secret agents. I’ll never forget the day I examined the accounts with him. Daddy didn’t exactly keep tabs on personal expenses, he operated deliberately on a need-to-know basis. Eamonn could have robbed Daddy blind but every penny was accounted for, every quarter per cent of interest. He was like a kid with a model train set, intent on showing how each part worked. When I asked if he got the same rates on his own offshore account he looked at me like I had ten heads. “Hasn’t your daddy set me up in a job for life,” he said, “with a grand salary and friends to look after me when I retire. I don’t need one.”’ Pete shook his head incredulously. ‘Every second businessman in Ireland was on the make and here, at the heart of it all, was this soul of fucking integrity.’

  That was the joke. There was always something within my father – a grain of integrity or even naïve patriotism – that seemed to set him apart and had made Cormac’s revelations all the more shocking. Maybe at heart every son thought that about his father. The sense of childhood innocence betrayed seemed like an unspoken bond between us as Pete and I smoked in companionable reflective silence.

  I needed to piss. The pressure on my bladder made me recall Ebun’s weight as she straddled me just a few hours before. My body had passed beyond tiredness. A greyish hint of dawn shaded the air. Although I often fantasized about maiming Pete Clancy, on many occasions when I actually dreamt about him we were like this – reminiscing as equals, discovering sudden respect for each other. At that moment it felt good, like I was finally somebody.

  ‘Tell me about the accounts that are still open,’ I said.

  ‘Keep your friends close but your enemies closer,’ Pete replied. ‘Daddy never trusted Slab McGuirk or Mossy Egan. Whenever Daddy helped himself he helped others too. He wanted to see Meath changed, building a future for itself. If he received a contribution along the way then that was just the way of things, the grease that kept the fast-track wheels moving. Certain builders understood that and landowners too. They weren’t corrupt, it was just the system of doing things. Eamonn understood it. Eamonn wanted nothing for himself, but he wanted Daddy up in the big house with the state car to show how far we’d come. That was how you got people’s respect. If Daddy had gone to England he could have been as big a millionaire as old Joe Murphy but he stayed at home instead. He served people queuing at our door with their hands out. You can’t manage that properly on a TD’s or even a minister’s salary. But Slab was different, only out for himself. If he had started throwing money around at certain times there was a grave danger of boats being rocked and questions asked.’

  Pete stubbed out his cigarette and rose to drag open the byre door with a low rusty squeak. He stood silhouetted against the inkling of light.

  ‘I love Meath in the dawn light,’ he remarked.

  ‘You still haven’t explained the remaining accounts,’ I said and he looked back.

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re your father’s son. What do you really know about Shyroyal holdings?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It started in the early seventies when Daddy got word of a British firm sniffing around Navan, attracted by the mine, looking for a site outside town to build a shopping centre. Daddy put together a consortium to buy those old cottages behind Emma Terrace. It needed a lot of donations and quiet words across party lines on the Council to keep blocking any application by the Brits while his own proposal was being put together. It was the making of Slab and Mossy and other contractors who never looked back afterwards. The site changed hands three times before being officially re-zoned, a chain of shell companies stretching back to Shyroyal Holdings. Money was made all right – Daddy owned half the shares – but more importantly every penny stayed in Meath with the Brits kept out.’

  I smiled wryly, remembering how I had blamed Phyllis’s hatred of Josie, who wound up in a block of Council maisonettes.

  ‘Once was enough for Daddy,’ Pete Clancy went on. ‘He never got directly involved in development again, beyond ensuring that the right schemes got the nod. Because the Brits had wanted a green-field site out the Dublin Road, part of Daddy’s plan to block them involved Shyroyal buying up small strategic parcels of land to make it hard for the Brits to get their preferred site together. Profits from building the shopping centre more than covered the outlay for these sites that were simply leased out for grazing afterwards. But suddenly in the 1980s those sites quadrupled in value. It wasn’t so much Navan growing out as Dublin growing to meet it. The sites were too small to develop themselves but Daddy made sure that anyone wanting to build an estate nearby had to buy them up at the right price and include them in their plans. It was easy for Eamonn to officially block every planning application on the Dublin Road as unsuitable. Then Daddy could swing a re-zoning motion once the builder agreed to play ball. There was a new generation of hungry fucks of clean-living politicians coming up and Daddy needed every penny to hold them off when fighting in his last election. Shyroyal Holdings provided the funds. From being a sleeping princess it was suddenly rich with cash. There had been one police investigation years ago and Daddy didn’t want another with Slab McGuirk drawing the taxman’s attention down by flashing around his cut. It wasn’t Slab’s fault that he was going daft, but he wasn’t trustworthy any more. That’s where Eamonn came in.’

  ‘I’m not following you,’ I said.

  Pete Clancy strode out into the farmyard. I followed, shivering with cold. In half an hour the view would be magnificent from up here. Rooks were stirring in the old trees near the gate. Pete Clancy stopped at his car, running his finger along the roof as if searching for dirt.

  ‘Do you like cars?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t use this one much – people like to see the state car. Daddy always said it gave status to a town, symbols are important. In England the und
er-secretaries drive around in what are only bangers by comparison. Crap cars but grandiose titles and traditions. They’re still only bloody subjects, not citizens. A republic is different. Daddy’s generation could make up their own rules from scratch. The Brits had Barings Bank for their inbred aristocrats until Nick Leeson fucked up. We had Des Traynor, bagman to the Taoiseach, running our own private bank from his office in Cement Roadstone. No doormen or frills, straight in to see the man if you were in the know. And Eamonn was in the know. He thought Des was a saint, the way he selflessly looked after Haughey’s finances – not that Haughey wasn’t long shafting the poor man’s memory after he died – and Daddy always ensured that whenever a stone dropped into a pond in Meath a ripple eventually reached Haughey via the same Mr Traynor. It’s how the world goes round.’

  Clancy opened the driver’s door. ‘Sit in and we’ll watch the dawn,’ he said. ‘You’d freeze to death out here.’

  My blood went cold as I walked to the far side of the car. I saw Lisa Hanlon’s face in her hospital bed, her voice barely above a whisper: Sit here, he told me, and we’ll watch the dawn. I sat in the passenger seat as Pete Clancy stared amiably ahead. Was this how he had looked on the night he turned on her, hands gripping clumps of her hair as he held her head down over his open fly? How did I come to sit here, trusting a man I had half-intended to kill? He looked over.

  ‘Tax rates were high, people felt penalized. All the banks were happy to run scams for selected customers, but Des ran banking for his own circle at its informal best. Once you were in that circle, and had a few bob you needed kept quiet, you simply gave him a call and popped over to the Burlington Hotel any lunchtime where he was available to receive envelopes with no questions asked. You’d be amazed who you’d meet there. Sometimes old P. V. Doyle himself was loitering around the doorway of his own hotel, with his tongue out. Well obviously Daddy couldn’t go in person and Mossy and Slab were too small fry to shake hands with the great Des himself. A circle only works if it’s kept small. But Eamonn was so well in with Traynor that it was simple for him to act as a middleman for Shyroyal and become master of his own circle. Des was a cultured man who wouldn’t have been overjoyed to know he was dealing with a clatter of Meath builders who never washed behind their foreskins. So the fact that Eamonn held no accounts of his own was a godsend. Daddy made the others agree to a moratorium on touching the money until after the election. Your father was the honest broker. Using his children’s names Eamonn set up three sets of accounts via Traynor who presumed that it was all your family’s money.’

  ‘Who was I?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘Mossy Egan.’

  ‘Sarah-Jane?’

  ‘Joey Kerwin. He had a small stake.’

  ‘And Cormac?’

  ‘Why?’ He watched me carefully.

  ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘Slab’s fifteen per cent stake was held in his name. Joey Kerwin drew the money down the day after the election. He was fond of lost weekends in Soho and giving donations to the church. He died soon after. Mossy Egan thought Channel Island banking was so good that he buggered off to Guernsey himself with poor P. J. left holding the reins and still vainly waiting for him to die. But Slab never touched his share. He didn’t want to know about amnesties or anything else that involved parting with a penny. Why pay fifteen per cent when you can pay nothing, when the Taoiseach’s bagman runs the scam and you know that no revenue official will ever dare poke his nose in? In truth, as his illness got worse I think he just forgot about the money’

  A small flock of birds crested the hill in the weak light, their wings making a faint clacking noise. I recalled the lobby of the bank in St Helier six weeks after the crash when I showed Cormac’s passport, the cashier scrutinizing my glasses and freshly dyed hair, then calling a higher official. I had already gambled away Cormac’s present by then and was desperate. The inner office was huge, a gold fan whirling overhead with an echo of the noise the birds’ wings were now making. I had wondered if he was the same official Cormac had conned as he examined my forgery of a forgery of a signature – Cormac’s name as my father would have scrawled it.

  ‘Not many of Mr Traynor’s clients withdraw money in person,’ he had informed me. But I had chosen my time carefully – an Irish bank holiday which fell on an ordinary working day in the UK and meant that nobody was contactable in Dublin. I had sweated as we made idle talk, waiting for the money to be brought in. The official was young and good-looking. He kept drumming his nails on the desk and glancing at me. Maybe Cormac had flirted with him weeks before. Stepping into his shoes there was so little I’d really known about who might recognize Cormac’s name, have intimate knowledge of his body, see through my dyed hair and bogus mannerisms. When the money arrived, the official had stood up. We shook hands. At the door I turned to blow him the faintest kiss.

  All the way across the marble-tiled lobby and down the steps beneath the white portico, I had resisted the temptation to run. Holidaymakers cluttered the narrow streets below while Fort Elizabeth rose in the distance, encircled by the harbour. In my real life I should have been avoiding fellow workers I owed money to in the factory, after enduring gridlock traffic on two bus journeys to work. Instead I had been living out a fantasy with a suitcase of stolen money. I had never confronted my father about my childhood. I had never got angry with him, but now I had got even, freed by the knowledge that he was crooked. The gambler in me had loved the thought of it being Barney Clancy’s money. In this, as in most things, I was wrong. I wondered now how many excuses my father must have invented to stall Slab McGuirk until his son made him eventually pay with his life?

  ‘Did my father want Slab to avail of the amnesty?’ I asked.

  ‘Eamonn was insistent I didn’t push him. He got quite agitated.’

  ‘That’s because half the money was missing,’ I replied. ‘Cormac and I stole it.’

  I couldn’t believe I had just told Pete Clancy. It came from an almost boyish desire to confide in and please him. Me and my new-found friend, bonding together. I don’t know what reaction I expected, maybe that he’d turn on me as quickly as he once turned on Lisa Hanlon. But he just took a last drag of his cigarette, then stubbed it out.

  ‘We’re all human,’ he commented, matter-of-factly. ‘With money involved things always get complex.’

  ‘When I forged Cormac’s signature I signed my father’s death warrant.’

  ‘You didn’t tie him up. You’re not to blame. How many accounts did you close?’

  ‘Two. Cormac closed one and I closed the other. That’s all the account numbers we had.’

  He whistled softly. ‘There were four parcels of land, four separate accounts. I can see why your father drew up strict new mandates for the two that were left. You are certain you do have those?’ His tone was less matter-of-fact now.

  ‘If it’s Slab’s money why are you so concerned?’ I asked cagily.

  ‘This business should have been closed long ago, for everyone’s sake. Jersey was just a starting point for Traynor, a dummy run before he got into his stride and shifted his major clients to the Cayman Islands. The tribunals are so busy chasing the labyrinths of money on the Caymans that they’ve never explored what got left behind in Jersey.’ He shook his head, amused. ‘Your father refused to shift accounts from Jersey. He loved bloody Jersey.’

  At least Phyllis did. There was something blackly funny there. While other men made and hid fortunes, my father’s obsession had been to protect the free holidays in a cheap hotel that he cadged for himself and Phyllis twice a year.

  ‘If these last two accounts are closed down nobody need know about Jersey,’ Clancy said. ‘It will be dead and buried with nothing to rake over. But if a trawl of active accounts throws up these two then lawyers will start digging. Neither P. J. nor I want that. It won’t matter to the media that I made Daddy accept the amnesty, all that will matter is that my father was involved.’

  ‘And that he was on the make.�
��

  ‘We’re all on the make, Brendan, it’s the human condition. You and Cormac were on the make when you stole that money. Your wife and son were on the make when they creamed your life assurance.’

  ‘They knew nothing about it.’

  ‘Do you think the newspapers will care? Why let truth get in the way of a good story? Everything is black and white for those fuckers, except their own expenses. I’m sick to death of reporters.’

  ‘Why not just quit?’

  ‘And do what?’ he replied. ‘Go where? My father gave me the seat that his father gave to him and I won’t be the one who surrenders it. Every year I see the loss of respect more. People don’t like me but their dirty consciences mean they’re never sure they won’t need me if their young son goes a bit wild, their granny starts shoplifting or an upstanding father of seven is found with the hind legs of a squealing ewe tucked into his Wellingtons. The day I lose that seat they’ll stab me in the back so hard that I’ll be a pariah, unable to walk through Navan.’

  He turned on the radio and skimmed through the stations until he found a classical music one, then turned the sound down low.

  ‘I’ve enough enemies without Jersey blowing up in my face. Slick doesn’t know how much money was in those accounts anyway. Slab hated his missus with a vengeance and hated Haughey for giving equal property rights to wives. He didn’t just hide money from the taxman, he hid it from his missus and told Slick nothing in case he squealed to her. It was only when Slick met Joey Kerwin’s son at Cheltenham this year that he found out about his father having a share in those land sales in the 1980s and that your father had babysat the money. P. J. and I were never going to tell him. He went to your father but they had a blazing row. All Eamonn had to do was lie and say that Slab took out the money years ago, but not Mr Fucking Integrity Retired Civil Servant. Eamonn never liked Slick. He had a notion that all your bullying came from him. It was his way to re-write the past. To hear him talk you’d swear that he and Phyllis had rigged up a luxury granny flat for you as a child after you refused to sleep in the house despite his pleadings.’