Death at Christy Burke's

by Anne Emery

  “Ah.” There wasn’t anything else he could say, because everything he knew had come from Finn’s half-arsed confession.

  “I wonder why they didn’t have the warrant when they made the arrest. They must have received new information. Maybe he opened up when they got him to the station. Hard to imagine, though, from what I’ve seen of him.”

  “Wouldn’t happen.”

  “Well, we’ll see how it plays out. Has anyone been in touch with him?” Monty asked.

  “Not since I watched them drag him out of here in handcuffs.” He wasn’t about to go into details.

  “Where would they have taken him?” Michael asked. “Up the street to Mountjoy Prison, I suppose.”

  “Not yet, I don’t imagine,” Monty said. “Police station first, most likely. They’ll process him, take him before a judge, who’ll either release him or order him remanded to Mountjoy or some other institution.”

  “I should go find him,” said Brennan.

  “He’d probably prefer that you stay with the ship, Brennan,” Monty advised.

  “They’ll let him out on bail, though, right, Monty?” Michael asked.

  “I don’t know Irish law but, to the extent that it’s similar to ours, they’d have to hold a bail hearing. Whether he’d be released would depend on a number of factors. Including his history. If it’s not his first offence —” Monty looked at Brennan, who gave a quick shake of his head “— then that might affect his chances. And if, for instance, he’s on probation or on parole already, it won’t go well for him.”

  Nobody got a drink at Christy Burke’s for the rest of that day or evening. The pub was cordoned off as a crime scene. The pub regulars were indignant and convened an emergency meeting to decide where they would go for the rest of the day. They voted to take their business to Dec Gallagher’s and headed down to Dominick Street to their temporary headquarters.

  “I’m going to stop in at St. Francis Xavier’s Church in Gardiner Street and say a prayer for Finn,” Michael announced.

  “Thanks, Mike,” said Brennan. “I’ll do the same when I get back to my own parish.”

  “What are you fellows up to this evening?”

  “I can’t speak for Monty, but I’ve had enough excitement for one day.”

  “I can believe it. See you tomorrow, perhaps.” With that, Michael took his leave.

  Monty was showing no inclination to leave. “Well, Brennan, what now?”

  “Off to the convent, I guess,” Brennan replied.

  “Oh, yes, the convent. They’re giving away clothing to the poor and the defrocked today.”

  “Bless them.”

  “I’d better accompany you on your shopping trip, in case you want to try something on. I’ll tell you whether it makes you look fat or not.”

  “How d’yeh think yeh’d look with a fat lip?”

  “Like if somebody punched me in the mouth, you mean? Instead of doing that, why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Start with the suit.”

  “The suit’s the end of the story.”

  “Which is?”

  “I did some cleaning up.”

  Monty looked him in the eye. “You cleaned up the pub. Somehow I find it hard to believe that even someone as fastidious as you would make cleanliness a priority, given the events of the day. So I am left to conclude that you cleaned out the pub. In anticipation of the police.”

  “I shall not attempt to influence what you think.”

  “And whatever you found you can’t talk about.”

  “I had a very short conversation with Finn while the guards where there.”

  “How did you get away with that?”

  “I was attired in the garb of a man of God.”

  “They let him talk to his priest. A confession, perhaps.”

  Brennan made a “maybe, maybe not” gesture with his left hand. “Come on, let’s get to the convent school.”

  They began walking up Mountjoy Street, and Monty continued his interrogation. “You and Uncle Finn had a chat that may or may not have been a confession, which led you to clean out the pub. And you got your clothes dirty in the process, which suggests that you were in a part of the building the rest of us don’t get to see. Because what we get to see is a nice, clean pub. So then you were clever enough to realize that if the police had a look around and found nothing incriminating but did find a very dusty suit of clothes, they would wonder whether someone had been hard at work sanitizing the place. Good thinking. I’ve always been impressed by how much more intelligent you are than the rest of my criminal clients.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course, anyone hearing this story . . .”

  “Nobody’s going to hear it. Right, Montague?”

  “Not from me. But having heard it myself, or tantalizing bits of it, I can only speculate as to the whereabouts of the things removed from the pub, if there were any things removed from the pub.”

  “It’s all been taken care of.”

  “I see.”

  “Ah. St. Joseph’s.”

  They stood before a large brick building with a statue of the saint in a niche and a cross on top.

  “You won’t make me go on a scavenger hunt, I hope.”

  “No. Just around the corner there.”

  Brennan went around the corner and retrieved the bag containing his suit.

  “Good. I’m going to head back to my room, then stop into the church for a bit. You?”

  “Back to the hotel, then out for a little sightseeing.”

  They set out for the Christchurch and Liberties area of Dublin where they had their respective rooms.

  “Why don’t I take the suit to the dry-cleaning service at the hotel?”

  “Good plan. Thank you.”

  “Think nothing of it. I look at this as just another in a series of bizarre episodes that seem to occur any time I go on vacation with the Burkes.”

  Burke nodded. What could he say?

  When he awoke the next morning, the first thing he did after showering was collect the newspapers. Sure enough, there was Finn being led away from Christy’s by the guards. One paper even called him a “reputed crime boss.” The dark glasses and the insouciant expression on his face did nothing to dispel that suspicion. And it turned out that Finn was on parole for a previous offence, a money-laundering charge. Not only that, but the gardaí claimed he had breached the terms of his parole by leaving the country, that is, slipping across the border into Northern Ireland, so that was another strike against him. Finn wouldn’t be pouring pints at Christy Burke’s tonight.

  And the paper carried a photo of Japanese passengers getting off a plane at Shannon. Brennan recalled seeing them in an RTÉ newscast, before his uncle had struck the television dumb with his fist. The Japanese stood smiling at the photographer. Christ almighty. Every single one of them had on a tall hat with a brim and a buckle. A crowd of Irish-Japanese leprechauns. “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do,” Brennan intoned. Then he saw the next photo, the whole crowd of them standing forlorn in what looked like a bog, each with a piece of paper in his or her hand. The article said:

  Mr. Burke is accused of defrauding a group of Japanese nationals in connection with a land purchase scheme. The one hundred forty-four Japanese people say they each paid anywhere from five to ten thousand pounds for plots of land here in the Republic. They chartered a plane and travelled here to visit their land, only to find there are no such plots of land. Mr. Burke is said to have made as much as one million pounds in the fraudulent scheme. No court date has been set for the hearing of the charges.

  Finn Burke’s new living quarters weren’t much of a hike from his pub. Walk up Mountjoy Street, which becomes Berkeley Street and leads to the Mater Misericordiae Hospital, which fronts on Eccles Street. Eccles is famous, or at least the house at nu
mber seven is, as the fictional home of Leopold and Molly Bloom in Ulysses. But Brennan’s destination was more in the nature of infamy. Behind the Mater is the North Circular Road, and across the road is the Mountjoy Prison. After the charges were read out in court, Finn had been remanded to the Joy, and he was about to have his first visitor.

  From where Brennan stood he saw a complex of red brick and grey buildings, and two huge octagonal chimneys. He crossed the street and approached the gate. It took a while but, after a bit of bureaucratic procedure, Brennan Burke, dressed as a priest on a mission to the incarcerated, was facing Finn Burke, the incarcerated, in a prison visiting room. A long, wide table ran down the centre of the room, with a foot-high divider separating prisoners from visitors. Two officers, one at each end of the room, kept watch over the proceedings.

  “Welcome to the Joy, Father. Make yourself at home.”

  “Thank you, Finn. I’ll make an effort to fit in and enjoy my time here.”

  “As will I.”

  It was the first time this trip that Brennan had seen Finn without his dark glasses on. A pair of grey-blue eyes fastened on him from across the table.

  “Will they soon be releasing you, Finn?”

  “I’m settling in quite comfortably, let’s say, Brennan.”

  Brennan took that as a no.

  “I hope the guards treated you gently after they removed you from my sight.”

  “They didn’t give me a thumping, if that’s what you mean. But my old nemesis Inspector Feeney, who has attempted to thwart my career at every turn, was there to greet me with a whole host of slanderous, unproven allegations. They nicked me for land fraud, but Feeney would have egged them on about everything from fake little artifacts that never hurt a soul to automatic weapons . . . I take it they went back to the pub with a warrant?”

  Brennan nodded.

  A prison warder walked past them, and they fell silent. When he was gone, Brennan asked, “Who is James Shackleton-Gore?”

  “You’re lookin’ at him.”

  “Will you be fighting the charges?”

  “I’m always up for a good fight. Be sure to get yourself a seat in the Four Courts when I make my speech from the dock.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it. What will be the theme of your speech, if I may ask?”

  “Redistribution of wealth, Brennan. This is not a rich country, as you know. They keep saying that’s going to change, that we’re going to reap huge benefits from the European Union, that the 1990s will be the decade when the Irish economy takes off at long last. Well, so be it. In the meantime, in my own small way, I do what I can to improve our balance of trade.”

  “You’re doing good works.”

  “I am.”

  “But surely you don’t give away all the money you make from your endeavours.”

  “You’ve seen my home, Brennan. A nice enough house but it’s plain to see I haven’t been spending the money on high-tech items, swimming pools, or luxury automobiles. And I pay all taxes owing to the Republic of Ireland, God bless it and save it. Don’t be looking skeptical there, Father, I pay up like clockwork every year.”

  “Does it give you pause at all, though? Taking these people’s money?”

  “People who are willing to spend money on supposedly stolen sacred artifacts, or wee plots of land in someone else’s country just so they can say they own a bit of the oul sod, people like that have too much money on their hands. And I feel very little compunction about relieving them of it. Particularly since the vast majority of Irish people do not have that kind of money to throw around.”

  “Didn’t people find out after they bought the crosses and statues and things that they were fake, or at least questionable?”

  “None of them came whinging to me about it.”

  “But wouldn’t they look into it?”

  “They knew they were dealing with a crook, Brennan, somebody plundering and desecrating ancient burial grounds and stealing the contents for profit. Or at least that’s what they thought they knew. In fact, there weren’t any burial grounds. Just my little craft shop in the tunnel of Christy’s pub. We claimed there were three, or was it four, sites, known only to me and my people. Sites we could visit only in the dark of night. Just a bit of codology for the tourists; they lapped it up. They were complicit in the crime. They didn’t want anyone probing it. And they didn’t want to acknowledge they’d been had. Feck ’em.”

  “And the land scheme. How did that work?”

  “Worked fine, till the whole feckin’ crowd of them got together and decided to land here at the same time. Most of the people who buy land just stay home and wave the deed around their local on St. Patrick’s Day. They don’t get on a plane and fly all the way over here to stand on a few square feet of bog. But the Japanese! Jaysus!”

  “These plots of land,” Brennan began, and then wondered if there really were any plots of land. “Or the descriptions on the deeds. What location are we talking about?”

  “Well, there’s land up in County Mayo. Most of it’s bog, but there’s a small part of it that’s green and scenic and has some hedgerows and stone walls on it. The occasional sheep wanders by, when my lads can corral one of the creatures into their lorry and transport it to the field and give it a smack on the arse and get it to stand up and look into the camera. It all looks brilliant in the brochures. I got hold of the land years ago. And I’ve been selling it ever since!”

  In spite of himself, Brennan had to laugh out loud. He asked, “What are your chances, do you think?”

  “Well, now, that will depend on whether the guards find any evidence linking me to the crimes.”

  Brennan looked around him, then spoke sotto voce. “I don’t see how they will.”

  “Because there’s nothing there to implicate me.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “Even though they’ve searched.”

  “Correct.”

  Something flared up in Brennan’s mind for an instant, then it was gone. Something about the tunnel and the items that had been stashed down there. He’d have to try to bring it to mind later. For now, he focused on the man sitting across from him. He said to Finn, “Lovely old neighbourhood. My old neighbourhood and yours. But a bit run down. You’d wonder sometimes why the city doesn’t take better care of some of the properties there. The church, other buildings. Old furniture, rubbish not picked up, that sort of thing. Shame, really.”

  Finn looked into Brennan’s eyes. After a few seconds, he said, “The black church. A fine landmark.” Brennan nodded in agreement. In collaboration. “Well, Bren, I’m sure you have better things to do than spend your day in the Joy. I appreciate your visit, and I hope you’ll come back and see me again. The time is long in here, and I get a bit lonely. You know, another fellow I’d be pleased to see is Larry Healey. Works out on the Naas Road. Perhaps you could tell him I’d enjoy a visit.”

  “I’ll do that. And I’ll be back to see you myself.”

  “Thank you. Here, now, before you go, have them show you around. I imagine you were too young to visit the place last time you had a close family member incarcerated here. O’Reilly!” Finn shouted to one of the guards. “Show my confessor some hospitality, would you?”

  “I’m on duty now, Finn. I can’t be leaving the likes of you to your own devices.”

  “Where’s Doyle then?”

  “He’s just coming on.”

  “Good. Have him give Father Burke a little tour of the place. And make sure he sees the helipad.”

  “You and your helipad! You’re living on past glories, Finn. We’re in the nineties now.”

  “Thank you for the reminder, O’Reilly. The twentieth anniversary will be coming up next year in October. Halloween, to be exact. I think I’ll put on a costume that day.”

  “Oh, you think you’ll be choosing your own wardro
be by then, do you? More likely you’ll still be sitting in here, wearing the same prison fashions as all the other fine citizens in this place.”

  “No, no, I’ll be out for good behaviour, but you needn’t shed any tears at my departure. I’ll be sure to drop in for a visit. Keep an eye out for me that day, O’Reilly. I’ll be dressed as a prison warder, and I’ll have my face painted a bright, glowing red!”

  Finn turned to his nephew. “Do you know what we’re on about, Brennan?”

  “Would this be the helicopter escape in 1973? It made the news in New York.”

  “Sure it made news around the world. And I, the humble prisoner you see before you today, was right here on the ground when it happened.”

  “Were you now.”

  “Yes, I was here. For a short stint on trumped-up charges, then as now. I was in the exercise yard when I heard the rotors of a helicopter approaching. Never to my dying day will I forget the sight of it. I’m looking up. We all are. And we see it coming out of the sky towards the prison and, Jaysus, isn’t it heading right for us? It’s going to land! Right here in the prison yard. And the most comical thing about it is that the man in charge of the prison that day thought nothing of it, thought it was Paddy Donegan, the minister of defence, paying a visit by helicopter. It’s right there in the parliamentary debates. Jack Lynch got up in the Dáil the next day and said, ‘The officer can be forgiven for thinking it was the minister of defence flying in by helicopter, as the minister is wont to use helicopters as other ministers are wont to use state cars.’ So I’ll be dressed as that poor, red-faced prison official on the anniversary.”

  “You’re a part of history, Finn!”

  “I am indeed, but as a witness only. I was as gobsmacked as everyone else when the helicopter landed in the yard, and three IRA men got on board and were lifted into the skies above the jail. What a sight!”

  “How could they orchestrate such a thing? Where did they get the helicopter?”

  “Hijacked it. Told the pilot no harm would come to him if he did as he was told, fly into Dublin without alerting air traffic control, and there he was before he knew it, hovering over the Joy and coming down in the yard. Kevin Mallon directed him down using semaphore! Mallon, J.B. O’Hagan, and Seamus Twomey were airlifted out. Twomey was chief of staff of the ’RA at the time. The rest of us, when we caught on what was happening, blocked the screws from getting in the way.”