by John Brady
Kilmartin had gone quiet since his suspension back in October. Persuaded to talk about anything in the news, he usually spoke in a tone of gentle contempt. Minogue missed Kilmartin the exultant cynic more than he would ever admit, even to himself.
Kilmartin had lost weight — maybe too much. Could he have even shrunk a little? He seemed to be using air-quotes a lot, as though nothing was to be taken at face value anymore, and more than a few times, Minogue suspected that Kilmartin had a wandering head.
There were too many topics of conversation out of the blue. Did Minogue know that Irish sailors had given Columbus the know-how to get across the Atlantic? Had he noticed the word scenario cropping up everywhere? Did he notice that no-one spoke in sentences any more? And what did Minogue know about the Culdees, the old Irish Christians who ignored Rome? Global warming, WiFi networks, the vomeronasal organ, J. Edgar Hoover’s belief that De Valera was a secret Jew?
He and Kilmartin still went on the walks each week. They were on varying days: one up at Carrickologan, the other at Dunlaoghaire Pier, or Killiney Beach. The walks had begun as a gesture but they had passed quickly through routine, into habit, and they ended up as duty. Minogue was less than thrilled about his. His real walks — as distinct from strolls with Kathleen — had been in the spirit of Augustine, solitary and self-escaping. James Kilmartin was a ruiner of walks.
But to his credit, Kilmartin had never been first to bring up mention of his travails. It had been Minogue who had worked up the nerve to ask him about Maura in the weeks and months after she had tried to kill herself. He had been met with an uneasy silence. The topic was a nogo area.
Kilmartin didn’t join in the mischief and slagging at get-togethers in Clancy’s pub with the other veterans of the Murder Squad. Tommy Malone, their colleague from Murder Squad glory days didn’t give up trying, however. He offered Kilmartin openings galore, with talk of culchies and cowshite and country music, all delivered in the disdainful nasal Dublin drawl that Kilmartin had tried to mimic. But these sterling efforts had done little to animate this new James Kilmartin who had emerged from the shambles of that night when everything had gone up in smoke on him: wife, job — Kilmartin’s whole life, pretty well.
He seemed to have settled on renouncing things. The house that he and Maura had been so proud of was up for sale. His Audi was sold. No cigars. He took only the occasional drink, and rarely ate a meal in a restaurant. Though he now rented a boxy apartment near Thomas Street, he actually spent a lot of time on the family farm in Mayo. That was where his older brother Sean, gone very bad with the arthritis, was avoiding making decisions about the future, Kilmartin told Minogue. None of his brood wanted to make a go of the farm, apparently.
Kilmartin’s time there in boggy, wild and wet Mayo were more in the nature of dude ranching, he told Minogue. Bringing in the cows, driving the tractor; fixing drainage in the same boggy fields he had worked decades before; repairing sheds, the barn. Biding his time.
One evening, he listed his foods for Minogue. It was as though they were a guide to the New James Kilmartin: cabbage for the dinner — spuds of course; porridge every day; fish on Friday. Evenings on the farm meant sitting by the fire, reading the paper or the odd bit of television. No satellite tolerated, no sirree. A game of cards with the neighbours, or he’d try reading books he wished he had read years ago. A bit of yoga too, imagine that. He was trying to improve himself, he told Minogue, filling in gaps, so to speak.
Kathleen Minogue had spotted Kilmartin early in the New Year, looking through the self-help section in a Dublin bookshop. She swore that she had seen earphones and the tell-tale white wire of an iPod on him too. Minogue felt a strange embarrassment and even pity when he had heard this.
For Minogue’s part, he kept track of the progress of the internal investigation into the shennigans at the Kilmartins’ house that night. The Ombudsman’s Office had been up and running nearly two years now, but it was still the Commissioner who had the final say in discipline.
Minogue had now been interviewed three times about that night at Kilmartin’s — or as Plate Glass Sheehy had whispered in his ear one evening at Clancy’s pub, in a parody of a come-all-ye that Kilmartin would have appreciated in better times, “The Night Before Jimmy Was Stretched.” Well, nearly stretched.
The interviews had been low-key, and terribly polite all the way. Two of the “chats” had been with that reed-thin sergeant, Feeney; Feeney of the strangely white teeth and peppermint breath, Feeney with the skin tight over his forehead, a man who seemed to be perpetually straining, or holding back some great revelation, or fury.
The same Feeney had a soft manner that Minogue didn’t trust one iota. There had been a civil servant there at the second meeting, a woman from Justice who liaised with the Director of Public Prosecutions. Minogue remembered she wore those small and severe oblong glasses that were the style everywhere now. The suspicion, maybe even the assumption, that a friend of Jim Kilmartin’s like Minogue had to have been privy to Kilmartin’s doings sat like another party in the room. It was hardly news that Coopers looked after one another, was it.
Several fragments of the conversation had lodged in Minogue’s mind, and he had replayed them over and over again since.
“You and Superintendent Kilmartin are friends for some time.”
“That we are.”
“Working together for many years, I believe.”
“A good long while, yes.”
And on it had gone, with Feeney making observations more than asking questions. All very mild and civil, like a chess game. Minogue knew that a lot of it was for the benefit of the civil servant. She’d had to report to her department and minister, and so he had resolved not to react strongly to anything Feeney might say or insinuate. He had nevertheless prepared an aggressive statement, and he often itched to pull the pin on it.
Even at the time, he was glad that his chance never came, and more pleased yet when he got out of the meeting. He was nevertheless dismayed that he had been unable to divine: whether anyone clearly believed a) Kilmartin had been dirty, or b) had been in cahoots with his wife when she was having her odd phone conversations — very, very odd indeed — with the head of a Dublin crime family.
It wasn’t so much a shunning of Kilmartin that Minogue had observed since that night. It was noticing how few of Kilmartin’s contacts in the Guards had made a point of meeting Kilmartin face-to-face, or showing up at any of the sessions in Clancy’s.
Well who could blame them, Kilmartin had quietly explained to Minogue. They probably thought he was gone off the deep end. Or maybe being seen with him might affect their careers. Kilmartin had chuckled to himself then, Minogue recalled. Career, Kilmartin had mused wryly later on, and raised a smile. He had turned the word from a noun back into a verb, hadn’t he?
The point was, Kilmartin was owed, and that was that. Minogue wasn’t going to budge on that. It had been James Kilmartin who had set up the shaky Matthew Minogue in his Murder Squad years ago, when Minogue himself was damaged goods. Jittery, inert, and numbed by his own near-miss with death, Minogue was soon a probationer with Kilmartin’s Squad, and the years that followed had been Minogue’s best, working with Kilmartin, close to the dead.
A few cars passed faster now as the city traffic fell away. Minogue again pretended to check his far mirror. He saw that Kilmartin had fallen asleep.
Chapter 5
Colm Breen did a lot of his trademark slow nodding while Fanning talked. He kept his spoon going, carefully turning it on the tablecloth in a series of quarter rotations clockwise, stopping every now and then to rotate it back. Fanning refused to be distracted, or irritated, by it.
Fanning was aware that he was nearing the end of his time.
“It’s so intense,” he said. “Dublin, the real Dublin. No U2 concerts, no trendy apartments by the Liffey stuff. Life in the raw.”
“Gritty, Dermot. That’s the key.”
“Gritty doesn’t go near it. Think of it as a
medieval city all over again.”
Breen nodded again.
“What I’m trying to get across,” Fanning went on, “is something beyond any genre, you know. That’s the thing about it being a medieval city.”
“Right,” said Breen. “Not a lot of people would see that.”
“Dublin itself is the story — now I know that sounds corny.”
“No way. You’re not one of those fellas trying to rewrite Ulysses. Thank God.”
“There’s the nobility, if you want to call them that, behind their railings and burglar alarms. Then there’s the ones with nothing, nothing to lose, I mean.”
“‘Two Irelands,’” said Breen. “‘Two Dublins’?”
“Exactly. It’s its own world, unto itself. But universal, like a city is a city.”
“Well, they say it’s worse than we think it is. Worse than the Guards let on.”
Fanning had expected this. He had his sombre tone ready.
“That it definitely is, without a doubt. A senior Guard has told me exactly that.”
He felt sure that this quiet affirmation had had an effect on Breen.
“The underworld,” Breen murmured thoughtfully. He looked out the window.
“Tell you something else,” said Fanning. “Going around with the guy I’m with, it’s pretty scary. It’s like a completely foreign city. And I know Dublin.”
“Your guide to the underworld,” said Breen, another wry smile creeping into his fleshy face. “This Orpheus, let’s call him. Is he a big thing, what they say, ‘connected’?”
“Well he talks a lot. Watches too many gangster flicks probably.”
“Scarface? Tony Soprano?”
“Pretty much.”
“Living the dream, is he.”
“We could talk about the semiotics of it.”
Breen actually smiled.
“Jesus, Dermot. Spare me. Remember all that crap?”
It was another test, but Fanning had a lot of ground to give. He smiled, and he shrugged. Breen uncrossed his legs and sat up.
“So what’s the going rate for this, em, tour of the underworld?”
“The usual thirty pieces of silver.”
Breen seemed to enjoy that.
“But he gets me places,” Fanning went on. “Even if he is a name-dropper.”
“Names?”
“Not any big scandal, well not yet. ‘You’d be amazed who buys heroin in this city,’ he says. Things like that. And he talks about his sources in the Guards.”
“Bent ones?”
“Hasn’t said outright. He has a contact in the Drug Squad, the Central one.”
Breen’s face became fixed in an expression of kind interest.
“‘The Wire’ you’re talking about, maybe?” Fanning knew he had to be careful.
“Possibly, sure. Why not. Let’s say it’s a starting point, but better.”
“Take the bad guys’ side then? The O’Sopranos, maybe?”
He almost forgot to acknowledge Breen’s quip.
“It could go that way,” he said. “I mean it could be done. But the real star of the story? The real star is Dublin. Local. Vernacular. Right in your face.”
Immediately, Fanning wished he hadn’t uttered those words.
“I’m not saying it right, Colm — but you know what I mean. The Dublin we know, or at least we think we know. But in fact we don’t?”
Breen’s brow creased.
“But Dublin’s a destination now,” Fanning said. “We’re on the map, right? Boomtown, the Celtic Tiger, all that. I know it’s jaded by now — for us, like. But the U.S. viewers? No, they’re behind, obviously.”
“No more colleens and shamrock, thank you very much. The Quiet Man done gone.”
“Listen. Have you ever stopped on any street here and just listened?”
“Listened?”
“I mean the languages. Arabic, I heard the other day. Polish, lots obviously — but I mean, it’s kind of like we missed out on some stage. Like we went straight from the past, and we woke up in the future, and found the place is full of foreign — immigrants, I mean. New faces, is what I mean, I suppose.”
“Well you can certainly hear them when you buy a cup of coffee, or a pint.”
“Absolutely,” said Fanning. “You’re right there.” He wondered when Colm Breen had last walked into an ordinary pub and bought an ordinary pint to drink with ordinary people. Decades.
“Let me just fire a few images your way,” he said to Breen. “Then I’ll be off. You know me, I’ve been around. But this place today — no-one, I mean no-one has this. Ready?”
Breen smiled, and nodded.
“Everyone who can get their hands on one carries a gun.”
“Really,” said Breen.
“Broad daylight, I swear. People I’m seeing are not just thieves, or B and E go-boys. These are serious people. You can feel the voltage off them. It’s nothing for them to go to Amsterdam and do deals, or Bangkok — anywhere.”
“I heard that.”
“The cops don’t want people to know the situation. Oh sure, they make statements and they talk about the new seizure laws and all the rest of it. What they don’t say, is that they’re not on top of this at all.”
“Scary.”
“You’re telling me. The hair stands up on the back of my neck. It’s life or death stuff. There are no laws for these people, no rules. Psychopaths.”
“Russians, I heard? Eastern Europe stuff?”
“You’re reading my mind! That’s in the story too. When the old guard, the Dubs let’s call them, decide to settle with all these fellas coming into the country and starting their own gigs.”
Breen leaned in over the table.
“Is that what’s going on at the moment, these shootings the past while?”
“‘Spring cleaning,’ Murph calls it.”
“Murph.”
“My contact, takes me around and about. My tour guide. Told me that the guy killed the other night was a friend of his. The name of Mulhall, I think.”
“Really,” said Breen. “Isn’t that kind of, well, too close for comfort? Pardon the cliche and all that.”
“Well Murph doesn’t seem to think so. ‘It’s only messers and two-timers need to worry,’ says he.”
“And this character was a friend of his,” said Breen. “What does he say about his enemies, I wonder.”
Fanning couldn’t be sure if Breen was ahead of him here in the irony stakes. He thought again of their early days together as students, when Breen was an awkward gobshite that he had taken under his wing in the Film Society.
“Murph’s not the fastest bunny in the forest, I have to say,” he said.
“You trust him?”
“As much as I trust any skanger, I suppose.”
Breen smiled.
“Plus he keeps telling me how well-in he is. Mr. Untouchable.”
Breen‘s smile faded into a dreamy look.
“‘Spring cleaning,’” he said. “‘The Rites of Spring.’ Plenty grotesque.”
He rearranged himself in his chair. His eyes slipped out of focus for several moments, and then snapped back to Fanning’s.
“Tell you what, Dermot Fanning: you’ve got the makings of a damn good documentary here. A damned good one.”
The anger detonated into Fanning’s chest. He tried to match Breen’s grin.
“We need the whole ball of wax,” he said. “Inside out. The full emotional whack: characters, levels, conflict. Family, feuds. Revenge. The voices, the faces. You won’t be able to take your eyes off them.”
“It sounds huge.”
“There’s a series in this, for sure. I’m telling you, I started out with the usual, you know: a knockout pilot, and eight episodes ready. But that won’t be enough, it just won’t. There’s so much.”
Breen smiled again.
“You are the real McCoy, Dermot. By Jesus. You’ve got the fire in you.”
“I hope that’s a good t
hing?”
“Of course it is, don’t be silly. Of course it is.”
“‘Stories tell the higher truth.’”
“I was waiting for that one,” said Breen.
Fanning didn’t want to notice that a tail of Breen’s shirt had become dislodged, and now hung over his belt.
“We’re talking The One,” he said. “Look, I know I’m just rabbiting on here. But have a look over the summary, the first chapter. I know you’re a busy man.”
“No sweat, Dermot. Never a problem. It’s the story, the writing, in the final analysis — always. And by God I know you have it in you.”
Fanning watched Breen’s hand resting on the folder, as though to guard it. He knew he should leave it at that, but he couldn’t resist.
“Ask me where I’m going right after,” he said. “Ask me.”
“Okay. Where are you off to?”
“A dog fight.”
Breen sat up.
“You mean dogs fighting?”
“Exactly. Murph has an in, and he’s bringing me.”
“Where are you going to see this?”
“About two miles from where we’re sitting.”
Fanning waited a few moments. He was pleased with Breen’s reaction.
“I don’t know the address,” he went on, “But it’s the real thing. And a lot of the big shots show up.”
“The bad guys.”
“Yep. It’s a kind of neutral place, where they might bump into one another but no-one starts throwing shapes. Business gets discussed, and all that. But it’s for betting. Been going on for years.”
Fanning finally felt he was getting through to Breen. He stared at him.
“Oh. And they go for blood-lust, I’d have to say. That medieval thing, it keeps on coming back, you see.”
Breen’s blank expression gave way a little. He gave Fanning a rueful look.
“Savage,” he said. “Incredible. But are you going to be able to handle it?”
