The Death of Love

by Bartholomew Gill

  There stood Gladden, looming in the shed door, but for a moment only. Quick for a man of his age and size, he snatched up the handle of a slane and, taking two short steps, swung it with both hands at McGarr. The heavy, shiny blade clipped through a row of stacked flowerpots that exploded in McGarr’s face. He had time only to turn his shoulders away, and the head of the slane caught him in the small of the back.

  The force of the blow spun him around, and the note cards squirted from his grasp. The smashed flowerpots had sprayed into his eyes, and he could only hear and feel Gladden’s footsteps on the loose floorboards of the outbuilding as he charged, blade lowered at McGarr’s chest.

  McGarr launched himself low and hard at Gladden’s ankles, and the big man, carried forward by his own momentum, fell roughly over McGarr, who pushed himself up so that Gladden’s tumble would throw his legs high. Gladden crashed hard into the back wall of the shed and took some time to get to his feet, but still McGarr could not clear his eyes. Whatever the pots had contained burned and stung. His back was now galling him, and he could see that Gladden had something else in his hand that looked like a breensler’s pike.

  Anything that McGarr could lay his hands on he now threw in front of Gladden—a chair that was kicked out of the way, some sawhorses, a wheelbarrow that Gladden shoved back into his shins—until McGarr backed into something solid. He threw out his hands. A wall. He began moving to what he could just see was light.

  But Gladden had cleared his feet and took two quick steps to load his weight into his swing. The blow caught McGarr high on the shoulder and ripped across the base of his neck, his chest, and the hand of the other arm. And again across his thighs, the material of his suit shredding as the blade bit into his flesh.

  Gladden had him pinned against the wall, and McGarr could feel the blood hot from his shoulders to his knees. He was about to push himself off the wall and charge, which was his only chance, when he heard:

  “Drop that, you bastard, or I’ll blow your head off.”

  There was a pause, and then the shed was filled with a noise louder than McGarr thought he had ever heard.

  Because of Maddie’s complaining, Noreen had not heard a car on the drive. Maddie had wanted to get out of her car seat, then get out of the Rover, then walk around to a field on the other side of a wall, where there were multicolored stones and the sun was bright.

  Gladden, Noreen now suspected, had caught sight of the Rover from the crest of the neighboring hill. He had switched off his engine and coasted down the incline until he got near the house.

  In any case—busy with Maddie in the field—Noreen had not seen Gladden until he was well beyond her and about to enter the final outbuilding, the door of which was open. She knew immediately from the stiff and truculent look of him that trouble would start, and instead of honking the horn, she lifted Maddie into her car seat, clamped it down, closed the door, and rushed around to the other side of the car. She reached under the driver’s seat for the Walther that McGarr kept there.

  The clips were concealed under the dash, and Noreen, whose sporting parents still hunted in three seasons, quickly armed the weapon and sprinted the hundred or so yards through to the door of the shed. Now she held the handgun in both fists, the barrel pointed at Gladden’s heart. The first shot had passed within inches of his head. With the next she would kill him without remorse; she hoped he could read the purpose in her eyes.

  Her husband was pinned against a wall, trying to look around. He looked as if he was stunned or…something. Shock? All of him from the shoulders down seemed bloodied, and there stood Mossie Gladden with a long, sharp pike in his hands.

  “Noreen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get him out of here. Get me out into the light where I can see. And give me some time. Did he come alone?”

  It wasn’t shock; it was anger. And she knew what he wanted. “Ah, Peter,” she pleaded, “are you sure—”

  “Out! Get us out. And give me some time. I’m fed to the teeth with shit like this. Jesus.” He tried to look down at his sliced and bruised body, but he could not see.

  “Now, missus,” Gladden began saying, “if you’ll just give me that gun—”

  When it went off again. The blast was stellar and left McGarr’s ears ringing with crinkling sounds, like icicles falling.

  “Out!” Noreen ordered. “Get out into the yard, and if you so much as move quickly or break, I’ll put one of these in your hide. I’m a dab shot, and Paddy Power was a hearty of my father. Because of you I’ve got a husband half-destroyed and a baby scared to death. And not a witness within two leagues.”

  “What does Paddy Power have to do—”

  “Out! Get out!”

  McGarr was now seeing enough to watch Gladden move by them. Out in the sun of the yard McGarr doused his eyes in the rainwater of an animal trough that had filled during the storm of the night before. He then felt the depth of the slices below his neck and on the palm of his right hand, which were still bleeding. Both needed stitching, but not by Gladden.

  “Take that thing out of here,” he said to Noreen, meaning the gun. “Go back to Parknasilla and find Bernie in the lounge. Tell him what happened and to stay close to a phone.”

  Noreen began to object, but all McGarr had to add was, “Maddie,” and she left to quiet her baby, who was now bawling.

  “So, you were going to give me a ‘toompin’ I’d never forget,” said McGarr, moving in on Gladden, who did not stir. “Can I tell you what I’ll never forget?” He had stopped in front of the larger man to look up into his strange, polished-looking jade eyes. “That slane. And the pike. No ‘toompin’ at all, you had weapons. Now I’ll give you a second chance. With your hands.”

  Gladden’s punch, wheeling off the breadth of his shoulders, whistled over McGarr’s head. And a second, thrown with the other fist as he rocked back and in at McGarr.

  Injuries or not, it was McGarr’s type of brawl altogether, and he wondered how many actual fistfights the good doctor and former, visionary TD, who had been born and raised in these barren hills, had had in his time. Not more than a dozen, he was willing to bet. If that.

  McGarr, on the other hand, had been born and raised in Dublin’s Inchicore, hard by the rail yard and gasworks. His first sport had been the punch-up. Necessarily. Then, of course, there had been his work, and he now took full advantage of the larger man’s propinquity, butting his head into his sternum and lashing out, once low and once high, with his fists.

  The first blow buckled Gladden’s body, so that the second landed squarely on the bridge of his long nose just as his head was jerking forward. The cartilage folded under McGarr’s knuckles, blood burst over Gladden’s face. His long, bent legs shot out, dumping him on his backside in front of McGarr, who stepped quickly out of range of his large hands.

  McGarr knew what Gladden was now seeing. A great, bloody red blotch of color that would molt into a rainbow of blinding pain. And yet McGarr felt cheated that it was over so quickly. The big man now turned aside, and his breakfast came up.

  McGarr noticed a bucket, filled it with trough water, and dashed it into Gladden’s face. McGarr looked behind him to see Noreen’s car on the narrow drive, slowing to ease around Gladden’s battered Land Rover.

  Gladden was trying to gain his feet. He slipped on the mud and fell into his vomit. When he had gotten to hands and knees again, McGarr put a shoe on his buttocks and sent him sprawling toward the trough. There, like McGarr before him, he doused his head in the water.

  A jetliner, making for Shannon to the north, now passed silently far above the pinnacle of the mountain, its great silver wings glinting in the full sun. McGarr went into the shed and gathered up Paddy Power’s note cards.

  The whine of the descending jet now came to them. He waited until it had diminished before saying, “You stole these before you poisoned Paddy Power. That makes it premeditation, murder in the first degree.”

  “I didn’t murder Paddy. Nor did I st
eal his note cards. I was sent them.” Gladden again lowered his head to the cold water in the trough.

  “By whom?”

  “By Paddy.”

  “Why would he have wanted you to have them?”

  “Because he knew they would try to kill him.”

  “They?”

  “Frost and O’Duffy and their crowd.”

  “Where were they sent you? Here?”

  But Gladden would say no more, and McGarr collected the rest of the cards.

  Next he lifted the greatcoat off its peg. “Where’s your felt hat?” he called out to Gladden, who was now sitting against the trough, both hands raised to his nose as though attempting to reset the cartilage. One hand came down and indicated the old Land Rover that was parked at some distance from the house.

  McGarr made Gladden drive. “Take us to the Waterville Lake Hotel.”

  Gladden shook his head and looked away. Already the sockets of both eyes were bluing, and his puffed nose with its split nostril was canted off to one side. “I only hope you know what you’re doing,” he observed, turning the truck around. “There’s a hell of a stink in this. Your career and a lawsuit to boot.”

  Or a hell of charge against a man who, as a doctor, had sworn to heal and protect life whenever he could: murder of his self-described best friend.

  And the attempted murder of another man who had sworn to protect life and society whenever he could.

  “Is there a doctor in Waterville?”

  “I don’t need one.”

  No, McGarr thought; Gladden would wear that nose like a badge of high culchie honor, having been set upon by “O’Duffy’s man.” The tough little police gurrier and gunman from Dublin.

  But McGarr hadn’t been thinking about Gladden’s medical needs. He had his own wounds to worry about, and whatever sepsis the crusted blade of that slane might create.

  First, however, he would take Gladden to the desk of the Waterville Lake Hotel for an identification. Some country gorsoon had delivered Paddy Power’s stolen note cards to his ex-wife, Nell Power, and McGarr was betting it had been Gladden.

  CHAPTER 9

  Debt Service

  OVER BREAKFAST MCGARR had told Ruth Bresnahan, “This is not a murder investigation. It can’t be, no matter how right Mossie Gladden was in predicting how Paddy Power had died,” which was by digitalis poisoning. “We’ve got the locked door, the proper medications in the appropriately labeled bottles, and the obvious signs that Power had attempted to treat himself. If he was murdered, he was murdered by his own hand.

  “That leaves Gladden’s charge of murder, which means we must investigate the death. Even if it were outright murder, I’m not sure we would want to call it that, at least until we had proof.” For the sake of the country, which would be mourning Power, he had meant.

  “The most we can do is poke around, perhaps stir things up gently,” he had emphasized, “if we can. But mainly we should listen and observe. There has to be some reason that we don’t yet appreciate why the government in the form of Commissioner Farrell and Ministers Harney and Quinn are so concerned. Perhaps if we’re patient, they’ll let us know what it is.”

  Which had long been McGarr’s approach to interviewing. On Bresnahan’s first case McGarr had told Bresnahan, “If you can keep the person talking, sooner or later he will tell you what you wish to know.”

  And was Bresnahan’s approach now, while sitting with Shane Frost in the bar at Parknasilla.

  “Are you acquainted with the Irish debt?” Frost asked. “Is it an Irish accent I’m hearing?”

  “Pretend I’m not,” Bresnahan replied. “Fill me in.”

  Frost liked the sound of that. He smiled.

  They had taken the last two seats at a corner of Parknasilla’s small, tasteful public bar, which was now crowded before lunch. Bankers and the few reporters who had remained to follow up on the revelation of the press conference were sitting in tight groups or standing in clutches, their voices lowered so as not to carry in the gleaming chestnut and cut-glass confines of the narrow room. Paddy Power’s death was on every lip.

  “After the Second World War Ireland found itself a small agrarian nation with a stable population, no debt, much genteel poverty, and little future beyond whatever Britain, who were still our major trading partner, were willing to grant us. Historically that had been less than nothing, and after we decided to remain neutral during the war and winked at German submarines charging their batteries in our bays and harbors, well—we had to do something. Certainly Britain was not going to reward us for betting against them.

  “Debt was the key. The idea was to prime our economic pump with borrowed money, get some industries going and Irish-made goods on the world market. When money began coming in, the whole mechanism would become self-sustaining. And there we’d be—a modern, productive republic for nothing more than the courage and foresight to risk debt.” Frost raised a finger. Watching it descend, he pointed it at the long and gentle slope of Bresnahan’s chest. “Mark that word.”

  “Republic,” she said.

  Frost nodded. “When tied to entry into the European Community and cheap petrodollars, it made great good sense. Some—Paddy was one—made the point that with worldwide inflation and low interest rates, it was foolish not to borrow as much as we could at what amounted to negative interest rates. Every underdeveloped country did.

  “The second oil shortage and Reaganomics in the eighties ended all that. Interest rates soared instead of falling, and economic contraction set in. Suddenly new borrowing and the easy money of the seventies had to be paid back in hard currency, the hardest for a fledgling industrial nation with the largest debt in relation to gross national product in Western Europe.

  “Still and all, we would have been great, had the bulk of the money been spent on the capital-producing aspects of the economy. But we Irish are an impatient people, and we desired to leap, all at one go, into the twentieth century. We demanded all the welfare benefits of a modern, progressive industrial society—a Denmark or Holland—before we possessed the means of paying for those privileges. Hadn’t we the example of Northern Ireland with its British benefits just across the border?

  “I don’t much fancy politicians myself, but they found themselves snagged on the horns of a dilemma. They could oppose such spending and be voted out of office, or support it and be condemned for corrupting the economy at some later date. Of course they took the easy way out.

  “And thus was born the villain of the piece, the Irish welfare state and not—”

  “An Irish republic.”

  Frost smiled fully and let his light gray eyes mingle in hers. He had an apt, as well as a beautiful, pupil. “We also got ourselves debt. Big debt. It eats up sixty-five percent of the average unmarried urban worker’s wages.”

  There he was referring to Bresnahan’s pay packet exactly.

  “Ninety percent of all income tax collected—some thirty percent of all annual government revenues—goes just to service its interest. Sixty percent of that money leaves the country.” Frost turned his head down the bar. “Excuse me?”

  Ward, who was washing glasses, looked their way.

  “Could you come down here, please? We’d like something wet.”

  Undoubtedly, thought Ward, drying his hands.

  “Whiskey?” Frost asked Bresnahan.

  “Neat. Water on the side,” she called down to Ward.

  “Two. Now, please.”

  “And Mr. Power’s proposal, the one he was going to ask this conference to consider?” And use as his first step into politics.

  Frost tilted his head and smiled ruefully. “Brilliant, uncomplicated and…elegant, like most everything Paddy did. His purpose was to clear the debt in one swift act, insist upon a change in the Irish tax structure, and thereby position the country to deal with the challenges of the Single European Act of 1992, which will abolish trade tariffs in the European Community.”

  Ward set the drinks before them
and allowed his eyes to flicker up at Bresnahan, who smiled. He moved a step or two away, as though busying himself with some bottles. At the other end of the bar Sonnie was dealing single-handedly with a brisk trade.

  “Using Chile as a model, Paddy was planning to put before this conference the proposal of converting Irish debt into equity in Irish government enterprises. He had in mind privatizing all the wasteful state-run enterprises like the rail and bus systems, the phone network, the Peat Board, Radio Telefis Eireann. Those agencies are sitting on valuable resources but can’t compete even now, when protected by government rules and regulations. Faced with foreign competition in 1992, they’ll only become further burdens on the Treasury. Why not barter them away while we can, for debt relief? Retaining Irish control, of course.”

  But all the jobs that would be lost, Bresnahan thought. Private enterprise would never put up with the featherbedding and shenanigans that went on in most state-run organizations she knew of. And then there were “The unions,” she thought aloud; Irish unions had to be either the best or the worst in the world, depending on your membership or lack thereof. Every third person either groused or practiced rabble-rousing as a matter of ethnic pride.

  “Paddy had an answer for them as well, which would also solve one of the major challenges of 1992. What if all those union members who deserved to retain their posts under the new scheme suddenly discovered their pay packets taxed not at the current sixty-five percent, but rather in the neighborhood of twenty or twenty-five percent? How would that sit with most Irish voters? With no debt, income taxes could be more than halved. Immediately.

  “Also, foreign firms—all those companies that we piled up our debt trying to attract to Ireland—would be less likely to pack up and leave in 1992. Because of our tax structure, foreign firms must now systematically double the salaries of the employees they send here. With trading advantages expunged in ’92, many are likely to leave.”

  Frost reached for his glass.