The Death of Love

by Bartholomew Gill

“Now, about Shane,” she repeated.

  Why not, Bresnahan thought. McGarr had also told her to stir things up, if she could, and she quickly recounted how Frost had blamed the debt on what he had called the Irish welfare state.

  Osbourne’s smile was contemptuous. “Ah, yes—Shane, the elitist, he blames the debt on Joe and Joan Soap, those two greedy freeloaders from Ballyrathdrum who are responsible for the shambles of the economy.” Suddenly Osbourne was on her feet, and Bresnahan caught the complex scent of some exotic perfume.

  “They insisted on free housing, free health care, free university educations for their layabout kids, who emigrated with their Irish degrees to cushy jobs in Frankfurt and New York. Now they’re sending back tax-free remittances and the like that are fueling the underground economy.

  “But not even that is enough for the grasping Soaps, who are also lazy, unproductive, and don’t want to see themselves or the country go ahead. There’s the dole for Joe, whenever he feels like a paid holiday, and finally some fat citizen’s pension for both of them as a kind of reward for their having avoided work for fifty years.”

  Bresnahan smiled. To the list of Osbourne’s other attractions, she now added passion and sarcasm, the last being of no little value in the country she was describing. If not to her heavily made-up cheeks, color had risen in Osbourne’s long, smooth neck.

  “What about Paddy’s plan? My plan now, I suppose.”

  “He outlined it.”

  “And concluded?”

  “That the proposal has a greater chance of being accepted with Mr. Power dead than alive.”

  “As, say, the ‘Sean Dermot O’Duffy Proposal’? You know, a program of economic restructuring that will lead Ireland into the twenty-first century? Do you want my opinion of that?” Osbourne had stopped at the drinks cart and splashed some whiskey into two glasses. “Neat, isn’t it? Water on the side?” She opened a bottle of Ballygowan Spring Water and clinked some ice into another glass.

  Frost had left nothing out, Bresnahan observed. Not even her choice of drink.

  Back at the table Osbourne placed the glasses in front of Bresnahan; when she sat, she leaned both elbows on the table and looked into Bresnahan’s eyes. Hers were a curious gray color, lighter even than McGarr’s or—Bresnahan now remembered—Shane Frost’s. Close, like that, Bresnahan could see the ridges in Osbourne’s face. Why hadn’t modern reconstructive surgery, which doubtless she could afford, been able to help her? she wondered. Or had the woman chosen to keep her disfiguration? Why?

  Osbourne reached for a whiskey glass and clinked it against the other. “To candor.”

  Bresnahan only regarded her appraisingly.

  “The economic pump Shane mentioned? It required priming. Did he mention how much?”

  Bresnahan shook her head.

  “To date, twenty-seven billion Irish pounds. That works out to thirty-five billion U.S. dollars, which is the currency much of it will have to be paid back in.

  “If the borrowed money had simply been divided equally and distributed, Joe and Joan Soap would probably have been better off, to say nothing of the Treasury, which at least would have been able to collect taxes on the money.

  “There are three-point-five million souls in Ireland, which works out to some seventy-seven hundred pounds per man, woman, and child. A family of five would have had thirty-eight thousand pounds. A family with five children, which is not unusual, fifty-four thousand pounds. How many people do you know who have derived benefits anywhere near those figures?

  “Even most of us who have gotten jobs because of our miraculous economic transformation haven’t seen that value.”

  Bresnahan blinked. Her salary was close to twenty thousand pounds per year.

  “Subtract what you would have made in the original economy, the incredible double-digit inflation of the late seventies and early eighties, and the sixty-five percent tax rate that comes right off the top of your salary and the eighty-two percent off mine. I won’t be petty and mention the other taxes on gasoline, tobacco, automobiles, alcohol, appliances, and so forth that make us among the most heavily taxed people in the world and virtual workers for the state.

  “And what have we got for it? A large number of low-pay jobs that might evaporate in 1992. A diaspora of new, shoddy housing estates that will soon be unsightly slums. Urban sprawl, traffic congestion, air pollution, crime, and drug abuse. All the sordid details attendant to an industrial society that you in the police see every day in Dublin or Cork or Limerick. Even sometimes out here, which twenty years ago was unthinkable.”

  Like a nice, neat locked-door murder, perhaps committed by one or several of the best persons in the society. Or maybe even the government itself for motives political and economic, though Bresnahan hoped not. The police did not see that every day.

  “Let me ask you something else. Do you know anybody who pays little or no direct taxes at all? Who, on the other hand, has benefited mightily from every sort of machinery grant, land consolidation, fuel support, and other government subvention?”

  Farmers. Her own father was one.

  “Then we have development grants, low-interest, government-guaranteed business loans, matching grants, government tax abatements and deferrals and suspensions.”

  Developers, entrepreneurs, financiers, business owners large and small, had benefited from those, and they were Sean Dermot O’Duffy’s staunchest supporters.

  “What I’m saying—Shane’s and O’Duffy’s and all the other boomers’ great gusher of a pump hasn’t splashed everybody equally, and with twenty-seven billion pounds flowing, you didn’t have to get too wet to get rich. Sure the Irish government has grown by leaps and bounds. Certainly a welfare state has been created. But the fact is that six percent of the people in this country now own eighty-five percent of our goods and resources. And now that they have political clout, they want somebody else to pay their debt. If that continues to happen, things for them will only get better. For all others, worse.

  “That’s what Paddy was trying to prevent with this conference. And now me.” Osbourne waited until Bresnahan’s eyes met hers. “Finding ourselves soon—sometime in the 1990s—a nation of young urban poor. Exploitable poor. You know, a ready pool of low-pay laborers. Those who remain and don’t emigrate.”

  “O’Duffy intends that?”

  “Think of the advantages. Free trade with Europe. Transportation costs much less than to the Pacific Rim nations, which by then will find their cost of labor rising while ours is falling. Already we’re the third-poorest-paid work force in Western Europe, after Spain and Portugal, who have only recently entered the Market and whose people are nowhere near as well educated or trainable.”

  Osbourne finished her drink and hunched a shoulder. The skin on her upper chest was fair and smooth and certainly looked younger than her—how old could she be?—thirty-five or forty years. “Far be it from me to know what O’Duffy intends, but his actions have seldom failed to benefit those who support him. Why would that change? And with him and not Paddy in charge of the details of any debt-for-equity swap, I should imagine there could be smiles all around their small group.”

  Bresnahan did not want to believe that the government might be involved in murder, but even if in some way it were, the act itself had to have been committed by a hand that would have had its own motive.

  “Mr. Power was a wealthy man?”

  Osbourne shook her head. “No—Mr. Power was a rich man.”

  “Billions?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t share that information with me. Or anyone.”

  “Who inherits?”

  “I don’t know that either. The Power Fund, I should imagine. And his children.”

  “The wife?”

  “Again, I don’t know, but I don’t think so. Paddy had a bitter divorce. ‘Highway robbery,’ he called it, and I don’t see him leaving Nell, who has already gotten her share, in his will. You should ask Shane, who was Paddy’s solicitor.”
/>   Bresnahan waited.

  “Oh, yes—Shane’s a lawyer too. He only became a banker on Paddy’s insistence. You know, an offer too good to refuse.”

  Bresnahan inclined her head, wishing to know more.

  “The founding Eire Bank agreement was a seventy/twenty split with ten percent to various political and, you know, establishment insiders. Paddy’s was the biggest part since, really, without him there would have been no Eire Bank. Paddy had all of the connections, all of the expertise, and much of the original money. Shane’s portion of twenty percent was more like a gift. An incentive for him to remain with the bank as…figurehead, when Paddy moved on.

  “But it was Eire Bank that became the bone of contention in his divorce. Paddy was partial to Eire Bank, since it was his first leap into finance and his only real commercial creation. The greater part of his money was made abroad in strict capitalist practice, buying and selling securities, financial vehicles, banks, savings institutions, and the like. Also, he wished to maintain a base here in Ireland so that, when he returned, people would know that he had shared their experience in good times and bad, and was not just another ‘conquering blow-in,’ was his phrase.

  “Nell knew it, and out of grasping spite, I’d say, demanded a half share of everything he was worth, even though they had not lived as man and wife for nearly twenty years and she had left him, though she now tells everybody different. Their lawyers negotiated back and forth for more time than I care to remember. Finally she settled for an enormous sum of money, which was never revealed, and a nineteen percent stake in Eire Bank. Leaving Paddy controlling interest of fifty-one percent.”

  “And a finger in his pie,” Bresnahan thought aloud.

  Osbourne nodded. “Which is just what she wanted. Given what she’s now worth, it could not have been anything else.”

  “Sounds as if the woman was angry.”

  “With every right, really.”

  Bresnahan raised her glass and pretended to drink.

  “Ultimately Paddy was a…vain, self-centered man, who was careless of his lovers, friends, and associates. Oh, I know”—Osbourne raised a palm—“what was said of him publicly. All the extolling of his brilliance and compassion, his generosity and humanitarianism. AIDS victims, battered women, abused children—Paddy was there first with the most. And I suppose he demonstrated concern for the people he dealt with daily, knowing the names of their spouses and children, where they went to school and university, their hobbies, their passions.

  “And Paddy was entertaining and could have gone on the stage. Really. A one-man show. He could tell a story better than anybody I ever heard. But it was all so…considered, so much to purpose. Against the day when he would need something from you.”

  “But his philanthropy?” asked Bresnahan, drawing Osbourne out.

  “Answer me this—at whom was it directed exclusively?”

  Bresnahan hunched her wide shoulders; she knew only what she read in the papers, which was that Power had given enormous sums to a broad range of Irish funds, charities, and institutions.

  “The Irish people,” Osbourne said through a bitter smile. “Against the day when he would call in that debt too. In the voting booth.”

  “Where on Sunday afternoon did you see Nell Power?”

  “In Paddy’s room. I was delivering some of these for the cocktail reception.” Osbourne reached for a fanfold brochure, which she placed in front of Bresnahan. “They had only just arrived from the printer.”

  “You had a key?”

  “Yes, of course. As Paddy had a key to this room. We were a team.”

  “But no longer lovers.”

  The question made Osbourne’s ears pull back. She pushed herself up in the chair. “I don’t know if we ever were, as that term is currently used. Let’s say that we were no longer that sort of team.”

  “Your choice or his?”

  “Neither. Or both. I don’t know. People change, life goes on.”

  “What about lending as love?”

  “Did Shane mention that to you?”

  Bresnahan blinked.

  Osbourne laughed and shook her head. “Shane’s the complete parasite, really. His mind has never been violated by an original idea. Lending as love was Paddy’s notion. He used to say that you have to love a borrower’s possibilities to lend him money, and he must value your good opinion of him to pay you back. But it was just the salesman in Paddy. You know, seeing things in clear, catchy, and simplistic ways. But it was revealing nonetheless. As I said, Paddy did nothing for nothing.”

  “And your opinion?”

  “Of that? Well, love is love, and banking banking. And there’s not enough of the pure kind of either activity in circulation these days.”

  You yourself being living proof, thought Bresnahan, who had yet to hear a sympathetic word about Paddy Power or anybody else from the woman. “Did you tell Mr. Power that his wife had somehow come into possession of photocopies of his note cards?”

  Osbourne shook her head. “To tell you the truth, it slipped my mind, what with the cocktail reception, the guests who were arriving, the conference itself, and Paddy’s looking so ill. Mossie Gladden called my attention to it. Paddy asked abut Nell’s visit, but he looked so…gray I decided to put it off until the morning, and I’m glad I did.”

  “Why would Dr. Gladden have been sent Mr. Power’s note cards?”

  Osbourne sat up. “Really? Mossie Gladden?” Her smile was playful and genuine, Bresnahan judged. “Isn’t that interesting, what with all Paddy’s insider information that the cards must contain. I should imagine Mossie’s just the man to make the most of them. Have you seen that he’s scheduled his own press conference for tomorrow at the bridge in Sneem?” She stood.

  “Mind if I take a sheet of paper from your photocopier?” Bresnahan pointed to the machine by the wall. “What happened to your face?” It was another McGarr technique: the unexpected hard question at the end of an interview.

  “Fire.”

  Bresnahan wondered if Osbourne had scars on other parts of her body, but she could not bring herself to ask. “Aren’t you going to answer that call?” She pointed at the phone and its red blinking light.

  Osbourne only smiled, as though to say, Whenever you’re gone.

  “Well, I must be off now.” Bresnahan offered her hand. When Osbourne took it, Bresnahan reached for the phone with her left, picking up the receiver and pressing down the blinking button.

  Osbourne cried out, objecting, and reached for it, but Bresnahan held her away.

  “Hah-loo, Gretta? Nell Power here. I’m sorry to pull you away from your conference, but shouldn’t we have a chat, after what’s happened?”

  “About what?”

  Osbourne said, “It’s not—” before Bresnahan, applying pressure with her right hand, folded under Osbourne’s knuckles and brought her to her knees.

  “The bank, of course.”

  “What about the bank?”

  “With Paddy now gone, it changes everything, doesn’t it? For you, for us. We must get Shane to reopen negotiations, since the Japs are here for the conference. We might even wrap it up before they have to return.”

  “Why?”

  There was a pause, and then, “Hah-loo, is this Gretta Osbourne?”

  “Hang on, I’ll get her for you.” Bresnahan smothered the mouthpiece of the phone on her chest and said to Osbourne, “What about Mr. Power’s death changes things at Eire Bank? For you and Nell Power.”

  Osbourne, her face contorted in pain, shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t own a share. I only worked for Eire Bank.”

  Bresnahan squeezed harder.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, I told you. I’m on leave to the Fund and not privy to anything there anymore.”

  “What negotiations should Shane Frost reopen, now that Mr. Power is dead? With some Japanese.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You’re lying.” Bresnahan loaded her shoulder into the gr
ip she had on the woman’s hand. Osbourne cried out again, and her head drooped toward the carpet.

  “I’m not lying. I don’t know. For a year now I’ve been working on the proposal for this conference. I’ve had nothing to do with Eire Bank.”

  Bresnahan released the hand. “Speak to this woman as though I’m not here.” She reached the phone to her.

  “Yes?” Osbourne said, when she had recovered herself. “Yes, it’s Gretta, Nell. I don’t know what you mean. She listened, said, “Fine. Tomorrow, lunch,” then handed the phone back.

  Bresnahan listened, but Nell Power had rung off.

  “Never in my life have I felt so…violated,” Osbourne began complaining.

  Then you must have led a sheltered life, Bresnahan thought, in spite of your brilliant career. She advanced on the photocopy machine.

  “Fergus Farrell will hear of this. And my solicitor.”

  “Could he be Shane Frost as well?”

  “I’ll ring Farrell up right now.”

  The machine was already on. Bresnahan pressed the button, and a sheet of paper was discharged from its maw.

  Down in the business office of Parknasilla, she found another machine exactly like it and did the same. “Are there any other copying machines in the hotel?” she asked the assistant manager.

  “One, which we’ve supplied to a guest for the duration of the conference.”

  “Gretta Osbourne?”

  The woman nodded. “No others anywhere in the hotel?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Walking past the telephones, Bresnahan thought about ringing up her parents, who had most likely heard from the hotel staff that she was in residence at Parknasilla. They would be miffed that she had not contacted them immediately upon arriving, but she saw by the clock above the desk it was already quarter past ten, and, elderly now, both would have long since retired to bed. After all, they were farmers.

  Also, she had something else on her mind. It was doubtless juvenile, but she wished to drive into Sneem to see if any of the “gang”—the people she grew up with—were about in the pubs. It was getting on now to closing hour, and perhaps a few might need a lift home in her glorious Merc that was a block long and looked like the staff car of a German industrialist. And some of them might have seen the country gorsoon who had dropped off Paddy Power’s note cards at the Waterville Lake Hotel.