by Brian Moore
Mangan said he would.
“He can go home any time,” the old doctor said to the nurse.
“Before he leaves, the pliss are asking to speak with him,” one of the Indian doctors said.
The old doctor nodded. “Goodbye, then,” he said to Mangan. “You’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”
The three doctors left the ward. The nurse gave him his jacket. “You can put it on later when you sit up,” she said. She went to pull open the curtain surrounding his bed, but at that moment two Civic Guards came through the curtain.
“Just let it be, will you?” one of them said. “Thanks very much.” The nurse went away. This Civic Guard was the same man who had spoken to Mangan the other morning at the house on the mountaintop. “Hello again,” the Guard said and Mangan noted a new, half-contemptuous familiarity in his manner. “You’ve been to the wars, I see.”
“I’m afraid so.”
The second policeman sat down on a chair by the bed, took out a black-backed notebook, and licked the point of his pencil with the tip of his tongue.
“Can you tell us how this happened?” the first policeman said.
“We were in the lounge bar,” Mangan began. He found it hurt his chest when he spoke and so kept his voice at a whisper. “I came back and found these two guys annoying the girl I was with.”
“Can you speak up a bit?” the second policeman said.
“What girl was that?” the first policeman asked.
“She’s outside. She’s a cousin of mine.”
“Ah yes. That would be Kathleen Mangan. It was the brother we had in custody,” the policeman told the other policeman. “And what happened then?”
“Well, I told them to leave her alone. And then later on, when I went to the john—”
“The gents?” the second policeman interjected.
“Yes, the gents. I was having a leak when they grabbed me from behind, knocked me down, and kicked me. The same two characters.”
“How do you know they were the same?”
“I saw them.”
“You could identify them, then?”
“Yes, I could.”
“Did he say yes?” asked the second policeman, writing in his notebook.
“He did, yes,” the first policeman said. “Do you know their names, or who they are, by any chance?”
“I heard one call the other Colum, and he called the other bastard Mickey.”
“Colum and Mickey,” said the second policeman, writing it down. “No surnames?”
“No.”
“And why would they lay about you in that fashion?” the first policeman wondered.
“I told you. They were trying to annoy this girl and I threatened to hit them unless they left her alone. They left, and later on they came after me in the gents.”
“That was very severe action, surely, for a little argument of that sort?” the first policeman said.
“Yes, it was.”
“I was wondering, though,” the first policeman said, “whether this affair could have any connection with that matter I spoke to you about yesterday morning?”
“What matter?”
“The theft of a load of scrap from Kerrigan’s yard in Cork City.”
“What are you talking about?” Mangan’s chest hurt because he was shouting. “I’m a visitor here. I’m not some local crook. I have no need to steal any scrap.”
“Of course not. Of course not,” the policeman said. “But the people you are staying with, now, that could be another matter. And you said yourself you’re prepared to make a statement saying that one of the suspects in this case was not in Cork City but was with you on the day of the robbery.”
“But that’s something else,” Mangan said, furious. “This is something totally different.”
“Sorry, now,” the first policeman said. “Maybe you’re right.” He looked at the second policeman. “All right, Kevin, I think that will do us for the moment.” Both rose and buttoned their slickers. “You’re going back to Drishane, are you?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, keep in touch with us, will you? The sergeant said to be sure and tell you to let us know if you are thinking of leaving this district. It’s because of your statement, you understand.”
“I see,” Mangan said. He had been lying down, dressed, on the hospital bed and now he tried to sit up, expecting the policeman to depart. But when he sat up he at once felt nauseated.
“That is a bad rap they hit you there in your mouth,” the second policeman said. “You’ve lost your right incisor, so you have. That’s a good biting tooth. You will be missing it.” He smiled, revealing a gap in his own front teeth. “I lost mine a couple of years back. Kicked by a horse, I was.”
Mangan put his hand up to his hugely swollen lip, felt a hole where the tooth had been. His mouth was so sore that he had not noticed the space until now. “We’ll say goodbye, then,” the first policeman said.
“Goodbye to you,” echoed the second.
“Goodbye,” Mangan said. They went out, and through a gap in the curtain he saw them in the hospital corridor, speaking in a low voice to Kathleen, who was sitting on a bench. He strained to hear what was said but could not catch it. The police then went away down the corridor and Kathleen came into the ward. She was holding a small plastic bag containing his wallet, traveler’s checks, the daguerreotype, his car keys, and some change. “Here’s your stuff,” she said. “I just looked in your wallet there. I see you’re a bit low on cash. Could you change some of these yokes before we go?” She held up the traveler’s checks.
“What happened to Con?” he asked.
She gestured hopelessly. “The Guards are taking him to Cork. They say he’s assisting them in their inquiries and he’s to be held until further notice.”
“In jail?”
“Yes. You see, it was his lorry that was found with the scrap in it. That makes it bad for him.”
“Would you like me to drive you to Cork?”
“Ah, what’s the use?” she said. “We’ll go on back to the caravan, the pair of us. You’re not fit to be running around chasing the likes of Con. And it’s his own bloody fault. You’ll have a nice rest now in the caravan.”
The caravan. The sleazy sofa, the narrow bunk beds, the remembrance, his first day in Ireland, of the tinkers huddled by a fire off the main road, the cur dogs sniffing garbage. He felt himself shiver, as though he had a temperature. He thought of the high-ceilinged bedroom in that strange house, the bedroom where he had first possessed her. “I prefer the house,” he said with a giddy laugh. “Can’t we go there?”
“We can, surely,” she said. “I know you. You like that big bed, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, will we go, then?” she asked.
He nodded. When he stood up, his head spun. He let her take his arm and she led him down corridors, through doorways, and out into a yard at the rear entrance to the hospital. She put him on a bench in the sun. There were two other people on the bench, a woman with a bandaged head and a man with metal crutches. “I can drive, you know,” Kathleen said. “If you sit nice and easy, I’ll go down the town and bring your car back. Are you all right, now?”
He said he was. The weak morning sunlight washed over him as he leaned his throbbing head against the rough bricks of the wall. His tongue sucked at the hole where his tooth had been. Where could you get a tooth replaced in a place like this? A pain nagged under his rib cage each time he breathed. He put his hand there. It was on the opposite side from his heart and as he touched himself he felt the frame of the daguerreotype in his pocket. The poète maudit. Life lived in the gutter. Drunken brawls in pubs. But now he was too ill to think about that. He wanted to lie down. He looked up toward the hospital’s rear entrance to see if Kathleen was coming with the car. There was no sign of her, but as he turned his head in the direction of the entrance, he saw a large traffic mirror positioned over it to show drivers whether the way was c
lear. In this mirror, distorted by magnification, he saw his head and shoulders as in a fun house glass, a sight which so startled him that he rose from the bench and approached the mirror for a closer self-scrutiny. Standing beneath it, looking up, he saw for the first time the extent of his facial injuries. His nose was swollen and bruised. Around one of his eyes was a bluish-red color, bulging over the eyebrow, with a Band-Aid covering a cut. His upper lip, very swollen, was drawn back over his teeth, revealing, as the policeman had said, a missing upper incisor on the right side. It was a face a person would turn from, the sort of face he used to see mornings on Eighth Avenue when he lived in Chelsea, drunk since daylight, begging a quarter, arrogant and vicious beyond all help.
But I am not that man. And yet, now it made sense: the Civic Guards’ new, half-contemptuous air of familiarity, the old doctor’s inquiring as a matter of course whether he had a lot to drink yesterday. He looked like a drunkard; he looked like a vagrant who might be mixed up in the theft of a load of scrap metal from a junkyard. He glanced at the two other discharged patients sitting on the bench, the woman with her bandaged head, the man with metal crutches. They had fallen into a desultory conversation of the sort strangers make when waiting for a bus. They had not spoken to him. They looked as though they had been in hospital. He looked as though he had been drunk. If only they knew: he thought of Weinberg in that impressive office overlooking Manhattan, his elegant suit, his Italian vicuña loafers, the voice detailing the two hundred thousand in savings accounts and a portfolio worth somewhere in the region of three hundred thousand. And, of course, the apartment and the summer house on the Island. He was rich: he had more money now than that Irishwoman with her bandaged head or that Irishman with his metal crutches would earn in several lifetimes. And then, as he began to smile at the irony, the thought came to him that perhaps, after all, his fellow patients were not wrong. For here, coming in at the gate, was Kathleen in the rental car. The woman with the bandaged head and the man with the metal crutches watched as Kathleen got out of the car and came toward him in her torn blue jeans and soiled baby-blue cardigan, her beauty whorishly pallid in the cold morning sunlight, a fit companion for the man he had just seen in the mirror. He looked again at his fellow patients, seeing Kathleen with their eyes. At that point the bandaged woman caught his eye and nodded to him in a kindly fashion. “Good luck, now,” she said. “And safe home to you.”
“Thank you,” he said. He got up and went to join Kathleen, his joints stiff, his gait unsteady. She took his arm, grinning at him as though amused by his new disreputation. “Ready, love?”
“Ready,” he said.
“What about money?” They had long left Bantry and were driving down the peninsula, approaching Drishane along the rim of bay above small patchwork-quilt fields and lonely cottages overlooking the ocean. Kathleen, turning from her driving, made an O with her mouth. “I forgot,” she said. “I meant to take you to the bank. Wait. There’s a bank at Drishane. I think it’s open.”
And so, some minutes later, they drove into the sleepy street of Drishane and Kathleen parked the car outside a building of concrete and tin which looked more like a storage shed than a place of business. A sign over it said ALLIED IRISH BANK. Leaving Kathleen, who said she had to buy milk, he entered these premises and spoke to the solitary clerk, arranging to change two hundred dollars in traveler’s checks into Irish pounds.
“Are you on your holidays?” the clerk asked, as he paid the pound notes over.
“I am, yes.”
“I’d say you’ve had poor weather. But I heard on the wireless this morning that there’s a high-pressure area coming this way tonight. It should be nice tomorrow, please God. There you are, one hundred pounds ten pence. Thank you very much, now.”
He went out. Whatever the bank clerk had thought of his appearance, he had been properly polite when he saw the wallet of traveler’s checks. When I am shaved and changed and tidied up, I will look like someone who has been in an accident, that’s all. But what about my missing tooth?
The main street of Drishane was deserted. Kathleen was nowhere in sight. Some of the shops had their front doors shut, as though they were closed for lunch. Walking stiffly, feeling the pain in his chest, he came down the steps from the bank building and regained the street. He saw that the door of Feeley’s shop was open and went toward it, thinking perhaps to find Kathleen there. But when he looked up, there was only Mrs. Feeley at the cash register, making up accounts. She looked at him in alarm.
“Mr. Mangan. How are you? Oh, God help you, we heard you were hurted. Are you all right?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Can I get you something?”
“I was just looking for someone.”
“Young Kathleen, is it?” She gave him a shrewd look. “I saw her go into Kelly’s a while back.”
“That’s farther up the street, is it?”
“Fourth shop on your right, across the street.”
“Thank you.”
She smiled minimally and turned back to her accounts, but as he went out into the street he heard a furious tapping on the windowpane. It was not her windowpane, he realized, but the adjoining one, the window which bore the legend S. P. FEELEY, AUCTIONEER & REAL ESTATE. And behind the window, urgently beckoning him to enter, was Feeley himself, looking just as he had on the first day of Mangan’s arrival here, his rubbery lips, pale glistening skin, and bulbous eyes again reminding Mangan of the head of a dolphin.
But now, as Feeley moved to the adjoining street door, which admitted to his office, and opened it, there was about him something peremptory, less amiable than on their former meetings. “Come in, will you,” he ordered. “I’ve been looking to have a word with you.”
The crowded office smelled of whiskey, and indeed on the mantelpiece there was, as before, a bottle of Paddy and two glasses. Feeley’s large cat sat in one of the armchairs by the fire and her master dusted her off to the floor as he indicated that Mangan should sit down. “Well, now,” he said, peering at Mangan’s bruises. “They gave you a real hammering up in Bantry. And I hear tell you didn’t even know the fellas that did it?”
“That’s right.”
“Were you—I mean, did you have a few jars in you? There’s a certain crowd that goes around looking to take advantage of a man who has drink taken.”
“I wasn’t drunk. Not in the least.”
But Feeley winked as though he did not believe this, then composed his rubbery features into a look which dismissed all levity. “I hear you are squatting in my house at Gorteen.”
”Your house?”
“I am responsible for that property. I am acting for Mr. Harmon, the new owner. I believe the police were up to see you the other day and they mentioned it to you.”
Mangan nodded uneasily, shuffled his feet like a claimant, and looked out of the window to see if Kathleen was in sight. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was a misunderstanding on my part. Con gave me to believe it was his family home.
There were even family pictures in the parlor. I had no idea the house belonged to someone else.”
“Well, I am telling you now that it is not his house and that he had no right to be putting you in there,” Feeley said. “I was the agent in the transaction, and when he sold the house, it was agreed he could keep his stuff in it until next June. But he had no right to put anyone in there. If it hadn’t been for the Guards tipping me off, I’d have had no notion of what the pair of you were up to.”
“I wasn’t up to anything,” Mangan said. This is what comes of hanging around with low-lifes, he thought. I look like a tinker now and this bastard is treating me like one. “I’m sorry for the mistake,” he said. “And it was a mistake. I’ll move out at once. And if it’s a question of my paying rent for my stay there, I’ll be glad to do it. Money is no object.”
But did Feeley believe him that money was no object? He smiled in an unbelieving manner. “Now, hold your horses. I know the trouble you’ve had in find
ing a bed here. And no one knows better than me what a right twister your pal Con Mangan is. Now, I don’t want you to take me up wrong on this, but I’ll say something to you now, if you’ll let me. Can I say it to you, man to man?”
“Yes, of course, what is it?”
Feeley leaned forward, his bulbous eyes fishily intent. “Mark my words, you’re not in good company there. These two, Kathleen and her brother, are not the sort of relations any decent man would want to own up to. If they are your relations. The police are keeping a very strict eye on the pair of them, and not just because of that business in Cork City. And there is something else I might as well mention. The longer you stay around here, the harder it’s going to be on poor Dinny’s mother. That poor woman is not right in the head, and it would be an awful thing to have on your conscience that the sight of you drove her back to the asylum. I’m just telling you all this now in a friendly spirit, mind you. If I were you, I’d go home to America. This place is bad luck for you. Go on up to Dublin and finish your holidays there. Look at you. Sure you might have been killed.”
“I’m not on holiday,” Mangan said. “I came here to trace my relatives and in particular to find out if there’s a link between my family and the poet James Clarence Mangan. I’m here to do research on that. I’ll move out of that house up on the mountain right away. That’s what you called me in here for, isn’t it? I’m sorry about the mistake. But apart from that, what I do is my business.”
“Ah, quite so. Of course you’re very right, so you are,” Feeley said in a new conciliatory manner. “Believe me, I was just trying to be of help. And as far as the house is concerned, there is no hurry. Stay a few days there, by all means. The Fallons, the people that run the Sceptre Hotel, are due back from Spain at the end of the week. You could probably move into the Sceptre then. But what I was saying about bad company was only for your own good. Ah!” Suddenly Feeley turned away from Mangan, his face opening in a false smile. Someone had tapped on the office windowpane. Mangan, looking up, saw Kathleen in the street, peering in.
