World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  Once they got settled on the plane, over the sound of the engines, there was the crackle of brown paper bags as the tour members pulled out the whisky bottles. After a while, the stewardesses moved down the aisle with a cart that had racks of canned beer. The tourists went for the canned beer with both hands. The plane was an hour out of Boston when the first kidneys leaked. Cops swung out of the seats and headed for the toilets. The aisle soon was crowded. The plane was out over the Atlantic with a solid line crowding the aisle from one end of the plane to the other. At first, the line was in good humor. That changed to irritation. Once a man gets going with beer he takes bigger leaks than a race horse. Now and then even a couple of women came on line. And always, all through the night, babies cried and the older babies squeezed past the men waiting in the aisle and wandered through the plane.

  5

  THE WHITE CLOUDS WERE dissolving into thin mist, and there were rocks covered with ocean foam and large squares of dull winter green and brown. The plane came in low over the cold flat waters of Shannon. At the airport there was nothing to look at except construction workers putting up buildings at the edge of the airport. Everybody went to the bar. An hour and a half later, the plane came through blowing fog to land at Dublin. The group was staying at the Gresham, which has the bar in the basement. With everybody in the bar from New York and with nothing to look at that was Ireland, the talk was the same as you would hear in the Green Derby in New York.

  The Monsignor drank Dubonnet. Johno and Dermot had ginger ale. Horace Mulligan, the old inspector, took over the conversation.

  “It was on the second, no, let me see, the third, that’s right, the third night of the riots in Harlem,” the inspector said. “That was in nineteen-sixty-four, July. Jiminy crickets, Monsignor, will I ever remember that. I was up on Saint Nicholas Avenue looking down a Hundred Twenty-third Street. The street was solid with these people. They were spilling onto the first avenue down from me, that would be Eighth Avenue. If they got across Eighth Avenue and started going down a Hundred Twenty-third Street some more, why they’d be right at the precinct, the Two-eight, and who knows what would have happened then? I walk back up to Saint Nicholas to a Hundred-Twenty-fifth Street where all the commanders were kind of grouped about I was going to see if I could get some men for a Hundred-Twenty-third Street. Don’t I get to a Hundred-Twenty-fifth Street just as these two busses pull up with men from the Academy. You could see just by looking through the bus windows at them that some of them couldn’t of had their Police Academy uniforms on more than two or three times, the shirts looked that new. Brother, did I know what to do with them. I didn’t ask nobody. I swung onto the first bus and grabbed a lieutenant in charge there and told him to line up the men, both busses of them.

  “Out they come. Big, fine-lookin’ lads. Monsignor, they would bring tears to your eyes, they were so good-lookin’. I stand out in the street and I explain to them who I am. I’m in plainclothes and half of them I guess didn’t even know my name. I tell them, Assistant Chief Inspector Horace Mulligan, chief of detectives. You should of a seen the faces perk up at that. I say to them, all right now, we’ve got a real job to do. I tell them just spread out and follow me. And get them sticks right out in front of you. I start walking down Saint Nicholas Avenue to a Hundred Twenty-third Street. I’m right out in front of them, naturally, and I turn around and spread them out some more. I want them from the building line on one side of the street to the building line on the other side of the street. Wall-to-wall cops.

  “Now we’re gettin’ closer to a Hundred Twenty-third Street and we could hear all the noise coming out of the street. Oh brother, you should of seen these men pick up the pace. I’m walkin’ right out ahead of them and all behind me I could hear them takin’ bigger steps, the feet were really coming down, and of course I start steppin’ out myself. Boy, what a feelin’ that was. I had a good solid line of these lads, I’m telling you, Monsignor, they were beautiful. Just between you and I, they were all white too. That was all right with me, I don’t have to tell you that. Now we’re walkin’ along and just before we get to the corner I take out my blackjack and I turn around, and I keep walking backwards fast on account of I didn’t want to lose any of the rhythm we had going, and I held up my blackjack and they brought the sticks up and out, and I said to them, ‘Are you ready, gentlemen?’ Boy, you should of heard them holler back, ‘Yes!’ So I said, ‘After me!’ I charge around the corner and the whole line of them come right after me and here we come onto a Hundred Twenty-third Street and this whole block is full of people and they’re all lookin’ down the street, down towards the Two-eight, you see, and they never seen us comin’. Ah, I’m tellin’ you, what a feeling. We were on those derelicts so fast, and we chased them so hard, they had no place to go. They went down cellar stairs. One of my lads was right after them givin’ them a good beatin’ for their troubles, the derelicts. Oh, Monsignor, if you could of only seen them. You’d have tears in your eyes. The way those wonderful men went to work on that crowd of street bums.”

  The inspector was half crying himself. He stared down at his drink. “You know, I never was in the war. The one thing in my life I always regretted, that I wasn’t a Marine landing at Saipan or one of those places. But when I turned around and looked at those men and I said to them, ‘Are you ready, gentlemen? After me!’ When I did that and I came running around the corner, leading these wonderful men, and we went running straight at the backs of these derelicts, well I knew just how it felt to come ashore with the Marines at Saipan.”

  He took off his glasses and began to wipe the wetness away from his eyes. “That was the greatest day I ever had in the Police Department of the City of New York.”

  At dinnertime, the Monsignor had made reservations at the Russell, which is supposed to be the best food in Dublin. They walked up O’Connell Street and were on the bridge across the Liffey, the inspector and the Monsignor walking in front. A woman was sitting in a heap on the sidewalk on the bridge. Her head hung like she had a broken neck. A dirty brown shawl covered her to the ankles. Shoes that had no laces in them stuck out from under the shawl. When the woman saw the group coming, she unfolded the shawl and held up a baby wrapped in rags.

  “The wee baby,” she said. She held the baby out in the drizzle.

  Two little girls came out of the drizzle and stood in front of them. One was about eleven. She had on an old frayed man’s suit jacket and a dirty red housedress underneath the jacket. Ankle socks were hanging over shoes that were so big they flopped when she walked. Even in the dim light and the drizzle you could see the grease in her hair. When she opened her mouth she showed teeth that were yellow with deep brown lines along the bottoms. Green was spreading from the gums at the top. The second girl was about nine. She had bright-red hair that was a tangle of knots. A blue rain-jacket covered whatever she had on underneath. Her legs were wet from the drizzle and smeared with dirt. Her feet were in sneakers that had rips along the toes.

  “Please, for the baby,” the eleven-year-old said.

  “The wee baby,” the red-haired one said.

  The inspector and the Monsignor kept walking, in silence now, and the two little girls walked alongside of them and looked up at them and then looked at the others trailing and one of them kept saying, “Oh please, mister, please, mister, for the wee baby.”

  The other kept saying, “Please, a few shillings. Oh please, mister, a few shillings. The baby, mister. Oh please, a few shillings.”

  The woman sitting on the bridge kept holding the baby in rags out in the drizzle.

  “Fucking thing,” Johno said.

  Dermot had his hand out first. He glanced down and saw that he had pulled out a five-dollar bill. He started to put that away and fish for a single when the green gums and yellow-and-brown teeth began moving.

  “Oh please, mister, the wee baby.”

  His hand stopped and she grabbed the five-dollar bill.

  “Oh, God bless you,” she said.

/>   They walked over the rest of the bridge in silence in the drizzle. They were on Grafton Street when the Monsignor pointed out a saloon called McDaid’s, on a side street, where the writers drink. On the other side of Grafton Street he pointed out Davey Byrnes’ and the Old Bailey, two places where Behan had hung out. The Old Bailey had a big crowd around its two entrances. Most of them had long hair.

  Up at the top of Grafton Street there was a movie-house showing a Charlie Chaplin movie, City Lights, and the Monsignor shook his head when he noticed it. “How do they let a traitor like this show his wares?” he said. He turned his head away from the theater. There was a long line waiting to get in. At the end of the line, a boy and girl in military ponchos and dungaree pants were huddled in the doorway of a shop. The girl wore one of these Indian headbands and the boy had black hair that fell into the hood of his poncho. The girl was taking a deep drag on a home-rolled cigarette. She held it between the thumb and forefinger and handed it to the boy. He took a deep drag and held it.

  They were at the corner of Stephens Green when footsteps came running. The little red-headed girl in sneakers spoke to Dermot. “Mister, you gave the girl the money, mister, and she was supposed to give me half of it and she ran away and now I have nothin’.”

  “Hey, that was your sister,” he said.

  “No, mister, ’twasn’t me sister. It was just a goil. I never seen her before and you give her the money and she runned away.”

  “Well, go find her and make her give you your share,” Dermot said.

  “Oh, I can’t find her. Please, mister, just a few shillin’s. Me mother’s sick.”

  Her eyes filled as she looked at him. He put his hand in his pocket and tried to come up with some change. He couldn’t find any in one pocket and he stopped walking so he could go through his pockets. As he stopped he glanced back. The other girl was staring from a doorway on the other side of the street She stepped back in the doorway when she saw Dermot looking at her.

  “Oh please, mister,” the other one said.

  “Come on now,” he said. He motioned to the one across the street. “Now the two of you are playing me for a sucker.”

  He walked away from her.

  “Mister.”

  He kept walking.

  “Mister!”

  “What?”

  “Fook you, mister.”

  They all laughed. The monsignor said that, aside from the language, you had to love them for their brazenness. Good tough street kids.

  The next day, the Monsignor led most of them out of the hotel early for the golf course. Dermot and Johno checked out after lunch and took the afternoon Enterprise to Belfast. A pale-green light was coming through the glass roof of Connolly Street Station. The train left exactly at two-thirty. It is supposed to be one of the world’s most punctual trains. Many Irish are afraid of the train because of this. A few minutes after the ride began, passing through a town called Malahide, the first raindrops hit the windows of the dining car. Dermot sat by the window. Johno had his legs sticking out into the aisle like construction horses. The waiter was a young boy in a white coat who handed out small leather menus.

  “You serve drinks?” Johno said.

  The waiter nodded.

  “Paddy’s and water,” Johno said. “Fuck the Monsignor.”

  Dermot said he didn’t want anything.

  “How long are we going to stay in the North?” Johno said. “We got to hang around our man a little bit, you know. That’s what we come for.”

  “He’s just going to be playing golf every day. We can catch him any time we get back to Dublin. Don’t you want to see anything?”

  “Yeah, but going to that Portmaronock clubhouse with a Monsignor from New York, they’ll treat us like kings.”

  “What the hell do you want with golf?” Dermot asked him.

  “I don’t. But while he’s playing, I’ll sit in the fuckin’ clubhouse and live,” Johno said.

  “I want to go to Belfast and then over to Bundoran and then we can drive back,” Dermot said.

  “What do we got in Bundoran?” Johno asked.

  “My father’s there, and I want to look him up,” Dermot said.

  “Why the fuck would you want to see him for?” Johno said.

  Dermot didn’t answer. It angered him when great things which he built up in his own mind were dismissed by somebody who didn’t know. He put his head against the train window. “We’ll be at the golf course with that son of a bitch in a couple of days,” he said.

  He fell asleep with the motion of the train. He woke up with the train going past black and white cows huddled together in rain at the foot of empty green hills that climbed sharply into the mist. Johno was talking to the waiter.

  “In Northern Ireland, the Catholic Church doesn’t run the country, right?” Johno said.

  “Aye.”

  “Does that mean the policy on pornographic literature is different in Belfast than it is in Dublin?”

  “Aye?”

  “Pornography. Books with big dirty pictures in them.”

  “Oh, the dirty pitchers. You can’t buy them in Belfast station. Just because it’s the North that doesn’t mean the people is dirty.”

  “Do they have a customs when we get off the train?”

  “Aye.”

  “Will they search me very closely?”

  “They’re old men and they just stand there.”

  “That’s good. Because I have a lot of dirty magazines with me and I don’t want to be searched and have them confiscated.”

  “The tings you bring in is your own business.”

  “Gee, that’s good. Do you know why I have so many magazines with dirty pictures in them?”

  The waiter was starting to go away. Johno held his arm so he couldn’t.

  “The reason I have so many dirty magazines is that I’m here without my wife. I go to bed all alone.”

  Dermot moved in his chair and he could feel the gun in his belt. Johno was looking at him. Dermot opened his jacket. The gun was stuck into his belt.

  “If they search us, we’re going to be in the shithouse,” Johno said.

  “You’ll be wishing you were in a shithouse,” Dermot said. “They don’t have them in a British prison. You use a bucket and it stays next to your bed all night.”

  “I don’t care about the gun. I care about the magazines. I have to have them.”

  Dermot said nothing.

  “Do you know what I have in my bag? An Italian Playboy. You should see it. It’s way better than the American Playboy. The Italian Playboy shows you pubic hairs. I have to get somebody to teach me Italian. I’ll bet the whole of Italy jerks off the day the new issue of Italian Playboy comes out. The Pope does it before the people do. He gets an advance copy.”

  Dermot said he was worried more about getting caught with a loose gun. The top half of the train window had a handle on it. He pulled the handle up and pushed the window out, like a slat of louvered glass, seven or eight inches. Wet, chilly air blew into his face. The sound of the train wheels was limited to a loud click as they went over the spaces in the rails. He stuck his hand out of the window. If there was any trouble with customs before leaving the train, he could drop the gun out the window. In case of any problems out on the platform, one of them could duck back into the dining car and drop the gun onto the tracks.

  The train made one stop, at Portadown. The station was empty and there were no people or cars on the streets of the town running out from the station. A printed sign on the station wall which said H.M. CUSTOMS told you what side of the border you were on. About the only real thing Dermot knew about the North and the South was the names of the counties. An aunt had made him memorize them. She would say, in a soft voice, the counties of the South: Sligo, Mayo, Galway, Kerry, Cork, Wexford, Waterford, and the rest. There are twenty-six counties in the Republic. Her voice had razor blades in it as she chanted the six counties of the North: Antrim, Fermanagh, Down, Derry, Tyrone, Armagh.
/>   6

  THE TRAIN CAME OUT of the farmlands and was running alongside a six-lane highway leading to Belfast City. There was a golf course and after the golf course a white cement fairgrounds auditorium and a big green wooden soccer stadium, and then the train was running in an alley between the first streets of red-brick row houses. British flags, new flags with bright reds and blues, big flags too, flags large enough to fly on government buildings, hung from flagpoles over each doorway on each side of each street. Strings of pennants, alternating red and blue, were fluttering over the little streets. The lines of pennants were fastened to the chimneys and they hung over each street like a cloth roof. When you looked down at a street from the train window it was like passing a baseball park on opening day. Somewhere under, all the bunting there would be one empty patch. Kids in short pants standing in wet garbage in the middle of the street and kicking a stone or a can while a scrawny dog with matted hair sniffed at the garbage.

  The bare walls at the end houses of the rows were covered with large signs painted in white. They were for train passengers to read. One said NO POPE HERE. Another house said NO SURRENDER. The wall of the last house of the blocks with flags said REMEMBER 1690. The train was coming into the platform. A porter put the bags on a cart and walked ahead into a little shed. A couple of old men in impressed uniforms, the white caps dirty, stared at luggage and marked it with pale-green chalk. They opened nothing, and did not look at the people. Dermot and Johno came out of the shed into a bare cement place which seemed more like a men’s room than a waiting room. It was nearly five o’clock. Outside, the street was crowded with double-decker busses and trucks. Old buildings of rough brown, dull stones, the corners of the buildings rounded, green shades showing in the big square windows, stood six and seven stories high.