He lost her in the sunlight as he neared the bottom, and was making for the street when a hand caught his upper arm. Startled, Fegan turned, his weight on both feet, ready to fight. A bolt of bright pain flashed in his temple.
“Jesus, Gerry,” laughed Vincie Caffola. “I thought you were going to split me then.”
Eleven shadows moved between the mourners, taking shape, dissolving again. Two came alongside Caffola, the vague forms of their arms lifted to aim at his head. Turn away and be quiet, Fegan thought.
He focused on the bald-headed thug’s eyes. “What do you want?”
Caffola smiled and put a hand on his shoulder. “Me and some of the boys are going to the pub after. You fancy it?”
The two UDR men made guns with their fingers. Fegan tried hard not to see them.
“All right,” he said. “Look, I’ll see you later. It’s too crowded here for me.”
“You should hang around a bit,” Caffola said. “McGinty’s coming over soon. He was saying he hadn’t seen you in ages.”
“No, I’ll go on.” Fegan pulled away from Caffola. “Sure I’ll see him tomorrow. At the funeral.”
“Suit yourself.” Caffola slapped his back as he left. “I’ll see you later.”
Fegan gulped cool air when he got outside, relieved to be free from the crushing stomachs and shoulders. Men were still gathered in front of the house, smoking and swapping stories. Again, he returned respectful nods and mumbled greetings until he was clear of them. He gripped the lapels of his jacket, flapping them to cool his body. He wiped a slick layer of sweat away from his brow and began his walk home.
The eleven followed.
“Don’t you lot get tired?” he asked. He turned to look at them. Eleven dead people, big as life, trooping along the pavement and looking right back at him. A laugh escaped his belly, and a giddy wave passed across his forehead. None answered his question, so he asked another.
“What was that about in there? What was I doing going after her? What was I going to say to her if I got her?”
The woman, her baby supported in one arm, stepped ahead of Fegan and turned to face him. She brought a finger to her lips. Shush. With the same finger she pointed over his shoulder. Fegan heard a car draw up, then slow down beside him. He looked towards it. A Renault Clio, a new one. The passenger window lowered with an electric whirr and Fegan stopped walking.
“Can I give you a lift?” Marie McKenna asked, her blonde head dipping to see him from below the car’s roofline.
Fegan looked back towards the house, then in the direction he’d been walking. He looked at his followers. The woman with the baby gave him a single nod.
“All right,” he said.
Fegan kept his hands in his lap and his mouth shut for the duration of the short journey. His knees pressed against the Clio’s dashboard, but the heavy silence caused him more discomfort. He almost wished the followers were in here with them. Marie had been on the verge of saying something from the moment he lowered himself into the car, but she seemed unable to let it out. Now, parked outside his house on Calcutta Street, off the Springfield Road, she struggled visibly with whatever she needed to say.
He was just about to thank her and go when she said, “I didn’t mean it.”
“Mean what?” he asked, even though he knew.
“What I said back there, by the coffin.” Marie stared straight ahead.
“I didn’t hear you say anything.”
“Yes, you did. I didn’t say it out loud, but you know what I said.”
“I suppose so,” he said, unable to put his heart into a lie.
“Well, I didn’t mean it. Please don’t tell anyone I said it.” She turned to face him. Fegan expected to see pleading in her eyes. Instead, they were cool like slate. Only their tiny movements betrayed her.
“Why would I tell anyone?” he asked.
“I know who you are. I know you were his friend. It must’ve really offended you. I’m sorry. Please don’t tell anyone.”
Marie’s voice cracked and her eyes softened. Fegan wondered if she feared him, and he hated the idea. Once he might have taken pleasure in it, but now it clawed at him.
“I won’t tell anyone,” he said. “I’m not . . . with them any more. I don’t . . .”
She waited while he struggled. “Belong?” she asked.
Fegan reached for the door handle, uncertain whether to stay or flee. “That’s right,” he said.
“I know the feeling.” A tentative smile flickered on Marie’s lips. “You can’t choose where you belong, and where you don’t. But what if the place you don’t belong is the only place you have left?”
Did she expect an answer? She had enquiring eyes, like the psychologists in prison. Fegan considered it. “Then you get on with it, or get out,” he said.
“Okay.” Her smile bloomed to fullness, and she reddened. “Listen to me, questions, always questions. Well, thank you for understanding. And I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean it.”
“Yes, you did,” Fegan said. The words fell from his mouth before he was conscious of the thought.
Her face paled, the red sinking beneath her skin. Her smile disappeared. “What?”
“You meant it,” he said, opening the passenger door. “And you were right.”
Fegan climbed out and stepped onto the pavement. He bent down and looked back into the car at her. “He deserved it,” he said before swinging the door closed.
Marie stared back at him through the glass for endless seconds before swinging into the traffic, tyres squealing, forcing a black taxi to brake. Its horn blared as the Clio disappeared down the street.
Fegan turned in a circle, looking for shadows. “What’s happening to me?” he asked.
9
Blankets of gloom filled the bar, layer on layer, concealing those men who wished to drink unseen. Fegan moved among them, avoiding their eyes and words. He sipped Guinness, not whiskey, to keep a clear head for his work.
He had always thought of killing as work. Just a job to be done, with no care or feeling behind it. He hadn’t considered himself a craftsman, more a skilled laborer. Not like those assassins who made it art. It only took a certain hardness of the soul, a casual brutality, a willingness to do what other men wouldn’t. He supposed he had a talent for it, just as Caffola had a talent for inflicting pain. And that talent had earned him respect.
But where did the line between respect and fear lie? All those knowing nods he’d received over the years - were they made out of reverence or the worry he might turn on those giving them, break them, like he had so many before? The twelve, now eleven, who had shadowed Fegan for seven years marked the lives he had wiped out. But he had scarred many more.
Although he hadn’t meant to, he’d killed three in the butcher’s-shop bombing. He knew there were also men and women who had lost arms, legs and eyes because of the same bloody act, damning them to lives of anguish. The struggle to grasp the weight, the shape, the realness of it had kept him from sleep for many years. He didn’t need the shadows of the dead for that.
As Fegan moved through the drinkers he tried to keep his mind from the past but it had a way of finding a route there without his help. He thought of the woman at the graveyard, the twelfth follower’s mother.
“You’re Gerry Fegan,” she’d said. She was small and grey. Her anger burned him. “You’re Gerry Fegan and you killed my wee boy.”
Fegan rose from the miserable bunch of daffodils he had placed on his own mother’s grave. He searched for something to say, anything, but could only think of the awful thing that had happened to her son.
“Where did you put him?” she asked. “I come here every Sunday. I walk around the gravestones and I read the names. Sometimes I forget myself, and I look for his name. I know I won’t find it, but I look anyway. Sometimes I have to think for a minute because his name won’t come to me. It’s like he never lived at all.”
She took a step towards Fegan, her shaking hand reaching
out to him. “Tell me where you put him. Please. That’s all. Just tell me where he is.”
He remembered the boy’s blood as McKenna worked on him.
He remembered how red it was.
“Gerry, how’re ya?”
Fegan blinked the memory away and turned to see who had slapped his shoulder.
Patsy Toner grinned up at him from behind his moustache. “McGinty was asking for you today,” he said. “At the house. You should have stayed.”
“What’s he want with me?” Fegan took a sip of Guinness.
“He doesn’t like to see a good man go to waste. You do all right out of that Community Development job he set up for you. With his connections he can keep that job funded for years and you don’t have to lift a finger for it. Just cash your checks, and nobody cares.” Toner sighed and placed a hand on Fegan’s shoulder. “You did your time so the party looks after you, but you need to give something back. Nothing much, just a wee job now and then. You’ll get paid, like.”
“I’m not interested,” Fegan said, turning to go.
Toner gripped his elbow. “It’s not as simple as that, Gerry. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors. Things haven’t been so smooth between Paul and the leadership, if you know what I mean. He needs to know who his friends are. Just listen to what he has to say, and do whatever he tells you.”
Fegan jerked his elbow away. “What are you, his messenger boy?”
“I’m just saying.” Toner held his hands up and smiled. “That’s all, Gerry. Just letting you know the situation. Sure, McGinty’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Fegan said, leaving Toner standing with his palms up and out, like a man surrendering.
Fegan made his way to the back of the bar, to the darkest corner, behind a computer quiz game no one ever played. It gave him a good view of the room and the drunks moving between its shadows.
Just a wee job now and then, Toner said. Fegan knew what sort of wee job he was talking about. There were many errands a man like McGinty needed doing. Even now the politicians had taken over the movement, even though they were shifting away from the rackets, the extortion, the thieving, people still needed to be kept in line. Competition for the bars and taxi firms needed quashing. Drug dealers needed discouraging from selling in certain areas - unless they paid their dues, of course. Come election time, reluctant voters needed gathering up and escorting to the polling stations where they would be reminded whose name to mark. And then there were the many hundreds of people who only existed on election days.
The last election, just two months ago, had been the watershed. For the first time the country’s voters went to the polls knowing they would elect a real government, that at last it was over. Over for who? Fegan thought. The headaches started around then. The shadows darkened, the faces grew clearer. He had tried to turn away, to be quiet, but still they came.
Then the screaming.
By the time Toner shoved a bundle of polling cards into Fegan’s hand, he hadn’t slept for a week. He only voted once - some nobody campaigning about fuel tax got his mark - and threw the rest of the cards in a bin. The boys ran a sweepstake on who would cast the most votes. Eddie Coyle had won, having voted twenty-eight times between eleven different polling stations. He got nearly five hundred quid which his wife promptly took from him. McGinty gave him an extra five hundred on top, and Coyle wisely kept the reward secret. Five hundred was a small price for McGinty to ensure he kept his seat. The talk on the streets was the leadership wanted to pass McGinty over. He was tainted by the old ways, no matter how hard he tried to play the politician. But if he kept his vote solid, the leadership couldn’t discard him like they had so many others on the climb to government.
A familiar spark flared in Fegan’s temple. Icy webs crawled towards his center. A commotion at the bar’s front door announced Caffola’s arrival. Fegan had expected him to be here when he came an hour before, otherwise he would have spared himself the ordeal of being among these people. He decided to remain in his shadowy corner for now. It was early yet. Plenty of time.
As the ache behind his eyes deepened, Fegan watched.
Caffola’s cranium and gold earring reflected the dim lighting. His thick neck melded with his broad shoulders to give the impression of power and strength. He was strong, all right, Fegan knew that much, and vicious. It would be hard, but Fegan could take him.
When and where? Tonight, if he could. Somewhere away from here, possibly in Caffola’s own home. The thug was already drunk; his staggering gave him away. He might leave early. Fegan could follow him. Or he might be invited to someone’s home to drink the night through. If Fegan knew where, then he could go there, enter through some open window, and finish Caffola in his stupor.
Balance and patience, he thought as the shadows gathered. Balance and patience.
Caffola cornered Fegan in the toilets, backing him against the cold tiles. As red-faced drunks blinked at the urinals, pissing down their own legs, Caffola’s spittle made cold pinpoints on Fegan’s face. The alcohol on Caffola’s breath mixed with the reek of urine. Fegan swallowed bile.
“I think the world of you, Gerry,” Caffola slurred. His eyelids looked like they weighed a tonne. “Swear to God. You and me. Mates. Right?”
“Right,” Fegan said. The pressure behind his eyes pulsed.
“I’m only telling you ’cause I respect you, right?” Caffola placed his left hand on Fegan’s chest. His right hand pressed against the tiles above Fegan’s shoulder.
Fegan kept his eyes on Caffola’s. “Right.”
“McGinty’s worried about you. You used to be the boy. I mean, everyone knows you were the boy, right?”
“Right.” Fegan ignored the chill at his center.
“But now you’re staying away, you’re drinking, acting all mad and stuff. It’s no good, Gerry.” Caffola rested his palm on Fegan’s cheek. “I’ll tell you that for nothing. I’ll tell you that for sweet fuck all. McGinty wants to talk to you. Get things straight, like. He’s worried, but I told him. I says, Paul, don’t you worry about Gerry Fegan ’cause Gerry Fegan’s fucking sound, right?”
“Right.”
“He’s the boy, right?”
“Right.”
“Then McGinty says to me about Michael, that you was the last one seen him.” Caffola’s eyes darkened. “And that Lithuanian cunt. I gave him a proper going-over, like. And all the time he says he knows nothing. Even when I was showing him his own teeth, he says he knows nothing.”
Fegan tried to step away from the wall, to slip by Caffola. The big man pushed him back against the tiles.
“You see my problem, Gerry?”
Fegan looked over Caffola’s shoulder. The bathroom was empty now, except for the eleven shadows taking form around them. Two separated from the others, hands raised. Could he do it here? No, there’d be no way out.
“You say you’d nothing to do with it, I believe you. That’s what I told McGinty. I stood up for you, Gerry, so don’t make a cunt of me. Right? You talk to McGinty tomorrow.” Caffola’s finger stabbed at Fegan’s chest. “You talk to him and do what he wants, right?”
“Right,” Fegan said, remembering a time when Caffola was afraid of him. Yes, he could do it here, do it now. He could get out before anyone knew what had happened. Get out and run. Leave everything and run. Caffola’s throat looked so tender, his Adam’s apple bobbing over the collar of his shirt.
The door burst open, tearing Fegan’s attention away from the other man’s neck. “There’s trouble brewing,” Patsy Toner said, his little face shining with glee. “There’s peelers all over the place and kids making a barricade. There’s going to be a row. A proper kicking match.”
Caffola looked from Toner to Fegan, beaming. “Fucking class,” he said.
“How the fuck did this start?” Caffola asked, incredulous. He indicated a burning mound of mattresses, wooden pallets and rubbish in the middle of the Springfield Road, just a few feet from the corner where McKenna’s bar
stood. A mob of thirty or so youths, children mostly, surrounded it, chanting.
Half a dozen PSNI Land Rovers idled thirty yards down the street. They looked less intimidating these days, painted white with colorful stripes instead of the battleship grey of the past. The peelers milling about weren’t in riot gear yet, but it was only a matter of time before suitably dressed reinforcements would arrive.
Fegan felt a strange stirring inside, a quickening of the spirit, as he watched them. The followers had left him; their shadows receded. He stayed on the footpath, close to the wall, as Caffola and Toner paced.
The Ghosts of Belfast (The Twelve) jli-1 Page 6
