The Lost and the Blind

by Declan Burke

  Iggy Patton was a priest and a boxer, and not always in that order. What he’d do was he’d wait until you found out he was a priest who boxed, or used to, then he’d tell you he couldn’t decide which vocation had sucker-punched him hardest.

  The idea being, presumably, that you’d imagine a bruised heart, a punch-drunk soul.

  When he’d tried it on me, I said, ‘Iggy, man, if God knocked you around any more than whoever it was busted in your face, you should skip pope and go straight to saint.’

  He had eyes the colour of prunes which were prone to melancholy. He was somewhere in his late forties now, the sandy-blond hair getting thin, the face battered to a dull shine and not entirely unlike the old leather punch-bag in the corner of his office oozing horse-hair stuffing from a split seam. I’d interviewed him a couple of years before, working on a book about a Magdalene survivor, Rose and the Thorns. He’d played it straight and I’d done him the same favour. We got on just fine.

  His office was the club’s storeroom. There was a scarred plywood desk wedged in against the far wall under a window that was opaque with grime, reinforced with wire and mossy on the outside. Iggy offered me his seat behind the desk but I took a pew on the punch-bag in the corner, its cracked leather pickled from booze-soaked sweat he’d pounded out in pre-mass dawn sessions.

  He sucked down about half of his latte in one go, closing his eyes to privately savour the bitter sin of its extravagance, then unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and topped us both up with a couple of Jameson bracers.

  ‘The sun’s over the yardarm somewhere,’ he said.

  ‘Sláinte.’

  He had himself a sip and situated the cardboard beaker just so on the desk and said, without looking at me, ‘A book about who?’

  ‘Sebastian Devereaux. Used to write thrillers back in the day. I never heard of him either.’

  It was odd. Iggy had been expecting me – it had been obvious from his expression when he’d opened his door. But I could tell that he’d been expecting something else entirely. ‘What is it, Iggy?’

  ‘He came to me for confession, Tom. Sorry.’

  ‘Shay Govern, you mean.’

  ‘Aye.’ He had another sip on his Jameson latte.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Late last week. Thursday, I think.’

  ‘So what can you tell me?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘But you recommended me, right? Thanks for that, by the way.’ I toasted him with the latte. ‘Much appreciated.’

  ‘No bother.’

  ‘So what was it you were recommending me for?’

  ‘I got the impression,’ he said after a minute or so spent staring at the cardboard beaker on the desk, ‘that he wanted his own story told. That was my sense of it.’

  ‘This story he told you in confession.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that story had nothing to do with Sebastian Devereaux.’

  ‘This is the first I’m hearing that name.’

  ‘Doesn’t make sense, does it?’

  ‘Well, it obviously does to Shay Govern.’

  ‘Should I be worried?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know, Tom. I mean, he’s bona fide when it comes to the money side of things, if that’s what you’re asking. He cut me a cheque for this place after we talked. Liked what we were doing for the kids. It wasn’t a fortune, exactly, but it didn’t bounce.’

  ‘Good to know,’ I said, ‘but I’m not asking about the money. Govern said you recommended me because I’d give a dead man his due.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did you tell him about my father?’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Tom. All I meant was, you’re conscientious to a fault.’

  ‘A fault?’

  ‘Jesus wept.’ It was his only profanity, although he was fond of it. ‘It was a compliment, Tom. And hey – it got you the job, didn’t it?’

  ‘Not the job you thought I’d get, though.’

  ‘Maybe not, but then God isn’t the only one who works in mysterious ways. But listen, Tom?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If it does work out with you and Shay Govern, I’ll be expecting a finder’s fee. A donation to the boxing club, we’ll say five per cent. What d’you say?’

  THREE

  I met Jenny for an early lunch in the Happy Bean at the bottom of South William Street. As always, we ate fast and then lingered over the coffee, despite the calypso-styled jazz wibbling through the Happy Bean’s speakers.

  ‘Sounds horrendous,’ she said after I’d filled her in on Shay Govern’s offer. ‘Six months’ paid leave, they’re putting you up on some island retreat, you’ll probably have time to work on something of your own. And you get another book on the shelf. What’s not to hate?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be able to do the movie column.’

  ‘I know. Don’t sweat it. We’re coming into blockbuster season anyway, it’s not like you’ll be missing much.’

  ‘You can hold it for me?’

  The weekly movie column was my one regular gig, the central plank of my monthly income. It was also my favourite. Time-consuming, sure, getting along to the morning preview screenings, all of which took place in Dublin city centre, but it was enjoyable and it paid well. It pretty much covered my big outgoings, which were rent and my contribution towards keeping six-year-old Emily in the style to which she was accustomed.

  Jenny was the first friend I’d made when I moved to Dublin, a comrade from the days of scuffling around the barricades of freelancing who was now tucked up in a velvet coffin as the editor of Night in the City, the Independent’s weekly magazine supplement that covered movies and books, theatre and music, fashion and food. Her hair had never really recovered its shape from the Rachel she gave it back when Friends was still hot, and I’d never really recovered from the first time I saw her heart-shaped face, those violet-tinged eyes peeking out from behind a ragged fringe, both of us covering the Pixies at the Point in 1991 – Jen for Hot Press, me for In Dublin. She’d had a raspy voice, a filthy sense of humour and a healthy instinct for self-preservation that had kept me at arm’s length for nearly two decades now.

  ‘It won’t be an issue, Tom. If anyone asks I’ll say you’ve taken a sabbatical; it sounds more official that way. Being honest, though, if anyone even notices I’ll be shocked.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. So how is Emily these days? Seen her lately?’

  ‘Last weekend, yeah. She’s great.’

  ‘Still keen on Disneyworld, is she?’

  ‘I think it’s Disneyland, actually. Which is the Florida one?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Do you?’

  She didn’t. ‘The difference being,’ she said, ‘I’m not the one who’s supposed to be bringing my six-year-old daughter to Disney heaven. So you might want to read up on that.’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘we might have missed the boat for Disneyland. All she was talking about last weekend was the pyramids, the Sphinx.’

  ‘It’ll be Machu Picchu next.’

  ‘Could easily be.’ With Emily you never knew.

  ‘So this guy, Shane Govern,’ she said.

  ‘Shay Govern.’

  ‘Shay, right. He’s eighty years old—’

  ‘Eighty-one and still dressing like Dean Martin. You’d love him.’

  ‘Sounds like my kind of man, all right. What’s the hitch?’

  I told her about Iggy’s recommendation, the dead man’s due. How he’d been expecting me when I called around to see him, but then baulked when he heard what Shay Govern was commissioning.

  ‘Sounds a bit weird, yeah,’ she said. ‘And because it was a confession …’

  ‘He can’t tell me anything.’

  ‘Not even off the record?’

  ‘I don’t think priests are allowed off-the-record briefings, Jen.’

  ‘You think?’ She grinned, evil. ‘Here’s a newsflash, journo-boy
… Crap, hold on.’

  Her phone had started chirping. Almost literally, as it happens – Jenny’s ring-tone was Woody Woodpecker. She answered it getting up, mouthing ‘Martin’ to me and spiralling her forefinger at the table.

  ‘Hey hon,’ she said as she walked away. ‘What’s hot?’

  I caught the eye of the waitress mopping the table alongside, ordered another couple of coffees. She’d dropped them off by the time Jenny came back. ‘Martin says keep your hands on your own side of the table,’ she said, sitting down. ‘Also, he can’t wait to read the Sebastian Devereaux book.’ She rolled her eyes at the Martin–Tom mutual appreciation society and ripped open a sachet of sugar and sprinkled half into her fresh coffee.

  ‘He’s heard of him?’ I said.

  ‘You’re surprised?’

  I shouldn’t have been. ‘What are you doing tonight?’ I said.

  ‘I am out and about,’ she said grandly. ‘Which means Martin’s babysitting tonight.’

  ‘I don’t think it qualifies as babysitting when they’re your own kids, Jen.’

  ‘Yeah, well, with our pair there’s sometimes some actual sitting on kids required.’

  ‘You’re a hard woman, Jenny Boyle.’

  ‘Be nice,’ she said, ‘or I’ll kidnap a chimp from the zoo, get him to write your movie column for the next six months.’ She sipped on her coffee and got herself settled in for some hardcore gossip. ‘So what’s the latest on Rachel?’ she said. ‘Is the custody hearing still going ahead?’

  ‘Week after next.’

  ‘Anything we can do?’

  ‘Other than offer me a full-time job with pension and health benefits, not really. But thanks.’

  ‘If it was my call,’ she said, ‘I’d do it in a heartbeat. If I thought you’d take it.’

  ‘I’d take it.’

  The freelance life is fine when you’re still a kid, scrabbling from month to month to pay for booze and dope, making sure there’s enough left over for rent and bills. When you’re a married man with a baby and a mortgage, the thrill of not knowing what you’ll earn next month tends to lose its appeal.

  That wasn’t the only reason Rachel had finally given up on me. But there was a reason why her new guy, Peter, was a life assurance broker.

  Life assurance. The guy was peddling snake oil, sure, but he was getting well paid to do it.

  As far as I could make out, from quizzing Emily on weekends, Peter was actually a decent guy. He was nice, she said. Uncle Peter. Told her funny stories. He didn’t sound particularly flash, either. He’d buy her books, or a football, or a DVD once in a while.

  The trip to Disneyland, or Disneyworld, had been Rachel’s idea.

  I had ten days before I stood up in front of a judge to try and persuade him, or her, that I was financially competent, that Emily’s long-term interests wouldn’t be best served by awarding custody to Rachel and Peter.

  It’d be a tough one. Mainly because lies only ever really work when you believe them yourself.

  FOUR

  I sent Martin a text as I walked up George’s Street, heading for home.

  You receiving gentleman callers this evening? Looking to pick your brains on S. Devereaux. Will bring beer.

  Martin Banks was an accountant, which meant he tended to stress over details that most people, the taxman included, considered excessively petty. Or so I tried to convince him on an annual basis, usually late in November and a week after deadline, when Martin was sweating the small stuff on my tax return.

  He was a good bloke, though. Solid. At the time I’d presumed Jenny was taking the soft option in marrying him, like buying a Volvo, safe and reliable and something you could learn to respect and maybe even love if you hung on to it long enough.

  Martin was quiet and ran well, for sure, but he was funny too in a dust-dry way, and he always got his round in. In his twenties he’d looked too old for his years, with his sensibly short haircut already going grey at the temples, the square-rimmed specs that might have been retro-hip if it weren’t for his penchant for suits and ties, rugby shirts and pressed jeans. He was a slow burner, though. Over the years he’d even managed to turn me on to the finer points of rugby. Where we overlapped was Jenny and crime novels. There wasn’t much to be said about Jenny without saying too much, so we talked a lot of crime fiction. The first time we met we’d bonded over Alistair MacLean’s When Eight Bells Toll, but where we really got on was with the old hardboiled stuff: Hammett and the Cains and Chandler, for sure, but McCoy and Burnett too, Edward Anderson, Goodis and Brewer.

  His reply arrived as I let myself into the apartment.

  Sounds good. Leave it till after 9 though. Anything new?

  By which he meant new writers, or at least writers who were new to us. I put the kettle on and then hunted out the Kem Nunn I’d come across, Tapping the Source, and put it to one side for later. After making a pot of coffee I went up the hallway to the smaller of the two bedrooms, which I’d converted into an office back in the grand old days when you could still claim for the costs of running a home office on your tax return. Handy, and a nice commute too. That day I was putting together a feature, twelve hundred words, on good movies adapted from bad books. Good fun, and I was about seven hundred words in when my phone beeped to let me know I had a message from Jenny.

  Your friend Govern? IT pg 7. xx J

  I put another pot of coffee on to brew and went downstairs and around the corner for an Irish Times. The piece on page seven was a short one, below the fold:

  Morrigan Mining, a division of Govern Industries, has tendered for a prospecting licence for Lough Swilly, Co. Donegal.

  If approved, the licence will cover gold, silver and copper. Archaeological excavations have revealed that copper was mined on Delphi Island in Lough Swilly as early as 2,500 BC, although it is believed that the seam identified by Morrigan Mining lies offshore.

  The licence is dependent on a survey which will determine the commercial viability of the proposed mine.

  In a statement, Morrigan Mining said: ‘Geological records of the Donegal area offer anomalies consistent with gold. The evidence to date confirms the presence of gold, although it remains to be seen whether it occurs in sufficient quantity to justify a full-scale mining operation. There is also evidence of other base metals on the proposed site but our main exploration will focus on gold.’

  A significant gold mine would be the first in Ireland for 2,000 years, and would offer a considerable boost to the beleaguered local economy. Morrigan Mining was unwilling to commit to a precise figure, but conceded that a viable mine offered ‘potential measured in millions’.

  ‘If the survey brings back positive results,’ said Morrigan spokesman Hugh Conroy, ‘we will be applying to the Department of Enterprise for funding in a public-private development.’

  The Minister of State for Natural Resources, Donal Daly, has promised the people of Donegal that the government will do all in its power to assist Morrigan Mining in its endeavours.

  A gold mine? Shay Govern obviously wasn’t a man for half measures. Give him six months and he’d be building a launch pad on Delphi Island for a rocket aimed at Mars.

  I was a little pissed at missing the scoop, but the good news was that Shay Govern wasn’t messing about. If he could afford to waste money prospecting in Lough Swilly, then the forty grand for a ghost-writing commission would be coming out of petty cash.

  It did make me wonder, though. About how much Shay Govern was committing to Delphi, and why. He’d described Carol Devereaux as an amazing lady, and he’d been protective of her interests, adamant that the book would be hers regardless of how much work I put in.

  He wouldn’t be the first widower to fall for a younger woman late in life, of course, but neither would he be the first rich guy to belatedly realize he was being strung along, and pull the plug.

  Call me a cynic when it comes to affairs of the aging heart, but I needed to sign a contract to put myself on a legal footing, and
fast.

  I went back to my desk, finished the feature and filed it. I was three days early, which would probably give the sub-editor a fright, get him thinking he was two days late putting the section to bed. Couldn’t be helped.

  Then I pulled up a fresh Google search and went looking for Sebastian Devereaux.

  It didn’t take long. No, scratch that – I spent about an hour or so, but everything there was to find I found in the first five minutes, and virtually all of it courtesy of a short bio from his last book, Endgame on Cyprus.

  Sebastian Devereaux (b. 1915), the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born in Norwich and grew up in Edinburgh. He attended Edinburgh University, studying archaeology. In 1939 he went to Delphi Island off the northwest coast of Ireland, where he has lived ever since.

  Sebastian has published four novels to date: Rendezvous at Thira (1968), The Corsican Affair (1971), Two Days to Malta (1973) and Endgame on Cyprus (1977).

  In 1984, Sebastian Devereaux was awarded an honorary degree by Edinburgh University.

  His books, as Shay Govern had said, were out of print, and his publisher had nothing about Devereaux on its website. I tried searching for Sebastian Devereaux literary agent but all the news fit to print there came from an obituary published in 1988. Wikipedia pretty much rehashed the info from the bio, and apart from some mostly positive reviews scattered here and there, none of which contained any personal information, that was as good as it got.

  After an hour of feeling like a fifth-rate Beckett, sitting there telling myself nothing twice, I decided that the lack of information was actually a good thing. That everything Carol Devereaux and I put into the book would be new and freshly minted and utterly fascinating.

  Provided, of course, we could find anyone who was even remotely interested in the life and times of one Sebastian Devereaux, the ex-archaeologist, forgotten author and, by the sounds of things, Olympic-standard hermit.

  It was looking more and more like the best bit of writing I’d be doing in the next six months was penning my signature to that contract.

  I was rooting around in the fridge for something that might constitute a dinner when my phone rang. I checked the caller ID, picked it up and said, ‘Jack B. How’re they hanging?’