Barely a Crime

by Robert Ovies

  Sixteen days into his sentence, Crawl’s father was stabbed and killed. The knife was twisted in his abdomen so that the blade would cut him badly; then the handle was broken off so that no one could pull out the blade. He died on the spot. Twenty days later, the man suspected of stabbing him was killed, his head nearly severed with piano wire.

  The killings were reported in the press as “two minor incidents in the continuing shedding of Irish blood by Republican and loyalist militants”. But his father’s death was not a minor incident to Crawl, because he had been with him in the yard of the trucking company on the night when his father and the others had been caught and arrested, the night his father had enlisted Crawl’s help as the group’s lookout, even though he was just a boy.

  Another drink from his pint, longer and deeper this time, nearly draining it.

  Short-haired Molly Dolan slid a chair close to him and said with a smile and her hand on his arm, “Hey, Crawl, how about a kind word for Molly?”

  He turned toward her with a light smile. “Later, darling,” he said in a voice that was naturally melodic, a gift he had put to good use in what he chose to call his “art of profitable persuasion.”

  “I do like your sweater, though,” he said. “I like red in a sweater, and I like you in a sweater. Or not in a sweater. Maybe just painted red.”

  Molly laughed.

  “But,” he said, turning to the window again, “I haven’t time to enjoy the red life tonight, love. Some other time, now.”

  Molly dropped her gaze to the letter on the table in front of Crawl. She tilted her head but couldn’t read it, so she shrugged, smiled again and said, “Right. Some other time.” Then she leaned to squeeze his arm one more time, slid out of her chair and walked away, turning her head to study him.

  Crawl was five feet eleven and wiry. In fact, he looked as though he could crawl as quickly as a snake if he had to, although he could no longer run, at least not at full speed and not without effort. A nationalist bomb had cut short both his right leg and his service in the Force; his leg by nearly an inch. He was left with such a pronounced limp that people who didn’t know about his frantic escape from the trucking company wrongly assumed that the nickname “Crawl” had come about after his limp was delivered years later by the nationalist bomb.

  His hair was dark brown and straight, nearly long enough to touch his shoulders. His nose was long and pointed, like his chin. Narrow, plotting eyes gave the impression, which was often accurate, that he was making plans no one else knew about. But his smile spread wide and showed itself easily and often. His reputation as a risk taker—first as a young volunteer in the Ulster Defence Association, where he began to learn about weaponry and the basics of military action, then as a member, with his father and brother, in the more violent Ulster Volunteer Force—had spread well into the neighborhoods. In the streets he now occupied, a dozen Molly Dolans in any three-block area would be quick on a rainy evening in March to approach the severe-looking twenty-seven-year-old at his place at the end of a bar, or in his chair pulled up to a window in the Long Neck Pub.

  He had fatally shot only two men that he knew of, though, in all that time and with all that opportunity. Only the second bothered him in the least, and then, the bother was momentary. The man was a sad-eyed security guard uniform, who cried as he died. But everybody died, Crawl told himself. The crier only died sooner than he expected. Or sooner than his family expected. But the way time flew, what the hell difference did it make? If Crawl hadn’t shot him, he might have gone through five years of hell dying with cancer in his throat or brain or something.

  He drained his stout and slid the glass to the side. He was a man who dearly loved to drink, but this third pint in a half hour would be all for him tonight. Any more and he might start to dull an edge without realizing it.

  That would be his worst case scenario for the night: the mysterious “Mr. Day” would turn out to be with some renegade or old nationalist soldier out to take revenge for something he had done to one of their friends while he was in the Force. Or that they thought he had done, even if he hadn’t, he being out of the paramilitaries for so long now.

  In fact, he had been largely, although not entirely, a law-abiding man since recovering from the bombing and leaving the UVF. He still broke-and-entered on a small scale, mostly alone in the few years since Kieran lost his taste for working with him, and always either in rich and vacant homes, petrol stations or little markets in far-out places. Nothing in or around Belfast. He thieved a little and conned a lot, had been pulled in and questioned by the law on four different occasions but never charged. Overall, he had worked legitimately for about five months of each year, taking odd jobs that involved talking fast and convincingly. He had been a car salesman, a door-to-door pest-control salesman and an insurance salesman, all with part-time rewards for part-time work. He had even worked as manager of a storefront salon offering a radio-frequency cure for arthritis, named Gonz-o-tron, which didn’t last long and didn’t make him much money because it didn’t work.

  Talk about people with sad eyes. Old, bent ladies and fat, middle-aged men would come in, twisted up from arthritis in their hands or someplace else. Then they would sit for forty-five minutes in thin-padded, straight-backed chairs waiting for radio waves to make their pain go away. Them thinking, “Is this working?” Crawl thinking, “How stupid can you be after all the time you’ve been around?”

  He looked out the window, checking one more time to make sure that Day wasn’t approaching their meeting place. Then he slid the letter closer, reviewing what he saw.

  All type. Even his name on the envelope typed. Delivered by a kid who took off running before he could ask any questions, not mailed. Kid getting paid to do it that way. The man paid the kid, he paid for delivery, he paid for fancy paper. He sounded smart. The letter dated that same day, March 3. And he addressed Crawl as “Mr. Connell”, which got his attention more than anything else. Not because it was cordial, but because it let him know he was already being worked on, just as he had worked on so many people over the last six or eight years to get them to part with their time, money or what little virginity there was left in Belfast.

  In fact, Crawl couldn’t remember anybody calling him Mister before. Not ever. Unless maybe phone-call salespeople trying to sell him crap he’d never be dumb enough to try to sell to anybody at all.

  Jane Regan, the Jane they called Jellyroll, who had known Crawl for more than fifteen years, wandered up, smiling. She was red-nosed, red-faced, red-eyed, nearly fifty and nearly drunk.

  “Mr. Crawl, my young hero,” she sighed, rubbing a fat hand over his long hair, from the top of his head to his shoulder. “You have a hunted and lonely look tonight. But I can help.”

  She started to sit down, then stopped in mid-crouch to reach out suddenly and snatch away the letter with a fat hand. “Who is she?” she blurted out, laughing.

  Crawl’s right hand shot out, grabbed her thick wrist and twisted it hard into the table.

  “Ow, God!” she squealed. She swung at him with her free fist, but the blow was weak and bounced off his shoulder.

  Crawl held her there as he rose to his feet.

  “Owww! Crawl!”

  The bartender shouted, “Play nice, children! We’ll have none o’ that, Crawl.”

  Crawl slipped the letter from Jane’s hand and released her wrist. “You mustn’t ever do that, darlin’,” he said without expression. Jane sniffed and rubbed her wrist. “You mustn’t ever grab a man’s personal mail. It’s a highly dangerous thing to do.” His voice was still quiet, but his eyes were not. “So go the hell away from me, now. I mean it.”

  Jane took a step backward. “You didn’t have to do that,” she whispered, glancing around to see how humiliated she had to feel.

  Molly Dolan, the bartender and two men at the end of the bar were the only ones still bothering to watch. The rest of the sixteen patrons had gone back to their drinking and talking and humming along with the m
usic, unconcerned in the dim light.

  Jane waddled away to plead her case to a short man at the far end of the bar.

  Crawl put the letter inside his jacket, in his shirt pocket, and leaned to the window, cupping his hand to block out the light.

  The door of the restaurant was still shut. The shade was still drawn. The crooked, red-lettered closed sign still hung at eye-level by a string.

  If it isn’t IRA or something like that, he thought, and the man really meant business, it would be some kind of corporate espionage. Someone wanting to draw on what he and Kieran had learned as paramilitaries, although Kieran hadn’t learned as much in his time with the Force as Crawl had. Kieran had a temper from hell, but deep down never liked violence; that was the way Crawl figured it. At least he didn’t like violence when it got to the point of bloodshed. Crawl didn’t mind because he understood Kieran. Others, like the older men in the Force, thought Kieran wasn’t at home with violence. But just the opposite was true. Kieran was so at home with it, Crawl thought, that it scared the hell out of him. Kieran had things inside of him that scared him. Maybe hurting somebody would uncork a bottle inside, and he would pay hell trying to get it corked again.

  Crawl hadn’t seen Kieran much since the few times Kieran visited him after his leg got blown up. After Brenna moved in with Kieran, Crawl didn’t see him at all.

  This job didn’t have any blood-letting, so Kieran would be fine with it, Crawl figured. From the way the letter sounded, all they would have to do is get in and take a few pictures of documents of some kind. That’s the only thing that would make sense if what the letter said about no robbery and no weapons could be believed. Nothing would actually be taken out, but something would be copied; had to be that. Press a key into a mold and disappear, something like that. Copy directions, plans, corporate secrets.

  His thinking time was just about over. It was ten minutes to nine. The man wanting secrets to be stolen would be there soon. Crawl leaned toward the window and looked up and down the street again. He realized his heart was beating faster and wondered why.

  He looked more closely. No one in sight yet. Not Kieran. Not Day.

  Unless that was Day, the tall man in the dark raincoat, up the street to the north, walking fast and straight as a lamppost, even in the rain, with an attache case in his right hand. One arm barely swinging, the other, the one with the case, held tightly against his side.

  He was still a full block away, but he was closing fast.

  2

  Crawl watched, giving the scene time to develop.

  He noticed that the tall man didn’t look around before he knocked and entered Mrs. Dougherty’s place. He didn’t look for friends of his own, and he didn’t check to see if he was being watched.

  Did that mean he was careless, or confident? Or could it mean he didn’t care one way or the other?

  Crawl looked for other activity in the area, anything that might be related to the man, near or far, up and down the street, but no one else seemed to have followed him. Cars and trucks went by, and people walked in the rain alone and in pairs to both his left and his right, but no one turned to look at the dining room.

  The bartender asked if he wanted another pint. He told him no, not yet. The bartender asked if he was expecting somebody else. He said he was. He said there would be ten or twelve people, all of them wanting to get drunk tonight at the Long Neck. The bartender left him alone.

  Kieran was coming up the street from Crawl’s left.

  Not good timing, though. As Kieran approached, Mrs. Dougherty came out, shutting the door behind her and looking to her right and her left. She paused to study Kieran, whom she had known for years in and around the neighborhood.

  Kieran noticed her and turned away, but then he continued up the street with a normal stride.

  He realized it’s too late to hide, Crawl thought.

  And it was. Mrs. Dougherty looked him over for several seconds before she turned and shuffled in the opposite direction without acknowledging him.

  Crawl wondered if something important might have just happened. The first thing gone wrong.

  He watched Kieran try the door, then knock. He saw the tall man open the door to let him in.

  The man didn’t smile or reach out to shake hands, which Crawl thought was good. Why pretend it was a reunion of old friends? But the man was dressed in a suit and tie, for God’s sake. Nine o’clock at night, in a district like this, and he in a suit and tie. What did that say?

  The closed sign swayed as the door closed hard behind Kieran.

  Crawl’s heart sped up again. He still didn’t know what to think of it all.

  He waited another five minutes to make sure no one else approached Mrs. Dougherty’s, or posted themselves across the street, or drove by staring longer at her door than they should have. Then he swung slowly out of his chair and started for the door. The bartender yelled after him: Were his friends still coming? He shrugged and left the Long Neck to see what the tall man, who walked like a general and wore a suit and tie when he didn’t have to, had in mind when he wrote the letter about Crawl and Kieran getting all that money for no risk, with nothing being stolen at all.

  Mrs. Dougherty’s Dining Room was no more than that: a single room.

  Four lamps, two on each side of the room, stood like sentries along the walls, which were papered yellow with outlined flowers of pale green and orange, but just one of the lights had been turned on.

  Kieran watched from a back table as the man who had written the letter opened the door for Crawl and said, “Mr. Connell, come in, sir,” in a deep voice that definitely did not sound Irish.

  Crawl nodded and slid past as the man stepped aside.

  Kieran smirked. He wanted to ask Crawl how it felt to be called mister and sir at the same time, and by a man whose suit looked as if it cost him the price of a good car.

  He waved as Crawl spotted him at the table farthest from the door, and said, “Hey.” Then he dropped his hand, wondering why he bothered waving, and he smirked about that, too. What was he trying to do? Make sure Crawl didn’t maybe look around and leave the place before he spotted the back table, with the whole place being no bigger than a minivan?

  Crawl murmured, “I see you, little brother,” and started across the room to join Kieran as the tall man in the dark suit closed and locked the front door, making the closed sign jiggle again.

  Each of the room’s six round dining tables had four chairs and a yellow plastic tablecloth. Each had a stand-up menu leaning against a white plastic vase with cloth flowers that were red, blue and yellow.

  There was also music playing, a Celtic group singing from a radio in the kitchen. Kieran had assumed it was for distraction, just in case someone was upstairs listening. But he knew Mrs. Dougherty as well as she knew him, and taking the money and running would be the only thing in the old lady’s mind. No one would be upstairs listening.

  The so-called Mr. Day took a seat opposite Kieran and Crawl. He sat rigidly, with his forearms flat on the table and his hands joined.

  Kieran studied him, then turned to Crawl and saw he was studying the man too, only taking longer to do it.

  His attention went back to the man in the suit.

  There was nothing friendly in the man’s expression. Nothing nervous about him, either. He should be nervous, though, Kieran thought, with that much of his money at risk. He was older, probably over sixty-five, but healthy looking. His hair was mostly white and combed straight back without a part. Everything else about him was neat, too—like his pressed suit and polished shoes—so he probably took care of details. That was good.

  He had sharp eyes. A hard expression. The most noticeable thing was a pale scar that ran jagged from his lip to his chin. Kieran wondered how a man could get that kind of scar. Not from a simple cut. More like a tear in a piece of cloth. A rip, with no more whiskers where the skin had torn.

  Crawl broke the silence. “You can call me Crawl,” he said. “I don’t ans
wer to Mr. Connell, tell you the truth. That was my father, and he died.”

  “Thank you. I will,” the man said. “You can call me Mr. Day.”

  “I’ll call you Mr. Daylight,” Crawl said with the beginnings of a smile. “That name means a lot to me. My father’s brother was called Mr. Daylight, and he was always a favorite. He slept till about noon every day, so they’d say, ‘Wake Bryan up, it’s daylight,’ and the name stuck. Daylight. So, to you I give the honor.” He nodded, smiled more broadly. “Mr. Daylight.”

  Kieran smiled too because he was watching the game begin.

  Way back when Kieran was twelve or thirteen or so and Crawl and his older brother, Michael, moved in with Kieran and his mother after their own mother died, Crawl told Kieran that everything a man did was going to gain or lose him something with the next man. That was how he taught Kieran. Saying things like, “The game to see who ends up on top is always in play.” Even when they were just little kids. Crawl called it “the game” even then.

  “Even the smallest things,” Crawl would say, the two of them hunched down on a curb or leaning against a brick and yellow plaster wall on Tenny Lane, smoking and watching life struggle by in dock worker’s clothes. “Even the smallest things will leave you either closer to being on top of the next man or closer to being under his foot.” And he would give an example or two: “If a man offers you a cup of tea, you tell him, ‘I don’t really like tea. I’ll have a bottle of stout instead.’ Or, if he offers you stout, the other way around. ‘No stout for me,’ you say. ‘I’ll have a cup of tea.’ Or if the man wants to do a deal and the window’s open, you say, ‘I’d like you to close your window first.’ Or, if it’s closed, the other way around. You find something to make him give way, you see? Even small things count.”

  “But why?” Kieran asked him once. “What do I care if he opens the window or not?”

  “It’s not the window,” Crawl told him, leaning close, as if they had secrets. “It’s, you’re the one makin’ the rules. Don’t you see? If they open the window instead of leaving it down, which is the way they wanted it to be or it wouldn’t have been that way in the first place, then you’ve got them goin’ in your direction. They’ve started giving you control. Don’t you get it?”