Kitabı oku: «Ordinary Decent Criminals», sayfa 2
“But I won.” Farrell poked MacBride’s chest in a gesture he realized too late was exactly like his own father’s.
“’Twas not a sound game, mate. Later that same afternoon I sat down to me own board and had you hammered three ways round.”
“The gentleman at your right plays a sedulous game,” Farrell explained. “Uses all the time on his clock. Knows all the books—”
“You could stand yourself—”
“Never! Never opened a page.”
“Your man here considers learning a cheat.”
“There seems little point in testing some other gobshite’s wits when the idea’s to test your own.”
“I thought winning was all, Farrell. Why not read up, then, if it topples the other fellow’s king?”
“I don’t collaborate, at anything. I win.”
“We might observe,” said MacBride dryly, “that by that arrangement you get singular credit for falling on your arse.”
“When you two play,” asked the girl, “who does win, anyway?”
“Did,” said MacBride.
“Oh, we still play,” said Farrell softly.
At last MacBride had given up ogling the girl, because he couldn’t resist looking at Farrell; funny, they were both showing off, for they had often used each other, or perhaps more accurately their relationship, to entice women. “I was trying to tell you, lass”—MacBride turned back to her—“the gawk here played reckless chess. Might seem a tame sport from the side, but your man conduct his pieces like commanding his crew into uncharted high seas. Could make you woozy to watch the board.”
“And you,” said Farrell, “never made an original move in your life.”
“No such thing as an original move. That’s your vanity, and your ignorance is vanity. It trips you, too. I always watched the larger game. You got too caught up in your flourishes, your flashy attacks. You wanted to impress me. It was the ruin of you.”
“Fischer and Kasparov were both victorious.”
“Aye, and where’s Fischer now? Crawled off in a hole.”
“Why did he quit?” asked the girl.
“Couldn’t keep it up!” cried MacBride.
“No,” said Farrell. “He was disgusted. Sick to death.”
“Och, for you to fasten on to your man Kasparov and that, it’s hubris of the first order. At least those lads had a clue. You, Farrell, just lit out. Never quite thought it through. You’re impulsive, man.”
“Yes,” said Farrell. “And you’re a bore.”
“O’Phelan, you never have seen the difference between a hero and a fool.”
“In my experience,” the American ventured, “just as many cautious people get run over by buses as careless.”
Farrell smiled.
As the trio trailed from the bar, the usual questions tumbled in: Where was she from in—, How long had she been—, How long was she planning—, Sure isn’t her name—? Ten years of this conversation, how rarely she gave straight answers anymore.
“Esther Ingrid,” she explained a bit through her teeth. “Little brother. It stuck.” The shorthand was getting so clipped it was incoherent.
“So what do you do in the States?” asked Farrell.
“What I do everywhere,” she leveled. “Leave.”
“Does that pay?”
“Often.”
“Yes,” he agreed with a collusive smile. “Handsomely.”
Both men were placated when she mentioned Belfast.
“And how might we look you up, now?” the lusty man inquired.
Estrin sighed, and glanced from one to the other. She had grown up with brothers on either side, and still attracted men in twos; the last cut was tense. And, she reminded herself, how frequently she had failed to keep Maybe we’ll run into each other sometime poised on the tip of her tongue, letting a few digits trip off instead, because it’s easier to give people what they want from you. But Estrin paid for laziness later, with the rude thud on her front door, a total stranger with flowers and expectations smoothing the tattered receipt where she’d scribbled an address only to get rid of the man. Don’t say anything dorky: it was a new discipline. So she was about to toss off, “Put a note in a bottle and throw it in the North Channel,” when some flicker in Farrell’s eye seemed to catch her in her very thought, as if he knew she was pressed for her number often and saw these scenes purely as something to wriggle out of. My dear, read his expression, don’t switch on automatic, you might as well resign. Well enough, you’re harassed by plenty prats, and good luck to you turfing them aside. But look harder now. You can’t sell us all downriver, and you like men—it comes off you like a smell. You look wildly young to me, but you’re no nun—you’ve that shine in your eyes as if you’re always getting a joke no one’s told yet.
“The Green Door, Whiterock Road.” Estrin flipped her club between them like a coin to beggars, turning to avoid their scuffle for the toss.
“Looks as if you’re white this time,” said MacBride to Farrell good-naturedly. “With that address.”
“I thought you were so successful these territorial niceties didn’t faze you anymore.”
“Successful, not mental, kid. For all that leather, I’d not slop into the Green Door. Think of the laundrette bills to get out the smell.”
“Laundrette? Mortuary.”
Farrell never liked to win anything by luck, though he preferred luck to losing; his eyes followed his new chip. He’d no intention to cash in. The option was sweeter than any dreary discreet evening. Still, as he watched the small woman work on the thick gloves and dive into the red helmet with, he thought, a certain snail-like relief, Farrell had an unresolved sensation he hadn’t felt in long enough that he didn’t recognize what it was. The girl knew they were watching and hurried, switching the engine and failing to warm it long enough; the bike lurched and stalled. Feeling this wasn’t a woman easily rattled, Farrell noted her fluster with satisfaction.
Finally the big red motorcycle pelted away; wind whipped the Union Jack down the road as she passed, the red, white, and blue curbside clouding with exhaust.
Their tour guide rasped up the drive toward MacBride. He was running, his face red with anticipation, as if he’d found the MP’s umbrella and was savoring how obliged MacBride would feel at the trouble taken to return it. But the guide’s hands were empty, and MacBride had his umbrella, and his hat.
“Your honor!” the little man panted. “Have you heard, sir? The radio—”
“Calm down, boyo, what’s that?”
The guide gathered himself and pronounced, “Enniskillen.”
It was a test. Enniskillen? A small town. Prod, a wee orange bud in the otherwise deadly green slime of Fermanagh, choked on all sides, a lone flower in a pond gone to algae—or this was the image that sprang to MacBride’s mind. Otherwise unremarkable; a fair concentration of security-force families, that was all.
However, the Bushmills tour guide did not say the name of Enniskillen like a small town, as no one in Northern Ireland would for years to come. Because Enniskillen was no longer a pit stop for lunch on your way to Galway, a Bally-Nowhere to be from. No, Enniskillen had been elevated beyond a dot on the map. Enniskillen was an atrocity.
The guide detailed the news grandly, taking his time. In the midst of Remembrance Day services, a bomb had gone off by the town cenotaph and blown out a gable wall. Nine, ten people dead, maybe more. Civilians every one. A bollocks. And injuries galore …
“Why, Angus,” Farrell noted. “If it isn’t a mistake.”
“Bleeding cretins,” MacBride puffed. “Freaking Provo barbarians—”
“Come on,” Farrell prodded. “Use scum. I know you save it for special occasions, but sure this counts as one.”
There was much commiseration and head-shaking. They were both relieved when the guide was gone. All that indignation was exhausting.
Angus dropped the twisted brow when the guide turned the corner.
“Does it ever strike you,” asked Farrell lightly, “that the Provisionals are quaint? Really. The Iranians blow three hundred air passengers with a briefcase. At current levels of technology, massacre by the dozen expresses considerable restraint.”
“Grand,” said MacBride. “I can see myself launching into the BBC with that one. I would just like to say that I thought Enniskillen was quaint.”
“Handy, this,” Farrell observed.
“Bastard of a thing,” said MacBride. “Bastard.”
As the two men whisked toward the Antrim Arms to find a TV, their step sprang, hands played with keys in pockets. Farrell began to whistle and stopped himself. Angus jostled against the taller man’s shoulder and kicked schoolboy at stones, the mood of both gentlemen unquestionably bolstered.
chapter two
Roisin Has Enthusiasms
Why couldn’t he nip in the back? Would he blink like a red light?”
“Blamed if I know, Roisin, you’ve never said who you’re talking about.”
“Lord, I can’t, Con. It’s not I don’t trust you. But matters being as they are—”
“Spare me how matters are.”
A little snippy, Roisin thought. “I’m only saying, so he was recognized, where’s the harm? He might shake my hand and say how very much he enjoyed it and smile and only the two of us the wiser.”
“Why risk it?”
“I want him to hear me read!”
“Then curl up in the coverlet and recite with your man on the next pillow. That way no one’s the wiser.”
Roisin bit her lip over the receiver. “Connie, you understand far better than you’re letting on.”
“So do you. You want your toy boy to see you all tarted up in that blue dress, in front of a whole crowd of eejits queuing for signed copies of The Dumb and Frumpy Cows—”
“That’s The Brave and Friendly Sheep! And it’s inhuman of me, when I see his own bake big as life on the telly every night?”
“… On the telly, now?”
“Forget I said that.”
“A fine way to get me to remember.”
“Seems to me, just,” Roisin went on nervously, “he might slip into one reading, who would point a finger.”
“Such a TV star, why not? The English Lecture Theatre’s hardly the King’s Hall … What show might he be on, now?”
The biggest show in town. Roisin smiled. The only show. “I’ve name enough by now, he’d only display decent public relations, attending a do for a major Six County poet.”
“A Republican poet.”
“I’m not a Republican poet.”
“Wise up! With your father and those brothers in the Maze, write a donkey’s years about birdies and butterflies, or for that matter, join the UVF, burn your own house as a bonfire on the Twelfth, and go up with it, sure you’ll still get your name engraved on the County Antrim Memorial, with a full IRA cortege strung out to Lenadoon.”
“For years in my work I’ve tried to—”
“Doesn’t matter a jot, Rose,” Constance interrupted with the impatience that was beginning to characterize this entire call. “You are what they say.”
“What has that got to do with Thursday?”
“He’s a Prod, sure that’s no secret.”
“I never said that.”
“Och, no! You’re bumping the daylights out of Bill Cosby.”
“Stop stirring me up! I said he was known, that’s all—”
“And enough times.”
To the injured silence on the other end, Constance continued. “I’m sorry, Roisin, but I can’t hold with this carry-on month after month about your famous man this, your famous man that—it’s a bit much, love. You’ve put the man terrible high up and there’s your problem. He can’t be as fancy as you figure, and if you could stare that down, maybe you wouldn’t let him wipe his shoes on your face. There’ve been times if I’d not seen the marks I’d swear you were making him up.”
“He’s not a cruel man, and it was only those two times. And I’ll not have you run him down or make out he’s some wee Prod—”
“If you’d stop exaggerating to me, you might stop exaggerating to yourself! So he’s some councilor or other—”
“Angus MacBride is no councilor.”
“You don’t say,” said Constance gravely.
“I haven’t said.” Roisin spoke with reserve, her dignity restored. “Now do you see why?”
“One of the bigger plums in the pie,” Constance conceded. “And you’re both better off he stays clear of the Thursday reading and every other.”
“I’d not mind if it were only politics,” said Roisin, already growing sullen, though with herself; her stomach felt glutinous, as if she’d eaten too much potato bread. “Truth is, he’s not mad for poetry, even mine. Claims he doesn’t understand it.”
“Fair enough,” said Constance. “You don’t understand politics.”
Roisin was too sickened now to rise to the charge. “I’ve to sort out my selection for tomorrow, so I’ll ring off. But, Connie—”
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep quiet. All the same—” Constance paused. “You shouldn’t have told me his name, love.” The receiver clicked in Roisin’s ear like a full stop at the end of any other simple, true declarative: The sky is blue.
It was, and it shouldn’t have been; it should be bucketing. Roisin fidgeted from the phone and, to keep from ruining her well-kept nails, frantically hoovered the carpet. Well, obviously the only way to prove once and for all to Constance Trower just how big a secret she was keeping was to give it away.
The hoover was full of cat hair, and filled the room with pet smell; Angus hated the cat and despised the smell. She kicked off the machine.
Loose Talk Costs Lives.
She’d pinned the poster at the entrance to the bedroom not long after she’d first started up with MacBride.
In taxis
On the phone
In clubs and bars
At football matches
At home with friends
Anywhere!
WHATEVER YOU SAY—
SAY NOTHING.
While Seamus Heaney’s advice was clearly lost on Roisin, every party in the Province followed the slogan to the letter.
I have a story you’ll like,” Farrell announced, with that long stride she had learned to keep up with. “Enniskillen. Now, the way bombs are handled in the Provisionals now, one cell makes the device, those that plant it are different lads altogether, no one ever meets anyone, correct?”
“That’s the conceit—but Fermanagh? Sure they’re all first cousins and play on the same hurley team.”
“Well, that’s what the Prods think—that every Taig knows who did it and won’t tell. But bear with me—”
Constance smiled. The Prods, not you Prods. After so many years she had earned herself out of her people. From Farrell, that was a compliment.
“—So the bomb was assembled weeks ahead of time. Now, it blew by the cenotaph smack in the middle of nurses and schoolteachers, and that’s why it was a mistake, right?”
“Giant PR black eye. A real shiner.”
“They forgot about daylight saving time.”
“I don’t follow.”
“One hour later, there would have been only soldiers by that cenotaph—everyone knows the ceremony, it’s the same dirge every year. But the boyo who made the bomb set it to go off at 11:45 a.m. on November 8, and forgot that in the meantime the clocks would change!”
“Who told you this?”
“A little bird with a balaclava.”
“I think it’s a story you like.”
“Well, yes. Perverse. Anarchic. Absurd. Their devices are so much more advanced than in my day—”
“It’s not your day?” She sounded disappointed.
“I don’t think I’d know where to begin with the contraptions they put together now. Microcircuitry, long-range radio control. But I could tell the bloody time.”
“How is Enniskillen likely to affect your referendum? You figure it’s really given the place a taste for reform and that? Enough is enough, let’s get off our bum?”
They were crossing the Lagan on the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, and stopped to lean over the river. It was only 3:30, but in Ireland’s stingy December already the sun was setting. Samson and Goliath, the two Harland and Wolff cranes, dipped the foreground, gold birds taking water. From here Belfast glowed, a vista never broadcast in news clips—a low city, its horizon stitched with spires. The light alchemized even Eastwood’s Scrap Metal with its Midas touch; hulks of burned-out City Buses mounded the shore, pirate’s treasure. Constance hoped the sunset was doing the same job on her face—projects of equal challenge, she supposed.
“I’ve been sniffing the wind, and it smells, as usual. The Prods are already getting resentful that the wet-nosed ecumenists have hijacked their tragedy. Pretty soon they’ll want their atrocity back. And Gordon Wilson’s getting to be a regular celeb—forgiveness as song and dance. There are churches in the States now that want to fly him, all expenses paid, to get up in front of their congregations and repeat for the umpteenth time, I forgive the men who murdered my daughter. So they can all feel warm and gooey. There’s money in grace. The man should get an agent.”
“You’re one godawful cynic, Farrell O’Phelan.”
“No, it’s sad, really—I did rather admire him. I’d never be able to pull the line off with a straight face myself. But as soon as he’s seen as successful he’s dead. All Gordon needs is the Nobel Prize and the North will have him deported.”
Constance sighed. “Poor Betty. She’s in Florida now.”
“I’ve tried to warn MacBride—if he does win that bauble, this mean-spirited backwater will have his head.”
“But can’t you use it, Enniskillen? Peace PR?”
“Not really. We’re unlikely to get this referendum together for a year yet. I predict? Gordon Wilson jokes. In a year all of Fermanagh will detest him, even the Catholics—for not having the integrity to detest them back. And once the hand-clasping hoopla clears, the Prods will look around them and notice, Bloody hell, those wankers took out eleven of our side. They’ll feel vengeful and persecuted, as always. Constance, how many times have you heard, these are the last caskets we will carry, now we’re all going to be matey and damp-eyed? Now we will understand one another, albeit from separate schools and different sides of town? Of course you murdered my whole family last night, that’s perfectly all right, you were just doing your job? The Peace People may have we-shall-overcomed the multitudes but without Taigs or Prods to bash we’re at each other’s throats after six months; now the office barely limps from week to week with American volunteers. No, Enniskillen will have no effect on the North whatsoever. Like everything else in the last twenty years.”
“Including you?”
“Oh, aye. Especially me.”
“Then why are we working eighteen hours a day?”
“I do not believe anything I do will make the slightest difference. I do it anyway.”
Then you understand me, thought Constance grimly. Why I phone the same number hours on end until I get through because you said “imperative.” Why I meet your planes on early Sunday mornings. Why I bring you cups of hot water and filled rolls you let dry out. Why I clip your piles of newspapers when you’re finished not reading them, why I collect city council minutes from Derry and Strabane when normal women are shopping for pumps: I do not believe any of this will make the slightest difference. I do it anyway.
She took his hand; that was permitted. They had sorted out the rules, even stretched them—he could put his arm around her, kiss her cheek. In tight spots with only a single available they had slept side by side in the same bed. He would curl against her. It was nice. She didn’t even find it painful. And they often held hands.
“I have a story you’re not going to like.”
“Shoot.” He did not sound nervous. Farrell preferred bad news to no news. He loved a turn of the wheel.
“You know Roisin St. Clair?”
“The name.”
“Don’t be coy. Why didn’t you tell me she was doing the nasty with Angus MacBride?”
Farrell pulled up sharply. “Says who?”
“Says herself.”
“You’re right, I don’t like this story.”
“And I’m hardly her best friend, Farrell. Lord knows who else she’s told. For all we know, she’s leaking like a Divis tap.”
Farrell dropped her hand and paced off the bridge. The sun ruddied his face; his eyebrows looked on fire. Now it was hard to keep up with him.
“I have warned and warned him!” Farrell railed. “How are we to kick this place into shape if he’s splayed in a two-page spread in the Sunday World? Look at Papandreou! Carrying on with that blonde is toppling his whole government!”
“You figure Unionists care that much about a wee bit of philandering?”
“Are you serious, it’s all they care about! The North is 64 percent Protestant, 36 percent Catholic, 100 percent gossip. As MacBride knows perfectly well, and still the bugger gropes over Antrim as if he were on holiday in Hong Kong. You must have noticed, he even flirts with you!”
“Even me,” said Constance. “Is the trouble that he’s married, or that she’s Catholic?”
“Either is dangerous, both are poison.”
“Find yourself another softhearted Prod.”
“No, I need the UUU behind this referendum, or it won’t fly. Angus MacBride is the UUU. He’s been coddling the party toward power-sharing for years. Half the lot will balk because they’ll boycott any initiative unless the Agreement is scrapped. And when we’re through lacing the proposition with Nationalist perks, there will be enough links with the South that the right-wingers in the UUU could easily label it an all-Ireland solution.”
“Bye-bye, Border Poll.”
“Better believe it. And it’s Angus keeps that rabble together; they do as he says because they like him. But he’s got to keep his nose clean. Bollocks—!”
“You’re not overreacting?”
“I take my prediction back: a year from now Gordon will be old hat. Angus MacBride jokes in the back pages of Fortnight are passing before my eyes.”
“Cross your fingers. Nothing’s in public yet.”
“When you have a leaky pipe, you don’t turn up the radio and pretend everything’s all right. People lose whole basements that way. No, the problem must be plumbed. Caulked tight.”
“How is a woman like a kitchen sink?”
“That’s the riddle, my dear. Now, tell me about Roisin St. Clair. What’s she like? Pretty?”
Wouldn’t that be the first question. “Rather. Well preserved, anyway. Thirty-five or so. Brilliant with clothes. Thin; I’d say from nerves. And if that lady ever hits the big time, some psychiatrist has it made.”
“Because of her father?”
Constance shrugged. “That’s the easiest answer. But it’s the mother she whinges on about. Roisin’s the only daughter. And the family is—old-fashioned.”
“Low expectations?”
“Where have you been? No expectations. Considering, she’s done well.”
“She a good poet?”
“Lord, I couldn’t say. I can’t bear any of that palaver, you know that. But at least it’s her one original interest, and she’s followed through.”
“In contrast to—?”
“Roisin St. Clair is one of those people with enthusiasms,” Constance explained. “A bit of a dabbler. I met her when we were setting up that integrated entrepreneurial support scheme with Father Mahon. Och, she threw herself into it with a right frenzy—late nights helping Catholics stuff teddy bears, Prods bottle mayonnaise. Then one day she disappeared.”
“What happened?”
“I suppose they broke up.”
“With Father Mahon—!”
“No, no, she and whoever gave her the idea. Roisin goes through phases, so she does—”
“You mean men.”
“I suppose the interest is genuine enough once it sparks. But your woman never lights her own fire.”
“Romantic history?”
“Nightmarish, protracted. She takes a long time to get the message.”
“Politics?”
“Reactive. Depends on whom she’s browned off with—and sooner or later, that’s everyone she’s ever laid eyes on. I’ve wondered if she’s carrying on with MacBride to spite her mother. She’d never tell her ma outright. But it might satisfy Roisin if the news slipped under the back door.”
“Republican?”
“You’re not getting the picture. Sure, stuck on the right boyfriend, she’d smuggle bazookas in her boot across the border with the best of them. With Angus I expect she’s stitching Union Jacks for the Apprentice Boys.”
“You don’t seem to think much of Miss St. Clair.”
“I’m getting catty. It isn’t attractive, is it?”
“No, it’s entertaining, but I’m beginning to wonder what MacBride sees in her besides the obvious. And the affair’s been on for a couple of years.”
“She is nice to look at. She’s no dozer once you get her intrigued. And with all that resentment, well—she can get scrappy in a corner. I imagine Angus likes a good fight.”
“As long as he can win.”
“Exactly. Besides, there’s a beguiling frailty to Roisin. One of those women who can spend all day in bed. I don’t know if she gets migraines, but she should. She makes you want to take care of her.”
“So far you’ve described a well-dressed rabbit.”
“That’s not fair,” Constance insisted, with discipline. “Roisin can be fractious, but when you smooth her back down she is sweet. And to see her thrive on the merest tidbit, that you like her blouse or her sofa—her childhood must have been appalling.”
“Aye,” Farrell murmured. “What’s sad is, she’s still looking for what the rest of us gave up on long ago.”
“Farrell O’Phelan, if you think you’ve given up on it, you’re fooling yourself.”
He put his arm around her shoulder, but absently. She liked it when he absorbed himself elsewhere so she could discreetly study his face. It never bored her. The eyes so deep-set, the nose so lumpy and Roman, those drastic bumps and hollows sculpture for the blind. She could see leading a pair of pale, unsighted hands to his head: Now, this is a face. This is a real face.
Because Farrell himself never bored her. And she knew everything—his distaste for red cabbage, his shirt size. Name a season and a year for the last forty-three and she could tell you precisely what he was doing and even when he got up in the morning—though a few years there were easy: at noon to drink till 5 a.m., like reporting for work. Yet there remained something insoluble about him; he was like Flann O’Brien’s infinite bureaus within bureaus, so that every time when you thought you had drawn his very self out of his own drawer there was one more inscrutable bit inside; she would have to pick out the next speck with tweezers, and would shortly be found scuffling the floor, having dropped him, the part she didn’t understand and therefore the only part that mattered, the clue.
Farrell stirred. “You’re cold,” said Constance. “Let’s head back. There’s a powerful lot of phone calls to return. And two boys from Turf Lodge rang up, with word they’re to be knee-capped. They want to spend the night in your office.”
“Check their story; only the outer room; no beer.”
“Then it’s time for Oscar’s, isn’t it? I know the food is desperate, but when you ignore them they’re hurt. They miss you.”
“What they miss is our sixty-quid checks. No, I’ve something on this evening.”
“Oh.” She did not know everything.
“I’ll ring you when I get home,” he offered.
“That would be lovely.”
“… We had dinner together last night,” said Farrell.
“Yes.”
“… and the night before.”
“Yes.”
“And lunch! And probably will dine tomorrow night as well!”
“Of course, if you like,” she said graciously. “If you’ve nothing else planned.”
“What do you bloody want, then?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to!”
Farrell scowled into the collar of his overcoat. They did not hold hands.
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