Aloysius Tempo (9 page)

On one side of the unit, each with a curtain draped over its cage, are the dogs. Sixteen of them chained up inside sixteen pens, all hungry and angry and hurting from slamming sore, filed-sharp teeth into steel bars.

On another side, a wooden crate, delivered for the occasion, with maybe a dozen swiped cats inside. The roaring dogs have silenced them all, and a look through the slats shows the creatures gathered together, in one quivering, defensive, clawed ball of terror.

I walk in front of the dogs, lifting each curtain in turn, a quick look to get an idea of its ferocity. I pick the meanest, most tragic looking animal, whip the curtain off, let it dance insanely, bashing its head and fangs off the cage, slavering as it watches me, demented by its training, by its desire only to kill.

I place my mobile on top of the cage, start up a downloaded, a generic recording of cats meowing, sending their infuriating, unmistakeable squeals into the personal space of this bursting, searing Staffordshire pit bull.

I haul long Roy up over my shoulder again, flip open the lid of the cat crate and look down at the hissing felines, at the beloved pets of people whose most distressing fears are being realised.

Roy is lowered in, head first, and right away the cats scrab and scratch, swipe and scrape and tear at his face. He is barely with us but as his eyes and lips lacerate and bleed, as the cuts multiply on his face, he is reacting, pulling, blinking, somehow now acknowledging what is happening.

I let him spill in further, folding his neck on the floor of the wooden box, his hair, clothes and skin now sucking up the scent of terrified moggies, their spittle, their piss, their blood.

And out comes Roy, my back aching now, and I’m thankful I have just one more place to put him. I pull the crate, tipping it over, leaving a wide open door for the cats to run for their lives.

They give it a few seconds, as I’m dragging Roy away, before they begin bolting out of their jail, dashing as far as they can from the dogs, searching for an exit.

I pull bloody-faced Roy to the pit, drop him down, kick him in, hear him give some kind of yelp as he lands on his side, his own blood smeared across his junk-fed face.

I walk to the cage, unhook the lock, watch as the mad dog bounces with furious savagery, its neck almost tearing its chain apart. I climb on top of its pen, detach the chain, feel the animal pull hard away from me, feel its tugging rage and the cage shaking as it senses prey, blood, death.

I drop down behind it, let it lead me to Roy, sniffing and snarling, barking insanely as it learns, with each step, more and more about the stinking, silent, still creature in the hole. I put my foot on its arse, just in case it needs any help, and push it into the pit.

As they say, the fight is won before you get in the ring.

The other dogs rampage around their pens at the sound of an attack underway. I collect my phone from the cage, cut the cat noises, film the footage I might need of Roy being pulled by his ear, by his head, hands, from one side of the pit to the other.

I film as the brick-shithouse, bulging-eyed dog goes for his face, as Roy gasps, throws an arm up in some kind of protest. It goes for his neck as Roy, high as fuck on heroin, confused beyond what his brain can take, kicks out at the uncontrollable viciousness tearing biscuit-sized chunks of flesh from his body.

I wait for as long as I must, checking the front door, checking the back door, not knowing when the fight fans will show. I watch as the beast locks onto Roy’s jawbone, pulls him again around the pit, painting the floor with thick, broad trails. I watch as it instinctively returns to his neck, sinking into it, easily crushing it. I calculate he cannot survive this, that he will depart sooner than I had expected – and on it goes, on and on it goes.

I stop filming, put the phone away, pace to the back door, check the window, open the door wide, leave it that way. Cats begin, one by one, to exit at bullet speed all around me.

It won’t be long, I reckon, before a fast decision is made to clear that red mess up, to mop up what has happened here.

November 2016

I AM sitting at the
Sunflowers
and I hear a woman’s heels snap across the floor in a sort of inappropriate asymmetric beat, a rhythm that suggests the wearer is limping.

As she sits beside me, the faint scent of a recent glass of white wine arriving at the same time, I am willing to bet a limb it’s Imelda.

Three months since her last communication and she flies – I’m assuming – from Dublin, so that she can sit beside me.

‘Well done, Aloysius,’ she says, and I can smell some out-of-season winter fragrance, some scent she is declaring herself with, some layer to hide the booze and long morning.

‘How so?’

‘Well done,’ she says, ‘with your stealth.’

Her accent lengthens that last word, tapers its ending silently down into the thoughtful quietness of the Van Gogh museum.

‘My stealth?’

‘You totally dropped off the radar. And soon after, funnily enough, Roy Bickerstaff dies in a very terrible dog-related accident.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘And when I say terrible … ’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘I mean terrible. They found him with no face in the boot of a Volvo at a scrap merchant’s. His mates did it, the German coppers reckon. But the mates are claiming they were just trying to hide him because he would draw too much attention. I’m hearing, Aloysius, they’re claiming someone drugged Roy and dragged him to a pit, set an eight stone pit bull on him.’

I say, ‘They would say that wouldn’t they?’

I look at her and she is looking at the
Sunflowers
, coat bundled beside her on the bench, laptop bag over her shoulder. Her hair is freshly dyed, a fuller silver, all pulled back tight over her head, all showing the rich maturity of her face, the tough beauty of her blossomed skin under the lights above. Those glowing blue eyes turn to me and she shakes her head.

‘I reckon,’ she says, ‘and it’s a mad reckoning – but I reckon you went to Munich on a bicycle.’

I turn back to the blooms, think how there are other versions of these scuffed masterpieces, all by the master’s own shaky hand, scattered all over the world. None of them are the same as the one I am looking at right now.

She goes, ‘You cycled all the way to Munich, left us running around airports wondering where you were.’

She goes, ‘Tell me Aloysius, did you actually go on a bicycle? I can’t work it any other way in my head. Did you cycle five hundred and whatever miles – and back – on a fucking bicycle?’

I shrug.

She shakes her head, goes, ‘
Unglaublich
.’

I shrug.

‘Unbelievable’, she says, and she can believe what she wants.

She looks around her, looks back at me, goes, ‘It’ll keep you fit anyway, this lifestyle of yours. You certainly do have the pulse of health about you.’

And I too had noticed it had been good for me, that the journey had toned me up and got the engine – the heart, lungs, system – relishing the pace, enjoying the workout. I too had considered how nobody notices a man on a bicycle, and that he’s a tricky thing to follow from the skies over the pedal metropolis of Amsterdam.

I go, ‘What happened to your leg?’

‘Eh?’

‘You’re limping.’

She goes, ‘I just can’t walk so well in these bloody heels after a few hours.’

‘Why bother with them then?’

‘Whatever,’ she says.

‘Why wear those heels if they don’t suit you, as a person?’ I say.

‘Whatever,’ she says. ‘Just to confirm, you are of course not a suspect in anything, Aloysius, so I don’t need to say any more about Munich.’

‘I know that,’ I say. ‘You should ditch the shoes though.’

‘Okay,’ she goes, ‘okay, fuck’s sake. I stubbed a toe as well, which explains the limp.’

‘What did you stub it on?’

‘On three hours of sleep and five or six gin and tonics.’

‘Painful?’

She goes, ‘Tell me, are you depressed? Is that why you come here? To wallow in your depression? You and Van Gogh, brothers in misery?’

And I’m thinking how she’s maybe on to something there, that I come here to go low, to deep dive to where it’s quiet and still, to do some kind of hiding.

I bring my complete lack of knowledge about what I’m looking at here and try to get lost in among it. I come here on mornings when I’ve found myself cleaning my teeth for that little bit longer, when I’ve been filling holes in my mind with other people’s days, other people’s ages.

I turn to her, ‘Have dinner with me tonight.’

She says, ‘I will.’

*

We go Indonesian. She’s in navy blue with those same heels and hasn’t changed her hair and looks close to beautiful when we meet. I don’t know what to say and she doesn’t say anything as the waiter settles us at the table.

She looks up, as if about to declare an interest in what to have, and says, ‘
Fingerspitzengefühl
.’

I go, ‘Sorry?’

She goes, ‘You heard. It’s a – how best to put it in English? – it’s a lightness of touch, a way of dealing with things, of getting necessary things done in the best, smartest way. Situational awareness, emotional intelligence. You have it in spades, Aloysius.’

‘I do?’

‘You do,’ she says, scanning the menu, ‘but you know that anyway.’

‘Know that I have it in spades?’

‘No. You know the word –
fingerspitzengefühl
. Sure you’re fluent in German.’

‘I am?’

‘Yes. And Dutch. And French. Your Russian’s not bad either. A smattering of Hebrew and Arabic as well. And, funnily enough, your Irish is perfect.’

I go, ‘Imelda … ’

She goes, ‘Shhh. I want you to stop lying now, Aloysius. I want you to stop it.’

And she’s shaking her head, her face telling me as sincerely as it can that she no longer wants to deal with the outside, that she really does want to get to the inside.

I look back to the menu and say, ‘It’s your turn. You’re going to be doing the talking tonight. That’s why we’re here.’

She goes, ‘No problem at all. I plan to be an open book, no problem at all.’

And I don’t believe her.

She says, ‘You’re annoyed that we put all that work into getting you and then, apparently, just let you go. Isn’t that right?’

Whatever.

She goes, ‘But we didn’t do that at all. I was waiting. I had to wait for Munich to happen. I wanted to see what you would do. You needed to get back to work yet you knew my eyes were all over you.’

‘I hope you enjoyed losing track,’ I say.

‘I did, but only for the right reasons.’

‘Whatever,’ I say, ‘it’s done now. No more talking about it. Some things have a natural end, Imelda, even if you can’t see that.’

‘And some things have a time when they should begin,’ she says.

She tells me I was ditched as a newborn, found in the woods off a tree-lined road in Tempo, County Fermanagh, in 1976. She says the belief is that one of two men could be my father, and that one of those men died in an Irish border gunfight between soldiers and the IRA. We eat as she tells me I was fostered by nuns, handed over for schooling to a priest-run and now infamous state institution in County Louth aged three, that I faced abuse until I was sixteen. At some stage I headed to Dublin, then London and, at twenty-three, was known to be working in campsites on the south coast of France, cleaning bathrooms, cutting grass, screwing tourists and getting high.

‘There are a few blanks,’ she says, ‘but we have you mingling with French-Algerians in Marseilles, doing some security work, a bit of door work, in and around the city at that time. In the ’90s we have you doing some mercenary work in the Balkans, a couple of big paydays for a few jobs, some undercover stuff that no Western government wanted to touch. That bled – we understand – into some paid time with the Chechens, which ended when you were taken by the Russians and given what the Americans think was a spell in prison. I can’t imagine that was very nice. We don’t know what went on, but we do know you somehow got a claw hammer smashed into your right knee. Luckily you were given a new state-of-art ceramic-and-titanium knee by the Ruskies and it seems to work very well. To the best of our knowledge you made your own way back through Europe, just like any backpacker would, but stopping off in Israel, Gaza and Spain. You taught English in Barcelona for a time, and worked your way back to Ireland. That’s when your case came up, the fact that you did not have an Irish passport.

‘Our friend Martin, who was at the time taking an interest in people such as yourself at the Department of Foreign Affairs, got you all fixed up. Funny thing is, we understand you never had a passport of any kind, which leaves me baffled as to how you did all that travelling. Can you shed any light?’

I say, ‘None at all.’

She goes, ‘For eighteen years, Aloysius, you were pretty much invisible. You went dark, dropped off the radar. Do you know how rare that is?’

I say, ‘No.’

She goes, ‘For the guts of a whole generation, your life is a closed book. What I do know is that, evidently, you are well-trained in mind and body, and that you get stuck in and thrive, sometimes creatively, in adversity. To add to that, right now you’re a very highly rated fucking assassin who has still never once – not even once – been questioned by police. And you wonder, dear Aloysius, why I am interested in you?’

I say, ‘I just travelled, just walked and worked and did my thing. I didn’t have a home to go to. Don’t read too much into any of it.’

She stares, shrugs, says, ‘This is great food, isn’t it?’

I say, ‘Yes.’

She calls the waiter. We order desert, more wine, and sit in a strangely comfortable silence.

‘You’re up next, soldier,’ she says, drinking. ‘Fire away with whatever it is you want to say.’

I go, ‘You want me to work for your agency.’

‘Yes.’

‘Which, on behalf of some kind of forces, whether inside or very close to the Irish government, wants some people dead.’

‘Yes.’

Immediately I like her bluntness, her answers to my statements.

I say, ‘You want me to kill Irish people for the Irish government.’

‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

‘Can’t tell you.’

‘How many?’

‘Four.’

‘And then?’

‘Then that’s it.’

‘Bollocks.’

She looks up, ‘Bollocks? Not sure I understand what you mean there, Aloysius.’

‘I’d be a bit of a loose end, don’t you think?’

She goes, ‘Ah, this paranoia again. You think I would want you to work for me and then I would have you dispatched? Is that what you’re saying to me?’

‘Yes. Makes sense. I’d know too much.’

‘I would also know too much. And no one is planning on killing me, are they?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘They’re not. And what, for example, if your country needed your services again and you were dead in a ditch?’

We eat.

‘Why me?’

‘Seriously? You still want me to answer that?’

‘Yes. Is it just because I’m hard to find, that I get lost easy?’

‘It’s more than that. It’s because you barely exist. Because your moral code is fucking haywire, if there even is one. Because I simply don’t have to spend the next year telling you that for the greater good some people have to die because you already know about how this stuff works. Because, Aloysius, you are pre-trained, ready for action. Because you have killed before in Christ knows how many situations. Because in the last two years alone you have killed thirteen people and – if your ratings system is to be believed – no one has as much as looked at you.’

I say, ‘Where do you get your information? And don’t tell me it’s your own. Don’t tell me it’s Dublin. The network just isn’t big enough. The budgets aren’t big enough.’

She licks around her teeth.

‘The Americans,’ she says. ‘Martin has some sort of ask-no-questions thing going on, been that way for years. Don’t ask me about it.’

I say, ‘I’m asking.’

She goes, ‘When they need help looking at Brits, at French people, Irish people, whatever, we know people in Ireland who will sort it out for them, for the Americans. We can get ridiculously close in situations where they can’t even get onto the same street. The Americans are expected, we are not. In turn, if we need some background on a person of interest out there somewhere distant in the world, they will get that for us. They can see most things, find out a lot of stuff. Yes, you went dark out there, but we got quite a bit on your past. They make great friends, the Americans, but terrible enemies. So, as I said, Martin sorts it all out. He’s a genius at that stuff. He does all those Irish-American handshakes, you know. He works that whole Celtic diaspora thing and I can tell you it goes a long way.’

I go, ‘Do the Americans know what you want me for? Why you’re looking at me?’

She shakes her head. ‘No. They wouldn’t care anyway. Doesn’t affect them, keeps us all friends. They’d just look the other way on a case like this. Just don’t kill any Yanks, basically. Truth is, Aloysius, the CIA see the British as minor rivals. They don’t like sharing intelligence or being beaten to anything by the other guy, by the likes of MI6. But they always see us as friends, always in some way useful to them, never a threat to them. All said and done, our relationship is more special with them than anything the Brits have going. It’s in our interest to keep it that way.’

I push my plate to her.

She looks at it, looks up.

‘One thing bothers me,’ she says, ‘and I’m just going to say it, right?’

‘Right.’

‘I’d feel a lot more comfortable if you were a patriot.’

‘Now that’s a weird thing to say.’

She goes, ‘What I do, and what I want to do with you, is for Mother Ireland. These are things to be done, ultimately, for very good reasons: for the greater good of the state, for the Irish people, for the heart of the nation, for the society that lies beyond our own lives. If you were to come on board in the current circumstances, I don’t know if I would have a full understanding of your motive.’

She folds her hands, that power move she does. The waiter asks if they’d like anything else. I ask for the bill.