Bloodland: A Novel (12 page)

Yes, he says.

Knot still in his stomach.

One of the conditions – and Jimmy’s not sure if this comes directly from Bolger himself or just from Phil Sweeney – is that the job is to be exclusive. He must suspend or abandon any work he currently has in hand and must turn down any new offers of work.

For the duration of the project.

Which could take anything up to six months or a year. And occupy his every waking hour. But also help pay off his mortgage.
And
enhance his reputation. Phil Sweeney has said he wouldn’t be ghosting the book, he’d be getting a co-credit. Which, in turn, could lead to any amount of other interesting work.

Jimmy scrolls down through a few more search results.

Squirming in his chair as he does so.

Because while this whole thing is clearly a no-brainer, there’s also something deeply insidious about it, about the way it’s making him re-evaluate the Susie Monaghan story … which all of a sudden has begun to seem inconsequential and tawdry. Why should he spend his time and energy writing about some coke-addled soap star, the argument appears to run, when he could be writing about national politics, and at the highest level?

Quite.

But how is he supposed to explain that to Maria?

In his head, he tries to – spins it one way, then another, contextualises it, rationalises it, brings in the old man …

Ends up feeling sick.

At eleven o’clock he turns off the computer. He tries to watch some television, but can’t concentrate. He goes to bed and tries to sleep, but can’t do that either. There is a loud bass sound thumping through the walls from across the corridor. It’s those students in the apartment directly opposite his. Now and again, he can hear their raised voices as well. What are they arguing about? Climate change? Afghanistan? Quentin Tarantino vs. Shakespeare? Which of them left an open tin of beans on a shelf in the kitchen for five days? They’re two guys, maybe three, it varies, modern languages, engineering, he’s not sure. He hung out with them once and after two hits on a joint felt so stoned he forgot his own name.

The bass thump goes on and on, works its way into his dreams. When he next looks at the bedside clock, it is 4.35, the thump still there, but muffled now, more like a heartbeat.

He looks over at the window.

It’s dark, too early to get up, but he knows that further sleep is out of the question. His
thoughts
are up. And it’s the same queasy merry-go-round – excitement about meeting Larry Bolger, shame at having to blow off Maria, excitement about meeting –

He climbs out of bed.

What better way to start a new assignment anyway than in a full-on state of jangly-nerved sleep-deprived anxiety?

Over the next few hours, Jimmy sits at his desk, drinking coffee and trawling through more of the same kind of stuff he was trawling through yesterday. He takes copious notes. He may not be entirely comfortable about the arrangement but he still wants to be prepared. Nor does he have any illusions about Larry Bolger and the kind of book
he’ll
probably want to write. As a senior politician, Bolger’s impulse will be to whitewash everything, to be self-serving and epically disingenuous. But the process itself will be fascinating – watching the big beast up close, getting to see how his mind works.

There was a time when Jimmy and his old man shared a fascination for another and considerably bigger beast, Richard Nixon – a man about whom they conversed and theorised endlessly. A key event in this shared mythology was the occasion in 1972 when Hunter S. Thompson rode with Nixon in the back of a presidential limousine between campaign stops. All they talked about, apparently, was football, but Thompson still managed to transmute the base metal of this banal conversation into psychological gold.

As a result, in some obscure corner of his mind – and the feeling has been building slowly, quietly, since yesterday – Jimmy sees the Bolger assignment as
his
chance for a backseat ride in that same limo. He knows this is a bit fanciful, but he also knows that it’s how the old man, if he were alive today, would see it too.

At eight o’clock, Jimmy has a shower and gets dressed. He puts on a jacket and tie. He eats a bowl of cereal and drinks more coffee. He checks his e-mails and does a quick round of a few newspaper websites. He puts his notebook into his jacket pocket. He heads out a few minutes after nine.

The hotel is up in Ballsbridge, so he can walk there in about twenty or thirty minutes. Jimmy has a motorbike, an old Honda, but he only uses it occasionally. He prefers to walk whenever he can.

It’s a beautiful morning, sunny and fresh, though it’s supposed to rain later.

Walking along Strand Road, towards Sydney Parade Avenue, Jimmy slows down and stops. His plan was to phone Maria later on and tell her what he was doing, but now he doesn’t think he should wait. Now he thinks he should tell her what he’s going to do, not what he has done.

Be straight with her.

Whatever about hedging his bets with his editor, doesn’t he owe Maria that much?

As he crosses the road and walks towards a seafront bench, he takes out his phone and looks for her number.

He sits down. The tide is in and is lapping gently up onto the strand.

A middle-aged lady walking her dog strides past.

He presses Dial.

It rings. She’ll be at work. Maybe this is unfair, maybe he should –

‘Jimmy?’

‘Hi, Maria.’

The knot tightens in his stomach.

‘What’s wrong?’

How does she know something is wrong?

‘Nothing is wrong … well, I mean, in the sense that –’ He pauses for a moment and regroups. The whole point of this was not to dissemble. To be straight. He breathes in, looks across the bay at Howth. He starts explaining.

It doesn’t take him long.

Then silence.

Oh fuck.

‘I’m sorry, Maria.’

He can hear her breathing.

‘Don’t be. I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m the one who opened up and talked. I’m the one who trusted a
journalist
.’ Her voice rising. ‘I believed you, Jimmy, I really did, but … Larry Bolger’s memoirs? You’ve got to be –’

‘Look, I –’

‘No, Jimmy, don’t, please.’

He doesn’t.

After a long pause, she says, ‘My sister, right? She was a fuck-up, a disaster-zone, and maybe she was responsible for what happened, I don’t know, but I was prepared to face up to the fact, and to live with it. Because I thought you were interested in getting at the truth. That’s what you told me.’ She pauses. ‘But Larry Bolger?’ She laughs at this, her tone cold, almost harsh. ‘Jimmy, do you really think that someone like Larry Bolger is going to tell
you
the truth?’

‘Maria –’

She hangs up.

Jimmy swallows. He lowers his hand slowly and stares at the phone. After a few seconds he flips it closed and puts it away.

He stands up.

He could have made a stronger argument. He could have pointed out that the truth of what had happened on that day would always elude them. That all they could ever do was speculate.

Whereas with Bolger …

But to what end?

No amount of logic can reverse what he has just done.

He pictures Maria sitting opposite him, talking like an express train.

Those eyes, the freckles around her nose.

After a moment, he refocuses. He has no choice. He stares out to sea, follows the line on the horizon. Then he turns away. He looks at his watch and starts walking. He has thirty minutes to get to the hotel.

He doesn’t want to be late.

*   *   *

Bolger paces back and forth across the living room. He’s got a large mug of black coffee in his hand and takes occasional sips from it. He’s wearing a suit and tie. The place has been aired, a combination of open windows and multiple assaults from a pine-fresh aerosol spray. The stench of cigarette smoke lingered for most of the previous evening, heavy and acrid – not unlike the atmosphere between himself and Mary.

But that’s all been taken care of now.

He came clean with her as they were going to bed, or at any rate made it appear that he was coming clean. First, he apologised – cried and begged her to forgive him. Then he explained. The two things you’re never supposed to do. Who was it said that? Wellington? Disraeli? Anyway, he’s pretty sure it doesn’t apply to wives. What he told her wasn’t untrue, but it was still something of a convenient retrofit. He told her he was in utter despair over this book he’s writing and that that’s why he’d fallen off the wagon. He also told her that Dave Conway’s phone call had been fortuitous. That Dave might just have come up with the perfect solution.

A bit too neat, perhaps, but it did the job. Besides, where else could Mary go with this? He’d only had a lousy few drinks, after all. It’s not like he was off with someone’s wife, or having his way with one of the hotel maids. Apropos of
which
, however – he did see a tiny flicker of panic in Mary’s eyes when he told her what Dave Conway had in mind, i.e. that a young journalist would come here to the hotel and help him out. He’d said ‘journalist’, not specifying male or female, and he let her stew in that for a while, let her picture some gorgeous young bird with a degree in politics and history from Trinity, someone she’d be forced to leave him alone with for hours on end each day, as they debated, and exchanged views, he inevitably becoming aroused in the presence of such an attractive, brainy young woman, and she, with equal inevitability, falling under the spell of the older man’s undoubted charms.

But at that point he had her where he wanted her, so he casually dropped in a gender-specific pronoun. ‘He’ll be here at around ten in the morning.’

He.

Checkmate.

Mary was all for it after that, of course – suddenly conciliatory and accommodating. She had stuff to do in town and would get out of his way. Then
she
apologised. To
him
. For overreacting. He waved this off.

The soul of magnanimity.

Bolger doesn’t feel quite so smug now, though. He didn’t sleep well last night, tossing and turning until the early hours, his mind teeming with partial reconstructions of the previous afternoon. When he got up he felt irritable and had to restrain himself from snapping at Mary. Now he’s afraid he might snap at this young journalist. Even though he’s quite ambivalent about the whole thing anyway.

Feels Dave Conway maybe railroaded him into it.

The journalist’s name is Jimmy Gilroy, Dec Gilroy’s son, as it turns out. Of Marino Communications. Dave Conway says he’s perfect for the job – smart and fairly experienced, but not to the extent that he has an ego to fuel, or an agenda to push. The balance is just right and Bolger should have no problems getting him to do what he wants.

Still.

Can you trust these bastards? Because what he’s also reticent about is exposing his inner demons – not to mention his indolence, and indiscipline – to a complete stranger …

For all his notoriety, Bolger considers himself a very private person, even a shy one, and there’s nothing about this situation that he finds reassuring.

He looks into his coffee.

And then glances at the time on one of the displays.

9:47.

He looks over at the drinks cabinet.

What do the Italians call it?
Caffè corretto
. A corrected coffee.

Leave it to the wops.

A coffee with manners on it.

How civilised can you get?

After a moment’s hesitation he goes over to the cabinet. He opens it and takes out the bottle of Jameson. He unscrews the cap and pours a drop into his mug of coffee. Then a second drop, a slightly extended one, a glug really.

He tastes it. It’s nice. Though the coffee
has
gone a bit cold.

He knocks the whole thing back in one go.

Start again.

He pours another substantial measure of whiskey into the mug, puts the bottle away and closes the cabinet. He goes into the kitchen and turns on the kettle. There’s some coffee left in the cafetiere. He pours this into the mug. When the water in the kettle boils, he adds some of that into the mix.

He takes a sip.

Hhmm.

It is just as he’s coming away from his second visit to the drinks cabinet a few minutes later that the phone rings.

It’s reception.

‘Mr Bolger, there’s a Mr Gilroy here to see you.’

‘Right,’ Bolger says, passing the mug under his nose, as though it were a fine claret. ‘Send him up.’

*   *   *

The first thing that strikes Jimmy is how small Bolger is. He’s smaller than he looks on TV. He’s also a little heavier, but that could well be a more recent development.

Bolger extends a hand and they shake. Then he waves Jimmy in. ‘Take a seat. Make yourself comfortable. Would you like something, tea, coffee?’

Jimmy enters a large, expensively furnished living room, lots of chintz, lace and mahogany. A deep-pile carpet. Some antiquey-looking stuff. No books. Above the fireplace there is a huge wall-mounted plasma TV screen.

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ he says, ‘I’ve already had enough coffee this morning to do me for a week.’

He sits at one end of a long sofa.

Bolger retrieves a mug from the dining table and carefully lowers himself onto a sofa directly opposite the one Jimmy is sitting in.

He crosses his legs and takes a sip from the mug.

‘So,’ he says. ‘Jimmy Gilroy. I knew your father.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Well, I
met
him a few times. I did one of those media courses. At Marino Communications. He was pretty good, I have to say.’

Jimmy nods. Most of the guys of Bolger’s vintage would have passed through Marino at one point or another and had at least some dealings with the old man – though they’d all have known Phil Sweeney much better.

Walking up here from Sandymount, Jimmy thought about turning back more than once. If he’d been struck earlier by how tawdry the Susie Monaghan story was, out on Ailesbury Road he couldn’t shake the idea that
this
story was potentially even worse, a spider’s web of cheap connections and called-in favours, of nods and winks, of underhand deals and impenetrable lies.