Death at Christy Burke's (45 page)

“The gun, Finn. Tell me about it.”

Finn,
sans
the shady glasses, regarded Brennan for a long moment with his cool grey-blue eyes, then pulled up two chairs, and they sat facing each other.

“You have to understand the effect the events of 1969 had on some of us here.”

The history was well known to Brennan. Nineteen sixty-nine was the start of the new Troubles, in the North. Civil rights protesters were clubbed and beaten by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the B Specials, a force founded by an Orangeman who once said in a speech that he “would not have a Catholic about the place.” Their allies in the Loyalist paramilitaries began firebombing Catholic homes and businesses. In 1969 in Derry, the Bogsiders set up barricades to keep the RUC out and took to throwing petrol bombs at them. The Battle of the Bogside.

“Thousands on the Loyalist/Protestant side joined paramilitary groups to have a go at the Nationalists,” Finn said. “That’s when things got so bad the British Army was sent in. And
welcomed
, even in some Catholic quarters, as you may know, Brennan. But they’ve long since worn out their welcome. Meanwhile, back in Belfast, rumours were making the rounds that the
Irish
Army was coming across the border, or the Catholics were about to rise up — the massacres of 1641 all over again. Anyway, it all culminated in brutal mobs descending on the Falls Road, shooting into people’s houses and setting them on fire. Nearly two thousand people lost their homes, the vast majority of them Catholics.

“Where was the IRA in all this? A handful of veterans from the old days scrounged a few weapons together and opened fire on the mob and the B Specials. If not for these old IRA hands, and a few young Volunteers, the entire Catholic community might have been destroyed. But where was the rest of the IRA? Sitting on their arses here in Dublin, dithering about the future of the movement. How far left should it go? Not only were the IRA leaders obsessed with politics, they didn’t have any guns! They’d let things slide. Well, Northern Republicans were fed up with Dublin. Early the following year, the armed-struggle faction — the Provisional IRA — split from the politicos — the Officials.

“Your grandfather Christy was after us all to round up every rifle and pistol and pot and pan, and bundle them all into lorries and take them up North. Which we set out to do. But he wouldn’t wait. He knew where to get his hands on a supply of guns and he did so, and he fired up one of our trucks and headed to the border in it. Seventy-six years old he was at the time, not a healthy man, but he was hard-headed and determined to do things his own way.”

“Runs in the family, wouldn’t you say?” Brennan remarked. There was more than a bit of that in himself; he couldn’t deny it.

“Em, well, anyway the oul man is thinking he can make one last contribution to the cause. He’s heading north in the dark of night in an unmarked vehicle, one that doesn’t say Burke Transport anywhere on it, and he takes a roundabout route to get there because he knows people in Monaghan, and likely stops to pick up a consignment there. When he passes Emyvale he notices a car pull in behind him, and it stays on his tail until he’s only about a mile from the border, and then this car whips by and veers in front of him and forces him to stop. It turns out this is Garda Special Branch, two of them in a car. One gets out and comes to Christy and demands to see what’s in the back of the truck.

“‘How good are you with a gun?’ the garda asks oul Christy.

“‘I’m brilliant.’”

In spite of himself, Brennan had to smile at that.

“‘All right,’ the garda says to him. ‘I could lose my livelihood here. So do this right. Put a round through the shoulder of my coat. Then get on the move. On the way by, fire one at the rear wheel of the car. Our man’s in the front on the radio, so make sure you go for the rear end! Don’t come back through Monaghan. God go with you!’

“And the garda pulls out the shoulder of his coat away from his body, and Da fires a round through it. The man staggers back, playing out his role, and Da grinds the lorry into gear and goes forward. He fires a round into the rear tire of the garda car and another into the boot, races for the border, and gets across, then makes it to the outskirts of Belfast, where he meets his contact and unloads the weapons for the struggle. He turns around and comes back by way of Crossmaglen. And does he crow about it? He can’t, except to me.

“There was an uproar about the gunrunner who shot at the guards, who were powerless to stop him; the story was, he nearly killed them. But he didn’t nearly kill them and he didn’t try to kill them. Nothing like that at all. Anyway, the garda who collaborated with Christy on the sly got to help the cause and keep his job, and everybody was happy. Oul Christy died with a smile on his face a few months later. Went out in a blaze of glory.”

“Good man!” Brennan exclaimed, without even intending to.

“The gun Christy fired was a Russian Makarov PM, black with the communist star engraved on the butt of it. Russian bullets lodged in a garda car. Not too much trouble for the gardaí to put two and two together if they ever found that gun, so Da had it buried in the tunnel beneath the pub, and I left it there. Kept it as a souvenir.”

“How did Christy get hold of a gun like that?”

“That’s the sort of question you don’t want to be asking, Bren, even to this day.”

“Well, somebody used that gun, formerly kept on the premises of Christy Burke’s pub, to kill the Christy Burke’s vandal.”

“You can rest assured it wasn’t me.”

“I believe you. But that doesn’t mean the guards will, if they connect the gun to the building we’re sitting in right now.”

Michael

The morning after the gun revelation, Michael was sitting in a taxi, barely listening to the amiable chattering of the driver. Michael was preoccupied. There was someone he had to see. Something he had to know, about a body that was transferred from one place to another and then wrapped for disposal.

He paid the driver and thanked him, then stood for a minute, getting his bearings and gathering his thoughts. He looked at a truck parked off to the side, then walked towards it. There was something slick in the open cargo area of the truck, a spill of some kind. Suddenly, there was the sound of feet hitting pavement, and Michael whirled around. A man had come up behind him. They stared at each other. Michael could see the anxiety and fear in the other man’s eyes.

“Is there something you’d like to tell me?” Michael asked him.

A long moment of silence, then a barely audible, “Yes. Yes, Father, there is.”

“Where?”

“In the front.” The man gestured to the vehicle. “Nobody will bother us there.”

When they were seated with the doors closed, the man said, “I know they’re going to search here. The guards.” He began to tremble.

Father O’Flaherty waited for what was to come.

“He was blackmailing me. The vandal. He made an anonymous call to me on the phone and threatened to expose me unless I paid him off. Said he knew the truth about me and would make it public. And he did just that, when I told him to fuck off with himself and burn in hell. He painted a sly accusation on the wall of Christy Burke’s, then called me again. I tried to suss out who he was, but I couldn’t. He hung up the phone and went at Christy’s wall again. A bunch from the pub stood guard but could never catch him at it. Which was fortunate for me; my secret would have been revealed. Anyway, when he telephoned me the third time, I was ready for him. I stayed on at Christy’s after closing time. Went down into Finn’s tunnel. I knew there was a gun there and I knew it was loaded. I took it.”

Michael looked him in the eye. “Have you heard the latest news? That gun was used in the shooting of two Special Branch detectives in 1969.”

“I heard.” From the sudden pallor in the man’s face, it looked as if he had just heard it for the first time. After a few moments, Michael prompted him to continue his story.

“I told him, the blackmailer, to meet me at Christy’s at three in the morning, and I made a promise that I’d finally pay him to leave me alone. I had my vehicle parked nearby, the one we’re using now as a confession box! I stayed inside Christy’s, waiting, and helped myself to a couple of jars of whiskey. Then I went outside, brought the vehicle up onto the little patch of grass by the pub, retreated to the shadows with my glass, and waited. The man arrived and couldn’t see me around the side of the building, so he started to spray-paint the wall again. I put my drink down, brought out the gun, forced him into the back there.” He indicated the cargo area behind himself and Michael. “And I shot him twice in the back of the head. I had planned to take him out in the country and dump him, so I started to drive away from Christy’s. Then I panicked and wanted to get rid of him right away. So I stopped. I knew about the old freezer that had been abandoned beside the black church. It had been there for weeks. People piled their rubbish there. I cleared the stuff off and dumped the body into the freezer. Made sure the lid was on good and tight. I put all the sacks of rubbish back on top of it and took off. Came back here and spent an hour cleaning up the blood. Then I got into bed and got the shakes and stayed awake till it was time to get myself washed and dressed for Christy’s. Took my regular seat and tried to behave in my normal way. And I guess I did. Nobody even knew the fucker had been killed. The young fellow who worked in the pub a couple of mornings a week, Kevin, he came to work and, if he saw anything out of the ordinary, he must have just put things back to normal and carried on.”

Both men jumped in their seats at the sound of a car approaching. But it turned and went out of sight. The man was silent for a few minutes, then turned to face Michael.

“How can a person betray the people who love him, Michael, the people who trust and love him most in the world? I can’t begin to fathom it. To me, the sun rose and set in his eyes. I killed him, Father! I launched myself at him and beat the life out of him. He didn’t have a chance, from the time my fist slammed into the side of his head.”

Michael stared at him.
What does he mean?
What’s this about a beating, and a betrayal?

“He played our games, carried us on his shoulders, walked us to school, fought our battles for us, took a bloody nose for us. Taught us to be strong and true. But he was neither of those things, not when he became a man and —”

“You’re not talking about the blackmailer now, the vandal. You’re talking about —”

“My brother. Rod. I killed my own brother, Michael. God forgive me!”

Michael sat there in the cab of the truck, staring at Jimmy O’Hearn. He could hardly grasp what O’Hearn had just said.

“Our big brother, the man my sisters and I adored all our lives, betrayed us as soon as the opportunity came up to make a small fortune and keep it all for himself. A crowd of rich Yanks were looking at our family boat business. And Rod knew he could keep all the winnings if he knocked the rest of us out of play. He forged some papers that made me out to be mentally defective! He created some kind of criminal record that was meant to implicate my brother-in-law, Niall, in Donegal. All along I thought we’d been victimized by a crooked lawyer, that Rod was a broken, disappointed man living in poverty in New Zealand. But he created a whole new life for himself and a new name. Ted Hannington. We would still write to Rod O’Hearn at the post office address he kept; every once in a while, he’d send us a pathetic little note meant to show us he was living rough. Couldn’t afford to fly home to Ireland. Didn’t want anyone to see what he’d been reduced to. Well, I scraped up enough money to fly to New Zealand. Didn’t tell the rest of the family. I wanted to scope out the situation first. I found Rod. And had my eyes opened in short order. He tried to cover his deeds with a lot of blather, but I knew. I went at him in a fury, killed him with my bare hands. I weighted his body down with stones and threw it into the sea. When they finally found it, they identified it as Ted Hannington. My sisters still think Rod’s alive and unwell in New Zealand.”

It took an enormous effort for Michael to hide his agitation as the confession unfolded.

“But then,” O’Hearn said, “the vandal came into the picture. His name, I learned when I confronted him, was Noel Girvan. He was a low sort of person who had left Dublin and gone out to New Zealand to work, and he met some Irish people, discovered I had been there and, with one thing and another, he figured out the whole wretched business. When he lost his job and came back to Ireland, he saw the chance to make a living by bleeding me dry.”

O’Hearn leaned forward, put his elbows on the steering wheel, and dropped his head into his hands. He remained motionless for nearly a minute, then sat up, looked in his rearview mirror and said, “It won’t take the guards long to zero in on a man who drinks regularly at Christy Burke’s and has marine engine oil in his possession. That’s what their lab tests will show on the dead man’s clothes. From when he was in the back of the truck. Blair McCrum was in the pub a while back, blathering on about traces of something — plant food or fertilizer — that got on a victim’s clothes when he was kept in the killer’s shed or his truck, whatever it was. That was a wakeup call. I’d mopped up the blood but I’ve got marine oil back there all the time. Now I keep cleaning it out. I even poured a bit of regular car engine oil in its place. I changed the oil, so to speak, Michael! I wonder if the guards will be fooled.” He made a sound like a strangled laugh.

The guards would not be fooled, Michael reasoned, even though they had not seen what Michael had seen on his earlier visit to the Poolbeg Marina. On that first occasion, when Michael had planned to tell Jimmy O’Hearn the truth about Rod’s betrayal, he had noticed Jimmy cleaning the oil from the bed of his truck. Michael hadn’t thought anything of it, until he saw last night’s news report showing the guards collecting oil samples to compare with the substance found on the victim’s clothing. That’s when it clicked into place for Michael. It would not take the police long to determine that it was boat oil, not car oil, that they should be looking for.

O’Hearn concluded his terrible story. “The man had to die. Girvan. I could not, and cannot, bear the thought of anyone knowing that I killed my own brother, or that we as a family were betrayed from within. I confess to you, Father O’Flaherty, that I killed Roddy, but nobody will ever hear that from my lips again. They’re going to get me for Noel Girvan, but not for Rod O’Hearn.”

Michael waited with Jimmy until the guards came to take him away.