Irregulars (22 page)

‘Was it Nicky’s jacket he was wearing?’

‘It was. His mother confirmed it.’

‘How did this youngfella get it? He’s not had a pair of shoes in his life by the state of his feet.’

‘You mean you didn’t ask him?’ The detective cracks a grim smile as O’Keefe passes through the doors into the hallway, where he is met by another man—larger, dark-eyed, jowly and wearing a trilby. Thick eyebrows and a bruiser’s scowl. Another detective, O’Keefe realises. Behind him is a woman—small, poor, a black knitted shawl covering her hair and shoulders. Mrs Dolan has stopped her at the door. She has a hand on her forearm and is nodding and whispering to the woman. Just Albert stares at O’Keefe and the two detectives.

Castle men
, O’Keefe reckons, using the name by which plain-clothes detectives are still known to most Dubliners. Their other collective name is
G-men
. The Dublin Metropolitan Police has been allowed by the Free State to continue to police the city and its detective squad, G Division, is based as it always had been, in Dublin Castle. Originally assigned to political crimes, Michael Collins’ gunmen had eliminated most of G Division during the Tan War. So these must be new lads, O’Keefe thinks. Recently promoted and in no hurry to stick their snouts into the business of civil war and its waging.

‘Who’s this?’ the new detective says to his partner.

‘He’s been hired by Mrs Dolan to find her son. He was with the Peelers.’

The larger detective talks over his partner as if the fact of O’Keefe’s former career is of no importance to him. ‘And we know for certain that’s not her son in there?’

‘It’s not him.’

O’Keefe can picture this detective in an interview room in a city barracks, his sleeves rolled up, looming over some poor bastard. Instinctively, O’Keefe’s eyes drop to the man’s knuckles, to the scarring he knows he will find there.

‘What’s your name? Have you any identification on you?’

‘No.’

‘So you’ve no way of proving who you are, so.’

‘I’m doing the woman a good turn. Nothing more.’

‘Not much of one so far. How much she paying you? More than I’m fucking paid no doubt.’

O’Keefe ignores the big man. Policemen in Ireland complain about their wages the way cocks crow the morning sun up. He’d been no different himself. ‘How long have those boys been dead?’ he asks.

The big man leans into O’Keefe and O’Keefe can smell onions and meat and stout on his breath. ‘And I ask you again. Who in the name of fuck are you to be asking questions? How do I know you weren’t the one who’s after scorching them boys’ mickeys and putting two in the back of their heads? How am I to know?’

The first detective intervenes. ‘Give it a rest, Pat. It’s not like we’re going to be asking anyone any questions ourselves, you know as well as I do.’ He holds out his hand to O’Keefe and O’Keefe takes it. ‘I’m Mulligan and this is Wynn.’

‘Seán O’Keefe.’

‘For fuck sake,’ Wynn says.

‘You were a Murder Man yourself weren’t you?’ Mulligan continues.

‘No, but I investigated my share of them.’

‘You’ve the cut of a Peeler. The way you examined the
body …’

‘You saw that then?’

‘I see what I want to see. What I’m allowed see, now’days.’

O’Keefe nods. ‘I was in Cork, during the Tan War. I know how that is. Still, I managed to lag the odd fella. War doesn’t give a man an excuse to do what was done to those boys.’

‘A lecture now. You’re not in the Peelers any more,’ Wynn says.

‘I’m only trying to find the boy for Mrs Dolan. Is that the mother of the other lad?’ O’Keefe asks, nodding at the figure down the hallway.

Mulligan shrugs. ‘She might be. She reported her boy missing a week ago. A gurrier, the youngfella is. Has a record for robberies, dipping bags and the like. For all I know, she’s mother to the one we thought was Nicholas.’

‘Was he known to be with the Irregulars? Or the youth wing … what are they called? The Fianna … Na Fianna?’ O’Keefe says.

‘The lad you’re looking for … he’s with them?’

O’Keefe nods. ‘And you’ve no idea who the other boy is?’

‘No, and we’ve no record in any of the Divisions of any other boys reported missing. Being in the Irregulars might explain that.’

‘It could,’ O’Keefe says. ‘You wouldn’t, by any chance, know where I might find Felim O’Hanley?’

Both detectives smile at this. ‘Jesus, I hope she’s paying you well if you’re looking for him.’

‘It’s not the money, believe me.’

‘Kind hearts are easily broken,’ Wynn says, shaking his head.

‘Happy hunting, gentlemen.’

‘To you too, Mr O’Keefe. Let us know if you find anything.’

Over his shoulder O’Keefe hears the big detective call to the woman he has brought. His voice is surprisingly gentle. ‘Mrs Fallon. It’s time now.’

The woman takes her arm from Mrs Dolan and passes O’Keefe on her way down the hallway.

O’Keefe, Ginny Dolan and Just Albert wait at the entrance while the woman goes through the first and second sets of swing-doors. O’Keefe moves to step outside, but Ginny Dolan stops him. ‘Wait.’

Moments later a keening cry rends the silence of the morgue, and Ginny Dolan nods and pushes through the entrance door to the outside.

Again, they wait, this time on the street—Ginny Dolan smoking a cigarette in a long holder—letting the cool night air wash over them, listening to the night sounds of the city. A goods train clattering through Amiens Street station nearby. Faint shouting and laughter from Monto.

Some minutes pass and the woman emerges from the Morgue, no sign of the detective with her this time. Tears streak down her cheeks and O’Keefe thinks of an expression his mother used.
The tears cutting ditches in her face.
Ginny Dolan once again takes the woman’s arm, and this time hugs her close.

‘I’m sorry for your troubles, Mrs Fallon,’ O’Keefe hears her say. ‘Take this.’ Ginny Dolan presses what O’Keefe assumes to be a roll of banknotes into the woman’s hand. ‘For the funeral.’

The woman says something and Ginny nods and says, ‘Of course. My men will find them. They’ll be taken care of.’

Finally, the woman pulls away, saying that she will not accept a lift and needs to walk, to think of her baby, Thomas. Her oldest boy. A good boy she says, but for that bastard Jeremiah Byrne. She’d always known it would be that Jerry who would be the death of her son ….

‘And do you know where this Jeremiah Byrne lives?’ Ginny Dolan asks.

‘Of course I do, sure isn’t it across the road from my own lodgings?’ And with this she begins to weep.

Thanking the woman and turning to O’Keefe, Ginny Dolan says to him, ‘Come in the back of the car with me, Mr O’Keefe.’

O’Keefe has known this was coming and feels powerless to avoid it. He wants to help the woman, more now than ever, but is afraid of what this will entail. This is no longer the simple search for a missing boy. He climbs into the back of the Bentley with the madam while Just Albert cranks the car’s starter.

The woman says nothing for a long moment. He senses the depth of her worry, her fear, and under these, the mass of her rage. At him perhaps, for not finding her boy. At the men her boy has left her to join in revolt. At the man or men who tortured and killed those two boys in the morgue. She had kissed those boys like they were her own. There was none of the joy O’Keefe had expected when she discovered that her Nicholas was not one of them. There had been only relief, and then with it, a new terror.

Finally: ‘How did those boys die, Mr O’Keefe?’

‘They were shot. Executed. Two bullets in the back of the head.’

‘Was that all?’

O’Keefe pauses. ‘Yes, that was all.’

‘You’re lying to me, Mr O’Keefe. I can smell it.’

He looks at her now. ‘They were …’

‘They were hurt before they died, weren’t they?’

O’Keefe nods, wondering how she knows this. As if reading his thoughts, she says, ‘I saw the bottom of that boy’s feet.’

‘We’ve no way of knowing if Nicholas even knows those lads, Mrs Dolan.’

‘That boy was wearing his jacket.’

‘Still.’

‘You’ll continue to look for my Nicky, Mr O’Keefe.’

It is not a question.

‘I will of course, Mrs Dolan. I’ll do what I can, but…’ He pauses.

‘Yes?’

O’Keefe does not speak for a moment. ‘I think the police need to be kept in this, Mrs Dolan. They can help us find Nicholas.’

Ginny Dolan laughs bitterly. ‘They’ve no notion nor means to look for Nicky, and you know it as well as I do. Nor have they any notion of finding who killed those two boys. They’ll write it off to the Irregulars or the Free Staters and be done with it. And even if they did find Nicholas, they’d have him up in front of a judge charged with treason or some such and hauled off to industrial school before you could say boo. They’d love to do that to a son of mine, the bastards, and I’ll not give them the pleasure. I hired you to find Nicholas, Mr O’Keefe. And now I want you to find who killed those two boys.’

O’Keefe has a strong urge to do just this, but knows what his chances are. ‘I’ll do my best, if it’s possible. But you must know, that things happen in war and sometimes, there’s no one brought to book.’

‘Torturing a young boy, two young boys, is an act of war, Mr O’Keefe? Is that what you’re telling me?’ There is a hard edge to her voice.

‘No, not at all. Not to you or me or any civilised soul. But there are men who do things in war and use war as an excuse for doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do. And there is something about this war, a civil war, that makes people
more
ashamed of what’s being done, I reckon. Of all of it. On both sides. I just don’t think …’

He feels he is talking in circles. Why can’t he come out and say it? He will try to find the killers because he does not think anyone else will. But there has been so much murder in Ireland in the past few years that the deaths of two boys could very likely pass unnoticed by a people, by institutions, inured to murder and wanting only peace. Free State or Republic, O’Keefe knows, the people of Ireland do not care one way or the other which one comes to pass once the shooting stops and they can go about raising their families again, making a wage. In a way, he thinks, this makes the people of Ireland more willing to tolerate outrages of violence in the name of achieving that peace. A whore’s son involved with the Irregulars would warrant little sympathy, even one as well-bred and educated as Nicholas, let alone the street robber on the table inside the morgue. As for the other boy, it wouldn’t matter. Normal rules have been suspended and all is fair in this civil war, once a peace is somehow achieved.

‘You sound like a civilised soul yourself, Mr O’Keefe, with all your fine ideas about war and peace. Your father had the same pretty way with words. A civilised man, your father, in his own manner. Are you such a man, Mr O’Keefe?’

He is stumped for the moment, and then catches the warning. His father owes a debt to this woman and it is O’Keefe’s to pay.

‘I try to be,’ he says.

‘Then you find my Nicky your own way. Find those killers if you can.’ Ginny Dolan’s eyes shine in the darkness. ‘But mind you, my Albert … he’s not so civilised as you claim to be.’

There is nothing he can say to this.

32

T
hey park the Bentley on George’s Dock and walk the warren of lanes that lead away from the river. Just Albert appears to know them well.

‘You lads, come here, you,’ Just Albert says. He waits as a ruck of boys, lounging with youthful menace on crumbling tenement steps, rises and makes its way over. There is an autumn evening chill in the air, bolstered by the seep of fog from the river.

‘Which building does Jeremiah Byrne live in?’ O’Keefe asks as Just Albert moves off into the shadows of the laneway.

‘Who wants to know?’ one of the boys says.

‘Never you mind. Which building?’

‘I was only sayin’, mister, don’t be gettin’ the hump on yeh.’

Just Albert returns and stares hard at the lad before handing him a shilling. The boys smiles and pockets the coin.

‘Third on yis’r right, first floor, the one with no windies in it. And by all means, tell the cunt I sent yis. Me brother’s gonna have the bastard for his tea when he finds him.’

As they approach the building, curious children in the lane gather and follow them at a safe distance, holding out their hands before moving away, seeing something in Just Albert’s eyes that frightens them. The coins are silent in his pockets as he walks, his fists clenched and held at his sides as he mounts the steps of the tenement.

‘First floor the youngfella said.’

‘I heard him.’

A man sitting halfway up the steps and clutching a bottle of cheap sherry looks up at them and then looks away. Albert notices and stops.

‘You’ve something to say, have you?’ he says to the man.

O’Keefe stops with him and takes the girder of his arm in his hand. ‘He said nothing, Albert, leave it. Sure, we know where the boy lives.’

‘He wants to tell us something, he does. Don’t you, pal?’ It is not a question. Light from one of the few unbroken lamps on the street is reflected in the man’s eyes, bloodshot and afraid. ‘Don’t you?’ Just Albert says again and his voice is nearer the growl of an animal than the speech of a man.

The man nods slowly and O’Keefe wonders if he understands. Then: ‘Only that yis are not the first come looking here for young Jerry Byrne.’

‘And how do you know we’re looking for him?’

‘Sure, ye’re wearing suits aren’t ye? And in my experience …’—the man burps and winces, something hot and painful in his throat—‘… anyone wearing a suit round here is looking for that young lad lately, for good or bad.’

Just Albert hands the man a coin, and the man takes it without thanks. ‘See?’ Albert says to O’Keefe. He looks down at O’Keefe’s hand on his arm and O’Keefe releases it.

‘It could be those detectives, the ones from the morgue. The Fallon boy’s mother told them the same she told us, no doubt. That this Jeremiah Byrne is involved … somehow. But we can’t assume he’s guilty of something, Albert.’

Ginny Dolan’s man ignores him for a moment, standing on the top step in the open door of the tenement building. He looks up and down the row of tenements and then back up at the dimly lit windows. There is no electricity in the flats, and rarely on the landings or hallways either, so the residents use tallow candles or oil-lamps when there is money enough, living in stygian darkness or going to bed early when there is none. The doorman says, ‘This Byrne lad would want to be praying no harm’s come to Nicky.’

‘More flies with honey, Albert,’ O’Keefe says, and feels a fool saying it.

‘Where’d you learn that, Mr O’Keefe, in the Peelers was it?’ They enter the building.

The entrance hallway is a sea of warped floorboards, the original tiles long stripped and sold or reused, and O’Keefe’s senses are struck by the smells of boiled cabbage, paraffin oil, scorched dripping; of black mould and crumbling brick and sweat and cheap tobacco. The walls and landing sing with the sounds of a baby’s crying and a man’s deep, hacking cough; the stuttering burst of a woman’s laughter; footsteps on the rotting floorboards above. The building is like a living thing, sweating, bleeding, heaving and dying a little every day.
Like all of us
, O’Keefe thinks, following Just Albert as he mounts the patchwork staircase, their way dimly lit by second-hand light from the few remaining gas lamps on the lane. Halfway up, they are forced to step over a sleeping child, wrapped in what appears to O’Keefe to be a burlap sack. The child shivers and flinches in its sleep.

As they reach the first-floor landing where they have been told the Byrnes keep their room, more children lie asleep, a huddled bunch of bodies on the floorboards outside a one-room flat with a torn sheet for a doorway. There is barely enough space to pass them by on the landing. One of the children, a girl O’Keefe reckons to be five or six years old, opens her eyes and looks up at them.

‘Are yis here for Jerry?’ she asks, as if expecting them.

Just Albert appears to soften at the sight of the children. He smiles at the girl in the half-dark. ‘We are, pet. Is he here?’

‘No. He’s gone ages, since the other men gave him a chase after he brought us some spuds and veg for our tea. Uncle John Keegan ate the bacon so we’s didn’t have any of that, so we didn’t.’

O’Keefe wonders who Uncle John Keegan is and whether or not he will meet him. He hopes, vaguely, that he will.

‘What other men?’ Just Albert says.

‘The other men Mam said was like Peelers but wasn’t Peelers. Men in smart clothes like yis’rs. Are yis Peelers?’ There is an innocence to her voice that cuts through the gloom and sour, stale smells of the landing.

‘No,’ Just Albert says, looking up and smiling without humour at O’Keefe. ‘We’re not Peelers, darling.’

‘And when was it these men gave the chase to Jerry, pet?’ O’Keefe asks.

The girl thinks for a moment. ‘Some days ago, at tea time. Do you have any grub, Mister?’

Sadness chucks against O’Keefe’s ribs. ‘I’ve no grub,’ he says, reaching into his pocket, ‘but here …’ he comes out with a fistful of coins, ‘take this and get some ray and chips and peas for you and the rest of the kids.’

The girl eyes the coins but makes no move to take them. ‘And do you want to touch my fanny for the scratch, Mister?’

‘Ah, jaysus fuck,’ Just Albert says. He turns for the curtained doorway to the Byrne flat.

It takes a moment for the words to register with O’Keefe, and when they do, he recoils. He has to force himself to lean back down and press the coins into the girl’s hand. ‘No, Jesus, no, pet. And don’t be … doing things like that, right? It’s not good for a young girl …’ He hears how lame and frail his words sound.
Like pissing on a tenement fire
, he thinks, and then regrets that his mind has summoned the common saying. There is no humour in it here, standing in this crumbling hallway filled with sleeping, hungry children.

O’Keefe tells the girl to go for food, and as he turns to follow Albert into the flat a scream shears the air, followed a second later by the dull impact of fist on flesh and bone. He yanks aside the curtain in the doorway.

In the weak, flickering light from a paraffin lamp, O’Keefe sees Just Albert standing over a naked man entangled in soiled bed clothes. The man’s mouth gawps open in a desperate search for air as he tries to rise from a mattress resting on pallets. A woman, naked as well but for a tattered shawl thrown round her shoulders, stands behind Just Albert, and she screams again and moves, lifting the room’s single wooden chair and swinging it at Albert before O’Keefe can reach her.

Just Albert steps inside the arc of the swinging chair and it bounces harmlessly against the wall, sending chunks of damp plaster cascading across the room. He grabs the woman by the hair as she stumbles past him and shoves her head first into the wall. There is a sickening thump and her skull leaves a deep, bowl-shaped dent in the soggy render. She slumps to the floor.

‘Jesus, Albert, that’s a woman,’ O’Keefe says, moving across the room before Just Albert can do any further damage.

The doorman’s eyes flare with threat. ‘And I give a fuck?’

O’Keefe stops and swallows back the words that rise to his mouth.
You should give a fuck. Only an animal wouldn’t.
But there is nothing he can say to him now, this woman likely not the first Just Albert has manhandled. Not in his line of work.

Just Albert crouches down to the man who is gathering the bedclothes around him to cover his nakedness. ‘Where’s young Jerry?’

The man shakes his head but still cannot find the wind to speak. Just Albert stands up and kicks him in the ribs. ‘Where is young Jeremiah Byrne?’ He kicks him again and O’Keefe hears something crack. The man yelps in pain.

‘Tell him, for the sake of Christ, John, tell him,’ the woman says, dragging herself away from the wall, tears shining in her eyes, pulling the shawl over her ghost-pale nakedness.

O’Keefe says, ‘What’s his name, Missus? Your fella here?’

The woman stands and darts towards the doorway, quicker than O’Keefe thinks possible. He catches her by the arm and tosses her as gently as he can down onto the mattress.

She rears up to sitting and spits at O’Keefe. ‘You fucker, you fuckin’ cunt!’

‘Now, there’s no need for that,’ O’Keefe says, wiping the spittle away from his jacket, hoping the woman does not have consumption or jail fever. ‘Just tell us his name. Is he Jerry’s father? Is he father to the kids in the hallway?’

The woman’s eyes fill with defiance now, sensing in O’Keefe someone who will not harm her. ‘You should know his fuckin’ name, yeh thick piece of Peeler shite. Yis lag him every fuckin’ week for something, leavin’ the likes of us with nothing on our plates at all.’

O’Keefe remembers the girl in the hallway. He pushes past Just Albert and grabs the naked man by the hair, lifting him to his feet and shoving him roughly against the wall. The man is larger than he’d thought, heavily muscled around his shoulders and thighs, a soft paunch around his middle that tells of beer and meals of bacon the children in this house never see.

He had meant to intervene, to keep Albert from doing such damage to this man that he unable to answer their questions. But something inside him has shifted. The thought of the girl in the hallway—of all the children in the hallway—going hungry because of this thing in front of him. He shields his mind, for the moment, from what else this man may have done.

‘Are you John Keegan?’ O’Keefe asks.

The man looks into O’Keefe’s eyes and looks away and nods. O’Keefe can feel Just Albert’s breath hot on his shoulder behind him.

‘
Uncle
John Keegan?’ Just Albert says.

Again the man nods.

‘Where’s Jerry? Are you his father?’ O’Keefe asks.

‘No, I’m not his fuckin’ da, I’m his fuckin’ uncle. That cunt’s his mother, but.’

‘So you’re not Jerry’s da and you’re riding his ma. Where is he?’ Just Albert says.

Petulance slips across the man’s face and into his voice. ‘How in fuck am I s’posed to know? The little git only comes round here lookin’ for grub and bringin’ grief on his poor mother. I’d love tell yis where he is but he’s not fuckin’ here.’

There is something about this man that reminds O’Keefe of so many he had lagged as an RIC man. It is the voice, perhaps, or the cast of face that so readily warps from tyrant to victim.

‘When was he here last?’ Just Albert says.

‘Day before yesterday, I think … when your mates were here. And then he legged it when he saw them, not leaving a penny in the pot for us at all or anything for the childer.’

O’Keefe leans in and puts his forehead against John Keegan’s forehead, pressing him back into the plaster. The man’s breath is rancid with beer and dead teeth. ‘He brought potatoes and veg for the kids, didn’t he, Uncle John?’

Something shows in O’Keefe’s eyes, and Uncle John Keegan cannot bring his own to meet them. ‘How should I know?’

Without taking away his forehead, O’Keefe reaches down and knocks the man’s hands away from where they are shielding his genitals. He grips the man’s testicles in his fist and squeezes, not hard but hard enough to give this man an idea of the pain that is coming if he does not answer his questions.

‘I heard you ate all the bacon, John. Did you eat all the bacon yesterday and not give any to the nippers sleeping in the hallway? Did you do that, John?’

‘What are you on about?’

‘Did you eat all the bacon and not give the nippers any?’

‘No, I …’

‘Did you?’ O’Keefe’s voice is a strangled grunt that sounds rough and foreign to his own ears. He squeezes the man’s balls harder.

‘Yes! Jaysus fuck! What’s that to do with anything?’

It is the voice that triggers something in O’Keefe. The whinging, pitiable victim in it. ‘And did you fiddle with that little girl out in the hallway?’

‘Jaysus, no!’

O’Keefe squeezes harder and tugs down on the man’s scrotum.

‘All right! Jaysus fuck, all right! Only when her mother’s not able is all. Jaysus, she likes it!’

Something red floods O’Keefe’s vision and he cocks his head back and drives his forehead into Uncle John Keegan’s face, the man’s nose shattering under the blow, blood spraying over his chin stubble and onto his chest in a fanlight splatter.

The woman screams. ‘You’re after killing him!’ She makes to stand and Just Albert turns to her.

‘Get out in the hallway and mind your babbies for once in your life,’ the doorman says.

The woman’s mouth opens to speak but closes again. She pulls the ragged blanket from the bed and wraps it around her as she exits the room. O’Keefe moves back a step, rubbing blood from his forehead with a handkerchief.

Just Albert says, ‘You tell me where we can find young Jerry. D’you hear me, bigfella?’

Still clutching his face, blood streaming through his fingers and pattering onto the floor, he nods. His voice is high and muzzled when it comes. ‘He works down the laneways by the fruit and veg markets, gaming punters, the quare youngfella. Tha’s all I know. I swear on the eyes of my …’

‘Don’t say
children
or I’ll kill you myself,’ O’Keefe says.

Uncle John Keegan goes silent. He looks away from O’Keefe back to Just Albert and sees something in the doorman’s eyes that starts him pleading. ‘Yis can lag me, for fuck sake. Lag me, take me in. I’ll leave here and not come back if yis lag me.’