Irregulars (31 page)

‘Thirty-three,’ he says.

‘Hmmm?’

‘I’m thirty-three. My age.’ He smiles in the dark.

She lifts her head from the hollow of his neck and smiles, and there is such beauty in the smile, and such sadness, that he thinks he would like to stay here, on this bench under this willow tree inside her for ever, growing old as one with this woman, as old as the tree. She takes his face in her hands.

‘Old enough to know better, so.’

‘And young enough to keep trying all the same,’ he says, smiling sadly in the half-dark, knowing, knowing, this will not last, this peace.

‘Yes,’ she says, not believing it, feeling old, ancient in her deception. Images of dead boys in a morgue, dead men on a butcher shop floor stealing away the blissful oblivion she has briefly found in O’Keefe’s arms.

43

O
nly hours after parting from O’Keefe, Nora stands on the sloping cement floor of the morgue and wills herself to lift the sheet. The body beneath it is small, and she realises that she does not need to lift the sheet to prove to herself what she already knows; to prove to herself that what O’Keefe had told her is true.

The mortuary man lingers behind the swing-doors as she has instructed him.

‘I’ll be forced to ring the guards if you don’t take yerself away out of here, Miss,’ he’d said to her as she pushed through the doors into the cool air of the morgue, demanding to see the bodies of the two boys. ‘I will call for the police, so help me God, miss.’

‘I am the police,’ she’d told the man, holding out her CID badge. ‘So help
me
God.’

I have to see for myself
because, though I know it is true, know what Dillon and his men are capable of, I must see it with my own eyes. Because I saw the boy
—she lifts the sheet—
yes—
confirming it—
this boy, one of the two who had come to me at the desk of the hotel that night nearly a week ago. This is the boy who’d waited in the lobby while his friend had gone up to Murphy’s room to deliver his message.

And not as a boy then but a young soldier, a small cog in the wheel of war, was how she had seen him, kicking his heels while he waited, his face fixed in a surly scowl. His face now purple and grey and misshapen with the bruising that comes from a bullet to the back of the head.

You had a part in this
, she thinks, and swallows down a wave of nausea.
Like you had a part in the killing of those men in the butcher shop. You are the pointer. The pointer bitch directing Dillon and his hunters in the way of their prey.
How many dead men had she marked for execution? And boys now. She notes the red welted burns visible on the soft underside of the dead boy’s arm and knows they are the marks of torture. Dillon’s work. And she had been part of it. Even before Seán had told her, she’d known something terrible had happened. And O’Keefe, she knows, will probably never find the boy he seeks alive.

Holy mother Mary forgive me
, she prays, a reflex, as she struggles to arrange the sheet over the body. Like tucking in one of her younger brothers when they were little. The image rears unbidden, and sorrow knots in her throat, tears welling in her eyes. She lifts the sheet from the other body, forcing herself to look. This one younger. Thinner. Hollow around the cheek-bones, downy-skinned. Again the bruising on the face like someone has punched it from the inside.
This boy is too young for a bullet.
Tears run down her cheeks, the image of her brothers as young boys, snug in their bedsheets, a savage mockery of the memory of love and family and goodness that she feels is now gone from her life for ever. Shot out of it in a war she wants nothing more to do with.

‘Wake up, you fucker! Wake up, you Tan bastard!’

The words are bellowed only inches from his face, and O’Keefe registers them from the distance of sleep. He opens his eyes, and the light from a single hanging bulb assaults his senses and he slams them shut again and scrabbles for the solace of unconsciousness.

‘No more of that, you sly cunt. Wakey, wakey, Peeler.’ The words softer now and followed by a hard slap across O’Keefe’s face. His eyes wide open this time, and the man hunched above him mercifully blocks the harshness of the light.

With consciousness comes the pain, the back of his head a fusillade of agony that blinds O’Keefe and sends him turning to the wall, willing his hands out so that he may rise to his knees, but finding them bound behind his back. He rolls, straining against the pain in his head, half on his side, his legs doubled under him, to vomit—thin, yellow streams of bile and the last whiskey he’d drunk—against the whitewashed wall beside him.

Black stars wheel in his vision, and over the sound of his retching he can hear one man tell another that it won’t be himself mopping it up, and the other man telling the first that it won’t be himself either, seeing as it wasn’t he who’d clattered the Peeler so hard when they’d pinched him.

Peeler
. To O’Keefe it seems a lifetime since he has been called this, and with such disdain. And with this comes the realisation of who these men are. He struggles to focus on them, slumping his back against the wall, shuffling his arse under him and away from the glutinous pool of his sick. He hacks and spits into the pool, a bloody streak of mucous, and takes in the men standing above him.

Two men in suits, one with a striped tie loose like a noose around his neck, the other with his tie a tightly knotted triangle as is the fashion, both of them hatless, hair slicked with pomade and combed back from the forehead with a roguish flip. Young men, younger than himself. Early twenties. They are both lean and tall, Dublin accents. One of them is strikingly handsome, with blue eyes and angular, almost Slavic features, and he takes off his jacket and hangs it neatly on a hook beside the door. He then begins to roll his sleeves up his forearms, and O’Keefe knows what is coming.

There is a single chair, bolted to the floor in the centre of the room.

And it is not a room but a cell, O’Keefe realises, taking in its dimensions and windowless, subterranean aspect. He has been in such rooms many times in his life, but never on the floor, never in the chair under the hanging bulb. What he cannot remember is how he has come to be here. He recalls dropping Nora back to her digs and stepping off his Trusty and then, nothing. He has an absurd pang of worry for his motorbike, as if it were an unminded child. If these men are who he thinks they are, he’s seen the last of his Trusty.

‘Get him up,’ the man in shirt sleeves says to his colleague, ‘into the chair.’

‘We’ll not wait for Charlie, so? He’s on his way from Wellington barracks.’

‘We will, but no harm in softening him up a bit, wha? This cunt battered Micka O’Shea half to death. He’s it coming anyway.’

‘What about the lads upstairs? They won’t mind, will they not? He’s their pull, their case …’

‘Charlie’s the bossman on this, sure. This fella bate shite out of O’Shea and plugged the gun merchant and his men full of holes. They’re happy to let us have a go at him.’

Awareness dawning, O’Keefe thinks back to the CID man Just Albert had beaten in the baths of the Achill doss-house. No name on the badge but only a number.
Battered half to death
. The CID man isn’t dead yet, he thinks, and that’s something at least. He blinks and tries to focus on the men. ‘Any chance of a cigarette, lads, before we start?’

The man in the shirtsleeves laughs. ‘Cheeky fucker, looking for a fag. Well, fair play to you, Peeler.’ He turns to his colleague. ‘Give the man a burner, Robert. It’ll be his last for some time I’d imagine.’

Dragged up and sat in the chair, O’Keefe takes the proffered Sweet Afton and accepts a light from the suited man. He takes a deep pull on the cigarette and begins to cough, the cigarette falling from his mouth onto the tail of his untucked shirt, smouldering there for a moment. The man takes it up and waits until O’Keefe’s coughing subsides before placing it back in his mouth. Then he lights his own and Shirtsleeves’ smokes and leans back against the wall. These men are prepared to wait, O’Keefe thinks. Their anger held in check by their respect for protocol. Or perhaps they hadn’t known, or liked, the man O’Shea well enough. Still, he had seen himself what men did to those who hurt or killed their colleagues. He’d seen it in the Peelers in Cork and it hadn’t been pretty. He has no illusions now.

There is silence as they smoke before O’Keefe says, the cigarette pinched in the corner of his lips, ‘If it means anything, I battered nobody. I’ve no idea who your man is, O’Shea. How did you even know to look for the likes of me?’

‘Big fella with a scar and a yardbrush moustache on his mug, the desk man at the Achill says. And the lad yis left tied up in Burton’s Hotel. That’s not you at all is it?’ Shirtsleeves says, smiling.

‘It sounds a match, but why me? What made you come for me when you got the description?’

‘I go where I’m told and I lift who I’m told lift and no one tells me why or wherefore, Peeler. Yours was the name and address I was given.’

O’Keefe shrugs and smokes, relishing the bite of the smoke in his throat, thinking how this could be his last fag, as the man had said.
How had they known about me?
he wonders, but not with any real vigour. Had someone recognised him? Or Just Albert? Had they lifted Just Albert? He cannot imagine Just Albert touting him to men such as these in return for a reprieve from the same torture that awaits him, but O’Keefe knows, as certain as night follows day, that every man will talk eventually, if the pain is applied properly and over a long enough time. Just Albert is unique but he’s human. He decides it doesn’t matter, but that he would have liked to have found Nicholas, if only for his father’s sake. His mind turns to his father and his mother. Another son, lost to war. And what a stupid fucking war to be lost to. One he could have avoided altogether.

He pulls again on the cigarette, and a finger of ash drops onto his shirt front, his jacket nowhere to be seen. The smoke is harsh and wonderful. Last pleasures. Like a man in front of a firing-squad. Nothing certain in this life, he thinks, and maybe they will not kill him, but he wouldn’t give odds on it. Not if they think—not if they know—he was in the Achill doss-house or Burton’s Hotel. Their very professionalism, in defence of a colleague, would demand it.

‘And you’re a fuckin Tan,’ the suited man adds, mildly, as if this explains everything O’Keefe has coming to him, ‘the Tans killed my brother in his bed. In front of his kids and his missus, two year ago.’

‘I was a Peeler but I was no Tan. And I never shot any man who wasn’t shooting at me first, and no man in his bed,’ O’Keefe says, but without conviction, knowing that what he had done or not done during the Tan War does not matter to men such as these so much as what side you fought on and what your side had done to their side. O’Keefe has no doubt the man is telling the truth about his brother, and that Tans or Auxies—or even Peelers like himself—had shot his brother in his bed in front of his family. And now he would pay for it.

‘You broke up O’Shea,’ Shirtsleeves says, ‘and that’s enough for me. Whatever about the Brit gun dealer and his men. Either one’s enough, and Charlie’s got the right hump over the gun seller. Crown spooks are demanding a head for him and it looks like yours fits the hat. You’ve finished that?’ He points with his cigarette before dropping it and crushing it under his brogue.

O’Keefe nods and savours a last drag. The suited man comes and takes the butt from his mouth, and O’Keefe has a flashing memory of Nora Flynn, her hands on his face, her face close to his. Sadness wells up in him at what he has lost. God knows, if they do let him live, what state he’ll be in when they’re finished. He allows himself a final memory of Nora and then shoves the memory away.

Shirtsleeves takes off his belt and wraps it carefully around his hand to protect his knuckles.

O’Keefe says, ‘Right so, lads, mind the face. I’ve a portrait scheduled for Thursday.’

44

T
he Foley Street door is opened by the young, mute girl and she admits the two men. The interior of the brothel is dark in contrast to the afternoon light, and Charlie Dillon and Jimmy Boyle wait until their eyes adjust to the dim hallway before following the girl into the parlour.

The room at first appears empty and smells of stale perfume and whiskey soaked into faux-Turkish carpets. Jimmy takes the odour of the whiskey over all other smells and his mouth fills with saliva and his hands begin to shake. He shoves them in his trouser pockets to still them.

‘A drink, gentlemen?’

Dillon and Boyle turn to the silhouette of a woman seated on a
chaise longue
in front of the parlour window, the outside light a harsh white through the lace curtains, making it difficult to see the woman’s face.

‘Don’t mind if we do,’ Jimmy says, and the driver slips behind the bar before Dillon can stop him, taking a bottle of Paddy from the shelf behind and glugging a generous measure into a glass. ‘You want one, Charlie?’

Dillon stares at his driver. ‘No, I don’t, Jimmy.’ This is not how he had wanted to begin.

‘A seat then, please,’ Ginny Dolan says, indicating two chairs across a low table facing the
chaise longue
.

Boyle refills his glass and follows Dillon to the chairs, setting down the whiskey and taking out his packet of cigarettes. He offers the box around and has no takers, the brothel madam smiling, he thinks, as she shakes her head, but it is hard to tell, seated as she is in front of the window.

‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?’ the woman asks, directing her question to Dillon. ‘You said it was urgent business in your phone call.’

‘I’ll not beat round the bush, Mrs Dolan,’ Dillon says, leaning forward, hands on his knees. He squints and tries to hold her eyes against the light of day behind her. ‘We’re looking for your man, Albert. You said on the ringer he’s not here.’

‘He’s not, you’re welcome to look if you care to …’

‘Missus, if I wanted to search this …
house
… for him I’d have twenty detectives and soldiers in here in a minute and you’d not have so much as a plate unbroken when we left. So save yourself the bother and tell us where your man is.’

‘I didn’t get your name, sir.’

‘Captain Charles Dillon, Free State Army Intelligence,’ Boyle says, setting down his whiskey, ‘And I’m Jimmy Boyle, CID.’

‘Ah, a spy and a copper. I feel so much safer now.’

Boyle nods, reaching into his jacket for his badge, and Dillon tells him to leave it.

Turning back to Ginny Dolan, he says, ‘This is not a friendly visit, Mrs Dolan. Your man is wanted for the attempted murder of a detective officer and the murder of three men in the employ of the Free State. I will have this house in shreds, I will, if you choose it.’

‘Twenty odd years I’ve run a business in these streets, Mr Dillon, and never once did a single serving soldier of the British Army ever threaten me. And now with the Free State of Ireland only a wet week old, I’m already threatened by an Irishman.’

The woman smiles pleasantly as she speaks, and this enrages Dillon. ‘You tell me where he is, whore, or I’ll burn this fucking stew to the ground. See how long it takes for your doxies to jump ship to one of the other houses …’

‘Captain Dillon, tut tut, sir.’

‘Do you think I’m having you on, Missus? Do you?’

‘I think you’d do well to ask your masters first before you threaten Ginny Dolan with burning, Captain Charles Dillon of the Free State Army Intelligence.’

‘My masters give me reign to do what I need do in the pursuit of enemies of the Free State.’

‘Including the destruction of Irish businesses and the harassment of loyal, Irish citizens?’

Dillon smiles a cruel smile. ‘Your loyalty isn’t worth a ride on your sorriest brasser, Missus, to the people and government of Ireland.’

‘So you’re threatening me, a poor, widowed woman, on behalf of the people of Ireland then, Captain Dillon?’

‘I’d mind my mockery if I were you, madam. Good whores are hard to come by if they’ve no house to tup in.’

Ginny Dolan pauses and turns to Jimmy Boyle. ‘Mister Boyle, why don’t you make yourself another straightener there like a good chap while I speak to Captain Dillon here?’

Jimmy Boyle looks to Dillon, and Dillon, flummoxed for the moment, pauses. ‘There’s nothing … he can hear anything you’ve to say.’

‘I’d rather think you’d hear what I’ve to say yourself first and then decide.’

Boyle shifts his gaze from Dillon to Ginny Dolan and feels a chill wash over his back. There is something about the woman that unnerves him. She is not afraid of Charlie and certainly not of himself. He stands and crosses the room to the bar for more whiskey before Dillon can stop him.

‘Now then, sir, will I tell you why you’ll be taking your threats away and leaving me be, will I?’

‘Go on, then, tell us. You’ve backbone, I’ll give you, for a pimping whore madam.’

‘Oh, I’ve more than backbone, Captain Dillon, believe you me,’ she says, her smile fading. ‘I’ve friends among your masters and among the departing Crown.’

‘And what friends are these?’ Dillon asks.

‘You’re an Irishtown lad, aren’t you, Captain?’

For a second Dillon is thrown. ‘I am, though what’s it …?’

‘Forty-five the Strand Terrace, is it? And your dear mother and two sisters and poor invalided grand-da live together, snug as bugs don’t they, in that lovely Irishtown terrace house?’

His face darkens. ‘And what of it?’

Ginny smiles again. ‘Oh, nothing of it, sir, only it would be a shame if any fire started here should send sparks down Irishtown way. Life’s terrible hard for a family with no home and young, pretty sisters such as your own. It can be fierce dangerous on the streets what with the type of men that will do just about anything to a young girl for the price of a jug or two …’

‘You whore, are you threatening my family!?’

‘Now, now, Captain Dillon. I do nothing of the sort. I’ve a mind to find my missing son Nicky and will have nothing or no man stop me. That’s all. Perhaps you might care to look for yourself. There’s a substantial reward in the offing should you find him.’

‘You rickety bitch. I should put a bullet in you right now, and then you’d be no harm to any upstanding man or woman.’

‘You’re calling yourself upstanding, Captain?’

He reaches into his coat, comes out with his Luger pistol and slaps it down onto the table with a clatter that makes Boyle spill his whiskey at the bar.

‘Put that away, for the love of God. Do you not think I’ve done my sums and paid who needs paying already? Just in case something ill should befall me? Let’s call it Ginny Dolan’s life assurance, shall we? There is no reason for us to be enemies, Captain Dillon. Grander men than you have benefited from my friendship.’

Dillon stares hard at her for a long moment, unable to believe how this meeting has turned on him. The notion of finding and killing this madam’s doorman is gone, leaving only fear in its place.
Not mad
, he thinks.
Dangerous.
There is a part of him that would just shoot the woman, solve this problem as he has solved all others in the past years. But there exudes from this whore a menace older, darker than those he has encountered in the Crown forces or in his former colleagues now aligned against the Free State. Her threats, he feels, are utterly real, and her malice boundless.

He takes the gun back from the table and holsters it. ‘Come on, Jimmy, he’s not here …’

‘I’ve enjoyed your visit, Captain Dillon. Really, I have.’

The madam is smiling as they leave.