Irregulars (5 page)

Gilhooley is little more than a boy himself, O’Hanley reflects. Eighteen, and yet so capable, loyal and brave. Rough, certainly, but a born leader.

‘Hit the bank then, Stephen, and may God guide and protect you.’

Stephen Gilhooley blesses himself and replaces his white butcher’s cap. ‘And you, Commandant O’Hanley.’ He holds out his hand and O’Hanley hesitates, inspecting the proffered hand for dried blood before he reluctantly takes it.

8

T
he Sheriff Street tenements where Jeremiah Byrne lives are two streets away from the Liffey quays. The buildings show grime-blackened brickwork and are hunched closely together, soaking up the daylight, forcing the autumn sun to fade its way up alleys, over chipped steps and onto the soft, grassless soil of fetid common yards. Jeremiah feels the chill of shadow as he shortcuts the warren of lanes leading to his home.

Like all Sheriff Street residents, Jeremiah knows every rat-run, every hidey-hole in the area. Residents pass through the open doors of neighbouring buildings and beat paths across what were once leafy gardens to access particular streets or dwellings. There is very little that is private in the tenements and, in this, Sheriff Street is no different from the rest of tenement Dublin. Outdoor toilets are shared, as are water pumps. Laundry lines are strung across lanes from building to building. Food, when it is scarce in one family and plentiful in another, is shared. Families of up to fifteen living in one room. Glass in less than half of all windows.

Jeremiah comes to the building that houses his family’s flat, and climbs the cracked and hollow-worn front steps, entering through the doorway that has been without a door since before he was born. On the coldest, wettest days of winter, sheets of scrap wood from dock pallets are sometimes nailed together and propped in the empty doorframe against the wind and sleet, and this is guarded by residents so that it will not be taken by neighbouring tenants for firewood. The fanlight at the top of the doorway is free from any pane of glass, and serves only to funnel winter winds into the building more efficiently. Years before, some resident had vainly stuffed rags in several of the empty gaps where now they sag like oily clots, blackened by time and smoke and cooking grease.

Sixty odd people share the Georgian house that had once been home to a single, wealthy family and several servants. Jeremiah’s flat was once a bedroom in this house. It is shared by his mother and her sister, his own four sisters and six male and female cousins and, occasionally, by his uncle. Of the children, Jeremiah is the oldest and the man of the family during times when his uncle, a carter, thief and opportunistic extortionist, is serving one of his numerous, if too short, prison sentences. Jeremiah knows that his uncle is free at the moment—has been for the past two weeks, though he has seen him only once briefly in that time—and says a small prayer. It is something he does rarely, and even then does it with the utter conviction that it is a useless practice, but he does it now; prays that his Uncle John Keegan has been lagged for something, anything and is not home and won’t be for a long time. He mimes a sloppy sign of the cross as he mounts the patchwork wooden stairs to his flat.

He fears his Uncle John. There are few in the tenements who don’t. But he fears more for his sisters when the man is around, and this is what has brought him home, if for only a few hours. It never occurs to him that it might not be safe to return home for any other reason.

‘Jerry! Ma, Jerry’s home!’ One of his sisters greets him as he reaches the first floor landing outside the flat.

The girl is six years old, as blonde as her brother and she hugs him tightly. Jeremiah hugs her back, something warm and liquid flooding his insides; the first touch of another human being since he’d stuck the knife in the fella in the laneway.

‘Sarah, pet. How’s me dote?’ he says, wondering briefly, as he has done in the past, if it was her hair, being so much like his own, that makes her his favourite. They are the only two of his mother’s five children who have blond hair, and Jeremiah also wonders if they share the same father. It is a question that can never be answered, and so is never asked, though many times, on the docks or on the streets of the city, Jeremiah will see a man with hair like his own and wonder,
Is that me da? Mine and Sarah’s da?

‘I’m grand, Jerry,’ the girl says, pulling away from him and taking his hand. ‘We got a flitch of bacon! Ma got it. I don’t know how she got it, but she got it and she told me fuck off and don’t be asking questions but we got it. Bacon, Jerry.’

Jeremiah knows how she’d got the bacon, and the butcher knows too, he thinks, and so will the butcher’s missus when she gets the itch. He musses Sarah’s hair and then smooths it back into place, his fingers lingering for a moment on the faded, frayed ribbon in her hair.

The poor thing could have a new ribbon, for jaysus sake
, he tells himself.
Next time I’m out I’ll reef it out of the hair of the first girl I see. A young girl could have a new fuckin’ ribbon at least.

He pulls his sister back by the hand before entering the flat. ‘Is Uncle John Keegan in, Sarah? Tell us quick ’fore I go in.’

Sarah shakes her head, the joy of the coming meal and her brother’s return washing from her features at the mention of her uncle’s name. ‘No, he’s out, Jerry, but he’ll be back, he will. He’s carting on the quays. He’s not in jail no more, Jerry.’ She looks up at her brother, her grip tightening on his hand, fear and worry in her eyes. A lump rises in Jeremiah’s throat at the thought of the man. The thought of him harming a hair on her head, the bastard. Her or any one of his sisters, nieces or nephews. The way he had harmed him. The beatings were only the half of it.

The bastard
. His mother and aunty—Jeremiah couldn’t give a ha’ penny ride for either of them. But the little ones. He wishes now that he hadn’t left his fish-knife stuck between the ribs of that fella in the lane the night before; thinking how he might have used it on his uncle, given half the chance.

He lets Sarah lead him through the tacked-up sheet that serves as a door into the one-room flat where his mother is sitting on the dwelling’s single chair at a table fashioned from a packing crate. She is drinking tea—Jeremiah thinks it is tea—from a cup with no handle. She wears her hair tied back, a thick swatch of grey at her crown from where her hair has grown since she last had it dyed the shade of brown she favours when she has the money. In front of her on the packing crate table, blood seeping through its wrapping of day-old newspaper, is the lump of bacon.

His mother turns as he enters, watches him as his youngest sister and two of his nephews now hug him and hang from his legs and arms, asking what he has brought for them. He smiles and tells them he has nothing for them.

Without speaking, his mother returns to staring out the open window at drying clothes dangling in the soft autumn air on a line that bridges the building across from their own.

‘Ma,’ he says, ‘I’m back and all, I am.’

His aunt emerges from behind a stained sheet hanging from a rope that divides the flat’s sleeping and common space so that his mother and aunty might have a modicum of privacy when they have brought punters home. They usually work in the alleys and lanes, but sometimes they bring their work to the flat if the chap has paid for a warm roll instead of one up against a wall. His aunt delivers the greeting her sister has refused to give.

‘And do you be wanting a medal, so? For your troubles?’

‘Aunty Pauline,’ Jeremiah says, lifting one of his sisters, Delilah, aged four, from where she is clinging to his leg. He nuzzles her hair with his face and, as he withdraws, spots a louse—one of many hundreds—clinging to an unwashed strand of the girl’s hair. He takes it between his fingernails, drags it down the length of the strand and crushes it. He scratches the girl’s head for her, serving only to awaken the remaining lice, causing the girl to begin scratching herself. He sighs—
Home
—scratches and feels the stirring of the lice in his own hair, under his arms, in his pubic hair.

‘Gone how many days and come back with nothing but his goldilocks and no pot to piss in even,’ his aunt says, not looking at him as she speaks, bending to feel the tea kettle hanging in the fireplace, feeling it cold. Then, to his mother: ‘And you, it’s my day for the chair, Madam Jump-up. You had it only bleedin’ yesterday.’

‘Fuck off away with you,’ his mother says, not taking her eyes from the window. His mother is the younger of the sisters, but pays the bulk of the rent on the room, and is thus its mistress when Uncle John Keegan is away. When he is present, Aunt Pauline and her husband rule the roost.

‘And you,’ his mother says, finally turning to Jeremiah. ‘You out gallivanting and see fit to come back skint as you left us. You think the world and her mother’s here to put food in your gob? You may hump off with that hoor of an aunty of yours if you think so much as one hot drop of fat from this bacon will wet your lips.’

‘You can keep your bacon. You didn’t spend the money I brought in last week on bacon, I know bleedin’ well, but.’

His mother looks at him now as if noticing him for the first time, some fear in her eyes that fades as quickly as it has come, thinking herself mistaken in fearing this boy she has reared. Not a man yet, still a youngfella, her Jerry. ‘You’ll not be minding what I spend on what, sonny buck. I’ll skelp your arse soon as I did when you were a nipper, don’t you think I fuckin’ won’t.’

‘You’d want to rise up the lazy bones of your worn out arse first.’

His aunt raises her voice. ‘The two of ye shut it. The racket of yis’d peel the paper from the walls, what’s left of it. And it’s my turn in the chair, Janey. You may get up off it, like the boy says.’

Jeremiah sighs and swallows and sets down his youngest sister, telling her to run out to Sarah. He wonders if his mother will leave the bacon alone long enough for him to snatch it before she can go out into the lane and swap it for drink. He doubts it.

‘When are you boiling the bacon, Ma?’

‘Never you mind when. When I’ve the notion to is when.’

He softens his tone. ‘I’m only sayin’ you should cook it before Uncle John comes in if yis want any for yiselves and the kids.’ At times, Jeremiah has seen his uncle come in, a gallon of porter on board, and eat the family’s entire meal of the day himself, the women and the children left to go hungry.

His aunt crosses the room in three strides and juts her chin out at Jeremiah. ‘You’ll not be talking of me husband like that, not in front of Pauline Byrne, you won’t, you scut.’ She raises an open hand as if to strike him and he laughs, a snigger that sounds to his own ears much the same as the laugh his Uncle John Keegan laughs when one of the women makes an idle threat against him; the laugh sounding like the one his uncle laughs just before he throws one or the other against the crumbling walls.

‘Get up out of that,’ he says to his aunt. ‘It’s only true and you know it.’

‘You’ll not talk like that about him,’ she says again, and makes to strike him. As she does, she sees something in his eyes that is different to the last time she lashed out at him. Her hands stops halfway to his face.

Jeremiah’s voice is low and calm when he speaks.

‘I’ll beat you worse than he does if you don’t pack away that hand, Aunty Pauline. I will, by fuck.’

His aunt lowers her hand and steps away from him, muttering about her John and how he would see to youngfellas thinking they were lord muck of the manor and bullying poor Pauline Byrne about the place. The young cock-o-the-walk would see, so he would, what her man could do to a lad, when he got home.

Jeremiah ignores her, knowing she will be long drunk and the incident forgotten before his uncle returns.

His mother speaks up, still seated in the one chair, as if the confrontation between her son and sister has never happened. ‘I’ll cook it when I’m good and ready and no sooner. And no man will take it—no John Keegan and no Jeremiah Byrne who brings nothing to this house but empty fists and
queer
smiles.’ She smiles at the insinuation and Jeremiah’s face burns.

‘Get the pox, y’auld bitch,’ he says, turning to leave, shame flushing his cheeks, hatred roosting in his belly atop the hunger. Hatred for his mother. For his aunt. For his uncle. For the fact that he has no food or money to feed himself or the young ones and hatred for what his mother knows about him. Hatred for himself, the Molly, the
queer
. And this hatred bats its black wings and raids the place in his heart he keeps free for the love of his sisters.

Fuck all of them, every last one
. He turns and leaves the flat, passing Sarah on the stairs, ignoring the hand she holds out to him and emerges onto the laneway, tears welling in his eyes. He needs to eat and he will swing it somehow on his own. He has done what he came to do. His sisters are alive, if not well. They will probably eat this evening. No, they
will
eat, because he decides now to ensure that they do, bacon or no bacon. He can do as much for them. Precious Sarah and his sisters. There are ways to scare up some coin. Ways. His face burns hot with the shame of it.

9

T
he door to forty-seven Foley Street is answered by a young girl in a pale blue dress and white apron. She is no more than twelve years old, O’Keefe reckons. He feels a hard bolt of anger in his gut, which fades only when he realises—taking in the apron and the damp rag in the girl’s hand—that she is merely a serving maid or cleaner in the brothel. He cannot imagine his father owing anything to a woman who would employ so young a girl in such a place, though God knows there are enough girls of this age working in other knocking shops and in the lanes or on the quays.

‘I’m here to see Mrs Dolan, if you please,’ he says, smiling at the girl. ‘My name is Seán O’Keefe. Dan O’Keefe’s son, you can tell her.’

The girl nods, saying nothing, and holds the door open wider for him to enter. The house is quiet, like the street outside, and smells of stale smoke, perfume and whiskey. The scents invoke memory, and O’Keefe wonders has he been in this house before. He follows the girl through the short front hallway, down a flight of stairs and into a bright kitchen, then outside again, crossing a garden past an outdoor privy, a henhouse, a pigeon loft and small kitchen crop of vegetables. At the bottom of the garden they come to a steel door cut into the back wall of the yard. He follows the girl through the door and into another garden, across flagstones set into the grass, arriving at a second redbrick house, identical to the one they have just left.

The girl enters the house, gesturing for O’Keefe to wait outside.

A moment later, another girl, older than the first, comes to the door. ‘You’re welcome, sir. Sorry about Maggie. She’s deaf and dumb as a pillar but a great little worker all the same. Does a grand job reading lips, though with that stoat of a moustache on you, I wonder how she managed.’ The girl smiles and O’Keefe smiles back. ‘Mrs Dolan is in the parlour.’

He follows this girl upstairs and is met at the parlour door by an attractive woman clothed in a silk dress in a shade of dark yellow that complements her brown hair and eyes and her pale skin. She appears to O’Keefe to be in her forties, but could be older or younger. Older, he imagines, because his father had retired from the police almost ten years previously. Her hair is worn in an elaborate topknot, and O’Keefe wonders how much of it is a hairpiece and how much her own. She looks more like the wife of a judge or bank manager than a procuress, even if the dress appears to O’Keefe too elaborate for daytime wear.

‘Thank you, Dolores,’ the woman says, smiling brightly. ‘Make us some tea, would you, dear? Or would the gentleman prefer something stronger?’

‘Tea, please,’ O’Keefe says with an urgency that makes his face redden.

The brothel madam laughs, and as she does, O’Keefe observes that she is missing most of her back teeth and that her laughter has a smoky rasp to it that is at once warm and vaguely menacing. The laughter of hard living, he thinks, much like his own rare laughter these days.

‘Forgive me,’ the woman says, extending her hand, her knuckles studded with emerald and ruby rings that O’Keefe guesses are not paste but real. ‘My name is Ginny Dolan. I’m an old friend of your father’s.’

‘Seán O’Keefe, ma’m, pleased to meet you,’ he says, taking her hand, but is wary of her suddenly, wondering again what hold a woman such as this could have over his father.

She studies O’Keefe, and under her gaze—dark eyes intent, intelligent and wholly separate from her smile—he feels the pull of fear again in his gut. ‘I am given to understand that you were once a detective, like your father.’

‘We didn’t have a detective branch in the Peelers
per se
,’ he says, thinking she must surely know this, in her line of work. ‘Other than Crimes Special Branch, which looked after political crimes and such. But I worked my share of investigations, some plainclothes, others in uniform.’

The Dolan woman smiles warmly at him and rests a hand on his forearm. ‘Thank God for that then. You’re just what I need, no offence to your father.’

‘None taken,’ O’Keefe says.

‘Please, come through. How rude of me.’

Holding out her hand for him to enter, O’Keefe defers and allows the madam to enter the parlour first. As she passes in front of him, he notices that she walks with a pronounced limp and that her left leg appears to flay outwards, her spine canted in the opposing direction. A hobble more than a limp. Rickets, he thinks: the disease of the poor. He wonders how she had made her living as a whore with the disease, and decides that her ailment might have led to her rising from the shop floor to the director’s office in some way.

O’Keefe knows, from his days in the police, that brothel madams can be callous creatures, every bit as brutal as their male counterparts. Most, if not all, are former whores themselves—women so bludgeoned by life in the trade that nothing matters to them but the money they make off the backs of the girls they employ. But to O’Keefe, Ginny Dolan presents herself as a far more complex woman.

Perhaps it’s her apparent wealth, O’Keefe thinks, realising that the house in which they stand is the madam’s dwelling and not open for business. On the wall are photographs of a baby and young boy, along with a family photograph from some time in the last century. The hall tables are topped with vases holding fresh flowers. There is nothing of the stew house about this place. It is a home.

He waits until Ginny Dolan has lowered herself, painfully, onto her upholstered chair, and then takes a seat on a settee facing her across a low, cherrywood table. Smiling, he plumbs his imagination for what his father might have done to lead his son to this house—taking tea in a parlour room as if calling on an aunt or widowed family friend—and finds only the warp of shadow. Nothing good could have indebted his father to this woman, warm as she seems. As a G-man—a political detective in the DMP— Daniel O’Keefe would have been as familiar with whores and their pimps as with solicitors, priests or republicans. Good G-men had contacts and touts on every rung of society’s ladder. But it was an axiom of the detectives’ trade that these souls remained indebted to the detective, and not the other way round. Still, every copper makes mistakes and some mistakes could lead a man places where he wouldn’t normally go. In thinking this, O’Keefe decides that he doesn’t want to know what debt his father owes. He will repay it and that will be the end of it.

‘I hope business is good for you,’ he says, by way of saying something. He notes the sacred heart picture on the wall over the mantelpiece; the tended fire grate laid with turf and coal for the evening’s fire; the stuffed chair in which the woman sits; the flowered wallpaper. And on the wall behind her, another posed photograph in an expensive frame—Ginny Dolan and a young boy of eight or nine years old. The same boy in the pictures in the hallway. He idly wonders who it is, assumes it is her son and wonders is she married.

‘Ah well, you know yourself, Mr O’Keefe. Nothing’s the same since all the trouble’s started up again. Even when the boyos were fighting the Tommies and Tans, business was business and no politics was spoken in my house. Tommies and Tans and Shinners … Sure, gunmen of every stripe and hue …’—she gives O’Keefe a bold smile that makes her, for the first time since he has met her, appear the pimp she is—‘… all of them need a taste now and again and, sure, what harm? Live and let live and let there be no ideologies under the counterpane.’ She laughs and O’Keefe smiles politely.

‘But now people are afraid to go out as much as they used to. No one’s sure who’s on whose side any more and who’s carrying a gun and who’s not. Times are hard, Mr O’Keefe, and only in Ireland, I think, can men let politics come between them and a screw.’

Despite himself, O’Keefe laughs at the truth of the woman’s words.

‘Now …’, she continues, taking a cigarette from a silver case and waiting while O’Keefe leans across and lights it with an ornamental lighter from the table. Exhaling: ‘… now there’s some who’d say auld upstairs girls like myself have no place in the new Free State, or whatever it is they’re calling it. Can you imagine? A free and independent Ireland without her upstairs girls? And let me tell you, when the Dáil is sitting, Ginny Dolan’s shop is still as busy as fleas on a fat man. Politicians are politicians no matter what colours they paint their posters. And the young gunmen do be just as bad for riding, for all their talk of God and independence. They’ll happily take their cut of protection money from the likes of poor Ginny, a gratis poke at one of her girls and then turn round and curse her for a Free State spy or Republican whore or just plain bad for the morals of the country. Truth be told, since they shelled the Four Courts and started this blight of a civil war, I don’t know who’s the worst.’

It is not the first time O’Keefe has heard this said. Independence is a fine thing, if you can put bread on your table without being shot at for your troubles. And O’Keefe knows at first-hand how much the average gunman cares about the troubles of the common people of Ireland. About as much as the average politician, he thinks. ‘It’s hard to tell all right,’ he says. ‘Strange times.’

‘Strange times indeed.’

The pair of them say nothing for the time it takes the girl to enter and pour tea.

They sip in silence for a moment, and O’Keefe sets down his teacup. ‘Mrs Dolan, my father is in your debt.’

The woman’s gaze is assessing but warm, and O’Keefe is confused by her scrutiny. Flattered but wary.

‘You look like him, you do. So much like him when he was younger. He’s not well, I hear.’

‘No, but I’m prepared to fulfil any obligation he has to you.’

‘I expect you are. Your father told me that you were a Peeler down in Cork. A fine one. A fine investigator.’ She speaks as of a time long past, a different life, a different person. ‘He was proud of you, as well he should be. A fine, strapping man like yourself. And doing right by his Da.’

O’Keefe’s face reddens. ‘I don’t know how good I was, Mrs Dolan. I worked my share of investigations, as I said: any number of robberies and more than a handful of murders.’

‘No, no … nothing like that,’ Ginny Dolan says abruptly, and O’Keefe notices the woman’s face change, her smile frozen. ‘No … please God,’ and in the common phrase—
please God
—O’Keefe hears a real prayer. ‘Nothing so serious as that …’

‘I didn’t mean to imply anything, Mrs Dolan, sure. I’m not certain what you even want from me.’

‘A job of work. You’ll be well paid.’

‘That’s not necessary, Mrs Dolan. I’m here to repay what my father owes, whatever it is you need me for.’ And as he says this, he regrets it. There are favours, he thinks, the madam of a brothel could ask for, that would test a man’s morality at best. ‘I’ll try.’

‘You’ll take the job, Mr O’Keefe.’ It is not a question.

‘What is the job, Mrs Dolan?’

She takes another cigarette from her case and pauses while O’Keefe leans across and lights it.

‘My son,’ she says. ‘I want you to find my son.’

‘Your son?’

O’Keefe wishes he had a cigarette. He pats his pockets and realises he has not bought a packet since his binge.

Ginny Dolan holds out her open silver case and O’Keefe gratefully accepts one. He lights it and takes the smoke deep into his lungs, feeling light-headed and stronger for it.

‘But why,’ he asks, exhaling, ‘do you not go to the police, Mrs Dolan, if your son is missing?’

The madam sets down her tea cup with a clatter. ‘No police. Is that clear, Mr O’Keefe? I’ll not have my son lagged by that shower, and they’d not be interested in finding him anyway. Your father,’ she softens her tone, ‘… was a good man, Mr O’Keefe. We were great pals in our day … I only wish him well, but I will have my Nicky found and no police.’

O’Keefe nods, unwilling to anger her further, finding himself slipping back into a role he thought he would never play again—that of investigator.

‘No police then.’ He pulls on his cigarette and begins. ‘All right so, when was the last time you saw your son, Mrs Dolan?’

‘Last month, more than a month really. Nicky slept here, like always, and then was off the next morning before I woke.’ Her smile is gone now, fear etched into the pinched lines around her eyes, a filigree of worried years around her lips as she pulls on her cigarette.

‘His name is Nicholas?’ O’Keefe instinctively pats his pockets again, this time for the patrol diary that is no longer there. He feels unprepared and amateurish without one of the hardback notebooks he had carried all those years as a Peeler, resolving to commit what the woman says to memory and copy it down as soon as he is able.

She nods. ‘Nicholas Dolan. And I should tell you, before we go any further, that he has been running with the anti-Treatyites. The
Irregulars
as they’re called now in the papers, so you see now why we cannot have the police looking for him. They’d hand him over to the Free Staters and he’d be banged up with the rest of them, or worse, shot.’ She blesses herself as she says this, before continuing. ‘Much though it breaks my heart, always having tried to rear the boy with a proper hatred for all politics—not politicians, mind, who are grand custom for a woman of my trade, but politics, ideas. This country is full of madmen and their mad ideas, and mad ideas never did anyone a lick of good, did they? But my Nicky up and joined them. Boys … men …’ Her words ring with weary disgust. ‘If there’s a fight to be had somewhere, they’ll seek it out. Peace and profit are just not good enough for them.’

O’Keefe groans inwardly. He wants to do right by this woman, for his father’s sake. And in the past few minutes he has felt a spark of interest that he has not felt since he left the Constabulary—the instinct of the hunt, the search, that is every policeman’s curse and blessing. But the boy could be anywhere in the country by now if he was fighting. And God knows, O’Keefe thinks, it will be hard enough scaring up a friendly contact among the Irregulars; someone who might be able to point to where the lad might be. It has been less than a year, after all, since a good number of them had been trying to kill him and his colleagues in the RIC.

‘How do you know he joined the Irregulars, Mrs Dolan?’