Irregulars (6 page)

‘He told me. Fourteen years old, the cheek of him. And I forbade it, of course, but he’s a headstrong boy, Mr O’Keefe. He was proud as punch. Said that he was running messages and other things he couldn’t tell me. As if I’d spent years doting on him and educating him so that he could go out and join up with that army of eejits.’ Ginny Dolan’s voice cracks and she pulls a handkerchief from her dress sleeve and wipes her eyes. O’Keefe notes how the woman’s speech shifts: from the delicate and refined one moment to the courser register of the streets where she runs her business the next.

She continues. ‘And I blame his school mostly. It was there he learned all that independence nonsense that’s about these days and even then they saw fit to throw him out. The masters there, and all their talk of the rights of man and republican heroes and independence. All well and good to a boy of fourteen until they cast him out for what his mother does for to put food in his mouth. To pay his school fees.’

Confused, O’Keefe holds up his hand. ‘What school was it, Mrs Dolan? And why was he expelled?’

‘Francis Xavier’s, off North Great George’s Street. Do you know it?’

‘I do,’ he says, sitting up, a slight dart of optimism piercing him, something he can use in this information. ‘I went there myself. Me and my brother.’

‘Of course you did. Sons of a respectable policeman.’ There is bitterness in her voice now, a hardness that alerts O’Keefe to the danger a woman such as this could be. A woman of wealth like Ginny Dolan, in the trade that she plies, would not have got to where she is now in the world through kindness alone.

‘But my Nicky? Turfed out when someone went to the Fathers with what kind of business I run. Some little turncoat. As if my money wasn’t good enough for the mighty Jesuits and their fine school.’ She roughly stubs her cigarette in the brass ashtray, exhaling a last blast of smoke. ‘Fine and fucking dandy, Mr O’Keefe, for them Fathers teaching the sons of lawyers and bankers and … and politicians, all of them as bent as the bishop’s crozier. But the son of a straight and true upstairs girl like myself isn’t half good enough for them. As if it was Nicky’s fault what his mammy does for a shilling. I run a good and honest business, Mr O’Keefe, and don’t let any manjack tell you different. I’m good to my girls and I provide a service much needed in this city. And let me tell you, I know things about some of them holy Fathers that would curl your hair.’

O’Keefe nods, thinking just how much one’s profession colours one’s view of the world. In this way, coppers are the same as whores and their madams. Having seen so many times the worst the world can offer, they end up expecting it. First order of faith: everyone lies, trust no one. Second order: corruption is the rule, not the exception. Everyone, in their own way, is compromised. And yet how limiting a world view, O’Keefe thinks, feeling suddenly sorry for this woman. Feeling sorry for his father. For himself.

‘When did he finish in the school?’ he asks.

‘Just before summer break—they asked him to leave. Very Christian of them too, it was. Jesus in heaven, I’d give an eye to know who played the Turk and told the Fathers. I’d have my Albert on him in a sweet minute, Mr O’Keefe, you can be sure of that.’

Again the anger, and with it, the recourse to Monto justice. He wonders who Albert is and remembers, vaguely, the name but not where or when he has heard it. He imagines the man to be Ginny Dolan’s muscle. Every brothel-keeper has one or two, usually a husband or brother but just as often a disgraced policeman or demobbed soldier.

‘And Nicholas gave you no indication of where he might have been going when he left to join the Irregulars?’

‘No, none at all. Dolores saw him leave. I asked her and she was none the wiser.’

‘And friends? Who are his friends, Mrs Dolan?’

‘You can get all of that kind of thing from Albert. He knows all this as well as I do.’

O’Keefe nods, assuming he will meet this Albert sooner or later. He thinks of a final question. One that may be painful for the woman to consider.

‘And what should I do, Mrs Dolan, if the boy refuses to come with me if I find him?’

‘
When
you find him.’

‘I’ll try my best, Mrs Dolan, but the war … will make it difficult. The Free State Army is having trouble enough hunting down the Irregulars as it is. And even if …’ he seeks to appease the woman but knows his odds are poor, ‘…
when
I find him, he might want to stay with his comrades. All the ideas, the uniforms, the guns … everything. It can be intoxicating to young lads. Fighting, scouting. Even running messages or splashing slogans onto walls.’

‘You speak from experience, Mr O’Keefe?’

‘I do,’ he says, and does not tell her how quickly the camaraderie, the excitement, the sense of purpose could pall when you saw the life gouting out of men you knew and loved. All the pretty ideas, the craic and stories and barrack-room laughs—none of it worth a half-pint of a friend’s—a brother’s—blood. But still, men stayed and fought and died, even long after they had come to know better. He had himself. Because the flipside of bravery and camaraderie, every soldier knows, is cowardice and shame. Feared worse than death by most boys, most men.

‘I just wonder,’ O’Keefe continues, ‘if you’re prepared for the possibility that he might not want to come home.’

Ginny Dolan stares at him again for a long moment and O’Keefe fears he has angered her.

‘I’m not as simple a woman as you might think, Mr O’Keefe. He may not come home for you, or even Albert …’

Again, O’Keefe wonders what role Albert plays in the household. The boy’s father? Ginny’s husband? There is no man in any of the photographs in the hallway or parlour.

‘…but I need him found, and when you do find him, I’ll decide what will be done.’

O’Keefe stands to leave, to start his search. Ginny Dolan rises with him in a rustle of silk and O’Keefe smells a faint scent of perfume—sickly sweet, corrupting—and unexpected fear judders through his senses.

‘You might start by asking around Talbot Street,’ she says, leading him to the front door. ‘I know he was selling the anti-Treaty papers there some months back, before they shelled the Four Courts. The
Nationalist
. Some of the vendors there might know where he is. Of course, I had my Albert ask round, and didn’t they tell him where to go with his questions? Not one bit afraid, they weren’t, not even of my Albert. But you’ve more experience of asking questions. Albert, you see, he’s not accustomed to asking for things. Not more than once, anyway.’

‘Why would they be afraid of your Albert, Mrs Dolan?’

At this, the woman smiles. ‘You’ve never met him, have you?’

‘No, ma’m, I haven’t.’

‘Probably for the better, that, if you’re to get along with him.’

‘Get along with him?’

‘Of course. You’ll be working with him.’

O’Keefe frowns. ‘I prefer to work on my own, Mrs Dolan.’

‘I’m afraid,’ she says, ‘that you do not have a choice in this. You will be paid handsomely for your work, but my Albert will accompany you.’ There is a steely menace in her voice, and behind her words O’Keefe senses the heavy price of the debt owed to this woman. Again he resists the urge to ask her what his father had done to incur it.

‘I’ll need to see Nicholas’ room, Mrs Dolan, if I could.’

‘Of course, upstairs, on the left.’

It takes O’Keefe less than ten minutes to search the room. He finds no diary or letters, though he sifts through the pages of countless adventure novels, war novels, cowboy books. There is a film poster for one of Valentino’s recent flicks,
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
, which O’Keefe has seen several times. Next to this is a yellowing poster copy of the 1916 Proclamation, and beside this a lithograph of the martyrs of 1916. It reminds O’Keefe of a soccer team’s photo, a brief biography of each player—martyr—below each oval portrait. A scuffed, deflated football lies in a corner of the room. A desk piled high with school texts. Childhood toys and a stuffed bear on shelves in the closet, nothing in the pockets of any of the clothes hanging within. Nothing, all told, to give him any indication where the boy might be. He returns downstairs to where Ginny Dolan is waiting at the front door.

‘Take this,’ she says, the threat gone from her voice. She hands him a roll of pound notes and a recent photograph of her son—strikingly handsome, in his school jacket and tie, early teens with brown hair combed off his forehead, an open face, a boy on the edge of becoming a young man. O’Keefe senses something familiar about the lad, but decides it is the Xavier school jacket and tie. He and Peter had worn the same ones in their own school days.

‘A handsome boy,’ he says, attempting to hand her back the banknotes. ‘I’ve no need for money, Mrs Dolan. I can manage.’

‘Take it.’ She closes his outstretched hand around the money. ‘God only knows who you’ll need to grease to find him.’

O’Keefe reluctantly puts the roll into his pocket, resolving to return it unspent, whatever the outcome of his investigations.

‘You’ll find Albert at the John of God’s Boxing Club on Gardiner Street. He’s expecting you,’ Ginny Dolan says, holding her front door open for him to leave. ‘And Mr O’Keefe … You won’t disappoint me, will you not?’

10

O
’Keefe finds the John of God’s Boxing Club on Gardiner Street and enters, his eyes taking a moment to adjust to the dim light of a foyer plastered with yellowing fight bills. He follows the sound of clanking steel plates into a gym that is windowless and redolent of sweat and liniment, of leather and dust. He locates the source of the machine-like noise at the back of the gym. Under a dangling electric light-bulb, the sole occupant of the gym—the man O’Keefe assumes to be Ginny Dolan’s doorman—is on his back on a bench, pressing an impossibly heavy stack of weights off his chest.

Standing by the empty boxing ring in a pale shaft of illumination from the gym’s single skylight, O’Keefe watches as the man finishes his set of exercises, the weight bar crashing into the rack above the bench like the sound of trains coupling in a station.

‘I can see your father in you,’ the man says, sitting up, his bare chest and shoulders like slabs of quarried rock.

‘Can you, now? Albert, is it?’ O’Keefe says.

‘I can and it is.’

O’Keefe says nothing, gazing at the man who returns his stare, unafraid.

‘Look, I’ve been hired by Mrs Dolan to find her son, Nicholas. She wants you to help me or spy on me, I’m not sure which. Either way, I’ve come to tell you …’

‘… That you’re delighted to have me round as a minder.’

‘That you shouldn’t feel obliged.’

‘I don’t feel obliged, Mr O’Keefe,’ Ginny Dolan’s man says, standing and taking a pair of massive bowling-pin weights from a rack and beginning to swing them upwards and back down in a controlled motion. Grunting out the words: ‘But Missus Dolan obliged me and she obliged you and that’s all there is to say about it.’

‘I’m well used to working on my own. I don’t need your help, sir.’

‘Your auldfella needs your help and you’ll need mine. There’s no sense in mithering on about it.’

‘You’d do well to leave my auldfella out of it,’ O’Keefe says, his face running hot.

‘Don’t worry yourself, Mr O’Keefe,’ the doorman says, through the strain of his exercise. ‘There’ll be not another word about him. But I don’t need to tell you he owes Mrs Dolan and it’s my work to oversee the payment.’

Anger rises in O’Keefe, and he contemplates lunging for him, but there is too much that he does not know. About the debt. About his father.

‘Are you nearly finished then, so we can get started?’ he says.

Ginny Dolan’s man does not reply, completing three sets of pin work. His wrists and forearms are as thick as the Latvian hemp rope tethering ships on the quays. He strips off his trousers and walks naked to a tap on the wall at the back of the gym. Over his shoulder, he says, ‘Unless you want to wash me back, wait outside. I’ll be all handsome and lovely in a flash.’

Some minutes later, O’Keefe is standing on the cobbled path in front of the gym with the doorman. Barefoot children in patched and ragged clothes gather around them, hands held out for copper coins. ‘Please, mister, a ha’penny for a bit of grub. Please, mister, for me babby brother, he’s fierce with the crooping coughs, so he is.’

Each child has a similar plea, and shouts it simultaneously so that soon they become indistinguishable to O’Keefe, but Ginny Dolan’s man smiles at the children, his hand coming out of his pocket with a jangle of coins, which he carefully counts out, making sure each child gets two ha’pennies, no more no less, each an equal share of the spoils. As he dispenses his coins, more children approach and these are also given their share, each child responding with a loud and, to O’Keefe’s ear, sincere belt of gratitude: ‘Thanks mister. Blessing of God on yis, Mister Albert.’ These children know him by name. Know him to be a soft touch.

O’Keefe studies Albert as he shoos away the children with a firm but kindly wave. The fact that he is a head shorter than O’Keefe is not unusual. O’Keefe is a constable’s son and had been a constable himself. The height and girth requirements of the RIC and the Dublin Metropolitan Police have ensured that there are few men in the country bigger than policemen. Even so, Albert is shorter than average. O’Keefe puts him at five foot six in the raised boot heels he’s wearing.

But, as he has seen in the gym, the man is built like an armoured car. His shoulders and biceps strain at the expensive light wool of his suit jacket—he wears no overcoat in the Indian summer weather—and the slabs of muscle that form his chest are like bodhráns under a crisp white shirt and pink and claret-striped tie, the wide chest tapering to a narrow waist and hips. His neck is freshly shaven, thick as the trunk of a young oak and a stiff white collar is drawn so tightly around it that O’Keefe imagines it would strangle the average man. A snap-brimmed black bowler tips low over pale blue eyes; a pale face—a night-worker’s face—splashed with freckles, butted by a jutting jaw; a nose flattened like a boxer’s. Or a doorman’s, O’Keefe thinks, noting the small red moustache and devil’s smeg of a beard at his clefted chin. He is roughly his own age—thirty odd—O’Keefe reckons.

‘Are you finished?’ O’Keefe says.

‘I am,’ Ginny Dolan’s man replies, cocking his head to the right and closing one eye, casting his face in cynical, if not sinister, mien, as if because he is forced to look up at most men, he looks up to none. His voice is calm, however, and there is the flicker of a smile on his lips.

‘Look,’ O’Keefe says in one last effort to liberate himself. ‘You feel free to look where you like. Mrs Dolan may have thought you could give me a dig-out but I’d say I’ll be grand on my own.’

Ginny’s man says nothing, and instead takes a thin cigar from inside his suit jacket and lingers over lighting it. Focusing on the tip of his cigar, he says, ‘You weren’t so grand on your own that you ended up in a drunk’s bed at your auldfella’s gaff.’

Heat rises to O’Keefe’s face again, and he thinks he has probably blushed more in the past week than a wedding-night virgin.
So much for ‘not another word about it’.
But there is anger melded to the shame he feels, and he holds his stare on Ginny Dolan’s man for a long moment, much as he used to do to those who challenged him when he’d been a Peeler.

Ginny’s man, head still cocked, meets this stare with one eye and holds it, unwavering, and O’Keefe realises that perhaps this Albert relishes a scrap as much as any policeman.

‘You’re a rare one, you are,’ O’Keefe says.

‘“Rare one” is right, Mr O’Keefe. Now you know.’

‘Right so, now I know. And now I’ll be off on my business for Mrs Dolan and you may shag off on yer own.’

The doorman does not appear offended. He pulls on his cigar and holds the smoke in his mouth, releasing it slowly, forming his lips into an O and conjuring a large ring of smoke. The wind catches the ring after a moment and snatches it away.

‘Mrs Dolan says we work together, we work together. She’s paying you. You do what she says and not one thing different.’

O’Keefe recalls the roll of notes Ginny Dolan had forced upon him for ‘expenses’. He takes it out and tries to hand it to the doorman, who ignores it.

‘Take it,’ O’Keefe says.

‘Put that back in your pocket before I get thick with you.’

O’Keefe realises there is no way he can force the money on the man and shoves it angrily back into his pocket. ‘She obviously pays
you
well. Do you do everything she tells you
and not one thing different
?’

‘That’s a stupid bleedin’ question.’

‘Then bleedin’ answer it.’

Albert sighs, as if speaking to a disappointingly dull pupil, and cocks his head again. ‘The answer is that every fella from Foley Street to Amiens Street and down as far as the Custom House docks does exactly whatever Mrs Dolan does say, and so help them God they better. That’s the answer and you’d do well to learn it. There’s more men than me she can call on when she needs them. Not that she needs more than me more often than not.’

‘Is that a threat then, Albert? Is that how I’m to take it?’

‘You may take it any way you like, Mr O’Keefe, but you’ll not cross me or Mrs Dolan.’

Again, O’Keefe resists the urge to lash out at the man, thinking of his father, his mother. What could his father possibly owe this man’s madam? He feels a spark of resentment towards his father for landing him in this mess. Exhaling, he decides he will hold his fire; shrug off this thug of a doorman when the time is right.

Forcing himself, he says, ‘So, Albert. You’ve a surname, Albert?’

‘Just Albert does be grand.’

‘Just Albert it is, so. I’m just Mr O’Keefe, then.’

‘I’d say there’s very little just about you, Mr O’Keefe, having once been a Peeler.’

O’Keefe smiles through his exasperation. ‘Little enough, Just Albert, little enough.’

‘So we’re straight is all.’

‘Straight as …’ O’Keefe recalls a version of Ginny Dolan’s words. ‘… straight as a bishop’s …’

‘… prick,’ Just Albert says, ‘when the Mass is finished.’

O’Keefe laughs despite himself.
Jackeens
, he thinks.
Dubs
.
Even men you hated could break your heart with a turn of phrase.