Islandbridge (36 page)

She deliberated for a week. It gave her time to try to find out more on Victory, and what she could get from Jim.

“Rynn?” he said to her when she'd brought it up first.

He'd given her that look, that trademark Guard look, delivered sideways. She wondered if he had picked up on her turmoil. She had waited for a dinner out to ask him.

“Rynn is an out-and-out gangster. A long-standing low-life Dublin gangster.”

“Really?”

“He certainly damned well is. Why were you asking about him?”

“His name showed up somewhere.”

“Somewhere?”

“On a request for people at work.”

“You're joking me,” he said. “At your place? Looking for staff?”

“Not for himself, exactly. A company of his – so far as I can make out.”

“‘Who's going to win? / Jimmy effin' Rynn!' Ever hear that one?”

She hadn't. He sat back and looked around the restaurant. It had only opened last year but he liked it. She didn't mind that she couldn't crowbar him away from the meat and two veg. Her appetite hadn't come back, and she wondered how much she could eat of the chicken she'd ordered.

Jim hadn't seemed to notice her picking at her food more.

“Well I'll tell you,” he said. “This Rynn is the second smartest crook in Ireland. The smartest one is not in Ireland. He's in jail in Holland and will be for another eight years. Guess who got him put in there?”

“Rynn?”

“Well done, girl of my heart. That is correct. But that doesn't make Rynn the smartest. Are you wondering why?”

She poured him more wine. The waiter came by again, and Jim had some comment for him. It was preparatory to a joke, she soon learned. She mostly enjoyed the banter that he inflicted on everyone who came in range, even this running joke about mad cow that the waiter was obliging enough to listen to. Liam, though, Liam got very embarrassed about it. At his age, of course, it was all about embarrassment, wasn't it, and crabbiness. If he was like this when he hit eighteen, she'd have to think twice about the plan to tell him about his real father.

The waiter actually enjoyed the joke.

“So that's what you do if a fish won't oblige,” Jim said, and the waiter laughed again.

She realized she hadn't been listening.

“Grand lad,” Jim said and put down the glass. “I could eat that every day of the week. ‘To hell with poverty, we'll kill a hen.' Matt does say that when he gets a bit of wind in his sails. In a session, you know the way it is. Ha ha.”

She smiled and searched for a way to get him back on the topic of Rynn.

“There's smart and there's smarter, I suppose.”

“What, the waiter?”

“No, this gangster.”

“Rynn? Well he is definitely a breed apart, so he is. It's common knowledge he got people over there to set up the other lad. I'll say that for him. Rynn's a thinker.”

He leaned in again, and he placed his finger along the side of his nose.

“Tell you the truth it's only lately we copped on to just how far he's gone. That journalist one, what's her name – Guerin – she's great at digging up stuff. God, she's annoying, but she gets her stuff.”

“What stuff?”

He squinted at her. Then he spoke in a whisper.

“He has companies, tax scams, drugs – anything you can think of, he has it. He has people on the continent – not just the usual bunch in Amsterdam, oh no, that wouldn't be good enough for him – but personal connections with big lads there. I even heard Russian, can you imagine that? What year was it that that Berlin Wall – four, five years?”

“Four,” she said.

“Well I do listen, as you well know. Oh yes. Now I shouldn't be passing this around because, well for one thing, we're only beginning to see how big this thing is. Rynn, he's way ahead of us. Oh yes, it's a fright to God in actual fact, how far ahead. I heard that the IRA – even the IRA – has gone to him for stuff they couldn't do themselves. How about that?”

“I never imagined.”

“To be sure! Keep what I tell you under your hat. I mean it. If this were known . . .”

“Now it's not as bad as maybe I'm painting it but, by Jesus, it was a big freak entirely last year. It started with a fella found in somewhere . . . Germany, I think, yes . . . with shall we say, acute and terminal lead poisoning. They traced a phone number to an associate of Rynn's. So it's not like Rynn can be looking forward to a free run much longer. All the accountants and barristers he has up his jumper aren't going to help him dodge what's coming his way.”

She tried eating, smaller morsels now, but swallowing wasn't getting any easier.

“Task force job one is going to be Rynn,” he said and winked. “It'll go big, I hear. He won't know what hit him.”

“Not many would be knowing about it though,” she said.

“You're right there. Oh yes, but you know me. I hear everything. I am an actual Hoover for information. God, yes. The thing is, we found a Judas. Do you get it?”

“Judas?”

“Ah come on – an informant. Everyone has a Judas. We found Rynn's, and he's going to do the business. Any day now, you-know-who's going to show up on the front page in his nice new boiler suit and his State bracelets.”

She had to think what the slang meant. It must be handcuffs.

“Victory something, did you call this outfit?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And was it himself who you dealt with?”

“One of the girls did, but I go over them all. She didn't know.”

“Of course she wouldn't. God, how cocky can you get, phoning up like that. No doubt he'd be keen to call himself a businessman. Classic, isn't it, this Dublin crowd? So bloody cheeky about it.”

She watched her husband's scorn ebb.

“‘Victory,'” he said after a while. “I get it. He's bloody obsessed about beating the law. Spends a fortune on the legal side. Well, it's worked for him so far. But we'll see about that shortly – oh, wait, I remember now: a young lad of his was shot to death a good number of years back. Maybe that did it. Maybe that made him get smart.”

Then he sat back and began to chortle softly, waving his knife and fork around. It was a habit that annoyed the heart and soul out of her still. She took it to be a relic of growing up far from the delicacies of proper dining.

“I have me own one for the same Rynn,” he said.

“What do you mean, your own one?”

“Hah. I doubt I'll ever get to say it to him. But somebody should.”

“Somebody should what?”

Mischief glittered in his eye as he whispered over the food between them.

“It's only a matter of weeks. That's exactly the words! Oh I'd give my eye teeth to see his face. Never happen of course. That'd be giving things away.”

He sat erect again and looked around the restaurant. She hoped he wouldn't make some comment about how much of the price of their meal was going on the flowers and the fancy fittings.

“My advice to you is put that bloody file through the shredder. Get one of yours to tell him you don't offer the services. Make up something. You wouldn't have him on the books for long anyway. A matter of weeks, oh yes – I like that, if I say so myself.”

She waited. He set down his knife and fork.

“What you're on about, this ‘matter of weeks' thing.”

He dropped his head and nodded to get her in close to his, almost touching the flowers.

There was a hard set to his eyes now.

“This Rynn's not the only one that can play with his words. Not by a long shot. The fella we have, the Judas that's going to put Rynn in the big house for twenty years? His name happens to be Weekes. We nailed him just a while back, on armed robbery and he went over right away. Oh yes. Do you get it? His name . . .? Only a matter of Weekes . . . ?”

Chapter 20

M
ALONE RAN ON AHEAD
. He said nothing to Minogue before began his run, but merely caught Minogue's eye before he took off, and flicked his head in the general direction of the Temple Bar.

Minogue half trotted and half walked through the crowds on the footpaths, and tried to keep Malone in sight. He lost track of the weaving-and-darting detective, rounded the post office in Andrew Street, and slipped between the waiting cars at the lights below.

He squeezed the mobile, trying to think what he should do with it. He skipped down the hill to Dame Street, more on the roadway than on the footpath, and he ran across toward the Bank of Ireland, straining to gain the broad footpath there before traffic roared down on him. One car horn he got, but mercifully, none of the kamikaze motorbikes that Dublin bred to rocket out suddenly from traffic lights.

He slowed to walk, felt the tics in his legs, and tried not to think of an overworked heart. He glared back at a man staring openly and a little condescendingly, he decided, at this flustered, panting countryman. Malone was already gone under the Central Bank building. He checked his watch and marvelled: literally three minutes since the woman from the Orient Express had called him, and Malone wasn't more than a minute away.

He took the steps three at a time, impressing and alarming himself. The smooth granite looked greasy, as if it could sweat up the decades of drizzle and smog that had been its companions since being blasted, torn and hammered from the Wicklow Mountains.

Down the narrow street he managed a brief trot again. His sliding belt and the shirt tail straining to be free didn't bother him now. There were more people eyeing menus by the doors of the restaurants, and clusters of people, men mostly, stood near the doors of the pubs. Still, the streets had not taken on that real evening feel.

In sight of the Orient Express now, he saw no sign of Malone. He tucked in his shirt just before he got to the window and tugged his belt up. The lights were on at the front of the restaurant and an elderly couple with a continental look to them were looking in. The woman was smiling at some newly seated people but she saw Minogue immediately. He waited by the window, tried to catch his breath, and marvelled a little at how her expression could change so quickly between her customers and him.

She was pointing. Around the corner? Malone was stepping out of a pub and scanning the street. He jogged over, drawing looks and several passersby to stop and move aside. Minogue was glad to hear him panting and taking deep breaths. Malone reached for the door but Minogue tapped his shoulder.

“Leave her, Tommy. She's scared enough.”

“Get out of it!” Malone snapped. “Forget ‘scared.' We're after a bad guy.”

Minogue grabbed his arm then.

“Leave her. There's other stuff going on. She'll never help if we barge in now.”

“Who's running this circus here? Us or the monkeys?”

“Try up the street, come on.”

Malone waited long enough to send a slow burning glare through the glass.

“One out, one in,” Minogue said to him. “Same as before?”

He watched Malone's heaving chest while he looked up and down the street.

“Okay. Let me start, I'll go in here again.”

Minogue found a spot against the wall of a pub, and he began a slow survey of the passing faces. She'd said the man was alone, that he'd paused by the window, looked in, and walked on. He'd been carrying a motorbike helmet.

Some men came out of the pub and gathered in a final group of four on the street. It was the English crowds they had bumped into earlier. They were only getting started on their soiree, by the look of things. Minogue looked away. He left it to the last moment before turning back to cover this end of the street again. They weren't moving. There was a lot of laughing, cigarette lighting, throwing comments across to one another and shifting their feet around. He tried looking by them, over their heads, looking at the faces of the people passing between them.

The wag from earlier had seen him now, he knew, and he was nudging his friend next to him. Another glanced at Minogue for a moment, and then let a spitball drop with slow deliberation to the pavement. The men's faces turned toward Minogue. There were more words. One of them buckled with laughter.

Malone appeared from the side door of the pub.

“We'll go this one,” he said to Minogue, nodding toward the next pub a half-dozen doors up.

“Wait, Tommy. I'm calling it in. It's just too hard here for the pair of us.”

“You're not serious.”

“Look, I want him as much as you do. I just think we're going to lose him here.”

“Don't be worrying,” Malone said and set his mouth in a grim line. “I'll find him. Him and me have to have a little chat. Come on.”

Minogue held up his mobile, but Malone was off. He called out after him, held up the mobile again, but Malone waved it off.

This is what keeps you from Sergeant, Minogue felt like shouting after him. This is what'll have you in the dock yourself for doing a number on this George character, if you ever catch up to him. If he doesn't hammer the crap out of you again.

Malone paused by the group of men and said something to them. The wag had some fast answer for him. It had an immediate effect on his friends. They fell away laughing. Minogue knew what was coming now by the way Malone changed his stance and faced the man.

Minogue saw Malone's arm come up and his finger settle inches from the man's face. He heard something about intoxicated. Some of the passersby moved away, others slowed to watch. He called out Malone's name again, saw the tilt of his colleague's head that meant trouble for sure. Four of them, he thought, and they've been drinking. Were there no uniform patrols here? What happened to all the promises and crackdowns after the stag-party knifings there a few years back?

He looked for the fluorescent green-and-white figures of any foot patrols, none. It was Malone's voice he heard say something about a night in the tank, and then an English accent in protest, something like
wotivoidanthen
. Another voice said
chasing
oilyins then?
Aliens, he meant, Minogue realized. Then he heard Malone pull obstruction, disturbance, and arrest out of the bag. Things were getting out of hand.