Resurrection Man (14 page)

There were about fifteen people drinking in the downstairs bar. They fell silent as the two men entered. They could see the guns in their hands and the two snub-noses stuck in their belts. There was a moment of uncertainty. The people in the bar feeling that something was expected of them, that they should shape a response out of the sudden onset of
consternation
. They exchanged glances, raised their eyebrows then turned to look at the men as if they had decided on a mood of apprehension. One of the men waved his gun vaguely in the direction of the drinkers.

‘Prods on one end of the bar, Taigs on the other.’

Half of the people rose immediately and began to move towards the bar. They seemed grateful for the guidance
offered. They went calmly to their respective ends of the bar and stood there awaiting further instructions. The rest of the people in the bar were more alert, their faces working
soundlessly
as they attempted to decide whether the gunmen were Catholic or Protestant, trying to come to a decision as to which end of the bar to go to. They began to mill around in the centre of the floor, knocking against each other and swearing softly. One of them, a man wearing plumber’s overalls, ran into one of the hooded men. He lifted his hands and shrugged his shoulders, his face mute and beseeching. He knew what was going to happen to him and felt it necessary to enter a plea to the nearest source of omnipotence. Missed opportunities, middle-aged loss of courage, all his small spectral failings had to be taken into account. He seemed to be saying that forgiveness was difficult but not impossible and should be given priority in an atmosphere of last things. The hooded man raised his pistol and with every appearance of generosity shot him in the mouth.

The two men began to fire at random. The drinkers ran towards exits, disappeared into the toilets, lay down on the floor, stood and covered their ears. Even in a confined space the firing did not sound like shots, did not fit into the perceived idea of gunfire – the roar, the muzzle flash, the profound and vital noise that hangs in the air. The aimed shot, the squeezed trigger. A whole glamorous ethic was missing from this scene with masked men pointing guns that made a flat, non-lethal sound.

Nevertheless people were dying. The barman was on the floor, hit twice in the chest. Two men were dying in the toilets. Another lay near the door in a pool of femoral blood. The upstairs barman was shot in the stomach from the bottom of the stairs. He clasped his hands over the wound and stood like that for a long time. There was a gentle expression on his face. He wished to be considerate in his dying. The two gunmen watched in appreciation as he started to fall, tumbling down the stairs in a graceful, cinematic manner.

The two men backed out of the bar, firing as they went. They stood in the doorway, reluctant now to leave. They shot at light bulbs, mirrors, bottles behind the bar. A sound of
half-hearted
skirmish, fading away.

Finally they were gone. There was a smell of gunsmoke in the air, a cordite hum. There was a growing background noise from the survivors. A thin wail as they got to grips with the idea of massacre and the reek of death. A wounded man crawled across the floor until he was under a table. He needed sanctuary, somewhere he could be alone with his pain, to turn it over in his mind and begin to learn its properties. There was moaning coming from the toilets, beer dripping from an opened tap, bloody handprints on the flock wallpaper.

McClure said he hoped they hadn’t left it too late for the last news. The four team members had walked into the bar with their weapons held high and their hair plastered down with sweat. They were crowded at the door and there was a movement to hoist them shoulder-high. They were like heroes from a film with John Wayne, McClure told Victor afterwards. Men in streaming yellow oilskins and exhausted expressions who have saved their community from an insane natural force of flood or landslide. There were more women than usual present. Wives and girlfriends sat at low tables in the carpeted section of the bar dressed in their best clothes.

At 11.40 McClure turned on the television above the bar. Men stood up holding their drinks. A tense silence descended. McClure located the volume button and turned to look at the audience. They held their glasses in joined hands and their solemn faces seemed lit from underneath. McClure considered their grave silence an act of devotion. The Shamrock bar was the first item on the news. The newcaster went to live pictures of the scene, the camera aimed from behind yellow incident tape. Dark figures moved in the distance across a bare tract of wet tarmac. Grey police Land-Rovers were parked diagonally
under street-lights. Policemen and soldiers stood with their backs to the camera so that they could not be identified. There was an atmosphere of disinterment, grim cloaked figures working by lamplight, poisonous graveyard vapours.

When the broadcast ended Heather noticed that Victor was missing. She found him in the storeroom with the mirror and razor-blade sitting on his lap. He looked at her as if he did not remember her. She felt the dread that the elderly sometimes aroused in her. He looked like an old man, a parched wanderer in the intricate landscapes of memory.

It was a time of anxious thought for Dorcas when Victor was released. It would not justify her to say that he had changed but there was a quietness in him to put her in mind of his father James and a new badness to his temper as well. It was also her lot to have the remarks of women in the street asking about him all sweetness and light, but she knew a cut about a son being in prison when she heard one. She wouldn’t let them see her mortified but smiled back saying in her heart at the same time put the knife back in the drawer, Miss Sharp.

Sometimes she would hear noises outside the house at night and she would be took with a fear like a seizure. The news was a sad complaint of people shot at place of work or blew up with bombs. There was a denial of government protection concerning the Protestant people and the IRA had their guns turned on the defenceless. There was no point in turning to James for comfort as the few words he did speak were worse than no words at all.

If Victor was involved in the protection of Protestants she asked no questions but sometimes there was a pain like an accusation from worry. There was an end to the visits when he would sit at the kitchen table making you laugh fit to burst, acting the big gangster from the pictures. He was so quiet the first time he got out she asked was it something they done to him in prison, because once they got you to Castlereagh or Gough barracks they could break you like a twig, no questions asked. It was known that the police did not hinder themselves
when it come to manhandling. When Victor was inside she wrote several times to her MP and also the chief constable but received no reply from those quarters. They made a big show of marching at funerals and putting on the big sad face on television but it was all personal ambition as far as they were concerned.

She asked Victor if he was still running with that girl Heather as she had interesting things to report as to who she was seen with while he languished. When he said sometimes, she decided however that it was a case of best say nothing. Even though it was plain to anyone with an eye in their head that the girl was used goods. But to be a mother is to know the value of silence.

It was about this time that James started to read to her from the papers about the people who were found cut with knives. He did it to deliver a shock to her. He would add detail of his own to put the heart out of you. He would be sat up in the chair by the fire and would start reading out of the blue in a voice like the voice of a minister in church that says no matter how much you fear you do not fear enough. It drove her to distraction. When he was finished he would look up at her with a glare on his face which said are you happy now?

Forbye all that he was a man and did not cease to come to her bed. For a woman and a mother the flesh is a matter of endurance. It is always women you see in the doctor’s surgery. It was not as if he come with flowers. That was put aside like any worn thing after marriage. It was a matter of pride with her to maintain her figure not for his benefit. A husband is a thing like a knife. He is a cause of pain. If he was not so quiet and strange she would have said to him straight out. Go you back to your own bed. She would have said a man of your age. He was honestly like a thief or a burglar to put the fear of God into you. And other women have envious thoughts of such a quiet husband. If they knew the way he made you feel like you were due a punishment. Afterwards she would lie awake and listen to the rain and the wind like a story of their love. But she
understood now the way life went that love did not enter into it as it used to, but men must punish you for their lives; and she wondered was it ever any different, even when they were just married and the baby was there and it was a case of yes but be quiet and do not wake the baby.

In the month following the Shamrock bar massacre there were two more knife murders, the victims picked up in Catholic areas and dumped nearby. Medical reports showed that the wounding was more extensive. There was evidence of frenzy, repeated slashing. It suggested that the rudiments of control had been lost.

The murders were reported in the papers but the detail was still suppressed. People examined street maps to trace possible routes used by the killers. The victims’ last
movements
were discussed exhaustively as if this might reveal what marked you out for this kind of death. Their final moments seemed to contain something that the city needed. There might have been concealed passages of grace and people wished to secure accounts of them.

Bombings and incendiary attacks had become less
frequent
in the city. There was a tightening of security: parking control zones were introduced, body searches, more troops on the streets. But there had been a rise in the number of sectarian assassinations. This was an arrangement within the city, an attempt to provide a suitable population for what it had become. It required those who were alert to exclusion.

This was a good time for the Resurrection Men. They were seen as favoured and visionary. Defenders of the faith. Victor himself was rarely seen. Sometimes he would get Willie to drive him around. He talked about replacing the windows of the Capri with smoked glass. He was surrounded by rumour and speculation. It was said that he spent his days in a darkened room. It was said that he suffered under a meticulous foreknowledge of his own death.

In the end Coppinger compiled a list of their names with ease.

‘It’s amazing,’ he told Ryan. ‘You’ve just got to walk into a bar and people are pointing them out to you.’

He added that he had approached his editor with the names. Crommie, Barnes, Lambe, Kelly.

‘I got all this trial by newspaper shit. The man says that if everybody’s so sure it’s them then why aren’t they locked up. I got to remind myself that this editor started out reporting schoolboy hockey matches part time, for fuck’s sake.’

To Ryan at that moment the reporting of local hockey matches played in a fading light seemed like a worthwhile and hardwon task with the virtues of endeavour, well-tended pitches, and the hallucinatory glimmer of white shorts against a darkening sky. But Coppinger went on to say that the identities of the men had been known to the police for a long time but that he had underestimated the degree of craft they brought to the killings. The carefully chosen routes, the stolen cars that were burned afterwards to destroy evidence, the removal of lead particles from clothing. He thought that the whole patient methodology was written down and stored in a locked filing cabinet. There would be pathology reports,
photographs
of victims, photographs of the Resurrection Men
themselves
; black and white shots, taken from a concealed camera, of men who could have been mafia or drug smugglers caught unaware in poses of artless evil. He said they operated across different police divisions in the knowledge that co-operation between divisions was minimal. Operations were hampered by distrust of the police. Detectives hinted at threads of sympathy for the killers in the lower ranks. There seemed to be a dark current of approval in the political sphere.

Coppinger seemed to be driven by this information. Ryan began to wonder what private purpose was served by this fascination. There was no doubt that it was a theme which rose above the ordinary violence of the city. One of the rare
happenings which declared itself different, yielded to appraisal, demanded a new agenda. Still this did not account for Coppinger’s obsession. Ryan had noticed that the other man had developed a bad smoker’s cough. The fingers on both hands were yellowed and he was paying less attention than ever to his dress. His cough came in long cancerous bursts, instantly recognizable in a bar or at a crime scene. There seemed to be a formal structure to it. And the more he coughed the more he smoked. Untipped Gallagher’s Greens. He seemed to cling to it, and Ryan could see its heroic qualities, the refusal to move warily in the presence of his own dying.

Coppinger wrote out the names for him and stuffed it into his breast pocket. He found himself taking it out frequently and surveying it. Ivan Crommie, Ian Barnes, William Lambe, Victor Kelly. He could not connect with them. They had the insubstantial feel of men listed missing in action.

That summer he thought that his marriage was still
somewhere
in the city, stored intact with its pleasures and
accumulated
loss. In the evening he would walk through the city centre to Charley Lavery’s and sit at the bar drinking slowly, watching couples behind him in the bar mirror, their expressions like masks of recorded behaviour fitted to their faces. Studies of desire and anger. One night after he had left he saw a young couple who had been drinking there all evening. They were trying to cross Shaftsbury Square, the girl running ahead, grabbing things to stop herself falling. They were shouting at each other. Words of haunting blame and violence. The
closing
-time crowd watched them patiently. Two members of a police foot patrol looked on from a doorway. The boy fell over a car stopped at traffic lights. He turned and kicked the bumper and cursed at it. It was an intrusive presence in the mysteries of his anger. If he had been asked then why his marriage failed Ryan would have said incomprehension and the failure to grasp what was constant in his own heart. The boy and girl reached the other side of the square. Ryan listened to their
voices trailing off into the distance, a note of surprise in their quarrelling, a sense of having discovered one of the many uses of love.

A week later he found himself in front of Heather’s house. There was a crack in the front door glass patched with tape. The garden was unkempt. This was the way the house
proclaimed
its lifetime of many lettings, tenants changing two or three times a year. The house had accumulated their
departures
, their restless nights, their declining fortunes. The
door-knocker
hung from a bent nail.

He knocked on the door and waited, wondering what had brought him there. He did not expect Heather to open the door. She would have left and the new tenant would open the door, accustomed to these incursions. A girl with wet hair perhaps, hurried and resentful. A girl with fine bones framed by the
hall-light
, by the smell of cooking and the sound of a television. She would see him as a threat to her lightsome and temporary structure of home.

When Heather opened the door it was a moment before he recognized her. She was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and wore no make-up. He thought she looked like someone else’s wife and suddenly saw another man coming to
Margaret’s
door, drawn by something under the skin, a chastened beauty that was the sole and guarded preserve of the
disappointed
wife.

But this was not the reason he had difficulty in recognizing her. There had been some other change. Her body still
possessed
the same light bulk that suggested aerial properties but there was fatigue in her eyes as though she had spent hours in hopeless watching. She had the distant look of the fatally unnerved. She smiled vaguely at him then turned and walked down the corridor leaving him to follow.

When he reached the living room she was sitting on the
sofa beside another man. A television was on in the corner. The room contained the elements of a familiar domestic scene, the sum of achieved moments. Matching vases on the mantelpiece, a polished table, a gathering of possessions in a dim, familiar light. It was a small-town room, Ryan realized, taken aback by the richness of its own applied comforts. The souvenir ashtrays and Delft candlesticks had an air of having earned their sentiment and the right to sit apart, to be lifted daily and dusted, to be always in the margin of a woman’s eye and beloved.

The man on the sofa seemed to be part of these
arrangements
. A man who worked with his hands perhaps. A panel beater, a fitter in a small engineering works. Ryan thought of him coming home in the evenings, washing his hands carefully with Swarfega, eating dinner and later in bed reaching for his wife carefully with those tended and fragrant fingers. He was smiling at Ryan. It seemed that he appreciated his
surroundings
and was happy to share the benefit of their stored, domestic virtue.

‘You going to introduce me to your friend, Heather?’ he said.

‘This is Ryan,’ she said, without taking her eyes from the television.

‘And what does Mr Ryan do?’

‘I’m a journalist.’

‘Good, good.’ Ryan felt that he was being reassured. That there was a procedure to be undergone in this room but that it would be simple and painless.

‘My name’s McClure,’ the man said, reaching out his hand without getting up.

‘Get us a drink there, Heather,’ McClure said. Ryan sat down on an armchair as Heather went out. McClure didn’t speak and Ryan felt that he was under intense scrutiny. He wondered if McClure knew about his encounter with Heather in the Harbour bar. He no longer thought that the man was
boyfriend or husband. It was starting to feel like a pre-arranged meeting. There were unknown resonances. He felt that
anything
he said or did would be full of significance.

‘She’s a fine big woman,’ McClure said softly, nodding towards the kitchen doorway. His tone implied that Heather was at a threshold, part of a species facing extinction, and that any reply would have to take the form of sorrowful agreement. Again Ryan could not find the words to answer, although McClure nodded as if he had, then looked at him as though to confirm that talk here would not be easy, that words would be cumbersome and fraught but must be exchanged none the less.

Heather returned with an unopened bottle of vodka and three glasses. She poured vodka into each glass, lifted one and sat down again facing the television. This made Ryan more uncomfortable. It seemed she intended to take no part of this, that she was estranged from what might follow.

‘What do you work at yourself?’ Ryan asked.

‘Typical reporter,’ McClure said, ‘always on the job.’