Resurrection Man (16 page)

He knew that his father had boasted in bars of his son the journalist, claiming an unearned credit for raising him. Or perhaps the man felt that he was providing a necessary sense of absence. What fathers are for. Their wandering. Their vivid lives.

Ryan was standing at the upstairs bedroom window with a glass of Bushmills in his hand. The city sloping down from the mountains to the lough. Divis, Tigers Bay, the Bone, the Short Strand, the Village, the Pound, Mackies, Shorts, Harland and Wolff. The city in all its history devised as a study in death. The shipyard that built Dreadnoughts. Engineering the means for people to face death. The ghettoes barely separated. The aspects of death common to any city. The lonely dying of pensioners. The monumental dying of public figures.

He expected McClure to contact him again. The man had a medieval air about him. The messenger whose coming presages famine and plague. It was an hour for uneasy imaginings, looking out over the ritual dark of the city. It felt as if there was something lying in wait for him out there, a
prefigured end. The knife killers were taking shape and he was being drawn towards them. It seemed that the city itself had decided to devise personality for them, assign roles, a script to accompany a season of coming evil.

Willie Lambe did not at first believe that he could carry out an operation on his own. It required a sense of timing and control which he did not believe he possessed. There were levels of fear to be maintained. When he did the first one it seemed ragged and barely in control and he found himself wishing that Victor was there. But even then Victor had started to take on the sleepless and haunted look of a man stumbling among the appalled belongings of his soul. The light in the back room of the Pot Luck sometimes burned all night which reminded Willie of ordeals endured on a sickbed by his father. Billy McClure described this to him as a pain of leadership. McClure was present when Victor asked Willie to carry out the next
operation
. Victor said it was necessary to continue to sow the seeds of blind panic among the Catholic population. McClure said that they were acting in defence of the Protestant
population
, its aims, ambitions and recognized virtues.

Willie was worried that Victor had an illness. His mother had told him that the city stood on a former marsh and that the ground you put your foot on was steeped in ailments of the chest. As a child he had nightmares of sickly vapours rising. When he was young his ambition was to be a doctor curing people with wisdom and touches of his admirable hands. He would tell the world how much he owed to a firm upbringing in the absence of a father. He would buy his mother a house on high ground away from the threat of eternal damp. When he
told his mother this ambition she looked at him as if he had a defect.

When Big Ivan came down to the bar that day to say that Victor wanted to talk to him he admitted to a small feeling of dread. Victor had been uneven in his temper recently; however, Willie had great sympathy. He knew better than the others who were not overendowed in the understanding department. He saw the strain of command which left a man looking older than his years. He had been at Victor’s right hand since the start and he knew that being given his own mission was a reward for loyalty. He could see the looks of respect on the faces of men in the bar. A person of standing which was what he always wished. Perhaps even his deeds seen in the light of history along with other defenders of the faith. A position involving your face on banners and songs about you in the clubs at night. In the end it did not come easy to him as he was by no means a person of natural cruelty. They lifted this Taig on the Newtonards Road who struggled against them which meant the use of blunt force. The fact was that this put his nerves on edge. There was the return of a twitch on the side of his face not seen since schooldays when it was an earner of
nicknames
. He made himself think about what the future held, perhaps driving along in an executive car as a trusted
lieutenant
, and this returned him to calm thoughts. Big Ivan confirmed Willie’s impression of him that he had no wit by making jokes on the one hand and hitting your man at the same time. He found himself in sympathy with the man they had lifted, and it crossed his mind that afterwards they would go for a drink and share thoughts about the night, finding themselves in
agreement
about the behaviour of Big Ivan. He knew however that this was not to be and felt a kind of sorrow for those alone in the world.

The journey seemed to take a long time although it was only a few minutes. It often happens that a road you know well seems endless. It was a relief to his mind when it ended. He
got out and went to the boot for the knives, leaving the others to move the man. It occurred to him standing at the back of the car that he was like someone on a mission of mercy in a location far from help. It was a place of broken street-lights and lonely rain. He walked back towards the man who was now on the ground. He felt himself overcome by reluctance at that point. He did not want to go through with it and later made statements to that effect, adding that in his opinion the finger of blame lay with Victor Kelly and no other. He thought of going back and reporting the mission accomplished but he knew that Victor would not be fooled and then he bent over and cut your man’s throat on the ground.

It was after this incident that his mother began to look peculiar at him. A look like there was something in the distance that she couldn’t make out. A look for things a long way off but coming your way.

In his opinion this and other actions were at all times under the directions and orders of Victor Kelly who must bear responsibility. He would say further that at that time everybody went in fear of Victor and there was no gain to be had in resisting his orders.

Victor had not driven his own car for months. Big Ivan or Willie Lambe took the wheel and he sat in the back. Often he would make them drive around the same streets for hours. He told them it was to do with the power he had acquired. It had to be displayed. He had decided that it answered a need in people, a craving for matters of opulence and dread. They always drove slowly with the engine idling in third gear. He wanted
passers-by
to think of curbed forces. Victor would stare straight ahead, his expression stern and commanding. He wanted to give the impression of someone contemplating harsh but necessary measures, a general with braid on his shoulders and dark glasses.

But sometimes on one of these runs he would say, where are we? He sounded surprised as if he had suddenly
discovered
that the streets were not the simple things he had taken them for, a network to be easily memorized and
navigated
. They had become untrustworthy, concerned with
unfamiliar
destinations, no longer adaptable to your own purposes. He read the street names from signs. India Street, Palestine Street. When he spoke them they felt weighty and ponderous on his tongue, impervious syllables that yielded neither
direction
nor meaning. Sandy Row, Gresham Street.

When this happened they would return to the Pot Luck and Victor would go off to the back room with the razor-blade and mirror without a word, leaving orders not to be disturbed. After taking a line of speed he would attempt to sketch portions of the city, working fast and silent, streets discarded, corrected, gone over again and again until they yielded up names, faces. Each one seemed incomplete. More detail was required – people moved, discarded their occupations, emigrated, got lost. Whole streets were erased, expunged from records, fading into the curtailed memory of the elderly, a place subject to shortages and unexplained curfew where the recent dead seemed the least dependable of all.

It was during one of these periods that Victor killed Flaps McArthur. Flaps spent most of his days running errands for the Pot Luck unit. He had a low brow and undershot jaw and spoke with hesitation. Even a simple word was full of unexpected pitfalls as if his tongue and lips were an apparatus unsuited to the purpose of speech. His voice had a sinister, long-distance quality like a man speaking into a telephone receiver through a handkerchief. Everyday words acquired a muffled threatening sound. The nickname came from the way his ears stood out from the side of his head, huge and ornately whorled as if they belonged to a fabulous beast. Legendary feats of hearing had been ascribed to him. It was said that he had detected explosions on the border sixty miles away, conversations
through locked doors. In the Pot Luck he occupied the role of a mascot. He was there from early in the morning until late at night, a mute and strange presence.

The suspicion had been growing in Victor’s mind that information was escaping from the Pot Luck. Missions had been abandoned several times on coming across checkpoints. There were rumours that the police were planning raids in the area. One Tuesday evening he assembled the unit in the Pot Luck. When they arrived the stage at the back of the bar had been cleared and a chair was positioned in the centre with a single light shining on it. The men gathered at the bar. It was a plain wooden chair and during the course of the evening they began to look uneasily towards it, becoming aware of its chipped members and dull varnished surfaces. It was the kind of chair to be found in police stations, court buildings and other places designed to the specifics of public retribution. As the evening wore on and Victor still did not appear the significance of the chair grew on them. The spotlight
illuminated
an area of human absence and gave definition to it, boundaried in light with its dimensions revealed. At eleven o’clock Big Ivan came out of the back room and went behind the bar. He poured double vodkas for all of them, Victor’s orders. They drank them quickly and ordered more. Biffo turned down the bar lights so their attention was focused on the cone of light in which the chair sat, contained and sufficient. Victor walked out of the back room carrying the Browning loosely in his right hand. By his face he was attempting to master a powerful emotion. He crossed the stage to the chair and stood behind it with both hands resting on its back. He paused, scanning the crowd to ensure that they had grasped the meaning of the chair. It was a place of last refuge. It was a place of utter solitude.

‘We got a traitor,’ he began quietly, ‘an informer in our midst. A Judas. Our aim’s been betrayed and our most inner thoughts made known.’

He spoke slowly and deliberately, allowing each word to stand revealed.

‘There’s an informer in this room,’ he shouted suddenly. ‘I hope the fucker’s arms and legs wither. I hope he gets fucking cancer.’

He began to pace the stage, crossing and re-crossing the patch of light and gesturing with the pistol, head down, breathing hard. He was gathering their regard to him and giving shape to his fury.

‘I been reluctant to admit that one among us has gone and sold his birthright.’ His voice was soft again. He was talking in a style that his audience were accustomed to. The preacher’s formal madness. The voice pitched and commanding. The vocabulary of flood and plague. The audience swayed now, attuned to themes of wrath and mercy. When Victor stopped talking there was absolute silence. Suddenly he raised the pistol and pointed into the front row.

‘Come on up here, Flaps.’

Flaps looked at the men around him, blinking his eyes slowly and wetting his lips. He held his hands palm upwards in front of him, his uncomprehending stare fixed on Victor. He stood up slowly. The men behind him pushed him forward.

‘Sit in the chair there, Flaps.’

‘I never done nothing, Victor, swear to God.’

‘Sit in the chair.’

He did as he was told. The audience looked on, convinced that this would be a spectacle of redemption and that Flaps would emerge from the ordeal, purged and godly. They would be stirred to pity by a stumbling confession and find
themselves
warmed in the end by the possibilities of redemption.

‘Swear to God, Victor, I never, swear to God, Victor.’

Victor was walking round him now, studying him as if this were a matter of promising angles, and solvable by degrees.

‘Swear to God, Victor,’ Flaps said in a terrible, dry-mouthed whisper, his body trembling. His eyes were screwed shut but
Victor knew that he was capable of hearing a lethal approach. To McClure it seemed distant, a televised roadside execution coming intact from a far-off war. Victor placed the barrel of the Browning against the side of Flaps’ head and fired a single shot, flat and undramatic, and Flaps fell sideways off the chair. No one moved. This must be a simulation of death, a poor rehearsal. Victor looked down at them. There were timely conclusions here for all of them, his face said, but they did not understand. He nudged Flaps with his foot.

‘Get rid of this fucker,’ he said, then walked off the stage towards the door of the back room. They exchanged puzzled glances then moved to do as he said, standing for a moment to gaze on Flaps’ unconvincing corpse.

Several days later Victor had Willie Lambe drive him to his parents’ house. Willie drove the car around the corner and watched the street after Victor went in. Victor was becoming increasingly aware of the possibility of assassination. He knew as soon as he opened the door that his mother was not at home. He walked down the hall to the kitchen, glancing at the pieces of furniture which had been carried from house to house until in the end they seemed to be imitations of furniture, unfixed and lacking in conviction. Victor went into the kitchen which was the only room that appeared unchanged no matter how many times they moved; not so much a room as the sum of what was well regarded by his mother. The tin of Vim under the big porcelain sink, the clothes line hanging on pulleys from the ceiling. A place of cooking and washing and watery legends prepared against the onset of sudden grief. His mother’s shopping bag was missing from the hook behind the door. It was enough to bring a tear to his eye to think of her walking between the stalls at Smithfield market. A small figure in flat shoes and a tweed coat following a threadbare routine, weighing carrots with hands she thought of as
blameless
– thrifty
and cautious in a way that was meant to show that she knew just how much can go amiss in a life.

He wished that she was here. He wanted to sit down at the kitchen table with her and talk about his life, reduce it to a series of wanly regarded incidents in the way that made her laugh until she would start to tell him things that he had done as a child, producing these memories shyly as proof that he held an honest place in a mother’s beseeching heart.

When he was at school he used to hope that she would fall ill so that he could pay for an operation. He imagined selfless vigils by her bedside with nurses shaking their kindly,
immaculate
heads in admiration.

Sighing to himself he went to the back door and opened it. The pigeons in his father’s loft were making their usual endless noise of intimate discovery. Victor lit a cigarette and looked up in time to see his father emerge from the doorway of the loft. They faced each other motionless across the yard as though a small pause was expected of them. For Victor, to study his father the way a child studies an adult with the frontal stare that is an entitlement of childhood. For the older man, to stare back, a father’s guarded look aware that his role lies in the measured display of his shortcomings and in ascertaining which disappointments his child will find serviceable.