Resurrection Man (19 page)

She reached for Heather’s hand suddenly and placed it against her cheek.

‘Here is the benefit of a good life in a fine skin. After eighty-six years forbye the worry of men.’

Heather pulled her hand away from the weightless
lineaments
of the old woman’s pale skull. She felt her hand being grabbed again and she pushed her away, hearing her fall against one of the tables. She turned to run but felt herself momentarily frozen by the watchful eyes in the photographs of William’s mother and it seemed to her that they were not the same person in each but many beautiful young women in their twenties, each with a wilful look which said they would not be overlooked, unnerved, or beguiled, and were capable of taking
all that was given to them down to the last dark handful put to their unsurpassed lips.

‘They’re going to kill him,’ the old woman hissed. ‘It’d be a mercy to the world if you put a gun to his head yourself.’

McClure said to Victor to stay in the room above the Liverpool Stores in Sailortown until he could be certain that the others had not divulged his name under interrogation. He found himself in a dreamy mood and began to feel the return of the old foxy Victor, dressed to the nines with cash in the pocket, waiting in Maxies until some bored wife would smile at him with a warmth that told him she’d be grateful, or she’d show him her tongue unbeholden in the corner of her mouth, a present for Victor.

Holed-up. The phrase came back to him from the films. Holed-up in Sailortown. In the films it was an interval of promise. John Dillinger’s late-summer thoughts in a wooden house on the edge of a forest while the lean-faced G-men searched elsewhere. He thought fondly of Heather, even if she betrayed him by accident under interrogation as women did; perilous words fell easily from their mouths.

McClure had arranged this room for him. It was one of the few houses left here, the buildings cleared to the water’s edge, and the small store had been closed for years. He wandered through it at night holding the Browning pistol, confident in the irresolute dark of old workman’s overalls, folded tea towels and damp-stained bolts of cloth. It was during one of these nights that he came across a man sleeping beside the broken window he had entered by. Victor lit a match and held the light on his face. The man’s clothes and skin were encrusted with dirt and Victor recognized him as a man known as Smiley who
would drink quietly in the doorways of Chichester Street until he reached the stage where he would begin to rage and growl like a dog, returning to the same spot every day as though bound to divest himself there of some ancestral madness. As Victor held the light over him his eyes opened and he regarded Victor calmly for a minute before he spoke.

‘I know you,’ he said. Victor studied him, unsure as to which form this knowing would take.

‘I know you’, Smiley said, ‘for the bastard son of a bastard Catholic by the name of Kelly.’ Victor raised the Browning and shot the man once in the stomach. Through that night he sat quietly beside him as he died. Neither of them spoke. Victor thought of that silence as being companionable. Smiley’s breath was slow and considered in the knowledge that he would soon become accountable for each one and Victor wished him well with his breathing. He imagined that it was an old friend and comrade that was dying beside him and played with this far-off sorrow in his mind. He hoped that his was an opportune death and that he would fit the darkness prepared for him easily and without slippage.

It was only after dawn when he had disposed of the body in the coal bunker behind the house that he remembered the comment about his father. He found that he could not see his father’s face in his mind. The meagre, pinched face looking worriedly about as if in constant danger of losing the thread of his own hopelessness. Or the look he reserved for his family, the gaze without properties designed to repel the most
dangerous
thing in a dangerous world.

It was an imperfect time for a sense of loss. Water running from a cast-iron spout, wet spilled coal tracked across the yard, the mealy, unsettled light of dawn which seemed an exemplar of time spent in vain pursuit.

Victor spent most of his time in a room at the top of the house which looked out over the docks. He watched the channel
buoys at night. Their alternate flicker, green–red, seemed faulty, short-circuited by some deep wildness in the tidal mass. Dorcas had warned him about the lough as a child; the sudden squalls, fast currents, sucking undertows. The sea to her was deadly and graceless – full of shifting bars and ancient murks that required a wariness beyond her comprehension.

During the day nothing stirred on the wasteland between the house and the water. Victor found that he could see faint outlines of the old streets on the ground. If he squinted his eyes he could almost see the streets themselves, windscoured and populous. The coopers on the quay, the ropeworks, the bakery, men selling milk from the tin, the honey-wagon from the abattoir. He thought about his parents meeting in an alley between the back-to-back houses, their two faces strange and animate.

But these were not his streets and he found himself drawn back to the night-time rides, with Willie Lambe driving, with few other cars on the streets and fewer people, and the sense that he had created a city-wide fear and put it in place and felt it necessary to patrol its boundaries.

He remembered how rarely the men they had lifted on these journeys had struggled or spoken. He prided himself on picking men who had a conviction of eventual solitude, natives of a wintry place. Smiley had been one, he realized, and he regretted that he had not brought a knife to work on him, to reveal the stony outlines of the silence within. It had been a mistake to hand over the task to Willie Lambe. Willie was a driver skilled in the tangible crafts of departure and destination. Willie kept his eyes fixed on the road oblivious to what lay beyond the verges; closed shopfronts giving way to fields with clouds in the dark east like wreckage gathered there.

There were rats in the house and Victor found a tin of Rodine Red Squill under the sink. He emptied half of the tin on to an old saucer, stirring the damp grains with his finger to bury the blue crystals of warfarin which were scattered on the surface like the leavings of some chemical malice. He placed
the saucer beside a rat-hole and waited in the dark for one to appear, eat the bait and return to its den. He thought of a rat crouched wakeful through the night, suddenly redundant in its own world and alive to the exacting wonder of pain.

In the morning he found a skylight on the roof and climbed through it to find himself on the roof on the side which faced away from the water towards the city. A different territory now that he was looking at it from this height, seemingly unreliable with slithery, grey rooftops and the dominating bulk of the city hospital looking prone to moodiness, as if it were at any minute liable to become detached from its surroundings and begin a surly flotation seawards.

McClure had told him on the way that he had moved Heather from her own place to another house which was normally kept for meetings or interrogations. He imparted this information with the appearance of understanding that a woman’s flesh is a fulsome commodity in times of trouble, and that he was making every effort to ensure her well-being. Thinking about this Victor was puzzled as to how McClure had persuaded him to come to this place which in daylight now seemed like a starkly lit setting for a hostage transfer or secret drug deal or some other exchange of bargains from a troubled world.

He remembered drinking in Maxies when McClure came in and took him aside.

‘Pack your bags, son. Big Ivan’s lifted. They got Willie and the knives and they pulled Biffo by the ears out of the Pot Luck an hour ago.’

Victor remembered going around the back of the bar for the Browning and tucking it into the front of his trousers. McClure reached out to him and pulled his shirt over it to conceal the butt. Outside there was a blue Escort at the kerb with its engine running. Victor had never seen the driver before and the man did not speak during the whole journey.

Victor realized that he had relinquished control in the bar with McClure acting like somebody’s uncle full of bluff
assurance
and awkward kindnesses. A hundred yards from Maxies they had been stopped at a police checkpoint which had Victor fingering the Browning and suffering from visionary images of policemen scattered dead or dying in the roadway, the face leaning through the car window shot away. He felt McClure’s hand close over his. The driver took a wallet from his inside pocket and produced a plastic-coated card which he showed to the RUC man, then they were driving again.

‘Ways and means, Victor,’ McClure said, ‘ways and means.’ He settled back into his seat smiling as if the checkpoint had been a pleasurable interlude in an excursion which had its satisfactions neatly portioned.

‘The way I see it, Victor,’ he said after an interval. ‘The way I see it is that you’re a resource. Ulster needs men like you. Leaders. The struggle’s going to be long and hard. The other three is the foot soldiers. They’re done out. The point here is to get you out of harm’s way for a while. Let things cool down.’

Victor looked out of the window. They were passing comfortable red-brick houses, their windows lit against early darkness and curtains as yet undrawn. For a moment he felt a pang of longing for the indistinct figures moving through their lit rooms, a dusk processional in the summoned warmth of their lives. These were the types of men that Victor had watched often as they left offices in the city centre carrying briefcases. The type of men he had despised then for being hurried, faintly shadowed, conditioned to sadness.

Twenty minutes later they were in Tomb Street. Victor saw a familiar figure on the pavement, moving close to the wall and casting furtive glances over his shoulder. A wino, he thought, lost in a wino’s private melodrama. But as the car drew level he caught a glimpse of the face. Twisting in his seat he saw the man disappear into the doorway of the derelict Tomb Street bathhouse.

‘Darkie Larche,’ McClure said in a low threatening voice. ‘Turned yellow so he did. There’s a traitor for you. Would have shot you in the back, Victor, if he had the guts to do it.’

McClure was businesslike when they reached the safe house. Victor was in the grip of a bafflement which seemed to claim this place of empty spaces and deadly ocean glooms as its own. They sat silently in the back while the driver carried boxes of food from the boot of the car to the house. When he was finished McClure told Victor to stay indoors until word was sent that it was safe to leave. As they left Victor saw McClure laughing with the driver.

That last day in the house Victor stayed on the roof until evening. He felt clear-headed about his life now. He had seven thousand pounds buried under concrete in the back room of the Pot Luck, along with a sawn-off and five hundred rounds for the Browning. He had the black Capri. He had
determination
, a steely prerequisite to the outlaw life. From the films he knew that outlaws sometimes got lost in romance, and that it could become necessary to return to the basics of a savage, haunted existence. He could start by settling a score. When darkness fell he descended the ladder into the attic where he checked and loaded the Browning. In the bedroom he searched washstands and drawers until he found a rusted open razor. He left the house by the front door, his solitary figure retrieved by the spent landscape of the dock.

Heather had in fact moved, but McClure had not mentioned the raid. Sleeping in the front bedroom she had been
awakened
by the noise of a police radio outside; isolated voices and static like some grim wartime reportage. She looked at the alarm and saw it was 4 a.m. It seemed a fictional hour, derived from films she had seen, with wet streets, the sound of men’s boots and pounding at the door. An hour packed with menace and grainy, dreamed happenings. Before she could reach the front door a soldier with a sledgehammer had knocked it off its hinges and within a minute there were soldiers and policemen in every room of the house. No one spoke to her, and if she had been asked afterwards to describe
their faces she would have found it impossible. Their guns and uniforms expelled a cold smell of lonely hillside observation posts, isolated checkpoints. She sat at the bottom of the stairs. She had read about abducted children that day and thought this is what it would be like to be a parent of such a child – stricken helpless by an immobility in the heart. She could hear them shovelling coal from the coalhouse, lifting floorboards in the bedroom, emptying cupboards and drawers. A soldier came out of the bedroom carrying the microphone which had been on the wall behind the bed, its wire and metal gathered in his fist like the abstract cartilage and feathers of some dead thing lain undisturbed for years in the room’s dust.

Shortly afterwards they left abruptly, leaving the house in disarray. Heather went around the house. There were holes in the floors and the contents of every cupboard were scattered on the floor. She was standing in the hallway still in her blue nylon nightdress when McClure arrived at eight o’clock.

‘Fuck they fairly put the place over the body,’ he said. He turned to her.

‘Away and get your bits and bobs together. There’s a house down the road where none of them’ll touch hide nor hair.’

As she went up the stairs she saw him walking the corridor, hands clasped behind his back like a strange curator devoted to the artifacts of desolation.

At that time Dorcas was a woman beside herself with worry for a child. She was a mere fiend for news with the television on full all day besides the wireless and papers. Every time there was a report of a man shot or a body found with name withheld until next of kin were informed she felt the clutch of icy terror. These deaths were broadcast with only bare detail attached and she dreaded to find Victor among these sad facts. She did not know the best direction for her feeling. She sometimes implored that her son’s name would come up as arrested at a scene and held for questioning. She could not remember the time lapsed since his last visit. She thought of him unattended somewhere in a gruelling pain of mind or body
unable to call on her to perform a mother’s office. In the end there was only one thing to be done. There were plenty of women to tell her the house where Victor saw the girl Heather. They would smile sweet as pie at Dorcas but with a viper concealed. It was common knowledge that the girl was there for any man that wanted.

She left the house early that morning in a bleak rain having taken special notice to her appearance and arranged for a taxi to call. She knew that the girl would take advantage from any breach of dignity such as wet hair or any failure in the apparel to impress. When the taxi pulled up outside she surveyed the house with the trained eye of a woman who has moved too often to be fooled by anything a house had to show. She was able to see a lack of care, a tenant who was unable to cope with landlords and estate agents or else was too busy in her noted career as a tramp.