Resurrection Man (2 page)

She worried about Victor when she read the letters about madness. They included words that she could not pronounce. Long words whose meaning could only be measured with the aid of finely calibrated and lethally expensive instruments. She could not imagine the consequences of such words.
Psychopathology
. She wondered if such words were dangerous to Victor.

In 1969 the streets began to come alive for Victor. They appeared in the mouths of newsreaders, obscure and
menacing
, like the capitals of extinct civilizations. Delphi Avenue. He got a delivery job driving a lorry. During the day he would
memorize a street, the derelict sites, no right turns, areas strangely compassionate under street-lights. He’d listen to the BBC in the cab. Unity Flats, Kashmir Road. The names took on an air of broken glass, bullet holes circled by chalk, burnt timber doused by rain. He felt the city become a diagram of violence centred about him. Victor got a grip on the names.

On his day off Victor would go down to Crumlin Road magistrates’ court. Park the car and then go in, women looking at him. It was a gift he had. Detectives would nod at him in the foyer. Looking good, Victor. It was the quiet respect of the interrogation room, the promise of darker days ahead. Victor sat in the public gallery beside the relatives as the defendants were called in. He liked to see a Taig brought into the box, a man’s thin figure wearing a cheap leather jacket and a V-neck jumper. He hated the Taig women sitting beside him. Their anxious looks which he despised. Their air of somebody sitting on a cardboard suitcase on a deserted railway platform, in flight from one half-starved city to another.

He drank in the details of a crime, in particular the ornate details of route and destination. He studied the type of weapon used, barrel rifling and trajectory. The pathologist’s report with photographs of entry and exit wounds was handed round the court and he followed its intimate passage from hand to hand.

Lastly there was the testimony of witnesses: I just seen these blue flashes in his hand and the deceased just kind of sat down, I can’t explain it. The testimony of detectives from Delta or Charlie division. The kind of look they put on for the judge made Victor laugh. Like, I’m haunted by dates of civil unrest, your honour.

Victor could have any woman he wanted. Click his fingers. But the women only lasted one or two nights. They’d look into his face when they were alone with him and get frightened. Looking into Victor’s blue eyes when you were fucking was like
watching
a televised account of your own death, a disconsolate epic.

He reckoned that Heather was the only woman who ever understood the depth of his ambition. He would always go back to her during the good years. Besides, Victor liked a woman with meat, pockets of flesh you could put your hand into. Towards the end she’d drink Bacardi and cry like hell itself. But at the start it was all Jesus, Victor, I could eat you with salt. Her big slow voice. Come on, you big fucker. I’m dying for a fuck. Take you home and fuck you bendy.

Dorcas said that Victor’s favourite programme was Harry Worth. He’d split his sides laughing, she thought he’d burst a vessel. He was always crackers about cars also. His first was a Mk II Escort with wide wheels and this hand you stuck in the back window that waved hello. Big Ivan thought that was the cat’s pyjamas. Him and Big Ivan would go down to the car park on the Annadale Embankment, do handbrakes in the gravel.

Before he formed his own unit Victor sat in on several killings. In one they picked up a Catholic on the Springfield Road in a hijacked black taxi. He got a bit of a digging in the back and was moaning by the time they got him to a lock-up garage off the Shankill. They carried him inside. There was an acetylene torch in the corner of the garage. A battery leaked acid on to the floor. Victor wore a blue boiler suit and carried a shortblade knife that he’d got in the Army and Navy stores. There was a smell of butane in the air, a sense of limits reached.

The body was found in a shop doorway on Berlin Street. There were 124 careful knife wounds on the body. Death was due to slow strangulation. The victim appeared to have been suspended from a beam while he was being stabbed. The taxi was found abandoned on waste ground. There were traces of blood on the windows and a woman’s lipstick under the passenger seat.

There was a cellophane-wrapped ordnance map of the city above Ryan’s desk in the newspaper office. He spent hours in front of it. Locations of sectarian assassinations were
indicated
by red circles. Many of these represented call-outs, the phone ringing late at night and a drive across the city through checkpoints. He would reach the place in driving rain. There would be a scene-of-crime officer, fingerprint and forensic men. The forensic men had fine hair and glasses. They wore white boilersuits and rarely spoke. They approached a corpse with gravity, removing it to another context.

There were lines on the map too, indicating rivers, areas which had been demolished, suggested escape routes
following
a bomb, zones of conflict, boundaries, divisions within the heart. Ryan drew a new one on the map almost every day. An evolution had been going on in there over the past three years, a withdrawing behind the lines. He thought he could learn something by keeping a record of encroachments and retreats. He was trying to develop the knowledge that the inhabitants of the city had. The sense of territory that guided them through hundreds of streets. That feeling for the anxious shift in population. He stared at the lines and circles that proposed something beyond the capacity of maps. His markings were like the structure of a language. He expected to hear its guttural sound being pronounced on the streets. He imagined being addressed in it. It would be arcane, full of sorrow, menacing.

Ryan had been working with Ivor Coppinger for two years. Coppinger was more deeply involved. It was Coppinger for instance who conducted meetings in parked cars with off-duty police and UDR men. There were intricate relationships involved once the contact was made. Knowledge became a form of suffering. In the end the information became almost incidental. Coppinger listened to terrible things about ambition, parenthood.

Early that morning he had gone with Coppinger to the Albert Bridge. A chemical tanker had been parked on the bridge with a bomb on board. He got to the scene just as the area was being sealed off. They were waiting for someone from the fire brigade to identify the cargo. The lorry was on the pavement with its hazard warning lights on. The man from the fire brigade could not read the cargo labels without binoculars. While someone went for them they stared at the orange decals at the back of the tank, symbols of mass panic and death by inhalation. The bomb disposal men were moving slowly up the Albert Bridge Road, pausing at intervals as if they were aware of other signs, not easily detectable: a shift in the breeze, a magnetic tug of warning in the currents of the Lagan beneath the bridge. Before they reached the lorry the detonator had gone off without piercing the tank. The man from the fire brigade said afterwards that it contained dry-cleaning fluid.

Coppinger had told him about Constable McMinn and Frames McCrea. McCrea had crashed through 164 checkpoints in stolen cars. McMinn had been picked to catch him because he was a part-time rally driver. There was a network on the outskirts of the city to which he belonged. Sullen men working in garages, stripping engines on oil-soaked benches, grinding down valves, increasing ratios, moving towards devout moments of speed and power. Small local papers carried intense motor-sports coverage, photographs of morose champions.

McCrea had become a matter of legend. He was at the centre of mystical events. The cars he stole had been peppered
with bullets. He had jumped a checkpoint ramp and landed on the Stockman’s Lane motorway access. He stopped outside Tennant Street RUC station every night and held the horn down to provoke a chase.

When McMinn rammed him off the road in Amelia Street the reaction was extreme. Two nights ago McMinn and his partner were dragged into the Victoria bar. They were forced to crawl on their hands and knees. They had to walk like chickens. McMinn was taken into the toilets where a shot was fired into the wall beside his head. He was forced to eat shit.

Coppinger pointed this out as an indication of the feelings aroused. The deeply felt immunities of the hero had been breached.

That afternoon Coppinger put the medical report of the first knife killing on Ryan’s desk. After death the head had been almost severed from the trunk. There were two depressed fractures of the skull, fragments of glass embedded in the face. The root of the tongue had been severed.

Later that afternoon Ryan drove Coppinger out to the scene.

‘They would’ve parked the car there,’ Coppinger said, pointing to the mouth of a small alley.

‘Drag marks,’ Ryan said, examining the pavement. There were bloodstains against the wall. There was nothing to distinguish the bloodstains or the doorway where the body had been left, but they both had a sense of familiarity, of scenes repeated in history.

‘They would have done your man out of view in the alley,’ Coppinger said, his finger describing their progress, ‘dead or near enough.’

‘He was strangled, cut to pieces.’

‘I reckon they kept him alive though, until they got here. They wanted him to know who was doing it.’

Ryan followed Coppinger’s thinking. The point of a random sectarian killing was its randomness, but here the killer wanted to be known to the victim. He wanted to convey familiarity. The
cry of the victim as a form of address. The killer would demand ritual. He would sever the throat regardless of arterial blood. He would hold the knife aloft.

Ryan found himself thinking about the way Margaret used to mutter in her sleep at night. She would mention unironed shirts, a room which needed wallpaper. Interior conversations composed of oceanic trivia which left him feeling sleepless and adrift.

‘The head was attached to the body by tissue at the back,’ Coppinger said. ‘It near fell off when he was moved.’

There was a certain awe in his tone. There was someone out there operating in a new context. They were being lifted into unknown areas, deep pathologies. Was the cortex
severed
? They both felt a silence beginning to spread from this one. They would have to rethink procedures. The root of the tongue had been severed. New languages would have to be invented.

Heather waited for Darkie Larche in the top room of the Gibraltar bar. There was sunlight coming in through the dusty windows and she put her legs on a pile of pamphlets to catch it. She loved the sun like life itself. Any chance she got she’d smear herself in oil and sit out in the Ormeau Park like some Buddha you saw in a book. She felt a voracious tenderness in the sun. She dreamed of beaches in Spain, high-rise hotels, oiled bodies that gave you the daytime sadness you felt for those who died young. Children with wasting diseases,
teenage
girls in car crashes.

The television was on in the corner with the volume turned down. She wasn’t like the other women who came into the bar, watching every news they could in case their street would appear. They looked on TV like a navigation system, migrating home through the channels. She watched scenes of street violence with the volume turned down. It gave her a sense of survival that she liked. Darkie called it the body count and watched it to check on incidents that his unit had been involved in. He would shake his head in sorrow at inaccurate details; a victim’s age given wrongly. It implied a lack of respect, an improper observance of the formalities. It was somehow vital to him that a victim’s age, religion and the exact location of the hit be given precisely. Errors were subversive. They denied sectarian and geographic certainties.

The room was filled with metal filing cabinets and unopened piles of literature. It was Heather’s job to ensure
that these were distributed. Glossy pamphlets with full-colour pathologist’s photographs of bomb victims were sent
anonymously
to politicians and journalists. The reds and blues of exposed veins and mutilated fatty tissue reminded her of Twelfth bunting. Packing them in envelopes she felt like the organizer of a sad parade.

Other pamphlets were more conventional. For God and Ulster. No Surrender.

Darkie came in, looked at the television and went to the window. He had brown skin and high cheekbones, remnants of a Huguenot merchant ancestry. He was continually nervous with a kind of racial edginess, the dissenter’s fear of pogrom. He came over to the desk and flicked at the pile of pamphlets with the tip of a ruler. He moved behind Heather and slipped a hand into the opening of her blouse, fingering her breast as if he had come across a mislaid object. Heather had often come across this kind of sexual absentmindedness in members of various organizations. And she remembered it in two young British intelligence officers she had met at a party the week before. Soft-eyed boys with north-country accents who
disappeared
together into a back bedroom as soon as they arrived, then stood around shyly afterwards, their trembling lips a little open as if they were on the verge of making secret disclosures, revelations of fellatio.

‘Take your blouse off,’ Darkie said, keeping his eyes on the television. She felt him shift his grip and remained still. ‘This fucking Victor Kelly character has that lot downstairs in fucking palpitations. Take your blouse off.’

‘Make me. Who’s Victor Kelly?’

‘This character hangs round the Pot Luck with Big Ivan Crommie and Willie Lambe. Thinks he’s God’s gift to the movement. Word is his da’s a Catholic. Thinks he’s some kind of hard man. Shooting the mouth off about how the only way to do someone is with a knife, for fuck’s sake. Take it off or I’ll rip it.’

‘Take her easy, Darkie, it’s only new. So what’s the citizens’ army so worried about?’

‘Don’t be so fucking sarcastic. They’re all scared out of their shite of him for some reason. My fucking granny’s ninety, has palpitations if she wins ten bob at the bingo. This lot’s supposed to be a unit. Defenders of the faith and all. Are you going asleep on me or what?’

‘What’s your big mad rush anyhow?’

‘Supposed to be a council meeting at six. Look very professional, so it would, them walking in and me sticking it in for God and for Ulster. Look at them bastard politicians on the TV – us down here doing their dirty work for them.’

‘If you’re going to do it, do it right. It’s not a fire you’re poking.’

‘Say it was him that cut this poor fucking Taig to pieces with this knife. Boy they found on Berlin Street.’

‘Who did – put your hand there.’

‘Victor Kelly, I told you. My granny …’

‘What?’

‘I says my granny …’

‘Fuck your granny.’

She liked Darkie. He was sensitive to the pain his organization inflicted. He watched funerals on the news, commented on the age of the children following the cortège. He had a sense of obligation. He was committed to a wider vocabulary of death which included widows and children. She liked his inattention, his slim brown cock, his seriousness.

She left him in the office and went downstairs where she ordered a Bacardi at the bar. There was still sunlight coming through the windows and the sandbagged doorway. Late
afternoon
. The sound of traffic. City centre office workers dispersing
to their homes on the outskirts with the radio turned up high for news of diversions, checkpoints in the radial suburbs.

The barman had to say her name several times before she took her change. It was a quality in her that women disliked. A lack of focus. A physical memory dwelt on.

There were four or five men in the corner of the bar talking about guns.

‘I could get you this Lee-Enfield. Perfect nick. Come across in the
Claudia
.’ The
Claudia
.
The turn of the century arms smuggler, a potent name riding in the offshore currents of an empire’s memory. Source of arms, blockade runner, succourer of outposts.

‘Lee-Enfield my arse. Tell us this, how do you hide a rifle in a fucking crowd? The pistol’s your only man. The revolver. Smith and Wesson.’

‘Browning.’

‘Fucking Magnum.’

One of the men detached himself from the group, joined his hands and arched his back. The others stopped talking and watched. He straddled an imaginary victim lying on the ground.

‘This way you see into his eyes.’

He lowered his joined hands until they were within a foot of the ground and moved as if from recoil.

‘Keep looking in the eyes. Boom. Fucking brains out.’ The man lifted the front of his shirt and mimed pushing a weapon into his waistband, then stepped back to the bar and lifted his drink.

‘That’s fucking all right close up. What happens you want to plug the bastard from the roof. Out a window?’

‘That takes your SLR, your Armalite, your Kalashnikov.’

‘Not the fucking Lee-Enfield’s been sitting in your ma’s attic this past fifty years getting blocked up with mouseshit.’

They were appreciative of the mechanisms of death. Some of them were ex-soldiers and had travelled to places such as Cyprus, Belize. Their sentences had a dusty, travelled air, a patina of hillside ambushes and jungle airlifts that the others
respected. They wore highly polished shoes and saluted with pride at the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. On Saturday morning at dawn they took groups of men outside the city for small-arms training.

They cultivated the carefully selected victim, economy of movement, the well-aimed single shot to the head. They were in control of their hatred. It was a tactical asset. They were worried about the young men coming into the organization and their dependence on random structures.

Over the following year most of them were interned on the HMS
Maidstone
moored in the lough, or in the prefabs of Long Kesh. They accepted this, lived by army discipline and spent their days constructing a rueful politics, things that prisoners work at alone in their cells, improvising in solitude.

Heather had slept with one of them when she first came to the city. He had taught her some Malaysian words in the bar. The word for where. The word for how much. She spoke them to him in the back seat of his car. She imagined him in a foreign brothel pointing to her. I’ll take that one. Leading her upstairs. The laughter from other rooms. The malarial silences.

She had been brought up in a seaside town twenty miles from the city. There was a network of these towns stretching along the coast from the city. During the summer people from the city stayed in guest-houses and littered the dunes with bottles and sandwich wrappers. Their arrival each bank holiday was momentous, a movement of populations. A desperate trek with ten-mile tailbacks. Sacrifices were being made, hardships endured.

In winter the town was empty, sand blowing in the car parks. She went drinking in the dunes with hollow-eyed local boys. The front was deserted. She liked walking there,
inventing
reasons why there was no one in the town any more. She imagined herself the sole survivor of an epidemic, a vast contamination of loneliness. Clouds massed along the skyline. Tidal surges left large boulders on the breakwater and
driftwood
in the outdoor swimming pool on the promenade.
Walking
on the front she could feel the sea grinding against the concrete beneath her feet. She tried to decipher voices in the sea. She thought she could detect a vocabulary of forces. At home she listened to the shipping bulletins, lying in bed at night with a transistor beside her, stations inching their way off the air with mariners’ jargon.

She moved to the city at eighteen and worked in bars. She began to move towards the loyalist pubs. The Pot Luck, Maxies, the Gilbraltar. Men smiled at her. Hey, big tits. She took a flat above a Chinese restaurant and beside a hairdresser’s on the Lisburn road. The smell of perming lotion leaked through the floorboards and walls. In the evening Chinese men played cards in the yard of the take-away surrounded by chickens in plastic freezer bags. They talked softly to each other in Chinese, a rivertongue of strange gamblers she felt familiar with. She would lean on the window-sill listening to them, voices in a dim light, a vernacular darkness which seemed lit by the yellow chickens defrosting in trays.

Ryan rang the police press office to confirm the details of the Berlin Street killing. They said they had no details. Cause of death to be established. A language of denial was being employed. His editor refused to accept the story without confirmation.

‘I saw him in the morgue,’ Ryan said. ‘He was cut to ribbons.’

‘Get confirmation.’

‘They won’t confirm. They’ll wait a year on the inquest finding. His head nearly fell off when they lifted him.’

‘Come back to me on it tomorrow.’

‘Story’s dead tomorrow. It was like he had these long cuts all over his body. Hundreds of them. You could tell he was alive when they cut the throat. A witness says he heard someone saying kill me, please just kill me.’

‘OK, write it up.’

The story did not appear in the morning edition. It was not the first time this had happened. Ryan thought he detected a failure of nerve, a reluctance to admit the terrible news.

After work he went to the Europa hotel. It was one of the first places to introduce body searches at the entrance. The hotel was bombed regularly. It had most-bombed-hotel status. Ryan had noticed increased local awareness of the value of such detail. Most-shot-at police station. Contempt was expressed for quiet areas.

Ryan went into the Horseshoe bar and ordered a drink. He watched the foreign correspondents come in. Photographers in khaki shirts with big pockets. Older men in safari jackets who looked continually dazed. It was said they had trouble distinguishing between assignments. One of them had told him that other wars kept creeping into his reports. His memory was swamped with incident. The presidential palace is
surrounded
. Armed gangs are roaming the commercial sector. There were long silences when he read these reports down the phone to his night editor in London. At a nearby table another group of English journalists was drinking heavily.

‘I saw the bomb in Woolworth’s today.’

‘It’s his first bomb.’

‘You stand around for hours and then it goes off. The building just collapses silently and then the sound hits you. There’s something comic about it.’

‘It’s a sonic delay. The blast travels faster than the sound. The blast is over by the time the sound gets to you.’

‘The fucking building collapses and there’s no noise. Then boom. It’s like it was staged. Like Buster Keaton was going to walk out of the dust or something.’

‘Did you ever smell gelignite. It smells exactly like
marzipan
. Cake mixture.’

‘There was a lot of dust. I never thought of dust. Flames yes.’

‘Women in aprons. Orange peel. Glacé cherries.’

Coppinger came in and ordered a pint of Bass. He’d been drinking in Tiger Bay. Listening to stories about the Blitz, Kingdom Brunel in Belfast, the construction of the
Titanic
in the shipyard. He said that a cousin of his father’s had
accidently
been sealed in the
Titanic
’s
double hull and the body had never been found. It was a haunted ship, he said. There was a ghostly tapping below the waterline.

Ryan followed his gaze towards a small group of men in a corner of the bar. Two of them he recognized as paramilitaries. The other two were unfamiliar but they had a military air about them. They could have been arms dealers. Ex-army steeped in counter-terrorist lore. The effect of rapid fire in an urban
warfare
situation. Arranging consignments of weapons from
Rotterdam
warehouses in crates marked machine parts.
Kalashnikov
. But Coppinger pointed out that the clothes were wrong.

‘A quartermaster’s notion of what you wear drinking in a hotel bar. Sports jackets, two, tweed. Ties, matching.’

Meetings like this were taking place all over the city. Fields of operations were defined. Documents of safe passage were granted. Information was exchanged. At official level these meetings did not take place. Accusations of army collusion with paramilitary groups were vehemently denied but the army continued to negotiate at ground level. People were aware of levels of duplicity being created. Irrational guilt complexes were being reported by doctors. The level of heart disease and road death was under investigation. Coppinger said he had difficulty in maintaining an erection. Teenage suicide was on the rise.