The Death of Love (15 page)

Said Farrell, “I’ll give you a hand,” and suddenly McGarr found himself alone with the taosieach, who tapped his knee.

“Listen to me now, Peter, and harken to what I say,” he said in the same confidential tone that he had been using with his two cohorts before McGarr had entered the room. “I would never ask you to do anything wrong, but I wish simply for you to keep me in mind as you perform your duty.

“Governing this country is like living in a small town in the West. Sneem itself, say. There behind closed doors a person can be anything he wants. He can gather powerful people from all over the world and plan and scheme and work for evil or—in the case of Paddy Power
and
this government—for good, so long as he breathes not a word of his intentions and presents a picture of rectitude.

“The cardinal rule, however, must be observed. Never reveal the confusion of the decision-making process or any disunity in the ranks. In politics, quick, sure strokes count for everything.”

O’Duffy’s fiery eyes regarded McGarr, who only held his gaze.

“Once you become fodder for public chat, once the pop
ulace is allowed to chew the honeyed cud of your indecision or, as in this case, to suspicion that you might be divided as to fact, your cause is lost. I’m at a crisis here, and how you handle this sad situation will as surely shape my future as any of the good things I’ve done in the past. I have confidence in you. I trust you. Don’t do me wrong.”

But the drinks now arrived, and Harney returned with the sheets on which the seven note cards had been photocopied.

“How long did it take you to make this page?” McGarr asked.

“Longer than you’d think. The first few times I put down the lid, the force of the air blew them off.”

The cards were this way and that, whereas the photocopies of the cards that McGarr had found in Nell Power’s room had been perfect, every last page of the thick sheaf.

“They’re still a bit disarranged,” Harney went on jocularly, “but then I hope I’m never forced to be a secretary.”

So did McGarr, who might soon be looking for any work he could find.

Politics was a vast, unchartable moorland, McGarr mused as Farrell’s limousine stole through the moonlit darkness a half hour later. For those who could smell rot beneath heather, he imagined it was a heady, bracing, and often profitable adventure; but for those many others who saw only bright flower and green petal, it was a dark, dangerous bog best avoided whenever possible.

How many civil servants had he seen slip into its perilous depths? Too many not to be wary of the—was it?—fair warning O’Duffy had tendered him.

How long did we have? Only until Frost or Farrell discovered that he was in possession of the note cards and had as much as lied to the taosieach.

Could Gladden have made himself another copy? He didn’t think so. Gladden’s reaction in attacking him had been too visceral.

McGarr ran his fingers over the slick surface of the photocopied page. The lenses of no two photocopy machines produced the exact same image, regardless of any other similarity. In the morning he would send to Dublin for an
alysis a page from Nell Power’s photocopy of Power’s notes along with sheets from all the copies they had discovered so far—in Gretta Osbourne’s room, the Parknasilla office, and now Taosieach O’Duffy’s house.

The note cards had been stolen from Paddy Power’s room in Parknasilla sometime between Power’s arrival there on Friday and Sunday morning when Nell Power claimed—and the staff of the Waterville Lake Hotel confirmed—the photocopies were delivered. By the tall, rough-looking gorsoon who was
not
Mossie Gladden.

With literally thousands of cards, how long would it have taken to create the photocopy that McGarr discovered in the ex-wife’s rooms? Six cards were reproduced on each page. Say it took Gladden or whoever photocopied them two minutes to place the cards on the machine, align them, and ease the top down so they weren’t forced off by the compression. That group would then have to be removed from the machine and another added in sequence, left to right, working down the page.

Five hours per thousand. Even at one minute, a large block of time would have had to have been devoted to nothing else. And unlike the page that Harney had made, the cards in the photocopy were almost perfectly aligned on every sheet. Which took concentration and care. By the tall, rough-looking country gorsoon who was
not
Mossie Gladden, McGarr assumed.

Farrell interrupted his thoughts. “I hope you’re not playing us false, McGarr.”

Us, was it? There had been a time no less than a year or two ago when McGarr would have told Farrell where to get off. But now with Maddie to think of, he only reached for the side of the bar and helped himself. He would drink on the government—or at least a man who represented it—while he could.

RUTH BRESNAHAN GOT up early Wednesday morning, astounded at how refreshed she felt on only a few hours’ sleep. It must be the assignment, she decided. Or the venue. Most of her work usually kept her in and around Dublin, but here she was on her own turf and centrally involved in the investigation of what the
Times
was calling “…the most troubling death of the decade.” The newspaper had been slipped under her door.

She bathed, dressed in another of the eye-catching costumes paid for by McGarr’s bountiful dispensation from the extraordinary-expenses fund, and picked up copies of the other morning papers on her way through the hotel lobby. It had rained sometime during the night, and there in the car park sat her gorgeous Merc, sparkling in the fresh sun like a wedge of black diamond.

Sipping from a container of coffee, she scanned the several journals as the digital report of the temperature of the “cabin”—a priceless choice of word—rose in the periphery of her vision.

Banner headlines studded black-bordered front pages. Mossie Gladden’s broken nose and blackened eyes stared up at her from the
Independent
. The headline read:

POWER MURDERED
GLADDEN CLAIMS
BEATEN BY POLICE

The front page of another paper said:

POWER CUT DOWN
GARDAI ENQUIRY LAUNCHED
PUBLIC OUTCRY

And yet another:

ASSASSINATION CLAIMED IN
PADDY POWER DEATH

The pages were filled with lengthy obituaries, eulogies, and retrospectives of Power’s life, but it was the Shane Frost press conference and Mossie Gladden’s allegations about the circumstances that dominated the lead stories. And the promise of Gladden’s press conference scheduled for eleven o’clock on the bridge in Sneem.

Bresnahan reached for the stick shift, which she only now realized had a startling shape and feel, and the car pounced down the long avenue of hardwoods toward the gate. Bresnahan drove fast and liked the big, muscular, but agile feel of the powerful, luxurious car. God, she thought, running her finger over the soft kid-sheathed cap and glancing toward the barracks where Ward was housed—what she wouldn’t give for one for herself. It was as though the Krauts had designed the seat, the wheel, the—she glanced down—everything just for her, and she promised herself that someday she would own such a glorious machine.

The gate and the road in both directions were packed with journalists and media vans, and she had to wait and sip her coffee while uniformed Guards cleared her a path. Even so, the Merc was besieged, and she had to dodge and swerve and gun the engine threateningly to clear herself a path.

Sneem itself was little better with cars lining every street, but after more waiting, Bresnahan finally found herself beyond the village where, not many minutes later, she pulled her rented Merc off the road and stopped. She had an hour and a half to kill before Gladden’s press conference, and she would do some “probing” Sneem-style, which was mouth-to-ear.

Touching a button, she slid down the window and
looked out over the sweep of field, upland pasture, and mountain—some 350 acres in all—which comprised the freehold of her father, who was a “strong farmer” in every sense.

Before her was the semicircular entrance gate, the pebble dashing of which was touched up with white paint at least once a season. The stubby columns were topped with redbrick and framed a long gravel drive, bordered by Lombardy poplars, that climbed the slope of the mountain to a nine-room house, all on one floor. It too was faced with white dashing and roofed with terra cotta tile.

To appease her mother’s notions of gentility, there was a lawn, which her father cursed when having to mow, and a solid, drained barnyard of cut granite. Surrounding it were many substantial outbuildings, the roofs of which were either in perfect thatch or covered with slate. These last were guarded by a shelter belt of towering Norwegian spruce that keened in the slightest breeze and before pesticides had been home to eagle and osprey. Above the trees was the great bald crag of the mountain and then sky, washed by winds off the Gulf Stream that flowed off shore here on the southwest coast.

A wisp of peat smoke was curling from the kitchen chimney, and Bresnahan knew that the considered, dowdy interior of the house would be as clean and orderly as the exterior was spotless, which on a farm was a labor. Now at half-nine her mother would be beginning her long preparation for the midday meal, which was still called dinner and left one feeling stunned at the sheer volume of food laid on the table. How she managed the ritual day in and day out was a mystery that Bresnahan wished herself never to solve, and, suddenly saddened, she eased her head against the back of the leather seat and considered the place in its totality.

In the brilliant morning sun the entire compound looked verdant and fine and today all “stitched up,” as her father said, for the coming winter and the Atlantic storms that raged over the cliffs a quarter-mile to the west. The winter wheat was already shin high, and dried hay bulged from the barns, the excess gathered in great cylindrical rolls that were bound in plastic and tied neatly with line. Also cov
ered were reeks of cut and dried peat, “Hard as black diamond and heavy as lead,” her father often bragged. “The best turf for burning in all of Kerry,” out of which he hadn’t set foot in twenty years. Profoundly a homebody, his farm was his life and his world, and he asked for little more.

There he was, she could see, standing tall in the farmyard with some other man, looking down toward the gate where she was parked. They would be speculating about who she was and what she wanted, and it occurred to Bresnahan not for the first time that no character as rude as Mossie Gladden or some other country gorsoon could travel from Parknasilla to the Waterville Lake Hotel without having been noticed and remembered by at least one man or woman who worked the land. Every sound and signal, natural or man-made, every local automobile, tractor, or bicyclist was known to them, and many of those, which were new, were remembered, especially now that tourist season had passed.

Slipping the Merc into gear and slowly moving up the drive, Bresnahan reminded herself that there would come a day in the not-too-distant future when she would either have to manage or in some other way dispose of these acres, and it would break her heart. In her father’s younger days times had been tough, and he had had to wait to inherit the farm before marrying. Although still square and strong, he was now in his mid-seventies. His eyesight was failing, and within the last year his gait had grown stiff. Her last time home, Bresnahan had rounded a corner of the milking parlor to find him sitting on a cream can, having fallen asleep in the sun in midafternoon, something he had never done or admitted to before. Not even her humming or her startled cry had wakened him.

When she had mentioned it in the kitchen, tears had come to her mother’s eyes. “Ah, well now—he’s winding down, isn’t he? And wouldn’t we all be after his seventy blessed years of toil. How he keeps on, I’ll never know. The place really is too much for him now.” And for me, Bresnahan also heard. “But it’s like he’s waiting for something or…somebody.” Before calling it quits, Bresnahan knew she meant. It was a further, fervent plea of the sort
she had been hearing since childhood, but with her mother fully sixty-seven herself, its finality had never been more apparent. “I’ve been thinking that I’d like a bit of the city myself,” she had said on another occasion. “You know,
after
. All I’ve known in my life is quiet.”

Which Bresnahan now heard as she opened the door and swung her legs out onto the recently swept stones of the barnyard. To think that sometime soon she would arrive under different circumstances and not find her father standing there to greet her made Bresnahan turn her back to the two men, ostensibly to belt her new winter coat, which was the same color as her hair. But she also dabbed at her eyes with a hankie and pulled in a deep breath of the cold mountain air that she only now realized she had been missing so much. She then glanced up once more at the ever-changing, changeless sky above the peak and, forcing a bright, brittle smile to her face, turned to them.

“What?” Her father set the broom against the hitching rail, and all six feet six inches of him stepped forward. As always, he was wearing a wool cap, bib overalls, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. “Is it our Ruthie?”

And her heart went out to him to see how he had to move within a few feet of her and cock his head to know who she was. He had slipped further in the—could it be?—seven months since she had last been here. His eyes were clear but looked starred, like shattered blue glass.

“It
is!
Amn’t I after meeting Sonnie, the barman from Parknasilla, in town and him telling me you’re staying there as a guest and hadn’t so much as rung up your mother. And now Rory here from the next farm, you’ll remember, ’s come over to say didn’t some friends of yours see you in the pub last night and were you here for a visit but not home?” He meant the young handsome man in back of him, who was as wide and only slightly shorter.

“I wonder now”—his strong hands, which were tight on her arms, now held her back so he could examine her, like a new colt or calf—“what’s come over our little girl?”

Bresnahan waited while he turned her this way and that, then without releasing her arms, leaned himself toward the
car and gave it a similar close inspection. “Is it a Daimler?”

“No, a Mercedes.”

“Ooo, go oo-ver, now,” he remarked in his heavy South Kerry brogue. “Is it yours?”

“For the moment.”

“You mean a renter?”

She nodded.

“And what about this?” Again he held her away from him, at this angle and that. He meant the orange merino wool coat, the brown hose, the Bruno Magli shoes. Thank goodness it was growing cold now, Bresnahan thought, and she had thought to wear a coat.

“Mine, I’m afraid.”

“At what cost?”

Bresnahan glanced at O’Suilleabhain, knowing his ears would be drinking in every syllable; like all good farmers, her father was a careful man and known to be close with his money, and it would be repeated now he had almost asked the purchase price of the garments she was wearing. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her mother now in the kitchen door, drying her hands on her apron before stepping out. “Paid for by my work.”

“Which is?”

Tiring of his questions, Bresnahan looked up into his old eyes. “Surely you heard that Paddy Power has died.”

He nodded. “But, is it murth-er, like they say?”

Bresnahan nodded.

“And they sent you, my little girl, out here to, like, investigate?”

She nodded again; there was no
like
about it.

“Hear that, Rory. Did you hear that? I can remember when you two were striplings and playing here in the barnyard, and now one of you is in the possession of the largest farm in South Kerry, and the other, who will possess the best, is out pursuing villains and thieves for the Civic Guards.”

But the heels of her mother’s stout black kitchen shoes were ringing on the stone. “Tom—leave off now. You’ll destroy her jacket altogether with your hands.” She pulled at his arms, but he wasn’t through with his daughter.

“I’ll say this, though. I’m partial, but I declare to God you’re the prettiest sight I have seen his many a long day.”

Bresnahan moved in to give him a hug.

“Oh, no, no, no,” her mother admonished, and turning to O’Suilleabhain as her husband and daughter embraced. “It’ll be ruin’t totally, and to think what it must cost.”

In the hollow of his broad chest Bresnahan breathed in the complex odor that she would always associate with her father. It was a strong, sweet smell, an amalgam of peat smoke, brown soap, Yachtsman plug-cut tobacco that he burned in his pipe, the bleach in his clothes, the barn where he had spent his early morning, and the damp earth where he passed his days. She closed her eyes for a moment and pretended that she was still his little girl and time didn’t matter. They could go on forever, just the three of them, there in
Nead an Iolair
(
Eagle’s Nest
in Irish) on the flank of the mountain overlooking the Kenmare River with the ocean beyond.

Close, like that, she could hear his heart beating. So strong did it sound that for a moment Bresnahan nearly convinced herself that her mother’s fears were groundless, and she herself was only being sentimental. He had whole decades before him. She could see him as a younger man, the way he had first appeared to her as she had grown conscious of his presence: the biggest, strongest man in all Sneem; a kind of tough, tireless giant who worked harder than anyone around; the man people had turned to for a right, a just, and a moral opinion on a matter in dispute, which probably had been one of the reasons she had gone into the Guards; but mostly
her father
who was always there for her, no matter what.

But when she pushed herself away, she could see that he too knew what was in the wind. For the first time ever his eyes were filled with tears. Turning his head away, he released her. “Shit,” he muttered.

“Shit yourself,” said her mother. “It’s what I’m worried about. Stand back now you”—she meant Bresnahan—“and let’s have a look at you.”

Her mother, Bridie by name, was yet another tall person for a woman of her generation, but thin, for which
Bresnahan gave thanks now that she herself had lost weight and, it appeared, could keep her figure. Bridie was dark with deep brown eyes, and a long, somewhat Spanish-looking face. Her hair, which was chestnut-colored and she kept tied at the back of her head like a girl, had only recently begun to gray, and she now nodded appraisingly, as she surveyed Bresnahan’s coat for spots. “Divine intervention, as it turns out. Not a smudge. Let’s have a look at the rest of you,” and her hands darted at the loop in the belt.

Before Bresnahan could object, she had the belt undone and the coat open. “Cripes—what’s this? Or what isn’t it?” She stared down at what she could see of a Vittadini riding jacket that was cut only to midthigh. Fashioned from wool sateen in two tones of brown, it snugged Bresnahan’s narrow waist, then flared dramatically to her shoulders.