The Devil I Know (16 page)

It was woody old gorse, left to grow unchecked for so long that you could walk between the trunks propping up its prickly canopy. The closer we got, the higher the mound loomed, and then we saw the glowing eyes. And the glowing eyes saw us. They had been watching us all along.

Neither of us said a word, just about-turned and legged it straight back to the truck. When we were both in, Hickey hit the central locking button and the accelerator pedal. He didn’t stop to shut the rusty gate when we finally found our way out. ‘But what if it escapes?’ I said and immediately regretted voicing the question, because in referring to it I had confirmed that there was an It. Hickey didn’t answer.

‘Do you believe in God?’ he asked me some miles down the road. Night had fallen by then. Real dark, country dark.

‘No.’

‘Do you believe in the Devil?’

‘Don’t be absurd.’ The quality of his silence made me turn to him. ‘Why, do you?’

His face was lit electronic blue by the screen of the GPS, which indicated that we were still stranded in a void. ‘Yes.’

‘You believe there’s an actual man called the Devil who walks amongst us?’

‘I do,’ Hickey asserted with vehemence, keeping his eyes on the road. ‘I seen him. Down at the Steak one night. The lot of us were standing around a bonfire outside the cave when suddenly there was this face on the other side a the flames, standing right across from me an looking at me mate Shane. Staring at him, like. Boring holes into his head. He was black. An I don’t mean African black. He was a white man but his skin was black, an shiny an greasy, so I elbowed Shane an says, ‘Who’s your man? Who brought him? Fucker seems to know you.’ But Shane couldn’t see him. ‘Where?’ he says, an I nodded across the bonfire but your man had already went. But I
seen
the prick. I
seen
him there that night. A few hours later, Shane was dead. Drowned. Fisherman’s son. Never learned to swim. You remember Shane.’

‘I’m sorry, Dessie, I don’t.’

‘You do. He was in the little school with us. Did you know he was dead?’

‘No, I hadn’t heard. I must have been away.’

‘They said you were dead too.’

‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence.’

‘That’s right. Another Tristram St Lawrence. Common name.’

I lowered my head. ‘Yes, it is a remarkable coincidence.’

We journeyed for another mile or so without speaking. Hickey turned the heat on full. ‘Perishing in here,’ he complained, though it wasn’t. Moths blundered into the beams of the headlamps, and a frog made a break for the other side of the road, getting its timing spectacularly wrong. The amount of vehicles that passed that way – maybe one or two each night, and maybe none at all – why did it have to wait until then?

‘Have you ever seen the Devil?’

‘No, Dessie, I haven’t.’

‘I think you have seen him. I think you just didn’t know it was the Devil. Or that you just didn’t admit it was the Devil. That’s what I think.’

‘Is it?’

‘It is. Do you think he’d talk with an English accent?’

‘Please, Dessie.’

‘Or would he be one a them mad fuckers from Kerry? You know where they hold the Puck Fair? The Puck is another word for the Devil, isn’t it? Isn’t that right, Tristram? Isn’t the Puck another name for the Devil?’

‘I don’t know, Dessie.’ So don’t keep asking me. We were going around in circles again but there was no sun to orientate us this time. No moon either, that I could see. And no St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers. The dashboard of the new truck was bare.

‘I’d say he’d be English. Like you.’

‘I’m not English, Dessie.’

‘You know what I mean. I’d say he’d talk posh like you.’ Hickey pondered the Devil’s accent as we raced along the country lanes. The blackness of the surrounding fields facilitated this strain of thought. There could have been anything out there. ‘Yeah,’ Hickey concluded, ‘the fucker at the bonfire with the coal-black skin didn’t look like a Kerryman to me. He didn’t look human. I’d say he was English. A posh English toff.’

The lane was steadily tapering and the hedgerows crowded in, a scrawny rabble clamouring at the windows to get a look at us, convicts in a prison van. They dragged their claws along Hickey’s new paintwork. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. I glanced at the GPS. It was still reading a blank.

‘Tell us this, Tristram: why don’t you drink any more?’ The heat in the truck was overpowering.

‘Because it’ll kill me, Dessie,’ I told him, although it was none of his business.

‘Why, what were you drinking, strychnine?’

Trying to make light of it. There was no light to be made of it. Addiction was a dark road. ‘Alcohol, Dessie. If I drink alcohol again, I’ll die.’

Hickey couldn’t get his head around this. ‘Is that what they tell you in the AA? That if you take a drink you’ll die?’

‘Not immediately, but yes, I’ll die.’

Hickey laughed. ‘An you believe that shite?’

‘Yes, Dessie, I believe that shite. I believe that if I started drinking again, I would keep drinking until I drank myself into the grave.’

‘An you laugh at me for believin in the Devil?’

‘I didn’t laugh at you, Dessie. We all have our private conceptualisations of Hell.’

‘Private conceptualisations of Hell,’ he repeated dubiously, giving the words his full consideration. ‘
Private conceptualisations of Hell
. So what you’re saying is, it’s in me head?’

‘The Devil was invented by man, Dessie.’ And like the nuclear bomb, once we invented him, we could not uninvent him.

Hickey shook his head. ‘I know what I seen that night. I know the Devil was standing at that bonfire. An I know that two hours later me mate Shane was dead.’

Why had I denied knowing Shane? I remembered Shane well enough. I hadn’t heard that he was dead. ‘Where’s your St Christopher?’

‘In the old truck.’

‘Oh.’ Silence. Miles of silence ensued. There was much to weigh up. ‘I don’t think we should go ahead with this project,’ I finally said.

‘Too late,’ said Hickey. ‘We already signed.’

Of course. Last night, or was it the night before? During the night of delirium, we had signed every contract put in front of us.
pp M. Deauville
, I had inscribed beneath my signature;
per pro.
,
per procurationem
, through the agency of. By the power delegated to me as his procurator, his steward, his proxy.

‘Here, Tristram?’

‘What?’

‘Do you ever feel he’s in the back seat?’

‘Who?’

‘The Devil.’

‘Stop it, Dessie.’

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you sounded exactly like him just there!’

‘I mean it. Enough.’

‘When you’re driving around, I mean. Like now, for example. Do you ever feel he’s sitting right behind you just out of range of the rear-view mirror?’

‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘I don’t.’

‘Or maybe he doesn’t have a reflection. Maybe that’s why I can’t see him.’

‘Or maybe you can’t see him because he isn’t actually there.’

‘Nah,’ said Hickey. ‘He’s there, all right. I can feel him. Breathing down the back a me neck.’

The relief when the first street light appeared on the horizon was immense, a glimpse of dry land to a shipwrecked man. A sign for the motorway soon followed and we hurtled towards the orange glow of civilisation. The navigation system
started
tracking our position again. I didn’t care that Hickey was speeding. I could not get out of that black hole fast enough.

‘I do right now, Tristram,’ Hickey said out of nowhere. We were stopped at a red light at Sutton Cross by then. At least forty minutes had passed between us in silence, Hickey blessing himself every time we passed a church, and sometimes when we didn’t. The Cross was deserted at that hour of the night.

I was frankly surprised when Hickey had slowed to a halt at the empty junction. I had expected him to bulldoze through the way he bulldozed through everything. Why, having broken all the other rules, had he chosen to obey this one? The rules of logic, of business, of matrimony, the rules of the Irish State – a trail of broken rules lay scattered in his wake as if a tornado had passed through town, and then he decides to stop at a red light after midnight? I looked at him. ‘You do what right now?’

‘Feel him in the back seat.’

‘Who?’

‘The Devil.’

I turned away to look out at the crossroads. The two of us stared dead ahead like a pair of mannequins. The skin on the back of my neck crawled like the pelt of a cat because as soon as Hickey said it, I felt it too. Felt him. Breathing on me.

The lights changed to green. We pushed on. Motion somehow alleviated it, that sense of the Devil bearing down on us, contracting his tensile spine.

‘Why do you think I bought the truck, Tristram?’ Hickey asked me at Corr Bridge. He was over-enunciating his words.

‘I don’t know, Dessie. Why did you buy the truck?’ I was over-enunciating my words too. We were under observation now. We were speaking before an audience.

‘Because it has no back seat.’

‘I see.’ We trundled on.

‘Nowhere for him to sit.’

‘I got that.’

He rolled down the electric window after dropping me off. The castle hovered in darkness, a damp slab of stone. ‘I still feel him breathing behind me though,’ Hickey stated grimly, inclining his head to indicate the space to his rear, the non-existent back seat that we were both afraid to look at. The window glided up again, sealing Hickey in with his cargo, and no St Christopher to protect him.

‘Mr St Lawrence, these lands you describe as your proposed new urban quarter for Dublin: would this be the farm in
Oldcastle
?'

That would be correct. ‘The most expensive scrubland in
Ireland
,’ as the
Irish Times
dubbed it when news of the deal was officially released a couple of months later. A profile of Hickey was published in the business section, with a picture of his shaggy head in a football jersey, describing him as a small-time builder with little formal education who had started out with garage conversions and renting prefabs to schools and graduated to developing the prominent coastal Claremont site and acquiring an international property portfolio within the space of ten years. Currently on to his second marriage to a marketing executive also from Howth, father to nine – nine! – children with his first wife. Then the article made reference to a powerful publicity-shy business partner, considered to be the mastermind of the operation but about whom little was known other than that he was connected at the highest level to the world of international investment banking.

I dropped the paper and stood at the window with a racing heart and mind. Mastermind of the operation. Powerful publicity-shy business partner. So Hickey had a puppet master too. Background figures were yanking his strings just as surely as they were yanking mine. He hadn’t the wit to pull it off, and, frankly, neither did I. We had bought properties in countries we couldn’t locate on a map.

I checked my phone. M. Deauville hadn’t called. He would already have seen the morning’s papers. His information
service
would have drawn the extract to his attention. This
silence
was a bad omen. I phoned Hickey.

‘I was about to ring you,’ he shouted at me over the racket – he was on site. On the old site, that is. The original one. The one we should have stuck with.

I eyed the man in the tower crane as if eyeing Hickey. I hated that he had a peephole into my privacy. I resented his vantage point. ‘I just saw the
Irish
Times
.’

The background noise fell away and I heard the drum of footsteps across a raised floor. He had retreated into the Portakabin. ‘Yeah.’

‘Who is this “powerful silent partner” that they’re talking about, Dessie? Your “shady business associate”?’

‘You, ya fucken eejit. You’re me shady associate. Listen, get your arse down here now.’

‘I can’t. I have a board meeting. The legal team is arriving as I speak.’ A black Mercedes S class was crunching across the gravel, reflecting warped silhouettes in its polished flanks.

‘Well, come down the minute it’s over. We could be bollixed.’

The barrister and his assistant shook my hand in front of the Castle Holdings plaque at the top of the terrace steps. I led them inside to the steward’s room.

Once we were seated, the assistant, a young man who was devilling for the barrister in the Law Library, took a laptop from his briefcase and powered it up. The barrister produced a mobile phone. He dialled a number and set the device on speakerphone before placing it in the centre of the table. The three of us listened to the foreign ringtone.

Click. ‘Yes?’ M. Deauville. My heart sat up in recognition, a dog responding to his master’s voice. How strange to hear him in an official context. How strange to hear M. Deauville answering a phone, in fact. I was the one who answered to him. Those were the terms of engagement.

The barrister listed the names of the three persons present and the young devil took notes.
Tocka tocka
on his laptop. The barrister read out the minutes from the previous board meeting: a list of properties acquired and the amounts paid for them, the extent of the loan notes issued to date – millions. M. Deauville proposed the adoption of the minutes and I seconded him. ‘Any Other Business?’ the barrister enquired, turning to me.

‘None,’ I dutifully responded as the statutory Irish resident of Castle Holdings Ltd. A spider was suspended from a gossamer thread directly in front of my face. It was a small specimen, brown with yellow flecks, and its legs were bunched so tightly that it formed a sphere. It plunged further down its thread until it hovered just above the tooled leather surface of the desk. I don’t know why I mention the spider. Other than to remark that I wished it wasn’t there, but it was there, and I lived with it, along with a number of other monstrosities that made their home in mine. The devil hit
print
and his portable printer fired out the minutes. It was most efficient. His master checked them for errata before placing them in front of me. He proffered a lacquered pen with which to sign. The spider scuttled back up its thread. I uncapped the pen and couldn’t help but pause to admire its craftsmanship.

‘You know, you should never share a good fountain pen,’ I said by way of making conversation now that the dirty work was done. ‘The nib has adapted to your hand.’

‘Don’t worry about the pen, Mr St Lawrence,’ the barrister advised me, indicating where my signature should be inserted. ‘This pen has adapted to many hands over the
centuries
.’

I scratched my name on the dotted line and returned the endorsed minutes and the pen. The barrister witnessed my signature with his, then handed the document to the devil, who stowed it in his briefcase. M. Deauville rang off at that point. I gave the barrister the unopened stack of post that had arrived addressed to Castle Holdings Ltd. Harps from the Irish taxman and block capitals from the North Americans: ‘IMPORTANT TAX RETURN DOCUMENT INSIDE.’ M. Deauville’s counsel accepted the correspondence and thanked me for my time. I saw the two of them back out to their car.

Didn’t I find this arrangement odd? No, Fergus, not in the least. It is what my family has done for centuries, I suppose. Managed our estate. That’s what passes for work amongst the landed gentry: authorising others to undertake it on our behalf.

‘By the way,’ I said to the barrister as he was lowering himself into the back seat, ‘could I get M. Deauville’s number from you?’ I took out my mobile phone. ‘I appear to have, ahm, deleted it from my contacts folder.’

The barrister glared up at me in outrage. I had deviated from the script. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ he muttered tightly before pulling the door of the Mercedes shut as hard as he could manage.

‘Have you gone up thirteen floors on that hotel?’ I asked Hickey when I found him in the Portakabin. I needn’t have bothered pitching it as a question. Hickey had gone up thirteen floors on the hotel. Any fool with an eye in his head could see that.

‘Don’t mind that now. We’re in trouble here.’

‘For the love of God, you can’t just go up two extra storeys.’

Hickey pointed at the paint-spattered plastic chair in front of his desk and raised his voice. ‘For fuck’s sake, Tristram, this is serious. Shut the fuck up and sit down.’ I shut the fuck up and sat down.

He turned his back on me and flicked a switch. ‘Useless piece of shit.’

I jumped to my feet. He had found out about Edel. How? Because someone knew about our affair.
I didn’t see her diddies!

‘Cheapo fucken crap. Jesus Christ, who designs this shite?’

The kettle. He was referring to the yellowing plastic jug kettle, trying to manhandle it onto its base. The thing eventually connected with the power supply and the orange switch lit up. He looked over his shoulder.

‘What are you standing there for?’

‘I . . . Can I help?’

‘You? Help? With a faulty appliance? Stop the lights.’

I sat back down on the paint-spattered chair and watched him make a cup of tea. He made only one, so I presumed it was for him until he placed the mug in front of me. ‘There,’ he said as if setting me a challenge. Which he was. Curds of sour milk floated on the surface. ‘Thanks, Dessie.’ I adjusted the position of the mug but did not raise it from the table.

He sat down on the other side of the desk, put his head in his hands and shook his great mane slowly. Oh Lord God, I realised, he knows. He knows that I am in love with his wife, and that his wife is in love with me. How could he not know? The birds were singing about it in the trees. The sun was shining about it in the sky. Yes, we had been seeing each other all summer, Edel and I, but that is a private matter.

I sat there awaiting my punishment like a schoolboy. A girly calendar was tacked to the wall behind Hickey’s head. Miss September’s breasts were as hyper-inflated as the tyres on his truck. Finally, he raised his face. ‘The Viking,’ he told me darkly.

‘Oh,’ I said in relief. ‘Why, what of him?’

Hickey averted his face, as if he couldn’t yet bring himself to speak of such things, and it was insensitive of me to ask.

‘What? Has he ratted you out with Svetlana?’ That would explain why Edel had come to me in the first place. The spurned wife.

‘The Russian one? No, she’s grand. It’s her pimp that’s giving me a pain in the hole.’ He resumed his slow, sour headshake, and his mouth performed a series of expressions of revulsion, as if nauseating words were teeming inside it, filling it with bile until he could hold them in no longer. He sprang to his feet and threw open the door. I thought he was going to puke but instead he hawked a gullier into the yard where it sizzled in the sun, glutinous with agro.

He shut the door and returned to his seat. ‘The Viking’s after getting to Ray.’

‘Getting to him?’

‘Yeah. He wants the Metro North diverted to service his land.’

I was missing something. ‘What does the Viking want with the Metro North? The Dart’s already servicing Howth.’

‘Not his land in Howth. His land in some kip I never heard of on the other side a the M1. An he gazumped us on diverting the Metro this morning. It’s going to terminate in his farm, not ours.’

‘But our farm is worthless without the Metro.’

‘Correct. We’ll be down ninety-eight million.’

Ninety-eight million. Could we really have paid that? I lowered my eyes to the curdled milk. ‘Well, we’re just going to have to cough up even more to the Minister then, aren’t we? How much is he extorting from the Viking?’

‘€300,000.’

‘Bloody hell. So we need to come up with €310,000.’

‘Nope. We need to come up with half a mil.’

‘That’s not how bidding works. You go in with your lowest offer.’

‘This isn’t bidding. This is bribing. The Minister says it’ll cost half a mil in “professional fees” to get the Metro North diverted to service our farm. He read in the
Irish
fucken
Times
this morning that we’re going to make a profit of over a hundred million on the new urban quarter so he wants a slice. Fair’s fair, is what he told me. Otherwise, the Metro North goes east to the Viking’s field. An oh yeah, he wants this “professional fee” to be delivered as a package.’

‘What, in a big brown envelope?’

‘No, a financial package. He wants a certain amount a the apartments from the farm – he hasn’t said how many yet – to be placed in various offshore trusts that can’t be traced back to him. He’s had a spot a bother in this regard in the past, as we all know. Plus we’ve to throw in the redevelopment of his gaff to include a 3,000-square-foot extension to the side an rear with swimming pool and gym. I mean, we can’t just hand the man half a million lids in cash, obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Except that he wants half a million lids in cash to be handed to him first.’

‘What?’

‘This is it. He wants half a million lids lodged as a “planning bond” an when he gets his apartments and extension he’ll give us our cash back.’

‘I’ve heard it all.’

A knock on the door then. Hickey threw his head back as if this were the final straw. ‘Oh Jesus Christ
what
!’ he shouted at the ceiling.

A labourer in a helmet inserted his head. ‘There’s a man here from Iarnród Éireann, boss. Says the railway owns the north-west corner of the site.’

‘Tell him to go and shite.’

‘Fair play,’ said the labourer and shut the door.

‘The Viking,’ Hickey said bitterly, stoking his rage. ‘Because a that ponce, we need an extra quarter mil. I’m already at the pin a me collar. Where am I going to find that sort a money?’

‘The country is awash with money. Ask McGee. I mean, he’s throwing cash around.’

‘Not any more, he isn’t. He says he has a liquidity issue, not a solvency one.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Dunno. He just came out with it. I rang him an says, Ulick, be a good man an loan us some extra money there for the Minister; an he says, Dessie, we have a liquidity issue, not a solvency one, but the fundamentals are sound. Then he says we said
we’d
take care a the Minister.’

‘No, you said
you’d
take care of the Minister.’

‘Yeah, but you’re me shady associate. So when I says I’ll take care a something, that means
we’ll
take care of it.’

The top buttons of his shirt had come undone, revealing a lewd tangle of chest hair. I didn’t like to gawp so I focused on Miss September’s cleavage instead. ‘The writing’s on the wall, Dessie. It’s time to pull the plug.’

‘We can’t pull the plug. The contracts have been exchanged. We have to get that shagging Metro redirected or else we’re down ninety-eight million for a farm that isn’t even any good of a farm, according to the
Irish Times
, although all farms are dumps if you ask me. So go talk to your money man about spotting us the extra quarter mil. Dickville. Give him a bell.’

pp M. Deauville.
I had exchanged contracts on his behalf for scrubland that didn’t even register on a GPS. ‘It’s not that simple, Dessie. I can’t just call him.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just can’t.’

‘Let me talk to him then.’

‘You can’t either.’

‘A course I can. It’s his investment too. He’ll thank you in the long run, believe you me.’ Hickey took out his mobile phone. ‘What’s his number? Call it out to me there.’

‘Trust me, Dessie. I can’t tell you his number.’

‘Give us your phone.’

‘No. Hey!’

He grabbed my phone because that’s how he had operated in school – by simply appropriating the things he wanted. And that’s how I had operated too – by simply letting him.