The Devil I Know (9 page)

Finally he found it. He lowered the plan and looked about himself, filled his lungs with sea air. ‘I’m building me hotel right here,’ he proclaimed, throwing his arms wide, a man unlocking the energies of the earth’s molten core and channelling them into the universe. Pandora’s Box was open for business. ‘An it’s going to be eleven storeys high!’

‘Mr St Lawrence, on the matter of the rezoning of the Claremont site from industrial use to high-density residential, would you elaborate on your statement that Mr Hickey claimed he “knew the very man”.'

Knew him? He had his number on speed dial. He took out his phone and got an appointment there and then, and hung up and winked at me. ‘I know the very man,’ he reasserted with swagger in a country where knowing the very man meant everything, and it turned out not to be an empty boast.

The meeting was scheduled for the 24th of June at one o’clock in a pub on the busy main street of Blanchardstown, the heartland of the Minister’s constituency. I remember that the man was late. The Minister was a full three pints late by the metronomic stroke of Hickey’s drinking arm, which lifted and lowered his glass to beat out time.

I can also tell you that it was hot. It was a hot sunny day and for this reason we were the only two customers sitting indoors. That suited me perfectly well. I dislike crowds. At the end of a mahogany-panelled corridor to the rear of the bar the beer garden glowed achingly bright. It was peopled with carefree office staff on their lunch breaks. Hickey and I, pale against the varnished murk of the foreground, were seated like penitents on a wooden pew, our backs turned on the sun as if to God’s love itself. I see us so clearly that I could be gazing at us on a gallery wall, a painting commissioned by the Church for the purpose of moral instruction.
The Folly of Greed
, or was it
Hubris
? Or just an all-purpose
Folly of Folly
?

We were facing the door.
Tick tock
went Hickey’s drinking arm, with fresh pints appearing to mark the quarter hour. I got lumped with the usual sparkling mineral water, which I order out of pressure to order something. I don’t even like sparkling mineral water. I’d rather just sit there with nothing. I gazed at the glass for the duration, turning it this way and that on the beer mat as if it were a diamond of ingenious cut, though I wanted to smash it against the wall for being just water. Water could never slake my thirst.

Hickey drank in silence as there was nothing left to say. The mood had turned sour on the journey over in the truck. I was attending the meeting on M. Deauville’s wishes and against my better judgement, and I was adamant that Hickey should know it. I tackled the matter from various angles to drive home my point. ‘Get down off the cross,’ he said after five miles of this. We hadn’t exchanged a word since.

As I’ve said, the Minister was late. You would think that it was him giving
us
all the money.
Tick tock
went Hickey’s pint. I folded my arms and crossed my legs. I was nervous, but then I am always nervous. Look at me. My hands are shaking. Each time the pub door opened to admit a figure silhouetted against the blazing sun, my heart accelerated only to subsequently slump when that figure proved not to be the man in question, whatever he may have looked like, because I did not know him. Hickey knew him, but I did not know the very man from Adam then. Let the record state that I had no dealings with Minister Ray Lawless prior to that day in June.

On the pew was a large crumpled Jiffy pack, propped between Hickey’s thighs and mine like a ladies handbag. If witnesses come in here banging on about brown envelopes, I’ll tell you right now that they are lying. They are downplaying the sums involved. A large Jiffy pack was required to contain the amount involved in this transaction, a transaction which I am given to understand was fairly typical of the times that were in it, and the amount involved fairly typical too. The fee specified by the Minister would simply not have fitted into one of these infamous brown envelopes. Pardon me? Yes,
fee
is the word Minister Lawless used. He was hardly going to call it a bribe.

It was this Jiffy pack more than anything else that, to my mind, gave the game away as we sat there scowling in the pub. The dogs in the street could have told you that we were up to no good. That package was as incriminating as a smoking gun, yet there was no place else to stash the bloody thing except right there between us on the pew. You could hardly entrust an amount of that magnitude to the floor. My insides fizzed with the sparkling water and my foot jigged up and down with the stress. I don’t have the stomach for dodgy dealings. Unlike Hickey. Hickey had the stomach for them. The stomach and the appetite.

I leaned in to him. ‘Will we get a receipt?’

He smirked. ‘Will we fuck.’

The door opened for the hundredth time. I checked my watch for the hundredth time. It was twenty to two. Hickey put down his pint and sat up. A tall sullen man had entered the pub, dressed in a belted beige trench coat despite the heat. He had hands like shovels and crêpe-soled shoes on great big splayed-out feet. He spotted Hickey, assessed me with dead eyes, and then clocked the Jiffy pack. Aw Jesus, I remember thinking as he plodded doggedly towards us. This is our man? I threw a glance at Hickey: can’t you do better?

A rain-coloured man is how I would describe him. Rain has no colour and nor did he. A rain-coloured man with rain-coloured hair and rain-tinted glasses on his nose. There was an excess of trench coat about his person, not in girth but height, as if there were two of them in there, one standing on the other’s shoulders. It occurred to me that he was wiretapped. But were this the case they would surely have done a more discreet job. These days, there’s technology.

He smelled wrong, because yes, I could smell him when he drew up before us. It was the odour of a garment left too long at the back of the wardrobe – mouldy, mildewy, mothballed. I glanced at Hickey again: are you serious? Him? Really? But Hickey was in a state of delight.

I got to my feet and registered that he was my equal in height, a rare enough phenomenon in Ireland. However, instead of shaking my shaking hand, the Minister reached down and pulled a three-legged stool out from under our table. He positioned the stool with both hands as though lining it up for a penalty kick before lowering his sodden weight onto it.

I resumed my seat and found that suddenly I was looking up at him. His height was all in his torso. A fine man, is how party members typically described him, persisting in the peasant trait of equating physical stature with moral fibre. Despite being tall, the truth about Minister Ray Lawless is that he was a short arse.

Lawless was perspiring. His rain-coloured skin was slick and clammy, weeping like the wall of a cave. He produced a balled-up handkerchief and mopped the sweat from his forehead but it immediately reappeared. Still he did not take the obvious measure of removing his raincoat. What was he hiding under there?

He stuffed the soiled rag back into his pocket and folded his arms. The man had not yet so much as grunted. A character entirely bereft of social graces, I concluded, a brute escaped from the zoo, at which assessment Lawless whipped around to glare at me, as if he had overheard me think it. He as quickly whipped his glare away. Uncomfortable with eye contact. That’s another thing I remember noting.

‘Tanks a million for coming,’ said Hickey, and the great big short arse nodded. His arms were folded with such hostility that his fists clenched his elbows. Hickey nodded at the bar. ‘What are you drinking?’

‘I don’t drink,’ Lawless said sharply. His first utterance and it was a rebuke. Was he in the fellowship? I didn’t think so. He struck me as the sort who had taken the Pioneer’s pledge when making his confirmation, then spent the rest of his life looking down his nose at the pathetic wretches dying of thirst around him, a man with no tolerance for human frailty. I knew his type. ‘Lookit, Dessie, let’s just get down to business, alright?’

Wasn’t anybody going to make the introductions? Apparently not. I cleared my throat. ‘Minister,’ I began.

‘Ray,’ he said without raising his eyes to meet mine. I followed the line of his gaze. The Jiffy pack. He was staring at the Jiffy pack.

‘Ray,’ I agreed, and was about to offer my own name when he cut me dead by turning to Hickey.

‘Did ye bring the drawings?’

‘I did a course,’ said Hickey, and presented the plans for outline planning permission across the table like a bunch of flowers, for he was in love with Ray Lawless, I realised then.

We sat in silence studying Ray as Ray sat in silence studying the plans. A police car or ambulance
nee-nawed
past. Hickey flashed me one of his wolfish smiles to indicate that he reckoned we were laughing. A bead of sweat rolled down the Minister’s face and landed with a splat on the drawings, followed by another. Ray was raining. He had begun to drizzle.

The wet rag was retrieved from his pocket and swabbed once more across his brow. ‘Roastin in here,’ Hickey offered to cover up the man’s embarrassment, not understanding that Lawless felt none. ‘Take off your coat,’ I suggested, but when did anybody ever listen to me?

Lawless pushed the outline drawings aside. ‘What else do ye have for me, lads?’ he wanted to know, returning his attention to the Jiffy pack. ‘Oh, sorry,’ said Hickey, and reached for the cash. He could not hand that money over fast enough.

I half-expected a third arm to extend from Ray’s belted midriff to snatch the package, his little parasitic bag man. You have seen the television footage. The Minister wasn’t fat so much as misshapen. And he was misshapen because he grabbed and grabbed, a country spilling over its borders, annexing smaller states, distending with each acquisition.

But no, Ray’s two shovel paws clamped the pack. He opened it up and stuck his nose inside, jigged the wads up and down to give them a good toss, a man distributing salt and vinegar through his bag of chips, for Minister Lawless had such an appetite for hard currency that I reckon he wanted to eat it.

He took his pitted nose out of the padded envelope. ‘That’s grand, boys. I’ll get back to ye.’

He rolled up the mouth of the pack and took custody, oblivious to how suspicious this looked, to how suspicious the entire transaction had looked, because Minister Lawless was quite without shame, though it took me a while to get my head around that, shame being one of mankind’s founding principles, as depicted in the story of Adam and Eve diving for their fig leaves. To be without shame was, to me, akin to being without thoughts or emotions. I didn’t see how a
human
could be a human without it. And then I met Ray.

He got to his feet and left, no goodbyes, the Jiffy pack wedged under his arm like a hog. When the door swung shut, and the raincloud of Ray had moved on to blight another part of the city, Hickey screwed up his face and rubbed his hands together, fast as he could, as if trying to generate a spark between his palms. ‘Sorted,’ he said with triumph. ‘I told you I knew the very man.’

Ray. I sighed at the irony of a name such as that being given to a man such as him. Who on earth had looked into his cradle, beheld the rain-grey infant inside, and named it after a shaft of light. Ray, a drop of golden sun.

And then I got it. He was not ray as in a sunbeam, but ray as in the fish, that ugly flat fish with its mournful face the colour of a mushroom. Ray, the bottom feeder. Steadily making its way along the ocean bed, ingesting the tiny creatures that strayed across its path, never hungry, never full, never hunting or giving chase, simply consuming methodically until it reached the end of its natural life. I was not one bit sorry when Ray Lawless went down, even though he took the lot of us with him.

‘And further to this “fee” being paid to Minister Ray Lawless, the Claremont site was rezoned?'

Yes, and fairly promptly too – you’ll see yourself from the records. Ray had fast-tracked our application. I answered the door one morning about six weeks later to find Hickey standing there, fit to burst with glee. He brandished a letter in my face. ‘You get what you pay for!’ he informed me before climbing back into his truck and carving a fresh set of skid marks into the gravel. Who knows what pleasure he derived from the skid marks? Some, I hope.

I closed the door and opened the letter.

the Minister had scrawled in crayon, or that is my recollection – it was a primitive mind that we were dealing with, scratching primitive marks into the earth. The letter confirmed that the land had been rezoned from industrial use to high-density residential and commercial. We had indeed gotten what we had paid for.

The site had been purchased for €10 million. It was now worth, Hickey rang that afternoon to inform me, six times that. The valuer had just delivered his report and had come up with a figure of sixty. ‘That’s over a million in profit a week!’ Hickey said, ever the class thick – we were up fifty million in the space of a month and a half, a profit of over one million
a day
. Hickey can be forgiven for making this
mistake
. Even in that economic climate it was difficult to grasp. Besides, he sounded scuttered.

‘Come down and see the new site office while you’re at it,’ he added grandly, as if extending an invitation to a cruise on his private yacht.

The site office was a Portakabin with a sign reading Site Office stuck to the door. It was mounted on concrete blocks just inside the old cement factory entrance. Messages were scribbled on its grey flank:
Jenny loves Darren,
Kerrie loves Karl,
a cartoon sketch of a nob. I had heard about Hickey’s famous Portakabins. He rented them to schools for forty-
seven
grand each per year, and some schools held on to them for a decade, making D. Hickey a rich man, he boasted. ‘Indeed,’ I had said, not buying a word of it – why would a school pay €47,000 a year to park a prefab in the playground when proper classrooms could be constructed for that kind of money? But we now know it to be true. The Irish educational system had humiliated Hickey so he had made it his business to expose the real gobshites.

His truck was parked between a fire-engine-red Mercedes SLK and a silver Audi TT, both 06 registration plates. I approached the prefab and knocked. It trembled on its blocks in response to movement within, then Hickey flung open the door. In his hand was a champagne flute, with which he gestured in welcome. ‘Come in an for fuck’s sake wipe your feet!’

I looked down at the upended beer crate that served as a doorstep. Wipe them on what?

‘Ah relax,’ he said, ‘it’s a joke. This is a site office, not a bleedin castle. For builders, not barons, wha! Bet you’ve never set foot on a building site in your life, am I right?’ He looked down at me from his perch and belched. ‘Ah, God love ya, you’re not the worst. Anyway.’ He stepped back from the doorway to reveal an attractive young couple seated at the rear of the cabin. ‘Here he is at last. Meet Tristram. He’s me business partner!’ The man got to his feet and extended his hand.

‘Tristram, this is me architect, Morgan. An this’ – the
woman
looked up but Hickey passed over her – ‘is the master plan.’

He cleared the architect out of the way and led me to the table. Displayed on a board like a wedding cake was the scale model of a modern urban residential and commercial development typical of and appropriate to, say, a downtown waterside location in an East Coast US city: eight towers of glass clustered in a crystalline formation. The tallest crystal was located at the most easterly point – the hotel, Hickey’s Pandora’s Box.

Hickey set down his champagne flute and leaned over the table, his nose hovering inches above the model. ‘That thing’, he said with satisfaction, indicating the hotel, ‘could take out your eye.’ He breathed heavily over the development, a god admiring his handiwork from the heavens, picking out which bit he might like to toy with next. If you lifted off the top of Hickey’s head, you’d find it crammed with plastic models. They characterised his relationship with the world. He had reduced it in scale to a size that was manageable, malleable, an entity he could carve up and sell. He was a very simple man. That’s what made him so dangerous.

I could feel the woman’s eyes on me. I glanced over at her and was about to introduce myself when Hickey nudged me. ‘Here, Tristram,’ he said, sensing that he’d lost my attention. He pointed out the encircled H of a helipad. ‘That’s me parkin spot. H for Hickey.’

‘I have the artwork here also, Mr Hickey,’ said the architect.

‘Go on,’ said Hickey. ‘Show us the artwork.’

The architect unclasped his portfolio and produced a set of large computer-generated shots illustrating how the
proposed
development would look at street level. Hickey devoured each one before passing it to me, the glossy
photographic
paper mottled with his chip-shop fingerprints. He grunted with relish at these images of the world he was on the cusp of bringing into being. Photoshopped women with ponytails and trim bodies toting tennis rackets. Men in shirtsleeves laughing into mobile phones. In one picture a BMW X5 deposited a smiling blonde toddler into the open arms of a smiling blonde childcare worker at the proposed crèche. A Maserati made its exit from the proposed underground car park with a surf board strapped to its roof in the next. Along a glittering limestone avenue with Ireland’s Eye in the background a man walked a bichon frise.

‘Who’s this prick?’ said Hickey. ‘He looks bent.’

Morgan leaned in to consider the photo. ‘With apartment developments in wealthy areas, our firm find it’s advantageous to include a representation of at least one member of the gay community. It’s a sector of the population with a high disposable income.’

‘Keep him so,’ Hickey decreed, ‘but no lezzers.’ He passed me the offending image. It was a man in a pair of calf-length shorts and a polo shirt. The man looked neither gay nor straight, he just looked preposterous. They all looked preposterous. Every last one of them was dressed for a Mediterranean summer. Sunglasses and shorts and sandals. This development promised another climate. Presiding over it all were these green glass towers, the sun glinting off their
elevations
in every shot. Despite their height, they cast no shadow at street level, as if they themselves were the source of the light, and very possibly of the heat too, a nuclear power station.

Hickey turned to me. ‘Whatcha reckon?’

‘Smashing,’ I told him. ‘You’ve really outdone yourself.’ I handed back the photos and the woman covered up a smile. I knew her. I knew that face from somewhere.

‘So who’s the girl?’ I asked Hickey when we were back out in the yard, having seen Morgan off in his little silver TT bullet. The red Merc was still parked next to Hickey’s truck. I was confused when she hadn’t stood up to join the architect as he took his leave but instead poured herself another glass of champagne. I had presumed that she was part of the design team.

‘What girl?’ said Hickey, and then, tilting his head at the prefab, ‘oh, you mean the wife?’