5

(DUBLIN—JUNE 16, 9:15 A.M.)

A sliver of moon. A lemon sky. Morning drawing a breath across the window. Bridget’s hair spread out over the white sheets in a gossamer bloom of vermilion and gold.

She’s asleep on the pillow next to me. Eyes closed, mouth open.

The fan’s on, but I can still hear the phone ringing in the other room.

It can only be Scotchy, so I’m letting it go.

A smell of honeysuckle. The faint murmur of the city. Sunflowers poking up through the bottom of the fire escape.

Her body is so still and white and beautiful it could be carved from Botticino marble.

It can only be Scotchy telling me to meet him at the airport. We’re flying down to Florida for a funeral. Darkey’s there already, which is why we’ve got this night together. Our only night together.

Her breathing becomes more shallow. Her eyelids flutter. “What’s that noise?” she mumbles.

“Nothing, go back to sleep.”

She yawns.

“What are you doing?” she asks. “Watching you.”

“Get the phone, Michael. It might be important.” “It’s never important.”

“Get the phone,” she insists.

“It’s Scotchy, it’s nothing,” I tell her.

She shakes her head in disgust. Out of all the boys in Darkey’s crew, it’s Scotchy she hates the most. Something about that feral weasel-faced wee hood. He’s never made a pass at her, nothing like that, he wouldn’t dare cross Darkey, it’s more his unfathomable unpleasant mind and that sleekit, native cunning. You could tell that under all that bigmouthed bluster there was something darker going on. Put the wind up anybody.

The phone gets louder.

“Just get it. Could be Andy,” she says.

“Ok,” I say. I take her hand, kiss it, then stand. I slide off the mattress, open the bedroom door.

Suddenly she wakes fully, looks at me with those deep green eyes. I wait to see if she’s going to say anything but she doesn’t. I walk into the living room. The phone’s fallen under the sofa. I move a roach trap, grab it.

“No. Wait. Don’t get it,” she says urgently, almost in panic. “Don’t get it. Don’t get it. You’re right, let it go. Come here instead.”

But it’s too late. I’ve already picked up the handset and heard Scotchy’s nasal intake of breath before he speaks.

“Hello.”

“LaGuardia, one hour, Bruce,” Scotchy says. “Hurry up.” “My name’s not Bruce,” I tell him for the thousandth time.

“One hour. Hurry up.”

I put the phone down. Bridget sighs. Yes, it’s too late…. Lima.

But there was no ocean. And the sky was the wrong color. Eggshell rather than deep blue.

What was going on?

Ask Hector, he’ll tell me. “Hector. Hector.”

Uhhh.

Where was my cell phone? I tried to sit, but an awful scrabbling pain took my breath away. I was in a car. A street sign said “Holles Street Maternity Next Left.”

Holles Street, Dublin?

It all came back. Hector was toast. I’d shot him in the head. I’d thrown an assassin out the window and I’d killed his partner with an upside-down .22 shot in his throat.

A woman in a blue dress was staring at me. “Are you all right, love?” she asked.

I got out of the car. Out, into the morning with no idea where I was going, or what in the name of God I was going to do next. Sunlight. Cirrus clouds. Nothing Irish about the day, but I knew it was definitely Dublin because the Liffey was a presence beyond the gray forms of the buildings. A smell off it that reminded me of gasoline. I couldn’t see it, but I could sense it was there, sluggish, like some dead thing on what was already a deadly morning. The lovely Liffey moving along effluent into the tidal basin, coating the pylons, bridges, and the wee blind alleys on the water’s edge. And there definitely was a stink from off it. If not petrol, diesel. Enough that I could tell. Dublin. Aye. That’s right.

There were stars in front of my eyes, as if my retina had become detached. I blinked for half a minute and the stars

vanished.

I walked away from the car. Only just in time.

Two men pulled up in a Ford Sierra, got out, and headed for the Mercedes.

Your average eejit might have thought, Ah, couple of car thieves.

But not me. Their suits were crumpled and dirty. Even from here they stank of fags and coffee. What man, who wore a suit, got this dirty this early?

Bloody cops or I’m a Chinaman.

“Morning,” one of them shouted across the street to me, with no love at all in the greeting and sleekit peeler eyes.

I nodded in reply and then thought better of it. “Lavly day, innit?” I said in estuary English.

In about five minutes they’d have a warrant out for me. Why not have them thinking I was a Cockney?

Backpack was still in there, but my IDs and cash were in my jacket. Screw it. I hobbled down the street, and when I was out of sight I ran as best as I could with a duct-tape bandage, sore foot, artificial foot, jetlag, painkillers, possible detached retina, sleeping pill, and no idea where I was going.

I was wrong about the five minutes. It couldn’t have been more than two. “Hey, you,” the cops yelled. “Stop.”

I had about a couple of hundred yards on them. Even with my handicaps, if I couldn’t lose them in rush hour in a busy city like Dublin I deserved to be bloody caught.

I turned a corner and found that I was at Trinity College. Excellent.

I ran in through the gates and chucked myself into a seething mass of students, visitors, and other extras in my little scene.

Total chaos.

Even more chaos than usual, which meant that a big party of tourists had just arrived, or that it was exam time, or graduation.

“What’s the craic?” I asked a forlorn girl who was looking everywhere for her friends.

“It’s the parade,” she said and pointed to a corner of the quad where a big disorganized line had formed and was filing out into the street. I saw then that it was part of the Bloom thing. The kids were all dressed in Edwardian gear, some were riding old-fashioned bicycles, and there was even a horse-drawn omnibus pulling drunken members of a rugby team.

As good a place as any.

I joined the procession just as the two peels arrived at the college gates. One of them still had his cigarette in his mouth. Jesus, didn’t they want to catch me? Let go your fag, you cheap Mick flat-foot.

They were both around twenty years older than me. Just about the right age to be thoroughly beaten down by the system, cynical and fed up. Maybe a couple of younger coppers would have stopped everyone from leaving Trinity, called in assistance, created a huge palaver. Not these characters. The parade wove its way past them without either lifting a finger. But even so, no point being a bloody fool about it. I snatched the flat cap off one kid’s head, threaded my way through the crowd, tripped another kid, and ripped the Edwardian jacket off his back as he fell down.

“Jesus,” he said, but whether that was followed by anything else, I don’t know because I had taken three steps to the side and four back. I pulled the Edwardian coat over my leather jacket, put on the flat cap.

I followed the kids out of Trinity and into the road.

Nice.

Now I was in a parade of a couple of hundred similarly dressed and high-spirited students heading for O’Connell Street. Like to see them find me now.

We marched merrily away from Trinity and turned north.

I wasn’t that familiar with Ulysses but it was an easy assumption that a lot of the weans were dressed as characters from the book. There were barbers, undertakers, bookies, priests, nuns, all of them in old-timey gear and most so cute you could forgive them for being young, exuberant, and irritating. And besides, they’d saved my hide.

Some of them were drinking and I got passed a can of Guinness, which I took gratefully.

“Cheers, mate,” I said.

“Sure, ’tis no problem,” a girl said. She had red cheeks and brown hair and was dressed as a tarty maid.

I took a large swig of the Guinness. Its effect was restorative.

“Are you for going to the party, young sir?” she asked in bad Edwardian. She was about nineteen or twenty and came from somewhere in County Kerry.

“Alas, fair lady, I have no time for such an enchanting offer,” I said. “I’m pressed by agents of the Castle.”

“Maybe another time,” she said and clinked her can of alcohol-free beer into mine. And maybe I would another time, but now I had to get out of town. It had been a staggeringly difficult twenty-four hours and what I needed more than anything was a place to gather my wits and lie low.

I knew no one in Dublin and I figured that all the old safe houses and chop joints I used to hang out in were probably gone. But seeing the Kerry girl dressed like that had given me an idea.

Back in my day, running with the teen rackets in 1990 Belfast, Chopper Clonfert used to take us lads to a whorehouse near

the Four Courts on one of the north quays of the Liffey. It primarily catered to lawyers and civil servants but Chopper worked big time for the rackets and he was the Belfast rep. So the girls, without too much feeling of resentment, would let us have a freebie. If it was still there (and this was nearly fifteen years ago), it might be a good place to bolt to for a while. I couldn’t use Chopper’s name to get in (Chopper had long since turned legit) but I could just pose as an ordinary client. With my long coat, flat cap, and haggard demeanor, I did look a bit like a crappy Dublin family-services lawyer or something.

Aye, the beginnings of a plan.

Go there, get my bearings, clean up. Maybe see to this wound. Anyway, I needed to be gone from the madding crowd and it was probably not a good idea to walk around too much longer in a bloodstained T-shirt.

Also I wanted to call Bridget from a quiet spot. I needed to know what the score was. Hopefully, her tone of voice would tell me. Had the cabbie been hers? Had he been anybody’s? Had I hallucinated or misremembered him saying my name? Bridget wouldn’t have all the answers but she’d have some of them.

And with that solved, it would make the next step clearer. Had to get out of Dublin. But whether I had to get out of Ireland, too, was the big question.

The cops didn’t worry me; if the cabbie lived he wouldn’t talk and if he died there’d be another gangland murder along tomorrow to occupy their limited attention span. In my eyes the Garda Síochána was only a notch or two above the Irish Army and, as an ex-member of the British Army, I had nothing but contempt for that body. Any squaddie worth his salt would join the Irish Guards in London; any peeler up to scuds would get into one of the big metropolitan police forces across the water. Irish coppers and soldiers were second-rate.

But complacency is also one of the byways on the road to ruin. I would have to put my contempt on the back burner and

play it bloody safe.

“Are you a lecturer?” the girl finally plucked up the courage to ask.

“No, no, not really,” I told her. “Are you a mature student?”

“Yeah, you could say that, I’m always learning,” I replied.

“Well, I think that’s great, it’s wonderful to go back to university at your age, education is very important.”

“Shit, how old do you think I am?” “Forty?” she suggested.

Well, Jesus, let’s see how you look after a knife fight, love.

“Ach, I’m barely in my thirties,” I said. “Just been partying all night, that’s all.”

“What are you studying?” she asked, but before I could make something up, we’d arrived at the O’Connell Street Bridge and a scene of complete bedlam. This parade was clearly not part of the official Bloomsday festivities and the cops were totally unprepared. Traffic was still trying to come off the quays and up the street and the parade wanted to head north onto O’Connell Street.

Buses, cars, trucks, bicyclists, and pedestrians had formed an ugly confused mess right in the center of the city. Some of the students were getting restless. They began shouting at the peels and chanting. Baffled tourists were getting separated from their tour groups, taxi drivers were yelling, the cops were flailing about uselessly waiting for instruction. It was all fine by me. The more disorder the better.

“Honey, I must be off,” I told the girl. She held my sleeve.

“Are you not going on to Jury’s?”

“I can’t, sorry,” I said. “I have to go, really, it’s like I said, I’m on the run from Johnny law.”

She reached into her tart handbag looking for something. She tipped it upside down and out dropped a big hippy Volkswagen key chain. I picked it up and gave it to her. By this time she had found what she was searching for—a piece of card with a Dublin telephone number on it.

“It’s my cell. Give me a call if you’re not doing anything later,” she said.

“I will, if I don’t get lifted,” I said.

“Riorden,” she said and offered me her hand.

“Brian,” I said and slipped away from her and the rest of the students. I dipped under the boom mike of a BBC camera crew, escaped a video unit from RTE television, and just about avoided being knocked into a bus by one of the old geezers from 60 Minutes.

I walked west and at a green phone booth took a look back for tails.

Nobody after me at all. I’d lost the cops and they’d lost me. Excellent.

Lost them. Now part two of the plan. The Four Courts. Where the hell were they?

Somewhere on the water.

I stopped a man in jeans and a Joyce T-shirt.

“Excuse me, you don’t happen to know whereabouts the Four Courts are? I know it’s around here somewhere, but I can’t quite remember.”

“Oh, my goodness. I am frightfully sorry, but I have no idea,” he said with an English accent.

The next woman:

“Weiss nicht. I live here, but I do not know. Four Courts? I haff a map of ze whole city in—”

And it took me six more people until I found a Dubliner. You wouldn’t have seen that in the old days either. People

immigrating to Dublin.

The native, though, told me it was piss easy, just follow the river and I couldn’t miss it.

I followed the river and didn’t miss it.

The big domed gray legal building right on the water. Barristers, judges, solicitors, clients all milling about the front.

“This is the Four Courts, isn’t it?” I asked a solicitor having a smoke.

“’Tis indeed,” he said. “Do you need a lawyer?” “Nah, but could I bum a cigarette?”

He lit me a ciggy and I sat down on the steps. Everything was hurting. The fag helped a bit.

I could think.

Now that I’d found the Four Courts, I had to search my memory to locate where the brothel had been. It was certainly on this side of the water. And it was pretty close by because I remember Bobby Fullerton seeing his brief at the Chinese restaurant, which was right next to the brothel.

Hmmm. It seemed simple enough. And although I’m not a negative individual, I had to admit that the chances of all those things still being there after all this time seemed unlikely.

I got up, began walking, turned left, followed the quay, and my heart sank. It became immediately apparent that everything I remembered about these streets had utterly changed. Where there had been seedy pawnshops, tobacconists, and greasy diners, now there were Internet cafés, Gap stores, and of course Starbucks, where they make you bloody queue twice. Never get away with that in Belfast, I hoped.

I walked down a side street that looked familiar, went halfway along it, stopped, came back to the quay. Tried another left, a second left, a third, tried a right, but now I was utterly baffled and well lost in the alleys and back streets. All of them gentrified, painted, scrubbed, new windows, window

treatments. The Dubs had even started putting up blue plaques like you saw in London. “Handel slept here,” “Wilde lived here,” that kind of malarkey. And no ragamuffin children or beggars. I suppose now if you wanted to know what the Dublin alleys looked like when this was my stamping ground you’d have to go to a seedy hutong in Beijing or a back street in Bombay.

But then, suddenly, with Beijing on my mind, I spotted two Chinese guys carrying a pole of pink dangling ducks. I followed them. Down one street, up another. They stopped outside a restaurant, fumbled for a set of keys, and went in.

Ahh. I stepped back. Was this the same place? Yeah. Bloody hell.

Completely different now, of course. Before, a concrete bunker with grilles over the window and a heavy iron door. Now, tinted plate glass, plush tables, a lilac paint job, and a big new sign. Still, something about it rang a bell. And if this was the restaurant the brothel was the house immediately to the left. A three-story Georgian affair, with the blinds pulled down.

No blue plaque announcing “Brendan Behan bonked here,” but you never knew, it might still be the same establishment. Someone had sandblasted the brick front, removed the old wooden window frames, and put in air-conditioning vents. Back in the day the front door had been a low-key brown, as befitted a whorehouse. Now it was a bright blue with a gold knocker and letter box.

I went up the steps, knocked. Waited.

Probably a firm of insurance agents in here now. I knocked again.

The door was opened by a beautiful hard-faced blonde with vampiric eyes. Skin the color of driven snow and slightly Asiatic features. She was wearing a tight silk see-through

black sweater, black miniskirt, and knee-length leather boots. Certainly not an Irish girl, and if she was in the insurance business it could only have been for Satan, fiddling the actuarial tables on potential soul sellers.

“Yes?” she said in an imperious Russian accent.

“I’m here for a little R and R, is this the right place?” “Perhaps. Would you like to come in?” she said.

“Aye, I would at that.” “Please, follow me.”

I went in.

There exists a school of thought which holds that madams in brothels, bordellos, and whorehouses are endowed with wisdom, taste, and a singular ability for understanding human nature. I have no idea where this notion sprang from, but in my experience madams are about as wise and sensible as the average giggly third-grade teacher. And as for taste, not in the brothels I’ve been in. The proprietor of the Four Courts whorehouse was no exception. Her tastes ran to cliché and old- world decadence. The blinds were drawn and the fake Tiffany lamps were exuding a dull-yellow depressing glow that made you wonder if they were trying to conceal the merchandise. Incense burning in a corner smelled of dead cat, and once you’d adjusted to the dim surroundings, you saw that the elegant blue door on the outside was in contrast to the bright reds, golds, chandeliers, paintings of eagles, and classical figurines in a look that seemed to be a cross between antebellum New Orleans and the Reich chancellory.

“My name is Lara,” the Russian girl lied.

“Aye, and I’m Doctor Zhivago. Listen, I need to speak to the woman of the house, if you don’t mind; I’ve got a couple of questions,” I said.

“We cater to all tastes.”

“Aye, I’m sure you do, but all I need is a quiet room, where I can have a shower and gather my thoughts, no fuss; I’ll pay

top dollar, and if someone would be so good as to bring me a cup of tea, I would love it.”

“It is three hundred euros for one girl, for one half hour, it might be extra for, uh, your particular, uh, needs,” she said, looking at me as if I were the biggest pervert who had walked in in months, God alone knew what I wanted to do with the girl and the tea.

“Yeah, I don’t need a girl. I just need a quiet room. Tell the boss.”

The Russian motioned for me to sit down on a leather chair. An Albanian cleaning woman started vacuuming the rugs. Lara went off and came back with an older conservatively dressed Irish woman in a black wig and ivory glasses. She sat down opposite.

I offered the three hundred euros. She refused to accept it.

“Ye can’t stay here, if that’s what you’re thinking. This is a respectable house, whatever you’ve done, this isn’t a place for fugitives,” she said, blowing my whole madam-smart-as-a- third-grade-teacher theory out of the water.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“No, of course not, that’s why you’re dripping blood on me leather seat and you’re wearing someone else’s coat.”

“Ok, there’s no need to be hasty. But you’re right, I need a place to lie low until I can figure how I can get out of town. I won’t be any trouble.”

“You won’t be any trouble cos you won’t be here. Get the fuck out, before I get the help to throw you out,” she said. “And we wouldn’t want your pretty face more beat up than it already is.”

“I’m working for Bridget Callaghan,” I said—the only card I had, and not mentioning, of course, that there was more than a possibility that lovely Bridget was trying to bloody kill me.

“Are you now?” she said, batting not an eye. “And who might that be?”

“The head of the fucking Irish mob in New York City, as if you didn’t know,” I said with menace.

She shook her head slightly. Took a small intake of breath.

“Ok, ok. Keep your voice down for one thing; this is a respectable house, so it is. And so what? Even if you do work for her, what’s that to me? You sitting there on the run from the Guards, frightening me girls.”

“I’ll tell you what it is to you, love. It’s bloody this. If Bridget hears that you wouldn’t help me, that you said there was no room at the inn when I was in a tight spot, you better fucking have fire insurance.”

She was going to say something, stopped herself, smiled, nodded. This was a hooker with a heart of brass. She knew what was what. She gave me a final once-over to see if she believed me. Apparently she did.

“What’s your name?” she asked. “Michael Forsythe.”

Her eyebrows raised a fraction, but she recovered quickly and asked me another question: “You worked for Bridget Callaghan a long time?”

“We go back a long, long way.”

“And would you be able to prove that if it was necessary?”

“I would. Listen, love, I just got into town. I’ve already had a fucking lot to deal with, I just need a hour to get my bloody head straight.”

The madam sighed and got to her feet.

“It’s more or less an empty house at the moment,” she said to herself.

“You’ll let me have a room?”

“Ok, ok, we’ll see what we can do. I suppose you’re here to help with the missing wee girl?”

“You heard about that?”

“Oh aye, it’s big news in certain quarters.” “Is it?” I asked, for information.

“It is indeed now.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Well, my first thought was that the lassie—Siobhan, is it?— must have run off, because no one in Ireland would dare to have lifted Bridget Callaghan’s wean. But I’ll tell you this, I’m not so sure now, that pop music nowadays, it’s all about drugs, one of those heroin fiends could have taken her off the street to his drug den. Let me tell you. I certainly don’t allow drug users in my establishment. Anything could happen.”

“Very wise.”

“You say your name is Michael Forsythe?” she asked a little slyly.

“That’s right. That mean anything to you?”

“No, no, not at all. Yeah, shame about the wee girl. But it happened in Belfast and, sure, Belfast is crazy like. I don’t know what’s going on up there. The lines aren’t set yet, not like down here. Dublin’s a lot more civilized, you know what’s what. Anyway, enough of the chitchat, get you a room. What do you want in your tea?”

“I’ll take milk and sugar,” I said.

The woman made a movement to a man I’d only just noticed lurking in deep shadow by the grandfather clock. He shimmered out of the foyer.

“Follow me.”

I had trouble getting up, so she helped me to my feet and led me down the corridor and into a side room. She unlocked the door and we entered.

Another decor change from the way I remembered these rooms. Cheap and cheerful in my day, now fussy Victorian: a four-poster bed hung with silky drapes, pictures of ballerinas and puppies lost in string, chintzy mirrors, clocks, sinister-

looking china dolls. I couldn’t have imagined a worse room in which to try to get an erection and fuck a stranger. But maybe the girls were so bloody great it didn’t matter what the interior decoration was like.

“You can take a shower and I’ll have someone go out and buy you a change of clothes. Thirty-two trouser and a large for a shirt, is it? Aye, looks like it. Well now, ok. And do you need a girl on the house?”

“No.”

“Fine, I’ll bring you clothes and let you get on with things. You can freshen up and get your shite together, but you can’t stay long. You certainly can’t stay over. If the Guards are looking for you, for anything serious, I don’t need it coming near my house.”

“I understand, I’ll be out of here within the hour. Oh, and if you could bring me a needle and a strong piece of thread, that would help too.”

She nodded, left the room. I lay down on the bed and began pulling off my clothes. I checked the straps around my artificial foot; sometimes you got chafing on the stump, but everything looked ok. I put it back on. A knock at the door.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Lara, with your tea,” she said.

I opened the door extremely cautiously, in case of trouble, but it was nothing more invidious than the gray-eyed hooker with a teapot on a tray. Behind her, in the corridor, a man wearing a pig nose was naked, on all fours, being led by another Russian girl dressed dominatrix-fashion in leathers and spiked boots. Probably the chief justice of Ireland, the chief constable of Dublin, someone like that.

“Will that be all now, sir?” Lara said, having rehearsed the phrase to sound like an Irish girl.

“If someone could get me a T-shirt, it would be great. This one’s ruined.”