Wednesday morning brought a break in the ceiling of cloud which had muffled the island for a week. The air was fresh again. Clouds so white as to be patently silly-looking to Minogue hung themselves from a sky of Blessed Virgin blue. The good burgher Magritte would have stood at his window for hours today, Minogue believed, so delighted would he have been with a sky like this.
A muzziness from last night’s drinking with Kilmartin (who had dragooned Hoey into the pub too) dissipated quickly after breakfast. The worm in his stomach returned when Minogue turned away from his usual route and headed for Fine’s house. Crowds stood at the bus stops still, some thumbing. Most cars were full. There were swarms of bicycles on the road. Minogue skirted the beginnings of traffic jams, reversing out of one road near Ranelagh to avoid a bottleneck and found himself at Fine’s street sooner than he had wanted. Any time would be too soon, he realized.
He parked in front of a light-blue Nissan Bluebird. The passenger had already stepped out on to the footpath and was staring at Minogue. Minogue couldn’t see the man’s hands. His back tingled. The driver, a man with a crew cut and a small mouth, already had his door open.
“Minogue, Technical Bureau. The Murder Squad, lads.”
The driver nodded. Minogue raised a hand to the red-haired detective on the footpath who was now rearranging his jacket and from the corner of his eye saw a lightly built man peering around the hedge two houses down. The driver spoke into a microphone pinned to his shirt and the man down the street withdrew into a garden.
Heavy and sweet smells drifted out from the gardens nearby. A wrought-iron gate to the side of the Fines’ house clanked open and Johnny Cohen trudged toward the main gates where the policemen were standing. Minogue pocketed his photocard and took several steps. Cohen nodded curtly. His gaze searched Minogue’s face.
“Morning to you, Mr. Cohen,” Minogue tried. “I trust I’m not calling too early on the Fines?”
Cohen squinted hard at Minogue. “He may be gone already,” he said slowly. “Or he may be catching up on last night. Were you there yourself later on, then?”
Minogue sensed challenge. The heavy beard seemed to close Cohen’s face. “The investigation, like? We were at it late, yes. But that’s what we do-”
Cohen scratched his eyelids, blinked and frowned. Then he looked over Minogue’s shoulder at the Special Branch car. “You didn’t hear, then,” Cohen stated the question. “The Museum.”
Minogue glanced from Cohen’s face toward the front door grinding open. Billy Fine stood in the doorway.
“Petrol bombs thrown at the doors of the Museum,” Cohen said. “The synagogue, I should say. Billy was up all hours. He got a phone call and off he went.”
Minogue’s wary drowsiness fled. He was acutely aware of details now: the cloying scent from the hedge, the far-off hum of the city centre traffic, Cohen’s bloodshot eyes. Fine stood very still in the doorway. Minogue pushed at the gate and strode towards the front door. He heard the gate being closed in his wake, his own feet skipping up the steps.
“I only found out this minute,” he said.
Fine’s arm moved and the door scuffed over a carpet. The sun escaped from a puffy white cloud and the light raced across the garden to the house. Minogue felt a tremor of helplessness when he looked at Fine now, the figure framed in the doorway, the morning sun, so kind to Minogue already, mercilessly bathing Fine in a harsh light, leaving him in the sharp contrasts, the shadows and glare of a fierce daylight. Fine had lifted his arm above his eyes so as to see Minogue. Cohen was walking toward the steps now. Dazzled by the sun, Billy Fine looked to Minogue as if he were grimacing in agony.
“They, whoever they are, tried to destroy the Museum,” said Fine. “Someone spray-painted PLO on the wall and threw a petrol bomb against the door.”
Minogue’s stomach froze and held tight. Cohen appeared by his side.
“The door held, we’re all right,” said Cohen. “The door held, that’s the main thing.” He did not take his eyes off Fine as he spoke.
Fine nodded. Minogue could not stop staring at him. Fine was unshaven, his eyes were reddened and his white shirt, open at the top, seemed to exaggerate the unkempt face. He drew Minogue into the front room.
“What else can happen?” said Fine. “Today’s Wednesday? If I don’t go to work I forget what day of the week it is. Do you have any cigarettes on you?”
Minogue wondered, from Fine’s tone, whether he was faltering, close to snapping.
“I don’t,” Minogue replied. “But I’m sure that… Look, I should leave off this interview if you’re-”
“It’s all right,” Fine said firmly. “Rose’ll be down in a minute. She has fags.” He went on remotely then: “You’ll have to persuade her it’s all right for her to smoke. She’s forever trying to give them up. She’s afraid I’ll start up again myself, so she won’t smoke in front of me, so…” The sentence died.
“We’re in a bit of a bind, you see,” Fine’s voice had changed to a monotone. “We can’t begin the week of mourning proper until after Paul’s burial. It’s very trying indeed to have to break custom as regard interring… We’re in a bit of a limbo, and what with droves of people in here to help… Then this thing last night-it must be some kind of nightmare, I thought first. Maybe the head is gone on me, and I was dreaming all this.”
“It’s well in hand now,” said Cohen. “Can’t you go up and lie down awhile? Get some rest even if you don’t sleep.”
Fine’s face eased. He looked at Cohen with a fleeting smile. “Ah Johnny.” He clapped Cohen gently on the shoulder.
“David and Julia are upstairs. Julia flew in from Boston yesterday. She’s knackered and very upset. David had to find a locum but he got in yesterday. He sat up most of the night.”
“May I ask about Paul’s wife?”
“Lily? Ask away. But she’s in a state,” said Fine as he examined his hands carefully. “She’ll only come for the funeral, I’m afraid. Very… upset. Bitter, I suppose. I think she feels that his family stole him from her, or Ireland did. Maybe Dublin. She was never gone on the place here,” said Fine, rising. “You’ll have a bit of coffee, will you?”
“Don’t trouble yourself,” said Minogue.
“I’m getting a pot for meself. You have a phone call to make before we do anything, anyway. Better do it now, man. It’s been hopping off the hook all morning. A Garda Hoey phoned not five minutes before you arrived, apologizing for himself but needing to speak to you.”
Cohen, slouched in the chair opposite, looked up as Minogue made for the hall. Minogue’s mind was cartwheeling, embarrassed and angry. Here he was, on a delicate enough visit, trying to mine more so that he could fill out a better picture of their murdered son, and this had gone off under him. He should have had a call about this, no matter what time. Hoey… probably tried him at home.
Cohen touched his arm as he passed. “It doesn’t look promising, does it, Inspector?”
Minogue scrambled for words. “Well, it seems to put a strong cast on the murder investigation. I’m just, I don’t know how to put it. Shocked. It’s…”
“PLO. I saw it on the wall, with my own eyes,” said Cohen. “Half-two this morning. Someone in a car. There were no witnesses to the actual thing.”
“Give me the name of the ranking Gardai you talked to, would you?” said Minogue.
“A Sergeant Hickey. I didn’t ask him what station. Then a mob of Guards showed up, just before some of the media. We’ve been getting calls from all over the world since five o’clock this morning. American television stations. The Taoiseach phoned here at eight o’clock. Archbishop of Dublin, the Lord Mayor. Then your own.”
“Commissioner Lally?”
“The very man.”
Minogue couldn’t decide if Cohen was hinting at his, Minogue’s, ignorance of the event. Hoey must have tried him at home, Minogue thought again. He excused himself and went to the phone.
“God Almighty, Shea,” he whispered into the receiver. “What the hell is happening? I’m up at the Fines’ and I’m looking for a place to hide my face. What broke down?”
“I only happened to be in early,” Hoey answered. “I heard it off the radio, and me parking the car.”
“Damn and blast it, Shea, we can’t be running an investigation like this. We look like iijits. We are iijits. This has to stop, man.”
Hoey didn’t reply immediately.
“It’s on your desk, sir,” he said finally. “I took the liberty of looking through your morning stuff from Eilis. Timed at four-fifteen from Dispatch. They knew to get you, anyway. I tried you at home but you were gone already.”
Cohen walked into the hall now, heading for the kitchen, thereby cutting short Minogue’s anger.
“All right, all right.” Minogue dug the receiver into his ear. “All right. Was it just this bombing thing, Shea?”
Hoey told him that he was awaiting a call from the National Library with more information. Doyle had gone over to the Library already to see the dockets and give Kearney a good going-over.
“Kearney, the library assistant who phoned?”
“Yes. He knew Justice Fine’s name and figured that the fella looking for books and filling in the request dockets was some relation of Fine’s. That’s how he remembered. Guess what Paul Fine was interested in?”
“Go on, Shea, for the love of God. I’m in Fine’s house here, sitting on their phone.”
“Sorry. He signed retrieval slips for nine books. Do you know how the system works there? You ask for books to be brought to you. There are millions of books there, and very valuable ones too. So Kearney is one of the assistants who’d go and get the actual books down off the shelves. Now it doesn’t say what time the books were given out and Doyle’s going to try and pin Kearney a bit better than that. All the nine books got to him, that is to say that none of the books was missing or anything. Ready for a few titles? Catholicism and the Franco Regime by a Norman Cooper. Never heard of any of these meself… Addresses, Essays and Lectures by J. E. De Balaguer, Church and Politics of Chile by a fella called Smith…”
“Hold on, hold on there, Shea. What’s all this? I’m swimming in detail here and now is not the time.”
“… Opus Dei: the Call of the World by-”
“What?”
“That’s it, though,” said Hoey. “They all have something to do with Opus Dei.”
“Opus Dei? But Shea, this thing at the Museum. Get Gallagher on to it, or at least confirm he’s alerted to it. And is Jimmy Kilmartin on to this already?”
“Yes he is, sir. He fairly pounced, I can tell you.”
Minogue stared at a shrouded mirror by the phone. Thoughts flickered and escaped. No order. He realized that he was biting his lip.
“He says he’s going to hold off on a separate task force until we sort this out,” Hoey continued. “He’s hunting down the top dog in Opus Dei, or whatever they call their boss.”
“I don’t know anything about them, so I don’t,” Minogue muttered. “All I know is that they’re religious.”
“Wait now,” said Hoey. “More stuff breaking, wait’ll you hear this. This is what you should have heard before the balls-up about last night.”
Minogue stopped chewing his lip.
“Remember we left just after ten last night, didn’t we? Well a woman phoned in at a quarter past, a woman from Dun Laoghaire. She has a young lad in the Scouts. There was a troop of them out on manoeuvres on Killiney Hill some time on Sunday afternoon. Putting names to trees and counting birds and that sort of diversion. Her young lad was up after his bedtime last night, annoying the heart and soul out of her. He saw a clip from the news though, our bit on the site up on the Hill. Quick as a flash-so says the mother-the chiseller says: ‘I was there.’ She asked him about it. There’s two detectives dispatched out to the house and the young lad will miss a morning’s school over it. Will I call you back there when I have any news?”
Minogue considered the suggestion. A morning with the Fines would be a long morning but Hoey’s news had buoyed him.
“No, Shea. Be better if you had some brief on what this Opus Dei is all about.”
Minogue remembered Kilmartin’s jibes from the previous night. Before they had knocked off for the night, Kilmartin had showed a shrinking Hoey the black-and-white photos of a curled, black mass. It was unrecognizable as the body it was supposed to be, except through the foreknowledge which Kilmartin’s expression of grim indulgence brought. ‘Trial by fire. Burnt offerings,’ the blasphemous Kilmartin had muttered as he had laid snap after snap of what had been Brian Kelly on Hoey’s desk like a ghastly game of cards.
“And try and get a hold of stuff and roll it out for me and Jim Kilmartin,” Minogue finished. “And find out what Gallagher and company make of the bombing. Stay put by the phone. I’ll get to you within the hour.”
Minogue held the receiver while he broke the connection. Phone Gallagher himself? Kilmartin? Drop the interview here and head for the Squad HQ, try and get into the driving seat as the information came in? The phone rang under his stretched fingers.
“Yes,” Minogue said, not yet back in the present. A man with a northern accent asked if Justice Fine was available. Minogue recognized the voice from somewhere.
“May I say who’s calling?”
“Sean O’Duill from Armagh.”
Cohen was already through the kitchen door and he took the receiver from Minogue. Fine emerged, carrying a tray. Minogue trudged after him into the front room.
“John Cohen, Your Eminence,” he heard Cohen say. “Very glad of your support… I’ll pass it on to him.”
Fine paused, tray in hand, listening to Cohen. He laid the tray down.
“Look after yourself,” he said to Minogue.
Minogue sat down in an armchair. Cohen came in yawning. Through the closing door Minogue heard Fine’s voice now, resigned and gentle. “Yes, Sean, we do. We keep on asking ourselves if this is really happening. Shock, yes…”
Cohen closed the door and sat opposite Minogue. The two men remained silent, one staring contemplatively at the tray, the other, a bewildered, middle-aged Clareman, anxious and distracted.
Rosalie Fine, a compact, stocky woman, entered the room noiselessly. Small patches of colour had gathered high on her cheeks. Her eyes were clear hazel, but they seemed out of focus to Minogue. He rose. She held the limp sleeves of her cardigan as she sat. Billy Fine came in after her and sat next to her on the couch, taking one of her hands in his.
“I’m sorry for your trouble,” Minogue said quietly. The words were thick and clumsy in his mouth and they ran back in his mind to taunt him. Rosalie Fine looked at him but Minogue felt she was not seeing him. Different people, these are. His embarrassment flared again. These people didn’t use a countryman’s stilted words. He dithered with the coffee, grateful for the strong sweet mixture.
“I was just about to apprise your husband of the investigation so far.” He paused to look at Fine. “But I’m far from sure now if this is the time-”
“There’s no time,” she interrupted. “There’s never any proper time. There’s no time that’s right…”
“With all the people coming to the house,” Minogue murmured, trying to recover.
“And last night’s…?” she paused, stuck for words, and looked directly at Minogue. Minogue took a quick sip of coffee. He heard Fine’s breath exhaled quickly.
“I wanted to reassure you that we’re casting the net wide. We have the expertise and the tools at hand to track down the suspects. And the will,” Minogue added slowly, returning Rosalie Fine’s distracted gaze. “The Special Branch has already conducted an extensive search for extremists who might be even remotely connected with Arab or Islamic causes. We’re still not ignoring the possibility of third-party involvement.”
“You mean the IRA?” said Fine.
“And groups on the Continent who have links with the IRA,” Minogue replied.
Fine nodded. The gesture seemed to wake Rosalie Fine from her detachment. “You don’t sound very confident about this,” she said abruptly. “We’ve been hearing these assurances from your Commissioner. I wonder if we’re not being reassured a bit too much.”
“Rose means that she’d sooner know the truth,” said Fine. “Same as myself.”
Minogue took a deep breath. He found that Rosalie Fine was still looking at him.
“This group that phoned the paper is not known to the Gardai. We’ve interviewed a large number of possible suspects already. Now, in the light of what happened last night, we might well be dealing with something involving more than just your own tragedy. I mean, not that…” Minogue felt his face redden and prickle.
Then Rosalie Fine spoke as though she had just entered the room. “Billy told me that you were in our Museum in Walworth Road.”
Minogue nodded. A faint alarm buzzed behind his thoughts.
“What did you think of it?” she asked. She might be making polite conversation with someone she had just bumped into in the street, Minogue saw. Was this the distraction that grief brings?
“I enjoyed myself,” he said. “All new to me. I’m County Clare, you see. Transplanted. I was taken to the altar by a Dublin-woman and I’ve been here since. It’s a tough calling. Our two at home would put the heart crossways in you.”
Rosalie Fine’s face took on a slightly indulgent cast, with a trace of irony plain in her eyes.
“I’d say you’re well able for them,” she murmured. Fine seemed glad to let down his load for a moment too. He leaned forward and placed his cup on the table. Rosalie Fines’ eyes slid out of focus again.
“I was talking to Lily,” she murmured in a different voice. “Last night, she phoned… Paul met Lily here on a holiday. She’s a cousin of the Greens. Greens the booksellers. Lily is a Londoner, of course. We were happy when Paul fell for her. A nice family and she wasn’t your traditional type to stay home and all that. Very modern and Paul liked that, he needed that. She was into the journalism herself, just starting into television.”
“Well he went to London with her but he couldn’t stand it.‘Exile’ he called it.”
“Lily had every right to say no to living here in Dublin,” Billy Fine took up the conversation. “And to be blunt,” he glanced at his wife before resuming, “they were bitter parting. Lily is a very strong personality, very confident. Of course you’d assume that Paul was the opposite, the one who gave way more…”
“With Julia and David it was different,” said Rosalie. “They knew early on they’d want to be moving eventually, seeing the world. With the youngest you never know. They say the youngest feels responsible for the parents. And then, who knows, maybe we wanted to hold on to him a bit longer…”
Minogue concentrated on part of the pattern on his cup as Rosalie Fine wept. Her husband wept also, sitting upright, clutching his wife’s hand until the hands were a jumble of whitened knuckles. A minute passed. The phone trilled once in the hall before they heard Cohen’s bass tones. Then the voice stopped. Cohen opened the door.
“Rose, it’s Canada,” he said. “If you’re up to it.”
Rosalie Fine drew in a breath, stood and walked to the door. Fine yawned deep into his palm.
“She has a sister in Toronto,” he murmured.
“I won’t burden you any longer,” said Minogue. “I must get on top of these developments and I don’t want to be hanging on your phone.”
Fine didn’t seem to have heard him. He rubbed at an eyebrow. “I thought we were exempt, you might say,” he murmured as he looked at the window. “Irishmen, the same as yourself. Oh but certainly there’s the root in Israel. You know, I must say that the years have me circling back to what I was born into. Being Jews, I mean, having a spiritual homeland. It’s no religious fervour. I’m less ‘Irish’ than I was ten years ago. Than I was yesterday, I must say too. Aliyah looms closer. It would not be a hardship on us.”
“I don’t follow you there, the last bit,” said Minogue.
“ Aliyah? We’ve given some thought to emigrating to Israel. Keep that under your hat. I’m a public figure the minute I walk out the door here. I’ll tell them when I’m ready to retire and not before. Sure, they only gave me the job last year, and me the youngest on the bench.”
Fine turned from the window and stared at the policeman. “Look, you don’t need to squirm here,” Fine said. “I didn’t expect you to come here spouting answers. You have to work out what happened at the Museum, same as myself.”
Minogue hesitated before deciding to tell Fine. “There’s something which came up late last night and again this morning,” he said in little more than a whisper. “Something that the Commissioner would not have known to tell you at tea-time yesterday. This may prove important. Please don’t read much into it yet until it becomes more substantial. We understand now that Paul may have been researching a group, a topic, which in turn may be linked to the death of a young man very recently.”
Fine blinked.
“He may have mentioned this to you? Opus Dei.”
Fine shook his head slowly.
“Not a word to me,” he murmured. “But you can’t be in earnest. I heard of them before. They’re a Catholic organization, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are.”
“To do with lay people, though, religious-minded.”
“I believe you have it in a nutshell,” said Minogue. “I’m awaiting a summary of what Opus Dei is, in Ireland anyway. Paul undertook to read up on them, but we can find no trace of notes he might have made. There was no mention of this until a citizen called last night, a man who works in the National Library. Paul was working there in the Library one day, researching this Opus Dei organization. There are several puzzling things about this. Opus Dei is not an extremist organization in the sense that they’d ever have anything to do with violence. And we don’t understand why Paul didn’t do his research in RTE, or discuss the topic with the people he worked with there. Then there’s the lack of notes. One might suppose that he was making his first pass over the subject reading the books on Friday, so he’d only commit things to paper later on…”
Minogue paused but Fine said nothing.
“I’m not suggesting there’s anything sinister or conclusive to this. And of course last night’s outrage-”
“Friday,” Fine interrupted then. “I met Paul Friday for dinner.”
“Did he say anything which strikes you as odd, connected with what I’ve just told you? Was he excited about anything?”
Fine frowned and ran a fingertip around his lips.
“No, no. He made a face at something though, something that came up in conversation. The journalism tended to make him a bit cynical, I think. Some of the hoi polloi were in the Gallery for lunch too, some TDs and Ministerial Sees. The luminaries gather there, usually toward the end of the week, to gab and gossip about one another. I recognized a few of them and of course it does them no harm to doff their hats to Mr. Justice Fine. Paul thought it was a bit rich. ‘Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths,’ he said, if I remember. Yes. Not like him to be cynical really. That may be more due to working with Mickey Fitzgerald and company. I know that Paul didn’t much like digging into the more gritty types of exposes that Fitz and the others like to blow up. Paul said something about the Ard Fheis coming up next week, some comment about: ‘They’ll all be at one another’s throats soon.’ Always the way, a cynic would answer, I suppose.”
“You didn’t ask him what he meant?”
“No. I assumed he meant that the Ard Fheis would be planning some strategies for the election. They’re always a bit of a circus.”
“I suppose,” said Minogue. He made for the door. “If you can spare me the time later, could I draw you more towards Paul’s personal life? I may be asking awkward questions as to any enmities with family and relations but I believe you’ll know that I have only a policeman’s interest… Could I arrange a time if I phone you later?”
Fine let his breath out and nodded slowly. He sat in the couch again and let himself slump. Minogue thanked Billy Fine and rose to leave. He nodded to Rosalie Fine in the hall. A woman sat next to her, crying. Minogue was seized again by furious, inchoate shame.
Through the door and descending the steps, he was grateful to be out in the air again, breathing deeply and trying to loosen the tension in his shoulders. He nodded at the detectives in the surveillance car and headed down the footpath toward his car.