In the last week of October Marguerite Ryan was carried through the streets of Cahir, County Tipperary by a small crowd, almost exclusively women, after receiving a suspended sentence for manslaughter. The State had no immediate plans to appeal the verdict. Minogue saw Marguerite Ryan on the nine o’clock news. She looked proud and embarrassed, but she did not hug the women with the same fervour as they were hugging her. Minogue went to bed early, thereby earning a curious look from Kathleen. He pleaded a light cold. At his age, he argued quietly, a man had to look after himself. He had dug some books out from under the bed and was going to give some of de Maupassant’s longer stories a second shot in the French. He also had a dangerous reading experiment in the form of a play next to the bed, too, if de Maupassant didn’t go easy on him: A Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Next to the books Minogue had drawn out a three-week-old copy of the Irish Times. It was folded open at the page where the headline announced that a PLO representative in London had disclaimed any responsibility for the firebombing of the Jewish Museum in Dublin, Ireland. The statement, quoted verbatim, included a paragraph referring to Ireland’s current post-colonial contradictions and malaise. Another paragraph claimed parallels between the plight of oppressed Irish nationalists and Palestinians. Minogue remembered trying to understand what the paragraphs meant but his thoughts had no bite then. All he fastened on was a statement declaring that it was in nobody’s interests to obliterate history.
Iesult-at Kathleen’s prompting, Minogue was sure-ferried a hot whiskey to him ten minutes after he retired. He regarded hot whiskey as a frivolous waste of good whiskey for the same reason that Kathleen thought it was a good drink. If a body had to take a drink at all, she would have added. The boiling water in on top of the whiskey burned off much of the alcohol, and the cloves and sugar made a toy of the precious liquid.
“Every broken-down father should have so solicitous a daughter.”
“What are you broken-down about? It’s only a cold. All Irish men love to complain, did you know that? Even Pat does it. I tell him to shut up. You’ll wake up as right as rain tomorrow and you’ll have to find some other excuse for feel-What’s that book? Eugene O’Neill? That’s very depressing. Why are you reading that?”
“Where did you pick up on the notion that art is for comfort?”
“Are you trying to make yourself sicker, is it? You’d better be on your feet when trouble-the-house gets in off the plane tomorrow. His poor little heart will be broken after leaving his Cathy behind in hamburger heaven. I bet he asks you if you told the Immigration to raid the shop so as he’d be put out of the place…”
Minogue glared at the wolf who had entered as Florence Nightingale.
“I hope you can control your hyperbole when you see him,” he said.
Minogue had picked up the cold on the previous Sunday. He and Kathleen had motored up to Sallygap-his choice-and had sat in the car with the Sunday papers and a set of binoculars. Minogue had spotted two hawks before evening. It was chilly and damp in the car, and the flask of tea was soon gone. Minogue hadn’t turned on the engine for heat because he saw that Kathleen has fallen asleep across the back seat, with a blanket over her legs.
Minogue surveyed the desolate bog plateau which led into Wicklow proper. He loved the place. It was a brown and grey darkening world, falling away into an early winter. The low clouds covered the television mast on Kippure Mountain high over the empty landscape. Minogue’s mind lingered over the view of the bog as he tried to remember the names of the chieftains who had escaped the dungeons of Dublin Castle and fled across these mountain passes in the dead of winter. Red Hugh O’Donnell was one of ours… the same year they founded Trinity College was it? 1591? Them and us.
A few drops of rain were all that had come so far from the heavy, low cloud. With the light going fast now and Kathleen stirring awake, Minogue gathered his wits and started the engine. As he had a last look at the fading world here-a view of the high boggy plains which he could take to work with him tomorrow-a mile off in the distance, under Kippure Mountain, he spotted a figure moving steadily across the heather. He put the binoculars to his eyes and looked to see what hardy hill-walker was racing the darkness back to whatever spot he had parked his car. The nearest house was four miles in off the pass, in the village of Glencree. The binocular view compressed the scene and crowded the walker into a tighter world. The low clouds seemed to be but feet over his head as he plodded along.
“There’s a citizen who’s fond of his mountains,” he said to Kathleen as he headed for Glencree. Coming down off the plateau, the road snaked and hairpinned under the beginnings of Kippure Mountain, bringing Minogue closer to the figure still striding across the moor. Might have parked his car anywhere along here, thought Minogue, before taking off along one of the sheep tracks. Turning a blind bend, Minogue saw the person more clearly now. Definitely a man, wearing a green anorak and an aran hat. He stopped the car and took up the binoculars again.
“Declare to God, Kathleen, do you know who that looks like? I was thinking about him, maybe that’s why I’m imagining it’s him.”
“A ghost?”
“Not a bit of it. That’s Billy Fine.”
“You’re joking. It’ll be pitch black within the hour, lovey. How can you see anything at all?”
“I think it is, you know.”
Minogue stepped out of the car and opened the boot. He took out his Wellingtons and leaned against the back door as he donned the rubber boots. Kathleen stayed in the back seat, looking down the road toward the valley of Glencree.
“I’ll find out soon enough,” he said apologetically. “Then I’ll hot-foot it back.”
“Mind the bog-holes,” said Kathleen with irony plain in her caution. “The light is poor already.”
Minogue shouldered his binoculars and made off over the heather. Walking, he thought over Paul Fine’s funeral. The crowd waiting for the coffin to be carried out of the little house within the Jewish cemetery at Aughavannagh Road. Archbishop Burke, who was there before Minogue and Kilmartin, had worn a yarmulka with no trace of the embarrassment afflicting Kilmartin and the Commissioner, who walked stiff-necked in the fear that theirs might fall from their heads. After Johnny Cohen had slipped him one, Minogue had put it on his head and promptly forgotten it.
As a species (which species or genus Minogue wasn’t sure, Gentile or merely policeman), Minogue and Kilmartin found themselves beside Tynan and the Commissioner. The trio of Mickey Fitz, Downey and Mary McCutcheon stood off to the other side of the crowd, nearer to the dignitaries from the government and Dail. Minogue noted Tynan’s almost uninterested attention as Tynan explained parts of the ceremony. The body, taken but an hour previously from the hospital mortuary, had been driven in a Flanagan’s hearse to the burial ground. It had been collected and accompanied by three men from what Tynan called the Holy Society.
“They’ll wash and dress the body, all under a sheet,” Tynan murmured. “All in white. Jews are enjoined to treat the burial of their dead with the greatest respect. All in white, from head to toe. Rich or poor. You don’t see any wreaths, do you?”
Minogue looked around. There were none.
“That’s how it is with them. Nothing showy. Go to God plain.”
They watched. the unvarnished coffin being carried to the graveside. The wooden pegs, Tynan explained when the four policemen were seated in the pub afterwards, were supposed to stick out like that. They were not hammered in tightly because God must know that the living were reluctant to part with the dead.
“They’d not be happy burying someone so late after death, you know. Especially with the PM,” Tynan had whispered.
Kilmartin had every appearance of being pleased to be in a pub with his own kind after the funeral, Minogue remembered.
“Tell ye something now,” Kilmartin had confided. “It wasn’t so much the hat falling off me head that had me nervous. When they started to say the prayers and some of them started bowing and waving around… But then, to cap it all, when the prayers started up I automatically began with an Our Father and a Hail Mary. Jases, such an iijit, I thought to meself. I hope nobody heard me.”
The Commissioner thought that Kilmartin’s addition to the Kaddish was very funny. “No fear of anyone overhearing you praying, Jimmy. There’s nobody has heard you saying prayers yet.”
Kilmartin had felt obliged to laugh, as the Commissioner was happy with his joke.
Minogue stepped around a turf-cut now and found a sheep track which led toward a point where the figure in the gloom ahead would cross his path.
Tynan had described the week of mourning awaiting the Fines after the funeral. The family members shouldn’t leave the house before nightfall, but should be together during the day. The prayers they were not expected to join in before the burial could now be uttered by the family members aloud. The bare maintenance of physical needs was to suffice, and even those things would likely be taken care of by friends and relatives. Minogue had wanted to tell Tynan that Fine had mentioned thinking of emigrating to Israel, but Fine would not have people know this. Tynan had not laughed at Kilmartin’s wrong prayers either. God, if he was worth his salt as an Omnipotent, had to be multilingual. Minogue remembered the smell of the Commissioner’s whiskey breath as they parted outside the pub, the frown of sincerity as he told Minogue that excellent police work had been done, with the minimum fuss over such a major crisis.
Fine had phoned Minogue at home some two weeks after the funeral. He had thanked Minogue for his work and said no more.
Minogue stopped in the heather and used the binoculars. It was Billy Fine. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, and was so intent on his path that he hadn’t noticed Minogue yet. Minogue looked back toward the car but it was no longer in sight. The roadway was hidden under a dyke which had been dug as an aid to getting turf out of the bog.
“Hello!” he called out over the bog. Fine did not turn. Minogue adjusted his direction to cross Fine’s path, and quickened his pace. Without warning, a fine drizzle began to settle over the bog. Minogue called out again, and this time Fine turned.
“Justice Fine,” Minogue shouted, and threaded his way around bog-holes toward the stationary figure.
“I thought it was yourself,” Minogue called out.
“We share the same bog, isn’t that something?” said Fine as he shook hands. His face was relaxed, suggesting wry amusement at the sight of Minogue. “What are you at?”
“I’m going home for my tea,” replied Minogue, pointing toward where he believed Kathleen and the Fiat were. “Here look, do you want a lift? That rain will be coming in in earnest, I’m thinking.”
Fine walked alongside Minogue. “I’m parked up above the village. The time ran away on me but I think I could have made it before the dark. I would have stepped out on to the road if it had turned dark on me.”
“I didn’t know you for a bog-man,” said Minogue.
Fine shrugged. “I came up from town to get a bit of space.” He stopped and surveyed the desolate landscape. “Plenty of room up here, and that’s a fact,” he murmured. He turned to Minogue with a quizzical expression and said: “ ‘Great hatred and little room… ’”
“ ‘… had maimed us from the start,’ ” Minogue finished.
Fine shook his head and looked down at his Wellington boots. “You’re a gas man, Minogue. Spouting Yeats and annoying people. I don’t think there’s a man in Dublin-outside of the Gardai, I mean-that’d believe a Guard is interested in poetry or museums.”
“Ah, why ruin a good stereotype,” Minogue said. “People depend on them, and sure it gives you a good cover to move around under.”
Fine began walking again. “ ‘Great hatred… little room,’ ” he said. “Room in the head and the heart departments, I suppose he was talking about.”
“I’d say so, all right,” Minogue agreed.
“Rosalie and I have been giving serious consideration to leaving,” said Fine then. Minogue was too taken aback to say anything. “It was her saying something that got me to thinking about that poem.”
Minogue said awkwardly, “You remember scraps of things, I suppose…”
“She has the feeling that there’s not room for us here any more. Odd sort of idea, and I’m not sure what she means.”
“If ye get up and leave, there’d be less room for the likes of us, I think,” said Minogue. Fine looked over to Minogue and frowned. Then his face relaxed.
“You are one of the oddest people I have ever met, Minogue-and I have lived and worked in a very odd city all my life. How did you ever get stuck into the job of being a Guard?”
Minogue shrugged.
“I don’t know. But the reasons I stay at it are different from the reasons I joined up. I was obliged to give up being an iijit a number of years ago… and I’m very glad of getting the chance, I can tell you.”
Fine smiled briefly and took up the pace again.
“Well, there’s a bit more to this place here than meets the eye,” said Fine as he looked around the bog. He stopped and wiped drizzle off his forehead, and pointed toward what Minogue guessed was Kippure Mountain, hidden in the cloud.
“I used to come up here for years. That was before they put the television mast up there and then the Army to guard it. You can’t be walking up there now because you’d be up for trespassing in a security zone. How would it look if I was up in court in front of myself one fine day, charged with trespass?”
“I’d hope you’d be lenient on yourself,” said Minogue. He felt the rain plaster his hair to his forehead.
“I still come up here the odd time,” Fine continued as he stared up into the clouds where Kippure was shrouded. “There’s something here for us Jews, you see. Did you know?”
“I didn’t.”
“The story has always affected me more than others I spoke to about it. That comes of being a poet in my spare time, you understand… An Irishman, a Dublinman, I believe, went to Spain some time in the seventeenth century and brought himself home a nice Spanish wife. They lived somewhere near Dublin, I can’t find out where. Every year the wife would go missing for a day or two, off on her own. During her lifetime nobody knew what she was at or where she went or why, but it went on year after year. She travelled alone, up into the mountains. Oddly enough, she was never harassed here, and you’d know from your history that the O’Tooles and the O’Byrnes didn’t care a damn for English rule in the country and did what they could until after the ‘98 Rebellion, pretty well… She came back safe and sound every year after the day’s absence. I suspect that her husband must have known what she was about.”
“The Wicklowmen are a tough crowd, this is true,” Minogue agreed.
The bog road where Kathleen was waiting for them was part of the Military Road which had been built with the aim of moving troops quickly and safely into the mountains of Wicklow to quell rebels and their families in the wake of the 1798 Rebellion.
“Anyway. This woman came up here every year. After she died, it was found out that she came up here to Kippure on the exact day when our Day of Atonement fell.”
He looked balefully at Minogue.
“Yom Kippur,” Minogue murmured. “Kippure.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m astounded. I never imagined…”
“Hardly anyone knows that,” Fine said, beginning his walk again.
“We don’t know her name but her life reminds us of Ruth and the whole history of the Diaspora. The woman was a Marrano: that’s the Spanish for ‘pig’. Do I need to remind you of the prohibition against pork? Marranos were those who survived the Inquisition only by renouncing their faith. The other alternative was to get burned at the stake.”
Burned, Minogue’s thoughts raced. Kelly in the car. For renouncing? Opus Dei had been founded in Spain and it had flourished under Franco. What did it mean? Was this what history was? Fine had spoken without irony when he uttered the word marrano. The facts were simple, the events past and unreachable. Why then did Minogue feel so stricken? Of course Billy Fine would be alive to the connection, this odd echo through time.
“Apparently people liked this woman very much, and they named the mountain after her,” said Fine quietly, picking his way around a turf-cut already filling with water.
“That was a terrible thing that she should have to…”
“Worse has happened,” said Fine simply. “And we’re still here. Let’s avoid this survivalist stuff. There’s more to Judaism than what some Austrian crackpot or the Spanish Inquisition tried to do.”
The two men were now in sight of the car. Minogue’s mind groped for the connection between Paul Fine and the woman who had come up here every year of her exile, centuries before. He wanted to go to Burke’s Residence and tell him that there could be no excuse, that people like Gibney would always follow because of the way the Church throttled Irish minds. But no: Burke and Heher and the rest of them would simply ask him for proof of causation… direct causes… necessary and sufficient cause. They’d tie Minogue up with sophistry.
“Who’s in the car?”
“Kathleen, my wife.”
Fine turned and took a look at where Kippure Mountain should be.
“Rosalie’s at home, packing. We’re off in the morning to London for a few days. We’ll stay with David and give him a rest from looking down people’s gobs to make a living. Then we’ll be off to Jerusalem.”
“For a while, is it?”
“A nice ambiguous question from a nice ambiguous Garda,” Fine smiled slowly. “We’ll stay a couple of weeks but then we’ll be back.”
Minogue nodded. “That’s great,” he said.
“I thought about it a lot. I don’t think I could keep quiet about the distaste I have for the way Israeli politics are going at the moment. It’s a very different country from what it was before. I don’t do very well with extremists: that may be a Dubliner’s trademark, that. As well as that, I think I might make an injudicious remark there a bit too often. Johnny Cohen says I’m not religious enough to ignore things, but I know he’s codding me. Then I was thinking about those Opus Dei people. There are extremists everywhere, aren’t there? It’s that simple.”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to acquit certain institutions here,” said Minogue.
“You’re a tough nut but you are an insider, you see.”
“They’ve done nothing right for the people,” said Minogue. “Excepting for the odd priest, the rest of them have been sitting on us for too long.”
“I believe Gorman. That may shock you,” said Fine.
“It does.”
“He was just a kind of an icon for them, as I see it. These people really wanted to install some kind of a government that’d suit their brand of Irish: Catholic, Nationalist, Conservative. Gorman’s no Peron: he was the one they chose to push for, and I don’t think he understood how far they were prepared to go. I don’t believe he would have thought of murder for a moment.”
“Don’t you think he must have known, have felt some inkling?”
“I don’t. Gorman wanted power. He wanted it enough so that he paid no attention to events that were happening. He wanted to believe that things were unfolding naturally, and that he was the man to deliver the country. A man with a mission, was Gorman. He saw what his ambition permitted him to see. I’ve met hundreds of people like him in court. Tell me, how many do you think would have rallied to Gorman if he had made his break at the Ard Fheis?”
Minogue thought of Kilmartin’s anger, the widespread grumbling about leadership, the simple solutions.
“I don’t know. There’s nobody admitting to even knowing the man now, of course. Not one member of the Dail or Senate,” he said.
“I expected as much. An Opus Dei member has testified that Gibney argued with poor Kelly a few weeks back. And that was how Kelly knew of the plan to bring down the government, I expect.”
“It was bred into Gibney to be ruthless, that’s what I keep thinking,” said Minogue. “And he had any amount of help he wanted, it seems. Our fella, Morrissey, actually fed him a telephone bug for Kelly’s home phone.”
“I’m a Jew, remember. I’m not supposed to be privy to the depths of the Irish Catholic Nationalist mind and what it can hold. What about the others in this group?”
“Well,” Minogue began, “it may well prove that everything leads back to Gibney. Morrissey is in more serious trouble than the others: he’s an accessory because he concealed knowledge of a crime. I maintain he abetted it. Gibney even got Morrissey to phone him if he heard anything about a body being washed up on the beaches. Morrissey heard it on the South Dublin Garda frequency first thing on Monday morning, and he admits to phoning Gibney. Gibney decided at some point he’d have to kill Brian Kelly, too. Best we estimate now is that he got into Kelly’s house and killed him there. The day your son was found.”
“Thus the peculiar timing of this fake call from the Palestinian outfit to the newspaper.”
“Gibney wanted to buy time as well as dirty up the motive. The Ard Fheis was only a week away then. There was the chance that your son would not be found at all-that’s why Gibney went to the trouble of putting him in the sea, I think.”
Fine’s eyes wandered past Minogue and slipped out of focus.
“Yes,” Minogue went on, “we have yet to get anything definitive from Gibney’s cohorts and it may be that he didn’t disclose to them what he was up to. It looks like he found some pretext to lure Paul out to Killiney. He might have used Brian Kelly’s name to set it up. Wily, organized-I think he had them all mesmerized. Leadership is an odd business. But Gibney’s associates are beginning to let slip that Gibney was obsessed with the way the country was being governed. Half of it is hindsight, I’m sure, patching up recollections to fit what has transpired. It’s possible that Gibney dithered over killing Brian Kelly. He may have thought or hoped that Kelly could be frightened off or brought back into the fold…”
“Had a row with Mr. Kelly prior to murdering him, perhaps?” said Fine. Minogue shrugged.
“What I still can’t get around is the fact that Gibney had such an effect,” said Fine. “How could he influence educated people to go along with this sort of thing? They were ready, before the weekend, to gun down the union man who’s leading the strike, weren’t they?”
“That’s what’s coming out, all right,” said Minogue. “They had a plan to cause as much chaos as they needed to.”
Fine turned up the collar of his anorak.
“The ground-work was done years ago,” Minogue said. “Not directly, of course. But the whole process took its toll, that’s how Gibney was able to persuade all those people: the fella out in Radio Telifis Eireann to monitor what Paul did on the computer and then wipe it out when we came looking for Paul’s stuff; those civil servants; Gorman, even. They had been readied years ago.”
“You’re talking about something I can’t comment on, you know,” said Fine. “I know piety and fervour in very different forms when they’re planted on to politics. That’s why I’ll be keeping my comments to myself when we’re in Israel.”
The drizzle was turning to rain now. Kathleen rubbed the window inside.
“The charges will stick, you know,” Minogue said. “We’ll get them all on conspiracy, if not accessory to.”
“It was hardly a conspiracy at all,” said Fine in a resigned tone. “ They were simply afraid of Gibney after a while, by the sound of things. I suppose we have Archbishop Burke to thank for getting to these people before they did worse.”
“And whoever it was who broke ranks and made that confession,” said Minogue.
Fine stepped over the ditch and climbed up toward the road. Minogue walked around the driver’s side. The rain was drumming on the roof now.
“Has the Commissioner kept you up on the evidence as it comes in?”
“The whole bit,” said Fine. He seemed to Minogue to be concentrating on the rain as it hopped off the roof.
“Yes. Court martials, the investigation tribunals in the Gardai-I believe the panel appointed by the Civil Service Commission is like the Inquisition all over again. Nobody has asked my opinion on the whole business yet, do you know that? It’s as if they’re going at it so ferociously to prove something.”
“It may be the guilt. Atonement.”
Fine took a lingering look back up into the rain and the gloom. Night was coming in with the rain clouds over the bog.
“For Paul too, for not knowing him as well as I could have. I don’t think he’d like to see us run out of Ireland by this. Do you know what finally decided me, though? I remembered this afternoon. It was something Johnny Cohen said to me afterwards. We all carry a spare yarmulka or two in our fobs at funerals, so as Gentiles can wear them. Johnny was complaining that he had run out of them and he had borrowed every spare one he could find, but that there’d be people in the burial-ground without a covering over them. Catastrophe in Johnny’s mind, of course. There were that many at the funeral. We were very glad of that.”
Again the image of the funeral circled in Minogue’s head. From a distance he heard his own voice, odd in the gathering, dripping gloom. “Not a part of the world or a season that a man could afford to be without some class of a covering over his head, is it?”
Minogue opened the door of the Fiat.
“Hop in there like a good man and introduce yourself. We’ll be down off this place before the night.”