Jammy Tierney stood up and stretched. He turned up the sound on the Walkman, dabbed more oil onto the cloth and hunkered down again. He shoved the rag in between the exhaust pipe and the axle, grasped it as it showed beneath and then continued buffing. The numbers came back to his mind: how much the bike had cost, how much he’d sell it for, what he could use the money for. Trade it in for the new Suzuki or buy a car? He made a face and looked at its reflection on the exhaust. Car?
He stood up when the figures appeared beside his own onion face on the exhaust. Painless he recognized. The other fella looked familiar. Pony-tail, studs along his ear. He pulled out the earphones.
“Jammy,” said Painless. “How’s it going, man?”
“Oh, great. How’s yourself.”
He felt stupid with the rag in his hand. He bent his knees to ease the stiffness.
“Going somewhere, are you?” asked Pony-tail.
Like who’s asking, he wanted to say. He studied the dark patches under his eyes.
“Nice bike,” said Painless.
“Thanks.”
“Paid for, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You up to anything these days, Jammy?”
“The usual, you know. A bit of this-”
“A bit of that?” Pony-tail asked. He took a step forward, blew a bubble and cracked it.
“Like a bit of what?” asked Painless. Tierney glanced back at the sallow, expressionless face of Painless Balfe. Indoors all day, he thought. Probably a user. Psycho.
“Things is slow on the buildings. I get the odd ruxer. Then the rock-and-roll.”
“Still good with the balls, are you, Jammy?”
He tried to smile. He realized his knees were turning to jelly on him.
“You know yourself. Couldn’t make a living out of it. But the odd game does the job.”
Painless’s face took on a quizzical expression.
“Is that the only game you play, Jammy?”
“You know me, man. Just trying to get along. I never went in for the excitement.”
Balfe’s eyes bored into his now. Again he tried to grin. It didn’t come. A trickle ran down his back. He shrugged. Painless’s eyes slid down to the bike. He nodded several times.
“How fast does this yoke go, Jammy?”
“About one-thirty.”
“A hundred and thirty miles an hour? Fuck me. For real?”
“If you get the road, you know? It’s a real buzz if you’re into it.”
Pony-tail blew another bubble.
“Have you ever been on it when it went that fast?” he asked.
Painless’s sidekick was grinning. His teeth were yellow. Average size, nothing special if it was a clean fight, but bad eyes. If the Egans had him on the payroll, he had to be the goods. Tierney rubbed at his eyes and looked down at the hands in the pockets. Knuckles, maybe.
“No. Went to one-twenty once, though.”
“Not fast enough,” said Pony-tail. Tierney looked at Balfe. His face was blank.
“Seen Leonardo today?” Balfe asked.
“Well, I seen him the other day, yeah.”
Pony-tail chewed more vigorously.
“I don’t stay in touch with the likes of him, though. I mean to say, he’s a fucking header, right?”
Painless’s expression hadn’t changed.
“He’s always messing,” he went on. “He’s a goner this long time, you know?”
“He’s a mate of yours,” said Painless. “Am I right or am I right?”
The fear made him vehement now. He jabbed at his own upper arm.
“No way. He stopped being a mate of mine when he started feeding his fucking arm.”
“Feeding his arm?” asked Painless
“Whatever he does. I don’t know exactly. I’m not into that. Never was.”
“Fella saw you and him in the Eight Ball the other day,” said Pony-tail. “Charley’s?”
He popped one bubble and stopped chewing.
“Who?”
“Doesn’t fucking matter who,” snapped Painless.
“Well he obviously didn’t hear me give Leonardo the brush-off, did he?”
“Obviously?” sneered Pony-tail. “Obviously you’re trying to be fucking smart.”
His hand slid out of his pocket. Tierney looked down at the rings. Pony-tail began a foot-to-foot motion as though testing new shoes.
“Here, Painless, wait a minute!”
Painless’s hand was already behind his back.
“I’ll help find him for you, Painless, if that’s what you mean, you know, like?”
“How?” Balfe’s eyes had gone clear and moist. “Said you didn’t fucking know him.”
“Well, I know him, but I don’t know him.”
“Fuck off out of the way, so,” said Painless. Pony-tail went by him and raised his arm.
“Jesus, Painless, don’t, man! I swear to God!”
He jumped out onto the street. A bread lorry honked but didn’t let up speed. Pony-tail brought his hand down in a chop. It glanced off the petrol tank.
“Fucking thing,” he said. He drew back with his next swing and scraped the side of the tank.
“Painless! Man! Just get him to stop it, for Jases’ sake, will you!”
Painless had replaced something in his back pocket. He stared at the motorbike. Pony-tail began kicking against the exhaust.
“These bikes,” Pony-tail grunted between kicks. “You could…fucking…get…yourself…hurt tearing around the place on one of these things.”
“Lolly,” said Painless. Pony-tail turned with a mischievous look and smiled at Tierney.
“Be seeing you, there. Stay in touch.”
He counted the money again and tried to decide. It was too late for laying out the stuff on the paths along by the Green. But the office crowd would be on the move in a little while. He couldn’t decide. He flicked the cigarette away. His shoulder ached from lying on the grass. Two kids were throwing crusts to ducks by the pond. He stared at a can floating in the scum on the surface. Christ, the stink.
The ache for a hit ran up from his stomach and his heart seemed to swell. He stood up and lit a cigarette. For several moments he was dizzy; the heat and the glare and the smoke in his lungs made the trees come at him, changing colour as they did. He closed his eyes. He’d have to carry the stupid bag with his change of clothes in it as well as the pictures all over the city. Again the craving came to him. He could make himself do it, he thought then, cold turkey. He wasn’t really into it anyway, not like people who needed it bad enough to knock pensioners around for a tenner.
The tips of his fingers began to itch and tingle. He began walking around the bench. Eat something, that’d help. It was too hot. He looked down at the bags, imagining them in slow motion falling toward the water, taking his troubles with them. Grabbing the pictures, twisting them to a pulp, watching them sink into the pond. Nobody’d help him. He was out there on his own. People were looking for him. No shelter, the sun beating down on him like it was the Sahara. Through the trees and beyond the dappled walks he caught glimpses of the traffic wheeling around the Green. A man with his shirt open to his waist staggered around the shrubs and came toward him. He almost slipped but held the bottle of sherry upright. He slowed and began heading toward him again.
“Hey, brother. Wait a minute there!”
He grabbed the bags and headed across the grass toward the gate. Where could he go? Take Jammy’s advice and get the boat to Liverpool? Stupid bastard. No way: he’d go under there. There was no work. He didn’t know anyone. He moved faster down the path now, checking the faces and the parked cars. A faint hope began to leak into his chest and his stride settled. There had to be a way he could talk to the Egans, prove he had nothing to do with… Nothing to do with what? The thought of Mary dead made him slow almost to a stop. Nobody’d believe him. There was no safe place. He looked back at the foliage spilling over the railings in the Green. It was like an island away from all this heat and crap and noise, a place he could just walk in, a place where he could lie down to rest. But this was the busiest bloody park in Dublin. It was full of dopers. They closed it up when it got dark.
The idea came to him then as a picture of dense woods. That’s where he could go. Hundreds of acres he could get lost in. Did the deer still run wild in the Park? And the zoo. If wild animals could do all right in a park in Dublin, why couldn’t he? He stepped back out onto the path and headed for the city centre. The bags felt lighter now. He’d get a bus down the quays to Islandbridge. There’d be a chipper down there near the gates of the Phoenix Park. He’d even spent a night in the Park once. A crowd of lads had gone into the Park, drinking and smoking dope. Someone got stabbed, he remembered, and everyone cleared out rapid before the cops came.
There was a charcoal of David Bowie down by the Bank of Ireland. A woman was still working on it, a hippy type he hadn’t seen before. There were fifties and pound coins in her hat. She didn’t look Irish. He bought cigarettes and a Coke and caught a bus pulling out from O’Connell Bridge. The bus squealed to a stop by Merchant’s Arch. He’d laid out his stuff there a lot of times. He spotted another chalkie there, one he’d seen before, a fella who specialized in religious stuff. A man who had been leaning against the railings by the Arch turned as the brakes squealed louder. It was the fella who’d chased him from the house. He spread his hand on his cheek and looked down again. He hadn’t been spotted.
The bus shuddered as it pulled away. Terror still rooted him to the seat. They were out looking for him. They knew his spots. Maybe he should just go to the cops and hope for the best. But what could he deal with? Even if he signed a statement for the car jobs, the cops’d want to set him up. They’d turn him into a stoolie or something. They didn’t care. Nobody cared. The panic made his bladder ache. The whole world was closing in on him, punishing him for something he hadn’t done or even imagined. The rest of the journey down the quays passed in a daze. It was suddenly time to get off. He stepped out into a mass of jostling school kids. Everybody seem to be looking at him. His bag caught against a kid’s shoulder and he pulled it free. He skipped across the street.
He looked over his shoulder, back toward the city centre. Was it vibrating? The heat. Jesus. A mirage right here in the middle of Dublin. He passed the Park gates and remembered the time he’d been there as a child. The main road stretched straight as an arrow ahead. He trudged across the grass for a quarter of an hour until he reached a small wood. He paused by the outermost trees and studied the shade and deeper shadows ahead. He entered the wood then and made for the middle. It was cool here, it smelled of clay. He let down his bags and lit a cigarette. The open fields beyond the wood were a dull glare now. He sat down against a tree and watched cars pass almost silently in the distance. It was only one of a hundred spots in the park, he thought. For a moment, he felt again as he had when he was a kid: this wood was a vast, limitless forest, a shelter where he could play and live forever.
“What did she mean?” Kilmartin asked. “Your Sister Joe.”
“That girls move from the streets indoors,” replied Minogue. “Money changes hands still, of course. Doyler agrees. The whole business is impossible to track.”
He looked away from the window. Kilmartin was poised on the edge of his chair looking up under his eyebrows. A smell of salami from someone’s lunch hung in the stifling air of the squadroom.
“Hnnkkk. This bloody flatmate of hers. Patricia Fahy. Christ, she has to start talking.”
Minogue sat back and watched Murtagh writing on the boards: addresses for hard cases and enforcers in the Egan clan. Next to one was the address of a shop owned by Eddsy Egan.
“Probably. We need to go to her with something, Jim. Something which will make her cop on to the fact that the Egans can’t touch her. Something to make her wake up and realize that we’re all she’s got. Any word on Hickey yet?”
“Not a sausage, and bugger-all new from the lab about Mullen’s bloody taxi either. I’ve been going through his log again, minute by minute nearly. We’re down to three or maybe four significant periods of time he could’ve had a chance. Murtagh’s got the file searches for regulars by the canal, the customers, well in hand. The gougers on the parolee list as well as ones on bail are coming up empty. We’ll have to widen the net. Open it up to a year even. Go through the logged incidents reported into stations. Jesus.”
Minogue caught Murtagh’s eye.
“This Balfe character uses the Egans’ shop as his HQ? ‘Painless’ Balfe?”
Murtagh nodded. Minogue swivelled back toward Kilmartin.
“We’re okay to jump on the likes of him, aren’t we? If we can’t poke the Egans directly?”
Kilmartin blew out smoke from under his lower lip.
“Don’t ask. Talked to Keane again. Last resort, says he. And I have to go through him if I want to. Holy God, says I, we have her in and out of one of the Egans’ houses-right from his own surveillance! ‘I know, I know, Jim,’ says he. Told him I could get a warrant as easy as kiss hands. ‘Course you could, Jim.’ All that shite. I talked to him for twenty minutes. Finally he drops the clanger: ‘Well, Jim, you’d really need to get good advice on going it alone with this.’ In other words, check upstairs or I’ll be pissed on. Trouble is, I knew that bloody Keane is right. But I didn’t let on, did I?”
He snorted and stood. A smell of sweat and long extinguished cigars wafted over to Minogue.
“I checked already with a certain party in HQ, you see. Turns out that Keane has all the trumps in the bloody deck. It’s a combo between Drug Squad Central, Revenue Commissioners, Customs and Excise, Serious Crime-with their automatics stuck down the back of their shagging trousers! Then, to put the tin hat on it, I find out that it’s the personal initiative of you-know-who, the Iceman himself. He set it all up. If I want to take the Egans in, it’s bloody Tynan himself I’d have to ask!”
“Well, did you phone him then?”
Kilmartin’s eyes opened wide.
“I could as easy have a nice chat with Tynan as my wife could walk by a shoe shop.”
Minogue looked down at the names again.
“Well, let’s pluck these fellas then.”
He flicked a glance at the boards. Kilmartin looked at the names.
“Doyler put them in order of severity. John’s got their haunts. Start with Balfe there?”
Kilmartin guffawed.
“‘Painless.’ Christ.”
“I’d like a poke at him too,” said Malone. Kilmartin and Minogue looked over at him.
“What class of a poke had you in mind there, Molly?”
“I knew him years ago. He’d remember me. Maybe I can get somewhere with him.”
Malone spoke with no trace of humour.
“Painless is an animal. The other one is a total loop in his own right too. Lollipop Lenehan.”
“Why not, Tommy,” said Minogue. “Will you arrange the pick-up then?”
Malone nodded, looked at Kilmartin and picked up the phone. Minogue stretched.
“God, the air in here,” he groaned. “I have to go out for a bit of fresh air.”
Kilmartin followed him out to the car park.
“Listen, Matt. Don’t let Molly off the lead so quick now. Here he is asking his pick of — ”
“He’s volunteering, Jimmy.”
Kilmartin grimaced.
“I’m saying he’s inexperienced. I don’t want this case banjaxed due to a trainee dropping the ball. It’s bollicky enough yet with all the blanks we have to fill in.”
“Ten-four, James.”
“Here-why’d he ask to see this Painless fella anyway?”
“Maybe Balfe knows the brother-Terry.”
“The Squad that used to be all business seems to be a holding area for comedians. If you ask me-”
Minogue didn’t. He held up his hand to be sure he had heard Eilis’s summons to the phone.
“Da.”
“Hello, love.”
“How’s it going?”
“A minute ago, I was looking for the jacket I never brought with me this morning. The heat has me addled.”
“Don’t be talking,” said Iseult. “I put paper on the windows here to keep the sun off.”
Minogue remembered that the window frames in Iseult’s studio were old metal ones. He had seen a crust of frost on them just after Christmas. Winter meant air thick with the smell of a gas storage heater and the sundry oils and dyes, the wood shavings and stains, the scents of hemp and paper. He had held off opining about the place as a health hazard. Iseult shared the studio with several others. He had been bewildered to find her working with chisels and awls last month, helping one of her fellow tenants to finish a wooden construction which looked, in sketches at least, to be a tank trap from a Normandy beach.
“Well, how are you anyway?” she asked. He forgot the ache in his back, the stale smell of sweat that clung to his shirt. Iseult wasn’t in the habit of calling him at work.
“For my age, do you mean? Or my occupation?”
“In general like.”
“Oh, as ever. Happy-go-lucky. Early dotage maybe…”
“Fibber. Are you working late?”
“It’s hard to know. The usual. Waiting, checking, talking, thinking, cursing…”
“I was just wondering.”
“Well, if I had known you were in the market for tea, now.”
“It’s all right.”
He waited for another hint. Malone waved at him, stepped over to the boards and tapped his marker against a name. Painless Balfe. Minogue put his hand over the mouthpiece.
“We can pin him, Tommy? Right now?”
“Surveillance at Egan’s shop saw him go in five minutes ago. They called it in for us.”
So Kilmartin had bargained something out of Serious Crimes then, Minogue reflected.
“Okay. Pick him up-only when he comes out though.”
“Here, I’ll leave you,” said Iseult. “You’re busy enough.”
The brisk tone made him even more alert.
“Busy? God, no! Where do you want to meet?”
“I don’t want to, you know, get in the way now.”
“Well, I do. What’s that black and silver place in George’s Street? Music from the Andes, the stuff on the walls, avant-garde and what-have-you?”
“‘Back Then’? Are you sure? It’s gone completely vegetarian, you know.”
He rolled his eyes.
“A quarter to six?”
“Done,” he said. “Will you be on your own?”
“To all intents and purposes. I’ll see you, Da.”
The connection was lost before Minogue could utter a word. Was that humour he had heard in her answer? He replaced the receiver and gave a sigh. Phone Kathleen. Tell her that Iseult wanted to see him. Him alone? How would he manage this one, he wondered.
The straps of the plastic bag had cut deep into his fingers again. He stopped to change the bag to his other hand and looked through the grove at the cars passing in the distance. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and lowered the bag to the ground. Did it get cold at night this time of the year, even with a heat wave? If he found some newspapers, that’d help. He sat down and rested against a tree trunk. Something had come between that world of busy commuters and the trees about him. He looked up into the canopy and imagined a tree house there. The chestnut leaves overhead were so dense that he found no bit of sky at all. Like a roof, he thought. Even if it rained, the trees would shelter him.
His hand searched out the bag but it landed amongst pieces of metal. There were beer cans all mangled up under the grass, cigarette butts. He moved over and took out the biscuits and the Coke. They didn’t taste as good as the first time. They had lost that magic which had brought him by the back of his tongue to the age of nine again. He stopped chewing. The bastard could have given him the money, the loan of money, without acting the bleeding Rambo about it. It’d been a long time since Jammy had been that mad at him.
Jammy was scared. Mary. Small pieces of biscuit caught the back of his throat. It began to tighten. His eyes prickled. What a mess, what a fucking mess. The crushed biscuit turned to paste as he cried. He tried to gather it at the front of his mouth to spit it out. Everything was stacked against him no matter what he did. He imagined going into a Garda station and yapping his head off, trying to do a deal to keep him on his own. They’d find out soon enough that he had nothing to do with Mary’s… Mary getting killed. They’d nail the bastard who’d done it. Then he’d be all right.
Even as that hope rose in him, he felt himself falling deeper into something. He swilled Coke around his teeth. Didn’t matter what he’d done or hadn’t done, nobody believed him, not even Jammy. The cops would use him and if he got nailed by any of the Egans, they wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it. He squeezed his eyes tight and sucked in air through his teeth. Fucking bastards, the lot of them. Whatever Mary had been into had left the Egans pissed off. Maybe she had told them some yarn about him just to buy time or something and they had done her in then…
He stood and took a few steps into the grove before peeing. The panic came back to him in an instant and it swept all hope away with it. He’d never make it, not tonight out here in the Park, not tomorrow- never! He’d been too cocky about using, even bragging that he could go weeks without a hit. Sure, he had once, but he had been climbing the walls. Junkie; user; scumbag; addict. He still had nearly a hundred and fifty quid. Go down to the Bell and score off Brannigan. Then what? Stay in the pub and blow more money? He could pick out a boozer and knock him outside when he left the pub. He slapped at the tree branch. If only he could talk to one of them, one of the Egans, without any danger he’d get done in, he could explain. He leaned against the tree. Bird-song erupted above. What the hell was he going to do here all night? The foliage seemed to look back at him, to draw him in.
“You fucking iijit,” he heard himself say. What time was it? He wasn’t hungry. Was he going nuts? Here in the middle of Dublin, in the six hundred acres of the Phoenix Park, he’d never felt so lost.
“Well, look at that,” said Painless Balfe. “The Kremlin.”
Malone looked around from the passenger seat. Balfe sat with his hands on his knees between two CDU detectives. The Nissan turned into the car-park of Harcourt Square.
“I’m going to miss you, lads,” he added. He looked from one to the other. “We’ve grown very close.” Malone turned back as the barrier came down behind the car.
“Do I get the chauffeur treatment on the way back too?”
“You lead, will you,” Malone murmured to the driver. “I still don’t know my way around here.”
A Garda in uniform met the car at the entrance to the lift.
“Any word from my solicitor?” said Painless.
“What do you want a solicitor for?” asked Malone. “Are you in trouble?”
Balfe’s expression didn’t change. The Guard held the door open.
“Hey Tommy,” said Balfe.
“Say hello to the brother for me, will you, Tommy? I hear Terry’s taking the air tomorrow.”
Malone watched the doors slide together.
“Maybe I’ll be seeing him before you do, of course,” said Balfe. “By the way, he didn’t mention to you about getting AIDS in the ’Joy, did he? Maybe he wants it to be a surprise.”
“Get yourself a fucking future, Painless,” said Malone. Balfe looked to one of the detectives.
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what,” said the detective.
The group followed the uniformed Guard to an interview room.
“Hey, there’s a phone,” said Painless. “I could phone him here myself.”
“Only internal calls there,” said the Guard. Minogue appeared around the door.
“Sit over there, Mr. Balfe-”
“Mr. Balfe? Is this going to cost me money?”
“-and shut up.”
Balfe’s face suddenly twisted into a look of hatred.
“Don’t you fucking talk to me like that, pal! I’m here because I co-”
“No sign of an up-to-date tax disc for Mr. Balfe’s Sierra yet?” Minogue asked one of the Guards,
“Sierra?” snapped Balfe. “Such a shitbox. Only cops drive them. I drove one four years ago.”
“Do you own a blue Escort XR3?”
Balfe shook his head. Minogue flipped open a folder and gave the top page a quick look.
“There’s a discrepancy in your car’s tax book, Mr. Balfe. Who did you buy the car off?”
“Oh, Christ, here we go. What’s it going to be this time?”
Minogue sat heavily into a chair opposite Balfe. He nodded at one of the detectives to go to the monitor room. Painless Balfe’s eyes slid around the room before resting on the mirrored glass.
“Hello, Mammy and Daddy,” he said, and leered at Minogue. “Will this make me a star?”
Malone dragged his chair into the end of the table.
“So, Tommy. What are you up to these days, oul son?”
“Cleaning up the streets, oul son,” said Malone.
Balfe put up his fists and made a mock feint.
“Still at the you-know-what?”
“Matter of fact, I am, yeah.”
“Not the real thing though, right?”
“That’s right. It’s only sissy stuff, Painless. I only take on fellas who know how to box.”
Minogue studied Balfe’s reaction. His face slackened and his eyes became very still.
“You’re such a fucking smart alec, Tommy. You probably think you’re even funny.”
“Last Monday, Mr. Balfe,” said Minogue. He sat up and grasped his pencil.
“Yeah? What about last Monday?”
“Where were you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Try. We certainly would appreciate the effort.”
“Got up. Had a cup of tea. A smoke.”
“You were at home Sunday night? Twenty-one Oriel Street, Ballybough?”
“My jases. The fan club’s really up to date. Yeah.”
“Alone?”
“With someone.”
“Theresa Joyce?” asked Malone.
“You said it. That was fast. I must tell her she’s getting famous.”
“And?”
“Well now. Monday. Went into town. Met me friends. Had a smoke. Et me dinner. Went to the bookies, watched the ponies. Played a few games of pool. Had a few jars. Had me tea. Went to the boozer. Oh, I forgot. Had a haircut.” He winked. “The whole thing: shampoo and blow dry. Ever get one of those, Tommy?”
“Haircut’s a haircut.”
“Well done, Mr. Balfe,” said Minogue. “Start again now. This time we’ll try the time element.”
Balfe looked from Minogue to Malone.
“Who’s Gentleman Jim here, Tommy?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Balfe. I forgot to introduce myself. I’m Inspector Minogue.”
“You’re not one of my normal fans.”
“Serious Crime Squad, Mr. Balfe? Oh, no. They’re the tough guys to be sure. I’m much more reserved and genteel really. Murder Squad.”
Balfe frowned.
“Murder Squad?”
“Let’s begin again now, Mr. Balfe. Start us Monday morning and take us with you all the way through until you woke up Tuesday morning.”