Death in Dublin - Peter McGarr 16 Read online

“Night, Daddy. Love you.” And the “love you” chorus echoed in the hall until she reached her room at the top of the stairs.

  Nuala was back in the doorway, as though blocking it. “Think you it wise to let your thirteen-year-old daughter see something like that?”

  It was the fi?rst time in two years that she had ever questioned McGarr’s raising of Maddie, and he had to check his fi?rst impulse, which was to push by her and attend to his pressing business.

  “Kehoe will have that tape on every screen in the country by tea tomorrow, so he will.”

  Her old dark eyes, which had followed countless politicians over the years, widened, then blinked, as she realized the sense in that. The video of the thieves actually destroying the book would allow Kehoe to take extraordinary measures—deploying the army squads or actually paying the ransom as a last resort.

  The public would have witnessed the demand and the destruction of the book. The press would play it up big, running daily features about the history and value of the relic from a time when Ireland enjoyed cultural preeminence in Europe.

  In that way and handled with savvy, which was the man’s hallmark, the theft and the drama of its salvation from the forces of evil—again, as witnessed in the hooded, masked fi?gure on the tape—might initiate a revival of interest in Ireland’s medieval Christian past that no 50 million Euros’ worth of advertising could equal. Or at least spark a revival of interest in Kehoe’s remaining taoiseach for another several years.

  “I think you know what I mean. I’m not blaming you. You are what you are, and we knew that. But are

  you doing it for her? Or for yourself?”

  “Why would I be doing it for myself?”

  “I think you have to ask yourself that.”

  Now McGarr pushed by her and started down the stairs. “D’you think I haven’t?”

  “Not completely enough.”

  At the bottom, he turned and looked up at her. “But you have?”

  She nodded. “To absolve yourself of the guilt you feel, when there should be no guilt to be felt. I’ve asked you before, and I’m asking you again—see somebody. Priest, counselor, anybody. But do it. For us.”

  “What galls me is how duplicitous and in-your-face it all is,” McGarr could hear Bresnahan telling McKeon through the receiver/transmitter that was looped over his right ear. “Look at that building, bold as brass with a methadone center and even a rehab out back when bottom line is they’re in the effi?n’ trade. They have to be stopped.”

  The three private cars—Bresnahan’s battered Opel surveillance sedan, Ward’s new Audi, and McGarr’s old Rover sedan—were parked at the curb on the busy Glasnevin Road several hundred yards from Celtic United headquarters.

  It was an old brick commercial building of four fl?oors with a brightly lit shop front over which hung a large green fl?ag with CU in white Celtic script across its face. Interweaved through the letters were designs in bright orange that seemed to mimic the images and symbols seen in the Book of Kells, it occurred to Mc-Garr. There was the tongue and tail of a snake, one paw and the head of a lion, and within one tangle appeared the eyes of a sheep, but deep and soulful, looking out.

  Milling in front of the building was a clutch of mainly young men but a few women as well. Most of the men had long hair or beards, and in spite of the weather, which had turned chilly, many were wearing only half-vests that exposed swirls of tattoos and other body designs.

  “And would you look at those effi?n’ wankers—probably not a job among them in spite of their muscles, tattoos, and perms,” said Bresnahan, the rose pin on the lapel of her jacket actually being a speaker connected to the other two cars via radio.

  Although once radically chic herself, Bresnahan hailed from rural Kerry, where conservative values, such as the work ethic, were revered.

  But few in the throng could be blamed, McGarr imagined. Ireland’s educational system was disparate, to say the least, and more than thirty years of police work had shown him that poor districts tended to have poor schools, poor community values, and much poverty of the spirit at home. And not all of Ireland’s young had ridden the Celtic Tiger, as the recent economic boom had been called.

  “The dole, the drug trade, and whatever they can nick from the public being their stock-in-trade.”

  “Ruthie, go ahead now,” McGarr advised through his own headset, as he removed the Walther from under his belt and checked the clip. “And remember to leave the tape with her.”

  They watched as Bresnahan stepped out of the other car and waited for traffi?c to pass before crossing the street. Tall, angular, her red hair fl?owing behind her, she immediately attracted the attention of the young men in front of the CU building.

  She was wearing a black leather jacket and short skirt that made the most of her shapely legs. When one of the men kept stepping in front of her, she said, “Ah, look—you’ve a bit of shit on your shirt.”

  When he looked down, she raised an elbow, shoved past him, and stepped into the open door of the shop. “My mistake, ’twas only you.”

  Patches of color had appeared in her cheeks, Bresnahan could see as she caught sight of her image in the glass of the open door. Why? Because she was in high dudgeon, she now realized.

  Nothing browned her off more than hypocrisy of the sort that preyed upon people—the innocent, the trusting, or here, she suspected, the ignorant: young, poorly educated, inner-city kids with little hope of even duplicating the straitened lives of their parents. Somebody had to be to blame. Why not the church, Christianity, and by extension the society that had accepted and continued to endorse that religion?

  She herself and Ward—her colleague, paramour, now business partner, and common-law husband—had run afoul of Christian strictures. But they had well understood the risks they’d been taking and the possible fallout.

  Stepping up to a counter covered with stacks of brochures and fl?yers touting Celtic United, its aims and accomplishments, she palmed a bell several times, until a woman appeared in the door of what looked like an offi?ce. “Help you?”

  “If you’re Morrigan, I’ve got something for you to see.” She held up a videotape.

  “I hope it’s licentious. Or at least naughty. I’ll consider nothing less.” A full-length, wheat-colored tunic made the woman look like a classical goddess out of Greek or Roman, not Celtic, myth.

  There was even a garland of tiny fl?owers in her long and fl?owing gray hair. Unlike her body, which was formidable, her face was long, well structured, and thin in the way some middle-aged women lose rather than gain facial fl?esh as they grow older, Bresnahan noted. Late forties, early fi?fties.

  “And to whom do I owe thanks for this present?”

  “I’m Ruth Bresnahan.”

  “The detective?”

  “Former detective.”

  “Ah, that’s right—she who lives in harem sin, according to Ath Cliath. Albeit, a small harem and thoroughly liberating sin, I should imagine. How’s life? The three of you still together? Or is it fi?ve?”

  “Six, counting all of the children.” Bresnahan could feel the blush that now suffused the light skin of her face. Even now, more than two years later, she rankled at being branded wherever she went because of Chazz Sweeney’s “exposé” of her relationship with Ward and Leah Sigal and the thoroughly happy life they had made for themselves there in Dublin. Which Ath Cliath now billed as a “world capital.”

  There were communes, groups that functioned as families, openly shared wives and husbands all over Europe. But no such grouping was to be tolerated in Sweeney’s Ireland, where every other class of license and crime was allowed. Which was, of course, yet more hypocrisy. “Yes, we’re still very much together, which is something I would have thought you here would applaud, given your...Celtic perspective.”

  “And do, do. You’re one of my heroes. Welcome. It’s not often the police arrive bearing gifts. What do you have? Give us a look.”

  She held out a hand.

&nb
sp; “Former police.”

  “Ah, yes—former police, which we both know is a patent oxymoron, don’t we, dear? Come.” She took the tape. “If it’s really exciting, I’ll insist you sit on my knee. Did I tell you I like that skirt and those legs? My, my.”

  Out in the Audi, Ward commented, “And the report said she liked boys.”

  “No, no—it said she liked sex with young recruits,” replied McKeon, who was sitting with McGarr in the Rover. “Gender was not named.”

  “Can you give me some hint as to what I’m about to see?”

  “You’ll know soon enough why I brought it to you. For comment.”

  As the introductory music began playing, McGarr thought of time and how, really, the Celtic era, while over a millennium past, was only a blink in the history of mankind. Who were a blink themselves in the history of the earth.

  And how Celtic lore and legend still resonated in the country, perhaps because the images of the Celtic revival in the early nineteenth century had lingered in the old money that was in the process of being retired, in the government and other publications, in “traditional” music, clothes, jewelry, literature, the theater, and now as a cover for a drug gang who were probably also involved in murder and grand theft. The grandest.

  More minutes went by as the two women in the offi?ce watched and the three men in the two cars listened, until Morrigan said, “So, at last—the other shoe drops.”

  The deep scrambled voice was making its demand.

  “I hope you’re not pointing the fi?nger at us. All you people make the assumption that, just because Celtic United and the New Druids tap into the same rich fodder of Ireland’s Celtic past, we’re one and the same organization. We’re not. We’re independent of each other and discrete.”

  Bresnahan had to struggle to keep her eyes from rolling.

  Behind the wheel, McKeon shifted in the seat and reached forward to wipe the windscreen.

  “Nor is Celtic United responsible for the citizens, mind you, who hang outside this offi?ce. By law, they have the right to assemble.”

  “Speaking of which, take a look at the tall one there,” McKeon said, “the one with the Kojak and— could that be?—a ring in his nose?”

  McGarr moved forward to peer above the condensation that had gathered on the glass.

  “We’re only allied in our core values. And these people—whoever made this tape—are not wrong in blaming Christianity for having usurped and supplanted the ancient culture of Ireland’s native people, which has led to the central religious division that obtains to this very day.”

  Either the woman, Morrigan, had a good memory, or she had viewed the tape before, McGarr thought, since her phrasing was nearly identical to the videotape.

  The man McKeon had spied was tall, bald, broadshouldered, and was wearing the same woven jumper-like top that they had seen young Sloane in earlier. Opening the glove box, McGarr reached for the binoculars that Noreen, an avid birder as well as a shooter, had kept there. The Rover had been her car.

  “And that book—I hope it was in fact a real page that he burnt, because the entire literally bloody thing should be torched to a cinder if only to demonstrate that we’ve unshackled ourselves from our wretched Christian-Brit past and embraced the New Celtic order.”

  Raising the binoculars to his eyes, McGarr thought of the many times they’d stopped so she could follow the transit of waterfowl or scan a hedgerow for some rare and errant songbird that had been blown to Ireland during a storm.

  “And do you think for a moment that we’d be so stupid as to identify ourselves so baldly and risk sacrifi?cing all of this?” Morrigan swept her hand to mean the building. “Two seats in the Dail and a burgeoning electoral base? Somebody is setting us up. Whoever stole the bloody book has a double agenda, and I know who it is.”

  “It’s him,” said McGarr. “Ray-Boy.”

  “You’re shittin’—what luck.”

  “Nose ring and all.”

  Bresnahan waited.

  “He’s twirling a set of keys.”

  “The car,” said Ward. “If we just could get that, it might provide evidence of how Derek Greene died.”

  “Chase him, he might run to it,” McKeon mused.

  Finally Bresnahan asked, “And who might that be?”

  “The man who is threatened most by Celtic United, whose party lost those very two seats to us in the last election and will lose more in the next, all the polls say.”

  “Brendan Kehoe, the taoiseach?”

  “None other.”

  “Bernie—pull up to the far corner, in case he goes that way,” said McGarr.

  “I was thinking you’d let me be the one to approach him.”

  “Patch on your head and all—he’d never see you coming,” Ward put in.

  “Haven’t I got me fookin’ hat? Let me at the fookin’ bastard.”

  Said Bresnahan, “I think if you think Brendan Kehoe would stoop to stealing the Book of Kells and murdering a security guard—”

  “Not Kehoe himself, but one of the cowboys around him. Think of Charlie Haughey and all the bagmen he surrounded himself with while taoiseach. And there was Watergate. Kehoe’s indirect involvement is not so far-fetched.”

  Thought McGarr: Another fl?ap would not do. And with all the other young men milling about CU headquarters, any provocation might spark an unwanted incident. Tact or, rather, tactics were called for.

  “Top of the street, Bernie. Please. And Hughie”— McGarr fi?t the Walther under his belt—“pull the car down the laneway, so he can’t leave from there.”

  Opening the door, McGarr got out and crossed the road to approach the building from the other side of the street, so he’d appear to be just another old man wending his way back home from a pub.

  Reaching into the pocket of his jacket, he depressed the switch on the receiver/transmitter that would allow him to send his voice to the others. “Ruthie, break off with your woman there and cover the door. Sloane’s son, the one who thumped Bernie, is out front. He might make a play for the building.”

  “He didn’t thump me.”

  “Just played knick-knack-paddy-whack on your snowy pate,” said Ward.

  “You messin’?”

  “Yah, I’m messin’. What’ll you do about it?”

  Seeing a gap in the traffi?c, McGarr stepped into the street and crossed directly in front of the building, making right for the crowd of maybe two dozen or more. Only when he was nearly upon them did a few take notice. But they did not move.

  Pulling the Walther from under his belt, McGarr fl?icked the barrel at the fi?rst one, who put out his hands and stepped back. “Hey, hey—look-ee here. A live one, incoming.”

  Breaking off their conversations, the front ranks hesitated, their eyes dropping to the gun before stepping back.

  Apart from Ray-Boy. One glance at McGarr and he pivoted, an arm sweeping out to shove one of his mates at McGarr, before he bolted toward the stairs into the building.

  Where Bresnahan was waiting, a 9mm Glock raised in both hands and pointing at his chest.

  Ray-Boy slowed. “You won’t shoot me.”

  “Ah, but I will.”

  “You won’t.” He picked up speed, charging right at her. “Bad fuckin’ PR. And you’re no fuckin’ cop.”

  He was right, she thought. What if she did put him down with a shot? How many additional years would it take her to climb out from under that dark cloud? And here she was with a happy child and a successful busi

  ness. She shouldn’t even be here.

  She lowered the gun.

  Muttering “Silly cunt,” he rushed by her.

  Back out at the bottom of the stairs, when somebody stepped in front of McGarr, he did not hesitate. His knee came up, buckling the fi?gure, whom he shoved at the others.

  Spinning around, McGarr aimed the gun at the forehead of the closest, while holding his Garda ID in the other hand. “Police! Stand back!”

  They stopped.

&n
bsp; “Back!”

  “Fuck that, fuck him. Ray-Boy needs us, lads. He’ll only get one of us,” said a voice from behind.

  “Let that be you,” said McGarr. “You with the mouth. You’re the one I want.”

  But nobody stepped forward.

  McGarr turned and moved to the door, where Bresnahan was waiting. “Sorry, Chief—I just couldn’t.”

  “Which way?”

  “Follow me.” They both rushed into the building, McGarr behind her.

  Out in the laneway, Ward had stopped his Audi at a chain-link gate that controlled access to the car park in back. Getting out, he had checked the lock and decided that a pry bar would open it easily. But when he returned from the boot of the car to check the lock, he saw headlamps fl?ash on and sweep past McGarr and Bresnahan.

  Shots rang out: two, two more, and then three. And the car yawed wildly and caromed off the grills of several others, before straightening out and heading for the gate.

  Very much caught in the glare of the oncoming headlamps, Ward glanced back at his car that he had only just bought, before throwing himself toward the corner where the gate met the laneway wall.

  Bucking and rocking, the large now-damaged car burst through the gate, which fl?ew over the hood, kissed the side of Ward’s Audi, and veered over into the laneway wall that it followed—sheet metal shrieking, sparks fl?ying—before jouncing out into the street.

  Horns blared, traffi?c stopped, and people—Sloane’s own mates—dived for cover as the engine whined and the one still-infl?ated rear tire squealed on the pavement before the car shot forward again.

  But there was a fi?gure standing in the middle of the road a hundred yards away with something in his hands.

  As the car neared, McKeon raised a 12-gauge Benelli shotgun and pumped six slugs into the grill of the oncoming car. The seventh and fi?nal shell he fi?red through the passenger side of the windscreen, which blew into the backseat, crazing the glass in front of the driver.

  Like a torero about to fi?nish off a troublesome bull, he then stepped to the curb and waited for the now hissing and steaming car to lurch alongside him. Whereupon McKeon drew his handgun from under his jacket and squeezed off three additional rounds at the right front tire, which burst with a pop.