The Death of an Irish Lass Page 7

  A large hand sprang from below the table and grabbed McGarr. Another hand swept across the table and struck the side of Hughie Ward’s head, knocking him into the wall of the snug. “This had better be the sickest joke you’ve ever told, pal,” a very American voice said.

  McGarr was now raised off his seat.

  Noreen rushed out of the snug.

  “This won’t help her, O’Connor,” said McGarr.

  McGarr saw the fist forming and the arm cock. It then lashed out at him. At the last moment he moved his head and the blow glanced off his jaw. The fist struck the padding of the snug cushions.

  O’Connor dropped McGarr, picked up the table, and tossed it out the open snug door. The table was made of metal and cascaded across the stone floor, slamming into the brass rail of the bar. The glasses had crashed to the floor.

  The barman had come running. O’Connor grabbed the man’s face in his palm and shoved it into the wall of the snug. He then stood. He was one of the biggest men McGarr had ever seen.

  The crowd that had formed outside the snug made an aisle for him. He walked up the aisle to the bar and grasped the edge of it until his fingers whitened. His body began to fold until one of his knees hit the brass rail. Then the other. His neck was bending too, until his forehead touched the bar. It was as though he was praying. But he sobbed. It sounded like the cough of a cow.

  Slowly he got up.

  There was not one sound in the bar.

  He turned. His face was streaming with tears. With the back of his hand he wiped them off his jaw. He then started back toward the booth, where McGarr and Ward still sat.

  He said, “Whiskey,” in a big hoarse voice and closed the door very softly behind him.

  Standing in front of the door, with his hands crossed over his chest, he said, “Everything. If you lie to me I’ll kill you, so help me God. Where on the Cliffs of Moher?”

  “The other side of the cut from O’Brien’s Folly,” McGarr said. He wasn’t about to get into a fistfight with that man. His teeth were getting old, but most of them were his own and he valued them.

  “How?”

  “Pitchfork. Upper chest. One jab.”

  O’Connor’s eyes closed. “No!” he shouted.

  The people outside the door began mumbling.

  McGarr heard somebody run out of the barroom.

  O’Connor turned and drove his fist through the veneer of the snug wall. He pulled it out and struck a second time.

  Hughie Ward sprang to his feet and punched O’Connor in the belly with everything he had. Ward, like McGarr, was a small man, but he had been a boxer and could hit.

  O’Connor turned his head slowly and looked at Ward, who hit him again, this time lower.

  O’Connor didn’t move.

  Ward hit him again.

  Still nothing.

  The snug door swung open and Noreen stepped in, holding a 9mm Walther in both hands.

  O’Connor had begun to crumble now.

  Even so, Noreen had to reach up to put the gun against the side of his head. “If you don’t sit on the floor, I’ll pull the trigger.” Her voice was flat, businesslike.

  McGarr imagined O’Connor had little choice. He melted onto the floor.

  McGarr took the gun from Noreen. The safety was on. He stuck it under his belt and sat.

  The bartender was standing in the door with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a trayful of glasses in the other. He was an older man with silver temples and a pink pate. His eyes were wide with fright, his complexion blanched.

  Noreen took the tray from him and shut the snug door. She held it while McGarr poured three glasses and then showed the bottle to O’Connor, who took it and drank long. He was gasping when he finished.

  “One more time,” said McGarr, who then took the bottle from him.

  The three of them sat and stared down at O’Connor, who was still on the floor.

  McGarr said, “You were with her last night.”

  O’Connor nodded. He reached out his hand.

  McGarr handed him the bottle.

  “She was pregnant.”

  O’Connor looked up at him.

  “Yours?”

  O’Connor turned the bottle over and poured the whiskey onto the floor.

  “Buck up,” said McGarr. “That’s no way for a man to behave. You’re acting like a child. Be strong.”

  O’Connor waited for the bottle to empty, then with a flick of the wrist tossed it at McGarr, who caught it. He said, “I’ve got something to do. I don’t think you’re going to shoot me.” Then he looked at Ward. “Touch me again and I’ll break you in half.”

  Slowly he stood. His legs were quaking. He opened the door and started through the crowd toward the street.

  McGarr got out of his seat, reaching for his wallet at the same time. He began following O’Connor until he got to the bartender, whom he handed a ten-quid note. “You Griffin?” McGarr didn’t take his eyes off O’Connor.

  The old man nodded.

  “On last night?”

  Again he nodded.

  “O’Connor in here?”

  “Which one?”

  “That one, of course,” said Ward, at McGarr’s elbow.

  “Yes.”

  “Did he follow May Quirk when she left?”

  “No.” The old man paused. “Not that he didn’t want to. She left with a German fellow in a big red Mercedes. Tall man like himself. Blond. A Viking if I ever saw one. Some of the boys thought he scared the lad.”

  McGarr doubted that. O’Connor wasn’t the sort to be frightened by anybody. He heard a car starting outside.

  “They talked it over for a while, him and her. And then she left with the kraut. He had another pint and left. What’s this about May Quirk?”

  On the way out the door, McGarr said, “She’s dead. Murdered. Anybody who knows anything about her last night should tell Dan O’Malley about it.”

  Noreen was already behind the wheel of the Cooper with the engine running. O’Connor’s car was just moving out of the square. McGarr could tell from the plates it was a Shannon rent-a-car. It was a red four-door Datsun and no match for the Cooper on any highway, much less the winding road toward the Cliffs of Moher.

  It was twilight now, which in Ireland during summer meant a long gloaming when the sun seemed to catch on the very edge of the horizon and melt slowly toward darkness. And the road from Lahinch to the Cliffs of Moher put the Cooper’s nose right into the banks of salmon clouds over the ocean to the west. It was as though they could sail off the precipice into the mauve medium between sea and sky and journey to the pink land in the distance, McGarr thought. There life would be different—no contention, murders, punches to the jaw, no need to hang back like this so that O’Connor wouldn’t quite know if he was being followed. When they approached the scene of May Quirk’s murder, McGarr had Noreen run closer to the Datsun, but O’Connor didn’t even turn his head toward the collection of some half-dozen vans and the glare of blinding kleig lights that had been maneuvered to the edges of the cliff in three different spots and were now trained on the sea below.

  McAnulty had spared nothing on this project, and he was getting what he wanted. McGarr saw a van from Radio Telefis Eireann and the cars of reporters with the press passes on their visors lowered. McGarr only hoped that the Technical Bureau would come up with a pitchfork. It was important for the country to know that their police force was still capable of a thorough job, in spite of the chaos in the North, and that every murder was being investigated conscientiously.

  Call signals now blatted out of the Cooper’s police radio. It was Bernie McKeon in Dublin, the signal doubtless having been relayed through a transmitter here in the West. His voice was loud and clear. “Got a line on Hanly. Definite I.R.A. connections. Everybody knows him but nobody wants to talk about what he does for them. It’s not the official I.R.A., neither. His brother Dick is a district Provo commander, Newry. It seems that Hanly’s mother’s people are from there. He
grew up in Dublin until his father died. That was in 1950, which would have made him—let’s see—fourteen or fifteen, you know, just young enough for him to get mixed up with all them muckers. At about age twenty, the family moved back to Dublin. That’s when he first got into the dance hall racket, first as a bouncer out at the Royal in Bray. Eventually, he managed to weasel himself a cut of that pie, and from there on he set up his own spots in Dublin—Fifty-One King Court, then on the Howth Road, and then a spot in Baggot Street when the disco thing took over. The last one is the only one he keeps open now. They say that stuff is really the rage overseas, and the manager of the place claims they’re currently operating at a loss, waiting to see if disco dancing will catch on here again.

  “However, it seems our friend Hanly has the Midas touch. Along with dance halls, he began begging, borrowing, mortgaging, and cadging every spare quid he could, and around 1966 began buying pubs out in all the country resorts—Salthill, Killarney, Ballydehob, Kinsale, even here in Bray on the waterfront. If you consider the inflation and whatnot, he’s loaded. But I can’t find out, first where he managed to get his hands on all that money at a time when money was tighter than the belly button of a nun, and that’s lintproof—.” He waited for a reaction.

  Hughie Ward moaned.

  Noreen shook her head.

  McGarr flinched and looked up the road. They were beyond the cliffs now, dropping down through a valley where the rock formation which is Clare eased its gray bulk into the sea. There the beach was heaped with boulders and faults that challenged the heavy swells of the Atlantic.

  “And second, what he does with his enormous income.”

  “He lives well,” said Ward. “Big car, good clothes, lots of liquid refreshment.”

  “If he tried to spend the money he makes in a year on such things he’d have to have a different car for every week and be changing his clothes on the hour.”

  “So?” McGarr asked.

  “So I’ve been putting the thing together in my own mind. And I’m only guessing, remember. I think the I.R.A. financed him right from the start. He’s their front. Back in ’66 they had their contributions, even though it was a quiet time for them. They’re not all gunmen, you know, and perhaps during that calm period they began to provide themselves with a mechanism that would insure a continuing flow of money and—what’s more—a way to justify the cashing of foreign currency without arousing the suspicion of the government. Hanly’s dance hall and pub schemes in holiday and resort areas was a natural. I don’t have any facts to prove this, of course, and I’m not likely to get them, either.”

  “But where, then, do the Provos figure in all of this?” McGarr asked. “Surely they didn’t have the money or the organization to finance such a project in 1966.”

  “That’s just it. I wouldn’t know. Maybe they’re trying to horn in on the thing now. They can be gangsters, you know. Hanly may have been connected with the Provos all along, through his brother. Maybe this Quirk woman was making some sort of payoff. And maybe I’m doing too much talking.”

  Nobody said anything. Whenever McKeon winged it without hard proof, he was always taken seriously, since he seemed to have a sixth sense for collusion and intrigue. He knew better than any of them how his countrymen thought and he had been keeping his ear to the ground for almost thirty years now. The transmitter popped and sputtered.

  They were approaching Black Head, a bald outcropping of dark rock. Noreen had to slow the Cooper to steer a path through five donkeys. McGarr had once heard they were wild in these parts, having been abandoned by emigrating farmers. Certainly their hooves had never been clipped; they curled up like the tips of snow skis.

  The lights of O’Connor’s car were still in front of them.

  McKeon continued. “About May Quirk. She was about six weeks pregnant. That probably places the happy event within this country, since she arrived back here about seven weeks ago, and—get this!—it wasn’t a holiday at all. She was on assignment. Something about guess who?”

  McGarr sighed. He didn’t feel like playing guessing games, but he could understand McKeon’s insouciance. The detective sergeant handled all the research and administrative details back at McGarr’s office in Dublin Castle. He hardly ever got away.

  “Rory O’Connor?” Ward asked.

  “Who’s he?”

  “Ah—Bernie,” said McGarr. “Spit it out.”

  “The I.R.A., of course. I just got through talking to the assignments editor of the New York Daily News. She was supposed to be buying a story about how the I.R.A. is financing the operations in the North and where all the American donations go. She had been working on the story first over there in the States, and then she got a lead and came over here. He said she was carrying a lot of the paper’s money and wondered if we had found it.” McKeon paused for a moment. He knew how McGarr operated. “I told him we hadn’t as yet, but would look for it.”

  “And all along I thought the money was May Quirk’s retirement benefit.”

  “I thought that’s what might have happened to it,” said McKeon.

  McGarr wondered if Paddy, the I.R.A. fund raiser who had written the letter proposing to her, had known she was writing a story about him. One thing was certain: McGarr intended to meet his plane at Shannon tomorrow. “I want you to put a tracer on one Rory O’Connor. He’s a Lahinch resident, living in America now.”

  Hughie Ward said, “New York also. He’s a popular novelist. Evidently pretty successful. I gathered his books wouldn’t get past the censor here.”

  McGarr then thought about how the three of them—Fleming, O’Connor, and May Quirk—had been drawn to the hub of New York and each in a different way had become successful and important because of the city. Only Fleming had chosen to return; at least until now. McGarr wondered if O’Connor wrote about New York or Ireland. Who knows—maybe he wrote about Afghanistan or Mars.

  Suddenly the rear lights of O’Connor’s car vanished.

  “Where is he?” Noreen asked, slowing.

  They were nearly at the end of Black Head now and had been passing campers who had parked their cars off the road and pitched their tents wherever they could find shelter from the stiff breeze off the ocean. The horizon was layered with narrow bands of red light that glowed like ruby near the water.

  Noreen stopped the car.

  O’Connor could be anywhere among the rocks. McGarr opened the door and stepped out on the road. He counted seven campfires. Three of the cars were small, like O’Connor’s Datsun. In the twilight everything metal looked red. The wind off the ocean was chilling but fresh. McGarr was hungry again. The surf made him think of oysters.

  That was when he heard a car door slam. It was in back of them, down a sandy trail that led toward a small patch of beach between two massive boulders. In the shadow of one, McGarr saw O’Connor walking toward a blue tent that had a light on inside. Next to it was a large car. McGarr guessed it was a Mercedes. The license plate was oval, which made it foreign.

  McGarr slid into the car. “In back of us and down the donkey path. Don’t use your lights unless you have to.” He pulled the Walther from under his belt and checked the clip. He slipped it into the nook below the dash.

  “Do I need one of those?” Ward asked.

  “Don’t think so,” said McGarr. “We’ll let Noreen handle the Howitzer this evening. I’m just getting it out of my pants so it won’t slow me down if that giant starts chasing me.”

  “If this is the German fellow I heard about, there’s going to be trouble,” said Hughie.

  They were halfway down the path. The Cooper, which was light, was having trouble in the occasional patches of sand.

  “Well, if you even see a gun, Noreen,” said McGarr, “don’t be afraid to use this one.” He placed it in her lap. “The safety is on.”

  She glanced at him and tried to smile but only succeeded in looking slightly ill. Whenever in the past she had gotten into a dangerous situation while accompanying McGarr on his
duties, she had exulted in having gotten through the scrape—but after the fact. During it, however, as in the pub that afternoon, she had performed well but seemed scared skinny every minute. McGarr had often thought about how she might one day be injured seriously, but there was no keeping her from the work. When McGarr had tried to keep her in the dark, she had threatened to sell the gallery on Dawson Street and become a Ban Garda, that is, a female Garda. She knew McGarr wouldn’t have that.

  They were close enough now to see figures silhouetted against the blue material of the tent. Two men of about the same height were standing nose to nose. The one closer to the flap had his fists clenched by his side.

  McGarr supposed that was O’Connor. The other man had a large object in his right hand, pointed right into O’Connor’s belly.

  Before McGarr could snatch the Walther out of Noreen’s lap, O’Connor grabbed the other man’s wrist and struggled with him. They blundered to the back of the tent, then staggered toward the lamp, which they tumbled over. It went out, and then the tent collapsed.

  McGarr popped open his door and began stepping out.

  That was when a shot roared from under the heap of tent material and bucked through the radiator of the Cooper.

  McGarr threw himself onto the ground and swore. From the report of the weapon, it was something powerful—a Mauser or Luger—and the bullet had probably shattered the block of the engine. Then McGarr smelled raw gasoline. “Get out of the car and run!” he shouted to Noreen and Hughie.

  They did as he said, running off into the darkness. Noreen fell. Ward picked her up.

  McGarr himself ran toward the men under the tent. If the Cooper exploded, it might set the tent on fire.

  But again the gun exploded, sending a jet of orange flame from under the billows of tent material.

  McGarr again dived onto his belly, but he saw the smoking protrusion that was the gun. He scrambled up and charged the tent. Using the very toe of his shoe, McGarr kicked at the gun for all he was worth and heard both men groan, but suddenly the protrusion was gone.