Border Angels (14 page)

Daly had decided to decline Brooke’s invitation and head for home when he bumped into Irwin in the car park. The younger detective looked uncharacteristically deflated, like the captain of a football team that had lost a dozen games on the trot.

“I need a drink. Want to join me?” he asked bluntly.

Daly thought for a moment. It struck him as unusual that the Special Branch detective was leaving the police station at this late hour of the day.

“I’ve something to get off my chest,” added Irwin, a note of desperation creeping into his voice.

On closer inspection, the Special Branch detective looked a mess. His dark hair was disheveled and his shirt rumpled. Several days’ worth of stubble and a pair of sleepless-looking eyes had done dark things to his face. It occurred to Daly he might kill two birds with one stone and take Brooke up on her invite after all.

“Fancy Hegarty’s then?”

Irwin shrugged his shoulders. “As good a place as any.”

“Should I bring the hankies?”

“I don’t need any fuckin’ hankies.” Irwin’s tone was defensive.

Outside the pub, a row of bouncers stood guard over the closed doors. They had just turned away a group of Eastern European youths dressed in T-shirts and jeans. The young men huddled together in the shadows with the look of those condemned always to wait on the wrong side of closed doors. One of them glanced up as the two detectives passed. Daly watched the yellow streetlights glinting in his eyes before the darkness hooded his face.

Grinning and nodding, the bouncers stepped aside and ushered the detectives through.

Once they had settled into a snug, Daly asked Irwin if it was part of Hegarty’s door policy to bar Eastern Europeans.

“Why not?” replied Irwin. “Isn’t that the whole point of a door policy—to discriminate?” He got up to order the first round.

“We should be doing something about it,” said Daly when Irwin returned with two pints of Guinness, their creamy heads spilling enticingly over the top.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Tell our antiracism officer about it, for a start.”

Irwin snorted. “And what will she do? Send in an undercover team of Lithuanian policemen to entrap the bouncers?”

“Fair enough. Forget it.”

“Targeting those bouncers and their racist door policy isn’t going to solve anything. Anyway, it’s not just Eastern Europeans they bar. If a group of Eskimos came up to the door, they’d probably turn them away, as well.”

“I just don’t like seeing it happen before my eyes.”

“Whether you like it or not, people will always want to drink and party with their own. It’s a fact the world over. Russians, Chinese, Africans, we’re all the same.”

“I don’t see the bouncers turning away Eastern European girls.”

Irwin’s eyes glinted. “Even bouncers can forget their principles.”

They were halfway through their third round of Guinness when Irwin came round to mentioning what was troubling him.

“I thought about quitting today,” he confided in Daly, his voice raw. “I’m going to talk to the chief. It’s the hours and the security threat. I don’t mind, but it plays havoc with your personal life.”

As far as Daly knew, Irwin had a healthy and colorful personal life, a pulsating soap opera of romantic conquests, furtive betrayals, fights, and makeups, involving his girlfriend, Poppy, and a cast of about half a dozen other women, most of them colleagues.

“It’s Poppy.” Irwin shook his head. His eyes grew watery. “She’s kicked me out. I think it’s for good this time.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I asked her how serious this was on a scale of one to ten. She said eleven. I’ve hardly eaten since.”

Daly nodded.

“It’s not what you think. We were in love. I was going to get her an engagement ring.”

“What about the other girls?”

“Poppy was different. I thought we were going to be together forever.”

That was what I thought about Anna, even a year ago,
mused Daly.

Irwin stared at his pint and swirled it sorrowfully, as though he were working out how the drink and he were going to manage in the big bad world without his girlfriend. He hugged the pint to his chest before placing it dejectedly on the table.

A waitress came to collect the empty drinks, but Irwin waved her away. He finished the dregs, wiping his lips as if too much had spilled from there already.

“She wasn’t like the others,” he said eventually. He barely glanced in Daly’s direction. “That’s the truth.” Then he went back to the bar.

He returned with two fresh pints and several bags of crisps.

“It’s not worth it, this job,” he declared. “When it drives a wedge between you and your loved ones.”

Daly decided to play devil’s advocate.

“How do you think giving up your job will change things with Poppy?”

Irwin gulped down a mouthful and shrugged. “You’re probably right. It’s too late for that.”

Daly remained silent. He felt a disabling echo of his own loss. He tasted once again the familiar pangs of separation, the desire to have his married life with Anna restored, the life they had enjoyed before the accident. He glanced at the younger detective and felt a twinge of empathy. It was an odd feeling. As though the circuitry of his emotions had gone awry, the polar forces reversed. He never imagined he might feel anything in common with Irwin, let alone sympathize with his predicament.

“We’re all under pressure in the force these days,” Daly said, sighing. “And everyone fears deep down that they’re about to be blown up by terrorists.”

“Bloody Republican dissidents. It’s like the transfer window in the football league out there. They’re bringing in a whole team of new signings from the IRA and the INLA.”

They raised their pints of Guinness in mock salute to each other and drank deeply. The creamy heads slopped back to the bottom of the empty glasses.

“I don’t mean to make light of your problems,” said Daly after a pause. “I’m just suggesting you shouldn’t lose your sense of proportion. You’re letting your emotions interfere with your career.”

Irwin responded to Daly’s sympathy by opening up further. He recounted in detail how he had spent the last week trawling the Internet for dates. Daly listened, suspecting the real purpose behind the younger detective’s frenzied search for romance was to prevent even a moment of silent reflection creeping into his life.

“It’s impossible to judge how a woman looks from a photo on the Internet,” complained Irwin, his face registering the memory of his disappointment. “This new woman I met online, she posted two pictures of herself. One was terrible. The other not so bad. I arranged to meet her for a date. I thought if she was somewhere in between . . .” His voice trailed off. The dance floor was beginning to fill with bodies. He stared longingly at the moving crowd, as though it were a train he had just missed, a train that would whisk him away from loneliness.

He picked up the thread of the story again, glancing back at Daly with a look of reproach. “Turned out, even the terrible photo of her was flattering.”

“What did you do then?”

“I escaped to the nearest pub after half an hour, but then she texted to say how much she had enjoyed the date. I texted back likewise, but shame about the chemistry. Then she said she thought the chemistry had been great. So I switched off the phone and hit the bar.”

Daly nodded. He wanted to say a few words, but could not think of anything that would extract the sting of disappointment from Irwin’s face. On the dance floor a mixed barrage of drunken businessmen and muscled builders were launching themselves onto the circulating groups of women.

“Thanks for humoring me.”

“Humoring you? I meant to do the opposite.”

Irwin grinned suddenly.

“At least you can still see the funny side,” said Daly.

Irwin stared at his glass. “At least I’m drunk.”

A group of women, who had been sitting at a nearby table, moved closer. Irwin went to the toilet, returned, and said nothing. After his brief outpouring of emotion, he drew a gloomy mantle of suffering around himself. He sipped the froth of his pint and smacked his lips deliberately, trying to keep his deck of troubles a little closer to his chest. The woman at the nearby table laughed at a private joke, and Irwin glanced uncertainly at them. He raked his hand through his curly hair, looked at them again, and gulped down his drink. He edged a little closer to the women, as though he were keen to share the joke.

Daly was about to advise Irwin to go home and tell his girlfriend he still loved her and that she was too good for him. However, a change had overcome Irwin. The oldest of the women flashed a smile in his direction. Love was in the air, or at least lust, as Irwin blinked and grinned. He was like a thief, thought Daly, newly released from prison, who comes across a wallet on the pavement. Just as in crime, sex was always more about opportunity than motivation. Irwin went up to the bar and nerved himself with a double whiskey.

Daly surveyed the women. The oldest had bleached blond hair and heavy makeup, designed more to cover the signs of age rather than enhance the freshness of youth. All three women were ogling Irwin now, islanded in a sea of knowing sexual energy, urging him to draw closer as he returned unsteadily from the bar. Something about the directness of their invitation convinced Daly they were foreign. Local women would have feigned disinterest for longer, playing out a charade of boredom until their target had drunk himself into an inebriated stupor.

Irwin gulped down the remainder of his pint, leaned over to the women, and introduced himself. His face glistened with sweat. He beckoned Daly over, and soon the older detective found himself exchanging meaningless pleasantries with the women, who were all from Poland. They claimed to be sisters, but Daly had the suspicion that at least two, if not three, generations were represented in their company.

The disco started, and the pub began to shake with the reverberations of the music. Irwin rose to the floor with the eldest of the women and began dancing as proudly as a strutting cock. After a few songs, he sat down beside Daly again.

“She tells me she’s forty,” he said. “I think she’s having me on. What do you think?”

“Give or take a few years—what’s the difference?” It was the most comforting thing Daly could think of saying. Truthfully, he suspected she might be the youngest woman’s grandmother.

Irwin rubbed his face. “At least I’ve moved off the Internet and into the real world.” His eyes blazed with a sudden lack of caution, his mind already inhabiting the reduced reality and raised hopes of the intoxicated. His tactics had changed but the scope for deception was still as great, thought Daly, as he rose to his feet. It was the easiest parting from company he had made in a long time.

Daly avoided the swell of people pushing onto the dance floor and forced his way to the bar. From what he could see, it was less a disco than an exploration of how far drunken men could be teased. He scanned the crowd, looking for Susie Brooke, but there was no sign of his colleague.

One of the younger Polish women appeared out of the sweating throng and sidled up to him.

“Your friend, he’s funny,” she said, smiling. “A typical Irishman.”

“Don’t call him that,” said Daly.

“What do you mean?”

“He thinks he’s British.”

“What about you? Are you Irish?”

“Yes.”

She leaned her face close to his and, widening her eyes with mock aggression, hissed in his ear. “Tonight my country will take its revenge on you.”

“What?”

She paused for a moment, drinking in Daly’s uncertainty.

“I’m talking about football.” She grinned and pointed to the television screen. The pumping music had drowned the commentary, but Daly was able to make out that Poland was playing Northern Ireland. An international friendly match, but there was nothing friendly about the atmosphere on the terraces. Poland had scored a goal and a flurry of missiles rained down on the pitch.

Behind the Polish girl, Daly saw a familiar face enter the pub, shun the bar, and disappear into the crowd. He blinked. It was a woman with short spiky hair, pale olive skin, and a gleam of disdain in her eyes. He felt an intimate heat rise in his chest. He caught another glimpse of her shoulder, her narrow black dress, the curve of her back and waist, as she weaved through the crowd heaving on the dance floor.

Daly made off after her. He pushed past the absorbed faces of young men and women bobbing together. The black lace of the woman’s dress hem slipped out of view. He forced his way down a long passageway leading to the toilets and outside smoking area. He was sure the woman had not seen him. He waited against an emergency exit and stared at the groups of smokers silhouetted against the brink of a starry night.

When she did not reappear, he pushed past the smokers. The increased tempo of their voices drowned out the beats of the disco. A young couple brushed against him and sneered, as though he were just another middle-aged man in pursuit of a woman, which, in a way, he was. What had brought him to this place, he wondered. Equal parts loneliness and work, he conceded. Perhaps he was just another pathetic drunk after all.

In the darkness, he heard the rapid sound of footsteps, a door opening, and then the heavy footfall of several bodies landing from a height. A voice cried out in pain, followed by muffled laughter. His eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. At the other end of the yard, he saw a figure drop from the wall. The woman he had been following was steadying a set of empty beer crates as a makeshift ladder, and a group of young Eastern European men were clambering down it into the grounds of the pub. They filed hurriedly past Daly. He recognized them as the youths barred entrance at the door.

He watched as the woman with short hair swept by him. She was sinewy, with a lean back and slender neck. Daly tapped her on the shoulder. She whipped round, her pale face expecting an interrogation. He saw that she was thinner faced than Lena, her features harshly shadowed, her eyes more hollow. Disappointment thickened in his throat.

“I’m not with them,” she said. “I don’t know where they came from.”

“It’s OK. I’m not a bouncer.”

“What do you want then?” Her eyes glinted.

Suddenly, it was he who was searching for an explanation.

“Nothing. I thought you were someone else.”

It was probably his age, he told himself. The faces of women were beginning to repeat themselves, that and the destructive effects of alcohol on his mental apparatus.

She leaned back against the wall and looked up at him, her dark eyes equipped with mascara, glittery eye shadow, and a smoldering expression. Her shoulders pressed against the wall, emphasizing the tight nexus of her waist. She smiled at Daly’s downward glance. A smile that said
I can twist you around my little finger.

“Lena Novak. Ever heard of her?” he asked.

“Are you seeing her?”

“No.”

“Then who are you seeing?”

“I’m not seeing anyone.” The words came out with a force that surprised him. “This is important. Do you know a girl called Lena Novak? She’s Croatian, your height and build.”

Her eyes rolled. “The more you run after a girl like Lena, the faster she’ll run away.”

He wanted to tell her he was a policeman, and that policemen don’t get caught up in romance. It was bad enough being caught up in crime, but he did not want to frighten her into silence.

“This is purely business. I need to know where she is.”

She was losing interest in him. Her eyes drifted to the side. “I haven’t seen Lena in over a month. What’s wrong? Is she in trouble?”

“Worse than she knows. But I’m her friend. If you see her, tell her Celcius Daly is looking for her. I have everything ready.”

“What’s everything?”

“A safe place. Legal help.”

“I know what you are, Celcius Daly.”

Daly said nothing.

“You’re in love.”

Daly flushed.

“See,” she said, her smile widening.

She made to leave but then turned back.

“If you want to find Lena Novak, speak to Martha Havel. She’s the boss of a cleaning company called Home Sweet Home. You’ll find it on Rutherford Street. She’s as hard as nails, but all the girls go to her if they’re in trouble.”

Daly made his way back to the bar. He glanced at his watch and wondered where Susie Brooke had gotten to. It was 11:00 p.m. and still there was no sign of her. With a sigh, he decided that sobriety was not an option with so many drunken people pressing around him. He ordered another pint of Guinness and a whiskey, which he downed in two gulps. For an Irishman, getting drunk in a packed bar was a physical imperative, like putting up an umbrella against the rain.

He was enjoying being one intoxicated single man among many when he saw a curtain fall back from the stage behind the dance floor. A shiny pole hung from the ceiling against a silver banner, advertising a pole-dancing competition. The dance music changed in pitch and grew deeper, as though the disco was slowing down. In reality, the pace was about to get a lot racier. A voice beside him shouted: “Showtime!”

Just as he was thinking it was too late for Brooke to appear, he caught sight of her. Onto the stage walked a tall woman with silver-studded hot pants and a glittering bikini top. Even in a crowded bar, Susie Brooke would not have been a difficult woman to spot, but as she sauntered scantily clad across the stage, her presence was like a searchlight filling the room. Daly sank back into the dark. Brooke’s hair had gone a little wild since the last time he saw her, and her skin was covered in false tan. She looked possessed. She lifted her chin toward the audience and wrapped one strong thigh around the shiny pole.

Daly could feel the excitement billow through the crowd like wind in an eager sail. Drunken men pressed closer to the stage. The floor trembled. Susie seemed oblivious to the leering audience. She leaned back, her body straining as if she were about to somersault backward.

The DJ shouted over the thumping music. “Our first contestant tonight is Susie. In her day job she’s Armagh’s antiracism officer, but tonight, I think you’ll all agree, she’s political correctness gone mad!”

Daly’s head began to spin. The dance floor tipped like the deck of a ship riding a high wave.

The pole trembled as Brooke slid up and down to the grinding rhythm of a Latin dance tune. After each flip and acrobatic move, the crowd cheered lustily. Her eyes remained half closed, her face a blank. Her body had taken over from her senses.

An overweight man bumped into Daly.

“You’ve the best seat in the pub!” he shouted. “Full view of the stage and within shouting distance of the bar.”

Daly nodded uncomfortably.

The man leaned closer. “What do you think of her?”

Daly avoided the glare of his bulging eyes and moved away. In the meantime, Brooke had finished her routine and stepped off the stage. She spotted him through the crowd and waved. When he raised his hand in awkward acknowledgment, she strode toward him, still on fire with the energy of her dance, her hair damp with exertion.

“That was a revelation,” said Daly.

“I’m not much of a dancer,” she replied. “I’ve only taken this up recently.”

“You seem to have it backward. Compared to you, I’m an invalid.”

She was so close he could see the soft boundary of skin above her bikini where the false tan stopped.

“This is my second adventure this year. Getting up there and dancing is just another source of adrenaline.”

“What was your first?”

“Getting a job with the police.”

“That’s a lot of excitement for one year.”

He tried to recall his last adventure. He had to think hard. Falling in love with Anna, he supposed, had been an adventure of sorts, but that had been a decade ago, and he’d jettisoned all his memories of that time and sent them spinning into the void. He gulped from his pint. He was overcome suddenly with the feeling that it was he who was spinning emptily into the void, cast off from the one great romance of his life.

The elastic figure of another dancer swung round the pole. Susie stared at him. He felt her tease around his silence, searching for a point of connection as though it were an ungraspable pole.

“What’s bothering you?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it the music or the dancing? Something tells me you’re not impressed.”

“I didn’t realize you were going to invite me along to this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Watching how long a half-naked colleague can hold her body upside down in front of a crowd of baying drunks.”

She shrugged. “I find it empowering.”

“Empowering? Now there’s an overused word. You know, I’ve even heard it used to describe charging a mobile phone.” He was drunk and could hear the contemptuous dismissal in his voice. “I thought women’s lib was against using the body as a sex object.”

“My body’s not an object.”

“Try telling that to the men who crowded the stage.”

“If your aim is to humiliate me, then you won’t succeed.”

“I don’t need to try. I thought you were a policewoman, not some sort of wannabe exotic dancer.”

She looked disarmed. “I didn’t realize you were sexist.”

“Me? Sexist? Now you really are political correctness gone mad.”

He watched as her face cooled and backed away, disappearing into the swirl of drunken strangers. He realized it was time to go home, before he said or did anything else he might regret.