Dublin Noir (13 page)

Then there was a knock on the door.

“Yes?”

“Garda. Open up.”

I was faced with a big man. He wasn’t dressed like a cop, but he had a badge. “Garda Jack Taylor,” he told me, just in case I couldn’t read. “Your name?”

I told him.

“Yank?”

I nodded.

“And what might you be doing in Sean MacDougal’s flat?”

I started to answer something not far from a lie, then stepped back. Life’s full of decisions that you end up going back on. “Want to come in?”

I told him the story straight through, but he was only half-listening, preoccupied with scanning the room for evidence of some kind. He walked around to a cabinet and brought a shot glass back with him. When I finished, he said, “So you’re a writer, eh?”

I nodded.

“Good on you.” He poured some Becherovka into the glass, said, “
Sláinte,
” and threw it back. “Don’t get much better than McBain.”

I admitted I’d never read the man, but quickly added that I was a Joyce fan.

That didn’t impress him—no one in Dublin gave a damn about their most famous son. He pulled out a pack of reds and popped one in his mouth, eyeing me as if my reading preference had proven I was a faggot. “Mister Steinhauer, I’ll be straight with you. What we’ve got are three witnesses placing you at Bellamy’s with the deceased. They saw you follow him into the toilet. They saw you leave quickly.”

“Yes, I told you this.”

“But there’s no mention of a big Hungarian.”

“Czech.”

“Yeah, right.”

He poured a second shot as I registered what he’d said. “That’s impossible—Toman’s over six feet!”

Taylor threw back the Becherovka and licked his teeth. “Maybe, Mister Steinhauer, you imagined him.”

I’d once written a bad story about a man whose friend commits rape, then later learns there was no friend, and he was the rapist. It was a common literary conceit, but in real life? “Give me a break. He bought my plane ticket. He introduced me to Sean MacDougal. Sean wouldn’t’ve let me stay here otherwise.”

Taylor took the bottle again. “Dead men needn’t invite you in.”

This cop seemed content just to sit here and drink Sean’s Becherovka, and I was developing a migraine trying to get my head around this. “Let me see that badge again.”

Unconcerned, he handed it over. It was real, all right—as far as I could tell—but then I noticed something. “You don’t work here. You’re with the Galway force.”

“I’m helping out the boys in Dublin.” Taylor pursed his lips. “I’m a fucking saint.”

I took the bottle from him and refilled my own glass. “Then where’s your partner?”

“Eh?”

“Police don’t visit a suspect alone. Not even in fucking Dublin.”

Taylor looked at me a moment, with a grin that reminded me of Toman. He reached out for the bottle. I handed it to him. “Aye, Mister Steinhauer, one thing you should be quite clear on is this Sean MacDougal was a shite of the highest order. No one in Dublin or even the Republic of Ireland will mourn this bastard’s leave-taking.”

I boarded the 2 p.m. to Prague bleary-eyed. After Garda Jack Taylor left I’d continued with the Becherovka, but instead of putting me to sleep it only made me sick. And my 5 a.m. shower only made me feel dirtier.

Toman hadn’t returned to the flat, and I didn’t see him in the departures lounge. I didn’t know what that meant. But after most everyone had settled into their seats, he appeared at the front of the plane, red-faced, as if he’d been running. He smiled hugely as he settled next to me.

“Almost, I was late.”

I looked out the window. He smelled bad.

“I stay at friend’s last night.”

“Did your friend survive the night?”

“Ha! A writer’s sense for the humor.”

“Your other friend sends his best wishes,” I told him. “He says thank you.”

“What friend is this?”

I finally looked at him; his red cheeks glimmered with sweat. “That Garda, Jack Taylor.”

“What I tell you?” he said, then patted my knee. “Toman, he is friend for whole world.”

“You stink, Toman.”

He sniffed, then wrinkled his nose. “I must to clean off this piss.”

F
our days since I called in sick. I think.

I ’ve been awake for three of them straight. I think.

My fellow Gardaí would piss themselves if they could see me, no doubt. Then they’d have me committed.

But they don’t know. They haven’t seen. They’re all out getting drunk, or off fucking their wives, or fucking their mistresses and lying about it to their wives, or passed out in front of their TVs in their nice safe homes while I’m

fucking

dead.

And I don’t know if even I believe it.

It started with Michael. A mental case, low-grade nut. We have quite a few. A handful of pedophiles, stalkers, minor assaults. Care in the community jobs, not criminal enough to be locked up for good, criminal enough to be in and out of the cells on a regular basis. Since jail seems to do fuckall by way of curing them—worse, many come out of it even more damaged than they went in—my own policy is not to arrest. Talk, threaten, watch, but don’t arrest if possible. Jail only makes them more of a risk to everyone in the long run.

Some of these guys are homeless, but not Michael. It’s a shithole of a flat, though, overlooking the railway tracks not far from where they cross the Tolka, north of Dublin’s city center. Building that smells of boiled vegetables and cat piss. Walls the color of boiled vegetables and cat piss.

“That woman hasn’t been poisoning your kitten, Michael. She doesn’t even know who you are. She wouldn’t know how to poison a kitten even if she wanted to.”

“Could swear I’ve seen her—”

“No, you haven’t. She hasn’t done a thing. Trust me on this, okay? Jesus, they train me for this sort of thing, and believe me, if she was guilty I’d know and I’d have dealt with her. You’ve got to stop yelling at the woman and threatening her, Michael.”

Sullen look. A child being unfairly chided. A flash of malice. I wish I could make him shut up. I wish I had some way to frighten him into behaving. Then, suddenly, there it is.

So I do it. I drop the threat. Let the genie out of the bottle.

“And you listen good to me, Michael. You leave that woman alone from now on, or else I’ll send your name, address, and photo to Iron Kurt’s Gay Nazi website.”

Let me explain. I have a friend, Curt, who’s funny, erudite, can hold his drink remarkably well, and happens to be gay. One night in Fallon’s, the conversation turns to gay rights and marriage, a subject which he understandably feels strongly about. He speaks his piece, and someone else makes some comment about him being a “facist homo” or something. Funny in its stupidity. And so the remark resurfaces and transforms, blossoming into something so much more.

It helps that there’s been trouble with a couple of neo-Nazi crackpots in the city on TV recently, even with the
NSRUS
pulling out of Ireland. Nazis make the best bad guys. Ask Indiana Jones. And I see a twitch of fear or homophobia in Michael’s eyes.

“I’ll do it,” I tell him. “And you know what’ll happen then …”

Of course, his mind fills in the blank with its own worst fears. He promises to be good.

And over the next few weeks, he is. And I trot out the same threat to other lunatics I have to deal with. And they don’t see me as a punisher. Iron Kurt is the punisher. I’m just the messenger. So they don’t even resent me for it.

My fellow Gardaí find the whole thing fucking funny. Some of them start using Kurt themselves. And Dublin sleeps safer at night. Kurt’s out there, watching over them. A specter in the fog blowing in off the harbor, creeping upriver. A paper tiger keeping evil at bay.

One afternoon, I see William, one of our deranged, sitting in the doorway of a boarded-up shop with an Iron Cross badge pinned proudly to his battered old blue Leinster rugby top. Next to him is a scratched metal strongbox.

“Hey, William.”

“It’s … you’re gonna beat me.”

“Leave it alone, William. What’s in the box?”

“They’re mine, see.”

“Fine. But show me what you’ve got.”

“It’s private. Mine.”

“Last time we had this conversation, you had a petrol bomb on you. I just want to make sure you don’t have another one. Anything else, you can keep.”

He thinks, pops open the box. Inside, an untidy pile of black fur.

“Why are you carrying a bunch of dead rats around?” I ask.

“They pay me. It’s my deal. Not yours.”

“I’ve got no ambitions of being a rat-catcher. Who pays?”

“The big red building down Castleforbes Road. Food warehouse. To set traps. Ten cents a rat.”

“And you get them from somewhere else, and they pay for them.”

“Yeah. It’s a good job.”

“Good for you. What’s with the Iron Cross?” I point at his chest.

“It’s protection, is what. Keith saw Iron Kurt.”

I try not to smile. “Yeah?”

“And he said, you wear stuff like this and you’ll be okay.”

“Unless you’ve been posted on his website.”

“Well, yeah.”

“While we’re on the subject, you’re keeping away from that playground, right?”

He nods vigorously. “Yeah. Never meant to do anything.”

“Did Keith say what Iron Kurt looked like?”

“Yeah. A big guy, tall, built like a brick shithouse. Bald. With a beard. Tattoos all over.”

The real Curt is 5‘5’’ and built for comfort, not speed. Again, I stifle a smile. “Yeah, that sounds right. You’d better stay out of trouble, huh?”

Not long after, I see Keith himself. The shopping trolley that holds his worldly possessions has a bunch of plastic German soldiers on string looped all the way around it like fairy lights. Now that I’m looking for it, I start to notice similar items on most of the other nutcases in my patch.

A belt buckle like an Iron Cross around the neck. A pencil-drawn swastika. An SS-style shoulder patch. In one house in Clontarf, a guy named Terry has a toy soldier shrine in a foil-lined cardboard box.

Votive offerings. Symbols of fear, not worship, not support. Warding off Kurt and his unholy wrath.

I shouldn’t be surprised. They all gather together in Duff Alley off East Wall Road to drink Tenants Super until someone passes out or pisses themselves. And they talk, and share stories. Chinese whispers. Some believe them, some don’t. But they all listen.

They say Kurt’s the son of an SS officer. They say he’s raped and killed more than two hundred men. They say his website has more than a thousand followers, all over the world, who take perverse delight in making each victim last as long as possible. They say—and when I tell Curt this he practically wets himself laughing—that he has a fourteen-inch dick and that most of his victims die from blood poisoning caused by massive anal tearing.

Iron Kurt.

My creation. My Frankenstein. My cartoon monster.

And then Keith disappears. One day, gone. No one knows where. No one’s seen him. They find his trolley round the corner from a soup kitchen on North Quay, but he never comes back for it. Shit happens, these people move on.

William stops picking up pay for his rats and vanishes from the hostel he’s been staying at. Someone tells me he’d been beaten up and his badge taken a couple of days before.

I stop seeing Terry. When I go to his house, his toy soldier shrine is still there, but he’s gone. The neighbor says the last they saw of him, he was going to get a pint of milk. A couple of the others disappear too.

Duff Alley gets very empty, and the conversation there becomes very muted. They get drunk, huddle together, and after dark they whisper that Iron Kurt has come for them. And now I’m

shit

scared.

Another trip to the piss-stained steps outside Michael’s flat. He’s almost the only one left, and I need to know what he knows. To find out if he can reassure me. Keith left for Cork. William found a winning lottery ticket in the street and moved to the Caribbean. Some other Gardaí told the Duff Alley crazies to get out, so they’re meeting somewhere else now.

When I knock on the door, I hear a wet thudding noise from inside. When I try the handle, it’s unlocked. When I should turn and run away, I push it open and walk in.

The sickly sweet smell of blood on the air. The acrid spike of human waste. The cloying taste of someone else’s sweat. Michael lies in a crimson-splashed, naked tangle in the middle of his living room floor. The carpet around him soaked black with blood. Legs splayed at an unnatural angle, and pink-yellow ribbons of intestines running from the split and tattered gash that yawns between them.

He twitches, and I realize he’s still alive.

“Michael? Can you hear me?”

Whimper. Twitch. One eye creaks open and fixes me with a stare of utter agony and shock.

“Who did this? What the fuck’s going on?”

“It … Kurt … didn’t …”

“Kurt? You’re sure? Christ.”

“Said … name … site … to punish … I didn’t …”

I should be calling an ambulance. I should be calling my colleagues. “Where is he now?”

Michael’s eye looks down. Pleading. Betrayed.
“You said … wouldn’t … website … I … good …”

He thinks I did it. “I didn’t tell him,” I say. “Jesus, Michael, I wouldn’t even know how. I swear to you.”

“
He … told …
” Michael smacks his lips. Dry mouth. Lost too much fluid already. Bleeding out. Dying.

“What did he tell you?”

“No … he asked … who … gave my name …”
Smack. Smack.
“I … told him … you …”

As Michael’s head drops to the carpet, something thumps out in the stairwell and my heart jumps into my mouth. Again I think about running, but I don’t. Again I think about calling the station, but to tell them what? That some kind of phantom is stalking lunatics on my beat?

I step outside, check the stairs with shaky steps and trembling hands. And there’s nothing there.

When I come back down to Michael’s flat, the body is gone. So is the blood that soaked the carpet a moment ago. Is the smell gone as well? I can’t tell. But there’s no sign that Michael was ever here. And was he—could I be imagining it? Could all this be in my head, a product of my own fear?