The Bloomsday Dead (15 page)

“It’s called style,” he said.

“Is that how they’re spelling shite these days? Seen this girl?” I asked, showing him the photograph.

“I’ve told you all before, I haven’t seen her.”

“Let me tell you something, fuckface. You might have fooled Bridget Callaghan’s boys because they’re from out of town, you might have fooled the peelers because they don’t want to know. But I know this place is a clearinghouse for pot, I also know you’re protected by the paramilitaries, and I also know you’ve seen this girl.”

He said nothing, stared at the floor.

“You’ve seen her and you’ve seen her with a ginger-bap kid and you are fucking going to tell me the name of that boy.”

The manager looked at me.

He bit his lip, scratched at his bad skin. I saw that I was right. He wasn’t going to win any poker hands anytime soon. He had seen her. And he did know the name of the boy. And what’s more, he wanted to tell me all about it. He hesitated, opened and closed his mouth. Dried the froth from his lips.

He’d changed his mind. He couldn’t afford to tell me. He didn’t know me from Adam.

“He’s a wee hood, drug dealer, and a girl’s life is at stake. You must know who he is,” I barked.

“I don’t know who he is, and I’ve never seen the girl,” he said, and his eyes flitted around the café to see if anyone was watching him.

I had to raise the stakes.

I took out the .38 and set it on the table.

“Listen to me, I’m not someone to be fucked with,” I said.

“You better put that gun away, there’s a couple of cops over at the window,” the manager said.

“I seen them. And if I have to, I’ll fucking kill them, too. I need to find this girl,” I said.

The color remaining in his face drained away. But he was caught between the devil he knew and a new one with a gun. He took a drink of water, made his call.

“Listen, I’m telling you, I never saw the girl, and I never seen that boy everybody’s talking about. You can ask anybody in here. They’ll all say the same.”

“I have asked everybody in here and they all have said the same, which is bloody suspicious. Who are you all afraid of?”

“Nobody.”

“Who runs this place?”

“I’m the manager.”

“No, who really runs it. Who are you paying off to?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the man that you pay protection money to every week, I’m talking about the man that makes you let him sell drugs on your fine premises here.”

He shook his head.

“Was he just dealing pot or was it stronger stuff too?” I asked.

“I don’t know. If kids are buying marijuana it’s nothing to do with me,” he said. I tapped the table. Well, at least that was one thing confirmed.

“Look, I’m very busy, I have to go,” the manager said, starting to get up.

“Sit the fuck down. Do you know who Bridget Callaghan is?”

He nodded, sat.

“Do you know what she’ll do to you if she finds out that you’re preventing her from getting her daughter back in one piece?”

He nodded again.

“I mean, this is Bridget Callaghan I’m talking about here,” I said.

He was sweating, shaking, scared, but even so he was more frightened of them than he was of me, even with the promise of Bridget’s wrath and a .38 sitting right here on the table.

I scoped the joint.

The place was stuffed to the brim with school boys and girls. The two cops. I really couldn’t shoot the fucker. I couldn’t actually put the gun to his head and order him to speak. The only thing to do would be to wait until he closed up shop and get the son of a bitch on the way home.

“What time you finish up here?”

“We’re open to midnight.”

“You stay till midnight?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied sensibly.

“Listen, is there any way we could talk in a back room or in private somewhere?” I attempted. Get him back there, show him the meaning of fear.

“Uh, no, I can’t do that, sorry,” he said.

“I’ll give you one more chance: the name of the boy or the name of the person you pay off to.”

“I’ve told you, I don’t know.”

One of the cops walked past on his way to the bathroom. I put the gun in my jacket pocket.

“Are we done?” the manager asked.

If I’d more time I could work on him. But I didn’t. I stood.

“You haven’t heard the last of me,” I told him.

I turned on my heel and walked out of the Malt Shop onto Bradbury Place.

“Shit,” I said. Christ on a bike. I’d thought that I could succeed where the cops and Bridget had failed. Instead I’d bollocksed it up. Run into a brick wall.

I leaned against the window.

And I hadn’t exactly told Bridget the truth either.

I wasn’t connected. I wasn’t tuned in. I didn’t know people. Sure, I’d run with the teen rackets back in the early nineties, but that was a long time ago. I hadn’t kept track of any of those useless fucks.

I bummed a cigarette off a passing student and sat down in the Ford Thunderbird. What the hell was I going to do now? I took a couple of drags on the ciggy and threw it away. Nodded to myself. Aye, there was nothing else for it. I wasn’t connected, but I knew a man who was. I had only one card up my sleeve, but that card was a wild one-eyed jack.

Chopper Clonfert owed me a favor.

One wet Saturday night, Chopper and I got lifted driving a lorry load of whisky. I was just a kid, so the Garda Síochána didn’t even cuff me, but they worked Chopper over and threw him in the back of a van. He could have done five years for smuggling, but lucky for him, I wandered to the back of the lorry, broke a bottle of hundred proof, threw in a lit cigarette, and ran like hell.

Classed as a fuckup by the Guards and with virtually no evidence, Chopper pled guilty to importing without a licence, got six months and was out in four. Of course, by that time I was in the army and then I went to America and I hadn’t seen him since. But I read things about him on the BBC. I had followed his career. Nowadays he no longer called himself Chopper.

Now he was a Northern Ireland assemblyman, a Belfast City councillor, and one of the rising stars of the Independent Republican Party. Indeed, he was tipped as a potential leader and was almost certain to become an MP at next year’s election.

Garrett Clonfert. Né Chopper.

The one villain in Belfast I knew was still in the game.

He had to be, because you don’t get to become an IRP councillor without having murdered your way through your rivals. Hard for an outsider to keep track of the fissiparous alphabet soup of Irish politics, and even I had trouble sometimes, but I did know that IRP was an offshoot of Republican Sinn Fein, who were themselves a radical offshoot of Provisional Sinn Fein, itself a breakaway of official Sinn Fein. IRP was by far the nastiest of the lot. It had renounced the IRA ceasefire of 1997 as a perfidious betrayal. Its military wing had planted a dozen bombs since 1998, pre-9/11 they had praised Osama bin Laden as an anticolonialist freedom fighter, and they were linked with ETA, the PLO, and the Italian Red Brigades. It didn’t fill me with glee to have to go begging for help from my old pal Chopper, but realistically he was my only hope.

A quick scan of the phone book. A ten-minute walk from the Malt Shop.

Councillor Clonfert’s offices were in a new glass-and-steel building off the Ormeau Road, near the BBC.

The entire ground floor was an IRP “advice center” for his constituents. There were a couple of hard men looking for work as well as some genuine local people there to complain about the drains, the trash collection, and the noisy neighbors. The place was painted a blushed shade of rehab-facility pink. There were posters of smiling children, of all races, holding hands. Embroidered along an entire wall was a Bayeux-style tapestry, also either done by children or mentally challenged adults, depicting scenes of daily life in Ireland. Scenes that were frozen in time about 1927. Sheep farmers, dairy farmers, fishermen. And above these scenes of mythical rural idyll was emblazoned the baffling IRP motto: “Peace, Power, Prosperity.”

I found a receptionist whose name tag said she was called Doreen. Older broad with a poisonous expression and a blond Partonesque wig.

“Doreen, I’d like to speak to Garrett, please. I’m an old friend of his. Name’s Michael Forsythe.”

“Councillor Clonfert is on a conference call with Brussels at the moment,” Doreen said with a hateful smile. “If you wouldn’t mind taking a seat, I’ll see—”

I interrupted.

“Doreen, I don’t mean to be rude but this is extremely urgent. Could you please tell him that Michael Forsythe wants to see him.”

“Listen, Doreen, there’s no need to get your goons involved. I’m not a troublemaker. Please, just call up Garrett and I’ll guarantee you he’ll want to see me,” I said quietly.

Doreen picked up her telephone and turned away from me. She spoke very quietly.

“I’m so sorry, Councillor Clonfert, but there’s a gentleman here to see you, he’s says it’s very urgent. He says his name is Michael Forsythe, I can get Richard to see him off the . . . Oh, ok. Ok. I’ll send him right in.”

Doreen looked at me with a bit more respect.

“Mr. Forsythe, you take the door behind me and then it’s the first door on your left. I’ll buzz you in,” she said.

She pressed a button on her desk and the massive armored door behind her swung open. Garrett would have needed this level of additional security because you never knew who might try and kill him. Because I seemed to be an old friend, she’d hadn’t got the two ganches to pat me down.

That might be handy.

Outside Garrett’s office there was a poster of pastyfaced Irish weans standing on Blackpool Pier with the words “Vote Clonfert: A Bridge to the Future” underneath. Might have been nice if the photographer had used an actual bridge.

To catch him off guard, I tried to open Garrett’s door without knocking but the handle didn’t turn.

“Who is it?” he yelled from inside.

“Michael Forsythe,” I said.

“It is you. Wait a second, Michael, and I’ll buzz you in.”

The door buzzed. The handle turned.

He was sitting at a large oak desk in a massive office. Behind him, through an enormous window, I could see the BBC building and cloudy Belfast.

Garrett stood and offered me his hand. He had put on weight since last I’d seen him, but he looked good. Late thirties, sandy hair, smooth cheeks, and warm open eyes and smile. He was wearing an Italian tailored silk suit in a fetching shade of burgundy. It was flashy for Belfast, and a canary yellow silk tie didn’t help tone him down.

“Michael Forsythe, as I live and breathe,” he said.

“Chopper Clonfert,” I said.

We shook hands.

“Sit down, sit down. Cigar? They’re very good,” he said.