The Bloomsday Dead (30 page)

“No, thanks. Listen, Dinger, I want to talk to you about your brother Slider,” I said.

“What’s that?” Dinger asked, pointing to a rock covered in the brown edible seaweed called dulse. Dinger crawled over to the rock, lifted up the dulse, pointed at it.

“You know what that is?” Dinger asked again.

“Of course, it’s dulse,” I said.

Dinger broke off a dry piece and offered it to me. I took it from him.

“Eat it,” he said.

I put it in my mouth. It was salty and revolting. I swallowed and struggled to keep it down.

“Thank you,” I said.

“What it taste like?” Dinger asked.

“You never tasted dulse?”

“No,” he said, his mouth opening and closing like a suffocating fish.

“What it taste like?” he asked again.

It tasted like something that had been shaved off the bottom of a trawlerman’s seaboot and then matured by nailing it to the floor of a particularly nasty whorehouse for a couple of decades.

“It tastes ok,” I said. “You wanna try?”

Dinger shook his head. He wasn’t a complete fool. It started to rain. He pulled out a Glasgow Rangers hat and put it on. It was wool, so it didn’t do much against the rain but it kept the wind out of his ears.

“Dinger, I want to talk to you,” I tried again.

“Do you want to go on an adventure?” Dinger asked me.

“Dinger, I’d love to, some other time, but listen, I wonder if you could do me a favor? I’m looking for your brother Slider and your ma said that you knew where he’s been going all week. He’s been giving you a ride in his car, hasn’t he?”

“You talk to my ma?”

“Aye.”

“Huh. We go on an adventure.”

It was really getting late now and I wondered if I was wasting my time with this wean.

“If I go on an adventure with you, will you tell me where your brother is?” I asked him.

“Yes, I tell if you do dare,” Dinger said conspiratorially.

“I already ate the seaweed, isn’t that enough?”

“You do dare,” Dinger insisted angrily.

“Ok, ok, what’s the dare?”

“I dare you to walk along the pipe,” he said, pointing to a sewage outflow pipe that led from the shore to the lough. It didn’t look like a particularly dangerous task, even though it was covered with seaweed and barnacles. The tide was still out and the water was only a few feet deep.

“Ok. If I walk along that pipe for a minute, you’ll tell me where Slider is? Agreed?”

Dinger nodded.

“Shake on it,” I insisted.

Hesitantly and with a great deal of consideration, he put out his left hand. His fingers were crossed and I knew that he was trying to stroke me.

“Ok, Dinger, your right hand and no crossies,” I said.

Dinger frowned and put out his right hand instead.

I climbed on top of the sewage pipe and walked along it for a few paces. It had the worst smell in the world and a few sad-looking gulls flying about picking up complete turds from the water. The stench was too fucking much. I jumped off and walked back to Dinger, who was now petting a stray dog.

“Dogs hear things in ultraviolet. They hear everything high pitched, like Batman. No, it’s not called ultraviolet, it’s something else. Ultrasomething but not ultraviolet,” he said.

I grabbed Dinger by the arm and held him tight. I bent down so that I was eye level with him.

“Now, Dinger, listen to me. I kept my part of the bargain, I walked along the pipe. You have to keep your end. Where’s your brother?”

“I don’t want to tell you,” Dinger said, tears coming into his eyes.

“Why not?”

“If I tell you, you’ll go away and I will have nobody to play with. Monkey and Stevey don’t play with me.”

“I’ll come back and I’ll bring Slider with me. You like Slider. Slider takes you places, doesn’t he? Slider takes you on adventures.”

Dinger’s face brightened.

“Slider takes me on adventures. He says secret missions like on TV.”

“Slider took you on a secret mission?” I asked, letting go of his arm and sitting next to him on the sand.

Dinger shook his head.

“Secret,” he insisted.

“Oh, you can tell me, I’m Slider’s best and oldest friend and I want to find him. We’ll all go on an adventure together, would you like that?” I said.

Dinger grinned.

“And we can go in Slider’s car?” Dinger asked.

“Of course we can go in Slider’s car, and we can get ice cream afterwards. You and me and Slider.”

“Yeah, and we don’t ask Stevey or Monkey.”

“No, we wouldn’t ask them. Just the three of us, you and me and Slider. Now, where is Slider?” I asked softly.

“He’s with the car.”

“Where did he go in the car? On a secret mission?”

Dinger nodded solemnly.

“Where in the car?” I asked.

“To the secret place. To the lodge, the old lodge with the arch,” Dinger said in a whisper.

“Where’s the old lodge, Dinger?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” I persisted.

“No.”

“Oh, that’s a shame, we won’t be able to get Slider and go on an adventure,” I said.

“We go adventure,” Dinger said, bursting into tears.

“Dinger, you think for a minute, where is the secret lodge?”

Dinger stopped crying immediately, closed his eyes, and held his breath.

“Orange Lodge,” Dinger said.

“Yeah, it’s an Orange Lodge, where is it?”

His brow furrowed and he touched his forehead onto the sand.

I knew hardly anything about the Orange Order, just the basics: it was a working-class Protestant secret society founded in the eigh-teenth century. It honored the memory of William of Orange, who had become king of Britain and Ireland after he defeated James the Second, the last of the illstarred Stuart kings.

Dinger stood up.

“Go home, Lucky, go home,” he said to the dog, who looked at him for a second and then ran across the sand. When the dog was definitely out of earshot, Dinger beckoned me close with his finger.

“I know where,” he whispered triumphantly.

“Where? Where’s the lodge?”

“Near that big monument,” Dinger said.

“What big monument?”

“The big monument across the water.”

“In Scotland?” I asked, stifling a panic.

“No, no, no, just over there,” he said, pointing out across the lough.

A monument over there.

I tried to see what he was pointing at, but it was so dark that you couldn’t see anything across the lough except the lights of Belfast, Rathcoole, and Carrickfergus.

And then it came to me.

“Jesus, you don’t mean the Knockagh Monument, do you, Dinger?”

The Knockagh Monument was a huge war memorial that had been placed on Knockagh Mountain near Belfast. I didn’t know much about it, except that it was a massive granite stone, which I think was carved with the names of the Irish dead from the two world wars. It was certainly enormous, and from up on top of the mountain you could see fifty miles in every direction. It was a makeout place for teenagers. A single road to the monument surrounded by forest and farms. An isolated, out-of-the-way spot. I didn’t recall any old abandoned Orange Lodges around there, but I didn’t know the area that well.

Dinger nodded excitedly.

“Dinger, let me get this straight. Slider took you to an Orange Lodge near the Knockagh Monument?”

“Bird kite, an eagle kite,” he said.

“You flew a kite at the Knockagh?”

“Aye. Knockagh, Knockagh, Knockagh. Slider said wait in car and we go see all of the world and fly the kite. Eagle kite.”

“He told you to wait in the car outside an old abandoned Orange Lodge near the Knockagh, right? And there was an arch outside the lodge?”

“Secret mission. Wait in the car at the lodge. Doink, doink, doink.”

“Did he ever mention a girl, a little girl?” I asked.

“We fly the kite, very windy.”

“Ok, forget the girl. Can you tell me anything more about the lodge?”

“We fly kite,” Dinger insisted.

“You went from the lodge to the Knockagh Monument and flew the kite?” I asked.

“Yes,” Dinger said, exasperated with all the questions. He started walking away from me. But I had enough.

“Thanks, Dinger,” I said and ran across the beach.

I digested the information. The kid might have made up the whole story and he was a bit of a looper, but Slider had been taking his kid brother somewhere this week. It could be that they were holding Siobhan in an abandoned Orange Lodge with an arched gateway not too far from the Knockagh Monument.

Slider tells Dinger to wait in the car while he delivers food or whatever to the rest of the kidnappers, and then immediately afterward he takes Dinger to the Knockagh, where they fly their kite.

Well, no good deed would go unpunished. Slider was only looking out for his retarded kid brother, but holy mother of God, I’d fucking kill him to get the girl.

And I really felt that I was close to her. This was a good lead. Slider was part of the gang. And if I were a betting man, I’d give you evens that Slider’s wee brother had just told me where they were holding the girl.

I might have to top you, Slider, but it’s your mistake, you’re not supposed to tell anybody. Nobody. Not your ma, not your da, not your bro. You certainly don’t bring him with you and tell him to wait in the car. Your mistake. . . .

I ran off the beach and into the center of town. I saw a taxi. Flagged it down.

“I’m on a call, you can’t get in,” the driver said.

I opened the door and got in the passenger’s side. I gave him most of the money I had left in my wallet. Several hundred dollars and euros. I took the gun out of my pocket and held it in my hand. I didn’t point it at him. Carrot and stick.

“Listen, mate, I need your fucking cab. You’re going to tell the peelers that I hijacked ya, but you’re going to wait till after midnight. Ok? Do we have a deal?”

“You need my cab for a couple of hours and you want to pay me five hundred euros? Fucksake, mate, you didn’t need the gun.”

“So we have an agreement?” I asked.

“I won’t call the cops at all. But you’ve got to tell me, where are you gonna leave the car?”

“I don’t know. I have to go. Take the money, and if you’re calling the peelers, you better fucking wait till midnight. Ok? I won’t need it after that,” I said.

“No problem, squire, no skin off mine. Ratty old beast, just make sure you keep the clutch way down when you’re changing gears.”

The driver and I swapped positions.

I drove out of town.

The Knockagh was, of course, all the way on the other side of Belfast Lough. You had to go through the city to get there. I checked my watch. It was almost ten now. But that was time enough. More than time enough. No need to be reckless. I slowed from ninety to seventy-five.

And you behind the mask.

It’s already been decided.

Long before you or I was ever born.

Sit tight. In your bolt-hole a world away, a drive away, from here.

Do you feel that breeze on the back of your neck?

That’s me.

Aye.

Sleep soft, assassins. Embrace your loved ones. Kiss your wives. Drink your fill of the cool night air.

Your days on this world have been reduced by the thousand and the ten thousand.

For I am coming.

I am coming.

Salt haze. Deserted shore.

Vehicles leaving the city. And farther, behind those hills, a gang of hoods and a sobbing, terrified kidnapped girl.

Something up there. Shapes just outside my field of vision. The songbirds are down. The seabirds, too. And, as per instructions, the helicopters are landing—abandoning the night to the insects and the doves navigating the magnetic field.

Something that’s bigger than dragonflies, pigeons.

A look of recognition.

Ahhh, I know what they are.

Imaginary things—specters, furies, impatient gods hovering above the car. Watching me, hurrying me.

“Faster, faster.”

They know it’s barely started. Pain behind. Pain ahead. They feed on it. It nourishes them. Go ahead, dip your talons, have a taste.

“We’ll assist you, death bringer.”

My palms on the steering wheel. My fingers loose. My fingers. Look at them. Aye. Those hands were not made for reaping wheat or serving food or welding steel.

Death bringer is right.

I don’t know what I’ll do when I have to stop, but for now I’ll let them do what they do best. A trigger squeeze. A knife flash.

Yes . . .

Fifteen minutes along the motorway and I was approaching Belfast again. This morning I’d been excited about coming home. But not now. I’d been inoculated against nostalgia. An RPG attack and a good kicking will do that for you.

I wound down the window.

Rain and briny water and cold air.

Still, Bridget had been correct to call me. Correct in her assumptions. Even after all this time it was as much my city as anyone’s and she was right to think that I was the man who could find her kid. Her goons couldn’t have gotten this close. Never. Throwing money is the Yank cure for everything. But in a society like Ulster or Afghanistan, money won’t do it. Not the peelers, either. In Belfast if you’ve a real problem, you don’t call the cops.

Aye, even now, I knew how the city ticked. I could feel my way through the streets. It wasn’t geography, it was just the way things worked. Same as New York, and Lima, too, come to that. Probably everywhere in the world. The same five hundred people at the top, the same five hundred people at the bottom. And everyone else in between. Little people. Extras. I could feel it out. I had felt it out. The trail was good. It was simple. There were three acts. She had given me a job to do and I was doing it. And the third act would work out too. Oh yeah. Deus ex machina. Me as both God and the instrument of destruction.

Over the motorway and through the city.

New roads that I didn’t know how to negotiate.

New buildings.

But eventually the signs took me out onto the M5, which led northeast along Belfast Lough. Traffic roaring by at eighty miles an hour.

The motorway had been built on reclaimed land. Four or five artificial lagoons created to prevent the road from being eroded by the lough water. Had this been here when I’d been here? I couldn’t remember. The lagoons were full of herons and oystercatchers stretching, squawking, settling down for the night.

Birds. Water. Clouds. Me.

The big sopping city retreating behind. Belfast receding in the mirrors for what could be the last time in my life.

I could just keep driving north to the ferry port at Larne.

I could. But I won’t. Bridget, Moran, the cops, everybody wanted me to stay out of it now. Time pressing and the kidnappers couldn’t have been more explicit. But Moran was wrong. I had never fucked up anything I’d tried. Clumsy sometimes and I’d taken hits, but I’d always seen things through. Maybe that’s why she’d asked for me. She understood that. Her speaking voice might be saying “I want everyone to pull back, to keep out of it, we should all do what the kidnappers say,” but the secret message to me was “Michael, I love you, I trust you, you can do this. Do it for me, Michael. Find my girl. Find her. . . .”

I let this thought sit with me for a moment, and then I laughed at my reflection in the windshield.

“Always the fantasist,” I said.

Still, I’d had it up to here with words and memories. I was full. There wasn’t any room for insults or accusations. From Moran or Bridget or anyone.

But I wasn’t so proud that I wouldn’t look back in the rearview mirror.

And I was eager to know how things were playing out. What were they doing there? Had Bridget convinced the cops to stand down? Of course she had. That imperious red hair and that cold smile and bending body. She could be the offspring of Elizabeth and Essex. She could be Queen Boudica. She could be . . . Fuck it, she could be the most powerful female mobster in the United States.

That clock, the touchstone for someone. Not a Belfast native. Unlikely anyone from the city would pick an exposed location like that, even for a preliminary phone call. But I’d bet a little money that that old man on the phone, that first voice we’d heard, had thought of that famous landmark as a good place to have Bridget wait. An old man, who maybe was from here originally but had spent many decades abroad.

Speculation.

In any case, now when I looked in the mirror, the city was almost completely gone. Only the choppers landing and the lights distorting on the black lough water. Even the traffic diminishing. Everything easing down on this, another wet Wednesday night in June.

Good.

Toy boats on the lough. The outlands of the islands and the hills that make up southern Scotland. A green backdrop, a Celtic sky, and the indigo water setting everything in place like a quilt or jigsaw map of this portion of the world.

Big sky, big land, big sea, and then, suddenly, it’s all just too much. Overwhelming. Those lights in front of my eyes, my head pounding, my cracked ribs throbbing, a dazzling feeling of vertigo. I dry heave. I put my foot on the clutch, slide the gear stick into neutral, slam back the handbrake, open the door, and climb out of the car.

I stumble to the grassy verge, sit, and try to get a breath. Hyper-ventilating. I lie backward on the grass, my arm falling in a sheugh. Not that it matters. I suck in the damp Irish air, rip my jacket off.

Get back in the car, get back in the car, the voice commands.

But still gasping, I lie on my chest and spread my arms. The over-powering smell of slurry, silage, and sheep shit.

I begin to breathe easier.

Where am I?

The hill country leading up to the Antrim Plateau. On the way to Knockagh Mountain. Aye, that’s right. A slight drizzle and the sky its usual lowkey gray-green shading into black. The stars when they all come out will be different from those I’ve become accustomed to in the last few months.

Gusts of wind wheedling their way down from the peaks. A williwaw. I stand and walk a little along the road, away from the car. My breathing almost under control.

Are you ok now? What happened there? Were you losing it? You can lose it at 12:01, but not now. After it’s done, but not yet. Get a grip, you son of a bitch. It’s not just your life at stake. Another human being might be depending on you. A girl. A mother.

“Just another minute,” I say, sitting again, reaching for the pack of cigarettes in my jacket pocket. Flies buzzing at the puddles in the ditch. Clegs and midges. And that smell. That dungy brew of cows and damp. I’m underdressed and cold. But the fag will help. Marlboro Lights, weak-kneed, but I hardly ever smoked now anyway. I light a ciggy and hold it between my thumb and my fingers, the way I used to before I quit, feeling the anticipatory heat of it in my nostrils in contrast to the crisp cold air on my fingertips. I drink in the smoke, cough, close my eyes. Oh yeah, that’s what it was like. I remember. The tobacco warming my lungs, toasting them with its flavor. Burnt and sharp like ocher. Aye. Is that the ticket to keep away the cold.

I take another hard draw and walk back to the car.

I’m ready.

That won’t happen again No . . .

I drove deeper into the Belfast hills and eventually found a sign pointing to a narrow single-lane track that might be the Knockagh Road. An old lady with a Scotty dog.

I leaned out the window.

“Excuse me, does this go up to the Knockagh?”

The dog was taking a dump and the old lady was trying to pick up the droppings with a cellophane bag over her hand. She couldn’t bend down too well because of osteoporosis and the dog wasn’t too happy about her interfering with its rear end before it was done with the business. A man in less of a hurry would have been amused.

“Does this go up to the Knockagh, this road?” I asked again.

“Where are you trying to go?”

“There’s an Orange Lodge near the Knockagh, I need to be there for a meeting.”

“There’s no Orange Lodge up there, I can tell you that,” she said.

“Well, is this the right road, at least?”

“Aye, this’ll take you there,” the old lady said, and breathtakingly slowly got out of my way. I resisted the temptation to run her over. She gave a friendly wave, and I sped up toward the mountain.

After a few turns, I saw that it was indeed the right road. Blocks of managed forest began appearing next to the farms. Dense, fast-growing pine trees, where you could probably hide out for months without anyone ever finding you. I hoped the mysterious lodge wasn’t buried deep within one of those.

I drove higher still until I was right at the top of the plateau. The big granite war memorial was hard to miss standing up about a hundred feet from the mountaintop. I got the car as close as I could, parked it, and ran to the monument. The view was of the whole of Belfast Lough and the surrounding countryside. From up here in the western hills you could see a lingering, fragmented sunset, but in the east, down to water the sky was black and already most of the settlements around the lough had turned their streetlights on.

I climbed on top of a wall, scanned the surrounding fields. No ruined buildings, no parked cars, no secret hiding places, no arches, no fucking lodge. Nothing.