The Glorious Heresies (31 page)

He looked down at the footpath, shaking his head.

“It's not like I want this,” Georgie said.

“Remember…” he said, slowly, and then he took her arm again, and escorted her to the edge of the path and the cold stone walls of their city centre. “Remember the time I came down to you in that weird chapel place?”

The prayer hall. “Yeah.”

“Remember you told me never to buy a prostitute?”

She remembered.

“But if I ask you to stop buying coke it wouldn't work.”

“That's sweet,” she said. Her voice cracked.

“If I told you that lads like me end up inside over shit you buy, would that stop you?”

There was nothing earnest to his expression. He seemed pained, impatient and resentful, all in one oddly beautiful tic.

She faltered. “You don't know my life…”

“You don't give a fuck for mine,” he said, and took his hand away. She pushed her fingers over the spot he'd held, instinctively. And for the beat before he left her she grasped something of what he was trying to say. And that it might have been nice to have someone like him, someone on the outside too, someone who got it, someone who might have stood by her and bawled her out of it when she stepped out of line.

When she made it home, two tricks later, she went online and deleted the bookmark for Robbie's Missing Person page, but found herself visiting him again later that night, and again, three times in total as the clock ticked on and she sat in her rented room, looking deep into Robbie's frozen eyes for something they might once have shared, but all she found was resentment, coming from inside her, rising up her throat.

“You are fucking joking me,” Jimmy choked, one day in the coldest April the city had seen in decades.

Maureen was like a lunatic. Not “like,” he thought.
Was
a lunatic. Right now, in her kitchen in the new apartment at Larne Court, she was doing a very passable impression of a maniacal beast, spitting, tutting, pacing.

“I'm not joking you,” she said.

Beside them, on the polished pine table, lay a copy of the
Echo.
Its front-page headline read “Repairs Completed On North Cork Church” and underneath,
“No arrests made in nightmare arson attack.”

“Well then why the fuck aren't you joking me?”

She stopped pacing and crinkled her nose as if she'd caught a whiff of decay. “It was a statement,” she said.

“What kind of statement? ‘I'm off my fucking meds'? ‘I don't think my son's suffered enough'? ‘I'm suffering delusions of demonic grandeur'?”

“That's the problem with your generation,” she said. “You're politically apathetic.”

“Oh? And what damn purpose does this kind of madness serve, Maureen? You burn a country church down? Up in fucking Mitchelstown, of all places?”

She slapped the table. “It's a pyre, isn't it? For
that
Ireland. For
their
nonsense. For the yoke they stuck round our necks.”

“Jesus Christ, what are you on about? What, you wanted to make a metaphor of the horizon, was it? And you expected the buffers above to get that? Jesus, Maureen, have you any idea what they could have done over this? You're damn lucky they didn't root out some black-pantsed fourteen-year-old twerp and nail him to a fucking cross!”

“Well they didn't, did they?” she said. “They did nothing. Why would they, sure? They've taken so much from me there's nothing left of me to see. I can do what I like and go where I like and all I get is a blind eye turned. It's ridiculous.”

“You want to get caught, Maureen? You want to spend a few years above in Limerick?”

“I can't get caught,” she said. “Churches and brothels and Robbie O'Donovan, and not a climbing wisp of fault for any of them.”

“Oh, mother of Jesus.” He hung on to the back of the nearest kitchen chair and pinched his forehead. “Maureen. Listen to yourself. You're not nine years old. You know this shit. Nothing goes unnoticed. You might think you got away with this and that, but people paid, and paid fucking dearly, for your messing.”

“Your insurance premium went up, I suppose.”

“You think you can burn buildings and kill gawky eejits with impunity? Oh fuck me. Just because you don't see the stains doesn't mean you didn't make shit of things!”

She felt she could do what she liked now. That much was clear to him. In burning down the brothel he had thought she'd made her decisive point and once he'd exhibited his rage he'd decided he could stand to grant her that last folly. He had stupidly assumed that was that. But the headline proved he couldn't trust her around loose ends. If a name lost from the lips of Tony Cusack could catch fire, then what could Maureen do with a living whore and a dented know-all like Duane?

Jimmy had watched the city long enough to know that it would right itself, sooner or later, and that the silence following Robbie O'Donovan's death was just a long, caught breath.

He extracted her promise that she wasn't going to get up to divilment as soon as the door shut behind him, and hurried to reinforce what he could before she got mind to break it.

Months back he'd been brought a mystery.

He hadn't had reason to bring the boat out in a while, but at the end of the summer he'd taken a day down at the yard, where he'd rolled up his sleeves and engaged in some therapeutic maintenance.

There was an ould fella who lived a couple of miles from the opposite end of the quay—Mike Costello, a gentleman bachelor, whose face was scored from coastline winds and disapproval at the unremitting advance of “feckin' Japanese” technology. He had his own boat, though Jimmy rarely saw him do anything with it. More often he engaged in the lightly infuriating habit of sitting around on the quay with his Border collie, smoking Players and offering unsolicited advice on the sea and sky. On this day, with the sun making sheets of blinding light from the puddles on the concrete, he approached Jimmy with customary solemnity, and asked after his plans for the vessel.

“I'll dock it this winter,” Jimmy said. “It took a bit of a hammering last year.”

“Of course it did,” said Mike. “And bringing it out in all weather, too. What you were at in January I don't know. Lucky you weren't mangled.”

“When was that?”

“January. In the rake of bad weather. Only the one time I saw you, in the early morning, but wasn't once enough? Ah sure, you do it for pleasure and you don't know what you're at; aren't you only a city boy? Dock it this winter and don't go making a widow of your good lady.”

Jimmy took this first exactly as he was tempted: he assumed Mike was mistaken. Hallucinating, even. Poking the ashes out of boredom and the malice boredom can call up. The image wouldn't leave him, though, and Jimmy wouldn't be where he was and who he was if he wasn't open-minded to dangers. He made delicate enquiries amongst his own, and no one had taken the boat out. He checked the dinghy and the boat itself for signs of mischief, and concluded there was no one tapping him for fuel and kicks on the high seas.

He didn't immediately suspect Tony Cusack, because suspicious as Jimmy was, he wasn't bloody insane. But there was an inkling, one day, driving into the wretch's terrace on unrelated business. Alongside Cusack's pile was Tara Duane's, boarded up. Jimmy asked his boys:
Did Duane take off?
It got back to him that she'd gone wandering, and that no one had any clue where; cops, drifters or the motherless chicks that lay for their sins under him.

You'd want to be stupid,
he told himself, as he unwound the mystery. Tony Cusack knew where the boat was kept and where he'd been promised a watery grave. Tony Cusack had a set on Tara Duane. But Tara was a flighty fuck-up and Cusack a weeping fool. Most likely one of Jimmy's own had been moonlighting, and lying to him.

Still, though.

Still.

Jimmy did his sums.

Good clean murder was art, and that was reflected in its price. He could do the done thing and call in a professional, but even with favours recalled there'd be a cash penalty, and he baulked at the notion of spending five-figure sums tying loose ends on what was essentially a domestic spat. Five damn years he'd been taming this cock-up.

With Duane's disappearance he was left with two superfluous players.

With Duane's disappearance he wondered if he could line up his targets.

He drove up to the estates on the hill and tried the handle of Cusack's front door. It opened. He let himself in.

Cusack was sitting at his kitchen table, a torn white envelope in one hand and a bill of some sort in the other. In granting himself access, Jimmy had not been quiet. But that was the thing, up where they had nothing worth stealing and five or six kids apiece. Privacy was neither granted nor expected.

Tony looked up and Jimmy watched his expression change.

“Afternoon, Anthony.”

He walked to the kitchen table and pressed his knuckles against its surface. Cusack gawped. The possibility that he thought their acquaintance suspended once more suggested itself to Jimmy, but he didn't derive the amusement from it he would otherwise have made use of. Cusack looked…fucking old.

“I need you to do something for me,” Jimmy said.

Cusack laid the bill on the table, and made a mask of his left hand. Jimmy looked over his head. The kitchen window was weather-splashed and smeared by little fingers writing lines in condensation, little palms wiping them off. The sill held the miscellanea of the poor bugger's life: coins and phone chargers and birthday cards soiled by the wet glass.

“You remember the whore,” Jimmy said.

Cusack said nothing, but looked down at the table and then back at Jimmy when his silence was matched. Jimmy took the eye contact as affirmation.

“She never stopped asking questions. Time's up on that bullshit. I want her gone.”

“Gone,” echoed Cusack. He took his hand from his mouth and said, “What d'you mean, asking questions?”

“What d'you think I mean, Cusack? Come on, the ould brain isn't that mushed, is it? Asking fucking questions. Making fucking noise.”

“It's been years.”

“Years enough for your brood to grow up? No.”

Cusack came round to it. “So you need what from me?”

“I need you to make her disappear.”

Jimmy pushed himself off the table and paced. Over at the sink, he flicked through forks drip-drying in a grey plastic caddy. Over at the drawers, he rifled through tea towels and school timetables. “I need you to clean up another mess,” he said, evenly. “I need you to do me one last turn. That's not so hard, is it, Cusack? For your own sake? For your kids'? I need you to end the whore so we can finally draw a line under this.”

Cusack said, “I'm sure you have lads better qualified for this kind of craic” in a voice no match for his meaning.

“How would that be, Cusack? How would I have lads better qualified? This is our issue, and one I'm not keen on compounding. I'm not offering it up to anyone else. What do I look like? Fuck's sake.”

“Isn't this compounding it?”

“No. It's drawing a line under it. I told you already.”

Cusack managed to get to his feet. “Jimmy,” he said. “Jimmy,” and his old friend stopped thumbing through the dregs and raised his eyebrows. “What are you trying to do to me?” Cusack said. His voice was a testament to conviction lost. “Jimmy…I helped. That's all I'm good for. Being given directions. Even then I get lost. You saw it yourself. This isn't something I'm even capable of doing. Think about what you're asking me.”

“Capable,” said Jimmy, and laughed. “Oh, Tony. What's that they say? ‘You don't know your own strength till you're pushed'?”

Cusack shook his head. “No point pushing. I can't do this.”

“You did Duane, didn't you?”

Tony sat down again. He put his face in his hands.

Jimmy waited.

“I don't know where Duane is,” Tony said.

“I can't imagine you do. It's been a long time since you sank her.”

“I had nothing to do with her taking off.”

“You did,” Jimmy said.

He returned to the side of the kitchen table and grasped Cusack's shoulder.

“She's no loss,” he said, mildly. “And men do what they have to do, don't they? Bit of a vampire to that wan. She wasn't very good at masking it. And sure, didn't she fuck your young fella?”

“Where the fuck did you get that idea?”

“Aw, come off it. Straight from the horse's mouth. That's why you put her window in. That's why you've been holding a grudge.”

It was a good fifteen seconds before Cusack responded.

“If you thought I had something to do with her running off, you'd hardly be saying shit like that to me.”

“What, because you think I'd be afraid of you? Oh Christ, you're hardly that naive.”

He let go of Cusack's shoulder and leaned back onto the table. It wouldn't matter what was said now. The man looked like a child in a dentist's chair. Out of deference to a shared past Jimmy wanted Cusack to show him something. A raised vein. A twitch, or narrowed eyes. Not this watery supplication.

“I don't blame you,” he said. “My young fella is thirteen in the summer. If anyone interfered with him I'd rain down fire and fucking brimstone. So it was your right, Cusack.”

He leaned closer.

“And it was my fucking boat.”

“So you're saying I owe you?”