Aloysius Tempo (17 page)

‘Evidently.’

The wind is firm against our faces now as I push her gently ahead, right to the end of the cement, to that ninety-degree shelf, to the death line.

I’m ready to shove her in the back now. I will see the wind swoop around her hair as she goes, I will see something in front of me become nothing. I will hear the punch of flesh on cement and already be five steps from here.

But she turns fast – agile, confident, with zero distance to spare. She faces me, eyes on my neck, bold as a bullet, and it takes me by surprise. She looks up, grins, alight and alive.

And I’m time-wasting here, wasting time I should use, making the seconds soft when they should be hard. I’m killing time at killing time. And I really like looking in her dark, dark eyes. I feel her hand take mine, feel it lifting up to her chest. She opens it, places it on her heart and I feel her rhythm, slow and strong. Now she puts one hand on my chest, feels the beat, slow and deep.

‘We’re alike, us two,’ she says, and she’s looping my fingers around that tough pink Lycra boob tube.

‘We go to the edge and sometimes we fall,’ she says, ‘but falling is beautiful, failure is beautiful.’

And I feel my hand tighten around her top, backs of my fingers onto her warm, silk skin on this cold roof, as she says, ‘Take a good grip.’

And Martha McStay lifts her arms, spreads them like wings, and falls back, closing her eyes, a beaming smile, feet on the ledge, leaning into the sky, an act of faith without faith, of trust where there is no trust.

I have to catch my breath, harden my grip, to stop her from falling.

The Lycra stretches, the wind rushing up between her breasts and I see now they’re not there. As she lies back further her top stretches and thins and I see fakes built in to the clothing, two upside-down smiles on her chest, two eyebrow scars where breasts once were. And she’s on her tiptoes, her only contact with the tower block. My arm is fully stretched, her top is as pulled as it can be. And now I have to lean back or she will surely plunge.

I reckon the wind could just whisk her away at any second, a firm gust would just lift her, float her out into the sky like a light little pixie, her hair dancing around her face.

I look at my hand, at how one movement will hard solve problems for people, will complete what I have been sent here to do, and my hand is firm and strong and holding fast.

‘What’s your name?’ she calls, her voice louder, yet just audible, just touching my ears before it gets shooed away by the wind.

‘What is it?’ she calls it again, head tilted back now, hair scattering about her face.

‘Aloysius,’ I say. ‘It’s Aloysius.’

And this mad, wounded woman has me smiling, holding her life in this killing hand and grinning along with her.

She goes, ‘Aloysius – I
love
that name. It’s fucking
poetry
.’

And, good and loud, I go, ‘Right.’

And she says, ‘You can let me go now.’

Russian Military Training Base

Tajikistan, Central Asia

April 2008

Evaluation Interview #21 – Final Session

‘I’LL BE driven to Israel, enter the country with a fake ID as a Russian Jew. There won’t be a problem with the language, with any questions about my past.

‘When I get there I go dark, disappear in Tel Aviv for a couple of months. They say they have a cash-in-hand job for me, working on the beach.

‘And when I get the call, I go ahead, collect the weapons from some location, make my way to Gaza and complete.

‘And after I’m finished? I don’t know if I’ll be alive or dead. If alive, well, the only order is never to speak of it, to disappear into Western Europe and never look back.

‘Then, yes, maybe go back to working in France, maybe over to London for a while. Maybe even back to Ireland or America, who knows? If I need work, I can put my hand to most stuff. If I need to put some bigger money together, I can maybe get involved in a bit of mercenary work, maybe even get some work somewhere as a hitman, an assassin-for-hire. I hear there’s always money to be made in that area. I’ve been wondering, to be honest, if there is a market in accidents.

‘Nothing troubles me just now, that’s why all of this is working out for me. Not the future, not even the past. Even if I died during this thing, it wouldn’t trouble me. If I live, well, I’ve been running since I was seventeen. Running some more won’t trouble me.

‘You know, they always knew it was me who beat that priest to death on his floor, but they never wanted to pin it on me. It was too messy, raised too many questions, would have opened the door on all of what we now know, and no one in power wanted to open that door. They just said it was a break-in, that some lunatic had smashed the window in and smashed Father Barry’s head in during a mission to steal some gold, but they knew it was me.

‘I stayed at that place for another six years, untouched, untroubled, before deciding to get the fuck out of Ireland on my own terms. I reckoned I had guts, dirty guts but guts, and that I could make a life somewhere.

‘So, despite all of the past, I’m on no register, no wanted list. To Ireland, I’m no one, someone long gone, maybe someone who was never there.

‘No loyalties, that’s me.

‘No one loyal to him, that’s me.

‘That’s why you guys went for me, isn’t it? You read something in me, something you could use. You saw someone who had no love of anything, someone who presented no risk of getting torn away.

‘So let’s just do what we have to do in Israel and it will be as if we never met, as if you never heard of some guy from a milk crate called Aloysius.

‘If I die, sure you can just sing a sad song about some Irish guy and that’ll be fine, too.’

March 2017

SUNDAY IN Dublin.

I’ve dropped the car off at the docks, am walking back through the squeezed city. There’s a light, barely wet Irish rain on my face.

That car, I’m thinking, goes back into some steel box for safe keeping or, more likely, gets shipped across the sea. It gets cleaned and re-sprayed somewhere, gets remarked and rolled out for someone else, someone else unofficial with official connections.

How many of those sorts of cars are there in this world? How many things or people or places get this official invisibility, this sanctioned cloak around them?

Fuck only knows. No one would ever tell me these things. You get a role and you play it. You do all this rule breaking within the rules, that’s how the game works.

Me? I’m just a guy who was given a car, a guy given some stick-on number plates, a guy told to replace them two or three times as I did my travelling. Who by? I don’t know. Whoever left the car on my street and put the keys through my letter box. Maybe the same person that takes the car away again, now that I’ve left it down at the docks.

A priest told me one time I would one day be the sort of guy who calls at someone’s door, cold and hungry, and asks for something to eat. He looked at me and said that was what the future held for me.

But he said in my case it wouldn’t just be a case of being hungry, it would be a case of being hopeless. He said I was bad luck, that I would always have it because I made it, I was a source of it. He said that was what went on in my heart – bad luck.

He said I would call at the door of the house and the guy there would know me, would be asking me what the problem is. And I’d be telling him the problem is I’m hungry, and he’d be all, ‘Why are you being so strange? Of course I can get you some food, but what’s wrong? I don’t understand. What happened?’

This priest told me it wouldn’t take long before I’m shouting it, shouting out that I am all empty inside and need to eat something. And the priest told me the guy at the house would kick me out, call me an arsehole as he shoved me out the door, his wife looking on from another room, head shaking.

The priest told me, ‘That can go on forever, Aloysius. You can go calling at every door in the street and everyone will be trying to understand what happened, how it came to this, and they will never get it.

‘It can go on forever, people not being able to comprehend. They’ll say you used to be fine, but now you’re at the door begging for an apple, a bit of bread or toast or a lump of cheese.

‘They’ll say “How can this be? What are we misreading here? Why is he being so forceful about this?”

‘People won’t understand that you speak the simple truth. And you will get shunned and shunned again because people feel that they suddenly don’t know you and your new ways, but it’s just the old you, the old you, but hungry and tired and fed up with the world.’

The priest said this would happen to me because I didn’t fit, that sooner or later I would always have a hunger and always be misunderstood.

‘You’re like me in that way,’ he said. ‘We’re both misunderstood. Your problem is bad luck, you have it in you, it’s where you’re going, it’s what you will be to people and they will come to realise it. You’ll ruin people’s hopes and hearts, so you will. You will be a man nobody wants, showing up at their homes all sincere like a cancer. That’s where you’re going. All little bastards like you end up like that.’

He said, ‘My problem, Aloysius, is that I’m drawn to people like you, drawn to help, to do what I can. It’s my mission, the path God has asked me to take, and I must take it.

‘But it means that I collect all the bad luck, it means so much of it rubs off on me, that I too end up ruining lives and hopes and dreams.

‘We’re the same, you see. We’re one and the same, you and me.’

He was saying I was already lost, lost and gone before I was found. He was saying he was the only one I could and should trust.

And I’ve dropped off my invisible car at an unknown location after a trip around Europe on which I didn’t actually go. I’ve knocked at doors, and what kind of a man was I, standing there, when the person opened them?

The priest was wrong. I am worse than a hungry man. I am worse than bad luck. I am much, much worse than a guy who might seem a little strange at your door. I’m a fucking nightmare, I’m adversity like you never knew before. I’m the last day, your last contact with the world. I’m the fucking Grim Reaper. I’m not bad luck, not some random event that goes wrong, I’m a fucking planned and executed dose of the fucking end, I’m your statistic, your number, and when I am up at your door you better not even answer.

*

Martin Gird sits on the steps leading up to the front door of my really very good-looking apartment block.

‘Did you hear about the three holes in the ground?’ he says.

‘No. Tell me.’

‘Well, well, well
,’ he says.

‘Well now,’ I say, ‘my joke detector tells me there might be one around here somewhere.’

‘Haha, not here my friend. But I do think this specific situation needed a—’

‘Well, well, well.’

I drop my bag, take a seat beside him, look across the quiet, Anglo-Irish grandness of the posh outh Dublin street.

‘Enjoy your travels?’

‘I note you didn’t use the word holiday.’

‘You note correctly.’

‘Aye,’ I say. ‘It’s a fucking weird line of work though.’

‘You’re not wrong,’ he says, passes me a newspaper.

I look at the image of a line of priests on their knees, praying for the rotten soul of Father Liam Marley.

‘We have them on their knees,’ he says. ‘They have to pray for the old fucker’s soul and at the same time pray for forgiveness from the rest of the country. They’ve a lot of praying to do.’

‘Yep,’ I say. ‘And nothing fails like prayer.’

He goes, ‘Do you see what it means though? It means there’s another pile being driven into the cesspit we called decent society around here. Another fucking leg up for the new day, y’know? You see it means we’re moving on another little bit, thanks to you? You see that, don’t you Aloysius?’

And I go, ‘Aye. I see it.’

Martin smiles at me, a smile that makes the outer edges of his eyes curl, one that tells me there is no distance between that smile and the mood of his mind.

‘Good man,’ he says, clearly happy yet clearly tired from co-carrying the secret weight of all of this brutal engineering. ‘You’d better go in.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning she’s waiting for you. I think you’ve pissed her off, to be honest.’

‘Nah,’ I say. ‘Sure she knows I’d kill for her.’

I leave Martin on the step, stretching his back. I go through the front door and turn right to get into my own pad. I didn’t even know she had a key, but then of course she has a key.

Inside and I don’t see her. I dump the bag on the sofa, step into the kitchen, into the bedroom, and she’s not there.

And she calls out, ‘I’m in the jacks.’

‘Right.’

I hear paper rustling so I turn on the TV to save her from the embarrassment she won’t have. She calls out to turn it off. She rustles again, flushes, washes, walks out, laptop bag over her shoulder, and I turn off the TV.

‘Sit with me,’ she says, putting her bag down. She’s wearing a blue suit with a too-short skirt, a touch of a dirty Margaret Thatcher about her. ‘Sit at the breakfast bar,’ she says.

‘This your first time in my flat without me being here?’

‘None of your fucking business.’

I sit and she finishes making the coffee she had already started.

‘Did you see Martin outside?’

‘Aye.’

‘Did he tell you I was raging?’

‘No.’

‘Liar,’ she says. ‘And he’s right. I am. Or I was. I’ve calmed down.’

‘I didn’t think you were so brittle, Imelda.’

‘Not brittle,’ she says, ‘brittle is easily broken. I think maybe I just don’t like weak men working for me.’

And she puts a mug down at my closed hands, takes a stool, takes a drink, tucks some stray hair in behind an ear, looks me in the eye.

‘Don’t take fucking liberties with our connection,’ she says. ‘Don’t take liberties with your role in all of this. If we don’t have a pecking order, we just have a mess, understand? There has to be a pecking order. There always has to be a hierarchy. That’s how society works. It’s how humans work, how we all get fed. A dog doesn’t want a master,
it has to have a master.’

And this is all a little haywire, all a bit crazy.

‘Wait a wee second here,’ I say. ‘I have no problem with a pecking order. I have a problem with the fact that you could park a convoy of Volvos in the gaps in our security.’

She takes a drink, thinks for a moment, puts the cup back down, goes ‘What do you know?’

‘I can’t say. Not here.’

‘You know nothing, in other words.’

‘Not true. I’ve had some feedback from someone. I know for a fact there are people who know things they have no business knowing. Things about me, Imelda. Things about you. Things you said you would stop people from getting to know. I find it a little hard not to mention all of that when everything depends on our work staying in the shadows.

‘All that stuff you do, that taking shit for granted, not being bothered about the detail, all that it’ll be all right in the morning shite, it’s all a bit Irish, isn’t it? Lovely and quirky and easy on the ear, but it’s got failure written all over it. It’s the kind of shite that gets people dead in this line of work. They might think they have no reason in the world to die, but that’s what gets them dead.’

And she’s looking at me like she’s not so interested in anything I’m saying, and she says, ‘Where’s Martha McStay?’

I go, ‘Did you hear what I just said? About security? About your promise being worthless? You think I can ignore this stuff?’

‘Where’s Martha McStay?’

And she takes another drink of coffee. And I take a drink of mine.

‘Let me spell it out, Imelda,’ I say. ‘We are being listened to and watched and tracked every fucking step of the way. And I mean every step, no matter what you think. Every job. Every name. The name on my fucking passport. You understanding that? We are totally vulnerable, totally compromised, totally at the mercy of anyone who wants to expose or finish us.’

And she goes, ‘Answer the fucking question.’

I say, ‘Fair enough. Fuck it, fair enough. Where is Martha McStay? Fuck knows. I last saw her on the roof of some truck. She fell ten floors. Why? What did you hear?’

‘I heard nothing,’ she says. ‘I got an off-message call from my asset in the field before the job was supposed to be done and, since then, I have heard nothing. Nada.’

‘They haven’t found her then?’

‘Evidently. You’re not bullshitting me, are you?’

‘About her falling ten floors?’

‘Yes. About her falling ten floors.’

‘No, Imelda. I am at this moment confessing to a murder, on tape, in fuck knows how many countries around the world. Probably in Britain, certainly in the US. I am confessing to a murder. Otherwise I’d probably just lie, cover my tracks a bit, but despite being an asset in the field, my chief doesn’t want me to cover my tracks. So, yes, I pushed Martha McStay off a fucking roof, she fell, landed on the back of truck. She is dead as fuck.’

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I got it.’

I get up, shaking my head, walk to the bathroom, put the plug in the bath, turn on the taps, squirt in some bubbles. I walk back to the kitchen and she’s watching, curious about my movements.

And I go, ‘We were supposed to trust each other Imelda. There is no trust now. We are clowns, all of us, at someone else’s circus.’

She nods, finishes her coffee.

I flip open the cupboard above the kettle, take out the only bottle that’s in there, an unopened Jameson. I lift down two heavy tumblers and I know she is watching me, curious as a cat. The only sound is the spin of the lid as I open it, lift it off. I pour the whiskey into the glasses and the scent suggests class and craic and caution.

She puts her head to one side as I carry them over, place one in front of her. She clears her throat, maybe taken a little by surprise, looks at the square glass, looks at me.

I hold mine out to clink it. She sighs and decides and I’m holding my hand there. And holding. And holding.

And she gets there, lifts hers, touches mine, we say ‘
Sláinte
’.

I say, ‘And peace.’

She nods.

I say, ‘Who is number four?’

‘Come again?’

‘Who is next on the list?’

And she grins, waves at me, as if saying goodbye.

She goes, ‘Wise up.’

‘Who is it?’

‘I can’t tell you that. It’s months away. Forget it. Take some time to yourself, Aloysius.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Forget it.’

And I’m nodding.

She goes, ‘Who were you speaking with?’

‘What?’

‘Who were you speaking with about our operations?’

‘No one.’

‘Who told you about the gaps in our security.’

‘I can’t tell you, it’s not—’

She goes, ‘Exactly. Same.’

And I’m thinking she doesn’t even believe me. I’m thinking now she reckons I made that up, that I’m trying to stir the pot, push myself forward, climb the ladder. I reckon she thinks I made it up so that I seemed like a guy with more than she thought I had.

‘I’m not lying,’ I say, ‘about that information. I’m not making it up. Someone could be toying with me, yes, but I’ve still been told what I said I’d been told.’

She smiles sweetly, patronisingly.

And we pause.

‘I had one other question,’ I say, ‘but I don’t want to ask it.’

‘You can ask it.’

‘I was going to ask you to have a bath with me. I wanted to know if we could share one, chill out, lose a couple of hours. But I don’t want to ask you that. You see, I think I’ve misread you enough. Everything is telling me that I’ve lost a skill I once had. So I won’t ask you to have a bath with me.’

She doesn’t bat an eyelid, doesn’t look at me or look away, doesn’t drum her fingers or say a word.