Aloysius Tempo (18 page)

Uncomfortably enough, she sits back now, looks around her – at the uncleaned bits of my life scattered on the coffee table over by the TV, at the way I left my curtains closed, at the way it looks like I’ve slept on the sofa more times than a man with a bed ever should.

‘My husband killed himself,’ she says. ‘And I’ve come to know it was the best thing for him to do. I’ve come to understand it, to see it from his side.’

And I nod. Unexpected interjection in the conversation, but one that makes sense on its own.

‘That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a selfish cunt,’ she says. ‘It’s his anniversary.’

She raises a glass and we clink again.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

‘Don’t be.’

‘Was he a good husband?’

‘He was. Better than most, I think. Men have problems, don’t they? Problems with their role in the world, with what it means to be male these days, with their simultaneous need to create and destroy, don’t they? But he wasn’t like that. He was solid, predictable, dependable. Call it boring if you want, but it was what I liked, what I needed in life. And then he did the most unexpected thing of all.’

‘I can get that.’

She drinks some more and says, ‘Don’t give me any surprises Aloysius, and I’ll do the same for you.’

‘Okay,’ I say, and pour another couple of glasses.

‘And I’ll go and get naked and sit in your bath and drink whiskey,’ she says, ‘and you’ll wait here, leave me to it.’

‘Okay.’

‘I might call you if I need my back washed.’

‘Okay.’

‘Can you read all that okay?’

I shake my head, say, ‘I needed some time to myself, to chill out, spread out in the bath. I was going to ask you to leave, but then I thought how fucking might make us both feel better. Looks like now I’ve lost the bath and the fuck. Another misread on my part.’

‘Not necessarily,’ and she takes a drink.

And I’m wondering if Martin is still outside, waiting for us to finish our showdown, sitting in his four-by-four as she, unexpectedly, takes a bath.

‘Should I … ?’ I’ve my thumb pointed towards the door.

‘I told him to give us an hour or so,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry about Martin. There’s no one on earth you should worry about less than Martin. If ever a man had it all sorted out.’

And I shrug.

‘Tell me about Martha McStay. Why her?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I know fuck all about her, to be honest. What sort of story did her life tell?’

‘Usual Northern Ireland misguided patriotism from a family of hateful wankers,’ she says. ‘Aged sixteen, beat a paramilitary commander to death when he touched her arse. Locked away for a while, ended up in love with some crazy Polish ex-soldier, ran drugs for him in Belfast, killed him, fucked off east with the cash.’

Imelda rubs at her face, tired of all of this, tired on this day her husband died.

She goes, ‘So she came home a couple of years later, helped spring her nutcase dad as he was going to a court hearing. Arranged for an ambush, shot two prison guards in the head. Got completely away with it, by the way, to the point where the mud didn’t even get thrown, let alone stick. These days her dad’s living somewhere in Ukraine, making all sorts of dodgy connections and showing up at illegal arms fairs. They had been keeping in touch via handwritten letters, full of codes the intelligence lads were never able to break.

‘Anyway, Martha was, as you will have gathered, charismatic, sexy, sharp as a tack, and one by one every fucking flag-waving loon was falling at her feet. And her latest move had been to become a politician. She was high-speed becoming the most divisive fucking fool in the North.’

I say, ‘So why the hard solve?’

‘Why? Because she was sitting on a stockpile of nine tonnes of high explosives and two hundred AK-47s. Because she had thirteen simultaneous bombings planned for 2022, anniversary of the foundation of the state. Because she was going to be nowhere near any of it when it happened. She was running rings round Irish and British political and security figures and half of them reckoned they were the targets themselves. She had too many people looking over their own shoulders. The truth is that neither the Brits, nor the Yanks nor even any of us on this busy little island had seen anything like the threat that passionate little Martha was starting to pose. She was a fucking red alert, Aloysius, and just getting more and more dangerous. There was nothing on her, nothing legal. There was nothing legitimate anyone could do. And people like that lend themselves well to sudden death. The conspiracy theorists have so little hard data it makes her unworthy. Hence the hard solve.’

I go, ‘Jesus.’

‘A woman like that could set a country back sixty years. She could cost it more than it could afford. Between the deaths and the emigration and the hatred she was going to cause all of us, she was like the second fucking Famine personified. Some people, you know, are just not necessary.’

‘And she couldn’t be stopped?’

‘Not in any conventional way, no. She knew and loved how much sway she had, knew how to build on it too.’

‘Can I see her file?’

‘Why?’

‘Because I just killed her.’

Imelda nods, takes a drink, says, ‘That you did.’

And I’m taking a drink when she says, ‘She get to you somehow? She make some kind of impression on you, Aloysius? Before you did the deed?’

I shrug, act it up a bit, look a little coy, say, ‘Maybe a wee bit.’

‘I’m taking that bath,’ she says, stands up, presses two hands in her back, stretches out, turns away.

‘Can I see it?’

She stops, ‘What?’

‘The file.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes. That okay?’

‘Jesus. You in fecking love or something?’

‘Please.’

She looks at the laptop in her bag, and back to me.

I say, ‘Fifteen hours ago, I let go of her, ten storeys high. She’s the only one I hadn’t researched, the only one I didn’t know all about before I did it, had no clue what she believes in. And, to be honest, it’s fucking killing me.’

Imelda pulls her laptop from her bag, opens it on the breakfast bar, keys in a password, brings up a file, sets it in front of me.

‘I believe you,’ she says. ‘But if you do happen to go looking for the fourth name on the list on my laptop, you won’t find it.’

I say, ‘Maybe better if I don’t know it.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You’re right about that.’ And she’s walking to the bathroom as I pull the machine in front of my face.

‘You can’t go online, by the way,’ she says. ‘It can’t connect to the Internet.’

‘No worries,’ I say, sliding on glasses as a door closes.

And I shrink the document and scan the desktop. All the files are numbers, weird words, random jumbles of letters. There’s some kind of code going on here. I click one open and it’s images of a roadside, shots of where the white lines are. I click another and it’s police pictures of Danny Latigan floating, dead and bloated, in his own swimming pool.

I click one and see pictures of an airport. One document has a breakdown of government spending on state security. Another lists millions of words, none of them in any language I’ve seen before.

‘Fuck,’ I say.

And I hear her getting in, sliding down. I thought she’d have me join her, thought I could have stolen away to rifle her laptop, but this is an even better opportunity.

I click onwards, looking for patterns, for images, for clues as to what might be a live or imminent project. And there’s nothing, nothing, nothing.

What am I looking for?

The next on the list. The next on the list.

So I’m looking for the list.

And what do I know about the list?

I know Latigan is on it. I know Marley and McStay are on it.

I hit search and type them all – Latigan, Marley, McStay. There’s one document that has all of those in it, called ‘data bridge 3994’.

I click through, and we’re talking 200,000 words of what looks like total shite. More random words, often repeated dozens of times. Random names, numbers, colours, towns, cities, countries.

But I see Latigan now, I see the word appears nineteen times. And I look at it, flick through all of them, looking at it typed nineteen times.

And I look at them all, at what’s around them. But it’s all just other names, words, numbers. It goes ‘celia yellow park tramlines Latigan charleston dundee shelf 208839 upswing … ’ and on it goes, bullshit galore.

Yet there, in the tenth mention, perhaps just by luck, I see it’s different. The second letter is an italic.

It’s all Latigan, then I see Latigan.

An odd little happening.

And in the tenth mention of the word Marley, it’s Marley.

And in the tenth mention of McStay, it’s McStay.

‘Wow,’ I say, chuffed with myself, pleased at the code cracking. This must be something she’s shared, something printed, maybe passed to Martin, passed to whoever it is they talk with.

But I have 200,000 words in front of me now and, I realise, I’m looking for a word I don’t know that has an italic as a second letter.

‘Wow and shite,’ I say.

Can I search for italics?

And, I don’t know why, but she’s getting out of the bath now. Why is she doing that?

I hear her getting out and she goes, ‘Aloysius?’

A questioning tone, a word that is a whole question.

Fuck it. So can I search for italics? I can’t even google that question. No wait, I can, my phone.

She goes, ‘Aloysius?’

Says use ‘Find’, then ‘Advanced Find’, then ‘Format’, then ‘Font Style’.

She’s drying herself off in there, the shortest bath in history.

She goes, ‘Just a little question for you.’

I get it to find all italicised ‘A’s in the document. It brings up one L
a
tigan, one M
a
rley.

I try ‘
e
’ and there’s none.

She goes, ‘Aloysius?’

Then ‘
i
’ and there’s – no, wait.

The door opens, I can hear the towel being tugged as she tightens her dressing gown.

And there it is. One entry, an answer to my question. Second letter an italic.

I click off the search box.

She is behind me now, reaches over, closes the laptop.

‘You not hear me?’

‘I did. Thought you were calling me in. I was just going to get the whiskey.’

She goes, ‘You said “Not what she believes in”.

‘What?’

‘You were talking about having killed Martha McStay and you said, quote, that you didn’t know “What she believes in”.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning present tense. Meaning, in your mind, she’s alive.’

I stand, say, ‘Fuck you, Imelda. Not this bullshit again. You’re finding trouble where there is none.’

‘None?’

‘None. You’re paranoid.’

‘No, not paranoid. Just annoyed.’

‘I know how that feels.’

And I wait for a retort, a hard-to-follow comeback, and she’s just looking at me, her toes gripping the carpet beneath her. Gripping and releasing. Gripping and releasing.

And I’m thinking how she’s the leader of the pack, how she’s the top dog, how she’s at the top of the pecking order and how I’m throwing myself around too much within it.

She’s looking at me, at my face, trying to read it, trying to see what’s going on under this big blank front of mine. She’s looking at it, all suspicious now, and all she sees is suspicious looking back at her.

And all I can think of is Martin.

He’ll be parked up outside now.

Martin’s outside.

Martin’s outside.

He’s next on the list.

March 2017

I’VE TOLD Martin I should drive. He hasn’t a clue what’s happening or where we’re going, but we’re going fast.

‘Trust me,’ I say.

‘I do,’ he says. ‘Is Imelda okay?’

‘She’ll be fine,’ I say. ‘Trust me.’

We take the tolled tunnel, spitting us out on the top side of Dublin, onto the M1 motorway, heading north, the far side of the speed limit.

He’s gripping the assist handle above the door, asks, ‘You stressed out or what?’

‘Just making progress, Martin. Just moving ahead with things.’

‘I’ve got a 7
PM
dinner with a TD in Ballsbridge,’ he says. ‘I need to be there.’

‘You need to be here first,’ I say.

We tear on and my brain is racing like the wheels. I won’t tell him right now, but I will tell him that I am running from the certainty that Imelda is seeking to have me take his life.

I am running because she knows I have found out what she insisted I must not know, that everything she has told me has been an act of betrayal. I am running before she has set me up with the murder of Martin. I am running in anger.

She wants me to be her hard-fanged puppy, some kind of cruel fool for her, and she believes she can get me to do that? Her patriotism is poison. Her loyalty is piss weak. She is the one who deserves to be thrown off a building.

I saw this coming. I’ll say it again, I saw it coming. I die, that’s what happens at the end of this story. I die in the moments after I kill Martin.

Maybe armed police catch me in the act, tipped off in some random call, and have been encouraged to shoot. Maybe it’ll be some undercover tough that who kills me, who gets lauded for taking out the unknown, homeless fucker who took down one of the nation’s best servants.

That’s what will happen – you can be sure of it – because then there will only be Imelda, the forever friend of whoever it was in the high place that paid for all of this. Only fucking Imelda and dead men with their secrets.

There is dirt in my throat now, some bits of grit and filth crawling coarsely up from the back of my tongue, and I want to spit, to shout and rage at the fucking world with a mouth full of mud.

*

There’s a sprawling service station, a pull-in plaza, and I drop the gears and cruise in, tucking up in the furthest corner of the car park. I reverse into the space, facing the building, the back of the vehicle against a field dotted with cud-chewing cows.

I cut the engine and note that it’s busy, that there’s dozens of other cars, other four-by-fours, lorries, vans, parents, children. And I’m thinking busy is good, that people and CCTV and daylight are all good because there are two men in this vehicle who are due to be killed, one after the other.

It hits me now, this second, as Martin looks at my face, that I didn’t look up my own name on that bloody laptop. I didn’t even get to look for a second italic marking me for death, but then maybe such a detail was too dirty even to write.

He goes, ‘This what you wanted to show me? A fucking shop?’

I hear myself sigh, maybe a bit of sadness. It’s maybe some tiredness and maybe some sliver of relief all mixed into one.

‘I wish it was that simple,’ I say. ‘I had to get out of Dublin. I had to get us both out of Dublin, just until I can get a grip on all of this.’

‘Explain,’ he says. ‘Calm down, Aloysius, and explain.’

And I breathe in deep, look all around. The cows in the mirror looking our way, contented, uncomplicated, unknowing and, therefore, unbothered by their fate.

I see a mum chuckling as she walks her three-year-old by the hand, as the little boy talks excitedly about everything that comes into his head.

‘Dangerous days,’ I say, turning to him. ‘And they didn’t have to be. I have some information you need to know.’

He opens his door and the noise makes me jolt.

‘Come on,’ he says, ‘let’s chat.’

The air eases around me, nicely, comfortably, as we walk across the car park and into the café.

‘I’ve made mistakes in my life,’ I say to him, a hot, paper-cupped coffee in my hand. ‘All sorts of shit, stuff that nearly got me killed, some stuff that at times made me want to get killed. Truth is, I sometimes don’t trust my thinking. Fact is, I sometimes put too much trust in my gut, sometimes too little. It’s all done often without taking full stock of all the circumstances. I don’t know if that balancing act keeps me sane or keeps me mad.’

His eyes, wide open yet yellowed and dimmed, take all this in, encourage more of this lid-lifting.

And I go, ‘I have to tell you that, all along, I’ve had doubts about this whole project. Where my head said everything is fine, my gut said it’s too easy, said go easy, keep looking over your shoulder, keep looking at Martin, at Imelda.

‘You know I’m not what you might call someone who set out to kill or die for his country. Yet you know too that I’ve been looking for a place, a part to play, some kind of sense of creating some kind of half-sensible life story. So I’ve been playing the part, Martin. And I’ve been out in the field hard-solving your problems, Ireland’s problems, and it’s been working for me. It’s been like coming home, but coming home on my terms, coming home as so much more of a human being than I was when I left. But I’ve kept my eyes open. And now I’ve got some information on this little organisation of yours, of ours.

‘I got to hear, loud and clear, that the Americans know every detail of it, that they’re tracking the whole thing, by the day, by the hour. And today I got to learn that Imelda doesn’t care about that, or doesn’t care enough to even look into it, as if it is all ending, as if the end is already certain and all she wants to do is close the book.

‘And today I also got to learn that she won’t tell me who’s number four on the list. So when we were in my flat, I did a bit of digging.’

He takes a drink, ‘And what did you find out?’

I say, ‘It’s you, Martin,’ and his big face is unmoved, the face of the practiced professional, the show of the diplomat who thinks and calculates and plans before he gives anything away.

‘At some stage, pretty soon,’ I say, ‘Imelda is planning to talk me into killing you. She’s going to set you up, I think, maybe lead me to believe I am under threat from you, I don’t know. But, much as she knows she can talk me into many things, I’m not going to do that. I can’t do that. It is a betrayal, cruel and, I think, very unfair, very un-Irish.

‘My own name may not be on that list, but you can be sure my fate is as certain as yours, my death will be the direct result of yours, and our two deaths clean this whole thing up very neatly for her, for the government, for whoever it is that funds this show. I need you to believe that Imelda Feather is not on your side, hard as it may be to swallow. She is the opposite, and she is the most dangerous person in this whole thing.’

And I know I haven’t even given him a moment to think, to digest this heavy load. All there is now, and it’s barely perceptible, is a little smirk, a micro mocking of what I have just said.

He goes, ‘How do you know this?’

‘The list.’

‘That massive document on her laptop?’

‘Yes.’

‘With one letter in the names in italics?’

‘Yes. That’s it. You’re the fourth name.’

‘I am,’ he says. ‘And I knew that, you big clart.’

‘You knew that?’

‘Yes,’ he goes, and breaks into laughter now. ‘Of course I did, fuck’s sake, Aloysius, you prick.’

And he’s still laughing, waving a hand to let it all clear from his belly, wiping an eye and enjoying it.

I can’t help but laugh too, smile and laugh at his reaction.

I say, ‘You knew that I’m supposed to kill you?’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he says. ‘Fuck’s sake, yes, I know all of that.’

‘What the fuck, Martin? So you’re some kind of mole in this outfit?’

‘No, no,’ he goes, chuckling again. ‘No, for fuck’s sake. Jesus Christ, you’re getting carried away now. I know you’re supposed to kill me and, what’s more, I damn well hope you do.’

Martin gets up, goes and buys two brownies, and I watch him all the way, leaner than he has been in a while, beaming happily at the woman behind the counter. He comes back, plops one in front of me.

‘Not hungry, thanks,’ I say, making a face that says he’s doing my head in.

He eats and chuckles again and I watch him.

Martin tells me I wasn’t supposed to have received this information for months, that I had broken in and seen something I shouldn’t have seen.

‘There are no betrayals, Aloysius,’ he says. ‘There are just complications, things that don’t seem to make sense on the surface. It’s the kind of business we have all chosen to get into, y’know? You’re looking for black and white and the whole thing is multi-coloured.

‘I told you from the start that you could trust Imelda with anything, and I meant that. It’s truer now than it ever was. She would die before she’d turn her back on you. And she would do the same for me.’

And I’m saying, ‘I don’t understa—’

‘No,’ he goes, ‘because you’re the blunt instrument. You’re the hammer head, not the guy deciding if he should swing the thing. There’s a structure to all of this, an order. Don’t you worry about how that all fits together, we just need each person to do their bit for the operation to run cleanly.’

‘Martin,’ I say, ‘you wanker. You seriously want me to kill you?’

‘Look in my eyes, Aloysius. Look at these tired eyes. I’m dying, my friend. I have four to six months before I shuffle off this mortal coil. I am rotten with cancer. I have it all over me like a wet week, bones to bollocks. I was too slow to find out and I’m way too long in the tooth for a massive dose of chemo, and for surgery that has a 5 percent chance of working.

‘But I’m living the lives of ten men with what we’ve been doing. I’ve never been happier, never prouder, never more ready to die. I’ve never seen justice like it, I’ve never seen the whip so fairly cracked in Ireland in my life and, at the back of every mind in the nation, there’s a happy little song, even if they don’t know where it came from.’

He tells me his own murder is his best way out, and that it must very clearly be a murder. He tells me it’s the fastest, cleanest way, that it unlocks a massive insurance bundle for his estranged wife, and for his daughter if she ever comes home. Under his policy, he says, a suicide or death by cancer would never provide as much.

‘But you know what the real craic is?’ he asks.

‘No.’

‘The real craic is that if you don’t get me first, the Americans or the British will.’

‘Kill you?’

‘In the end, as good as. But they’ll disappear me, it’s a certainty. They will take me and interrogate the living fuck out of me, and I can’t go through that. I can’t face that, can’t survive that. They don’t know and, the fact is, they wouldn’t care that I’m a dying man. They have very serious unfinished business with me and they want to move when we have finished the list, when I’ve stepped away from you and Imelda into obscurity, living alone, they want to pick me up and take me away.

‘They can’t do it now because I’m with Imelda every day, regularly in touch with people in high places, but they need to do it soon. I’m told they will move when number four goes down. For me, Aloysius, that would be a fate, literally, worse than death. And that’s why I’m number four.’

Walking to the door, heading back to the vehicle, he says, ‘When we started this whole thing, me, Imelda, a couple of guys in the civil service, a couple of political people, we started with fuck all. In fact we started with less. As soon as we did anything, they knew. The Yanks, the Brits. They just had so many ears on our phones and software, red-flagging every conversation that they knew of, even if the topic was of no interest to them at all.

‘But we couldn’t have that. It left us vulnerable. So we turned the tables, succoured them in, started conversations that made us more interesting to them. Mad stuff. Stuff we made up. And when we got them closer, when they felt we really did have a few direct lines into people and places of interest to them, we got to asking them for help. And the help came.

‘And, Jesus, it was a hoot. We were spinning fucking tales about the Brits to the Yanks and vice versa. We were filling them with shite about what the hard left were up to, about what all sorts of terrorists are up to. You know the sort of twats that like to wander about Belfast and Dublin in revolutionary T-shirts, hoping to smell blood and talk about bombs? We told the Yanks we knew a load of those guys were setting up a cyber terrorist camp in Athlone. They believed it, too.

‘Then when Kiera went off to Iraq – my daughter – our contacts went apeshit with joy, asked me if I thought she could be turned to work for the west and all of that and I said “Oh aye definitely, not a bother”, and they formed a whole unit aimed at finding her and getting word to her.’

He holds the door open for me and he’s saying, ‘Sure I told the posh boys at MI6 there was a secret American base in Galway where they were torturing some Islamic State fellas, for fuck’s sake. The whole county had drones flying over it before I was home for dinner.

‘At one stage we had them telling themselves the Irish were their best friends. We had them thinking, Ack sure the
Irish chat away and everyone chats away to the Irish and sure maybe the Paddies will be of use to us
. And, by fuck, I filled them with a load of dung, so I did. Never enjoyed myself more, to be honest with you. With even the little bits of feedback I was getting from a few old, good contacts, it wasn’t long at all before we knew how they did their listening, where they did it and the sort of stuff they were most interested in. Great craic altogether.’

And we stop walking when I ask, ‘And in return?’

‘Well, I got a few favours from them. I found out about my daughter, where she is, who she’s with, about her health, if there were grandchildren on the way. They got me enough to know she’s a lost cause, but that she’s found some kind of happiness.

‘To be honest, we got all we needed to know about a few dozen people. We couldn’t possibly have done all the work ourselves. Wouldn’t have had the resources, the manpower, the experience. Basically, we just bluffed the holes off ourselves. It wasn’t even too hard. We got to learn things we could never have known. We found out who says what about us around the world, who owes us, who is planning to fuck us in one way or another. We got what we needed, got watching who we wanted and, one day, we stopped pissing around and drew up a little PR plan, a little list.