Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) (13 page)

Katie’s father put down his knife and laid his hand on her wrist. ‘They’ll find somebody to replace you, darling, don’t you doubt it. You’ve been keeping Cork City free of crime for long enough, don’t you think? Maybe it’s somebody else’s turn.’

‘I mentioned on the phone that I had some ideas, didn’t I?’ said John. ‘Well, one of my ideas is that you could take up a senior consultancy position with Pinkerton’s.’

‘Pinkerton’s? Are you serious? You mean Pinkerton’s the private detectives?’

‘That’s right. The oldest and most well-respected security agency in the world. Would you believe that Abraham Lincoln used to hire Pinkerton detectives during the civil war? They have an office on Howard Street in San Francisco and as it turns out my very good buddy Jed Walters is a very good buddy of their director of consulting. Plays squash with him, in fact.’

‘You see?’ said Katie’s father. ‘You could be doing just as much good in America as you’re doing here. And enjoying it more.’

He didn’t add ‘
and
you’d be living with the man you love’ but the implication was there. John was giving Katie a look that was both pleading and cajoling. Even Ailish was smiling at her, her eyebrows raised, with that sort of romantic twinkle in her eyes, almost maniacal, that women have at weddings.

‘But how would
you
cope?’ Katie asked her father. ‘You get your arthritis when it’s damp and your eczema when it’s dry. Not to mention your angina.’

‘Get away with you, girl,’ he told her. ‘I’m not completely helpless, you know. I’ve got Ailish here to look after me, haven’t I? And I can always call on Siobhán, in case of dire emergency.’

Katie thought to herself:
Siobhán
?
Siobhán is a one-woman dire emergency in
herself
. But to keep the peace at her father’s supper table, she nodded and said, ‘All right, da. Give me some time to think about it, that’s all.’

‘But you
will
think about it?’ John asked her. Sweet Jesus, she had already forgotten how handsome he was, how chocolaty-brown his eyes were, and how the side of his mouth tilted up like that, as if he were amused.

‘Look now – your crubeens are getting cold,’ Katie’s father admonished her.

‘Oh. Yes. Sorry,’ said Katie, although she had completely lost her appetite, especially for pigs’ trotters, which had made her gag ever since she was little. She had always imagined them standing in a mucky pigsty. Didn’t her father remember her at the age of six, sitting at the kitchen table until four in the afternoon, with a plate of untouched crubeens in front of her, refusing to eat them, but forbidden to go out and play until she did?

Ailish cleared away the dishes and washed them up with a furious clatter, while Katie found a tea towel from Lourdes and dried them for her. The two of them chatted about traditional Cork recipes like crubeens and drisheen and porter cake, and then their conversation turned to the schoolyard games they used to play when they were children, which children never seemed to play these days, like Rats and Rabbits and Shadows and Red Lights, Red Lights, 1-2-3!

Ailish said nothing more to Katie about moving to California with John, but after she had hung up her apron she gripped both of Katie’s hands tight and smiled and shook her head as if to say,
I’d go, girl, if I was you
.
Myself, I’d jump at it
.

‘Goodnight, sweet Ailish!’ called out Katie’s father as she went to the front door and opened up her umbrella. Outside it was still raining, although much more softly now, so that the raindrops sparkled in the street lights like thistledown.

‘Why don’t I give you a lift?’ Katie offered.

‘Don’t go troubling yourself, Katie. It’s only a five-minute walk up Fairy Hill.’

‘Goodnight, then. And watch out for those fairies. Mischievous little rascals, some of them!’

Katie and John and Katie’s father sat in front of the living-room fire for another hour, as the logs gradually collapsed and disintegrated into ashes, and between them they finished off most of a bottle of Paddy’s. Katie’s father told them lurid stories about Cork in the 1960s, and the rival gangs who used to run the city’s crime.

‘There was one fellow, Jimmy Dunne, what a header he was. He had a penchant for cutting off his rivals’ noses with a straight razor. Jimmy the Gonker they called him. He got his deserts in the end, though. The three Murphy brothers broke into his house one night and abducted him and his wife Eileen right out of their bed, and their five children all asleep and not one of them woke up. The Murphys took them to a cellar off Oliver Plunkett Street and did things to them that would make your hair stand on end. When we found them, the two of them had been reduced to such a smush we couldn’t tell which of them was who.’

He finished his whiskey and shook his head. ‘It was all different in those days, though. Nobody had any money, or mobile phones, or credit cards, so mugging was almost unknown. And it was all local boys, who weren’t the sharpest tools in the box, so we usually knew which eejit was going to commit what crime about five minutes before he’d thought about committing it himself. Before I retired, though, all of these Romanians and all these Nigerians started taking over, and Katie can tell you how wily they are. And ruthless.’

‘Well, let’s put it this way,’ said Katie, ‘if somebody crosses them, they think nothing of chopping off their ears or their fingers or even whacking off their feet.’

‘That’s right,’ said Katie’s father, ‘and the trouble was, I could never make heads nor tails of what they were talking about, even when they were supposed to be speaking English. How do you take a witness statement from somebody who says “e don red” when he means that “things were getting serious”? It was bad enough in my day, trying to understand some of those young tearaways from Crosser.’

‘Here’s a sign of the times for you, da,’ said Katie. ‘Last Thursday we had the annual crime statistics in. Can you guess which criminal activity made the most net profit last year – apart from drugs?’

‘Well, people smuggling, I’d say, and pimping.’

‘Wrong, believe it or not. Second-hand clothes. You know, the bags of clothes that people put out for charities?’

John said, ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’

‘Not at all. There’s gangs of Eastern Europeans driving around the south of the city at three o’clock in the morning, picking up the charity bags from people’s doorsteps. They drive them across to Lithuania or Estonia or wherever, and they clean them, and smarten them up like new, and they can make a hundred and fifty thousand euros out of the contents of one forty-foot trailer – a whole lot more if there’s handbags and shoes in it.’

‘Is that for real?’ John asked her. ‘I guess it’s criminal, but you have to respect their initiative, don’t you? I mean, you wouldn’t catch me driving around the suburbs in the middle of the night, picking up hundreds of plastic bags of smelly old sweaters.’

‘Believe me, John, they don’t deserve your respect. The clothes are not legally theirs and it’s theft, however you look at it. There’s three rival gangs of them and they’re even more violent than some of the drug dealers. We had to send fifteen gardaí to break up a pitched battle on the South Ring Road last month, thirty or forty clothes collectors with knives and broken bottles and hurley sticks, and they’re forever fire-bombing each other’s vans.’

Katie’s father stood up. ‘All I can say is – come back, Jimmy the Gonker, you’re forgiven, boy.’

‘Are you going to bed now?’ Katie asked him.

He nodded, and leaned over and kissed her. ‘You and John have a chat together. See if you can work something out.’

‘I never would have taken you for a matchmaker,’ said Katie.

‘Me, my darling? Never. But I’m looking at life from the opposite end of the telescope from you, and everything that once seemed so grand and impressive has all shrunk down to size. I can see now what could have been, but wasn’t, and I don’t want you to get to my age and feel the same way.’

‘Goodnight, da. Sleep tight.’

John stood up and clasped Katie’s father’s hand in both of his. ‘Goodnight, sir. And thank you for everything.’

Katie’s father shrugged, as if to say ‘we’ll see’.

When he had creaked his way upstairs, John sat back down again, much closer this time.

‘How about another drink?’ he asked her. ‘We might as well see this bottle off.’

He poured them each a last glass of whiskey. Katie said, ‘I’m going to be langerated, so whatever I say to you tonight, I don’t really mean it.’

‘You mean like you’ll change your mind and come to San Francisco with me?’

‘No, John. You know it’s not fair to ask me that.’

‘But Pinkerton’s, that would be a fantastic job. Prestige, or what? And think of your golden suntan.’

‘Pinkerton’s do accept Irish citizens?’

‘Not in their government departments, no. But on the private side, they’ll consider anybody, regardless of creed, colour, nationality, disability or sexual orientation. Mind you, I’m not so sure about pretty red-headed drunks. Or pretty drunk redheads.’

Katie swilled her whiskey around in her glass. ‘I don’t know. It seems so disloyal, even to think about it. You have to swear an oath, when you join An Garda Síochána.’

She raised her glass and said, ‘I hereby solemnly and sincerely declare before God that I will faithfully discharge the duties of a member of the Garda Síochána with fairness, integrity, regard for human rights, diligence and impartiality, upholding the Constitution and the laws and according equal respect to all people.’

John stared at her. ‘Jesus. You know if off by heart.’

‘It’s in my blood, John, that’s why. I inherited it from my father, and my grandfather, too.’

‘I love you, Katie. I’m just trying to find a way.’

Katie looked at him for a moment, and then she said, ‘The week before last we raided a brothel off Patrick Street, and we rescued a girl who had been smuggled over from Albania, along with five others. She was fifteen years old, this girl, and she was a virgin before she was brought over here, a schoolgirl. She was locked in a room twenty-four hours a day, wearing nothing but a bra, and she was forced to have sex with at least a dozen men every day, seven days a week, any way they wanted, or else she’d be beaten black and blue. She told me she felt like she was dead.’

‘Okay,’ said John, seriously. ‘That’s great. That’s fantastic, in fact. You gave the girl her life back. But you can’t save every girl who gets abducted.’

‘I know. I know that. But you should have seen her, John! You should have talked to her. How can I possibly stop trying?’

John was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘You never told me about this when it happened. In fact, come to think of it, you hardly ever talked about your work, did you?’

‘Well – I never thought you’d be interested.’

‘Are you serious? Of course I’d have been interested! For Christ’s sake, sweetheart, your work is what you’re all about! It’s everything that makes you Katie Maguire. But now I feel like you’ve always kept yourself shut away from me – like you never trusted me to find out who you really are.’

‘John – it was never that, I promise you. It was just that when you and me got together, I didn’t want to bring my day’s work home with me, all of that stabbing and beating and drunkenness and foul language. Apart from anything else, crime is boring and criminals are boring. They have a vocabulary of two words and their answer to everything is to give you a good reefing, if you’re lucky. If they could only see themselves for what useless gobshites they are. You think I want to talk about people like that all evening?’

John took hold of her hand. She was still wearing the emerald-set ring he had bought her to celebrate his decision to stay in Ireland forever.

‘I get it, Katie,’ he told her. ‘I understand completely what you’re trying to say to me, and I really admire what you do. But your father’s right. You’ve achieved so much, and you’ve done so much good. But do you honestly want to end up as a grey-haired old biddy, surrounded by cats, wishing that she’d done more with her life than chasing after pimps and drug dealers and second-hand clothes thieves in one of the wettest cities in the world? I know how important it seems to you tonight – but in twenty years from now?’

The dolorous clock in the hallway struck eleven, as if to emphasize the passing of time. Katie had seen it happen to other gardaí as they grew older – how they had graduated from Templemore with a bustling sense of public duty but had eventually settled into a kind of routine righteousness. It was the scumbags who wore you down in the end. You got up, you went out on the streets, you confronted young men with tattoos who were shouting all kinds of filth at you, you feckin’ swamp donkey; or perspiring accountants who had embezzled a builder’s merchants out of fifteen thousand euros’ worth of loft insulation; or unintelligible pimps from Sierra Leone with diamond earrings and three-hundred-euro Nikes and shiny tracksuits. After a while you didn’t even hear what any of them were saying, it all became a kind of grey noise; and at the end of the day you went home, you watched TV, you went to bed and stared at the ceiling, and listened to your husband breathing next to you, if you still had one.

Maybe the same thing had happened to her, and she had become institutionalized. Perhaps martyrdom had become a habit.

John reached up and held her face in both hands, and looked directly into her eyes. ‘Still as green as ever, your eyes, like the sea.’

‘Oh, stop. I’m surprised they’re not bright red, after all this whiskey.’

He kissed her, and they held that kiss for a very long time, while the last of the logs lurched softly in the hearth. The tip of his tongue penetrated her lips and ran across her teeth, and then slipped into her mouth. Their tongues wrestled with each other but Katie didn’t try very hard to resist. She had missed him so much, she had missed
this
so much, the feel of him close to her, the smell of him, his breath against her face.

He took hold of the small oatmeal-coloured cardigan she was wearing, and peeled it off her shoulders. Then he tugged her sleeves off, one after the other, and dropped the cardigan on to the floor.