“Yer head’s too heavy,” she said, and slid off the sofa. She went to the window and looked down on the gray city and the gray Liffey. Lowe felt his tranquil bubble burst and his balance slip away. He opened his unwilling eyes.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Time fer yer walk.”
He nodded and a large liquid weight shifted in his skull. She was right, he thought, his head was too heavy, and overfull with booze and static—a pail of mud on a rickety perch. Lowe rubbed his eyes. He pulled on clothes and slipped two midget whiskey bottles into his raincoat pocket. He looked at Margot. She was still by the window with her head against the glass.
Though Margot had told him not to, he took the same route to the park each day. The buildings he passed were mostly low and old, which made the new ones look even taller and glossier. The streets were full of young people who looked like bankers and accountants and computer guys, and looked like they’d come from someplace else. It reminded Lowe of Wall Street that way. Maybe that’s what Margot meant about fitting in.
He took a wide, tree-lined avenue deep into Phoenix Park, to a bench by the pond he’d been staring at all week. The air was damp and burrowing cold, and he shivered when he sat. The park was mostly empty now—old people, dog walkers, a couple strolling down the path. The woman had thick red hair and an umbrella. The man was tall and pale and his hair was pitch black. Lowe had seen them in the park before and wondered if they worked nearby. He closed his eyes and listened to birds and distant cars and the crunch of footsteps on the gravel. He opened his eyes when the footsteps stopped.
It was the couple, looking down at him. They were handsome, Lowe thought, though there was something cold in the man’s lean face, and something angry in the woman’s eyes.
“May I?” the man asked. American.
“Help yourself,” Lowe said. The man sat; the woman remained standing and looked up and down the path. “You from the States?” Lowe asked.
The man nodded. “From New York, Jimmy—like you.”
Lowe wasn’t conscious of trying to get up, but suddenly the man’s hand was on his shoulder, pressing him back. Lowe’s mind raced, but without traction.
“Relax, Jimmy,” the man said.
Lowe’s mouth went dry and the rest of him was bathed in sudden sweat. “Flynn?” he asked finally. The man reached into his coat pocket and pulled out five photos and laid them on the bench.
“She brought them to Dublin, Jimmy, same as you,” he said, pointing at the photos as he spoke. “And Dublin’s the last stop.” He said some names but Lowe had trouble hearing him. A roar filled his ears as he looked at the pictures of the five dead men, and suddenly he couldn’t see. He must’ve been leaving again because the man had him by the arm and the woman looked worried.
“Five, in five years,” the man said. “You make it half-a-dozen.”
Lowe slumped on the bench. “Flynn?” he said again. It was an old man’s voice.
The woman shook her head in disgust. “There’s no Flynn but herself—Kathryn Margot Flynn.”
Lowe gripped the little bottles in his pocket and looked at the ground. “You’re cops?”
“She is,” the man said, nodding at the redhead. “I’m private, working for your employers. The good news is they just want their money back. You make that happen, and keep your mouth shut, and they won’t prosecute.”
Lowe clawed at his gut. “What’s the bad news?”
The redhead looked down. “I am,” she said. “I don’t care fer yer girl leaving bodies all over my city, but I got no proof of anything. That’s where you come in.”
Lowe slumped on the bench. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. He looked at his hands and saw the little whiskey bottles in them. He cracked the metal cap on one and the man took his arm.
“Let’s wait on that, Jimmy,” he said, but Lowe shook him off and drank one bottle and then another. The woman spoke, but Lowe couldn’t make out the words. His head was down and his eyes were closed. He was waiting for his balance and another bubble to ride, but in his heart he knew it was no good. The best part was over.
H
e’d left London in disgrace. A banking scandal, one of the worst. More than a half-billion pounds sterling in losses, bolloxed up every trade he made for months, going deeper and deeper. The end of days for the 230-year-old Ravenscroft Bank. Hundreds sacked. Pensions gone. Dreams shattered. Suicides, at least five of them, including Desmond Chick, for thirty-eight years the janitor at the Con Colbert Street branch in Limerick, a widower, raised three sons himself, working dusk till dawn. Sent away without so much as a plaque for comfort, he cried himself to death, they say, too old to start anew and as heartsick as if he’d lost his Minnie all over again.
The trader, meanwhile, was sentenced to four and a half years. Got out in three. Good behavior, though the arrogant shite never owned up to what he’d done. Eleven hundred days in Coldbath Fields and every one spent planning to cash in like Nick Leeson did—a book, Ewan McGregor on the silver screen, lectures—his reward for breaking the Barings Bank in ’95. Now you can play poker online with Leeson, punters thinking, Here’s yer guy, he’ll ride a bad patch straight to hell.
None of that for this trader, save a photo that went on the wires: scowling, bruised, itching, hollow eyes darting this way and that, maybe two stone lost to labor. No publishers, no producers; banking scandals old news now, a story already told. His wife gone off with an orthodontist, moved to Hamburg. Not even a word from his mot Trudi, tossed aside by the
Sun
after she told of their life together, all coke and cognac, laughing at regulators and the likes of Desmond Chick before they tracked him down.
Ah, Trudi, bleached-blond and beyond plump, a hostess now at the Odyssey in Bristol, and she knows her time has passed. Her fifteen minutes and all. Let the Remy warm her belly and she’ll talk the ear off a man’s head, give him something she never told them at the
Sun.
Ever hear about the only time he expressed regret? No? Well, Ducky, we were in that big comfy bed of his in that hotel in Tokyo, and he props up on his elbows, and he says,
Trudi, they can keep it all, the bastards. Every last piece, every last shilling. But I’ll tell you, I’d give my left thumb to have back my old guitar.
That being what they call a white-on-white 1961 Fender Stratocaster. Owned and played by Rory Gallagher, it was. Rory Gallagher, love. Sure, you heard of him. Rory—
Rory Gallagher,
for fuck’s sake …
As for the trader, the bitter prick, still thinking who he was, packed up and disappeared. Did a good job of it too. Four years gone by now, and not a word. Man barely qualifies as a bit of trivia these days.
Funny, isn’t it? Sometimes, when the world is turning and the craic is good, it almost seems as if it had never happened.
The trader, clever man, reemerged in Dublin, just another stranger brought in on the wave of the Celtic Tiger. Had a plan, he did: shaved his head, and when his auburn hair grew back he done it blond and spiked. Put 80,000 miles on the Audi, nose redone in Nice, jaw in Seville. Teeth in Milan.
Didn’t have to do much about the accent. Born in Sligo, he was, not London, as he claimed.
As for wardrobe: gone were the Spencer Hart suits, Turnbull & Asser shirts, Hermès ties, Fratelli Rossetti shoes. Would’ve run around like Kevin Rowland, scruffy Dexy himself,
Come on, Eileen
, if he could’ve, if it wouldn’t have drawn eyes. Instead, old jeans, T-shirts, a gray Aran sweater, and a brown knit, and he put holes in the elbows with a Biro, having tossed the Parker Duofold. (Not true: Like all else, the fountain pen was seized and sold at auction.)
Figured now he could hide in plain sight, more or less.
With all the expenses, he still had about 300,000 euros stashed here and there. No one knew, not even Trudi.
Decided to buy himself a perch and look down on the world, laugh as the rabble passed by. But then it came to him: no, he wanted his nose in it, wanted to smell the stench of ordinary life, to listen to the love song of the forlorn, revel in their petty grievances, in their miseries, watch as the bloody stasis took hold, watch as the light dimmed and died.
The trader bought himself a pub.
A dump over on the north side of the Liffey, off the Royal Canal, a regular shitehole it was, a right kip. Entrance in a stone alley beyond mounds of rubbish, and you couldn’t stumble upon it without a map. Celtic Tiger, my arse, it seemed to say. Two steps down and the rainwater flooded the drain, and that was all right too. Mold and rotten wood, the floorboards sagging.
The place reeked of failure, of resignation.
Perfect.
“Welcome home, you bastard,” the trader said as he stepped over the moat, dusted his hands, coughed.
It needed a name, didn’t it?
The trader, who by now was calling himself Eamonn or English Bill, depending, thought about it, and his first instinct was to call it “Rory’s.” No, “Ballyshannon,” after Rory’s birthplace. “The Calling Card,” that’s a good one, after Rory’s—
“I must be out of me feckin’ mind,” said English Bill to no one.
Which wasn’t far from true now, was it? Talking to shadows, the cobwebs: took more than one roundhouse to the side of the head in the community shower in Coldbath Fields, he did, though well short of what he had coming.
Pitch black now in the pub and he doesn’t know it, maybe his eyes have gone weak again. Thinking a little crank would do him good.
“The Rag and Bone,” he said, his throat feeling like he ate sand. Thinking of his childhood, and Yeats.
Yeah, and soon tour buses are parking out front and the Japs are snapping photos, thinking they’ve tripped over history.
Back to square one, and two hours later, still not a clue. And then another hour after that, come and gone.
Cheesed off, he came up with “Póg Mo Thóin,” as in “Kiss My Arse,” but he let it float, and he fell asleep on the bar, woke up to the gnawing and
cheep-cheep
chatter of a rat inches from his skull.
Got up, pissed in the sink when the jax was two feet away. Cupped his hand and took a mouthful of brown water, felt the rust wash over his Italian teeth.
Soon, sunrise and thin white light through the veins in the painted windows, and he can see the booths against the mud-brick walls, drunk-tilted and ready to fall in on themselves, creaking even in the shouting silence, and who’d give a shite?
And then, like inspiration, like Yeats dreaming, “Cathleen Ni Houlihan,” it comes to him: “Desmond’s.”
Brilliant.
But he don’t know why.
“Desmond’s,” and he likes the sound of it. “Desmond’s.” Likes it because it don’t mean nothing.
They started coming within minutes after the Guinness and Murphy’s trucks pulled out, smelling it as they stumbled along, squat little men, and they were the dregs and had nothing to say. The same story, again, again: never had a break, this bastard or that, she was hell on earth she was; ah, but me dear sweet mother, I’ll tell ya, and me da, Fecky the Ninth he was, but, God, I loved him. Sitting but a stool apart, three, four of them, each brutalizing the same tune. Clay faces in the flicker of cheap candles, a motley bunch straight out of Beckett, and moths flew up from under their tattered greatcoats.
The trader wanted entertainment, stories of the long, long fall, and soon he realized he had put Desmond’s at the end of the shite funnel, and who but them was going to appear?
“Jaysus,” he said as he rinsed a glass in foul water, “the sin of pride, my arse.”
“What’s that you say, Eamonn?” asked one of the sagging men, spider veins, rheumy eyes, fingers stained piss-yellow, paralytic before noon.
“I said, ‘Get the fuck out.’ All of you.” Shouting, bringing it from the bellows. “You and you and you!” Finger stabbing the air, and there’s the door. “Out! O. U. T.”
The men shrugged, plopped down, hitched up their trousers, and slouched out, forearms a shield from the sun.
And then the trader made a mistake.
He jammed the bolt across the door, poured himself a pint to wash the crystal meth off the back of his throat, went into a threadbare carton, and dug out Rory’s
BBC
Sessions
, cut in ’74 but released when he was in Coldbath Fields, four years after Rory died. Whipsnap “Calling Card,” “Used to Be” like a cold knife against yer spin. The trader blasted it, oh did he blast it, and they heard it in the alley through the cracks, the ancient splinter wood, rattling bricks. The trader had every piece of music by Rory Gallagher that was ever recorded—all the officials, bootlegs too, bits of tape, third-generation copies; snatches of solos, rehearsals, sound checks, Rory turning the white Strat into a chainsaw, Rory levitating.
The bastards didn’t get the trader’s stash when they sent him up, the pricks, they let his lawyers cart it away; and he could tell you which was the solo in “Walk on Hot Coals” on
Irish Tour ’74
and which was the night before, two nights hence, thanks to some boyo who smuggled in a recorder under his coat. The trader had twenty-one versions of Rory doing “Messin’ with the Kid,” one more kick-ass than the next, and he blasted every one of them, and more, for four days and nights straight, shaking Desmond’s to its foundation.
And when he opened the door, they were lined up halfway to the Liffey, shivering in the cold, shuffling, frozen fingers tucked under their arms. Hopeful eyes now. Expectations.
Word was a Rory pub was opening by the Royal Canal, and they wanted in. Rory was their man. Rory pushed the blood through their veins, and if someone was going to pay him tribute, they were going to be there, ice and snow and wind and hunger be damned.
“What the fuck?” the trader said, squinting against the silver light, suddenly wishing he hadn’t the need for more crank and something other than stale crisps.
By 8 o’clock they were three deep at the bar, totally jammers, and the snug was swollen, and Rory wailed, setting the fingerboard ablaze, and the trader had hired himself a bouncer and a lass to clear the tables. The next day he needed a man to pull the taps, and a plumber to fix the jax.