The Death of an Irish Politician (6 page)

At the dock in Galway City, a Garda sergeant was waiting for McGarr with the message to call the Pierce Hotel in Naas and ask for the minister for justice. McGarr imagined Horace C. K. Hubbard had contacted his own well-placed friends.

McGarr was wrong.

From the moment he saw the minister standing at the hotel bar, he knew the request
for this meeting was in some way extraordinary. A tall man whose paunch had fallen, David Horrigan grasped a whiskey in his right hand and stared into it as though trying to divine some mystery at the bottom of the glass. The minister, however, did not drink. And although the bar with its flagstone floor and shaded windows was cool, Horrigan’s brow was beaded with sweat. Because of the recent change in government ministers, McGarr didn’t know the man well and wondered why he was away from his office on a working day and why he had asked McGarr to meet him here, outside Dublin.

Plainly, Horrigan hadn’t expected Noreen to be along and her presence irked him. His pleasantries seemed forced. At length, he asked her if he might have a word with McGarr alone, and leaving her to lunch in the dining room with the publican’s wife, whom Noreen knew from her days at University College, Dublin, the minister for justice and McGarr climbed a flight of stairs to his suite on the second floor, which Horrigan explained so: “Like you, Peter, I grew up in Dublin on Clanbrassil Street near the Four Courts. Like yours, my family was poor. I’ve been going through your dossier, which I took the liberty of lifting from the files a few moments after you left the Castle Saturday afternoon.”

“Gerald told me everybody had left.” Horrigan’s office was not in Dublin Castle but on
St. Stephen’s Green, and whereas the minister was responsible for the Garda, as a politician he did not normally have free access to their files.

“I was hoping it would seem that way.” Horrigan was nervous, and his hand shook as he fit the door key into its lock. “Where was I?”

“Hotel living.” McGarr was now on his toes in every sense. Seldom had he ever allowed a governmental officer of Horrigan’s rank to engage him in such familiar conversation. Much political in-fighting was transpiring in Dublin mostly because of the differing approaches to the trouble in the North. Horrigan had made no bones about his position: a united Ireland controlled in Dublin. He wanted England to purchase at market price the land and real property of any Scotch-Irishman who couldn’t live with a Dublin-based government, and then have England set up a program of resettlement back where Cromwell’s campaigners had come from, across the Irish Sea in Scotland and northern England. He wanted the Dublin government to repudiate the 1937 constitution that had declared a special relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and Ireland and had prohibited divorce and contraception. McGarr thought this an interesting but naïve plan, impracticable and designed only to put Horrigan in office. It had proved tremendously popular.

Horrigan swung the door wide and McGarr stepped into a room appointed not in standard hotel gauche but rather a period setting that McGarr judged as accurate and tasteful as any of the mansions he had visited during his many burglary investigations. Most of the pieces were Chippendale originals. A finely detailed oriental rug with blue and green patterning on a beige background covered most of a parquet floor. The windows were French, specially constructed in the recent past. Brilliant linen drapes gathered the light from the courtyard. “My father was a farrier who worked for the Shelbourne Hotel whenever they had too much work for their own man to handle. I, being the oldest, was let out as a step-and-fetch-it, bootblack, you know what I mean.” Horrigan had opened a sideboard that contained a number of crystal decanters below. “And I said to myself that if some day I could afford it, neither house nor farm nor boat nor castle would be my abode. Nothing but a hotel for me with hot-and-cold running servants, a kitchen, bar, stables, and lots of company. And so here I am. Malt?”

“Please.”

Horrigan poured McGarr a generous drink and dropped the stopper back into the neck of the decanter.

McGarr was trying to remember the details of this man’s life. His address in Dublin
was
the Shelbourne, in fact a suite of rooms on the
top floor overlooking St. Stephen’s Green. He had made his money by slippery practices. As the government’s lawyer, he had negotiated with a cartel of international oil companies the establishment of a deep-water port in Bantry Bay that could accommodate the supertankers of the future. When the combine came to purchase land for their storage tanks and refinery, David Horrigan’s father, mother, sisters, and brothers just happened to be the new owners of every square foot of waterfront property along the projected site. Horrigan had resigned his post and had remained unavailable for comment for nearly ten years, long enough time, he must have felt, for his gains to have become legitimized. He surfaced as a major contributor to the coffers of the Fianna Fail resurgence.

To the carping queries of a journalist during a television interview, Horrigan, a man with a lively intelligence, had explained his checkered career so: “And how did those other politicians, the ones with the English names we still kowtow to and let control disproportionate shares of the countryside, gather their fortunes? They made laws that declared them more equal, allowed them to steal us blind, and when there was nothing left they clapped us into a slavery more vicious and pervasive than that of Czarist Russia. Why? Because we were ‘barbarous,’ which meant we no longer owned anything. When I was growing up,
their cry was no different. The LAW!, they shouted whenever any of us started agitating for a redistribution of the country’s resources. I decided I would study this law which had been so good to so few. What did I learn? That the law was the tool by which the name Horrigan could appear on the deeds of several thousand acres of Bantry Bay shoreland instead of the name Guinness or Ormond or Watson. I don’t like the way things are any more than other patriotic. Irishmen, but, since they are, then I must conform until I enjoy a position preeminent enough to allow me and my people—the ones from the Dublin gutters like me, the ones from the rustic poverty of the country like my wife’s people—to effect sweeping change in this country. It is to this end I am working.” That statement and his stand on the Northern Ireland question gave him a seat in the Dail. His contributions to the party gave him his cabinet post.

Handing McGarr the drink, Horrigan scrutinized the detective in a way that made McGarr self-conscious. He was still in his boating garb. “You don’t know me,” Horrigan said, pacing in front of the mantel, on which the gold balls of an eight-day clock spun silent in a vacuum, “nor I you, outside of the bare details of our lives. It’s because of our backgrounds—Dublin, poverty, the law—that I chose to call you and not somebody from Internal Security or some other agency. What
I’m going to put to you, you needn’t accept, since my request cannot be official.” Horrigan turned to McGarr suddenly. “In this I’m thinking of you. If I have to go, no reason I should take anybody with me, much less you, who haven’t an idea of what’s happened.” Greying hair curled onto his brow. His face was characteristically Irish: bulbous nose, puffy cheeks and jowls. He was not a handsome man. His dark blue pin-striped suit was expensive, but he appeared uncomfortable in it.

He turned toward the window. “Sometimes I wonder how things happen and why so fast. It seems only weeks ago that I left school, got married, felt so young and enthusiastic. Now”—he let his narrow shoulders fall—“I feel so old.”

“How old are you?” asked McGarr, somewhat embarrassed at this confessional monologue.

“Forty-three.”

He looked at least fifty.

“I thought I saw things a little clearer than other people, you know, what was happening here in Ireland, what I should do to get ahead, how I could help myself and the country, the sort of family I wanted, the friends, the whole…works.” He let out a little laugh. “You know, I was wrong. It made me happy thinking I knew, and in that way I deluded myself no less than the dreamer who crawls into the amber world of a porter bottle.” He moved to
the sideboard and poured himself a whiskey.

“Certainly that won’t help,” said McGarr. “Tell me why you’ve called me here.”

“I’ve watched you work. You’re from Swift’s Dublin. That’s the sensibility I work in, but being a public man, I keep my kit bag of verbal palliatives close by.”

McGarr shook his head. “I’m from McGarr’s Dublin.”

“That’s what I mean,
just
what I mean!” Horrigan sat opposite McGarr in a wing-back chair that wrapped him in shadow. He took a sip of whiskey and shuddered as he swallowed. “We deal in the real, no—”

“Bull shit,” said McGarr.

“Exactly. Now, this is what has happened, why I called you here. Did you work on the Bombing Report?”

McGarr nodded. He had headed the investigation, and he knew Horrigan knew that.

“Then you know it blames the IRA, says it was a cheap political ploy. They had hoped to blame it on some one of the ‘loyal orders’ or some Protestant extremist group and thereby bring the fighting home to the Republic. They hoped to arouse public sentiment and support. Do you know my position?”

“On the IRA?”

Horrigan nodded.

“Not in so many words.” The IRA was as complex an organization as could be devised by the Irish people, who are an enigma unto
themselves, since, unlike the government, it claimed to represent their dreams as well as the most glorious moments of their past.

Horrigan said, “I support them.”

“All of them?” Some IRA elements were committed to urban terrorism.

“
All
of them. The rhetoric means nothing to me, nor the violence. For every drop of British blood now being shed up there, they have sucked buckets of ours. People say, why those British colonists have been living in Ulster for three hundred years! That just goes to show how tight is the iron grip those patriots, who now call themselves Proves or Maoists or whatever, are trying to break. In 1916 the average Dubliner thought the show at the GPO was a bloody farce.”

McGarr nodded and sipped from his whiskey.

“In any case, my copy of the report is missing.”

McGarr looked up. To his knowledge, the report was still most secret and political dynamite of the worst sort, since it blamed the IRA for the blast. And for the government it was a no-win situation: they had seemed to sit idly by while this organization, or some part of it, bombed downtown Dublin during rush hour.

Horrigan continued, “It was a question of degrees—how much of the report we were go
ing to release, how much innuendo we might have been able to create.”

McGarr furrowed his brow. He didn’t care for politics or politicians one bit. He had seen too many competent policemen become patsies for wily politicians.

“You know, we could go to the IRA and say, look, we know some part of your outfit did it, but there’s no reason to bring down the government too. We’ve been good to you. The arrests we’ve made, as you well know, have been
pro forma
. Here are your options or we’ll round up and intern every single IRA suspect we can find and then release the whole report: one, give us the names of the bunch of bastards who did it along with the evidence to hang them; two, give us some evidence to blame it on a British provocateur or any other organization but the IRA and its affiliates. Of course, we’ll hope they don’t just laugh at us. Mass arrests and internment would bring this government down in days. The people wouldn’t stand for it.”

McGarr felt very uncomfortable and needed another whiskey badly. Politics blurred things so. He had been one of the first to arrive in Nassau Street after the blast. He had found a little girl with a leg and a hand blown off. That was wrong, no two ways about it. He wanted to get back to the facts. “Was there another copy?”

“Not in this form. I was going to go over it
Thursday night one final time before we retyped it and sent it to the Taoseaich. This was the unedited version.”

“Where was it?”

“In the sideboard under lock and key, of course.”

McGarr could have gotten into that sideboard with a toothpick. His glance was more toward the whiskey decanter than the door lock. A person who didn’t drink had no idea of the timing necessary to be a successful host. McGarr imagined one whiskey might last Horrigan an eternity.

“You see, this is most embarrassing to me. In order to get elected I had to support the violence in the North. Now, when it happens here in my own electorate and I’m in charge of the investigation and it seems like the IRA might get blamed, I suddenly dispose of the report. Or, just as bad, I release only a part of the report and the whole thing then turns up in the press.”

“So somebody wants to get you and not necessarily the government.”

“That’s why I called you. It seems to be some sort of private vendetta. I believe firmly that if I were to resign today, the report would either be returned or the parts that this government would doubtless eliminate or obscure will never surface.” McGarr said nothing, only looked at the minister, who added, “But I don’t want to resign voluntarily. I’ve waited a
dozen years to get here. And where I’m headed I’ve wanted all of my life.”

“No forced entry. You must suspect somebody and not just the”—he waved his hand—“IRA. Who else knew you had the report with you?”

“My secretary, my first assistant, and”—Horrigan raised his glass to his mouth; he said over the surface of the liquor—“my wife.” He wet his upper lip. “My secretary is a widow near retirement who lives in Dublin. Both of her brothers died in the Troubles, both with the IRA.”

“Name?”

“Neila Monahan, two eighty-three North Circular Road.”

“Your first assistant?”

“A literary man. Sometimes submits poems in Irish to the
Times
.” Horrigan watched McGarr finish the whiskey in his tumbler. “Aren’t you going to take any of this down?”

“No.” McGarr never took notes, he simply concentrated all his intelligence on the vital details of every case. He could summon from memory the names, addresses, and distinguishing characteristics of all persons he had arrested and many of the others who had figured in his investigations.