The Death of an Irish Tinker (2 page)

Dublin
February

IT HAD BEGUN six months earlier in the dead of winter. With the men who put the other man down. They could not have seen Biddy Nevins. She was on her knees across the street with a large concrete planter between her and them.

Kneeling on the footpath, she was counting the change people had tossed her for her colored chalk drawing of a page from the Book of Kells. In fact, it was the page that was presently on display in the Trinity College Library at the other end of Grafton Street.

Around noon Biddy had called into the college and glanced at the book, a new page of which was turned every day. She had then drawn the page perfectly on the pavement, the ornate Celtic design and complex Latin phrasing letter perfect. Biddy herself, however, was illiterate and unschooled, even in art.

It was a talent that she had discovered while in hospital, recovering from the gear—as heroin was called—that had
marred six years of her young life. Biddy needed only to glance at a printed page, a painting, a person, or a thing once, and she could draw it like a photocopy.

It was also the talent that had led her to be called the Queen of the Buskers, her own Mickalou with his music being the King of the many sidewalk artists and minstrels who plied Dublin’s most fashionable commercial district. Closed to traffic, Grafton Street was usually thronged with shoppers; now, as a cold winter evening set in, however, nearly all had gone home.

It was a shout or a scream that caused Biddy to look up from her take and over at the men. Streetwise since her Traveler father had dropped her off in Dublin during the winter she turned nine—to “harden” her, he said—there was little that could occur around Biddy that she did not ken. Which made what was happening on the corner across from her stranger still.

Standing in deep shadows by the gates to St. Stephen’s Green were two big
shadogs,
called shades by Biddy and her other Traveler friends. Dressed in their winter blues, their broad chests were spangled with the silver buttons of the Garda Siochana, Ireland’s national police. But it was the man between them who was crying out, “Jesus, no! Please! I beg yeh, I’ll do anyt’in’! Name it, Tod. Just fookin’ name it, and it’s fookin’ yours. Isn’t it enough you’ve already fookin’ crippled me?”

It was then that Biddy noticed that the two shades were holding the man up, as though there were something wrong with his legs. And a fourth man—the man he was appealing to—now stepped out of the shadows to look up the street in the direction that the traffic flowed around the large park in the center of Dublin. There was little traffic at this hour of a winter evening, when most people were having their tea, but the lights of an oncoming bus caught the short, dapper man whom Biddy recognized immediately and loathed.

Called the Toddler because of how he was built—round and wide—and how he walked, which was flat-footed, he was without a doubt the biggest drug dealer in the country. “And one wily fooker altogether,” said Mickalou, who had got straight with Biddy and had once run for the Toddler when he had no other choice in life.

Biddy stopped counting, scooped up the remaining change, and tossed it into her chalk box. She did not want to be anywhere near the Toddler, even across a street, and she had Mickalou and their four-year-old daughter to get home to in the flat they rented off Patrick Street, about a half mile away. She’d pick up a few bangers, a cabbage, and a loaf on the way, and they’d eat in for a change on such a bitter night.

But Biddy had only just closed the lid when the man cried out again, “No! Please! I have a wife, a fam—” And the two cops rushed him out of the shadows toward the double-decker bus, the front of which now lurched around the corner. They hurled him headfirst under the large back wheels.

There was another pitiable cry that was cut short by a sharp, cracking sound, like a balloon bursting or a backfire, and the bus roared off toward Dawson Street, where it would turn.

It had been the man’s head. It was flattened on the tar, his popped eyes lying side by side like a cutout with a halo of blood and brain. And yet one arm now jerked up, as though to feel the damage, before falling back onto the tar.

Biddy did not realize that she was now on her feet and had taken a step or two toward the street until the Toddler turned his head to her. It took only a moment for both of them to react.

Like a salute, the Toddler’s hand darted at her as Biddy turned to flee. “Get her! Get that Tinker bitch!” And the two shades—who couldn’t be shades—sprinted across the street, one angling off to keep her from running into King Street toward the shopping arcade there. The other one came right for her.

Down the dark brick promenade of Grafton Street Biddy Nevins plunged, her chalk box under one arm, the heavy woolen greatcoat that she wore against the cold flapping behind her. Now nineteen, she was a tall, thin woman with yellow gold hair that formed tight natural curls she wore long. Like some other Travelers whose clan had “married close,” she had one blue eye, the other brown. But her high cheekbones and fine, even features were those of her mother’s prominent Traveling family, the Maughams, and she looked all of what she was: an exotic creature in every regard.

Who could shift, because she had been forced to and fast for most of her life. She pegged by Cathedral Street and Moore Lane, which were too narrow and too dark to enter and hope for help if she was caught. And the one, the smaller shade, was right on her heels.

With her heart in her mouth and her chest bursting, Biddy rushed by Bewley’s Tea Room and the lighted display windows of Dunnes and Switzers and the Brown Thomas department stores, before cutting into Wicklow Street. If only she could find a shade, a
real
shade, but that wouldn’t help her either if there was only one.

Madly she racked her brain for a refuge down the streets and laneways where, as a child, she had begged and stolen and run in a wilding pack with other abandoned children. They had terrorized tourists, stolen cars and anything that wasn’t nailed down, and booted drugs, which was the beginning of the end for so many of them. And now maybe for her, here where it all had started.

But would she want the police? she asked herself, glancing back to find that she now had a half block lead on the only one of them she could see. God, no. Not if she could avoid it. Cops would mean giving her name and later detectives, who would come around when they put together why she was running with who she was, with her work, and with the dead man. Biddy only ever drew Book of Kells pages there on the wide squares at the top of Grafton Street.

No shades could protect her from the Toddler when no shades had been able to put him away for lo these many years. He was, like, immune or in with them—the shades—who, some said, now worked for him. Could this be proof? No—in spite of all that had happened to her, Biddy refused to believe it; otherwise…there’d be no point in carrying on. There had to be somebody out there in “Buffer Land,” as Mickalou called the settled society, who was good. Who believed in right and wrong. They couldn’t be all like the politicians—on the take.

Bang. Biddy ran right into him—the second shade who was not a shade. He must have circled around through William Street and run fast. Bouncing off his broad chest before he could grab her, Biddy shot the box of chalk and change up into his big rough pan, shouting, “He’s not the police! He’s
not
the police!” at a car in William Street that had slowed to watch the altercation. “He’s a fookin’
murderer
!”

And her hands—they came up hacking, scratching, punching at his face, churning—fast, faster—so he couldn’t grab her. Her boot—she got that in too, right between the bastard’s legs. Once, twice. He roared and lunged for her. Christ, where was the other one? He couldn’t be far behind.

But the big one had caught hold of her lapel and now began lifting her off her feet with one hand while cocking the fist of the other. Spinning, Biddy slipped one sleeve and then the other, as the hand, the arm, the fist punched past her ear. She pivoted and left him crouched there, holding the garment.

To hell with it, she thought, as she sprinted down the slight hill and toward the many headlamps she could see lashing by at the other the end of the street. Like any other “Tinker bitch,” she had a closetful of cast-off clothes back at the flat. The heavy thing had only been slowing her down.

It was then she heard the shots, not one but a bunch of them booming like a cannon in the tight pack of buildings along the narrow street. A shopwindow near her head cracked, a second bullet knocked out a piece, and Biddy
only just jumped into the road when the whole works—a wall of glass—crashed into the street.

Bolting right out into the busy Dame Street as she had years ago after nicking some buffer’s billfold, Biddy ran right at the oncoming cars where no sane person would follow. All she could think of was Mickalou and her baby, the only two people who mattered in her life. It was plain now they would kill her; hadn’t the shots proved it?

The Toddler would have stopped at her chalk drawing and would now know who she was: Mickalou the Gypsy minstrel’s girl. The “Tinker bitch” that he’d already called her. Another junkie and therefore expendable, somebody the Toddler had been killing slowly for years and now would finish. No—now had the
right
to finish, like the man he put under the bus.

Didn’t the Toddler and his gear
rule?
There was graffiti like that—
THE TODDLER RULES
or
TOD’S TOT, THE
TOTAL
GEAR
—all over the city. Or the drawing that was printed on glassine tabs, of a smiling Toddler with top hat and spats, holding something (Biddy knew what it was!) behind his back.

Written on the bottom was the sentence they all said to each other so often nobody gave a thought to what it meant:
IT’S
DEADLY!
It was scrawled in shooting galleries, in pub loos, on walls where people were poor and stupid, the way Biddy herself had been for all those years.

And the expression on his face? That said, Come and get it, you stupid dead fucks. Come into my world and let me kill you slowly. I’ll take everything from you, and after it’s mine, I’ll take what’s left of your worthless lives. If I choose.

With one phone call the bastard would learn where she and Mickalou lived, and he’d take away Mickalou and hold him until he got her. Then he’d kill Mickalou too, and maybe even the baby. It was her fear speaking to her. But why not? Why not a baby? It would add to the way people spoke of him, to the terror. The awe. It was said that the
Toddler never killed the same way twice, and it was always never certain that he had. Only that the people he wanted dead got dead. Sometimes horribly, like just now at the top of Grafton Street. God, why hadn’t she packed up sooner and gone home?

Back on the footpath now, rushing by the gates to Dublin Castle, Biddy could see a guard in the kiosk, and she thought of turning in. He too could make a phone call. There was even some class of guard office right there on the grounds, as she remembered. But would he or any shade believe her, a Tinker and former junkie, a pavement artist with a long record and now a tall tale? How long would it take her to convince them that what she said was true and send a car to the flat? Too long, she decided. And had she not learned never to trust the shades again? Not after what they’d done to her those first few months in the city when she was nine.

Raped repeatedly, night after night, by the boys in the gang of Traveler children who were living by the dump in Ringsend, Biddy had hemorrhaged and fainted in the street. The shades took care of her all right; out of the fat into the fire. From the Richmond Hospital they took her to a “shelter” where she was molested every night by the superior of the place. To give the nun credit, she was gentler than the boys. Sometimes.

Christ, a limo now poked out its bonnet at the top of the street. It was a Merc, long and black with tinted windows and an amber spotlight that the driver was playing along the footpath, as the car drifted toward her.

Biddy nipped into the Castle Inn, the bar, not the lounge, and noted how conversations stopped the moment she appeared in the doorway. Sure, she must have color in her cheeks after all her running, but to appear hatless and coatless on such a bitter night and dressed only in a fisherman’s knit jumper and a long plaid kilt with her tangled blond tresses and two-color eyes, Biddy could be only one thing. “Knacker,” she heard somebody mutter.

Her eyes darted first to the other doors: to the lounge, another in back of the bar that seemed to lead to a kitchen, and a third that was the men’s room. Next she scanned the crowd to see whose eyes were still on her good chest. Without her coat or chalk box she had no money, and she should ring up and warn Mickalou while she still had the chance.

She turned to a middle-aged man who was sitting against the wall. A whiskey drinker who had on a good suit, he was probably some bureaucrat from the nearby City Hall or the Castle. “Please, sir, for the love of God, could you give me a bit of help? It’s a matter of life and death,” she whispered in a chesty rush, words that she had heard her mother and so many other Traveling women utter over the price of a bottle of milk, but here what she said was the truth. “May I fall down paralyzed dead, if I’m tellin’ you a word of a lie. I’ve to make a phone call. Two lives depend on it, and I came away without me coat and purse.”

“You there, woman,” the barman called to her. “Out, out with yeh now! No beggin’ in here.”

But she had fixed the man with her eyes that she knew would tell him truer than words. There was a long moment on which her entire life seemed to hinge, as the barman came around to put her out in front of the Toddler’s Mercedes and the man paused to decide. But his hand reached out and shoved a fifty pence coin toward her.

“God love ye, sir. You’re a savior.” She turned toward the phone.

“It’s not God’s love that I need tonight,” he said to a companion.

“Being a sinning savior.”