Authors: Bartholomew Gill
“Out! Get us out. And give me some time. I’m fed to the teeth with
shit
like this. Jesus.” He tried to look down at his sliced and bruised body, but he could not see.
“Now, missus,” Gladden began saying, “if you’ll just give me that gun—”
When it went off again. The blast was stellar and left McGarr’s ears ringing with crinkling sounds, like icicles falling.
“Out!” Noreen ordered. “Get out into the yard, and if you so much as move quickly or break, I’ll put one of these in your hide. I’m a dab shot, and Paddy Power was a hearty of my father. Because of you I’ve got a husband half-destroyed and a baby scared to death. And not a witness within two leagues.”
“What does Paddy Power have to do—”
“Out! Get out!”
McGarr was now seeing enough to watch Gladden move by them. Out in the sun of the yard McGarr doused his eyes in the rainwater of an animal trough that had filled during the storm of the night before. He then felt the depth of the slices below his neck and on the palm of his right hand, which were still bleeding. Both needed stitching, but not by Gladden.
“Take that thing out of here,” he said to Noreen, meaning the gun. “Go back to Parknasilla and find Bernie in the lounge. Tell him what happened and to stay close to a phone.”
Noreen began to object, but all McGarr had to add was, “Maddie,” and she left to quiet her baby, who was now bawling.
“So, you were going to give me a ‘toompin’ I’d never forget,” said McGarr, moving in on Gladden, who did not stir. “Can I tell you what I’ll never forget?” He had stopped in front of the larger man to look up into his strange, polished-looking jade eyes. “That slane. And the pike. No ‘toompin’ at all, you had weapons. Now I’ll give you a second chance. With your hands.”
Gladden’s punch, wheeling off the breadth of his shoulders, whistled over McGarr’s head. And a second, thrown with the other fist as he rocked back and in at McGarr.
Injuries or not, it was McGarr’s type of brawl altogether, and he wondered how many actual fistfights the good doctor and former, visionary TD, who had been born and raised in these barren hills, had had in his time. Not more than a dozen, he was willing to bet. If that.
McGarr, on the other hand, had been born and raised in Dublin’s Inchicore, hard by the rail yard and gasworks. His first sport had been the punch-up. Necessarily. Then, of course, there had been his work, and he now took full advantage of the larger man’s propinquity, butting his head into his sternum and lashing out, once low and once high, with his fists.
The first blow buckled Gladden’s body, so that the second landed squarely on the bridge of his long nose just as his head was jerking forward. The cartilage folded under McGarr’s knuckles, blood burst over Gladden’s face. His long, bent legs shot out, dumping him on his backside in front of McGarr, who stepped quickly out of range of his large hands.
McGarr knew what Gladden was now seeing. A great, bloody red blotch of color that would molt into a rainbow of blinding pain. And yet McGarr felt cheated that it was over so quickly. The big man now turned aside, and his breakfast came up.
McGarr noticed a bucket, filled it with trough water, and dashed it into Gladden’s face. McGarr looked behind him to see Noreen’s car on the narrow drive, slowing to ease around Gladden’s battered Land Rover.
Gladden was trying to gain his feet. He slipped on the mud and fell into his vomit. When he had gotten to hands and knees again, McGarr put a shoe on his buttocks and sent him sprawling toward the trough. There, like McGarr before him, he doused his head in the water.
A jetliner, making for Shannon to the north, now passed silently far above the pinnacle of the mountain, its great silver wings glinting in the full sun. McGarr went into the shed and gathered up Paddy Power’s note cards.
The whine of the descending jet now came to them. He
waited until it had diminished before saying, “You stole these before you poisoned Paddy Power. That makes it premeditation, murder in the first degree.”
“I didn’t murder Paddy. Nor did I steal his note cards. I was
sent
them.” Gladden again lowered his head to the cold water in the trough.
“By whom?”
“By Paddy.”
“Why would he have wanted you to have them?”
“Because he knew they would try to kill him.”
“They?”
“Frost and O’Duffy and their crowd.”
“Where were they sent you? Here?”
But Gladden would say no more, and McGarr collected the rest of the cards.
Next he lifted the greatcoat off its peg. “Where’s your felt hat?” he called out to Gladden, who was now sitting against the trough, both hands raised to his nose as though attempting to reset the cartilage. One hand came down and indicated the old Land Rover that was parked at some distance from the house.
McGarr made Gladden drive. “Take us to the Waterville Lake Hotel.”
Gladden shook his head and looked away. Already the sockets of both eyes were bluing, and his puffed nose with its split nostril was canted off to one side. “I only hope you know what you’re doing,” he observed, turning the truck around. “There’s a hell of a stink in this. Your career and a lawsuit to boot.”
Or a
hell
of charge against a man who, as a doctor, had sworn to heal and protect life whenever he could: murder of his self-described best friend.
And the attempted murder of another man who had sworn to protect life and society whenever he could.
“Is there a doctor in Waterville?”
“I don’t need one.”
No, McGarr thought; Gladden would wear that nose like a badge of high culchie honor, having been set upon by “O’Duffy’s man.” The tough little police gurrier and gunman from Dublin.
But McGarr hadn’t been thinking about Gladden’s med
ical needs. He had his own wounds to worry about, and whatever sepsis the crusted blade of that slane might create.
First, however, he would take Gladden to the desk of the Waterville Lake Hotel for an identification. Some country gorsoon had delivered Paddy Power’s stolen note cards to his ex-wife, Nell Power, and McGarr was betting it had been Gladden.
OVER BREAKFAST MCGARR had told Ruth Bresnahan, “This is not a murder investigation. It can’t be, no matter how right Mossie Gladden was in predicting how Paddy Power had died,” which was by digitalis poisoning. “We’ve got the locked door, the proper medications in the appropriately labeled bottles, and the obvious signs that Power had attempted to treat himself. If he was murdered, he was murdered by his own hand.
“That leaves Gladden’s charge of murder, which means we must investigate the death. Even if it were outright murder, I’m not sure we would want to call it that, at least until we had proof.” For the sake of the country, which would be mourning Power, he had meant.
“The most we can do is poke around, perhaps stir things up
gently
,” he had emphasized, “if we can. But mainly we should listen and observe. There has to be some reason that we don’t yet appreciate why the government in the form of Commissioner Farrell and Ministers Harney and Quinn are so concerned. Perhaps if we’re patient, they’ll let us know what it is.”
Which had long been McGarr’s approach to interviewing. On Bresnahan’s first case McGarr had told Bresnahan, “If you can keep the person talking, sooner or later he will tell you what you wish to know.”
And was Bresnahan’s approach now, while sitting with Shane Frost in the bar at Parknasilla.
“Are you acquainted with the Irish debt?” Frost asked. “Is it an Irish accent I’m hearing?”
“Pretend I’m not,” Bresnahan replied. “Fill me in.”
Frost liked the sound of that. He smiled.
They had taken the last two seats at a corner of Parknasilla’s small, tasteful public bar, which was now crowded before lunch. Bankers and the few reporters who had remained to follow up on the revelation of the press conference were sitting in tight groups or standing in clutches, their voices lowered so as not to carry in the gleaming chestnut and cut-glass confines of the narrow room. Paddy Power’s death was on every lip.
“After the Second World War Ireland found itself a small agrarian nation with a stable population, no debt, much genteel poverty, and little future beyond whatever Britain, who were still our major trading partner, were willing to grant us. Historically that had been less than nothing, and after we decided to remain neutral during the war and winked at German submarines charging their batteries in our bays and harbors, well—we had to do something. Certainly Britain was not going to reward us for betting against them.
“Debt was the key. The idea was to prime our economic pump with borrowed money, get some industries going and Irish-made goods on the world market. When money began coming in, the whole mechanism would become self-sustaining. And there we’d be—a modern, productive
republic
for nothing more than the courage and foresight to risk debt.” Frost raised a finger. Watching it descend, he pointed it at the long and gentle slope of Bresnahan’s chest. “Mark that word.”
“Republic,” she said.
Frost nodded. “When tied to entry into the European Community and cheap petrodollars, it made great good sense. Some—Paddy was one—made the point that with worldwide inflation and low interest rates, it was foolish
not
to borrow as much as we could at what amounted to negative interest rates. Every underdeveloped country did.
“The second oil shortage and Reaganomics in the eighties ended all that. Interest rates soared instead of falling, and economic contraction set in. Suddenly new bor
rowing and the easy money of the seventies had to be paid back in hard currency, the
hardest
for a fledgling industrial nation with the largest debt in relation to gross national product in Western Europe.
“Still and all, we would have been great, had the bulk of the money been spent on the capital-producing aspects of the economy. But we Irish are an impatient people, and we desired to leap, all at one go, into the twentieth century. We demanded all the welfare benefits of a modern, progressive industrial society—a Denmark or Holland—before we possessed the means of paying for those privileges. Hadn’t we the example of Northern Ireland with its British benefits just across the border?
“I don’t much fancy politicians myself, but they found themselves snagged on the horns of a dilemma. They could oppose such spending and be voted out of office, or support it and be condemned for corrupting the economy at some later date. Of course they took the easy way out.
“And thus was born the villain of the piece, the Irish welfare state and not—”
“An Irish
republic
.”
Frost smiled fully and let his light gray eyes mingle in hers. He had an apt, as well as a beautiful, pupil. “We also got ourselves debt. Big debt. It eats up sixty-five percent of the average unmarried urban worker’s wages.”
There he was referring to Bresnahan’s pay packet exactly.
“Ninety percent of all income tax collected—some thirty percent of all annual government revenues—goes just to service its interest. Sixty percent of that money leaves the country.” Frost turned his head down the bar. “Excuse me?”
Ward, who was washing glasses, looked their way.
“Could you come down here, please? We’d like something wet.”
Undoubtedly, thought Ward, drying his hands.
“Whiskey?” Frost asked Bresnahan.
“Neat. Water on the side,” she called down to Ward.
“Two.
Now
, please.”
“And Mr. Power’s proposal, the one he was going to
ask this conference to consider?” And use as his first step into politics.
Frost tilted his head and smiled ruefully. “Brilliant, uncomplicated and…elegant, like most everything Paddy did. His purpose was to clear the debt in one swift act, insist upon a change in the Irish tax structure, and thereby position the country to deal with the challenges of the Single European Act of 1992, which will abolish trade tariffs in the European Community.”
Ward set the drinks before them and allowed his eyes to flicker up at Bresnahan, who smiled. He moved a step or two away, as though busying himself with some bottles. At the other end of the bar Sonnie was dealing single-handedly with a brisk trade.
“Using Chile as a model, Paddy was planning to put before this conference the proposal of converting Irish debt into equity in Irish government enterprises. He had in mind privatizing all the wasteful state-run enterprises like the rail and bus systems, the phone network, the Peat Board, Radio Telefis Eireann. Those agencies are sitting on valuable resources but can’t compete even now, when protected by government rules and regulations. Faced with foreign competition in 1992, they’ll only become further burdens on the Treasury. Why not barter them away while we can, for debt relief? Retaining Irish control, of course.”
But all the jobs that would be lost, Bresnahan thought. Private enterprise would never put up with the featherbedding and shenanigans that went on in most state-run organizations she knew of. And then there were “The unions,” she thought aloud; Irish unions had to be either the best or the worst in the world, depending on your membership or lack thereof. Every third person either groused or practiced rabble-rousing as a matter of ethnic pride.
“Paddy had an answer for them as well, which would also solve one of the major challenges of 1992. What if all those union members who deserved to retain their posts under the new scheme suddenly discovered their pay packets taxed
not
at the current sixty-five percent, but rather in the neighborhood of twenty or twenty-five percent? How would that sit with most Irish voters? With no debt, income taxes could be more than halved. Immediately.
“Also, foreign firms—all those companies that we piled up our debt trying to attract to Ireland—would be less likely to pack up and leave in 1992. Because of our tax structure, foreign firms must now systematically double the salaries of the employees they send here. With trading advantages expunged in ’92, many are likely to leave.”
Frost reached for his glass.
Bresnahan thought for a moment. Like most bold new initiatives, the Power plan sounded marvelous, and she wondered why it had not been thought of before. But of course Frost had said it had. “Isn’t Chile saddled by some atrocious dictatorship?”
Frost smiled and nodded, carefully setting the brimming glass before him. “It was, when the restructuring occurred. Which is the point. It’s something that only a Paddy, who had no political ‘debts,’ as it were, could have gotten through. Somebody who was independent, new to politics, and enjoyed widespread popular support. And then not without a lot of help and by referendum.”
Bresnahan nodded. Although a
fait accompli
, the 1992 SEA was still being hotly debated all over the country. But, say he had gotten the Irish people to accept his program
and
it worked, Power would have been canonized. He would have solved the central problem that was causing so much hardship and emigration. “What happens to the proposal now? Did it die with Power?”
Frost shook his head. “Not in the least.” His eyes snapped up at hers. “Do you want Eire Bank’s opinion, or my own?”
“Your own, surely. We’re being candid here, are we not?”
Frost returned her smile, then raised his chin to look away, as though contemplating the future. He waited while she studied his severely handsome and chiseled features. “That in this, as in other matters, Paddy was a genius. A kind of seer. It’s undoubtedly an idea whose time has come and just might make the difference between Ireland’s foundering on the rocks of 1992 or our sailing off into prosperity. Without debt we could respond to the challenges of the SEA. With it…” Frost shook his head.
“And that Paddy Power dead is probably more valuable
to the Irish people than Paddy Power alive.” Frost glanced at Bresnahan to see if she was shocked. “
In this situation
. Sure, Paddy had personal force and charisma. And
genius
, that much is history. But what is also established was his record as a”—Frost looked away, as though having to choose his words carefully—“do-gooder and…crank. It was not for nothing he called somebody like Mossie Gladden his doctor and friend. And the Power Fund!”
Frost returned his gaze to Bresnahan, and his eyes were suddenly glassy with contempt. “All that house-building and giveaway to people who are too weak, meek, or ignorant to help themselves. Encouraging them to”—he searched for a term—“
procreate
, for Jesus’ sake. He was just compounding our problem with them through further, innumerable generations. More good would have come had he taken the money out and burned it.
“No”—Frost shook his head once, as though deciding with finality—“Paddy might have sold the program to the nation, but its implementation would have been botched. Politics is a fine art that is not learned late in life.”
“And now?” Bresnahan encouraged.
Frost’s eyebrows danced once, and he even smiled slightly. “The future of Paddy’s proposal?”
Bresnahan nodded.
“Why, it’s bright, of course. Now that it is in more capable hands. Done right, I can see it becoming a kind of…memorial to him, who was so much loved for his simplicity and generosity. You know, a kind of national paean to Saint Paddy the Second. We Irish are such a contrary people. We love nobody more than a—”
“Martyr,” she suggested.
“—and a man who—think of it—championed gross, unlimited debt, and then founded a bank to profit by the borrowing. Suddenly as rich as Croesus, he would have turned around and redistributed our money according to his own plan of how things should be. And for
that
he will be loved.”
Which wasn’t quite fair, thought Bresnahan, according to Power’s history, which had been well documented in the press. Power had begun his fortune with Eire Bank, but made the lion’s share of it abroad with the Yanks and the
Japanese. And then there were plenty of rich people the world over who never gave other human beings a passing thought. Also, Power had donated his time and
worked
for the poor, often with pick and shovel for weeks on end.
“But who, then, if not Mr. Power?”
Heated on her tangerine legs that were crossed in front of her, Frost let his smile climb her body and settle on her lips. “Who else but the sanest and most deft of the Irish politicians? Who is himself a self-made millionaire and throughout his career has been all for privatization and free enterprise. Who began his career with Paddy and after whom Paddy even named his first son.”
“Sean Dermot O’Duffy,” said Bresnahan. The man who through his toady Fergus Farrell had as much as named the way Power had died. Or had been murdered.
“Certain details, of course, would have to be changed.”
“What about the write-down? Is that one of the details that will be changed?”
Frost’s smile fell slightly, and he released her hand. “May I ask
you
something and expect a candid answer? Where did you get that?”
“Another shareholder in Eire Bank. How many are you, by the way? Is there a list of shareholders available?”
Frost said nothing, only regarded her.
“What share is yours?”
“Nell Power told you,” he said.
“Will
she
inherit Mr. Power’s share?”
“I don’t believe you. Nell would never—”
“Ask her.”
“She’s
here?
” Frost’s eyes strayed to the sun room that they could survey through French doors.
Bresnahan thought of another question that McGarr had asked her to put to Frost. “What about lending as love? Power’s idea or yours?”
Elaborately Frost unbuttoned his suit coat and spread the lapels. Turning his body, he looked down at himself. “See anything you need the loan of?”
Bresnahan laughed. He
had
a sense of humor, which rather softened her hard opinion of him.
“My turn with the questions. What about dinner tonight? Away from here. I know a hotel in Kenmare with
a three-star Michelin rating. Their other accommodations are more agreeable still.”
Bresnahan tried to look flattered, but it was all too apparent from Frost’s easy delivery that he was used to receiving a yes. “Why don’t you start by asking my name.”