Authors: Bartholomew Gill
“You’ll have to ask Mick. I wouldn’t know one from the other, not being in the market, so to speak.”
“Mick?” Bresnahan looked at the breensler.
“He’s over at the Scariff Inn in West Cove, playin’ the spoons.”
Said O’Suilleabhain. “I’ve bloody big quid burning a hole in me pocket. Tell you what, we’ll pop down there and I’ll lay the whole thing on the bar for all to admire. And enjoy.”
Good traditional Irish music touched something deep in Bresnahan. Having been preserved with fierce racial pride, it was a mixture—curious in this day and age—of life and antiquity, and it acted upon her as a kind of aphrodisiac, especially with a drink in hand.
The deep, rapid throbbing of the
bodhran
was the wild beating of the smitten heart. The fiddle, concertina, and flute, dueling together, were the spirits soaring, while the spoons provided the crack of mental activity, of reality and the need to make…connections in life.
Or to dance, which she had often on the flagstone floor of her father’s kitchen, while he beat time on his knees and watched with love and pride, and later in parish halls and
teach an ceoil
(houses of music) that were a feature of a handful of villages here in the West.
And standing hip to hip with Rory O’Suilleabhain, unable to keep her feet from moving as the music swelled to its rousing conclusion, Bresnahan felt more disloyal to Hugh Ward, whom she loved—or, at least only this morning had thought she loved—than when holding O’Suilleabhain’s hand or at any other moment in the two years that Ward and she had been together.
Ward had once said of such music, “Crude culchie shite, every last thump of it,” and most of the other jackeens she knew in Dublin thought the same. Had she been denying what was really dearest and best about who she was? Was there any need? Now.
The music had stopped. O’Suilleabhain, handing her a tray of “jars” that he had purchased for the group of players, whispered, “Now’s your chance with Nick. Remember, now—I’ll be watching,” in a way that tickled her ear and sent a shiver down her spine. She wondered if “Now’s your chance” could be prophetic. For her.
“An Audi,” said the spoon player, who was a decade younger than his brother, the slanesman. “Brand, spanking new with a bumper sticker that said:
EIRE BANK
EUR BANK OUR BANK
Bresnahan had seen them before; every third car in Dublin seemed to have one.
“Could you recognize the person—him or her—again?”
“I didn’t get a good-enough look, I’m sorry to say.” He raised the creamy head of the pint and took a long drink that closed his eyes and left a buff-colored ring on his upper lip.
Bresnahan sipped from her own glass.
“I was perched on the ass rail, like I said, and my eyes were fixed on the long blond mane, me wondering if the woman was a transvestite, a cross-dresser, or off to a costume party. Like yourself, say.” He paused for another sip, his eyes glinting with the gaiety of the large, packed pub. “Your father get a glimpse of you yet? I see Rory has.” He winked. “Remember, it’s a band”—he showed her the third finger of his left hand—“or nothing. Any other accommodation—you could have another murder to investigate, too close to home.
“Care to dance?”
Bresnahan only smiled and turned her head to the bar where O’Suilleabhain was holding forth, his handsome head thrown back in uproarious laughter. She let her eyes roam the room, noting how many others seemed to be having an uninhibited good time. They were her people all right. And his.
“Rory’ll be in Dublin within the year, count on it,” said the spoon player.
And what to do about that.
EARLY IN THE afternoon McGarr had found Noreen waiting for him when he got back to their suite in Parknasilla. She was standing before the sideboard on which sat three groupings of note cards and the receiver of the baby monitor that McGarr had asked Ward to place in Frost’s room. Only static was coming from it now. Placed near its speaker was the tape recorder that, since Maddie’s birth, Noreen had used to dictate correspondence and notes to the two employees of her picture gallery in Dublin. The device was automatic and voice-activated.
In one hand she held a tall glass filled with ice and an amber-colored fluid. The other hand was placed firmly on a hip that was sheathed in a pearl-gray chemise. A dressing gown was draped from her shoulders. Her auburn hair, which was wavy, had been freshly combed, and in all she looked provocative, apart from the determined glaze in her eyes.
With a finger she indicated the first grouping of note cards. “This is all that’s said of Gladden. Here is a card that I thought germane to Power’s thinking, at least in regard to this debt conference. And this last is the ‘Frost’ stack, which for some reason you failed to go through with the same thoroughness as you did the headings for the two women. “It’s him who murdered Paddy Power, make no mistake.”
McGarr removed his mac and hat and looked into the
other room. No Maddie. Considering what Noreen was wearing, maybe there was hope. “It’s who?”
“Frost. He’s a slimy bastard.”
McGarr glanced at the monitor.
“That’s right. Hughie got the monitor into the room, and he’s just finished boffing Nell Power, I think it was.”
Who? Hughie or Frost?
“Imagine—his best friend and partner, the man without whom he’d be nowhere—isn’t even in his grave, and he’s out…”—she couldn’t bring herself to repeat the word—“the widow.”
“The ex-wife,” McGarr corrected, glancing at the two audio devices on the sideboard. “How do you know it was—”
“
What?
Do you think I was born yesterday? It was savage, with all sorts of creaking, shrieking, and moaning, like two animals in rut. Slaps even, as though they were practicing some type of sadomasochism.”
Boffing?
Where had she gotten that word, McGarr wondered. Out of a mystery novel? He hadn’t heard “boffing” in decades and then only on the BBC or through a wall.
“You never heard the like of what went on between them. It was—” She shook her head and drank from the glass. “Tell me something, do women often throw themselves at you?”
Only savagely. Unfortunately. Which had something to do with being short, squat, bald, and truculent. Frost, on the other hand, was tall, thin, handsome, wealthy (McGarr supposed), sometimes charming, and looked a good fifteen years younger than McGarr, though he was not.
“And, when they do, do you take advantage of them?”
“Advantage” was an interesting interpretation of having to catch a body thrown at you without breaking
something
, if only your willpower or your ego. Still, McGarr said nothing.
Noreen shook her head. “Ach—you’re all the same.”
Slimy bastards, McGarr thought.
Noreen turned and entered the bedroom, the silk whistling over her hips.
McGarr considered trying to find the source of the am
her fluid in her glass, but instead turned his attention to the note cards.
“Excuse me.”
McGarr looked up.
“Were you expecting something?” The glaze was still in her eyes.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know,
something
.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You had that look.”
But didn’t he always, these days.
“Well?” she demanded.
“Well, what?”
“Well, let’s get to it. We might not have another opportunity like this for a while.”
Put that way, could he refuse, bandages and all?
Sometime later while still in bed, he lit a cigarette and cupped a palm under his head. Noreen was dozing beside him, and he thought of how they were joined, bonded, locked (?) together for life and were performing a delicate, intricate, enormously complicated dance in step, the patterns of which would affect at least Maddie for all of her life. So far so good, largely because each had sympathy as well as love for the other. It was the given part of a good match, how two people went about their shared life together.
He also thought about Paddy Power, the note-taker, the man with a saying borrowed from this thinker and that. He had two significant others, with neither of whom he could form a permanent bond and who didn’t seem to mourn him much. Yet Power had been loved by the world, or so all of the newspapers were saying. Outsiders. People who didn’t know him well. Apart from Mossie Gladden, who had seemed genuinely aggrieved when viewing Power’s corpse. And angered.
Which caused McGarr to remember how Power had been found, laughing wildly—savagely, grotesquely—and waving the single note card over his head, as though to say, this is the prize. There is no answer, no real knowing. Why strive? Death is the only certainty, which is the biggest and best laugh of all.
The note card, the one that he had been waving—McGarr had marked it with his pen. Easing himself out of bed so as not to wake Noreen, he padded into the sitting room and found it among the others on the sideboard.
Sunday, 3:30 Parknasilla: debt conference
Have stopped again to catch my breath before descending the narrow path through the cliff face. From time to time the sharp report of Mossie’s high-powered rifle comes to me and then howls through the mountains. Target practice, he’s told me, for the dogs that summer people leave when returning to the city. Jackals, he calls them. The wily and strong have survived and reproduce, preying on Mossie’s sheep. For a time he took to trapping the dogs, but with no takers even for the pups of such animals, the local dog warden only had to put them down
.
Now he uses the rifle
.
Not very enlightening. Nor probably even accurate, Power merely having accepted Gladden’s explanation of why he was shooting. Hadn’t the farmers in the Sneem House pub told McGarr that morning that they hadn’t seen a wild dog in ages, men who were out on the land much more than any doctor-politician-gentleman-shepherd or any financial wizard?
McGarr then remembered the target that he had found in Gladden’s press with “Sean” duly marked on top. McGarr made a mental note to ask Superintendent Butler of the Kenmare Barracks to call in on Gladden and relieve him of the weapon, which was illegal in Ireland. He would have taken it himself, had he not been “distracted.” He tugged at the bandages on his neck that had begun to itch.
Next he skimmed the cards on Shane Frost that Noreen had culled that morning. Most had to deal with Power’s changing opinion of Frost as time passed. The first negative assessment was undated but was yellowing with age:
If life is most successfully perceived from a single window, then Shane’s singular advantage is in viewing people and things strictly for their utility. He has no
larger view than what he sees for himself, and thus is your basic, hollow ‘economic’ man who will work hard and devote himself only to those projects that will win him quick, substantial profits. At gaining those, he has few peers, which is why I continue to associate with him. He is utterly ruthless, and I would not want him working against me
.
Some time later, Power wrote:
Shane has grown so mean and niggardly that I don’t think I’m far wrong in guessing that he has never married because the very idea of sharing his wealth in any way, even with a wife and children, is anathema to him. I don’t think I have ever met a wealthy man so considered about every expense. He’ll pay for drinks or buy you dinner, but he keeps a running tally on everybody, it seems, and always comes out ahead
.
I think of his old father dozing there in his chemist shop, never throwing anything away, always with one eye half-open on the door and the other on his ledger. People call him the meanest man in Sneem and delight in telling stories about his avarice in which—imagine!—he takes pride
.
Already stories circulate in Dublin about Shane. Like father, like son
.
McGarr thought of another thing he had been told that morning in the pub—about how Frost had employed a gang of men from Dublin to build his house in Sneem, the same who had worked on the Eire Bank headquarters, local opinion be damned. Doubtless it was economics again, and the house was probably a “perk” of the Dublin contract, gotten for next to nothing. Or nothing.
Other cards went on in the same vein of critical assessment, the most recent being dated
January 22 Dublin
I keep asking myself what happened to Shane. Formerly, though always careful, he was a hell of a good fellow. Perhaps it is who we’ve become as the years
have gone on, and the system that’s flattened us out. We’ve all had to change. With Shane, however, the process has been rather more severe
.
Today I divulged to him my proposal for the national debt, and he nearly jumped when I mentioned how necessary an immediate write-down of no less than 20 percent would be. “Why?” he demanded. I told him for good faith, to show that we in the banking community were compassionate and willing to “take a hit,” as the Americans say, along with everybody else
.
“You mean
your good
faith,” he replied, and then charged me with hypocrisy in espousing compassion for the very “yokes”—by which he meant average rate-paying citizens, I believe—whom I had formerly despised. I told him I never despised anyone; I had simply made a mistake, as had he
.
“On the contrary,” he said. “It is you who are making a mistake on two scores. You are being inconsistent. Worse, you are acting against your own self-interest.” I tried to tell him I’m not, that if the country as a whole is better off, I will be too. But he stormed out
.
So much for Frost’s claim to have backed the Power proposal, McGarr thought. He was about to reach for another group of cards when from the baby monitor he heard what sounded like a key being worked in the lock of a door. Frost himself then said, “Come in, gentlemen. You’ll find drinks and snacks on the bar. If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I have a phone call to make.”
Another voice that McGarr recognized as that of the Japanese banker he had heard that morning now said, “Su’ely.” There was a pause, and, when another door was heard to close, a flurry of low, rapid conversation in Japanese ensued. McGarr checked to see if the tape recorder was running and padded back into the bedroom for the still half-filled glass that, he decided, Noreen had abandoned.
“Sorry,” said Frost, returning to the room. “I just wanted to make sure I have all my pins in place.”
A Paddy Power expression, McGarr remembered from the note cards.
“What—no drinks? Please, help yourselves. When I was over in your country last spring, you weren’t so reluctant.”
“After hours, Shane. We w’ap this deal up, hey—we pawty.”
The phrase seemed practiced and American, and McGarr wondered how many times the speaker had employed it. Japanese seemed to own half of Dublin nowadays, and half of New York, from what McGarr had read.
“Well—I’m going to have a drink, and I’m going to pour you one as well, Anaki.” Frost’s voice sounded already a bit oiled, and, if what Noreen had said was accurate, he was having an interesting day on other scores. McGarr took a wee sip himself.
“Oh, you Irish,” said the other man resignedly.
The curse, thought McGarr, which was looked on by most of the cursed as a blessing. And why not? If his work had taught him anything, it was that life
was
short and often violent. He sipped again.
“There now. Cheers.”
“Chee-ahs.”
Some of the other Japanese were now speaking among themselves.
“Where were we when last we spoke?”
“Forty-eight Irish pounds for
all
eight million, three-hundred-and-thirty-three shares of Eire Bank stock.”
“But why
all
shares, Anaki? That will be difficult, if not impossible. Isn’t it enough you’ll have my twenty percent, Mrs. Power’s nineteen, and the fifty-one percent that Paddy left to Gretta Osbourne? With the remaining ten percent we’re certain to get a few curmudgeonly shareholders with money who will choose to sacrifice the quick profit for what they perceive as the possibility of a larger, long-term gain. Also, there’s the government to consider. I’m not at all sure that they’ll allow an outright purchase.”
“Nonsense, Shane. One, you wouldn’t be wasting our time, had you not that pin in place as you say. Two, with Mr. Powah’s share soon to be in hands that are agreeable to such a sale, it’s only a matter of ten percent of the shares. I can’t imagine you haven’t spoken to the other shareholders in detail and at length.”
There was a pause in which McGarr believed he heard
the distinctive ring of crystal on stone. In his own suite there was a cocktail table with a green Connemara marble top. “Fifty-two pounds per share, and I’ll personally guarantee the sale. Or eat the shares.”
“Eat?”
“Refund you the money for the unsold shares out of my own pocket.”
“Forty-nine.”
“No—fifty-two or nothing.”
The Japanese banker’s sigh was audible. “Then, I’m afraid, my friend, it is nothing. Chee-ahs.”
Crystal again rang, and the voice of Anaki spoke in Japanese to his associates. Standing at the sideboard in his suite, McGarr quickly computed on the pad the value of Eire Bank by multiplying the number of shares by the forty-eight-pound asking price, which was a whopping 423 million Irish pounds.
Noreen had awakened and now approached him.
“I’ve consulted my colleagues, Shane. We can go fifty, but that’s all. Our last offer.”
“For Eire Bank?” Noreen asked.
McGarr nodded.
Static crackled over the monitor, and McGarr could almost feel the tension in Frost’s room.
“No,” said Frost. “If I am to be responsible for
all
shares, it’ll have to be fifty-two to insure my exposure.”