Dead I Well May Be

CODA: ELEVEN YEARS LATER-L.A.

A tap dripping. A car idling. A dog barking. The distant roar of automobiles. The occasional plane. Heat. The hum of the air conditioner. Blue water in the pool. A glass of orange juice undrunk because I think it must be grapefruit by mistake. It’s bitter. A leather sofa. A computer, a bookshelf, the blinds half drawn. Dust on them. The dust spiraling up from a faux Aztec-patterned rug. A long hair on my suntanned arm. Hers. A coffee table with The Economist and a couple of letters. A painting of a moon and deer. Also hers. A pencil sharpener in the shape of HMS Victory. An ashtray. Cigar clipper. Typing paper and soda cans in the wastepaper basket. A coffee cup, the crossword. Sleeping plants. The window. The enormous sky complete with vapor trails. The manicured and watered lawn that will never be quite green.

The room is inert, frozen, still. I look at Granpa’s photograph with the sepia faces of the dead. The tap. The dog barking furiously. My stomach growling: it’s an hour before she gets home, before I have to make dinner. Depending on traffic, of course. At least I’m not out there. The people running with buckets along the battlements. Fire in the keep. Stress. It’s the new millennium and transport is still vehicular and ground-based. How disappointing. In fact, the whole century’s been a bit grim so far. I reach out and turn over the cover on The Economist. Sometimes it’s best not to know. My hand twitches and I close my eyes. Black fields. A faraway place. Observe, see us, see Patrick in the forest rehearsing his prayers, see us walking through it, a wounded arm and cuts on the barbed wire and the bog sucking down our packs. Cold rain that never gets this cold, not in the temperate brother of the Temperate Island. Aye. Jesus. I blink awake. I stare at the computer, whose background image is the Hubble Deep Field. I stare, and finally the screen saver kicks in, which is the Earth in daylight and nighttime portions. The AC. Reliable, relatively quiet. A rivulet of condensation from off the cooling ducts. Far off, a carnival of pneumatic drills. I get up from the sofa and look in the mini fridge. There is no grapefruit juice. I lie back down again. Think. The tap. The dog. The sound of the engine idling. What foul conspiracy is this? She poured it for me at eleven A.M., just before she left for her afternoon job at the marketing agency. Odd. I lie under the counterfeit mahogany and the multiplications of the ceiling fan. Think. I roll off the sofa and pick up the glass and sniff it.

Footsteps, the gate. Ahh, I see. Consequences. Someone has come to murder me.

In an hour or two, the sun will set and then it will be dusk. The best time to be in this city. Yellow and brown and gold lines will weave the clouds into a picture. The sunsets in Los Angeles… It was not always so. Father Henriques Ordóñez of the Santa Barbara Mission, writing in the 1790s, describes night falling quickly, the sun disappearing like a ghost into the Pacific. Spectacular now because the polluted air scatters the light into its lower frequencies. All this is true. Obvious.

The juice sitting there, sipped, but otherwise untouched. The air conditioner spitting, whining. Another plane. The dog louder now. A picture of the desert. A banana. Oranges. CDs on a shelf: Undertones, Ash, Therapy, U2, Van Morrison, Irish bands all, nostalgia no doubt, pathetic really.

The juice. The dog. A dying lemon tree. I’ve tried with it. Watering. Starving. Moving from out and back into shade. The tap.

He comes. He has prized the lock on the gate. Prized not picked. This is not going to be about savoir faire. He is medium build, a light gray suit. Pinstripes. Cheap but expensive-looking shoes, slippy soles. White sport socks. He is wearing pilot sunglasses and a brown felt fedora. His face is pockmarked, his nose especially. He is about thirty, but with the skin and the uneasiness he seems older. He is steady on his feet, but clearly he’s a drinker. After this job he’ll go to a bar and take a shot or two before heading back to report. The weapon is in a shoulder holster. A longish pistol, perhaps a machine pistol or maybe the length is a silencer, or maybe it’s both. He has another gun around his ankle. A revolver. His trousers are too short. In fact, the whole suit looks too small for him. If he were Latino, I’d say that the suit was perhaps his brother’s. But he’s not, he’s Caucasian. He walks up the path on the left-hand side. A Brit, a Mick. Maybe just a leftie. No, the gun is over his heart. He’s a fucking Paddy, I know it.

He won’t be sure about the city. The heat bothers him. He’s wearing a stupid hat. He’ll be easy. He’s not being particularly cautious, even though this isn’t his town. How have they been briefed? I’m drugged and asleep? Why hadn’t Carolyn been more insistent about me taking my vitamin C? Nervous, she didn’t want to put too much emphasis on it. Raise suspicion. But the dose was too big. Clumsy, clumsy lass, never could do anything right.

We’ve been dating for about half a year. We met at the firm where I worked briefly as a security consultant. Carolyn’s her real name, but she wants everyone to call her Linnie. That should have been a clue right there. She’s no Bridget, though she is pretty. Pale, thin, blond, fragile. She’s from Athens, Georgia, but likes the B-52’s rather than R.E.M. Another clue.

It was clever that they would come to me through her. She’d be afraid of them. Wouldn’t tell me, wouldn’t tell the cops. Must have got to her yesterday. Was she weird last night? I don’t remember. How? We’ve got your mother, your brother, we’ll get you… I don’t know. They’d question her. What’s he like at home? What’s his routine? Ok. Well, we only need you to do one thing. Slip this in his orange juice and go to work. Don’t act weird in any way. Don’t do anything different. She hadn’t, nothing I’d picked up on anyway.

Yeah, come through her. They’d be wary of me, the man who killed Darkey White. You’d think you could just hit me in the street but somehow it would fuck up, better to get at me from the inside. The weak spot. Yeah, I’m drugged and asleep and here he comes…

Well, you can’t say I haven’t been patient. I have. Ten years I’ve been waiting. Eleven. Aye, I did the dirty, I had to. The peelers came, lifted me, and I gave them every goddamn Mick I could. Everyone who wasn’t already dead. Or murdered in a different way: Bridget, me. It’s been so long. So tedious. I’ve begged them. I’ve dreamed them here. I’ve dreamed me there. Seamus Patrick Duffy, get off your arse. Do your duty.

Oh aye. You’re an old man, but that is no excuse. Get to it. Your ancestors were schooled in blood feud, in Ulster, in the wars against the Indians; Christ, for instruction look at the early career of Andrew Jackson. Let not a man stain your honor. Listen to that siren voice. Didn’t he break his sacred oath? Only a coward blabs to the police. It’s been a long time, but we still have to kill him. Every day that Michael lives we die…

But they didn’t come, they didn’t find me. Four years ago in Chicago, I was on the elevated train, a man approached me with a gun. Late at night, empty car, one man, one gun. The train jerked and he stumbled forward. I pulled his weapon hand and broke his arm and bolted the train at the next stop. Was it a mugging? I should have checked; I ran instead, but in retrospect I think it was a robbery attempt.

Anyway. I read the papers, I keep up.

Seamus Patrick Duffy died last year. He was seventy-eight and he was in bed. He was the last of the old Irish hoods, the final sad player in a forgotten story. The obituary in The New York Times said that in the 1990s the Irish mob was broke, like the Italian mob, like the Russian mob. Now, of course, the unions in New York are incorruptible and no one gambles and no one needs a green card and no one uses drugs…

The Mick assassin takes off his fedora and wipes his face. He’s hot and bothered and all he’s done is walk from the car.

Oh, the anticipation, watching the calendar and clock. For too long, for far too long. I almost thought you weren’t coming. That you’d see that the torture was in the waiting. But really, you’re not that smart. You couldn’t probe the depth of my psychology.

Who is the boss now? I’ve heard rumors. They bleed me information. Is it you?

Maybe you’ve imagined this day. Talked it out, planned it. Well, so have I. It’s the distillation of everything that was our world. The apotheosis of our journey together. Time compressed to now. The world has moved on, but we have not. So much is different. But we’re locked in together, you and I. I know. And don’t worry, I will not disappoint. I’ve rehearsed this. Again and again. We will all of us play our parts…

I roll off the couch, crawl to the drawer beside the computer, and take out the latest masterpiece from Gaston Glock. I fit the silencer and slip out of the study and into the hall behind the sprawling yucca plant. He’s still there. Still coming. I get ready to open the front door, my hand is on the handle, about to apply pressure, and then I almost have a heart attack. There’s a creak in the back kitchen. Jesus Christ. I’ve miscalculated. There is someone already in the house. The idling car. The front gate. And of course, all the time the boys were coming in the bloody back. Up from the gulch and through the neighbors’. The house over on the other side, their Alsatian, Omar, saw the whole thing. That’s why he’s been barking like mad. Warning me. Jesus, Michael. Getting old. Stupid. Dead.

Fucking hell.

The back kitchen.

It’s all been timed. A man in front, a man or men coming in the back. There is no possibility of escape, and Linnie has told them that I’ll be on siesta. I sleep in the afternoons anyway, so the draft was just an added kick.

Pretty and with an accent that could straighten out a Jesuit, but Linnie, really, abetting assassins is just not on; if I survive we’ll have to rethink our whole relationship.

If I survive this. A big if. These guys aren’t bad. They’ve made a wee plan, got someone on the inside, and they’ve taken the trouble to come up the gulch, so I suppose they’re semiprofessional at least. And they’ve just sent Paddy here to watch the front. The lowest job available, since, after all, I’m hardly likely to come running out guns ablazing. No, I’m sleeping. Somewhere. She tells them I’m a nut about my orange juice, I’ll drink it. I’ll be in the living room perhaps or maybe if I felt really tired I’d have gone upstairs to lie down. She will have told them I do that. The kitchen boys are talking in a loud whisper. They shouldn’t be talking at all, should be pointing. They should have hand signals all worked out. They can’t be a regular team or they would. They’re a mishmash, assembled from guys who individually are pretty good; perhaps that’ll be their downfall: they’ll play like England against Norway, individual stars against a team. Except that I’m a team of one.

The top lad’s whispering:

Ok, lads. Sweep down the stairs first. When it’s secure, we’ll all go up together. I’ll stay here. He’s supposed to be up and out. But you never fucking know. So go careful now, very careful. Watch each other.

Their boss says all this with a bit too much confidence. Too much reliance on Carolyn’s abilities; he’s an eejit, like me. I can’t tell precisely what the accent is, but it’s definitely Brit.

Ok, ok, two voices reply.

So, Jesus, there’s three of them in the house and one outside. Well, the clip holds seventeen.

I nip from the hall back into the study and look for a place to hide. There’s nothing. The sofa is too near the ground and there are no curtains. I’ll just have to wait in shadow and pop him as he comes through the door. I get into a crouch and raise the pistol. I’m sweating. God, am I really this out of touch? That’s easy living for you. Too many good restaurants in this town. Too much driving. Too much si-

The study door opens. He’s young. Pale. T-shirt and very tight white jeans. Sneakers. He has a shotgun. His finger is underneath the trigger. His mouth is open, he’s transfixed by the tap dripping from my water cooler. He hasn’t even seen me here in the shadow of the corner, and he never will. There is a small spurt of flame and a quiet whoosh and then there is a hole in his forehead that looks like a third eye, blood all over the tiling. I catch him as he falls and ease the shotgun out of his hand. I close the door, turn him over. A wallet, an Irish passport for all love. Sean Glass. Dubliner. Twenty. I rest his head on the fireplace and let the blood drip there. Ok, so there’s just two more inside. One skirting about in the snooker or downstairs guest room and the headman most likely in the hall by now commanding the stairs and the doors. That’s what I would do. No, actually I wouldn’t have spoken at all and I wouldn’t have split us up. But getting into his brain for a minute: he’ll send a boy left and a boy right and he’ll stay in the hall. So he’ll see me as soon as I leave the study. And what will I do? Hmmm. I believe I’ll just sit here and wait for him to get impatient; sooner or later he’ll think: Sean’s taking too damn long. I hear him tap the window at the front door, signaling to Pat out there that all’s well so far. He walks back down the hall. Nearly at the study door. Is he coming in?

Would you hurry the fuck up, Sean boy, he says from where I thought he’d say it. He’s ex-army or I’m the ponce hooring your ma. His accent is all Brummie. Easy.

Aye, I say in me best Dub.

I’m going up, another voice says, and the Brummie lets him go, which I wouldn’t do either.

Sean, come on, we’re going up, he says.

Ok, I say. Coming.

With the gun ready, I wait for a count of two and crack open the study door. I look down the hall and see that he’s all reassured and gazing up the stairs. He has a mustache and chubby blue-white skin. He’s short, edgy-looking, and he’s wearing an Aston Villa cap. From me to him is fifteen feet of hall. I step out quietly and bring the gun to full extension from my body.

It’s me, hi, Death’s ambassador.

I put the side of his fat face between the sights and squeeze the trigger on him and of course the fucker moves, having just seen me out of the corner of his eye. The bullet nicks his cheek and smashes into the window beside the front door. He’s carrying an Uzi machine gun or some such ignoble wee piece. I shoot again and as his weapon opens up excitedly on the floor, I’ve hit him in the sternum and the neck and he’s going down. The Uzi falls away from him and is silenced, but it was loud enough. I cross the hall and open the front the door and shoot Paddy standing out there gawp-eyed and open-baked. He goes down without protest, and I close the door and wait for the fourth eejit up the stairs to shout “What’s going on down there, boss?” or some such nonsense.

Hooorie oop, git down eaaah, I yell up the stairs urgently and put on the Villa hat to confuse him. I hear him run and down he comes, falling the second half of the stairs as the bullet erases all motor control over his legs along with the top part of his head.

Well, it wasn’t exactly the Marx Brothers, but it was close, and there was me thinking they were something special because they came up the gulch. I safety the Glock, put it in my trouser pocket, and wipe the sweat from off my hands. An old habit makes me take it out again and hold it. You never put away your weapon until you are absolutely sure. I look at the two bodies in the hall and am absolutely sure. Those boys aren’t going anywhere. The alarm on the Brummie’s watch starts to beep. I lift up his hand and look at it; it’s still on eastern standard time. They must have only just got here. I put it down sadly. Wouldn’t it have been smarter to fly in a week ago and acclimatize?

I turn off the watch and take out his wallet and oh my God, his level of incompetence is such that he’s brought with him to the hit the cheat sheet with my address and photo and physical description. What if he’d been arrested in situ or on the way?

Jesus Christ.

I paw through it, amused, and then I see something that staggers me. The instructions have been printed out but annotated in a wavy hand that I instantly recognize as hers. Her letters, organizing my death. She’s changed how the fee gets paid and where the weapons are to be dumped. So-it is her. She’s at the top of the greasy pole, and this is her primary concern. Unfinished business. What Duffy couldn’t do, she will.

She had risen, I had heard that, untouched by my indictments and clean. But who ever heard of a woman rising to the very top? I smile a little. Get with the times, son, Ireland’s had two woman presidents since last you lived there.

And Christ, it was my fantasy that Bridget would come to kill me, but seeing it here in black-and-white… Suddenly I feel nauseated. I need a drink.

But no, business first. Clean up this shit and make the obligatory call.

I open the front door and check the street and am about to start to pull in Paddy before someone sees him and gets upset, when suddenly there’s a horrible thumping feeling in my head which translates into a creaky board and that can only mean that young Sean has made a miraculous recovery in the study or there was a fifth member of the team. And wouldn’t that just be a son of a bitch, wouldn’t that just be pride before a fall and serve me fucking right? Of course, they had a driver, or a safety man, and he’s come in to see what’s taking so goddamned long.

I drop to a crouch, fire blind behind me a couple of times and dive for the stairs. The hat didn’t fool him, for as I dive a bullet hits me in the leg and there are two more big-caliber marks in the front door.

Got ya, ya bastard, he says.

The stairs are up against the wall and make a corner with the front door, so I’m safe here for the moment. To get me, he’ll have to come round a blind spot made by the stairs and the wall and I’ll have him before he has me. Hopefully. I roll down my jeans. He did get me, the bullet caught me in the plastic foot.

I laugh out loud.

Save your breath, about to die, mate, he says.

I spit and shake my head. Say nothing. Just wait. No sound at all now, except for the tap and the car and the barking dog. I take the Aston Villa cap off and throw it round the corner but that doesn’t faze him. He’s coming slow. I lift up the Glock and support it in both hands. Just then a black object rolls into my field of vision, and I recognize it as an old GB army-issue white phosphorus grenade. For fucksake. Fuck me and Jesus and the Holy Ghost. A WPG. A corporal killed himself with one of those while instructing us about how dangerous they were in my very first week in the army. I’ve been a bit phobic about grenades ever since, and high-explosive white phosphorus grenades in particular are very nasty. I think they’re banned now.

With my cracked foot I can only get halfway up the stairs before the thing goes off. A boiling white ball of fire. You bury your head, but you don’t put your hands over your head. You’ll need your hands in a second to shoot people and at this stage you can’t have them disabled or worse, burnt off completely. As it is, my back’s on fire as I roll onto the landing. I take my T-shirt off before it melts on me. Not badly burnt. I catch my breath. Calm down. Ok, he’ll be round after me in a sec, but there’s still that blind spot at the bottom of the stairs and he’ll be cautious after seeing his mates all curled up there in the hall. He’s thinking the grenade got me, but he didn’t hear any screaming, so he’ll go slow. My trousers are on fire. I pat myself down, and as quick as I can I drag myself to the upstairs bathroom. I open the window, climb out, lower myself down onto the kitchen roof, and then drop from the gutter onto the patio. My leg gives way under me. Somehow I get up. I limp in the back door of the house and through the kitchen and then gently open the kitchen door that leads into the hall. He’s there still, slowly making his way to the bottom of the stairs. His gun is one of those nifty Belgian jobs. He’s tall, curly-haired, with a denim jacket and black jeans. He’s wearing sunglasses. He’s inching along. He’s assuming I’m dead, but taking no chances. You have to be careful but, you know, sometimes you can be too careful.

Drop it, I say, and he spins wildly around. The Glock smiles and shoots him in the chest four times. He goes down, and I take a breath.

Thank you, Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles, I say to the statue in the hall. It’s a joke Ganesh and I share and he grins with his elephant head. For the obstacle is not them, or me, it’s the past that cannot be unwoven.

I do a thorough scout, and this time there are no more surprises. They were five of them. But, like eejits, they split themselves up. You’ve got to hand it to her, after all this time and after all that’s been happening on the earth. But don’t go cheap, love, get pros. Come on, you’re in New York, and I’m in L.A., my dear, isn’t that punishment enough? Ha.

Will there be a next time? There will. I know you. I know you now, not then, but now I do.

I hobble to the fridge and crack open a Corona. I take a big gulp. I pick up the phone and dial a number I’ve memorized these ten years. Ever since they took out that slug and saved my life and came and threatened me and I made a deal to save my sorry ass. I give my code name and then my handler’s.

They put me all the way through to his mobile. He’s outdoors somewhere near water. It’s lapping but it’s not breaking; he’s on a lake.

How’s the fishing? I ask him.

How- he begins, but I have to interrupt him; I’m going to need help quick before the peelers show and there’s not much time for idle chatter.

Listen, you were right, my mistake, I want back in the program, I say.

Ok.

Somewhere you get seasons.

Seasons, he says. You get seasons in L.A. It’s just that they’re all good.

Ok, somewhere with more rain.

More rain? he asks quizzically.

Yeah.

I think that can be arranged, he says.

I’ll need to go to a hospital.

Are you hurt?

Just a burn. I’ll live.

Lucky us.

Lucky you.

Are there casualties?

Yeah, it’s messy.

How many?

Five.

Shit.

Yeah.

Don’t worry, we’ll keep you safe, he says.

That would be nice, I say. The lie going down as easily as the booze.

I hang up. I pull in Paddy. The smoke alarm goes off and I play around a bit with the fire extinguisher. I make my way to the kitchen and put salve on my burned neck and scalp. I look at the scorch mark in the mirror; it doesn’t seem too bad. I grab another Corona. I get a bottle of gin and some aspirin. Shouldn’t really be drinking. I limp into the backyard and sit next to the pool.

Omar comes bounding over and barks at me through the gaps in the fence.

Good boy, good boy, I tell him, and he wanders off, pleased.

I finish the Corona and let the bottle drop. I sit up, swallow two aspirin with some gin and water.

I take a long look around…

A south wind is stirring the slender stems of pines. The hawsers bend, and there are murmurs in the clay figurines as the sun dips behind the fence. The evening star waits, beguiled, while airplanes and birds mark boundaries in all that blue abandonment.

The cars sing, the grass creaks in parks and cemeteries. I am calm, erased of all extraneous emotion. Collected. Easy. I feel the pine needles, the warm roads, the scent of butterflies, the sniff of coyotes in those teeming hills.

These are my last days in this town. And when the heat’s cooled down and I am safe and far away, I’ll disappear. Find you easier than you found me. I can see it. You and I, my honey love. Oh yes, Bridget, I can see your face. You and I in the still of the dark together. And in that moment, and in that place, Death incants a name and, somehow, it doesn’t sound like mine.

I close my eyes.

It well may be.