The Bloomsday Dead

4: CIRCE (DUBLIN-JUNE 16, 9:15 A.M.)

A sliver of moon. A lemon sky. Morning drawing a breath across the window. Bridget’s hair spread out over the white sheets in a gossamer bloom of vermilion and gold.

She’s asleep on the pillow next to me. Eyes closed, mouth open.

The fan’s on, but I can still hear the phone ringing in the other room.

It can only be Scotchy, so I’m letting it go.

A smell of honeysuckle. The faint murmur of the city. Sunflowers poking up through the bottom of the fire escape.

Her body is so still and white and beautiful it could be carved from Botticino marble.

It can only be Scotchy telling me to meet him at the airport. We’re flying down to Florida for a funeral. Darkey’s there already, which is why we’ve got this night together. Our only night together.

Her breathing becomes more shallow. Her eyelids flutter.

“What’s that noise?” she mumbles.

“Nothing, go back to sleep.”

She yawns.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Watching you.”

“Get the phone, Michael. It might be important.”

“It’s never important.”

“Get the phone,” she insists.

“It’s Scotchy, it’s nothing,” I tell her.

She shakes her head in disgust. Out of all the boys in Darkey’s crew, it’s Scotchy she hates the most. Something about that feral weasel-faced wee hood. He’s never made a pass at her, nothing like that, he wouldn’t dare cross Darkey, it’s more his unfathomable unpleasant mind and that sleekit, native cunning. You could tell that under all that bigmouthed bluster there was something darker going on. Put the wind up anybody.

The phone gets louder.

“Just get it. Could be Andy,” she says.

“Ok,” I say. I take her hand, kiss it, then stand. I slide off the mattress, open the bedroom door.

Suddenly she wakes fully, looks at me with those deep green eyes. I wait to see if she’s going to say anything but she doesn’t. I walk into the living room. The phone’s fallen under the sofa. I move a roach trap, grab it.

“No. Wait. Don’t get it,” she says urgently, almost in panic. “Don’t get it. Don’t get it. You’re right, let it go. Come here instead.”

But it’s too late. I’ve already picked up the handset and heard Scotchy’s nasal intake of breath before he speaks.

“Hello.”

“LaGuardia, one hour, Bruce,” Scotchy says. “Hurry up.”

“My name’s not Bruce,” I tell him for the thousandth time.

“One hour. Hurry up.”

I put the phone down. Bridget sighs. Yes, it’s too late…

Lima.

But there was no ocean. And the sky was the wrong color. Eggshell rather than deep blue.

What was going on?

Ask Hector, he’ll tell me.

“Hector. Hector.”

Uhhh.

Where was my cell phone? I tried to sit, but an awful scrabbling pain took my breath away. I was in a car. A street sign said “Holles Street Maternity Next Left.”

Holles Street, Dublin?

It all came back. Hector was toast. I’d shot him in the head. I’d thrown an assassin out the window and I’d killed his partner with an upside-down.22 shot in his throat.

A woman in a blue dress was staring at me.

“Are you all right, love?” she asked.

I got out of the car. Out, into the morning with no idea where I was going, or what in the name of God I was going to do next. Sunlight. Cirrus clouds. Nothing Irish about the day, but I knew it was definitely Dublin because the Liffey was a presence beyond the gray forms of the buildings. A smell off it that reminded me of gasoline. I couldn’t see it, but I could sense it was there, sluggish, like some dead thing on what was already a deadly morning. The lovely Liffey moving along effluent into the tidal basin, coating the pylons, bridges, and the wee blind alleys on the water’s edge. And there definitely was a stink from off it. If not petrol, diesel. Enough that I could tell. Dublin. Aye. That’s right.

There were stars in front of my eyes, as if my retina had become detached. I blinked for half a minute and the stars vanished.

I walked away from the car.

Only just in time.

Two men pulled up in a Ford Sierra, got out, and headed for the Mercedes.

Your average eejit might have thought, Ah, couple of car thieves.

But not me. Their suits were crumpled and dirty. Even from here they stank of fags and coffee. What man, who wore a suit, got this dirty this early?

Bloody cops or I’m a Chinaman.

“Morning,” one of them shouted across the street to me, with no love at all in the greeting and sleekit peeler eyes.

I nodded in reply and then thought better of it.

“Lavly day, innit?” I said in estuary English.

In about five minutes they’d have a warrant out for me. Why not have them thinking I was a Cockney?

Backpack was still in there, but my IDs and cash were in my jacket. Screw it. I hobbled down the street, and when I was out of sight I ran as best as I could with a duct-tape bandage, sore foot, artificial foot, jetlag, painkillers, possible detached retina, sleeping pill, and no idea where I was going.

I was wrong about the five minutes.

It couldn’t have been more than two.

“Hey, you,” the cops yelled. “Stop.”

I had about a couple of hundred yards on them. Even with my handicaps, if I couldn’t lose them in rush hour in a busy city like Dublin I deserved to be bloody caught.

I turned a corner and found that I was at Trinity College.

Excellent.

I ran in through the gates and chucked myself into a seething mass of students, visitors, and other extras in my little scene.

Total chaos.

Even more chaos than usual, which meant that a big party of tourists had just arrived, or that it was exam time, or graduation.

“What’s the craic?” I asked a forlorn girl who was looking everywhere for her friends.

“It’s the parade,” she said and pointed to a corner of the quad where a big disorganized line had formed and was filing out into the street. I saw then that it was part of the Bloom thing. The kids were all dressed in Edwardian gear, some were riding old-fashioned bicycles, and there was even a horse-drawn omnibus pulling drunken members of a rugby team.

As good a place as any.

I joined the procession just as the two peels arrived at the college gates. One of them still had his cigarette in his mouth. Jesus, didn’t they want to catch me? Let go your fag, you cheap Mick flatfoot.

They were both around twenty years older than me. Just about the right age to be thoroughly beaten down by the system, cynical and fed up. Maybe a couple of younger coppers would have stopped everyone from leaving Trinity, called in assistance, created a huge palaver. Not these characters. The parade wove its way past them without either lifting a finger. But even so, no point being a bloody fool about it. I snatched the flat cap off one kid’s head, threaded my way through the crowd, tripped another kid, and ripped the Edwardian jacket off his back as he fell down.

“Jesus,” he said, but whether that was followed by anything else, I don’t know because I had taken three steps to the side and four back. I pulled the Edwardian coat over my leather jacket, put on the flat cap.

I followed the kids out of Trinity and into the road.

Nice.

Now I was in a parade of a couple of hundred similarly dressed and high-spirited students heading for O’Connell Street. Like to see them find me now.

We marched merrily away from Trinity and turned north.

I wasn’t that familiar with Ulysses but it was an easy assumption that a lot of the weans were dressed as characters from the book. There were barbers, undertakers, bookies, priests, nuns, all of them in old-timey gear and most so cute you could forgive them for being young, exuberant, and irritating. And besides, they’d saved my hide.

Some of them were drinking and I got passed a can of Guinness, which I took gratefully.

“Cheers, mate,” I said.

“Sure, ’tis no problem,” a girl said. She had red cheeks and brown hair and was dressed as a tarty maid.

I took a large swig of the Guinness. Its effect was restorative.

“Are you for going to the party, young sir?” she asked in bad Edwardian. She was about nineteen or twenty and came from somewhere in County Kerry.

“Alas, fair lady, I have no time for such an enchanting offer,” I said. “I’m pressed by agents of the Castle.”

“Maybe another time,” she said and clinked her can of alcohol-free beer into mine. And maybe I would another time, but now I had to get out of town. It had been a staggeringly difficult twenty-four hours and what I needed more than anything was a place to gather my wits and lie low.

I knew no one in Dublin and I figured that all the old safe houses and chop joints I used to hang out in were probably gone. But seeing the Kerry girl dressed like that had given me an idea.

Back in my day, running with the teen rackets in 1990 Belfast, Chopper Clonfert used to take us lads to a whorehouse near the Four Courts on one of the north quays of the Liffey. It primarily catered to lawyers and civil servants but Chopper worked big time for the rackets and he was the Belfast rep. So the girls, without too much feeling of resentment, would let us have a freebie. If it was still there (and this was nearly fifteen years ago), it might be a good place to bolt to for a while. I couldn’t use Chopper’s name to get in (Chopper had long since turned legit) but I could just pose as an ordinary client. With my long coat, flat cap, and haggard demeanor, I did look a bit like a crappy Dublin family-services lawyer or something.

Aye, the beginnings of a plan.

Go there, get my bearings, clean up. Maybe see to this wound. Anyway, I needed to be gone from the madding crowd and it was probably not a good idea to walk around too much longer in a blood-stained T-shirt.

Also I wanted to call Bridget from a quiet spot. I needed to know what the score was. Hopefully, her tone of voice would tell me. Had the cabbie been hers? Had he been anybody’s? Had I hallucinated or misremembered him saying my name? Bridget wouldn’t have all the answers but she’d have some of them.

And with that solved, it would make the next step clearer. Had to get out of Dublin. But whether I had to get out of Ireland, too, was the big question.

The cops didn’t worry me; if the cabbie lived he wouldn’t talk and if he died there’d be another gangland murder along tomorrow to occupy their limited attention span. In my eyes the Garda Síochána was only a notch or two above the Irish Army and, as an exmember of the British Army, I had nothing but contempt for that body. Any squaddie worth his salt would join the Irish Guards in London; any peeler up to scuds would get into one of the big metropolitan police forces across the water. Irish coppers and soldiers were second-rate.

But complacency is also one of the byways on the road to ruin. I would have to put my contempt on the back burner and play it bloody safe.

“Are you a lecturer?” the girl finally plucked up the courage to ask.

“No, no, not really,” I told her.

“Are you a mature student?”

“Yeah, you could say that, I’m always learning,” I replied.

“Well, I think that’s great, it’s wonderful to go back to university at your age, education is very important.”

“Shit, how old do you think I am?”

“Forty?” she suggested.

Well, Jesus, let’s see how you look after a knife fight, love.

“Ach, I’m barely in my thirties,” I said. “Just been partying all night, that’s all.”

“What are you studying?” she asked, but before I could make something up, we’d arrived at the O’Connell Street Bridge and a scene of complete bedlam. This parade was clearly not part of the official Bloomsday festivities and the cops were totally unprepared. Traffic was still trying to come off the quays and up the street and the parade wanted to head north onto O’Connell Street.

Buses, cars, trucks, bicyclists, and pedestrians had formed an ugly confused mess right in the center of the city. Some of the students were getting restless. They began shouting at the peels and chanting. Baffled tourists were getting separated from their tour groups, taxi drivers were yelling, the cops were flailing about uselessly waiting for instruction. It was all fine by me. The more disorder the better.

“Honey, I must be off,” I told the girl.

She held my sleeve.

“Are you not going on to Jury’s?”

“I can’t, sorry,” I said. “I have to go, really, it’s like I said, I’m on the run from Johnny law.”

She reached into her tart handbag looking for something. She tipped it upside down and out dropped a big hippy Volkswagen key chain. I picked it up and gave it to her. By this time she had found what she was searching for-a piece of card with a Dublin telephone number on it.

“It’s my cell. Give me a call if you’re not doing anything later,” she said.

“I will, if I don’t get lifted,” I said.

“Riorden,” she said and offered me her hand.

“Brian,” I said and slipped away from her and the rest of the students. I dipped under the boom mike of a BBC camera crew, escaped a video unit from RTE television, and just about avoided being knocked into a bus by one of the old geezers from 60 Minutes.

I walked west and at a green phone booth took a look back for tails.

Nobody after me at all. I’d lost the cops and they’d lost me. Excellent.

Lost them. Now part two of the plan. The Four Courts. Where the hell were they?

Somewhere on the water.

I stopped a man in jeans and a Joyce T-shirt.

“Excuse me, you don’t happen to know whereabouts the Four Courts are? I know it’s around here somewhere, but I can’t quite remember.”

“Oh, my goodness. I am frightfully sorry, but I have no idea,” he said with an English accent.

The next woman:

“Weiss nicht. I live here, but I do not know. Four Courts? I haff a map of ze whole city in-”

And it took me six more people until I found a Dubliner. You wouldn’t have seen that in the old days either. People immigrating to Dublin.

The native, though, told me it was piss easy, just follow the river and I couldn’t miss it.

I followed the river and didn’t miss it.

The big domed gray legal building right on the water. Barristers, judges, solicitors, clients all milling about the front.

“This is the Four Courts, isn’t it?” I asked a solicitor having a smoke.

“’Tis indeed,” he said. “Do you need a lawyer?”

“Nah, but could I bum a cigarette?”

He lit me a ciggy and I sat down on the steps. Everything was hurting. The fag helped a bit.

I could think.

Now that I’d found the Four Courts, I had to search my memory to locate where the brothel had been. It was certainly on this side of the water. And it was pretty close by because I remember Bobby Fullerton seeing his brief at the Chinese restaurant, which was right next to the brothel.

Hmmm.

It seemed simple enough. And although I’m not a negative individual, I had to admit that the chances of all those things still being there after all this time seemed unlikely.

I got up, began walking, turned left, followed the quay, and my heart sank. It became immediately apparent that everything I remembered about these streets had utterly changed. Where there had been seedy pawnshops, tobacconists, and greasy diners, now there were Internet cafés, Gap stores, and of course Starbucks, where they make you bloody queue twice. Never get away with that in Belfast, I hoped.

I walked down a side street that looked familiar, went halfway along it, stopped, came back to the quay. Tried another left, a second left, a third, tried a right, but now I was utterly baffled and well lost in the alleys and back streets. All of them gentrified, painted, scrubbed, new windows, window treatments. The Dubs had even started putting up blue plaques like you saw in London. “Handel slept here,” “Wilde lived here,” that kind of malarkey. And no ragamuffin children or beggars. I suppose now if you wanted to know what the Dublin alleys looked like when this was my stamping ground you’d have to go to a seedy hutong in Beijing or a back street in Bombay.

But then, suddenly, with Beijing on my mind, I spotted two Chinese guys carrying a pole of pink dangling ducks. I followed them. Down one street, up another. They stopped outside a restaurant, fumbled for a set of keys, and went in.

Ahh. I stepped back. Was this the same place?

Yeah. Bloody hell.

Completely different now, of course. Before, a concrete bunker with grilles over the window and a heavy iron door. Now, tinted plate glass, plush tables, a lilac paint job, and a big new sign. Still, something about it rang a bell. And if this was the restaurant the brothel was the house immediately to the left. A three-story Georgian affair, with the blinds pulled down.

No blue plaque announcing “Brendan Behan bonked here,” but you never knew, it might still be the same establishment. Someone had sandblasted the brick front, removed the old wooden window frames, and put in air-conditioning vents. Back in the day the front door had been a low-key brown, as befitted a whorehouse. Now it was a bright blue with a gold knocker and letter box.

I went up the steps, knocked.

Waited.

Probably a firm of insurance agents in here now.

I knocked again.

The door was opened by a beautiful hard-faced blonde with vampiric eyes. Skin the color of driven snow and slightly Asiatic features. She was wearing a tight silk see-through black sweater, black miniskirt, and knee-length leather boots. Certainly not an Irish girl, and if she was in the insurance business it could only have been for Satan, fiddling the actuarial tables on potential soul sellers.

“Yes?” she said in an imperious Russian accent.

“I’m here for a little R and R, is this the right place?”

“Perhaps. Would you like to come in?” she said.

“Aye, I would at that.”

“Please, follow me.”

I went in.

There exists a school of thought which holds that madams in brothels, bordellos, and whorehouses are endowed with wisdom, taste, and a singular ability for understanding human nature. I have no idea where this notion sprang from, but in my experience madams are about as wise and sensible as the average giggly thirdgrade teacher. And as for taste, not in the brothels I’ve been in. The proprietor of the Four Courts whorehouse was no exception. Her tastes ran to cliché and old-world decadence. The blinds were drawn and the fake Tiffany lamps were exuding a dull-yellow depressing glow that made you wonder if they were trying to conceal the merchandise. Incense burning in a corner smelled of dead cat, and once you’d adjusted to the dim surroundings, you saw that the elegant blue door on the outside was in contrast to the bright reds, golds, chandeliers, paintings of eagles, and classical figurines in a look that seemed to be a cross between antebellum New Orleans and the Reich chancellory.

“My name is Lara,” the Russian girl lied.

“Aye, and I’m Doctor Zhivago. Listen, I need to speak to the woman of the house, if you don’t mind; I’ve got a couple of questions,” I said.

“We cater to all tastes.”

“Aye, I’m sure you do, but all I need is a quiet room, where I can have a shower and gather my thoughts, no fuss; I’ll pay top dollar, and if someone would be so good as to bring me a cup of tea, I would love it.”

“It is three hundred euros for one girl, for one half hour, it might be extra for, uh, your particular, uh, needs,” she said, looking at me as if I were the biggest pervert who had walked in in months, God alone knew what I wanted to do with the girl and the tea.

“Yeah, I don’t need a girl. I just need a quiet room. Tell the boss.”

The Russian motioned for me to sit down on a leather chair. An Albanian cleaning woman started vacuuming the rugs. Lara went off and came back with an older conservatively dressed Irish woman in a black wig and ivory glasses. She sat down opposite.

I offered the three hundred euros. She refused to accept it.

“Ye can’t stay here, if that’s what you’re thinking. This is a respectable house, whatever you’ve done, this isn’t a place for fugitives,” she said, blowing my whole madam-smart-as-a-third-grade-teacher theory out of the water.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“No, of course not, that’s why you’re dripping blood on me leather seat and you’re wearing someone else’s coat.”

“Ok, there’s no need to be hasty. But you’re right, I need a place to lie low until I can figure how I can get out of town. I won’t be any trouble.”

“You won’t be any trouble cos you won’t be here. Get the fuck out, before I get the help to throw you out,” she said. “And we wouldn’t want your pretty face more beat up than it already is.”

“I’m working for Bridget Callaghan,” I said-the only card I had, and not mentioning, of course, that there was more than a possibility that lovely Bridget was trying to bloody kill me.

“Are you now?” she said, batting not an eye. “And who might that be?”

“The head of the fucking Irish mob in New York City, as if you didn’t know,” I said with menace.

She shook her head slightly. Took a small intake of breath.

“Ok, ok. Keep your voice down for one thing; this is a respectable house, so it is. And so what? Even if you do work for her, what’s that to me? You sitting there on the run from the Guards, frightening me girls.”

“I’ll tell you what it is to you, love. It’s bloody this. If Bridget hears that you wouldn’t help me, that you said there was no room at the inn when I was in a tight spot, you better fucking have fire insurance.”

She was going to say something, stopped herself, smiled, nodded. This was a hooker with a heart of brass. She knew what was what. She gave me a final once-over to see if she believed me. Apparently she did.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Michael Forsythe.”

Her eyebrows raised a fraction, but she recovered quickly and asked me another question: “You worked for Bridget Callaghan a long time?”

“We go back a long, long way.”

“And would you be able to prove that if it was necessary?”

“I would. Listen, love, I just got into town. I’ve already had a fucking lot to deal with, I just need a hour to get my bloody head straight.”

The madam sighed and got to her feet.

“It’s more or less an empty house at the moment,” she said to herself.

“You’ll let me have a room?”

“Ok, ok, we’ll see what we can do. I suppose you’re here to help with the missing wee girl?”

“You heard about that?”

“Oh aye, it’s big news in certain quarters.”

“Is it?” I asked, for information.

“It is indeed now.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Well, my first thought was that the lassie-Siobhan, is it?-must have run off, because no one in Ireland would dare to have lifted Bridget Callaghan’s wean. But I’ll tell you this, I’m not so sure now, that pop music nowadays, it’s all about drugs, one of those heroin fiends could have taken her off the street to his drug den. Let me tell you. I certainly don’t allow drug users in my establishment. Anything could happen.”

“Very wise.”

“You say your name is Michael Forsythe?” she asked a little slyly.

“That’s right. That mean anything to you?”

“No, no, not at all. Yeah, shame about the wee girl. But it happened in Belfast and, sure, Belfast is crazy like. I don’t know what’s going on up there. The lines aren’t set yet, not like down here. Dublin’s a lot more civilized, you know what’s what. Anyway, enough of the chitchat, get you a room. What do you want in your tea?”

“I’ll take milk and sugar,” I said.

The woman made a movement to a man I’d only just noticed lurking in deep shadow by the grandfather clock. He shimmered out of the foyer.

“Follow me.”

I had trouble getting up, so she helped me to my feet and led me down the corridor and into a side room. She unlocked the door and we entered.

Another decor change from the way I remembered these rooms. Cheap and cheerful in my day, now fussy Victorian: a four-poster bed hung with silky drapes, pictures of ballerinas and puppies lost in string, chintzy mirrors, clocks, sinister-looking china dolls. I couldn’t have imagined a worse room in which to try to get an erection and fuck a stranger. But maybe the girls were so bloody great it didn’t matter what the interior decoration was like.

“You can take a shower and I’ll have someone go out and buy you a change of clothes. Thirty-two trouser and a large for a shirt, is it? Aye, looks like it. Well now, ok. And do you need a girl on the house?”

“No.”

“Fine, I’ll bring you clothes and let you get on with things. You can freshen up and get your shite together, but you can’t stay long. You certainly can’t stay over. If the Guards are looking for you, for anything serious, I don’t need it coming near my house.”

“I understand, I’ll be out of here within the hour. Oh, and if you could bring me a needle and a strong piece of thread, that would help too.”

She nodded, left the room. I lay down on the bed and began pulling off my clothes. I checked the straps around my artificial foot; sometimes you got chafing on the stump, but everything looked ok. I put it back on. A knock at the door.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Lara, with your tea,” she said.

I opened the door extremely cautiously, in case of trouble, but it was nothing more invidious than the gray-eyed hooker with a teapot on a tray. Behind her, in the corridor, a man wearing a pig nose was naked, on all fours, being led by another Russian girl dressed domina-trix-fashion in leathers and spiked boots. Probably the chief justice of Ireland, the chief constable of Dublin, someone like that.

“Will that be all now, sir?” Lara said, having rehearsed the phrase to sound like an Irish girl.

“If someone could get me a T-shirt, it would be great. This one’s ruined.”

“Very well,” she said and closed the door behind her.

I drank some tea and ate a couple of the chocolate biscuits that came with it. They’d also provided that needle and thread. I started running the shower to get the hot water warmed up.

I picked the phone up from the bedside table. I found Bridget’s number at the Europa.

Well, this was it. Your last chance, my dear. She’d have to be pretty bloody convincing. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…

I dialed the Europa Hotel, got through to her room.

“Who’s this?” a man asked.

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“Moran.”

“I want to speak to Bridget, this is Michael Forsythe,” I said.

“Hold on,” the man said with cold anger.

“Michael, are you in Belfast?” Bridget asked urgently.

“Am I hell. I’m not in the grave, anyway.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Despite your best efforts I am still walking the same planet Earth as you,” I said.

“Michael, I don’t have time for this, come to the point,” Bridget muttered impatiently.

“Honestly, this is getting very tiresome,” I said.

“Tiresome for me, too. What are you talking about?” Bridget yelled.

“Your boy tried to kill me, as if you didn’t know,” I said.

“What boy?”

“Your boy, the cab driver. Surprise, surprise, he knew my name and he tried to fucking kill me.”

Bridget considered the information. Her breathing became shorter and she sounded irritated.

“Michael, I don’t know what is going on. If someone tried to kill you, it was nothing to do with me.”

“Bridget, I know you’re playing. Do you think I am that stupid?” I said, a half-rhetorical, half-real query.

“Michael, believe me, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t send anyone to kill you. Why would I do that when I could have killed you in Peru?”

Fair point.

“You didn’t send someone to the airport to meet me?”

“No.”

I leaned back in the leather chair, tapped the phone against my forehead. Just exactly how good was she? Was she good enough to send two hit teams at me in two days, fail in both the hits, and still convince me that she wasn’t trying to knock me off?

“Bridget, I know it was you, I-” I tried to say but Bridget cut me off.

“Listen to me, you worthless shit. You killed my fiancé and I’m giving you a chance to fucking balance the ledger. My daughter’s gone missing. Do you understand? I don’t know what the fuck you’ve been doing in Dublin, I don’t care. I need your help. The most precious thing in the world to me is Siobhan. Not you or what you’ve been up to, you son of a bitch. I don’t have the time to talk to you anymore. I’ll be in the Europa, you’ll either come or you won’t, it’s up to you. You are not my concern right now. Ok? I have a million things to do, so I have to go. Hell with you, Michael, useless as fucking usual.”

She hung up.

I listened to the dial tone and then the recorded operator told me to put the phone down. Jesus. Where did that leave me? It was back to the original question. Was she good enough to hit me and still make me come to her in Belfast?

I groaned, put my head in my hands.

She was.

What was happening to me? What kind of an idiot had I become? Was my judgment going? Either that or a possibility that was worse. Maybe I really didn’t buy it, maybe I didn’t believe her at all. I didn’t believe her but I wanted to go to Belfast anyway. I was being drawn to her even though I knew it would bring death. I wanted to see her this one last time whatever the cost.

Was that what was going on?

I shrugged. Nah. It wasn’t as complicated as that. I simply believed her. She was telling the truth. What was happening to me had nothing to do with her. It was a coincidence. I had more than one enemy in the world, after all, and maybe I had several in Ireland. And by now, my presence was known about and advertised.

I removed the duct tape, took my trousers off, and climbed into the shower.

Quick shower. Quick dry.

I wrapped the towel around me and sat on the end of the bed. I ripped off a piece of pillowcase, dipped the needle in the hot tea, and double threaded it. I grabbed the flesh on either side of my knife wound. Easy does it. I pushed the needle through the epidermis, threaded it over the wound, drove it through the skin on the other side of the cut. I repeated the procedure five times in a crisscross pattern and gently pulled the stitches tight. When the wound was together, I tied off the thread, wiped away the blood, applied a bit of pillowcase as a bandage, and rewrapped the duct tape around the whole thing.

I spent a while recovering from the waves of pain and then I started dressing.

There was a knock outside. Ah, Lara with the T-shirt. I pulled on my trousers and opened the door.

Not Lara. A six-foot-four bald guy with a goatee, a black suit, narrow slits for eyes, and a six-shot.38 revolver in his meaty paw.

“What the fuck is all this?” I asked. “The lady of the house and I have an arrangement.”

“Are you Michael Forsythe?” he asked in a Belfast accent.

If I hadn’t learned in the last ten years, certainly the last two days had taught me the inefficacy of answering to that name.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Oh, you don’t need to know who I am. Put your hands on your head and make like a fucking statue. One move and there’s a bullet in that bandage in your gut.”

I put my hands over my head. The man rummaged through my things and found my passport. That wouldn’t help him. I was called Brian O’Nolan on that. Still, he looked at the picture and at me and compared it with a mental picture.

“I think it is you,” he said rhetorically. “The foot too, bit of a give-away.”

“You want to tell me what this is all about?” I asked.

“No, I want you to put these on,” he said and threw me a pair of handcuffs. I let them drop on the floor.

“And if I don’t?”

“Just put on the cuffs,” he said.

“Bridget sent you?”

He didn’t offer any information, but perhaps that was a tell in a very slight shake of the head.

“I won’t put the cuffs on unless you tell me what’s going to happen after I do.”

“You’ll be going on a journey, see some old pals. Now put the cuffs on. You’ll be fucking sorry if you don’t, it’s all the same to me.”

“Did the madam tell you I was here?”

“Yeah, she did, now get those things on,” he yelled.

“At least let me get dressed first.”

He thought about it for a second.

“Ok. No funny stuff or I’ll top ya.”

I put on my clothes, taxing his patience with my Stanley boots. I picked up the handcuffs. Standard cop jobs. I placed one over my wrist and casually tilted my arm so he couldn’t see exactly what I was doing, and closed the cuff about halfway. I tugged the metal between my finger and thumb to show him that it was locked. The man seemed satisfied. Of course it wasn’t locked at all. I put the second loop over my other wrist and closed it, this time all the way. I held my hands in front of me with the big gap on the right side, underneath my wrist where he couldn’t see it. If he had any brains he’d kick me in the balls, kneel on me, put the gun in my face, and make sure the handcuffs were really bloody tight.

But he was a trusting son of a bitch and either not very good at this or was under orders to go softy softly with me.

“You walk ahead of me, we’ll wait downstairs, there’ll be a car along in a couple of minutes.”

“Where are we going?”

“Doesn’t concern you.”

“The Garda is looking for me. You can’t just take me away, they’ll spot you in a second.”

“Aye, heard about that. How long have you been in the city? About four hours? And they already have a photofit of you up on the telly for attempted murder. Nice work. But don’t you worry about the Garda, mate, we know all the ins and outs of this town, believe me.”

“Where we going?” I tried again.

“North,” he said ominously.

So it was Bridget.

I walked along the oak-paneled corridor and into the foyer. It had been cleared of girls, clients in pig noses, and Albanian cleaning ladies.

He was behind me. I looked at our reflections in the polished oak. He was following me about four feet back.

I wriggled out of the right handcuff. A tiny clinking sound, but he couldn’t see what I was doing.

I wouldn’t have long to make my move. A car was coming. Presumably with more men inside.

Three steps led down from the hallway into the foyer.

It would have to be now.

I tripped and fell down the steps, keeping my hands in front and landing on what looked like my unprotected face.

“Jesus,” the man said and ran over to help. He transferred the revolver from his right to his left hand and pulled me up by the hair. I let him lift me six inches off the ground then I made a grab for the gun. My left hand found his wrist, I stuck my knuckle into the pressure point an inch below his life line.

He screamed, his grip loosened, and I grabbed the pistol. He threw a punch at me with his right, missed, smacked his fist into the hardwood floor. I kicked his legs and he fell on top of me. He landed with a two-hundred-pound crash on my back, crushing the air out of my lungs and nearly opening my stitches.

Painfully I rolled to the side just as he was drawing back a big fist to smash into my face, but there wasn’t going to be a fight. I wriggled my arm free, held the gun out horizontally, and pulled the trigger. A bullet caught him in the armpit. He screamed and writhed, and I pushed him off. And as he made a desperate lunge for the gun, I shot him in the shoulder. The second bullet knocked him on his spine.

I stood up and backed well away from him.

“Who do you work for?” I asked.

Through one of the brothel windows I could see that a red Range Rover had pulled up outside. Men getting out. Bollocks. No time for twenty questions.

“Ammo,” I said.

He pointed to his jacket pocket. I reached in and pulled out a bag full of assorted.38 shells. Old, new; still, they would do the job.

“Handcuff key?”

“Other pocket.”

I reached in and took out the key.

“Don’t kill me,” he pleaded.

“This is your lucky day, pal,” I said and ran back up the foyer steps and along the corridor, kicking open doors until I found a room with a girl inside.

Mousy little brunette taking a break.

“Is there a back way out of here?” I asked her.

“What?”

I put the gun on her forehead.

“Is there a back way out of here?” I asked again.

Running. Those stars again. My eyes were definitely fucked up. Couldn’t see properly. I rubbed them. Big red birds sitting around a black mark in the road. As I got close they turned into kids in Man. United shirts.

I looked back.

No one behind me.

“Over here, mister,” a voice said, and a tiny hand tugged me down a narrow lane. Dogs barking. Papers. Cardboard boxes. Beer cans. Bottles. Narrow streets. An outdoor toilet. Smell of bacon fat. Curtains of gray slate, yards of washing.

“This way,” the voice said.

Finally I stopped seeing the stars. But Jesus, I’d have to get to a doctor for that.

We went into a court between some back-to-backs and then across a yard full of burned-out cars. In front of us was an open space where a block of flats had once stood and now was derelict. Kids playing in the cement, women talking. Caravans. Trailer homes.

“You’re safe now, mister,” the voice said. The kid was a boy of about thirteen. A dark-haired wee mucker with a scar on his face below the ear. He was wearing a patched sweater, dirty plimsolls, and trousers miles too big for him. Clearly he was a Gypsy kid, or a traveler, if you wanted to be politically correct about it.

“Who ya running from? The poliss?” the kid asked when he saw that I had my breath back.

“Sort of.”

“Aye, thought so. I just seen this eejit running and I thought the poliss are after him. That’s why I done come after ya, show ya a wee route.”

“Thanks.”

The kid looked at the handcuff still attached to my left wrist. It was also still holding a silenced revolver, but the boy didn’t give a shit about the gun.

“Did ya make a break for it? Outta the car?”

“Aye. Sure,” I said. I found the key, took the handcuffs off, and gave them to him.

“Did ya have that key made? How did ya get out of those things?” he asked.

“You ever heard of Houdini?”

“Nope.”

I drank in air, safetied the pistol, and shoved it down the front of my trousers.

“Ya want me to get ya a drink or something?” the kid asked.

“No. Thanks.”

“Are ya heading back?”

“Yes.”

“Where to?”

“Belfast,” I found myself saying. “I’m going to Belfast to get some answers.”

The boy was looking at me funny now. Squinting as the sun came out and then smirking as it went back behind the clouds. I stretched my shoulders where they hurt and reached in my pocket. I found a twenty-euro note.

“Buy yourself some candy,” I said.

“I will,” the kid said, with a trace of ungracious defiance, as if he was just begging me to tell him to say thank you, in which case he would be ready to tell me to fuck away off. But I wasn’t falling for it. I looked at the wee lad and found myself breaking into a grin.

“Have you any brothers or sisters?” I asked.

“Jesus, you’ve no idea, mister.”

“Give them a share of the candy.”

“I will,” the kid promised.

“Give you another twenty if you could russle me up a T-shirt, this one’s fucked.”

The kid nodded, walked across the waste ground, walked into the nearest caravan, came out with a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt. A man appeared and said something to the kid and pointed at me. The kid replied, nodded. Brought me the T-shirt. I put it on.

“What did that man want?” I asked.

“Nothing. He was just telling me there was two men who came after ya, looking for ya, loike, asking questions.”

“What did he say to them?”

The kid grinned.

“Nobody saw anything or anybody.”

“Ok. Good. Which way back into the city center?”

“Down to the right. All the way down the hill.”

I left the boy and walked down the hill, past boarded-up houses and a few scary-looking hoods keeping watch at the corners. This was the heart of a bad area (interestingly, just behind the façade of new Dublin) and I walked fast to get out of it, but not so quickly that I would attract attention. If they thought I was an undercover cop or a rival hood I’d be approached at gunpoint, bundled into a van, and taken somewhere to be interrogated. Take me bloody hours to get out of it.

At the bottom of the hill I came to a bus station and then I saw some familiar street signs.

I was near the river again.

Belfast, I’d told the kid. And Belfast it would be.

The peelers.

Oh, they’d send a couple of beat cops to the exit points. Avoid the train station, avoid the bus station, avoid the airport, but there was no way the Garda could control cars leaving the city, not these days. Dublin was a big, modern commuter city with a thousand roads in and out.

Piss easy, steal a car, drive out of town. Shit, hire a car. They didn’t know who I was. Get my credit card, dial Hertz.

I found a quiet nook and took out my cell phone.

I called up every car-hire place in County Dublin but in every one the story was the same: “We’re all out of cars, there’s a big festival in Dublin to do with James Joyce. You’ll have no problem tomorrow, but not today.”

So, it was either thieve a vehicle or risk the bus or train stations. I really could chance the latter two. I didn’t have much respect for the Garda’s ability to apprehend someone even if they did have a photofit. But then again maybe that would be pushing my luck just too far.

As for the first option. There were hundreds of cars parked right here in the street, but who knew what fuckwit would miss his vehicle fifteen minutes from now, call the cops, and then they’d circulate the license plate and some keen motorcyle cop would lift me. What then? Shoot an unarmed Garda Síochána just trying to do his duty?

Nah. I had another idea. I found the card in my trouser pocket. I phoned the number.

“Hello,” I said when I got connected.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Hey, it’s me, the old geezer from the parade.”

“Oh, you, where did you go?” Riorden asked.

“Hey, let me ask you something, have you got a car, a Volkswagen?”

“Yeah, I do, a Volkswagen Beetle. One of the new ones. Why do you want to know?”

“Uh, I don’t. Just checking. Friend of mine wants to buy a car, he really likes Volkswagens, that’s all. You’re not in the market to sell it?”

“Is that why you called me up?”

“No, you got me. It’s only an excuse, I wanted to see you again and I couldn’t think of a reason for calling you. Where are you?”

“We’re still at Jury’s, do you know it?”

“Aye, I know it.”

Twenty minutes later I walked into Jury’s. A party was in full swing. It was a nice June day, the international media were in town, term was winding down. What more excuse did you need for celebration?

In any case it was packed with students. Standing room only and there wasn’t much room to stand. Two hundred dead easy if someone shouted “Fire.”

I found the girl talking to an enormous black-haired English rugby player in an Aran sweater. She was on lemonade, but he was half wasted and thought his luck was in. I waited till she took a bathroom break before I approached him.

“Fuck off, Hercules, the lady is spoken for,” I said with menace.

“Are you talking to me?” the rugby player asked.

“No, I’m talking to the midget who works you by remote control, now fuck away off before we test the adage, the bigger they are…”

“You’ve got to be pulling my leg?” he said.

“No. I’m not pulling your fucking leg. I’m not climbing up your fucking beanstalk to steal your magic beans either. I’m telling you to fuck away off before I get upset.”

“Jesus, are you looking for trouble?” he persisted.

“Believe me, I don’t have to go looking. I’ll count to ten and you better be out of here, this lady is spoken for.”

“You picked the wrong guy to start a fight with,” he maintained.

As I began my countdown, he clenched his fists.

“One, two, three, four,” I counted and kneed him right in the nut sack. He sank to the floor and as he tumbled I grabbed him by the hair and smacked my fist twice into his face. He wilted, wobbled, fell. I checked to see if anyone had spotted my assault on a brother student, but everyone was drunk, exuberant, not paying attention and I was a fast wee turd when occasion arose.

“Lend a hand here, Nigel can’t hold his drink,” I shouted and pushed the big guy’s head backward onto the concrete floor.

A couple of his mates, looking round for the first time, saw that their pal was out for the count and ran to help him. Just then the girl came out of the toilet.

“Your boyfriend can’t take his drink,” I said.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” the girl said, looking to see that he wasn’t dead, but not much beyond that.

“Good, you deserve better,” I said.

“Who are you?” she asked, exasperated.

I bit my lip.

I was going to romance her but suddenly, from out of nowhere, I was fed up with this story. I wanted to expedite matters. I wanted to bring things to the goddamn climax. There wasn’t time for an hour or two’s worth of bullshit.

“You want the truth?” I asked.

“Yeah?”

“I’m a police officer, I’m undercover. Inspector Brian O’Nolan. Dublin CID. I know you don’t want to hear this in the middle of a party but someone broke into your car,” I said deadpan.

“Someone broke into my car?” she said, horrified.

“That’s right. We ran the plate, your name and number came up and I thought, Jesus, that’s a coincidence, I was talking to that wee lassie this morning.”

“Is that why you asked about it on the phone?”

“Aye, but I hate to tell people bad news on the phone. Thought I’d come in person. Come on. We’d like you to ID the vehicle and drive it to the nearest station for us, if you don’t mind.”

“Jesus, I’m glad I gave you my number,” she said, happy enough to buy the story without a heartbeat.

“Come on, let’s go ID the car.”

Five minutes later and we were at a small parking lot near Trinity. I deflected easily the many “You don’t look like a cop” or “You have a bit of an American accent” questions, reassured her that her car was relatively unharmed, and asked her a couple of details about her habits, friends, and teachers to see if she would be missed.

“There’s the car,” she said, pointing to a blue Volkswagen. “Shite. It looks ok from here.”

I checked the street.

There were people about but no one paying us any particular attention. We walked to the vehicle.

She looked at me with first a puzzled and then a suspicious expression playing across her pretty face.

“No one broke into the car,” she said.

“Don’t scream or I’ll fucking shoot you,” I said, taking out the revolver and shoving it into her ribs.

“Are you serious?” she asked, wondering, no doubt, if this was all some nasty practical joke.

“Aye.”

“W-what do you want?” she asked, a little bit more frightened this time.

“Well, I want your car, but you’ll have to come with me, because I don’t want you reporting me and I’m not feeling well enough to drive.”

“You must be kidding,” she said, her big eyes widening in terror. Her chest heaving up and down. It was not unattractive. I pushed the gun farther into her body.

“No joke, love. Now unlock the fucking car and get in.”

“You wouldn’t kill me in broad daylight.”

“I fucking would,” I said savagely.

This was the turning point for her.

“I don’t want to get shot. I’m, I’m… I’m pregnant,” she said and began to sob.

It threw me for a second, but only for a second.

“You listen to me, honey. You’re going to live till you’re a hundred and twenty years old. You’re going to be popping champagne corks in the year 2100 and you’re going to be here when the aliens show up with all their videos of Jesus and Alexander the Great. Either that, or you’re going to be fucking dead with a bullet in your skull, thirty seconds from now. Your call. And if you die, the bairn dies too.”

She composed herself a little, looked at me, stared at the gun.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“We’re going to get in your car and you’re going to drive me to Belfast and you’re going to drive back down to Dublin and never bloody mention this to anybody. Now enough yakking, get in the fucking car and drive.”