The Color of Blood

Sixteen

IT’S NOT DIFFICULT TO FIND SOMEONE WITH ROOMS IN Trinity College; the names are listed outside each door. And it didn’t take long to find Jonathan O’Connor, because he lived in one of the first buildings on the right in Front Square, which is where I started looking. I did have to lean on the bell for a while to persuade him to let me in, but that didn’t take very long either. After about ten minutes he clattered down the stairs and opened the door.

“What do you want?” he said, attempting to block my path.

“I want to talk to you, Jonny. Ask you a few more questions.”

“Anything you have to say, you can say out here. I’m very busy at the moment, I’ve an essay to finish.”

A couple of female students had come in Front Gate and were heading in our direction. “All right then,” I said in a much louder voice. “I want to ask you about your use of prostitutes in the pornographic films you made, and whether you feared some of them were having sex in those films under duress: being raped, in other words.”

Jonathan looked at me in shock, then at the approaching women, then withdrew and said, “Come up. Second floor.”

I followed him up two flights of stairs and into his “rums,” which consisted of a kitchen the size of a telephone kiosk, two tiny bedrooms and a living room with the kind of furniture junk shops no longer accept. There was a gas fire and no other form of heating; the bathroom was in the hall.

“Wow,” I said. “Where do you have to live if you don’t win Schol? On the street?”

“The privilege resides in living on campus,” he said, his little accent at its snootiest. “And I don’t have to share; one normally would. And of course I could fix it up and buy all sorts of furniture and so on, but how vulgar would that be?”

I nodded, impatient already with the idea of teasing him any further. I sat down on a steel-frame sofa and nearly fell through one of the cushions; Jonathan perched on an orange plastic chair in his expensive jeans and his expensive sweatshirt and looked at me with a supercilious grin. A silver laptop computer lay open on the table beside him. The walls were decorated with pictures of airbrushed, orange plastic women in and out of their underwear cut from the pages of FHM and Loaded and Maxim; the women looked as if they were all dying for sex; none of them looked like they came fitted with the flesh you need to do it properly. There were two portraits of Dr. John Howard, and an aerial photograph of the three towers of the Howard Medical Center. I was cold, and I had just seen two men killed; I needed a meal and a drink and a good night’s sleep. One out of three would do.

“Do you have anything to drink?” I said.

“I’m not running a pub, you know,” Jonathan said in an exceptionally spoiled and shrill voice. It took every ounce of self-control I possessed not to smack him in the head. At some level, I think he may have picked up on this. He trudged off to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of Absolut vodka and a carton of orange juice and two glass tumblers. I ignored the juice, poured off a slug of Absolut and threw it back.

“The blond girl in the second sex film you made,” I said. “What was her name?”

“Wendy. At least, that’s what they called her. She was in the film with Emily too.”

“Was she Eastern European? And if you say you didn’t check her passport, I’m going to toss you out the fucking window.”

Jonathan looked gratifyingly frightened at my threat. I kept looking at the window, not because I was going to throw him out of it but because through it, you could see straight up Grafton Street; you were right in the heart of the city. I was starting to see the point of these “rums.”

“I think so,” he said. “She didn’t really speak very much, but when she did it was with an accent. Polish, or Russian, I don’t know. And no, in answer to your next question, it didn’t seem like she was being forced. She wasn’t wildly enthusiastic either, but…I just figured she was being paid, she needed the money.”

“That’s as far as you thought about it?”

He looked at the floor and began to rub his wrists together; when he looked up again his eyes were glistening, and he was shaking.

“I don’t know. I…the other woman was Irish, Petra, Sean Moon called her, but that was bullshit, she was a hooker really, extremely coarse…she wasn’t very happy about it either…I think she was pregnant…the whole thing was a bit of a nightmare, actually…”

He started to retch, then ran out to the kitchen, where I could hear him vomit. I was giving him a hard time, bullying him, taking out on him the anger I should have used on Brock Taylor. I told myself I should have as much patience with Jonathan as I had with Emily; it looked like their family had put them both through the mill, and if I didn’t find him as sympathetic, that wasn’t necessarily his fault. When he came back in, his eyes burned red in his grey face.

“Are you all right?”

“What do you care? Just ask your questions and get out,” he said. “What are you after, anyway? The Guards are dealing with Uncle Shane. Either they have enough evidence to charge him or they don’t. It’s pretty straightforward, I should have thought. Why are you trying to complicate it?”

“Because I’m not so sure your uncle is guilty. Because if he isn’t, the question is, who did kill Jessica Howard and David Brady? Because there’s more to the case than just those murders, and what there is goes back twenty, maybe thirty years.”

“Christ, you sound like David Manuel. Nothing’s ever what it is, it’s always bound up with something else, something that happened in the past.”

“Your mother says that’s true of you. That nothing has been the same for you since your father’s death.”

“So what? Does that make me special? People die, life goes on. What’s it got to do with you? Why are you so interested in our family anyway? You’re like a little orphan boy, his face pushed up against the window of the big house. Why can’t you just leave us alone?”

“I’m being paid by your mother to do a job,” I said, stung by the sense that there was a whip of truth in his words, that for all I told myself, I didn’t just make my living this way, and it wasn’t just about justice; I seemed to need the chaos other people brought me so I could make a pattern from it, establish the connections they couldn’t see themselves. Not from envy, but from need.

“I’d be interested in the job description. Does it include fucking her on the stairs in Rowan House? Do you think that’s what a woman like my mother needs? You’re a grubby man, Mr. Loy. I don’t think you could make sense of our family in a million years. Do you know why? Because you’re not our kind of people.”

“There’s a fair likelihood Wendy was being held against her will, that she was either trafficked here or kidnapped once she arrived. That she was forced to have sex with you and Emily. That’s something you did, Jonathan, of your own free will. What kind of person does that make you?”

He flashed an anxious look at me, then stared at the floor again, shaking his head.

“I didn’t know. I didn’t know,” he said.

“Tell me what you remember about her, something, anything, no matter how trivial.”

“She wore a ring. She took it off before we started shooting. The stones were so big, they kept scratching us.”

“What kind of ring?”

“Red stones…they couldn’t have been rubies, but deep red. Two big ones, coming to points, like…I don’t know, like claws.”

Like crab claws. I remembered Anita’s words yesterday morning: It’s not an engagement ring. It’s for protection. A talisman.

I stood up and walked around the room and came to rest in front of the photograph of the three towers that made up the Howard Medical Center.

“Do you think there should be a fourth tower built, Jonathan? I know that’s what your mother wants.”

“Of course I do. And Denis wants it too. It’s an expression of confidence in the family, of continuity, of tradition. It’s the only option.”

“Jessica didn’t agree. Neither does Shane.”

“Shane will come around,” Jonathan said. “Anyway, it’s hardly the day to discuss plans of that sort. Is there anything else?”

“There’s one more thing I need to know. It’s about Emily, yesterday, in the house in Honeypark. Did she leave the house during the day?”

Jonathan nodded.

“And when she came back? How did she look?”

He shook his head.

“I understand, you want to be loyal to your cousin. And believe me, I don’t want to get your uncle off by putting Emily in the frame for her mother’s murder. But the Guards aren’t stupid, and if they get to her first, they’ll take her down.”

“And what, you’ll protect her? If she did it, if she killed David Brady, you’d try and cover it up, would you? Because that’s what I’d do.”

“Is that what you did? The house in Honeypark burned down today. Was there something there? Physical evidence?”

Jonathan shook his head again.

“I saw you nearby. In the Woodpark Inn with the Reilly brothers. Not long after the fire had started.”

Jonathan glanced uneasily at me and looked away.

“I…I needed them to keep quiet about what they knew.”

“What did they know? That Emily killed her mother?”

“Not her mother, my God.”

“You really think she killed David Brady? Jonathan?”

“I don’t know. She was so angry at him. She felt she had been forced to make the film, and she hated it. She went out that morning. When she came back, she was wild, distracted, like something really awful had happened. She went into the bathroom, had a shower, wrapped the clothes up in a bag and put it in the bottom of the wardrobe. Then she told me we had to have sex. In the middle of it, she started fighting, hitting me. Then crying. Then sex again. I was turned on, freaked out, all points between. I didn’t know what had happened, what was happening. That went on all afternoon, until you arrived. It was too fucked up.”

“And the bag? She just left it there?”

“I think so.”

“And the fire today?”

Jonathan breathed in slowly.

“If they couldn’t find any physical evidence, they couldn’t link her to the murder. But I don’t know anything about the fire. I didn’t set it.”

He looked up at me.

“Is Wendy…what’s happened to her?”

“The people who kidnapped her still had her tonight,” I said. “She saw your friend Sean Moon kill your friends Wayne and Darren Reilly.”

“Oh my God.”

“But then, she got away. No thanks to you.”

I went out into the hall, feeling as if I knew less than when I had arrived.

As I opened the door to the stairs, I thought I could hear the boy sobbing.

I walked down Westmoreland Street to the river and stared at it for a while, envying its steadiness of purpose. Groups of drunken men and women tumbled along the quays, screaming and howling, baying at the suffocating night. It sounded like they were trying to get the party back up to where it had been on Halloween, and like they were having to work just a bit too hard at it. I envied them too, though; tonight I envied everyone who didn’t know what I knew. I called Shane Howard, who told me he was at home and not in jail, and asked me did I get the little bastards, and I told him not to worry about them, and that I had his money; he was pleased about that, and laughed one of his crashing laughs that nearly deafened me, and then gave me Anita Kravchenko’s phone number and address.

Anita didn’t live on the North Circular Road, she lived on North King Street, a confusion I attributed to Shane Howard’s brain seizing up completely at the mere mention of Dublin’s northside. The cab let me out by a dingy strip of shops, most with steel shutters on their windows and doors; Anita lived above a dry cleaner’s called Eireann Fresh; I rang her and she came down and let me in. She and her sister were on the first floor in a room barely big enough for one, lit by a bare bulb, with a sink and a two-ring stove and two plastic chairs. Maria huddled on the mattress in a grey sweat suit, her knees drawn up to her chest, studying a television which showed an improbably coifed James Caan doing something unlikely in Las Vegas.

Anita went over and whispered to her sister; Maria shook her head; she wouldn’t look at me. I couldn’t say I blamed her; if I were she, I wouldn’t look at an Irishman again as long as I lived. Anita turned the volume down on the television, then came back and we sat down on the plastic chairs opposite one another.

“Mr. Loy, thank you, my sister thanks you too. She is too upset to speak.”

“I’m not surprised. Are you sure you’re safe here? Does anyone else know where you are?”

“Mr. Howard only. And Jerry.”

“Jerry Dalton?”

“Yes. He tried to help too.”

“I need to get in touch with Jerry Dalton.”

“I should not say.”

“But you’ve been helping him, no? Leaving messages for me on my car?”

“Yes. I do not know what they mean.”

“Neither do I. I’d like to talk to him to find out.”

Maria made a sound, which Anita retreated to the bed to interpret.

“Maria says of course, because you helped us. He will be at the rugby club tonight, he is working.”

“Thanks. I don’t even know…where are you from, Anita? Poland?”

“Kiev…Ukraine.”

“Do you have papers?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’m not with the Guards, Anita.”

Anita said nothing for a while. I could hear the sounds from the other rooms, men quarreling, babies crying, a couple having very noisy sex; then a lull, during which I could hear, and see, Maria sobbing.

“No, we have no papers. That’s why I cannot ask Mr. Howard to help. I am afraid he will fire me.”

“How did Jerry know to help?”

“He met me at Shane’s house and talked to me. He was with Emily, but he talked with me for a while. He is interested in me, not like most Irishmen, only one thing.”

“How did your sister get drawn into this?”

“She is working in a pub, went for drink with a man who comes there, she thinks she goes to other pub with him, but it is his house. Suddenly he beats her, she must sleep with other men. Anything he says.”

“An Irishman? Was that Sean Moon? Was Sean Moon or Brock Taylor the man, Maria?”

Maria’s sobs had now turned to insistent, shrill wailing. Anita went to her, and they whispered together.

“No names. It is too frightened,” Anita said.

“Does he know where you live? Do any of the men who harmed you…do they know where you live?”

Maria looked me in the eye for the first time.

“Yes. They know.”

“Okay. It might be an idea if you didn’t stay at home tonight.”

“We have nowhere to go,” Anita said. “If we go to the Guards, we have no papers, we get sent home. Nothing there. Not for us.”

“Nothing except pimps,” Maria spat.

I found it was easier to say it than to think about the wisdom of it:

“All right, get your stuff. You can stay at my place. I probably won’t be there tonight. You go there, and you lock yourselves in a bedroom, and you don’t answer the door. Is that all right?”

Anita looked at Maria, but her sister was already nodding.

“You are good, Mr. Loy.”

“No I’m not. I’ve got no choice, is all. I’ll wait for you downstairs. Take everything.”

I hailed a cab, then let it go because the first remark the cabdriver made was about the cushy fucking number all these fucking immigrants had round here; by the time I’d found another, the girls were on the street. Everything turned out to be a small fabric suitcase each. The cabdriver promptly got out and put the bags in the trunk, which I took to be a good sign. I asked whether they needed to tell their landlord; Anita began to explain that they owed some rent; Maria, whose English was patchier than her sister’s but effective, said, “Landlord is cunt. Fuck him.” Revolutions have been fought for less. I paid the driver, tipped him well, made sure he knew exactly where he was going and gave Anita Tommy’s key.

No names. It is too frightened.