Ordinary Decent Criminals

Farrell cast about the crowd, goaded by those sanctimonious poppies on every staff lapel. Thank God, it was Remembrance Day, after which the Somme would once more be over for another good eleven months. Farrell supposed dully that there was nothing wrong per se with mourning your war dead, though of course every gesture was subverted here and that wasn’t what the poppies connoted at all. Those are OUR wars. Those are OUR dead. Take ’em, thought Farrell, childish bastards. Little matter that plenty of Catholics had died in both world wars; fact had never contaminated anyone’s politics in Ireland. (The fiction was wick, since who needed it? We’ve got history.) No, ceremonies were divvied up and the Prods had picked Remembrance Day, the Twelfth, and probably Christmas, since they’d more cash. The Taigs got Easter, Internment Day, and for twenty years a whole smattering of, ah, unscheduled celebrations all across the calendar. Let the Prods have their sorry paper poppies and weepy parades to cenotaphs, it was only fair.

Don’t get the wrong idea. This left Farrell in a conflicted position—Catholics didn’t wear poppies and Prods did, but if Farrell were Protestant, being Farrell, he would refuse to wear a poppy, so to express this alienation in Catholic terms should he wear one instead? For his own people had excluded him as well, or he’d excluded himself; each had leapt to disown the other. Farrell despised groups of all kinds and made sure they despised him in return; then he needed the backs of crowds to feel wholly, spitefully himself. He was no different from the rest of this tip, where you loved your enemy all right, but not quite the way Christ had in mind—loved him precisely for being your enemy, for obliging you with something outside your own mirror to revile.

He was easy to locate, thick platinum hair curling over the crowd. The large crown and high forehead bent toward his boisterous companion. While Estrin found Irishmen a frumpy crew, given to bundling—they wore sweaters with their suits, jackets binding and short in the arm—Farrell’s dark wool three-piece was impeccably tailored, European; his crimson tie, silk handkerchief, and long Dickensian overcoat suggested a kind of style she’d not seen on this island—that is: style.

And, she observed on the way over, he was a drinker, since in this deluge of a country whiskey was the only force of nature that gave the national complexion any color at all. So she was surprised on arriving at their corner to find his measure clear.

“Hot water,” he explained.

“You don’t drink?”

“Wine. After eight.”

“A.m. or p.m.?”

“I sleep little enough to lose the distinction.”

Estrin raised her malt. “I like to break my rules from time to time.”

“You can afford to,” he said severely. “You’re still young.”

“Not that young,” said Estrin with a trace of irritation. “And I can’t afford not to. Too many rules and too much obedience are just as dangerous as going off the deep end.”

“Don’t you worry now,” said the heavier man, slapping his friend on the back. “Farrell O’Phelan’s in no danger of being too obedient a boy, or too faint a drinker, either. Knows how to impress the ladies with a cup of hot water at tourist draws, is all.” He laughed, though Farrell didn’t, exactly, join in.

“You brought me here to torture me,” said Farrell, and meant it; the smell was beginning to get to him. How happy it would make MacBride if he strode up to the bar and threw back a double. And how it firmed his resolution, to deny Angus that joy.

“Now, it was damned decent of Bushmills to open today. And I could hardly meet you at the cenotaph this morning,” MacBride muttered. “Sure you’d hum ‘The Battle of the Bogside’ all through the two minutes’ silence.”

Farrell was about to quip that he was more likely to hum Polish polkas than some whimper of Irish resistance, when he noticed the American’s eyes had sharpened; most foreigners here were clueless, but he did not like the way she looked from one to the other and he did not like the way she looked at MacBride. He shut up. He did not want to be understood. That was the first thing women didn’t understand.

“The fumes off that wort were something, what?” recalled the girl. “Ripped in thirty seconds. Like sniffing glue, and the end of the tube is six feet wide.”

“You sniff glue?” asked Farrell.

“Putting together balsa Sopwith Camels at eight or nine? We breathed too much, they didn’t fly so hot, but we’d had a good time. My life has had to do with airplanes from way back.”

“How so?”

“I’m tempted to return-address envelopes, ‘Window seat. Nonsmoking.’ Though I don’t send so many letters anymore … Lufthansa,” she commended.

He clucked. “Free cocktails, but frozen salad.”

“You travel much?”

“Same address, but on the aisle.”

“Long legs.”

“I like to be the first off the plane.”

“I like to look out the window. Flying into Belfast I was pressed so close to the pane that the man next to me asked if this was my first flight.”

“And you said?”

“Always. I never get bored with flying. Though I am sympathetic to the aisle seat,” she noted. “My mother claims I used to stand in my crib and plead through the bars: Ah wan ow. She was impressed that I started talking in a whole sentence. But I’m impressed what it meant.”

“Which was?”

“I want out.”

“And have you? Gotten out?”

She seemed to consider this more seriously than the facile question required. “Maybe not.” Abruptly she accused him, “I have it on good authority that locals never touch this place. You don’t even drink whiskey. What are you doing here?”

“Is this an interrogation?”

“Are you used to being interrogated?”

Farrell faltered, and wondered momentarily if she knew who he was—ridiculous. “Just—a diverting opening.”

“You play chess?”

“Aye, and you?”

“No. I wouldn’t have wanted to learn unless I was great. And I don’t quite have that kind of brain. So instead of being second-rate, I just don’t play.”

“Then you do have that kind of brain,” Farrell observed. “Abstention is a strategy.”

“Never will forget that first game,” MacBride nosed in again. “This sorry scarecrow teetering to the board. I shook his hand and nearly crushed it—a sickly sort, this one. But ten moves later, who’d have guessed he had it in him? Loopy, I thought, the boy’s in a fever!”

“But I won.” Farrell poked MacBride’s chest in a gesture he realized too late was exactly like his own father’s.

“’Twas not a sound game, mate. Later that same afternoon I sat down to me own board and had you hammered three ways round.”

“The gentleman at your right plays a sedulous game,” Farrell explained. “Uses all the time on his clock. Knows all the books—”

“You could stand yourself—”

“Never! Never opened a page.”

“Your man here considers learning a cheat.”

“There seems little point in testing some other gobshite’s wits when the idea’s to test your own.”

“I thought winning was all, Farrell. Why not read up, then, if it topples the other fellow’s king?”

“I don’t collaborate, at anything. I win.”

“We might observe,” said MacBride dryly, “that by that arrangement you get singular credit for falling on your arse.”

“When you two play,” asked the girl, “who does win, anyway?”

“Did,” said MacBride.

“Oh, we still play,” said Farrell softly.

At last MacBride had given up ogling the girl, because he couldn’t resist looking at Farrell; funny, they were both showing off, for they had often used each other, or perhaps more accurately their relationship, to entice women. “I was trying to tell you, lass”—MacBride turned back to her—“the gawk here played reckless chess. Might seem a tame sport from the side, but your man conduct his pieces like commanding his crew into uncharted high seas. Could make you woozy to watch the board.”

“And you,” said Farrell, “never made an original move in your life.”

“No such thing as an original move. That’s your vanity, and your ignorance is vanity. It trips you, too. I always watched the larger game. You got too caught up in your flourishes, your flashy attacks. You wanted to impress me. It was the ruin of you.”

“Fischer and Kasparov were both victorious.”

“Aye, and where’s Fischer now? Crawled off in a hole.”

“Why did he quit?” asked the girl.

“Couldn’t keep it up!” cried MacBride.

“No,” said Farrell. “He was disgusted. Sick to death.”

“Och, for you to fasten on to your man Kasparov and that, it’s hubris of the first order. At least those lads had a clue. You, Farrell, just lit out. Never quite thought it through. You’re impulsive, man.”

“Yes,” said Farrell. “And you’re a bore.”

“O’Phelan, you never have seen the difference between a hero and a fool.”

“In my experience,” the American ventured, “just as many cautious people get run over by buses as careless.”

Farrell smiled.

As the trio trailed from the bar, the usual questions tumbled in: Where was she from in—, How long had she been—, How long was she planning—, Sure isn’t her name—? Ten years of this conversation, how rarely she gave straight answers anymore.

“Esther Ingrid,” she explained a bit through her teeth. “Little brother. It stuck.” The shorthand was getting so clipped it was incoherent.

“So what do you do in the States?” asked Farrell.

“What I do everywhere,” she leveled. “Leave.”

“Does that pay?”

“Often.”

“Yes,” he agreed with a collusive smile. “Handsomely.”

Both men were placated when she mentioned Belfast.

“And how might we look you up, now?” the lusty man inquired.

Estrin sighed, and glanced from one to the other. She had grown up with brothers on either side, and still attracted men in twos; the last cut was tense. And, she reminded herself, how frequently she had failed to keep Maybe we’ll run into each other sometime poised on the tip of her tongue, letting a few digits trip off instead, because it’s easier to give people what they want from you. But Estrin paid for laziness later, with the rude thud on her front door, a total stranger with flowers and expectations smoothing the tattered receipt where she’d scribbled an address only to get rid of the man. Don’t say anything dorky: it was a new discipline. So she was about to toss off, “Put a note in a bottle and throw it in the North Channel,” when some flicker in Farrell’s eye seemed to catch her in her very thought, as if he knew she was pressed for her number often and saw these scenes purely as something to wriggle out of. My dear, read his expression, don’t switch on automatic, you might as well resign. Well enough, you’re harassed by plenty prats, and good luck to you turfing them aside. But look harder now. You can’t sell us all downriver, and you like men—it comes off you like a smell. You look wildly young to me, but you’re no nun—you’ve that shine in your eyes as if you’re always getting a joke no one’s told yet.

“The Green Door, Whiterock Road.” Estrin flipped her club between them like a coin to beggars, turning to avoid their scuffle for the toss.

“Looks as if you’re white this time,” said MacBride to Farrell good-naturedly. “With that address.”

“I thought you were so successful these territorial niceties didn’t faze you anymore.”

“Successful, not mental, kid. For all that leather, I’d not slop into the Green Door. Think of the laundrette bills to get out the smell.”

“Laundrette? Mortuary.”

Farrell never liked to win anything by luck, though he preferred luck to losing; his eyes followed his new chip. He’d no intention to cash in. The option was sweeter than any dreary discreet evening. Still, as he watched the small woman work on the thick gloves and dive into the red helmet with, he thought, a certain snail-like relief, Farrell had an unresolved sensation he hadn’t felt in long enough that he didn’t recognize what it was. The girl knew they were watching and hurried, switching the engine and failing to warm it long enough; the bike lurched and stalled. Feeling this wasn’t a woman easily rattled, Farrell noted her fluster with satisfaction.

Finally the big red motorcycle pelted away; wind whipped the Union Jack down the road as she passed, the red, white, and blue curbside clouding with exhaust.

Their tour guide rasped up the drive toward MacBride. He was running, his face red with anticipation, as if he’d found the MP’s umbrella and was savoring how obliged MacBride would feel at the trouble taken to return it. But the guide’s hands were empty, and MacBride had his umbrella, and his hat.

“Your honor!” the little man panted. “Have you heard, sir? The radio—”

“Calm down, boyo, what’s that?”

The guide gathered himself and pronounced, “Enniskillen.”

It was a test. Enniskillen? A small town. Prod, a wee orange bud in the otherwise deadly green slime of Fermanagh, choked on all sides, a lone flower in a pond gone to algae—or this was the image that sprang to MacBride’s mind. Otherwise unremarkable; a fair concentration of security-force families, that was all.

However, the Bushmills tour guide did not say the name of Enniskillen like a small town, as no one in Northern Ireland would for years to come. Because Enniskillen was no longer a pit stop for lunch on your way to Galway, a Bally-Nowhere to be from. No, Enniskillen had been elevated beyond a dot on the map. Enniskillen was an atrocity.

The guide detailed the news grandly, taking his time. In the midst of Remembrance Day services, a bomb had gone off by the town cenotaph and blown out a gable wall. Nine, ten people dead, maybe more. Civilians every one. A bollocks. And injuries galore …

“Why, Angus,” Farrell noted. “If it isn’t a mistake.”

“Bleeding cretins,” MacBride puffed. “Freaking Provo barbarians—”

“Come on,” Farrell prodded. “Use scum. I know you save it for special occasions, but sure this counts as one.”

There was much commiseration and head-shaking. They were both relieved when the guide was gone. All that indignation was exhausting.

Angus dropped the twisted brow when the guide turned the corner.

“Does it ever strike you,” asked Farrell lightly, “that the Provisionals are quaint? Really. The Iranians blow three hundred air passengers with a briefcase. At current levels of technology, massacre by the dozen expresses considerable restraint.”

“Grand,” said MacBride. “I can see myself launching into the BBC with that one. I would just like to say that I thought Enniskillen was quaint.”

“Handy, this,” Farrell observed.

“Bastard of a thing,” said MacBride. “Bastard.”

As the two men whisked toward the Antrim Arms to find a TV, their step sprang, hands played with keys in pockets. Farrell began to whistle and stopped himself. Angus jostled against the taller man’s shoulder and kicked schoolboy at stones, the mood of both gentlemen unquestionably bolstered.

chapter two

Roisin Has Enthusiasms

Why couldn’t he nip in the back? Would he blink like a red light?”

“Blamed if I know, Roisin, you’ve never said who you’re talking about.”

“Lord, I can’t, Con. It’s not I don’t trust you. But matters being as they are—”

“Spare me how matters are.”

A little snippy, Roisin thought. “I’m only saying, so he was recognized, where’s the harm? He might shake my hand and say how very much he enjoyed it and smile and only the two of us the wiser.”

“Why risk it?”

“I want him to hear me read!”

“Then curl up in the coverlet and recite with your man on the next pillow. That way no one’s the wiser.”

Roisin bit her lip over the receiver. “Connie, you understand far better than you’re letting on.”

“So do you. You want your toy boy to see you all tarted up in that blue dress, in front of a whole crowd of eejits queuing for signed copies of The Dumb and Frumpy Cows—”

“That’s The Brave and Friendly Sheep! And it’s inhuman of me, when I see his own bake big as life on the telly every night?”

“… On the telly, now?”

“Forget I said that.”

“A fine way to get me to remember.”

“Seems to me, just,” Roisin went on nervously, “he might slip into one reading, who would point a finger.”

“Such a TV star, why not? The English Lecture Theatre’s hardly the King’s Hall … What show might he be on, now?”

The biggest show in town. Roisin smiled. The only show. “I’ve name enough by now, he’d only display decent public relations, attending a do for a major Six County poet.”

“A Republican poet.”

“I’m not a Republican poet.”

“Wise up! With your father and those brothers in the Maze, write a donkey’s years about birdies and butterflies, or for that matter, join the UVF, burn your own house as a bonfire on the Twelfth, and go up with it, sure you’ll still get your name engraved on the County Antrim Memorial, with a full IRA cortege strung out to Lenadoon.”

“For years in my work I’ve tried to—”

“Doesn’t matter a jot, Rose,” Constance interrupted with the impatience that was beginning to characterize this entire call. “You are what they say.”

“What has that got to do with Thursday?”

“He’s a Prod, sure that’s no secret.”

“I never said that.”

“Och, no! You’re bumping the daylights out of Bill Cosby.”

“Stop stirring me up! I said he was known, that’s all—”

“And enough times.”

To the injured silence on the other end, Constance continued. “I’m sorry, Roisin, but I can’t hold with this carry-on month after month about your famous man this, your famous man that—it’s a bit much, love. You’ve put the man terrible high up and there’s your problem. He can’t be as fancy as you figure, and if you could stare that down, maybe you wouldn’t let him wipe his shoes on your face. There’ve been times if I’d not seen the marks I’d swear you were making him up.”

“He’s not a cruel man, and it was only those two times. And I’ll not have you run him down or make out he’s some wee Prod—”

“If you’d stop exaggerating to me, you might stop exaggerating to yourself! So he’s some councilor or other—”

“Angus MacBride is no councilor.”

“You don’t say,” said Constance gravely.

“I haven’t said.” Roisin spoke with reserve, her dignity restored. “Now do you see why?”

“One of the bigger plums in the pie,” Constance conceded. “And you’re both better off he stays clear of the Thursday reading and every other.”

“I’d not mind if it were only politics,” said Roisin, already growing sullen, though with herself; her stomach felt glutinous, as if she’d eaten too much potato bread. “Truth is, he’s not mad for poetry, even mine. Claims he doesn’t understand it.”

“Fair enough,” said Constance. “You don’t understand politics.”

Roisin was too sickened now to rise to the charge. “I’ve to sort out my selection for tomorrow, so I’ll ring off. But, Connie—”

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep quiet. All the same—” Constance paused. “You shouldn’t have told me his name, love.” The receiver clicked in Roisin’s ear like a full stop at the end of any other simple, true declarative: The sky is blue.

It was, and it shouldn’t have been; it should be bucketing. Roisin fidgeted from the phone and, to keep from ruining her well-kept nails, frantically hoovered the carpet. Well, obviously the only way to prove once and for all to Constance Trower just how big a secret she was keeping was to give it away.

The hoover was full of cat hair, and filled the room with pet smell; Angus hated the cat and despised the smell. She kicked off the machine.

Loose Talk Costs Lives.

She’d pinned the poster at the entrance to the bedroom not long after she’d first started up with MacBride.

In taxis

On the phone

In clubs and bars

At football matches

At home with friends

Anywhere!

WHATEVER YOU SAY—

SAY NOTHING.

While Seamus Heaney’s advice was clearly lost on Roisin, every party in the Province followed the slogan to the letter.

I have a story you’ll like,” Farrell announced, with that long stride she had learned to keep up with. “Enniskillen. Now, the way bombs are handled in the Provisionals now, one cell makes the device, those that plant it are different lads altogether, no one ever meets anyone, correct?”

“That’s the conceit—but Fermanagh? Sure they’re all first cousins and play on the same hurley team.”

“Well, that’s what the Prods think—that every Taig knows who did it and won’t tell. But bear with me—”

Constance smiled. The Prods, not you Prods. After so many years she had earned herself out of her people. From Farrell, that was a compliment.

“—So the bomb was assembled weeks ahead of time. Now, it blew by the cenotaph smack in the middle of nurses and schoolteachers, and that’s why it was a mistake, right?”

“Giant PR black eye. A real shiner.”

“They forgot about daylight saving time.”

“I don’t follow.”

“One hour later, there would have been only soldiers by that cenotaph—everyone knows the ceremony, it’s the same dirge every year. But the boyo who made the bomb set it to go off at 11:45 a.m. on November 8, and forgot that in the meantime the clocks would change!”

“Who told you this?”

“A little bird with a balaclava.”

“I think it’s a story you like.”

“Well, yes. Perverse. Anarchic. Absurd. Their devices are so much more advanced than in my day—”

“It’s not your day?” She sounded disappointed.

“I don’t think I’d know where to begin with the contraptions they put together now. Microcircuitry, long-range radio control. But I could tell the bloody time.”

“How is Enniskillen likely to affect your referendum? You figure it’s really given the place a taste for reform and that? Enough is enough, let’s get off our bum?”

They were crossing the Lagan on the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, and stopped to lean over the river. It was only 3:30, but in Ireland’s stingy December already the sun was setting. Samson and Goliath, the two Harland and Wolff cranes, dipped the foreground, gold birds taking water. From here Belfast glowed, a vista never broadcast in news clips—a low city, its horizon stitched with spires. The light alchemized even Eastwood’s Scrap Metal with its Midas touch; hulks of burned-out City Buses mounded the shore, pirate’s treasure. Constance hoped the sunset was doing the same job on her face—projects of equal challenge, she supposed.

“I’ve been sniffing the wind, and it smells, as usual. The Prods are already getting resentful that the wet-nosed ecumenists have hijacked their tragedy. Pretty soon they’ll want their atrocity back. And Gordon Wilson’s getting to be a regular celeb—forgiveness as song and dance. There are churches in the States now that want to fly him, all expenses paid, to get up in front of their congregations and repeat for the umpteenth time, I forgive the men who murdered my daughter. So they can all feel warm and gooey. There’s money in grace. The man should get an agent.”

“You’re one godawful cynic, Farrell O’Phelan.”

“No, it’s sad, really—I did rather admire him. I’d never be able to pull the line off with a straight face myself. But as soon as he’s seen as successful he’s dead. All Gordon needs is the Nobel Prize and the North will have him deported.”

Constance sighed. “Poor Betty. She’s in Florida now.”

“I’ve tried to warn MacBride—if he does win that bauble, this mean-spirited backwater will have his head.”

“But can’t you use it, Enniskillen? Peace PR?”