Ordinary Decent Criminals

“The North?”

“Not for a minute—here.” Balancing two glass towers of Pisa, Estrin handed him the shorter stack, and Farrell found himself trailing after her unpleasantly. “Mainland Britain may be more precarious, a race riot waiting to happen. This place is full of nice boys”—she smiled at the young bartender and handed him the jars—“who still buy flowers on Mother’s Day. And children may go on about the Orangies, but they’re incredibly well behaved.”

“What have you done?” the boy directed to Farrell. “Don’t get her started.”

“I have too many opinions,” Estrin admitted. “Which has turned into: one more opinion. No use.”

“For opinions, you’ve come to the right part of town,” Farrell suggested. “But West Belfast has a strict point of view. And they love to make ambassadors of Americans—”

“You say they,” she noted. “Not we.”

“I’m not sure I’ve used the first person plural in my life,” said Farrell. “But I’m advising you to get out from time to time. This neighborhood can be too cozy.”

“I told you before—the last thing I need to be reminded is to get out.”

“If it isn’t O’Phelan.”

Farrell turned and he was still holding these bloody glasses; he foisted them on the boy.

“Hardly see you in these parts now,” Michael Callaghan went on—a moist, pallid man who was forever pulling his trousers up over his belly. “Word’s out you’ve changed, mate. Too fine for us now. Ordering wine, is it.” He sauntered closer. “And take a geek at that suit, sure it’s from London, or is it New York? Farrell O’Phelan wouldn’t be caught out in Belfast rags, not even old Marks and Spark’s. Why, look at that weave, look at the quality!” Callaghan fingered Farrell’s lapel.

Farrell picked the man’s hand off his jacket like a speck of lint. “Don’t you dare touch my person again.”

“Your person! Lads, we’ve a person here! In this herd of West Belfast animals. We may remember old Farrell a liter under, but Mr. O’Phelan’s a star now, fancy! Seen him on our tellies, haven’t we, all done up in three pieces, shoes shining like a wee boy’s eyes on Christmas morning, hands crossed over his knee?”

Farrell let Callaghan go on, taking a seat impassively, for this was the first thing any of these gombeens had said all evening that actually interested him.

“You might explain to us, then,” Callaghan proceeded, “why we’re such sad wee folk, clinging all confused to some wet dream of a united Ireland, no longer able to think straight from the Brits bashing us too many times on the head. How we kick drogue bombs down the street ’cause we’re on the dole and haven’t a clue how else to spend our time? Then go on and explain how the UVF’s just a charity relief fund and poor Reverend Paisley’s merely got indigestion from a few too many Ulster fries—”

“If you’re referring to Panorama,” said Farrell calmly, “I don’t believe I mentioned Paisley at all. I spoke of a united Ireland long ago having lost any practical political connotations. National aspiration has achieved the same qualities as faith in the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus—or perhaps something a bit more farfetched: the Catholic Church. Though don’t forget, I gave you credit. I said this showed a capacity for abstract thought that from people of your caliber, Callaghan, is astonishing.”

“You left out the part about how we’re still in our nappies and that.”

The club had gone quiet, the dynamic at the bar talk show: Farrell’s legs were crossed, Callaghan’s voice inquiring, mild.

“I said both Nationalism and Unionism, emotionally, are forms of arrested adolescence. Pre-adolescence. Unionists are still clutching on to mother’s skirt. Nationalists seem more traditionally rebellious, but the rebellion is traditional and therefore not rebellion at all. Foreigners”—he nodded to Estrin—“often see Republicanism as a radical ideology, and Sinn Feín invites this misperception with its latching on to the ANC, its quotes in An Phoblacht from Camilo Torres and Castro. However, handed from father to son, it is more accurately conservative, right-wing. Joining the Provisionals in West Belfast is the equivalent of working for Daddy’s law firm in America. No one in Ireland gets away from his parents; no one grows up.

“Furthermore—” The loathing in the club was narcotic. “So convinced that Britain is in control, the Nationalist community flatters the place: Britain is using the conflict to experiment with espionage techniques, to train troops. You reveal a childlike faith in order: there is a puppeteer; this is happening because someone up there is making it happen. You lack the intellectual sophistication to conceive of ordinary bollocks. You are too terrified to live in a world where no one is in control: there is no God; Mother is an ordinary selfish woman the neighbors dislike; Father drinks and can’t do your maths. In this world anything can happen and there is no resort; you can’t fix things by gaining control yourself, because there’s no such thing; you will be as utterly at sea in a united Ireland as in a partitioned one. So these proclamations about British might crushing the helpless Catholic waif is, perversely, a belief in Britain, loyalty to the Crown. In actual fact, Westminster is a tawdry has-been capital once victorious over the Spanish Armada, now reduced to claiming the midget Falkland Islands as a serious military coup—bloody hell, it makes you want to cry. Why, West Belfast is the last place on earth where the British Empire still exists.”

“But we’re missing a wee bit here,” said Callaghan, who seemed satisfied with Farrell’s performance. It was a regular holiday to find a wally who’d string himself up of his own accord. “That we’re non-starters.”

“Oh, aye,” said Farrell pleasantly. “I did explore the culture of victimhood, the culture of defeat. Your united Ireland Valhalla, for example, only serves its religious, symbolic function if it never comes to pass as a state. The South is obviously just one more crumpled patch of map trying to sell cheese to the EEC—which is why hard-line Republicanism has invalidated the Dublin government: it is of this earth, and therefore squalid, as any state has ever been. So you may aspire but you must not arrive: in short, you must not succeed. That suits this island, which is historically envious, resentful, and whiny. Likewise, the IRA can only exist so long as it fails. Fair play in ’69, as an instinctive, as you said yourself, animal reaction to attack. But as an institution it is not in the long-term interests of the organization to meet its own goals: the lot would be out of a job. To put this in language you can understand, Michael: you’re all witless gobshites.”

Callaghan moosed closer. “If I was you, O’Phelan—”

“You wish.”

“I’d steer clear of the Door. I hear your nine lives ran out about ’79. Besides, we’re a bit tatty for your tastes now. Try Whitewells. There you’ve lads to protect you when you say something ill-advised.”

Farrell stood and straightened his lapel. “I’ll go where I like, as I have my whole life.” Farrell may have been taller, but Callaghan had two stone on him; Farrell had better scoot. He thanked himself, since with two more glasses of wine that wouldn’t have glared nearly so apparent. Still, he needed one last slag, and his eyes panicked before finding an exit line. “Estrin”—Farrell’s voice rang over the club, and his mouth felt strange—he had never, it seems, said her name before. “Dinner?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Eight o’clock.”

“Bedford Street, 44.” As he turned, Farrell felt the bitterness glow behind him with all the tangible heat of a turf fire. It took restraint to keep from smiling.

“Sure you owe it to the girl to confess when you and Margaret be married!” shouted one of the boys, but it had taken him too long to come up with the quip, and Farrell was already out the door.

Estrin watched him go, wondering if he appreciated her collusion. She might jockey with them over politics, but she did have to contend with these customers five nights a week, and it was a queer choice to throw her lot in with the one character who clearly had it in him to alienate them to the man.

“They say he’s always breezing off to British Air,” said Callaghan, “reclining with a pile of papers full of waffle a mile high, white wine—and don’t you know Maggie takes him shopping down Oxford Street, all kisses.”

“What bleeding happened to the bugger?”

“Fuck all happened. He’s been scarce and you’ve forgotten. O’Phelan was a weedy, hostile creature from day one.”

Estrin would have chosen different adjectives, for in the last fifteen minutes Farrell had managed to be obstreperous, inconsiderate, abusive, and nonplused. It relieved her she was not the only one so consumed by the desire to please.

chapter four

Women on and off the Wall

She had been waiting and pretending she was not, reading The Use and Abuse of Emergency Legislation in Northern Ireland, but she tired of these games with herself, as they no longer worked: she was waiting. All night; so she designed a reason she had to talk to him with that proficiency that characterized everything she did, and rang herself. No answer. And later, again, with only rugby and snooker and Ulster Newstime on TV—another bomb in the city center. Twice more; she wondered was he off on a tear. She knew it was not her affair. Not her affair. Words were always turning on Constance.

Finally she replaced the receiver for the last time. Her concoction was only so urgent; it was after midnight, and her excuse had just turned into a pumpkin.

Farrell kept a small office off the Lisburn Road with no sign on the door. It was a suite of two rooms and a reception area but no secretary, which Constance had long ceased to consider herself. Nowhere, not on his stationery nor on a single card in his wallet, was there a title or the name of an organization.

Constance Trower had no official position. He had never told her what hours to keep, paid her whatever she asked for, and gave her no itemized responsibilities, which of course meant that she would arrive early and stay late, ask for far too little money in return, and take responsibility for everything.

He’d bristled at an office, but later liked having another territory, another key. Farrell collected them; rings jangled every suit pocket. (Though he’d forgotten what the keys were to, he wouldn’t throw them out. Farrell placed a high value on access.) “For security reasons” he didn’t keep regular hours himself, though Farrell, like the British government, found “security” a convenient umbrella under which to protect a variety of idiosyncrasies.

He did not, for example, own a car, instead hiring taxis as far as Derry and Armagh. Yet Constance was convinced he was less terrified of gelly wired to his chassis than of insurance forms. Besides, he liked taxis. He liked making the driver go where he wanted, being conveyed. He liked privacy and scorned petty details like changing buses in Portadown; he deliberately had no sense of direction. Train schedules were an imposition; why, he might not want to go to Dublin then. The only organized transport he did not resist was the airplane. The atmosphere of hurry and importance made up for meeting the timetables, if barely—he liked nothing more than whisking onto international flights with the door closing on his coattails. Airports are the last refuge of urgency in this world.

His most aggravating “security measure” had to do with his own house—wherever that was. And if he didn’t tell Constance where he lived, he clearly told no one. Farrell admitted parties here had probably found him out, but he was hardly going to make it easy for them by publishing in the directory. Once more, however, the nature of Belfast simply conformed to the nature of Farrell O’Phelan, as if he were not camouflaged for the city but the city for him. He would hardly be holding hoolies on his front yard every June if only he could afford to share his address with his many friends and neighbors, with their children and dogs.

As for the office, he had no interest in decor—and the number of things Farrell had no interest in by policy could grow irksome if you listed them out—and left the walls to Constance. Her original selection of, she thought, harmless travel posters underestimated the depth of Farrell’s loathing for his island: the rolling hills of Kerry, the thatched byre houses in Tyrone—from which, he claimed, he could “smell the sheep from across the room,” the craggy sprat fishermen of Antrim. (“Look at that face,” he had cried, “twisted with fifty years of spite. You realize he’s not fishing at all—which would be economically useful—but looking out for a boat of Kalashnikov AK-47s for the UDA!”) After two days Farrell had had his fun, and Aer Lingus had to go.

Those intervening weeks had been frustrating; she wanted to please him. And Farrell did have an aesthetic, even if he wouldn’t dirty his hands with carpet swatches. Whitewells and all that travel had refined him beyond Glengormley—he bought only the best in clothes, gadgets, presents when he remembered (with Constance, once). While the Best Of habit was lazy, the application of an easy rule that spared him individual decisions, inevitably he’d become rather starchy. No help, Farrell had less taste than distaste: he recognized what he didn’t want. Had a Unionist streak in him, Farrell did.

When they next went to London, then, between setting up his interviews, she scuttled into the Museum Shop at the Tate. She turned her mind off entirely and just went by feel, flipping the racks of prints, art by Braille. What she unrolled back at the hotel surprised her.

For had anyone asked before the Tate how Farrell’s preferences in art might run, she’d surely have answered the Futurists, full of tumult and flight; the nightmares of Surrealists, trapped in their own heads as he in his—contorted Dalís, absurd Magrittes; or dour Brueghels. She might have made a case for the Middle Ages, with the flat agony of those pigments, the gory, long-suffering crucifixions in which he’d recognize his own face, the plain, self-denying, racked penitence and flesh effacement of his childhood. Or perhaps, recognizing his stodgy side, she’d have said nothing modern—only classics, Da Vincis and Michelangelos, name brands, the way he bought everything, the Best. But none of these presentiments described what she spread on the bed that night.

Women. Not conflicted character portraits, either, but young, even virginal things, with red cheeks and languid fingers. Simple women, with water. Soft women—Whistler’s The Little White Girl; seaside Seurat; Degas. Shapely, sway-hipped Tissots, splayed nineteenth-century picnics by a pool, languid bites into apples with a demitasse, bustles curved at a pleasure-boat rail. Inshaw’s The Badminton Game, long hair in breeze, shuttlecock midair. April Love, the Lady of Shalott. Round women, drowsy women, beautiful women. And while some were dolorous—Matisse; Ophelia—the girls were never angry or scheming, filled with nothing so demanding as desire. No, these were guileless women, tender, and probably even stupid, not that he would value their stupidity, but what he would want from them had nothing to do with talk. Farrell might slop through every rank backroom in Belfast, but Farrell’s women were innocent.

When she hung the prints late one night and waited for Farrell to walk in the office that morning, Constance jittered, only pretending to scan papers as he strode pensively from one painting to the next, all nicely framed. He said nothing. He studied each one a long time. He went to his own office and shut the door. He’d not mentioned them then or since, but neither did he insist they come down. And just as she knew to choose them, Constance knew not to bring them up. She was not hurt; he was, a little. The paintings were an intrusion. By accident or instinct she had found his neighborhood. Whistler’s Little White Girl stuck to the wall by his desk like a pin on a map.

Having phoned until midnight the night before, Constance knew it was ridiculous to feel injured. So he hadn’t rung himself, wouldn’t he see her the next morning? At the office she was unusually efficient—which is to say immeasurably efficient, frightening, perfect—and, as Farrell swept in and out, a little cold. As evening drew he ducked in the loo and reappeared, face washed, hair combed, tie freshly knotted, and smelling of cologne, his kerchief perking from his pocket. With no mention of Oscar’s, he kissed Constance officiously on the forehead and tripped, yes, ran, practically danced down the front stairs. Constance sat at her desk and typed an address. She didn’t cry or confide on the phone or go on a bout of irrational cleaning. She finished the letter and locked up, relieved to be such a practical person.

Estrin could not remember when she had last actually planned ahead of time what to wear to dinner. She picked the black silk blouse with a thin strip of Bedouin embroidery, pleased that no one could tell from the outside it was her favorite shirt. Otherwise it was back to full leathers, to remain thick-skinned.

How often had she thrown on anything hurriedly without even bothering to check her reflection, already annoyed at having agreed to go, already waiting for the meal to be over? It had been a bad, dry fall, and as such seasons will, it eclipsed all others, as if she’d only known evenings that rose with a bottle of wine, and fell as she finally looked across the table: he was smitten; she was bored.

Yet tonight Estrin did check the mirror, with despair. Ideally she saw herself as a tall Russian heroine, unpredictable and desperate, hollowed and harrowing, with high cheekbones and wide, lethal eyes. The real Estrin was consumptive. The real Estrin wore heavy hooded cloaks, under which she clutched a snickersnee; she had just done something dreadful. Estrin had read a lot of Dostoevsky when she was fifteen.

Instead, she was short. Her cheeks were round, her features even; if Tolstoy was correct, that a truly beautiful face always had something wrong with it, then Estrin was merely a pretty girl. And girl was the word, embarrassing at her age. The only aspect of her Russian heroine she sustained was the eyes: they crouched. They both took you in and threw you out. Estrin recognized that with satisfaction.

Otherwise there was a sweetness to her face she had tried to live down for years. No matter what she suffered, her face showed no trace of it. When she studied photos of Marla Hanson, the New York fashion model attacked by her landlord with a razor, the slash scars made Estrin envious. How much more fascinating Marla would look later, with the pencil of tragedy down her nose. Estrin looked nice. Of a full busload of passengers, Estrin was the one old ladies shook down for change. Panhandlers marked her from blocks away, crossing the street for her quarters; in India, “Baksheesh” could have been her name. And so long as she rode with an open visor, nowhere was this plaguesome Rebecca-of-Sunnybrook-Farmishness more apparent than at checkpoints.

That’s right, even in Newry and Crossmaglen, when they were stopping every goddamned car, license, computer check, boot search, all soldiers ever did to Estrin was wave. Witness: Teeming the Guzzi to the city gates toward Bedford Street, Estrin slowed long enough for them to see that yes, that back compartment could pack enough Semtex to blow that new shopping center sky-high. But no. Three smiles and a “Happy Christmas.”

Banking around City Hall, a banquet of a building whose Beaux Arts façade now blinked with reindeer, Estrin noted the BELFAST SAYS NO banner had been amended. The DoE had told the City Council it could not post such a patently Unionist response to the Anglo-Irish Agreement on public property. So the Prods had soldered on an extra section of sign: -EL. Estrin laughed. She loved this fucking town.

“You look beautiful.”

Estrin felt a wild compulsion to comb her hair.

As he took her jacket and asked for a back table, Farrell displayed that curiously grave quality which characterized all his minor moments; he attended forward neatly from the waist and ushered Estrin before him with precision, even delicacy. He was a formal man, deft and considerate in all the ways that didn’t really matter—he would hold your chair out, pick up your napkin when you dropped it, pour your wine, and next week fail to show up altogether.

The gravity fell away as he began to chat about the assassination of George Seawright, when he became entirely light-hearted.

“Creepface!” recognized the waitress. “And here’s another one! Don’t I see him every week with one more lovely lass in tears.”

Farrell glared.

“You’ll pardon, but Mr. O’Phelan must be seated on the wall, eyes on all the windows and doors, isn’t that right, love? Usually the lady’s seat, but none seems to mind. Sure, she gets a handsome view whichever way she’s facing!” She patted Farrell’s cheek and delivered their menus.

“How lucky, Maire, we were seated in your section.”

“Och, I asked, love, I switched! Like following Coronation Street and earning your keep at the same time.”

She brought a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé without Farrell’s asking. “Sure we can skip the charade of having you taste it,” she announced, trickling Estrin’s glass halfway and glugging Farrell’s to the top. “Never known you to send a bottle back if it was turned enough to dress your salad. Now, should I bring the second right away, or would you like to wait and order it? A nice ceremony that, but as for the third, it’s just from the case in the icebox. You’ll have to hold your horses.”

Estrin ordered seafood. She always ordered seafood. It was a rule; fish was light. Estrin ran courses like track. She followed precepts, and not because she wasn’t a sensualist, but because she was and therefore couldn’t be trusted. In Estrin’s personal mythology, should she ever be set loose in a stocked kitchen to do as she really pleased, you would find her an hour later packed incoherent with raw beef and rolling on the floor in a melee of ice cream and apple pie.

As they had both ordered exactly the same thing, Estrin asked on an odd hunch, “Do you always order fish?”

“Or chicken.”

“Dessert?”

“Never.”

“Do you have a morbid fear of fried foods?”

He laughed. “I’ve never put it quite that way, but I avoid them.”

She inclined an inch more forward. “When do you get up in the morning?”

“Seven. Exactly.”

“Sundays, too,” she filled in. “And go to bed?”

“When I am finished. Ideally before seven. Not always.”

“When did you get up as a child? Say, twelve, thirteen?”

It was wonderful. His eyes whetted. “Five.”

She nodded victoriously. “But when did you go to school?”

“Not until 7:30. Why?”

“It was still dark,” said Estrin. “No one else was up. The house was yours. Most of the time you worked, read, wrote. But some mornings you got up only to think. For hours, watching the light gray out the windows. The birds here are exotic. And you still believed in God.”

“Did you, at thirteen?”

“No, by then I was a violent agnostic. But my father was a minister, so that speeded things up. My most remarkable precocity was early disaffection.”

“I meant, get up at five?”

“Naturally,” she dismissed. “But I’m not finished. Exercise?”

His face clouded. “I don’t have time now. I used to run—”

“All weather. All winter. Rain. In fact, you liked it when it rained. Other people were agog, when secretly the problem is keeping cool. The mizzle felt good on your face.”

Farrell did look amused. “And how far did I go?”

She licked her lips. “Ten miles. Every day.”

He laughed. “Only eight, and every odd. Still, you’re very good!”

“I’m very like you.”

The eyes unexpectedly brambled. “You know,” he said, attacking his lettuce with no dressing at all, “I think it’s time we had an ordinary conversation.”