Minogue knew that his brother knew more than he'd tell. The mannered ambiguity and the lifetime's practice with evasion meshed the two men. Ah, Minogue thought sometimes as the stout hit his stomach, we have the same sisters and mother and father, isn't that the strangest thing? How's things Matt? Grand and how's yourself and yours? Can't complain, Matt, back to the wind. And how's Kathleen and the two children? Good, thanks be to God. Not thanks be to God at all, to Kathleen probably.
Minogue had felt a God in the singed grass at the side of the road, in the slowness of things winding down. The young fellow with the scattered blots and freckles of blood thick all over his face and everything silent and slow and slower as the smoke moved off. Minogue had spent a long time thinking about it in hospital. It was never fear really, more a surprise, especially so because there was something so familiar there at the time. It was like a face maybe. Maybe like those Zen fellas, a face he had before he was born. Not smiling or puzzled or anything at all really, more a feeling that something was there. A watchful presence, interested and disinterested at the same time. Great calm, silence. Maybe a trace of regret as it receded. Life marches on, each wave of people full of themselves, but less so as they get closer to the edge with the years. Then it's our turn.
Lying in the hospital bed, Minogue had imagined all the life, plants and animals, all the plankton in the sea, all the organisms in his body. This small hating island off the coast of Europe… There were people dying of hunger elsewhere, without the time or the energy to be on their mad summer marches, without any dirty little pubs to plot in. Ah, but that wasn't the half of it even. People are nice here a lot of the time. More inane phrases drifted by Minogue and he'd turn aside to sleep.
Then, driving back up to Dublin after the games, Minogue would sometimes dream what life would have been like had he left for the States those years ago. He might be a cop on the beat in New York City. He might be a farmer in Montana with a Ford pick-up truck and steers. His wife would be a blonde with big white teeth and a skin that'd tan. Maybe two cars. The kids would have American accents.
No end in sight to this business, is there, Matt? That is if the English insist on being blackmailed by those Orangemen. No, Mick, it doesn't look like it.
Mick didn't shoot the guns, but Minogue was sure he cheered the count of soldiers or loyalists killed.
Maybe it'll spread, Matt. It may well, but we'll do what we can, Mick.
Minogue listened to the things his brother left unsaid. Minogue had by then given up any ambition of rescuing his brother or indeed any of his countrymen from whatever threw them effortlessly between savagery and kindness.
Agnes laid the vapouring cups on the table. Slowly the two of them sipped their tea. Occasionally, a gust sprayed rain on the window and rattled the frame. Finally, Agnes spoke:
"A great day for going to the library… or a funeral."
Minogue couldn't deny her. He had been sitting there as a visitor drinking tea. He was afraid to intrude upon her by asking her questions about her own family. That was none of his business. She had told him as much as she could about Jarlath Walsh. Agnes prepared to go. He couldn't stay here. He was supposed to be detectiving, not sitting here with a girl, daydreaming.
He walked down the flights of stairs ahead of her and side by side to the carpark. Allen leaned over and pushed the passenger door open for her. When Allen fussed with attaching her seat-belt, Minogue believed that this was a different Allen, a solicitous man taking custody of a precious cargo. A fatherly concern? Easy in a man with no brood at home to be keeping him in the real world, a part of Minogue's mind jeered.
Minogue closed Agnes' door. It closed with a solid clap. Beads of rainwater quivered on the waxed paintwork. A nice, big, new Toyota without an excess of chrome, Minogue mused. He would have had to put his boot to his own door on the Fiat to get it to close first time. As if reading the thoughts of a poor but secretly favoured suitor, Agnes looked up briefly and smiled through the glass. Unreachable, going. As he walked aimlessly back into the college, Minogue worked at persuading himself that he was not somehow envious of Allen. A moment of juvenile insecurity, he chided within.
What Minogue could not put aside, however, was the belief that the case had left him beached with the ebbing tide no longer touching him. Funerals. The last funeral Minogue had attended was that of an old IRA man from 1916, one who had survived the Civil War and a spell interned in the Curragh, to write memoirs and die renowned as one of the last of the hard men. There couldn't be many left. Three old men, propped up by their relatives, had stood over the grave. Mick had been among the hundreds of mourners there. Minogue had caught his brother looking over at him several times. He thought it was a look of some satisfaction on Mick's face, as if to claim the damp countryside and its people as his inheritance, not Minogue's.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Back in his room, Minogue doodled. He wrote down names and events. Then he tried to join them with lines so he could work out cause and effect later. Nothing.
They'd be burying the boy now. There'd be beads of rain on the coffin. The wet would give the bouquets more colour. Minogue reached a disagreeable decision. He phoned the Drug Squad.
While Minogue doodled, thought and telephoned, a well-dressed man in his late thirties took up a padded barstool in the Bailey public house. He held a copy of the Irish Times under his arm. He had stepped from a taxi but feet from the door.
The barman prided himself on recognising customers' occupations by the way they dressed. He took the order for a small Paddy, and he registered some surprise at an American accent, soft but there all the same. The customer unfolding the paper had the ruddy tan of a robust Yank with any amount of rhino for holidays and grub. Took care of himself.
The barman put him as a legal eagle, but that was a long shot, he realised, as he poured the water into the jug. Irish-looking, all the same, probably in the early thirties. The barman recognized a forty quid shirt when he saw one. The plain grey suit had the looks of having cost three hundred quid. Although he hadn't seen the customer hang up his coat, the barman guessed an Aquascutum.
The customer opened the paper to the editorial, which concerned itself with a condemnation of the murders of policemen, culminating in another one yesterday. He sipped at the whisky. The barman returned to his preparations for the lunchtime crowd.
When the customer's pal showed, the barman pegged him for a journalist or a theatrical type. Maybe not though. He served him a pint and returned to setting up glasses. He felt the light grab at the small of his back, the twinge that would grow to an ache by lunchtime. The barman's name was Gerry, and he wasn't any more interested in politics than he was in soccer, but he talked about both endlessly every working day. He heard enough guff. The tanned and fit-looking barrister who was not a barrister was likewise disinterested in what passed for politics. He was so antipathetic toward the way politics ran on this island that he carried a large-calibre automatic pistol holstered under his armpit. The magazine was fully loaded and there was a bullet in the spout. The man wanted nothing to do with talking politics or any other conversation which policemen might wish to engage him in.
Before starting out on this project, he had weighed the things he felt were necessary and those which he could get around. Daily, and with no sense of excitement, he cleaned the gun in his hotel room. Carrying it was a non-negotiable item in his list and he felt quite at home with yet another hard and fast rule in his life.