She forced herself to think of Tuscany. A moon would be up. The stone walls would be warm. The sky would be full of stars. She could sleep in a barn or in the fields to be awakened at dawn. That was the way to live, sleeping from dusk to dawn. None of those noises at night, the sirens or the floodlights. La Luna, mi amore.
"Daydreaming, Agnes?" said Allen.
She glanced at him. What was different about him? She was too used to seeing him deliver lectures.
"A bit, I suppose."
"You think being restless is exclusively the preserve of persons under twenty-five? Or perhaps a sign of early senility?"
"Aye. We all could do with a break," she said.
Agnes thought of the city waiting for her, her bedroom, the telly with the news blaring out one more miserable day for the city. She had trouble remembering her father's face, seeing only the crumbling face of her mother. With no warning, her mother could be stricken helpless with crying. Watching T.V., reading a book or eating, her mother's face would suddenly contort. Agnes understood it was the commonplace things that could upset her, the vertiginous understanding that her husband was dead. No shaving soap in the bathroom, no other person in bed, no need to make sure the toast wasn't underdone. Agnes could comfort her mother again and again, but the weight seemed to increase.
Sometimes she felt that she was nothing, neither young or old. When would it all end?
The sergeant started up the car. Minogue sat in the front passenger seat. He felt Kilmartin's impatience as a palpable weight in the car. Minogue noticed that the sergeant's uniform was spotted with cigarette ash. His breath came across stale, penetrating.
"Well, the Branch didn't so much say it as let it be known," Kilmartin began. "They got a phone call. Somebody claiming that there's going to be a car going north with weapons aboard. Tomorrow. They think it might have to do with that other car or cars in that garage."
Minogue contented himself with looking out at the dusk over College Green.
"They know the heat's on. I don't doubt they want results fast," Kilmartin murmured.
"Yes," Minogue allowed. He was tired. Drifting through the traffic made him sleepy.
"They've bought into McCarthy's Yank business anyway. I still have me doubts. Yank or not, you can't persuade me there isn't a connection though," Kilmartin said.
"What?" Minogue said reflexively.
"The shooting in Blackrock. The place is gone to hell in a wheelbarrow. I can see the news tonight and the bloody headlines: 'Murderers still at large,' 'Armed men on the rampage in Dublin,' 'Gardai draw a blank in search for killers."'
"You think the same people are involved," Minogue said.
"Maybe not the actual same people. Did I tell you we got a rocket about being alert for new types of weapons and a new network for getting them in? That's what has the Branch looking for this mysterious Yank and taking crank calls seriously. The fella who called described a car that sounds like the one in the garage. And the way McCarthy was hinting about arms smuggling got them going in a big way," Kilmartin said.
"Well in anyhow: the other thing is a no-go. Those two fellas have gone to ground. Between me and you and the wall-" Kilmartin nodded in the direction of the sergeant's head, "-those shaggers are back in the North by now."
"Signs on," Minogue said.
"And as for the thing about the garage, well I'm sure we closed it down before anything became operational. I say it was a mistake to raid it," Kilmartin said.
Minogue elbowed onto the seat and turned to Kilmartin. He was wary of the sergeant driving because he would be all ears, like anyone else, for an inspector's candour. Minogue imagined the sergeant going home to his wife: 'Wait 'til I tell you what I heard today… '
Minogue was surprised to find himself alert. He noticed that Kilmartin was frowning at him. The front gate of Trinity College fell away behind the car, as the sergeant wheeled the car around into Dame Street.
Minogue's knees began to itch. He strained further to look out the back window at Trinity College receding behind them. It looked magical, a place apart. The lights gave it an air of churchiness. Students emerged from the archway, out onto the centre of a city which Minogue believed had gone mad. They could always go back in to the squares and the classic proportions, to the insulated clarity of that island. Stone buildings and edged lawns answered the bullydom of Ireland. But no: that was false, too facile. Minogue was thinking as a peasant. In the week he had been in and out of the university, he had felt it had a vulnerability, despite the intellectual and physical architecture which held it in place. No amount of pretty young girls with baskets on the handlebars of th^jr old bikes could stop history. No amount of paintings hanging down over the dining tables could exempt this place from the present.
Agnes McGuire carrying her terrible burdens. Mick Roche trying to work through the place, not cynical enough to give up on the well-to-do students there. And Allen, for all his academic manner, he was trying in his own way to change things. Was he jealous of Allen? Minogue recalled Agnes smiling briefly as she went off in Allen's car, under his care. Maybe it was that he, Minogue, had felt stuck on the sidelines again, a spectator to events, with Allen's swanky car hissing away to the funeral in the rain. Allen's car: Jesus, Mary and Joseph…
"Pull over here, if you please, Sergeant," Minogue said.
Kilmartin was staring at Minogue.
"That other car in that garage. You said whoever called gave a description which might match that one in the garage."
"The Mercedes, the canary yoke," Kilmartin said.
"No. The other one,"
"We don't know. A Japanese car, fancy, was the best we got on the one in the garage."
"And the one in the tip-off?"
"I don't know. A Branch man just told me it was awful like the description of the other one," replied Kilmartin.
"Are there any reports of stolen cars of that type?"
"Now, Matt, you know as well as I do… "
"But it was checked against the reported stolens, wasn't it?"
"No doubt. But, here, hold on a minute Matt. The one in the garage might have been legit anyway, a fella fixing a car. Anything. It was only that oul lad thinking he saw one. Let the Branch worry about it."
The sergeant was assiduously trying to prove he was deaf. Minogue opened the door.
"Sergeant, could I ask you a favour, please."
The driver's head shifted around.
"Anything I can do, Detective Sergeant."
"Would you find out what you can on the radio about this car business. Inspector Kilmartin here will furnish details."
"But Matt," Kilmartin leaned over to look under the roof as Minogue stepped out onto the kerb.
"That can wait. We have this thing on the boil."
"Sure what can we do about this evening, Jimmy, except, kill time waiting for something?" Minogue said.
He had actually been reprimanding in his tone, the driver realised. Now if he himself tried that with an Inspector…
"I'll be back in a few minutes," Minogue said. He began striding down the footpath toward Trinity.