‘Any mention of when the funeral is?’
He straightens up. ‘Thursday morning.’
She passes Jack on her way to the fridge and strokes his head.
‘Is it going to be a state funeral?’
‘Mamma.’ Delayed reaction.
‘Yeah.’
She opens the fridge and takes out a carton of cranberry juice. ‘I still can’t believe it.’
‘No, me neither.’ It’s not the only thing he can’t believe. His brief phone call to Don Ribcoff and then… problem solved?
Again?
Or maybe Larry Bolger simply obliged, succumbed to the enormous pressure he was under, the guilt, the fear, the apprehension.
Ticker couldn’t take it anymore.
Either way, problem solved.
That problem solved.
Who does Conway phone up now, though, about his other problems? His financial woes, his impending profess-sional meltdown, his own guilt and fear and apprehension?
‘Oh,’ Ruth says, ‘I meant to ask you. How did the meeting go?’
They’d been so caught up last night in the news about Bolger’s death that they hadn’t talked about anything else.
He pauses. He’s about to tell her the truth. But not with Corinne there, not with the baby, not in the kitchen.
‘It went OK, I think. We’ll see.’
Ruth pours some juice into a glass and puts the carton back in the fridge.
‘Right,’ she says, and knocks the juice back. ‘I’m off.’
‘Mamma.’
A few minutes later, Conway heads out himself.
Driving into town feels normal enough, like any other morning, but only so long as he keeps the radio off and ignores the constant pinging of his phone. As soon as he arrives at his building, however, the feeling evaporates. Because what awaits him here, up on the sixth floor, especially after yesterday’s debacle with the Black Vine people, will bear no resemblance to a normal day at the office. Instead, there’ll be frantic messages from Martin Boyle, from the banks, maybe even from business correspondents, people at RTE and Newstalk and the papers. Among the staff, there’ll be an air of panic, of incredulity, of how can this be happening.
He’ll be expected to say something.
He’ll be expected to turn this around.
When Jimmy walks into his apartment on Tuesday afternoon he is almost sick. Finbarr warned him that the place had been turned over, but he isn’t prepared for the visceral shock of it – the sense of what it’d be like, he imagines, to look in the mirror one morning and see your face unexpectedly disfigured.
He puts his bag down.
Everything has been disturbed, moved, knocked over. The bookshelves have been cleared, with all the books now in messy heaps on the floor.
But he’s prepared to bet there isn’t a single one missing.
Because burglars don’t take books, certainly not old paperbacks. They clear bookshelves because they’re looking for something.
He goes over to his desk and switches on the computer. It’s one of the few objects in the room still in its proper place.
Which will maybe tell its own story.
And, straightaway, does.
Wiped.
Fuck.
It’s not the loss of data he’s concerned about – he has that on his laptop, on a flash drive, stored online – it’s the message this conveys. It’s how it makes him think again about what happened in London.
Fuck.
He looks around.
Apparently, two other apartments in the building were broken into as well, but he can only conclude that these were for show.
It’s with a certain degree of ambivalence, not to say unease, that he decides to start tidying up. The alternative would be to go and stay with a friend, but this is where he lives. It’s his apartment. He isn’t going anywhere.
He kneels on the floor, picks up a few books.
Starts there.
Thumbs through a couple of them, ends up reading bits, and quickly feeling indignant.
He picks up a Scribner’s Gatsby.
A Picador Dispatches.
Concrete Island.
It takes him a while.
In fact, it’s not until the next morning that Jimmy can bring himself to get back to work.
And effectively this means tracking down Dave Conway.
Without much difficulty he finds an address for Conway’s office in town and a reference to his home, which is somewhere near Enniskerry. He also finds a couple of phone numbers and an e-mail address. But initial approaches prove fruitless – a cursory message is taken, a call is not returned, an e-mail gets an automatic out-of-office reply. He makes it as far as the reception area of the building where Conway Holdings has its offices and is told that no one is available to see him.
But he picks up on something here. There’s a certain frantic air about the place, maybe even a sense of panic – which is not unusual these days, but he wonders if there’s more to it than that.
He considers going out to Enniskerry to see if he can locate Conway’s house, but decides against it, reckons that it might be a bit tricky. Or even risky.
Or just pointless.
When he gets back to the apartment, he delves further into a couple of online news archives, and keeps reading, searching, probing, as if some revelation might be at hand, some neat and convenient tying together of the various threads.
It’s not quite that, but a significant fact does emerge from the acres of material he manages to scan – Dave Conway and Larry Bolger were close. During Bolger’s time in office reference after reference puts the two men together, at meetings, in corridors, on the phone.
In photographs.
Jimmy looks at a few of these and tries to parse the body language, to extract some meaning from the position of a hand on a shoulder or the direction of a gaze.
It proves difficult, elusive.
Ultimately what he gets from the photographs is pretty obvious. And simple. It’s the realisation that as a result of this close association between the two men, Dave Conway will more than likely be attending Larry Bolger’s state funeral tomorrow morning in the church at Donnybrook and then later out at St Felim’s Cemetery.
‘I see the way you look at her.’
This is whispered. Ruth only whispers when she’s about to explode. Or when there’s no choice, when she’s at something like a funeral, and a state funeral at that.
And at the bloody graveside.
‘I don’t look at her,’ he says. ‘Jesus.’
Conway has been blindsided by this. Of course he looks at Corinne. The girl is so beautiful she breaks his fucking heart every time he sees her – but he’s not fourteen, he’s not an idiot.
He swallows.
‘You do.’
‘I don’t.’
He swallows again.
OK… maybe it’s not inconceivable – lately, at any rate – that Ruth has caught him staring at the au pair.
For inappropriately long periods of time.
But whatever she might think it’s not actually sexual. He doesn’t want to fuck her. He’s old enough to be her father.
He just -
He wants to envelop himself in the fragrant idea of her, and disappear.
Basically.
Evaporate. Escape.
Which might well be worse. From Ruth’s perspective. Mightn’t it?
A more serious transgression.
He should shut up.
It’s been a long day. Two hours in the church, readings, tributes, poetry, the interminable shuffle back along the aisle to get out, then the car park, the cortège, the lined streets.
And now they’re out here at St Felim’s, at the graveside.
Waiting.
For the oration. Which is to be delivered by another former Taoiseach, and will no doubt be tedious beyond belief.