Downey blinked. Fitzgerald continued cleaning his glasses, taking excessive care with his handiwork. Hoey tapped his pencil lightly on the pad and glanced at Minogue.
“Such names would be a great help to us, Mr. Downey. They would in no way incriminate anybody,” said Minogue.
Downey looked to Fitzgerald but had no guidance there. Fitzgerald breathed on the lenses again.
“It’s not the custom for policemen to be asking journalists for their diaries or notebooks. Excepting places such as Chile, perhaps,” Fitzgerald observed.
“I didn’t know you for a man who revered customs,” replied Minogue. “I rather like novel approaches myself.”
“Thanks but no thanks,” said Fitzgerald conclusively. “I appreciate your appreciation. A free Press does not involve policemen following up names in a journalist’s notebook and questioning them on what they may or may not have said to that journalist.”
“I don’t much care what they said to Mr. Downey here. I want to know what they knew of Paul Fine.”
Fitzgerald put his glasses on, curling them around his ears carefully. Minogue saw a brain-warrior girding his loins.
“Seeing as we’re talking man-to-man here, Inspector, let me ask you this: is it because Paul’s Da happens to be a Justice of the Supreme Court that you are so pushy?”
“Not principally,” Minogue answered.
Fitzgerald rested a languid gaze on Minogue for several seconds, then he turned to Downey. Downey left the room. Must have known and made their minds up before I ever actually asked, Minogue thought.
“It’s because Paul Fine is a Jew, isn’t it?”
“That could well be,” said Minogue slowly. “But I don’t like to say it out loud. Every victim of a murderer gets our best. I may look like a superannuated culchie cop to you but I am in fact a lunatic-a lunatic in the sense that I am a stubborn weasel when I get to grips with the murder of a person. My bite is very bad indeed, Mr. Fitzgerald, and I’m at the age where I don’t much care for jaded slogans like ‘the freedom of the press’. Not that I’m not a democratic person. It’s that I tend to lose track of public rituals when I seek out fairness for someone like Paul Fine. We’re his advocates, in a sense. Now if you want to get on your high horse and find my superiors’ ears in order to have me taken to task, fire away. But you’ll be surprised. This is a very personal business. You get to know who was treated so unfairly that they end up on a slab in the pathology department of a hospital and turn into a heap of reports on your desk. Frequently you get to like those victims and the people they were stolen from: you even get to like some of them inordinately. And it tears at your stomach and it can make you ill yourself, this grief and madness. Do you know what I’m saying at all? Let me know when I’m trampling on your civil rights, won’t you?”
Minogue heard Fitzgerald breathe out heavily through his nostrils. He looked to his watch.
“Tea?” said Fitzgerald. Minogue believed he had won something.
Downey brought the tea. He sat next to Hoey as they doctored their tea and pointed to names in his notebook. Hoey began copying them.
“If you think that Paul was by way of being very religious, you’d be wrong there,” said Fitzgerald. “I don’t know if there are lapsed Jews like there are lapsed Catholics but he didn’t wear his religion on his sleeve. I asked him when he came to me with the bit about the Arabs, the students, if he hadn’t an interest to declare there. He laughed it off, treated it as a joke.”
“A joke,” Minogue echoed with a leaden emphasis.
“Yes. Because being a Jew he’d necessarily be expected to have it in for any Arab. Stereotyping. Get this, now: Paul was an unashamed progressive, like a lot of people here. Your mob call it Leftie, I don’t doubt. Let’s just say that Paul wasn’t a gobshite. We have to fight our corner here on this programme. There’ll always be complaints, and dinosaurs from the bog wanting to put us off the air and have more ‘entertainment’, less looking at the Emperor. Paul wouldn’t have been working here if he was a bread and circuses man. It was a personal challenge to him to go out and meet these students, he said. He actually had a lot of sympathy for Palestinians. We think there are no shades of opinion in Israel, you know, and we assume that every Israeli-and therefore, every Jew the world over-supports what has happened in Israel over the last ten years. Not so.”
“It’s getting a bit murky for me,” Minogue murmured. “It seems odd to me that he should be murdered for being a Jew who was apparently taking an interest in Arab goings-on as regards Ireland.”
“That’s putting it a bit crudely. I don’t think any of those students would do that, even if they knew Paul was Jew. Remember that he was an Irishman, a Dubliner. Would you have known him for anything but that if you’d met him in the street?” asked the rhetorical Fitzgerald. Dead with a hole the size of a tenpenny piece in his forehead, Minogue wanted to reply. The back of his head pulped too, Mr. Smart-arse Fitzgerald.
“Point taken. What if there are more militant students coming here now? Like you were wondering about, ones with some brief to be involved with our crop of IRA? What if one of them knew precisely that Paul was a Jew?”
Fitzgerald shrugged. Minogue drained his cup and he watched as Fitzgerald rummaged in a drawer of his desk. A grainy newspaper photograph of Daniel Ortega fluttered to the floor by Minogue’s feet. He picked it up and laid it on Fitzgerald’s desk. Fitzgerald smiled then and laid a key by Minogue’s cup. Minogue couldn’t suppress a snigger.
“There: now you know for sure. Don’t tell the bishops,” said Fitzgerald.
“I didn’t think you kept pictures of the Sacred Heart in there, Mr. Fitzgerald. Don’t be worrying about shocking me.”
Fitzgerald announced that he had to get back to work. He had allotted nearly an hour to the Gardai, holding off calls and conferences for this interview. Now he had to get on top of this evening’s programme.
Minogue asked him what other stories Paul Fine had been working on.
“Bren will tell you those. I knew some of them. He did a story on chemists down the country refusing to stock contraceptives. Em, he trimmed something we got about Thatcher’s own constituency, you know, how the locals view her. What else? The Arab student thing, of course. Oh, I forgot: it was his turn to hunt for some scandal.”
“Scandal? Journalists?” said Minogue, not quite carrying it off.
“We’re always interested in what sulking backbenchers might be bellyaching about. Especially with the Ard Fheis, our glorious governing party’s convention, coming up in a week and a half. Not a lot of Party members will talk to our programme, you see-before the Ard Fheis, I mean. We have the name of stirring up trouble, making mountains out of molehills because our format pretty well dictates that we can’t give them a half an hour to gab. Still, we try. There’s always a grumbling TD out there, a fella who would like to air his notions.”
“I take it you mean a bit of muck-raking.” Fitzgerald affected shock. “Seeing as we’re talking man-to-man here,” Minogue added.
“You’re not a bishop in disguise, are you?”
“I’m merely a pawn,” replied Minogue.
“It’s not muck-raking. It’s called accountability and scrutiny of public officials and it’s rather popular in textbook discussions on democracy. I mean that we might want to check how many holidays a Member of Parliament or councillor takes and if the State purse is being devoted to projects a little too close to home for these boyos. Recreations, expense accounts, that sort of thing. See how they vote on certain issues, who they’re rolling around in the sack with. Who’s on the up-and-up, what Cabinet decisions for whom. Squeeze all that into a quickie magazine format for tired motorists, and you’re a better man than I. There are the obvious limitations.”
“Sounds mighty exciting,” Minogue fibbed.
“I’ll tell you what I like the most about it,” said Fitzgerald. He rubbed his hands together theatrically. “Aside from raising the wrath of the curators of culture and family life here, it’s knowing that the whole mob listen to our programme so they can get any dirt on their rivals. Then they pretend to condemn us for finding something isn’t quite square. I love it.”