John Brady - The going rate

Murph turned on him, blocking his path.

“What? Are you out of your mind? You’re asking me here?”

“Just asking. What’s wrong with that?”

“Don’t even think about stuff like that here. Do you know what’d happen if anyone here heard you? Have you any idea? Jesus!”

“Okay. I get it. “

“You’ve got to start using your head, man. Anyone here got wind of that stuff, they wouldn’t even ask me about it. They don’t care, you know?”

“I said I get it. Sorry.”

“Sorry? Like that’s going to help? Listen, this isn’t a story here, I keep telling you. Stuff happens in this world, you know. It’s not on a page, or has special effects, or anything like that. The real world, you understand?”

Fanning saw that Murph’s chest was not heaving so much now.

“Like, we’re talking people with no morals or anything,” Murph went on. He leaned in.

“Mental issues, you know? Nutters. I mean a lot of these people got hard going when they were kids. Abuse and all that? So, like, now, well I mean to say — would you turn out normal after that? You know?”

These people, Fanning thought. If anything crystallized Murph, with his delusions, that had to be it right there.

“Am I getting through to you at all?”

“Oh sure. I forgot, I suppose. I get it.”

Murph’s straining and bloodshot eyes still bored into his.

“So did he?” he murmured. “Malone…?”

For a moment he thought Murph would actually hit him.

“No he didn’t,” said Murph between clenched teeth. “And he told me to stop annoying him with it. He doesn’t want anything to do with it.”

Fanning took a step back but Murph’s sour breath seemed to have stuck on him. He spoke in a low voice.

“I don’t know if I want to go in there with you. I mean, what’ll you come up with next?”

“It’s okay. I know, now.”

“But do you? Really, do you?”

“Let’s just go in. Look, I spoke out of turn. Bad timing. Okay?”

“But you’re the fella with the degrees and the books and everything. And what am I? Kicked out of the school. Haven’t read a book for years — but at least I know reality from fake, from, from fantasy.”

“I hear you. Can we go in now?”

“If you make a promise to keep your trap shut, maybe, just maybe.”

“I promise.”

He watched Murph search his face for any sign of irony.

“Remember me telling you, my turf, my rules?”

“I remember.”

“You better. You don’t ask anybody anything in here. Not even ‘what day is it.’ None of that, you know, what do you call…”

“Small talk.”

“That’s right! No chit chat. This is a business here. The people that come to this don’t come here for the scenery, I can tell you. They want to relax a bit, sure. But they’re betting. And they take it serious. They’re not there to talk to you, and they don’t want to be wondering who you are, or what you’re doing here. All they know is, you’re with me. So that’s good enough for them. They’ll leave it at that.”

“What if one of them starts talking to me?”

“Not going to happen,” Murph said quickly. “I’ll do the talking, if there’s any. I set this up, with Jacko — that’s him at the door there, in the red, the butty little fella.”

Fanning watched Murph draw hard on the cigarette and begin to smoothen out a patch of broken bitumen with slow, rhythmical side-to-side movements of his foot. Then Murph jerked his head up.

“And none of that jotting down notes effort,” he said. “Like you were doing in the pub the other- Hey: you carrying that recorder thing I seen you using before?”

“No.”

“Oh. And give me your phone.”

“It’s off,” Fanning said. He had to clear his throat. “I’m not using it.”

Murph squinted at him, and he grimaced. Fanning tried not to notice that his yellowing teeth had a shade of green near the gums.

“My turf, my rules,” Murph said. “Phones are cameras, remember.”

Fanning got his thumbnail under the catch, took off the lid, and slid the SIM card into his wallet.

A Fiat van arrived. Instead of parking with the others, it made its way wallowing and swaying over the asphalt toward the back of the warehouse. Fanning caught a quick glimpse of the driver, a late middleaged man with a greying seventies moustache, and a stud in his ear. One of the two men who had been standing by the door, a skinny twentysomething-looking one in a hoodie, walked after the van. From around the corner of the warehouse, Fanning heard a door being pulled up.

“That was Tony,” said Murph. “In the van. Pretty well top of the heap. Goes all over the country with them dogs of his. There’s a story about him I can’t tell you.”

“I won’t be using names,” Fanning said.

Murph chuckled.

“Okay,” he said. “Let me just ask you something then. What would you do, if you were breeding a fighting dog and it turned on you, the dog?”

“I don’t know. I’d get it put down, I suppose.” Murph tugged at his nose. The rash on his nostrils became a brighter red.

“‘Put down? There is no putter-downer for a dog like this. What would you use, I’m saying.”

Then he winked at Fanning, and he took a last, hurried drag of his cigarette before flicking it into the weeds.

Jacko was flabby but sort of well tended in a wholly unoriginal way, with the stock Beckham stubble and cropped hair, and a plain silver chain showing by the zipper of his jacket. Turning his head for a moment, revealed a small Bluetooth earpiece that Fanning had not noticed before. His empty gaze settled again on Fanning as he followed Murph to the door.

“We’re here and gone, Jacko,” Murph said. “Just a sampler, is all.”

Jacko flicked a look from Fanning to Murph and back.

“Yous are here to play or not?” he asked.

“Course we are,” Murph said. “Been looking forward to it.”

“Where are you coming from,” Jacko said to Fanning. “Who do you know?”

“Jacko, man, come on,” Murph said. “He’s with me, he’s sound.”

“Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“Jacko, we already talked about this. You know me, you know the score.”

“Well the score’s nil-nil right now. Far as I can see.”

“Look,” said Murph. “Phone me, later on. I might have something for you.”

“Stuff. What sort of stuff.”

“This and that. Situations. Transportation business. Stuff like that.”

“Really. I’ll talk to my parole officer about it.”

Three more men appeared from where the cars were parked.

“Step aside for these men here,” said Jacko.

“How come they don’t get hassled?” Murph asked.

“They paid the admission fee. That’s how.”

“Ha ha,” Murph said. “Nice one, Jacko. There’s no such thing.”

Jacko shifted on his feet.

“There is now, brother. So step aside.”

“What’s your hurry,” Minogue called out after Kilmartin.

As Kilmartin drew closer to their car, Burke and Delahunty seemed to feel the time was right to retire to its interior. Kilmartin gave them a short, ecclesiastical stare before he conceded a nod in, and passed on. Minogue ignored a wink from Burke as he passed them himself.

He recognized several Guards biding their time in the cars ahead, a Deputy Comm from Cork, a few more Superintendents. He passed two ancient priests sprawled in the back of an old Passat, some of Tynan’s former Jesuit mentors from his seminary days, he was willing to bet. A fat, frustrated-looking man sat in the champagne-coloured Lexus ahead of them, talking into his mobile and making elaborate gestures, all the while glancing at papers on the passenger seat. Beyond the Lexus was a bread van, with its driver leaning on the door of a lorry that preceded him, talking with little enthusiasm to whoever was in the cab.