John Brady - A Carra ring

“Brian Whelan,” Malone said. “Right?

Minogue nodded. Garda Brian Whelan, two years on the force, had been making what he and his partner believed was a routine check of a vehicle parked on a street in Castleblayney, County Monaghan, two weeks after Christmas. The car had disintegrated when Whelan opened the passenger-side door. The remains of Joseph Brogan, known as a tout of checkered reliability to the RUC and the Guards, were found among the wreckage of the car. The talk was still that it was settling scores and staking out territory for a gang made up of IRA men. This was during a cease-fire.

The first roadblock was next to a landscaped knoll that hid the cargo terminals from the traffic. The shrubs hadn’t flourished in the four years Minogue had begun noting them on his trips here. He wound down his window and slipped out his photocard. A Guard with watery eyes and blond hairs growing high on his cheeks laid his hand on the roof of the Nissan. Had the bomb squad arrived yet, Minogue wanted to know.

“Ten minutes or so,” the Guard replied. “No smoke yet, but.”

Shrmooaak, Minogue registered. County Cork, and not inclined to hide it.

“There’ll be a site van along by and by,” he said. “Steer them right, like a good man, will you.”

“I will.”

No “sir.” Minogue looked up at him.

“Ye’d better meander over that way,” the Guard said. “Everything that side of the hill is locked up tight, so it is.”

“Tighter than that Munster cup you have below in Cork, I hope,” Minogue said. The Guard’s smile revealed pointy teeth. A fox, Minogue thought. A Cork fox.

“Clare, are ye?”

“Not on your shagging life,” said Malone.

Malone coasted down the empty road. Minogue’s belly growled again. He strained to catch a glimpse of the car parks on the far side of the shrubs. A Guard in full motorbike regalia waved them down a roadway away from the car park. A line of flagpoles followed the curb. Most of the flags were tangled in their ropes. Snapping and straining, the American one still floated free.

Caty, his son’s fiancee, with no h because it was the Polish version, had fallen in love with Ireland. Minogue wasn’t sure what or whose Ireland she was in love with. She wanted to live here, learn Irish, walk the back roads, talk to everyone, learn everything. Caty was a sociologist, raised in a devout Polish-American family in an outer suburb of New York City. Her grave accounts of immigrants in American cities impressed Minogue. He didn’t understand how she could see Poles and Irish as similar though, the centuries of oppression thing.

He remembered her sitting on an outcrop over the Burren not two months ago, writing notes. A strange sight entirely, with the stone fields all about her. It was one of those pet days, with roaring sunshine and the clouds low and fast, when even the hills seemed to be on the move. Interrogating him afterward: what had happened to all the families in these ruined villages now hidden under hazel and ivy? Was it true like Daithi had told her, that he’d wanted to move to the States himself years ago? Were Clare people really musical, second-sighted? Was the Celtic Tiger destroying the real Ireland? And why did everyone seem to talk ironically here anyway?

“Jases,” said Malone. “It’s a right bloody maze here.”

He turned the Nissan down toward a collection of dumpsters and airport vans clustered around the back doors of what looked like a warehouse. Several uniforms moved around between the vehicles.

“Yellow,” said Malone. “The lorry. There we are.”

He parked by an airport van. Minogue checked the battery before he pocketed the cell phone.

“Does anyone really think it’s booby-trapped,” Malone said. “Your man’s car?”

Minogue shrugged. A Guard stepped down from the rear door of the communications lorry. Minogue stepped out onto the grass and turned his back to the wind. He looked around the sky. At least it had only been a shower. But instead of the wind slicing at his face, he imagined for several seconds the air full of glass, pieces of torn metal scything through the shrubs, the blast hitting them before they’d even hear it. He stopped buttoning his coat. Couldn’t happen, he almost said. There was a peace deal in the works. The sharp ache in his chest ebbed slowly.

He rapped on the door, stepped in. Two technicians were seated side by side in front of a console. One tugged on his handset and raised the pencil he’d been tapping on the counter.

“How’s things, lads?” Minogue asked.

Someone was smoking. Minogue glanced at the monitors. He stopped at the one that held steady on the hatchback of the Escort. The picture shuddered, shrank to allow other cars in and then closed on the Escort again. The technician closest to the cab of the lorry turned and lifted his cigarette from the ashtray. O’Reilly, Minogue thought.

“Pretty close now,” he said.

Minogue watched him suck hard on the cigarette. Some skin problem, a face like a well-cooked pudding, a wispy mustache. O’Reilly tapped at the partition door into the cab.

“So what,” came the voice from the door as it opened. “Ask them if I give a shit. Go ahead. This isn’t one a their bloody concerts, their gigs here. This is a security shutdown.”

Minogue’s eyes returned to the monitor. The camera was steady on an armored lorry parked sideways across the entrance to a car park.

“Fine and well,” the voice went on “Make whatever calls you want. That’s your business.”

Minogue recognized the soft voice, how the speaker managed to squeeze in a light cough in the middle of a sentence. “ Make whatever ah-uh calls you want.” A mannerism, Minogue wondered, or a conscious put-down.

The speaker backed in through the partition door. The cell phone clenched in his hand was identical to Minogue’s. Superintendent Damian Little stared at the phone as though it had bitten him. He addressed nobody in particular.

“Fucking yobs,” he murmured. “Did you ever hear the like?”

O’Reilly smiled and unplugged his headset. The police radio traffic was constant now. Little straightened up and looked at the two arrivals.

“Will you lookit,” Little said.

“How’s Damian?” Minogue asked. Chisled, they’d call that jaw, action hero model, maybe. Did women really like that class of a fella? The Adam’s apple standing out on his neck, the veins running beside them. Weights, Minogue understood vaguely, something strenuous and even close to a torturous rapture that photos of athletes showed so clearly.

Little grasped Minogue’s hand. The grin spread to a tight smile. Right, Minogue remembered: that little-boy gap between his teeth, what he remembered along with Little’s intensity that came through so strangely in his drawl. The almost slow-mo, gentle tone Minogue associated with teachers on automatic, priests in confession maybe. As though you were on the slow side, and the speaker was taking account of it.

“The undertakers themselves. How’s Matt?”

“Fair to middling, Damian. That wasn’t us you were referring to now was it.”

Little’s leather jacket creaked as he brandished the cell phone. Minogue plucked out his own and waved it. Little smiled.

“For fuck’s sake you wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “Show business.”

Malone stepped around Minogue.

“Well, stop the lights,” Little said. “Tommy Malone. Moving up too, huh?”

“Dead on,” said Malone. “How’s it going.”

“Don’t mind me, I heard you left the Killer whistling over a case there.”

“Only rumors ”

“Ah you should have come over to us when you had the chance, man!” said Little.

For all Malone’s physical abilities and the hard-chaw self he brought to work, Minogue still couldn’t imagine Malone as one of the Emergency Response Unit cowboys.