Роберт Паркер - All Our Yesterdays

Voice-Over

“You walk along the River Liffey,” I said, “which cuts right through the middle of the city, and there’s a bunch of barrel-arched bridges. And the arches reflect in the water and make a circle. You walk along the river, past Guinness Brewery, and veer up past Heuston Station and go up a hill and there’s Kilmainham Jail, this — Christ, I don’t know — Stonehengean pile of granite block, right in the middle of a bunch of neat small houses with neat small yards. So I went in. You can’t go except on a tour, so I tagged along. And, Jesus... abandon all hope ye who enter here.”

Grace waited, her gaze resting on me, calm and guarded so that it felt heavy. Though it seemed a little less guarded to me than it had. Always when she listened, she gave you her full attention and you felt as if you were saying things of absolute grace and significance.

“It felt like you’d think a prison would feel: ponderous, unyielding, and hopeless. There was a light rain the day I was there. Actually there’s a light rain most days in Dublin, I think. And the rain didn’t make it more cheerful, but even in the present day, you know, now, when I was walking around in there, and now it’s just a museum, I felt” — I looked for the right word — “like despair. I felt buried underneath this atrocious heap. It wasn’t a cold day, maybe fifty-five, sixty, but inside the walls it was freezing. You knew what it must have been like to be caught in the gears of the British Empire. They were entirely indifferent, and they must have ground exceeding fucking fine.”

“And yet he escaped,” Grace said.

“He was an indomitable bastard,” I said.

The thick snow had begun to pile up along the bottom of the window, its whiteness making the night storm blacker.

“Except that it sounds like he didn’t care about anything.”

“There’s freedom in that.”

“There’s freedom and there’s freedom,” Grace said.

“True.”

She looked at me again for a time.

“There’s indomitable and indomitable too,” she said.

“What the hell does that mean?” I said.

Grace shrugged.

“We’ll see.”

I waited but she didn’t say anything else. Lightning startled outside the window, and thunder rolled in after it. The space between the light and the sound had narrowed as the heart of the storm moved toward us.

“A little after Conn left Ireland, they had stopped fighting England and started fighting each other. Michael Collins was killed by some other Irishmen, on the other side of the treaty issue.

“But Conn cared no more about that. He was over here. He arrived late in 1921 and joined the cops. The police strike was only two years before, and the force was pretty much starting over, and so was Conn. It was a match made in heaven. He was a charmer. I’ve seen pictures of him. Tall, strong looking, black curly hair, bright eyes, with a kind of go-to-hell look in them, you know? Like Errol Flynn. In fact much like myself.”

Grace smiled.

“And one of his missions in life was to score every woman in Boston. Sort of a fuck-you to Hadley, I suppose.”

“I thought Irishmen were sexually inhibited,” Grace said. “Hung up on their mother and the Blessed Virgin, whom they quite often confused with each other.”

“You shouldn’t generalize,” I said. “Anyway, he started out walking a beat in the West End with a guy named Knocko Kiernan. I’ve actually met Knocko. I was a little kid, and he was a fat old guy drinking beer in his undershirt, when my father took me to see him once. But he still had funny eyes — like Robert Benchley, you know? Eyes that know life’s secret, and it’s funny? Lot of Irishmen like him, about half of them, the other half thinks life’s secret is tragic. I’m not sure yet which kind I am.”

“Maybe a complete one,” Grace said. “Maybe you’re both.”

“So he’s walking a beat in the West End, which isn’t even there anymore. Nice high rise condos — if you lived here you’d be home now. And they bust some bootleggers, and roust some loan sharks, and one day they caught a guy trying to murder an old lady. It wasn’t great sleuthing, they just came across him in the act. But they saved the old lady and collared the guy and it made the papers. Martin Lomasney wrote a letter to the Post about it, and the mayor, James Michael Curley, had his picture taken with them, and in a while they were both detectives. And in another while they were both, still partners, working homicide out of Headquarters. Is this a great country? Or what.”

“Land of opportunity,” Grace said.

They went to Boylan’s, next to City Hall, which meant that Knocko Kiernan’s wife, Faith, who had arranged the blind date, considered it important. Conn had a pint of whiskey with him in his coat pocket and he and Knocko were already aglow with it when they met Faith and Mellen Murphy in the restaurant.

“Mellen’s a very pretty name,” Conn said.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s Mary Ellen, actually. I think my father invented the contraction when he was mad at me and couldn’t get ‘Mary Ellen’ out without sputtering.”

Her hair was the color of honey, and her eyes were very large and blue. She was slim, and wore a green dress with a lace collar. Her only makeup appeared to be lipstick, and she wore a small crucifix on a gold chain round her neck. Conn smiled to himself when he saw the crucifix.

We’ll see about that .

“Hard to imagine getting mad at you,” Conn said.

The waiter came with menus.

“We’ll have some glasses and ice,” Knocko said. “And a siphon of seltzer.”

“It is not permitted to drink here,” the waiter said. He was a small dark man. “It’s the law. Prohibition.”

Knocko was bald, and jowly. He looked like the caricatured Irish policeman who appeared occasionally in The Evening Transcript . His face reddened.

“Maybe you’d like to have the place shut fucking down for a couple weeks,” Knocko said.

“Francis,” his wife said. “Your language.”

“I’m sorry sir,” the waiter said. “Management—”

“Fuck management,” Knocko said.

“Francis!”

Conn stood up. He rested a hand on Knocko’s shoulder, for a moment, as if calming a restive horse. Then he said, “Excuse me,” to the table, put an arm over the waiter’s shoulder, and, smiling, steered him a few steps away. With his back turned so that only the waiter could see it, he took out his badge and showed it to him. He smiled broadly.

“Just bring us the setups, guinea-wop. And shut the fuck up,” Conn said in a pleasant voice. He nodded his head encouragingly. “You unnerstand?”

It wasn’t the badge, as much as it was what the waiter saw in Conn’s eyes.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Sorry.”

Conn gave him a little pat on the back. And came back to the table.

“See that, Francis?” Faith said. “That’s how a gentleman handles things. No need for rampaging round like a great sow.”

Knocko winked at Mary Ellen.

“A sow is a female pig, Faith, if you’ll be insulting me, for Crissake, at least get it right.”

The waiter returned with glasses and ice and seltzer. Conn took the bottle from his inside pocket and mixed them all a drink.

“Make mine very weak,” Mary Ellen said. “I really don’t know how to drink very much.”

“Plenty of time to learn,” Conn said. They drank and looked at the menus. Mary Ellen drank in very small sips, and Conn could see that she didn’t like the taste. He looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar. He was wearing a blue suit and vest and a red-and-blue tie with a collar pin. His white shirt fresh laundered by the Chinaman. His face had a healthy, wind-burned look and the blue suit set off his eyes and made them look even more piercing than they were.