Ken Bruen - Green Hell

“Is everything all right?”

Jack said,

“Your boss is a serial rapist, don’t be alone with him.”

The critics assert that all of Beckett’s characters are drawn from his early life in Dublin; the streets, bogs, ditches, dumps, and madhouses.

Beckett implied his people were the castoffs, the lunatics, the street poets, the “bleeding meat of the entire system, denizens of an urban wasteland.”

I thought how well the above could easily fit Taylor’s world. After our train wreck meeting with the professor, we ended up in Garavan’s. They still have the snugs where you believe you have a measure of privacy. Intrusion is the theme of Jack’s exis shy;tence. We’d just settled with our drinks, a sparkling water for me, Jameson and the black for Jack. Jack had barely skimmed the pint’s creamy head when a man burst in, plunked himself down beside Jack, gasped,

“I’m dying of thirst.”

He was in his very bad fifties, wearing a distressed pin-striped suit, a grimy shirt, and blindingly white sneakers. His eyes were dancing insane reels in his head. Jack got him a pint, laid back, asked,

“What’s up, Padraig?”

The man, seeing my stare, gulped half the pint, nigh shouted at me,

“Hey, I used to be someone!”

Jack muttered,

“Didn’t we all?”

Another swallow and the pint was gone. He glanced at me as if I wasn’t up to speed, said,

“My wife left me.”

I said,

“I’m sorry.”

His head cocked, question mark large in his face, he asked, amazed,

“You know her?”

Staying tight-assed polite, I said,

“No.”

Spittle leaked from his lips, he near spat,

“Then why the fuck are you sorry!”

I had no answer. A light peered through his madness. He said,

“You’re a Yank.”

No joyriding point on this statement. I agreed I was. He turned back to Jack, offering,

“Get the fuck into Syria, help those poor fuckers.”

Jack asked,

“What can I do for you, Padraig?”

His body language altered, then, positioning for the kill, he said,

“Two fifties, Jack.”

The description of a hundred taking the harm/sting away. Jack gave him twenty and Padraig turned to me, asked petulantly,

“Where’s your contribution?”

I shrugged.

He turned back to Jack,

“God be with the days only rich Yanks came here.”

He lumbered to his feet, said,

“I’ll have to go, the wife will have my dinner ready.”

And he was gone, trailing bile and disappointment.

I asked,

“Did his wife come back?”

Jack gave me a look, ridicule spiced with irritation, said,

“Jesus, wake up, he never had a wife.”

Needing more, I pushed,

“The pin-striped suit, was he in business?”

“Sure, if you count traffic wardens as business.”

Jack indicated we were done, shucked into his all-weather coat, asked,

“Want to tag along on a case this evening?”

Gun-shy by now, I asked,

“Will there be. . ah. . violence?”

He gave a sly smile, said,

“We can live in hope.”

A time would come when I’d tentatively ask Jack,

“Do you get a rush from. . um. . you know. . the violence?”

He considered that, then,

“My friend Stewart, a Zen entrepreneur, ex-drug dealer, believed I’d become addicted to it.”

He said this without rancor, it was what it was, then added,

“Like greatness, some are born to it, then others, God help them, have it thrust upon them.”

I wish I’d realized what a rare moment that was. He was actually letting me in but I blew it, went the wrong way, said,

“Could you just walk away?”

Silence for a full minute, then,

“For a supposed scholar, you are as thick as two cheap lumps of wood.”

Attempting recovery, I said, conciliatory,

“I’d like to meet your friend.”

He laughed without a trace of humor, said,

“Good luck with that; they settled his Zen ashes across the Bay.”

Daily Mail, September 2013

Headline:

250 Sex Fiends on the Run: Convicted Paedophiles and Every Hue of Sex Offender Have Disappeared or Broken the Terms of Their Release

On page 19, above a tiny paragraph, almost lost amid reports of Miley Cyrus’s sexual antics, was this:

22 New Vocations to the Priesthood

Jack would ask,

“And those are connected. .”

Pause.

“How?”

One of the rare to rarest times I was with Jack and not in a pub was over coffee in McCambridge’s. Black for Jack and decaf latte for me, earning me full derision. He said,

“What’s the friggin point? Without caffeine, it’s like Mass without Communion; there’s no hit.”

I had no answer. My iPad was before me, the famous photo of Beckett as my screen saver. His face almost as lined and ruined as Jack’s. I asked,

“You read Beckett?”

Gave me a long look, then,

“If I say no, you’ll write me off as pig ignorant, so let me assume a literary mask and say, ‘I don’t read him, I savor him.’”

I nearly smiled, he said,

“Ol’ Sam was a Bushmills guy.”

When I didn’t rise to whatever bait he was trolling, he continued,

“See, Catholics are the Jameson guys. Bushmills is for the other crowd.”

He reflected on his own words, added,

“You might say black Bushmills is for. .”

Paused.

“Black Protestants. . and, trust me, we aren’t talking about skin color.”

The evening I accompanied him on “the bit of business,” he was dressed in a black tracksuit, carrying an Adidas holdall. I tried to go light, said,

“Promise me there’s not an AK47 in there.”

“Nope, just a simple hurly.”

He led me down past Spanish Arch, parked himself on a bench facing the Claddagh Basin. He motioned for me to sit. Time passed to the sound of gulls and a vague turmoil from a Quay Street hen party. Finally I asked,

“What are you waiting for?”

He nodded in the direction of a small group huddled close to an upturned boat, said,

“A fairly regular drinking school, doing no harm to anyone save themselves. Over the past few weeks, some young guy appears, drops a homemade Molotov among them. No one’s been killed. .”

He took a deep breath,

“Yet.”

I had my laptop, about to open it, paused. Sounding more priggish than I intended, I said,

“Surely a case for the Guards?”

He snickered. I never actually thought there was a sound to match the word. There was. But damn it, I persisted,

“And why are you here? Indeed, why are we here?”

Lord, I sounded like a frat boy!

Jack said, in a low tone,

“They hired me.”

Oh, sweet Lord, I guffawed,

And worse,

“And they’ll pay you in what. . Buckfast?”

As to what would have gone down, I’ll never know, but out of the Spanish Arch shadow a man appeared, moving fast, almost a blur. His arm raised, holding a bottle, a bottle ablaze, moving toward the school. Jack was up, hurly out of the bag, and amazed me with the speed.

Whoosh!

I could hear the knee crack and the guy was down. Jack kicked the bottle aside, reached into the guy’s jacket, pulled out a wallet, shoved it into his own pocket. Jack never saw the second guy, came flying from his blind side. Without even thinking I decked him with the laptop. Jack turned, said,

“No spam, eh?”

The first guy was whimpering, pleaded,

“Didn’t mean no harm, just a bit of fun.”

Jack said,

“You need to have that broken nose looked at.”

The guy touched his unblemished nose, managed,

“What. .?”

As Jack swung the hurly.

We were in the bar at Jury’s, it being the nearest. I was having a large Jameson to stop my trembling. Jack? He was having fun, asked,