Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

“Sounds like a lot of activity,” I said with a slight air of skepticism.

“Forget it then,” she said.

I stared at her. She was pretty and I liked her. I wanted to placate her. Words from Heine, my favorite writer about the poppy.

“What did you say?” she asked, unable to understand me.

“ Du bist wie eine Blume, you are like a flower,” I said.

Her face reddened. She breathed in. Amazingly, it was a line unknown to her, maybe it was the German, although no one’s ever said it’s the most romantic of tongues.

She leaned forward and we kissed again until John came back up from the dance floor with his girl.

“You look serious, you weren’t talking about why beards are coming back, are you?” he asked me with a wink.

“No, were you talking about the Platonic embodiment of your Triumph Bonneville?”

“No, and by the way, that was far too long a sentence to work as sarcasm. Anyway, did you hear about the rave, are you in, man?” John asked, with a big, hopeful grin.

“I don’t know where you get the energy from, but I think I want to go home,” I said.

“No, no, no, the rave is in Boulder, we have to go to Boulder tomorrow, right? To go to Victoria’s office?” John said.

“So?”

“So it’ll save us the trip,” John said.

I had no resistance and the girl was cute.

“Ok,” I said….

A small thing but, who knows, with a good night’s sleep what happened the next day might not have happened.

An hour later. The highway to Boulder. The drive to the university. Drunk kids saying “Ssshhh,” very loud. Jeeps and SUVs up into the mountains. A long walk through a forest to the top. A clearing. The city of Boulder a few thousand feet below.

Tents. Speakers. A DJ. About three hundred kids. Ecstasy being passed around in solemn little tablets. The DJ faking a British accent. A smiley-face poster. All of it Manchester, 1989. The generator started up. The spotlights came on. The speakers kicked in. Dutch trance music. The mountains. The city. Everybody yelled and started dancing. She passed me an ecstasy tab. But I might be unemployed, I might be a druggie, I might be in the throes of existential crisis, but I wasn’t stupid. A few hundred people die of heroin overdoses every year. There are about four thousand heroin cocktail deaths. Heroin and coke, heroin and speed, heroin and e. You don’t mess with that shit.

I palmed the pill, fake-swallowed, kissed the girl. We danced. They played acid house and Euro dance and trip-hop and for variety the Soup Dragons and the Stone Roses and Radiohead. At two we drifted away.

We laid out sleeping bags and we took off our T-shirts and our jeans and I stole beside her and kissed her breasts and her long legs.

We had sex and I still didn’t know her name and in the dark she could have been anyone. And our moves were theater and our words rituals. You are beautiful. You are my little flower. You are the negation of the enemy. But a substitute. Oh yes, my dear, a substitute.

And I ground my hips and my heart pumped and from nowhere some last residue of that wonderfully refined opium plant changed the chemistry of my brain. I smiled and the world’s pain eased. We got to our feet and we walked naked to the tent and the stars lit our way and our feet trod lightly on these subtle and unforgiving grasses of the New World.

The blue flame of the paraffin lamp was almost cobalt in the darkness of the tent. It burned clear with only a fragile light that dripped color and a little heat, taking the dark, molding it into tiny shapes and forms that were weird and spectral under the aged canvas of khaki and muck black and burnt sienna.

The tube around the wick was hot and the green metal of the vessel buckled slightly as the heat rose. I adjusted the intake valve to make it consume more oxygen. The smell of the oil was strong and rich, like some exotic opiate or sleep inducer, and I drank it in and kneeled there for a while like a devotee before his idol.

I sighed, and leaned back, and sat, still in the moment, holding my breath and then slowly letting it out again into the cool night air.

The heroin easing out of my body now.

I shook myself. The lamp burned on, seeping a brittle indigo onto the cheek of the sleeping girl. I hadn’t slept at all. I climbed out of the tent. There were a few people awake waiting for the dawn. John, one of them, smoking by a fire.

“How do, mate?” John asked, grinning at me.

“Not bad,” I said.

“You look terrible. You shot up again, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“What about your ‘Only an addict would shoot up twice in twenty-four hours’ spiel?”

“Jet lag. Doesn’t count,” I said.

“Why even bring your gear with you to the bar? Do you carry it everywhere now?”

“John, I was up all night and I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I would take a hit. I am exhausted beyond belief. We should have just gone back to the hotel.”

“Yeah, blame me,” John said, his face showing a little irritation.

“I’m not going to get into this with you again. I’m really not.”

“Ok.”

And what was I going to say? John, the heroin in America is not to be believed? John, I’m having serious misgivings about trying to be a cop again? But the bastard was right. I didn’t have to do heroin now. It wasn’t necessary. The fact that I had shot up this morning meant something huge.

“Hey, at least did it go ok with the girl?” John asked.

I didn’t answer. I was thinking now about the day ahead. We had much to do. Victoria Patawasti’s neighbors had to be interviewed, her work colleagues, the police, the supposed murderer and his attorney, and if possible the murder scene had to be examined, her movements explored, a thorough, slow, precise investigation. Haste is the enemy of the investigator. Haste makes you jump to conclusions, miss things. The ally of lies is speed. I’d solved about two dozen cases in the RUC as detective and ordinary cop. All of them broken by solid police work, a slow growth of fact and evidence until the picture had formed itself. In my experience no one cracked under questioning, no one confessed, there were no sudden lightning flashes of insight. An assembling of a jigsaw full of detail. Detail upon detail until its weight breaks through the lies and ambiguity, and truth rings out.

That was the way to solve this case, too.

But it wasn’t to be that way. I mean, did I want to fail? Did I want to escape from the awful injunction over me? Did I want to sabotage myself? Maybe the peeler wants to be nabbed himself, trapped, found out. Maybe he has had enough of truth.

“You don’t buy into this summer solstice shit?” John asked, taking off his Belfast Blues Festival baseball hat, wiping his forehead, and shaking his long hair in a way he knew really annoyed me. I was determined not to let him piss me off.

“Well, John, they say it’s the holiest day of the year. In Hinduism and Buddhism it was a propitious day to reach enlightenment.”

“You ever been to Newgrange in County Meath?” John asked.

“No.”

“I went down there on the bike once, now it’s aligned with the winter solstice, not the summer, that’s more like it, that makes more sense, you’re begging the sun to come back again, see….”

But I wasn’t listening. I was still obsessing on me and Victoria and that big word: truth — I don’t buy into the existential solipsism of fucking defense lawyers: “Everything’s relative, subjective.” I’m old school. Aristotle, who says there are five ways of finding things out: techne, which is practical technique; episteme, or scientific method; phronesis, which is sagacity; sophia, which is wisdom; and, finally, intelligence or nous. Techne is the most important for a policeman. The most important for me. And before heroin, my technique was killer: patient, focused, incremental, deep.