Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

Let’s go in, he says, this overhang is barely giving us any shelter. This smoke can’t be good for your lungs. Gimme a hand to get this thing open.

He gives me his cigarette and tugs on the window and tries to pull it up. It sticks on the first shove and he has to thump it. A heap of red ash falls on us from the wooden board covering the air conditioner on the next floor.

Hey, watch what you’re doing, John, I say.

Relax.

He bends his body and pushes past me, climbing in through the window, over the grille of the security gate.

Aye, like you couldn’t wait for me, I say sarcastically and look around at this sorry excuse for a town, the orange sky, the old buildings, shriveled and spectral. And all I can think about are the gray waves that separate us from our home. A moat between me and the braided dark.

Eagla, mathair, eagla, I whisper into the stinking air.

Are you saying something? he mutters from inside.

No.

Aye, well, get in and we’ll get this window closed, so we will. Quit your gabbing and get moving, he says suspiciously.

I put a leg over the metal trough. It’s sharp and comes up to my groin, so I can’t lean on it. I end up falling in and landing in a clatter on the floor.

Keep your comments to yourself, I say before he can call me an eejit.

You care about my comments, he says, with a sly grin on his pale face. Anyway, it’s late and it’s time we were in bed, he says.

I am in bed, I say.

And he looks at me, surprised.

So you are, he says. What are you doing?

I’m recovering from drowning and from Pat taking a shotgun pellet out of my leg and the fact that I’m going off ketch forever.

You’re not.

John, I have to. They’re having a fund-raiser, a ball. We saw it on Channel 9. And I’m going. And this time I won’t screw up. This time I’m going to kill him. I’m quitting ketch. Pat’s helping me.

John looks at me skeptically.

You couldn’t kill someone, he says, and don’t say you killed that guy in the cemetery, there was no report about it in the paper, they must have taken him with them.

I gave him half a clip, I protest.

How many hit him? John mocks.

The dying man, who has been in the corner the whole time, looks up at me. His flat cap is askew, shotgun by his side, he’s still soaked, but with blood, not rain.

Enough hit me, he says.

John snaps his fingers in front of my face.

Ignore him, he says. Continue.

Pat’s making me healthy, I say.

Sure, he’s in no fit state himself, he says.

He’s fine. End of conversation. All right?

Aye.

And now I have to see Ma, and I have to reveal the black secret at the heart of the Troubles.

That’s ok, just don’t say that thing again.

What thing?

I am the Last Incarnation of Vishnu, the Avenger, Storm Bringer, Lord of Death.

Ok. I won’t, I say, and pause for effect and then announce: I am the Last Incarn—

He turns off the light….

Ma is in the ground six weeks, and I’m on the Scotch Quarter being interviewed. They’re accepting my application to join the police. It has annoyed my lefty, progressive father, and that’s the beauty of the thing.

“Alex, we always want someone who has experience of the law and your A levels are outstanding, do you have anything you want to say?”

Do I have anything I want to say?

My eyes fluttering…

The bedroom spinning.

Pat gives me the bucket and I throw up.

“Neither poppy nor mandragora will ever medicine to thee that sweet sleep which thou hadst yesterday.”

“What?”

“Not poppy, not mandragora (whatever that is) will give me that sweet sleep of yesterday. I see that now. Heroin takes, never gives. That and that alone can explain so many mistakes since coming to America.”

“And you say heroin is to blame?”

“Yes.”

“But earlier you said heroin saved your life?”

“It did.”

“How?”

Like this:

I’d been a policeman for nearly six years. A full detective for three. I had gone straight into homicide. As Commander Douglas of the Samson Inquiry will tell you, this is practically unheard of. Being groomed, and I knew it. I was being used, but I wanted to be used, I wanted to make my way up. There were factions within the RUC that didn’t like the way things were. Fine, use me to further your ends. My talents, my skill. My techne .

All the way to the black heart of the Troubles.

A secret. Ostensibly, the rival paramilitary forces of the Protestants and the Catholics, the UDA and the IRA, were deadly enemies; but in the late eighties and early nineties, while they were killing each other in bombings, shootings, massacres, something brought them together.

Heroin.

Ireland was an island and it was impossible to get drugs there, especially when the paramilitaries had a thing for killing drug dealers and proving that they were as legitimate of respect as the police. But in 1993 at a secret meeting in Jake’s Bar in Belfast, it was decided to divide up Ulster between them. Heroin was just too big a moneymaker to ignore. Had to be secret. Had to be hush-hush. The IRA’s backers in Boston and New York and San Francisco would have been upset if they had known the IRA was in the drug-dealing business. And the UDA’s backers in Belfast and Glasgow would have had similar qualms.

After six years as a police officer I was appointed DC/DS, Detective Constable/Drug Squad.

Heroin, the gateway drug, was giving the paramilitaries millions and they were still bombing bars and factories and driving people into their arms for protection. That was why people like Victoria Patawasti had to leave Northern Ireland in the first place.

Yes, thinking, remembering it.

Lying here, in this bed, Pat bringing me soup.

“Are you ok, son?”

“I’m ok, Pat. Hey, it’s snowing.”

“No. It isn’t, Alex. It’s just ash from the wildfire, don’t worry about it, just relax, they have it eighty percent contained.”

“Look, Pat, the snow,” I say, but he’s gone and it’s night. I put my head out the window and the snow stings me in the iris making tears that skitter down the lines of least resistance on my face, half-freezing before they slide off my chin.

I can stare right through the clouds, through the dark. The snow is coming not from the sky but from the blue-faced moon, where the Celts believed the dead go. You sent it, Ma. Drizzling from the ether and the high atmosphere and down the roof onto this bed. It moistens my lips.

Morning.

“Eat your soup,” Pat says, and kisses me on the forehead.

“The case,” I tell him.

I followed it for months, it wasn’t that important, but it led to a suspect. Was it all a setup? My mentor was Chief Superintendent William McConnell. Big man, forties, old school. I trusted him.

“Alex, follow this where it leads, I’ll back you up.”

“I will, sir. I will.”

Stakeouts, undercover, but more the paper trail. Made an arrest. Stuart Robinson, a CPA. Ha. Just like how they got Capone. Does no one ever learn the lessons of history? I cracked him, I broke him, I trapped him in his own lies. He gave me names and I found it out. It was waiting to be found out. I don’t flatter myself. I saw it, a black secret. The IRA, the sworn enemies of the police, worked with a tiny corrupt unit within the police to control the flow of heroin into Ireland. The IRA and dirty cops. The bad guys and the good. Samson was on the right track. Buck McConnell, Commander Douglas were on the right track. It was all true. It went to the highest levels of the cops. Dangerous information. And what did I do, reading the accounts, that rainy night in Carrickfergus in my apartment overlooking the marina. What did I do?