Adrian McKinty: The Dead Yard

The second book in the Michael Forsythe series, 2006

My sweet enemy was, little by little, giving over her

great wariness… But Death had his grudge against me

and he got up in the way, like an armed robber, with a

pike in his hand.

– J. M. Synge, Poems and Translations from Petrarch (1906)

Dawn over the turquoise shore of Africa and here, under the fractured light of a streetlamp, brought to earth like some hurricaned palm, I woke before the supine ocean amidst a sea of glass and upturned bus stands and the wreck of cars and looted stores.

The streets of Playa de las Americas were flowing with beer and black sewage and blood. Smoke hung above the seashore and the smell was of desolation, decay, the burning of tires and fuel oil. The noise of birds, diesel engines, a dirge-like siren, a helicopter, voices in Spanish over a loudspeaker- all of it more than enough hint of the breakdown in the fragile rules of the social contract.

I was sitting up and adjusting to the light and the growing heat when a kid hustled me under cover and the riot began again.

Five hundred British football hooligans, three hundred and fifty Irish fans, all of them on this island at the same time for a “friendly” match between Dublin’s Shamrock Rovers and London’s Millwall.

A riot.

I wouldn’t say I’d been expecting that but I wouldn’t say I was that goddamn surprised either.

Some people go through their lives like a mouse moving through a wheat field. They’re good citizens, they pay their taxes, they contribute to society, they have kids and the kids turn them into responsible adults. They create no stir, cause no fuss, leave no trace. When they’re gone people speak well of them, sigh, shrug their shoulders, and shed a tear. They avoid chaos and it avoids them.

Perhaps most people are like this.

But not me.

You’d notice me in the wheat field. You’d notice me because the field would be on fire or the farmer would be running after me with a gun.

The Bible says that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Well, trouble followed me like sharks trailing a slave ship. Even when I tried to get away it was there swirling in a vortex around me.

Even when I tried to get away. Spain. Tenerife, to be exact, the largest of the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco. It’s a hell of a long flight from Chicago but the FBI won’t let me go near Florida or the Caribbean. Seamus Duffy, the head of the Irish mob in New York City, has had a contract out on me for five years for killing his underboss Darkey White and testifying against Darkey’s crew.

With that in mind you can’t be too careful about where you take your vacation. So O’Hare, JFK, and seven hours to Tenerife for a wee bit of R & R and of course this is what bloody happens.

“Brian, are you all right?” the English kid asked. Pale skin, sunburned, wearing a Millwall shirt and white jeans.

I stared at him. My name had been Brian O’Nolan since I’d moved to Chicago in January. It still didn’t seem right.

“I’m ok,” I said. “I must have fallen asleep. What the hell is happening?”

“The riot’s starting up again. Those Irish bastards have all gotten ball bearings from somewhere.”

I gave him a look.

One of those looks.

My speciality.

“Oh, by Irish bastards, I meant, uh, I meant no offense by the way,” he stammered.

I didn’t say anything. I almost felt more American now than Irish. I ducked as stones and ball bearings landed in the shop fronts. Pieces of dark lava and Molotov cocktails flew back from the English side.

The London lads were drunk and the Dublin boys had taken off their shirts, looking like ghosts flitting nervously behind the barricades.

The riot progressed. A shop window caved in under a big rock, a roof collapsed, a car went up in flames. A big English bruiser trundled along a wheely-bin filled with gasoline and halfway down the hill, he burned some scrunched-up newspaper and tossed it after. The bin exploded and he caught fire.

Jesus.

The colors fused: green banana skins, inky smoke, crimson blood, the blue Atlantic and iodine sky merging in the west. Over by the dunes amazed surfers were wondering if the town was on fire, and later it was, as the hotel burned and the surfers and the other noncombatants decided to be long gone.

At dusk the Spanish police finally got their act together and turned fire hoses on the two sides. The Micks started an outof-date football chant: “Francisco Franco is a wanker,” and the English side trumped that with “What Happened to the Armada?” Singing was general over the lines now and each song was echoed back and as full night fell, everyone got teary-eyed and guilt-ridden and we had a truce, the impromptu leaders meeting up in one of the main squares under a flag of armistice.

The shadows lengthened and there was a toast. A drink. A parley. And it was agreed then that whatever differences existed between the Irish and the English soccer fans, here, fifteen hundred miles from the British Isles, the story wasn’t terrorism or the Famine or Enniskillen or Bloody Sunday. It was August 1997 now, there was a new British prime minister, and a new IRA cease-fire brewing that extended even unto football hooligans. Aye, we could see that out here with our fresh perspective. Here in Tenerife under the black sky of Creation, where Columbus set out to enslave half the world, where Darwin came on the Beagle, where Nelson lost his arm, and where they still made the same dark Canary drunk by Fal-staff and Sir Toby Belch. Where we were all away from gloomy Albion and we could accept a new vision of a new Earth with sunshine and cheap food and Swedish girls and where we could see the folly of doing evil unto one’s brother. The drunken leaders deciding that harmony would reign forever between kinfolk and that the riot between the Brits and Paddies was over; and from now on we would concentrate on the real enemies: German tourists and the Spanish police.

So began the second phase.

This time, though, I wanted no part of it, especially when I saw the big NATO war helicopters landing beyond the cliffs and out of them pouring scores of paramilitary cops from Madrid-tough bastards who came with machine pistols and gas and billy clubs that they used up in the Basque country against the ETA guerrillas. Me and the kid, an eejit called Goosey, slipped away from the drunken insurgents under the cover of darkness. We negotiated our way through the abandoned holiday villas and the half-built outlying hotels and the pink-shaded small pensions where a few British expats hid in the dark, having retired to Tenerife to escape the bad weather and (ironically) the growing yob culture of England.

Goosey, it turned out, was a bit of a mental case from some East London shitehole who wanted us to do a Clockwork Orange-style burglary on some of the pensions, nicking things and hurting people and generally raising a bit of hell, but I would have none of it. They might have shooters, I told Goosey, and Goosey thought this was entirely plausible and got discouraged from the idea.

Instead up we went into the lava fields and through the mangrove and the palm trees until we’d climbed a thousand feet above the town. We slept in a barn among guano and baked hay and the sleep was the best since the riots had begun two days ago when three Millwall supporters had attacked some guy from Dublin and the peelers had allegedly beaten the near life out of them down at the cop shop. It had grown like a tropical storm, stores being looted and cars set ablaze and the climax came when the local jail had been stormed and the Millwall boys and a team of time-share crooks were let out and one person got himself shot in the shoulder by a peeler.