Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

“Maybe another time,” she said and clinked her can of alcohol-free beer into mine. And maybe I would another time, but now I had to get out of town. It had been a staggeringly difficult twenty-four hours and what I needed more than anything was a place to gather my wits and lie low.

I knew no one in Dublin and I figured that all the old safe houses and chop joints I used to hang out in were probably gone. But seeing the Kerry girl dressed like that had given me an idea.

Back in my day, running with the teen rackets in 1990 Belfast, Chopper Clonfert used to take us lads to a whorehouse near the Four Courts on one of the north quays of the Liffey. It primarily catered to lawyers and civil servants but Chopper worked big time for the rackets and he was the Belfast rep. So the girls, without too much feeling of resentment, would let us have a freebie. If it was still there (and this was nearly fifteen years ago), it might be a good place to bolt to for a while. I couldn’t use Chopper’s name to get in (Chopper had long since turned legit) but I could just pose as an ordinary client. With my long coat, flat cap, and haggard demeanor, I did look a bit like a crappy Dublin family-services lawyer or something.

Aye, the beginnings of a plan.

Go there, get my bearings, clean up. Maybe see to this wound. Anyway, I needed to be gone from the madding crowd and it was probably not a good idea to walk around too much longer in a blood-stained T-shirt.

Also I wanted to call Bridget from a quiet spot. I needed to know what the score was. Hopefully, her tone of voice would tell me. Had the cabbie been hers? Had he been anybody’s? Had I hallucinated or misremembered him saying my name? Bridget wouldn’t have all the answers but she’d have some of them.

And with that solved, it would make the next step clearer. Had to get out of Dublin. But whether I had to get out of Ireland, too, was the big question.

The cops didn’t worry me; if the cabbie lived he wouldn’t talk and if he died there’d be another gangland murder along tomorrow to occupy their limited attention span. In my eyes the Garda Síochána was only a notch or two above the Irish Army and, as an exmember of the British Army, I had nothing but contempt for that body. Any squaddie worth his salt would join the Irish Guards in London; any peeler up to scuds would get into one of the big metropolitan police forces across the water. Irish coppers and soldiers were second-rate.

But complacency is also one of the byways on the road to ruin. I would have to put my contempt on the back burner and play it bloody safe.

“Are you a lecturer?” the girl finally plucked up the courage to ask.

“No, no, not really,” I told her.

“Are you a mature student?”

“Yeah, you could say that, I’m always learning,” I replied.

“Well, I think that’s great, it’s wonderful to go back to university at your age, education is very important.”

“Shit, how old do you think I am?”

“Forty?” she suggested.

Well, Jesus, let’s see how you look after a knife fight, love.

“Ach, I’m barely in my thirties,” I said. “Just been partying all night, that’s all.”

“What are you studying?” she asked, but before I could make something up, we’d arrived at the O’Connell Street Bridge and a scene of complete bedlam. This parade was clearly not part of the official Bloomsday festivities and the cops were totally unprepared. Traffic was still trying to come off the quays and up the street and the parade wanted to head north onto O’Connell Street.

Buses, cars, trucks, bicyclists, and pedestrians had formed an ugly confused mess right in the center of the city. Some of the students were getting restless. They began shouting at the peels and chanting. Baffled tourists were getting separated from their tour groups, taxi drivers were yelling, the cops were flailing about uselessly waiting for instruction. It was all fine by me. The more disorder the better.

“Honey, I must be off,” I told the girl.

She held my sleeve.

“Are you not going on to Jury’s?”

“I can’t, sorry,” I said. “I have to go, really, it’s like I said, I’m on the run from Johnny law.”

She reached into her tart handbag looking for something. She tipped it upside down and out dropped a big hippy Volkswagen key chain. I picked it up and gave it to her. By this time she had found what she was searching for-a piece of card with a Dublin telephone number on it.

“It’s my cell. Give me a call if you’re not doing anything later,” she said.

“I will, if I don’t get lifted,” I said.

“Riorden,” she said and offered me her hand.

“Brian,” I said and slipped away from her and the rest of the students. I dipped under the boom mike of a BBC camera crew, escaped a video unit from RTE television, and just about avoided being knocked into a bus by one of the old geezers from 60 Minutes.

I walked west and at a green phone booth took a look back for tails.

Nobody after me at all. I’d lost the cops and they’d lost me. Excellent.

Lost them. Now part two of the plan. The Four Courts. Where the hell were they?

Somewhere on the water.

I stopped a man in jeans and a Joyce T-shirt.

“Excuse me, you don’t happen to know whereabouts the Four Courts are? I know it’s around here somewhere, but I can’t quite remember.”

“Oh, my goodness. I am frightfully sorry, but I have no idea,” he said with an English accent.

The next woman:

“Weiss nicht. I live here, but I do not know. Four Courts? I haff a map of ze whole city in-”

And it took me six more people until I found a Dubliner. You wouldn’t have seen that in the old days either. People immigrating to Dublin.

The native, though, told me it was piss easy, just follow the river and I couldn’t miss it.

I followed the river and didn’t miss it.

The big domed gray legal building right on the water. Barristers, judges, solicitors, clients all milling about the front.

“This is the Four Courts, isn’t it?” I asked a solicitor having a smoke.

“’Tis indeed,” he said. “Do you need a lawyer?”

“Nah, but could I bum a cigarette?”

He lit me a ciggy and I sat down on the steps. Everything was hurting. The fag helped a bit.

I could think.

Now that I’d found the Four Courts, I had to search my memory to locate where the brothel had been. It was certainly on this side of the water. And it was pretty close by because I remember Bobby Fullerton seeing his brief at the Chinese restaurant, which was right next to the brothel.

Hmmm.

It seemed simple enough. And although I’m not a negative individual, I had to admit that the chances of all those things still being there after all this time seemed unlikely.

I got up, began walking, turned left, followed the quay, and my heart sank. It became immediately apparent that everything I remembered about these streets had utterly changed. Where there had been seedy pawnshops, tobacconists, and greasy diners, now there were Internet cafés, Gap stores, and of course Starbucks, where they make you bloody queue twice. Never get away with that in Belfast, I hoped.

I walked down a side street that looked familiar, went halfway along it, stopped, came back to the quay. Tried another left, a second left, a third, tried a right, but now I was utterly baffled and well lost in the alleys and back streets. All of them gentrified, painted, scrubbed, new windows, window treatments. The Dubs had even started putting up blue plaques like you saw in London. “Handel slept here,” “Wilde lived here,” that kind of malarkey. And no ragamuffin children or beggars. I suppose now if you wanted to know what the Dublin alleys looked like when this was my stamping ground you’d have to go to a seedy hutong in Beijing or a back street in Bombay.