Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

Murk. A stink. A creaky set of wooden stairs.

“Down these steps?” I ask.

“Aye, watch you don’t break your neck,” he says without looking up.

Carefully I walk down the steep staircase.

A lot of noise coming from behind a metal door. I push on it, go in.

A wall of cigarette smoke. Screaming, shouting, yelping. The aroma of defecation, blood, spilled beer, and sweat. A gloomy room with an arc light swaying from a concrete beam. From the noise, the fight must have already begun. A ring of about thirty men. I walk closer. A barrier of sandbags, sawdust on the floor, and two pit bull terriers tearing the hell out of each other. A brown one and a black one. Both dogs are caked with gore, the brown one’s ear has been ripped off, the other’s eyes are filled with blood. They’re tired and snapping at each other with desperate weary lunges. But it’s clear that no one is going to stop it. This is a fight to the death. I watch for a moment and then head farther into the crowd. Don’t want to stand out. Maybe all these men know one another.

A bookie comes over to me. Skinny character in a suit, tie, and chestnut wig. You can tell he’s a bookie even without the chits he’s carrying, because he has that wiry bookie energy and a hungry look.

“Wager?” he asks.

“It’s all over by the looks of it,” I say.

He gazes back at the fight.

“Give you two to one on Danielle,” he says.

“Which one is Danielle?”

“The bay,” he says.

There’s no point on getting on the wrong side of him, and bookies love marks more than anything in the world. I give him a tenner and he gives me a paper chit.

“Listen, it’s my first time here. Supposed to meet a mate of mine, Gusty McKeown, you know Gusty? Bit of a joker. Where-abouts is he?”

“Gusty’s right over there,” he says, pointing to a tall, spiderlike man with a black bowl haircut and hollow eyes.

Just then the black dog falls on the brown one, sinks its teeth into its throat, and begins biting through its windpipe. It’s something I’ve seen lions attempt on TV but never witnessed a dog do. It’s awful. The brown dog’s howls are silenced and it slowly suffocates.

“You can’t win them all, sorry,” the bookie says.

“Should have offered me ten to one,” I tell him, to keep him sweet.

He smiles.

I edge around the ring of perspiring, heaving low-lifes and find Gusty yelling as the brown dog expires in a blood-curdling spasm. When the cheering dies, a man comes in with a snow shovel and scoops up the dead dog. Another man muzzles the winner and leads it off. A third man throws more sawdust on the floor. The crowd is buzzing with cathartic release and expectation about the next bout on the card. Mixed crowd of Prod and Catholic paramilitaries together- you can tell because of the tattoos. Maybe underground dog fighting is one of those cross-community schemes everyone is always trying to encourage.

The bookie, who seems also to be master of ceremonies, walks into the center of the ring and begins a spiel about the next two unfortunates.

“Gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed our pedigree tussle. Quite a performance. Now it’s a mongrel battle. Sparky is a wee fighter from Doagh, this is his first time in a formal competition, but let me tell you, I have seen this dog go on mutts twice his size…”

“Gusty… Gusty,” I whisper in the big lad’s ear.

He turns and looks at me.

“Who the fuck are-”

I get real close, lift his T-shirt, and put the snub of the.38 against his belly fat. I grin at him for show and pat him on the back like we’re old mates. But I’m angry now. Those kids outside, all this, what’s happening to Siobhan, it’s finally getting to me.

“Gusty, listen to me, me old china plate, this is a fucking.38-caliber revolver and I’m going to blow your guts apart if you don’t tell me what happened to Siobhan Callaghan,” I say quietly.

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

I push the revolver tight into his stomach so hard that it’s bound to be hurting.

“Gusty, I’m serious here,” I say.

The arc light swaying on the crossbeam swings above our heads and the bookie ringmaster catches my eye. The bottom halves of our bodies are blocked from him by the people in front, so he can’t see the gun, but Gusty has turned several degrees paler and it doesn’t look so good.

“Another wager, stranger?” he shouts over. A few men turn to give me the once-over. Have to reply fast.

“Aye, twenty quid on that thing on your head against any dogs you got back there,” I shout back and keep the revolver tight on Gusty’s belly button so he won’t try anything heroic. The crowd hoots with laughter and the bookie gives me a black look and goes back to his spiel.

I pull Gusty’s hand behind his back and twist it hard. Gusty winces. The bookie gives me another suspicious glance. That son of a bitch doesn’t like the look of me one bit, but he’s immediately caught up in a dozen wagers; while he writes them down, two unfortunate terrier mixes are led out on ropes.

“Who took Siobhan, Gusty? Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll kill you right now, Gusty. I don’t give a shit what happens to you or me; tell me where Siobhan is and you’ll live, don’t tell me and I swear to God I’ll fucking plug you in two seconds,” I say, looking him square in his dilating pupils-attempting in that look to convey what a badass motherfucker I am, how little Gusty’s life means to me, and how easy it would be to let him die.

Gusty gets some of it but not enough. He’s still more afeared of them than he is of me.

“Gusty, I know you murdered Barry on the Ginger Bap. I know you’re working for the kidnappers. Tell me where she is,” I say.

The dogs begin ripping each other to shreds.

The room. The sweat. The stink. The bookie yelling. Me pushing. Gusty trembling.

And then just like that, a tidal wave of exhaustion ripples through me. It’s hard to keep this up. Hard to go at it hour after hour, day after day. Tired of all of it. This sordid wee place. People like Gusty. This whole town, in fact. Belfast with its surface changes. But these generations of old blue-white fat men have to die first for real change. Gusty’d be a good start.

“Ok, mate, you’re done, I’ve had it,” I say and make the mental decision to kill him just to see what happens. I squeeze the trigger.

Luckily, in a piece of telepathy or empathy, he sees exactly what I’m thinking and starts begging for his life.

“Please don’t. I don’t know where you get your fucking information, but really I don’t know a thing about that wee missing girl,” he says rapidly.

Make the present terror more incipient with a countdown, I tell myself.

“Ok, Gusty, it’s an old saw, but I’ll give you five seconds and then I’m going to shoot you in the kidney. One-”

Gusty’s no Braveheart. No one who goes to a dogfight is a bloody Braveheart.

“Ok, ok, fucking Jesus. Don’t shoot me, I’ll tell you everything. Don’t shoot me for fucksake, my wife just had a bairn.”

“I don’t give a damn if she gave birth to the bloody Messiah, now talk.”

“Ok, ok, ok, I’ll tell you everything I know, which isn’t fucking much,” he says.

To show that there’s a bit of quid pro quo in the transaction, I remove the gun from his gut but I keep my hand as close to his belly as if it were J.Lo’s arse.

Time must have passed because two more dogs begin ripping each other to shreds and it occurs to me that we seem a wee bit suspicious standing here stock-still, whispering.

“Go on, my son,” I yell when one of the dogs bites the other on the bridge of the skull.