Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

We talked for a couple of minutes and Dan stood up. One of the goons was coming back with a bunch of forms.

“Here come those faxes. Let me get you dinner at the executive club. Airline food is getting worse and worse,” Dan said “Aer Lingus never hit the culinary high notes to start with,” I said. Dan smiled and put his arm around me and we left for what I’m sure Dan thought was something of a last supper.

The flight was full and overbooked. Aer Lingus offered me two first-class tickets and a thousand dollars to fly tomorrow. But I wanted to go now.

There was a festive air to the check-in crowd and it made me wonder if there was some holiday or event taking place that I didn’t know about. A wealthy-looking, trim, educated crowd, so it wasn’t some drinking binge or the hurling final. It wasn’t the Olympics, but I did know that the Tour de France sometimes went out of country. Perhaps that was it. The Tour de France was having an Irish leg this year.

I got a window seat and they brought me champagne and gave me a copy of Ulysses, which was strange.

“Don’t you do movies anymore, love?” I asked the stewardess.

“Sorry?”

“Like I know Aer Lingus is a bit backward but most of the other airlines have films, and computer games and stuff like that. Giving someone a brick-size book for a six-hour flight is pretty lame,” I said.

“No, that’s just a complimentary copy, we have a dozen films for you to watch, sir,” she said, raised her eyebrows, and walked off to deal with a less obtuse passenger.

The woman next to me had heard the conversation. She obviously had enough dough to be flying first but she looked like a retired English teacher from central casting. Aran sweater, granny glasses, sensible shoes. I supposed she was about sixty.

“I take it, young man, that you’re not flying to Dublin for the festivities,” she said in a patrician accent.

“No, I’m just going home. What festivities?”

“You don’t know what day it is tomorrow?”

“Aye, it’s Wednesday.”

“No, no, no, it’s Bloomsday. June 16, 2004. It’s the hundredth Bloomsday,” she said, doing little to disguise her contempt for my ignorance.

“Flower festival, is it?” I asked.

“What?”

“Bloomsday is some sort of flower festival?”

“Good God, no, not that kind of bloom. Leopold Bloom. You haven’t read Ulysses then?” she asked, holding up her complimentary copy.

“How could I? Only just got it.”

“Previously,” she said with a touch of exasperation.

“No, I haven’t. I heard it was a dirty book,” I said and took a swig of my champagne. The woman’s thin lips thinned even more.

“It is most certainly not. It is the greatest work of literature of the last or perhaps of any other century.”

“Aye, that’s what people say about Moby Dick, too. I wouldn’t read that either, it must be filthy with that title,” I said and smiled at a sudden remembrance of a time, years ago, when I dragged an old pal of mine called Scotchy to visit Melville’s grave in the Bronx. A used-car dealer we knew had refused to pay the increased protection money and we were there in the dead of night breaking the windows and slashing the tires of every third vehicle on his lot. Woodlawn Cemetery was just next door and of course Scotch and I had both read Billy Budd for school. Scotchy cracked up when he saw that the author of Moby Dick had pussy willows growing on his grave.

And of course like every other Mick in the world, I’d tried to read Ulysses a couple of times.

“And tomorrow is when the book was published, is it?” I asked for the entertainment value.

“Tomorrow, June 16, is when Leopold Bloom spent the day walking around Dublin in the book.”

“Leopold Bloom. Something to do with Mel Brooks, right? Hope there’s going to be singing.”

The woman shook her head impatiently.

“It’s really when Joyce met Nora Barnacle. There will be a big parade and lots of festivities,” the woman said, and bored with my ignorance, turned away.

I swallowed a gag about Nora Barnacle and the Little Mermaid and examined the book. Joyce looked chic in eye patch and bow tie. I put it in the seat pocket in front of me. Not really my cup of tea and I only hoped that the festivities wouldn’t impede a successful navigation through Dublin to Connolly Station and the train to Belfast. Still, if this was as big a deal as the old lady was saying, the traffic would be coming south, not north, and I’d have no bother getting to my home city.

And, who knew, maybe Bridget would be waiting there with open arms. Maybe I’d ask around my old haunts and we’d find darling Siobhan together. Maybe all would be forgiven and tonight I could sleep easily for the first time in a dozen years.

I smiled. Sure. Shut-eye, though, was going to be essential whatever happened. I swallowed an Ambien, finished another glass of champagne, turned off the light, and closed the window shade.

The pill took about fifteen minutes to kick in.

The sky darkened, the stars came out, the 777 raced east to greet the dawn.

I pulled the blanket around me and drifted into a chemical sleep.

The Atlantic, heaving silent and black five miles below us; and I dreamed of it, of words and things, of whale boats, barnacles, eye-patched Irish men, Leopold Bloom in and out of Dublin pubs, Star-buck and Scotchy and Siobhan, all of them missing, and Ishmael’s rescuer, the devious cruising Rachel, seeking out her lost children, but only finding another orphan.

The fucking coca leaves. Perfectly legal in Peru, useful for calming nausea and helping you get through the night shift. Really quite benign. You stick a couple in your cheek, they slowly dissolve, and you’re set. Almost impossible to refine cocaine from the leaves in their dried form and completely impossible with the tiny amount I had left in my backpack. But even so, most western governments had declared them illegal controlled substances.

The dog stopped barking.

“I’d loike ye ta come wit me, sur,” the customs agent said. I hadn’t heard that hardcore North Dublin accent in a long time and I could barely understand the man. The words were there but it was like hearing Anglo-Saxon or being aurally dyslexic. It took me a while to process what he’d said.

“Of course,” I said after a long pause.

I accompanied him into an antechamber.

“Look, I know why the dog is going crazy, I’ve got these coca leaves in my pack, the dog probably thinks they’re cocaine.”

“Iz zat so, sur?”

“Aye it is.”

“Yaar fra America?”

“No, originally I’m from Belfast. I work in America now. Well, Peru. It’s complicated… Until yesterday I was the head of security at the Miraflores Hilton in Lima. We used to take the leaves for the night shift.”

The customs agent found the bag of coca leaves and sniffed them. He was an older gentleman, fifties or sixties, a shock of white hair, dead capillary nose, ruddy cheeks, chubby body squeezed into a faded white shirt. The sort of desperate character who would like nothing more than to fuck someone over at four in the morning. It looked bad. If the authorities were feeling ungenerous I knew that this could be seen as an attempt to smuggle coke into Ireland. I could be looking at jail time.

“What ya doin in Oirland?”

“I’ve come to help an old girlfriend of mine. Her daughter has gone missing and she’s really cracking up and I’ve come to support her and maybe help find the girl.”

“What’s hur neem?”

“Bridget Callaghan.”