Ken Bruen - Dublin Noir

Slapped the lock across the cubicle door and let Barry’s head drop against the toilet bowl. Fumbled for my Stanley and pulled the cunt’s drawers down. Wiped my nose with the back of my hand and sniffed hard, slumped down onto the floor with him. Got to work. Had to keep wiping my face because I couldn’t see through the water.

Outside I heard people singing country songs. Cunts didn’t cry at the funeral, but stick on Patsy Cline and they greeted like bairns.

“Crazy.” Of all the fuckin’ things to hear.

I leaned back against the toilet, mopped my face with my sleeve. The cunt had bled all over the shop, the tiles sticky. And there was me, sitting right in the middle of it, man. Britches all fuckin’ bloody and that, my shirt a mess. It stank of Barry’s last pish and blood and shite. I let my head fall back and I stared at the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, red dots in front of my eyes.

Barry Phelan didn’t kill Big Yin; God did. And it didn’t matter which Barry Phelan did the London Road blag, didn’t matter that Big Yin wouldn’t give a fuck if I had the cunt’s balls or not.

I promised him, ken? You can’t go back on a promise to a dying man. Especially when you was all the poor bastard had.

And aye, there was no way I was getting out of here alive. If I’d had that gun I put Lee to the lino with, I’d have had a fighting chance. But right then, my arse wet through with Barry Phelan’s blood, I didn’t have the strength in me to do fuckall but sit there and listen to Patsy fuckin’ Cline and Tammy fuckin’ Wynette, tears rolling down my cheeks.

Took they cunts an hour to realize Barry was a no-show. Took another fifteen or so to check the bogs. And daft fuckin’ micks, took them a bucketload of mouth and one hard kick to bust down the door.

I heard a lad puke. Heard the hammer of a revolver thumbed back and oaths yelled, proper nasty Irish shite.

It’s not every day a lad admits he died with another man’s balls in his hand. But what else was I going to do, eh?

I was a Boyo to the end.

This was back in ’94, in the middle of a planned three-month stay in Prague. I thought that by soaking up a little Bohemia and wading through Joyce’s Ulysses, I’d become a writer. But that was a joke, largely because I spent each night drinking with Toman, a six-foot shaved-bald Czech who passed his days in the gym. He liked buying drinks for a writer, and I liked having drinks bought for me.

“You come to Dublin on this weekend.”

“I don’t know. I’ve got to work.”

“A writer’s work,” he said, puffing out his chest like a Cossack, “is to living. Only one night. Weekend. You come.”

“I’m broke, Toman.”

He slapped my back. “We stay with Toman’s friend, Sean. The plane-Toman will pay.”

“You have a friend in Dublin?”

“Toman, he has friend all over world!”

He liked referring to himself in the third person. Toman must to pee, or Toman must get to work. I never knew what his work was, but he had enough money to keep me in drinks, which was all that mattered.

We landed at Dublin International on January 22, a Saturday, then took a taxi to a posh southern neighborhood called Ballsbridge-a name that got a giggle out of me-where the bay winds blew down a narrow street of matching brick Victorian houses. It was very fucking cold. The door Toman knocked on was opened by a skinny Irishman with a beard that made me think of the drunks lingering in the corners of pubs in Ulysses -everything I knew about Dublin came from that book.

“Shite. Toman.”

“Toman and his American writer friend are here for until tomorrow. You have a floor?”

I was embarrassed, because we clearly weren’t expected. All I could do was introduce myself as Sean reluctantly led us inside.

“How is our Linda?” asked Toman.

“Gave her the boot. You know.” Sean took a green bottle of Becherovka, the Czech national liquor, from a cabinet. It was the last thing I expected to drink in Dublin. He handed me a shot. “Whaddaya write?”

“Trying to write like Joyce.”

He raised an eyebrow, his expression not unlike scorn.

So I said, “How do you know Toman?”

Sean lipped his glass, then poured it down and wiped his mouth. “Real estate investments. In Prague. Toman, he helps me out. He’s the go-between.”

“Toman helps,” said Toman, “so my good friend Sean can buy all of Prague for his friends.”

“What friends?” I asked.

But the Irishman didn’t hear me. “A pint, lads?”

A pint, it turned out, meant ten pints in three pubs-the Paddy Cullens hidden in the embassy area; Crowes a few doors down; and by 11:00 I was dizzy in Bellamy’s, where at this hour all the surfaces were sticky and rugby boys were singing to each other and businessmen at the bar swapped jokes over Guinness. Toman and Sean drained their Harps and roared over jokes about Linda-who’d-gotten-the-boot ( “Och, ochón,” said Sean, “she had an ass onner!”) and others whose names I couldn’t keep track of. They liked my Zagreb drinking stories from five years before, where after finishing most of a bottle, we’d pour vodka on the dorm floor and set it alight or spark a match at the mouth of a bottle and watch it shoot, rocket-like, down the corridor.

Toman preferred the ones about running into Zagreb police at 3 a.m. This was still during the Communist times, but my Croat friends would drunkenly yell at the militiamen, calling them idiots and just daring them to arrest us. “I don’t know why we didn’t end up behind bars.”

“Because they know it is true,” said Toman. “Police, they are idiots.”

“The Gardaí wouldn’t arrest you,” said Sean, wiping Harp from his wet beard. “They’d bust your head, strip ya starkers, and toss ya in the Liffey, ne’er to be heard from again.” He shook his head. “I’m pissed.”

We watched him get up and stumble to the toilet.

Toman leaned close with the atrocious breath that would often portend a shift into Czech seriousness. “Olen, you want to be writer?”

I was drunk enough to answer with soulfulness. I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Toman, my friend, a writer is the only thing I want to be.”

“True?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then come,” he said as he stood up.

On his feet Toman was steady, but I wasn’t. “Where we going?”

“Toman helps you become writer.”

“Dandy,” I muttered.

He led me to the bathroom, and through the alcohol I became hazily worried, but for the wrong reason.

“Not all writers are queer, Toman.”

He didn’t answer as he pushed through the door. It was empty save for Sean, who was trying to focus his wobbly stream into a urinal. He noticed us. “Aye, I’m óltach.”

That was another thing I didn’t understand. Later I learned it meant drunk in Gaelic.

Toman looked back at me and whispered, “Watch, writer.” Then he grabbed Sean from behind, a thick arm over his trachea muting his yelps. He dragged the Irishman back into a stall. A spastic fountain of urine shot from him, but the only sounds were his kicking heels dragging across the tiles, then the crack of bone inside the stall.

It was very fast, and by the time Toman had placed Sean on the toilet, shut the door, and started using paper towels to wipe the wet spots on his pants, I was still unsure what had just happened.

My body figured it out before my head did, and I threw myself into the next stall and regurgitated my ten pints.

“You was watching?” I heard him say behind me. “You watch, writer?”

I don’t know exactly how, but soon we were out in the biting cold, Toman helping me walk and explaining that Sean’s clients were from Belfast, laundering IRA proceeds by buying up most of Prague’s old town.