Ken Bruen - Dublin Noir

“You know that song about Jeffers? It’s a celebration. See, Jeffers was a diamond trader, and he was English.”

She couldn’t get the phone working again, even after she’d disentangled it from his body. She took her cell phone and dialed. When Lambert picked up, she said, “Someone came after me. I’ll need removals.”

“Someone from the north?”

“No, he claimed to be one of us.”

“Name?”

“Patrick Jeffers. Passport backs that up.” She looked at the passport she’d retrieved from his jacket. He certainly had the right look.

“Jeffers? There has to be a mistake. Let me just check something.” She could hear Lambert tapping away on his computer keyboard. He was as much an old-timer as she was and always hit the keys like they belonged on a manual typewriter. “Liz, Patrick Jeffers is on his first assignment, but he’s in Damascus; he’s a Middle East specialist.”

She looked at the throttled body, slumped in the chair like a drunk, and now that she thought of it, he hadn’t seemed to recognize the name of Robinson Jeffers, and surely he would have, as surely as she knew who Robbie Burns was.

“Well, I hope he’s doing better than the Jeffers in front of me now.”

Lambert laughed. She liked Lambert; he had a good sense of humor. People didn’t need to look much in this game, but a sense of humor was an absolute must.

He took all his girlfriends to Ireland, as it turned out. “All” being defined as the four he had dated since Moira, the inevitably named Moira, with the dark hair and the blue eyes put in with a dirty finger. (This is how he insisted on describing her. She would never have used such a hackneyed phrase in general and certainly not for Moira, whose photographic likeness, of which Barry happened to have many, showed a dark-haired, pale-eyed girl with hunched shoulders and a pinched expression.)

When he spoke of Moira, his voice took on a lilting quality, which he clearly thought was Irish, but sounded to her like the kind of singsong voice used on television shows for very young children. She had dark HAIR and pale BLUE eyes put in with a DIRTY FINGER. Really, it was like listening to one of the Teletubbies wax nostalgic, if one could imagine Po (or La-La or Winky-Dink, or whatever the faggotty purple one was named) hunched over a pint of Guinness in a suitably picturesque Galway bar. It was in such a bar that Barry, without making eye contact, explained how he had conceived this trip to exorcise the ghost of Moira, only to find that it had brought her back in full force (again), and he was oh so sorry, but it was just not to be between them and he could not continue this charade for another day.

So, yes, the above-the triteness of his speech, its grating quality, his resemblance to a Guinness-besotted Teletubby- was what she told herself afterward, the forming scab over the hurt and humiliation of being dumped two weeks into a three-week tour of the Emerald Isle. (And, yes, guess who called it that.) After her first, instinctive outburst-“You asshole!”-she settled down and listened generously, without recriminations. It had not been love between them. He was rich and she was pretty, and she had assumed it would play out as all her relationships did, for most of them had been based on that age-old system of give-and-take, quid pro quo, parting gifts. Twelve to twenty months, two to three trips, several significant pieces of jewelry. Barry was pulling the plug prematurely, that was all, and Ireland barely counted as a vacation in her opinion. It had rained almost every day and the shopping was shit.

Still, she nodded and interjected at the proper moments, signaling the pretty waitress for another, then another, all for him. She nursed her half-pint well into the evening. At closing time, she slipped the waitress twenty euros, straight from Barry’s wallet, and the young woman obligingly helped to carry-drag Barry through the streets to the Great Southern. His eyes gleamed a bit as she and the waitress heaved him on the bed, not that he was anywhere near in shape for the award he was imagining.

(And just how did his mind work, she wondered in passing, how did a man who had just dumped a woman two weeks into a three-week trip persuade himself that the dumpee would then decide to honor him with a going-away threesome? True, she had been a bit wild when they first met.

That was how a girl got a man like Barry, with a few decadent acts that suggested endless possibilities. But once you had landed the man, you kept putting such things off, suggested that the blowjob in the cab would follow the trip to Tiffany’s, not vice versa, and pretty soon he was reduced to begging for the most ordinary favors.)

No, she and her new accomplice tucked Barry in properly and she tipped the waitress again, sending her into the night. Once the girl was gone, she searched his luggage and selected several T-shirts of which he was inordinately fond. These she ripped into strips, which she then used to bind his wrists and ankles to the four-poster bed. She debated with herself whether she needed to gag him-he might awaken, and start to struggle-and decided it was essential. She disconnected the phone, turned the television on so it would provide a nice steady hum in the background, then helped herself to his passport, American Express card, and all the cash he had. As Barry slept the rather noisy sleep of the dead-drunk, snorting and sawing and blubbering, she raided the minibar-wine, water, cashews. She was neither hungry nor thirsty, but the so-called honor bar was the one thing that Barry was cheap about. “It’s the principle,” he said, but his indignation had a secondhand feel to it, something passed down by a parent. Or, perhaps, a girlfriend. Moira, she suspected. Moira had a cheap look about her. She opened a chocolate bar, but rejected it. The chocolate here didn’t taste right.

They were e-ticketed to Dublin, but that was a simple matter. She used the room connection to go online-cost be damned-and rearranged both their travel plans. Barry was now booked home via Shannon, while she continued on to Dublin, where she had switched hotels, choosing the Merrion because it sounded expensive and she wanted Barry to pay. And pay and pay and pay. Call it severance. She wouldn’t have taken up with Barry if she hadn’t thought he was good for at least two years.

It had been Barry’s plan to send her home, to continue to Dublin without her, where he would succumb to a mounting frenzy of Moira-mourning. That’s what he had explained in the pub last night. And he still could, of course. But she thought there might be a kernel of shame somewhere inside the man, and once he dealt with the missing passport and the screwed-up airline reservations, he might have the good sense to continue home on the business-class ticket he had offered her. (“Yes, I brought you to Ireland only to break up with you, but I am sending you home business class.”) He was not unfair, not through and through. His primary objective was to be rid of her, as painlessly and guiltlessly as possible, and she had now made that possible. He wouldn’t call the police or press charges, or even think to put a stop on the credit card, which she was using only for the hotel and the flight back.

Really, she was very fair. Honorable, even.

“Mr. Gardner will be joining me later,” she told the clerk at the Merrion, pushing the card toward him, and it was accepted without question.

“And did you want breakfast included, Mrs. Gardner?”

“Yes.” She wanted everything included-breakfast and dinner and laundry and facials, if such a thing were available. She wanted to spend as much of Barry’s money as possible. She congratulated herself for her cleverness, using the American Express card, which had no limit. She could spend as much as she liked at the hotel, now that the number was on file.