Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

His wife held her husband’s hand and kept her counsel, smiling about herself vaguely. She was dressed for a skiing trip on a beach. Fur-lined boots on her muscular brown legs, denim shorts, a sheepskin gilet over a sun top. Hickey sized her up with interest. She had a gleaming mane of chestnut hair and a hard little nut of a face beneath it.

If the Viking noticed Hickey and me sitting at the bistro table when he came through the gates, he didn’t betray it. We watched him regally making his rounds, his brown queen on his arm. He surveyed the Lambay building with a proprietorial tilt of the head before cocking a hind leg to squirt his scent on it. Tsss . Hickey was itching to belt over and counter-spray — I could feel him chafing beside me.

‘You know he has a conviction for beating up his former partner, don’t you?’ he muttered.

‘Yes.’

‘Girlfriend partner, not business partner. He beat up a woman.’

‘Yes, I heard.’

Even I knew that. We all knew that. Everyone on the hill knew that the Viking had been handed down a suspended sentence for breaking a former girlfriend’s jaw. Somehow, this hadn’t impacted on his social standing.

He came upon us at the bistro table when his tour was complete. ‘I like what you’ve done here,’ he told Hickey. ‘I like the look you’ve achieved, yeah?’ His great bullish head was blocking out my sun. He was a handsome man, in a coarse sort of way.

‘Phase One sold out in forty-five minutes,’ Hickey stated.

The Viking tossed his hair. ‘Sweet. A lot of new customers for my bar.’

Hickey tossed his hair back. ‘They’ll be at my bar.’ He nodded at the trunk of the hotel. ‘Have you seen me hotel? It’s going to be eleven storeys high.’

‘Yeah, your hotel.’ The Viking stroked his smig. ‘I wouldn’t mind a word in your ear about that. I have, uh… a proposition. You must come see my operation some evening. You know, get the tour.’ He made eye contact with me to indicate that the invitation extended to us both. ‘Why don’t I give you a call?’

‘Yeah, why don’t you?’

‘Excellent.’ The Viking touched his temple in salute before rounding up his feral children and sauntering off. I won’t repeat what Hickey called him when his back was turned. I don’t approve of that kind of language.

*

Three days later, we were summoned.

‘Why are you after wearing a suit?’ Hickey berated me as we made our way to the Viking’s bar, ‘did you have to go and wear a bloody suit?’ He had never objected to my suits before. I always wear a suit, and have done ever since giving up the drink. Even on weekends. It is my Sober uniform. Every morning, I must get up and put it on.

The Viking was parading himself outside his bar on his phone in his linen and we hated him. His bar was a block of jade glass like Hickey’s hotel, like McGee’s bank, like the Lambay building, like everything. He lowered the phone. ‘Guys, I’ll be with you in a tick. Have Svetlana bring you a drink.’

He pointed to a blonde who was standing sentry inside the door. Svetlana stepped forward and held it open to welcome us into the Viking’s emporium. I noted Hickey noting this — the Viking’s hand command; the beautiful blonde leaping to his bidding. She was dressed in a fitted white shirt, black tie and black trousers. A long black apron was knotted around her waist. Hickey stared at her trim backside as she led us upstairs to the VIP area. He would have liked to have run a woman like that — five foot ten and slender as a runway model, her hair pinned up in a French twist. He would have liked instructing a woman like that to serve his friends.

The VIP area was empty. Nobody was Very Important that night. Svetlana guided us to a raised platform and took our drinks order. We sat looking out the window at the Viking, still strutting up and down his patch of Harbour Road. Tsss : he cocked his hind leg to mark the lamppost. ‘I could burst that X,’ Hickey remarked quietly, resorting to that word again that I find so objectionable. I nodded my agreement all the same.

He finally appeared in the VIP den. ‘Gentlemen, did Svetlana take care of you?’ It was not a hospitable enquiry but a power display: there would be consequences for Svetlana if she did not take care of his friends. ‘She did, thank you,’ I told him.

Svetlana arrived with a tray and set down our drinks. A sparkling water for me, a Carlsberg for the Viking and a double brandy for Hickey. It was the most expensive drink he could think of. He should have asked for my advice. Svetlana’s nails were an inch long. Her palms were stained fake-tan orange, her lifelines and heart lines a tracery of tobacco brown. Your path in life will be a dirty one, a palmist would have told her. You will have a filthy, dirty little path.

‘Jaysus,’ said Hickey as he watched her arse depart, the belt of her apron tied in a smart bow at the small of her back. He swirled the contents of his brandy balloon and knocked back a mouthful: Ahhhhh . ‘This immigration business. It’s not all bad news.’

‘Svetlana? Yes. The Russian girls are beautiful. Doesn’t translate into the men though.’

‘No,’ Hickey agreed. ‘Now that you say it. I hadn’t looked at it that way.’

They nodded thoughtfully, two men of the world. ‘The Russian men don’t find Irish women attractive,’ the Viking added, ‘but the Russian women find Irish men extremely attractive. Did you know that?’

‘Get away,’ said Hickey. ‘You’re bullshitting me.’

‘I am not. They find rich Irish men practically irresistible, in fact. They’re all Roman hands and Russian fingers when you get them in a corner. Don’t tell me you haven’t tried one yet.’

I had never seen Hickey embarrassed before. He sniggered into his cognac glass. I glanced back at the bar to see what Svetlana was making of this. The girl stared fixedly out at the harbour lights.

The Viking signalled for another round. Svetlana collected the old drinks and replaced them with fresh ones. I looked at her tray as she removed it. The Viking’s old pint was two-thirds intact. Hickey’s brandy glass was empty.

The Viking nodded at me. ‘I heard this fella was dead,’ he said to Hickey.

‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence,’ Hickey told him.

I stared at them as they exploded into laughter, failing to understand the joke. ‘I am dead,’ I said to shut them up, but it only made them laugh harder. The Viking raised his hand for attention when Hickey had emptied his glass. Svetlana approached, exchanged Hickey’s empty glass for another double, and a fresh pint for the Viking’s partially consumed one. A third sparkling water was set in front of me.

Hickey didn’t notice that his new best friend was sending back barely touched pints. All he noticed was my sparkling water. ‘Are ya too good to drink with me?’ he wanted to know. ‘Is that it? Is that the problem?’

I recognised the space he was in. No drinker trusts a sober man. ‘We’ve been over this,’ I told him quietly.

The Viking looked from Hickey to me for an explanation. None was forthcoming. It was a private matter. Then my phone rang. Tocka tocka . Saved by the bell. I excused myself and left the table.

Hickey was red in the face by the time I returned, maybe as much as half an hour later. The call to M. Deauville had dragged out. I had raised objection after objection. ‘Hickey and I…’ I tried to explain to him, ‘we have a past. He used to be my—’ but M. Deauville felt that it was a necessary step in my recovery that I return to the VIP den immediately to face down my fears, so in the end I complied, having first admitted to him that I was powerless over alcohol and then accepted the things that I could not change, i.e. everything.