Dark Times in the City (18 page)

He reached down to the floor of the car and picked up the big black automatic. In his hand it was massive and it weighed nothing. Smooth, hard.

Yes
.

He was out of the car and walking, Zippo ten paces behind, watching his back.

Left the car unlocked.

Minute from now, don’t want to be fumbling with keys
.

That’d be fun – come back, car’s gone
.

He made a small hooting noise.

The sweat on his forehead was icy cold.

He could feel a single drop of warm sweat running down his back.

Everything clear, everything sharp
.

Clear sky.

Stephen could see the craters on the moon.

Everything around him.

Sharp, every edge.

Smooth, every surface.

Nothing sliding now, nothing falling inside his head.

His pace regular, in time with the beat he could feel in every part of his body.

Me and him
.

It was like there was no one else in the world, just Stephen and his target.

Almost there
.

Nothing else on the Earth. No buildings, no mountains, no seas, no other people. Nothing. Not even Zippo. Just a big, smooth ball turning in space, Two little dots – Stephen and the loser he was about to kill, the distance between them closing down.

Him and me—

Clear as that, sharp as that. Two people on a big, smooth ball in space. One living, one dying.

The big gun was a feather in his hand.

Two in the chest, one in the head
.

This machine, this big fucker – you put two from that in an elephant’s chest and down it goes.

Then one in the head, for keeps.

Two in the chest, one in the head.

Mozambique Triple Tap
.

Closer, steady stride. Any second now, his victim would turn and see him coming.

Big boys’ rules
.

*

‘
Arogancki bestie
.’

The first time he’d heard the words was the afternoon all those years ago when his father came home early from work and announced that he’d been fired.

Novak slipped into his leather swivel chair, behind the oak desk in the back office of the Blue Parrot. Another hour before business got heavy. About the time he usually poured himself a coffee and came back here for a break. Stay away from caffeine, his doctor told him. Novak figured an evening without the respite of his ten-minute break and his mug of coffee would be far more damaging than anything the caffeine could do.

‘
Arogancki bestie
.’

That time, towards the end of the 1950s, Novak had been approaching his teens, his father had been in Ireland for a dozen years and only when he was angry would he lapse into Polish. There had been problems at the furniture store where he worked. One of the four dispatch workers had been let go and the other three would have to work extra hours without overtime. Bad times, few jobs, waves of emigrants leaving for England. Of the three remaining workers, only Novak’s father made a token protest about the buckshee overtime. Then he joined the others in doing as he was told.

Two weeks later, his boss called him in, told him to fuck off.

‘What have I done?’

The boss’s face was blank. No anger, no gloating. He was doing what he had the power to do. There was a price to extract for the momentary rebellion and now it was safe to use his strength.

‘I don’t have to explain myself to you. Get out.’

At home that afternoon Novak’s father spent an hour in the front garden, on his knees, using a shears to trim the grass, the repetitive labour helping the anger seep away. Sitting at the kitchen table, he poured Novak a glass of Taylor-Keith. ‘
Arogancki bestie
.’ His tone was mild. ‘That’s how I think of such people – arrogant beasts. The
strength of the beast and the arrogance of the man. People with position, people with guns, people with the power of the state behind them, people who wield power over others – in business, in war, in the home, wherever. They feel the strength of the beast, they taste the arrogance of the man, and the sickness takes them. All my life I’ve seen it, everywhere I’ve been.’

Novak’s father had been 22 and a merchant sailor, his ship docked at Liverpool, when the Germans invaded Poland from one side and the Russians went in from the other. He didn’t return home for over fifty years. After fighting with Sikorski’s army in France, he escaped to England and was reorganised into a Polish rifle division under Allied command. ‘Butchery on a grand scale, all sides, all the time. In those years, the
arogancki bestie
struggled to own the very world we stand on.’

Badly wounded, he sat out the last year of the war, then he married an Irish nurse and they came to Ireland. He didn’t visit Poland until 1995, two years before he died. Most of his immediate family were among the country’s five million casualties. There was a dispute about which side, the Germans or the Russians, exterminated which members of his family.

‘The Cardinal Sins you learned in school – lust and gluttony, greed – just human weakness. But the real sins, they come when you surrender to the power of the beast.’

Shortly after he took over his pub, Novak opened up one morning and two men in cheap suits came in and told him they were there to help. ‘Bad neighbourhood – lots of tough bastards.’ The taller one made little effort to hide his sneer. ‘The kind of people who’d set fire to a pub just to warm their hands on the flames, you know what I mean?’

He leaned across the counter, big smile on his face. ‘Know what I mean?’ he said again. His shoulders were broad, his hands big, and when he put his elbows on the counter and leaned towards Novak he casually coiled his fingers into fists.

‘How much?’ Novak said.

‘Two hundred a week,’ the smaller man said, and Novak hit the bigger one in the face with a beer glass. They both started running – Novak was slimmer then, fitter, and he caught the bigger one before he’d gone fifty yards. He went through his pockets and found a name and address on a doctor’s prescription.

‘Anything happens, I know where you live.’

Nothing happened. Fifteen years had passed and Novak wondered if he’d have the nerve now to fight back. These days, the arrogant beasts had guns, and they were usually high on something or other.

After his meeting with Frank Tucker, it seemed like Danny Callaghan had nothing to worry about from that quarter. But something was stirring and Callaghan had been drawn into it. The arrogant beasts that slaughtered Walter Bennett, whoever they were, were still roaming. Since the shooting, Novak had hidden an extra three hammers at strategic points around the pub. He wondered if he should have something more lethal within reach. He pictured himself those years back, angered as he had been by the two thugs, this time with a gun in his hand. No, he decided. There were enough arrogant beasts around.

Danny Callaghan parked in his usual spot across from the Hive and took two bags of groceries from the boot. He’d read for a while. Eat, then maybe go down to Novak’s place, finish the day off with a couple of drinks.

To his right, from the corner of his eye, someone moving fast. He turned and saw Oliver’s grandfather, running. Away from the Hive, out onto the green, his step irregular and ungainly on the uneven ground. In the middle of the green, lit only by sparse light from distant lamp-posts, half a dozen people gathered. Before Oliver’s grandfather reached them he gave a harsh, despairing cry that echoed across the green. A woman moved towards him,
attempting to hold him back, but he brushed past her. After a few more steps he bent over, then went down on his knees, a young man reaching out to help him.

Danny Callaghan stood there, staring out across the green, until he heard a siren in the distance. Then he went upstairs to his flat.

Of the forty or so police officers in the room at Garda HQ in the Phoenix Park there were half a dozen uniforms, the rest were plain-clothes detectives. All but three of those attending what had been labelled the ‘special incidents conference’ were men. Tables had been arranged in a rectangular shape around the periphery of the room, with the police officers facing one another.

Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey nodded to a colleague across the room, a detective sergeant with whom he’d worked a couple of years back. Some of the faces were familiar, most were strangers. At the top of the room, instantly recognisable to everyone present, Assistant Commissioner Colin O’Keefe was getting to his feet. To O’Keefe’s right, three chief superintendents. To his left, a young woman garda taking notes.

‘Sit down everyone, let’s not take all day.’

Bob Tidey found one of the last empty chairs. Those left standing clustered near the door.

O’Keefe sat down, tapped the table with the butt end of his pen and waited for the incidental noises of shifting chairs and tailing-off conversations to end. Then he said, ‘As you know, this special incidents conference was scheduled in advance of what appears to be the latest gangland killing. The function of the conference was to pull together the members involved in the various threads of recent gangland investigations. We’ll have a report on this latest murder presently.’

Each detective had been given a blue cardboard folder on entering the room. Bob Tidey opened his and found that it contained several
sheets of A4 paper, blank except for the Garda Siochana letterhead at the top of each page.

That’s helpful
. He closed the folder.

Assistant Commissioner O’Keefe continued. ‘This morning, the aim is to familiarise ourselves with the totality of the various cases under investigation – if anything rings a bell, any linkages, any patterns, speak up. The minutes from this conference will be circulated later today – discuss it with your fellow officers back at the station. If any two pieces of information look like they might fit together, if you need further detail – there’ll be a sheet going around. I want names and stations from you all, along with mobile numbers and email addresses. Don’t be shy, keep in touch with one another – that’s what these meetings are about – ask questions, share information.’

O’Keefe leaned forward and ticked off a line on a sheet of paper in front of him.

‘Let’s go over the details of the current incidents. For the benefit of any member who doesn’t know you, begin with your name, rank and station.’

Member
.

After twenty-six years in the force, Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey still found the use of the word silly. Over the years, the in-house term
member
had derived from
Member of the Garda Siochana
. New recruits, back in Templemore, not yet used to referring to one another as
members
, used to joke about members rising in the morning or members waving from trains. They perpetually promised to introduce members to their girlfriends. Even now Tidey never heard the word in a police context without thinking of his colleagues as pricks – which, in the case of some of them, was fair enough.

‘Conor?’

A detective inspector from Finglas nodded to Assistant Commissioner O’Keefe and began outlining the details of the four
gangland killings, much of which was already known to most of those in the room. ‘Murders one, two and three came out of a business deal that went sour – the Colleys and the Molloy gangs, all locals. We’re expecting another one or two before they call it quits, but hopefully it won’t spread beyond that. Victim number four was an idiot who pulled out of a plan to shake down a racehorse owner – and then went ahead and did the job on his own. His former partners caught up with him.’

Assistant Commissioner O’Keefe said, ‘As we thought, it looks like it’s just a localised spasm – two minor sets of headbangers.’

The Finglas detective said, ‘It’s simmering. There’ve been several beatings, a number of death threats, three people have gone out of circulation – we assume they’re lying low, probably outside the country.’

Colin O’Keefe said, ‘Given that there’s a dozen or so heavyweight gangs in the city, a lot of their people permanently coked-up, occasional bloodshed is to be expected. The lesser incidents – they don’t make as big a media splash, but they may be a symptom of problems to come.’

A sergeant from Coolock gave details of an incident in which four shots had been fired into the living room of a house. ‘The woman of the house came close to being clipped – says she knows no reason why the house might have been targeted. Her husband works for a bookie, so it could be some kind of extortion racket, though he says not. There’s another family, same name, two roads away, the older son isn’t long out of Mountjoy, two years on a drug charge. It might be that he stepped on someone’s toes and they shot at the wrong house.’

An inspector from Clondalkin gave details of the beating of a young man, four nights back. ‘He’s one of Tommy Farr’s enforcers – what we hear is Tommy’s semi-retired, living in Spain for the past few weeks. And now that this kid hasn’t got Tommy to hide behind he ended up being stomped on by some people who figure they owe him a thumping.’