Falling Glass (19 page)

“Well, there’s no way we can go on is there?”

“No.”

“We’ll have to return the retainer.”

“That’s okay.”

“I don’t see how Tom keeps this out of the papers.”

“Oh, they’ll blame the paramilitaries. They always do.”

“Aye I suppose you’re right.”

“Are you okay, mate?”

“It’s funny I was feeling so good after New Hampshire. I handled that well. Not a drop of blood. Everybody happy. I thought I was getting my groove back. I’m too old, Sean. I don’t have the stomach for it.”

“Aye, I know. Don’t worry about it. Circumstances beyond your control. Go to bed and try and get some sleep and get that window fixed if you can.”

“There’s one other thing though, isn’t there?”

“What?”

“Well, he’ll probably kill Rachel now, won’t he? Now that he’s off down this road he’s got nothing to lose.”

“That’s someone else’s problem, mate, not ours. Come and see me in Belfast tomorrow, okay?”

“I will.”

“Get some sleep if you can.”

Killian hung up.

The Larne road was deserted but there ahead of him was the North Channel and all of Galloway. He could see the ferries and blue mountains and even the lights of planes on the approach to Glasgow.

He drove through a whitewashed traditional village he didn’t know
existed, through chimneys curling peat smoke over thatched roofs. There were horses in fields. Big hunters and fine racing mares.

Of course because it was early morning he got caught behind a herd of cows on their way to milking. A kid driving them about eleven years old in jeans and Barbour jacket and a flat cap.

The kid was smoking. Killian was time travelling. To cattle markets and horse fairs of his youth. He still didn’t know where he was, except that Slemish was in the rearview now. The satnav was showing blankness and even the Welsh girl was suspiciously quiet.

The cows were going slow and Killian stalled the Ford Fiesta.

Of course Sean was right. Go to bed. Sleep. Forget about it.

Sean was older than him by fifteen years. Killian had gone to work for him when he was twenty-one after he’d returned from America.

Sean had become a kind of surrogate dad.

His real father, of course, would have given him completely opposite advice to Sean:
The tinker code did not rely on paper. Your word was everything. Your name was everything. Duty was more important than right. You fulfilled your obligations above all else. Even unto death
…

Killian had read a thousand books since Sean had taught him his letters. He had tried to transcend that code.

But he knew better.

You are where you came from.

There are no disembodied selves. There are only humans embedded in practices, places, cultures. The man without a culture is a myth. No such being exists.

In the Pavee code of honour a life is given meaning by the narrative each narrator imposes on himself within the story.

Killian’s journey could not end at this place. It just wasn’t possible.

He called Sean.

“Yes?”

“I want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“I’ve got the licence plate of the Range Rover: JGI 3245. I’ll bet it would
be pretty easy to get the guy’s credit-card details through the hire-car company. Find out who he is.”

“Aye, probably.”

“And it’s bound to have satnav, isn’t it?

“Aye.”

“If he’s running it, which as a stranger to Ireland, he probably is, the car rental company can trace the car through it, can’t they? We can find exactly who he is and where he’s heading.”

“Killian, you’re not thinking of—” Sean began but Killian cut him off.

“Aye I am
thinking of.
Call me back when you’ve got a bead on this motherfucker.”

“It’ll cost us. I’ll have to lay out a couple of grand.”

“Lay it out.”

“You can’t let it go mate, can you?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Is this some sort of fucking tinker thing?”

“Yeah. It is some sort of tinker thing.”

A long pause.

“I’ll call you back when I have anything.”

The Fiesta had reached the edge of Antrim Plateau now and beneath him was the ferry port of Larne. The sea had white caps and a navy helicopter was flying close to the water churning spray as it searched low for some lost comrade or missing boat or dog walker swept out to sea.

Up here in the high country, however, everything was calm.

chapter 10
the high window

T
HE PHONE RANG IN APARTMENT
14D
OF
1738 E
AST
T
ROPICANA
. Marina was on the balcony watching the planes carve big ellipses in the azure air above McCarran. It had been a full morning. She had ridden her bike to her class at UNLV and on the way back had bought fruit at the Safeway. As usual she was the only cyclist in any direction. When she got back to her apartment building a bus had collided with a jeep right outside the Liberace Museum. No one was hurt and the cops were just standing around. Broken glass had made it to the sidewalk on the north side of Tropicana and she’d gotten off the bike and carried it gingerly into the lobby.

In the elevator Greghri, the Lithuanian dealer from the MGM, hit on her a little, asking about her bike and telling her that he liked her with short hair. She was feeling lonely and enjoyed the compliments. Sasha knew that Greghri often talked to her but for some reason Sasha had gotten it into his head that Greghri was gay and he didn’t mind.

She’d spread cream cheese on rye bread and made tea and gone up to the balcony to watch the accident but gradually had been drawn to the aircraft in their holding patterns. She knew Sasha wouldn’t be in any of them, not for a while yet, but she still wondered. Often he surprised her, coming home unexpectedly. She used to think he did this to try and catch
her in the throes of an affair, but now she knew that he did it because he missed her and because Las Vegas was home.

At the first ring of the telephone she ran to the living room. She picked up on the second.

“Hi,” Sasha said.

“Oh, hi, darling!”

“I miss you very much,” Sasha said.

She knew he was upset because he was speaking in Russian and he was trying to hide the slur in his voice.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he lied.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine. Everything is fine. How are you?”

“I’m okay. It’s morning here. I had my class. Are you still in Ireland?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“It is place called En-nis-kill-en,” he said, sounding the difficult word in increments.

“What time is it there?”

“Night,” he said and lapsed into silence.

A Boeing 777 air-braked on its final approach.

A police radio crackled.

Sun glinted off the pyramid at the Luxor a mile to the west on the Strip.

“Do you want me to call you back?” Marina asked.

“No. No. I will go to sleep now. I have an early start in the morning. I am so tried,” he said.

Marina waited for the other shoe to drop. The confession. The tears. Sasha was an emotional man and Marina was his only outlet for these emotions. To everyone else he was Starshyna – the Sergeant – but to her he was Alexi Alexander, little Sasha of the golden hair.

Of course now he almost always shaved that hair “for the job”.

A fire truck pulled noisily up outside to deal with the accident and she closed the balcony door.

“What’s going on there?” he wondered.

“Nothing. It’s paramedics. There was a car accident.”

“Did you wear your bike helmet to the college?”

“Of course. And I always ride on the sidewalk anyway.”

“Tropicana is bad street, many drunks,” Sasha said in English.

She switched to English too. “Are you all right?” she asked.

There was another long pause.

“Yes, it was just, little tense.”

“Have you been doing your stress ball? Remember Dr Keene, Sasha. Do your stress ball.”

“I have been doing stress ball!” Markov snapped.

Marina said nothing and waited. She didn’t have to wait long.

“There was an incident. An unpleasant incident,” he said back in that Volgograd dialect of his.

“Are you hurt?”

Sasha muttered something that she couldn’t get.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine. Other people are hurt when they deal with me,” he said. “Old fuck, old, interfering fuck. I should have cut his throat.”

“But you didn’t – you didn’t hurt anyone that badly did you?” Marina asked.

Five thousand miles away in the Quality Hotel, in Enniskillen, Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, Sasha looked at the phone as if it had just bitten him. Did she really know? Was she still buying into this denial? She, who was so clever that she had graduated first in her English language class and was now studying at the University of Nevada. Was he such a monster that she had to do this in order to live with him?

He smiled at the mirror above the writing desk in his hotel room.

Yeah, she did.

And worse, he had to play the game too when he was back with her. And no, not for her. For himself.

He shuddered, frowned, sat down on the edge of bed.

He bounced his rubber ball off the wall, but it didn’t help.

The old woman had screamed so sickeningly.

The man had begged him.

He hadn’t wanted to kill them.

Their daughter’s fuck up was nothing to do with them.

No good deed went unpunished. He had let the old fuck in Carrickfergus live and because of that he had to kill three people.

It wasn’t necessary. He would have made the husband talk eventually. If he’d been given the time. If the old fuck had only given him the time. That fool he had sent to do his dirty work for him. Barging through the door. Was that really the best they could do in this country? It was bullshit. This country was bullshit.

They thought they were tough? They thought they had had it hard?

They were spoiled.

“If you want to see the aftermath of a real civil war visit fucking Grozny sometime, assholes,” he muttered inaudibly.

He thought of the boy with the parachute in the McDonald’s.

And this time it came.

This time he didn’t suppress it.

“Sasha?”

But he was there. Being herded out of the Tupelov by an officer with a drawn side arm. Jumping from 2000 metres with no live jump training because they always took the strips now or landed you in helicopters. A dozen of them falling from the sky. Screams, frantic pulling at cords. The ground coming to meet him, green and brown like a wet, lethal family dog. Accelerating towards him so fast, so eager to hug him, so eager to smash him to bits, to send his tibias through his kneecaps and into his skull.

Free fall. Open your eyes maggot, open your fucking eyes.

Clouds, apartment buildings, grey evil.

Yuri face’s covered with blood. Yuri – his buddy. Falling with him. What the fuck had he done to himself?

Buildings.

Screams.

“The orange toggle,” he remembered somebody somewhere saying once. A slurred voice, a drunken voice. He pulled the orange cord and the yelling next to him ceased, the drama around him displacing itself into a silent world.

They lost a quarter of the platoon.

Pancaked.

Worthless dead conscripts that nobody would ever miss.

The corporal, high on moonshine he’d brewed from boot polish, lived. The officer who’d “saved” the plane from Chechen AAA got promoted.

“Sasha?”

“I am still here.”

“And you’re sure that you’re okay?”

“Yes,” he said impatiently.

“You’re not in any kind of trouble? Should I call Bernie?”

Sasha laughed. “No! You worry too much. Don’t call Bernie. I just called because I wanted to hear your voice,” he added.

“Well, here it is,” she said.

“Tell me about your day, how was your class?” he asked.

In Las Vegas Marina smiled. She told him about the class, about who hadn’t showed up, about what the professor had been wearing, about his talk on the tensile strength of I bars and how disappointed he had been that none of the Americans had understood calculus.

“But you understood it, didn’t you?” Sasha said.

“Of course.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else. I came home. I saw the accident. I saw Greghri.”

“I like him, he is a good man, for a Lithuanian.”

“Yes.”

Sasha yawned. “I must go darling,” he said.

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

He blew a kiss down the phone and hung up.

Marina walked back out to the balcony and set the phone on the glass coffee table.

The accident in front of the Liberace Museum had finally been cleared away, much to the disappointment of a camera crew from Channel 7 who now had nothing to shoot.

He hadn’t sounded
that
intoxicated, she told herself.

She sat down, sipped her tea and closed her eyes.

She crossed herself and prayed to St Andrew that Sasha wouldn’t drink himself into oblivion and that he wouldn’t do anything stupid, and finally that he would come home safe.

chapter 11
the big sleep

K
ILLIAN WATCHED FROM THE CAR PARK UNTIL THE HOTEL LIGHT
went off. Earlier than he’d been expecting. The phone said 10.33 and the Fiesta clock said 10.42 which was probably more or less the same thing. He figured Ivan for a night owl, but he’d seen him knock back five bottles of Bud and five double vodkas in the hotel bar.

He’d seen him go outside and bounce a rubber ball up and down ten times and then go back inside and get two more double vodkas.

A lot of booze and the fella was skinny…

He’d give him half an hour to toss and turn and take a piss before he’d try anything.

The rain had stopped. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes. The dead rising from their graves. The fucking rain had stopped.