Irregulars (15 page)

The man in the cap returns to the doorway. ‘He’s inside.’

Just Albert indicates for O’Keefe to lead the way, and O’Keefe nods his thanks for having their passage smoothed. He is growing weary of the jousting this day has required. He had forgotten how difficult investigating anything in Ireland could be; forgotten just how guarded and suspicious of intent eight hundred years of foreign rule could make a people. And the recent years of war had made things worse. When he had been in uniform, there had been people in any town who would discreetly aid an investigation, if it were thought to be morally right. There were also those who were happy to put the finger on another man so long as their names were left out of any testimony, thus, at very least, providing the intelligence that any investigating police require. But there were few who would willingly volunteer anything to a common man in a suit. Ireland had never had great success with plain-clothes police detectives since they were thought to be little more than informants or spies when out of uniform. So O’Keefe expects little from the Mahons.
A common man in a common suit is what I am now and nothing more
, O’Keefe thinks, and he feels a great distance between his life now and his past life as an RIC man.

He enters the hut, Just Albert behind him, and slowly his eyes adjust to the dim interior light. Three men are seated at a table in the centre of the room, and through an open doorway behind them O’Keefe can see a room housing bunks, all of them neatly made with turned-down sheets that would not have been out of place in a police or army barracks. Or a prison, he thinks, noticing how everything in the room in which he stands is tidied or hung away on hooks or displayed on purpose-built shelves. The military discipline of the men in the other huts could hardly be more rigorous than the penal tidiness these men had embraced during various spells in Dublin’s jails.

‘Gentlemen,’ O’Keefe says. ‘I was hoping to speak with Dominic Mahon if I could.’ As he speaks, he realises there are two other men in the room besides those at the table. They are young and big and one of them has a flat, smashed nose like a boxer’s. They move now and take up a place on either side of the entry door behind O’Keefe and Just Albert.

‘If you could, who would you be?’ one of the men at the table says. O’Keefe judges the speaker to be Mahon himself because the other two look at him when he speaks, as if to take their lead.

‘My name is Seán O’Keefe. I’ve been hired by …’

‘What’d you call yourself?’ a second man asks. He has oiled, black hair, a pencil-thin moustache and a pile of newsprint roll-ups on the table in front of him.

‘Seán O’Keefe …’

The third man speaks to his mates at the table. He is stocky and fit, shoulders and biceps straining his shirt fabric. Built like Just Albert, O’Keefe briefly thinks, only from slinging crates off ships rather than dumbbells. ‘It looks the same, it does.’

It?
O’Keefe frowns.

‘Couldn’t be …’ The black-haired man squints with concentration, focusing on O’Keefe’s face.

‘He’s the cut of him, I’m fuckin’ tellin’ yeh,’ the stocky man says now. ‘Why don’t yeh ask him?’

‘Ask him what?’ Just Albert says, and O’Keefe can hear the smirk in his voice.

‘You’re no relation to Daniel O’Keefe are you? Big, strapping G-Division copper?’ the first man says, the one O’Keefe assumes to be Dominic Mahon.

‘I … well, I am.’

‘Holy jaysus, the chances of it …’ the stocky man says, smiling in a way O’Keefe does not like.

O’Keefe sees Dominic Mahon nod. Sensing movement behind him, he turns, into the arms of one of the men behind him, who links his hands together in front of O’Keefe, squeezing him tightly in a bear hug and lifting him off his feet.

‘What in the name of Jesus…?’ O’Keefe says, before his breath is viced from his lungs. He writhes against the man’s grip and sees Just Albert move now, skipping for the doorway, towards the big man still stationed there. For a moment, O’Keefe thinks Albert is fleeing the hut, and the man at the door thinks the same, taking two steps forward as if to cut off his escape.

‘Albert!’ O’Keefe manages, but Just Albert ignores him, his hand going inside his suit coat and coming out with a stunted club the length of his forearm, stepping inside the big man’s lunge and using his wrist to swing the club in a short arc. Lightning quick, the sound of the club on skull is like cracking wood, and the man’s stunned momentum takes him forward past the grappling O’Keefe and face down onto the table where the three men sit, its legs collapsing, the three men shoving back and standing to enter the fray.

The stocky docker is closest to the captive O’Keefe, and he moves forward and throws a telegraphed, windmill right. O’Keefe sees it, his arms still pinned at his sides, and lowers his head into the punch, the fist slamming into his forehead. An explosion of white stars erupts in O’Keefe’s eyes, and he hears bones snap in the man’s hand, but the man brings his fist back to swing again. As he does, Just Albert feints a headshot with the club, and instead swings it low and up into the man’s groin with a sickening
thud
. The man doubles as if hinged, his punch dying in the air, and vomits in a cascade that splatters O’Keefe’s legs and boots.

Stars clearing in his eyes now, O’Keefe senses that the man holding him has turned his head to follow Albert’s progress, tracking Ginny’s man as he moves with his club to the black-haired man with the moustache. This man has a knife but Just Albert advances, as if oblivious, with a relentless, practiced aggression.

As if unconscious, O’Keefe lolls his head forward and then hurls it back with all the force he can bring to bear. The back of his skull connects with the right side of his captor’s face and O’Keefe can feel the the big man’s cheek shatter and collapse. Yellow bolts of pain shoot through O’Keefe’s head and neck and he nearly faints as the man releases him, vertigo claiming him, falling, falling.

O’Keefe hits the duckboard floor hard on his hands and knees, the hut spinning around him. Holding his face, the big man lifts a leg to swing a kick at O’Keefe, who sees it but cannot move. The boot is halfway to his ribs when Albert’s spit-shined brogues dance past on the floor under O’Keefe’s pain-blurred gaze and there is a resounding crack and the sound of a heavy body dropping.

From O’Keefe’s vantage point on the floor, Ginny Dolan’s man is a whir of fluid, violent motion, feinting again with the club as the black-haired man swings his knife, allowing Albert inside the arc of the blade to jab his club into the man’s throat, stopping the knifeman’s breath on its way out, a sucking gawp in place of the breath as the assailant drops to his knees. The knife clanks to the floor and the man’s hands scrabble at his neck, face going bright red and then just as quickly, death-pale grey. Just Albert kicks the blade away to a corner of the room and swings the club into the man’s face, obliterating his nose in a mist of blood.

O’Keefe raises himself to his knees, nausea welling in his own throat. As he rises, his eyes catch movement in the doorway and register the two men from outside entering. He stumbles forward and lifts an upturned chair from the floor. On his knees, he swings the chair, splintering it across the chest and shoulders of the first of the two to enter the hut. Without pause, he brings the remains of the chair to bear on the second man, swinging wildly and catching him in the stomach. He brings it back over his head to swing again when it is taken from his hands from behind. Instinctively, he covers his head, but the blow he is expecting does not come.

‘A hand up, Mr O’Keefe?’

Just Albert stands over him with his hand extended, his face glowing with the healthy flush of moderate exercise, as if he had just returned from a country walk. The club is nowhere to be seen and O’Keefe assumes he has returned it to its place inside his jacket. He takes Albert’s hand and allows himself to be pulled to his feet.

Surveying the scene, O’Keefe sees the man who had held him sitting with his back to the wall of the hut, his hands pressed to his shattered cheek-bone. Three other men lay on the hut’s duckboards, the short, stocky man rolling from side to side, clutching his hands between his legs, a high-pitched moan, like a wounded dog’s, emanating from deep in his throat. The two others lie on the floor unmoving, and O’Keefe says a silent prayer that Ginny Dolan’s man has not killed them. The two men they had encountered outside stand with their palms held out, looking across the room to their boss for guidance. To O’Keefe they appear as if they are pleading for mercy. O’Keefe follows their eyes to where Dominic Mahon has sat down and watches him light one of the needle-thin fags.

Exhaling, Dominic Mahon tells the two to move the wounded men. ‘They need see the sawbones. Take Jimmy first …’ Mahon prods his unmoving comrade with his boot, ‘… and then come back for the others, but don’t disturb us here. We’ve things to discuss it seems, wha?’ He smiles now at O’Keefe, and indicates the one remaining chair.

O’Keefe rights the chair and sits down, the pain in his head beginning to throb as adrenaline surges and ebbs in his veins. Just Albert takes up a place behind his chair, standing like a sentinel over his shoulder.

‘You’re Dominic Mahon, aren’t you?’ O’Keefe says, suddenly worrying that the man they had come to see might be among the unconscious. And then, the words emerging unbidden: ‘And if you say
“who wants to know?”
I’ll kick your teeth in.’

‘No doubting you were a Peeler, so, and your father’s son,’ Dominic Mahon says.

O’Keefe leans forward in his chair. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘If you don’t know, then I’m hardly the one to tell you.’

His fists balling instinctively, O’Keefe repeats his question. ‘Are you Dominic Mahon?’

‘Of course I fuckin’ am. Who’d you think I was? You only need ask your gorilla, Albert there. He’s known me for how long, Al?’

‘Too long,’ Just Albert says.

‘Now, now, no way to speak to an auld buddy who sends every sea captain, every dirty deckhand and ship’s passenger the way of Mrs Dolan’s shop for nothing but kindness’s sake.’

‘And ten pound a year at Christmas.’

‘One good turn deserves another, me auld flower.’

O’Keefe cuts in. ‘This needn’t have happened. Look, all we need is to ask you a few questions. Nothing to incriminate you. We’re looking for a boy is all …’

‘Sure, Ginny Dolan can find you one of them any time you’ve the fancy …’

‘Keep it up, to fuck,’ Just Albert says, ‘and you’ll be sipping your dinner, Dominic.’

‘And always so cordial, we were, in the past, Albert.’

‘Past is past,’ Just Albert says. ‘We’re looking for Mrs Dolan’s Nicky. You’ve to tell us what we need to know.’ Albert reaches down and drags one of the supine men to the door of the hut by his collar and drops him outside. He does the same with the second, each unconscious body dropping like a sack of spuds onto the hard ground. Then he closes the hut door. ‘Or I will hurt you like you’ve never been hurt, Dominic. So stop taking the piss and listen to what the man says.’

Dominic Mahon locks eyes with Just Albert for a long moment. He does not appear frightened. Finally, he turns to O’Keefe and smiles. ‘Cigarette, gentlemen?’

O’Keefe reaches across, accepts one and takes a light. He is not as big as O’Keefe had imagined, Dominic Mahon. Mid-forties, he reckons, with cold blue eyes and red hair oiled back off his freckled forehead. An expensive white shirt and collar with cufflinks in the shape of anchors at his wrists. It has been a long time, O’Keefe thinks, since this man has slung a gaff.

‘Now, first off, why didn’t yis tell me yis were working for Ginny Dolan? We needn’t have cracked any heads at all.’ He smiles again. ‘Sure, I’ve known Ginny for years, so yis can save your hard talk, Albert, for your Saturday sweetheart. Any problem of Ginny’s, I’m happy to help with.’

O’Keefe turns to look at Just Albert, gauging his response. He is relieved when Ginny’s man laughs. ‘You just answer Mr O’Keefe’s questions here and there’ll be no more hard talk.’

‘Grand so.’

‘Grand,’ Albert says, taking out one of his cigars and lighting it.

Turning back to Mahon, O’Keefe slips the recent photograph of Nicholas Dolan from his jacket and hands it to the docker. ‘Mrs Dolan’s son,’ he says. ‘You knew him, I take it. He’s missing now. Fifteen years old, looks young for his age. You supplied him with a gun some months ago. I need the name of his contact in the Irregulars.’

Dominic Mahon exhales smoke and laughs. ‘You don’t want much, do yeh?’

‘It will never come back to you, Mr Mahon. You have my word on that.’

Mahon shakes his head. ‘I couldn’t give a tinker’s bollix if it does. Them poxy
Irregular
…’ Mahon says the word with a disdain O’Keefe recognises from his time in the police; the same way some men once called him
Peeler
, ‘… bastards cut me and the lads loose as quick as did their mates in the Free State army. After all the blasters and barkers we got them in the Tan War. Ungrateful bla’guards. That boy was the end of it for us Mahons on the docks, as far as guns went. I was stupid to use him. I could get hold of nobody and I thought maybe he could tempt his bosses into paying out for a few crates of Webleys and Lee–Enfields we’d liberated from an English boat. The shipment meant for the Free Staters and all, but that lad …’

O’Keefe senses Just Albert tense behind him, and so does Dominic Mahon, who changes his tone mid-sentence.

‘He was a grand youngfella. That’s why I used him. You say he looks young for his age, but he was older than his years in more ways than one.’

‘Is,’ Just Albert says.

‘Wha’?’

‘
Is
older than his years. Not
was
.’

Exasperation sharpens his words. The docker king is not used to being so freely contradicted. ‘For fuck sake, Al. I didn’t mean nothing by it. Jesus, since when did you become such a sore prick? You used to be a good auld skin, good for a giggle, Albert.’

‘Since Nicky went missing and I found out you had something to do with it.’

‘Now, look here. I had nothin’ to do with his going where-in-fuckin’-ever he’s bunked off to. I told you. I shouldn’t have given him the gun, fair enough; shouldn’t have used him as a runner neither, but I gave him the gun and that was the last I seen of him. I’d never want any harm come to him, for jaysus sake. Ginny and I have been pals for years, so we have.’